Hey :) 

I keep coming back to this mental model, especially in client work.

Most people arrive locked into a very specific way of seeing the problem. It’s usually binary.

All or nothing.
Right or wrong.
Zero or one.

“If I can’t do it properly, I won’t do it at all.”
“If it’s not perfect, it’s pointless.”
“I need to go from where I am now straight to the finished version.”

And what gets completely missed is the bit in the middle.

I think of that middle ground as the grey.

This showed up for me again this week in a team huddle.

We were talking about doing something new and the conversation started drifting toward what it would look like to do it properly. Ideally. Perfectly. With all the right conditions in place.

I was just watching it unfold. No judgement. No frustration. Just noticing how quickly we’d gone to “if we can’t do it perfectly, maybe we need a different way altogether”.

And what was interesting was how relaxed I felt about it.

My instinct wasn’t to solve for perfect. It was more like:
Let’s just do what we can with what we have.

This is the first time we’re doing it. We don’t yet know if we’ll have enough time. Or whether the right conversations will happen. Or where it’ll feel clunky. That’s kind of the point.

Let’s run it.
Then we’ll debrief.
And six or eight weeks from now, when we do it again, we’ll do something slightly differently. Probably better.

That’s the grey.

A really simple way I’ve found to help people move into this space — whether it’s a team or a client — is this question:

What do you want less of?
What do you want more of?

Not “what does perfect look like?”
Not “how do we fix this once and for all?”

Just: less of this, more of that.

Less friction.
Less frustration.
Less resistance.

More clarity.
More momentum.
More ease.

The world isn’t perfect. Teams aren’t perfect. Processes aren’t perfect. Clients aren’t perfect. But improvement doesn’t require perfection. It just requires movement.

I’ll often come back to the same question week after week.

What do you want less of now?
What do you want more of now?

And slowly, things shift.

There’s a Kevin Kelly line I’ve always liked: life is figuring it out. That feels right to me. You’re never really “done”. You’re just moving from one version to the next, learning as you go.

I think a lot of stuckness comes from believing progress only counts if it’s dramatic. From zero to one. Black to white. Before to after.

But most real change happens in the grey.
Less of this.
More of that.

And then you ask the question again.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.