You Dig?

They had trouble finding the bullet lodged somewhere in President Garfield's abdomen, so Alexander Graham Bell invented the metal detector.

Unfortunately, it didn't help because A) the metal bed frame interfered; and B) the doctor only allowed him to scan Garfield's right side, but it turned out the bullet was in his left side. 😕

A hundred years later, I'm 7 years old and at the beach with my family when I hear the eager, pitchy beep of a metal detector. I watched in awe as the detectorist raked a Hot Wheels car out of the sand and flipped it into his cloth shoulder bag.

Immediately, the entire stretch of sand transformed in my imagination from two dimensions to three. I could picture countless treasures hidden beneath its surface, and all I wanted to do was dig for them.

Here’s the deal: without a formal mechanism (metal detector) to get input and feedback (valuable treasure) from your stakeholders (miles of sand), you risk letting the very ideas that could transform your organization remain buried.

The organizations that truly scale their impact and revenue require every executive leader to have weekly conversations with staff, funders, partners, and those who benefit from their mission. The feedback from these conversations is discussed in the leadership team's weekly meetings.

Yes, you’ll rake in a good number of useless old bottle caps. But A) your stakeholders will feel heard, and B) it only takes a few unearthed treasures to completely transform your organization.

For the staff conversations, a simple start/stop/continue conversation can be pretty effective - supplemented with quarterly surveys that go deeper.