Collaboration Cafe
Collective Brilliance
What questions is your team asking? Perhaps more importantly, what questions is your team NOT asking?
Your team’s ability to ask the “right questions” is critical to its success. Unfortunately, many teams, business leaders and organizations are consistently at the effect of prevailing culture, history and experience - for years, our academic and social cultures have insisted “having the right answer” is the best way to grow.
We see it daily in our lives:
- Students who have more right answers get higher grades
- Workers who solve problems quickly get more money and promotions
- Community officials are commonly elected based on having the right answer
- People are recognized as experts when they have more right answers
- Community project developers win the contracts based on having the “right answers” to what needs to be changed in a community
So it’s not surprising most of us have been programmed to have the “right answer”.
It seems having the right answer is all we need to succeed in life.
Having the Answer is Safe (but dangerously limiting)
Consider challenging this belief. What if our pursuit of the right answer is actually the most debilitating obstacle we could face?
You see, when we insist on having the right answer:
- We become attached to being right which drastically narrows our ability to create vision or get perspective (altitude) on a situation or project
- We develop a powerful black/white and either/or context (perspective) that kills off tremendous possibility
- We inhibit powerful creativity and access to new perspectives
- We focus only on winning the “race” rather than on developing long-term sustainability
- We frequently disempower our community leading to dissention, confusion and resignation
For example, American automotive companies have been espousing their automobiles as the answer to the American consumer for years. “Buy American, it’s the right thing to do” is a powerful and well intended message, but is not necessarily the right answer for the average consumer looking for improved style, comfort and fuel efficiency. What questions have the American automotive companies been refusing to ask?
As business leaders, teammates and organizations, we cannot afford to rely on just the “right answers,” for with that perspective, we risk in alienating ourselves, having our egos drive our actions, and failing to truly serve our constituencies.
So what’s the alternative?
Please take a moment to reflect on the following question:
What’s possible for you, your project and your team if you spent just 20% more time focused on identifying the right questions?
In Germany, major business organizations (e.g. Daimler, Siemens, and SAP), have entire departments dedicated to Grundsatzfragen, meaning “fundamental questions.” The primary role of this department is to create and discuss fundamental questions. Tragically, when many of these companies were acquired by a U.S. company, the Grundsatzfagen departments were eliminated.
What’s the lesson? Many believe questions are the life-blood of creativity, reinvention and evolution. Questions stir vision, purpose and passion. Questions lead to rich conversations that not only spur collaborative and intimate relationships, but ultimately lead to the most effective “right answers.”
Introducing the Collaboration Café
The core of this “café conversation” is based on the premise that questions are far more important than answers. Its intention is to break apart the familiar process of investing significant resources in having the right answer or depending on an “expert” to have the right answer, and replaces it with a collective process that focuses on discovering the right questions.
Highlights of the Collaboration Café
- Sharing knowledge, stimulating innovative thinking, building community and exploring possibility around real-life issues and questions
- In-depth exploration of key challenges and opportunities
- Deepening relationships and mutual ownership of outcomes with government, development and constituent groups
- Engaging the community in authentic, vulnerable conversation leading to deeper collective wisdom and action
The Collaboration Café process guides your team through an introspective and strategic process to: a) identify the real questions the team needs to be asking, b) develop answers through the collective wisdom of the group, and c) create strategic & tactical actions that can be addressed short and long-term.
The Café process is typically a two to three hour guided conversation in which participants gathers in small groups of three to four individuals at a “café” style table to share ideas, insights and opinions. Throughout the conversation, participants rotate tables two to three times. This allows ideas that started at the first table to mature, develop, and expand as new participants enter the previous conversation. The conversation wraps up with the entire participant group sharing collectively.
Results of the Collaboration Café
- Create new and innovative ways to increase team communication & involvement
- Create ownership across individual, team and organizational roles and initiatives leading to greater collaboration in ideas and action
- Identify and prioritize key issues along with actionable steps to address them
- Connect and integrate the heart, mind and bottom line of the project and organization
Letting go of always having the right answer may not happen overnight, but focusing on the right questions will move the project forward more quickly, create far more possibility and, ultimately, have you develop more fulfilling projects, teams, and profitability.
If your team is interested in developing a new, powerful, strategic and collective process that will deliver both relational, operational, and economic results, the Collaboration Café is a critically important process in which to engage.
Food for Thought (Literally)
Do you know what question led to the invention of the McDonald’s fast food empire?
Founder Ray Kroc asked, “Where can I get a good hamburger on the road?” He did not profess he had the right answer.
Proof that starting with the right question can truly pay off.
For more information on hosting a Collaboration Café for your team and organization, please contact:
Preston True
(248) 219-9435