Fingerspitzengefühl

Author

Jon Matzner
January 22, 2025

Here's the thing about growing a company - you keep getting further and further from the actual work.

One day you're doing everything yourself, the next you've got layers of management between you and the front lines.

You're getting briefed instead of being in the trenches.

Everything's going through filters and layers before it hits your desk.

Which is good!

That's what scale is supposed to look like.

If you're still in the weeds on everything, you've built yourself a job, not a business.

But there's a hidden risk: losing touch with ground truth.

The Marine Corps teaches this concept called a "directed telescope"... which I love.

Here's why it matters for you as a leader, and how to use it right.

The Problem: Your Reports Are Like Instagram

You know how Instagram is everyone's highlight reel?

That's what happens with management reporting.

Everything gets sanitized, polished, and formatted before it hits your desk.

"Hey boss, here's our weekly update. All green! Minor challenges but handling them!"

Meanwhile Rome is burning, your best people are updating their LinkedIn, and that "minor challenge" is actually a furious customer about to churn.

This isn't because your people are lying.

It's because information naturally gets filtered as it moves up.

Nobody wants to send bad news up the chain.

They want to handle it themselves.

Show they're capable.

The result?

You're flying blind more than you realize.

Enter: The Directed Telescope

A directed telescope is when you occasionally zoom WAY in on some tactical details.

Without warning.

Not to micromanage - but to maintain a feel for ground truth.

This is especially crucial if you run a decentralized organization.

The more autonomy you give your teams (which you should), the more important it is to maintain that tactical feel.

It's the counterbalance that lets you push authority down while keeping your finger on the pulse.

(The best title for this is Fingerspitzengefühl…a German term, literally meaning "finger tips feeling" and meaning intuitive flair or instinct)

Example:

I run a global business services & recruiting membership community (Sagan)

Getting beautiful weekly reports.

Numbers looked great.

In the early days, I decided to watch three random candidate interviews from our newest recruiter.

Just picked them at random, no warning.

Shit.

Turned out we'd accidentally created this culture where our recruiters were rushing through interviews to hit their numbers.

Our "time to hire" looked amazing but our quality was about to fall off a cliff.

This wasn't malicious - the team was just responding to the incentives we'd created.

But I never would have caught it from the reporting.

Had to go look myself!

How To Do It Right

The key is to do this OCCASSIONALLY and RANDOMLY.

Pick something small and tactical.

Could be:

  • Watching 3 random customer service calls

  • Auditing a week of outbound emails

  • Sitting in on 2 random sales meetings

  • Reviewing every step of one customer onboarding

Then go deep.

Don't sample - look at EVERYTHING about that small slice.

Some guidelines:

  1. Don't tell anyone in advance

  2. Pick something different each time

  3. Look for systemic issues, not individual mistakes

  4. Use it to update your brain, not to punish

  5. Do it rarely enough that it's meaningful when you do

The goal isn't to catch people doing things wrong.

It's to maintain an accurate picture of how things ACTUALLY work in your business.

You can delegate authority, but you can't delegate understanding.

The moment you lose touch with ground truth is the moment you start making bad strategic decisions.

This is how you build organizations that are both highly autonomous AND highly aligned.

Your people have the freedom to execute, but you maintain enough tactical understanding to spot issues early and course-correct before they become problems.

Your job as a leader isn't to do the work.

But it is to deeply understand how the work gets done.

Use the directed telescope to maintain that understanding. Y

our strategies will be better for it….just don't be a dick about it.

Have you done something like this in your business?

Hit reply - I'd love to hear about it.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon