The “Yes, and…” mindset

It happens quite often that a person will suggest an idea or a line of action:

I believe that we should …

And automatically the people around start to move into an “I don’t necessary agree with your strategy…” mindset.

I have found it useful to reframe my thoughts to “Yes, and…” in this situations.

⚽ It’s not a zero sum game

I’m not sure why, but in my observations we are wired to play zero-sum games. If I win, you lose. And it is very easy to apply this mentality to team/projects decisions.

It has been a while that I have been paying attention to what is going on inside my mind when someone proposes an idea that I haven’t considered yet. As everybody else, I tend to value much more the ideas that were originated inside my brain than the ones originated on somebody’s else brain.

But I cannot assume that my brain is just more evolved than everybody’s else around me. I would be fooling myself if I only value my owns idea.

Don’t miss the opportunity to learn something

💡 There is a single person that I cannot learn something new from

A habit that I have adopted after reflecting about this topic is to write on a post-it “Yes, and…” and keep it in front of me during meetings.

It is a memory token to remind me that I know what I know already, and I can use this meeting as an opportunity to learn something new.

If during the meeting my only point if to be heard, than I can assume that I will not learn something from the people around me. And probably the whole meeting could be replaced with an e-mail.

🎲 A concrete example

It’s very common to see situations where after a post-mortem session a team start to argue how they can prevent that failure from happening again. More than once I have seem this situation unfold:

— Mary: I believe we should adopt TDD as a coding practice. — John: I actually believe we need to have production like data in a test environment. — Peter: I would prefer to automate tests scenarios to cover these corner cases

Ask yourself, which idea should we test in such potential scenario? Yes, All of then‼️

Unless the ideas are mutually exclusive, we should ALWAYS consider: Why not to validate all of them.

But Roger, it don't have infinite budget and we have other priorities. We must prioritise. I hear you and I agree 100%, but first we filter than we prioritise. And during the filtering it is important to be ready to listen.

💥 Peace time vs War time

Of course, the context must be considered. If there is an urgent topic that requires an action to be taken to solve an particular situation, then I intentionally don’t apply this pattern.

Instead I focus on how to get to an execution state ASAP.

🏆 It is not about been right, it is about succeeding

One of the lessons that I liked the most from Ray Dalio’s Principles book is this:

“My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?”

If someone shows me I’m wrong I should be thankful, not resentful. And instead of trying to show that I’m right, I should actually be validating if I could be wrong.

15 Nov 2022