Employing Differences, Episode 84: What results do we want?

Karen: 0:08

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

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What results do we want?"

Karen: 0:28

So what we're pointing to here is that an awful lot of the time when we do planning or we're policy setting, or we're being strategic in some way, the question we ask ourselves is,"What should we do?" What should the policy say? What's the next step? Where are we going from here? And then we do that thing, and then we look around, and go"Wait, we didn't land where we wanted to. Wedidn't get the result we wanted to get." What we want to talk about today is the value and the benefit of starting with the question,"What results do we want? What's the end point we'd like to achieve?" And then working backwards to what would get us there.

Paul: 1:17

To follow up with your example of, "Hey, we need to write this policy," I think it's really useful to think about,"What are the results that policy needs to create?" Because often I ask the question, "What results do we want?" they're like, "Well, we want a completed policy." And I'm like, "Great, I could write you one in 30 seconds. Here's our policy. Done." Right. But that's not going to get you the results. It exists for some instrumental purpose. It exists to create something. And people are often just so not used to thinking about things in that way. So one of the places I often start, because it's sometimes required to jar people out of their usual thinking about this, is I will start by asking, "So if we wrote a policy that utterly failed, that was completely wrong, what would that be like?" Because it starts to point out what are not the things that we want to get. Sometimes that's the door into what are the results that we actually want. Because sometimes people have a really hard time thinking about and articulating that.

Karen: 2:31

Yeah. And I think that that also could bring up this next piece I want to get to but might not which is the collateral damage. And that's in that the negative, but there's the side effects and the positive as well. I work a lot with community groups that have shared property, and so they make a lot of policies about how to use that shared property. If I asked what what results are you looking for, they're likely to come up with things like, "We want the space to stay clean." So we have a policy about how people clean up after themselves, because we want this place to stay clean. And if you go down that route, and you just look at that really tangible kind of result, you can end up with putting down cleaning deposits, and there's this rigorous thing, and there's this white glove test. There's all these things that could go with it, and that's being extreme, obviously. But what you didn't notice was that what you actually wanted was for people to be comfortable in this space. You want people to use the space. And so by having this policy that's so focused on keeping it clean, you actually create the collateral damage of,"Well, nobody wants to be in the space, because they're going to get yelled at if it's not kept to that standard," or they're afraid of the policy or whatever. So really looking at what I would think of as the culture or the feeling or what's the impact on the relationship space. What's the relationship end of things that we want? So we want a policy, and we want that space kept clean, perhaps or we want a project finished, or you know, those kinds of things. And we want a solid, cohesive team at the end, or we want people to feel really good about using the space or those kinds of things. What are the results? Because an awful lot of the time, the things that we do are going to get us the result that we thought we were going to get and a bunch of other stuff in the relational space.

Paul: 4:28

Yeah. What that points to, is when you're talking about the results that you want, you want to be describing characteristics of a good outcome from a couple of different angles. There are multiple different things that you need to be thinking about. And again this is sort of my trickster nature that will show up when groups trying to do this so to go to this idea of,"Okay, so we want a policy that makes sure that this space stays clean." And that's the point where I would say, "Cool, so the policy sounds like you just keep the room locked all the time. Because I'll keep it clean." And they go, "No, well, that's...""Oh, okay, cool." And so it's by exploring the edges of that, by suggesting something you can do this from inside the process, too, but I often end up doing it as an outside facilitator is poking at the things that they are not saying, but you're pretty sure are there. It goes back to when I was in college, I was in an Artificial Intelligence class. The professor told a story about how she was asked to design an algorithm for running an elevator. The metric for success was that people spend as little time as possible in the elevator. And so the elevator never opened its doors. And so by the metric of success that was defined, zero is the amount of time that was spent in there. So the idea is that you actually need to be looking at multiple different angles. "Oh, we want people to use it. And we want it to be clean and inviting. And we want to feel like, nobody feels like they're overburdened needing to clean it." What are all the different angles? I think one of the things that groups often fall into when we start to try to define results, is they define one thing about the results, rather than the sort of whole constellation of things that actually makes it useful. And so often, the work that I do with groups is helping them to explore what is that constellation of things.

Karen: 6:40

And the cool thing about that work is that when you've got the whole constellation of things, what you're really defining there in a significant way is the group's values. And often you get a ton of common ground. So if you've got one thing, you get into a whole locked battle over which is more important. For you having the space be clean is really important. For me having it be easy to use is really important. And so we fight with each other about which one is the goal, right? But when we work in the constellation space, I can acknowledge that it's great to have a clean. I don't have any objection to it being clean. I want it to be easy for me to use. You don't have any objection should be easy for me to use. You can get a long list of even competing values, things that don't coexist easily, but we can all agree they're results we would like to have. We would like it to do all of those things, and we can all feel good about that. So you get this sense of common ground and shared purpose and shared values that even if I would have prioritized them differently than you do, I can still value it with you. I can still agree that that thing that's important to you is a valuable thing, even if there's something else that's more important to me. And so if you get that constellation, then you can start trying to build a policy or a process or whatever it is you're working on that addresses and maximizes all of those things rather than pitting one against another.

Paul: 8:09

Mm hmm. And the other thing that that does is actually creates a space where instead of there being a thing that's important to you and a thing it's important to me, and so we're in this back-and-forth battle about those competing things. If instead, we both agree that we want to try to achieve both of those qualities, now the geography of that is different now it's the two of us shoulder-to-shoulder facing the problem, as opposed to seeing the other person is the problem because they insist on this one thing. It's one of the things that I work with a lot in product development organizations, in software. The idea is often there's a tension between "we need to build the right thing" and "we need to build it right." It's true that those sometimes do have a tension between them. But if instead of you being the person who holds "we need to build the right thing" and me being the person who holds "we need to build it right," if both of us can say we both need to hold both of those, now, we can use our our creativity, our intelligence, together in the service of solving that problem, rather than using our emotional resources to fight against the other person. We get a lot smarter when we do that.

Karen: 9:35

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that once we've gotten that alignment on the result that we're looking for, that creates a lot of space for creativity in the possible solutions. So probably as we stepped into this arena, I had an idea. Like, "This is the thing we could do." But I didn't probably have a robust measure. That metric that you're talking about? I probably only had my own metric. And so if we've had the conversation about the results, then we have multiple metrics. And now when I go back and look at my fabulous idea, I realize it really does minimize the amount of time people spend in elevators, but oops, now I need an idea that minimizes the time people spend in elevators and gets them to the 20th Floor. And so when we have both of those, I think the creativity and the problem solving just gets way richer.

Paul: 10:33

Yes. And we're often not used to having to do that. And so where this sometimes goes awry is that people get impatient with defining "What are the results we want?" because they think everybody understands the results we're trying to create. And so I will often see with groups that they have a limited patience for actually going through this process, particularly when it starts to become harder than they thought it was going to be. Because now they're having to incorporate all these ideas and viewpoints and things like that that weren't in their head to start with. And then they just start to get really impatient to just go and work on the thing, to go do it. And so that's one of the things that I think is important to balance. I will do a couple of things around that. One is that I will often normalize that this process is difficult and probably unusual, that they're probably not used to it. But also talk about exactly the things you just said about how this is going to help later. But then I will also really be paying attention to"Have we gotten a good enough definition of the results that we want, such that we could get started, maybe revisit it later?" Because if we've gotten there, then we can go. And I want to actually get the group to being able to do something sooner the more impatient they are. If if they're totally into, like, "We need to explore the space and really figure out what the results are," then I'll let them stay there for a while. But I'm always paying attention to how much impatience to get started there is, even though they've already started,

Karen: 12:21

Right. And sometimes that impatience is is for really important reasons. Sometimes there's some sort of external urgency about it, that it's not just, "I'm impatient," it's, "We we have a deadline" of whatever sort. The thing is changing around us, and we need to get it addressed. So I think that turns out to be really important. And I think one of those "Do we have enough?" things is "Have we heard the places where there's significant emotion?" Because I think that frequently as I have my great idea, and you just think it's terrible and we're in that stress point, the reason you think it's terrible is because you're terrified of something that I'm not seeing. You think this bad thing is going to befall us that I'm completely blind to. And I would agree, it's a bad thing. I just don't notice it. Or maybe you have a sensitivity to it, and you're terrified of it, but I know it's not gonna happen and you don't know that because we haven't talked about it. So it can go either way. But if we've gotten all of the heavy emotional stuff on the table, then we probably have enough. And if we haven't, and we're being conflict avoidant, and we're hiding from all the heavy emotional stuff, we're probably borrowing trouble if we move ahead without getting through it.

Paul: 13:43

Yeah, and it does come around a lot to that idea of by investing in this work at the front end, ultimately, that does make it faster. Because we were going to have to work through it eventually. To go back to your point about the collateral damage, we could write a policy really quickly that achieves the one thing, the one result, but then creates all of this other collateral damage that we didn't want, and that we didn't realize that we need to talk about. Dealing with that later is going to be slow. It's going to be even slower than spending the time now to get it on the table so that we can come up with a policy that doesn't create that damage. That's the thing that's so true about many of these ideas about generating alignment around purpose and mission and what results really look like at the beginning is that when you're doing it right, it does actually make you go faster, even if it feels like you haven't started yet.

Karen: 14:48

Yeah. So really tracking, we're starting from a premise of you want to start with the question of "What results do we want? What are we looking for?" And you want to get a step beyond maybe what you thought, to look at all of the results. What are the emotional results? What are the relational results? And what is the actual impact? So particularly if you're trying to design a process or write a policy, your goals or the results that you're looking for aren't to have a policy there to change in some way people's behaviors or people's activities, or the conditions of something. So getting clear about what those are. And that when you take time to do that, you usually discover that what some people thought were the results that we were looking for is different than what other people thought. And that almost always, there's room for all of them. So you get this constellation effect of what is the constellation of results that we're looking for, getting really solid alignment on that, and then standing shoulder to shoulder within that, looking for all of those values, working toward the challenge when some of those values compete with each other, and trying to address all of them, and as a result of doing that work end up actually saving time in the long run.

Paul: 15:59

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

Karen: 16:05

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