I can control your thoughts, but I cannot read your mind

That statement normally wakes up a crowd at the beginning of a meeting or a workshop. Let me try and prove it.

Thought control: I can make you think of something I am currently thinking of - even though I will be telling you that I do not want you to think of it. Take 10 seconds to clear your head before you go on. Think of anything that springs to mind. Ready?

Whatever you think of, do NOT think of a horse. How did I do? (The likelihood that you saw a horse with your mind’s eye is statistically high. If you didn’t, play along still).

Mind reading: spend two minutes sketching the horse you saw. I will sketch mine. Let us compare notes and add all the horses drawn on top of each other. I am certain it would look something like the cover photo. And that is my primary point. No one sees my exact horse. Everyone has their own image. That means I can set the stage for what we think about, but that is the extent of my mental powers.

I cannot read your mind, though, and that is the important bit here. I cannot feel and sense the dimensions of your horse when I talk about mine. I can talk to the concept of a horse, but I am not sure that you and I view it in the same way.

Is it not interesting that some of us saw a gorgeous thoroughbred while others saw a big-faced alpaca with skinny legs? In business, or anywhere people work together, I consider it vitally important that everyone involved agrees what we are working towards. For the team to be motivated, for the project to be successfully implemented, for the change to be adopted and for the company to have the best probability of surviving, we must agree what the horse looks like before anything else.

Throughout my career, I have used this introduction and picture of a multi-layered horse to engage teams in different aspects of business. I believe you can use it as follows:

When discussing team goals and delivering company strategy, it is very powerful to use the horse as a mental image of the individual team members’ objectives. Open up honest team discussions on strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and skills needed to deliver on the joint mission. How do you create a commonly understood horse with individual limbs driven forward by one heartbeat? How do you optimise the skillsets and individual motivations to strengthen the legs that are weak? Do all legs understand what the other legs are doing so you don’t have half in gallop while the others are trotting?

In the project management space, the horse image has proven useful when discussing the three key items of scope, time, and money. What kind of horse do we want to build, what can we afford and how long do we have? No doubt we would all like to go towards the back and have the mother of all systems delivered, but it takes a lot of time. Do we really need all those bells and whistles? Time to market counts. Maybe it is better to decide on delivering towards the middle and make continuous improvement sprints from there? When considering solutions, are we exploring all angles or staying in well-known territory optimising with focus on the as-is? Whatever the choice, make sure that everyone at the table agrees and the decisions are documented. “Neigh”-sayers later on are not welcome. Speak up at this point or follow the unstoppable stampede when we get to that stage. Stand united.

In the change management arena, you need to roll-out the story of the horse to the wider organisation. You better have the reasoning for the horse choice clear because someone will challenge you on it. For the sake of argument, let us assume we went with a horse in the middle of the drawing. The parts of the organisation that are used to a process or a system from the front part of the horse are super excited. They are getting something better than what they are used to and have a blast selling it to their customers. “Hi Ho Silver, away!” Teams that are used to solutions coming from the rear part are, however, unhappy. They need to un-learn and settle for less – at least it can feel that way. Life would be better if things could just stay the same. Change resistance is high. To overcome this it is important that all colleagues who were a part of the decision stand tall and help each other tell the same story.

My morale of the story is this:

In the real-life horse race, you have the highest probability of winning if you train, work with, and develop the horse itself. The winning effort is based on a single being. Whether it is a marathon or a sprint, it only matters if you are Hidalgo going on a 3,000-mile adventure across the desert, or you are Secretariat having to set an unbeaten record pace to win the Triple Crown. There is only one winner. No one remembers the runner up – and the winners cannot keep up the pace or stamina for very long.

For the human race, longevity is prevailing. Business is not for the short term. You need to not only win now, but in the long run. Focusing only on the next battle will inevitably mean losing the war. That will be the downfall of you, your team, and the organisation. I read an old proverb that said: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. This rings very true for me. In order to go together, and if you want to increase the probability of winning, you need to create a sense of belonging to the team for the individual and a feeling of commitment from the team to the individual. To get to that, it has worked for me to discuss and agree what the horse looks like before the race has started. Even if the outcome was a pony with a sore throat, we were all aligned.

(The dad-joke waiting to unfold here is that a pony with a sore throat is a little hoarse)