< back I recall very clearly the words of wisdom I received from Stephen Covey who I met shortly after qualifying as a facilitator of his “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” programme some 10 years ago: “If you really want to be effective then work on your paradigms”. Now to be blunt I didn’t see them as words of wisdom at the time. Indeed, I was struggling to come to terms with a lot of the language you get taught by the Covey learning experience such as the ironic “abundance mentality™” - they have a whole new dictionary which come complete with hundreds of quotes and quips to suit just about every occasion. But increasingly I now appreciate what he was saying. People see the same things very differently. Last week I took several clients and colleagues to the Malcolm Gladwell/Steven Levitt double-bill conference organised by ‘Benchmark for Business’ (who get top marks by the way) and was struck by the story of the Getty museum purchasing a Kouros (ancient Greek statue) for c.$7 million in 1983 after spending a year authenticating it with several in-house experts armed with the latest technology. Unfortunately the immediate reaction at it’s unveiling to a group of most distinguished art historians were the cries of “fake” and now the museum web site states that the Kouros origins are: “about 530 B.C., or modern forgery”! (Read Gladwell’s book “Blink” for the story in detail). The conference posed the question: “How can these experts have such different opinions” and I thought about the recent telephone call with my accountants and tax advisors and pondered that actually differing opinions is the norm in business. Taking this further I’m continuously reminded by my soon to be sixteen year old daughter that my choice of music/film/literature is “lame” (or “random” if she’s feeling generous) and regularly find myself thinking “did I see a different game of football, cricket or rugby” when discussing the weekend’s sport with colleagues. In fact I think that everybody sees everything differently and there are 360 degrees of difference – at least! More often than not, when helping clients create and implement a HEMP (Highly Effective Marketing Plan) and asking them to complete step 10, titled “Know Yourself”, I find that a group of four or five board directors will write down totally different answers to questions such as: “what’s the one big thing about our company/product/service?” and “what is the personality of our business?” and “what’s our greatest customer benefit?” – in far too many cases the answers are not just different they’re completely contradictory! If you dare to try this out and pose these questions to your board the next time you meet and find that your top team has differing answers to what I suggest are fundamental questions then imagine how your sales force might answer and most importantly of all your customers? Just yesterday I received a phone call from a client who said that he found our proposal “offensive” – a word I put into the extreme feelings bracket. Thanks to the Covey habit 5: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood” I listened carefully to his concerns only to discover that we were in 100% agreement, everything we proposed was what he wanted, (including the fee!) however his interpretation of our written proposal was so different to ours. Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever experienced someone completely misunderstanding your email for example? If you were to review your web site, company literature and other communications would they all say the same things, be in alignment and would all readers take away the same messages? I doubt it. And here’s the contradiction. On the one hand we produce web sites, brochures and other communications to try to help our clients see how useful our offering will be for them and yet by doing so we might actually be confusing them or worse even turning them off. So what can we do about it? My sense is that in the same way you get legal and financial documents checked over thoroughly by expert lawyers and accountants so any sales or company literature should also be run by the experts before publication – and your experts are your customers as their paradigms are the one’s that matter most. Peter Knight is the founder of Phoenix, a privately owned marketing agency, and author of HEMP – The Highly Effective Marketing Plan. Email Peter at pk@phoenixplc.com
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