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Jonathan Hansing
Don't Work On Your Business; Work With It
People have a hard time creating shared understanding, but what if we always had someone at our back to help us?
People have a hard time creating shared understanding, but what if we always had someone at our back to help us?
A group of scientists sit in a conference room, each focused on the laptop screen in front of them. Their screens show video feeds from different cameras zoomed in to parts of an animal, but they aren’t sure what it is.
The first camera shows the animal’s trunk, so the scientist says, “It’s like a thick snake.”
The second scientist sees its leg and says, “It’s like a tree.”
The third sees its side and says, “It’s like a wall.”
The last sees its tusk and says, “It’s hard and smooth, like a spear.”
If you’ve heard this parable before — or versions of it — you know the animal they are looking at: it’s an elephant! Each scientist sees a different part of the elephant’s body and offers their unique perspective, believing their limited and subjective views represent the whole truth.
In some versions of the story, the scientists fight over this disagreement. In others, they calmly discuss what they experienced and collectively envision a weird snake-tree-wall-spear chimera thing — not the intelligent and noble creatures we know of as elephants.*
We love this story because it highlights a profound truth that still resonates today: We all have limited perspectives on the world, and building a shared understanding of any situation — no matter how mundane or complex — can be incredibly difficult. We are just as likely to invent pure fantasy as we are to start an altercation in our attempts to solve a problem or understand the world.
This phenomenon rears its ugly head in our political discourse, social media, scientific inquiry, and everyday lives as we navigate the ambiguities of people and work.
So many issues arise in our jobs because organizations, by definition, are groups of people that each bring their own perspectives to bear on wrangling big amorphous problems, much like the scientists and the elephant.
These problems span everything from “How do we achieve our growth targets this quarter?” to “How should we prepare for this next meeting?”
We spend our days nominally aligned toward growing or optimizing our organizations in some way, but how we do this is rarely straightforward or obvious.
We might look at the user analytics and telemetry and say, “Let’s build more features to drive retention.”
A teammate, seeing the website analytics and social media engagement, says, “We need a website revamp and a new content strategy.”
Another, looking at P&L statements and headcount allocation, says, “We need more operational efficiency.”
We poke and prod at this nebulous thing at the center of our organizations with our analytics, CRM, marketing automation tools, and social media suites, each viewing it from a different angle — customers, users, revenue, costs, support tickets, leads, conversions, etc. We can’t agree on what it looks like, much less where to go or what to do next.
We could call this big strange creature The Business, The Mission, or The Vision — whatever shorthand works to describe, “this thing we spend 40 hours a week working on together.” It’s abstract and hard to understand, even for those veteran teams who have already built great products and organizations. Every week presents a new kind of problem — market dynamics shift, customer needs change, or the macroeconomic environment presents a novel challenge no one has seen before.
Our inability to understand the true nature of The Business manifests in a myriad of annoyances and problems that pervade our working days. We see it in the urgent messages that fill the inbox before the week starts, in the calendar packed to the brim with meetings that could be emails, and in the barrage of notifications, tasks, and interruptions that whittle down our sanity until we feel zombified by 2:00 PM.
When teams can’t grasp the true nature of The Business, it creates a lack of unity and alignment that becomes almost tangible. It's like a dark fog that permeates the landscape, day in and day out, an interminable haze that makes it impossible to work together as perfectly as we’d like.
The resulting tension can cause people to feel lost, exhausted, alone, or burnt out.
But does it have to be like this?
What would it take to fix this problem?
You may think, “Ah, a classic case of information silos. I’ve heard this one before. That company needs a better knowledge management system, a better communication platform, a better CRM, or a better business intelligence tool. Then it will all be fixed.”
Not quite.
Remember that the scientists could talk to each other. They had no information silos! Our business teams don’t lack visibility or communication. Many tools help us see our business better, yet we still grasp about in the dark.
So, let’s imagine something radically different, something really magical.
What if the elephant could speak?
The elephant says to the people, “I am an elephant, and this is my nature.” The elephant understands itself and can communicate that understanding. Suddenly, the situation becomes clear as day. The veil lifts. Things happen differently.
Instead of arguments, distrust, and confusion, we get inquiry, curiosity, and knowledge.
What if our businesses could do the same?
Imagine that, instead of being poked and prodded in the dark, The Business itself could join the conversation and actively participate in its own growth and optimization. It could understand the world, its place within that world, who it works with, and how to move itself forward.
It would be a partner at our collective backs, a new team member we’ve never had before. Not just another assistant, intern, or chatbot, but a key player. One that changes how we work with our businesses and each other.
Take a moment to picture what that world could look like.
You don’t check your calendar on the weekends because you know everything is already handled. You no longer have to spend time gathering data on key metrics and discussion topics for your 1:1s. Instead, your Business actively participates in the meetings, filling calendar invites and bringing issues to discuss, such as the goals you both care about, the latest status on each, and novel insights that could be early indicators of more significant problems or opportunities.
You would have a team video call where someone raises a hand to say, “The Business helped me discover a gap in our strategy. Metric X isn’t looking so good. Should we do something about that?” Before anyone needs to ask, The Business runs the numbers and comes back with an analysis and some suggestions. After a few minutes of back-and-forth collaboration and problem-solving with the Business, the team diagnoses the issue and ends the call with a plan to address it.
If you have a few minutes to spare between meetings, you might look at the executive business review due on Friday. The Business has already filled in all the reportable metrics for itself — not just the numbers but an explanation for each one: Why Metric X looks like this and what we could do about it. It’s even tracking the intervention your team discussed a few minutes ago!
Or perhaps status meetings like this no longer exist; everyone always has the information they need whenever needed. If you want to know something or need help brainstorming an idea, The Business is there for you, your leadership, and your team.
Everybody is in sync. Teams swarm on problems before they become problems, and work feels effortless. Like someone dosing your coffee with liquid luck, everything falls into place as you flow through the day, focused on the things that truly matter.
Instead of a pervasive fog obscuring everything, there is an ambient light helping you navigate the terrain with ease. It’s everywhere you need it, illuminating obstacles and things you didn’t know you could see. You end your day refreshed because you have a new member of the team: The Business itself.
In this world, The Business is no longer something that you work on but is now someone that you work with.
Work would change dramatically in ways we can only now begin to imagine. Everyone from the most senior executive to the newest hire could collaborate with The Business. The largest enterprise and the smallest three-person startup would benefit from a mutual understanding of its true nature, with a collaborator perpetually moving it forward — identifying opportunities no one thought of, addressing problems you didn’t know you had, and answering questions no one knew to ask.
Building this world just might be possible.
All it takes is a little bit of AI. And maybe some magic.
If you felt inspired by this story and would like to talk with a mini kangaroo instead of an elephant, you may be interested in how we’re building Wallabi. We’d love to hear from you!
*In our original blog, we published a version of this story that included ableist language. Thank you to our community for calling this out; we have updated the story to reflect a modern retelling inspired by The Dermis Probe by Idries Shah.