A Little Dollop Will Do Ya

What a great word. If you read this blog regularly, you know how much I enjoy certain words, particularly if they sound like what they mean.

Dollop.

You can just hear it plopping into whatever it’s going into–to freshen, enliven, enrich, zhuzh. That little bit of extra that's needed. That’s what I want to talk about today. The art and power of adding just a little bit extra.

We live in a time of great change. Solutions always seem to be along the lines of big, bold and dramatic.

“Throw the bastards out!” cry the electorate.

“You’re fired!” screams the chief executive to his minion.

“I’m taking my business someplace else!” exclaim infuriated consumers when their vendors don’t get it just right.

Every solution involves absolutism. I admit, crying “Off with their heads!” if only in my own little mind, seems so satisfying. But it rarely provides any real solutions.

This is where the dollop comes in.

It’s a far cry from the final conflict of solution finding. Dollops are incremental, but nobody wants incremental anymore. It takes too long, and it seems so timid.

Is it true that coffee always tastes better by pouring an entire cup of half and half in it? Rarely, if ever. What if we were to approach our challenges with dollop solutions? Suggestions, attitudes, demeanors which were less invasive, more additive?

Dolloping is about changing the chemistry slightly, not nuking the recipe. Sometimes a little dollop will do you.

To use a completely different analogy, it’s about preventing the asteroid from striking earth by nudging it ever so slightly so that the trajectory change will allow it to miss earth. Dollops are about changing trajectories with nudges.

Photo: Marek Piwnicki

When is less more?

More often than not.

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