The Power of Clarity: How Shared Understanding Drives Success

All leaders face the same challenge: how to achieve shared understanding of a problem to be solved or a policy to be executed among stakeholders who bring fixed and passionately divergent opinions, competing values, and their own biases to the table. It is possibly the most challenging task of attacking a problem, and often where the least effort is applied because it is difficult to do, particularly in today’s environment. A busy and distracted workforce and leaders with short attention spans can drive organizations to increasingly seek the fastest, least complex solutions. Sure, simple is best, but the journey to a simple solution means wading through some level of complexity to have everyone understand the problem before spending the sweat equity to solve it.   

As CEO of a nationwide non-profit organization, I spend the lion’s share of my time working on this issue. My leaders in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas see things through a different lens than their counterparts in Tacoma, Washington, or in Portsmouth, Virginia. I bring what I learned from 35 years serving in the military leading successively larger cross-sections of American society (oftentimes blended with coalition partners) to this challenge. The key to success was always shared understanding and it was my responsibility, and still is, as a leader to achieve it. Failure to achieve it among those who must execute a plan can mean catastrophic mission failure and, in the military at least, lives lost.   

That is why the military takes the concept of shared understanding to an extreme with processes and practices solely dedicated to achieving it. The U.S. Army, in particular, subscribes to Albert Einstein’s classic advice, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” The use of intent statements, confirmation briefs, and back briefs are just a few practices that are part of the U.S. Army culture and shared with corporations by Thayer Leadership, where I am a faculty member, to enable shared understanding among diverse teams.    

I offer two techniques from my own experience as an Army Officer and from my current work in the private sector that I find useful in speeding shared understanding.   

Technique 1: Gather all key stakeholders, facilitate building the problem statement collectively, and then break the problem statement down into “word equations.”   

Not too long ago at an academic medical center, I sat in the back of a conference room and listened to one side of a conference table full of medical center administrators argue with the other side of the conference table, which was lined with medical faculty. At the time, I was the Associate Vice Chancellor for Leader Development at the University of Texas System and was asked to assist this particular medical center. The main topic was “physician burnout,” and there was no consensus on the problem. The administrators cited new aspects of the environment that had reduced revenue and needed the doctors to see more patients, and the doctors expressed concerns about the quality of care, their ability to effectively teach medical students while balancing clinic hours, and the many administrative requirements that devoured their personal time. The group was getting nowhere, and the temperature in the room was rising.    

I took off my sport coat, rolled up my sleeves, and without saying a word, I moved to a giant whiteboard in front of the room, grabbed a marker, and started writing what people were saying. When I had their attention – because both sides immediately began correcting my wording (and punctuation) – I started facilitating the conversation. After some time, with all the diverse thoughts in the room, we collectively drafted a problem statement that had full consensus:  

“Changes in the national health care environment and changes in the administration of higher education has exacerbated the conflict between mission and margin for academic health institution faculty, negatively impacting faculty vitality and retention, and compromising clinical care, research, and education.”  

Everyone agreed this statement accurately captured the problem. It was the first time both the medical faculty and administrators in the room had agreed on anything, and credit goes to the fact they all participated in developing the statement.  Most importantly, while doing so, they listened to each other’s opinions and arguments on why an issue existed and how the problem most accurately should be stated.   

So, now we had a problem statement, but was there a shared understanding of the complexity of the problem at a level that would allow us to successfully address the issues? No, not at all. We then applied the technique of breaking down the problem statement using word equations.   

As a group, we went back to the problem statement and underlined those elements of the statement for which all present believed necessary to measure or prove with data. The underlining exercise to identify elements of the problem that required further shared understanding resulted in this:    

“Changes in the national health care environment and changes in the administration of higher education has exacerbated the conflict between mission and margin for academic health institution faculty, negatively impacting faculty vitality and retention, compromising clinical care, research and education.”  

The group still had very fixed opinions, so we took the underlined phrases and made a word equation for each. Here are two examples of that work:   

Changes in the national health care environment = declining reimbursements + increase in pressure for outcomes-based assessment + declining $ for research, grants, and formula funding + increase in competition driving the need for increased clinical activity  

Faculty vitality = job satisfaction + productivity + morale + length of service + sense of control + quantifiable distractions   

By doing this for the entire problem statement (and further breaking it down as desired), we had specific issues on which to gather data, emplace measures to gather data if there were none, and create a narrative – grounded in data and with consensus – to pursue resources and change policy.  

However, almost as important for this organization was the result that everyone on both sides of the table was satisfied their concerns were heard and captured, and by learning the challenges of others, a higher level of empathy was generated that was key to sustaining the group’s address of this problem.   

Technique 2: Take an existing unrefined statement of a problem or description of a desired outcome, gather all key stakeholders, and ask the question, “What do we mean by…?” Organize the answers to that question in the form of word equations.   

Several times during my military service, I was presented with a policy directive my organization had to operationalize and I found myself required to turn rather non-specific words into actions on the ground. This is to be expected: policy statements at the strategic level are most often, by necessity, ambiguous, and one of the primary duties of a leader is to remove ambiguity for their organization. The routine necessity to turn ambiguity into something executable can result in many practices and techniques to achieve shared understanding, clarity of purpose, and assign responsibilities for execution of the task.    

One example of this occurred when I was leading operations in the seven provinces north of Baghdad, Iraq, in 2009-2010. The push at that time was to hand over responsibilities to “effective Iraqi security forces,” which were Iraqi units that were being trained and equipped by an international coalition but led by Iraqis. Imagine the diverse stakeholders involved in this effort. So, what was meant by “effective Iraqi security forces”?   

To help achieve shared understanding and gain consensus, we gathered key stakeholders in my sector and workshopped for several hours. Exemplars of the results:   

Effective Security Forces = Recruitment + Training + Equipping + Leadership  

From there, we could further tackle each of those elements, as daunting as they were at the time. For example, the following equation achieved consensus for Recruitment:  

Recruitment = Vetting + Adequate Pay + Freedom from Intimidation  

Teams were then organized around the vetting issue, an initiative was coordinated to ensure adequate pay, and the complex requirement to prevent intimidation was worked on, too. All this first started, however, with gathering the key members of the team who would execute, and asking the question, “What do we mean by…?”, and then constructing a product that was the result of all voices heard and understood.   

I have applied this technique several times leading in the private sector as well. Several years ago, I was asked by local and state entities to help build an organization called the “National Security Innovation Council” in Austin, Texas. In a moderated “design” session, our many stakeholders (more than 90 in number) came to agreement on the following statement of intent for the new organization:   

“We will create a facilitating body and an operational model that sustains a common operating picture of clearly understood national security problems to be solved by Texas-based entities, and rapidly connect problem owners to problem solvers.”  

Again, there was consensus on a statement, but one that was filled with vague terms that could mean many things to many people. Much like generating policy, statements like this are often necessary to bring diverse groups to some general agreement on a way ahead. However, when the session ended, there was still no shared understanding on specifically what that statement entailed. That drove a second, facilitated session with the same group, where we asked the question:  

“What are the key elements of an organization that can meet this intent of this statement?”  

Experts chimed in, “You’ll need people with special skills” and “We have to have a database” and “We’ll need a budget -- whatever that will look like…” and so on. To gain shared understanding and agreement, we listed these ideas on a white board (frequently combining and deleting ideas with permission of the group). Once we had a list, we built a word equation that looked like this:   

National Security Innovation Council = Data Base Management System (DBMS) + Talent + Operating Budget + Communication Capacity 

This further level of refinement was understood and accepted by everyone. As with the previous examples, however, we had to go further. “What do we mean by DBMS”? Potential sponsors of the organization wanted to know the elements of the operating budget. Talent could be many things. We asked the question, “What do we mean when we say, Talent?” and this was the result:   

Talent = Exec Director + Deputy Director + “Lead Connectors”/“Problem Leads” + Knowledge Managers + Outreach (public/government) + Admin + Advisory Board  

Repeatedly, we used this technique to continue to build-down the elements that require time, attention, resources, and decision space. When we were finished, everyone understood the elements of our original grand and now no-longer ambiguous statement, and we had something we could operationalize.   

Final Takeaway 

These two techniques may seem brutally simplistic, but they are effective in getting a roomful of diverse and distracted people to a level of shared understanding of not just the problem itself, but the complexity and sub-tasks required in solving it. This approach can be applied to establish shared understanding, buy-in, and unity of focus within any organization.