One Simple Idea to Advance Your Cause
Aug 17th, 2010 by David Svet
I just got back from a short vacation house boating with my fraternity brothers. Had you asked any one of us 30 years ago if we could envision ourselves as old, fat, bald guys who float around together in a doublewide on a barge, you would have gotten a lot of laughs. Yet, we are and we do. To make matters worse, a bunch of us are also amateur geologists — yes, we are old, fat, bald, house boating rock collectors. I suppose we could have done worse. So what could you possibly learn from such a motley crew? How about the power of having everyone in your crew on the same page?
Every year when we tie up the boat a few guys get off with their little hammers and tink, tink, tink for concretions, geodes and such. Occasionally someone finds an interesting one, but it’s a pretty rare occurrence. This year started out pretty much the same. Then something changed. One of the guys found a very interesting concretion and we all started talking about it. Among us were anthropologists, geologists and engineers. Pretty soon there was a collective sharing of information about what causes the formations and where to find them. Suddenly, everyone on board knew to look for a particular pattern in the layers of rock on the shoreline. It paid off. The next place we decided to tie up had a vein of concretions so thick that everyone quickly got bored digging them out. Now the problem was to choose the best ones. The result was an array of very collectible specimens.
Getting the whole team on the same page, engaged with the information needed to advance the cause — what a novel idea. If something so simple can help a barge full of old, fat, bald, rock collectors imagine what it could do for your team!
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