Magnify Your Problem

What do you do when your life’s work is under public attack?

Few have grappled with the question as deeply as Becky Margiotta, co-founder and champion of the 100,000 Homes campaign (my colleague Bob Sutton has been singing her praises for years, including a terrific writeup about her a few years ago). Becky spent months wrestling with responses to highly public ridicule of her heroic effort to put a dent in homelessness.

What’s fascinating is, to hear her tell it now, that’s actually part of the problem. “Every minute wasted worrying about how to respond to a critic was a minute I wasn’t fighting the real enemy: homelessness.”

As Becky tells it, if she knew then what she knows now, she wouldn’t have wasted more than 10 minutes on the question of if, let alone how, to respond. And the remainder would have gone to furthering the mission.

“I had to learn how to flip from a reactive to a creative brain. You simply cannot create from an adrenalized state.”

When pressed for details about how to flip from reactive to creative, she mentioned three tactics: “Blurt, Breathe, Move,” “Clearing the Pipes,”and my favorite, “Magnification.”

The goal of magnification is to make the problem bigger, much bigger, absurdly bigger. And to do that, “you need play partners, people who will create the safe space to make a challenge or critique or slight into an absurdly big one.”

Within trusted relationships, such lighthearted magnification can quickly dispel the tension and give frustrations a comic tone. Her partner has even named her magnification character: “Angry Penguin, because I tend to waddle a little bit when I’m magnifying.”

Humor is one of the best ways to help us see new angles of a problem, and come up with fresh solutions.

It’s also one of the best tools to keep our bruised egos in check.

Related: Create Psychological Safety
Related: Request Criticism
Related: Roast A Problem
Related: Generate Bad Ideas

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