Does Your Team Know How to Think?

It’s a bit of a cliché that often when a company hires a consultant, it’s because you want to outsource the job of saying something that everyone knows but no one feels equipped to say. 

Recently I’ve realized that there’s a corollary function that consultants serve, especially those doing innovation and customer insight work. Sometimes the engagement is to build the team up to saying a thing they’ve been tiptoeing around, but more often, the point is to get team mates to say things that they think everyone else knows.

That’s where the real juice is.

Whatever bag of tricks a consultant brings to the engagement, part of the real value we’re delivering is a new context for individual team members to articulate key insights and working knowledge of their particular area. Because a thinking team is more than a group of smart people with complementary skills.

In fact, the smarter the people and the more complementary their respective skillsets, the greater the risk that each individual carves out their own territory which they can tend fairly independently. This works well, up to a point, as the leaders of different functions deepen their respective expertise and optimize their operations. But this model of teamwork has a hard ceiling for how effectively its members can think together to solve problems.

Relying on independent competence over team cognition especially sucks if you’re facing a new problem that doesn’t sit neatly within one functional area. Because the accrued implicit & explicit knowledge across functions, the stuff that doesn’t come through in dashboards and syncs, is essential to formulate a solution to a truly new challenge.

That’s where the tools of the consulting trade have real purpose and utility. I don’t hold any particular framework or workshop structure in high holy regard, but I do try to judge them consistently on three factors:

·         Does this help people articulate what they know?

·         Does it give them a way to understand what others know?

·         Does it have a path to bring those domains together?

Because usually, those are the three major barriers to really thinking as a team. If there isn’t time, space and the right toolset to ensure those three activities, you’re not going to be able to solve any problems together.