Mastering the strategic moment

After you've recognized the strategic moment, the next thing you do is quite paradoxical. You do — nothing.

Have you been in a meeting lately — with one or twenty people — when the whole conversation went off on a tangent of no return? This is not an uncommon experience, particularly when the topic is challenging and the players have different points of view.

What can you do — either as a leader or meeting participant — to get people back on track, heading in the same direction, with shared commitment to a positive outcome?

Having clear desired outcomes and a meeting agenda with a logical topic flow are essential tools for setting up a meeting for success. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of intervention. But rarely does a meeting plan, however well constructed, prevent all conversational upsets, diversions, and shutdowns.

The first thing to notice — "Hmmm, something different is going on here" — is that the conversation has reached a crossroads. Let's call that crossroads a strategic moment. The strategic moment is a point in a discussion (or any process, including an organizational change) when participants are faced with a choice about what to do next and how to do it.

Examples of a strategic moment:

• People are talking about different subjects or using different processes.
• The group is stuck and can't decide how to move forward.
• One or two members of the group are dominating the conversation.

After you've recognized the strategic moment, the next thing you do is quite paradoxical. You do — nothing.

The biggest problem people have at strategic moments is to rush — in their minds, adrenal systems, and behavior — into action. Or more precisely, into reaction. That's a very understandable response. We rush to fix the situation because we want to reduce the anxiety associated with the uncertainty of the moment. But a quick reaction generally produces the wrong conversational move — and further exacerbates the tension in the moment.

In a strategic moment, it's not knowing what to do that counts. What really makes a difference is knowing what to do when you don't know that to do. That sounds pretty existential, but it's really quite simple.

In a strategic moment, the first thing to do is to slow down and stop, as we do at a traffic interchange. Then we ask three questions [5]: Where are we? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

Putting the questions of a strategic moment into action might look something like this:

1. Ask or say what's going on.

Excuse me. It looks like we're at a strategic moment. We seem to be talking about two separate issues.

2. Ask for, or restate, the desired outcome or phase of the conversation.

Before we continue, why don't we recall what we're trying to achieve here?

3. Ask for, or suggest, a process forward.

O.K. Since we're trying to reach agreement on this, what might be a good way to move forward? (Or... here's a suggestion for how to move forward.)

Strategic moments happen frequently during the course of a meeting. By taking the time to slow down — and to publicize and externalize the key questions of the moment, you can help get the group back onto the right track and increase the likelihood that others will share greater responsibility for success as the conversation moves along.