Rod Sayegh explains how the improv rule "yes, and" breaks down silos in design workshops. When compliance, legal, and risk teams can't say no, they generate better ideas in 45 minutes. The same technique works in salary talks and client meetings to keep conversations constructive instead of defensive.
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So I likened it to a few different situations, and Kate, you, you did say it can happen in any situation, in any industry, in any conversation.
And I'm just going to break that down and give some examples of that. So I have a design team, and we bring people from the front office, people dealing with clients, into the design room, and we say, hey, we want to design a new process.
And what they bring with them is baggage.
They bring with them baggage of how things are, how crappy they might be, or what is legal going to say, or what is compliance going to say, or what is risk going to say, or what the regulator is going to say. Especially in a regulated environment, it's very hard to add the "yes, and" piece around that. So essentially, we have rules that I state up front, which is you can't say no. And anyone who gets no, I write their name on a board. You got to make it a little bit of fun.
And that we implore "yes, and." So as we think about designing, we make sure that compliance and legal and risk are not in the conversation to cloud anyone's judgment, and we yes-and everything.
So during the design phase, if someone says something, we've got to yes-and it, and we continue to force that. The design team, which are the leaders and myself, are pushing the folks to think out of the box. And you'll be surprised after the— it's a whole day session, and you'll be surprised after the first kind of 45 minutes to an hour, it comes very natural because they've been given permission. And I think that is what's missing a lot of time, is that permission to build and think. And when you have that, you tend to have a lot more people on your side to push towards the right goal, the right client experience, or the right whatever.
And it comes up another way. You can be having a performance discussion or coaching discussion with someone on your team, and the "and" piece can come into play in a little different way there, right?
If they're like, "I want more money," or "I want to do this," and you can say, "Yes, and it would be great if we focused on these items," and got you to where you needed to go so you can excel. And that's where you can have a real open, honest conversation and they know that you're on their side versus saying, no, I'm not going to give you an increase, or no, you don't deserve that promotion because these are all the bad things. And so using it even in that, in a situation where you're like, well, I don't want to— I can't yes and every time someone comes and asks for a raise or promotion, right? That you can use that as a coaching opportunity.
So those are two different extremes.
Around kind of the design phase or even a coaching phase.
And oftentimes kind of in the middle, there are times I'll talk with clients who want to discuss features and functionality on our website, and that's a really different thing.
I'm dealing with someone else's client. I want to make sure they're happy and continuing to build upon their desire and their ask about what they want to see and really getting to the heart of what questions they're trying to answer so we can do a better design within a technology or an online site. So you can see where it builds into anywhere from a performance conversation to thinking completely outside of the box on a design solution.
