Handle Holiday Conflicts with GRACE: A Framework for Navigating Tough Conversations

The Holidays are upon us! These times can be opportunities for family, food, and heartfelt connections—but let’s be real, they’re also ripe arenas for tense conversations that can derail the best of gatherings. Before you dive into a battle over politics or who gets to carve the turkey, consider using the G.R.A.C.E. model. It’s five easy steps to help you navigate any sticky conversations with more grace and ease.

If you really want to dive into conversation mastery, get some free chapters from my book Good Talk: it’s all about how to design conversations that matter.

The G.R.A.C.E. model stands for:

Ground Yourself and the Conversation

Right Channel

Attend to Their Perspective

Co-Create Solutions

End With Commitments

Let’s say you're at Thanksgiving dinner, and a family member expresses a strong political opinion you deeply disagree with. Or vice versa - you say something you feel any sane person would agree with, and they disagree with you, strongly and loudly. The conversation gets heated and you want to approach it constructively instead of escalating the conflict.

Ground Yourself and the Conversation

In any conversation, at any moment, we have choices: We can react, or we can pause. Before heading into a conversation that we know might be difficult, it’s a good idea to ground yourself: Why are you engaging in this conversation? What are your goals, needs and objectives? Can you align with your conversational partners on shared goals and objectives of the conversation?

Applying Grace:

Try to reset the tone by shifting the ground (or the why) of the conversation from winning the argument to maintaining respect.

"I can see this is an issue we both care deeply about. I’d like us to talk about it in a way that helps us understand each other better."

Establish shared values if possible:

"We’re all here because we care about family and spending time together."

Right Channel

Often, I find that arguments can get heated if they are happening in the wrong place - text messaging, emails, slack - are all places where reduced context can get conversations off track and spiraling out. But the dinner table, with the whole family watching? That might not be the best venue for a full-on political debate. That venue is on the PBS News hour!

Applying Grace: Ask to change the channel

Suggest a calmer, lower-stakes one-on-one conversation later, if you really want to get to the bottom of things and do some deep canvassing:

"I think this topic deserves more attention than we can give it over dinner. Can we talk more about this after dessert or on a walk after the meal?"

If they refuse to shift the conversation to later, think of “channel” in an even broader way - change the channel from the “facts” channel to the “feelings and stories” channel. Research shows that, unfortunately, facts don’t change minds, so get them to share some stories instead.

"Maybe we can both share why this issue matters to us without trying to change anyone’s mind right now…

When did you first start thinking about this issue in this way?”

Using a “time shift” question like this is a great approach to get out of the present-moment conflict and into their backstory.

Attend to Their Perspective

Deeply listen to whoever you’re having the friction with. Attend to their perspective. It will de-escalate the conversation and help you empathize with them more completely. 

Applying Grace: Seek to understand first. Ask curious, non-confrontational questions to draw out their reasoning:

"What makes you feel so strongly about this issue?"

"How has this impacted you personally?"

Acknowledge their feelings, even if you don’t agree with their conclusions:

"It sounds like this is something that’s really important to you, and I respect that. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Pass the cranberry sauce, please.”

Co-Create Solutions

In a complex, difficult conversation, once you’ve understood their perspective from deeply attending to it, it’s possible to find common ground or ways to move forward without division. This is also an opportunity to reconnect with step one: Grounding yourself and the Conversation in a shared Why. Reconnect to that why in any solutions you propose, or invite your partner to propose solutions that align with what they see as your shared why.

Applying Grace: Offer options grounded in a shared why, together

"I think we both want what’s best for [the country/our community]. We might have different ideas about how to get there, but that’s something we share."

“What do you think is the best way forward for us today, given that we agreed we don’t want to win this argument, and that we all want to have a great time as a family together?”

If it’s clear that agreement on the issues isn’t possible, suggest shifting the focus of alignment to something you both can value, like enjoying dinner together:

"I’d rather not let this issue get in the way of enjoying our time together today. How does that land with you?"

End With Commitments

The best movies have great endings that satisfy us deeply. Ending a conversation with “Well, let’s just agree to disagree.” or “well, it is what it is” doesn’t give us a very satisfying ending. Such endings are 

“Thought-terminating clichés” which are part of the language of totalism. This kind of language ends thinking, feeling and humanity. It’s the opposite of a GRACEful ending.

Applying Grace: Find something, even something tiny, you can both align on.

Ending with commitments keeps the conversation grounded and meaningful. It’s how you make sure all that talking wasn’t for nothing—by agreeing on next steps, even if it’s just agreeing to revisit the topic later or agreeing that you both think differently. It leaves both participants feeling heard and respected, with a clear sense of where things go from here.

Saying:

"I’d love to understand your perspective more deeply when we’re both in a calmer setting. For now, let’s focus on enjoying dinner and catching up as a family.”

Such language connects us, and allows positive conversations in the future, rather than freezing it out.

Handling a Challenging Conversation with G.R.A.C.E. in a nutshell

If you’re feeling up to it, you can even use all five elements of GRACE in one elegant swoop:

Ground: "I know we both have strong feelings about [political issue], but I don’t want this to overshadow the holiday."

Right Channel: "This might be a better conversation for another time when we can really dive into it."

Attend: "When we have more time, I’d love for you to tell me more about why you feel this way—I want to understand your perspective."

Co-Create: "I think we both care about making the world better, even if we have different views on how to get there."

End: "For now, let’s focus on enjoying dinner and catching up as a family. Pass the cranberry sauce.”

Holiday dinners don’t have to end in frustration or silence!

Navigating difficult conversations doesn’t have to mean avoiding them or letting them escalate. With the G.R.A.C.E. framework, you can approach challenging conversations with thoughtfulness and empathy. When you slow down, choose your words carefully, and truly listen, you create space for understanding—even when you disagree. The goal isn’t to win an argument but to honor the relationships that matter most. With a little effort, you can keep the peace and keep the holiday spirit alive. Remember, the goal isn’t to win but to connect—and to leave the table with relationships intact and tupperware filled with leftovers.

If you’re still hungry for more tips, check out my 2022 essay on this same crucial question or check out my book, Good Talk.

11 Ways CEOs can use one-on-ones to scale excellence in their leadership teams

Founders often want to stay involved in many or even most aspects of their businesses (see the conversations over “founder mode”). However, most soon realize that if they ever want a vacation, a sustainable romantic relationship, or a sustainable, scalable business, they need to scale the capacity of the people on their leadership team to lead the organization without them.

Instead, CEOs are using this precious time to manage projects and run through a to-do list with their most senior leaders.

One-on-ones are an extraordinary opportunity to unlock the potential of your team to think more clearly, lead more effectively and to unlock growth for your company. 1:1s are an opportunity for a creative conversation (see item 10)

I know you’re busy, so here are the 11 ways you can use one-on-ones to scale excellence in your leadership teams:

1. Have them regularly. (read why below)

2. Limit the number of agenda items.

3. Get more feedback than you give.

4. Start with wins and increase your positive to negative feedback ratio.

5. Use 1:1s to coach your team to solve their own problems, not to solve problems for them.

6. Align on a time horizon to focus each conversation on.

7. Listen actively and deeply before responding.

8. Follow up on past conversations.

9. Flip who runs the show

10. Create a standard agenda with each direct report.

11. Get feedback on the meeting format.

I just saved you a few minutes!

The first four easy pieces are crucial to making your 1:1s better. If you want to know the reasons why and some research that proves the point, read on.

The real, outsized impact is in items 5, 6, and 7. These are deeper mindset shifts backed by powerful frameworks. Putting them into practice will take time, effort, and feedback to realize the real value and potential, but the possible gains are enormous.

Items 8-11 are ways to lock in the gains from items 1-7. Use these moves to make sure your 1:1s are continuously improving.

1. Have them!

Many leaders cancel or reschedule 1:1s when more urgent issues come up. But a big part of leadership is about creating stability, and keeping your 1:1s at a steady cadence is one great way to build stability. Plus, it bears fruit: research from Gallup found that employees who have regular one-on-one meetings with their managers are almost three times more likely to be engaged than those who don’t. We can guess why just having them is better than not having them - keeping the meeting as planned sends a signal that the meeting matters and that the employee matters.

Set the example for your direct reports by holding regular 1:1s with them, and ensure they do the same with their teams. 

(For more on why great leadership creates stability in the midst of change, listen to this episode of the Conversation Factory with author Ashley Goodall. He co-wrote the blockbuster Nine Lies About Work, and most recently, The Problem with Change).

2. Limit the number of agenda items so you can make meaningful progress.

If you try to talk about everything, you can’t go into depth about anything. Boil it down to a handful of items to dive into - 3-5 tops. Don’t run through the whole To-Do list!

3.  Get more feedback than you give.

A positive side-effect of asking questions to get feedback is that you’ve demonstrated you seek and can process challenging feedback. Over time, this creates trust and allows you to offer more challenging feedback to your reports.

During your 1:1s, ask questions that help you be a more effective leader for them:

• “Is there anything I can stop/start doing that would make your life easier?” 

This is a good place to start. When you’re ready, ask this varsity-level question:

• “What’s one thing you think would be really hard for me to hear, but that I really need to? I’d like to hear that feedback.”

Set the example of being radically open to feedback and make sure your FQ (Festering Quotient) is low in your relationship. Simply put, the longer you wait to talk about an issue, the more stinky it gets, for everyone involved.

(For more on the FQ and the SBIO model of giving situational feedback, listen to this podcast about The Intentional Conversations That Build Powerful Co-founder Relationships, with Rei Wang and Anita Hossain, co-founders of coaching platform The Grand.)

4. Start with wins and increase your positive-to-negative feedback ratio

Top performing teams maintain a nearly 6:1 ratio of positive to negative comments, according to HBR. It is likely that the abundance of positive comments helps create a deeply felt sense of psychological safety and the connective tissue that allows feedback to be heard as constructive rather than negative…and to be acted on, all while driving performance.

You can leave this ratio to chance, or you can choose, as the leader, to create a culture of celebrating wins. One-on-ones are the perfect opportunity to plant the seeds of that culture. Too often, I see 1:1s getting bogged down in project management and troubleshooting. Start with wins, and start creating a better feedback ratio early.

Also note: the more specific your feedback is, the better. 

Think about feedback as four quadrants, represented by the suits of a deck of cards: Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. Feedback can be Warm (positive) or Cool (negative), and Sharp (clear) or Fuzzy (vague). Note this is not my framework! I first learned it from my friend Peter Haasz.

Giving people “Warm and Fuzzy” feedback in your one-on-ones is nice, like the Heart that represents it, but giving pieces of Sharp and Warm feedback, like little Diamonds, makes people feel really seen. An additional positive side-effect is that the more you notice and name their excellence, the more excellence you can evoke in them over time.

For example, compare these two pieces of feedback:

“Great job on that client presentation.”

vs. 

“The way you reframed the client’s objections to the roadmap shift as a natural evolution that would be a win-win took a lot of presence of mind. You really commanded the room in that moment. Great job.” 

Spend more time in the Warm-and-Sharp Quadrant than you do in the Warm-and-Fuzzy Quadrant of The Feedback Matrix, and spend time between your 1:1s collecting diamonds to share with your direct reports.

It’s best practice to give your direct reports cool-and-sharp feedback in the moment or as close as possible to whatever happened to evoke the feedback. Don’t wait for a 1:1. The Feedback Matrix above classifies cool-and-sharp feedback as the playing card suit “spades.” (Spades are what the British call a shovel). Just as a spade is a handy garden tool, think of cool-and-sharp feedback as a tool to help folks get better. Share that feedback with them when you can be cool and calm about giving them the feedback—, i.e., when you can share the feedback in a helpful, non-clubbing- them-over-the-head kind of way

5. Use 1:1s to coach your team to solve their own problems, not to solve their problems for them.

After working with me for a few months, many of the CEOs I coach ask me, “How can I work with my team the way you work with me?” These leaders see how our coaching conversations make space for their own deep thinking and strategic problem solving and they want to do the same for their teams. But these CEOs are all smart and effective problem solvers; it’s easy for them to slip back into their problem-solving habits. But, “what got you here won’t get you there.” 

In order to scale your leadership impact, you need to scale your team’s impact. That scale will happen more rapidly if you slow down and learn to coach their thinking, instead of doing it all for them. 

Slowing down and leveraging a coaching approach can feel frustrating at first. The best way to make progress with anything is to put it on your calendar and stick with it. Developing a coaching habit with your team is no different. Insert a regular coaching conversation agenda item in your standard 1:1 agenda in collaboration with your direct reports.

In short, remove the option to NOT coach by telling them you will be coaching them, not solving problems for them. Ask them to come to the conversation with the key priorities they feel blocked on and what they think their best solution options for each one are. 

Then, to help coach them to think through problems, leverage the SSOON Model of Coaching Conversations.  The SSOON model helps make their implicit thinking explicit in five simple steps so you can understand their thinking process.

1. Situation: What’s the context around the challenge the coachee is facing? A coaching stance here is to just ask more questions to uncover what’s really going on and encourage the coachee to share their thoughts and experiences fully.

2. Success: Here, the focus shifts to envisioning the desired future. The coach helps the coachee articulate what success looks like and explores possibilities that may exceed their initial expectations, often using imaginative questions to clarify their vision. 

3. Obstacles: In this step, the coach encourages the coachee to identify any barriers preventing them from achieving success. By reflecting on these obstacles, the coachee can gain clarity on what stands in their way.

4. Options: Once success is clearly defined and obstacles are acknowledged, the conversation moves to exploring potential actions. The coach facilitates brainstorming and may offer gentle suggestions to help the coachee consider various paths forward that they haven’t considered.

5. Next Steps: Finally, the coach guides the coachee to commit to specific actions they will take moving forward. This involves selecting manageable and impactful steps that can lead to the desired outcome, reinforcing a sense of accountability and momentum.

Together, these five elements help create a structured and reflective coaching dialogue, empowering the coachee to navigate their challenges and achieve their goals through clearer thinking, guided by you.

6. Create a standard agenda together, but follow the structure of creative conversations.

I talk about these phases in more depth here, but you can also read one of my favorite books, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, which is the source of the delightful diagram above. 

(See below for 22 questions to use across these three phases to create your own ideal 1:1 agenda with your direct reports.)

7. Listen deeply and actively before responding.

Remember the Talking and Thinking Gap, which captures the fact that while people can think at up to 4,000 words a minute, most of us can only speak at 125 words per minute. So, in every interaction, people always have more to say than they can ever express.

For leaders, this means that in your meetings, you don’t hear everything your direct reports want to say. Plus, you’re often likely thinking a bit about what you might say in response, or something else entirely! Don’t forget this classic quote from the late U.S. ambassador Robert J. McCloskey:

““I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” ”

— Robert J. McCloskey

Assume that you did not fully understand everything your teammate meant to convey.

Active listening is usually defined as making sure you heard what you thought you heard by repeating it back and getting confirmation.

To listen more deeply, try leveraging the Listening Triangle to get to the heart of what’s being said.

When you get confirmation that you heard them right (by sharing your active-listening paraphrase), ask another question from a slightly different angle to deeper into their response. The listening triangle helps you get to the heart of what someone is really saying.

Re-asking also helps create the kind of psychological safety essential for an effective leadership relationship, confirming that you really want to understand their perspective.

8. Flip who runs the show.

Share your plan to coach more, and share this article with them so they know the game plan you’ll be sourcing from. Sketch out an agenda together (Item #6!) then hand the agenda over to them and let them take the reins. This eliminates almost entirely the possibility of backsliding on your intentions!

9. Align on a time horizon to focus each conversation on.

Often, 1:1s can get stuck in the now—the immediate challenges of a company’s day-to-day survival and growth—which is natural. 

In fact, most people are encouraged to focus on the most urgent and important items on their to-do list. This is a trap! The idea of focusing on the urgent and important is a mis-application of a speech by former president Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. In the speech, Eisenhower was quoting Dr. J. Roscoe Miller, President of Northwestern University, as saying:

““I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.
The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
”

— Dr. J. Roscoe Miller

This "Eisenhower Principle" is said to be how he organized his workload and priorities. For years, I was told to focus on the Important/Urgent quadrant (in red, far left) as a first priority and to delegate or ignore the Not Urgent/Not important (in blue, lower right on both matrices below). But the quote is actually pointing us to the upper right yellow-green quadrant - the NOT urgent YET Important quadrant. 

These NOT urgent YET Important items are the ones that easily fall off a to-do list filled with urgency but lacking items that address longer-term or even medium-term strategic impact.

Working with your leadership team to focus weekly or bi-weekly conversations on the non-urgent but important items will slowly create a buffer against the tyranny of urgency. The matrix on the right is the ideal Eisenhower matrix - intentionally making ample time for the non-urgent as the lion’s share of our focus.

Make sure you use periodic conversations to look even further ahead - where does this person want to be in 10 years? In five? Where do you both see the company in three years? Shift the time horizon for each conversation intentionally.

10. Follow up on past conversations.

Make sure topics and issues don’t dangle. Following up on past issues with your direct reports will remind them not only to stay accountable to you, but also to follow up with their direct reports so that they remain accountable too. All of it trickles down to create a culture of accountability organization-wide. I hosted a lovely podcast conversation with the co-founders of Huddle who called this shift "building an Integrity Culture" - a culture where you expect yourself and others to do what they say they will. Listen here.

11. Get feedback on the meeting format.

Regularly check in with your direct reports and ask them: Are you getting what you need from these conversations? What’s working? What could be improved? 

As mentioned above, you will find that the unique needs of each member of your team will shape the 1:1s over time, even though they will all follow the same open-explore-close architecture.

22 questions to try out in your 1:1s

Questions are the rocket fuel of conversations, and 1:1s are no exception. Here are some tried-and-true questions to take for a test drive on your next one-on-one, organized according to the open-explore-close pattern of powerful, creative conversations:

Opening:

1. The “Traffic Light” check in. 🚥 Are you Green (all systems go, full speed ahead), in the Red zone (ie, having some significant challenges you’re managing that are stopping you in your tracks) or yellow (ie, you need to slow down to stay safe)

2. What has your attention right now?

3. What's driving you crazy these days? 

4. What's making you happy to come to work these days? 

5. What is the general mood and morale of the team(s) you're on? 

6. How are things outside of work?

7. How is stress at work?

8. How is your workload at work?

Exploring Key Topics:

1. Progress towards goals:

a. What Victories do we need to celebrate? 

b. What are some important Roadblocks we need to remove?

2. Career development:

a. Where do you want to go? How are we going to get you there?

3. Coaching questions:

a. How can I help (with challenge X)?

b. What does “good” look like? What’s your real goal?

c. What’s the real challenge for you here?

d. If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? (nod to Michael Bungay Stanier for this powerful question)

e. Check out the SSOON model of coaching to make sure you lead a coaching conversation effectively.

4. Feedback for the leader:

a. What’s one thing you think would be really hard for me to hear?

b. Anything I'm doing that I need to stop? 

c. Anything I should be doing that I'm not? 

d. Anything I'm doing that I should keep doing?

e. What should I be doing more of, or less of, to make your experience at ___ the best it can be?

Closing:

1. What's your next step?

2. What was most useful to you?

Leading Teams to Unlock Creative Potential with Design Thinking

There is more intelligence inside our organizations and our teams than we are using.

It’s the job of leaders to unlock the creative power of their teams - not to generate solutions to all problems for them.

Leaders can do this by leading conversations that leverage the power of a creative process - finding new, unexpected and innovative solutions to challenging problems instead of business as usual. 

This creative process has gone by many names, has been studied for decades, and offers leaders powerful, practical tools to drive change and innovation through creative conversations. My book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter is just one of many, many books on this topic. In this essay I’ll break down some essential tools of leading creative conversations and share some other books on the topic for your further reading.

At various times, this process has been called Creative Problem Solving (CPS), and more recently known as Design Thinking. Over the decades these approaches have been hailed as practical and functional, or a terribly failed experiment.

While the realities on the ground of how these methods get implemented is nuanced (to say the least!), Creative Problem Solving and Design Thinking work because they leverage some fundamental forces of creative gravity. In my days as a physicist, we liked to joke that gravity isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. 

You try to get a plane in the air without understanding aerodynamics and the fundamentals of gravity! Working with a basic understanding of the laws of creativity means leaders can make meetings soar, instead of feeling like a drag. And yet most leaders are flying blind or working with outmoded theories.

These methods are best learned in action, so…Let’s do an experiment, shall we? After the game, I’ll unpack the five keys to leading more impactful creative problem solving meetings with your team.

I’ve been playing improv games to help teams learn design thinking in action for years. And I remember the first time I saw a colleague lead a group through this particular game more than 10 years ago. At the time, I had taken some improv classes and had already been teaching design thinking for awhile, but had never thought to put them together. It lit a spark in me that still burns to this day. There are many ways to lead this game and to help teams unpack their experience and make meaning of it. This is my approach.

Setting the Scene

I set the scene by asking the group if anyone has done any improv.

Some have, some haven’t.

I remind those that have done improv that we will be “breaking” some of the rules of improv. This will create some discomfort, and I ask for their patience and curiosity with the discomfort. 

For those who haven’t done improv, I *also* ask them for their patience and curiosity with the exercise ahead.

Yes, But

“Grab a partner and plan a party together for the next 2 minutes. One person will suggest a party idea. The other will respond with yes, but….

And you’ll continue to offer suggestions, back and forth, always starting with yes, but…”

It’s a simple instruction. If you do this exercise in person, you’ll hear the noise in the room rise as people dutifully try to follow your instructions and have a “Yes, But..” conversation. And one minute later, you’ll hear the chatter in the room die down as people struggle to keep the conversation going.

At two minutes I rescue the room from the pain of continuing. 

“What was that like?” I ask

“Painful”

“Hard”

“Slow”

“Argumentative”

…come the replies.

“Did anyone actually get to plan the party?” I probe

Most teams admit that they got bogged down pretty early - where to get the ice became an intractable problem. They got lost in the details.

I draw the axes of Energy over Time and ask the teams - did your energy go up or down during the conversation? The chart below summarizes the overall experience - Energy in the groups drops, fast.

Now, there will be one or two pairs who had a BLAST during this conversation. In some organizations the proportions of “Yes, but” enjoyers are even higher.

“I loved how they kept poking holes in my ideas and I had to find solutions!”

But the room as a whole admits that such conversations create a one-sided effort that does wear thin over time since poking holes is a lot easier than plugging them.

The main points I want teams to notice is that:

Many people do not enjoy “Yes, But” Conversations.

Some people like “Yes, But” Conversations

Overall, “Yes, But” conversations drain energy

Yes, And

“Grab the same partner. The other partner now gets to suggest a party idea. You’ll continue to offer responses, back and forth, always starting with yes, and…for the next 2 minutes”

Again, if you do this exercise in person, you’ll hear the noise in the room rise as people dutifully try to follow your instructions and have a “Yes, And..” conversation. And one minute later, you’ll hear the chatter in the room continue to rise as people really get into the party ideas

At two minutes I have to shout to be heard and get the room to settle down.

“What was that like?” I ask

“Fun”

“Energizing”

“Collaborative”

“Flow”

…come the replies.

“Did anyone actually get to plan the party?” I probe

The room usually explodes with people ready to launch their party ideas into the stratosphere.

Returning to the Energy X Time Chart, I ask the room how the arc of their energy was for this conversation. 

“Was it going up and to the right?”

Most of the room agrees.

“Or was it starting to level off?” I enquire

Now, in a mirror to the “yes, But” portion, there were several  pairs who felt like the “Yes, And” energy was getting to be a bit much towards the end of the conversation. Could they really afford Jay-Z and Beyonce for this intergalactic unicorn party on the moon? Who was going to fund the rocket flight - Bezos or Musk?! Things were starting to feel a bit out of hand for some.

At this point, I want the group to understand:

“Yes, And” Conversations are energy producing

Some people run out of steam with “Yes, And” Conversations

Different people run out of creative energy at different rates.

It is the job of a leader to make space for these modes of creative thinking. We need “Yes, And” thinking to make sure we have MORE creative ideas on the table. And we need “Yes, But” thinking to make sure the ideas actually hold water.

Opening and Closing at the same time sucks

At this point, I can point out the fundamental problem:

There are people who LOVE poking holes in ideas.

There are even folks who love having their ideas being poked.

But generally speaking, it’s more energizing to build on ideas.

So why are our creative meetings so broken?

The problem is that teams are generally playing BOTH games at the same time. We have all been in meetings where people are simultaneously generating and destroying ideas.

“What if we try___________?”

We did that last year… it didn’t work.”

“What if we try___________?”

“We can’t get that past legal.”

“What if we try___________?”

“That sounds expensive”

Like a quantum foam of particles being born of the vacuum and disappearing from existence in an instant, almost nothing escapes this kind of meeting, where “Yes, And” people are cut off by “Yes, But” people before ideas even get to develop or mature.

The leader who understands the physics of creative conversations makes sure we play both the “Yes, And” and the “Yes, But” games ONE AT A TIME. 

Yes, And is Opening. Divergent or Generative Energy.

Yes, But is Closing, Convergent or Subtractive Energy.

Electrons and protons are negatively and positively charged, respectively…but we need both in balance to make up the universe we live in.

So, too, do leaders need to balance positive and negative energy to drive creative thinking.

Creative Culture is limited by classic Cognitive Biases

At least two common cognitive pathways keep us from pushing through “Yes, But” thinking into new and innovative solutions: The Loss-Aversion Bias and the Negativity Bias.

The Negativity bias is thought to be an adaptive evolutionary function (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1999; Vaish et al., 2008; Norman et al., 2011). Our prehistoric ancestors were exposed to environmental threats that were truly threatening - the sound of snapping branches in the woods could actually be a tiger or worse. Being highly attentive to potentially negative stimuli played a useful role in survival. Seeing gaps and challenges in ideas as fatal flaws to be avoided at all costs makes us flee from new ideas.

The Loss-Aversion Bias is summed up by the old saying “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Loss aversion was first proposed back in 1979 by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as an important framework for prospect theory – an analysis of decision under risk. We feel the possible loss of, say $10, much much more sharply than the gain of $10. Investopedia suggests that “human beings experience losses asymmetrically more severely than equivalent gains. This overwhelming fear of loss can cause investors to behave irrationally and make bad decisions, such as holding onto a stock for too long or too little time.”

Samuelson and Zeckhauser, in their 1988 paper “Status quo in decision making” pointed out that incumbents do much better than they would in a neutral election.

These cognitive biases keep us rooted in protecting what we have instead of exploring new possibilities - because doing so costs time and energy.

Creative leaders make space for Opening, Exploring and Closing.

In 2010 I read Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. Gamestorming brought together decades of practical wisdom and research into how groups can work together, better by thinking of work through the lens of game theory.

Yes, And is a Game. The rules create an additive thinking space.

Yes, But is a Game. The rules create a thinking space of subtraction.

It’s easy to get frustrated when you are playing a different game than everyone else on the field. Can you imagine trying to play soccer while everyone else is playing rugby? Or playing chess while your partner is playing backgammon?

It’s impossible to make any progress this way.

Gamestorming opened my eyes to the importance of balancing these three games, in sequence, as in the diagram of a creative process below. The authors also  opened my eyes to a third energy: Emergence, or exploring.

Opening: Divergent (positive)

Exploring: Emergent (neutral)

Closing: Convergent (negative)

In the universe, we have electrons and protons, but it’s actually neutrons that help hold atoms together. And just so, a culture of innovation is found in making space for creative emergence - a kind of “neutral” space, where we are not generating or eliminating ideas, but holding space for them to be heard and to combine and recombine.

Openers love opening and may resist closing.

Closers love closing and may drag their heels in opening.

Almost everyone finds exploring a bit challenging, which is why Sam Kaner’s Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making describes this middle part of the creative process as the “Groan Zone”.

We all need to become switch hitters in the creative process if we’re going to work together.

Openers need to learn to close - to choose and launch

Closers need to learn to lean into opening, to get curious about ideas before poking holes in them.

Leaders can create the guardrails for conversations that make this possible. 

Creative Leaders are Multipliers

Leaders have an outsized influence on how teams solve problems. They can intentionally set up a space where these three modes of creative conversation can flow. If they know where the rough air is going to be in the process, they can plan for it.

For example, in her bestselling book Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter, Liz Wiseman posits that there are at least two types of leaders 

- Multipliers, who expect great results from their teams AND create the conditions for genius to emerge 

and …

- Diminishers, who micromanage, take credit and waste the genius in their teams and organizations.

Multiplier leaders provide the support and forward movement for teams to navigate the perilous middle of the creative process with grace. They expect great results and know that setting time aside for thinking through options and opportunities creates the best results - what Daniel Kahneman calls “Thinking Slow” in his book “Thinking: Fast and Slow”.

How might we create the conditions for effective creative thinking for our teams?

At this point, the hour is coming to a close and there’s precious little time for much more than reflection and projection - getting people who’ve gone through this improv game to think about what it was like, and how they might lead differently in the future. And for them to share what they might already be doing that looks and feels like what we’ve been talking about for the last 45 minutes or so.

Five Steps for Leading Creative Conversations

Make space for Opening, Exploring and Closing. Doing all three in one short meeting may not be possible or feasible at first.

1. Open with a clear challenge statement. What problem are we here to solve? Defining the problem well is a powerful form of creative leadership. More on that here.

2. Open Pt 1: Think alone, then think together. Get everyone to write down their ideas in silence. For more on why, check out “Your next meeting should be silent”

3. Open Pt 2: Get people to share their ideas. No “Yes, But” energy allowed…yet!

4. Explore: Share ideas and remix them. Combine the best parts of ideas together. While some people criticize collective creativity with the saying “A camel is a horse designed by committee” I challenge you to cross the Sahara desert on a horse!

5. Close: Decide on one or more ideas to prototype, test or evolve.

Step Zero should usually be “Decide how you’re going to decide”.

Leaders need to set groups up for success by letting them know if this is a democracy or an advisory committee. Leaving things vague just causes a mess.

Step Six should usually be “Let’s talk to real people facing the challenge we described in step one without showing them our ideas yet” so that we reduce the chances of a third dangerous and common cognitive bias - the Confirmation Bias, ie “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values”.

In the Toyota System of continuous Improvement, this is called Genba, or Genba Walks - “going to the real place where the actual work is done”

Leadership is Designing and Facilitating the conditions for Transformative conversations.

Left to our own devices, conversations will be an unstructured mix of “Yes, And” and “Yes, But” modes of working. Leaders have the opportunity to set up conversations to run on a different operating system - one where teams cycle through “yes, and” and “yes, but” thinking in ways that create respect, psychological safety and forward movement.

This mode of leadership isn’t directive or authoritative, but is more akin to the style of leadership Daniel Goleman described in HBR in 2000 as a Leadership That Gets Results - a coaching mode of leadership. Coaching and Facilitation are two sides of one coin - leadership based in empathy and an understanding of how humans are built - but that’s a conversation for another time.