The Rule of Three

From Goldilocks and the Three Bears to the Religious Trinity

Story telling is often based around a principle of 3. Mother, father, and child. Birth, life, death. Beginning, middle, end. Father Son and Holy Ghost.

Decision making also needs to come in threes. The angel on your left shoulder, the devil on the right, and yourself in the middle. Too hot, too cold, just right. Left, right, center.

How about all, none, or a practical some?

Venn Diagrams are a perfect illustration for us to see how ideas overlap.

Red: Republicans Blue: Democrats Green: Libertarians

Cyan: Liberal life styles, personal freedoms Yellow: Personal responsibility, capitalism, small government Magenta: Fascism, socialism White: Good ideas everyone agrees on

The problem with just 2

Washington politics seems to be a pendulum swinging back and forth, with some overlap in the middle. What if there were 3 ideas on the table? There would be much more overlap for people to agree.

Right now a single majority party can control the political scene. If it always took 2 out of 3 parties to pass a bill, the ideas being exchanged would have to be shaped to please more people.

If you only have 2 ideas on the table, then one is right and one is wrong. And as soon as the majority swing the other way, policies get put in place that please the other side, and that lasts until the pendulum swings back the other way again.

As the third party gets bigger...

Here political parties are on the outside mixing to create the colors (laws, taxes, programs) on the inside. You can see the the more integrated the Libertarian party is, the more cyan colored personal freedoms you get, the yellow colored concept of a smaller government is shared by more people, and the magenta colored fascism/ socialism can entirely go away.

Cyan: Personal freedoms, limited restrictions and behavioral laws
Yellow: Personal responsibility, capitalism, small government
Magenta: Fascism, socialism
White:Good ideas everyone agrees on

Red: Republicans
Blue: Democrats
Green: Libertarians

Three Filters

The use of 3 colors has been published by my father, Steve Wille, for another purpose. 3 Filters™ is built around Larry Nelson's 3-Filters theory, a model of human needs. Like the red, green, and blue lights in a television coming together to build a high definition image rich in color, these three basic needs come together to build a complex picture, rich in possibilities.

Where red, blue, and green come together in the illustration below, you see white light. This is known as the additive color process. A colorful leader uses the additive process, thinking and acting in three dimensions.

The following is directly pulled from http://www.colorfulleadership.info/papers/3-FiltersManagement.htm
Quality is the enemy of innovation, innovation is the enemy of quality, and people get in the way of both. A great organization needs to focus on all three, all the time and a great manager must see from all three perspectives. 3-Filters Technology offers a way for dealing with these conflicting needs.

People, Feelings

Effective leaders are in touch with people’s feelings. A organization needs talented people committed to team success. Externally, you must consider the feelings of customers, investors, and the community at large. If any significant group of people are against you, you quickly drop from good to not good.

Security, Quality

Survival of the organization is dependent on quality products and services. Quality is driven by processes and procedures that assure consistency in every product. The goal is predictability and control, so every product meets specifications and every customer gets the required level of service.

Future, Innovation

To adapt to a changing world you need flexibility and an eye for what is over the horizon. If nothing ever changed, you could stop with people and quality. The economy is constantly changing. Laws change. Technology change is accelerating. High quality but obsolete products are of no value.

To succeed long term as an executive you must manage these three major areas well. Doing two out of three just does not cut it. That would be sort of like a television picture that has one of the colors missing. It is good enough for a while, but it gets old quickly.

Color television builds a full color image from just three colors. If you look through a magnifying glass at a white area on your screen, you will see small dots of red, green and blue lights. Older television projectors actually had three lenses and you could see the red, green and blue lights. You could hold your hand over one or two of the lenses to get the off color images like the ones you see here. The yellow image in the graphic lacks blue light. You need all 3 colors to get full color. By the way, if your first grade teacher told you the primary 3 colors are something other than red, green and blue, your teacher obviously needed to be watching more TV.

People have a full spectrum of needs, and like the color TV, you can group these needs into several categories that when mixed together create a rich array of possibilities. A manager leads by meeting these needs among many groups such as developers, business owners, and customers. Within each group are individual people, each with their own filters. You have to make sense to every person in every group if you want to keep your job and lead the organization.

We tend to develop our personalities around our needs and talents as individuals, and we tend to deemphasize other areas. We then follow the golden rule and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. That is perfectly fine if you are in a technical job where you get paid for doing specific things well. Corporate executives do not have that luxury; they have to do the full job and lead everyone, accommodating all needs and personalities. The golden rule is not good enough. Often people who get promoted into leadership positions got there because they did something extraordinarily well, sometimes at the expense of under emphasizing other important things. This can create problems as they grow into their new roles. Managing through 3-Filters helps you to consciously see all 3 perspectives and avoid the pitfalls of being blind to some aspects of the job.

Links and sources

http://www.storyteller.net/articles/222 http://www.creativekeys.net/storytellingpower/article1017.html http://www.colorfulleadership.info/index.htm
http://www.colorfulleadership.info/papers/3-FiltersManagement.htm
http://www.icrint.com/
Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker - Google Books - Amazon