• What might you be stepping into?
• Who is attached to the status quo or the outcome and why?

You can ask a few simple questions like,

It's good to know how deep the water is, where the swells are and how strong the undercurrents are!

The Creative Alignment phase takes you to the next level of definition of the challenge.

The Socialising phase would inform you about who these Creative Alignment conversations need to happen with. So you might talk to a smaller group of people or just one person.

Stay with me here.

Creative Alignment is about uncovering the feelings, reservations and motivations people have about the situation or the approach or the impact and the facts, the evidence and the data. Basically, anything that could cause your initiative to fail, you want to know about it. And equally, anything that could help speed up things is precious and valuable to know.

A large part of your role in Creative Alignment conversations — and possibly the most effective and influential is to ask lots of questions.

How you do this is important. If people feel judged and under pressure to say something smart or to come up with solutions straight away, they can’t be creative and generous. There’s too much cortisol and adrenaline (stress hormones) in their system.

Two important things to mention here — and Leaders Who Coach™ Graduates will recall their own learning in appreciating these:

1. You don’t need to have all the answers and sometimes it’s better to be detached and less triggered by what people say because you don’t have the answers.

2. Don’t jump into ‘solutioning’ because whatever you come up with at this stage is not likely to be innovative or collaborative but heavily biased towards normal ways of doing things. This may draw lower levels of commitment or ownership from others.

There you go. I’ve just given you permission to not have an opinion and not have a solution. (And breathe.) You are welcome.

You can’t rush this exchange of ideas and positions because it relies on building trust between you and your conversation partners. They may want to see what you do with the initial information they share with you before they give any more.

Stories help people feel the point, not just understand it. They create connection, memory, and momentum.

Another reason we shouldn’t rush the Creative Alignment phase of conversations is that time to reflect is a really important part of the thinking and evaluating process. Our brains need that time to make connections and come to a new level of awareness.

Some realisations are only possible when we’re doing something else, and some positions soften towards alternative possibilities. They become more familiar, often just because we’ve had time to sit with them for longer.

It means that when we next come together to continue the conversation, we can be more nuanced and more considered. Possibly even more open to other people’s ideas that, at first, we rejected.

If you’re thinking, “But that’s so slow. I just want to get in there and get stuff done,” then this might help.

Think of it as an approach that encourages generosity and emotional connection in your conversations. The more generous people feel, the more likely they are to share their best ideas with you.

And the stronger the emotional connection between you, the quicker you’ll be able to work through the harder parts of negotiating and contracting later on.

So slower now, perhaps, but quicker and stronger later.

This is just as important an aspect of leadership as strategising and getting stuff done. And it will show up in your manner, the way to make people feel and how loyal they feel towards you.

It’s critical to the next phase, the Contracting phase.

It’s where we:

These Contracting conversations are calorie-burning conversations.

If you haven’t, then this phase will be stressful, conflict-ridden, and physically and emotionally draining. That’s if you get to this phase at all!

If you’ve built up trust and powerful levels of emotional connection with people, then contracting will be a truly enjoyable calorie-burning phase — you’ll feel energised and hopeful.

As well as giving you more influence with people, stronger emotional connections will help things go smoother and move quicker.

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