9 out of 10 people agree: you’re wrong about penguins
How design thinking helps teams get and stay aligned
Published December 18, 2023
Psychologist Celeste Kidd at U.C. Berkeley asked a bunch of people about penguins. She wondered how much overlap there was between different people's concept of what a penguin is. The result blew her mind.
“The probability two people selected at random will share the same concept about penguins is around 12 percent” (Makin 2023).
Even worse, the same study showed while you might disagree with a friend about what a penguin is, you think that they agree with you.
“Participants believed around two thirds would agree with them when the actual proportion was usually much smaller. In some cases, people believed they were in the majority when virtually nobody agreed” (Makin 2023).
Conceptual misalignment happens especially with abstract concepts. Research on organizational strategy by Vikas Mittal, Alessandro Piazza, and Ashwin Malshe shows that organizations believe they are well-aligned: “participants were largely optimistic… reporting that they felt strategic agreement within their companies was 82%.” In fact, alignment fared much worse, averaging just 23% (Mittal 2023).
Conceptual disagreements like these hamper your team’s progress because team members pursue "divergent or even clashing goals" (Mittal 2023).
With all this conceptual disagreement, how do you align your team?
Three design thinking facilitation strategies help your team get and stay aligned:
Make it real
Ask questions
Come to an agreement
1. Make your ideas real
If something isn't written down, it isn't real. Workshops spawn flurries of sticky notes because every idea you write down can be seen, asked about, moved around, and discussed. When you take an idea and make it real, you give your colleagues something they can see and react to, point at, and respond to.
Writing your ideas down and making them real is the first step to bringing your team closer to conceptual alignment.
2. Ask questions
The entire point of writing your ideas down is so they can be discussed. Good teams ask each other questions to clarify ideas, understand implications, and uncover nuances.
These discussions ensure everyone on the team understands each idea in the same way. Through discussion, your team comes to conceptual alignment.
3. Come to agreement
Every facilitated discussion should arrive at a decision about how to move forward. Insisting the team makes these decisions requires that the team has created a shared understanding of the issue they’re discussing and a shared vision around the ideas they’ve chosen to move forward with.
* * *
9 out of 10 of your colleagues probably do agree that you’re wrong about penguins. Making your ideas about penguins real, discussing them, and then deciding what ideas to move forward with as a group helps your team get and stay aligned.
These strategies work as well for penguins as they do for business processes, and innovation. Design thinking facilitation helps your team get on the same page, so they can make productive decisions and move forward.
Makin, Simon. 2023. “People Differ Widely in Their Understanding of Even a Simple Concept Such as the Word ‘Penguin.’” Scientific American. April 25, 2023.
Mittal, Vikas, Alessandro Piazza, and Ashwin Malshe. 2023. “Is Your Company as Strategically Aligned as You Think It Is?” Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2023.
“The probability two people... share the same concept about penguins is around 12 percent”
