Business Insight Zone

We’re trained to make fine distinctions. Being smart — thinking critically — is about knowing when to make fine distinctions. Believe me, I wouldn’t be earning a Ph.D. if I didn’t see the value in making fine distinctions.

Sometimes.

But often, as we go about our daily business, we spend so long on fine distinctions that the process bogs down, the meeting goes on 40 minutes longer that it should, or the process of reviewing the new prototype / plan / draft takes forever.

There comes a time when you need to interrupt the cycle of distinction-making, ask a simple question, then make a quick, ruthless, even arbitrary decision on the item at hand.

The wrong conversation to have:

• “I like the red, but we could also go with the orange.”
• “I might prefer the orange, but I like the red, and even the purple wouldn’t be bad.”
• “Yeah, it looks good with the purple.”
• “Did Jenny already look at this?”
• “Yeah, she liked the orange.”
• “Let’s get her in here to look at it with us . . . “

(You can imagine the following 20 minutes of chatter for yourself.)

The right way to have this conversation:

• “I like the red, but we could also go with the orange.”
• “Did Jenny already look at this?
• “Yeah, she liked the orange.”
• “Does it make a big difference either way — in price or anything?”
• “No, it’s just our preference.”
• “Well, I think we all like orange well enough, so orange it is. What’s next?”

I’m thinking in this vein because of Kevin Meyer’s Evolving Excellence writeup about problem-escalation practices on the floor of a Toyota plant in Japan. The thing that struck me was how decisions at the first three layers of response (worker, manager, supervisor) are boiled down to super-simple Yes/No parsing questions:

• Is there a problem?
• Is it really a problem?
• Can the problem be fixed within the next two minutes?

If the answers are Yes, Yes, and No, they shut the whose line down, just like that — no hesitations, no recriminations. I like Meyer’s summary:

Pressure? Not really. The decision-making is so defined that it becomes easy. The desire to find problems easily outweighs the potential cost. Shutting down the entire factory is still better than letting a customer receive a quality problem.

Boom.

Consider the following yes/no questions and how they could liberate your decision-making if you applied them ruthlessly:

• Is this worth my time?
• Am I the right person to do this?
• Is the expense involved worth worrying about?
• Would it hurt us if we skipped this?
• Does this matter enough to move the needle on anything?
• Do customers care about this?
• If we do this to perfection, will it make us enough money to care about?
• Does this make us better?
  

How long do you take to make calls on questions like these? How many things in your e-mail inbox, on your desk, or on your to-do list could be dispatched between now and the end of the week by practicing this sort of ruthless parsing?

What questions would you add to this list?