1.5 - About University

6.4 D EALING V ERBALLY WITH C OMPLEXITYInspired by the thousands of participants in the Consulting Skills for Professionals workshops.A challenging leadership situation is when someone approaches you with a mess. Often, thesemessy problem statements contain implied general, but ineffective, solutions: “The maintenanceproblem occurred again last night” or, “We’ve got the systems snafu again” or,“Absenteeism is up again. I told you we needed to send our supervisors to a leadership workshop!”Your chief verbal tool in dealing with such complexity is questioning, even thoughmost people don’t think much about types of questions or their implications. This tool willprovide an on-the-spot, effective questioning strategy. The model presented illustrates the useof three levels of questions. Actual sample questions and a questioning sequence are outlinedlater in this tool.T HE HOURGLASS MODEL FOR SORTING OUT A COMPLEXSITUATIONType ofquestion Mental model Why these questions? What you are doing?➊TriageQuestions➋Big-PictureQuestions➌ClosingQuestionsComplexsituationImmediate needsdealt withLonger-term issuesdealt withTriage is the medical term for sortingout priorities when multiple casualtiescome into a medical facility. Triagequestions do not fix the underlyingproblems. They alleviate theimmediate symptoms, establishing "Inwhat order do we treat the casualties?"or "What needs attention first?" Theyare the classic Band-Aid questions.Big-picture or open-ended questions:• Help everyone step back and lookat the overall situation.• Help get at underlying causes, systemicissues, and longer-termneeds.Many leaders find it difficult to askbig-picture questions, becausea. They are afraid of the answers! Bigpicturequestions may make theproblem look worse and move yououtside your comfort zone.b. It may feel better to have a poorsolution than none at all!Once you have the big picture sortedout, you are in a most strategic placefor a leader. You and others can nowdecide on priorities and plans toensure that the problem does notrecur.• Fixing the immediate hurts. (Seethe Danger!—caveat section.)• Putting on Band-Aids.• Finding quick fixes.• Buying time.• Not dealing with underlying issuesand causes.• Relieving immediate pressurebefore being able to look at the bigpicture.• Establishing rapport by helping theperson talk it out.• Asking open-ended questions tobroaden and get at the context ofthe problem.• Getting at the underlying issues.• Getting at the context, causes, andrelated systemic issues.• Setting yourself and the others upto deal with the longer-termsolutions.• Narrowing the scope of theproblem by jointly establishingpriorities and action plans.• Clarifying responsibilities and nextsteps.SECTION 6 TOOLS FOR CRITICAL THINKING AND INNOVATION 179