I know you said you were doing GREAT — but were you really?

It probably doesn’t really matter about the circumstances that find me training for a big gravel bike race in a month, but suffice to say, I have been on the trails training.

As I was riding the other day I came across two riders — one was almost at a dead stop waiting for the second rider who was out of the saddle pushing his bike. As I approached, I offered some words of encouragement, “You can do it”

As I rode by the response was, “I’m doing great”.

The thing about being in the saddle for a while is you have lots of time to reflect — and reflect I did because my first reaction was no you aren’t.

Maybe he was in fact doing great because his goal was simply to get the bike out of the garage or he had the unusual goal of pushing his bike instead of riding it. For me success was defined by riding the bike but in this situation, the measurement for success could be different. There is an academic discussion to be made about alignment of goals and objectives to ensure measurement of success is properly reflected. In this case, with the context being on a bike trail where people ride bikes, I think to say you are doing great when you are pushing your bike is inaccurate.

Does any of this matter in the scheme of things? Not really, but again I rode for quite a while and had time to think.

Maybe it was an issue with language and how we interpret what is said — language has meaning and like all things, it evolves. It’s possible I missed the memo that says doing great on the trail now means pushing your bike. Like aligning goals and objectives, I think it’s important to align language so everyone’s understanding is the same.

It may also just be the result of being human; we are an overly optimistic bunch after all. We are always overestimating our abilities and how we stack up against each other, as well as the world at large. Sadly, we overestimate our abilities relative to reality, and if we don’t like the results, we adopt the illusion of changing reality with words or artificial action. The hard reality is no matter how much you want to change the standard deviation curve you simply can’t have the whole class in the 95th percentile — not unless you want to pretend.

It probably was simply a misinterpretation of the situation because we all get off the bike once in a while and have to push — although anytime it’s happened to me, it’s never because I’m doing great.

iamgpe

Sacrificing Sacred Cows

One of the simplest examples of a Sacred Cow can be found when you write blogs because there’s a small number of words in play. Occasionally, you write a sentence that you like very, very much but as you continue to build your thoughts and as the page expands, you start to realize that the sentence just isn’t appropriate anymore. You refuse to edit it out and actively rationalize why it needs to stay. No matter how much it is not working you want to keep it — “It’s such a fantastic sentence and it just has to be used.”

This thinking regarding sentences can easily be transferred to operating mechanisms and processes, where you focus your efforts, roles and responsibilities, strategies and tactics — anything that has worked very well in the past but for many reasons doesn’t work anymore.

The pithy term Sacrificing Sacred Cows is used when something revered isn’t working anymore and has to be removed or changed — it’s a course correction needed to bring an idea to life or sustain continued success. Something works until it doesn’t, and the glitter of the Sacred Cow can blind the recognition that there is problem, and what has worked in the past, isn’t anymore. They can be hard to sacrifice, these Sacred Cows — disbelief they’ve become a problem or suboptimal, aspects of being human and our strategies*, the perception of sunken costs or one of the seven deadly sins; they all keep sacred cows alive and well.

It is easy to sacrifice a sentence in blog when it doesn’t work and much, much easier than shifting a company strategy or a blowing up a process tied to revenue. In the end though, if you don’t, the result will be the same — a poor product that over time becomes obsolete. Adapt or die is the harsh reality of business, life and even humble blogging and the result of sacred cows not dealt with appropriately. How they are dealt with can range from the subtle to the dramatic but first they need to be recognized.

And sometimes that is hard — we’re only human after all.

iamgpe

*The Nash Equilibrium — The Nash equilibrium is a decision-making theorem within game theory that states a player can achieve the desired outcome by not deviating from their initial strategy. Yes, he is the one in the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind”.

The best question you can ask... ever.

“What question should I be asking but haven’t?”

There are instances where a culture of “don’t ask; don’t tell” exists or people who hold information back for the perception of control and power but in general, with no malicious intent, most people operate under the simple contract of “asked and answered” — you get what you ask for.

Critical understanding is a result of asking questions, and particularly those questions you don’t know to ask — eventually you exhaust the questions that come innately to you so it’s imperative to surround yourself with people who ask the questions you didn’t think of — or better yet ask them what you should be asking.

In the same vein, another very good question is” What am I missing?” Just make sure you aren’t just talking to yourself.

iamgpe