Challenging the Challenge Process: Part II
You’ve got a great idea. You present it to your colleagues and they shoot it full of holes. Crushed, you limp back to your cubicle, wishing you had a door to close.
Sometimes that’s what the Challenge Process feels like. But it shouldn’t. Especially if you and your team are leveraging the brainstorming half of the Challenge Process.
Brainstorming is inherently collaborative, a playful team activity. When you are in the zone, the ideas are flowing so quickly the facilitator can’t write fast enough to capture them all. Ideas build on each other, sparking variations as they race around the room, from mind to mind. Afterwards it’s hard to recall who came up with any one idea. A good brainstorming session not only generates innovative ideas, it strengthens team relationships.
Those relationships, those bonds, can be strained during the next phase, the analytic phase. This is when you evaluate, test, and question the ideas, working to find the best one – “continually questioning to find a better way.” This phase can be the more challenging part of challenge. Feelings get hurt or people become defensive because they feel the team is evaluating them rather than the idea they are championing.
Effective teams, who start with brainstorming, are less likely to experience this pathology of challenge. The ideas under evaluation are the result of a team effort, so everyone feels some ownership for the final recommendation. The positive team dynamics developed during brainstorming carry over to the analysis. The group evaluates all the ideas, not turning the spotlight on any one person and their single idea.
Getting the Challenge Process right is a positive team activity that’s easy to get hooked on. Have you ever been part of one? Share an anecdote in the comments!
- 3 Comments »
- Posted in Knowledge Processes, Mental Models
I agree with everything. some comments:
I’ve been in the kind of brainstorming sessions where the ideas are flowing and you don’t even know whose idea is whose or collective or piggy-backed to…
Those sessions are fun and fulfilling, but most importantly they help to depersonalize the analysis portion. If group A is “attacking” group A’s idea, there really is not any defensiveness. So, much like you said: The better the brainstorming session, the better starting point you have for the remainder of the process.
Now the anecdote:
I was in a brainstorming process recently that was “facilitated” by a person whom I had never worked with previously. To further akwardify the situation, I was invited because someone (not in the meeting) told him I needed to be there, and that’s that.
I feel as if I’m usually pretty good at reading people, but I couldn’t figure this guy out. I would suggest ideas, or try to ground the conversation, and was basically ignored as a person, yet my comments weren’t necessarily ignored.
Halfway through the second day he started sneering at me after certain comments and then used a cussword to describe me to myself after a particular comment I made.
Here’s what’s odd: After reflecting on his mannerisms the first day and his pre-existing relationships, I realized about an hour later that he only does that to people he likes.
I was now ENCOURAGED to contribute further, speak up, and challenge.
totally bizarre.
learn from it what you may.
David, I liked the way you described it in your first comment: “if group A is ‘attacking’ group A’s idea, there really is not any defensiveness.”
Your anecdote is a sad example of “brainstorming gone bad.” Or perhaps just “facilitators gone bad.”