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Sometimes an organization’s best growth opportunities lie hidden in something that, at first glance, makes no sense. Idiosyncratic customer preferences or employee behaviour can lead to aberrations in business results. How do you deal with these anomalies?

One common response is to ignore them. Most organizations try to contain or suppress anomalies, for fear they will draw attention to departures from standard operating practice.

When senior managers learn of anomalies, they generally dismiss them as random, one-time events. That’s too bad. Anomalies can reveal what your customers really want - and what your organization is capable of delivering in response. Paying attention to them may point you to major opportunities to grow your business by doing on a broad scale what some part of your company is already doing on a small scale. Wise executives capitalize on anomalies. They dig into them and look for ways to exploit them, asking: What’s really going on? How can we learn from this? Is there an insight buried here that can move the business to a whole new level?

At a maker of high-technology health care diagnostic machines, the key anomaly was in the unusual performance of a local sales-and-service unit. A curious manager noticed that in Manhattan, the company had an extremely high capture rate for lucrative service contracts to maintain and repair the complex technology. What’s more, customers there were buying all their new equipment from the company, even in product lines where the company’s market share was normally quite low.