I was listening to a podcast recently, and someone commented that “ideology is the enemy of intelligence.’ It was in reference to the CIA, but it struck me as an apt mantra for a growing business. Our mission, vision, and values, combined with our product and go to market approach is our way of describing our ideology. Particularly in an early stage business, the founder has a vision and constructs a company to build the product or service that will deliver that vision. The vision is generally informed by experience, such as solving a problem the founder encountered in their past. Nonetheless, the leap of faith the entrepreneur takes is based on their belief that enough other people have encountered the same market void and are willing to spend money to address their need. The entrepreneur’s vision for solving the problem becomes their ideology. At their core, they believe they know the right path.
Intelligence is comprised of actual market data, customer and prospect feedback, competitive information and the like. The market is teaming with data, and every company needs to develop a framework to absorb it and then separate the signal from the noise. The problem arises when the ideology causes us to ignore or drown out the true signal from the market. Selective listening, or only measuring the data points that reinforce our ideology is a sure path to lead a business astray. Too often, we celebrate data that confirms our ideology, and make excuses for data points that contradict or undermine our ideology.
In sales we see ‘happy ears’ behavior when a sales person only hears buying signs and ignores cautionary signals. The result is that they are surprised when the buyer chooses a competitor’s solution. They were filtering out the intelligence that may have provided them a path to success. In customer management, we love the feel-good metrics of usage stats and engagement, but we miss the true warning signs of discontent. We have all been ‘surprised’ by the big account that ‘loves us,’ but suddenly churns. We missed the signals that the account was not perceiving enough value to continue the relationship. Lastly, perhaps the most difficult example is the product team that believes in their vision for how the product should work and how customers should use it, but ignores the customer and market intelligence that is signaling that the product does not have adequate market fit, or does not solve the problem the way customers want to work. In other words, ‘the dogs won’t eat the food.’
All of these are examples of confirmation bias. We believe in our business and our ideology, and we avoid conflicting data. We seek data that confirms our beliefs. When we see data points that do not fit our ideology, we start explaining them away, but instead we should heed the old sales saying ‘if you are explaining, you are losing.’ We need to recognize the facts for what they are. When our ideology is the enemy of intelligence, our business suffers. The mantra should be ‘measure what matters, and believe the results.’ Better to have the intelligence and be in a position to make informed decisions and adjustments than to be blindsided by ideology and have adjustments made for you.
The best advice for an ideologue is to go looking for trouble. If we acknowledge our ideological bias, then we can challenge ourselves to find the outlying data points. Adopt a healthy dose of paranoia and do not let conflicting data go unexplored. I have written in the past about CEO optimism and the need to balance cheerleading with reality. As an overly optimistic CEO, I recognized that I needed to have trusted realists by my side, and I had to listen to them. We would debate the meaning and implications of the data, but the facts were the facts, and we had to be brutally honest about the information. Do not let ideology be the enemy of intelligence. Listen to the data.