Our frames are valid

A story of moving towards greater unity in organizations

We were forty people in a big open hall to discuss strategy at a major AI company’s first product offsite. And I heard someone say afterwards that the meeting was the most meaningful meeting of their careers. I vividly remember the moment when the presence of our group deepened, and the glow of the light coming through the windows shone brighter and more brilliantly. And this moment wasn’t an accident, it was predictable because it had some important ingredients. Why aren’t more meetings like this?

Five years earlier, I stood in front of a small mental health start-up to boldly share a strategy. I expected the people sitting in front of me to feel the same enthusiasm that I felt while presenting the strategy that we had spent an entire offsite day creating. It elegantly integrated our engagement goals, our design goal and also our clinical goals. Once this strategy clicked, ideas for our product and company came pouring out from us.

But instead of sharing our enthusiasm, I could feel the painful disconnect with the people in the room. I looked out and the group was silent. The sales VP looked confused and the COO looked tense and concerned.

I knew that everyone cared about the mission and about the people we served, and so I hoped we could inspire them with a product strategy that was in that frame. But I was not integrating theirs.

In an organization, different roles are the keepers of different frames. For example, a sales team is holding the frames that help them close deals, like contacts, pipelines, and individual relationships. And these seemed to be the metrics in their minds when listening, what would help them succeed at their roles. I joked with a friend that different people are walking around thinking “number go up” for different things. In this meeting, the sales person didn’t see the relevance of my grand vision for their responsibilities.

It wasn’t until I started treating his priorities as essential that I saw how we could combine his strategy.

I think the way to integrate multiple parts of the organization into a cohesive strategy is to hold them in tension until a creative third way pops up. But, importantly, I don’t think it works to just look across all the goals of an organization. I believe that adding caring for people and the mission is an essential ingredient and the solvent that makes a unified strategy possible.

Caring for people is a unifying frame. It brings people out of a zero sum mindset. It opens hearts, helping us be creative. It puts us in touch with a deeper emotional layer of our experience which creates a sense of connection that we need to unite with each other around a vision.

At the major AI company, I contributed to the product team’s first off-site by bringing in the unifying frame of our care for people into the discussion with the whole team who were working on sales or product. Importantly, I was not framing it as being in competition to the other’s goals, which were essential, but making a case for there needing to be an intersection.

And the room palpably shifted. It felt like we were suddenly a united group. Anxiety dropped, openness increased. And a few colleagues who pay attention to culture saw this moment too with awe.