The Power of Three...How I Learned To Make Better Decisions.
I try not to read the news too often because it’s all become so polarizing. We can’t seem to stop defining everyone and everything through the lens of either/or - either law is conservative or progressive, a politician is elitist or populist, either you love Twitter, or you’re leaving it…you get the idea. Interestingly, this tendency toward black-and-white thinking also shows up with my coaching clients, and that’s what got me thinking. Whether we’re evaluating a policy, a business decision, a family issue, or a personal problem, we are all guilty of binary thinking.
Research shows that the average person makes approximately 35,000 decisions a day. Of course, many of these are small and not all that relevant in the long term – when we wake up early or late, whether to drive or take the train to an appointment. But what about the more consequential decisions we make? What about when we are switching jobs or careers or if we want to change how we work or where we live? Viewing these decisions through an either/or framework is a trap. We fail to be expansive in our approach when we automatically default to binary thinking.
Binary thinking, by definition, is believing that there are two sides to an issue or problem, and you can only pick one. It seems useful initially because the two options tend to be the extremes, so they are clear, measurable, and convincing. But when deciding between two options, I push my coaching clients to find a third way. For example, if a client is going back and forth between moving the family abroad for one year versus staying home, a third option to consider could be going abroad for the summer. It’s less of a disruption than moving for the entire school year, and summer vacation is generally a time when we are open to changing our routines and surroundings; perhaps the family will be more receptive to the adventure if presented with this third option. In college admissions, what lies between acceptance and rejection? Deferrals, gap years, transferring…in other words, any number of third ways. Torn between continuing to run your business or selling it? How about considering a third lane: keeping the company but bringing in a COO for hire to run the day-to-day?
Coach and consultant Liz Guthridge calls this replacing the either/or framework with “the power of three.” We force ourselves to devise a third alternative to expand our minds. So why do so many people get stuck in binary thinking if it’s as simple as coming up with a third option? Because finding that third way often requires patience, listening, and curiosity, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, does not always come naturally to us. Also, this exercise will often produce a more ambiguous or complex option, which can be intimidating or uncomfortable for us to work through. But “when you regularly analyze the shades of gray and consider multiple options," Guthridge explains, "you’ll have moved from binary thinking to spectrum thinking which is all about considering nuanced options, alternatives, and possibilities.” Perhaps even more importantly, when we push ourselves to go beyond the obvious and are imaginative when we resolve to be a different kind of problem solver, that’s where the real growth happens…at least in my experience.