ALL WE CAN SEE IS THE DARK

This morning as I was waking up my 3 year old daughter Jemima came into bed for a cuddle. It was cold and she snuggled under the covers putting her head under the duvet. I heard a little voice coming up from beside me, "Dad come under the covers with me." So I dutifully dived my head down under. 

I said to her, "we can't see anything in here," and she replied, "all we can see is the dark."

This reply struck me. How many times do we encounter situations where we dismiss a situation and don't try to see in the dark? How often do we shut down lines of exploration or thinking because we feel we are in the dark and deprived of sensory input or data?

What about trying to understand how people are responding to your website, landing page or proposition? How many times do we just default to, "we need another tool and more data." Sure this is sometimes the right answer but most often it's an excuse not to really think and use our intuition to determine through the darkness an answer to the problem. You'll probably get it mostly right by seeing through the dark and even if you don't pushing yourself will help you develop new ideas of hyptheses to test with your new tools.

What about a difficult relationship issue with a colleague or peer? How often do we make assumptions and not take the time to see through the darkness and really understand what is being said. One of the values that I was taught by Procter & Gamble was; Seek to understand, then be understood. High emotions can create darkness, clouding issues and hiding true feelings, being able to sense effectively through this darkness is not just a work skill but a life skill.   

Even in the dark there are always things to see.

Justin