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I have to cut three people and I keep changing my mind about who. How do I decide something like this fairly?
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Across the lenses

3 patterns to sit with.

What the lenses had in common. Sharpest when a pattern names a tension you hadn’t fully named yourself — weakest when it summarises something you already know.

  1. 01 Warning

    Criteria first, names second

    Thiokol's engineers reversed their recommendation when asked to think as managers. If your standard shifts between candidates, you're reverse-engineering a justification for a name you already chose. Write the criteria down before any name appears, then apply them cold — everyone downstream can tell the difference.

    From The Challenger O-Rings De Bono's Six Thinking Hats

  2. 02 Warning

    Difficult is not the same as unnecessary

    Lincoln kept men who despised him because they could do the work. Under redundancy pressure that distinction collapses silently — the person who challenges you starts looking expendable. Have a peer who knows the work but not the politics check your list against the written criteria.

    From Lincoln's Team of Rivals

  3. 03 Opportunity

    How you do it outlives what you save

    Guilt pushes you to justify the decision by building a case against the person, which is the most damaging available move. Keep the explanation on the role, be generous with notice and references, and plan the day after as carefully as the day itself. The survivors are drawing permanent conclusions.

    From Separate the People from the Problem Kintsugi

The substance

The five lenses themselves.

Often the sharpest provocation lives inside a single lens, not in the synthesis above. Skim them; one tends to land harder than the others.

The Challenger O-Rings

The engineers said no, overruled by the launch you couldn't delay.

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What this lens reveals

The night before Challenger launched, Thiokol engineers argued the O-rings would fail in the cold. Management asked them to reconsider 'as managers rather than engineers', and the recommendation reversed. Nothing was concealed and nobody was reckless — the decision framework simply shifted until the answer changed. Watch for that in yourself. If you find your criteria moving between candidates, you're not weighing people against a standard; you're reverse-engineering a standard that produces a name you've already chosen.

Try this soon

Write the criteria before you write any names — skills the business needs in twelve months, role redundancy, demonstrable performance against known expectations. Then apply them cold. Criteria written after names are always rationalisations, and everyone downstream can tell.

Go deeper three provocations to sit with
  1. Have you written the criteria down, or are you holding them in your head where they can drift?
  2. Would your criteria survive being read aloud to the team afterwards?
  3. Which name did you think of first, and have you been building a case for it since?
About this lens what made this interesting to humanity

1986 · Morton Thiokol engineers, NASA management

The night before the Challenger launch in January 1986, Morton Thiokol engineers told NASA the O-rings on the solid rocket boosters had never been tested below 53°F and were likely to fail at the forecast 36°F. Management at Thiokol overruled them under pressure to launch. The orbiter broke up 73 seconds after liftoff. Seven crew died.

The principle: When a schedule conflict reaches an engineer who has never flagged a concern before, the schedule is wrong, not the engineer. The cost of a delay is finite and visible; the cost of a failure is open-ended and obscured by everyone's hope that the engineers are being paranoid.

De Bono's Six Thinking Hats

Wear one mode of thinking at a time, in turn, deliberately.

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What this lens reveals

De Bono's hats separate modes of thinking so they don't cancel each other out. Redundancy decisions collapse because all six run simultaneously: the facts, the guilt, the legal risk, the optimism about who'll cope, the fear of the conversation. Held together they produce paralysis, which is exactly where you are. Separated, each becomes tractable, and the emotional register — which is real and shouldn't be suppressed — stops contaminating the assessment stage.

Try this soon

Do this in three separate sessions on different days: what the business needs, who meets it, and how you'll handle the conversations. Doing them together is why you keep changing your mind — you're re-running an assessment through a filter of dread each time.

Go deeper three provocations to sit with
  1. Which mode have you actually been stuck in — the facts, or the dread of the conversations?
  2. Have you assessed the roles and the people in separate sittings, or in one anxious loop?
  3. What would you decide if you were only allowed to consider what the business needs next year?
About this lens what made this interesting to humanity

timeless · Edward de Bono

De Bono observed that ordinary discussion blends six distinct modes — facts, emotion, caution, optimism, creativity, and process — until they cancel each other out. He proposed that a group instead 'wear one hat at a time': everyone gathers facts together (white), then surfaces gut feelings together (red), then catalogues risks (black), upsides (yellow), creative alternatives (green), and finally meta-process (blue). Single-mode thinking, done in parallel rather than as adversarial roles, produces more decisions in less time.

The principle: An idea looks different from six angles. Force yourself to spend time inside each angle before letting them argue. The angles you skip are where the idea fails.

Lincoln's Team of Rivals

Keep your opponents inside the tent.

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What this lens reveals

Lincoln kept men who despised him because they were the most capable available, and he distinguished ruthlessly between people who were difficult and people who couldn't do the work. Under redundancy pressure that distinction reliably collapses — the person who challenges you in meetings starts looking expendable, and the agreeable underperformer survives. It happens quietly and it feels like judgement rather than preference.

Try this soon

Have someone who knows the work but not the politics — a peer director, a trusted senior — review your list against your written criteria without your commentary. You're checking for the friction bias, which is close to invisible from inside and obvious from outside.

Go deeper three provocations to sit with
  1. Is anyone on your list there because they're hard work rather than because they're not needed?
  2. Who on the team disagrees with you most, and are they safe on this list?
  3. If you removed the friction and only looked at output, would the names change?
About this lens what made this interesting to humanity

1861 · Abraham Lincoln, William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates

On taking office in 1861, Lincoln appointed his three main rivals for the Republican nomination to his cabinet: Seward as Secretary of State, Chase as Treasury Secretary, Bates as Attorney General. Each was abler in many ways than Lincoln himself. Keeping them inside the administration converted their ambition into his asset, and removed the most credible external opposition.

The principle: Capable rivals outside the organisation are weapons; inside the organisation they are talent. The leader confident enough to bring them in gains their ability AND removes their ability to oppose. The insecure leader who excludes them gets neither benefit.

Separate the People from the Problem

Argue against the problem, not across the table.

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What this lens reveals

Separate the people from the problem: hard on the issue, soft on the person. In redundancy this is not a nicety, it's the thing that determines whether people leave able to speak well of you. The instinct under guilt is to justify the decision by building a case against the individual, because that makes it feel less arbitrary. It is the single most damaging thing you can do, and it's the most common.

Try this soon

Script the conversations around the role and the business, not the person's shortcomings. Be direct about the decision being final and generous about references and notice. People forgive being made redundant; they don't forgive being told they deserved it as a way of making you feel better.

Go deeper three provocations to sit with
  1. Are you preparing to explain why the role went, or why the person wasn't good enough?
  2. Would you be comfortable if your explanation were repeated back to you by them, verbatim?
  3. What would let each person leave with their professional standing intact?
About this lens what made this interesting to humanity

1981 · Roger Fisher, William Ury

Fisher & Ury's core principle from Getting to Yes: parties who treat each other as the obstacle entrench; parties who sit on the same side facing the problem find room.

The principle: Attack the issue, not the person. The moment a conflict becomes about character rather than the thing in dispute, resolution stops and defending face begins.

Kintsugi

Don't hide the break; gild it. The repair is the value.

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What this lens reveals

Kintsugi repairs a broken bowl with gold along the fracture, refusing both to hide the break and to discard the object. What happens to the people who remain is the part nobody plans. They will watch exactly how this is done and draw conclusions that outlast the savings. A team that sees colleagues treated well through something awful becomes more loyal, not less. One that sees people disposed of quietly learns something permanent about where it stands.

Try this soon

Plan the day after as carefully as the day itself — what you tell the remaining team, how honest you're willing to be about why, and what you can commit to about the future. The savings are finite; the precedent you set is not.

Go deeper three provocations to sit with
  1. What will the survivors conclude about how they'd be treated?
  2. Are you planning to explain this honestly to the team, or to move on quickly and hope it fades?
  3. What do you want people to say about how this was handled, in a year?
About this lens what made this interesting to humanity

Japan, 15th century onwards · Japanese ceramic tradition

Kintsugi is the Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold — making the fracture lines visible and beautiful rather than disguising them. The repaired bowl is considered more valuable than the unbroken one because its history is now part of its surface.

The principle: What you've been hiding because it looks like damage may be the most interesting feature of the object. The instinct to camouflage a failure, a pivot, an embarrassing chapter — that instinct is often the thing reducing the object's value. A visibly mended thing carries its history; a perfectly restored one carries only its present.

Also considered

Lenses ranked relevant but kept off the exploration — the runner-up reading. Each links to the lens itself, not an applied reading of your question.

  • Method

    BATNA — The Door You'll Walk Out Of

    Your strength is the door you're willing to walk out of.

  • Method

    Steelman the Other Side

    Build their argument stronger than they did, then answer that.

  • Myth

    Solomon's Judgment

    Offer to split the baby and watch who flinches.

  • Nature

    The Ant Colony

    Leave signals, not instructions.

  • Method

    The Reflection Check

    You haven't earned your rebuttal until they agree you understood them.

  • Engineering

    The Andon Cord

    Make it safe to stop the line, or the fault ships anyway.

  • Statecraft

    The Marshall Plan

    Pay to rebuild the enemy you just beat.

  • Method

    Wu Wei — Effortless Action

    The most powerful move is sometimes the one you don't make.

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