It was the middle of a heated discussion during a meeting in office. There were many points flying around, many ideas in the air. Lots of debate in a discussion that had totally spun of-track. Until it suddenly dawned on the convener of the meeting – what is the objective? Why are we doing this?.. what is the whole point of this exercise?. What do we want?
I have noticed this. We work really hard, do all the right things and the outcome doesn’t turn out the way it was planned. Sometimes, the results are just opposite to expectations. And then, we brood over the overbearing question – Where did we go wrong? What is the root cause of the problem?
My guess is – Many times we have no idea about what we want. We focus on the “DO” step before the “THINK” step of any job. Client tells you, jump 5 feet.. We jump 5 feet, with no clue to why!.Sometimes only the senior management know it, while the rest of the team is working away hard like headless chicken out to attain Mission Impossible 5!.
Who is to blame?
Well, isn’t that exactly a leader’s job? ..
To understand simple common sense things like – What is our objective.. What is the goal.. What do we want to achieve from this exercise?. By answering these simple questions and communicating it to the team, we can fix the biggest problems that hound us. Missed deadlines, poor quality, under delivering on promises..
All due to a very simple problem.. We have no idea what our goal is!!
Thought Experiments 