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Are Your Lenses Obscuring Your Vision?

Are Your Lenses Obscuring Your Vision?

So long as a man’s eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary.” – Herman Melville.

The idea of vision is a pregnant metaphor, full of intimations and implications. In its verbal sense, vision refers to the act of seeing, of perceiving the world around us. As a noun, one’s vision has more to do with a sight into the future, to a place where one wishes, eventually, to reside.


The idea of vision, in both senses, tends to suffuse the jargon of everyday business. When customers come to us, they are not just in search of the domain knowledge related to a given enterprise system. They come to us looking to understand how to best integrate the use of a system with their particular business climate, such that they can best achieve their strategic goals, their vision. Customers tend to be strong in understanding the opportunities available to them. That is, they are able to formulate a vision for the future. Customers often struggle to put into place the processes, practices and procedures that allow them to achieve the vision that they’ve formulated.


After a losing year, the CEO of a company for whom I once worked, remarked (only half-sarcastically) that our company was “perfectly structured to achieve the results we’ve achieved.” That is, our company had a strategic vision, but our actions failed to achieve it. Our actions had achieved a different (and less profitable) vision. And I would offer that the reason for our failure to achieve our vision was in our inability to remove the paradigmatic lenses that colored everything we perceived, and ultimately drove our actions.


Einstein famously described insanity as the expectation that the repetition of same behavior will yield different results. In that light, I have worked for and worked with a few companies over the years that have gone insane at one point or another, seeking to achieve new strategic goals using the old methods that had worked in previous generations. The logic behind such an approach has some justification – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Such a an approach seems fine until a losing year leaves the CEO glowering down at you, over his horn-rimmed spectacles. The problem here is not one of vision, but of lenses. A company’s lenses serve as the paradigms that cement the company’s habits, culture and means of solving problems. As time goes by, and circumstances change, these lenses may begin to skew reality. In the most dysfunctional of environments, these lenses may even warp perceptions as to encourage the most maladaptive of business behaviors.


As ERP implementation consultants, it is of necessity that we come into a business from the outside, unaware and unaccustomed to the perspectives that shape the business in question. As consultants, we also have the good fortune of being exposed to many companies, in different industries, working with various products, catering to disparate markets. The expectation here is that our ERP implementation strategies across such environments gives us a cadre of different perspectives to use, and that we should be able to use these to the benefit of our client when they develop a vision and strategy. Because of the natural ignorance to a customer’s cultural worldview, and the access to alternative perspectives, the goal of a consultation effort has less to do with the use of an enterprise system than it does with the opportunities for a fresh perspective. The implementation of a new system becomes a means of surfacing and understanding the customer’s existing lenses and the consulting effort becomes an opportunity to try out new lenses, lenses that can be leveraged to formulate new processes and practices, that address changing business landscapes, and help companies achieve their respective strategic visions, in so doing.


So what is your vision? Come talk to us at the Estes Group, and see if we can help develop a vision and strategy to make them into a reality.