Teams, groups, and companies are organic networks. When trying to make a Big Important Change, spot problem solving is about as effective as acne cream on a third degree burn. Addressing an organizational issue with a quick tactical fix just moves the problem somewhere else. Often that somewhere else is even more difficult or more expensive to solve.
We all want to do the right thing and improve the entire system. But it’s hard. We go in with the best intentions to be inclusive, all encompassing, collect all points of view, and consider all points equally and fairly. But soon you find yourself buried to the neck in uncategorized data, personal opinions, personal agendas, unresolved conflicts, and every other point/counterpoint that has ever been brought up and not solved in the organization. As the days stretch on you find yourself doing more office therapy than analysis, your list of should have dones stretches longer and longer, and worst of all, nothing is actually getting done. Even the most hardened leaders eventually snaps, sweeping their arms across the desk and knocking all the best intentions to the floor, finally making the gut decision you wanted to make in the first place.
We call that “making the tough decision”.
You need a balanced yet urgent approach that includes organization wide data and idea generation, filtering, categorization, consensus building, prioritization, and sooner rather than later, action.
So let’s talk about that first part: gathering some ideas. Too often we start in the middle of the process. We take that gut “I know what this place needs” and get to work rather than taking a consensus building, eyes wide open approach. This doesn’t mean slowing down or getting mired in beauracracy. It simply means spending some of the communication and collaboration time up front, before you’ve settled on your task.
Form a Team
First things first, you need to put a core team together to attack the problem. This should be a small, highly talented, hand picked team that will speed you towards a solution. Don’t veer off into making sure it’s fair and equally representative across the company. That just gets you a larger team that’s harder to manage and keep focused, without any guarantee of adding any value from being bigger. Aim for a little smaller team than you are comfortable with; make the hard choice and cut the size in favor of speed, agility, and clear communication paths. Choose team members with wide experience, proven ability to get things done, raw intelligence, and importantly, the willingness to debate and express their opinions without overpowering or thugging up the conversation.
Articulate the Question
Next you need to craft a tight, specific question statement that everyone in your team will use to gather feedback and data from the organization. This is the most important part of the entire exercise. You can put an Ocean’s 11 team against a poorly thought out problem and you’ll end up with junk (or Ocean’s 3, as most of the team won’t put up with nonsense like that). Just like a good goal, your problem statement needs to follow a few rules:
- Set the stage. “Because of…” or “Since this event…” gives context and sets participants up to think about the issue in the way you need them to.
- Describe the situation. You want to have a mix of broad and specific here. Broad so as not to lead people to specific conclusions or problems to solve. Specific to remove choices or thought paths that aren’t worthwhile to explore, and convey that absolutely most important data point.
- Simplify. You want to ask about one and only one topic. Reduce your question until there isn’t any “and”s, “or”s, or “also”s.
- Either End with “Why?” or start with “What…”
Consider these examples:
Since changing insurance providers, our rate of refusal has increased by 15%. Why?
Notice the context: you are specifically looking for ideas around the change of insurance provider, either as a time frame or causation. I don’t even know what rate of refusal is but you do, as it’s your company language. Then note the specific decrease: 15%.
Because of the cancellation of the Ozark Project, Engineering should have additional time for new projects, but doesn’t. Why?
Again, setting context by referring to a specific incident. In this statement I’ve chosen to leave the end a little more vague. I could have gone with “20 hours/week more time for” if I had that level of data and wanted to guide the discovery conversations a little tighter.
Here’s that previous statement, messed up:
Engineering doesn’t have as much work to do as they used to, but still isn’t able to take on any new projects or work. Why has productivity of that team dropped?
I’m sure you’ve encountered problems like that. See how the additional detail, tone, and pre-problem solving injects a bunch of waste into that statement, and thus the process? Folks will spend half their time debating and defending against all the “you don’t even know!” emotions if you take that into the field. And if you know productivity has dropped, why are you even wasting time getting some ideas?
Send the Team Into the Field
We’re talking about idea generation. And that’s what your crack team is going to make happen. With your shiny new problem statement, send the team out on a bulk brainstorming mission. Their goal is to facilitate one or more brainstorming sessions and generate no less than fifty, but preferably more, ideas and reasons around your problem statement. This is where broad equal coverage is important. You want every team involved to contribute. And you want a lot of ideas. Why? The first five or ten ideas are what everyone will say about the problem. The next twenty or thirty are going to be creative. But the last twenty ideas – folks are going to dig deep for those. And that’s where you’ll get your off the wall, your crazy, your nonsensical, and maybe your company saving stroke of genius.
Run the Brainstorm
Now one of your team members is sitting with 10 or 12 people, ready to ignite creativity and gather some ideas. There is a lot more to talk about running a brainstorm than the short list below, but here’s the key points:
- Introduce the concept. Let everyone know why you are doing this activity, what you hope to accomplish, who all is involved, and what specifically is going to be done with the data.
- Introduce the problem. On a whiteboard or giant post-it pad, write the problem big and proud.
- Facilitate. There are many ways to run a brainstorm, but there are a few always good rules. One, keep the ideas visible. Capturing brainstorm ideas in a computer, even if you are projecting, just doesn’t work. You want the fruits of labor staring back at everyone the entire time. Two, keep the ideas short. Phrases, fragments, thoughts, even words. Detail at this point breeds discussion. Three, no debate or judging. The only statements allowed about someone else’s idea are those belong with “Yes, and…” You want folks building on previous ideas, not evaluating previous ideas for merit.
- Keep it moving. If discussion falters, time for the facilitator to call specifically back to a previous point or ask a “what about here…” question. If the facilitator never has to do that, by the way, that’s great!
- Number every idea. Run the brainstorm as long as people can handle. Once warmed up and in the groove, 30 minutes is about as long as you can sustain good participation.
- Capture. After everyone is done, the job of the facilitator is to get every idea into a document. Yes, that is the sucky part of the job.
Aggregate
Collect everyone’s separate brainstorm feedback into a single document. Don’t worry about duplicates, irrelevent, or just plain weird items yet – you’ll handle that later. Also, don’t categorize or assign owners to the items. Remember, you are solving for an organic system, all feedback and ideas will be evaluated on the idea, not the originator. And hey, save yourself some pain and use Google Docs or some other collaborative system so everyone can dump their data in as it shows up.
And that’s it. A few days of effort, mostly fun stuff, to collect hundreds of insights and ideas from your organization. We’ll talk about what to do with this giant bag of ideas next…
