Seeing the same elephant

In the Indian parable of the six blind men and the elephant, each is very convinced about what he is facing from the way he is interacting with it. Yet when they share with each other what each thinks the strange creature they are facing is, it is clear there is no cohesion in their views.

This often happens in organizations. A team is asked to deal with a challenge, but people are hesitant to ask questions for fear of looking incompetent or unsure. After all, we are paid to solve problems, so when we are given one, we need to deal with it. A few days or weeks or months later, gaps and cracks start to appear. The solutions are not really working. What HR thought is not really compatible with what the production or the finance team has in mind. A lot of bickering appears about whose solution is better and why this or that won't work. Very rarely does the team go back to the starting point: what is the problem we are dealing with ?

That is a critical phase we spend a lot of time on when we apply the Action Learning methodology with a team facing a challenge. In fact, we will not talk about or suggest solutions, until the team has reached a shared understanding of what the problem is, and has written it down. Only then will the team go into looking for appropriate solutions. Spending time to reach this key point has clear advantages, as was demonstrated again in a recent experience.

The team had already spent 2 sessions (1/2 day each time) to work on the challenge, to look at it from different angles. Asking questions and identifying actions each of them took after the session, to try and get a better understanding. A better understanding of the problem the organization is facing, not a better understanding of solutions. And when, during the 3rd session, the team came to a consensus about what the real root cause of the problem was (and wrote it out in full, see the picture), two things happened:

(1) there was a real sense of achievement and of having made progress ...
(2) with a clear agreement of the problem, the solutions became almost obvious - although maybe not easy to implement.

The first point about sense of achievement is really critical. After all, the team had "only" reached a shared agreement of the problem ! They hadn't even solved it yet !! However, the positive energy that had built up in the earlier sessions, and the clear consensus of where the root cause lay, ensured that the team could quickly come up with a very comprehensive list of proposals (in the 4th and final session) that was proposed to management. And it was a clear team effort, with everyone feeling 100% at ease with the solutions.

When you keep on dealing with the same problem year after year, ask yourself the question: is my team really seeing the same elephant ?