Today I want to share with you one of the tools, or a framework, that I refer to quite a bit in my own work when I’m working with teams who tend to get stuck on a problem and in particular, getting stuck on divergent ideas.
And what I mean by that is, you may start with:
Oh! there’s a project that we really need to work on, or a question that we really need to dig into. How can we solve this?
What ends up happening – and you may have experienced this yourself – is that one person will say,
Oh! Let’s do that!
Here’s another idea…
… oh hey, here’s an idea too!
And you end up having SO MANY IDEAS, you don’t know what to do with them!
You can’t get people to agree that THIS is the one we need to focus on, and that is the one we need to drop.
In his book, The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making, Sam Kaner describes the overall work cycle as the “Diamond of Participation”. In the middle of this Diamond is a process called the “Groan Zone,” where there’s so much that the group is holding in terms of ideas and possibilities… it’s really uncomfortable.
Nine times out of ten, this is where teams get stuck… and this is where groups give up. They say:
To heck with this! I’m not dealing with it any more! We’ll just push it under the rug… I’m not going to worry about it…
So, the key – and one of the things I really like to bring into my work – is finding ways to stay in this Groan Zone with your team… where it IS uncomfortable, but this is where all that good perturbation happens; where people have to live with this discomfort and really kind of get used to the ideas. And finally, someone’s going to start laughing and it will just become clear. The group will shift to an understanding that THIS is what they were talking about all along.
Again, the key is to wait this Groan Zone out… because if you give up too soon, you miss all the good stuff that can happen as a result of sitting with all these diverent ideas: letting them steep, being uncomfortable, and then bursting through that to converge on what you really meant all along.
