Three Little Ducks
Before you reach for a framework, find out whether you are working off the right facts.
I answered a tax helpline for a good many years, and I can tell you what most callers wanted. They wanted an answer. They had a problem, they wanted it to go away, and the question they asked me was the one they thought would do that. I answered it, honestly and precisely, and quite often it was the right answer to the wrong question. Nobody found out until later, by which time my answer had become somebody else's fact.
So I came up with a little test I ran before I let anyone ask me anything, and I called it Three Little Ducks. It started life as a VAT thing, and VAT needs all the help it can get. The premise was simple: if I could get the three ducks in a row, so that they all pretty much said the same thing, I had a much better chance of giving an answer that would stand up.
The first duck is what the people involved believe is happening. The second is what the paperwork says is happening, and I mean any paperwork: the contract if there is one, but also the email somebody sent on a Friday afternoon and the plan nobody has opened since the away day. The third is what actually happens, on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody is describing it. You find that one out by going and looking, not by asking.
You could split the first duck into one duck per party, because each party to a situation believes its own version of it, and a situation can have a good many parties. I kept it at three. Three ducks sounded right, and any more sounded like a committee. So the first duck is one duck in several minds, and if the people in the room did not have a common understanding of what was happening, the other two ducks were probably dead in the water anyway.
What surprised me, and went on surprising me for twenty years, was how rarely they lined up. The parties disagreed with each other even when they were certain they agreed. The paperwork said something nobody remembered signing. And what happened in practice tied in with neither. I remember a town centre redevelopment, a local authority and a developer working together on a multi-million-pound scheme. I had read the heads of terms and the draft contracts beforehand, and something did not feel quite right, so in the room I asked for one volunteer to explain the whole thing to me in simple terms. A senior representative of the council started to take me through it, clearly and confidently: the council would acquire a lot of properties and grant long leases to the developer. At that point the developer's lawyer cut in. No, you are transferring the freeholds. A massive difference in understanding, exposed a few minutes into the conversation, and the meeting had to be adjourned until it was resolved.
If you are the whole team, do not let yourself off the first duck. What the people believe is what you tell yourself, and what actually happens is what you do by Thursday. I ran my own sheet while we were building this page, and I marked a disagreement between what I believe we should be doing and what I actually do. It was the most useful line on the sheet.
When the three agree, you have a fair idea you are working off the right set of facts, and you can start. When they do not, the gap between them is your first issue, and it is very often the real one. The sheet below is for finding that gap before a framework hides it.
Start with a rough list. Write down what is bothering you, in your own words, as many things as you like. Do not tidy it. A rough list is the right place to start, and the sheet will do the sorting.
What do the people involved think is going on? If two of them would say different things, write both down. If you are the whole team, write down what you tell yourself. It still counts.
What does the written record say? The contract, the plan, the minutes, the email trail. If it is written down anywhere, it counts.
What happens in practice, on an ordinary day, when nobody is describing it? Go and look if you can.
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Which situation is this?
If you know which decision this is, pick it below and the playbook will give you the homework and the four frameworks in order. If you do not, say what is in front of you in a sentence or two and the pointer will suggest where to look.
- Planning the year?The board wants a plan and you have a list. Four frameworks that turn the list into choices, including what you will stop doing.
- A big call the spreadsheet cannot settle?Work out what kind of problem it is, rehearse the futures, price the branches, then fail it on paper while you still can.
- Setting a price?Find the job you are hired for, price the value rather than the hours, check the sums, then imagine it has gone wrong.
- Losing money and not sure where?Find out whether each sale makes money, where the losses gather and what is throttling output, before anyone proposes an initiative.
- Not sure who to sell to?Choose whom to serve and whom to decline, learn the job they hire you for, then walk their whole journey.
- Launching something?Work out what customers would hire it to do before your enthusiasm spends the budget.
- Going into a new market?Read the weather, judge whether the industry can pay you, name the risk you are really taking, then choose with your eyes open.
- A team that is not working?Find the layer that is actually broken, tell a fault from a phase, check the team was built for the work, then coach rather than tell.
- Leading a change?Diagnose the culture underneath, respect the physics of unfreezing, run the programme in the right order, and land it person by person.
- Who decides, and who checks?Settle who owns risk and who oversees it, pin decision rights to names, then put the risks on one page.
- Handing the business on?Map who sits where before anyone argues about who is right, then write down who decides, while the goodwill lasts.
- Can we afford it?Four frameworks for the question every owner asks before every decision, in the order that stops the answer being a guess: when the cash runs short, what the thing has to earn, what the accounts say you can carry, and whether it beats doing something else.
- Choosing between options?Make sure you are choosing between the right things, weigh the big choices in the open, sort the long list by what it would do against what it would cost, then agree what gives way when time runs out.
- Something keeps going wrong?Agree what the process is before you argue about it, get every plausible cause onto one page, drill the likely ones to the root, then test the fix small and hold the gain.
- Do we actually have a strategy?Test whether what you have is a strategy or a vision statement, find what you own that is a real advantage, make the one choice most firms avoid, then turn it into measures so it survives the year.
- Which of our businesses deserve the cash?Ask what holds them under one roof, map where the cash is made and where it goes, judge each on its merits rather than its history, then set how much of today you will spend on tomorrow.