Don't be a Binary Thinker

From Management By Baseball:

Binary thinking is where the decisionmaker views things as having two opposite possibilities, and no others. Nuance tends to be winnowed out for the binary thinker. What channel shall I distribute through...direct or indirect? Is Jacques Chirac good or evil? Should I plant soybeans or sorghum? Should I expand our markets or look for a buyer? Shall I consumer 950 calories a day or not bother to diet at all?

Binary thinkers are mentally and usually physically uncomfortable in the grey areas (and almost all the best possible decisions are grey areas).

As lawyers, we often think we are masters of the “grey areas,” but I don’t think we are.  We spend much of our time advising our clients to stay out of those grey areas and are often afraid to inhabit them ourselves. 

Here’s a quick exercise:  Take a three pieces of paper, and label one each BLACK, WHITE, and GREY.  Take a problem you are facing and write it on the top of each page.  On the WHITE page, write all of the “safe” solutions to your problem.  On the BLACK page, write all of the dangerous solutions — the ones that would never work and that you’d be absolutely crazy (or criminal) to try.  Finally, on the GREY page write some solutions that fall somewhere in between.  Try to get at least 7 solutions on each page.  Once you are done, spend a bit of time (and if it’s a client problem, go ahead and bill them for it) concentrating on the grey area.  You will likely find your best solution there.