While flying across the country recently, I spent part of my flight watching the movie, "Three Thousand Years of Longing". The story revolves around a djinn (or genie) and the story of his journey over the last three thousand years (thus, the title). Of course, wherever there is a djinn, there are three wishes to be granted. How many times have we seen what on the surface seems to be a very positive situation (you've received three wishes) turn into disaster once the wishes are made and granted?

That got me to thinking, what's behind the consistently poor outcomes when making three wishes, and what can we learn from this?

When people state their wish, they tend to leave out something important - the context that clarifies the meaning and purpose behind their wish. For a comical example, look at the recent Capital One commercial that frequently has aired during the NCAA basketball tournament where Charles Barkley rubs a lamp and out comes Magic Johnson to grant the trio of Barkley, Spike Lee, and Samuel L. Jackson three wishes. Barkley wishes for wings because he is hungry, but he gets a different kind of wings. Lee asks for box seats because he wants great seats to the NCAA tournament, but he literally gets “box seats”. When we seek something single-mindedly, such as a metric or plan achievement, without understanding the context and the ultimate outcome we are seeking, we too wind up with our “wish” granted, but not achieving our ultimate outcomes.

Another common wish mistake is not considering the consequences of your wish. Think of making a wish as picking up a large stick. You are interested in the good stuff that is on the end of the stick you are looking at. What you may not realize is that when you pick up that stick, you also get the stuff that is on the other side of the stick - the side you weren’t looking at when you picked up the stick. The good stuff comes with the bad stuff - you have to deal with both ends of the stick. Even really good wishes can have side effects - think about how curing disease could eventually lead to overpopulation, even greater climate change, and starvation. So before you embark on any sort of change in your organization, try to look at both sides of the “stick” and understand what the trade-offs are of the change and be prepared to address those trade-offs.

Another way to look at wishes is that it makes it easy to go to extremes. Many things can be viewed as existing somewhere on a spectrum. Think of things like centralization and decentralization. Organizations where all decisions are made in one central place are at one extreme, and organizations where all decisions are left to individual groups are at the other extreme on the centralization spectrum. Of course there are plenty of organizations that reside somewhere in between these two extremes with some decisions made centrally and some left to individual teams to decide. This is an example of a polarity. Often times, we treat polarities as either-or propositions instead of both-and opportunities. Usually, the best outcomes don’t come from the extremes but from an appropriate balance and tension between the two extremes. The problem with wishes is that they usually focus on achieving one end of the polarity, not an appropriate balance between the tensions. Other examples of polarities are learning and building, efficiency and resiliency, and exploitation and exploration. Think about how your change initiatives, metrics, incentives, goals, etc. - do they encourage your teams to go to extremes or are they used to encourage finding a healthy balance of tensions? If you want to read more about polarities, Barry Johnson wrote the seminal book on polarities. Jardena London also has a great section on polarities in her book, “Cultivating Transformations”.

Fortunately or unfortunately, we don’t have genies hanging around granting us wishes every day. However, we pursue wishes everyday through our plans, our investments, and what we measure and reward. I leave you with the following admonition - be careful what you wish for and be careful what you measure and reward!