chapter 4
Strategic Vision
No Time for Strategy
One of your key product managers calls. He is concerned because he is under pressure to deliver a new product on time. However, his team continues to seem unclear about the priorities and direction of this development. In addition, they don't seem to get along very well.
What They Say—The Situation
What You Hear
Your conversation with the client and your research has brought you to the following conclusions laid out in table 4-1.
Table 4-1. Logical conclusions.
| What the Client Says | What You Hear |
| Request for an unknown type of help. | I have a problem I have no idea how to fix. What kind of training could help me? |
| The team isn't getting along. | I guess I made a mistake when I put these two project teams together, but it's too late to start over with new people. |
| The team hasn't bought into this project. | I assume it is a lack of confidence after the last two projects, but I don't know how to get these two teams collaborating past that. |
What You Do
You build agreement with the client that the goals of this program are to:
improve the project velocity and success through a stronger team with shared vision, values, and strategy
foster team collaboration
reduce formation of cliques within the team.
The audience will be the team members on this project as well as the manager who is working with you.
You begin where all good performance solutions begin—with asking the right questions. Your training and performance instincts have already given you some good guidance, but you first have to figure out what's really behind what is said. Here are some questions that need to be asked before the solution can be proposed:
How many people are really feeling the way the manager describes? Often, there are a few people with strong emotions who are influencing the others. Who are these people?
What is the current vision of the project? What are the constraints? How is this current project so critical to the business?
What kind of project plan exists now? What kind of role definitions?
How much time can this team sacrifice away from the project?
What happens specifically in project meetings? Where do people sit? Who are the people who speak out more than others?
Results of Questions
Assume you have learned from asking these questions that:
There are two strong people, one from each original project team, who seem to be influencing the rest of the project team members. Others defer to these two.
The project roles are unclear. The only thing documented well on this project is the looming deadline.
When asked, different people talk about different project goals. One says that the project is quality driven, but another says that the project needs to be “quick and dirty.”
Everybody is working very hard and putting in many hours. In the absence of any measurable milestones, people are feeling overworked. The result is low morale.
What Are the Project Constraints?
There are two constraints on this initiative. First, the project work takes priority, but the project manager has agreed to three 2-hour sessions for 3 weeks in a row. In addition, the sessions need to begin as soon as possible, preferably next week.
Your Triage Intervention
You have proposed to the executive a plan, which he has accepted (figure 4-1).
Session 1
As a prerequisite to the session, each participant must complete an individual learning history (activity 4-1). Purpose: Allow people to review their past project and share what they learned from that experience, both good and bad. This helps people vent and move into the future project.
Participants will then attend a 2-hour session for sharing their learning histories. Purpose: Establish trust and point out project mistakes that may be recurring.
Figure 4-1. An intervention for building a team vision.
Session 2
Participants should develop a team vision containing three verbs and one noun as a prerequisite to the second session. Purpose: Allow people to express their view of the vision of the project without being influenced by the views of the influential, self-proclaimed leaders.
During the second 2-hour session, participants share their team vision, build consensus, and establish rules of engagement for their group's vision. Purpose: Continue to build trust and break down cliques within the old teams to create a common project vision and to develop rules of engagement to regulate team behavior themselves (activity 4-2).
Session 3:
The final 2-hour session will use scenario planning. Purpose: Help the entire team imagine four possible future states for the project and build a consensus action plan to move the project toward agreed-upon success (activity 4-3).
Better Get a Move on
You only have 1 week to get ready for the first session, and less than 5 days to prepare for each of the following two sessions. As you've thought the situation through more thoroughly, you come up with a more refined detailed plan. Here are the final strategies and goals for your five-part solution:
1. Prerequisite Individual Learning History
A learning history is a document that tells a typical story from a project that is over. The story chosen should illustrate the typical issues the project team had to deal with. The document should be no more than one page typed, and should relate in as much detail as possible the people involved, the decisions made, and the constraints and any other factors that help explain what happened. Learning histories usually reflect both strengths and weaknesses of projects; they are not exclusively negative.
2. Sharing Learning Histories—2-Hour Session
Each person should bring a copy of his or her individual learning history to the meeting and provide enough copies so that everyone will be able to read along. Each person reads his or her story, and others have an opportunity to ask questions.
After a person has read the learning history and there are no more questions, the person reading summarizes with three lessons learned from the story. The facilitator captures these on a flipchart. It is not necessary that each person has unique lessons learned. It is common for overlap to exist.
3. Prerequisite Team Vision—Three Nouns and a Verb
Each person, before the session, writes a vision for the project using exactly three verbs and one noun. It is useful to give them an example so they get the sense of what they are going to do, but it should be an example that is not project related and won't influence their answer. An example might be:
The vision of our project is to plant, water, and cut fresh flowers.
Note that sometimes it is useful to give people a list of verbs and nouns to choose from, but this might limit their contribution and creativity.
4. Sharing Visions, Consensus, and Rules of Engagement—2 Hour Session
Have everyone share their three verbs and one noun vision statements. Break the group into teams of three, preferably mixing up the two old teams. Have each small group create a combined team vision. Bring these together to create a consensus team vision for their project.
Use this vision to create a list of rules of engagement using a brainstorming technique. Have these rules of engagement made into laminated wallet cards.
5. Scenario Planning—2-Hour Session
Define four possible futures using the variables “project on time” and “team collaboration.” Brainstorm how a day in the life of each of these futures would look, and then what events would occur to trigger each future. Finally, ask each person individually to share where he or she thinks the project is now, where he or she thinks the project will go if nothing changes, and where he or she wants to go.
The last step is to build an action plan for project success using a brainstorming technique. Complete the action plan with task owners and due dates.
What You Build
Now it is time for you to design the measurable learning objectives for each part of the proposed solution, determine facilitation requirements, and create materials.
Preparing for the Individual Learning History
Learning Objectives. Each participant will learn about his or her perception of the strengths and weaknesses of the last project that he or she worked on.
Required Equipment and Supplies. You must email directions (including a sample of a well done learning history) to all of the participants at least 1 week before the first session. Then, be sure to print a sufficient number of each learning history's results so that each participant may have one in the session. Lastly, send out a follow-up email 24 hours before the session to remind the participants to attend.
Step-by-Step Design.
1. Construct the email notice, and write up a generic example.
2. Send the notice to each of the project team members. Ask each to bring a completed copy of the learning history.
3. Send a reminder 24 hours before the session to remind people of the prework.
4. If people show up without a learning history in hand, ask them to go to a computer and type it up and copy it right then. Let the others go on with the sharing exercise.
When sending out an example of a learning history, make sure the one you use is very brief and be sure to stress that the document should be telling a typical story. It is not meant to be documentation of the project. You should also make sure the participants know that they will be sharing these stories. If the trust level is too low, skip the copies for others, and just let people read their stories to others.
Top Priority
Amazingly, people will write their real feelings and beliefs, even when they know they are going to be shared with others. Writing often liberates people from their armor of silence.
It is not a problem if people end up rushing to create their story right before the meeting. In fact, they quicker they do it, the more honest it is likely to be.
Be careful not to give them an example that influences their own response.
Results. People often don't know how they feel until they read what they have written. They will be thinking differently about their project after they've written their learning history—even before you gather the team together.
The First Session—Lessons Learned
Learning Objectives. Each participant will learn about his or her own view of the successes and failures of the last project he or she worked on. The participants will also learn about how the views of other project team members may differ from their own. At the conclusion of this facilitation, each of the project team members will have a shared understanding of what actually happened on the last project.
Required Equipment and Supplies. You will need to provide a flipchart and markers to note lessons that were learned by the participants in their previous project experiences. After the session, send out a follow-up email that summarizes the flipchart notes from the session.
Step-by-Step Design.
1. If they have made them, ask each participant to distribute the copies of his or her personal learning histories, in turn. While others are reading along, each person will read his or her learning history aloud.
2. As people read, ask the people listening to take brief notes that will help them in the discussion to follow.
3. After a person finishes reading, ask for questions of clarification. To keep it conflict free, ask people to phrase their questions using only what and how, for example, “What happened that caused you to think that the customers wanted a new project manager?” Notice how this is very different in tone to “Why did you think the customers wanted a new project manager?” which appears to be more threatening.
4. When there are no more questions, continue with the next reader until everyone has read his or her learning history.
5. After all have read, approach the flipchart paper. Ask people to share the challenges they heard as people read. If people are not participating equally, consider going around the room and asking each person to contribute one challenge.
6. Next, ask the participants to share something that they heard which helped the project and would be considered a success.
7. Finally, ask the participants to share lessons learned from what they have heard. On a fresh sheet of flipchart paper, document the participants’ ideas for how to do projects differently to avoid repeating the mistakes they have just heard about. Translate this into an action plan, with people designated to each step as well as due dates.
It is very easy when facilitating this kind of session to “lead the witness.” Limit your comments to active listening (“…Let me see if I've captured this right, you said the customer disliked you from the start?”) and content-oriented what and how questions (“What about the timeline did you find worrisome at the beginning?” or “How would the timeline be different for you to be confident that it could be met?”).
Carefully control the discussion. If one person accidentally says something that might offend another, be ready to jump in, enforce the ground rules, and get the group back on track. The point of this exercise is to get the team to have a common view of history. Together, then, they are able to build the action plan, creating a co-owned way of moving forward into this project. Do not get involved with this other than to document what they decided.
If the group gets to a standstill and can't seem to come up with anything else, remember to use silence to motivate them to speak what is on their minds.
Top Priority
People are taking great risks by sharing personal emotions and perceptions of how a project went. In some cases, they may be sharing stories about each other. When people are allowed to honestly express themselves in this way, other team members begin to empathize with each other. It is not unusual to hear, “Wow, I never knew you felt that way,” and “I had no idea you had invested so much time into that task.” Help the team see that:
Project team members never see the whole project. It is important to bring teams together to see the whole, instead of just the separate parts.
Everyone carries their own “war wounds” into the next project if no one allows them time to vent and heal.
Sharing pain with others creates a strong trust in the group.
Results. After this discussion, the team is ready to look forward to the project they are currently on together. Use this increased trust to move into setting up ground rules for the project—a task that most teams avoid tackling.
Preparing for the Individual Team Vision
Learning Objectives. Each participant learns about his or her own vision for the project.
Required Equipment and Supplies. Contact all the participants with a friendly email that contains an example vision statement and instructions on how to create their own. As you did with the first session, 24 hours before the session send out a reminder email in case it slipped anyone's mind.
Step-by-Step Design.
1. Construct the email notice, and write up a generic example. An example might be “On this project, we analyze, code, and implement a sales solution.”
2. Send the example to each of the project team members. Ask each to create a vision for the project using three verbs and one noun. Connecting words are OK.
3. Send a reminder 24 hours before the session to remind people of the prework and of the session itself.
4. If people show up without their project vision, ask them to create one quickly before the session starts.
Make the example you create for the email notice very brief. Stress that the vision is their preferred vision, not necessarily the vision of anyone else. If people come late and do not have a vision, they will still be able to help prioritize the others’ thoughts. If no one has done the vision, take the time at the beginning of the session to let people silently and alone create one.
Top Priority
People will be honest in how they interpret the goal of the project even if they think it will conflict with the views of others in the group. Writing often liberates people from their armor of silence.
If people scramble to write their statement at the beginning of the session, that's OK. Often, writing is more honest when it is done quickly.
Be careful not to give them an example that influences their own response. Stay vague and instead focus on adhering to the sentence construction guidelines.
Results. Many people have never really stopped and thought about what a project is all about. This exercise forces people to be specific about what their role is on the project, and how the project fits into the strategies of the business.
The Second Session—Rules of Engagement and Team Vision
Learning Objectives. Each participant will participate in building a common list of rules of engagement to reinforce good collaborative team behavior owned by the team itself. In addition, the team will come to a consensus on a unified team vision that should create alignment among team members no matter their past projects.
Required Equipment and Supplies. As usual, you should bring a flipchart and markers to make note of rules of engagement and team vision ideas. You will also need Post-it notes, and, as for the first session, you should send out a follow-up email with the summarized flipchart notes to all of the participants.
Step-by-Step Design
1. Rules of engagement: Explain that rules of engagement are the rules that each member of the team will be expected to follow after they are established to make it easier to work together. Ask each participant to take out some Post-it notes. They will be putting one idea on each Post-it note. Give them between 5 and 10 minutes to think of rules that would be appropriate for the following categories that you have written on a flipchart page:
a. Email Etiquette (reply, CC, appropriate use)
b. Meeting Manners (lateness, preparation, interruptions)
c. Presentation Policies (length, purpose, questions, PowerPoint slides)
d. Phone Facts: (voicemail messages, checking, when to return calls)
e. Other:
2. As people begin to stack up their ideas in front of them, gather them up, and group them under the category that makes the most sense.
3. After people seem to slow down, read the ideas to the group. Gather more thoughts and ideas if they come up.
4. Break into five teams, and assign each team one of the categories. In 10 to 15 minutes, ask them to create “Rules of Engagement” from the Post-It notes in their category.
5. Have each team read their resulting rules. If possible, have them write them on flipchart paper so that people can review them multiple times. Ask for suggestions on how to improve these rules.
6. After each team's results are discussed, read through the entire list once more. Remind them that you will be emailing this list to them and ask for additional comments. This entire process takes approximately 1 hour.
7. Now onto the team vision exercise. Ask participants to take out the team vision that they created as prerequisite work. If some have not, encourage them to take a few minutes to create three verbs and a noun describing the vision of the project. Have participants write each word (the three verbs and one noun) on an individual Post-it note. Again, collect these and group them together on a flipchart page toward the front of the room.
8. When you have collected all the Post-it notes, read the results to the group. Discuss if any of the verbs or nouns are similar and whether they should be combined.
9. Ask the participants to take out a pencil and explain that each person has 10 votes. They may use their votes any way they want: They can put all 10 votes on one verb that they really feel strongly about or put one vote on 10 different words. They vote by placing a checkmark on the Post-it note containing the word they are voting for.
10. When everyone has voted, summarize the results. Select the top three verbs and one noun and write them on a flipchart page as a draft team vision. Lead a discussion around the meaning of each of the words and whether the words require additional adjectives or adverbs to make the meaning clear.
11. Send a follow-up email containing both the rules of engagement and the team vision.
Again, be sure not to “lead the witness.” Limit your comments to active listening statements (“Just to confirm, you said the product timeline was unreasonable?”) and content-oriented what and how questions (“What about customer relations did you find worrisome at the beginning?” or “How would the timeline be different if you were in charge?”).
You must carefully control the discussion. If one person accidentally says something that might offend another, be ready to jump in, enforce the ground rules, and get the group back to the task at hand.
Force the team to address the measurability and accountability of the rules of engagement. Lead a discussion around the question, “Who will enforce the rules, and how will they be enforced?” Take the team through the difficult conversation the members would probably rather not have.
When working with the verbs and nouns, it is often helpful to have people create one-line descriptions to ensure that everyone is clear what the words mean. For example, how would the team differentiate the verbs “manage” and “lead”?
Top Priority
At this point, the team has been through some deep discussions with each other, building a trust that will be necessary to move into the third session. Help the team celebrate this accomplishment so its members are aware of how differently they are communicating with each other. Emphasize that:
Sometimes it takes a little structure that may seem like overkill to ensure that teams work well together. Everybody needs something different, and it is important for a team to establish common ground for their interactions.
The team can use its vision to assign priorities to work and get over trouble spots when members disagree. Help the team focus the vision on the customer, not the team. For example, a team vision that says, “We support, defend, and empower the other team members” is not a project that will add any value to the business.
Results. The team is now ready to move into a hard look at the future of the project. Utilizing the rules of engagement and the team vision in the next session helps ensure that the team continues to move toward project success.
The Third Session—Scenario Planning
Learning Objectives. Now that the participants have agreed on rules of engagement and a team vision, it is time to get more specific. After completing this scenario-planning session, the participants identify how everyday decisions affect progress toward the team vision.
Required Equipment and Supplies. A flipchart and markers are necessary to take note of important statements in the session. As for the first two sessions, you should also send out a follow-up email that summarizes the flipchart notes so that everyone is on the same page.
Step-by-Step Design.
1. Post the team vision on the wall so everyone can refer to it.
2. Post the figure 4-2 on another flipchart page so all can see it.
3. Go over each of the quadrants. Explain that each describes a future state for the current project.
4. The overall process is to have team members first describe “a day in the life” at the end of the project and then describe, working backward, the events that would have to occur to make the project end up like that. This is done for every quadrant.
Figure 4-2. The four-quadrant approach for projects.
5. It saves time to split the team in half to work concurrently. If you have enough people to split into four teams, this will work as well. Each smaller group will take 5 minutes to document on flipchart paper what a “day in the life” would look like with the project as their assigned quadrant describes. Post this list of brainstorming ideas to get them started. Consider:
What are the stakeholders like?
What is the client involvement?
What is the budget like?
What has happened to the rules of engagement?
Has there been turnover or illness?
What are the deliverables of the project like?
What are some of the roadblocks and success factors?
What processes are being followed?
What is the organizational structure?
6. Have each team report back to the larger group and tell their stories. Encourage the listeners to check for inconsistency, for example, there is no budget but the manager buys pizza for the team every day. Discuss the stories and add to them if it makes sense. Keep this moving and limit the time to 10 minutes total.
7. Have the groups return to their analysis and list events that would have to happen starting today to make their quadrant, as described by their story, come true for 5 minutes. For example, if the stakeholders are currently very involved, what might happen to cause them to not be involved at all? Give the teams permission to be very creative here. They can think up and add any events that logically would contribute the cause-and-effect situation. The caveat is that the events have to flow together to support the entire scenario as described in the last step. Again, have each team report back to the larger group and share their events. Expect some laughter and some “burns” in this discussion. Again, ask the listeners to verify consistency. Limit the time to 10 minutes.
8. Ask each team member, one at a time, to go up to the table and indicate the following by initialing the poster:
where he or she thinks the project is now
where he or she thinks the project is going if nothing else changes
where he or she wants the project to go.
9. After this candid discussion, spend at least 15 minutes building an action plan. Ask team members to contribute what needs to be done to ensure that the project moves to the quadrant they want it to move toward. This will be the list that you will send out via email as a summary after the session.
Tips. During discussions, limit your own comments to active listening and content-oriented what/how questions, but be ready to control the discussion if one person accidentally says something that might offend another. Enforce the ground rules, and get the group back on track. Be especially aware when people are sharing their own beliefs about the current or future state of the project.
Watch out for lazy thinking. It is possible to do scenario planning without getting into much interesting thought. As teams share the results of their stories, challenge them to take it one more step. For example, if a team says, “Everyone has their résumé out” ask them what other behaviors occur because everyone has their résumé out.
By the time the team gets to action planning, the members may be a bit tired. If necessary, have them brainstorm actions using Post-It notes when a full discussion is not working out. Moving people around can help, too. If the action planning is not going very well because of lack of energy, try asking people to share ways to ensure that the project goes into the “straight into the trash can” quadrant. After a couple of minutes of this, complete with laughter, the team should refocus on the positive.
Top Priority
These three sessions combined will have helped the team begin to see one another as thinking individuals. The first session helped them build trust and a way of clearing out the baggage from previous projects. The second helped them create a common language for behavior and the vision of the project. In this final session, you have forced the team to look honestly at the future of the project and their contribution to either its demise or success. From all three, you have action plans to encourage them to adopt new collaborative behaviors.
To close this engagement, set up some time with the project manager a couple of weeks after the third session. Coach the project manager to use the language of the three sessions and enforce the rules of engagement.
Results. After the third session, the team is ready to return to the project with new thoughts. They will be able to see and talk about decisions and events that might trigger the project's slide into an unhappy scenario.
Measuring Your Success
The goal of the project manager at the beginning of this initiative was to get the team collaborating quickly to save this critical project.
Measuring the success of the project (how close to budget, how close to deadlines) is not really going to tell you if the team is collaborating; too many variables other than team collaboration can affect these numbers. Instead, consider setting up a baseline at the start of this project. Ask each individual team member to rate their “comfort with the team” from 1 to 10, 1 being low. Have them give you these numbers privately (perhaps even through email) and average the results. Repeat this exercise after the final session.
Debrief
In this chapter, you have learned about a pretty typical situation. Usually by the time the training department is called, the team has built a strong habit of not getting along. A common solution is a quick 1-day session, but this approach can actually add to the disagreement and bad feelings because the problem will seem to have been trivialized. Teams do not go bad overnight, so helping them choose to get back on track is not a quick process. Multiple sessions over time are necessary although the sessions do not have to be very long.
As was true in the scenario presented here, help requires more than just team building in the traditional sense. It requires rebuilding the trust the team had destroyed and replacing bad norms with good. The final activity for alignment used scenario planning to build a shared vision. All team interventions require building trust, positive shared behaviors and a shared vision.
The result of fostering collaboration is an aligned, resilient project team. This should greatly contribute to the success of the project, but if the project has other risk factors, improved team functioning may not be enough.
In the next chapter, you will read about a situation where a whole information technology organization has degraded into a large dysfunctional team. A breakdown in trust degrades everything else, and trust is very difficult to re-create.
Activity 4-1
Activity 4-2
Activity 4-3