Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 155: What do we know?

May 02, 2023 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 155: What do we know?
Show Notes Transcript

"But if we have three different understandings or three different models of how this operates – that's the situation we want to avoid. We don't want to get to the problem and realize we don't have a common way of understanding or talking about the problem."

Paul & Karen discuss the challenges of creating shared understanding – and the dangers of failing to do so.

Paul: [00:00:06] Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: [00:00:12] I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:00:14] And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:00:16] Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What do 'we' know?"

Paul: [00:00:23] We want to emphasize the 'we' in that question there, because one of the things that lives in the space between, in partnerships and in groups, is shared understanding. Or sometimes the thing that doesn't live in the space between a shared understanding.

Paul: [00:00:38] We talked a few weeks ago about the difficulties we sometimes have in making decisions in a group, where we discover there's some asymmetries in information. That I know something that Karen doesn't. Karen knows something that I don't. We end up getting in a conflict about a thing. Until we can actually peel back the onion enough to realize, "Oh, we're working from different bases of information."

Paul: [00:00:59] What we actually want to talk about today is things that we can do to help us not get into that situation. What are the things that we can do when we start working together as a group? Start working on a problem together in a partnership, or in a group, that can help us establish a shared understanding of the problem that we're trying to solve, of the thing that we're approaching. Before we start to get into the details and the decisions that we need to make, what are the things that we can establish? So that we all know them well enough. That we have a good enough shared understanding. That we can actually get into the details of the situation we're trying to dig into.

Karen: [00:01:40] Yeah. And that before part, I think is really important that we want to get this really early. It's generally the first thing that I'm going to do, if I'm facilitating a lengthy process. And you don't have to do this so much if it's just a simple decision. But these are, when there's a lot of complexity going to be involved, and it's big decisions and longer processes.

Karen: [00:02:01] One of the first things I'm going to do is step back and say, "What are the things that we all have to know in order to make good decisions together? And what are the odds that we all actually know them?"

Karen: [00:02:15] And in my experience, the odds are pretty slim, actually, that we all know them. And so slim, in fact, that I'm going to assume that we don't. I am going to start from the premise that as a facilitator, it's useful for me to figure out what are the things that I think we'll all agree are true. These are not the points of contention. These are the things that form the basis of what we're doing. But that probably a lot of members of the group haven't yet thought about because they're not finance people, so they don't think about spreadsheets headed into budget time. Or they're not maintenance people, so they don't think about all the different pieces that go into fixing things or whatever ss that decision making space that you're in?

Karen: [00:02:52] What are the things that everybody involved in making the decision needs to have? Not only that they all need to know about, but they need a shared understanding about. And if we wait until we're into the discussion before we do that, what happens is that that sort of factual kind of shared knowledge space that we want to all agree as baseline becomes fodder for the disagreement.

Karen: [00:03:17] So if there's a piece of shared understanding that we could have had at the beginning, but it looks like "That's going to work against the thing that I have now decided I want", then I have a harder time accepting that that was actually just a piece of reality that we need to all come to agreement about. If we haven't gotten invested in the argument yet, to whatever extent there's going to be an argument, we have way better capacity to just take in and create that shared foundation that we're going to need to have the conversation effectively.

Paul: [00:03:49] One of the things that I find really useful in establishing that shared understanding is having a shared mental model of how the thing that we're working with operates. So for example, very recently, because of some changes in my company, we've been actually documenting some of our financial policy and figuring out a few things. And in most cases not really changing a whole lot.

Paul: [00:04:13] But there's sort of a mental model that we use of thinking about money and buckets. That there's this bucket, it's called this money, flows into it this way, it flows out of it this way. There are these types of buckets and that, that model of thinking about how things flow in and out, that's a way that I think about how the finance stuff works. And as it turns out, that is a model that has resonated with my business partners. So that's a way that we talk about it.

Paul: [00:04:43] We think about it in the same way, because that way when we get those details of, "Oh yeah, so we're going to have this $50,000 expense that's going to come out of the overhead bucket". You go, "Hold on. Like, what is the overhead bucket?" "Oh, no. Actually, we all understand what that is like."

Paul: [00:04:58] We have a shared understanding. And then, and then there's the question of, "Well, wait a minute. So how is there enough money in that bucket?" "How do we know that there will be enough money in that bucket by the time that expense hits?" Those are the things that we actually really need to be talking about.

Paul: [00:05:11] But if we have three different understandings, or three different models of how this operates, that's the situation that you're talking about we want to avoid. We don't want to get to the problem and realize we don't have a common way of understanding or talking about the problem. We want to establish that first.

Karen: [00:05:31] Yeah. And the larger the group is, the more I think you need to think like a teacher when you're at this stage of facilitation. Your group of three is one thing. I'm working on a budget process with a community that's 40 people, with a variety of backgrounds and experience, and a variety of interest levels actually. But at the end of the day, the budget touches everybody, so everybody wants to be involved.

Karen: [00:05:53] And so one of the things that I really try to think about is not just "How can I share the information in a way that makes sense to me", but "Hhow can I share the information in a way that gets everybody in the group on board?"

Karen: [00:06:08] And one thing that I will just point to, this may not be true if you're in a tech company where everybody is very tech-minded, but if you're in any other kind of environment, and maybe even in a tech company, I suspect. That there is something about that sort of PowerPoint, spreadsheet approach, that feels very safe and feels very professional and feels very, you know, "That's the way we do things."

Karen: [00:06:32] And often the same people who are going to have the hardest time with the technical information are the people who find that least relatable. And so I very often, especially- I mean, it helps if it's in person, but if I'm in an in-person situation and I have the option, I often will deliberately handwrite signs that I taped to the wall. Because that format turns out to be more relatable. Now, obviously, sometimes there's enough complexity that I want my PowerPoint on my screen and whatever. So, but being thoughtful about 'make it simple enough', this isn't, it's not necessarily that we all have to understand all of the information.

Karen: [00:07:11] You can go way too far in detail with this, but think about what is reasonable for the audience that I have and what's the thing that's going to get it through to them to really understand the key points that we need to have in common, so that we can move forward? And so just being open to the idea that your standard PowerPoint or the spreadsheet and, you know, like if you're the finance people? Make a guess that the thing that works for the five of you sitting in a room together thinking about this presentation is not the same thing that's going to work for most of the people sitting in those chairs.

Karen: [00:07:47] So if you can try to put yourself in that spot, but even better, bring in someone who's not a finance person, and kind of run through it with them. Like, "What's going to work for you to make sense of that?" I do this a lot when I do design work and I work with architects and I say to the architects, "I don't think they know those words because I didn't know those words. Like, those are architect words."

Karen: [00:08:08] So we can gain them. We can build this shared language, but we do have to build it. We have to create it and be thoughtful about how we're using it.

Paul: [00:08:17] There's a concept in the software world, from domain driven design of 'ubiquitous language'. Which is that within a particular domain, when we're working on a particular problem as a group, we have a shared vocabulary that we use in a pretty rigorous way. Because it drives out the ambiguities of what we're talking about so that we can actually deal with the real problem.

Paul: [00:08:41] That's really the thing that comes up here, is that we either can run into the situation of we actually disagree about what we ought to do, or we misunderstand each other. And so we only think we disagree about what we should do! And what we're really talking about are techniques that actually help us get to eliminate that, or to minimize that second category of problems. So that we can actually dig into the real hard stuff we need to. 

Paul: [00:09:06] A lot of the misunderstandings and ambiguities and things like that cause unnecessary stress on the group. And unfortunately pulls us away from the necessary stress from the things that we really need to do. So yeah, that, that idea of- and what it's really doing is, like a lot of that technical vocabulary, or the deep understanding, often lives in part of the group.

Paul: [00:09:29] It maybe lives in one person who is the finance expert. Or it lives in the in the architect, or it lives in- And what we're really talking about are what are ways that we can get enough of that understanding into the whole group. So that we have a good enough shared understanding that we can actually really dig into the real decisions that we need to make.

Paul: [00:09:49] And that can be very, very hard to see when you are the person who has that understanding. This is the curse of knowledge in action. And I love your one idea about thinking like teacher, but to involving somebody who doesn't have that expertise. And oftentimes if I'm facilitating, and I'm not the expert, I'm not the one who's going to be presenting the model, the language, the things like that. I'm working with the people who are going to be doing that to prepare, I will play as dumb as I possibly can to help them. Like, to get them to see that if they explain it the way that makes sense to them, it's not going to land with the group.

Karen: [00:10:27] Yeah. And in addition to the two categories you gave, I want to give another one. Which is the category where some people in the room are having a fabulous spirited conversation within vocabulary that they all understand, and others in the group are just struggling to figure out what it means. "What do the words mean?"

Karen: [00:10:46] I recently did a sailing course and one of the things that had to happen was I had to get to where I wasn't translating "Port means left and starboard means right". And windward, and you know all of the sailing terminology that I had studied enough that I could spit it out on a test, but I was still processing 'what do the words mean?' 

Karen: [00:11:10] And so then the complexity of, "Well, if you turn the sail this way and the wind goes that way and you want the boat to go this way, and you've got these three different pieces", there wasn't enough brain left to manage that. Because I didn't have the, even the terminology, the language, just as fluent as I needed it.

Karen: [00:11:26] And this is another reason to keep with simplicity, like "What are the things people really have to know?" And no more. Because they're not going to get fluency on a graduate level course in accounting, no matter how well we teach it. That's not going to happen.

Karen: [00:11:42] So what are the key pieces that we need, and what's language that's useful? And I had someone recently say to me, "Well, our accountant isn't going to like that word." I don't care. The finance people can translate for words the accountant likes, but within the community, we need to use words that make sense to the people who are trying to have the discussion and make the decision. And then the experts can go translate it to whatever they need to implement it.

Karen: [00:12:08] But for the conversation, words with fewer syllables, words that are less technical, I don't actually care if it has any related meaning. If everybody in the room knows that 'hedgehog' means, you know, whatever fund it is or whatever concept, it doesn't have to even be true as long as we all have the shared language around it.

Karen: [00:12:30] And in fact, bringing a little levity in often helps. Because when we don't feel like we know the framework, or we don't know the model. We're on unfamiliar territory. Anxieties go up. We often feel isolated. We often we're more likely to feel misunderstood. We're more likely to get defensive.

Karen: [00:12:46] And so if we can minimize the experience and then add some levity here and there. I was doing a pre-budget work piece the other day. And there was a bucket that we knew a lot of things were going to come out of. So I actually made a scroll of clip art. And so when I let it go, like it rolled down and across the floor and everybody kind of chuckled. And it just brought that amusement piece in. So, anything that you can do to make it seem less formal, less scary, more playful, more fun, is going to increase the learning and just the sense of cohesiveness around it.

Paul: [00:13:19] And the ownership, right? This becomes our way of talking about this. This is our understanding of it. Yes, we recognize that there's a whole other set of things that we don't need to worry about. Like that there's a whole technical vocabulary around that. We're not even necessarily using the right words and that, but that's okay because it's ours. I don't know why that's always this.

Paul: [00:13:38] I worked with a team once, we were doing property management accounting stuff and I don't even remember what our original term was for it. But somewhere on a whiteboard there was a translation table of things that we talked about to what the actual property management accounting terms were. So it was whatever this thing was that was we needed to debit the expense account. And because we did eventually at some point need to deal with it that way.

Paul: [00:14:03] But in conversations within the group, when we were talking about how are we going to solve this problem, we didn't need the type of technical accounting vocabulary. Because we weren't solving the generalized problem, we were dealing with our specific thing. And so we had our specific language that within the group was good enough. And had a shared model, and shared meaning, that allowed us to actually make progress on the problems we needed to deal with.

Karen: [00:14:30] Yeah. And the one other piece I want to just bring into this is in addition to shared meaning, it's also shared values. Any model, any structure that we use is going to have values and assumptions built into it. That's normal. What we want to make sure is, is that we're all on board with that.

Karen: [00:14:48] So, "Do we all agree that we need a budget?" "Do we all agree that that budget needs replacement reserves or some sort of insurance thing going forward?" And to be explicit, I think we're not going to have to argue about whether we're going to pay our electric bill. "Do we all think that?" Like, and if you start at that level and build, you really create the safety. 

Karen: [00:15:09] But you also reveal the moment when somebody says, "But isn't there some other way we could get electricity that would be cheaper? I think we should look into that." We shouldn't just assume that that's a line we don't have to talk about. Or whatever the thing is.

Karen: [00:15:21] We want to just get really explicit about your assumptions. It's not that you won't make them. You want to be making them. But get explicit about them so people have a chance to say, "Wait, I'm not with you on that assumption or that value. That piece of priority that we're talking about." So that we can sort that out early and not have "Because another place where things really go sideways is if something that I'm just sure is true, every organization should have a budget. I know we need a budget", we, you know, whatever. And you've got somebody else in the room thinking this budgeting thing is just a waste of time for whatever reason. Well, we're not going to get to a good budget process then. There is no space between to work in until we get to some of these shared assumptions. So looking at the values, the assumptions that are driving, and just making sure that those also are in the shared space.

Paul: [00:16:15] Well, that tracks sort of where we been today then. We're talking about what are the things that we actually know. When we look at a group that's trying to solve a problem. Avoiding some of the problems that can happen by getting down into the weeds too quickly, by taking the time to really establish a shared understanding. A good enough shared understanding, a shared model, some shared vocabulary around this particular problem. And about how that can head off all sorts of cognitive difficulties and misunderstandings later on.

Paul: [00:16:47] Of course, doing that is not easy. If it was, we wouldn't have to talk about it. But talking about approaching the idea of getting this shared understanding into people's heads. Like a teacher, thinking about what are the conceptual things that we can bring forward that will help people to build a shared model in their heads of how this works, of really encouraging people who do understand this deeply to take a step back and go, "What is it like to know nothing about this? What are the critical details that we all need to understand?"

Paul: [00:17:18] Not that we all need to be experts in this, but in order to deal with the particular problem or situation that we need to deal with, what's just enough? And then how can we find language that works for this group to deal with this problem? It may not be the exact technical language of this particular domain or profession, and that's fine.

Paul: [00:17:38] But what's a good enough language? That maps to the model that the group is using to solve the problem, so that they can use that in a relatively rigorous way when they're talking about problems, so that they drive out the ambiguities. They deal with the necessary stresses of solving the real problem, rather than the unnecessary stresses of misunderstanding each other, or staying in ambiguity for too long. 

Paul: [00:18:00] And recognizing that every model that we work with, for helping us to understand a problem, has assumptions baked into it. Particularly about values, and about what's important. That interrogating those can be really useful early on. That in fact sort of presenting a model, and then looking at what are the pieces of that model that point to what we feel is important. 

Paul: [00:18:22] And actually having those conversations early can help us avoid a lot of problems later on. And help us can move together as we try to solve this problem by emphasizing not just what does one person know or what do several people know, but collectively about this problem, "What do 'we' know?"

Karen: [00:18:41] That's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:18:45] And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.