In the business world, we have a shorthand for losing focus. When someone veers off-topic during a meeting, someone inevitably laughs and says, “Squirrel!” We are taught that success requires staying on the agenda, eliminating distractions, keeping our eyes straight ahead.
After more than 25 years in banking, I have come to a different conclusion. What if the squirrel was never the distraction? What if it represented discovery?
Early in my career, people sat across from my desk to discuss finances. On paper, our conversations were about money. In reality, they were about life. People rarely came in asking for a financial product, just as they rarely walked into an agency asking for insurance. They told me their stories. They told me about parents who had passed away, about the gaps left behind, about the quiet worries keeping them awake at night.
Conventional wisdom would call those moments tangents. I chose to follow them.
My job was to translate the beautiful, messy tapestry of a person’s life into strategies that reflected what mattered most to them. Looking back, the detour was not disrupting the business. The detour was the business. By following the squirrel, I wasn’t losing focus. I was gaining understanding.
Today I practice the same discipline in reverse. Instead of beginning with a story, I begin with reports, trends, dashboards and statistics. Then I ask a different question: Whose story does this data represent?
We know from cognitive research that our minds wander roughly 30% to 50% of our waking hours. It is how we are wired. If half of our lives is spent drifting away from the immediate task, perhaps we should stop fighting the drift. Perhaps we should look closer at where we go when we wander.
Information tells us what happened. Interpretation explains why it matters.
People rarely move because of information alone. They move when information becomes meaningful. Interpretation reshapes perception; perception awakens emotion; emotion creates energy in motion, and that energy influences behavior.
When we discipline ourselves to listen intentionally to the detours within our organizations, whether they come from a client, an employee, or a shifting market, we rarely find a waste of time. Instead, we usually find three distinct treasures.
First, we find an acorn, which is a tiny, beautiful idea worth nurturing into a major initiative.
Second, we find a walnut, which represents a dense, complex challenge or a systemic issue that takes time and patience to crack open.
Finally, we find fruit, which is mature wisdom wrapped around a seed that has the power to nourish an entire team or community.
Here in Indianapolis, Madam C. J. Walker followed a different squirrel, and she found fruit that still feeds our community today. Many people saw hair care, a simple commodity. She saw dignity. She saw economic opportunity. She saw thousands of Black women capable of building businesses, creating wealth, and transforming their neighborhoods. The product mattered; the deeper question mattered more. Her squirrel led her to a harvest that outlived her by generations.
People often ask why I call this column “Clarify the Confusion.” The answer is simple. I don’t write because I have all the answers. I write because I have clarifying and curious questions. Writing helps me to clarify my own confusion.
Perhaps that is what has guided me from telling stories on a school bus, to listening to customers across a banker’s desk, to helping organizations translate data into human understanding. The direction changed. The work did not.
The next time a conversation wanders, resist the urge to chase everyone back to the agenda. Follow the squirrel for a moment. Ask one more curious question than you normally would. Pause long enough to understand the lived experience behind another perspective.
When we choose curiosity over convenience, conversations become places where acorns are discovered, walnuts are opened, and seeds are planted for a harvest we may never personally see.
Maybe the squirrel was never the distraction. Maybe it was quietly leading us toward the very thing we needed to discover. And perhaps, together, we can clarify the world’s confusion, and our own.
