Don't know what you don't know?  There are times in our lives when we are out of our element. These are times when education, life experience or just plain gut instincts are of no help. Facing a major illness, dealing with the death of a parent or buying our first house are such experiences.

Afterward, we are wiser even if we aren't satisfied with the outcome. We just didn't know what we didn't know until after all of our choices were made and the critical results were in.

We look for clues to help understand what needs to be done, or can be done, or should be done. What makes these problems more difficult is that we don't even know what questions to ask, much less what the answers might be.

The clues that are available only help us understand how things have been done in the past, not how they could be done now. Traditional ways of achieving a desired result are only relevant if the conditions affecting that outcome have not changed.

Hiring a doctor because he has done your operation 10,000 times is not relevant if the recovery rate of his patients is less than that of another doctor with half the experience. Selecting a mortuary because they have buried celebrities or because they are in the neighborhood isn't necessarily relevant if what you want is a warm, considerate and respectful environment. Buying a first home because it looks great with someone else's furniture is only important if you intend to trash all of your own things and replace them with similar furnishings.

These examples are overstated, but they do reflect a common mindset of some of those with the responsibility for selecting critical services that can impact the success of many corporations.

Corporate staffs continue to get smaller and more officers have more responsibility for choices and decisions for which their education and experience has not prepared them. These tested officers can prevail if they contract with consultants to deliver a desired result rather than a product. Don't ask your real estate broker to find 150,000 square feet of office space when what you want is a facility where your people can be happy and productive.

Think twice before asking your law firm to make the problem go away when what you want is to have the problem solved so it doesn't come back. Be careful not to hire a landscape architect to design and maintain your company's office campus just because this particular firm also does snow removal. Rather than change your trademark for the sake of change, hire a design firm that will assess, identify and position those elements of your overall brand so that your customers can appreciate the change and support it with their loyalty.

When you really don't know what you need, try identifying what you want. When you can do that, it almost doesn't matter what you don't know.

Our website has case studies that demonstrate the results of focusing on getting what you want.

Worth your time:  Money Ball, The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. All evidence to the contrary this book is not about baseball. The book illustrates the futility of attempting to improve the quality of performance of any closed system without the willingness to reexamine how success is measured. Additionally, Lewis contends that by redefining success using new goals with the same data, innovation is inevitable. Money Ball demonstrates that applied creativity can change the whole game.