#74 - Controlled Oscillation

It’s easy to decide on a position and stick to it. And then once you’ve made that decision — that commitment — inertia surrounds you and everyone around you and then you get after it. That should happen less.

I think there’s great power in actually being purposeful in adopting points of view, even after you’ve made a decision. By doing this, you get to “live” in different contexts, exploring the crevices of an idea or concept or path… mining the good stuff from that area, before you purposefully shift to a different one and repeat.

Here’s the example today:

You decide that your team is going to launch new onboarding experience to give people hands-on guidance as they learn about and ultimately decide to use your product. Your team does all the research on the market, the tactics; you liked some LinkedIn post that

was structured

like this

to make sure

you get the point

and keep scrolling

to learn that human-led onboarding is super powerful

so that you ultimately like whatever they posted, because everyone’s doing this approach now

So, you make the decision and start building your new experience and even testing it. Great, right? Maybe. The problem here is that people go so deep on this approach, that they might lose sight of the merits of one others.

This is why you should have structured oscillation. Someone on the team (you) should be thinking: “Well, what if humans could NEVER talk to a customer when they onboard? What would we do then?” —> And then you should just stay in that questioning zone. You should think deeply about that zone, and maybe you convince yourself that it’s the better approach.

This is the point where you absolutely f*ck inertia and go back to your team and say, “Folks, I know we made the decision to go down this path. OK, but work with m here: what if …..” and then make your case again. Debate, overcome the “ugh, dude, no. We’ve already made the decision” because your job shouldn’t be to just produce outputs, it should be to achieve the goal, and it turns out there are usually multiple ways to achieve it.

And then after these contemplations, these moments of frustration, you oscillate back to the group’s POV, but maybe in that journey to the other view you found something golden that helps make the original strategy more powerful.