Mastering Collaboration

by Gretchen Anderson

  Breaking out of the normal patterns of thinking and constraints will take some doing, but there are tangible techniques you can use to get your team there and make the most of their talents. What’s key is that you make time and space for the team to explore new ideas safely, away from those who might want to fall back to known solutions or dwell on what can’t be achieved rather than look for the new.

  Throw Away Constraints, for a While

  Being able to relax or work around constraints to get somewhere new is challenging. I once worked with a diverse team of talented engineers and leading physicians to develop a next-generation surgical robot capable of performing many different kinds of surgeries, unlike the models that were currently on the market, which could perform only a single therapy. The team spent years studying the problem and had invented incredible technology to solve different aspects, and it was time to put those together into a single system that could be used in the operating room. The question was how the doctors should control the machine. The physicians the team worked with were leaders in their fields and possessed amazing physical abilities to control manual tools; their dexterity and “touch” had gained them prestige and credibility in their field. But this system was designed to support those who didn’t have that touch and could benefit from computer-aided support. To create a compelling demo for investors, the team needed a way to mimic the clunky manual controls that most doctors used, so they hit upon using a standard video game controller. Because video games were so far removed from the domain of surgery, no one seriously considered this to be a real answer to part of the problem. And, yet, once they had that demo, the entire company and their investors quickly realized that this approach was exactly what was needed—because video games, like surgical procedures, span a huge range of ways to move through space, from first-person shooters to third-person strategy games. All it took was for someone, under pressure, to decide to ignore the constraint of how surgeons typically worked, and choose a solution that supported many ways of controlling objects in space and apply it to a new domain.

  What About When Constraints Are Real?

  When I coach teams to “throw away constraints,” I often hear about how real those constraints are and how impossible or imprudent it is to ignore them. Of course the limitations on any problem are real, whether they are the laws of physics or legal regulations and requirements, but at the same time, if we don’t open up our thinking beyond those limitations, the ideas and solutions we generate rarely end up in a new place. What’s important to remember, and to help teams realize, is that you aren’t actually getting rid of constraints but rather imagining they’re not there, just for a short span of time, to see what you come up with in their absence. This is why the process is visualized as a diamond shape, where the group alternates between being expansive in their thinking and then bringing constraints back in to narrow down and refine their ideas.

  Because many people are overly attached to constraints, taking them as givens that prescribe work and keep things realistic, teams need help with the “yeah-buts”—those who continually interrupt expansive thinking with “yeah, but what about X?” comments that shut down thinking. Sometimes you can actually change or work around constraints, as in the robotic surgery example where it was assumed that doctors needed the same sorts of controls they had in a nonrobotic world. Once you open the team up to what’s possible, you’ll find that many constraints turn out to be assumptions.

  When constraints are real, such as regulatory rules, it’s also possible that imagining a future with different constraints is actually more beneficial for everyone, and leads to arguments to change or evolve them. Once, a client was looking for ways to improve team collaboration and empower employees to be more autonomous. They had strict policies about expenses for employees at a certain level, requiring VP-level approval for everything from ordering lunches to obtaining supplies in an effort to control costs. As a result of the signoff requirement, rather than approach executives about small purchases, employees just didn’t make them, instead “making do” even if it was challenging to end results. The team, working through different approaches to improve the working environment and drive decisions about key product features, continually ran into this constraint. They were good-natured about it, making jokes about the situation, but it was clear that the policy was literally and figuratively working against the very thing the company was trying to achieve. “If we aren’t trusted to make decisions about spending $50 on food or supplies that we need, how do they expect us to make big decisions about what the company should do?” asked one participant. This frustration became the basis for a scenario where teams had a full P&L for each product that included a budget for their small expenses, removing the approval cycle and creating complete autonomy. They included a part of the story showing how executives were freed up from reviewing and approving the requests as well. When this idea was shared with executives, they were surprised that this had been such an issue. The team had assumed that the constraint was fixed, rather than something they could revisit with those who had created it. The rule change was a huge success across the board because, as it turns out, everyone resented seeking or being asked for approval on up to 50 purchases a week. The team achieved their objective by placing the constraint change in a constructive scenario that showed the overall benefits, rather than arguing on principle or taking the constraint as a given when it clearly was a problem for everyone, no matter how well intentioned.

  Even if a solution doesn’t meet requirements immediately, it may meet them over time. It’s worth identifying whether requirements are binary (meaning the idea can meet them or it can’t) or whether they can be met through optimization and evolution. One of the most challenging yet successful collaborations I uncovered during my research was when Google took on a challenge to make Search—the heart, soul, and revenue generation engine of the company—“more beautiful.” Google was a market dominator in the space, and the product delivered on every hard target it had, from the quality of results to response time to advertising performance. But the brand also wanted to see its user experience evolve to catch up with trends in the online space from other big brands like Facebook and Airbnb (see Figure 7-4).

  Figure 7-4. Comparing Google’s search results from before and after the Beautiful Search effort

  This effort, with Marissa Meyer at the helm, is well known as the infamous data-driven experiment to test “46 shades of blue” to determine which worked best. And certainly, the analytical giant thoroughly tested their options to arrive at an answer. But data-driven A/B tests weren’t useful to help the deal reach the qualitative goal, which was to make search “more beautiful.” Any change that the team made in service of making the user interface more pleasing negatively impacted the system’s performance. And this makes sense—the old version has been refined and optimized to within an inch of its life. In the years since this effort, “beautiful search” has also been refined so that performance is stronger than ever. What was required initially was opening up the discussion about margin sizes and padding levels to engineers and product people, who had little experience with those things qualitatively. Jon Wiley, who led the effort, says, “We get together, we have lunch, and we talk endlessly” so that those across the stack, from business to engineering to design, can all air out their hopes and fears.

  Constraints are very often real, and they do need to be respected, but if you can help open up the team to think past them initially, you may find good solutions that remove, relax, or meet requirements over time. The sidebar “Unleash Your Imagination” offers exercises and tools to help you explore the possibilities that emerge without constraints limiting your imagination.

  Tools to Help Explore Possibilities: Unleash Your Imagination

  Make It Magic

  One of the simplest ways to get people to let go of constraints and develop many different ideas is to encourage them to do some magical thinking. Give someone, or many people, a magic w
and that they can wave when people bring up reasons “why not” instead of developing ideas.

  It’s important that the magic wand is used on things that could actually change, even if it might take a great deal of work. Using the wand to change the laws of physics won’t be helpful, but once you can imagine what’s possible if a regulation were changed or resources applied differently, it becomes easier to understand the relative return on investment (ROI) of making changes. Often we assume that changing given constraints is not possible or worth it, so we never investigate what could be unlocked if we did make the change.

  Random Provocations

  In this exercise, the facilitator provides random “provocations” to the team to help spur lateral thinking.

  Gather random objects or photographs and provide one to each group or individual in the brainstorm.

  Take five minutes to list out associations people have with the object or image. For example, if the object provided is a child’s xylophone, the characteristics might be colorful, musical, tinkly, metal, and loud.

  Choose one of the associations and brainstorm ideas based on that word. You can rotate through a few other associations, or choose a new object or image and repeat.

  Figure 7-5 shows an example of how to set up Random Provocations.

  Figure 7-5. Example Random Provocations exercise

  Extreme Constraints

  There are times when constraints actually help people think more creatively. When teams face extreme constraints, it forces them away from typical solutions and safe ideas. Constructing ridiculous constraints also helps the team understand that the exercise is about getting “outside the box” rather than solving the problem right then and there.

  Instructions for the exercise:

  Have the group list out as many of the “givens” about the context and situation as they can on Post-its or a whiteboard. For example, if you are creating a web-based service, you might list out having an internet connection as something you take for granted. Or, if you are creating a new company policy, you might say that it will be delivered in English (or whatever the native language is). (5–10 min)

  Next, have them take a few givens and invert them to make an extreme constraint. For example, what if there were no internet connection, or all materials were delivered in a language nobody spoke? (5–10 min)

  Now, break into smaller two- to four-person groups and have each one spend time generating ideas using those extreme constraints, looking for unusual ways to deliver solutions. (20 min)

  Afterward, have each small group share out their ideas and spend time together trying to make some of the ideas more practical by getting rid of the extreme constraints, but holding on to the nugget of the idea. For example, if the team decided that the new policy would be delivered via leaders acting out the new rule, maybe a more realistic idea is to have “interpreters” of the policy appointed as ambassadors to help people with questions once they have read it themselves.

  As with any of the idea generation techniques shown here, what’s important is to get people generating many, perhaps silly, ideas rather than focusing on one very predictable one.

  Like X for Y

  Sometimes creative inspiration borrows rather than invents. This exercise can help get people started generating new ideas by borrowing from old ones.

  Create a list of well-known products and services, such as Amazon, Blue Apron, or Band-Aids. These can be modern, time-honored, physical, or digital. This is the X list. It’s best if the facilitator can create this list ahead of time.

  Create a list of key problem areas or needs to be addressed with a solution, like “customer service” or “tracking expenses.” This is the Y list. This list should already exist from your assessment of the problem you are solving, but if not, the group should create it together so they understand each item. (5–10 min)

  Have the team choose (or assign) an item from the X list (a product or service) and one from the Y list (a problem area) and have them see what solutions it inspires. For example, what would it mean if you had “Netflix” for “supply chain vendor management”? It can be useful to think through what the attributes of the item from the X list are—such as “streaming,” “subscription model,” “personalized suggestions”—and apply them to the new problem area. (20–40 min)

  The ideas generated here will likely need some refinement, but this exercise can be useful to get people warmed up to generating ideas if they get stuck.

  Act It Out

  Not everyone likes to draw ideas, and not all ideas are “things” that can be captured in a single state. Getting a group to act out a scenario helps them understand relationships, motivations, and missing pieces of more complex things like systems or processes with lots of moving parts. This exercise can be used to understand a current system or process, or a future one.

  Identify different “players” of the scenario to be acted out and assign them to people in the group; have one person be an observer and note taker.

  Do a first run-through with everyone ad-libbing their parts to the best of their abilities. They may ask questions about what should happen or need direction about what to do at times.

  The observer should record on a Post-it or whiteboard where people clash or act at odds with one another, indicating parts of the scenario that need to be reworked.

  Have the group review the notes and rework the scenario to streamline it and handle clashes more elegantly.

  This approach applies well to processes or policies where there’s not a lot to prototype.

  The Path to Great Isn’t Straight

  Lateral thinking doesn’t follow a specific path and is hard to predict, which is why developing clear objectives and success criteria is so important. It takes leadership to make sure everyone is clear about what you are aiming for, especially when it’s just out of sight. We like to think that greatness comes from meritocracy and experience, and lies on a line that slopes up and to the right, just waiting to be followed. It’s often not just meandering, but mysterious. Mikael Jorgenson of the band Wilco shared his view on balancing digging in to get a “great” take versus driving yourself mad. He remembers the “Studio Response Curve,” a diagram on the wall of Sear Studios (Figure 7-6), where the band recorded A Ghost Is Born in 2004.

  Figure 7-6. The Sear Sound Studios depiction of how recordings evolve over time (source: http://bit.ly/2IIE2B9)

  The curve shows how recording may begin with something that’s great but has mistakes. Over time, repeating the take again and again can yield worse and worse results. But after some amount of takes (not too many, not too few) you can break through to greatness again, this time with the kinks worked out. There’s not a scientific formula for how many tries it will take to get to greatness, but given the tendency to rush through this stage in most orgs, it’s usually a good idea to stick with it longer than you actually feel comfortable.

  Jorgenson also shared the story of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” a song whose bassline, to many musicians, contains a “mistake.” (In the interests of full transparency, he wasn’t quite comfortable with that word being applied to such a classic, but it was the only one he could find.) To most fans, however, that moment doesn’t even register. He says to beware of setting up and holding to a framework whose rules and structure are so precise that it can’t tolerate missteps and mistakes here and there. Being diligent about being divergent doesn’t mean chasing perfection in the face of what “just works.”

  Often what’s needed is to spend time reworking and revising ideas that have been generated a few times. It’s useful to group similar ideas together, then have the team spend a session refining them, either by trying to explain them or by combining different ideas. But it’s also useful for the team to have a model of success that isn’t so exacting that it can’t be met. The sidebar “Tell Me the Story Backward” describes an approach to get people thinking about how a solution might evolve
over time.

  Tools to Help Explore Possibilities: Tell Me the Story Backward

  Some groups are good at generating very far-flung ideas that need a bridge back to the present for people to understand them and relate to them. You can use the template in Figure 7-7 to help people think “backward” to develop ideas as well as think through how they might evolve. Have the group place the description of the solution or the future state in the first box, and then develop a backward narrative of how that future state could evolve. There’s nothing specific about the five stages to the story. Teams may need only one or two to connect the future state to the current state, or they may need more. What’s important is that they think about how the idea might be reached incrementally if it’s considered too radical at first.

  Figure 7-7. A template to work backward from an idea