There is a riddle that my father once told me that relates so well to finding answers to challenges within an organization. In the story, a King searched for the wisest man on earth. In his search, he brought in the three wisest men known in the land, painted a gold dagger on each forehead, sat them in a triangle and posed a riddle to them. He said to them, “I have painted either a gold dagger or a silver dagger on your foreheads. After I remove your blindfolds, if you see a gold dagger on someone’s forehead you are to raise your hands. Then, the first person to tell me whether you have either a gold dagger or a silver dagger painted on your own forehead will receive great riches and will be known as the wisest man of our Kingdom.” The blindfolds were released and immediately all three men’s hands went up. After some time of intense thinking, one of the wisest men spoke. “Sir, I wasn’t sure at first, but now I am. Without a doubt I have a gold dagger painted on my forehead”. The King asked, “How do you know you have a gold dagger painted on your forehead and not a silver dagger”? The man looked at him and said. “I know I have a gold dagger painted on my forehead because there is no way I could ever know and all others were silent”. The King then declared, “You are the wisest man in the Kingdom”!
***Spoiler Alert: You can easily find the solution to this riddle on the internet, although it is worth trying to solve it on your own. If you don’t want to know the answer, do not read the rest of the blog.***
Sometimes the solution comes in the form of understanding that you don’t know what you don’t know. That could mean that there is no solution or that the solution is staring you right in the face. Sometimes we have to take a step back and realize that there are times when we are never going to solve the problem, but that knowledge gives us the answer we were seeking. Upon solving the riddle, I now use the lesson in business every day, when I realize that the solution to a business challenges isn’t available. Not that a solution hasn’t been figured out yet but that no solution exists. That’s the realization that leads you to true innovation, path changes and “ah HA!” moments that come with “I didn’t even know I didn’t know that”.
Achieving this corporate understanding comes from a solid understanding of a COE (Center of Excellence), funneled into a BICC (Business Intelligence Competency Center), with a laser focus on BVA (Business Value Attainment). These components are integral to project success and long term health of your individual silos as they interact with the business, IT, and executive decision-makers. Like the three wise men, each area interacts with the other, performing a specific function, and, in many cases, operating as a portion of the whole business. They only see what they are directly looking at, while focusing on their own objectives. They often don’t see the cascading effect their actions have on the other business areas.
With a retail client, we invested significant time developing analytic dashboards for their customer base in Cleveland, Ohio. We developed great looking graphs and pie charts that showcased the retail line and provided the perfect set of metrics for customers to log on and make their buying decisions. After the go-live, although surveys consistently showed positive presentation feedback, we were disappointed by the user traffic to the website. Then a team member that was also a football fan looked at the site for 30 minutes, looked up and said, “This is great, but I don’t like the colors. Why are you using Pittsburgh Steelers colors”? We had been using black and yellow colors for all our charts and graphics. Once we made the change to brown and orange, our web site traffic improved dramatically – we just didn’t know what we didn’t know.
Developing an unbiased executive sponsorship of a collaborative group with a blended and pooled budget model with zero organizational cost should be the entire focus of the three wise men. The metric for success is agility, project transparency, team development, support, and communication.
