The first three essays established that leadership teams improve organization performance by developing shared understanding. Leadership conversations strengthen that understanding, and making thinking visible allows teams to examine, challenge, refine, and improve it together.
Once thinking has been made visible, leadership teams can begin developing shared ways of thinking and working. They do so by working together on visible representations of their ideas.
Visible Representations Create a Shared Workspace
Structured templates help leadership teams create visible representations of their thinking by organizing it around the questions that matter most and expressing everyone’s contributions in a common form.
Templates begin as tools for structuring individual thinking. Once completed, they become shared workspaces where leadership teams develop thinking together. The shared structure shifts attention away from who contributed an idea or how it was expressed and toward the thinking itself. Visible representations help separate the evaluation of ideas from the accumulated perceptions leadership team members naturally develop of one another, allowing ideas to be evaluated on their merits.
People naturally become attached to their own ideas. A shared representation loosens that attachment by giving everyone something they can examine, question, modify, and strengthen together. The representation gradually becomes the leadership team’s work rather than any one person’s contribution.
Structured Thinking Improves Decisions
Leadership conversations often begin with participants presenting conclusions. Others respond by interpreting, questioning, agreeing, disagreeing, or offering advice before everyone understands the thinking that produced those conclusions. Much of the conversation is then spent haphazardly and incompletely reconstructing the observations, assumptions, questions, and reasoning behind them.
Structured templates help leaders organize their observations, assumptions, questions, and reasoning in a form that can be shared before the conversation begins. Leadership practices then help the team work on that thinking together by first seeking to understand it, then strengthening it, and only then deciding what to do next.
With templates, conversations begin with thinking that is already visible and end with thinking that has been strengthened. Decisions emerge from stronger thinking rather than from the effort to reconstruct it.
Visible Representations Also Strengthen Leadership Dialogue
Visible representations also strengthen leadership dialogue by inviting better questions:
- What observations support this conclusion?
- What assumptions are we making?
- What alternatives have we not considered?
- What important thinking is still missing?
Because everyone is working on the same representation, the dialogue becomes more deliberate. Leaders draw out and understand the thinking behind one another’s conclusions before deciding what to do next. Questions also help the team examine, refine, combine, and develop ideas on their merits rather than through the accumulated perceptions people naturally develop of one another.
As the conversation unfolds, observations are added, assumptions are refined, questions are answered, and reasoning becomes clearer. Gradually, the representation stops reflecting any one person’s thinking and begins representing the leadership team’s shared understanding. Questions help the team examine, refine, combine, and develop ideas on their merits rather than allowing established perceptions of the contributor to shape the team’s evaluation.
From Templates to Leadership Disciplines
Templates begin by helping leadership teams structure their thinking. Once completed, the representations they create become shared workspaces that the team can examine, question, strengthen, and refine together. Over time, those repeated conversations cultivate the leadership disciplines through which teams develop shared understanding.
Different leadership challenges require different templates because different questions require different kinds of thinking. Some help leadership teams clarify purpose. Others help them understand change, establish direction, define priorities, or make commitments. Each template supports a particular leadership discipline while contributing to the broader discipline of developing shared understanding.
Every well-designed template serves the same purpose: helping leadership teams make thinking visible, strengthen it together, develop shared understanding, and lead from it. No collection of templates can anticipate every leadership challenge, however.
When a leadership team encounters a new or unusual situation, one of its first tasks may be to create a structured representation that helps it explore that challenge together. The value lies in creating a shared workspace where leadership teams can explore new challenges together. As experience accumulates, that workspace often evolves into a reusable template for future conversations.
Once thinking has been expressed in a structured representation, that representation becomes a shared workspace in which thinking continues to develop. Leadership teams strengthen it together while individuals receive coaching as they work. Because the workspace is visible, AI can identify opportunities to strengthen reasoning, clarity, specificity, integrity, and cohesion, ask questions that deepen understanding, provide feedback, and suggest improvements.
The ultimate purpose of a template is not simply to produce a document. It is to help leadership teams develop enduring ways of thinking and working together. Templates provide structure. Visible representations create shared workspaces. Leadership practices shape behavior. Repeated practice develops habits. Over time, those habits influence mindset and ultimately transform how the leadership team thinks together.
As those disciplines become internalized, templates continue to provide value in a different way. They help introduce new members to the team’s way of thinking and working, support particularly important or complex challenges, provide shared workspaces where leadership teams and AI continue strengthening their thinking together, and help propagate those same disciplines throughout the organization.
As leadership teams at successive levels adopt the same ways of thinking and working, they propagate those disciplines throughout the organization. Over time, the organization’s culture comes to reflect the same shared ways of thinking and working that first took root within its leadership teams.
Manage to Lead Essays
Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organization performance.
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One of the most useful leadership templates helps teams develop shared understanding by answering three deceptively simple questions: What are we trying to accomplish? Who must do what? Why does it matter?