Is Your Team Getting Its Brain Food?

Being in the midst of a significant organizational change in my company right now, I have been thinking a lot about how we organize ourselves to get work done. One thing I have become more and more convinced of is that with words like “organization” and “design” we have to begin to use them as verbs, not nouns! The days of a small, elite group of people coming up with the plan and then the much larger group implementing that plan have come to a crashing halt amidst the ambiguity and volatility of a digital world. We have firmly entered the days where strategizing and executing have to happen everywhere, at all levels, simultaneously, so that our organizations can adapt and succeed. 

And that’s all very well and good to say, but what does that look like? What does that imply for the disciplines of organization design and strategy? What is required of leaders across companies, how big a change is this for them? But, most importantly, what tangible actions can we take today to help us lead in this brave new world?

The answers to those questions are legion, and many are yet to be uncovered. But I was recently reading something that captured my imagination and gave me some ideas about one thing we clearly need to do differently and that is how we talk and think as a team.

The book was Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind; Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt was talking about the value of the collective or group in making good decisions and he used an the analogy of our brains. He said,

“A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain, you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron.”

I immediately saw this image in my mind, even though I’ve never seen actual neurons, given that they are embedded in the brain and very, very small! But I think we’ve all seen representations of networks and are beginning to understand these more elastic, dynamic, and changing entities represented by how our brains work and grow. 

Haidt went on to say,

“In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest of reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them in interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

The implications of this were clear to me.   Teams need to express ideological diversity to find truth or make good decisions. What is wonderful about neural networks is that they are notable for being adaptive, which means they modify themselves as they learn and their power is in the whole, not the parts. So, when we form or develop teams we need to ensure we have a diverse mix of thought being shared and challenges being made. What tools can we give teams that could lead to them being more adaptive and getting smarter as a system, not just a group of individuals?  Here are three simple simple suggestions to get us started.

Give teams coaches to push them to uncover the real challenges and define problems better (or, at a minimum, have a rotating team coach role to do this). My good friend and co-conspirator, Michael Bungay Stanier of Box of Crayons, teaches coaches to start by asking the question, “What’s the real challenge here?” and then to keep asking it until the person they are coaching can uncover the real problems, not the surface ones. This can work for teams just as well as for individuals.

And what about those dangerous “HiPPOs”? Do you know that acronym? It refers to deferring to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Can we put HIPPO guards in place like Margaret Heffernan suggests when she touts the virtues of taking turns in a meeting or do you actually need to remove the power in the room like Ed Catmull does for creative meetings at Pixar?

Finally, there is the “pause to consider”. Halting immediate reaction to what someone else just said and requiring people to think through their comments, and if their comments will benefit the group or benefit themselves.  A mentor of mine would push for group understanding by having members restate what the person before just them said before they could talk. And they had to do it to the satisfaction of the person who just spoke. It took some time, but it was incredibly effective!

I hope those suggestions are useful for you or even spark your own, even better, ideas to get all the views out and benefit from the diversity of thought in the room. Whichever tools you employ, please consider how you can bring diversity and candor to your meetings—it’s the brain-food of the team!