ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT closes off the possibility of her team producing a superior solution. In essence, she (or he, of course) unwittingly kills the cat. As a manager, I know this mistake intimately. I, too, have killed the cat many times. As a quantum manager, however, I also know the incredible rewards we reap when we resist the urge to prescribe a path, when we refuse to look in the box — even when we fear it’s on ifre and think we’re the only one holding an extinguisher. I’ve found myself at this crossroads many times, most notably at my last startup, Luminate . Engagement had suddenly fallen off a cliff. At the time, I had plenty of reasons to think the box was on ifre and enough experience working on engineering teams to believe that I could teach my team how to build an extinguisher. As the founder of the company, I didn’t want us to fail. As a human being, I wanted aiffrmation that my idea was a good one. As a quantum manager, I bit my tongue. Ultimately, I didn’t engage in the brainstorming process because I knew my team would latch onto anything I offered. Instead, I just told them what winning would look like: a 300% increase in user engagement seemed like a lotfy goal, but I pitched it anyways. A few days later, my team returned with a solution that I could never have imagined, and the results were stunning. Though their strategy was remarkable from an engineer’s perspective, what I learned from the exchange as a manager turned out to be even more valuable. By not offering my own idea, I enabled the creation of a better one. By not suggesting a destination, we all ended up somewhere extraordinary — a place I didn’t even know we were going. No cats were harmed in the making of this article. 16