Change the state of play.

Make it Large, take away please. Trendy coffee-shop, latest gadget-phone, clever book resting next to the well-lit MacBook. Enters the word: startup.

Or not

Sometimes don’t you envy all the consultants, writers and lecturers that have a clear idea about how to start a company, how to run a company, the destiny of the World as we know it and so on?

It’s all shades of grey to me to be honest… and not of the sexy type. This is why I have decided to summarize my way forward in carefully random chosen points and decided to share it with you (yay!):

1. Less is too much.

Less is more, actually I would probably go even further and say that less is already too much: You should constantly try to find ways to go from A to B in the most direct way. If possible, actually see if B can come to you rather than you travelling.

Call me lazy, I don’t mind. Sometimes laziness can be a great motivator, I’m not thinking of the couch-resting-pizza-eating-all-day-long type of laziness, this is to me more a symptom of a bigger problem. When I talk about lazy, I’m thinking of asking yourself “do you really need to go to the office?”, “do you really want to sit in this meeting?”, “can you not do this report in a quicker way by standardizing this and that?” and so on.

2. Stop pretending

This brings me to the next point: look around you, don’t you feel like a goldfish in a bowl? I do. Everyone is smartly dressed, talks well, and is so very busy. Everybody is meeting all the time and even when they are meeting someone, they are focused on having a parallel meeting with someone else on the other side of their smartphone. I can’t do that, my brain does not handle multi-meeting and actually, it struggles with a mono-meeting feature — more on that later.

Believe me I tried, like an awkward teenager, to fit in. To convince myself that I was oh so very busy and that I was handling oh so very important matters. Then I stopped pretending and it worked. My wife says that I miss some basic notion of social empathy and it is probably true, but in the spirit of sustained laziness I stopped trying to fit in and embraced my dry-side.

I'm not suggesting you should all be like me, far from that trust me. However, let’s advocate a stop pretending attitude and reassuring the couple of you like me out there: it is OK, we can survive just the way we are.

3. Life is simpler and the power of NON.

Most of the time our efforts at work (but not only) are directed towards navigating through layers of self-generated complexity, these being at entity controls level or in personal interactions.

I lived and worked in France for a few years and if you asked me to summarize my work experience it will sound like this:

NON, ssszzzzzzzh (breathing in through the mouth with closed teeth).

At first, my gut reaction was that the French really ought to come out of Napoleonic era, that a little can do attitude would have done wonders to these romantic Parisian streets and those walking on them. But fast forward a few years later and I have somehow and progressively abandoned my Mediterranean pride mixed with the overrated “go get them attitude” and replaced it with a calmer, older thought process. I have not completely embraced the “cannot do attitude” of Gallic legacy since, mind you, but I can say that I do understand better where this comes from and I can see pragmatic business sense in what I call the power of NON.

I’ll try and explain myself better by using two rather far fetched examples:

The first is closer to my Italian origins: my football coaches used to say that you should not take 50–50 chances against another player unless you have no other easier alternative option. Partly it is because I was a defender and not really gifted with silk feet, but partly because it does not make sense to take a 50–50 risk when you have an 80–20 option in front of you, even if the 50–50 will make you look like the one that saved the day.

The second goes back to those days when I was convinced that I could earn some good money in tournament Hold’em (I admit that I did win a few tournaments but never really got to the high-life of a professional poker player). Without going too much into strategy poker (and simplifying it quite a bit): usually the best strategy for long-term survival in multi-table tournaments is to play conservative and tight, showing as little as possible and committing when you do have a high percentage of winning probability. Again, this approach will not make you the hero of the latest Martin Scorsese movie, but it generally yields longer-term benefits.

Long stories to say that even if you feel strange and not productive, sometimes life is simpler because you say NON. Is it better to be in the situation where you think “perhaps, I should have moved forward with this one” but keep enough options to advance to the next opportunity or regret having said YES and struggle to get through?

Commit when the odds are in your favour, when you have considered all other options and committing is clearly the best course of action…go for it.

4. Chekhov's gun

Have you heard of the Chekhov's gun principle? I love it. For the ones that aren't familiar with this: it comes from the theatre and it basically (very roughly) says that if a gun enters the stage, it has to be shot.

I think you can give it at least two different interpretations:

The first interpretation is that Chekhov suggests that we should keep the elements in play to the essential. Each element needs to have a clearly defined role and a story arch in its lifespan.

The second interpretation, a little more personal, is that if we bring a gun into the play (replace gun with a word of your choice such as: threat, discussion, complaint, confrontation, ultimatum, etc.) we must be prepared to take it to completion and face the consequences. Empty threats, complaints, confrontations etc. will do nothing else than weaken your position unless you are prepared to move to action and have considered the impact and consequences (positive or negative).

5. You always have one more scenario: do nothing.

PRINCE2 and generally good Project Management involves considering every possible course of action when implementing change. An often overlooked course of action is do nothing.

We are so focused on change and our resistance to it that we forget that a perfect and legitimate assumption is: simply do not change. I’m personally guilty of sometimes wanting to change for the sake of changing because the best friend of lazy is bored. More than once I changed something in my life (moving home being my favourite) and then realized that ultimately and at best, the change brought no meaningful financial or standards improvement.

It was an idle move. Sometimes it is OK to do nothing.

Conclusion

Change the state of play is the title and we haven’t really talked about it … or have we? Well, yes we have started to. I might have sounded a bit like the king of doom and gloom in this article, but there is a reason:

The first step in changing the state of play is to make room for a new approach. How can you add new furniture in a room that has still the old one in? Same thing: if you want to change the state of play, do things differently, try something new the first step is to analyse what needs changing and what is redundant. Find out and throw that out. Then start to build…but that is a topic for the next (or one of the next) article(s).

Thanks and speak soon.

Roberto is a management consultant specialized in project and change management, lean management, audit and investigations. He is also the founder of the upcoming internal audit platform #kob and its siblings.

Available for speaking opportunities and writing collaborations.