If you managed things right, people all over the company are beginning to notice the competitive intelligence work that you are doing. Your name is known. Probably they have heard about your website and seen at least one of the analyses that you completed. Things are really bubbling and other senior managers are taking notice. Your initial senior manager sponsor is happy with what you have done and just a little proud of your work and their role in getting it started. Now you will expand your effort to go for the value (to the larger organization).

The next step is very important and sensitive.

Simply put, you have to move beyond your initial sponsor to deliver value to other senior managers. Why? Because effective competitive intelligence (CI) generally moves “up and over” in an organization (rather than remaining isolated in one group). This reflects the simple truth that long term CI value is needed by multiple senior strategy managers. Significantly, most are not getting such information that is researched, interpreted and delivered as needed.

Your goal is to get your initial sponsor’s help to facilitate a competitive intelligence discussion among their peers.

If you haven’t lived with senior managers up to now, it’s time for you to move into their neighborhood. Assuming that you don’t get promoted, the most likely way to accomplish this is to be invited and the best person to issue the invitation is the manager that you have already helped prosper. Once you are invited the goal is to establish relationships that can endure. In other words, you want a recurring invitation that goes beyond formal meetings (and that can be issued by more than one senior manager). Ideally, you will nurture relationships that result in unguarded discussions over time. It is through the informal discussions that you will discover the true pain points (or opportunities, if you wish) that present openings for CI to make a strategic impact.

My wonderful son stood in front of me excited to be retelling the adventures he had at church camp last week. He was full of words and stories. I just love hearing him talk about his experiences and answer questions. I asked him about his favorite food, the friends he made, the different play activities, the bus trip and so on.

Did he remember the things that his mother told him before he left on the trip? For instance, did he always put on sunscreen (the Texas sun is bright and very hot in July)? Yes, he assured me that he always had done so.

Did he remember to always wear his swim shirt to the lake? That’s when he averted his eyes, shifted his feet and changed his tone. “Well,” he said “I only went to the lake twice.” And then he grinned at me and I knew. TRANSLATION: Dad, I forgot about the shirt.

When you know someone really well, you can often sense their message from many cues that are more telling and accurate than their words. All of the other signals give them away. In fact, in a strange way, the actual words are distracting as often as they are informative.

Interpersonal signals abound among those we know best (and that know us). I use this often with close friends.

We might be listening to a speaker when one of us will signal the other with a lifted eye brow (TRANSLATION: can you believe this speaker?). A casual flicker of the hand (TRANSLATION: this is not important), a half smile (TRANSLATION: I’ll tell why it’s amusing later) or rolling eyes (TRANSLATION: we are wasting our time) can all be quite meaningful when interpreted correctly.

In competitive intelligence we can use the same signals (except that our subjects are other companies).

It’s breakout time. Time to go public with all of the competitive intelligence work that you have done in the first 10 steps of The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence.

There are at least five important things to do at this stage. Before listing them, let’s review everything in the important prior steps. (Remember that the people and your relationships with them will contribute most to your success.)

1. You spotted a competitive intelligence problem of interest to a senior manager and you delivered a useful answer.
2. Even though you started small, you intentionally began to show the outlines of a compelling vision for competitive intelligence.
3. You established a foundation for the effort and made the first introduction (in a limited way) of your CI brand. A few people began to notice what you were doing.
4. With confidence, you approached your senior manager sponsor with a larger vision for competitive intelligence. Behind the scenes you established some standards to guide you and began acquiring the basic tools. As part of this, you also identified the critical people and groups to help you.
5. All of the prior steps made it possible for you to request a budget, albeit a small one, to begin establishing an infrastructure. With the infrastructure slowly coming online, you began the more overt announcements of what you were doing and how it was important to the organization.

Here we go with five ways to expand the awareness and scope of your competitive intelligence brand.

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There are many lessons that I have learned in my adult life. One of them had to do with saying, “I don’t know.” Who knows why this was so difficult? I just know that years went by after I got married and my wife swears that she never heard those words from me.

“Where is the place that we are going?” she would ask. My answer was always, “Don’t worry, we’ll find it.” My motto was that we weren’t lost until we ran out of gas. (Note: If you have the same motto, always leave home with a full tank.)

Well, the cure for my malady was children. We have two and they are questioning machines.

“Dad, how much does that building weigh?”

“Daddy, is a gazelle faster than a horse? Which one is taller? Which one lives longer?”

“Dad, who was the best baseball player ever? Who was the second best? …”

Questions can tumble from their mouths faster than water goes over Niagara Falls. There is no defense except to admit the obvious – I don’t know. (Perhaps I know a few things. I am pretty sure that a horse is usually taller than a gazelle.)

It occurs to me that we learn a lot about life and business from the questions that are asked. Sometimes we also learn from the questions that are not asked. Of course we learn from the answers. How an organization deals with questions, answers and change say a lot about them.

What can you learn about a business by their competitive intelligence questions? Here are some ideas.

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