People in every context struggle together because they're simply working from the wrong conversations. This happens even when we believe we have all the right people, agendas, urgencies, accountabilities and resources at the table. People can assume they're having the right conversations for three reasons:
The person leading conversation who is supposedly smarter than others dictates the conversation It's the same conversations that moved us to success in the past We don't know any other conversations to have
Wrong conversations keep groups stuck, fragmented, ineffective or unrealistic. Groups realize their potential only when they have the right conversations. One easy way to stack the deck in favor of right conversations is taking time to reflect whether there might be better conversations for us to be having at this point. It could be that we need to have multiple rather than single conversations happening.
There are also a few core questions we can use to identify better conversations, like:
What matters most to us at this time? What are our most pressing questions right now? The principle is that when we change the conversations, we change our capacity for being smarter and faster together.