Strategy & stress

Choice stress

Last week I wrote about the Dutch love of intensity: their ‘next level’ spatial planning. Well, a Dutch friend told me about another of their concepts that is a symptom of prosperity: keuzestress, or “choice stress”.

This is the feeling I get when I walk into a famously branded shoe store to buy a pair of sneakers, or when I go on Turo to rent a car in Los Angeles for a week in January. There are just so many options, I spend a half hour weighing up multiple versions of which all would be acceptable — and eventually give up. To choose one would be to deny others.

Steve Jobs famously said that one secret of Apple’s mid-career success was its (or his) ability to “say no to the 100 great ideas out there”. His implication was that they found only the very best of the good ideas — but my suspicion is that they simply chose one that looked as good as the best of the others, and invested their attention there.

I observe ‘choice stress’ sometimes amongst my clients: they spend aeons doing competitor analyses, developing business cases, and forecasting, when they should be exercising rapid judgement, picking an option, and moving on it, fast.

Question: How can you best make a choice amongst equivalent options and feel good about doing so?

Fix first, or strategise?

I was approached by a former client who’s taken up a CEO role in a troubled organisation. The brief? To focus his leaders’ energy and attention on a clear set of strategic factors leading to an ambitious, well-articulated future vision.

Pretty clear, huh? And, certainly my bread and butter.

But, his eyes were wide open, and he and his Chairman realised there was something holding them back from thinking expansively, futuristically and limitlessly. Further discussion revealed what this was — and it was three very big bright red flags:

• They hadn’t gained any new customers since COVID began
• They are losing money hand over fist (losses of 15% of turnover, with limited cash on hand) with corporate overhead of 30%
• Their best staff are leaving, setting themselves up in competition with the company, and poaching the second-best staff

So, what would you do? Fix the leaks, or plan a big voyage?

I told them I wouldn’t help them plan the voyage until they had a seaworthy vessel (or close to one), so I recommended another consultant to help them with a rapid financial and operational rescue plan. How did I come to this view, very quickly? My experience is that you can’t engage senior executives in aspirational thinking if their BAU asks them to batten down hatches and operate defensively. To ask them to do both, simultaneously, would be unduly stressful and ensure that neither the defence nor offence would work superbly.

Question: How do you know whether repairs need to be done before embarking on an amibitous strategic goal?

Gaining energy

Bali has a population of just 4 million and, until COVID, used to get more than that many visitors each year (over 6 million). 

The tropical paradise is infested with all sorts of healers: spiritual and physical, Eastern and Western, shonky and authentic. This includes what must be the most concentrated population of masseurs anywhere on earth (except on board the ocean liner, The Queen Mary, where the ratio is one masseur for every 60 passengers). 

My wife and I love massage and on some 40 trips to Bali, we’ve road-tested dozens of masseurs: some charge as little as $5, while the fancy resorts charge $200 upwards.

However, long ago in the lush green hills around Ubud, we found the best, we think, a thickset small man called Nyoman Suparsa. He is not a massage therapist. He's a healer who doesn't need you to tell him "my lower back's sore". He just knows. He doesn't need you to say, "A bit harder in there please". He just does it. He's become so popular, that he's trained numerous therapists to model his approach.

I’ve asked Nyoman how he can do 6, 8 or 10 massages a day. He says, “I get energy from my clients to give to me, through my hands”. He says there’s an optimal zone of focus which absorbs him, what Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls the high performance state of “flow”, when he’s unaware of anything except his client’s body and his hands.

Question: Are your staff fully focussed and gaining energy from their interactions with your customers?

I always gain energy from knowing you’re gaining energy from reading, so please click the ‘like’ below.

Spend the week examining — and resolving — sources of stress in your world, and I’ll see you next Friday as usual.

Andrew