Romeo and Juliet are Dead....

"You walk into a room.  It is completely bare.  There is nothing inside except two bodies. Romeo and Juliet are dead.  They are lying close to each other in a large puddle of water, surrounded by broken glass.  Their bodies are under an open window.  You are the only person who has been inside this bare room.  Please write down what you think happened to Romeo and Juliet, and how you think they died.  Your answer must take into account all the clues mentioned herein."

This was an actual question on a psychological and personality evaluation test that I wrote as part of the selection process for joining a special purpose team.  The memory of this question has remained with me for all these years because of what it was trying to gauge: The ability to think creatively and with inspiration when confronted with a problem - or what we call in the business world, "thinking outside the box".

When faced with an unexpected challenge, or an unorthodox (re: "never" seen before) one, it is the ability to improvise and not merely respond in a habitual learned manner that seperates the simple from the great leaders.

There was no real wrong answer (there was, however, as I correctly figured out, a right one) to this puzzle; it simply gave a glimpse into how the subject's thought process worked (if they worked in the problem-solving vein at all.  Some people's do not).

Romeo and Juliet are dead. They are close to each other, in a large puddle of water.

In the business world, we are often faced with perplexing puzzles that offer no easy answers.  "Why did our sales not increase as a result to that brilliant marketing plan" or "Why are we not attracting the best people and losing the ones we have?" are two very often voiced concerns (or paraphrased examples of these concerns) I have often heard the mistake wasn't in making the plan, but in assuming that once the step-by-step checklist was drawn up and the appropriate people signed off on it, the list could then become reality and ipso facto run it's course to it's logical (ergo successful) conclusion.

It's "management-by-numbers" for dummies, and it doesn't work.

In order for strategies to work, certain assumptions have to be made first.  Those assumptions need to then be tested for veracity - some will be correct, others won't.  Then the strategy needs to be reworked to take these new facts into account.  The plan then needs to be mentally weighed and compared against certain elements that managers are aware of, such as the overall plan for the quarter/half/year; or a new directive or policy that has been adopted.  The leader then takes all these facts and tries to project himself into the future to see how his reworked plan should play itself out, taking into account everything he knows so far.

Romeo and Juliet are dead.  They are surrounded by broken glass.

So far, anyone can do what I've described above.  But where the inspired leader comes into his own; where the "cause and effect" model of action and reaction are left by the way side is when the leader takes what he or she already knows about the situation, and injects some of his or her own personal feelings into the mix.  It's not scientific, and it certainly cannot be quantifiable nor taught, but often times, I have observed that the most successful leaders had a deeper grasp of what was the correct course of action to take exactly because they listened to how they felt about it.

There is an allegory going around that when Steve Jobs was first shown what his engineers and designers had come up with as a prototype for the 1st generation iPod, he rejected it.  Why?  It was certainly feasable, practical, and could have easily and cheaply be mass produced, and it would serve to satisfy the operating criteria that was drawn up for it.  It was, in other words, completely logical.

Romeo and Juliet are dead.  Their bodies are under an open window.

But Steve Jobs didn't like it.  It didn't elicit a positive feeling from him.  It wasn't visceral.  He stood up and drew a rectangle with a cirlce at the bottom of it and asked his team to build it like his drawing.  The rest, as they say, is history.

But how did Steve Jobs know his design would be the "correct" one?  How did he know that it would be more successful and more acceptable by the consumer than the most assuredly well designed, if somewhat industrial looking, prototype he was originally presented with by his experts?

I do not claim any insight into the man's mind - nor did he ever call me up and speak to me about it - but it would safe to say that whereas he didn't know if his "circle within a rectangle" would be embraced by the public, he certainly knew that an entertainment device should look, well, kind of cool and not like a cold, utilitarian one.

Romeo and Juliet are dead.  You are the only person who has been inside this bare room.

He had the hard facts that his engineers were telling him, to which he added an improvised design that was based on his feelings on the matter, and changed the world, and his company, forever.

It is this act -  that he had the courage to listen to what his feeling were telling him without fear that he would be ridiculed or suffer any blowback for it - that should be cultivated and immitated in your teams everytime you put your proverbial heads collectively together to overcome any challenge before you.  It was his improvising that gave a solution to which there was no wrong answer, but there was certainly a right  one; the one that made the most sense now in hindsight.

Managing your decisions with logic and cold calculations is only effective to a point.  After that, it sometimes only serves to obfuscate what is the right thing to do.

Sometimes, for a leader, that obvious answer is the hardest to see.  But that's what we're paid to do.

Romeo and Juliet are dead. 

Of course they are. 

Fish can't survive long if their bowl falls off a window ledge and breaks open on the floor.  After all.....

....Where did it say that this Romeo and Juliet were people?