Playing Small & Playing Slow
Sound judgement is one of the most critical ingredients of effective Leadership. At its heart, judgement is simply the comparing and contrasting of options and alternatives, exploring perspectives that yield clear value distinctions between choices. Which choice is better or worse? Buy, sell, or hold? Which option has the higher probability of success, given the givens? What about when we tweak each of the variables this way and that, how do those probabilistic outcomes change?
Often times the representational algorithm of this process can have perhaps a dozen variables, all mutually interdependent and inherently unforeseeable. This complex decision making can get extremely tedious and feel overwhelming, leading to less than optimal outcomes and suboptimal coping strategies.
Many Leaders tend to instinctively shy away from such imposing complexity, and instead of seeking the best way forward tend to orient instead towards finding the safest way forward. Finding a path that definitively avoids the imagined “Big Miss” outcome becomes the driving goal for them.
Occasionally this is precisely correct, like when managing a financial portfolio where long-term security is explicitly prioritized over aggressive short term growth. However, many other times this pursuit of safety creeps in unconsciously, and can easily overshadow the more explicit stated goals. In my work I call this tendency “playing small.”
Other Leaders’ first reaction is to simply not decide at all. They may ask for more details, more information, another perspective, or just for a little more time. And again, sometimes those are real concerns that yield fresh data that changes the equation in a meaningful way. But much more often they are simple delaying tactics, only meant to alleviate the pressure of making the decision now from a place of discomfort.
A similar move is to “make” a decision, but not actually implement it in any meaningful way and therefore still create a safety space of inaction in which to rest. This move is just a slightly more sophisticated form of delay, but one that allows some self-serving wiggle room when asked about it. Either way, in my work I refer to this as “playing slow.”
How do you know if you are falling into one of these unconscious traps of playing small or playing slow? When working with clients on these challenges I almost always recommend that we begin by seeking more clarity on what’s really going on underneath the hood.
A helpful approach that can bring more awareness is to explore a form of gentle interrogation that looks more deeply into your process of deciding. I play the role of gentle interrogator with my clients here, but you can also easily do this on your own without a Coach too. You can role play both parts - the part of you that really wants to make the best decision possible as the interrogator and the part of you resisting it as the person in the hot seat. The point is to explicitly embody each perspective 100%, and make fully conscious both the parameter and goals of the best decision and the reasons and rationales for any resistance to aiming high and/or getting there quickly.
If you suspect you are erring too far towards safety and playing small, then you can begin to ask yourself to explicitly lay out the full range of probabilistic outcomes you have generated, especially the negative ones. Really get into the details here. What are each of the potential outcomes, and what is your best guess, to the decimal, of that outcome actually occurring. What outcomes are more preferred, and why? What are possible bad outcomes, and how bad are they actually?
You might be surprised to see that your best guess odds of those bad things coming to pass are much lower than you “felt” them to be, or that the circumstances of *really bad* aren’t really that bad after all.
If you are concerned about the delay mindset of playing slow creeping in, ask yourself to fully articulate what additional information you are seeking and how, exactly, that new information might impact the decision to be made. Be as specific as possible here. What information are looking for? What would you need to see to change the circumstances in a meaningful way? How much more time do you think you need? And what exactly are you going to do with that time that will change the variables?
You have to demand explicit details here, hence my choice of the word “interrogation.” Again, you’ll probably find that the role of “hotseat you” can’t fully articulate a coherent rationale here.
So many clients report to me their initial surprise, and then frustration, at how weak the answers to these questions can be. “David, why do I feel such strong resistance in one moment, but then under direct interrogation, I really can’t articulate anything resembling a solid perspective to support it?”
And to these questions I simply say, “Good, you’ve simply identified that your “reasons” for shying away aren’t conscious, nor are they objectively real. That doesn’t mean they aren’t true or powerful, but it does mean that they might have a lot less to do with the facts of the decision itself and much more to do with YOU and your unconscious fears around accountability or self-confidence.”
This move to reframe decision-making away from the imagined concerns with concrete outcomes and over to the unconscious fears holding the decision making process back through either playing small or playing slow opens up some great opportunities where Coaching for more effective Leadership can be quite impactful.
Where are you holding yourself back? And what does the “hotseat you” have to say about that?
