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THE STORY
Several years ago, when Google was in its infancy, I decided to have fun by typing in the names of people I knew just to see what Google would find. When I put in my daughter’s name, up popped a reference to a web site with an article from the college campus where my daughter was attending.

The article was about a number of college girls who were paying tribute to one of their classmates, a girl who had done something special. They even had some quotes in the article from my daughter, who was saying nice things about this girl. I decided to call up my daughter and surprise her with my “newfound knowledge” about what she was up to.

When I referenced the web article, my daughter said, “Don’t believe anything in that article. The girl who wrote it up got all the facts wrong. I didn’t say any of the words that the article claimed I said. Someone else said them, and they said them differently than the way they were quoted. It’s all wrong.”

This got me to thinking. Throughout my entire life, whenever I have read a newspaper article or seen a news story about an event with which I had personal knowledge, I have always come away with an attitude similar to my daughter’s. Either they got the facts wrong or they distorted the overall tone of what occurred in order to make the story more dramatic. It would be as if the reporter and I had been at extremely different places, instead of having been at the same place.

This got me thinking even deeper. If it’s true that for every article for which I have personal knowledge, I know the article is wrong or terribly distorted, then why is it I believe the truth in all of the articles which I cannot verify with personal knowledge? Wouldn’t they be equally distorted?

THE ANALOGY
Strategies are based on knowledge. If we have a solid base of knowledge, we can create better strategies. Therefore, knowledge gathering is a key part of the strategic process.

However, as the story above points out, just because something claims to be accurate knowledge, that does not necessarily make it so. If a strategy is based on a pile of distortions, then the strategy is also distorted.

During the Cold War between the US and the USSR, there was great secrecy between the two nations. Very little information would come out of the USSR. At the time, there were these specialists in the US called Kremlinologists. These people worked in think-tanks, where they would try to make sense out of the small snippets of information they could get out of the Kremlin.

They would try to discern the grandiose plans and long-term strategies of the Kremlin based on the tone of a person’s voice, or their body language, or a small phrase. Since this was their profession, these Kremlinologists were very good at finding great depth in shallow information.

I read an article once about one of these Kremlinologists who had the pleasure of visiting Russia after the end of the Cold War. He got to see all kinds of secret Soviet documents that were once hidden from the US. His conclusion was that the Kremlinologists gave the Soviet Union too much credit.

He said that back in the days when the Kremlinologists would examine things, they always seemed to do so under the assumption that the Soviet Union had a well thought out plan and were executing it well. They figured that everything must have a hidden meaning, because why would the USSR do anything that had no meaning?

However, once he saw the secret documents, he realized that the Soviets had been bumbling along with half-baked plans and internal dissention, just like us. There were not a well-oiled machine, perfectly perfecting the perfect strategy. Instead, they were just people, full of all of the same human weaknesses found everywhere in the world. Most of their actions had no deep hidden meaning. They weren’t that sophisticated.

It’s like the story above. If we know that our side has all kinds of flaws and weaknesses, why do we assume that the other side is perfect?

THE PRINCIPLE
Strategies are based on assumptions. If we assume that our competition is highly competent and rational, then we will build strategies to thwart a highly competent and rational foe. But what if our assumptions are wrong? What if the competition reacts to things on a very emotional basis? Then we have created the wrong strategy.

The same could apply to our assessment of the customer. We might assume that the customer is highly knowledgeable about our offering as well as knowing all the details about our competition. After all, we sure are knowledgeable about these things. We talk about them all the time, so why wouldn’t our customers also do so? If we believe this, we would then try to appeal to them based on referring to that knowledge we presume they have. However, if the customer has little knowledge of the offerings, that appeal will make no sense to them.

Yes, you can gather facts to help learn if your assumptions are true. But if you gather them and examine them with too much of a preconceived notion in your head, you can easily gather incorrect data or misinterpret the data you receive. Just look at how preconceived notions impacted the fact gathering and interpretation of the facts by the White House regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Therefore, to keep from making the mistakes of the Kremlinologists, here are a few tips.

1) Don’t Believe Everything You Read
A lot of “information” really isn’t. It is distortions. Sometimes people have particular agendas and present biased half-truths to support their agenda. Consider the source. Listen to all sides of a discussion.

If a couple has a nasty divorce and you only talk to the former husband, you would think he was an innocent victim, tortured by an evil wife. If you only talked to the former wife, you would conclude that she had been a saint for putting up with all the grief from her vile husband. To get a more complete and accurate picture, you have to talk to both of them.

2) Don’t Assume Your Competition Is Brilliant and Perfectly Rational At All Times
As long as your competition is made up of people, they will suffer from human weaknesses. There could be all kinds of political backstabbing going on there, or people acting out personal agendas, rather than what is always in the best interest of their company. If you ignore the human element, you will probably come to a less than perfect assessment of what they are up to, and thereby enact the wrong strategy.

3) Don’t Read Too Much Into What You See
As Sigmund Freud supposedly said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Over-analysis, and the search for hidden meanings can lead you down the wrong path. Yes, it’s good to analyze what you see, but don’t convince yourself that you are seeing things that do not exist.

SUMMARY
Gathering facts is an important part of the strategic process. Facts help us form opinions about a situation. If our opinions are well-founded, they will help us make effective strategic decisions. However, we need to remind ourselves that not everything which claims to be a fact really is. We need discernment to help separate fact from fiction.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Often times before a big game, a sports team will be asked if they have made major adjustments in their strategy due to the opponent they are about to play. The typical response from the team is that they best know what their own strengths are, and so the team is concentration more on improving what they know they do best rather than on what they think the opposition might do. Given how distorted our views of the opposition may be, this is not bad advice.