If you’ve ever launched an entrepreneurial venture or run a small business for any amount of time, you know that what hurts your success the most is what you don’t know – those areas that you think you’re handling successfully, but because of your lack of understanding, knowledge or discernment of what your clients and customers truly need and want, you’re taking a wrong path. And often we can’t see we’re on the wrong path until it’s far too late.
To learn more about those damaging blind spots that limit or crush our business success, I caught up this week with Diana Kander, New York Times bestselling author of All In Startup, a novel outlining lessons for launching successful products through the story of a struggling entrepreneur competing in the World Series of Poker. Today, Diana is the director of Innovation Culture and Habits for Maddock Douglas, a Chicago-based innovation consulting firm. In this role, she trains executives and Fortune 1000 companies to be more innovative and to inspire employees to think more like entrepreneurs.
Kander is the co-author with Andy Fromm of a new book, The Curiosity Muscle: A Story of How Four Simple Questions Uncover Powerful Insights and Exponential Growth. Their book explores why most companies reaching the peak of their potential lose their curiosity and crash into irrelevance. Written as a novel, it walks the reader through specific ways to boost innovation, uncover customer needs, solve problems, engage employees and ultimately, future-proof your business. It helps you ask essential curiosity questions to uncover and address your blind spots and take your business from stagnant to soaring.
Here’s what Diana shares on blinds spots and how to identify and address them powerfully:
Kathy Caprino: How do you define “blind spots” and how can we recognize them?
Diana Kander: Blind spots are not your weaknesses. They aren’t things you know you need to improve. Blind spots are things you think are working well but are actually frustrating your customers. And everyone knows this, but they won’t tell you because they don’t want to be mean about it. It’s like not wanting to tell someone they have food in their teeth. You don’t want to be the person that ruins someone’s day, so you let them keep walking around with spinach sticking out of their incisors. You typically don’t recognize blind spots on your own. You need others to tell you they exist.
Caprino: What is so damaging about our not recognizing these blind spots?
Kander: When you have blind spots, you invest your time and money in things that aren’t the most vital to keeping your business alive. No company that lost its foothold in the market and went out of business like Toys R Us or Blockbuster ever stopped innovating or working hard. They were just innovating and growing in the wrong direction. Away from their customers. The danger is that you waste your resources working on things that aren’t the most vital to customers.
Caprino: Focus is so important in moving forward towards what we care about most, but how do we know if we’re focused on the right things to do that?
Kander: There’s a trick to knowing if you’ve uncovered real blind spots. You have to get information that is surprising and painful to hear. If you think about the last 12 months in your business, and you haven’t received feedback that was surprising and painful, you likely have blind spots that are hurting your business. So that’s when you should start asking questions.
Caprino: What are the four essential questions we need to ask ourselves as entrepreneurs, leaders and business owners, if we want to avoid blind spots in the future?
Kander: The four questions are:
- What are my blindspots?
- Am I focused on the right things?
- What can I test?
- How can I engage others to achieve my goals?
Caprino: What specifically should we test to help us stay on track to what we care about creating and delivering?
Kander: Just knowing about your blind spots isn’t enough and usually your first idea to solve them won’t be the right one. So you have to create a feedback loop to find out if your ideas are actually solving the problems you are trying to address. Make sure you aren’t just looking for vanity metrics – feedback that makes you feel good about your progress but doesn’t tell you whether your solution is actually making a difference. If you are going to test something, make sure there is a way for your test to fail. I know that might sound silly, but if it’s impossible for the test to give you a negative result, then it’s not a real test, it’s just a vanity exercise.
Caprino: Clearly, we need others to support us to reach our goals. How can we best engage others to do that?
Kander: Lots of managers put too much pressure on themselves to solve problems and come up with big ideas. When you involve others in your company to come up with solutions, they will not only come up with incredible ideas (because they are closer to the customers) but they will become more engaged at work and feel ownership over the solutions. Your customer experience will never outpace your employee experience. So make sure you keep them engaged.
Caprino: Can you share your top three strategies for overcoming blind spots and creating more success in our businesses — for ourselves, our customers and our employees?
Kander: My top three strategies are:
#1: Uncover your blind spots by asking your customers tough questions that yield surprising and painful feedback. If you are talking to your customers regularly but you haven’t heard anything surprising or painful in the last year, then you haven’t discovered your blind spots.
#2: Engage your team to help brainstorm solutions to these blind spots. Don’t put so much pressure on yourself to come up with all of the answers. Your team will have amazing solutions and they will be much more invested in implementing those solutions if you engage them early in the process.
#3: Experiment with several different solutions to find the best fit. Know that your first idea will almost never be the best solution. Give yourself the time and resources to try at least 3 options.
For more information, visit Diane Kander and The Curiosity Muscle.
For more career and leadership support from Kathy Caprino, take her Amazing Career Project career growth course, and her Career Breakthrough coaching programs for emerging and seasoned leaders.
Originally published at Forbes