Comparison is the thief of joy, as the old saying goes. In business, it’s more like the thief of opportunity.
It’s easy to say “just work harder” when the real culprit is the system.
Like a broken traffic light. There’s always someone honking their horn, sure the problem is some #@%! driver up ahead.
What’s required is an understanding of cause and effect. Seeing what’s really happening. And when you do, it’s like placing the final piece in a thousand-piece puzzle — and wanting to do it all over again.
There’s something satisfying about turning chaos into order.
Reports do that. But without context, a report is just borrowed sight. It still can’t fully see.
Turning a blind eye usually means choosing not to see. The phrase goes all the way back to Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801. The story goes that when the signal came to withdraw, he put his telescope to his blind eye so he could honestly say he didn’t see it.
That’s how he won.
The signal came from Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, watching from well back. Nelson was close enough to see what the signal couldn’t.
But maybe the best example is W. Edwards Deming’s Red Bead Experiment.
Deming would pull volunteers from the audience and hire them as Willing Workers. The job was simple: dip a paddle into a box of beads and come up with white ones. White is good product. Red is a defect.
Then management went to work.
Someone was best. Someone was the worst. The best got praised. The worst got a talking-to. Then probation. Then let go, while the top performers picked up double shifts.
It’s the purest version of “just work harder, never mind the system.”
Deming named two mistakes. One: treating a system cause as a special cause, which leads to overadjustment. Two: treating a special cause as a system cause, which leads to inaction.
In a world of ever-evolving systems, “just work harder” is always the first mistake.
Comparison without context is the second.
Cheers,
Jerry
P.S. A leaderboard that ranks your reps by sales is a red bead count. It tells you who came up with white beads, but not who got the busy Saturday, who took the most ups, or who was on the floor when the traffic wasn’t. Trakwell 3.0 puts every number in context: traffic, opportunities, and conversion side by side, so you can tell a system problem from a people problem. And when something looks off, ask the Trakwell Assistant why. See what’s new in Trakwell 3.0
