Several At Once
Move on a stuck challenge by trying several small things at the same time.
What is made possible
A stuck challenge gets a spread of small, different, time-bound experiments instead of one chosen answer, and reality does the choosing. Everyone’s private bet on which will work goes into a sealed envelope, so a fortnight later the room can put what it expected next to what happened.
Five structural elements
Structuring invitation.
“Think of a challenge this group is stuck inside. We’re not going to find the best answer. We’re going to start several small experiments at once, as different from each other as we can make them, and meet in a fortnight to see what reality did with them. Nobody picks a winner today. You’ll get a private bet, and betting isn’t choosing, because every card still runs.”
Space and materials.
Chairs, index cards, pens, one envelope, and a flat surface; the floor will do. One card per foursome carrying the four tests and nothing else:
Small enough to lose?
Fast enough to teach us something within a fortnight?
Killable without a meeting?
Would we notice it working, or making things worse?
Fails a test? Shrink it until it passes, or bin it.
Participation distribution.
Everyone writes, everyone tests, everyone bets, and anyone may end up owning a try, but only one within their own reach. The facilitator scribes the challenge sentence, states the rule and keeps time; the tests do the arguing. Four people up.
Group configuration.
Everyone, then alone, then pairs, then foursomes, then everyone.
Steps and time allocation
- 3 min
Intro. Give the invitation. Say the rule again, plainly: today has no winner.
- 5 min
The challenge. The room dictates one sentence, the facilitator writes it up: the situation, not a solution in disguise. Test it aloud. Does the sentence already know the answer? “People are drowning in meetings” passes; “how do we get everyone using the new system” fails. Rewrite until it passes.
- 5 min
Write alone. As many experiments as you can, one per card, each starting “we could try…”. Small, concrete, startable. Range beats quality, so include one you don’t quite believe in.
- 5 min
Pairs. Merge true duplicates only. Keep the odd ones. A spread, not a shortlist.
- 15 min
The tests. Foursomes pool their cards. Read each one aloud and run it through the four tests. A card that fails gets shrunk until it passes, or binned. Keep the bin visible.
- 7 min
The spread. Everyone. Pool the survivors. One pair builds the spread while the room watches: the two cards most unlike each other, then add until there are at least three and no two alike. No dots, no votes, no ranking. The only legal challenge is “those two are too alike”. If someone asks which is best, the answer is the date.
- 3 min
The envelope. Alone, on a slip, the one try you privately expect to win. Your own is allowed, and so is “none of them”. Fold, seal, one person keeps it, opened at the reconvene before anyone reports.
- 7 min
Claim and watch. Every card gets an owner who can start it without asking anyone, and two signals: what would say it’s working, what would say it’s making things worse. One reconvene date for all of them, about a fortnight out. Each owner names somebody outside the room they’ll tell this week. No owner, no try.
An hour with movement.
Practice insights
- Tips
The challenge sentence is where this succeeds or fails, so hold the room to the test. The four tests are pass or fail, not scores, and a fat bin with a thin spread is the structure working. If the spread comes out samey the room has voted without admitting it; put the oddest survivor back. There is no dot pass here, deliberately, because dots pick winners. Opened early, the envelope turns into lobbying. A “none of them” slip isn’t cynicism to be managed, it’s a prediction like any other, and the fortnight will settle it. If nothing survives Claim and Watch because nobody can start anything without permission, stop: the group has found something bigger than the challenge, and it deserves the rest of the session.
- Riffs and variations
Where the group knows the argument, point at the spread and name what didn’t happen. Nobody picked. Choosing moved from the meeting to the fortnight, and the envelope will say whether the meeting would have chosen well. The spread is variety kept on purpose: a system carrying plenty of internal variety has something that survives conditions it didn’t see coming, and a system that picked one has whatever it picked.
- Practical applications
Straight after Same Plan, Ten Times, when one right-zone sticky is the room’s shared albatross. When a stalled programme is about to be relaunched bigger.
- Optional string
The challenge is usually the sticky chosen in Live Inside It. At the reconvene, open the envelope first, then read the fortnight with What, So What, Now What (opens in a new tab).
Where it came from
15% Solutions (opens in a new tab), for the test of acting within your own reach. The move itself is the sizing discipline from Chapter 7 of the book: each try small enough that failing costs little, and enough of them that some will land.