Distance Risk - how do you minimize it?
Prime Future 211: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy
Did you ever play the game Telephone as a kid? You know, where everyone stands in a line, and the person at the start of the line whispers a message to the person next to them. That person whispers what they think they heard to the person next to them. It keeps going until the last person says out loud what was whispered to them.
It starts at the first kid with something like "Taylor Swift's Eras Tour generated $5 billion in economic impact, in the United States alone," and by the time it’s passed to the last kid, it comes out like "Taylor Swift is running for president of the United States and she’s favored to win at least 4 swing states."
The message heard by the last person is always so different from the message sent by the first person. Which is funny when you're playing a game with a bunch of kids; it's less funny when you're putting real resources to work in real businesses.
And yet, every company I can think of faces a dynamic where too much distance between some internal critical point A and internal critical point B can wreak havoc, with distorted messages being passed across the organization, leading to sub-optimal outcomes.
Some examples:
Packer - distance between the fabrication floor that's producing the product to be sold, and the sales team doing the selling
Feedyard - distance between procurement team buying cattle, and operations team who will feed the cattle
Dairy - distance between crop team growing feedstuffs, and the nutrition & operations team who manage the usage of those feedstuffs
Poultry - distance between the typical contract growers and the customers' perception of production
Retail/foodservice/distribution - distance between supplier's 5 year plans and your 5 year plans
Or, and this is what initially led me down this path, there's the Mega Distance Risk inside every tech company - where the people developing new products get too far removed from the people they are developing new products for.
Let's call this general dynamic 'Distance Risk.’
The more you think about it, I bet the more examples you'll think of in your own business.
So today, we're brainstorming ways to minimize it.