Stuck Between Two Bad Options? You Need to “Knock the Flagpole Down”

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Have you ever been stuck between two bad options?

Both will create problems. Both will make you unhappy. And yet, they are the only options available. You keep telling yourself: I have no other choice. I have to pick one…

But what if there’s another way?

There is: You knock the flagpole down.

I first heard about this from Netflix cofounder Marc Randolph. It’s one of his favorite decision-making strategies, and he included it in a story he wrote for Entrepreneur a few months ago. I’ve thought about it regularly ever since.

Here’s that tale, and how you can put it to use yourself.

About the flagpole…

The year is 1970. The Kent State shootings just took place, and a group of students walk into their local McDonald’s with a demand: The store must lower its flag to half-staff.

The store complies. The flag is lowered.

The company’s then-chairman, Ray Kroc, hears about this and is upset. He demands that the store raise the flag back up. So the flag goes back up.

Now the students are upset. They march back into the store and threaten to burn the place down unless the flag is re-lowered.

The store manager is freaked out. There is no good solution here — either he upsets the students and loses his store, or he upsets McDonald’s chairman and possibly loses his career. So he calls Fred Turner, the president of McDonald’s, and asks for advice.

“Tell you what to do,” Turner replies. “The next delivery truck that arrives, have him back into the flagpole and knock it down.”

Problem solved: If there’s no flagpole, there’s nothing to fight over.

“Rather than obsessing about which of several bad outcomes is preferable,” Randolph writes in the Entrepreneur story, “sometimes it’s worth turning your creativity toward how to make your problem disappear altogether.”

How do you put this into practice? Randolph shares an example. One time at Netflix, two people were up for the same promotion. They were both highly valued, both wanted the bigger job, and both refused to work for the other one. Picking one meant losing the other. And Randolph didn’t want to lose either of them.

So he knocked the flagpole down: He reorganized the company, then promoted both.

How to knock it down yourself

The way I see it, “knocking the flagpole down” is really an exercise in abundant thinking.

When we’re stuck between two bad options, our mindsets become fixed. We think: These are the only options. And then we stop getting creative.

But of course, there are always more options. Always! When we knock the flagpole down, we are clearing out space to see beyond our problems. We are giving ourselves permission to take action, rather than to simply settle.

I remember discovering this at my first job out of college. I worked as a reporter at a tiny community newspaper, and my boss was a joyless task master. We were supposed to write two stories every day, but I struggled to fill the quota. Meanwhile, I was writing an opinion column every few days and loved it.

Eventually, my boss gave me an ultimatum. I could either step up the number of stories I reported, or I would lose my column.

I don’t begrudge him that demand. He hired me to do a certain amount of work, and I wasn’t doing it. So I stepped back and answer myself: Why am I having so much trouble? After all, I’m usually full of ideas.

That’s when I realized the problem. It wasn’t the workload. It was happiness: I struggled to write about things I did not care about, and I did not care about writing those small-town stories.

The choice was a false one. If I wrote more stories, I’d be unhappy. If I lost my column, I’d be unhappy. There was no way to win. Staying guaranteed unhappiness.

So I quit. I sat in my bedroom, teaching myself how to pitch freelance stories to other publications. I developed new skills. New contacts. New ideas. It reinvigorated me, even though I made very little money. (I was living in a $500/month dump next to a graveyard, so I had some runway.) It set me off on a new direction, and primed me for the career I have now.

When I knocked the flagpole down, I saw beyond my troubles. The world opened up in front of me.

When we pick between two bad options, we are trying to keep the flagpole up. But that’s not the point. The flagpole doesn't matter. What matters is that we raise our own flag.

...

P.S. Marc Randolph has produced a lot of great advice for us at Entrepreneur — you can find it all here.

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Cover credit: Getty Images / alashi