When you look at the hands on the clock, they look like they are not moving. And so it may be in the day-to-day view of your business and the markets that you serve. If you keep staring at the same thing, change is not apparent. The status quo seems like a good strategy. But of course, things are always changing. And it depends more on how you look at things, in order to be able to garner new insights.

One of the keys to garnering those insights is to ensure that you soak up information from multiple channels. Your customers live across multiple channels or touch points and so should you. What you will pick up in each of them will always vary. And it is only by aggregating what you learn from each of them that you will be able to connect the dots of how your market is behaving.

Nate Silver predicted the results of the 2012 presidential election in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Quite a feat. He accomplished this by aggregating hundreds of polls, at both the state level and the national level. There was no point in trying to pick a subset of polls as the source. Rather, he aggregated them and established a baseline based on historical performance of the individual polls. With a starting point for the weighting assigned to each individual poll, he applied a model of conditions which would adjust the weightings. The results of the prediction cannot be argued with. He got them all right. And this is amongst a whole lot of professionals claiming the presidential race was too close to call.

There is a lot of insight here in how to read your own market. Identifying all the channels through which information about your market and customers can be gleaned is important. Having an aggregate model which you adjust will keep you headed in the right direction, more so than any single source. Voters and customers are a lot alike. With customer research data and customer surveys, the same type of decision making occurs. Customers, the same as voters, think that they will do one thing, and then can change their minds. So it is only by using the equivalent of multiple polls that you can get a better picture of what is happening.

Within the business context, multiple polls translates into collecting input from multiple channels: multiple types of customers, multiple suppliers and multiple advisors too. You will benefit by aggregating those multiple perspectives. I myself have looked at multiple research reports which vary in their conclusions, sometimes quite diametrically opposed, even in surveying the same customer base. The key is not to try to pick the winner. Rather the larger insight will be gleaned if you can derive a superset model where all results hold their spot.

Even if the status quo is serving you well, it will be important for you to understand what is impacting your status quo. The internet tools today offer up so much in enabling you to build your own model. From A/B testing to Google Analytics, techniques and tools abound. Be sure that you are tapping the information resources that will enable you to see how your market is moving. Don’t be fooled, the hands on the clock are always moving.

Strategic decisions these days are all about taking calculated risks based on good data. And that is the tough part. The good data. Indeed, we see firms like Gartner and Forrester growing steadily, and quoted widely by firms who want to strengthen the credibility in their message. In general this is a good thing. There is no question in my mind that both Gartner and Forrester produce high quality and professional research. And there is a lot of value in the focus and frameworks that they provide. But, it is still quite important to judge how the data is put together, before accepting the forecast and conclusions.

From my own experience, I had once the led product marketing thrust for an optical performance monitor for the telecom industry. Over the course of 2 years, I had introduced the module to every major switching equipment manufacturer in the telecom industry. But, as you may recall, the telecom industry went into quite a collapse in the period 2001-2002. At that point in time, there was incredible amount forecast scrutiny. Since I was looking after a product that had a bright future, the scrutiny was even greater. And with this scrutiny came the data that had been provided by a market research firm who was specializing in the telecom industry. The executive team presented the industry forecast data and was wondering about the disparity with my own figures. When I looked at the data, I found it very interesting. The market segmentation was completely consistent with my own assessment. But the forecasted quantities differed somewhat significantly. I came to the conclusion that clearly we talked to the same customers but filled in the blanks differently, in order to arrive at the forecast. Unfortunately I turned out to be correct, and the growth was slowing down at a rapid pace.

You need a fortune teller to predict the future. Since the answer to your questions is not in the back of the book, the fortune teller needs to have excellent skills in interpolation and extrapolation. Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that no-one can predict the future. The best that you can do, is identify patterns of things that have already occurred. But where things are going in terms of both direction and speed is a tough one to get right. You need to get close enough to the field of study; you have to hone your skills of perception and intuition; and you still need to have a manner in which you can stay objective. And that is the real tough part. Picking the right dots and connecting them the right way.

To grow as a company, you need to make strategic bets of the future. To do this without losing the farm means you need to establish a systematic process by which you can gather and assess different sources of information. Customers, suppliers and competitors are all contributors to your knowledge base. And so are research firms and consultants who can bring an outside perspective to your process. Blending it all will identify strategic choices, while reducing risk. But remember, it will never be a clear cut answer and it is not in the back of the book.

No, it’s not your mother, your spouse or your best friend. They may all understand a part of you. But professionally speaking, in your business, in your career, someone needs to understand you and your context. Someone needs to be the objective observer, and bring those insights forward to enable you improve your operations.

Recently I was at a start-up networking event where the featured guest was George Babu, one of the co-founders of Rypple. When discussing how startup CEOs can be successful, he spoke about hiring coaches. This is what enables the learning and development to happen at a faster pace. Someone that is disconnected from the company makes it possible for the CEO to be unguarded about what they are able to openly talk about. And he sees this as a trend that is occurring in many startup companies. And of course, he himself, now a VC with OMERs also has a personal coach for himself in his new endeavor.

Of course, you may say that this is not something new. When start-up companies are getting off the ground, one of the steps is to recruit advisors. Advisors are selected based on key factors such as: having experience in a similar situation, being subject matter experts, or being customers. This is excellent as long as there is an accompanying focus on you as the leader, and focusing on maximizing your personal effectiveness in undertaking new and different tasks. But that is not a given, as we often see start-up CEOs that are pushed out of the companies they founded, because they were deemed to be ineffective.

Away from the startup scene, we have formal organizations that are put together as peer advisory groups. These are effectively self-help groups, where company leaders can share problems with peers who may have dealt with similar problems and issues. A very nice summary is provided by Rey Carr and his post “Fee-Based Peer Coaching & Peer Mentoring Groups: How Do They Work?”.  Again, these appear to provide great benefit for leaders to remove themselves from their own company and ecosystem, and get on neutral ground with other leaders so they can share openly. But how this leads to improved levels of effectiveness seems to be less certain.

And then there is the mentor approach, where a leader may have an open-door to someone who is senior to them and has the wisdom to provide guidance. Certainly this provides another great mechanism for the leader to learn, but only if the mentor can effectively relate to the context in which the company is operating. But this may not be the case. The mentoring scenario could be much like the “Grasshopper” spiritual training in the Kung Fu television show. A lot of great parables, which can get the leader thinking. But may not be there to support the action.

Back to George Babu’s thinking. If you need to be better, you need to bring in coaches. The title itself brings a completely different implication. It implies that someone must get to know you. Completely. And they must know the context within which you operate, the goals you have set for your company, and the obstacles which you face. And from there, you must be pushed and held accountable to the goals that you committed to.