Optifying your advice is delivering the freedom to choose in the optimum way. Your optimum way. And it follows the Rule of Three.

People like things in threes. Think of The Three Little Pigs or The Three Musketeers or Superman’s: ‘truth, justice and the American way’. Or ask Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’; or advertisers: ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’ (a very successful government- funded campaign in Australia in the 1980s to shift people’s attitudes to taking precautions against skin cancer).

We like things in threes. We just do.

So optimise your advice using the rule of three. For most complex or at least complicated decisions there are multiple options that can be taken. Prepare three when giving your advice.

One should be low end, not favoured by you but at least heading in the right direction. One should be high-end. You would be over the moon if that option is taken. And one should be in a sweet spot in the middle. People like choice and will more likely be swayed away from the low-end to the middle by the high-end choice.

So when presenting the findings from your measurement of data, provide it as a range as best you can and give three options across the range.