The four conversations of a leadership team | Part II
Something is wrong.
It could be you missed some key performance targets. You might have lost a customer. A product launch is delayed. You missed the emergence of a competitor that is now stealing market share. You know something is up — and it’s the leadership team’s job to find a solution.
The thing is, you don’t find a solution by starting with one. You find it by defining the right problem to solve — and if you frame a problem well, you have already defined its solution (to paraphrase Charles and Ray Eames).
Leadership teams get stuck when they rush too quickly to solutions and don’t harness the power of all their members to frame the problem in the first place.
If I had an hour to solve a problem I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking of solutions.
— Albert Einstein
The best leaders resist their bias for action here. They will draw on every member of their team individually to define the problem, and ignore any solutions until they have several potential frames for the problem itself. They ask what the data show, and then keep digging. “Why?”, they keep asking. Again and again, until they get to the root cause — and a frame that explains all the whys.
Don’t expect people to love you for this. One CMO we know, dealing with a very action-loving culture, would get a lot of eye-rolls. “Uh, oh, here she goes being strategic again”, one person would say, half-jokingly.
Learning vs blaming
As with any true conversation, defining the right frame for a problem benefits from an open and curious mindset. It’s easy to fall into the trap of a “blame frame”, where investigating what went wrong looks like trying to find someone to blame. That’s an exercise in futility. You’ll put everyone on the defensive and encourage a culture at the top of hiding important mistakes and finger-pointing.
Try this
Your role as leader is to ensure the team is defining the right way to see the problem, and not jumping to superficial solutions.
1 | Listen for where the conversation gets into solving territory and pull it back to get clarity on the problem. Ask “What is the real problem we are trying to solve?”.
2 | Look for what is missing — step back from the active conversation in the room and ask “What are we not thinking about?” or “What are we not seeing?”
3 | Listen for a bias towards opinions or judgment, and encourage your leaders to ask questions that begin with “Why?” or “What if?”.
4 | A great ritual to put into practice is an After Action Review. Drawn from the army, the practice is about learning from events without blaming people. The four questions to ask in sequence are: “1. What happened?” (without judgment) “2. Why did it happen” “3. What can we learn for next time?” and “4. How will we implement those learnings?”
A great problem-solving conversation yields:
A written problem statement (perhaps with a diagram) that frames what is wrong, and a theory to test — if we do X, then we will see Y. Spelling out a problem for the team to see is important. For example, a retailer summed up their problem statement at the end of a recent meeting: “We saw a decline in customer acquisition online, despite launching a new product line that increased traffic. We think the problem is with the customer experience, not the product itself — the bounce rate for new product pages on the website is high. If we improve the experience online, we will improve acquisition.” That statement led to more debate about whether the root cause was actually about their marketing capability — and helped them frame the problem in a bigger way around marketing.
A list of interesting questions that have emerged.
A plan for how to test out the assumptions, including who will own the follow up
Next week: The planning conversation