Didn’t work – Something was tried, and for reasons known or unknown, results were disappointing. Doesn’t mean that the same outcome would happen again, or that whatever is being proposed shouldn’t be tried again. This is a statement of history, often made blithely without the investigation of context, input, resource, influence or wider climate. It presumes a track record of past and therefore continuing disappointment.
Won’t work – Doesn’t mean it can’t work or that it hasn’t worked or even that it’s not working now, only that it will not work in the future in the way it is being framed or the way things are projected or with the allocated resources. In other words, it could work but it may require revision going forward.
Can’t work – Unfeasible. You’d have to be a fairly confident person to be making this statement. It states categorically that something will not work no matter what happens in the market, with customers, to the business, within any timeframe. Never. No debate. No right of appeal.
Will never work – Sounds definitive, but it’s usually subjective. It says that the person appraising this idea cannot imagine it working. They cannot see beyond the boundaries they have placed around the idea or the environment within which it operates. There’s an inherent fear of failure; a built-in shut-down mechanism that is keen to stifle any hope that this idea might even get an airing. An immediate change of conversation is signalled through tone and body language.
Four very different judgments spread across the full array of timeframes – and yet so many decision makers end up treating them as interchangeable.
Each one provokes exactly the same reaction. In today’s risk-averse corporate world, they all cultivate doubt. They all generate a “responsibility” to delay, fudge, detour, pass the buck, send this back for another rethink, put it into committee, investigate further.
They all buy time because what almost everyone immediately hears is ‘not now’.
And that’s how things get stuck.
Think back to the last feedback someone came to you and suggested “we” not go ahead with something. What did they actually say?
