Welcome to the age of transparency. Businesses have opened their doors to their consuming audience and their passing public. The age of transparency is allowing us to get to know, for the first time, the big businesses that change our lives. That’s what the books and blogs we read tell us. Correct? We’re to be authentic? We’re to be transparent?
The reality
We’re proud of what we do in business. We’re happy to share testimonial. We believe we offer the best service to our buyer. We use this as the principle mechanism to attract new buyers.
But what about when we get things wrong? What about the mistakes we make getting to our objective. They’re the stories we love to hear about too. What about our determination? Our belief is re-energised when we hear of the 12 rejection letters JK Rowling received. We’re comforted when we hear about James Dyson’s 5126 failures before finally getting his vacuum prototype right.
50 years back, American physicist Richard Feynman wrote,
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.”
Do struggles add to authenticity?
How far are you prepared to go in order to tell your authentic business stories? Do your struggles mean as much to your audience as your successes? Isn’t that where we create a bond with our audience? As humans, don’t we draw empathy from conversations about our battles as well as our wins?
‘We tried this… it didn’t work… but it allowed us the vision to get to THIS’… a story that we truly believe?
Should we be thinking about breaking convention and blogging about our business struggles as well as our business wins? Maybe we’re missing a trick?
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