Mastering Collaboration

by Gretchen Anderson

  Capture decisions and key insights

  Just as a serial TV show runs a recap before new episodes to review how the plot has evolved, you should focus on sharing highlights of the recent work. A good test of what to share is to ask: What has changed recently and why? What have we learned?

  Know your audience

  It’s a cliché, but it’s always good to think about what those around you are interested in and value, even if it’s not exactly the same as what the team’s focus is. Chad Jennings of Babylon Health says, “You’ve got to know the top one or two things the CEO cares about and address them at the start, or they will never hear the rest of the material.”

  The Big Reveal Belly-Flop

  You’ve worked hard. You’ve been diligent. You’ve got some confidence. You gather your critics, and reveal the creation. And it all goes horribly wrong. Either the room erupts in chaotic responses that are all over the place, or no one says much of anything. In Discussing Design (O’Reilly), Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry advise you to avoid the “Ta-Da Moment” because it provokes “reactive” feedback rather than thoughtful comments that are actionable, and I second that emotion.

  These moments can also be a case of overdelivering the artifacts for feedback. Computer scientist Bill Buxton has said, “There’s no such thing as high or low fidelity, there’s only the right fidelity for where you are.” That being said, I’ve seen teams struggle in this stage because they’ve created a prototype or other artifacts that look very polished when the idea isn’t fully thought out or is an early idea they want feedback on. When you’re finding out what others think about general ideas, unnecessary detail or finishing can be distracting. You’ll end up getting feedback about things that you haven’t thought out fully or aren’t committed to, and may miss people’s comments on the bigger picture. When things look very polished, your audience may assume that the core concepts have already been vetted and refrain from giving you their honest opinion.

  So what can I do?

  Frame the feedback you seek

  It might feel intimidating to tell executives or leaders what questions you want them to answer, but I promise it is a lot less intimidating than hearing feedback you aren’t ready to implement or address. I suggest listing out on a whiteboard or Post-it specific questions or decisions you need stakeholders to focus on before you share updates so they have it in mind as they take in the work. If there are people who can’t seem to focus their feedback on those areas, don’t fight it. It’s helpful to also have an area to capture “great ideas for the future” to make the person feel heard rather than getting defensive.

  Send it out ahead of time

  Now, this technique can backfire, so be careful, but consider sending the work out ahead of time. The best times to do this are when you know that the work doesn’t need much context to be understood. Test out whether this is the case for you by sharing it with a few people around the office first. If you don’t get blank stares, you can let people spend time with the solution on their own so they can be more thoughtful and thorough in their response.

  Bring them back

  Because you know that “everyone” helps in a collaboration, make sure that you bring back into the process the people outside of your core team who contributed to the effort. People will naturally want to know how things turned out, and you should be sure they get to hear the story, either individually or in a group. Being transparent is more about continually communicating than it is about nailing a one-time presentation.

  Conclusion

  By proactively sharing information about what the team is working on, where they’ve been, and what’s coming up, you can focus stakeholders on what’s important and avoid clashes over expectations or surprises. Many organizations view project management as a series of status reports focused on whether something is “on track” with regard to a timeline, rather than the quality of the work and what the team has learned. Keeping others informed doesn’t have to be a painful, time-consuming process if you focus on documenting as you go, and making it transparent over packaged status reports. It is also important to share the work the team is doing, not just meta-level information. This gives stakeholders and leaders a view of the quality of the work, not only whether deliverables are being met.

  Key Takeaways

  Keep work that the team has done recently visible, and tie it to the objectives that have been set, as well as what been learned or key outcomes that have been achieved.

  Don’t hoard information in an effort to save time or avoid questions. In the long run, it’s easier to loop people in on what’s happening and avoid conflicts over different expectations.

  While templated status reports may be required in certain organizations, giving stakeholders and leaders a view into what is being done can go a long way toward building trust that you are on the right track, especially when the work isn’t something easily understood.

  Chapter 11. Tell the Story

  In this chapter we’ll look at why stories are so powerful, and what makes them work. By being conscious of how you are crafting the narrative about your team’s progress, and about how solutions work in the lives of those who use them, you can help make the ideas and decisions of the group stick. Telling the story of the collaboration is as important as the collaboration itself in many ways. After all, the Post-it notes and whiteboard sketches rarely live on for very long, and seldom pack enough punch to persuade those who weren’t there of the merits of the effort. In order to bring along those who were not involved, it’s critical that you communicate effectively not only about what work was done, but also about the journey the team took to get there.

  While we consume stories all the time, we don’t get much practice creating them. When I teach workshops on storytelling, people tell me that they know a lot of the techniques and principles involved, but they don’t use them at work. There’s a tendency to think that the work will tell its own story, or that situations that are filled with a lot of tension will be inherently interesting and understandable. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Great stories don’t tell themselves.

  When Jimmy Chin, the mountaineering photographer and filmmaker, was making his first movie, Meru, about the first descent of a peak in the Himalayas, he had the raw material for a story full of near-death experiences and amazing human feats. But when he shared his first cut with documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi to get her input, she told him it felt like watching a bunch of guys climbing; the story wasn’t coming through. This led to them collaborating to use the tools of storytelling to bring out the dramatic tension and help the audience make sense of the narrative.

  Without employing storytelling strategies, you might find the team experiencing a type of Groundhog Day, where those who haven’t been in the trenches with the team don’t remember decisions or insights that were shared previously, forcing you to rehash old material instead of moving forward. Or, you might find stakeholders and subject-matter experts getting distracted by their own pet ideas and “what-ifs” that you’ve already explored, and not focusing on what the team has thoughtfully prepared.

  The art of storytelling is a field of study unto itself, but for the purposes of better collaboration, there are some basics that will go a long way toward helping you get buy-in and establish a clear direction for the group. For this chapter I owe a huge amount to Christina Wodtke, author of the best-selling book, Radical Focus (Cucina Media), who shared her thoughts on storytelling and what makes stories work. As with many topics Wodtke speaks and writes about, her notes on storytelling were well researched and articulated, and helped me put my own thoughts and experiences with storytelling into a more organized—and hopefully useful—format.

  Why Stories Are So Powerful

  Stories are universal, so we respond to them automatically because we are literally built to hear them. Kendall Haven is a leading expert on the neurological and cognitive science of story, and his book Story Proof:
The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story (ABC-CLIO) looks at how our brains process stories, and shows some surprising evidence that we are in fact hardwired for them.

  When we listen to information, even before it reaches the conscious mind, our brains turn it into story form within what Haven and his researchers call a “neural story net,” a dedicated part of the brain that processes stories and operates on a “make-sense mandate.” This mandate means that our brains will make sense of information as a story, and what we can’t make sense of, we ignore or distort. Because our brains process such a huge amount of information, this is part of how we keep from being overloaded. Haven’s research shows that we will even reverse or invent key data points in a narrative if they don’t fit with the sense-making our busy brains are trying to do. In a video about the topic at Stanford, Haven gives a few entertaining examples of how our brains do this.

  So, if your audience is sitting there inventing their own information and creating their own stories in their busy brains, what hope do we have of convincing and informing others of what we said and did? It turns out that by using effective storytelling techniques, you can minimize that distortion and keep your audience on the same page.

  Elements of Storytelling

  Most experts agree on the basics of storytelling, even if they use different names and vocabulary. These include elements like the story arc or structure, characters, and mechanical details like dialog and exposition. While the topic of storytelling is itself very large, I will touch on just the key elements you need to master to help collaborations make a bigger impact on your audience.

  The first critical element for our purposes is the story arc, or how the story progresses. This may seem obvious, and yet, in a business setting, this element is often the first to go. In an effort to be concise and (we imagine) dramatic, presenters often unveil a big point or takeaway, and try to back it up with data as an argument. I noticed this early on in my career when delivering my own research findings to clients. I would create these utopian “stories” about how easy life for people would be if only they had a great new product. After a few failures, I made sure I always included an “oh shit!” moment, where the protagonist faces a challenge, and then the great new product or service makes an appearance to save the day.

  Consider telling The Wizard of Oz the way most business presentations go:

  A young girl wakes up and has newfound respect for her family.

  There’s no tension to make people care about the girl or her family, nor any understanding about why she maybe didn’t respect them beforehand.

  But adding that tension is only one piece of the puzzle. To be effective a story needs:

  An inciting incident that kicks off the action. For a collaboration, this is usually a business objective or hypothesis that the group can or will agree is desirable. It can also be a problem that the group faces that needs to be addressed.

  Next, there should be a struggle or failure that the “characters” or collaborators face. In a collaborative setting, this might be a description of pain points observed in research, or ideas that were tried that didn’t work out. This is where the “oh shit!” moments come in.

  The climax of the story is where we unveil the idea or insight or product of the struggle that the team has developed. Instead of opening with your big idea, by leading up to it with some struggle, you’ve engaged your audience in wanting to know and embrace the winning idea rather than pick it apart for no good reason. The climax should bring the audience to understand not just what you did, but why. You should show the criteria and values you discovered and used to find the solution.

  Finally, your story must have a resolution. The happy couple lives happily ever after or, more likely in our case, there are some next steps or key indicators that we need to watch to see how well we did or to create the solution.

  All of these factors are important, because they’re what gives the story its neural-net-inducing powers. As the story moves through each phase, our brains fill in (or remove) details so it will make sense to us. When you shortcut a stage or put them out of order, your audience is now suddenly writing their own version of the story in their heads, and you are no longer in control of what they might take away from it.

  Using story structure doesn’t mean just delaying the big reveal of your idea behind a lot of prelude. A team of young people I once mentored was developing a medical device that had some tricky mechanical elements to be worked through. The team diligently identified all of their constraints and prototyped over 70 permutations of the mechanism to see how they could make it smaller and easier to use. Their presentation showed some of the more interesting of these, and it turns out many of them were interesting to the team for one reason or another. Their big idea made an appearance somewhere after slide 50 of their presentation. Instead, we worked on four or five slides that talked about the process and criteria they used that made it challenging and required 70 prototypes. We painted the story as a mystery to find a needle in a haystack of possibilities, rather than an exhaustive catalog of prototypes. “Show your work” may be great for math problems, but it kills stories. For more advice on using the storytelling elements to make the narrative of your work compelling, see the sidebar “Storytelling Worksheet.”

  Storytelling Worksheet

  While the elements of storytelling might seem obvious, it isn’t always easy to create a story out of thin air, especially when the team has been focusing on finding and explaining a specific solution to try out. The framework in Figure 11-1 can help teams generate explanations that don’t simply focus on the positive side of their work, but make sure to address the problem and struggle that makes a story compelling.

  Figure 11-1. A template to aid teams in creating simple stories to communicate in ways that stick and keep people engaged

  The “Oh Shit!” Moment

  The biggest mistake I see people make in the workplace when trying to be persuasive and engaging is forgetting the very thing that makes stories sticky—suspense. Or, as I call it, the “oh shit!” moment. When I first began using scenarios and stories to compel executives to understand and support new product and service strategies, I would often focus on how great the offering would be, and how it would improve life for those who used it. My stories showed a person going through their day, experiencing no problems, all due to our great invention—aren’t we smart! But I began to notice that no matter how finely crafted I made my presentation, I was often met with a “so what?” response.

  One day, after a particularly unsuccessful set of sessions getting feedback with customers, I found myself sharing the difficulties we were having, and how they had changed our thinking about how the product was used. I noticed that the executives were much more engaged than usual, because here, I finally had a real story where something happened.

  It can be natural to try to exclude the “oh shit!” moment in an attempt to focus on the positive—the successes. But when you do, the opposite happens. With nothing to compel their curiosity about how the story will turn out, the tone and emotional tenor of the conversation is flat and uninspiring. This doesn’t mean you have to air every bit of dirty laundry outside the team, but it does mean that you should always make sure you include a struggle in the story that your solution helps your protagonist overcome.

  The Shape of Stories

  The elements of story—an inciting event, a struggle, a climax, and a resolution—can also take different shapes. Not every story behind a collaboration needs to be an epic tale from a storybook. There are two major shapes that stories take in the business world (Figure 11-2).

  Figure 11-2. Stories tend to show up in two basic shapes in the business world

  Each story shape does a different job and can be used in different situations:

  Story-Decorated Update

  If you’re looking to keep a group of stakeholders informed of and confident in your efforts, the Story-Decorated Update is an effective way to te
ll different vignettes that punctuate your overall delivery of information to a group that needs continuity. The key is to give each of these stories their own struggle and climax in a concise manner.

  In her essay “Working with Story”, Christina Wodtke describes the “story-decorated” approach, where the arc follows a central theme punctuated by several smaller stories. She identifies Ken Robinson’s TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” as a shining example of using multiple different stories to make a larger point (Figure 11-3).

  Just because the nature of the meeting is more of an update, or a report, it need not be a dry recitation of the facts. The trick with being story-decorated is ensuring that you aren’t just stringing together different anecdotes and treating them like a spray of facts to dazzle you audience. Instead, you need to think of arranging your “mini-stories” into their own arc that brings the audience along.

  Figure 11-3. Christina Wodtke’s depiction of a story-decorated presentation

  The Story-Driven Struggle

  If you are looking to create buy-in, the Story-Driven Struggle structure can be an effective way to pitch bold new ideas, or present a synthesis of lots of prespectives. You can help create buy-in to an initiative by ensuring everyone can relate to a narrative that pulls facts into something memorable.

  This shape serves to ground the audience in the pain points—the struggles of someone in the target market who goes on to achieve greatness, with the help of your solution. This is frequently employed in business in the form of demos and proposals. Steve Jobs was a master of the pitch form in his onstage presentations at Apple events. He tended to minimize the “hurdle” aspect of the pitch in favor of dazzling audiences with clear, impressive images of a brilliant future. Mad Men’s carousel scene is an exemplary, almost meta-level “pitch about pitching” that nails the form.