Strategy Principles – Picking The Right Tool

The other day I was cooking a quick dinner for my family. We have two small children (a one year old and a two year old), so “quick” is critical to our dinner preparation. I needed to cut up some chicken so I reached over to our knife block to grab the necessary tool. Instead of grabbing the 7″ Santoku or the 8″ chef’s knife, I grabbed a steak knife. As I was doing so, the following conversation occurred in my head:

Me: “That’s not the best knife for cutting chicken.”
Also me: “We’re using the steak knife.”
Me: “Bad idea.”
Also me: “We’re using the steak knife.”
*Kid yells and our attention refocuses on getting dinner ready.

That’s the set up to this story: I’m tired, hurried, and distracted. And I just grabbed a tool that I know isn’t designed for what I’m doing… How do you think this story ends?

I cut my thumb. Nothing that a band-aid couldn’t fix but nonetheless, I cut my thumb.

Progress was slowed as I had to tend to my wound. Had the cut been deeper, it would have ruined the whole meal. And here it is a few days later and I still have a bandaged thumb and it aches every time I touch it against something. All of which could have been avoided if I’d just grabbed the right knife.

The Right Tool for the Job

You may not know this but the reason knife blocks come with so many different types of knives is that each one is designed for a specific type of cutting. Factors such as the blade length, cutting edge shape, hilt weight all affect how the knife achieves it’s core function: cutting. Each knife is purposefully designed with a specific function in mind and that design is informed by science, by research, and by years and years of and experience.

So it is with most tools.

Whether you’re a chef or an accountant, a childcare provider or physician, whether a pastor or a carpenter, your trade has specific tools and you have many options as to which tool you should use. Granted, selecting the wrong word processor does not have the same potential for danger as selecting the wrong knife, but you can still avoid some inefficiencies and frustrations if you follow these three simple steps when selecting the right tool for the job.

How to Select the Right Tool for Any Job

1. Slow Down

Yeah right. Often extra time is not a luxury that we have. But I can not stress the importance of slowing down.

First, it helps you maintain clarity of purpose. Maintaining focus in is crucial and slowing down is one way to fend off the hundreds of distractions that keep you from doing your job well.

Second, it creates an environment where instinct and intention can work together. In my story, I instinctively knew that the serrated blade of the steak knife was poorly suited for slicing raw meat. But I ignored instinct because I was in a rush.

Third, you’re better off in the long run. The five seconds I saved by not second guessing myself ended up costing me ten minutes to tend to my wound. Plus the inconvenience of a tender thumb has plagued me for the past few days. The potential cost of selecting the wrong tool plus the effort required to fix your mistake is always greater than the cost of slowing down and focusing.

2. Think Success

I’m not saying that you need to have a winning attitude, I couldn’t care less about your attitude in this context. I mean you need to know what success looks like for the specific task and larger job at hand. There are three ways you need to think about success: Strategic Criteria, Conditions and Assumptions. These will help you focus on what it is that you need the tool to do and provide a framework for evaluating different tools.

Strategic Criteria are the important goals that are the reason for doing whatever it is that you’re doing – both immediate and longer-term goals. In my cooking example, my short-term goal was to prepare a quick and healthy dinner. I needed a knife to facilitate the preparation of the different ingredients.

Conditions are the primary outcomes that are desired. I needed a knife to cut both raw chicken and an onion. I preferred to use one knife because less hardware means less clean up. I needed a knife that was convenient.

Assumptions are the underlying concerns that you might not think about when you’re doing your job but are important nonetheless. The assumptions in my example are I didn’t want anyone to get injured and I wanted my hardware to be clean (to prevent food-borne illnesses).

3. Consider Function Abstractly

When we evaluate tools we often think in terms of if a tool can do the basic job. If it is a knife, we ask, “Does it cut?” We want to know if it will work.

Once we’ve established that we rely on secondary indicators to help us determine how well a tool can do the job. Given the plethora of options available to us for most tools, it’s easy to be overwhelmed trying to select which ones do the job well. This is why marketers spend millions of dollars promoting all of the bells and whistles of their products. They overload your evaluation process trying to convince you that their product not only can do the job well but is the best.  Despite their best intentions and tons of consumer research and market analysis; ultimately you will be the judge of what is the best tool for you.

Have you ever thought about why a product is designed the way it is? Why developers added certain functionality to an application? Why some knives have serrated blades and others have  long, flat blades? You should because this kind of consideration of the intent of product features helps you truly determine how well a tool can do the job.Thinking abstractly will help you to understand how a tool does what it does.

When you think about a tool’s function abstractly you educate yourself about the different considerations that went into the design of that tool. For example, you learn that serrated blades are designed to tear meat while straight blades slice through meat. This means that while a serrated blade will be most effective for sawing through a tough steak, it doesn’t offer the precision and control necessary for slicing up chicken breast. You’ll also learn other things like proper knife handling techniques designed to minimize the danger of cutting yourself. This knowledge helps me to know that a steak knife is not the best choice while you’re making a quick dinner. (Unfortunately, I chose not to pay attention to what I knew.)

One Last Piece of Advice

Next time you’re picking a knife or whatever tool you need to do your job, slow down, think about what success looks like, and draw upon what you know about the tool functions. This will ensure that you pick the right tool for the job and make you more effective at your job in the long run.

And if you can avoid it, don’t do anything of strategic importance or that is potentially dangerous when there are hungry, cranky kids in the room. It seldom ends well.

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Update: Talk about great timing. On February 10, Tom Mylan published a great primer on the proper care and use of kitchen knives over at The Atlantic. Click here to read the article.