Mastering Collaboration

by Gretchen Anderson

  Yellow: Optimistic

  Identify the possible benefits of the idea. What does it enable?

  Green: Creativity

  What are some out-of-the-box associations or additional ideas?

  Essentially, this exercise is about channeling diverse perspectives, but it’s also about getting individuals to try out different ways of thinking in a structured setting. I like using this approach when warming up a group to become more judgmental about ideas that have been generated. It can be a way to mark the turning point in the process where you intentionally shift from being expansive to closing in on things to test out.

  The second setting for converging on an idea to test is in front of external, generally senior stakeholders who haven’t been closely involved, but who are ultimately accountable for the outcome and therefore empowered to decide or bless the team’s direction. In both cases, it’s important that a healthy discussion take place, and that it be as blind as possible to power dynamics, seniority, and politics.

  Make Tension Productive

  Part of productive critique is going to involve conflict, and for many people conflict is uncomfortable. As children we’re told to play nice; in performance reviews we hear about being too confrontational; and the business world’s explicit culture is often about getting along even more than getting somewhere productive. And certainly, we don’t want to turn the workplace into a toxic environment where people don’t feel that they can be candid or express themselves. At the same time, if we don’t have conflict, we likely aren’t challenging ourselves, our teammates, and our stakeholders enough to get to great, creative solutions.

  Unproductive conflict is not what anyone wants or needs, but when any conflict feels uncomfortable or we avoid it altogether, how do we distinguish “good” versus “bad” ways to challenge each other? The easiest way to identify bad conflict is when it is personal, and the opposing parties are directing their criticism at the person offering an idea to the group. This type of conflict is not only terrible for the person on the receiving end of the attack, but it also generally distracts from any real discussion of the idea itself. Farai Madzima of Shopify taught me the German word Sachlichkeit, meaning “the thing about the thing,” or being objective about discussing the merit of ideas. While Germans as a whole tend not to shy away from conflict, perhaps the fact that this word and concept is so strong in their culture also means that critique isn’t seen as personal.

  In Designing Together (New Riders), Dan Brown calls out the fact that unhealthy comments directed at a team member are often a mask for a deeper issue, one that isn’t directly about the topic being discussed. When someone is attacking someone personally, rather than stating the thing about the thing, there are a few things that may be going on. First, the person may not actually understand the argument being made, and if the power distance index between the two people is high, they may not want to admit that fact. A neutral third party can restate or clarify the base argument, any necessary context or assumptions, and the implications to help disarm the attack.

  Anxiety about making a decision is another reason Brown gives for unhealthy conflict. I have certainly witnessed people in the hot seat to choose a direction, having not been given ample time or information, have a knee-jerk reaction to being exposed. Often we compound this problem by holding formal sessions where the stated outcome is to drive a decision, and there’s much fanfare about needing a senior leader to be decisive. Even the most real-time-processing people I have met need some time and space to wrestle with ideas; after all, that’s why we gave time and space to the team to develop them in the first place! And often when someone is very decisive on the spot, that decision has little sticking power and tends to become unmade and remade several times. In such situations, it can be helpful to decouple the laying out of decisions from the decision itself.

  Manage Tension by Framing the Argument

  In Ms. Susan’s fourth-grade class, one of her principles for when she has students debate a topic collaboratively is to “have reasons.” This is her way of bringing her charges back to the root of what is being debated and teaching them how to depersonalize their commentary, especially when they might have naturally emotional responses to what a fellow student is saying. She scaffolds the behavior she wants to instill by having prompts for “Academic Discussions” posted on the wall (Figure 8-2), and she refers back to them frequently to help students frame and reframe personal arguments.

  She also points out that by setting up the prompts as “academic” ways to speak, she is signaling to the class that this isn’t just about being nice. Teams that promote and use the correct framing for discussion—that it’s about being a more capable, respected professional—will benefit more than if they simply emphasized “getting along” because, remember, we want friction and conflict. We just want it to be at a higher level than what you find in the comments of a YouTube video. The sidebars “Compare and Contrast” and “Model Success Criteria” offer some tips for achieving this level of discourse.

  Figure 8-2. Ms. Susan’s prompt to guide healthier discussions about ideas in her fourth-grade classroom

  Tools to Support Discussion and Decisions: Compare and Contrast

  Critiquing ideas often becomes freeform discourse and opinion. Take time to identify archetypes with your team and together lay out what’s working and what’s not in a more structured way.

  Gather all of the ideas generated and put them up on a wall. Have the team review them all and then group similar ideas (Figure 8-3). These groups are different archetypes of solutions that can be named or assigned symbols to describe them.

  Figure 8-3. Identify archetypes or clusters of ideas that can be compared and refined

  Next, list your success criteria (Figure 8-4). Some of your criteria might be on a spectrum from high (meaning the ideas meet the criteria well) to low (ideas meet the criteria less well). Some might be more binary, where an idea either does or does not meet the criteria.

  Figure 8-4. An example of laying out core concepts against success criteria to structure discussions about them

  We can see in Figure 8-4 that the vase-shaped idea (#3) meets some key criteria. But it’s missing one of them entirely, which makes it unworkable. You can now refine it, using aspects of the other two ideas, to “fix” what’s wrong and make it work to meet all the criteria. You might also decide that idea #1 is worth refining to see if you can improve its performance on criteria C.

  Once you have refined your ideas, have the team map the variations against the success criteria again. Figure 8-5 shows what it might look like to tackle the weakness of #3 to see if we can make it a viable solution.

  Figure 8-5. Lay out refinements of a core concept against success criteria to compare different variations in a structured way

  Here you can see that of the two variations generated, one has gotten over the hurdle presented by criteria B, even if it’s not as strong on the other criteria.

  The more you can help the team place their ideas relative to key requirements and seek to refine them in specific ways, the more you can reduce conflict around critiquing ideas and keep everyone focused on being productive.

  Tools to Support Discussion and Decisions: Model Success Criteria

  Sometimes you have success criteria that are interrelated. In Chapter 6 we looked at defining objectives and stating what qualities good solutions should have. At times, two criteria affect each other and need to be considered together when you’re evaluating ideas. In this case, you can create a 2×2 matrix of your success criteria and have the team discuss how to prioritize different quadrants. A good test of whether your criteria have a meaningful relationship is to see if the matrix gives you a strong “no go” zone, and/or a strong “go” zone where you want to target ideas (Figure 8-6).

  For example, if you’re making something that’s meant to be used frequently, you may want something portable. But making something small enough to carry may make it very
expensive. So, by looking at these two criteria together, we can see that (obviously) we’d love to have something cheap and small, but if we can’t, then what? The team discussion should be around whether something small but less cheap, or cheap but less small, is preferred.

  Figure 8-6. An example of modeling success criteria that are interrelated to understand what is a priority and what should be avoided

  And, of course, in this situation, people are unlikely to want something big and expensive. This clear “no go” area is helpful to give the team focus, and the prioritized areas can help them evaluate ideas more clearly. Remember, if you aren’t sure how people would actually make tradeoffs between different criteria, you can always ask them!

  Manage Tension by Trading Perspectives

  Teams also conflict when they don’t understand or value each other’s contribution to the effort equally, especially under stress. Vanessa Cho, now of Google Ventures, led a team developing software for the GoPro product line, while Wesley Yun led the hardware team. The two of them knew that success depended on those things being designed and developed together, rather than in silos. But they found that across the hardware and software, and even across subgroups working on the television versus the on-device features, each thought they had the hardest job on the team. Her solution was to bring the two groups together and have them all rotate through each other’s area during a sprint to understand the other group’s constraints and come up with solutions to key challenges. This helped them all see and respect what the other group was dealing with, and in some cases, bring insights that made things easier overall.

  Dan Brown also suggests helping teams adopt each other’s perspective, or mashing up competing ideas to reach a new harmonious solution, as ways to make tension productive. I refer to this as making Neapolitan ice cream or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, where two great tastes taste even better together.

  Manage Tension with a “Disagree and Commit” Approach

  Clear roles and facilitation can help groups have richer discussions and make decisions together. But there are still times when teams just can’t agree and get stuck, unsure how to move forward. When arbitrating such disagreements about a decision, you may find it useful to take a “disagree and commit” approach. Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass) describes this idea as helping people say, “We may not agree here, but in the interests of moving on, let’s commit to this direction until we learn more.” At this point, the best thing to do is to try the decision out and test it to see if it holds water.

  Disagree and commit requires that everyone actually have what Matt LeMay, author of Agile for Everybody (O’Reilly), calls “look-me-in-the-eyes-and-tell-me-you-commit” commitment. In this situation, silence signals a lack of agreement, so getting people to explicitly get on board is necessary. The advantage of embracing a “disagree and commit” approach for contentious decisions is that it allows the team to air their perspectives, but ultimately asks that they remain unified in their pursuit of a direction. It can also be useful to remind the team that, should evidence arise that shows that their decision is a bad one, they must be willing to shift accordingly. Disagree and commit is a way to end debate at an appropriate point so that the group doesn’t become sidetracked by the tension, or dissolve under it.

  Chad Jennings says it’s useful to help people pick their battles, rather than turning every difference of opinion into a “do or die” moment. Disagreements that are based solely on opinions are rarely productive. Help the team pick a direction, almost any direction, to move forward so that they can start gathering actual information about what works and break the stalemate. Jennings brought up one of my favorite phrases to use when differing opinions get in the way: “If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” Again, the team can always change direction if the decision proves to be wrong or suboptimal, but sitting around a table arguing without any real-world data is rarely productive for very long. Getting them to agree on a direction, with the understanding that it can be altered if necessary, can alleviate unproductive tension.

  Helping Teams Make Sense of Ideas and Decide What to Pursue

  Humans are not rational actors, and our decisions fall prey to many kinds of biases and forces we may not always be aware of. It’s important to be aware of some of these forces so you can spot them in play, and either correct for them or test less rational decisions in a real-world setting to make sure you aren’t missing positive or negative options. There’s been much written about cognitive biases that affect decisions, but I will recap a few you should be on the lookout for. This isn’t to say you need to try to cure humanity of these biases, but if you’re aware of them, you can keep track of them and test your choices more thoroughly to make sure you haven’t been led astray in your decision-making.

  Satisficing Versus Optimizing

  The first tendency to be aware of is that, especially in complex domains, people tend not to look for the most optimal choice given all possible information, but instead look for the options that meet several of the most important criteria, or “satisfice.” Information is often incomplete about all aspects of a choice, so we make do. Not all criteria are of equal importance, so we prioritize.

  Satisficing describes the case where teams seek to meet only specific criteria to complete the work, while optimizing describes the case where teams seek the best possible solution. Teams looking to compare possible solutions may approach the problem from either of these two very different lenses. Be aware which one people are using when they’re making choices based on different priorities, because conflict may actually arise based on that disconnect, rather than on any specific idea itself.

  When you are generating ideas and selecting some to refine, keep in mind which of your success criteria must be met, and which describe the qualities of the “best” solution. Where possible it’s helpful to rank and prioritize your criteria as well, especially those that are interrelated. For example, if cost versus size is a tradeoff, it’s helpful to know which is more important. If you can’t or don’t know that when starting out, test with the actual audience to see if you can determine their priorities among different criteria as you go.

  We Want the Best

  In The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (Temple University Press), Scott Plous brings together several studies about how we make choices and what affects our thinking. He points out that we value avoiding loss over making gains, choosing riskier options that promise rewards but choosing more conservatively if there’s a risk of loss—for example, we’d rather chance gaining $100 than losing $50. This means that we may struggle with decisions where the exact level of risk is unknown, avoiding what might be promising approaches if there’s a chance of a negative outcome.

  Studies also show that we value certainty over risk, choosing things that we know will pay off at a smaller rate over taking a risk. Again, if the decision being made can’t be fully qualified, people may make choices based on a perception of risk, avoiding options that might have a great return and where risk can be mitigated if it’s understood. If you see a team taking this course of action, talk it through and see if there’s a way to de-risk more radical options and innovations.

  We Want What We Can Imagine

  Our decisions are also affected by the way in which they are presented. Options that are shown with more, and more vivid, detail tend to be more credible, which can translate to more appealing. If we can imagine a scenario occurring, we are more likely to find it probable than if we can’t. Plous cites the example that many people believe shark attacks are more likely than deaths from airplane parts falling from the sky. Because shark attacks receive more press than falling airplane parts, we think they will occur more frequently, even though the latter is 30 times more likely.

  What this means for you is that you need to make sure that groups are evaluating options at similar levels of fidelity, and with similar attention paid to imagining how they might wo
rk. It’s worth spending time, once you’ve generated options, to refine them so they’re comparable in detail and vividness.

  This also means that you can use detail and compelling scenarios to be more persuasive when you’re presenting ideas. In Chapter 11, we’ll look at techniques you can employ when you’re trying to get outside stakeholders to understand and buy in to decisions the team has made.

  Troubleshooting Decision-Making

  The Popularity Contest

  Too often I’ve seen teams work hard to develop ideas and be inclusive of wide-ranging perspectives, only to give in to voting on the “favorite.” Groupthink can be a real problem in this stage, especially among teams who don’t have a ton of experience together or with constructive criticism. Unlike in the previous stage of generating ideas with no limits, what happens in this stage has consequences, and your team may not be willing to stick their neck out for an idea in case they are wrong. When asked to critique or select ideas they feel are strong, they may look to others so they don’t stand out as having poor judgment or taste. Or, they may feel that making this type of decision is “above their pay grade,” wanting someone more senior to take responsibility for it.