Your team doesn’t need more answers. It needs the right containers.

Am I the only one who finds it satisfying to find just the right-sized container for after-dinner leftovers? When I’m cleaning up the kitchen, I size up the food and look for the container that’s just big enough for what remains, but not so big that it takes up precious fridge space.

I’ve come to think of leaders as playing a similar role: creating the right containers so their teams can focus on the right work at the right time.

Why answers aren’t enough

Change comes with a lot of questions. Leaders who think it’s their job to have all the answers either get the answer wrong and have to clean up their mistakes, or they land on one correct answer (usually out of several) and then have to convince everyone it’s the best one. The truth is, most situations have no single right answer. They have many potentially right answers, each of which only works if other people change some part of what they do.

The leaders who succeed in these situations can detach from any particular answer and focus on creating the right containers: structures that let other people do the right work at the right time.

This is one of the core moves of navigational leadership. You can’t eliminate the mess of change, but you can organize it. In our work, containers are part of the infrastructure layer of an organization: the repeatable arrangements that keep effective work moving.

What counts as a container?

A container could be a process. It could be a meeting cycle. It could be a single template that shows people what they need to fill in to make progress together. Sometimes it’s simply the right question, asked at the right time.

Containers as a process

Sometimes the container is a process: a cycle of activities, reviews, and conversations designed to move a group from one place to another over time. The team alignment and performance cycle we built with Joyful Reading Co. (then Zoobean) gave the team a container to align and realign as they learned together through change. Everyone knew what to expect and when, through a consistent rhythm of semi-annual retreats, performance reviews, and data collection. That’s a repeating process container.

Even a one-time process, designed to take a team from point A to point B, should start by identifying the right containers for the work. A process container, or roadmap, might lay out the steps for developing a new strategy together or for reaching a big, difficult decision.

Containers as a meeting cycle: why yours might feel broken

Designing an effective meeting cycle is all about creating the right containers, so that as things come up, you have a place to put them. You need a container for each kind of work, and each one should be sized to the task.

When a meeting cycle feels broken, it’s usually because a key container is missing, or because the team is trying to stuff things into the wrong one. Strategic decisions get squeezed into a 30-minute status meeting. Updates that could be an email take over the deep dive. Problems come up and have nowhere to land, so they become emergencies.

Containers as a template

Sometimes the container is the right roadmap or template. If a team takes the time at the beginning of a project to lay out a thoughtful outline of everything it wants to present at the end, it has a powerful focusing effect. Rather than doing a lot of work and then deciding at the end how to pull it together, the team builds the shared template on the front end. It saves them from discovering late that pieces are missing or that some of the work was off track.

Containers as a question or hypothesis

Sometimes the container is just the right question at the right time. Questions are containers when they clarify what is, and isn’t, the most important thing to think about first. Their shape and size determine what people can put inside. It’s like setting out a bin for kids who resist clean-up time and saying, “Let’s see if this mess will fit.”

A leader might ask, “If we have one week to make the user experience better, what can we do in that time?” Suddenly there is direction and focus, with plenty of room for different answers to be tried and for learning to emerge. It’s motivating, too. Let’s see if we can figure that out. Framed as a hypothesis to test, a question like this becomes the start of a learning cycle.

What the right containers do for a team

Whatever kind of container you create, the effect is powerful. When things are messy, which they are and always will be, the right containers don’t eliminate the mess. They make cleaning it up much faster and easier. They take away half the cognitive load that usually goes to figuring out how to approach the mess, and free the team to focus on actually working through it.

Containers also create consistency in the middle of uncertainty. People often want an answer, or think they do. When you can’t give them one, the next best thing is a consistent process that gives them something to anchor on while everything else feels up in the air.

Are your containers there, and the right size?

Back to the leftovers. It’s great when I guess right and fill just the right container with the right scoop of potatoes. It’s a bummer to guess wrong and have to switch. It’s even worse to open the cabinet and find no container at all, at least nothing close to the size I need.

That’s how many people feel when change is underway. Not only do they not know the answer; they aren’t sure where to begin. They’ve opened the cabinet, found no container, and have nowhere to put the mess. Your job as a leader is to make sure those containers are there, and that they’re the right size for everything that needs to be put away.