Not a clue

My wife just walked over to the computer, where I’ve been staring blankly at the screen for the last several minutes.

“I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write tonight.”

“Then just say that.”

So here I am. Without a clue.

It’s not the first time. And it’s not for a lack of thinking about this little blog problem I have. My wife will be the first to confirm that I spend too much time thinking about this project.

And as I write this, I realize it’s a lot like what faces us in business. We have an idea we want to try or a need to fill. But what’s between that and reality, we really have no idea.

Seth Godin talks constantly about delivering. I’m reading “The Icarus Deception” right now, where it’s a constant theme. You don’t always know what to do or how you’re gonna do it. But at some point you’ve got to decide you’re gonna be the one who just starts making it work. Which is a great idea if you’ve got an Idea, but a lot harder when you don’t.

It seems to me that the answer to our problem of not knowing what to do stems, at least in part, from the delusion that we should know what to do.

This last week or two I’ve been thinking a lot about helping my kids. I’ve got four of them and I’m frequently struck with the overpowering conviction that I have no idea what I’m doing. So as I was pondering on the subject last week, it occurred to me that there are a few questions I should ask my kids every day:

• What are you learning?
• What would you like to be learning?
• What would help you finish your work?
• How can I help you?

I doubt it would be effective if I started peppering these questions at them every day after work. Rapid-fire interrogation has a way of making their eyes glaze over, I see it every time I tell them “‘Because’ isn’t a reason, it’s a conjunction.” But I’m a wily guy and I’ve been around for a bit, so I figure I can work these four questions into our conversations without them even noticing for a while.

Anyway, right after I wrote those four questions, I realized there are a corollary set of questions applicable to work. They are:

• What are you working on?
• What would you like to be working on?
• What would help you finish your work?
• How can I help you?

Now, I’m not the first guy to come up with this series of questions (or one very much like it). Doug Conant has me beat by at least 14 years, and Moses’ father-in-law had the wisdom to ask nearly 3500 years ago.

You see, the thing that ties Doug Conant in with Moses is that there’s really no way we’re going to have all the answers all the time. But as entrepreneurs, it’s not our job to have all the answers. If entrepreneurship really means leadership, then our job is to define the vision and then to make sure the team is unified around the vision.

Neal A. Maxwell defined a useful framework for defining a vision and encouraging team unity:

1. Define the problem;
2. gather ideas;
3. test the ideas;
4. choose among the ideas; and
5. plan the action.¹

And that’s where the questions come in. If we handle it right, these questions will walk us right through the five elements of Neal’s framework. At the same time, they’ll help us understand where our kids’ employees’ heads are at. We’ll understand pretty quickly whether they understand the vision, whether they support it, whether they’re on board but not sure what to do next, or whether the task at hand is more than they’re competent to handle. If we don’t use the questions as an excuse to take over, the questions will also reinforce our trust in them.

And the best part is, if we get real answers to our questions we might just start to have a clue.