Prioritize opportunities
Once you’ve adopted that opportunity-seeking mindset, the digging expeditions get easier because the feedback starts coming voluntarily. Then, your challenge is just prioritizing the input you get.
“You take this list of opportunities and you start measuring them both on what creates the most value for the customer and what creates the most value for the company,” Danner says. “If you get too big of a list, you freeze. So narrow it down on value and narrow it down on what’s achievable. And then you turn that into the vision and then the strategies to achieve that vision.”
Identifying what’s doable is a risk assessment that involves anticipating obstacles you might hit. Danner constantly revisits what goes right and wrong with each project, building a keener ability to predict future barriers.
“If you’ve done your work on analyzing what goes right, what goes wrong on existing projects as you’ve grown, then those barriers and the potential pitfalls fall out through continuous improvement [or] some people would call it post-mortems on projects,” he says. “It’s just always examining what goes right and what goes wrong and striving to improve.”
Ideally, after each project, have your team debrief with group self-evaluations that weigh results against the goals of both the company and the customer. Don’t stop at what happened — also think about why.
“You go, ‘What were the keys to us getting [those results]?’” Danner says. “Or if you missed and you were late or over budget, you break it down into a root cause analysis as to what went wrong.
“You’re always examining what you did. Did I do what I said I would do? Did the team do what we said we would do? And you’re holding yourself accountable to those pluses and minuses.”
With that background knowledge, you’ll build your foresight of future potential pitfalls. You probably won’t build your company around a solution buried behind too many barriers, so you’ll be able to prioritize which opportunities hold the most value — and therefore, which ones to build your vision around.
“Try to think about what you’re going to do to knock down the barriers,” Danner says. “Are those barriers within your control, or are you really going to have to rely on a third party? If you’ve got to go outside to rely on that third party, those opportunities probably go to the back end of this analysis. You keep going to the ones you can control or, in some ways, you can get control of.”