Freedom or constraints?
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
My wife was writing our weekly food/groceries order online tonight and asked me: “What would you like to have for dinner this Friday when your friend visits us?”. I couldn’t think of anything. Isn’t that interesting? I have all the possibilities in the world and come up with no answer. Had she instead asked, “Would you like to eat pancakes or meatballs?” the problem would have been extremely easy. Voila, we just created a boundary condition. There’s clearly a flip side with total freedom when it comes to creativity.
This makes me think of leadership. I can imagine that if you are someone high up in the hierarchy you are constantly bombarded by decisions. If I need a decision or guidance from a superior, the food example above is the perfect analogy. If I go to my mentor and ask, “What should I do?” or “Should I do A or B?”, the second option would be at least 10X faster and easier to handle. And if I have identified a problem and then I just point my superior towards it, I am not helpful. One could perhaps even consider it nagging or complaining. It would be analogous to me telling my wife: “I don’t know what I want to have for dinner on Friday”, even before she asked me. Then I would hand the problem over to her instead, abdicating from responsibility. But the key to good leadership is to take responsibility.
If I would really want to make my wife´s life easier I would answer to her original question “I would like to have pancakes or meatballs.” A simple A/B decision. Then she can choose which one she prefers. I wonder if there is a magic number of options you can send in return. Spontaneously, two sounds very effective to me. Very easy to rank order. Three could also work, but it clearly requires more work on the receiver’s end. If I reply that I would like to have one of these five proposals… that is probably to negate responsibility.
What happens if I reply, “I would like to have pancakes or meatballs, and I would prefer meatballs”. That would solve a potential problem that the options A or B are equal to my wife. I remember when I was in Japan some years ago and we ordered food and the waitress told us that we could choose between two different desserts included in the lunch. There was a big language barrier – she did not speak English – so the waitress solved it in a lovely way by bringing one of each to the table after the dinner and we could choose ourselves. My table companion chose first and was very happy, and then I was left with the other option. Now something interesting happened. The waitress became very uncomfortable, and I could see in her eyes that she was thinking “Oh no… maybe he wanted that dessert too, and now it’s gone!”. I was very satisfied with the dessert that I got, but this little story shows something interesting. There is no one size fits all solution here. Had the waitress chosen the same dessert (A or B) for both of us, there would be a risk that we both would have wanted the other one. By bringing one of each, she minimized the risk and put one egg in each basket. At least one of us would be satisfied, and hopefully both (which was indeed the case). I guess that she was just extremely compassionate and really wanted us to be satisfied. There was indeed one part that was determined by the personality trait, but then again, if you have ever visited Japan, you also understand that the culture is very different to Sweden. I think they care a lot more about this stuff in general, than we do.
Anyway, what’s the conclusion from this little blog post where I am just writing out the words of my thought process in the middle of the night? I’ll go with the A/B option. I think that’s the best takeaway here. Do correct me if I’m wrong. What do you think? Are two options the optimal constraint?