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You have a desire, problem, need — an opportunity. You have a team of people all with ideas on how to meet this need, but because of one reason or another no one speaks up and you end up going with a solution stated by the first person who speaks, or the highest paid person in the room. Weeks later it fails and there is a lot of side conversations about how many folks never thought it’d work in the first place.
Unfortunately, if you’ve never experienced this… you are likely the person that spoke up and the psychological safety on your team is so low that you didn’t hear the whispers, but I guarantee you they happened.
This is avoidable. If you do a few simple-to-understand-but-hard-to-do things…
(1) Orient: Establish context and a desired outcome
- Make everyone is clear on why this is worth the time we are spending on solving it. Observable events and a timeline are the best way to do this in my experience
- Iteration is impossible without… OUTCOMES! So set what the world looks like after we’ve successfully completed our objective. Don’t have an objective… be prepared for a bad time. Cannot skip this. The “we will know it when we see it” or “make it good enough” is a trap!!
(2) Diverge: Establish options
- Yep a good old fashioned “no bad ideas” jam session. Do it quietly where folks are writing their own and share all of them with each other after the quiet time. Do it as a chaotic brainstorm (be sure to create an environment where the more introverted actually have a way to be heard). Doesn’t matter… even get things out there that we know we won’t do. The point here is to get more than one solution to compare. Without that you aren’t going for an outcome, you are just pursuing outputs, and if you are reading this and I haven’t convinced you that is awful, I’ve failed you.
(3) Converge & Act
- I play this with “chips and anti-chips”. Folks can use anti-chips to remove options. Or folks can split up their chips across multiple solutions. Or folks can push all of their chips into a single solution. The facilitator will decide how you reach a conclusion. Remember, A Leader is / is not (modified MLK quote) … leadership is NOT gathering consensus… it is molding consensus. Don’t get stuck or choose a new facilitator.
- Do something… assign todos, hold each other accountable… solve for forever!
Note… it is more than ok if you get to converge and need to go back to diverge. That means collaboration is happening. This isn’t a linear process. True progress towards outcomes is a bit messy… lean into it.
So next time you have a big or small decision to make… D<>C it!