Confidence levels can actually be tied to your ability to figure something out.

Have you heard of council process? It’s when teams come together to share their thoughts one at a time. Read more about it here.

Inclusion is simply the invitation to join.

"Let's just have an open discussion!" This is a well-intentioned statement that we hear a lot in teams.

There are a couple ways it could go wrong, though.

Let’s start with this: what do we even mean by 'open'? The intent of calling an open discussion “open” is to encourage participants to share openly. But it also tends to refer to the process, or way the forum is conducted, like 'open mike,' and there’s rarely full openness in what is shared.

Are your group or team conversations truly reflecting the full range of thinking happening inside the heads of those in the room? It needs to if you are to truly harness the collective intelligence potential that is greater than the smartest people in the room would be alone. (And this is not a given, by the way.)

There is one question you can ask that will help you actually hear the truth right then and there from the people who have information or perspectives that you can't yet see.

Have you been in an important meeting during which you sat on the edge of your seat, trying to jump in at the right time, only to – when you finally do – get the floor swept away again by someone else? This is stressful and anxiety-provoking, and these emotions have the negative effect of impeding our best thinking.

When my daughter attended her first preschool, the almost- and barely-three-year-olds would, upon arrival, take a photo of themselves that had been glued to a magnet and place it in either the 'yes' or 'no' column to a question of the day.