942: How to Reach Better Team Decisions with Less Drama with Janice Fraser

Pete Mockaitis

Janice, welcome.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, me too. I’m excited to be chatting about Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with a tale of a time you were enmeshed in a whole lot of drama.

Janice Fraser

Oh, boy. Well, you know, honestly, life will throw drama at you no matter what. I mean, we’ve all just lived through a whole bunch of drama, whether it was the pandemic or, you know, what have you.

So, you know, I’ve been through, let’s say, 3 economic meltdowns in my professional life. So we had going way back, we had 2000 when the dot com bust. I live in San Francisco, so the dot com bust ruined everything. And then, you know, 2008 was another time of total, like, right? Everyone thought the sky was falling, and it was.

I was raising money for a startup company that year. And I’ll tell you, I had no idea how I was ever going to hold my head up again because let’s see.  Get heavy for a minute, in February, my father died.

And then in May, my brother died, same year. And then 3 months later, the economic meltdown happened. And here I have this team of people who have come to help me build this company, and there was not gonna be any money. And I had to lay them all off and close the company.

I handed back a check to one of my investors. It was a really hard time.  And, you know, I was just crushed, and I thought I would never recover. I thought that this is it. Like, my career’s over.

You know, I was, what, 30 something, 35, and my career felt like it was over. And you know what? You put one foot in front of the other. And, you know, you cry in your beer to your friends and you keep going. And I, as an independently employed person, right, as a startup founder, I got a couple consulting gigs, and I connected with some friends, and I made some phone calls, and I reached out.

And it took a lot of courage to stand up. And then I started another company. It was the best one I ever did. And I sold it to a bigger company. And, you know, careers were made and life was happy again.

But, you know, when I say, like, less drama, the world has so much complexity to it. I want us all to be able to be as effective as we possibly can be, not in a, like, hustle culture kind of, you gotta work yourself to the bone kind of way. But, like, I just think it should be easier to get more done because you never know what’s going to happen, and there’s enough drama coming from the outside we don’t have to make our own. So, the idea of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama is about just letting the easy things be easy, helping us to move with flow so that we have more resilience when the unexpected comes down the pipeline.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, that sounds like some great outcomes we would all love to have. Can you tell us any particularly surprising means by which this is done?

Janice Fraser

So, I think that the surprise for a lot of people is how simple it all seems. I’m often taken, my attention is grabbed by methods that feel easy to use, easy to repeat, easy to adapt and pick up, but then they’re kind of under the surface, they’re hard to practice. It’s kind of like if you think about meditation. Well, what is meditation? So, we all do yoga or whatever, and you think, “I’m just going to sit and be quiet for a minute,” and that’s easy but meditation is actually hard because you’re doing it mindfully.

So, here’s an example, point A, point B. From the first job we have, we’re taught about goal-setting, “You have to set a goal. If you don’t set a goal, you’re not going to get where you want to go.”

I absolutely believe that, and we have lots of ways to do goal-setting but no one has ever mentioned or taught, at least not for me, that you have to start with understanding where you are right now, and no one has given me a framework or a tool for understanding, “Here’s where we are right now,” so that we can all reach that goal together. So, in business, you hear a lot of words like alignment, or buy-in, and “How do we get buy-in for something?” and all of that is about we want to get someplace together, so we want to reach that goal together.

But let’s say my team, half of my team is Denver, half of them is in Miami, and I need to get everybody to Albuquerque. Well, I live in San Francisco. If I give them driving directions from San Francisco to Albuquerque, my Denver and my Miami people aren’t going to get there. We’re not in the same place, so even though we know our goal, Albuquerque, we have to start by knowing where are we together, what is our starting place.

And so, I’ve developed and adapted some techniques for defining point A and getting alignment around point A, “Where are we starting from?” It goes like this. Situation, complication, then question, and answer. So, the situation, “We all need to get to Albuquerque.” Complication, “We’re in different cities starting out.” Question, “How do we get there?” Okay, now we can tell the answer.

So, situation, complication, question, answer, I did not develop that. That was developed by this wonderful woman in the ‘60s, her name is Barbara Minto. I think she’s an unsung hero. She was in the first graduating class of women coming out of the Harvard Business School, so she was in the first graduating class of women, and she went on to work at McKinsey Consulting, and really defined how they do strategy communications. And it’s called the Minto Pyramid Method.

So, situation, complication, “What is true right now? And what makes this moment complicated such that it’s a work to achieve our goal, our point B?” So, point-A-point-B thinking can help you have better meetings, it can help you with your project planning, it can help you manage your career, it has helped me be a better whatever, parent, partner, human.

So, point-A-point-B thinking, super, super simple and straightforward but you avoid so much drama if you just take a moment and say, “Are we all driving from Denver to Albuquerque?” “No, some of us are in Miami.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, we talked about driving from different locations to Albuquerque. Could you share with us how this situation, complication, key question, answer stuff can unfold in a real-life situation and be useful for folks?

Janice Fraser

Sure. Well, there’s an example that I like to use because it’s so relatable. I started a company with seven founders. This is going back 20 years. And we started that company at a time when our service offering was in great demand, it was a services company. We have more inbound interests than we could possibly handle. And I was the CEO and lead salesperson of this company, and I was just drowning.

Our close rates were really high, and others were involved in sales meetings here or there, but for the most part, I was kind of running the process. And I went to the partners and I was like, “I need to buy a printer,” $300, we were an all-virtual company, so they didn’t really see that I was drowning, but we’re all a virtual company. And I said, “I just need $300 to buy a printer. Are we all cool with that?”

And I’ll tell you, we argued for 10 minutes for six months why I want to buy a stupid $300-printer. It was excruciatingly painful.

Pete Mockaitis

Ten minutes for six months, like 10 minutes a meeting?

Janice Fraser

Ten minutes at our partner meeting every Tuesday because it was on the agenda. So, here I am like clawing my eyes out, like, “Ah, just let me buy a printer.” And, honestly, if I had to do it over, I would’ve just bought the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

And you’re the CEO with seven partners.

Janice Fraser

Yeah, but we were equal partners, and it was a CEO role and I didn’t get to wave my magic wand. Anyway, the problem there was that I had framed it up so the situation was I did not define the situation for my partners very well. I asked the wrong question, and I asked the wrong question because I hadn’t teed up, “What is the situation? What is the complication?”

The situation is lots of inbound interests. The complication is I was having trouble keeping it all straight, and juggling all of the big piece parts. The question that I should’ve asked is, that I should’ve brought to my partners is, “How can we support this level of sales without burnout forever? I have a suggestion. The suggestion is blah, blah, blah.” Suggestion is, “Other people should be participating.” Suggestion is, “I want a printer,” suggestion is whatever.

And so, the framing of the question led to the wrong debate. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis

So, framing the question, just like, “Just let me buy a printer.”

Janice Fraser

“Can I buy a printer?” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Just like you want one.

Janice Fraser

“Janice wants a printer because she’s a prima donna.” Right. Like, whatever the story was that they were telling themselves in their head, rather than, “How can we make our sales operation more sustainable?” And probably there were two or three other things that could’ve been done to make it a more sustainable operation.

Pete Mockaitis

So, this is so fascinating to me. What sorts of objections does one hear to, “I want $300 to buy a printer”?

Janice Fraser

So we were a consultant company, so it was a low-margin business, and this is me, I’m with my business person’s hat analyzing why people were doing what they were doing, which is always easier in hindsight than in the moment. And, literally, like one person was highly motivated by wanting to be a paperless company, absolutely from a kind of philosophical standpoint, they were just simply opposed to printers, whatever.

Another person literally said the words, “One-seventh of that money is mine.” Yeah, right?

Pete Mockaitis

“You can have one-seventh of the printer when we’re done with it.”

Janice Fraser

“One-seventh of $300 is not going to make or break you.” But people are motivated by different things. Some people thought that we just shouldn’t need it, “We didn’t have an office because we were an all-virtual company, and we’re going to put a printer in one person’s office? That doesn’t make any sense.” Again, these were dumb things. Like, I said, none of these makes any sense in retrospect.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it is dumb, and yet I think it is richly instructive for us to dig into this in incredible detail, which might sound odd. But it’s like, in all of our organizations, there’s dumb stuff that’s going on.

Janice Fraser

Yes, and it’s so human. It’s just so human. Everyone’s point of view here was legitimate to them.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, thusly, if you’ll indulge me to go in tremendous detail about this printer discussion, I think it can be illustrative for us all. So, your opening was just, “Hey, I want a printer,” as opposed to sharing how that could be an enabler. If you could give us an example of that, “Hey, this will enable the sales and such”? Can you spell that pathway for how having that printer will enable the sales team to be more effective?

Janice Fraser

Sure. So, the sales team, remember, so this is, at this point, was an eight-person company. We had employee number one. So, it’s seven co-founders, so equal partners in a partnership, and one employee, and no professional salespeople, like I was the sales lead, and we had a couple of other partners of those seven were participating in sales operations based on me setting up meetings, inviting them to the meetings.

And so, we had all these inbound interests, and I was spending as much time on our losses as our wins. And you can imagine, I’ve got, let’s say, four to six customers at any one time running through the sales process, with four to six participants on the customer side. So, now you’re at 24 to 40 people, humans, that I’m keeping track of in my mind, that I’m interacting with.

Now, I’ve got 40 people living in my head, as many as, living in my head all the time on a rotating revolving door basis. How do we keep that straight? And so, for me, what I wanted was to have kind of a stack of folders, physical folders, where my most important, most recent notes were on top. And so, for me, I would, like, be on a sales call, and I would type, type, type, type, type. At the time, I was doing this myself.

And I would summarize that stuff, and I would want to print that out so that the most relevant information was always at the ready so that if I needed it, I could context-switch simply through physical manipulation of stacks of paper.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Janice Fraser

So, that’s what I wanted.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you just got to print notes, “So, I could stick them in folders and move them around. That’s what I want.”

Janice Fraser

Like, I just needed a way to keep my brain straight. I was, like, my brain was coming out of my ears.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Okay. But you didn’t offer that kind of context or path. It was just sort of like, “Hey, I want a printer. Can I just get a printer?”

Janice Fraser

Yeah, I didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And you probably didn’t think it was going to be that hard, “I need a printer. Can we just do that? Okay. Oh, we can’t. Oh, really? Oh.”

Janice Fraser

Exactly. I thought it was a trivial ask.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you had to bring the big guns in terms of laying out the pathway. So, then did you ever get that printer, Janice?

Janice Fraser

I did. I did eventually get the printer. And like I said, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have asked permission. I’d just go buy the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, totally, “The receipt is in the reimbursements. Are we going to fight about it now? Well, I got the printer.”

Janice Fraser

Yup, live and learn. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lovely. Well, I think that is instructive in terms of if we frame up the situation, complication, key question, and answer in a way that is resonant for the different stakeholders and the different things that they value and care about, that’s really cool, and then that’s a compelling story, like, “If I have this printer, we are going to significantly increase the revenue that can come through this because I am, in some ways, a bottleneck as the single sales professional in the midst of overwhelming demand.”

So, there we have it. All right. Well, that is just one of many tools that you share in your book. Can you lay out a couple more with us? You say you’ve got one tool to rule them all. It’s a two-by-two. What’s this one?

Janice Fraser

This is another one that if you’ve done any work time in consulting companies, you’ll recognize it. We call it the two-by-two. It goes by many names, and it is, I think of it as a virtual or physical sorting grid. And the way that I prefer to use it is, at a blank wall, I literally stand at a wall, and I take blue painter’s tape, and I make a big plus sign. So, there are four quadrants, and the way that I organize it is a little different than kind of you may have heard of before.

I choose two different criteria, one for each axis. And on the vertical axis, it’s whatever the criteria it’s an obvious yes-no, “Is it important? Is it not important?” Like, if it’s not important, I don’t want to think about it. So, find whatever my criteria that’s a yes-no, I put that top to bottom, yes on top. And then, on the horizontal axis, I think of, “What is the criteria that is a yes-maybe?” And I put the yes on the side, on the right side, and the maybe on the left.

And if you construct your two-by-two sorting grid this way, you can take whatever your ideas, your options, you can plot them into these four quadrants based on, “From one perspective, this is an absolute yes. But from another perspective, that, I’m not sure.” So, I think an easy-hard. So, let’s say you’re building software. You have 20 product features that you know would be great additions, or you think would be great additions, that everyone has requested.

So, a product manager has the job of prioritizing, “Which ones are we going to build and not build?” Well, from one perspective, it’s easy to do but from another perspective, it’s not that important. It doesn’t help the user or the business at all. So, you’ve got easy but unimportant. Well, that’s going to fall down to this one quadrant, this bottom right quadrant. And even if it falls in the bottom right quadrant, this is the stuff I call seductive distractions.

From one perspective, it is, “Yes, it’s easy to do.” From another perspective, it’s a, “No, it’s not important. Why would you bother?” You’d be shocked to know how many unimportant things end up in a product backlog and waste your time, waste your developer’s. And so, these are the things that cause people to argue.

Imagine that you’re in a product prioritization meeting, and you don’t have a tool like the two-by-two that makes this very obvious that there’s a no. You could easily get into a 30-, 50-minute discussion, argument, debate about whether or not to include this feature, “Well, it’d be easier to do, we should just throw it in there.” But you shouldn’t do it because it’s not important.

And so, what a tool like this does is it puts the real depth of conversation on, “What are the decision criteria that we agree to?” So, rather than having the real conversation be, “Should we build this feature?” That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “How should we choose which features to build?” Well, it’s only, “Build the ones that are important.” Okay, that sounds like a no-brainer, “Okay, let’s build the ones that are important.”

So, now if you’re using this two-by-two diagram, this sorting grid, is what I call it, then you’re only going to have a debate about the ones that are an obvious yes from one perspective, but a maybe from another perspective so you eliminate 75% of the discussion required because it’s just so obvious the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, what’s distinctive about this is one of the axes is pretty much binary, and so it in terms of like, “That’s it. Almost no user cares about this feature. Ergo, it’s not important so we just don’t even need to, or put our little heads about it for a minute, or not even a minute.” So, you can get right into it. Now, can you share with us some other contexts where this can be illuminating?

Janice Fraser

So, we use this in pretty much every aspect of life, and I’m not kidding.

Pete Mockaitis

“What should I eat for lunch? Is it delicious and nutritious?”

Janice Fraser

“Is it delicious? Do I have the materials? Can I make it?” We’ve done two-by-twos for everything. Everything from kind of disruptive strategy at very, very large companies. Or, actually, I did this with the Navy Seals training command. 

So, I taught this, I led a workshop where I could not actually physically see any of the two-by-twos that they were creating. I simply coached them through the steps and answered their questions as they went because it was a highly secure environment. So, it can apply to any situation where there are many choices, and you have to be able to reveal which choices makes sense, and which ones do not.

And so, in the preparation for one of these kinds of high-stakes facilitations, I worked with my clients to figure out, “What is the body of ideation that we want to do? What is the range of ideas that we want to generate, or thoughts that we want to elicit from our participants?” And then, “What are the choice criteria that will help us to know which ones are the correct ideas to move forward with and which ones we ought to let go of?”

And, usually, I can find a way to layer in three or four different criteria. So, it could be importance, easy-hard, urgency, what have you. And so, if we want to go from a wide range of ideas represented down to, let’s say, four or five things that we intend to do that we’re actually going to do, in one hour I can get 20 people to generate 200 ideas and come down to six using this two-by-two method.

And the way that you do it is you say, “All right, I’d like everyone to come up with 10 ideas, one idea per Post-It note. And in 10 minutes, you’ve got 200 ideas, and then you spend the next 50 minutes reducing that from 200, to 100, to 50, and we do that using the two-by-two.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, that’s cool. And I think it’s nice because you really put a spotlight on, “What are the criteria that we’re using here?” And if that is left beneath the surface, poor criteria can rule the day, “It’s easy. It’s fun. I’m really just interested in this kind of project. This seems cool.” And so, it’s like, “All right. Well, that’s notable but what’s the goal here? Is the goal just for you to enjoy yourself? Or is the goal more of an economic profits-minded kind of a thing?”

And so then, you can recognize whether it seems cool and fun and easy and interesting is a valid criterion that we should utilize here, or if we should say, “Oh, I guess we actually have to be disciplined grownups and put our personal preferences to the side on this particular context.”

Janice Fraser

Well, so much friction and wastes results from people arguing over something that they’re not actually explicitly saying.

So, we end up with this proxy that the friction and the waste and slowness often is the result of a proxy argument. You’re arguing over something on the surface but, really, there’s something underneath that that’s more of the issue. And if you could just have that conversation, you could resolve it. So, for instance, you could say, one of the yes-no axis is, “Does it cost more than $100 or not? Like, if it costs more than $100 that’s an obvious no because we’re broke.” You see.

So, instead of arguing over the thing that’s the proxy, you can have a meaningful conversation to align on the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And I’m curious, do you have any favorite words, or phrases, or means of going deeper there? Because if folks aren’t surfacing their real concern, they may very feel kind of sensitive about it. How do you recommend we go there?

Janice Fraser

So, I think a lot about, “What are the prompts?” When we ask a question that inspires people to come up with new thinking, that’s what I call a prompt. I actually think a lot about prompts. I craft them very deliberately because I want to elicit information from the people that I’m collaborating with. So, putting this back in a work context, what we’re talking about here is collaboration to make progress.

And when I write the prompt, I’m thinking about, “What is the underlying question?” again, we’re back at point A, “What’s the underlying question that will help us orient honestly in the present moment?” And that’s why I ask questions like, “How will we know, how might we recognize the right thing to do? Like, what are the things that matter most in making this selection?”

And I value those conversations, and sometimes it can feel, to people who aren’t familiar in working with me, it can feel a little bit slow at first, but then the wrap-up happens so easily that we make up for all that time. So, if we spend 10 minutes having a conversation about, “What are the decision criteria? How will we recognize something that is the right answer?” we’re going to get our heads on straight together and that’s going to make it easier for us to recognize the right path forward, the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Okay. Well, so you mentioned this waste. In your book, you highlight two pernicious kinds of wastes. It sounds like we hit one. What’s the other?

Janice Fraser

Yeah, okay. So, when it comes to decision-making, there are really two big ways that we waste. There’s the kind that happens before the decision is made, and the kind of happens after the decision is made. So, there’s before a decision is made, we end up with these slow decisions, and it sounds like, “Oh, they’re never going to make a decision. We’ve been talking about this forever. Six months, we’re talking about a freaking printer. Are you kidding me?”

So, when a decision is taking a really long time, it’s often because we’ve set the wrong kind of standard, and it’s like, “Is this the right thing to do? Is this the best decision? Do we all agree?” Those three sentiments all set this very, very high standard for the quality of decision and the amount of support that the decision has. And what that leads to is deliberation. So, that’s how you get extensive talking.

So, with the printer example that we talked about earlier, it was, “Do we all agree this is the right thing to do? Is it really necessary for seven people to have complete agreement, and that is unequivocably the right thing to do?” “No, no, this does not rise to that level of importance.” Compared to like, “Do we all agree it’s the right thing to do to pull the plug on grandma?” Like, “Okay, now, we should probably all have consensus, and we should all know that it’s right, unequivocably.” So, that’s the first kind of way, is setting the wrong standards for the quality and alignment of our decision.

After a decision is made, the other kind of waste is the waste that happens if a decision is like a snap decision that’s made by fiat or that’s made by gut instinct. Have you ever been on a call and on a Zoom meeting, and you’re watching all 25 talking, all 25 heads, and a decision is made, and you could just see the looks on their face. They’re going to go back to their desks and do whatever they want because they don’t agree with whatever, but nobody is going to say anything.

So, if a decision is made in too-cavalier a fashion without sufficient attention being paid to building support and depth of understanding, then what you end up with is decisions that are reversed, or they’re reversed and nobody talks about it so now there’s chaos. And what happens there is that you erode trust and belief in the quality and nature of the decisions that get made in your organization.

And so, that breeds resentment, and lack of trust, and a lot of churns, and people doing things in conflict with one another because person A doesn’t believe in it, so they’re going to go off and do their own thing, person B is going to do the same thing but without talking to person A about it, so you end up with this entropy chaos-type of situation.

So, what we want instead is to think about decisions, like as, “What could a middle ground be?” And I ask two questions. One, “Can we all live with it?” because if no, if you can’t live with it, that’s important to know. If your lawyer is like, “I cannot live with that. That exposes us to too much risks.” That’s super important information. So, “Can we all live with it?” is a really helpful thing to ask.

And, “Does it move us toward our point B? Does it obviously help us make progress?” because if a decision is something that everyone can live with, that obviously makes progress, it’s probably a good-enough decision.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s nice in terms of good enough as opposed to…

Janice Fraser

Right or best.

Pete Mockaitis

…striving internally for optimal, universal acclaim by consensus may be a fool’s errand in certain contexts.

Janice Fraser

Right. I just can’t, I can’t even. It really drives me nuts when people are, like, debating, as if continuing to talk will actually give us new insight. Sometimes we need to just stop talking and move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that. There’s a time and a place where we want to raise the bar. I think about my conversation with Greg McKeown here in terms of essentialism, in terms of if you’re clearing out your closet, “Might this ever be useful someday?” is a very low bar, and you’ll not get rid of very much stuff. Just everything might be useful someday. Versus a Marie Kondo question, “Does this spark joy?” Okay, now there’s a very high bar. Not a lot of things are going to go there.

And so, here, we’re sort of playing it in reverse. It’s like there’s a time when we want to have a very high bar for this decision, and the consensus, and everyone jazzed about it, and then there’s a time where we should have a lower bar, and there’s a little bit of an art of leadership there in terms of making that determination for where this falls along the continuum.

Janice Fraser

And you mentioned the spark of excitement, and one of the things that keeps us in a really boring middle ground is not being willing to take risks. And sometimes, I think, when we start to see organizations shifting how they frame up decisions, and, “Do we all agree this is the right decision to make?” like, if we all agree it’s the right decision, we’re never going to take any risks.

I made a highly controversial decision at one point in my career. Again, I was a leader of a company, just a small company, but it was tiny but mighty. And we made a product, and we ended up selling it to Google within a year of developing the product. It was such a cool outcome. And shortly after the transaction was closed, and we returned a nice big check to all of the shareholders in the company, everyone was excited, one of the shareholders was very upset, and said that it was the worst decision the company had ever made. The worst decision the company had ever made because it put us at such risk.

And it really landed with me because I was feeling so proud of what we had accomplished, and I was so pleased with the decision-making acumen of the board of directors that allowed us to take that decision, even though one of the shareholders was so risk-averse. Because if we all have to agree that something is unequivocably the right thing to do, we’ll never do anything bold.

So, I’m still really proud of that product, and that set of decisions, and that way of bringing something new to market, and helping everyone make good-enough decisions that kept the company safe enough that we could take a calculated risk.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Janice, that’s really a beautiful perspective that you have as you reflect on this because I think myself, and others with some people-pleasing tendencies, might look back on that, and sort of wonder, “Oh, I don’t know, is that person right? And did we make the wrong call after all?” Whereas, you said, “I love the fact that we went after this, and one person was really upset. That’s really cool of us.” So, I love that perspective.

Janice Fraser

And, honestly, like he took home a cheque for like $400,000.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go.

Janice Fraser

Like, “Dude, it’s fine.” I’m not happy that he was upset. I’m happy that we were able to have a vision and move forward even without consensus. So, there was some research done about the best venture capital investment decision-making. And what turned out to be true was high conviction, low consensus led to the best outcomes in venture funds.

So, that means that, at the partner table, all the people that are sitting around, debating whether or not we should invest in XYZ company, what you needed to really have good outcomes was somebody had to see outrageous potential, outrageously positive potential. And even though everyone couldn’t see it, if somebody saw that there was outrageously possible potential, then there was a capacity, like that potential could be realized.

So, high conviction but low consensus means that it took a leap of faith to believe in it. And I look at the challenges that we have as a planet right now, whether it is war in multiple places, or economic uncertainty, high inflation, climate change, political divisiveness, these are really big challenges. This generation, I think a lot about, my son is 22, my daughter is 35. So, she’s peak Millennial, he’s peak Gen Z, and I think about these young professionals that are coming into the workplace, and we need them to be bold. We need them to help us through some really difficult challenges.

And so, I want us to embrace high conviction, low consensus opportunities to explore big leaps forward in our culture, in our world.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s intriguing that low consensus is advantageous, like, that is better than high conviction, high consensus. Can you unpack this pathway for me a little bit more? Is it that it’s because of VC funds, and VC funds tend to prosper when they have a few bets that pay off massively as opposed to the majority of their bets do pretty well?

Janice Fraser

They don’t tend to. They only prosper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like that’s the way of the VC fund, as opposed to a mortgage lender. It’s a different risk gain.

Janice Fraser

So, I’m going to say it’s not just the way of VC funds. It is the way of anything innovative, actual innovation, all innovation across. And this is something that I spend a lot of time looking at. The numbers are in, the math works. If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo, then you will be taking risks, and a small number of those risks will pay very high returns. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean, in whatever.

A lot of the organizations that I work with are, like I worked with the Air Force, like they’re not necessarily profit-making contexts. It’s about creating disruptive results. And the thing about disruption, and I mean this in a sort of business school sense of disruption, like there’s a guy, Clayton Christensen, who developed disruption theory.

The thing about it is that is a fundamentally optimistic act. Our innovators, whether they’re economic innovators, political innovators, they are imagining a world that is different and somehow better. And that imagination, we need to have ways and methods for harvesting the insight and imagination of people who imagine better, and who are willing to wrestle with the status quo in order to make improvements in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, I guess, in a way, low consensus is, in a way, an indication of the innovativeness of the thing. Because if everyone says, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Everybody, all loves it.” Well, odds are, if everyone feels that way, it’s probably already done, or it is so obvious that it is not disruptive.

Janice Fraser

Well, if it’s so obvious and it is disruptive, there’s some reason that it’s not been done, and so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess I’m just thinking for listeners, like a takeaway is, “Hey, everyone thinks this is a terrible idea but I’m really gung-ho about it, and Janice said that’s exactly what I want.” Is that the takeaway? Or how should we view high conviction, low consensus?

Janice Fraser

No. So, it’s not “I want.” It’s “What if this were true, how good would it be?” So, the framing, again, it’s, “What is the framing? If this were true, how good would it be? And then, what would we need to learn in order to find out whether it’s true, whether it’s possible?” And that’s where you get things like, there are terms like MVP, where it’s the smallest thing you can do to test out the critical path idea, that kind of thing.

So, it’s not “I believe in this, therefore, I’m going to shove it down everybody’s throat.” It’s, “I believe in this. What’s the smallest thing we can do to figure out whether it’s right?” So, it comes with a degree of humility, that high conviction, conviction doesn’t mean blind faith. Conviction means, “I’ve seen some indicators that there’s real potential here. Not everybody sees it yet, but I do.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Janice Fraser

So, there’s actually a quote from my book that I sit with a lot and I pay a lot of attention to, and it goes something like this, “We no longer believe in work-life balance. It’s all just life. And what we want is to make it a life filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning.”

And it’s not because I believe in hustle culture, and I think that you should have no boundaries between work and the rest of your life. It’s actually kind of the opposite. It’s more that I want life to infect your work. Who we are at work, what happens to us at work, the pains and joys that we experience at work, the kinds of decisions we make at work, they alter who we are as people.

And if we can be really attentive and mindful to being ourselves wherever we go, we will end up building a life that is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. And if we have a planet filled with people who have fulfilling satisfying lives, I believe we’re going to make better decisions on that global geopolitical kind of scale.

So, I think that that is the thought that I would want to leave people with, is that you’re allowed to have a life filled with confidence, patience, security, love, meaning. These things really do matter, and they matter at work as much as at home.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Janice Fraser

Well, my favorite tool that helps me be awesome at my job is Google, Google Docs, the Google Suite. I have a long, long, long list of tools, and the one that I could not live without is G Suite. And I’m surprised by how few people notice how powerful it is. You could do everything on G Suite.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Janice Fraser

When I get up in the morning, I sit for one hour and do something I love.

Pete Mockaitis

For example?

Janice Fraser

Usually, it’s I drink coffee and I read a book, and I pet my cat in a favorite chair with the curtains open and the sun shining in, but I spend one hour every morning doing something I love, sometimes it’s social media, let’s be honest.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Janice Fraser

Yup, figure out the truth. Figure out what’s true and make it a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Janice Fraser

JaniceFraser.com. J-A-N-I-C-E-F-R-A-S-E-R.com.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Janice Fraser

Well, the call to action is I would love it if you would take a look at the book. If it looks interesting to you, give it a try. I read the audiobook, so if you want to hear me talking in your ear, that’s the best way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Janice, this has been fun. Thank you. I wish you much speed and little drama.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much, Pete.