If every Boss lets each of their direct reports know in advance what their filtering questions are—how much time would be freed up for other more productive activities? Three percent, thirty percent? What amounts of productivity gain might that bring your organization? 2x, 3x, maybe more? Can you see how this simple time management tip can help your team’s decision making?
This almost amounts to an AI of your first line thinking—then share it with your team. If you keep it to yourself, is that a power thing? Don’t want anyone else to figure out your mojo?
Sharing your filtering questions is a far superior process than everyone wasting time sitting around a table and asking each other what they think? Why? Because they haven’t thought it through, yet. Those responses are just knee jerk reactions to how much more work/aggravation they’re going to get themselves into. Style matters but so does consistency. This blog will give you a framework to do both. I call it the Square Drum. But first let’s lay down the rhythm from DRUMBEAT the book, an Amazon bestseller in both Time Management and Decision Making.
Filtering questions are the interface between your internal and external. It is where you and your team have the opportunity to do some serious second line thinking together. Small groups are almost always smarter than the smartest person in the room. We also know that process beats analysis maybe even by a factor of 6, or so says McKinsey.
The Square Drum process is where your external Notes bubble up in the Kettle Drum of Questions for future action. Notes usually are not what you are working on this week or next. Notes are ideas that are waiting to become worthy of your time. They are probably best sorted in folios by topic. They need to live somewhere so you can easily find them and see how they sound. Having them digitally sort-able is a major plus. If one Note sounds good it has to get past the Filtering Questions. Filtering Questions are the guardian of your time gate. If the Note makes it though the Filtering Questions they can float up and become their own questions. Hence I call this process the big, booming, Kettle Drum of Questions.
To begin the Filtering Question process, you might use a lateral thinking technique or you may have a stroke of genius and see where that leads. Ideas count. We live, or should live, in an idea meritocracy. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that’s where the Square Drum comes in. Essentially, there are four sides Marketers who prefer Risk, Marketers who prefer Safety, Operators who prefer Risk, and Operators who prefer Safety.
By the way, if your team is only on one side of the table then you may be taking too much or too little risk, and you may be overly focused on marketing or operations. At the end of the day the CEO or business owner has to decide on the balance between safety and risk, and when to invest in operations or marketing. That’s usually called Strategy, whether intentional (analytical) or from the gut (intuition.)
We now know from science that the gut actually has brain cells throughout. This gives credence to the saying, “trust your gut” as it actually is your second brain. How you balance the analytical and intuition is a huge topic itself, and for another day. But as it pertains to sharing your Filtering Questions with your team, and knowing your team’s bias for risk, safety, operations, marketing—the goal is to understand their Filtering Questions up and down the organization.
Here are some examples to get you started…
How does this advance the mission (state it clearly) of the organization? In other words, if the mission is to be the friendliest plumbing business ever, then the question is “How does making this change help us become the friendliest plumbers ever? Can you see how this clarifies matters quickly?
“If we are saying ‘yes’ to this, what do we have to say ‘no’ to?” Attention is a limited resource, if the company starts chasing every shiny object then it’s possible nothing will ever get done. This is an example of a Safety bias. In the other hand, this may or may not be the time to abandon another initiative. Not only is attention limited but resources are as well.
Now let’s get back to lateral thinking processes. You might consider using the Six Thinking Hats, a process developed by Edward de Bono to help develop your own Filtering Questions. First, “What are the Facts?” Then, “How do I feel about it?” Then, “What could go right?” Then “What could go wrong?” Then, “What haven’t we considered?” And finally, “What’s are the next steps?”
The point here is to think something through completely without just trying to manage the outcome to favor your pet idea. When done inside your head—you stand a chance to get the “whole” picture before deciding on an action. If done with a thinking partner or a team—it eliminates the tendency for the extroverted alphas to status manage their way to victory—almost every time—even when they’re wrong.
It’s been shown that high performing teams are ones where everyone participates about equally and feels they are in a safe and caring environment. The behavior we want to hear here is “we just need to get to the best answer.” If you really want to jam, I mean like a jazz quartet totally in the groove, try silent ideation using the Six Thinking Hats. In about 15 minutes you can have almost everything you need to consider before arriving at a solution. Well, after everyone has read it, anyway.
Before getting back to Filtering Questions and the Square Drum, it is important to note the difference between a challenge or opportunity that is relatively simple to one that isn’t. Recently folks have written about the difference being when there are more than say ten or twenty moving variable. Less than that you can probably run a convergent process. More than that a divergent process is probably called for. The former you probably have enough information to make a decision. And for that matter, all the solutions may be so similar that a coin toss might be best practice. I suggest having someone in every meeting be on the look out for coin flip topics.
Get on with it.
A divergent process is called for when not only are there no apparent “good” answers but the team probably hasn’t even identified the problem needing to be solved. Not enough is known to even begin formulating any patterns or cause and effect. It’s a good idea not to hold divergent meetings in the same space as convergent meeting. Another way of saying it is—work on numbers in one room, and not numbers in another.
Numbers usually turn off the creative mind.
Not even knowing the correct questions to ask brings us nicely back to your Filtering Questions. Here’s the best way to pen your Filtering Questions to share with your team. For a couple weeks, maybe even a month, every time a team member comes to you with an idea, challenge, or opportunity, and you blind them with your brilliance—write down said brilliance in the form of a question. Shortly, you can just give them your rules, your filtering questions for them to run in their heads without you having to be there.
Would that improve your productivity?
In turn, your direct report can do the same with their direct reports. What will that do for their productivity? So on and so on until you reach folks who are totally client or customer facing. And even there, the Filtering Questions begin to resemble a Kanban or Kaizen of their position. This is also the AI that’s coming to replace the jobs of people who essentially are sorting though a customer’s requests just to get them what they need—as fast as possible.
This brings us back to the Square Drum. If everyone on your team has a bias towards taking Marketing Risks, but “statistically speaking” it is only the best solution 25% of the time—this workgroup will feel like they are at war with everyone else. Of course, it is important to understand the excellence in Marketing Risk, but not when operational safety is the goal for the day, week, month, quarter or year. That’s up to central management.
More and more is being talked about having a diverse team that can consider the whole problem because it prevents “groupthink” in a department or company. How can you arrange that at your shop? Here are some easy ways to look at things. If your Marketing Department isn’t A/B testing on a regular basis then your Marketing Department may be playing it too safe. If your operation people aren’t continuously looking to improve process, again they may be playing to too safe. It is up the central management and ultimately the marketplace to decide.
If you are in a hot market then the best strategy may be to grab market share as fast as you can before the eventual downturn. If you are in a bad market then it’s time to start dotting the “i” and crossing the “t” whenever possible by upgrading to best practices. Why? Your competition isn’t—that will give you a competitive advantage.
Take a look at your department or all of the workgroups in your shop to see if they have at least one person banging away on each side of the Square Drum. This will up the thinking game in your business and keep a steady beat your company can dance to at year’s end. It all begins with the right questions.