Business Over Breakfast Webinar Series with Emory Executive Education, Patrick Noonan & Lynne Segall

Good morning, everybody. I'm Nicola Barrett, Chief Corporate Learning Officer of Emory Executive Education at Goizueta Business School. Thank you for joining us for Business Over Breakfast today, the second in our series with Professors Patrick Noonan and Lynn Siegel, which focused on problem solving and teamwork. in a virtual world. I heard earlier this week that pre-COVID, about 3 to 4% of the US workforce worked from home, and now 2 to 3 months later, it's about 40%. And from my own experience, for some organizations, it's closer to 100%. So today's webinar that specifically focuses on collaborating remotely to increase productivity is something that a lot of us are very interested in. benefiting from. We hope this knowledge will not only help you and your work and your teams, but also help reduce some of the stress for yourselves and your families as we continue to operate in this COVID-19 crisis environment. Our faculty guides today are Goizueta Business School professors Patrick Noonan, Professor Emeritus in the Practice of Information Systems and Operations Management, and Lynn Segal, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Management and Associate Dean of Goizuega Impact. Both Patrick and Lynn bring a wealth of knowledge based on their extensive global consulting and academic experiences. As with last week, Lynn and Patrick will spend about 40 minutes walking through the topic, and then there will be a Q&A. please write your questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of the screen. And at the end of today's session, there'll be a very short survey which we would love you to fill in. One quick reminder for those who would like to further explore some of our topics that we've had in the Business Over Breakfast series, Emory Executive Education at Goizueta Business School— we really like long titles here— is offering a selection of more in-depth programs with either of the faculty that have been— have spent their Thursday mornings with us. The next one is on June 9th with David Knorr on strategy visualization and agile alignment, and he promises that he's going to use some cool technology to make that program very interactive. Patrick and Lynn are also teaching this summer, so please look out for more information about that. And we are trying to make these programs really accessible. So please reach out if you're interested and talk to one of our learning guides, Sarah Gill and Lauren Flamer. So now I want to pass over to Patrick and Lynn and hope you all enjoy the conversation from this morning. Thank you so much.

Well, great. Thank you, Nicola and team. Good morning, Lynn. And good morning, everybody. Good afternoon. Good evening for wherever you are in the world. My name is Patrick Noonan. And Lynn and I are delighted to be back again this week for the second of our series of Bits Over Breakfast about problem solving in the context, of course, that we're all thinking about problem solving is not just the usual issues that we have, but thinking about how do we do it under very different kind of circumstances with distributed teams and distributed organizations. And in the situation where we're really being forced to reinvent a lot of things that we do. Anyway, so to begin, what I'd like us to start with for week 2 is actually a little bit of involvement and engagement with, with you. And I'm going to share a screen here. Those of you who were here last week will remember we, we used this tool called Menti. And what I'd like you to be able to— what I'd like you to do is go to any browser, go to any phone. Pull up a browser, go to menti.com. menti.com, M-E-N-T-I dot com. You'll be prompted for a code, and the code for today's session is 4496, and you'll be prompted with this question then: where are you? So please type in an answer or answers to this question, and we will take a quick survey of where everybody is joining us from today. Got a lot of Atlanta. So good morning to those of you who are also in Atlanta. Istanbul is back for another round. Hello, Istanbul. We've got a variety of different places around Georgia, Atlanta, New Jersey. Good morning, New Jersey. And then some people, as we did last week, answered the question in a different way. They're at home. They're at their home office. Space has a different meaning for us all, doesn't it? now. And so geographic space and where we're physically working has been thrown up in the air, and we've got to find some new ways of doing things. We're going to move on to another question that we've got for you. Again, for those of you who were here last week, it's the same question that we asked second to just help understand who we all are today. And so I'm going to move on to the next— move on to the next Menti question. And that question is about your professional role. So now you've got a new prompt for a new question, and you can enter more than one if you like. Your professional focus in terms of the functional area or sector that you're working in. Again, multiple responses are, are possible. We've got a lot of people from, from the Atlanta area, but we are— we do welcome you. A couple of people I saw from the West Coast, some people from, from well east of here in Europe and the Middle East. And as we saw last week, a lot of general management strategy-oriented people, and also a number of people who are in and around the consulting function, but a wide variety. And as we said last week, really, the, the tools and techniques, the ideas that Lynn and I have been working on regarding problem solving come from the consulting profession because each of us have some experiences practicing consultants, but also in other kinds of organizations as well, and we've been trying to bring these kinds of ideas, and we've distilled down some, some of the processes and principles of problem solving that we learned from consulting, and that we've observed and distilled from the firms, uh, to practical problem solving for all of us, no matter what kind of organization that we find ourselves, uh, find ourselves in. Well, I'm going to move over to PowerPoint now. Thank you for your responses, uh, there and your responsiveness. Uh, keep that browser open, we're going to have some other questions a little bit, a little bit later. So let's go to the PowerPoint. As we mentioned, this is week 2 of our 3-part series. It doesn't matter if you were not here last week. Today's topics should hold together just on their own. Again, we'll be going back to Menti in a few times. Last week, a quick review of last week though to set the stage. Last week we were talking about solving the right problem and solving the problem Right. That was a point in which we talked about the nature of work that more and more people are finding, and everyone in almost any organization, as they move up through an organization, are finding characterizes their job. It's to figure it out. They're given unstructured kinds of problems. There's an itch needing a scratch. There's a need for change needing a change, and they're asked to figure it out. Lynn and I talk about this in terms of a watermelon, a complex problem that's a little un— unclear what's going on that we have to take apart and do something with. And the title of the book that we've been working on that talks about good techniques for problem solving is called Don't Smash the Watermelon. So that's— you can see what we don't want you to do is the smash and grab method that we often, that we often see. And we talked about it in terms of the metaphor was getting from the need for change to the change, going across some big sort of canyon, and trying to figure out what goes in between. How do we actually build that beautiful bridge that gets us from the issues, uh, to the action? And there is a toolkit. There's a lot of very specific tactical tools involved, but really it's more than that. There's a, there's a process and there's a set of principles involved that, um, uh, that we've been talking about, and we'll share a few more of those today. So there's a 7-step process. Last time we talked a little bit about some ideas of step 1, in which we're really solving the right problem and solving the problem right, starting out by trying to get the right frame of the problem, to understand the heart and soul of the problem, really define it, uh, define it well, and then define the problem in the form of a question, because the question that you ask is the one that you'll answer. So we talked a little bit about that. We also talked about, um, thinking about the players. Getting across that bridge is a social process. There's people on the team and there's other external players, and doing some preliminary analysis of the of the people who will be making the decisions, the people who we need to bring some clarity and confidence to in this process. And so the first part of the process is really about getting the problem right and understanding a bit of that context. And where that leaves us now is, is that we're, um, you know, we're starting to go further onto the bridge, and in this week's session about, um, moving forward into the problem solving. Now, there's a lot here, and we've got limited time today. It may seem like an awful lot. How do you go from a very simple rickety rope bridge to more and more complicated bridge. Um, one way to do it, Nicola mentioned a few minutes ago, we do have a course coming up in August where you can spend the equivalent of a couple of days with us virtually. We'll go through all the steps and all the procedures and talk a lot more about the tactics and give you opportunities to apply them. So if you are interested, please join us, uh, then in August. Today we're going to talk about collaboration. The theme is collaboration, and we need to understand a little bit about what, um, keeps you up at night regarding collaboration. So again, let's go to, go to Menti. I'm going to flip over to Menti and advance the question. You're going to get a new question there. So just give me one moment to, to switch over to that Menti screen. But you can use the same Menti that you— browser window that you had before. But let's move on to a new question. Short answer. What are the biggest challenges you face when collaborating virtually? Type those in and enter, and let's see what we— what comes up on our scroll. Convincing people, communication. And next week we'll do a Business Over Breakfast about communication. Time zones, alignment, communication, the lack of personal touch. Boy, we're all learning how The you know the differences between being able to interact on contents and being able to interact face to face where there's so many more channels of communication going on. Tone and miscommunication, resistance to video, and video fatigue, right? Okay. So all of the usual challenges for Collaboration are present and then some when we add the virtual environment. And so the, the solution is not going to be strictly a technological one. And so what we're going to talk to, talk to you about today, and I'm about to turn things over to my colleague and co-author Lynn, is 2 things. There are some technologies, and we're going to be demonstrating some a little later, the technologies, but also what are the collaborative processes that you're using with the technology. If we just speed up the mess, We're not improving anything, or if the technology is so wide open and powerful but doesn't give us any guidance as to what to do, we've just got people meandering around when we have the same problem. So how do we come up with processes that— and technologies that are going to allow us to collaborate in effective, effective ways? So with that, um, I think we'll turn things over to Lynn. Lynn, can you grab the screen from us, from me here? Let's try that.

Yeah.

I gotta find the right— there it is.

There we go.

It's at the bottom of my screen. Sometimes it's at the top of my screen. I know.

How many of you are all thinking about how many screens you now need to have, right? We're all— we just need one more screen, right?

This into slideshow mode.

There we go.

But it's not there yet.

Let's see.

Okay, do you— are you seeing my screen? Hopefully you are. So as Patrick said, we are going to talk today a little bit about collaboration. We're talking today about collaboration. And before we get into the tools, because it's— the tools are there to enable us, we want to talk about the intention that we are going to apply in our team process to— in the way that we use the tools. So Patrick mentioned the watermelon. As our metaphor for the problem, we also like to say that you can eat a whole watermelon, but you can't eat it whole. And so, as we talked about last week, framing the problem is the first step in the process. But now we've got to figure out a way to break it down in order to get to the work that we need to do as a team. And I saw someone in the Menti wrote that we see the problem— we're all aware of the same problem, but we see it a little bit differently. This device here at step 2 is a way to remove some of that ambiguity. Because yes, everyone has questions flooding their brains. Our brains work differently. We think about things differently. And so the one of the first tools that, that we're going to talk about is the idea of creating a hierarchy of all of these questions that are flooding the team in the process of breaking it down.

Patrick, I was just— Lynn, I was just noticing on some of the items that are still scrolling up on the On the Menti, I'm still keeping an eye on it. Understanding what the action item or action items is, is something that's popped up a couple of times too. And that's, that's another, that's another thing that this tool is going to, is going to serve up for us pretty well, I think.

Absolutely. So we call it a question tree. In consulting, the term of art is an issue tree. But the idea is that we want to create a hierarchy of questions That help us help focus the work of the team, remove the ambiguity. We call it disambiguation, remove the ambiguity so that we can actually get to the work and get clarity about the work that we need to do. Before we can get into talking about the trees themselves, there's a concept that we need to discuss first, and it's a concept. Is an initialism or an acronym, MECE, and it stands for mutually exclusive And collectively exhaustive. So the idea here is that mutually exclusive means that each of the parts of the problem are separate. We can separate them apart and they are discrete. They're distinct. There are no overlaps in those parts. The collectively exhaustive piece of MECE is that together we have the whole. So here you see our team member, she's thinking about all of the different pieces and parts of the problem. She's breaking the watermelon apart. Each part is discrete, but we can bring it back together on the other side of things to have the complete watermelon. And so the way— or here, there's a tweet. I can't click to the next slide.

Here we go.

There was a tweet about these 2 books, What They Teach You at the Harvard Business School and What They Don't Teach You at the Harvard Business School. And this tweet said that, wow, these 2 books contain the sum total of all knowledge. They're discrete— what they teach you, what they don't teach you— but together they are the sum whole. That's, that's the concept of MECE. So the way the tree works is that we take that central question, that big overarching question that we need to answer, and we need to break it down. And the way that we break it down is by thinking about, well, What are the sets of questions that I need to answer that if I can answer those questions, I'll be able to answer my big question? And so we start splitting the big question into smaller and smaller pieces until we get to pieces of analysis— questions that are specific enough that we can imagine a piece of analysis that we could go do to answer that question. The idea here is that we're going to create a custom tree That is unique to our problem. So there's not, there's not a repository anywhere of all of the question trees that you could ever possibly need. That doesn't exist because it wouldn't be very useful. The whole idea here is that each problem is unique and the questions and the issues that we need to resolve in order to address that problem are unique to the organization and in the context of the industry and in the context of the time of the problem. There are some guidelines for how we maximize the tree that we get into in a lot more detail in our class. What I'd like to do is share with you an example from this spring. We teach this methodology to all of our MBAs here at Goizueta, and this spring we had an executive MBA cohort where 2/3 of the class were involved in the healthcare profession. They were in the middle of doing a project for a large corporation that you would recognize. And when COVID hit, they said— they came to us and they said, we're really busy in our day jobs and we want to do— we want to do this project. We want to do a project, but we want to focus on COVID and we want to do something to help an organization that's struggling with all of the challenges that this coronavirus is presenting. And so we pivoted and they had— they came up with a central issue, which was around Using telehealth to decompress the ER? Well, that's a big question. You can't imagine one piece of analysis to answer it. It's tangly— it's tangly? That's not a word. It's tangled. It's complex. And so we had to break it down. And what happened in the splitting of this is we came up with 3 different areas of focus. But each of those areas is still messy and complex. And so we kept splitting the the tree further and further. At each level of splitting, we do a logic check. The logic check starts with this concept of MECE. So what we had to do was look at each of these 3 branches of the tree and say, are each of these discrete? And if we answer all 3 of these, will we be able to answer this question to the left? We, we determined that yes, the way we were defining these as a cohort These were discrete and, you know, the— there were very specific intentions around the words that the team chose to use for here, and then they split it further. They broke each of these questions down into smaller questions, and then that same MECE test applies again. So they looked at the 2 boxes to the right of the healthcare system having the organizational capabilities. They said we can really break these down into service provider resource limitations. and the health system infrastructure. But those also are really too big to answer, so they recognized they were going to have to split again. But at this stage, they're doing that MECE test to say, hey, if I can answer these 2, can I answer the question to the left? And they did that for each of the branches of the tree. And then it split again. And we didn't put the whole tree here because it wouldn't fit in this formatting in a way that would be legible for you to read. But they, they pushed the branches out further. And in fact, later in the session— actually, I have it in the next slide— they fleshed out the tree. So, level. So, and you'll notice when you look at this full tree that some of the levels, some of the branches go out to 4 levels and some of the branches stop at 3 levels. In some cases, it stopped because the team recognized that that wasn't going to be in scope for their work, so they didn't push it further. For the purposes of just being complete. And in other cases, the reason why the tree didn't go to 4 levels was because maybe the team had some analysis they knew they could do at that stage. But let's talk about the stopping rule. Like, how do you know how far to go and when do you actually stop? So what we'll do is we'll focus in on this one part of the tree and we're going to zoom in and blow it up a little bit. So are patients willing to use telehealth options? What this team did is they said, well, in order to know if we can answer that question, we think there are 3 things we need to figure out. There's something about language and cultural barriers. There's something about the different segments. It might be different for certain segments than other segments. And the, the type of health issue that they may be facing might be a driver in willingness to use. So then they said, okay, well, if, if we think those are the things, we need to then form some hypotheses and think about what kind of analysis we need to do. We're going to come back to this in a little bit to talk about another tool in the toolkit for how we can get more clarity in our team around the work that we actually need to do. But for now, let's shift gears and talk about the process for how you go about doing this. And with that, I'm going to hand it back to Patrick.

All right, let me unmute myself. All right, you should now be seeing a dinosaur. The question of how do you come up with a tree like that is a very important one because this is— it's a difficult thing to do. We often hear people Uh, when we train them in this technique, uh, they'll tell us that step 2, doing these question trees, um, can be the hardest part of it. And we tell them that shouldn't be surprising because, um, it, it really is the heart of the problem solving, trying to understand what are the components of things you need to figure out to solve the big problem, and letting that drive what work you actually need to do. I mean, that, that sounds like problem solving. So it's, it's a— you're really engaging in it, and it's very difficult, but it's early on in a project. We tend to not understand What the problem is about yet. We're still learning as we go. So the process of how do you come up with that elaborate, very detailed question tree that Lynn just showed is a really important one. And you might liken it to this question of building a dinosaur. How would you build a dinosaur skeleton? In what order would you assemble the bones? Do you start with the big ones? Do you start with the big ones? Do you go with the small ones and build up and so forth? Well, in a way, it's It's in a way, it's a, it's a trick question, or at least it's the wrong question because it makes it a good, good metaphor. When you find a dinosaur skeleton, it's a jumble of bones in the, in the ground. It's a mess. It doesn't look like anything at all. So you have to figure out what are the pieces that matter for this particular dinosaur, for this particular problem. How do they fit together? What does the overall shape and structure look like? You don't know upfront. And so, like a good excavation assembly, you can't just think about starting from the top and then, and then magically finding the pieces that connect to that. When Lynn and I first show people question trees, we expose it bit by bit from the central issue to the sub-questions to the next sub-questions, but it's rare that we can actually build it in that, in that order. So to demonstrate that, we're going to look at a case example in a minute. The idea is this: what we have found to be most useful in, in developing the skill to build question trees is an iterative process. Most good problem-solving processes are iterative. That's one of the principles that we often refer to. We talk about it as KISS IT. It's not KISS the way you think of it. It's not keep it simple stupid. It's keep it simple and start, meaning plan on iterative processes to build understanding and insight as you go. And so in the real world, building a tree like that involves a lot of sticky notes and a lot of iteration. In fact, we draw from some language that is used in writing. They tell you when you're writing something, write the barf draft first. Just barf all the words onto the page. And then, and then edit, because you can't fix an empty page. So what we want to do, and what we've learned working with teams, is to build a tree like that, get everybody to contribute ideas, just barf all the ideas out, give them a prompt, have— collect all the ideas, and then start to structure and gather and learn the structure and gathering as you go. So in the real world, back, back then, we did this a lot with sticky notes and whiteboard, very low-tech but very Engaging and very collaborative. Well, now how do we do it? Well, there are some ways to take that process, to take the idea, the goal of an issue tree, what we call the question tree, the process of barfing it out and structuring it and using virtual technologies. And let's, let's actually demonstrate that. Lynn and I are going to demonstrate that. I'm going to switch over to Menti and I'm going to advance the question again. to a prompt to get you to think about a question, so you can be putting up some virtual sticky notes for us as well. Let me get to the— to that. And so, our new question is now this: Trader Joe's, the grocery chain, should they launch an online option for their customers? Currently, they do not have it. There are actually even— Lynn was explaining this to me— there are actually even third parties that buy things from Trader Joe's retail and sell them online at a markup to markets where they don't have a Trader Joe's. So, here's what we want. We don't want a yes/no answer-oriented thinking. Here's what we want to do. We want you to think about other questions. What questions would we need to answer? What things would we need to figure out in order to answer that top level, the central issue, should they launch an online option? So rather than thinking about yes, no, and jumping into solutions or how they might do it, let's keep thinking about questions. What things would we need to figure out in order to Answer the big question.

Patrick, it occurs to me that we just got some consumer research for Trader Joe's. I think all of these yeses are actually consumers saying, yes, I want this.

I would, I would say the same thing. And, and those, those of you who were here last week, remember, we— one of our principles was do the right thing, and we were making the distinction between advocacy and discovery. Advocacy is when you start with the answer and you back into analysis to support that. The more honest way is the exploration or discovery, which is you think of the question and then you come up with the, the questions and the work that would answer that question. So what we're seeing now is— yeah, Lynn, you're seeing some of these things too. There's some really good questions. Do we have the capacity to deliver?

Can the experience of being online feel as good as being in the store? That's actually an interesting one because the employee culture at Trader Joe's is a factor.

What are the highest demand products? Do they have infrastructure? And we might break infrastructure down into smaller pieces as well. Do they have inventory to support that via online? Great. You guys got the spirit of it perfectly, and it helps us distinguish this idea between what do you think the answer should be and what are the questions that are smaller questions that we need to answer in order to be able to— in order to be able to get to that. Okay.

And thank you because I'm using this question in class on Tuesday with our 1-year MBA cohort. So I'll see what questions they come up with and how they compare to the questions that you all came up with. These are great. There's some great stuff in here.

All right.

So now, Patrick, pick 1 or 2 of these that you want to use for the demo.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

I got a couple in mind. So, all right, good.

Now I got to—

you take the comm.

And I have to switch to this again. Sorry, it's a little clunky.

All right.

Oops, I'm on the wrong slide. So we wanted to introduce you to some of the collaboration tools that are out there. This is not the full set of them, but there are some different collaboration tools that already exist that enable you to work collaboratively in your team simulating the Post-it or the sticky note iterative process. We've tried a few of these and we're going to do a demonstration in Lucidchart, but we're also going to show you some output from some collaboration that we used using IdeaFlip. But Mural and Miro are other tools, and we will, we will also give you the chance to share tools that you have used in a Miro situation. So now I am going to switch again. I'm not very savvy on this. I'm going to switch to—

You just need, you just need more screens.

I need more screens. I'm going to switch to No.

Okay, the browser.

Great.

Um, give me one second. You're seeing Patrick in like triple, I think, right now.

Why is—

So, you know, some, some people I know, I recognize from the people who are registering, are former students and so forth. They know that, that I'm also a musician. There's an old joke that guitarists tell each other and their families: how many guitars does a guitarist need? Just one more. That's how many screens— how many screens does a virtual worker need?

One more.

Just one more.

So are you seeing Lucidchart, Patrick?

You are.

Okay, I just want to make sure. So we pre-populated— this is Lucidchart— we pre-populated— I'm going to zoom out for a second— a few Post-it notes on here, and you can see me moving my Mouse around. Patrick is also here in Lucidchart at home. We're, we're co— we're not co-located, we're in different places. You can see Pat there.

You're perfect.

We're each gonna grab a Post-it just off of the workspace on the side here. Oops, let me move this this way so you can see. And, um, um, So what would happen— oops, I didn't mean to do that. What would happen in a team collaboration process is team members would just keep bringing Post-it notes over. We used IdeaFlip with the Executive MBA course and we had 15 people in there adding stuff. It felt a little bit chaotic, but it worked. And then what happens is we can start looking for themes here on the board and here on the board. Patrick, I'm noticing there seem to be a number of Post-it notes about customers and there's some others about competitors. Why don't I take customers and you take competitors and we can start moving them around into Groupings.

Okay, which, which one did you want me to do, competitor or customer?

I'm looking for customers and you're looking for competitors. I've got some customer ones here and then I'm just going to kind of move these others around and then I can grab a box and Right.

So you see, this is all taking place real time. And we can start to group things as we see some relationships. We can find, you know, we can find the structures. We can, you know, the relationships emerge as you would as you start pulling the bones out of the bone pile. You start seeing similarities, you start seeing what might be connected to what. If you have a sense of the body shape, well, wait a minute, there's got to be legs, there's going to be feet. What do those look like? Competitors, customers might be some groupings that they may not last. We may decide to reattach things later. It's very dynamic, very fluid. And notice the technology facilitated us doing this without any constraints. It's an enormously flexible platform. All these are. But rather than just letting Lynn and me run loose on it, we were, you know, we had a process that we were trying to, to use with it.

Right. And so there was a question in the, in the Q&A that I already saw come in around how might we use— is there a tool other than PowerPoint to share issue trees or question trees? So let me show you a sample tree on this Trader Joe's question. So I'm going to play around with the sizing a little bit, just, you know, I don't expect you to be able to read all of these, and that's not the point. But here is using Lucidchart. This team organized their— they, they then moved out of Post-it notes and they created a new document And they created text boxes and then they were able to easily move things around and create lines. You can see you can move things around and it, it works pretty flexibly. So this is an alternative to PowerPoint, as anyone who's ever tried to create an issue tree in PowerPoint knows. Here, I'll just blow this out so you can kind of see what the scale is. And this is a work in progress. Anyone who's ever tried to create an issue tree in PowerPoint knows that PowerPoint was not designed for that purpose and is not very friendly. Another way that you— there are other ways that you can show issue trees. I've had teams put them in Excel. The benefit of Excel is when you, when you move beyond the tree and you start getting to work, you've got more columns and you can move horizontally to start thinking about what those hypotheses are and what's the analysis that you would do in order to prove or disprove those hypotheses, and you can have that flow into a work plan where you can start assigning responsibilities and that sort of thing. So those are a couple of ideas. I don't know that there is a nirvana perfect, perfect solution there. So let me switch now back to PowerPoint and get us back here.

All right.

So going back to the The Executive MBA team. This is actual output from the brainstorming that we did in Idea Flip. They use different color Post-its. Things were kind of in different places. A couple people got creative with their shapes. And this is what we did in terms of a process is we had everybody first write their own ideas on a piece of paper, just wherever they were located. And the benefit of that is it gives everyone a chance to just get their own thinking straight first. Then we went into the tool. But in advance of the class, I'd sent out the blank workspace. So everybody had the workspace. We went into the tool and people just started— it was the barf draft, as Patrick described. Everyone just started populating all of their Post-it notes. Then we paused. And as a class, we took a step back and we started creating some of these groupings. And we created little boxes and we dragged the Post-its into those little boxes. But this was still unfinished work. So then what we did is we went into breakout rooms. And we had— we actually had 4 breakout rooms, but for the purposes of the slide, I only pulled 3. You can see it's still pretty messy. But what we did was we assigned each of the breakout rooms one of these big buckets or areas of focus, and then the teams grabbed the Post-it notes. You're able to copy them from one document to another. They grabbed all the Post-it notes that were in the in that, that grouping, that cluster, and they dropped them into their workspace. And then they started looking for the hierarchy. They started saying, well, this is a bigger issue. And this is a smaller issue that's really a part of that issue. And you can see they drew arrows and they just started creating this somewhat messy but starting, you know, emerging structure kind of hierarchy. Then we went away and, and a small group of people said, okay, we're going to take all of this work product and create the tree. And the first version of the tree, as you can see, was very incomplete. We've highlighted some of the places where we're like, okay, we know this question is too big. We don't know what the breakout— the breakdown questions are yet. But again, it's iterative. In the first version of the tree, there were 4 items stemming off of that, the very— at that first node. And they said, you know what, these 2 seem like they really should go to the right. And there's this bigger issue around value. And so they reconciled those as a class in our next meeting and came up with the structure that we've already talked about. So that's a little bit of how the process worked with our executive MBAs. As I mentioned, we had 15 people engaged in this process, and we did it in a couple of stages, and we used the collaboration tools to do that. So now let's hear from you. What are some of the collaboration tools that you found useful in your virtual teams? We'll go to the Hive and see if there are other tools that people have found that will be helpful Lynn and I have been experimenting with a number of these things, and we don't—

you know, we're agnostic about the tool. We're still learning. The tools are a moving target. This was an emerging set of capabilities that the market was looking for before COVID I imagine that these things will explode in features and sophistication, a lot more competition. Our capabilities will get better and better. And I think various kinds of tools for collaboration, virtual whiteboards, if you will, will get better and better and more numerous. But looking back at everything that Lynn has been talking about, remember that it's not about the technology. You want the technology that can give you very fluid interaction. But interaction, and interaction for a purpose. And the purpose of all of this was this idea of a hierarchical set of questions where we're getting insights. We're not just having a bull session and throwing out ideas and hoping for the best. There's that, that idea of being able to shape that question tree that drives a lot of this, of this process.

Yeah, so it's interesting. There was a question about mind map tools. So Lucidchart and Miro have mind map templates. Actually, they both have a ton of different templates. So Patrick's showing you a Miro example right now. I don't know, Jodi, if you've tried these and find them less than satisfactory. I think as Patrick was saying, the fact that so many people are now working virtually, we are anticipating an explosion in the improvement and sophistication of how these tools work.

Absolutely.

There's one other question I think we could answer now, which is around how do we designate— or how do you really do this in a group process? In the classroom setting, I played a lead role of facilitator. The content came from the students, so I wasn't adding Post-its and doing that. I was really a facilitator, and I had created the different workspaces already. So that when we went into the session, we had the main workspace ready to go for everybody to talk. And I anticipated that we would have 4 or 5 breakouts. And so I created blank workspaces and didn't have labels for them and then assigned them. And very quickly, as I set up the breakout rooms, I then very quickly invited the right people to those specific spaces so they could do it. But I think it's helpful. And when you're doing the grouping to have multiple people Engaged in how you group. And it's really important to also be— have an audio component, as you heard Patrick and I, so that you can actually disambiguate right now. Well, I'm not sure who put this one up here, but what did you mean when you said value? Did you mean it this way or did you mean it that way? And in some cases, you can just re-edit the stick— I keep saying Post-its and 3M would be happy. You can edit those sticky notes right there on the screen real time as you As you discuss it as a team.

All right. Another important point of process that Lynn mentioned that I, I think it's important to— we don't want it to get buried— is this, this idea of, uh, of giving people specific prompts and giving them an opportunity to think on their own first before collaborating. Because once you've got the hive mind going, it's very easy for people to— people's good ideas to get, um, forgotten and left aside. And we sometimes won't bring them up if the group seems to be already coalescing in a particular direction. So the thinking first, the solo reflection, generating a bunch of ideas, and then pooling them into the common barf draft, you're much less likely to miss out on the great diversity of possible ideas and directions, and you're much less likely to converge too quickly on some ideas that everybody that everybody had. So that multiple stage— Lynn and I talk about one of our principles of problem solving is, um, you know, is the right fight at the right time, and getting, getting people focused on, on particular, uh, tasks. And so the other aspect here too is we're trying to come up with the questions, not just tell— don't tell me your ideas, don't tell me your solutions, don't talk about data issues. What are the things we need to figure out? So structure it in, prompt it narrowly, Then let everybody individually think about it before pooling.

Yeah, there are a couple of technical questions here, Patrick, that I want to just address very quickly before we get to the last part of our session. And they both have to do with the technology. One is around how the sticky note input gets done, entered in Lucid.

It's—

we're just typing. And so I'm not sure if that's what the question was, but it's just a click and drag of grabbing which item you want. We drag it over. So you can see Patrick is in Lucid now. He's just dragging it over and he's now typing. And then the other question was around color coding. That one's going to be platform-specific. And so the different platforms have different options in terms of what you can do and not do.

So, okay.

And then the next question was around what's the biggest group that you've successfully collaborated using this tool. I will admit these tools are— Patrick and I've been talking about these tools for a long time, but as with many of you, this crisis really forced us into experimenting more. And here's Patrick demonstrating that you can change the color of the, of the sticky notes. It has forced us into trying this for the first time. When, when I facilitated the Executive MBA cohort, we had 15 or 16 people in the room. That was my first time doing it. And I told them at the beginning of the class, well, this is a grand experiment. We're all going to learn this together. And it actually worked really well. I think you could do bigger groups, but Getting to breakout rooms and working in smaller groups, once you get that initial bar dropped and you can get people in smaller groups, I think is going to be more effective. All right, Patrick.

All right, I think you've got a little bit of a war story to tell us first, so don't you?

Thank you. I was— Back to me. All right, but I am not sharing, I think. So I'm kind of clunky on this sharing thing. All right, yes.

I broke mine off. There you go. Well, you know, we've got a lot of moving parts ourselves here today.

All right, come up. All right, I like this guy. This is how I feel some days. We, we know this is hard, and we say all the time that familiarity with these tools is pretty easy and straightforward. It's proficiency that is This is the difficult part. But investing in these steps of the process, particularly building the tree and coming up with the hierarchy of the issues, is an investment that pays major dividends. But even if you don't get to the tree, that's okay. I had the occasion to work in a cross-functional team a while back, and everyone came from different parts of the organization. They had different levels of expertise, and we had to put together a recommendation that was going to go to the highest levels of the organization, and ideas were flowing all over the place. And what we realized was, if we just grouped the ideas into these different aspects of the implementation— some of the ideas were around inspiration, some of the ideas were around empowering because they were on providing tools and skills, some were about advice and bringing in other experts. When the structure emerged, and this was in fact these bubbles and these arrows was part of what I pulled from the actual presentation. When we found the structure in all of the ideas, we were— that was the key that unlocked our stuckedness. There's another word that I just made up, but we were stuck. And but when we got this to— when we found a framework and we got to structure. then we were able to really put together the implementation plan and the recommendation. So, it doesn't always have to be a tree, but this idea of grouping and summarizing ideas is what we hope will be helpful for you. And Patrick, you're muted.

Okay.

There we go. We've got a limited amount of time left today. We've got another week coming. Next Thursday, we'll be talking about collaborating over communication and how we use effective rules of high-impact communication, even through a virtual collaboration environment. But there's, there's a whole course that we have, I mentioned before, in August, where you can spend— we can stretch out over a couple of days and do this virtually, and look at a lot more examples and really carefully look at the whole process and and a lot more of the toolkit. But a couple of quick highlights this morning that really are part of the theme of collaboration. What are some important collaborative tools and possible traps to avoid in some of the other upcoming steps of the problem-solving process? Well, what comes after this process of decomposition, of creating this question tree that gets us to these tiny questions, is then planning the work. And in step 3, we're, we're, we're thinking about What, what are all the things that we need to pull together in a plan to be able to get agreement on what the scope and nature of the work is going to be, but also to manage the team through the process, through the fact-based analysis that carries the weight of this work. During that process, there's a lot of art there, a lot of good craft skills there, but one of the things that That always strikes us where, um, where teams fail some, uh, some of their ability to collaborate and things fall apart is, is here. Is, uh, remember this? This is a slide that Lynn showed earlier where at the bottom levels of the tree, we've got these small-level questions, the ones where we stop dividing, because for those questions, they're concrete enough and specific enough. We, we can imagine a way to answer them. These are answerable questions, and we've achieved that goal of breaking things into real tractable, solvable questions. Well, then we've got to figure out, well, what is the step? What's the analysis? Let's say, what's the actual action step for resolving that question, proving or disproving a hypothesis? This is where a lot of teams run into trouble. So for example, we could end up here with These, these questions about willingness to use telehealth options. And we've got 3 sub-levels, 3-level sub-questions that we think are the bottom level. And we've got some hypotheses for each. And then we've got some reasonable language around them. For example, you know, to resolve the hypothesis as to whether different cultural differences about power distances, it's called, make people more or less open to telehealth. The analysis might be, okay, we do a survey of willingness to use telehealth, and we slice it by some kind of cultural identity, and so forth, whether it's the kinds of age and profession might be— some people more or less amenable to it. And also, depending on the potential severity of the illness, that might— that also might change it. And so we describe the analysis. Here's what the trap is. The trap is this, and it always reminds us of this great quote. I tend to attribute it to Elvis Costello, but it's been attributed to a bunch of people: writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It's a lovely quote. What does it mean? Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. I think the context is trying to express a frustration about how when you try to write about music, Words don't quite capture it. The idea is it's the wrong language. Music has its own language. And so dancing about architecture would mean this: if you're going to try to get somebody to build a big office building or build a house, you don't tell them how to do it by doing some kind of interpretive dance, right? Getting that on the video, everybody? You don't, you don't describe how it's built. There's a language for describing— what to build, and it's blueprints. And so for creating analysis, using words which are designed for a different purpose to describe analysis is like dancing about architecture. It's just inadequate language. And the solution we propose is something we call the protograph. The idea here of the protograph is this, is that the collaboration process for analysis and the tasks should be, instead of describing the analysis, is actually sketch the analysis. What is the output of the analysis going to look like if the hypothesis is true? And that allows us to apply the principle of disambiguation that Lynn and I talk about. How do we clarify what goes on in the analysis? Well, let's, let's fight over what the analysis would look like at the end. And that actually is a simpler job and a much more focused fight than you might see, but you might think, because To tell the truth, there's really only about 5 basic kinds of comparisons. So if we fight over this question, what comparison are we trying to make? There's really only 5 answers. A component comparison is a size compared to a whole, and the natural graph for that would be a pie chart or some kind of a stacked bar chart. Some comparisons are item comparisons, the relative sizes of many different items, in which case a horizontal or vertical bar chart might be the most natural chart. Likewise for time series line charts, frequency comparisons of distributions, and various correlations where regression lines or scatters. We see if we were thinking about what analysis to do, the first question we ask is what comparison are we trying to make, and that's going to disambiguate that. And then we then sketch, literally sketch the chart. And then sketching the chart allows us to focus on and realize before too much time has passed what are some other details that we need to, to resolve. And so it might be something like this. Let me switch quickly to another little tool that I really like. Um, it is, it's a document camera and it's just sitting on my desk and I'll show it to you in the camera in a minute, but you can collaborate over these things when we're talking about, for example, When the analysis that we want to do has to do with willingness to adopt telehealth by severity of illness, what comparison are we trying to make? Oh, it's a correlation. We're trying to see whether there's an association between a willingness and a severity of disease. And so the way we would fight about it is rather than trying to talk about it is we'd say, oh, okay, so we're going to have some kind of, uh, some kind of scatter plot here where we want to have some sort of willingness to telehealth, and we've got some sort of severity here, and we've got to get some data, and our hypothesis is that they're positively correlated, and it's going to look like that. Well, that's not doing the analysis. Despite what you hear, that's not what consultants do, is just sort of make it up. But, but it's helping us structure the argument, because if somebody said, no, I thought this— we're talking about whether this was changing over time, Oh, well, that would be a different chart. This focuses us on— no, this is a correlation. Now what does it do? It forces us to think about, wait a minute, we need to decide on what are we measuring here? What's our metric for willingness to telehealth? What's our metric on severity? What data points do we need? Where are we going to go get them? And so forth. So again, we're about out of time for talking about it today, but in the context of collaboration, there's a lot of other things that that we can, that we can do. And very, some very simple tools like this, this is maybe a $200 item that sits on the desk and is very simple to use, might be part of our arsenal as well as our virtual, as well as our virtual sticky notes.

Yeah.

And I think that's important to share because while the protograph is the tool that we teach in the problem-solving context, the Dot Cam is a tool that teams can use to simulate being in the room And being able to go up to the whiteboard or just sketch something and say, hey, here's, here's what I mean. And it's really clunky to try to do that in a whiteboard in Zoom or even, you know, in PowerPoint. You get hung up on formatting and you— and that takes time away from the idea.

It's just a way of using the right language. When we talk about the language of analytics, the language is the analytics itself. So we use prototype graphs as a way to disambiguate things. Well, we're going to see if there's— we've got time for one or two more questions, but just want to remind you that we'll be talking next week about what happens next when you've got recommendations. Imagine we've got recommendations. By the way, we can structure them as a— in the form of an answer tree using exactly the same kind of collaboration strategy and tools to do that. And then we've got to come up with story slides, a strategy for communication and delivery, and we'll be dealing with some of those issues. In our 3rd and final session of this series next Thursday.

So, Patrick, I've been handling some of the questions in text while you were talking. So there's just one question left that we haven't covered, and it's going to extend a little bit outside of the scope of, of our work. But the question was, what are your opinions as to the overall productivity loss due to these online and virtual communications and work solutions caused by the shutdowns due to the coronavirus? Obviously, every country— every company cannot— function cannot be transferred from hands-on and in-person to online.

You know, that's one of the great unknowns of all of this, right? I mean, we are still in just the early phases of all this. And I just think it's very difficult to say. The other thing I think we'll say is that it's going to be, as with most of the answers to the question, what's the impact of COVID it's going to be an enormous range. And there are some organizations and some processes that are to slide into this. There are organ— there are some companies announced a couple of weeks into remote work that, that, you know what, we're going to do this permanently. They just saw immediately that their work and their workforce and their systems and the way that they approached problems and communicated was so well suited to that, that why not just cut the cord immediately. Others are struggling to figure out how to do that.

Organizations can't do that. You know, you've got to plant, you've got to go. So it's—

Yeah, but I think, but again, I think bringing it back to what Lynn was talking about here, it's the technology is a facilitator. And I think what we should assume is that the technology will be able to very soon, we'll be able to do whatever we want it to do. The problem is still going to be us, the intention, the principle of intention. How do we guide the collaboration? Assuming the tool can facilitate that, we want to structure it. And in this case, Lynn was talking about hierarchies of questions to get insights about the problem and what work to do. The technology is caught up with that and can do it. The key is going to be in any organization having good problem-solving processes and being the willingness to redesign what— how they do things.

Yeah. Thank you all for being here. It's so nice to see you, especially the names in the participant list that I recognize. Yeah, nice to see you as well. We hope you have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Patrick and Lynn, and thank you to our wonderful participants for joining us again. On behalf of Emory Executive Education and Patrick and Lynn, we want to thank you all. As Patrick mentioned earlier, they are going to be hosting a 2-day, couple-day course with us called Approaching Problems Like a Consultant. You can find the hyperlink in the chat box for more information and registration for that particular program. Patrick and Lynn will be returning next Thursday, again with Problem Solving and Teamwork in a Virtual World. So we hope to see you all for that. A recording of today's session and also Patrick and Lynn's sessions from last week is available on our LinkedIn page. And momentarily, you all are going to see a brief survey. We just ask you all to take a couple of minutes to fill out that survey for us, give us some feedback on today's session, and we look forward to you all— seeing you all next Thursday at 9:00 AM. Thanks so much.

And thanks to the team for supporting this and making all the technology work. Thanks for your time today. Hope to see you again next week. Thank you.