TrailNotes offer an occasional reflection on the dynamics that influence growth and the pathway of real impact creation for clients, company, and community.

Do you Drag or Roll?

The pressure to demonstrate activity steals time, reduces overall impact and can de-sensitize the best teams against the value of a evaluating why, what, and how we do our jobs.

Perspective #1 – An entrepreneurial caveman proposes an approach that might help address a team’s obvious challenge. The team politely declines out of a concern for their immediate work demands.

Perspective #2 – An established team (and pet) happily executes against their assigned responsibilities. They apply a familiar method and avoid distractions that might negatively impact their progress.

My Experience

I shared this cartoon with my team a few years ago after we had run up against adoption issues for our new and improved product offering. Our clients, while recognizing the value our service delivered, often reported that they did not have the cycles in their product roadmap to explore our service.

Initially, my team enjoyed the comic relief offered by the cartoon of the entrepreneurial caveman. However, I soon realized that my team suffered from the same conundrum that we had attributed to our clients. Our critique of another quickly turned into a review of our own blinders.

Have you supplied the wheels for your organization’s existing methods, but failed to gain a receptive audience? Have you fallen prey to inertia’s temptation and resisted the opportunity to re-think the organization’s approach to serve its stated purpose? 

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