Tag Archives: Shared Understanding

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?

Manage to Lead

Developing Shared Ways of Thinking and Working

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The first three essays established that leadership teams improve organization performance by developing shared understanding. Leadership conversations build that understanding, and making thinking visible enables leadership teams to strengthen it together.

Once thinking has been made visible, leadership teams can begin developing shared ways of thinking and working through visible representations that everyone can examine, question, strengthen, and refine together.

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. They become shared workspaces for strengthening collective thinking and ultimately shared ways of thinking and working. 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 and not their source.

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 independent of 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. Once that shared understanding has developed, the organization has something from which it can act.

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. When leadership teams encounter new situations, one of their first tasks may be to create a structured representation that helps them explore the challenge together.

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.

Every time leadership teams use a template, they practice the same disciplines. They organize their thinking before the conversation, reveal it to one another, strengthen it together, and act from the shared understanding they develop. Over time, those disciplines become less dependent on the templates that first introduced them. They become part of how the leadership team naturally thinks and works together.

Templates 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 transform how leadership teams think together.

The same templates also help leadership teams share their ways of thinking and working throughout the organization. As successive leadership teams adopt the same structures, practices, and habits, they begin approaching problems in similar ways and communicating from a common frame of reference. Over time, those shared disciplines become part of the organization’s culture.

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.

Manage to Lead Essays

Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organization performance.

Next: Learning to Think Together

Making thinking visible gives others something they can understand, explore, and build on. Leadership teams can develop this into a regular way of working.

Each person develops and reveals their own thinking. Team members compare what they see, discover similarities and differences, and consolidate what they learn into shared thinking. They then seek what more they can discern through questions, evidence, experience, and perspectives from others, using what they learn to develop what they now think.

The next essay explores this recurring discipline, the Shared Thinking Cycle:

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

Manage to Lead

Leadership Conversations Start Before They Begin

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This essay builds on the ideas introduced in The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset.

Leadership teams create enormous value through conversation because conversation is the primary way they develop, maintain, and continually strengthen a shared understanding of the organization they lead.

A leadership team can complete a meeting, make a decision, and still leave without developing shared understanding. Differences become apparent later, when one leader believes “grow” means entering a new market while another believes it means increasing share in the current one, for example.

Leadership conversations take place in meetings, at offsites, through online exchanges, over the phone, on Zoom, or in the hallway. Some unfold in a single interaction. Others develop over days or weeks through an ongoing conversation. In every case, great leaders create the conditions that enable people to prepare, contribute, and learn together.

The form and duration of leadership conversations vary. The discipline through which they build shared understanding does not. Every important leadership conversation benefits from thoughtful preparation, genuine inquiry, and disciplined follow-through.

Great leadership conversations start before they begin. An executive review begins very differently when everyone has already studied the same information, reflected on its implications, and arrived prepared to explain what they see.

Every important leadership conversation begins when someone accepts responsibility for creating the conditions for its success. The conversation leader clarifies the purpose of the conversation, the outcomes it should produce, how the work will unfold, who should participate, what preparation is required, and how the team’s understanding should advance. Background information is assembled. Advance materials are shared with time for thoughtful participant preparation.

When the conversation calls for preparation, participants review the advance material, reflect on its implications, develop a point of view worth contributing, and are invited to begin sharing questions and observations before the conversation formally begins. This way, everyone arrives prepared to make their thinking visible and equally committed to understanding how others see things.

Facilitators guide the conversation and the way people engage with one another. Recorders work closely with the conversation leader to ensure the team’s evolving shared understanding is accurately articulated, thoughtfully refined, and memorialized. Every role prepares differently because every role contributes differently to the team’s shared understanding.

Great leadership conversations continue long after people stop talking. Leaders reflect on what they have learned, fulfill the commitments they have made, test their assumptions against reality, and carry that learning into the conversations, decisions, and actions that follow.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Understanding 

Preparation, facilitation, and follow-through matter because they create the conditions in which individual thinking can be shared, examined, and refined until shared understanding emerges. Leadership conversations create value to the extent that they surface, strengthen, and integrate the thinking people bring to them.

Much of what guides a leader’s decisions remains invisible.

  • Assumptions.
  • Observations.
  • Experience.
  • Questions.
  • Concerns.
  • Possibilities.

Each influences judgment, yet much of it remains unspoken.

Leadership teams often leave meetings knowing what they decided without having developed a shared understanding of why they reached that conclusion. Over time, different interpretations emerge because the thinking behind the decision was never fully shared. What appeared to be shared understanding turns out to have been only shared agreement.

Making thinking visible changes the nature of the conversation. Leaders explain their conclusions as well as the observations, assumptions, and reasoning that produced them. Others respond. Similarities become clearer. Differences become easier to explore. The team gradually develops an understanding that is richer than any individual perspective. Shared understanding begins to emerge.

Leadership Is a Learning Process

Organizations are often described as learning organizations. Organizations do not learn; people learn, and leadership teams learn together. The distinction matters because leadership is the continual process of improving a team’s individual and collective understanding until its members can make independent decisions and take actions that reinforce one another.

Most organizations already possess far more knowledge, experience, and insight than they effectively put to work. It resides in the observations, expertise, judgment, and experience of individual leaders. Leadership’s challenge is to surface that thinking, examine it together, refine it, and integrate it into a shared understanding that is richer than any individual could have developed alone.

In most situations, sufficient understanding can be developed by leadership teams that learn from one another while listening carefully to customers, employees, partners, and outside experts. Leadership’s responsibility is to uncover the best collective understanding that can be developed and help the organization act from it.

The Next Conversation

Leadership conversations shape the understanding from which the organization will act next. Because people think differently, every conversation is an opportunity to make those differences visible, learn from them, and build an understanding that enables the organization to move forward together. Every conversation leaves the organization with a stronger, weaker, or unchanged shared understanding. Great leadership teams ensure it is stronger because tomorrow’s decisions will be made from it.

Manage to Lead Essays
Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organizational performance.

Next: Making Thinking Visible
How leadership teams learn together by revealing the thinking behind their conclusions.

Manage to Lead

The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset

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Leadership teams talk for hours on strategy, priorities, budgets, talent, and performance. Turning those discussions into coordinated action is agonizingly difficult.

The core reason is simple: leaders rarely operate from a shared reality.

Even large, well-run organizations are known to spend significant time and money, including on consultants, to evaluate whether they are “ready for change.” Change readiness, it turns out, comes down to a shared state of mind.

Specifically, organizations perform best when their leadership teams share a common understanding across four critical dimensions:

  • What they seek to accomplish
  • The reality they face
  • What should happen next
  • How they will guide and govern execution

Shared understanding is a leadership team’s most vital asset. The larger and more distributed an organization becomes, the less it can rely on proximity, hierarchy, or informal conversations to create alignment.

Unlike capital, technology, or top talent, it cannot be bought, borrowed, or commissioned. Shared understanding must be built. It develops when leaders make their own thinking visible, become genuinely curious about the thinking of others, and continually refine their perspective until the team shares one vision.

Teams can survive on fragmented understanding, but they also waste immense energy overcoming the friction it creates. Today, as leadership teams become more diverse, distributed, and specialized, shared understanding can no longer be left to circumstance. Leaders have to create and sustain it deliberately.

Why Shared Understanding Matters

Imagine four members of a leadership team leaving a strategy meeting after missing their Q1 plan, realizing Q2 and Q3 are now at risk. The team agrees the organization should move into the higher end of its market. Each leader leaves with a different understanding of what is required:

  • The CEO believes the priority is to immediately pursue opportunities in high-end target prospects.

  • The CFO believes the organization should either secure incremental funds to invest or expand its credit facility.

  • The COO believes success depends on upskilling customer success personnel to manage large-scale projects.

  • The Chief People Officer launches a search for experienced enterprise salespeople and account management leadership talent.

None of these actions is unreasonable. Each reflects the legitimate perspective of a functional leader. The problem is that the team has not developed a shared understanding of what success requires from each of them right now.

The Two Futures

Without Shared Understanding

Over the following weeks, each executive makes sound decisions within their own domain, but those decisions clash. The CEO commits to opportunities the organization cannot yet deliver. The CFO holds off on approving needed investments until financing is secured. The COO strives to force large-scale project management onto a team lacking aptitude for it. The Chief People Officer sets up interviews before the team agrees on required capabilities.

Resources are committed before demand is validated. Opportunities stall, capabilities are built for customers who have yet to appear, and confidence erodes as another quarter slips away.

With Shared Understanding 

Suppose, instead, the leadership team agrees on a unified principle where the organization moves into the higher end of the market only as customer demand is validated and revenue leads investment.

  • The CEO works closely with prospective customers to validate demand before committing.

  • The CFO expands borrowing capacity so financing is available should demand warrant it.

  • The COO strengthens delivery capabilities in step with demonstrated customer needs.

  • The Chief People Officer pipelines talent, timing actual hires to match validated demand.

Shared understanding enables leaders to exercise sound independent judgment that reinforces the judgment of others. As uncertainty unfolds, the organization responds coherently.

Shared understanding is a leadership team’s most important asset.

Building Shared Understanding

Shared understanding rarely emerges from a single meeting or off-site. It develops gradually as leaders make their thinking visible, test assumptions, draw each other out, and challenge one another respectfully.

High-performing leadership teams continually use an explicit diagnostic to evaluate their alignment:

Questions High-Performing Teams Constantly Re-Answer

  1. What are we trying to accomplish?

  2. What business are we really in?

  3. What must change right now?

  4. What should we do next?

  5. How will we know whether we are succeeding?

  6. How will we maintain alignment as conditions change?

Organizations usually struggle because leaders answer these key questions differently, even in subtle ways, without realizing it. These differences can cause big problems downstream. The work of leadership is to bring individual answers into the open, compare them candidly, and refine them until they become a shared understanding.

Leadership conversations are investments of valuable time and energy. To extract maximum value from these meetings, leaders need to learn to deliberately prepare, heighten consciousness and behavior during conversation, and ensure disciplined follow-up. Each conversation leaves the team with a stronger, weaker, or unchanged shared understanding. High-performing leadership teams are intentional about ensuring it is stronger.

Every Leadership Team Has a Choice

How leaders respond to differing perspectives largely determines how the organization performs:

  • Assuming: Some leaders are content to be oblivious to differences in perspective, taking alignment for granted until conflicting priorities and failed execution force the issue.

  • Living with it: Others recognize differences but accept friction as the inevitable cost of doing business.

  • Prescribing: Others dictate what everyone should think. That may produce compliance, but it rarely produces the richer understanding that emerges when diverse perspectives are explored and refined together.

  • Cultivating: High-performing leaders actively seek out the thinking of their peers while making their own explicit. They foster an environment where executives continuously share, test, and refine their views to build a collective perspective far richer than any individual could create alone.

A Leadership Imperative

Leadership’s responsibility is to continually improve the understanding from which decisions and actions flow.

Organizations that do this well develop a different way of working together. Thinking becomes more visible. Curiosity becomes habitual. Assumptions are tested rather than protected. Disagreements become more productive. Decisions and actions increasingly reinforce one another.

Over time, those behaviors become the organization’s leadership culture.

That culture, built one leadership conversation at a time, may become a leadership team’s most enduring competitive advantage.

Manage to Lead Essays
Essays exploring how leadership teams build shared understanding and improve organizational performance.

This essay introduces why shared understanding is leadership’s most important asset. The next essay explores how leadership conversations develop and strengthen that shared understanding.