Having learning as an objective can be very useful; just make sure that the team is clear that the effort isn’t about tackling an immediate problem, but about working on a longer-term objective. In the case of ER drills, the result isn’t the saving of a life in that moment, but making sure that the team is ready when that moment comes.
Troubleshooting Objective Setting
Setting objectives is a critical step, but one that can be tricky to get right. This section gives suggestions for overcoming common problems teams run into.
Overly Prescriptive Direction
It’s very common that when faced with a question, people offer specific solutions versus general criteria about what a good solution looks like. For teams who need to be able to explore different possibilities and gather data about what works from a realistic trial, this can be challenging—especially when the solution is given by a senior leader or expert whose opinion is respected, or whose authority is intimidating. More often than not, when the CEO tells you their solution to a challenge, they are offering an example meant to inspire investigation, not an order. I’ve watched teams jump through hoops to implement a leader’s idea, only to be surprised to hear them say, “I didn’t mean it literally!”
The tendency to speak in terms of tangible solutions also results in a run-off between different guesses about what will work, even if they aren’t easily comparable. This can turn discussion into a popularity contest between ideas or those who offer them.
So what can I do?
Add it to the list
Because specific solutions are often not meant to be taken as gospel, it’s useful to write them down on a list and save them for later. It’s not useful to argue the merits of an idea that hasn’t been thought through completely. Instead, keep track of it and use it for inspiration. Having a record of what others have offered is also useful when presenting work for them to review later. You can refer back to their specifics, and then show how the idea has evolved or pivoted based on what the team has learned.
Back it up
Being able to take someone’s specific solution and back up to the general characteristics it implies is a skill worth mastering. This is easier if the group has some general success criteria identified and can relate the idea to them. You can ask “Why is that idea good?” to get the person to think and talk about the motivations for their solution, minus specifics. By backing the person up to articulate and understand the goals behind their solution, you help everyone get clarity about where the group should be headed.
Consequences Not Clear
When the team doesn’t know what’s at stake, the interpersonal dynamics can turn into conflicts when things get challenging. If the group doesn’t have the equivalent of a patient whose life is in danger, fear of failure can make them turn on each other.
So what can I do?
Create worst-case scenarios
It can actually be fun to spend a bit of time dreaming up situations gone wrong. Asking the group to think about possible unintended consequences of their work isn’t a strictly analytical process, and takes some creative thinking. This can also be a way to warm up for developing solutions, as people begin thinking about factors that are not obvious.
Identify potential bad actors
While understanding your users or target audience for solutions is important, it’s also worth thinking about those who might abuse the system. Have the group develop profiles for bad actors to think through what might motivate them to act out. It’s also useful to test ideas for ways they can be subverted by asking, “What if our bad actor used this?” so you can defend against them.
Look for instructive examples of comparable failures
There is a lot to learn from others’ mistakes. Ask the team to research embarrassing or dangerous situations that competitors or those with comparable problems have experienced, and see if you might be facing a similar vulnerability.
Constant Questioning of Objectives
In some groups friction arises that keeps them at square one, continually debating assumptions rather than developing hypotheses that can be tested to turn unknowns or guesses into something concrete. At its root, this behavior stems from fear—fear of being wrong and facing the consequences of failure. At times, this can also happen when the group lacks experience with developing hypotheses and experimentation.
So what can I do?
Co-create and refine objectives together
Don’t simply take what you’ve been handed as a starting point and run with it. Spend a few hours or days working through objectives to make sure they are understood, and to air out concerns the team has.
Revisit objectives periodically
If you establish a practice of revisiting objectives often, you also help signal to the team that objectives can and will evolve, and make room for questioning “givens” that may prove to be flexible over time.
Juking the Stats
The epic television drama The Wire, about crime and life in Baltimore, has several great set pieces about “juking the stats,” where cops focus on getting the numbers right, by any means necessary. “You make robberies into larcenies,” says one of the characters. “You juke the stats, and majors become colonels.” Watch out for teams that chase the numbers but lose sight of what those metrics were really supposed to indicate.
When I led product management and development at GreatSchools, a Yelp-like website with ratings and reviews for every school in the US, we worked hard to get schools to supply more information about themselves on the site and engage with their families to strengthen the school-home connection. Our target of having a certain percent of schools claim their profile online was ambitious, and reaching schools difficult. The team hired several people to scrape the web for information to display on the site. While it increased the data we had, it failed to reach the real goal—connecting schools and parents.
So what can I do?
Be descriptive
Use the previous exercises to develop a clear description of what you are looking to achieve, avoiding general goals, and simplifying and modeling objectives that are complex and interrelated. Keep your team focused on the objective, not simply the leading indicators you’ve established, so that they themselves can spot when something meets the key performance indicators (KPIs) but doesn’t deliver the outcome.
Manage a portfolio of measures
Rather than trying to nail one, or even all, of your OKRs, think of them as a portfolio of early indicators that should tell you directionally if you are doing the right thing. Be sure to underscore that OKRs aren’t grades, and making them won’t get anyone promoted the way “SMART” performance goals may have worked in the past.
Conclusion
Setting objectives is a critical skill to master to set direction for the team. It’s worth spending time as a team and with stakeholders to develop and express objectives that are descriptive, have a clear sense of urgency, and tie to a vision of the future and solving a real-world problem. Revisiting objectives frequently and refining them as you learn more should be a standard part of your practice.
Key Takeaways
Every effort should have clear objectives to guide the work and fight against tendencies to get distracted by different problems or solutions.
Good objectives are derived from the problem you want to solve, and aren’t overly prescriptive of what solutions the team should implement. Teams need to know what’s at stake in their efforts, so create objectives with a sense of urgency to them.
Objectives shouldn’t just be taken as a given, but refined to be specific and useful to avoid having an ill-defined target that doesn’t help the team evaluate different ideas.
A team’s objective may be simply to learn how to work together, rather than solve a problem with no known solution, but that should be made clear.
Whatever the team’s objective is, make sure it is transparently shared within the team and with stakeholders
to avoid clashes when expectations don’t match up.
Part III. Exploring Solutions
Collaboration is necessary when teams are seeking solutions that aren’t obvious or facing unknowns that carry risks. Being able to bring a group together in the right environment and give them a good start helps them be productive. It’s also important, however, to get them out of their comfort zone so they can seek new answers, and to share those ideas early and often to learn and refine them. In this part we look at ways you can support the exploration of ideas more widely and channel critiques and feedback constructively.
Chapter 7. Explore Many Possibilities
In this chapter we’ll look at ways you can harness the power of your team to generate diverse—even wildly impractical—ideas that help lead to innovative solutions. What’s key here is to be deliberate about thinking in an open-ended way, getting rid of constraints and generating ideas separately from evaluating them and making them more practical. This generally happens every cycle, after objectives have been set or revisited (Figure 7-1).
Figure 7-1. Exploring ideas and deciding which to pursue should happen each cycle, or even multiple times in a cycle
During this stage, we must be intentional about driving divergent thinking, because it doesn’t happen naturally. As we build up our expertise and reputation for deeply understanding a domain, what makes it work, and what makes it break, we can tend to shut off being expansive in our thinking. This can lead to blind spots and limitations when we want to innovate. You’ve probably witnessed brainstorm meetings where most of the ideas offered are retreads of things already being done, or pet ideas pushed by a coalition convinced they’ve won the guess-a-thon. Idea generation can also be stifled by those who can’t get past constraints and shoot down new ways of thinking.
Teams also need help productively critiquing ideas as a group to understand what’s working, and to refine those they want to take to a wider audience. Deciding what ideas to prototype or test can fall prey to the tendency to select safe ideas or those that are favored by more senior people or experts. Being able to analyze different ideas, especially those that aren’t ruled by constraints, to make them stronger and more practical is a skill you can develop and use to help others. Because this process can be challenging and introduce a lot of conflict, it’s a good idea to do at least some of it in a safe space with the core team first. You can bring in others once the group has some confidence in their ability to attack the problem and can speak clearly about constraints and what makes ideas good. Remember our framework for understanding different types of contributors from Chapter 2 (Figure 7-2).
Figure 7-2. Understanding different types of contributors to a collaboration
If you can help teams generate new ideas with those outside the group, you can arrive at some great solutions. At Pacific Gas and Electric, which serves Northern California and is the largest energy utility in the US, I worked with teams to develop digital tools to help workers build, maintain, and operate over 141,000 miles of electrical wires and over 40,000 miles of gas pipeline. Robert Bales of McKinsey worked hard to make sure that in collaboration workshops, we always included the field workers in the ideation, because they knew the details of how the system worked and what it took to support it. But they also turned out to be the most inventive thinkers on the team. Every session, these grizzled, seasoned engineers would tell us how they weren’t “really into technology” and could “barely work this fancy phone.”
In one session, an engineer was describing the challenges of searching for gas leaks underwater. In a moment of frustration, he blurted out, “I just wish I had a gas-sniffing dolphin!” to the merriment of his colleagues. But to the digital technology people in the room, this was a breakthrough, because they understood that fitting sensors onto an underwater drone was absolutely possible, and not nearly as complicated as some of the Rube Goldberg ideas that had been developed so far. It turns out that being naive about technology made the engineers better able to see through to solutions.
Sometimes, the biggest challenge we face is to imagine the unimaginable, but when we do, it often becomes more possible to conceive of as reality. And that reality can also be much simpler to achieve than the crazy idea that spawned the new way of thinking. In the case of gas-sniffing dolphins, it was the engineer’s ability to articulate the ideal state machine to solve the problem, no matter how fantastical, that led the group to see a simple solution. Solving for or relaxing constraints once new ideas have been generated is often easier than it might seem initially.
Working Backward, Thinking Laterally
Alan Cooper, founder of the consultancy Cooper and father of Visual Basic, calls this approach “working backward.” He has spoken frequently about how in business people typically try to take a linear, forward working approach, piling analysis upon analysis until they hopefully arrive at the right destination. The problem, he points out, is that this approach tends to not have any concept of what that destination is, at least not in a way that is helpful.
Instead, he argues that when we have a clear vision of where we want to go—an objective that is explicit and concrete—we can work backward from there, casting about for possibilities to see if they lead in that direction. And because this way of working isn’t linear and analytical, it requires enabling some magical thinking among the team.
In his book The Design of Business (Harvard Business), Roger Martin talks about how typically companies are quite good at optimizing and streamlining processes that are well understood—working forward, in essence, toward efficiency (see the top of Figure 7-3). But most organizations struggle with “mysteries” where things aren’t predictable or analyzable in the same way. When a company seeks a competitive advantage or an innovative approach to a problem, digging deeper into analysis isn’t likely to bear fruit; it just gets them deeper in the same hole.
This push for data-driven optimization doesn’t apply only to manufacturing or production processes, either. I once worked for a large electronics manufacturer to help develop a strategy for a mobile cloud offering that would not just compete with Apple and others industry leaders, but actually overtake them. The company culture was so strictly analytical, so “data-driven,” that not a single idea could be raised that wasn’t derived from data. In their minds, the process of innovation was an algorithm, like a perfectly executed Google query that would tell them exactly what steps to take. It was completely lost on them that even had I been able to deliver such an algorithm, there was nothing to stop their competitors from doing the same thing. And if data existed to tell us where a solution lay, it followed that competitors must have arrived at that solution before in order to create that data. In the end, the strategy we offered was so data-driven that just three months after we presented it, a new challenger in the marketplace delivered a product offering that was almost identical. If a solution is well understood, it’s because it already exists, and so it may not need a collaborative effort to invent it but more of a cooperative effort to build it.
One way to stop analysis paralysis and help teams deal with “mysterious” challenges that don’t have an obvious solution is lateral thinking, which is described by Edward de Bono in his 1970 book of the same name (Harper & Row). Lateral thinking is the practice of coming at a problem from different perspectives (some almost completely divorced from the problem) to arrive at innovative solutions that you might otherwise miss by simply analyzing your way toward a solution, building logical conclusion upon logical conclusion. I always think of Aristotle, the Greek mathematician who was struggling to find a way to calculate the volume of an irregularly shaped object. It was only when he put the problem to the side for a moment and got into the bath that he realized that an object’s volume is equal to the amount of water it displaces when submerged. These kinds of “eureka!” moments are at the heart of lateral thinking techniques.
To enable lateral thinking, you need to break the typical analytical processes that people use to
derive answers in a linear fashion (see the bottom of Figure 7-3). When people come at a problem sideways, they may generate ideas that aren’t feasible but, like gas-sniffing dolphins, can be tweaked to be feasible. Don’t worry too much in early stages about generating ideas that aren’t feasible. The goal is to get to the moment where an ideal solution is expressed. This doesn’t come naturally to most people, but there are techniques you can use to divert the team’s thinking and distract them from analyses and constraints so they get creative and generate new solutions.
Figure 7-3. Lateral thinking doesn’t attack a problem head-on but instead tries to distract the mind and find ways around the problem
When you’re working in this mode it’s also good to push the team to generate many ideas, focusing on quantity over quality. If you can get enough ideas and cross-pollination among your diverse team members, you are more likely to have a breakthrough in the team’s perspective that enables a shift toward new solutions.
Because lateral thinking isn’t analytical or predictable, it works best when there’s a vision to work backward from, as Cooper advises. The clear objectives and vision that you created in Chapter 6 should serve as the target for a team working in this nebulous space. This way of working will challenge many organizations, especially in the early days when the team doesn’t yet have the answer and leaders get impatient without any obvious “progress.” Help protect the team by not exposing them to outsiders at this time, or by doing it very carefully. It may take a few rounds of investigation with actual “users” of solutions to get data confirming that you are headed in a good direction, even if you aren’t done. The best way to cope during this phase is to be strong throughout it and express how the team’s work facilitates the vision of the future, not how they meet production deadlines.
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