Remove barriers by asking your team, “what would have to be true?”
There are many questions you can ask your team. Historical questions, future-oriented questions, tactical questions, strategic questions, and rhetorical questions to name a few. As a leader your focus should be strategic and on the future, not on the minutia or problems of the day. Easier said than done, of course, as there are always issues just waiting to dominate a leader’s day. When you carve out time to focus forward, there are a few compelling questions you can ask to lead your team to answers they would not otherwise reach.
The first and most impactful by far is, what would have to be true? This question fundamentally alters conversations, creating opportunities where none were seen before. It can single-handedly break down cultural resistance and create alignment where it did not exist previously. How can that be? How can one question be so effective?
The question “what would have to be true” removes barriers. You are not asking “what’s in our way?” or “why hasn’t this worked in the past?” or “can we do this?” or “what needs to change?” or any other variation of a question that allows people to insert commentary about why something cannot work. Rather, it takes the opposite perspective, focusing on the idea that if we want this good thing to happen, then these things must be true, these roadblocks must be removed, and these challenges overcome.
What would have to be true includes everything from alignment with other teams, to funding availability, to leadership buy-in, to cultural change, to customer response, to technology capabilities, and on. Initially, it doesn’t matter what must be true, it just needs to be captured. Then, you can ask the next important question: do we believe those things can be true? The cycle of asking “what would have to be true?”, reviewing those statements, and then asking, “do we believe those things can be true?” is phenomenally powerful. Not only does it break down barriers to possibilities, but it also creates extreme clarity on the work required to achieve your goals.
As noted in this post, in one of my organizations we developed the following local vision statement: To become a digital technology organization faster than our competition. As part of our strategy to achieve this vision, one of the categories of work we identified centered around automation. We recognized digital technology organizations highly automate their own processes as well as those of the businesses they support. We said we needed to intelligently automate mundane operational activities to shift our workforce to higher value-add work customers are willing to pay for and to automate the team’s application development pipelines.
To make this happen, we needed to take over 100 associates and contractors out of their current operations work and ask them to automate away their jobs. This was approximately 25% of the overall operational labor budget. We needed to do it within 18 months and there were numerous roadblocks including:
- we had no funding to perform the work: automation, self-service, testing improvements, etc.
- we could not see how 100+ associates were going to be willing to automate their work which would put themselves out of a job
- there was business risk associated with pulling people out of their current manual work directly supporting the business units; our business partners were not going to be excited about the potential risks although the expense savings and delivery speed increases were important to them
- team members generally follow their HR reporting lines for direction and, for various reasons, we could not move all the team members under one leader to create a direct reporting line. We would have to maintain a distributed team structure which, in turn, could lead to individual managers and leaders prioritizing other work over this effort and slowing progress
- although we had worked with our managers, leaders, and a consulting partner to define the opportunity for savings when we began to detail the goals, people began to back away.
How did we get past so many roadblocks? By asking “what would have to be true?” For each item above we clearly stated what would have to be true. Here are examples for the first two challenges:
- we had no money to perform the work described: automation, self-service, testing improvements, etc.
- To self-fund the work, we need to pull 100+ team members from their current operational work and allocate them 100% to automating their jobs away.
- We need to do this through a mandate; those team members must work on this and nothing else with one exception: there is a significant operational issue only an associate on this team can help with. Managers must accept the mandate and act in alignment with it.
- My approval would be required in alignment with my direct leaders for someone to shift his work even for a short period of time.
- Managers must provide the specific names of the individuals to be on the team. No generic allocations of multiple people. It had to be an actual name. We agreed that when you know the names it is real.
- Operations team members not joining the automation team would need to pick up the manual work for the team members who were joining the automation team as those team members’ manual work would not disappear overnight.
- Business partners and team members would need to better prioritize work. Team members not joining the automation team would need to recognize they pick up for others regularly already, just not to the same scale. Every time an associate moves on to take a new opportunity it generally takes 60 days or so to backfill the person. The teams generally work with our business partners to prioritize the most important work and to ensure no disruption to the operations, so why could this not be the same way but over a longer period?
- we could not see how 100+ associates were going to be willing to automate their work to put themselves out of a job
- My leadership team would have to commit to shifting the automation team associates to other work. Effectively, we would need to replace a contractor working on building new features with an associate who automates his operations work.
- To replace a contractor with an associate, we would need the associate to have the required skills. Many of the automation team members needed to build those skills; they did not already possess them.
- Associates would need the right support structure to learn the new automation skills and to put them to work quickly.
- We would need my peers across other areas of the technology to support this work and provide skilled associates to support my team in learning and applying their newly forming skills.
- Associates would have to believe we were serious and would do this.
As you can see, there were many things that would have to be true for this to be successful. Many of them quite difficult. We went through the list and asked ourselves whether we believed we could make them true. If we did not believe we could, we re-asked the question and tried until we got actionable steps to make each point true, thereby breaking down the barriers to achieving the outcomes we sought. In the interest of brevity, I won’t enumerate the actions we took to make each of the items above true.
By asking “what would have to be true?” we broke through the noise and made it happen. We asked the question, developed a plan to address each need, and took action to eliminate each roadblock. And in the end, we ended up with a win-win-win-win situation, a truly rare event:
- We substantially advanced toward becoming a digital technology organization in full support of our broader business goals
- We reduced our operations labor expense
- We managed risk to our businesses by retaining associates who understood the operations; they were available to assist with resolving issues while they were automating activities and shifting to application development work
- Our associates developed critical go-forward digital skills, creating an even broader set of knowledgeable team members in the organization
A remarkable success for the organization and for the team overall. They did an amazing job delivering this work and achieving the desired outcomes.
Share your thoughts below.
What questions do you find to be most effective for engaging your team and breaking through inertia?
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