Find a Way to Yes

Find a Way to Yes

Every company has a phrase that gets used when something stalls. In the companies I ran, mine was find a way to yes. It has been misread often enough that it is worth saying what it means and what it does not.

It does not mean say yes to everything. A leadership team that says yes to everything is busy, unprofitable, and unable to explain what it is for. It does not mean push harder on the thing that is not working. That is how nine-month initiatives die in month eleven.

It means this. When something stops moving, ask 3 questions, in order, and do not skip one.

What is in the way?

Name the obstacle specifically. Not “operations is slow” but “the quote sits for 4 days because one person approves pricing and she is in the field 3 of them.” Most stalls are never named this precisely, which is why the same one comes back next quarter with a different label on it.

Most of the time the obstacle is one of 7 conditions I score in every company I work with: who owns it, whether the method is written, whether people have the time and tools, whether the numbers arrived, whether an idea has a path, whether the person was prepared for the job, and whether anyone cares enough to say so. Find which one and you usually have the fix.

What other path would work?

The first plan is a plan, not the outcome. If the outcome is quotes out in 2 days, there are several routes: a second approver, a pricing rule that removes the approval for standard work, a different person in the seat. Teams that are stuck are almost always stuck on the route, and they keep arguing about the route because nobody restated the outcome.

This is where the phrase earns its keep. Yes is the outcome. The path is negotiable.

Is the outcome still worth it?

This is the question people skip, because asking it feels like giving up. It is the opposite. Circumstances change. The customer that justified the initiative left. The margin that made it worth doing moved. A team that can say “we set this outcome in January and it no longer deserves the effort” is a team that finishes the things it keeps.

Kill it out loud when the answer is no. Thank whoever proposed it, say why, and take it off the board. A quietly starved initiative teaches everyone that commitments are negotiable. A killed one teaches them that decisions get made.

The customer version

The same discipline applies outward. A customer asks for something you do not do well. Finding a way to yes is not pretending you do. Sometimes the workable path to their outcome is a competitor who is better at that one thing, and sending them there costs you a job and earns you the next 3. An honest no with a route attached is a yes to the relationship.

Why it matters more than it sounds

A leadership team that runs these 3 questions in public, week after week, changes how it thinks. Obstacles get named early, while they are cheap. Routes get argued on evidence instead of ownership. Dead work gets buried instead of carried. And the owner stops being the only person in the building who can decide whether something is still worth doing.

I have used this in companies I ran and in companies that brought me in. If your team has something that has been “in progress” for 2 quarters, put the 3 questions on the screen at the next meeting and work through them out loud. If you want another set of eyes on it, my door is open.