Challenges are the issues that everyone recognizes: those insatiable requirements that will eat up every minute of your attention and still not be fully resolved. Take customer expectations.
Brands work like crazy to meet the expectations of customers, and then, because a competitor raises the bar, or customers get used to what is offered, or an industry breakthrough comes along, they find they are once again slipping behind, so they launch another Herculean effort to catch up and move ahead. There they stay for a time before they once again lapse. So they organize another super-human effort to regain control. And on it goes.
Challenges are constant. They’re frustrating, difficult, time-consuming … but ultimately, they’re actually part of being in business. And in a curious way, they equalize competition because they are issues faced by everyone. The volatility of being on top one moment and struggling to keep up the next applies, or at least has the potential to apply, to all.
A dilemma on the other hand is much more menacing. It’s much more than a keep-up requirement. It’s a do-or-die requirement. It’s end-of-your-business-model stuff. It’s the new way of doing things no-one was ready for. It’s the buy-out that revolutionizes the priority list. It’s the scandal that rocks everyone’s reputation.
It’s dangerous because it’s not constant. And the very thing that made it, or could have made it, an advantage for someone else – its irregularity – makes it doubly difficult for you as an incumbent. You can’t catch up to a dilemma. You can’t just improve, amend or adjust your way out of it. Instead you must unfurl your entire game plan, wipe much of the playbook clean and reset your operations. All the while, you’re losing money. Maybe the media’s giving you grief. Everyone wants to know why it’s taking you so long.
The problem for many leaders is that, given how much they have to deal with, they see everything coming their way as part of the ‘to do’ list. Their radar is not tuned to tell the difference between ongoing challenge and incoming dilemma because they’re judging everything as “tasks” and not through the eyes of their stakeholders, investors, customers, staff. A problem seems like a problem. That is, of course, until it’s too late, and suddenly management find themselves waist-deep in a distorted reality and having to sift, sort and prioritize as though their business depended on it – which of course, it does.
Any business that tells you they’re ready for whatever the market throws at them is lying. How can they be? What they mean is they’re aware of what they know about and they have a plan for the scenarios they can predict. That’s escalation – and for the most part, managers have orderly intensification of response down to an art.
Here’s my simple rule of thumb. If something happens or develops and you know how to respond, that’s a challenge. If someone does something for which you have no reply, that’s a dilemma. The temptation of course is to answer that dilemma, and to answer based on what you know. The music industry responded to the download dilemma by citing IP concerns. The movie industry has done the same.
What nowhere near enough brands do is to step back and survey how all this upset has wobbled the world, and what that might now mean.
Challenges force everyone to do more of the same. They are all about improvements, so in a strange way, although they’re distracting and confronting, they actually reinforce how things work now. Dilemmas are much more difficult. They’re about ‘next’ so they require those who survive to do less of the same. Much less. At the very time that most brands feel naturally compelled to do at least something they know.
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