Last week we kicked off a series inspired by board games with the classic game of checkers and making sacrifices.  This week is about leveraging knowledge as we reflect on Battleship and taking shots. 

When I was a little kid I played more than my fair share of Battleship.  In case you haven’t played, it’s a two player game where your objective is to sink all of your opponent’s ships.  There are two boards.  You can see your board, but you can’t see your opponent’s board.  Each board has a grid of letters on the left side and numbers on the top.  You would call out a letter and number combination like B1.  Your opponent would tell you if you missed or if you hit their ship.  If you missed, then you knew you had to try another area.  If you hit the ship, you knew that you needed to take shots in the nearby surrounding area.  It might take you another shot or two to know exactly where the ship is, but you wouldn’t have to start over.  You could leverage the knowledge you had and keep firing shots until the ship sank.

So how exactly does this connect with work?  In some ways work (especially marketing) is like a game of Battleship.  Essentially, you have a board and you are calling out shots (launching some kind of customer solution) and hoping that they hit (fulfill the need of a customer).  In the very beginning you might be playing on a completely unknown board, like if you were entering a new disease state.  However, we are usually playing on boards that we already know a lot about.  Often, we are playing in situations where we can leverage 3^rd party data, previous learnings, and our own tribal knowledge as a starting point before launching a “shot”.  In many situations we have already had a “hit” and need to build off of that instead of blindly searching for new ships to hit.

The question is how often do we search for this knowledge and leverage it before blindly launching solutions?  Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve said, “Why are we reinventing everything?  We already know X and Y, so why aren’t we starting there?”  Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve heard someone say, “That was a miss a few years ago, so why are we revisiting it now?”  I know that I’ve asked those things, and I’ve also been the one who has tried to reinvent the wheel.  It’s easy to get caught up in the feeling that everything you do should be novel and amazing in order for it to be valuable and recognized.  At the same time, starting from scratch isn’t very efficient.  You know when to go explore vast new areas and when to leverage the knowledge you already have.

The challenge: Are you blindly launching shots or are you leveraging the knowledge that exists to be more efficient?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry