Eric Johnson:
You asked about getting different opinions in the room, and it reminded me of a really nice story about Barack Obama when he was trying to decide whether or not to go into Libya. And in those meetings, I was actually lucky enough to take a tour of the White House with a friend who was in the administration, and I got to see the room where those decisions happened. I wasn’t in the room where it happens, but I saw the room where it happens.

Joel Miller:
That’s Eric Johnson, he teaches at Columbia Business School at Columbia University. He’s also the head of, And seriously, this is real, the Center for Decision Sciences. Beyond that, he’s the author of The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters.

Eric Johnson:
There’s a small table where all the principals, as they talk about them, sit, all the adults in the room. On the outside are the junior people. Now, those junior people are much more important than you and I to the world, but they are assistant secretary, under secretary, things like that. He started the meeting by saying, “I want to start to hear from the kids,” the people on the outside of the room, because he suspected they would have a slightly different opinion than their bosses. So that’s a really nice example of using the feel for the room to get in an argument that wouldn’t have been first out.

Joel Miller:
Barack Obama could run a room. He knew that dominant voices tend to determine decisions, and when it came to the room where it happens, the design of the space, almost guaranteed senior voices would dominate. So he changed the design, not spatially, but conversationally. He encouraged the junior advisors to go first. Obama was utilizing something known as choice architecture or what Eric Johnson, a leading voice in the discipline, would call choice design.

Eric Johnson:
Every time you’re faced with a choice, there has been somebody who’s been there before you and they’ve made a bunch of decisions about how to present that choice to you.

Joel Miller:
Choice architecture represents an example of what journalist Michael Blastland calls the hidden half. There’s what we know about a situation and what we don’t know, and very often what we don’t know has tremendous power over the outcome. In the case of the decisions we make, there are countless ways that choice has already been stacked and not always to our benefit.
If you’re a business owner, the hidden half of decision making has far more influence over your results than you realize. I spoke with Eric Johnson about some of those impacts, and I also wanted to hear what Full Focus CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller and Chief Revenue Officer, Courtney Baker, had to say, especially when it comes to the hidden costs of these decisions. When you as the business owner are always solving problems, you might feel like you’re doing your job. But what if you’re actually undermining your business’s long term potential for growth? Megan and Courtney bring up three primary costs that you just might be missing, development, depletion, and distraction. If you’re not aware of how these costs are impacting your results, you’re going to want to listen up.
I’m Joel Miller and this is the Business Accelerator Podcast, where we have one goal, we want to help you scale yourself so you can scale your business. So let’s pick this up with Professor Johnson. He mentioned all the decisions that others make in advance of our choices.

Eric Johnson:
So let me go through just a couple of those. One is how many options do I give you? Another is, basically, how to describe those options. If I don’t present you with an option, it’s very unlikely that you choose it. So if it’s not on the menu and you don’t know all the off the menu secrets, the menu itself limits what you’re going to choose. And so choice architecture is essentially the art of designing those choices.

Joel Miller:
Well, when you think about things like menus, I also think about websites or labels or other sort of things that are very clearly designed. And yet I know that as I was reading your book, there are so many applications for live moments, not just designed things, but moments themselves, and I was especially thinking about meetings. And so I just thought I’d open that up, how do these dynamics affect interpersonal communication, especially in a business context?

Eric Johnson:
So I mean, I talk a little bit in the book about conversation you might have with a wife or a significant other, but it’s really much more powerful I think when there are multiple people there. And that’s because the person running the meeting, the designer in this case, often actually seems to have less control. They don’t say, “You speak now or you speak later.” They can do a little bit of that, but they don’t want to be too heavy handed.
But they also are choice architects. They’re also designers. And there’s something really important to realize that. Most people when they’re affected by design don’t know it. And so actually I would argue the leader has much more power than not only the people in the room know, but probably that they even know.

Joel Miller:
That is an argument that you make throughout the book, that most of us are just clueless about the design that we’re walking through all the time. How can a leader be more purposeful about designing a meeting, for instance, or designing a set of choices?

Eric Johnson:
Well, one thing which is true is just to be conscious of the impact of those decisions. We’re usually, people are making choices. We’re in meeting attendees, so we’re not thinking about how the person leading the meeting is influencing us. We’re busy trying to make the decision. And as a result, we don’t learn and leaders don’t learn about what that impact can be. It’s actually sort of a very subtle ability that you have to observe from the outside, and very hard to do. So I think it’s actually being aware of that, just saying… Let’s think of it this way, there’s a checklist of things the leader is doing. And that checklist would have things like, how many options do I present? What are the things that people should talk about, the characteristics of the options?
And going through that checklist before that meeting would actually be a great sense of consciousness raising, saying, “Oh, my gosh, I have all these levers I don’t know about.” You’d have to go through the list because each of those has its own impact. Let me give you a really simple example, we’ll come back to in a little bit, which is just a default, what is the thing that is going to happen if there’s no decision?
On the web, we see these all the time with buttons that are pre-checked, but in meetings, there’s normally a status quo. There’s something, if we don’t make a choice, we’re going to pick the same thing. And that can be changed by the leader. The meeting could be described, I’ve been thinking about this a little bit as, “Okay, do we continue with the same vendor? What vendor do we switch to?” Now, notice those are going to change very much how you think about the problem. In the first case, you’re going to think about what are the experiences we have with this vendor and not bring to mind alternatives. And the second one, you’ll probably think about what are the things that outside vendors can do that our current vendor doesn’t do? So they’re very different ways, and that’s just one of the many levers you have.

Joel Miller:
And the question is the frame, that is what helps set the choice up. So if you position that in a particular way, you’re going to be steering the conversation a particular direction.

Eric Johnson:
That’s right. And the issue is that most people run meetings the way they saw them run, not how they want them to come out.

Joel Miller:
This gets to an idea that’s in the book that I found really fascinating, in fact, two of them. One is plausible paths and the other is assembled preferences. Can you describe what those two ideas are?

Eric Johnson:
The reason they’re important is because most of the tools we’re going to be talking about, about choice architecture, like defaults, like the order in which you present things are going to take advantage of these two principles. A simple preference is actually even more powerful in a group because it’s about what comes up, what is talked about. In individuals, you think about what comes to mind, and so what’s top of mind is something you consider first. The interesting thing about a group, it could be whoever speaks first can actually help set the agenda, maybe for good or for bad.

Joel Miller:
At the start of a meeting, it’s pretty typical, if the meeting’s well run, there’s an agenda and there’s a stated purpose, the intended outcome of that meeting, that’s going to govern the meeting in terms of the primary goal. But as you mentioned, you may have an outspoken person in the group who asserts, essentially, another goal and they could derail the meeting.

Eric Johnson:
Right. This is the balance that I think a leader has to really feel for is how much do I let people talk? And how much do I direct them? The interesting thing is I think by being subtle and using choice architecture, you can do less direct steering. It’s not as if it’s a huge engine. It’s more like something you have to touch just a little bit to move.

Joel Miller:
Another tension that you talk about in the book is fluency and accuracy, and I wondered if you could describe those two. And then I just want to share where I see this pop up the most.

Eric Johnson:
Fluency is, essentially, the fact that we often make decisions the way that’s easiest. We all know the person in a meeting who wants the absolute best option be picked-

Joel Miller:
Yes.

Eric Johnson:
… and goes on forever to make sure you understand the weakness of each of the other options.

Joel Miller:
It’s very common to have people who, let’s say, they just are lower in their risk aversion. They’re fine with a handful of details, then make a quick call. Meanwhile, they work on teams with people that have higher risk aversion, and so they want to see all the information, whatever the all actually looks like. There’s never all, right? You could never actually have enough. But let’s say it is more exhaustive than the other person. Those two people have to somehow work together. And in a team environment, you may have really difficult decisions that involve some people that would tend towards a more fluent answer and other people that would tend towards a more accurate answer. How do you balance that?

Eric Johnson:
It’s a great challenge. One thing that I think works pretty well is asking a question of the people who are overly concerned about getting every detail right. You could say, How is that going to change the outcome?

Joel Miller:
Great question.

Eric Johnson:
How is that going to change the outcome? I mean, occasionally, I’ll have someone working for me who I love, because I’m not a particularly finely detailed thinker. I mean, I think I’m more than confident, but I’m not going to get the last detail. And so sometimes I want them to think that way because they’ll catch something I’m going to miss. But to help them let go of those other details, I say, “How is that going to change what we ultimately end up doing here?” “Oh, yeah, you’re right. It’s not.” “Okay, then let’s move on.”

Joel Miller:
So if something’s immaterial, you could just flag it and get going.

Eric Johnson:
Yeah, Well, particularly, saying if it’s in material to this decision, you could even say, “Look, there are contexts that would really make a difference. But, here, how is that going to change what we end up doing?”

Joel Miller:
What about a situation in a meeting where there are competing goals at play? Let’s imagine we’re in a meeting and between you and the decision is alignment around a goal, and yet it does not seem like the people in the room are aligned around the goal.

Eric Johnson:
It’s interesting because part of that is what makes meetings and groups different than individuals, is they can legitimately want different things out of the decision. I mean, a person [inaudible 00:12:13] conflict, they want the person who’s tall and attractive and rich and everything, and they have to struggle with that. But that’s kind of different than someone who these folks really want to go to the East Coast and these folks really want to go to the West Coast. They really individually have separate agendas.
That’s where a leader has to bring out the conflict and try and raise it to another level. By that I mean often those kind of conflicts have other attributes underlying them and to get what is the common goal, the usually a higher level goal, makes a lot more sense and can make a sense of progress.

Joel Miller:
Is there a way a leader can use things like defaults to help deal with those goal agenda related questions in advance?

Eric Johnson:
Absolutely. I mean there are a bunch of tools that are out there and we’ve talked a little bit more about defaults and others and we’ve talked a little bit about order. So example, if you think the people who want option A are doing better, the East Coast people, let’s talk about the advantages of the East Coast first. Let’s talk about the advantages of the West Coast. And then let’s talk about the disadvantages of the East Coast, and then the disadvantage of the West Coast. Order’s going to have an influence. There are going to be attributes, different properties, cost of real estate, availability of the right kind of health. There are going to be lots of different things.
You can cycle through those in a way that will influence the outcome, saying, “Okay, let’s first talk about X.” So you’re not talking about your feelings about the attributes. You’re not choosing East Coast versus West Coast, but you’re structuring the agenda in a way that’s going to favor one versus the other. Important thing to notice, by the way, is you’re going to do that whether you’re doing it or not.

Joel Miller:
Right. Absolutely.

Eric Johnson:
There’s no such thing as a neutral choice architecture.

Joel Miller:
I think this is a really valuable point, because just like if somebody sits down and designs a website or somebody sits down and writes up a menu or somebody sits down and does pretty much anything, there is a natural bent to whatever that they did that will result in a particular kind of interaction from the next user. And that’s true for a meeting agenda. It’s true for anything. And yet those things are mostly invisible to us. How can we make them more visible to us?

Eric Johnson:
I think one of the things that would be very useful is to literally go through a checklist. I have my students do this all the time. Write down all the decisions you’re making when you’re designing that website. Imagine you have a blank piece of paper or if it’s a website, a wire frame that you have to design. Write down every decision you’re making, how many options are there? What’s the order of the options? What are the attributes? What’s the order? And subtle ones, how are the attributes described?
To go to your earlier example of someone who’s obsessively worried about every detail, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about very fine categories, but maybe an ABC scale is enough, or maybe even a traffic light scale red, yellow, or green. That will help people let go of the small differences and embrace the stronger option. I think that’s a good example. So going through a list of all these things, probably makes you a little bit more aware. Just ask yourself, what is the decision I’m making? We make them so implicitly, they’re so automatic, that you really do have to, before the meeting, stop and write them down ahead of time.

Joel Miller:
It’s almost like we breathe all day long, we don’t think about that. But if you wanted to take up the practice of meditation, you better get really good at being aware of your breathing. That’s kind of the same thing you’re talking about here.

Eric Johnson:
That’s right. And I have to get much better at running meetings, so I’m going to start meditating.

Joel Miller:
Okay. One final question here. You note that choice architecture, designing these choices can actually be manipulative. And I thought that was an interesting point to be made. You made it multiple points in the book ,and you come back to it at the end. And as you come back to it at the end you kind of restate the Golden Rule. And you mentioned designing unto others as you would have them design unto you. So I ask you build on that a little bit, develop that thought. How should we as responsible, wise, hopefully moral people be thinking about this in terms of business interactions?

Eric Johnson:
The first thing again is to realize there’s no such thing as a neutral choice architecture, you have to take a stand. So I was once asked by a foundation I got fellowship from, how do you apply this in your own life every day? And I realized I was kind of being what seemed pretty manipulative, because I learned whenever I’m sitting at an appointment by email, I always put a default time, “so I think Thursday at 10:30 sounds like a great time.” And then I add, “Of course, of course, I’m flexible.” But it’s amazing how many people start saying, not only, “10:30 is a good time for me.” So that not only gets the time to be the one that’s good for me, but save them a lot of time. Because they’re not going through the calendar or three rounds.
We’ve all had those email chains where it takes six emails to get a silly half hour meeting together. So I think realizing that I’m not only doing something that’s in my best interest, but in everyone’s best interest is sort of one way of doing that. Having a default for most things that incorporates other people’s needs is probably a good way of doing that.

Joel Miller:
It’s almost a generous action to the world, to your coworkers, to go ahead and make these quick decisions that enable them to not have to make the decisions. How do we as leaders then respond as people are presenting us with those kinds of decisions? They have thought it through, they are trying to save us time, do we take advantage of that? Or what’s the right way to think about that?

Eric Johnson:
It’s an interesting question and one of the things that it makes me think about is how often do I take somebody who I trust, who I’m training to be a better decision maker, and ask them the question, “What do you think I should do?” That’s a way of encouraging them to have their input. And, “Why do you think that?” Actually asking, not just for the facts, but also for their recommendations, because they’ve thought about this more carefully than I have.

Joel Miller:
Eric, thank you so much for spending time with us and sharing with us your insights.

Eric Johnson:
Joel, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Joel Miller:
Coming up after the break, we’re going to turn to the conversation with Megan and Courtney, and explore another side of the hidden half of decisions.
The conversation with Eric Johnson highlights the role that structure plays in the decisions we make. And a lot of that structure is invisible. It happens in the conversations that we have with our teams and the conversations that our teams are having amongst themselves. If you’re looking to get great decisions from your team, you need to be aware of these dynamics. If you’re not, they’ll undermine your results.
And that brings the conversation between Megan and Courtney directly to the fore. They’re talking about the hidden costs of solving all the problems. If you’re a business owner, you may feel like that’s your job, and to a degree it is, but you’re really better served by helping your team make those calls. And here’s the thing, everything we just heard from Professor Johnson about choice architecture comes into play as our teams are solving problems, only, however, if we actually give them the problems to solve. And that’s what Megan and Courtney are talking about now. This is a conversation grounded in some real experience and has some boots on the ground application for, really, any business owner.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So I have to start by telling a story on myself. So as business owners, as CEOs, as executives, we think that our job is to make decisions and solve problems. I mean, we get a lot of kudos for that. We’re probably pretty good at it. Well, I feel like I’m really good at it. And I’m so good at it that sometimes I get myself in trouble.
And this happened recently when I heard about a meeting that our directors had in which they were expressing some frustration about a couple of things. And I don’t like my team members to be frustrated. So I was trying to think about how to solve this problem and this and that. And I was thinking, might need to get HR involved on a couple things to help out. And so I was talking to my coach, Les McKeown about this, and he did what he often does and what a good coach will do, and that is you think you go in with one problem. This is like going into the doctor and thinking you have some minor problem, and then you realize you actually have a bigger problem.
And he said to me in his amazing Irish accent, he said, “Megan, founders make decisions, but CEOs build teams that make decisions.” And I was asking him, “Okay, should I have this follow up meeting? How should I solve this problem?” And he basically said, “You need to stop solving these problems, because these problems are keeping you from your most important work.” And so we were talking about that, and he said, “What you need to do is anytime a problem comes across your desk, you need to do your very best to get it off your desk as quickly as possible.”
And that was a big idea for me, because I think I have a lot of confidence in my ability to solve problems and apparently to a detriment. And I think that I’m getting in the way sometimes of my team. And so, anyway, I started just thinking about this and just kind of the hidden cost of solving problems. Because we always think about the benefit of solving problems. I mean, nobody likes problems, we want to get rid of them, but actually there is a hidden cost to solving the problems. And in fact, I think there are three in particular that we need to talk about.

Courtney Baker:
I think this is really interesting, and I know that when Les was talking to you about this, he was speaking to you specifically as a CEO. But as you’re telling that story, I’m thinking about me and my role as the Chief Revenue Officer of how easy it is to do that, to just make decisions, because you’ve got a career of doing it and most likely you are where you are because you’ve made some good ones along the way. Probably some bad ones too, but your good ones probably outweigh your bad ones.
And the tendency to just stick with that, because it’s worked to this point. You probably haven’t had to make the transition of deciding not to make a decision. I think what you’re talking about is more than delegation, it’s actually maybe even deciding you know the answer, but not solving, letting other people step in to solve.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. And if I’m really honest, and Courtney, I’m curious if this is true for you, I get a hit off of solving problems. I might complain about, “Oh, I’ve so many problems to solve and that’s easier than the work that I need to be doing sometimes.

Courtney Baker:
Yes, absolutely. And I think it’s fun sometimes to play that a little bit of a hero role of like-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
… “Oh, other people need me. Please let me step in and tell you all the answers.” Yeah, it’s fun. It’s like a little game that we get to play in business that we didn’t [inaudible 00:25:01] realize we were playing. But it is very fun.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s very fun, right up until you realize that there are costs. And I don’t think anybody really talks about this, that on the one hand there’s cost to not solving problems and there’s also a cost to solving problems. And really what we’re talking about in this case is who should solve the problems? Not whether or not they should be solved. The problem is, like you said, part of why we have succeeded in our careers is because we take a lot of ownership. We see a need, we just go in and solve it. And I think that can be really helpful in the early stages of our business. And it can be really problematic later on. Because, frankly, there are just too many problems to solve.
I mean, that’s sort of the nature of business as you’re all, you’re solving problems for your customers, you’re solving internal problems, you’re dealing with problems externally, it’s just a lot of problems and you cannot do it on your own. This is not a job for a hero, this is a job for a team. So let’s dive in to what these three hidden costs are, and just kind of have a sober moment about what it’s costing us to solve problems that we shouldn’t be involved with in the first place.
The first one is development, and here’s what I’m talking about. When we’re solving problems exclusively, we are keeping people on our team from developing the muscle of solving their own problems. This is what Les, my coach, helped me to see is, yeah, you think you’re being helpful, but you’re actually hurting. You’re actually keeping the people on your team from developing their skills, from developing their confidence, and you’re not really preparing them to lead the company that you’re building for the future. And that’s a problem. So tell me what your thoughts are on that.

Courtney Baker:
Yeah, I think this is a really important one, and this might have been Les, it might have been you, Megan, someone said this to me recently, but, “To push the decision down to the lowest level of the organization.” And lately I’ve just been saying that to myself over and over again, and even to my directors to encourage them, “You don’t need to play the hero either. Push that decision down to the lowest level that the decision could be made at, and it’d be appropriate.”
And I think that does, that mindset allows everyone the ability to step up and step into a position where they get to build trust with themselves in making decisions. They get to display it to their supervisor, all the way up from me to you. It gives all of us an opportunity to develop that skill and not only to build confidence, but to build trust, I think, with each other, which is what’s needed for a really fantastic team.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, absolutely. And I think it was Les, thank you for trying to give me credit, but I’m giving it back to him, because it was his idea. He said, “Push the problem down to where it belongs.” So even if in doing that it exposes other problems like a skill deficit or a lack of confidence or something like that, at least now you can solve the real problem. When we race in, and gosh, Courtney, I’ve done this so many times, I just couldn’t even count, but when we race in to solve problems, we mask the real root problems.
And so it just kind of perpetuates whatever keeps causing these problems. And someday, when we find ourselves in that position of, “Oh, I’m tired of firefighting, I feel like I’m always firefighting,” that’s one of the things we hear often from new clients who join our coaching program. Oftentimes, that comes after a long season, I think, of solving problems that we really shouldn’t be involved with, because we just haven’t built that capability on our team.

Courtney Baker:
I have a question for you on this.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay. Tell me.

Courtney Baker:
Because I think that historically, you and I have worked together for over four years pretty closely, I would say in general, I think this is something that you’re really strong at.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Oh, well, thank you.

Courtney Baker:
But I wonder if it’s like, do you get to these places when an organization is developing that it just has to get realigned again? Is there moments where it’s like you’re tempted as a CEO to fall back into that?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
I’m just kind of posing that because, again, historically I would say you’re fantastic at really equipping your executive team and anybody on our team to do their work and do it fully. It’s one of the reasons I love working with you. So I’m just kind of curious, what is it about this moment in time that’s been like you’ve kind of had to reset that thinking?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s because everything’s a disaster. And I’m thinking about this for the first time. I think maybe the language around it is new for me. This idea around that Les shared with me that “founders make decisions and CEOs build teams that make decisions.” But I think that as we’re building businesses and maturing in our organizations, just like we talk about with the Freedom Compass, this concept that we teach within Business Accelerator about where you make your highest and best contribution, that’s not a fixed thing.
And so the decisions or the problems that were appropriate for me to solve five years ago, or even one year ago, are not the same ones that are appropriate for me to solve now or make those decisions on. In the same way that my highest and best contribution to our organization today is not the same as it was five years ago or a year ago. And so I think this is just a constant kind of giving away of your job in a way. It’s like we want to keep developing the people who report to us so that they can do more and more of the job we’re doing now, so we can step into the role that we need to for the future.
Even if the title doesn’t change, what it means to be a CEO for me today and what it will mean five years from now are not the same thing. I have to grow into that person. And so I think that’s where, maybe just to answer your question, I think that we’re just always evolving, and we need to let go of more things as time goes on.

Courtney Baker:
I might have been watching too much Rings of Power, because I’ve recently been sick, and… Do y’all like how I’ve taken this whole podcast and now I’m just asking you all the questions?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I love it Courtney. You know what? I’m just building a team that can make decisions. You leave this podcast.

Courtney Baker:
Okay. So when it comes to, because you talked about being able to hand off parts of your job and move on to the things that you need to step in more fully to take your organization to the next level, in a sense, you are giving up part of your role, you’re also giving up a little bit of your power.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yep.

Courtney Baker:
Again, maybe too much Rings of Power in my life right now, but is there ever a sense where you’re just like, “But I liked having all of that. It felt good”? Or how do you reconcile that in your thinking?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, certainly, every time you give up part of what you’ve done to narrow your focus so you have a greater impact, I think that it creates kind of a weird liminal space where you’re like, “Okay, now what do I do?” And I think that that’s okay. We have to just work through that till we get to the other side of clarity, of here’s what it means now to be a CEO, as I’ve given these things away, or an executive or whatever your context is.
So I think the other thing that we have to be conscious of is not abdicating. And what I’m not saying here is that we just abdicate. We just sort throw up our hands and walk off the field and leave it to the rest of the team. Obviously, the idea here is that we’re building and developing a team that’s capable of making decisions, which means that there’s probably certain kinds of oversight and mentoring and checkpoints and other things that are in play here. You’re not just handing somebody the checkbook and saying, “You make the decisions.” That’s not what we’re saying, and obviously that would be reckless. So I think that’s a good point of clarification.
Okay, well, let’s go on to the second hidden cost of solving problems, which is your own depletion. Okay, so we have cost number one is development of your team. Cost number two is your own depletion. And here’s the reality, and, gosh, we hear this all the time from new clients coming into the program. They are worn out from making decisions and solving problems. They use this language of firefighting a lot, because they just feel like they’re running around from one thing to the next. And it can really drain you.
And I had the opportunity this morning to meet with some of our brand new clients. And one of the things that occurred to me that happens when you’ve had a season where you’ve just been in firefighting mode, is that we end up not having the energy or kind of the emotional disposition to dream about the future anymore. Which is probably what we’re the best at, it’s probably where we’re making our highest and best contribution when we’re thinking about the future, planning for the future, envisioning it. But I think when we get depleted by making decisions and solving problems that are not necessarily the highest and best use of our time, the cost can be fatigue that really shows up in our contribution to the business. Have you had that experience, Courtney?

Courtney Baker:
I mean, never.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Never?

Courtney Baker:
I think what’s most challenging about this, is it usually is a season where all of a sudden it’s just fire after fire after fire, and you just feel like, “I don’t know how to get back to any kind of normalcy.” And then I know you mentioned this a minute ago about solving problems that you get a little bit of hit. I think you also get that when you’re firefighting, that adrenaline is off the charts. And there is a sense of fun in that, and a sense of fulfillment that you can get from that. And kind of get stuck in it to the sense you might start creating some fires yourself, just go put them out.
Ultimately, you leave that just totally burn out. Totally depleted. Totally unclear from the… Oh, man, I was about to make another Rings of Power analogy, and I’m not going to do it, because it would’ve been a spoiler. But just can’t see through all the smoke fumes to know where you’re actually going in your business.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, and this is, like I said a couple minutes ago, why we emphasize this concept of the Freedom Compass, this tool that we use to help people get clarity on where they can make their highest and best contribution. Because if you don’t know what the answer to that question is for yourself… And again, this is very evolutionary in its nature, it’s not fixed where you figure it out once and it’s the same 10 years later, absolutely not. But if you don’t have clarity on what’s at stake in terms of your contribution, then it’s so easy to default to this firefighting and get sucked into it and not get out of it, because you’re not clear on what that cost really is.
That leads us to cost number three, the final one here of solving problems, which is distraction. Back to the Freedom Compass again. I mean, when we’re solving problems that really somebody else could or should be solving, we are being pulled away from the things that only we can do. And the cost to our business is really our future potential. I mean, we need to be very clear about that. That when we get distracted as business owners, CEOs, executives, we are really writing a big check unconsciously that the future has to pay for. And I think that that is sobering, and I think it should help us to get clear on what the things are.
We talk about in the Freedom Compass, our desire zone is the intersection of our passion and our proficiency. But there’s also a distraction zone, which are things that we’re pretty passionate about, but we’re not necessarily that great at. So that would be for me, organizing the office or giving direction on how I want things to be in the office, when really somebody else could do that. Or on the flip side, the disinterest zone, which are things that we’re good at, but we don’t have any passion for. And there are so many things in both of those categories that can cause us ultimately to be distracted from bringing about the vision that we have for our company. And woo, it’s costly, isn’t it?

Courtney Baker:
Can I give an example that to your example, but-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.

Courtney Baker:
… share it from my perspective?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Sure.

Courtney Baker:
So I saw you do this in a very kind of near and dear to you project that you worked on for a very long time in the Full Focus planner.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
And some of our very first colors were your brain child. I mean, you worked really closely with that. And I remember Joel and I were talking about, “Hey, we feel like we need to go a little bit different direction with this.” I can’t remember all the specifics, but we kind of said, “We feel like we need to talk to Megan about maybe changing the name,” that’s what it was, “of the line of these planners.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes. Yes.

Courtney Baker:
And I said, “Okay, Joel, you can do that.” We joked about it, but when we talked to you about it, you not only were like, “Totally, you’re absolutely right. And matter of fact, I need to step out even further from this.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
I no longer need to be involved with this anymore.” And you basically said, “Now the decision, y’all are going to make those decisions.” I think that’s a really good example of a moment you could have leaned back into this and said… because I think you enjoyed it, you had fun doing it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I did. Oh, yeah, it was so fun. It was so fun.

Courtney Baker:
But it would’ve been a distraction for you to continue on in the role the way that you had been to that point.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, thank you for telling that story. That was a difficult moment for me, in that, like you said, this had been kind of my brain child, it was my baby. I loved the process of creating those planners and everything that was involved with that, with our product team. And I got a lot of significance out of it. But ultimately, nobody put me in this role to be designing product at that level. We have a whole team for that who are very capable and honestly far better than I am at that.
And what I had to realize is, as you and Joel were sharing this with me, in this, I vividly remember this meeting, I had to say it to myself, “You know what? There is going to be more where that came from in terms of things you love and feeling that sense of significance and creativity there. There’s plenty of that in the future. And you need to let this go so you can make space for what’s coming. And if you don’t, you’re going to hold the whole company back. Not to mention really frustrate your head of marketing and head of product at that point,” which is you and Joel.
You’ve since gone on to manage all of revenue in that capacity. But anyway, it was a moment of decision for me, and I’m grateful that I had the clarity in that moment to realize I needed to let it go.

Courtney Baker:
The other area that I think is interesting with this, and we’ve talked a lot about this as an executive team, when it comes to distraction and getting sucked into solving problems you probably shouldn’t, is now that we’ve kind of shifted to this more Slackesque type of communication that sometimes we end up getting tagged on everything-

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.

Courtney Baker:
… under the sun. And it’s basically like, “Well, I don’t really need to be making that decision, but it’s right here. It’s easy for me to just do it.” So much so that it’s easy to slip into that and realize, “Why am I answering these questions that someone else should be doing?” To the point that we’ve talked about, just saying like, “Hey so and so’s going to make this decision.” Rather than just being silent or abdicate, like you said earlier, of trying to actually pass it down to the appropriate person. I think that’s kind of a new, more modern technology issue that can kind of suck you into this distraction.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Totally, because it really democratizes decision making and visibility of information, you kind of have private channels or public channels. And so from our way of thinking, the more that can be open and public, the better. There are benefits of that. But the downside is that you and I and everybody else listening to this show, if you ask us, we probably have an opinion on it, right? If it’s visible.

Courtney Baker:
Not us.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I know. I don’t know who you’re talking about. If you see somebody asking, “Do you cover A or cover B?” I mean, I’m going to tell you which one I like, but in reality I don’t need to make that decision. And so I do think you’re right, there is a challenge in our technology where we see all this stuff, and it requires a lot of clarity and discipline to stay out of those things. But I think, to our topic today, and we’ll wrap up with this, part of how we address that and say no and exercise that discipline and have clarity is by really understanding what the hidden costs of solving problems are. That it costs us the development of our team, it costs us our own depletion, which really impacts negatively the future and it costs us distraction, which again, costs us the future.
And so I think getting clear on what is our highest and best contribution, and then how do we, as my coach Les McKeown says, “How do we push these problems down where they really belong and then solve the problem at that level? Then masking it with our own firefighting or putting our superhero cape on.”
So Courtney and I are not talking to you guys about this because we are super experts. This is vulnerably just sharing something that I’m learning in my own coaching relationship. But, gosh, this is part of why we are so passionate about coaching, because so often we see our problems through our own lens. But somebody else from the outside who’s an expert can see things in a much broader way and really challenge us to grow and reach our potential in ways that we just couldn’t on our own.

Joel Miller:
These two conversations bring me back to Michael Blastland in The Hidden Half. The influence of what we don’t know is sometimes shocking. Honestly, it’s the kind of thing that can even be paralyzing sometimes. So here’s what I want to leave you with. We can become aware of the influence that decisions are having in our business. We can become aware of the choices that we are making and what’s influencing those choices. We can also be aware of what it’s costing us to make all the decisions.
If we’re busy making all the decisions, we’re robbing our team of the chance of development. We’re also depleting our own energy and our own emotional stamina. Beyond that, we’re getting distracted. We’re just wasting our effort around things that other people could do just as well as us and maybe even better.
One of the things Professor Johnson talks about in The Elements of Choice is just how invisible choice architecture is. And I want to emphasize that because that ties in exactly with what Michael Blastland says, that there are invisible realities in the world that we inhabit and the decisions that we make are heavily influenced by those.
But now, I think, we’re equipped to know what some of those things are. We’re equipped to know what some of those dynamics are in a meeting, for instance, or in any conversation on our teams. We’re also equipped to know what the cost is to us if we don’t learn how to do that better and train our own teams how to do that better. If we don’t develop those skills in our employees, our businesses will not scale at the pace they otherwise could.
Here’s the other problem with the hidden half. There’s what we know and what we don’t know, but what we know can sometimes slip out of our minds. So if you’ve learned something that’s been of value on today’s episode, I want you to talk about it with your colleagues. I want you to talk about it with your friends. I want you to talk about it with somebody close to you. Because if you learn how to implement these ideas by talking about them, trying them out, actually putting them into practice, you’re going to stand a much better chance of learning them in such a way that they stick with you for the long run.
And that’s it for another episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. Thanks for listening. If you’re a business owner interested in learning more about our Business Accelerator coaching program, go to businessaccelerator.com. We help successful but overwhelmed small business owners like you scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. We’ll be back next week with another conversation to accelerate your business.