The discussion paradox traps teams in endless talk or sparks real progress. As a leader, you have to strike a balance between action and conversation.

The best way to not do something is to discuss it. Let’s face it, how many times did you witness people starting a huge discussion to avoid doing things?

On the contrary, how often did you witness people writing an email instead of having a phone call or an in-person discussion to find a good solution?

Welcome to the discussion paradox.

The Dark Side: The Excuse for Not Doing Things

Monster Solutions

How many times have you experienced a discussion about a solution that needs to fulfill hundreds of requirements, and solve the problems of dozens of stakeholders?

Irrespective if we are talking about an RFP, an internal project plan, or a new feature for your SaaS solution, people tend to over-specify solutions. And the more stakeholders you involve in the specification, the longer the discussions take. For every new stakeholder you add, somebody would rather discuss an additional aspect of the monster solution than take the first step of implementing the solution.

Start. A small first step is so much better than discussing aspects that may matter down the road.

That’s why I usually say, “Let’s cross the bridge when we get there.” Ask my team at Yonder, they hate me for that saying.

Procurement and Legal

Let’s go back to the monster solutions described above. For the sake of the argument, let’s assume we finally agreed with all the stakeholders and can start working on implementing a solution.

Enter procurement and legal. In large organizations, those players always come last, and rest assured they have yet another plethora of inputs, questions, and (non-functional) requirements.

Lawyers are on a mission to cover every possible risk and event in the contracts they draft. That’s why I am usually getting very impatient with them.

Do you know why? Innovation will produce failures, but not in the areas that you know upfront. So it’s just easier to accept that things will go wrong, rather than to find hundreds of potential risks and threats that will not happen anyway.

In the military, we say that no plan survives the first shot. It’s the same with a contract. I dare say that most court cases are not about things that are written down in a lengthy contract, but rather about things that weren’t foreseen.

So get on with innovation and solve the problems if and when they occur.

Like legal departments, procurement departments were founded with good intentions. Their original mission was to prevent your incapable cousin from supplying sub-standard and overpriced goods and services to your company.

Often in my career, procurement delayed a decision by more than one year after the final offer was handed in. In an innovative, fast-moving world, your product might have changed significantly during this period. And if you’re unlucky, procurement will tell you at the end of the process that you will have to deliver exactly what you offered over one year ago, even if your product has improved in the meantime.

Shifting Tickets Around

Open discussions about specifications and solutions are easy to spot. Covert discussions are more difficult to unearth. My most detested covert discussion is when people shift tickets from one team to another without contributing to a solution. Ticket comments such as “@XYZ, can you please take care of this issue?” really mean: I don’t give a flying fart. I deliberately move the ticket away from my desk, in the hope it gets lost in ticket graveyard.

Remember that every ticket was created because there is a problem that needs a solution. Not wanting to solve problems doesn’t get you anywhere.

The Bright Side: Finding Good Solutions

Replacing that letter

Email is a great tool to handle everything that was handled with letters in the past: invoices, meeting invitations, document transfers, monthly reports, mass communications, etc.

However, do you think innovation and business were handled by letters in the past?

I don’t think so. People met, and here is the first good reason: Neither a letter nor an email is interactive. Emails are misunderstood because they are written hastily on the sender side, and read on a mobile device in a hurry or whilst doing other things on the receiver side. The sender and receiver don’t see the rise of the other person’s eyebrows or the puzzled look on their faces.

So, what do you do with an email that you don’t fully understand? You let it sink lower in your inbox, disappearing in the flood of other emails. At the same time, the sender is waiting for your answer — which will never come.

The second good reason to meet or talk instead of communicating over email is the fact that everybody receives too many emails, but nobody can be in two conversations simultaneously (even if some people think they can double-book their calendars, but that’s another story).

Talking doesn’t need to be face-to-face only

I hear the criticism already: haven’t you noticed that the world has changed, with the majority of people working on their laptops from their homes?

Of course, I have. I’ve been doing this for the last couple of years myself, too.

However, I have spent hundreds of hours in Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex meetings, the majority of which with cameras on. In such a setting, business and project work can be managed very efficiently as contrasted to trying to do it over email only. During the pandemic, we onboarded large customers completely through online meetings — whilst certainly not ideal, it worked, and it would never have worked by email only.

The same thing was true for product demos, contract negotiations, and other business-related activities.

However, there are two activities for which I would always prefer face-to-face meetings:

• Establishing personal relationships and building the trust that is required for a long-term collaboration. With some of our team members being based outside Switzerland, we assemble the whole team three times yearly in a “Swiss week” in our headquarters in Zurich — just to establish and deepen personal relationships.
• Starting innovative projects. Innovation mostly sparks spontaneously in real-life situations, and not in structured meetings. That’s why you can’t invite people to an “innovation workshop” and request innovation on demand. There is no other way than to hang out and talk to people regularly — even if you leave the office, bar, or dinner table without a major innovation.

The good old telephone

Most day-to-day communications aren’t about establishing new personal relationships or starting innovative projects, but about maintaining personal relationships and driving business and project work.

My tool of choice for such work is the good old telephone instead of email. Everyone on my team has heard this sentence from me: pick up the phone and call the person.

I know people roll their eyes when I say it. I know it’s harder to try calling somebody multiple times rather than firing off one single email. But I also know that it is more effective than firing off that email. And that’s why I ask people to pick up the phone.

Conclusion

As a leader and an entrepreneur, you have to walk the tight edge of knowing when to start a discussion, and when to stop a discussion.

Not an easy task, but being able to balance the discussion paradox has helped me be both effective and efficient in most of my activities.