When I first started doing facilitation and design work, it was almost always in the context of a single company or organization. They needed a collaborative process because they were generally large organizations, and the only way to make sure their strategy took into consideration all the necessary complexity they were facing was to bring in all the people with direct knowledge from the far-flung parts of the company. Not only did it make for more nuanced strategies, it also got a jump-start on rolling out the plan afterwards, as so many of the key people had a hand in building the strategy and were thus much more likely to be bought into it.

And that was the key challenge in those processes; finding a strategy or idea that was sufficiently compelling to enough people that they would actually want to do it. We always talked about how important it was to find that shared intent.

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What I didn't know then was how much easier it was to find shared intent in a process where most people were told they had to be there. Don't get me wrong; having your boss order you to be in a room doesn't automatically guarantee your buy in for whatever happens in that room. The reason so many large projects fail is that we consistently under-represent the impact of misalignment, misunderstandings, passive resistance and apathy. But as a starting point, having people who feel they at least need to show up, and feel they have at least something at stake in the outcomes is a decent place to start.

It wasn't until I started doing multi-stakeholder work that I realized just how important intent was. For those who are unfamiliar, multi-stakeholder work revolves around the many areas where people or organizations who don't necessarily have any responsibility or accountability to one another find themselves exploring an area in which they all have a stake or an interest. That might sound like a vague problem space, but it's actually where many of the biggest challenges facing civilization lie right now; the growing spaces and cracks in our systems that no individual actor has the knowledge, influence, resources, ability or mandate to tackle on their own.

Back in the easy days of working on smaller problems, bad faith actors in a collaborative process could face consequences from their boss. In a multi-stakeholder process, if a crucial stakeholder becomes bored and decides to drop out, there's no boss to compel them. They have to want to be there, or feel they need to be there.

We used to say that a group needed a "burning platform" in order to really move to action, but more and more, I don't see that as being anywhere near sufficient. In fact, I think that when it feels like the whole world is on fire, a burning platform doesn't seem as urgent as it used to. Just looking at issues like climate change, we are still not compelled to decisive action despite having a very real, and not-so-metaphorical burning platform.

That's why, these days, I've come to think that intent is everything.

There is a magical moment when people move from a thought or a conversation of some possibility into a visceral desire to act, to bring that possible future into reality. You can feel it in yourself, when you move from indecision into action. You can feel it, as well, when the intent you hold connects with others.

There are so many things in life, whether in our personal lives or our working lives that we do out of routine, obligation or inertia. We go along to get along, we don't rock the boat, we do things the way they've always been done, we do things because we have to, because we're supposed to. Sometimes we change because we're forced to, because our conditions change. Change is happening, but not by design.

Making deliberate change requires intent, and while we may experience intent as spontaneous, as something that "is there or it isn't", I believe there is a process to it. Intent is always individual, even when it's collective. It springs up in the place between a problem and a possibility, when the problem can be seen clearly enough and the possibility is desirable enough to motivate action.

Groups of individuals need to go through the same process to build intent that individuals do, with the added challenge of, well, being a group. For shared intent to emerge, that group needs to come to a collective understanding and definition of the problem they are solving, and a collective vision for how to solve it. Everyone comes to intent on their own, but individual intent that is reached as part of an emerging group intent is incredibly powerful. So, the design challenge is to create a container where a group can arrive at that place together.

A few tips for finding group intent:

* Remember that organizations aren't people: just because an organization has been involved, doesn't mean that the person representing an organization has any context. Focus on people.

* Every new person resets the clock: every time people come and go in the process, you have to assume a reset. If they haven't been on the journey, you need to think how to take them through that journey...but the journey might change with each new person and perspective you add.

* Take time to build language: we all see the world a little differently, and while sharing diverse perspectives can be powerful, moving forward on the assumption that we already share the same perspectives is a recipe for misunderstandings. Diverse viewpoints tend to only be valuable when participants make the differences explicit, and build a new synthesis together.

* Go slow to go fast: taking the time to build shared understanding slowly. Sometimes a first attempt at coming up with a solution will change your definition of the problem; allow these iterations, as it is part of the process of a group making sense together. Solving the wrong problem really well doesn't help.

* Relationships matter: shared intent is not only about a shared understanding of what we want to do, but also a shared understanding of each other. Trusting that others want something as much as we do can help us take the leap into a new reality.

Remembering some of these tips allows you to move from a mechanical approach to movement building to a more organic approach. Scheduling a series of consultations and one-on-one meetings may fill a project plan and look like progress, but understanding that intent is a core design consideration means you need to design for emotion and experience.

If we want a future by design, and not default, we need to design for intent.

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