6. Provoking Conversations, continued
Have you ever posed a question, only to be met by silence? People look at the tabletop. Shuffle their papers. Refuse to make eye contact. Wait and pray that someone else speaks up. Obviously, the posing didn’t provoke conversation.
You can provoke conversations in a number of ways.
The best way is to ask open-ended questions (questions that can’t be answered yes or no), and non-leading questions (leading questions steer the listener to a seemingly desired answer).
Ask the open-ended question, “How can we best use the warehouse space to support our efforts?” rather than the close-ended, “Do you think we ought to close that warehouse?” And, “Would it really be bad to close that warehouse?” is a leading question that, coming from the boss, could generate a lot of pressure to just say no.
A non-leading question would be, “How could we develop stronger relationships with our key customers?” This question is phrased in a way that’s designed to stimulate thinking, which the more leading question, “Do you really think putting more effort into developing relationships with our customers will be worth all the time and effort we’ll have to expend?” won’t.
Besides asking thought-provoking questions, there is another issue that may be involved if you often are met by silence when you pose questions.
If you have a history of beating up on people, ridiculing ideas, not accepting ideas other than your own, or any of a number of other noxious practices, you’ll have to do some groundwork to change the culture of your conversations. While you are changing your approach, the best way to deal with this is to have someone else lead these conversations.
Depending upon how much of a dampening effect you presence tends to have on conversations, you may or may not be able to sit in and observe. If you do sit in, be sure to demonstrate support and approval of the process through gestures, brief comments, and your general demeanor.
Probing Your Assumptions: In a quote usually attributed to Albert Einstein, he defined insanity as, “Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.”
At some point in a brainstorming session, we wind down. Sometimes we wind down before we come up with an idea that moves us forward. This occurs, in part, because our old assumptions, our habitual perspectives, have the effect of limiting – of channeling – our thinking into certain repetitive loops. One way to kick ourselves out of our ruts is to revisit, understand, and question our assumptions.
One effective technique is to start your thinking from a point of view that is deliberately different from your norm.
It is constructive to pay some attention to considering how old assumptions, or a traditional point of view, are limiting your conversations.
Are your assumptions still valid? For example, “Does it still make sense for us to maintain our own warehouse component? Would we be better off using the giant package-shipping companies instead?” Those are two different, but interrelated, questions that consider traditional assumptions, or how things have always been done.
It will be impossible to arrive at the best answers, or to develop new strategies, without exploring the assumptions that support old strategies.
Possibility-Generation: In this stage of the conversation, you are identifying and exploring alternatives. The options discussed can be considered within the context of the company’s business idea and its brand promises. The business idea and the brand promises are serious, but not sacrosanct.
To be most valuable, those ideas have to change and evolve. This can be a difficult idea to grasp at first, because we have a tendency to become overly attached to our solutions. We want them to last longer than they generally do.
Because conditions change over time, what makes for a good solution has to change as well. Once the reality of ever changing ideas is embraced (in a rigorous, focused manner) it can be extremely invigorating. It is a posture that fosters innovation and development. It is a posture required to sustain extraordinary execution.
Path Making: Once you’ve culled the generated possibilities down to one, or a select few, they need to be tested and assessed. Agree on who will carry out which elements of these tasks, and state a realistic timeframe for completion.
Make sure the group considers how they see the organization moving forward to change course, or effectively implement a new idea.
Over the course of these dialogues, the specific members of the conversation may vary. Some people might drop out, while others join in, as the conversation evolves. Still, there should be a core of participants who stay on throughout the process to maintain continuity as the conversation matures.
(More specific thinking and problem-solving skills can be found in the Tools in section 9, which focuses on smart organizations, and in section 10, which deals with extraordinary execution .)