You ‘Accomplished’ Anything?

Some years ago now my kindergarten-aged son stomped angrily off the playground and booted a nearby bucket. The bucket flew up into the air, rotated, and promptly hit him in the mouth. The effort left him with a cut lip.

When I heard about it that evening, it seemed a perfect opportunity to help him take away an important life lesson.  My son was a respectful six-year old and very eager to sit down for our discussion.

I asked him about what had occurred and he had apparently become frustrated because during their recess soccer game, “Cole was not playing by the rules.” I inquired for details and patiently followed along with the flow of his logic and how he ultimately became angry about the situation.  The conversation was going according to plan (queue the Father of the Year Acceptance Speech.)

Finally, after working through to the point of the bucket’s revenge, I asked him what he accomplished by allowing himself to become so frustrated that he put his foot to the bucket? My highly cooperative kindergartener then appeared to become less so and responded with a near teenage version of, “I don’t know.” Of course, I then patiently asked the question of what he hoped to accomplish another way. I elicited a similar response. At this point the conversation was no longer going according to plan (scrap the acceptance speech.)

After another similar pass and result, I too was growing frustrated. Fortunately, just prior to letting my frustration get the better of me, I asked him why he was having such a hard time answering my simple question (which I had now ironically constructed to teach the lesson of no good coming allowing your temper or frustration to get the best of you.)

He then looked up at me and said, “Dad, I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish because I don’t know what ‘accomplished’ means.”

This conversation took place over a decade ago and still resonates with me. In a business setting, how many times is our purpose and intent perfectly clear to us but not others? In our heads, we are able to work back from intent and fill in all the gaps giving ourselves the benefit of doubt and never missing any subtleties. We don’t misinterpret the question based on our experiences because we formed it based on our own experiences.

We don’t have meetings to solve simple problems because simple problems are already solved. We have to get people together to work on complex and persistent issues. More often than not this process is hampered because the people in the room have not defined the problem carefully enough to have the same definition of it and don’t have a shared sense of what a successful resolution would look like.

We simply don’t do a good job of defining what we are trying to accomplish or what that even means to us. The discipline to define the problem and the parameters of a successful solution feels unnecessary because we each already know it. Of course, therein lies the problem. We each know it, but collectively we do not know it the same way.

If it takes five minutes at the start of the process to define the problem and the solution, then it is time well spent. If it takes significantly longer, then it is definitely time well spent!

#CelebrateEverydayMiracles