Chapter 18

Clarifying the Situation

This is the entry point—the starting gate in any innovation, performance improvement, or problem-solving process. When you clarify, you sort out the real problem from the symptoms or distractions. You look at all relevant data. You measure all aspects of the situation. You ask probing questions. You work to understand the history of the situation and assemble as complete a picture as possible so that you are poised to address the most crucial issues or seize the most significant opportunities. This is your chance to identify that portion of the situation that will have the greatest impact if it is improved. If you succeed, your team's purpose will be clear. If you don’t, you may end up solving the wrong problem or moving ahead without enough data to support ongoing decisions.

Innovation is not all about coming up with new ideas. It begins here—figuring out which challenges are the most important and focusing your energies there. Far too often teams do not spend the time clearly examining the situation and defining the challenges. Without this investment of time to clarify, improvement efforts become like shooting in the dark. It is a scattered, inefficient, and ultimately wasteful approach. If we understand the situation well and appreciate the inherent challenges, we can target responses and gain traction from the very beginning.

Innovation is about changing things for the better. Here you know something is amiss so you begin the process figuring out what exactly is wrong. It's kind of like going to the doctor. You know something is not right; you don't feel well, so you seek medical advice. Your doctor cannot immediately prescribe a treatment without first conducting an exam and making a diagnosis—to do otherwise would be malpractice. Essentially, that is what is happening in the clarifying stage. We know we have something to take care of, a predicament (fixing something that's broken) or opportunity (making the most of a good situation). The diagnosis the team makes of the situation is what determines the focus for the remainder of the process. Choose the wrong focus up front and everything else becomes an academic exercise. Choose wisely and the tumblers to the innovation safe align and unlock.

As with every stage of the creative process, there is opportunity to use divergent and convergent thinking. Challenging yourself to think of new and intriguing data or identify unexplored causes of the issue is where divergent thinking plays a role. Some good questions to ask during this phase include the following:

• What is the history behind this situation?
• What has already been done and what has happened?
• Who is involved?
• Why is this important?
• What is the ultimate goal or desired end?
• What has yet to be explored?
• What else might be going on here?
• Where else might we find relevant information?
• What other data might be useful to know?
• What would each stakeholder in this situation see? What might be their perspective?

Once you feel you have a sense of the overall challenge, it's time to apply some creative thinking as you enter the convergent phase. Here you select the data that is most relevant and most essential to understanding the challenge at hand. The creative opportunity here is to consider unique and unusual information—factors or data that may not have been previously explored. Some questions to ask yourself when selecting important data include these:

• Where else have I seen this before?
• Are there common themes here?
• What stands out as particularly important? Unusual? Intriguing?
• What data give us the greatest insight into the situation at hand?
• What information have we not considered before?

Once you have completed this phase you should have a strong sense of the direction your problem solving needs to take. Ideally, you will have one or two open-ended questions on which to focus your efforts. In our story, Kate and Juan were able to diverge on data and with the team's help find several specific areas to explore. From there, they narrowed their focus on two areas in particular that were new—end-user needs and marketplace compatibility. But this wasn't the end of their work in this phase.

Their next task was to turn these areas of data, these buckets of related information, into challenge questions. They used stems such as “How to . . .” and “In what ways might . . .” to generate a series of challenge questions that invited solutions. Then they converged by selected the ones that seemed to yield the most potential for creative results and moved on to generating solutions to them.

Recognizing Your Team's Strengths and Weaknesses

In the story, Juan was the embodiment of someone with a clarifying preference. He needed time to explore the situation. He became absorbed in the data and saw its value. He was uncomfortable if he felt pushed to move forward too quickly. You can recognize people like Juan on your team because they will likely show the following traits:

• Focus on the task at hand
• Be methodical
• Be organized
• Ask lots of questions
• Be a critical thinker
• Look at areas that have yet to be explored
• Have a high need for information to feel comfortable with the project
• Focus on the details
• Be reluctant to move on to the next step
• Point out lots of obstacles
• Overload teammates with information

Not everyone likes to clarify. Some people, such as Damon or Elaine, have a negative reaction to this step. You can recognize people with a low preference for clarifying because they may do the following:

• Treat data collection in a superficial manner
• Lose patience with detail-oriented research
• Try to move the group into problem solving or action planning too quickly
• Become overwhelmed by too much information
• Become easily annoyed by those who ask a lot of questions

How to Move the Group Through This Stage

Clarifying is all about exploring the situation at hand by asking questions and gathering enough data to steep the team in a deep understanding of the situation. The team will show they have a solid grasp of the situation by creating a few open-ended challenge questions that target core issues. With these questions in hand, the team can move on to the next stage in the breakthrough thinking process.

Knowing the steps in a process and managing people within a process are two different—yet linked—challenges. Steering a group with varied preferences can be tricky, to say the least.

In our story, Kate's challenge was that her team had one strong clarifier—Juan—who seemed cemented into this phase. He couldn't let it go. He needed more and more information to feel he had a clear picture of the problem. Elaine and Damon, however, clearly lacked the interest or patience to work through the data. So to move things along, Kate used two simple techniques: one to help visualize the data and another to frame the right challenge to tackle.

To help understand and sort the data related to their client, Kate introduced the team to mind mapping. This divergent tool is great for identifying relationships with any assortment of information. The team here used it to get a big-picture understanding of all the factors their client was facing in their marketplace. From this big picture, they could zero in on those areas of the map that held the most promise for valuable and novel outcomes—innovative thinking.

Another technique the innovative team used pays specific attention to the fact that how we use language has a direct impact on our thinking. Before the team could move on from the clarifying stage, they had to find a way to focus on their challenge. To do this they used a technique specifically designed to produce the opportunity for great solutions by transforming potential barriers into open-ended questions that invite solutions—challenge questions. Closed-ended or negative statements are a conversational dead end—the pronouncements seem final, like staring at a wall with no clear way around it. Nonjudgmental, open-ended questions focused on the specific challenges at hand, by contrast, and invite solutions and participation. When we phrase a question openly and target it at the challenge we need to face, it invites new thinking and multiple responses.

For instance, in our story the team knew it had to approach the area they described as “market compatibility.” If Kate had just said, “Folks, we need some ideas on how to tackle market compatibility. What do you have?” the team would likely have sat there, staring blankly at their leader, their brains mired in the muck of the marketplace. Finding an innovative solution from this statement would be highly unlikely.

Instead, they explored different ways of framing the challenge so they could find other avenues for approaching the problem. They diverged on a few challenge questions such as, “In what ways might we reduce competition?” “How can we work effectively with other businesses?” and “How might we target new markets?” Instead of just stating the topic and asking for ideas, ask for questions that challenge the team to explore where the new opportunities might be. The conscious use of language can make all the difference by enabling the exploration of possibilities.

When moving a team through a process, it is always helpful to have a tool or structure to keep the team on task and engaged. The trick is to use the structure of the team meeting to get the results you need—this is when you need some thoughtful planning and design of your time together. Knowing where you are in the process and what needs to be the outcome of that step is key to getting results.

So how do you move a group through this stage?

• Know the preferences of your team. How might you predict they will behave in this stage of the process? Will they stay in it too long or not long enough?
• Know your own preference so you can manage yourself well during the process.
• Look at the situation from as many varied perspectives as you can to uncover more data.
• Be prepared to use some data-generating questions or a tool like mind mapping to help the team gain a clear holistic view of the challenge.
• When converging, consider which directions are more likely to yield innovative solutions. Which directions were previously unexplored? Which are you excited about exploring?
• Phrase challenges as open-ended questions. Use the stems, “How to . . . ,” “In what ways might . . . ,” “How might . . .” to help you create a challenge question that invites solutions.