A Room Full of Hammers

Lis­ten to the Arti­cle (5:29)

We talk about a team full of yes peo­ple like it’s a diag­no­sis. Some­thing has gone wrong when every­one just agrees. And we talk about an aligned team like it’s the goal, the thing we’re all work­ing toward. Both of those are true, and nei­ther one is the whole story.

Align­ment mat­ters. We push hard for it in every com­pa­ny we work with. But align­ment and agree­ment are not the same thing, and when we stop telling them apart, some­thing starts to break. Too much agree­ment does­n’t feel like a prob­lem while it’s hap­pen­ing. It feels like har­mo­ny, like every­one’s final­ly on the same page. What it actu­al­ly pro­duces is tun­nel vision. Every­one starts see­ing the same things the same way, and the ideas out­side that view sim­ply stop show­ing up.

The Team That Agreed on Everything

My friend Mike Mad­dock learned this the hard way, long before he built Flour­ish Advi­so­ry Boards. Back when he ran Mad­dock Dou­glas, an inno­va­tion agency that worked with a quar­ter of the For­tune 100, the firm grew fast. Five mil­lion to 25 mil­lion in three or four years. Then it stalled. 25 mil­lion dropped to 22, then 18.

Out of des­per­a­tion, Mike brought in a con­sul­tant to test the whole exec­u­tive team. What she found stunned him: every­one but one per­son had almost the same Kolbe score. They were all quick starts. Under pres­sure or on their best day, they all did the same thing. Piv­ot­ed. Threw out new ideas.

Their resumes looked com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. But as Mike put it, ​“the win­dow we look at things through was the same.” When they saw a prob­lem, they were ham­mers look­ing for a nail. As he told it: ​“Every­thing looked like a nail. And if it did­n’t look like a nail, we did every­thing we could to make it look like a nail.”

It was­n’t a lack of tal­ent. The peo­ple in that room went on to lead major com­pa­nies, one became the head futur­ist at the largest con­sult­ing firm in the world. It was­n’t intel­li­gence, or val­ues, or expe­ri­ence. It was that they all saw prob­lems through the exact same lens, and nobody in the room could see what that lens was missing.

Engi­neer­ing the Room

That expe­ri­ence is why Flour­ish is built the way it is. Mike does­n’t just gath­er smart CEOs and hope for diver­si­ty of thought. He engi­neers it.

Diverse Per­spec­tives to Win (0:38)

Using tools like Kolbe, Pre­dic­tive Index, and Ennea­gram, he’s mapped out six seats every group needs:

• Oper­a­tor
• Strate­gist
• Rain­mak­er
• Vision­ary
• Tech futur­ist
• Orches­tra­tor

“I curate peers, forum groups,” he told me, ​“so that there’s at least one per­son in each one of those seats.” Add a pro­fes­sion­al mod­er­a­tor, a coach, and a rotat­ing guest expert, and you’ve got a room that’s built, on pur­pose, to see a prob­lem from six dif­fer­ent angles instead of one.

The pay­off shows up when some­one brings a hard prob­lem to the table. ​“You’re going to get it viewed through six dif­fer­ent lens­es,” Mike said, ​“and you’re going to see it dif­fer­ent­ly. And that is how you get unstuck.”

Com­fort­able Isn’t the Same as Aligned

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. We tend to build teams and boards the way Mike’s old agency built itself, not on pur­pose, but because it feels good. ​“We tend to recruit, attract, and hang out with peo­ple that laugh at our jokes,” he said, ​“that tell us that our baby isn’t ugly, it’s cute even when it is ugly.” It’s com­fort­able. It’s also how a whole room ends up agree­ing on the wrong thing.

Mike said some­thing else that stuck with me: ​“it’s been my expe­ri­ence that we tend to res­onate with opin­ions that align with ours. Because it’s easy. Our ego loves it.” His best think­ing does­n’t come from that com­fort. It comes from ​“out­side pres­sure and frus­tra­tion because some­one’s say­ing some­thing very different.”

CEO Suc­cess Requires Healthy Con­flict (0:31)

That’s the real dis­tinc­tion. Align­ment on where you’re going is exact­ly what a strong team needs. Agree­ment on how to get there, agree­ment that nev­er gets chal­lenged, is what qui­et­ly turns into tun­nel vision. You can have both a unit­ed team and a room that push­es back on you. In fact, the best teams have both at once.

Chal­lenge

Look around the table you rely on most, your lead­er­ship team, your board, your clos­est advisors.

• How many gen­uine­ly dif­fer­ent lens­es are actu­al­ly in that room, not dif­fer­ent titles, but dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing a problem?
• When was the last time some­one in that room told you some­thing you did­n’t want to hear, and you actu­al­ly changed course because of it?
• If you test­ed every­one’s nat­ur­al response to pres­sure the way Mike did, how many of you would come back look­ing the same?

If the hon­est answer is that your room agrees more often than it argues, that’s worth engi­neer­ing your way out of, on pur­pose, the way Mike did.

Watch the full inter­view with Mike:

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About Mike Maddock

Mike Mad­dock spent his career study­ing how good ideas die inside orga­ni­za­tions. He co-found­ed Mad­dock Dou­glas, an inno­va­tion agency that worked with a quar­ter of the For­tune 100, and wrote four books on the sub­ject, includ­ing Free the Idea Mon­key, Plan D, Brand New, and Flirt­ing with the Unin­ter­est­ed. He now runs Flour­ish Advi­so­ry Boards, where he curates peer forums so CEOs get pres­sure test­ed by six delib­er­ate­ly dif­fer­ent points of view instead of one. He also hosts the pod­cast Your Seat at the Table.