Even teams filled with brilliant thinkers can struggle with strategic conversations. Your team may excel at managing crises, setting priorities, or aligning on targets, but when it’s time to explore new possibilities, reconcile conflicting goals, or reshape the organization, many teams find ways to avoid these critical conversations.
The challenge is to stay open to creative, unconstrained thinking while holding the complexities of a tough issue. This is especially difficult when the stakes are high and opinions are strong. Most of us are trained to solve problems quickly, so when someone proposes a solution, opinions form immediately. The team starts reacting and polarizing. At that moment, the team stops imagining and shifts to advocacy.
By rushing past the emergent part of your conversation to converge on solutions, the team walks away from potential breakthroughs. Instead, using the simple process we describe below, you can get your team into “emergent mode” where new ideas surface, possibilities expand, and breakthrough thinking can happen.
“But We Have Great Conversations!”
In our work with leadership teams, we’ve seen many that are good at having wide-ranging discussions. And, we’ve also noticed patterns that pull teams out of “emergent mode” too soon. Several challenges get in the way of these open-ended conversations:
- Delivering results is the priority. Hypothetical thinking can feel unproductive when there’s pressure to deliver.
- Existing commitments hold us back. Teams hesitate to rethink their direction when milestones are approaching.
- Implementing new ideas is daunting. Having new ideas is one thing, but then you need to get alignment, make new decisions, commitments, plans, and communicate and manage to the new direction. We understandably resist making these kinds of changes.
- Pre-developed ideas limit exploration. When the purpose of a meeting is to discuss an already-formed idea, the discussion can easily devolve into debate, limiting fresh thinking.
- Repetitive discussions discourage new ideas. Teams often fall back into familiar patterns, which stifles breakthrough ideas.
Worse, many team dynamics hinder creative conversations.
- Some voices dominate, while others stay quiet.
- Teams struggle to think beyond their own functions and may feel hesitant to challenge higher-ups.
- If past attempts at risky ideas have failed, teams can be reluctant to try again.
Emergent Mode Conversations
Emergent thinking helps teams frame challenges in novel ways, uncover new goals and reframe problems to gain a fresh perspective. It’s about challenging assumptions, asking deeper questions, and seeing things differently.
In an emergent conversation, the team keeps evolving its shared framing of the problem rather than rushing to answers. The team can challenge accepted narratives and invite new ways of seeing. When a team sustains its emergent mode, they unlock high-value leaps in thinking.
Staying in emergent mode isn’t easy. As more people join the conversation, communication becomes more complex, and opinions multiply. For leadership teams, prior commitments and roles make it even harder to stay open to new ideas.
Still, imagine the possibility: your entire team thinking innovatively, generating new ways of framing your challenges, and then seeing new and better ways forward!
How to Get into Emergent Mode
Emergent mode is like a jazz combo exploring a riff together. There is a lot of listening, and when someone throws out a new idea, others often pick it up and run with it. Perhaps they build on it, or they transform it, and perhaps they go to a new place that becomes possible because of this prior insight.
Jazz musicians train for many years to learn how to have this kind of conversation. For a leadership team to jump into—and stay in—emergent mode, it must fully disrupt the usual way it communicates. Here are the “culture hacks” we propose teams use to short-circuit their own default ways of having a conversation:
1. No talking
Silence may seem like an odd way to spark conversation, but it works. Without talking, people can listen to their own thoughts and break free from unhelpful conversational dynamics. The ideas that emerge can be less incremental, more provocative. They can be judged more by their merit than their source.
2. No answers
Only ask questions. When a question is answered, the team’s thinking gets hijacked by the answer. If questions are left open—hanging in the air—they can do the work of suggesting new possibilities.
3. Use a shared display
Write down each question on a whiteboard, flip chart, or shared document so the whole team can see it. This creates a visible record of the team’s thought process, enables more thoughtful contributions, and slows the conversation in very productive ways.
4. Notice the possibilities suggested
When a question is asked, answers immediately flood our mind. That’s the power of a question. When you read someone’s question, set aside the answers that automatically start to form and instead notice the question’s implications and the new possibilities it suggests.
5. Take turns
Take turns so everyone gets a chance to engage and contribute. It also helps avoid common dysfunctions like dominating voices or jumping to conclusions.
6. Integrate others’ thinking and ask generative questions
When it’s your turn to contribute, you have choices. We’ve found that the most productive questions are the ones that (1) reflect the cumulative thinking of the team, and (2) invite everyone to explore new possibilities.
“Integrate” means that you’re listening to others’ questions and building on them:
“Generative” means that you ask a question that creates space and invites new thinking:
These are the mindset shifts we are looking for:
- from tactical issues to underlying dynamics
- from reductive framing to thought-provoking framing
- from constraints to possibility
- from advocacy to inquiry
A team with these new mindsets is definitely in “emergent mode.”
7. Reps
This will take some practice. Many contributions will not be revelatory. It may take time to get past the more incremental contributions. The team needs to keep going in order to relax and realize that they will get many more turns to contribute than in a typical conversation. Sometimes the team needs to get stuck in order to have a breakthrough. When you do get stuck, you will have the benefit of spacious silence to think more deeply.
When the team has mastered the tool, you will cover great distances very quickly.
8. Integrate and Act
Once you complete emergent mode, the team needs to agree on the new framings you’re moving forward with, align on new assumptions, and then plan next steps.
The team should also debrief the process, reflecting on what worked and what you might do differently next time. Each time the team enters emergent mode, you will get better at asking generative questions, embracing silence for deeper thinking, and valuing the collective wisdom of the group.
If you want to get a sense of how well your team is positioned for thinking together, take the Mindsets and Innovation mini-surveys of our Team Outcomes Model. These are short surveys that provide a sense of your team’s underlying capacity.
Conclusion
Emergent mode is a powerful way for leadership teams to think together more effectively. Your team will foster more innovative conversations, avoid the invisible costs of premature convergence, and make better decisions together, and grow your capacity to address complex challenges.
David Huffman, of Groupaya, has been coaching and consulting with leaders and their leadership teams for over ten years. Prior to Groupaya he was a founder/CEO of a tech startup, and previously to that a strategy consultant.
Copyright © 2024 David Huffman and Groupaya, Inc.