Employing Differences, Episode 178: Are we planning or not?

Paul: [00:00:06] Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: [00:00:12] I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:00:14] And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:00:16] Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, 'Are we planning or not?'

Paul: [00:00:25] One of the things Karen and I have talked about before on the show is our tendency, our advocation, in a lot of ways of being able to work in sort of iterative ways. Being able to do things where we need a little bit, we're going to try something and then we're going to re-evaluate. We're going to go from there based on what we've learned.

Paul: [00:00:42] We've talked a little bit about some of the challenges that we occasionally have with groups trying to do that kind of thing. And one of the challenges that we run into occasionally is that we need to, in order to figure out whether or not we're going to move forward with a particular thing, to do some research, to figure some things out.

Paul: [00:00:59] And sometimes that research looks an awful lot like planning. It looks like 'Well, actually, we're drawing up plans to actually do this thing' and that can make some of the group very nervous about 'Wait a minute, we haven't committed to doing this yet. I don't know what's going on.'. 

Paul: [00:01:14] And so this question kind of sometimes comes up in the back of our heads like, 'Wait a minute, are we doing planning around this right now or not?' And there are traps that we can fall into when we are trying to do some discovery, some exploration. That we can accidentally get into a case where we commit ourselves to a plan without thinking that that's what we were doing.

Paul: [00:01:34] So we want to explore today this idea of when we're doing something that we aren't fully committed to, that we're trying to figure out enough to decide whether or not we want to commit to it. How do we avoid falling into some of these traps, both cognitively and emotionally?

Karen: [00:01:50] Yeah, and I'm particularly intrigued by the emotional side. I think we've probably touched on the cognitive even more on this one than the emotional piece. And I'll just say that part of why this came up between Paul and I today is that my husband and I are in one of these processes, having just bought a house that we could do any number of things with it. Including living it exactly the way it is and do nothing, to renovating to various degrees, to knock the whole thing down and start over. And all of those could be reasonable possibilities.

Karen: [00:02:21] And so we've spent a lot of time, as one might do, sitting in the house and thinking, 'Well, what if that wall moved over there?' Or 'What if we added a window here?' Or what if we did this, you know, total redo of the floor plan? And because there's such a huge range of possibilities, there's a whole lot to think about and explore. And I like to, you know, get out my graph paper and draw things. 

Karen: [00:02:44] And it's really easy to get out of the exploring mode and emotionally attached to, you know, 'If we did that, I could have that really nice bathtub I wanted' and 'We'd have this great light over here, and then there'd be enough space for this chair that we don't have space for right now.' Whatever the thing is.

Karen: [00:03:01] And it's tricky then to go back and say, 'Wait. Now that we've sort of explored what this would look like and we have some idea of cost and whatever, do we actually want to do it? Because, boy, I love that bathtub, but $100,000 remodel? Yeah, probably a bad way to get a bathtub.' It's probably not worth that, right?

Karen: [00:03:21] And so that emotional dance of 'How do I engage cognitively enough to really explore the possibilities while not getting so emotionally attached that the exploration?' You know, that I just sort of fall into a huge project that actually once we get to the point of, 'Okay, we've explored and here's the if we were going to do anything, this is the way we'd go.' 'Okay, now does it make sense to do anything?'. 

Karen: [00:03:51] Can we then go back and say, 'Nope, we're not going to.' And can I be in an emotional space where I can let go of the work that I've done, where I can let go of the dreams and the, you know, 'Boy, that kitchen would have been beautiful!', whatever the thing is, and not have sort of cursed my life in the house as it is. Like, can I do that emotional dance?

Karen: [00:04:12] And of course, my husband, who is mostly watching me do all of this. Because it turns out, he actually kind of doesn't want to do anything. Because he just doesn't want to have the chaos in our lives of some major remodel. And how does he find the way to say that to me? And how do we engage with the creativity and the exploration to make a good decision, without that exploration taking away our decision?

Paul: [00:04:39] One of the reasons we're talking about this today is I see an almost exact parallel with this in teams that I've worked with that are building out software. Where it's the same thing, where we have to do enough, get enough into the details, to start to make informed decisions about what we're actually going to need. That it's then very easy to just continue along that path.

Paul: [00:05:01] First of all, we've made the plan, or we've done the exploration, we've done the work, so we get attached to it. So now it becomes ours. And so we then are biased to continue with that. This is a thing that we know from behavioral economics.

Paul: [00:05:14] And you know, it's interesting, you talked about this idea of 'We've now seen what's possible.' And I think what a lot of times we talk about when we talk about, you know, 'We need to do this exploration, we need to figure this out and then we'll make a decision.' A lot of people say, 'Well, yeah, but we've done all this work already, so we should continue on the path', you know?

Paul: [00:05:33] And this is the sunk cost fallacy at work of saying like, 'It doesn't matter how much work we did, we need to make the right decision based on here we are now.'. 

Paul: [00:05:41] But I don't hear a lot of people talking about what you're bringing up, which is the whole 'If we decide not to do this, I'm going to live with this ghost of what was possible, of what I saw that could have been.' And that's going to hang around a bit. That doesn't necessarily mean that we should end up doing $100,000 remodel in order to get you your bathtub. Still probably the right decision not to do that. Or build out this feature or re-architect the way that the back end of this software function works. Like, it still may not make sense to do that. 

Paul: [00:06:13] But it does mean that we kind of need to address the emotional piece of like 'We saw what could have been maybe possible. And it's not going to happen.' We need to acknowledge that. And I don't think that that shows up a lot when we do this type of exploration work. Which is really what this is, right? We're saying we need to 'explore possibilities' and then we 'uncover things'.

Paul: [00:06:34] You know, these dreams, in a lot of ways that the reality we're living in tells us 'Actually we're not going to do that.' How can we sort of honor that and not push it aside, but let it go? Like recognize 'Yeah, it would be really nice if we had this, that would be lovely.' And how do we not let that affect, negatively, our experience of what is going to be.

Karen: [00:06:57] And I think a lot of this comes to themes that we talk about every episode around being able to say the things. So that I can say, 'I'd love to have that bathtub' and I can still rationally, like ,I can agree that we're not going to do the remodel. And I'm still sad that we're not going to get that bathtub. You know, or if it's software, I can still think that, 'Wow, this would be an amazing feature', even as I recognize that it doesn't work from a business model plan. Or that it would have costs in other ways that turn out not to work for a user, or whatever that is. 

Karen: [00:07:34] That there's still a place to express 'Wow, that would sure be great.' It would sure be nice to have whatever that was or to have built that out. And even to make space for, 'You know, is this a thing that we will have the conversation later? Maybe.' It's not the thing to do now, but maybe it goes into a 'someday' box.

Karen: [00:07:52] And so I think that just ability to talk about it, and to be clear in the language. If we're dreaming, we're dreaming. If we're planning, we're planning. They are not the same thing, even though they can look an awful lot alike.

Karen: [00:08:03] And so the more that we can just share what's happening, like I'm really excited about this dream and I know it's a dream. And I'm holding the possibility that this piece might happen. Maybe it doesn't happen now, maybe it happen someday. But just being able to talk through those things really helps with the emotional management.

Karen: [00:08:22] I think where we get in trouble around this potentially is well, two ways. One is that we don't acknowledge the attachment on the front end. That in this exploration, we're getting attached. And because we don't acknowledge that we're getting attached, we sort of fall into just the momentum of keeping doing it without stopping to say, 'Okay, I've gotten attached to it, but is it a good idea?' Like, ask the hard question. So that's one way.

Karen: [00:08:48] And then on the back end, the way we get in trouble, is that whether or not we acknowledge the attachment, we don't acknowledge the grief. 'Okay. We all agreed it was a bad idea. So we're not doing it! Bye! We're never talking about it again!'

Karen: [00:09:00] And the emotions don't go away like that. Even if my head is in agreement, there's a piece of my heart saying, 'But- but there was that picture that I had that was going to be so cool!' And so to make sure those align.

Karen: [00:09:16] And then the other piece I just want to give with this is that the emotional is relevant. So as we ask that hard question of 'Is this a thing we should actually do?' Look at where that emotional energy is. Did we explore it enough? Do we have enough information? Are we sure about this? Like, what is the emotion telling us? And so we're talking about the case where we decide, 'No, we're not going to go ahead.'. 

Karen: [00:09:40] One of the things that can make the grief harder is if we didn't actually give the emotion enough weight in the decision. Because the fact that we've got a whole team of engineers super excited about doing it? That's going to impact the marketability, that's going to impact the user experience, that's going to impact the quality of the product. Like that's not irrelevant. It doesn't maybe change some of those other things, and it doesn't mean that it has to be the driver. But boy, should it be in the conversation.

Paul: [00:10:08] Yeah. For me, the big thing around this is the acknowledgement of kind of the all of the pieces of it, right? Because one of the things that helps us to move beyond and to let go of stuff, to transform our relationship with any of these things, is acknowledgement.

Paul: [00:10:22] It's not just me acknowledging, 'Yeah, hey, I would really love it if we'd redesign the message dispatch system because wow, would that make things a lot easier for a lot of people.' Like for me, for customer success, like for all these folks? Like, it's important for me to acknowledge that.

Paul: [00:10:37] And I think it's important. It can be really helpful to me if other people acknowledge that, right? If the person making the decision who ultimately, you know, the product manager who is making the call about where we're going on this saying, 'Hey, I hear that you would really have loved to have redesigned the message dispatch system on this.' And that there's a lot of things that that would, you know, that's important to you. That doesn't mean that then they're going to go 'So because it's important to you, we're going to do it.'. 

Paul: [00:11:05] But to create, to make space for that, to have that acknowledgement, of that sense of loss. It's weird because it's the loss of a thing we never had. But we were dreaming about this. And we had a dream and then we realized, 'Okay, this can't happen or this isn't going to happen at this time.' And so I think the acknowledgement piece is really important.

Paul: [00:11:22] And the other thing you said that I want to point at is the when we acknowledge that as a group. When it gets said in the group space, then it becomes a thing that we can all kind of be thinking about, or tracking, for opportunities to do something like that in the future, right? That fulfil the essence of that, of that dream. Where it's like, 'I really wanted this because it would decrease these support costs. There would be less frustration that our customer success reps would have to deal with.'. 

Paul: [00:11:52] And so it's like, 'Well, now we're kind of primed to start thinking about in the future. Are there things that we could do that would reduce that frustration, that might get the same end result even through different means?' And I think if we bottle that stuff up, if we never share it, and if we don't hear it back from other people, that's much less likely to happen. Which means we're much more likely to feel like we have to hold on to it. Because we're the only person who's thinking about it.

Paul: [00:12:18] And so I think that, yeah, the self-acknowledgement of it, but then being able to get acknowledgement from the group is one of those things that helps change our relationship to that sense of loss for the thing we didn't even have.

Karen: [00:12:30] I want to add another word to that concept of acknowledgement, and this comes out of the emotional, the imago relationships work that I work with. But in that imago dialogue frame, we would call it validation. And it would look like what you're saying makes sense. Because that feature that you think would be really great would do all those things you think it would do. And they would be great.

Karen: [00:12:49] Yeah.

Karen: [00:12:50] And even if we're not deciding to do it but that I think often we get so into the sort of debate, 'Are we going to do it or are we not going to do it?' And we take sides, and we sort of settle on our own side, and if we can pause to really validate for the other person. 'I totally see that what you're saying makes sense and that you want to do it makes sense. And you have all these great reasons for wanting to do it. And we're not going to.' 

Karen: [00:13:12] Like, it doesn't mean I agree with you about how it comes out, but I am seeing what you're seeing and you're not crazy. I'm not, you know, I'm not dismissing you as 'You know, those are pipe dreams. They wouldn't really happen.' No, I believe you that they would happen. And in the big picture, they don't work or whatever the answer is.

Karen: [00:13:29] But that validation piece of what you're saying, and your emotions, and your attachment, all make perfect sense. That is a big piece that helps with the grief and all the ways that you were talking about with acknowledgement.

Paul: [00:13:40] And it comes back to, I think the reason why we often don't do that is because we aren't comfortable with, or we aren't practiced at being able to say 'We're making this clear decision that isn't going to get you what you want.'. 

Paul: [00:13:54] We're not practiced being able to say, \I get that this is something important to you and we're not going to do it.\ And being able to do that in a kind way, in a way that it feels like, 'Well, if I can't tell this person that we are going to do what they want, then I just don't even want to talk about it. Because I don't recognize that I have another option.'. 

Paul: [00:14:12] And so I think that's a thing that gets in the way of us being able to do that type of validation. Is we feel that like by validating, we're reopening the decision. When we aren't, we don't have to do that. We can actually get skilled at both of those.

Paul: [00:14:27] And also when we acknowledge at the beginning of this sort of exploration, or dreaming process, that that is likely to happen. Because I don't think there's a lot of that that happens. When we do that, then I think we're better equipped when we get to the end of it to just be like, 'Okay, so this is the decision we're going to make. What else do we need to do before we're ready to move on from this?'. 

Paul: [00:14:47] Because that's really what we're doing. We're acknowledging that we've reached the end of this exploration. We now are actually making a plan and we're going to commit to the plan and we're going to move forward through it. But given that we're moving to a different phase, what needs to happen in order for us to be ready to move to that phase?

Karen: [00:15:04] Yeah. Yeah. So I think just to track where we've been, the question we started with is 'Are we planning or not?' So really saying, let's get some clarity around. When we're in this space where we're not ready to plan, we're not moving in a direction, we're just exploring whether that direction is a good idea. We want to get more information. We want to figure out what questions would be in the mix. We may want to do a few little trials of feasibility, all that kind of thing.

Karen: [00:15:28] When we're in that exploratory or dreaming kind of phase, what's going on emotionally? And how do we get into that phase and back out of it in ways that are good for the relationships? And solidly support the emotional experience that we're likely to have?

Karen: [00:15:43] And that emotional experience can be a lot of excitement, can be a lot of attachment. Like, I'm building this thing and I get excited about all the good stuff about it and I get very attached to it. It can also be others expecting attachment, and having fear and anxiety around that. Like, 'Boy, they're putting a lot of energy into that exploration and now they're going to be attached and I'm going to be stuck with it kind of emotion.'. 

Karen: [00:16:05] So all of that goes into play at the front end. And we think it's really important to acknowledge and name that. To be very clear in our conversations that we're in the exploring, dreaming, research kind of space, and that this isn't a plan.

Karen: [00:16:20] And then to make sure that we have the wherewithal at some point, and maybe many points along an iterative process, to stop and say, 'Okay, this is what we know so far. This is what's on the table so far. Is this a direction we want to keep going in?' 

Karen: [00:16:35] And not to let that sunk cost fallacy keep us going through momentum on something that actually, if we stop and look at it, turns out not to make sense, in the sort of cost benefit analysis that we need to do.

Karen: [00:16:47] And if we come to that conclusion, that we're not going to go from this exploration turning into the planning part. That actually this exploration was what we needed to do to figure out that we're not going that way. 

Karen: [00:16:59] To pay attention to the grieving that needs to happen, to the loss that is experienced there. Because emotionally, we probably did get some attachment to the ideas that we were exploring, and the good sides of that. And if we can acknowledge that, and especially if we weren't the one who were doing the work. So we need to acknowledge it for ourselves, but we also need to be able to acknowledge it when it's somebody else. 

Karen: [00:17:20] And do that validation piece of 'Your attachment makes sense. The things that you thought were going to be fabulous are real.' There is loss in this and we can all hopefully all agree together, or if it's hierarchical, that the boss decides whatever that is. But that we're going to move in a different direction for good reasons. 

Karen: [00:17:37] And that doesn't mean that those other things weren't good ideas, or weren't valuable, or weren't even a thing I get to be sad about.

Karen: [00:17:43] And if we can name all of that and sort of keep that present, we don't get the conflict in relationships. We don't get the resentment about the decision, and we keep the possibilities that may have come up, stay alive in a different and healthier way, because we acknowledged the loss of not doing them now.

Paul: [00:18:03] Well, that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:18:07] And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.