While re reading Gary Hemel’s brilliant book “Competing for the Future” it once again highlighted that with all strategic planning, marketing planning and sales planning, business owners and key executives always use their “learned knowledge base” to make decisions.
Typically this is using the “perceived knowledge” the “existing knowledge” while framing strategically important plans. But is the existing knowledge sufficient to truly enable effective planning.
On a day to day basis working as a business coach I frequently have to challenge the existing work protocols, systems and thinking. We are all very much creatures of habit and we work well with habit, but are our habits good habits?. Do we need to unlearn in order to really learn?
One of the common challenges we all face is that of trying to forecast the future or at least try to get some sense of direction for where the future may lie in our industry.
How do you do this if your only experience is historic? Why did Sony as the dominant force in portable music not foresee the potential market that is now dominated by Apple, with their IPOD. Is it because their “learned logic” could only conceive a product that built incrementally on their previous products. Is it that they couldn’t foresee competition coming from completely outside their industry.
Nokia have also fallen victim to this in not anticipating Apple as a potential threat to their dominance.
But how Ronan could you foresee these.
Nobody is clairvoyant, and I agree. However  I feel the answer to this is built on my previous blog article, “what my 4 year can teach us all in business”. The essence of that article is that we must learn to question everything we do, all of our suppositions, assumptions, theories and practices on a continuous basis.
Unlearning is tough and having your decisions challenged is tough, but tough is good. Tough is necessary, tough is in itself learning.
Learn to unlearn.
At your next strategic planning session try challenging the decisions that are being made. Try turning them inside out. Try thinking like a new employee who’s natural compunction is to question everything. Ask the hard question. Are we doing this because this is the way we’ve always done it? Do we need an outside perspective. Are our assumptions based on past success, and now need to be revised?
If you want to increase sales, grow profits, motivate your team and improve your marketing at a new level, can you afford to use the old thinking?
Actions,
Stop, listen, question and unlearn, then start to learn all over again. The  pursuit of knowledge is a relentlessly one but all the more enjoyable for it.
Best of luck
Ronan

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.