strategy

Look where you’re going!

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People looking through binoculars
 
I’m all for taking stock – especially this time of year, it’s important to see how you’ve measured up against your goals. Once that’s done, though, it doesn’t do any good to keep rehashing your old mistakes. Figure out how to go forward, and understand your course corrections, then set your eyes on the future. 

This afternoon I had an opportunity to catch up with a board member I used to serve with. He was lamenting that there are always a couple of people in the organization who are stuck on “replay”, always bringing up some past transgression that’s long done. They’re the same people who are unwilling to try anything new, or examine their own part in any so-called failures. 

Does this sound familiar? Do you have team members who would rather grouse about what didn’t work in the past, than to try and discover a better way forward? Ultimately, these individuals aren’t helping the team. It’s worth having a quiet conversation offline, to remind them in advance of the next meeting, that you’re focused on the future. Here are some other ways to prime them for the right kind of action:

  1. Ask them to describe in writing the most persistent problem that exists today – and to list five or ten possible solutions. Share their most positive ideas with the team, so they feel acknowledged. You want to reinforce the behaviour you’re working to create.
  2. At the meeting, ask them to be a note-taker and reporter for the group. This may not stop them from airing their grievances, but it will make them listen more carefully to people who are expressing more positive opinions – and positivity can be contagious.
  3. Acknowledge that problems do occur, and engage them in telling a story of what kinds of solutions have made positive improvements in other situations. Then ask them to describe how similar approaches might be used here.

If you’ve given your best effort to be sure their voice is heard, you’ve done your work. Keep repeating your mission and make sure the meeting ground rules are clear. And if necessary, find a project that will consume their time elsewhere. Then, eyes forward. Face the future, and plot your course.

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners and Founders here at PANOPTIKA. We help our clients see everything they need to know to make better decisions for their organizations. Looking for a facilitator who can help you have richer, more robust conversations? Let’s talk. In the meantime, you can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn – or you can sign up to get useful business ideas sent right to your inbox, using the handy button below. 

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When the frequency illusion is no illusion…

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PictureImage by kalhh from pixabay

The frequency illusion. We’ve all experienced it. (It’s also called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon). That’s when you see something – a picture, a concept, a word, an idea – over and over again, all of a sudden. It seems like you’re being sent some sort of message. The truth is, you may be. In our case, we’ve had an idea come up multiple times this week, almost like a theme. It has to do with honesty. Or more specifically, about being honest with ourselves. 

Now the first time this came up, it was in Eleanor Beaton’s community of practice group. Eleanor was discussing being radically honest with ourselves about our priorities. In other words, if we say something is important, but we keep pushing it aside, perhaps it isn’t as important as we say it is. We need to unpack that and find out why we’re dodging it. Is it really not so much of a priority? Or if it is, why are we putting our commitment to the end of the queue? We need to make a firm decision, then either drop it, or drop something else and focus on making it happen with the effort it (and we) deserve. 

In the second instance, I was having a discussion with a new member of my network. We were talking about one of the reasons it can be better to hire a passionate but neutral third party researcher to have discussions with your customers about satisfaction with you and your performance as an organization. I call this the “do these pants make me look fat” rule. When I ask Steve that question, he is honest, but diplomatically so. In other words, he might be a bit too kind, even if that isn’t giving me the kind of honesty I really need, to be sure I look my absolute best. (To be fair, I’ve trained him to know that I want the truth in this instance). In many cases, a best friend or a sister might be more willing to give the answer we need, instead of the one we want. 

The third time it came up, we were working with one of our clients on a study to understand what customers and prospects want and need. They’re considering a number of new offerings, and want to see how those things rate, and rank, in the customer’s mind. Now we’ve done this sort of study hundreds of times, and nearly every time, there are features or offerings on the list that the customer has no intention (or no ability) to deliver. Then, in the worst cases, the customer says those are exactly what they want. So much that they will do anything (including switching suppliers) to get them.

Now you may think that asking a prospect or a customer or a user whether they want something, when you know you can’t or won’t give it to them, is letting you know where a competitor might have an edge. And you’re right. But if you suspect it gives them an edge, it probably does. The other thing it’s doing, is setting up an unrealistic expectation (and possibly setting the stage for dissatisfaction or disappointment). If the customer wasn’t thinking of it after all, they will be, going forward. So Steve asked them, “Be honest with yourselves. Perhaps if there is anything here you have no intention of providing, whether you can’t or you won’t, you should take it off the list.” This prompt will give them a chance to take a step back and engage their customers authentically and honestly.

What themes have been coming up for you again and again this week? What do they mean? If you need a hand getting your team to engage in some insightful truth-telling, we’re here to help. Just let us know. 

I’m Megann Willson, the CEO and a Partner here at PANOPTIKA, with COO Steve Willson. After more than 18 years helping our clients see everything they need to know to make better decisions and engage their customers, we’ve seen some interesting patterns and learned how to employ ideas that work, in multiple ways. You can also find us on LinkedIn , Twitter , or Facebook. And if you’d like to learn more about what we’re learning by working with companies like yours, why not sign up to have insights delivered straight to your inbox? You can do that with the button below. 

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Sort Yourself Out!

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Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
 
“We don’t have enough information to make a decision!”

“Everything is so unclear!”

“We need more research, but we don’t know where to start.”

“Of course we have a research objective. In fact, we’ve got five or six of them.”

Often when we hear clients expressing these things, we work with them to discover that it isn’t a lack of information, but a lack of clarity about what they know, and don’t know, about the problem. If you’re dealing with this in your organization, and you have limited resources, the last thing you should do is invest in more research (yet). First, you’ve got to wade through the complexity and ambiguity and sort out exactly what you need. And a sorting activity is an excellent first step. Here’s how you can get started:

  1. Gather all the data, research, articles, information, and relevant people, that are connected in any way with the problem(s) you are trying to solve. (Things written about the product? Check. About the right customer group? Yes. Sales data? Uh-huh. Customer service logs. Absolutely. Articles from experts in the field? Yup. Vision boards or prototypes? Positively.) Divide up the work amongst the people, by volume. Don’t invest time in who knows more, who did the research, or who found the article. Just sort it, and divvy it up. Quickly. 
  2. Next, ask each person to go through whatever artefact they have (article? research report? dataset?) as rapidly as possible, and assign it a label, or a category that represents what it mainly can answer or illuminate. Don’t debate. Let each do their work on their own. Set a time limit. Max, a couple of hours. 
  3. Now, get together in a room and share the labels. You might hate sticky notes, but they are useful for this. Look at the box of tea in the photo. If you wanted a certain type of tea, could you find it in a messy drawer, randomly mixed together? Not easily. But here, whether you organize it by fruit tea, or herbal infusion, black tea, or by brand, it will be easier to see what you’ve got. Group them, if there are commonalities. As a group, identify patterns. Express what you have a lot of. Now, what’s missing? Why is that important to the problem you’re trying to solve? 
  4. List the missing things. Prioritize them. Ask, “What do all of these point to, collectively, as the concept we need the most, to move forward?” Then ask, “Which of these, if we don’t figure it out, could kill our business/product/project?” Now you’re on to something. 

Sorting exercises may seem simplistic, but there’s a reason these are one of the first things we teach to babies, and then to kids learning to read, and later, to people who are programming, filing, organizing, or creating an information architecture. They help us get to the gist of what we need to know, to make sense of the world. And they can help you do better research, more efficiently, and for less time and money. I’m sure of it.

My name is Megann Willson, and with my partner, Steve Willson, we run PANOPTIKA, where we help our clients see everything they need to know to find, understand, and keep customers. You can also find us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or Facebook. If you’d like more news you can use to grow your business, subscribe to our weekly updates, and the occasional offer, using the link below.

 
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Never Compromise When You Can Collaborate.

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Hands meeting in collaboration
 
If you’ve ever tried to create something or solve a problem as part of a high-functioning team, you know that conflict is practically unavoidable. Add a looming deadline, a commitment to an important client, or a boss who just won’t take no for an answer, and there’s a lot of pressure to come up with a solution. 

There are a lot of different ways to solve conflict – the Thomas-Killman Conflict Mode breaks it down into five key methods.  Their model includes a matrix where one axis is assertiveness, and the other is cooperativeness. The four quadrants break down as follows:

  1. Competing – that’s where each of the parties wants to “win”. Usually that’s a no-win for everyone.
  2. Avoiding – is where the risk to one or more parties of being hurt by the process is high, so they “turtle”. Does that sound like a satisfactory outcome?
  3. Accommodating – people want to “keep the peace”, right? Sounds like a good idea. Except when the result is that a few bullies learn that they can continue to run the show, while the simmering resentment begins to build, and build, in the others.
  4. The fourth is Collaborating – and we’ll get back to that in a moment. 

What about compromising? Isn’t that the best approach? Maybe not. And here’s why.

Compromising sounds okay, for sure. It’s fair, right? Well, it’s fair – in both the good, and the bad sense of the word. It’s a little like the difference between equity and equality. Compromise may seem like an acceptable solution, but often it is the solution that gives everyone exactly the same amount of sway, but ultimately provides a weak solution that leaves everyone disappointed. 

So how do you Collaborate? Very carefully. It takes time. (Remember that point at the top about maybe there’s a looming deadline?) Earlier models for conflict resolution also talked about the axes being people-driven, or time-driven. And while there’s no right answer, suspending the time deadline does increase the likelihood of collaboration. Collaboration is arriving at a co-created solution, where everyone feels heard, their ideas are validated, and then, if they must back off their position, they feel that it was at least given careful consideration by the other members of the team.

If time really is of the essence, then the solution may not be to leave it up to consensus decision-making. You may have to rely on a decider, and then return to the collaboration table to discuss less time-sensitive issues. (This is why design sprints usually appoint a decider – someone who has the final say, if push comes to shove). 

So the next time you have a group decision to make, if you know there will be lots of strong wills in the room, leave enough time for collaboration. If there isn’t enough time, appoint someone to decide, and move on. In situations of critical importance, sometimes every kid doesn’t get a valentine.

I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to make better decisions – including facilitating collaborative decision-making by teams, leading sprints, and helping them decide which framework best suits the kind of decisions they need to make. If you and your team need help doing that, send us an email, and let’s set up a free call. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and for more news you can use to help you or your team to ask more questions in ways that will let them make better decisions, click the handy button, below.

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Are you charging enough?

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Pricing. We can’t tell you the number of times we’ve heard business owners or product managers wrestle with the question of how much to charge for what they sell. This can be especially difficult if you are in a service-based business, where, even if you’ve created packages, you’re ultimately selling your time. What if the client takes longer to make decisions than you thought? What if they aren’t good at deciding what they want, and their brief to you is terrible? What if they expect unlimited, time-consuming phone calls…for free?

Like every facet of your strategy, pricing decisions are ultimately on you. With a physical product, you can look at the costs associated with producing or acquiring the product, storing it, selling it, and shipping it to the customer. It’s worth looking at “product you” the same way. One big mistake we see with new consultants or service providers, is that they charge an hourly rate that sounds high enough…if they’re working 40 hours a week, for 40+ weeks a year. If you’re a solopreneur, this simply isn’t realistic. You need time to run your business, doing bookkeeping, accounting, and paperwork, or meeting or conversing with partners who do those things for you. You need time to sell to your customers (or you need to make enough on your service to pay a sales person to help). You get the picture. So how do you know the appropriate rate to charge? What if the client schedule has slippage or they delay the start of a project, so the dates when you thought you would be making the income are “missed”?

First, think about your costs – whatever overhead you have, whether it’s rent, your cellphone bill, professional associations, networking meetings…the list could be endless, if you let it. Then consider how much you want to make every year, net of fees or taxes. Add it up. How much vacation will you take? How much selling time will you need? (A good rule of thumb is that you, or someone, will probably need to spend at least five hours selling for every hour you deliver, especially with new clients). Divide this by the number of hours you realistically expect to spend delivering the work. That’s your charge-out rate.

What about cost overruns? You can have a series of up-charges for clients who have scope creep every time they come with a project. Truth be told, though, in most cases you want to avoid this, because the aforementioned newcomers to the market will bend over backwards for very little money, in an attempt to build their client base. Your client may come back to you after they’ve been stung by these inexperienced competitors, but they’ll have spent their budget, and you can’t get that project back. Instead, build in some wiggle room that you can live with. In our own case, we let new clients know that we have standard pricing that we apply to projects, and we estimate the scope according to their brief. When we have more experience working together, and they become a repeat customer, we will consider more favourable pricing, but we never discount out of the gate. We also explain at the start that the pricing we charge is adjusted for their second project – if they turn out to have an issue with scope-creep, we’ll raise the rate we charge them in future. This means we can stand firm on the charge-out rate, and make it up on the honour system, later. Of course if there are costs that have been incurred, like space rentals, that had to be paid twice, we expect them to cover those costs.

Explaining why a price has gone up for project two isn’t always easy. When you need to do this, consider using the airline seats discussion. Although they may get their weekly or monthly paycheque no matter what, as a service provider, you get paid when you work. If you have blocked time and turned down other clients for that time period, you can’t “sell that seat” to someone else. The risk is that they will go elsewhere, to someone who is willing to under-charge for the work involved, but wouldn’t you rather have that, and search for a client who’s willing to pay what you’re worth?

If you’re finding it hard to make time to think about strategic questions like these, because you’re so busy working in the business, that you can’t work on your business, let’s take a look at your strategy. There’s definitely a better way. I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the partners here at PANOPTIKA. Let’s get you the money you deserve.

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Make Sure Your Business is Strong AND Flexible

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Image by AndiP from Pixabay
This post originally appeared back in April 2019, but it’s just as relevant today.

Today I was reading a cautionary tale about restaurant ownership, and one of the issues was the problem the owner had run into with pricey real estate and long-term leases. For sure, there are some businesses where you absolutely must “be there” – where space is important – and in these cases you should push for the best you can afford, as soon as possible. For most businesses, though, when you think about the “where” of your business, you’ll be stronger in the long run if you build flexibility into your plan.
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Let me give you an example. One consultant we know (we’d say “headhunter”, but he wouldn’t) had lots of corporate clients, back in the days when businesses like his usually had large, pricey offices in the financial core of their city. Those kinds of businesses often relied on the prestige of real estate to convey a message of reliability, dependability, and success. Our friend got into the executive shared office space in its very early days. No one knew that his Bay Street address was only a mail-drop and answering service. After all, he went to the clients. But since people still wrote letters for business back then, his address looked very impressive on business cards and letterhead. Fast forward to today, and you’ll find that many businesses have no physical space at all. Consultants, coaches, advisors and more, have found that they can carry out their business very well in the virtual space, or by going to where their clients are. On the rare occasion when they need to host a meeting, they can do it in a rented-for-purpose location like a hotel meeting room or a co-working space. This doesn’t just apply to knowledge workers, though. Think about all of the direct-selling operations that don’t have storefronts, but sell through home parties. Or online businesses. And what about our restauranteur? What about catering with a rental kitchen, or food pop-ups, or other creative locations?

When you’re planning your business, ask yourself what the space signifies to the customer, and whether you can achieve that signal in another way that’s less costly, and that ties up less of your resources. We’ve spent so much time making remote work possible for employees of large organizations, there’s no reason you can’t build this into your own business, as well.

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners in PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help you see everything you need to know to make better business and career decisions. Want more insights to help you grow? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Then sign up before Friday to receive the next issue of our News You Can Use.

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If The Teacher Will Appear When You’re Ready, How will You Know It’s Time?

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You’ve got a great team of mentors who have helped you get this far, there’s no way they could be holding you back, is there?

​If you have ever taken lessons in a sport, or music, or some other area of your life where you did really well and it seemed to come naturally, you may have also experienced a time when you had to move on to a different teacher, at a higher level. You can have a certain need for support and interaction, and someone can be exactly the right teacher or confidante for that time and place. But as you grow, your needs may change. The good teacher will recognize this, and encourage you to move on. Someone who wants you to stay at the same level, may have their own challenges to work on – and you will need to work on gaining the wisdom to know the difference. This is your job to manage.

As you become faster, fitter, stronger, or whatever goal you have set for yourself, you also need to be looking for those around you who will help you keep up the challenge. At the gym, when the set of weights become easy to lift, experts at fitness know that it’s time to try something heavier or harder. The same is true with your career. Otherwise you are possibly just playing it safe, and coasting. You don’t have to be constantly dissatisfied with your progress, that’s not the point. It’s that by pushing to the next stage, you will begin to build your confidence in just how far you have come – and how far you can go in the future. People who have lost significant amounts of weight say things like, “I can’t believe how much I used to eat”, or “Wow, I would never drink so much on the weekends now, it seems so unhealthy”. Each new challenge is an opportunity for you to build your confidence, and knowing when or whether you need a new teacher is also part of your growth.

If you feel like you’re not progressing, it may be time to look for the next teacher to appear. If you believe you’re ready, you are.

We’re Megann and Steve Willson, the Partners behind PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to build better businesses and have better relationships with customers and peers, by helping them see everything they need to know to make better decisions. If you’ve got big decisions to make, we’d like to hear from you. You can also get more free advice on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or by clicking the orange button, below. 

 
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The Platinum Pivot

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When you think of startup founders, what do you think of? Do they look something like this? 
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There seems to be a perception lately that “startups” are only:

 

1. Tech companies
2. Mostly young men
3. Looking to scale exponentially and strike it rich.

In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and if you’re over 50, an immigrant, or a woman, the next business to launch in Canada might be yours. In 2016, over 6.6 million Canadians over age 50 were in the labour force – about a third, and the number of self-employed persons of all ages was about 2.7 million. If a third of those are self-employed, that’s 900,000 over-fifty entrepreneurs. A 2012 CIBC study noted that over-50s were the fastest-growing segment of the start-up market. While women don’t make up the lion’s share of business starts, their share is consistently growing. Immigrants, too, are finding that if they are struggling to find employment for others, building a business lets them create a job for themselves, and for others. So why not you?

As for the money, there’s nothing to say you won’t strike it rich. There are some late bloomers who went on to have very successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs also identify many other reasons, such as values alignment, more purposeful work, providing necessary but “missing” services in their communities, and employing others in their communities.

There are tremendous advantages to being an entrepreneur when you’ve already logged some career and life experience. Among these, you may have assets you can leverage for start-up capital, so you don’t have to hand over part of your business to venture capitalists, but can retain control for yourself. You’ve also had lots of time to observe a wide variety of business models that work (and don’t), and you’ve built valuable skills that can form the basis of your new enterprise.

Given the high number of workers over age 50, and yet an increasing youth bias in the workplace, there are plenty of mature workers who are (in the words of one columnist we read recently) “disappearing” themselves – doing everything they can to disguise or hide their age. Wouldn’t you think that at age 50 you had finally earned the right to be yourself? So if you’ve reached the half-century mark, we’d like to encourage you to consider the “platinum pivot© ” – think now about how you’re going to take ownership of your career and rely on your own talents for your next 20, 30 or more years of your work life. Sure, there are plenty of youthful startups out there, but they’ll all get older eventually, if they survive. You’ve just got a head start.

We’re Megann and Steve Willson, and we’re the Founders and Partners at PANOPTIKA. We started our business in our 40s, and we’re still going strong, nearly 20 years later. Let us help you build a business that’s just right for you. You can find us on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, and we’d be glad to have you join our inner circle and subscribe for weekly insights using the orange button, below. Let’s get growing, together. 

 
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