Remember when you were a kid and pretending to be someone else was just a fun game? You can use the same idea in your small business to get to know your customer, up close and personal.

Knowing your customer is critical to the success of your business. You cannot create effective products, marketing copy and materials, processes, or ideas that will delight your customer if you don’t understand her life, her worries, her skills, her dreams, and her goals.

Some years ago I read an article about a company that served aging customers. To give their employees the opportunity to get into the customer’s head, they had them spend time wearing gloves and special glasses that impaired their vision.

I thought of this recently at the grocery store, as three young employees stood around chatting while an older woman in front of me struggled to put her overloaded plastic sacks into her cart. I stepped ahead and loaded the woman’s cart for her.

If grocery stores were to give their employees the opportunity to spend a few hours working with glasses that impaired their vision, gloves that make their fingers fumble, and arm weights that make them difficult to lift, might they be more likely to help an older woman struggling in the future? I would be happy if they even learned the difference between weight and volume when they are loading a grocery bag to the splitting point!

Pretending to be your customer doesn’t have to be a physical experience. It’s even more fun to play Let’s Pretend mentally.

Spend the day pretending to be someone else, to not know what you know, to try out someone else’s dreams and worries. Look at your products with a stranger’s eyes. What ideas for your small business come to mind? What questions do you have? What tasks could you easily accomplish as yourself but might puzzle your customers?

In your small business, the idea of playing Let’s Pretend could seem like a waste of time. But you may be surprised if you immerse yourself in the game.

By going about your day as your customer, you will not just improve your current products, your marketing copy, or your web site; you may also generate profitable new small business ideas that will delight your real customers.

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I was not surprised by the results of the recent elections. Apparently, some people were.

My hunch is that they were trapped in an infinite loop bubble.

It happens in government, in big business, and in small business. Ideas and issues don’t make it past the gatekeepers to the leaders who need to have a full picture of what is happening with their customers or constituents.

Why? Ideas and information are filtered to protect leaders, whether they are small business owners, big business CEOs or the President of the United States. And they become trapped in an infinite loop bubble.

Surrounded by a culture of yes-sir or yes-ma’am, they lose touch with what is happening in the real world. To a person who is not caught up in the loop, it is difficult to understand how someone could make such choices, but to the person ensnared in the loop, it’s like being surrounded by a bubble and protected from the realities of the world. All that is required is insulation or selective hearing.

This infinite loop is a syndrome that can be seen over and over in the behavior of sports stars, rock bands, and other famous people, not to mention…government executives. Whenever you ask yourself the question, “What were they thinking?” you can probably assume that person was caught in an infinite loop bubble.

Now, you might think this cannot possibly happen in your small business. Your idea is that you know exactly what your customers are thinking, that your employees are telling you everything that happens, that you know what’s going on.

And that’s exactly when you are at risk.

Preventing infinite loop bubbles in your small business is fairly simple, but not always easy. Why not? Because a prevention program requires that the person in power has the self-worth to allow himself/herself to be challenged.

For those with the guts, here are three techniques for preventing infinite loop bubbles:

1. Have a Jerk-O-Meter: Make sure there is one person in your life/business that won’t hesitate to tell you when you are acting like a jerk.
2. Appoint a corporate fool: Give someone the job of asking “stupid” questions about policies, processes, and assumptions.
3. Use the Mom test: If you would you be embarrassed to have your mother read about it on the front page of the newspaper or on Google News, think again.

Don’t miss out on great small business ideas or information that could harm your business by letting yourself be trapped in an infinite loop bubble.

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Strategy #1: Treat Your Small Business Employees Like Interchangeable Pegs

Just like wooden pegs, employees can be yanked from one spot and shoved into another. After all, if you’ve seen one peg, you’ve seen them all. Treat employees like inventory, perhaps using the first-in-first-out rule—each time a new employee is hired, fire the most senior employee. The beauty of this rule is that it also saves costs by replacing a high salary with a low one. Or, why not borrow from the clean-out-your-clutter gurus and get rid of any employee you haven’t seen in six months?

Strategy #2: Never Define Expectations

One of the best small business ideas for management is to be as vague as possible when asked for explanations or expectations. If you never define expectations, you will never be wrong. Create secret standards and then punish those who don’t live up to them. If questioned, employ a useful phrase like, “You know what I’m looking for” or “A good employee would figure it out.”

Strategy #3: Believe Your Own Press

Assume that people have ceased disagreeing with you because of your sudden attack of brilliance—not your positional power. If someone does dare to express a difference of opinion, be sure to make an example of them. Public floggings are a preferred method.

Strategy #4: Treat Your Small Business Distributors and Vendors with Disdain

When you get the idea your small business is in vogue, use it as an opportunity to throw your weight around, dictating terms to anyone who has an idea for doing business with you. After all, you never really believed that old saying: “Goes around, comes around.”

Strategy #5: Never Admit Mistakes

If someone dares to accuse you of making a mistake, use the “everyone else does it” defense. Mom surely wasn’t talking about business when she said, “If everyone was jumping off a cliff, would you jump, too?”

Strategy #6: Yes, Virginia, There IS a Silver Bullet Solution

If a solution can’t be explained on a single piece of paper, it’s obviously too complex to be successful as an idea for your small business. Instead, hold out for those silver bullet solutions, the ones that solve every problem in the business with one tiny, inexpensive change.

Strategy #7: Don’t Invest in Anything if You Cannot Calculate ROI

If you can’t see it, touch it, control it, and crunch the numbers, it’s obviously a poor investment. Intangibles, intellectual property, and social media are economic myths, sure to be debunked at any moment.

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