Business Performance Improvement in the Future of Work

Moving from best
to better and better
Business practice redesign is an untapped opportunity

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Below the surface of current events, buried amid the latest headlines and competitive moves,
executives are beginning to see the outlines of a new business landscape. Performance pressures
are mounting. The old ways of doing things are generating diminishing returns. Companies are
having a harder time making money—and increasingly, their very survival is challenged. Execu-
tives must learn ways not only to do their jobs differently, but also to do them better. That, in part,
requires understanding the broader changes to the operating environment:
• What is really driving intensifying competitive pressures?
• What long-term opportunities are available?
• What needs to be done today to change course?
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Moving from best to better and better

Introduction | 2
The nine practices | 12
Frame a powerful question
Seek new contexts
Cultivate friction
Commit to a shared outcome
Bias toward action
Prioritize performance trajectory
Maximize potential for friction
Eliminate unproductive friction
Reflect more to learn faster
CONTENTS
1

U
NDER mounting performance pressure,
many corporate leaders are looking to busi-
ness process reengineering to improve per-
formance, and in many ways that makes sense—after
all, processes give shape to an organization and are
often useful for coordinating routine flows across
large organizations. The routine work of a company
should be done as efficiently as possible, which in-
creasingly means incorporating automation.
But organizations may be missing a much great-
er opportunity to improve performance.
Here’s the thing: Much of the work of many or-
ganizations today—at least the work that typically
offers the potential for differentiation—is no longer
routine or even predictable. When conditions and
requirements shift constantly, processes fail. While
process optimization can still certainly help reduce
costs and streamline operations, leaders should
consider a different kind of organizational rethink-
ing for significant performance improvement.
And in an environment of accelerating tech-
nological advances and rapid and unpredictable
change, constant performance improvement is a
must. Competition can come from anywhere—do-
ing well relative to the competitors on your radar
isn’t enough. Many barriers to competition are fall-
ing, and many boundaries, between industries and
between markets, are blurring. Consumers have
more access to information and alternatives than
ever, along with a coincident increase in expecta-
tions. Workers have more access to information and
alternatives—and increased expectations.
At the same time, many employees, in all kinds
of environments, face increasing pressure to reach
higher levels of individual performance. The useful
life of many skills is in decline, creating a constant
pressure to learn fast and reskill.
Many companies have struggled to effectively
respond to these pressures since long before the In-
ternet of Things and cognitive technologies added
new layers of complexity. The average return on
assets for US companies has declined for the past
several decades, and companies find themselves
displaced from market leadership positions more
often than they used to.1
While the price-perfor-
mance improvement in the digital infrastructure
has increased exponentially, most companies are
still capturing only a small fraction of the value that
ought to be available through the technologies built
on this infrastructure. Existing approaches to per-
formance improvement appear to be falling short.
It begs the question: In a world of digital trans-
formation and constant change, what does perfor-
mance improvement mean? Many companies suf-
fer from at least one of three broad problems that
can misdirect their focus:
1. Thinking of performance improvement
too modestly. Leaders often think of perfor-
mance advances as discrete, one-time jumps
from A to B, or even a series of jumps to C and
D. The initiatives that typically generate these
bumps are similarly construed as pre-defined,
one-time changes rather than as unbounded ef-
forts that have the potential to generate more
and more improvement. As we discuss in more
detail in Beyond process,2
not only do most com-
panies need to continually improve their perfor-
mance—those that don’t start accelerating may
fall further and further behind and become in-
creasingly marginalized. Accelerating improve-
ment, then, should be a goal of operations, not
just one-off initiatives.
too narrowly, focused only on costs. Pro-
cess optimization and cost reduction have
Overview: Beyond process
2

DEFINITION OF A FRONTLINE WORKGROUP
For our purposes, a frontline workgroup is characterized by size, sustained involvement, and integrated
effort. A workgroup pulls together three to 15 people working interdependently to deliver a shared
outcome that could not be achieved without all members working on it together. The members spend
the significant majority of their time interacting with each other, formally and informally, on tasks that
cannot be highly specified or sequenced in advance.
What a workgroup is not:
• an entire department
• a task force or committee in which decisions or recommendations are made but not executed by that
task force or committee
• a set of people whose work is determined by highly specified, tightly integrated tasks
• a standing unit whose composition remains stable over a long period of time
• a team that meets on an infrequent basis to perform some tasks together
dominated much of performance improvement
efforts for the past several decades, focusing
largely on the denominator of the financial ratio
of revenues to costs. But costs can be cut only
so far, and technology-based process efficiencies
can be quickly competed away, especially at a
time when the changing environment and shift-
ing customer expectations are making many
standardized processes quickly obsolete. Fur-
ther reductions can become harder to achieve
and have less impact.
The relevant performance might be more
about an organization’s ability to create signifi-
cant new value. Workers across an organization
regularly encounter new needs, new tools for
meeting needs, and opportunities to identify
new ways of delivering more value and impact
in multiple dimensions, including helping other
parts of the organization generate more value.
The potential for value creation isn’t confined to
certain roles or functions, and is bounded pri-
marily by an organization’s ability to create new
knowledge and creatively address new problems.
Focusing on new value creation may be the key
to getting on a trajectory of accelerating perfor-
mance improvement. Doing so would require
an organization to move beyond efficiency and
standardization and begin focusing on cultivat-
ing the behaviors—such as experimentation
and reflection to make sense of what has been
learned—associated with new value creation.
at the wrong level. Most organizations man-
age performance where they measure it—which
is to say where they have data: broadly, for the
department and organization, and narrowly, for
the individual. Both levels can miss where work,
especially value-creating work, increasingly gets
done: in groups. As a result, organizations can
miss the opportunity to shape how work actu-
ally gets done. Focusing on performance where
it matters most to the organization’s work might
be a key to having a significant impact on the
performance that matters.
The imperative to act seems simple: Today’s envi-
ronment seems to offer no reprieve, no stabilization
that gives us a chance to catch our breath and say,
“OK, now we’ve got it figured out.” The methods and
processes that led organizations to great success in
the past seem to no longer be working. For sustained
performance improvement, companies may need to
change their focus and look in new directions.
3

Where will organizations
find performance
improvement instead?
Fortunately, many companies have a largely
unexplored opportunity to not just improve perfor-
mance but to accelerate that improvement, break-
ing out of the trap of diminishing returns and mov-
ing onto a performance curve of increasing returns.
And it isn’t an opportunity only for the organization
but for the workers as well.
If an organization is to take advantage of this op-
portunity, it may need new business practices—fo-
cused on new value creation—that help it get better
and better, faster. The opportunities to identify and
create significant value will likely emerge on the
front lines, where workers are encountering chang-
ing market needs and dynamic conditions almost
every day. These unexpected demands, or “excep-
tions,” fall outside of the standard processes. As the
demands and conditions become more complex and
unfamiliar, frontline workers could have to work to-
gether in order to address them, since an individual
alone will be less likely to effectively solve an issue
or develop an opportunity.
An opportunity for companies, then, is to shift
to cultivating the workgroup practices (see sidebar,
“Definition of a frontline workgroup”) that can ac-
celerate improvement in the operating metrics that
seem most relevant to a company’s performance.
These groups’ ability to accelerate their own learn-
ing and impact as they encounter exceptions can
be key to improving their own operating metrics,
which in turn could be critical to overall corporate
performance.
PRACTICES TO ACCELERATE
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT
We identified nine key practices that help
frontline workgroups accelerate performance im-
provement.
First, what do we mean by practice? A
practice is the way work actually gets done, the ac-
tivity involved in accomplishing a particular job.3
We use it in contrast to formalized process, refer-
ring to the way work and information flow is or-
ganized and coordinated across stages. Process is
how work can be done in a controlled and predict-
able environment where the solution is understood
and predetermined.
Processes leave little room for variance. They
can be documented. They are often handed down
from above and manifest the command-and-con-
trol often thought necessary to drive performance
efficiency in a predictable, scalable efficiency mod-
el. Practices, by contrast, are not typically codified.
They are mostly tacit and emerge through action—
for instance, there’s no learning to ride a bike ex-
cept through the act of trying. Practices tend to be
context-specific and are constantly evolving—much
like today’s business opportunities.
Practices can be difficult to articulate; they
don’t translate into a “practice manual.” Specific
instances of practices will share some similarities
that guide—rather than govern—our actions. That
is part of what can make a practice so powerful.
One can describe a practice and what seems to be
most important about it at a high level, but the ac-
tual practice will develop in a way that is specific to
the context. Studying Xerox field technicians in the
1990s, anthropologist and organizational consul-
tant Julian Orr observed that even supposedly iden-
tical machines, once deployed in the field, develop
peculiarities depending on age, usage, and the char-
acteristics of the physical environment in which
they sit. As a result, in all but the most straightfor-
ward cases, the issues technicians faced fell outside
of the documented process for which they had been
trained. Fixing any given machine on any given day
depended upon a set of undocumented and evolving
practices that helped field technicians learn faster
what would work or not work in a specific context.4
Practices that may help accelerate performance
improvement in the workgroup would:
• Emerge in the workgroup: We distinguish
the practices of a group from management
practices, which tend to require organizational
leadership to implement, or individual prac-
tices, which rarely have the scope to affect an
organization’s performance.5
By providing the
space for experimentation and reflection, work-
groups can be a uniquely effective environment
for cultivating the tacit knowledge of practices.
Practices may more readily be observed, tried
out, refined, and informally shared within a
group’s narrower confines and deep, trust-based
4

relationships. In this way, groups can both learn
new practices and use those practices to poten-
tially learn faster how to improve performance.
• Drive learning embodied in action: The
learning that is important here is not just shar-
ing existing knowledge or data but creating new
knowledge. That might mean coming up with
more creative ways of acting on information or
dealing with entirely new situations.
• Leverage technology: Practices should
catch up with technology. As new
technology platforms and
tools emerge, practices
should evolve to har-
ness the potential
in technology.
• Evolve as con-
text evolves:
Business prac-
tices may not
sound revo-
lutionary. In
fact, the shift
from focusing
on business pro-
cess optimization
to cultivating work-
group practices, which
could evolve and diverge,
is subversive, empowering
work and workers and undermin-
ing efforts to standardize and, ultimately,
control them. Shifting to practice more than
process can lead to a proliferation of ways to do
things on the front line, defying documentation
and standardization.
While practices themselves are usually context-
dependent, the need for practices can transcend
contexts, including “culture.” Some cultures may
naturally lean toward certain practices over others,
while some may seem unsuited for any of the prac-
tices. Regardless of the existing culture, however,
organizations aiming to stay relevant will likely
need to move toward a culture in which workgroups
accelerate performance improvement. These prac-
tices can help create the conditions for groups and,
perhaps ultimately, organizations to rapidly evolve.
This set of articles hardly constitutes an exhaus-
tive blueprint of everything a workgroup should
do—a well-functioning group will no doubt develop
other useful practices and processes that help mem-
bers accomplish their work. The practices we iden-
tify specifically focus on what may be needed to ac-
celerate performance improvement. However, they
are also not exhaustive in the sense of even
detailing what a workgroup might
need to do to accelerate per-
formance, since the conun-
drum of writing about
practices is that, by
their nature, even the
act of trying to cap-
ture a practice has
a way of changing
it. We have tried
to describe what
is most pertinent:
the practices that
seem to drive the
type of continuous
learning in action
that is needed to ac-
celerate performance. We
also offer examples of more-
specific sub-practices and tactics.
Note that we deliberately are not
talking about the practices for high-perform-
ing teams. The distinction is more than semantics.
Others have extensively discussed practices for high
performance, and we don’t intend to challenge or
recreate that research. Nor do we dismiss it. The or-
ganizations that learn how to get on an accelerating
performance trajectory—where they continuously
develop new and better ways to deliver new value
rather than becoming more efficient at delivering
the same value—could be the ones that thrive in an
increasingly unpredictable world, one in which a
strength can rapidly turn into a vulnerability. The
practices that aim to generate high performance as
typically defined within an organization—delivering
the results that leaders expect—are unlikely to gen-
5

erate accelerating performance improvement and
may actually hinder it.
THE PRACTICE BUNDLE
In this report, we identify nine practices (see
figure 1) that are key for accelerating performance
improvement in operational workgroups. Taken in-
dividually, they can help provoke, propel, and pull
together, building momentum around a challenge.
Combined, they reinforce and counterbalance each
other to help workgroups learn faster and have
more impact.
Given the limitations of text and language, we
write about each practice individually. Two points
should be clear: First, the power of the practices
is as a bundle—the more the better. They tend to
Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insightsSource: Center for the Edge.
PULLTOGE
THER
P
ROPEL
PROVOKE
SEEK NEW
CONTEXTS
FRAME A
POWERFUL
QUESTION
ELIMINATE
UNPRODUCTIVE
FRICTION
REFLECT
MORE TO LEARN
FASTER
MAXIMIZE
POTENTIAL
FOR FRICTION
BIAS
TOWARD
ACTION
PRIORITIZE
PERFORMANCE
TRAJECTORY
COMMIT TO
A SHARED
OUTCOME
CULTIVATE
FRICTION
Figure 1. The nine practices
The practices for accelerating performance improvement work together:
provoking the workgroup to push boundaries, propelling the group into action,
and pulling the members together to achieve more and more impact over time.
THE NINE PRACTICES PLAY
THREE ROLES THAT CAN
ACCELERATE PERFORMANCE
AND LEARNING:
• Those that can provoke the workgroup
to think differently about a challenge and
possible approaches and create better
alternatives
• Those that can propel a group into action
to gain additional insight into the next best
move to make a greater impact
• Those that can help members pull
together to harness diversity and come up
with ever-higher impact and outcomes
6

amplify each other to accelerate performance and
learning within a workgroup. While implementing
any one practice can help a frontline group accel-
erate performance, the goal should be to bring to-
gether as many of the nine as possible.
Second, workgroup leaders should not think of
these practices as sequential—and certainly not as
siloed. Many of us in organizations are so oriented
toward thinking in process steps that it can be al-
most impossible to look at nine practices and not im-
mediately start thinking about them in a sequential
way. Resist the urge. These are not stages or hand-
offs; they don’t have defined inputs or outputs. Rath-
er, these are ways of working in which most, if not all,
group members would be engaged much of the time.
They reinforce each other.
For example, prioritizing performance trajec-
tory can help amplify the shared outcome by es-
tablishing tangible objectives that the team can
pursue. Additionally, having a bias toward action
and a commitment to a shared outcome could di-
rect a group forward but also might mean that work-
groups stick to the way things have always been
done. However, pairing it with cultivate friction
and reflect more to learn faster might ensure that
teams go beyond “good enough” and look beyond
the old way of doing things.
How to use these practices
Practices may look different for every workgroup.
We present the nine practices in a format intended
to guide exploration and practical use.
Each write-up includes the following:
• An introduction, describing the potential value
of the practice in terms of driving performance
improvement over time for a workgroup
• What the practice is: definition and key
distinctions
• What it isn’t: misunderstandings that can send
you down the wrong path
• You know you need this practice when:
You have to start somewhere; use this section to
get a sense of which practices might have the big-
gest impact on your workgroup in the near term
• Putting the practice into play: discussion
and examples of how a practice can become real,
including a deeper look at techniques that could
help bring theory into practice
• Antibodies at work: Why isn’t this easy? What
are some of the key obstacles you might face in
the organization when trying to put the practice
into practice?
• Questions for reflection: practical questions
designed to help you develop the practice within
the context of your own workgroup
How to get started
Perhaps the best news: This doesn’t have to be
a huge organizational transformation. Get started
today, one workgroup at a time, starting with those
that might have a disproportionate impact on the
organization’s operating performance. Small moves,
smartly made, can set big things in motion.
Anyone, whether an executive or a frontline
worker, can use these practices to begin changing
how her organization works. Leaders may have
to resist the urge to make it a major initiative and
instead be very targeted, focusing on one or two
workgroups with the most potential for impact to
generate proof points and build momentum. Stay-
ing small and focused could help avoid alerting the
organizational immune system, affording more
space to demonstrate impact. On the other hand,
employees would have to take initiative to start de-
veloping these practices within their own groups, or
honoring and cultivating the practices that already
exist, without relying on a mandate or even permis-
sion from above.
Which practices you start with might depend
on whether a particular workgroup has been in ex-
istence for a while or if it is just forming. It’s safe
to say that many organizations could benefit from
more productive friction, but some established
groups may need to eliminate unproductive fric-
tion first, while new-forming groups might be en-
couraged to defy conventional wisdom by forgoing
“fit” and seeking to maximize potential for friction.
A workgroup should choose the practices that seem
likely to have the most impact on the challenge it
is facing. Whatever the practices, look to identify a
few workgroup metrics that are especially relevant
to understanding a workgroup’s performance and
7

trajectory. Significant performance improvement,
as reflected in a key operating metric, could drive
interest in having a more systematic focus on prac-
tices to drive widespread performance acceleration.
It is worth repeating that, as momentum builds
in one or two workgroups, the goal should not be
to standardize these practices for scale across the
organization. Measure and monitor performance
at the workgroup level, for those groups. Use the
selected workgroup-level operating metrics as tools
for better understanding the success of certain prac-
tices rather than for reporting or compliance.
Business practice redesign is more than a key
to unlocking the potential for accelerating busi-
ness performance improvement. These nine prac-
tices can be a key to working in a world of constant
change and digital transformation—for working in a
world of flow. They have the potential to change the
way we work with each other, today. And they might
be just the beginning of a conversation about how
we will work, tomorrow; they may put organizations
on the path to redefining work to focus humans on
what we can uniquely do, along with helping to am-
plify the potential of humans and machines working
together. The practices are ready to be made yours
and put into practice in your own workgroups—a
living, and evolving, list that shouldn’t require ap-
provals or change management. It requires only
that you get started.
CASE STUDIES
Over the course of developing this framework
and identifying and describing these nine practices,
we talked to 60-plus workgroups across 20 markets
and three continents. We sought to focus in partic-
ular on groups that seemed to be improving their
performance over time. For a representative list of
these groups, see exhibit A in Beyond process.6
Full case studies for eight workgroups will be
forthcoming in the Case study library, to be pub-
lished in February 2018. Although our research sug-
gests that few organizations collect any type of sys-
temic data at the workgroup level, members of the
groups we profile believe that they are indeed accel-
erating performance. Each have adopted at least one
practice from each category (provoke, propel, pull
together). The two most commonly used practices
are commit to a shared outcome and maximize po-
tential for friction, which seems to make sense: To
get better over time, the groups we studied had to
be committed to a specific outcome, and all of them
had tried to bring in divergent ideas around achiev-
ing those outcomes. Where many workgroups fell
short was around cultivating friction to harness the
creative potential of that diversity. The case studies
illustrate how real workgroups across an array of in-
dustries are using practices to accelerate their own
performance improvement.
8

1. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Maggie Wooll, and Andrew de Maar, The paradox of flows: Can hope flow from
fear?, Deloitte University Press, December 13, 2016. The Shift Index shows that over the past five decades, there
has been a sustained, non-secular decline in ROA for the US economy. The rate at which companies lose the
leadership position in an industry is known as the topple rate and is tracked as part of the Impact Index.
2. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Andrew de Maar, and Maggie Wooll, Beyond process: How to get better, faster as
“exceptions” become the rule, Deloitte University Press, November 13, 2017.
3. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “Balancing act: How to capture knowledge without killing it,” Harvard Business
Review, May-June 2000.
4. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School,
2002), p. 101.
5. As discussed in greater detail in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “Practice vs. process: The tension that won’t
go away,” Knowledge Directions, spring 2000, there is an ongoing and unresolved tension in any organization
between how knowledge is generated, through practice, and how it is implemented or propagated, generally
through process. Large organizations need not to resolve this tension but, rather, to become comfortable with
the play between the practice and process.
6. Hagel et al., Beyond process.
ENDNOTES
9

PROPELPROVOKE
Look around
Look within
Bust silos
Find a
performance edge
Shape
serendipitous
encounters
Put context in
context
Probe the context
Seek an unvarnished
view
Give before taking
Focus on the
fundamental
Embrace
complexity
Amp it up
Keep an open mind
Celebrate diversity
Be curious
Play with
possibilities
Name one thing
Make it personal
Seek surprise
Look for insights,
not answers
Make the most
important thing
the most
important thing
Make it
meaningful
Take the long view
Be bold
Deﬁne the ends,
not the means
Capture the feeling
Go public
Make it real, now
Keep it real
Raise the bar
Maximize
potential
Disagree a
commit
Create san
Make mor
decisions
Go until n
Modulariz
possible
Stage you
Minimize
maximize
tum
Leverage
Accelerate
decision-m
Look for w
not being
Expand th
potential f
improvisa
Improvise
moment
Build on m
How can
workers and
companies get
better, faster?
Nine business
practices aim
to help
workgroups
accelerate
performance
improvement.
SEEK NEW
CONTEXTS
CULTIVATE
FRICTION
COMMIT TO A
SHARED OUTCOME
BIAS TOW
ACTION
Set the stage
Amp it up
Know what you
don’t know
Ask a question
that changes the
game
Focus on the who,
not just the what
Name one thing
Make it personal
Seek surprise
Look for insights,
not answers
FRAME A
POWERFUL
QUESTION
10

EL PULL TOGETHER
Measure what
matters
Don’t give up on
your gut
Embrace double
standards
Closely watch a
few numbers
Put operating
metrics over
financial ones
ng view
ends,
ans
e feeling
l, now
ar
Reframe risk
Act to learn
Maximize upside
potential
Disagree and
commit
Create sandcastles
Make more
decisions reversible
Go until no
Modularize where
possible
Stage your moves
Minimize effort,
maximize momen-
tum
Leverage to learn
Accelerate
decision-making
Identify metrics
that matter
Track trajectory,
not snapshots
Focus on accelera-
tion
Keep moving the
edge
Jazz it up
Look for what’s
not being done
Expand the
potential for
improvisation
Improvise in the
moment
Build on mistakes
Tackle tradeoffs
Think both short
and long
Put effectiveness
before efficiency
Make distinctions
Engage diverse
perspectives
Diversify diversity
Look outside the
workgroup
Foster trust and
respect
Embrace
vulnerability,
encourage humility
Empathize
Make it about we,
not me
Build deep trust,
swiftly
Live your values
Feed the reflection
Capture what
you can
Be radically
transparent
Seek continuous
feedback
Seek volunteers
Find powerful ways
to pull
Vote with your feet
Turn down
volunteers
Look for character
before competence
Staff for passion over
skill
Prioritize a growth
mind-set
Build an all-star
group, not a group
of all-stars
Evolve a winning
workgroup
Change it up
Make it a rule to
change the rules
Make roles
context-dependent
Have learning
conversations
Create a common
language
Focus on what’s
important, be
specific
Start broad, go deep
Listen for what’s
not being said
Manage the
temperature
Make it fun
It’s up to you
Make the most
of your -mortem
Conduct
pre-mortems
Reflect in action
Conduct
after-action reviews
Reflect on how
you reflect
Be your own judge,
not your only judge
Make sense of
signals
Detect anomalies
and celebrate
exceptions
Recognize
emerging and
evolving patterns
BIAS TOWARD
ACTION
PRIORITIZE
PERFORMANCE
TRAJECTORY
MAXIMIZE
POTENTIAL
FOR FRICTION
ELIMINATE
UNPRODUCTIVE
FRICTION
REFLECT MORE
TO LEARN
FASTER
11

Frame a
powerful question
Ask questions that focus on the learning
opportunity—and can provoke and
inspire others to change the game

Introduction:
Beyond incrementalism
It sounds like a too-good-to-be-true story of
inspiration—but it actually happened. In 1943, Po-
laroid co-founder Edwin Land was taking vacation
photos with his family, and his 3-year-old daughter
asked, “Why do we have to wait for a picture?”1
Now, that is a powerful question. It inspired the
invention of an entirely new product—and it exem-
plifies the kind of inquiry that opens up real possibil-
ity. Its audaciousness grabs our attention, captures
our interest, and motivates us to come together to
try to make its vision real. And in an environment
that can be unpredictable and challenging, framing
a powerful question might provide inspiration and
motivation to the workgroup and help lift it out of
the day-to-day to zoom out to a bigger-picture, fu-
ture view.
In a rapidly changing world, with dynamic re-
quirements, assumptions will change, including
potentially the assumptions that made a particular
approach the best one, or made a performance ob-
jective the most relevant, or made a shared outcome
worthwhile. Consider, for example, the assumption
that film must be developed in a multi-step process
in a darkroom. The target at which you’ve been
aiming may no longer represent what you want to
achieve. A powerful question forces the workgroup
to continuously challenge its assumptions and focus
on what might be most relevant.
A powerful question can also help a workgroup
break out of incremental tendencies. Incremental-
ism allows us to believe we are doing OK because
we are busy and getting better at something every
day, but it can obscure the real danger of falling
ever further behind more rapidly advancing alter-
natives and expectations. But it’s one thing to un-
derstand that incremental efforts are not enough
and another to let go of running a little harder on
the business-as-usual treadmill and to really look
for what might make the treadmill obsolete. A pow-
erful question can pop that bubble of complacency,
provoking us to reconsider the bounds and rules
of the game. Framing a powerful question is a way
for a workgroup to step back and ask: Is this what
we should be doing? What else is possible? Is the
group’s shared outcome still the most relevant and
important thing we should be focused on to have
more impact?
Workgroups looking to accelerate performance
improvement will have to be able to continuously
adjust to focus on the outcomes where they can
make the greatest impact and avoid getting trapped
making incremental progress against objectives that
are no longer relevant. Framing a powerful question
can help us not only adapt to change but use it to
break new ground.
The frame a powerful question
practice: What it is
A powerful question, as we define it here, is one
that reframes what a workgroup is committed to and
how members approach it. A practice of framing a
powerful question might mean periodically stepping
back from the workgroup’s immediate demands and
considering what has changed and what hasn’t.
A powerful question is:
• Authentic. Powerful questions should expose
what we don’t yet know. They should challenge
us to embrace our own vulnerability, to admit
uncertainty about the path forward, and to lean
into discomfort.
• Compelling. A powerful question should pull
people out of an incremental mind-set, refocus-
ing workgroups on where they can achieve an
entirely new level of impact. Even as a powerful
question should require collective exploration, it
can also tap into individual passion, generating
energy and excitement in members.
• Open-ended. Instead of inspiring a single, de-
finitive answer, a powerful question should open
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• The questions we’re asking aren’t attracting
others or leading to new insights
• There are few, if any, opportunities to
change the game
• Outcomes don’t inspire individuals or
energize the workgroup
Provoke | Frame a powerful question
1

things up, setting the stage for ambitious, tar-
geted action. It shouldn’t be fuzzy or vague, or
limited by what the workgroup or the organiza-
tion has done in the past.
• Focused. A powerful question should challenge
the why and the what, as well as the who, how,
where, and when, for a workgroup. It should be
a focusing mechanism to help a group focus on
what is going to matter to actually achieve break-
through performance. The question should give
us pause yet remain within the context of the
workgroup and be about the kind of future a
group might strive to shape and create.
• Actionable. A powerful question should come
out of deep thought and reflection, backed by
commitment to act. It should reflect the convic-
tion that there is value in asking it—inviting new
perspectives and ideas to the table—and should
generate actions rather than answers.
In short, a powerful question can help a work-
group navigate a shifting environment, directing
our attention and guiding our action. Unlike a fixed
North Star, a powerful question should leave room
for doubt and new information and leave itself open
to be challenged. It should prime the imagination, fo-
cus passion, and motivate accelerated performance,
aligning the group toward a transformative goal.
. . . and what it isn’t
• A “moonshot.” A moonshot isn’t a question but
a declared destination: We will go to the moon.
It is inspiring but predetermined, not open to
debate. A powerful question also shouldn’t pre-
sume a single resolving answer or dictate what
form the solution will take. Answers are of lim-
ited value in accelerating performance and, in
an exponential world, tend to become obsolete
faster and faster.
• A questioning culture. While there is in-
herent value both in questioning and in learn-
ing to ask better questions, the idea here is
to use a single, overarching question as a fo-
cusing mechanism—one that could help the
workgroup home in on the crucial elements of
breakthrough performance.
• A stretch goal or incremental. It’s not How
do we get to 100x performance, but What could
we do, what kind of impact could we have, if we
were performing at 100x? By moving the focus
away from numerical measurement and toward
fundamental change, framing can set the stage
for entirely new levels of impact.
• A postmortem. Rather than asking questions
when something goes wrong, the workgroup
should frame a powerful question when every-
thing is going well, in the face of success: What
else should we be doing to do a lot better?
EXAMPLES OF POWERFUL QUESTIONS
The right question can animate a workgroup. Here are some variations of powerful questions that
have inspired real workgroups and organizations:
• Why do we create appliances for our customers instead of with them?
• How can we make innovative products that the market wants—while it still wants them?
• If we are the “best of the best,” why are attacks not disappearing but actually increasing? What
game should we be playing, and how do we get better at playing it?
• How do we grow higher-quality barley in a future with half the water supply?
• What would it take to eliminate all car accidents?
• What if we could keep more planes operational? What if we could knock the No. 1 delay driver out
of the top 10?
• How can we use technology to see the impact of our decisions and make better ones?
2

Putting the practice into play
A powerful question isn’t handed down from
on high—instead, a workgroup must articulate and
refine it. How do you get to the question that is go-
ing to catalyze a leap in performance? First, set the
stage for the workgroup to ask the questions that
matter. In an exponential world, what got us to
where we are likely won’t get us to where we need to
be. How can you convey that magnitude
of changed assumptions and expectations
to engage others?
Part of what makes a question power-
ful is that it can invite new perspectives
and ideas to the table and lead to signifi-
cant actions that may not have otherwise
been considered or possible. How does
this work? The framing matters—not only what you
ask but how you ask it. Amp it up to turn the ques-
tion into something that is visceral and urgent, not
just a thought exercise, for those who hear it.
The challenge is that there are a multitude of
questions that could potentially change the game.
The workgroup members must consider how they
can make it their own in ways that only they can.
The powerful question and the possible actions it
spurs are unique to the group.
INTERSECTIONS WITH THE OTHER EIGHT PRACTICES
A powerful question can influence every aspect of a workgroup’s efforts.
• Maximize the potential for friction. By not prompting an easy answer, a powerful question can force
workgroups to look outside the group for perspectives and re sources that can help uncover or create
the answer.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. A compelling question can create a context for shared meaning in
which we can articulate disagreement and explore thoughts and feelings, facts and figures.
• Reflect more to learn faster. The question can shift the scope beyond just the moment at hand,
connecting the “moment” to the implications and learnings across moments and over time. What did
we learn that informs our powerful question?
• Commit to a shared outcome. A powerful question can set the stage for committing to a
shared outcome, while progress toward that shared outcome can create the basis for a more
powerful question.
• Bias toward action. A powerful question can help overcome old assumptions and build more of a
creative set of conditions.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. A powerful question can help identify the area of highest-
potential impact, which would guide the performance objectives and metrics that the group will choose
to track.
• Seek new contexts. To answer a powerful question, workgroups look for inspiration and exposure to
more and different ideas and approaches that might accelerate learning for the group.
• Cultivate friction. Saying from the outset, “We don’t know how to get there” can set the expectation
of coming at a problem from different angles and challenging them on the way to finding answers.
Lacking a ready answer invites productive challenges. In addition, the magnitude of the question can
raise the stakes for group members.
QUESTION FOR REFLECTION
• How many times have we missed an
opportunity by being “realistic”?
3

SET THE STAGE
A powerful question may originate from a work-
group’s leader or emerge from a discussion. That
first question starts to open up the space for getting
to the question that matters. Focusing on a question,
rather than a goal, is more than semantics: Saying,
“I have no idea what that goal will look like or how
to get there” is very different from saying, “We will
land a rocket on the moon in five years through this
agency.” This is something new: I think I have a
powerful question and an interesting idea, but how
could it be more powerful?
The purpose isn’t to reinforce your own opinion
or persuade others to your thinking—adding a ques-
tion mark to a predetermined idea can breed cyni-
cism and shut down potential avenues of explora-
tion. Rather, this type of asking is for getting better
insight into what matters and where the workgroup
can focus to have the most impact.
Know what you don’t know
and ask for help. Organizations of-
ten see questioning and admitting
to not having all of the answers
as signs of weakness. But fram-
ing a powerful question that
acknowledges the current state
of reality—including the areas of
weakness and doubt—can get peo-
ple’s attention. It also can build trust.
The process might start with being vulner-
able and explicit about not having an answer,
and lead to a shared acknowledgement of what
people don’t know and a shared commitment to ex-
ploring potential answers. Legitimizing doubt often
creates the space for workgroup members to chal-
lenge, fundamentally, what the group is doing and
whether it should continue to do it. Admitting im-
perfection and uncertainty can also unlock a certain
human empathy in others beyond the workgroup,
allowing you to forge connections to those who oth-
erwise may not have been as apt to help.
Ask a question that changes the game
to jolt the workgroup out of business-as-usual. It
might not be articulated such that it will be the
overriding question for the workgroup, but you may
need some shock and a sense of urgency to help the
group look at the big picture and notice what’s new.
At first blush, the question might seem impossible,
or at least not obvious. The goal should be to treat
absolutes as conditional, to recognize that what may
be true in one context may not be true in another.
For every one question, there are sub-questions
to unpack:
• What assumptions am I making that make this
seem impossible?
• What don’t I know about that assumption?
• What are the leverage points that might make
it possible?
• Does the question fundamentally revolve
around value creation and impact on costs
and efficiency?
Force the group to identify the issue it is aim-
ing to solve and why it matters. For example, costs
will matter, but focusing only on cost might get you
nowhere. One problem with posing game-changing
questions is that people will likely try to provide an-
swers. Group members may respond with facts, fig-
ures, and expertise about how it is done and (more
likely) why it can’t be done. Try to acknowledge
current realities that run counter to the vision of a
possible future, and then push on and explore the
nature of those constraints.
Consider the elite Field Tech workgroup in
Southwest Airlines’ Maintenance and Operations
Unit: Members didn’t ask themselves how they
could get planes back in service 2 percent faster
than other airlines, or relative to themselves the
year before. Instead, the field techs began the ques-
tion in the context of the shared outcome: If we care
about getting passengers where they need to be,
how can we keep our aircraft operational all of the
time? That was ambitious but too costly relative to
the impact. They unpacked that question to one that
motivated action: How can we knock the No. 1 “de-
lay driver” on the issues list out of the top 10? At the
time, Southwest people generally believed it nearly
impossible to reduce the impact of that No. 1 issue,
much less knock it out of the top 10.
The question has value, but so does the asking.
Focus on the who, not just the what, to elicit
broad participation. The more tightly you frame the
question, the less it is going to challenge people in
terms of creating new approaches. Not having the
answer focuses attention on what can be learned,
and in so doing could attract others who want to
4

learn and make space for others to bring forward
options and get excited about creating answers.
AMP IT UP
Challenging questions can be overwhelming.
The point of framing a powerful question isn’t to
overwhelm but, rather, to spark urgency and inspire
action, including reaching out for help and attract-
ing outside resources. The way the group shares the
question with others will likely shape their response.
How does a workgroup go about framing and shar-
ing a powerful, challenging question in such a way
that it motivates group members, attracts other re-
sources, and gives everyone a sense that there is a
way forward? It should be a balance between being
narrow and diffuse, between being grounded and
making space to accommodate others, between be-
ing ambitious and working with constraints.
One way of narrowing the question is to focus
just on uncovering points of leverage. It’s not about
changing everything—the challenge is to name one
thing that has the potential to change everything.2
Think about a performance goal, but instead of fo-
cusing on the goal, frame a question around what
could have a genuinely major impact: What one le-
ver in the organization that, if we shift it, might get
us to a different level of performance? What would
have to happen for that to become reality?
Having landed on a potentially powerful ques-
tion, the workgroup should be as open as it can with
as many people as it can about the question. The
goal is to attract other resources and passionate in-
dividuals who are excited about being part of making
progress toward an answer. The messenger matters:
People are more likely to help someone they value or
respect, especially when that person demonstrates
conviction and commitment. Make it personal
and humanize it: Why does this question matter
to me? What is my story that led me to
this question? To what human need does
this speak? Avoid framing in conceptual
terms that engage only the mind. When
the question isn’t abstract, people can be
more willing to deviate from the standard
operating procedures to look for alterna-
tives that might generate more impact.
For example, for a group of supervisors
of dispatch at Southwest Airlines, the ques-
tion was how they could honor the legacy
of a colleague, Mike Baker, who had cham-
pioned using technology to make smarter routing
choices and make a complicated job a whole lot easi-
er. They formed a workgroup committed to address-
ing the very question that he had posed and named it
in his honor. “Baker” is now mentioned hundreds of
times a day throughout the organization, and his pas-
sion for smarter decisions can live on throughout the
next generation of dispatch supervisors.3
If you aren’t surprised by the responses to a
question, it is not the right question. Don’t ask a
question seeking to confirm a belief or validate a
preferred approach—seek surprise by focusing on
what you don’t know. Seek to uncover information
or resources you didn’t know existed. One way to
do this is to play with constraints—resources, time,
or methodology—to make the question provoca-
tive enough to attract attention and elicit focused
responses.4
For example, a broad question, “How
do we win the race with a car that is no faster than
anyone else’s?”5
is ambitious but likely to generate
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• Let’s not get distracted by questions—
we’ve got to stay focused on results.
• Great question, but we’re probably not
going to be the ones who figure it out.
• Yeah, sure, this all sounds good—but it’s
too risky, and here’s why it will never work.
• We don’t have time for questions.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
• What should we ask but never do?
• What questions could we ask today that
would fundamentally change the game
tomorrow?
5

broad responses based on what people already know.
Constraints—“How do we win if we can’t change
the body?” or “How do we win if the race is twice
as long?”—could prompt people into thinking about
specific dimensions that they have not considered
and that they would need to explore further, through
action, because they haven’t thought about it before.
Constraints can force people out of areas where per-
ceived expertise stands in the way of new learning—I
have answers—and into unknown territory.
Here, where they are not expert, they can be
more open to looking for insights, not answers.
In an exponential world, answers, no matter how
good they are, tend to become quickly obsolete. Be-
yond the boundaries of their expertise, people may
be more open to taking in new information, build-
ing new constructs, and being more creative and
resourceful in developing an understanding of the
challenge. The answers that do emerge may be just
the starting point for an even better question.
6

1. Warren Berger, “The power of ‘why?’ and ‘what if?’,” New York Times, July 2, 2016.
2. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (New York:
Viking, 2014).
3. Andrew de Maar and Maggie Wooll, interview with Brandon Beard and John Strickland, Southwest Airlines, Oc-
tober 27, 2017.
4. Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages, and
Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), p. 36.
5. Ibid., p. 59.
ENDNOTES
7

Seek new contexts
Expand your exposure to a range of
contexts to discover promising new
approaches

Introduction:
New tools and techniques
Doing what you’ve always done, even if you’re
really good at it, probably won’t accelerate perfor-
mance improvement. At best, continuing practices
could yield incremental improvement; at worst, you
might see performance plateaus or even declines as
the tried-and-true becomes less suited to a chang-
ing context. To accelerate performance improve-
ment, workgroups likely need new approaches, and
even more so as more cases of first instance appear
without proven ways to address them. Workgroups
need to rapidly gain new insight, information, and
resources to begin developing approaches, and they
are less likely to find these within their current con-
text—even when the group has the intent to push
boundaries and break from old ways.
Exploring a different context, whether adjacent
or seemingly unrelated—along with seeing how oth-
ers are approaching their own issues and opportuni-
ties to reach higher levels of performance—can yield
fresh perspective on the nature of the challenge a
workgroup is facing. It can help them explore their
own context and performance challenges differently
and avoid falling back on solutions already in place.1
More tangibly, it can expose group members to new
tools and techniques.
Our assumptions tend to dictate our choices
and actions. Workgroups need to be able to test,
challenge, and refine hypotheses without being
constrained by unexamined and potentially in-
valid assumptions. Trying to understand an unfa-
miliar context can bring to light those deeply held
assumptions that are rooted in “the way we’ve al-
ways done things.” It can help group members to
reframe core assumptions,2
repurpose and build
off the methods of others, break existing frames,
and uncover valuable new ideas. In addition, the
act of changing context—and engaging with it to
identify similarities and differences—is potent fuel
for sparking the imagination, and for inspiring and
giving shape to creative new approaches.
For example, LiveOps, a company that runs cus-
tomer call center operations, took inspiration from
the online game World of Warcraft, in which play-
ers create their own dashboards to track relevant
statistics as a means of improving their own perfor-
mance. Building from this completely different con-
text, LiveOps gave each employee a dashboard that
showed her own real-time performance across sev-
eral relevant dimensions, including changes in her
ranking among peers on key indicators. The person-
alized dashboards have helped agents understand
and improve their own call effectiveness.3
In a stable environment, seeking new contexts
may have been less important because each work-
group could rely on its pre-existing resources and
knowledge. But as the world changes more rapidly,
workgroups that look first to what they have and
know within their own context may find themselves
increasingly disadvantaged. Even if your own con-
text doesn’t seem to be visibly changing, you should
be relentlessly exploring other contexts to find bet-
ter and better ways to achieve your outcome.
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• The market is changing faster than your
business
• You rarely seem to have unexpected
but relevant encounters with ecosystem
participants
• The range of interactions you’re having
with people and workgroups from
different contexts is limited
There are many ways, and the way you choose should depend on the current
context. You can’t solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions.4
—Ellen Langer
Provoke | Seek new contexts
1

The seek new contexts
Looking for new contexts means identifying the
most relevant and potentially fruitful contexts to
learn from and drawing insights that each work-
group can use to have more impact on its own out-
come. Groups have only so much time, so be de-
liberate in choosing where to invest it in exploring
new contexts. Contexts change at different paces,
which means that the right ones may offer a win-
dow into some aspect of the workgroup’s future. A
targeted approach can help identify contexts that
are further ahead in some way and that have the
potential to expand the group’s understanding in
one of three areas:
• Inputs that might matter. Identify new in-
puts—such as technologies, data sets, or mate-
rials— that could help the workgroup reach a
higher level of performance. Is someone already
using one of these inputs, providing a model
from which we can learn?
• Performance metrics that matter. Where
is someone achieving higher levels of perfor-
mance on a key performance metric (for exam-
ple, customer churn rate) that matters for us?
Go explore that, and try to figure out what is—
and what isn’t—context-dependent.
• Outcomes that matter more. At the edge,
where change is occurring most rapidly and
where performance requirements may be most
demanding, the workgroup may discover an op-
portunity to achieve even more impact.
• A time-consuming process of explora-
tion. Immersion can lead to serendipitous
insights and connections. But few workgroups
have the luxury of time to immerse themselves
in a context that may or may not prove relevant.
Groups should, then, aim to get better at swiftly
• Maximize the potential for friction. Seeking new contexts is a powerful way to discover resources
beyond the workgroup. Part of the workgroup’s diversity might be the range of contexts that members
have experienced.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. The shared experience of a new context can create a touchstone
that deepens the relationships between members and provides a tangible and neutral reference to
frame disagreements.
• Reflect more to learn faster. Reflection both in advance and after exposure to a new context can
help members identify patterns and draw connections in their observations and signals in order to
transform an onslaught of information into useful insights for the challenge at hand.
• Commit to a shared outcome. The workgroup seeks insights that can be useful for improving the
shared outcome.
• Bias toward action. The point of seeking new contexts is to draw insights that lead to and inform the
next action.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. Spending time in new contexts can help the workgroup discover
new approaches to pushing the boundaries of what they thought was possible for the outcome.
• Frame a powerful question. The magnitude of the question propels the workgroup to seek insight
from new contexts and shapes what might be important about them.
• Cultivate friction. Immersion in a new context can take members out of their comfort zone,
challenging their assumptions and mental models in an immediate and tangible way.
2

identifying relevance and picking up insight
with less exposure.
• Random, hoping for serendipity. This isn’t
about just being open to learning or getting out-
side our comfort zone to see what we can see
and hoping that useful insights will material-
ize. While that can be valuable for some indi-
viduals, workgroups should be more effective
at exploring.
• A search for the latest shiny trend. In fast-
changing contexts, not all that is new is relevant
or useful. It is important to differentiate between
the temporary and the enduring.
• Only about others—or only about the
group. This is about finding connections across
contexts that might drive mutual learning and
even reveal opportunities to work together to-
ward outcomes that are of mutual interest.
A fresh context can open a window into the nar-
row silos of understanding and provide a new lens
on the workgroup’s own work. However,
the relevance of an unfamiliar context is
sometimes less apparent when it appears
in a typically unstructured way, through
narrative accounts, field memos, news re-
ports, anecdotes, and the collective mur-
murings of social media. It typically takes
practice to know what contexts matter
and to uncover the underlying informa-
tion and draw connections that are not
easily observable, finding patterns that
we have not previously imagined.
The practice of seeking new contexts,
then, broadly has two parts to it: first,
knowing how to look around to find the most pro-
ductive contexts to accelerate the group’s learning
about how to have more impact; and second, know-
ing what to do with it—looking within to gain
insight and derive actionable information from the
relevant contexts.
LOOK AROUND
The future is unpredictable, but it also doesn’t
happen at the same time. New technologies, poli-
cies, and preferences hit certain arenas, geogra-
phies, and markets sooner than others. As a result,
one way for workgroups to find a way forward is to
look around.
Practically, this means that workgroups, and in-
dividual members, shouldn’t stay in their lane. Bust
silos and avoid tunnel vision by connecting with
others who are engaged around a similar issue but
may live in other departments, organizations, or do-
mains. At Facebook, this occurs organization-wide:
Employees from different groups get pulled out of
their role every 12–18 months to spend a month on
special teams to work together on a particular chal-
lenge or interesting opportunity. When people re-
turn to their old groups, they tend to be more open
to questioning assumptions and participate in more
informal sharing of ideas and information across
groups.6
It is important to bust silos everywhere—
including at the periphery, not just among the usual
suspects in the core functions.
As change accelerates, peripheries and edges can
become more valuable because they are often mov-
ing at a faster pace. Exposure to new contexts at the
periphery can shape group members’ understanding
Your brain is designed to make
meaning out of what you see and
will look for patterns out of whatever
information you take in through
your senses.5
—The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
• What gets in the way of us (organizational
polices, practices, silos) connecting with
those from whom we can learn?
• When was the last time we encountered an
unfamiliar resource that ended up providing
incredible amount of value? How did we go
about uncovering it?
3

of certain conditions and inform their own work.7
They might be better able to make sense of the sig-
nals they are identifying on the frontlines
and better able to identify alternative re-
sources that might be used in unexpected
ways. The practice of looking for, and en-
gaging with, new contexts also keeps the
workgroup’s own boundaries permeable,
so that the group can avoid becoming
its own silo and better leverage valuable
ideas, skills, and resources from others.
Where should we look for context? On
the one hand, looking around is about
finding the performance edge that mat-
ters most to your outcome. On the other,
it is about increasing the likelihood that
you turn up valuable resources of which
you were unaware. In either case, look for the fast-
moving contexts for which the performance re-
quirements are most demanding—this is where the
future is likely already happening. Look for the tools
they are creating and the inputs they are using. The
point isn’t to bring those tools and models in whole
but, rather, to build upon them and make your own
better solution for your context.
Edges can take many forms: They can be other
workgroups, enterprises, industries, technologies,
or even demographic groups. Find a perfor-
mance edge likely to generate insights that the
workgroup can use to improve its outcome. Rele-
vant performance edges have either achieved a high
level of performance on one of the workgroup’s key
metrics, are targeting a more significant opportu-
nity for impact, or are further advanced using an in-
put that the group believes might be important. For
example, an oil-field services group that is targeting
customer churn rate might look to a wireless com-
pany that has dramatically reduced customer churn.
In another example, consider how, in advance of the
Southwest Airlines fleet adopting fiber optics, sev-
eral Southwest field techs sought out the training
school to which a leading telecom sends its employ-
ees so that they could learn in context with a group
that is pioneering the technology.
The relevant performance edge might also be
one in which others are engaging with similar con-
straints. For example, a workgroup aiming to design
a radically inexpensive mass-market car might look
to a developing region with a vast, previously unmet
demand for such products.
Knowing what to look for in a performance edge,
how do we go about actually identifying a context
that meets our criteria? Research and discussion—
asking, “Who does it best?” or “Who has faced
something similar and is succeeding?”—might help
the group create a preliminary list. Accessing digital
content—such as blog postings, social media outlets,
and analyst reports—can be the first step in learn-
ing about potentially useful contexts. To increase
the potential for getting a truly different angle on a
challenge, however, it may be worthwhile to cast a
wider net by tapping into group members’ social and
professional networks—for example, posting a brief
explanation of the issue on social media and asking
for recommendations of contexts worth exploring.
Conferences and training sessions, too, can be
an effective way to gain preliminary exposure to a
new context and make connections for exploring it
more deeply if warranted. Workgroups may discover
relevant but previously unknown tools, techniques,
and resources and, by seeing them in use and being
among the people who use them, may gain unique
insight into how to apply them to their own outcome.
For example, the New York City Fire Department’s
Rescue Company 1 regularly attends days-long train-
ing with fire units from around the country as well as
with military and other forms of search and rescue,
from marine to alpine, to learn new techniques and
potentially encounter useful tools that could be re-
deployed in the urban rescue context.
• What will likely be relevant to our business in
the future, and where can we find examples
of that in action today?
• How has the periphery changed what we do?
When was the last time we acted based on
something found on the edge?
4

Ultimately, finding the relevant performance
edge often requires getting “out on the street,” talk-
ing with people engaged in and around the perfor-
mance edge to get a better understanding of the per-
formance or input and its relevance to the group’s
outcome. Physical proximity often leads to connec-
tions, from a casual encounter at a surf shop to a for-
mal introduction,8
that can be invaluable in terms of
revealing new facets of the context and new avenues
to pursue to unlock the most powerful insights.
Shape serendipitous encounters to in-
crease the likelihood of attracting assistance from
beyond the workgroup in identifying relevant
contexts and drawing insights from them.
While actively searching for new contexts
can be valuable, great insights can also
come from people and contexts not on
the radar screen or in the existing da-
tabase. Instead, there are ways to in-
crease the likelihood that people from
other contexts will seek you out. While
shaping serendipity can be valuable
for individuals, organizations, and
workgroups as a means of attracting
the passionate and uncovering unex-
pected resources, consider, specifi-
cally, how you can use serendipitous
encounters to identify and explore
new contexts. Think beyond organi-
zational barriers and constraints and
consider ways to further leverage people
outside and across the organization, aiming to tap
into their knowledge, expertise, and connections to
gain exposure to new contexts without devoting the
time to becoming fully immersed or proficient in
those contexts.
What might this look like? It might mean estab-
lishing a presence in physical or virtual space so that
others can find you. The second part of this is being
as clear as possible about the metrics and poten-
tial inputs in which you are interested. Motivating
others to participate through potential, thoughtful
posting in these spaces can be helpful, so long as
you’re transparent about what you’re doing.
But the point isn’t just to get people to come to
you and say, “Here’s an idea—go for it.” Exploring
new contexts is time-consuming. Workgroups need
to be both effective and efficient in drawing insights
from new contexts. The point is to get people to
come to you and say, “Here’s an idea, this is what I
know about it, this is how I think it applies to your
context, and I am going to connect you with this per-
son and take you to this place so that you can learn
more.”
Part of the work, then, is identifying the tal-
ent spikes—the forums and platforms that could
be most relevant to other contexts, along with the
physical gathering spots, whether a surf shop
or a conference or a hackerspace favored
by activists—and establishing a pres-
ence, crafting questions and challenges
that can engage others, and cultivat-
ing relationships from promising leads.
When two executives from GE Appli-
ances were introduced to Local Motors
CEO John Rogers, they were primed
to draw insights from this open-source
hardware innovator that was upending
traditional product development and
production. A fellow GE executive with
whom they’d shared their problem came
across Local Motors and suggested it might
be a relevant and fruitful connection. The
executives had for months been thinking
about—and discussing with anyone who would
listen—creating some type of innovation center
to rethink product development in their industry.
They brought a coherent and explicit statement of
the problem they were trying to solve: How can we
create innovative products that the market wants
while the market still wants them? When they saw
what Local Motors was doing in the automotive
space, they realized that the consumer for whom
they were designing was a valuable input to a whole
new approach. With Rogers’ guidance, they quickly
learned about creating a community and using
platforms and moved to rapidly develop and launch
their own model for co-creating appliances. That’s
how GE FirstBuild (now a Haier company) got off
the ground.
LOOK WITHIN
Knowing where to look for new context is only
half the battle. Understanding how to delve within
that context and how to extract insights and learn-
ing that the group can use to improve performance
5

is what makes it valuable. For workgroups looking
to accelerate performance, the point of seeking new
contexts is to help workgroups uproot assumptions
and uncover new tools and approaches, and, most
importantly, gain insights that point to possible
new actions.
Making effective use of exposure, however, isn’t
easy. The goal is to explore the periphery without
being consumed by it. Workgroups that develop
practices for how they will explore new contexts may
be better able to gather information and, through
reflection and discussion, draw out the insights that
could make an impact on the group’s outcome. Time
is always a factor, and it can be tempting to divide
and conquer to quickly gather information from as
many different contexts as possible. A small group
exploring together, however, can gather richer in-
formation and help each other make sense of what
they see and experience. With practice, workgroups,
like individuals, can get better at exploring and ex-
periencing the edges.
How do you approach another context? What
works—or doesn’t work—in one context may not
translate into another. Look for what can be gen-
eralized but also what can’t. In the GE FirstBuild
example, one key difference between contexts that
workgroup members didn’t grasp at the time was
that many people may be less excited about appli-
ances than about cars. One way to begin is to put
context in context. Take a step back and consider
the next, larger context—the slightly larger picture.
Just as a chair exists in a room, a room in a house, a
house in a neighborhood, and a neighborhood in a
city, context is relative. Considering how “the room
fits within the house within the neighborhood” can
change our perspective and may reveal previously
unnoticed relationships and opportunities, both in
the context we are looking at and elsewhere.
New context can be overwhelming. Our mind-
set and dispositions often determine the world we
encounter, including what we notice and pay atten-
tion to, and the possibilities we apprehend. Simi-
lar to how an emergency-room triage nurse makes
snap decisions about who should be admitted, we
often make quick judgments based on “precognitive
responses,” guided by our experience as well as by
the systems we have constructed in advance, that
allow the brain to make rapid decisions.10
In a cog-
Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insightsSource: Doblin.
Novel
approaches
of our potential
competitors
Common challenges
and solutions across
contexts
Analogous situations
that can be instructive
Metaphoric lessons
to draw inspiration from
INSIDE ARENA
OUTSIDE ARENA
Figure 1. Diﬀerent levels of looking outside-in
6

nitively diverse workgroup, members will
naturally notice different things and in-
terpret them differently. The workgroup
may find that being more deliberate
about probing the context, however,
can help to reduce the complexity and to
stage their moves to balance the breadth
and depth of exposure.
Workgroups won’t have the time or re-
sources to become proficient and fully im-
mersed in all contexts of interest; the goal
of probing is to get enough information
for the next move. Probing balances the
immersive richness of physical with the efficiency of
virtual, moving from reading a web page to having
a phone call to meeting in person to taking a group
to visit off-site, stopping at whichever level is appro-
priate for the value gained. Each nugget of insight
can potentially help to develop a new lens and shape
the next move. For example, at New York agency
sparks & honey, the culture briefing workgroup had
been noticing a trend around different milk sources.
These “micro trends” were showing up in a range of
places including social media discussions, product
testing in local markets, and localized menu inno-
vations. After tracking related signals and connect-
ing those to existing “macro trends” in the agency’s
trend taxonomy, the group concluded there might
be something to it. The entire workgroup visited,
and eventually immersed themselves in, a tasting
that included milk from several different animals,
including camels.
Another approach to probing is to assign a dif-
ferent aspect of context for each member to pay at-
tention to or use as a lens (see figure 1). Sparks &
honey uses the five senses as lenses but also formal-
izes sensitivities by “tagging” items along a spectrum
from micro- to macro- to mega-trends. Alternatively,
workgroups could use a system such as ethnogra-
phers’ “AEIOU” (Activities, Environments, Interac-
tions, Objects, Users) observation framework, with
each member going into a new situation with respon-
sibility for just one category.11
Of course, the most
important lens to use against the onslaught of in-
formation may come from the shared outcome itself.
Calibrate the group’s attention to focus on what actu-
ally matters to the shared outcome. What informa-
tion, if we could figure it out, would help us know our
next move? What’s different and what’s comparable
between the context and the outcome we are trying
to achieve? Workgroup members may also find it
more effective to explore and experience contexts in
dyads or triads, rather than altogether, to avoid over-
powering the context with their own presence.
Although it’s easy to talk about taking on new
contexts in the abstract, in reality staying aware and
vigilant to signals can easily morph into being over-
whelmed. Certain contexts may prove very useful,
and in those cases, the workgroup may want a deeper
exposure, over time, gleaned from building a relation-
ship rather than just harvesting insights in a one-off
visit. Consider what the workgroup can give before
it takes: Does it have new knowledge or learnings
that might be beneficial to others in the new context?
Ideally, the learning becomes open-ended, mutually
beneficial and generative, creating a new node or set
of nodes from which to gain feedback and perspec-
tive on the group’s experiments or future challenges,
even if the current issue is short-lived. Workgroups
that help develop others may begin fielding propos-
als to collaborate, creating a virtuous cycle of insights
and impact. Connecting to these broader networks
can provide specific subject-matter expertise where
needed and can lead to additional ideas to inform the
group’s current frame of thinking.12
When group members can maintain an open-
ness to inspiration from other people, areas, and
environments encountered throughout the day, the
workgroup can continually collect ideas from vari-
ous contexts that can be used to fuel the productive
friction in service of getting better and better at
problem solving in other instances.13
For example,
in Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.’s Newbuilding &
• How much time do we spend looking at the
periphery versus things closer to the core?
Do we have the right mix?
• How can we provide more value to the
ecosystem, and how can the ecosystem
provide more value to us?
7

Innovation workgroup, designers decided to change
the configuration of a room after staying in a hotel
that made use of limited space in an interesting way:
It featured a modular desk that a guest could slide
out when needed but made the room feel more spa-
cious when concealed. The unique design inspired
several sliding furniture additions that Royal Carib-
bean made to its Quantum staterooms.
Although workgroups will have to make trade-
offs—going deeper in some areas and broader in
others, depending on time and resources—it can be
beneficial to focus on the fundamental. Not all con-
texts are changing at the same rate, and facts have
different expiration dates (see figure 2). Differenti-
ate between what is changing fast and what is cur-
rently stable, what is transient and what is enduring.
Look most frequently to the contexts that are chang-
ing most rapidly—others may have valuable paral-
lels, but if they’re moving more slowly, they’ll likely
reward only intermittent check-ins.
Drawing insights from individual observations
and the flood of information out there requires
group members to listen to one another and their
surroundings deeply, to recognize patterns and
draw connections through discourse and reflection,
and to incorporate these insights into their evolving
assumptions. Paradoxically, successful exploration
of new contexts designed to cope with near-term
uncertainty often requires an increased focus on
long-term direction. Contexts are shaped by what
connects them to each other.
Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insightsSource: Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now.
An example of how diﬀerent contexts change at diﬀerent rates.
Fashion
Commerce
Infrastructure
Governance
Culture
Nature
Figure 2. Stewart Brand’s pace layering model
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• We need to keep our heads down and
focus on what we do best.
• Since no one is asking for that, why are you
spending time on it?
• Plenty is wrong about what we do today—
why are you worrying about the future?
• We’re the market leaders—others try to
copy us.
8

1. Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages, and
Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2015), p. 36.
2. Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti, “Capabilities, cognition, and inertia: Evidence from digital imaging,” Strategic
Management Journal 21 (2000), pp. 1,147–61.
3. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Tamara Samoylova, Work environment redesign: Accelerating talent development
and performance improvement, Deloitte University Press, June 3, 2013.
4. Ellen Langer, “Mindfulness in the age of complexity,” Harvard Business Review, March 2014.
5. Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for
Changing Your Organization and the World (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), p. 34.
6. Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2015), pp. 178–80.
7. Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 1995), p. 38.
8. John Seely Brown and John Hagel, “Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly,
May 2006.
9. To learn more about FirstBuild, see GE Appliances, “GE’s FirstBuild celebrates breakout first year,” July 28, 2015.
Based on interviews with FirstBuild co-founder Venkat Venkatakrishnan and Local Motors co-founder John B.
Rogers.
10. Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures (New York: Portfolio, 2009), p.
64.
11. For more about the AEIOU framework used in ethnographic research, see EthnoHub, “AEIOU framework,”
accessed December 18, 2017.
12. Tom Austin, “Watchlist: Continuing changes in the nature of work, 2010–2020,” Gartner, March 30, 2010, p. 5.
13. Marian Petre and André van der Hoek, Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2016), p. 15.
ENDNOTES
9

Cultivate friction
Draw out conflict and learn from
disagreements to generate new insights

Introduction:
Avoiding a flat trajectory
Friction can lead to better outcomes. The right
type of friction can transform individual contribu-
tions into something far larger than the sum of the
parts. Indeed, creating good friction is the entire
reason for forming a workgroup and entrusting it
with key organizational work. That power material-
izes, however, only when the potential for friction is
realized and the workgroup draws relevant, action-
able learning from it.
And cultivating friction is increasingly important.
In this rapidly changing environment, workgroups
aiming to accelerate performance will need to learn
faster how to make an impact on the performance
that matters to the outcome. Issues will likely only
become more complex and unexpected, requiring a
range of approaches to address them. The right ap-
proaches might not exist yet. The type of learning
that’s perhaps most important to accelerating per-
formance improvement, then, is that which creates
new knowledge about how to approach unantici-
pated problems or situations. It isn’t about training
in new skills or accessing existing knowledge. It is
group learning embodied in action.
A group of people with conflicting perspectives
has the power to envision a set of possibilities dif-
ferently, and more broadly, than any of the indi-
viduals alone, potentially leading to emergent be-
haviors and creation of new knowledge that could
not have arisen elsewhere.1
Creating that new
knowledge requires workgroup members to make
full use of the group’s diversity and the external re-
sources to which it is connected across the range of
the group’s activities. The ways people diverge in
how they think about a problem and differ around
approaches, assumptions, and actions can reveal
potentially powerful insights.
How does friction come into play? Friction can
drive faster, more robust learning to help work-
groups come up with better and better approaches.
The right types of friction—for our purposes, defined
as group members’ willingness and ability to chal-
lenge each other’s ideas and assumptions—can drive
groups to reexamine assumptions, test constraints,
and push boundaries. It can force individual mem-
bers to stretch their own thinking, about the prob-
lem and how to approach it, in ways they would not
likely get to on their own. “Un-like-minded” people
and contradictory evidence or information that runs
counter to our current framework can help us see
our own thinking in a new light. If we are open-
minded and committed to improving an outcome,
and if we don’t feel attacked, challenges could make
us reexamine our assumptions, refine our thinking,
and even change our approach.2
Such challenges
can also make us pay attention to new information
and resources that fell outside our initial frame.3
Of course, timing matters. Some workgroups
need to operate like a well-oiled machine in the mo-
ment, whether that moment is going into a burning
building or interacting with a customer. The key
for improving that in-the-moment performance,
though, is cultivating the friction between moments,
to elicit observations and new options for approach-
ing the next moment differently. Focusing on seam-
less execution (the goal of many high-performing
teams) and failing to cultivate friction can result in
a flat trajectory, even if the starting point is high.
The cultivate friction
Cultivating productive friction is about ben-
efiting from the potential for learning that comes
from diversity—all kinds of diversity. In a diverse
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• There is little space and time for
disagreement and debate
• Everyone agrees and talks about agreeing
or takes pride in the group’s cohesion
• The group seems focused on its own
efficiency as the primary measure of
success
• Everyone has a designated role and area of
expertise for which they are responsible,
and the group defers to the expert
judgments
Provoke | Cultivate friction
1

workgroup, members are influenced by a range of
past experiences, apply different implicit rules, and
notice different pieces of information.4
Cognitive
diversity can create tensions within a workgroup,
and those tensions can have unexpected and posi-
tive results.5
Yet our desire for harmony can be so
strong—to some extent, we are biologically wired
to mirror the behavior of those around us6
—and
often is so ingrained in organizations that produc-
tive friction simply will not happen without taking
deliberate action to stoke it.
Friction must be cultivated first within the work-
group, day-to-day, but also outside the workgroup,
between the workgroup and others who might have
relevant insight, knowledge, or resources. Practi-
cally, this means that members are open to being
tested and questioned by others and willing and
able to see how one idea fits with or builds on an-
other. It also means that the group itself is open to
challenges from the outside. The workgroup essen-
tially invites others to “question us” and to intro-
duce diverse external resources.
A workgroup that cultivates friction might be
characterized by:
• Energy over harmony. Workgroups that
go along to get along won’t get far in an envi-
ronment that demands new approaches and
rapid learning. The right type of friction can
be exhilarating.
• Challenge and discussion over approval.
In fact, if the workgroup’s output is similar to
one of the inputs, there may be too little friction.
• Transparent thinking. Sketching a potential
solution or a framework for approaching a prob-
lem or even a list of assumptions on a white-
board can be an invitation for challenges from
within the group. Up the ante by putting the
board in a public place and inviting outsiders to
the conversation.
• Thinking made tangible. Just writing some-
thing on a board can reveal assumptions and
relationships that aren’t apparent in a discus-
sion. As an idea becomes progressively more
tangible—for example, moving from spoken idea
to written description to drawn pictures to mod-
els and prototypes—fresh aspects of the problem
and potential solutions can be exposed, stirring
up additional friction.
• Brainstorming. Too often groups use brain-
storming to get “more” ideas on the table, and
the means of doing this is to remove friction.
Participants may be told to silence their skepti-
cism and treat all ideas as equally valid and plau-
sible, and at the end, everyone feels good about
the number of ideas generated. But stifling any
arguments carries a cost, as the potential learn-
ing from exploring the trade-offs and unstated
assumptions behind the ideas is lost. Lost, too,
is the opportunity to candidly interrogate the
ideas, to find weaknesses or to see the power to
be found in combining two ideas that didn’t cap-
ture anyone’s imagination initially. Workgroups
looking to accelerate performance should focus
on better ideas, not more.
• Playing devil’s advocate (or other roles).
If everyone knows that someone is playing a
role for the sake of creating some friction, they
will likely treat it as a game. The quality of the
friction generated would be low, because the
challenge wouldn’t be grounded in a real per-
spective or deeply held belief; there would be
little to unpack and few insights to discover.
The goal should be to stir up and direct the real
disagreements and divergence that exist, not to
manufacture arguments.
Just setting up the conditions for friction is a
start, but the type of productive friction that can
help a workgroup learn faster isn’t likely to occur on
its own, even with a diverse and passionate group.
Being open to friction and maintaining a high lev-
el of friction generally takes a deliberate and con-
scious effort, at both the individual and workgroup
levels. How can you stir up the right type of friction
and sustain it over the group’s time together? Work-
groups may need to get comfortable with being un-
comfortable. It begins with embracing complexity
when our instinct is to simplify. Leaning into com-
plexity, with all of its messiness and unpredictabil-
ity, can help highlight a problem’s nuances and the
contrasts and contradictions within the workgroup.
2

But it doesn’t end with recognizing that a problem
has many facets and group members have different
ideas. Having shined a light on complexity, seek out
challenges and draw out the group’s areas of dis-
agreement and divergence.
EMBRACE COMPLEXITY
Performance improvement isn’t
straightforward, in part because we don’t
always even know how to assess perfor-
mance. Proxies such as focus, speed, and
efficiency—driving out waste and costs—
tend to favor stripping out complexity.
But in a world of interconnected systems,
the inputs, outputs, and conditions of
each are constantly changing. A single approach or
toolset won’t generally suffice across the range of
conditions; mastering a single process or tool can’t
be the goal. In a complex world, it isn’t about how
Workgroups often need friction across the board, in all of the workgroup’s activities, to sharpen the
thinking and push the group to be better.
• Maximize the potential for friction. The productive friction a group cultivates can become more
potent when it comes from a diverse and passionate membership. Members who are passionate
about the outcome will likely challenge each other and themselves to learn how to have more of an
impact, faster.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. When the group proves itself capable of managing friction
productively, members will be more confident and willing to engage with different perspectives
or challenge and explore as a group. It can create a virtuous cycle, wherein they see that friction is
beneficial and more confidently bring forth their diversity in future interactions.
• Reflect more to learn faster. Challenging each other’s observations and interpretations of what
happened in-action, and what the results of the action were, is an important element of effective
reflection that draws out learning.
• Commit to a shared outcome. The group periodically challenges itself to ensure that it is still
pursuing the highest-value outcome. The commitment to a meaningful outcome can help workgroups
tolerate the discomfort of friction.
• Bias toward action. To act with the most impact, workgroups need friction not just in coming up with
ideas but in planning action, taking action, and making sense of action.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. The metrics that matter to the outcome may provide a focal point
for discussion and can ground disagreements in data.
• Frame a powerful question. The right question should create tension that provokes friction.
• Seek new contexts. Immersion in a new context can take members out of their comfort zone,
challenging their assumptions and mental models in an immediate and tangible way. Changing context
and experiencing a new and very different context can also help create awareness of orthodoxies and
assumptions, and through exposure to others’ contexts, group members can cultivate a willingness to
continuously reexamine, test, and update their own.
• Are the unique voices and perspectives in our
workgroup being surfaced and heard?
• How can we do a better job of drawing out
the diversity that we have?
3

fast you get from break to shore but about how
well you ride the wave. This is second-order per-
formance: how well you adjust and drop what isn’t
working and pick up new things, how well you stoke
curiosity, sample from the edges, and develop new
skills and tools.
Workgroups can create tension when they resist
the urge to immediately simplify. The perspective
you hold, as an individual or a group, is never the
only perspective. Keep an open
mind to consider other angles
and explore the nuances
of a particular situation.
There’s usually more to
the story: What else don’t
we know? Take time to
consider, for example,
that a refrigerator isn’t
going into just a “house”
but into a kitchen within
a duplex in a shrinking
Midwestern city. Does
that change any as-
sumptions? Abstracting
a problem until it looks
like something with which we are more familiar can
seem like an efficient way to handle complexity; do
it too early, however, and you risk losing the rich-
ness of the problem, which is where the opportuni-
ties are likely to be. In the case of the Joint
Special Operations Command7
in Iraq,
when intelligence analysts were teamed
with the forces, some important nuances
came to life: Although most raids shared
some similarities in the abstract, being
on the ground in a raid made clear to
the analysts that the specific context, the
ways in which that raid did not resemble
others, often mattered more. Being delib-
erate about interrupting the tendency to
jump straight to tasks, to be as efficient
as possible, can make space for members
to diverge, explore, and start to build on
the possibilities without feeling as though each di-
vergent thought is a tangent that is preventing the
group from getting on with the “real” work.
Celebrate diversity by being explicit that cog-
nitive diversity is not just a nice-to-have but exactly
what the workgroup needs. Be open about the fact
that group members have different backgrounds
and skills; this may open the door for members to
reveal more of their differences. When workgroups
rush to smooth over differences, they can miss the
opportunity to sample ideas and techniques and
pick up new tools and approaches. Set the tone by
provoking members to speak to their belief systems,
their reasons for participating, and why the outcome
matters to them—even if, or especially if, these rea-
sons differ. Resist the urge to resolve contradictions
or emphasize commonality. Establishing a tolerance
for unresolved tension can ease individuals’ fears
that disagreement will damage the team dynamic.
The goal should be to create disequilibrium
in the group and evolve the options on the table,
keeping the intensity high enough to motivate the
group toward a creative next step, but not so high
that it becomes unproductive. One way to do this
is by playing with possibilities to slow down a
pell-mell rush to execution. A playful discussion
of what-ifs can test the boundaries and conditions
rather than treating them as realities. As commu-
nicator Nancy Duarte points out, the arc from what
could be to what is creates useful tension.8
It doesn’t
have to be just a mental exercise—tinkering is a way
to look for where there is play in physical systems
and routines as well. Royal Caribbean Cruise’s New-
building & Innovation group, for example, uses a
variety of design tools and graphical simulations to
explore the ideas and possibilities brought forward
by domain specialists from aircraft design, fashion,
entertainment, and shipbuilding that stretch the
group’s collective thinking.
• Are we turning up the heat enough?
In what ways do we tend to avoid conflict?
• What if friction wasn’t just allowable
but demanded? What if we went beyond
accepting different points of view and
insisted that they be surfaced?
4

Ultimately, it may be as simple as being willing
to be curious. A workgroup aiming to improve has
an obligation to be curious. Ask the question when
you don’t understand, and adopt a beginner’s mind-
set. Reach beyond your experience, and listen for
what an idea could be rather than what it is.
SEEK OUT CHALLENGES
It’s one thing to get options on the table, another
to transform them into solutions. The goal of cul-
tivating friction is the latter, getting to better and
better solutions by learning as a group and embody-
ing it in action. An alchemy of interactions makes
a workgroup more than the sum of its parts (or its
ideas). Individual ideas bump up against each other
and against diverse perspectives, get tested in real
conditions, and become different and better as a re-
sult. This happens not once but repeatedly, as the
context changes along with the group’s understand-
ing. To create this alchemy, it isn’t enough for mem-
bers to tolerate challenges9
—they should insist on
challenges.
Sometimes, particularly when a group seems to
gel quickly and develop instant camaraderie, the
idea of doing anything to upset the balance can
seem completely counterproductive. But a norm of
not rocking the boat can solidify over time, making
it seem harder and less likely that a group member
will risk a rift. Challenging early on, when the stakes
might be lower, can help a group under-
stand and adjust how it responds and
reacts to uncomfortable situations. Com-
munity—and bonds of trust—can come
from crises, even small ones.
Challenge yourself and others to
break through any ego and hubris that
can prevent individuals from engaging
with each other around what is most im-
portant, from unwillingness either to show vulner-
ability by asking questions or to be open to being
questioned. Misunderstandings and disagreements
can be fertile ground for learning and creating
something new. Individuals should strive to repress
the desire to display authority or expertise—and
shouldn’t let other members go unchallenged by
virtue of their expertise. A workgroup, collectively,
can help by not accepting serial monologues or
presentations and by questioning and exploring as-
sumptions as a matter of habit.
Even people who think they are open to new
ideas and learning often have deeply ingrained—and
unexamined—assumptions that can shape the way
they approach the world. Although it may feel awk-
ward at first, here are some ways to elicit challenges:
• Try to bring more of the invisible and unstated—
beliefs, experiences, expectations, and theories—
into the open by asking others to state their core
assumptions when they offer a perspective.
• Take the group into a new context temporarily,
or bring outsiders in, to help heighten aware-
ness of our own orthodoxies—a key first step to
reexamining and updating them. For example,
as the Red Cross has begun using more people
from local communities in responses, a side
benefit has been to expose the organization’s
professionals to more perspectives that chal-
lenge what they “know” about the work.
• Prompt members who are likely to hold oppos-
ing perspectives and explore the disagreement.
Rather than minimize the differences, try to
explicate the “ladder of inference,”10
working
backward from the expressed perspective to the
beliefs, experiences, and assumptions that led
there. Instead of, “How can you think that?”, ask,
“I wonder what information you have that I don’t?”
or, “How might you see the world such that this
makes sense?”11
Even better than asking: Try to
experience what the other person does. Going
deeper into disagreement may get to a more nu-
anced understanding of the root problem.
• Call out the elephant in the room or question the
organization’s long-established conventional
wisdom and principles. Setting an expectation
that the unspeakable may well be spoken is an-
other way to break through complacency and
elicit challenges.
• To what extent are workgroup members
encouraged to speak beyond their expertise?
5

The goal of bringing gaps in knowledge and un-
derstanding to light is to gain insight into what we
don’t know: Either others do know about it or the
group can create new knowledge around it.12
For agency sparks & honey, success depends in
part upon cultivating friction in a daily culture brief-
ing.13
The briefing leaders prompt specific individu-
als on certain subjects and consciously distribute the
conversation. Rather than try to resolve opposing or
even unrelated perspectives, they use the common
language of the agency’s cultural intelligence system
and framework to focus on looking for the new in-
sights and connections that such divergence might
reveal. Over time, many of the briefing participants
have also tacitly picked up skills for eliciting diverse
perspectives and managing the resulting friction—
an ever-growing community of practitioners devel-
oped through tacit learning.
Beyond a practice of challenging each other in
discussion, another approach is to impose con-
straints as a means of forcing creativity and diver-
gent views by placing an entire workgroup into a
stress position. Imposing constraints on the tools and
conditions of a solution is one way to do this. Con-
straining the budget, expertise, or (especially) timing
can spark creativity and produce a sense of urgency.
Finally, try to create space so that friction can
develop from a variety of sources. Silence can be an
important tool and is a discipline that supports the
need to avoid rushing to answer, resolve, or sim-
plify. Silence itself can provoke tension for some
while allowing space for other voices to clarify and
emerge. Mediate the conversation to keep multiple
interpretations alive so that additional important
insights and slow-building approaches can have a
chance to materialize.
Although action-oriented group members may
become impatient or frustrated when passionate
views collide and generate multiple interpretations
of a challenge, these collisions and interactions
could be necessary to continue to reach new levels
of performance. It takes practice, for both individu-
als and groups, to balance the need to diverge and
generate heat with the directive to draw actionable
insights that can be used to make progress toward
an outcome. As a group’s members increasingly em-
ploy tensions and disagreements to reach better so-
lutions, they can help create a virtuous cycle of more
honest and forthcoming challenges.
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• Don’t stir things up—just smile and nod so
we can be done.
• There’s no such thing as a bad idea and all
ideas are equal—let’s not judge.
• We’re all in agreement and know how this
works—let’s just get on with it; we’ve got
the A-team on this.
6

1. Kevin Crowston et al., “Perceived discontinuities and continuities in transdisciplinary scientific working groups,”
Science of the Total Environment 534 (2015), pp. 159–72.
2. InstructionalDesign.org, “Cognitive dissonance (Leon Festinger),” 2015.
3. Dave Gray, Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Two
Waves, 2016), p. 15.
4. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (New
York: Penguin, 2000), p. 33.
5. John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, “Productive friction: How difficult business partnerships can accelerate
innovation,” Harvard Business Review, February 2005.
6. Carol Kinsey Goman, “The art and science of mirroring,” Forbes, May 31, 2011.
7. Joint Special Operations Command. See the full case study based on Stanley McChrystal’s 2015 book Team of
Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.
8. Nancy Duarte, Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2010).
9. We use challenge as both verb (to dispute, to question, to call someone to engage) and noun (a call to participate or
engage, a call to prove or justify).
10. The “ladder of inference” was put forth by psychologist Chris Argyris in 1970 and further developed by Peter
Senge in his 1990 book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. The model describes
the unseen thought processes that come between taking in facts and ultimately acting or responding.
11. Stone, Patton, and Heen, Difficult Conversations, p. 37.
12. From the Johari Window framework. There are four quadrants: On one axis is “known to self” and “not known
to self”; on the other axis is “known to others” and “not known to others.” By making what we believe we know
visible to others, we can gain insight into what we don’t know, whether because someone else does know it or
whether by bringing the unknowns to light, the group can collectively create knowing around something none
individually knew prior. See Gray, Liminal Thinking, p. 62.
13. The daily culture briefing is developed and hosted by the Briefing Workgroup and attended by most of the
agency as well as outside participants. Read more about the sparks & honey briefing workgroup in the full case
study, forthcoming in February 2018.
ENDNOTES
7

Commit to a
shared outcome
Focus on the outcome that matters
most to foster passion and amplify
your actions

Introduction:
Focus and alignment
A shared outcome is the reason a workgroup ex-
ists; it is why group members come together and
what they aim to achieve every day—for example,
to save lives or to stop cyber-intrusions. For most
workgroups, this outcome will support the mission
of the larger organization, but it is much more with-
in the group’s ability to control.
When a shared outcome is significant and mean-
ingful, commitment to that outcome can drive a
workgroup to take action. It can rally members from
different domains and possibly different organiza-
tions to work together despite their having compet-
ing perspectives, goals, and even performance met-
rics. A shared outcome can also compel a workgroup
to reach outside its membership for help, insight,
and resources. All of these—action, generative col-
laboration, and leverage—are key for workgroups
looking to accelerate performance improvement
amid rapidly changing conditions and requirements.
When it comes to accelerating performance im-
provement, the way an outcome is defined is key. No
workgroup can definitively achieve a well-defined
outcome in the short term. For example, while a
group of firefighters might be saving lives every day,
there are always more lives to be saved and, con-
ceivably, better, more effective ways to do so. As a
result, commitment to a shared outcome typically
helps to focus and align workgroup members on
what could be done and drives them to constantly
take action to get better at achieving that outcome.
Committing to a shared outcome can help ele-
vate a group’s objectives over individual objectives,
creating an expectation and a vehicle for putting
aside competing agendas1
and focusing on the is-
sue at hand. The significance and meaningfulness
of a shared commitment can also help workgroup
members to tolerate the potential discomfort of
challenging and being challenged by others as a
means of getting better and better at achieving the
shared outcome. In fact, research indicates that
groups with shared outcomes are half as likely to
feel that competing priorities hold the group back
and a third as likely to complain about constraints
due to corporate politics.2
By being larger than any one member and requir-
ing not just every member of the workgroup but also
external resources and learning, a significant shared
outcome can lead to learning from others. In a world
of mounting performance pressure, one of the keys
to success could be finding ways to engage and moti-
vate others to help achieve even more impact. Defin-
ing a shared outcome can help a workgroup attract
the right talent and connect more effectively with
others by being clear both about what it is trying to
accomplish and where and how others can help.
The commit to a shared
outcome practice: What it is
The optimal shared outcome—this is what we
are committed to—can help a workgroup accelerate
performance improvement. A well-defined shared
outcome should provide clarity, focus, and guidance
for making decisions and taking action, orienting
workgroups amid uncertainty, and making clear to
members where they are heading and what is worth
fighting for and what is not.3
Some attributes of a good shared outcome:
• Clear and credible. This is about the basic
work of the group; members are the driving in-
fluence and doing the bulk of the work.
• Significant. Big enough to inspire and moti-
vate. Group members believe they can achieve it
better collectively than individually.
• Broad and open-ended. There is always
more that can be done, and doing it typically re-
quires pulling in resources and talent from out-
side the workgroup.
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• There are competing definitions of success
with no consensus
• We have a bunch of solutions but no clarity
on what we are solving for
• The workgroup is easily distracted or
moving in too many directions at once
Propel | Commit to a shared outcome
1

• Narrow and tangible. Defined to provide
focus and guide decisions because it is directly
relevant to who they are and the skills and scope
they bring to the work. The outcome can give a
sense of what success would really look like.
• Meaningful. At its best, a shared outcome has
an element that connects to members’ values
and identity; achieving that outcome can be-
come personal and meaningful to each of the
group members.
• The organization’s goals or part of a broad-
er effort. For most workgroups, the shared
outcome will support the mission of the larger
organization, but it must be within the group’s
authority and ability to make a significant im-
pact on the outcome. For example, if the orga-
nization has a mission to “improve lives through
wellness,” the workgroup’s shared outcome
might be to “scale a wellness business.” The ex-
ception might be project-oriented organizations
such as an urban fire department.
• A quantified goal or target. Workgroups can
get locked in on a specific number, causing them
to act more narrowly or even game the system,
aiming to achieve that number rather than con-
tinuously push the boundaries to achieve better
and better outcomes.
• An ideal or vision. Lofty goals that aren’t tangi-
ble or clear—say, make the world a better place—
generally provide too little focus or guidance to
prompt action. The group may be inspired but
could either become overwhelmed by magnitude
• Maximize the potential for friction. A clear, long-term direction around a meaningful shared
outcome can help attract diverse members who are passionate about the outcome and can help
mobilize others to engage as well. Without it, the workgroup may attract people best suited for near-
term events but unprepared to make progress toward longer-term objectives.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. By overriding individual agendas, a shared commitment to an
outcome can help build the foundation for deeper trust between individuals.4
• Reflect more to learn faster. When group members trust each other’s commitment to an outcome,
they may be more willing to reflect and share honestly in order to learn how to have a greater impact
on the shared outcome.
• Bias toward action. The shared outcome provides guidance that enables members to move more
quickly and confidently into rapid actions that could yield learning, without fear of political reprisals for
appearing to make a mistake or having to change direction.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. The shared outcome sets the context for how success would be
measured and what metrics would be most relevant for the workgroup.
• Seek new contexts. Using a shared outcome as a lens for what matters can help you make sense of
new contexts and not get overwhelmed.
• Cultivate friction. Motivated by commitment to a shared outcome, members may be more willing
to endure some discomfort in order to participate in practices that increase the type of friction that is
generative of new and better approaches.
• Frame a powerful question. There is a back-and-forth dynamic between the shared outcome and
the question. The shared outcome generally sets guiderails for the direction of the question, while
that question animates and adds urgency to the shared outcome. Part of the art is using one to inform
the other.
2

of the outcome or paralyzed by the range of po-
tential paths and interpretations of success.
A shared outcome can be valuable for any type of
group. However, for edge workgroups, the way the
outcome is articulated and the ways that members
choose to deepen commitment to it can influence the
size and nature of the group’s impact. Workgroups
can create and sustain commitment to the type of
shared outcome that accelerates performance im-
provement by making sure that the most important
things are treated as the most
important, and by making
the shared outcome mean-
ingful to the members.
These practices, in them-
selves, have the potential
to drive accelerated per-
formance improvement.
While a shared out-
come will remain rela-
tively stable, it should be
an ongoing conversation, open
to revision as the workgroup and context evolve.
Throughout the effort, leaders should entertain
suggestions for updating the outcome, periodically
surface other interpretations, and then rearticulate
the shared outcome to ensure continual team align-
ment.5
This gives the shared outcome renewed cred-
ibility by illustrating that it is connected to its dy-
namic context—and reassures members of the team
that they are a part of the shared outcome.
MAKE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING
The workgroup shapes the nature of their work
through the way members define the outcome
they are committing to deliver. Even with orga-
nizational expectations of what it will deliver, the
right outcome on which to align may not be imme-
diately obvious. For example, a disaster response
group might define a shared outcome of “saving
lives” or “minimizing trauma” or “restoring normal
infrastructure function,” each suggesting differ-
ent priorities and approaches. Without alignment
on what the most important thing is for the group,
workgroup members may find themselves work-
ing at cross purposes or just being slowed down by
the need to keep renegotiating priorities. Negotiat-
ing and agreeing to a shared outcome will almost
certainly raise different and opposing perspectives.
This is an opportunity for the group to establish
how it will handle friction productively.
Ideally, the workgroup collectively explores
how it might define the outcome, up front, to bet-
ter ensure that all of the members share in and can
commit to it. Start by taking the long view, ask-
ing: What is the highest impact that we can have?
Where can we offer the most value? The idea is to
focus first on the future and the opportunities ahead
and then work backward. Paradoxically, focusing
on a long-term direction could actually help to deal
with near-term uncertainty. This can generate ex-
citement, helping groups break free from current
constraints and opening up the domain beyond just
what group members currently do. For example,
a group of firefighters might initially define their
shared outcome as “putting out fires” but, upon fur-
ther discussion, clarify the outcome to be “to save
lives” or even “to prevent fires.”
In addition to looking to the future, be bold
in considering unexplored horizons that might not
yet seem quite possible. Periodically reevaluating
the shared outcome can provide an opportunity for
the workgroup to draw out potential and possibil-
ity over time. IsraAID, an international humani-
tarian aid organization, defines its mission as act-
When you face a tough decision, or when prospects for success look bleak,
reminding one another what you are trying to do provides guidance,
sustenance, and inspiration.
—The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
3

ing where it can make the most impact,
where others are not, to provide disaster
relief and long-term support. Depend-
ing on the response effort, an IsraAID
workgroup might define a shared out-
come of building public health capacity
or creating an infrastructure for future
local response. The group responding to
the 2011 Japan earthquake focused on
areas and populations that larger orga-
nizations were overlooking. When group members
discovered that other organizations were failing
to offer psychosocial and post-traumatic support—
especially for children and elderly victims—the
response group refined its shared outcome: to in-
crease local psychosocial capacities to support the
local population’s long-term sustainability. Ulti-
mately, the IsraAID group worked with local gov-
ernment agencies to train educators in art therapy
and offer post-traumatic stress disorder training
for counselors and social workers.6
A workgroup commits to making the outcome
the focus of all activities and to working together to
achieve it. And while the outcome should be within
the group’s scope and authority, the shared outcome
should also acknowledge the inherent uncertainty
and evolving nature of both resources and contexts.
By aligning on only the ends, not the means, a
workgroup is free to think broadly and creatively
about the best approaches to achieve that most im-
portant outcome. A compelling what combined with
an open how would also tend to attract relevant
resources that the group might have been unaware
existed. Defining a group’s impact requires flex-
ibility, balancing concreteness and aspiration to ar-
rive at something tangible enough to pursue, based
in a concrete understanding of the effort required,
but not so tangible that it hinders creativity or kills
group members’ passion and motivation.
In some contexts, outcomes aren’t straightfor-
ward and might be difficult to articulate. In addition
to defining the outcome, try to capture the feel-
ing that you want the outcome to generate. Then
the workgroup can reflect on whether the outcome
as defined would elicit that feeling, for the group or
others. Appeal to group members’ emotions, not
just their minds. There are different ways of know-
ing, and feeling and emotion are powerful moti-
vators that may be overlooked by groups eager to
jump to metrics and goals. At Pixar, for example,
workgroups often lack objective criteria to assess
their progress: They reflect on whether a particular
character animation or scene captured the feeling
they were trying to elicit, and, if it doesn’t, they con-
sider every component—the lighting, the colors, the
textures, the shot style and camera angles, visual
details, sound, and voice, as well as the actual script
and story—to understand what is supporting the
feeling they are trying to achieve and what isn’t or
is working against it. In Inside Out, about a child’s
emotions, the filmmakers struggled with the char-
acter Joy, knowing they wanted to elicit a childlike
optimism and enthusiasm without irritating view-
ers with too much sweetness.7
With a group commitment to a shared
outcome, go public. Reinforce it by
speaking the commitment out loud to
each other and use it to guide the group’s
activities. Whether through blogs or
press releases, conversation or public
speaking, look for ways to publicly share
the group’s shared outcome to motivate
taking action and, more importantly, to
attract others to your cause and poten-
tially reveal new resources.
• Where has a short-term orientation gotten us
into trouble?
• What is the most important thing on which
we could focus our efforts?
• What would be the impact on the
organization if we succeed?
• What would have to happen for us to achieve
the largest impact?
4

MAKE IT MEANINGFUL
A workgroup is committing not only to the out-
come but to the journey together. But the commit-
ment that feels so strong at the beginning, when
the challenge is novel and exciting, can fade as the
new becomes old and the exciting becomes diffi-
cult. Paying attention to what makes a shared out-
come meaningful can help to sustain and revitalize
commitment over the course of a longer effort—or
of many short efforts. The shared outcome should
remain relevant even as circumstances change and
evolve. How does the shared outcome connect to
the larger context of an organization or situation as
well as to the smaller contexts of the group mem-
bers? How can the outcome connect to something
larger, something beyond self-interest or ambition?
Workgroups that can answer these questions—or at
least keep asking them—may be better able to sus-
tain members’ commitment.
Make the outcome real now by taking
meaningful actions now. An outcome around which
the workgroup can mobilize today helps members
to begin learning sooner. For accelerating operating
performance, small actions help test the assump-
tions and conditions necessary for achievability,
and the actions themselves should also
demonstrate commitment. The members’
unique and diverse sets of resources and
capabilities put the group in a unique
position to achieve this outcome. Past
performance, in particular, can make the
achievability real. Have the people and
organizations involved in this effort pre-
viously shown themselves capable of fo-
cusing their actions and resources on the
“most important thing?”
Over time, commitment generally comes from
having a connection to the shared outcome and de-
riving meaning from it. This connection may hap-
pen through a negotiation: Members bring their
own identities, which initially shape the way each
member thinks about the outcome and her indi-
vidual approach to it. Through defining the shared
outcome, a collective identity begins to emerge. The
workgroup identity, and the deeper understanding
of the impact the group can make, begin to shape
the members’ personal identities. When members
find alignment between the shared outcome and
their individual identities, it can elicit their pas-
sion to bring the outcome to life and have more and
more impact on it. Members can keep it real by
continuing to shape and evolve the outcome to ac-
commodate what they learn and what is important
over time. They frame their actions in terms of the
outcome. What they do, why they do it, and who
they are can align.8
One way in which members can internalize the
shared outcome is by articulating what they find
personally meaningful about this effort and how the
shared outcome aligns with that. Through clarifying
the group definition, personal identity, how each
individual might approach the problem and her
role in the group, and what meaning she will derive
can begin to emerge. The workgroup can sustain
that commitment by being open to challenges from
group members as the context changes and more
information comes into the picture, and adjusting
their shared outcome and action-taking as a result,
showing a constantly improving and credible path.
This bottom-up approach to accountability and
group identity can allow the entire group to adjust
quickly to respond to the changing environment
and work together toward their shared outcome.
Beyond remaining relevant as context changes,
a shared outcome can be more meaningful when it
connects to something larger, an impact beyond the
reach or ability of any one individual or workgroup
that motivates the workgroup to seek to get better
and better at achieving the outcome. This type of
commitment typically has an emotional component
and connects to individuals’ personal passions and
identities. Passion makes members feel more in-
vested in the outcome and mutually accountable to
getting the work done; more importantly, passion
is associated with a desire to learn faster to have a
• How do we avoid inertia from
overcommitment?
• What changes would allow us all to believe in
the outcome and feel committed?
5

greater and greater impact.9
Tying the shared out-
come to a larger narrative that spans workgroups
is one way of raising the bar—inspiring, stoking
passion, and reinforcing commitment.
A narrative can be a powerful call to action. It
should appeal to emotion, not just intellect, and lay
out a compelling, open-ended vision that invites
others to participate in it, shaping it through their
own actions. It is realistic about the challenges and
obstacles that may be confronted along the way, but
that’s why the call to action is so powerful—it makes
clear that workgroup cannot achieve the opportu-
nity without sustained, collective action. In times
of uncertainty and turbulence, narratives can help
groups overcome risk aversion, short-term thinking,
zero-sum views of the world, and erosion of trust.10
Organizations or movements might create a narra-
tive; the workgroup probably won’t. By definition,
the narrative exists outside of the workgroup and is
focused externally: How can others participate, tak-
ing independent actions to make the vision reality?
So if workgroups aren’t creating the narrative,
how do they use them? Workgroups can start by
becoming aware of the narratives around them and
identifying the narrative that can turn the shared
outcome into a greater, open-ended aspiration that
taps a deep need in individuals and motivates them
to go the extra mile to achieve the desired outcome.
In the case of a workgroup, a narrative can illumi-
nate how actions support an even greater ambition,
one that can be accomplished and is being accom-
plished—not necessarily by the workgroup alone
but in part through its efforts.
One way of continuously making the shared out-
come meaningful is to keep it visible, front and cen-
ter, as a guide, a call to action, reminding the group
what they are striving for. Whether in physical form,
on a whiteboard or dashboard (Southwest Airlines
Field Techs), incorporated into a project name
(Royal Caribbean Project Edge), or as an open man-
ifesto (sparks & honey), incorporating references to
a shared outcome reminds the team what they are
trying to achieve and can help guide decisions. Vis-
ible cues can often be enough to spark the inspira-
tion and motivation that many members feel when
they first join a team.
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• The organization already has a
mission statement.
• We shouldn’t ask for trouble. Restating the
organization’s goals is the safest way to go.
• Keep it vague. We don’t want to sign up for
something we can’t deliver.
• My boss sets my performance objectives.
6

1. Rawn Shah, “The leadership paradox of shared purpose,” Forbes, February 16, 2015.
2. Ibid.
3. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “Practice vs. process: The tension that won’t go away,” Knowledge Directions,
Spring 2000, pp. 86–96.
4. Jill Geisler, “To build the team, build the trust, with these 8 tips,” Poynter, May 10, 2012; Geisler, “What great
bosses know about building trust,” Poynter, February 20, 2010.
5. For examples of how successful companies don’t change their commitment to the shared outcome, see Michael
E. Raynor, The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and What to Do About It) (New York:
Crown Business, 2007).
6. UJA Federation, “IsraAID’s impact in Tohoku Japan,” YouTube, March 12, 2012. Andrew de Maar, Dalia Katan,
and Ryan Gatti, interviews with IsraAid co-CEO Yotam Polizer and global programs director Naama Gorodischer,
March 2017.
7. Lauren Davis, “How Pixar came up with a whole new way of showing a child’s mind,” Gizmodo, June 16, 2015.
8. Mark Bonchek, “Purpose is good. Shared purpose is better,” Harvard Business Review, March 14, 2013.
9. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Maggie Wooll, and Alok Ranjan, If you love them, set them free: Why building the
workforce you need for tomorrow means giving them wings to fly today, Deloitte University Press, June 6, 2017.
10. For more about the power of narratives and how to create and use them, see John Hagel, “The untapped poten-
tial of corporate narratives,” Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, October 7, 2013.
ENDNOTES
7

Bias toward action
Move from discussion to action
as quickly as possible

Introduction:
Reactivity is not enough
The front line is, of course, where most problems
or opportunities first appear—and where people find
themselves crafting strategies and taking actions to
address them. Such moves usually need to happen
at top speed, since the window of time to address
the issue at hand is often short—too short to accom-
modate exhaustive analysis, planning, and approval
processes. It’s no surprise that many organizations
look to speed reactions and solve problems more
quickly. But workgroups aiming to accelerate per-
formance improvement should adopt a different
mind-set: They should act rather than react.
In a rapidly changing world, workgroups take
a real risk in reacting to whatever is happening at
the moment. Reactivity tends to breed modest, in-
cremental improvement at best; at worst, it tends to
lock workgroups into their approaches of the past.
Groups need to respond quickly to whatever they
are confronting—and respond in ways that can move
them toward achieving higher impact.
Action is a means of targeted and rapid learning
that is an important element of accelerating perfor-
mance. It is a different type of learning than training
or sharing existing knowledge. Taking action to en-
gage with a possible solution uncovers a problem’s
conditions and requirements as well as the capabili-
ties and limitations of our resources. This informa-
tion informs the next action and ultimately creates
new knowledge that can be built into a better ap-
proach. Until the new knowledge is embodied in ac-
tion, the workgroup is unlikely to learn from it.
A group can learn faster how to achieve higher
levels of performance by taking more of the types of
actions that create new knowledge and matter to the
outcome. Balancing the value of fast feedback with
the longer-range goal to significantly improve an
outcome, a group can avoid the reactive incremental
loop and pursue truly impactful learning. This can
shape how members will think about what actions to
take and which actions and opportunities to pass by.
Further, in a world where what is true today
about a given issue may not be true tomorrow, a bias
toward action could orient the workgroup to look
beyond compliance and the status quo. It can help
propel a workgroup past the paralysis brought on
by uncertainty and prompt the group to keep test-
ing assumptions and developing new approaches to
improve performance regardless of inertia or road-
blocks in the larger organization. A bias toward ac-
tion can also help clarify the overwhelming noise
that many workgroups sometimes encounter.
To accelerate performance improvement, work-
groups should increase decision-making velocity,
taking reasonable and fluid actions—whether that is
first responders breaking down a door or a product
designer posting a mock-up on a platform—without
cumbersome decision-making and approval pro-
cesses. Groups should be able to take action—small
moves, smartly made—over and over and over, to
keep testing conditions and assumptions and push-
ing boundaries to reach higher levels of performance.
Too much planning or approval-seeking without
action can defuse momentum, squelch passion, and
delay the learning and refinement needed to prog-
ress. If workgroups are too slow to try things outside
the status quo, they may miss valuable opportunities.
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• We are slow at putting our ideas into
action; we focus on process (for example,
stage gates) more than the results we are
trying to achieve
• There is no time to tinker, prototyping new
ideas feels high risk, and failure is frowned
upon
• Many people can say no, while no one can
clearly say go
• We can’t get the right people in the room
to make decisions—or, worse, we have to
get everyone in the room
• The outcomes around which we align cater
to the lowest common denominator; we
could be missing the opportunities that
would have significant impact
• We feel as though we have too few
resources to achieve the impact we want
• There are no consequences for not
improving performance over time
Propel | Bias toward action
1

For example, Polaroid was slow to act when radical
changes were occurring in the imaging/camera in-
dustry even though the company had the technical
capabilities to pursue a new approach.1
Accelerating
performance improvement, then, doesn’t necessar-
ily come from response and reaction, no matter how
fast, but from choosing where to act to get the best
impact on the outcome over time.
The bias toward action practice:
What it is
In a fast-paced and unpredictable business en-
vironment, not all actions are equal. Action matters
when it leads to new actions that can ultimately de-
liver higher impact. Bias toward action is about act-
ing quickly to learn faster, but it’s also about choos-
ing where to act; deciding what will drive the most
useful learning. It is a balancing act: Groups need
to get into action sooner—and also take every pos-
sible moment before action to get the most out of
it. A strong sense of where the workgroup is aiming,
what performance metrics matter most, and what
the workgroup doesn’t yet know make bias toward
action possible.
Effective action to accelerate performance im-
provement is typically characterized by:
• Timing. Be explicit about the downsides of
waiting to act. Knowing when to act can be as
important as knowing what to do.
• Leverage. Leverage others’ capabilities to learn
as fast as possible and focus on what has not
been done before.
• The unknown and unpredictable. Aim for
actions that haven’t been taken before, whose ef-
fect is unknown, rather than variants designed
to confirm a hypothesis. There shouldn’t be a
designated result that, if it doesn’t turn out that
way, the action is a “failure.”
• Improvisation. Improvise as you go. Look for
ways to tinker with the approach, and incorpo-
rate feedback to build on—and build in.
• Short feedback loops. Take action that elicits
useful feedback faster. Look for ways to get feed-
back earlier from actions that take longer.
• Planning. Take time to understand and man-
age risk in advance. Plan for how the workgroup
• Maximize the potential for friction. A diverse and passionate workgroup can shape and build the
actions that will have the most impact on performance.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. Workgroups can act more effectively and learn from actions if
members do not fear judgment and repercussions and expect actions to be made in support of the
workgroup’s learning.
• Reflect more to learn faster. Action generates the raw material for reflection. What action can give us
the quickest feedback about how to improve the outcome the most?
• Commit to a shared outcome. Action has implications for bridging all of the workgroup’s practices
into impact on the shared outcome.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. Out of all the possible actions, which is most likely to have an
impact on the performance metrics that matter most to the outcome?
• Seek new contexts. Workgroups can draw inspiration and insight from other contexts about what
assumptions they should test and what types of actions they can take next.
• Cultivate friction. If the point of action is to generate the most impactful learning, groups should
constantly question assumptions and look for opportunities to build on and improve other actions.
• Frame a powerful question. The powerful question can help overcome old assumptions and build
more of a creative set of conditions for action.
2

will gather feedback and learn from actions,
and consider whether the action can be made
more productive.
• Agile. The way many organizations have in-
terpreted and implemented Agile, it is almost
exclusively focused on speed-to-market and
the ability to respond more quickly. While orga-
nizations can find this incredibly useful, work-
groups aiming to accelerate performance im-
provement should focus on the actions that will
help them learn faster how to reach higher and
higher levels of performance.
• Acting for the sake of action. Without a clear
direction and a desired impact to help guide and
prioritize possible actions, groups can spread
themselves too thin in a misguided belief that
more action is inherently better than less. Of
all the actions on the table, choose those most
likely to have an impact on the performance that
matters most.
• Acting recklessly. It’s anything but. All fail-
ures are not created equal, and those resulting
from inattention or lack of effort or competence
should have consequences.2
Workgroups aiming to accelerate their impact
should act relatively quickly. But they should also
act deliberately, to avoid getting trapped into react-
ing to the moment rather than choosing the actions
that have the most potential to propel the work-
group toward its long-term objectives. The practice
of biasing toward action, then, is a balancing act
between speed and impact. It requires prudence
and planning, as well as a nuanced understanding
of risk to make it more manageable and place it in
the context of other risks and rewards. Rethinking
and reframing risk can make taking action more
compelling. At the same time, planning actions to
be less burdensome, more productive for learning,
and designed to accommodate improvisation in the
moment can further encourage workgroups to act.
In fact, part of the practice is knowing when not to
act—and being focused on exploiting the limited
time available to make the next action, and the one
after that, have as much impact as possible.3
REFRAME RISK
In a fast-moving environment, inaction is one
of the greatest risks that workgroups face. Concep-
tually, we know that inaction means sticking with
the status quo, which means, at best, diminishing
returns and a shallow line of incremental improve-
ment. At the outset, though, it may be hard to ap-
preciate the opportunity missed or gauge the cost
of a chance to learn passed up. To begin reframing
the notion of risk, groups should make the risks
of inaction part of the conversation. What are we
risking by doing nothing? What is the potential im-
pact of what we might learn? What is the cost of
continuing without this learning? The risk of doing
nothing is missing the opportunity to jump from a
shallow linear curve to an accelerating trajectory of
performance improvement: Where could we be in
six months, in a year, in 10 years relative to today,
if we get on an accelerating trajectory?
The same phenomena—increasing rate of change
and shifting expectations and demands—that are
moving the action to frontline workgroups also
significantly increase the risk of inaction, though
few organizations have the tools or skills to really
understand the impact of opportunities missed. A
group can set a tone by deliberately focusing con-
versations on action and making the risk of inac-
tion part of any conversation about risk. It can also
be useful to draw on well-known examples of the
changing dynamics in other domains to be explicit
about the potential downsides of waiting (for ap-
proval, for clarity, for external pressure) relative
to the potential of getting on a higher trajectory in
such an environment. Consider, for example, the
story of Amazon Web Services. Back in 2005, when
a group at Amazon began working on the project,
many likely questioned the investment—after all,
what did it have to do with books? Yet within a de-
cade, it had reached $10 billion in annual sales and
was growing at a faster pace than Amazon’s e-com-
merce business.4
For workgroups, a large part of developing a
bias toward action is to focus on what can be gained
3

from taking an action and then maximize the up-
side potential. What impact or learning might an
action have on the outcome? How could we tweak
this action to increase the impact or gain even
greater learning? Consider what is desirable, feasi-
ble, and viable—in that order. One way to maximize
the upside is to focus on actions that haven’t been
taken before, whose effect is unknown. These will
likely have far greater learning potential than trying
out variants designed to confirm a hypothesis. The
action should generate information or create new
knowledge rather than have a designated answer
that is either right or the action “fails.”
Putting thought and planning toward action
may help to direct the group’s efforts toward high-
impact goals, but members will likely have different
perspectives about which actions have the greatest
potential and how exactly they should be taken. The
goal should be to balance impact with the speed of
getting feedback to drive learning. If a workgroup
has divergent views, try to disagree and com-
mit rather than force consensus. This practice is
inspired by a phrase from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,
who credits this concept with the productivity of
the company’s teams: Feel free to challenge an
idea or plan, but when the time comes to make a
decision, everyone commits to executing it even if
they disagree.5
For workgroups, it generally means
knowing when the value from further discussion is
less than the value of getting feedback from action—
when it is time to make a decision and move on. The
expectation that many actions will fail to generate
anticipated results means that the commitment to
any particular action may be limited. It would gen-
erate learning of one kind or another, and if it fails
to have the expected impact, the group may well go
back and execute the other option.
Developing this sense of open-endedness about
a workgroup’s decision-making can help that group
take action more easily. Members can question
their own assumptions about a proposed action’s
magnitude and finality. Decisions often feel weighty
because we assume they are weighty; it’s always
worth questioning. Consider making it a formal
part of discussion to ask: How significant is this de-
cision? What are the implications for regrouping
and trying something else if this action
doesn’t have the expected impact? This is
somewhat of a paradox, since workgroups
should be looking for actions to take that
are significant in terms of potential for
impact and learning, while also thinking
about them as transitional and experi-
mental. In rapidly changing conditions,
this impermanence only increases; as one
Southwest field tech put it: “What was ‘no’
yesterday might be ‘yes’ today.”6
Consider playing with assumptions
and boundaries to make more deci-
sions reversible. Reversible decisions
can be made with less authority or consensus, creat-
ing a stopgap for workgroups that might get stuck in
analysis paralysis. If an approach or decision fails,
the group can quickly recover and try another op-
tion rather than live with the consequences for too
long. In doing so, members would learn and move
on to focus on learning about the biggest opportuni-
ties rather than trying to predict the future.
Making risks more manageable can also tip
the scales toward action rather than deliberation.
Simulate actions by creating sandcastles in en-
vironments that have a lower cost of tinkering and
contain the ripple effect of experiments. Try using
environments that aren’t dependent on core pro-
cesses and IT, and leverage virtual tools to iterate
quickly on specific actions that would benefit from
tinkering. This practice could make it easier for
workgroups to embrace productive friction because
it would lower the stakes of any one challenge or
decision—hey, it’s only sand. The group would de-
• What has prevented us from accomplishing
our larger goals?
• Are there types of decisions we make
final and unchangeable that shouldn’t be?
How might we benefit from making more
decisions reversible?
4

velop an approach and then immediately build or
test it. The immediacy of the action can generate
rapid feedback for the group to take in and reflect
on, shortcutting the need for long decision-making
processes and cumbersome scheduling and buy-in.
Having limited downstream effects, a group would
have increased degrees of freedom to quickly test
out and adjust its approach rather than trying to fix
an airplane midflight.7
For example, FirstBuild—the open innovation
unit of GE Appliances, now a Haier com-
pany8
—uses a community of enthusiasts to
test concepts for new products. After see-
ing which types of products generate en-
thusiasm, such as a “chewable ice maker,”
FirstBuild might go back to the community
with more detailed concepts. After nar-
rowing the concept, the workgroup begins
a more detailed design, going back to the
community as needed. Once a design is
ready to prototype, the group uses a crowd-
funding site to test the market’s interest in
the product as designed and priced. If the
market is less interested than expected, the
group can easily pull the product back and
either kill it or tinker with features and pric-
ing to take to market again. In Royal Carib-
bean Cruises’ Newbuilding & Innovation
workgroup, members build sandcastles in
virtual environments where they can simulate thou-
sands of design solutions in a few hours, swapping
out details that would otherwise have been costly
or impossible to test in reality. For example, the
group adjusted colors of panels, tested how much
light structures provided at night versus day, and
got to identify safety hazards invisible in blueprints.
While members don’t get the benefit of guest feed-
back, the entire group can see the design impact of
decisions almost immediately, making for richer re-
flection and discussion of what actions come next.9
Workgroups should be able to address the issues
or opportunities they see unfolding in front of them
when the chain of command is occupied with other
concerns, or when there isn’t time to wait for more
complete feedback or further instruction. An as-
sumption of permission—go until “no,” both for the
group actions and for individual members—is key
for moving quickly and not getting hung up seeking
permission, consensus, or buy-in from a wide array
of possible stakeholders in advance. Asking for for-
giveness rather than permission can help a group
maintain momentum and spend its resources on
activities that generate new knowledge rather than
on navigating the organizational structure.
This assumption of permission may conflict
with an organization’s broader culture and make
members uncomfortable. In order for this to work,
members would have to trust each other
to act in good faith in the interest of im-
proving the shared outcome and to have
a clear understanding of the need to pri-
oritize actions that have the potential
for greatest impact on the outcome. In
increasingly dynamic environments, act-
ing too slowly may be riskier than letting
competent people exercise their judgment.
Constraining decision-making authority
could also constrain a group’s learning
potential and may be unnecessary if the
group’s objectives and priorities are clear-
ly understood to guide decision-making.
As Gen. Stanley McChrystal describes in
Team of Teams (his book about the Joint
Special Operations Command during the
Iraq War), “I was connected to almost
every decision of consequence. This was
great for establishing holistic awareness but it also
created a nightmare of paperwork and approvals.
. . . The wait for my approval was not resulting in
any better decisions, and our priority should be
reaching the best possible decision that could be
made in a timeframe that allowed it to be relevant.
I communicated across the command my thought
process on decisions like airstrikes and told them
to make the call.”10
ACT TO LEARN
The most powerful learning for workgroups
can be through action—getting out there and doing
something—rather than sitting around a table and
discussing. The more quickly the group gets to ac-
tion, the sooner it can start learning how to acceler-
ate performance improvement.
5

The relevant actions for a group often aren’t the
type that require large investments and extensive
planning. If the actions are, instead, a means of
learning to improve the outcome, how can we for-
mulate actions to maximize the potential impact on
the outcome and also have shorter feedback loops?
One way could be to divide complex actions with
long feedback loops into a series of assumptions
to test. Consider formulating the most impactful
actions into a series of small moves with interim
milestones designed to elicit new information and
create new knowledge. Try to stage your moves
to focus on getting the actionable information
or feedback that is important to the next step as
quickly as possible without losing sight of the larger
action. Consider what information or knowledge
the workgroup may be missing and what feedback
would be sufficient to inform further action. These
actions can be viewed as interwoven experiments in
a larger experiment that can lead to better solutions
and outcomes in the future.11
A minimum viable approach (MVA) can help
minimize effort, maximize momentum by
helping groups quickly identify what works and
what should be discarded. MVA is frequently used
in product development to deploy a product in the
market sooner; in the context of workgroups, it has
a wider aperture. The group would focus on identi-
fying the barest approach or action that can lead to
the next iteration, accelerating the rate of learning
and encouraging members to test ideas outside their
comfort zone or established approaches with mini-
mal investment of time or resources.12
MVA may not
be appropriate for all situations (for instance, space
exploration or surgery), and scaling a solution may
eventually require greater organizational support.
Workgroups can lower the barriers to action, in-
crease the diversity of perspectives, and reduce risk
by leveraging (capabilities, expertise, resources)
to learn from outside the group. In fact, setting
constraints—time, budget, technical—can prompt
more creativity and also focus a workgroup where
it is most likely to create value. If someone does it
better, let her do it for you. Many work products
are openly available and can reduce the cost, time,
and effort required to act. Doing this well may re-
quire emphasizing rapid appropriation and reusing
knowledge from other contexts and tight feedback
loops so that participants can rapidly build on the
contributions of others. While orchestrating others
and using existing third-party tools has costs, mobi-
lizing others can cultivate allies, build relationships,
and allow a workgroup to focus on what it does best.
The more rapidly a group learns from others, the
richer the overarching set of possibilities—both the
nature of the opportunity and the journey
needed to achieve it.
Keeping in mind that the reason
for adopting “minimum viable” prac-
tices is to accelerate the rate of learning,
workgroups can accelerate decision-
making as a proxy for whether they are
making progress toward creating an en-
vironment where more learning happens
faster. A “good” decision made too late for
the opportunity or challenge can prove
worse than an imperfect decision made
in the moment. Part of this practice is to
get more comfortable with acting on less
information. Another is to get more creative at iden-
tifying proxies for the information you need. A third
aspect is to make use of the immediacy and trans-
parency of technological tools to get input much
more rapidly than hiding behind established deci-
sion-making processes. For example, e-commerce
luggage start-up Away attributes the use of Slack to
“making decisions in a day that used to take weeks
or months.”13
Consider how the Joint Special Operations
Task Force in Iraq went from 10–12 highly planned
monthly raids to more than 300 monthly raids by
learning how to take action within, sometimes, min-
• What do we do best that will make a
difference, and what can we rely on others to
do?
• To what extent could we make decisions
faster with less information and achieve
more as a result?
6

utes of receiving actionable intelligence information.
The raids may have had more unknowns, but they
were also more successful at capturing targets and
additional intelligence information because they
were acting on information that hadn’t gone stale.
Another example comes from Southwest Airlines,
where the Baker workgroup has developed a tool to
see decisions’ direct impact on network operations.
At one point, the group wanted to add a graphical
dashboard that would show where Southwest was
long or short on airplanes. Rather than take weeks
to build the functionality, the superintendents of
dispatch sat next to a developer in the workgroup,
working together to create a summary table built
into the system in only a few hours. They began get-
ting feedback immediately as their colleagues began
using it.14
Jazz it up
There is no such thing as perfect experimenta-
tion or efficient innovation. Taking action early and
often can only produce so much learning if work-
groups don’t also bring a spirit of play and possi-
bility to their work. Try to take off the guardrails
and embrace the messiness of rework and devia-
tion. The point is not to discourage mistakes but
to encourage recognizing mistakes, ineffective ap-
proaches, and invalid assumptions, and use them
as inputs into better approaches, sooner. To really
draw on its performance improvement potential, a
diverse workgroup should embrace the vital role of
improvisation, failure, and the unexpected in creat-
ing new knowledge that can lead to better and better
outcomes over time. Similarly, leveraging capabili-
ties from the outside is nothing more than outsourc-
ing if the group uses those capabilities in predeter-
mined, already-established ways.
With any action, look for what’s not being
done. We tend to focus on the urgent or the easy—
because it’s right there—but what is most important
to the outcome may be neither urgent nor close at
hand. Venture into a territory where your efforts
can expose or create new knowledge rather than
iterating on well-worn ground where the insights
are incremental. The more unexpected the outcome,
the more potential for valuable learning. If a work-
group is generating few surprising outcomes, it may
not be pushing the boundaries that would lead to a
new level of performance.
Improvisation is a skill that defies documenta-
tion, codification, and outside control. It can be mis-
construed as chaotic, with individuals just winging
it. In fact, for workgroups, similar to jazz ensembles,
the quality of improvisation could depend in part
on the foundational skills and talents each member
brings, and in part on the quality of listening and
riffing on what others are doing—and what has al-
ready been done—to make each additional move
additive and constructive. Expand the potential
for improvisation by relaxing organizational and
operational constraints that get in the way. Royal
Caribbean, for example, creates the space for impro-
visation by building change orders into the plan so
that the company is prepared, structurally and men-
tally, to benefit from the interactions of the diversity
of backgrounds brought together in the
design workgroups. This also seems to set
the expectation that members could build
off of each other.
Celebrate the “fast failures” as oppor-
tunities to practice improvising in the
moment. This would keep the focus on
problem-solving, incorporating new in-
formation, and creating new knowledge.
Although failing fast has become almost a
cliché when talking about innovation, the
• To what extent is the current approach
holding us back from achieving more?
• What can we do to learn more from our
mistakes?
If you know in advance that
it’s going to work, it’s not an
experiment.15
—Jeff Bezos
7

key is often to keep improving the group’s ability
to find the easiest, fastest ways to generate discrete
and actionable feedback. Workgroups’ limited size
and the shorter time frames within which they work
typically demand that these practices more closely
resemble tinkering than iteration, and small, rapid
adjustments rather than formal revisions.
Failing can lead to unexpected outcomes. Build
on mistakes. Rather than start over after a failure
or, worse, hiding it, consider incorporating failures
and the learning from them into the next action.
Starting with a clean slate loses the learning. Work-
group members may struggle with recognizing the
value of what they are learning from unexpected
outcomes, and what is relevant may come to light
only through discussion and additional viewpoints.
Consider the well-known example of 3M and the
Post-it note. One of the company’s most widely
sold products, the Post-it resulted from a “defec-
tive” new adhesive that was insufficiently sticky to
hold papers together; sheets could just be peeled
right off. It was only after consideration that the
workgroup recognized the potential for an alter-
nate use.16
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• We need consensus. If we get everyone on
board, we’re full steam ahead.
• This is it—take your shot.
• Failure is not an option: Screw this up, and
you’d better look for another job.
• We don’t move until we’re sure.
8

1. Mary Tripsas and Giovanni Gavetti, “Capabilities, cognition, and inertia: Evidence from digital imaging,” Strategic
Management Journal 21 (2000), pp. 1,147–61.
2. Amy C. Edmondson, “Strategies for learning from failure,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011. There are different
types of risk-taking behaviors that are acceptable failures as differentiated from actions that are reckless and
poorly thought out or ineffectively executed.
3. For more discussion of the value of reflection even amid action in the moment, see Donald Schon’s explanation
of the “present-action” concept in The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic,
1983).
4. Jeff Bezos’s 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born from a website engineer-
ing workgroup that was originally working on improving IT infrastructure to address rapid growth. While the
workgroup was exploring the option of separating applications and infrastructure, members came to realize that
they could also provide the virtual machines that are commonly used as part of the infrastructure as a service,
and so AWS was born. Today it accounts for over $12 billion in annual revenue and more than $3 billion in profit.
See Brandon Butler, “The myth about how Amazon’s Web service started just won’t die,” Network World, March 2,
2015; Julie Bort, “Amazon’s massive cloud business hit over $12 billion in revenue and $3 billion in profit in 2016,”
Business Insider, February 2, 2017.
5. Jeff Bezos, “2016 letter to shareholders,” Amazon, April 12, 2017.
6. Andrew de Maar and Ryan Gatti, interview with SW Field Tech workgroup, Dallas, May 1–2, 2017.
7. John Seely Brown and John Hagel III, “Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation,” McKinsey Quarterly,
May 2006.
8. For more on FirstBuild, please see the full case study, forthcoming in February 2018.
9. Andrew de Maar and Dalia Katan, interviews with Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd, June 6, 2017.
10. Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engage-
ment for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015).
11. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner.
12. Linda Hill dubs this type of creative solution process creative agility, in which you need to “act rather than plan”
your future. See Hill, “How to manage for collective creativity,” TEDxCambridge, September 2014.
13. Andrew de Maar and Ryan Gatti, telephone interview with Steph Korey, co-founder and CEO, Away Travel, July 13,
2017. See Away Travel, “What we believe,” accessed January 14, 2018.
14. Southwest Airline Baker Workgroup.
15. Bezos, “2015 letter to shareholders,” Amazon, April 6, 2016
16. Marc Gunther, “3M’s innovation revival,” Fortune, September 24, 2010; Brian Hindo, “At 3M, a struggle between
efficiency and creativity,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 10, 2007.
ENDNOTES
9

Prioritize
performance
trajectory
Track trajectory of the metrics that
matter and make trade-offs to
accelerate performance improvement

Introduction:
Increasing impact
“Are we getting better at achieving our outcome?”
This is the crux of workgroup performance, and al-
most no one measures it. Not only that, but in times
of more rapid change—when the requirements, the
technologies, the competition, and the contexts
often change minute-to-minute, day-to-day, and
incremental improvement can’t keep pace—the im-
portant questions to consider are, “Are we getting
better at achieving our outcome quickly enough?
Are we getting better, faster?”
It may be insufficient to commit to a particular
outcome. In a world of exponential technology ad-
vances, we need exponential, or accelerating, im-
provements in performance. That means com-
mitting to a trajectory, not just a target. Frontline
workgroups will be making decisions and solving
problems, in changing contexts, with limited time
and other resources. It can be easy in this type of
environment to get caught up in the immediacy of
the day-to-day demands, acting to maximize impact
in the moment but getting only incrementally bet-
ter and possibly moving in a direction that could
soon be obsolete. Pressures on the larger organiza-
tion may push the workgroup further to focus on
efficiency at a time when it needs to be focused on
creating more value or delivering a better outcome.
A key to shifting the focus away from efficiency is
to identify and prioritize what will have the biggest
impact on the shared outcome.
Setting high-impact performance objectives and
tracking the trajectory of their improvement can
help workgroups make trade-offs that may accel-
erate them toward better and better delivery of the
shared outcome instead of getting distracted by in-
cremental or short-term gains. As Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos noted in 1997, “Because of our empha-
sis on the long term, we may make decisions and
weigh trade-offs differently than some companies.”1
Focusing on trajectory can help workgroups priori-
tize the signals that matter and balance opportunity
with distraction, discipline with flexibility, and ex-
perimentation with learning.
As workgroups come together to tackle the un-
expected, the right performance objectives, and
metrics against them, can help the group better
understand the impact of their work, improve de-
cision-making around priorities, maximize learning
in the short and long terms, and continue to moti-
vate action to figure out how to reach the next level.
The prioritize performance
trajectory practice: What it is
This practice is about explicitly identifying and
tracking the key metrics that matter for improving
the shared outcome. It involves regularly assess-
ing trade-offs across the metrics in order to achieve
greater impact faster. The emphasis is on looking at
performance over time and not settling for linear
improvement. The performance trajectory indicates
whether the workgroup is building in enough oppor-
tunity for experimentation, learning, and knowledge
creation to keep up with, or ahead of, the changing
environment.
• Focus on value. What does performance mean
in terms of the value we deliver and what we are
trying to achieve? Define better in the context
of the shared outcome, and clarify how it might
be measured.
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• There are no workgroup-specific metrics
and/or rewards for workgroup success
• Personal metrics are not tied to the impact
they have on the workgroup and the larger
organization
• The workgroup’s critical priorities are
different based on whom you ask
• We don’t know where we stand relative to
outcomes we want to achieve
• There is no agreed-upon and measurable
metric for success that is being prioritized
above others
• Metrics are focused on the near term
and are mostly backward-looking—for
example, ROI
Propel | Prioritize performance trajectory
1

• Focus on workgroup operating metrics.
What frontline metrics could have the greatest
impact on the organization’s key operating met-
rics? What metrics and performance objectives
will support improvement in the outcome? One
challenge is that most organizations don’t mea-
sure workgroup performance, either at a point
in time or over time. The individual is measured,
and business units are measured, but few orga-
nizations track anything at a workgroup level.
• Make small moves, smartly. Take actions
to understand the key drivers of the shared out-
come, and what aspect of performance is most
meaningful to improve for that outcome.
• Efficiency. Efficiency-based improvement can
increase for only so long before it generally ta-
pers off. You typically won’t accelerate perfor-
mance improvement by focusing on efficiency.
• Financial performance. Revenue is usually
an inadequate metric for value and, with few
exceptions (such as for sales groups), is almost
meaningless at the workgroup level.
• A lot of numbers. The metrics that matter
can change over time, but if you have more than
three key metrics, you likely have too many.
• Performance snapshots. Performance at a
particular point in time offers little useful infor-
mation about where you are going and how you
might get there.
• Maximize the potential for friction. A clear, long-term direction around a meaningful shared
outcome can help attract diverse members who are passionate about the outcome and can help
mobilize others to engage as well. Without it, the workgroup may attract people best suited for near-
term events but unprepared to make progress toward longer-term objectives.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. Tracking and prioritizing group, rather than individual, performance
metrics can help group members put aside competing agendas and ulterior motives that can lead to
unproductive friction.
• Reflect more to learn faster. Taking the focus off performance snapshots in favor of performance
over time might free workgroup members to be more open about failures and potentially eager to
delve into current performance in order to improve the trajectory. Leading indicators point to likely
areas of inquiry and provide fodder for reflection in advance of and in between action.
• Commit to a shared outcome. The shared outcome is what the group wants to achieve; the right
performance metrics should help the workgroup assess progress toward that shared outcome.
• Bias toward action. Movement is a key to improving the trajectory. Action can be helpful when it is
focused and accelerating progress toward a shared goal. Metrics help assess the current action and
shape the next action.
• Seek new contexts. Finding performance edges in new contexts can help the workgroup get to
previously unimaginable performance levels.
• Cultivate friction. When group members focus on rapid performance improvement and have data
as a starting point, they may disagree about how to get to that next level of performance and generate
ideas for new approaches.
• Frame a powerful question. If a powerful question and commitment to shared outcome help identify
the area of highest potential impact for the group and align the workgroup around it, prioritizing
performance trajectory may help the workgroup increase its impact over time.
2

Caught up in the action of the day, workgroups
often need to make decisions fairly rapidly; even
reflection and post-action debriefing may be com-
pressed. They won’t have the luxury of waiting for
quarterly reports to see how effective their actions
were, and the financial metrics would yield little in-
sight into an operational workgroup’s effectiveness
in any case. Instead, for workgroups faced with pri-
oritizing their own efforts and resources, the ques-
tion is: What can we look at, today, that can give us
an indication of whether we are taking the right ac-
tions to achieve the impact we want to in the future?
Workgroups that want to accelerate performance
improvement will have to identify which metrics
matter most and track their trajectory over time to
make better, more informed, trade-off.
IDENTIFY METRICS THAT MATTER
The winners in this exponential age will likely be
those that can focus most effectively on the relevant
leading indicators of performance. Good metrics
can provide visibility into impact at any time. This
can motivate the group and also overcome compla-
cency, highlighting relevant trends and flagging po-
tential problems and opportunities earlier.
If the adage what gets measured gets man-
aged is true, it is important for workgroups to be
thoughtful about measuring what matters. Too
often, it is also true that we measure what we can,
or because we can, not because it matters. Mea-
surement should reflect what you value and what
will be most important to achieving the shared out-
come at any given time. While it may seem obvious,
the most important thing for a workgroup to mea-
sure is generally workgroup performance, against
the shared outcome and the objectives that support
the shared outcome. Within the workgroup, that
means prioritizing group performance objectives
over competing agendas, at either the individual
or department level. Shifting incentives toward
workgroup performance can help, but that decision
is often outside the group’s control. Beyond the
group’s performance of the shared outcome, what
else matters? Define a few objectives that can have
a significant impact on improving the outcome, and
identify the associated metrics that will be most im-
portant at a point in time to indicate whether the
group is on track.
But focusing too heavily on measurement and
metrics based on what is available can lead to un-
dervaluing areas in which measurement or data is
less available. One consequence of being too fo-
cused on the metrics at hand—whether or not they
are the right metrics—is that we may dismiss feel-
ings and gut instinct. Don’t give up on your gut
just because you can’t measure something. For a
workgroup, that means treating gut instincts and
feelings as potentially valuable inputs and explor-
ing them as part of developing approaches and
making decisions. Such feelings may reflect im-
portant information that hasn’t yet fully emerged
about the context or connections between disparate
and unarticulated ideas. Workgroups that deal only
in facts may miss important information
and be hostage to courses of action guid-
ed by irrelevant or incomplete metrics. At
a minimum, a gut reaction should make
us ask some questions: What assump-
tions are guiding this feeling, and how
true are they? If I had no background
on this problem, what would I see and
believe about it? Do we need to identify
new metrics? Workgroups can use gut
instincts to reconsider the objectives or look for al-
ternative proxies that better represent progress on
the desired trajectory.
Too many metrics can be as bad as no metrics.
The point is to closely watch a few numbers,
not to spend a lot of time collecting, reporting, and
managing metrics. Too many metrics can dilute
the group’s focus. Identify the few that can give
the group the best information about how they are
doing and what to do next to have even more im-
pact. Each Amazon “two-pizza” team, for example,
• How will we measure success?
• If we can closely watch only a few numbers,
which might those be?
3

focuses on a single business metric, with that met-
ric serving as the team’s “fitness function.”2
The
metrics are a tool for discussion, course correction,
and learning, not an end point or the basis for as-
sessing rewards and punishment.
Not all metrics are created equal: Some might
indicate a company’s financial success or highlight
a single initiative’s marginal impact on reducing
turnaround times. While senior executives tend to
use financial metrics as a measure of performance,3
workgroups should put operating metrics be-
fore financial ones. Good metrics are leading
rather than lagging, indicating what impact an
action is likely to have, while there is still an op-
portunity to influence and adjust it. This is impor-
tant because failures can unfold over long periods
of time, and leading indicators can help you get
ahead of the potential challenges before the failure
plays out. Financial metrics are generally easy to
measure but tend to be lagging indicators, reflect-
ing the financial impact of a previous operating en-
vironment. They’re also often difficult to tie back
to specific initiatives or workgroup performance.
Operating metrics, such as customer churn rate or
time to introduce new products to market, tend to
be more timely and thus more useful, reflecting a
current state of performance that is within the
workgroup’s ability to affect. They antic-
ipate the resultant
financial perfor-
mance.
In working on
Harmony of the
Seas, Royal Ca-
ribbean Cruises
Ltd.’s (RCL) larg-
est and most tech-
nologically ad-
vanced ship, the
company’s Eco-
rizon workgroup was committed to making it the
most energy-efficient cruise ship on the seas. The
group began with an objective of reducing energy
use by 12 percent over the most energy-efficient
ship at that time. The workgroup identified 89
initiatives that could improve the ship’s energy ef-
ficiency—from the weight and amount of materials
used in the ship’s hull and the types of engines in-
stalled, to energy reminders for guests, glass thick-
ness on balconies, and interior designs that maxi-
mized natural light. The workgroup focused on a
few initiatives that would drive the majority of the
energy savings, but over the course of three years, it
also pursued “quick” wins, always keeping an eye on
progress against the energy-efficiency metric; ulti-
mately, the group delivered a more than 20 percent
reduction in energy use.4
Figure out which leading metrics will be most
important at any point in time. The optimal operat-
ing metrics, ones that can have the greatest short-
term impact on the shared outcome, could give the
workgroup a tangible lever with which to improve
performance. For example, instead of focusing on
call-center costs, a company that aspires to deliver
top customer service might identify a short-term
objective, such as reducing average time to reso-
lution, that would accelerate progress toward that
long-term outcome. This objective, and the associ-
ated metrics, might lead the group to prioritize an
initiative to find trends across calls. A recent study
found that companies that measured a relevant
nonfinancial factor (and validated that it had an
impact on value creation) earned returns approxi-
mately 1.5 times greater than those of companies
that didn’t.5
How can workgroups target the right metrics?
First, understand the connection between action
and result through small what-if experiments that
can test which metrics have the biggest impact on
performance. Beware of metrics that are used as a
matter of habit or convenience that could be flawed
or inappropriate for the objective. For example, in
the well-known story of Moneyball, Oakland A’s
then-general manager Billy Beane changed the
game when he chose to focus on then-arcane met-
rics such as on-base percentage and slugging per-
centage based on a deep understanding of cause
and effect.6
Operating metrics are just the beginning. With
new technologies that make the invisible visible
through sensors and real-time capture, workgroups
may find new ways to monitor interactions and
other patterns that would define new metrics that
matter. For example, research on social metrics has
4

revealed that certain patterns of interaction within
an organization can help to accelerate the introduc-
tion of successful new products and services.7
Track trajectory, not snapshots
A trajectory is a path, a series of positions over
time. A snapshot, which is how many organiza-
tions look at per-
formance, is a po-
sition at a single
moment in time.
Workgroups that
accelerate perfor-
mance over time
are on a steeper trajectory—over time, the end
point could be very different than a workgroup on
a path of linear improvement. Looking at any giv-
en snapshot, however, wouldn’t tell a workgroup
whether its performance was accelerating or incre-
mental. Snapshots offer little useful information
about where you’re going and how you might get
there. Workgroups aiming to accelerate
performance should pay attention to the
trajectory—considering where they start-
ed, the rate of progress, and the direction
they want to go—and not get too excited
or discouraged by performance at any
given moment.
When Billy Beane started using his
new metric analysis to acquire players,
the new Oakland A’s roster got off to a
slow start: After 46 games, the team had a
record of 20 wins and 26 losses. Beane ig-
nored the discouraging snapshot, sacrificing short-
term fan approval by refusing to abandon his met-
rics and bring on higher-salaried stars, and focused
on trajectory. By the latter half of the season, the
A’s had improved to 68–51—and then came a 20-
win streak, taking the team’s record to 88–51. The
A’s ended the season with 103 wins and 59 losses.
Beane constantly reevaluated his system of leading
indicators—beyond the simple win-loss column—as
the environment changed, aiming to confirm that
he was best using the metrics.8
While Beane’s example shows the potential
value of focusing on the group’s trajectory when
snapshots would indicate the group is performing
poorly relative to others, it can be equally impor-
tant to maintain a focus on acceleration when
snapshots indicate the group is doing well. An up-
beat snapshot can breed complacency: If the snap-
shot indicates that we are hitting a pre-set goal or
performing as well or better than competitors, we
are typically satisfied. There can be two problems
with this:
• As industries or markets undergo significant
change, an organization’s known competition
may be less and less likely to be the relevant
performance marker, and today’s drivers of high
performance might be obsolete tomorrow.
• Snapshots can be easily gamed in the moment—
by making teams smaller, for example, and
pushing the remaining people to work harder.
These tactics generally can’t be sustained and,
over time, generate diminishing returns or even
productivity erosion.
For a workgroup to focus on acceleration, it
should find a relevant way to track its improvement
relative to past performance. For some workgroups,
tracking metrics in and across situations over time
• What leading indicators could we use to track
performance improvement over time?
• How can we better monitor these key
performance levers?
Everythingimportantyoumanagehastobeonatrajectory
to be “above the bar” and headed for “excellent.”
—Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work, 2017
5

might mean clustering projects of similar type or
scale or looking at improvements within a longer-
term project and being aware of the factors that
could limit direct comparison. Focus on metrics
that can be tracked in relatively short intervals—
these may provide more data about changes over
time that can inform how workgroups approach
reaching the next level of performance. For exam-
ple, at sparks & honey, a New York-based adver-
tising agency, every two weeks a small workgroup
reviews a key set of operating and performance
metrics related to the group’s daily “culture brief-
ing,” a critical driver of the insights and pattern
analysis that underpin the agency’s products and
services. Looking at the week-over-week changes in
the metrics and comparing them to the longer tra-
jectory can allow a fast-growing company to scruti-
nize what is shaping performance, identify areas to
explore or improve, and develop new approaches to
reach the next level.9
A workgroup can track performance over a se-
ries of events even if many of the group members
change from one project to another. The perfor-
mance of the overall pool from which they are being
pulled should be accelerating over time, creating
new knowledge and practices. This is another argu-
ment for keeping metrics simple, easily understood,
and few.
But how do workgroup members know if they
are on the right trajectory? If competitors aren’t a
relevant guide for how high to aim or how fast to
move, what is? Don’t get trapped into comparing
against others. The comparison should be internal,
to the workgroup’s own trajectory so far. Keep
moving the edge. Where are we improving most
rapidly, and how can we do more of that? Where
is improvement slowing down, and how can we
change what we’re doing to improve the trajectory?
It can be valuable to look at the performance trajec-
tories on other fast-moving edges, including in un-
related arenas—not to judge success but to ask what
can be learned from them, especially about effec-
tiveness. How are they doing more with less? Accel-
erating performance improvement is unsustainable
if it’s accomplished by throwing more and more ef-
fort and resources at it. Part of the key is learning to
get better at accelerating value creation—otherwise
you could just get widespread burnout.
TACKLE TRADE-OFFS
In times of uncertainty and rapid change, one
of the greatest risks is distraction. Workgroups
constantly make trade-offs: between short-term
demands and long-term expectations, between
learning and efficiency, between better and cheap-
er, and so on. On the road to accelerated perfor-
mance improvement, workgroups may have to
make trade-offs that run contrary to the
short-term mind-set ingrained in many
organizations. While most companies
are willing to sacrifice long-term eco-
nomic value for short-term earnings, a
short-term mind-set can distract a work-
group into activities that deliver a quick
performance bump but don’t help the
group get on the path for higher performance in
the long term and may even send it in the wrong
direction.
Workgroups looking to accelerate performance
should think both short and long. The group
has to act in the short term, often addressing a
challenge over a short, or very short, time frame. At
the same time, the workgroup itself may continue,
possibly with a varying subset of members, over a
longer period of time, pursuing the same shared
outcome across changing conditions. At the organi-
zational level, companies such as Amazon and Net-
flix have successfully accelerated their performance
by focusing on two extreme horizons: Where/what
do we need to be in 10+ years? And what two or
three initiatives can we take in the next 6–12
months to accelerate toward that goal? The long-
term focus helped Netflix see past the significant
drop in stock price the company initially experi-
enced when it shifted to streaming services.10
While
workgroups might not operate in such a long time
frame, this type of two-horizon approach is a use-
ful model for more informed trade-offs: It allows
• What can we do today to get better, faster
over time?
6

workgroups to iterate between where they are now,
where they want to go in the future, and what types
of actions can address the immediate demands of
the present in a way that puts them on the right
path toward significantly better long-term perfor-
mance. Use the long term to aim high, focus efforts,
and create opportunity to learn from successes and
failures. Use the short term to test assumptions and
increase learning.
Some actions result in short-term gains and
generate momentum. Some make a long-term im-
pact. Ideally, a workgroup will take pragmatic ac-
tions, delivering value and learning in the short
term and building the foundations for longer-term
learning and value creation aligned with the long-
term objective. Thinking on the extreme long-term
horizon can have an added benefit of encouraging
the workgroup to think in a space that others are
not yet thinking about. This practice allows work-
groups to use information and learnings from quick
actions to adjust the long-term objective and chal-
lenge themselves: Is the most important thing still
the important thing?
Returning to the Royal Caribbean example, be-
ing in the top echelon of energy-efficient ships is one
objective alongside others such as improving guest
satisfaction. These long-term objectives help the
workgroup prioritize initiatives and opportunities
that come its way, helping it look beyond just the
savings that can be built into the ship design. In-
stead, members also look at opportunities to experi-
ment with different partnerships, on-board experi-
ences, and refurbishments a few years down the line
to include innovations that don’t yet exist.11
Finally, even for those who nod their heads
and recognize some truth in the idea that we are
moving from a world of scalable efficiency to scal-
able learning, chasing efficiency can be a hard
habit to break. Efficiency as a goal and a value is
so baked into most of our organizational struc-
tures—even those that are incredibly inefficient—
that workgroups may default to favoring efficiency
as a performance objective and will put time and
resources to the activities that gain measurable
improvements in efficiency. Efficiency tends to be
particularly compelling because it lends itself to
measurement. But workgroups that want to get
better, faster, over time may have to consciously
emphasize effectiveness over efficiency.
Mistakes, while the enemy of efficiency, can be
the fuel for learning how to be more effective. This
shifts the emphasis away from performance in the
moment and away from ad-hoc measures of suc-
cess. Paradoxically, it is through focusing on im-
proving performance over time that groups can get
better at addressing ad-hoc needs.
This isn’t to say that efficiency doesn’t matter.
The answer to accelerating performance cannot
be simply to work harder and harder. No amount
of commitment to a shared outcome will prevent
eventual burnout if the workgroup doesn’t also
become more efficient at creating value. The dif-
ference is that it is efficiency in the service of value
creation.
Trade-offs are part of a workgroup’s reality, and
a whole group should be engaged in them to make
better decisions, avoiding the trap of splitting the
group. For example, when part of a group focuses
on short-term solutions while others look at long-
term goals, each can venture too far down its own
rabbit hole, missing opportunities and changing
context, and creating an environment in which
people talk past one another and become artificially
invested in one side or the other.12
The tensions be-
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: We made our
quarterly targets—we must be doing
something right.
• I’m just trying to survive. Trajectory over
time? Making our numbers, today, is
what matters.
• Metrics are meaningless in such a complex,
rapidly changing world. Measuring is a
waste of time.
• Focus on efficiency. Performance
improvement means that costs are going
down or speed is going up.
• I have my own metrics to worry about. I
know what I’m measured on, and it isn’t
this group.
7

tween trade-offs create friction, even if the group
doesn’t encourage factions. Making distinctions
between temporary challenges and enduring prob-
lems, nice-to-haves and need-to-haves, big prob-
lems and acute ones, can help workgroups better
understand what the issue is before deciding what
to do about, making the trade-offs, and tensions
easier to navigate.
8

1. Jeff Bezos, “1997 letter to the shareholders,” Amazon 1997 Annual Report. The original 1997 letter to the share-
holders has been attached to all subsequent annual letters to the shareholders from Amazon as a reminder that
it “remains Day 1.”
2. Alan Deutschman, “Inside the mind of Jeff Bezos,” Fast Company, August 1, 2004. Bezos is credited with this rule
of thumb for keeping teams and workgroups sized to be effective: “Two pizzas” should be enough to feed a team
or the group is too large. On these teams, the key business metric arises out of a discussion between a senior
executive team and the team lead.
3. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Christopher Gong, Stacey Wang, and Travis Lehman, Pragmatic pathways: New
approaches to organizational change, Deloitte University Press, March 4, 2013.
4. Andrew de Maar and Dalia Katan, interview with Xavier Leclerq, senior vice president of newbuild and innova-
tion, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., June 6, 2017.
5. Michael J. Mauboussin, “The true measures of success,” Harvard Business Review, October 2012. For more on the
Oakland A’s story, see Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
6. Mauboussin, “The true measures of success.”
7. Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread (New York: Penguin, 2014). Also see Scott Berinato’s inter-
view of Pentland: “Social physics can change your company (and the world),” HBR IdeaCast, April 2014.
8. Edward Ford, “Moneyball: How big data & analytics turned the Oakland A’s into the best team in baseball,” Sports
Marketing Playbook, August 31, 2016.
9. Andrew de Maar and Abigail Sickinger, interview with Merlin Ward, director of culture systems, sparks & honey,
February 15, 2017.
10. For more on the zoom out, zoom in approach to corporate strategy, see John Hagel, “The Big Shift in strategy,
Part 1,” LinkedIn, January 5, 2015.
11. This workgroup is committed to a shared outcome of building a ship that would be at the leading edge of design
and innovation. For more on it, see the RCL case study, to be published in February 2018.
12. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Managing yourself: Zoom in, zoom out,” Harvard Business Review, March 2011.
ENDNOTES
9

Maximize
potential for friction
Assemble a group of passionate people
who can challenge each other with
diverse mind-sets, preferences, and
perspectives

Introduction:
Generating new knowledge
Friction may generate plenty of uncomfortable
moments—but it’s essential. Friction fights against
groupthink and complacency; it can force a work-
group to reexamine what it is doing and whether
there is another way to have more impact. It can
take a good idea and turn it into an even better idea;
it can transform two better ideas into a great ap-
proach or slow down a misguided assumption be-
fore it gains momentum. The right types of friction—
for our purposes, defined as people’s willingness
and ability to challenge each other in the interest of
coming up with better approaches—can transform
a workgroup into something larger than the sum
of its members. Questioning assumptions and ap-
proaches can uncover new opportunities and better
ways to address issues or meet customer needs and
lead to better outcomes.
This type of productive friction is often absent
in workgroups. Few organizations encourage fric-
tion—indeed, many leaders work to minimize it in
any form. Yet as groups face issues that are more
complex, unexpected, and demand fresh solutions,
they will need a broader range of approaches to
problem-solving and analysis. Productive friction
around how to approach a problem is an important
element of generating new knowledge embodied in
action, perhaps the most powerful type of learning
for improving performance.
Maximizing the potential for productive fric-
tion across every activity and phase of work can
help workgroups to keep pushing the boundaries
to accelerate performance improvement. The key
is to heighten the conditions that lead to more pro-
ductive friction.
The maximize potential for
friction practice: What it is
Practically speaking, ideas don’t clash and
transform into better approaches on their own. The
friction comes from people. One member brings an
idea or an approach or a technique to the table, and
another member disagrees or suggests alternatives
or brings a different interpretation of the problem.
Each challenge, if made in good faith and respect-
fully, can lead the group into a deeper exploration
of the problem and potential approaches. This is
friction—productive friction. In the end, the output
could look quite different from anything that was
originally brought to the table.
Additional friction can result when the group
takes action against real requirements and compli-
cations in a particular context. When we consider
the results, we challenge each other’s interpreta-
tions and evolve our understanding of the implica-
tions. From this friction, we create a next approach.
Maximizing the potential for friction means ensur-
ing that a workgroup has the right people in the
group, and the right connections outside the group,
to disagree with and diverge from each other and
the status quo.1
The potential for accelerated performance
comes from the powerful intersection of diversity
of mind and the passion of the explorer in the work-
group’s composition:
• Aggressively recruit diverse individuals.
Bring people into the workgroup because of
their different attributes and styles, not in spite
of them. Researchers have done a lot of valuable
work on diversity in organizations, creating an
array of definitions; for our purpose, for fric-
tion that can lead to better problem-solving and
analysis, we are concerned with cognitive diver-
sity, most closely aligned with Scott Page’s defi-
nition.2
Individual members represent problems
differently, have different ways of interpreting
information or developing a solution, and think
about cause and effect differently. Cognitive di-
versity helps a workgroup examine a problem, or
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• People have no passion for the outcomes
the workgroup is trying to achieve
• People choose people like themselves
• You have the same people doing the same
things and getting the same results
• You’re overly focused on only a few types
of diversity
Pull together | Maximize potential for friction
1

solution, from multiple sides and offer more ap-
proaches and broader challenging.
• Seek people who share the passion of the
explorer.3
Build a workgroup in which, de-
spite being diverse, everyone is similar in her
passion and mind-set. The dispositions for pas-
sion—specifically the disposition to quest and a
commitment to domain—and a growth mind-set,
as well as some basic values, can motivate the
members to probe, to challenge others and be
challenged, and to seek out additional resources
to learn how to make a better impact. With the
right mind-set and dispositions to listen and
make use of friction, group members learn from
each other and from new information and expe-
riences, creating new connections between one
perspective and another.
• Getting more ideas on the table. Work-
groups looking to accelerate performance should
focus on developing better ideas, not just bring-
ing in more.
• Narrowly defined diversity. Diversity has an
important role to play in shaping and develop-
ing ideas. This is not about achieving appropri-
ate demographic diversity. It is about ensuring
that workgroups bring different backgrounds,
experiences, perspectives, and personalities into
the mix to enhance the potential for new and
creative ideas.
• Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing can be useful
as a funnel to bring in a higher volume of ideas
but typically doesn’t increase the potential for
friction. Many organizations treat crowdsourc-
ing ineffectively, as a competition to identify the
final solution: They pick the best one and run
with it instead of working with the top five ideas
and combining them to make something better.
Where does the useful friction come from? A
group of like-minded people doing what they’ve al-
ways done is unlikely to naturally generate the type
of friction that leads to better and better outcomes.
Instead, the workgroup may have to be deliberate
about setting up the conditions for friction to occur.
The group itself can be a primary source of fric-
tion: Who are the members? What do they believe?
What do they bring to the table? What do they care
about? How will their way of viewing and interact-
ing with the world challenge others in the group?
Secondarily, the workgroup can increase the poten-
tial for friction by reaching beyond the group, even
beyond the organization—for resources, inputs,
challenges, and guidance on gnarly questions—and
to connect to a broader network of others who are
also on a quest to increase impact. Finally, the
workgroup can adopt practices to structure in epi-
sodes of friction: periodically changing the routine,
context, roles, or membership.
ENGAGE DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES
Research suggests that groups that are more di-
verse are likely to be more creative and productive
than groups that share equal ability but are less di-
verse. UK researchers Alison Reynolds and David
Lewis found that cognitive diversity, defined as “dif-
ferences in perspective or information processing
styles,”accountedforthevarianceintheperformance
of over 100 groups of executives on a strategic execu-
tion exercise focused on managing new, uncertain,
and complex situations.4
University of Michigan pro-
fessor Scott Page further notes that “random collec-
tions of intelligent problem-solvers can outperform
collections of the best individual problem-solvers,”
provided the problem at hand is one that will benefit
from diverse interpretations, heuristics, and perspec-
tives.5
As the world moves faster and more routine
work is automated, more of the work of the frontline
workgroup likely will be exactly the complex prob-
lems that do benefit from this type of diversity.
Humans have a uniquely unlimited potential to
address new contexts and push boundaries. How-
ever, a group that shares similar ways of thinking
about problems and analysis may have trouble
generating alternatives when they get stuck. New,
uncertain, and complex situations may require
framing problems differently, using different ap-
proaches (for example, experimenting versus ana-
lyzing), or bringing different interpretations.6
These
2

differences nudge members to pay attention to dif-
ferent things, leading to fresh understandings of
the opportunity and potential resources to address
it. While members’ experience and skills are key to
a group’s ability to execute, its capacity to improve
depends on its range of approaches to problem-
solving and its ability to learn from and use that
experience and those skills. In fact, research has
shown that without making an effort to make use
of members’ diversity for better understanding, de-
cision-making, and problem-solving, groups often
perform less well than do individuals.7
The diversity that can lead to productive friction
goes well beyond identity markers. However, just as
with identity, workgroups will tend toward cogni-
tive homogeneity unless they intentionally diver-
sify diversity. In many organizations, hiring and
staffing tends to favor like-mindedness, standard-
ized requirements for education and experience,
and cultural “fit.” Expediency, meanwhile, focuses
groups on the resources that are most easily accessi-
ble, staffing workgroups from within their own unit,
geography, or enterprise. And people’s tendency,
particularly under pressure, is to choose those with
whom we anticipate the least friction, resulting in
“functional biases.” Workgroups can counter this by
deliberately seeking diverse backgrounds and expe-
riences that will make cognitive diversity more likely
and paying attention to the group’s inter-
actions to see if further diversity is needed.
Consider the example of the briefing
workgroup at sparks & honey, an adver-
tising agency focused on mapping culture
and one of several groups we saw trying
to engage diversity in more effective ways.
Although members have a range of back-
grounds—languages spoken, age cohorts,
• Eliminate unproductive friction. The potential found in diversity and passion can be harnessed when
members aren’t derailed by negative friction.
• Reflect more to learn faster. Analysis and adjustment can be more fruitful with more, potentially
divergent, interpretations of events and passion to learn to do better.
• Commit to a shared outcome. A clear, long-term direction around a meaningful shared outcome can
help attract diverse members who are passionate about the outcome and can help mobilize others to
engage as well.
• Bias toward action. While a diverse and passionate group can bring a broader set of perspectives to
shape the actions that will have the most impact, taking action can drive individual learning as well as
help to cultivate passion.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. Passionate workgroup members can be more likely to want to get
better and will help pull the entire group upward.
• Frame a powerful question. A compelling question can attract others who are passionate to make
more of an impact on the challenge.
• Seek new contexts. Experiencing new contexts can cause us to reevaluate our assumptions and
broaden or change our perspectives, creating the potential for additional friction for the group
and individuals.
• Cultivate friction. Group composition and connecting with other resources provides the raw material
for productive friction.
• To what extent can we broaden our circles
and invite new perspectives? Could/should
we do more?
3

countries of origin, ethnicities, gender expressions,
as well as functional expertise (data science, stra-
tegic consulting, brand planning, journalism, an-
thropology, and social sciences)—these traits don’t
indicate whether the group has cognitive diversity,
and it can fall into some common biases: residing in
New York, being “creative,” having chosen this type
of work. In order to increase the potential for engag-
ing with more diversity of mind, and to overcome
biases that arise from social class, personality/tem-
perament, working style, and mind-set, the briefings
are open to guests, and the agency cultivates exter-
nal participation through an advisory board, scouts,
and immersive ethnographic studies. The agency’s
intelligence system also balances these biases with
automation: active machine learning that surveys,
gathers, and feeds intelligence into the system from
the broad (mainstream) to the narrow (fringe).8
Bringing in more cognitive diversity is one thing,
but the potential friction can be amped up by bring-
ing group members into closer contact and deepen-
ing the level of engagement with each other. Instead
of soliciting divergent feedback via email or some
other static exchange, a more useful, generative in-
teraction might result from surfacing the divergent
perspectives in the workgroup setting, with dis-
agreeing members potentially venturing out into the
relevant context together to test an idea or
approach. For example, when the Army’s
Joint Strategic Operating Command was
seeking a better way to fight an unortho-
dox enemy in Iraq, it coupled intelligence
analysts with Navy SEALs and Delta
Force operatives to go “shoulder to shoul-
der” out on raids as well as into analysis.
Workgroups can further broaden the
range of perspectives by looking out-
side the group, whether to specifically solicit ad-
ditional perspectives, to test and debrief a new ap-
proach, or even to partner in delivering a solution.
Casting a wider net, beyond your own networks, may
be particularly important for complex or thorny is-
sues. Workgroup members can exploit what sociolo-
gist Mark Granovetter calls “weak ties,” looking be-
yond their small circle of deep relationships—where
people often share similar values, interests, and ex-
periences—to their looser network, where connec-
tions, insights, and unexpected resources might be
more far-reaching and diverse.9
For many workgroups, the nature of the issues
and exceptions will dictate that the actual mem-
bership changes over time or episodically. Diverse
groups can be rapidly staffed from larger pools. In
fact, as frontline workgroups take on more impor-
tant, value-creating work, companies may scrap
much of their organizational chart, instead organiz-
ing as pools of workers assigned to flexible work-
groups that stretch across boundaries. If groups
are diverse and passionate, the pools would also
become more diverse over time as members rotate
back. However, leaders would still have to be delib-
erate in assembling cognitively diverse workgroups.
For example, at the Red Cross, responders are of-
ten pulled from an external, formal pool of local
resources who are likely less similar in background
to each other or the professional staff. Members of
this local pool share certain basic training, but each
brings a unique perspective and set of tools and re-
sources to the specific problem. For instance, each
local resource might have a unique take on how
and where to procure supplies, how to navigate
back roads to get from one site to another, or what
the most powerful coalitions of local service group
leaders might be.10
SEEK VOLUNTEERS
Asking for volunteers attracts people who are
motivated to make a difference and who can attract
others like them. As Gillian Tett notes in The Silo Ef-
fect, “People who are willing to take risks and jump
out of their narrow specialist world are often able
to remake boundaries in interesting ways.”11
Since
even the most passionate people need something
to be drawn to, workgroups should make them-
selves known and discoverable, whether formally,
• What can we do more to access and attract
those outside our workgroup to achieve more
of our potential?
4

creating blogs or websites that state the group’s
purpose and goals, or informally, through word of
mouth. In either case, try to find powerful ways
to pull. For example, Team Solo-Mid, a group that
plays the multiplayer online battle game League of
Legends competitively, posted a recruiting message
on a well-known League community website: “Our
goal is to improve and to constantly develop strat-
egies. The purpose of this clan is to constantly in-
crease the skill level of the upper-level play.” Tap
into the passion of potential members with a suc-
cinct description of the issue that also speaks to the
outcome and the way the group will get there—the
practices and opportunities to accelerate individual
learning. A small set of willing members can build
momentum, making membership in such a group
more attractive to others.
Even if the group has to start small, letting people
vote with their feet—opting in or self-nominating
rather than being “volun-told”—attracts those who
are passionate about a particular challenge and want
to be involved.12
Choice about where to focus peo-
ple’s efforts can fuel dedication, accountability, and
excitement. At Google Analytics 360, for example,
people can self-nominate to be part of the response
group that forms whenever a competitor launches a
product. They can also self-nominate into more sus-
tained workgroups, choosing to participate on the
issues about which they feel most strongly or where
they are excited by the type of challenge or the cus-
tomers with whom they’d work.
TURN DOWN VOLUNTEERS
Not everyone who volunteers will be right for a
particular workgroup. You want people
who care deeply about achieving the
outcome—but also people without a lot
of preconceived notions about how that
outcome could or could not happen. Ex-
perience can be valuable, certain skills
might be necessary, but overreliance on
expertise can be limiting, to both the indi-
vidual and the group. Expertise can tend
to work against openness to learning and
new ideas. Workgroup members need to
be willing to challenge others, to be chal-
lenged, and to be open to learning from
those challenges.
Consider what can happen with an issue that
is perceived as high-visibility, one that might have
leaders calling for the “cream of the crop.” Having
all risen to the top of the same organization, these
individuals will likely have broadly similar concep-
tual tool kits, problem-solving approach-
es, and mind-sets. This can become more
pronounced in narrower or
more specialized fields and
lead specialists to approach a
solution in a similar way and
converge in their findings.13
Deliberately busting silos—
pulling skills and expertise
from across organization-
al and functional barriers, to build an
all-star group rather than a group
of “all stars”—can help to counter the
cognitive homogeneity problem. This can
be an exercise in releasing control and trusting the
workgroup to do what they’ve been assembled to
do, which is not to just execute the status quo. It is
yet another acknowledgment that the organization
can’t predict the future or the shape of the solution
that will emerge.
Character also matters. Diversity in core values
is generally unproductive no matter how strong a
person’s skills, and the skills and tasks required
may change. Values persist. The values might be
broad: Behave ethically; don’t do anything illegal.
Or they might be specific to a workgroup and con-
text. Consider this example from a Deloitte leader
who credits some of her success in growing account
revenue over the past decade to looking at char-
• What workgroup values do we want to stand
for—and, quite possibly, make more explicit?
• How might we select for the kind of
challenge-seeking, boundary-pushing
behavior that will create new opportunities
for the workgroup and the organization?
5

acter before competence in staffing. She has
created a list of guidelines for behavior and attitude
(see figure 1 that addresses character.) The list is
both a filter and a way of setting expectations at the
outset to increase the likelihood that all members
are suited to creating value in that environment.
So if not skills and performance ratings and
other résumé criteria, and not the friction-killing
cultural “fit,” what criteria might guide whether to
accept a potential group member?
Passion and a growth mind-set.14
Without
these, a workgroup is unlikely to constantly push
boundaries in pursuit of learning how to make a
greater impact.
Aside from certain nonnegotiable competencies,
favor passion over skill. People who have pas-
sion—what we’ve defined as passion of the explor-
er15
—seem driven to learn how to have more of an
impact, faster, on a particular domain. To that end,
they tend to embrace challenges and connect with
others around those challenges and typically find
the unexpected and difficult more motivating than
fatiguing. They continuously pursue new approach-
es and better solutions and will persevere and look
for learning in nearly every situation. In a group of
passionate members, the desire to make an impact
can overcome organizational tensions and barri-
ers. For those with passion, a workgroup can be an
attractive opportunity to connect with others and
learn faster on significant challenges. At Southwest,
for example, the selective Field Tech group looks for
“folks who are frustrated because they could perform
their job so much better if only they had this tool
or that tool.” One perk of the job is being empow-
ered to create or obtain whatever tools people need
to do their job better. The group looks for members
who have technical aptitude and a good work ethic
Figure 1. How do we define quality?
10
A little humility goes
a long way
We need to continue to win over our clients.
9 The customer is always right Treat clients with respect—always.
8
“Nothing propinks like
propinquity”
Show up. Be proactive and deliberate in building relationships
(internally and externally) and delivering services.
7 We need clear leaders Clearly distinguish leaders and advisers in proposals and delivery.
6
We are the advisers
in the room
When you see your client may be headed down the wrong path,
speak up and escalate professionally.
5 We work it out
Break down any functional barriers and do what’s right for
the client and our organization—even when it’s difficult.
Communicate!
4
When paint falls off the
ladder, everyone gets
splattered
We are one organization to the client. Finger-pointing is unhelpful,
so work as a team to solve challenges.
3
Nothing gets better
with time
If you sense a client issue, be quick to address it.
2 Deadlines aren’t guidelines
Do your best to adhere to commitments and deadlines. If you are
not going to meet a deadline, provide ample notice to your client.
1 The client is your buddy And his requests are exceedingly reasonable.
Source: Deloitte analysis. Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insights
6

but also “love trying to fix something that
can’t be fixed by anyone else.”16
One challenge is that this type of pas-
sion is scarce, characterizing only around
13 percent of the workforce, although 52
percent of workers surveyed have at least
one attribute of this type of passion on
which to build. For those who haven’t fully realized
their passion within the confines of a job description,
participation in a workgroup may help cultivate the
questing, connecting, or commitment characteristic
of the passion of the explorer. Through deliberately
breaking silos, workgroups can have the added ben-
efit of connecting the passionate with other passion-
ate people from across the organization.
Connecting and working with others who are
passionate can be a powerful motivator.17
For ex-
ample, at Facebook, voluntary hackathons showed
that many people would take time outside of their
day job to come together purely because they were
interested in a specific problem and wanted to be a
part of creating a solution. (For example, a manager
of the site’s News Feed created a Facebook feature
specifically for in-laws because she was close to her
husband’s mother and had no way to classify their
relationship on the site.) This in turn can create
more demand for the opportunity and attract others
who may not have understood the impact previously.
EVOLVE A WINNING WORKGROUP
Over time, informal practices may harden into
formal processes, expectations may become codi-
fied, and perspectives and beliefs may converge.
This may be comfortable but is not good for fric-
tion. What wins in one context may lose in another.
Change it up with new people, ideas, and condi-
tions that are surprising rather than predictable.
Look for people who tend to play with, rather than
within, the boundaries. Try to nudge people out of
their comfort zones. Even changing the work envi-
ronment—meeting in person if the group is remote
or working off-site if it’s normally in the office—can
refresh the dynamic. Structure in ways to avoid
the trap of tried and true by making it a rule to
change the rules. At sparks & honey, the briefing
group’s goal, every day, is to run the most produc-
tive and insightful one-hour meeting possible. They
have honed the format to a specific pace, hitting
benchmarks of discussion and analysis throughout
the hour. When something works, members stick
with it—except for on Fridays, when they try some
new structure or technique, keeping the group off-
balance and interested and discovering useful new
techniques to incorporate along the way.
Individuals can be stretched and motivated and
the group dynamics shaken up by making roles
context-dependent. Switching up the structure
and roles will likely make some members uncom-
fortable and may cause frustration because it works
against the drive for efficiency into which we tend to
fall. Being in different roles and relationships could
challenge the expectations of a group and create
potential friction for individuals and the group col-
lectively. For example, the Red Cross has a practice
called blue sky/gray sky that allows for members
to adopt entirely different roles from their normal
day-to-day in a disaster response. Depending on the
context and their own skills, someone might be the
incident commander in one response but be boots
on the ground loading water for the next one. The
explicit move to gray sky seems to eliminate the
friction that can come from hierarchies and refo-
cuses everyone on achieving the shared outcome.
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• We want people to want to work here—we
don’t want them to fight.
• We don’t have time to go out and create
the perfect team—just make do with what
you have.
• We need to be a well-oiled machine, not
one that’s constantly in the shop.
• We need to minimize the potential for
conflict, not maximize it.
• What rules do we need to change or make
more context-dependent?
7

1. Peter High, “John Hagel: Scalable learning is the key differentiator for enterprises of the future,” Forbes, July 25,
2016.
2. Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). Page explains why diversity is fundamental to a productive
workgroup in simple terms: If two collections of problem-solvers contain equal ability, but one is homogeneous
and the other is diverse, the diverse group will, on average, outperform the homogeneous. He offers four
“frameworks” of cognitive diversity, that is, diverse perspectives: ways of representing situations and problems;
diverse interpretations: ways of categorizing or partitioning perspectives; diverse heuristics: ways of generating
solutions to problems; and diverse predictive models: ways of inferring cause and effect.
3. For more on the concept of worker passion and passion of the explorer, see John Hagel, John Seely Brown,
Maggie Wooll, and Alok Ranjan, If you love them, set them free, Deloitte University Press, June 6, 2017.
4. Alison Reynolds and David Lewis, “Teams solve problems faster when they’re more cognitively diverse,” Harvard
Business Review, March 30, 2017. In the study of more than 100 executive groups, performance variance was not
causally related to gender, ethnicity, or age.
5. Page, The Difference.
6. Reynolds and Lewis, “Teams solve problems faster when they’re more cognitively diverse.”
7. Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie, “Making dumb groups smarter,” Harvard Business Review, December 2014.
8. Andrew de Maar and Ryan Gatti, interview with Paul Butler, COO of sparks & honey, New York, February 21, 2017.
9. Mark S. Granovetter, “The strength of weak ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): pp. 1,360–80.
10. Andrew de Maar and Maggie Wooll, interview with Alyssa Pollock, regional disaster officer, Red Cross Regional
Disaster Unit Central/Southern Illinois, October 26, 2017.
11. Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2015), p. 168.
12. Abigail Sickinger, interview with Google Analytics 360 team, January 17, 2017.
13. Page, The Difference. Similarly, Reynolds and Lewis reported working with a start-up biotechnology company at
which a team of scientists, mixed in terms of gender, age, and ethnicity, never finished a strategic exercise task.
They were all experts in the same domain, had no versatility in how to approach the task, and could not complete
the assignment.
14. Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006). Stanford professor
Dweck distinguishes two extremes of the mind-sets that people tend to have about their basic qualities: 1)
In a fixed mind-set, “your qualities are carved in stone.” Whatever skills, talents, and capabilities you have are
predetermined and finite. Whatever you lack, you will continue to lack. This fixed mind-set applies not just to
your own qualities but to those of others. 2) In a growth mind-set, “your basic qualities are things you can
cultivate through your efforts . . . everyone can change and grow through application and experience.” Qualities
such as intelligence are a starting point, but success comes as a result of effort, learning, and persistence. The
distinction between fixed and growth mind-sets has tremendous implications—as individuals, workgroups, and
organizations—for how we address the growing pressures around us.
ENDNOTES
8

15. Hagel et al., If you love them, set them free. Worker passion, or “passion of the explorer,” is defined as exhibiting
behaviors consistent with having a questing disposition, a connecting disposition, and a commitment to making
a significant and lasting impact in a given domain. While around 13 percent of the US workforce, as measured
by a 2016 survey of more than 3,000 workers, have all three attributes of passion, they are not innate and
can be cultivated and developed through experiences and environment. However, today’s organizations, largely
designed to pursue scalable efficiency through standardization and tightly scripted processes, have little place
for this form of passion and often work to limit it.
16. Andrew de Maar and Ryan Gatti, interview with Field Techs, Southwest Airlines, Dallas, May 1–2, 2017.
17. Tett, The Silo Effect, p. 182.
9

Eliminate
unproductive friction
Seek ways to make friction as productive
as possible

Introduction:
How much is too much?
When diverse people with different ideas come
together, friction is inevitable—and can be highly
generative. When workgroup leaders are able to
channel that friction into challenging and strength-
ening the group’s thinking, new approaches can
emerge. For workgroups that need to constantly de-
velop better solutions in order to accelerate perfor-
mance, the more diverse the flows coming together—
the more friction—the better. The point isn’t just to
bring in more ideas but to create something new
and better when—not if—the knowledge, ideas, data,
and resources conflict.
That is productive friction. Group members
bring their diverse perspectives to challenge each
other’s thinking, and such challenges can expose in-
adequacies in the approach and uncover gaps in un-
derstanding. They can also broaden the possibilities
and point a workgroup to explore new, more fruit-
ful directions. Indeed, a virtuous cycle can develop:
When we see friction leading to better results, we
may be more willing to bring challenges and diver-
gent views to the table, expanding the flows.
But there’s a limit: Too much friction, or fric-
tion of the wrong kind, can flatten flows and de-
rail a workgroup. With tensions festering, a group
might lose energy and lack the time or energy to
seek out the flows that might have the highest im-
pact. A group may not risk interrupting progress
to question its assumptions or approach. Members
can become less willing to challenge their own be-
liefs, show weakness, or expose themselves to criti-
cism, and less willing to push boundaries and take
risks as a group.
Whether a workgroup has been in existence for
a while or is just forming, in most organizations
members don’t likely share an overabundance of
trust. When unproductive friction goes unmanaged,
a group doesn’t work to create better approaches,
and performance may slip. Members can become
frustrated, further losing trust in the workgroup;
they may withdraw either formally or by increasing-
ly declining to express divergent ideas or challenge
other members. Minimizing and managing unpro-
ductive friction is key to building trust and encour-
aging members to put forward more of the types of
friction that can generate better solutions.
The eliminate unproductive
friction practice: What it is
This practice is about fostering trust and creat-
ing an environment that encourages more produc-
tive friction while minimizing the types of friction
that might make workgroup members hesitant to
challenge and interact.
Productive friction can help a workgroup active-
ly create new knowledge. It can arise from engaging
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• People seem frustrated or unhappy
• People feel put down upon, dismissed, or
rejected
• Some voices are not being heard
• Hierarchy is preventing people from being
forthright
• We spend most of our time talking about
what we agree on versus what we don’t
• Our best talent doesn’t stick around for
very long
Teams that bring these diverse styles together should, in theory, enjoy the many
benefits of cognitive diversity, ranging from increased creativity and innovation to
improved decision-making. Yet time and again, diverse teams fail to thrive.1
—Suzanne M. Johnson Vickberg and Kim Christfort
Pull together | Eliminate unproductive friction
1

diverse individuals around an outcome about which
they are passionate and playing with the resulting
tension—if the individuals are willing and able to
challenge and build on each other’s perspectives.
That typically means the friction is focused around
the what or the how instead of on individuals.
Unproductive friction is often rooted in mem-
bers feeling threatened, misunderstood, or disre-
spected, which can escalate conflicts and harden
positions such that a group reaches poor compro-
mises and continually sub-optimizes. Unproduc-
tive friction can be caused by, among other things,
miscommunication, interpersonal conflict, com-
petition for resources, political behavior, status-
seeking, zero-sum mind-sets, a culture of blame, or
different personalities and styles. Friction can also
become unproductive when it occurs at the wrong
time or place.
Creating friction and eliminating the unpro-
ductive elements of that friction is a balancing act.
It’s often challenging to get the balance right, and
perhaps understandably, many organizations have
aimed to reduce friction in the first place. After all,
no one is penalized for insights not surfaced—they
aren’t visible. But friction is visible, often in a nega-
tive way. Avoiding conflict is always the easier path.
Eliminating unproductive friction balances:
• Preventing certain types of unproduc-
tive friction from occurring. Build trust,
and focus on the learning opportunity and the
group’s larger goals. A sufficiently meaning-
ful and urgent outcome, such as the life-or-
death nature of firefighting, tends to minimize
unproductive friction.
• Making friction more productive. This
might include leading with questions rather
than making pronouncements—for example,
instead of, “That won’t work—we already tried
it,” asking, “What has changed that makes us be-
lieve this could work?”
• Being more efficient. After decades of scal-
able efficiency, there’s often an underlying as-
sumption that friction is always unproductive
and undesirable. Friction can definitely slow
things down, at least in the short term. But ac-
celerating learning in order to achieve greater
impact isn’t simply executing against a plan.
• Eliminating all friction/fitting in. Much
of the focus on group dynamics tends to be on
minimizing differences and focusing on com-
mon ground. We often lack confidence in our
ability to manage friction and, naturally, look to
get along with everyone, especially as the work-
place itself becomes more diverse. As a result,
the bias is to assemble like-minded teams and
favor fit, though “team players” often go along
to get along rather than provoking a group to
improve itself.
• Removing emotions and feeling. Emotion
and feeling play a vital role as a source of un-
derstanding and motivation as well as of friction.
When people are passionate about an outcome,
they bring emotion. Creating space for feelings
can help to foster the relationships that work-
group members may need to work productively
through friction.
• Safety from discomfort. At the same time,
this practice isn’t about creating a safe space
where group members won’t be challenged on
their beliefs, assumptions, and ideas. Challenges
should be respectful and with the intent of ar-
riving at a better understanding, rather than to
be divisive, but this doesn’t mean that people
uncomfortable with rigorous discussions should
expect to avoid them altogether.
Workgroups can make friction more productive
and subvert the unproductive aspects by fostering
trust and respect and having learning conversations.
The two reinforce each other: trust is a prerequisite
for learning, and as learning happens, trust and
respect deepen. At the same time, you can’t really
have trust, or learning, until you have friction. In
disagreement, conflict, or crisis, you get to see how
people behave. These moments can also reveal the
hidden depths and strengths of a community.
2

FOSTER TRUST AND RESPECT
Our notion of trust has changed. An organiza-
tion’s success used to come from owning some
knowledge or formula that no one else knew, ap-
plying those knowledge stocks in distinctive but
repeatable ways, and doing it efficiently. Trust was
grounded in having the specific skills and knowl-
edge necessary to deliver the expected results. The
leader had to trust that subordinates would execute
his plan, efficiently and without challenging it; the
workers had to trust that the leader’s plan would be
effective, with minimal changes or need for rework.
Strength and certainty reigned.
Trust based on knowledge stocks, predictability,
and efficiency is no longer as compelling. In fact,
when the goal is to achieve more impact than the
sum of the workgroup’s parts, trying to establish
trust in this way can actually erode it. While past
actions or accomplishments suggest how we can
expect someone to act in the future, trust is becom-
ing more about whether we believe a person has the
disposition and values to learn and work together
even if his existing skills are being challenged or
made obsolete. Any person, whether a leader or a
peer, claiming to know all the answers rings false
when we see the environment changing rapidly and
know ourselves to be increasingly in unfamiliar sit-
uations. Instead, the type of trust that workgroups
may need comes in part from attributes that used to
be considered weaknesses.
Expressing vulnerability and encourag-
ing humility can establish a trust that isn’t pre-
mised on power, control, or omniscience. At the
workgroup level, this might start with collectively
acknowledging a situation’s realities and difficulties.
When a workgroup makes a practice of establishing
what we don’t know, what else don’t we know?, and
this is what we need help with, it makes space for
individuals to be open about needing help or hav-
ing gaps in understanding or ability. Other group
members would trust more, and be likely to admit
their own vulnerability, further deepening trust.
Asking for help can give others a mechanism to step
forward to help fill the gaps—and is what can make
vulnerability powerful.
It isn’t just OK to admit weakness—for this type
of trust, it is essential. This is important: When
members don’t conceal deficiencies and don’t delay
asking for help, the group can learn more rapidly
and uncover valuable new resources. Of course, be-
ing vulnerable should be a prelude to dis-
cussion, not an ending—no one wants a
group member who regularly throws up
his hands and says, “I need help!” with-
out an inclination to dig in and work to-
gether to figure it out. The practice is to
become more aware of what we lack and
more effectively frame our needs to elicit
better help.
Trust and respect together can pro-
vide the basis for being open to new infor-
mation, listening deeply and working to understand
divergent ideas, and being willing to accommodate
contradictions and embrace discomfort.
Group norms that can reinforce respect can
emerge through the way the group discusses and
frames the challenge. Start with the expectation that
members will treat each other with courtesy and an
assumption that everyone has value to offer. Build a
respectful climate by letting people with conflicting
positions explain their reasoning—within time con-
straints—rather than quickly jumping to “agreeing
to disagree.” This can be the time for group mem-
bers to practice challenging ideas rather than peo-
ple and begin to demonstrate that they can engage
with others’ observations without either sugarcoat-
ing or overreacting. Groups may have to be more
deliberate to guard against the subtle reactions that
communicate that honesty and interpersonal risk-
taking hinder a workgroup’s forward progress.
Even in a group where members appear predis-
posed to extend courtesy to each other, disagree-
ments and misunderstandings often arise. Being
able to empathize with other members—and to
recognize that disagreements might arise from
• What dimensions of friction do each of us
find most unproductive?
• What makes us dread or avoid collaborative
work?
3

unmet, unarticulated needs rather than from bad
intentions or incompetence—can reduce the nega-
tive friction. Try to meet in person, at least at the
beginning, and discuss different working styles,
preferences, and strengths. A framework, such as
Deloitte’s Business Chemistry (see figure 1), can
provide structure for understanding and discuss-
ing differences that lead to unmet needs and can
set the tone for embracing the differences that
cause friction.2
Making it about we, not me can help keep
the workgroup focused on a shared outcome and
members’ mutual commitment to it rather than
on their individual identities, fears, and ambitions.
Language can matter in subtly shifting the group;
avoid assigning ownership to specific ideas or ques-
tions and actively guide the discussion away from
who is right and toward what is right. Of course,
even in a workgroup that celebrates group suc-
cesses and shares rewards and recognition, some
individuals might not be able to shake the me-first
mentality. The Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. New-
build & Innovation workgroup, which includes
external designers and other specialists, learned
that no matter how talented a member was, the
group would benefit only if she was committed to
the shared outcome and open to being challenged.
Now everyone, including designers with brand
recognition, presents to the entire workgroup to
reinforce that all decisions are about the shared
Source: Deloitte. Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insights
Figure 1. Understanding business chemistry
4

outcome and all members have an invest-
ment in those decisions. Designers might
ask questions of the architects; restaura-
teurs might challenge the designers—and
outsiders really like working with RCL
because they are able to learn so much
more through this practice.3
While deep trust and respect often
take time to develop, there are tactics that
can help build deep trust swiftly. As a
workgroup:
Assume trust. Extend trust (and respect) to all
members from the outset, assuming best intentions
and value to offer, and establish that everyone is
committed to achieving a shared outcome.
Invite trustworthiness. Find near-term tasks to
give individuals opportunities to act in ways that
are transparent and show commitment to the work-
group and openness to learning.4
This can be as
simple as demonstrating, in less significant matters,
that they are willing to voice their views, to take ac-
tions that are consistent with what they voice, and
to have their views challenged and changed.
Work together to deepen trust. Deeper trust and
respect ultimately come from observing others in
action. When members actively work together on a
shared outcome, they begin to act as a community
of practice, bound together through “shared experi-
ence, reciprocal trust, and a collective world view.”5
Working side by side, trust and respect deepen as
• How well do we ensure that we maintain the
trust of the workgroup?
• What do we do to encourage each other to
express vulnerability?
• Maximize the potential for friction. Eliminating unproductive friction can help clear the way for the
group to benefit from bringing diverse perspectives and cognitive styles to bear on an issue. Managing
disagreements and tensions effectively can help members be more receptive to bringing in an even
greater diversity of voices and resources.
• Reflect more to learn faster. How workgroups handle friction outside of the moment—how they
honor it and learn from it while managing the more emotional and reactive frictions—can shape their
ability to act and accelerate.
• Commit to a shared outcome. Group members trust each other to act in good faith in support of
the outcome. Individuals would be more motivated to work past the unproductive traps of friction and
have more incentive to focus on making friction productive if the shared outcome is meaningful.
• Bias toward action. Workgroups can’t get distracted and waste energy on unproductive friction in the
moment, when decisions need to be made quickly, especially if lives are on the line.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. Objective data and metrics can provide grounding
for disagreements.
• Frame a powerful question. A powerful question can help to focus workgroups on what is important.
• Seek new contexts. By adopting a different context for a time, a workgroup can gain fresh perspective
on its own problem as well as on the group itself.
• Cultivate friction. The more productive the friction becomes, and the more the group trusts
that destructive friction will be handled effectively, the more members will likely also be open to
challenging, creating a virtuous cycle.
5

group members see each other live their values
and gain deeper appreciation for what individuals
have to offer.
Research has shown that workgroups identify
more strongly as a group and show higher levels
of innovation when their members share certain
non-negotiable work values.6
These might include
core tenants that guide how the group pursues the
outcome, such as treating each other with respect,
maintaining personal integrity, and acting legally
and ethically, as well as some that might be work-
group-specific, such as acting sustainably or sup-
porting members’ personal goals.
HAVE LEARNING CONVERSATIONS
Try to learn as much from friction as possible,
especially the disagreements. The point is to learn
how to achieve higher and higher impact. By treat-
ing the group’s interactions as parts of a long con-
versation, members can channel po-
tentially destructive disagreements
into something more informative
and unexpected.
The goal of a workgroup’s
learning conversations is to
look at things from multiple
vantage points and expose paradoxes and areas
of ambiguity. In these conversations, a group tries
to draw out and probe “mindbugs”—the trouble-
some blind spots and habits of thought that get in
the way when we are trying to break frames and
innovate. Mindbugs may be around long-estab-
lished performance trade-offs that no longer hold,
or about conventional wisdom that no longer ap-
plies; they can lead us to say that something won’t
work or to overlook the problems in something we
assume will work.
What makes a good conversation?
• Everyone seeks to understand a broader per-
spective. It isn’t a presentation or a debate or
trying to persuade others or defend our opinion.
• It surprises us, providing unexpected informa-
tion or insight and provoking further inquiry.
• Everyone listens and everyone participates—at
least, every unique voice participates, recogniz-
ing that some members will share a common
experience or perspective. Researchers have
found that relatively equal distribution of voice
in workgroups leads to better work.7
The Hu-
man Dynamics Laboratory at MIT used a badge
technology to track communication behavior
in groups and discovered that patterns of com-
munication were as significant to group perfor-
mance as all other factors combined: individual
intelligence, personality, skill, and substance of
discussions.8
Researchers also found that when
some members don’t participate fully (wheth-
er because of culture, background, or affilia-
tions), the whole group ends up with less energy
and engagement.9
• There is space to clarify misunderstandings.
With more diverse voices, people might use the
same words with very different meanings. We
heard this concept expressed as, I don’t know
what I said until I know what you heard from
members of the Army for whom
“brief backs,” repeating an order back
to the giver, are part of the workday.
As one general said, upon ask-
ing for a plain hamburger and
getting a hamburger with abso-
lutely nothing on it, the brief back
on its own isn’t enough. Creating
a common language is an ongo-
ing practice of confirming and clarifying what
people mean. This could be as informal as inter-
rupting the flow of a discussion to clarify a key
term—for instance, When you say ‘X,’ what do
you mean? What does that look like? It could
also be a formal set of key definitions published
or posted where members can see and reference
them easily. A common language might be bor-
rowed from another discipline or the organiza-
tion itself, then customized and periodically up-
dated to the workgroup’s needs.
• It keeps moving. Time still matters. Strike a
balance between clarifying and being repetitive
or getting mired in minutiae. Hold each other
accountable to focus on what’s important—
and be specific. Filling air time without saying
what you mean can block other voices and make
members work unnecessarily hard to find mean-
ing and understand points of conflict. It can also
mean trying to discern the key points of dis-
agreement and understanding their sources, in-
cluding the emotional context, rather than over-
6

analyzing peripheral issues. For the
Joint Special Operations Command,
there was a real cost when meetings
bogged down: The task force wouldn’t
get a chance to digest valuable intelli-
gence until later in the day or the next
meeting. The group addressed it by es-
tablishing a norm that each presenter
had only four minutes, including dis-
cussion. It forced the briefers to pro-
vide only the most salient information
to the entire group, letting others continue the
discussion offline, and to solicit viewpoints rath-
er than wait.10
Productive idea flow is a delicate
balance of reinforcing existing ideas and values
to build confidence, while exploring alternative
ideas and perspectives. Attend to how ideas flow
within the workgroup so that members can in-
corporate others’ innovations to arrive at better
actions. Start broad and go deep to balance
the value of surveying the landscape to identify
what issues are most important against the val-
ue of getting beneath the surface. Reserve time
to delve deeper into the issues that are most rel-
evant to the workgroup.
Workgroups might find it helpful to periodically
take a meta-view of their group conversation—using
an outside observer, technology such as badges, or
through surveys and analysis of data collected from
collaboration tools—to get a better understanding
of how the workgroup itself is functioning separate
from the work of the group.
These insights can help a group leader control
the temperature, possibly with a moderator’s
help: Turn up the heat, bringing more diverse par-
ticipation into a conversation that has become low-
energy and monotonous, or using anecdotes to in-
troduce doubt into a conversation that has become
too certain. Researchers at Yale found that Major
League Baseball umpires assess their accuracy in
calling pitches—their ability to accurately see real-
ity—at 97 percent. Yet, when calls were analyzed
against Pitch f/x data, they are accurate only 87 per-
cent of the time and, in close calls, only 66 percent.11
Turn down the heat by redirecting the conversation
away from issues that have become too emotional
or laden with interpersonal friction for the group
to be constructive. It can be helpful to acknowledge
that the heat is too high and give the group a few
options to cool down. Techniques include taking a
step back to talk about where the issue fits relative
to the shared outcome to refocus the group on the
positive vision, looking for small wins to point out,
and connecting the dots for group members about
how the issue relates to other actions they are in-
terested in. A moderator can also help to de-esca-
late and clarify tensions around share of voice and
depth of engagement.
The best conversations happen between hu-
mans. We all have feelings, even at work. When
emotions are ignored or denied, the gap between
what members think and what they say generally
widens, and the potential for misunderstanding in-
creases. Workgroup members don’t need to spend
a lot of time talking about feelings, but they should
cultivate greater awareness and appreciation of
emotional context. Listen for what is not being
said, the song beneath the words: Acknowledge
the likely emotional subtext; leaders can reinforce
this by being more open about their own emotions
in the moment, such as saying when a piece of feed-
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• Friction is inefficient. Let’s just make sure
we don’t have it in the first place.
• To be successful, we all have to come to
agreement, on everything. Dissension is
a problem.
• Don’t derail the train—get on board or
get off.
• Feelings are a distraction. No place for
them in business.
• To what extent do we create space for conflict
versus marginalize those who disagree?
• What values are we striving to uphold, and
are we living them?
7

back made them angry or worried. And don’t react
emotionally: Show care or concern, but act in ways
that help the other—through coaching or checking
in—rather than devolving into “ruinous empathy”
that helps no one. When workgroups make a point
of accepting emotions as normal, interactions can
actually become less emotional.
Finally, make it fun. Shared laughter or an un-
usual experience goes a long way toward reinforcing
the interpersonal connections that make unproduc-
tive friction less toxic.
8

1. Suzanne M. Johnson Vickberg and Kim Christfort, “The new science of team chemistry: Pioneers, drivers,
integrators, and guardians,” Harvard Business Review, March-April 2017.
2. Ibid. Deloitte Business Chemistry is a system created by Deloitte that identifies four primary workstyles and
related strategies for accomplishing shared goals. Each person is a composite of the four work styles, though
most people’s behavior and thinking are closely aligned with one or two.
3. Andrew de Maar and Dalia Katan, interviews with various groups from Newbuild & Innovation, Royal Caribbean
Cruises Ltd., June 6, 2017.
4. John Hagel and John Seely Brown, “Control vs. trust: Mastering a different management approach,” Deloitte,
2009.
5. Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter (New York: Penguin, 2014), p. 78.
6. A series of studies conducted in the British National Health Service has shown that workgroups whose values
cohere identify more strongly as a group and display greater levels of innovation. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
and Dave Winsborough, “Personality tests can help balance a team,” Harvard Business Review, March 19,
2015; Rebecca Mitchell et al., “Perceived value congruence and team innovation,” Journal of Occupational and
Organizational Psychology 85, no. 4 (2012): pp. 626–48.
7. See David Engel et al., “Reading the mind in the eyes or reading between the lines? Theory of mind predicts
collective intelligence equally well online and face-to-face,” PLOS, December 16, 2014. Google’s Project Aristotle
similarly found few patterns among successful teams except for encouraging distributed share of voice and
exhibiting emotional and social sensitivity to other members.
8. Pentland, Social Physics, p. 90. MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory developed a badge technology to read individual
communication behavior and deployed it to 2,500 people in 21 organizations across a variety of industries in
order to better understand group performance. Researchers discovered that patterns of communication were as
significant as all other factors combined: individual intelligence, personality, skill, and substance of discussions.
9. Alex “Sandy” Pentland, “The new science of building great teams,” Harvard Business Review, April 2012.
10. Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, Team of Teams: New Rules of
Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015).
11. Gil LeBreton, “Umps get 1 in 3 close pitches wrong, HBO story shows,” Star-Telegram, October 1, 2016.
ENDNOTES
9

Reflect more
to learn faster
No matter how fast things are
moving, take the time to reflect on
your experiences, supporting even
faster movement

Introduction:
The dual role of reflection
When it comes to accelerating performance,
there’s a paradox: If we want to have greater impact,
faster, we have to slow down enough to reflect on
what we’ve done and what we’re going to do.
It’s a balancing act. Speed matters, of course,
but we can’t focus too much on speed—otherwise
there’s no time for reflection, and reflection is criti-
cal for learning. If your workgroup just acts and acts
without pausing to understand what you’ve learned
and how to apply it, you won’t likely achieve a high-
er level of performance. Action without reflection is
a waste of time.
At the same time, it isn’t about constantly push-
ing forward to complete the next task. Taking time to
step back and reflect on actions, the results of those
actions, and our expectations for actions can be a
rich source of insight and learning. What seemed
to have a greater impact? How can we do more of
that and amplify it? This process of reflection and
adaptation—before action, during action, after ac-
tion, and outside action—is often very powerful.
Reflecting as a group holds unique potential for
uncovering more insights, drawing more connections,
and using them to build better solutions. A group’s
diversity and passion can be especially valuable when
brought to bear on making sense of and interpreting
results and data and developing potential new ac-
tions. Reflection can serve a dual role, drawing out
members’ challenges to generate new insights and
ideas and, at the same time, helping to build more
alignment around a shared understanding of the ac-
tions that may have the greatest impact. Workgroups
often need opportunities to pull out of the demands
of the moment and revisit how near-term actions
connect to improving the shared outcome.
Reflection can help workgroups break out of an
incremental mind-set at a time when tried-and-true
techniques may prove inadequate for the variety of
new and unpredictable challenges and cases of first
instances that workgroups will encounter.1
Regular
practices of looking at results, observations, and
data, and being open to the implications of that
information, can help workgroups break from the
status quo and chart new paths forward that could
better achieve the desired outcome. In reflecting on
near-term initiatives and assessing whether they are
accelerating us toward our destination, workgroups
also learn more about the destination they are striv-
ing to reach. Part of the learning process should be to
continually step back and ask how refining our view
of the destination might help us progress even faster.
The reflect more to learn
faster practice: What it is
Reflection, for our purposes, is about under-
standing and interpreting information—in the form
of results, observations, and data—to evolve our ac-
tions to get more impact. It is primarily a group ac-
tivity. For accelerating performance improvement,
we should create more opportunities for group re-
flection. A diverse group of people willing to chal-
lenge each other can get much further than any indi-
vidual sitting in a room with a mountain of data and
trying to make sense of it.
Reflection can get a workgroup together to chal-
lenge each other around:
• What worked better than expected?
• What didn’t work as expected?
• What assumptions need to be changed?
• What strengths can we build on to ratchet up
the impact?
YOU KNOW YOU NEED
THIS PRACTICE WHEN:
• The workgroup isn’t getting the rich, real-
time, and context-specific performance
feedback it needs
• All the reflection that takes place is on
failures; there’s no reflection on successes
• Successes seem rare and appear to be
either accidental or stem from heroics
rather than discipline
• Performance improvements developed in
one part of the workgroup rarely scale to
others in the workgroup
Pull together | Reflect more to learn faster
1

In addition, reflection is about stepping back to
remind ourselves of the group’s long-term aspira-
tions and the role of near-term actions in accom-
plishing it.
• Learning for the sake of learning. Reflec-
tion can be valuable when the workgroup uses it
to learn more about impact and to catalyze action
toward a destination. Without a destination in
mind, groups may learn from their experiences,
but the learning won’t necessarily help them
improve performance.
• Finding fault or failure. Rather than run un-
til something goes wrong, then fix the problem,
and keep going, continuous reflection constantly
seeks greater impact. It is looking at the success-
es, the partial successes, and the failures, at the
errors that happened and the errors that didn’t,
to try to determine what the workgroup should
do next.
• Just reflecting on the problem or the op-
portunity. To get better faster, the workgroup
should reflect on its approach to problems and
opportunities. In fact, the more you reflect on
your approach, the more likely your biggest prob-
lems may become your biggest opportunities.
Reflection for faster learning comes from first
making a conscious decision to make it a priority
for the group. A workgroup should focus attention
Taking the time to reflect is a conscious decision. It can strengthen and support all of a workgroup’s other
practices and activities—as long as there’s a mechanism to translate insights into action.
• Maximize the potential for friction. Bringing together diverse and passionate people can be a
necessary condition for rich reflection.
• Eliminate unproductive friction. An environment of trust and respect is a prerequisite for the honest
and rich reflection that can accelerate a workgroup’s learning. Reflection focused on achieving a shared
outcome, supported by rich inputs, can make it easier to articulate disagreement in a productive way.
• Commit to a shared outcome. Through reflection, a workgroup can learn how to have more impact
on the shared outcome and assess whether a shared outcome is still the highest-value pursuit.
• Bias toward action. Action creates rich inputs for reflection. Reflection draws the relevant learning
from action to accelerate performance.
• Prioritize performance trajectory. The performance objectives and metrics can ground and inform a
workgroup’s reflection about the impact of actions and the performance it is achieving.
• Frame a powerful question. The question often shifts the scope beyond just the moment at hand,
connecting that moment to the implications and learnings across moments and over time: What did
we learn that informs our powerful question?
• Seek new contexts. The techniques and approaches encountered in a different context can form the
basis of reflection on what is context-dependent and what is more generalizable, and reflection can
transform observations into relevant, actionable insights.
• Cultivate friction. Challenging during reflection—with the aim of developing better approaches—is
important, both pre-action and post-action.
2

on getting diverse and robust information to feed
the reflection. Also, grounding reflection in the
group’s larger goals for impact can help to ensure
that the reflection is most valuable for accelerating
performance. Members can practice reflection—at
different levels of granularity and at different mo-
ments in time—to reexamine the status quo in light
of the desired impact and trajectory.
FEED THE REFLECTION
In order to learn how to get more and more im-
pact, a workgroup needs new information and inter-
actions, along with a growing base of new knowledge,
upon which to reflect, draw insights, and determine
new actions. Capture what you can to feed re-
flection—data and formal metrics as well as the ex-
periences and observations of group members and
others—but try to keep data collection simple. For
example, look for ways to exploit and analyze data
that already exists, such as the digital exhaust that
groups leave behind as they interact with people,
technology, and equipment.
Our technology generates an increasing amount
of data, such as the number of times we badge into
work, or how we move and to whom we speak, or
how much time we spend using a particular app, or
the ways we link from one website to another while
searching for information. Often invisible to us, this
data can provide insight into the underlying fac-
tors that influence the effectiveness of a particular
approach or opportunities to tinker with how the
workgroup itself works to create more impact.2
At
Southwest, the Field Tech workgroup has begun
to evaluate real-time airline health maintenance
data—on the planes’ operations, temperatures, ro-
tations, etc.—to identify patterns that act as early
warning for parts nearing failure so that they can
be addressed before they become an issue. Col-
laboration tools can bring further visibility into the
data around our work—interactions, queries, and
searches, distribution of comments, usefulness of
our contributions, and shared objects—for individu-
als or the group. Often this data is available in real
time and can be combined with data pulled from
other sources for dynamic feedback.
More data—of all types, even if it involves
just short back-and-forth conversations—means
more transparency. Look for ways to be radi-
cally transparent within the workgroup. A
more transparent group has more potential value
because members can more fully understand the
context of what’s going on. More context supports
more action, trust, and respect, all of which can
fuel richer reflection.
If “what gets measured gets managed,” the cor-
ollary is that workgroups that cast a wide net for po-
tential insights have to avoid the trap of managing
everything they measure. Just because data is avail-
able and easily collected doesn’t mean it is valuable.
At the same time, we don’t always know the value
of data in advance, so it may be worthwhile to con-
sider all sources of information initially. For data
and metrics that will require more effort to gather,
go through the thought process of why
each type of data would be relevant to im-
proving the outcome—for example, what
information would it provide that is cur-
rently missing, and will that change the
next action?—before deciding to invest in
data-gathering resources.
Staying focused on learning how to evolve a
group’s actions to improve an outcome is impor-
tant for making reflection productive. Seek con-
tinuous feedback as just one more valuable
source of information to draw insights from about
how a new approach is working, the unexpected
consequences of an experimental solution, or our
own performance in the workgroup. In this context,
• What data do we need to get better faster?
FEEDBACK QUESTIONS
FOR INDIVIDUALS
1. What should I continue to do?
2. What should I stop doing?
3. What should I start to do?
4. What can I do to make the group
more successful?
3

feedback isn’t an evaluative or punitive tool or a
check-the-box reporting activity. The purpose of
giving and receiving feedback is to discover some-
thing we don’t know—feedback that is expected or
confirms what we believe is less useful than that
which is surprising.
A key to fostering more productive reflection is
to identify and implement faster, and richer, feed-
back loops to get internal and external feedback on
a recurring basis. Workgroups should look for op-
portunities to establish feedback loops that help
members understand what the customer expects
or needs and where they stand relative to that; they
should also look for opportunities to create loops
that help point to where they can focus their efforts
to have a greater impact. The feedback that groups
need has parallels to the feedback that individuals
need.3
In fact, encouraging group members to ask
for feedback, understand it
within the larger context, and
translate that feedback into
action at an individual level
can establish feedback-seek-
ing behavior that translates
into how members reflect
and improve performance as
a group. If members aren’t
pulling for feedback, they
aren’t likely to get it. Con-
sider how even in loosely or-
ganized open-source software initiatives, contribu-
tors get rapid feedback from others who try their
code. Broad adoption of a team’s or individual’s
work products confers status. Contributors care-
fully monitor this measure of performance and try
to learn from others whose contributions gain much
greater acceptance.
The patterns of feedback can also yield insight
into feedback loops’ effectiveness. For example,
when GE FirstBuild launched its open innovation
model for appliances, members tried to engage the
community on every possible design element, down
to the shape of the ice-dispenser lever in the freez-
er door. Looking at the feedback in totality made
clear that FirstBuild’s community was disengaged
and not giving the group useful, actionable insight.
FirstBuild founder Venkat Venkatakrishnan said,
“We made one big mistake: We assumed that every-
one that was part of our community had a passion
for appliances.” The group refined its approach to
be less reliant on the community for the day-to-day
product development.4
MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR -MORTEM
Most people in organizations are familiar with
the postmortem.5
We use the term somewhat face-
tiously, as workgroups can learn from the practice
of examining and reflecting on a problem, its con-
dition, and the circumstances surrounding it—not
just in “deaths” or failures but over time—every
step of the way. Timing is important: finding time
to reflect and determine what level of reflection is
appropriate at a point in time—before action, in ac-
tion, after action, and apart from action. Each has
its own objectives and techniques.
These types of thoughtful reviews require
groups to commit time
and resources and for
members to participate in
a spirit of creating some-
thing better rather than
defending a position, ra-
tionalizing results, or gain-
ing status. To generate
more actionable insights
and avoid check-the-box
status meetings, reviews
should prioritize whatever
is surprising—good or bad—and focus on causal-
ity. The goal is to improve impact, and to do that
groups need to better understand what drives im-
pact and how best to affect those drivers. Finally,
reflection, even productive reflection, should have
an end point to avoid the paralysis of analysis. The
goal is to reflect just enough to know what to do
next to gain even more valuable information about
the current question.
Perhaps the most important objective of con-
ducting a pre-mortem, or pre-action review, in
terms of accelerating performance, is to frame the
questions that the activity is intended to answer and
to remind the participants of the context surround-
ing the action. What is the purpose of the action?
What is the desired impact? What is the most valu-
able information that could come from the action?
The pre-mortem leverages the group’s collective
4

experiences to clarify what is known and unknown,
align on what is needed, identify and mitigate
known risks, and talk through possible scenarios
and triggers for alternatives in order to give the ac-
tion the best possible chance of making the desired
impact. Pre-action reviews may be brief—in the US
Army, units sometimes focus around the simple
question, “What’s important now?”—but even in
quick-turnaround situations, some reflection to en-
vision cause and effect, action and reaction, in ad-
vance, can make a difference in managing risks and
ratcheting up impact.
Pre-mortems can also be thought of as occurring
between episodes or in the absence of an episode.
For example, the Field Tech workgroup at South-
west took a largely reactive maintenance program
and turned it into a preventative maintenance
program by reflecting on and analyzing all of the
existing data (pilot write-ups, in-flight diversions,
delays) to identify what caused these issues. The in-
sights helped members focus on addressing the most
common instances of errors and aircraft downtime
before they could even occur through pre-mortem
reflection. By taking the time to reflect on the issues
as a unit, they were able to uncover larger patterns
that led to better overall performance of the mainte-
nance crews and the airline’s operations.
Reflection in action—on what’s working,
what isn’t, and how conditions are changing—can
help workgroups reorient to be more effective in the
moment. In-action reflection often occurs individu-
ally or in small groups, in micro-reflections that are
so short they might seem involuntary. Taking even
a tiny pause to step back and reflect on the action,
during the action, can yield powerful insights into
how the approach might be more effective before
key details or ideas are forgotten. Understanding
and playing with the in-action time horizon comes
with experience, but a useful first step is to take ad-
vantage of small moments outside of action. To the
extent that a workgroup can slow down the moment,
creating even small spaces for noticing, compar-
ing what we observe against what we expect, and
considering the implications for action provide a
unique opportunity for learning that might be lost
otherwise and provides more concrete input for
postmortem reviews.
Increasingly, technology can capture more re-
al-time details and context—think dash-mounted
cameras or GPS features in smartphones—that can
be brought into the postmortem or after-
action review. In addition to supplement-
ing faulty or incomplete observations,
one benefit of sensors and other real-time
capture technology is that it can be used
to create dashboards that support rapid
reflection in the moment and more robust
analysis in the after-action review.
Conduct after-action reviews6
to
create an opportunity for the group to
step back and consider what occurred and what the
implications are for the next action. It’s often in this
stage of reflection that patterns begin to emerge and
new approaches are developed. For the firefighters
of FDNY Rescue 1, informal postmortems begin as
soon as the firemen are riding back to the firehouse,
capturing raw observations and impressions, in-
cluding what was particularly challenging or unique
about the situation. The conversations continue
back at the firehouse, where other responders hear
their stories and share their own insights; together,
they are able to draw patterns and develop an ac-
tion plan for the future, based on the unit’s collec-
tive experiences. Additionally, when firemen have
identified a particularly challenging, complex, or
ambiguous scenario, they try to recreate that sce-
nario in training so that all members of Rescue 1 can
be better prepared in the future. Effective postmor-
tems can enhance a workgroup’s ability to handle a
similar situation more effectively in the future—and
to identify incorrect decisions or assumptions and
how they were made.
An effective postmortem is an opportunity for
group members to challenge current ways of think-
ing and performing, if everyone is open to acknowl-
edging the factors that may have contributed to
• What can we learn from our results?
• What are the implications for how we move
differently in the future?
5

failure and success. Such candor is often lacking in
organizations out of fear of reprisal or loss of status.
Workgroups should be committed to norms that
keep politics and one-upmanship out of the group’s
interactions and might find it helpful to use a facili-
tator and structured questions to offset the fear and
loss of control that might come with speaking openly.
Postmortems should spend as much time on
what went right as on what went wrong, in par-
ticular what had more of an impact than expected,
and explore how to build on that and do more of
it. While the positive-negative balance makes it a
safer environment to explore every aspect of the
project, it keeps the group oriented toward future
actions and performance. Participants also bring
their supplemental performance data—including
metrics such as how often something had to be re-
worked—to ground the discussion away from de-
fault assumptions and subjective impressions.7
A workgroup’s power is that it can come up with
better solutions and have more impact than an in-
dividual, no matter how skilled, on her own. It’s
taking what one member knows, coupling it with
what another member of the groups knows, get-
ting other members to react and add, and creating
something totally original. A group has the ability
to continue to get better and better at performing
under changing circumstances in a way that an in-
dividual can’t, by effectively leveraging the collec-
tive passion, knowledge, and experience
to create new solutions from which to
continue to iterate and improve. Doing
so requires the workgroup to invest in
one more level of reflection.
The workgroup can evolve its own
practices of reflecting and taking ac-
tion. Periodically reflecting on how
you reflect—being aware of which
reflective practices seem to be generat-
ing increasing impact over time—helps
guard against falling into a routine with
diminishing returns.8
Research from
the University of Alabama in Huntsville suggests
that groups improve their performance when they
meet in a structured environment in which each
member reflects on her role and how it relates to
the overall performance of the team.9
By drawing
out perceptions, supplemented by data, members
can identify patterns in their own interactions and
thought processes to understand how they contrib-
ute to incorrect or ineffective actions and how to
make better decisions that have more impact in
the future.10
Pay attention to the way messages are
conveyed and processed as well as what is not be-
ing said. What is the timing, and who is involved?
What is the energy? What is the result?
• Where are we improving most rapidly, and
how can we do more of that?
• Where is improvement slowing down, and
how can we change what we’re doing to
improve the trajectory?
Figure 1. Framing signals
What? Observation
Statement of fact. It reflects a single incident that you heard or
observed
So what? Insight
A pattern in your observations and some degree of interpretation. It
may build off of a repeated failure, or something especially powerful
Now what? Implications
How insights can drive action. How does what you observed affect
what you should design? Typically phrased as “how might we address
Y . . .” or in the imperative voice as in “provide customers with Y . . .”
Source: Deloitte analysis. Deloitte Insights | deloitte.com/insights
6

Consider how the Joint Special Operations Com-
mand (JSOC) Task Force11
had to reflect on its own
practices when its overwhelming firepower and ex-
pertise were failing to slow attacks by Al Qaeda in
Iraq. The task force took a step back and through
careful thought and reflection came to understand
that “AQI operated in ways that diverged radically”
from what American forces were accustomed to
fighting. In the time it took for US commanders to
move a plan from creation to approval, the battle-
field for which the plan had been devised would
have changed. The task force had to reflect on its
own practices for processing and learning from in-
telligence information, because members weren’t
learning what they needed to fast enough to re-
spond, much less make progress against the enemy.
The data, when they took time to look at it all
together, showed that the tried-and-true tactics
weren’t working. This opened the door to greater
questioning of assumptions about what members
“knew” about how things worked. With new insight,
they restructured the force from the ground up on
the principles of transparent information-sharing
and decentralized decision-making authority to
make shorter feedback and reflection loops tied
closely to the action. As a result, forces began con-
ducting more and more raids per night, getting in-
telligence information across the chain of command
much quicker, and acting on its analysis faster. By
being their own judge but not their only
judge, relevant outsiders helped units within JSOC
perform at their highest potential.
MAKE SENSE OF SIGNALS
During action, in action, after action, and in-
between action—we are gathering more and richer
information. It becomes valuable when the work-
group collectively engages with the raw informa-
tion to learn from it and develop new action (see
figure 1).12
Group members will likely begin to ob-
serve more carefully and bring richer context back
to the group as they see the group’s capacity to de-
rive actionable insights improve.
Most of us value patterns. But years of standard-
ization have taught many of us to abhor anomalies.
We try to hide the exceptions, rationalize the pieces
that do not fit, and hope that no one notices. Yet
breakthroughs happen when we notice and explore
the inconsistencies, anomalies, and unintended
consequences—these are the leverage points that
can accelerate impact. Detect anomalies and
celebrate exceptions,13
acknowledging what you
don’t see in the data rather than looking just to con-
firm a hypothesis. Sometimes an insight lies in con-
necting the dots between what isn’t there when new
data doesn’t align with an existing belief.14
When the group can recognize emerging
and evolving patterns, it may help to make
sense of the passive data it collects and inform the
-mortem reviews. The frameworks and hypotheses
in our heads influence what patterns we uncover.
We see what we look for. The patterns a workgroup
identifies and how it interprets them can be influ-
enced by the questions it asks and the nature of the
problem it is trying to solve. The diverse workgroup
members also bring range and variety to how they
notice and categorize.
The goal should be to make sense of both what
we’ve seen before and what we haven’t, looking for
indications of some new structure, or of indica-
tions that an existing structure is changing mean-
ingfully. Observations and snippets of information
that seem unimportant on their own can heighten
our awareness of the periphery and provoke new
ideas when considered together with the collected
flotsam of other group members. Do the snippets
signal a deeper structural change? Or are they su-
perficial noise?
Group members challenge each other’s catego-
rizations and add their own, creating and break-
ing categories on the way to identifying meaning-
ful patterns. They may gain perspective through a
ANTIBODIES AT WORK
• What we are doing is working; we don’t
need to change.
• Our workgroups are well regarded for
being tried and true. We’re successful
because we haven’t bought into the craze
to reinvent ourselves and try new things.
• In our organization, seconds count; we
need people to act immediately, not
debate what they would do differently.
7

practice of deliberately viewing a new problem as a
variant of an old problem from a different context.
For example, the research problem we set ourselves
was focused on workgroup practices, but one of
the ways we tried to gain insight was by choosing
to see dynamic workgroups as akin to sports teams.
Seeing the current situation as like something else
can help reveal opportunities to apply aspects of
previous approaches or solutions to our problem;
understanding where the similarity breaks down
and previous experiences aren’t relevant can be in-
formative as well.
8

1. Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for
Changing Your Organization and the World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business Press, 2009).
2. For more information about the findings from the MIT Human Dynamics lab, see Alex Pentland, Social Physics:
How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter (New York: Penguin, 2014).
3. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (New
York: Penguin, 2015). Stone and Heen distinguish between three types of feedback for individuals: evaluating,
coaching, and appreciating.
4. Ryan Gatti, interview with Venkat Venkatakrishnan, co-founder, GE FirstBuild, Louisville, Ky., April 18, 2017.
5. Wharton@Work, “After action reviews,” April 2012.
6. Ibid.: “Called ‘one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised,’ the After Action Review
(AAR) was developed by the United States Army in the 1970s to help its soldiers learn from both their mistakes
and achievements. Since then, the AAR has been used by many companies for performance assessment. And
yet, as The Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge notes, efforts to bring the practice into corporate culture most often
fail because ‘again and again, people reduce the living practice of AARs to a sterile technique.’”
7. Linda Hill, “How to manage for collective creativity,” TedxCambridge, September 2014.
8. In Agile methodology, deep reflection is described as a keen focus on the effort being exerted: the work being
done. Our research suggests that this type of deep reflection should focus on the workgroup itself—the how
work gets done.
9. Jim Steele, “Structured reflection on roles and tasks improves team performance, UAH study finds,” University of
Alabama in Huntsville, April 8, 2013.
10. Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (New
York: Viking, 1999), p. 34.
11. For more on JSOC, read the complete case study, publishing in February 2018.
12. This framing is similar to what many of our Doblin colleagues use to uncover significant patterns and relationships
across observations.
13. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic, 1984), p. 131.
14. Gary Klein and Barbara Fasolo, “Seeing what others don’t: The remarkable ways we gain insights,” London School
of Economics, Department of Management public lecture, March 26, 2015.
ENDNOTES
9

JOHN HAGEL
John Hagel is co-chairman of Deloitte Center for the Edge; he has nearly 35 years of experience as a
management consultant, author, speaker, and entrepreneur and has helped companies improve perfor-
mance by applying IT to reshape business strategies. In addition to holding significant positions at lead-
ing consulting firms and companies throughout his career, Hagel is the author of bestselling business
books such as Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, The Only Sustainable Edge, and The Power of Pull. He is
on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jhagel and on Twitter @jhagel.
JOHN SEELY BROWN
John Seely Brown (JSB) is independent co-chairman of Deloitte Center for the Edge and a prolific writer,
speaker, and educator. In addition to his work with the Center for the Edge, JSB is adviser to the provost
and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. This position followed a lengthy tenure at
Xerox Corp., where he was chief scientist and director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. JSB has
published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and authored or co-authored seven books, includ-
ing The Social Life of Information, The Only Sustainable Edge, The Power of Pull, and A New Culture of Learning.
MAGGIE WOOLL
Maggie Wooll is head of eminence at Deloitte Center for the Edge; she combines her experience advis-
ing large organizations on strategy and operations with her passion for getting the stories behind the
data and the data behind the stories to shape the Center’s perspectives. At the Center, she explores the
emerging opportunities at the intersection of people, technologies, and institutions. She is particularly
interested in the impact new technologies and business practices have on talent development and learn-
ing for the future workforce and workplace. She is on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/margaretwooll.
ANDREW DE MAAR
Andrew de Maar is head of research at Deloitte Center for the Edge; he leads the Center’s research
agenda and helps clients make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business
and technology. De Maar has worked with a wide range of public, private, and nonprofit entities to help
executives explore long-term trends that are fundamentally changing the global business environment
and identify high-impact initiatives that their organizations can pursue to more effectively drive near-
term performance improvement and large-scale transformation.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
I

RESEARCH TEAM
Michael Ding was a research fellow at Deloitte Center for the Edge; he is passionate about seeking tech-
nology and analytics driven approaches to address challenging problems. As a senior consultant within
Deloitte’s Cyber Risk Services, he has assisted clients with discovering and managing information secu-
rity and privacy risks across a range of industries, including technology and retail. At the Center, Ding
has researched extensively on continuous improvement methodologies related to agile, DevOps from
leading enterprises and scalable learning from emerging e-sports ecosystems.
Ryan Gatti was a research fellow at Deloitte Center for the Edge, focused on the intersection of strategy
and innovation. He is passionate about understanding how the world is changing and, in particular, how
disruption will affect fintech players, emerging markets, and broader ecosystem plays. As a consultant
within Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Strategy practice, Gatti has helped clients analyze competitive threats,
better understand players on the periphery, enter new markets, and stand up corporate innovation
units. At the Center, he focused on innovation, scouting organizations that are operating on the edge of
what is possible, and establishing broader partnerships across the ecosystem.
Dalia Katan was a research fellow at Deloitte Center for the Edge; she is a strategist and designer pas-
sionate about using design thinking to foster creativity and human connection in the workplace and to
transform the work for the future. Working within Deloitte’s Strategy & Operations practice, Katan has
worked with consumer products and technology clients to solve problems related to brand, growth, and
innovation strategy. At the Center, she focused on learnings from technology, emergency response, and
hospitality industries that may help teams improve their performance over time.
Abigail Sickinger was a research fellow at Deloitte Center for the Edge, passionate about exploring how
the rapid evolution of technology is making it difficult for humans to keep up and their organizations to
remain relevant. At the Center, she delved into the group dynamics and decision-making that shape how
practices are adopted and replicated within an organization. As a consultant within Deloitte’s Strategy
and Operations practice, Sickinger has helped a range of clients, from public transportation to pharma-
ceutical company to a youth education nonprofit plan for and take advantage of new opportunities.
II

We could not have developed this topic without the generous and open participation of the following
individuals: Brandon Beard, Mike Perna, John Strickland, Dave Fischer, Barry Lott, Jesse Luck, Matt
Hafner, Steve Hozdulick, Ryan Files, Charles Cunningham, Alan Kasher, Sonya Lacore, Jeff Hamlett,
Craig Drew, Paul Butler, Merlin Ward, Annalie Killian, Terry Young, Nikelii Bennett, Irineu Romano,
Adam Goldstein, Luz Luna, Hani Eid, Patricia Conway, Gray Shealy, Raimund Gschaider, Fernando
Iglesia, Adam Goldstein, Harri Kulovaara, Kevin Douglas, Kelly Gonzalez, Xavier Leclercq, Joseph
Miorelli, Diane Stratton, Paris Swann, Gaby Landa, Erin Barton, Jaime Lemus, Carla Makela, Zack
Cangiano, Gabe Trujillo, Daniel Schneider, Eric Lewis, Kelly Watkins, Neil Shah, Sheela Subrama-
nian, Elain Zelby, Emily Stephens, Richard Hasslacher, Michael Lopp, Julieanna Gray, Melody Kho-
daverdian, Anastasia Afendikova, Jamie Feeley, Jimmy Lee, Matt Schwartz, Walter Villavicencio,
Venkat Venkatakrishnan, Justin Berger, Randy Reeves, J. Taylor Dawson, Naama Gorodischer, Yo-
tam Politzer, Stanley McChrystal, Frank Kearney, Maureen LeBoeuf, Rebecca S. Halstead, James
“Spider” Marks, Jen Rubio, Steph Korey, Alyssa Pollock, Lynda Hruska, George Samuels, Coran Lill,
Skip Skivington, Vivian Tan, Joy Marcus, Jan Ferguson, Michael St. James, Jason Wiseman, Ariel
Yoffe, Ryan Villanova, Samantha Klein, Jake Guglin, Antonia Cecio, Kiomi Sakata, Bronson Green,
Carson Cland, Dennis Holden, Matthew D’Amato, and Sha Huang.
In addition, we are grateful to the colleagues and friends whose enthusiasm and insights helped shape
this topic: Maynard Webb, Guarav Tewari, Waguih Ishak, Dick Levy, Brian Rouch, Doug Bade, Doug
Gish, Andrew Blau, Cheryl Pinter-Real, Jacquie Obi, Joseph Bakal, Tom Nassim, Lynne Sterrett,
John Tripp, David Kuder, David Martin, Matt David, Amy Feirn, John Henry, James O’Kane, Mat-
thew Standart, Chad Whitman, Kusandha Hertrich, Tim Gillam, Wendy Meredith, Greg Tevis, Bill
Pollard, Debbie Fox, Phil Lubik, Matt Angelo, Amy Lawson-Stopps, Stephanie Hill, Jack Wisnefske,
Grant Hartanov, Peter Liu, John Gelline, Peter Robertson, Dave Zaboski, Blythe Aronowitz, Neda
Shemluck, Mukesh Singhal, Paul Keck, and Duleesha Kulasooriya.
The team would also like to thank the following individuals whose support is invaluable: Jodi Gray, Car-
rie Howell, Matthew Budman, Emily Koteff Moreano, Molly Woodworth, Troy Bishop, and Joanie
Pearson.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
III

CONTACTS
Blythe Aronowitz
Chief of staff, Center for the Edge
Deloitte Services LP
+1 408 704 2483
baronowitz@deloitte.com
Wassili Bertoen
Managing director, Center for the Edge Europe
Deloitte Netherlands
+31 6 21272293
wbertoen@deloitte.nl
Peter Williams
Chief edge officer, Centre for the Edge Australia
Tel: +61 3 9671 7629
pewilliams@deloitte.com.au
IV

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