From Goal to Go
A cinema date taught me about reaching agreement.
“I’d like to go to the local cinema. Apparently, they have armchairs and cake!”, squealed my wife.
“If you like, I can take care of the baby whilst you go with your friends?”, I suggested.
“I think you’re missing the point!”, my wife countered, “What does a girl have to do to get a date around here?”
It was then I realised my mistake.
In my desire to be helpful, I’d misread my wife’s goal: she’d wanted connection, not rest. My babysitting solution had therefore attempted to optimise for the wrong goal and solve the wrong problem. No wonder it was met with resistance, instead of agreement.
Something in my head clicked.
In businesses, we’re often met with resistance when we propose a helpful way forward. But, how can we agree on a way forward if we’re yet to agree on the goal?
By goal, I mean something that answers the question: what is the one thing we’re optimising for? Are we optimising our cinema trip for connection or for rest? Are we refactoring our software to optimise for better performance or better readability? We must choose one, else we risk having neither.
Even if we’re all optimising for the same goal, how can we agree on a solution if we’re each imagining different problems? Is our business facing a revenue or a cost problem? Is the recent plethora of software bugs due to a problem in software development or a problem in software testing?
Problems are often complex, meaning different views of the same problem are likely true at the same time.
As Ackoff reminds us, “At any one time, different managers will see the same thing in different ways […]. No two slices through an orange yield exactly the same view of its structure; but the more slices we examine, the more complete a picture of its structure we can formulate. It is through efforts to make different perceptions compatible that the whole truth can be approximated.”
So, there is no sense talking about the problem before we agree on the goal. And, “there is no sense in talking about the solution before we agree on the problem, and no sense talking about the implementation steps before we agree on the solution.” as Dr Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag suggests.
The takeaway? Good dates and organisational buy-in come from agreeing on the goal, problem, solution, and implementation steps - in that order. Proceeding out-of-sequence encourages resistance, not agreement.
