Turn strategy into action

An Amish barn raising by Randy Fath - Unsplash

There’s a basic duality about new strategies: people require space and permission to understand them and their relevance, while they’re under pressure to maintain the day to day business.

And if the process is badly managed new strategies are ignored and inevitably forgotten. 

Opening creative conversations

Truth & Spectacle recently ran a Provoke game session with a large organisation who had just launched a brave new strategy. The players came from across the country and had been selected as future leaders for the company.

With their Learning and Development, and Leadership team, we decided to use their new strategy as the Big Question for the game. In Provoke, the Big Question is the focus of the game and is usually framed as, “How can we (insert strategic objective)”. It’s a simple and well practised method of opening a creative conversation.

Dedicated space and time

Through creative play in a safe environment teams explore the Big Question as thoroughly as possible, with the objective of creating their own questions that can lead to better answers. 

Provoke is as much a game as it is a practise which allows for dedicated space and time to have conversations and insights that can lead to better business. 

During the process, this large group of future leaders, many of whom had just met for the first time, came to understand they weren’t alone in feeling confused by the brave new strategy. 

Many of them weren’t sure what it meant for their teams, or how to implement it.

Curious collaboration 

What was amazing to see though, was how a questioning mindset and creative play quickly opened the conversations up and kept them open rather than jumping straight back into solutions and answers. One person remarked, “Provoke showed me how to keep conversations open and diverse for as long as possible”. 

The questions swiftly moved from “why” to “how”, which is what new strategies are actually for - making things better.

The players quickly helped each other understand the possibilities of the new strategy, both positive and negative, and create meaningful questions their teams would answer later.

Collective understanding

Over the period of 4 hours we observed how teams built shared understanding and a change of perspective.  People were really surprised about the diversity of thought amongst people in similar roles and how a better question, a second question is sometimes all that’s it takes for abstract ideas to start making practical sense. 

Turning strategy into action. 

Provoke Good Question cards with the all-important workshop coloured dots.

How to ask better questions

Great teams know how to ask the right questions at the right time. So how can we help teams ask better questions?

Over the last 24 months, I have had the pleasure to work with brilliant teams and leaders who are all weathering change and transformation.

They say you learn as much from your clients as your clients learn from you.

What I learned is that the best most successful teams and leaders are not the ones with the best answers but the ones with the best questions.

When you think about it, it makes complete sense. Having the answers does not necessarily mean you are asking the right questions.

But it is hard. Most of us are trained to be the ones with the best answers. Why do we need to ask more questions when we already have the answer? We have the experience, we have the expertise, we have the solution. It is an impulse reaction, but not one that serves us terribly well today.

To quote a friend of mine: “A lot of new products and services that did not make the mark have been developed because people solved the wrong question really well.”

To become the ones with the best questions, we need to re-train ourselves to break through the behavioural muscle that makes us want to jump right into the answer. There is a lot written about this but very little practical support and tools to help teams ask better questions.

So we made something. We have developed a card game that helps teams think creatively about questions.

We call it PROVOKE, because throughout the moderated play session we use provocations and challenges in a safe and playful environment to help teams get creative, ask questions and build practical creative leadership skills.

How does it work:

Our methodology is tried and tested in education and in industry and uses provocations to work through a real problem while developing creativity, critical thinking, and meaningful questioning habits. We allow teams to explore with play. Provocations encourage new connections with creative challenges and good questions about assumptions and habits.

The game is a catalyst to help break away from more conventional ways of thinking about projects and organisation in a safe and playful environment.

What do teams get out of it:

As teams work on a ‘live’ project question, we have seen teams walk out of the session with a much richer, accelerated understanding of the question, with new thinking connections and provocations that they bring back into the organisation. We have also observed the sheer energy and joy when teams allowed themselves to explore the question in creative, often non-linear ways.

We’ve been beta testing it over the last weeks and the feedback has been amazing. So we thought it was time to share it with you.

Let me know if you are interested to play.

Alex