9
OTHER VITAL TEAM TOOLS THAT BOOST COLLABORATION
People with different expertise and backgrounds see the world differently.
As one Silicon Valley leader said, “When you are bringing people together who have different competencies, they think and act differently. Their brains are wired differently. For example, marketing and finance were working together recently. The two departments’ spreadsheets didn’t even look alike.”
Other leaders said similar things. As one put it, “Operations and product groups see the world differently.” Another summed it up as: “It’s as if we’re all roped together, climbing up the mountain, and we each think we have a better path up that mountain. We all have the same goal, but we’re all tugging to get others to follow our path.”
You probably aren’t surprised to hear that people with different perspectives see the world differently. We often wish that this wasn’t the case. We wish that people could always work together seamlessly.
You might assume that things are different at companies that boast great collaboration, that folks at those companies work well together right from the start. In reality, Silicon Valley leaders have not stopped these differences in perspective from occurring. Nor do they want to. They know, as one leader put it, that “conflict isn’t necessarily bad. It’s fine as long as it’s done in a good way. Working successfully together isn’t just about mindshare and liking each other. It’s about mining the differences.”
The leaders with whom I spoke shared the following ideas for helping employees with disparate views to work together well:
“We make sure that all the groups working together on a project have shared goals. We don’t want them cancelling others’ efforts and wasting energy working against each other.”
“In the past, when we saw an opportunity we jumped on it. Now we pause and remind ourselves of our overall strategy. We make sure that this new direction will help us achieve our strategy. We find ways for staff to ‘hold that strategy in their hand’ so they can judge whether this new opportunity is on or off target. It democratizes the reason, the why.”
“We take time to set context. We anticipate differences and help work through them.”
“We’ve found that most difficulties aren’t usually because of content differences. Much more frequently, they are based on styles and approaches. We supply tools to help staff work together better.”
Let’s take a closer look at how one company helps set the tone for employees to work together. What follows is a description of a unique program they use to bring employees together.
HOW SANDISK INCREASES TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
We are immensely grateful to our global sales force at SanDisk. They work extremely hard and only come together as a whole team once or twice a year. They use those meetings to learn even more about our products, company goals, strategies, and progress. They also use the time to grow themselves as professionals and energize themselves for the next selling cycle. Their external clients often attend parts of the meeting.
This year, they decided to include a volunteer event as part of their meeting. They had done it before and found that it hugely enhanced employee work relationships. Although they hadn’t included clients previously, they wanted to this time.
At SanDisk, we are deeply committed to philanthropy and helping communities in which we work. Our philanthropic programs have also become a way to strengthen our ability to work together across our teams. In working together on a meaningful volunteer activity, participants develop strong bonds. They feel honored to work side-by-side to make the community (or the world) a better place. When employees return to work, things are different. They have much stronger respect for each other. They realize that they truly are all part of a greater whole.
We helped the organizers of the sales meeting plan a volunteer event to assist a non-profit group whose goal is to eradicate hunger. It was a bit of a challenge to include 800 people, but it came together well. These 800 people worked side-by-side, packaging 450,000 meals to feed the hungry. They were so enthusiastic that many of them chose to go back to the warehouse on their own, to participate in the next steps in getting the food out to those who desperately need it.
As consistently happens, these 800 people went back to their meeting with very different attitudes. The rest of the meeting surpassed people’s expectations in the ways that the participants interacted with each other and the decisions they made.
After these volunteer engagements, some of the most creative ideas come from the folks we least expect: employees who rarely spoke up before the event. The changes are so meaningful . . . almost magical. Staff risk sharing their ideas because nobody feels “dragged through the dirt.” Even if their ideas aren’t used, they know they were seriously considered. The trust developed while working together to help people in their communities creates the safety to work together to fix big hairy problems at work.
THE TAKE AWAY
For SanDisk, the positive effect of these volunteer activities is long lasting. Employees get to know each other while working on an issue of importance to the community, on which they see eye-to-eye. They learn about each other, their families, their hobbies, and their values. After they return to work, these new bonds create understanding, empathy, and a safety net for taking risks and sharing ideas that are not “wholly baked.”
Using a volunteer program to help staff get to know and trust others at a deeper level may or may not work at your company. The take-away should be that respect and trust can foster a safe environment in which staff want to share and are willing to take the risk of expressing ideas that are not yet fully researched.
Although that environment can be built in many different ways, it needs to be built in order for people to work together well. As one leader of a large, well-known Silicon Valley company remarked, “Sharing your untested ideas will, by definition, make you feel vulnerable. You could have a radically new idea. If you don’t feel safe, then you won’t put it out. Organizations benefit when people are willing to think creatively and take the risk of sharing those ideas. That’s a part of our culture here. Emotional safety lives here.”
Your company needs to build that trust, respect, and sense of a safe environment.
APPLICATION
Think about the way SanDisk helps people get to know each other and build a culture of safety. Could that method work at your company? Does your company do things to help employees get to know others personally to build those bonds? How well does that work? Does there need to be more of this?
TOOLS THAT HELP GROUPS WORK MORE EFFECTIVELY
This chapter will offer two tools to assist groups of people in becoming more effective. The first one, Framing Topics, helps narrow a group’s focus so that they don’t waste time considering a variety of subjects that add no value to the conversation. The second one, Scenario Planning, a structured way of thinking about the future, is a tool for situations when you need to take into account aspects of the future that are unpredictable. We often see uncertainty about the future as a problem to either be immediately solved or ignored. Scenario Planning helps us see uncertainty as an opportunity rather than a problem to be minimized.
FRAMING TOPICS
What does it mean to frame a topic? Taken literally, a frame is a border that separates something from its surrounding environment. In the same way that a picture frame helps to focus our eye on the enclosed art piece, framing can do the same for a conversation. It focuses our attention on a particular aspect of a topic.
You’re probably familiar with the saying “garbage in, garbage out.” It arose with the advent of computers, and made people aware that if you put the wrong information into a system, the wrong information will result. If we are unclear about what we are doing in a particular meeting or even an entire project, we’re not likely to achieve the result we desire. Albert Einstein supposedly said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask.”1
Imagine a group of people coming together to discuss how to improve employee satisfaction. If those three words (improving employee satisfaction) were the only introduction to the topic, you might observe the dialogue jumping from salaries to vacation policy to sick leave to bonuses. Although any of those topics might bring out some interesting points, they will be of little benefit if the purpose of the discussion was to focus specifically on the company’s work-at-home policy.
If the person calling the meeting had let attendees know that the purpose of the meeting was to explore the specific sub-topic of employee requests to work at home, then participants would have arrived ready to talk about it. The conversation probably wouldn’t have wandered into those other areas. If it had, the facilitator or a coworker could have redirected them back to the intended focus.
How many times have you sat in a meeting and realized after 20 minutes that the conversation has wandered way off topic? If the meeting organizer “frames” the topic carefully and with fore-thought, this is less likely to happen.
Framing is not only useful in setting the agenda and introducing the topic, it continues to be useful throughout the conversation. And it is a useful tool for everyone—not just the meeting organizer or facilitator. Effective collaboration is much more likely when attendees take ownership of the task of guiding the conversation to the right places.
What follows are four categories that can help frame a conversation and help participants focus on the right topics.
THE FOUR WHAT’S
Think of your conversation in terms of:
What Is. The facts and evidence we know about this topic.
What Should. The opinions, views, and judgments we need to know more about.
What If. Brainstorming possibilities and new ideas regarding the topic.
What Then. Where we want to take this topic. How we wrap it up for today and set up the next steps.
I will share tips in the following section for using these Four What’s effectively, as well as offering several other categories of thought to assist you in framing your discussions.
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
There is an art to framing topics in ways that brings out individual intelligence and weaves it into a communal brain. Asking questions is particularly useful. “Questions stimulate the mind and offer people an opportunity to use their brains [even more] constructively.”2
As an experiment, when you want to engage others, phrase what you want to say in the form of a statement. Then observe what happens. Did it result in the conversation you were hoping for? The next time, try articulating your thought in the form of a question. What happened this time?
For example, regarding your company’s work-at-home policy, if you are wording your thought as a statement, you might say, “Our company’s policy regarding work at home is too restrictive. It needs to be more flexible and allow more employees to take advantage of it.” If you are wording it as a question you might say, “What effect do we think our company’s work-at-home policy has on employee satisfaction, and the decision that some of them make to leave our company?”
Beginning the conversation with a question can set the tone so that the ensuing discussion is collaborative, whereas starting with a statement can polarize others who disagree with your statement and create more of a debate environment.
What follows are brief summaries of major types of questions that are useful in setting up various kinds of collaborative discussions. (Four of the seven types of questions are from the Four What’s. I have added three other types of questions.)
Questions that help determine the needed focus of a discussion. What seems to be the problem? For whom is it a problem? In what ways are things going particularly well? If we were going to improve two to three things, which would be highest priority?
Questions that elicit detail when people do not understand a topic. These questions are often called “funnel” questions because they start at a general level and guide folks to a more specific place as their understanding increases. Useful questions in this category include: Can you tell us more about the issue? What did you like about it? What confused you? What could you have used more or less of? What are the most important lessons from that situation?
Questions to guide a group toward a vision (to help explore “What If” topics). What about this situation do we most care about? What does this mean for us? What about this would inspire us? How would we like this to be? What would be the ideal? How could we move toward that ideal? If we could ask a clairvoyant three questions about this situation what would they be? How would we answer those questions?
Questions to help consider alternatives and options. What should be our criteria for judging these ideas? On what should we base our decisions? Based on those criteria do any ideas seem stronger than others? Do any seem weaker? How might we best meet our goals? What other issues might we want to consider? How might this change the way others are thinking or working?
Questions that elicit data (to help explore “What Is”). What evidence do we have to support that thought? Should we gather more information on this topic? What else do we need? Who might be willing to do that research and bring it to our next meeting?
Questions to surface opinions, judgments, assumptions (to help explore “What Should” issues). What are you hearing about this situation? What do you observe? What do you think about this? What do you feel about it? How should we interpret it? What thinking (and assumptions) might support those notions? What important events from the past should we recall as we plan this topic?
Questions to move to action (to help explore “What Then” topics). How should we complete this project? What steps should we take? Who needs to be involved? Who needs to be informed? Who should be performing which tasks? What are the timelines for these steps? How should we measure our effectiveness?
Do you notice the absence of a particular word among the sample queries provided here? Take a moment to glance back and see if you can guess. That missing word is why. Perhaps you have heard that “why” questions can be dangerous because they can sound judgmental and put people on the defensive. Still, there are times when “why” questions are called for. They can increase your understanding in totally different ways than questions of which, when, where, and how. Just be careful when you use the word why so the wording of the question and your tone of voice do not give the impression of an inquisition.
An example of a great use of “why” questions is “The Five Why’s.” This is a quick and effective process to help a group dig deeper to find root causes. After exploring a sub-topic, the question “Why?” is posed. When this is done five times, it can lead the group to great new realizations. Say you want to figure out why customers are suddenly returning so many women’s blouses that they purchased from your company. You open the discussion with the first question and go from there.
1. Why are so many blouses being returned?
Because too many buttons are falling off.
2. Why are so many buttons falling off?
Because the sizing is wrong and many women are buying blouses one size too small. When they wear the blouse the buttons tend to pop off.
3. Why is the sizing wrong?
Because we bought the blouses from a manufacturer in a different country that uses a different sizing system.
4. Why wasn’t that detected before we bought the blouses?
Because we usually only buy from the same manufacturers and know their sizing. It didn’t occur to us to check this issue with the new manufacturer.
5. Why are we buying from a new manufacturer? Is that something we will do more often? Should we create a practice of checking sizing when we are working with new manufacturers?
THE TAKE AWAY
We often assume that questions are most useful for conversations in which we are brainstorming new ideas. But they can be used effectively for other purposes as well. They can be used to help:
Persuade people.
Gain information.
Clear up fuzzy thinking.
Motivate employees.
Solve problems.
Take the sting out of criticism.
Overcome objections.
Clarify instructions.
Reduce anxiety.
Defuse volatile situations.3
The effectiveness of questions depends on how they are framed. The key is making sure they are worded accurately to solicit the information you seek. Their effectiveness also depends on authenticity. Are they being used to genuinely explore? If so, then they will likely be met with openness and result in a successful conversation. However, if someone is using questions to manipulate a conversation, then others will probably notice this and the dialogue will be unsuccessful. It may even impair the trust others have in the asker beyond this one conversation.
One Silicon Valley leader offered a great tool that he has used over the years. One or more participants in a meeting are dubbed the “rat-hole patrol.” They are armed with humorous cards with a picture of a rat in a hole. When the group goes off focus, a member of the rat-hole patrol throws a card on the table; one that looks like this:
Graphic by Eileen Zornow
APPLICATION
Do employees at your company frame topics appropriately? How would you rate your firm on this skill? Try some of the skills provided in this section.
SCENARIO PLANNING
Desired futures don’t just happen, they are created. Creating those great futures means that we have to consider uncertainties and do a better job of predicting what will happen. Predicting the future used to mean doing accounting-like forecasts. Employees told themselves that if something had been true in the past and is true in the present, then it’s logical to assume it will still be true in the future. The problem is that this type of thinking doesn’t allow us to factor in possible changes.
Scenario Planning can help guide decisions when a team is facing significant uncertainties. By using the data we have and combining it with our observations and well-founded perceptions, we can make reasonable guestimates about how things might unfold. We are not betting on one particular future. Instead, the idea is to create several scenarios that describe how things might play out. Then we make a decision that provides the most promise for as many of these scenarios as possible.
Peter Schwartz, a noted American futurist and author, was instrumental in shaping Scenario Planning.4 The process that follows is one that I customized over the years in my work with companies. First, I will explain the eight-step Scenario Planning process. Then I will provide you with an example of how it works.
AN APPROACH FOR USING SCENARIO PLANNING
Step 1: Identify the issue under discussion. Take enough time to “frame” it carefully to ensure that you are working on the specific issue of concern. Also, be sure to enumerate how far into the future are you are considering. Two years? Five years?
Step 2: Identify the most important factors and trends that will be relevant to this decision over the time period of interest.
These might include factors internal to the organization, such as the primary competencies staff currently have (or lack), your current products, and other factors that could influence your decision.
It should also include factors external to the organization that are important to this issue, such as changing consumer preferences, competition, new technology becoming available, governmental regulations, and so on.
These factors and trends will be used to help create the scenarios. Typically, most of these factors are not subject to company influence in the short term.
Step 3: Examine the factors identified in Step 2 and determine whether or not each is highly certain to occur.
Bucket all of the uncertainties together. These uncertainties will be used to craft the scenarios in Step 5. Then, prioritize these uncertainties. Which are most relevant to this project and the decisions you are making?
Bucket the certainties together. These are essentially unchangeable pieces because they are highly likely to occur and there is not much you can do to influence whether they do or not. These are the fixed constraints that will help you examine your scenarios. Prioritize the certainties; you will use the most relevant ones to consider your scenarios.
Because of the importance of these two buckets, after you have assigned every factor or trend to one of the two buckets and determined the highest priority ones, double-check the high-priority items. What evidence supports your inclusion of that factor? Does it hold up to examination? What assumptions might you want to check out? This double-check increases the accuracy of your Scenario Planning process.
Step 4: Answer these questions to further increase the validity of the scenarios you will create.
Is there anything else that happened in the past or is happening now that might shape the future related to this subject?
What haven’t you been looking at that you should consider?
Step 5: Now it is time to bring together the high-priority uncertainties into four scenarios, each of which summarizes how the future may look with respect to this issue.
You should craft the four scenarios so they contain some variation of the high-priority uncertainties. This may sound confusing in abstract terms, but it should become clearer when you see the following example on page 163.
Four scenarios are suggested so the group will give due consideration to each scenario rather than taking the easy way out and concentrating mainly on the middle scenario. The objective is to reach a solution or decision that is best for all of these scenarios, not just one them.
Insert the most important certainties into the scenarios as constraints. (They remain the same across each of the scenarios.) Again, this should be clearer when you see it demonstrated in the following examples.
Step 6: Step back from the four scenarios and assess them. The following questions can be used to check them for usefulness:
Does this scenario make logical sense?
What chain of events could lead to this future? Is it plausible?
Based on your answers to these questions, you may want to revise some of your scenarios or create new ones.
Step 7: Examine the decision you are trying to make in relation to these scenarios. The goal is to make a decision with the greatest potential for success across all of these possible futures because you don’t know which one will come about. An important question to ask is: What decision would allow us to the best chances of being successful, regardless which of these four scenarios actually happens?
Step 8: Select your final decision and formulate an implementation plan for executing it. You may want to include a “yellow-light” warning system that requires you to reexamine your decision if conditions change and your scenarios are no longer accurate.
AN EXAMPLE OF SCENARIO PLANNING
To clarify how this works, here is a fictitious example of Scenario Planning applied by a company that is thinking of moving into the production of all-electric vehicles. (This example is not based on real data. It is a simplified version of what you might create when using this process with a real issue.)
Step 1: Framing the issue: Can we base a lucrative business around manufacturing and selling all-electric vehicles in five years?
Step 2: Sample trends relevant to this decision: (You should create an exhaustive list of important factors and trends well beyond this abbreviated example.)
Price of gasoline in five years.
Availability of public charging stations for all- electric vehicles.
Cost of public charging stations for all-electric vehicles.
The feasibility of having a private charging station at one’s home.
Step 3: The first three bulleted trends in Step 2 are uncertainties. We do not know what the situation will look like with respect to any of these three issues in five years. The fourth trend will be considered a certainty for this scenario. We are going to assume that anyone purchasing an all- electric vehicle will want and be able to have a charging station at their home.
We bucket together the first three bulleted trends as uncertainties, and identify all of them as highly relevant for this example.
We have one certainty for this example. It too is considered highly relevant.
A double-check of these four trends supports their inclusion and their placement in the buckets mentioned previously. (If this had been real, we would have conducted research to check out the validity of assumptions we were making with these four factors.)
Step 4: When we ask ourselves the two questions posed in Step 4, we find that the four trends that we identified sufficiently cover the important issues. No other factors or trends are identified.
Step 5: Here are the four scenarios:
Scenario 1: The price of gas is considerably more expensive in five years. Public car charging stations are widely available at freeway exits and on local roads at a very low cost for customers. Private charging stations are widely available and affordable at people’s homes.
Scenario 2: The price of gas is somewhat more expensive in five years. Public car charging stations are widely available at freeway exits but not on local roads. Charging stations are of moderate cost for customers. Private charging stations are widely available and affordable at people’s homes.
Scenario 3: The price of gas costs about the same in five years as it does today. Public car charging stations are of limited availability at freeway exits and on local roads. Those charging stations are high cost for customers. Private charging stations are widely available and affordable at people’s homes.
Scenario 4: The price of gas is less expensive in five years than it is today. Public car charging stations are not readily available at freeway exits or on local roads. Those charging stations are very high cost for customers. Private charging stations are widely available and affordable at people’s homes.
Step 6: In conducting the check of the four scenarios each seems logical, plausible, and useful as written.
Step 7: Now it’s time to consider our decision in light of these scenarios. The decision is whether to move to the manufacturing and selling of all-electric vehicles in five years. Considering this in relation to each of the four scenarios we come to the following:
Scenario 1: After estimating costs, benefits, and limitations we conclude we should definitely move to manufacturing and selling all-electric vehicles under the circumstances enumerated within this scenario.
Scenario 2: After estimating costs, benefits, and limitations we conclude that we should move to manufacturing and selling all-electric vehicles under these circumstances as well.
Scenario 3: After estimating costs, benefits, and limitations we come to the conclusion that we should move to manufacturing and selling all-electric vehicles under these circumstances. The demand for these vehicles will be such that our profit will be less but still high enough to warrant this move, under the circumstances we have outlined in the third scenario.
Scenario 4: After estimating costs, benefits, and limitations we come to the conclusion that we should not move to manufacturing and selling all-electric vehicles under these circumstances. The demand for an all-electric vehicle will be so much lower if these circumstances come about that our profits would be insufficient. Under this scenario we could not base a lucrative business around manufacturing and selling all-electric vehicles in five years.
Step 8: Our Scenario Planning activity gives us confidence to move ahead with our decision to manufacture and sell all-electric vehicles because three of the four scenarios tell us that this strategy can be profitable. However, because one scenario indicates otherwise, we will continue to monitor these factors, and if any of them seem to be moving in unfavorable directions, we will reconsider our decision.
Scenario Planning is a way to bring as much intelligence as you can to a highly ambiguous situation. It helps you consider uncertain futures and make decisions with some rigor. The Scenario Planning process takes time. It is not intended for relatively easy decisions and it should be reserved for decisions in which a lot is at stake.
APPLICATION
Could Scenario Planning help structure some of your own discussions on topics that are enmeshed in uncertainty because of unknowns about the future? Consider trying it out when you are planning a meeting to discuss a complex topic.
This eight-step process should be sufficient to plan and implement use of Scenario Planning. If you would like additional information, I highly recommend Peter Schwartz’s book, The Art of the Long View.