Fingerspitzengefuhl is a German word that translates poorly (I am told, my German is marginal at best) meaning literally ‘finger tip feel’. The real meaning is the intuitive sense that develops in some people with deep domain knowledge, experience and expertise. Somehow, they just know when something ‘feels right’.
In this day of the metrics tsunami, this sense of deep understanding should be easy to find, or at least much easier than it was, but I find in my travels that it actually seems harder to find. Very few seem to have developed it, and those that have seem to effortlessly outplay their competition.
It occurred to me that this is because the metrics we are trying to untangle only give us half the information.
Why, not what.
They all tell us what happened, that is what algorithms do, they record the events. Very rarely do I see people digging around to find out why they happened. In the ‘old days’ pre-digital, there were few metrics that were easy to come by, so we spent much more time understanding the why something had happened.
Outcomes, not Activities
Our metrics report on all sorts of activities, but do a less effective job of telling us the outcomes of a specific activity, in identifying the real cause and effect chains in place. There are now simply so many options that the causal chains are more obscured than they ever were. However, digging them out is gold, as it enables huge productivity gains in your marketing investments.
Yours and theirs.
Most metrics concentrate on measuring the success, or otherwise, of your own investments, with scant regard paid to understanding the returns your competition is generating from theirs. Commerce is a competitive sometimes Darwinian game, and knowing your opposition better than they know themselves offers huge competitive rewards. Understanding how they will react to something you do enables you to wrong foot them, catch them off guard, sneak in their back door, and generally knock them around.
None of this comes without effort, it requires deep commitment to understanding, and often breaking with the status quo, but the rewards are there for the bold. You will develop ‘fiingerspitzengefuhl’ and everyone else will marvel at your insight, and ability to out think and out manoeuvre your competitors.
For SME’s, ‘fingerspitengefuhl’ is both the source of their competitive advantage and competitive disadvantage. On one hand, they are by their nature much closer to the customers than a larger business, unencumbered by the friction of a bureaucracy, and therefore have the potential to be more agile and responsive. On the other, they are so busy working to keep the bills paid, without the support mechanisms of a larger business, that they never lift their heads to see what is going on around them.
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Header credit: Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
