CIAO helps you build a bridge from exploration to execution

One of the challenges of leadership (and life) is knowing whether you should be executing on what you already know, exploring what you may not know or some combination of the two.

If you devote your time and energy to exploring possibilities and risks under conditions in which you already have sufficient information, expertise and experience to be confident you can get great results in your current context using your current approach, exploration may feel to you and look to others like a waste of time and resources. On the other hand, if you become so convinced that you have sufficient information, expertise and experience to get great results that you stop paying attention to changes in the environment or market, you put yourself at risk of executing a great solution to a problem that no longer matters to anyone but you.

This can be challenging enough when you are working alone on something that only requires action from you, but it can be an even more vexing dilemma when it is your responsibility to get results through others because they will be looking for you to help them decide whether to stick to the straight and narrow so they can get today’s results or branch off into uncharted territory to search for the best ways to get tomorrow’s results.

The EDIT model is useful for reminding yourself (and those around you) to periodically return to exploration, so you can avoid repeating approaches that are no longer getting you to where you really want to go. That said, exploration without action has limited value. Once you’ve defined a problem or opportunity to work on, it’s time to find out if you can turn it into something executable. The Iteration phase of the EDIT model is where you start turning your ideas into actions and results.

CIAO is the process by which you bridge the gap between exploration and execution by finding out what it is actually possible for you to execute.

In the iteration phase, you engage in experimentation. CIAO makes the experimentation process a bit more explicit by helping you plan and track cycles of experimentation. In the ITERATE stage you conduct EXPERIMENTS to figure out if and how you can convert the problem or opportunity you have defined into a believable and executable transformation narrative.

The word CIAO can mean hello or goodbye in Italian, and this makes it a perfect match for the ITERATION stage in that you use CIAO at the beginning of an experiment to articulate INTENDED outcomes and actions and AGAIN at the end of an experiment to reflect on and evaluate actual OUTCOMES. Because it can be used for both pre-action planning and post-action reflection, CIAO is also useful as a single model that enables you to do both feedforward and feedback without having to switch between models. CIAO can also be useful for difficult feedback/reflection dialogs in that it adds space to address the outcome the receiver of the feedback INTENDED to produce.

Popular models like SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) are fantastic for the preparation of one-way feedback, but I’ve always found it strange that most of these models don’t explicitly include space for confirming what outcome the receiver of the SBI feedback had intended to produce. By including explicit reference to INTENDED outcome, the CIAO model can set the stage for a much richer dialog between the giver and receiver of the feedback in which both parties gain additional opportunities to learn from each other. Likewise, the popular coaching model GROW is great for clarification of intention and action planning, but it doesn’t explicitly include space for after-action reflection. CIAO is specifically designed to make it easier to work alone or with others to organize both feedforward / ideation / planning AND feedback / reflection / evaluation.

The CIAO model can be represented as a cycle or as a 4-box planner in which each quadrant or box clarifies some aspect of the experiment:

CONTEXT – In what context or situation will you conduct your experiment? A context statement includes factors like people, places, resources and other aspects of current reality, particularly descriptions of factors that explain why you are doing the experiment. Examples:

– My team has missed several deadlines on our current project.

– The company is embarking on a new strategy that changes our relationships with other teams.

(Depending on how transformational your INTENDED (outcome) is, you may start from INTENDED (outcome) rather than CONTEXT.)

INTENDED OUTCOME(S) – What is the “to be” state you are hoping to realize at some specific point in the future? Examples:

– We will notice whether or not we are on track to meet deadlines at least 3 days in advance. What would this look like in terms of a SMART goal, if appropriate?

– Our team will started laying the foundation to re-position our relationships with other teams by the time the new strategy is launched. What proxy indicators would help us track whether we are doing the right things and whether we are making progress?

ACTION(S) – What specific things can you say or do to move toward realization of the intended outcome? Examples:

– Who will use what process to track our progress on each of our deadlines and how will that person keep us updated and proactively engaged on moving things forward?

– Who will take what steps by when to begin the re-alignment process with the teams we collaborate with?

ACTUAL OUTCOME(S) – After you have started taking action, at some point you are ready to assess what outcomes you are actually getting and how they match up with your intended outcomes. Examples:

– Have we stopped missing deadlines? What concrete evidence do we have?

– Have we effectively re-aligned with the teams we collaborate with? What indicators tell us the re-alignment process is on track?

At various points in the iteration process, we need to stop, take stock and make a judgment about the value and viability of the transformation formula we have developed through our rounds of CIAO. Does one of them seem promising enough to roll out on a broader basis? Does it make sense to integrate elements from a number of rounds and do another CIAO round before beginning the rollout? Or have we perhaps realized through the iteration process that the transformation opportunity statement as currently articulated is no longer powerful and believable enough to be promoted more broadly.

As we answer these questions T is adjusted based on what we have learned in the EDI stages. Some candidate Ts include:

Transform

Transfer

Transition

Translate

Thrive

Template

Trigger

Transcend and 

Threshold (credit to Pomona College philosophy professor Steve Erickson)

If the actual OUTCOMES we get through a CIAO cycle do not match the INTENDED outcomes we started with, this is a clear sign that something didn’t work. Before moving forward, we need to figure out why things didn’t go as intended. Perhaps we still believe the INTENDED outcome is the right one to work on, but we now realize we need to try a different combination of actions to produce that INTENDED outcome. Perhaps we realize that we have misjudged the context. Maybe we forget about an important stakeholder who we needed to enlist or at least placate or failed to notice something else that was going on in another area of the organization or market that obstructed our actions. Sometimes we even come to realize that the INTENDED outcome itself needs to be revised because it is too much of a stretch or too far out of sync with other things that are going on around us.

Sometimes, in the process of conducting a CIAO cycle, we realize we are so far off based that it probably makes sense to go back to the beginning and start over. In such cases, we may TRANSITION back to the DEFINE or even the EXPLORE phase.

There will also be cases when our CIAO experiments produce exactly the INTENDED outcome we were hoping for. In these cases, if it feels like we have discovered something with the potential to become a TRANSFORMATIONAL narrative we can start to TRANSLATE our learning into a story that will make it easier to TRANSFER that learning to others as we enlist their support as you try to TRIGGER a larger scale TRANSFORMATION.

Since the world never stops changing, we never escape from the need to re-explore and re-evaluate how we can and want to transform the world and ourselves. This may be daunting, but it can also be liberating in that it opens our eyes to opportunities to create spaces to experiment with the creation of ‘an order of our own choosing’. We can choose to do this even if we are working within a greater order we did not choose or even in the midst of chaotic periods when no one seems to have made any conscious choices at all.

If we step back to think clearly about the outcomes we intend to create and the context in which we can create them, we can almost always find actions worth testing and evaluating in the real world, and the real world is after all the only place where we can create real results.

A number of years ago, I introduced a similar model (ISAO) with “Intended Outcome” placed on the front end to an executive who was trying to make more space for open dialog and critical thinking in his leadership team meetings.

The CEO and his team used the model to guide their thinking/dialog in a strategic management simulation exercise. Although the model was simple, it had a profound effect on the quality of dialog and thinking in their decision-making process. The CEO told us he was surprised by how useful it was to be reminded to repeatedly step back and re-confirm exactly what “intended outcomes” they wanted to drive with each decision.

A few months later, in a follow-up meeting he laughed that his team was driving him crazy by constantly asking him, “What is the outcome we intend to get with this approach?”

Evidently, when they kept the model in front of them it was easier/safer for his team members to challenge each other and him. He said that while constantly being required to re-confirm intended outcome(s) was tiring (we all sometimes forget), executives who had hesitated to share their logic and ideas with him before were doing so now, and it was improving their decision quality.

The framework has also proven useful in other contexts. As part of a leadership development program I was delivering about a decade ago we introduced separate models for feedback and coaching. Due to time constraints (and also just because it seemed to make more sense), we stepped back from the tools themselves and explored the context in which we used these models. In the course of our discussion, we realized that the models where something we utilized in the context of an ongoing relationship and series of conversations between managers and the people who report to them, and that those conversations occurred in the context of our ongoing attempts to improve performance against targets while experiencing professional and personal growth.

Once we had placed the feedback and coaching tools in this context, we realized that the only major difference between them was that one was backward looking and the other was forward looking. When we lined the two models up next to each other, we realized the elements included in the tools were quite similar: goals, situational factors, actions and outcomes. Given they were covering the same factors, we reached the conclusion that we didn’t need two separate models to have these performance conversations. Why not reduce it to one? The feedback model seemed to lack space for discussion of goals and intentions, while the coaching model didn’t explicitly open up space for reflection.

During our practice, rather than just practicing feedback or coaching as separate conversations, we used a version of CIAO to allow for a more fluid conversation that allowed the manager and team member to move smoothly back and forth between reflection on past actions and ideation of future actions. This eliminated the need for two separate models, making it easier for the manager and team member to use critical thinking to work on their shared need to improve performance AND create opportunities for growth.

Since that time, I’ve introduced CIAO as a simple model that can anchor all of the other models that fill leadership development programs. Once you get used to flexibility of what can be fit into the 4 boxes, CIAO helps you clarify your thinking and when your thinking is clear, your communication usually is more clear as well.

CIAO is a simple model, but it can have a big impact on the quality of our thinking and communication.

Simple change; big impact.

© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.

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