Two surprising insights from prisons and police that help you with collaboration
(the art of 'meeting quality' and asking the right questions)
I remember early in my career, I submitted a painstakingly prepared report, only to have my supervisor say I used too many generalities and not enough specific examples. That stuck with me to the point I’m sometimes reverse engineering, and asking, ‘what’s that an example of?’ That was the case as I read a recent New York Times article that said, ‘Throwing money at police and prisons has not made us safer, because insufficient punishment is not the root cause of violence.’ Can you guess how I saw this as two insights for collaboration?
First, you can make a similar statement about meetings intended to help your team collaborate. Scheduling more meetings hasn’t led to better results because ‘insufficient number of meetings’ is not the root cause of project chaos and indecision. (But arguably, last Tuesday’s planning meeting was like punishment.)
Yet you keep scheduling more meetings. Maybe you’re too close to it, so you don’t see that meetings aren’t working. Think of Kodak or Blockbuster Video stubbornly resisting the digital revolution.
Instead of ‘more meetings,’ run better meetings, but fewer of them. Use the art of facilitation to structure sessions that people know will get results that make a difference.
Second, the prisons statement demonstrates a common error of collaboration. Your team might easily get going on the wrong question. Here, the wrong question is, ‘how can we improve prisons and punishments to keep society safer?’ This problem statement contains a solution—prisons and punishments. No one wants bigger prisons, better prisons, more prisoners, just for the sake of it. People want the result of safer communities.
Use this principle from design thinking: craft a problem statement or challenge without answers built in. In this case you could ask ‘How might we make your community safer?’ Imagine you’re trying to explain this principle to a group of problem solving partners. As long as they’re not in the ‘corrections’ industry, this prisons statement makes the principle easier to see and explain.
Which of these insights resonates more with you?
‘insufficient number of meetings’ is not the root cause of project chaos and indecision
the principle from design thinking of crafting a problem statement or challenge without answers built in.
Let me know in the comments.