The counterintuitive thing is, we often feel like our task is to get to a “yes.” But what we actually need is a way to say “no.” It’s the ability to eliminate many, many things that aligns us on the one thing. It’s the “no, no, no, … YES!” that gives us the power to move forward and to stick with a project.
To help us to eliminate (not forever, but for the purpose of making a decision now) I’ve found one technique very helpful. The trick is to flip things around. Instead of describing the good that will happen by doing an idea, we look at what goes wrong when we don’t do it. To make that flip, we can ask two simple questions:
- Knowing the customer can’t do what’s in the idea today, What are they doing instead?
- What’s bad about that?