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Boardroom Rules II: A strongly held opinion is not a benchmark

So maybe you've noticed your team / management / board meetings are getting a little tense these days? Understandable, given the current state of the economy, and in any case, managing rocky interactions is an important part of Predictable Success.

However, in troubled times there's one type of interaction that seems to rise like a kid's lost balloon, especially in team meetings: The 'strongly held opinion' - one (vocal) person's simplistic, dramatic or counter-intuitive proposal for resolving a painful issue:

- "It's vital to our survival that we slash our prices by 20%."
- "We need to raise our prices across the board by 20% - today!"
- "Shut down all our overseas offices."
- "Open a new division delivering more environmentally-friendly products."

You know the type of thing - you've seen it before, and you're sure seeing it now...

The important thing to remember about SHO's is that there's nothing inherently wrong with them - but there's nothing inherently right about them either. A strongly held opinion is (in it's first appearance) just that - someone's strongly held opinion. It might be their mantra, a flight of fantasy, a genuine flash of insight (these are rarer than all those books would have us believe), something they read on some geezer's blog over the weekend, or a revelation from God his/herself. Often (though not always), they're delivered by executives with CADD - Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder: people who find it really painful to grind through the detail involved in most decision making.

The problem for most teams is that unless it is outstandingly goofy, upon first declaration, they can't tell which of these many version's of a SHO this particular one is. And as a result, it gains traction, and before you know it, the SHO has become the benchmark for the entire discussion - should we do this thing or not, and if so, how do we make it work?

The Predictable Success rule for SHO's is simple: don't lob them into meetings without warning, like a hand grenade. If you have a serious proposal for resolving a painful issue, do us all the favor of thinking about it before hand, and commit at least the bones of an outline to paper - just a bullet list of the pros and cons will give us a start.

And if you don't feel like doing so, and instead insist in using your SHO as a club to hijack the discussion on the run, then we'll table the item, excuse you to let you work on the bones of it for half an hour (while we sort out something equally pressing), then you can come back in and lead a though-through, planned discussion of your idea.

Managing a business in times like these is in itself a serious business - it's not helped by allowing highly vocal mavericks to short-circuit the process just because they can't stand the pain of detail.