☯️ The Yin and Yang of "Just" & "But"
☯️ The Yin and Yang of "Just" & "But"
Or how to "Just" and "But" better
This past week our team at TheyDo had the splendid opportunity to listen to John Cutler live! What an amazing time going through a plethora of mental models to aid our thinking in our scaling phase!
One of my favourite models was the “Just” and “But.”
It goes like this: an engineer might hear “Let’s just get that integration done”, “Let’s just speed up that QA process”, “Let’s just copy paste…”
It is just so simple. Why don’t you just do it. (Thanks, Nike?)
And then you’d say something like “But we don’t have enough people”, “But we can’t because the domains are different”, “But we can’t because there are so many interdependencies.”
But this, But that, your team hears Buts left, right, and centre.
The problem with Just
The person that says “Just”, typically says it to other teams. He/she might not appreciate what it takes to make a “simple” change. The outcome might seem easy, but getting there might cost hours, weeks, months…
The problem is that jumping to a solution skips over a deep understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.
The problem with But
The person that says “But” typically knows the dependencies and work required to achieve a seemingly simple outcome. This person might even have a laundry list of Buts. They will most probably be able to go to a few other teams and extend that list!
The problem is there is no clear effort to solve the problem.
We can’t eradicate the “Just”-s and “But”-s. However, we can make them better.
Our opportunity
Before saying “Just,” we should align around the Why. Why are we concerned with an issue? What is the context? What is the common enemy? What is the barrier we are trying to overcome? What would be the desired outcome?
WHY matters. Understand the Why and our recommendation might even be obvious. By the time we finish with our Why, our listener might come to the same conclusion by themselves.
After saying “But,” we should demonstrate the clear path to the How. Yes there are dependencies, yes there are issues, yes there are a ton of considerations. Get to the How can you launch an MVP, or How can you make something happen in various timeframes, in various states of completeness. What would it take?
HOW matters. Provide a clear path to various ways to get to an outcome, and the one that works for all parties becomes apparent.
To sum up, the Just and But are an Yin and Yang. They can live together in perfect harmony when they start with “Here is WHY we should Just…” and “But this is HOW we can get there…”
Happy Justing and Buting. ✌🏼😎
As always, if you have questions or comments about this article, please connect with me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vessclewley