Category Archives: Manage to Lead

Managed to Lead posts are organized into the categories below and are about what can be managed in order to be a better leader. There is a category for each of seven actions motivated by seven simple truths about leaders and organizations which, if followed, can help you change the world.

Manage to Lead, Operations

IVOA Is Now Available as a ChatGPT Plugin

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An on-demand thinking partner that brings proven operating experience and Manage to Lead methods directly into ChatGPT.

OpenAI has approved IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA) for public availability as a ChatGPT plugin. Leaders, teams, coaches, and consultants can now access and apply IntelliVen’s Manage to Lead (MtL) knowledge, methods, templates, tutorials, and rubrics directly in their ordinary ChatGPT conversations.

Leaders regularly face consequential decisions, challenging problems, and opportunities when designing, building, running, growing, governing, or changing a business. Having an experienced operating partner who can challenge assumptions, test ideas, ask questions that might otherwise go unasked, and help turn good thinking into effective action can make a big difference.

IVOA is like having a senior operating partner at your side, available whenever you need a thinking partner. It draws on IntelliVen’s Manage to Lead system, developed by codifying the practices and lessons learned from more than a dozen highly successful operating executives. IVOA makes accumulated operations knowledge, experience, and discipline accessible through ChatGPT to help leaders, coaches, and those who support them work through difficult issues, improve plans and work products, make better decisions, and determine what to do next.

IVOA is even more useful when working with others. It helps team members develop their thinking independently, compare perspectives, identify and resolve consequential differences, and agree on direction and plans. It also helps teams establish the practices needed to guide, support, and govern performance.

Whether working alone or with others, IVOA helps leaders get clear about what they aim to accomplish, align on where they stand now, and put in place the plans and practices needed to drive performance.

Install IVOA in your ChatGPT

When to Use IVOA Instead of ChatGPT Alone

ChatGPT provides broad general intelligence and is useful for a wide range of management and leadership work.

IVOA adds IntelliVen’s integrated Manage to Lead knowledge, methods, logic, and discipline. It brings together the templates, tutorials, and rubrics developed and refined through years of experience leading organizations and working with executive teams.

IVOA applies these methods to help users:

  • Make assumptions explicit and distinguish evidence from inference.
  • Evaluate work against established criteria and identify how to improve it.
  • Compare independent points of view without losing consequential differences.
  • Translate intended outcomes into plans, initiatives, and measures.
  • Prepare for the reviews and conversations through which leaders guide, support, and govern performance.

The aim is to help leaders develop better thinking, produce better work, and make better decisions, together.

Use ChatGPT for general intelligence. Invoke IVOA when you want that intelligence disciplined by Manage to Lead.

Five Ways to Put IVOA to Work

IVOA explains its methods and helps you apply them to real situations as you work. Here are five practical examples.

Get Clear About Purpose

IVOA can help articulate an organization’s purpose by clarifying what it provides, who it serves, and the problem or need its offering addresses for those people.

Give IVOA a website, management presentation, or other source material and ask it to infer a draft WHAT-WHO-WHY. Compare that with the team’s own versions to surface agreement, gaps, and important differences. Then ask IVOA to suggest a consolidated version that reflects the strongest shared thinking while preserving consequential differences for the team to resolve.

Try asking:

@IVOA Infer our WHAT-WHO-WHY from our website. Explain your reasoning, identify your assumptions, and suggest what we should clarify or improve.

You can also give IVOA a draft Mandate and ask it to assess the organization’s intended direction and performance expectations against the Manage to Lead rubric.

Improve Leadership Work with MtL Rubrics

IVOA can assess WHAT-WHO-WHY statements, Mandates, Change Frameworks, and other leadership work products.

It applies relevant MtL rubrics, explains its assessments, and recommends improvements.

Try asking:

@IVOA Assess this Mandate using the Manage to Lead rubric. Score it, explain your assessment, and suggest the changes that would most improve it [entered mandate].

Revise the work and ask IVOA to assess it again. Repeat until you are ready to share it with others.

This makes IVOA useful as an iterative thinking partner, helping leaders prepare stronger work before bringing it to their teams.

Compare Perspectives and Build Alignment

One of IVOA’s most useful applications is to compare and synthesize independently prepared input from multiple people.

Suppose six executives each prepare their own description of what the organization should accomplish, or the attributes they want in their next CEO.

Give their submissions to IVOA and ask it to identify agreements, differences, additional considerations, and issues requiring resolution.

Try asking:

@IVOA Compare these six independently prepared descriptions of the attributes we want in our next CEO. Identify where they agree, where they materially differ, and suggest a consolidated version. Preserve consequential disagreements for the team to resolve: [enter descriptions in sequence or in a table or screen shot]

The same approach works with WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates, Change Frameworks, Mirror input, team priorities, and other structured leadership work.

Alignment comes from making differences visible and resolving the ones that matter.

IVOA helps teams prepare for those conversations and make better use of the time they spend together.

Plan and Implement Change

IVOA can help leaders determine how to move from their current situation (NOW) to a desired future (NEXT).

Using Manage to Lead Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, IVOA helps identify promising initiatives, intended outcomes, actions, measures, ownership, and checkpoints.

After entering WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandate, and ECF, try asking:

@IVOA Given our WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandate, and current situation, suggest initiatives that could help us move from NOW to NEXT. Explain your reasoning and help us evaluate which initiatives offer the greatest value.

Once an initiative is selected, IVOA can help develop its Change Framework, implementation plan, measures, and milestones.

Guide, Support, and Govern Performance

Developing a good plan is only part of the job. Leaders must also help their teams carry it out, learn from experience, address obstacles, and adjust course.

IVOA can help prepare and improve materials for operations reviews, leadership meetings, and initiative checkpoints.

It can also turn meeting transcripts into concise records of decisions, insights, actions, owners, and matters requiring follow-up.

Try asking:

@IVOA Help our executive team establish an ongoing review process for our functions, markets, and strategic initiatives. Recommend who should meet with whom, about what, when, and how progress should be reviewed.

IVOA can help make the practices of ongoing management and governance more systematic and effective.

How to Install and Use IVOA in ChatGPT

OpenAI has approved IVOA for public availability through the ChatGPT Plugin Directory.

To get started:

  1. Open the IVOA plugin page.
  2. Select Install plugin.
  3. Return to an ordinary ChatGPT conversation.

Once installed, ChatGPT automatically uses IVOA when it determines that its specialized knowledge is relevant to your request. You can also invoke IVOA explicitly whenever you want Manage to Lead knowledge, methods, and logic applied to the response.

To invoke it, type @IVOA in the ChatGPT message box, select IntelliVen Operations Advisor from the displayed options, and continue with your request.

For example:

@IVOA Help me improve this strategic plan: [enter or upload strategic plan]

You do not need to invoke IVOA for every follow-up in a continuing conversation when the context is clear. But explicitly calling it removes ambiguity about whether you want Manage to Lead guidance.

IVOA and the Leadership Workspace

The IVOA plugin makes Manage to Lead guidance broadly accessible to individuals working in ChatGPT.

For leadership teams doing substantial work together, IntelliVen also provides the Leadership Workspace.

IVOA helps you think. The Leadership Workspace helps a team codify, compare, refine, communicate, and maintain its shared thinking.

An individual can use IVOA in ChatGPT to work through a leadership challenge, develop ideas, and improve work products.

The Leadership Workspace provides a persistent, shared environment where team members independently prepare their thinking, compare submissions, reconcile differences, and maintain the agreements they reach.

It supports WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates, Enterprise and Initiative Change Frameworks, team scoring, measures, and other shared leadership work.

IVOA is also available within the Workspace, where its guidance can be applied to the team’s accumulated organizational context and work products.

Together, they help teams establish and maintain the habits and practices of Manage to Lead.

See How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity for an introduction to the Workspace and how teams use it.

Try IVOA on Something You Are Working on Now

The easiest way to appreciate what IVOA can do is to use it on something you are working on now.

Start with a Mandate, strategic plan, Change Framework, meeting agenda, or leadership question. Ask IVOA to assess your thinking, identify what deserves attention, and help you make progress.

Install IVOA in ChatGPT

If you would like to learn more about IVOA, Manage to Lead, or how the Leadership Workspace can support your team, please get in touch.

And if you use IVOA, I would very much like to hear what works, what does not, and what you wish it could do. Your experience and suggestions will help guide its continued development.

Peter DiGiammarino
IntelliVen, L.L.C.
Get Clear. Align. Grow. Together.

IVOA Frequently Asked Questions

What is IVOA?
IVOA is IntelliVen Operations Advisor, a ChatGPT plugin that applies Manage to Lead methods, templates, tutorials, and rubrics to leadership, operations, and governance work.

How do I install IVOA?
Follow the public IVOA plugin link and select Install plugin.

How do I use IVOA in ChatGPT?
ChatGPT may invoke IVOA automatically when relevant. To call it explicitly, type @IVOA and then enter your request.

Do I need to use @IVOA for every prompt?
No. ChatGPT can continue using the context of an ongoing conversation, but using @IVOA makes it explicit that you want Manage to Lead guidance applied.

What can IVOA help with?
Among other things, IVOA can help develop and assess WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates and Change Frameworks; consolidate team input; apply MtL rubrics; and extract decisions and action items from meeting transcripts.

How can my leadership team use IVOA together?

IVOA can help individual leaders and teams think through issues, assess work, consolidate perspectives, and apply Manage to Lead methods. For teams that want a structured place to develop and maintain shared thinking, the IntelliVen Leadership Workspace provides a collaborative environment for WHAT-WHO-WHY, Mandates, Change Frameworks, initiatives, measures, team input, and related leadership work.

Learn about the Leadership Workspace

Where can I learn how to use Manage to Lead?

IntelliVen offers Manage to Lead training for leaders and leadership teams. Participants learn the habits, practices, tools, and governance methods behind IVOA and apply them to real organizational work.

IVOA can then serve as an ongoing advisor as those methods are put into practice.

Learn about Manage to Lead training

Can IntelliVen help our team apply these methods?

Yes. IntelliVen works with CEOs and leadership teams through coaching, consulting, team alignment, strategy and planning sessions, and ongoing operating and governance support.

IVOA and the Leadership Workspace support the work, but the objective is the same: help leadership teams get clear, align, and grow together.

Explore IntelliVen services

Focus, Manage to Lead

Help Young People Choose Where to Grow

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Parents, grandparents, mentors, and coaches share a wish: to help a young person build a happy, fulfilled life. A simple visual exercise invites young people to set goals that reflect their own interests and aspirations. It begins with three questions:

  • What do I like doing?
  • What am I good at doing?
  • What do I want to spend time doing?

The third question asks them to make a choice. They may enjoy an activity or have a talent for it without wanting to make it a priority.

Bringing these dimensions into harmony is central to personal alignment. Our interests, abilities, and priorities change, so alignment is something we revisit throughout life. For more on this idea, see A Note on the Power of Alignment.

Learning to choose where to spend time helps us navigate two common pitfalls: pursuing one interest at the expense of everything else, and spreading ourselves across so many activities that none receives enough attention for mastery or deep enjoyment.

Learn to Choose Early

Many adults struggle to decide which pursuits deserve their time. Young people can begin to develop this judgment while their interests and habits are still taking shape.

Sports, music, academics, creative work, friendships, and new experiences all compete for attention. A young person may continue an activity because it is familiar, because friends do it, or because an adult expects it. They may also have interests no one has thought to ask about.

The exercise below helps make those choices visible. It gives a young person a way to reflect on what matters to them and gives a trusted adult a window into their thinking. With the young person leading the exercise, the adult can ask questions and offer support in a way that invites conversation and respects their independence.

Although designed with young people in mind, the exercise can be useful at any age. The underlying principles are also explored in this video on personal alignment and fulfillment.

Step 1: Make an Activity List

Start several days before you plan to work through the exercise together. Ask the young person to list activities they currently spend time on, along with anything they would like to try.

Use pencil and paper, a phone app, or a document. Keep the list open for additions and changes as ideas arise. The aim is to capture a picture that feels complete to them.

An adult can offer a starter list or point out an overlooked interest: “What about cooking?” or “You spend a lot of time on logic puzzles.” Let the young person decide what belongs on the list and how to describe it.

Move on when they feel the list represents their interests.

Step 2: Choose What Matters Now

Ask them to place each activity in one of four groups:

  • Top priorities: Activities they most want to invest time and effort in now.
  • Keep doing: Activities they enjoy and want to continue regularly.
  • Occasional enjoyment: Activities they like but do not need to do regularly.
  • Pause or stop: Activities they are ready to step back from.

Encourage honest answers. If a long-standing activity lands in “Pause or stop,” take it as useful information. Ask what has changed and listen before discussing existing commitments or practical constraints.

These choices reflect what matters now. They can change as the young person gains experience.

Step 3: Select Skills to Develop

Focus next on the activities in “Top priorities” and “Keep doing.”

Identify which involve skills the young person wants to develop through practice, effort, and experience. Examples include soccer, drawing, piano, math, cooking, climbing, and coding.

Other pursuits may be valuable mainly for enjoyment, connection, or discovery, such as attending a concert or visiting a museum. Keep them on the activity list, but leave them out of the skill map unless the young person identifies a particular capability they want to develop.

The distinction depends on their purpose. Watching films might be recreation for one person and part of learning filmmaking for another.

Step 4: Draw a Personal Pursuits Map

The map shows how the young person sees their current capability and where they would like to be in five years.

On a large sheet of paper:

  1. Draw the center. Make a small circle and write their name inside it.
  2. Add the spokes. Draw one line outward from the circle for each skill selected in Step 3. Space the lines evenly around the center.
  3. Label the skills. Write one skill beside each spoke.
  4. Agree on the scale. The center represents just beginning. The outer edge represents advanced capability in that activity. Discuss what that might look like for each skill.
  5. Mark current capability. Ask them to place an X on each spoke to show where they think they are today.
  6. Connect the current marks. Join the marks with straight lines and shade the enclosed shape. Label it Current Capability.
  7. Mark five-year aspirations.  Ask: “Where would you like to be in this skill five years from now?” Choose a horizon far enough away to imagine beyond today’s limits, yet close enough to picture progress they could achieve with sustained effort and support. For some, three years may work well. For a younger child, use their future age: “When you turn 15, what would you like to be able to do?” Use the same horizon for every skill on the map.
  8. Connect the aspiration marks. Join them with straight lines. Use a different color or pattern to distinguish the space between the two outlines. Label the second outline Future Aspiration and note the target age or year.

The map records their perspective. It does not need precise scores or a symmetrical shape to be useful.

A Personal Pursuits Map created during a tenth-birthday exercise. The inner outline shows self-assessed current capability; the outer outline shows five-year aspirations.

Step 5: Turn the Map into Choices

The conversation about the map is where much of its value emerges.

Ask questions such as:

  • Which skills are you most excited to develop?
  • What would you like to be able to do that you cannot do yet?
  • Where would practice, instruction, or encouragement help?
  • What might you spend less time on to make room?

A large gap between current capability and aspiration suggests something to explore. Ask what the young person imagines and why it matters. A small gap may mean they are content with their current level or would prefer to direct their effort elsewhere.

Use their answers to choose a manageable focus for the coming months. Agree on a concrete next step, such as joining a class, establishing a practice routine, trying an activity, or pausing a commitment.

Adults can then direct their support toward priorities the young person has helped choose.

Revisit as Interests Change

Keep the map somewhere the young person finds useful, such as a desk or bulletin board. Return to it at a birthday, before a school year, or when interests or circumstances change.

Allow enough time between reviews for experience and growth. Ask what they have learned, what still matters, and what they want to revise. The purpose is to build a habit of reflection and choice. Some skills will become more important. Others will recede. The map should change with the person.

A question as broad as “What do you want to do with your life?” can be difficult to answer. This exercise offers a more approachable starting point: What do you want to develop, and how will you make room for it?

Over time, young people can learn to manage a portfolio of pursuits that reflects their interests, develops their abilities, and makes good use of their time.

For the broader framework, read Personal Alignment: How to Increase the Odds of Being Happy and Leading a Fulfilled Life.

Manage to Lead

How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity

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Learning to think together gives a leadership team a powerful capability. The next step is to apply it to the work of leading the organization.

Every leadership team member carries a picture of the organization.

That picture includes what the organization seeks to accomplish, where it is now, what needs to change, where it needs to be next, how it will get there, and how it will know it is making progress. It also includes each person’s understanding of their own role: what they are responsible for, how they will act, and how they will make decisions that move the organization forward.

Those pictures are likely to be similar. They are pictures of the same organization, after all. They are also likely to differ because each team member sees the organization from a different position, with different information, experience, responsibilities, and assumptions.

The differences matter because people act from the pictures they carry.

A leadership team that has learned to think together can put that capability to work. Team members can make their individual pictures visible, compare them, understand and appreciate different views, and develop a shared picture informed by the experience, perspective, and judgment of the entire team.

The Shared Thinking Cycle introduced in the previous essay provides the basic discipline: Draft → Compare → Consolidate. Applied repeatedly, it gives the team a way to develop shared understanding about virtually any consequential aspect of the organization.

The question might be large: What are we trying to accomplish? What business are we in? Where should we be three years from now?

It might be immediate: What needs to change next? What should we do about a particular customer, market, acquisition, hire, investment, or organization issue?

Or it might be operational: What outcome do we expect from this initiative? Who owns it? How will we know whether it is working? What does the leadership team need to review?

The subject changes. The discipline is the same. Each person thinks. The thinking becomes visible. Different views become available to the group. The team works through them and develops a shared understanding it is prepared to use.

That is where Manage to Lead fits.

Manage to Lead (MtL) is an integrated system of tools, habits, and practices that gives leadership teams a practical way to develop and maintain shared understanding across the work of leading an organization.

MtL is organized around foundational leadership questions: What are we trying to accomplish, and by when? What business are we in? Where are we now? What needs to change? What will we do? How will we know we are making progress? How will we stay on track and aligned as we execute?

The questions give the team’s thinking structure. The tools provide practical ways to work through the questions. The habits and practices make shared thinking a continuing part of how the team leads.

The IntelliVen MtL Leadership Workspace is an application that gives leadership teams a place to develop, store, share, and work together on their thinking.

A team member can develop a view. Other members can develop theirs. The team can compare what people see, identify common ground and meaningful differences, work through those differences, and develop a shared understanding. What the team comes to understand remains visible and available for decisions, actions, communication, and leadership review.

As the team works through different aspects of the organization, those understandings begin to connect.

What the team seeks to accomplish connects to the business it is in. What needs to change follows from its understanding of where the organization is now and where it needs to be. Initiatives advance those changes. Measures show whether the organization is making the intended progress. Leadership review enables the team to guide and support the work, make adjustments as needed, and keep the organization on track and aligned.

Together, these understandings form a coherent and continually evolving picture of the organization that the team can see, discuss, communicate, use, and maintain.

The Workspace enables the team’s thinking about different aspects of the organization to connect. It makes shared understanding practical to communicate, use, maintain, and update as the organization moves forward. It makes shared understanding practical to develop across the organization and sustain over time.

The IntelliVen Operations Advisor (IVOA), part of the Leadership Workspace and loaded with Manage to Lead knowledge and logic, helps the team strengthen that thinking.

Upon request, IVOA can help strengthen an individual entry for clarity, specificity, and internal integrity. It can examine the integrity of thinking across different Manage to Lead tools. It can also surface common ground and differences among team members and help them develop greater cohesion across their views.

The leadership team develops the shared understanding, exercises judgment, and decides what to do. Team members learn to make their thinking explicit, understand and appreciate the thinking of others, test what they believe against what they know, work through differences, and develop shared understandings they are prepared to use.

They also learn to keep those understandings current. Conditions change. New information becomes available. Experience adds evidence. The team’s picture develops with what it learns.

Over time, making thinking visible and developing shared understanding becomes a normal way of working together. Team members become proactive about sharing their own thinking and drawing out the thinking of others. They become better at finding differences early, working through them productively, and maintaining shared understanding as the organization moves forward.

The Workspace is the place. Manage to Lead provides the tools, habits, and practices. IVOA helps strengthen the thinking. The team leads.

Try it on something that matters

Choose one consequential question your leadership team needs to answer.

Ask each team member to develop their own view before the group discusses it. Make the views visible. Compare them. Look for what you understand similarly and where your pictures differ. Explore the differences. Develop a shared understanding the team is prepared to use. Then decide what to do.

You can practice the discipline with a sheet of paper, a document, or a whiteboard.

Or bring a real question about your organization to the Leadership Workspace and see how Manage to Lead and IVOA help you make your thinking clearer, more explicit, and easier to work through with others.

Take the Leadership Workspace Tour →

Start with one question that matters. Make the thinking visible. Think together. See what you learn.

Explore the Manage to Lead series

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This Post: How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity

Start with: How Manage to Lead Fits Together →

Manage to Lead

Learning to Think Together

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Leadership teams develop shared understanding by learning to think through important questions together.

The progression is simple:

What I think.
What you think.
What we think.
What more we can discern.
What we say.

This progression describes a discipline that leadership teams can apply to virtually any consequential issue. Practiced repeatedly, the discipline becomes part of how a team thinks and works together.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Thinking

The preceding essays explored what makes this possible. Leadership conversations begin before people enter the room. Individual thinking becomes more useful when it is made visible. Structured representations help people organize their thinking and give teams a common form in which to work with it.

Once thinking is visible, it can be understood, questioned, developed, and shared. The next discipline is learning how to do that across a leadership team so individual thinking contributes to stronger shared thinking.

Draft: What I think

Drafting gives each person an opportunity to develop and express their own thinking before the team works on the question together.

A structured Draft asks everyone to consider the same elements of the same leadership question. Each person brings different knowledge, experience, perspective, and judgment. Putting that thinking into words makes it visible and often develops the thinking itself.

The Draft can also receive feedback while it is being developed. Assessment can help a leader see where an entry could be clearer, more specific, or more internally consistent. Questions and suggestions can prompt further thought and another iteration. 

The result is a stronger expression of what each person thinks and useful material for the team to work with together.

Compare: What you think

Compare brings individual drafts together and reveals similarities and differences.

Similarities show where understanding is already shared. Differences create opportunities to learn from the information, experience, interpretation, and perspectives distributed among team members.

A common structure also helps separate ideas from their sources. The team can concentrate on what each contribution adds to its understanding, giving ideas an opportunity to be considered on their merits rather than according to the role, status, personality, or presentation style of the contributor.

How leaders respond to revealed thinking matters. Seeking first to understand what someone means, then asking questions that help develop the thinking, creates an environment in which people become increasingly willing to share what they really think.

A facilitator can help establish and reinforce these ways of working until they become natural to the team. Repeated experience of having ideas understood, explored, and developed together strengthens both the thinking and the team’s capacity to work this way.

Comparison turns differences into material for inquiry. Leaders learn more about the question at hand and about how their colleagues see it.

Consolidate: What we think

Consolidate uses what the team has learned to develop its current best shared understanding.

One person’s observation may sharpen another’s idea. Several partial insights may combine into a more complete view. Exploring differences may reveal distinctions or possibilities that were absent from the individual drafts.

The resulting consolidated draft represents what the team has developed together. It becomes a shared reference point for further thought, conversation, decisions, and action.

DRAFT → COMPARE → CONSOLIDATE
What I think →
What you think → What we think

What More We Can Discern

Reaching shared understanding establishes what the team thinks together. Making that thinking visible gives the team something it can examine, test, and further develop.

Clarifying questions sharpen what the team means. Push-up questions invite further consideration of assumptions, evidence, implications, and possibilities. Advice and suggestions contribute additional experience and perspective. Each can help the team discern something worth incorporating into what we say.

Shared thinking can also benefit from perspectives beyond the leadership team. Customers, employees, investors, partners, advisors, and others see the organization from different vantage points. Sharing the team’s thinking with the right people and listening carefully to their responses provides another way to test and develop it.

The purpose throughout is the same: use what can be discerned to strengthen what we think.

Infer: What We Say  

Organizations express their understanding of themselves through websites, management presentations, plans, brochures, advertisements, reports, articles, and other communications. Together, these materials provide evidence of what we say.

Manage to Lead calls the function for making that thinking visible Infer. Infer uses existing materials to create a draft in the same structured form the leadership team used to develop its shared understanding.

The team can then compare what we think with what we say. What it discerns may sharpen the team’s understanding, improve how that understanding is expressed, or bring useful thinking from existing communications back into the team’s shared view.

What the team learns feeds another round of comparison and consolidation. Thinking and its expression develop together as the organization learns and evolves.

The Shared Thinking Cycle 

The progression forms a continuing cycle for developing and maintaining shared understanding. We call it the Shared Thinking Cycle. 

What I think → What you think → What we think → What more we can discern → What we say ↻

Draft, Compare, and Consolidate provide structure for moving from individual thinking to shared thinking. Questions, advice, outside perspectives, experience, and evidence provide opportunities to discern more. Infer makes thinking already expressed by the organization available to the same process.

What the team learns feeds another round of thinking, comparison, and consolidation. The subject can change while the discipline remains the same. Leaders can work this way when considering strategy, an acquisition, an important hire, a customer situation, an organization change, or virtually any issue that benefits from their collective thinking.

The discipline can be used with different degrees of rigor. Some matters call for a quick exchange of views and a decision. Others warrant individual drafts, careful comparison, further inquiry, and several rounds of consolidation. The greater the consequence of the decision and the importance of shared understanding, the more worthwhile it is to invest in developing the team’s thinking together.

Making the Discipline Easier to Learn

The Manage to Lead Leadership Workspace makes this way of working explicit and easy to practice. Across its leadership tools, the Workspace provides Draft, Compare, Consolidate, and Infer functions in a consistent form. Leaders can develop their thinking independently, discover similarities and differences, develop shared thinking, and incorporate what they learn through further cycles.

The Workspace also includes the IntelliVen Operations Advisor, or IVOA, which supports leaders throughout the process. As thinking is revealed in a Draft or developed through subsequent iterations, IVOA assesses its clarity, specificity, integrity, provides feedback and guidance, raises questions for consideration, and offers suggested upgrades.

IVOA accompanies the work throughout the cycle. Each leader can use it while developing an individual Draft, and the team can use it as shared thinking is compared, consolidated, tested, and refined. In each case, IVOA helps leaders improve what they have expressed before carrying their thinking forward.

The leadership team brings the knowledge, experience, judgment, conversation, and responsibility for what it ultimately concludes. The Workspace structures and facilitates the work. IVOA helps leaders continually improve the quality of the thinking they bring to it.

From Method to Leadership Capability

The structure is especially useful as a team learns the discipline. Repeated practice turns an explicit method into a familiar way of thinking and working together.

Leaders learn to make their own thinking visible and invite others to do the same. They look for similarities and differences, seek to understand what others mean, and use what they discern to develop stronger shared thinking.

They also learn to test what they think against evidence, experience, outside perspectives, and what the organization communicates. As they learn, they revisit and refine their shared understanding. The cycle becomes a habit of leadership.

With practice, the capability travels with the team. Leaders can use it during a meeting, around a whiteboard, in a planning session, or whenever an important question benefits from their collective thinking.

The artifacts created along the way capture shared understanding so it can guide decisions and action. The more enduring result is a leadership team increasingly capable of thinking, learning, and working together.

That prepares the team to apply the capability to the work of leading the organization.

The work begins with developing a shared definition of success:

What are we trying to accomplish, by when?

Continue the Manage to Lead series

Next: How Leadership Teams Build and Maintain Shared Clarity →

Executive Assessment, Manage to Lead

Conversations Every Fast-Growing Leadership Team Needs

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As organizations grow, leadership conversations naturally focus on strategy, fundraising, sales, product, and operations.

Those conversations are essential. Yet one conversation often receives far less attention than it deserves, even though it may have the greatest impact on the organization’s future:

What do the people around me know about my leadership that I don’t?

Every leader makes decisions based on an incomplete understanding of how others experience them. The question is whether they are open to becoming aware and intentionally closing that gap.

Some of the most valuable leadership feedback already exists in the experience of the people who work with you every day. They see your strengths. They see your contributions. They also see the habits and behaviors that are beginning to limit your effectiveness, often before you do.

I saw firsthand an example that played out with the COO of a rapidly growing software company.

His CEO said in a one-on-one check-in that he’d heard from a direct report that looking at his phone during one-on-one meetings made them feel dismissed. The COO discounted the feedback:

“They just don’t understand me and how I work.”

Several months later, a confidential multi-rater executive assessment process gathered input from the leadership team. Independently, nearly everyone described the same behavior and the same impact.

Presented with the collective experience of his colleagues, the conversation changed immediately. This was no longer one person’s perception. It was the shared experience of the people who worked with him every day.

Instead of becoming defensive, the COO became curious. He asked his colleagues to help him change. He even placed a sign on his desk during one-on-one meetings that read:

“Tell me if I’m being disrespectful.”

His colleagues did. The behavior changed. Trust deepened. Not long afterward, he became CEO, leading the company through more than tenfold growth with the confidence and respect of the people he led.

The assessment process itself is remarkably simple. For each participating leader, selected stakeholders answer four core questions:

A Simple Process for Better Leadership Feedback

  • What is this person especially good at?
  • What has this person contributed?
  • How has this person grown?
  • What should this person focus on next?

Stakeholders are also invited to offer any other input or advice they believe would help.

The questions are simple. The discipline lies in how the responses are synthesized, tested, and discussed. That work is best led by a trusted facilitator. Whether that person is an HR leader, an executive coach, or another respected professional, everyone involved must trust that the process is impartial, confidential, and focused on helping leaders grow.

The facilitator helps stakeholders distinguish isolated observations from broadly shared experience, challenges vague or unsupported conclusions, identifies the few themes that matter most, and ensures the feedback is specific, fair, and actionable. Their stewardship gives leaders confidence that what they are hearing fairly represents their colleagues’ shared experience, not just individual opinion.

Until recently, there were two practical obstacles to making this kind of reflection routine. Gathering and synthesizing perspectives from multiple people takes considerable time and care. And most executives have not been trained or naturally oriented to gather candid input about themselves, make sense of differing perspectives, and turn what they learn into a productive development conversation.

The IntelliVen Mirror application changes what is practical. It makes it easy and efficient to gather stakeholder perspectives and uses AI to organize and distill them into a coherent first-pass synthesis. A structured process and skilled human guidance then help test and refine what emerges and put it to work in a meaningful development conversation.

Stakeholders then meet as a group with the certified Mirror facilitator to test and refine the synthesis until they can stand behind one consolidated reflection. That agreed portrait becomes the starting point for the Participant’s development conversation.

The result is a way to make high-quality leadership reflection doable and routine, producing the kind of grounded development conversation few leaders are equipped to create on their own.

For HR leaders, coaches, and organization-development professionals, this makes it possible to bring a rigorous, thoughtfully facilitated reflection process to many more leaders and teams without the administrative burden that previously made it difficult to use routinely.

Organizations struggle when leaders continue leading from assumptions that no longer match the reality experienced by the people around them. By the time those unseen realities become obvious, they have often become costly.

The strongest CEOs build organizations where those realities surface early, while they can still be acted upon. They cultivate leadership teams that are relentlessly curious about what others know that they do not because they understand that leadership growth begins with a simple question:

What do the people around me know that I need to learn?

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