Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Knowing that insights reside everywhere and new solutions can come from anywhere, we need a systematic way to gather, analyze, and develop new, creative options to solve the problem—without being bogged down. That’s what the second phase of the QuEST process framework, Envision, is all about. It’s where we generate a wide range of options for solving the problem, and begin to track the criteria that will ultimately let us choose the best options based on our shared vision of success.
If you are like most people, you start this chapter with some context for how to approach problem solving through idea generation and brainstorming techniques.[12] The weakness with these tools and techniques is that people use them assuming that the best idea will become apparent. However, people often generate a range of ideas without a clear idea of whether those choices will actually work, given the organization’s internal capabilities and market situation. The Envision phase lets you use whatever approach you want for idea generation, but adds a nuance to the process by recognizing that not all solutions are right for a particular company.
Envision aims to answer the question, “What is the right set of options for you, given your problem and particular set of circumstances?” It’s not about blue-sky thinking and generating the broadest set of options. It’s about focusing and generating options that are most likely to work, knowing that best theoretically and best practically are two entirely different things.
The Envision phase (Figure 5-1) is important because, until we’ve had a chance to gather all the viable options, we won’t be able to select among the best of them. Envision lets an organization use collaboration to generate solutions. Because you have named the problem already in the Question phase, you can now open up the floor to the best ideas from unexpected sources. This is done in a flat structure that allows for open input. Because so much is known about idea generation, this chapter is going to focus on how best to do options development, and then how these options and the selection criteria feed into the next phase (Select).
Let’s look at how the Envision phase will help you come up with viable options to solve your strategy problem and generate the necessary outcomes for your business.
There are two short-and-sweet steps to the Envision phase:
Developing a rich set of options
Tracking criteria that will be used to shape decisions in the Select phase (Phase III)
As you leave the last step in the Question phase, you have a group of people with a shared understanding of the real problem. At this point, they are champing at the bit to actually solve the problem, and this is the time to let those people loose to identify viable solutions.
In the Envision phase, the goal is to tap into the latent power in your organization by asking people to contribute toward fixing the problem. In this phase, we include people at all levels in the organization so we can generate a diversity of ideas on the table. Ideally, this ensures that the aperture for potential solutions is as wide as possible. This is a good place to use those collaborative tools (listed in Appendix A) that let you do mass idea generation and brainstorming so that gathering options goes quickly. Some of these tools also let you camouflage the source of input so you can protect people from the risk of looking stupid or naming a political issue that stands in the way of the organization’s success.
There is no such thing as “the right answer.” There is something that is best for you, given your problem and particular set of circumstances. Envision that.
The other part of this phase is to keep the focus on “why” something matters. In order to make any of these options viable or practical, you need to figure out which ones matter for your company or organization, and know why they matter. This is the reason that we call out criteria tracking in the Envision phase. It lets you gather many, many ideas, while starting to draw distinctions as to why one option might be better than another. So let’s talk about both of these pieces—option development and criteria tracking—in this chapter.
In option development, you slow down enough to involve many people in thinking things through and understanding all of your possible choices, so that when you’re ready to make a choice, you have a rich pool of options to evaluate.
Be sure to involve the people who do the hands-on work in the business; they’re better able to see the day-to-day challenges and act as a source of new options and key insights. Include people outside the business (partners, suppliers, channels, etc.) if you want to be open about solving the problem and could use their outside-in perspective. You’ll have many good options, and later we can understand the distinct impact each would have on the business.
Face-to-face meetings traditionally have been the source of brainstorming work, but there are several compelling ways to do this kind of problem solving with collaborative tools. Whether you hold several brainstorming and discussion meetings in person or host a brainstorming session online, the focus of each session will be driven by the dynamics of your specific situation. For example, you may want to have an entire meeting devoted to developing a particular idea, looking at product options, exploring regional alternatives, or whatever type of results you are considering.
In option development meetings, the focus is on exploring possibilities: “What if we...?”, “Is there a reason why...?”, and “What would happen if we tried...?” You may need to integrate different techniques for different aspects of the project. In addition to including various domain experts, you may want to bring in people with inquisitive, provocative, or energetic styles, though be sure to balance that energy with the sense of safety that the team needs to feel in making contributions.[13]
It’s important to explore many different angles on the options you could pursue, and to make sure that you engage everyone on those options that are relevant to them. This doesn’t have to mean bringing everyone together at the same time (although that is an option if you’re confident they won’t get bored and check out).
Ask people if there’s anything new, from their perspective, in the current project. If so, how can it be handled? How do proposals from other functional groups influence them? How does our competition do it? How will our competition respond? What if energy prices rise? What if? What if? However you approach this, make sure you probe for a broad set of perspectives. Often we are limited by our specific near-term experience. To ensure a holistic viewpoint, task a knowledgeable and open-minded person with representing each aspect of your project during ideation.[14]
As you begin to produce some ideas and options, you or someone else on the team may realize that there are embedded criteria being used to either create or filter the options list. That is fine, and indeed is part of the reason these two steps are part of the same phase. But you must ensure that you make criteria explicit and keep them in different buckets while developing options.
Some of the more creative ideas may require some investigating before you can answer questions such as: “Can we actually do that?”, “What would it take?”, “How does this currently work today?”, “What are the current barriers?” In this case, you may need to revisit the Question phase to dig up more information. Don’t let this deter you. If the idea is compelling, further digging may take you to an exciting and powerful new solution—or not. You won’t know in advance. What’s important is to be sure that you keep the team aligned around what you are doing, and how that affects the eventual picture of what success could look like.
Option development generates a full range of ideas that offer potential ways to solve the problem, as well as a solid understanding of how these ideas compare to each other in terms of their impact on the organization.
Option development is directed creative problem solving. There are myriad ways to structure and manage such processes. Again, check out the resources section in Appendix B. Choose whatever method works for you and your team.
For the option development step to be effective, you need to foster an environment in which people feel safe enough to rigorously debate ideas, share their wide-ranging opinions, and keep their defense shields down long enough to build on one another’s ideas. Safety is an interesting notion: it’s when judgment is suspended and risks are encouraged. As the leader, your key role is to make sure there’s a safe environment. If you are interested in passionately advocating and building your set of proposed solutions, make sure someone else is facilitating and driving the process for everyone.
Leaders as facilitators serve more like the host of the party than the guest of honor. You are hosting a party where people are expected to come ready to play and to have a good, productive time. In your role as facilitator, you will oversee the details of the event, as a skilled party planner would. As your guests arrive and while the party is in full swing, you’ll manage their interactions, keeping things running smoothly so people want to come again.
Leaders who are not strong in the role of “host” or “facilitator” may choose to delegate or outsource this role. For more information on the role of host, refer to “Facilitation” on page 254 in Appendix B. Use a trained, high-quality facilitator from outside the firm, or choose someone within your company who has demonstrated this natural skill. This approach has the advantage of freeing the leader to participate on an equal footing with others.
No one party can overpower another in these situations; equal footing matters. Remember, everyone’s ideas have merit.
As the facilitator or as the content leader, you should get the ball rolling by proposing some semi-outrageous notions, such as, “Should it be solar powered?”, “Should it have speech recognition?”, or whatever outside-the-box suggestion you might have. As the leader, you will have a certain amount of permission to take such an approach.
Table 5-1 lists the responsibilities that leaders, facilitators, and collaborators have during option development.
LEADER’S ROLE |
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FACILITATOR’S ROLE |
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CO-CREATOR’S ROLE |
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In the option development step, everyone is undertaking a deeper creative act than any one person could do alone. You get to bring together experts in different domains—engineers, marketing, and sales channel specialists. Inspire them to work together to generate ideas outside their individual expertise. Co-creating like this simply doesn’t happen when people are hesitant to speak their minds for fear of stepping on toes, damaging new working relationships, or driving into a “career cul-de-sac.” As described in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, the tone for this dialogue is set by everyone.
As a part of the option development step, you and your team will invest a bunch of creative energy in finding a good range of potential approaches to solving your problem. In the process, you’ll probably touch on various notions of success. Capture those ideas while they are fresh. This is called criteria tracking because you are identifying the footprints and patterns that seem to dictate whether one option is better than another. Criteria tracking does not need to be treated as completely distinct from option development. That is, the two steps can overlap somewhat. In practice, this means you’ll initially focus on option development with occasional moments of criteria tracking. Later, in the Envision phase, you’ll be doing some criteria tracking that will spark more option development.
Criteria tracking is parallel to option development in another way: it is about creating a rich set of potential criteria for evaluating visions of success. This criteria list will be sorted and prioritized during the upcoming Select phase. Criteria tracking also serves another useful function: it provides some effective separation between the idea generation space of the Envision phase and the idea rejection space of the Select phase.
As you build your list, include criteria from each area: product development, sales, operations, and so on. The intent behind criteria tracking is to gather what matters to the team and your organization so that during the next phase, Select, you can make the most well-informed choice among all your strategy ideas. You are seeking to answer several questions: How will we know when we’re winning? What does success look like? Where do we want to be? How does this influence what other moves our company can make? Some people have described this as tightly linked to a corporate mission. Often that will be true. But sometimes the criteria for a particular strategy will be unique for its own reasons.
The point to remember is that the criteria you develop now will determine how you choose amongst all these options. It’s important that these criteria align with the larger mission of the organization, to make sure that you’re not abandoning your core principles just to make an extra buck. Dollars matter in business, but not at the expense of core values. Doing things in alignment with the core mission and vision of a firm can accelerate success (Figure 5-2).
There are two key points to remember about criteria tracking. First, you want to expose tacit assumptions about the project goal and help your team come to a shared and explicit understanding about what matters. People in different roles often disagree about what success will look like. Finance may want the new project to address an anticipated revenue shortfall. Business development may want the new project to win a potential new partner. Engineering may see the project as a chance to learn a new technology. Resolving these tensions in an agreed-upon way is vital to the project. This can make a big difference in the ultimate success of the business solution. For example, the product development team might be motivated and even incentivized to keep capital equipment costs down, but when they understand that doing so is less important than schedule or quality (or whatever), they can take this to finance and explain why they need more in their budget. That’s an example of a decision that teams make after selecting criteria because they understand the inherent criteria and trade-offs. The full debate on criteria can wait until the Select phase, because at this point you want to focus on bringing things to the surface.
Debating why something matters instead of which idea is best lets people think collaboratively.
Second, explicit shared criteria give the entire team a shared vocabulary for “where we want to be” and will help each team member know how to make decisions at any point in the process where they need to make a trade-off. They will be aware of the underlying logic of the strategy and be able to articulate it. This is a benefit of collaborative strategy. The leader won’t hold the criteria alone; everyone will get it.
People sometimes don’t understand what forms criteria, so Table 5-2 lists some examples that can be useful for spurring the creation of a rich list of potential criteria.
WHAT MATTERS | EXPLANATION |
Size/revenue | It will be big enough to be a significant focus for the division. |
Timeframe | It will match our needs in number of quarters/years to yield. |
Portfolio | It will match our portfolio of products/services/offers. |
Region | It will be available in regions where we are strong. |
Certainty | We will have the right data available to make a good decision. |
Affinity | We will need to follow what our e-team wants, and they really want to do this. |
Defensive move | We will do it because we don’t want others to. |
Sales model | We will already be set up to sell it. |
Customer | The account type will match buyers that we know how to reach. |
Leverage | It will use our core strengths (product, channel, know-how) best. |
Service | We will be able to perform to meet customer satisfaction expectations. |
Profitability | It will support add-on of items, such as professional services. |
Criteria are ultimately another way to foster the culture of thinkers and strategists who can arrive at their own answers and drive forward the business without needing explicit direction. Criteria include all aspects of what is important to the business. Sharing these makes everyone aware of what matters. When everyone knows this, they are all thinkers rather than “just” doers. When we have shared criteria, we enable a healthy and thriving culture of problem solvers rather than simply doers. This is a key notion of the New How.
One simple question to start the criteria tracking step is: “How will we know when we are done?” This question gets people thinking about what the solution should look like, without specifically considering any options. Another question is: “Imagine you are looking at a series of options of what we could do and pointing and saying, ‘That’s the ONE!’ What about that solution makes you sure?” This question helps people start to consciously identify their decision-making criteria and helps them communicate explicitly what will drive the decision for them.
The goal of criteria tracking is to create a shared understanding of what success will look like. The understanding must be shared so each person on the team has a chance to talk about, internalize, and agree on the criteria or evidence of success. Consensus is important, but so is progress. If one or a few people do not agree, allow a little extra time to resolve the differences. If it still does not resolve, the leader or leaders will need to make a call. It may be appropriate to remind the team that once the options have been aired and discussed, the co-creators have a duty to support judgment calls. In Chapter 2, we discussed how collaboration is not consensus but rather an opportunity to participate fully, think together, and then co-create the future.
Discussing the criteria in detail gives team members an opportunity to clarify what’s most important by adding essential details or identifying and removing extraneous elements that might contribute to confusion.
Agreeing on and internalizing the criteria are essential pieces of the overall process. Individual team members will draw on their internalized criteria to inform and guide the selection of the one best strategy from the final strategy options. They’ll also use the criteria as a decision-making guide downstream during the execution of the project. Your team’s ability to select the right strategy is the logical byproduct of each team member having internalized the indicators or aspects of success. Their shared agreement is also valuable because it encourages individuals to support others through the project.
With this in mind, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to lead your team through the thinking process to develop quality criteria. This involves helping each member of your team reach a unified sense of what is most important and why. Although the debate must result in a set of criteria that you as a leader can live with, it’s also important that you give the team permission to add to the conclusions. Try to avoid forcing a preset outcome on them. In other words, avoid any tendencies you have to transform into the Chief of Answers!
Table 5-3 lists the main leader responsibilities during this part of the criteria tracking step, as well as the responsibilities of your team.
LEADER’S ROLE |
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COLLABORATOR’S ROLE |
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Identifying the criteria openly is also important because it allows people to state what is important to them as a team, as a division, and as an organization, and it helps them internalize why the strategy is important (that is, not just because “Bob said so”). When everyone is able to express their ideas for success, you win in two ways. You gain the advantage of potential upsides: some of the ideas will be very good. And you eliminate some downsides: later on, people won’t spend a lot of time fretting over whether their idea might have made things better, because they will know. For additional ideas on how to help teams develop criteria, see the "Tips for Criteria Development" exercises in Appendix A.
Imagining what success looks like can seem strange if you are not accustomed to it. Many organizations use phrases like “getting traction” and “achieving momentum.” These sound positive and successful, but they are not specific enough to allow people to steer their activities in alignment with the overarching goal. Instead of “getting traction,” we need to talk about how many new customers we are looking for. Instead of “achieving momentum,” we should look at specific quarter-over-quarter growth targets. The more specific and quantifiable the various dimensions of this project are in people’s hearts and minds, the better they can make decisions that support success.
When you are capturing criteria, the debate is often as valuable as the actual result. The outcome itself may not come as much of a surprise to you, but your team’s discussion as you’re developing criteria will give each individual on the team time to internalize what is important and why.
What’s most important about criteria tracking is that you turn unspoken assumptions into explicit and shared insights.
During the Envision phase, you’ll generate, capture, and articulate a full range of options that create potential strategic solutions. Because of the way people have been asked to participate in creating this option, you’ll have some buy-in within the organization. Because you’ll have a way of actually picking the one right option for this organization, you don’t need to be afraid of having many options.
Once you’ve successfully guided the team through this phase, you’ll have some viable choices for consideration (Figure 5-3).
When you have completed the Envision phase, your team will have generated a rich set of possible criteria and many options to explore. At this point, your job is to migrate the team’s attention toward the third phase of the QuEST process framework: Select.