A few posts back I wrote about a friend of mine who gives me a good reality check when I need it. It also got me thinking about the kind of advice that we take from friends and what it is based on.
Everyone sees through their own frame of reference. If you want good advice, it's really important to understand just what frame of reference your adviser is speaking through.
At any executive level advisors are deep experts in their field, when companies hire consultants, they also hire deep experts in the area they seek to improve - even when it seems like it's a general area like "competitive advantage" or "process consultant". In general you won't find a CEO going to a risk consultant for the next audacious business idea and you wont go to the guy responsible for your last crazy business venture (successful or otherwise) for a detailed risk assessment, because their frames of reference are just way off for the particular areas where help is needed.
When I spoke to my friend about a few changes happening at work, i was a little stunned at just exactly what I got back - I got every reason that I shouldn't do it, everything that could go wrong and every reason I should stay where I was. I was stunned at first - but eventually had a good laugh at myself when I realized that I'd just asked my friend the senior risk consultant from a major financial firm about a new job - of course she was going to give me the risks, her entire frame of reference is risks. Later on when I spoke to another friend of mine - a senior sales consultant with a major IT company, I got entirely the opposite - what a great opportunity I had to do something great, she wasn't better or worse, her frame of reference was entirely different - and based on the views of two experts, I came out somewhere in the middle - leaning to the optimistic side because I'm a terminal optimist.
Too infrequently we do not consider the frame of reference of the person from whom we are seeking advice or discussing a problem.
We also don't understand our own frame of reference.
A frame of reference is something that developed over years, it isn't really controllable on a day by day basis, the best you can really do is steer it in a particular direction and be aware of the gaps that you have - it's the gaps that are really important because they represent your blind side,
Filling gaps is where advisors become really valuable - and there are many ways to identify your gaps. The best place to start is probably personality tests - myers briggs or disc or any one of a hundred others. Look for the areas in which you score badly so you can find people who are strong in the areas you aren't.
A second place to try is your own job function. In almost any organization of a reasonable size you'll be able to find the jobs that are naturally at odds with yours - marketing and finance, sales and operations, find someone who represents the opposite philosophy to yours and ask them lots of questions - seek advice on particular situations, ask them what they'd do, you might be surprised at the insight they have based on a different frame of reference.
Understanding your own frame of reference isnt an easy task - and it's actually harder in areas that you know something about. We have a the tendency to automatically underestimate the size of the things that we don't know we don't know. Developing an understanding of your blind spots really starts with deciding that there are people who know more about all kinds of things than you do - not always an easy task.
A couple of key things to remember every time you seek advice:
- Consider your sample size - one person doesn't generally make a total picture unless it's the Dalail Lama or they're a deep expert in exactly what you're talking about.
- Consider the sample size of the person you're talking to - if they've experienced something related to what you're talking about once they're better than nothing, but maybe not much.
- It's the unknown unknown that will get you most times - in these cases ego will get you every time and a mentor or a deep expert will save you most times.
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