Down The Road...

Think about the last time you were on a road trip. I used to make regular trips between Montana and Washington state. It usually took around 11 hours to make the entire trip and a lot of that was through windy roads at 70-75 mph.

So here’s a question – do you think my driving was better in the first couple of hours or the last couple of hours of my trip?

If you guessed the first couple of hours, you’re right. As the trip went on, I became increasingly tired and distracted. I would unconsciously start to drift a little more toward the sides of the road.

The same thing can happen even on short trips. When you come to a huge curve in the road, you can tend to over-correct or under-correct your steering and end up treading a little too close to that white line on the side of the road.

Why does this happen? And what does taking a sharp corner while driving have to do with running a business?

I think that the same thing can happen to us when managing our businesses.

In the case of a long trip, I got overtired and started paying less attention to my driving. In a similar way, when we are grinding out the day to day tasks of our business or getting to the end of a long project, we can sometimes start to let tiredness affect our decision-making and judgement.

Or you might be coming up against a particularly challenging situation – your sharp curve in the road as it were. Maybe an employee is being uniquely difficult, a legal issue has come up, or you are needing to make significant changes in organizational structure.

As these things come up, it’s easy to get shortsighted.

And that’s the real danger when driving as well. When we approach a sharp curve or are at the end of a long road trip, it’s natural to let our eyes drift down close to the road right in front of us. We forget our destination or even the road beyond our immediate circumstances. We narrowly focus on what’s in front of us and, consequently, we start making some mistakes.

We over-correct. We under-correct. We try to do too much or too little.

The solution is to consciously realize that this is our tendency as humans and to intentionally look a little farther ahead. Try this when you’re driving sometime – you’ll find that you naturally drive better and smoother, in no small part because you can anticipate what is coming next.

This same logic can often be helpful in approaching your business as well. Dive into the little things when you need to, but remind yourself every once in a while to look a little further down the road. You’ll sometimes find that what seems like a REALLY BIG DEAL becomes a little less threatening when you consider it in terms of the big picture.