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An excerpt from my workshop
Again, we want to go into a flair mode. We want as many ideas as we possibly can get about what we could do to address that particular lever, to address that hypothesis, to prove or disprove our hypothesis. In a lot of respects, it's a lot like the brainstorming that we've probably in the past.
It's about quantity - as many ideas as we can. And we don't want to try to edit them as we go. We don't want to try to evaluate them. We certainly don't want to shut anybody down because we think that that idea is silly or stupid or whatever, and there are some tools that we can use that will help us to get there.
Yes, and...
is one of them. It is a standard practice in the world of improvisation. It goes well beyond that, and we'll look at that much more explicitly in just a moment, and some other ideas.
We want to make everyone to feel free and safe to come up with the silly, the flippant, the crazy ideas, that when we combine that idea with something a little more down-to-earth, we really come up with a different way of looking at the problem -- a really creative way of solving that problem.
We are also going to become at least a little bit vulnerable. If we're going to throw out a silly idea like that, we have to be prepared for, and understand that somebody might laugh at that idea of ours. And that's better than just okay.
Because when we become vulnerable like that, we put ourselves "out there". We're expecting (and hopefully we're going to experience) the fact that our team doesn't take advantage of that vulnerability. That in fact, we encourage them to also be vulnerable. When we share vulnerability, we grow the bonds between us.
We can deepen the ties with our team, and make it even better as we move forward. We can build those kind of relationships that say "Hey, I can let this all hang out and we're all going to be okay with that - and you can too". In a very short period of time we're going to be able to communicate better. We're going to be able to work together more smoothly. We're going to be able to understand that we may not agree. In fact, we could be vigorously opposed -- but we're going to focus on the topic, and not the people, because we've developed that relationship.
We can have a high trust environment because we've been vulnerable, and we've been protected. We've seen people be vulnerable, and we've accepted that, and we've embraced them. That's a way that we can really improve the strength of our teams.
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This is a portion of the Appendix from "Standing On Shoulders: A Leader's Guide to Digital Transformation".
It is taken directly from a workshop I do on design thinking. It is lightweight enough to use for team retrospectives, and still powerful enough to use for product, service, or process development.