There is no security in ignorance

There is no security in ignorance

Tiffany Sauder: I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. And this is scared, confident, this next piece of advice didn't come from anyone I've never met this person in real life. Maybe sometime life will take me there, but there is a book called the great game of business written by Jackson. And it was like written in the eighties or like maybe nineties, I don't know, a minute ago.

It's like not a new book. And then I think it was released not too long ago, like updated and the premise of the book for me, it's about essentially the power of open book financials and why that is important to creating focus clarity. And I would say a team environment and comradery inside of companies.

That's like the premise of it, the great game of business. And it's like, not as simple read has some pretty complex models. But again, my brain synthesizes and the Proverbs of sorts, the takeaway for me from this book was this statement and it says there is no security and ignorance. And this while first introduced to me in this idea of the financial performance of companies is oftentimes kept very private between an owner like me and our employees.

And we think that everybody just should feel safe as a matter of default. And so if you assume your people feel safe, even with no information, then there's really no incentive to share information with them that would either make them feel safer or. Maybe rightly make them feel a little bit nervous because we need to get focused in the company isn't performing financially.

So that's the context in which Jack stack says the statement of there is no security and ignorance. So to just speak really explicitly about the argument he's making to business owners is to say, you're wrongly assuming that your people feel safe. You think just because you, you know, you think they're supposed to think you're smart and companies must have money that they just feel safe all the time.

And the truth is that's not true. They feel vulnerable. That's oftentimes more than a starting point, but when you arm them with the information of how your company is doing financially and what plays out is even if it's not performing well, people feel more secure knowing the truth, because now they are armed with the information, the true information required to help you change the trajectory of what's happening.

That's a premise of that statement and the way that he uses it. But I have extrapolated this into a lot of different things. The way I lead inside the way that even I parents insight my relationship with Jr. Is that think about so many different topics in your life. You never feel safe until, you know, the information, even if the information is not what you want it to be, at least, you know, What is assumed to be the facts and the truth about the scenario so that you can then act with intentionality.

You can act with context, you can act with confidence as an adult and somebody who's sort of trying to change an impact outcomes. But when you're trying to make up what's happening in your head, we oftentimes catastrophize what's going on. And so then we start behaving in a way that is not relevant at all of the scenario, because we don't know what's happening.

So. There is no security and ignorance has led me to be a very transparent leader in lots of things, including our financials as a business. And the reason I think that's the case is when you assume people are going to use the information you give them with good intent and as smart adults, we're trying to help you achieve your goals.

Again, it can be in business at home, a lot of different settings. It creates a velocity commonness and perspective that creates a ton of velocity. And the other thing that is interesting to see play out is people will make decisions where they individually may lose. If they understand that it's the right thing for the collective.

I think we underestimate the reasonableness, the goodness, the decision-making ability of our people and some of the tensions that come into place in our and our families and in our companies is when we're working with two very different sets of information. And we don't take the time to reveal the other side of the coin so that everybody has a shared understanding of.

The facts and I'm using air quotes, but like the perspectives are individual truths. You can't get to a place where you really are moving things forward. So the piece of advice from this book, the great game of business and Jack stack is there is no security and ignorance. Sometimes fear can hold us back from having the conversations and getting our collective truth on the table because we're afraid of what might happen, but what we have to understand when we're operating in a place of ignorance.

Oftentimes much bigger than if we would just step forward in confidence, get the ignorance out of the way so that we can have more confidence in security.

So what else is on your mind? Text me 3, 1 7. 3 5 0 8 9 2 1 3 1 7 3 5 0 8 9 2 1. And be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening today. .

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