From Idea To Plan to Completion balancing team formation

I’ve been learning about balance lately in a highly colaborative workplace.  In this environment people come together to determine plans.

I’ve seem Kick-off meetings that attempted to involve everyone degenerate into chaos, I’ve seen well run teams conduct research around problems and solutions and then in the end no real change.  I’ve seen the talkers wandering from office to office selling their version of history and sometimes with great impact.

Can you develop an idea without doing some research.

Can you research an idea without approaching people for their expertise and explaining your idea.

In explaining and having people question how your activities will affect them, how do you explain if you don’t yet have a plan.  (You are still doing research right?)

So you get some information and you start converting your idea into a plan.

If you do have a plan, how do you avoid the impression that you have come up with a wonderful plan for their life without consulting them.

If you consult them, how are you going to balance their interests with the interests of others.

When do you involve people with a project, early enough so that they have a sense of ownership and buy-in, and so that you can benefit from their insights, but not too early so that their confusion poisons the vision for the project.  To early and you have chaos. Too late and you surprise people and they react. (people like surprises, but only for Christmas)

There seems to be a lot of rhetoric tied up in deciding when to involve people.  We’ve all see the projects that stretch on for an eternity and at the end we learn that almost the entire organization was at some point consulted, but in the end the result doesn’t really fit with the desires of the people listed as participants.  We hear about transparency, which seems to imply that you can’t have a meeting without inviting everyone.  We hear about vision and direction and goals, which usually means you missed the last meeting when everything was decided.

There are the pre-meetings before the meeting so that the people with goals can get everybody on side for the meeting and there are the post meeting where the misunderstandings get hammered out in the corridor safely away from where the meeting minutes might capture the insights that dispelled the confusion.

There are the shadow meeting which we all suspect must be taking place because half of the meeting participants are using words as if they had special meanings that had been hammered out previously. (Am I the only one who doesn’t think that makes logical sense?  Why is everyone sitting there smiling at me as if they knew something I don’t?)

For me respect is a big part of meetings.  I not only want to get to consensus, to hammer out issues and get to the root of problems, to get decisions on solutions or directions, I want to be building relationship with the people I meet.  I want to have a stronger connection with them the next time we meet.  A bridge that can carry more weight which, if required can bear the load of some ambiguity or confusion until it can be cleared up.

What are your thoughts about how soon is too soon to involve stakeholders in your meetings?