In the early days of my company Praxis, I said yes a lot.
Interns, contractors, and employees had ideas. I said go ahead and try them. Why not? It was fast-paced, wild, experimental. I love saying yes to people acting on their ideas.
I’ve found myself in phases where I can’t say yes as freely, and I have to be involved in a lot more back and forth before action is taken. I hate it. Recently, I’m back in a place where it’s easy to say yes.
I started thinking about the factors that enable saying yes. It requires a clear vision. If the vision is muddy or badly articulated, every idea will just sort of miss the mark enough to warrant discussion. The mark hasn’t been made clear enough to allow various paths to it to be freely tried.
It also requires excellent teammates. To let someone free to chase down their ideas requires people who tend to have ideas worth chasing and tend to be able to execute on them. At times when hiring outpaces acculturating, you get phases where you can’t green light as much.
It requires a sense of urgency and pace where growth is prized over stability. If you’re protecting what you have, you’ll say no a lot. If you’re boldly moving into the unknown anyway, what the heck, let’s try some stuff! This mindset must be maintained even if you have stuff to lose. Growth should be prized more than loss is feared if you want to be able to say yes often.
I love pitching a vision, rallying a great team around it, and then saying yes to everything they come up with. That’s when I’m in the zone. I don’t like getting into the weeds and trying to tweak people’s ideas. But I can’t just avoid it any more than I can ignore throbbing pain in my body. It’s a symptom that reveals a problem. If I’m not finding it easy to say yes, it means the vision isn’t clear enough or not communicated well enough, the team isn’t right, or the loss aversion is too strong.
Take care of those, and I get to start saying yes and watching the magic happen.