A field map of team collaboration
“No system is broken. Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”
W. Edwards Deming
Conversations might look like a soft skill, but they are a system: loops running under every meeting, decision and silence. And a system produces exactly what it is designed to produce. In a team, that is one of two things: value or waste.
This map comes from almost two decades inside hundreds of leadership teams all over the world. Five minutes here and you will recognize yours.
Behind this map
I research and facilitate organizational conversations: the kind leaders tend to avoid, and the kind that decides whether a team moves forward or stays stuck. Earlier in my career, I co-founded and ran a group of companies, so I have been on the receiving end too. I know what it costs when these conversations don’t happen.
The quality of your professional life comes down to the quality of your questions. Helping leaders and organizations ask better ones became the obsession behind this map.
A diagnostic you can run in one minute. Tick every sentence you have heard at work in the last thirty days. The map will tell you which loops are loudest in your team.
Six loops burn value. Three compound it. If some feel personal, good. None of them are character flaws. They are loops, and every loop here has a reverse gear.
Every waste cycle is a conversation that didn’t happen.
And every value cycle is one that did: early, direct, and with the right person.
Strip the nine loops to the skeleton and one structure remains. A tension arises. The conversation happens, or it doesn’t. What decides is how we listen. And avoided conversations behave like debt: relief now, interest later. Hover anything below: every box, sign and pill explains itself.
Same people, same pressure, opposite outcomes. The difference is a handful of sentences a team says to itself. Mindset is how I think; behavior is what I do.
Every line here recurs, in some wording, across a third or more of the teams behind this map.
A map is not an intervention. These four moves are, and none of them needs budget, permission, or an offsite.
MOVE 01
Bring the map to your next leadership meeting and ask one question: which of these is running us? Naming a loop out loud is the first time most teams see a system instead of a culprit.
MOVE 02
Retire “did you understand?” and “does it make sense?”. Ask “what worries you about this?”. One swap, every meeting. It converts silence into information.
MOVE 03
Pick one tension you have been postponing and have the fifteen-minute version this week, while it is still cheap. The same conversation at crisis point costs ten times more.
MOVE 04
Before the next project starts, put the review on the calendar. Teams that skip the look-back repay the same debt twice, and call it bad luck.
Somewhere in these loops you pictured a colleague, a boss, a whole team. They will recognize themselves too. That recognition is where the conversation starts.
Ryo Penna is a researcher and facilitator of organizational conversations. He maps how teams create value and waste when they talk, and facilitates the conversations leaders tend to avoid: almost two decades, hundreds of leadership teams, all over the world. New patterns land on LinkedIn first.
This map stands on
Systems deliver exactly what they are designed to deliver. The premise of the whole map. (Out of the Crisis, 1986)
The structure above is his shifting-the-burden archetype: the quick fix that quietly starves the real fix. (The Fifth Discipline, 1990)
The avoided conversation is a defensive routine: a skilled way teams protect themselves from discomfort, and from learning. (Harvard Business Review, 1994)
The stock this map calls trust and safety to speak. Her research made it measurable. (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999)
The deepest leverage in a system is the mindset it runs on. Here, that is how we listen. (Leverage Points, 1999)
Conversations create value or waste, and how we listen decides which. The engine under every loop here. (Mickey Connolly and Richard Rianoshek, The Communication Catalyst, 2002)