At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Renita Joyce Smith stepped into the room—and immediately made the room itself the subject. Her session, “The Edge of the Room Is the New Center,” challenged facilitators to stop hiding behind tools, frameworks, and polished agendas, and start asking a more uncomfortable question: how much of you is actually in the room when you facilitate? With warmth, humor, and a gift for meeting people exactly where they are, Renita guided participants through a deep exploration of authentic presence—what it means to be unmasked, why it matters, and how it changes everything.

The Unmasked Facilitator

Renita opened with what she calls her “welcome mat”—a belonging slide that trades the standard resume for a more honest introduction. Oldest daughter (which drew knowing laughs from a specific demographic in the room). Natural introvert. ADHD/autistic. Improv enthusiast. Owner of a famously bougie dog. The point wasn’t to overshare; it was to model something she has tested across years of facilitation work: when a facilitator lets people behind the curtain, the room breathes differently.

She grounded this in a story from early in her career. During an executive retreat, a CFO paused mid-session and shared something raw: “I really just don’t feel like I have the trust of this team.” Renita heard it—and then, with her agenda queued up and her rent payment ringing in her other ear, she kept moving. “Thanks for sharing. Next activity is.” The debrief afterward was polite but flat. They hadn’t gotten to the heart of it. She knew exactly which moment she’d missed.

That experience became a turning point. “From that moment on, I’m going to sense and really be present in what’s around me. And remember that there are humans in the room. Beyond the plan, there are humans there.”

She was careful to draw a clear line around what being unmasked actually means. It isn’t oversharing. It isn’t ignoring what the room needs in favor of performing your own authenticity. What it is: being real enough so the room can be real back. Trusting your instincts. Naming what’s actually happening. And knowing your secret sauce—what Renita calls your “bay leaf in the gumbo.”

The Stage and the Paradox

Midway through the session, Renita sat openly with a paradox she’d wrestled with for days while building it: how do you show up as your full self and hold the room’s wisdom at the center? How do you be the person who facilitates and not just the facilitator?

The answer came from an unlikely source—a glass of whiskey and a rewatch of Hamilton. Renita was captivated not just by the show but by the stage: its turning platforms, its hidden intricacies, its ability to expand and contract around whatever the story demanded. She tracked down the set designer’s interview. David Korins described his task simply: “To create a malleable envelope that could expand and contract to support the story and then stay the hell out of the way.”

Facilitators, Renita offered, are that stage. Not the star of the show—but the carefully designed, responsive container that makes the show possible. The invitation was to build your own stage: a full toolkit of pivots, questions, and moves you can deploy the moment you sense the room shifting. That’s what allows you to be fully present as a human and fully functional as a facilitator—at the same time.

Notice. Name. Invite.

The session’s practical framework was deceptively simple: notice what’s happening in the room, name it out loud, and invite the room to go there with you. Noticing, Renita emphasized, isn’t just reading faces—it’s tracking shifts in language, energy, pacing, and the offhand comment that changes the texture of a moment. Naming means having the courage to say the thing everyone in the room is already feeling: “I’m sensing a shift here—is it just me?” Inviting means opening a door, not issuing a demand: “May I ask you a question? If you’re willing…”

She illustrated what this looks like in practice with a live moment from her own work: a CIO who kept speaking in data and process, with conspicuously little warmth. Renita asked her directly, “Do you like people?” The mask dissolved. The CIO admitted she found the emotional demands of managing people exhausting—and that became the real design brief for the workshop.

Participants then worked through their own versions of this, revisiting moments where something had been missed, writing a headline for that moment, and then rewriting it—what would you have named, and what would you have invited? The tip exchange that followed surfaced a remarkable collection of practical tools the room generated together: “elephant spotting” with actual stuffed elephants on the table; fist-of-five alignment checks done with eyes closed; ten-second pauses that cost nothing and give everything; and the simple reminder that clarity is kindness.

Throughout, Renita returned to the same thread: the facilitators in the room who were showing up most powerfully weren’t the ones with the most polished technique—they were the ones willing to say the real thing, ask the real question, and trust that the room could handle it.

Renita closed with an invitation as much for herself as for the room: we are never finished becoming. The work of showing up unmasked isn’t a destination—it’s a practice that evolves with every room you enter. For a session that challenged facilitators to stop performing and start connecting, Renita modeled exactly what she was asking for. The room, in turn, gave it right back.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Renita’s Session:

Speaker 1:
Let’s give a warm welcome to Renita.

Renita Joyce Smith:
So excited to be here. This is a great space. I was contemplating in the back of the room listening to Dan’s great. Thank you for teeing all of this up amazingly. What I noticed hearing all the conversation, I was like, “Oh, Renita, you get the opportunity to model what you’re talking about today.”
This room is very self-aware. This room is very advanced. I’ve been in a lot of rooms. I’m like, “They’ve got poetry. They singing songs. We doing land agreements. Oh, this is a different type of space.” So, I’m going to invite myself to also pivot in this moment to dance in what we are in this space together. I’m going to copy and paste over Dan’s container and agreements. Is that okay? All in favor, say aye.

Audience:
Aye.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Any opposed? Awesome. The motion carries. Second thing. I love conversation. So, the same energy that you brought to the last session of being able to, I have a thought, here’s how I’m contemplating. I invite that into this session as well. All in favor, say aye.

Audience:
Aye.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Any opposed? Motion carries. Awesome. So, what are we talking about as the edge as a new center? I don’t know if any of you noticed lately, the world’s been interesting lately. We talked about a lot of it in the last session around how are we holding this tension? How are we holding these spaces in different types of ways?
But what I’ve been noticing is that outside of work walls, we’re having these conversations. But when it comes in to the corporate spaces, we clam up. We have to be professional, and the conversation stops. We don’t push ourselves. And so what I’ve been experimenting with over the past few

years is what does it look like to push a room, to be a bit more of myself, to allow others to be more of themselves?
It was a risky gamble because I like to eat and I like nice things. My dog likes his little dog food that has actually little wet dog food. Listen, he’s spoiled and he’s bougie, like his mama. And so it was a gamble and a real risk to show up this way because people are paying me tens of dollars to be in these spaces and in these rooms to facilitate these conversations.
And if I take a gamble by pushing the edge, will I get invited back? Will I have more work? Will I be able to keep doing what I love doing? And I said, “Okay. Let’s give it a whirl.” What I found out is the more that I pushed myself, the more the room opened up. The more conversation got deeper. The more unhinged I was, folks were like, “Oh, my God, we love you, Renita. Come back. Come to my room.” Not that room, come to our… Although any of those invitations, hit me up later on, we’ll talk. Just kidding.

But what I’m setting the context for now is that what we thought before were these edges and being a bit more of a rebel, actually is the re-baseline of what is necessary right now. The world has recalibrated, but we haven’t quite caught up with it just yet. So, the whole purpose of this session right now is to invite you into a recalibration of yourself.
Dan hit on it that to be able to do the work out there, we got to do the work in here. So, in my deep self, I’m going to be inviting you to do the work in here. So, every time that I present, first thing I throw up is a slide. It is called a welcome mat or a belonging slide. There’s usually a wonderful resume or a bio read about me. She was in management consulting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the real thing is this is who I am. I’m a oldest daughter, which informs a lot of how I… See, I always listen for the laughs in the room because it’s usually the eldest daughters. It informed my sense of responsibility and how I show up. Quiet as it’s kept, I’m naturally an introvert. This takes a little efforting for me to be into personality, to be in an extroverted space.
I’m going to crash when I get home. I tend to be a bit more on the ADHD, autistic side as my therapist is like, “Take this test.” And I was like, “Oh, this explains a lot of things.” But when I lift that up, folks in the room are like, “Actually, I’m neurodivergent as well. Thank you for saying that.” I was feeling odd and quirky, but now to see you doing this, I can show up more in the room too.

In addition, I have a diverse group of friends racially and ethnically. I hang out with pretty much everybody. Now, what this does is two things. I’m let you behind the curtain. I don’t tell my folks this. I’m going to tell y’all this, okay? When I show up into a space, especially when I was doing a lot of DEI work, folks are like, “Here’s the black woman coming and talk about DEI.”

So, to be able to flash this up and say, “There is a whole human with a lot of experiences.” I do improv. I like unicorns, queers, hells. There’s a lot going on right here. It brings my humanity into the space where regardless of whatever ideas they had of me, now I’m telling the real story here of who I am. I’ll tell you, like I tell my folks that are usually in my sessions, if you were to make this, what would be on your slide?

In this moment, I invite that version of you into the room. Not the one with the title, not the one that says facilitator, but who and what is in your collection of background and experiences that make you you? Even the most obscure thing. I do improv and I love it. Folks are like, “Nerd Alert.” I jam out on it, but it’s my secret sauce in spaces, because I can pivot and dance with a room and tell a very corny dad joke every once in a while.

Now, how did I get to this moment? So, a few years ago, I was invited into a room. I had just got my fancy certification and I had executives come to me and say, “We need you to facilitate an executive retreat. We aren’t gelling as a team. We got this whole strategic plan, God help us, that we aren’t rallying around. So, we need to circle back and get alignment and cohesion for the path forward for the organizational goals.”

And I’m like, “Yay, this is going to be great.” So, any great facilitator, I had my slides, I had my exercises, I had my agenda, my session lab was on cue, had my mural queued up. It was great. So, we’re partway through the session, working out all the things, and the CFO says, “I really just don’t feel like I have the trust of this team, and that’s what’s getting in the way.” In that moment, I heard Eric in my ear, “Hold this space.” And in my other ear, I heard my rent payment, “Keep going.”
They didn’t put you here as a therapist. They didn’t ask you to do all this, and I froze. I looked at my session lab, it’s like two seconds before the next activity, and I looked at her and said, “Thanks for sharing. That’s important. Next activity is.” I asked, you debrief on your follow-ups, I was like, “How was the session? Did we get what we need?”

And they said, “Yeah, it was a great session. It was fine.” I was like, “It’s a little bit of a lackluster fine. What’s going on?” They said, “I really don’t think we got to the heart of what’s actually going on.” I knew the exact moment they were talking about because I missed it. I went back and said, “Well, why did you miss that, Renita? Why’d you punk out?” I talk to myself kindly sometimes.

I said, “I was scared of the moment. What if it got out of control and people started crying and rinsing robes and gnashing of teeth? How would I hold that space? I didn’t trust myself in the moment.” So, from that moment on, I said, “Okay. Now on, I’m going to sense and really be present in what’s around me. And remember that there are humans in the room. Beyond the plan, there are humans that are there.” And that brings me to the whole thesis of our time today, which is, what does it really mean to be unmasked?

It’s a cute word. Be yourself, be real, be authentic. What the hell does that mean? Especially when this has our money involved, our credibility, all these things. And then we say the V word, be vulnerable, which is a hot topic now. But what does it truly mean to show up as the person who facilitates and not as the facilitator?

I struggled with this topic a bit and really wanted to explore what the difference between what unmasked is and what unmasked isn’t. So, I’ll start first with what it isn’t. It isn’t oversharing or making it about you, but it’s a fine line because I know I just showed y’all a slide that was all about me. But it served a purpose of setting the container and the framing for the room.
Unmasked also isn’t ignoring the room’s needs in order for you to be authentic. If you haven’t noticed, I have a personality. I love the knot there. Thank you. Now, this personality has a dial setting. If I’m showing up into a stiff room, I’m not coming out to Shut Up and Dance

With Me. Maybe. But I can dial that in based off of the setting on where I am for what the room needs in the moment.
Also, unmasked doesn’t mean performing personality for its own sake. You may easily come in here and say, “Renita, you got a lot going on. I’m more reserved. I’m more quiet, more pensive and thoughtful.” There’s room for that in here. Show up that way bec

ause people who are like, “This is too much,” want you instead in the room and your fullness of yourself that’s there.
Last but not least, it’s not abandoning your role as a container holder and getting caught up in the drama of the moment. I can’t believe you just said that. Well, what do you think about that? Well, let’s stir the pot some more for stirring the pot’s sake versus stirring the pot in a very responsible way. So, if we talk about what it isn’t, let’s now talk about what it is.
What unmasked actually is, is being real enough so the room can be real back. Someone was mentioning at the end of the last session, I was like, “Y’all can come up here and teach my own session here.” Being able to name what’s happening in a moment. I did that earlier. I got to pivot some things because y’all are smart and thoughtful.

I can be real enough to say that in front of y’all and know that that’s what’s happening right now. It also means trusting your instincts, and we’ll talk about that a lot, that intuition. There’s going to be some other speakers today talking about, and Chris is talking about whole intelligence.

What are these signals in your body that’s giving you information about what’s happening in the room? That’s letting down these barriers and these guards and saying, “Let me really be present and embodied in this whole space.” And then you layer on top of that, “What is your secret sauce? What’s your style?”

I tell people, “What’s your bay leaf in the gumbo? How are you seasoning it up beyond the salt and pepper?” Please use more than salt and pepper. Thank you. There’s garlic powder. Tony Chachere’s has got a whole league in the spice aisle. What else are you adding to the food, to the moment to bring your own style?

So, when I’m introducing you to these concepts, I’m curious now pivoting it to the room. What are some of your thoughts when you think about being masked versus unmasked? What’s coming up for you as we’re exploring this concept? Yes.

Audience:
Just as of December, I’m starting my own business. I’m a freelance graphic designer. Thank you. It’s terrifying. I’m really balancing what you’re talking about right now, but specifically the word professionalism. I have to bring a level of professionalism. I have 10 years of expertise. I know that I can do the work, but how do I show up in a way that just frankly shows my human, my whole self?

The way that it’s showing up for me right now is that I’m not really interested in showing up in semi-business wear, just reminding people that I am human, and trying to find those intersections within conversation where we can remind one another that we are in this human struggle together.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Okay. Let me ask, what have you tried so far?

Audience:
Besides how I show up clothing-wise, I’m not good at small talk, but I’m practicing it more so that those as inroads to find the meat of conversations and things that we have in common. If somebody really passionately cares about something, that’s something I gravitate to and letting that drive the conversation.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Yes. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing that. I’m a coach at heart and a sage, so may I invite you into a coaching moment?

Audience:
Sure.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Awesome. More of an advisor moment, actually. Something that really helps, and you touched on two things; clothing and small talk. Clothing is a small act of rebellion, and usually just enough to crack it open to begin to say, “Well, that was safe. What else can I do?” We need those moments of safety and experimentation to give us more information than, “Oh, this actually is safe. This jacket is a whole choice.”

The first time I wore it, I was like, “We going to see what happens.” The feedback I got was like, “Girl, it’s a cute jacket. That’s cute. I like this.” Data then told me I don’t have to show up in a black blazer, in black slacks, in a white t-shirt. I can do this and it’d be okay. So, you’re experimenting to get more data, which is amazing.

A quick thing on the small talk. I don’t do it either. But I have a pocket of questions that I ask that’s not about weather and sports because I mess up sports so bad. I’m like, “So, did they get the goal in the hole of the…” No. But I have three questions. What’s bringing you joy right now? What’s alive in you lately? What are you curious about?
Still small talk, but it has substance that’s there so you can experiment with that. Thank you for sharing. What else is coming up when we were talking about masks and unmasked? Yes. I got you friend. I don’t think you could. Breathe, honey. You’re good.

Audience:
I’m a new mother, I have a one-year-old, so something I’ve been doing… Thanks. Something I’ve been doing, especially with my online meetings, is being honest when I have a little kid running around and crying, and I’ll bring them on camera before I even start and be like, “Hey, this is Shiloh. Shiloh, say hi.” I just take the mask off. I’m like, if I seem distracted, I am.

The other thing I’ve been doing, especially with my online meetings, my neurodiversity makes it really hard to have meetings with my camera on and I’ll call that out. I’ll say, “I’m turning my camera off because I’m neurodiverse and this helps me get through my agenda more focused way.” And people really respond well to that and they’ve pulled me aside after and been like, “Thank you for saying that. I love that.”

Renita Joyce Smith:
Absolutely. I’ll meet you right there. Thank you for sharing. And the cool thing here again, listen to the data in response. People responded back and said, “Thank you for sharing that.” People are craving. Please be real because they’re being real, real on the TV and the tickety toks. They’re being real.

And now I got to show up on a Zoom screen and act like everything is okay? That I also don’t have kids screaming in the background and a partner popping in here asking me random questions when they know I’m on a call? Life is happening. And when we can acknowledge that life is happening, we stop gaslighting ourselves.

So, as facilitators, how can you reduce that as well to not gaslight your folks of everything is fine, everything is okay when you can feel in the room it is not. What else is coming up if it’s talking about mask versus unmasked on this side of the room? Yes. I got you. Go ahead. Let me obey up here. Let me …

Audience:
I think there’s a tension between being, if you’re a people leader, you probably have a lot of ambition and motivation and ideas and things like that, that gave you fuel to get where you are and lead people. But at the same time, if you’re a facilitator, then it’s the opposite.

Now you’re just a container, you’re trying to help other people take the spotlight and think and collaborate. So, then there is a tension where depending on your personality type, you’re masking your internal desire to participate directly or insert yourself or whatever.

And so you’re having to occupy two spaces simultaneously, where you are cognizant of the goal and you’re cognizant of your own ideas, but you’re also trying so hard to be present with people and sensitive to them. It’s hard to be in your head with your thoughts and in their space with their thoughts simultaneously.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Very much so. So, my coaching question for you, you don’t have to answer in this moment, unless you would like to, what would it look like for you to hold both at the same time and not see a separation, but collapse it into one identity? The facilitator that holds the room with experience, ideas, vision, and all the things, what would it look like to hold both?

Audience:
That’s hard to answer because I think when it’s happening, for me anyway, I don’t know about other people’s experiences of this. But I think sometimes we are in a flow state where we are holding both, but in such state, we’re not aware maybe. We would need someone else to tell us like, “Wow, you held both,” or whatever.

But then in a state of suddenly becoming aware of these two different levers that you’re supposed to be pulling at the same time, then there can be a lot of insecurity about whether you’re doing it successfully. Oh, no, I went too far in my direction. Maybe I made someone feel alienated. There’s so much insecurity in the gap whenever you’re aware of these two people you’re supposed to be at the same time.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Oh, great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that in. We’re going to actually work through this. How many of you identify with what she just said of holding two identities at the same time? Yes. Thank you for being honest. We’re not alone, sis. Me and you.

The thing that happens, and there is a term within coaching and psychology, it is being able to examine what is the limiting belief that’s in my head right now? I say collectively, let me take the belief out of my backpack and say, “The story I’m telling myself is that I have to be two different people and switch back and forth between the facilitator and the professional/people leader.”

We get to ask ourselves, “Is that true? Do I actually have to choose? Have there been moments where I’ve been in this flow state and not had to choose? What did that look like?” That’s how we can begin to dismantle the narratives that keep us masked of, I can’t do that because. Well, is it actually true? And most of the time it’s not.

But I also am very much aware that there is a paradox. I sat with this for days working on this slide. I’m like, “Renita, you’re saying two different things.” One, to show up in your fullness of yourself and also to be able to hold the room and let the room be in its own wisdom. How do you navigate and choose what you’re doing at any given moment?
I was like, “Well, wait a minute. I don’t want to do too much that way, because then I hear Eric in my ear.” You stay with me often. “And then I don’t want to go too much the other way because then you miss the moment. So, what do you do?”
So, I had a glass of whiskey one night and I had on… Yes. This little musical you may or may not have heard of, it didn’t really make a splash. It’s called Hamilton. I sat there and I was looking at the stage in the moment where Angelica was like, “Rewind, rewind, rewind.” I was like, “This stage is doing the Lord’s work.”

I kept watching, so the stage turned. If you haven’t seen Hamilton, let me paint you a picture. It looks like this, just two floors, wooden planks, but there’s so many hidden intricacies within this stage. It turns, the dancers are using the furniture on the stage on the world turns upside down. They’re turning tables and chairs and Lafayette is jumping off of the tables. And the stage is in service of the show. And as great AUDHD goes, I go in to say, “Who was the set designer? And there has to be an interview.”

I want to know what made him create the stage in this way? There’s always an answer in the bush. So, David said, “My task was to create a malleable envelope that could expand and contract to support the story and then stay the hell out of the way.” He built a container that could push and pull and be flexible, so that the actors on that stage could then be able to use it into its fullest capacity.

So, you may say, “Renita, great story. How does this apply to me?” As facilitators, what is your stage that you have built? What is your bag of tricks in your containers you can pull out at any given moment to say, “Hey, the room needs this. I sense something.” Here is a pivot. Here is a question. You walk in and folks may not think, “Oh, you have a whole agenda,” but they might not be knowing how you are pivoting in the middle because you have a whole stage of things that’s available to you.

What we’re about to do in a second here, I want to invite you to explore something, so we can really begin to talk about how we can push our own selves. I love the concepts of experiments. When I’m coaching clients, a lot of times I’m inviting them/telling them to say, “Hey, let’s go try this new behavior.” And a lot of times resistance pops up because it’s like, “Well, wait, if I try that, then I’m changing my whole personality,” and our nervous systems and our brains are like, danger, danger, danger. We don’t know. We don’t trust this.

So, what an experiment allows us to do is to try it on for size. Do I like this? Let me get some information. Let me see how the world responds to it. In the book, Holding Change by Adrienne Maree Brown, Inca Mohamed has this quote, “Learning and experimenting with new approaches is key to keeping the excitement and passion alive as you walk into a room.” When was the last time you experimented with something as a facilitator? I see it all the time. When have you tried a new activity?
At the same time, keeping it alive for yourself answers the question of the paradox. “To trust that the people in the room have the answers and be mindful that my job is to not get in the way, but to facilitate the surfacing of those answers.” So, my experimentation is to have as many ways as possible to allow those answers to surface in a room.

So, I’m going to turn this now to you. I have talked enough, my dear friends. In front of you, there is a handout on your tables. It should look like this. Pass it around. If you don’t have one, my friends will come and find you and give you one. We’re going to start on the side that says, “Me unmasked.”

Speaker 4:
If you don’t have one, raise your hand.

Renita Joyce Smith:
You told me to ask that. You did. I’m sorry. If you don’t have one, raise your hand. So, here’s what I’m going to invite you to do. I mentioned I’m a teacher at heart, and someone mentioned also wanting to go back analog. There’s a lot of power in having people write things down tangibly.

So, doing a mix of both technology and also allowing people to write is a tool in your toolbox. So, start on the side that says, “Me unmasked.” At the top, you will see how much of you is in your facilitation. You’re going to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10.
One, they don’t know my name. I’m showing up as a figure on a stage. 10, I’m all the way live. This is me, Greatest Showman style. You’re going to rate yourself. And then I invite you to reflect on three questions. Why that number? What would make you the next number up? So, if you rated yourself a five, what would a six look like? And then the last piece of what is holding you back from beginning that next number?

So, we’re going to play some nice music for about four minutes here, and we’re going to go into a pair share afterwards, but just stay in this moment and I’ll lead you to what happens next.

All right, my friends. As we bring it on back, I am here for all of this conversation. It is delightful and yummy. I want to hear what came up for y’all. So, I would love to invite three shares, one from this side of the room, a middle, and I’m going to mose my way on down that way, so get your minds right.

I’ll allow you to choose your own adventure. Share either what came up for you during this contemplation and conversation, any net new awarenesses or aha moments. So, I’m going to start down or my friends are going to start down there. I’m going to stay put like y’all told me too. Yes.

Audience:
This may be more of a question for you.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Absolutely.

Audience:
I gave myself an eight, but as in the discussion, we talked about it being a refined civilized eight versus silly, goofy 10. And so I pull myself into a professional grownup version of myself instead of the curt, silly, goofy tend that I could be in a room, but the room probably doesn’t need that.

Renita Joyce Smith:
That is a really good… So, I toy with this often, so thank you for saying this. I often talk about authenticity and vulnerability being a ladder, and figuring out where you are on the ladder at any given time. A lot of times we think of that authenticity as going from zero to 100. Nobody wants that. It’s exhausting.

It is, if you’re at the eight, what does the texture of the nine look like? And even having a net new ladder and a scale for professional settings. My brunch 10, nobody wants to see that. It’s a hoot and a half. I will get fired. I will get fired. But my professional 10 has a little bit more unleashed in it. Depending on the crowd, I might throw out a million dollar word here and there that’s in the other side of the dictionary to wake people up a bit.

I said hell earlier. That is scooching towards the professional 9, 10. Another part too is if you do have a bit more of an unhinged personality, I set that tone with whoever is writing the check at the beginning. Do you know who I am? They call me a velvet hammer. My personality is a secret sauce. I’m going to push the room with it.

I might say a couple of things here and there, do y’all have the tolerance for that? Pause for response. So, no one is surprised by you showing up as the 9 or 10, but figuring out what that looks like for you. Thank you for that share. Moving towards this part of the room. Yes. Behind you.

Audience:
Yeah. I’m really glad you brought up the whole topic of the person writing the check. So, if the person writing the check really indeed in their heart want their team to get better, or they’re just checking the boxes say it’s the annual retreat, let’s bring somebody in and entertain.

I think in those early calls where you’re actually vetting the person hiring you, then say, “If you really want to get here, your competition got here. We can get you here. It’s going to be uncomfortable potentially for you and your managers. Are you okay with that?” And then we can calibrate this session to actually get you there.

So, I think a lot of times that conversation that what is the sponsor really willing to allow you to do? In that case, then you can actually zoom in on what you want to do and then scale up and get to your 10.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Absolutely. I will even invite you to push that further and talk about what uncomfortable looks like.

Audience:
Yes.

Renita Joyce Smith:
You’re uncomfortable and my uncomfortable, wildly different. Sometimes what they’re imagining is uncomfortable really isn’t the thing that’s uncomfortable. So, being able to paint it out in almost explicit detail of, I’m going to ask these types of questions and I’m going to want you to also answer in the room. Are you okay with that?

This is what’s going to happen. I have almost a mini coaching session with them. The fact that people keep hiring me is wild. I talked to one CIO and again, this is all on that spectrum of being unmasked. And some of the answers she was giving me, and I’m like, “I’m going to be real honest with you. Can I be honest and ask you just a real question? Do you like people?”
She looked at me, she’s like, “Renita, what?” I said, “I am just, look, it’s in my head. Do you like? Because I’m hearing a lot of process and data. Do you actually like managing people?” I saw her mask begin to dissolve and she was like, “Actually, no. I hate this part of my job. It’s so many feelings that are involved and personalities. It’s too much.”

Then we got to the heart of the session of actually we’re going to work on that. How can this team be able to flex and talk to each other in ways that bring in emotion, but also hold the data in the process? But because daring to ask the real questions and stay in the container, you can actually design the workshop that’s really needed, not the one that they signed up for on the paper. But it’s risky in doing it.

Thank you for bringing that in. What else came up for this exercise?

Rob:
So, we were talking and it actually just came up. I was talking to Stephanie and we were sharing back and forth and I had written myself down as an eight and it was this insight at the very end of our conversation that I thought about. I think what would be very interesting with this exercise is if there was a second line.

The second line is, what do these three people who you work with very closely, what number would they give you? Because my number was an eight, but I think a lot of those people would be like, “Well, Rob’s like a three or a four.” And so I think it’s our perception and how people perceive us. And is that an opportunity for us to think more broadly about what we could do differently?

Renita Joyce Smith:
May I ask you a follow-up question?

Rob:
Sure.

Renita Joyce Smith:
If the folks around you did rate you a three, what do you think that they’re seeing that make you a three?

Rob:
I think they would say that Rob, I look at it as myself managing… Someone had said it earlier on, making sure that we introduce as much of ourselves as needed for the intended outcome of the session. It’s not egregious. And so I look at it as I’m managing, I’m introducing myself, but I have the service of what we’re trying to do here together in mind. I think they would just say I’m just too closed up. They see me in other contexts and they’re like, “That’s not you all the time.”

Renita Joyce Smith:
Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. So, what Rob noted here is there are two parts of this process. We talked about phase one, staying in the container and being the human in the room. There’s this other phase two of actually doing the session where we can’t turn ourselves off there. So, what does it now begin to look like?

These aren’t revolutionary practices that I’ve named here, but it’s three of them. Each facilitator across these two days is going to probably double click in my consulting language into each of these as the techniques and tools for how to do it. But again, I’m bringing into the identity of who you are. So, three things that I invite you to. When you’re in phase two, now you’re actually in the session.

What are you noticing? What are you naming, and what are you inviting? So, within the room, what are you noticing as the energy of the room? I’m noticing various levels of folks varying contemplation. Some folks the caffeine has worn off. Some people are like, “What’s she going to do next?” And so I’m paying attention to the pulses that are here and responding as such.

And then it comes to being able to name it, to actually say the thing out loud, I’m noticing this and then inviting a pivot. So, let’s dig into these a little bit more. So, when we notice something, we tend to just look at maybe one or two pieces of data, faces, or if there is awkward silence because no one is answering your questions. But what else is available to your senses for you? If we turn on our bodies, what else begins to be in the space that we notice?

Whether it’s something that someone said, was there a shift in language? Did somebody make an offhand comment where they’re just being disruptive, or are they not? How do we notice really what’s happening in these textures of the moment while still holding our agenda, but at the same time, being able to say, “Something is afoot here.” Good, bad, or indifferent. This is just not a negative circumstances.

Sometimes the room is so locked in and zoned in and buzzing, you allow them more time, but what are you picking up by being present in the moment? And in addition to that, the next step is you back in your humanness, what can you say out loud to put a label on it, to put words to what you have noticed? What does that look like for you?

Sometimes it could be I’m sensing a shift in the room. Is it just me? I noticed when you just said that, I want to pause right now and really give that some space. I’m noticing we might need to take a little break and do an energizer because the energy is dipping. But being okay with noticing and naming it out loud and some facilitators are like, “I can’t actually say the thing that I’m seeing.”

Well, guess what? Everybody out here is seeing it and feeling it too. So, you can be the person that says, “I’m feeling a little bit of a pivot here. Can y’all rock with me?” So, having something in your tool belt that will allow you to be able to name it in your own personal style.

And last but not least, it is to invite. It’s one thing to notice and name, but the wheels fall off the bus in inviting. I don’t know how to ask the person. What if they feel like I’m picking on them? You’ve noticed how I’ve done it here. May I ask you a question? If you’re willing, can you tell me more? I would like to pause here. Are you okay with that? What does it like for you to invite someone to expand on a moment in a space?

So, what we’re going to do next is on the back of said handout that you just had, in true facilitator style, there’s more contemplation here. So, I want you to think about a facilitation experience you’ve had that may not have gone the way that you wanted it to go, or you could have went deeper into the moment.

If you’re like, “Renita, I haven’t had a facilitation moment. I just got here. I still have fresh ink on my facilitator badge.” Think about a meeting you had, or a conversation with a friend, a loved one, a coworker. Those are also facilitated moments when you might have missed something.

So, if you were to revisit that, I want you to think of a headline of the moment. I was in the C-suite meeting. Someone said there was lack of trust. I missed it. With that, what did you notice and what didn’t you name? This is teaching us how to be very explicit and hone our senses.

And now we get to rewrite history. That second row says, how would you name it now and how would you invite? So, we get to create tools in our toolbox. And then those last two boxes we’re going to save for a moment. So, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to give y’all about four minutes here to write this out.

And then in the spirit of there being collective wisdom in the room, we’re going to have a round two of a table share, and I’m going to give you instructions there. So, get your minds right, you’re going to be talking some more. But for first, about four minutes while we have the experience playing and really lean in to this, because you will be sharing. Let it be messy. There are no wrong answers. And go.

Okay. Now we’re going to do a bit more of a complex facilitated exercise, but I trust this room to be able to handle it. Yes? All in favor? Any opposed? Wonderful. Motion passes. I need one volunteer from each table to raise your hand. One volunteer from each table. As you all look at each other like, “You knew, not me.” Thank you. One volunteer each table.
We got someone, we got some holdouts in the draft. There we go. Here’s what’s about to happen. We’re doing two rounds. First round, you as table captain are going to help facilitate this. It’s a low lift. Each person is going to go around. Give your two-second headline of the moment. This is not War and Peace. Well, back in 1960.

Picture it. Sicily. No. I was in a room. I facilitated a team. Someone said X headline. You’re going to say what you noticed, and then what you’d name now and what you’d invite. So, how would you invite and how would you name it? 90 seconds per person, probably less than that. Table head, if folks are giving War and Peace, do this.
If you’re their neighbor, you can invite to gentle. May I touch you?

Audience:
Yeah.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Hey. Okay. We’re going to do a little bit of speed round around the table. This is not a crosstalk moment. Just going to listen to each person’s share. When your whole table has gone around, I need the table captain to raise your hand, so I know that y’all are done, okay? Any questions? And go.

Okay, my friends. In the spirit of true facilitator style, I’m going to also pivot because I’m very nosy. I want to hear some of the tips in the room. So, this is going to be a little bit of a two-parter. This is now going to be the tip exchange. So, this first round, you heard each other’s stories, what they would do. You probably heard some things that was like, “That’s a good idea. I’m going to steal that.”

This is the only situation you have permission to steal. So, there’s a whole box in that lower left-hand corner on tips I’m stealing. What did you hear that stood out on pivots, on naming, on inviting? I want to hear as a room, some tips that you talked about and how you would name, notice, invite that came up at your table that you might have even shocked yourself of like, “I’ve never had that in me.” What came up for you?

Let’s just share this wisdom. I’m going to start down here this time. Yes. I heard great stories, I know y’all got tips.

Audience:
I’m going to share one. It’s elephant spotting.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Tell me more.

Audience:
So, a lot of people talk about the elephant in the room. No one really wants to talk about it. There’s an opportunity ahead of time though with your sponsor, with the group that you’re going to be spending time with. And it’s like, let’s surface some of those things that no one really wants to talk about. And maybe there’s opportunity to surface those.

Renita Joyce Smith:
I’m immediately stealing that. It’s going to be a whole elephant. I see a whole poster. The elephant. Yes. Great tip. Thank you.

Audience:
To lead on that, I actually make little flags out of a chopstick and a thing that would be, in that case, would be like elephant. So, it could just be on the table and we talk about it and set it up, so that someone can actually just pick up the flag and go like that. Like you name the things and you bring it forward and then you give people tools to nim them in the moment.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Fantastic tip. What I love about these both, it’s both tangible and tactile, where you account for all personality types; the shy ones, the outspoken ones. The little popsicle stick, it’s fantastic. What else?

Audience:
Can I just build on that idea?

Renita Joyce Smith:
Absolutely. Build away.

Audience:
I’ve heard this idea, but then literally with stuffed animal elephants at the table. And so you can grab the elephant. Instead of the flag, you could have actual physical elephants.

Renita Joyce Smith:
I’m going on Amazon or whoever we support nowadays. Yes. Getting actual. Hi.

Audience:
I think, forgive me, I didn’t catch your name.

Noel:
Noel.

Audience:
Noel mentioned, can we pause? I’m horrible at it. I’m a maximalist in my agendas. We’re slamming. We’re getting shit done. When you said, “Can we just pause for a moment?” I haven’t asked a team to just stop and breathe in years. That’s just my jam. So, that was really refreshing.

Renita Joyce Smith:
And are you willing to incorporate that?

Audience:
Oh, heck yeah. Absolutely. 100%.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Thank you. So, what’s cool about that too is the level of self-awareness as facilitators we have to have of, I know I do this a lot. I might need to incorporate a new tool in my tool. I can imagine your sessions are gangbusters, man.
The pause is a gift for all humanity. Let’s just take a beat and an inhale and an exhale. See, that’s how you do it. You’re doing it great. It was only 10 seconds. You’re still on agenda. Yes. What else do we have? Oh, we’re volunteering, voluntelling someone. Here. I love the collective wisdom. You.

Audience:
We talked about this idea of that when somebody is quiet, you can interpret that as that they disagree. We have a new leader, a new CEO in our company, and the way that whenever we’re making a decision or discussing something, he says, “Show your hands.”

If you show five fingers, it means I emphatically agree. Four means I agree, but can we tune or fine tune this a little bit? Three means I’m skeptical. I need some convincing. And basically two and one is I’m not with you. And then you can have a discussion about the, why not? And then a decision can be made, but you can disagree and commit and everybody had the chance to weigh in to buy in.

Renita Joyce Smith:
How have your sessions changed by doing that?

Audience:
One thing is it’s become playful because first for all, are we throwing on three, or two, or four? It’s like rock, paper, scissors. But sometimes you realize that you have alignment and you can move on. You don’t have to dwell on it. And so sometimes it helps you move faster.

It’s also been surprising that sometimes there’s misalignment on things that seem trivial and it would be easy to blow by it. But if you have two people that aren’t there, it’s good to identify it and take the extra moment to understand it and try to work through it.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. Also in the pocket. What else came up? These are getting juicier as you progress. New friend here.

Audience:
Hi. I have to share with the idea of the stuffed elephant. I have used stuffed worms, stuffed rats, and it’s about going in a wormhole or a rat hole. You can literally throw them across the room. I had four of them with a group of 25 people recently and they loved it, and it caused this big giggle in the middle of the whole conversation. It’s really awesome.

Renita Joyce Smith:
But that wasn’t professional. But amazing. What I’ve loved all these shares progressively is that no one stormed out of the room and said you’re fired, right? Anyone say you were fired? Popsicle stick, anyone say you were fired? Elephant, anyone say you were fired? No. Aha, there’s a theme. Let’s keep going this way. Yes.

Audience:
So, just listening to everyone in our group, I was pulling out themes of what’s similar in everyone’s unique little secret sauce. And really, the two main themes came up and one was just clarity is kindness. So, clear and direct. Naming it. Using those I statements of like, “I noticed this, I did this,” or, “I want clarity on this.”

And then the second part is how do you follow up with a probing question or more of an honest and curious question. So, really utilizing your inquiry mindset to approach and pivot in the conversation.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Absolutely. And being able to have a basket full of questions in your pocket is the greatest thing. You find out how many people don’t ask questions when you start asking them, like, “Oh, that’s a good question.” I know. I Googled it before I got here.” It was great. So, being in that appreciative inquiry is a fantastic tip. One more.

Audience:
I have one. I just want to respond to the fist of five, not the energy one, but the alignment one. I wonder what would happen if you did it, where people closed their eyes and they put it up? And then maybe you have them open their eyes so they’re not influenced by other people’s decisions and they saw, or just keep it anonymous the whole time. And then you can see as a facilitator, that’s data for you to see where the alignment is.

Renita Joyce Smith:
In my pocket.

Audience:
Yeah. I’m stealing that for sure.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Fantastic. Thank you. So, then thank you for all of the tips here. And as you’re going into lunch and at your tables, reflect back on each other’s stories and say, “This may be a good moment here or that’s a really good idea. This doesn’t have to stop here.”
So, any good facilitator, I always ask, what are our curiosities, our questions? What’s still sticky, if anything, in your mind that you want to bring into the room? I invite a bold soul that’s like, “Renita, I got questions.” Oh, yes.

Audience:
A curiosity that I’ve been thinking about is navigating what the potential client hired you for. Which is, at least in my experience, it’s often they want something practical, they want a final product, they want something tangible. But often I find myself leaning of the intangible things and that balance between what the client is paying you for, and meeting that goal or that expectation. And really holding that container of surfacing what is actually happening or what the group actually needs in that moment. So, it’s a question. I don’t have an answer.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Yes. I invite others during break to also come and add to the wisdom. One thing that’s worked for me is the ability to hold both. So, there’s a duality. Your discovery meeting is your gold session. So, you take everything they want to happen and you give the good old improv, yes and this is also what you’re going to get. It becomes your differentiating factor.
Other facilitators are going to come up here and probably give you a workshop out of a box. I’m going to also feel what’s in the room and pivot in the moments and really dig in deep. You’re still going to get a framework, a report out, and a whole coach in the moment. So, it is a gift and a benefit, not just, you want this? I’m going to give you this. How can you be a partner in it?

That becomes that secret sauce there. Fantastic curiosity. I see a hand. Did that help answer? Yes. Oh, he’s writing. Okay. It was a good answer then. Yes. Oh, did you have a hand? Oh, I’m with you. Yes. Yes. Any other questions or curiosities to bring into the room? Yes, please. One over here.

Audience:
If you are still in the process of unmasking, what is the best way to accelerate that? To really determining who you are unmasked.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Can I give you a secret?

Audience:
Please.

Renita Joyce Smith:
We never stop being in the process. I have asked my therapist this consistently. When am I done becoming? Can I became? Have I be’d yet? I have racked my brain on this. There is no destination unless you’re probably in a crematorium or a casket. But that also becomes the fun part of you get to discover net new pieces of yourself. We don’t spend time in our curiosity and wonder of ourselves. We want to rush to the final product.

I want to be the best facilitator now. But we were talking about patience earlier and how we can be impatient, and it’s allowing the process to move through you. I tried some stuff up here today. I’m like, “We’re going to debrief myself on that later on. How did that go?” But that is also the unmasking and it becomes its own adventure and you’re never done.
When you stop doing it, that’s when you get concerned because it gets stale. Fantastic. So, in true fashion, we have a question for you on the miro join here, le QR code. The question for you is going to be, what is your secret sauce? And then what’s one aspect of your unmasked self that you’re bringing in? Is it your contemplation? Do you like to tell a dad joke? Are you going to bring in a pause, Eli?

Eli:
I’m going to try.

Renita Joyce Smith:
Let them breathe. Are you going to ask, tell me more? What’s going to be your secret sauce? As I see some of these come in, and as we talk about sauce, I want to thank you for allowing me to be in my secret sauce today. I hope that the lunch is saucy as we go to it next. I’m around for questions, conversations. Thank you so much for having me, and turning this back to our Master of Ceremonies.

The post The Edge of the Room Is the New Center appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Dan Walker led a session titled “Unlocking Collective Wisdom,” guiding a room full of facilitators through a rich exploration of why collective work matters, how to stay grounded amid societal turbulence, and what it truly takes to navigate difficult moments in a facilitated space. Dan, a facilitator and community builder from the Coast Salish territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples—colonially known as Vancouver, Canada—opened with characteristic candor, acknowledging his own imposter syndrome at the summit before centering the very philosophy he was there to teach: our ideas are better than my ideas.

The Case for Collective Brilliance

Dan anchored his session in a foundational belief: the smartest person in the room is the room. He invited participants to sit with the question of why we should embrace the brilliance of the collective—and then gave them time to actually do it, building in space for personal reflection before pairing participants to share emerging themes.

What surfaced was striking. Participants observed that collective creation fosters a sense of ownership that top-down direction never can. They pointed to the value of the journey itself—the making of meaning together—as distinct from whatever outcome is eventually reached. One participant offered that holding space for multiple truths is an act of resistance, a challenge to systems that prefer singular, authoritative answers. And in a moment that drew audible appreciation from the room, another reached for something more poetic: “To hear the song of our highest possibility that no one knows they have access to, and to empower them to be the place where it happens.”

Dan reflected that he once believed facilitation was simply about finding better answers. What the room reminded him—and what he returned to throughout the session—is that the collective process itself is where the real value lives: the relationships formed, the meaning made together, the shared recognition of a common human experience.

Patience and the Long Game

One of the session’s most resonant moments came through a personal story. Dan described his time leading social impact work at outdoor brand Arc’teryx—years of building toward change, only to find himself completely burnt out, frustrated that progress felt impossibly slow. During a walk with an indigenous elder on the island, he shared his frustration. She stopped, looked him in the eyes, and offered one word: “Patience.” The land beneath their feet, she told him, had been under negotiation since 1963.

This story opened a rich, wide-ranging conversation about one of facilitation’s most persistent tensions: the urgent need of now versus the patience required for generational change. A participant offered a concept that resonated immediately—”manufactured urgency”—the idea that urgency is often wielded as a form of avoidance, an excuse not to do the harder, slower, more honest work. Another framed the tension like a rubber band: tension is the point, not the problem, and the question is whether we can make space to hear each other’s values within it.

Dan held all of these perspectives without rushing toward resolution, which was itself the point. Different people come to this tension from different places—some lean toward speed, others toward patience—and the work of facilitation is to bring those expressions into the same conversation rather than declare one of them correct.

Finding Joy When the World Is at an Edge

As the session turned to the current moment in society, Dan created space for something facilitators rarely name out loud: the challenge of sustaining wellness—and even finding joy—when the world feels like it’s at an edge. The room responded openly. One participant spoke about reclaiming analog experiences and slowing down enough to feel human again. Another raised the importance of privacy as a precondition for genuine play and personal growth. A third quoted something she’d been holding close: “I know that there is kindness in the world because I exist in the world.”

Dan connected these reflections to something he’d learned from years of mentoring young climate activists: burnout is the single biggest barrier to long-term change work. You are only as useful to the movement as long as you stay in it. His invitation was both gentle and serious—give yourself permission to find joy, tend to your own sustainability, and trust that doing so isn’t a departure from the work. It’s what makes the work possible.

Navigating Turbulence as a Facilitator

The session’s final arc brought everything back to the practice of facilitation itself. When a single comment shifts the energy of an entire room—what do we do in those moments? Participants offered grounded, practical wisdom. Slow down, one suggested, and let the turbulence be the wisdom that wants to be heard. Set the container before anyone walks in, because it is far harder to establish safety after something has gone sideways. Design sessions like stories, with a clear narrative arc that makes space for disagreement, tension, and resolution. Actively invite the counterpoint—what Dan described, drawing on the Lewis Deep Democracy method, as “finding the no”—so that dissonance becomes part of the process rather than a disruption to it.

One insight that lingered long after it was offered: take 15 minutes with each participant before the session begins, because what the client thinks is the challenge is often not what participants are actually carrying. And as another participant put it simply: discomfort is not danger. Giving a group that frame, and trusting them within it, can change everything about how they move through difficulty together.

Dan closed the session with a song by Fred again—a piece about light, dark, and light again. It was a fitting end to a session that held both the weight of turbulent times and an abiding belief that collective wisdom, given the right conditions, will always find its way through.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Dan’s Session:

Dan Walker (00:03):
It’s a pleasure to be with you all. I kind of want to go around and just say hello to everybody. I won’t do that. To begin with, I don’t know, is anybody sick of the word edges so far? Is that feeling like we’ve said it too many times? I don’t think we have as of yet, but we’re getting closer. What I would say this morning, like when I think about edges, an edge by its very definition is that space distant from the comfortable space at the heart of us. There’s very much comfortable, familiarity, safety in who we are. The edge is pushing into those spaces beyond. They’re challenging in so many ways. One of those pieces being a clarity of vision. Where am I going? What does it look like on the other side? It’s these new spaces that we’ve not stepped into previously. And more than that, there’s this area, once we do know where we’re going, this challenge of how am I going to move to action?

(00:54):
The imposter syndrome that comes up of what right do I have to do this? Am I capable of doing that? Should somebody else be doing that? It even resonates with me right now. I sat this morning and I looked at the summit agenda, the facilitation lineup. And I saw as I was looking, every other facilitator has done the master certification. I have not. That stands out. And it’s like, okay, well, what right do I have? What am I missing? What’s the opportunity there as well? But these spaces are critical to us. We have to move into those edges and move beyond. And I see that as challenging at the best of times, but profoundly so when the world itself feels like it’s at an edge. It feels like we’re very much living in an edge, in a society that’s living at an edge. How do we maintain doing that work collectively?

(01:42):
How do we find the courage to push through and unlock that self-brilliance, that collective brilliance that exists and is so heavily needed? So that’s the conversation that I want to look into today and kind of chat through. Tap into the collective wisdom in this room. I think that’s really what we have as it’s come through so strongly in these times. We’ll touch on three things. We’ll unpack facilitation, why facilitation? Why do we do this work? We’ll then step into really within the context of this moment, what are we navigating? What are we thinking through? What’s it revealing to us to be important? And how are we finding wellness in those times too? And then we’ll bring it home and we’ll come back to really in facilitation. Similarly, times of turbulence emerge. One comment can send the room in a completely different direction. How do we manage that and how do we work through it?

(02:33):
So that’s kind of what we’ll work through today. I’ll guide us all along the way. Click through. I’m coming here from Coast Salish territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. A big part of protocol there is to acknowledge the land on which we’re from. So I bring that into the space today to acknowledge with gratitude, the indigenous peoples of this land who have guardianed it since time immemorial. Similarly, it’s Black History Month this month too, and I’d invite us to reflect on that. So much of this work through times of turbulence and challenge, we’ve seen brilliance of black peoples, indigenous peoples to navigate that. And I’d invite us to think about that as we do this work today.

(03:14):
I often say, and I offered this at the intro, I just say I do things and I smile lots. That’s really who I am. I’m a human. I care. I smile all the time. I don’t know. I don’t like sharing my resume. You can probably find it on LinkedIn if you wish. But I think it’s more interesting, like what are the core values that we hold to be true? For me, this is central to what I believe. I genuinely believe our ideas are better than my ideas. The wisdom that’s in the room is always going to be higher than whatever I can muster. If we’re having a conversation on any complex topic, no single human has the answer. Instead, it sits in the middle and together we shape an ever better version of it. I’m seeing some nods which tells me I’m in the right room. I was like, “That’s a great sign that this resonates.” I think just a sense, this resonates with facilitators, this is great.

(04:05):
Similarly, I expressed a different way. I actually picked this up last year at the summit. Danny, I don’t know if he’s here from San Francisco, maybe not this year, but he brought this into the space. The smartest person in the room is the room. Similarly, a similar belief. And I shared this last week actually. I was doing some work with a group doing amazing work around refugee settlement and said the same thing. One plus one equals three. And the gentleman in the front row looked at me incredulously and was like, “That does not work for me. I studied mathematics at university. That does not make any sense.” If this doesn’t serve you, disregard it. But really the belief, the belief is this. The belief is in the brilliance of the collective. That’s what we’re trying to unlock and that’s what I believe as facilitators is our work. How do we think about that? How do we support that? How do we move through? And that’s what we’ll do today. And we’ll see that repeated time and time again.

(05:00):
To click in, I want to touch on these sort of agreements that we’ll look at. I’m going to try and move the room. The room’s massive, so I’ll try and shift up and down. These are the agreements that I would encourage us to sit with today. So the first one being we act with respect. I say this as respect for ourselves. If you need time to nip to the washroom, if you need to go and get refreshments, if you need to find Liquid Death, feel free to do that. But yeah, move with respect. Be kind to each other. We need that more than ever in this moment too. The smartest person in the room is the room. I’ve said that at the start. That’s true. How do we unlock that wisdom? I’m not giving away prizes or dollars for the smartest human. That’s not on offer. Instead, how do we unlock that collective wisdom that exists?

(05:45):
The next piece is just to advance our collective learning too. So that’s always the goal. If we bump into challenges, those pieces, how do we learn through it together? And the final one I think is really important to me. We’re often entering into spaces that are uncomfortable, unfamiliar. It’s okay to be raggedy. Even more than that, it’s a gift to be raggedy. It allows others of us to express our ideas. So if we’ve got ideas that we’re like, “I’m not entirely certain this is where we are,” feel free to share it. It’s likely that that’s the idea that resonates with us too. So those are the three pieces that I’d encourage. Oh, that’s looking good. It’s looking good and different.

(06:23):
So yeah, we want to start with an activity. So I think we often touch on this. We often get into facilitation, but why do we facilitate? Really what’s at the heart of that? Why do we think there’s power in doing this? So the question that I want us to sit with, and we’ll take some time to personally reflect on it, is why should we embrace the brilliance of the collective? What is the reason behind that? Why do we come to believe in this? Why do we facilitate because of that? The way we’ll structure it is we’ll have time for personal reflection. I often find this in society, we don’t give ourselves that time just to stop and compose our thoughts. We immediately jump into action. So we’ll start there. We’ll have personal time and then we’ll pair up. So pick a partner beside you and then we’ll unpack that question. So we’ll take another four minutes to go through that. And then we’ll come back into the room and we’d invite some opinions that have emerged, themes that have come up.

(07:31):
I’d love to invite into the space just what came up. Yeah, what were some of the themes that emerged? Anybody want to share?

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Oh, I have a mic. Look at that. Jackson and our group was talking about the strength of a sort of collective creation. And so people are bought into ideas when they come to them together rather than somebody sort of bringing it in and requiring it from the top.

Dan Walker (07:54):
So good. It’s huge, right? The difference between us building it together and feeling that sense of ownership versus us being told by the leader, “This is what we’re doing.” Yeah, thanks for sharing.

(08:04):
Yeah. Who else has other things to contribute? Yeah, I can jump.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, I’ll just say something my new … I’ll just say here, something my new friend brought up here is there’s also immense value in the journey to come to that collective decision.

Dan Walker (08:19):
So good. So good.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
And just the journey itself shouldn’t be discounted for whatever you get to.

Dan Walker (08:24):
Really great. Yeah. The value of the journey, the making meaning together. That is a big part of this work, right? It’s like how do we actually make meaning? Some of these challenges that we’re working through are immensely complex, but how do we collectively process it and learn together?

(08:38):
Yeah, maybe one or two more. Yeah, we can go to the back. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (08:41):
I hope this isn’t too intense, but if we leave room for multiple truths, for just sitting with ambiguity, mistakes, then that is one of the best ways to challenge authority, fascism, things like that.

Dan Walker (08:54):
So great. So great. So great. It’s not going too far. It’s great. I love that you share that too. I appreciate you bringing that into the space too. It does. It challenges the way we run systems, right? It re-imagines this possibility of the collective brilliance that we’re trying to unlock that systems often pushes against. So yeah, huge thank you.

(09:11):
I’d love one more. Yeah, in the back.

Speaker 6 (09:15):
And to wrap us up in a bit of a poetic sense, my thought was to hear the song of our highest possibility that no one knows they have access to, and to empower them to be the place where it happens. It’s an extraordinary feeling.

Dan Walker (09:32):
Wow. It’s beautiful. Wow. Wow. Stunning. Yeah. So many pieces that came up in that conversation. So the journey, the power of that together, the power of the collective brilliance, our possibility of challenging systems, redefining the way we do it. So many of these ideas are brilliant and central to why we do this work. Just to click through, if I could get the slides back up, that would be awesome. If I can’t, that’s fine too. But really when I started out, I always thought this was the reason we did it. I always thought the reason we facilitated was to find a better answer. And I think it’s true. I think we do find a better answer when we work together, but I don’t actually think it’s the fullness. I think what we identified in the room is the reason. That collective process, that collective meaning making is where the value comes.

(10:17):
It’s probably for many of us, it’s hard to sell that to leaders at times. The belief in that the process is the value of itself, but you see it time and again, that conversation around the sense of ownership we feel when we’re going through that collective process, this realization of the shared human experience that we have, that’s really where the power is. I work a lot too in conflict spaces, and you’ve seen this shift in that work too. Historically, the space was known as conflict resolution. This idea of how we’re resolving the conflict. These are big complex issues. What’s the resolution to it? And you’ve started to see a shift into actually that being named as conflict engagement. So it’s not actually possible to resolve some of those pieces, but how do we engage with it better? And so that’s a big part of this work.

(11:04):
That’s a big part of facilitation and what we’re trying to do is engage better, make meaning together, build relationships, build bond, build resiliences that challenge systems and structures. So yeah, I love what came into the room naturally, and thank you for that. The next space I’ll touch on at some point is this piece. So I was burnt out. This is where we go back six years ago. I was at the outdoor brand, Arc’teryx. I was leading their social impact work. It was amazing in many ways, but the big challenge is as you do this work, you get ever closer to community need to understand what’s going on in community, the barriers that exist in terms of access to the outdoor industry and to nature in general. And you realize how distant we are from that. That’s profoundly challenging. You’ve then got to turn internally and try and build the CEO’s buy into that work and there’s a tension there.

(11:57):
And I was totally frustrated, totally burnt. I couldn’t move anymore. And so I was over on the island. I was actually over here and I was chatting to an indigenous elder and we went for a walk and she stopped me at one point and just looked me square in the eyes and was like, “Patience. Patience is what you need.” I’ve been doing this work for five years and I was like, “I need to move. It’s not moving. Why is it not going?” She said that the land we were on had been under negotiation since 1963 and that year the agreement on it might have been signed. It’s this long-term view that we often don’t bring into the spaces. So I think there’s often this reality within that, it’s the work of generations in which we sit. We’re slowly shifting systems, we’re solely shifting product design and all those pieces, but it’s long-term and we often sit in this urgent need of now at the expense of the long-term nature of the work.

(12:52):
What I would say is this tension is really this. The urgent need of now played against the patients of long-term change. It’s a thing we often don’t bring in, we often don’t talk about. They both exist at the same time and that’s challenging to hold. So that’s what I want to do for the next question is really within our work, whatever space that’s in, but how does this urgency play against this long-term game as well? How do we sit with that? So the question we’ll ask is that it’s like that. Yeah. How do you balance that tension between urgency? We need this now, we need this yesterday, we need it last week with actually the quality work takes time. How do you hold that tension? Maybe you can’t resolve it and that’s okay, but what comes up within that? So we’ll kind of do personal reflection time and then we’ll share back within the group. So yeah, start writing in your notes, whatever comes up for you.

(13:52):
What came up for people? What emerged? How do you balance this? How does urgency and … Yeah, please do. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 7 (14:00):
I think where I used to find this tension is like everywhere. Especially I see myself as someone who leans a little bit more patience. Like I’m a little bit more slow with how I operate. So yeah, I would find that tension everywhere of people annoyed with me. But I think where I am now is I don’t think there is tension. The tension’s not actually there. It’s just perceived and we can choose to play with it or be in it or not. So yeah, I just don’t think there’s tension.

Dan Walker (14:34):
Wow. I’m just curious as a follow-up, how did you arrive at that place too? What was the journey to arrive there?

Speaker 7 (14:42):
That’s a good question. I don’t know. I think I just woke up one day and was like, “There is no tension.”

Dan Walker (14:48):
And epiphany’s always a good solution. So have an epiphany is the …

(14:52):
Yeah, maybe one at the front and then we can go to the back would be great. I can give you this. Thank you.

Speaker 4 (14:58):
This is one of my favorite topics.

Dan Walker (15:00):
Oh, great. Here we go.

Speaker 4 (15:01):
So I’ve coined this phrase manufactured urgency.

Dan Walker (15:04):
Love it. Love it.

Speaker 4 (15:05):
And so I think you need to be intentional about when urgency actually matters and not have it as a default position.

Dan Walker (15:14):
Sounds great. Wow.

Speaker 4 (15:14):
And one of the things that I’ve concluded is oftentimes people use urgency. It’s a form of apathy to me because it’s an excuse not to do the hard work.

Dan Walker (15:22):
That’s good. Whoa. Whoa.

Speaker 4 (15:25):
And so I try to combat it now.

Dan Walker (15:26):
That’s good. That’s really good.

Speaker 4 (15:27):
Part of the way that I maintain credibility on those positions is sometimes urgency does matter. And if you can really explain why it matters, then sometimes time is the most important element, but time is very rarely the only measure of outcome.

Dan Walker (15:40):
So good. So good. And how have you found that? I mean, I love so much in what you just shared. How have you found that ability to then explain manufactured … Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:49):
I find it’s an extremely polarizing topic because there are people who think speed and velocity is the only thing that matters.

Dan Walker (15:49):
So good.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
And then I think there’s kind of the other side where you’re kind of looking at the whole.

Dan Walker (16:00):
So good.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
And I use analogies all the time like, “Well, do you want your omelet cooked quickly or you want it cooked right?” And so there are things in life that just require the right amount of time and there are things in life that you can do quickly and you have to just be able to make the judgment between the two.

Dan Walker (16:17):
So good. Intentional when we are urgent and intentional when we take the time. Yeah, I love that.

(16:22):
We can go to the back. Thank you very much.

Speaker 8 (16:23):
Yeah. Both of those gentlemen sound very patient and I love that for y’all.

Dan Walker (16:30):
Let’s get urgent.

Speaker 8 (16:31):
I am a very impatient person, always have been. So for me, this is like a very big struggle because I am somebody who I think I usually work very much towards the urgency piece. And I kind of, I don’t know, I flatter myself by thinking, oh, I can get it done urgently and right. And we know that that doesn’t always work. So I think that for me, the biggest part is when I have to slow down and be patient and let things play out organically, it’s hard for me because it means I have to acknowledge the fact that I’m not in control of every outcome and I have to acknowledge the fact that I may not know the correct answer and that is very hard for me giving up that control. So I think that the personal journey, what’s made it easier for me is acknowledging the fact that I don’t have all the answers and if I have to give up control, that’s all right. And then the patience kind of comes naturally from that. But it’s hard. Yes.

Dan Walker (17:35):
It’s so good. So good. I mean, it’s the work, right? I’ll go to the back with one more and then, yeah, we can come back in. But I think that piece, right? It’s like this personal work, it sits within us. We often gravitate by our lived experience, by where we are to different expectums. Some of us want to move fast, some of us want to go slow and patient. That’s beautiful. But how do we acknowledge that? How do we hold it? How do we hold that we all have different expressions of that? And how do we bring that into the conversation too? Yeah, I love what you shared.

(18:01):
We can go to the back too. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (18:02):
Hi.

Dan Walker (18:03):
Hi.

Speaker 9 (18:03):
So when I look at this, I think of the fact that urgency and this idea of slowing down and thinking of a long-term goal actually work hand in hand and it’s a tension that exists and needs to exist. And so a way to think about it is a rubber band. A rubber band is effective when you actually have tension and you’re holding and you’re tying something together. And that’s essentially an organization maybe versus an individual. In my perspective, it’s not a right or wrong, it’s what do we value? So what am I valuing versus what are you valuing? And can we make space to hear each other and figure out what is going to work?

Dan Walker (18:45):
So good. So good. I think that’s beautiful in what you said too that can we make space to hear each other? We all have these different expressions and that’s a beautiful thing. This tension isn’t, we should always answer it urgent, we should answer it slow, but actually how do we resolve it together and how do we have it as a conversation rather than it is just this way or is just this way? Yeah. Thank you for everybody you shared. I would love to carry on longer, but I should probably keep moving.

(19:09):
Kind of in the next piece that I want to touch on, really the lessons that I strive to learn are these two, the importance of the collective, the importance of that work together. This repeats time and again. We’ve heard about that, the sense of ownership that comes, the sense of meaning making that comes through that. It’s all there. The importance of the collective is everything. And then two, bringing in this conversation around the generational nature of the work too, and how do we resolve that with the urgent need of now? How do we have that as a conversation and a dimension of the work too? So those are the two pieces.

(19:41):
We’ll move kind of into the next section. Really, this conversation is always framed around it. How might we maintain this ever upward spiral towards a more just and joyful society is a question I often sit with. I think it’s collective work that we hold, that we sit together. How do we advance it? I think coming here … I’m based in Canada and we see the conversation that’s live. We see what’s happening in the world right now. There is a massive shift. There are massive changes at play and it feels wrong not to create space to have that conversation. We’ve got a room full of people. How do we process this moment together? So that’s what I want to do.

(20:20):
I want to focus in two ways. Really the first piece, as moments of turbulence arise in our lives, in society, there’s too much going on. I’m overwhelmed. How do I focus my time and energy? These are conversations that rise, but what does it reveal to be important? I think this is almost the strange gift of this. Amidst that noise, you start to see, actually, it’s this. Actually, it’s my family. It’s my community. It’s whatever that may be. I’m not going to answer it, but this is the question that I want us to sit with. So now we’ll kind of take some time on our own again just to go through what’s the moment revealing to be important to you.

(21:05):
It’s feeling important to people. Yeah, we’ve got one at the back.

Speaker 10 (21:19):
What’s revealing to me is that we’re like seeking, at least from my truth, is that I’m seeking analog experiences and not necessarily optimizing for efficiency and profit and creating for the sake of creating. And I do think that with the age of AI, the pendulum will swing and that we’re going to have this creative renaissance again.

Dan Walker (21:20):
So cool.

Speaker 10 (21:39):
And so for me, I think we’re tapping into what makes us inherently human, which is like, how do we build things that tap into our senses that remind us that we’re alive?

Dan Walker (21:49):
Wow. Wow. And just as a follow-up, I mean, it’s beautiful. That piece of tapping into who we are and our humanity and how we express and how we share ideas, how’s it feeling for you? I’m just curious to you like … Mark, maybe we can get the mic? Yeah.

Speaker 10 (22:02):
Sorry, repeat that again.

Dan Walker (22:03):
Yeah. How’s it feeling for you to do that? To be centered … Yeah, to be focusing on that.

Speaker 10 (22:07):
Oh, it’s changed my relationship to my work, which is like, one of my affirmations when I show up every day is like, my soul’s not in a rush and that I’m doing whatever-

Dan Walker (22:07):
So good.

Speaker 10 (22:17):
… I need to do for this collective.

Dan Walker (22:19):
So good.

Speaker 10 (22:20):
And that may be a small piece of this much bigger puzzle, but we’ll figure it out.

Dan Walker (22:25):
So cool. Yeah, my soul’s not in a rush. It’s beautiful. That’s all right. Yeah. Amazing. Welcome to the front. Yeah.

Speaker 11 (22:31):
Yeah. For me, privacy is something I’m trying to really hold onto right now. I think often privacy is framed in this sense of like, “Well, if you’re not doing anything wrong, who cares if you’re being continually surveilled?” But I think privacy, the conversation about how privacy enables play and personal growth is undertalked about, I think. And so the example I came into my mind was just yesterday, I was going to rake leaves in my front yard and I put on some headphones, got some country music going, and in my mind I was going to go practice two-step in, dance in while I was raking the leaves. But as soon as I got outside, I noticed my neighbor had her Tesla parked in her driveway and a nest camera on her doorstep. And I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched and I could not feel comfortable dancing and raking leaves because I just felt like I was being watched by this camera. And that’s just a shame. We’re going to lose all of our private spaces.

Dan Walker (23:36):
Wow. Yeah. And that piece of the inability to express who we are and what we want to do. And imagine if we could, imagine if that’s possible that you can go and dance whilst raking leaves in the garden. Awesome. So good.

(23:50):
Yeah, can we come here? Do you want me to go? Erase me.

Speaker 12 (23:58):
So this came up for me that you cannot fully progress as a collective unless you fully acknowledge and atone for mistakes of the past.

Dan Walker (24:09):
Wow.

Speaker 12 (24:09):
And that’s what I’m feeling viscerally in this moment right now.

Dan Walker (24:14):
Yeah. Yeah. The acknowledgement of what’s the reality, the mistakes that have been made, the mistakes that are ongoing, the challenges, the harm that’s resulted in that. It’s true, right? Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 13 (24:28):
Thanks. I’ve been thinking a lot about risk and this moment and watching a lot of truly incompetent people be really confident.

Dan Walker (24:38):
I don’t know who you’re talking about.

Speaker 13 (24:44):
So why not me? So why not us? We are the people we’ve been waiting for. So when I see all these folks kind of confidently stepping into places and doing terrible and ill-mannered and otherwise bad things, and here we all are working on ourselves trying to be better and better we shouldn’t be reserved. We shouldn’t hold back. We should take the risk. We should step into the unfamiliar place and we should shine.

Dan Walker (25:15):
So good. Yeah. Be brilliant ourselves. Yeah. So yeah, round of applause, definitely. So good. So beautiful to express the fullness of who we are, the brilliance that we each hold. I think that’s what we have, right? Whether it’s the creative expression, whether it’s dancing to leaves in the front garden. Be us and be brilliant us and unapologetically us. Yeah, thank you. Maybe one more. I can come here too.

Speaker 14 (25:39):
I’m going to combine two answers.

Dan Walker (25:41):
Oh, this is great. This is great. You’re doing my work.

Speaker 14 (25:43):
Between the creativity and the leaning in, because I can imagine that probably everybody in this room is creative. Everybody’s creative, but I imagine this group is maybe a little elevated in the creativity. So taking that creativity, because I think when you lean into those things, it does contribute to whatever professional work you are doing. But I’ve also really been leaning into those uncomfortable creative spaces, like learning guitar with my son, and I’ve never done anything musical in my life. And I’m an aspiring standup comedian. And speaking of people that have competence and no talent, go to an open mic mic in Hartford, Connecticut. And so you think, “I’m terrible, but they’re worse, so I can get up there.” So I’m really pushing myself into those spaces where it’s uncomfortable and I can grow maybe with no purpose. I don’t know why, but I’m just going to do it.

Dan Walker (26:33):
So good. Yeah, like pushing us in … Yeah, so good. So, so good. Growing in those uncomfortable spaces in different aspects too. We’ll go to one at the back and then, yeah, we’ll go to the next section. Thank you.

Speaker 15 (26:44):
One more thing that came up for me is the need to go back to a conversation about values and human values because I feel like with the world getting so polarized right now, our ideology can get in the way and we cannot see eye to eye with people. But if we bring it back to values, then maybe we can find common ground. Maybe I’m hopeful we can find common ground. And even if we can’t, I personally feel the need to go back to that conversation.

Dan Walker (27:14):
So great. So great. Yeah. I mean, shared values, really. How are we having that conversation? I think I see this all the time. So I’m originally from the UK. I’m from near Manchester is home. We don’t have a shared vision for what England’s doing. We don’t have a shared vision for what Canada is. I see the same in the States. We don’t name what is that shared value. I think when we click it up, our shared values are probably closer than we realize. We care about good health for ourselves, our family, our loved ones, fair opportunity, a roof over our heads, food on the table. We’re pretty aligned in that, but we put this polarization in place and we sit miles apart. And so how are we creating those spaces to have conversations around values? Yeah, thank you to everybody who shared as well. We’ll move through in the interest of time.

(28:01):
The second piece, and this is kind of wisdom that’s often shared in justice movements. It’s shared with me when I started out, you’re only good to the movement as long as you’re a part of the movement. If you’re burnt out, you leave, the work’s not moving. So the key is like, how do you push with all that you’ve got, but not push beyond that you then leave. It’s the thing that I see. I mentor a lot of youth in the climate movement. I was on a mentorship call probably four years back now it would be, and they asked this group of 50 youth, what’s the one biggest barrier to positive climate action in the future? And by a million miles burnout was number one. It stuck with me, right? It’s this piece of like how do we push when we care, our values exist, but we don’t push beyond.

(28:48):
So this is what I want to kind of focus on. I want to take us into the next conversation, which is really here. How are you seeking to maintain wellness and find joy in this moment? We’ve heard pockets of it too, which is beautiful. And I think how do we tap that up? It feels challenging. For some, it might feel jarring to say, I’m actually finding joy in this moment when there’s so much pain and harm existing at the same time, but I think it’s important. So we’ll take some time here on our own. We’ll get into conversation later, but yeah, take five minutes. What is this moment? Yeah, how are you finding joy and wellness amidst it?

(29:23):
Okay, everybody in taking another minute now, just the final minute to come together. I’m curious, what came up? Yeah, I’d love to hear some thoughts in the room so we can go to the back, please.

Speaker 16 (29:45):
The first part was being willing to give permission for wellness and permission to find joy and recognizing that when I take care of myself, it builds capacity for me to take care of other people. And when I have capacity for joy, I have capacity for heartbreak and rage and everything else.

Dan Walker (30:03):
Wow. Yeah. Huge. Huge. Yeah. Taking the permission, giving that permission for yourself to hold it all. And that’s wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, we could go back here as well.

Speaker 17 (30:15):
I just wanted to give a very specific example of something I tried a few years ago and then I’ve kind of upped it. So a couple years ago I was in Milwaukee for work and I realized a friend of mine used to live there and so I texted her and said, or lives there and I said, text her. I was like, “Hey, do you want to get together?” I haven’t seen her since high school. And she happened to be in jury duty. She checked her messages during the break and said, “Absolutely, I’m there.” And we went out for dinner and three hours later it was like time never passed. So ever since then I’ve been trying to do it. And I was just telling my partner Kelly here that I, a couple months ago I was in San Diego and looked up another friend and I was like, “Oh, Chuck, he’s still in San Diego. Where in San Diego? Oh, 45 minute walk. I’m just going to walk to his house and I’m just going to knock on the door.”

Dan Walker (31:01):
Wow.

Speaker 17 (31:02):
And at worst, I’ll leave a message on his phone or in the Ring camera. And he was there and he’s like, “Oh my God, I haven’t seen you since college.” And we spent three hours just connecting and being human.

Dan Walker (31:11):
So huge.

Speaker 17 (31:11):
And so being in that moment just brought me so much joy and him so much joy. So I’ve told that story a couple times now because I’m like, it brought me to the moment and I want other people to feel like they have those moments too.

Dan Walker (31:24):
So huge. So huge. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I think you heard it too in the space, like the joy that was shared when you were sharing that story of connecting with old friends. You hear the giggles, the laughter, the amusement too. So thank you. Yeah, we can go here.

Speaker 18 (31:39):
I just got something to say. Okay. This is also kind of speaking to last question as well. So I really took this question more practically, but mutual aid and resistance. Gathering is a way of fighting the, or gathering well is a way of fighting the idea that we should all be angry at and scared of each other. And so how I’ve been managing it personally is journaling. It’s been really easy with a fountain pen. That’s been nice. Adding novelty to our lives because we get in the routines. That’s so important, especially for your brain. I meet a group of girls every two weeks for facilitated conversation and we all chose to be there, which is great. And finally, I saw this quote and I think it’s helpful for all of us. I know that there is kindness in the world because I exist in the world.

Dan Walker (32:39):
Ah, wow. Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 18 (32:41):
And there’s got to be more.

Dan Walker (32:43):
Wow. Wow.

Speaker 18 (32:44):
And finally, it’s not just going to happen on its own. It’s a conscious decision to not let the rot consume you.

Dan Walker (32:53):
Wow. Wow.

Speaker 18 (32:54):
And someone else has something to say after.

Dan Walker (32:56):
That knowing that kindness exists, because we can put it into the world. We can control. We have agency over that, right? How we show up and how we bring that into the world, the processing together, processing individually in the journal, whether we do that, whether we process together in groups and how do we intentionally work through it. Yeah. Thanks so much. That’s awesome. I’ll go this end and then yeah, over that side too. Yep. Great.

Speaker 19 (33:16):
So Tony and I were talking about disconnecting, which we’ve already talked about a couple times, but I was discussing how I’m really trying to enjoy the minutia of life. I used to wash the dishes and listen to a podcast or listen to an audiobook. And now I’m just trying to be so present in the moment and be more mindful and try to enjoy, stop rushing and just be like, “Oh, it’s a Tuesday and I have to wash the dishes and I’m just going to do that or I’m going to drive in silence.” And I think that’s so important to ground you and also go outside. Just also go outside.

Dan Walker (33:51):
So good. Thank you. I mean that, I mean, time outside, I’d second that any day. Time in nature, it’s there. It’s magical. It’s wonderful spaces to be in. But just having presence in those moments slowing down. My Spotify playlist was problematic this year. The wrapped days, I had 179 days literally of like 24 hour, 179. It’s too many. I live with music all the time. I love music, but I’m not intentionally listening to it. What is the crutch that I’m holding onto and how might I have presence instead? Yeah, thank you.

(34:21):
We had one over this way and then I’d come in the … Yeah. Come to you. We can go here and then we can go to the back. We’re good. Yeah, we can go. I’ll come to you.

Speaker 20 (34:30):
So Phil and I had some similarity in ours that we’re finding joy and wellness in putting ourselves in places where youth are, because it’s just hard for everything else that’s looming to continue to loom when you see joy and hope in the young people that are around us.

Dan Walker (34:50):
Yeah, that’s amazing. Yes, finding that energy in others too. There’s one at the back too, if we could go to this … Yeah, there’s someone here. Oh, Mark has got it, I think, behind you.

Speaker 21 (35:00):
I have found finding rhythms helps with wellness. And so making sure that every day there’s space every week, there’s a couple of nights and a day, like a day a week, and then rhythms kind of annually where you’re just getting away. In terms of joy, I left Toronto yesterday with four feet of snow and I landed here in Austin and experienced a great deal of joy.

Dan Walker (35:25):
I echo that coming from Vancouver where it’s much colder than it is here. So jumping in Barton Springs was a delight yesterday. It’s beautiful. It’s these little pieces, right? It’s the space and the presence that we apply, but making space for that and the time to connect, the time to find youth as well and see that joy that’s rising.

(35:42):
Maybe one more. Does anybody else have anything to share? Yeah, over this backside.

Speaker 22 (35:48):
You’re doing a great job, Dan. Thanks.

Dan Walker (35:49):
Thanks.

Speaker 22 (35:53):
For me, there’s a lot of talk right now about the importance of storytelling as a core competency for business, but stories are the technology that we have developed to share the tools for persistence and survival. And all of us are here because our ancestors persisted and survived and they had a story to tell. So I work a lot in addiction and recovery and trauma, and there is so much healing in sharing stories.

Dan Walker (36:26):
Wow. Wow. Yeah. The power in stories. And we’ve heard that through time and again, the human experience, the shared connection that we have too, and that’s what we have. We each have those stories. We each have that lineage. And how do we connect and share that and find the joy that exists? Thank you everybody. Yeah, it was amazing. So we’ll kind of move into the next section. So starting to bring it back into facilitation. These parallels apply. Really this work around the importance of the collective, this human identification, this shared narrative that we have, these shared experiences, the ancestry that we’re bringing forward, the stories that we’re carrying into the future, that applies too in facilitation. It’s exactly the same. And similarly, this embrace of the long-term nature of the work, I think that touching on the ancestry just then, that’s part of it, right?

(37:12):
We sit in this long line of work that’s moving forward. So that’s what I want to turn to now and start to bring back. How do we come in to this work of facilitation with this mindset as well? So the question I want to sit us with is how might you best navigate moments of turbulence that arise in facilitation practices? So when we’re facilitating and that one conversation, that one comment comes up in the room and it changes the entire energy, what do we do in those moments? What are these stories around the human experience, these connections that we have? How can we learn from that too? So we’ll take time on our own and then we’ll come back into the main room as well. So yeah, if we take five minutes ourselves just to reflect, how do we apply these lessons within facilitation?

(37:56):
Okay. And I’d love to get some thoughts in the room. What came up? How do we start to apply these conversations we’ve had within the context of facilitation? When turbulence arises in a facilitated practice, what do we do? How are we approaching that? Would love to hear some thoughts.

Speaker 23 (38:24):
This is where I come the most alive, so I’m going to slow down.

Dan Walker (38:28):
That’s great. You go. You go.

Speaker 23 (38:30):
I think the best way to navigate these moments is to slow down.

Dan Walker (38:33):
That’s so good.

Speaker 23 (38:35):
And to let that turbulence be the wisdom that just wants to be seen and heard in service to the conversation that’s wanting to emerge.

Dan Walker (38:48):
So good. So good. So good. So slowing down to allow that turbulence to allow the conversation to emerge. Yeah, it’s huge. And hard too, right? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. We’d love to come … Yeah. Mark, just down at the front.

Speaker 24 (39:07):
This is probably something that comes up in every facilitation lab we’ve ever had in New York City that a lot of the work happens before anyone gets in the room or what you did at the beginning where you’ve been intentional, you’ve set norms, agreements of how you’re going to navigate the space, because it’s so much harder to respond to something after it happens if you haven’t already laid those groundworks. And it makes me think of Priya Parker’s generous authority, where you have to set the boundaries and hold those boundaries because then that’s what creates the freedom and the space and the safety within to say we can navigate and wrestle with the discomfort and the disagreement and let the wisdom emerge within the boundaries that we’ve all agreed to. Without the boundaries, then it becomes much more difficult.

Dan Walker (39:48):
Yeah. So good. Setting the container is huge, right? That’s what we’re doing. We’re creating this container for this conversation to exist. Huge thank you. Anybody else get a similar theme to that of setting the container and how … Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 25 (40:01):
It’s facing it immediately at the beginning of a session. So giving people the space, I call it a lot of times the brain dump after going through the purpose and the goals and realizing that everybody might not be on the same page, giving space and time to discuss what is not aligned, what issues there are, what questions need to be addressed. And that kind of lets the air out of the balloon of the turbulence and the pressure that they’re feeling. And you’re able to then design it in a way where you can address issues and redesign a session as you go to answer those questions. So instead of waiting for the turbulence to happen, you address it and then design it into your session.

Dan Walker (40:46):
So good.

Speaker 25 (40:46):
And then another thing is acknowledging the resource of time and energy and even emotional capacity that people have. Something that’s really great here and it’s awesome, but almost is a little overwhelming is how open everybody is. And how in tune everybody is. Most people aren’t like that. Most people don’t have the time. So being able to acknowledge that and design for that is really important to help people feel comfortable and respected.

Dan Walker (41:16):
It’s huge. And just on a practical level, how do you make space for that in that conversation of like bringing up what is actually in the room? What are we bringing in? Yeah, how on a practical level of your ideas of how you approach that as well?

Speaker 25 (41:28):
Practical on …

Dan Walker (41:30):
In how you structure your sessions of what you’re doing to bring that in the space.

Speaker 25 (41:32):
Oh, I can talk all day about how the practicality of the structuring sessions. But I mean, in the most practical tactical terms, it comes in treating it like a story. I think somebody mentioned storytelling and the importance of stories. Structuring sessions like a story where you have a beginning, middle and end, you address, you set the rules for the entire session in the first place. You set the idea that everybody can show themselves and their needs. You establish the characters, everybody giving everybody a chance to talk in the first place, setting the scene, letting the growth happen in the middle, having a resolution in the end. And if you don’t have a beginning or an end, you’re not going to have a good story that people could walk away with and sort of this narrative of growth or discovery or a solution without that.

Dan Walker (42:21):
So good. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, this narrative arc we’re taking and how are we processing that within the context of this container, this space that we’ve made. I think there’s maybe one in the front. You put your hand down so you can …

Speaker 26 (42:37):
The real microphone at the front. Okay. Yeah. I just had a thought based on what you were just sharing, which is I also like to navigate turbulence by actively inviting disagreement. When I feel that we’ve reached consensus, I like to call out this is what I’m hearing, but also like, what’s missing? Who disagrees? Where is this? What corner haven’t we explored? To maybe try to invite in, to use the turbulence metaphor, the strong winds before they become turbulent, right? So that people feel like they aren’t pushing against the direction we’re moving, but it’s actually part of the process to begin with.

Dan Walker (43:26):
Thank you. Yeah, I’d be curious for others too. I do work with the Lewis Deep Democracy method and they say this. They say, “Find the no.” Within each of us, I think if you look at that piece of the urgent need of now and the patience of generational change, we hold them both. I might lean one way, but I also hold the other side too. And so how do we bring that into the space? And it allows us to see the fullness. None of us are completely one thing or the other, we’re all of it. So I love that too. Yeah. Any other … Okay. Yeah, you go. Thank you.

Speaker 27 (43:57):
So in this room, we have a lot of creative individuals and part of being creative is all the grace you give yourself. It’s you give yourself the ability to try things and develop opinions and then try other things. And that’s kind of the creative process as we know. And there’s a lot of safety in that, but it’s all safety you give to yourself. So if you’re trying to facilitate a group and you want everyone to be able to engage in a creative process as a group, then you have to figure out how the group is going to have grace for the group. So creativity involves a lot of self-love and forgiveness to be successful. So how is the group going to develop some belief about themselves that creates that love for all the peers within the group? So just very like, not abstractly things like, “We’re an amazing team.

(45:04):
We’re like raccoons. You give us any kind of like weird container and we’ll figure out how to open it and get at that peanut butter.” All of those positive things that the team can iterate to themselves and tell themselves and create the story about themselves helps with the turbulence part because then whenever there’s a point at which people’s personal egos are in conflict with the identity and goal of the team, then you can do what you do for yourself as an individual, but as a group and say, “Okay, well, let’s just try that. Let’s try and see.” And then also as a facilitator, sometimes your own ego gets in the way and you don’t agree with the people in the room and what they want to do. So then you can try to have that same group level grace and be like, “Okay, let’s just try that. Let’s try and see.”

Dan Walker (45:56):
So good. So good. Yeah. The building the dynamics within the group that we are in this together, how do we build that cohesion, that trust, that safe space where we can misstep? Things will come up inevitably. We’re never going to be perfect. No one’s ever perfect. That doesn’t exist. And so how do we have trust within each other that we can go through those moments? Would love, yeah, anybody else, anything else? I’d be curious too, if you go to the back.

Speaker 7 (46:27):
Something I’ve been exploring, but it’s not necessarily tactical or practical and it actually is kind of painful sometimes, but I’ve been looking to explore the turbulence that I experience externally as really a reflection of the turbulence I feel internally and using it as a mirror, which is hard. It’s not easy. But yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at right now.

Dan Walker (46:54):
It’s amazing. I think because that’s the piece too, right? There’s this work in the space, but there’s the work outside the space too. There’s so much of like, who are we coming in? What am I bringing into this space today? What am I activated by? What have I read? I think a big one too is our media intake. We see that all the time and we see ever more challenging stories emerging. Yeah, what’s our relationship to that? Do we want to bring that in? Do we not want to bring that in? How do we manage it?

(47:18):
Just maybe a couple more. Yeah, any thoughts on what’s happening prior to the session as well, what people are doing prior to the session? If not, that’s okay too. Yeah, we can go. Yeah.

Speaker 28 (47:35):
Something that’s been part of my practice for a couple of years now is to the extent that I’m able, I try to have as many, just like 15-minute conversations with as many participants as I can beforehand because what the person who’s like hired me to do this considers the challenge is often not reflected in what other people have to say. And recently I had engagement where everybody said how much tension there was and also everyone was coming with a very similar perspective and desire for getting through that tension. And in reality, they were not that far apart and they just couldn’t see past this idea of we feel uncomfortable, therefore something must be wrong. And it’s like, no, you’re uncomfortable because this is really hard and that’s okay. And like giving space for discomfort is not danger and that’s like your growth edge there.

Dan Walker (48:31):
Yeah. Such beautiful framing that discomfort is not danger. That’s huge. And that time to intentionally, kind of as we were saying with building connections with our teams, the same way with participants too. That’s part of this team that we’re having. How do we support together? How do we build those relationships? Yeah, huge thank you. So we’ll kind of come towards the close of the session. This is a new feature. So Douglas has developed this, but really starting to get feedback on the next question of really what are we taking away? What’s that next step? So if everybody wants to grab their devices, wherever they may be, take down the QR code.

(49:10):
And on this, I’m not entirely sure how this is going to work, so we’ll see. But in response to that question, we’d love to get your thoughts. So what are those tiny actions that you’re going to take out of this session? Make it small. Yeah. What is really the smallest thing that you can do leaving this session? Participate, discuss connecting with others, networking, community, family. These are themes that came up repeatedly. Find the no. Yeah, find the no. I love that too. Discomfort is not danger. I think that came up in the conversation and is really powerful too, that that discomfort will emerge. We don’t view it as danger. How do we embrace and run through it?

(49:56):
Invite novelty too. How do we move into these different spaces? So we’ll keep watching a few more of these come in and then we’ll move to a close. Get out of the comfort zone. Practice patience. Be present. Presence keep coming up too. Listen aggressively. I like that. Listen aggressively is great. Okay. So I’d encourage us to keep reflecting on these and bring these outside of the space as well. I’d love to continue the conversation with anybody with interest in those spaces too. So yeah, feel free to connect, reach out, come and chat to me. If any of the questions came up, I’m more than happy to discuss. Keep chatting through. Spend time with each of you on these two, so feel free to connect. As we did, as we were talking, this session is so well produced, so well-structured, so intentional in everything. You even get to select your own walk on and walk off music.

(50:55):
I was very tempted to get some musical comedy and meet low for Tom Jones, but I resisted. I resisted the urge. Instead, I think this song Fred again has produced that speaks to this beautifully, this idea of light, dark, light again. There are challenging moments that we go through, whether in society, whether in facilitated sessions, but on the other side of it always exists the lightness. And I encourage us to sit with that, to have those conversations, to find the humanity exists between us, to find those shared experiences, to tell our stories, to listen to stories. And that’s all that’s come up in this space today. So with that, I’d say a deep thank you and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.

The post Unlocking Collective Wisdom appeared first on Voltage Control.

When Douglas took the stage to open the 8th Annual Facilitation Lab Summit, he did so with a question rather than an agenda: What becomes possible at the edge?

It was the right question for the moment. Over two days, facilitators from across the country gathered to explore what it means to work at the boundaries — where pressure meets reality, where comfort gives way to growth, and where the most meaningful facilitation happens. Douglas framed the experience with a line from Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” That metaphor of cracks, edges, and light anchored everything that followed.

A note on this year’s summit: AI was present in ways it hadn’t been before. Sponsored by Miro, the event showcased how AI tools are reshaping the way we design and deliver experiences — at one point, an AI-generated landing page summarizing a live session appeared in real time. It was impressive, and it raised a question that ran quietly beneath the entire two days: if AI can generate the content, the agenda, even the design, what is left for us? The answer that emerged, session by session, was clear. What’s left for us is presence — the human capacity to read a room, hold tension, and choose what happens next. People won’t remember the activities. They’ll remember how they felt.

Day 1: Edges, Emergence, and the Courage to Stay

Unlocking Collective Brilliance in Turbulent Times — Dan Walker

Dan Walker opened the summit with a session on unlocking collective wisdom in service of a more just and joyful world. His central reframe — from conflict resolution to conflict engagement — set a tone of productive discomfort that would carry through the day. He explored the tension between the urgency of now and the patience required for generational change, surfacing the idea of manufactured urgency: how constant pressure can become an excuse to avoid deeper work.But what stayed with the room was his insistence on centering joy. In conversations about turbulence and justice, joy can feel almost out of place. Dan pushed back on that. Sustaining ourselves, he argued, is not indulgent — it is strategic. We are only good to the work if we remain part of it. He offered a phrase that lingered well past his session: “It is a gift to be raggedy.” Imperfect, in-process, unfinished. Maybe that’s not something to fix. Maybe, as the summit’s framing suggested, it’s simply where the light gets in.

Recalibration and the Paradox of Authentic Facilitation — Renita Smith

Renita Smith explored one of the deepest tensions in our practice: staying true to yourself while holding space for what the room needs. Using the metaphor of Hamilton’s set design — a stage that must expand and contract to hold the story while staying out of the way — she offered a simple but powerful framework for navigating that tension:

Expand — with presence, authority, and direction when clarity is needed.
Contract — with silence, witnessing, and the release of ego when emergence is happening.

Her practical framework: Notice. Name. Invite. Notice what your senses are picking up. Name what the room already feels. Invite courage, because your courage becomes the room’s permission.

Navigating the Unknown — Chris Lunney

Chris Lunney guided participants through sense-making using a deceptively simple model: head, heart, and hand. The heart as compass. The head tracing the map. The hands affecting reality. He reminded us that “in nothingness, there is potential” and encouraged tiny experiments — small, trackable actions taken without judgment, treated simply as data.

In a summit that had already surfaced the pace of technological change, this session deliberately slowed things down, creating space to feel alignment before rushing into action.

Facilitating Innovation at the Edge of Certainty — Shannon Hart

Shannon Hart re-energized the room in the afternoon, literally — participants stood, moved tables, and took the conversation outside. Her session challenged one of facilitation’s most embedded assumptions: that consensus is always the goal. In some cases, she argued, consensus actively hinders innovation. The facilitator’s role is not to drive the group toward agreement, but to create the conditions where something new can emerge.

Her key guidance: slow the rush to certainty, protect the quiet sparks who need more time to process, and stay in the “groan zone” longer than feels comfortable. Creating the conditions — not controlling the outcome. That phrase closed out Day 1 and echoed into the evening, where many attendees extended the conversation over dinner long after the sessions had ended.

Day 2: Voice, Light, and the Rooms We Create

DJing the Room — Joe Randel

Joe Randel opened Day 2 with a session that quickly became one of the summit’s most talked-about. Framing facilitation through the lens of DJing, he laid out two foundational tracks.

Track 1: Find your voice. Preparation. Repertoire. Practice. Interpretation. Two facilitators can run the exact same design and produce completely different experiences. The difference isn’t the framework — it’s the voice behind it. In a world where AI can generate the agenda and the slides in seconds, voice becomes our competitive advantage: tone, timing, humor, instinct, the lived experience we bring into the room.

Track 2: Read the room. Preparation gives you options. Presence tells you which one to choose. The room is alive. Your plans aren’t.

He then described three types of transitions every facilitator navigates: Cut — close the moment and move forward with clarity. Blend — weave what’s emerging into what comes next. Let it end — stay with what’s unfolding, even if it disrupts the plan. Participants practiced these with real scenarios, and the result was illuminating: each facilitator chose differently. No single correct answer. Voice shapes choices.

Illumination — Brian Buck

Brian Buck extended the summit’s central metaphor through an exploration of facilitation identity, offering three distinct orientations:

Ember: Tend my fire.
Kindle: Tend the firebox.
Illuminate: Tend the spark.

He described his own practice as “presence illumination” — not about answers, but about the human beings who carry them. The invitation he left with participants: what might be illuminated through your presence in the room?

The Body Knows — Robin Neidorf

Robin Neidorf brought the afternoon into the body. Working with yoga as her central metaphor, she guided participants through partner exercises sensing energy fields and, in one of the summit’s more memorable moments, through silent eye contact in groups of two, three, four, and five — experiencing firsthand how group size shifts the energy of a room.

Pairs felt vulnerable. Triads felt creative but slightly unstable. Groups of four felt productive. Five introduced diffusion. It was a visceral, embodied demonstration of something facilitators often sense but rarely examine directly. Many participants said afterward they wouldn’t think about breakout group formation the same way again.

Safety at the Edge — Trudy Townsend

Trudy Townsend centered the afternoon on trauma-informed facilitation, grounding the conversation in a layered definition of safety: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cultural. Her core argument was direct — facilitator regulation shapes the room. It is our responsibility to show up regulated, and to remain present enough to hold the space we’re creating.

She also centered empowerment through agency: ask people what they need. Safety isn’t assumed; it’s co-created. And the edges we hold as facilitators are not always theoretical. Sometimes they are deeply embodied realities for the people in the room.

Closing

Eric closed the summit with the poem he returns to each year, ending on the line: “Your edge of darkness is an edge of light.” He reframed edges not as cliffs, but as shorelines — places to stand, to look out from, and to stay long enough to see what might emerge.

The room responded with a standing ovation. It was a fitting close to two days that consistently asked facilitators to do what we ask of others: stay at the edge, hold the discomfort, and trust that presence — not tools, not templates, not technology — is what makes the work meaningful.

Summit Awards

We were proud to honor members of the Facilitation Lab community whose work exemplifies the transformative power of facilitation. The 2026 award recipients are:

Community Award — Reshma Khan This award recognizes alumni who have gone above and beyond to foster connection and collaboration within the facilitation community. Reshma embodies what it means to meaningfully bring people together — in Kenya and worldwide. She has been instrumental to the growth of our Facilitation Lab community over the past year, building bridges across geography and background with quiet, consistent dedication.

Impact Award — Cat Rodriguez The Impact Award honors facilitators whose work has made a meaningful difference in the lives of others — through organizational change, team empowerment, or addressing societal challenges. Cat has brought extraordinary impact through her work at the Anti-Defamation League and beyond, embodying what it means to hold courageous space for the justice conversations we must have.

Growth Award — Brian Buck The Growth Award celebrates alumni who have shown remarkable personal and professional development since completing the certification program. Brian has made extraordinary leaps in both his internal and external growth. As he has built from within, he has simultaneously built externally at Progressive — charting a path toward a facilitation center of excellence that creates growth at scale.

Innovation Award — Chris Lunney This award celebrates alumni who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and forward-thinking in their facilitation practice. Chris has led much of our work bringing facilitation into this AI future — guiding and modeling what it looks like to collaborate with AI as a teammate, and asking the essential questions along the way.

These four facilitators represent the best of what our community is becoming — and we were honored to celebrate them.

Key Takeaways

• Presence — not tools or design — is the facilitator’s deepest competitive advantage in an age of AI.
• Conflict engagement, not resolution, allows groups to do more honest and generative work.
• Joy and sustainability are strategic, not indulgent.
• Voice shapes experience. Two facilitators, same design, completely different rooms.
• Safety is layered, co-created, and often more embodied than we assume.
• Creating the conditions matters more than controlling the outcome.

Join the Community and Stay Connected

Although the summit has ended, the journey doesn’t have to stop here. Continue engaging with facilitators from around the world through our Community Hub. Share resources, exchange ideas, and keep the momentum going!

Join the Community Hub

Looking Ahead to the 2027 Summit

Stay tuned for early bird tickets and announcements for next year’s summit. We’ll see you at the edge.

Get 2027 Tickets Now

Thank you to everyone who made Facilitation Lab Summit 2026 a success. We can’t wait to see you next year as we continue to inspire, engage, and transform through the power of facilitation.

The post Facilitation Lab Summit 2026 appeared first on Voltage Control.

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Erin Warner, founder of Head + Heart Coaching and Facilitation. Erin shares her journey from traditional leadership training to interactive facilitation, emphasizing the power of peer learning, rituals, and the “flow channel” for team engagement. She discusses authentic facilitation, embodied practices, and her holistic “3D wellness” approach. Erin also explores how words and self-talk shape reality, encouraging leaders to foster connection, courage, and creativity. The episode highlights facilitation as a transformative tool for personal and collective growth in organizations and beyond.

Show Highlights

[00:03:01] Learning from Each Other
[00:07:09] Redesigning Experiences, Not Just Agenda
[00:12:06] The Importance of Ritual and Structur
[00:15:02] Studying Civil Rights and Facilitation
[00:20:14] Empowering Participants Through Facilitation
[00:26:04] Advice to “Don’t Conform” and Authenticity
[00:31:06] 3D Wellness: Physical, Emotional, Social

Links | Resources

Erin on LinkedIn

Erin on Instagram

About the Guest

Erin Warner is an executive coach and facilitator who helps leaders and teams connect more courageously, communicate more clearly, and collaborate more creatively. As founder of Head + Heart Coaching and Facilitation and partner at EXEC Consulting, she brings over ten years of experience guiding organizations and individuals to build trust, emotional intelligence, and authentic leadership. Erin is a bridge builder, weaving together the precision of a lawyer, the presence of a coach, and the playfulness of a dance teacher into a deeply personal approach to growth, self-love, and empowerment.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:
Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control Certification Alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach, so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences.
This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening.
If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.
And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Erin Warner, founder of Head + Heart Coaching and Facilitation.
She’s on a mission to help leaders connect courageously, communicate clearly, and collaborate with creativity. She is also a partner at Exec Consulting, where she facilitates trainings on leadership, emotional intelligence, trust, and teamwork. Welcome to the show, Erin.

Erin Warner:
Thanks, Douglas. It’s great to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:
Oh, it’s so great to have you. Well, let’s get started here with some early on experiences that you’ve went through. And I know that early on at Exec Consulting, you and Mauricio were delivering tried and true content for leadership trainings that folks might be very familiar with, and you began to notice some subtle surges of energy during partner shares and reflection. What were the specific patterns in those rooms that told you facilitation was calling you toward a different way of working?

Erin Warner:
Yeah, exactly. We were doing a series of workshops that were very well received, people really liked them, and I had the privilege to see them over and over again because of that. And I noticed that the little bit of interaction that we had built into it were moments of particularly high energy in the room, and actually delight and pleasure of the participants, and learning from each other in that moment instead of just simply learning from us.
So, I got curious about that, and I started to bring in little bits of other interactive moments and saw that that held true. People loved it. They got a lot out of it. And so I just got curious about, “How can I find ways to up-level our workshops with intentionality by leveraging this pattern that I’ve observed?” And I had a feeling that there was a whole world out there that I didn’t really know about, and I set out to find it. And that’s how I found Facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I’d love to hear more about this learning from each other. How was that first showing up for you?

Erin Warner:
Yeah. So, the most basic form of interaction that we had in our original format was when we asked people first to take solo time to reflect on their aha moments and takeaways from what we had taught them. So that was the first step, solo reflection time. And then we had them pair up and just simply share their aha moments and takeaways with each other.
But that’s what I mean by then they were learning from each other in that moment, because it’s either reinforcing something that they also thought was interesting, or maybe bringing something back up that had kind of slipped through and not registered with them and they’re like, “Oh yeah, that was interesting.” And so, maybe they would bring in their own work context and explain why it was interesting or relevant to them.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s always fascinating too when folks are able to connect to something a little bit deeper inside themselves, ’cause then they’re relating to the material in ways that are difficult when you’re just passively just soaking information in.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. And so relating to material, I’m really excited about the first intuition I had to bring that into our training. There’s something we teach called The Flow Channel, which many people might have heard of. It’s that flow is when you’re so engaged in an activity that you lose track of time, you forget about your surroundings, and you’re just like fully present with the activity or the challenge.
And so we teach about that. And we also teach that managers have the power to like bring people into flow by balancing challenge and support with intention, because if you have too much challenge, you get into anxiety, and if you have too little challenge, you get into boredom. And we used to just simply teach that to them, but then we brought them an activity, as I was exploring this world of like, “How do we make it more interactive, and they get to actually wrestle with the information instead of passively receiving it?”
So we had them draw just an X and Y axis, a little graph, and then a diagonal line from the lower left to the upper right, and then that represented the flow channel. And then literally like plot themselves and their colleagues as little dots on the graph, either above the flow channel in anxiety or below the flow channel in boredom, and just start to have real awareness of what this means in their real life. Not just as an abstract concept, but, “Oh wow, look, my colleague is in anxiety, and how can we bring them back into flow?” And so that became really a favorite of our participants.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. They can connect to it in a more meaningful way. It becomes an assessment versus just a piece of information.

Erin Warner:
Exactly. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, I’ve seen that used too for leaders to think about managing and mentoring their team, because the idea of helping ensure that you’re assigning tasks and work when you’re delegating, you’re doing that in a way that is keeping them in that flow state.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. It’s a little bit counterintuitive. We come across some managers who are afraid to give people too much challenge, but humans actually… The flow channel actually isn’t where challenge and skill are perfectly matched. It’s actually where challenge exceeds skill just by a little bit, just enough to make it fun and to make you feel like you accomplished something when you did it.
And you can look at video game design. Once you complete a level, what’s your reward? It’s a harder level. It’s not an easier one. Nobody would play that game. We actually crave challenge as long as it doesn’t put us into that stress and anxiety zone. And so it’s really liberating for managers to learn that and know, “Oh wow, actually I can challenge my people and that’s going to bring out the best in them.”

Douglas Ferguson:
And it’s such a fun reframe too, because oftentimes I think managers are looking at the symptoms, and this is a great way of stepping back and looking at, “What’s really at play here? Are they really disengaged or is it that I haven’t given them enough a challenge? Or have I over challenged them?”

Erin Warner:
Yeah. And I’d advise them to be curious about the whole person. Maybe they’re challenged, but it’s not things that work, but maybe things are going on in their life, maybe they have a sick relative, and just being curious about what challenges though are factoring into how they’re showing up and how we can support that.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, absolutely. In your alumni story, you described the Piedmont sessions as a mirror for your practice, where you could literally see when the room leaned in or leaned back. And I’m curious, can you take us to a moment where you realized you needed to redesign the experience, not just the agenda?

Erin Warner:
I would say that we like to over-deliver. We really want to give so much information and content, but I think we know as facilitators and learners ourselves that there’s a certain point where it’s too much, the brain can’t take in anymore in a day.
And so, seeing that fatigue set in when we, out of goodwill, were just giving so much, but mid-afternoon people are just not receiving it anymore, then we can still provide value without providing more info and content, but actually providing space for them to integrate and reflect and connect with the content that we’ve already provided. So it’s not about quantity at that point, but it’s about quality.

Douglas Ferguson:
When you’re working with clients like that, and diving in the content and helping them find tools, integrate, go deeper on stuff, how often are you coming back and coaching later on? I’m always curious about the relationships that folks have with their clients when they’re working in a facilitative manner.
Some folks tend to spend more time coaching and there’s a little bit of group work that feels more facilitated. And then there are others who do nothing but the group work and they don’t do any coaching. I’m kind of curious where your blend is there.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. I don’t know how to quantify the blend. It’s a mix and it depends on the context. We do now, in the version of the workshops that we have evolved into, hold a lot of space for group coaching in the moment.
So the things that emerge, and if we see a consensus in the room like, “Yeah, I have that problem too,” then we pause, we don’t give any more content. We just have a group coaching moment, 10 minutes maybe right there, ’cause that’s what’s alive for them, that’s what they’re asking for.

Douglas Ferguson:
And what about after the session? Does it typically transition into some one-on-one coaching work after the session or are some of these sessions just purely a group education and you’re done with that team?

Erin Warner:
Yeah. I’d say that the majority of them don’t engage with us for further coaching and that that’s just the experience that they get in the room. Of course, sometimes that does happen. We go deeper, we get brought in house.
And I will say when we do, not in this Piedmont series that we’re talking about, but when we are already in house and we’re doing a workshop training for our company, very often we have what we call a follow-up program, where we follow them for like two months after the fact to give them accountability, support and coaching around applying whatever it was that they learned that day.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I found that accountability can really help ensure the stickiness of what’s been learned in the more dynamic group session.

Erin Warner:
Absolutely. It’s very challenging to then go back to the demands and the pace of your normal workday and then try to apply new behaviors and shift things. We tend to go back to our default, and that’s human. And so, we do try to support people by giving them the structure and accountability, and the feedback and the coaching and all that.

Douglas Ferguson:
And I recall you also talked a lot about early formative experience that shaped your instincts as a facilitator before you even knew the word facilitation?

Erin Warner:
Yeah. So looking back, I really felt well when I was in a container of an excellent facilitator. Looking back, I can name it. At the time, I had no idea. A big example for me is Girl Scout camp. I absolutely adored Girl Scout camp. And I was kind of a shy introverted girl, and going to a camp, actually, it wasn’t with people I knew like these are all new girls, and they’re all strangers at the beginning and dear friends at the end. And how was that possible for me to have a positive experience is because of the counselors and the leaders who really facilitated a strong sense of belonging and connection.
And the way they did that was things that we might see in pop culture about camps, but there were things like songs that each little group had their own songs, so you had a feeling of belonging and identity, or simple things about like how we gathered for our meals, or even how we lined up and walked from like our tents to the dining hall. Or we would raise and lower the flag every morning and evening, and these rituals marking the deeds throughout the day. And it was really excellently facilitated, and I think it allowed me to thrive and feel welcome and safe and included. And I think that’s one of the things I love about facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:
Rituals can be so soothing, this idea that we know what to do. We don’t have to have anxiety around what’s next or, “Am I fitting in right?” Or, “Am I doing the right thing?” Or, “Do I look funny?” It’s like, “No, I have a purpose to be here.” And so I think they can provide nice structures to kind of lean on.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. I really relate to that. I feel structure for me does make me feel safe and guided, and then you can flow within that. Then you can explore and be free, but you’re held in that structure, and I think that’s a really good feeling.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s different just going to the gym and picking up some weights and throwing them around, versus having a program or even having a coach, or even being part of a class. It’s just a totally different feeling and experience, right?
You might be way more self-conscious just walking in a gym and heading over to the free weights and doing whatever, unless you’ve got a lot of experience. But if you go to a class and the instructor’s giving you some really specific instructions and moves and exercises, it feels way different. Right?

Erin Warner:
Yeah. Yeah. And that makes me think about my life. I moved a lot as a child to different schools and different states, and luckily I played sports, and that’s how I was able to make friends quickly, because I knew how we were going to interact. We’re going to get on the field, we’re going to hit the ball around.
Meanwhile, we’re chatting, we’re getting to know each other, we’re joking, we’re becoming friends, but that structure, I think, made it really easier and more accessible for me to connect with people quickly when I was the new person in a new place, in a new school.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. And when we’re invited to be parts of different new teams or new programs, or invited to work in new ways… And this comes up all the time because innovation is constantly shifting just the status quo, or what normal is, right?
We didn’t have all these AI tools five years ago, and yet, now they’re commonplace. So it’s changed the landscape on how we work. And having rituals surrounding that and underneath it helps us come together in a way that’s more knowable and more calming.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. And that makes me think of one team that I’m working with, they’re growing, so they’ve brought a lot of people on board in the past year. And the onboarding moment is so crucial, and there’s so much opportunity there to really let them know the culture and give them some structure of like, “This is how we do things.” Now you can flow within that, be yourself.”
But it gives them something to work with that I think is healthy for the collective and also for that individual. And it’s just such an important moment, that with the client that I work with, we’ve been iterating on to really capitalize on that moment.

Douglas Ferguson:
And how did studying civil rights at Reed’s College impact this? Were there formative moments there as well?

Erin Warner:
I studied civil rights because fairness is a value of mine, and anything that has to do with the racial inequality or discrimination on a very basic level, just has always struck me as unfair. Nonsensical really, but I’ll call it unfair because that’s how it registers in my value system.
For instance, in 2020, I found Voltage Control because I was looking for ways to develop my facilitation skills for my work. And at that time, there was a lot of racial upheaval in the US, and one of the first activities that I participated in was a remote gathering where a facilitator gave us space and processes to reflect on and share how we were feeling about what was going on in the country.
And this really meant a lot to me, because again, it was very helpful to have some structure around that, because otherwise, because I really care about these things and emotions were high, I could range from feeling overwhelmed and highly activated to just shut down and disconnected. And with a really skilled facilitator who gathered us that day online, it helped me have some clarity and moving the feelings through, and sharing them with other people and feeling not alone.
And I just had looked for facilitation ’cause I wanted to make my work, my corporate work stronger. I didn’t know it could also offer these things that were so related to my deeply held values. And discovering that was really amazing because then I was even more excited about facilitation. I feel like it truly can be something for civic engagement.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I remember you telling me that you had planned to work quietly at that first Facilitation lab. And so bring me back to Erin showing up, assuming that you’re going to just kind of lurk and be quiet and soak it in. How did that unfold for you? How did you get sucked in?

Erin Warner:
Yeah. So, I just showed up with curiosity wanting to observe, which was pretty common in those days. I was on a lot of calls we were passively observing, and the facilitator gave us a really deep prompt, which was, “When was the last time that you cried?” And then he put us into breakout rooms of two people. So there I was one-on-one with somebody. I had my camera off.
And of course, I’m always at choice. No one had a gun to my head. No one forced me to do it, but I did decide like, “Hey, I’m here with this person, I’ve been given this really human question, and I’m going to turn on my camera.” And we proceeded to have a conversation that I do remember to this day, because he vulnerably shared crying recently, more out of joy ’cause he had just finished a big milestone in his life, and that was beautiful.
And I was actually in a moment of my life that was not easy. I was feeling really down in that period. And so, just being able to share not a specific cry, but crying or feeling like crying was a feeling I was living with. And just being able to be witnessed in that. He didn’t try to fix it or anything, but it was a beautiful moment, and so unexpected that that kind of connection could happen across space and time and screens.

Douglas Ferguson:
How did that unexpected intimacy shift your sense of what a gathering can do?

Erin Warner:
It really raised my ambitions, to be honest, in a good way. It showed me that the limits were my imagination and my courage to make bold invitations. That was a bold invitation, to ask us to reflect and share when was the last time we cried, and it has to be handled delicately.
And I’m glad that I’ve invested in this skill and that you train people in this skill, but with the right care and craft, so much is possible, so much depth and healing and connection, and delight and wonder. And so yeah, the lesson I took from that is that really anything is possible with the intention and courage to pursue it.

Douglas Ferguson:
And as you got deeper in the facilitation, so it’s 2020, you’re attending these sessions, you’re kind of going deeper, you’re experimenting more, what would you say was the first idea that you tested with your participants, and what changed for them as you started to make some of these experiments?

Erin Warner:
I think as I started to make experiments with facilitation, what changed from my participants was their own sense of empowerment, because with great facilitation, you really are empowering the people in the room to generate their own experience, their own collective wisdom, their own decisions.
And I think that is refreshing for them and energizing and motivating. And so, I’d say that’s probably one of the biggest gifts that I’ve been able to offer now that I lean more on facilitation, is the empowerment of the participants.

Douglas Ferguson:
Do you recall a specific story? Does anything come to mind when you noticed this empowerment, and what was the facilitation move that really unlocked that?

Erin Warner:
I was working with a group that was not connecting as a team. And we were literally trying to do team building, and help them feel and function as a team instead of a group of solo practitioners, individuals. And I think it was really important that we facilitated them through what that meant to them and what that would look like, what would make them feel like part of a team.
So we used some of my favorite activities, we used TRIZ, which I think goes by some other names sometimes, like inverse thinking or opposite thinking. But TRIZ is basically where you say, “If you wanted to have the most dysfunctional team ever, where no one trusts each other and everyone’s at cross purposes, what activities would you do?”
And we have them brainstorm and share, and then we kind of turn the tables on them and say, “Okay, which one of these activities are you currently doing?” And to create safety, I let them keep that anonymous. I didn’t ask them to share it with everyone. They weren’t outing themselves, but just like, “Be honest with yourself. Which one of these are you doing?”
And then giving them not a to do list, but a not to do list. So like, “I’m not going to give you any extra work, but I’m going to ask you to just stop doing one of those things that you identified that’s counter to building a team.”
And so, I think that was a moment where they felt like, “Hey, we are responsible for creating our own reality of whether we function as a team or not, and here’s some insight and awareness around that. And now, here’s an action that I can take.” But I didn’t tell them what to do. They told themselves what to do.

Douglas Ferguson:
TRIZ is fantastic, and I think the biggest challenge with TRIZ is getting folks to follow that rule of not identifying new things to do, but identifying things to stop. Everyone always wants to say, “Oh, they’ll turn the stopping thing to a doing thing.”
And if we can really hold people to that notion or that rule, that ritual of identifying the thing we’re going to stop doing, that’s really powerful because it creates room for other things we’ve been wanting to do.

Erin Warner:
Yeah, it is really powerful. And that’s one where I have the privilege to work with some of the people in that group individually. And so be able to follow up with them after, like, “How is it going? Are you able to…”
Sometimes these things are habits, you’re not even conscious you’re doing them, so stopping isn’t always easy. So checking in, “Are you able to break that habit, shift that, make a different choice in that moment?”

Douglas Ferguson:
I’ve even seen participants, they get really clever, they use double negatives. So it sounds like, “We need to stop not having annual report.” It’s like, “Hey, you’re just saying we need to start making an annual report. What are we doing that’s getting in our way? Let’s identify those things and stop them.”

Erin Warner:
Yeah, exactly. Like, “I’m on to you.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. They have little tricks, of course.

Erin Warner:
They do. They do, because it’s hard, and I get that. It’s hard to look in the mirror, take responsibility, and accept that there’s things that we’re doing that are productive and there’s other things that are counterproductive, and let’s let those go, but it’s not easy.
There’s a reason. I also tried to share with them in this particular case, empathy and understanding, “I know there’s a reason you’re doing these things. You’re not doing them to sabotage the team. They’re serving some function.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Or they served a function in the past.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. But if they’re still serving a function, “Okay, it’s going to be hard to stop doing it until we get to the root cause, and then address that in a different way or resolve it so that you don’t feel the need to do that anymore.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. Sometimes people feel the need to do the things because of, coming back to that word we were talking about earlier, ritual. If it’s become customary or ritualistic, then I think these activities can be powerful to connect back to the purpose and, “Why are we doing these things?”
And if we’re doing things that are counterproductive to what we’re wanting to accomplish, and we can’t really attach to any real meaningful why, and it’s just for historic purposes, then we should probably get rid of those things.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. In this particular case, what we identified, many of the counterproductive behaviors were stemming from trust or lack of trust. So either maybe micromanaging because I don’t trust that person’s going to follow through, or maybe double checking because I don’t trust that that person’s got my back. So, a lot of it came down to trust was producing counterproductive behaviors, that once that was addressed, which is no simple feat, it would help them function better as a team.

Douglas Ferguson:
I’m also remembering that you were given some coaching advice, “Don’t conform,” that was powerful and reflection, because you said it gave you permission to bring your full self to the work. And I’m curious, can you share a moment when you felt the pull to fit a mold and instead chose authenticity?

Erin Warner:
Yeah. Well, I want to share that that advice came from Eric when I was in the Voltage Control Certification, ’cause I had noticed a pattern in myself of once I train and learn the way things are done, then I feel pressure that I put on myself to conform. And then that drains me of the enthusiasm that I initially had, and my unique contribution that I might be able to make.
And I mentioned this pattern that I was trying to shift and resist, and Eric really gave me the greatest gift of saying to me, “Your unique perspective is an asset. It is your contribution and it will attract people to you who resonate with that, so don’t conform.” And it was really meaningful to me. He gave me that advice.
And one time that that came into play was actually when I had been invited to facilitate a session at the Voltage Control Summit, which was a really exciting opportunity for me and one of the bigger stages I had ever been on. And I felt a lot of enthusiasm at first. I was like, “This is great.” And then I started to feel resistance and procrastination.
And I’m glad that I was able to identify it was because I was starting to feel like it was a performance and I needed to show up the way I thought a capital F facilitator would show up and not as me. And then I remembered, “These people know me well, they know who I am, they know my vibe. And if they asked me to do this, it’s because they want me to do it, not me pretending to be someone else.”
But I was able to make that connection because of that amazing advice Eric had given me a couple of years prior, and it continues to be something I reinforce to myself regularly.

Douglas Ferguson:
I love that. It’s reassuring to tap into who we are and let that shine.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. I always tell myself, “I’ll be an infinitely better version of myself than I ever will be of anybody else. Just be my best self. Don’t be my best imitation of somebody else.”

Douglas Ferguson:
That reminds me, one thing that’s unique about you and your approach is how you’ve woven fitness into your work, and how that’s a hallmark of how you think about facilitation and how that shows up for you. So I’d be curious to know more about that. And I’m sure the listeners would be interesting to hear how you kind of weave that into your style.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. I really believe there’s a lot of wisdom in the body, and also a lot of energy and pleasure. And so, I think it’s great to bring those things online. That’s exactly what I brought to the summit. I led a session on embodied decision making. And I have a background as I used to be a lawyer. And I love decision making. I think it’s really powerful and one of the greatest outcomes we can bring in facilitation, if that’s what’s been requested. And so I wanted to bring those two things together, and what does our body tell us when we’re sensing into a decision?
And so, giving people opportunity to actually feel how they feel about a decision gives them information, like, “Do I feel comfortable with this? Do I feel torn?” That’s a metaphor for your body being split. So, one thing I particularly like is if you have a few options, to set up stations in the room where those options are being represented. And you can mingle and look around, walk through the room, walk through the space to evaluate them. And then when it’s time to vote, to literally go walk and stand in that space.
And in this experience, little by little, got narrowed down to two. And maybe your top choice is no longer available and there’s only two choices left, and you have to walk to one of the two options that’s left. There’s a lot of information for you and for the facilitator in your walking. “Am I walking with hesitation or with enthusiasm? Am I literally dragging my feet? Am I feeling like I don’t want to walk over there?”
And I think that’s the wisdom in the body versus just checking a box on a ballot, for example. So, I love to bring in the wisdom of even it could be standing up or sitting down to represent your point of view, or walking closer or further to a certain point to represent more like your temperature on that decision.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s kind of about tuning in, and it’s making me think about your 3D Wellness concept.

Erin Warner:
Yeah. So I do have a background also as a fitness teacher. And I was teaching on Zoom during the era when we were all online during the pandemic. And I had a big aha moment, when at the end of my classes that I would do every week on Zoom, people would stay and chat and laugh, and joke around and commiserate for a long time, like 30 minutes minimum. And then I might close the room at that point, but people were loving it.
And so, I realized that people were coming for the fitness, but they were staying for the connection. And I realized that what I was offering them was not only physical wellness, but also emotional wellness within themselves as an individual and social wellness within the collective. And so I named that 3D Wellness and that’s something that I try to offer in all of my experiences.

Douglas Ferguson:
So, as your clients begin to experience the impact of this work and you bring on more facilitation and the Exec’s offerings, how are you aligning with long-term clients who expect content for a delivery so they can embrace a more participatory, co-creative way of working?

Erin Warner:
Honestly, it’s not feeling like a very hard sell right now. I find that people are actually hungry for this. They’re hungry to participate and be asked to contribute. We do live in a time where there’s no shortage of information. And if we’re gathering in person and making that effort, it’s starting to be, I feel like, in the zeitgeist that people feel like, “It’s a waste of time to do something I could do on YouTube or research myself.”
And so, we’re building on the abundance of information that’s available. We will refresh it and we will bring some teaching always to anchor what we’re going to be focusing on, but our clients are really on board with getting to roll up their sleeves and play with it and apply it. And everyone wants results, so they want to know like, “What is this going to do for me? What’s the point?” And that’s what facilitation is. They get to immediately use it and see how it’s going to benefit their company, their culture, their customers, and just their day to day.

Douglas Ferguson:
We’ve talked a bit about how you are ready to and have stepped into moments of leadership for corporate rooms and intimate circles alike. And I’m curious what signals tell you a team is genuinely ready to do the self-awareness and shared responsibility work this approach requires?

Erin Warner:
So when we’re scoping and engagement and making the plans with the leader who’s bringing us in house, we really want to be of service in a practical way. And so we lead with that, “This is not just like a nice to know, ‘I read the book and now I’m done.'” We are very results oriented and I think leaders like to hear that, but they also want to know, “But how is that going to happen?”
And so then we can explain to them about facilitation, “That we will bring in some content that’s going to anchor our focus. Everyone knows that this is the topic today, and then we are going to actually…” I like to make the word responsible into a verb, like, “We’re going to responsiblize the people in the room for their own upleveling and their own professional development,” because they’re adults and they’re going to learn better too if they feel autonomous and empowered and responsible.
And so, I think that’s how we get leaders on board with the style of learning that we’re offering that’s interactive and participatory. And I think they want to hear that it’s not just going to be silly games and icebreakers, but it’s going to be actually really deep and potentially rigorous for an outcome that shows results, ’cause that’s the name of the game, I think, for the leaders.
And then in the room, we kind of give a recap of that and say, “Hey, we are going to talk about this topic today and then we’re going to put it back in your lap, in your hands to generate the connections and ahas and the takeaways, and the action items and how you’re going to apply it. We’re not here to tell you what to do. We’re here to help you discover what makes sense for you to choose, to commit to, and then to help you have accountability and support around doing that.”

Douglas Ferguson:
We haven’t talked about Head + Heart much, so I’m curious to learn more about the vision there and what experiments you’re excited to run in the next year to test that vision.

Erin Warner:
In my personal life, I’ve been on what I call a self-love journey, where I really learned a lot of things about myself and healed some things, and reframed some self-limiting and beliefs that I had. And it really changed my life, and I’m so grateful that I did that.
And so now, what’s really meaningful to me in this chapter is to make a new, more personal offering. It’s completely separate from the corporate work that I do, and it’s self-love and empowerment, experiences, gatherings and coaching.
And I’m a very word-oriented person, and so what I’m offering is actually thinking about words as literal magic spells that we use every day to create our reality. And so, harnessing the power of words to create a reality that is more empowering.
My background is in law, and law is a great example of words creating reality. You can go to jail or not based on following the things that are written down in a law book. They have the coercive power of the state behind them, but that gives them power, and it’s just words.
Words that we say to ourselves, self-talk definitely creates our reality. It creates our frame of mind, the decisions that we make, the way we respond to people. That’s a big focus of the work that I’m doing now.
And in facilitation, the words, the invitations that the facilitator offers is creating an immersive experience that is the reality for the people in that room in that moment.
So, I’m really excited to be exploring this in partnership with people who want to go on this journey with me. And it’s just a very personal offering that I am making in this chapter in my life.

Douglas Ferguson:
Wonderful. And as we come to a close, I want to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Erin Warner:
So my final thought is that words are literal magic spells that create our reality, so use them wisely, especially the ones that you say to yourself. And words are the tools that empower us to connect courageously, communicate clearly and collaborate creatively.

Douglas Ferguson:
So great chatting with you, Erin. I look forward to the next time we’re able to sit down and talk, and thanks for coming on the show.

Erin Warner:
Yeah, I look forward to that as well, and it was a pleasure to chat with you, Douglas. Thank you.

Douglas Ferguson:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review, and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released.
We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post The Greatest Secrets to Engaging Facilitation: Unlocking Team Potential appeared first on Voltage Control.

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Renita Joyce Smith, CEO of Leap Forward Coaching and Consulting. Renita shares her journey into facilitation, emphasizing the importance of authenticity, humor, and humanity in meetings. She discusses how facilitation bridges structure and human connection, offers practical techniques for engagement, and highlights the transformative impact of skilled facilitation on organizational culture. Renita also explores the role of technology, the value of adaptability, and the need to prioritize human connection in the workplace, leaving listeners inspired to lead with empathy and authenticity.

Show Highlights

[00:01:23] Renita’s Turning Point: Seeking Authenticity in Meetings
[00:06:34] Authenticity in the Workplace: Risks and Rewards
[00:12:40] Facilitation as a Bridge Between Structure and Humanity
[00:17:29] Facilitation Across Contexts: Corporate, Leadership, and More
[00:21:34] Connection Activities: Personal Histories and Emotional Check-ins
[00:29:48] The Deeper Impact of Facilitation
[00:35:21] Current Transformations: AI, Project Overload, and Workforce Resilience

Links | Resources

Renita on LinkedIn

Renita on the web

About the Guest

Renita Joyce Smith is an Executive Coach, Master Certified Facilitator, and CEO of Leap Forward Coaching & Consulting. With 23 years in management consulting, she helps leaders and organizations tackle burnout, transform culture, and make work suck less by making people matter more.

An AI enthusiast who believes technology should amplify humanity, she blends storytelling with practical tools that leave leaders braver and more grounded. Renita serves her Dallas community through The Dallas (TX) Chapter of The Links, Incorporated, Junior League of Dallas, The Senior Source, and UT Austin’s Forty Acres Society. Her superpower? Calling people back to their humanity, even in chaos.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson (00:05):
Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach, so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Renita Joyce Smith, CEO of Leap Forward Coaching and Consulting, where she helps leaders navigate the messy middle of change with clarity, courage, and heart. She’s a strategic alchemist, master facilitator, and advocate for making work suck less and people matter more. Welcome to the show, Renita.

Renita Joyce Smith (01:21):
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited.

Douglas Ferguson (01:23):
Yeah, looking forward to chatting. So let’s get started with the origin. You described in your alumni story a turning point for you when you asked yourself, “Is this it?” after years of efficient agenda-driven meetings. Can you take us back to that moment? What was happening internally that made you start questioning the way you were working?

Renita Joyce Smith (01:46):
Absolutely. So as a backstory, I am a career management consultant, started off at Big Four, right out of college. I was the kid that actually looked forward to having business meetings, which was unusual. So when I got into corporate, they were all ran the same. You have your agenda. You’re super professional. And then midpoint in my career, at the same time, I was really leaning into my own authenticity of I want to actually bring my personality to work and not just be one of these out of the box wearing black and blue and brown consultants. And I was like, how can I make this a bit more fun as we’re having these meetings for strategy or technology? And the more I started to infuse personality and humor and just making people feel seen and human in these meetings, folks would respond of like, “You run really great meetings, and it’s fun to come to your meetings. And you’re a really great facilitator.” And I was like, “Well, is that an actual thing?” We all run meetings, so is it really a net new skillset that’s here?

(02:49):
But the more I started to listen to people and they would say, “No, you are really good at this.” And as any kind of type A personality of like, okay, if this is a skillset, there has to be someone out there that’s teaching how to do this extraordinarily well. Right now, I’m making it up as I go along. And so, I really wanted to understand the psychology of how do you have really great meetings and facilitate where you get things done. And so that was the biggest turning point is just that desire for more learning and more information to push this skillset even further.

Douglas Ferguson (03:21):
And how has that shift impacted you? What’s been the revelations and the developments since you’ve started to focus there?

Renita Joyce Smith (03:28):
Oh, gosh. So first of all, my favorite word I’m always using is container. That’s the one thing of I’m always trying to build a container for a meeting. And whether I am doing a workshop or a strategy session, my first mind goes to how am I creating a container so that people can show up in their best selves, and we actually hit these outcomes as well. And we’re not wasting people’s time. And so, that is the heart of my business, whether it’s a one-on-one coaching session or I’m doing a workshop or an executive retreat, having the mindset there of how do I make this a magical meeting versus let’s just get in here and get the work done.

(04:09):
So when people are showing up, they are actually like, “Well, wait a minute, A, we got things done that we said on the agenda. It was efficient. We had fun, and we actually learned something about each other.” It just revolutionized, again, how I am approaching just work, getting work done with people and just showing people a net new way that we don’t have to just be so boring in all of this within corporate and our nonprofits. We can have fun and engage one another and create something different.

Douglas Ferguson (04:39):
And speaking of which, you told a story about running a meeting, that C-suite strategy meeting.

Renita Joyce Smith (04:45):
Yes.

Douglas Ferguson (04:45):
Yeah. Tell us a little bit more of the humor and humanity in that story.

Renita Joyce Smith (04:50):
So this was super interesting. And Douglas, this is one of the ones where I’m like, I’m going to either get fired or this is going to go really, really well. We’re going to risk something here. So I was a director of strategy at the time, and we had a big project coming down the pipeline. We needed to engage the full C-suite. Now these meetings were going to be a beating because we’re trying to do all of our priorities for the upcoming five years and going through each department. And as we were building this, I was like, well, what would it look like to open up with the dad joke at the beginning of these meetings? Or what would it also look like to put a meme or a JIF in these emails and to add maybe a little bit of a gaming as we’re creating these?

(05:32):
And so, I would start infusing those in the agenda. Now, mind you, again, full C-suite that are on these calls plus VPs, and here I am also a director of like, “Hey, here’s the dad joke of the day before we go and take a break.” And then hearing them laugh, and they kept showing up to meetings. Now, mind you, it’s notoriously hard to get a C-suite into a meeting, but to have them say, “We actually look forward to coming to yours because they are fun and engaging.” And even beyond that, I had the CFO at the time, she came to me when I was leaving that company, and she said, “Renita, because of the way that you were showing up authentically and being funny, you allowed me to give myself permission to also show up and be more human and show my personality.” So it’s kind of one of those things where yes, we have these containers of facilitation, but we never know the impact that we’re going to have on people just for us to show up as who we are, giving others permission to do the same.

Douglas Ferguson (06:34):
Yeah. This showing who we are and showing up with authenticity can be powerful.

Renita Joyce Smith (06:40):
Yes. Do you ever find that there’s kind of a lack of authenticity now, or do you find that we’re kind of moving more towards it? What’s your pulse on it?

Douglas Ferguson (06:51):
Yeah, it really depends on where you look. Some teams are all in on being real, like where my wife works at the Natural Gardener here in Austin, where everyone says exactly what they think for better or worse. Others are still wrapped up in that layer of corporate armor. I think what’s challenging is that we’re realizing authenticity isn’t just a vibe, it’s a practice. It’s about designing spaces where people feel genuine, where it’s safe to disagree, laugh, and to admit you don’t know. That’s what makes teams work, not the polished scripts, but the honest conversations.

Renita Joyce Smith (07:26):
Yes. And I think I’ve experienced the opposite of it, and I almost have it as a personal mission now of, if I come in with, again, adjusting for the environment, I’m not going to come out with full level 10 personality in a super buttoned up environment. But I’m going to go probably a good level five.

Douglas Ferguson (07:45):
Yeah.

Renita Joyce Smith (07:46):
And if people can start to laugh a little bit more and joke within that container… I just finished up a women’s leadership development program at a utility. Mind you, utilities are very buttoned up. And by being in that program, we set out to say, “Okay, we’re going to be super authentic, super personable, a little bit unhinged, a little bit funny.” And that was also a risk. But at the end of it, folks are like, “Well, wait a minute. By watching y’all be human and again, funny and have personality, I didn’t know that was possible in a corporate setting.” So now they’re a lot more open. So this is from the participants all the way to our stakeholders. So I think there’s also that thing of people just need to see an example that it can work, and it can still be effective. And it can still be professional, but we don’t have enough of those examples in the room. But if we can be that, it’s just another way being able to imagine another way of doing it. And that is so powerful.

Douglas Ferguson (08:48):
Yeah, being that north star for folks.

Renita Joyce Smith (08:50):
Absolutely, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson (08:52):
That reminds me of a story that you shared around this moment of deciding to wear braids to work for the first time.

Renita Joyce Smith (09:01):
Yeah. So the journey of a Black woman in corporate America has been, many books have been written on it because it’s a feat at times and even something as simple as hair. So this is probably mid 2000s, and we hadn’t really got into the Crown Act and folks being able to come to work as they are. And I live in Texas. Summers are 105, 100, 105. And trying to come in a full blowout and you’re sweating, walking from the car to the office, and I was going on vacation. I was like, I really want to get braids, but being in consulting, you’re like, “Well, is this going to be okay? What’s the client going to think? Are they not going to think I’m being professional?” And I had a conference call with some of my girlfriends, and I was like, “Okay, can I get braids or not? What’s our decision tree here?” And I took a step back, and I was like, “This is stupid. It is hair.”

(09:55):
And my brain is still functioning the same with or without however my hair is being styled in the moment. And if I am not in an organization where I can show up, at least with my hair in a different style and that be also authentic, I may be in the wrong organization. So one, can I trust myself that I have enough in the bank, and my value is still the same regardless of my hair? And then two, can I trust my company enough too? And if this also creates an opportunity to challenge some biases that people have around hair, so be it. I’m a change agent in so many parts of my life.

(10:33):
And it was an invitation for me to do something different and to make a shift and kind of break the mold a bit, and it ended up turning out fine, which is like most things as you were kind of talking about, organizations that are inauthentic. I think it’s because folks have this worst case scenario of what’s going to happen if we do, but you have to try and go see and get the data. And then you can confirm is your story true or not. But until you do, everyone’s just making assumptions all the time.

Douglas Ferguson (11:01):
Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? It reminds me of organizations that are in highly regulated spaces. Oftentimes, they exist in this belief that they need to do certain things or behave in certain ways because of the regulations, but that’s been a story they’re telling themselves. They made the regulation worse than it is because they’ve kind of calcified this understanding of like, “Oh, we can’t talk directly to customers because of healthcare. We’re in the healthcare space, and we’re regulated in ways that we can’t do that.” But if you go look at the regulations, they don’t actually state that. That’s just some lawyer decided to take an overly critical reading of it, and then someone else interpreted that. And someone else built a policy on top of that and then off top of that, and then it got more and more calcified to a point where people were debilitated. They couldn’t move.

Renita Joyce Smith (11:49):
Right. And if you think about it’s like, wait, so you’re saying you can’t talk to the patient in healthcare? Let’s all just take a step back in how we’re doing all of this. It makes no sense. You’re not making widgets. You’re actually dealing with people, so it may be helpful to talk with the person. And I think what I’m finding now, especially just our whole environment as a country and just the atmosphere of how can we come back together and just start engaging each other as humans again. So regardless of all the rules, regulations or policy or I think I’m not supposed to talk to you or whatever else, let’s pause it, and we can start just getting back to the place of asking questions and being curious about each other, still staying within regulation. I think we have so much more room to play in engaging with each other than we think we do.

Douglas Ferguson (12:40):
You said facilitation was the bridge between structure and humanity.

Renita Joyce Smith (12:44):
Mm-hmm.

Douglas Ferguson (12:44):
What does that balance look like for you today when you walk into a new engagement?

Renita Joyce Smith (12:51):
Facilitation is one of those pieces where you come in as a neutral party. And at the same time, the mindset that I have is what am I here to create for these folks? They brought me in for a reason and a purpose. And so, if I can bridge the gap between the outcome that they want and their humanity, coming up with a structure to be able to do that is kind of what facilitation is. And so some people think, “Oh, you’re just showing up and talking to us, Renita.” No, there is actually a framework that’s behind all of this and how to architect this container and architect the moment for it. And so, facilitation is kind of that magical piece that’s in the middle of it to create that outcome. And I think having it look seamless and effortless is also one of the best compliments you can get as a facilitator too, of like, well, wait, this was so smooth and looks like you weren’t even trying.

(13:54):
It’s like, no, there’s actually a lot of trying and architecting in the backend of what is the story that this whole session is going to flow in? How do we get people in the right mindset? What barriers could be in the room? How do we make sure we hear all the voices and creating those pockets within the agenda and the exercises and the connection points in it, that is the structure that gets you the result. And so, I think that’s the heavy lifting that facilitation can do in the backend if you’re really stepping into it all the way. And I think that’s something being able to… even learning within Voltage Control of there is a lot more behind the scenes that goes into it. And it’s why I appreciate the programs y’all have too, because it gives a level of meatiness to this role versus just, again, putting a couple items on a Word document and calling it an agenda and just rolling in and saying, “What’s next?”

Douglas Ferguson (14:46):
Yeah, definitely more than an agenda.

Renita Joyce Smith (14:48):
Yes.

Douglas Ferguson (14:50):
I think that’s the pitfall a lot of folks fall into is no agenda, no agenda, these kinds of things. And it’s like, “Yeah, sure.” But has your agenda accounted for the dynamics of the people and the experience we want to deliver, or is it just a list of topics?

Renita Joyce Smith (15:08):
That part. I’m curious on your end too, what was your moment of that facilitation is actually the important thing to lean into and to emphasize?

Douglas Ferguson (15:19):
It took me a long time to get there. I was using a lot of tools. As a CTO at various startups, I was facilitating a ton, picking up these various methods, whether it come from agile or extreme programming or Scrum, later on picking up a lot of design thinking type things that I would bring into my team and utilize, or even just helpful little techniques that I would pick up in workshops and things. And I think I had compartmentalized facilitation as things that folks do at these public workshops that you pay to go to, to learn leadership or learn some new skill. And it wasn’t until working closely with Jake Knapp and the rest of the design team at Google Ventures where I started to realize, wait, this stuff can be embedded in the teams. This stuff can be a leadership skill. And I’ve been doing this organically, but I haven’t really thought of it as a core skill.

Renita Joyce Smith (15:19):
Yes.

Douglas Ferguson (16:21):
And honestly, that transition moment was when I realized I needed to start Voltage Control.

Renita Joyce Smith (16:26):
Yeah. And thinking about it as a core skill, that’s kind of my wish and hope for corporate in general of now look at this as also a skill to develop alongside leadership. And for those that actually enjoy meetings and putting together, inviting them in to know you can go deeper into it. It is such a valuable skillset to have. And again, you’re not just showing up, and knowing that you can, A, save a company money because you’re actually getting objectives done that you need to get done in the meeting. You’re not swirling endlessly week after week on these agenda items and outcomes. That alone is a selling point for A, folks to invest in a facilitator to come and do workshops, meetings, strategy as well. But again, having that in your back pocket just as whether you’re a project manager, a Scrum master, just any role where you are putting these meetings together, making sure you’re focusing on that is so important, so important.

Douglas Ferguson (17:29):
Yeah. And speaking of leadership, you’ve worked on a lot of different projects ranging from corporate strategy to leadership development and lots of different things between. What have you noticed about how facilitation shows up differently or even similarly across those different contexts?

Renita Joyce Smith (17:45):
It’s funny, I was thinking about this the other day. I finished a C-suite executive retreat, and there was heavy misalignment within the four members of the executive team. And I had also just finished up another event where I was talking about generational gaps within a workforce for an all staff retreat, very different topics. But the core thing that remained the same in both of those was you cannot take the human out of this. And I know I beat that drum consistently, but every single time I’m like, “Hey, by the way, there is another whole human that’s next to you [inaudible 00:18:30], but their experience, their lenses, their preferences, their own communication styles, all of these pieces of the container that’s there. And once you can lift that up in facilitation, then you get to the outcomes.”

(18:43):
So I think the thing that is consistent and that I build into every workshop, every experience is a connection moment where folks can actually begin to experience each other. Because once whatever begins to melt of an assumption they had about the other person, they can be more comfortable talking to each other. They can be more transparent. They can be more honest and vulnerable, and then you get things done. And so, one of my principles now that I really lean into is you cannot skip the human stuff. That’s my very businessy way of saying that. You can’t skip the human stuff to get to the business outcome. It’s impossible. We’ve tried our best the past decade or so of just driving and treating people as resources, but we have never been this burnt out, this inefficient, and people are at their breaking point. And it’s like, well, let’s go back and get back to this humanity piece of it to try to ease some of that up. And so that, again, the most consistent thing across when I facilitate bringing it back to the person.

Douglas Ferguson (19:50):
Yeah, it’s been longer than the decade that we’ve been doing that. I’d argue that the last decade, there’s been a lot of people trying to unwind some of the stuff that’s been put in place by Taylorism and a lot of the industrial military complex where so much of the work we do is influenced by military type of structures, and those need to be rethought.

Renita Joyce Smith (20:11):
Yeah. And I use this example at times, and thank you for reminding me of the Industrial Revolution there, where back in the day, if you were working at Ford and making a car, you’d need to talk to the person next to you to put on the next tire. It was coming down the assembly line. And so, there was not any need for collaboration in that. You knew what you were doing. There is so much collaboration that’s needed now, and I continue to be in awe that people just do not talk to each other. And so I will consistently get into these rooms, and I was like, “Oh, so you need this information. Have you talked to them?” And they’re like, “Well, no, I assumed. I didn’t want to bother them, or I thought that they knew. They had it all together, or I thought they had enough information. Or I thought, I thought, I thought.”

(20:59):
And it’s like, but the person’s right there. How about we talk about it now? Five minutes later, the amount of clarity that comes. And so yeah, being able to introduce people even back to conversation because it’s just not happening in our hallways or Zoom screens anymore. Folks, again, just showing up, “What do you need from me? I’m going to bounce out,” versus, “Let’s actually talk about this and connect and work through it.” We’re not just putting tires on a car anymore, so we need a little bit extra support in this.

Douglas Ferguson (21:34):
So tell me about the connection activities that you typically like to embed.

Renita Joyce Smith (21:38):
Yes. So one that I’m loving right now is personal histories. And so being able to ask folks, going back to your childhood, were you the oldest, middle, youngest sibling? Where did you grow up? What was the environment like, and what was the challenge of your childhood as well? And so, this works extraordinarily well for folks who don’t know a lot about each other, even though they work with each other for years. And it’s a low enough threshold so that where people are a little bit extra guarded, they’re not having to be overly vulnerable in it, but just enough, 10% more vulnerable and transparent. And watching people’s eyes light up, it’s like, I didn’t know you were the oldest kid, or I didn’t know you grew up in Idaho. My grandparents were in Idaho. And then now they have this whole conversation topic, again, with the person they’ve been sitting next to for the past five years.

(22:33):
So being able to introduce these moments of, you can share more about yourself without, again, telling all your business, that has been eye-opening for people. The other part that I love doing is some type of, how are you doing today on an emotional side? And so as adults, we’re kind of afraid of emotion wheels of, nope, I don’t want to actually know how I’m doing or how I’m feeling today. But introducing people to, if you were the weather today, how are you showing up in the room? Sunny, stormy, cloudy, foggy, and going around a room and having people hear each other of like, “Oh, I’m foggy today,” or, “Oh, I’m rainy.” Folks are like, “Oh, I heard you were foggy. Is everything okay? Can I support you?”

(23:21):
And being able to mirror of, you can do this within your meetings, so you just kind of know how your team is doing. Again, you don’t need to know what’s happening at home or the backstory, but getting a good gauge of why Anne may be showing up a little bit down today. Her saying it’s rainy, could be again, that connection and getting that support, and so, those are two that I love leading into.

Douglas Ferguson (23:43):
Very nice. You also mentioned using technology to help structure and drive creativity in your virtual spaces. How’s that enhanced your facilitation practice?

Renita Joyce Smith (23:54):
Yes. So learning how to use a virtual mural board that I learned within the program here at Voltage Control, which has been an amazing tool. So instead of, again, people just looking at the screen, having them go in and do a live sticky note so they can see their idea on the board, and you’re moving things around. And again, people are locked in, and it gives them a way to be tactile because sometimes, especially virtually, folks can zone out and go check email or do something else. But if we have them actively clicking on a virtual whiteboard, it gets their attention even more, and they feel like their ideas are being captured. And it’s not just, no one heard me. Nope, we heard you because you have these three stickies right here, and so your ideas are being brought into a room. So that’s one angle that I love to use virtual whiteboards as technology.

(24:48):
In my own backend process, I love using AI. And I know it can be a little bit controversial nowadays with, wait, is AI going to replace people or whatever else? My position on AI is that it is a value multiplier for how I can be even more effective for a workshop. So I can take my initial ideas for crafting an experience and say, “Here’s my audience. Here’s what we want to get done. Help me really refine this exercise to meet the needs of this audience and workshop.” And so my ideas are better with using AI in the backend. The agenda is smoother. I’m able to also give out handouts with exercises that mirror. And so, I have kind of a facilitation partner in the backend with AI that has quantum leaped my workshops, just being able to have that as a partner.

Douglas Ferguson (25:40):
What AI tools are you leaning into?

Renita Joyce Smith (25:42):
Oh, goodness. That’s a whole… I can jam out for days. I am a Claude girl nowadays. Still, ChatGPT is my old school there for a good workhorse and refining an agenda, that’s there. But Claude for getting the in between of exercises and really getting that tone right for slides and transitions I’m falling in love with. Those two I have in my hip pocket consistently. And then, if I’m ever trying to do any kind of thought leadership, I’m using some automation in there to refine ideas as I go along. But between Claude and ChatGPT, I can go a very long way in facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson (26:24):
Yeah, fantastic.

Renita Joyce Smith (26:25):
Are you weaving in AI in your practice anywhere?

Douglas Ferguson (26:28):
Yeah, I use it daily. Big fan of ChatGPT. I use Claude some. If I’m writing code, I’ll use something called Cursor, heavily using the AI capabilities inside of Miro. We built a ton of stuff on that and launched it at Canvas this year, which is pretty exciting. So also, I’ve been experimenting with tools like Gamma for creating presentations.

Renita Joyce Smith (26:52):
Yes.

Douglas Ferguson (26:53):
Yeah. And have even been using Zapier to automate a lot of stuff. So the things that I was doing by hand with AI, I’m having AI do in the background. So I don’t even have to take the time to prompt it anymore. The stuff’s just waiting for me when I sit down to work on it.

Renita Joyce Smith (27:09):
Absolutely. And Gamma is a fantastic tool. And I continue to be in awe just on the leaps that these tools are making by the week. And so, even just trying to catch up and stay in lockstep with it. But I think having the perspective, especially as a facilitator of what can you have in your back pocket to just make things more efficient and more effective so you can focus your time on the experience versus just the punching of the keyboard. So figuring out how to weave it into your workflow is so important right now.

Douglas Ferguson (27:39):
Yeah, absolutely. And you talk about wanting to build a bench of facilitators in Dallas. What kind of culture or mindset do you hope that group will embody?

Renita Joyce Smith (27:49):
Oh, goodness. So I have a business partner that I work with a lot as well. And we were talking about this the other day of, as we kind of expand our bench, there is a mindset of, can you also be authentic and vulnerable and present in a room and engage? So this is not you showing up and reading off of the script, which there’s nothing wrong with that. There are some trainings and facilitators that are very much of, I need a full binder of facilitator notes. Those aren’t [inaudible 00:28:20] I’m looking for. I’m looking for people that can have an outline and knowing what beats you need to hit, but also have the intuition to know what’s in the room and to be able to pivot and to flow and to engage the audience where you’re almost one with the material versus having to say, again, that scripted workflow that’s there.

(28:42):
So it’s a little bit of an X factor in it of what does your stagecraft look like? And I think that’s one of those little pieces of facilitation that I don’t know if we talked about enough that sets you apart even as a more masterful facilitator. How are you just working in this, like it’s an audience while you’re also facilitating the room. And so that’s what I’m looking for. And what I’m talking to other facilitators or asking, “How are you just so good with the people?” I tell them, “Go take an improv class.”

(29:15):
Improv has been the other biggest game changer for me in my practice. I’ve been doing it for four years, and nothing teaches you how to stay in the moment and be able to respond to what’s in front of you like improv does. So right now I can step into any room and anything can pretty much happen, and I’m like, “Okay, yes, and what’s next? Yes, and we can pivot.” If someone has a weird question, I have a response. I can be in this moment with you because I can deal in the uncertainty and ambiguity because I learned how to play with it in improv.

Douglas Ferguson (29:48):
What do you wish more people understood about the deeper impact of facilitation, especially the impact it can have on teams and organizations?

Renita Joyce Smith (29:57):
I think one thing I wish people understood about the impact to facilitation is that it’s not a nice to have, it’s a critical component. Your facilitator can make or break your meeting and experience. If you’re investing thousands of dollars in the venue, thousands of dollars of man-hours of people showing up, stepping away from their desk to be in a room to get something done or to connect or to build, thinking about the facilitator last or oh, I can do it myself, which again, can have good results. But the impact of having a specialist in the room when you are investing all of those resources is critical for, again, the outcomes that you want to have.

(30:48):
So what I love seeing now is if people are starting to make this shift of, “Hey, we have this coming up. We need to call in a facilitator.” That’s now becoming the second thought versus, “Oh, we’ll just do it ourselves.” And seeing the results, again, of having that expertise in the room helps people just to know that it is a valuable thing to invest in as well. And also just for the people that are putting on the meeting, you get to experience the meeting with your team. You don’t have to be on. You can be a participant and create with your peers. And so, it gives you a chance to also rest and be a part of it versus having to facilitate and organize, and, and, and. Nope, you get to sit in a seat and know that you are kind of just being held in this container.

Douglas Ferguson (31:39):
Yeah. So looking ahead, what’s your next frontier in facilitation?

Renita Joyce Smith (31:45):
Oh, goodness. My next frontier in facilitation is I really want to be on the edge of thought leadership for facilitation. And as you heard across this whole interview, it is really pounding home just the humanity of it all. And so, I want to lean into creating more experiences where that is present. And fortunately, going into 2026 here, that’s already starting to show up because people are responding to, “Oh, I saw what you did over here. Can you bring this to my organization?” We need to lighten up. We need to connect. We need to get some things done, but we don’t know each other.

(32:25):
And so, what’s on the frontier for me is one, again, sharing that this can be the way that it can look like. It can look fun. It doesn’t have to be stuffy. It doesn’t have to suck. That’s in there. And you can walk out with an outcome and a net new connection. And so being able to beat that drum there. And then the other part I’m looking forward to in facilitation is it being my Trojan horse of me getting into organizations and facilitating that change. And so, as we were talking about earlier, so many organizations are inauthentic. And so, if I can Trojan horse my way in and add a little bit of that fairy dust of, nope, y’all can connect. It’s okay. And so, that’s my way of leaving organizations better than I found them as well.

Douglas Ferguson (33:11):
Love that. Leaving organizations better than you found them.

Renita Joyce Smith (33:15):
And so, knowing that, oh, they experienced Renita. They experienced Leap Forward, and now the team is better. They’re closer. They’re getting things done in a net new way. Burnout has decreased. And you can say, “Wait, Renita, all that’s from a facilitation? Come on now.” But in reality, planting those seeds and breaking that ice and breaking down those barriers has exponential results in ROI going forward. And so, I will spread a seed and be a gardener. And that is my inherent purpose, and I love it.

Douglas Ferguson (33:51):
And when you think about the types of organizations that you’re hoping to work with going forward, are there new problems or new types of organizations that you’re hoping to lean more into?

Renita Joyce Smith (34:02):
I think organization-wise, I’ve been really enjoying taking some of the old stuffy organizations that are in the middle of transformation, knowing they’re like, “Hey, we’ve done things this way for the past two decades. We have net new blood coming in, but we don’t know how to turn that corner. We know that we need to turn a corner, but we need some help in doing it.” And so, I am drawn to the chaos of that. I’m also drawn to organizations that, even if they’re not in the transformation, they’re like, “Well, we know just something has to be different because our people aren’t experiencing the company like we want them to experience it. We aren’t showing up the way we want to show up. And so, can you show us a net new way of doing it?”

(34:49):
So I am drawn to the organizations that are ready for a change and to experience something different, even if they don’t know quite what it is yet. And the more chaotic and broken, the better for me because it’s just kind of ripe for being able to build that up anew, yes. And then having that consulting background, you can drop me into a Fortune five or a nonprofit that just started, and the Swiss Army belt’s there of tools is the same.

Douglas Ferguson (35:21):
What sorts of transformations are you mostly seeing folks dealing with these days?

Renita Joyce Smith (35:26):
So one is AI. Folks are really trying to understand how do we get people in the mindset of using these tools and the change management of it as well. And so, being able to couple my pro side change management with the facilitation and the professional development aspect of it and getting people’s minds ready for AI, reinvigorating that curiosity again in folks, and then where it can fit in the business process. So that’s one aspect of change.

(35:54):
Another is, there are so many priorities and projects that companies are dealing with, and it is compounding. Nothing is slowing down. And so, how do we hold all of this work that we need to get done and be able to sequence it in the right way where people are talking to each other? So that’s another big transformation aspect there of just helping to, again, organize the chaos of it all and create alignment in there.

(36:22):
And then the third type of transformation is we’ve had either an influx of workforce, or we’ve had to lay people off. And we need someone to come in and just help our people be more resilient because they are burnt out, and there’s so much going on. So can you come deal with the heart of people in the transformation? So it hits those three buckets of AI, project and work, and then the resiliency of the actual workforce.

Douglas Ferguson (36:49):
So I want to invite you to lead our listeners with the final thought as we wrap up today.

Renita Joyce Smith (36:54):
So the final thought that I would have for everyone is, it won’t come as a surprise, but do not forget the humanity of who we are. There is so much goodness in being able to connect with someone. And so, whenever you have the opportunity to create a connection point, whether that is a small icebreaker at the beginning of the meeting, asking someone how they’re doing in the break room, inviting someone to lunch, to coffee, to get to know them better, offering something about yourself, being able to inject more of that connection within whatever you’re doing, that is such a powerful aspect to lean into. And so, that’s what I would invite folks to do, is just find one extra way to connect with someone in all the containers that you’re a part of. And we’ll start seeing that ripple go through our community, and it is so needed right now. So don’t forget the human stuff.

Douglas Ferguson (37:55):
Awesome. Thanks for that important reminder. And just want to say thanks for being on the show. It was great chatting.

Renita Joyce Smith (38:01):
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Douglas Ferguson (38:04):
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Authenticity Transform Facilitation and Workplace Culture? appeared first on Voltage Control.

December offers a rare pause—a pocket of time when teams naturally slow down, look back, and look ahead. It’s tempting to use that time to draft resolutions or curate highlight reels. This year, try something bolder: use the moment to move AI from the edges of your work to the operating core. Many teams still treat AI like a novelty or a personal productivity boost—handy at transcribing notes or drafting emails, useful in rare bursts, invisible to the rituals that actually power the business. That pattern yields pockets of efficiency, but it does little to raise the collective intelligence of the team or increase throughput on what matters most.

Putting AI at the center is not about “using AI more.” It’s about redesigning how work happens so AI shows up in the moments that shape clarity, alignment, decisions, and follow through. That means explicitly inviting AI into the room—not just to send the recap later, but as a seen and understood participant in the meeting arc. The shift is cultural as much as it is technical: moving from “What can I do faster alone?” to “What can we do better together—with AI as a teammate?” When you do that, you convert isolated wins into compounding outcomes that are visible across the system.

Think of this month as your strategic reset. Which rituals served you in the past but now hold you back? Which decisions routinely stall? Where does work bottleneck across roles or functions? Use those questions to identify places where AI can be designed in from the start—so it supports how you diverge, synthesize, converge, and decide. If the holidays tend to be a season of gifts, the gift you can give your future self is a deliberate redesign: AI-centered practices that create speed with quality and enable momentum you can feel.

Make AI a visible co-facilitator across the arc

The simplest way to re-center AI is to thread it through the full arc of a session—open, explore, decide, close—instead of sprinkling it into isolated moments. In the opener, invite participants to pair safely with AI. A prompt like “Ask AI to generate three provocative ‘what if’ questions about our purpose today—keep one that expands your thinking” primes both curiosity and comfort. When you normalize AI’s presence early, the team spends less energy on whether AI belongs and more on the quality of the work you’ll do together.

During divergence, let humans generate the raw ideas and let AI extend the option space: reframes, constraints, adjacent patterns, and “non-obvious” complements. As energy naturally shifts toward convergence, ask AI to produce a first synthesis—short, imperfect, and testable. When an AI-generated synthesis is on the table, people react faster and more concretely: “We can live with these parts, but not those.” That reaction accelerates prioritization and brings hidden misalignments into the open. Your job as a facilitator is to toggle the modes—solo-with-AI, small-group-with-AI, humans-only—and make those transitions visible so learning compounds.

Close with intent. A strong closer doesn’t just capture what happened; it evaluates how you worked with AI. Try, “What did AI do today that saved us time or improved quality? What should we ask it to avoid next time? What guardrails do we need to add?” Verifying AI summaries live, while the group can correct and clarify, prevents drift and creates a shared memory. Over time, the team will feel the difference: AI is no longer a shadow tool; it’s a visible collaborator that helps you open, expand, pattern, and decide.

Decide how to decide with AI

Where teams lose the most time isn’t in generating ideas; it’s in making decisions. Endless loops, ambiguous thresholds, and unclear ownership sap energy. AI can help here—if you design the decision rules. Start by choosing one recurring decision that often creates churn (e.g., prioritizing backlog items, approving experiments, selecting messaging). Ask AI to propose three viable options with explicit trade-offs and risks, then use a consent-based method to move. Consent beats consensus when speed and learning matter because it asks, “Is this safe to try now?” instead of “Does everyone love it?”

Design an escalation path before you decide: when does human judgment override AI-suggested options; who breaks ties; what evidence triggers a revisit? Ask AI to draft that “decide how to decide” canvas, then tune it as a team. You can further improve momentum by capturing objections in context. Instead of archiving dissent, structure it: What threshold of evidence would resolve this objection? What signal would confirm a risk is materializing? Feed those conditions into your AI memory so it knows when to surface a check—preventing unnecessary re-litigation while honoring new learning.

Finally, draw the line on where AI must never decide alone. Ethics, safety, brand integrity, people decisions—name the categories that require human ownership. That act clarifies roles and builds trust. Then define the inverse: Where should AI always propose first, so humans can accelerate judgment? When you codify both, decision-making becomes transparent and repeatable. You move faster not because you cut corners, but because the lanes are clear and the work of deciding is designed.

Agreements that build trust with humans and AI

If AI is going to sit at the center, it deserves formal working agreements—just like any teammate. These are short, visible norms that define boundaries, transparency, and shared responsibilities. They protect against two extremes you’ll likely find in any room: over-trusters who accept AI output without scrutiny and under-trusters who refuse to engage. Clear agreements pull the team into the productive middle, where AI accelerates and humans ensure quality.

Start small and make it living. Define what you will disclose and when (“Call out where AI contributed,” “Note the model or tool when relevant,” “Flag data sensitivity”), what you will verify every time (“We always review AI summaries live,” “We validate references, quotes, numbers”), and what you will avoid (“No AI generation on sensitive HR matters,” “No autonomous approvals”). Include bias checks in your openers—simple prompts like “Ask AI to generate counter-arguments from diverse perspectives” or “Scan for missing stakeholders.” Add a consent renewal check each month: “Are we still comfortable with how AI shows up in our work? What needs to change?”

Treat these agreements as pop-up rules that evolve as you learn and as the tools improve. Post them in the room or at the top of your collaborative doc. Invite the whole team to co-author and revisit them monthly. The act of co-creating and refreshing agreements builds trust, creates psychological safety, and reduces risk. It also sends a clear signal to your organization: AI here is not a stealth add-on—it’s an explicit collaborator governed by shared norms.

Redesign whole workflows not isolated prompts

The biggest gains happen when you stop sprinkling prompts and start threading AI through end-to-end workflows. Pick one journey that matters (e.g., discovery to delivery, feature rollout to customer comms, incident to learning review), map the gates, and design AI invitations at each gate. Replace ad hoc “someone remembers to prompt” with structured moments: AI drafts a brief to react to; AI proposes test conditions; AI synthesizes stakeholder quotes; AI surfaces pattern risks; AI produces the first pass of the decision memo. None of this removes human accountability; it changes where human attention is most valuable.

Blueprints help you see the gaps. A quick service blueprint or journey map reveals where work crosses silos, where it stalls, and where people repeatedly rebuild context from scratch. That’s where AI can remove friction: creating living memory that recurs at each gate, sparking first drafts that the team can critique, highlighting dependencies you might miss. These are not “set-and-forget” automations running in the background; they are deliberate, in-the-room invitations that elevate the quality of collaboration while the team is together.

Prototype a threaded flow you can test in two weeks. Give it a visible name so the team can reference it (“Release Flow 1.0”). Pause an old ritual while you test, and watch which gaps emerge without it. Resist the urge to recreate the ritual—solve for the gap instead. Run a retro at the end and ask, “Where did AI add speed without sacrificing judgment? Where did it distract? Which gate needs a new invitation?” That cycle—prototype, run, retro, tune—compounds quickly and makes AI-centered work feel real, not theoretical.

Activity of the Month AI-at-the-Center Bingo Diagnostic

To make the shift from edge use to center use tangible, run AI-at-the-Center (AI @ TC) Bingo with your team. It’s a hard-mode diagnostic masquerading as a playful game. Each square represents a concrete behavior—AI drafting specs, shaping rituals, generating prototypes, supporting decision-making, producing live synthesis, capturing objections, or maintaining living memory. The rule is simple and strict: mark only what is consistently true weekly. Aspirations and one-off experiments don’t count. That constraint makes the results honest, and honesty reveals where you really are on the maturity curve.

Run it as a fast, focused session. Start with a check-in that frames AI as a co-facilitator, not a mandate. Distribute the card (digital or printed), and give individuals a few minutes to mark their practice. Then compare patterns in small groups and as a whole. Where do you cluster at the periphery—personal productivity, transcription, occasional ideation? Where are there blank rows in the center—decision rules, consent methods, role clarity, living memory? Use the scoring guide to place yourselves on the spectrum from “AI at the Periphery” to “AI at the Center,” and normalize the result. Most teams discover they are earlier in maturity than they assumed. That’s a feature, not a bug; it creates a shared starting line.

Turn the snapshot into action. Choose one to three gaps to prototype in January. For each, define a visible artifact that will signal progress: a decision rule canvas, a weekly AI check-in, a living agenda template, or a workflow blueprint. Be thoughtful about who is in the room for the diagnostic—invite adjacent roles (ops, legal, data, customer success) to get a fuller picture and avoid blind spots. Set expectations upfront to reduce performative responses: “We mark only what’s truly weekly in our current practice.” Watch the AI-at-the-Center Bingo Diagnostic video for a quick walkthrough, and then schedule your session now while the year-end reflection energy is high.

Turn reflection into January momentum

Reflection is valuable only if it converts to habit. Translate your December insights into operating rhythms you can see on the calendar. Start with one weekly ritual that anchors AI at the center—for example, a 25-minute Monday “AI Enablement Standup” where each team member names one place AI will draft first, one place AI will synthesize live, and one decision where AI will propose options. Layer in a monthly agreement review to refresh guardrails, renew consent, and adjust bias checks. Consider a quarterly redesign sprint focused on one workflow—prototype, measure, and share what you learned with the broader org.

Build machine memory plus human judgment into your closers. Use AI to produce a concise, decision-forward summary while you’re still in the room, then verify as a group. Document objections with thresholds and next checks. Feed forward the summary into the next agenda so you don’t rely on imperfect recall. Choose a simple template to house decisions, context, and learnings—something your team will actually use. Establish a review cadence that keeps insights alive: weekly review for open decisions, monthly scan of agreement health, quarterly synthesis of what changed because of your AI-centered experiments.

Measure your momentum without micromanaging. Define two or three outcome signals that matter (reduction in time-to-decision, fewer re-opened debates, more cross-silo throughput, clearer accountability). Balance those with boundary checks that protect ethics, equity, and brand trust. Start small but start now: schedule one AI-at-the-Center Bingo session, pick one decision to move to consent with AI-generated options, and prototype one threaded workflow. Then tell us how it went—your stories help our community learn faster together.

Closing and call to action

If this year taught us anything, it’s that isolated use of AI by individuals yields isolated benefits. The organizations that will see meaningful ROI in 2025 will be the ones that put AI at the center—visible, designed-in, and co-facilitating the work that shapes results. That shift is not a top-down mandate. It’s a collaborative exploration where teams redesign rituals, clarify roles, codify decisions, and build living memory. It’s multiplayer AI, sitting in the room, helping us open the option space, converge faster, and decide with more clarity and less churn.

As you wrap December and look toward the new year, choose action over aspiration. Run the AI-at-the-Center Bingo Diagnostic. Draft your first “decide how to decide” canvas. Co-create three working agreements that will build trust between humans and AI. Prototype one threaded workflow you can test in two weeks. Put the cadence on your calendar now—commit by schedule, not by enthusiasm.

We’re here to help you make it real. Want the AI @ TC Bingo card, the scoring guide, and the activity video? Ready to bring a Voltage Control facilitator in to co-design your January flow or to run an AI-centered redesign sprint with your leadership team? Curious about integrating these practices into your Facilitation Certification journey? Reply to this newsletter or reach out to our team and we’ll get you everything you need. Let’s make 2025 the year your team moves AI from the edges to the center—and feels the difference in every meeting, every decision, and every outcome.

The post AI at the Center for a Stronger 2026 appeared first on Voltage Control.

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Sophie Bujold of Cliqueworthy. Sophie shares how her early experiences in MIRC chat rooms shaped her approach to building human-centered, connected communities. They discuss the importance of trust, generosity, and adaptability in online spaces, as well as Sophie’s journey from digital explorer to expert facilitator. Sophie reflects on lessons learned, balancing structure with emergent conversations, and her impact on social causes, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The episode highlights the enduring power of technology and facilitation to foster authentic connection and belonging.

Show Highlights

[00:02:53] The Nature of Early Online Communities
[00:07:41] Learning and Generosity in Online Communities
[00:14:10] Trust and Curiosity in Facilitation Style
[00:18:32] Realizing the Role of Facilitator
[00:27:12] Riding the Wave: Managing Growth and Avoiding Burnout
[00:35:30] Favorite Sectors and Desired Impact

Links | Resources

Sophie on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Sophie Bujold is a facilitator and community strategist who helps membership-based organizations design communities that feel more human, connected, and sustainable. Through her company, Cliqueworthy, she works with associations, professional networks, and social impact organizations to rethink how members engage and how teams collaborate behind the scenes.

With more than 20 years of experience in community design and facilitation, Sophie helps turn scattered efforts into clear, meaningful action so organizations can build communities where participation and belonging come naturally.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:
Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.
Today, I’m with Sophie Bujold from Cliqueworthy, where she helps membership-based organizations design communities that feel more human, connected, and sustainable. She works with associations, professional networks, and social impact organizations to bring clarity, connection, and momentum to their member experience. Welcome to the show, Sophie.

Sophie Bujold:
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:
It’s so great to have you. Looking forward to chatting.

Sophie Bujold:
Me too.

Douglas Ferguson:
So to get started, I’d love you to take us back to those late nights on mIRC in a small New Brunswick town.

Sophie Bujold:
So I discovered mIRC when my parents signed up for the internet. It came on a floppy disc back then with our internet provider service. And little did I know that that piece of software would actually open up a whole new world for me.
I quickly started meeting people from around the globe in cities and countries that I hadn’t even dreamed of being able to access at that point and made some really lifelong friends. I still have friends from those days that are in my world. My partner and I met on those chat rooms and started, I think, one of the first online relationships really, it was just not heard of during those days. And it was really one of those moments where I don’t think we realized it at the time, how transformational it would be, but looking back on my career, I realize how much of an influence being able to have those first experiences connecting with other humans in an online world just really influenced how I do my work today.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I recall you were talking about this idea of slow but meaningful online conversations and it really shaped a sense of place and relationship.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. I mean to give you some context back then, for those of you who know mIRC, you know that it’s a pretty boring platform. It’s text on a screen. Multiple people could join in a channel. For a little while, you couldn’t even have private conversations on the side with people. And we had to literally mail each other photographs. That’s going to make me sound very ancient, but we couldn’t send files through the software.
So it had a little bit of innocence to the interactions in that there wasn’t a huge amount of people on there. Most folks were from universities, so a lot of scholars, a lot of professors, and a lot of students, and everyone was kind of helping one another with all kinds of things. I got help with my homework back then. I got help even just learning about other parts of the world that I had not been into. And there was a wholesomeness to it that I think the internet has lost a little bit today, but that was really powerful in helping me see, at least, the power of using technology to connect with other human beings.

Douglas Ferguson:
Turns out you didn’t need subreddits in the beginning of the internet.

Sophie Bujold:
Exactly. It was just one of those places where if you were mildly technical, you could find your way to it, but it wasn’t wildly accessible to everyone. So the networks were actually fairly small, even though there were multiple of them. So there were actually a lot of people on those networks, but you had to find your way to little corners and then kind of just stay there because you were like, “I don’t know what else is out there,” and you don’t know if you can come back and find your people from there.
So I felt very adventurous, I think, in the process and also really curious about the folks that I was meeting. I just thought that was the coolest thing that I could have friends in far off places and not have to do it by pen pals or whatever else.

Douglas Ferguson:
It felt a lot like traveling. You find a spot where you really connect with people and you kind of want to stay there and come back because it took a lot of effort to find.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah, that’s a really great point. It was a little bit like traveling without leaving the comfort of my home at that point, which I couldn’t really do. I was a teenager, so I was at the mercy of my parents back then, but this was a way for me to start exploring things beyond my backyard in a way that was still relatively safe and harmless.

Douglas Ferguson:
You also reminded me, you couldn’t send images, there was no DM at that point, right? And also, I think it’s just helpful context for folks to think about, there was no cell phones then and in a lot of ways, it was like the messaging that we have now on our cell phones, but you had to do it with a computer. You couldn’t send images yet.

Sophie Bujold:
Exactly. That sounds tedious to every teenager on earth right now.

Douglas Ferguson:
You had to know someone’s phone number where this group of folks were. It’s like a group chat on your phone that you had to know the phone number for, or at least become aware of it somehow. And it’s text only and you’re tethered to a computer and it’s over a phone line, so when your mom needs to make a call, you had to get off.

Sophie Bujold:
You’ve been there. You’ve been there.

Douglas Ferguson:
I just wanted to make sure that the folks that weren’t as old as us or weren’t keyed into this stuff at the time had some point of reference because some folks got the internet much later.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah, absolutely. And it definitely was a bit of a wild world. And we ended up in channels that were very random. Our favorite channel, ironically, for those who don’t know me, I have zero farming background, yet I hung out in a channel for many years called Dairy Farming because that’s where all our friends were. So it was just a weird and wacky place to visit. And it was almost like one of those curio cabinets where you could open a door and be like, “What is behind this and what can I find here and who is in that room?” And if you didn’t like it, you just closed the door and moved on. So it was a very, for me anyways as a curious teenager, it was a really fun and exciting environment to be in.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that’s so fun. It definitely felt like a bazaar, like, so many curious things and really I think it just tapped into my love of eccentricity, just random things. And it was such a fun way to discover new stuff, whether it was music or art or just new ideas.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah, absolutely. And also tapping into the number of people that I met that were world experts in whatever, or at least claimed to be and I believed them, was really unreal. I remember a time where I had a physics assignment that I couldn’t figure out and instead of going to a web browser and searching it, which was limited back then too, I just hopped on to a chat room and found someone who had that expertise and he walked me through my homework. That’s just something that’s a little bit hard to emulate today unless you have an app for tutoring or whatever else. Back then, it was just a lot of goodwill and a lot of people just connecting with one another.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. And I’m curious, how did the early internet spirit influence how you gather people today?

Sophie Bujold:
I think for me, there were two big pivotal points. So one is, I come from a very small community of people on the east coast of Canada and I think the first piece for me… And let’s note that I did not realize that until I was much older, but I think I realized now that that community experience really shaped my perception of belonging and how I want to welcome people in a space. There was a warmth to the culture that I come from that I crave on a regular basis and really try to emulate in the work that I do.
The internet came in and chat rooms and things like that really shaped the second part because I was a very early adopter of that technology. And when I started my career, what I heard from people was, “It’s really cool that you’re doing that, but there’s no way a computer can create real human connection.” And I was like, “I think it can.” And I don’t think that I consciously set out to really take that on as a challenge in the work that I do, but I did do it, at least at a subconscious level, to the point where I started playing with, how do we create spaces that welcome people in and how can we create experiences that they come back to over and over again? And how can I do that with limited technology? So really, I started marrying the two and I think one of my key tenets for the work I do now is how would this interaction look if it was in person and how close can we get to it with the technology that we have today?

Douglas Ferguson:
Okay. So you mentioned that you had a professor help you with a physics problem, but also I believe that you had a plane ticket that led to some deeper relationships later on. So what was that like?

Sophie Bujold:
That was wild. So I mentioned earlier that my partner and I met in those chat rooms that I was in very early on. We were nowhere near one another. I was on the east coast of Canada, he was on the west coast of the United States. And as a teenager, the prospects of traveling to one another sounded pretty impossible. And what we had is one of those strangers in the room that saw us chatting day in and day out approach me and say, “I would love to give you a plane ticket so you can spend your first Christmas together.” Total stranger. I have never met this person. I don’t even know their real name. Somehow, I trusted that a plane ticket would show up at my door, because back then they were paper tickets that had to be mailed, and gave this stranger all of my personal information and got a ticket and my identity is totally safe.
So that person showed up at that right moment, gave us an opportunity to spend some time together. Many, many years later, we’re still together. So they kind of were the catalyst for that relationship really taking off and working, which was unheard of in those days. My family was going, “What the heck are you doing?” And I said, “I think it’s good. We’ve been talking for two years. I know more about this person than anyone else.” Maybe that was a bit naive on my part, but it worked out. And to me, that’s a moment that was really magical.
And that person came in, did that good deed, and then we haven’t seen them since then. So they really just showed up and it just showed the generosity that was happening back then. There were a lot of people helping each other out in different ways. It emulates some of the things I see on social media now, to be honest, whether it’s a crowdfunding campaign and things like that. But in those early days where all of that stuff was not set up or accessible yet, it was a pretty magical thing to have someone land right in the middle of another relationship that was building and just say, “Let me help it along.”

Douglas Ferguson:
And what did those acts of generosity teach you about trust in an online community?

Sophie Bujold:
That’s a very good question. I think it has taught me less about generosity in the online community very specifically. For me, the biggest lesson I took from that is to always assume the best out of people first. And I do that, whether it’s in an online setting or a lot of the communities I built also have an offline component. Just with interacting with humans in particular, assuming the best before you assume the worst until someone proves you wrong is really a philosophy that I’ve carried forward since then because it has served me so well across the spectrum of my life to just trust that people have good intentions in most cases.
Has it worked out 100% of the time? No, but I’d rather assume that it will than assume that everyone has bad intent and not have the opportunity to experience those moments of generosity. Because really at the end of the day, had I said no to the offer, we wouldn’t have had that opportunity to spend time together and build that relationship and that trust and that carries forward with any other moment where I’ve trusted that someone was coming to do good in my life.

Douglas Ferguson:
And how do you think this notion of trust and assuming positive intent has shown up in your facilitation style?

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. So I think in facilitation in particular, that same philosophy can be applied, right? So I don’t assume that my participants are there to cause trouble or that even their reactions are to harm the experience for everyone else. I think it helps me get curious when something happens in the room that’s unexpected that maybe the first instinct is to go, “Oh my God, why are they doing this?” Or whatever that is, to get curious about where that reaction comes from. And I think that helps create an environment where people really aren’t afraid of showing up as they are and they know that the room is being held for them to have the reaction that they have and that we can have a conversation in most cases around that, when we have the time obviously, but it has really helped me not see reactions that are unexpected as a bad thing and see it as part of this process that I’m bringing people through.
So whether that’s thinking through strategy or looking at the vision for a new community structure, people will have feelings about it and I see it as an opening really to exploring why that person had that reaction, what they meant by it, and what it can mean to how we shape whatever we’re shaping in that space.

Douglas Ferguson:
I love that because a lot of facilitators really struggle with some of those pieces, especially when it comes to what’s emerging in the space can really knock some folks off their feet. They’ve come ungrounded and they lose their sense of flow. So it sounds like you’ve really tapped into some of these early lessons to help ground you.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. And I would say part of my superpower is really relationships, right? And a lot of those personality assessments or strengths assessments, that always comes out loud and clear for me that empathy and relationship building are my top skills. So those hard moments or those moments that someone might say, “Oh, they don’t have a good intention,” for me are an area of opportunity to bring that person in rather than push them out. In most cases. There’s always exceptions, but in most cases, it creates this beautiful opportunity to either deepen the conversation or have them realize what’s going on with them too. There’s been times where they didn’t even realize the impact of their reaction in the room and just not necessarily putting them in the spotlight or on the spot, but just bringing attention to the fact that that was coming up helped them analyze where their feelings were, which really helped them feel connected to the group really at the end of the day.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I’m also thinking about your early career. I was thinking, digital explorer kind of came to mind as you were moving across these different roles and doing these things and you were kind of in a season of figure it out. And I’m curious if that helped you with this notion of being comfortable with ambiguity and just iteration as a core part of your practice.

Sophie Bujold:
Absolutely. And I would say that even today I’m still in a season of figure it out with a little bit more knowledge to make it a bit easier, but that’s just par for the course in a lot of this stuff. And I think if I was building community without being comfortable with human emotion and human being, I don’t know how effective I would be at the work that I do because at the end of the day, you can plan a community experience on paper all you want, but once you put humans in it, it might react differently and you need to be comfortable with that and you need to be comfortable with the feedback that comes from that in order to move forward in building an experience that makes people feel like they belong and they’re welcome in the space.

Douglas Ferguson:
And before you had the language of facilitation, you were already shaping conditions and softening the hard edges of tech. And can you recall a moment when you realized, even without the label I’m facilitating here, that you were doing that and what were you noticing in the group?

Sophie Bujold:
Well, it’s funny because I don’t think I realized it until I was in the cert program and we started walking through what it means to be a facilitator and then also being asked to bring forward some examples of our work in which we have facilitated. So for me, it wasn’t a moment in the room with a client. It was more the moment of me taking a moment, wanting to deepen my skills in an area where I felt like I wanted to explore and develop, and then realizing all along that, “Oh, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing here is facilitating these rooms and then pulling out all the examples of my work.” That was a pretty significant moment for me because I think before that, I realized the depth of the work that I was doing, but I don’t think I realized how deep that depth was, if that makes sense.
I knew it was important work, but I didn’t realize how much impact it had until I started sitting down, looking at the work that I had actually done, and thinking about, well, what did that mean for the customers I helped? And then I started realizing things like, I have impacted directly 11 out of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. I have been able to build communities that support people in areas that I feel pretty proud of, helping folks grieve very real-life situations, helping advocate for mental health across Canada, being able to help entrepreneurs secure funding for their ideas in the impact world. All of those things really… I don’t think I’ve ever done the work just to stroke my ego, but in that moment I stood a little bit taller and the impact that that has had on the world. And I think especially right now, where things are so tumultuous, I hang onto that and I say, I’m not the only one doing work that has impact. There’s still a lot of good that’s really happening out there.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yes, I love that. And I wanted to come back to something that you said in your alumni story that really struck me as this kind of comparing, trying new methods to picking up a fresh set of paintbrushes. And there might be a few rough strokes at first when getting used to the feel and how they presented on the paper or the canvas. And so I’m curious, because we embrace and embody practice so much at Voltage Control and Facilitation Lab, it’s such a critical part of the journey, and so I wanted to come back to these first rough strokes and curious if you could share an experiment that didn’t quite go as planned and what you learned from it?

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. I think that analogy, first and foremost, came from the fact that I am an artist, I paint, I do photography, I create a lot. And over the last several years in particular, I’ve been focused on intuitive creation as opposed to very formal realistic paintings and things like that. So for me, once I started realizing that facilitation was a thing I was doing, I’ll say I was very comfortable with experimenting, but that doesn’t come with areas of discomfort.
So the first few engagements that I did after certification were definitely an area of opportunity for me to be putting the skills I just learned to use. And in those moments, yeah, the engagement went very well from the client perspective, but I could start seeing, “Oh, I forgot to…” The first one that comes top to mind is I totally forgot to ask how many people would be in the room on my first workshop. I assumed that it would be a small group and then I ended up with a slightly bigger one that I didn’t quite know what to do with. And then I was like, “Okay, moving forward, that’s going on my intake sheet.”
So these little blind spots that you don’t think about in the moment, you’re just like, “Hey, I’m going to do this workshop. I’m going to knock it out of the park.” And just having that experience of having to operate on the fly and go, “Okay, there’s twice as many people as I expected here. How do I handle that right now because everyone’s in the room?” Figuring it out, working through it. Again, the engagement was fine from the client perspective. They had a good time. They really got what they needed out of the session, but in the background, I was definitely peddling a little bit faster.
And I think from engagement to engagement, that was the first one, the second one, it was just finding the balance between… I love a good conversation, I really do, but keeping time and having a good conversation sometimes goes against one another. So finding the balance between letting that conversation emerge and keeping on schedule so that everyone can get what they need out of the session was definitely another balancing act. So it was more on the technical side of things of me just kind of finding the right fit for the style of who I am and how I like to dig into things. I really love the kind of emerging stage where we’re thinking of new ideas, we’re putting things on the table, we’re having those conversations, and I’m learning that I need to get better at the convergence at the end.
So I’m okay with that, and I know that that’s what it is, and I’m putting practices in place in how I run my workshops to get better and better at it. Is it perfect now? Absolutely not, but I’m okay with that and that’s the part that I practice from time to time.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. I mean that is what practice is about. We do things and we learn from them. If we’re not learning from our behaviors and our actions, that’s where I think practice ceases, both our ability to run a practice, to put in practices, and just the broader definition of like, are we learning? Are we growing from the things we’re doing? And I love that you’re like, “I’m going to put this in my intake form.” It shows that we observed a lesson and we learned it, we applied it, and then we’re going to try to avoid it in the future.
Also, it’s interesting you talk about the timing stuff, loving the conversation, not omitting or assuming the number of people. And so I’m sensing a love of the art, of the passion in the conversation, the beautiful stuff that can happen when people are in communion together, but the logistics maybe are the thing that you’re personally working on.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. And it’s definitely finding the balance because a lot of what I do comes in those emergent moments and I don’t want to lose that as part of my facilitation. And I’m also known to just modify the agenda on the fly if I feel like the thing that we need is about to emerge and we’re just going to adjust the rest of what we’re doing. I’m comfortable doing that and I think that’s part of the figure-it-out training that I’ve had over my career is like, “Nope, we’re just going to adjust. Here’s what we’re going to cut out because this is where the nugget is.”
But I lean a lot more on our common humanity and what can come out if we just talk to one another. And that’s something that, at least in community building, is super important. It’s like, how do we get people to not just be shooting mechanical questions back and forth and then answering below, but how do we create that feeling of, “I want to be in this room because amazing things happen? I’m getting conversations that are very productive and stimulating for me and I want to be there?”

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s so important that we’re creating a sense of flow for folks.

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. And a sense of, I’ll come back to it over and over, just feeling like they belong in that room, like they found their people and they just can’t get enough of wanting to be in there.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. Love that. And it’s reminding me too of, I think near the end of certification for you and also about the time we were chatting about our community and about the alumni story, you were talking about just the right work was landing and multiple clients and a large member-based organization was coming in and just generating lots of deal flow. And I’m curious, what did you do structurally and personally to ride that wave without burning out? I think listeners could probably be interested and benefit from hearing what worked and didn’t work as you were kind of getting a lot of interest and trying to navigate a busy time, but also a time that was busy with things you were passionate about.

Sophie Bujold:
I think one of the most important things I did was really leaning on the community that I had created within our program. I met some amazing folks, some incredible people that I’m still in touch with now on a regular basis, and really leaning on some of their expertise in areas where I just had less experience.
The other piece of it too is I wasn’t using this to kind of shape the whole thing, but I used AI as a thinking partner a lot to just kind of challenge how I was structuring things or suggest activities that I might not be aware of that I might want to consider. It didn’t build my whole agenda, but it was definitely a thinking partner in the process of it.
And then third, leveraged a lot of the office hours that were happening at that moment to really kind of bring my work to the table and be like, “Here’s where I’m heading with it. What am I missing?” type thing.
So I think part of that. And then also, I’ll be very candid and say, part of it was also the, I’ll figure it out as I go thing that I’m really good at. But I relied a lot on the relationships that I had, whether it was with the client to start figuring out, “This workshop didn’t quite hit what we were looking for, what if we did a second one to just tie it up and here’s where we would focus?” So I left a lot of room for fluidity even in the engagement because I knew that these were new ways for me to work and that I might not hit the mark exactly on the spot that first time.
So for the client, that actually ended up adding a lot of value because they got a little bit of extra time to think through things, but it also gave me a playground to be able to really start structuring how I move in my Miro boards and what exactly I’m trying to extract from this group in order for us to continue doing the consulting piece of the work afterwards, right? Because my work has those two parts in balance all the time. It’s like, yes, I facilitate, but it’s also with the goal of getting information that I can then use to be the consultant to say, “Okay, based on the decisions you made, here’s the direction we can take with the experience you’re trying to create.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Another thing I was thinking about was just the importance of clarity and focus for organizations, especially I think professional services organizations benefit greatly when there’s a really sharp focus and you know who you’re serving. And you’ve done a great job, over the past few years, really starting to clarify that member organizations are your lane, co-designing roadmaps, facilitating discovery, and aligning teams. And I’m curious, if we walk through a typical engagement with you, what does that look like and how’s facilitation making a pivotal difference for you?

Sophie Bujold:
Yeah. I think every engagement is a little bit unique just based on the need that comes through my door, but people typically come to me in two-ish buckets. So one, they’re either coming to me where they have an idea for a community experience, whether it’s online, hybrid, or offline, they just want to think through what exactly are we offering people? How do we structure it? And how do we start building a team that can support it? The other piece is, we have something and it’s broken. It’s not working the way we want it to. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know how to fix it. So that could be low engagement, high churn, just something’s just not jiving and it’s not meeting the needs of the organization that it’s supporting.
So in both those cases, I think the journey starts very similarly. I have a pretty robust intake form that everyone goes through on my website. That is purposefully done to get information ahead of the conversation that I want to have with clients, to get them reflecting about exactly what they want. So to your point about focus, that’s one of my ways to help them focus is to get them to stop for a minute and think about some of the key aspects of their community before we even have a conversation.
For a lot of people, I get to the call and they thank me for those questions because it really helped clarify in their head what exactly they’re asking for. So it leads to a much better discovery call where we can really dig into, what are their specific needs? And then craft an engagement that makes sense for that.
For a lot of the folks who are in that bucket of, we have something new, I have a whole community mapping process that is usually, 90% of the time, the process that we’ll go through where we really start digging into the values and mission that’s driving the community and why it needs to exist in the world. We take a look at what is already out there and how it might not be fitting the need of their client or where is the opportunity to find a difference that we can fill in the market. And then from there, we start looking at each piece of the community, right? Events, any kind of interactions they want to be having, whether it’s forum groups or whatever it is, whatever components, we always match it back to the needs of the community and the needs of the members that are in it.
I think one of the key pieces of what I do is really this empathy map of who is your member and what journey do we know they go through as they move from the first few moments of being in the community all the way to feeling like they’ve got what they need and exiting that community? What is that journey and what is the core need they need at every step? And we use that to then go into the experience and go, “Okay, now we know what they need. How do we help them scratch that itch? How do we help them fulfill that need so that they can move through the journey and be transformed?”
So many people don’t realize that community experiences also have a member journey and can be transformative. They just think like, “Oh, people come in and they hang out and they leave when they’re ready.” But if you tie the experience that you create to those member needs, one, it creates an experience that people participate at much higher rates in. Two, they stick around a lot longer, sometimes by years, which is usually good if it’s a membership-based fee at the front. It means more lifetime value for that customer. And yeah, so tying it all together from there.
And then once we have that really good picture of what the community needs, then we put in place the launch plan and the team plan and all of those things to move forward. And then on the side of, how do I fix my community? That usually starts with an audit of sorts and then moves from there based on the needs that we find in there.

Douglas Ferguson:
Looking ahead, what kinds of member-driven challenges or sectors are you most excited to tackle next? And how do you hope the ripple effects of your work will show up in communities those organizations serve?

Sophie Bujold:
So there’s three key areas that I actually love serving. It doesn’t mean that I don’t go outside of that, but it’s where I feel like my impact is the greatest. One is really in kind of social services area. We’re talking about things like communities that are helping people with their mental health, communities that are advocating in those spaces, and kind of adjacent communities in that space. I never set an actual wishlist for who I want to work with.
The other space is really the space of creativity, but I tend to work with clients who, again, are in that space of we want to have an impact in the world. So they’re doing creativity for the purpose of wellbeing, mental health, and having a positive impact on the people that are learning. It’s never just a learning community, there’s always that goal of, we want to help through art, through music, through all kinds of things. I’ve worked with painting communities and cello communities and all kinds of things in between, but all of them had that social impact kind of woven in, that they weren’t just doing it for teaching purposes, it was really to help people feel better, find something that they’re passionate about, and wanting to move forward.
So for me, those spaces are really important, especially, again, right now. There’s so much happening in this world and I think people need those anchors that are not work related, that are not politically related, where they can actually just sit in a room with other folks who have an interest similar to theirs. And I would even say that I consider those spaces really transformational, especially when two people with maybe opposing views can find some common ground. And I’m seeing that more and more with all kinds of initiatives in those spaces that I just named. Like, you have the Gaia Collective in New York City that’s based on music and singing and a whole bunch of other communities where, at first, it feels like, “Oh, it’s just for hobbies,” but really there’s a really connective fabric at the bottom of it.
So that’s what I look for in projects, is spaces where there’s some thought that’s been put into, how do we bring people together, especially people with differences?

Douglas Ferguson:
Ooh, love that. And I would imagine the ripple effects when we’re bringing together folks with differences are that we might have a bit more understanding about each other and a bit more harmony maybe, which I would argue that the world could benefit from. And anyway, we’re coming to our end, unfortunately. I know we could keep going and going. So I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Sophie Bujold:
So my final thought for today is really in the fact that there’s a lot of opportunity right now to create connection between people to help people feel like they belong and they’ve found a supportive community and that, sure, it can take the form of working with someone like me on building something a little bit more formal, but I would also say there’s a lot of opportunity to look within our neighborhoods and our communities right now and being like, how can I gather people to either hold a potluck between neighbors or where can I create that opportunity of connection right now? You don’t need a formal business setting to be able to do those things. That’s what I experienced when I was online in those first few years and I think that’s something that folks have been slowly coming back to in a lot of cases right now and is needed more than ever.

Douglas Ferguson:
Wow. Yeah. I would echo that and thank you for sharing. It’s been such a lovely conversation and hope to chat with you again sometime soon.

Sophie Bujold:
Well, thanks for having me. It’s been great.

Douglas Ferguson:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration; voltagecontrol.com.

The post The Greatest Lessons in Trust and Generosity from Online Communities appeared first on Voltage Control.

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas Ferguson interviews Marco Monterzino, a human-centered designer and innovation facilitator. Marco shares his journey from luxury product design to facilitation, emphasising the significance of ritual, adaptability, and purpose in both fields. They discuss how design thinking and frameworks like the hero’s journey inform facilitation, and how rituals shape user experiences. Marco also explores building organisational resilience, the evolving nature of purpose, and the importance of cultivating equanimity. The episode concludes with insights on blending facilitation and education to foster resilient, innovative teams and communities.

Show Highlights

[00:01:45] Marco’s Entry into Luxury Design
[00:08:21] Rituals and Product Design
[00:15:49] Gaining Confidence and Structure as a Facilitator
[00:23:59] Workshops as Human Gatherings
[00:31:14] Bridging Facilitation and Education
[00:35:17] Final Thought: The Equanimity Hack

Links | Resources

Marco on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Marco Monterzino is a Human-centered Designer and Certified Innovation Facilitator at Monterzino Design, where he helps senior leadership teams discover their organisational resilience.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson (00:05):
Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method-agnostic approach, so you can enjoy a wide-range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances to enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening.

(00:38):
If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in realtime with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

(00:58):
Today I’m with Marco Monterzino, human-centered designer and Certified Innovation Facilitator at Monterzino Design, where he helps senior leadership teams discover their organizational resilience. Welcome to the show, Marco.

Marco Monterzino (01:14):
Thanks for having me, Douglas. Great to see you.

Douglas Ferguson (01:16):
I just want to say it’s so wonderful having you on the show today. You’ve been such a great collaborator, and the work you’re doing at Facilitation Lab Europe is so wonderful. We really appreciate everything you’re doing there. And we’ve got some cool stuff that we’re working on that we might be launching next year. So always a pleasure to chat with you, and it’s so wonderful having you on the show today.

Marco Monterzino (01:37):
Thanks. Look, it’s been an incredible experience and so supportive of my own journey. So yeah, thanks for setting it up really.

Douglas Ferguson (01:46):
You began your career designing luxury objects, like lighters and fountain pens. What first drew you into that world? And what did you learn from working in such a rarefied space?

Marco Monterzino (01:56):
So that’s a great question, Douglas. I would say I more or less stumbled upon this market. It’s something that I was introduced to by the college I studied at. So Central Saint Martins College in London is a college that has a very strong network in a very specific niche of the market, which is the high end luxury market. Really because they are active in the intersection of art, fashion and design. So that’s the kind of network that I got introduced to.

(02:31):
I also have to say, as a child growing up, I really enjoyed collecting lighters and fountain pens, but really not the lighters that cost you half a yearly salary. So these are things that I just encountered along my journey and I really enjoyed discovering. Especially I would say the whole experience of creating these items, luxury items, high end items is connecting to a notion that the French call savoir faire, which is basically craftsmanship.

(03:11):
So having a chance to immerse myself in companies that have these workshops where they make bespoke diamond-encrusted accessories for gentlemen, for ladies, it was really super, super precious. And opened up my mind as a designer because I could see how … This was my first experience in connecting the practice of designing to the practice portfolio manufacturing, and this was a very specific type of manufacturing. It’s very little industrial production, just a little bit of C&C milling, digital manufacturing, which was then all finished by hand, encrusted by hand, engraved by hand. So the range of possibilities was really endless.

Douglas Ferguson (04:04):
I recall that your big project was the Diva. And I playfully suggested From Diva to Facilitator as your alumni story title, but that felt a little off to you. Tell us about the origins in the name Diva, and what was there for you as you were working on that project?

Marco Monterzino (04:19):
Yeah, thank you. That’s a great memory actually to recall. So I had been given this assignment to work with a young audience for a luxury brand called Stephane Tissot Dupont based in Paris. They started being known for travel case design. They created these travel cases that people use for traveling on the great liners of Cunard, that heritage. When I went to visit the factory, the workshops, the atelier actually how they call it, it was really super feeling the weight of these objects and hearing the sound of the lids as they came open. I was introduced to a whole new universe. I never really could see how you could design into that level of detail.

(05:08):
Now, the concept actually came because I was struggling with coming up with an idea for something in that market. It’s really not my market, I hardly could empathize with the user. And that’s my first job as a designer, understanding what a user needs. So one day I was just walking around in Lugano, on this Italian border with Switzerland. Actually, it was the Swiss border with Italy. And I saw … Sometimes you start observing, and I’m the kind of person sometimes, a bit awkwardly stops and starts staring at something as if I was invisible. I was super mesmerized by something that I was observing. And this scene was a guy and a girl who was basically, they didn’t know each other and they crossed paths on the shore of this lake. She asked him if he had a lighter. And the way this interplay happened was really beautiful because the light was just right, there was a gust of wind, and their hands gently touched each other as they were exchanging this moment, this gesture.

(06:28):
And for me, that moment was where I was, “Oh, wow, that’s really beautiful. What if I could design a physical object, a tool like a lighter, that could really represent and enhance this ritual of giving fire?” The elegance of an open gesture like that. So the idea was what if a person like me could, in a dream, be able to treat a woman like a diva, like you see in the great films of the Hollywood era. So that’s how the name came about, just thinking of a lighter that was dedicated, it was an homage to the user. A lady who’s treated like a diva by a gentleman. The divas are in this dream scenario that I lost myself into.

(07:38):
That landed really well Stephane Tissot Dupont, the creative director really liked it and said, “We can manufacture this.” And in fact, I think they didn’t end up manufacturing that specific design unfortunately, as it often goes with product innovation. But they built the idea of something that could be operated with an open gesture in other collections. One for 007 is operating that way, then they have another one that is a bit more sporty and leverages the strength of the hand. Because the whole idea was to offer a lighter, rather than in your fist like many would, on the open palm of a hand, as if your hand was a surface rather than your hand holding onto something.

Douglas Ferguson (08:21):
That story immediately drew me to the idea of ritual, and I think you even invoked that word yourself. This idea of passing the flame has become a thing of the past because people are moving away from smoking due to health concerns or picked up vaping instead. Are there other human-to-human rituals that we’ve lost that we could amplify with design or objects?

Marco Monterzino (08:44):
Look, it’s a very interesting space, that one, I think for all forms of industrial design especially because that was where I asked myself this kind of question. The idea of a ritual really is at the root of many products that we use. If you think about simple rituals like how we use our handsets, there’s lots of little rituals in there. A lot of little gestures, a lot of thoughtless acts, a lot of cultural norms we can play with.

(09:17):
Now of the top of my head, I wouldn’t be able to pull in a specific ritual that I have in mind. But if you think about the usual rituals of, for instance the tea ceremony or many other cultural rituals, really are about the process being just as important as the outcome. Because the outcome, at the end of the day, might be drink a cup of tea. But what if the pleasure and the value of the experience is throughout the process from the beginning to the end? Yeah, how you prepare the mug, how you select and appreciate the blend, how you embody a certain posture rather than another one. In certain cultures, like in Japan, there’s a lot of very sophisticated detail that goes into these things. So I think ritual is everything in product design and it’s a great place to start a design process from my experience.

Douglas Ferguson (10:18):
At what point did you realize objects, though beautiful, didn’t quite align with your own values? And how did that spark your pivot toward utilitarian design?

Marco Monterzino (10:28):
Now, it didn’t come without its pains. You can imagine, I was very excited to be in such a market. It made me feel extremely fortunate. I didn’t see myself designing a fountain pen for Montblanc or helping Stephane Tissot Dupont launch a new lighter. It was something that it was completely foreign to me. But I don’t know, I just felt by doing other bits of work, the purpose part of it was really driving me.

(11:03):
When designing these beautiful objects, you’re often designing items that end up being collected. They might not even be used as much. These brands are really keen to make sure that their products are not seen as collectibles, but unfortunately quite often that’s the way it goes, especially with the more customized and expensive pieces. So being on the other end of the spectrum, so solving real life problems, everyday problems, really addressing something that you might observe in real life, like how can we make packaging not end up in our seas, that sort of problem. How can we help people behave in a different way when it comes to sustainability? These are issues that I’ve dealt with very, very regularly.

(11:55):
It’s the other end of the spectrum. Very, very fast-moving goods, packaging. Not glamorous at all, not massaging my ego as much as a designer, but definitely giving me a sense of purpose and I’m having an impact here. Which I have to say, I wasn’t feeling as much when I was designing the other products. And that is not to say that you can’t have a sense of purpose when designing those other products. If you’re a watchmaker, I think there’s a lot of purpose there. But just it didn’t really click with me. I felt I needed something more grounded. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson (12:36):
Can you share the moment when you first sensed that facilitation, not just product design, might be the real work you were meant to do?

Marco Monterzino (12:44):
I think I mentioned earlier, product innovation, that’s when my shift happened. That’s the first moment I encountered the … I understood the skill behind design. The mindset was transferable, I could use it outside of designing stuff. I could use it to help an R&D team come up with a product without designing the product, just coming up with 10, 20 ideas. So it was incremental in my experience. I went from designing hands-on, to a degree like a craftsman. Designers are, to a degree, craftspeople. They apply their ability to understand manufacturing and form. I went from that place to a place where I could generate lots of ideas for organizations.

(13:44):
And then that turned into we’re not solving product innovation problems now, but when working with a large fast-moving goods company, like Proctor & Gamble or Pepsi, PepsiCo, we might need to really think about, say structural problems for a smaller organization like a startup or a scale-up. And that’s when I could see that holding that hand in understanding how they could discover their product. So their very first product, it was all product-based at the beginning for me, could be done through the same process that I used for designing the product itself. So understanding the what problem is, reframing it, coming up with solutions, and then prototyping and testing solutions to a degree whenever it really fits.

(14:40):
And that’s when I actually started doing design sprints because I overheard at Makerversity, a lovely coworking space I was based at in London, I overheard that my friends in the neighboring office or set of desks were able to sell this product like hot cakes. I was like, “Wow, what’s the secret here?” And the secret was, it was very clear. For the first time I was able to hear people talk about the design process like something that was bite-sized and that could be seen as very tangible because you got from big problem to a user-validated solution at the end.

(15:25):
So that’s where I could see that there was something on the horizon around facilitation. But by no means, I didn’t have the experience or the methodology I could lean on. It was all I was winging it big time. And sometimes, as you do when you’re winging it, sometimes it goes really well and some other times it doesn’t go just quite as well. So yeah, that’s actually how I came about you guys and it was very much to address that need for structure, that need for a sense of also confidence. Because if I was winging it and it was a sunny day and everything was going well, I was completely confident and bold. But if things were not working out, or the client was potentially pushing back, or things were not really, yeah, working out, I would be losing my confidence. You can’t lose your confidence as a facilitator, it’s a key feature of the work we do. We have to guide and lead in a confident way.

(16:30):
So having methods, the readings, especially the first reading, the Art of Gathering, super clear. It was a big light bulb that went off in my head. It clarified my role. I was gathering people, I wasn’t just running workshops. So there was a lot more thought that had to go into it.

Douglas Ferguson (16:53):
That confidence is really key. You talk about when everything’s sunny and goes well, it’s easy to follow the playbook, run the recipe. But then what happens where there’s a perturbation in the system or something goes unexpected? We have to be unflappable. We have to be resilient. That’s why we have our competency of adaptive. If we’re not adaptive facilitators, when we’re met with adversity it’s going to be really hard to respond.

Marco Monterzino (17:25):
Definitely, definitely. Look, one thing that really got me thinking about this topic was when, I think you brought it up on Circle, on the live community, the Facilitation Lab community. You brought up the topic or the notion of equanimity, which was an entirely novel term for me. The English language is not my first language and I had not come across this word before. So I looked it up. I was like, “Oh, I need a bit of this.” It was this inner smoothness was really extremely tantalizing. It was like, “Yeah, I need more than a bit of that. I need to have control of that.”

(18:11):
So yeah, that planted a little seed somewhere in the back of my head. And then through experience, I was able to actually craft for myself something that could ground me when things were not working out quite the way I was hoping.

Douglas Ferguson (18:30):
So tell me more about that?

Marco Monterzino (18:31):
Well, this is something that I refer to as my, I don’t know, it’s a mantra for me. Something that I go to to find my footing. And I found myself and I still find myself quite regularly … Maybe it’s because it’s I’m a creative, I’m a designer, emotions have a strong grip on my psyche. So whenever there’s some emotion that’s making me feel less confident because maybe I’m experiencing an emotion called fear, then as soon as I realize that’s going on I go, “Okay.” I just take a breath and then I just repeat within myself quietly, “I’m here to serve you.” Because at the end of the day, all the work that I do as a consultant, as a human-centered designer is to serve people.

(19:22):
And then it’s like pressing autofocus on a very blurred image. Things go blurry, blurry, blurry, and then I go, “I’m here to serve you,” and everything is crystal clear and instantly I have my confidence back. Instantly, every time. Super reliable.

Douglas Ferguson (19:39):
Nice. There’s a reason purpose is first and adaptive is last. If we’re not starting with purpose and anchoring the other competencies along the way, it’s going to be really difficult to get to adaptive.

Marco Monterzino (19:51):
Totally, totally. And I would say that adaptability is a key feature of purpose. Because I can see my purpose as a business evolving over time, and I can see that you guys possibly have the same. Depending on how you evolve, your purpose has to evolve. Depending on how the market evolves, your purpose has to evolve. Depending on how the learning that I take on along the way informs me with new knowledge, my purpose has to evolve. And that piece where I’m constantly iterating my purpose is the adaptability, the ability to keep that purpose, the driving purpose fresh on my mind. I don’t know how it is for you guys, but that’s definitely the case with me.

Douglas Ferguson (20:39):
Yeah, that echoes true. I want to come back to the journey we’re talking about there. At Untapped Innovation, you saw design embedded in R&D and fueled by frameworks like the Hero’s Journey. How did that experience shape your view of design as facilitation?

Marco Monterzino (20:54):
So yeah, I would say one thing that I came across when working with Untapped was I would label it as a wealth of experience. They had a huge amount of experience, they’d been working with lots of large organizations, companies, multinational companies. One of the methodologies we were using that I encountered was the Hero’s Journey. Because ultimately, one of these human-centered design 101 methodologies is you put the user at the center and you design the whole narrative of whatever you’re innovating upon around it. So that was super, super powerful.

(21:35):
Just a quick example, a quick memory, anecdote. I was brought in to work with a manufacturer of a product that has been … Well, I’ll just say it. I was brought in to work on a tobacco harm reduction project with a large organization that needed to address the fact that their products were harming people. So I remember how having that perspective that put the user at the center, and also having that perspective as a designer to think about the user as a person who is engaging in rituals, especially when it comes to consuming drinks or having other experiences. That became the core aspect of how we generated ideas. So we generated ideas about how we can reduce harm by making the experience of, for instance consuming tobacco, while physically less harmful, but also a lot more about the ritual. A lot more about the quality of the experience, rather than just the consumption and going through packets of cigarettes. So that was powerful.

Douglas Ferguson (22:59):
Yeah, that reminds me of some advice I’ve heard in the past about quitting cigarettes and how important it is to not leave the rituals behind. A lot of times, people smoke when they’re having coffee. A lot of times people will take their smokes breaks. That will be the only time they go outside and take a break from work. There’s some people that even argue it’s the deep breathing that is the relaxing part because nicotine’s a stimulant, it actually raises the blood pressure. So if there’s any argument to it feeling relaxing or stress relieving, it’s the deep breathing that you’re doing when you’re inhaling deeply and exhaling, which people don’t normally do. So this group encouraged folks to, “Hey, keep your coffee ritual. Keep your afternoon and mid-morning breaks. Go outside and breathe.”

(23:47):
I find that interesting reminder of that story while listening to you around designing around those rituals. It kind of comes back to what we were talking about earlier with the lighters and the other human exchanges.

Marco Monterzino (23:59):
Yeah. Look, we could connect this with also the practice of seeing workshops as gatherings. For me, it’s the same matter, or it was the same transition. Because why should we suddenly treat a workshop as a situation where there’s one person talking at a group, and there is no structure, and there is no ritual to it. It doesn’t feel like something that belongs to our culture, something that belongs to our human nature.

(24:35):
When you say if we look at it as a gathering, wow. We start thinking about a big circle of people with a blazing fire in the middle. It can become something I think quite natural and quite … There’s a lot of references from our culture itself. So when you are running a workshop, you should think about how the most important thing is the relational quality of it, especially at the beginning. Clarifying purpose of course, keeping things on track, but also making sure that people connect because that’s why you’re bringing them together. And it’s not about getting people through as many design thinking exercises as possible to get to an outcome that is designed by committee. But rather, getting people excited about being together. Able to give shape, to contribute with their logs to the big fire, and to make it bigger and better, and make it memorable.

(25:30):
So yeah, I think making experiences whatever they are human is one of the key learnings of human-centered design, and at least one of those that I really keep close to my heart.

Douglas Ferguson (25:40):
Love that. And also, in your work you’ve described facilitation as “helping organizations access their own resilience.” Could you share an example where you saw that resilience come alive in a powerful way?

Marco Monterzino (25:53):
Right. So this one is covered by a certain amount of confidentiality, but I think I want to share, I would say, the essence of it. Which is there’s been, due to geopolitical changes on the landscape, there’s been a need for certain technologies to be employed in the defense sector. And a lot of innovation, because we’ve gone through a lot of periods of extensive peace which has been I think something we took for granted. And unfortunately, we’re looking at a picture that is a lot less clear and a lot less certain as we speak.

(26:32):
But anyway, these companies were required to help their countries to be resilient in a time where there was disruption. Or these companies themselves were going through a change of purpose that was potentially going to push away a number of their workforce. Or these companies were experiencing a disruption in how they saw themselves and that takes a lot of intentional structure. You can’t do those sort of things just organically. You can, but it takes longer, it’s a lot riskier, and you might risk losing a lot of your people along the way.

(27:17):
Well, if you do it in a very structured way, in a very fair way, in a very transparent way, in a very intentional way, in a way that is designed, then you have basically the equivalent of a well-operating device. You’re basically taking charge of that process. And I think facilitation does that brilliantly because it comes into a place where there is need to be able to spring back to shape after disruption, and I’m giving this example, but it could be other examples. Even simply an organization needing to change management. So there’s a new CEO and maybe with the CEO, a whole new group of executives come into the organization. I’ve been involved in a couple of these larger structures. That’s a huge disruption that then poses the question how do we then connect with the workforce? And how do we enable the workforce to be taken on to a journey?

(28:21):
Because sometimes I’m asked, “Marco, can you help us roll out a new strategy?” And of course what I hear is, “Can you help us enable the work to themselves lead parts of their strategy and meet those goals one-by-one?” And that’s what we do basically, and I think that’s where I see facilitation being, let’s say, a skill or a role or a responsibility that is conducive to resilience. Because it makes disruptions, it turns disruptions into fuel, rather than into things that stop your motion and stop your progress. You take the disruption as an opportunity to redesign, as an opportunity to come up with new solutions, and as an opportunity to refresh. And yeah, facilitation can definitely do that.

Douglas Ferguson (29:11):
Yeah. It’s sort of reframing. Because what might seem like a disruption, or if you look at it through the lens of a disruption is something that is destructive versus looking at disruption as something that is as signal, as a force. But how can we harness that force and utilize it? Because it is showing that people are passionate and there’s energy there. So if we’re able to harness it, if we’re able to redirect it in ways that help us in pursuit of our goal, wow, that’s super effective.

Marco Monterzino (29:42):
Yeah. The notion of resilience has gone through phases. It’s been a buzzword during the big eras of disruption around COVID and I think people grew tired of it. And now I think there it’s come back up with new disruptions and new challenges. I can see that it’s a word that attracts a lot more interest now and I’m glad to see that. But I think there’s been a big argument that resilience is not enough. So what if resilience is not the point?

(30:14):
I can’t remember what was the author, maybe someone will be able to let us know who was the author of this piece of writing. But there was a book that described the 2.0 version of resilience is being this anti-fragility, the anti-fragile type of system. And I don’t like the word itself because I find it a bit difficult to pronounce, it’s a bit long, where resilience to me flows nicely. But I think when I think of resilience, I think of resilience as something that is really fed by challenge. So at the end of the day, it’s something that is anti-fragile. It’s really fueled by all of the challenges that we have coming towards us.

Douglas Ferguson (30:57):
Are you think about Nassim Taleb’s book?

Marco Monterzino (30:59):
That’s the one.

Douglas Ferguson (31:00):
Yeah, great read. And yeah, that word can be a little bit challenging for folks, but I think that might have been its goal. Let’s put something out there that catches people’s attention.

Marco Monterzino (31:12):
I think so. Yeah, definitely.

Douglas Ferguson (31:14):
Well, let’s look ahead. You’re starting to bridge facilitation and education. Thinking about lecturing and other pursuits that are in that world of academia, what excites you most about teaching as a natural extension of facilitation?

Marco Monterzino (31:28):
So the two worlds are very intertwined, aren’t they? Teaching and facilitating. Now that I’ve discovered what facilitation is, which is this soft skill, the mother of all soft skills, I understand or I see teaching in a completely new light. I realize that people who are teaching are facilitating a gathering, a class is a gathering. There is a purpose, which is let’s learn about that subject, that topic, and by the end of the session we will be at the end of that chapter or whatever it might be. So I think there’s a quality which is a natural extension of the more commercial facilitation practice.

(32:11):
And then the other aspect is I have been myself asked a number of times, “Marco, can you help us train our own people so that we can empower our workforce with human-centered design, with collaboration skills, with workshop design, with facilitation?” And that I think took that part of my brain or gave me an opportunity to grow into a new aspect of my practice. Which is to be able to not only perform the craft of facilitation, but also being able to communicate it and to be able to take other people, a journey where you have to make the right space for learning, you have to create the right conversations among peers so that learning can happen. You have to stand back and really not be at the front of the room as much. You’re there enabling this mysterious phenomenon, which is how do people learn stuff.

(33:19):
But yeah, it’s something that I’ve come across as a request, an ask. People ask me, “Can you do that for us?” And I’m like, “Yes, let’s do some experiential learning.” Which is basically taking people through the experience. And then I came across you guys, and you talk about practice, practice playgrounds, which is a brilliant way to experience methodologies and to basically understand that like playing an instrument really well, like finger-picking on a guitar. You might be born with it, but you don’t have to be born with it. You can just spend many, many hours every week practicing, practicing, practicing, and then you get the hang of it. And then you get better, and better, and better. And facilitation is the same, learning these kind of skills is the same. I find it exciting to hold space for that sort of thing because find it made it useful for me, and so I believe it can be useful to others.

Douglas Ferguson (34:15):
And if you look a few years down the road, how do you hope your work, whether in consulting, education or facilitation will contribute to building more resilient organizations and communities?

Marco Monterzino (34:25):
If I blur my eyes and I try to see beyond the horizon, I think I see myself doing a blend of the two worlds. I think that’s where I might be able to keep myself fresh. And also, learn, pick up new things and cross-pollinate. So I think my ambition is to continue on this journey that I’m on. I’m not keen to, let’s say change everything, but I’m keen to continue making small changes as I go forward. And I think these two spaces, the learning and the consulting space to me, there’s a tradition. Lots of designers do that, lots of people in the consulting space also teach, and I see the point. And I think that’s a good ambition to work towards.

Douglas Ferguson (35:17):
And as we come to a close today, I’d love to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Marco Monterzino (35:22):
Okay. So my final thought for the listeners is as an invite as much as a small challenge. I invite you all to craft your own equanimity hack, something that you can tap into when you might lose your confidence. Because as you know because you are maybe already working as a facilitator or maybe it’s something you will discover as you start working as a facilitator, being able to keep that wind in your sails no matter what is crucial in this practice. So craft yourself a little hack to tap into your equanimity and rekindle your confidence. That’s my final thought.

Douglas Ferguson (36:12):
So important. Thanks for coming on the show, Marco. It’s been great chatting.

Marco Monterzino (36:16):
Thank you, Douglas, for having me. It was lovely.

Douglas Ferguson (36:18):
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review, and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Rituals in Design Enhance Facilitation and Organisational Resilience? appeared first on Voltage Control.

As November settles in, teams naturally shift into long-view mode. It’s the season for pruning, strengthening roots, and harvesting insights from the year so we can plant smarter in the next one. That rhythm is tailor-made for the kind of thinking AI transformation actually requires—systems thinking. Because while AI can accelerate what works, it can also amplify what doesn’t. If you adopt it as a series of isolated tools, you risk scaling the very patterns you’re trying to change.

This month, we invite you to step back and see the whole. AI transformation is not a tool swap; it’s a chance to redesign roles, rituals, rules, and boundaries across your organization. When you map the system together—actors, relationships, flows, and incentives—you uncover bottlenecks before they appear, create better decision pathways, and frame experiments that compound learning rather than stall in governance fog.

Our Activity of the Month is Systems Mapping, inspired by the session Erik Skogsberg and Dirk Van Onsem led at the Facilitation Lab Summit 2024. If you’ve never mapped a system with your team, this is the perfect time to try. If you’re already mapping, this is the perfect time to revisit your map, stress-test your future state, and align on experiments that everyone can rally around.

Below, you’ll find a practical, seven-part guide to approach AI with a systems lens—complete with an activity you can run in 60–90 minutes, ways to anticipate tomorrow’s bottlenecks today, and facilitation moves that turn digital transformation teams into conveners of clarity. Let’s get you set to map before you move.

See The Whole To Change The Parts

AI adoption tends to enter organizations as a noun—a new platform, pilot, or policy. But sustainable transformation lives in the verbs—how we decide, coordinate, hand off, learn, and adapt across the system. If you focus on “the tool” you’ll optimize pockets of work. If you focus on “the work,” you’ll redesign the moves that matter most—especially the moves between people and teams where friction and value compound. Verbs over nouns is the mental shift that keeps AI from amplifying yesterday’s patterns.

That shift is only possible when you broaden your container. Instead of asking what AI can do for one role or function, ask what becomes possible across roles, rituals, rules, and boundaries. Where are decisions waiting on a single person? Which incentives reward local wins at the expense of system outcomes? Which rules were written for old constraints that no longer apply? Seeing those dynamics is what lets AI actually change the system, not just accelerate it.

It helps to imagine your organization as an ecosystem, not an org chart. Ecosystems thrive through flows—of information, decisions, value, trust. When we talk about AI adoption, we’re really talking about ecosystem gardening, not gadget shopping. It’s the work of cultivating healthy relationships, pruning outdated norms, improving the soil of incentives, and introducing new capabilities with intention.

Most important, a systems view honors human needs. Change lands well when people feel safe, skilled, and significant. If fear is present, judgment narrows and teams retreat to what they can control. That’s why a facilitative stance matters. Check-ins, working agreements, and visual artifacts create a shared field of view. They lower the waterline of uncertainty so teams can engage, learn, and own the change together.

Make It Visible Together

Systems are invisible until you draw them. The fastest way to move from assumptions to alignment is to make your work visible—actors, relationships, dependencies, decision points, and feedback loops. When it’s out on the board, you can collectively see where latency piles up, where incentives subtly pull teams apart, and where a small change could unlock major flow.

We love Miro as a base container for this work because it supports both divergence and convergence in one place. You can invite many perspectives, surface assumptions quickly, then converge on the parts that matter for your next move. With Miro’s AI features, you can even bring in an “extra lens” to help spot patterns—emerging loops, clusters, or contradictions—that the group can then interpret, validate, and refine.

A critical step is asking whose voices are missing from the container. If you’re mapping a process without someone who lives its pain points, you’ll miss essential nuance. If you’re designing decision rules without folks who actually carry them out, you’ll create elegant bottlenecks. Make your invitations explicit: who co-owns this map, what benefits and responsibilities come with participation, and how the artifact will be used beyond the workshop.

Finally, remember that maps are prototypes. The goal isn’t a perfect diagram, it’s collective insight. A good systems map gives you enough clarity to move, learn, and iterate. Hold it lightly. Update it as you test, so your shared understanding grows. When the map changes, that’s not rework; it’s progress.

Activity Of The Month: Systems Mapping

If you run just one session this month, make it a 60–90 minute systems mapping workshop. This is a practical, low-lift way to transform big conversations about AI into concrete decisions and experiments. Our facilitation team has been running versions of this for years, and the moves are straightforward to adapt to your context.

Start by clarifying purpose and boundaries. In 10 minutes, align on what system you’re mapping and where it starts and ends for this session. Then list actors—teams, roles, customers, partners, tools, policies—who impact or are impacted by this system. In the next 20–30 minutes, map flows: how work actually moves today. Surface handoffs, delays, and decisions. Highlight where information waits, where approvals stack up, and where “ghost rules” create drag.

In 20 minutes, annotate the map with friction points and incentives. Where are people rewarded for local optimization? Where are norms or policies written for constraints that no longer exist? Where does trust have to be rebuilt for a new move to stick? As you talk, capture opportunities for AI to help at the system level: better triage at handoffs, improved decision support at key thresholds, smart routing to reduce latency, or lightweight automation where waste is predictable.

Close by harvesting experiments and decision rules. Choose 2–3 experiments you can run within 30–45 days. For each, name the owner, success signal, consent threshold, and a safety check or ethical red line. Define how you’ll make the decision to scale, reverse, or sunset. This small governance layer keeps learning fast and trust high. For more background and inspiration, watch the Activity of the Month video and revisit Erik Skogsberg and Dirk Van Onsem’s 2024 Facilitation Lab Summit talk on systems mapping:

Find Tomorrow’s Bottlenecks Today

The most valuable maps don’t just describe today; they help you see around corners. As AI introduces new capabilities, bottlenecks move. You may reduce time on a task and inadvertently flood a downstream team. You may open access to information and discover that decision rights—not data—are your new constraint. Mapping lets you anticipate those shifts so you’re not surprised when your pilot meets friction.

One powerful move is to run a premortem on your future state. Sketch the improved flow you want with AI in place. Then ask, “It’s three months from now and the pilot failed—what happened?” Look specifically at four areas: data access, decision latency, policy gates, and trust. Where will approvals slow you down? Where is risk-threshold clarity missing? What new handoffs appear that weren’t there before? This is how you “pre-mortem the future” so the future doesn’t mortem your pilot.

This is also where governance benefits from a reframing. Many teams get stuck because governance shows up as a heavy brake. Try treating governance as choreography—the roles, rules, and rhythms that keep you moving responsibly. Define consent thresholds for experiments, decision rights for scaling, safety checks for sensitive data, and clear reversibility criteria so decisions can be unmade with minimal cost. When governance clarifies motion, momentum follows.

Finally, watch for latency loops that quietly drain energy. When decisions repeatedly wait on one person, consider role-based or rule-based approaches that preserve accountability without creating single points of failure. When a policy meant to protect inadvertently blocks benign learning, craft lightweight “sandbox” zones with clear boundaries. Each constraint you make explicit lowers the cognitive load on your team and raises your chance of compounding wins.

From Commanders To Conveners

Digital transformation teams are increasingly being asked to lead AI strategy and enablement. The temptation is to become the owner of the answers—publish standards, pick platforms, roll out roadmaps. But in complex environments, invitations beat mandates. The most effective transformation teams act as conveners of clarity, not commanders of compliance.

Being a convener means you design the spaces where cross-functional sensemaking happens. You set cadence, craft agendas that surface trade-offs, and make the work visible. Decision logs, journey maps, and systems maps become the living artifacts that align stories when memories diverge after the meeting. Instead of “big announcement” heroics, you build trust through reliable rituals and transparent artifacts that anyone can reference.

Co-ownership is key. Ask yourself: who needs to co-create and co-own the map for it to matter? Which leaders and operators must be present for decisions to stick? Spell out the benefits and responsibilities of participation in plain language. This sense of authorship is what turns alignment into commitment. When people see themselves in the work, they carry it forward without extra push.

This stance also transforms your messaging. Rather than “Here’s the tool we’re rolling out,” try “Here’s what we want to get better at doing together, and here are the experiments we’ll run to learn how.” Verbs over nouns. Process over prescriptions. In our experience, the more your team is asked for answers they can’t hold alone, the clearer the signal that it’s time to convene the system.

Incentives, Norms, and Skill Building

Many AI “adoptions” stall because the organization’s incentives are tuned for local optimization. A team gets rewarded for shipping more tickets, so they resist a change that would slow their queue to speed value end-to-end. Or a policy written for old constraints blocks safe experimentation under new constraints. Systems mapping helps you spot these misalignments so you can adjust rules and rewards to fit the era you’re actually in.

When you identify friction on the map, treat it as a design clue, not a personal failure. Ask, “What agreement, norm, or slight boundary change would unclog this without shifting the burden somewhere else?” That last part matters. A superficial fix often moves the problem downstream. The systems view helps you see those second- and third-order effects before you pull a lever.

Skill-building belongs inside the work, not outside of it. Instead of one-off trainings, create peer-led practice circles that meet regularly. Turn early adopters into coaches without anointing them gatekeepers by pairing them with peers and rotating roles. Use check-ins to surface where people feel unsafe or unskilled, then scaffold practice moves into your routines. When people feel safe, skilled, and significant, they try new things. That’s the engine of transformation.

Finally, clarify decision-making patterns so experiments don’t stall. Define when consent is sufficient, when advice is required, and when a higher threshold is needed. Make decisions visible and, where possible, reversible. The goal is not reckless speed; it’s responsible velocity—the discipline to go fast where it’s safe and slow where it’s wise, with clarity everyone can trust.

Cadence, Artifacts, and the Power of Visible Agreements

Cadence builds trust. Sporadic heroics and big-bang announcements breed resistance; steady, predictable rhythms build reliability. Think weekly mapping huddles, biweekly experiment reviews, and monthly retros that refine working agreements. This isn’t ceremony for ceremony’s sake. It’s the social choreography that turns insight into practice and practice into capability.

Artifacts align stories when memories diverge. After a workshop, each person carries a slightly different recollection of what was decided. A living map, a simple decision log, and a one-page experiment sheet reduce rework and confusion. Ask, “Which artifact would most reduce rework this month?” Then keep it live—visible, updated, and used—rather than letting it become a static prop.

Co-own your artifacts to strengthen buy-in. If the transformation team is the sole author, artifacts can feel like compliance documents. When leaders and operators co-create, artifacts become references people trust. Make sure each artifact lives where the work lives, not tucked into an obscure folder. Visibility is an invitation.

And let’s talk cadence that sustains momentum without fatigue. Use check-ins to tune pace and focus. If your rituals are creating drag, prune them. If they’re building clarity and confidence, strengthen the roots. This is the season to ask: what cadence serves our goals, and what can we let go of to protect energy and attention for the work that matters most?

November Harvest and Your Next Move

November is a natural time to harvest insights and prune scope so new growth can thrive. Look across your meetings, decision rules, and flows. What will you sunset to make space for better practices? Which rules were written for constraints that AI has lifted? Which norms reward silo wins over system outcomes? Retire rituals gracefully. Name what you’re letting go of and why. That story helps people release the old to welcome the new.

Use your map to make smart trade-offs explicit. When you reduce scope, show the dependencies you’re preserving and the risks you’re accepting. When you create a sandbox for safe learning, document the boundaries and the reversibility. Transparency compounds trust. The more clearly you visualize trade-offs, the more confidently your team can move.

As you look ahead, ask a few focusing questions: What cadence will sustain momentum without fatigue? Where are skills uneven across roles, and how might peer-led practice close the gap without creating gatekeepers? How will we connect AI use cases to our purpose and values so participants carry a clear story back to their teams? Those stories are how change scales.

Call to action: Run a 60–90 minute systems mapping session before the month ends. Clarify your purpose and boundaries. List actors. Map flows, handoffs, and decision points. Identify friction and incentives. Harvest two or three experiments with clear decision rights and safety checks. Watch our Activity of the Month video to guide your session, and revisit our write-up on facilitating change by mapping systems. Then share your map and learnings with your broader org to build momentum. If you want a partner, Voltage Control can facilitate your first mapping session or coach your team to lead its own. Let’s map before we move—so your AI transformation amplifies what you value most and your system is ready for what’s next.

Resources:

Facilitating Change by Mapping Systems

Summit talk video

Activity of the Month Video Systems Mapping

Ready to convene clarity? Reach out to schedule a mapping clinic, join an upcoming facilitation certification, or bring Voltage Control in to help your digital transformation team lead with a systems lens.

The post Map Before You Move appeared first on Voltage Control.

In this Facilitation Lab Podcast episode, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Grace Losada, Vice President of Learning and Development at Change Enthusiasm Global. Grace shares how her early experiences in peer counseling, athletics, and performance arts shaped her facilitation style. The conversation explores creating safe, engaging environments for learning, the importance of shared language, and the art of scaling intimacy in large groups. Grace offers insights on embracing mistakes, fostering connection, and designing impactful experiences, emphasizing playfulness and agency. The episode highlights facilitation as both an art and a science, rooted in intentionality, collaboration, and authentic human connection.

Show Highlights

[00:04:27] The DJ Turned Facilitator Story
[00:08:15] Beyond Psychological Safety: The Role of Enthusiasm
[00:16:52] Team Dynamics and Nonverbal Communication
[00:21:18] Advice to Her Teen Self
[00:24:02] Discovering Facilitation as a Discipline
[00:32:09] Designing for Impact in Large Groups
[00:37:38] Scaling Intimacy in Large Venues
[00:42:32] Connection as the Ultimate Outcome

Links | Resources

Grace on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Leveraging a background in learning and psychology, Dr. Grace Losada has served as an executive leader in start-up and high growth organizations at the intersection of business and social enterprise.  Well before the pandemic, she successfully built and led multi-functional national teams, both face to face and virtual, through rapid growth and change.  At the center of Grace’s work is creating professional environments that support the development of individuals and teams so people and business can thrive. 

Born and raised in Asia, Grace attended an international school that gave her a love of travel, a global perspective, and a dedication to inclusive development of people. She is grateful every day to live in sunny San Diego.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach, so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Grace Losada, at Change Enthusiasm Global, where she serves as vice president of learning and development, supporting individuals and enterprise clients to navigate change in a more human way. Welcome to the show, Grace.

Grace Losada:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

So great to have you. I’ve been looking forward to chatting. I really enjoyed interviewing you for the alumni story and seeing that get published. So I know it’s going to be a great conversation today.

Grace Losada:

Looking forward to it.

Douglas Ferguson:

So you’ve shared that your facilitation roots trace back to high school, specifically to a retreat in Hawaii where friends nudged you into a pure counseling program. When you revisited that first immersive weekend, what was the moment you realized a well-held container could transform how people show up with one another?

Grace Losada:

Yeah. It was such a powerful experience. And I wish I could remember the name of the organization who embedded in our high school and helped us get this program off the ground. Because I feel like I tell this story sometimes and I want to give them credit, and I can’t remember the name of the organization and I feel terrible. So if they’re listening out there, remind me. But I went to a few different high schools, but in this particular instance, it was a small private high school where we got to do a lot of really cool creative things, just by the nature of our size. And also, I’m going to give credit to my headmaster. His name was Pieper Toyama, and he was just a gifted educator. And this peer counseling program was set up between our high school and a rival high school in the area where we had some bad blood, to be perfectly honest.

And so they set it up so that the sophomores, juniors and seniors got trained in this particular protocol. And then we put on an event for the seventh, eighth and ninth graders. And it was an overnight event, which I think is always risky when you’re dealing with middle and high schoolers. And we all camped out in a gym for two days and had really meaningful conversations about the nature of life and where all these young people about to launch. And certainly, because of the nature of the relationship in the high schools, we also talked a lot about human relationship and what that was like for us, and what we wanted to create going forward in the world. It was just a mindblower for me. I’ve never been exposed to something of that depth at that age, and they put the kids in charge. That was the thing that was just so incredible when I look back on it.

But there were just these moments of closeness and connection that were so emotional and heartfelt, and powerful and transformative. That’s the word I really want to say. It was transformative and you could just feel it happening. And people were laughing and crying and hugging, and we were a bunch of teenagers. It was great. It was truly, truly amazing. I’m so grateful for that experience. And I didn’t really know the impact at the time. I knew I was feeling something, I was experiencing something. I had no idea that that was going to be kind of a harbinger of things to come in my life, but it certainly was. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s talk about the DJ turned lead facilitator twist.

Grace Losada:

So again, I was reluctant to join this group. I had no interest. It just didn’t occur to me. But a couple of my friends were like, “No, no, no, you got to do this. We’re going to all do this. Let’s go do this together.” And so I joined the group. And still not really seeing myself as any kind of a facilitator, or leader or… I just was a kid who was into theater and soccer and whatever. And not a great student, by the way, and just didn’t see myself in that capacity. And so I show up at this thing and we’re having all these conversations and we’re setting up roles for the event. So most people were going to be facilitators, and then there were a couple of roles that I would call more like production and logistics. And there was one role that was the DJ for the event, and you got to put together all the music and lead that effort. And I thought, “Oh, that sounds fun. I’ll do that.” And I raised my hand for it.

And the adults in charge, kind of pulled me aside and they were like, “Well, if we think that maybe we could really leverage your talents in another way that was just more powerful, are you open to that?” And I was like, “All right, sure. Yeah.” I was again, along for the ride. So they did not give me the DJ role. They put me in a facilitator role. And again, I think that they saw something in me at that time, that I didn’t really see in myself yet. And that’s again, the mark of a good educator. That’s hopefully, what we’re doing for young people when we’re educating, is we’re pulling things out of them that were going to help blossom and grow. And they did that for me for sure.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I was curious how that experience shaped the way you spot and cultivate leadership in others?

Grace Losada:

Oh, that’s a great question. Well, I guess I’m probably having these thoughts for the first time, because I don’t know that I ever really thought about that, but it absolutely did upon reflection. Because what I know that I have done with young people and adults that I’ve worked with in terms of leadership development, is most often trying to create the container, I guess I’ll call it. We’re creating the conditions and the container for something to occur, and then we have to let go. We let go of the reins. So when I work with people, specifically around leadership, which is a big part of what I do, you’re looking for these flashes of insight and beauty in the way that they’re relating to others, in the way that they’re reflecting vulnerably, in the way that they’re willing to share. And then you want to pull that thread.

So the best way I know to do that is to create an environment, to create a container, to create the conditions where people feel not only safe, but we talk a lot about psychological safety, and that’s super, super important. But it’s a step beyond that, because I need people to not just feel safe, but to actually feel excited and engaged in whatever the moment is bringing. And to take risks and to reach and to quite literally, grow in real time and watch that transformation happen right in front of you. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever experienced as a professional. And really, the thing that’s kind of cool about it is it’s almost effortless if you’ve set up the environment, because people take it on themselves. They drive their own ship, so to speak.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And coming back to your point around it needs to be more than just safety, I think you missed a great opportunity to point out that it has to be enthusiastic.

Grace Losada:

Yeah. Well, right. And I should be talking about that. Change Enthusiasm Global, if nothing, we are enthusiastic. And I think that that’s just, it’s a symptom. It’s a marker of great engagement. When you’ve got people sort of on the edge of their seats because they’re so into whatever it is that you’re discussing or doing, the enthusiasm just starts to flow, and then you know, then you know you’ve got them.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. So let’s talk about Parker School. Am I understanding, they champion student voice and you help recreate retreats for younger students?

Grace Losada:

That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. That school again, was just it was ahead of its time. And our headmaster was ahead of its time and very, very gifted. So another example of just empowering students, you had the opportunity to create not all, but some of your own courses. So being that it was a small school, they had sort of the core curriculum that was offered. And then if you wanted to do something that was slightly out of the box or unique, et cetera, you were empowered to design your own course. And you would find somebody on the faculty who would champion the work that you wanted to do, and you could put that whole thing together. And so, I remember one I wanted to do was photography, and I created the whole course and found a sponsor. And I did a photography course that I actually wrote that went on my transcript.

And so they were just very good about putting us in the driver’s seat. And I think for this particular peer counseling program, the idea of putting a bunch of teenagers in charge of some younger teenagers or pre-teens, that’s a really risky thing to do. You’ve got to have a lot of confidence in your ability to create that container. You’ve got to have a lot of confidence in your ability to create the condition, so that that goes well, because it could very easily go poorly. And you could easily put kids in a situation where real damage is done psychologically and relationally, and so forth, but they were just masterful. So another kind of pain point, right? So I mentioned we had 10th, 11th, and 12th graders in charge of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders. And mind you, in these schools, seventh and eighth was middle school and ninth was high school.

And so the freshmen were like, “What in the heck? You’re putting me back in middle school?” And so we were starting with a loaded situation, where people were already kind of like, “Oh.” But it worked, it just worked. And it was brilliant that they did that in the end, because it gave the freshmen this opportunity for what I guess I’ll call, like a transitional leadership. Because they were the oldest of the bunch. They were in a different sort of category in terms of their grade at school, but maybe they weren’t quite ready to lead because they were just getting their feet wet. And it gave them this sort of transitional leadership opportunity that I think initially, they felt like, “Oh, I’m being pushed back into middle school.” But then they quickly realized the ability that they had in that role to sort of stretch their own leadership wings, which was really cool.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s really neat, this idea of almost passing the torch and these ritualistic moments where people are priming for the next evolution of themselves.

Grace Losada:

Yeah, absolutely. The whole program really was essentially like a social emotional learning program. We talk a lot about that now in education. This was back in the early ’90s. And I think it was maybe just beginning to be a conversation around those things. None of those labels, I don’t remember any of those labels being put on what we were doing. But as I grew in my own career and went into the psychology and science of learning, I started to understand the wisdom and what they had set up for us and really appreciate them.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s powerful stuff. Speaking of foundational experiences, I’m always really fascinated by the influences folks have throughout their life that kind of shape who they are today, and what makes for great facilitation skills and just all the resources and experiences you bring into the work. And for you, early on, you balanced outrigger canoeing, and soccer, and dance, and theater, even playing some notable roles on stage. So I’m curious, how did the rhythm of athletics and the presence of performance train your facilitation muscles around timing, energy and reading the room?

Grace Losada:

Yeah, that’s such a good question. And again, one that I wasn’t aware of what was happening at the time. But upon reflection, I just think, “Oh, that was the recipe.” So I often talk about performance when I talk about facilitation, because I think when we think about facilitation, we think about clearing the way for participants to drive. And that’s really, really important. And I think that sometimes we forget because we’re so focused on clearing the way as a facilitator, there’s one way of thinking that maybe what we need to do is sort of fade into the background, be almost unseen as this thing starts to happen in the room with the participants. And there’s some truth to that, but I also really feel that none of it starts to happen unless the facilitator has the ability to model the energy and enthusiasm that we’re looking for in the event, in the exploration. Whatever the topic is, whatever the assignment is that we’re working on collectively, the facilitator sets that tone, at least initially.

And at some point, maybe they’re passing the baton to certain people in the room, but that’s sort of phase two. In the beginning, another thing that I’ll say a lot of times is no one’s going to learn from you if they’re not paying attention. And how do we get people to pay attention? Well, in the beginning, we kind of have to entertain them. We have to sort of pique their interest. And there should be the ability, I believe, of the facilitator to stand in front of a group of people well, to take up space and energy, and then also retreat and become smaller and be in command of that. It can’t be accidental. It’s got to be purposeful. And you learn a lot of those skills in theater and performance. So I was a dancer and I was an actress, and I loved those things, and I have absolutely brought them into my facilitation.

And when I am working with people who are learning facilitation skills, I bring that up right away. I recently led a development for a group where that was pretty much all we did. We called it a day of play and learning, and we took on different personas and they had to deliver content that they were used to delivering that they already understood really well, but they had to do it now in some kind of crazy character, and start to feel what that was to stretch and where were those points of authenticity, even when you were emulating something ridiculous, like Austin Powers. And just to really play with that and have fun with it. And it opens the door also to laughter, which is a huge connector for people.

And then when I think about the sports aspect, primarily, I did do a couple of sports early on that were individuals. I was on the swim team at one point, and I think I was just a very kinesthetic kid. I was very active, and so that was always a part of my life. But when I really got into it, was when I started to play team sports. And so it was the outrigger canoeing and soccer. These were sports where you have to be really in tune with your team and coordinated. And if you’re not pulling together in the same way with the same end goal in mind and with a certain rhythm, you won’t be successful.

So I think you learn to communicate with human beings in ways that are sometimes free of language. So you can’t always stop and sort of consult when you’re on the soccer field, or certainly not in an outrigger canoe boat. So if people don’t know what that looks like, it’s a six-man canoe and you’re all lined up front to back, straight down the row, and you have the steersman calling out the stroke changes, but you can’t hear each other. There’s no conversation. You’ve got to be in tune with each other.

And that one’s even really interesting, because you really can’t see each other either. You can see the person who is right in front of you, but that’s it. And so you’re not even picking up on body language. You’re picking up on energy. And again, you become successful in that space through solid human connection and being able to read each other and take unspoken cues towards a goal, while pulling together towards a goal. And I definitely learned so much about the dynamics of a team, because here’s the other thing, especially at that age too, right? We are still learning how to be good human beings. Well, I guess the whole life, we are trying our whole lives. But it’s high school. There’s squabbles. You don’t love everybody on the team, and that persists today, but you still have to work together. You still have to find a way to put all of those things aside and find a way to pull together. And I think sports are a tremendous way to do that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely.

Grace Losada:

Another thing that happens too in sports, I think, is that even though you have a designated position, so you’ve got a position in the boat, you’ve got a position on the soccer field, your defense or your offense, or whatever the case may be, but the reality is, when the game gets going, you’re trading positions. And you are filling in where you are needed, and you are looking at the gestalt, the whole picture, to understand where the detail lies and where the opportunity is. And I think that’s a great metaphor for life too. I think the people who really are successful in broader scheme of things, they’ve kind of figured that part out. They’ve figured out how to look at the big picture, and also understand how the minutia fits into that and feeds it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. An ability to move from high levels of granularity, to low levels of granularity, and even specificity sometimes, because we have to make decisions on really quick information. Some of it feels almost like intuition. And it’s really fascinating when they do those studies around, like baseball players, for instance. They’ll ask them, “What are you doing when you hit a home run?” And they’ll say all these things. And then you put a high speed camera in place and they’re not doing any of the things they think they’re doing. They’re just in a moment, right?

Grace Losada:

Yeah, yeah. It’s the difference between an expert and a novice. When we’re just learning something in the beginning, it’s not automatic yet. And so we’re being conscious about all of our choices. And the more you do it and the more sort of expert you become, oftentimes, the worse you are at being an instructor or teacher or mentor to someone, because now, all of these things that you’re doing are unconscious. It’s all automatic. And you have to really stop and reflect and think deeply. And sometimes you’re going to get it wrong about, “What am I doing? How did I get from point A to point B? What would be the roadmap I would give to someone?” And we’ve oftentimes put that way back in our mind somewhere, because now, it’s just automatic and we’re looking at different things.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I’ve often heard that referred to as the curse of knowledge. Once we get really good at something, it’s hard to remember what it was like to not know that thing or not be able to do it.

Grace Losada:

Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

So another question about the past, and then we’ll get to kind of what’s happening right now. But I’m really curious, if you could sit beside your teen self after that first retreat, what short principle or reminder would you whisper into her ear?

Grace Losada:

I think it would be something about dreaming big. Because again, I think one of the things that when I… And maybe this is universal. This is probably not just me. I think it’s got to do with where we are developmentally. Right? But when I reflect back on all of these different elements that we’ve been talking about, the common thread for me was just not really being aware yet of my own agency and power as a human being. I don’t know if other people would say this, but when I look back on who I was at that stage in my life, I would characterize myself as a floater. I would sort of just like, wherever the wind took me in, I was just in the moment. And I wasn’t future oriented. I wasn’t really thinking about any of these experiences as being foundational or something that I would build upon in my life going forward.

I just didn’t have that awareness. And I wasn’t talking about that stuff at home with my parents. Some kids are. Some kids are really, and parents are really focused on kind of like, “You’re building your future,” and all this kind of stuff. I wasn’t getting any of those messages. My parents are not that style either. They’re very sort of in the moment as well. And I think I didn’t have an awareness that whatever I kind of dreamed, I could build it. I could do that, as we all can. And I might whisper that. And I think it’s a hard thing. It’s like the sliding doors principle. Right? Because on the one hand, maybe I would have made different choices and there would have been some different and new opportunities that would have come up in my life, and things that I would have created intentionally. On the other hand, it’s been a pretty good ride.

So I don’t know. Do I want to mess with it? I don’t know. But I think that there was definitely a lack of awareness on my part of like, the agency and power I had as a human being to create my reality. And that’s a belief that I’ve developed over time, that we all have that ability to create our reality to an extent, obviously. We can’t control certain outside forces, but I just didn’t have that awareness at all, and I think that would have been a helpful awareness for me to have from a younger age.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. So switching things up a bit, and you can talk about the present day, or at least leading up to it, you described joining Change Enthusiasm Global as the moment you realized facilitation is a distinct discipline. And I’m kind of curious, what assumptions you held about facilitation that was most productively challenged in that process?

Grace Losada:

I don’t know if it was an assumption, maybe it was. Yeah. Okay, it was. I guess it was an assumption that these things just happened, these magic moments with groups of people where they’re coming together with an intention, but it’s just sort of happening. And I probably did know because I was designing things as a facilitator without calling it that, designing experiences for people. And so I did know that there were certain things that I learned you could do to create one type of experience versus another, et cetera. If you’re looking to have a creative exchange, if you’re looking to have a problem solving exchange, there’s so many different reasons that we come together. I just didn’t know that it was a field of study. I just didn’t know that it was a whole profession. And of course, it is. Why wouldn’t it be, right? If there’s something like this that’s so powerful, why wouldn’t there be people out there who are thinking about and documenting and creating a common language around this phenomenon, this study, this professional ability? But I just didn’t realize that.

And I think anytime that you start to organize your thinking in that way, so it’s like, “Okay, now, I get it.” This is a whole field and there’s structured ways to think about this and approach this. And my goodness, the role of the producer blew my mind. And I sort of had had producers, I suppose, in a certain way, in different events and experiences, but there were no labels on any of these things. And so when we don’t have labels, we don’t have the clarity to understand really what it is that we’re talking about.

So it was like all of a sudden, everything came into focus. “Oh, that’s what we’ve all been doing this whole time. I get it. Yes, okay.” And now, because I have language and a structured way of thinking about it, I can be even more intentional about the choices that I’m making as I’m doing this work. And it just all of a sudden, rockets you forward in terms of the sophistication of what it is that you’re doing.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I love how much of a force multiplier that can be.

Grace Losada:

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve really felt it deeply. And also, there have been moments where I’ve kind of wanted to laugh about certain things and go back and thank people who have been a part of the journey. There was a woman that I worked with for a long time who, again, I didn’t call her a producer. She probably wouldn’t have used that label herself. I don’t remember what we said, but she sort of made sure that everything that needed to happen, happened. And then I was facilitating in this recurring learning experience that we were… It was an onboarding process for a company that I was with. And at the time that we were doing that, I was in graduate school. So I was being flooded with new thinking and ideas all the time, and I would get excited about those ideas and I’d want to bring them into the experience.

And so this was a recurring learning experience that was designed to be the same way every time. And every time I would show up and I would be like, “Karina, I’ve got this new idea and we’re going to do this whole new thing.” And she’s very much a very structured, organized thinker. I loved partnering with her because I would be out there with these wild ideas and she would help me narrow in and actually make it happen. And I know I sent her into a panic every time I would show up and be like, “I’ve got this new idea.” And she would kind of groan. But to her credit, she’d go along with it and it was a great partnership.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. In fact, I was curious to hear more about the producer-facilitator partnership. I was recalling in your alumni story, you had mentioned following the keynote with a learning session for hundreds, complete with streamers, lights and personal storytelling. And so I’m curious, it seemed like that experience taught you a bit about the producer-facilitator partnership. And so I’m curious about that, and what practices are now non-negotiable when you design at scale?

Grace Losada:

Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah. And that was a new aha again. As you said, there was a keynote. I think the keynote was for about 600 people. And then we were following that with a learning experience, an interactive learning experience for about four… Well, what was supposed to be about 400 people, ended up being almost everybody stayed for the learning experience, and that credit goes to Cassandra for her keynote. But as we were planning this and we were up against the wire because this invitation to create this experience came late in the game. So we didn’t have a lot of time to plan. And of course, we’re going to be delivering this in person together, but the entire team was remote. And we were given a producer by the company that we were serving in this situation.

And this was someone I had never met before, and they were producing the entire week long event for this organization and we were one piece of that. So we started talking, and initially, it’s just kind of the basics. Here’s a handful of visuals we want to share. Here’s some moments where we want to have some music and talking about microphones, and who’s going up and who’s going down, and just some real basics. And then I started to get the feeling that this gentleman I was working with, he was pretty gifted at what he was doing. And so then, I started bringing forward some really more theatrical, I’m going to say, ideas. And that’s a little maybe out of the wheelhouse of what you would typically see in corporate learning event, but he was right there with me. And then he started bringing in ideas and they were so good.

And what we ended up with was this experience that was very dramatic, very emotion… I don’t want to call it emotional, but it elicited a lot of emotion from the audience and got them involved and engaged in a way that was really important for the learning. I wanted them to feel personally connected to some of the stories that were being told and go on an emotional journey with the facilitators. I think we largely achieved it because of what the production team brought to the experience. If we hadn’t had the element of music and lighting and so forth, that really became almost like another member of the facilitation team where all of those elements in the room, we still would have gotten somewhere with the team, but it would not have been nearly as impactful. And so I look for that now, especially when I’m doing something on a bigger scale.

Because you’ve got to be able, I think, when you’ve got… The more people you have in the room, it’s like you almost have to have these things choreographed in an even stronger way to have the impact. It’s like, the more bodies that are in the room, the more things have the potential to be diluted. And if you really want to have the impact, you’re going to have to keep upping the ante, but you’ve got to have a producer who fully understands that and can work with you on timing. Timing is big and visual impact is big. We’re visual creatures. So yeah, gosh, that was a lot of fun. I’ll remember that forever. And it set a new standard for me, in terms of how I’m thinking when I’m thinking about designing for large groups.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s a different ball game when you got way more folks and way more things that you’re thinking about, what could go wrong or what attentions could shift. And it’s such a big wave that could happen.

Grace Losada:

Yeah, yeah. And everything does go wrong, by the way. Everything does go wrong. And I think that’s another beautiful part though of facilitation. And I think it’s a point where you can see a facilitator sort of level up when they… There’s this point where I think facilitators stop fearing that the mistakes and the errors and the things that go wrong, and instead, start noticing them as opportunities. And comfortably leveraging those things to propel the learning, whether it’s as simple as bringing human fallibility into the room and just acknowledging that these things happen, and what that does to people’s willingness to take risks and be wrong and show their vulnerability or maybe something more profound too. But I think that’s a really important lesson for facilitators. And I also think it’s one that you can talk about ahead of time, but it’s not until you really have the experience that you start to truly trust that.

A phrase that I use all the time is trust the process. And just know that whatever happens, it’s going to be okay. And that’s usually my final message when I’m working with a group of facilitators. And we’ve done everything we can to prepare, and then it’s time to release and just go do the thing. And the last thing I try and always remind people is, listen, trust the process. You’re not going to do something so wrong here that it’s going to sabotage the whole thing. In fact, it’s going to be beautiful. And just know that and just trust it. And magical things happen in these settings and I really enjoy watching that. And in that respect too, I feel as a facilitator, if we’re tuned into that, we never stop learning either, which is part of the appeal to me of facilitation. We get to continue learning and making new connections throughout this process, even though we’re sort of there supposedly setting up the learning for others. I think that part is magical.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think similarly, you mentioned building a shared language for your facilitation team at Change Enthusiasm Global. What rituals, artifacts, or even debrief habits are helping keep that language alive across different clients and contexts?

Grace Losada:

That’s a great question. I think a lot of it is about repetition, deciding what’s really important. What are those things that need to be centrally held, and making sure that we’re attending to that over and over again, and we’re saying it over and over again. And I think also, there’s something about it that needs to be playful, so that that language… I’m trying to remember who I learned this from, but there’s this point when you’re being repetitive about something, there’s this point where it becomes a little obnoxious. And then if you keep going, it becomes fun again. And it’s funny, and you can be a little self-deprecating about it. And it’s like, “Yeah, I know I’ve said this 15,000 times and here we go, 15,001, because it’s that important.” And so I think I try and have fun with it, but it’s really about repetition.

There’s an educator, his name is escaping me right now. It’ll come to me. When I first read about in the world of K-12, he was promoting this idea of doing classroom walks. And so what he meant by that was getting together a group of educators and walking through the school building and observing in classrooms and having conversation about that. And the whole point of doing it from his point of view, was to create this common language. Because one of the challenges that you can have in education is you have three people conduct an observation in a classroom, and they come out and tell a story of three very different classrooms, even though they just looked at the same thing. And it’s because they don’t have a common language about how they want to talk what’s important, what are we going to talk about about this space?

And so just doing it over and over and over again, and doing it together and building that language together, and how powerful that is. And I think you have to be willing to allow the language to evolve as well, in that you’ll begin in one place and you’re on this hopefully, lengthy journey of learning. And as you do that, if your language isn’t evolving, you might be doing something wrong because that’s awfully static. Right? And so, I think you’ve got to be willing to allow the voice of the group to come alive and add to what you’re talking about and maybe take away too, when sometimes you realize that, wow, now we have a new awareness that so shifts our paradigm that we’re going to release this part of it, and because now, we kind of see that we want to go in this new direction. And that’s a co-creation. That has to happen collectively. You can start it, but then it becomes something that the group owns, I think, and it should own.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s take that ownership and intimacy to another level. You were wrestling with the question, how do we scale intimacy? When we spoke about the alumni story and as you envision ballrooms, maybe even stadiums, what designs, principles guide you to ensure that a massive venue feels like a small, brave space?

Grace Losada:

Yeah. I think I’ll be learning about this for a while, but where I am right now, I mean, I think we can think about it metaphorically like, just life and humankind. There are things that are happening on a global and on a national scale that we’re all experiencing. And yet, in our day-to-day lives, our relationships are much more intimate and direct, and we’re being impacted by what’s happening in our broader context. But still, our day-to-day reality is much smaller than that. If we were to draw circles around like, “What do I experience every day?” And then there’s these rings of context expanding from there, it’s kind of the same thing I’m thinking, when we’re designing for these large groups, is we have to be aware that there are certain things that are going to be experienced by all in this broader context in the space, again, whether it’s a ballroom or even a stadium. You could think about it in concerts too. Right? Everybody’s watching the band play, but they’re also having an intimate experience with whoever is sitting in the seats right around them.

And so being able to be mindful of what those things are, what elements are at play, and how can you impact them through design. Are there things that you can do through design that impact both the broader context and what’s happening in the little space? So yeah, in this instance, the event that we were talking about, we’re in this huge ballroom and there are certain things that everybody is experiencing, but then everybody is also organized into tables. And I think it was 10 tops in this particular environment. There were 10 people at each table. Those people are having an intimate experience. They’re having a unique experience in the room that’s going to be impacted by what everybody else is experiencing, but it’s also going to have elements that only occur at that table because of who is at that table.

And so really thinking about how we set up in a learning experience like that will have usually, moments where we ask people specifically to turn to your neighbor or discuss as a table or that type of a thing, and being really intentional about how we set those moments up. There’s also something to be said also about creating little allegiances and little teams within the team. So we had, again, in this particular experience, people were sitting in the room according to the division that they belonged in the company, and we decided to sort of lean into that. There were some things that the company wanted us to lean into with respect to that, to create a sense of camaraderie and connection on those teams, that was an opportunity to deepen the connection for those teams. And so there were certain things at play that we could pull on that were already in place within the organization, but then that was where we brought in certain color and team names. And we set up these moments of celebration that were specific to the team.

We had talked about there was an energy around and a desire initially, for us to put a lot of competition into the room, which is one way that you can do things. But I think that I tried to resist that a little bit because it can also backfire. And I felt like what this particular organization was trying to accomplish, might not be what they really needed. And instead, what they maybe needed was to celebrate together. And so we leaned into that a little bit, and it worked, and it was really powerful. Some of the intimate conversations that we were asking people to have were pretty emotionally laden. And those were quiet conversations that happened in small groups, and people kept that confidentiality. We talked about that part and set that up. And then we had these slightly larger experiences where people were still affiliated with a smaller group, but they were celebrating together in a way that was not diminishing to any other group, but still was uplifting for the group that they were a part of. And we had a lot of fun with that.

Douglas Ferguson:

So last question before we wrap up. When you imagine someone leaving your largest future events years from now, not recalling every bullet point, but remembering how they felt, what do you hope they say they carry forward in their work, their teams, and their lives?

Grace Losada:

I think it’s connection. I think it’s just about building connection. I believe that as social creatures, we are at our best when we are well-connected to each other, and disconnection is the thing that drives most of our challenges. And so if we’re promoting one thing, I hope we’re promoting connection, human connection.

I went to a concert several years ago, some people listening probably went to the same one. It was a Coldplay concert and I don’t remember the name of the album. I’m not good at this stuff, but it might have just been Colors, that might have been the name of the album, Colors. When you walked into the stadium, you got this wristband that sort of looked like a watch. It was white and there was no face on it. There was no numbers or anything, but it sort of looked like a watch and you were instructed to put this on. And so then, we’re all in the concert, and at some point, these watches start lighting up in colors that are forming patterns and just amazing beauty in tandem with the music. And also, sort of geographically, somehow they know where you are in the stadium because there’ll be waves of colors going through. And it was so powerful. I’ve never forgotten that.

And it’s something that I try and think about, as I’m designing experiences for people, just the power of that moment, how these little… First of all, it was unexpected. Maybe some people knew what was coming. I sure didn’t. And the wristband was white. And so when it all of a sudden, lit up in color, I had no idea that was going to happen. It was beautiful. So visually, it was stunning and it was a connector. It connected everybody. The entire stadium was going, “Oh, wow,” all at the same time. And we’re watching the colors flow through our bodies essentially. It’s connected to our bodies through, and it was the most powerful thing. That’s probably one of the things that that band, Coldplay, is known for, is that they’re good at eliciting emotion and a sense of connection in their audiences. And boy, did that work. That was really cool.

Douglas Ferguson:

Super cool.

Grace Losada:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we had to come to a close, so I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Grace Losada:

Oh, goodness. It’s just to have fun. Just play with this. It’s hard to make a wrong move. I think just have fun with it and recognize that if you have the opportunity to do this work, as in you’re functioning as a facilitator, or even participate as a participant in an experience that’s being facilitated by someone, what an incredible experience. What a wonderful way to learn, to create, to grow, to develop. I just think it’s a unique gift that we have. And not necessarily the way that things are always structured. There’s a lot of times where it’s a stand and deliver or a top down, or this is what it is, and it’s just a forced delivery. And so when we have the opportunity to create experiences in a more creative way that gives the power and the agency to the people in the room, it’s just beautiful. It’s magical. And just have fun with that. And I think the more fun you have with it, the better it goes. And I mean, that’s certainly my goal.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s lovely, Grace. It’s been such a pleasure chatting with you. Thanks for coming on.

Grace Losada:

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoy the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration at voltagecontrol.com. wholeness of people and not just the fragments that we’re expected to show up with. So that we are connecting because we understand that people are carrying so many different things, either things from their past or things from their present that are affecting how they show up. And so how do we just take away the stigma? And make it acceptable to say, “You know what? If we’re not healing, if we’re not healing ourselves, if we’re not investing in that, our workplaces are going to stay sick, our society doesn’t get better.”

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