Employing Differences, Episode 97: Isn't it obvious?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:15

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:16

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Isn't it obvious?"

Paul: 0:28

One of the greatest stumbling blocks, I think, between people, in that space in between individuals is where we think that it's clear, obvious, apparent what it is that we're going to do. And then we discover that we are the only one who thinks that. And we suddenly discover – surprise – we're in conflict with all the people around us, because what was obvious to us is not obvious to them. And one of the places that I think Karen and I experience this most often actually has to deal with decisions, where we think that a decision has been made, or we don't realize the decision needs to be made about something. And sometimes we think that there just isn't a decision – this is just how things are or have to be. Or we think that "Oh, yeah, well, we decided this." And so we're proceeding down this path. And other people around us, it is not clear that the decision was made, or that there is a decision to be made, and we have not yet made it or that there is a decision, and we need to make it and they don't like the path that we seem to be assuming and is thinking is obvious. So we want to explore a little bit about this, explore around the space of clarity and decisions and transparency, where that manifests and what we can do about it and why it's hard. So that's what we want to explore here today.

Karen: 2:00

Yeah, and I think that there's a starting point with this, where we tend to hang out in relatively homogeneous groups. We probably have a fair bit in common with the people we're in a group with, and so an awful lot of the time, we're all on the same page about stuff. And we don't actually make a decision about, we're gonna use spreadsheets for our finances, or we're going to use QuickBooks, or we're going to use a certain meeting structure. I mean, there's any number of things that we just we do them, and we're fine with it, and everybody's fine with it because we're an awful lot alike. And so there's a certain number of things that just go that way, and it's totally fine. And the problem is that somewhere along the line, the fact is that we're different. As much as we have all these things in common, we also have areas in which we're different. And so I'm going along just doing things that feel totally normal to me, moving ahead with the obvious things that seem perfectly clear to me, everybody would agree with, because this is just the way normal people do things in my life. And then stumble into"Oops, difference." Somebody in the group, maybe a lot of people– or as you said in the intro, maybe everybody, but that in my experience, it's usually not everybody, it's usually some, some subset, which may be half or more just naturally, you're doing it and they're going along with it. And it's all fine. And it's just going that way, and then someone or someones say,"Wait a minute. This doesn't seem right. When did we decide that? Or why are we doing that?" And the response is, "Well, isn't it obvious?" Like isn't that just what people do? Doesn't everyone put cream in their coffee? Or doesn't everyone, you know... And to the person who's just moving along, it doesn't feel like they're grabbing power or sidestepping process or trying to avoid a decision. It just feels like the same way that you do routine automatic things and just roll with that. I mean, you don't stop and ask what color ink to use in your pen. There's all sorts of stuff that you don't just all day long stop and ask before you do it. And this just feels like that same just routine stuff that we just know, this is what it is. Except it's not feeling that way to somebody else. And that shows up to some degree as conflict. And this is one of the themes that we talk about is that conflict shows us where we have work to do. And this is one of the ways I think that happens.

Paul: 4:57

Yeah. And it is true that there are all kinds of things we don't actually make decisions about. And it would actually be horrible if we actually had to make decisions about absolutely everything. So I think where we run into trouble is where we're either trying to work in a different way and be in a different way together, and so we need to actually make some more explicit decisions or use an explicit process around things where we're not used to it and then we just kind of keep going through in our old way. Or, we haven't previously been making space for those voices that objected to previous decisions, too – previous assumptions of "Well, we'regoing to do this" – and now we're starting to hear them. And those are not new, it's just that we can hear them for the first time. I think that's one of the places where it pops up. But I mean, I run into this a lot in organizational work, where one of the things we talk about a lot is making transparent decisions to do a thing or not to do a thing. Where it's like,"Great, we want to pursue this line of business." Or "We've decided that we're going to not deal with this particular set of shortcomings." I remember one, in particular, in an organization that had to do with a bathroom situation. It was obvious to a bunch of people that we should make some changes with regards to this thing. And they couldn't understand why this wasn't happening. Until finally the VP of Engineering just laid out, "Here are the constraints we're dealing with regards to the plumbing situation in the building. If you wanted to do that, we would need to give up these other things over here." And everybody kind of looked at it and went,"Oh, we wouldn't want to give up those things over there. We can live with what we've got." And so what was interesting is that this is something that the VP had been – it was obvious to him that we shouldn't do that. That we shouldn't give those things up. We would need to sacrifice this space over here in order to do that other thing. So he never really brought it up to the group. But finally people complained about it so much. It was a recurring thing. It was like every three months, it would come back up. "What's going on with the bathrooms? Why haven't we fix this thing?" He laid it out on the table. And everybody went, "Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense." And so it wasn't necessarily an explicit decision. But it was transparent why he was choosing not to act on it. And so that way, when somebody new joined the company, and they said, like, "What's up with this? Why don't we deal with this thing with the bathrooms?" Everybody who was there could say, "So here's why." And so what was interesting is that when we actually stopped and slowed down to make it obvious to everyone, then it actually became obvious. We actually didn't need to change anything about the way... It was still ultimately the VP who was making the decision, but he was making transparent what the decision was and why. And so suddenly, it became obvious to everybody and that conflict that we had around it dissolved, because we were all working for the same stuff. But where are we I think get into trouble is when we don't notice that that conflict is asking us to do that– to stop it to slow down and dig into it and either go,"There hasn't been a decision made, or we haven't been explicit about it, or it's not transparent," and we just try to push through. And we just try to keep going, rather than slowing down and stopping and dealing and working through it. Because the result was the same. The result was we didn't change anything about the bathrooms. But we processed what was going on there, and the conflict never resurfaced.

Karen: 8:56

Right. And I do think, I mean, you're pointing to hierarchy and how when you have hierarchy, transparency – even if you're going to keep the hierarchy of your decision making, you're still going to have the VP make that decision – transparency makes a huge difference in how that decision rolls out, and how it impacts the rest of the group. And I'm completely in agreement about that. I think one of the places that a lot of this can show up is when we're trying to leave behind hierarchy, either within an organization that says, "You know, okay, we're gonna adopt a more agile approach, and we're gonna give more power to teams" and that kind of thing. Or when people who've been in corporate environments or other hierarchical environments join organizations that are non-hierarchical by definition – or at least by intention – which is the space I work in a lot, of folks that are really new to a non-hierarchical environment. And and so that same kind of thing wants to happen where, the person who's involved in that part of the work – the VP that knows what's going on with bathrooms, whoever that is – wants to just say, we're not fixing the bathrooms. Because they're just sure that's the right decision, and they know what they need to know for that. Two things then go on. The thing that you're talking about, the transparency problem happens, but the other thing that happens is that they've really taken away agency from other members of the group. And that doesn't happen when you've got a structure of hierarchy, because that agency isn't supposed to be there. Nobody thought they got to make the decision. So you didn't have that happen with the VP. But if they think they're in an organization that is supposed to be more flat, where they're supposed to be involved in the decisions, and where they're supposed to know what's going on– and frankly, where, to one of them, maybe it really is important to them to get the bathrooms fixed for whatever the reason is, that that same person who has been doing enough of the work, they're the one who has all the information. Even if they share the information, and say, "We're just not going to do it and these are the reasons why," there's still a piece about the explicit decision making, because it doesn't match. The "I just declared what's going to happen" doesn't match with the group identity that says, "We make collaborative decisions." And if that decision had been delegated to that person – if the group had said, "We've decided we don't want to all make the maintenance decisions, and so this one person, or this team of people is going to make them" and then they're just handing it down it, then you've kind of built in a pseudo-hierarchy in there that lets that happen. But in the absence of that explicit delegation decision, and the absence of an explicit decision on the topic at hand, you can get into all kinds of mess, because somebody really wants new bathrooms. And they're saying, "Hold on here. Where is my agency in this? Why wasn't I consulted?" And you've still got the person who knows all the elements and has been around longer, for whatever the reason they think they know. And they don't maybe want to take time to go through it, or more often, they're just completely unconscious that there was a decision to be made here. Like this is an actual decision. It's not just a natural thing that flows. It is an actual decision. And at the end of the day, if it hasn't been delegated, to keep feelings good about it – certainly at the moment that anyone brings up any discouragement about it – it's really important for that person who knows to not only come and transparently say, "Here's the plumbing situation and what it would mean, and we'd have to lose a few things." But to also say, "So I recommend that as a group, we decide." And this is where I tell people, it's actually perfectly okay to say,"There's this one good option. And these other three terrible options, which would you like?" But you still have to get to the"Which would you like?" or you lose the trust in the system.

Paul: 13:41

What you're pointing to, it's actually kind of the same situation in both the hierarchal and the non-hierarchical is a question of who actually has the decision-making authority. In the hierarchical situation, this person by virtue of their position in the org has the authority to make the decision. In in a more consensus based approach, a person does not have that authority unless they've been explicitly delegated it by the group. And we often don't realize that we haven't – that there is a decision to be made and that we don't have the authority to make it. And I think the big thing there, I mean that you and I run into this a lot because we think about that kind of thing all the time. We are process nerds when it comes to how humans human with each other. And one of the things that we do a lot of – because we've been exposed to it and thought about it – many of these processes that are invisible to people are visible to us, because we've thought about it, because we know what to watch for, because we recognize that there are alternatives. It's the reason why people engage us as consultants is because we've seen these kinds of things before. And also, when we are trying to help people to do this stuff, at the very beginning, we're trying to get them to see things that have been invisible to them the whole time. Because they've just been instinctual, they haven't needed to think about this before. It's just not in their awareness. And anytime that you're trying to work with something that is not in your awareness, or that is just starting to come into your awareness – you're just starting to notice it – it's super awkward. That's a thing where we as as facilitators of this type of process have to have a lot of empathy. Because honestly, I will say – this is a conversation that I have with people I work with all the time– even as someone who teaches this kind of stuff, it's hard for me at times. And so I have to imagine for people who it's brand new to, it's even more challenging. Because it's forcing us to be explicit about things that we have always handled implicitly. And so it's we don't have the language or the vocabulary or the patterns of thought around it to do it fluidly. And we don't have good role models for so much of it either. We don't even have an idea of how it should look when we're doing it well. So I think that's really one of the places where we get where we get caught.

Karen: 16:32

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And I think it gets particularly messy if the person or group who is responsible for what is sometimes called "process" – that the people who are guiding, setting meeting agendas, figuring out how we make decisions, which decisions we need to make... You need somebody in the organization who's paying attention to "How do we make decisions" because you and I, as process nerds, probably know that you're not going to have an organization where everybody's good at this. And that's just fine. But what you do need is at least somebody who's good at those who's highly trusted and that is actually really good at getting conscious about where a decision is needed, where a decision hasn't been made, that's really got a good filter for "This seems like a thing we should just move forward and do," and which is the, "Yes, we're going to do laundry again this week, because we do laundry, and if the machine's broken, we're just going to go to laundromat this week." Things that are pretty straightforward and we need to do that. And really watching for where have we crossed the line over to where I was making an assumption, or somebody was making an assumption, or there was a certain momentum around a thing that had never been decided – or worse, had been decided but not documented as decided or not communicated as decided, which means not decided. So really knowing and getting really good discernment about where that line is between the things that we don't want to stop and try to make decisions about, that we just kind of keep doing, and what are the things that need decisions. And one tip about that is that none of us is going to get that right all the time, but the minute there's someone in the group saying, "I don't know if we should do that," we have crossed the line. All it takes is one person who isn't sure we've decided it to make me at least go back and get curious and go, "Okay, so I need to not assume." I need to know clearly it isn't obvious. And so do I need to go back and find the document of the decision? Or is this a decision we haven't made? Or is this a decision that's been delegated? And how do I know that? But for those folks in particular, being able to set aside the biases and the assumptions, and get really conscious of the simple job of holding space and an offering structure to help the group make decisions is so important and so easy to slip.

Paul: 19:28

And it is. Again, it's the kind of thing where when you're trying to do it differently than you have been, you don't even often realize how that stuff is coming back up. A few years ago, I was still an internal facilitator in an organization, I had a manager ask me to facilitate a culture workshop for his part of the organization. They were going to be growing a lot, they were gonna be hiring a lot of people and they wanted to articulate sort of what their values were and what was important to them so that they could continue to perpetuate those as they as they grew. And he brought me in, I ran this stuff, and a like a week or two later – they'd come up with this is this is who we are, this is our values, it was very participatory process – and he basically came back and said he was unhappy with the result. He started talking about how the method that we had used had these statistical problems, and this voting thing... And I stopped, and I said, "I'm curious, is your objection to the process that we used, or the result we landed on?" And he had to stop and he realized, "Oh, no, actually, my objection is not the process. My objection is where they got to." And then that allowed us to have a conversation about how he thought he was ready to delegate this stuff to the group, to let them figure it out, and he was wrong. He wasn't ready to do that. He wasn't ready to trust the process. He had right answers that he wanted them to land on. And that was a case where it was obvious to him what answers they should have gotten to. And when they didn't, he didn't even have a way of seeing that that was what he was expecting. And so instead, he started critiquing process rather than result. And so I think that that's another piece where when we hear objections, I think it is worth asking the question, "Is your objection that we didn't actually use the process we said we were going to, or is your objection that you don't like the result we got to? Because you didn't engage in the process? Because we didn't engage the process?" I think it's interesting to explore what's coming up around that. But again, it was a case where it was obvious to him the answers that the group was going to get to, and then they didn't get there. And he was surprised by it. And we had a whole lot of unpacking to do around that.

Karen: 22:10

Mm hmm. And, of course, the process can influence outcome. And that's particularly tricky, if the outcome isn't what you want. Because if you'd run the process differently, it might have gotten – I mean, almost certainly, if you'd run the process differently, some of the outcome would have been different, whether it would have been what he wanted. And there is the outcome of the actual decision and the outcome around the group relationships, and those are different outcomes, but both related to process. But I think what you're saying is exactly right, that if you're going to have good process, the person organizing the process has to be unattached to outcome and has to be really good at noticing their own biases and assumptions. And in the end, I think what we're saying is that the answer to the question,"Isn't it obvious?" is "No." And we need to get curious about what is going on that something that seems obvious to me really isn't.

Paul: 23:20

Yeah. Well, I think that's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 23:26

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.