With tax season finally over, firms are taking a moment to breathe and regroup. Many will hold off-site retreats and do postmortems on what went well during busy season, what didn't go well, and what they can improve on. I applaud the effort, but if you're not careful, your brainstorming and debriefing meetings can be even more stressful than the busy season was.
Whether you're in your conference room or at a luxury off-site retreat, it's important to set the ground rules from day one about whether the debrief will take the form of an Idea Lab or an Echo Chamber.
In other words, do you want to have an Idea Lab promoting frank and open discussions in which everyone can suggest ideas and challenge how things have always been done? Or will the gatherings be more of an Echo Chamber in which groupthink and conformity dominate the discussion and few people have the courage or opportunity to challenge the status quo?
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In our profession, a great deal has changed over the past 12 months. If you feel your firm has been doing things the same way over that period, chances are you're doing something wrong. But I still see many firms in which the Echo Chamber lives on. Discussions are dominated by the five people who have been at the firm the longest. "We hear there's some new stuff coming along," they say. "But it sounds difficult to implement. So, we'll pass."
When viewed with an Echo Chamber lens, no decision is their final decision. And it's not just at off-site retreats and at all-hands gatherings. It's every day at firms like that.
Compare that to an Idea Lab in which everyone is free to ask: "What if we did things differently?" With an Idea Lab culture, team leaders can openly admit they don't have all the answers with fear of being embarrassed or marginalized. They can declare: "Hey, we're going to talk about change — and it's not a bad thing." That encourages trust and respect. It also encourages listening to other people's perspectives.
How to start an idea lab
I get this question often, but it's not a matter of starting an idea lab at your firm. An Idea Lab is not a physical place as much as it's the lens through which you have a conversation. You have to decide whether or not you want to challenge groupthink at your firm. Are you comfortable admitting you don't know the answer to a question when you really don't know? Do you have a healthy degree of skepticism around the status quo? Your whole office is an Idea Lab, especially when you're going into meetings where decisions will be made.
One of the best ways to get the Idea Lab mindset to take hold at your firm is to explain the danger of living in an Echo Chamber. It's the same thing repeatedly in which you largely ignore each other's opinions, when you keep hiring and recruiting the same kinds of people, and when you don't encourage people to try new things and make some mistakes. That's the only way to grow.
To change, you must have a safe place where people feel comfortable respectfully disagreeing with each other. In an Idea Lab, a disagreement isn't about determining a winner and a loser to a debate. It's about collectively coming up with the best answer rather than determining who came up with the answer. It's also about listening to different perspectives from outside your firm and even from outside the accounting industry.
In an Idea Lab, everyone regardless of job title can say, "Here's what I think. Let's talk about it." Sure, disagreements will happen. It's important to look at how disagreements are handled at different firms. In an Echo Chamber, a disagreement is perceived as rudeness. But in an idea lab, a disagreement is perceived as exploration — a chance to explore your options.
The outcome of the meeting may be something other than what you agree with. That's OK. You're not always going to be right. Again, the outcome of a disagreement should be to determine what's right for the firm rather than who's right.
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Next steps
Things are happening very quickly at professional services firms these days. Sometimes you walk into a meeting, and you need help figuring out where to start. It's hard for firm leaders to admit they don't know what the future looks like. So, it's tempting to fall back on their entrenched opinions, regardless of their validity. Leaders will never walk into a meeting and say, "Hey, there's a good chance I'm wrong about this. How do we come up with the best solution?"
But suppose you started a meeting by saying, "We're going to decide X today," and that you will explore various options together and decide what's best for the firm. That doesn't necessarily mean you have a consensus. But it will go a long way to getting buy-in from everyone at the firm when they know they have a seat at the table.
Not everyone at your firm will be comfortable with the Idea Lab concept. You may see some team members, even partners, leave your firm after introducing it. But after a year or so, you'll see fewer and fewer people trying to distend their ideas. More and more will be simply looking for the best solution regardless of whose idea it is. High-performing firms know it only matters that you find the solution and that the firm is better as a result of that solution.
What is your firm to challenge the status quo and give everyone a chance to share ideas for getting better, faster, and more efficient? I'd
