Have you ever considered how our brain’s wonderful ability to skip over things we’re familiar with can cause us massive problems in our businesses?
Like making a cup of tea. It’s so easy! You’ve likely done it hundreds (if not thousands of times) and you don’t need to put too much thought into it.
But what happens if we look beneath the surface? What about if we identify all the unspoken assumptions that are hiding in that scenario…Transcript
Have you ever considered how our brain’s wonderful ability to skip over things we’re familiar with can cause us massive problems in our businesses?
If I were to ask you for a cup of tea, most likely you’d go to the cupboard, get a cup and a tea bag, put the kettle on to boil. When it boils, you’d put the tea bag in the cup, pour on the boiling water, ask me if I want milk or sugar, put them in if I want them, and then give me the cup.
Done, right?
It’s so easy! You’ve likely done it hundreds (if not thousands of times) and you don’t need to put too much thought into it.
But what happens if we look beneath the surface? What about if we identify all the unspoken assumptions that are hiding in that scenario…
Things like
- Do we have clean cups? Are they in the dishwasher? Has the cycle finished and I just need to take one out? Or does the cycle need to run first? Would it be quicker and easier to just take one out and wash it?
- What varieties of tea do we have? Are they what my visitor wants? Is the tea still in date? Do we use loose leaf tea or tea bags?
- What varieties of milk and sugar does my visitor want? Do they want lemon or cold water instead? Or something else?
- What if my water boiling thing doesn’t work? Do I have a backup? If not, how long will it take me to get it fixed?
- And so on…
We all go through life making assumptions about everything, all the time. Because if we didn’t, just getting out of bed would be impossible, with all the different permutations we’d have to think about and evaluate.
And that’s the way we run our businesses too. Most often, the assumptions and interconnections between things are not identified explicitly…
… which means that things often feel like they come to us out of the blue. Like the kettle dying (when we haven’t cleaned it since we bought it…). Or just assuming we’ve got tea in the cupboard (when the daughter finished it last week and didn’t write it on the shopping list…)
These are the things that can easily de-rail our business lives. They can keep us constantly putting out fires if we haven’t put systems in place for making sure that things run as we want them too, as often as possible.
… or at least have alerts in place so we pick things up when they’re still embers and much easier to deal with, rather than getting to ferocious forest fires before we’re aware that they’re there.
And doing this doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming.