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What happened to “getting it”?
Over the last few months, I’ve gotten a bunch of those synchronicitous nudges from the universe that have reminded of something pretty important. More and more, topics like intuition and vision keep popping up in my reading or in conversations. Being the theory junkie I am, I’m always game for this sort of thing, but it took a few of these in a pattern for me to realize there was a deeper relevance for me.
Through a bunch of postings so far, I’ve tried to explain strategy as a rational, analytical methodology that can be explained and reproduced. This is an outgrowth of the work I’ve been doing for my current employer, introducing a new and challenging concept to a corporate organization. But this couldn’t be further from where I started out - as a shoot from the hip cowboy who followed gut instinct and made big decisions without much data.
The thing of it was, though, that despite the lack of business rigor and methodology, a lot of pioneering efforts succeeded in achieving their goals - mostly traffic back then. There was an indefinable quality that would allow some people to understand the internet and its users well enough to imagine then build successful online environments and applications. The difference between those who could do this and most others who could not was called “getting it.”
What does “getting it” mean, and who gets it? I’d say it combines some of the following talents - out-of-the-box thinker, analytical, able to synthesize, not conservative in outlook, embracing of change, conceptual, and philosophical by nature. In my experience, people who get it are able to imagine something that isn’t there (may never have been there) as if it were right in front of them - vision, in other words. When they tell you about their baby, you can see their eyes actually focusing on some internal picture.
So why haven’t we heard much about this lately? With the burst of the bubble and the advent of the business-driven Web, the language of direct marketing has replaced the instinct and logic. There’s a lot more data, and the Internet people have learned how much success can be driven by pure methodology - measuring, testing, optimizing. “My spidey sense tells me so” became a tough sell as a basis to justify major projects to senior management.
In my last few years, I’ve drunk the cool-aid and even undertaken a personal project to find a way to bottle my particular process for hitting the mark. The thing of it is, there’s always been something about it I haven’t been able to put my finger on - a way to explain just how all the inputs is section A led to the solution in section B. All these little vibrations out there (especially Gladwell’s Blink), just brought me full circle to realize the obvious.
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