Successful entrepreneurs are very much like archeologists, as well as detectives. Better said, their style resembles that of accomplished archeological guides.
After you discover an exciting strategic truth about your business, communicating it is your next challenge. A major mistake entrepreneurs make is trying to proclaim their discoveries as though they were dogma. Give fragments to your colleagues, just like a skilled archeologist might hand a student a few shards of pottery or fragments of a tablet with hieroglyphics. Let them dust off the sand and fit the pieces together. A scrap book of possibilities is more absorbing than an abstract formula.
Your goal is to share the power of discovery, not to convince others of your own brilliance.
When you enable others to discover:
▪ You inspire them through expressing confidence in their ability to piece together partial information and solve a puzzle.
▪ You increase their commitment to the result because it becomes their findings and not your theories.
▪ When you give colleagues the chance to discover, you develop their creative skills and increase their ability to think intuitively.
▪ If they draw the same conclusions that you do, then you also amass validating evidence to confirm your own original reasoning and intuitions.
▪ And, in no trivial way, you increase the entertainment value of work, because people are far more engaged in tasks which demand ingenuity and reflection than those which require only superficial repetition.