Pinpointing: Noticing External Change Before Others Pick Up on It

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Savvy leaders stay ahead of the curve and act before their competitors even start to respond. They pick up on changes in the environment early and adjust for what will work in the future, not what worked in the past.

Hone Your Senses

A second aspect of know-how is your ability to “connect the dots”–that is, to pick up on all the clues that come in daily about ongoing changes in the marketplace and assemble them into sound judgement about where your business needs to be in the future.

To do this effectively, you need to be able to look at your business and industry from the outside in. You need to be looking at everything that is happening in the general business community as if you had no vested interests. If you can pick up on changes early on, you’ll then have time to try new ideas, run some real-world tests, apply your resources and if necessary reposition your business more advantageously.

External changes can be cyclical or structural. As a rule of thumb, cyclical changes need to be managed and can be deferred to some extent, whereas structural changes are long term and therefore require permanent corrective actions to be taken. Being able to see pending external changes before they occur is more an exercise in pattern recognition than anything else. Those who are skilled in pinpointing change are typically very adept at detecting patterns in the external environment. This competency then allows them to act confidently and decisively while others are still bogged down sorting, sifting and analyzing the data.

Angles of Observation

To pick up on emerging patterns, there are seven reasonably straight-forward questions you need to be able to answer:

What is happening in the world today?Look at all the changes that are taking place and try to get a complete mental picture. You’ll need to fill in the gaps and decide how changes in one area will have likely flow-on effects elsewhere.

In terms of my personal frame of reference, what has worked for me and which aspects have not?People with know-how have the ability to engage in some self-reflection. You need to evaluate why you may have failed to pick up on some clues in the past and then do something about it.

What are the potential responses from those who are most affected?Savvy business leaders evaluate all potential responses. They look through the eyes of different groups and make an informed judgment about what is most likely to happen. You must learn how to do this.

What will changes in the big picture mean for my organization and its strategies?Once you have the big picture issues in place, you can then determine what the flow-on effects will be on your own enterprise. You can then develop workable strategies that will allow you to seize any and all new opportunities.

What would need to happen for new and exciting opportunities to open us for us?Spend time getting a feel for the prerequisites that will need to fall into place first. You will then be able to differentiate what level of certainty there is, and how far along the sequence of unfolding events are.

What can we do to play a role in making those respective changes happen proactively?This generally means reorganizing your business to be positioned for the new opportunities. You may also need to look at your leadership pipeline, management structures and other practices.

What can and should we do next?Once you’ve assimilated all this information and processed it, you then need to go ahead and move. There’s no use accurately anticipating change but then sitting back and doing nothing worthwhile about it.

Keep Your Eye on the Big Picture

It’s easy to become so immersed in what you’re doing that you develop a form of myopia to everything else. Those with know-how are always busy becoming better at what they do because they can see their own business model in the context of the big picture. To enjoy those same advantages, you need to become skilled at pinpointing the changes coming soon and placing your business in an advantageous position. This is important because the world is changing all the time.

Know-How