Conversations against mediocrity

The 5 questions every company should be asking right now

The Boating Party, Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Over time, I’ve become a believer in this idea:

Conversations are destiny.

The recurring conversations that you have as a leadership team, in your organisation, determine whether you’ll be among the winners or losers in five years time.

When you think about it, we all have highly limited mental bandwidth right? There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many things we can think about and focus on. Much of that bandwidth will be eaten by routine unavoidable admin. And so it is the “discretionary remainder” - the topics that we choose to focus on - that will determine the variability of our outcomes.

It’s like that saying “where your attention goes, your energy flows”. If the focus of your attention as a leader is on defensive, reactive, operational, nitpicky, insular things then you will naturally drift towards decay. You will naturally become the victim of circumstances, rather than their master.

By contrast if the focus of your attention is on offensive, proactive, big picture, macro things, then you will naturally drift in the direction of growth, leverage, and being in control of your destiny.

Now sadly, this latter habit is not natural.

This is just not how most human beings think. All our behavioural biases, loss aversion, blah blah blah, are stacked against this. And that means if you were a fly-on-the-wall in most leadership meetings you wouldn’t be hearing these expansive conversations. You’d be hearing stuff more like:

“People aren’t filling in their timesheets properly.”
“Can we push back on that invoice? It feels high.”
“Can we talk about the expense policy again?”
“Did you see what [competitor] just announced?”
“A customer complained about the onboarding flow.”

And so on.

That is the sound of the seeds of failure being sewn, years in advance.

So, to fix this, I have an idea.

I want you to set aside some focused time - perhaps as little as one hour a week - where you sit down with your leadership team, your co-founder, or whoever else in your business, and you simply discuss one of the following five topics.

There is no specific objective. There is no output.

All we are doing is drawing your attention, energy, and creativity onto the front foot; and getting you into the habit of thinking in a more strategic way. Do it on a walk, over a beer, whatever, and it’ll actually be super fun and low pressure.

But stretched over time, the positive effects will be huge.

Companies who routinely talk about this stuff will crush it in the next few years. Simple as that. So let’s start talking.

The topics