A Little Less Information, A Little More Action4 min read
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As I pulled my rental car into the very busy parking lot of the Hanalai Bay Beach a few days ago on my Kauai vacation, my wife remarked, “It looks like everyone in Hawaii is at this beach,” to which I quipped, “Yeah, we might even find Elvis here.”
And at that very moment, the song, “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis Presley began to play on the radio!
A little less conversation, a little more action
All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth, open up your heart and satisfy me
It was one of those synchronicity moments, but not just because of my comment and the song playing…
Earlier that day I had started writing this eZine article on “The Information – Action Ratio” and the word “information” is not far away from “conversation.”
Elvis had stated very much what I wanted to say:
A little less information, a little more action
Look, as a consultant, coach, trainer, workshop leader, etc, we spend a lot of time disseminating information. We are also immersed in information and overwhelmed by information.
Information, once highly valued, has become a very cheap commodity.
With Google, almost anything we want to know is immediately at our fingertips. Want to know how to write a good article? Type: “Articles (or blogs) about writing articles” in Google and you’ll get pages and pages about writing articles.
The same goes for virtually any topic about marketing our businesses. It’s all there and it’s all free. The monetary value of information has dropped to near zero!
So, as information businesses, what are we to do?
Due to the proliferation of information, people have also become addicted to information. It’s the drug of choice for almost everyone in business. We stare at our screens 12 hours a day absorbing more and more information.
And as a result, we become deluded that we need even more information, despite evidence to the contrary. Consider the ratio of information to action – the amount of information we take in vs. the action we take on that information.
Nobody knows the actual ratio, but let’s say 20 years ago (at the very beginning of the web), the ratio was 100 to 1.
Now with the web, Google, social media and portable devices, the ratio is closer to 1000 to 1. That means for every 1000 pieces of information we absorb, we only implement one piece of that information.
Someday, someone will calculate the actual ratio, but that’s not too important. But Elvis knew the simple solution. We need a little less information and a little more action.
And that’s where the huge opportunity for our businesses reside.
Because there’s such a huge gap between information and action, our clients need services that will narrow that gap and get more of them moving into action.
We need to provide services that support the implementation of information. Yes, we’ve all been doing that to some degree, but now it becomes more important than ever. It’s not what you know, it’s how you can effectively facilitate the implementation of that knowledge.
So coaching, mentoring, consulting and programs that are more oriented to moving our clients into action will become more valuable than ever before.
The questions we should be thinking about are:
– How do we shift our services to be more action-based, and less information-based?
– What are the best, most effective and affordable ways to provide services that accomplish that?
– How do we engage clients, build accountability, track progress and increase results?
– How do we get the best information to our clients, waste less time, and move them into to action more quickly?
– How do we deliver on the promise of results with new systems and methodologies for coaching, consulting and training?
– How do we get our clients unstuck from information addiction and support them in making effective action a priority?
– And how will we market these services? What do we need to communicate powerfully to our prospective clients about how we can help them with this approach?
Answering those questions for yourself may completely transform your business. Make Elvis proud.
Cheers, Robert
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