Brand Strategy 101
Lesson 5: The Expert Trap
Think you need more knowledge and experience? Think again.
Reflect
What was most useful for you in this lesson?
Experience is overrated
Once upon a time Nokia was the world's most dominant mobile phone maker. They set the pace. And back when the iPhone first launched with its detestable glass touchscreen and useless virtual keyboard, like an overpriced luxury bauble that would only ever appeal to freaks and geeks, some very smart people, with tons of experience and complicated data, dismissed the smartphone as a passing fad. They thought to themselves, "who wants to carry around these expensive, heavy things with batteries that drain quickly and break when you drop them?" The experts at Nokia were in thrall to their past success; their experience told them they knew what they were doing.
Experience can make people resistant to change and more likely to dismiss critical information that conflicts with their views. Knowledge can be a curse, since once we know something it becomes almost impossible to imagine what it was like to not know that thing. We can lose our ability to empathize and to translate for others what we know. Expertise can trick us into assuming that we know best, or simply that we ought to know best.
As creatives, it's easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking we need to be the smartest one in the room.
We think we need to be the expert. And that the expert has all the answers. But who really has the critical information? It's not us. It's the client. They should be the one doing the talking. We should be the one listening.
"But sooner or later we have to come up with an answer", comes the common refrain. But what is the assumption in this idea? It is that we have to be the one to conjure a solution. Just like we get addicted to the moment of the grand reveal - where we pull the curtain back to reveal our brand spanking new logo for an astonished client and go "Ta Da!" - we get stuck on this idea that we are responsible for magically brandishing The Answer To Your Problem. We get stuck on the idea that there is just one answer. A right and a wrong. And we are the wielders of The Right Answer. It's as if we're half in love with our own terror of being anything but perfect.
But, just like working on a logo, the real value lies in letting go of this selfish idea that it's all about us, and instead, through close collaboration and curiosity, we can help our clients discover a solution that works for them, on their terms, through their eyes. We can put down our own lens - with all its assumptions and fears and desires and noise - and we can be free to see the world through the eyes of our client. And in so doing, we can define the real problem that's stopping them from getting where they want to go, and work out a way forward, together.
No more surprises. No more ta-da. No more anxious overpreparation or analysis paralysis.
No more thinking we need to learn more, know more or be more before we have enough to offer. Our greatest value lies in our ability to listen and to understand. That is our job. That is our gift. Just as we are sick and tired of being told what to do, it would be cheap of us to then turn around and do the same to our clients. "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it" is something I heard for years from clients. And you know what sort of clients they were? They were the ones who turned around and told me what to do, who said "I'll know it when I see it", only to go through endless revisions, and who I felt suffocated and demoralized working for.
Clients who value you, once you value yourself first, will be only too delighted to collaborate and discover a way forward on the journey, together. They will feel confident and reassured that they are seen and heard and understood by a partner who neither judges them, nor makes them feel stupid, nor comes in heavy with assumptions.
That is the core of going in empty. Your curiosity is your superpower.
Once we let go of our ego and truly go in empty, we free ourselves of the pressure to have all the answers - or indeed any answer - and we can begin to help solve those big problems with clarity and confidence.
What's more, we rid ourselves of the pressure to be right. We are free to make mistakes and to fail. But that's another story. See you in part 3.
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Stay tuned for Lesson 6 in your inbox tomorrow!
