Recently I participated in a 3 day executive strategery session to determine a positioning and overall corporate message. One of the habits I developed over the years is to take very thorough and copious notes. So I took, no lie, 52 pages of notes over 3 days. Upon return to my home base I reviewed the notes and found some interesting tidbits I wanted to pass along.
Initially what struck me as interesting is my preparation included a note to myself that this company sells one product. When I was in transit to the east coast for the meeting I also noticed I noted that my estimated time for completion of the meeting objectives would take one maybe two days max to drive to a coherent, well differentiated positioning statement. In the end, I was wrong here are some highlights;
First is one of the “isms” I constructed while observing a debate on data types (yes this is my life) between a technical savant and a finance guy. Seriously this actually happened. The thread started as a high level company and product positioning objective. From there it plunged quickly into a debate on the product functionality and the exact, and I mean exact, definition of certain data types. In fact while six people participated, two seemed to be most interested in defining terms, phrases, and specifics while constructing, ahem, persuasive arguments as to why their positioning statements that were proffered were in fact logically correct. In my notes I called this a “technical beat down.” Upon further review after the trip I figured it out. So here goes;
Definitional Specificity is the art of creating an illusion of rightness of position via deconstructing another person(s) {sic} position by arguing the underlying word usage used to form the argument is definitionally flawed when the underlying words used to express the position are not expressed as individually accurate.
Huh? Simple, I ran this by my focus group (read: 3 people I know who have sat in a meeting as similar to the one I attended) and offered up the behavior observed. Since they all agreed that they had seen variations of it, here I type.
Now that the Definitional Specificity attacks were on the table I watched as literally one half hour was lost for real planning as people with organizationally different views debated underlying word usages as the premise for forming their overall, to boil it down to its simplest form, thoughts on positioning.
What struck me as I reread my notes, outside of the insertion of a line from a Pink Floyd song I had to write when the presenter presented a good segue, was the loss of time and focus it caused. The team lost an entire morning driving to be definitionally right instead of productive.
The long and short of it is the positioning was tabled to get out of the semantic deconstruction basement and move onto another topic that, coincidently, was also definitionally challenged as ideas , um , flowed.
What to do? What I did, head to the airport, pay the change fee on the return airfare and get out of town.
Most definitely.
Initially what struck me as interesting is my preparation included a note to myself that this company sells one product. When I was in transit to the east coast for the meeting I also noticed I noted that my estimated time for completion of the meeting objectives would take one maybe two days max to drive to a coherent, well differentiated positioning statement. In the end, I was wrong here are some highlights;
First is one of the “isms” I constructed while observing a debate on data types (yes this is my life) between a technical savant and a finance guy. Seriously this actually happened. The thread started as a high level company and product positioning objective. From there it plunged quickly into a debate on the product functionality and the exact, and I mean exact, definition of certain data types. In fact while six people participated, two seemed to be most interested in defining terms, phrases, and specifics while constructing, ahem, persuasive arguments as to why their positioning statements that were proffered were in fact logically correct. In my notes I called this a “technical beat down.” Upon further review after the trip I figured it out. So here goes;
Definitional Specificity is the art of creating an illusion of rightness of position via deconstructing another person(s) {sic} position by arguing the underlying word usage used to form the argument is definitionally flawed when the underlying words used to express the position are not expressed as individually accurate.
Huh? Simple, I ran this by my focus group (read: 3 people I know who have sat in a meeting as similar to the one I attended) and offered up the behavior observed. Since they all agreed that they had seen variations of it, here I type.
Now that the Definitional Specificity attacks were on the table I watched as literally one half hour was lost for real planning as people with organizationally different views debated underlying word usages as the premise for forming their overall, to boil it down to its simplest form, thoughts on positioning.
What struck me as I reread my notes, outside of the insertion of a line from a Pink Floyd song I had to write when the presenter presented a good segue, was the loss of time and focus it caused. The team lost an entire morning driving to be definitionally right instead of productive.
The long and short of it is the positioning was tabled to get out of the semantic deconstruction basement and move onto another topic that, coincidently, was also definitionally challenged as ideas , um , flowed.
What to do? What I did, head to the airport, pay the change fee on the return airfare and get out of town.
Most definitely.
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