Option Solving Blog

It is not unusual for a growing company to outgrow its existing leadership team and therefore feel the need to revamp with some fresh talent. So, once it moves through those steps and finds itself with a combination of fresh executives and existing members, it senses the requirement to pull them together as early as possible. A case in point is particularly churning through your editor’s mind.

The owners have become familiar with option solving over time and therefore use it to help them decide. Hence they set about posing an initial rational question, which looked like this: “What is our best option for pulling our revamped leadership team together; considering 1) we’re growing nicely, 2) our organization is in good shape, 3) morale is good across the board, 4) we have ambitious intentions, and 5) our executive team is a mixture of new and established players?” Here they used 5 primary considerations, although we normally recommend 4 so as not make such overall question too complex for our general sensibilities.

They immediately set about devising two yin and yang “bookends.”   These would be used as extreme unlikely possibilities and serve as bookends to help focus their intuitive minds toward their most realistic options. Bookends like these are vital for preventing people’s imaginative intuitive minds from losing focus away from the issue at hand.

The yin and yang bookends that came through were: “Demand that they work closely together” and “Offer a big team bonus if they show strong collaboration over the next year,” both of which were unlikely possibilities in the circumstances. However, they would again serve the purpose of inducing more realistic possibilities into their thinking – see our Latest Worked Example on the blog site.

Now that their bookends were in place, they created the necessary focus for producing at least five realistic options, so as to stretch the number of available possibilities. They ended up producing six to make allowance for their key team to produce their own favored option(s). Such bookends also aided pinpointing all likely and realistic possibilities. They then turned to emotional distancing to help choose an optimum solution. Feel free to review their potential six in our Latest Example, one of which was: “Option-B: Take team away for monthly overnight retreats over next 6 months.”

With their “pictogram” potentially ready for a decision point, they now pursued some emotional distancing: which could be a couple of hours, several hours, or end at “getting-out-of-bed-time” the following morning: a great time for an epiphany –providing you don’t then second guess yourself. If you second-guess yourself, you’ve pretty much lost the whole benefit of option solving.

Emotional distancing would allow them to utilize their intuitive minds to the fullest extent in scanning their sub-conscious range of options: against so many similar life experiences and choices, thereby seeking an optimal solution. What option would you have chosen?

In this case, they decided to share their pictogram with their executive team and invite it to produce a sixth option or more. Then they would encourage the use of “Peeling the Onion” to find the best overall approach to their dilemma, as well as buy-in by their team.

If you have an example of your own, please share it with this blogger, through the COMMENTS area.  Thanks Option Solving. (NOTE: Next posting will be in two week’s time: “Peeling the Onion: What is our best option for pulling our re-vamped executive team together?” Let’s have your COMMENTS or go to peter@ileadershipsolutions.com to connect with the blogger. Also consider buying the book: “Smart Decisions: Goodbye Problems, Hello Options” through amazon.com)

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