You don’t see the cracks in your own home

I have tried my best but I can’t remember who said this phrase and inspired me to write this blog. You don’t see the cracks in your own home. Picture the scene, house swept, mopped and vacuumed. All your belongings arranged meticulously in the most attractive way possible. Maybe even some potpourri added for the purposes of providing a sweet ambiance. I am describing a typical scene for anyone trying to sell out or rent out their home to a prospective client.

 

How frustrating when you get home later in the day and the agent tells you that one of the prospective buyers complained about the flow of the house. Or worse still mentioned that the cracks in your lounge would have to be repaired. And even worse, that if they were to buy the house they would completely destroy the kitchen and build a new one. They also hate your bedroom and would like a fireplace which you don’t have.

 

You swallow our pride in disbelief. Our house is perfect. We have so many happy memories from living here. And you have never noticed any cracks at all in the lounge. How dare they judge your dream home in this way!

 

Unfortunately, we can apply this blindness to other areas of our lives too. Where being in the system and being so passionate about it, makes us blind to it’s potential flaws. That working system that you have built up over the years that worked so well may have real deficiencies. Or that marketing insight you have used as the basis of your strategy for the last 20 years, might have expired. The structure of the team you have built and how their roles and responsibilities are shared between them may not be appropriate anymore. Basically, our house that we built is starting to show some cracks and we just cant believe it. How dare, outsiders walk into our world and tell us that it is flawed! Surely, if there were cracks we would have seen them ourselves? Unfortunately, not in this case as I believe we really don’t see the cracks within our own homes.

 

When we are too close to the action we generally struggle to notice the small faults that could lead to larger problems in the future. To test this theory can you think about times you have been surprised that someone has such negative feedback about something you believe to be working well? The shock when a trusted employee resigns suddenly, a major customers surprises you by removing you as the main supplier for a contract, or your partner in a relationship tells you that they wish to leave you. All those fissures started as a small crack potentially, but because we were in the system at the time, we did not notice these cracks at all. So where does this leave us? I believe this is further evidence that one needs to look outside of their own environment sometimes and get feedback from trusted sources as to how things really look from the outside. This could be feedback from team members, customers, industry bodies or even other non-competing suppliers in the industry about how well things are really going.

 

Cracks are terrible things. Sometimes they get wider and reveal structural issues with the foundations you have built. Sometimes they are not severe and as a result we walk past them, or ignore them on a daily basis. When we least need them to be visible to outsiders, is when they show up the most.