Deep Conversations

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate with a team of highly accomplished

people to draft a letter to a potential client requesting a meeting to pursue a business proposition of mutual interest to both our companies. We began the letter writing process with an initial draft provided by one member of our team which was to be edited by the other team members via a shared Word document and tracking changes. After numerous iterations of the letter, we realized that we were not being productive with our letter although attempting to be highly efficient in doing so. Sometimes our quest to be efficient gets in the way of our being effective as a Team. 

We found that, as a team we were unable to communicate effectively with each other via this shared document mechanism and suggested that we go face to face for one hour. After that hour of engaging each other in a deep conversation, we produced a product that was exponentially better that we could have done in a month of online exchanges of edits. During this process, it occurred to us that something extraordinary had occurred within our team during the hour spent together. 

Here are our learnings from this exercise.    

• Our Team had a more Distilled Sense of Shared Purpose.  As we worked on perfecting our letter, we had to refine our purpose in sending the letter, the intended recipient and how he would read the letter, and our desired outcome from sending the letter. 

  
  

• Our Team had Diverse Perspectives on content and tone, ordering of paragraphs to capture and hold the interest of the recipient.

  
  

• Our Team Uncovered Hidden Knowledge and Expertise that did not come to light, or if it did, was not fully understood and appreciated when working individually.

  
  

• Our Team actively engaged in Collaborative Problem Recognition and Solving.

  
  

• Our Team Listened and Heard the contributions of other members, Building Trust and Collegiality within the Team.

  
  

• Our Team Experienced the Power of Immediate Iterative Feedback and Refinement.

And I believe the underlying catalyst for this good work was having a forum to engage the Team in face-to-face Deep Conversations.