Hack:
Refreshing decision-making and problem-solving meetings

By Miguel Sacramento

July 30, 2010 at 6:00pm

Moonshots

Capture the advantages of diversity

Summary

Important meetings supposedly to be conclusive are becoming boring, endless and inconclusive?
Bring fresh air inviting people with diferent paradygms to participate.

Problem

Same solutions and proposals for different problems and decisions.

Solution

Whenever your organization faces a difficult problem a successful strategy already tested would be bringing to take part of the decision-meetings someone with proven competence in his (or her) profession, but with no knowledge at all of his company business.
Adding people with different paradigms may bring important issues company's people wouldn’t be able to perceive and easier, faster and/or less costly solutions may be suggested.
Being working for many years at the company has pros and cons. The main con is that the window each of us uses to watch the company and the market becomes smaller. I just bring someone with a bigger window.

Practical Impact

Improved quality of decisions.
New ideas, opportunities and threats are brought up.

First Steps

Make sure you overweight the team with
(a) young (*) people--who have less to unlearn;
(b) people who have experience in other activities vs 20-year veterans (*);
(c) people who work a long ways away from HQ and
(d) people who have differing areas of expertise.

(*) According to Quincy Jones "At the evolutionary speed we are facing today someone's age should not be measured cronologically anymore, but by the pain level felt facing a new idea". Therefore, there may be 50, 60, 70-year-old young people at your company.

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