Mastering Collaboration

by Gretchen Anderson

  Try using this technique with groups on a second or third round of idea generation to see what other ideas it spawns. Often the steps that are invented in the middle are as compelling as, or even more compelling than, the future state.

  Alternatives

  This exercise is good for refining ideas, or generating lots of alternatives to an idea that shows potential but isn’t working in specific ways.

  Choose one of the ideas that the group has come up with to refine.

  List out the issues that people have found with the idea. These might be weaknesses, ways it violates constraints, or just unspecified aspects of the idea that need to be clarified.

  Generate variations of ways to solve for the weaknesses and note down how it has been improved.

  Lather, rinse, repeat as needed to get to something that the group feels is workable.

  Figure 7-8 shows a template to use when generating alternatives to an idea that isn’t quite working.

  For example: If the group has a “security system” idea, you might need to add more detail to evaluate it well. You might want to clarify whether the solution is about observation, protection, or safety. From these, you might imagine alternative ideas like “guard dog,” “security camera,” “bodyguard,” and “alarm system.” Each of these accomplishes different things and takes a different form. This can help the group dial in exactly what the system could do and get at what is important about security more specifically.

  Figure 7-8. A template for refining ideas by finding alternatives to impractical or unworkable ideas that show promise

  This exercise is most useful toward the end of an exploratory period, when you need to start making ideas more practical to test out.

  Troubleshooting Idea Exploration

  Getting the team to generate new ideas and refine them to be workable will inevitably run into challenges. This section lists some common pitfalls teams face and suggestions about how to handle them.

  No New Ideas Emerge

  It’s not unusual that, during their first cycle or two, teams don’t actually develop very many new ideas and just try to move forward with the obvious solutions that have already been proposed. This may be because some people actually think that the solution is sound, or it may be because people are afraid to look for new ideas that won’t be as workable as one that’s already been identified.

  So what can I do?

  Third time’s the charm

  At the very least, spend three rounds generating ideas in this stage. The first round is likely to be full of the mundane, the pet ideas, and some amount of performance by team members whose brains and intuition are just getting into gear. The second round will tend to push things a little further, so that by the third try, you should be covering some new territory. If you can, bring the team back a day later and try it again a few times, remixing ideas you’ve already discovered and getting silly with the exercise. While it’s hard to call “done” on this effort, if people aren’t getting anywhere new for more than two tries, you’ve probably exhausted that pool. If you don’t feel like you’ve gotten anywhere new or fruitful, it may be time to invite a few new people or change venues.

  Alone, together

  Most people assume that exploring ideas with more, different people means agonizing meetings or chaotic brainstorming. Those who are more introverted may dread the group environment and not contribute as much as they could. You can also let people explore ideas on their own and then bring them back as a group to share them.

  Lob a stinker

  One of my favorite ways to get people to both open up and start contributing ideas is to offer up some that straight-up suck. People can’t help but show you that they can do better than terrible.

  Focus on quantity, not quality

  I find that giving teams the explicit challenge to come up with as many ideas as possible both lowers expectations that any one idea is perfect and gets competitive types generating silly ideas just to make the numbers. What tends to happen, though, is that those people then actually come up with more expansive ideas that lead to breakthroughs. It can be useful to set a numerical target that is absurdly high (“come up with 50 ideas”) or to walk around the room calling out teams or people who have high volumes to generate some competitive energy.

  The “Yeah-Buts”

  We’ve all met them, and they’re lovely otherwise, but when you’re deliberately trying to let go of constraints, those people who consistently return to, “yeah, but,” lumping requirements onto teammates or spouting subject-matter expertise that isn’t helpful can be a real pain. Not only is shutting down options in this stage counter to your purpose, but some ideas that don’t get air time may become “martyred ideas,” which can take on mythic proportions and divide groups unproductively. I’ve seen people cling fervently to a position, simply because no one will let them have it. This is time to be open-minded and help others be open-minded too.

  So what can I do?

  Make it magic

  One of my favorite things to give yeah-buts is a magic wand. Grab a ruler or other wand-like object (or make it imaginary) and give the person a mechanism to wipe away troubling constraints, making sure they know they can wish them back later after they’ve generated a bunch of ideas to make them more realistic.

  Embrace and inflate constraints

  The Extreme Constraints exercise is a provocation to get teams generating ideas. The heart of this approach is to load up constraints and make them even more restrictive until people finally find ways around them. For example, if you are designing a service offering for customer support, imagine “what if” no one involved spoke the same language, or the support staff were all children. Inventing wild constraints not only stretches the thinking of those generating ideas, but it can appeal to the hidden creativity in “yeah-buts” in surprising ways as well.

  Invite users into the brainstorm

  While it can be a challenge to organize, if you can involve your intended users in co-creating the solutions meant to help them, often your team members will be more likely to play along because they want to impress their customers.

  Split the group

  If you have some people who really can’t or don’t want to leave constraints behind, you can appoint them to be a separate team that focuses on turning “wild” ideas into something more practical. This leverages different strengths in different groups to get a better result.

  The Swoop and Poop

  The swoop and poop is when a senior person—like a seagull on a pier, descending upon unsuspecting folks with their eyes not on the skies—enters a collaboration or meeting halfway through, drops a few loaded comments, and then glides back out on their way to their next victim, leaving the team with a pile of crap to decide what to do with. Because the person generally holds some authority, and may even be a respected stakeholder with a vested interest, the team struggles to ignore or make productive sense of the feedback.

  The swoop and poop is generally not ill-intentioned. Often, busy leaders who have expertise to share find themselves between a rock and a hard set of competing priorities. Rather than refrain from commenting and letting the team get too far astray, they want to provide “helpful” guardrails, without realizing how disruptive or uniformed their input is.

  The most frustrating and challenging swoop and poops happen when the team is at the “end” of a process and the swooper rejects the team’s solution entirely. This feedback might take the form of “that just doesn’t feel right.” This interaction can make even the most sanguine team members boil with rage, and tends to undermine the leader’s credibility in ways they probably aren’t aware of.

  So what can I do?

  Avoid it

  Much of the advice out there around managing these problematic stakeholders involves stopping it altogether. Jared Spool counsels teams to use proper planning to involve these people early and often, giving them a chance to better understand the constraints
and opportunities and provide more actionable feedback. While I appreciate the optimism of this approach, as someone who has committed this foul myself more than once, I’m not convinced it’s very practical. Certainly you should make every effort to schedule sessions that work for people with important perspectives. Exposing them to (hopefully novel or surprising) findings about the problem will definitely improve the quality of discourse and build harmony across the organization. At the same time, unless your initiative is the most important one in their viewfinder at the given time, even sessions scheduled early and triple-confirmed don’t mean much.

  Make it useful

  If avoiding swoop and poops isn’t likely to happen, a better approach is to turn the steaming pile into something the team can make use of, or not. If you can exercise some empathy for the overloaded stakeholder and assume they had the best intentions, you may find that their perspective isn’t as destructive as it feels. See if you can, in the moment or later with the team, turn lemons into lemonade. Walk back their specific recommendations to constructive guidance. “Make the button do X” might really mean, “make it easier for someone to know how to do X,” which is actually useful input. A key phrase I use here is to follow the specific critique with, “so that the user can…” and see if you can fill in the blank with a valid objective that the executive intended.

  Try being a traveling salesman

  One way I’ve found to avoid swoop and poops being quite as disruptive, or to minimize them, is to use the traveling salesman approach, either before or after an offense happens. The traveling salesman goes door-to-door, one-on-one, to gain the necessary time and thoughtfulness required from your stakeholder. By requesting a brief session of time from them and specifically asking for their help, you are more likely to get the high-bandwidth attention you seek, instead of a performance that they may feel pressured to give in front of the group. If you don’t think that you have enough pull to get solo time from an executive, you can also try the traveling salesman with one of their trusted advisors that you can get time from. Asking this trusted advisor to give input, or channel what they think the executive would say, may bear fruitful feedback. But it may also lead that advisor to suggest either that the executive make the time or that they themselves approach the executive to put the importance of their participation in terms that will be more meaningful and understood.

  Admit failure

  Sometimes, very experienced leaders have an intuition that’s worth listening to, even if it’s painful. As John Edson of McKinsey Digital says, “It’s never too late for a good idea.” When the feedback being dumped amounts to “go back to square one,” it’s worth considering its validity. No stakeholder (usually) wants to derail the effort in a fit of pique, so when they express deep aversion about the direction, it’s worth listening.

  Show them their idea

  Most of my advice here can be summed up as, “don’t get into a fight with the swoop and pooper.” It’s simply not a good idea. You lack the data to argue it, and probably don’t fully understand their position. Rather than reject it, you can try to act on the feedback, no matter how wrong it seems. Jared Spool suggests taking the ideas to the users and bringing back data about what they say, positive and negative. Sometimes, even before you have actual data to share, simply showing what the person requested is the quickest way to get them to admit defeat or clarify what they actually meant to say.

  Conclusion

  When teams are seeking new ideas, they often need scaffolding to help them explore widely to ensure that new perspectives get airtime. Moving from thinking analytically to thinking creatively means that people must set aside constraints, and bring in stimuli that takes them from a linear path to a more lateral one, at times even “getting lost in the woods” chasing ideas that may not go anywhere. Give the team the time and space to come up with, and then abandon or refine, “crazy” ideas that solve the problem in unique ways.

  Leading a team in this part of the process means balancing the need to keep an open mind with keeping a focus on the challenge to be solved. Because the path to the answer isn’t always straight and obvious, the team must periodically stop and take stock of the ideas at hand to see how they are tracking toward the challenge.

  Key Takeaways

  Teams need help thinking creatively and exploring the solution space widely to be sure to capitalize on the diverse perspectives of the group. You can employ lateral thinking techniques to free analytical thinkers up from following a linear thought process and considering only obvious ideas.

  Help the team set aside constraints when generating ideas. The ideas that get explored at first may be unworkable or impractical, but it’s better to try to refine “wild” ideas than simply assume that safe ideas are the only ones that will work.

  Be intentional about separating the process of exploring widely without constraints from the process of evaluating and selecting ideas to refine and test.

  Chapter 8. Make Sound Decisions

  Once a team has spent dedicated time exploring different ideas and getting away from constraints, they need to switch into a mode where they begin to select promising ideas to refine and make more practical. In this chapter we’ll look at how teams can constructively critique ideas and manage the natural tension that arises when we start thinking less “blue sky” about all the options and get more judgmental (see Figure 8-1).

  Figure 8-1. Exploring ideas and deciding which to pursue should happen each cycle, or even multiple times in a cycle

  Democratize Discussion, Not Decisions

  Chad Jennings, CXO of Babylon Health, is often brought in to make critical decisions for the company. He says, “Product management is a loud discipline with lots of discussion. I’m on everyone’s email list, and I’m brought in a lot to ‘make a decision.’ But I’m making decisions about people who I don’t manage directly and situations that I don’t know intimately.” He knows he should make key decisions because he’s accountable, but he can’t do it alone. He realizes it’s important to open up discussions about ideas, how they work, and what doesn’t work so that everyone understands the choices being made, and that they’ve been made with a great deal of thought and input.

  Simply having a team vote on key decisions can be dangerous, leaving it open to pressures of “groupthink” or popularity. At the same time, leaving the decision to a senior leader who wasn’t instrumental in developing options isn’t the answer, either. In both cases, you lose all of the nuance and context that you’ve carefully engineered into the process so far.

  In Discussing Design (O’Reilly), Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry say, “Critique is at the core of great collaboration.” For a deep dive into the art and science of giving and receiving critique, their book is a must-read. To master collaboration, there are many other aspects to consider, but critique is certainly crucial. After all, you got yourself into this mess because you valued bringing diverse points of view and skills to bear on a complex challenge. This stage of the process can be especially challenging to teams because it requires moving out of the safe space and trust you’ve (hopefully) established and exposing your collaboration to others. Those others won’t necessarily be coached into giving “constructive criticism,” and it may take some patience and effort to get their valuable feedback to be actionable. Testing concepts, prototypes, or releases with users/customers is the most typical context for this activity, where you can’t necessarily explain the constraints of the problem or rely upon shared institutional knowledge to make yourself understood. But this is also where you can end the guess-a-thons and get some “truths” into the mix to react to.

  It’s important to look at the idea of critiquing and converging on an idea in two different settings. The first is within the group that investigated and developed different approaches together. In this situation, you’re looking to bring different threads together into something coherent. Likely, if you threw away your constraints properly, the ideas you ha
ve aren’t entirely coherent or plausible, so the team’s discussion needs not only to praise or point out flaws, but to be generative as well. See the sidebar “Thinking Hats” for some pointers on fostering this kind of productive discussion.

  Tools to Support Discussion and Decisions: Thinking Hats

  It’s useful to have different perspectives represented when the team is evaluating ideas and trying to make a decision. The Thinking Hats framework from Edward de Bono is useful to assign people to roles and get them to think in new ways, making room for diverse perspectives.

  Assign different people different hats, or choose randomly. If you have enough people, assign several people to a color, and have them discuss different ideas wearing that color hat. The facilitator can have a color-coded Post-it or dedicated area of the whiteboard to capture the insights from each perspective.

  Blue: Managing

  What is the subject? What is the big-picture view? What controls are needed?

  White: Information

  Take a data-driven approach to identify trends and gaps. What do we actually know?

  Red: Emotions

  This is where you get people’s gut reactions, either the team’s own or the imagined emotions of the end user.

  Black: Discernment

  Look for potential negative outcomes of the idea. Think like a bad actor who might abuse the solution.