Genies are assholes.

Showing stakeholders how wishes can be misused to create chaos can help them be specific and sufficient in their goalsetting.

Over the last two days, I’ve written about using Alternative Universes and Outliers exercises to help stakeholders focus on behaviors over emotions and cognitions. So now it's time for a final tool: The Genie.

We need a new example, so in honor of the New Year, let’s go with an individual one: “I want to be the richest man alive.” And for a stakeholder, let’s use a plucky young orphan named Aladdin.

The Genie uses extremity to provide both levity and utility; its chief aim is to promote specificity and sufficiency in the behavior that is selected.

I often preface the exercise by talking about genies in general. “What does every genie movie teach us? That genies are assholes. Let me show you. Alright, I’m a genie - rub my fuzzy bald head, snap my fingers, boom - your wish is my command. So Aladdin, what is your wish?”

It doesn’t really matter what Aladdin says; your job, as The Genie, is to show him how actually getting that isn’t desirable, because the outcome itself is bad or can be interpreted with enough latitude to make it bad.

“You want to be the richest man alive? I got you. Rub my head, snap my fingers, boom - killed every other man on Earth. Now you’re the richest man alive; I mean, you’re the only man, so definitionally you’re the richest man. We good?”

The key is to use a ridiculous outcome. Obviously Aladdin didn’t actually want you to kill all the men.

“No? Not good? I told you: genies are assholes. They’re scammers - they make you screw up your first wish so you have to use your second wish to undo it and now you’re down to one. Capitalism at its finest. So rub, snap, bring the men back to life…want to change your wish?”

You can do this a couple of times if you need to, even if they start expressing behaviors, to help them drive to specificity.

I tend to use The Genie over the other two exercises when Aladdin is absolutely certain he knows the outcome he wants but he’s wrong, either because he actually wants something different or because he’s not really communicating in enough specificity that other people can deliver it.

Obviously, there is a fine line between showing someone that they aren’t where they need to be and humiliating them in front of others. So make sure that you’re as much of the joke as he is and be explicit that good “wishes” are hard, but that taking the time to do them well helps align the group.

This is particularly important with groups where the stakeholders either have created false alignment or one particularly loud voice is overriding others. One modification is to offer to let them “phone a friend” to help with the wish; by bringing others into the conversation, it can show Aladdin how just talking about a behavioral outcome in a clear way can create exponentially better results.

And that’s it! Three new tools for your toolbox, using humor and discussion to help stakeholders align on observable behaviors. Each of them takes a little practice, so start on yourself: can you make a New Year’s resolution that even I can’t mess with?