business is people

Technology, systems, processes, administration — they all go through people.And all people come with emotions, with baggage, with reactions and inconsistencies. Put simply, Business is People. Without people, there would be no business and no one for your business to serve!

But wait a minute…if we are all people, as a person, don’t we each have insider information? Shouldn’t we know how to deal with these human creatures effectively?  If only! People problems are the most difficult kind! So what is it that makes people so dang challenging?

Here is the first of two theories I have on the subject: “The Horizon Theory.”

Imagine you’re standing on the edge of the shore, feet in the sand, waves lapping at your toes, looking out through the crystal clear air and over a calm, still sea, gazing at that line where the earth meets the sky–the horizon. Now imagine a sailboat gliding majestically along that line into the evening headwinds when suddenly it tacks away from you and visually falls off the face of the earth.

So here’s the question: before it disappears from sight, how far away is that boat?

When I ask this in groups, I get guesses ranging from one mile to a hundred, sometimes even a thousand! But the truth is, if you’re 5’8” and standing on the edge of the shore, that boat is 3.1 miles away.

3.1 miles, and yet some people think it’s 100 miles or more?!  What does that tell us?
That we think we can see and know more than we really can.  

Let’s not confuse this simple distance test with our vision. You can see the moon and the stars millions of light years away and the mountain poking up over the horizon hundreds of miles away or the ISS circling the earth, but I’m not asking how far you can see.  I’m asking, at sea-level when do we begin to lose sight of objects?  Standing on our own two feet, we can really only see roughly 3 miles ahead of us. But we think we can see so much more!

And that’s what gets in the way with people.  

We think we know and can know so much more than we do.  We make assumptions and guesses without ever really verifying those assumptions.  We act “as if…” As if we know, as if we can see more than we can, as if information and knowledge is cumulative, but we don’t, we can’t and it isn’t.  Think about the analogy in one more direction:

If we want to see that boat again, we have to move. But the problem with that movement towards the boat is the horizon behind us follows us, always staying about 3.1 miles away. Given this analogy, at any given point in time we really only have about 6 miles of range to our vision, barring drastic variances in topography. Beyond that, things fall out of sight and become speculation. We can only know so much, and we never know or understand as much as we think we do.

Remember that Billy Joel song, Keeping The Faith?  There’s a line that says: “The good old days weren’t always good and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems.”  And therein lies this lesson of the horizon. The unknown before us isn’t as bad as it seems and our memories aren’t as accurate as we think.  When dealing with people we would do well to live in that sweet spot between the horizons, smack in the middle of what we actually do know — and when knowledge falls out of site, move towards it. Take in the new information while remembering that new information changes old information. As we learn new things about the people we lead, remember we also need to let go of the past.

As Andreas Gide taught us, “We can’t discover new worlds until we have the courage to lose sight of familiar shores.” If we want to grow with people into new solutions, we can’t hold on to past problems, assumptions or conclusions.

Be brave!  Discover the ever evolving world of the those you lead – especially yourself.