How to Break Through Deadlock on Your Team
Here is my latest post, published on the Harvard Business Review website.
If your team deals with important issues and team members have strong views on those issues, you can end up in a deadlock. When that happens, people dig into their own preferred solutions, operating from a unilateral control mindset where everyone believes that he or she understands the situation and is right, and that those who disagree just don’t understand the situation and are wrong. When all team members are thinking and acting this way, it creates a vicious reinforcing cycle. The more people try to prevail, the more people stand their ground, and the less likely it is that the team will ultimately resolve anything.
First, it’s important to understand how deadlocks develop. Think of them as an adult version of a connect-the-dots puzzle. In the children’s version, you draw a line connecting a series of numbered dots that are scattered on a page. If you connect the dots correctly, they form a picture, which is the solution to the puzzle. In a team deadlock, the dots represent the assumptions, interests, and relevant information that each member uses to arrive at his or her own solution. The line connecting the dots represents the reasoning process. In deadlocks, team members don’t select all the same dots, nor do they connect them in the same way. As a result, they arrive at different solutions. And everyone believes they have the one correct solution to the puzzle. Because each team member’s solution is the result of how they selected and connected their own dots, arguing about competing solutions without understanding what generated them in the first place just maintains the deadlock.
Consider a three-person leadership team with members Stephen, Daphne, and Kim deadlocked about how to reduce the time it takes for the three divisions they lead to meet client deadlines. Let’s look at the dots:
Assumptions. Assumptions are things you accept as true or certain to happen without proof. The assumptions you make influence which solutions you consider effective or even possible. If Stephen assumes that all division managers are capable of performing at a certain standard, but Kim and Daphne assume that some managers don’t have the capacity to do so, their solutions for meeting client deadlines will likely be at odds.
Interests. Interests are the underlying needs that team members try to meet through their proposed solutions. Positions are simply solutions that people support that meet their interests.
People often take positions that meet the legitimate needs they face given their role in the team or organization. For example, if Daphne directs operations and Kim heads up finance, they may both take the position that the problem be solved using people who do not directly generate revenue. Their position may be based on their need that any solution be developed in a way that does not jeopardize the unit’s short-term profitability, for which they are accountable. If Stephen is responsible for strategy, he may take the position that all the managers need to meet together. His position may be based on his need to ensure that everyone understands the plan and is committed to implementing it.
The problem with focusing on positions is that team members’ positions are often in conflict when their underlying needs are actually compatible. Unfortunately, when people fail to realize this, they fail to explore solutions that everyone would likely support.
Relevant information. Relevant information is the information you use to formulate your solution. It includes financial and other data about the issue, information others have shared with you, and opinions that you value.
Whether people consider information to be relevant also affects the solutions they reach. If Daphne believes that the impending organizational change will alleviate some of the deadline challenges, she may not support a solution that commits resources she believes will be unnecessary. Similarly, if Kim believes that the new time management training program is starting to have a positive effect, she may want to delay any decision until the program has had sufficient time to show its full effect.
Connecting the Dots
To identify the cause of your own team’s deadlock and develop a solution that everyone can support, examine the reasoning that each person is using to connect their dots:
- Identify the assumptions, interests, and relevant information that team members are using to reach their solutions. You can map these out using a connect-the-dots approach, or you can simply develop a list. Place the names of people next to the assumptions, interests, and relevant information they believe needs to be included; this enables the team to quickly identify who needs to explain their reasoning for each item.
- Identify the assumptions, interests, and relevant information that team members do not agree on. Whether you are using a visual map or lists, circle the items that not all members agree on. In our example, Stephen, Daphne, and Kim would circle: Stephen’s assumption about managers’ capability; Daphne’s and Kim’s interest that implementing the solution not jeopardize short-term profitability; Daphne’s information that an impending organizational change is relevant to consider; and Kim’s understanding that the new time management training program for managers is having a positive effect.
- Explore what leads members to include or exclude the item as part of their reasoning. For each item the team identified in the previous step, give individuals time to explain how the assumptions, interests, and relevant information they think are important influence their thinking. The purpose of this step is to understand how each team member is thinking, not for team members to try to convince others.
- Agree on the assumptions, interests, and relevant information that will be considered in developing a solution. The core of this step is jointly designing ways to resolve the differing views. In our example, Stephen, Daphne, and Kim would jointly design a way of determining the extent to which the assumption that managers who report to them are capable of performing at a certain standard is accurate. They may decide to review available information or collect new information. They would agree on whether the interest of maintaining short-term profitability was critical. Finally, they would also jointly design a way to resolve whether Daphne’s information about an impending organizational change is relevant to consider and whether the new time management training program for managers is having a positive effect, as Kim believes. Jointly designing how to resolve the differences ensures that people agree on the data that will be used, how the data will be analyzed, and what decisions will be made based on the outcome of the analysis. This is the most challenging part of the process. It requires that team members be genuinely curious about others’ views and willing to examine their own assumptions and interests.
- Jointly develop a solution that integrates the newly agreed upon assumptions, interests, and relevant information. In this final step, your team uses its collective creativity to generate a solution that is based on all the items they have agreed to. If your team has done its work well up to this point, then this step feels like you are solving a difficult puzzle together. The team is focused on the challenge of developing a solution, not on challenging each other.
While these steps are logical and seemingly easy to follow, to use them effectively, you and your team need to shift out of the unilateral control mindset that led you into deadlock in the first place. Most of the time, deadlock happens because we’re not fully transparent with others about how we arrived at our conclusions, we’re not curious enough about how others arrived at different conclusions, and we don’t creatively address and resolve the seemingly unbridgeable differences that form the deadlock. Making the shift to transparency, curiosity, and creativity is the key to making the process work.
Originally published in the Harvard Business Review July 2015
