First, the bane …

In the Lord of the Rings story, the fellowship travels great distances and through many adventures trying to accomplish their mission. One of my favorite parts of the story is when they must travel through Moria, an underground dwarve colony and site of their great mines. Led by Durin, the dwarves settled “under the mountain” and began to build, explore and mine the riches that they found there. What they did not know (until it was too late) was the danger that dwelt in the depths. A Balrog. Durin’s Bane. The unspeakable terror that threatened them all. And it was coming for them.

A little dramatic, I suppose, but it is worth recognizing similar banes that befall the competitive intelligence community. That is, the “terrors” that hold the potential to derail all that we know to be true and worthwhile and to make our mission difficult, if not impossible. It is not hard to identify these things. It is only hard for us, collectively, to overcome them.

Here are the five banes that I think are most troublesome.

One of the laments of the competitive intelligence community is how others erroneously define competitive intelligence. Left alone, others view CI as everything from spying to something that is indistinguishable from <file in the blank> (e.g., market intelligence, business intelligence, marketing, just good thinking). It is no wonder that many of us encounter skepticism, ignorance and doubt when we talk about competitive intelligence to potential clients or customers.

I would be pretty happy if I could say that all of my problems were due to those that garble the definition of competitive intelligence.  If customers would just understand what I do better, then my business would boom, my clients would prosper and the long awaited vacation home in the Colorado mountains would be a reality!

Fairness compels me to admit, however, that poor definitions are only the beginning of the issues faced by me and, perhaps, by others that practice competitive intelligence.

Another significant problem has to do with marketing competitive intelligence. (I have previously written about “The Failure of Competitive Intelligence Marketing.”) Undoubtedly, there are exceptions but my sense is that it is common for CI professionals to face difficulties in marketing their services. Why? One reason might be that previous successes are problematic to share. If I deliver outstanding insight to a client, it is reasonable for them to want exclusive access to that insight. Thus, I cannot ethically share this story to help me get my next client. Another reason might be that it is often hard to capture discrete, numerical benefits directly attributed to competitive intelligence. Testimonials help, of course, but the holy grail of benefiting a company’s bottom line is often elusive.

Finally, there is the issue of increasing personal value over time. How does a competitive intelligence professional get better at his or her job? Admittedly, there is no substitute for numerous client engagements to support on-the-job learning. Still, the absence of a well-established competency framework (though some are in work) to guide or certify professional development in the industry is a clear community weakness. In absence of a framework that has a commercial meaning (i.e., customers value the framework and use it to make buying decisions), how does a CI professional manage their own skill development? There is no lack of opportunities but how do you decide what to do. And, after taking advantage of some of those opportunities, how do you translate the improved skills into increased value for customers?

Sometimes, you only have a limited time to assess a situation. You can try to look, listen and question but very quickly you have to have an opinion, a course of action or a response. The truth is that in our hectic world, we are giving each other less and less time to make judgments about people and situations. I think that this is often true for competitive intelligence, also.

Consultants commonly face the challenge of doing a quick analysis of a new organization. We have to be ready with the right set of questions to discern what is happening and what might improve the outcomes. I suppose that this is true inside organizations when competitive intelligence is applied to a new problem or within a new business.

If you are lucky, you will have sufficient time to analyze before prescribing action. Whether it is a short time or a long time, the time is still finite. Therefore, the right focus is important.

All of this got me to thinking about what I would asked if I were limited to five questions. That is, what five questions would give me the best possible picture of the competitive intelligence status of a company and some idea of what might improve the competitive intelligence value?

Early in my career, I supported the computers that ran a machine shop factory. The factory was a large, open room filled with machinery of every sort designed to form, cut and polish metal fixtures. I remember things about that factory. One memory is of the smell of machine oil. Another memory was of the cleanliness of the aisles between the production machines. The primary memory, however, was of the sound. When the factory was running (most of the time), there were all kinds of sounds. Drills, cutters, polishers and packaging machines were operating at the same time. Though it was possible to carry on a conversation in the factory, it was not the best place to hear or communicate important messages. Of course, overhearing conversations was just about impossible.

There were ways to get around all of this noise.

• You could take advantage of the times that the factory shut down. That removed all of the background noise. Unfortunately (if your goal was talking instead of production), this happened very infrequently.
• If you knew exactly who to talk to, you could move close to them and speak loudly. If you were the listener, the right strategy was to focus on the speaker’s words while ignoring the barrage of other sounds.
• If you wanted to “overhear” something, then the only recourse was to become involved in the conversation. That, of course, depended on the acquiescence of the other participants. Thus, you were unlikely to hear much of value accidently.

Conversely, some approaches would only make the problem worse.

• You would not want a goal of hearing everything that was being said in the factory. That would simply complicate the problem of separating an important conversation from the background machine noise. Lack of focus was a sure way to hear nothing of value.
• You would never want to amplify the sounds in the factory. Though this might increase the volume of the speaker’s voice, it would also increase the sounds from the machinery.
• You would not want to encourage people to whisper. Obviously, this made it harder to hear since the level of noise would overwhelm the conversation

Both of these lists could go on and on. They illustrate the common problem that we have of separating the important from the unimportant. The difficulty arises because every important communication is surrounded by background (i.e., contextually unimportant) noise. The world (much like the factory) is full of noise. What we want to hear is typically competing with so much that is unimportant (or less important). Furthermore, sometimes we want to “overhear” or discern things not originally meant for us. The background noise makes that task especially hard.

Thus, we get to the fundamental task in competitive intelligence. That is, targeting the signals that we desire to hear, decreasing the “volume” of the background noise and, finally, interpreting the important signals correctly.