“It doesn’t matter what you think. It matters what other people think.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. It matters what other people think.”
I said these exact words during a conversation with a client. As a leadership coach, this isn’t something I typically say; at least without context. Let me explain.
My client and I were debriefing a team session where I had used the Cynefin Framework to help the group get unstuck. We named aspects of their situation, wrote them on sticky notes, and placed each one in a Cynefin Framework domain: clear, complicated, complex, confused, or chaotic domain (see this post for an overview of the Cynefin Framework).
For one aspect, a team member said, “I think it belongs in the complicated domain. Everyone else thinks it's complex.” Aha! Differences in perspectives like this are great signals - like a metal detector signaling where to dig.
So, I invited the group to get more specific about the aspect - to break it down into two or more sticky notes and see if they could agree on the domains for those sub-aspects.
No one responded. Here are three potential reasons (and there may be more).
My instructions were unclear.
The group was tired or preoccupied with other concerns.
Team members weren’t interested in exploring the difference of opinion; they preferred to stay “right” and convince others of this rightness.
It could very well have been Reason 1 or 2. If it was Reason 3, however, we may have hit on a deeper reason this team is stuck. The aspect being discussed may belong in the complicated or complex domain. But, the issue of team members holding tightly to their individual perspectives? That, in my view, belongs squarely in the complex domain. The presence of entrenched disagreement is a strong indicator that we’re not in the complicated domain anymore.
When we assume our own interpretation is the right one, we risk blocking ourselves from noticing signals, engaging in generative disagreement, and seeing new possibilities.
So, what do we do in complexity?
We convene. We gain multiple perspectives.
We choose a direction of travel.
We create the conditions for patterns to emerge through safe-to-fail experiments.
Every team member’s perspective matters. But to move past stuckness, teams need to seek understanding across perspectives, make good enough sense of the issue, agree on a direction, and take action. So, the question shifts from “How do I make sure people understand what I think?” to “What’s everyone seeing and how do we move together from here?” Which is a more nuanced way of what I actually said :)
