Indecision isn't a reliable signal, and isn't always weakness
As our disagreeing correspondent pointed out, "cool new ideas can be a stand-in for leaders making hard choices and communicating with clarity which outcomes are most important".
Absolutely. When teams have a range of viable options—too many, most likely—and leadership won’t commit, focus can be a good answer. Pick a lane, pick a metric, execute, repeat.
And if there isn't a range of viable options...?
Often, when we show up to help a client with something, this is the flavour of problem we find. Not indecision in the face of a delectable menu, but an offering of grey slops contaminated with e-coli.
Smart leaders can get stuck not because they're struggling to make a difficult choice, but because they're trapped in a Kobayashi Maru* – an unwinnable situation where every visible path leads somewhere they'd be ill advised to go.
In this scenario, what looks like “lack of strategic backbone” to employees can actually be down to the fact that all the options on the table are unappetising or actively bad. Every time the leadership starts to align around a particular lane, the alignment crumples on contact with reality.
These situations are increasingly a consequence of conditions in the market that are outside the leaders' control, or because of past decisions that made perfect sense at the time but would up sending the team down a dead end.
It's here that “focus harder” just gets you even more stuck.
Are you bashing or are you thrashing?
Reliably, we see two signals that hint that focusing harder will be a waste of energy:
1. You’ve been bashing away at one goal for a while and it’s not making a blind bit of difference.
Like a client of ours who optimised each part of their flow using weapons-grade A/B testing logic – and yet the whole still wasn't working well enough. There was a hidden constraint beneath the surface, inaccessible to the powers of A/B testing.
Sometimes this happens because you’ve hit a local maximum and need to make a big shift. Sometimes it's because you can’t simply add a load of local optimisations together – the interactions between individual optimisations are frequently non-linear. When you’re in that situation, the thing you almost automatically want to do is TRY HARDER, focus MORE. But that just digs you deeper into the hole.
So just shift optimisation goal, right? Maybe not: another signal is ...
2. You’re thrashing between different goals, either struggling to agree on a path forward at all or starting one path then jumping to another, over and over.
As we noted above, this kind of thrashing looks like “lack of strategy” or “lack of backbone”. Employees start whispering that the execs are "clueless" or "spineless".
Don't underestimate this. Many people think that changing your mind because you learned something new means you simply don't have a strategy. As book The Halo Effect explains: when business is good, leaders are seen as clever; when business is bad, the same leaders are seen as foolish. And in both cases, it has surprisingly little to do with how strategic the leaders actually are.
Early in our careers, we too sometimes made that mistake. It's oh-so-tempting to be an armchair executive and imagine that, obviously, you could commit to a direction if you were in charge. The assumption hidden behind this is that if teams could be allowed to focus long enough to ship something really good then outcomes would naturally follow. But as most of us have learned for ourselves, building something you consider good mostly doesn't lead to dizzying success in the market.
(Know anyone who's experienced these signals? Please forward this email on to them!)
So, what to do when you find yourself wanting to do a sick in your mouth, set fire to the tablecloth and go home hungry?
Change what's on the table – or change the table
If you hate all the options in front of you, don’t force a decision. Don’t impose an artificial backbone. Instead, for a fixed time period, work on changing the conditions.
You can think about changing the conditions in a couple of different ways.
First, it's possible to change the conditions while still holding onto a clear objective. (Maybe you're quite attached to the table. Maybe it's got a live edge and custom wrought-iron legs.) You can sweep all the plates onto the floor, with a satisfying ceramic crash, and try a radically different menu.
Create new interactions between you and the market, improvise and respond without needing to know the right way forward beforehand, and let options emerge that you couldn’t have thought of in 50 brainstorming workshops or strategic off-sites. (This is what effective founders do when they’re starting something up.)
Or, you can do what people do when they want to get to Tipperary but the locals joke, “I wouldn’t start from here!”. That is: change where you’re starting from.
This means totally letting go of your objectives so that you can shift all your attention onto the constraints you don't like. Basically, you're saying, "if we can alter this incredibly annoying constraint that we're operating under at the moment, then other options might become possible. So first we have to adjust that damn constraint". Maybe you keep banging your knees on the wrought-iron legs and the bruises are a distraction. So you start by ditching the table, and the menu comes later.
Adjust the conditions of TODAY without wasting more time trying to align on which tomorrow you all want. (You already know in your heart of hearts that you can’t align on that.)
The irony? When you stop trying to force the future, you simultaneously make many desirable futures more likely AND enable alignment to emerge as another consequence of the conditions you changed.
The tl;dr
- Identify the conditions keeping things uninspiring today.
- Change some of those conditions.
- See what shifts, notice what you do and don't like about what's changed, and double down on the changes you do like.
This is what we specialise in. Getting you data from potential futures so you can answer “what if” questions. Because you can’t answer “what if” questions using data from the past (and that's pretty much the only data you currently have).
Again and again we see that the most effective way forward is almost always something that isn’t currently being considered. So we don’t help you choose between A, B & C. We help you uncover options D through K. And it ends up that everyone’s pretty jazzed about option G.
We dare you...
We love to challenge our thinking and find out where we're wrong about stuff! Do you have an example of a business that exists in the world in the precise way its founder intended when they started out? Reply and tell us about it.
In our experience to date, every successful initiative has ended up being wildly different from what anyone imagined at the beginning. Whereas every initiative that failed stuck steadfast to its initial vision.
And every company that looks like it started with a vision actually has a much messier history. The vast majority of new products, services, and business ideas begin by changing conditions and seeing what emerges. Not by picking the least-worst option from a predetermined set and strapping a stick to your spine.
Tom & Corissa x
P.S. If you’re in one of these situations – banging your head against a wall or unable to decide between dismal options – we’d love to chat. Not a sales pitch, just to understand more and see if we can help.
*Kobayashi Maru refers to Star Trek, specifically a simulation scenario they use to train cadets at Star Fleet Academy. The idea of the simulation is to teach aspiring commanders that sometimes there's no way to win. In the show, James T Kirk "beats" the simulation by cheating – sneaking in the day before and changing the simulation. The conclusion? Either Kirk or Star Fleet Academy is clearly refusing to learn an important lesson.
