The Fog of Impact

Imagine a multiplayer video game in which players compete to shoot goblins that appear in a foggy landscape. Some goblins carry a small pouch of gold which the shooter wins on killing the goblin. The game lasts for forty minutes and the best shooter wins. But there’s a catch.

The goblins appear and disappear, and it is not easy to take aim at them through the fog. What’s more, they may take several shots to die, and it is tough to see through the fog if they are still alive. Shooters can’t get too close because the goblins disappear. The players start with a fixed amount of gold for guns, tech upgrades, and ammunition.

Here’s the secret. The key to winning the game is to earn enough gold to invest in an expensive upgrade that offers fog-piercing vision. Those who don’t realize this waste their gold on more powerful guns and ammunition.

This game is playing out in the real world of business and digital initiatives. The goblins represent ephemeral opportunities in the market. The benefits landscape is foggy, and initiatives struggle to hit the mark unless there is adequate investment in impact intelligence in the form of tight impact-feedback loops, the equivalent of fog piercing vision.

Unfortunately, many business leaders, both Askers and Approvers among them, haven’t bought into the fog-piercing abilities of tight impact-feedback loops. They think it is too high a bar or it is only applicable to tech companies. Some of them also fear that without the fog, they’ll no longer have an excuse for their poor scores. With the fog in place, they can simply spray their guns and pray for a hit. Thus, the game continues in the fog with all the available funds spent on doing more things faster and with new tools. It is spent on new shiny tech that can fire faster and longer into the inscrutable, unyielding fog.

This is the topic of my new book, Impact Intelligence: Get more out of your discretionary spend.

It makes the case that the fog-piercing vision doesn’t have to be a super high-end upgrade in the form of controlled experiments and advanced data analysis. The iRex framework described in the book offers a mid-range upgrade with adequate fog-piercing capabilities.

Book website: www.impactintel.net