So, what’s your deal?
How to use the clear ideas process to make clear deals
I love working with clear ideas. But, I think, even more than that, I love working with clear deals.
A clear idea gets you clear on what you are doing. And if you are working alone — that’s all you need. But what about when you need help? What about when you want to help someone else? I believe that the key to working together well is making clear deals.
Making a clear deal…
A clear deal is, essentially, a clear idea that two people can sign up to.
A clear idea defines the work to be done. (And can be arrived at by using the clear ideas process.)
But when two people are working together, then you also have the task of getting clear on what help is needed.
‘Help’ either means something I see myself doing, that I imagine would help you with what you’re doing.
Or it means something I imagine you doing, that I see would help me with what I’m doing.
So, if I want to help someone, I can tell them what help I want to offer — and I can express it in the form of a clear idea.
If I am asking for help, I can say what help I need — and express that in the form of a clear idea.
The challenge of helping and being helped…
The challenge of helping and being helped is that every time we agree to work with someone else, there is every chance that we won’t actually be clear about what each of us wants and needs.
If you are trying to get something done and you call on someone else for help, then there is every chance that they’ll do it wrong. That they will say they want to help, but then they won’t do anything. Or they’ll say they want to help, but they won’t have really understood what you need. Every time you call on someone else to help, there is the risk that your vision will get diluted. Like poorly-made contacts in an electrical circuit, poorly-made ‘deals’ between collaborators decrease the efficiency of the system (and lead to possible short-circuits, blown fuses, overloaded systems… extend the electrical metaphor as far as your understanding of physics allows).
But the alternative — not asking for help and trying to do everything yourself — is not really an alternative at all. It’s not possible to do alone what you can do if you can call on all the helpers that you need. Your capacity to do things is vastly (maybe endlessly?) increased if you are able to make clear deals with people and get the help you need.
Clearly helping…
When I first teach people the clear ideas process, the result is normally that it kind of revitalises their relationship with their work. When you are not clear about your work, then your work ends up being (some degree of) frustrating and unsatisfying. When you get clear on what your work is, then suddenly the work is full of life. It flows. It’s fulfilling.
And, when you get more and more used to starting a piece of work by getting clear on your idea, then it becomes more and more strange not to work that way with other people. Of course if I am really clear about what I’m doing, then work is satisfying and much easier to do successfully. But what about the people I work with? Would I just tell them what to do? Without checking it’s something that they need and want to do? Would I just ask them to do things without checking that it’s clear?
If you want the people you are working with to be clear about what they are doing…
If you want the people you are working with to be clear about what you are doing…
If you want the people you are working with to be whole-heartedly and entirely engaged with what they are doing…
If you want the agreements between you and the people you are working with to be crystal clear…
… then you need to start making clear deals.
I want to help…
When you want to help someone else, call to mind the work that you see yourself doing to help them. Then sum it up in a sentence. Then use the clear ideas process to explore and test that sentence in order to ensure it is accurately defined. Then go to the person you see yourself helping and propose that you do that piece of work.
At this point, the work is already defined as a clear idea. Your clear idea.
But, although a clear idea tells you that it is definitely a piece of work for you to do — it doesn’t tell you whether doing that piece of work would actually help the person you want to help. In order to find out if you are helping or not, when you go to the person you see yourself helping, tell them your clear idea (your idea of how you might help them) and then ask them:
If you think of me doing that piece of work, is that what you need?
Is that what you want? (And so on through the clear ideas questions.)
If they don’t say yes to all of the clear ideas questions, then that means that if you do the work that you think will help them, then you won’t actually be helping them. (Or, you might be helping them in some ways. In other ways you might not be. In other ways you might actively be getting in their way.) If you start your collaboration from that point, then you are like a bad connection in a faulty electrical circuit.
Wherever they answer no to one of the questions (say — ‘Is this what you want?’), then — as in the standard clear ideas process — you can then switch from testing to exploring (and ask them ‘What do you want?’). By exploring any noes you can uncover what is really needed. What would actually help. Continue the process until they are able to sum up in one line what help they need.
This is the point where you double-check — seeing if the help they need is the help that you want to give. In practice, I’ve found this part seems to flow very naturally and easy. If you try it, most likely you’ll find you fall into a mixture of being very systematic on the one hand (testing and exploring for one person and then the other — and then repeating if necessary) and, on the other hand, being kind of informal / intuitive (throwing in little tweaks and suggestions and questions and horse-trading and back-and-forth).
The goal is to arrive at one line. An idea that you can both sign up to. A clear deal. Where the one being helped can say ‘yes — this single line perfectly articulates the help that I need’ and the one helping can say ‘yes — this single line perfectly articulates how I see myself helping’.
You have arrived at one thing that you both need and want and demand and love and wish for and dream of and live for. But, because that is true for both of you, only one of you actually has to do it — and both of you get the benefit. That is the magic of help.
I need help…
It’s probably obvious, but if you need help and want to ask for it you use the same process, but in reverse. The difference is that rather than talking about the work you see yourself doing, you’re talking about the work you see someone else doing.
So, before you talk to them, you get clear on the help you need. You use the clear ideas process to capture it in a line. Then, when you talk to them, you tell them your clear idea — and ask if that is something they could see themselves doing. Then, use the clear ideas process to find out exactly how they might want to help.
For extra clarity…
The joy of making clear deals is that every time you talk about your work and explain to someone what you need, you actually end up finding out more and more about what you need.
I believe that every clear deal you make ends up making you clearer about your work as a whole.
When you use the clear ideas process to get clear on an idea, then you systematically interrogate your idea from different perspectives: practical, emotional, ideal, personal, etc… The benefit is that looking from different angles lets you see your blind spots. It destroys bias. The same is true when we make a deal with someone else. As they interrogate our work — trying to understand clearly how it overlaps with theirs — we can’t help but experience it from their point of view.
What’s more, in trying to find a way to express an idea so that two people can sign up to it, rather than one, requires the language to be clearer. It’s not enough to use the kind of shorthand that makes sense only to my own mind — I have to find the words that work in my mind, in the world, in someone else’s mind…
Making a deal also requires a level of commitment — a level of concentration — that is more demanding than just having a conversation. Tell someone about your idea in a pub and they might ask a couple of questions. Ask them for help — they’re going to ask a lot more questions. (Deals where money is involved seem particularly fruitful when it comes to seeking out clarity. How many times does it feel like you’ve agreed everything — and then you start talking about the money and it turns out there’s still a lot more to be discussed?)
In fact, every time we take action in service of our idea, we are making a kind of commitment. Whether that’s committing to buy a certain kind of pen or rent an office or spend our time in a certain way. These moments of commitment demand a kind of focus that increases our clarity. When we’re making clear deals though, we are in the unique situation where the thing we are committing to can talk back. That’s why making clear deals is such a valuable part of getting clear on your work as a whole.
If you want to be *very* clear in the deals you make, then it pays to be able to articulate not only the help you need as a clear deal — but also to be able to articulate your work as a whole as a clear idea. So they know what they are contributing to. This helps them understand why you want the help you want. And may even uncover unexpected other ways in which they might be able to help.
If you can articulate your own work as a clear idea (or set of clear ideas) then you can start saying very clear things like:
“My life’s work is [insert clear idea]. Over the next six months my work is [insert clear idea]. And the help I need right now is [insert clear idea].”
Even clearer is if you also know what the other person is working on — and you know how they would sum it up as a clear idea. You know what their life’s work is. You know what they’re working on right now. Then you have a clear context for your potential collaboration.
If you have these things clear, then you get to the position where you can say:
“I know what I am doing. I know who is helping me. I know how they are helping me. And I know why they are helping me.”
So, is this helping?
Making the clear deal isn’t a thing you do and just put away in a box. It’s more like the first step on a journey. It’s setting an intention – your best guess at what walking alongside each other might look like.
And, when it’s done well, there is every chance that the single line of a clear deal is enough to fully articulate what needs to be done – start to finish. The art of making clear deals, in fact, is getting more and more skilful at finding that elegant definition at the beginning that clearly delineates the work to be done.
But we are alive people living in an ever-changing world and, over time, things change. So it can be wise to check in. If you’re deal-making is in your job and you work in some kind of traditional organisation, then checking in on that clear deal can happen at Monday morning meetings, or yearly appraisals, or performance reviews or whenever. But – regardless of the context – whether you’re making clear deals in a professional capacity, or with a friend organising a holiday, or a partner planning a life together, checking in is very simple. All it requires is to look again at the deal, look at what is actually happening and ask ‘Is this helping?’
You can ask yourself, ‘Is this helping me get what I need?’ You can ask yourself, ‘Is this helping them get what they need?’ You can ask them, ‘Is this helping you get what you need?’ They can ask you, ‘Is this helping you get what you need?’ Whichever way you’re using it, basically the only question you need is, ‘Is this helping?’
Clearly well-organised…
This is a simple practice. It’s nothing more than asking and answering a set of very simple questions. But it takes a bit of practice to get used to doing it. Because being this clear is not currently the norm when it comes to our everyday culture of asking for and offering help.
But the alternative is not being this clear. And that means visions getting gradually diluted as more helpers are recruited. It means people working like hell to help someone — only to find out that wasn’t the help they needed. It means people working in organisations that end up resembling badly-wired electricity circuits — full of people burning out, or being out of the loop, or being disempowered (while a few bright sparks might find themselves — almost by chance — in the right place and actually able to get things done).
Bureaucracy and org charts and job titles and employee engagement strategies and motivational speakers and incentives and performance reviews and appraisals and … the whole mechanics of putting people into boxes and joining them together with lines… all of this is no substitute for taking a little bit more time over the agreements that we make so that they are actually clear enough. (And, really, an ‘organisation’ is nothing more than a set of deals made by individuals.)
And when the deals are clear, everything flows.
Clearly working well together…
To bring clarity to your work life, think of the few key relationships that matter most when it comes to doing what you need to do. Your key collaborators. Whether you call them colleagues or supporters or agents or friends or partners or ‘boss’ or whatever.
Then make the time to get clear on how your work overlaps. The actual scope of your collaboration. How you are helping or being helped.
Finding that basic clarity – being able to sum up what you’re working on together in a single line that is true for both of you – that changes how you work together.
It makes it harder to get lost in conflict.
It makes it harder to do the wrong thing.
It makes it harder to lose touch with each other’s intentions.
It makes it easier to agree on things.
It makes it easier to build on each other’s capacity.
It makes it easier to make the most of what you and they have to offer.
No need to argue…
One more thing to add. Navigating our needs and finding our way to a deal can be something of a tender process. Should be a tender process, even. If we’re not feeling it, we’re probably not really doing it – but just going through the motions.
In particular, the moment where the deal is struck should feel quite distinct. (In his work on creativity in organisations (‘source’), my friend Peter Koenig introduced me to this phenomena. The moment when one person hands over responsibility for something – and someone takes responsibility for that something – if the responsibility has genuinely passed from one person to the other – it should be a distinct and memorable moment for both parties.)
It is natural that, if you need to make something happen and you hand responsibility for making it happen to someone else, then that’s going to feel vulnerable. You are letting go of control. Letting go of responsibility. Entrusting the work to them. Relying on them to do it. The movement from holding on, to handing over, to letting go – that’s full of vulnerability.
And likewise if you take responsibility for making something happen that someone else needs – that’s also a vulnerable spot. They are entrusting the work to you. Relying on you. Handing control to you.
If it’s done thoughtlessly, without alertness of feeling…then there is every chance that it will be done poorly. And everyone suffers. One poorly made can trigger a whole world of confusion or micro-managing or disenfranchisement. And, ultimately, it just means the person who needed help doesn’t get helped. And the person who is trying to help wastes their time.
When done well, on the other hand, the responsibility cleanly and clearly passes from one person to the other. And everyone benefits. Like a perfectly executed baton-pass in a relay race.
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