Scaling Conversations. Dave MacLeod
Читать онлайн книгу.
is that, in a small group, this phenomenon of surfacing important ideas, instead of counting the frequent ones, is just so obvious.
Picture any meeting or group discussion you've had with six or seven people. As you try to solve a problem, everyone shares ideas as others react. Eventually, someone shares a thought that many people resonate with and that becomes an important thought that guides the actions you all take together. This is an extremely common and standard way of people working together. It's a conversation.
Now picture, in that same meeting, someone was listening to the conversation and counting the frequency of ideas shared. After the group arrives at agreement to take an action, that person interrupts and says: “Sorry, we can't go with that idea. It was only shared once by Julie and there are several other ideas that were shared more often early in the conversation. We need to use one of those earlier, frequent ideas. They are more important.” That is obviously ridiculous. No one would do it. But maybe they would. And more importantly, maybe you would. In fact, you probably do. I'll explain.
Mistaking frequent thoughts for important thoughts is how most organizations inform decisions affecting many people. The annual survey run through HR is now a staple of almost every organization in almost every sector. These surveys are supplemented by special issue surveys/polls/pulses on topics such as Diversity and Inclusion, Culture and Professional Development. Some organizations even “pulse” weekly to measure everyone. During this now familiar process, a quantitative survey of questionable scientific value is sent to a few hundred or a few thousand people and the results are, let's be honest, hard to interpret. And for good reason.
I recall speaking with one leader who had the opportunity to talk with an employee who had anonymously provided an extremely low mark on their internal NPS survey. The question was phrased something like this: On a scale of one (low) to ten (high) how likely are you to recommend our organization to a friend or colleague as a great place to work? The employee gave an extremely low rating. Fortunately, they spoke up as the results were discussed by the team. “I gave that a one because all of my colleagues already work here and none of my friends work in our industry.” They had interpreted the question as asking whether their friends would be suitable employees, not as a measure of their happiness.
In another, very similar scenario, a parent came forward after participating in a school district survey, which had asked a similar question: On a scale of one (low) to ten (high) how likely are you to recommend our school district to your friends and family? They had also given a rating of one. Their explanation: All of my local friends already attend this school district and my family lives out of town.
Ah.
“But how do you feel about our school district?”
“Me? I love it!”
It's worth repeating: Closed‐ended responses are hard to interpret. To remedy this, along with the closed‐ended questions most or all surveys now have at least a few open‐ended questions asking for more context and explanation. In an effort to unpack various high and low marks in their surveys, leaders look to these open‐ended responses for context. Modern survey platforms even help disseminate these open‐ended comments by sending pages and pages of open‐ended thoughts to managers and leaders in the areas of business related to the feedback. Facing this firehose of feedback, much of it directly contradictory, what do we do? Count responses. Theme them by frequency. Put them in word clouds to see which ideas are most…Common. The more frequent, the bigger they are in the cloud and the more influence the idea has.
If those people were all in the same room, you would instinctively know better than to count the number of times something was said. You would be far more interested in how things resonated with people, how they learned and changed their thinking after being exposed to the thinking of one another. You'd be interested in what emerges in a conversation as the most important ideas, which people agree on, and you would take note of the areas where people don't agree.
In early spring 2020, education leaders in the city of New Britain, Connecticut, were conducting a review of their curriculum, just as the COVID‐19 pandemic was gaining momentum. Jonathan Costa, Assistant Executive Director of EdAdvance, a Regional Educational Service Center, wanted to scale a conversation and get the district faculty's thoughts and feedback on their return to school in the fall so his team could better respond to their needs.
“I was thinking we were going to get some instructional guidance,” Costa shared with our ThoughtExchange team. However, as he quickly discovered, “If you don't feel safe, you're not going to be thinking about building a good lesson plan.”
When Costa saw the trending thoughts in the conversation with approximately 800 people, it was clear that curriculum instruction wasn't what they were looking for. “I could feel the intensity of everyone's personal concerns for health and safety—their inability to imagine how we could safely bring people back to school without a guaranteed vaccine or therapy.”
The surprising results from that online conversation gained the attention of Dr. Miguel Cardona, Commissioner of Education for the State of Connecticut. He chose to further scale the conversation about safety and the return to school amidst the pandemic to include the voices of teachers and parents across the state. Over a weekend more than 40,000 people joined a conversation where thoughts were considered by one another more than a million times. Ultimately, the Connecticut Governor, Ned Lamont, utilized the voice of tens of thousands to inform critical decisions that literally affected the lives (and, sadly, deaths) of many Connecticut residents. Schools were closed for the remainder of the year.
So, if your organization still counts responses from open‐ended surveys, analyzes text, and mistakes frequency for importance, or if you start a conversation expecting it to be about one thing and find it ends up being about something completely different, your organization has something to learn from the lonely and powerful margarita.
CHAPTER 2 Why Do We Need to Scale Conversations?
Why do you need to scale conversations? I don't exactly know. Only you do. I know why I need to scale conversations. Everyone has their own problems, which they are trying to solve to achieve their own goals and aspirations; and, importantly, their own set of stakeholders, who expect to exercise their right to have their voice heard and who are affected by the decisions you make. You likely have employees, customers or community members affected by the decisions you make. Maybe you have all three. And, while I don't know why you personally need to scale conversations, I can help you discover why.
The key to understanding the “Why” is thinking in terms of capital. Capital is defined as the assets you have available for your purposes. Often narrowly defined as money, it's important to understand other forms of capital that are equally, if not more, important than the mighty dollar. To get at these, let's consider a term that in 2020 was used an unprecedented number of times, even more than the term unprecedented…. That word is crisis.
CRISIS
Crisis simply means a time of intense difficulty. All our communities, businesses, and personal lives contain crises. The real question about crisis is not if one will happen, but rather when one will happen next, and how soon will the one after it follow on its heels.
The year I write this book, 2020, has been a whirlwind of crisis. In a matter of months, the world has suffered more than a million deaths attributed to the Coronavirus. Economies are extremely uncertain. Racial tensions are increasing. Futures of all sorts are unknown. If there is one thing we can agree on globally, it's that we are experiencing crises.
We humans are resilient, however, and the good news is that you have survived 100% of your worst days so far. Not only survived, in many cases you've grown, learned, adapted, and even thrived. Crisis inspires change, and often for the better. As a result of the global unification around the issue of ensuring Black Lives Matter, billions of dollars (an estimated $7 billion at the time of writing) have been pledged by corporations to attempt to make irreversible and sustainable change in