Twenty-seven years ago, I was sitting in an electronics engineering lab staring at a screen full of static.
Somewhere inside all that noise was the information I actually needed. The problem was, I couldn’t see it until I filtered everything else out.
Years later, I realized I had created the same problem for myself running a company.
My team brought me every issue, concern, idea, and piece of feedback. There was so much coming at me every day that it was getting hard to tell what deserved my attention.
I had become the complaint department.
Implementing Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helped. We had leaders and managers who could filter what was coming through the organization and help separate real business Issues from everything else.
Once that structure was in place, things got a lot simpler for me. I could focus on moving the business forward instead of chasing every piece of noise that came my way.
At EOS Worldwide, I ended up facing the same challenge again, just at a completely different scale.
Nearly 35,000 organizations have worked with an EOS Implementer, roughly 940 Implementers are out in the world, and four million EOS books are in readers’ hands. That’s a lot of people with something to say.
For a while, my leadership team and I gave people pretty direct access to share all of it with us.
And before long, I was right back in the complaint department.
We needed to get better at using the filters that EOS had already given us.
The Meeting Pulse gives Issues a place to go, get prioritized, and get solved. The 90-Day World gives us enough distance to step back and see what continues to surface.
That matters because not every piece of feedback deserves the same response. One comment may be worth noting, while a pattern that keeps resurfacing deserves more attention. And some Issues are urgent enough that they can’t wait.
The point isn’t to hear less. It’s to know what deserves your attention and when.
What are you using to separate the signal from the noise?
And is something getting your attention because it keeps showing, or simply because it’s loud?
