Fact or Fiction? What’s the Story You Tell Yourself?

“You can focus on things that are bar­ri­ers or you can focus on scal­ing the wall or redefin­ing the prob­lem.” — Tim Cook, CEO Apple Inc.

It start­ed the same way: I was giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with a new tal­ent­ed team who were excit­ed by the oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op their annu­al plan. The team reflect­ed on how they per­formed over the last year and rel­ished in new access to cap­i­tal, and new team mem­bers around the table.

Then the con­ver­sa­tion drift­ed to growth for the upcom­ing year and expense man­age­ment. Imme­di­ate­ly, every­one did what they always do: they drew on their his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge to posi­tion com­ments like:

• “Our indus­try saw a down­turn last year.”
• “Our team doesn’t have the capac­i­ty to do more.”
• “Our cus­tomers don’t want to hear from us more than we already meet with them.”
• “We only grew 3% last year so we can only grow 3% this year.”
• “We had high turnover last year so we can expect the same this year.”
• “Our rev­enue grew by 50% last year so we should expect the same this year.”

It was a very con­trolled, log­i­cal, and real con­ver­sa­tion based on the mind­set of the pre­sen­ter – same as usu­al, and cre­ative­ly stifling.

Fact vs. Fiction

The prob­lem aris­es when we take the sto­ries we tell our­selves as fact, and then shape what we believe is a log­i­cal, ratio­nal frame­work with­in which all busi­ness deci­sions must fall. The con­ver­sa­tion is eas­i­er because the team is famil­iar with the rhetoric but shouldn’t be con­fused with the bru­tal facts we real­ly need.

So how do we elim­i­nate the sto­ries we tell our­selves and deal with the real facts?

We use a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent approaches:

Start from zero:

Treat the busi­ness as if you were start­ing it fresh, today, with no his­to­ry to draw on. Take a holis­tic look at the envi­ron­ment and base your deci­sions only on what you find.

• If you only had one set of num­bers (noth­ing you could trend), how would you go about estab­lish­ing your future?
• Where would you invest?

Build an impos­si­ble future.

Take your team to a place they can’t pic­ture them­selves and then work back to build the plan.

• We are going to grow rev­enue by 500% next year, or we will add 1000 clients next year.

Assum­ing these num­bers are nowhere near the nor­mal trend, it forces your team to push through the nat­ur­al bar­ri­ers they have estab­lished and forces them to think creatively.

The team I’m work­ing with decid­ed to embrace the ​“Build an impos­si­ble future” approach and were able to chal­lenge them­selves to make that future a real­i­ty. They embraced the mind­set of ​“Let’s go make this hap­pen” ver­sus being weighed down by his­to­ry. I ful­ly expect excep­tion­al growth this upcom­ing year.

The Chal­lenge

• Iden­ti­fy three busi­ness sto­ries you have told your­self that are ground in sto­ry ver­sus fact.
• How would they change if they were future-focused with no his­to­ry to pull on?
• How would that change what you do?

Dean Ritchey is a Coach and Strate­gic Plan­ning Advi­sor at Lawrence & Co.