Getting Outside the Pool

I was sitting on the plane the other day thinking about how to make a point to a colleague. It wasn’t an earthshaking notion, but it was something that seemed important for that conversation. At Group Partners, we’re huge fans of what we call Structured Visual Thinking. It’s what you think it is. I’m not the keeper of the artistic flame, John Caswell is, but I’ve learned that even some simple doodles can make the point.

The question at hand had to do with organizational change, new vision, new strategy, involving people . . . those sorts of things. The first thing that comes to mind when you go swimming in those pools are the people and their experiences. I think of them as a collective “pool of experiences.”

What’s important to realize is that they aren’t good experiences or bad experiences. They’re just experiences. They define how people see their company, see their jobs, and often how they see themselves. Job one of any change agent is to honor those experiences. Take a moment on that thought. How do you do that? One of the first things you can do is listen to the stories people tell . . . and they do tell stories. Better still, go see them where they work and listen to the stories in context. It’s just not possible for people to move forward and contribute thoughtfully if they don’t feel that what they’ve been through is being honored and acknowledged.

Any modern organization is awash in data. I think of it as another pool, a pool that typically overlaps with the pool of experiences. They are by no means the same pool and often aren’t even about the same things.

Data can be a wonderful thing but also a miserable trap. To the extent that it’s about the question at hand, it’s a good thing. But often it’s not, particularly if the thing we’re trying to sort out is new. Something else worth remembering: Data is an artifact of not only what we can measure, but what we have to measure with. New questions, new tools, and new techniques all have a nasty habit of making existing data worthless long before the keepers and users of existing data care to admit it.

So along come the change agents.

Do they honor the experiences of the people already there? We know they bring their own experiences to the pool. They may even have some additional data.

New people are good. In fact, one of the best tactics you can take when working on a hard problem is to go talk to people with different and divergent points of view. We don’t want to just talk to people who will confirm what we think; we want to talk with people who won’t. The trick here is getting those new and old people and their collective experiences to come together in a way that’s productive. Not a small thing.

The thing that we hope to do in these sorts of thinking processes is to help/ask/encourage/force folks to find ways to see their experiences in new ways.

Encouraging these new perspectives is a necessary part of both organizational change and decision quality. It’s what good process does for you [shameless ad, that's what we do!]. The big reason for doing this is to generate new thinking as well. New perspectives and new thinking about what’s right in front of you is another way of describing what my colleague Peter Flatow refers to as “re-invention.”

Besides wanting to have a conversation about . . .

• Honoring stories
• Not getting too caught up in existing data
• Using process to bring out new perspectives
• Putting our reinvention hats on

. . . I also wanted to make a point about problem solving. Left to our own devices, we tend to define problems in ways that track with our experiences and the data we have about those experiences.

Worse, we too often . . .

• Latch onto the first problem definition that floats across the screen: “We need to . . .”
• Turn solutions into problems that require the solution we already want to do: “I think we should reorganize.”
• Define problems the same way we always do.
• Settle on the first reasonable, politically feasible, familiar solution that comes to hand.
• Work problems in familiar ways.
• Avoid conflict throughout the process.
• Look for data in all the familiar places.

None of this makes us bad people, but it does make for low quality thinking, problem solving, and solutions. [Shameless ad, we help you avoid those sorts of decision traps.]

The truth is, the solution is to break the tyranny of the familiar. It’s not so much thinking outside the box as it is getting out of the pool . . .

. . . and working to see the whole thing in a way that honors experience, intuition, insight, data, and perspectives while still being able to unhinge from the familiar, as well as . . . bring people along through the process of getting there: An act of balancing inclusion and efficiency. No small thing.

Tags: Change, Organization, Experience, Data, Group Partners, Structured Visual Thinking, Decision Making, Decision Quality, Peter Flatow, John Caswell, SVT, reinvention