At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Alyssa Coughlin led an engaging workshop that dove deep into the power of storytelling for successful change management. As the Director and Chief of Staff at Autodesk, Alyssa has seen firsthand how effective storytelling can drive adoption and align teams. Her session, titled “Storytelling for Change,” introduced attendees to the essential components of compelling narratives and their role in overcoming organizational challenges.

Alyssa’s approach started with an interactive exercise called “Color This,” which asked participants to pair up and practice storytelling by embellishing details to create engaging, personal narratives. Through this exercise, Alyssa emphasized the importance of reading your audience and knowing when to provide just the right amount of detail to captivate and maintain their attention.

Key Insights:

• Tailor Stories for Your Audience: Alyssa stressed the importance of crafting stories for specific audiences, highlighting that what you share with executives will differ from what you present to a project team. Simplifying complex concepts and making them relatable is key.
• The Power of Emotion: One of the most critical takeaways was how emotional connection is a driving factor for successful change management. As Alyssa shared, “People don’t have to agree with you to commit. They just need to understand why you’re making the change.”
• Addressing the “So What?” In any narrative, the “why” is paramount. Alyssa discussed the significance of explaining not just what is changing, but why it’s necessary and beneficial for everyone involved.

Alyssa’s session also featured playful and exaggerated examples of change management, such as the “toilet paper gamification” challenge and “spirit animal” identity exercises, designed to make change more palatable and encourage creative thinking. These exercises served as a fun yet poignant reminder that storytelling is not just about delivering information, but about engaging the audience, making them part of the journey, and ultimately gaining their buy-in.

Final Thoughts:
Alyssa wrapped up the session by challenging participants to reflect on past changes that were poorly managed and what key pieces of the story were missing. She encouraged them to consider how they would approach upcoming changes, with a focus on clear, empathetic storytelling that brings people along.

Alyssa’s insights left attendees with a renewed understanding of how vital storytelling is in the change process, offering practical strategies for facilitators to foster understanding, collaboration, and commitment across teams.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Alyssa’s Session:

Alyssa Coughlin:
So how awesome was Skye? What a great way to kick off the summit. So I got the memo on yellow, but I did forget to wear something I can clip a microphone into. So I’m going to try to use both hands, and it’s kind of this thing, but I think I got it.
So my name is Alyssa Coughlin. I am a director and chief of staff for Autodesk. Yes, yay, somebody out here likes Autodesk. Which means facilitation is a lot of what I do every day, and I’ve had a lot of lessons learned along the way and I’m really excited to share some of those with you today.

So let’s jump in by just putting our storytelling hats on. We’re going to do an exercise called Color This. So you’re going to pair up, you’re going to find a partner. You are going to think of a story that comes from one of these three prompts, and you are going to tell your partner your story. As you’re going through, if you get to a detail that your partner would like to know more about, they’re going to say, “Color This.” And that means elaborate, talk more about the details, the feelings, whatever comes to mind. And then after they’ve heard enough detail, they will say, “Advance,” and you continue the story. So we’re going to take about five minutes per person and then we’ll switch and we will rinse, wash, and repeat. And we’re just going to kind of warm up and get going with storytelling. So with that, find a partner and you’ve got five minutes for your first story.

All right, what did we take away from that? Did you learn anything with just silly stories? Okay, JJ’s a good time, kind of knew that. So when you’re telling a story, it’s important to read your audience and to know the right details to go into to really get that engagement. And so we’re going to hear about other ways to do this when we talk about nonverbal cues and just reading the room in general. But your story won’t go anywhere if you don’t find that hook that your audience cares about.

Okay, so here’s my personal story. This is everything you need to know about me in a nutshell. I live in Portland, Oregon with my partner Chris. I have a six month old puppy named Nandor the Relentless, who very much lives up to the name. And I have a cat named Kalinka, who has infamous RBF.

My professional story and how I got here today, being a chief of staff is actually my second career. I started as a pharmaceutical rep in the neuroscience space. So I can tell you useless information about things like pseudobulbar affect disorder. But that was actually a great way to segue into the career I have now because I learned to read the room, I learned to tell a story, I learned to tailor for various audiences.

And so it led to where I am now at Autodesk. Peter over there, we work on this project together. But I work in a deeply technical space, so I work on the platform team, and the biggest hurdle to having a platform is adoption, is getting your product teams to want to adopt whatever capabilities you’re offering them. And so storytelling is something I’ve been really working with my organization on because we have to give a compelling value proposition. Otherwise, we’re building stuff that nobody’s ever going to use.

And then of course here is my facilitation journey from my certification that I did last spring. So if you have any questions about that, feel free to let me know. Yes, everybody should have one of these. So if you haven’t done it yet…
So let’s talk about change management. There are a million different guidelines for change management. There’s the five Ps, the five Cs, XYZ. I follow ADKAR. It’s from the Change Management Institute. Okay. I have a certification from ADKAR, I’m sorry, from the Change Management Institute. And so they say for successful change management you need awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

What do you think is the hardest part of this formula? Exactly. You can tell people what the change is, you can give them the tools to adopt it, you can reinforce the change, but if they don’t want to change, if they don’t see the what’s in it for me, they don’t see the value in this change, it’s not going to last. It’s going to be one of those, like I told you kind of things. And have you ever seen a change where somebody’s like, “Because I said so?” Was it successful? Probably not.

So we’re going to double click on desire, and that’s where storytelling is going to come into play. And so my definition of a story is it’s a narrative that gives compelling information in context with reason. So it’s the why. It’s the why are we doing this? What led to this decision? What have you considered up to this point to come to this conclusion? And it’s how you’re going to get that buy-in from whomever you’re trying to bring along the journey. And the story can be about anything. And so we’re going to practice that some today. I’ve got some really silly scenarios for you. And it’s not what you’re saying that’s important, it’s just the practice.

And so the important thing on that journey is that you are taking your customer, your user, your stakeholder, whomever, with you. If you’re going along by yourself, you’re going to end up at the top of that mountain alone and you’re not going to have successful change management. Your story will have not done its job. You will not have a compelling value proposition. So a successful journey is when you bring people along willingly. And without the journey, there’s no understanding, there’s just that, “Because I said so.”

So how do you build a story? Well, first you have to know who the story is for, and you want to tailor your story to their specific needs. So for example, if I am building a story for a C staff, I’m going to have very different details and information than if I’m building a story for the execution team. C staff is going to care a lot more about the strategy, the business value. They’re not going to care as much about the actual solution and how we’re doing it, but the implementation team very much cares about that. So the story I’m creating is totally going to vary based on who I’m creating it for.

You also want to simplify complexity to just the basic ideas. What do you need to know? What does this group or this person need to walk away from this conversation knowing? If you give them information overload, you get analysis paralysis and they might miss the one important detail that you want them to know. What is the one critical thing that they need to walk away from after hearing your story in order to buy into it or at least to understand it? Because remember, the journey is about understanding. It’s not necessarily about they like it, but they understand how you got there.

You also want to make it compelling. So remember, your story is just one of many your audience will see, especially in the context of change management. So if you have a big organizational change, you know everybody’s talking about it, everybody has their opinions. They’re hearing this answer from this person and, “This is why we did it,” from that person. And so you need to make sure that your story is standing above the noise and that they are actually hearing the information that is important for them to understand the journey.

And you don’t want them to guess what you’re trying to tell them. Be explicit, be direct, say, “This is why we have made this decision. This is why we are implementing this change, and this is why you should care.” The corporate flowery words you hear sometimes, you’re just like, ah, I think I just got lip service and I don’t know what they’re saying or what it means for me, that’s not how you tell a compelling story. And so that’s something you’re going to want to avoid.
And then most importantly is the so what, the why, the what’s in it for me? It goes by a whole bunch of different names, but it’s that personal connection to the story where you’re really going to drive it home and that people are going to remember. It’s like the Maya Angelou quote. People are going to remember how you made them feel, and that feel is going to come from the why.

So I kind of break this down into three categories. Again, you want to be explicit and succinct, the what’s in it for me? And in order to do so, explain, connect, and remind. So explain what you want your audience to know in clear details. And then you want to connect what you want them to know to why they care about it. And then lastly, you want to remind them. Like we’ve all heard it, you have to hear things X amount of times before it really sinks in. So it’s not a one and done. If you want your change to last and to be successful, you have to revisit it and continue to revisit that why.

And so here’s just some examples, some notes. So Start With Why, Simon Sinek. If you haven’t read the book, you totally should. But remember, what does your audience need to know? Why does your audience need to care? What’s in it for them? Where is their so what? Is the goal of the solution clear? Did you cut through the noise? What do you want them to remember? And why does your story stand out? If you’re doing this in a presentation, my guidance is generally less is more. If you have a slide that’s super wordy, nobody’s even going to listen to you. They’re just going to be trying to follow along with the words, and your story and the details and the message you have for them will get lost in that.

Again, are the most important details obvious? So I will put certain words in bold or change the color or something to really draw their eye to it and be like, “This is what I need you to take away from this slide and this conversation.” Visuals go a long way. You have to remember, people are different kinds of learners. So some people are listening to you, some people want to see a chart. I would recommend you hit on multiple solutions. And then does it clearly serve the purpose? Did people walk away from this meeting saying, “Why am I here? That was not a good use of my time. This could have been an email,” or did they see the value and they walk away with understanding your journey and wanting to go along it with you?
So a common narrative or story arc breaks down the solution and the problem, and then in between is the why should I care. And that’s what we’re going to practice today. So obviously you start with just identifying the problem that needs to be solved. And then you want to figure out what is your current state? What is your baseline? Where are we now, and where are we trying to move to? Why is that current state a problem? Why are we changing this in the first place?

Then you want to propose your direction, your solution. And then this green box, which is the most important one, why is this better? Why did you propose this solution? Why do you want to go in this direction? And then lastly, summary. We all talk about the importance of closing and facilitation, bringing back that reminder. So you want to make sure that you’re revisiting.

So here’s what we’re going to practice. This is what we’re going to do for most of the time because I am really excited to hear the solutions you come up with. So each table has markers and a large sheet of paper, and you should also have a flipped over piece of just like computer paper. And that has a scenario on it. It is a ridiculous scenario. And what I’m going to ask everybody to do is to create a storyboard proposing your solution for your audience. For the purpose of this exercise, it is the general organization. You have a change that you were proposing at an all hands. And this is just from Luma. I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with it, but just an example of what a storyboard would look like. Consider it like a comic strip.
So then we’re going to take 10 minutes to create our storyboards. They do not need to be practical solutions. I encourage you to be as silly as you want to be with this. The point is that you’re going through the steps and that you’re finding the why within the story. And then we’re going to do lightning pitches. I’m going to give each table, send one representative, and you’re going to have three minutes to pitch your silly solutions and practice telling your story.

Give a round of applause for table one, who’s going to kick us off. So if you want to, you can send representatives or the whole table can come up. We have a second microphone over here that I’ll grab for you. The ask is to read the situation, the change that your table was solving for, and then present your story. All right, table one.

Speaker 2:
So do I have five or 20 minutes? Which one was that?

Alyssa Coughlin:
Two to three.

Speaker 2:
Oh, okay. So here’s the situation. Your company has determined that as part of a well-being initiative, they’ll be replacing all coffee and tea offerings in the break rooms with room temperature sparkling water. Sounds like it almost sold itself right there. So what we have determined is, I don’t know if you know about caffeine, but that’s a [inaudible 00:13:36] liquid, right? It doesn’t really refresh you. It’s dehydrating by its nature. So what we have are people who are completely dehydrated by coffee. We have dry eye syndrome, people are just breathing in dust, they’re showing up as raisins to work.

So we care about your well-being, but we also care about the planet. So what we have determined is that we’re working with some power plants and we’re taking their carbon and capturing it. So we’re doing a carbon capture technology, and then we have the whales take that carbon and ingest it. And then when they blow it out their blowholes, we capture that water as sparkling water, now with free mucus. And also antibacterial. And so we capture that and we put it into our break room. So we’re not only being healthier, we are actually saving the whales and the entire planet.

Alyssa Coughlin:
All right, way to go, table one. What do you think? Did they take you on a journey? Are you sold? All right, table two.

Speaker 3:
All right. Hi, y’all. First of all, some grace with my drawing. I’m a much better musician than I am artist here. But our situation is your company has determined that as an effort to develop an interest in business from an early age, they will be expanding their internship program to include kindergarten through 12th grade schools. Okay, that’s a tall order, I have to admit.

So first off, we have to know about the problem we need solving. So the kids, they’re just not interested in business, not interested. They’re more interested in being on their phones, more interested in playing with their dog, playing music. We need kids interested in business, stocks. Okay, yeah. So the current state of the market, market’s bad, people are crying. Not a good moment for this in the market right now. So this is bad because markets are low, stocks are low, things are not good. Money, not happening. Mushroom cloud, bomb going off. Bad news across the board. Everyone agrees on this.
So our proposed direction is that we are going to put these kiddos, as we call them, into our business, and this is going to be essentially K through 12 care. So we all know how expensive childcare is, and this is a big problem in our country. So put them to work. That’s what we’re saying. We love this. We love child labor in this country. So putting the kids to work, very essential.

And this is a good decision. It’s better for us because people love a job. People love going to work, people love that. But also it makes our wallets thicker. So we love money. So this is going to be good for the economy, good for the heart too. And people love a resume builder. So the kids are going to love having that first job on the resume. This is a win-win-win across the board. I see no problem with this.

And in sum, we have more money and also we get all the bright ideas. So we also said if anyone has a good idea when working for our company, we get a royalty on that idea. So in perpetuity, we get pennies on the dollar for any good idea from these children. So they’re going to be in our business for life. That’s a win. Anyone with me?

Alyssa Coughlin:
All right, table two, give it up for their story. Table three. Oh, it got so quiet. Make some noise for table three.

Speaker 4:
Our situation is that our company has determined that our February one team offsite should be moved from Tulum to Siberia, due to optics and concerns about the company meeting at a beach destination. So here’s a problem. People are very, very unhappy because they think that we’re not getting work done because everybody’s at the beach, enjoying themselves. However, because we made this shift where we’re moving the team to Siberia, our whole team is really, really unhappy and they’re just bummed.

And what’s causing it is that their productivity is just tanking. So we’re having a problem on our hands. Solution, we have to really sell Siberia to them. We have to make it really, really attractive. And so we go and hire a Voltage Control alumnus, alumna from Siberia, who’s got a special method of using vodka in her facilitation. The team rises to the challenge and their productivity goes back up, and the company and the optics are preserved.

Alyssa Coughlin:
All right, table three, thank you for your story. Table four, take us on a journey.

Speaker 5:
Situation, your company has determined that there is a need to cut costs due to the current macroeconomic environment. They will be closing the company funded doggie daycare and combining the dog and human daycare into one program. And now cutting over to our president, Rob, of the Acme Company.

Speaker 6:
Let me start you off by saying, who let the dogs out? Need help? They do too. Kids, dogs, and even grandma. So let’s say we’re going to do this in a different way. So let me introduce you to our team that’s going to take you on a journey, for Casey, who’s our VP of Doggie Care, and from Tamara, who’s our VP of human care.

Speaker 7:
Did you know that 38% of dogs say that smells at the office remind them of home? Did you know that 48.46% of dogs say that they get more treats and have an expanded network if they go to the office every day? Did you know that 92.7% of dogs that spend time out of the home report feeling better about themselves?

Speaker 8:
But wait, there’s more. Did you know that 85% of young children who spend time with emotional support animals actually read better? Did you know that kids who spend time with dogs and the elderly, yes, your grandparents, they have much lower cognitive, emotional, and behavior issues, and they’re also more likely to be kind? And of course, we all know, and research shows elderly people who hang out with kids and dogs are proven to live 20 years longer.

Speaker 7:
So our solution is that we combine the doggie daycare with the elderly and kid daycare, come up with a curriculum to help them support each other.

Speaker 5:
Problem solved.

Alyssa Coughlin:
All right. Oh, it comes with a dance. Thank you for sharing your story, table four. All right, table five. Yeah, table five.

Speaker 9:
POV, your company has determined that as part of their sustainability initiative, they will be moving from two-ply toilet paper to one-ply toilet paper and enact daily toilet paper limits per person. And action.

Speaker 10:
Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming here this morning. We have a very exciting announcement to make. So we took a look at our sustainability efforts as a company. We want to be carbon neutral by 2027. So we’ve got a couple years.
We’re not making progress towards that. And I know you know that paper waste leads to environmental negatives that impact us all in our home communities. So we want to be better as a company and do what we can every day. And so we’ve identified two-ply is bad for the environment, and you know going to the bathrooms, that there are long lines because our toilets are clogged. Our pipes are not able to flush the two-ply. So I know it’s super annoying. You have to go across the street to go to the other restroom when you’re like, “The restroom’s right there, why can’t I go?”

So what we’d like to try out is we’d like to do one-ply instead of two, so your toilets can flush and you don’t have to wait anymore. And we will enact a daily limit. That way people aren’t just stuffing toilet paper into the toilets and flushing. So this will mean you’ll have less wait for the restrooms. And we get to meet our sustainability goals.

And then in summary, all these changes, so two-ply and daily limits, will be better for our environment, meet our sustainability goals, and you get to be happier. So yeah.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Woohoo. I lost count. Thank you, table five. All right, table six, come on up, share your story.

Speaker 11:
Continuing on the saga of one or two-ply, this is option B. But to remind you of the situation, our company has determined that as a part of our sustainability initiative, we will be moving from two-ply toilet paper to one-ply, as you’ve heard already, and we’re going to enact a daily toilet paper limit per person. This is option B.

Speaker 12:
So yeah, we heard from our leadership that we really need to make a positive impact on the environment. It turns out there’s a global paper shortage. There’s only two trees left on the planet. And we really sort of leaned into this as employees. We’re seeing the graph of paper supply going way down. So we had a Voltage Control facilitator come and facilitate us through a co-creation workshop as employees. Lots of ideas down here. We were going to get bidets, poop at home, a clench and trade TP, charge for change eating habits, compete for lowest amount of paper use.

So yeah, we were really saying, okay, yeah, you said two-ply to one-ply. We are going to go all in on this thing. And any good co-creation workshop that has lots of ideas, we created an app to gamify all of these ways to reduce toilet paper. And it’s called the Paper Saver app. So we have an interaction screen here in the middle where you push buttons, and then of course whoever wins the gamified app thing gets a bunch of money. You win. So that’s our idea. We are super happy.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Thank you, table six.

Speaker 11:
In case you were not clear on how you win money, we also tied paper to performance.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Ooh.

Speaker 11:
You’ve heard pay for performance. Well, this is paper for performance. Thank you.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Thank you, table six. I hope your office has hand sanitizer. All right, table seven, come on up.

Speaker 13:
All right everyone. So our company has determined that in an effort to consolidate vendors that everyone must now solely use Microsoft Teams. So yeah, I know it sucks.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Hardest one of all.

Speaker 13:
We all don’t like it. So look, our problem right now is that everyone is using different vendors or platforms, communication. We’ve got John using Slack, we’ve got Bethany using Google Chat. It’s just all across the board too many things. We need to be more efficient. So sorry, the current state is that we are going all over the place. We’ve got everybody not knowing what to do. We’re missing deadlines. We’re losing revenue overall for our company.

So by centralizing, cutting out all our subscriptions from all the other platforms, we will not only be more efficient, but we will increase our revenue overall. And because of subscribing to Microsoft, we get a lot of new bonuses as a result from working with them. So first off, because of our efficiency, we’ll meet more deadlines, we’ll make more money overall. And because of that, we get more bonuses five times fold per year, which you make sure that you get all those [inaudible 00:26:42] Christmas gifts for your family at the end of the year.

And because Microsoft Teams is so nice to us, they want to give us all the money so we can go yearly to Disneyland, take the whole family, take all your kids, and have a nice time with us over there. And we all know that we like Taco Tuesday, but because of that extra money, we are able to get free lunch every single day at the office.

So as we all know about Microsoft Teams, we’re not all on the same board of that, but because of that centralization of communications, we will get more money in your pocket, more money as a cut for the shareholders, and all the nice trips, all the free food throughout the year. Thank you.

Alyssa Coughlin:
All right, table seven, thank you for sharing your story. You might even be able to afford more toilet paper with that. All right, table eight, let’s do it.

Speaker 14:
Picture this, your new CEO, Dwight K. Shrewt, has decided to replace free pretzel day with free beet day. He claims this will save money and improve company health. The beets are even from a local organic farm.

Speaker 15:
All right, so our problem is that the CEO is now saying we’re going to serve beets. And unfortunately, our staff are all on team pretzel and they’re not so motivated by this. So it is our job to convince everyone why this is really a great idea.
So I don’t know if you know this, but beets are actually super healthy. They’re good for your cardiovascular health, they’re good for iron absorption. So you can work those muscles. All kinds of good fiber. So beets, much healthier for you than pretzels, but we know that’s not enough. So we’re also, we are a pretzel company. I don’t know if we mentioned that earlier. And so this is really a problem for us. But we’re looking at the trends out there and we’re noticing there’s a lot of people with celiac disease, there’s a lot of people with diabetes who can’t eat pretzels. And there’s also a lot of people who are just trying to be healthier.

So if we want to follow the market trends, we really need to get ahead of it so that we can sustain our profitability and our market share as these trends develop. So what we’re going to do to help smooth this transition, we’re going to create a beet pretzel to help just smooth the way. And that means that we will all be healthier and wealthier altogether.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Woohoo. Thank you, table eight. Okay, table nine, what do you have for us?

Speaker 16:
Hello. All right, so we’ve got scenario three, your company has determined that part of the well-being initiative, they will be replacing all coffee and tea offerings in the break room with room temperature sparkling water. I know there was an earlier group, they missed it. Charles, sorry. We’ve got it. We’re going to give it to you.

Okay, so here’s our problem. Too much damn energy in the room. I like to come to work and feel mellow. I’m from California, I want to feel the groove.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Use your mic.

Speaker 16:
[inaudible 00:29:52] our current. Dull smiles, where does dull smiles come from? Where do dull smiles come from? Tea and coffee. So we’re part of the problem. We’re going to fix that. Insurance expenses for whitening are out of control. We’ve got an insurance expert at our table. That’s her point there. It’s out of control.
So our current state, way too much productivity going on in our group, just way too much productivity. We need people to slow down.

They’re not focused on their looks. I mean, everybody should be taking pride in their looks. What’s this stuff about whales? You need to focus on you.

The people that are producing and working really hard, what do they want? They want money. No money. No money. We make enough. So we’ve got this corporate wide ban on coffee and tea in the break rooms, okay? It’s going to improve glamour shots, websites, LinkedIn. You guys are going to sparkle like nothing. Who cares about that whale?
Better sleep. You’re going to sleep better. You know caffeine has a half life of 12 hours? We want you getting a good night’s sleep. And when it hits lunchtime or afternoon, we want you to have a quick nap. All right? We want you rested, calm. Does that sound good? Does that sound good? All right. But at the end, you get what you get, if you don’t fuss a bit. Bye. Thank you.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Thank you, table nine, for sharing your story. Table 10. I can’t … There we go. Thank you. All right, give it up for table 10. Take us on a journey. Oh, oh, they’re going on stage. They mean business.

Speaker 17:
Imagine a time when you’ve been faced with an incredibly huge challenge and you’ve had to make an enormous change to adapt. We’ve all had to do it here together at Guber Inc. We’ve weathered a lot of hard things together. And in this moment of difficult macroeconomic times, we all know that Guber Inc is being squeezed. And we care so much about you, about your pets, about your families.

And so because of that, because of that, we are unveiling a combined doggie and child daycare starting tomorrow. And what does this mean for you? What this means for you is better relationships. Better relationships. Because research shows that when children under the age of five spend at least 17 minutes a day within the vicinity of a dog, they are 75% more likely to be kind to their parents and to be a good human. And we know that when dogs look into a child’s face, they will live 13% longer. So we are thrilled to unveil this new program for all of you. And that’s it. And that’s it.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Thank you for sharing your story, table 10. I think we’re all better when we pet dogs. All right, table 11, take us on a journey.

Speaker 18:
Shout out for [inaudible 00:34:14]. So our situation, your company has determined that as part of their inclusion initiative, everyone must be addressed by both their name and their spirit animal. Accompanying interpretive dances are encouraged and we are making them required.

So as we were developing this, we came up with why do we want to bring forward our spirit animals? We have a problem. Our problem is we don’t understand each other’s work styles. I mean, imagine that your cubemate is a cat. They’re very busy chasing laser pointers, climbing on the laptop, putting their butt in the camera. You ask them a question, they swat at you and they hiss and then they run away. It’s not very productive.

You have your other cubemate, a dog. They are just way too happy. Somebody gave them way too many treats first thing in the morning. They’re chasing their tail. You can’t understand them half the time because they have this insatiable desire for peanut butter. And when a ball rolls by, you are just done for the day.

So what this causes is silos, confusion, swirl, missed deadlines, and miscommunication because your cat’s aloof, your dog just wants to play. And let me just tell you, it creates problems, especially when the dog wants to sniff the cat’s butt.
So these problems have caused issues with engagement, retention, and as I mentioned, HR and legal issues. So the new direction that’s been proposed about bringing forward your spirit animal is highly encouraged. Imagine Sarah is a cow. Using her pronouns she/her, always announces, “I’m Sarah, she/her, I’m a cow.” It gives you an idea of how she may be coming into a meeting.

And then you have John, who’s a goldfish, which explains why he doesn’t remember anything. And he shares his pronouns, he/they, so you know where he’s coming from and you know how to work with him. He’s very busy taking notes, by the way.

So giving this will help us understand how we work, as well as how we need to work with each other. So why is this better? It creates vulnerability. We’re all vulnerable with each other, sharing our spirit animals. We have a better idea of where each other’s coming from. Be more inclusive, higher retention, give each other grace, and it would be a lot of fun.
So in summary, we think doing this will move us from misalignment, we’re all headed different directions, we’re all speaking different languages, and we’re going to move forward together, understanding each other so that we can communicate better, have better human connection, and move towards alignment.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Woohoo. Thank you, table 11. Interpret dance off the stage. All right, table 12, take us on a journey.

Speaker 19:
So our situation is that your company has determined that as an effort to develop an interest in business from an early age, they’ll be extending their internship program to include K through 12 schools. Any parents in the room, any parents? So you guys get this. Kids keep pursuing unrealistic goals. They want to be marine biologists, they want to be doctors, they want to be nurses. But what the world really needs is more middle managers.

Here at Business Functions International USA Incorporated, we understand that problem. These kids are out here trying to pursue these lofty goals, but what we really need them to do is sit in a cubicle and learn business lingo. So that’s why we developed the Kid Internship Program. K through 12, we’re talking elementary school. Your third grader Sally could be a VP of product in no time. Timmy can ditch the slide and slide into his quarter four sales projections with ease. We’re creating a cradle to CEO pipeline. We’re increasing our kid performance indicators nonstop. And this pipeline will not only project these kids into greatness but our country into greatness. So join the Kid Internship Program, and like Ricky Bobby said, “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

Alyssa Coughlin:
Thank you so much for sharing your story, table 12. Last but certainly not least, table 13, take us on a journey.

Speaker 20:
Hello, everyone. I didn’t know that we had to be theater majors to be in attendance today. So thank you for all of you for putting on such beautiful shows. Our situation was very similar to the table two tables before us, but of course I forgot my sheet of paper because I’m a goldfish. We identified that our problem is that … Oh, sorry, yes.
So our situation is that people are not knowing each other well. And in order to solve that problem, we all are now going to be able to use each other’s names and our identity animals. We are using the term identity animals, that was a team choice, to talk about how we are able to relate with one another. So our situation is we’re in the office, we’re wandering around, no one’s using our names. No one knows anything about each other because we don’t have a shared language. We don’t have anything that keeps us together.

But what do we all love and adore? Animals obviously. Obviously animals. The fuzzy ones, the big ones, the mean ones, the cute ones. We love all animals. And that is our shared language with one another. And so instead of sitting in our meeting saying, “Oh hey, you over there,” and not talking to one another, we’re all looking on LinkedIn. We’re like, “Hey, indeed.com, I don’t want to work here anymore. They don’t feel me. They don’t feel my vibe.” And so at our next team meeting I say, “Hey, you know what, my name’s Samantha and I’m a manatee.” And my friend says…

Speaker 16:
I’m Tom, and I’m an emotional support bear.

Speaker 20:
And you know what? Manatees and bears have more in common than you think they do. We both don’t like the cold. We get into warm places over the winter and we hang out and we just vibe, we nap, we vibe, and we have a great time. And you know what? Now Tom and I are best friends. And no longer are we in our meetings job surfing on the internet. We are now sharing our connections amongst a group of two foxes, a duck, a horse, a chihuahua. And we would love to hear all of y’all’s as well. Thank you so much.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Thank you, table 13 for sharing your story. So of course these were all very silly. I got every table, right? Okay, these were all very silly, over-the-top examples, but the point is these were changes that would probably not be very well received. And so in order to get that buy-in from your organization, it’s really important that you go through the process and you sell them on why this is better. Why are you making this change? What is on the other side of this change? What’s in it for me?
Is there anything you all noticed throughout this process? Yes, emotion, absolutely. I mean these were silly, we’re laughing. But when you can make that human connection, when you can make something personal, you can make the change linger. It’ll last. People understand it. People have that value prop, people have that buy-in. Anything else? Yeah … You’ve got to wait.

Speaker 21:
So yeah, it was spirit animals, everything was a joy. As far as the humor thing, how do you know the line? And I know there’s just read the room, but I’m curious if you have any more advice in terms of more tactical, like if maybe you don’t always sense these things or know where that line is of when it’s appropriate to throw in humor if the topic is more serious or it’s something objectively bad that the company’s got to do. Do you have any guidelines or advice around that?

Alyssa Coughlin:
I wouldn’t say firm guidelines. It’s kind of situational. And so I try to think about, I mean this is a great place for empathy, too. So what would I want if I was on the receiving end of this change? Would I want you to just tell it to me straight because I’m really concerned? Or do I want you to make me laugh a little? This is rough, but how can we make it a little bit better?

There’s also just kind of the know your audience thing. So for example, when I’m working with my team, who I work with all the time, I know that I can joke around with them more. Versus when I am presenting to the CTO staff, I’m probably not going to make a joke unless the moment just really presents itself. But I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule. It is a tricky one. Humor can be tricky. But for the most part I just try to think about how would I want to receive this news?
Yeah?

Speaker 22:
I think it’s important. Our group was actually having a little bit of a hard time getting consensus on what the problem was. And I think oftentimes we just jump into what’s the proposed direction versus us saying what are we actually trying to solve? And I think it’s just a good meta reminder for me to be like, are we aligned on the problem as a group, as a starting point? Or is there one problem we’re going to tackle for this scenario because maybe there’s three, but for this situation, how do we differentiate before we integrate?

Alyssa Coughlin:
Yeah, absolutely. That is a great call out. I appreciate that.

Speaker 23:
I think it’s important to be real about the problem and to acknowledge that people, not everyone is going to be excited about the problem, but then I think it’s also really helpful to not give huge bonuses and so forth, but give, do something, have a company do something to lighten the burden.

So we had to move to a new area in the building and nobody wanted to move to the new area because we had to share desks and so forth. But they made it a really nice area and they added an outside area. They tried to make it as pleasant as possible, even though they knew there was going to be pushback. So just being honest. And then also give them something, like, we know this is bad, but we’re going to try to make the space really engaging and comfortable to make it a little bit easier.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Yeah, absolutely. And we kind of talked about it in the beginning around be direct, don’t dance around what you’re trying to tell me, even if it’s something I don’t want to hear. And that’s the beauty of the story, is you have that full context. Even if you don’t like where the journey ends, you at least understand how you got there. And a lot of the times in these difficult situations, people just want to be heard. Acknowledge that you understand why I am hesitant to adopt this change. And sometimes that’s enough to get them over the hurdle.

Katie:
I’m going to say something. Hi, I’m Katie. We just went through a really big change at our company and people were upset, very upset. I won’t get into it, but what they could have done, if you guys are doing any change management, is they could have said, “We are sorry for how this change has made you feel,” without saying, you know, “We know this is the right direction, but we are sorry for what this is causing you to go through.” And I think just speaking humanly to your people is really important. Okay, who’s next? Unless-

Alyssa Coughlin:
Could not agree more, by the way.

Speaker 25:
Hello. Something that I saw, which was just inspiring, was everyone’s different ways of communicating and telling a story. I mean, we all show up to the problem with different experiences. And everything we just saw on stage through 13 groups, it differed greatly. And whenever you are surrounding yourself with people who are tackling problems like this, you can gain inspiration from how they approach a problem. So yeah, keep your eyes open and watch how other people tackle similar challenges. And there’s a lot to learn.

Alyssa Coughlin:
I love that because we all were working with the same formula, but we all interpreted it and presented it differently, and it is so important to learn from others and to gain from their experience.

Speaker 26:
One of the things you’ve been talking about, what’s in it for me? Sometimes that what’s in it for me is, and I heard some of the stories, reframing it. So you’re reframing this situation for the folks so that they’re looking at it from a different lens.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s important to establish the lens you’re looking through when you make a change and when you make a decision. Because they might have a completely different perspective, and without the journey, without the story, they’re not going to understand why you’re making their life miserable, or not all change is awful, but you have to acknowledge they might have a different perspective. And so frame it for them. This is what I’m looking at. This is why.

Speaker 27:
Yeah, I mean I think, I know all of us probably liked show and tell when we were younger, and I think we sometimes forget to do that as facilitators, is to, if we’re not the presenters, to have our presenters do some show and tell. I launch new tech at my company, so I always try to have my storytellers or the people that are presenting with me to show the change.
And I think some of you that, I think one of you did the mobile app, I think sometimes you take things out of the conceptual and show it as a prototype if you can do it. I think that really helps. And I heard a story a while back, some of you may have heard of it. When Disney went to create Animal Kingdom, when they first pitched the concept to Disney executives, they were like, “We’re not a zoo, why would we want to have animals?” Because they were trying to pitch this idea of the majestic nature of some of these animals. So the next time they went into the pitch meeting, they put a lion literally on the top of the conference room table and brought the decision makers into the room.

And it was tame. But the point was they saw the powerful nature of the lion in the space. And now you can all go to Animal Kingdom and see some of these things. So I think it’s just the point that some of you showed, was see if you can do a little bit of show and tell. And I really enjoyed that today with everyone.

Speaker 28:
Just quickly picking up on the show piece, the visual aspect of this activity and the visual aspect of storytelling seems really critically important to not just align on what you’re talking about, but it is generative. Once you start making marks, it creates new ideas.

Alyssa Coughlin:
And I would echo that it is especially important in the virtual and hybrid world that we live in today because you don’t have as many human connections. And so it’s really important that you do share the why and that you do frame things as a story and as a narrative and journey when you don’t have the benefit of connecting in person as often. Oh, we had red glasses.

Speaker 29:
First of all, I am so moved by how we all leaned in. There was an experience, right? I’m still loving the dog with the hair and all the things. But I think that there’s an opportunity as facilitators, especially because we’re typically navigating a problem. So put that context into it, like say the big elephant in the room and then let’s figure it out. Bring people along.
We saw it multiple times. There was the pattern of the multisensory experience, there was the laughter, that was movement. There was I think some singing, dancing. We saw things. But the five senses, oftentimes when we’re trying to help people to transform because of a problem, if we just get back to the basics and engage those senses, close your eyes, get grounded, put your hands up, listen, sometimes that’s an easy way to help folks to experience it. And I just want to thank you all for being a part of it.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Yes, the engagement is so important and thank you all for it. When you have that engagement is when people actually start coming with you on the journey instead of staying behind and letting you go by yourself.

Speaker 30:
The question about humor made me think of something. If I was facilitating the team trying to figure out how to roll out the change, so this is sort of like the working group, I can’t remember the name of the practice technique, but it’s basically tell me all the ways this will fail. And if you did that and you allowed them to say maybe add one that’s really silly or something, you kind of allow them to go beyond the bounds, it might really trigger brainstorming because it can be really easy, especially if you’re in a high

stress, we’re worried about the change moment, that you don’t think about all the peripheral things that can happen.
And I think to the question of humor, if it’s the right group that might bring up ideas. Like who would have thought an app for toilet paper could be the next best thing? But we didn’t do that unless it was humorous and we had the bounds taken away. So just a thought on how that might help a certain kind of group.

Alyssa Coughlin:
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, thank you. So we have two minutes left and I want to close with a reflection. And I want to start with when you are sharing a story, when you are going through the change management process, people don’t have to agree with you to commit. They don’t have to like the answer, they just have to understand why that is the answer. We have a saying at Autodesk, you can disagree and commit, as long as it is safe to try.

So my challenge to you as we close out is to reflect. Think about a change that you’ve experienced in the past that was not managed well. What was missing from that change? What piece of the story would you have liked to have had, to have been brought along on the journey? And also reflect on maybe a change you have coming up. It could be real or hypothetical, and just how you would like to show up and how you would like to tell your story and bring others along on the journey.

The post Storytelling and Change Management appeared first on Voltage Control.

“One of the things that really motivates me is seeing the light in people’s eyes when they come into the innovation center and we have them play with Legos or do something fun. Bringing enjoyment into work is something that really motivates me personally.”- Ralitsa Dimitrova

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Ralitsa Dimitrova, who leads the Ignition capability at KPMG Switzerland. Ralitsa shares her journey as a generalist and connector in facilitation, emphasizing the value of adaptability, empathy, and continuous learning. She discusses her career path, starting unexpectedly at Accenture, and highlights the importance of being a generalist in fostering collaboration and innovation. The episode also explores the role of community, storytelling, and creativity in facilitation and touches on future possibilities involving AI in the facilitation process.

Show Highlights

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About the Guest

Ralitsa Dimitrova is leading Ignition Switzerland- KPMG’s program and experience hub in Zurich and Geneva focused on accelerating innovation through the Insights Center and the Innovation Lab. Ralitsa has more than 10 years’ consulting experience in the areas of innovation, digital centers of excellence and emerging technologies. She is a certified facilitator in design thinking and futures thinking. She works with multinational clients across industries, supporting them in their strategy through insights-generating sessions, inspirational technology showcases and collaborative workshops. Prior to joining KPMG Switzerland, Ralitsa successfully launched the KPMG Insights Center in Milan, Italy. She started her career at the Accenture Innovation Center Network and later on headed the social media and digital marketing division of a boutique communication agency.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Voltage Control on the Web
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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 Ralitsa Dimotrov at KPMG Switzerland where she leads the ignition capability, which is a part of a global network of expert business facilitators with more than 20 client experience centers around the world. Welcome to the show, Ralitsa.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Thank you, Douglas. Thank you for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. I’m excited to have this conversation. It’s always lovely to be in conversation with our alumni.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the invite.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, of course. You described your journey as a generalist and a dot connector. Can you take us back to that moment at Accenture when your manager helped you see your strength in simplifying complexity?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, so that’s actually a great question to start this with because maybe I’ll just step even back in time, actually, in terms of how I ended up joining that company because I think that was really a funny story. Essentially, I did not proactively had set up my mind on, oh, I want to go for a career in consulting. I just watched a video on YouTube. I remember that moment, and there was this video on YouTube where they were shooting from the Accenture Innovation Center in Milan, and they were showing emerging tech and how they work around the client experience and things like that. That first impression was really very positive as a young kind of graduate. I decided to contact the person on the video proactively and just said, “Okay, I mean, what can I do? What can I lose?: I mean, let’s just reach out. It seems like a great place to work.

I always had this passion about technology and about design, and this seems really like the perfect place to merge those passions. That’s already a little bit part of my generalist nature showing up because I didn’t have my mind set up on anything particular. I just saw this looks like a nice place to start my career. I reached out without expectations and it was funny that they actually responded and one thing led to the other and they invited me to visit the Innovation Center, and this ended up to be a first interview.

Then I joined the team and this leads us basically the moment that you already mentioned that where, essentially, I had my first manager and I started having these conversations as part of my career journey on how do I shape my role and myself as a professional? Am I going to be more of a generalist or am I going to specialize? This is where this conversation essentially opened up my mind towards the opportunity of being more of a facilitator rather than specializing in a particular solution or in a particular set of technology or a service. This happened really naturally, just I think from the fact that they very soon noticed that I seemed to be very good in summarizing concepts, in also transforming complex concepts into visuals.

That basically led me to join multiple different projects and really try a lot of different things from different industries, different types of clients, mid-sized, corporates, consumer goods, luxury, fashion, pharma, whatever it is. I really, really saw a wide range of projects and clients and that I think at the end, if we come back to the role as a facilitator, is really, really precious. I really think that it makes a difference, even now as I’m basically I have grown into this role even more. This is something that I constantly go back to in terms of experience from this wide range of sectors and companies.

Douglas Ferguson:

This idea of being a generalist is something that comes up quite often when I talk to facilitators and certainly our alumni. I’d be curious how much that continues to play a part in your career and maybe even others that you noticed come up behind you or around you?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, it’s true. It does come up quite often, also, with my current and past team members. Because I think as facilitators we often observe and sometimes in the world that we live in, we are used to or we are made to think that in order to add value and to sell that value to the external world, you need to specialize in something. You need to be really good in one thing. That’s why I think a lot of people are struggling to accept themselves to an extent in the facilitator role. It’s not, I mean, at least from my experience, it doesn’t come that easy because you think, “Oh my God, I need to choose a direction and that direction should be specialized. I need to be able to prove my value to the context that I am in, the company I work for.”

It doesn’t come naturally to the mind that, “Oh, actually my value can be cross. It can be cross-functional, it can be, I actually can be a facilitator.” It does not come as an immediate job description or at least from my experience. I think in the last couple of years, that has shaped a little bit more in terms of a role and maybe now people are also, actively looking for a facilitator role or preparing themselves and kind of training for facilitator role. I think in the past when I started my career, that was not the case, at least in my experience.

Douglas Ferguson:

There’s tons of folks that are leveraging these skills and out there doing great work as generalists, but don’t have a facilitator in their title. Frankly, the titles are all over the place. It can be hard to make that connection that, “Oh, these skills are going to be valuable for me to make a difference in what I do.”

Ralitsa Dimotrov:

Exactly. I think it’s just something that also, maybe comes natural to people and they don’t even realize if there isn’t someone maybe from your friends or colleagues to point you in the direction, “Oh, by the way, you would be a really good facilitator.” Maybe you don’t even think about it. Oh, actually that is a real skill. I can even deep dive into that skill or train even better for that skill. The program for example, that I did with Voltage Control was probably one of the first things also, for myself, that first programs for myself that I really decided I’m going to invest into that skill even though I have been doing it for so long.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. What do you think this idea of investing in the skills after having done it for so long, what was that like to approach this with some level of curiosity or newness?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I came from the perspective that we can never stop learning and I always have something new to learn. I was amazed, by the way, that there were so many different people and so many, on the program specifically, I met so many people that are similar and I really felt that, “Oh my God, finally I found my crowd. Finally, I found my people,” because before I had no idea. Just in terms of speaking the same language, learning from each other, just having this very easy understanding because, obviously, we all start from a base of let’s say, fundamental skills that we all have. It’s very easy to then build on that, on each other’s experience and exchange because we all have some fundamentals in place. That experience was really amazing in that sense to just meet my group of people and feel kind of a belonging.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. It’s such a big part of our values and what we are attempting to build and grow. Community is just at the center of so much of what we do. I love that you felt that you found your people, ’cause that’s kind of part of my mission is to bring people together and celebrate the ecosystem and really the reason why we created the summit and all the local meetups and everything. That warms my heart to hear that that was a big thing for you.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think it’s one, to be honest, one of the few networks that I really think is built for facilitators. I really like that.

Douglas Ferguson:

What about with inside the company? Have you found that there’s a growing group of folks that are supporting each other in this kind of community manner?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

I mean, think in my team, we definitely have created a supportive ecosystem for ourselves. Is that part of the larger culture in the organization? Probably not, but maybe I would like to say not just yet because then I really would like to also, at least I’m trying with my team to contribute to an evolution of that corporate environment or culture where collaboration and facilitation becomes actually part of the day-to-day. Because I believe that there can be only benefits to the way, at least consultants because I talk about my work environment, but at least consultants engage with clients and the way they provide professional services, the way they interact with clients. I think there is only benefits to be realized there if facilitation and collaboration becomes part of the culture and becomes part of the day-to-day. That’s why I also take it a little bit also as the mission of myself and my team bring that to the organization that we are working for and to evangelize a little bit even in that regard, the company. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think it’s infectious when teams start to work in this way and are intentional about making it part of your every day and not just, “Oh, this is a special workshop.” If we really embed it in what we do and how we come together, other teams start to notice and then it starts to just almost infect an organization. I love that you’re at least thinking about doing this locally for your team and at least changing the lives of the folks that are immediately around you.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

I think so, and you know what? I think two things. First, for me, it’s very important for my team to live that culture as a team. Whenever we not only like to preach, “Oh, you need to be more collaborative, you need to use this or that technique to our colleagues,” but also to live it in my small team basically. Every time we try to make a decision or we need to brainstorm something, we use our own techniques on ourselves as facilitators. We test our techniques, we use them also, to brainstorm ideas for the team to kind of collect and bring up ideas bottom up. I always try to first approach my team as a small company within the company, let’s say, and make sure that we follow the culture that we want to create for the organization, so that’s one.

Then I think what you said before, it’s exactly right, that the word basically spreads. Once colleagues have tested, have tried some of our techniques here and there. One of the things that really motivates me is seeing the light in people’s eyes when they come into the innovation center and to the insight center that we have in Zurich, and we have them play with Lego, so we have them kind of do something fun, collaborate, form groups, maybe engage them with some kind of metaphor, add some storytelling, and you can really see how people are having fun while working. Kind of bringing the enjoyment into work is something that really, really motivates me personally, and that’s why I think one of the reasons that why I like facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. Joy can certainly unlock creativity.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Exactly, yes. I think especially in such corporate environments, when you think of the big fours or other big corporates. There is I think to an extent a reputation of, “Oh, this is not a fun place to work. It’s very serious, it’s very professional place, it’s very trusted environment,” but joy does not come to mind when you think of these big corporates. While I think that, actually, there is a lot of space for joy in there and for creativity because we solve problems for clients every day, and these problems are so different, so various from one to the other. Creativity is needed daily. We need to be able to fire creativity through facilitation for sure.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was just thinking about your story about the early days and reaching out to someone who had inspired you. I think that’s really good advice for folks that are just getting their practice started or just getting in their career, reaching out to folks with curiosity and connecting with the community or with folks that are a few steps ahead of you. Was this just a one-time occurrence for you? Is this something that you typically do through your career, just reaching out to others and with curiosity?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, I love reaching out to others. I think, generally, I never had a problem to ask for advice and be inspired by someone. If I saw something, maybe a snippet of the work that someone else has done, I really like to first of all reach out to congratulate them on the great work and second, to also kind of understand more. That, I think, is something that I’ve always done, and I think it can only benefit a person if you make it part of a habit to reach out and to share sometimes. You don’t need to have a specific task that you need to accomplish that you would maybe need help with. Sometimes it’s literally just as you said, just out of curiosity. Maybe that’s something that will come handy in a few months or years time, but in the meantime you have learned something new. Definitely, yeah, that’s something that I’ve always done and I definitely advise people, especially that you’re starting their career to do so. You can only have a no for maybe, yeah, they won’t respond immediately, and so what? You just tried.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, you can really only benefit. I love this framing that you had of saying that it doesn’t have to be transactional, you don’t have to expect something out of it. I think coupled with this point you made, which I want to highlight, which is starting off with some appreciation and gratitude saying, “Hey, thanks for putting this out into the world, I really appreciate it.” They might be thinking about something new they haven’t shared. They might notice something about you. Even just something offhanded or simple that they say might have a profound effect on you, even if they don’t go out of the way and do anything special, just something they say in response could click and be of high value. It’s totally worthwhile to just to put out those questions and put the curiosities out in the world.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely, and I think it comes back to, again, what I believe is the role of the facilitator and back to the topic of being a generalist, because you are constantly collecting different types of information that maybe you don’t know if that would be useful for you today or tomorrow. I mean, again, going back to connecting the dots, yes, because by reaching out to people, by being curious about different types of information, not only in your professional area but also, outside of it, I think really contributes to a facilitator being able in a workshop, let’s say, on the spot, bring up the right example or bring up the right metaphor or the right association that would make concepts click for people. In order to be able to naturally do that, you just need to absorb a lot of information and just have that huge, let’s say, backlog of information and then just pick up something from it whenever it comes handy, but first, you need to constantly build it and maintain it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. Having these stories, these examples, this context in your quiver, I think more powerful than having tools, to be honest, because if you’re able to help people connect in and resonate and understand something to have the context for it to go deeper so they can integrate it into their thinking, that’s so much more powerful than maybe a tool or a technique.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, I agree. That’s why sometimes you can have the perfect activity set up, the perfect technique, but sometimes there’s just playing with associations and having the right, let’s say, visual in place or the right story as you said in place, just puts a little bit of magic in the whole mix and makes the collaboration even better. I do encourage my team a lot to use storytelling as well. Metaphors, as I said, we have a concept that is called preludes also, which is again, a concept around storytelling of how you introduce, let’s say a session or how you introduce a workshop with some kind of story to it. That’s why it’s called a prelude. Something that comes before the actual core objective or core agenda, but we do use these a lot to reinforce the objectives to make connections between people and to make the mission of the day click for everyone.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. It’s always important to start with purpose, and if you can do that in a storytelling way that acts as a scene setter, it can actually make it a little more intriguing. Maybe you can decorate it with some details that maybe entice people in some fun ways. I love that.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, and I think it also makes it more memorable and the whole experience becomes immediately more memorable.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. The way you open, the way you close and creating the high point throughout the time together definitely are great ways to make things more memorable. Thinking about that beginning and how you make them feel.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think the way, especially at the beginning, I think, is really key to kickstart the project or the agenda with the right level of motivation and the right level of alignment. For that, I think storytelling helps a lot.

Douglas Ferguson:

Coming back to your generalist point and this idea of collecting lots of information and how that’s really helpful to have on hand and making the most out of your sessions. It also makes me think that there are a couple of things that it impacts your ability to adjust and adapt activities. Rather than just taking it for face value of what does it say in the book or what did I read online, but how do I shift it and change it in ways that make it unique to me or customize it for the group? Then likewise, your ability to notice little things that are happening in the room to synthesize how Susan’s feeling versus Bob is feeling. Then link those things and compare them really fast so that the group can benefit from those insights that are bubbling up that maybe are just under the surface.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely. I mean, being able to pivot when needed due to dynamics that you observe in the room or just realizing that, “Oh my God, actually there is new information coming which needs to change the agenda in order to, we need to change the objective midway. I don’t know, something happened. There is new information, new stakeholders that are important.” Having this possibility to pivot, I think, and this capacity actually, to remain flexible I think is very important. I think for me personally, I had to learn this because this was something that did not come naturally, for sure. I’m a very much of a perfectionist. I very much prepare. I really want to have the plan ready. I had to kind of, with experience, lean more into, actually it’s okay sometimes to relax a bit, to improvise when necessary and not to be so strict on the planning. That’s definitely important.

Also, what you mentioned about observing the room, reading the room, that I think is something that it’s a little bit, I would say in my opinion, slightly more difficult to learn. You either have it a little bit or not, you can improve for sure, but I think it’s linked to empathy and I think really good facilitators have a lot of empathy, and this capacity to observe and read the little signs of what’s happening across the table with the people and empathize with that and maybe have the right activity in place or the right phrase to bring up the mood, for example, or address challenge or friction in the conversation if you notice it. I think then it comes really handy for facilitator, but first it’s the capacity to observe and empathize with the group.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s certainly important. I want to come back to that point made about the adapting and maybe being a bit more emergent wasn’t natural for you and you had to learn it. What were some of the ways that you practiced or exposed yourself or were able to learn how to be a bit more adaptive?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, so it is just a very simple example. Even with my public speaking skills, I’ve always, initially, I used to have these long scripts. My brain was making me over prepare. I would go around three days before I have a speech to do. I would go around with these papers, read through my scripts, memorize my scripts to the extent that I would start feeling more natural doing it. Then I started saying to myself, “No, this is not natural. This is actually making it much more stressful for yourself. Throw away all the scripts, try with kind of more simplified bullet points kind of list or maybe key messages lists.”

I forced myself to do not write down everything but just key points, try to naturally get more, let’s say, to get used to improvise a little bit my speech. Then I think now I’m at the stage where I probably don’t even need usually the bullet points. I think it was a gradual progression, but yeah, I had to go out of my comfort zone and say, “No, you’re not going to write down your script this time for this presentation. Try something else, try something different.” Then it worked. I saw that actually it comes out even better when I leave myself some space for improvisation and then I took it from there.

Douglas Ferguson:

How did this room for improvisation show up in your facilitation?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

I think I had actually a very kind of a recent example of a workshop where it was a few months ago where we had prepared an amazing agenda, amazing setup, full range of activities, everything with a purpose. Sometimes for a facilitator, when you’ve done this work, there is a part of you saying, “Oh my God, I really want everything to go perfectly so that I can see all my ideas taking place in the room.” You have been preparing maybe for a couple of months to that day and everything should happen on the day. Then midway, the client says, “Oh, by the way, one of the most important stakeholders in the workshop cannot join this part anymore. He can only join till this time,” and without him there is no point that we need to, so what do we do? I’m like, “Oh my God, this is completely rearranging our agenda midway to accommodate this thing that was not clear at the beginning that he couldn’t join that part.”

We had to … And then there, I think it’s very important to have a very strong team, and your co-facilitators are so important to be able to, because if you’re a front facilitator, you need to be able to be present in the moment to calm down the client, maybe to discuss with them, “Okay, let’s arrange rearrange this part,” and be present in the moment. In the meantime, in the back office, you need to very strong team to say, “Okay, let’s take care of this. Let’s move the lunch, let’s move the break. That means that we need to rearrange the room in this way. Let us bring these chairs because that’s a sit-down presentation, it’s not an activity anymore.” All these logistics need to happen in the background and to do that so smoothly that the participants and the client, they don’t notice.

For them, everything is still calm and then they remain in the mood of collaboration, creativity, new information, new insights that they need to think about, focus. In the meantime, everyone is running around trying to fix it. To your question, I think in order to be able to pivot well, team is so important. Having the support on the day and also, just remaining calm and collected, and it is what it is. Don’t get too affectionate towards your ideas, I would say. Don’t fall in love too much in your ideas of facilitate of how things should be. I think that’s important in terms of mindset, just from the beginning.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you fall in love with your ideas, it’s hard to remain in that positive, optimistic, solution-oriented mindset. If you’re too tied in, it’s easy to take it personally and say, “Oh, they don’t value what we’re doing here, or they’re not taking this seriously.” Then once you go down that path, then it’s really hard to think about, “How do I leverage this great team that I have? How do I have keep things smooth?” Because now it’s, “Oh, it’s this negative event,” versus thinking about, “Okay, this is just a curve ball that we have to react to.” I love that this is stuff that you’re positively responding to.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely, and I think that’s actually what you said brings me to what I have reflected in the past a lot in the facilitator role, and this is the topic of the ego. I don’t know if you’ve observed that as well, but as facilitators, sometimes we need to be careful with our own ego because as you said, if you sense as a facilitator that the people in the room are probably not understanding, not fully grasping the value that you’re trying to bring to them, it happens. It can totally happen. Maybe they just focus on different priorities. I mean, we as facilitators focus on delivering the best experience, having or achieving the objective for them. Maybe that’s just a little part from a broader picture and they focus on completely different objectives. Politics maybe that are happening in the background that maybe we don’t know about. Conflict, things like that.

Sometimes if you don’t manage your ego as facilitator, you can definitely be heard and also, start to think that, “Oh my God, my role is not understood. I don’t bring value,” and kind of undermine yourself in that way. While actually what we do, I think, as facilitators is we voluntary step back sometimes. We need to be mindful of when we reinforce our presence and when we kind of need to step back and we do this, I think, with generosity. I think it’s a great act of generosity when we observe and we understand actually the room maybe needs a bit less at the moment, so I need to step back or allow them to sort themselves or things like that. That’s also, I think, part of great facilitation without that impacting you personally.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. Well said. I want to talk a little bit about, I think you’ve been doing this long enough and you’ve got a strong team around you, and so it makes me curious how much you’ve started to think about developing those around you or the facilitators that are more junior or the staff members that are just getting curious about facilitation. How are you supporting them? In what ways are you finding that you can make them more successful or help them with their curiosities about what facilitation can do?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Something that they really believe into is personal development and learning. We have a very supportive company in that way. When we are willing to explore learning opportunities, we always get support. In terms of courses, in terms of even a couple of days conference or events that my team members join. We are always looking for training on methodologies. For example, if someone from my team members expresses interest in certain methodology, they can freely explore what are the options on the market and come back to us and say, “I found this and that course I want to do this. What do you think?” We would consider it and very often or usually we’ll sponsor it. For that, I think, is very important and it’s one way to keep them curious.

The other way for me is by giving them the freedom to explore topics. Sometimes we assign to each other a techniques or create a prelude about this or maybe explore if we can do this and that activity or let’s test this other thing out. I like to establish this culture of experimentation. Very recently, for example, with my team, without receiving it as a task from somewhere, we just decided to go a little bit deeper into signals of change and observing and collecting signals of change.

We started just as a team on a Friday afternoon kind of setting up some time, silent collaboration time I call it. We get on a Teams call for an hour, we don’t speak. It’s silent collaboration time, but we are together on that call. Everyone researches signals the first half an hour, and the second half an hour we kind of share. This we did purely for experimentation purposes because we didn’t have a specific objective in a sense that, “Oh, we need to collect X amount of signals in order to create an observatory in order to publish a thought leadership piece or anything like that.”

We were, “Okay, let’s just see if this can be part of our day-to-day, if we can get into the habit of collecting signals and let’s see where this would lead us towards.” We have been doing this for more than six months now, and now we are to the point where we have to reflect back and see, “Okay, what did we learn? Is this something that we want to continue doing in the future? How can we create an output out of this?” I’ve always been transparent to my team members that if you have the time you join, if you don’t this time, but we do this as a team and maybe we can also fail. Maybe we do it for some time and we realize, “Oh, actually we cannot benefit, and that’s fine.” In the meantime, we have learned a practice and that probably would become part of what we do also outside of work. Yeah, that’s another experimentation, I think, is also very important.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that was one of my questions. What experiments are you most excited about trying next? Whether it’s tools or formats or audiences?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

At the moment, obviously, AI is big topic, so experimenting with technology and how that can influence what we do as facilitators, as storytellers is where I see a lot of potential for doing things differently. The other day I was thinking also, if we project ourselves in the future, what would a workshop be from a facilitator point of view if I need to facilitate between humans and maybe AI agents? Would I do the same activities? Would I base myself on the same methodological foundation? If I need to facilitate between AI and humans, what would that look like? I don’t have the answers yet, but it’s just I’m reflecting on those questions going forward. I think in order to have an answer, we need to be the first ones to experiment with these tools and to learn about these tools and to be prepared to understand how they work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. We were running a workshop at South by Southwest, and it was focused on AI teammates. Really, this curiosity of, rather than using AI as a tool, so many of us default to it’s a one-on-one thing where, “I need this result, I’m going to ask it to do this thing,” versus bringing it into the collaboration context and having the team react to it or having it react to things the team’s generating and back and forth. It was really quite fun. People started to consider what was possible from a whole new lens.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely. I think for the moment, we also have experimented a lot with AI as a supporting tool, as you say, as a helpful assistant, maybe in the preparation of the workshop mainly. I really want to push ourselves a little bit more to see, “Okay, what would that mean if AI is actually a participant?” We have tried out a few things, but I still think there is a lot of potential there to explore and to understand how that would work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. It comes back to what you were saying earlier about the importance of being a generalist and how that role has a lot of value, and I’d argue with AI becoming more and more prominent and getting specialized in certain things and able to do certain specialized tasks or have specialized knowledge, this generalist that can question and draw things together across these different perspectives is going to be even more and more valuable.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, I think so. I think, really, I’m very much thinking about would I have a role in the future? Because we have experimented with AI, building agendas, building activities, brainstorming, the whole concept. I’m like, “Okay, AI can do this.” Then as a facilitator, what is the value that I would bring in a future when maybe I would have an agent that would do these tasks for me? Maybe I don’t even need to analyze the objectives. Maybe I don’t even need to, for sure, I won’t need to script the agenda. Probably an AI agent would even schedule the initial calls with my clients. I don’t know. For sure, a lot of these tasks will be outsourced to my agent. That would probably have also already my knowledge.

The agent will probably already, also, will be already fed with my experience. Then would that mean that I would just go and facilitate face-to-face? Would that even be a need anymore? Maybe there will be a virtual assistant on a video that would be do the talking. I don’t know. I’m definitely curious about how that vision of the future would look like. I do think that there is a lot of truth in what you’re saying, that it’ll be more important to have a generalist knowledge in order to create connections between the worlds. Because all the specialization seems that can be outsourced to an AI. The true human creativity I think is really in making unexpected connections. I don’t know, I still have to live and see.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think that’s what the future is about, is we will see what unfolds.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s leave our listeners with a final thought. Would you like to share an insight or something that’s found helpful in your career?

Ralitsa Dimitrova::

I think maybe this last topic that we touched upon makes me think about the fact that we live in so exciting times. I think it’s really, we have the chance nowadays to redefine how we do work and really to redefine what work means for humans and even further define the foundations of human and AI collaboration. I think I would like to leave the listeners with this inspiration to think about what that future collaboration between humans and AI could look like. As facilitators, how can we shape that and what would our role be? More than an insight, it’s actually a question, but I think it’s also part of our job as facilitators to ask the questions.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, let’s facilitate our future.

Ralitsa Dimitrova::

I like that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, thank you so much for being on the show and this amazing conversation. It’s been so much fun. I really appreciate it, Ralitsa.

Ralitsa Dimitrova::

Thank you so much, Douglas. Thanks again for the invitation. I hope this was insightful for the listeners.

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 Why Did the Facilitator Bring Legos to the Meeting? To Build Connections! appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Dr. Karyn Edwards led an engaging and thought-provoking session that bridged the gap between coaching and facilitation. With her vast experience in both fields, Karyn helped participants explore how coaching techniques can elevate facilitation practices, encouraging a shift in mindset and perspective. Her session was not only educational but highly interactive, inviting attendees to reflect on their personal experiences and challenges.

The Power of Non-Directive Coaching

Karyn’s session began with an energetic icebreaker, setting the stage for the day’s exploration of non-directive coaching. By playing Lizzo’s “Good as Hell” and Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” Karyn invited attendees to consider which song aligned more with coaching frameworks. This fun activity underscored the importance of empowering clients to discover their own answers, rather than providing prescriptive solutions. As Karyn explained, non-directive coaching encourages a space where individuals can reflect, think critically, and ultimately find solutions that resonate with their experiences.

Interactive Activities: From Worst Facilitator to Best Solutions

Karyn used practical exercises to help participants identify common challenges faced by facilitators. Attendees were asked to brainstorm and share sticky notes about the worst facilitation experiences they’ve encountered or witnessed. This activity was followed by group discussions on how these challenges could be resolved. The collective wisdom of the group sparked deep conversations about the importance of self-awareness, energy, and how facilitators can create environments that foster growth and transformation.

Key Insights: The Role of Facilitators and Coaches

One of the central themes of the session was the role of the facilitator in creating an environment conducive to learning and growth. As Karyn put it, the facilitator is responsible for setting the container, but it is up to the participants to do the work. This shift in perspective was eye-opening for many attendees, as it emphasized the importance of trust, openness, and collaboration. Karyn also stressed the idea of “letting go” of the desire to control the outcome, allowing participants the freedom to explore and contribute to the discussion without fear of judgment.

The Intersection of Coaching and Facilitation

Throughout the session, Karyn highlighted the overlap between coaching and facilitation. Both practices require a deep understanding of human dynamics, the ability to listen actively, and a willingness to adapt to the needs of the group. The session also addressed the balance between structure and flexibility, noting that while facilitators must prepare and plan, they must also be open to adjusting the course based on the group’s needs and the conversation at hand.

Karyn’s facilitation philosophy aligns with the principles of non-directive coaching, where the coach or facilitator serves as a guide rather than an expert. Her emphasis on inquiry, listening, and creating space for reflection was a powerful reminder of how these skills can be leveraged to empower others in both coaching and facilitation contexts.

Key Takeaways from Dr. Karyn Edwards’ Session:

Flexibility and Adaptability: Understanding when to stick to the agenda and when to let go, allowing the group to steer the direction of the conversation.

Empowerment through Inquiry: The importance of asking open-ended questions that evoke insight and encourage participants to explore their own solutions.

Energy and Self-Awareness: How reading and managing group energy is essential for creating a productive facilitation environment.

Non-Directive Coaching: Facilitators should adopt coaching techniques that help participants take ownership of their learning process.

Creating Safe Spaces: How facilitators and coaches must ensure a safe, supportive environment where participants feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Karyn’s Session:

Speaker 1 (00:04):
All right. Well, it’s great to be here and thank you all for coming back and for being here today. I am really excited to share what I’ve learned about the similarities between coaching and facilitation. And I had some people ask me some really great questions this morning about how I’m going to do that. So I’m not going to give all that away, but this will be a highly interactive session for all of you. So my first question to all of you, when you think about coaching, what is it? Right? I’ve talked to some people, say I’m a coach, and I think to myself, I wonder if we were talking the same language. So I’m going to do this through a song. We’re first going to hear Lizzo, which is my favorite song of hers, which is good as hell. What I want you to be listening for in the lyrics is what she’s describing to you. Coaching. There we go. And dancing. By the way, get up. I’m not dancing by myself. Come on. Okay. That was weak dancing you all. Come on. Okay. All right. So now we’re going to listen to the Queen, Ms. Whitney Houston and her song. How will I Know? Okay, everybody up. It’s time to dance. Okay. You cannot listen to Whitney Houston and Not Dance. Okay, here we go.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
What is this? Come on.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Okay. Alright. So think about that. Have a seat. Good job. Nice job. All of you. That really put some moves out there. I appreciate that. Okay, you can scan the QR code up there. This is Slido. Which artist song is more aligned with a coaching framework? Annette. Neck and Neck. Really? Okay. So for those of you that voted for Whitney Houston, how will I know, tell me why did you select that song as more aligned to a coaching framework? Yes. Listen,

Speaker 3 (02:46):
I feel like when she says how will I know she’s putting the onus back on the other person and kind of making them think and reflect about what would achievement or success look like.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
I love it. So you’re looking at it from a perspective that she’s the coach, which I hadn’t even thought about. So that’s a new perspective. Excellent, thank you. Oh, right here. Or I’ll let the Katie decide who’s going to go next.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Exactly the same reason. And Whitney Houston as coach in this case, because that’s a classic coaching question I’m going to do. How will I know?

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, love

Speaker 4 (03:16):
It. It’s the follow up, the accountability.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Great, thank you. Are some other questions? Why did you pick which song you picked? I saw a few other hands who picked Lizzo? Maybe give us, what was it about Lizzo song that you decided was a coaching framework?

Speaker 5 (03:31):
I definitely did not pick Lizzo because I agree with them. Lizzo seems prescriptive, like she’s forcing her definition of what good is on the person or us. Also, Whitney’s just better and Lizzo is getting sued by a bunch of her dancers. So I don’t really trust her as an authority.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
I didn’t know that. So new information, yes,

Speaker 6 (03:53):
Counterpoint. I picked Lizzo because I think if I took it from the person who was being coached. So that’s the point of view. And it’s like if I’m feeling good as hell about myself and my day and what I’ve got ahead of me, I’m like on wings. I’m feeling really good about that. Nice. So confidence maybe could have been the one word answer.

Speaker 7 (04:17):
Great,

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Thank you.

Speaker 7 (04:18):
One more. So I chose Lizzo again from the perspective of someone being coached and it’s how do I show up?

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Nice. Okay, great. Interesting perspective. Let’s take one more and then we’ll talk about, is there a right answer here?

Speaker 8 (04:33):
Sure. I also chose Lizzo good as hell because as a coachee, I am the one that’s running the agenda and the discussion points with my coach of how I’m feeling, what I want to do, what I want to see where my path is going and my coach is there to help walk me side by side on how I see that path.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Nice. Thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate you adding your perspectives. So my perspective was that as a coach, Whitney is asking how well I know, right? And so as a coach, my question back to her would be, how will you know if he really loves you? And by the way, is there’s some emotional suppression in that song. I just want to point out, don’t trust your feelings. No, trust your feelings. Lizzo on the other hand is being what we would call in coaching a cheerleader. And so while that can be effective in what we sometimes think of as traditional coaching, an executive coach would consider that advice giving, right? If he doesn’t love you anymore, you walk your fine ass out the door, right? That’s advice. And so non-directive coaching is working to not give advice even though it feels good. That’s a feel good song.

(05:47):
I love that song. It’s a my go me collection of playlists. And so I just wanted to describe in a way that could bring it to life for you what the differences are and sometimes how we think about what a coach does. So today in our session, and I’m hoping my slides are going to cooperate with me, we’re going to talk about how do you apply this then to facilitation. So yesterday we had some great presenters and I did not get to see the last presenter, so I didn’t get to include the information there. But you notice that Eric started us off talking about listening, that we’re connecting, we’re building bridges. And Sky talked about listening without judgment. She talked about vulnerability is cool, and she talked about metaphors, analogies and reflection. And Alyssa talked about that change happens through story that we have to state the problem and that we get to play a little bit with the problem that we’re trying to solve. And then Kathy talked about the backpack essentials of curiosity, engaging, embracing detours, and making it real. And then I noticed the session in the afternoon had some things about breaking things down into smaller steps. All of those are fundamentals of executive coaching. All of them you could see even just through the facilitation that you’ve already been through, there’s a direct connection between the skillset sets of a coach and a facilitator.

(07:14):
So I appreciate them teeing me up so well. Yesterday Sky mentioned tris and actually I’ve used this several times. And before I started working with Voltage Control, I didn’t know what I was doing, I just knew I was doing things. And so it was really nice to put a label to some of the things that I was actually already doing. So I looked it up because I was like, what does that actually mean? It’s kind of an interesting word. And so you can see there, it’s a Russian word and a loose translation is the theory of inventive problem solving. And so what we’re going to do next is we’re going to talk about how do you look at counterproductive behaviors and figure out then how can you fix those. And again, we do this a lot in coaching as well. So you’re going to have an activity.

(07:57):
By the way, anytime you see red on the screen today, there’s something for you to do in your table group. So you’re wondering what are we doing? Or you step out for a second that’s going to be your clue to come back. So individually, I want you to take two minutes and I want you to get some sticky notes in front of you. And I want you to brainstorm. Consider elements that have been present when you have either seen the worst facilitator that you’ve ever seen, or you’ve been the worst facilitator that you’ve ever experienced. And I want you to write down, and I want you to be creative. I want you to not hold back what are the things that you see in the worst facilitation? If we could get some music while we’re doing this activity, one idea or one element per sticky note and just pile ’em up there.

(08:43):
And on your flip chart in the middle of your table, so by the fact that you’re still writing, I think we’ve all seen some pretty tough sessions. Okay, so you’re going to take your flip chart and I’d love for somebody to just draw a line down the middle on the vertical. And on one side I just want you to put all of your stickies that you observed where things did go so well. Okay, on the next step on the screen is I want your team to take a look at and examine and do affinity clustering of what themes do you see? So the ones that are similar are like put ’em on top of each other, put ’em together in some kind of cluster. Okay?

(09:45):
If you haven’t already, when you have your clusters together, give them a label of some sort and then move on to question two, which is what makes these hard as a facilitator to overcome. Have a discussion at your table, grip around that. And then the third step is you need to decide what’s your top challenge and elect someone to be your Slido entrant person who’s going to do that? And I’ll share the Slido in just a minute. Okay, so head on back to your work. All right, so there are 13 tables in here. There should be 13 items entered into what is the worst case scenario that your group selected. So just one representative from your table needs to scan the QR code and enter what is the worst case scenario that your group entered. So question for you all. When you look at that list, what comes up for you? And do we have our mics? Yep. Okay, we’re right here. Oh

Speaker 9 (10:54):
Gosh, thank you. I think all of those are tied to lack of self-awareness. So our table chose energy and from my experience with energy is that we as human beings exchange energy whether or not we know it. And so as good facilitators, one of the first things that you learn, or maybe it’s what draws us into this industry, is that we can read energy and some are better than others, and that’s tied to listening and willingness to learn, be vulnerable. And so I think that all of that negative is tied to not leaning into your authenticity and knowing who you are and how to change for the better and be a better energy space for other people.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, thank you. That was a good answer. Nice. Appreciate you for sharing that. Yeah, so as facilitators, we’re responsible to create the environment in which the learning takes place. The participants actually create the outcome. So if you learn nothing else from me today, if you remember nothing else, you job as a facilitator is to create the environment. You create the container. It’s the same thing that coaches do. We create the environment, the participant or the client does the work. Rule number one of coaching is the client does the work. Rule number one of facilitation is the audience does the work. You as a facilitator, that should make you less nervous and take a lot of weight off of your shoulders because they’re responsible for the outcome. You’re responsible to structure it and create a framework for them to work within.

(12:42):
Alright, we’re going to do part two, flip them back and forth here. By the way, I really appreciate all the work that you’re all doing. Give yourself a round of applause. Okay. Alright. So we did that. Did that. Okay, so now we have to design the fix. So from the one that you selected, I want you to ask this very specific question to your table group. What would it be like if this challenge was resolved? What would it be like in the sessions that you go to, if this challenge that you came up with was resolved, and I want you to do the sticky note activity again. Put them on the other side of your flip chart. Okay?

(13:30):
I’m going to read the rest of the instructions just so I don’t have to interrupt you as you’re working after you do step one, then I want you to, again, what’s your best rank? Those ideas that you have from best to next best, they’re all going to be great. And then I want you to vote on two solutions that you’re coming up with that you would submit into Slido. Alright, coming on back. Coming on back. So if you are the representative, Slido entrant for your team, you can enter the two solutions that your team came up with. There should be when we get done 13 line items in here. No instructions. All right, so as you look through these, and I’ll scroll a bit as we’re finishing up getting the last one or two in here, I’d love to hear what stands out to you. And again, this is what would it be like if we were able to design a fix for some of the most difficult things that happen as facilitators? Yes.

Speaker 6 (14:41):
So if in Dom’s session yesterday you heard him say one of the most important takeaways from the behavior design system is help people feel successful. And in his book, BJ names that emotion and he calls it shine. So it’s a feeling of success that both wires in the habit that you want and propels you to future action because if you’re feeling successful, you’re leaving that session and saying, oh my gosh, what else does Dr. Karen have for us? And let me tell you about the session I went to last week. So it’s the way that you feel shine, and we did have positive outcomes, but we just felt like shine and candor were the differentiators from our group. So that’s why we put it up there.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
Love it. I’m just going to make a quick tie to coaching because when people leave a coaching engagement or even a coaching session many times, that’s the energy that’s actually creating the transformation and the energy that we create as facilitators is what creates the transformation. So there’s direct links almost. You can make a direct connection to me. Thank you for your comment. I appreciate it. One more, yes, over here.

Speaker 10 (15:58):
So I really love how you’re relating the coaching work with the facilitation work, and I’d like to hear what you think the differences are and just sort of building on what you just said because it sparked a thing with me. You get to the end of the last day of a workshop and everybody’s just all jazzed up. They’re pumped up on the thing and then they leave and then that’s when the work actually begins. I assume in a coaching engagement, you’ve got a longer term, you know what the next steps every step is going to be more or less. You’ve got a plan, I guess as a coach and you should as a facilitators, we should always have a plan after the workshop, but a lot of times you get engaged to do the workshop and create some outputs of the workshop and that’s where a lot of value gets lost. So I’m curious as to what you said

Speaker 1 (16:53):
About that. Yeah, I do think there’s a difference there in terms of the kind of once and done of what can be facilitation woes, I guess I’ll say, and the impact that you have when you do small incremental meetings over time with people because there’s an accountability loop that’s built into that. The plan, I just want to go back to that the plan comes from the client, right? Again, and that might be a slight difference in facilitation because you generally maybe have some ideas of things that you’re going to be speaking about. So there’s not a full, the group gets to decide what we’re talking about today. There’s some nuances and differences in that, but there’s many more connections than there are differences. I think that that accountability loop for facilitation is actually something that we all need to make sure we’re solving for and the work that we do as well.

(17:41):
Thank you for the question. Great question. All right. Okay. I’m going to move us forward to a little bit of part two here. So this is a great book. I’m a big book slash resource person, and Claire Norman has written a book called The Transformational Coach. I also like Marsha, I can’t think of her last name, coach the person, not the problem. Marsha Reynolds. So both of these books are great. This one in particular is really emphasizing non-directive coaching. So what is non-directive coaching? Non-directive coaching is really what the ICF, the International Coaching Federation espouses, which is that the coach is not a consultant. The coach is not going to be telling you what to do. The coach is going to be creating an environment and setting up these kind of foundations in coaching sessions. So one is really important that people are whole and capable and competent and resourceful and that they have within them everything that they need and that our job as facilitators and as coaches is to help clear the cobwebs and get through the mental hurdles that we sometimes set up for ourselves.

(19:02):
We build our own prison walls, I like to say. And so our job is to help people see things from a different perspective, give them an opportunity to sit down and work and do the work in a structured, sometimes unstructured environment. So that’s number one. You have to believe that if you don’t believe as a facilitator that your group is whole and capable and competent and resourceful, you really need to check and see. Are you actually then just training because you’re not facilitating If you’re telling them how to do what they need to do, you’re either consulting, which there’s nothing wrong with that, but you just need to be clear about what it is that you’re there to do.

(19:43):
The second is that it’s an exploratory approach and it empowers the participant and the client in this case to discover their own solutions. The fact of the matter is we can never really walk in someone else’s shoes no matter how similar you are, no matter how much your life experience. I have an identical twin, so I know I blew the bingo card, so I’m the facilitator that has the identical twin. And even though my sister and I literally shared a womb, right, we are very different. And even though we grew up in the same house, I cannot necessarily know what it’s like to live in her shoes every single day. So even people that are that close. And so when we put our ideas and solutions onto a group or an individual, I like to say we’re actually stealing a little bit of their power. There’s also a bias that we can work towards with us, which is that people love their own ideas. I mean, how many of you like to be told what to do? Raise your hand. Hi. Hi. Oh yeah, we all love it. And so if we come up with our own ideas, we are much more likely to implement those ideas and take them forward and break them down into small steps and do the work.

Speaker 11 (20:58):
Do you discern a difference between the athletic coach in English, the word coach in athletics has a kind of connotation? Is there a difference between that kind of coach as you see it and the coach in this setting?

Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, so the question is, is there a difference between an athletic coach and a, what I’ll call a executive coach or a workplace coach? In my opinion, yes, because coaching in sports you’re teaching, you’re putting together a structure, they’re running drills, there’s certain plays. I’m not really that into sports, so I don’t pretend like I know what I’m talking about. I sound all like woo. So there’s definitely a difference, whereas a non-directive coaching, I’m going into sessions with asking the client, what is it you want to coach on? Today I’m going into facilitation session saying the thing that we’re going to be talking about is leadership traits. This conversation can go in a million different directions and it’s going to be up to you to decide which of those directions is most important and most impactful. So while I have a framework when I’m facilitating, I’m going to go where the group goes, and it’s part of that being adaptable and letting go of having to control the outcome, which is probably the hardest part in coaching and in facilitation that we are somehow in control of what’s going to happen. I have no idea what you’re all going to do with the next activity that we do, and I hope it goes well, but it’s up to you. So it’s letting go is a big part of this. I already talked about the client does the work, and then again, we’re responsible to create the environment. Yes.

Speaker 12 (22:31):
Good morning everyone. Just to point on that letting go piece, I think one of the things, and we were talking about this at the table, is if you understand to your point coming in asking, Hey, what do you want to get out of today? Sometimes it’s important to have data in advance, especially if you’re facilitating a session. If you know, all are seeing here are are your focuses for 2025, here were the problems, here are the gaps. What do we want to focus on today related to what you said you wanted to do? That’s very critical and important and it can empower you when you get to the end and do a survey. I love yesterday there was a session where the facilitator asked, give me feedback because we’re always improving ourselves as well. So just some points there. This has been great, doctor. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Oh, you’re so welcome. I love what you said. So the idea that I, I’m not just going in free styling, so I’m doing my homework, I’m doing my prep work. One of the things about data is I’m just going to tweak that just a little bit. It depends. Yesterday I was talking to a group about my doctor title and there’s some times where that works for me and sometimes where that doesn’t work for me because it can be intimidating to the group where they think, oh, great, this will be an academic boring blah, blah, blah, right? Kind of thing. No offense, Eric, but that can be a perception that it comes along with that title. And so knowing that I could go in and tell you, I could tell you all the neuroscience of why coaching works, and I could come in with loads of data and research and some of you would be like, yes, let’s talk about that. That’s exciting. And others would be like, oh, right. So we started off with Lizzo and Whitney Houston instead because we’re trying to engage in a way and teach in the debrief. That’s what I espouse is teach in the debrief, have people experience something and then tell ’em what they just experienced as opposed to telling ’em what they’re going to precisely how to do things. Again, just a difference. But thank you for the question. Great question.

(24:39):
Nope, that was right. Okay, so today we’ve been following a participative agenda and we’ve been doing things like the focus has been on the conversation that we’re having within a framework. So I had ideas of what you’re going to do, right? I’m using facilitative techniques, we use tris, we’re doing some engagement activities. The role of the facilitator again is to create the environment, but I’m not walking around going, oh, that’s that idea. No, don’t put that up there. That’s not exactly what we’re doing. I’m asking you questions and you’re asking me questions and we’re the experience that you’re having and it’s a partnership. We’re in a partnership together. I’m not in coaching, it’s also a partnership just because I went and got a coaching credential and I have all this stuff. I am on equal footing with my clients, which is different. When you go to a doctor, doctor, like a doctor that can help you, you’re going to probably take their advice, excuse me, or you’re going to seek maybe a second opinion, but you’re probably going to take the medicine they prescribe or you’re probably going to think about what they wanted you to do or you’re just going to go do it.

(25:47):
That is a hierarchical relationship. The coach and the facilitator, we are an equal footing. I don’t know more than you, I don’t have your experience, I don’t have your background, but we are sharing an environment together. So what I’d like you to do is stand up and I want you to find a partner, someone that you haven’t met, and I want you to decide how have we been demonstrating a participative agenda so far today in this session? Okay. Find somebody you haven’t met. Okay. I’d love just a few shares maybe from a table in the back that hasn’t shared yet today. What were some of the things that you came up with?

Speaker 13 (26:36):
So me and Harry were together and we were talking about that you set the stage from the beginning, you set the environment because I asked Harry, well, how do you create an environment? And then we talked about it and it was apparent you set the stage from the first of the training today that we were going to do the word, you aren’t going to do it. You’re not going to give us your list. And then we come up with our own list. That’s boring as heck, but you’re going to leave us alone and you’re going to turn us loose and we’re going to go save the world. And it was fun. Good. Anyway,

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Thank you for that. Appreciate it. Couple comments over here.

Speaker 14 (27:15):
So a meta question came up for me because we were talking about the dissonance between the two questions. What is the outcome versus what are the solutions? And then I saw you come over and it was like figure it out kind of thing. And so we were talking about creating this environment and does the environment look like a pool or rails? And I wonder if there’s matching the situation to the creation of that environment. Do you go into a coaching session where it’s like, okay, well declare your outcome and let’s see if we can get there versus wow, let’s just open up the floor and let it spill out. I dunno.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
That’s a good question. Yeah, it’s in coaching us a little bit of both. So there is a framework. So you’re asking the client what do they want to coach on? You’re asking them what they want to walk away with at the end of the time together that they don’t currently have. And you’re asking them, how will we know when we’ve gotten there? So those are just three very common questions at the beginning of a coaching session. And those are similar questions I ask myself when I’m facilitating, what’s the topic, what’s the intended outcome? Where does the customer, because we all, even though we don’t have a boss, we do have a boss. All the customers we work with are bosses and how are we going to know when we got there? And then the flexibility is if in a session something has drastically changed. We started off today talking about the differences on what’s working and what’s not working in facilitation, but I’ve noticed a shift and now we’re starting to talk more about coaching and how do we apply this practice and you just throw it out there and you give it back to the group.

(29:03):
So I’ve noticed a shift. We want to still continue on this topic that we originally were slated for. Do we want to shift over and really spend a little bit more time on this? What’s most important to all of you today? That’s how you hand it. You just adapt and flex in the moment. And you do have a structure and a framework that you’re working within and a way in which you’re setting up for people to feel safe that we can do that. We can adjust if we need to. And as a facilitator, that’s part of your role. Does that answer your question?

Speaker 14 (29:30):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
Maybe not.

Speaker 14 (29:33):
I’m not sure if I had an answer.

Speaker 1 (29:36):
Okay, well good. Yeah. But how much direction you give to when people doing activities, that’s a choice. Some people are very linear and they want to know they’re doing it right as opposed to there really isn’t a right way to do things. We’re trying to learn and have an experience. So you want to give them that freedom.

Speaker 15 (29:54):
So in our conversation, we got a little tripped up on the word agenda because we’re like, well, she kind of mapped out an arc that we’re following. So from that perspective, the road was laid and we’re building the content of the road perhaps. So that was one conclusion, which is, well actually we didn’t really wrote on the road, but the road was already there. But then we also saw, well, maybe the question is really have we demonstrated techniques of how we could build a Jenna that’s not fully fleshed out? So we sort of saw two different questions, two different potential meanings in the question.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, because in my mind, I have a certain timing that I’m sticking to and there’s certain things I want to get through. But my first slide, the agenda of everything we’re going to do and how it’s all timed out and mapped out, it’s not that specific. Again, it depends on what your goal is, what you’re trying to accomplish. Back here

Speaker 16 (30:57):
A little bit following up on the outcomes that maybe you were talking about earlier, Jacqueline and I had a conversation around you saying letting go of the outcomes and kind of a little bit of a debate. Do you mean letting go of outcomes or letting go of the outcome that you had in mind? In my world, I have to drive outcomes through co-creation participation as a product manager in software, I can’t just facilitate yay. And then nothing actually happens. The outcomes out of facilitation, whether that’s a roadmap, whether that’s a solution that’s technical, whether that is a new idea. So I’m kind of curious, did we read that right? Can you a little bit explore more on the outcomes and exactly what you meant?

Speaker 1 (31:48):
Yeah, so I would argue that there’s different types of facilitation. So most of the facilitation that I do is leadership. So if you’re in technology or doing scrum or those kinds of things, and there’s certain, and it’s not like I get to walk into a company and go, oh, that was fun, but there’s really nothing that got accomplished, right? There has to be something. Same thing with coaching. There has to be a change. There has to be a shift. The letting go of it is the feeling that you are responsible for it. The group is responsible for what actually gets created. That’s the outcome that I’m talking about. I can’t control what you experienced today. I can’t control what you walk away with. All I can do is set up the environment and have a structure of things that we’re going to be doing. But if it shifts, I also have to be adaptable and flexible to move with that. So I know that in organizations, especially if you work within organizations, I do too, but you have to somehow prove your ROI of the work that you’re doing then taking all these people away and you’re spending all this time. And I think that that’s important. But I guess I would say it’s letting go of the fact that you have to walk out with something concrete that everybody is going to go do next. That’s not necessarily the outcome that is in every session, but it could be in some, right? It could be in some,

Speaker 4 (33:13):
I love that you gave the name non-directive coaching because that’s my coaching background and it’s people who have more directive coaching styles. It’s just like how does that, so could we give a name to different kinds of facilitation, more directive and more, yeah, I mean rather than trying to figure out which one is right or

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, I, so I think that, like I said to me, there’s different types. There’s different flavors for what you’re trying to accomplish. And similarly, when I’m a coach, I don’t always do peer non-directive coaching. There’s sometimes when people haven’t heard of something or they just don’t know or about a resource or something, and I will offer it to them and say, something’s coming up for me that might be interesting to you. Would it be all right if I shared it? So I’m asking permission before I’m giving advice or resources or what have you. Most of the time people say yes because polite and they’re not going to say no, but I think it is using those things like salt and pepper, right? Not if you over season things with too much of your ideas, it doesn’t go well. And people then start depending on you as a facilitator or a coach to fix everything as opposed to, again, rule number one is, oh, you forgot rule number one. Yeah, you do the work, the group does the work. Your question,

Speaker 17 (34:44):
Just want to say one quick note. Thank you for one of the lines you said was teach in the debrief, and I thought that was particularly helpful, so thank you for letting us steal that from you. But the other thing that I’d maybe offer to the group is the concept that I think I also use this as a norm when I’m facilitating, but I say the phrase, the smartest person in the room is the room. And I think that helps continue to create a space for, I didn’t create that by the way, so you can steal that, but the smartest person in the room is the room and kind of explaining like we are collaborating together. We are co-creating together. And so I love what you said, teaching the debrief and using that same methodology, and I think that’s what you helped us participate in this morning and we’ve been doing it all day yesterday, is this idea that we’re co-creating together. So thank you.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, I’m going to steal that back in return. Absolutely. I think she had a question over here too, if we can get her a mic. Yeah, go ahead Kathy.

Speaker 7 (35:38):
I didn’t have a question more than a comment, but when I was talking to Walter over there, we appreciated the non-directive coaching and whoever said smartest person in the room is the room. We felt that in our working with our tables so appreciated. You kind of gave that framework, but we were able to work together to determine what direction it was really going to go. And so how I’m thinking about how would I bring that back into my world also in the delivery space is making sure that space is such that yes, we have an outcome we’re driving to, but the answer sits with the team that’s working on it. So making sure they have that space to kind of do what we did today, kind of set the direction.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
Yeah, I love that the facilitator isn’t the expert. They don’t have all the answers. I want to make sure we get to this woman in purple here.

Speaker 18 (36:26):
Thanks. Yeah. Building off of some of the other comments, I think it’s useful to think of these things as different tools, different approaches that exist on a spectrum. And when we understand the different ways that they can be used, we can then align those distinctions to the purpose. Kind of thinking back to one of the early comments about, well, what if I am responsible for the outcome or a conversation we were having? Well, what if you’re the team lead and the facilitator? So understanding is this a coaching moment, is it a mentorship moment, is it a management moment? I’m actually just communicating, telling the story about the thing that’s already been decided so that we can be intentional about how we’re approaching whatever that interaction that we’re having, again in the facilitation, this a purpose and a moment where full participatory agenda makes sense and works for everyone. Or being able to use that dial as a spectrum. How much do I need to direct? How much to leave it open? But just having the full range of those possibilities available to us.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yeah. Isn’t it nice to have options, right? Yeah. Thank you for adding that. Oh, up here. Yeah.

Speaker 19 (37:35):
I have a question. So I’m watching, I’m participating, but I’m watching the pattern of why we did this session and that’s what happens when you present to facilitators, right? We’re going to be watching the technique as much as we are a part of it. I’ve heard some comments that there’s different levels of experience in the room as facilitators. So some people might say, well, I already know what a facilitator role is. I already know that the audience or the group, the room is doing the work. Is that something just because all human beings and we’re not perfect, is that something like gravity that we have to watch out for because facilitators are going to get a lot of attention that we’re naturally going to keep leaning in towards we have the knowledge because experienced or blah, blah, blah. How do you answer the people that have been like, Hey, I’ve been a facilitator for a long time. I’m fascinated by that perspective. Is this something we have to watch out for?

Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, I think our own ego, for lack of a better word, is definitely something we always need to watch out for. And our propensity, if you’ve always been the expert or if you know a lot about the group or the room that you’re in, it’s challenging to not consult. What I would say is that if you learn the skills of non-directive coaching, you can turn that on when it makes sense and you can turn it off when it doesn’t make sense. But I think the experience of the facilitator and experience of the coach for that matter, I think you always have to put yourself in the learner’s mindset to say, I don’t have it all figured out. I don’t stand up here telling you I know every single thing about coaching and facilitation. This is just the experience I want to share with you. So I think that’s my answer to that is always be watching for that and always keep the learners’ mindset.

Speaker 20 (39:29):
If I could say something about that. The mic runner for us, we explicitly tell our participants, you guys are the subject matter experts. We work for a healthcare company. None of us are in healthcare. You guys are the subject matter experts on laundry spend. We are the subject matter experts in facilitation. And we tell them, you guys are the superheroes, we are the guys in the chair, and we run through action items with them at the end of the meeting. But once that happens, goodbye, they’ve asked us for 30 day follow-up meetings for them. But at least for our facilitation, once we end this session, it’s up to them. I hope that’s helpful.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Very helpful. Oh, one more and then two more and then I’m going to move us forward.

Speaker 21 (40:14):
Thank you for this experience. I’m going to verbally drift towards the question. There’s one here, I’ll get to it. I promise. You talked a lot about coaching, coaching and facilitation, and I think there’s also some nuance between facilitation and consulting as we’ve started to allude to. I think oftentimes in my experience, people, my clients hire a facilitator, but they expect a consultant, if that makes sense. So even though we bring that process neutrality, there’s always questions that are veering into that subject matter expertise. I personally am comfortable having that neutrality. However, one of the things we talked about at our table was that as facilitators, we often arrive in a spirit of service to other people in the room. And I think this is a room where you say empathy and compassion in humans, we’re humans and we nod because we respond to people in that sort of way. So double clicking way into the room, not the client conversation, but you’re in the room and you have those participants who want you to be the expert. They want you to tell them how to do something even though you believe they’ve got it in them. I’m just curious what tips or tools you would offer in terms of how do you help empower people in the room to believe it in themselves if they don’t have that already?

Speaker 1 (41:35):
Yeah, I love that question. I love the drifting to the question too. I’m going to steal that as well. My mind just immediately clicked into coaching because I have coaching clients too that will tell me what to do. I don’t want to think about it. Just tell me what to do. And so the way that I approach that is I say, well, there are ideas that I’ve come up with. We are all smart people. We all have had different experiences and been exposed to things. And I’ll just say, I have a few things I’ve come up for me. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share those with you. And then I’ll serve ’em up on a platter, like three things. One thing that’s come up for me is this. The next thing that’s come up for me is that, and this final idea, you don’t have to do anything with any of them, but that’s the way I handle it, is I just put ’em out there is, yeah, I have ideas and things like that. That doesn’t mean they’ll work here, because what happens is what the trap is, is you, especially if I don’t work in the company, I put my thoughts out there, well, that won’t work here because you don’t know anything about manufacturing corn syrup, right? Well, no, I don’t. And so if you serve it up in such a way that people can say, okay, she’s giving us her ideas, that doesn’t, I may have to tweak it or I may not like it at all. That’s the way I approach that situation. Oh, okay. Go ahead.

Speaker 22 (42:56):
I would add to that too, in the facilitation setting, when someone asks me a question as if I’m the expert, I always say I might want to take a pass at that in a moment, but first I would like to put it out there to the group and let’s hear from

Speaker 1 (43:11):
The

Speaker 22 (43:11):
Wisdom and the brilliance and the expertise from the group first.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Yeah, I love that too. Yeah, throwing it out to the group, the collective, absolutely.

Speaker 4 (43:21):
This is more of an answer than a question, but it’s a useful metaphor that one of my coaches used in certification, which was, I’m going to take my coaching hat off and put my consulting hat on right now and tell you what I might know about this, and then I’m going to take my consulting hat off and put my coaching hat back on. It just helps to keep it clear. Yeah,

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Absolutely. And

Speaker 4 (43:41):
It could be true, the directive coach too. I’m going to be a directive coach here. I’m going to be a nondirective.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
I like that too. I forgot what I was going to say. I’ll come back. Alright, maybe one more and then we’re going to wrap us up here.

Speaker 7 (43:55):
I was going to say, I loved how you offered out your ideas. I borrowed something, I borrowed something from a coach I have, and sometimes when I’m talking to her, I’m like, I’m really kind of stuck. Not sure where to go with this. Let’s go on a shopping trip. So I’m going to show you what the store has. You have to tell me what direction you want to go, what’s going to work for you, your or your situation.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
But

Speaker 7 (44:15):
Oftentimes we find ourselves on a shopping trip.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
Yeah. Another couple quick questions I can tell you back for facilitating and when somebody asks me for my opinion, I’ll say things like, well, what’s most meaningful or important to you? What would it be like if you were able to solve that? So I think throwing it back, trying to throw it back as much as you can to the room versus what you alluded to, and I didn’t get your name but is now I’m the expert, right? And you want to just watch how many times you put yourself in that position if you’re truly trying to embody the structure that we’ve talked about today. Well, my timer is timing down on me here. So a couple superpowers. Okay, superpowers that I know you all have. And that coaching really espouses, which is first one is listening. We listen on three levels as a coach, we listen for the facts, we listen for the emotions, and we listen for what’s not being said.

(45:18):
So when Whitney Houston was Kooning to us this morning, how will I know what were the emotions that are part of that song? If you had to just shout a couple out. Vulnerable, angst, vulnerability, despair. Despair, uncertainty, uncertainty, right? So there’s emotions behind the words that people share. There’s also connecting the dots. If someone is sharing something with you and it’s becoming a theme, you say, there’s a couple of dots I’m trying to connect here. Let me just ask you if this resonates and correct me with whatever doesn’t. So a lot of it’s in how you position when you are going to make a statement as a coach and then always follow up with or facilitator it. Did I understand that correctly or what’s your reaction to that as I share that with you? So these are just techniques and things that we use when we’re trying to understand and listen. The other thing is to create space and silence. Silence is underused in our world today, and I’m always amazed when I just pause and let people think that more and more comes out. And you notice that today people ping pong off each other and ideas get grown from that. My advice to any leader, including myself, is talk less and talk less. If I ever write a book, that’s probably going to be the title. So nobody gets to steal it.

(46:50):
So the more you talk, the less other. You create less space for other people to be with their own ideas. So short statements, short questions brief, and then mirror neurons. Who’s heard of a mirror neuron? What’s a mirror neuron?

Speaker 20 (47:10):
It’s when Well, oh gosh, now,

Speaker 1 (47:12):
Oh, on the spot Could help,

Speaker 20 (47:14):
Isn’t it? When it fires in both people at the same time, or is that totally off?

Speaker 1 (47:20):
That’s close. Mirror neurons. Stick to

Speaker 20 (47:24):
Mic running.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
It’s okay.

Speaker 18 (47:29):
I think it’s when the same neurons fire in your brain when you see someone else doing it as if you were doing it yourself. Is that correct?

Speaker 1 (47:36):
That’s close as well. Yep. You are very scientific. Alright, so it’s the idea that when we, so I want you to, whoever you’re sitting across from, mirror their body language real quick. Pick somebody and just do the exact same thing.

(48:02):
Okay? What that does is it instantly creates comfort. It instantly creates comfort. So when you sit down next to someone, if you want to create a comfortable environment, mirror them. If you’re talking to someone with their language, if somebody says to me, gosh, I’m really frustrated with this situation. I don’t say, oh, it sounds like you’re super annoyed with that. I say, tell me more about what you’re frustrated about. I use the exact language because it’s comfortable. It’s their language. Annoyance and frustration could mean two different things to someone. So mirror language, use people’s words when they share with you. And our second superpower is inquiry. So the process of asking questions, questions that evoke insight, short, brief questions, they usually start with what or how. And then I’ll give you the magical question too, which is, if you woke up tomorrow and this situation was all resolved, what would be different? How would that have happened? What steps would you have taken? Because it forces us into future thinking versus our challenges right here, right now, which we can get kind of mired down in. And then always, where we talked about this extensively is avoid leading questions, which it sounds like, wouldn’t it be great if you just tried to do this? That’s a leading question. Versus what might you try?

(49:31):
So starting questions with what or how. There’s all kinds of books out there on questions that you can use. But those are two superpowers. So I, I’m going to end with, we’re not unfortunately going to run out of time for this part, but I want to ask you, what were your key insights from today? In coaching, we always ask, what did you learn about yourself? What are you taking away with you? And what type of support might you need? So as you end your sessions in facilitation, I invite you to try on some of these questions. What small experiments might you make? And the last question that I always ask is, what else do you need from our time together today to feel complete? What else do you need from our time together today to feel complete? So in my last question to all of you is, this is a reflective question, what will you use from our session today immediately? So take a few minutes and jot that down. And I thank you so much for your time and attention today.

Dr. Karyn Edwards’ session was a powerful reminder of the synergies between coaching and facilitation. By blending non-directive coaching with facilitation techniques, she empowered participants to embrace a more reflective, adaptable approach to their work. Her dynamic, engaging session left everyone inspired to incorporate new insights into their own facilitation practices.

The post Coaching and Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

“The power of facilitation is to bring all the voices to the table, and as you may have heard this saying, “nothing for us without us,” and I love that, it resonates so much.”-Alexis Scranton

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Alexis Scranton from Aligned Impact Solutions. Alexis shares her journey from teaching kindergarten and third grade to training teachers on national reform projects, which led her to specialize in facilitating corporate social responsibility and social impact initiatives. The discussion highlights the importance of inclusivity in decision-making, the differences between facilitating adult learning and teaching children, and the role of effective questioning in overcoming resistance. Alexis emphasizes creating environments where all voices are heard, fostering collaboration, and drawing out collective wisdom for impactful outcomes.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

Alexis on Linkedin

About the Guest

Alexis Scranton, is a dynamic facilitator, strategist, and change-maker dedicated to building capacity at all levels of an organization—from executives to frontline professionals. With a background in global education and leadership development, Alexis has spent her career teaching, training, and coaching across the U.S., South Korea, Malaysia, and Brunei. Her experience spans both traditional and nontraditional learning environments, working with students, educators, and leaders to develop skills, foster innovation, and implement strategic initiatives. In addition, she has managed programs and strategic partnerships that support professional growth and organizational transformation, equipping teams with the tools they need to succeed.

Through her work, she helps leaders and teams navigate complex challenges, align their visions to drive meaningful outcomes. Recognizing the power of facilitation in fostering engagement and strategic clarity, Alexis pursued certification through Voltage Control and has since engaged in ongoing professional learning, exploring a variety of facilitation methods and approaches. She specializes in bringing clarity to complexity, guiding groups toward a shared vision and transformative action, while ensuring that diverse voices are heard in decision-making processes.

The organizations Alexis works with—whether in education, government, nonprofits, or corporate sectors—are united by a common mission: contributing to positive peace, creating lasting impact, and driving change in their communities. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

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 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 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.
Today I’m with Alexis Scranton at Aligned Impact Solutions, where she helps corporate social responsibility and social impact leaders avoid costly problems around stakeholder misalignment, community engagement, and private-public partnerships. Through facilitation of collaborative and inclusive dialogues, she guides teams toward clarity, alignment, and strategy.
Welcome to the show, Alexis.

Alexis Scranton:
Hi. Thank you, Douglas. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, of course. It’s so great to have you. As usual, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got started. Your career began in education, teaching kindergarten and third grade, if I recall correctly. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment you first realized that facilitation might be your true calling?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, wow. Well, after teaching elementary school, I actually moved into training teachers on several different national reform projects. I think that’s when, although I may not have had the name for it at the time, recognition of the need for facilitation probably first emerged.

Douglas Ferguson:
What did that feel like? Do you remember some of those early moments around what you were noticing or feeling at the time?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. Being that, again, these were in other countries and these were major reform projects where you’re talking about big system-level changes. There are a lot of different stakeholders involved, from the teachers themselves all the way up to district-level educators and other stakeholders. With any change, I’m sure you know, there’s a lot of resistance and a lot of emotion that comes along with that. I started to recognize the importance of being inclusive of everyone’s voice, the need for everyone’s input in order to have that buy-in.
I worked a lot with teachers one-on-one in a coaching space, but even in coaching, it is very similar in a lot of ways to facilitation. In order for the teachers to be excited and willing to make these changes being asked of them in the classroom, I really had to engage with them. Again, have their voices be heard, include, and consider their opinions and their voices. That’s, again, when I started to realize, not really understanding facilitation as it separate field necessarily, but the importance of inclusiveness in decision making.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, it’s easy to start cuing in on the dynamics, especially if you’re responsible for helping groups make progress. It’s easy to start noticing some of those things. Often, we’ll talk to folks that have been in facilitation for a while and starting to learn new things. You’ll hear things like, “Wow! It’s amazing to have vocabulary to put toward these things I’ve been noticing for years.”

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah, definitely. Even in education itself, you can use that same approach. There’s different ways people go about teaching, but really the best way to have people to learn is, again, taking that same participatory approach, have people engaged in their learning. Even in that way as I was facilitating learning and training, again not knowing facilitation as a field of its own, or not having the language necessarily, but being able to still apply those concepts, apply it to education and learning.

Douglas Ferguson:
You mentioned reform earlier. I’m really curious to hear a little bit more about that, especially for our listeners that maybe haven’t been in those spaces with teachers, and superintendents, and school district issues. What are some of the things that they were facing? You mentioned systems change. Help our listeners understand a little bit more about the kinds of things they were dealing with. Was this things that were coming from outside policy that they had to just react to, or were there things they were want to change? What was the nature of some of this stuff?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. Well, it all initiated at the national level. The countries where I work, you have the ministries of education wanting to make changes for one reason or another. But often time, we’ll directly relate it to the teaching pedagogy, the way in which the teachers were teaching. I doubt that they had a lot of say-so in the initiatives being started, but they were definitely frontline and impacted probably the most by these initiatives. Then right after then, probably those people that were over the teachers, so your coaches or your school-level administrators also responsible for ensuring these changes are happening, they’re accountable for them. It’s impacting all levels, but the teachers, again, I don’t believe they probably had a lot of input into the decision being made.

Douglas Ferguson:
In your work making it more inclusive and facilitative, were you able to at least bubble up their input? So that, even though they didn’t have a say whether or not the change would happen, were they able to influence how it rolled out or some of the nuances?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. In these situations, I wasn’t fully in a facilitative space as we know it, but I was able to … Again, the concepts of the inclusive voices and so forth really came about more in a coaching setting. Then also, in our training workshops. Again, as a coach who my role was to support the teachers in implementing these changes within their classrooms, but I can’t force them. I didn’t have necessarily a title or position of power, so to speak. It was more of the, I don’t know, I’m forgetting the term that I’m looking for, but just being able to influence them to make these changes.
In order to do that, you’ve really got to have their buy-in, their belief in the changes, the belief that it’s possible, support with the changes. As a coach, although it wasn’t formal group facilitation, it is understanding their needs, understanding the barriers, understanding from their perspective how I can best support and be of service to help them implement these changes that were thrusted upon them. Same thing with the school-level administrators as well. Again, they were also having to make changes and were responsible for overseeing the changes, so really had to support them as well.
Then I also led a lot of training workshops in order to teach these new skills to the teachers. Again, in that way, really being inclusive of their voices, understanding the dynamics of their working environment. I worked across different schools, so there’s a lot of differences when you move from school to school. Really understanding, again, their strengths and their barriers, and just what they needed. I was able to semi-facilitate in that way, in that manner.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. Well, it sounds like there was some natural tendencies, just to be curious about the needs, and not force things upon people. Even the one-on-one coaching probably had a direct impact in the success in the classroom, because once you understood the fears, the goals, the desires, the values, then you were able to address those in the classroom and reinforce some of that stuff so that people didn’t feel so, maybe helpless, as they were navigating these changes.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, 100%. I would say it all has to do with the teacher in the classroom. That is the most effective, the most important, if I dare to say role, is not going to happen without the teacher doing it in his or her classroom. Yes, 100% what you just said.

Douglas Ferguson:
I’m curious, how did this work with adults differ from the work you were doing teaching younger adults, children, K-through-12 I think it was?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah. Well, I initially started out teaching just elementary school. I did later move into adult education. Yeah, totally different.
Teaching adults and teaching children. In some ways, teaching children is a lot easier, especially the little ones. They’re a lot more enthusiastic, and open, and receptive. Whereas again, adults can have a little more pushback and more resistance to things, especially if it’s a top-down approach that is being forced on them without their say-so. When you’re teaching adults and when you’re teaching children, usually the objective is different, depending. With children, it’s usually you’re teaching and they’re learning for the sake of learning. Whereas with adults, oftentimes they’re learning in order to gain a new skill and apply that new skill. It’s just different approaches, different outcomes. You’ve got to really make it applicable to their real life situation and immediate application to the workplace.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that real life application is so critical. I’ve seen, so many times, where folks just aren’t connected to the purpose or that layer of outcome that’s coming next. Often, I’ve seen them get labeled as the troublemaker or the difficult person. Man, as soon as you label them as such, of course that’s all they’re going to ever be. Whereas if we take the time to, like you say, really get into articulating why are we even here, how are we connecting that to these real world needs.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, definitely, the why. Why am I here? Why am I spending my time learning this and how can I use it?

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah.

Alexis Scranton:
It’s not to say children don’t have the same inquiries, because we know you hear children all the time, “When am I ever going to need to know this? When will I ever use this?” But it’s definitely primary for adult learners.
I’ll say something that’s the same probably amongst in both though, is that need for the social aspect of learning. That’s one thing I really appreciated with going through my certification with Voltage Control is just the combination of some asynchronous, because we all living busy lives and need to have a bit of control over when and how we’re learning. But the social aspect is critical, especially even more I think once everybody got thrusted online with COVID. I think people crave it even moreso now.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s so easy to point to how different it is, and yet I think at the end of the day, we’re still humans.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:
We’re still doing the same things we were doing, we just have more nuanced maybe approaches. I think maybe one thing to consider is that kids are more likely just to say why out of the gate. Whereas adults might just be confused about the why, and then not even ask or just be there in their state of confusion and get disgruntled, or whatever. Does that fit with your observations? Were kids more likely to vocalize the why when it wasn’t clear?

Alexis Scranton:
To ask why, “Why do we have to do this?” Not as much. I think children are … It’s a bit of a social construct. They go to school and know they have to go to school to learn all the things they need to learn. It’s just an expectation that, “I’m here just to learn for the sake of learning.”
I won’t say that they’re necessarily more inquisitive, adults are inquisitive, but it’s different. Whereas again, adults, especially if they’re not self-selecting to take a course. Again, if they’re in they’re work environment and they’re being mandated to attend, you’ve got to really, really hone in on why, “Why I am being asked to be here, my precious time being used to learn this thing. Why is it necessary? How is it going to make a difference?” In these situations, “How is it going to make a difference for me as a teacher? How was it going to make a difference for my students?” Again, “Show me how I can take what I’m learning and apply it right away.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. One thing I’ve noticed, especially with groups that are not sure, they’ve been mandated to do it, is not only attempting to explain it to them, but just again, some dialogue around why the group thinks it’s important. Because I think nuance amongst the group, it’s one thing to hear it from me, it’s another thing to hear it from one of their coworkers.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, I agree. That’s why what I really strive for with facilitation and doing this work is for any initiative that is going to be implemented, the hope and the desire would be that all stakeholders that are going to be impacted in any way have a seat at the table, have a voice. Because it’s much easier to … People support what they help to create. When they have a say-so in the creation of whatever this initiative might be, one, they understand what the problem is and why we’re even surfacing that the need to create a solution by way of an initiative. But they could bring different perspectives that aren’t always understood and seen when it’s being given top-down.
When they have that voice, then again, there’s the buy-in created. It’s like, “Okay, now I understand why we need to address this, and I’m offering up my opinions as far as solutions as to how we might address this. My day-to-day life, work life and circumstances are being considered, so that you’re not asking me to do things that are impractical.” Just all these things are considered and included. I think, I don’t think, I know, the research shows that it actually helps to make different strategic initiatives much more impactful. That is the power of facilitation is just to bring all the voices to the table.
You may have heard this phrase or this saying, “Nothing for us without us.” I love that. I just love that. It resonates so much.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s bringing to mind a comment you made in your alumni story about when facilitating, just experiencing a sense of connection and momentum. This idea of with us maybe creates that momentum. Tell me a little bit more about this connection and momentum you feel when facilitating.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah. Definitely. Again, it just gets everybody on board. If you tell me, “Alexis, you’ve got to do this thing,” and I didn’t understand why, and I had no say-so, and this thing you’re asking me to do, I feel like it’s putting me out of my way. You’re not considering A, B, and C, these other components. Again, there can be this resistance, even if it’s passive resistance, that happens a lot.
But when you come to me and say, “Hey, there is either a problem or there’s some change we want to make, would love your input. I would love your perspective, would love to hear what you think is causing the problem.” Or, “Would love to hear your perspective on how we might create this solution.” Just include the voice. Automatically, I’m more excited, I’m more bought in, and I see my ideas included. It’s just natural, there’s going to be more momentum, more excitement around it, and more success.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve certainly witnessed it. It’s making me also think about, you talked about how coaching played a big part in your evolution into this facilitation work. There’s actually a talk at the Facilitation Lab Summit this year around how coaching skills can be directly applied to facilitation and vice versa. Almost this idea of coaching is one-to-one, whereas facilitation is one-to-many, but we might use the same tools and techniques, and maybe even the same questions.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a great point and a great comparison. It is, because if you think about what coaching gives. For those who may not be familiar, coaching, you’re asking questions with the belief that the person being coached has the inherited wisdom. They have all the answers within, you’re really just asking questions to draw it out of them, to help them come to their own realizations, draw their own conclusions. It’s the same thing when you’re working with the group and you’re facilitating a group, you’re really just drawing out that collective wisdom. You’re asking questions, you may be making some comparisons to make sure those are realized. But it’s not you imparting any knowledge, or wisdom, or expertise. Same thing with coaching.
It’s a skill that has to be developed. Because a lot of times, people want to just jump in with the answers and solutions, but you have to very much contain that and allow the people to get to that space. When they do, it is so much more rewarding for them. Yeah, whether it’s an entire group or whether it’s the individual, again, back to that buy-in, it’s like, “Wow, these are my ideas that I can up with, I believe in them, and I’m excited to now move forward with them.” Yeah, it is. Yeah, you’re right. It’s just like coaching.

Douglas Ferguson:
I love that point around the importance of questioning. I’m curious, what are some of your go-to questions to pull that stuff out of people?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, wow. Well, it really depends, but something … Let’s see. Maybe just, “Tell me more about that,” just to get people to elaborate and expand.

Douglas Ferguson:
Great one.

Alexis Scranton:
Another question I do like to ask though, once we’ve gotten near a point of resolve and decision making. I do like to ask on a scale of one-to-10 for example, how committed they are to this decision. How committed are they to implementing this decision? That says a lot, because although they may have come up with the ideas, if I’m getting a low number, now I can dig a little deeper and ask, “Okay, well, what is it that you need that will bring that number up closer to a 10?” That says a lot about what other supports or just whatever it is that has them causing the hesitancy around that.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, I love this idea of asking for ranges, many ways to present that. Then also, pointing the group toward the ones that need some further guidance or further dialogue to get their number up. Rather than just saying, “Hey, we’ve got a majority here, there’s 50% support. We’re good, let’s move on.” No, let’s pause and see what it could take to elevate some of the folks that aren’t in support, and then we’ll have a more robust decision. I love that, that range and then helping work with those that are lower, just how might they elevate their score.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, definitely. One thing I’ve learned about consensus is that it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody in the room is 100%, “I’m excited about this, ready to go.” But it does mean that, “I’m willing to move forward. I’m willing to move forward with this and I don’t see a reason to stop the group’s progress.” To your point, is how do we get everybody to that point where they feel good about moving forward.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. You also brought up a really interesting point. As your asking questions, and connecting with folks, and drawing out this wisdom from the crowd, taking time to point out differences and comparisons, or maybe what’s a pocket that might need attention and helping the group focus there. Very important.
I even talk about the importance of the facilitator doing live synthesis. How are we recognizing what’s happening, replaying it back to the group so the group can keep going? We’re stoking that flame, if you will.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. Well, one of the things … Clarity is the keyword. I’ve recently just started my own practice, I’m excited to say. My tagline I’ve come up with is really just, “Clarity, alignment, and strategy.” This is all done through collaboration, but the first thing I really think facilitation helps groups with is to just get really clear, to your point. Because you just have so many things floating around, and ideas, and a dialogue, and often times things can get muddled or feel chaotic. Having a facilitator first brings clarity to the group.

Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely. You just mentioned starting your practice and how clarity is so important. Earlier, you were talking about the importance of acknowledging the answer within. As the facilitator, our jobs are extract that or expose it. It’s making me remember a story that you shared in your alumni story about the vision board you put together that helped guide your self-reflection and provide your clarity on what was maybe already there, and exposed this, vision, this desire, this goal that you had. What was that process like on creating this vision board? What advice might you have to others that are in this journey of not really quite sure about what to do next? What was that like and how might others follow in your footsteps to find that clarity?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned that process. It just made me think about clarity, but the a-ha moment when a person comes to the realization of whatever the thing is, but that’s very similar to teaching. A lot of teachers, you’ll hear them say, “Oh, they just light up when they see the look on a child’s face when they have the a-ha moment.” When they’ve realized they can do whatever the thing is they set out to do. There are some similarity there, just as to what one thing that’s really fulfilling and similar in both of those roles.
But to answer your question, yeah, I had moved. During COVID, I moved out of the education sector. Had always really been directly in education some way or another. I moved into a more corporate space, although still supporting educators. I didn’t stray too far. But as I moved up, and over, and around about within the corporate sector, I started to move further and further away from working directly with educators, and in schools, and with students. For a time, I started to feel a bit dissatisfied, like something was missing and was desiring that. But then, I also had this really big desire to move beyond just education. I wanted to really be able to do work that I felt was making an impact on society at large. Yes, education is critical and important, but then so are other causes. I wanted to be able to do something that would take me into all of these spaces.
I started a period of reflection trying to figure out what this thing was. What was this skill that was going to allow me to work to support what I like to call positive peace? I didn’t make that up, but just supporting organizations that are contributing to positive peace. Eventually, I discovered the world of facilitation. I don’t remember exactly just how, I couldn’t tell you. But the journey just consisted of reading a couple books, doing a lot of introspection, a lot of reflection over my past experiences and those things that brought me the most fulfillment and the most joy, where I felt the most competent and the most confident. I started to see the path and I started to see the connections. Then whenever I did discover facilitation, I saw the overlap. I saw how a lot of my skills would be useful as a facilitator. That just led me down this journey.
Then I moved on, I found Voltage Control and went through the certification course. At that time, I was working in partnerships, that was my role, so was really seeing the need for facilitation within that role. Especially for internal. Internal, again, the clarity and the alignment that we needed internally, and was able to utilize a lot of the skills that I learned at facilitation in that role. Then, as I say, the rest is just history. It’s just been on that path since then.

Douglas Ferguson:
What would you say is the biggest shift you’ve experienced professionally since you’ve fully embraced facilitation?

Alexis Scranton:
The biggest shift would probably be just in how I identify with my profession. I don’t know if this is true for all professions, but definitely as an educator, that just becomes a big part of your identity. I’m an educator, that’s just who I am. I still feel like I’m an educator and still want to support people in that way, but it is a shift. It is a shift from identifying myself as solely and purely an educator, to transitioning to facilitation. Then, helping others to understand what that means and the power that facilitation holds.

Douglas Ferguson:
Amazing. I’m reminded of a time that you were telling me about where you were facilitating a meeting for your organization’s executive team. If I remember, it was an opportunity to really step up into a new stage, so to speak. I’m just really curious, what was going through your mind leading up to that big facilitation moment? How did you prepare yourself, both mentally and just logistically for the challenge?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, I’m sure I was very nervous. It was the executive leadership team, so you’re talking about your C-suite members. But at the same time, these were my colleagues. In the space where I was working, it didn’t feel very hierarchal. It was very flat and everybody was just friendly, called me by my first name. Although I was nervous, but I just reminded myself, “These are nice, supportive people.”
But furthermore, the reason. Again, I was in partnerships. We were considering several different partnerships at the time. It was my responsibility to present the key points to them, but then we also had to come to alignment and consensus as to whether or not we were going to move forward with these partnerships. That’s where I saw, “Okay, this is a time to shine. This is the space where I can bring forward these skills I’ve been learning and really make a difference.” And help, again, bring that alignment amongst the team and decide how we’ll move forward. These partnerships were going to help impact students beyond just the schools we were currently in, but just help us have a broader reach.
How did I prepare? Well, I again was either going through or had just completed the Voltage Control certification, I had a lot of resources and books at my fingertips that I utilized, and was really just constantly thinking about what the objective was. What was I trying to accomplish, what was the end goal? Just like with teaching, you start with the end in mind and work backwards. And decision how I would structure the conversation to guide them through to ultimately, again, reach a consensus about how we would move forward.
I also had to consider logistically, this team, I worked remotely, but for this particular meeting, the entire team, they were in the room together in another state from me and I was online. That was interesting, but not too bad of a challenge. Just considering the logistics. But it made it easy because they were in the room together, so they were able to converse with one another, and pair up, and do all the things, and just had to look at my face on the screen. It was very rewarding. We got a lot of positive feedback after that, and invited to facilitate in other spaces. And we did, we gained consensus as the goal was to do. It gave us some direction to move forward with.

Douglas Ferguson:
Wow! You really stepped into a challenge there, having to facilitate for the team for the first time, it’s a step-up in maybe the level of stakes in the meeting you’re facilitating, and you had to do it remote while they were in the room.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, yeah. But it was fun! It was good. I think what maybe would have been more challenge is if … Actually, I think some of them may have been online. I’m getting them mixed up now, because I’ve done a few things. I think the most challenging was a meeting I had to facilitate, and there were some people in the room together and some people were virtual. Now that, that’s complex. But having them all in the room together, not as bad.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yes, yes. You just had to make sure you maintained their attention. When folks are distributed across different environments, you really have to think carefully about how you’re ensuring that everyone still has a level playing field.

Alexis Scranton:
Definitely, definitely. It’s all about the participatory approach. How am I going to make sure everyone has space to participate, make sure their voices are included, their ideas are included? I love it. It really, as I sat down and was planning this session, and all of the sessions, I just kept flashing back to, “Wow! This just feels like when I was teaching, having to sit down and lesson plan.” You have all your resources and ideas. When I was a little girl, that’s when I knew I wanted to be a teacher because I used to love playing school. But it wasn’t just the part where you stand in front of your dolls and teddy bears, it was the planning part, and being creative with how you would plan the lesson. For me, I love it. I feel like I was just in my zone. It was just more confirmation, “Yeah, I’m doing the right thing. This is where I should be,” because it was just joyful.

Douglas Ferguson:
That’s so sweet. I’d love to hear more about the 10X Is Easier Than 2X.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah, yeah. That was a book that we were required or encouraged to read at work, which I did. It has been a while now, so forgive me if I’m forgetting some of the key things. A major point of that book was a lot of times … A couple things. One, a lot of times in our lives, we’re trying to do more. We’re 10X-ing. Or, excuse me, we’re 2X-ing, we’re doubling the work. We’re doubling and we’re just making these incremental changes. Which then, we often times end up maybe feeling overwhelmed, or exhausted, or just making progress, but nothing overwhelming, nothing major.
When you 10X, you’re really doing a lot less. That’s why they say 10X is easier than 2X, because when you 10X, you’re eliminating 80% of the stuff. It’s focused on what is the 20%? Whatever it is I’m trying to do, what is the 20% that I need to focus on that is going to make the biggest impact? It also went through the process by which you do that for yourself. That’s what, when I told you earlier, I sat down and I went through my professional history, and I wrote down all of those experiences that had been most impactful to me, I got that activity from that book. That was a part of me trying to 10X my life professionally. How do I let go of all the things that aren’t necessarily bringing me the most joy, or all the things that aren’t helping me to make the most impact? And just focus on the 20% that will make the biggest leaps and bounds.
That book was really profound for me, I really appreciated it. It was actually written for entrepreneurs, which I wasn’t at the time, but I was definitely striving to be one. Yeah, it just helped me to 10X my life in a lot of ways. I think that’s probably what AI is going to be doing for a lot of folks. Just really helping them to just 10X their life, getting rid of the tedious things that don’t bring them joy that they have to get done. Let AI do it so you can just focus on the innovation and the creativity, and those things to maximize your impact.

Douglas Ferguson:
As we look into the future, you’ve spoken about positive peace being a guiding concept in your facilitation, and I would imagine in your practice. I’m curious to hear more about where you’re imagining things will go. Maybe explain a little bit more for our listeners, positive peace and where you’re going with it.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. We hear peace and we usually think of peace of just being the absence of violence, the absence of turmoil and chaos. But the idea of positive peace is really it encompasses the institutions and the structures that help to create and sustain peaceful societies. That’s what I mean when I say positive peace.
What that looks like for me is, in my facilitation practice, I want to support organizations whose missions help to contribute to a more just and positive social environment. That could be a number of things, but they’re mission-oriented essentially. A lot of times, people hear that, “Oh, mission-oriented,” and your mind may automatically go to nonprofits. Yes, nonprofits are one entity, one sort of entity in the space of making social impact and contribution, but there are actual for-profit enterprises that are doing the same. I worked for one. Our mission was to eradicate illiteracy. Although for-profit, the mission is still there. I want to support any entity, again, that’s helping to support positive peace and helping to sustain a more peaceful society.
As far as the for-profit entities, I also just want to highlight you have the corporate social responsibilities. A lot of these big companies, as you probably may know, contribute millions of dollars towards community initiatives, community engagement, really giving back to the community. I’ve been doing a lot of research in that space. I’m really impressed, it makes me feel better about spending my money with a lot of companies, to know the good work that they’re doing. I strive to also support these corporate social responsibility initiatives too, and the work that they’re doing for communities.

Douglas Ferguson:
Impressive. It’s important to have a vision and stick to your values, so I commend you for that. We need more people doing that kind of stuff in the world.
As we come to an end, I just have another question, and then ask you to leave our listeners with a final thought. My last question is if we fast-forward five years, what impact would you like your facilitation work to have? Both personally and for the organizations you support.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, wow. Well, I would like to say that my facilitation has helped these organizations to fulfill their missions. I would say that is the mission that I’m on, to help them fulfill their missions. That really just looks like, again, whatever these social impact initiatives are and these community engagement and partnerships, they’re more successful. They are able to, again, be more inclusive all of the voices that would be involved and impacted, and therefore make more meaningful programs and meaningful initiatives that see success and sustainability.
For myself personally, I hope to continue to build my competence, and just continue to grow in my love for facilitation and my understanding of just how profound it can be. Yeah, I’m just wanting to enjoy it more and more.

Douglas Ferguson:
Well, I’m hoping that’s the case. As we come to a close, I’d like to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, just a final thought about facilitation. That it is really about unlocking the collective intelligence of the people to drive real lasting impact. Again, nothing for us without us. Any time one is planning to create anything for a group of people, be sure to have their voices included in the decision making.

Douglas Ferguson:
Thank you so much, Alexis. It’s been so great talking with you today. I hope to talk to you again sometime soon.

Alexis Scranton:
Likewise! I’ll come back anytime. Thank you for inviting me.

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 to 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 Inclusive Facilitation Transform Decision-Making in Organizations? appeared first on Voltage Control.

We’ve all had that moment—sitting in front of a prompt box, wondering if we’re “doing it right.” With AI tools at our fingertips, the temptation is to treat them like vending machines: input a request, wait for a satisfying output, move on. But what if we’re missing the bigger opportunity? What if these tools weren’t just utilities, but actual teammates in our collaborative process?

When we proposed a workshop for South by Southwest, we knew we didn’t want to stick to surface-level tips or demos. The organizers challenged us to go deeper—beyond the AI hype and toward something more transformative. And so, we leaned into a question that’s becoming central to our practice: What does it look like to truly collaborate with AI? Not just one-on-one, but as part of a team—many-to-many, in real time, across disciplines.

This was the genesis of our “AI Teammates” workshop. Drawing from tried-and-true facilitation techniques, we reimagined AI as a participant in the room. From the very start, we wanted to shift how people perceive their relationship with these tools. It’s not about asking better questions—it’s about asking better questions together.

The results were electric. People didn’t just learn—they transformed how they thought about AI. They saw themselves not just as users, but as facilitators of AI conversations. They began to glimpse a future where AI isn’t separate from our teams, but embedded within them.

Reimagining AI Through Personas

To help people enter this new headspace, we began with something deceptively simple: a set of AI persona tarot cards. These weren’t just warmups—they were intention-setting tools, designed to spark self-awareness and curiosity. Participants drew cards representing different AI roles: the Challenger, the Historian, the Synthesizer, and the Optimist. Each represented a style of interaction and insight.

From there, we asked them to reflect on the following: Which persona reflects how you currently use AI? The answers served as mirrors, revealing habits and blind spots. Some noticed their go-to AI interactions leaned heavily into optimism, while others hadn’t thought to use the AI as a Challenger or a Historian. The room started to buzz—not just with conversation, but with realization.

This exercise wasn’t just about introspection. It created a shared language for teams to explore how they engaged with AI. Suddenly, AI wasn’t a black box or a mystery. It had personality. It had range. It could wear different hats depending on what the team needed.

And here’s the kicker: People started seeing their own biases and styles more clearly through how they prompted the AI. They also began considering what perspectives were missing. In a team stacked with Optimists, who’s playing the role of Devil’s Advocate? That insight alone sparked new dynamics in the way teams used AI throughout the rest of the workshop.

Prompting as a Team Sport

Once personas were in play, the real fun began. We invited participants to explore a real-world organizational challenge through the lens of their AI teammate. What happens when you tackle a problem with a Challenger AI? How does the response shift when your AI wears the Historian’s hat?

We watched as teams began tweaking their prompts—not just once, but iteratively. “Let me try that from the Synthesizer’s angle,” one participant said. Another team noticed their initial question had been too narrow and asked, “What would an Optimist say if they were trying to pitch this idea to a skeptical executive?”

This prompted a new layer of collaboration—not just between human and AI, but between teammates. People began co-designing prompts, inspired by each other’s strategies and observations. Some even started using different AI platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) and feeding responses into a shared Miro board, where the ideas could be synthesized and built upon collectively.

This iterative cycle—prompt, reflect, remix—became the heartbeat of the session. It wasn’t about finding the “right” question. It was about evolving the conversation in response to the group’s curiosity. And that, more than any technical breakthrough, is the mindset shift we’re after when we talk about AI teaming.

Bringing AI into the Room—Literally

Most people think of AI as a tool you consult before or after a meeting. But what if you could bring AI into the room in real-time? In the second half of the workshop, we pushed participants to imagine AI not just as a participant, but as a co-facilitator.

Here’s how it worked: We gave them a live meeting scenario—something going off the rails—and asked them to prompt the AI for in-the-moment facilitation help. Not “What’s a good agenda?” but “What should we do for the next 15 minutes to bring this meeting back on track based on our original purpose?”

The responses were surprising, creative, and sometimes hilariously off-base—which made for rich team discussions. But what mattered most was the shift. Teams were engaging with the AI in the moment, treating it not as a scribe or planner, but as a facilitator. They were inviting the AI into real-time problem-solving—just like they would with any other team member.

And because each participant had a different persona in mind, the diversity of responses grew exponentially. One team’s Challenger AI might poke holes in a proposed solution while another’s Synthesizer AI tried to weave together contrasting ideas. And all of this was visible in real-time on the Miro board, where teams could compare notes, build on each other’s work, and generate collective insights.

The Power of Group Sensemaking

As the teams worked, something incredible started to happen: collective intelligence took center stage. The room became a living organism—AI prompts feeding human insight, which then sparked new prompts, which then seeded even richer responses.

This wasn’t just about AI being smart. It was about humans working smarter with AI. People were teaming not just with AI, but with each other—through AI. It was a case study in group sensemaking, powered by diverse perspectives and iterative prompts.

At one point, we noticed teams prompting with an eye toward others’ personas. “I’m usually an Optimist, but let me try this like a Historian.” That cross-pollination of thinking styles is hard enough with human teammates. Seeing it happen with AI added an entirely new dimension.

We even saw people assigning different roles to different AI platforms—using NotebookLM for document summarization, ChatGPT for brainstorming, and image generators for visual exploration. It was like assembling a team of AI specialists, each with a job to do. And the team—the human team—was coordinating it all in real-time.

From SME to Creative Collaborator

In the final phase of the workshop, we introduced a new prompt: What if AI could serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME)? We gave teams common roles like product manager, designer, or engineer, and asked them to prompt AI to identify what perspectives were missing from their project.

The results were astounding. Participants uncovered blind spots they hadn’t considered. Some even had visceral reactions—one participant who worked in AI said they had goosebumps thinking about how their tools might evolve. AI wasn’t just helping solve problems. It was helping reframe them.

We also played with advanced tools like Miro Sidekicks, which allowed us to synthesize insights from participants’ sticky notes in real-time. We ended with a classic facilitation activity: “I used to think… now I think.” Participants entered their reflections into the board, and Sidekicks turned them into key themes and next steps.

This real-time group reflection—facilitated by both human and AI—offered a powerful closing moment. Teams could see not just how their thinking had changed, but how collective reflection with AI could accelerate learning, deepen insight, and spark new directions.

Using AI to Expand Classic Facilitation Exercises

One surprising outcome of this workshop was discovering how AI could enhance exercises we’ve been using for years. Take the brand takeover activity. Traditionally, we’d assign groups a brand like Nike, Disney, or Chanel, and ask them how that brand might solve their current problem.

Now, using AI, even a team of three can get rich results. Ask AI to roleplay as a Nike strategist and boom—philosophies, playbooks, tone, and style all pop into view. Then ask AI to roleplay Apple, and suddenly you’re switching lenses with ease.

This not only accelerates the activity—it enriches it. Teams can prompt AI to generate visuals, slogans, or mock ads. And even if the outputs are flawed (hello, six-fingered hands), they often spark brilliant ideas. The hallucinations become a feature, not a bug.

Better still, you can have AI personas debate each other. What would Nike and Disney build together? What if Chanel redesigned a Nike product? This “AI team of teams” idea turns solo brainstorming into a rich, multi-perspective dialogue—and invites facilitators to orchestrate that dialogue like a symphony.

Closing: The Future Is Teaming

We ended our workshop—and this reflection—with a simple idea: the more we treat AI like a teammate, the more value we get. Not by anthropomorphizing the tool, but by engaging with it collaboratively, curiously, and creatively.

Whether you’re prompting pre-meeting, mid-discussion, or during synthesis, your mindset matters. Are you just asking for answers? Or are you asking AI to think with you, alongside others? When we shift from one-to-one use to many-to-many collaboration, we tap into AI’s potential as a real force multiplier.

So here’s your call to action: Start small. Give your AI a role. Try a persona prompt. Run a brand takeover with your team and invite AI into the process. Use tools like Miro Sidekicks to synthesize group thinking. Play, reflect, remix. Because the future isn’t just about using AI.

It’s about teaming with it.

The post From Tool to Teammate appeared first on Voltage Control.

“It’s most costly in the wasted human energy and time that goes into things that people in the end don’t care about. That is what’s the most frustrating to me, seeing people pour their energy with the hope that it’s going to pay off, and then in the end, when people shrug, it’s just so demoralizing.”- Jake Knapp

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Jake Knapp, co-founder and general partner at Character Capital, and a former Google employee instrumental in developing Gmail and Google Meet. The episode delves into Jake’s extensive experience in product development, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer needs and market differentiation. Jake shares insights from his early coding and game development days, highlighting the value of iterative testing and customer feedback. They discuss the “foundation sprint” and “magic lenses” techniques for refining product ideas and making informed decisions. The episode underscores the necessity of clarity and alignment in successful product development.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

About the Guest

Jake Knapp cofounder and general partner at Character Capital and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he helped build Gmail and Microsoft Encarta, cofounded Google Meet, and was a partner at Google Ventures.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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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 Jake Knapp, co-founder and general partner at Character Capital and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he helped build Gmail and Microsoft Encarta, co-founded Google Meet and was a partner at Google Ventures. Welcome to the show, Jake

Jake Knapp:

Douglas, thank you so much for having me on. Great to see you as always, and pleasure to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s so good to be in conversation with you again. I want to start off with the first story in the book, and as someone who spent countless hours on a Commodore 64 at a young age that story really resonated with me, and so I just thought it’d be a fun way to kind of open up the podcast to you.

Jake Knapp:

Well, yeah, I started with the Commodore 64 as well, although I could never quite make anything happen on it that I wanted to. When you remember the cassette tape drive, I mean, that seems wild today that the data was stored.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I mean, I even remember coding with a go-to command and just the thought of that makes my brain hurt nowadays.

Jake Knapp:

If you’re listening to this and you’re wondering when we say cassette, what we’re talking about, it’s literally the kinds of cassettes that you’d make, like a mixtape on, an audio cassette. But the story at the beginning of the book is about when I was in middle and then high school and got into coding and making computer games on the Mac computer, and this is the black and white Mac. If you think of the first Macintosh computers, that’s what it looked like. And I spent just ages working on this game.

It was a castle adventure kind of thing. Go in the castle, you get a sword, fighting monsters. And I was trying to do this first person perspective, but it wasn’t like it was rendered by code, I was hand drawing the artwork for each view that you had. So if you turn left, then all of a sudden I had to draw that screen too. And as you move through the castle, I just couldn’t get very far. And anyway, I’ve finally felt like, okay, it’s ready to show to people.

I’ve been working on it for, I don’t know, a year and a half or something, and I bring it to school and on a floppy disk, and I show it to my friend Ian. And I didn’t tell him where it came from, and he’s just starts playing it, and he’s like, “I don’t know.” And my other friend comes in and he’s like, “Matt, do you want to turn on this game Jake found?” And Matt starts playing it and he’s like, “Yeah, you guys want to go play basketball?” And I was just like, “Oh my God.” I’m.

Douglas Ferguson:

Crushed.

Jake Knapp:

I’m crushed. I’ve spent so long working on it, and my hope was, “Oh, I won’t tell him.” And they’ll be like, “Whoa, what’s this cool game? Where’d this come from?” So the thing that happened though was I was just dead set on making something that my friends would play. And so I went back home and I started trying different games, but this time I thought, I can’t wait a year and a half every time before I show them, or I’m going to be graduated from high school before this gets done.

So I would just make the beginning of the game and to try out the mechanics a little bit. So I’d spend about a week on it and I’d come back and I’d show it to my friends and see what happened. And I tried all different kinds of games and finally I hit on this one. It was a mouse going through a maze, and each maze was really fast. You could get through it in like a few seconds. And in fact, there was a timer that would count down. So it was very fast-paced. And I got a bunch of sound effects from Ren & Stimpy and The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-Head, all the stuff that I was watching and enjoying at the time.

All these little sound effects that would play and kind of make fun of you as you went along. And finally, my friends, they started to get into that and it clicked. I remember watching them play and lean forward and get into it and talk trash to each other. So that experience, yeah, it was the genesis of the way I think about products to this day. You’ve got to find something that clicks with your customer and above all else, that is the most important thing.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m really curious, with that lesson learned so early on, were you able to avoid making stuff that didn’t click or did you still run into those moments where you thought you had it figured out only for other people to show you otherwise?

Jake Knapp:

Right. That sounds like it should be the origin story of… And then I went on and created blizzard, but that’s Minecraft. But that is not what happened. I went to work at Microsoft, actually, was the first big software company I’d worked at. I worked at Oakley, the sunglasses company briefly beforehand on their website, their online store. But when I got to Microsoft, I was like, “Okay, now I’m building software and this is a continuation. This is my dream to make things that people love.”

And I was working on the encyclopedia. And in the early days that I was there, so 2000, 2001, 2002, I mean, this was still a product that people really did love and we would work on it and build a new version of the encyclopedia each year and launch it. And there were a lot of really enthusiastic fans of that product. Kids used it to study and it was really cool. But Wikipedia came out right around that time and started to just explode and so it was pretty evident a couple years in that the internet was changing the way people looked for information.

And we, with our CD ROMs that you had to swap in and out of the drive were not on the fast track to long future. So yeah, the thing is, it took us a year to make a product and put it out in the world. And I kept thinking, “I’ve got a new idea, this is going to change the game.” And it would take us a year before it got out there and you know, it wasn’t moving the needle and it wasn’t moving the needle. And this is a thing that can happen far too easily, especially if you’re in a large organization, especially if you’ve had success in the past, but it also happens to startup founders.

So I mean, if we fast way, way, way forward to today, I’m an investor with a fund called Character Capital and we invest in early stage startup founders, and it can happen to them. It can happen to folks who are just getting started just in that garage phase, so to speak, that you can have this idea and be convinced that once you get it right and get it out to people then it’s all going to work and you can talk yourself into just as I did in high school, just as I did at Microsoft, spending a year, a year and a half building something that in the end people see it and they’re like, “Ah.”

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s also making me think about how you can make something that clicks, but then the market can shift and it can unclick. And so it’s about being just super conscious of how things are evolving, what’s new, what’s fresh.

Jake Knapp:

That’s right. And a big part of the message of the new book is getting in touch with your customer and getting really crisp about what your belief is, about what the customer needs, what the customer’s problem is, how you can solve it in a special way, get really crisp about that. Put it into the form of a hypothesis, and then test that hypothesis. And you always have to test your hypothesis about the customer because it does change.

The world is constantly changing people’s expectations, their hopes, the solutions available to them, they’re always changing. And that first started to become clear to me at Microsoft as I was working on Encarta. And when I went to go work at Google in the mid two 2000s it was reinforced for me because we were building products there that really were on that edge of changing the way people did things. I worked on the Gmail team and then co-founded the product that became Google Meet.

And as we were doing these new things you’d find that something that you tested one week and it didn’t make sense to people and they’d never try it, and if you kept at it and tried to make it clearer and clearer, and as the world changed and people got more used to new things, hey, you know what, a couple of months later, maybe they were open to it, maybe you got it right and their world changed. And getting that intersection right requires a constant awareness of and experimentation with your customers.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m thinking about the Foundation Sprint and even the book itself, Click, what was the moment that sparked for you that this is necessary? Because there was a lot of talk of know, is Jake going to do Design Sprint version two? Is it going to be like a newer, bigger, better Design Sprint or whatnot? But you went to the thing before. And so what was the moment that you said, “Okay, I need to go figure this out and write this book because that’s what’s needed next.”?

Jake Knapp:

Well, it’s probably overdue for there to be a Design Sprint 2.0 book because I’ve learned things, Douglas, you’ve learned things. It’s been a while that we’ve been running these and we know there are improvements over what’s in the book, but at the end of the day it’s a lot of work to write a book. Having done it a couple of times I wouldn’t do it unless I knew that there was something that is just driving me crazy to not share it with people. That’s getting a little ahead though.

To go back to that moment when I realized something was missing. So I had worked at Google and created the Design Sprint in around 2010. I ran the first one in 2010, and it was starting to think about it in 2009 based on some experiences with Google Meet and with Gmail where I’d run these one week prototype sessions and then tested it with people at the end of the week and saw how powerful that was. Created the Design Sprint, started to formalize it, went to go work at Google Ventures, started running these with founders and startups and did that for five years, wrote the Sprint book.

I left Google and then together with my co-author John Zeratsky and our friend Eli Blee-Goldman, we founded this venture fund Character Capital, and we started working with early stage founders. And at Google Ventures we had gotten further and further away from the early stage as our reputation grew and as we were able to invest more money in later stage companies, that was always the strategy with Google Ventures, was to put a lot of money to work. But that means later stage companies and those companies don’t have what for me is really the heart of it, the cherry on top.

The most fun part is the earliest moments when you’re shaping the direction, you’re trying to figure out if you can find product market fit in the first place. So with Character Capital, we fast-forward to 2020, 20 21, and I’m starting to work with early stage founders. Again, it’s so fun. And I started to notice occasionally we would do a brand sprint with them or just have a conversation a sideline conversation in the Design Sprint and started to realize that there were some really basic fundamental things that all founders think about and have some sense of, but rarely have made crisp.

And let me be specific about what those are. It’s rare that on the founding team, every person on the founding team, let’s say there’s three people in an early stage startup, it’s rare that all three people will say the same thing if you say who’s your target customer, but they’ll all define it in the exact same way. It’s rare that they’ll all three tell you what the customer’s problem is that they’re trying to solve. It’s rare that they’ll have an immediate list of here’s our top three to five competitors and this is the one who’s the most important.

It’s rare that they’ll be able to quickly rattle off for you, here’s our advantage that we have, the insight, the special capability that the competition doesn’t have. And they all have a general sense of those things, but it’s rare that all of that is super crisp. And unfortunately it’s also rare that they’re really crisp about their differentiation. What’s going to make our solution so much better than those alternatives, those competitors, the ways people are doing things today? What’s going to make our solution so much better that it’s going to make the alternatives look like junk and people will switch to ours?

So they may have thought about differentiation in terms of industry or technology, but it’s rare to have this crisp vision of the customer perception that we’re trying to create. And so it just came up from these conversations, and I remember starting to think we don’t have a good tool for getting at this. The brand Sprint was actually almost the closest tool that we had. And the brand Sprint is all around figuring out how do you want to express yourself through visuals, through language? How do you compare yourself?

You think about car brands and are they more friendly or more of an authority or whatever. And so it’s not the right tool. And so that was the genesis of this first notion that there’s something missing before the Design Sprint. People need to get crisp about what their hypothesis is. And if you look at the teams who have had the best Design Sprints that we’ve worked with, they had clarity about their hypothesis, and it made the results of their sprint better because they knew what they needed to get at, they knew what they needed to assess when they prototyped and tested.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s making me think about how you mentioned that even the simple stuff is not easy, these seemingly obvious basics that teams consistently struggle with. And so I’m curious, why do you think they find them so challenging?

Jake Knapp:

I think it’s hard because it’s like you’re a fish and there’s water all around you, or we don’t think about the air we’re breathing. It’s just there are so many things to do when you’re starting a company. There’s so many things to figure out. You’ve got to think about incorporating your company and making payroll and all of these millions of things. Can we get the domain name that we need? And there’s just a million things. You’re trying to talk to customers, you’re trying to get customers, you’re trying to build something.

And so of course you thought about what you’re doing, you thought about who your customer is and what kind of thing you’re building, but it’s that difference between being at the 100-foot level and being at the one-foot level and being really specifically crisp about it. I think people talk about it and then they move forward doing those first early steps of a project. And if you’re in a large company, the same thing happens. You start off and you say, “Oh, I think this would be an interesting opportunity for us to go after.” And pretty soon you’re building your team.

The engineers are chomping at the bit to write code. You don’t want to slow them down, you’re writing a PRD. And in all of this we have a lot to do. We have to create big documents, we have to create lines and lines and lines of code. We’ve got to do all this stuff that the simple kernel gets obscured. And something that I believe is true about the most successful products that we’ve ever seen in the world is that they have clarity about that simple kernel and they don’t lose that clarity. And so the thing that they set out to do in the beginning is, we’re going to solve this problem for people in a radically differentiated way.

It’s so different from what anyone else has seen before. It’s a cliche to talk about the iPhone, but it’s a clear example of this. So much easier to use, so much more powerful than the products that had come before. And they set out to do that and then that’s what they build and that’s what they talk about when the product comes out. And great products, great solutions do that. And it is actually hard to keep clarity about the simple basics of what you’re offering and to nail it in the right way. And so yeah, I think, I think it’s just true that it’s difficult.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s talk about differentiation. What are some of the mistakes that startups make when trying to differentiate? And how can the two-by-two and clearer project principles help them?

Jake Knapp:

The biggest mistake, I think, is just that we don’t realize how hard it is to stand out in the market and to make a compelling case to people that they should spend any time even thinking about what you’re doing. And so I think the more we go along in life and we have the experience of creating things and offering them out into the world, the more we’ll get the experience of that not going the way we hope. Sometimes just as that happened to me in high school and it happened with Encarta and I’ve seen it happen with all kinds of things over and over again.

Quite often we come up with what we think is going to be a lovely idea, something people get really excited about, we show it to them and they shrug. And it’s not that people hate us, it’s just that there’s so much going on in everyone’s life. And we have limited time, we have limited energy so to spend the calories even thinking about adding something new into your work world, your life, whatever, it’s something we don’t want to do. We don’t want to do it unless it’s really compelling and really catchy and really just, gosh, I’d be crazy not to try this thing.

So even to listen to the sales pitch is a lot. Even to look at your marketing page is a lot to ask. And then you get past that to try the thing that’s a lot. Gosh, this untrusted thing from the startup I’ve never heard of, I’m going to sign up for it, oof, that’s tough. Even if you’re talking about early adopters, tough to get them to make that step. There’s so many things being offered all the time. And then to get people to truly adopt it, that’s tough too.

So I think the mistake that we all tend to make about differentiation is to undervalue just how fantastic something has to sound to penetrate through our natural armor against trying anything new, against listening to any new pitch, against all of the constant messages and shouting that’s coming at us all the time from our inbox, from the news, from wherever you go, everybody’s trying to grab your attention. And to get through that it’s just got to be really, really special. And you should not stop experimenting with your differentiation until you’re extremely confident that I’ve got a message now that’s getting through the noise and people are excited about it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do you ever find that startups will claim a differentiator that their competitor might claim or put them in a bucket that a competitor would never say or the market would never perceive them in that way just because it’s an ideal way of looking at it? And if so, what are your tips for helping them break out of that way of thinking and being more authentic maybe?

Jake Knapp:

I think it’s quite common that if we set out to differentiate ourselves, our products ourselves, you know, individually or whatever, and we say, this is what makes me special, that we might not actually have the right viewpoint on what we’re offering. Let’s use the example of speed. You might think that, gosh, the way our product delivers something it’s really fast and that’s going to catch customers attention, but we might find that when we actually offer it to customers, when we run experiments that they’re not moved by that. That doesn’t matter to them.

They’re like, “Well, the alternative is already fast enough.” I’m not excited enough to change my approach by speed. And actually, I’ll give you a concrete example of this. So we worked with a company called Orbital Materials. They’re in our portfolio. It’s a startup who was founded by a guy from DeepMind who had worked on this really cool project where they developed an AI to analyze X-rays for trying to detect breast cancer. And they were able to beat radiologists at diagnosing breast cancer from X-rays.

And so this guy’s a great mind and a great computer scientist, and he thought, “I would love to apply AI to designing molecules so that we can find replacements for jet fuel and cobalt.” And things that are hard to develop today, or rare, expensive. If we could design molecules, he thinks we can solve a lot of problems that the world either faces now or is going to face very soon in terms of shortages of items or high costs items. So he starts off this company, builds an amazing team of chemists and computer scientists. And then to make this business actually work, to make this vision actually work, they’ve got to be able to work with the chemical manufacturers.

And so to go and set up a pilot program to get a design partner who will work with you as you’re designing these chemicals and hopefully finding some that work and actually be willing to say, “Okay, now we’re going to go through and manufacture some of these and see if they scale,” he’s got to make the case to these companies who have been coming up with their products in the traditional way, which takes years of trial and error through traditional chemistry. They’ve been doing it that way for 100 years.

And the promise that this new way of doing things is faster or higher tech or smarter, which on the surface, if you listen to the story, the way I tell it seems, yeah, well this new way has got to be faster, it must be smart and high-tech, but if you’re a chemical manufacturer and you’ve been doing it a hundred years the same way and it’s working for you, well that doesn’t sound. The old way of doing things I don’t have to change anything to make it keep working that way, it’s reliable, I trust it. So how do you reframe the world and make this new way of doing things sound appealing?

And so they had to try a bunch of different differentiators before they hit on this is the thing that’s actually compelling to people. And it was that they were going to be able to produce higher quality products and that those products would actually be more reliable. That it would be a more reliable development chain. And then they had to prove those two points. But they had to first hit on where’s the sort of the in the armor? Where’s the gap where we might be able to penetrate through the defenses that we all have against new stuff?

And they thought those are the spots they first identified as being vulnerable and then they had to say, “Okay, now we’ve got to prove that we can do that.” And then guess what? Like that ends up shaping the product that you build because first and foremost, you’re now trying to develop a product that will deliver on that promise of reliability, that will deliver on that promise of higher quality products. So that’s why I think what it looks like in real life is that we often, our first guess what we think might be compelling isn’t compelling, and we have to keep experimenting and tweaking until we find the thing that breaks through.

Douglas Ferguson:

You first introduced the idea of work alone together in the book Sprint, and it makes a strong comeback and click. And so I’m curious, why do you think this technique continues to resonate and proves so effective for teams, especially compared to our default methods or brainstorming and the ways that people typically approach these challenges?

Jake Knapp:

Well, you’ve experienced it. You’ve done this work alone together thing I know a lot and it is a surprisingly simple and powerful shift when you have a group of people. There’s some fantastic magic that happens when you have a group of people together trying to solve a problem. You’ve got different viewpoints, you’ve got the sense of perhaps inspiration people will get from one another, you’ve got also a little hint of competition that Douglas is in here and he’s going to come up with some good ideas, I need to bring my A game if I’m going to have anything worthwhile to contribute.

It’s different for me being on my own now with no one watching. Now Douglas is watching I’ve got to do a bit better. And all of those elements are really healthy, but they actually get watered down and messed up by the unfettered group brainstorm. Everyone can talk, anything goes conversation that we will default into as just as humans. We’ll all default into just talking our way through a problem. And that talking our way through our problem is subject to people who are really great at making a sales pitch for their idea. Their ideas will tend to be overvalued.

Folks who are introverted or for whatever reason, just maybe don’t think well when other people are talking, and I put myself in both of those categories, they’re not going to do as well in the environment of a group brainstorm. And then we have all kinds of cognitive biases that come in. So like the last idea that somebody said well that’s going to have recency bias helping it out, or the more somebody pitches their idea, we’re going to start to have confirmation bias. We’re going to associate ideas with people rather than with the merits of the idea itself.

And we’re going to be limited to the verbal, the audio only description of the idea and not the content of the idea. So when we work alone together, I mean, simply what happens is you say, okay, everybody be quiet, here’s the prompt, here’s the question that we’re trying to answer first and now I want you to spend some time thinking about it quietly writing down your solution or your answer. It could be an answer on a sticky note, it could be a back of the napkin style sketch of something or a detailed solution as we do in Design Sprints.

And then we’re going to review all of those, but they’re going to be anonymous and we’re going to look at them in silence, and then we know we’re going to vote on those and then the decider’s going to choose and maybe she or he is going to say, “Hey, there’s a bunch of votes here and a bunch of votes there, but I like this one. Could somebody tell me why? What I’m missing here.” And so then maybe the kind of conversation you have at that point is so much richer, the contribution, everybody’s been able to contribute, they haven’t had to sales pitch and think at the same time, there’s more detail.

Just everything about it is better. And I know I don’t have to sell you on this because I think you’ve been doing this and modifying it and finding your own new ways to apply it, but it’s super powerful. For me, honestly, it goes back to writing code and procedural thinking, trying to break down a function into what are the steps that need to happen to make it work. And when you run a request, the computer, the processor, it’s got to do some work. Our brains are the same way. So it’s also partly about creating space where the brain can process and then return something back to you.

And it just makes so much sense and works so much better than the traditional group brainstorm. So yeah, I work alone together. I found myself coming to the point in the new book, which I have a finished copy of right here. I found myself coming to the point where I was like, “Gosh, you know what? I’m going to have to reintroduce that idea because I can’t assume that everybody else is already sold on that. And I got a little more into it in Qlik and drew some cartoons and tried to really drive the point home of why it makes such a difference.

Douglas Ferguson:

The decider role also came back for round two.

Jake Knapp:

Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

How can facilitators engage the decider? That’s something I’ve always been really curious about, ensuring that the decider’s voice is influential without overpowering others, and how do we guide them toward making clear decisions?

Jake Knapp:

Yeah, if you’re facilitating the decider is your best friend. I mean, not that you have to cozy up to them in some way, but just that the decider makes it so much easier to navigate through a problem with a group of people because at any point that you need to, you can flip to the decider and say, “Hey, can you tell us which of these options is the best?” Or “Can you narrow this down now to a field of three where we can zero in on.” Whatever.

You’ve got a lot of possibility with a decider to snap out of what becomes an open-ended conversation or an open-ended debate at any point, the decider is your key to moving on to the next level, unlocking the door to the next room that you have to pass through to solve a problem. And in the structures that I set up, whether it’s the Design Sprint or now the Foundation Sprint, I’m very intentionally setting the decider as the lock opener into the next room as we go from one batch of activities to the next and to the next and to the next.

And if you’re a facilitator and you’re either running a Foundation Sprint or crafting your own structure, I think that’s the first, the simplest thing is just to use the decider when you’re at a point when it would be otherwise hard to make progress they make the call, they move things along. And you can call on them even before your process is ready for it if you need to break a tie or to tell us, “Do you feel like we should spend three more minutes talking about this or have we heard enough?”

I mean, anything goes. The thing about the decider is that the method has to create enough space for everyone to contribute that it doesn’t just become a decider monologue going all the way through. And so for me, it’s a balancing act between now if I think about a small startup and we think about, hey, there might be three, five, 10 people in this early stage startup, the CEO’s usually the decider, although not always, depends on the content of the sprint, but the CEO’s voice is incredibly important here. We don’t want to make a decision that subverts the CEO, what she wants.

We shouldn’t have the group’s decision, a democracy subvert what the CEO wants to have happen because it’s her company, her role to make those decisions. But at the same time, we should provide her with as many tools as possible to make the best decision possible. And that means getting something good from everybody that she can evaluate and getting some sense of the group’s evaluation of those options. So as we talked through the work alone together structure, it’s everybody comes up with their own proposal in silence, everybody reviews and votes in silence.

Sometimes even people will write down their decision or their proposal on a sticky note in silence, and then the decider makes the call and she’s encouraged to draw out those conversations. As the facilitator, you can intercede there and when you see that maybe the decider hasn’t paid enough attention to this stuff, you can slow things down or speed them up, and I think that’s one of the key powers of the facilitator. But the structure itself also should always elevate competing opinions for the decider, should always give pause to the decider before she makes a decision.

But you also have to be really careful as a facilitator that you don’t let that methodology overwhelm the decider’s intuition. At the end of the day, the most important thing about the way that I work with teams, the Foundation Sprint where you’re creating a hypothesis or the Design Sprint where you’re testing that hypothesis, is that we need the decider’s intuition to get great. It may not be great in the beginning, but we need it to get to the place where it’s great because the deciders ultimately are predictor of what’s going to work.

They’re going to make a prediction and we’re going to follow executing on that prediction, and then we’re going to hope it comes true in the end. There’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So in these sprints we’re trying to zero in and identify the decider’s intuition. We’re trying to tune it and give it every advantage of the team, but ultimately the deciders forming the hypothesis and then the decider saying, “This is the form of solution, I think will prove that hypothesis.”

And every time we run an experiment and test with customers we’re showing, well, here’s what the world said. It said, “You’re wrong.” And when that happens that’s a powerful moment for the decider to get better, for their intuition to improve and improve and improve. The success of our product ultimately will be the result of how well we can inform and improve our decider’s intuition or how strong it is to begin with and how much we can isolate and clarify it. So anyway, that’s a lot, but as a facilitator, that’s what I see my job is doing.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love the callback to the swords and sorcery games and the decider unlocking the next room.

Jake Knapp:

It’s a quest. It’s always a quest.

Douglas Ferguson:

That it is. Maybe there’s another book title in the future.

Jake Knapp:

It could be. It could be a good one. I like that word. I always a big fan of a tribe called Quest and so the word quest is just always a special.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk about magic lenses for a moment. You talk about it being an activity or a way to explore conflicting opinions, which I think is really important when we’re bringing groups together and harnessing the power of diversity. So how can facilitators burst guide teams through this process?

Jake Knapp:

Magic lenses is an activity that if I do say so myself, I’m really proud of it. I think that for the past, I suppose 15 years, you could kind of boil down what I’ve been doing with Design Sprints and now the Foundation Sprint, you can boil it all down to helping people make decisions about things that are hard to decide on. And part of that is time boxing, so you accelerate those decisions, but part of it also is evaluating multiple paths, making sure we’ve clarified what those paths are and identifying them in a Design Sprint that’s sketching different solutions that we might prototype and build in a Foundation Sprint.

On day two of the Foundation Sprint, it’s about identifying the approaches that we might take to solving this problem. So not the specific solution, but like are we building a plugin for somebody else’s software? Are we building standalone software? Are we building a dashboard? Are we building a chatbot? There’s all these different broad paths that we might take and then in a Design Sprint we’ll get really detailed on, okay, what’s the form of that thing look like? And making a choice like this, when I thought about it for these early stage founders, it’s you have the opportunity to pre pivot.

Often you’re a founder and you start building something, it’s just not working out, and like me showing my friend Ian, this computer game, I realize I’ve got to go in a different direction. I’ve got to pivot. Well, if you could have that moment of thinking, so what are my other options? If you could do that first, you might either have more conviction about the path you’re already on or you might say, “Gosh, this other one, when I evaluated in the context of my differentiation and everything I’ve been thinking about with the basics of my project, I actually think I have a better shot at this other path I’m going to pre pivot.”

Anyway, that’s a huge decision to make. And even though in a Foundation Sprint we’re only forming a hypothesis, we’re going to experiment right away with a Design Sprint and if I haven’t made it clear already, the idea is you run this two-day Foundation Sprint and then you go right away into five-day Design Sprints to test it, to run the experiments. But even if it’s just a week at a time experiment it’s still a big decision. We want it to be very carefully considered. So the idea with magic lenses is to use two by two charts, that old business school, standby to plot out different viewpoints on our options.

So let’s say we’ve got three different options for how we might approach this problem, option A, option B, option C, we’re going to look at those through the customer lens. What solves the customer’s problem in the best way possible? And plot that out on a two by two. Think of the two factors that for us are most important for the customer solution. And which of these is the easiest to use and solves their problem in the best way? And that’d be in the top right. Maybe option A is in the top right there. And then we think about the money lens. Well, we’re going to need to turn this into a business.

So which of these has the highest long-term value to a customer? What do we suspect people would pay for the most? Which has the largest possible audience of customers? And now maybe option B is in the top right. And option A in this one maybe it’s in the top right quadrant, but it’s not pegged right into the corner there and option C is somewhere in the mix. And now we look at growth. Not only what are the most potential customers, but what do we think is the easiest to adopt? And now we look at the pragmatic view, which of these is the easiest to build, the fastest to build?

We look at our differentiation. If our differentiators are reliability and high quality, which of these approaches best delivers on those factors? And then there are always other lenses particular to a company. So people can create their own two by two charts. What happens if we’ve color coded option A, option B and option C? You can imagine these charts side by side by side, we zoom out on those and we look at where the colors are, you can often see a pattern often the same option is in the top right in every chart. That actually happens a good amount of the time and you think, well “Gosh, clearly we can feel good about pursuing that option.”

Sometimes it’s a mix. And that’s actually helpful too, because if we’re feeling conflicted about proceeding on our project, it might be that it’s because it’s just not clearly as good at growth as it is at the pragmatic view or as it is at differentiation. And so now we know growth is going to be a challenge, but maybe we still have conviction. Maybe when it’s mixed we’ll say one of these lenses is truly the most important. And even though we don’t have consensus among all the lenses, this one is so important. That’s the way that we’re going to make this decision. For us, it’s all about the customer.

We’re just going to deliver the thing that is best for the customer and trust that the rest of it will work itself out. Any of those is a viable way to move through magic lenses, make a decision on an approach and graduate to having your founding hypothesis. If you’re the facilitator helping teams to move through that is a really special moment. There is just mechanics of getting people through plotting charts, and we can talk about that if you like. It helps to do one axis at a time and to have the decider or one person who’s an expert on each domain talk about those charts.

But what’s really special about this activity is that you make a very complex situation, visual. You capture it in a way that the brain can parse, whereas when all of these factors are in our heads, it’s very hard to have clarity about what’s going on through all these different lenses. As a facilitator, your guidance to the decider about what you see, about where you think they should give a little bit of extra care, if it’s consensus, it’s easy, but when there’s not consensus deciding, okay, is it the best idea here if I have the whole team vote on which lens is most important?

Will that give the decider the sort of pause that they need to consider this? How do I make sure that the democracy of the team doesn’t outweigh the intuition of the decider? And this is an area where your judgment, your expertise, your experience, your gauge of human nature and interaction and what’s going on all become really important. It’s a very powerful moment. And it’s just potentially, I think, a super tool that you can use not only in the Foundation Sprint, but in any situation where people face a complex decision. And the stakes are pretty high for getting that decision right.

Douglas Ferguson:

You have a gift for simplifying complex decisions, whether it’s exploring these conflicting opinions or selecting what to prototype into these clear step-by-step recipes.

Jake Knapp:

Well, thank you.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m super curious, what’s your secret for turning these tough, abstract decisions into straightforward processes anybody can follow?

Jake Knapp:

I was talking to my son, Luke, recently about, you know, life and careers and work and he was talking about there’s a piece of advice that folks sometimes give which is follow your bliss, and I am actually a bit of a skeptic of that advice. I think that following what’s completely your bliss is telling a startup founder to like, “Well just build whatever like sounds fun to you.” And that could work out you. There are certainly examples where that does work out, but it really only works out if there’s a market for your bliss.

And so I told him, I thought perhaps a different way of thinking about it is, you should be aware of your bliss, you should make time for your bliss to plug another book of mine. Your bliss may be a hobby, but you must find a way to become obsessed with the thing that you do. If you can become obsessed with it, if there’s enough interest and excitement that you can really, for the long haul, dig into this thing and be obsessed with getting it right, then that’s I think a more likely predictor of both your satisfaction and happiness as an individual and that your work will find a market of people, an audience of people.

That it’ll matter to people. And for better or for worse, I became obsessed with the beginnings of projects and those decisions that people made and I just can’t stop thinking about it. And it drives me nuts when I’m in a conversation and we start to make a decision and sometimes it’s me who’s screwing it up, but I can tell that in some way we’re screwing up the way where we’re processing it. We’re taking too long, we’re not considering enough options. It just feels like, “Oh man, something’s going wrong here.”

Maybe I’m not naturally even like the most decisive or naturally the most analytical or rational person, part of this has just been trying to decode what’s going on in my own brain and try to make those meetings and those moments go right. And I would have thought that I’d be done with it by now, but it just seems like I still am uncovering parts where I’m like, “Oh, I want to fix that too.” So I’m just obsessive and gosh, if it’s helpful for folks that’s fabulous because I at this point can’t stop.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. I’ve got a few rapid fire ones here to end on, so here we go. Beyond the example in the book, have you ever used a funny or memorable eject lever message to carve out focus for a good emergency?

Jake Knapp:

I have migraine headaches and I don’t have them very bad compared to a lot of people who have them, but if you have migraines, you might know that there’s a pre migraine part and a post migraine part, they affect your whole body and your whole brain in a way that goes beyond the headache. And in fact, for me, often there is no headache. I’m really lucky in that way. There’s often no headache, but there’s still a mental fog that happens and body aches and I mean, it’s wild.

I may have overplayed the effect of the mental fog at times to buy myself time to think something through, to list out my options, analyze them, to perhaps work with folks. And that’s an eject lever that I have used from decisions in the past might, if you are talking to me and I need to make a decision about something and I say that I have a migraine now when I would need to get back to you in a couple of days, it might just be that I need time to think. And actually, now that I say it, I don’t know why I’m not just honest about that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Just you can never confirm nor deny that you have a migraine. Amazing. Well, okay, this is a fun one. So you compare differentiation to pizza toppings, and if the founding hypothesis were a pizza, what are some essential ingredients that always belong and what are some questionable toppings that teams insist on including?

Jake Knapp:

Yeah. Well, I talk about it because differentiation is something that if you get it right, it’s still probably not going to be the thing for everybody. Not everybody agrees on the perfect pizza. So we talk about the iPhone as this product that’s such a huge success story. And yet lots of people choose not to get an iPhone, they get something else. And so pepperoni pizza is not for everybody. Some folks are like, “I need a different flavor.” And so part of differentiation is getting the ingredients right.

And when we talk about the founding hypothesis it’s if we solve this problem for this customer with this approach, then they’re going to choose it over this competitor because we’re going to be different in these ways. So you’ve got some variables there. The customer, the problem, the approach you’re taking, the competitors and the differentiators, and each of those ingredients they are important, but you might be wrong about them. So when you form your founding hypothesis, you might be sure that your customers have this problem.

And then you might start talking to customers and realize, “Man, the people we’re talking to, actually, they’re not the right people at all.” And so that’s almost like the cheese. That’s the thing that seems the most basic, well, who’s the customer? And you start talking to people and you’re like, “Oh man, these people are lactose intolerant.” Or these people they like feta, whatever. You’re off base with this thing that you wouldn’t even considering it. You’re just like, “Everybody loves mozzarella.” And well man, maybe they don’t or maybe your mozzarella is not good enough or whatever.

And so any one of those, actually, I can think of examples with any one where we’ve seen startups go out and realize, oh, the customer is right, but the problem, this is not a problem that’s a big enough deal for them. It’s not painful enough for them to warrant trying something new or we have the competition wrong. We thought it was this and actually it’s just that they’re doing nothing. They’re not aware of all these solutions that exist because they just really don’t care, again, which could be back to the problem’s not that important. The differentiators is one that I always harp on because it’s so commonly missed and it’s something you have to work at to get right. But any one of those things could be a bit off, which is why we test. That’s why we experiment.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s why it’s a hypothesis.

Jake Knapp:

That’s why it’s a hypothesis. Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you could wave a magic wand and instantly grant every facilitator or startup founder one essential insight from Qlik, what would it be?

Jake Knapp:

I think that the most essential insight is you cannot take for granted the basics of your business, of your strategy, of what you’re doing. In a startup, in a big project, in any organization, even in things that we do in our lives, we very quickly become blind to the simple core underlying things. And we can very quickly forget that the most important thing for a startup for a big project is that in the end that people care about it, that it clicks, that it does the thing we hope it will do for people.

And it’s worth taking time to reexamine those basic obvious things, get them really crisp. And so if you’re a facilitator, you should never hesitate to ask the dumb questions. And this book is full of dumb questions that I was embarrassed to ask. And so I wrote a book and created a framework to help me ask those dumb questions. And there’s this set of dumb questions, but there are a lot of dumb questions out there that if you’re a facilitator you’re actually in a really special and unique situation where you can ask those.

You’re coming in as an outsider and you can say, “Hey, look, I know nothing. So could you explain that acronym you just used? Could you tell me why we’re doing this thing?” You can ask those almost rude basic questions. And I promise you, 80 to 100% of the people on the team who should know the answer to it, they’re going to thank you for asking those, for clarifying the basics. You should never be shy about asking the simplest questions. And it’s always wise to rewind and get those basic questions nailed first. The assumptions we make are often where we fail.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s such a gift to a team when you can shine a light on some of those things that maybe they’ve been afraid to bring up because it’s like, “I think we’re supposed to have this figured out, but I don’t know if I want to admit that we’re so far off base here.”

Jake Knapp:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And there are just far too many situations where those oversights, not through any malice on anybody’s part or even really malpractice, it’s just our human nature that we’re like, “Okay, good, we know what we’re doing, let’s go.” And those oversights end up being the thing that makes it fail in the end. And what’s a bummer about that, I mean, sure, from a Machiavellian perspective as an investor or a capitalist perspective, I guess, I’m just hoping that if we get those things right, your business is more likely to succeed and if I’ve invested in your business, then I’m going to make money in the end so I’m very self-interested in getting this stuff right.

But it’s most costly in the wasted human energy and time that goes into things that people in the end don’t care about. And that is what’s the most frustrating to me, is seeing people pour their energy with the hope that it’s going to pay off. I’m putting all of this time in, but in the end it’s going to be worth it because we’re going to solve this problem for customers, and then in the end when people shrug, it’s just so demoralizing. You’ve lost all that effort. You can’t 100% solve that, but if we get the basics right and we experiment to prove to ourselves to every extent possible that they’re right we have a chance of saving a lot of human effort, and that is very worthwhile.

Douglas Ferguson:

Very well said, sir. And I think that brings us to our end. And I just want to say thanks for the conversation, Jake. It’s always a pleasure being with you, and I look forward to our next time.

Jake Knapp:

Always a pleasure to speak to you as well, Douglas. And listeners, if you made it this far, check out the clickbook.com and see what you think of the book. We’d love to hear what you think after giving it a read.

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 Finding The Click appeared first on Voltage Control.

“You can talk the talk all you want, but the group is going to know if you’re not walking the walk. As the facilitator, you have to be the one that’s ready to lead in what you’re asking them to do.”- Caterina Rodriguez

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Caterina Rodriguez (Cat), a facilitator consultant and strategic leader at ADL. Cat shares her journey from anti-bias education to organizational effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of authentic connections in facilitation. She discusses the challenges of adopting a new facilitation style and highlights the transformative power of collaborative group experiences. Cat stresses the need for facilitators to embrace uncertainty and model genuine engagement, advocating for a method-agnostic approach. The episode underscores the value of building trust and fostering inclusive, change-ready cultures within organizations.

Show Highlights

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About the Guest

Caterina Rodriguez is a facilitator, consultant, and strategic leader dedicated to helping organizations build inclusive, change-ready cultures. With a background in program and learning design, facilitation, and organizational change, Caterina specializes in designing experiences that foster collaboration, co-creation, and meaningful outcomes. As the Director of Strategic Initiatives & Continuous Learning at ADL, she leads learning and capacity-building initiatives to strengthen organizational effectiveness. In her consulting work, Caterina designs and facilitates experiences that foster collaboration, co-creation, and strategic alignment to help teams navigate complexity and drive lasting impact. From guiding executive teams through complex change to developing large-scale programs, facilitating high-stakes conversations, and equipping teams with facilitation tools and leadership skills, Caterina enables organizations to build capacity for alignment, collaboration, and long-term success.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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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 Caterina Rodriguez, a facilitator, consultant, and strategic leader dedicated to helping organizations build inclusive change ready cultures. Cat serves as the director of strategic initiatives and continuous learning at ADL, where she leads learning and capacity building initiatives to strengthen organizational effectiveness.

In her consulting work, Cat specializes in designing and facilitating experiences that foster collaboration, co-creation, and strategic alignment, helping teams navigate complexity and drive lasting change. Welcome to the show, Cat.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Thanks so much for having me, Douglas. Excited to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

So great to have you. To get started, let’s hear a little bit about how you started your facilitation journey.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, so I’ll go back to right as I started working after I graduated grad school, and I had just started as a program manager at ADL. And I was in charge of both managing some of our anti-bias education programs locally, but I also would sometimes go out and facilitate them myself.

And that was the first time that I had ever facilitated, not presented, or given a training or a talk, where the majority of the program was actually focused on creating discussions, walking the groups through really interactive activities. And I remember getting onboarded to deliver these programs, and it blew my mind a little bit. I had never, not just not facilitated, I had never been in a session that was facilitated up to that point. Every experience I had had, had been very much kind of the talking at you, presenting at you style,

Douglas Ferguson:

What blew your mind the most?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Honestly, seeing the difference in the amount of engagement from participants, and the fact that by the end of the session, they had done just as much, if not actually a whole lot more talking than I had, and something inside of me clicked. I just went, that felt right. It wasn’t, I’m here to teach you what I know, but rather all of a sudden I kind of noticed this shift of, I’m here to help you uncover what you already know and what you’ve experienced, and then start to become a little bit more aware of, okay, then how do I continue growing from where I’m currently at?

And so all of a sudden it became less about me and more about the group that I was working with. And that felt super right, because I had never thought about learning being this co-creative process, versus the more traditional style of learning, which is more, there’s one or two people, right? They hold some kind of expertise, and you just get all the knowledge that you need from them.

But I think when it comes to anything like whether it’s, you know, anti-bias education at the time, or now a lot more, you know, learning and development or organizational effectiveness work that I do, a lot of that is really around the messiness of people. And so it’s really not nearly as effective to talk at people about that messiness rather than actually helping them explore that messiness, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

It does. I want to come back to your point about it feeling right. When did you first notice that feeling? Was it when you were in the training, and learning these techniques, and how they were going to structure the time with students? Or was it when you were facilitating it for the first time? Or like when did you notice that?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, so during the onboarding when I was getting trained, I think it was just a whole lot of anxiety. So that was definitely not the moment that it felt right. It was just a totally new approach to me. So I was absorbing. And we had tons of space to practice, but I think that always an onboarding always feels kind of like, okay, well this is artificial, so of course it’s going to go in a nice way.

For me, it clicked the first time that I actually got out into the field, where I was working through my agenda with the students, and all of a sudden I noticed that it became a group conversation, and things were starting to surface that weren’t necessarily directly related to the question I asked, but rather things were building up and up and up and people were responding to what other people were saying, and digging a little bit deeper and asking questions of each other. And so for me, it was the first time that I actually got out on the field and worked with the group.

I’m painting a very idyllic picture. It did not go perfectly right at all, but just the drastic shift in experiencing that was really wild. And so after that first time I was hooked. I was super hungry to really start to take facilitation more of as a craft versus just, you know, this is just a particular style in which I deliver this specific program for this specific organization. And so I started to, kind of, start to pay attention to facilitation is something more than just how to do something, but rather a whole, you know, mindset shift, approach shift, externally. I hadn’t quite yet, because now in my current role, I’m fully internal at the time, right? I was still associating facilitation with this is how I work with external stakeholders. And it hadn’t quite sunk in that this is just in general an approach to working with people regardless of whether they’re on my team, outside of the organization, so on and so forth.

So yeah, I would say the first time I went out in the field was when it clicked, but it was also when I very quickly realized I had a whole lot more to learn and practice.

Douglas Ferguson:

Coming back to those feelings of anxiety during the training and prep, how much of this new way of working, or the mystery of like approaching training in this way, how much did that have an impact in the anxiety or the uncertainty?

Caterina Rodriguez:

I mean a whole lot, honestly. It really leans into all the skills that, I think traditionally they’re called soft skills, when honestly they’re just leadership skills, right? And so the unfamiliarity with facilitation as a style, as an approach, as a practice was a big part of it. Because it was two things that I was learning. It was the content and the kind of the subject matter piece of the programs while at the same time learning how to deliver it in an entirely different way.

And for me, the subject matter, that’s easy, right? You study, you learn it, you’re good. But learning an entirely different way to engage groups, that takes time to craft and to kind of find your authentic voice. Because that was another piece too, that because it was so new to me and I was immediately implementing it on the ground at the same time, I was still looking at some of the other facilitators I was working with because we always did it in a co-facilitation pair. And so, I was trying to pull from the best things that I was noticing, but I hadn’t quite found my own authentic facilitation style and voice. I was still mimicking for a long time.

Douglas Ferguson:

What helped you move past the mimicking? Were there steps that led to something that felt more authentic?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, honestly, a lot of trial and error, and this is going to sound really funny, trial and error with actual groups of participants. So one of the things that, you know, I’ll come back to that I so appreciate now about voltage controls or community of practice, but I didn’t have that back then. There were no spaces to practice, to unpack, to ask questions of facilitation as a practice.

I just got out there a lot in my role as a program manager. I didn’t necessarily have to be out in the field facilitating that much. We had a core group of independent contractors that we would deploy, but I liked getting out there. And so I would co-facilitate quite a bit.

And it was through a lot of trial and error and feeling and seeing the reactions of the groups to me, that kind of started to cue me in on that I wasn’t bringing my authentic self into it. And that is a very hard realization, all of a sudden, to notice that the group you’re working with is kind of almost calling your bluff a little bit.

I started to just kind of take a little more risks in terms of just showing up as myself. I wasn’t trying to be as gentle as maybe the facilitator that comes off as almost like a super caretaker. I wasn’t trying to be the most boisterous, like hilarious comedian in the room. I wasn’t trying to be the most elevated of subject matter experts. I just kind of showed up as Cat, and all of a sudden I started to realize that participants were responding to me entirely differently. They were starting to feel like they were making genuine connections with me. And I noticed that in the work itself, it started to lead to much more interesting conversations, because all of a sudden they noticed that I wasn’t performing. They noticed that I was just there to connect with them and help them connect with each other, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

It does. And you know, it’s much easier for people to connect when we’re able to model what connection is like.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Definitely. That is, honestly, the biggest thing in facilitation across the board. Whether it was previously leading anti-bias education programs or now doing a lot of organizational effectiveness work, it is about authentic connection across the board, because that is going to be what kind of… You can say that you’ve designed a container or a space for people to come in and you know, build up that trust and do these things together.

But you can talk the talk all you want. The group is going to know if you’re not walking the walk, essentially. And I do think as the facilitator creating that container, you have to be the one that’s ready to lead in what you’re asking them to do, at the end of the day. So for me, modeling that connection is huge.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know, I was thinking about the comment you made earlier on the shift between anti-bias to org effectiveness, and I’m curious what led to that shift? What gave you the inspiration and confidence and what were the bricks that were laid to get you there?

Caterina Rodriguez:

So I had started to get a little bit involved with helping deliver our Train the Trainer, which is our internal onboarding program when we hire new staff or new independent contractors for our programming. And so I became part of the behind the scenes team that helps people learn about facilitation, and I absolutely loved it.

Quickly thereafter, I shifted from being on our regional team to our national education team, and that’s when I became the director of our anti-bias programs. And half of my job was around the program management piece, but the other half became very quickly a lot of this internal onboarding and capacity building for facilitating our programming. And that was my favorite part of the job. Like, I absolutely adored starting to work more internally to teach people about facilitation and create spaces for them to practice, start to bring to the team new designs and methods that were out there. Or in the anti-bias field, you’re leading really fraught conversations that have only gotten more polarized with time.

Starting to think about how do I help staff and contractors be able to lean into the inevitable conflict and uncertainty that’s going to come up in those spaces, with practices like how do we ask curious questions, how do we reframe, how do we actually throw it back to the group? And use the wisdom of the group, things like that to help the group probe deeper as opposed to constantly having them turn to you. Like you hold all the answers, so what do you think?

I fell in love with teaching people about facilitation. And that part of my portfolio, although it wasn’t my primary role at the time, kept expanding and expanding. So first it started with helping with the Train the Trainer. Then I started leading the Train the Trainer, Covid hit, and I completely redesigned it to be delivered virtually once Covid hit.

And that then kind of stepped me into a completely different echelon of thinking about facilitation, because I’ve been remote since 2018, but there wasn’t a lot of that being done virtually. I was still traveling to help lead Train the Trainers, and then Covid hit and I was like, oh, I now have to reimagine this craft that I absolutely am in love with, into doing it completely virtually. And that’s a whole different beast. That was a really, really fun process to basically have to redesign from the ground up, how do you train people on facilitation, which a lot of people have this concept, oh, you got to be in person and you do the cool things with the sticky notes on the wall, right? To at the time, not just going virtually, but teaching people how to be interactive on Zoom, and how do we do breakouts and this and that. So it took on a whole different technical meeting.

At the same time that I was redesigning this program, I was also having to teach myself a whole lot more about technology than I ever knew. And I’m very much a person that learns by doing. So it’s funny because at the time I look back and think about my biggest anxiety was not even around training facilitators, it was around the virtual piece. And now a majority of the facilitation I do is virtual. And that has started to feel a whole lot more natural to me, because there’s some interesting things around the virtual settings and dynamics that are at play or not at play. But all that to say, I think I started to, the biggest building block was starting to go from helping out with our Train the Trainer to leading it to then redesigning it.

Organically I just started to get more involved in kind of the learning and development side of things. So if someone in our department writes some part of our team released a new piece of content or updated one of our programs or things like that, I would often work with those stakeholders to think about, how do we bring that to our staff in a way that’s engaging and interactive. We don’t just sit them down for a 45-minute PD or professional development session, where we just talk at them and say, here’s the things we updated, or here’s the new information now go do, right? It would be okay, how do we think about you present bite-sized pieces of information and we have an experience, to experience the impact of the thing that we’re going to be asking them to then take to their stakeholders, to the schools, and the campuses, and the community organizations that they partner with on the ground across the regional offices.

So I slowly started to get more involved with the learning and development side of things. And that kind of just continued to grow until last, about almost a year ago now, I really shifted into a fully internal role and stepped away from my program director role where now I sit at this really cool intersection of learning and development program design and organizational effectiveness facilitation. And so it’s fun because I am still housed in my education department with a team that I adore, but I kind of almost act as a consultant to the other departments across the organization, where I basically bring them my expertise on facilitation to help them either deliver information to the organization or recreate their own programs where they’re engaging different stakeholders externally.

It’s been really neat to kind of become this internal, almost like a capability builder, where we’re really trying to help the folks across the organization engage whatever stakeholders they work with in much more effective and interesting ways.

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s been the reception across the organization to this kind of capacity building or even this consultative approach to where you’re providing these abilities? What have you been noticing as far as the reactions and how willing they are to embrace this as an alternative?

Caterina Rodriguez:

I think that at first, people were, no one was ever really resistant. It was more of like, I don’t know what to expect of this. So I think it was just more a little bit of uncertainty and curiosity, and also on my end too. So it’s a brand new role that has never existed, kind of building it as we go kind of deal. And so it also just required a lot of flexibility and nimbleness, to kind of see what comes of it.

As I’ve been working with teams, it’s been really fun because once we’re on the other side of it, they’re like, holy crap, that was really cool and really amazing. And once I’m on the other side of it, I’m like, holy crap, I had no idea that this is what you were doing. We always hear just very high level readouts from different departments. I mean, it’s an organization of I think about 500 people, so it’s not a small one.

And then there’s the other piece too, that in like any good nonprofit setting, we are all probably juggling two to three roles at once. And so, at the end of the day too, anyone is always really happy to get extra capacity or help to do something or help them think about something in a different way. So it’s been really neat.

It’s still a very new role, and we are still very much figuring out how does it show up in different spaces across ADL. But my favorite part of it is that it truly is like this internal consultant. So every project is different. It’s a different puzzle piece to solve, not just because it might be either a different team or different content. Sometimes it’s the same team, but because it’s more about enabling people to do their work better together, it just becomes a whole different beast, right? Like it’s not repetitive, it’s not monotonous. There’s always something new bubbling to the surface to work through or to think about or get curious about.

I would say that that’s been my favorite piece, is just that it is not boring. It’s never the same week to week, which I love. And it’s also one of the things that I love, I think, about consulting as well, is that every project is different because everyone has a different messy human challenge to solve.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Your point about there not being a lot of pushback and that it was people seeking more clarity or more certainty around what it is. I’d say that most of the time when I see pushback from individuals, it’s because they lack the clarity and certainty of what the thing is.

And so that might, how they show up for you as more curious versus more just blatantly pushing back, I think might be culturally or an impact of the culture there. But I’m just kind of curious what advice you would have for folks wanting to grow or offer up a service like this with inside of their company. Like what were some of the things that were successful or that you would just recommend people will tend to as they’re thinking about setting something like this up?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, definitely. Once, I’ll take one step back. I think a couple pieces. One is definitely the culture too, is I had been there at the time back then for already seven and a half years. So I’ve also built a ton of trust across the organization. And so I think, having those trusted relationships. Now, fast forwarding to your question about what are some tips or pieces of advice I may have for folks that want to do more of this internally, is first, especially if you’re not new to a place and you don’t have relationships developed, start building those relationships, not just within your team, but outside of them.

So join those optional calls that are hosted by other departments, or come to critical cross-departmental conversations and offer up ideas or offer up hard questions that we need to explore. And I would say probably one of the biggest things in my journey, where I noticed a really different shift in how our own leadership team started to look at the value that I brought to the organization, is when there have been really sticky challenges that have come up internally and there’s disagreement in how to solve for them, or how to move forward.

I went from being reflective and a little quieter and going like, okay, this is how we’re going to do things, regardless of what I think too. I started to become pretty vocal, but I did it in a very solutions oriented way. So I would step into these spaces with my peers or with leaders and say, you know, I’m not so sure about that and here’s why, but I’m curious though what you think about this instead. Or, you know, I don’t know if that would work or not. Honestly, here’s where my head was at instead. And like, let’s explore, you know, where the delta is and why we’re thinking about this differently. And I started to engage in conversations.

I think there’s an interesting balance to strike between just being a “yes” person and being, you know, just completely negative all the time about things that you’re not in a hundred percent alignment with. I guess what I’m trying to say is I really started to practice, I think one of my key mantras for myself and facilitation is commitment over consensus. So I started to unpack conversations and push back and suggest and recommend things, not because I wanted everyone to think the same way as me, or I felt like I should think the same as them, but because I wanted us to understand all the different perspectives where we might have room to learn from each other and then start to create this path forward that made sense for everyone, right?

Everyone may not be a hundred percent in alignment or agreement about everything, but we’re all understanding where we’re at, where we’re headed, why we’re doing it that way. And so now you really lowered the barrier of resistance and you have buy-in for people to commit to those decisions, to that strategic path forward. And so that would be, for me, probably one of the biggest pieces of advice is to start strategically inserting your voice into critical conversations, both inside and outside of your team.

And then the other piece too is just getting curious in your conversations with people. So asking a whole lot more questions than you are, kind of making statements at, or telling people things. I think that also really helped shape the ways in which people expected me to show up, where I think all of a sudden I start entering spaces and people almost expected me to want to probe deeper, have these discussions, or explore and answer questions.

So yeah, I would say build relationships outside of your team, not just inside of your team. Start to build that trust, show up to spaces and use your voice in them, but use it strategically, right? And model the kind of effective curiosity that leads people to start to behave in a way where they’re starting to ask more questions and eventually starting to see, you know, how do we commit, despite the fact that we’re not all agreeing. Because especially in large teams, you very rarely are going to have a hundred percent consensus on sticky challenges.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know, I think that that’s an interesting phenomenon, because you know, consensus means agreement. And we can decide as a group what agreement means for us, and rarely does unanimity serve us well, right? And I think a lot of people hear agreement and they hear consensus and they think unanimity, when really there might be other protocols that might serve us better.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, no, that’s honestly so true. And it’s been, I think when I work, whether it’s internally or consulting, when I work with groups of people where there’s been some kind of breakdown along the way, oftentimes it’s because people are expecting unanimity in order to move forward. And I think that’s one of the most critical pieces or differentiators of facilitation, is the fact that we are not actually trying to achieve unanimity versus right.

When you do more like a presentation, you know, a speaking engagement kind of deal, or you approach it more in that way of a trainer style of, I have the right way and I’m going to equip you with that one right way. I think that’s when you start to allow for a whole lot more of the gray instead of the black and white. And that’s when you start to see a whole lot more nuance. And I think that’s the biggest piece is that we need to get people outside of the binary thinking of everything is a yes or a no, and realize that oftentimes most things actually lie somewhere in between, and that it’s okay for them to be there.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know, coming back to your model, your advice of building relationships, crafting a perspective, and you know, speaking up, sharing that perspective, as well as being curious. If you think about it, those things all layer on each other pretty well because it’s hard to have a perspective if you haven’t gotten really curious and have a lot of understanding about how things work.

And then also, if you’re building up relationships and trust and getting to know folks through curious questions, then you start to understand their perspectives and you can become an advocate for their perspectives as well. Maybe even elevate them at times. So you know, it’s interesting, those things you laid out all kind of feed into each other, and if you use them together, they’re kind of self-reinforcing versus kind of independent pillars.

Caterina Rodriguez:

A thousand percent. And honestly, when you use them all together too, you start to realize that you become very well aware of people’s motivations in the room, even though they may not know each other. So because you’ve gotten really curious and you’ve built these relationships, and you start to shut them up to these spaces and lead in ways that engage rather than dictate, all of a sudden, I know that this person who constantly pushes back is because they are fearful that any change is going to be at the detriment of our impact with our stakeholders, right? Or I know that this person is consistently quiet and doesn’t engage, not because they’re uninterested, but because oftentimes they feel like they don’t even have the space to think and process. And so they just kind of sit back trying to catch up on everything that’s happened.

And all of a sudden you start to, as you build these relationships, you start to be able to understand a lot of the personalities that come into the space and their motivations behind it. And so you’re able to, it’s kind of like you said, as you build these relationships, as you lean into these spaces more, and you build this trust, all of a sudden I’m able to follow up with even more curiosity, but that’s tailored at helping each other see these different motivations and realizing we’re all actually committed to the same thing. We’re just coming at it from very different places. And none of those places are right or wrong, they just are.

And it’s very similar to in consulting practices where I may only work with a group for a very short period of time, or sometimes it’s like a one and done kind of deal. And even though I may not have the time to build relationships with everyone that’s going to be in the space, because of my experiences and practices internally, I’ve become really attuned to the fact that I’m not making assumptions about anybody. And so I’m going to get really curious, right? If something comes up in the room, if there’s some kind of reaction, or some kind of interesting statement or question or a non-reaction, I’ll get really curious and I’ll dig into it and I’ll ask that question.

Because I think that when people start to see that you are not just trying to take them through a process, but actually you’re taking the time to see them as people, they become a whole lot more willing to enter that space and to engage in that space. I think it honestly is about the fact that a lot of people aren’t used to the practice of being seen in a professional setting, right? It’s like, I’m heard, or I hear you, and that’s it. But to actually see someone and go beyond just kind of the surface level, we’re here to achieve this outcome and this is how we’re going to get there, versus, oh, but you may or may not be ready to completely go all that way because there’s something unresolved here, right?

It forces you to have to see people in their wholeness and not ask them to check themselves at the door, right? I think that’s the other big piece in professional settings is we’re expecting people to leave 75% of themselves at the door. You just bring like your brain with you to professionally engage versus actually know the space is meant for you to step inside of it fully and whatever surfaces is part of the process. I don’t expect you to check your emotions at the door. I don’t expect you to keep your disagreements to yourself. I don’t expect you to keep your fear or anxiety about what might be changing in the space to yourself.

I think when you invite people wholly, you start to see that they’re engaging wholly. But without that invitation, it’s not the norm. It’s not how we’ve created spaces in a professional setting before. And for me, that’s been one of the biggest pieces in being very intentional when I work with groups as a consultant versus internally, because like I said, internally have those relationships built. So when it’s groups that I don’t have those relationships with, how do I off the bat based off of my design, so how I’m designing the experience, how I think about the container I’m building, design becomes a whole lot more intentional there. And the decisions that I make around it before I even step in the door or in the virtual Zoom room.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s all making me think about a comment you made earlier about the mindset shift versus just thinking about facilitation through techniques. And so, that’s making me more curious about that. What do these mindset shifts look like for you? What do you think is most important to acknowledge there?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, the biggest shift for me was, if I’m stepping into a space as a facilitator, right? Not a trainer, not a speaker, as a facilitator, I don’t have to hold all the answers. And in fact, I shouldn’t be the one holding all the answers.

And that was a huge shift for me for a couple of reasons. I think internally, one, it takes the pressure off. I think there’s a lot of fear around saying to someone, I don’t know, I’m curious what you all think about that instead, right? I almost think that people see that as a kind of failure instead of actually using that as a way to get curious and empower other people to be the experts of their own work or experiences.

So for me, it actually became way less high stakes when I didn’t feel like I had to have all the answers. But the other piece too is, it models for groups, the idea that if I don’t have all the answers, then you know, there’s a reason why we’re here as a group and I can start to rely on the wisdom of the group. I always love to say the wisdom of the group is great. It’s better than just myself.

That’s a big one. A big mindset shift was that, you know, I’m here to be a guide. I’m not here to be the expert. And then another big mindset shift is, you know, the fact that curiosity only leads to more curiosity. I think that, when I first started facilitating, I was very, you know, by the book of the activities or the methods that I was doing, it’s like, okay, so in this part it says, I do this for five minutes and then I ask these three questions and then we move on. It was very prescriptive.

And then as I started to shift in my entire mindset about facilitation, I became way less attentive to the steps and much more attentive to what was happening in the space, what was emerging. And so what that might have looked like is, yeah, I took them through these steps and I’m actually just going to ask him what’s coming up? And then I’m just going to start to riff off of the comments that come up. All of a sudden it becomes way less prescriptive, way less of a performance, and it becomes much more of a conversation.

So I think that’s the other piece too, is that I’m there to have and guide conversations. You know, I’m there to ask questions that help lead them to their own answers. I am there to help them work through the messiness that humans bring into a space versus, you know, my main goal is not to be an expert at what you all are doing.

So that’s kind of the other big shift as a facilitator, is that all of a sudden I, it’s not that I had to be a subject matter expert, it’s that I had to be almost like a gathering expert, if that makes sense. You know, it’s been fun because in my consulting work, there’s been some projects I’ve done where, and groups I’ve worked before. I’m like, I know nothing, absolutely nothing about what you do, but what I do know is people and how people work or don’t work when you bring them together into groups. That’s been another big shift, is shifting away from being a subject matter expert to really being kind of this, almost a human centered gatherer, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

It absolutely makes sense. And the shift from technique to people is certainly, I think a growth edge, the maturity moment for facilitators. And some people don’t get out of it, some people stay in that mode of, I’ve got the tool and I’m going to go around looking for opportunities for this tool. And then it typically goes, I’ve got a tool, and then I’ve got a toolkit of tools, and then that longing for more, like how can I be more connected? How can I drive deeper outcomes?

And sometimes I see people coming to those conclusions when the tools fail them, when there’s a great laid plan and things go a little wrong. Or maybe they barely land the plane, but they feel like they were lucky to do so. And then reflecting, they think there’s something more here. So I’m curious, what do you think propelled you on this journey of making this shift from being about the process or the tools to being about the people, or looking for this meta broader, more holistic kind of look?

Caterina Rodriguez:

So I think obviously in addition to kind of just going out there, testing things, some going well, some going not great, learning from it, this is actually really taking me back to before I even got into this space, before I started at ADL, before even I was doing social work operations work, I actually got my start in the theological space. So I was actually training to be a hospital chaplain. And there is nothing certain about theology. There is nothing certain about chaplaincy. In fact, the only certainty is uncertainty, right? And the only ways in which you really engage with people are around big questions that have no answers.

And so it was interesting because it’s almost like there were these two separate sides to me, right? It was like the piece around like what I know and the piece around what I practice. And what I knew I was very comfortable with being in the messy uncertainty, but professionally, that was not the way that I was trained to practice. By the time that I got to ADL and the time that I have been a program manager and all these things, I feel like in professional settings, we’re very much trained to lean into the certainties and keep things as binary as possible.

I remember that at a certain point, right as I was facilitating and like I said, trying things, testing things out, learning from those experiments and refining, I started to also realize that I had kind of compartmentalized that side of myself because it almost felt like the things that I was practicing and the habits that I had formed in my theological practice or in my chaplaincy practice, were almost not at all something of value to my professional career. It was, and I think that actually came about because once I shifted, a lot of people would ask me, oh, so like, do you ever even use that? Like, I’m sure you don’t.

And it’s almost like, you know, people react to something weirdly enough that all of a sudden it makes you start to question, oh, so is that like a weird thing, I guess that’s not relevant, you know, and maybe I should kind of like table that or felt that, you know, it’s almost like you want to hide that part of yourself because it almost makes you an “other.” And it was really interesting that fast forwarding and getting more and more into facilitation, which meant I was getting more and more back into, I am literally choosing to stand in the messiest part of human collaboration as a facilitator.

It started to bring back the, almost the purposeness that I felt, around what was at the heart of chaplaincy, but in a very different way. And so all of a sudden I found it was, it was like a light bulb moment where I was like, that’s, that’s how this connects to this, because I have stood in the uncertainty. In fact, that’s all that I ever used to know.

And that’s where I saw that people needed me most, not me as Cat, but me as like what I brought to the space and how I might have guided them through that moment. And that realization is, I think what really ultimately propelled me from being practice focused to being people focused. And my facilitation is kind of bringing that part of myself back, that I had really hit and then compartmentalize like really deeply in a professional sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

So Cat, I think that takes us to a stopping point, because we’re nearing our end of our time here together. And I’d like to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Caterina Rodriguez:

My final thought, I would say, is to take the time to not just invite people, but expect people. So what I mean by that is if you are a person that works with groups in any way, right? Whether it’s you call yourself a facilitator, you call yourself a manager, you call yourself a cross collaborator, whatever it may be, whether it’s internal or in a consulting capacity, do not invite people into these kinds of spaces unless you’re ready to actually fully engage with people and their wholeness. There’s nothing more frustrating than being told, I want to invite you in, but I don’t want to see or hear you, or I don’t want to see or hear those parts of you.

What I would say is lean into the uncertainty and the messiness of what it means to be human and collaborate humanly. Because when you take the human piece out of it, all you have left is empty process, if that makes sense. And that’s when you get people who are not connecting, who are not committing, who also are just not included. I would tell people that the only certainty of facilitation is uncertainty. The only certainty of working with people is that they’re going to be messy and unpredictable. And as facilitators, we have a very unique opportunity to be able to step into those moments that no one else would, and help make some magic happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And I think one thing to remind folks of is that in order to do this, you have to have some hard conversations about what makes you as a person uncomfortable.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Oh, yeah. And that all starts with you, right? So if you are not keenly aware of what makes you uncomfortable and how you move through that, you’re not going to be able to do that for other people. It’s kind of almost like the mantra of, you can’t fill someone else’s cup before you fill your own, right? Or else you’re trying to pour from an empty cup or the airplane thing of like before you try and help someone with their own oxygen mask, put it on yourself. It’s the same thing with facilitation. If you have not done the work for yourself, you are not going to be prepared to do it for other people,

Douglas Ferguson:

Or you might dismiss or ignore someone that you know is going to behave in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable or you find challenging. So you just find ways of engineering your process to avoid them.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, that’s so true. That’s the other thing about, there is such a thing as over-engineering, and it happens often in facilitation. And I think it happens because people are afraid of conflict, they’re afraid of tension, and oftentimes it’s in that conflict and tension that you’ll actually find the right path forward. Thinking about as conflict and tension almost being kind of your responsibility to actually tend to, versus something to ignore or dismiss or try to avoid.

And I think people will not be able to do that unless they see you model it first. I think that’s the other piece too, is as facilitators, we have to, like I said earlier, we truly have to be willing to model, to walk the walk. And so that’s the other piece around facilitation, is that there really is no destination point. It is truly an ongoing growth journey. There is no point in which I say, I’ve learned all the skills, I’ve learned all the methods. Every time that I facilitate, I’m learning something new. I’m taking questions back with me, and I am seeking out more wisdom from others, which is, I think the other piece too, that I want to leave people with is, if you are in this field of facilitation, find a community of facilitators to plug into.

Because there’s that really old proverb that goes, how does it go? It goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And facilitation is definitely a craft in which you cannot go far without going together. It takes all types and it takes all kinds. And once groups see that, you embody that, they’ll understand that for themselves, and they’ll be able to start to work with people that think differently and show up differently from them. Don’t just invite people, expect people. Expect them in their messy wholeness.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Cat. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you. I look forward to chatting again sometime soon.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Thank you so much, Douglas. It was awesome to be here. And yeah, look forward to many more chats to come.

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 Shift appeared first on Voltage Control.

When I stepped onto the stage to kick off Facilitation Lab Summit 2025, our 7th annual facilitation summit, I took a moment to acknowledge the deep appreciation and humility I felt as I reflected on our seven remarkable years and journey that brought us all together. Full of exuberance, curiosity, and optimism for what we all might create together, the energy in the room was palpable. In the days since, I kept telling people how special it felt, as if it were a barometer of great things to come. 

The summit is an annual experience dedicated to showcasing our talented and engaging alumni and fostering an environment of shared curiosity and practice. This year was filled with inspiration, learning, and growth. Facilitators from all backgrounds came together to engage in thought-provoking sessions, participate in interactive activities, and share their expertise. Whether you attended or are hearing about it for the first time, here’s a recap of what made this year’s summit unforgettable.

Summit Highlights

I’m deeply proud of all eight of our alumni who facilitated the conference this year. They did an exceptional job of guiding everyone through thoughtful exploration of concepts alongside hands-on exploration. In the coming weeks, we release videos of each of the workshops. In the meantime, here are some key highlights:

Day 1: Laying the Foundation for Transformation

Our summit kicked off with an electrifying session by Skye Idehen-Osunde on building credibility and psychological safety in workshops. The Safety Net session set the tone for the day, equipping facilitators with practical tools to foster environments where everyone feels safe, valued, and heard. Skye’s high-energy delivery was the perfect catalyst for the learning and exploration that would unfold throughout the day.

Next, Alyssa Coughlin took us through Change Through Stories: Capturing Hearts and Aligning Minds, a powerful workshop on the role of storytelling in change management. Alyssa demonstrated how compelling narratives can unite teams and inspire collaborative action, offering attendees a framework for creating stories that resonate and drive transformation.

After a brief networking break, Kathy Ditmore led a session on Mapping Your Change Journey. Kathy dove deep into the complexities of change initiatives, guiding participants through the essential steps to successfully align teams and navigate the challenges of process redesign. Her interactive exercises, including pre-mortem analysis, provided real-world tools to help facilitators tackle change with confidence and purpose.

In the afternoon, Dom Michalec brought a groundbreaking approach to the table with his session, Facilitating Transformation: How Small Changes Change Everything. Drawing on his expertise in Behavior Design, Dom illustrated how tiny, intentional shifts can lead to massive transformations in both personal and professional settings. His insights were both practical and inspiring, leaving attendees with a newfound superpower: the ability to create lasting habits and facilitate meaningful change.

As the day wrapped up, we gathered to honor the incredible contributions of our community. The Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 Awards celebrated some outstanding individuals whose dedication and innovation have left a lasting impact on the field of facilitation:

• Innovation Award: Dan Walker for reshaping how facilitators engage teams with creative techniques.
• Growth Award: Theresa Ledesma for her continuous learning and professional development, making a positive impact in her community.
• Community Award: Robin Neidorf for her mentorship and fostering collaboration within the facilitation community.
• Impact Award: Dirk Van Onsem for his profound influence on driving organizational change and empowering teams to tackle societal challenges.

These incredible facilitators exemplify the power of facilitation in driving positive change, and we were thrilled to celebrate their achievements.

Day 2: Deepening the Practice and Creating Lasting Connections

Day 2 of the summit began with Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC, as she introduced The Secrets of Applying Executive Coaching to Facilitation. Karyn’s session on non-directional coaching techniques provided valuable insights into how facilitators can create self-led discovery and foster deeper learning within groups. Her session was a transformative experience for attendees looking to refine their facilitation skills and deepen their impact.

Next, JJ Rogers led us in exploring Radical Acts of Delight. In this lively and inspiring session, JJ encouraged facilitators to infuse joy and creativity into their practice, creating high-trust environments where participants feel engaged and connected. The session was a reminder that delight and creativity are essential to making facilitation memorable and impactful.

After lunch, Caterina Rodriguez brought us into the world of nonverbal communication in her workshop Enhancing Facilitation Through Nonverbal Communication. This interactive session highlighted the critical role nonverbal cues play in building inclusivity and connection. Participants learned how cultural values shape communication styles and gained practical tools to enhance their facilitation by listening beyond words.

The summit closed with a truly special session by Elena Farden titled Consent as Ceremony: Learnings from Nurturing Safe Connections in Indigenous Play Parties. Elena’s exploration of cultural practices of consent and gratitude provided profound insights into creating environments where respect, trust, and connection flourish. This session offered a unique perspective on how cultural teachings can enhance facilitation, fostering deeper connections and more inclusive experiences.

Key Takeaways from the Summit

While the summit was full of insightful sessions, here are some key takeaways that resonated across the two days:

• Psychological safety and credibility are crucial for creating impactful workshops where everyone feels valued.
• Storytelling is a powerful tool for fostering change and aligning teams around a shared vision.
• Small, intentional behavior changes can lead to meaningful transformations.
• Nonverbal communication plays a pivotal role in creating inclusive and engaging environments.
• Infusing delight and creativity into facilitation fosters greater engagement and trust.

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 2026 Summit

Excited for next year? Early bird tickets for the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit are now available at a discounted rate, but don’t wait—these tickets are only available until August! Secure your spot early and save on registration.

Get 2026 Tickets Now

Thank you to everyone who made Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 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 2025 appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I saw her facilitate and I thought, “Wow, she’s really drawing things out of the group instead of telling them what to do.” That was so powerful, and I thought to myself, “I want to do that. I want to be able to do that type of work someday.”- Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Dr. Karyn Edwards, an organizational psychologist and executive coach. Dr. Edwards shares her journey into facilitation and leadership, starting at Carlson Wagonlit Travel. She highlights the influence of her mentor, Julianne Wiese, and discusses overcoming imposter syndrome and challenges in leadership roles. The episode delves into the importance of “power skills” like emotional intelligence and adaptability. Dr. Edwards also talks about her current work, including writing for the Association for Training and Development and exploring organizational culture change programs. The episode underscores the transformative power of coaching.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

About the Guest

Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC is the founder and CEO of Abloom Coaching. In her work, she takes an evidence-based approach to bringing professional coaching and personal development to leaders so they can take control of their future. The work that she does is rooted in her experience working in organizations for 25+ years as a senior leader with the majority of that time in the talent management arena. She has a solid understanding of what leaders experience and what organizations are looking for in their top leaders.

Karyn earned a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology, a master’s degree in organizational management, and certificates in business process improvement and professional and executive coaching. Karyn is certified in PROSCI’s model as a change practitioner and has supported the process of change management for many years in the roles she has held. Karyn is a member of the APA and of the Society of Psychologists in Leadership. As a speaker and expert facilitator, Karyn motivates organizations and individuals by focusing on leadership essentials, powerful storytelling, and practical strategies. Karyn regularly speaks at industry conferences and as a keynote for organizations. Karyn is a trusted advisor who connects the dots to help leaders and organizations meet the current challenges and those that lie ahead.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas:

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 Dr. Karyn Edwards from a Abloom Consulting, where she supports leaders and organizations as an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and leadership development expert. Welcome to the show, Karyn.

Karyn:

Thanks for having me, Douglas. I’m really excited to be here.

Douglas:

Yes. Fantastic to chat. It’s been a minute since we had a moment to sit down and talk about facilitation and coaching, and all the wonderful things that you do.

Karyn:

Yeah. It’s one of my favorite topics to talk about, so thanks for having me.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s get into it. So, let’s start off with how you got your start. Could you take us back to that moment at Carlson Wagonlit Travel, where you first saw Facilitation in action? Gosh, am I remembering, was it Julianne Wiese?

Karyn:

Yeah., so I worked for Carlson Wagonlit. So, it’s a French company, part of it. So, it looks like Wagonlit, but it’s Wagonlit. I worked there for a long time and I met Julianne Wiese. Gosh, she was part of a merger that the organization did, one of many. And I was in a session that she was facilitating, and I thought I had done technical training for a long time. I actually started off in banking, was a bank teller during college, and then I started training for the bank. And so, I had done all this regulation and technical, how to use a computer and there’s technology systems.

But I saw her facilitate and I thought, wow, she’s really drawing things out of the group, that instead of telling them what to do, that I thought was so powerful. And I thought to myself, I want to do that. I want to be able to do that type of work someday. And she was really a role model for me. And actually, we’re still good friends to this day, so we’re actually colleagues now. So, she was a huge part of my career development.

Douglas:

Did you ever get to collaborate with her on designs or sessions before?

Karyn:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, not in that job, which was funny. So, I left that role and I went to go work for a big utility here where I live in Arizona. And when I got into a leadership role, I called her because she was a coach. And so, she actually supported me as a leader, as I was learning how to do some transitions, and figuring out how do you get along with people and all that fun stuff. And then the present day, she actually helped me figure out that as I was deciding what I wanted to do next, what was my next act after working at Corporate America for 30 years. I got this PhD and she said, “I feel like you just really could do this on your own and you’d be great.” And she’s a super encouraging person, so she’s played a lot of roles in my career trajectory. She’s listening, shout out, because she’s an amazing coach and amazing person, too.

Douglas:

That’s fantastic. Isn’t it great to have those folks from time to time to just push you a little bit, push you out of the nest a little?

Karyn:

Totally. Yeah. She had to drag me out of the nest, but she did it.

Douglas:

So, you mentioned a moment there when her memory came back to you when you were finding yourself in that new leadership position. What was it like for you when you had that opportunity to step into leadership? What were some of the things you were noticing and feeling as that was fresh and new for you?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, I had been in leadership for a while. When I took that job, I had led people in different types of roles and different organizations and things like that. But what was different about that job is it wasn’t in my area of expertise. So, I had shifted. They asked me to shift. They were sort of doing leadership rotations out from a development role and into an operations role. And it was in a call center and it was customer service. And I was working with a lot of frontline leaders and just finding myself as a duck out of water, so to speak on, how do I motivate people? Because most of the time I was working with people that were trying to learn a job and they already had internal motivation. These folks already had their job, and didn’t necessarily need me to do their job and already knew what they were doing.

So, it was just a completely different experience. And I found myself kind of rudderless, I think as we were talking earlier about some things. And just sort of flailing about, trying to figure out what’s right and how do I empower people. I had some natural abilities, in terms of getting people to talk with me and that type of thing. But how do you lead people when you don’t even know what they do? How do you lead people when you’re not the expert at the thing? And so, it was a very unsettling experience. And so, I reached out to her and said, “Hey, I know you’re not only a great facilitator, but also a coach. And I could really use some help figuring out how do I navigate this space that I’m in.”

Douglas:

Yeah. So, what was the unlock for you that really brought things into focus, the rudder, so to speak?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, at the time I was having just this feeling of I didn’t know what I was doing. Sort of this imposter syndrome feeling of, pretty soon people thought I was going to be great at this job and now they’re going to find out that I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing. And so, working with her… And I’ve learned this too as a coach over time, is that it’s not so much about what people know technically about their job. It’s how do you work with other people. That’s really what at the end of the day is what trips up most people in leadership roles. So, they used to call them soft skills and I call them power skills. It’s all these skills of how do you appreciate, how do you get along with other people? How do you maximize their potential and basically get out of their way?

And so, she really helped me with really overcoming that imposter syndrome piece. And it’s funny, I just took a session the other day on the same topic. And it’s something like 70% of people experienced this at some point, so it’s very common. But at the time I didn’t know that. I thought I was the only one that was thinking that I was feeling that way. And so, that was a big rudder establishing, putting the rudder back in the water, so to speak, of, okay, you don’t have to know what they do. What you have to do is help them figure out where we’re headed and then how they can help us get there. And so, for me, that was sort of a light bulb moment.

Douglas:

Were there any specific techniques or tools, or even just things that clicked as you were starting to put that into practice?

Karyn:

I think watching people do what they do, and getting out of their way, and realizing that the solutions that they came up with were way better than what I would’ve ever thought of because they know what they’re doing. And that my job was to set a vision of where we’re headed. It wasn’t to be in their day to day or tell them how to do everything. Now, it’s not to say that there weren’t issues that came up from time to time that were in the weeds and they would ask me for help or that type of thing. But when I think of where I spent the majority of my time, it was on what are we doing next, not what we’re doing right now. And so, I think that’s a distinguishing piece as well of what I learned in that job.

Douglas:

At what point did you start to develop your experience in organizational psychology?

Karyn:

So, it was in the same role that I was talking about earlier. And I decided to go back to school and get a doctorate, because it’s pretty common in my field to get a doctorate. And around that time, as I was working on my doctorate, I was thinking, and so was the company, how are we going to use somebody with a PhD? And at first I was insulted. I was like, well, gosh, there’s a lot of things you can use someone for. But I’m not really an academic. I’m more of a practitioner style. And so, I decided to switch jobs and I wound up moving over to Choice Hotels. And in that position, I really got the opportunity to take all these things that I had learned plus all this experience, and put them all together and help with things like establishing leadership development programs, and doing succession planning, and coaching people internally within the organization.

I didn’t have the coaching credential that I do now at that time, but I was doing a combination of coaching, and consulting, and helping people figure out… And I really felt a natural attraction to that part of my work the most and really enjoyed it. And so, IO psychology or industrial organizational psychology is the study of people in the workplace. And it has a lot of different facets to it. There’s some parts around assessing leaders, there’s parts around how organizations are structured to make them successful. And the part that I gravitate towards is around leaders and leadership effectiveness overall.

Douglas:

And in your doctorate, was there a particular area of focus in your research?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, my dissertation was on the leadership style that leaders have and its impact on employee engagement. So, that was the overall, the 300-page document that you can go out and read if you want to. But Choice, I’m really grateful to them because they let me do the research at the company, which in an academic setting is very unusual, because a lot of research is done on college students. And they’re not necessarily representative of leaders and organizations who’ve been in their jobs for 10 or 20 years, so it was really nice that I got to do that internally. And the research that I found was that leaders who are servant leaders really have the biggest impact in terms of employee engagement. And so, that premise in terms of the different types of leadership was one of the findings, so kind of interesting.

Douglas:

Yeah. Were there any things that really surprised you or caught you off guard as you were conducting your research?

Karyn:

I guess how many people were interested in helping me. So, I put out a survey in the organization and asked people to identify their current leader’s leadership style based on some definitions, that we had three different definitions. So, one was the servant leader approach. The second was, I guess I’ll call it a line manager style. I’m not giving the academic terms, but somebody who is in the day-to-day, giving direction, constant. And then their last one is these hands-off leaders that maybe think they’re giving a lot of autonomy, but they’re really removed and distance from the people that report to them.

And the servant leader was the most effective leader. The distance leader was the least effective leader. And the people in the middle get some successes, but others don’t appreciate that style as much. So, anyway, I guess, how many people completed the survey of a 2,000 person at the time organization? About 900 people completed the survey, which is a pretty good survey response.

Douglas:

Oh, wow.

Karyn:

Yeah. So, I was really appreciative. And like I said, I’ll always be grateful to that group for helping me out with that.

Douglas:

Yeah. That’s super cool, that not only were receptive to you doing the work, but then also supportive of the research and the degree as well.

Karyn:

Yeah. I remember when I went to one of the town halls after I had finished my program, and I was speaking about some business topic and I just stopped for a second. I said, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know you can now call me Dr. K, because I finished my doctor.” And I got this huge standing ovation, which was again one of those moments where I was like, wow. I think always appreciating there’s so many people that want to help out there, and sometimes you just have to ask.

Douglas:

Yeah, no doubt. It’s interesting that I feel like so many surveys are like self-assessment kind of surveys, or they take some sort of long evaluation and then it puts them in a bucket. Interesting that your approach was having the direct reports categorize their leaders. And I guess I’m curious, what were some of the qualities that people would use to distinguish between someone who’s more directive versus someone that’s more servant leader? Because the off hands is like, that’s kind of a very clear bucket. They’re just not present. But there’s some subtle differences I think, between the other two or there could be on perception. And so, I’m curious, what are some of those qualifiers that direct reports were latching onto, ways that they were differentiating?

Karyn:

Yeah. Well, what’s interesting, in the research, we gave them very specific academic definitions that are part of a leadership model. So, they didn’t really have a lot of latitude to give us like, “Hey, this leader has these certain traits.” But what we were able to tie it to was, once we had… We had the list of leaders in the organization, we had the people who responded, and then what we were able to do is look at the engagement scores for the organization of those leaders. And to see if there’s a correlation between, hey, this person’s been described by the majority of their team, that they’re a servant leader. And oh, let’s take a look at their engagement score and their engagement score correlated. And same thing with the hands-off leaders. Their engagement scores were lower in the organization’s results. And so, it was just really interesting to see them define it and then watch it show up in a completely different survey that another organization put out. And just correlate those two things together was fascinating.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s hard to ignore when there’s definitive clusters. It’s like, okay, well, that’s there and what kind of meaning are we going to apply to it? So, in your mind, I guess for the listener, what are some of those qualities, or how do y’all define those academic definitions for the directive type leader versus the more servant leader?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, depending on which research you read and different models, some of these models have been in place for a long time. And when we’re doing a PhD, you have to lean on more academic definitions in order to get through that process. But I would say in practical terms today, what a servant leader is, is somebody who has the ability to put their own interests behind that of the person that they’re trying to help. And so, it’s a little bit of a ego definition, too, where you sort of have to say, “Yeah, I’m the leader, but my job isn’t to be the one to take all the credit or to stand out. But my recognition is actually going to come because of the way in which I support my team and the work that gets done through my team, versus the work that I do as an individual.”

And I think that’s one of the biggest distinguishing factors of people that move up successfully in organizations, is they understand that switch that you have to make when you go into senior leadership. So, you’re not getting the work done through your own self work that you do, but you’re getting work done through the people that work for you. And it’s a hard transition to make, because all through your career, all the way up, up until that point, you’ve been rewarded and validated for the things that you’ve done versus other people around you, or maybe you’ve been part of a team or something like that. But to actually have the recognition given to you based on how effective you are at helping other people is quite different and quite vulnerable. It’s a vulnerable position to be in.

Douglas:

Yeah. And are you finding most of your coaching clients are in this moment of transition where they’re needing to redefine their leadership style?

Karyn:

Yeah. I would say most of my clients are in some moment of transition. They’re either moving from a senior level position into an executive team, or they’re already an executive, and now they’re… The world is changing so rapidly that they’re finding themselves in, I don’t know what the right word is, complexities that they have never experienced before. And so, even though they’ve been an executive before, they’re now experiencing that imposter syndrome that we talked about earlier for themselves, because it’s untested, it’s net new challenges that have not been present. Like AI for most organizations is net new. There’s nothing like it that’s ever been before and it’s continually evolving. And there’s sometimes struggling with, “Okay, how do I integrate this new thing? And how do I show up as a leader while I’m leading all these people through this significant processes and times of change?”

Douglas:

What’s the most common transition? It sounds like, ultimately, you’re trying to help people get to that servant leader mindset or from that frame of reference. What sorts of positions are they? Are they exhibiting those behaviors but needing to refine them? Are they more stuck in the declarative type of leadership or hands-off? Or what are you finding that’s the most common transition folks go through?

Karyn:

That’s a good question. I think the common thing, if I were to boil it down, is transition. So, for some people, it can be being promoted and their scope is expanding. For other people, there’s something that’s been observed or noticed that they really need to change in order to be effective. And they have a blind spot and they’re not seeing it, but they need to transition in terms of behavior. Other people are buying a business or starting a business and they’re trying to figure out, “I used to work for a company and now I’m an entrepreneur.” And those are pretty significant transitions. Some people I’ve been working with are thinking about retirement. And okay, so, how do I get out of this identity? And maybe that’s the word, Douglas, is it’s an identity shift from, “Hey, I’m this person at work and then now what? Now that I’m not going to be working anymore or working in a traditional sense, what’s my identity?” So, a lot of work is around that concept of identity.

Douglas:

Yeah. You mentioned transitions. And anytime folks are changing or going through some kind of transition, identity is such a core part of that. The story I like to tell in regards to this is when so many companies were going through cloud migrations, digital transformations, there’s so many roles that had to shift. You were a sysadmin at a company that had a lot of servers inside of a data center. Now they’re migrating everything to the cloud. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a job at that company. But if you only think of yourself as a sysadmin, it’s going to be really difficult. And so, a big part of change is that identity component.

Karyn:

Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s hard. I mean, I think we all have this sort of self-awareness and self-perception of who we are and how we operate within what we know, what we’re experts in. And then somebody comes along and rattles that cage or puts a big change in place. I’ve worked in a couple organizations that have gone from waterfall to agile, and just mind-bending to people to have to work in these short sprints. And their jobs were completely changed in terms of how they operated. And that’s hard, because there’s the brain. A lot of neuroscience stuff here, too. We like to be able to predict what’s coming next.

Douglas:

Certainty.

Karyn:

And when that gets interrupted, it’s like you can go into the fight, flight, freeze mode of I don’t know what to do. And that’s where, as a coach, it can also be helpful to help people recognize, through either helping them just through the questioning process of what I call non-directive coaching. And actually comes from Clare Norman and her work. It’s called The Transformational Coach. And that process of, hey, you know the answer. It’s within you. We just got to clear all this clutter out that’s getting in the way of your clear thought process because you’re under stress.

And so, the other thing I like to talk about is we are both thinking creatures, but we also have chemistry going on in our body at the same time. So, when we have stress responses, your brain actually doesn’t work the way that it should. So, if you’re getting all these micro stressors all day long of, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing. Oh, my gosh, they changed this again and ugh, I don’t like that.” Then you’re getting a lot of cortisol. Cortisol interferes with your ability to use your prefrontal cortex, and your center of clear and logical thinking is diminished. And so, as a coach, I also help people recognize these patterns that we get into of stress response. And then the third thing that I do is I use assessments to help them understand how they’re wired, because we all come into the world with certain personality traits and then we get raised in certain ways.

And so, the nature-nurture debate has been solved. It’s both. And then when you get into the workplace, you’ve made all of these compensatory strategies to be able to function as a leader. And some of those have worked. And now that you’re ascending into a new scope or a broader team, or a different job, some of those strategies all of a sudden aren’t working for you anymore. And you got to figure out new strategies. And so, working with someone to help think about all of that and then figure out what’s right for you and how do you want to show up, but with the fundamental belief that you are whole and capable and competent. And we all need sometimes for somebody to listen and then help us figure out where we go next. And I love doing that. It’s my favorite part of my job.

Douglas:

Yeah. So, when you think about these transitions and helping individuals work through it, even mentioned the agile transformation, similar to the cloud example I gave. People are having to go through identity shifts. Do you often find that when you’re doing the one-on-one coaching that opens up needs and conversations at the team level? So, in addition to one-on-one, it’s one to many kinds of engagements to help broader organizations start to grapple some of these transitions?

Karyn:

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times in my work… And I just did the talk at the Voltage Control Summit. So, that was exciting to talk about how executive coaching concepts can be utilized in facilitation. So, oftentimes, I’ll work with an executive or a leader and they’ll say, “Hey, this is great.” And also, my team, they’re an extension of the leader, and so they oftentimes will bring me in to do leadership sessions or facilitate meetings, or that type of thing. First of all, one of the first concepts is that people are whole, and capable, and smart, and can figure out the things that they need to, is applied to the many as well as to the individual. So, the collective wisdom of the group.

But one of the things that we talk about in coaching is you have to let go of the outcome and you have to let go of being right or giving advice, which I also think applies to facilitation. I think you need to have a structure, and a framework, and you need to have an outcome in mind that the group is trying to get to. But how they get there and what they actually accomplish is something that can be applied from the coaching framework into facilitation. Because those skill sets of asking questions and helping people recognize what they want to do is really fundamental to facilitation, and it’s also fundamental to coaching.

Douglas:

That’s making me think about one of our recent facilitation labs. I was just in New York City. We were having a facilitation lab there at Muro’s office. So, I went in to help support, because I knew we’d have a larger audience and just excited support our friends at Muro for offering up the space. And so, I was assisting Noelle, our regional lead there in New York. And the person that was practicing was struggling a little bit. And I noticed it and Noelle noticed it at the same time. I also noticed Noelle starting to lean in to give him some advice and maybe even help the audience better understand the instructions.

And then I motioned at her and said, “Just wait.” And then once she understood what I was encouraging her to do, just to pause, then I leaned over and I said, “That’s going to be really great for the debrief.” Because especially in Facilitation Lab where we’re just practicing in front of a peer group and learning, it’s okay if things are rough. That’s what lab’s all about. But the learning is so much richer if we talk about it in the debrief versus if we correct it in the moment.

Karyn:

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s funny, that’s something that Julianne and I always talk about, too, when is the learning or the teaching, if you want to call it that from a facilitator perspective, comes and pointing out in the debrief. Which isn’t unlike coaching, where someone will say something and I will reflect back to them, “Hey, this seems really important to you. You’ve brought it up several times. What’s your reaction to that?” So, it’s inviting people to react to different parts of information that you’re noticing or observing, or pulling out along the way, but really letting of that I am the stage, on the stage or whatever everybody says. And that I have the all-knowing…

It’s like, no, you’re there to set up an environment where people can do the work that they need to do. And that’s another translation to coaching, is as a coach, my job isn’t to figure out what… I’m not a consultant as a coach. I can be, but I try not to be. My job is to set up an environment where people can do the work that they need to do. And a lot of that has to do with the preparation that you do and the questions that you ask. And so, there’s a ton of tie-backs to facilitation.

Douglas:

Yeah. I like to compare it to being a gardener versus a mechanic. A mechanic goes in with the tools and they put everything at the right to work. They make the engine work. But a gardener just sets the conditions for plants to grow. They can’t make the plant grow. They can’t tell the plant what to do. It’s going to do what a plant does. And so, I think humans are not like cars. They’re more like plants.

Karyn:

Yeah, I love that analogy. I might steal that.

Douglas:

Please do. I think more people need to understand that.

Karyn:

And it’s also, if you think about it and take that analogy one step further, the preparation, the soil has to have certain components to it and that you have to have certain sunlight and heat. And there’s just so many factors. And I think sometimes that’s where facilitators might get overwhelmed, is there’s a lot of variables in there. But if you set up an environment that you are pretty sure is going to create conditions that would be successful, that’s what your role is.

Douglas:

Yeah. And being prepared for some potential outcomes, but being willing to adapt if things don’t… If it doesn’t snow, then we maybe don’t need to put up the heat lamp or whatever. I think so many times folks get really excited about a design or their plans and they’re unwilling to let go of that. And to me, the real thing is just being willing to respond to what emerges.

Karyn:

Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve noticed that learning to be a coach has really helped me do. And I often wonder if there’s a place in Facilitation, training around coaching, because I’m super comfortable now, more comfortable than I’ve ever been. And being able to handle any question from any level of person in any meeting that I’m in, because I don’t have to have the answer. My job isn’t to have the answer. And no matter how challenging someone can be or things that I’m not expecting, I can be okay with that because my job is to reflect, and to ask questions, and to set up an environment. And when I do get nervous, that’s what I tell myself is that’s not my job. My job is to set up the environment. My job isn’t to control how this goes.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. I think so often folks get so concerned about making sure every detail’s correct and everything’s right, and it turns out perfectly, that the obsession and concern over all the details means they miss landing the plane, when in fact landing the plane was all they needed to do.

Karyn:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, I’m learning a new program right now. And I’m listening to the recording of the way that they’re doing their certification. And one of the things which I really love is they’re expecting you to know that you know what you’re doing. And they’re giving you, “Here’s the what’s important part of this, here’s why this matters, this particular concept or piece of information,” but how you as a facilitator go through the exercise or what have you, there’s so many different options and ways that they’re giving you to do that. And I think that’s another important thing, is to be flexible. Is that even though this activity was planned to be 20 minutes, but people are having a really robust conversation, being flexible to go, “Okay, well, I’m going to adjust this other activity because this one seemed to be really valuable.” And instead of being so structured and rigid to a specific timeline, I think that’s another key learning… And just getting comfortable, being flexible really.

Douglas:

It’s funny, it reminds me of a recent conversation I had at Facilitation Lab, Austin, where someone was talking about a challenge they have around keeping people engaged and maintaining the engagement. And when we peeled back a few layers, it was clear that she was not given the latitude and flexibility to adjust the timing, to adjust how it was facilitated. Everything was by the minute, spelled out. There was no leeway. If something needed to go longer and something else get compressed, none of that was allowed. It had to be on the money, and it was even audited to that point. There were people that were observing to make sure she did it right. And it’s funny, because when we really looked at the design, there were some real design flaws to begin with. So, not only was there no ability for her as a facilitator to adapt that space to the needs of whoever showed up, it also was designed in a way that didn’t create great engagement. So, it was like we were at little bit of a loss to give her advice because, wow, you’re kind of in a trap.

Karyn:

Yeah. And companies spend millions, if not billions of dollars on development. And it’s stuff like that that just makes me cringe. I’ve worked in some environments like that. And I would say if that were the case today, I would definitely not do that facilitation, because you’re just being set up to fail. And everybody in the room is actually being set up to fail, not just the facilitator.

Douglas:

Yeah. And that’s a problem I would say with a lot of L&D types of facilitation. It’s like you’re working with people that have just been instructed they have to be there. It’s like they didn’t sign up for this.

Karyn:

Captive audience.

Douglas:

Yes. It’s like, man. Well, amidst of captive audience, you’ve been talking about how you’re just going through a moment right now, which I think might be reflective of just where the market’s shifting, from a bit more of a bearish market to maybe a more bullish market. Or just people are spending more. You’re talking about fish jumping in the boat, so what’s that been like.

Karyn:

Oh, yeah. It was funny, I was just talking to someone today. They said, “Wow, you have a lot of fish jumping in your boat.” So, I just have been very grateful that there’s getting a lot of different types of work. So, I do executive coaching, I do facilitation, I do leadership development, I do some speaking. And I’ve had this really nice blend and mix of all of those opportunities. But really, this year has started off really strong. And I’m super grateful for that and the different types of experiences that I’m getting the chance to do. So, it’s so far so good. So, I’m optimistic that it’s going to be a good year.

Douglas:

I love that.

Karyn:

Knock on wood.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. And it sounded like lots of coaching opportunities, which it’s really great that there’s more of that work coming and you’re able to solidify that.

Karyn:

Yeah. One of the things that I love about executive coaching is, to me, it’s one of the most individualized forms of development. So, you can go to a class and learn a lot of great things. And you can go to conferences and pick up on new ideas and innovations and all kinds of… And all of those things are great and valid. But the deep work that you can do as a leader, I think there’s probably no substitute in my mind for sitting down with a coach and figuring out what’s next for you, what might be getting in your way, and how do you want to go about resolving that. Not somebody telling you or giving you a model.

There’s a time and place for that in leadership development. I think when you’re newer in career, learning about situational leadership and learning about the different models of strategic direction and strategic leadership, those are all important to know. But then there comes a point at which knowing, again, the technical aspects isn’t going to solve it. It’s how do you move through different transition periods in a way that’s going to work for you? And I love doing that.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s almost like it becomes more introspective than tool-based at that point.

Karyn:

Yeah. Some people want more structure than others. Some people want to talk through… A lot of times one topic that comes up a lot is delegation. And there are different ways to delegate that some people have never heard about. And so, as a coach, I sometimes will weave consulting into coaching, because if people truly don’t know that there’s lots of different ways to solve a challenge, then I’m happy to share that. But a lot of times you can never really fully appreciate where somebody else is coming from because we don’t sit in their seat. We don’t have the same lived experience, no matter how similar you are to someone else. So, we’re all more biased that our own solutions are the best. And so, the more we can pull those out and go, “Okay, well, what do you want to try? What do you want to experiment with?” And doing something on a small scale, seeing if it works, continuing to build, and that also builds confidence. Those are all the techniques and things that I tend to work within.

Douglas:

Where do you see all this going? I know when we did the blog post, you had talked about maybe there’s a book in the future. Is that something that’s taken some roots or what do you think is coming in the future for you?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, I’m still rolling that around. I think the struggle I’m having is finding the time, which is probably the biggest factor for everybody. But I’m actually writing some articles. So, I’ve written a couple articles for training and development. So, ATD, which is the Association for Training and Development. And I’m writing one right now with a partner of mine about, if you’re a leader in an organization, how do you select an executive coach? I mean, it’s a pretty flooded market and it’s pretty unregulated. There’s a lot of great coaches out there, but how do you find the one that is right for your organization and right for you? John Reed, who is another co-collaborator with mine, he wrote a book about that subject. I’m doing some writing in some different kinds of ways right now. And then I do think at some point down the road, I’d love to get a book out.

I’m actually also learning some different programs. So, there’s a program out of New Zealand, which is called Riders and Elephants, and it’s around culture change. So, I’m learning about how leaders can impact that, because I think organizational cultures and just the culture that we are all living through right now deserves some thoughtfulness. And so, I’m learning how to facilitate. So, I’m going to be a lifelong learner. My husband keeps asking me if I’m done. He is like, “When are you…” I said, “I don’t think I’m ever going to be done.” So, those are, for me, what’s next, is just how do I continue to keep contributing in this space in lots of different ways. And then when I finally can get some space and figure out how I’m going to write a book, maybe I need a coach.

Douglas:

There you go. I’ve had friends that the book becomes an artifact of all the smaller writings that were done along the way. So, maybe these posts that you’re working on are the breadcrumbs that take you to the larger work.

Karyn:

Yeah. I have my index cards, and the way I write down all my ideas. And then I have a stack of index cards, so someday those will find their way into a book.

Douglas:

Fantastic. Well, we can’t wait to see it. And I guess in the meantime, make sure to share the articles. We’d love to read them, amplify them, get the word out, because a big fan of what you’re doing.

Karyn:

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Douglas:

Thanks for being a part of the summit and being an active alumni. We appreciate all you do.

Karyn:

Oh, thanks, Douglas. And thanks for having me on. It was great to talk with you, and I appreciate it very much.

Douglas:

Yeah. And before we go, do you have a final thought for our listeners?

Karyn:

I would say if you are thinking about your development and you’re considering what’s next, I would say consider a coach. It can be a transformational experience. It was for me, and I think it can be in a lot of ways. So, I think that’s my final thought, is give it a consideration.

Douglas:

Nice. Yeah. Excellent. Well, Karyn, it was a pleasure having you. I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Karyn:

Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas:

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 Embracing Vulnerability Transform Your Leadership Journey? appeared first on Voltage Control.

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At its core, Dare to Lead is about cultivating courage and resilience in leadership. Our facilitation certification takes these principles and integrates them with additional competencies that enhance your ability to drive change and innovation:

• Active Listening and Inquiry: While Dare to Lead champions the power of listening, our certification provides you with a toolkit to not only listen but also to ask probing questions that uncover deeper insights. This leads to richer, more meaningful conversations that propel your team forward and encourage ownership of ideas.
• Conflict Management: Learning to navigate and resolve conflicts is critical for any leader. Our program offers practical techniques for mediating disagreements and turning conflicts into opportunities for learning and growth—skills that complement Dare to Lead’s focus on accountability and trust. With hands-on practice, you will develop the confidence to de-escalate tensions and maintain harmony in challenging situations.
• Strategic Planning and Execution: Beyond inspiring leadership, our certification gives you the tools to map out strategic plans, facilitate brainstorming sessions, and implement decisions effectively. This blend of visionary thinking and practical execution ensures that your team not only dreams big but also makes those dreams a reality.

Blending Additional Methods for Holistic Leadership Development

Beyond the core competencies that align with Dare to Lead, our facilitation certification introduces a variety of additional methods to further enrich your leadership toolkit:

• Design Thinking: Integrate creative problem-solving techniques that encourage innovative solutions. Design thinking’s iterative process of prototyping and testing complements Dare to Lead’s emphasis on learning from failure and continuously evolving. Leaders who incorporate design thinking can approach problem-solving with greater adaptability and creativity.
• Systems Thinking: Understand the interconnectedness of team dynamics and organizational structures. Systems thinking helps you see the bigger picture and design interventions that address complex challenges at multiple levels. By leveraging this skill, you can identify key leverage points for impactful change.
• Collaborative Technologies: In today’s digital landscape, knowing how to effectively utilize collaborative tools can make or break a team’s productivity. Our training covers digital facilitation methods, ensuring that you can lead both in-person and virtual sessions with equal confidence. With hybrid and remote work environments becoming the norm, mastering digital collaboration is a must-have skill for modern leaders.

Real-World Impact: Case Studies and Success Stories

Consider the story of a leader who had fully embraced the principles of Dare to Lead but struggled to translate these insights into team action. By enrolling in our facilitation certification, they learned how to set clear agendas, use reflective inquiry techniques, and manage diverse group dynamics effectively. The result? Meetings transformed into vibrant spaces of co-creation, conflict turned into constructive dialogue, and innovation became a regular part of the team’s workflow.

Similarly, many leaders have found that our certification not only reinforces their Dare to Lead training but also introduces them to new strategies that amplify their impact. From structured brainstorming sessions that yield breakthrough ideas to conflict resolution techniques that restore trust, these real-world applications demonstrate the powerful synergy between courageous leadership and skilled facilitation. Our alumni have reported increased confidence, stronger team engagement, and measurable improvements in organizational effectiveness.

Creating a Legacy of Leadership

In today’s complex environment, leadership is not just about guiding a team through day-to-day tasks—it’s about creating a legacy. When you combine the transformative ideas of Dare to Lead with the practical skills from our facilitation certification, you’re not only equipping yourself for success; you’re setting the stage for a culture of innovation, accountability, and resilience that can transform your entire organization.

• Empowering Future Leaders: By modeling both vulnerability and effective facilitation, you inspire those around you to take initiative, lead with authenticity, and continuously seek improvement. A commitment to facilitation ensures that leadership skills are passed down and cultivated within the team.
• Sustainable Change: The skills you gain from our certification are not one-off tools but part of a sustainable approach to leadership. As you continue to apply these methods, you’ll see long-term benefits in team cohesion, innovation, and overall performance. Organizations that adopt facilitation principles tend to experience stronger alignment and clearer pathways to execution.
• Community Impact: The ripple effect of empowered leadership extends beyond the workplace. When leaders are equipped to foster open dialogue and inclusive decision-making, they create a positive impact that resonates through communities and industries alike. Leadership is no longer confined to boardrooms—it shapes societal progress as well.

Final Thoughts: Your Next Step on the Leadership Journey

If you’ve embraced Dare to Lead, you already possess a deep understanding of the qualities that make for transformative leadership. Now, imagine coupling that inner strength with a set of practical facilitation skills that allow you to translate vision into action. Our facilitation certification offers you that opportunity—a way to apply the lessons of Dare to Lead in a concrete, impactful manner.

Together, we can transform the way we lead. Welcome to a new era of leadership—one where vulnerability meets actionable strategy, and where every challenge is an opportunity for growth.

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