Kennedy: You never say no. You always give a choice. It’s actually a really interesting rule that I use all the time. It’s not going to do any good to say no if you don’t have a solution. I love the process of trying to figure it out: “OK, what am I going to offer up?” I don’t want to say, “You can’t do this.” If there’s a good reason why we can’t do it, then the problem needs to be solved, so what’s the alternative?
Bevan: And it’ll make the crew smarter, too. Challenging the crew against budgetary constraints is a good thing, actually. All of a sudden their creativity goes off in a different direction, and quite often you get a more interesting result.
Kennedy: Or ask a question rather than saying no. “It doesn’t look like we can do this, but what do you think?” You might get three or four different ideas and often those ideas are better than what you started out with.
I believe ALL professionals need to adopt this approach.
