THE 15 COLOUR CHALLENGE
There is a great deal of talk about teaching entrepreneurism is schools. Business start-up specialist and entrepreneur Craig Eason looks at one of the key skills that should be part of any course.
Something to think about
If your school is considering an initiative to introduce an enterprise or entrepreneurial programme, then why not ask your students and staff to take this simple colour challenge together. It will help you to understand one of the biggest, unseen traps that every aspiring entrepreneur and start up business will face and which can completely derail all the good work it might be doing as it gets under way. It has nothing to do with business principles, product market fit, service, competition, market conditions, money, or people. It is about how entrepreneurs need to think.
The 15 colours challenge
Ask a class or group to consider the following colours: Red, Yellow, Pink, Green, Orange, Purple, Blue, White, Grey, Black, Tope, Lavender, Cream, Silver, Lemon
Then ask them to categorise these colours by putting them into columns. They can choose between 2, 3, 4 or 5 columns, they can have a different number of colours in each column and the decision of which colour goes where is entirely theirs. Students can work on their own, in a pair or in a group – or, preferably on their own, then in pairs then in a group of two or three pairs, and finally as a whole class.
Outcomes
What the exercise will demonstrate in a very simple way, is that we all think and see things differently. The exercise may be well-defined and even closed, but the possible answers are entirely open. There is no right or wrong answer, and though variations may not always be significant, the more people involved, the more differences there will be.
The odds are that everyone will have a different configuration. It shows that the way we take in, analyse and process information is unique to us, just like our DNA and fingerprints. We draw on our own experiences, learning, intuition and different types of evidence to come to our conclusions about what goes where.
Business analogy
Drawing an analogy with the world of business start-ups, if each colour represents a business challenge, or piece of business intel or data to be discussed and you have 5 people in your management team, you now, potentially, have 5 different versions of what’s going on, and the same dilemma is apparent. Who is right and how do you know? Is anyone completely right or do you each have part of the picture but not all of it?
Different thinking in business is good, we need it, and we can’t go anywhere without it. But when you are looking for problems and to identify what is working and what is not, five completely different and possibly inexperienced lenses do not necessarily produce a useful outcome. Everyone might be right – or no one. It’s difficult to make an objective decision.
The discussion will involve expressing opinions. Some may be backed by good evidence. Others may not. Subjectivity and bias – especially unconscious bias – is difficult to avoid. The danger is that the dominant person in the room carries more weight into these discussions than is healthy. Their colour chart becomes the chart adopted, not because they are right, but because they are the most vocal, the most certain, or the most senior. Think ‘The Apprentice’!
There is a much higher chance that a new business will simply fail if a common and agreed approach to strategic problem solving is not found, and found quickly.
Effective entrepreneurial decision-making
To make good decisions, entrepreneurs need a reliable process to steer them through difficult decision making in the early stages of their new, and therefore vulnerable, business.
Distilling a truth from competing evidence is a skill. Having the methodology to assess and understand different viewpoints to filter the good and the bad is something all successful entrepreneurs have – they would not be successful otherwise. It is the key, first to survival and then to success. For some, this skill is intuitive, but for the majority, it is a learnt skill and in an entrepreneurial team an agreed and trusted approach for making good business decisions is vital.
Only when a team has worked out a process that helps them to ask and answer the right questions about the way forward, do the differing ideas of each team member become an asset, because they have now learned both to evaluate and appreciate alternative positions for what they are. Once there is agreement about the problem, smart people can usually find the solution. If you can’t understand or agree on the problem or the way in which it is solved, you will run around in circles. You spend time, money and people resource working on the wrong things, solving the wrong problems.
Steve Jobs said that he never allowed a meeting to end where the senior team were not in total agreement about the big issues. Getting to that point needs a process, where you can collectively and objectively look at all the information without any bias, to find the facts.
Finding the process
Entrepreneurs, therefore, need a way of mentally managing the noise, chaos, competing information and opinions to navigate a way forward. Without that process and thinking skills, you limit your business potential and scalability, no matter how good your product or idea is.
Having appreciated the need for such a process, where might it be found and how can schools prepare future entrepreneurs to develop the skills they will need, in order to start their own businesses with a greater expectation of success?
WEF and future skills
An important clue can be found in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report for 2025, the latest in an important series of papers from the WEF that have looked at the skills that employers think are and will be important.
At the top of the list of skills for 2025 is Analytical Thinking skills. Not creative or even critical thinking, but analytical thinking in which questions are framed and evidence weighed in order to identify effective solutions. It is still in the top three skills employers see as being vital in 2030, by which time AI is going to play a far greater role in business thinking than it does now.
“Analytical thinking remains the most sought- after core skill among employers, with seven out of 10 companies considering it as essential in 2025. This is followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, along with leadership and social influence.”
From: The Future of Jobs Report 2025 – Published: 7th January 2025
See: https://www.weforum.org/videos/what-are-the-most-essential-skills-in-the-workplace-of-tomorrow/
You can hardly give a young person a better start to an entrepreneurial career than by providing your students the opportunity to develop and use these skills at school, not only as individuals but also as members of a group being asked to frame good questions and come up with even better answers.
Entrepreneur Craig Eason started and grew his own commercial insurance brokerage and risk management company, The Insurance Management Group before selling it in 2013. He is the founder of the Inventive Step Consulting Company and the founder and CEO of the business coaching company, Startup4ten®, which works with schools to develop entrepreneurial thinking.
FEATURE IMAGE: by Victor on Unsplash
Support Images: Alex Shuper For Unsplash+, Getty Images For Unsplash+ and Emily Morter on Unsplash
