 You guys probably read the synopsis on this, right? Today's session is Teamwork 8 Always Easy. And all I'm going to share today is a few tools that I've learned over the years and that we use to help with different issues on teams in terms of problem solving and how we actually come together to reach consensus, right? Especially as teams get larger and larger, this gets to be more and more difficult. One of the things that I noticed this morning, though, in all of the presentations so far, there was some cat visible. So as a member of Groupon, I feel like it's kind of gratuitously, I have to add at least one, right? So if you don't recognize that, that's the Groupon cat. A little bit about myself, not too much. I swear most of this is going to be about the material itself. So I am Doc Norton, right, with Groupon, Global Director of Engineering Culture. If you don't know what that title means, that's all right, we're in the same camp. I think what it means is folding the social map, right? Helping to bridge connections among a very large group of people and help improve communication and help us to work together as one cohesive unit, building awesome solutions, right? I am married. I have two children. And I tell you this, only as a precursor to share with you, I'm also a grandfather. All right, so that's all it about me, right? So there's three things that we're going to cover today. The first, simple team decisions, making just really easy, quick decisions. Then when we start getting to more complex decisions, how do we form the right team? How do we make sure that the right people are involved in the conversation? And then finally, thinking in parallel, which is really about a way of solving some complex problems, right? So let's jump right into it. Simple team decisions. These are relatively low risk, low complexity, high certainty type decisions, right? Think like the binary type stuff, right? Just flipping a coin, heads or tails. Should we do this or should we do that? And over time, what I've found is when you've got a group of eight or 10 or 20 or however many together, and you raise these types of questions, conversation has a tendency to just kind of keep going on and going on and going on. And oftentimes, what we discover is that we're all in agreement, but we've just got a slightly different perspective on this particular problem, right? Or this particular question. So I'll give you an example. Let's say we're a startup company, and we decided that we want to actually start offering coffee in the office instead of having people go out and buy it at the corner place. And the question is simply, should we offer Pete's coffee? And it seems like it's a yes or no question, but if we're having a conversation about it, that conversation can go on for quite a while. So we've actually started using something called Fist 5. Does anyone here familiar with Fist 5? All right, so it's a pretty simple process, right? So rather than just yes or no, it's a continuum of agreement. And the way that we typically do this is kind of Roshambo style. So we don't get any anchoring. The lead of the team or the boss doesn't say, I think it's a great idea. And then everyone kind of goes, sure, me too, right? So Roshambo style, we just basically put the fist out, one, two, three, and you throw whatever number is appropriate for you, right? A fist is basically saying like, look, I disagree. I actually require changes. We've really got to talk about this. I cannot support this thing. One says, look, it needs discussion. I've actually got some change suggestions, right? I'm not adamantly opposed, but I'm not convinced that I don't want this thing. Two is I desire discussion. There's some minor concerns. As we cross from two to three, we start to get to a point where people are kind of like, okay, maybe we can do this. So three is I'm not in total agreement, but I would support this, right? So I don't really care for Pete's coffee all that much. But if everybody else wants that, that's cool. I'll just add more cream and sugar, right? Four is, hey, I think this is a good idea. I'm actually gonna support it. And five is like, holy crap, I will help make this happen. I will go out every morning and I will buy the coffee and I will bring it into the office, right? I am in total support of this. Any questions on this? It turns out this was really simple, right? And a lot of times, even as the conversation kind of ensues, rather than letting it just continue and continue and continue. I usually will do this right at the very beginning of a session, we'll say, hey, should we offer Pete's coffee? What do you guys think? Let's just do a quick fist to five. If it turns out that everybody's three and above, we're done with the conversation. Let's just roll with it. If everybody's a two and below, we are also done with that conversation. We're not gonna do that, right? If we get a mix, then let's talk about the pros and cons, why what's going on. And at some point during that conversation, if you get kind of a feel for things that are listing one way or the other, go ahead and call for another fist to five vote. Get it quick, right? So we can actually shorten the timeframe that it takes to make these decisions. So this is a pretty simple one. Simple decisions, simple teams. I want you guys to try it, all right? So I'll actually start the count and then I want you guys to throw your numbers. Go ahead and throw them up in the air if you want, right? So the question that I have to you is, should we move on to the next and more complex topic, right? So we ready? One, two, three. Threes, fours, fives, note, any one, twos or zeros? I got a two. Okay, so two in the back. What's up? Usually on something like this because they're fairly simple decisions, if the whole group is at a one or two, then we look at that as like, there's general disagreement on this. Let's move on, right? There's another option that we should be considering, like, all right, so maybe it's not Pete's coffee, maybe it's Starbucks coffee, or maybe it's in a caribou or whatever, although caribou is Pete's now, right? So typically if it's, you know, if everybody's below two or below, we move on. Cool, any other questions, thoughts? All right, so that's a simple one, right? But it actually ends up being extremely effective and it's something that you can do at any time during a conversation. Let's get into some more complex stuff, right? So first of all, when we think about collaboration, and so let me, I'll step back a little bit. The reason that I use these tools, I'm really looking for an environment where everyone is involved, right? And the challenge when we get large groups and we want everyone to be involved and we're looking for consensus is things can go on forever and then we have a tendency to push for, hey, someone just needs to be in charge and make this decision. So these help us to kind of, you know, keep everybody involved or the right folks involved. But does collaboration mean everyone? Should every single person be involved in every single conversation? And I think really if we look at it realistically, all of us would kind of answer, no, but I want to be involved, right? So let me give you an example of, something that a relatively simple decision, but this is no longer binary. This is no longer a yes or no, right? This is something where there's more dimensions to this. There's more involved in the decision. For example, what kind of chairs should we purchase? And if we look at this, we can see at Groupon, there's all different kinds of seating, everything from trees to boulders to wooden benches to actual conference room chairs to, you know, work chairs in the back there, right? What type of seating should we actually be offering to people? Seems like it's got enough dimensions to it that it's gonna invoke a bunch of conversation. And in conversations like this, here's something that I've typically seen, kind of a progression of what happens, right? Everybody kind of starts to chime in and they've all got different views, different opinions on this thing. As you look at this feedback, these statements, is there anything in here that kind of stands out to you as maybe a concern or something that's a little interesting? Anyone? Price? That's exactly it, right? We've got people who are literally saying, well, it doesn't matter to me, but, I don't really care, but, right? And I've actually seen this happen in hip chat or in a G chat, right? Some kind of a group chat. We actually have a written record of this. And you can watch the timestamps and you can watch the traffic. In one case, we were actually talking about what type of rigs did we wanna have for our standard rig for all developers, right? Do we want wireless keyboards or wired keyboards? Did you want full or short? Did you want mice? Did you want trackpads? You know, right? What do we want? And this conversation was just going on in hip chat and a lot of activity. And the activity started to wane. Started to wane. And then this one dude jumped in and said, well, it doesn't really matter to me, but we could go with Microsoft Organomic, right? And then all of a sudden, all this chatter about why that's a bad idea or a good idea or whatever. And then it kind of starts to wane again, wane again. And the same dude jumped in and said, well, I don't really care, but, and threw out something else. So I DM'd him on the side and I was like, man, you keep saying you don't care, but you keep chiming into the conversation. He said, well, I don't care. I really don't. I have carpal tunnel. And I have a specific rig that is for me so that I can be as comfortable as possible, no matter what you decide. When I show up to that workstation, I'm going to unplug whatever you've put in and I'm going to plug mine in. I really don't care what decision you guys make. So then why do you keep chiming in? Well, because we're all in this together. He said, ah, okay, I get it. So he was invited to the conversation. So he's taking place. But his level of commitment to the final solution, right? His actual, he's not really engaged in this thing in terms of what the outcome's going to be. He already knows what he's going to do and he's got a special reason for that. So how do we actually form the right team to make these kinds of decisions without someone in authority leaving people out? So here's where collaboration contracts come in. So collaboration contracts, where these came from, we were faced with this exact kind of situation. And at the time, I was studying some of Juergen Apello's work. He just released Management 3.0 and he's had a couple of books prior to that and he's, in the Netherlands, he's very large in the agile space. And he had this construct that he was talking about in one of his books that was a delegation agreement, right? And the idea was that I am someone in authority and I'm going to impart unto you some responsibility. And when I do that, I wanna make it clear what the expectations are, right? I either want you to go ahead and just make the decision and it will be done or I want you to go gather information and bring it back to me and I'll make the decision or, and there's this whole continuum of kind of decision-making. I really like the notion of the continuum of decision-making but what I didn't like was this notion of there's someone in authority who imparts upon to others a level of power for a brief period of time, right? If we're really all in this together, how do we kind of turn that on its side? How do we eliminate the, I'm the boss and here's what you're allowed to do and turn it into we're a team, here's what we're gonna do together? So I took that basic construct and we adjusted it a little bit. It's really fairly simple. You've got five levels along this continuum, right? You've got explain and what that means is I am the decision-maker. I think that for whatever it is that we're talking about right now, I am the individual who should actually make this decision but I will explain to you why I've made the decision, what the value is to the team, et cetera and then we're gonna go forward from there. I've got a consult, right? Now that means that I still think that I am the decision-maker on this but I really wanna hear other people's input and opinions before I make that final decision, right? And agree is I actually want to work with some folks and when we come to consensus, then we'll move forward. If you are an advice, you have information that you wanna make sure the decision-maker is aware of. You've got an opinion that you want to share but you're willing to let someone else make that decision and you'll gladly abide by it, right? And then there's the inquirer who basically says like, look, I don't actually, I really don't wanna have a whole lot of involvement in this. It doesn't matter to me but I do of course wanna know what the outcome is, right? So what we do is whatever the question in front of us, we have people assign themselves to these roles. Based on this particular topic, I think that it's appropriate for me to be in the agree role. I wanna be a part of the decision-making process, right? I wanna agree with that decision before I move forward or I think I'm good being an advice or whatever it might be. The questions on this so far? I'll give you a couple of examples of how this actually plays out, right? So let's take a look at this situation. So here's a team. The specific thing that they're dealing with is not necessarily that important but let's just say that this is an HR policy concern, right? Joe is the VP of HR. Alice is our of counsel, right? And the rest of the team has varying roles. Some of those we'll cover later, right? So it's an HR policy concern. Again, Joe is the VP of HR and Alice is our of counsel, right? She's our legal advisor. So as you look at this contract after they've actually signed up for the various roles, does anyone see a challenge here? Alice, and why is that? Right, so we have Joe says, I'm the final decision maker but I will seek guidance from others before I make that decision. And Alice says, I want to agree with this decision before we move forward. But we can't have both of those things, right? Joe either has to say, yes, I will work with Alice until we come to an actual mutual agreement and then we move forward or Alice has to be able to say, you know what? I trust Joe enough. I will advise but I will defer to him for the final decision, right? And one of the things that this does for us, a lot of times in a team when we're working together, we actually have these expectations. We hold these expectations but they're hidden because we haven't exposed them, right? So we're all sitting here talking together and we feel like, hey, this is something where we're all gonna come to consensus but the reality is Joe feels like, no, this isn't a consensus thing. This is my bag, baby. I'm gonna make this call, right? And it creates this tension on the team. So by actually exposing it, we know what people's expectations are and we can have a realistic conversation about, well, wait a minute. What do we think is appropriate? So in this particular case what ended up happening was after a little bit of conversation, Alice said, you know what? Joe, we've worked together for a while. I've seen you make a lot of really solid decisions. I know that you take my input. I trust you and I'm gonna go ahead and step down to an advice on this and that'll allow us to actually move forward, right? Give you another situation and I actually see this happen quite a bit and I've always found it very interesting when it does happen. So in this case what we have is, this is a key financial decision now, right? Susan is the CFO and she actually has all of the analysis and data that's needed to inform us about this decision and right now it's information that she has that others don't, right? Of course, Alice is of our council. Tom is the CEO and Arnie and Frank are department heads, right? So as we look at this contract as it's laid out so far, do you see any challenges with this? Right, right. We've got potentially two things here. One, we've got a team of four individuals that would need to come to a mutual agreement before we could actually move forward and then the individual who really has the most information and for whom this happens to be really her area of responsibility and her area of expertise has stepped down to an advise. So I've actually seen in cases like this where someone else on the team after looking at where did the names fall in the contract will say, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Susan, I'm a little uncomfortable with this idea, right? I really think that you should be either a consult or an agree. I don't think that you should just be an advise and Susan might say, well, you know, but I hate to upset other people and I want it to be a mutual thing and the team could talk about it and say, no, you know what? We actually think it's really important that you kind of step up into this role and a lot of us are, we're okay with that and after that conversation, what ends up happening is, in fact, Susan does step up into that role and several people that were in the agree now feel comfortable that the right people are involved in making the decision and actually step down to an advise. Right? This makes sense, questions on this? Where this really comes into play is when you have a team that needs to work on multiple things, right? This is where you start to really see this kind of thing shine. So I'll give you an example. At Groupon, we have interest leagues and interest leagues are these cross-cutting groups. So the Java League, as an example, is developers from multiple teams, multiple offices who all have a common interest in Java. Right? And so they come together as a group and they talk about all kinds of things. Should we be using dependency injection frameworks and which one should we use? What kind of testing strategies and standards should we have? You know, what kind of framework should we be using? What kind of, you know, should we be using static analysis tools and what would they be? And right, there's a bunch of different things we want to talk about. There's a bunch of different things that we want to actually make decisions on. And if all of us are involved all of the time in all of the discussions, nothing moves forward. So every once in a while what we'll do is we'll actually have a meeting. We'll identify what are some of the things that we think are really critical that we should be focused on and trying to move forward? We'll do some fist-to-five on those. We'll actually do some dot voting to get them kind of organized into priority order. Then we'll lop off the bottom portion, just focusing on the tops. We're focusing on the priority stuff that we all agree is priority. And then we'll run collaboration contracts against all of those things. And it helps to think, right, when you have like these five things to talk about and you're looking at that, if we address them one at a time, you might feel like, well, I want to agree with all these things. When you realize like, whoa, wait. If I had to agree with all of these things, I've got to be involved in all of these conversations. What's really important to me and where do I think I actually have the most, to provide, et cetera. And so you sign up on each of these topics for a different level. And then we have the conversations about, do we have conflicts here? Do we think this is right? And now we've formed a much smaller subset of the individuals that can move forward and bring information back to that larger group, right? So the one at a time, this feels a little funny, when you start to actually look at it in a real context where you've got lots of things to deal with, it actually helps quite a bit. So I want you guys to try it. Now in order to do this, this is something of a hands-on workshop, right? So we've got this exercise and then we've got another exercise that we're gonna do after this. And I need you to kind of, I need you to get into teams. A good team size, somewhere between eight and 12. And I think we've got enough in the room for maybe five, six teams, right? That looks like it's eight right there. So that probably works out really well. If you guys can kind of self-organize into teams of approximately eight or 12. And then I've got some tools I need for you. All right, we got our general teams. Cool, so here's a scenario, right? You're a startup company. Startup software company, right? You have 34 employees. They're all located in Dearborn, Michigan. Your primary business is Agile coaching. But you started working on your own Agile project management tool for use internal and now you feel like, hey, you know what? Maybe we could actually take this to market. This thing's pretty sweet. We're gonna revolutionize Agile software, right? Because who isn't? All right, so you wanna take this tool to market. The name of the tool is Agilistration, right? So first thing I need you to do, I need you to make a name tag and we're gonna use the post-it notes for the name tags, right? I need, from each team, I need a facilitator and then we can kind of go on down, right? Usually what I do is it's usually round tables. So we'll say like, you know, the person closest to the front of the room is the facilitator and then to the left just go around and take these roles. So to make a name tag, I want your actual name on there and then your fictitious role, right? So I'll say for each team, the person sitting or the person located closest to me for that team is the facilitator. And then kind of to their left, you know, figure it out, right? It's not like it's super, super important. If your team is larger than 11, then, you know, go to eight, pick up QA engineer, follow back down again, right? It's just a never-ending loop. It ends when you run out of resources, right? The sequencing isn't super important except that I wanna make sure we have a facilitator and I don't want two CEOs or two CFOs, right? One's enough. All right, so now what we're gonna do, this is where the facilitator's gonna have to come in, right? I'm gonna need a little bit of help there. On one of those sheets of paper, I want you to quickly lay out a simple collaboration contract, right? Just basically make some headings, explain, consult, agree, advise, acquire, probably horizontally along the page. And then what I'd like you to do as a team is for like the next 10 minutes, we're gonna try and get through some of these topics as collaboration contracts, right? So in your assigned role, for choosing conference room chairs, we'll start with that one. I want each of you to take your name card and stick it in the column that you think is most appropriate for your role on that kind of a decision, right? And then let's have a conversation about, are there conflicts there? How do we resolve those conflicts, right? And let's see if we can actually get to a collaboration contract that we think is appropriate for the team. And then if we can do another one, that's great, right? I'm gonna kind of walk around and if there's questions or whatever, I'll help you with those. So there is one thing I kinda wanna warn folks about, right? We have a tendency when we run these exercises because the titles are contrived and the situation is contrived. We have a tendency to start to play a caricature of the role, right? So oftentimes we'll see like the person who's assigned CEO becomes a very hard-headed bully. The person who's assigned CFO becomes a penny-pinching money controller, right? Play the role as if it was actually you in that role. Let's take a break for a second here. Everybody's made it through the first one, right? All right, so kind of look at each of the teams as you worked through that one kind of independent of the others. What were your observations? What things came up? How did you guys kind of get to your consensus, right? Right, right. Something that this group did that I saw that I thought was really interesting. I wasn't observing everyone at once, right? But one of the things that they realized right away was, hey, you know what? If the CEO goes first in a real company that kinda anchors the decision, right? You may have felt like, yeah, I should agree with this. And the CEO says, I will explain. And then you're like, yeah, I was just gonna advise anyway. So the way that we actually do this, a lot of times a group I would end up doing is I create just simple Google form or whatever, right? I'd like to build an app for this relatively soon, but a simple Google form. And so the idea then is that you see the different continuum of options and you choose where you think you belong and you submit it. Then you see what the rest of the group said. So that like is a way of easily avoiding the anchoring, right? Yes, yes I do. I think that what ends up happening, if we really wanna come together as a team, when you get someone in authority that speaks first, it changes the way the group actually behaves. And you may lose opportunity. Someone actually has a very good perspective on this. Someone actually has information and the rest of the team doesn't, but they're willing to defer because they don't want that tension, right? So I mean, it's the same reason like, I don't know how many of you guys do estimating, but the way that we typically do estimating is a planning poker, right? We a lot of times do the Rochambeau thing as well. Like, all right, one, two, what's the... Because if the lead says, well, I think it's a two, you know, that tends to kind of anchor the team, right? It's not bad to have the conversation after the fact, but I like to see where people actually feel that they are and we can have that talk. So what they actually did was they ended up using Fist to Five to get agreement on how they were going to lay their cards down in what sequence, right? To try and resolve that in real time in this group. So I thought it was kind of cool to use both tools. A couple of times I've done this workshop and whenever we're doing these kind of contrived situations, I've found more often than not, we end up in situations where the CEO and the CFO are both going head to head and they're looking to go, oh, great tool. It didn't solve our problem. What are you gonna do now? And my response is usually, dude, I've not found a tool yet that solves asshole, right? Like, if you don't trust each other, there's very little that we can do to help with that, right? You wanna come lay on my couch? Great, we can talk about it, but you know. So yeah, try and act as if you actually would because I'm assuming that most of you are in fact, in fact, I'm assuming all of you are in fact good people, right? And you want to actually come to some kind of agreement. So the interest leagues, so there's a couple of ways. So when we started the leagues, we sent an email to everyone in development and said, hey, this is what we're doing. We've got a couple that have started and the way that we actually started the first couple was they already existed. There was some team in this office, let's say there was a team in Chicago that would get together on a regular basis and talk about closure. And we said, that's fantastic. Let's take that team as a nucleus and let's spread that to the rest of the organization. Let's invite others in that are interested and get this conversation going across our offices, across our divisions, right? Then after we had a couple of those actually up and running and working, we sent out an email to all of development saying, here's what we have, here's what we're looking to do. If you have ideas for interest leagues that you think would be a benefit to the organization, let us know and then we've basically created a framework to help people get them launched and get them going, right? Which by the way, when you're looking at an organization, especially a large one, we grew through acquisition and so there's a lot of different kind of pockets of people, lots of different opinions, et cetera. There's a couple of different ways that you can sort of create standards, right? One is that someone at the top can say, this is the new standard and from henceforth thou shalt, right? The other is you can look deep into the organization and find excellent things that are going on and give them a platform and help to spread them, right? So we choose the latter. We choose to look into the organization for excellent things that are going on, give them a platform and spread them. Yeah, there actually is, right? And so this in its original incarnation actually had more lanes in it. There was actually like, I don't remember what we called it anymore, but basically it was a tell, right? I'm going to make the decision. I'm going to tell you what the decision is. I'm not even going to bother explaining it to you. And there was also a abstain. I just totally don't want to be involved in this at all. And what we found as we were working with this tool on a regular basis, very, very few people chose either end of the continuum. And if anyone chose tell, a team with any level of courage basically said, no, I don't think so, man, right? Like I'm cool with you making the decision because that's the right thing, but I want to hear your reasoning. If you want me to buy in, just laying it on me and walking off is not the way it's going to happen. So eventually we said, you know what, let's just drop those two. Because even if you don't basically inquire is I don't want to be involved in the process, but we're assuming you're a member of this team, you probably do want to know what the decision was, right? So then the question becomes, and these guys had the question of, if they had four people in a group, is that too many people? Is that not enough people? Is this the right size? And at that point, it really comes down to your organization, your team, how you feel about things, right? There's a very good chance that the dev team that you work on, assuming you work with these folks every single day, right? If it turns out that you ran one of these and everyone was in agree, that might be just fine for that team. And then there may be other situations where, and I know we really do need to adjust this. So it comes down to how you as a team, what do you think is the right thing? The important pieces of this is, we know who's on the team and we know what the expectations are around the decision. There's a lot of hidden stuff in teams that we don't normally uncover early and it creates tension later on, right? And we're allowing people to opt in, opt out. So excuse me. I actually think what happened is common and good, right? So you had two situations there. You had one where everybody was kind of in this more passive role, no one was actually stepping up. So someone said, okay, fine. I'll take this responsibility, which then serve as a catalyst for others to reconsider. Well, okay, wait a minute. Maybe it's a trust issue. Maybe it's the right, like, well, do I really want the office administrators to just choose chairs when they don't actually do this work every day? Maybe I should have a voice in this, right? And then it becomes a trust thing, right? Am I okay being in an advise because I trust that this person is going to really take that in consideration and make a decision and I can abide by it, right? You know, maybe as the head of engineering, I really think that everyone should have the Herman Miller ergonomic, the whole deal and because of budget constraints, the office administrator makes the decision to actually step that down but still meets the majority of my needs and I'm okay with that, right? And it facilitates the conversation and makes us have those talks. Now, part of what you're talking about is these broader decisions that are organizational and this is really more, you know, you've got to get the right people in the room to actually lay out the contract in the first place. You know, if you, if we went through this and let's say engineering wasn't represented at all, then we're gonna have a problem with the decision or we have a very high chance of having a problem with the decision. So part of this too is do we even have, do we have the right people in the room before we actually start this exercise? It should be a matter of discussion. So it's the one scenario that we had where Susan Wright was what our CFO and was in advise and the group said, we're not comfortable with that. We think that you should actually step up, right? And then she's got to make the decision of like, yeah, you know what, you're right. I'll step up, a couple of people step down. So, you know, it is about the conversation. You know, if we get to where someone's not there at all and we basically tell them what their assignment is, you know, now we're kind of getting back to, it's not really a collaborative process as much as it is like, hey, we expect you to do this, so just go do it, right? So the engineering organization is very large. We have roughly 1,300 developers on a worldwide basis and we're in many, many offices. So there are four significant, whatever that means, offices in the US and then we've got Santiago, we've got Chennai, we have Japan, we have Berlin. Usually when we're running these, the teams that have actually come together are either a local development team that is talking about how they actually want to approach this project or, you know, maybe it's an executive team that's talking about higher level strategy type things. So we still have that strata in the organization. You know, it's not every decision everyone's involved in. That's, I would, you know, philosophically that sounds great. I just, I've not found that it scales, right? So it is about getting kind of the right people in the room. The largest that I've done this with is probably 25, 30 people when it's like one of the leagues of interest. But then, again, we're talking about multiple things at the same time. And so people are more inclined to opt out of things that if there was just this one topic, they'd say, oh yeah, I want to agree. But when they look at, oh man, there's 12 things to talk about. This is the one that's really important to me and I'll, right? So it kind of changes the dynamic. And I, normally when I run this, the workshop is usually with 10 or 20 people. So it's one or two teams. I've usually got whiteboards, I've usually got. So today we're kind of punting with, you know, all right, let's figure out how we can do this without some of those resources available. So we ran just one instead of four because off the top of my head, I couldn't think of a way to run all four at once. So it did change the dynamic of the exercise a little bit too. All right, so let's move on because we got another one that's actually gonna, it's gonna take some time as well. It's a little bit to grok, right? So we've got the right team now, right? So we've, basically what this has done is helped us to select who's on the team and set some expectation around how is this decision actually going to be made, right? And oftentimes we've got a team of four or five that want to be in agree. So we got the right team. Why are decisions still so difficult? Why is it so hard for us to then actually come together and make a decision that we can all agree on? And I think there are many, many factors here and we'll go through a few of them. So the first is, frankly, we all have different personalities, right? How many of you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs types? Right, now it's a little bit of pseudo psychology but there are many different forms of this but the fundamental idea behind this is that we all have kind of different perspectives, different views, different values, different things that we bring to the table that we think are important, that give us energy, that take our energy. I'm more fact-oriented, I'm more feeling-oriented, right? And none of these things are necessarily right or wrong. They're just elements of fundamentally who we are. I mean, look at something as simple as Myers-Briggs which is basically three continuums in a modifier, right? And you end up with 16 different personalities, potential personalities in the room, right? I mean, this is clearly part of why we can't all get along and if this doesn't resonate with you, which for some of you it may not, I'm sure that this one does, right? And if this doesn't resonate with you, I know that this one does for everybody. The other thing is, so now we've got all these different personalities, right? The other thing is that we have these different perspectives. When we're actually looking at a problem, we're seeing it from slightly different angles and for each one of us, that is our reality. That is the truth, right? So we look at it and you know with absolute certainty what object casts this shadow and you know with absolute certainty what object casts this shadow. But you're wrong, right? We look at each problem from our own perspective. Whatever information it is that we have shapes our reality and we don't necessarily share that perspective. We think we're all talking about the same thing but in fact, we're not. Each of us has some of the information. And finally, different personalities, different perspectives. Then you add these dudes into the mix, right? What's wrong with these dudes? The basis of Western thought, which is what most of us, it's our natural kind of go-to, right? The basis of Western thought is in fact argument, right? Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, they kind of developed the concepts of critical thinking, classification, counter-argument, contradiction, right? And that's been carried on from generation after generation after generation to the point where most of us, this is embedded in our language. This is the way we speak. It is the way we think. It is for most of us, the only way to solve a problem. It is our truth. The seeking of truth is how we think things get solved, right? We fundamentally reason this way. An idea is presented, we agree or we disagree. If we disagree, we formulate some argument to counter that thing. Back and forth we go. So let's look at a situation here. This is our company's financial charts. Not Groupon, this is our, our fake company, right? And we've pulled the right team together. We have the CEO, the CFO, we have all of the right folks in the room to talk about this particular problem, this particular challenge, different personalities, different perspectives, point to counterpoint Western thinking argument. What happens? We get something like this. What's going on here? As we look at this, fact, feel. This is awesome. We're doomed, right? Hey, I've got an idea. That'll never work, right? All of that comes together now. Different personalities, different perspectives, and point counterpoint, but we're talking in completely different perspectives on this problem, right? I want to talk about the facts. You want to talk about your feelings. I think this is great. You think this is awful. And it's very difficult with all of that in the mix to come to any kind of consensus. And typically what happens? What happens is a couple of things. The individual who is the best at articulating their perspective rises to the top as the most well thought out and therefore must be correct. Or the person with the highest level of authority in the room is by defecto correct, right? Or we kind of compromise. We end up with a solution that maybe not everybody's happy with, but man, we're just tired of going through this whole thing. So what do we do? How do we actually overcome some of this, right? This is where parallel thinking comes in. Parallel thinking is from Edward de Bono. 1950s actually wrote books on this. Is anyone familiar with de Bono and his work? All right, so another thing that you may be familiar with that de Bono was very involved in was lateral thinking, right? And parallel thinking is basically a subset of lateral thinking. In parallel thinking, what we're doing is we are honing everyone's energy onto one aspect of the problem. All of us together are going to talk about this one aspect of it. How do we feel about this? And that's the only thing that we're actually gonna talk about for a little while. Then we'll talk about the facts about this. Then we'll talk about what the risks are. Then we'll talk about what the opportunities are, right? And so we're gathering all of this information and we're working together to build these sets of information. Counterpoint goes away. If you're the individual who actually presented this concept, when it is time for us to talk about the risks and the concerns, it is as much your responsibility as anybody else on the team to genuinely think about what are the risks and concerns and to actually critique this concept. So it kind of removes some of that defensiveness as well. This is the time where we all say what we're concerned about. So I don't feel compelled to immediately counter what you just said was a risk with. Yeah, but, right? So what Debono did was he came up with this thing called Six Thinking Hats. And Six Thinking Hats is a way of implementing parallel thinking. I'm gonna go through this. Basically he broke it down into there's six views, right? And each hat represents one of these views. And the idea was that you would say, okay, we're all gonna wear our white hat right now and everybody knew what that meant. I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm gonna walk you through this stuff. I don't talk about hats when I do this, right? Maybe in the 50s people were like, yeah, that's cool. When I sit with a group of engineers and I say, okay, everybody wear your yellow hat, half of them leave the room, right? And the rest put the black hat on and they're done for the day, right? So we just talk about the perspective, right? But Six Thinking Hats is an easy way to kinda look at this. So the white hat is neutral and objective. It's only concerns with facts and figures. So when we're talking about that, we're talking about facts and figures. What do we know about this thing? What actual facts are there? As the facilitator of the session, you wanna be careful with this. You want to make sure that people are staying on course. And so when someone says, well, as a matter of fact, this sucks, it's not a fact, right? Make sure that we're actually talking about the facts and the figures. And by the way, there's something, there's a cue that I'm gonna give you that will help you to determine very quickly if something is or is not a fact. Any statement that begins with, well, as a matter of fact, is not a fact. We're gonna talk about how we feel about this thing, right, the emotional view. And when I do this, you talk about how you feel no justification is needed. In fact, most of the time that I do this, I will say no justification allowed. The feeling piece of this, one, can be difficult for people to talk about in the first place. And two, when we begin to provide the justification for those feelings, we begin to introduce point counterpoint, right? And it's really easy for it to derail. So I'm actually looking for people to say like, this scares me, I'm excited, I hate all you people, right? Whatever the fact, whatever, you know, how do you feel about this, right? Black hat, careful, cautious, devil's advocate, what are the weaknesses in this idea? What are the risks here? What do we think could go wrong here, right? Hope, positive thinking, what's good about this? What opportunities exist in this? What could come from this that's good, right? Then we get into what he calls the green hat, right? So now what we're talking about is, basically we've gone through all of these others. What are the facts? What are the risks? How do we feel? What do we think the opportunities are? When we step back and we look at all of that information and we say, okay, based on everything that we now know, everything that we now see, everything that we've gathered from this group, what could we do? What could we do? What would reduce those risks and maximize these opportunities, right? Now we can think outside of the box or whatever you want to, right? To actually, what else could we do with this? The blue hat is basically the organizer, right? It's the person that is the facilitator running the session. Ideally, the individual that is running the session does not have a vested interest in the outcome. They need to be able to actually monitor, hey, let's stick to facts, hey, you know what, that's, let's not do the point counterpoint thing, right? It just kind of helped to run the session. And if they've got a vested interest in the outcome, there's a risk that they'll actually kind of steer the session towards where they want it to go. And that's, again, a matter of trust. So what does this look like when we actually run it with a team? So you start with the blue hat, which basically means the facilitator is setting up the situation saying, all right, folks, here's why we're here today. And this is the team. We need to come to consensus on this thing. What is this thing? Might lay out the ground rules, right? We're gonna go through, you know, looking at the facts, looking at how we feel, looking at risks, looking at opportunities, right? And the goal today is to come up with, you know, what we mutually agree is the right solution to this particular problem. Then they might actually, I often go right into facts. What do we know about this? And a lot of times the reason I go into the facts first is because when we are deficient in the facts, oh, it actually turns out we have no idea how much money we have available. Oh, you know what, actually, we don't know anything about the demographics of that particular market. Oh, gee, we don't, great. And the meeting, go get the facts, come back, and then we can talk, right? So we're kind of what facts do we have as well as what facts do we need? There's no sense in continuing on if we don't have the information that we actually need, right? What's the possible opportunities up here? What do we think could happen? What could be good? What are the risks? And at that point, I might actually say, okay, we know the facts, we know the opportunities, we know the risks, what else could we do? Let's get creative here, right? Get some creative ideas out. A lot of times, you know, oftentimes there's one or two kind of key things that come out of that. All right, how do we feel about the projects we're making? How do we feel about these new proposals or this particular new proposal? And on and on, right? So we just keep kind of going through these various cycles until eventually what we actually find is, eventually there's this moment where the team starts to really kind of coalesce their thinking. And you can actually, you can feel it in the room. It's often very palpable where people recognize like, that's it. Dude, that's the one. And, you know, meeting over, right? We've gotten there. On occasion, when I run these, if it's a topic that I know is really emotionally charged or there's gonna be, you know, there's gonna be some challenges there, I might actually move the red hat right to the very beginning, set the stage and immediately collect how do people feel about this. And part of that is providing them the opportunity to just get it out and to get that in front of the whole group that, you know, these are the things that are going on. Some of us are really scared, right? Some of us are really optimistic, but just kind of making that available to everyone. And oftentimes being able to just say how you feel about something helps you to kind of get past that. It's no longer a block for you, right? If someone says, you know, as a matter of fact, then what follows that is actually something about how they feel or it's something about, you know, what the risks are or something along those lines, right? Really it's acknowledging it and saying, hey, you know what, that's really kind of, you know, that's more about risks or that's more about opportunity, you know, hold that. Let's make sure that we cover that when we get there, but let's get back to what are the actual facts about this. And it's, when this is new for teams, it's very difficult, right? It, you know, getting people kind of thinking along those lines because we really, our natural inclination is to hear something and say, well yeah, but you know, you didn't think about, or well yeah, but, and we really want to, you know, if you've done any improv training, really what we kind of want to get to is yes and, right? And each one of these things is the, you know, is the yes and instead of the, well yeah, but, right? Right, who would actually facilitate it? So a small enough organization, let's say there's 10 people in the company, it's a decision that impacts everyone. We all want to be involved, you know, now who's going to be the facilitator? I mean, it may be bringing in someone outside, right? I've actually done this. So a company that I worked at before, we used collaboration contracts to actually, we were looking at the five major functions of the organization and us as a leadership team, CEO, CFO, et cetera, et cetera, you know, in broad strokes, which decisions will be involved in? We actually brought in someone from outside of the organization to facilitate the session for us so that all of us could, you know, participate. And it was actually really interesting. So we had, you know, those five major categories and then we had all of us, right? And our CFO, we laid it out, had himself and agree on every single item and was able to step back from that contract, look at it and go, oh dude, I'm the problem, aren't I? And no one had to say, yeah man, you're a problem, right? He just kind of was like, okay, wait, all right, so what's really important to me? And he was able to like move himself around and he also moved himself up in particular areas, right? The facilitator, you know, was someone from outside of the organization and she was able to kind of push us on things. Okay guys, does this really make sense to you? Does it make sense that the CEO is not involved in this decision at all and that, you know, these folks are, right? And just kind of making sure that we're, yeah, sometimes it's someone from outside. Sometimes it can be, you know, if you've got someone who's in an inquire but really is more of like an abstain, like, well, this isn't even my thing, man, right? Like I'm in charge of, you know, I'm running marketing over here and you guys are talking about, you know, your testing frameworks for, you know, for the development teams, I can facilitate that. I don't even know what you're talking about, right? So we've only, we've got like 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Which time do we have? 12, 40, so we've got 20 minutes. All right, so I think we got enough time for this, right? So now you guys try it. All right, so everybody knows who the facilitator is, right? I have any facilitators that are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. There's no way that I'm gonna be able to even like do this at all. Do I have anyone that wants to, all right, all right, cool. So I got, all right. So we're back to we are this startup, right? Dearborn, Michigan, 34 people, right? Here's a proposal. Doesn't matter who brought this in. Someone's decided, hey, we're gonna take this as an illustration, right? And we're gonna actually move it to, you know, its own separate product. So, the proposal is we're gonna open a new office for sales and development of a illustration in Palo Alto. When I say development, I mean software development, right? We currently have $2.4 million in funding and we've generated that revenue off of our consulting business. Our consulting business, by the way, is self-sustaining and obviously profitable. That is still a truth for us, all right? We wanna separate this out. We're gonna take this basically seed capital to start this new venture. We're gonna run it as a completely separate division, both financially and everything else, right? If we need additional funding, we're gonna look to get it from employees, then friends and family. Right now, our thinking is we are not gonna go out to any VC to actually to get this, right? There's a ton of detail that is not included in the information here. What I'm looking to each of you to do as you're kind of going through this on your teams is let's get creative, let's yes and a little bit. So as you're coming up, as you're talking about the facts, if you're the CFO and there's a fact that is missing here, go ahead and what do you think is reasonable to come up with something, right? So we're making up this scenario, but the actual end game is still very much the same, right? You understand what I'm asking of you, right? So earlier what I'm saying is if you've got questions about, well, what's the size of our market or what's the, either none of you know and that's a fact you've gotta go get or one of you knows it and it just came to you now. Right? So the goal to get a yes no on do we go for this or what's the... So the goal here, I mean it may be, right? It may just be that like you go through this and you go, hey, what are the opportunities? These are all great opportunities. What are the risks that are done? You're like, hey, great proposal, let's do it. It might be that as you look at what your risks are and what your opportunities are, what your concerns are that you come up with a different proposal, right? Our primary goal here is we wanna launch a illustration as a separate product. The current proposal is that we start a new sales and software development in office in Palo Alto. Here's how much money we have, right? So I mean, every time I've done this, we come up with all different kinds of things. Teams come up with different sources of funding. Teams come up with different ways of staffing the project. Teams come up with different locations for where the project should actually be launched. It all kind of, and it's if you can as a team get to like, yeah, you know what? We actually all feel good about that. I'll be honest with you, if you have a problem this complicated, in the 15 minutes that we have left, we probably won't get there, but you're gonna get a good sense of how this process kind of works and what happens inside of the process, right? It's usually multiple iterations. When I do these, a lot of times we'll run through an iteration or two, then we've actually gotta break and come back together, reset, okay, here's where we were and what's next, right? So I'm gonna give you just kind of the synopsis, Palo Alto sales and software development office for illustration, 2.4 million, additional funding from employees, friends, family. I've got the different hats up there to help the facilitator kind of remember like, okay, what are the things we wanna gather? The gathering will be obviously we've got the paper and the pen, right? And then kind of looking for you guys in each of your roles to contribute to the conversation as it's going along. Cool? I'm gonna up. The facilitator is also described here? Yeah, I'd say the facilitator is also described here, right? Let's kind of do a little bit of a, let's do a little bit of a recap and kind of we got like five minutes left. So I know no one got all the way through, right? Did anybody get through one round? Did you get all the way to like the green and then? No. No? All right, all right. If we actually provided more detailed facts. Yeah, yeah, all right, all right. That's good feedback, I appreciate it. So one of the things they experienced was that the conversation wasn't really moving and the facilitator said, hey, let's try a different perspective on this, right? Let's just, let's go ahead and put on a different hat, right? One of the things that you'll find sometimes as a facilitator is you're sitting in, you're sitting with the group and discussion is going on and there's someone who's kind of, they're wringing their hands, they're gnashing their teeth, they're kind of rocking back and forth. They've got that, they look like maybe they're holding their breath and veins and you might want to say to them like, hey, John, I see that you're looking a little agitated. Is there a perspective you would like us to talk about? And they might say, well, yeah, actually, I really want to talk about the risks. I say, okay, let's wrap this up real quick and then we'll get to risks, right? And what you're doing there is, you're still maintaining kind of control of the flow, but you're providing those people the opportunity to express that they really want to do this thing. When they know that they're gonna have the opportunity to actually raise another risk, it allows them to kind of reengage with the fact that right now we're talking all about sunshine and unicorns, right? They know that the risk is gonna get captured. That can be very helpful. So I know everybody didn't, we didn't make it all the way through, but how do folks find this compared to maybe the normal way that you would go about collectively solving this type of problem or having one of these conversations? So I don't know if everybody heard that, but basically he liked the fact that we move from perspective to perspective, right? It's easy sometimes in these collective conversations for folks to kind of stay in the critical mindset, right? It's critiquing something is often the easiest thing for us to do. And when we're making these big or risky decisions, it feels right for a lot of folks to stay in a conservative kind of mindset, like whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, right? And if they feel that there's too much momentum towards let's just rush into this, they're gonna stay in that space, but if everyone is expected to be in this space all at the same time, it allows us to kind of funnel that conversation. Right, right, yeah, we're diminishing the possibility of those kind of back and forths that happen between strong personalities, because again, we're all focused. And even just the organizational kind of stuff? Yep, yeah, yeah, exactly, right? And that's exactly what kind of the scenario that I gave was that each of us has kind of our natural tendency, the place that we're gonna go to, and I wanna talk from this perspective, and you wanna talk from that perspective, but if we can actually get us all home together. So we talked about three things today, we talked about simple team decisions, and that's fist to five, right? We talked about forming the right team, and that's collaboration contracts. And then we talked a bit about complex team decisions, and that is parallel thinking, right? Got a couple of parting thoughts. So this is from a Navy admiral, no one person, no one alliance, no one nation, no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together. That's part of the idea behind this. And then from De Bono himself, argument completely lacks a constructive, creative or design element. It was intended only to discover the truth and not to build anything, yet we try to use truth seeking to get creative and build things, right? So thank you. I got a couple of things, one, actually very important, our audio visual guy here who's working hard and doing great stuff. His jacket has gone missing. It's a black fleece jacket. It was on the chair back there. If anybody's seen it, if someone might have actually, it'd be great to get it returned to him. And the final thing, if I have available up here, just basically Cliff Notes version of this, right? Pistify, what does that look like? What are the things? Collaboration contract, what is that? And parallel thinking, what are the six thinking hats? So anyone's welcome to come grab these if you want them. Thank you very much.