If your job is above a beginner level’s job, it will probably involve, at least to a small degree, some amount of strategy, planning, or predictions. At least I hope it does, if you want to keep challenging yourself and growing.
There’s an Achilles’ Heel in almost all plans and strategies that I hear—and thus a constant source of frustration for your manager or client, to whom you’re presumably proposing the strategies—they rely on a huge degree of hope. And the problem is that hope is not a strategy.
Indeed, it’s worse than that, far more often than not, hopes turn out to be misplaced, and disillusion and disappointment. The key is in how you deal with it, and how you work to minimize it, learn from it, and turn it around. Doing this will make your client or boss think you’re the best hire ever.
This one is harder to analyze than most others because it is so context-dependent. But there are a bunch of patterns.
It’s very common for reports to suggest ideas such as:
- If we build it, they will come!
- If we take out ads, we’ll get clients!
- If we have a great design, everyone will talk about us!
- If we create a podcast, the mainstream media will notice us!
- If we create a smooth site, conversions will increase!
- If our TV commercial is cool, sales will go up!
And so forth.
All of these rely on magic to a huge degree. So, your manager will need to rework your strategic thoughts, far too often.
The solutions here depend on the context, and also as you get more experience, getting around this will be easier.
But a general rule of thumb to solve this relates to some of our earlier suggestions, or rather, is another positive consequence of them. If you suggest smaller ideas, those let you fail and learn—so you can tweak, try again, and improve. Or if you start with predefined tests, you can see how the tests go, and then propose better solutions from there.
Communicating extensively (over-communicating) with your manager will allow you to get his instincts about what will work or not. And he’ll likely have better instincts than you in some regards, so those are good starting points that are more likely to get approval so you can try them out.
The broader rule of thumb is: the more magic that is involved, the more likely it will fail and the more likely your manager will either need to rework your ideas, or go along but then see negative results. So, keep that in mind.
