Managing cadence is about setting the pace. From your vantage point, you’ll show your team how they are progressing, so they can sense incremental accomplishment and thus maintain a sense of forward motion. You will always keep people informed to let them know where they are and what other mountains lie ahead. You will use whatever means are appropriate and comfortable, regardless of whether you rely on “one-on-ones,” email, voicemail updates, or standing meetings.

Pay attention to the frequency, volume, and duration of your communication. Pace matters. Be cautious that you don’t drive your people so hard that they fatigue and become less effective. (And this applies to you, the leader, also! Go to the gym, garden, whatever helps you stay balanced, and do it regularly to mentally reboot.) Operating for extended periods at just a few percentage points over their capacity can leave people feeling overwhelmed and apprehensive about participating. Push hard, take a break and assess the pace, and then push hard again.

If you observe that your direction and communication leave people energized and looking forward to meeting each new challenge, then you may have found a good pace. Still, remember that a good pace for the team might be too fast for some individual members of that team, depending on what other responsibilities they have. Stay attuned to pacing at the individual level as well as at the team level.

Also pay special attention to what people are saying about the process, and don’t shy away from asking them how they feel.

If and when the collaborative strategy process gets chaotic or confusing, remember to reorient people, manage expectations, and set context whenever the need arises.

You will manage various phases of the methodology covered in detail in Part II. Keep that context in mind when checking on people’s response to pace. If you hear your people saying things such as “I don’t know which way is up,” consider:

Generally, acting as an “Official Process Guide” is easy if you maintain a clear view of the big picture and where you all are in the thick of it. Remember to communicate it early and often so others know it, too.

You can give your people a sense of security by making it clear that it’s your responsibility to guide them forward. This will help individual team members be open to stepping outside of their comfort zones and taking risks that might pay off further down the road.

Keep people in the loop and let them know what else is going on. Feel free to send quick one-liner emails, or use microblogging tools to let the team know that things are on track. It’s a great idea to send a quick note when someone on the team has gained a useful insight; for example, “Joelle just did 30 phone calls with customers and learned that the key reason why advertisers are using our competitor is xyz.”

Celebrate milestones. It’s simple yet powerful to send a message or “tweet” when you accomplish something, even something small. You can even celebrate team learning. Collaborative strategy creation can, at times, be a challenging back-and-forth process, so help your team coalesce and stay aligned by helping them create meaning around what they are doing. If your team has just finished deciding something they deem important to the company, celebrate it. Celebrate the fact that your team has declared, “This really matters to us.” Help your team manage perspective by seeing that they belong to something larger than themselves, and that as a group they are contributing to something greater. What you punctuate with your actions and language indicates what is important to you and will be noticed.

When you invest in managing team perspective, you help people stay in motion. This keeps the overall momentum up, and when people sense they are in motion, they are far more likely to continue putting in the effort to make progress.

Sparking ideas is about illuminating insights, empowering people to see what they already know in a new light. When you perform this assignment, you’ll often find yourself generating ideas as you create new connections, as well as reinvigorating existing connections. You will use these interactions to create fresh opportunities that allow ideas to bubble to the surface, expand, and even pop.

New ideas and solutions to present-day problems rarely fall out of a cloudless blue sky. What typically precipitates a new idea is a shift in thinking prompted by the tension between competing ideas, or the pressure of an unexpected challenge in a tight timeframe. Sometimes new technologies can spark that shift in thinking. Another rich source of opportunities comes from talking to others about specific improvements, especially if the improvements are driven by outside market forces. Conducting brainstorming sessions can also be a good source of concept sparks. Such sessions have the added value of helping people to explore the natural tensions that create friction between opposing ideas.

Sometimes ideas come back from groups and they are counterintuitive to a leader’s experience or wishes. When that happens, you get to take them on then and there, rather than have that perspective hidden within the hearts and minds of people. Idea generation with the spark of debate leads to shaping each other’s ideas, but it also can be about explaining why something really won’t work. It doesn’t mean that a leader has to succumb to the mass democratic nature of the people generating ideas. Collaboration is not meant to be a democracy, but rather a meritocracy or a benevolent dictatorship in which the larger good of the company is achieved.

Ask your people to find ways to clear their minds and inspire new thinking, such as listening to an insightful industry speaker, hunting down interesting blogs, or watching a TED talk.^[9] In each case, the topic may be only peripherally related to work. You might share a radical new concept and push the group to “prove you wrong,” just to stir things up and give them practice at convincing you of what they believe. It also lets them see that you don’t expect everthing you say to be treated as gospel.

Frequently challenge assumptions. Question the way things are. How did the status quo become the status quo? Probe and challenge in situations where your team can learn that doing so is accepted and valid. Make sure your team is fully supported as they come up with the best ideas possible to solve your particular strategy problem.

People will share their ideas most effectively in the right environment. And so another one of your responsibilities is nurturing a safe environment that invites new ideas.

Leading collaborative strategy requires nurturing a culture in which people feel safe, so that you lower the sense of risk people feel as they begin to work together to invent new solutions. A simple reality of collaboration is that people can’t create together if they don’t trust each other.

Some people find that team-building activities let them get acquainted, begin establishing a sense of trust, and have conflict-free conversations before the pressure of schedules, budgets, and conflicting interests enter the picture. Once your people feel safe enough to risk expressing their precious ideas, you must encourage everyone to bring their best selves and creative ideas to the table. Your job is not to control this, but to facilitate it (Figure 3-5).

Figure 3-5. Control is really not the point

To create the space for people to express their opinions without fear of ridicule or condemnation, you must temper your own criticism and that of others. Insist that criticism is given constructively so that it pushes the conversation forward and advances learning.

In a larger sense, your job involves welcoming and accepting contradictory voices. Although there is an appropriate time to critique and discard weak ideas (as we will highlight in the process framework), most organizations have a number of team members that are adept at “stone throwing.” We need to get all the ideas out in order to discover the good ones, and that is not as easily done if people are afraid of getting stones thrown at their ideas. Ask that people express their opinions and ideas so that they build on the ideas of others rather than chip away at them. A great example of this happens in improv theater where participants learn to say “yes, and” instead of “no, but.” This technique keeps the conversation moving forward. Both Google and Whole Foods offer their people classes in improv to teach them how to apply these kinds of techniques in business.^[10]

The story of Hans Grande in the sidebar "Profile of a Collaborative Leader" on page 87 provides a memorable example from my own experience of someone who was extraordinarily successful in building a culture where people felt comfortable collaborating.

As we reflect on how Hans approached his assignment, we can see that he did more than simply create safety. He also established connections. It’s a part of our job as leaders to build the bridges that bring people together and create a group or ensemble to address particular challenges or problems. Developing connections across boundaries—across corporate silos, divisions, functions, departments, and teams—is at the heart of building a truly productive and collaborative environment.

Developing connections is about bridging divides, large and small. When working on this assignment to assemble the right group of people to tackle an issue, you will be linking departments, divisions, and individuals across the organization in new and sometimes unexpected ways. You will use your understanding of how different parts of your organization operate, and you’ll encourage conversations across the invisible boundaries that might have kept people from working together in the past.

As you compose any team, think about individual personality types and styles. Whether you rely on systems such as Myers-Briggs, colors, or the Enneagram, or you use your own “spidey-sense” intuition, keep in mind that certain styles can be quite compatible or incompatible, and that “compatible” may not mean “similar.”

Do what you can to encourage that every connection is a kind of creative partnership. However, if a specific connection doesn’t click, try building a connection with a different person, one where there’s better chemistry between people.

As you build each connection, carefully think through each choice you are making and how it will impact the team, because it will determine who’s at the table and who needs to play what role. By figuring out who specifically needs to engage and by catalyzing the right connections, you will help different parts of the organization come together and work on the problem at hand.

Developing connections is particularly important because addressing the toughest challenges in business requires getting the right people to work together in alignment with a shared vision of success.

And connecting people across organizational boundaries lets you leverage the company’s strengths, wherever they happen to be found.

As you initiate connections, provide context of business issues to discuss. Kindle each connection with the spark of a new idea to test the chemistry. New ideas provide the fuel and the energy to develop creative new solutions to ever-changing problems. New ideas provide the power for collaborative strategy.

One thing that everyone will want to know is when you have arrived at a destination. Please note that there are many destinations along the way to the end of a project. As simple as this might sound, you’d be amazed to discover how difficult most people find the process of recognizing the finish line. When there is no checkered flag, how do you know when you’re done? As a leader, you can clarify where the finish line is by influencing how and when decisions are made. In particular, you can orient your team to recognize situations where seeking the absolute best option is not justified. Quite often, it is more than acceptable to achieve a milestone or result that is “good enough,” meaning it meets or exceeds the needs of the situation. This is the process of satisficing.

The job of figuring out when done is done (or when you need to keep trying) is a judgment call. When I discovered the concept of satisficing many years ago (in Scientific American, of all places), I found the word that describes the perfect stopping point.^[11] Satisficing is a decision-making strategy that uses criteria for adequacy rather than perfection. It’s a concept that helps us know when we’re done. Satisficing is about defining when enough is enough and it’s time to move on. It is a pragmatic alternative to maximizing, minimizing, or optimizing. When you engage this technique, you choose to stop one thing and move on to another while managing the time and resource constraints. You help your team make the best decisions for the situation at hand, knowing that you might need to make more decisions later.

Satisficing is the opposite of trying to achieve the “perfect” solution. As Voltaire said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” When you’re balancing a dozen competing demands, there is no clear notion of “perfect,” so seeking it does not add value. Other times, investing in some element makes no difference to the larger outcome. Does your website need a custom feedback form? Or is an email address enough? Would travelers choose Southwest more often if it served almonds and cashews, or are they really driven by low fares and on-time arrivals? Satisficing is about helping your people recognize they’ve succeeded given the scope of what you were working on (Figure 3-6). Sometimes peanuts are a perfectly acceptable answer.

Figure 3-6. Satisficing is knowing when enough is enough

When you engage the issues, you lead the simple act of getting people to talk. You pose questions such as: What will it take us to address this problem? Is this something we are willing to look at right now? Do we all agree on what the full problem is? Do we agree this is a priority for us given where we are on other things? Which factors are most critical to our success?

Engaging the issues is an act of bravery because you demonstrate the ability to deal with issues head-on. Engaging the issues does not mean having the answers, but it does mean being committed to learning. For example, where someone says X is the most important problem and another says the most critical issue is Y, the question to ask is: how can both be true? It is possible you will learn that X is most important to customers and Y is most important to finance (or operations, or channel partners). By engaging the issues, you create the opportunity to learn what the organization is willing to do in more detail.

Engaging the issues accomplishes two things that can dramatically shape culture. It allows you to:

People at all levels actually want to be able to understand the issues, they want to be able to talk about what is really going on, and they want to do it without fear.

By engaging the issues, you lead this effort, giving others permission to speak to what they see, ask questions, and contribute freely. By choosing to engage the issues, you shed light into dark corners and take the discussions in your company to a higher level. You also diffuse pent-up concerns that something important is being ignored.

In general, people tend to shy away from engaging the issues in an effort to protect themselves. They fear difficult conversations, and they want to avoid feeling uncomfortable, incompetent, unsuccessful, or blamed. They don’t want to be perceived as causing conflict. When a culture lacks a pattern of dealing cleanly and fairly with tension and conflicting viewpoints, those natural avoidance behaviors are understandable. Not healthy, but understandable.

However, engaging the issues does not mean blame, judgment, or conflict. It does mean having conversations about present and future risks, such as customers defecting, competition winning, or markets disappearing. We have these conversations because the benefits of engaging the issues will ultimately outweigh the consequences of staying silent.

Engaging the issues requires some consideration about how people might receive information. Avoid getting personal, and keep the discussion focused on the business impact. For example, don’t say, “What Kristine did is causing a lot of pain.” Instead, you might say, “This situation is impacting us a lot. What would it actually cost us to solve the problem?”

Often problems arise through reasonable actions, and it can sometimes help to acknowledge this: “It seems that in the rush to meet our last milestone, we took some shortcuts. That’s understandable, but as often happens, some of the shortcuts have caused a problem, and we need to deal with it. Do we have the capacity to solve this problem now? What would be the impact of waiting six months?” By showing the impact and asking questions with room for choice, you empower your colleagues to decide how best to move forward.

By engaging the issues and opening up a dialogue, you enable your company to begin talking about key decision points. It is not necessary to get commitment about solving a problem, only to get the conversation going, so that it can be solved at some point in time. In some situations, you may find that a group’s decision to postpone dealing with a particular problem can be the absolute right decision, if, for example, there is a larger issue that needs addressing first. If you find yourself unable to deal with conflict and you avoid it to the detriment of yourself or your business, figure out the underlying reason and resolve it by participating in the Hoffman Program referenced in Appendix B.

To make it easier to engage the issues, here are some helpful hints:

You set the tone by what you allow to happen and by what you reinforce or ignore. Whenever you are involved, engage the issues in a healthy way. I’ve had executives watch an aggressive power play happen right in front of them and say, “I’ll let you two work it out.” That rarely works; instead, it signals that it’s OK to do power plays within the organization. If you let power games go unchecked, you are setting up a catastrophic failure in your business. You may not want to choose sides, but you can strongly urge that the merits of the issue get addressed instead of allowing the issue to become political.

Keep power games and passive-aggressive behavior in check. If you let them go unchecked, you end up letting people work from positional power, which undermines the power of good ideas. It ends only when we say that it’s not OK to work from positional power. To get from us-versus-them to a collaborative culture, that stuff is no longer allowed (see Figure 3-7).

Figure 3-7. Don’t tolerate behavior that limits collaboration

Our cultural norm going forward is about having each of us co-create our future, defining together what we want to build for our teams, divisions, or companies. So we need to start demanding that people focus on the problem and get on the same side of the table to do it.

Tell your people that any energy spent showing one another up is wasted energy that could have been spent on winning the market. (A tip: when I see a power play, I find just chuckling and saying, “What’s that about? Are you taking that approach because you don’t have a good cost-benefit argument for your position?” works wonders to get people to cut it out.) And if you tend to hush up issues as a way to avoid conflict, just know that you are missing out on opportunities to learn. Conflict is a signal that there may be an opportunity to improve on the status quo. Until some shift happens (like learning a new fact or point of view), change and growth never can.

When creating strategy, maintaining forward progress is essential to overall success; satisficing supports this. When you engage this responsibility, you establish what is ahead and make sure that people don’t get stuck in one place for too long. The next responsibility is about navigating the terrain.

The collaborative strategy process is most effective when teams use the phases of the process described in Part II. But it’s not always easy to do. Nuisances and distractions unavoidably crop up. You must manage these things. When you perform this assignment, you’ll be holding the “topo map” of where you are, even when your team is mired in the details of the rugged terrain. You’ll remind your team of the larger goals and guide them away from paths that you know lead to a dead end.

In this role, you’ll answer questions. You’ll give directions. You’ll encourage your team to keep going even when they feel lost. When there is a decision to make, you will know what this decision looks like at the ground level and how it fits into the larger landscape of what you are trying to do. This, of course, means that you keep perspective and don’t get caught up in the act of doing.

One common nuisance is that some team members will tend to arrive at a new phase of a process unprepared for what they are about to do. This is normal when people have a lot on their plates. Still, it’s essential to ensure that participants do not accidentally sabotage the process with their lack of adequate preparation, and part of this responsibility is pushing the members to be prepared.

Conversely, other team members will be all fired up and itching for the next phase before the rest of the team has agreed to close the current one. This is also normal. Normal or not, collaborative strategy requires that people support constant progress. They must work together in a loosely coordinated fashion to ensure that the necessary work gets done at roughly the right time and is of adequate quality to support constant progress. Your job is to help them.

All the nuisances and challenges of keeping creative, motivated human beings focused and working together require sequencing. Sequencing what, you ask? Sequencing is an advanced, high-level skill related to managing the following:

It is about managing the readiness of change.

The best way to manage orientation is to stay on top of events and activities as they unfold over time. You can achieve this simply by staying keenly aware of what’s happening as it’s happening.

By doing two things consistently, there is a simple way to accomplish this: establish an explicit purpose or intent for everything the team must do, and refrain from holding regular meetings out of habit, regardless of cultural norms or the convenience of setting up an automated, recurring calendar event. Yes, I’m giving you permission to have fewer meetings. That biweekly meeting in which you see eyes glazing over like Krispy Kremes? You’re allowed to cancel it.

Instead, convene people in ways to keep the team fresh. Move in small groups or in other flexible ways so you are not designing strategy “by committee.” Spend less time knowing the answers in advance; instead, clarify the agenda each time you meet with any department, team, group, or subgroup, and start each session with what you need to accomplish together and why it matters.

Maintaining strong momentum through the process requires that you proactively work to minimize the nuisances. As we lead, our deep understanding of collaborative strategy phasing gives us a leg up and helps emphasize when we need to:

In short, you know and signal when team members can embark on the next phase.

It can go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that preparing for the next phase includes making sure the current phase of the collaborative strategy process is being done thoroughly enough, and that critical resources—especially time—are available in sufficient quantities to complete the next phase.

Here is a simple example of sequencing that recently took place with one of my long-term strategy clients:

Launching some activities, deferring others, and cueing up the next conversation, task, or decision as the active thread completes are all important because they keep the collaborative strategy creation process moving forward.

Nobody waits—not the world, not the competition, not your customers—for you to get it all right. Figuring out what needs to happen at what point will give people a sense of what is on the horizon, so they have enough time to learn and reflect and act with grace.