What are the "elephants in the room" for your leadership team?

You know how sometimes you have an idea or a conversation, and then that idea unexpectedly  pops up again, more than once, so that it becomes a kind of theme? That happened in our work with company leadership teams over just the past few weeks. The recurring theme: what are the "elephants in the room" for your leadership team? 

Good problem definition is a critical foundation in agile strategy, as unless you define the problem correctly, its unlikely you will get the right solution. This is particularly important with respect to business, company and market design issues, where the impact of correct problem definition can be profound. As a result, we spend a lot of time working with leadership teams to surface, properly define and prioritize their key issues.

In many cases, individual interviews with leadership team members, or group brainstorming with the leadership team as a whole, reveal a rich list of issues that need to be analyzed and synthesized to get to a well defined set of priority issues. In some cases, however, the leadership team is unwilling or even unable to articulate some of the issues they are facing.

Perhaps the issue is to do with the CEO, founder or other influential stakeholder, the increasingly obvious lack of success of a key initiative, or fundamental market discontuities that threaten the core of the company. Perhaps there are issues that fall between current organizational responsibilities, so "no-one" and "everyone" is responsible for them. There may be issues that the team believes the founders, shareholders or board will never agree to address. Or they may even be issues that exist because of a prevailing mental model that is never challenged - for example, the requirement to make a certain gross margin.   

Whatever it is, the issue is not being discussed - even though many leadership team members may recognize the issue and even know that it urgently needs to be addressed. This can be a major challenge for leadership teams, as these "elephant in the room" issues go unaddressed, in some cases for years, potentially severely hampering company performance.   

In such cases, the first step it to recognize that there are unexpressed or even unidentified issues, some of which may be having a significant impact. With that recognition, your leadership team can then do a short exercise to take a step back and really think deeply about the critical challenges you face as a company. It is often most effective to do this through a combination of confidentail individual intervioews and group sessions. 

Doing this in a properly facilitated process ensures an optimal result that will reveal the actual, often deep, issues facing the company, engage each participant in a positive way and really advance the team's thinking. Done properly, with a genuine commitment to address all the elephants in the room, it can unleash powerful new insights and real excitement amongst your leadership team.