Before I learned to create a little distance between what I felt and what I needed to express at work, I let too many of my worries and fears leak into my voice and into my daily interactions. Your team amplifies your mood, so when I was frustrated, those feelings rocketed around the office and came back tenfold. The more upset I got with our lack of progress, the more those frustrations infected the rest of the team. So I had to learn to modulate myself. To crank my personal style down a couple of notches to establish an effective management style.

His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous - “These charts are bullshit!” or “This deal is crap!” - and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected it - poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it. Watching him reminded me of a principle of engineering: Sending out a sharp impulse - like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish - can teach you crucial things about your environment. Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.

But while in the early days his opinions would swing wildly and his delivery could be abrupt, he became more articulate and observant of people’s feelings as time went on. He learned to read the room, demonstrating skills that, years earlier, I didn’t think he had. Some people have said that he got mellower with age, but I don’t think that’s an adequate description of what happened; it sounds too passive, as if he just was letting more go. Steve’s transformation was an active one. He continued to engage; he just changed the way he went about it.

To this day, it’s hard to describe the power those simple words had. He could have said dozens of other things to make me feel better—“You’ll find a way through this,” “It’s not as bad as you think,” or “Here are some things to try.” But what he said instead was specific to me, and something I felt he genuinely believed. It didn’t mean my opinions were always right, but his vote of confidence that they came from a principled place restored some of the confidence I had lost. By recognizing a strength of mine, Chris gave me a renewed sense of motivation.

“REVERSE-ENGINEERING DOS AND DON’TS

• Don’t spend a lot of time up front analyzing everything you can; instead, use reverse

engineering to pinpoint only what you really need to know.

• Do frame a clear and important choice up front; make it real and significant.

• Do explore a wide range of where-to-play and how-to-win possibilities, rather than narrowing the list early on to those that feel realistic; unexpected possibilities often have interesting and helpful elements that can otherwise be dismissed out of hand. Learn from them.

• Do stay focused on the most important question (what would have to be true for this to be a winning possibility?), listing the conditions under which this possibility would be a really good one.

• Don’t forget to go back and eliminate any nice-to-have conditions; every condition should be truly binding—if it weren’t true, you wouldn’t pursue the possibility.

• Do encourage skeptics to express concerns at the specify-barriers stage; have them articulate the precise nature of their concerns about specific conditions.

• Don’t have proponents of a given possibility set and perform the tests; ask the

skeptics to do it. If the skeptics are satisfied in the end, everyone else will be too.

• Do test the biggest barrier first. Start with the condition the group feels is least likely to be true. If it isn’t true, the conditions required do not hold and you can stop testing.

• Do use a facilitator to run the reverse-engineering process; it helps to have someone to attend to process and group dynamics as you work through the thinking tasks.