"Polished" Decisions

I recently came across a video of Steve Jobs comparing good teamwork with a rock tumbler. He mentions that as a youth he saw a number of plain looking rocks put into a rock tumbler and heard the rocks grinding against each other. After a bit of time, the rocks were polished and beautiful.   

Jobs uses the rock tumbler as a metaphor for teamwork.  If a team allows the ideas they are working on to crash into each other, the resulting idea will be more polished. It was Jobs’ way of encouraging teams to engage in conflict. 

The metaphor is good up to a point. However, if the rock tumbler is on too high a setting, the resulting rocks are not polished, rather they are reduced to pebbles. If it is not set high enough, the rocks stay covered in dirt. So the key is to use the right setting. 

I like to think of conflict on teams falling along a continuum between collegial and confrontational. Neither end of the continuum produces the best results. 

In schools, teams tend to be too collegial. They avoid conflict at all costs. The first idea thrown out is usually accepted because no one wants to hurt the feelings of the person who suggested it. This may lead to peaceful meetings, but it rarely leads to optimal results. All ideas can be improved with vetting.

On the other extreme are teams that rip apart any idea from a colleague. These team members are often protecting their own turf and fear ideas that may take resources or power away from their department. In these situations, teams do not work effectively as people are afraid to present ideas at all. 

The productive midpoint are teams who are willing to critique and improve on their teammates’ ideas in constructive ways. These discussions focus on the idea rather than personalities, and the team knows the motivation behind the comments is to get to the best result rather than forward a personal or departmental agenda. 

As schools tend to fall more on the overly congenial end of the continuum, it is up to the leader to mine for (productive) conflict. Some techniques to do so include

• Asking a team member, particularly one that is supporting the idea, to argue against it. 

• Going around the table and individually ask each team member to articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the idea. 

• Holding a premortem. A premortem is much like a post mortem except it is done before the idea is implemented. The team is asked to envision that the implementation went horribly wrong and then hypothesize about why it failed so miserably. 

• Asking the team to develop other ways of addressing the issue at hand. 

• Talking privately to team members who seem to be critiquing ideas based on their department’s needs rather than the school’s needs.

Mining for conflict can be hard, especially for the conflict averse. (Indeed, one of my team members was so disconcerted by conflict that she would sit at the table and peel a clementine and then tear the peels into smaller and smaller pieces until she had a huge pile in front of her. The team could often gauge how contentious our meetings were by the height of her clementine pile.) However, ideas do need to be tumbled a bit so they can emerge as shiny and bright.