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Matt Ridings

Social Business Transformation: It's OK To Start Simple | SideraWorks

Social Business: It's OK To Start Simple - SideraWorks

Reaching the vision of a truly social business is complex, there’s no denying that fact.  What often gets lost in our discussions of those complexities however is that where you start is less important than where you’re going.  After a few months of working with customers it’s clear that we’ve done a poor job as an industry (including SideraWorks) of letting companies know that you don’t have to try and tackle everything all at once.  We’ve instilled a fear in them that this stuff is just too overwhelming.  We’re in the process of changing our materials to correct that misconception, but in the meantime let’s try and provide some clarity around how you can start down this road simply and easily.

Where Are You Going?

Building a social business basically falls into two major categories of activities.

  1. Dealing with the implications on your business of engaging in external social media
  2. Taking advantage of the opportunities that applying social concepts within your organization represents

That’s it, nothing more nothing less.  It’s perfectly fine if you only want to do external engagement for a while.  What does matter however is that you deal with those implications.  Whether that’s through applying something like the SideraWorks Center of Gravity™ framework or another model of your own design you need centralized understanding and agreement. 

Where Do You Start?

The initial items at that stage are things like policies, governance, crisis and escalation processes, etc.  These are the items that can be decided upon and put into effect without much of an investment in human capital.  Later on you can tackle the items requiring slightly more recurring investments like standardizing and centralizing social technologies, cross-communication models, and so on.

 No Excuses

These items aren’t rocket science and can be accelerated if desired by utilizing an outside consultancy that has developed all these things before and can facilitate the decision making process within your groups.  But you are capable of doing these things yourself as well (promise), it’ll just take longer and may not be as complete in the beginning.  In either case there’s no excuse for not moving forward today.

Cost Savings & Risk Mitigation

The key here is to develop a clear vision of where you’re going and to do so from holistic perspective not just a single department or business unit.  By having that clarity you can then align the various social activities you’re undertaking with the eventual goal so that when you arrive there you’ve done so in an efficient manner.  The cost savings and risk mitigation you’ll achieve by doing so is massive and the investment of developing that vision is minimal.

Do you know what that long term vision of social looks like in your organization?  You should.  Need some help with that? Feel free to contact me.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings – @techguerilla

Photo Credit: By Steve-h

 

Want a clear explanation of social business? Download our SideraWorks brief on “What Is Social Business” for free. And don’t forget to subscribe to the blog via RSS or email.

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Social Business Coopetition: My Response

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I was asked an interesting question last week, or rather I should say that I was challenged to defend a certain behavior.  Specifically, "Why do you promote the work of your competitors and/or interact with them?".  It's a valid question, my response is below:

  • It's in my clients best interest, and thus my best interest, to be as informed as I possibly can be.  The thought leaders outside of my own company will tend to be people working at my competition.  Those thought leaders who are most interested in elevating their knowledge understand that the best way to do so is to engage with and challenge one another.  It's true that makes each party better, but that's a small tradeoff.  Those people who believe they alone hold all the answers and whose egos won't let them acknowledge anyone else soon find themselves lagging the field.
  • Trust.  Clients want to know that their advisors will come to the table with the *best* answer regardless of its source.  They would much rather their consultant be mature enough to give them the right advice even if they have to give credit to a competitor than to give them a less effective answer due to their arrogance.  It may seem counter-intuitive but in the long run it's always the best strategy.  As much as my ego would like for it to be true, clients really don't care as much about whether you 'know the right answer' as they do whether you can 'find the right answer'.  And having a network available to find that right answer, even if some of them are competitors, is a valuable asset.  It's a reciprocal network though so you have to give if you expect to take.
  • A rising tide lifts all boats.  I would much rather be one of a dozen *great* social business consultancies than I would be one great consultancy in a sea of mediocrity.  Seems crazy right?  Why wouldn't you want to be the one standout firm?  Let me explain.  An industry needs validation to be successful.  If mediocre consultancies are doing mediocre social business initiatives then they achieve mediocre results.  That in turn gives social business a bad name.  Which, in turn makes fewer businesses believe in it and diminishes the industry as a whole.  Trust me, there is much more business to be had in a thriving industry riddled with success stories than one filled with doubt and stories of failure.
  • The notion of 'my competition' isn't always wholly accurate.  'Social Business' is an incredibly complex and broad space filled with specializations.  SideraWorks happens to specialize in the strategy and structure side of things (org design, culture, change management, framework development, etc.) while other social business consultancies specialize in a variety of the other aspects.  There are many cases where we could (and do) work side by side with organizations that may seem like competitors on the outside simply because we both fall under the generic term of 'social business'.  We have overlaps certainly, but quite often aren't fully parallel when it comes to competing for business.
  • Clients don't buy on 'capabilities' alone.  I've never really been afraid of competing.  Even in cases where we are competing on exactly the same capabilities there are always differences.  Clients also buy based on 'fit'.  For example, do our people and our approach fit better within their culture?  If I don't win that business because someone else was a better fit doesn't that mean that we wouldn't have meshed well with the client anyway?  The type of work we do is extremely 'up close and personal', if I sell you a bill of goods just to get your business and then deliver in a completely different way then all I've done is create an unhappy customer.  That in turn costs me future business.  Don't get me wrong, I'm fiercely competitive and I hate to lose but making the sale 'at all costs' is ridiculous to me.  That's a short term view and one destined to bite you in the ass over time.
  • It's a small world.  Those people who are your competition today may be someone you acquire (or are acquired by) tomorrow or at the individual level perhaps a future employee.  Staying engaged with them vs. alienating them because they are 'competition' isn't so smart.
All of the above notwithstanding, it's just who I am.  I simply enjoy the intellectual stimulation and I don't really care what role the other person has or where they work.  If they write something that my clients and followers would find valuable then I'm going to promote it, period.  It's not something that I feel threatened by, I know where SideraWorks' value lies with clients and it's not in pretending that we are the smartest people on the planet on every subject.  Would you trust someone who implied that they were?  

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

Photo Courtesy Of: http://www.flickr.com/people/62604982@N04/
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The Lens Of Business Management

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It strikes me that photography is a lot like running a business.  You have to develop an eye for potential and you do that through experience.  You learn to view the world as it would be seen through a lens, to see it for what it could be not necessarily how it looks to you at that moment.  Seeing the location for how it will be when the light strikes it just right at sunset vs. how it appears at noon.

However, the experience that helps you find the potential in a location or an idea is only half of the story.  You still have to take a *lot* of pictures if you want to end up with a few that are spectacular.  In the case of a business, that translates to trying a lot of approaches (from the ones you've filtered down via experience).  There are a lot of them that you'll leave on the editing room floor.  Those aren't failures, those are steps on the path to success.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbratl/
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Broadcasting Your Culture

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Today, a simple question and one of the shortest posts you'll ever see from me.

If you took your business culture and unleashed it onto the world by transparently broadcasting your employees unfiltered thoughts….their opinions of their environment, their co-workers, their leadership, their sense of purpose, all spread out on a public table for the world to see….would that scare you or make you proud?  

Think about it.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

Co-Founder & CEO, SideraWorks

 


Image courtesy HerPhotographer

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Your Client Is Not An Idiot - A Rant On Consulting

Begin rant.

  1. Every department feels like they best understand how to achieve the companies goals.
  2. Every department feels like they are in a tug of war with departments that 'don't get it'.
  3. Every department thinks if they could just get the budget they needed they would be much more successful.
  4. Every department feels threatened if they hear of some initiative taking place elsewhere that they think they should be the owners of.
  5. Every department feels under-represented at the leadership table
  6. Every department feels many of their company-wide processes are broken
  7. Every department feels like infrastructure services (HR, Finance, IT) often make their lives more difficult instead of enabling them
These truisms exist not because companies are stupid, but because they were smart.  These fractures occurred because of a need to scale.  It is the divide-and-conquer approach to a hierarchical chain of command.  It is the source of silos.  It's a simple thing to stand at a distance and see these structures and believe that organizations are feeble-minded.  After all, if we can all see these flaws for what they are then why can't they?  For the most part, they can.  But you have to keep in mind that these structures were formed during an industrial production/consumption period in which companies had never before come close to reaching these kinds of sizes.  They needed new ways of distributing and scaling corporate functions.  It's easy to pick these structures apart now when we have a developing knowledge based economy, but let's not forget that using these traditional structures we grew the largest companies known to man over the period of a century.  I, for one, have a real issue decrying something that proved its worth over a much longer period than anything we are suggesting now.  Yes, these structures have issues, and yes those issues are being exacerbated as we move into a different type of economy.  But there was a lot *right* about those structures as well.  They served their purposes very well.

When I hear consultants and theorists berate companies and the way they are structured one of two thoughts crosses my mind; either a) They've never actually been in a large enterprise in their life or b) They have foregone reality in favor of making themselves look smart.  

Do they really believe that the leadership of these 'broken' companies don't understand that their models carry with them certain problems?  Do they really believe that the leadership hasn't read all the same books on how to run a better business that they have?  Do they really believe that the McKinsey's of the world haven't crawled throughout that company over the years pointing out these issues?  It's this arrogant point of view that many consultants carry with them into the boardroom that really gets under my skin.

The best ideas in the world cannot, and will not, be successful if they are built on a foundation of fantasy.  You don't modify the structure of a company overnight, you don't put technology in place and watch all of your woes magically disappear, and most importantly you don't make the individuals within your company suddenly sing kum-ba-ya and forget about their own self-centered needs and desires.  It takes time, sometimes a lot of it.  It takes work, always a lot of it.  It takes determination, a ridiculous amount of it.  Most of all, it takes leadership caring about the state of the company ten years from now more than they care about the state of it one year from now.  That's a pretty daunting view for anyone, particularly for those beholden to shareholders, and it's why only the very best leaders tend to take on these types of challenges.  

IBM and GE would be two of the most obvious examples of those successful business model shifts because of their size, but there are hundreds of mid-cap companies, and thousands of SMB's who take on this challenge every year.  Those ratios might imply that it gets easier the smaller you are.  I disagree to a point.  It can happen *faster* as you get smaller, and the variables are less complex, but I'm not sure I would say *easier* because that implies that the commitment required was less.  I would posit that one reason volume increases with a decrease in size is 'legacy'.  The smaller you get the more likely you are to have an Owner/Founder in place.  One that is more than just a 'job' for the CEO.  A leadership that isn't walking away with its millions even if the business fails.  One that sees the company as a means to provide for its descendants.  That tends to organically support a longer term view.

Do I believe that the tools, the surrounding culture shift, and economic status are now aligned in such a way as to incent many leaders to finally make some of these business model adjustments?  Of course, it's why we started SideraWorks.  It's why I believe in the structure of Social Business. But don't mistake proper timing and incentives helping corporate leaders make these choices now as being the same thing as them 'finally seeing the light'.  They saw the light long ago, but the perceived risk/reward balance wasn't yet leaning far enough for them to justify it.

Our job is to help these organizations realize their vision, not to realize ours.  Whether 'social business' is the method by which that occurs, or some other name you choose to apply to it it is still a *method*.  The 'vision', a more efficient/agile/responsive/successful company, is still theirs.  The more you dismiss the intelligence stored within your clients companies, the more likely you are to fail them.  Success in these matters is achieved only by sitting at the same table with the leadership and *facilitating* solutions.  Standing upon a pedestal with hoarded knowledge and dictating solutions to the peasants simply doesn't work.

End rant.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

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What Is Social Business? A SideraWorks Brief

You can find the brief on "What Is Social Business" below, directly on SlideShare, or on the SideraWorks website (Yes, it's now live!).  Enjoy!

 

 

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

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The Role Of The Asshole and Mutual Objectives

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I recently became embroiled in an exercise of frustrating back and forth communications with an individual.  I was becoming increasingly annoyed at myself for becoming so frustrated, or more specifically why I was.  As I was writing a post regarding social dynamics and their impact on organizational design and facilitation, I realized I not only knew the answer but was writing about it at that moment.  

Before we tackle that however, a little background and an explanation of the title.  The other post that I was writing involves asking a question about 'The Role Of The Asshole'.  I'll explain that further in the post itself but essentially it involves a variant of what is known as Bohm's Dialog, in my case I've specifically used an extension of Isaacs 'Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together' in my executive facilitation sessions over the years.  Peter Stoyko recently sent me a brilliant visualization that he had made of that very structure, I'll reference it further in the next post but you can view it here .  The premise is that the most effective dialogs require that the participants fulfill certain roles (each person plays multiple roles at different times in a dialog); Movers, Bystanders, Followers, and Opposers.  It's that last group, the Opposers, I'm focused on here.

When most people think about a team they'd like to be on, or a meeting they'd like to be in, it would be ones that exclude Opposers.  Those skeptics, the devils advocates, the ones questioning everything at every turn.  However, we need those people to be at our most effective.  It's been proven over, and over again that it makes us more effective as a team.  I call it the 'Role of The Asshole' (soon to be trademarked) but that's really a bit of a misnomer since someone in the Opposer role also has things they very specifically should *not* do.  And it's those items that cause things to go awry.  Being dismissive, belittling others, being self-serving, etc.  More on that in the later post, let's get back to the point at hand and why I was continuing to be so frustrated with this exchange I was having.

First, I had to realize that my exposure to, and ardent belief in the Role Of The Asshole causes me to engage further with some types of people than others would. I expect it to further the outcome and make it better.  My belief dictated that it didn't always have to be a pretty and comfortable process, it just needed to produce the best outcome.  So, I engage with people that others avoid because they are often perceived as..assholes.  Second, I had to realize that just because I had a role in mind that has certain boundaries to it to make it effective doesn't mean the other person felt any obligation to conform to them.  Third, and most importantly, if we don't actually share the same objectives then the dialog is doomed before it ever begins.  

While I may be engaging with them to find some kind of shared understanding, the other person may be engaging to 'win at all costs', pander to an audience, or even to try and explicitly diminish someone.  To be clear, this is not a singular event for me, it's a pattern to some degree so it's really not about this specific instance.  I tend to approach debates, arguments, dialog (I see each as different, but call them what you will) with this notion that it's important to be understood…and it is, but only if that objective is mutual.  If the other person has no desire to understand and has a different objective entirely then you will rarely find success using these professional approaches to dialog and facilitation.  They serve me well when consulting to organizations, but it's obvious to me that they also give me unrealistic expectations about other people in general and how they approach communications.  This creates dialogs that are circular in nature and never evolve, and in my case creates a desire to plant my head into the nearest flat surface out of frustration.  I'm sure these instances of 'You're wasting your time', or 'It's not worth it', etc. seem very clear cut and obvious.  They certainly seem that way to me…on paper.  In real life?  I'm often in the middle of them before I allow myself to believe it.

Will this recognition change my behavior?  Perhaps.  If nothing else I would hope that I'll get better at asking "Do we share the same objective?" before engaging in these kinds of dialogs, and then make a more informed decision as to whether I'm willing to apply my time.  

As for the Assholes out there, we need you.  Don't let anyone tell you that we don't.  But do me a favor, go read the list on the graphic linked above of what an Opposer should do, and what they should not do.  If you find yourself in the latter column then that's a different kind of asshole entirely and you might want to work on that if you want to contribute to a team, consult for or run a company, or simply have friends.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla  

image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/51647767@N06/
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Death Of A Harpsichord, Or Why Nuance Is Important

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Over at SideraWorks we've been busy lately with trying to take the complexity of communicating what "Social Business" is and distill it down to more simple terms for the sake of clarity to our clients.  If there's one thing my business partner Amber Naslund and I disagree over sometimes it is this exercise of distillation.  From her point of view anything that can be stripped away for the goal of communicating more clearly and simply should be.  She's right of course, it's just that it often goes against everything in my nature.  The act of simplifying something necessarily means that you have to leave a lot on the cutting room floor.  And those of you who've either met me in person, or taken the time over the years to read my writing know that I am not the most succinct person in the world.  I *want* those cast-off snippets!  It's the in-between bits that I love so much because they are nuanced. They seem absolutely critical to me.  Eventually I succumb to the logic that you have to effectively 'summarize' something before diving into the details, but that activity and the book I'm currently reading* has me thinking about the power of nuance and the limitations of language.

Common Ground
When we talk about the 'soft' aspects of organizations, like corporate culture for example, language often falls short.  We can communicate the gist of something, but typically it requires finding some common ground with the reader/listener. Some shared experience is generally the means by which true understanding takes place.  Nuance is one of those things that lies just beneath the surface of language, we can intuit it, we can use analogies that people can more easily relate to, but describing a corporate culture is like trying to describe what love feels like.  Culture is something that is felt, something that is experienced. Because of that the best we can really do is to describe outcomes of specific cultures.  "The by-product of x type of culture is that y, and z occur".

Outcome Based Communications
Outcome based communications are great.  They provide the incentive for change and they give you a yardstick to measure success, yet capturing the elusive descriptors that truly define the 'feeling' of a culture is an exercise in frustration and patience.  We take for granted that that kind of nuance won't be communicated, we don't even expect it anymore, but I believe we should try harder.  Traits are useful, and they are the most commonly used vehicle for this type of dialog but they are just another form of outcome based communications.  It's like the Big 5 personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), we're describing how someone acts (an outcome of that personality) but not trying to capture what those personalities feel like.

"Why worry about even trying to communicate that level of nuance at all?" you might ask.  A few reasons.  
  1. It's difficult to implement effective change management if all parties don't truly grasp the experiential side of the desired culture.  Those difficult to describe aspects that are so subtle you only catch them out of the corner of your eye, yet they are disproportionally felt.  
  2. Culture initiatives can quickly dive headlong into a set of procedural 'hard' activities within an organization if the 'soft' aspects aren't both understood and given a high or higher priority.  And when that happens the initiative *will* fail. 
  3. Slight variations in these nuanced aspects can revolutionize an organization, foster innovation cycles, and help it evolve with its broader ecosystem of customers and partners.  But if the nuanced aspects aren't well understood how can you introduce intelligent variation?
Variation Begets Nuance
In regards to variation and understanding the importance of nuance, you can think of how musical instruments have evolved.  When is the last time you saw a harpsichord?  The piano replaced it because it had something that the harpsichord did not…nuance.  A note played on a harpsichord has one volume, period.  The subtle variation of moving to padded hammers hitting the strings instead of being plucked as they are in a harpsichord allowed musicians to add nuance to their music. They could now increase or decrease the intensity that they pushed on a pianos keys and achieve variations in volume, thus adding nuances never before available.  The guitar, unlike the piano, isn't bound to the rigid set of notes available (C, C#, D, etc).  Why not?  Because adding the variation of bending the string means they can add nuance and play the tones between the notes.  Even the human voice has had this experience of introducing variation that leads to nuance.  The microphone meant that instead of having to constantly project loudly to be heard in an audience the artist could now add subtlety and softly sung material and still have it projected clearly.   In this same way businesses often see an initiative involving culture and view it as rigid set of processes to be done, instead of fostering an environment where subtle but important variations can be introduced to achieve the nuances desired.  

Why The Hard Things Are Easier
'Hard' aspects of change are easy to measure, easy to check off of a list and say you've made progress.  So we naturally gravitate towards them.  'Soft' aspects not so much.  Without full buy in from the top, and the ability for everyone to comprehend and visualize what the desired change looks like, lower level managers are stuck with trying to explain what they are accomplishing.  So they do what they think is safest and work on the 'hard' aspects, because they know that only saying things are 'feeling' better during a performance review will get them a ride on the express elevator out of the building.

In an ideal world we'd have immersion programs in organizations where the desired culture already exists and key team members would go and spend enough time there to experience it.  But in the real world this doesn't happen, although to be fair I've run initiatives in organizations where we effectively built a startup within an enterprise, fostered the culture we wanted, and then used it as a seeding ground to spread into the larger enterprise.  And while that's a great method, it's still not very common.

No Magic Bullet
So do I have a magic bullet for expressing the nuances of these kinds of initiatives so that they are fully grasped? I wish that were so.  However, I do think it's important that we try, and an imperative that the key members understand why it's important to try.  Do you have any methods that you've found successful in communicating highly nuanced 'soft' topics?  I would love to hear about them in the comments below.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

*I'd like to thank the book "Guitar Zero - The New Musician & The Science Of Learning" for inspiring this post and the instrument examples I've used.  It's a great read and I highly recommend it.

**Photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/jrandomf/
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Surveys and ROI, You Have To Start Somewhere

A single survey, of any kind, can only hold a certain amount of value.  Continue doing that same survey over time to the same audience however, and no matter how bad the survey is crafted its value will increase exponentially.  This is because you've established a baseline by which you can spot patterns and trends.  You now have something 'relative' which you can factually give comparisons to.

For all of the semantic hullabaloo over the term ROI in social media and all of the supposed complexity involved in its measurement, the basics are no different than the survey example given above.  If you don't put a mark on the ground that represents your starting line, there's no way of stopping and knowing how far you've run.  I don't have to agree with your key performance indicators, if you want to measure 'Likes' and 'Follows' right now and treat them as meaningful, have at it.  But draw as many lines on the ground as you can *now*, even if those lines represent things you aren't currently trying to measure against (like new revenue).  Put basic tracking mechanisms in place *now*.  That way, later on you have baselines from which you can draw meaning immediately.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
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You Can't Plan For Everything

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When we soft launched SideraWorks last month we had a plan.  I'm not much of a 'business plan' kind of guy, by that I mean those templated documents that you spend a considerable amount of time trying to fill in content for and then put on a shelf never to be seen again.  While I was in venture capital I can't tell you how many of those I had to read that weren't worth the paper they were written on, so I'm a bit cynical.  However, I do research and analyze a marketplace to see what its needs are, how well that need is currently being met, and how it could be done better.  After a number of sanity checks and revisions with people smarter than I am that eventually leads to a business 'plan' (call it what you will, my partner and I don't formalize it into giant documents).

This isn't my first rodeo, I'm well aware of the fact that the marketplace doesn't conform itself to your planning. Yet I'm foolishly still surprised when things fall out of the woodwork that I didn't expect.  What do I mean? Here's how well some of that planning has shaped up so far:

  • Plan: Soft launch the company, generate enough interest to land a couple of clients while we spend time finishing up some basic things like web sites, materials, etc. before the hard launch.
  • Actual: The interest has outstripped our ability to work on much of anything else.  A good problem to have? Sure.  According to plan? Not even close.  It's great for now, but if it were to continue for too long it would be to our detriment as we wouldn't be scaling the company.  It's a fine balancing act splitting your time between generating revenue for today vs preparing for revenue tomorrow.

  • Plan: Two primary revenue drivers.  One is self-evident, Social Business consulting.  The other will be a bit of a surprise and arrives late 2012 (or should I say, that's the 'plan'?).
  • Actual: Yes, consulting is still the driver, but about 30% of the demand has come from a *completely* unexpected direction and with a slight variance on our offering.  30% is a pretty large number to have not seen coming.  We've had to refine a separate offering that's more in line with that unexpected demand because the one we'd built wasn't a perfect fit for it.  It also means changes to the sales pipeline structure, targeting, messaging, etc to account for the differences.

There are many other examples, including 'simple' things on a list that turn out to be more difficult than we expected.  Social Business is an incredibly nuanced topic, and not the easiest to explain.  As anyone in this space can attest, simplifying what you do and why you do it into a clear concise message is by far the biggest challenge.  We knew that, hell we're hyper-aware of it since we think the space in general does a really poor job of it, but I suppose we arrogantly believed that when we put some true effort towards it we would quickly overcome it.  I'd love to say we've got that one licked since it was on our list to be complete months ago…but we don't.  Have we made considerable progress in refining that message? Certainly, but 'making progress' is a long way from putting a checkmark in the 'complete' column.

To be frank, we're lucky.  The things that 'haven't gone to plan' have been beneficial to us for the most part.  You could say we were mindfully conservative in our estimates.  You could say it was the good planning of a soft launch model that allowed for the flexibility we've had.  You could say it was the million other little things we did that built the foundation.  But truthfully? It could just as easily have gone the other way.  Would I have been this transparent if things hadn't gone so well?  Great question.  I'm not sure.  Soon enough another surprise will come that makes me look like Nostradamus' idiot brother, we'll see what happens then.  

So should you have a plan?  Absolutely, not necessarily a traditional 'business plan', but a plan nonetheless.  But know that the only thing you can count on for sure is that things will not go completely to plan.  Prepare yourself for that fact so that when those surprises appear you can more easily accept them and roll with the punches.  Otherwise you'll keep trying to frantically shove them into your 'plan' and either miss the opportunity or not heed the risk they represent.  I'm no wise sage upon the hill who never makes this mistake anymore.  I'm the guy who often forgets this and needs to be reminded that a business plan should never be 'done', it should be a living thing that is always a 'work in progress'.  

P.S. - Do I like to ask rhetorical questions and then answer them myself? Apparently.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

*photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/isaacmao/
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