My own raven paradox.

Today's post is slightly different than more normal. Normally I like to review some ad I've seen or go on a tirade about something that I've seen/heard/did-to-an-innocent-bystander, but not today. Today is a bit of a stream of thought. It gets down to marketing towards the end but the trip is a little "over the river and through the bend" (nice rhyme).

Today was my second day of experienced consultant training with Bain and Co and, frankly, I've been out of the loop. I haven't really been checking my email, I've barely tweeted, and I've been doing my best to be present in the training (I mean, this stuff isn't cheap), but I, of course, can't stop daydreaming. So today, while I was supposed to be reviewing the best way to create a work plan (yeah, thrilling stuff, I know), I happened to look over and saw this bird standing on the ground.



I looked at it, it looked at me and suddenly I thought: "what the fuck is that?" Firstly on the more obvious level, is it a raven? is it a crow? A blackbird? I have no idea. But on a more fundamental level, why is it black? I mean most birds I know are bright and colorful and are chirpring. From my High School biology, as far as I know the colors help the birds stand out for mates, blend in to hide from predators or attack prey. Clearly since all the birds of this type are black it's not a sex thing, so is it a hide from predators/attack prey thing? Maybe, but if that was the case, why is it out in broad daylight? Wouldn't it make more sense for this bird to be hunting at night, in total blackness?


















(picture of that same bird at night)

My consultant's soul screams out to me that this doesn't make sense!! It says, Cerrone, you hate things that don't make sense and this needs to be fixed. That bird needs to be brighter and green so it blends into the trees or grass or whatever.

So is a black bird in the middle of the day a paradox? I may not know a ton about nature but I do know that mother nature doesn't tolerate waste. So if this bird does fly and hunt and do its thing during the day, there has gotta be a reason and just because that reason isn't immediatily apparent to me, doesn't mean it's not a good reason. Maybe if I was whatever creature eats this bird or whatever creature this bird eats, the reason it's black and diurnal would be painfully obvious.

So how does this tie into marketing and nonprofits? easy. Nonprofits, marketers, business people, nearly everyone who looks at a problem and wants to solve it, wants to make a seemingly senseless situation make more sense, but we need to remember that just because it doesn't make sense to us, doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We need to study the situation, put ourselves fully and totally into the scene, allow ourselves to see how it does make sense and then solve the problem that we feel as a member of the scene, and not the problem we felt as an outsider looking in. Maybe then we'd see that the raven doesn't have a problem at all or that the real problem the raven has isn't its color but the fact thats claws are too tiny?

So, I ask you this: are you solving your clients problems or are you solving the problem of the person watching your client?