There are so many complicated problems that go unsolved for the lack of one major ingredient: open and honest communication.
Not just honest, but more: radically honest. So honest that feelings bubble to the surface and change the energy in the room. So honest that there are NO doubts how people perceive the situation. They may disagree, but they get closer to understanding.
How can you solve a complicated problem without a clear understanding of both the facts and the feelings of the situation?
The answer is, you likely can't.
Creative, high impact problem solving requires open and radically honest communication.
The analysis could be jarring. Feelings will be exposed and activated. People will occasionally want to hide the facts or hide from the feelings. But unless we completely understand what they are it is incredibly tough to effective deal with them.
Get it all out on the table. Tell it exactly the way we see it. Adjust and change as necessary but get the dialogue going -- unthreatening, unjudging, non-concluding but open.
Once it is safe to say what we see hear and feal, it's safe to start solving the problem.
It's at the heart of complicated problem solving: communication.
What will you do today to encourage people to say what they are really thinking?
-- Doug Smith
-
The mastery of problem solving begins with the mastery of self. -- doug smith
-
Highly structured? Wildly improvised? Harmonic, or distorted? Fast or slow? Analytics help, but there's nothing quite like a touch of t...
-
Whenever I find a way to embrace joy some part of a problem fades away. -- doug smith
-
Do you try to do everything on your own? If you're part of a team, and especially if you are leading a team, it goes better by collabora...
-
Things change. Problems deepen. Solving a persistent problem might require us to let go of what has fixed it in the past. -- doug smith
-
Sometimes it's more important to be centered than to be right. -- doug smith
-
We're all in a hurry. Urgency is a way of life. When we're working on a problem it feels as if the faster we solve it the better. Bu...
-
We can push really hard on hard problems and not get anywhere. The problem may be too fixed to get fixed. It may be too tough to push over. ...
-
It's the system. Or maybe it's the process. It might not be you at all. It might not be your team at all. Personal problems come fro...
-
Problems are complicated. We need to think clearly about them, to analyze their causes. We also need to act quickly because, oddly or not, s...
No comments:
Post a Comment