“With Every Pair of Hands Comes a Free Brain”

I don’t like cricket

It isn’t quite true. I like all sports, its just that cricket isn’t quite at the top of the list. Frankly I was never very good at it and I always found it very complicated and that was in the days before they had that Duckworth Lewis method, that I have never bothered to master. So why mention it here? Well to ask this question. ‘Can you imagine playing cricket without a scoreboard’? No one would have a clue about what was going on, including the players. With other games the tally of the scores are usually so low that you don’t need to be very bright to know what is going on, but cricket, well that is a totally different ball game! (Sorry!). Even without a score board you would probably understand that your football team has to score in the next 15 minutes or it will lose the game. It is never so clear with cricket and in the absence of a scoreboard it would be totally unclear. So it would be a challenge for the team to know what they needed to do to win and how much time they have to do it in. It is really difficult to win when you don’t know the score. So what, you ask? Well the game of business is far more complicated than either football or cricket and I expect you are playing it to win. So, do your players, your team, your people know what the score is? Do they know how much more they need to do to be winning when the referee blows the whistle for full time? Do they even know how the score is calculated? It amazes me how often we ask our teams to play a game as complex as the game of business and yet fail to give them sight of the score board and let them understand their progress towards the final whistle,– usually the end of the month. If we don’t teach them how the score is calculated and keep them regularly informed of what the score is and how much time there is left, how do we expect them to help us win? If we do happen to win, it is pure good fortune. There is a quote from Henry Ford on the front cover of my book ‘Tuesday @ Twelve’, ‘with every pair of hands comes a free brain’. How do we expect to engage the brains that we have if we can’t even let them have sight of the scoreboard?