Category: Collaborative Inquiry

The Hierarchy of Inclusivity

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Efforts to help organizations become places that welcome differences – in who we are and how we like to work – have shifted from an emphasis on diversity to an emphasis on inclusivity. An emphasis on diversity, which can be thought of as an outcome, leads to conversations about representation that often devolve into a focus on demographics. An emphasis on inclusivity, which can be thought of as a practice, leads to conversations about human needs that create opportunities to focus on structures that create and sustain unfair advantages and oppressive disadvantages.

Abraham Maslow famously represented human needs as a pyramid suggesting that we won’t be motivated to meet some needs until more foundational needs have been satisfied. For example, in Maslow’s hierarchy, we cannot work to meet our need for “love and belonging” until our physiological and safety needs have been met. I won’t seek out companionship if I’m living in fear of being harmed or being left without a livelihood.

At Unstuck Minds we have been dabbling with a framework that borrows the notion of a hierarchy of needs with a focus on inclusivity. We want to acknowledge recent conversations with our colleagues Tracy Rickard and Ford Hatamiya who have both contributed their experience with the topic to the current expression of the model. We view this post as an invitation to continue the conversation about how best to provide a simple, memorable, and powerful way for organizational leaders to explore how they practice inclusivity.

Hierarchy of Inclusion Needs

The Need to be Seen

The first section of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, and Smith, 1994) introduced many of us in the West to the African philosophy of Ubuntu. Senge, et al. shared the Zulu phrase, Umuntu ngumuntu nagabantu, which translates as: “A person is a person because of other people” (1994, p. 3). In a sense, your acknowledgement of me brings me into existence.

The Ubuntu philosophy explains the significance of the Zulu greeting, Sawubona, which literally translates as: “I see you.” Each encounter with someone becomes a reaffirmation of our coexistence and interdependence. In writing and directing the 2009 movie Avatar, James Cameron imbues the Na’vi, the native population of the fictional planet Pandora, with a version of the Ubuntu philosophy. In Na’vi, the greeting, Oel ngati kame, also means, “I see you.”

If I don’t feel seen at work, I will not identify with my organization. I will see my workplace as a foreign territory I periodically visit. It will feel risky to reveal myself to others.

The Need to Belong

David McClelland, an American psychologist most noted for his work on motivation theory, popularized the concept of affiliation needs. McClelland thought of affiliation as a fundamental need to feel a sense of involvement and belonging with a social group.

Researcher, author, and world-renown speaker Brené Brown has made “belonging” a centerpiece of her message about the power of vulnerability. Brown, like McClelland describes belonging as an innate human desire. For Brown our need to belong sometimes manifests as a desire to “fit in” that ironically separates us from others because we are hiding our authentic, imperfect selves.

If I don’t feel like I belong at work, I will not support my organization. I will see work as a marketplace where I trade my effort for pay. I play a role at work the same way that a car-engine part plays a role in making the car move. When my capacity to serve my function is diminished, I expect to be replaced.

The Need to Matter

Following the rubric of a hierarchy, until I feel seen, I won’t try to belong. Until I feel like I belong, I won’t work to establish my distinctiveness; a distinctiveness that demonstrates how I matter. When I no longer question whether or not I’m a recognized and accepted part of my organization, I can seek out ways to be significant to my organization.

Will Schutz, an American Psychologist, author, and creator of the psychometric instrument known as the FIRO-B® described “significance” as the primary feeling associated with our need for inclusion. For Schutz, to feel significance is to “…know that I make a difference, am an important person, am meaningful and worthwhile” (1994, p. 31).

If I don’t feel that I matter at work, I will not contribute my creativity, ingenuity, or discretionary effort. My organization has become a comfortable place where I understand the routines and people count on me to do my part. I might embellish the odd assignment with a personal touch in order to express myself, but eventually my yearning for meaning and for being consequential will alienate me from my organization and I will seek self-esteem elsewhere.

Applying the Framework

If you are a target of the “isms” that undermine social cohesion and human development (racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, etc.), it makes sense that you would feel worn out and angry by a daily struggle to be seen, to belong, and to matter. If you have the good fortune to fit your society’s preferred identities, your world has been set up to facilitate your requirements for being seen, belonging, and feeling like you matter.

Frameworks can help us see invisible structures. If we can’t see how structures cause harm, we can’t talk about them. If we can’t talk about them, we can’t dismantle them. Over the course of your day, how much energy do you expend trying to be seen, trying to belong, and trying to matter? Now pose that question to someone who experiences society as inhospitable.

Senge, P., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R.B., & Smith, B.S. (1994). The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. New York, NY: Doubleday

Schutz, W. (1994). The Human Element: Productivity, self-esteem, and the bottom line. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass

Have a D.I.E.T (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity Talk)

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Download a free D.I.E.T. Deck at Unstuck Minds/ D.I.E.T. Deck

I’m a 60-year old, white, heterosexual, cisgender male. I’m not apologizing; that’s just how it has turned out for me.

I mention the circumstances of my existence and identity because I want to offer something useful to promote diversity, inclusion and equity on our teams and in our workplaces. I make this offer in spite of my identity and circumstances (or maybe because of my identity and circumstance).

I’m experimenting with a card deck of questions that you can download for free at Unstuck Minds. I’m imagining that a facilitator or team leader would bring people together, shuffle the cards and place them face down on a table. A group of people who want to better understand and appreciate one another would take turns picking a card and reading the question out loud. Any member of the group with a personal experience to share in response to the question speaks up with an answer and/or an example. The leader or facilitator closes out the session by asking for insights.

I have listed the questions below if you’d rather not bother downloading and printing off the questions in the form of cards. I would love to hear what you think of the questions and how you use them. I will happily update the deck based on new questions that people submit or revise questions based on suggested edits. Bookmark this blog post so you can submit new questions in the comments section. Indicate whether you like or dislike the questions so we can decide which new questions get included in an updated deck.

D.I.E.T. Deck Questions

  • What do you believe is among the first things people you meet at work notice about you? What would you rather they notice about you?
  • In what retail store do you feel most at ease? Why?
  • You’re walking into your first meeting with a team of people you’ve never met. The others have been working together for a year. What do you most want the team leader to do to help you feel like you belong?
  • What do your co-workers not get about you… that you wish they did?
  • What language was spoken in the home you grew up in that is not spoken at work?
  • What did a memorable teacher do to make it easier for you to learn when you struggled with a subject or topic?
  • Which of your colleagues is worn out by a non-stop series of interactions? How do you know?
  • When you board public transportation and walk down an aisle to find a seat, what do you assume the people who are seated think when they notice you?
  • What do you wish recent college graduates understood about what it takes to be successful?
  • What do you wish people who will be retiring in the next 15-20 years understood about people just entering the workforce?
  • How would you feel about being forced to use a bathroom designated for a different gender?
  • How important is it for a cafeteria at school or work to accommodate dietary restrictions (e.g. allergies to the presence of certain foods, religious dietary laws, diets based on health or ethics, etc.)?
  • What assumptions grant you an unearned advantage over others (e.g. “Tall people are good at basketball,” so you get chosen to play based on your height – Thank you for this example, @Stephanie Walton)?
  • What do you need to use that is designed badly for someone like you?
  • What do you have in common with someone at work who is very different than you, something you were surprised to discover?
  • What’s an example of something in our organization that is rigged against people like you?
  • What’s an example of language or jargon used by a group at work that seems designed to exclude others?
  • What do you “just deal with” at work, even though it puts you at a disadvantage?
  • Bonus Question: What’s the name of the person who cleans the toilets at your workplace? What else do you know about them?

Who Needs What?

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In October of 1962, through a series of backchannel negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Missile Crisis came to an end when Attorney General Robert Kennedy met with Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin to broker a deal involving the removal of US missiles in Turkey. The US had planned to decommission the missiles in Turkey anyway, but including the removal of the missiles as part of the settlement allowed Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev to privately claim to officials in the Kremlin that he had won a concession from the US. The solution worked because it satisfied a web of needs and interests.

In my last blog post I described distinctions among three groups of stakeholders that we often consider as having homogeneous needs and interests: the consumer, the client and the customer. I defined consumers as the group who ultimately adopts a solution, the client as the individual requesting a solution, and the customer as the individual or group who authorizes or pays for the solution. I suggested that those of us in the business of designing solutions would be well served by paying attention to the distinctions.

Since presenting the distinctions at a community forum for learning and development leaders, I’ve had several conversations about the differences among customers, consumers, and clients, all of which suggest to me broader applicability of the concept. For example, in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, The Kennedy brothers and their advisors crafted a solution. The solution worked because the customer, Khrushchev (who authorized the solution) needed the consumers of the solution (The Kremlin officials including Khrushchev) to get something they needed (a demonstration of their sovereignty). The client, Dobrynin acting on behalf of the customer, requested and helped shape the solution.

Human centered design, but which humans?

For the last several years organizations have focused attention on helping their leaders become more innovative. Design thinking has been the methodology of choice for teaching leaders how to spur innovation. Design thinking is founded on the premise that innovative solutions depend on insights about people and their needs. Until an interesting idea or new invention gets adopted by people who see it as a way to get their needs met, you may have a novel creation, but you don’t have an innovation.

I now see that one of the challenges I have encountered in translating design thinking for organizational leaders has been assuming that the customer, the client, and the consumer all want the same thing. If you’re designing a consumer product for, say a packaged goods company, the client (who asked for your help) and the customer (the functional leader whose budget will pay for your help) want you to focus on the needs of the consumer. For the most part the interests of the client, customer, and consumer are shared.

If you’re designing a new manufacturing process, the needs of the client (my boss put me in charge of this project), the needs of the customer (my bonus depends on increasing throughput by 10%) and the needs of the consumer (The company is changing the way I do my job) may create a misalignment of interests.

Design thinking means starting with people and their needs, but it’s not always obvious which people to start with. When tensions exist between needs, whose needs take priority?

Three Examples

An HR business partner asks you to coach a leader

In this case, your client is the HR business partner. The consumer is the leader getting coached. The customer may not be obvious. Maybe the leader’s manager came to the HR business partner asking for help. On the other hand, someone responsible for talent development may have identified the leader as ready for promotion and sees coaching as a tool to prepare the leader for new challenges. If you don’t consider the needs of the person authorizing the coaching request, you may be missing important context for your coaching conversations.

A leader requests a training program for her team

In this case your client and your customer are the same person. The consumers are the team members being asked to attend a training program. If you develop a training solution by assuming that the needs of the customer are aligned with the needs of the consumers, your well-crafted instructional design may fall on deaf ears.

An executive team asks for an update on a project you’re leading

Your manager requested that you put together a few slides on the project and present at the next executive team staff meeting. The manager is your client. The executive team is both customer and consumer. They authorized the solution (your presentation) and they will use (as consumers) the information you present. It would be easy in this case to ignore the needs of your manager. After all, your manager reports to one of the executives you’ll be presenting to.  On the other hand, your manager reports to one of the executive you’ll be presenting to! What are the consequences of ignoring your managers unexpressed needs when designing your presentation? In what ways does the presentation represent an opportunity for you and your manager?

Consider a challenge you’re currently working on. Who asked you to take on the challenge? Who, ultimately will authorize and/or pay for your recommended solution? Who will need to alter their behavior in order to adopt your solution? To what extent are three stakeholder groups’ needs aligned?

How to Scope a Business Leader’s request without being Annoying

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A leader walks into a bar. She says to the bartender, “I’ll have a beer.” The bartender replies, “What problem are you trying to solve?” The leader walks out.

A couple of weeks ago, I worked with an aerospace company whose Human Resources department was shifting to a new service delivery model. Like many HR departments, they want to alter the way line leaders see the role of HR and make use of HR services. For the last several years, HR departments in large organizations have restructured, retooled and retrained so that business leaders stop viewing HR professionals as order takers and start collaborating with them as strategic business partners.

HR professionals aren’t the only experts who feel constrained by requests from decision makers. IT professionals are often asked to build solutions without due consideration of systemic impacts or even a conversation about more efficient non-technical options. I had breakfast with a marketing professional the other day who was working on a new template for creative briefs submitted by internal clients requesting design support. Her team felt the template needed updating so that business leaders stop submitting lists of specifications and instead describe desired impressions and the intended audience.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Consultants have been taught to ask their clients, “What problem are you trying to solve?” as a way to shift the conversation away from order taking. Asking about the nature of the problem rather than discussing how to implement a request allows the expert to problem-solve with the leader rather than simply enact the leader’s solution. Programs, task teams and new processes that originate from uncritically implementing a business leader’s request, often result in wasteful activity and misaligned priorities. After all, even if you are experiencing familiar symptoms and you tell your doctor you need an antibiotic, you can bet that the doctor is going to ask a few questions and conduct a few tests before writing the prescription.

In theory, it makes perfect sense to slow leaders down to ensure the right problem gets solved. We want to make full use of our functional experts who may have interesting perspectives or an alternative the leader hadn’t considered. At the very least, a functional expert can gather data so that leaders make informed decisions before taking action.

In practice, many leaders feel as though they have given due consideration to their situation and feel confident about the efficacy of their request. As Peter Block pointed out decades ago in his pioneering work Flawless Consulting, the consultant might want to establish a collaborative relationship with the client, but the client might simply want an extra pair of hands to get work done. Some people who walk into a bar want a suggestion from the bartender. Some people know what they want. The best bartenders know the difference.

Try This

The next time you find yourself across the desk from a leader placing an order for a solution and all the while you’re thinking, “That won’t work,” buy yourself a little time to plan a scoping conversation by making the following proposal: I’d like to schedule 30 minutes with you to learn more, so that I don’t make the wrong assumptions about what needs to be done.

Design the scoping conversation around four questions. The questions make use of the Unstuck Minds Compass model and will help ensure that you walk away from the scoping conversation with an agreement on the strategic question that will guide the work.

As an example, let’s say the head of a manufacturing group made the following request, “I want to put all of my supervisors through diversity training.”

1. Contextual Inquiry: What’s changing?

You will need to understand the leader’s motivation for investing time, energy and resources to change the current situation. In particular, you’ll want to know whether the need has been building over time or if it’s in response to something new. Listen for and ask about factors outside of the leader’s functional area.

For our example, you might learn that the leader has been hearing about sensitivities of younger workers to things like implicit bias. Perhaps the leader has been paying attention to media coverage of topics like “White Privilege” and the “Me Too movement.” The leader may also be thinking about demographic shifts creating a wide range of generations all working together in a manufacturing facility.

2. Critical Inquiry: What’s holding things in place?

Next, you’ll need to learn about aspects of the current situation that have become the source of dissatisfaction. Given what you learned about what’s changing, what is it about the status quo that has become unsustainable? What existing habits or routines will create tensions between the way things are and the way things are going?

For our example, you might learn that many of the plants have inadequate locker room facilities for women. You might hear a story about an argument that broke out about which cable news channel was being broadcast in a break room. Maybe the leader received an anonymous complaint about a plant supervisor who starts his weekly safety meetings with a prayer.

3. Collaborative Inquiry: Whom will we organize around?

Now that you understand the context of the situation and its relationship to the status quo, it’s time to focus the assignment. Any solution that depends upon people altering their behavior must consider the specific population being asked to change and how the change connects to their needs.

In our example, we might determine that focusing on all people managers in the manufacturing group makes the most sense. Maybe we learn that there is a wide disparity of comfort with the topic of diversity and inclusion among the managers. Deeper inquiry might reveal undercurrents of resentment and feelings of injustice below the surface of discussions about how we include and exclude people based on the circumstances of their identity.

4. Creative Inquiry: What question will guide our work?

Having a guiding question rather than a set of static outcomes allows for new information to emerge that can be incorporated into our definition of the challenge. A question points us in a direction. An Unstuck Minds question eliminates the thinking traps that limit and misdirect.

Our example started with a question about implementing a request: How do we get the manufacturing supervisors through diversity training?

After using the Unstuck Minds Compass to scope the issue, we might choose to ask ourselves a different question: How might people managers in our manufacturing facilities help our employees feel welcome and respected?

Once we have a strategic question to guide our work, we can describe success and identify the elements of our response. One element may include training, but we now know what needs the training should address and what other changes can be included that will put the training into a broader, more sustainable context.

How Do We Get Started? versus Where Do We Go?

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Consider your immediate reaction to two different ways of describing the activity of setting direction:

  • Defining a strategy
  • Choosing a way forward

If each of the above activities defined the purpose of two different meetings, which one would you rather attend?

To me, defining a strategy raises the stakes; it suggests that we seek an answer. Choosing a way forward acknowledges that there are many ways to go and our task is to pick one. A way forward can be abandoned in favor of another path without much fuss. An abandoned strategy feels like a failure.

As someone who has studied strategic thinking and facilitated my share of strategic planning exercises with organizational leaders, I want to go public with a recent heretical conclusion I’ve come to: Strategies are worthless.

To be clear, I’m not saying that formulating a strategy is a waste of time. Thinking together with other stakeholders whether on behalf of defining a strategy or as an exercise in taking stock helps build commitment and ownership. The mistake is presuming that the product describing the group’s conclusions matters as much or more than the process of reaching the conclusion. As Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

Strategies in my experience suffer from a mythology that the daily activities of managers must conform to a set of strategic do’s and don’ts as if strategies were commandments rather than choices. At best, strategies inform investments of time and money. However, once the investment decisions have been made the organizational system and the marketplace react. Suddenly, the assumptions under which we defined our strategy no longer pertain. You can plan your next few moves in a game of Chess, but if your opponent responds in an unpredictable way, your strategy becomes useless. In today’s business environment unpredictable conditions are the only thing we can be sure of.

Essentially, strategies are marketing statements that most often put a positive spin on what you are already doing. Organizations don’t pause like an army before a battle waiting for a plan of attack. Everyday choices are being made that lead to outcomes that hopefully lead to better options. Your best bet is to develop a strategic question that will orient and focus the activities of the organization. A question that will inform what leaders pay attention to when making decisions and assessing outcomes.

Organizations and teams need a shared set of working hypotheses from which to choose a way forward; they don’t need (and almost never defer to) a strategy. Finding a way forward depends on asking thought-provoking questions before you get stuck. Here are four questions based on the Unstuck Minds Compass that can be applied in the flow of work rather than at some fictional starting point.

What is changing?

To ask, “What is changing?” is to zoom out and conduct Contextual Inquiry. In traditional strategic thinking terms, investigating what is changing is similar to conducting an environmental scan. Contextual Inquiry focuses the environmental scan on emerging trends and potential disruptions. By asking about contextual changes, we force ourselves to evaluate our assumptions. An adaptive organization does not wait for the strategy offsite to consider whether an emerging technology makes its product obsolete.

What do we take with us and what do we leave behind?

In light of what you discover about what is changing, use Critical Inquiry to zoom in and assess what will continue to work and what can be suspended. Consider what aspects of the current situation people find satisfying. Now consider the subset of the satisfying activities that contribute to your future customers’ future needs. Let go of the rest. 

Whose needs should we organize around?

In conjunction with Critical Inquiry, use Collaborative Inquiry to clearly define who benefits from what your organization produces and specifically how they benefit. Given what is changing, who are your future customers, clients or communities and what will be different about their needs in the future?

What question will define our path forward?

Note what is changing and compare it to what you’re currently doing and for whom. Now use Creative Inquiry to find the question that will reorient the organization’s attention.

By the way, if members of your organization, your board or your investors still insist on a clear statement of your strategy, you can always do what most organizations do. Retrospectively review what has worked so far and declare that you will do more of it and even better.

Unjust Deserts?

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When I started traveling for work, I resented the airlines for creating social hierarchies favoring those who pay more or fly more. Something about the overt unequal treatment of people rubbed me the wrong way. In those days, I would proclaim to my friends and colleagues that if I ever I qualified for a first class seat I would refuse it out of principle. Instead, I would offer it to someone infirmed or perhaps to a parent traveling with an infant. I would gallantly swap my seat for whatever seat the less fortunate traveler had been assigned. I would not become a pawn in the airline’s twisted plot to create addicts of their frequent fliers.

Fast-forward thirty years. I now qualify for American Airline’s top tier status. I get upgraded to first class about 75% of the time. I’m treated deferentially. The more onerous travel becomes for the occasional flier, the more my status distinguishes me. By the way, I have never once given up my first class seat. What’s worse, the resentment I once reserved for the airline sometimes manifests as impatience with people who board too slowly like the infirmed or parents traveling with infants. I’m not proud of abandoning my earlier principled stance. I am, on the other hand astonished by how quickly I got used to the blatant preferential treatment.

I qualify for special treatment by the airline because of my job. A few of us on every commercial flight have an advantage over the planeload of other passengers even though everyone onboard needs to get from point A to point B. Some passengers in first class have paid extra for the comfy seat, free food and deferential treatment. Many of the passengers in first class are road warriors whose company or clients pay about the same fare as everyone else on the plane.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the advantages I enjoy and often take for granted; I’ve been thinking about whether or not I’ve earned all those advantages. For example, I’m just over six feet tall, white and male. It would be impossible to list all the advantages I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime because society favors certain of my traits.

There is a dynamic relationship between “access” and “advantage.” My unearned advantages have made it easier for me to access earned advantages like a good education and promotions at work. Earned advantages afford me preferential treatment when competing with others for access to even more limited and valuable advantages and opportunities. For others, the virtuous cycle becomes a vicious cycle when a lack of advantage prevents access, which in turn puts opportunity for acquiring advantages out of reach.

I got inspired to turn my attention to the topic of earned and unearned advantage after reading an anecdote in Eugenia Cheng’s excellent new book, The Art of Logic in an Illogical World. Early in the book, Cheng shares a story about commuter reactions to the new green markings painted on the platforms of the London Underground. The markings let waiting passengers know where the train doors will open so they won’t stand in the way of people exiting the train. Cheng noted, “Apparently some people were upset that these markings spoilt the ‘competitive edge’ they had gained through years of commuting and studying train doors to learn where they would open.” This story led Cheng to an insight about affirmative action, “…If we give particular help to some previously disadvantaged people, then some of the people who don’t get this help are likely to feel hard done by.”

Helping those who have been previously disadvantaged has been in the news recently owing to a high-profile lawsuit against Harvard University based on their affirmative action practices in admitting students. Putting the politics of affirmative action aside, I tried applying the Unstuck Minds Method to the questions we ask about affirmative action. The Unstuck Minds Method helps people identify thinking traps that prevent them from discovering new options. We generally pose questions about our dilemmas and then focus our energy and attention on generating and debating solutions. The Unstuck Minds Method helps us determine the extent to which a misleading or incomplete question might be responsible for our inability to find a solution.

The practice of affirmative action attempts to correct for a long history of systemic and institutional bias against minority groups and women who seek equal access to limited opportunities. Our questions about affirmative action focus on improving things for those who have been disadvantaged by discrimination. When devising affirmative action practices, we generally ask some version of, “How do we level the playing field for the disadvantaged?” The question is clear and evocative, but it also misses an important aspect of the problem.

While we work to remove barriers that unfairly target minorities and women, we also need to ask some uncomfortable questions about our relationship to our unearned advantages. American Airlines is making an economic decision by establishing tiers of service and rewarding frequent fliers. As a consequence of their system, I become habituated to better treatment. After a few years I start to believe I deserve better treatment. When I start to identify with the treatment I’m getting; that’s when I fall prey to a thinking trap.

When I conflate my unearned advantages with who I am, “leveling the playing field” starts to feel like an existential threat.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we give up on removing institutional discrimination. I am suggesting that until the conversation feels personal, we may not get enough of the people who have the power to enact change to engage in the conversation in any meaningful way. It’s not unlike getting people motivated to work on climate change. We need regulations and we need personal commitment to change our daily habits.

Here is a question I would like to include in our public conversations about affirmative action: How might increased awareness of our unearned advantages spur a call to action?

Question your Answers

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There is an important difference between getting unstuck and finding the answer.

Remember when you were solving word problems in high school algebra? Do you remember that feeling of being stuck? Going to the back of the textbook for the answer did not help you get unstuck. The goal of getting unstuck is to reorient your relationship to the problem, which makes it possible to find an answer.

Getting unstuck liberates us from our thinking traps and restores momentum. Fundamentally, getting unstuck means learning something new.

To get unstuck, we need one or more of the following

  • New data,
  • New perspectives
  • New insights.

The Unstuck Minds Compass reorients your relationship to your most persistent challenges by equipping you with four strategies for recognizing potential thinking traps and loosening their grip. Taken together, the four strategies provide data, perspectives and insights that change the way you define the problem. A single question headlines each strategy of the Unstuck Minds Compass. Let’s use each question to work an example.

Imagine that you are part of an employee engagement task force sponsored by your organization’s Human Resources (HR) department. The team has concluded that one key to greater employee engagement is frequent, ongoing coaching conversations between direct reports and their managers. The task force has implemented several initiatives to encourage coaching conversations. After each program or training course, employee focus groups report sporadic improvement, but the improvements peter out within weeks. Meanwhile, the employee engagement scores haven’t improved. The task force has defined the problem as an inability to get managers to conduct regular coaching conversations with their employees. The team feels stuck.

The Four Questions of the Unstuck Minds Compass

  1. What is the bigger picture?

Contextual Inquiry encourages us to zoom out and consider what is changing in the environment that we haven’t paid enough attention to. Let’s say that by asking about the bigger picture, we learn that…

  • Lower unemployment rates and aggressive recruiting are making it harder to retain our most talented employees
  • The increasing importance of learning how to adapt to a volatile and complex business environment might mean that mastering tried-and-true practices has become a lower priority for leadership development
  1. What is causing our dissatisfaction with the current situation?

Critical Inquiry directs our attention toward the underlying and hidden systemic issues that might be responsible for the situation we want to change. Let’s say that by asking about the causes of our dissatisfaction, we learn that…

  • Coaching in our organization is perceived as punitive rather than a way to build trust, rapport and capability
  • Our managers don’t care as much about the employee engagement surveys as the leaders of our HR department do
  1. What needs and perspectives are we missing?

Collaborative Inquiry asks us to consider the influences of social networks and diverse life experiences on our challenge. Let’s say that by uncovering needs and seeking out diverse perspectives, we learn that…

  • Millennials and their managers have misaligned priorities and values when it comes to performance expectations and career planning
  • We discover that our highest potential, early career employees view their current role as the place they’ll learn the skills they need for their next role
  1. How else might we define our challenge?

Creative Inquiry challenges us to question our assumptions and consider alternative ways to frame our problems given the data, perspectives and insights we’ve gathered by responding to the first three questions.

Perhaps we have come to realize that focusing on changing the behavior of our managers may be part of the problem. We originally defined our challenge as, “How do we get our managers to conduct regular coaching conversations with their employees?” Maybe we should consider defining our challenge as, “How might we help our employees realize their potential?”

A Thought Experiment for Getting Reacquainted

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Last week I was in Southern California. I had volunteered to drive my daughter’s car from our home in Dallas to Los Angeles so she would have it for commuting to and from school. She is getting a physical therapy degree and had been on a clinical rotation in Dallas for the summer. She didn’t have time between the end of the rotation and start of school to drive back. Since I had client work in Los Angeles, I agreed to drive west with the car and fly home after my work. The client work got rescheduled to October, but I already had my flight and the time blocked, so I turned my parental good deed into a road trip and rewarded myself with a day off in Santa Monica.

A week before my road trip, Rochelle, a friend that I hadn’t seen in over 30 years sent me a message through Facebook. After a few e-mail exchanges, I discovered that she lived near the hotel in Santa Monica where I’d be staying and we made plans to meet for breakfast before my flight back to Dallas.

I had several days and about 1,400 miles to try and remember when I last saw Rochelle and to think about what I most wanted to know about her life since then. Apart from class reunions, we rarely get a chance to skip ahead on a relationship to see what you still recognize about one another. It’s like finding yourself in front of a current episode of a TV series you stopped watching after season one. What will be surprising and what will be familiar? “You don’t go backpacking anymore?” she might wonder aloud. “You still eat too fast I see.”

Amidst all this over-thinking, I came to an insight. I know it counts as an insight because it revealed something that both surprised me and became obvious the moment I recognized what I had previously failed to notice. I’ll share the insight with you, but first the experiment.

Step 1: Think about someone from your past that knew you well. Someone from a different era of your life. Perhaps someone from a time when you imagined your life turning out differently than it has.

Step 2: Imagine that you only get to ask them one question. The purpose of the question is to re-establish the rapport you once shared. You are not trying to get caught up on the activities and events you’ve missed; that’s what Facebook is for. You want a question that when answered honestly will disclose how your friend feels about their current situation and perhaps about the future. A provocative question that your friend will want to answer truthfully and completely and in so doing may come to realize something that they have not been paying attention to.

Don’t go to step 3 until you have a question in mind

 

Step 3: Now, imagine your friend posing that question to you.

Here’s the question I imagined that I would ask Rochelle, “What are the most satisfying aspects of your life these days and what needs remain unfulfilled?” I didn’t actually pose this question; I’m not a complete social nitwit. I wanted to reminisce, not conduct research or therapy. Most of our conversation was about our kids and our spouses, and most of the questions started with, “Do you remember…?”

In a moment of clarity that came to me somewhere between Albuquerque and Flagstaff, I realized that I was projecting my inner critic onto the Rochelle I anticipated meeting. When you imagine seeing someone you haven’t been in contact with for over 30 years, you are also imagining the earlier version of that person encountering the current version of you. The question I had crafted was designed for me, not for her. My 60-year-old self wanted to get reacquainted with my 25-year-old self. My 60-year-old self wanted to be reassured and refocused.

What was it like when I asked you to imagine posing to yourself the question you designed for a long lost friend?

 

 

What would you accept as evidence that you’re wrong?

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Virtual instructor led training will never replace in-person classroom training.

When I facilitate a discussion about the challenges of leading organizational change, I often use a personal example. I mention that Interaction Associates, the training and consulting firm where I work, has been developing modules of instruction that can be delivered through web conferencing platforms. Our clients want virtual training and we are responding.

To emphasize the challenges of organizational change, I bluntly describe my aversion to participating in webinars, which is exceeded only by my aversion to leading webinars. I then ask participants to imagine that they are my bosses and that they would rather help me adapt than replace me.

By the way, if you are one of my clients and I’m scheduled to lead a virtual learning session for you, don’t worry… keep reading. The point of this blog post is to share what I’ve learned about making it easier for people to be wrong so that they can avoid getting stuck. Spoiler alert: I have turned the corner on my resistance by better understanding its source.

We have learned from the work of Kahneman and Tversky that when people consider options and outcomes, “Losses loom larger than gains.” From William Bridges work on “Managing Transitions” we understand that people experiencing change will first consider what they are losing before they can accept a new beginning. Ron Heifetz warns us not to ignore the adaptive aspects of change (aspects that require us to transform our repertoires) by only focusing on the technical aspects of a change (aspects that we have the expertise to deal with). The more a change threatens something a person considers core to their identity, the greater the resistance.

For those of us with a more analytical bent, our resistance often masquerades as well-reasoned conclusions. We experience the fear associated with the threat of loss, but we’re more comfortable with rationale than raw emotion and by the way, so are our organizations. We build theories to justify our opinions, and then we interpret the inevitable missteps that accompany any large-scale change as evidence that we were right all along.

In 1959, the philosopher Karl Popper introduced the concept of “falsifiability” as a way to distinguish a legitimate scientific claim from a pseudo-scientific claim. For Popper, an empirical scientific system is one that can be refuted by evidence. Borrowing the concept of falsifiability can be useful when people raise reasonable sounding objections to hide their fear of loss.

Ask someone who argues in support of the status quo two questions:

  1. What should we accept as evidence that we’re wrong about making this change?
  2. What would you accept as evidence that you’re wrong about preserving the status quo?

If we want to have a conversation about the emotional impact of change, then it’s best not to argue about whose theory of emerging trends is more accurate. Simply give people the time and space to express and empathize with each other’s reaction. If we want to have a conversation about the most reasonable course of action given our hypotheses, we should be prepared to look for falsifying evidence, not just confirmatory evidence. If I can’t imagine discovering evidence that I’m wrong about one of my theories, then it’s not a theory; it’s something I take on faith.

If you’re a leader or manager and you’re dealing with a pain-in-the-ass employee like me, consider allowing your employee to pontificate, and then acknowledge that they may have a point. If the employee has a reputation as an alarmist, they’re unlikely to sway others. If the employee is respected and trusted, he or she will come around or opt out because that’s what people with integrity do.

Sometimes being stuck is like recognizing that we’ve stepped into quicksand and we struggle unproductively to free ourselves. Sometimes being stuck is like standing still while the ground beneath us turns to quicksand. At first we feel comfortable and settled. We scoff at the frenetic activity around us. We’re content to stay put. What we need is a better question to wake us up to the sinking feeling that we may be left behind.

When is a Question not a Question?

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I run for exercise. I don’t go fast and I don’t go far. I just like the way I feel after 30-40 minutes of exertion, and running is a convenient exercise if you travel a lot. I’ve reached an age where my doctor sees running as a risk rather than a benefit. When I complain about aches, pains or swelling, my doctor says, “get a bicycle.”

I notice that when I’m plodding along my running path and another runner passes me, I imperceptibly pick up my pace. I’m not aware of some intention to keep up or compete; it just seems to happen. As I watch the person open up distance ahead of me, my first thought is usually, “that person is much younger than me.” Or, if the person looks to be about my age I might think, “that person trained when they were younger and has probably run competitively.” These unflattering thoughts and behaviors last for at most 20 seconds and then my body returns to a comfortable stride and my brain returns to whatever I was thinking about before someone passed me.

I’m exercising to maintain health and reduce stress, but under certain conditions, my brain and my body seem wired for a different task.

The Social Psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “Social Comparison Theory” in 1954 to describe research into what he concluded was our inner drive to evaluate ourselves. According to Festinger, when we don’t have an objective non-social standard against which to evaluate ourselves (e.g. Did I complete today’s run faster than yesterday’s?) we make our evaluations by comparing ourselves to others.

One related and more recent research study investigated the relative happiness of Olympic medalists based on which medal they won during the 1992 Barcelona games. You might expect that gold medalists would be happier than silver medalists and that silver medalists would be happier than bronze medalists.

The researchers gathered video clips of athlete reactions at the moment they learned of their results and when they received their medals on the podium. Research participants reviewed the video clips and assigned a rating to the emotional reactions of the athletes on a 10-point scale. The study concluded that bronze medalists were noticeably happier than silver medalists when hearing the results of the competition and when receiving their medals.

The researchers viewed their study as an extension of the concept of counterfactual thinking. In counterfactual thinking, people entertain thoughts of “what might have been.” In the study of Olympic medalists, the silver medal winners compared their result to the gold medalists. The bronze medalists on the other hand compared their result to the remaining athletes who did not medal. In other words, it’s not necessarily the objective value of what we have that matters. What matters is how we feel about what we have when we evaluate what those whom we compare ourselves against have.

So, what’s all this stuff about social comparison theory have to do with the recent Congressional committee hearings to investigate the actions of Deputy Assistant FBI Director, Peter Strzok?

One of the four strategies of the Unstuck Minds Compass is Collaborative Inquiry. Collaborative inquiry makes it easier for people to take concerted action. Theoretically, an investigative hearing is called in order to explore an important issue, to learn about critical incidents so that appropriate actions can be taken.

If we want to understand the thinking and behaviors of individuals in order to align on meaningful change, we have to keep our drive for social comparison in check when we choose our questions.

Social comparisons contaminate our interactions when the need to be right, the need to win and the need to look good become more important than the need to learn.

I’m not so naïve as to be shocked that Congressional investigations are not actually conducted for the purpose of investigating. Nor is one party more or less likely to use televised hearings to ask rhetorical questions masquerading as curiosity. The word, “inquiry” and the word, “Inquisition” may share the same etymology, but they couldn’t be farther apart in practice.

In case you missed it, have a look at the clip below and marvel at the litany of masterful questions designed to learn nothing.