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Think about the really important goals your team talks about all the time. When you talk about them everyone agrees they are critical: We must improve quality. We must innovate. We must respond to a competitive threat. We must evolve our business model to provide better service.

Talk vs. Action

To move your team from talking about important stuff in a vague way to actually making progress on these things in a real way, the first step is to realize that you are stuck because you are still only talking.

You need to change the nature of the conversation to become one that drives action, instead of just more talking. One of the biggest hazards to watch for is a concept called “smart talk.”

The term was coined by Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer in their Harvard Business Review article, “The Smart Talk Trap” (May–June 1999), and it so richly describes what happens when smart people substitute talking for action:

We found that a particular kind of talk is an especially insidious inhibitor of organizational action: “smart talk.” The elements of smart talk include sounding confident, articulate, and eloquent; having interesting information and ideas; and possessing a good vocabulary. But smart talk tends to have other, less benign components: first, it focuses on the negative, and second, it is unnecessarily complicated or abstract (or both). In other words, people engage in smart talk to spout criticisms and complexities. Unfortunately, such talk has an uncanny way of stopping action in its tracks. That's why we call this dynamic the smart-talk trap.

This is a specific and unfortunately common type of corporate behavior where people substitute sounding smart in a meeting for actually contributing work. I'm certain you know some of these people!

These people will come to meetings with lots of insight and data. They will always be ready to shed more light on the problem by providing details, benchmarks, and customer examples. They will have lots of smart stuff to say. Everyone will think, “Wow, they're really smart.”

Describing the “Situation”

It's vitally important as a leader to recognize when your team is falling into the pattern of accepting smart sounding ideas and inputs instead of measurable forward progress. The most effective way I have found to break through this is to recognize when you get stuck in a pattern of smart-talking about the “situation.”

Groups of people have a very strong tendency to discuss the situation – a lot. Over and over again. For a really long time. Situation conversations are the easiest conversations to have because there is no risk. You are simply stating facts. You might contribute facts that no one else knows, and you might sound really smart while saying them, but the fact of the matter is that there is no forward progress because you are simply describing what is happening.

Situation discussions describe what we are doing, what the market is doing, what the competitors are doing, what the investors are saying, what the problems are, what the costs are, what the customers are demanding, what the changes in business model are causing, what the opportunities are, what the employees are doing and not doing. Situation discussions don't go anywhere; they only gather more detail. With a ready supply of smart talk, the situation discussion will be colorfully augmented by someone saying, “Well, this is an even more critical problem than we thought because I just got back from Asia and saw this…”; or, “This is even harder because I learned our competitors are launching their new version this quarter....” More and more smart talk gets added, and the situation discussion turns into a bigger and bigger situation hairball.

Sure, it's important to use some time to note and understand the situation, but you can just feel it when everyone has internalized the situation and then…you keep talking about it! Talking and talking and talking about it. You can feel it in your stomach when the meeting is not going anywhere, and you're still talking. The talk gets smarter and smarter and the forward motion everyone is craving never happens.

Situation discussions are basically this: collectively admiring the problem.

Situation vs. Outcome

The way to break through this type of stall is to train your team members to catch themselves having a situation discussion, and then say, “Let's stop talking about the situation and let's try to define an outcome that we want to achieve.”

For example, one of the most common situation discussions that I guarantee is happening hundreds of times at this very moment in business meetings around the world is the following “mother of all situation” discussions:

This is very important, but we don't have enough resources to do it.

Here is a specific version. We need to improve the quality of our product to be more competitive, but all of our resources are tied up on creating new features. We can't fall behind on features, and we have no extra resources. But we really need to improve quality. But we don't have the budget…and around and around.

Instead of adding fur to that situation discussion, let's take this situation discussion and turn it into an outcome discussion. Here is an example. Note how resisting situation talk allows the discussion to move forward:

● Okay. We can't afford to fix all the quality problems, so let's stop talking about this in a vague way. Let's talk about some concrete things we can do on a smaller scale that would make a positive difference. Which quality problems are having the most negative business impact right now?

● There are two issues in the user interface that our biggest customers are complaining about. (Situation)

● How about if we fix those two problems first? (Outcome proposal)

● But that doesn't take into account the issue in Europe. The quality issues in Europe are related to difference in governance laws. (Situation)

● I suggest we fix only the top one issue in the United States right away, but we fix the top three in Europe now too (Outcome proposal), as we have more pipeline held up in Europe.

● But that doesn't solve our overall quality problems, which are related to the fundamental structure of our product, which I have assessed is slowing our sales pipeline growth by 20 percent. (Smart talk. Rat hole. Situation)

● What outcome do you suggest we target to solve that particular point? (Challenge to smart talk)

● I don't know, we just need to fix it. It's really important. (Situation. Stall)

● That is still situation discussion. How about we fix the problems we just listed first, and right away we train the sales force on how to help customers work around these platform issues temporarily? (Outcome proposal)

● But when can we fix the main platform? We don't have the resources to do it. (Age-old situation)

● Let's look at doing a platform release one year from now. After we fix this initial round of quality issues and release this current round of features, we then prioritize the platform changes and get it done. (Outcome proposal)

● But if we do that, we'll fall behind our competitors in functionality again. (Shut up. Situation)

● We need to agree that if the platform change is a priority, we must get it accomplished no matter what our level of resources – even if we need to move resources from the work to add new functionality. (Outcome proposal)

● We will work with marketing and sales to improve our conversion rate in the part of our pipeline that is with customers not currently affected by the platform issue. (Outcome proposal)

Note the difference between situation and outcome conversation.

Outcome discussions can be long and painful too, but the big difference is that they are going somewhere. Outcome conversation is productive conversation. It leads to action.

Outcome vs. Next

There are many other benefits to moving from situation conversations to outcome conversations. One of the other great things about outcome-oriented conversations is that they can be used to resolve disputes. When you are talking about a situation and what to do next, “next” is a concept fraught with opinion and emotion. It might involve someone giving something up or stopping something. It might involve doing or learning something new. “Next” has all the personal investment of the present wrapped up in it. So to get people to agree about what to do next if a clear outcome is not defined, there could be a million possible choices, all laden with personal investment, experience, insight, opinion, and emotion.

But instead you can pick a point in the future and say, “Let's describe that point. Let's agree on that point in the future.” Suddenly everyone's focus is shifted away from their invested and urgent personal space, and it is placed on a goal that is in the distance. It breaks the emotional stranglehold of something that threatens to change right now.

The other benefit is that if you can agree on what the point in the future looks like, it reduces the set of possible next steps from a million to several. There are far fewer choices of what to do next to serve a well-defined outcome. You can have a much more focused and productive debate.

Describe What It Looks Like When It Is Working

To force the conversation to be about concrete outcomes can be a difficult skill to master. But it is worth the effort. It's the only way to move decisively forward.

If your group is having trouble with this, here is something you can try. When I'm working with a team that can't seem to get their minds around which outcome to focus on, I ask them to simply describe what it looks like when it is working. If the desired outcome were working the way you needed it to be, what would you see? What would be happening? What would people be saying and doing? What would employees, customers, partners, analysts, and media be saying? What would they be experiencing?

Once you start describing what the concrete desired outcome looks like when it is working, you will be able to land the plane. For example, I was working with a team who needed to execute a successful product migration from an old version to a new version. They naturally started talking about the situation, the complexity, the expense, the possibility of customer attrition....But when I encouraged them to start describing desired outcomes, one person said, “We'd have enough customers successfully using the new version by February 1.” Then others added these descriptions: “There would be a combination of existing and new customers successfully using the new version”; “Existing small and mid-size customers would be motivated and volunteer to migrate on their own”; “Our largest customers would be confident to migrate because they felt guided and supported by us to make sure their migration was successful.”

By focusing on describing what it would look like if it were working, they were able to define outcomes that were concrete enough to suggest the specific necessary actions. This is another wonderful thing about outcome conversation. When you get concrete in your language about outcomes, the action plan just falls out in a very clear way. In this example, the team quickly got to a list of actions to create a self-migration program for small and mid-size customers, a personally delivered program for large customers, and a marketing campaign for new customers.

Trap: Avoiding Action – “But It Doesn't Solve the Whole Problem”

One of the other mistakes I see teams making is that when they work on big problems, even if they focus on describing outcomes, the outcomes are too big – and then they decide it's impossible.

Here is an example of such a desired outcome: We need to do a better job running meetings in our organization. What would it look like if it were working? All meetings would start and finish on time and have a clear purpose and desired outcomes defined, the right people would be in attendance, and we'd document decisions and actions.

Then they start to think about all the reasons why this won't work in certain organizations or geographies, or that there is not enough sponsorship, or that there are too many different kinds of meetings to make a new process work.

Then one brave soul will stand up and say something like, “Why don't we start by improving our quarterly business review meetings? Let's describe what those would look like if they were working better.”

Then someone else will shoot that down and say, “But that doesn't solve the whole problem,” or “that doesn't solve the biggest part of the problem.”

Resist this type of reasoning.

Solve the smaller, concrete problem. Then pick another small concrete problem and solve that one next.

Don't let the reasoning of “but this doesn't solve the whole problem” stop you from making progress on a valuable, smaller, concrete problem.

This destructive immune response happens for a few reasons. People can convince themselves that if the big problem is impossible, then it's okay not to try. Why waste time on something that is impossible? But the real issue is fear of actually doing something. Once you commit to defining a specific, concrete problem that can be solved, then it becomes clear what you need to do – and you need to do it.

There is a lot of avoidance of doing that happens in business, because it's easier to pretend to add value by just talking about the complexity of the big problem and sounding smart, and stating all the reasons why it can't be done.

Concrete, specific outcomes drive action. Always beware of people who are experts at avoiding action.