I’m in the idea business. Chances are that you are too since you are reading this blog. We spend a lot of our time thinking, imagining and dreaming. Along the way we conceive of new products, innovative services and solutions to difficult problems. What a great way to make a living!

Business strategists and competitive intelligence professionals deal in ideas. At first it may seem that having a good idea is the biggest challenge. Later we come to know that affecting people successfully with those ideas is a much greater challenge. It’s wonderful when we work with people that accept our ideas readily.

Sometimes though, we run up against people that resist our ideas.

You know the type. Despite our honorable intentions, elegant solution and impressive presentation, they remain unmoved. More than that, they sometimes can get quite hostile. They seem to resist the very possibility that we have a great solution. Maybe their hostility or resistance is passive. It can take us a while to even figure out those people.

After battling the passive folks it is almost a relief to confront someone that openly and vociferously opposes us. Ah, let the battle begin, we think. My ideas versus your ideas and may the best ones (mine, of course) win! There is a big problem with this scenario. (Well, maybe there is more than one.)

It is extremely difficult to overcome someone’s resistance when we think of it as “resistance.”

People are masters are detecting our strategies and adjusting their “wall” to deflect unwelcome ideas.  You try to argue with them. They might argue back, withdraw from the discussion or retreat to fight you another day. Many people will seem to agree with you and only later will you learn that their agreement was not sincere. The one certainty is that they remain unconverted to your idea. You will not be allowed to win because it means that they will have to lose.

Try transforming your image of resistance into one of “safety.”

Jerry Weinberg of Weinberg & Weinberg gave me this lesson a few years ago. At the time my head was bruised from all of the times that I beat it against a wall. The wall, of course, was all those idea resisters. How dare they withstand me, I thought! My ideas were good ones. They only wanted to see me fail which turned my bewilderment into anger and resentment. Then Jerry gave me transforming idea that the issue was their “safety.” What I was advocating affected their safety because it threatened them with change. The change that I wanted to occur was not something that they had asked for or welcomed. Coming to grips with how to effect change is the acid test for “idea” professionals.

Helping others work through their safety issues can actually improve your idea.

So I began to rethink how I approached others. I realized that my best ideas would languish without the agreement of at least some of the people that felt unsafe. I began to ask them about the possible impacts of my ideas. Did they have any thoughts about mitigating the side effects of my proposed idea? Were there things that could be modified in my original idea that would better consider the culture of the organization? In their opinion, what was the right pace of change? Were there ways to test my idea in some incremental fashion? Amazingly, by asking these questions, my idea and its implementation always got better. Adversaries became allies and co-owners. They began to trust me more and to help rather than fight me. My blood pressure went down and my forehead healed.

It’s good to have ideas. It’s good to make beautiful presentations. It’s good to find solutions.

It’s better to work through change with people together.

The days of command and control organizations (at least in high technology) are long passed. We have a few examples where knowledge workers can do powerful things when they are operating with confidence rather than fear. Your job and mine is to make sure that while we love our ideas, we also make sure that we are helping people feel as safe as possible with what we proposed. Yes, there will be discomfort with change. But harnessing the creative, contributory energy of others is the measure of a successful idea person.

Do you agree?

Ellen Naylor of The Business Intelligence Source recently wrote the following in response to my blog entry Six Ways to Kill Competitive Intelligence (where I stated that a tactical focus was one sign of the demise of a competitive intelligence program).

“In my experience, I learned that starting with tactical was a good stepping stone to strategic CI, especially in large companies. You need to build trust and a track record. Also in these tough times, companies are looking for results, and they’re easier to affect with sales, for example helping close more deals.”

Ellen points out a couple of good reasons when a tactical focus might be necessary or desirable. Let me give you some more reasons why an approach of “always and only strategic issues” is not a subtle enough approach for a CI professional. Work can be tactical for a while but there are cautions in every case.

Starting small means starting tactical.

Few CI programs magically burst into view in their full blown form catering to the most critical issues for the company. However many get started with small scale efforts (as Ellen mentions). These efforts originate in a department or a division among a few people that recognize that the competitive landscape is poorly understood. So, in absence of an existing strategic program, they simply get started with something that meets their local needs.

The caution is that it cannot remain tactical if the assumption is that the ultimate customers for competitive intelligence are strategic decision makers; that is, senior management.

Tactical work helps with brand building.

Even when the focus is usually strategic, there are times when building a CI brand within an organization is best done tactically. Why be concerned about a brand? The reason is that cooperation throughout the organization, credibility during presentations and access to key decision makers often depends on the brand that has been established. More time can be spent on this effort when not consumed with the high impact strategic studies for management.

The caution is a great brand name among the larger organization with a poor brand image among the strategic decision makers can be fatal. If you have to choose, choose senior management.

There is time to improve infrastructure and tools.

There are artifacts from every CI analysis. The artifacts are tools, approaches, techniques, presentation formats, etc., that are useful after the analysis is complete. None of these things are strategic except that they are used during strategic analyses. Why not improve them when the pressure is temporarily off of the CI team? It’s a great time to test innovation in less visible settings.

The caution is that you will not be paid to have great tools and infrastructure. You are paid to produce strategic insights. Make sure that the tools and infrastructure support the strategic processes.

New sources can be identified and nurtured.

There is not a CI person alive that already knows everything that he or she needs to know. We are constantly using sources inside and outside the company to find new information. Tactical times are a great time to develop and nurture relationships with primary sources. Then, when the fast turnaround strategic study is due, you will know who to talk with and they will be inclined to help you.

The caution is the CI effort must be balanced. Even during tactical times there will be deliverables that must be made. Too much relationship building might be seen as detracting from important near term contributions.

You can provide near term business development support.

Finally, the most obvious activity during tough economic times is to help drive sales. Ellen points this out in her comments. A CI person is uniquely equipped to put competitive product offerings in perspective and to support business development efforts. Many jobs depend on closing deals and it is not the best time to adhere to a strict definition of what you will and won’t do.

The caution is that there is a considerable risk that the CI function will disappear as a distinct role. Since CI is overhead and usually executed on a strategic timescale, near term pressures can overwhelm CI teams. Navigating through tough times means hanging on to the CI moniker but doing whatever is necessary to help the organization.

In normal times the competitive intelligence function will be busy doing strategic analyses for senior management. When you do the job well, your input and insight will be sought after by your customers. There are in between times however when your focus can be tactical for a time. Use this time well and you will be prepared for the next round of strategic requests.

When I was growing up one of the highlights of the school year was the report card time. I was a good student so I looked forward to the time when my teacher “told” my parents that through the grades and comments on the report card.

At work, the closest thing to a report card for an employee is the usually the annual review. If you live in a corporate environment, you know the drill. You show up for the meeting, the manager tells you the bottom (financial) line and then proceeds to list what you have done well or poorly.

This process may or may not be an effective one. The review checklist is often the standard one created by the HR department. Sometimes managers complete the review simply to check it off the list of their duties. At other times, an employee may invest very little into the process and miss the chance to get meaningful feedback. The whole process can be perceived as an optional, perfunctory exercise with little benefit.

There are times when a report card (and all that it implies) is not optional.

A competitive intelligence (CI) report card is such a case. It is an indication of impending failure if a competitive intelligence professional does not get a report regularly on his or her performance. Why? Because a CI function depends on the relationships with and value to senior management. When either the relationship or recognized value is waning, then corrective action must be taken. (Or, you need to look for a new job.)

So how do you get a report card from senior management?

It is probably too much to expect most senior managers to spend time creating a formal report card for you. If you are regularly communicating with them, you will get many signals that express their satisfaction (or lack thereof) with what you doing. A report card is simply one way to stimulate this conversation. And it’s up to you (not them) to get this process started.

You have to create a report card for them to use.

This works well because senior managers are used to evaluating people and their performance according to set guidelines. Since there probably isn’t a competitive intelligence specific set of guidelines you will have to create a template to use.

Keep it simple and focus on value.

The template should be one page or less. It should cover multiple categories. It should be understandable but not too restrictive. Finally, it should be used to highlight exceptional (good and bad) so that meaningful conversations can then happen about those areas. Here is an example. Note that the box to the left of each bullet is the place for a “grade” given by the senior manager.

Use the report card for long term planning and education.

A virtue of a getting a mark is that you can measure your progress over time. I have used “low” marks to help me define my plans for the future. For instance, I initiated regular CI reviews when I received feedback that the organizational communication about CI topics was too infrequent.

Another less obvious use of the report card is that it gives you a vehicle to expand a manager’s perception of CI. Perhaps they never considered that tradeshow intelligence was important. When they see it on your report card they might question what you mean and how it might help them. This is a great time to talk about how CI can be more valuable to them.

The grades that you receive don’t matter.

Well, actually they do. You won’t long survive if you consistently receive poor grades or if you receive good grades only for the less important (as defined by senior management) categories.

However, if the discussion about grades is regular, if your relationship with senior management is deepened and if “low” marks are used for improvement, you will win in the end. Report cards will become your friend and senior management will thank you.

And, by the way, that annual review cycle will also likely be a rewarding time for you as well.

A former colleague at Texas Instruments responded to my “PowerPoint Woke Me Up” blog entry by saying that sometimes the most effective communication is that done on a whiteboard with other people. As I thought about that I realized that he was exactly right (at least it matched my experience).

The vast majority of information is not written down.

It is communicated verbally or nonverbally between individuals. We are conditioned as social animals to use this method most frequently. The advantage is that it is often quick. The disadvantage is the intended message can easily get lost somewhere between the speaker’s words and the listener’s interpretation.

Meanwhile, many businesses are great fans of PowerPoint. Someone somewhere carefully (or sloppily) crafts a message that is presented. Much of the time there is one active presenter and multiple passive listeners. This can work but sadly it often doesn’t because the listeners are not engaged when they accept that the presenter is responsible for the communication.

There is a better way.

Why not draw pictures together?

Pictures are powerful ways to represent information. Much better than phrases on a PowerPoint slide, pictures can show relationships, sequences and other interactions. And when they are created by multiple people together, they can embody the collective wisdom of the group. If this is done appropriately, the resulting picture includes both the understandings and agreements among the people. How powerful is that!

The Grove Consultants International is a company that teaches graphical facilitation. The concepts are simple to grasp. Significantly, they all are aimed at graphically documenting what is most important. This works for topics like strategy, visions, value propositions, industry overviews and other similar things. The facilitation skills include the use of templates, creatively drawing to represent concepts and coordinating the discussions.

Here is an example where a Grove template was used to create an industry overview.

Pictures sometimes are a means to an end such as a specific decision. I have found that Sam Kaner’s book “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making” is an excellent resource to help a leader understand how to reach a decision. Kaner’s techniques work well with the graphical facilitation techniques used by Grove.

Another excellent example of the powerful impact of drawing a picture together can come from a project retrospective. Norm Kerth’s book “Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews” is a valuable resource to describe how “looking back to move forward” is critical. His website at http://www.retrospectives.com/ explains the prime directive for retrospectives and more.

One of the exercises in a retrospective is the project timeline. A long piece of butcher block paper is tacked to a wall. Then, all members of the team the document the project by adding their recollections to the timeline. The ups and downs, deliveries, significant meetings, personal events, etc., are all added to the group picture. When everyone is finished, the whole team examines the completed picture to answer four questions.

• What did we do well, that if we don’t discuss we might forget?
• What did we learn?
• What should we do differently next time?
• What still puzzles us?

The actual format of the retrospective timeline is less important than the fact that the team creates it together. Here is an example from http://www.thekua.com/rant/category/retrospective-exercises/.

The impact of this exercise can be profound. Team members can literally see the entire project and what others considered important. They can understand more about what frustrated them, the problems that they faced together and overcame and the things that led to disappointments. Later, when they have digested the personal messages, they can use the picture to extract lessons and explain to others what went on and why. (Esther Derby is a great resource for teaching others how to conduct retrospectives. Esther and Diana Larsen have written “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great” to show how to architect, design and run retrospectives.)

Maybe the pictures we create together aren’t as pretty as the PowerPoint masterpieces. Maybe they cannot be fit into the company template. And maybe they don’t have transitions, animations, embedded videos and other special effects which would impress Hollywood producers.

But what they do have is the powerful message created, owned and understood by a team.

Later, if you feel like it, you can always make a version for PowerPoint (with the approved company template). <g>