In option development, you slow down enough to involve many people in thinking things through and understanding all of your possible choices, so that when you’re ready to make a choice, you have a rich pool of options to evaluate.

Be sure to involve the people who do the hands-on work in the business; they’re better able to see the day-to-day challenges and act as a source of new options and key insights. Include people outside the business (partners, suppliers, channels, etc.) if you want to be open about solving the problem and could use their outside-in perspective. You’ll have many good options, and later we can understand the distinct impact each would have on the business.

Face-to-face meetings traditionally have been the source of brainstorming work, but there are several compelling ways to do this kind of problem solving with collaborative tools. Whether you hold several brainstorming and discussion meetings in person or host a brainstorming session online, the focus of each session will be driven by the dynamics of your specific situation. For example, you may want to have an entire meeting devoted to developing a particular idea, looking at product options, exploring regional alternatives, or whatever type of results you are considering.

In option development meetings, the focus is on exploring possibilities: “What if we...?”, “Is there a reason why...?”, and “What would happen if we tried...?” You may need to integrate different techniques for different aspects of the project. In addition to including various domain experts, you may want to bring in people with inquisitive, provocative, or energetic styles, though be sure to balance that energy with the sense of safety that the team needs to feel in making contributions.^[13]

It’s important to explore many different angles on the options you could pursue, and to make sure that you engage everyone on those options that are relevant to them. This doesn’t have to mean bringing everyone together at the same time (although that is an option if you’re confident they won’t get bored and check out).

Ask people if there’s anything new, from their perspective, in the current project. If so, how can it be handled? How do proposals from other functional groups influence them? How does our competition do it? How will our competition respond? What if energy prices rise? What if? What if? However you approach this, make sure you probe for a broad set of perspectives. Often we are limited by our specific near-term experience. To ensure a holistic viewpoint, task a knowledgeable and open-minded person with representing each aspect of your project during ideation.^[14]

As you begin to produce some ideas and options, you or someone else on the team may realize that there are embedded criteria being used to either create or filter the options list. That is fine, and indeed is part of the reason these two steps are part of the same phase. But you must ensure that you make criteria explicit and keep them in different buckets while developing options.

Some of the more creative ideas may require some investigating before you can answer questions such as: “Can we actually do that?”, “What would it take?”, “How does this currently work today?”, “What are the current barriers?” In this case, you may need to revisit the Question phase to dig up more information. Don’t let this deter you. If the idea is compelling, further digging may take you to an exciting and powerful new solution—or not. You won’t know in advance. What’s important is to be sure that you keep the team aligned around what you are doing, and how that affects the eventual picture of what success could look like.

As a part of the option development step, you and your team will invest a bunch of creative energy in finding a good range of potential approaches to solving your problem. In the process, you’ll probably touch on various notions of success. Capture those ideas while they are fresh. This is called criteria tracking because you are identifying the footprints and patterns that seem to dictate whether one option is better than another. Criteria tracking does not need to be treated as completely distinct from option development. That is, the two steps can overlap somewhat. In practice, this means you’ll initially focus on option development with occasional moments of criteria tracking. Later, in the Envision phase, you’ll be doing some criteria tracking that will spark more option development.

Criteria tracking is parallel to option development in another way: it is about creating a rich set of potential criteria for evaluating visions of success. This criteria list will be sorted and prioritized during the upcoming Select phase. Criteria tracking also serves another useful function: it provides some effective separation between the idea generation space of the Envision phase and the idea rejection space of the Select phase.

As you build your list, include criteria from each area: product development, sales, operations, and so on. The intent behind criteria tracking is to gather what matters to the team and your organization so that during the next phase, Select, you can make the most well-informed choice among all your strategy ideas. You are seeking to answer several questions: How will we know when we’re winning? What does success look like? Where do we want to be? How does this influence what other moves our company can make? Some people have described this as tightly linked to a corporate mission. Often that will be true. But sometimes the criteria for a particular strategy will be unique for its own reasons.

The point to remember is that the criteria you develop now will determine how you choose amongst all these options. It’s important that these criteria align with the larger mission of the organization, to make sure that you’re not abandoning your core principles just to make an extra buck. Dollars matter in business, but not at the expense of core values. Doing things in alignment with the core mission and vision of a firm can accelerate success (Figure 5-2).

Figure 5-2. Knowing what matters to us

There are two key points to remember about criteria tracking. First, you want to expose tacit assumptions about the project goal and help your team come to a shared and explicit understanding about what matters. People in different roles often disagree about what success will look like. Finance may want the new project to address an anticipated revenue shortfall. Business development may want the new project to win a potential new partner. Engineering may see the project as a chance to learn a new technology. Resolving these tensions in an agreed-upon way is vital to the project. This can make a big difference in the ultimate success of the business solution. For example, the product development team might be motivated and even incentivized to keep capital equipment costs down, but when they understand that doing so is less important than schedule or quality (or whatever), they can take this to finance and explain why they need more in their budget. That’s an example of a decision that teams make after selecting criteria because they understand the inherent criteria and trade-offs. The full debate on criteria can wait until the Select phase, because at this point you want to focus on bringing things to the surface.

Second, explicit shared criteria give the entire team a shared vocabulary for “where we want to be” and will help each team member know how to make decisions at any point in the process where they need to make a trade-off. They will be aware of the underlying logic of the strategy and be able to articulate it. This is a benefit of collaborative strategy. The leader won’t hold the criteria alone; everyone will get it.

People sometimes don’t understand what forms criteria, so Table 5-2 lists some examples that can be useful for spurring the creation of a rich list of potential criteria.

Criteria are ultimately another way to foster the culture of thinkers and strategists who can arrive at their own answers and drive forward the business without needing explicit direction. Criteria include all aspects of what is important to the business. Sharing these makes everyone aware of what matters. When everyone knows this, they are all thinkers rather than “just” doers. When we have shared criteria, we enable a healthy and thriving culture of problem solvers rather than simply doers. This is a key notion of the New How.