Unless you have been asleep, we have already outlined dozens of things for you to have looked at and, if appropriate, suggested some corrections you can make. If we are together on this, you should already have freed up resources which we will ask you to later invest in growth.
And if you haven’t yet taken action on those, it’s because change (and yes Stop is a type of change) always has obstacles holding you back—we’ll call these Opposing Forces. If there were none of these Opposing Forces holding you back, you would have already made those changes way before you picked up this book. Yet, you’ve picked up this book because the changes you desire are illusive.
Opposing Forces
What’s an Opposing Force you ask? It’s a military term used for a unit tasked with representing an enemy, usually for training purposes in war game scenarios. Once you identify who the Opposing Forces are, what their objectives are, and where they are, you can then go about overcoming the Opposing Forces. If you skip the initial identification stage, overcoming the Opposing Force tends to become more difficult. You need to know what/who you’re up against to stand a chance of overcoming it/them.
Likewise, when you have a desired change in mind, you need to first identify the Opposing Force, before you can overcome it. Let’s take it for granted that any change you desire already has an Opposing Force. If an Opposing Force didn’t exist, you will probably have already successfully achieved the desired change.
In military training scenarios, as your proficiency increases, you’ll be exposed to increasing difficulty levels of Opposing Force. Likewise, in business we see three levels of difficulty of Opposing Forces.
• Puzzle: The change you desire is of a relatively simple Cause and Effect variety. You’re working with a one-dimensional relationship. Once you understand the cause and effect relationship, the Opposing Force can be easily—though maybe with a little effort and more data—identified. The Opposing Force has a simple answer with clear criteria. So you know where to look for answers and what type of answers you are looking for. Checklists and textbooks are good for dealing with puzzle-type Opposing Forces.
An example of this might be to determine what the tactics are for getting the best return on investment (ROI) of your marketing spend in your specific type of business, assuming you have a predetermined marketing budget?
• Problem: The change you desire is of multidimensional variety. There are multiple possible answers that require judgment and choice and rarely can be answered with simply getting more data. It’s complicated. Checklists and textbooks are not sufficient for dealing with problem type of Opposing Forces. Relevant experience to understand the potential second- and third-order implications of what you choose to do is what you need.
An example of this might be deciding whether you increase your marketing budget or allocate that increment to other projects that might/might not have a higher return on your investment and these other projects may or may not have a positive or negative effect on your marketing initiatives.
• Mystery: This is where the Opposing Force is invisible. You do not know who or what you are up against. You’re in an emergent and unpredictable environment and have no clear answers to choose from. These options defy definition and clear criteria. They are complex and you cannot know the effect or the Opposing Forces until you have the cause so you’re in a circular argument.
An example of this is finding your business on a plateau!
We think you’re a dab hand at dealing with puzzles and can give most people a run for their money when it comes to dealing with problems. However, as you embark on busting through the plateau, the Opposing Forces you are dealing with are by definition invisible. You do not know who or what you are up against.
Yep, it took us the whole Opposing Forces section, or just over a page, to say that if you’re a Plateau Business, then by definition you are up against Invisible Opposing Forces.
In military situations, if you don’t know who or what you are up against, the priority becomes to send out a reconnoitering team to scout out the terrain to gather knowledge to figure out who and what you are up against and where they are located. Likewise Plateau Businesses need to prioritize experimentation or, if you prefer trial and error, to figure out what you are up against.
We can’t offer you predetermined solutions. That is why the premise of this book has been to encourage you to think: what if…?, how about…?, and let’s try this…. We can offer many parables to facilitate alternative perspectives and enthuse your curiosity to overcome the Opposing Forces, whether visible or not, that are holding your business back.
We said earlier—truthfully and intentionally—that this book is not written by a couple of university dons. It means in part we have purposefully been light touch on a broad range of hopefully useful topics rather than narrowly focused on one. And we have no intention to quiz you on it later. Instead what we want is to inspire you to burst through your plateau. Our continued objective in this book is to select a few things that inspire you to curiously identify things that will allow you to experiment, and with a better insight of the Invisible Opposing Forces, make bigger bets and get maximum impact.
It is important you actually take action. If you read this book—or indeed a far more comprehensive book—without taking action, that would be a total waste of your time. We don’t want to waste your time.
We’ve tried our best through the words on these pages to help you look at these changes from different perspectives—because we know that you already know deep down in your gut you need to make these changes. We have and will continue to pose questions of the what if…? variety to help you overcome the focus on the hurdles to changes. Let’s now be more blatant! How much do you desire the fruits of the change, and how can you overcome the hurdles to change?
We’ll now look at more big-bang opportunities before reviewing some other meaty chunks of change. Some of these will require very little effort on your part, some considerable planning, but we rather see these as, on balance, neutral in terms of the energies needed to implement them. Their rewards should be anything but neutral.
What is important is once you have identified those changes you are going to make, start on them and don’t leave them parked on some imaginary to-do list. Commit to these changes. If it is your business, you are the driver of change.