You Can Change Other People

CHAPTER 24TASK 1: IDENTIFY OPTIONS: LET'S PUT THAT ON THE LIST. WHAT ELSE MIGHT YOU TRY?

In the Identify Options task, you are going to get your partner's creative juices flowing so that they can come up with multiple possibilities for effective action to achieve their energizing outcome.

If they've been stuck, struggling with a problem for a long time, this is a chance for them to reclaim their agency. Often, you'll gently nudge them past the obvious solutions into new and exciting (sometimes scary) territory. Just as you grow muscles in the gym by exercising them to failure, you want to encourage your partner to exercise their creativity muscle slightly past the point of comfort.

Let's return to Dara and Ben to see how they identify options.

DARA:	So given that opportunity, what might you try?
BEN:	[Chuckles] Well, it's funny. Before we talked, the most obvious solution was to fire Ramona, or boot her from the team. Now that's not even on my list of options. It would miss the opportunity, and it wouldn't even get us close to the outcome of a high-performing team.
DARA:	That's a great observation.
BEN:	Well, one thing we could do is, HR has a 360 process that we've never done as a team. We could do it and use it as a way to talk together about our strengths and weaknesses as a team.
DARA:	Are you writing these down?
BEN:	Um … I am now.
DARA:	What else might you try?
BEN:	I guess one thing I could do is bring in an outside vendor who does team-building. We could take ...