Thinking together
Pick an industry. Any industry. In nearly every case, you'll find two companies that started at about the same time, with roughly the same resources. One of them succeeds and the other fails. Or one prospers while the other languishes. Why? Ask ten people and you'll get as many answers. But in the end, their answers come down to this—the successful company out-thought its competitor, which means that thinking is the ultimate core competency.
Actually, thinking together is the ultimate core competency. Most good ideas are produced by groups of people thinking in concert. Contrary to conventional wisdom, innovation is more often a social affair than an individual act.
How do groups go about thinking together? They engage in conversation. They think out loud. Like most things, there's more to conversation than meets the eye (or ear). And like most activities, it’s something that can be done well or badly.
One way is to classify conversations is by purpose. Three of the most common purposes are to describe, explain, and prescribe:
Describe: Sometimes the purpose of a conversation is to describe what was, is, or will be the case. For example, a group of managers might note that memberships were down by 10 percent last year (was the case), or they are down by 10 percent this year (is the case), or that they are expected to decrease by 10 percent next year (will be the case).
Explain: Explanation usually follows description. Once some phenomenon is described, people want to explain why it happened, is happening, or will happen. The conversation turns to identifying causes.
Prescribe: Prescription follows explanation. After the causes are understood, the group is positioned to prescribe some action to correct or prevent a negative outcome or to extend or enhance a positive one.
The elements of a conversation are topic, issue, position, and argument. Groups are frequently overwhelmed by the task of keeping track of the elements. As explained in the post on conversation mapping, tools for diagramming a conversation can help.
While a conversation mapping tool helps people do a better job of thinking together, it takes them only so far. The method of conversation that is used has much to do with amplifying group intelligence. Two meta-methods to consider are advocacy and inquiry.
Advocacy is the practice of debate. With this approach, a person adopts a position and advocates it to the exclusion of all others. Advocacy is the predominant form of conversation in American culture. Nearly everywhere you look—on the editorial page of the newspaper, in the courtroom, on TV talk shows, in the company boardroom, even the sidewalk cafe— you find people zealously clinging to their version of the world. It reminds you of the pro-gun bumper sticker: "The only way you'll take my gun [read that, position] away from me is to pry my cold, dead fingers off the barrel."
Inquiry is the practice of listening and understanding. (See the post on the three types of talk.) Rather than maintaining a death grip on their position, each group member works to understand the positions of the other members. To understand does not necessarily mean to agree. It simply means suspending judgment and listening without resistance to another's point of view. Few of us really make the effort to listen deeply. As one person put it, "People don't listen, they reload."
Advertising executive Byron Nahser tells of a time when he was forced to engage in inquiry. Nahser attended a conference at the University of Chicago led by M. Scott Peck. The attendees were divided into small groups, and each group was given a problem to solve. They were required to use the following ground rules: 1) When a person has the floor, you cannot interrupt or correct him, 2) If you want to challenge a person, you can only say, "I hear you saying . . . .", and 3) You can respond only when the other person is satisfied that you heard and understood what he had to say.
Nahser's first thought was to bolt for the door, but, he says, "I stayed put, wondering if Milton Friedman would suddenly appear to stop all this nonsense." Over the course of three days, the group went through four stages. First was the strained conviviality and role-playing of a pseudo-community, which, he comments, "[Was] familiar to those of us in business, since American corporations operate at the pseudo-community level . . . ." The next stage was chaos, as conflicting positions emerged and subgroups formed to defend them. The third stage was emptying. The participants began to empty themselves of old beliefs and started listening to one another. Finally, there was the stage of real community. The group became a community of inquiry in which, Nahser explains, "Each person add[ed] ideas, insights, or 'a piece of the truth,' building toward a clearer picture of reality from which flow[ed] the decision and action."
When a group is thinking together, they carry out a task as if the group, itself, were a single, intelligent organism working with one mind. When done well, the group produces an idea that no one person could have come to alone. But thinking together can be done well or badly (or not at all). Like singing together, thinking in concert is a learned skill. That it is the ultimate core competency, as I said at the start, suggests that it is a skill worth learning and amplifying. Two ways to start are to employ conversation mapping and to master the practice of inquiry. More to follow.
Kevin W. Holt, the founder of Co.Innovation Consulting, is a strategic planning consultant and meeting facilitator based in Phoenix, Arizona. He works with commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations to develop innovative strategies and solutions. His strategy consulting and meeting facilitation practice centers on the use of proven processes mapped to collaboration technologies (e.g., electronic brainstorming) and specialized software tools (e.g., the Blue Ocean strategy canvas). The technologies enable him to serve as both an offsite meeting facilitator and a virtual meeting facilitator for strategic planning workshops, innovation labs, brainstorming sessions, feedback sessions, and other types of meetings. Kevin is the author of Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different, published by Routledge in June 2022.