17/09/2026
What do you do when the thing you most want to get rid of is also the thing nobody else will take?
Daniel had spent years quietly owning a job nobody had ever given him. His team fed an internal market indicator into a company-wide dashboard. It started as a side task, a number nobody paid much attention to. Then finance leadership tied that number to sales targets and bonus calculations across the whole company, and overnight a task nobody wanted became a number everybody watched.
His team hadn't changed anything about what they did. The scrutiny had.
He and his manager had asked finance to take it over more than once. Every time, the answer was no.
When we talked it through, he had two options he wanted to put on the table. Keep pushing finance to take it over, which is what he actually wanted. Or scale his team back entirely and let finance run it the way they do for every other division, which he knew was a long shot.
Two options. I asked him what happens with two options.
He thought about it and said, someone wins and someone loses.
That's the whole problem. Two options is an argument. Three options is a choice.
So I asked him for a third. Something so unappealing that nobody would seriously consider it, precisely so the middle option, the one he actually wanted, would look like the reasonable compromise. He found it quickly once he had the frame.
Three options. One his team would clearly do extra work for. One nobody with any sense would choose. And one that was actually reasonable, sitting quietly in the middle, waiting to be picked.
He was no longer asking them to choose between yes and no. He was asking them to choose the direction that already looked right.
So the next time you're building a case for one specific outcome, are you walking in with two options, or three?
I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.
