Our own model · Metaphor
The six and the nine.
The image is simple and useful for that reason. A figure is painted on the floor and two people are standing on either side of it. One sees a six and the other a nine, and neither of them is wrong about anything, because the difference lies in where they stand and not in what they are looking at. In a company this is the everyday rather than the exception, and most conflicts described as problems with collaboration are in practice two people standing on opposite sides of the same figure.
Where the figure usually lies
Sales sees a customer who is ready to sign if only you can start in March. Delivery sees the same customer as a project that will burst an already full spring. Neither of them is describing the customer wrongly.
Finance sees a price that covers the costs with a margin. Sales sees the same price as the reason three deals went to somebody else. Both figures are correct.
Two people talk about the sales process and mean different things by the stage Qualified. To one of them it means the customer has shown clear interest and seems to want to work with you. To the other it means you have tested the customer against your own criteria. Neither is using the wrong word, but the forecast they read off the same list turns into two different forecasts.
Why it isn’t solved by somebody explaining
The first attempt is nearly always that one of them describes their own picture more carefully, preferably with more supporting material. That rarely helps, because the problem is not that the picture is unclearly described but that the other person is standing somewhere else.
What actually moves something is one of them walking round and standing beside the other. In practice that means the salesperson sitting in on a delivery meeting, or the person doing the costing coming along on a customer visit where the price is questioned, meaning not as a guest but for long enough to see the figure from that side.
Two questions that move more than an explanation
When you notice that what you said landed wrongly, there are two questions that do more good than a clarification.
The first is “what did you hear me say just now?” The answer usually differs from what you said, and only then do you see where the figure lies for the other person.
The second is “what consequences does that have for you?” That one explains the reaction. What sounded like an objection to the proposal often turns out to be an objection to something the proposal would mean, and the two are not the same thing.
Only after that is there any point going on. The aim is not for the other person to see my figure, but for us to read the same one. Sometimes that means she walks round, sometimes that I do, and which of the two matters less than that you are standing on the same side when the decision is made.
It won’t do as an excuse
The image has a flip side. That everybody is right from where they stand must not become a reason to avoid deciding, because the company still has to choose whether there is a six or a nine on the floor this time.
The point, then, is not that all perspectives weigh the same, but that the decision gets better when it is made in knowledge of both, and that the person who gets a no understands why. An employee who understands which figure applied and why can follow the decision. One who was only told they were wrong rarely does.
Something to try
Take a question where two parts of the company have been pulling in different directions for a while. Have each of them describe the other’s position well enough for the other to recognise themselves in it, meaning not their own first.
If that cannot be done, you have found the problem itself, and that usually does as an insight for this time round. If it can, the question afterwards is usually a good deal smaller than it looked.
In practice
In The Review this is often the first thing to become visible, because we talk to several people separately. The picture of what the company sells, what it is able to deliver and what that is worth nearly always diverges somewhat, and it rarely shows in the everyday precisely because everybody is right in their own corner.