I walked into one of our stores last month and saw a lollipop signage board sitting outside. Small. Flimsy. The kind of thing you'd put outside a chai stall to catch foot traffic.

The store already has a board. Twenty feet by five feet. You can see it from across the road.

I stood there staring at this lollipop sign and felt something I can only describe as a wince. Not anger. A wince. The kind you feel when something is wrong but you can't immediately articulate why.

I asked: who approved this? Why is this here? It's a waste of money. The store has a massive board — what does a lollipop add?

The answer came back in four words: "You told us to."

I traced it back. In some conversation — I don't remember when — I'd said something like, "Maybe we need more visibility. Like a lollipop signage." An idle thought. Thinking out loud. Not even a suggestion, really. Just an example.

And someone went and got it done.

Nobody stopped to look at the store and ask: does this even make sense? We already have a twenty-foot board. What will a two-foot lollipop add? Is this worth the money?

Nobody asked because they didn't think they were supposed to ask. I'd said it. That was enough.

This is what I call the silence trap, and it gets worse the more experienced you become.

When you're new and uncertain, people push back naturally. Your half-formed ideas sound half-formed. People feel permission to challenge because they can hear the uncertainty in your voice.

But as you grow — as you become calmer, more composed, more articulate — something shifts. Your thinking-out-loud starts sounding like your decisions. Your "maybe we should consider" sounds identical to your "get this done." Your team can't tell the difference because you deliver both with the same steady conviction.

The more mature and balanced you become as a leader, the less pushback you get. Not because your ideas are better. Because your delivery makes everything sound final.

The lollipop incident bothered me for days. Not because of the signage. Because of what it revealed: my team was executing without thinking. And the system I'd built — or failed to build — was making that the rational choice.

Think about it from their side. If you push back on your boss and you're wrong, you've created friction for nothing. If you push back and you're right, maybe you get acknowledged — eventually, privately. But if you just execute? No risk. Boss is happy. Work gets done. Move on.

Silence is the easy path. I needed to make it the hard one.

The fix turned out to be a Shakespeare problem.

To do or not to do — that is the question every person receiving delegated work needs answered. But the person delegating rarely tells them which question they're asking.

I realised I was operating in four distinct modes when I gave work or shared opinions. The problem was that nobody — including me — had ever named them. So everything landed as one undifferentiated signal: Mohan said do it.

Here are the four modes.

Mandate (M). Get it done. I have strong reasons. Don't question this one — just execute. I use this roughly 1% of the time, and when I do, the situation usually doesn't afford the luxury of debate.

Strongly Suggest (SS). I've thought about this deeply. I'm almost certainly right. You should do this unless you have a strong reason not to — and the bar for that reason is very high.

Normal (N). This needs to get done. But I want your judgment before you start. You have three choices: do it and give me a date, refuse and explain why, or tell me you're not the right person and suggest someone else. This is the default — roughly 84% of everything I assign.

One Man Opinion (OMO). Half-baked idea. Might be brilliant. Might be the lollipop sign. I haven't thought hard about it. I'm throwing it out for you to stress-test.

The lollipop was an OMO. Maybe not even that — it was thinking out loud. But without a label, it got treated as a Mandate. The most casual thing I said received the most unquestioning response.

Naming the modes was the easy part. The harder question was: how do you make people actually use their judgment instead of defaulting to execution?

I tried the obvious thing first. I told the team: "In Normal mode, you have three choices. Use them." Nothing changed. They heard the words. They didn't change the behaviour. Because the system still rewarded silence.

The breakthrough was a forcing function borrowed, in spirit, from Shakespeare.

To do or not to do. Each mode now comes with a required response — and the direction of the question flips depending on the mode.

For Normal and Strongly Suggest: Come back within 24 hours with your best reason NOT to do it. Then give me your date — or tell me which of the three paths you're choosing.

For One Man Opinion: Come back within 24 hours with your best reason TO do it. If you can't find one, the idea dies. No hard feelings.

For Mandate: No response protocol. Just execute.

The symmetry is deliberate. In Normal mode, I need you to be the critic before you become the executor. In OMO mode, I need you to be the advocate before I take the idea seriously. Both break the default of silent compliance — they just push in opposite directions.

The 24-hour gap is the mechanism that makes this work.

It's not about speed. It's about creating a space between hearing the assignment and starting execution. That space is where thinking happens. You can't nod along in a meeting and immediately start working. You have to go away, consider it, form a view, and come back with something written.

Written is the key word. A verbal "yeah, I think it's fine" is easy to fake. Writing down your best reason not to do something — or your best reason to do it — forces actual engagement with the idea. You can't fake a written reason the way you can fake a nod.

Two things I had to commit to for this to survive the first week.

First: I label every assignment. If I forget — and I do forget — anyone on the team can ask: "Is this an OMO, SS, M, or N?" That question is not insubordination. That's the system working. The day someone asks me that in a meeting is the day I know the mechanism has taken root.

Second: I reward pushback visibly. Not just after the fact, privately. In the room, when it matters. When someone on my team pushed back on a Normal-mode assignment last quarter and turned out to be right, I didn't just thank them later. I told the team: "That pushback saved us from a mistake I would have made." That moment taught more than any document could.

Because here's the truth I had to confront: the reinforcement gap was mine. I had rewarded pushback inconsistently — more with some people, less with others, and almost always after the fact rather than in the moment. The in-the-moment reaction is what teaches everyone in the room whether it's safe to speak up. The after-the-fact acknowledgment just confirms what they already learned by watching your face.

I've had these modes in my head for years. Mandate and OMO existed as labels. Normal existed as a vague expectation. The 24-hour protocol, the reason-to-or-not-to forcing function, the explicit contract with my team — that's new. A few weeks old.

The informal version worked when I remembered to use it. The formal version works when I forget — because the team now asks: "Is this an OMO, SS, M, or N?"

What I can tell you: the first time someone came back with "here's why we shouldn't do this," the quality of the reason told me they'd actually thought about it. That alone was worth the entire mechanism.

The lollipop sign is still there, by the way. I haven't taken it down. It serves as a reminder — to me, not the team — of what happens when a leader's stray thought travels through an organisation without a label attached.

To do or not to do. Now my team knows which question I'm asking.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life

Quick note: If you've been following the CAPA series, Part 3 is still coming. I didn't want five straight weeks of incident investigation — this newsletter has readers across functions and interests, and I wanted to break it up. Normal programming resumes shortly.