The last time I saw Rami Ismail speak, he did a little flourish with the audience that went like this:
Rami: "Ok. I want all of you to think about a platforming game."
audience all look thoughtful
Rami: "Alright. What I had in mind was a 3D platforming game like Banjo Kazooie, how many of you thought of that?"
It turned out about 60% of the crowd had apparently been thinking about 2D platformers, myself included. It was a demonstration on communication that has stuck with me ever since, especially over time as I have notice the ways that specificity in communication comes with tradeoffs and ambiguity can produce surprises.
Once you are attuned to just how differently requests can be interpreted, there's a natural inclination to focus on clarity and specificity when communicating with others. The more you clarify the specifics, the higher you raise the floor of what someone delivers. But there is a caveat: **specificity and clarity can also lower the ceiling of what someone can surprise you with**.
In a previous life, I once asked a team member who was eager to grow to be in charge of defining the path forward on a messy refactor we needed to do in order to enable something new. I did not specify when I hoped to hear from him. In my head, I was expecting to get a plain text bulleted list that looked like this:
- Remove code that does X - Add code that does Y - Migrate to using Y code
I waited for about a week, and then got frustrated and asked to see the plan. You can imagine my surprise when I got handed an 8 page Google Document that went down to the line number on changes we needed to make!
By not raising the floor on that team member by telling him what I was expecting ("plain text bulleted list, under 10 items"), I was quite negatively surprised by what he ended up delivering and how much work had gone into it. But if I HAD raised the floor, what are the odds he would have diverged from my expectations and instead delivered that document?
This can be really powerful, especially in situations where you explicitly hope to let someone run free and surprise you with what they can do. When that is not what you want, it is worthwhile to understand what you DO want, so you can be specific. If I spend time raising the floor with someone by being specific, they are far less likely to disappoint me by showing up with less than I expect... but also less likely to surprise me with something that I never would have thought of. As time went on, getting clearer on when I was looking for one or the other (or more often, something in the middle) was helpful to understand how to communicate with others.
This is similar to how you might use Task Relevant Maturity (originally from High Output Management, I believe) to define how you work with a given person. If TRM is low and consistency is important, raising the floor is beneficial. If TRM is high, raising the floor puts you at risk of not even realizing what opportunities you miss when someone sticks to the lanes you have defined for them.
So yes, sometimes it’s important to raise the floor. It might be necessary to constrain the solution space to set somebody up for success. But try to be intentional when you do it, and keep in mind the potential upside of surprise - don't lower the ceiling unless you have to.
Thanks to Allen Pike and John Brennan for suggestions and early draft feedback.