Many strategic-planning teams make the same mistake when they hunt for consensus. They assume it's not present in the group, and their attempts to find it take them far afield, when actually consensus has been there all along, just napping under a stack of papers.
Your planning team's first step should be to uncover the consensus that exists and to use it as the foundation for your plan.
A company we'll call Irreconcilable Industries wanted to develop a strategy to take advantage of changes in their industry (something all businesses should do if they want to grow). They used four steps to uncover the existing (but invisible) consensus in their team. Their discoveries were invaluable in formulating a new direction, and the participatory process ensured that the plan got implemented.
Here's what they did (and what you can do) to find the hidden consensus in your team.
Separate idea generation from evaluation.
Your staff undoubtedly knows your industry well and is aware of impending changes and challenges. They learn constantly, as they talk to customers and suppliers and keep track of competitors. How can you tap their knowledge and draw out their insights without getting embroiled in controversy?First, get all their thoughts and ideas in the open BEFORE anyone has a chance to poke holes in them. Invoke the basic rules of brainstorming -- absolutely no evaluative comments allowed as members generate ideas. No matter how ludicrous or irrelevant someone's idea might be (you WANT them to think "out of the box"), one disdainful snicker from across the table can thwart not only that speaker but others who fear their comments will be met with scorn or argued down.
To stimulate their thinking, ask team members to put their thoughts and suggestions on paper, either at the start of the meeting or as a "homework" assignment. It's important to isolate each part of the brainstorming process -- first GENERATING and later EVALUATING ideas. Allowing simultaneous proposing and judging of suggestions is the best way to disrupt a team and derail its progress.
Separate the idea from the person.
The conflict that sometimes emerges in a group is not a conflict over ideas but over who proposed the idea. To avoid the "who said it" bias, anonymously display the team's ideas in front of the whole group. The tried-and-true flip chart works just fine. Scribble down the ideas -- no names attached, as fast as they come, using the authors' own words, where everyone can see them.Exhibiting the suggestions in neutral territory -- on a dry-erase board or an overhead projector, for example -- depersonalizes them and frees the group to focus objectively on the merits of the idea, not on the individual -- allowing the team to evaluate the ideas, not the people.
Evaluate the ideas.
Once the team members have contributed their thoughts and suggestions, and the ideas have been recorded in "neutral territory," its time to evaluate and prioritize.Ask participants to vote on the items suggested -- in the case Irreconcilable Industries, the items they consider the most important trends in the industry. They can pick their top five, or rank all the ideas -- any quantifiable (and anonymous) method of prioritizing will work. Once the votes are counted, you're likely to find, as Irreconcilable Industries did, a surprising degree of agreement. It is that area of consensus -- the trends considered most important by the group -- you'll address in your strategic plan.
Focus on the future.
Now you have a strong foundation for productive discussion. You've developed, say, five or six valid market trends, independent of proponents and politics. To keep the discussion productive, be sure it focuses on the organization's FUTURE. Questions for the group should involve (1) how these trends will affect your company, and (2) what your company can do to take advantage of them?Most companies are scrambling just to keep abreast of change -- in the marketplace, for example, and in technology and management ideology. It's essential that the individual and collective energies of your team be expended where they'll do the most good -- not bickering over technicalities or semantics. The process just described, if done openly and honestly, will activate the team's collective wisdom and incorporate the consensus that already exists.
