The Case for Collaboration and Facilitation

Why do today’s problems seem so much harder than they used to? Maybe it’s the glossy veneer that our memories put on the past, but it sure seems like most of the problems of yesteryear could be solved with a handful of smart folks and a few pots of coffee.

The truth is, the nature of problems has changed. They are no longer just “engineering” problems – where you have to work with a certain number of parts to find the optimal solution. No, today’s problems are much hairier than that. There is no “right” answer in the back of the book. These problems require collaboration among many people with very different interests, and this complex collaboration requires facilitation in order to be successful.

Wicked Problems
"Wicked" problems do not have a “best” solution. There is no “right” answer. These problems involve lots of different people and perspectives. The solutions must address the different and often conflicting needs of these different groups. What kind of community should we build? How can we be innovative and profitable? What and how should our schools be teaching our children? How should our offices be set up? How can sales and support get onto the same page? The solutions to such problems often require input from a variety of disciplines and professions. There are a number of workable solutions to such problems, and some of them are excellent. The trick is how to find them.

When we run across such a problem, our gut response is to grab some smart people, experts if we can find them, and ask them what we should do. This works some of the time – just enough, in fact, to encourage us to keep at it. But how many times have you heard the complaints that the expert just didn’t understand “our situation” ? The truth is that experts became experts by being deeply involved in other situations, other organizations, with other issues and requirements. No one understands your problem like you do, like your team does, like your partners and customers and suppliers do. So while it certainly doesn’t hurt to get some “expert” advice, the best solutions to your problems are going to come from within.

More Eyes on the Problem
I imagine that you have had experiences similar to this one. You work for hours, days, or weeks on a problem, yet you find yourself stuck. You show the problem to a colleague or a friend or a spouse, and their response is “Oh, why don’t you look at it like this?” Voila. Problem solved.

Every problem can be looked at in such a way that it is easy. There are some problems that you find easy that other people would have to wrestle with for a lifetime. And, sadly enough, there are problems that you find “impossible” that another would solve in a few seconds. This is not a reflection of your “brains” or your intelligence. This is simply a matter of the kinds of tools and associations that your brain has acquired over your lifetime. Different people will look at the same inkblot and see very different objects in them. In the very same way, different people will take very different paths to solve the same kind of challenge. Not all paths will work for each problem, but no path will work for all problems, either.

To solve a wicked problem, then, you need to bring to bear a variety of vantage points. You need to bring all of the stakeholders together – from investors to builders to end-users. Each of these people will bring their unique needs to the table, but they may also bring a perspective that allows the problem to look easy. Instead of limiting the size of the group to a very few “key decision-makers”, you should expand the group to include anyone who has an interest in the outcome. This will dramatically improve your chances for finding an excellent solution.

Facilitation
Now that you are dealing with both a complex problem and a large group of self-interested stakeholders, it may be time to consider using a professional facilitator. There are several reasons to bring in an outside facilitator.

Outside Perspective
You only know what you know. You have tremendous experience with your problem, but you may not have experience with many different variations of this problem. A professional facilitator will have worked with hundreds of different groups facing similar and dissimilar challenges. The facilitator may not bring you “the answer”, but he should bring a lot of important questions and issues to consider. He will also not be biased by the experiences and culture of your organization – he can serve as a reality check.

Politics and Relationships
As a key stakeholder yourself in this problem, you have already established relationships (good and bad) with the other stakeholders. Your role in the organization is already defined, and others might have some idea (right or wrong) about what your positions might be. If you were to facilitate this meeting yourself, you would either A) have to squelch your personal opinions and insights in order to appear unbiased, or B) may bias the entire event with your perspective – this will make buy-in and implementation all the more difficult. Outside facilitators can be much more neutral in asking the group to explore possible solutions because they will have no stake in one outcome vs. another. People support that which they help to create - a neutral facilitator allows the solutions to come out of the group and not be forced on them by the boss.

Free Yourself
By bringing in an outside facilitator, you free yourself from the business of running the meeting. You free yourself to dig into the work and help to solve the problem yourself. The facilitator will deal with people showing up late, making sure the food is on time, crafting the assignments, and setting up the room. There are a lot of logistics related to an event like this. Dealing with those logistics will prevent you from bringing your entire focus to the problem at hand.

Flexible Design
A professional facilitator will work with you to design the event, not just establish an agenda. The design will push participants to explore your problem from different points of view before trying to build a solution. Each participant will come to understand everyone’s needs, not just their own. When the group starts to build and test possible solutions, these solutions may look very different from what you and the facilitator expected in advance. In fact the group’s solution should look different from your solution – otherwise, why should all of these people get together in the first place? A good facilitator will keep the design flexible so that it can respond to the needs of the group and of the work as they arise.

Documentation
A professional facilitator will also provide you with some kind of record of the event – not just what decisions were made, but also how you reached those decisions. It is critical to record the journey, not just the destination, because it is in the journey that relationships were built, context was created, insights were achieved, and consensus was reached. In complex problems like these, it is as important to remember how you reached the goal as it is to remember the results themselves.

Organizing for Innovation

A short excerpt from something I wrote for
Fabriquer le futur
L’imaginaire au service de l’innovation
(Creating the Future: The Imagination in service to Innovation)
By Pierre Musso, Laurent Ponthou, and Éric Seulliet
Published by Village Mondial, Paris, January 2005


In the old days, organizations - especially big ones - were often thought of as silos. Each department was separate; there was little integration; perfection was when all the silos did their little job well. Only top management worried about integrating all the silos into a whole.

This was a world of relative stability, a world in which change was slow, and seemed predictable; a world in which the future would be like the past.

We don’t live in that world, and the siloed organization is not the right one for our times. The evidence for this is all around us, in the form of old-style organizations falling one after another to the rigors of modern, omni-directional competition.

So what is the new organization?

It is the company that is built around innovation, around the constant and pressing need to come up with the new right new stuff that will enable our company to remain in the game, or even to gain an advantage. Because it is now clear that constant innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage. So what else could we possibly do but organize the company around innovation?!

The attributes of innovation, and of innovative organizations, are clear. They embrace novelty; they create it, they recognize it, they seek it out. They are diverse, because innovation and creativity thrive in diversity as they wither and die in uniformity. They are also thoughtful, purposeful, and often very frugal.

What’s different about this new organization? How people work, especially how they work together. How people think, and what they think about. How they are measured and compensated. How they manage knowledge. How they manage people. And their goals may also be different.

We work, frequently, in teams. Most of us are members of many teams. These teams are multi-disciplinary; multi-departmental; closely facilitated; highly productive.

We think about change, and how it is happening, and what will be changing next, and after that. We think about the new knowledge we will need to remain competitive tomorrow, and how we can get that knowledge today.

We know that people perform according to how they are measured and compensated, and what we care about is the success of the organization as a whole, so we are compensated only partially for our individual efforts, but more and more as members of teams and especially as an organization as a whole.

We pay close attention to knowledge because we are competing in a knowledge economy and knowledge is often the difference between success and failure.

And people, being the sources, creators, and “repositories” of knowledge, are managed mostly by themselves. Of course there are managers and CEOs, but each part of the organization has significant influence on its own managers, through “360 degree” feedback systems, open communications, and a culture of dialog and honesty.

As to their goals, well, they don’t just want to be a successful company; they want to dominate the market, overwhelm the competition, inspire their customers. And change the world!

To the old style manager, looking on in horror, this is sheer, ghastly chaos. But to the new-style manager, it is merely controlled chaos. Ah, what a difference! Controlled chaos has the critical potential that the old style organization lacked, the possibility to create the new idea, the new service, the new product, just in time to meet the need of the customer, and to gain thereby, the future!

The silos are gone - all that there is, is work done well, imaginatively, measured by its contribution to the whole, and rewarded by longevity - because innovative organizations survive, and thrive.

In this organization, “R&D” is not something that happens just in labs; it happens everywhere. Everyone in the company works for R&D, because everyone in the company thinks about what they’re doing and what the customer is doing, and what they want to do better.

The Future of R&D Has Arrived

A short excerpt from something I wrote for
Fabriquer le futur
L’imaginaire au service de l’innovation
(Creating the Future: The Imagination in service to Innovation)
By Pierre Musso, Laurent Ponthou, and Éric Seulliet
Published by Village Mondial, Paris, January 2005


The history of R&D in a modern sense goes back to the mid-1800s, when the industrial economy was in its early stages, and the chemical companies, in particular, discovered that well managed research laboratories could produce valuable new knowledge, usually in the form of new products or industrial processes. Solvay, Edison, and Siemens, and were among the pioneers of this era.

Now, with more than 150 years of history, and hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of research scientists and technologists having spent countless days, weeks, and months at work doing R&D around the world, you could say that all of the easy ideas have been done: The easy chemicals have been found, or invented; the easy processes have been developed; the easy inventions have been made. So it seems that science and technology have begun to creep close to the limits of what can be done by people working just in their laboratories.

Furthermore, it’s no longer a question of what we can produce in the laboratory or in the factory, but a question of what will appeal to the customer, who, after all, has now more choice than ever before.

All of which means that innovation is not stopping, it’s just changing. And as competition gets more demanding and more globalized, the need for innovation as a competitive tool for every company is only increasing. So what’s happening? Researchers are still working - and working hard. They’re just working differently. They no longer remain closed up in their labs, because they have found that many of the best ideas come not from the pure scientific process, and not from isolation, but rather from human interaction.

Of course it does matter who they’re interacting with - and the most important point here is that researchers are interacting with people who are different than they are.

Why? Because anyone who has studied creativity knows that many of the best new ideas come when people who have different points of view, different experiences, different backgrounds, or different objectives encounter one another, talk, exchange ideas, work together.

And those who study innovation also know that a large percentage of the best ideas that are developed in any field come from people who are not trained in that field. Outsiders are often innovators because they see differently, because they bring ideas that were developed in one field or one métier to another. So what may be common knowledge for automotive designers, for example, could lead to all kinds of breakthroughs for computer designers - old knowledge becomes suddenly valuable in a new context.

Hence, the method of the new innovation process is not scientists in the laboratory working in isolation, but scientists who have scientific and technical knowledge interacting with those who see the world much differently, because in their interaction come new insights, possibilities,

Of course the ones who may see the world really differently are the customers. So a lot of researchers are spending more time with customers, learning about them, talking to them, imitating them. But to find out what the customers want for the future it is useless to ask them - because they usually don’t know! Instead, you have to watch them do their daily work, or watch them live in their homes, and then talk to them about what they’re doing and what they want to do, and how it might be better. This is an important distinction even if it is a subtle one - the key is to ask what they want to do, not just what they want. The answers will be very different.

And today, one thing that almost everyone wants to do is to have a modern economy that does not destroy the natural environment. We could even say that we have to learn how to do this if we’re going to survive, which means that the fields of innovation, creativity, and R&D have already today a ready and willing market for products and services that enhance sustainability.

The standard of judgment for sustainability is really a simple one - a sustainable product or service is one that, once experienced or consumed, leaves the world a better place rather than a worse place.

Researchers from all kinds of companies are exploring these issues by understanding better how people live, thinking about what customers want to do, and then finding all kinds of interesting and unexpected kinds of knowledge and experiences from many different fields to illuminate the problems and the possibilities.

So this is the new process of innovation. It can be quite rigorous and disciplined even as it also seems wild and crazy compared to the old, boring lab. But it is the future of R&D, without question.

SDO Model of an Organization

I'm constantly looking for new ways to think about organizations. New perspectives don't always lead to insight, but without them, any insight remains elusive. To create this model of an organization I started by aggregating all of the types of activities or work that is done inside the organization into three categories. These categories are much different than you'd find on a typical organization chart. In fact, no matter where someone is on the organization chart, they will find themselves engaged at some time or other in each of these major activity aggregates.

All work can be divided into strategy, design or operations. In the most mechanical of companies, the operations component is streamlined to the point where human beings simply manage exceptions or perform repetitive tasks that are not yet automated. Well executed operations yield efficiencies that are necessary for competitiveness, but all operations are basically entropic, meaning that their effectiveness and coherence decays steadily over time unless work is done on them. This sounds more complex than it really is. It means that if a company continues to produce the same things in the same ways, that it will lose competitiveness, and that loss of competitiveness, if unaddressed, leads to a diffusion of the energy in the organization, similar in metaphor to the effects of entropy in physical systems. One definition of synergy is the amount of energy in a system that cannot be used to do work. Metaphorically in organizations this is the amount of energy expended by people and systems that cannot be used to create net positive value. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy)

The work that must be done on operations to keep it from increasing its entropy and eroding its ability to create value is called strategy and design.

The purpose of strategy and design is always to provide some operational (including perceptual) differentiation in the marketplace that will yield an increase in some measurable aspect of value--price, performance, presence, scale, share, margins. Strategy tends to set direction. Even deep in the organization, people formulate local strategies as they figure out how to get work done. A local strategy might be a goal or objective, or a direction in which an individual decides to take his work or his department. Goals in this sense are the simplest types of strategies.

Design is the process of translating the strategy into something that can be made operational. Design may involve the creation of a new product or service, or it may work on improving products or services. It may address the layout of the physical environment, the structue of departments, or the operating guidelines for teamwork.

In the end, strategies and designs are translated and compressed into operational algorithms like procedures manuals, automated processes or rules of thumb because only a widely distributed and executed algorithm can create efficiencies. Without this compression and absorption into the culture, the strategies and designs will fail and the entropy of operations will lead to an unfavorable position in the marketplace.

Even in the simplest of companies, all strategy and all design is collaborative--people must work together to achieve something because they can’t do it alone. They must decide what they want to create together. They must uncover something new or innovative about what they want to create because it’s usually been done before or has other competition for it. They must form a strategy for positioning their creation. They must make the creation understandable to the marketplace--this is the process of creating products and services. They must design the algorithms by which many people can learn to make and deliver the products and services, and useful structures to help people organize their efforts. They must also craft plans and strategies that allow for the easy adoption of what they’ve created by the rest of the organization.

The sole glue that holds all of this together is that somehow, and in some way people must be encouraged to work together--to collaborate with one another. Typically, the challenges are too difficult for individuals to solve alone and more important, no one individual or even senior management team has the breadth of perspective to be able to adequately address the challenge of creating strategy and designing ways to fold it into operations. The people who have front line interaction with the customer or direct access to the manufacture of a product or the delivery of a service have a perspective that must be added to senior management perspectives in order to create a response requisite with the complexity and reality of current conditions.

Without this vital competency of collaboration, organizational friction will cause damage to the company, damage to its people, or both. Our premise is that people support that which they help to create, that creativity is natural, that collaboration is natural, and that an environment can be created where creativity and collaboration are protected and where great designs and strategies can emerge and become operationalized.

The New Diversity

Computer scientists have known for many years that with enough eyeballs, all bugs are easy. Michigan professor Scott Page told us this at a recent conference. In other words, all problems can be looked at in such a way that they appear to be simple to solve. Each of us brings a set of tools and mental associations with us to any situation. The question is whether or not our particular set of tools and associations will be able to see the problem at hand as simple. And if our tools and associations are insufficient, then we should bring as many other sets of tools and associations to bear on the problem as we can. This is the value of diversity – enough different people with different ways of seeing things will always see your problem as simple.

There are no smart people. Or, perhaps more accurately, the IQ of a person is of very little importance when it comes to problem solving. Cognitive science is learning that a much better metaphor for the brain is a toolbox. Over our lifetimes, we learn how to use different tools and models. Language, grammar, and syntax are tools. Algebra, geometry and calculus are tools. Biologists learn whole sets of tools which are quite different from the tools that architects or astronauts learn. When we find ourselves faced with a problem, we quickly search through the tools we know to find one that might work. More importantly, we also combine the tools that we have – which compounds the usefulness of any new tool that we might learn.

We also develop sets of associations over our lifetimes. If you were to show a circle drawn on a piece of paper to different people, they will assign very different meanings to it. Some might think of a ball and sports. Others might think of an O-ring and the space shuttle disaster. Still others might think of ball bearings and various engineering applications. With the same stimulus, people will think of all sorts of different things.

When you are confronted with a problem, then, diversity matters in very tangible ways. “Social” diversity – race, gender, age, class – is almost irrelevant here. What is more important is what Page calls Cognitive Diversity – a diversity of tools and associations. We want to bring together a group of people with very diverse toolsets. The tools from different disciplines just might be able to solve the problem that we’re facing. Moreover, if we combine the tools from different disciplines, we will generate even more perspectives from which the problem might appear easy. We also want to bring together a diversity of associations. Different kinds of associations will lead us down very different paths to try to solve the problem. The more paths we try, the more likely it will be that we will find a way to look at the problem such that it will be easy.

So believe it or not, getting a “bunch of smart people together” to solve a problem is not the best approach. If you have a lot of very smart molecular engineers together, they will all very likely think in very similar ways – their training and toolsets will have very little diversity. They will see the problem in the same way, and if it is intractable to one (like, say, how to best design an office building), it will likely be intractable to them all.

This information should radically change how we assemble teams to solve problems. We should not bring together a bunch of smart people that we went to school with because the odds are that we will all think in very similar ways. We do not want to bring together only the “experts” in a field because their view of the “problem” will already be fixed by their years of experience with it. Instead, we should seek out a team with very diverse experiences, training, tools and associations. The greater the diversity, the more likely it will be that one of them will see your problem in a new way – a way that makes it simple.