How To Nail The Crucial Collaboration Stage Between Vision & Execution

This is the third in a series of 8 newsletters with lessons on innovation and thinking differently—accompanying the web series?The Making of Resignation . Thanks for reading!

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Let’s talk about misspent team potential.

I see the following tragic case study too often at both startups and big companies:

1: A leader identifies a problem or challenge.

2: The leader crafts a compelling, awesome vision in light of that challenge: “We’re going to climb this mountain,” they declare. They tell the right story about why this is important, why the time is now, and why their creative vision is worth going the extra mile for.

3: A team is gathered to execute that vision. The team has all the right ingredients: cognitive diversity , willingness to engage and debate respectfully , intellectual humility —everything you could ask for in a Dream Team , on paper.?

4: The team toils together and haul itself to the top of the mountain.

5: And then, once they get to the top, they realize that they climbed the wrong mountain.

Unfortunately, this happens too often. It’s way too easy—especially, ironically, when you have a team of capable people.

The more capable a team is of executing together, the easier it is to successfully execute the wrong thing.

And on the other side of the coin, the more visionary and persuasive the leadership, the more potential there is to convince the team to execute the wrong thing.

This is why I believe that Design Thinking is important at every stage and level of an organization, not just at the “design” stage.

How Problem-Solving Often Happens:

Far too often, leaders identify a problem, think through options, and then choose a strategy to make their team execute.

This problem-solving process might seem logical in the leader's head—and they might be really smart—but success is constrained by the leader's thinking, not the team's potential.

A Better Problem-Solving Process:

If, on the other hand, leaders take a page from Design Thinking, they’d do this instead:

Identify a problem, generate lots of options for tackling it, and explore the adjacent possible to obvious solutions, over and over.?You might call this brainstorming, but brainstorming alone is flawed , so instead let’s call it Step 1: Diverge.

After that, Step 2 is to Converge, or identify the BEST of those options. (I like to use Question Filters to eliminate options with negative second-order effects , and Wisdom Filters to eliminate options with negative moral consequences.)

Then you can move to Step 3: Execute.

How TEAM Problem-Solving Should Happen:

Ideally, these three steps: Diverge, Converge, and Execute should not be done in silos. If Diverge and Converge happen in the leader’s head, there’s a higher probability of sending the team to Execute up the wrong mountain than if some of the Execution team members are involved in the first two stages.

Now, it’s not feasible for a whole army to weigh in at every step in a strategic planning process. But it is feasible for representatives of that army to do so. This is a case for stacking your team with someone to play the role of Integrator (to use the term from the book Rocket Fuel , which Jay Davis recently got me into),?

And this is, I believe, how the magic happens in group problem-solving.

Here’s a recent example from my own experience:

A Case Study: Better Problem Solving By Including More Of The Team Earlier On

If you’ve been following this newsletter, last week you saw the first two posts in my series about lessons learned from The Making of Resignation , an ambitious independent TV pilot filmed in virtual production .?

The backstory is we created film tools that opened up tons of options as a filmmaking team.

But that optionality also created many more “wrong mountains” we could potentially send our team out to climb.

For example, the ending scene of our TV pilot has our main characters at a bar. One of them makes a life-changing decision, and then immediately has a wrench thrown into her plans. So our "problem" to solve was "how should we construct this bar conversation scene?"

What we did first as leaders… was the wrong way to do it.

We sat down and said, “Ok, bar scene… important, intimate conversation… has to be an inexpensive set… voila, let’s make it a dive bar.”

But then, thankfully, we stepped back and decided to bring our Integrator into the process.

This was our Production Designer, the leader of the team in charge of execution—of designing and building our set. We loved collaborating with him and decided to bring him on as a co-producer of the series itself. And that meant giving him a seat at the strategy table where decisions were made earlier than when Production Design usually gets involved.

The Production Designer asked us a bunch of questions about our vision for this bar scene, and then he and his team generated more options for how we might pull it off—by changing the script itself.

One of the options involved making the bar an outdoor rooftop bar, where our characters could look out at the world so full of possibilities. We could have the scene take place at a lovely Golden Hour where the view looks inviting. And then when the twist happens to our character, the sun could have gone down, and now when she looks out at the vista, the world would suddenly look daunting and frightening.?

This was a fantastic solution. And when we ran it through our Converge filters (primarily: budget), it turned out to be an even smarter option than our original idea. We gladly re-planned and rewrote the scene accordingly.

I’m happy to report that making our Production Designer a partner in our Diverge+Converge process ensured that we sent our team up the right mountain. Instead of making them execute a mediocre idea, they helped us figure out the right mountain to climb.

Watch Episode 3 of our web series below to see this in action:

In this webisode, our team's big challenge was literally integrating physical and virtual art—which as you'll see, is a terrific meta-analogy for our big lesson on how to successfully Diverge+Converge+Execute as a team:

Stay tuned for lessons from Episode 4 tomorrow!

– Shane