Sunday, May 22, 2016

About questions and onions !

When a team experiences Action Learning through a first discovery session, the questions they ask can be a bit haphazard. It sometimes feels like there is a competition for asking as many questions as possible. This can frustrate the problem presenter who might think that this “great new tool” that would help with the problem feels more like an inquisition ! And indeed, not all questions are created equal. Team members are aware during the session what questions are really powerful and helped the problem presenter, and which ones were not really helping that much. So after debriefing about what they learned, they sometimes ask me “But how should we ask more of these great questions ?”.

I prefer to avoid any attempt to “teach” which questions are great and which questions are average. After all, it is the person who receives the question who determines whether that question helped to open up new thoughts, or whether it felt more like a burden to answer. There is no such thing as “the one great question” that works in any situation !

It is not really a matter of great questions versus average ones, but more about the extent to which the questions help the problem presenter think. I use the metaphor of an onion (see the picture) before we start the session. I explain that there is no harm in asking the questions that are at the level of the outer peel of the onion. When exploring a new issue, team members need to get basic information. These questions are useful for the team members to start to know about the problem, but they will not really help the problem presenter develop new ideas. For new ideas to be explored, team members need to try and move “towards the center of the onion”.

The team typically gets this concept very well. In a recent session, I asked the team what they thought about the kind of questions that were asked. One team member replied “We are asking questions at peel of the onion !”. The team immediately picked this up and confirmed that they would have to try and move to the center of the onion if they wanted to help the problem presenter. A similar intervention when I feel a team is asking rather superficial questions is “Team, from the questions we have been asking so far, have you seen the problem presenter having to think a lot or not ?”. The metaphor of the onion comes up almost immediately.


Avoid to teach what a great question looks like. Invite the team to think about questions that help the problem presenter … think !

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Communicating is not collaborating

I was at an interesting experience-sharing event last week where the speaker popped up "Collaboration Tools" on the screen. Whenever I see collaboration my neurons start to fire because I believe this is the key to successful team performance.

And so I was paying full attention when he explained that in his organization, many of the younger employees were steering away from email but using the "collaboration tools" Line or WhatsApp pretty much all the time. And that's when my neurons went in overdrive. Do business leaders really believe that Line or WhatsApp, or emails for that matter, are evidence of collaboration ? It is maybe useful to distinguish communication from collaboration ...

Communication is exchanging information. With modern tools, I can communicate with 100s of people at the same time. But getting a "read" message in Line or WhatsApp does not mean anything but that. It does not mean "I received your message and will act on it". So although Line and WhatsApp may be cooler than email, not much has really changed.

Collaboration is when people work together to a common objective. And that does not work with 100s of people, and although communication is important, it is very different from collaboration. Collaboration requires people to be really connected and for things to actually get done.

If Line were a collaboration tool, there would be loads of great collaboration going on all the time, most of it on the BTS skytrain system in the morning. Exchanging information is good but don't confuse this for things actually getting done.