In 2006, I gave a presentation at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. My pitch was this: in creating a startup, you’re going to be faced with a thousand seemingly inconsequential decisions. Tucked among those thousands of decisions are five decisions that actually matter. These decisions will change the face of your company. What I didn’t say was that I believe it’s next to impossible to figure out which decisions matter and which ones do not.
How depressing.
Here’s the deal: you can spend a lot of energy deciding what the big decisions might be, but that’s much less important than making the decision. There’s a pile of thoughts on creating decision-friendly environments in Chapter 25, but that chapter focuses on the idea of thinking in a team scenario, and I want to talk about when you choose to take your thinking solo.
Let’s start with the most infuriating e-mail you’ve ever received. I’m not talking about that jerk in tech support who is simply stupid, I’m talking about the e-mail from someone you trust . . . a peer . . . pissing you off in e-mail by commenting on a problem that needs to be solved and perhaps casting doubt on your ability to solve it. You’re going to want to react to this e-mail in the same manner as if I came into your office and punched you in the face. It’s your animal brain at work and it served you well when you were living in a cave doing the hunter-gathering thing because reacting slowly meant you were eaten or punched again.
Now. You have time to soak.
The soak is when you plant the seed of a thought in your brain and let it bump around in a rich stew of ideas, facts, and whatever other random crap that seems to relate. The soak is a protected activity that will rarely occur during your busy day because you’re busy reacting to the familiar never-ending flood of things to do. The goal of the soak is simple: an original thought. Whatever the problem is that you’re stewing on, you want to find a glimmer of inspiration that transforms your response from a predictable emotional flame-o-gram into a strategically considered thought and, ultimately, decision.
Emotion and Ignorance
At a prior gig, I was finally hitting my stride. After a two-year awkward getting-to-know-the-company phase, I was in the groove. I knew who was doing what, who was hungry, and who was coasting. I’d turned a small, bright idea of a product into a successful moneymaker, so my boss decided to saddle me with something completely different. An entirely new product built on technology I’d never used. It was a strategic-shift product for the company, which meant everyone would be watching. This visibility would amplify potential fuck-ups. This was the career-defining product for me.
Holy shit.
Having no clue where to start a new project and wanting to rip someone apart in e-mail share one important characteristic. The best move in both cases is to start with a good long soak.
I break soaking activities into two buckets: active soaks and passive soaks. The active soaks are activities that you can direct and usually involve gathering content, whereas passive soaks are activities when you just point your brain in a random direction and pray. Passive soaks are where the real work gets done—provided you laid the groundwork with an active soak. Let’s start with that first.
Active Soaking
Ask dumb questions. Your first job when faced with ignorance is information acquisition, and, hopefully, there are folks out there who’ve already done some soaking. These folks have some facts, ideas, and opinions regarding whatever the problem might be, and you need to hear them all. The first five of these conversations can be awkward for managers because it’ll be obvious after your first two questions (“What is it?” and “How does it work?”) that you have absolutely no clue what’s going on and you think it’s a manager’s job to appear knowledgeable.
Wrong. It’s a manager’s job to be clued in. You work in an industry populated with engineers, and these are folks who are paid a lot of money to care about the details, and that means they see right past feigned knowledge. Sure, they’re not saying anything because you’re the boss, but, um, you look stupid.
Soaking starts out uncomfortable, but with each ignorant question you ask, you’re adding content to that managerial brain of yours. Asking dumb questions is the best way to start figuring out what is actually going on. Furthermore, asking any question of your team is a handy way to indirectly say, “I care about what we’re doing enough to ask you what you think.”
Pitch a stranger. Once you’ve asked enough dumb questions, a picture will start to form in your mind about what exactly you’re doing. It’s not a complete picture, it’s more a rough sketch coupled with the mild relief that accompanies the sudden absence of ignorance. Now you’ve got to test your understanding with a qualified someone who is willing to listen to you ramble. Pitch this person on your picture and see what happens. Lots of nodding? Great, it’s coming together. Blank stare? Oops, time for more dumb questions starting with the person you just pitched.
What I find when I pitch a stranger is that the words coming out of my mouth have very little to do with the picture that’s in my head. The act of linearly mapping my thoughts into words and sentences exposes flaws or gaps in my thinking that I never find when the ideas are swirling around my head. This leads me to our next step.
Write it down, throw it away, write it down again. Once your stranger is no longer totally confused by your idea, it’s time to write it down. This is the same process as pitching the stranger in that you’re finding another medium to test your idea. The stranger gave you a chance to verbalize your pitch; writing it down routes your idea through a completely different part of your brain and then down through your fingers. Seeing the words on a piece of paper or flat panel monitor will, once again, expose gaps you can’t see in the picture in your mind. Those gaps prove you’ve got more dumb questions, so go ask them, write it down again, and then throw it away. That’s right, don’t just close the document window; you need to get rid of everything you just wrote down. Toss it, empty the trash, and step away from the computer.
I know you’re attached to some part of that document that you wrote—some witty thought that elegantly captured an angle on your problem—but remember what we’re trying to solve here. This isn’t whether or not you should get a blueberry-orange muffin on the way to work, this is a decision that matters, and solving it elegantly means you want to visit and revisit your response as many times as possible. Consigning your first written draft to the ether might forever lose a piece of wit, but if that wit shows up in the second draft, I guarantee that it belongs there and you’ll never lose it again.
Passive Soaking
Once you’ve done all your active content acquisition, once you’ve pitched some strangers, once you’ve written it down a few times, you need to stop actively working on the problem. Remove that sticky from your screen, hide those second drafts on your desktop, and just stop working on it. Yes, you need to make a decision, you need to respond to whatever the problem is, and while I am saying you should remove all the physical artifacts of your active soak, you’re not going to stop. You can’t. Your brain won’t let you.
Back to the original flame mail from your friend. You’ve received these before and you know the absolute wrong thing to do is immediately respond. Of course, your animal brain is dying to do so because it feels so good to punch back, but it’s never the right move because your animal brain is defending itself, it’s not resolving anything other than proving boy, can I punch back or what? My advice regarding flame-o-grams and hard decisions is the same. Sleep on it.
A night’s rest is one of the best ways to calm and alter your perspective on a problem. Ever gone to bed at night when the sky is falling and awoken to a blissfully simple way to easily prop the sky up? How’d that happen? The answer is, your brain never stops working. Better yet, it has the unique ability to subconsciously construct elegant solutions to hard problems when you least expect it. Call it inspiration, call it intuition, but don’t stare at it too long because it’s a shy ability. It does its best work when no one knows it’s there.
Soaking Takes Time
Don’t tell anyone I work with, but I earn a majority of my pay during the 40-minute drive to work in the morning. I get in the car with my cup of coffee, hit the road, and let my mind wander to whatever music is playing. Never do I think, “OK, Phil flamed me pretty hard yesterday . . . how am I going to deal with this?” My mind stumbles, it strikes out in random directions, and I never know where it’ll end up. Still, if I’ve spent time actively soaking on the Phil problem the day before, my wandering often ends up somewhere Phil-like, and sometimes, the mental journey reveals a nugget of inspiration.
As practical advice goes, the soak is sometimes pretty thin. If your boss is waiting for you to weigh in on a critical decision, I am not advising you to say, “I have no clue what to do, I’m going to go ask dumb questions, pitch a stranger, write it down and then throw it away, and then forget everything I did.” What I am saying is that any big decision, any big problem, deserves time and consideration. If you’ve got years of experience under your belt, you can probably wing it pretty well, but you’re still going to be faced with situations where the right decision is to not decide, but think.
The soak is, hands down, the favorite part of my job. What I’m doing when I’m soaking on something is an act of creation. It’s design work. It’s strategy. It’s removing the emotion and ignorance from a problem and then constructing an original solution that shows those I work with that I’m actively caring about what I do.