Grease the Skids…Or Get Left Under the Tire

Hearing something for a second time is not as exciting as hearing it for the first time. It’s also not as scary. It’s like porn–you get immune (or so I hear). That’s why in your business and in life it it so important to tell people what might happen, tell them how they might feel when it happens, and tell them what you’ll do to make them calm the hell down when they call you freaking out.

President Obama should have heeded this advice. Oh look at me, giving advice to Barry.

People are freaking out over insurance cancellation notices. And they should be freaking out because being able to pay for one’s health is a matter of life and death. Poor President Obama has spent the last month backtracking, backflipping and apologizing for his repeated vow that if people liked their plans, they could keep ’em. He should thank Rick Perry for his response to that. Oops.

What Obama knew: Insurance cancellations happen all the time. Companies react to change. Sometimes companies overreact to change. This is just like how people react because companies are people, too. Right, Mitt?

What Obama should have known: Insurance companies will continue to cancel policies. They may even cancel policies at an inopportune time (like when the Affordable Healthcare Act rears it’s Big-Deal-Head). Insurance companies might even cancel policies more voraciously (See: react to change, above).

What Obama NEVER should have done: Promised that if people liked their plans, they could keep them. Never ever because…that has never ever been the case. Some insurance companies may cover Viagra, but they never promised reciprocated love.

Here’s the recipe for what Obama SHOULD (coulda, woulda, shoulda) have done: Explained all the stuff that he knew, add in all the stuff he should have known, sprinkle in several dollops of what might happen, and top it off with the spice of how folks might feel.

Just like Obama, we have many trials and tricky traps  that commonly surface in our own businesses. When we know about them or we should know about them, they become an obvious part of our lingo and our lives. We begin to get lazy and assume in dangerous ways. We take pride in navigating around these issues so our clients think life is swell. Our clients often never even know these trials and tricky traps exist, nor do they know that we saved them from a perilous disaster. That’s what makes us rockstars…in our own minds.

The scarier trap is that we assume that our clients and customers get it. They very often don’t. On one hand we squander an opportunity to take credit for making these snarky messes disappear. On the other hand, when we’re unsuccessful making these messes disappear, our clients are scared and surprised by what they hear about and experience for the first time.

There is every reason to grease the skids by discussing trials, tricky traps and snarky messes with our clients. A story scenario works wonders. Don’t scare the crap out of them, but do prepare them. If you fail to grease the skids and you happen to enact change or make something happen (a huge healthcare reform, perhaps?) at the exact time people experience unexpected adversity, you can forget all about the fact that correlation is not cause. You will be blamed, left under the tire, and abandoned like a skid mark…and you should be.