Starting in Different Places

Starting in Different Places

About two and a half years ago I was in a strategy day with three colleagues I hadn't worked closely with before.

It was one of those rare opportunities to sit down together and think properly about the future of a part of the business we were responsible for. The kind of day where you expect ideas to open up as the conversation develops.

Except I remember finding it strangely difficult to follow the discussion.

Not because the thinking wasn't good. It was. But I couldn't seem to get my own mind to engage with it properly. I could hear what people were saying, yet I couldn't quite get hold of the shape of the thinking.

So I did what I often do when my brain gets stuck. I started drawing.

Big messy diagrams across a sheet of paper. Arrows, shapes, fragments of ideas. Trying to see the thinking rather than just hear it.

Afterwards, I got some feedback.

Apparently my scribbling had come across as distracting. Even slightly disrespectful - as if I'd mentally checked out of the conversation and started working on my own ideas.

Which honestly couldn't have been further from the truth. I was trying to stay in the thinking.

For a long time I couldn't quite explain why that moment had been so difficult for me. I just knew something about the way the conversation had unfolded hadn't worked with how my mind processes things.

Then very recently, Co-Valence helped me see it. For me, I need the big picture first. The frame, the context, the shape of the whole jigsaw before I can work meaningfully with the pieces.

Some people begin in exactly the opposite place, starting with the pieces and allowing the bigger picture to emerge as the conversation develops.

Neither approach is better. But when you don't know that about each other, collaboration becomes harder than it needs to be.

What Co-Valence did for me was make that difference visible. And once you can see it, you start designing work differently.

James and I use it constantly now as we build The Lucent Collective - including this week as we prepare to welcome Ahmed into the team. Before we even sit down together, we're already thinking about questions like: where will we naturally align? Where might we interpret things differently? What structure will help the conversation work well for all of us?

Small invisible differences like this shape how well people think together.

Most teams never see them.

Do you?