Avoiding Rabbit Holes
Sharon Toye
“Alice just could not sleep because her thoughts were way too deep, her mind had gone out for a stroll and fallen down a rabbit hole”
- Lewis Carrol
Lewis Carroll first introduced the term falling “down a rabbit hole” in his 1865 story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the story, Alice falls down the White Rabbit hole which takes her to Wonderland. During her lengthy fall she checks out her environment, grabs some food, thinks about other parts of the world, wonders about cats, and nearly falls asleep. Does this remind you of some team meetings where you disappear into metaphorical rabbit holes and little progression is made?
In Accelerating Performance[1] my co-author, Colin Price, and I outline the results of our extensive research with more than 2,000 teams across a wide number of organisations, functions, and geographies, in industries as diverse as banking, private equity, insurance, engineering, telecommunications, health care and charitable institutions. Our research into the financial impact of team health on organisational performance revealed a clear picture of the importance of healthy teams. Effective team meetings are one key domain of team health. It doesn’t matter whether a team is operating an airline or building the latest tech unicorn. Healthy high-performing teams know how to make effective decisions at pace, and to do this they need to either avoid rabbit holes or get out of them as quickly as possible.
Tell-tale signs your team meeting has fallen down a rabbit hole
Having observed and facilitated many hundreds of team meetings over the last two decades it is clear to me that a majority of teams frequently fall into some kind of rabbit hole, leading to lack of engagement and progress.
The first step in getting out of a rabbit hole is to recognise that you are in one. Here are some examples of what to look for:
Is the team bogged down in discussion and finding it difficult to agree a way forward?
Is there a lot of problem-stating with few clear proposals on how to move the discussion forward?
Are you experiencing the common phenomenon of ‘layering’? This is where team members pile their ideas on top of each other, with any useful suggestions disappearing into a black hole, often without even being acknowledged, let alone considered.
Are team members talking over each other with the consequent risk of missing vital contributions and insights?
Is valuable time lost by everyone having to say what is on their mind, even if ideas are just being repeated?
Have you gone off on an interesting, but irrelevant, tangent?
Once you start to recognise these rabbit holes you will see them everywhere in your meetings – a bit like the Baader-Meinhof[2] phenomenon, which is a frequency bias. You start to notice something new and suddenly you are aware of that thing all over the place. Once your awareness is heightened it tends to stay with you and you can spot the signs more quickly. See if you can start spotting these rabbit holes in your next team meeting.
Awareness is an essential first step, but to make a real difference you then need to do something with it. Here are three approaches to either avoid falling into a rabbit hole or to climb out of one as quickly as possible:
1. Listen to and summarise discussions
A lack of quality listening is a great precursor to disappearing into a rabbit hole. See if you can spot when you or others are either not listening (although perhaps making a good job of looking like you are!) or only listening for evidence and opportunities to win an argument. Giving your full attention, actively listening and summarising where you think a discussion has got to is enormously helpful to keep the meeting on track. The critical step of summarising what you have heard enables everyone to stand back, pause and see where the discussion has got to and what might be best to focus on next.
2. Make clear proposals
Pay attention in your next team meeting to how many clear proposals are made that move the discussion forward. I suspect there will be very few. Without clear proposals the team risks spinning around on topics, adding a bunch of great ideas that don’t go anywhere. Making a clear, succinct proposal focuses the work of a team and gives it forward momentum.
In your next team meeting try making clear proposals yourself and encourage others to do the same. Here is a simple 4-step process to ensure that your proposals are clear and concise:
If you summarise a discussion and then make a clear proposal, it can be hugely impactful in either avoiding, or getting out of, rabbit holes.
3. Balcony and Dance
Heifetz and Linksy[3] coined the term ‘moving from the dance floor to the balcony’ as part of their adaptive leadership theory based on research they conducted at Harvard University. Moving from the dance floor to the balcony describes the mental activity of stepping back from the discussion and asking ‘what’s really going on here?’. Team members metaphorically step away (head up to the balcony) whilst in the midst of the team discussion (the dance floor). In team meetings people spend most of their time on the dance floor, engrossed in the task, where it is difficult to see what’s happening in the room. Balcony and dance is an approach where you ask one or two members to be both in the dance and on the balcony – to be both in the meeting and observing it. Consequently, those on the balcony have a broader perspective of what’s really happening in the meeting. By asking those on the balcony for their observations part-way through a meeting on what is helping and hindering effective discussions and decision-making you either avoid or escape from the inevitable rabbit holes.
I recommend that you relish this team role and take turns on the balcony to develop the skill of being in the meeting and observing it.
For many years I’ve used and facilitated these 3 approaches with teams across geographies and industries. Many teams have integrated them into their everyday work with great success. Whether you are a team leader or a team member, try using them in your meetings to avoid or escape from the ubiquitous rabbit holes. Then use your time on the Balcony to watch as your team accelerates its performance.
Sharon Toye is a founding partner with Leadership Mindset Partners. She brings a breadth and depth of psychological expertise with a passion for business impact to the executive teams she works with. She is co-author of Accelerating Performance: How Organisations can Mobilize, Execute and Transform with Agility
https://www.leadershipmindsetpartners.com/
[1] Price & Toye (2016) Accelerating Performance: How Organisations can Mobilize, Execute and Transform with Agility. London:Wiley
[2] https://www.healthline.com/health/baader-meinhof-phenomenon