Assumptions is the mother of all fuckups
Vipps and MobilePay is becoming one company, bringing both challenges and opportunities. This article is part of a series on this topic, and the primary audience is Vipps Mobilepay employees. If our reflections on culture and ways of working during the merger is of interest to you, you’re our audience too! 🤗
This week we facilitated a exercise in a one of our leadership teams; Bring up all the elephants! And, I can reveal: and it turned out that there was a whole elephant farm hiding! 🐘🐘 Like quite a few other teams, I’m sure. But, the team finally set aside time to discuss, and they had open and good dialogues. I observed that they solved some hassle and even set up action points to work on this in the future. Very good work and they took some steps in the right direction :)
Some examples of elephants I have observed across the organization right now is; “We need to speak more openly and honestly in our leadership team”, “how should we collaborate with other areas”, “we do not create a strategy, but rather a set of action points”, “how can we discuss risk appetite without ending in a deadlock because we think so differently”. Well, you probably recognize some of the elephants, and you can probably add a few more.
The key to working with these difficult topics is set aside time, and to have a dialogue, that means: You need to speak your mind and let others understand what you mean. But also listen to others and be curious about others’ perspectives. You need to build on each other’s opinions and thoughts. This sounds easy, but not so easy in practice. I have observed in many workshops and team building sessions lately that the dialogue stops with a comment like “This is not possible”. Why does the dialogue stop then?
When the dialogue stops in the team, it’s often because we let it die with the comment and we never get to explore the meaning of it. Don’t do that! It can cost us as a company incredible amount of time and money because we don’t. And that leads to endless discussions in meetings with many people without results. It will most likely lead to poorer cooperation, we don’t get the best ideas and innovate, and most likely we even interpret each other in the worst possible way.
We must dare to be curious when we disagree; Be curios and friendly 😀 and ask open questions, like “There must be something here I do not understand because I see it differently. Can you help me understand why….?”
Dig into the problem to understand: it might be a problem, but maybe not. It could be a misunderstanding, a lack of information or something else behind it, such as emotions. I have seen this several times and it is liberating when the knots are untied. We often tend to interpret each other in the worst possible way, and assumptions is the mother of all fuckups.
Principle: We embrace new perspectives and take well-judged risks
That is why we have created the principle:
We embrace new perspectives and take well-judged risks. We encourages all to speak their mind so we can learn from each other and be curious and explore the ideas of others. What we should not do is watch what we say because we risk losing political or social status, and kill ideas due to lack of understanding or time to explore.
If you find yourself in the same situation, here are a few tips that worked for us:
- Dare to face the elephants together
- Set aside sufficient time to so you can deep dive into the topic
- Be focused, stick to one topic at a time
- Be curios and friendly
- Summarize your key takeaways or actions to ensure that you are all on the same page
Good luck!
Contact us coaches if you need help facilitating such a session, or just want to have a chat about the topic! 🫶
