Is that a cone of uncertainty on your head or a dunce’s cap?

When asked for advice, when playing a consultative role, it’s easy to and natural to follow the first inclination. To prepare and propose a solution. Often this is also the easier route, since we don’t know what the problem is, yet, but we often do have a favorite solution already prepared and ready to serve.

Curiously on more than one occasion while meeting with a group or executive that espouse a will to “improve” coffee and pleasantries are quickly followed by a “what will you do if we bring you in?” or a “what should we do?”

I used to have an answer. I’ve since realized how my will to help and mutual wants for quick results often made me less effective, sometime wholly ineffective.

What happened was that I entered a helping situation with a stance of already knowing the answer. But by so doing I never shared my diagnosis, and failed to create a space for joint ownership of the solution.

Already knowing the solution is a bad position for genuinely sensing the situation and deeply understanding the current forces and tensions we seek to relieve.

I now often answer with a simple “I don’t know, please tell me about what you see” and then I try to create opportunities to run experiment, test hypothesis and establish a direction in which to move rather than a destination to reach.

The approach is a tougher sell, selling a box of method or a polished presentation does give a wonderful aura of knowing. It gives a sense of certainty and hope of that elusive easy fix. Doesn’t matter that the previous easy fixes didn’t work out. With enough confidence of course this one will.

But having a finalized goal, a blue print, a plan, a detailed playbook impedes not only real learning but often ends up quickly loosing traction due to lack of fit with the current environment. It’s the crash diet way of change management or coaching.

If we enter the engagement with little knowledge but many answers we wear the cone of uncertainty like a dunce’s cap. Sadly it’s easy to convince both ourselves and our surrounding that it is indeed a wizards hat.

I keep repeating to myself that the key to real change, real learning and real progress is as Fujio Cho put it to:

Go see, ask why, show respect

That means peering into the the cone with a sense of wonder and expectation to be surprised. But also a feeling of calm determination knowing that shared skills and insights will help you navigate what you find.

The problem is that it’s really hard to not get enamored with our answers. They flock to our minds like moths to a flame. I try to advice people to avoid the trap of thinking of metrics, KPI’s, numbers as answers, especially when aggregated they more often only reveal a point of view or a hint of where to go see.

The numbers are great for guiding us towards where to look, but we need to get up on our feet and actually go to where things are happening, observe and ask why to truly know.

An additional problem with arriving with your head full of answers is that it will also disengage the problem sensing facilities of others. The more fully formed your solution, proposal, idea, the narrower the feedback or proposed adjustments are likely to be. Once you put the cap on your head the solution space has effectively been blocked off. The direction has been set. At the height of your ignorance.

Please join me in daring to instead embrace the cone, make it your periscope see how possibility increase with uncertainty. Ask others to contribute, not to a filled canvas but to scanning the surroundings in search for the next point of interest.

Walk there together. Make time to smell the roses. 
Take of the the ready made cap, turn it around, use it to hear what’s really going on.

Safe travels.