Knowledge = confidence
Recognising the issue is often not the hardest part, defining it into a business case and proving the existence of it through insight and data can often be the toughest part. “You don’t know what you don’t know” has never been more apt.
So the big question becomes this: how confident are you about the challenges you’re facing in your business and how committed is the organisation to address them? How much do you really know about these challenges? Do you have the insight and data points to validate their existence, their impact and find a solution? When the answer is “not a whole lot”, then your first challenge is less likely to be to solve these challenges. But rather find out what you can do to recognise what you don’t know and how you can act on it - and beyond that, get the senior level buy in to do something about it.
“Things aren’t black and white, but rather, different shades of grey”
- Steve Patterson
The Scale of Certainty is something that can be used to map where an organisation places itself or its problems in how well defined or understood they are, or ‘degrees of confidence’ as Steve Patterson describes. Coupled with how urgent or critical they are to a business, you start to get a high level of visibility into how much of a priority a particular problem or challenge is and a roadmap starts to form.
Often at the more ‘uncertain’ end of the scale we see the challenges that are hampering the growth of many companies, crippled by a complex issue they have neither the time, budget or even data to approach.
When these are mapped onto a chart, you start to visualise where the challenges fall and the possible solutions to address them become more apparent. I wish I could prescribe a magic solution to solve these - by their very nature they’re elusive but by committing to have the right level of customer, business and market insight in play coupled with the right approach, the blindspot can be addressed and the hidden problems unearthed and dealt with.