Leaders face an onslaught of new challenges that demand increasingly innovative solutions.

Yet their approaches to finding them often get stuck in either blue-sky brainstorming or bottom-line decision making. Instead, leaders need a path that blends these two approaches -- a middle road that engages not only the minds of their teams, but also their hearts.

To address these challenges, Lisa Kay Solomon co-authored the book, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. Lisa is an innovation, leadership, and design expert and Principal Faculty and Managing Director of Transformational Practices at Singularity University. Her writing has been featured in BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.

In this interview, we talk about:

Why we need to bring the human side -- our hearts and minds -- to strategic conversations
How designing strategic conversations is an important leadership skill
How strategic conversations differ from brainstorming and decision making
Why strategic conversations are about more than getting the right answer
Why these kinds of conversations are about the future of our organizations, of challenging the status quo, and of multiple perspectives, whether that involves new products and services, entry into new geographic regions, new business models, or new ways of staffing
How strategic conversations can help us build understanding and help us see what success looks like
The power of staying in the exploration space, staying expansive in our thinking
Why these conversations are about mindsets, emotions, new ways of thinking, and new possibilities versus logic, right over wrong, or defending particular points of view
Why strategic conversations require leaders to develop greater self-awareness and an understanding of their biases
Why strategy is emotional
How our education and schooling tees us up to think of strategic planning as all about the correct, numeric answer
The important role design thinking, empathy, and supposed soft skills play in strategic conversations
Why designing strategic conversations is a craft, not a crapshoot
The importance of engaging multiple perspectives rather than just identifying participants -- paying attention to diverse ages, people outside the organization, visualizations, etc
Why we should prepare participants before bringing them together, so that we set them up for success
How background readings, information on who else will be in the room, meeting goals, etc, can help participants do their best work
Why we want to design backwards when bringing people together for strategic conversations
The importance of asking what participants will be thinking or saying to friends before, during, and after strategic planning meetings
Why framing the issue of the strategic conversation is so important and so challenging
How framing the issue is like providing the picture on the puzzle box because it is about setting the parameters
How we can reframe discussions of market competitors by asking who is delivering value in new ways to our customers
Why a school considering adding a high school asked should we do it versus can we do it
Why leaders need to get comfortable bringing emotion into the room
How setting the agenda is about making it an experience,

CM 074: Lisa Kay Solomon On Designing Strategic Conversations

Curious Minds at Work