Prescott Paulin

When you're documenting feedback from leadership, make sure you keep track of it in a place you can easily find it later. Ensure you're taking action on their suggestions, and show them that you're listening by making progress on what they care about while also providing coherent, timely updates as to what you're progressing on. If you can establish a common operating system for your organization (such as a centralized place you store knowledge), it's appropriate to include feedback in places that other peers can see and act on if the feedback was intended to help the group be better. If you aren't sure if you are suppose to share this widely (even internally), just ask to clarify so you don't overstep your boundaries or break confidence.

If you're part of a large organization like I am, set aside time to do training that will improve your knowledge as well as how you think. The military has thousands of training opportunities, including online education to help you level up in your career and your skillsets needed to be a high performing contributor in your workplace. Setting aside time to intentionally connect with others in your community is equally important -- build relationships by showing up to conferences and hosting meetings where you help people meet one another. Even if you don't get anything out of it initially, over time you will help build valuable long term relationships that can come back to help you down the road.

When you aren't present to have "water cooler conversations" in your office, it can be helpful to have a consistent cadence for meetings where you can interact with your peers. If only one person is speaking in the meetings, it's time to assign new people to speak up and task them with getting the conversation started. An easy way to get dialogue flowing is to interview a team member and then (with their permission) share details about them that others didn't know. What do they do for fun? Do they have a family that they love and support? Where do they like to travel? What do they like to eat? Get to know your people so they become more like family members, and that can unlock the ability to relate with them and grow together.

If you want to accelerate this process, use an innovation management platform to help curate ideas from across your workforce. We use one for Defense Innovation Network and have a way to ingest ideas as well as see patterns within the data to determine a "heat map" of sorts -- so we know what keeps coming up in the flow of ideas / conversation.

One of the best tools to use with root cause mapping is a mindmapping tool, such as Miro. When you visualize what you're working on, it becomes easier for people to find solutions. See if you can go 5-7 levels deeper on the "Who/Why/What" factor to identify what is causing the problem in the first place. "Who (stakeholders / action takers / enablers / detractors) caused this to occur?" "Why does this happen?" "What contributing factors are causing this to occur?" If you're brainstorming in person, just get a pack of sticky notes out and start placing them on the wall as you talk through ideas.

One of the best means for analyzing a complex problem is ensuring that all of the voices on your team are recognized. If you have someone who is a quiet or introverted individual, make sure you empower them to speak up, or directly ask if they have a perspective they'd like to contribute. Find a common place you can take notes and document your research efforts, so that you can revisit it later and include others on your team as needed. You may also want to use Generative AI capabilities to help you determine what aspects of the problem are worth focusing, and what can be flushed out to refine your problem set. Even a simple T scale with Pros on one side and Cons on the other can help with narrowing your focus.