Line of sight - never lose it with i4cu

It always fascinated me how readily we are prepared to forget or dilute universal principles just because some (often irrelevant!) parameters in our environment changed. That sounds philosophical, so let me give you a down to earth example. You are driving in a busy road, one of your favourite songs comes up and you start day-dreaming. Well, the road is still busy, you can easily have a bump and you are day-dreaming. You lost your ‘line of sight’, your 'connection', to what really matters and that’s not very wise! So, the truth here is that the density of traffic increases the probabilities of an accident and day-dreaming does not help you at all in managing the situation successfully. Your favourite song does not help you at all navigating the situation.

And it is not different in our professional lives. Why? Simply because we lose ‘line of sight’ too often by unnecessary complexity and noise creeping into our business reality and blurring our vision.

You might think, well, it is not that bad: I always have line of sight of what I want to achieve even if I get distracted a little bit along the way. That’s good and I believe you unconditionally because you know your business inside-out so you do know what you want to achieve.

Interestingly though, knowing what you want (wish) to achieve does not tell you how you will get there – it is your unwavering attention to your roadmap of actions and interactions that will do this. And here lies the problem: these actions and certainly these interactions, do depend on many, many other actions, interactions and reactions. You cannot control when an email will hit your inbox that changes something critical on what you are working on. Nor you can control if an interaction will lead to a slight or a significant redirection of your actions. Nor you can control when the one person in your business that has long memory of what happened and why will decide to move on. You can think of plenty of examples when you started with clarity of purpose and a plan only to discover after a few weeks or months things are not so clear any more and in fact, it is a jolly good idea to stop and take stock of where you are and why.

You would have good reason to say that this is precisely why you keep every email, use a document management system, a CRM, project management, Trello, Slack, MS Teams and lots of other software to know exactly what you do. All these are good but you got a little problem: they all hold part of the story and you will have to put all these pieces together to build a full picture. Thjis is why this ‘taking stock’ exercise evolves into a consuming activity for re-discovering what exactly is going on. Why? Because the line of sight has been lost or blurred by the realities of our business lives.

And that’s a universal principle. It does not matter if your professional engagement is academic studying, offering organisational support, market research, medical research, procurement, law etc. All information-based professions depend on actions and interactions which will influence the clarity of your roadmap and given time, will blur your vision of the facts, the critical information and your ability to act in context.

i4cu reflects your roadmap of every informaiton asset you have used and maintains clarity no matter how many planned or unplanned actions and interactions take place. Why? Because it preserves the line of sight by keeping every single activity on a clear timeline reflecting the story line of the aim you have set. So what? Well, in a nutshell, no drama, no confusion, no loss of organisational memory and no risk of having a painful bump in the heavy traffic of business affairs!