Parking Lot or Trash Bin?
When we put people together to collaborate, there is always a central issue or purpose that gives the group a north star to guide their efforts. It’s the hope of the organizers that the group will focus all their efforts on reaching the north star and their efforts will lead directly to an innovative solution for the issue at hand.
Collaboration, though, is experimental. The whole point is that the solution is not known. It has to be painstakingly assembled through discussion of potential answers that are tested with everyone to see how they might work. And so, the discussions that happen when you collaborate aren’t a straight line between problem and solution.
Down the rabbit-hole
It’s all about the rabbit-holes. In day-to-day meetings and discussions, we typically set a purpose and then very intentionally avoid the rabbit-holes. We stay on task, because the thing we are trying to accomplish is known. In collaborative dialogue though, the rabbit-holes are where we find the gold. We explore them in the hopes they will lead to a solution, and also knowing that most will lead nowhere.
Often as we explore, we find different problems to solve or we find solutions to a different problem than the one we are working one. Good collaborative process and a good facilitator will catalogue the various issues and solutions we find, but that don’t serve our purpose. They get put into the Parking Lot, and we move to the next discussion to see if that one will get us closer to the solution.
What happens to the parking lot items at the end of your collaborative process? It’s been my experience in so many collaborative projects, that the ideas and the thinking captured in a parking lot are never visited again. Sure, they might end up in an appendix of a report, as a list of stuff without much context and that people ignore as soon as they see the Parking Lot label. Your parking lot might as well be called the Trash Bin.
Can we save them?
Surely, there’s something we can do to save our parking lot items and make them useful and appealing. After all, there might be something there that turns out to be as important as the initial focus of your collaborative project.
Build time into your collaborative process explicitly to address parking lot items. This can take a variety of forms, but often doing something simple is the best approach.
Capture the group’s thoughts on why the parking lot item was important enough to capture and remember, as this will allow readers to understand the thinking that lead to the parking lot item.
If you want to put in a bit of extra effort, consider ranking your items by potential impact or ease of completion.
Don’t label them as Parking Lot
Your group put their mental effort into discussing these different lines of thinking, so to label them as parking lot is basically the same as saying “please ignore this content.”
Instead, try calling them Further Opportunities or Other Potential Actions. These kinds of labels spur the reader to think there is gold in the content.
And there is.
Happy collaborating!
Scott Millar often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. Through Collaboration Dynamics, he offers a program in High Performance Collaboration, where he guides groups to explore the nature of collaboration, inclusivity, and innovation, and acquire new abilities to create the conditions that enable groups to contribute and thrive in challenging environments.
