In a recent episode of the 2Bobs podcast, host Blair Enns was talking about how businesses fail. In his view, they never fail for a single reason but rather for a variety of different reasons. From the show:
“It’s a basic tenet of design thinking that there is no reason for anything. There are only ever reasons, multiple reasons. When our business fails, we go to the excuse and say, it failed because of reason and it’s usually external reason, but if you look at how species go extinct, it’s a combination of, it’s called the press pulse theory, pressure, constant pressure, and then a pulse. We blame the pulse, the external thing that happened to us. We don’t take stock of our role in the ongoing pressure that the business was feeling because of the things that we were doing or not doing.”
It’s a harsh way to view business failure, but I suspect it’s often true.
Following the same idea but flipping it around a bit, it reminds me of my recent post about the erroneous focus on last touch attribution. When companies are working to determine why a particular customer found them, they try to drill down to the reason. This is a fool’s errand, because it’s almost always a variety of reasons.
If your business is struggling, resist the urge to find “the reason”, and the same goes for your marketing — when you finally sign that great client, know that it was due to many of your great efforts and not the one that they happened to see last.
