The team gathered under the hot summer sun, trying to decide the best path to carry out their mission. They had two options. Both options carried significant risk and uncertainty.
Option A required a great deal of physical exertion. It also came with the added risk that if they team failed, they were guaranteed to lose one of their team members and would have to continue the mission without them. After a few dry runs of Option A, the team was getting very tired and wanted to explore other options.
Option B was a more technical solution. It required less physical effort and put no team members at risk. However, if this option failed, they would lose access to precious resources, eliminating the possibility of attempting Option A. While the initial prospects of Option B were promising, there wasn’t time to work out all the details with certainty.
Time was running out. As the afternoon wore on, the team struggled to make a decision. They were exhausted and patience was wearing thin. Finally, one team member suggested they bring the matter to a vote.
As they debated the merits of both options, someone said, rather bluntly, “I’m voting for Option A. It’s more fun.”
This tipped the majority into voting for Option A and the team was successful in their mission. This ended up being the correct choice.
But why?
Start with why
In my class on Leadership & Organizational Behavior, Professor Dong Liu provided us with a copy of Start With Why by Simon Sinek1. Throughout the book, Sinek makes the case that if you clearly understand and articulate your why, the how and what will naturally follow.
The converse is also true. If you’re unclear what to do, ask why you’re doing it. Sometimes the obvious answer jumps out.
What’s going through your mind as you read through the scenario at the beginning of this post? Doesn’t it seem a little crazy that the team would put one of its members at risk just to choose the option that’s more fun? Without knowing more about the group and why they were there, it’s hard to make sense of the what.
The ground is lava
The scenario I described at the beginning of this post took place last week. My fellow classmates and I were participating in an outdoor leadership challenge that contained several activities. In one of the activities, we were tasked with retrieving a bowling ball placed on a paint bucket in the middle of a ring of cones. The ground inside the cones was lava. We were given a collection of objects to try to retrieve the bowling ball, but if an object—or a team member—fell in the lava, it could no longer be used for any further attempts to retrieve the bowling ball.
For us, Option A involved using a rope ladder to hoist a team member up into the air while we carefully crossed over the middle of the “lava” to retrieve the bowling ball. Just practicing this was exhausting! And it seemed totally crazy. So we explored Option B. We inserted a plastic storage container securely inside the rope ladder and tried to think through how we might push the bowling ball into the bucket. It wasn’t clear that Option B would work and there would still be a lot of luck involved.
It’s hard to describe how it felt to try to make a decision as a team. It was indeed very hot and we were indeed very tired. You could feel emotions starting to run hot and patience starting to wear thin. There wasn’t time to get all the data we needed to feel confident in a decision, hence the need to put it to a vote.
While it didn’t sway everybody, when one of my teammates suggested voting for Option A because it’s more fun, Option A won the majority.
And it was fun! We hoisted our teammate up into the air, side-stepped ten feet over, retrieved the bowling bowl, and side-stepped another ten feed back to victory. Any weariness immediately disappeared, replaced by the rush of having achieved something amazing together as a team.
Nobody explicitly said one of the reasons we were there was to have fun. There were no signs where “fun” was one of the core values of the leadership challenge course. And to be honest, when we were tired and exhausted, it was hard to remember exactly why we were there. Weren’t we supposed to pick the option with the greatest guarantee of success?
Despite the fact that we didn’t have a clear guarantee of success for any option, when we remembered that “the ground is lava” was one of the rules of the game, it was immediately clear that fun was part of our why.
Without a clear understanding of the environment, it’s not always clear which option to take. By taking the time to remember why we’re in the situation we’re in, our what may emerge on its own.
The entire book reads like an extension of Simon Sinek’s 2009 TEDx talk. If you read my post last week on inviting questions, you might have read the subtitle, “Business presentations are not TED talks.” I’m following up this week with a reference to a book, Start With Why, which reads like a TED talk. Perhaps this is a topic for another post, but it’s interesting to me to think about how to combine both styles. On the one hand, you have a persuasive talk intended to inspire (the TED talk, Start With Why), while on the other hand, you have a format that, while also persuasive, intends to invite questions. When you invite questions, I suppose you lose a bit of the magic that the TED talk offers, but I also think connection between humans isn’t supposed to be magic. Real connection is two way. Inviting questions helps with that.