BA’s Guiding, Challenging, Soft and Squishy, Crucial, and Team-based Conversations
De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats
In this post, I want to share Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats model and how it can help you in facilitating much richer discussions surrounding your technical decision-making. But first, I want to share another facilitative model with you, though it’s more of a dynamic that occurs between individuals and teams who are trying to create new products, solve new problems, add features, or generally compete in their respective markets with creative solutions that drive customer value.
Divergent vs. Convergent Thinking
Divergent – many possible answers. Convergent – one answer.
One way to think about any team-based discussion that needs to lead towards a decision is that it occurs in two phases. The first phase is focused on divergent thinking. In divergent thinking, you want to get ideas on the table, so consider this team-level process as equivalent to brainstorming.
When brainstorming, you want to get ideas and options on the table. You don’t want to judge, prioritize or analyze them. You simply want to generate as many as possible. If your divergent timeframe is too limited then team members will feel as if they haven’t had a fair sharing or vetting of their ideas.
As a facilitator, letting a team ramble on or throw around crazy ideas is a perfectly sound thing to do. In fact, if you don’t do it, it will lead to less buy-in and less permanent decisions. Quite often, you’ll want to leave half of your meeting time-box for divergent conversation in order to foster engagement across the entire team.
Then, mid-way through the meeting, you need to turn the discussions around and focus more on convergent thinking. That is, you want the team to start winnowing down ideas and converging on a single decision or at least a very small subset of options to decide upon later.
If you recall, I presented some decision-making tools in my last post. For example, as part of closing down or converging on an option, you could do some of the following:
- Vote on the options on the table; define loose, strong or unanimous majority before voting.
- Prioritize the options, keeping the top 2-3 in play for a second round of discussion.
- List pros/cons for each option, leading towards prioritization and elimination.
- SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) analysis for the top 2-3 options, then discuss and converge on a selection.
- Select a decision-leader to lead the convergence discussion; if resulting discussion exceeds your time-box, decision-leader decides.
Usually, the above are led by the facilitator who is at the front of the room, actively collecting data from the team at a whiteboard or flip chart and converging towards a decision.
It’s this oscillation between divergent and convergent thinking that is the hallmark of good facilitation when making important or groundbreaking decisions. Striking the balance between over/under discussion and fostering a whole-team view is crucial. I usually allocate set times for divergent, interim, convergent, and decision-making close as part of this exercise, even allowing these themes to cross over multiple meetings.
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