Lawn Signs And High Performance

By Les Mottosky

There’s a saying in brand strategy: ‘If you speak to everybody, you speak to nobody.’ 

For a message to matter, it has to be crafted for a particular psychographic or demographic in language that resonates with them. Only then does it have a chance to make an impact.

Urbanites in North America can observe something with a similar. But the mechanism is inverted. When targeting their specific audience for their specific cause is taken-on by specifically everyone with a front lawn, there's a curious outcome: nothing.

Because when everything matters, nothing matters.

All those different messages from all those homeowners produce a lot of noise and very little signal.

Perhaps the intention of these campaigns is to generate awareness rather than action. In which case the impact of a 'saturated lawn-sign marketplace' remains the same. It produces responses akin to: “You seem to care about something-or-other. Congrats.”

Go for a sunset stroll around your ‘hood with a goal of reading each of the lawn signs you see, and within a few blocks, those messages start to take on the character of a complaint or a demand. That walk you’re on begins to feel like the IRL version of a twitter or facebook feed.

A few home owners might be focused on the same issue, but the variety is so overwhelming, it’s hard to remember any of the calls-to-action so you can learn more. (If you even want to learn more.)

The above concept ‘If you speak to everybody, you speak to nobody’ can be tidily tweaked as a reminder for ourselves. And that reminder might sound something like: “If everything is a priority, nothing is.”

Not all progress is equal.

There’s a chasm of difference between the work that moves the needle and the “busy work” that distracts. Chasing whatever is next in front of us, can dilute — and maybe even poison — the well of meaningful progress. 

And if we don’t have a reliable system to identify, qualify and measure the tasks that are most meaningful, we’re stealing from ourselves. From our potential. From our future. From our life.

Deciding, reviewing and pursuing only those things we deem most important, can have a funny way of ensuring the other things get done as well. And that’s for two reasons: momentum and capacity. 

These are born of a dynamic called the confidence/competence loop.

The more we get done, the more confident we become. The more confident we become, the more we’re willing to take on.

One of the places confidence comes from is when we know we're doing what we deep-down know we should be doing. And competence comes from doing more and more of that same thing.

When competence and confidence combine, they engineer the "city" every high performer wants to live in: capacity.

Best perk of all?: no more lawn signs.

TAGS: #What's That About?

Les Mottosky writes to expand the capacity of the human behind the career.

Adaptation Strategist // I help organizations turn creativity into their competitive advantage by aligning leadership, culture and strategy to unlock adaptive innovations.