Getting it right Archive - This Moment Counts

Why did that meeting really explode?

“I don’t think you realize the chaos this is creating!” Her voice was clearly sharper than she wanted.

The COO snapped backed: “And I don’t think you’re grasping how slow we’ve become. We are drowning in inconsistency.”

An hour into the meeting, the discussion had very much escalated. What had happened?

Well, the exec team was debating whether to centralize key decisions or grant teams more autonomy. Kind of classic clash territory. And this meeting was no different, a constant back and forth.

The CEO kept coming back to coherence. Fewer exceptions. Less duplication. One company, one way of doing things.
The COO kept coming back to ownership. Fast reactions close to customers. Managers who can act without waiting for permission.

At some point, the language turned into labels: Chaos! Bureaucracy!

And then, the COO closed their notebook. “We are miles apart on this. If we centralize like this, we will kill initiative.”

The CEO later told me she felt like they blocked necessary progress.

We looked at the situation again, trying to understand what each side actually wanted.

The CEO wanted faster decisions and less duplication.
The COO? Faster decisions and less duplication.
Both wanted clear standards for teams.

So why did it turn into a battlefield?

Because at some point, both of them stopped getting it right. And wanted to be right. It’s a frequent pattern I see in my coaching.

Once the goal is to be right, every counterargument feels like a personal threat. A concession feels like a loss of status.

But once you see this, how can you go back to getting it right?

Stop defending your story and shift to something like this:
“What would have to be true for their concern to be valid?”
“What are they protecting that I might be underestimating?”

Now the objective is not to validate your take. You try to understand the constraints well enough to design a better way forward.

In messy executive reality, a path is often available long before everyone agrees on why. In fact, everyone can have different explanations for why it’s the right choice. And it still works for everyone.

The best part is this: once you’re moving, yesterday’s opponent can become tomorrow’s loudest advocate.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

When did we stop questioning the question?

As you might know, 42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, at least according to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

The only problem is that nobody knows the question.

Which couldn’t be more timely. We’re living in a time that’s obsessed with answers.

Open any app or tune into any media and you’re bombarded with all kinds of answers on all kinds of questions you never asked.

Even worse, when you do ask a question, you’ll get all sorts of answers from people who didn’t listen closely, don’t understand the context, or simply have no clue what they are talking about.

Answers feel like the shortcut to results: Know this, do that, and everything will be fine.

The appeal of an answer is that it’s definite. It’s an end to a story. Even better: When someone gives you a simple answer it can feel like you’ve reached the summit without having to climb.

Until you discover that you’re on the wrong summit. Or only halfway there. Or something even worse …

Because e.g. the answer wasn’t applicable in that case. Or only half the truth. Or outdated. Or plain wrong. Because, well, what was the question again?

When everyone seems to have answers to almost anything, it’s a good habit to start looking at the questions again. Answers get you only as far as the question went.

Without a good question, answers are meaningless.

Just as “42” can be the answer to a lot of things and will remain meaningless until we know exactly what the question was, many answers that we get today are meaningless because we haven’t agreed on the question or the question was unclear from the very start.

And with AI generating 42s faster than ever, this problem is only going to get worse as the flood of answers is growing by the hour.

What we need is leaders who ask better questions and make sure the team is climbing the right mountain.

Because as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so beautifully proves, questions can be harder to find than the answer.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Champions keep playing

Two ways to read this statement.
Only one makes you a champion. The other leads to burnout.

Many people read this and think it means this: Just keep going long enough and success will follow.

That’s persistency.
Some would call it consistency.

What it mostly does is produce effort.
Sometimes results.
And very often burnout.

Because if you just stubbornly keep playing, doing what you’ve always done, you’ll get the results you’ve always got.

It’s the second line that makes the difference.
You keep playing, yes.
But with every repetition you tweak and adapt.

Maybe just a little bit.
But that’s the magic.

You keep getting it right – as opposed to stubbornly being right.

That’s how you become a champion when you keep playing.

But wait, there’s another important aspect here.

The word “it”.

Because: can you say what “it” is for you?
What do you want to get right?
What do you want to be a champion in?

Surprisingly few leaders can articulate that for themselves. Or for their team.

But if you can’t, how do you know what to adapt? So you can finally reach it?

Start there: Articulate what you want to get right, in the most plain and simple words you can find.

Then keep playing until you get it right.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

Busy being right

When you’re busy being right, consider that, in the meantime, others may already be getting it right.

PS: Happy to help if you’re trying to get your communication right.

When rational hits emotional

When a rational argument hits on an emotional argument, it usual ends badly.

Both increase their volume, the rational side by elaborating their arguments in ever greater detail and citing even more rational voices, the emotional side by shouting louder, crying harder, or damaging art more badly.

While both fail to see that almost no problem worth discussing has a 100% rational or 100% emotional answer to it.

Part of today’s divide in societies stems from an ignorance about this duality on either side.

And so, both try to win the game by playing it according to their respective rules – which of course means that no-one can win as they don’t even play the same game.

The irony is that it might not be about winning at all. That it’s not about who is right but about how to get it right.

For this, it helps to ask why the emotional side feels the way it does when you’re standing on the one side of the argument. And why the rational side thinks the way it does when you’re standing on the other side.

Someone’s got to start. It could just as well be you.

Gut it wrong?

My gut doesn’t know what is right.
But it knows what feels right.

And that’s enough of a reason for me to look closer.

I don’t usually trust my gut with making decisions without involving some rationality. But when my gut tells me that something doesn’t quite feel right, I do wanna know why.

So I go explore.

More often than not I find that I need to adjust some aspects of my actions. Or that I need more information.

Surprisingly often, the gut seems to intuitively take into account a thing or two that the brain tends to overlook.

2 books that make the case that not all hope is lost

1. How to be perfect by Michael Schur

Who doesn’t want to be a better person?

My bet is that almost anyone reading this wants to. And yet, if you ever tried, you quickly discovered that this is harder than it should be.

Worse, it’s not going to help much to ask the experts – the moral philosophers – and dig deep into what they wrote because, well, have you ever tried? It ain’t easy. And certainly no fun!

Michael Schur’s book is different. It’s a book about how to do good, why you’re doomed before you even try, but why you should try anyway.

It starts really easy: “Should you punch your friend in the face for no reason?” I assume you can guess the answer. But make no mistake, it gets tricky immediately after. Yet, in a fun way – which makes sense as Schur is a Comedy TV writer who worked on The Office and created The Good Place.

Indeed, “How to be perfect” is a profoundly fun read. Schur manages what few others have managed: He’s written a book about philosophy for the rest of us with some actually practical recommendations.

And so – without spoiling too much – at least trying to be a better person is an option.

But then again, you look around and see all the mess that’s happening across the globe and you might think: Why on Earth should I even try? As everyone can see with their own eyes and as every media seems to suggest for as along as we can remember, humans are intrinsically selfish and mean.

But are they?

2. Humankind by Rutger Bregman

Rutger Bregman argues otherwise. He’s accumulated quite some evidence that the common view on humankind might not be that accurate. He looks closer at some of the best known arguments which seem to support the view that humans are inherently mean, such as the Standford prison experiment or the conclusions drawn from books such as “Lord of the Flies” and finds some surprising – and significant – flaws.

Bregman argues that no, if left to our own devices, we might actually not be cruel and murder each other for our own benefits. Most of humankind might actually be, you know, kind.

I’m not a sociologist. Neither a historian. So, I can’t really scientifically evaluate most of the claims in the book on either side of the argument. I’ll leave that to more knowledgable people in the field.

Yet, the reason I recommend you take a look at the book is slightly different: Whenever I speak with people about that book, the reaction is a heavy rejection of the idea. In every single instance that I tried, people were lightning-quick to look for reasons that counter Bregman’s arguments and conclude that “No, in fact, humans are not that kind … there must be some serious flaw in his arguments.”

Which might be the case. I’m not here to say who’s right.

But I’m here to suggest that it’s worth to have a look from the other side.

The right idea in the wrong meeting room

Some pitch situations quickly turn into a status game.

The pitching party feels high status because they feel like they’ve really nailed it and have an extraordinarily brilliant product. It’s going to change the world (which might be true).

The decision maker feels high status because they get to decide about the proposal and they want you to know that they have the final say. They are extraordinarily brilliant in identifying trends (which might be true).

Inevitably, both desires for higher status clash when one of the parties makes a claim that the other just must dispute – because, well, they know it better (which might be true).

The world, however, couldn’t care less about who’s right and who’s not. Or about who’s in charge and who’s not. They care about which ideas see the light of day. And so, the right idea in the wrong meeting room likely isn’t worth much when the parties have status as their top priority.

Change happens easier if we ban status from the meeting room.

If the other party doesn’t see it that way, you might be better off looking for a different partner.

“I’ll have to think about that.”

In his biography, Larry Ellison recalls a conversation he had with Bill Gates on the phone that left him stunned:

“I didn’t agree with him on some point, and I explained my reasoning. Bill says, ‘I’ll have to think about that, I’ll call you back.’ Then I get this call at four in the afternoon and it’s Bill continuing the conversation with ‘Yeah, I think you’re right about that, but what about A and B and C?’ I said, ‘Bill, have you been thinking about this for the last five hours?’ He said, yes, he had, it was an important issue and he wanted to get it right. Now Bill wanted to continue the discussion and analyze the implications of it all. I was just stunned. He had taken the time and effort to think it all through and had decided I was right and he was wrong. Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right.”

Leaders who light the path don’t try to be right, they try to get it right. They don’t care for who’s right but what’s right.

New information

“Have you heard the news about David?”
“Oh, yeah, yet another proof for how selfish he is.”

When new information becomes available, we immediately relate it to what we already know. If there’s a matching story, we fit the data into the story.

Rather than adapt the story to the data.

Because when we look closer, we discover that saying “no” to your support request for the project was for a good reason. He’s going through a rather difficult time and is uncomfortable speaking about it at work.

It’s actually a choice: When new information becomes available then either the narrative has to be adapted to the new information or the new information has to be integrated into the narrative. We either need to change the story so it’s consistent with the data or we interpret the data so that it confirms what we already believe.

The problem is that rewriting a story takes effort and it seems that the more effort it takes to adapt the narrative to the new information, the less likely it is that we actually do it. If it’s easier to interpret new information in a way that supports what we already believe, then that’s what will happen.

Keep that in mind when you try to convince someone. There’s no guarantee that they will interpret your data the same way you do.

Posts in Tag: Getting it right