Creating a Challenge Network to Improve your Performance

When you have a new idea – for a project, for a product, for an initiative – your first step might be to bring that idea to people who will support it. Their excitement feeds your energy and reinforces the merit of your idea.

But what if this supportive network isn’t the most useful audience for your new ideas?

Rather than taking new ideas to people who will uniformly support them, I encourage leaders to take their ideas to people who will debate them, look for potential blindspots and help them consider alternatives or contingencies. In other words, I have them create a challenge network for themselves.

In his book Think Again, organizational psychologist Adam Grant discusses the benefit of a challenge network. According to Grant, it is a “group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise, doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.”

Challenge networks help us more easily tune into dissenting opinions and change our minds. They can be useful in pointing out potential problems before they occur, so that they can be planned for and addressed in advance. While we might hear some tough feedback about our ideas, that feedback has the opportunity to make our idea even better.

There are three steps to help you establish a challenge network and reap the most benefit from it.

Three steps include:

1. Invite the right people. In order to build a strong challenge network, you want to include the right people. Look for people who care about your success and will also be candid with you. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich calls these individuals our “loving critics” while Adam Grant refers to them as “disagreeable givers.” Whatever we choose to call them, they have our best interests at heart and will be honest even when it’s difficult. These are the people from whom we can expect transparency and candor while knowing they care about our success; they want to see us win.
2. Set expectations. In order to make the most out of the network, take time upfront to set expectations with each other. Let your challenge network know that you want to be able to bring ideas to them so that they will help question your thinking. Tell them you want to hear any dissenting views and that you will respect their pushback. Aligning on the approach upfront helps to establish norms and makes it easier to share feedback along the way.
3. Leverage them regularly. Challenge networks are most effective when they’re used regularly. It gives network members the opportunity to keep their skills and their rapport strong.

Some companies have gone so far as to formalize challenge networks as part of their process. One example is Alphabet Company’s X: Moonshot Factor (the division formerly known as Google X) that is an innovation lab looking to create breakthrough technologies that can transform people’s lives. Alphabet’s Moonshot lab uses an approach similar to challenge networks that they call their “Rapid Evaluation Teams.” 

Because Moonshot wants to focus on ideas that have the potential to grow, they aim to quickly end projects that will not work. In order to do that, they engage a Rapid Evaluation Team: individuals asking questions such as “Let’s imagine everything fell apart. What are the things that caused that?” Ideas fail at this stage because they’re too expensive, too difficult, or aren’t possible. In practice, the Rapid Evaluation Teams stop around 90% of new ideas from going forward; this translates to more than 100 cancelled projects each year. While it may feel initially disappointing to see your idea fail, it stops the company from wasting time and money on projects that will not be profitable or worth the investment.

On a smaller scale, there are plenty of examples of individuals creating challenge networks for themselves. I recently worked with a team that wanted to do a better job of innovating together. Specifically, they wanted to explore a process for sharing new ideas while thinking critically and helping to troubleshoot problems before they arise. We designed an approach for them to utilize their team as a challenge network. In weekly team meetings, team members are invited to bring new ideas forward for healthy debate and discussion. They simply say, “I have a new idea and I want you guys to be my challenge network…” and the team knows just how to engage with each other.

As Adam Grant shares, we learn more from people who challenge our thought process than from those who affirm our conclusions. Establishing and maintaining a challenge network can help you road test your ideas and learn from others’ perspectives.

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Eurich, T. (2017). Insight: The surprising truth about how others see us, how we see ourselves, and why the answers matter more than we think. New York: Currency Books.

Grant. A. (2021). Think Again: The power of knowing what you don’t know. Viking Books.