Using the “Black-Box” Principle

When an engineer needs to design a new process from scratch, many unknowns can surface—so many, in fact, that if the engineer were to try to answer every necessary question while creating the design, it might become hopelessly bogged down in detail, becoming almost impossible to complete. A handy solution to this obstacle is to enclose each unknown in a black box and design the rest of the process without knowing the details of what goes inside the boxes.

Adopting this idea to design your marketing action plan can be a convenient solution to a common problem experienced by marketers. Let’s say you are working on the stage of Filling the Pipeline, and you’re pretty sure you will need some “networking venues” in order to start meeting more prospects. Yet you have no idea what those would be or where to find them. Your lack of information might cause you to say, “I can’t choose that; I don’t know how to go about it,” and ignore this important ingredient completely. Or, you might go the other direction and try to fill in the gap in your knowledge by chasing after information about networking in your industry, delaying getting started on your action plan until you have some answers.

By using the black-box principle, you can avoid both of those wrong turns. You can simply choose “networking venues” as something you need, and put it on your Success Ingredient list, without knowing yet how you will acquire it. This is exactly what you should do.

So refer to Part III of this book only if you need additional information in order to choose one to three ingredients with which you will start. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn how to accomplish each one once you begin your action plan.