Chapter 10
Lack of Diversity
Abstract
PrD is best facilitated with diverse teams, diverse not only in terms of roles but also in thinking styles. In the Creation Session, the more assumptions teams offer up, discuss, and build into artifacts, the better. If groupthink or social loafing minimizes the number of assumptions aired, the process will suffer. Moving through the quadrants of the concepts, solutions, discoveries, and frames is best facilitated with a diverse mix of Designers, Builders, Researchers, and Analysts. In Creation Sessions with lots of people, it may be necessary to divide individuals into groups, using techniques to ensure the various thinking styles are balanced across teams.
Keywords
social conformity
homophily
diversity
groupthink
roles
activities
thinking styles
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
—Lyndon B. Johnson
Overview
It was a typical PrD session: The teams had worked feverishly to create artifacts and prepare for their first Engagement Session. Excited and anxious, they sat at the tables in the assisted living center and began working with the women, trying to capture their reactions to the pillboxes they’d created (Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1 “Junk prototype” mock-up of an intelligent pill dispenser
As The Case of the Pushy Pillboxes describes, the sessions didn’t go as planned, or as the teams had expected. But it’s what happened the next day back at the workshop that was eye-opening for the facilitators. The designers were crushed by the women’s responses to their designs, believing they had to start over. The researchers took away completely different impressions: They felt the teams were on track and just needed to make modest adjustments to the designs. What everyone learned from the experience was a successful PrD engagement requires a multidisciplinary team: a team including more than just designers and researchers.
This chapter begins by discussing the ways in which PrD fails due to homogeneous teams, regardless of their membership: designers, researchers, product managers, engineers, or business leaders. Further along, we discuss how the characteristics of multidisciplinary teams contribute to PrD’s success. The bulk of the chapter describes each of the roles on a PrD team (as well as possible professions in the organization adept in those roles), team member responsibilities, and the methods for balancing team composition.
Although we spend considerable time describing large-scale PrD projects, PrD truly is a lightweight process, usually requiring only a few people on the team. This chapter focuses on large-scale efforts, simply because they have greater opportunity for things to go wrong and are more difficult to manage. The issues we discuss, such as groupthink, social conformity, and the need for diversity in reasoning, are just as applicable to small teams as to large teams.
The Hazards of Homogeneity
Social Conformity + Homophily = Groupthink
In 1951, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted the first of many experiments focused on the notion of social conformity (Figures 10.2 and 10.3).1 The experiment was simple: Two flashcards were shown to a group of eight people. On the first card was a single vertical line; on the second was a set of vertical lines of varying heights. The people in the room were then asked to indicate which of the lines on the second card most closely matched the line from the first.
Figure 10.2 A flock of sheep as social conformity
Figure 10.3 Asch (1951) social conformity study
Unknown to the participant, the seven other people in the room were confederates, who were, on certain trials, instructed to unanimously answer incorrectly. On these trials, 75% of participants answered incorrectly at least once. In the control group, where there was no pressure to conform to confederates, participants answered incorrectly only 1% of the time. Asch later varied the number of confederates present in the room. When there was a single confederate (the only other person in the room), the participant erred only 4% of the time. With two this more than doubled to 14%. With three it shot up to 32% and, interestingly, leveled off at four (at 35%).2
We avoid people different from us. The sociological term “homophily” suggests we prefer to be with people who we perceive as being like us. Homophily along with social conformity results in the well-known phenomenon of groupthink.
Disagreement Deficit
Kathryn Schulz suggests close-knit communities suffer from an effect she calls “disagreement deficit.”
… [O]ur disagreement deficit … comes in four parts. First, our communities expose us to disproportionate support for our own ideas. Second, they shield us from the disagreement of outsiders. Third, they cause us to disregard whatever outside disagreement we do encounter. Finally, they quash the development of disagreement from within … Whatever the virtues of our communities, they are dangerously effective at bolstering our conviction that we are right and shielding us from the possibility that we are wrong.3
How Groupthink Impacts PrD
Given PrD expects everyone to be wrong, what difference would a team’s composition make? If everyone agreed on an artifact, the process to create it should take less time. But since PrD depends on external stakeholders to set the team straight, the process should correct for groupthink.
And it will.
But phenomena such as groupthink, idea anchoring, and social loafing reduce the number of possible outcomes the team will explore, slowing down the process. Social loafing says if 20 people generate ideas in isolation, there will be 20 ideas. If they generate ideas as a group, there may be only five real contributors. Some team members will not reveal their assumptions, choosing instead to agree with what’s been offered by others. Regardless, without a group dynamic supporting opposing points of view, assumptions and ideas will be left unstated.
In Appendix B we offer an antidote to social loafing, a form of brainstorming called “brainwriting.” In brief, team members brainstorm silently by themselves before sharing their ideas with the group (Figure 10.4).
Figure 10.4 Results of brainwriting
Homophily and Schulz’s disagreement gap cause a homogenous (or nearly homogenous) group to quash disagreement from within. The minority voice won’t stand up to the herd. These dynamics reduce possibility thinking and wild idea brainstorming. As we mention in the prior chapter, PrD requires teams offer artifacts from the future with “magical” qualities. Magical artifacts need crazy ideas. For PrD to be successful, both the Creation Session and the Engagement Sessions demand multidisciplinary teams with an appropriate amount of diversity.
Diversity in a small organization can be a challenge. But small organizations are not off the hook. Even if the team is too small to be diverse, it must find ways to broaden its membership. In The Case of the New Case, Leo had only two team members other than himself: an Analyst and a Builder (see below for definitions of these terms).
In this case, he played the role of Facilitator/Researcher and brought in a Designer to help. Similarly, in The Case of the Business Case, an Analyst, a Builder, and a Researcher comprised the entire team. In that case, they brought in a couple of Designers, a Researcher, and a Facilitator to help them with both the Creation and Engagement Sessions.
In the Engagement Sessions, Schulz’s third disagreement gap comes into play: When stakeholders disagree with our presumptions, and we are all of one mind, we downplay the input. Further, it isn’t enough for one of us to advocate for the minority position. We all must let go of the erroneous presumptions (or at least a majority of us) lest we fall prey to Asch’s conformity behavior. Alternatively, we may not hear the subtlety of the critique offered by our stakeholders; we may bucket it all together as the Designers did in The Case of the Pushy Pillboxes described at the start of this chapter.
But what sort of diversity are we seeking on these teams? And is it the same set of differences during the Creation Session as it is during the Engagement Sessions? And how many people are enough, and how many are too much?
Diversity of Reasoning
What we’re recommending is diversity in thinking and reasoning. “Right-brain” and “left-brain” thinkers, analysts and synthesists, deducers and abducers—the team must have a balance of different kinds of reasoners. We are not suggesting all analysts think alike or all business leaders think with one mind. We are suggesting, to reduce the risk of groupthink, teams should comprise people who naturally reason differently. Often people choose a job function or role that best fits their problem-solving approach or style of reasoning. It’s natural: We go with our strengths; we gravitate to job roles supporting those strengths.
But as Charles Owen suggests (when he introduced the four-square design thinking model), just because a profession or domain has a center of gravity in one of the quadrants doesn’t mean individuals from that domain reason only within that quadrant.4
In short, building teams with individuals from different job roles may be all that’s needed for enough diversity in reasoning to make PrD a success. Maybe, but not necessarily. We look to other characteristics, in addition to job role, to help us build balanced teams. One approach we’ve taken is to balance the team based on where an individual sits within the design thinking model.
Reasoning Roles
We suggest five different roles for balancing a team (Figure 10.5). Although we use names like “Researcher” or “Analyst,” we’re not suggesting job roles; we’ve simply assigned a title to the types of skills and reasoning appropriate to the quadrant. The designations are shorthand for the types of activities going on in those quadrants.
Figure 10.5 Reasoning roles, all
The sorts of activities in which each role engages will differ between the Creation and Engagement Sessions. In the following, we offer an overview of each role’s activities within each type of session.
Researcher
The Researcher is focused on the real (here and now) as opposed to symbolic (Figure 10.6). Researchers are adept at active listening, are concrete, and are concerned about maintaining consistency and coherency between the artifact and the purpose of the research. The Observer role occurs only during the Engagement Session. Typically, a market researcher, UX researcher, business analyst, or human factors engineer can easily perform this role, in both the Creation and Engagement Sessions. The Researcher is responsible for curating how things are done currently.
Figure 10.6 Reasoning roles, Researcher
Activities in the Creation Session
In the Creation Session, this individual assists the team by confirming the artifact best addresses the team’s objectives and assumptions. In contrast, during Engagement Sessions, the Researcher is one of several roles potentially becoming the Facilitator. Because of this duality, the Researcher is constantly imagining how the artifact will be used as the team is building it. As the assumptions are being expressed, both verbally and in artifact form, the Researcher captures them and begins to construct the Engagement Session “script.”
Activities in the Engagement Session
In addition to transitioning to the Facilitator, the Researcher may be responsible for planning and logistics—recruiting and calendaring participants, finding the right rooms, incentives, and the like. Alternatively, these activities could be handled by a project manager who may not participate in the actual sessions. If there is more than one Researcher during the Engagement Session, the second Researcher becomes an Observer, capturing notes, interactions, expressions, body language, and other “tells.”
Analyst
Analysts are comfortable working with symbols, drawing “box-and-arrow” diagrams to describe processes, software stacks, and the like (Figure 10.7). They are concerned about economies, architectures, and other elements driving system performance. They are, well, analytical: able to categorize, decompose, rearrange, and organize information often in service of normalizing it. Several different types of analysts are found in large organizations: business analysts, system analysts, enterprise architects, system architects, data analysts, and the like. The Analyst is responsible for curating why things are done currently.
Figure 10.7 Reasoning roles, Analyst
Activities in the Creation Session
During the Creation Session, the team is trying to identify an ideal experience from the perspective of the external stakeholder, based on the team’s assumptions. The Analyst can provide an ideal state for the system or business processes and argue for those to be part of the team’s assumptions.
Analysts may be uncomfortable during the Creation Session because of their strong desire to normalize. We’ve seen cases (when the team comes up with outrageous notions violating all sorts of existing conditions) where Analysts become agitated and question the entire process. If it is too uncomfortable for them to set aside their day job, and they are compelled to offer reality checks, then the Facilitator must step in to prevent delays and confusion.
Analysts can document and track the differences between the proposed experience and current realities as the team comes up with wilder and crazier ideas. If the Analyst is channeling his energy away from being hypercritical, he can highlight potential risks, costs, and performance impacts. Although this information could be critical, much of it may be irrelevant after the Engagement Session, as in the case when external stakeholders disagree with the team’s assumptions and the idea is thrown out. Remember, in PrD it’s perfectly okay if the artifact suggests something that can’t actually be built or that could even exist! If creating a putative time travel device vets the team’s underlying assumptions, the Analyst must be able to suspend his disbelief.
The Analyst can also direct his energy to capturing ideas as they flow, before the Designer can express them in the artifact. Wielding the marker, the Analyst becomes the scribe, helping organize ideas, letting the Facilitator focus on her tasks.
Activities in the Engagement Session
In complex offerings, the Analyst is required during the Engagement Session. Generally, the Analyst becomes an Observer, but he is specifically listening for key elements impacting the systems and/or business processes. Without saying a word, the Analyst captures the ideas presented by the stakeholder, and in those instances where there are surprises, marks them for later discussion during the debrief session.
If the conversation turns technical, as some sessions require, the Facilitator may turn to the Analyst to get a brief set of ideas about how the stakeholder’s proposal might be accommodated. In exploring some of these structural considerations with the stakeholder in these early sessions, the stakeholder may adjust her thinking, helping the team understand what is a “must have” versus a “nice to have.”
Seeking such ideas from the Analyst should be done sparingly, especially during early iterations, as the true purpose of these sessions is to capture the mental model of the stakeholder rather than the realistic potential for execution of ideas.
Designer
Because PrD depends on design thinking, the team must have at least one Designer as a member! Designers are possibility thinkers and lateral thinkers, and often provide other-worldly perspectives on the discussion (Figure 10.8). They think symbolically while simultaneously making things concrete. The Designer riffs off others’ suggestions, building on them, supporting ideas, capturing them, and cheerleading others to come up with more. Most importantly, the Designer makes things. She glues paper to paper, and googly eyes to pipe cleaners. Naturally we expect to see anybody with “design” in their title, but for some organizations the job role may be difficult to find. Interaction, UX, visual, graphic, web, industrial, game, and curriculum designer are just a few titles that make sense. Design engineer is another possibility, and we’ve had great success with software architects and software designers even though those titles often refer to activities far removed from design as we’ve been discussing it. The Designer is responsible for curating why things should be done in the future.
Figure 10.8 Reasoning roles, Designer
Activities in the Creation Session
The Designer captures and expresses the assumptions posed by the team in the form of an artifact. The Designer is free to offer her own suggestions as well, but must do so explicitly, not silently. While everyone is permitted to craft the artifact, the team generally looks to the Designer for expertise and creative approaches to express their thoughts. We’ve found in some cases having two Designers is necessary, especially if the remainder of the team does not have much comfort with the “make” side of the model.
The Designer may play her role quietly, allowing the team to explore and brainstorm before swooping in with a representation of what’s been discussed, capturing the essence of the conversation.
As a synthesizer, the Designer constantly puts two and two together, coming up with five. With teams that aren’t flowing, this can add tension and confusion into the process; in most cases it provides humor and the right touch of lightheartedness and fun.
Activities in the Engagement Session
With one exception, the Designer is an Observer during the Engagement Session. In some cases, the Designer captures and expresses any changes proposed by the stakeholder as necessary to move the conversation forward. Normally, the Facilitator can handle most conversations around the artifact with a little imagination and framing. Sometimes, however, the stakeholder has suggested something so radically different from what the team had presumed that the conversation would stop if not for an addition or change to the artifact.
Either the Designer makes the change directly or the Facilitator suggests the stakeholder make the change and the Designer assists as needed.
The Builder
Builders are the ultimate realists (Figure 10.9). They work with material things, even if they are writing symbolic code. As their name suggests, they build things. They are concrete. They don’t do well with ephemeral concepts and diagrams. At the same time, they are deeply immersed in the technical details of the solution space, and for that reason alone, it is crucial to have them on the team. Anyone with “engineer” in their title is likely to be a Builder, but, again, it has more to do with their reasoning and thinking styles. The Builder is responsible for curating how things should be done in the future.
Figure 10.9 Reasoning roles, Builder
Activities in the Creation Session
During the Creation Session, Builders face the same tensions as the Analysts, only more so. As we have said throughout the book, during the Creation Session, “Reality bats last,” but Builders are the ultimate realists. The team needs to enlist their service not to shoot down ideas, but to begin to consider how to build those ideas.
This requires a special sort of developer/engineer, one who is dedicated to making a difference, who really wants to build something stakeholders will clamor for. Builders who get early insight into the team’s assumptions can also begin to think about where the existing system’s structures and capabilities aren’t going to cut it.
Activities in the Engagement Session
As with the Analyst, the Builder becomes an Observer. Having a Builder at the Engagement Sessions is important for two reasons:
1. The Builder hears, with her own ears, and sees, with her own eyes, exactly what the stakeholder is saying and doing. This uninterpreted raw engagement is transformative, especially when a stakeholder is passionate about his point of view. Few Builders come back from Engagement Sessions unswayed by customer feedback. In fact, Builders often swing far to the other side, becoming overly avid customer advocates. Builders must attend the debrief to ensure their points of view are calibrated with the rest of the group.
2. True science-fiction scenarios may need to be explored further. If the stakeholder requests something of the system that would violate laws of physics, for example, the Builder should signal to the Facilitator to dig for additional information. Without the Builder’s real-time intervention, the process may get delayed as the team returns to discuss what they learned, only to discover the proposed ideas are truly not buildable, at all. Again, this intervention must be handled extremely carefully, and generally rarely. Similar to the Analysts above, the real issue is not whether something can be built but rather why it’s important to the stakeholder in the first place.
The Facilitator
We’ve dedicated Chapter 14 to facilitation in the Engagement Session. In Chapter 15 we discuss the role in the context of the Creation Session. Here we briefly sketch the key attributes of the Facilitator role. The Facilitator is ego-less: empathically in tune with everyone on the team (Figure 10.10). Any of the roles can be a Facilitator, if the individual is good at it.
Figure 10.10 Reasoning roles, Facilitator
Activities in the Creation Session
The Facilitator maintains an open mind, listening to the flow of ideas, making sure every voice is heard. He gently shuts down overenthusiastic contributors to let others chime in.
The Facilitator is not overly critical about any offering but offers probing critique if the artifact (or the assumptions on which it is based) isn’t clear. He constantly checks the mood and energy level of the team, adjusting as needed and calling time when the team is too tired to be productive. The Facilitator keeps time, making sure the team understands the urgency of the exercise and the finality of the clock. He uses the clock as a gentle prod to get people thinking.
Activities in the Engagement Session
As in the Creation Session, the Facilitator makes or breaks the Engagement Sessions. Any one of the team could be a Facilitator, as long as they are good at it and they understand the process. As mentioned above, often the Researcher becomes the Facilitator.
The Facilitator keeps a tight control over the process, allowing only the stakeholder to talk, accepting questions or prompts from the Observers through some silent mechanism (passing of notes, IM window, etc.). The Facilitator keeps time, moving the stakeholder along if she gets sidetracked, allowing her to linger if the specific point she’s making is worth a deeper dive. He is present, moving real time where the stakeholder wants to go. The Facilitator watches the clock, not because he wants to hurry the stakeholder along but to respect the stakeholder’s time. In our experience, once an Engagement Session gets going, stakeholders are typically happy to stay far longer than they initially had committed to.
How Many Again?
Figure 10.11 shows the desired number of team members for both Creation and Engagement Sessions.
Figure 10.11 Number desired, role by session type
At a minimum, the team should have four members during the Creation Session and two members during the Engagement Session. This is in line with the purpose of having diversity in your teams: Teams need maximum diversity during the Creation Session; during the Engagement Session less diversity is required.
The Creation and Engagement Sessions may have as many as eight individuals. As we discuss in Chapter 16, having five team members working with a single stakeholder can be overwhelming to the stakeholder; the advantage being it accelerates alignment across the team. Builders and Analysts often don’t have the opportunity to engage with external stakeholders; participating in the Engagement Session is a transformative experience. One way we avoid overwhelming stakeholders is to mix and match individuals on the team, keeping any one session limited to three people. For example, we have a Facilitator/Researcher and a Designer, and we rotate in one other role. Over the course of all sessions, team members will have had a chance to participate in at least a couple.
At the end of the chapter we discuss the risks of teams with too few individuals in both the Creation and Engagement Sessions.
Personality Attributes
When we are involved with large Creation Sessions, we need to consider more than just team members’ approach to reasoning. Large Creation Sessions may have several teams working independently—the largest we’ve run had six teams of eight. In these contexts, we are careful to identify other aspects, such as extroverts, introverts, dreamers, realists, and, if it’s possible, any known relationships among participants that might be problematic (Figure 10.12).
Figure 10.12 Multiple teams at a Creation Session
With large sessions, we ask participants to answer a short questionnaire. We also gather information about them (if they are not known to us personally) from trusted associates who can attest to their style of engagement, relationship, and personality. We do this research at least a week before the Creation Session and, based on the information, we adjust team membership accordingly.
Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of capturing intelligence about the team members beforehand and must create teams during the Creation Session itself. When we run workshops on PrD, for example, we don’t know in advance much about the attendees. Instead, we run a small creative exercise helping people separate themselves by self-evaluating their reasoning styles.
Thinking Style Questionnaire
We send out the questionnaire given in Figure 10.13 in advance if we have the time and if:
• The situation calls for it.
• The attendees aren’t people we know.
• We have more than two teams participating in the Creation Session.
• We offer these instructions to the participants when we send out the questionnaire:
1. For each row, circle the one word that best describes you. The total of items circled should equal 20 (one item/word for each row).
2. Next, add the number of items you have circled in each column.
3. Send your totals for Columns A, B, C, and D to <Facilitator>. For example, your totals might look something like the following: Column A, 8; Column B, 2; Column C, 6; Column D, 4.
Figure 10.13 Thinking style questionnaire
Hidden from the participants are the qualities associated with each column: Column A, Logical; Column B, Organizational; Column C, Imaginative; Column D, People.
By making sure each team comprises individuals scoring high in one of the columns, we increase the likelihood of balancing team membership.
Team Balancing Exercise
Sometimes we don’t have the ability to know, in advance, who is coming to the Creation Session, especially when we are running workshops at conferences or in large organizations. In these cases, we use an ice-breaking exercise at the beginning of the Creation Session to help balance the teams.
We have everyone get on their feet and offer them the following instructions:
We’re going to divide ourselves up using a self-assessment based on four labels I’ll announce in a moment. This is a bit forced, as it is impossible to categorize yourself based on one label, but for now, go with your first impulse. Don’t overthink the words, or their association. Just go with your gut instinct.
I’ll read off four labels. When you hear a label that best fits your own self-assessment, please move to the corner of the room I’ll associate with the label.
Everybody understand?
Okay. The four labels are: Scientist, Artist, Engineer, Designer.
If you consider yourself a Scientist, go to that corner of the room.
If you consider yourself an Artist, go to that corner of the room.
If you consider yourself an Engineer, go to that corner of the room.
And if you consider yourself a Designer, you’re excused, you can leave.
(Obviously a joke.)
As you can see, the exercise expresses design thinking and introduces the four-square design thinking model at the very start of the Creation Session.
Neither approach is perfect. In the case of the questionnaire, it’s unclear whether those words really are indicative of the categories in which they have been associated. In the room exercise, if working with a homogenous group, it may be difficult to get enough variance to balance the teams. Still, doing something is better than relying on pure happenstance.
Where Things Go Wrong
How Many Is Too Few?
Establishing the team composition beforehand, as described above, is key to establishing diversity, especially for the Creation Session. For the Engagement Sessions, as we’ve mentioned and as Figure 10.11 suggests, at a minimum we should have a Designer and a Facilitator. What should we do if in spite of best efforts we’re not able to achieve a diversity of roles on the teams?
For the Creation Session, it is possible a single individual, let’s say the Designer, can generate assumptions and artifacts. That is, a Designer, working solo, could create the artifacts (and, by definition, her assumptions) to support an Engagement Session. But it is the rare Designer who can also draft the script and who can step outside her worldview enough to see the assumptions she’s making. Other than the Designer, it is possible the Facilitator/Planner could craft artifacts expressing assumptions, but (by definition) these roles are not artifact makers, so what the Facilitator creates may fail to have the future-leaning, magical qualities on which PrD depends.
Regardless of whether it is possible to have a single individual craft a magical artifact misses the point. The point of the Creation Session is to generate divergent ideas, get assumptions out in the open, and continue aligning the team on the goals for the project. That just won’t happen if a single individual is doing the work in isolation. Yes, the individual’s assumptions will be surfaced, but those may be completely insufficient in the context of the team’s or business’s needs.
For the Engagement Sessions, going solo is a recipe for disaster. While going solo may be possible with standard user interviews (and even there, having at least one partner is often essential), PrD requires more effort of the interviewing team than a single person can muster. PrD requires a Facilitator and a Designer, at a minimum. If we can’t field these two roles, we don’t bother proceeding (Figure 10.14).
Figure 10.14 A stakeholder with a Facilitator and five Observers at an Engagement Session
Here again, fielding the minimum number of team members makes the process possible, but it still misses a key benefit of PrD: gaining alignment across the organization on potentially disruptive innovations. It is nice to have additional team members in the Engagement Sessions to observe and collect data. Of greater benefit is having them gain firsthand knowledge of customer insights. The more team members who have heard and seen stakeholders’ points of view, the more advocates there are for the ideas that ultimately make it through the process.
Failure to Cohere
So there is a minimum below which the Creation and Engagement Sessions will likely not be successful. Of course, crossing a minimum threshold doesn’t guarantee success. In spite of best efforts at creating diversity, the Creation Session may not bear fruit. In the example of the all-male engineer team mentioned in the sidebar in the Section “How Groupthink Impacts PrD,” the team just didn’t get itself together and was consistently falling behind in the exercises.
We’ve had similar dysfunctional teams at workshops in which the attendees were all from a similar domain. In one such workshop, individuals on one of the teams consistently responded they didn’t feel their ideas were being heard, and the outcomes they drove were not the best they could have imagined. We helped the team better understand the goal of the exercises they were doing, reducing some team members’ performance anxieties so that, as a team, they could move forward. The symptoms of this malaise are relatively easy for the Facilitator to spot: delays in making decisions, sour faces, disengagement, and less than hearty fun. In some extreme cases, the Facilitator may need to “reset” the entire session, perhaps even scheduling a separate session. In most cases, however, the problems are resolved through assertive Facilitation and intervention. In Chapters 14 and 16 we offer more details about facilitation to improve the likelihood of success.
Detractors
To begin the process of aligning a very large project team, we ran a three-day Creation Session. We balanced the teams, established clear objectives, provided background to the process, and offered ongoing positive reinforcement for the team’s effort. In spite of all that, we had more than one upset participant. In this case it was an Analyst and a Builder who couldn’t accept several tenets of PrD: Letting go of reality and junk prototyping were just too much for them to accept. Thankfully, they reserved their concerns until the “hot wash” critique at the end of the Session.
Detractors, especially outspoken and passionate detractors, can spoil the suspension of disbelief required to make magical artifacts. If their concerns and anxiety are not addressed, their attitude infects their team and perhaps the rest of the participants. Every large event has at least one individual who doesn’t quite resonate with the purpose of the event, no matter how much prework and preparation one does. Builders’ and Analysts’ key concern is often cost, even if they don’t express it in those terms. Sometimes it’s expressed in terms of complexity, sometimes in terms of technical gaps, but in the end, their concerns are about how costly an idea might be. The Facilitator listens to those concerns but continues to remind the team that costs are only one half of the equation. If the ideas the team generates are truly disruptive, the business may have discovered a completely new opportunity—an incremental revenue stream with an extraordinary ROI.
In short, the Creation Session is way too soon to know what too expensive looks like.
The irony is that many of these same individuals become the biggest proponents of PrD once they get past their concerns. So we don’t want to exclude them from the Creation Session and even if that was desirable we can’t predict who they will be. The best we can do is assist them in overcoming their concerns through strong facilitation. Fortunately, we’ve never had to resort to escorting a participant out of a session, but in extreme cases it could come to that.
Summary
• PrD depends on teams and diversity within those teams. Groupthink, resulting from homogeneity on teams, isn’t fatal, but it will slow the process down (and risk dismissing stakeholder criticisms).
• By “diversity” we mean diversity in thinking and reasoning. Getting members from each quadrant of the design thinking framework is a good way to balance teams.
• Each role plays a part in both the Creation and Engagement Sessions. Sometimes individuals shift roles when transitioning from Creation to Engagement.
• For large Creation Sessions, we pre-staff teams, based on information we glean from associates about characteristics, or use a questionnaire or self-assessment activity to improve team diversity.
• PrD works best with at least a few people on a team for a Creation Session, and at a minimum two people at the Engagement Session. But minimums miss the point: PrD is about alignment. Having more team members present improves alignment on assumptions and stakeholder reactions.
• In spite of our best efforts, some teams (or some individuals) may not work out. Masterful facilitation usually resolves these difficulties.
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