I Can Clearly Not Choose The One in Front of Me
“They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.” -The Man in Black, as played by Cary Elwes, The Princess Bride
We’ve all been there… Locked in a deadly battle of wits with a mortal enemy and you need one last trick up your sleeve to win the day. Okay, so maybe I am exaggerating a bit but the truth is that as a leader, you need to prepared for just about anything.
Let’s start by talking about the Princess Bride, which by the way is one of my absolute favorite movies with which I pull inspiration for leadership. Inconceivable, you may say. But it’s true. Okay, so in this scene of the film, one of the bad guys has challenged the Man in Black to a battle of wits. To aid in this process, the Man in Black says he has secretly put poison in one of the glasses in front of them and asks the bad guy to decide which one they will each drink. After the bad guy hilariously debates which glass he should drink, he chooses a cup and they both drink. At this point, the bad guy drops dead — poisoned. Princess Buttercup asks the Man in Black how he knew which glass the bad dude would choose. That’s when he lets her in on a secret. Both glasses had poison, but he has built an immunity to it and therefore survived.
That’s one epic backup plan if you ask me. As a leader, you’re going to find yourself in positions where a good backup plan will save you and or your team from failure. I certainly hope that if you work in any sort of office environment that you would not find yourself in a battle of wits to the death… but that doesn’t mean there won’t be big ramifications to not being prepared.
When it comes to being prepared with a good backup plan, I suggest using a strategy that I have affectionately titled The Three Whats:
What could go wrong?
What are the chances of that happening?
What are you going to do about it?
Normally I spend some time defining the terms, but I feel like The Three Whats are pretty self explanatory. So instead I’m going to give you a hypothetical situation of how you might apply this strategy.
First things first, it’s important to make these preparations before you find yourself in a situation where you need the backup plan. Whenever things don’t go the way you were hoping, it is infinitely easier to have an alternative plan in place rather than be forced to be reactive.
For our hypothetical situation we are going to use a big meeting with some senior managers of your company, as well as some of your peers. For this situation we will assume you are a mid-level manager. Your goal for the meeting is to have a new idea of yours approved so that your team can move forward on a new project.
Before the meeting, you sit down and think about the first what. What could go wrong? For something like this you’ll want to think about everyone else in the meeting and whether they will like, dislike, or just not care about your idea. This helps you understand how much support you can expect from your peers, which can be key in getting an idea approved by the senior managers. In situations like this, I like to play out the conversation in my head to see how others might support or detract and how I would react that. This can help you find some good ideas for defending your idea from common objections that might likely be raised. Or even worse that your idea is quickly denied and dismissed.
Which brings us to our next what. What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances of your idea being dismissed or so disliked that it could sway the senior managers against it? This is important in the grand scheme of things because if after working through what could go wrong, you may find the probability is so high for being denied that it doesn’t feel worthwhile to even present in it’s current format. Which of course bring us to our third what.
What are you going to do about it? While there are a myriad of different options that you could choose, two really boil to the top of most scenarios like this one. You drop the idea and instead go in a completely different direction with a new idea that will hopefully someday get you to your original goal. Or you find a new approach for original idea to find a path with a better likelihood of getting it approved. How do you decide between these two choices?
When I find myself in these situations I ask myself how important the goal is to myself, the team, and the company. As you might guess, if I feel in the long run we can achieve the goal by going in a new direction without much harm, then I would make that choice. If however, as a leader I know this is what we really need to do then I’ll find another way to pitch the idea and get it approved. It’s really that simple.
Next time you are preparing for something big and you think that having a backup plan might just save the day, then I strongly suggest giving The Three Whats a try and see how it works for you. Even if you choose a different method to go about designing a backup plan, I promise you that it will always payoff.
It may not guarantee success, but even if you fail you will know that you were as prepared as possible… which can go along way in quelling any doubts about whether or not you could have done better in this situation.
If you’re still feeling like you could use some help working through The Three Whats, and being better prepared with a backup plan for every situation, please shoot me an email and let’s chat. You can find me at Jason@yourturncoach.com
-Jason