What If
A Distributed Work Tool
Team members explore the future without commitment by asking “What If . . . ?”
This experience helps teams to explore the future by taking away the pressure of action or the need to be brilliant, while rapidly generating ideas.
Additional structure like that found in the activity “Start, Stop, Do More” (see below) or specific attention can transform the start of a conversation and create powerful mini ideations on a regular basis.
Basic Version
The leader begins by saying, “Today we are simply going to launch offers of what we might do by saying ‘what if’ and then filling in the blank. These are offers, not commands. They are just ways for us to explore the future. For the next few minutes, there is no such thing as a foolish idea.”
To kick things off, the leader may share a few offers to model before turning the experience over to the team. For example, “What if we used regular mail to talk with each other” or “What if we limited ourselves to 10 hours of meeting time weekly.”
Start, Stop, Do More
The easiest way to give “What If” more structure is to do three rounds where you offer possibilities based on these fill-in-the-blanks:
“What if we started ___________?”
This question identifies new habits and tactics that people are interested in trying. Though this may seem like where you might want to begin this exercise, we actually think it’s best to begin with “do more.”
“What if we stopped ___________?”
This question may be one of the least asked and most important questions for businesses and teams. In service of working better together, people often look to starting something new, but identifying things that the team can stop doing requires little effort to implement while yielding pressure-relieving results.
“What if we did more of _________?”
This question identifies the things that are already going well on the team. This is actually a great place to begin, because building on current wins creates a positive feeling, while demonstrating that there is a lot already working.
Why This Works
Giving offers and asking "what if" gives people ownership over the ideas
A massive theory in social psychology and organizational theory is that of psychological ownership. This theory states that people tend to enjoy and value things more when they feel ownership of them.
In “What If,” people are empowered to either come up with the idea or to accept (or reject) the ideas given by others (including the leader!). This can help people obtain a psychological feeling of ownership as well as truly have ownership over the direction of the team.
