See the rock, hit the rock!

This is really yet another post about how important it is to focus on the right things. I have been involved in many discussions with peers lately, and many seem to be focused on what I believe to be at best secondary concerns and at worst dangerous distractions (see my previous post on architecture). Here's a story, unrelated to the world of business, that is a pretty good illustration of my point;

The Rocks!

A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a winter driving school in the New Hampshire White Mountains. We went through many exercises, from skid control, accident avoidance, braking on ice, you name it. The final stages were some relatively high speed runs on forest logging roads. One of the things the instructors stressed during the early classroom sessions was to focus on where you want the car to go. They said near the end of the class the would show us some things that would prove how important this was.

On the last break of the class, they took us for a walk out to the forest road, with some shovels, and knocked down some of the fluffy snowbanks along the edge of the road. During all our runs, no one had gone off road on the forest course, and it turned out to be a good thing, as under the soft stuff was an almost unbroken wall of granite boulders! They said they purposely covered them with snow, because if we could see the rocks, we would hit the rocks, as that is where our focus would be. This was something they learned over years of teaching these classes, and was not the way they started out. To further illustrate the point, we walked back to the skid pad circle, a place where several people had gone off over the course of the two days. As it turns out, of the 11 cars we put into the snow bank, all but one of them was right in front of a large tree that could be seen over the bank. we would come around the circle, see the giant tree, focus on it, and head right for it.

The point of the story is that you'll get what you focus on, which may not be what you really wanted in the first place. In our wonderful world of IT, there are a lot of things getting focus these days, but not all that many of them are adding value to our businesses.