Finding Growth in Chaotic Times: Send Out Explorers and Miners
By Martin Pazzani
Espionage writer John LeCarre wrote that “a desk is a terrible place from which to view the world.” This is as true in the business world as it is in the spy game, and it is especially relevant in a rapidly changing, chaotic, multi-dimensional, global marketplace.
And indeed it is. An increasingly overworked and overstressed workforce is frustrated, not only because they are increasingly overworked and overstressed, but because they can’t seem to make headway against the competition, or to connect with new customers or markets, or to make a profit. Many have trimmed away any fat — actually well past the fat — to get to leaner, meaner, faster organizations, and now, while things are certainly leaner and meaner, it is apparent to many that you cannot cut your way to growth, and that you can actually be too lean.
Certainly controlling costs and minimizing risk is prudent to a degree, but if it is all-encompassing and indiscriminate, it is akin to retreat and surrender. In an environment where competing and growing gets harder every quarter, withdrawing on all fronts, or becoming overly cautious can easily infect the way people think, encouraging passivity and diminishing their ability to solve problems.
One way out is to broaden your horizons, and for that, you need Explorers and Miners.
Explorers and Miners are the people in your company who specialize in being always out there on the front lines, with their antennae up, hunting for ideas, seeking feedback, testing what works and what doesn’t, talking to customers, digging into problems and issues, looking for answers, and incorporating it all into something useful.
Explorers and Miners bring perspective and insight, two important elements of competitive advantage, and essential ingredients for growth. Perspective is the ability to see things from various angles at the same time, to consider more than one point of view and to be more concerned about what you do not know than what you do know.
Insights are findings or observations that change thinking and identify opportunities. Both require grasping the hidden nature of things and both are at their best when they provoke action.
In tandem, perspective and insight are powerful assets.
The more perspective and insight you have, the more truths you know, the more options you have, the more creative you will be, and the better your decision-making will be. This is critical to growth because being open to a fresh viewpoint often opens up a world of new possibilities.
Regrettably, many companies — and most people — do not make enough effort to maximize perspective and insight. Sometimes they get overconfident, arrogant, or lazy. Perhaps budgets have been cut so severely that all you can do is sit behind your desk. Perhaps your organization is so lean you have no ability to send out an explorer. But for whatever reason, most will stop short of getting to the heart of matters, they don’t or won’t dig deeply enough, or they only look where everyone else has already looked. And this is exactly why you must do it: going the extra mile, exploring and mining, gives you competitive advantage.
From behind a desk, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you know it all. From that sheltered spot, when you rely on past experience and second-hand, filtered information, it’s usually the case that ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. You stop learning, so you stop growing, and so your world shrinks.
But the world does not stop growing when you do. Customer needs continue to evolve. Consumers change and often seem distrusting, fickle, and unpredictable. New companies and technologies come out of nowhere and steal business from you before you know it’s gone.
This is exactly when you need to turn to your Explorers and Miners. They bring back new substance, information from the front lines, ideas and material that you cannot get from a research report or a tracking study. They provide useful human knowledge that, if assimilated into your world, can be a fresh supply of fuel for innovation and growth.
The operative word here is ‘assimilate’ because often what they unearth will challenge the status quo, run counter to conventional wisdom, and make key people uncomfortable. So you need to insure that your organization’s leadership is open-minded enough to permit dissent, debate and change. It does no good to have Explorers and Miners if you are resistant to using their efforts to expand your world.
In reality, you probably have people who already are, or who are highly capable of becoming Explorers and Miners. These are your front line sales force, client account handlers, customer service managers, and in particular people who have multi-market or regional roles. These are the people who spend the most time in planes, trains, and automobiles, and the least time sitting behind a desk.
Usually they don’t realize they are Explorers and Miners, and they are not if they are just ‘out there’ without a bigger purpose, unseen and unheard. But they are a huge source of priceless perspective and insight if you use them properly.
What they need most is a mission.
They need to be told that their role is to explore and dig, that they are an indispensable resource, that they are essential to future growth, and that they will be rewarded for their discoveries. And they need to have a direct line to the C-suite or their most valuable discoveries have a tendency to be squelched.
Explorers and Miners are invaluable to a company that knows how to bring them into play. If you don’t have enough of them, you need to get them, and fast. The more you have, and the more you draw on them, the greater the positive impact. It raises everyone’s game, leads to better decisions and higher levels of creativity and innovation, and is a prime channel for growth in difficult competitive times.
The answers you need are out there. But you need to explore and mine if you want the treasure.
Martin Pazzani is an entrepreneur, an explorer, a mountaineer with ascents on all seven continents, and a company founder with multiple startups in multiple categories, including fitness, technology, and craft distilling. Formerly a CEO and CMO in consumer goods and services, advertising, and management consulting, he’s had tenures at FCB Foote Cone and Belding, DDB Worldwide, Bally, Crunch, and Heublein (now Diageo), and has given seminars and keynotes on six continents.
