Building consensus around difficult strategic decisions is one of the toughest challenges senior leaders face today. With high-stakes issues clouded by preconceived notions, conflicting data, and deeply held beliefs, traditional meetings often create more friction than alignment. At The Willis Organization, we help leadership teams cut through this complexity and turn disagreement into productive dialogue and actionable outcomes.
Senior leaders today have the unenviable task of making decisions around difficult strategic issues, where people come into discussions with preconceived notions, and where data can be skewed to support pre-existing perspectives. We experience this regularly in our work helping top leadership teams navigate disruptive change: Should they sustain the core business or create new growth businesses? Should they invest in a hot new technology or take more of a wait-and-see approach? These are rich questions that can’t be answered clearly, even in hindsight.
Strategic Sparring Session
Over the past two decades, we have developed a tool to help leaders with this challenge: a strategic sparring session. These are immersive, interactive discussions specifically designed to help groups see through the fog that accompanies today’s predictable unpredictability. We call them “sparring sessions” because they are purposeful places to bat around ideas, challenge assumptions, and get fighting fit for the future. These sessions help teams align on key assumptions, build conviction on a path forward, and activate individual and collective change.
As an example, strategic sparring sessions can be a very effective tool for increasingly fraught “return to office” (RTO) discussions. Like other consequential strategic decisions, there is not one “right” answer in the virtual vs. hybrid vs. in-person debate. But applying three key principles can enable leadership teams and critical stakeholders to have productive discussions and create a RTO approach that’s appropriate for the context and needs. We’re using RTO as an example to help illustrate how to conduct a strategic sparring session, but the technique can be applied to any uncertainty that your company is facing or may face in the future. Here’s how it works.
Hold Data-Informed Dialogues
Amazon is a great example of a company that holds data-informed dialogues. The beginnings of important meetings at Amazon are characterized by a strange sound: silence. People are busy reading the six-page memos describing the issue at hand. There are no PowerPoint slides. In fact, the memo’s authors aren’t meant to present anything. Rather, they are meant to facilitate an honest-to-goodness discussion on the issue.
That space is the essential feature of a strategic sparring session. It isn’t death by PowerPoint or some other kind of one-way transmission of information. It isn’t even a debate where one side fights against the other. In his book On Dialogue, physicist David Bohn said a dialogue isn’t “ping-pong, where people are batting the ideas back and forth and the object of the game is to win or to take points for yourself,” but rather something featuring “common participation, in which we are not playing a game against each other, but with each other.”
This kind of dialogue brings people into the process of decision-making. Research by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne a generation ago showed that people strongly prefer “procedural” justice (a fair process) over “distributive” justice (a fair outcome). Inclusive dialogues build commitment — even if individuals ultimately disagree with specific outcomes.
The Future of Work
Will your company adapt or be left behind?
Regarding RTO, research shows that 80% of employers think their initial RTO policies were wrong, partially because only 7% of them used employee feedback to inform their strategies. Involving broader groups in the discussion will lead to much higher buy-in.
We call these “data-informed dialogues” to remind us that, while we should bring the best available data to the table, when talking about the future, data is by definition incomplete. Yes, bring the latest research on productivity, engagement, creativity, and so on in different environments. You’ll see conflicting findings, for sure. Do remote policies boost or diminish engagement? As Jena McGregor from Forbes noted in an extremely comprehensive review of research around work from home, “research can be cherry-picked to point to either result.”
Look carefully enough, though, and perhaps you will see patterns. It seems increasingly clear, for example, that open plan offices don’t actually boost creativity. You’ll likely see ambiguity and opportunities for innovation. As the Chief People Officer at one of our clients put it, “If you are telling your people exactly which weekdays they can or can’t work from home, this is still about order and control. It is not hybrid. Hybrid working should be liberating.” Another client has a department where everyone comes into the office for a full week each month and then can work flexibly the rest of the month. Client data suggests that the consistent expectation helps with planning and creates ample space for “heads down” focus and self-directed time, boosting productivity and engagement.
Hold Battles of Assumptions, Not Beliefs
We call this exercise “strategic sparring sessions,” but what exactly is the focus of the fight? Assumptions. Take, for example, a discussion that co-author Scott Anthony had with a team formulating a strategy to open a series of cafés in Japan.
The discussion among team members was getting heated.
“I believe we shouldn’t do this,” Rachel said. “We should shut it down.”
Another teammate, Asher immediately disagreed. “I believe we absolutely should do it. In fact, the problem is our targets are not aggressive enough.”
“Scott, what do you think?” they both asked.
Everyone looked at Scott. Rachel and Asher had entered into a battle of beliefs. While there may be individual winners in these battles, the institution always loses. Why? Because the personal connection that each person made to their claim means that at the end of the discussion, when a winner is anointed, the loser ends up feeling not heard, deflated, or dismissed.
Harvard Business School Professor and leadership expert Linda Hill notes that “you don’t get innovation without diversity and conflict.” But an overly personal battle inhibits what Hill calls creative abrasion, the friction between ideas that sparks creativity. When people take battles too personally, the sparks from abrasion glow white hot, but fail to change perspectives. Turning down the temperature allows creative abrasion to work its magic. Do that by shifting from beliefs to assumptions.
In this particular case, Scott stopped the discussion and re-framed it. Instead of starting statements with “I believe” or “I think,” he said that Rachel and Asher should make their argument with statements starting with “The critical assumption is.”
Rachel said the critical assumption behind her assertion was that the average Japanese customer would spend less than ¥1,000 (about $9) per order. Asher said he actually agreed with Rachel’s assumption. It turned out that his critical assumption was about the degree to which customers would become loyal and make the cafés a routine destination. Rachel asked about comparative data from other cafés. Asher said that was a good question and agreed to look into it in more depth. Everyone agreed on the need to conduct deeper analysis around the performance of the prototype café the company had opened. And we brainstormed ideas for other experiments that could increase our confidence around this critical assumption.
In any strategic sparring session about a future of work issue, it’s important to seek out critical assumptions behind different approaches. Make them specific so you can test them. Don’t accept statements like “it’s better to work from home.” Instead, push for information like “working remotely two days a week leads to a 10% increase in employee engagement scores,” or “having a required day per week in the office will lead to a 20% increase in feedback to engineers.” The more specific the assumption is, the more you can research it — and test it.
Focusing on assumptions over answers has two benefits. First, it depersonalizes the discussion. In psychological terms, you split the person and the argument, enabling productive creative abrasion. Second, it focuses on the areas where you need to learn more via research or focused experimentation.
Make Misalignment Visible
Groups will often end meetings thinking they are more aligned than they are. That’s why they need to fight against groupthink (where individuals prematurely conform to an emerging group viewpoint), the hierarchy effect (where individuals hesitate to question more senior voices), and social loafing (also known as the bystander effect, where an individual keeps quiet because they worry that speaking will give them more work to do) to minimize the gap between an individual’s private thoughts and what they express publicly. The goal of a strategic sparring session isn’t to drive to blind agreement. Rather, it is to pinpoint the greatest areas of misalignment.
A technique that we use to highlight misalignment is called “walk the line.” We take a key strategic issue, such as the revenue target for a new initiative, and then put a piece of tape on the floor. We put markings to delineate different positions and ask people to stand in the place that represents their view on the topic. Sometimes this is done in real-time; sometimes we use pre-surveys to get people to commit before entering the room. The exercise can be done fully digitally as well. We typically ask the most senior leader to go last (or sometimes not at all), as in many cultures team members will quickly mimic whatever the senior leader does. We then ask people to explain why they stood where they stood.
When we worked with Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading mobile telephony company, leaders were surprised to see that they had very different perspectives on their company’s growth trajectory over the next seven years. Critically, everyone saw, literally, where everyone stood, which enabled more robust discussions about critical assumptions and what data could change perspectives. Through several rounds of sparring sessions, the team aligned on a growth target that was significantly higher than the group’s starting position. One leader described the outcome as “a moment of joy and relief.”
A range of RTO topics could benefit from a walk-the-line approach. Put a piece of tape on the floor with markings ranging from highly disagree to highly agree. Then ask people to stand in the place that represents their perspective on prompts such as:
- Worker productivity (vs. employee engagement) is the variable that we should be optimizing for.
- Physical proximity boosts creativity.
- Teams are more productive when they spend more time together.
- Sales is only mastered through in-person apprenticeship.
- In-office days should be coordinated and mandated vs. at the discretion of employees.
- Compulsory office attendance will lead to our top performers leaving.
- Employees who do not comply with RTO policies should face negative repercussions.
- In-office days create more opportunities for learning through coaching, apprenticeship, and mentoring.
- Another way to make misalignment visible is to have a meeting ritual. For example, during decision meetings at DBS Bank, a leading bank based in Singapore that Scott and Natalie advised, a slide randomly appears during presentations featuring a character called Wreckoon, who asks questions such as “What have we forgotten?” “What is the riskiest assumption?” “What is the opposing view?” and “What could go wrong?”
Making decisions through uncertainty presents fundamental challenges. It also creates opportunities for forward-thinking organizations to outflank competitors and get ahead of market shifts. Strategic sparring sessions can help organizations develop their own unique take on the future of work — and move from talking in tense terms to confidently moving forward with focused experiments.
Article thanks to HBR. Authors: Scott D. Anthony, Natalie Painchaud and Andy Parker