Business' Prime Directive: Awareness and explicit choice?

Sometimes
different observations lead to the same conclusion. Or maybe it's just that
these observations are made because they fit an intuitive conclusion that was
already brewing somewhere in the recesses of my mind, where there always seems
to be a lot of brewing going on.

The first of these observations came when David Gurteen held an interesting
on-line
workshop on conversations as a core business process. His main point being
that conversations only take place on the basis of equality of all parties
involved. Somewhere during the session I remarked on the aspect that we tend not
to see conversations as work, but as pastime. I suggested that this might be due
to the fact that we almost never have some sort of routine of feeding the
results of these conversations back into our work processes. The conversations
maybe inspire us, and plant some seeds in the brewery in the back of our minds,
but it does not routinely impact on our work in progress in the here and now.
This to me later on translated into the point that if we are aware what
specific points in the conversations we have were the inspiring and valuable
parts, we could then choose and/or decide what to do with it.

The second observation I made was during the on-line presentation by Dominic
Kelleher on his
experiences with introducing KM at Price Waterhouse Coopers, at the time
when Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merged. Here again the primary
conclusion was that KM needed to be directed at solving identified needs,
with clear choices being made along the way.

This all already correlated with what I had concluded in the discussion
on Trust earlier on, where I took self knowledge and explicit
choice making as prerequisites for entering into mutual trusting
relationships, both as an individual and as an organisation (of whichever shape
of form). When talking about learning, during a pleasant lunch with Lilia Efimova, and how her PhD proposal
was taking shape, we again returned to this duo of formulating principles
and establishing a clear field of operation in which to then make choices
towards concrete actions.

Then last Friday, while visiting a convention of
our branche network on how research can assist marketing professionals I got
multiple examples of both the presence and absence of awareness and clearcut
decision making. In an interesting, but mediocre executed, presentation by
Research International, a method was explored how, based on scrutinously
testing your views against the general public, you can decide in a
very early stage which innovative ideas you can wisely throw out, and, much more
important, which to keep and take to market.
The same point was made by Ed
van Eunen, when talking about the effectivity of sales promotions. Without
knowledge of what you want and deciding on what to do any
promotional campaign will probably only cost you money. Counter examples were
amply provided on the convention floor by loud mouthed, flashy clothed marketing
people that know only how to tell you that it's only the packaging of the
product that matters. That any content will sell if the package is right. These
were the same people that left the earlier mentioned presentations mumbling that
this was all "too far fetched" and that noone would be able to apply it. Even
though that most of both presentations were presenting hardly more sophisticated
ideas than plain old common sense. Maybe they couldn't see the content for lack
of packaging? Talking to these guys made it very clear to me that trust and self
reflection was not on their agenda. A lack they may well intuitively feel, for
why else would they have to shout so much, other than to convince themselves?

In a totally different setting this saturday, in a workshop on what to do to
give a national association responsible for organising local festivities around
national holidays more public face, the conclusion delegates came to was that
content is the best pr, and then pursuing discussions on identity
and what decisions to base on that. And these were all volunteers, with
only a couple of professionals around. Thus, the conclusion that self knowledge
and explicit choice are important is not likely to be unconvincing, as it is
clearly apparent to the untrained eye. So why do we practice it so little?

Self knowledge and explicit choice are certainly not the odd couple, but
might well form the Prime Directive of succesfull business. I guess, it's time
to brush up on my understanding of Martin Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit".