Everything Should Have a Home

When business problem solving feels chaotic, the instinct is usually to slow down. To think harder. To try again.

Sometimes those techniques work, but often there’s a different approach needed.

What’s missing isn’t usually insight or effort. Teams don’t need more time, or even to communicate their ideas more clearly.

What’s often going on is that the chaos is caused by things not having a home, or those things lacking structure.

Leaders who understand these dual root causes, and who can deploy interventions, will save a lot of headaches for themselves and the team.

The First Problem: Things Without a Home

Ideas come up in meetings and disappear.
Errors get noticed but never written down.
Tasks get mentioned, but they don’t get done.

You get burned by a risk on a project, but you know you and the team talked about it three months ago. What happened?!

It didn’t get documented. It didn’t get put in its home. It wasn’t put into a system where it could be processed.

Everything needs a home. It needs to be contained.

When something doesn’t have a place to land, it floats. And floating things consume attention out of proportion to their importance.

People don’t need everything solved immediately.

They need to know it’s being held somewhere other than their head. They need to know that it’s being put into the system.

This is why simple things work:

• A “parking lot” for ideas that come up during an offsite.
• Error logs
• Risk registers
• Task lists

If this problem doesn’t resonate yet, try it yourself. Brainstorm the top 10 things you need to do today, but don’t write them down - keep them in your head. At the end of the day, how many got done? How often did you think about the list during the day? Were you stressed?

On the next day, brainstorm again, but this time write them down. How does that feel? I bet it feels great. You don’t need to remember. All that cognitive load is freed up to focus on the task at hand.

The Second Problem: Things Lack Structure

This problem is subtler. It’s about orientation and architecture.

Or it’s like the old “joke” about three blind men touching different parts of an elephant. They’re all talking about the same thing, but are describing it differently. It feels like disagreement, but in practice they’re all talking about different elements of the same object.

This failure mode often looks like a conversation that feels tangled. You’re sort of talking about the same thing, but not quite. It’s not resonating. People are talking past each other. Things get tense.

Let me illustrate this one with an example.

A Two Short Examples

I was on a recent call where a team was deep in a technical and project discussion.

It started off well. Ideas were flying. I could see the merits in each suggestion and how they fit together. But pretty soon the conversation got tangled and tense. I could see people getting confused and frustrated.

Then it dawned on me. Not everyone was using the same mental map I was. I saw how some things were short-term versus long-term (sequencing). I saw how some things were quick fixes versus features versus architecture. And then there was another layer of which problem was being addressed by the suggestion, which further complicated things.

So I paused the conversation to zoom out and share the map.

I said, “I think we’re actually all in agreement. Here’s how I see it.” And then I said we’ve got three buckets; fixes to the existing product that we need to get out ASAP, new features for the existing product we need to ship next week, and finally, changes to the architecture to make this problem easier to solve for future clients.

I pointed out how one person was talking about solving problem A with a quick fix, and doing so immediately. I pointed out how another person was talking about fixing problem B with a new feature next week. I showed how everyone’s points fit on the map.

Once I did that, everyone realized they were in agreement. The conversation ended and everyone got into action mode. Less time arguing, more time solving customer pain.

As a bonus example, I was on another call solving a different problem. Everyone on the call had a different role, so everyone saw the root cause of the problem differently. Pretty soon the conversation became a debate; one problem versus another.

But actually, ALL of the factors were contributing to the problem. It was an AND, not an OR. These problems were not mutually exclusive where only one could exist. There are pricing issues to look at, and there are execution problems to look at, and there are capacity problems to look at.

All I did was share the three buckets and point out how they will each need to be addressed. Now everyone realized it wasn’t an argument. Their point had been made and recorded. We could move forward into solving them.

Placement and Structure Change the Nature of Conversation

Giving things a home, and giving things structure, are two powerful leadership moves to untangle complicated problems and conversations.

This is especially true in modern remote work with Zoom meetings. It’s common for everything to stay in the mental / verbal realm. People try their best to remember the issues and ideas, and they try to communicate how they see the world through language.

But memories and language are imperfect. Everyone has different experiences and biases. We need another approach.

Instead of saying the same thing harder, we make sure everything has a home and we create structure. That done, people can more easily interact with the system and see how the pieces fit together.

Containment solves: “Does this have a home?”
Structure solves: “How does this fit in relation to everything else?”

Containment reduces stress.
Structure creates shared reality.

Good leaders do both, and usually in that order. Contain what’s floating. Orient what’s tangled.

If you skip containment people get anxious. If you skip structure people get confused.

Where This Breaks

Like most things, you can get this move wrong. And it usually relates to ownership and forward action.

If you’re putting things in a home, but that home isn’t part of a system, or no one owns resolution, then the home is just a dumping ground and things don’t get resolved.

If you write your task list on a piece of paper, but you actually manage your day on your computer and never look at the list, you didn’t really solve a problem.

On the structure side, if you’re constantly debating the map and the architecture, but nothing is getting done, then it remains an academic exercise.

The point of structure is to create clarity and forward progress.

The Question to Ask

When things feel noisy or tense, I don’t ask:

• What’s right?
• Which thing should we prioritize?
• Who is wrong?

I ask: Is there anything floating? Are we all touching different parts of the elephant?

Some things need a place to land. Others need a map.

Both are excellent leadership moves.

Call to Action

Be sensitive this week; look for people feeling anxious or confused.

Look for floaters. Are there ideas, risks, tasks, or other elements floating without a home? If so, give them one. Even if it’s just a list where everyone can see it, that works.

If there are no floaters, check if everyone sees the same map. If people are confused, see if you can create structure. Even naming groups of things (like in my examples above) can be a form of structure.

If this works for you, let me know! Tell me about it at kevin@catalyst.group18.co.

Kevin