Does Your Team Have a Thinking System?
We can only control three things, our thinking, words, and actions. Your business is probably pretty good at the actions. We have a cognitive bias to get the job done, make habits of processes and procedures, and keep score somehow.
Words are a little trickier. Words are the notes that make music out of your sentences. If you shoot down good ideas with bad words, what’s your company’s culture? How do you want your people talking to each other? What are the good words that bring purpose and enthusiasm to the team? Words matters, a lot. More on this in a future blog.
Do you hand out your proprietary thinking system to all you new hires on their first day? What does that even look like? Do you just hope everyone will figure out how to work together? Would better quality thinking beat your profit goals? Look what it did for Netflix, and AirBnB. Look what it didn’t do for Kodak and Blockbuster.
This is my favorite mistake in the workplace. The “Boss” doesn’t share with key reports all the Filtering Questions that will lead to the team’s success. For whatever reason, maybe to look like the smartest person in the room, the “Boss” holds back the greatest wisdom. It’s actually a power play, “If everyone thinks like me, I’ll get replaced by someone who makes less money, or they’ll quit and compete with us.” This kind of “A” Player is a Taker who is out for themselves not for the team. The “A” Player who is out for the team is called a Superstar.
How is not sharing to develop the next generation of “A” Players—your future leadership?
The litmus test to see if you’re sharing your Filtering Questions and those of the company is how often people are knock, knock, knocking on your door to ask a question? If the team knows how the company thinks, its values, purpose, and they are empowered to make decisions—who’d have time to knock?
An Open Door Policy is Great—if the Door is Open.
A key habit in the DRUMBEAT is getting two, uninterrupted 90 minute thinking sessions in each day. You can’t make excellent decision or have powerful insights without it. And those knocks are like a flag on your thinking. You lose yardage, and your rhythm. If you don’t get in these Solo sessions your thinking is second rate and obviously not of foremost importance. Is that acceptable for your direct reports? Why is that acceptable for you?
Your 90 Minute Solo sessions don’t necessarily need to be by yourself. One thinking partner can be very effective. However more than two people and it’s best to consider these Jam sessions, which have other best ways of practicing. There’s a concept called “racecar” thinking and “hiking” thinking. The former is long on expediency and dopamine, the latter is well thought out and requires delayed gratification. There have been studies done that show the ability to delay gratification is a predictor of overall success. When two people talk things through it might be best to alternate between focus (the solution) and diffuse thinking (other options). I call this alternating “scanning” for options. You might also call it a Duet.
There are four different types of Jam Sessions or meetings are…
…Information Exchange, Convergent, Divergent, and Social. An information exchange is probably best done by email or internet or phone but sometimes it is best to all get together. Just keep it short maybe even without sitting down.
A Convergent meeting means we have enough information and we just need to make a decision or someone needs to identify why not. These challenges or opportunities typically have less moving parts or variables to them. These are the kinds of items that can be knocked out at a team meeting with action plans. The next step is usually fairly obvious.
A Divergent meeting is a whole ‘nother animal. These are usually for fairly complex situations with maybe 20 variables or more to arrange properly. Frequently, a lot of people need to be in the room, too. This isn’t the kind of problem a couple people can solve off to the side because they don’t have all the information. It’s been shown that groups are almost always smarter than the smartest person in the room. Sure, occasionally there’s an unparalleled genius in the company but more often than not you need a group process to beat these conundrums. From the example above this is “hiker” or diffuse thinking. It’s circular not linear.
Some processes to consider are lateral thinking like deBono’s Six Thinking Hats, silent ideation, combinatory play, or random word association. In these situations there’s not enough information to make a decision—yet. In fact, you may not even be able to ask the correct question.
In the DRUMBEAT we call this a Better Sounding Question. You’ll know it when you hear it, because usually it opens up the puzzle to a new way of seeing it. It even helps to use all your senses sometimes because that will help you use more of your brain. Innovation processes don’t look like a weekly staff meeting. Creativity springs from the arts, music, no numbers, questions not answers.
The last kind of Jam session or meeting is Social. It’s important to have your band of characters or team to have social cohesion. This is best done on company time, purely voluntary, and allows for folks to participate in the ways they prefer. Not surprisingly, some quality divergent thinking can get done when people are having fun. The downside to social meeting is that because we are social animals all the other types of meeting have a tendency to devolve into Social and soon everyone’s whole day is taken up with hugely unproductive meetings. Hmm, stop that!
Here’s the crescendo: Don’t schedule a meeting without declaring what type it is, and have your own company rules for each.
What’s your mix of Jam Session, now? Look at it in a month? Are things going better?
This is a key element to your company’s Thinking System. I almost named the book DRUMBEAT Thinking but decided that most people think thinking is too hard. The word “Productivity” I thought would better appeal to at least the owner, executive team, and the superstar “A” players among you.
Instead of developing a thinking system for your company from scratch, why not get the DRUMBEAT and customize it yourself, or give us a call. I did the work so all you have to do is call the plays.
What do you think?
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