Expand to Contract

This is tool 7 of the Approach Toolkit – A principle encouraging unconstrained, wide-ranging thinking early in planning before deliberately narrowing focus to define a well-grounded and precise frame for delivery.

What is it?

Much like “Go Slow to Go Fast”, Expand to Contract is another mantra that anchors to the earlier tools in the approach toolkit. It is about granting yourself the permission to be unconstrained in your early planning — ensuring that the frame you create is anchored to the wider context around it, rather than being insulated and blinkered.

The mantra has two deliberate movements. First, you expand — opening up the thinking, exploring the edges, and resisting the temptation to narrow too soon. Then you contract — pulling the frame back in with purpose, shaping it precisely around what the challenge requires. Done in that order, the result is a frame that is both well-founded and well-fitted.

To bring this to life, consider a team leader laying out the brief for a new challenge. When the frame is established within a wider context, it becomes more powerful. People understand not just what is to be delivered but why it matters. That understanding unlocks full cognitive ownership — the ability to identify the best strategies, push against the edges of the frame, and flex it over time to fit the context more precisely. The benefits of the endeavour can then be maximised.

The alternative is a frame that is insulated — where beyond the boundary is unknown. In that scenario, people become wary of pushing the limits for fear of invisible consequences. Ownership diminishes and the quality of results follows.

Expand to Contract is therefore a mantra you can offer in two directions — to your team, as permission to think freely in the early stages, and to your senior leadership, as reassurance that you are not deviating from the agreed goal. You are simply taking the time to firm up the foundation before you push on.

At its core, this tool is about building confidence and clarity in your approach.

How does it work?

This mantra directly applies to the establishing the frame section of the getting to the root tool.

Think of it as a phrase you can use to describe your activities which creates a protective buffer around the time and space you require to do some proper analysis. When used it can sound something like this:

“We are in the expand to contract phase right now. Bear with us while we establish a firm foundation for this deliverable as it will pay dividends in the form of pace later down the line.”

The ‘establishing the frame’ section of the getting to the root tool details all of the kinds of questions you may want to explore while expanding your thinking. Contraction is simply simmering the thinking down to definite answers in each of these areas to solidify the frame for your deliverable.

Within that expand phase, a few guiding principes shape how to think well. It is these that we are going to explore in this tool.

No Bad Ideas

Create psychological safety for your team by cultivating an open environment where it is accepted to question and challenge everything. We want people to feel free to ask the ‘obvious’ questions to make sure everything is fully clarified and understood.

Often in a group setting, people hold back their thoughts for fear of looking foolish in front of a crowd. It is your mission to set the tone and make open sharing and constructive challenge the accepted norm. When people feel safe to speak freely, the quality of thinking — and therefore the quality of the resulting plan — rises accordingly.

Discounting

Sometimes it can be difficult to directly identify what outcomes we want precisely. In this situation, the best approach is not to simply try harder — it is to invert the question and instead identify what it is not.

Start stripping options away to bring into focus the zone that contains the right answer. Do this until you achieve clarity that is “good enough for now”, then move on and revisit once you have learned more.

Lateral Thinking

Tied in with lateral thinking, we need to have our complexity radar dialled up in the early stages of planning. We are looking out for complexity so we can embrace it — not simplify things and avoid it.

Where complexity is detected, it highlights where only minimum viable planning is required: plan just enough in that aspect of the delivery to get going, then be prepared to flex your plans as you learn more.

This search for complexity goes hand in hand with lateral thinking to identify discrete workstreams that require different delivery approaches for successful execution. Embracing complexity, then, is fundamentally about being comfortable flexing your approach to meet the particular demands of each aspect of the challenge at hand.

Embracing Complexity

Accountability is King

Nothing kills momentum as quickly as inaction born from indecision.

It is for this very reason that in the early stages of your delivery it is essential to identify who has the authority to make different kinds of decisions. Avoid ambiguity and stagnation — rather than relying on decision by committee, clearly define who can make the call about what, so that when the pressure is on, you can act quickly.

In the context of retaining momentum towards your goal, a bad decision is much better than no decision at all.

Value the Process

Valuing the process is about accepting the grind.

Tracking back to the start of the mindset toolkit, the act of acceptance is what you are striving for here. This means being content with the fact that things are complex or complicated, and that you must invest a great deal of both time and effort to be successful.

If you first accept the struggle to come, you remove the internal friction that makes what is already hard even harder. The mindset shift is simple but powerful: the difficulty is not the obstacle — it is the work.

Just as with No Bad Ideas, it is your mission to set the tone. Make acceptance of the challenge — and the commitment required to meet it — the standard expectation for the team.

Benefits and Practical Applications

Expand to Contract is a mantra you can lean on whenever you are presented with a challenge that contains a degree of ambiguity. Firming up the foundations before you get going will pay dividends in the form of pace later down the line.

This all sounds straightforward — and it is precisely for that reason that people assume this kind of thinking just happens naturally, and walk right past it.

The difference is that you now have a name for it. It is something you can point at, identify in the moment, and act on deliberately. Use it when you need it, and bring others along with you over time so that it becomes a shared instinct across the team.

Once you have applied this approach and can demonstrate its benefits — showing that it enabled rapid delivery while booting control — you will find that nobody questions it again. It speaks for itself.