I’ve been hobbling around all week with a crook back (mental note: don’t wrestle alpacas, they are stronger than humans!)  My niece Stephanie has been visiting and working in the sphinxx office, having just passed Year 12 with flying colours, and as she’s also a farm girl we decided to oversee the alpaca shearing together at the farm.When it came time to explain my injury to my husband, Steph just laughed and said “she took one for the team!”

To cut a long story short, a belligerent alpaca was trying to make a break for it away from the shearers and in an instinctive moment I thought I could stop him.  Well stop him I did! (which was popular with the shearers because it would have taken us another hour to round him up again) But there was a price to pay as I landed side on into the metal barricades of the cattle crush. 

Anyway, as I’ve been licking my wounds this week it got me thinking of all the times I’ve acted on instinct in business and the good, the bad and the ugly that comes with that:

1.  The good is that what you see is what you get: there’s no time for false niceties and often the first answer is the right answer – and if you believe Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink theory, we’d sort things out in half the time if only we’d trust our instinct.  And it sure felt good putting that big fella back in his place.

2.  The bad is that you sometimes get unintended consequences, which you might have avoided had you thought it through.  This is usually me – I speak before I think and being a country girl it often gets me in trouble!

3.  The ugly is when you completely stuff up in the process, because you haven’t taken the time to collaborate with the people around you who can often add to and improve the quality of your outcomes.  What I’ve learned growing up on the land is that there are always people around you who’ve seen a few more seasons and weathered a few more storms than you, and it doesn’t take much effort to ask them what they’ve learned in the process.

How does this apply in your business?  I can’t say for sure, but I reckon it does.

Have your say on the sphinxx blog…..