O my aging bones. I have been doing this for thirty years now, helping clients and steering teams across meeting rooms, floors, cities, continents, time zones, and the occasional emotional minefield. The longer I do it, the more suspicious I become of bright and clever easy answers. I sat in rooms with whiteboards so clean they squeaked, decks so polished they could be used as mirrors, and plans so confident they could walk into traffic with a baseball cap on. Somewhere early on, a mentor of mine, a patient human with sharp eyes, a scalpel mind and very little tolerance for nonsense, gave me the best advice I ever received. Do the right thing and do it right. It sounded like something you’d embroider on a cushion, until I discovered it is an energy burning, daily wrestling match with reality. Because the universe, life, team members and clients have an utterly annoying habit of disagreeing on what “the right thing” actually is. Add a dash of my long-standing fascination with three-body problems, systems where everything affects everything else in unpredictable ways, and you get what I now privately call the Tri-Lego Dilemma. Simple advice, endlessly complicated possibilities to solutions and execution.
Most briefs quietly lie to you. A client shows up with a briefing, an RFP, a burning question, an ROI expectation, neatly typed and confidently sent. The unspoken assumption is that responding perfectly to that document is the right thing, especially if it is done flawlessly. Except… is it? Henry Ford, the industrialist who turned cars into a middle-class utility, famously said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Charles Kettering, the engineer behind the electric starter and half of modern General Motors, put it even more bluntly: people want change, as long as it’s exactly the same as before. So when someone asks me to answer and execute a brief “perfectly,” my default answer is no, followed closely by “are you out of your mind”. Because a brief often describes the horse people think they need, not the terrain they are actually trying to cross.
LEGO, the Danish toy company that made plastic bricks into a global language of imagination, is useful here, because it exposes our professional bad habits in bright primary colors. Give ten ten-year-olds the same LEGO Friends Space box, complete with instructions and a picture of the finished spaceship, and you get ten variations of the same pre-chewed answer. Everything is technically correct, every model looks like the promise on the box, and nobody has actually learned very much about space, gravity, or how to navigate in an asteroid belt.
If all we do is build exactly what the brief tells us to build, we are paid way too handsomely to be just obedient.
I do not want the box. I want all the LEGO randomly smeared across the table, the sorted piles destroyed, the instructions ruthlessly tossed aside. I want my teams to look at the context, the problem behind the problem, the hidden interactions, the opportunity nobody dared to mention, the concealed dangers, the non-discussions, the rusty bolts holding the whole thing together. I want the uncomfortable questions asked out loud, the model turned around until it hurts… until the glorious moment where/when someone says, “Wait, are we sure this is even the right battlefield?”. Refusing to confuse compliance with value is a sign of strategic respect.
Somewhere in all of this, the number 42 keeps tapping me on the shoulder like an annoying, old, but always correct friend (I miss you, Douglas Adams). In that old sci-fi joke we all secretly love, 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, but the real joke is that nobody remembers or questioned the question. That detail matters more with age. Briefs are usually very confident answers looking for validation, not questions looking for understanding. The real work starts when you slow the room down and ask what problem we are actually solving, for whom, and in what universe this solution is supposed to survive. Answers are cheap, especially when they come pre-numbered and pre-approved. Questions are where the strategy hides, quietly, waiting for someone brave enough to look a bit stupid and ask them.
If you build LEGO strictly by the pieces and instructions in the box, you are nowhere near a strategist, you are a builder, probably an excellent one, and there is honor in that craft. Strategy starts earlier, messier, with dirt under the fingernails and the risk of being wrong… even about what the question is. It is the difference between assembling a mighty perfect combat knife because everyone else brought one and spending a long night inventing a rapid-fire bow and arrow because you mapped out the fight is happening across a river. One of those wins awards for craftsmanship, the other changes the outcome.
I would rather create a tailored solution for a stress-tested opportunity than deliver a perfect replica of a picture someone else imagined in a calmer room. Do the right thing, then do it right, in that order, even when it means emptying the box onto the table and living with the chaos for a while. That is where the real answers tend to hide. It’s where the fun is.
42
