The Three Minute Drill

How to give advice your boss will hear and use.

As America’s Crisis Guru®, I am preparing to launch an A.I. twin which will dramatically improve access to my writings and thinking. Of the nearly two million words I have published in my lifetime, it is The Three Minute Drill™ published almost 40 years ago that stands powerfully, urgently, and with lasting influence. This single document has powerfully changed the relationships between trusted strategic advisors and those that they coach and counsel.

Supercharge your career in more critical ways, more powerful ways, more practical ways using The Savvy Thinking of The Three Minute Drill. Good luck. Remember, I’m always available to talk about how to make your time matter more.

The crucial reality of being a trusted strategic advisor is that the best and most critical advice is often needed in a brief period of time (on-the-spot) under enormous event pressure. The Three Minute Drill is a compact, direct process for giving those who rely on your focused, accurate, and complete information – framed in a strategic way – as options – from which leaders can choose a course of action, or not. Emphasis on, “they choose.” That’s where your power lies…providing clear options for the bosses to decide to use, or not.

The discipline is to use this highly focused, structured, time-sensitive approach to get your recommendations promptly put forward and clearly understood. This allows the balance of the brief discussion time, meeting time, or face time with those you advise to be productive and directed toward helping them make better decisions. Here are the six elements of the process:

Step 1: Situation description (60 words):Briefly describe the nature of the issue, problem, or situation. This is the factual basis for “what we know now,” “why we need to take your time, now, to discuss this,” or “This is a new and important topic we need to talk about, now.” The Three Minute Drill process gets the boss up to speed quickly.

Step 2. Analysis (60 words): Briefly describe what the situation means, its implications, and perhaps, how it threatens or presents opportunities. Include one or two key assumptions that validate the analysis. Managers need to know the why, plus useful details. They’re also interested in the intelligence you’ve gathered or know that supports your analysis, assumptions, recommendations, and option selection.

Step 3: The goal (60 words): A clear, concise statement of the task to be accomplished. Goals keep everyone focused forward. The goal should be stated as the behavioral, emotional, or intellectual change in your target constituencies. Useful goals are understandable, brief, achievable, positive, and time/deadline sensitive. The boss always wants to know when they will score.

Step 4. Options (150 words): Always present at least three options for action. You can suggest more, but three is optimal for management to choose from. The goals you suggest are to, “do something, the 100% option,” or “do something more, the 125% option,” or “do nothing, the zero percent option.” Having multiple options keeps you at the table and avoids the “death by question” syndrome that often plagues the “magic bullet” or single recommendation approach. Lose that single recommendation through a crucial unanticipated question or concern, and you’ll find yourself outside of the discussion for the duration. CEOs learn early there are always more than one way to accomplish everything.

Step 5. Recommendation (60 words): Be prepared to stay in the room and say what you would do if you were in your boss’ shoes, and why. The recommendation is usually selected on the basis of which option will cause the least number of negative unintended consequences. This is where you earn your paycheck and a place at the table. The boss will always want to know what you would do if you were in his/her shoes. Be prepared to stay in the room to walk through a similar sort of analysis for each of the options proposed.

Step 6. Justification (60 words): Identify the negative unintended – but fully predictable – consequences of each option, including the option to do nothing. These are the reactions or circumstances that could arise resulting from the options you suggest (including doing nothing). Every management decision or action has consequences that can be expected. Each also has unintended consequences that can also be forecast. Inadequate provision for consequences is what sabotages otherwise useful strategies.

Striving to provide advice in this 450-word format (three minutes) is powerful, conserves management time, and coupled with the discipline of suggesting three action options every time, will get you invited back to the table again and again. Savvy Thinking means writing to time, talking to time…the boss will notice and invite you back or to stay.