Imagine this. You say to your friends: We should open a bar! (1) Then you explain in details all the tiny details that will make this bar an awesome place! It’s perfect. Now we all just have to put some hundreds of thousands of bucks and we can make it happen!

Obviously that perfect idea never happens.

I feel this is sometimes how we pitch big cultural changes within our organizations. We come with on fancy and perfect new idea. And we give all the details of how it should be.

Then what happens? For the decision makers this feels way too complex and huge. So they say: no. If we can’t make it work then let’s not make anything.

It feels like a trap. Do perfect or don’t do. But if you offer multiple options. Showing different ways we could approach the dream suddenly the conversation changes. It’s not a trap anymore. We are discussing not if we should do the one perfect thing, but we discuss which one of the options could make more sense.

It’s a harder to refuse to make progress on making your service more sustainable when it doesn’t feel like a trap.

Action question

What are 3 different options you can present to propose a move to make your service or organization more sustainable?

Footnote

(1) That’s a classical beautiful idea that we often pitch to our friends (having had a few drinks usually helps).

The inspiration behind this principle

This principle is based on a conversation I had with Michel Sterckx, a project manager working on a big sustainability project for the Salvation Army in Switzerland. The conversation was in French:

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

• Another title for this principle was "Give multiple options to decision makers"