“Somewhere along the line, as we grow up, we get so used to doing things a certain way that we lose touch with that creative side of the brain. As kids, we tried all sorts of things and never stuck to a certain methodology or structure, but I think facilitation brings out that childlike curiosity, which makes the whole thing very special. And I think that’s what’s kept me going.”- Varsha Prasad

In this Facilitation Lab podcast episode, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Varsha Prasad of IdeaCompass about her journey as a facilitator and entrepreneur. Varsha shares insights from her first design thinking workshop, the impact of mentorship, and the importance of creating engaging environments. She discusses navigating cultural differences in facilitation, her transition to independent consulting, and the value of community support. The conversation highlights the power of innovation, structured reflection, and open-mindedness in workshops, offering practical advice for facilitators seeking to inspire creativity and collaboration across diverse teams.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

Varsha on Linkedin

IdeaCompass on Instagram

About the Guest

Varsha is an innovation strategist and the Founder of IdeaCompass, a consulting practice dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs transform bold ideas into actionable strategies. She specializes in facilitation, design thinking, and business innovation, working with diverse industries including tech, education, transportation, hospitality and e-commerce and public sector.  

With a strong background in customer success and corporate innovation, Varsha has collaborated with organizations globally to drive impactful change. She is passionate about building human-centered solutions that deliver tangible business results.  

Varsha’s expertise lies in guiding cross-functional teams, fostering creative collaboration, and simplifying complexity into clear, actionable strategies. Her approach blends structured innovation frameworks with a deep understanding of customer needs, ensuring sustainable transformation for the businesses she works with.

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:

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 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 Varsha Prasad at IdeaCompass, where she helps entrepreneurs and enterpreneurs build customer-centric products through custom innovation workshops. Welcome to the show, Varsha.

Varsha:

Thank you, Douglas. Happy to be here and chat with you.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s so good to have you. And I guess let’s get started by hearing a little bit about how you got your start. Take us back to that first design thinking workshop at Cisco. What do you remember about how it felt walking into that room and why did it hit so different?

Varsha:

Yeah, that was a different kind of day for me, especially because I was used to one hour meetings in a conference room with long tables and chairs on either side of the tables, one person standing at the front of the table walking through a presentation, and most of us joining off or just looking into our phones. But that was a special one because as soon as we entered the table, the room set up was totally different. There was music playing in the background.

And we had our director, who was supposed to be one of the senior most people in our organization, standing at the door welcoming people with smiles, and I could see sticky notes, colorful sticky notes and Lego blocks and all sorts of cool stuff lying on the table there. So that was very new to me. And from the time we entered, I didn’t know how the day passed. It was eight hours. We walked in at 9 AM and then we finished, I’d say I think five or something with a break in between for lunch. That was the day that things turned around for me and I fell in love with the whole process of design thinking and creative workshops.

Douglas:

Was there a specific moment in the day where something clicked for you?

Varsha:

I think the fact that ideation is, I think one of my favorite ways to work around things, like from the day I realized that this is how you can brainstorm and come up with new ideas. Idea bombing is one of my favorite exercises. Every time I feel like I’m in a clump, I’m stuck, I just stick to this plain, simple exercise. I take a sheet of paper and a pen and just start writing as many ideas as I can. And some of the best ideas come up when you are sitting with a tight timeline. You say, put a timer of 10 minutes and in the 10 minutes come up with as many ideas as you can. And that is one of my favorite exercises, and I keep using that over and over again, both with my participants and myself as well.

Douglas:

I love that. Have you ever done ten-by-ten writing from Liberating Structures?

Varsha:

I’ve done, I think the eight-by-eight, is the Crazy Eights the same thing?

Douglas:

Crazy Eights is a little different. I love Crazy Eights too. To your point, that’s another rapid fire time constraint activity. The ten-by-ten writing is, it’s not part of the Liberating Structures repertoire, but it’s listed as one of the in development. And basically you give your participants a prompt and they’re supposed to write 10 responses to it, and then you give them a second prompt and they write 10 responses and a third prompt, and they write 10 responses. And it’s about just creating so much volume because essentially they’re writing a hundred things that they’re writing 10 things to 10 different prompts.

Varsha:

Exactly. Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Probably the next ideation exercise for me to try out.

Douglas:

Yeah. You can get really playful with the prompts too. One of my favorites is what is something that users don’t want.

Varsha:

I think that there’ll be a list of 20 of them. [inaudible 00:05:04].

Douglas:

Yes. So often we’re making things that people don’t want, right? That’s amazing.

Varsha:

True. I agree.

Douglas:

So you mentioned your lead being a real pivotal mentor, and I want to come back to that kind of scenario you described of just walking in and the room was set up totally different and they were greeting you at the door and there were all these things sprinkled around the room that were different and just how much of an impact the way the room is set up can have.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

Varsha:

Yeah, a lot, because I think this also came up in the Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, when we were doing the certification. So how you set up the room, how the room is placed when participants enter it changes the mood, the psychology of the participants, I think to be in a different environment. I think that’s key. I think for me, it just transported me into a very playful environment and having the music around and seeing those creative, colorful sticky notes, it just activated that creative side of the brain. I guess that’s what it did to me. And ever since then, I realized that that plays a very crucial role because corporate meeting setups, usually there is a hierarchy where the head of the meeting stands at the front and everyone is seated around the table in rows. So it’s a stark difference for sure.

Douglas:

And it’s interesting how powerful that can be. Just putting some thought into how we might just rearrange the space, how we might group folks different, how we might change the seating. It’s a totally different experience walking in with rows of seats versus clusters of chairs or… Very powerful. Also, I took note of you talking about how you were greeted at the door.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

It’s like so often the host is stuck behind a laptop trying to get the HDMI cable to work or whatever, and that feeling of being invited in, being welcomed, so powerful.

Varsha:

Yeah. And it shows that they were in the room much before the meeting started and they prepped for it. They got all the stuff in. So it shows how much effort they’ve put into designing that space for us, and that automatically signals that we need to be just as involved. It allows us to reciprocate that.

Douglas:

Yeah. The facilitation doesn’t start, once everyone’s in the room and we’re getting folks attention. It starts when folks are first arriving and how are we making them feel comfortable. And to your point, you even just mentioned that you were starting to feel a certain way around like, oh, I’m already in a creative mindset. I’m ready to play games. I’m ready to be totally different in this space.

Varsha:

Yeah, yeah. Especially when you’re not used to that in your office and when you hear music in the office, it just plays on your mind. Yeah.

Douglas:

Yeah. So cool. So coming back to your mentor, what did you learn from shadowing him and working alongside him and how did that shape your early style as a facilitator?

Varsha:

Yeah, so my mentor, his name is Viva, that’s how we call him, Viva. And he was the one who had been to a design thinking workshop, and then he realized how powerful the framework is, just the mindset that it puts us all in. And he decided to introduce that into our organization, and I think we were one of the first or the second teams that he introduced this concept to. The day we did the workshop, I went up to him and I said, “Hey, I really liked the whole workshop that we did today. How can I be part of this?” And he said, “There is no formal design thinking club as such, so let’s start something here.”

I think his mindset was to… He had already embraced the design thinking mindset where you test things out, you prototype it, and then if something doesn’t work, then you reiterate on it. He had a playful mindset himself, so that encouraged us to be bold and accept that. And I think that played a crucial role. He never expected us to be perfect. He didn’t say, if we walk into the room, we need to have answers to everything. That was a huge learning that I had from him.

Douglas:

Yeah. It also sounded like you were really curious throughout your tenure and just trying lots of different things and being persistent and following through on things, what helped you keep that drive and that curiosity and that willingness to explore new things? I could imagine some folks might lose steam or get frustrated or not stick through things. So what kept your passion alive there?

Varsha:

To be honest, that’s a question I keep asking myself even today, because I’m the kind who just jumps from one hobby to another. I don’t keep through with things. I’ve tried dancing, I’ve tried singing, I’ve done all sorts of things. But this is one thing that I think I’ve been doing it for six plus years now since the day I first walked into that room and learned about design thinking. Every time there is a workshop, every time there is some ideation session, I want to be the one who’s facilitating it. I want to be the one who’s driving it. I think one of the key things is when we walk into the room, there is a lot of chaos, there’s a lot of misalignment, and what do we do?

There’s a lot of confusion when we enter the room, and then by the end of it, people are so happy with the amount of ideas that were just generated and the amount of clarity that they get by the end of all those exercises and activities. And somewhere along the line, I think as we grow up, we got so used to doing things a certain way that we’ve lost touch with that creative side of the brain. As kids, we tried all sorts of things and we never stuck to a certain methodology or a structure, but I think it brings out that childish behavior, that childlike behavior, I shouldn’t say childish. But childlike curiosity, which makes the whole thing very special. And I think that’s kept me if I need to answer that question.

Douglas:

Yeah. It sounds like unlike some of the other things you’ve tried, this really connected in with something deep and meaningful that you just couldn’t let go of.

Varsha:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Douglas:

And so also noticed reading your alumni story, the arc of building creative culture across three countries. There was the group, they’re in Bangalore, then Poland and now Netherlands.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So I’m curious what you’ve learned about facilitation from doing this work across these three different cultures around how people show up in different ways or just anything you’ve noticed about the differences or the similarities even.

Varsha:

Yeah, I think when I was facilitating back in India… And also it was more around very technical teams. So one thing that I’ve noticed is technical folks are very rooted in a structure. They have a certain way of working and introducing creative ways of working is something new to them, and it’s not as acceptable to these folks. But when I moved to Poland and I started the design thinking club, I think there was a lot more acceptance on or curiosity around how does this work? What does this contain? I think when it comes to cultures, I think Poland has been a lot more accepting in terms of being playful, but I think the culture is also getting better in India where people are open now to newer ways of working. But there was this initial resistance, especially from technical folks where they said, “Hey, what are you making us do? What are these sticky notes? What are these activities and energizers that you’re making us do?” But yeah, over time I think there’s been an acceptance around these new ways of working, these new ways of thinking even.

Douglas:

Coming back to the technical folks having a bit of resistance early on. When you look back on that, what were some of the things that helped them connect in with the purpose or understand more deeply why that was important? Or was it getting to the other end and realizing that, oh, there’s value in this, or was it some clarity that they were getting along the way? What was it that do you think that really helped them?

Varsha:

Yeah, it is definitely the clarity that they get along the way where we… Highlighting the fact that no matter how good your technology is, if it doesn’t connect with your customer, then that’s going to flop. So telling them or making them understand that important fact has played a very crucial role. So especially when you say, we did a lot of these training programs for technical leaders, so aspiring solution architects and technical leaders, because they need to get out of that structured or single one way of thinking into now how do we bring innovation within our company, within our teams, and how do we change that culture within our teams. So once they saw how design thinking works, I think they were a lot more accepting, thinking that this is something we need to embrace and it’s new, but it’s something that we need to embrace. So, yeah.

Douglas:

Yeah. You’re making me think too if the technology folks start to realize that, oh, we’re making this technology for humans. We need to think about the experience they have, and in order to explore that, maybe we need to use some tools that have a bit more human connection

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So that we can get in that mode of understanding and thinking about and maybe empathizing with other humans.

Varsha:

Yeah. And I think it also helped when our organization itself was renamed as customer experience, so that put the customer at the center of everything that we do. So I think that changed a lot of our mindsets as well.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s fascinating too, that you bring that up. Just naming the group had an impact. ‘Cause if you think about how those folks were showing up early on, they might’ve just been resistant because they were confused. They’re like, where am I at? Why is this team doing this thing? How does it fit in to the bigger picture? How does this impact the work I’m doing? But then you reframe it, you tell a different story around the fact that, “Hey, we’re helping with customer experience.” Now they’re showing up in a different way with a different expectation, and they say, “Oh, this is going to help customer experience. I see why we might be thinking about things a little different or even interacting with ourselves a little bit different. We might need to do some make believe because the customer’s not here.” If we need to think about them, we might be in a different mindset.

Varsha:

And I feel like the culture shift comes a lot from top down. What are your leaders speaking? What are their core values? So customer centricity was one of the biggest value that we had. As we shifted names, we became the customer experience organization, and I also became part of the customer success team where we had to be in front of customers day in, day out. Our job was to understand what the customers need and how we can help them. So I think that also played a huge role in the shift of the mindset. Yeah.

Douglas:

Yeah. Also, I remember you saying that facilitation actually disrupted the hierarchy you’re used to. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means and how it showed up in the rooms that you held?

Varsha:

Yeah, so if you remember, I said that our director, who’s one of the senior guys in our organization, he was at the door inviting people and then he was smiling and he was just encouraging people to be more present and to be involved in the whole process. And then we had our managers, our team leaders on the same table that we were sitting in. So we had our be it our team leads or solution architects, so who are senior in the team, and someone who just joined the team also contributing to the ideas that they were trying to pool in. So they were all solving the same problem of how do we help the customer, but they all belong to different grades.

One was talking from the perspective of managing a team, a manager. And a senior solution architect, he was bringing in his perspective, and then there was a person who just joined the team and she was bringing in her own perspective of what she thinks is happening with the customer and how she’s dealing with things. So it was a round table rather than that long table where we sit according to our grades.

Douglas:

I love that shifting from the long table to the round table and maybe flattening power structures. I love it.

Varsha:

Absolutely. Yeah. And then I think power structure, when you say about that, I have seen where managers said, “We don’t mind sitting out from this because we know that the dynamics might change if we are present in the room.” And because they understand the purpose of say that particular workshop or meeting where they want their employees to be more authentic and speak out. And I’ve seen managers sit out from certain meetings and the dynamics of the rooms completely change. So that’s also very powerful.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s so fascinating and amazing when leaders realize that dynamic is there and are willing to do what it takes to make sure that we can still move forward to subdue that a bit.

Varsha:

Yeah, yeah, and I think I’ve been fortunate where I’ve worked with leaders who understand that and they know that it’s not about them, it’s more about the culture that’s already present and the biases that are present. So in order to remove them, they need to be out of the meetings. So that’s been a good thing.

Douglas:

Yeah, got to love the leaders that believe in we, not me.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So you made the leap from Cisco to independent facilitator. What was going through your head during that messy middle? I’m sure it was a little bit… It’s got to be scary, those moments. I know when I started Voltage Control, I was like, oh my gosh, what am I doing? So I’m just kind of curious, how did you finally make that decision and what was going through your head?

Varsha:

It was definitely the messiest middle that I’ve been in. I mean, I’ve done over a hundred workshops and I’ve seen a lot of messy middles, but this was a messy middle in my life. So I think when I decided to quit my tenured job as an employee to become an entrepreneur or a independent consultant, firstly, I was super scared. There were days when I could not sleep just thinking about what am I doing? I didn’t tell this to anyone except for my husband. So it was just me and my husband discussing this because I didn’t want anybody else’s opinions to sort of mess with my thinking. And I think that was the best decision because I really wanted to know if this is what I really want to do. And once I had that clarity that yes, I have been doing these workshops for six years now.

This is not a hobby anymore. This is something that I really love doing. I think I can figure things out on my own if I get the right kind of support. I actually designed think that phase of my life, I think. So I literally sat down and did a sailboat exercise, and I said, “What are the challenges that I’m facing right now? What is the things that are pulling me back or holding me back? And then what are my wins? What is helping me at the moment?” So I sat and did a whole exercise on what I need to do. By the end of that workshop that I did with myself, I had an action plan for the next 90 days. From the day I put my papers, or I rather told my manager that I’m going to be quitting, I had three months time, so I knew exactly when I woke up, what are the things that I need to do in order for me to go through this messy middle.

So automatically, I think my brain was like, this is not a difficult task, you know exactly what you’re going to do when you wake up, and this is what you’ve achieved in a week’s time. So I did have these check-ins with my husband every week I remember and I said, “This is what I’ve achieved. Look.” And I just felt good about having that clarity on where I’m moving, and I actually wanted to name my business Chaos to Clarity because I love the name, because that’s how I always saw my teams moving from chaos into clarity. And that’s how I felt at that moment when everything was just so chaotic and confusing and I moved through that into a space of clarity. I think that’s how I overcame my messy middle, and it was a huge benefit knowing these kind of methodologies exist that eventually ground you. I think that’s how I felt once those three months were done.

Douglas:

That’s really incredible. And I would argue you need a good compass to move through the chaos and get to clarity. So I think you still kept the name in that spirit.

Varsha:

Yeah, I took off with something that I really loved as well. It took a lot. I had all my design thinking, all my toolbox, books out with me, and then I was sifting through all the pages and I keep writing down all the names that I thought could help in naming this business and eventually was Idea and then how do you guide people with these ideas. So Compass came in and I’m happy with the name.

Douglas:

Yeah. And I wanted to talk a little bit too about compasses and journeys. You came to Voltage Control. It all started through one phone call with Eric that led to the certification and then the summit, and then co-leading or leading the Amsterdam region. And also that’s been a little bit of a journey for you anyway around leadership. And I’m just curious, your leap into the Voltage Control community and leading the region, what did that leap into the leadership teach you? What did you learn as you were going through some of those motions?

Varsha:

A lot of learning. I keep telling my husband this, that the amount of learning that I’ve had in the past six months, I don’t think I’ve learned so much throughout my career time. Because it’s like I’ve been put on fast track because I think I have to do everything on my own now and I don’t have someone teaching me, but having a community is so… I realize how important it is, especially when you don’t have a team or a boss to tell you this is what you need to do and these are our goals and stuff like that. But in those three months, this messy middle, my first goals was to get a formal certification in facilitation itself. So that I think was the basis or the foundation over which everything else is built up. So I don’t think all this would’ve been possible if I didn’t know that I’m already good, but this has made me even better.

So that’s the confidence that the certification gave me. And being around other facilitators who do the same kind of work that I do, and especially seeing other facilitators… Because I think facilitators do this out of a space of love and passion for what they do. Most facilitators that I’ve been working with, even in the community or on my LinkedIn community, they’ve all been extremely helpful. And I think empathy is where they all operate from, and that’s how I think the certification itself helped. I think before I even enrolled myself, I was already part of the community and I said, “I want to volunteer,” because putting myself in a volunteer position helped me grow a lot more than if I hadn’t been there. I was leading the solopreneur or independent facilitators community at Voltage Control, and through that I learned how to do organic marketing. For example, I didn’t have a single post on LinkedIn during my professional career at Cisco, but then I realized how important it is to be visible to your network to make sure your work is seen by others.

And that’s when I decided that I’m going to do a weekly post of all the learnings that I’m going to learn through the certification, and it helped me keep accountable both on my marketing and also my learnings. So that was a great start to both learning and marketing and yeah, that’s how I think the certification played a huge role. Being a part of the community and volunteering at the community helped. I think anyone who’s come to me after that, I said, “Just go join the community first. See how the vibe is. Volunteer if you want to learn about facilitation and especially if you are starting on a new path in the facilitation space, this is a great space to be in.” I think that’s how it played a huge role.

Douglas:

Yeah, amazing. And looking ahead for what’s next. Gosh, I think it’s so much potential when you think about the moment you’re in and growing a business and whatnot, and I’m curious, what’s one hope or vision you have for the future of your work, either in your own practice or for the future of the field at large.

Varsha:

Yeah. And I think I realized as I was building the business and what I wanted to do, also the coaching calls with Eric helped a lot when I was trying to figure this out. I realized how much I love innovation. Also, people say innovation is a very broad term, but to me it’s about creating something new. It’s about using what you have and the creative powers that you’ve got to make the world a better place. And for me to be able to play a part in that is a huge win for me. And I think that is what keeps me driving. And I think our world has a lot of problems that can be solved and the place can be made a lot better than what it is now. And that’s what I see for my future and for the future of IdeaCompass at the moment.

Douglas:

As we come to a close here, I’d like to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Varsha:

That’s a deep question, final thoughts. I think if there’s one thing that I had to say is to my technical folks, I keep saying before every workshop, “Trust the process.” And if you are in any workshop, creative workshop like this, switch off the rational mindset and switch off the skeptic mindset to embrace what’s coming through in your workshop. It doesn’t matter if I’m facilitating or if there’s anyone else facilitating, because that makes a huge difference in the output of the workshop itself. I think that would be something that I really want my listeners to… If there are technical folks or if there are skeptical folks who are entering the workshop, that is something that I would like to tell.

Douglas:

I think we could all learn from that, right? Let’s put our guards down because our assumptions and all of our prior learnings inform those guards, and if we want to innovate, we got to put those guards down and be open to almost anything. And then we can of course put up the spectacles, pull up the guards, start to criticize stuff, but let’s wait a little bit before we start doing that and create some space for it. So I think that’s great advice, and not only for your techies, but for anybody, because I think we all get set in our ways and could use a dose of like, let’s ignore our best advice and try to come up with some good stuff here.

Varsha:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think the energy just shifts when people enter with that kind of mindset. And as facilitators, I’ve seen a lot of facilitators try their best to create an environment where those fears, where those biases are shut down. But as participants, if there is an effort from there end, then that’s a powerful workshop.

Douglas:

I couldn’t have said it better. Varsha, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I hope we can do it again soon sometime.

Varsha:

Absolutely, Douglas, thank you so much for having me and having this wonderful platform for facilitators to share their learnings, their experiences. I love listening to your podcasts, and I hope there are many more other folks who can join the podcast and we learn from them.

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 at voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Facilitators Ignite Creativity in Diverse Workshop Environments? appeared first on Voltage Control.

At this year’s Facilitation Lab Summit, we explored the theme of Practice—not as something passive or theoretical, but as a verb. A doing. A commitment to growth. Whether you joined us in Austin or from across the globe, the summit invited all of us to sharpen our skills, embrace experimentation, and reflect on what it means to truly be in practice as facilitators.

We’re grateful to the eight incredible facilitators who led sessions across two days of hands-on learning, connection, and transformation. Each brought their unique lens to the craft of facilitation, offering tools, stories, and experiences we can carry forward in our own work. Here’s a look back at what we practiced together:

Skye Idehen-Osunde

The Safety Net: Building Credibility and Psychological Safety in Workshops

Skye opened the summit with energy and intention, guiding us through a powerful session focused on building trust and psychological safety. Through interactive exercises and honest conversation, she invited us to reflect on how we show up as facilitators and what it means to earn credibility in the spaces we hold. Skye reminded us that safety doesn’t happen by chance—it’s something we cultivate through consistency, care, and courage.

Her session offered practical techniques to design workshops that center psychological safety from the start. We explored how body language, tone, facilitation structure, and group norms can either foster or fracture trust. Most importantly, Skye reminded us that psychological safety is a moving target—something that requires continuous attention and repair. Her tools helped us feel more equipped to meet that challenge with compassion and clarity.

Alyssa Coughlin

Change Through Stories: Capturing Hearts and Aligning Minds

Alyssa took us deep into the world of storytelling as a facilitation tool for change. With warmth and clarity, she helped us understand why stories are more than just communication—they’re bridges. In any change process, people are looking for meaning, for belonging, and for their role in what’s unfolding. Alyssa showed us how compelling stories can align teams and move them forward together.

Participants explored the anatomy of a story that truly sticks: one that centers emotion, includes relatable characters, and speaks directly to the “what’s in it for me.” Using real-world examples and structured frameworks, Alyssa led us through exercises that helped us articulate narratives with clarity and resonance. By the end of the session, we had a clearer sense of how storytelling can transform resistance into connection.

Kathy Ditmore

Mapping Your Change Journey

Kathy’s session brought structure and insight to the often messy work of navigating change. Through the lens of facilitation, she unpacked how to guide teams through transitions using clarity, empathy, and smart design. We worked through frameworks that helped us identify project misalignment, engage the right stakeholders, and create shared understanding—especially in moments when change feels stuck or overwhelming.

One of the standout moments of her session was a group pre-mortem exercise that helped us uncover potential pitfalls before they derail a change effort. Kathy also shared practical strategies for rescuing projects that have gone off track, including how to uncover root causes and recalibrate purpose. Her guidance was both strategic and human-centered, reminding us that successful change is a journey—and we, as facilitators, are its guides.

Dom Michalec

Facilitating Transformation: How Small Changes Change Everything

Dom invited us to rethink how we approach transformation by zooming in on behavior design. Drawing from Stanford research and his own facilitation practice, he shared how small, specific changes can lead to profound results. Through real-life stories and a mix of theory and application, we explored how habit formation can be a powerful lever for sustained change.

Participants learned how to apply models like B=MAP (Behavior = Motivation, Ability, Prompt) to their own facilitation goals and client work. Dom’s energetic and relatable style made it easy to see how we might bring these insights into everyday practice—whether we’re helping teams adopt new behaviors or individuals cultivate lasting habits. His session left us feeling like we had gained a new superpower: the ability to shape change one small step at a time.

Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC

The Secrets of Applying Executive Coaching to Facilitation

Dr. Karyn’s session was a masterclass in blending facilitation and coaching. She introduced us to the principles of non-directive coaching and demonstrated how these techniques can unlock greater participation and agency in group settings. By stepping back from the role of “expert,” facilitators can empower participants to discover their own insights and solutions—leading to deeper engagement and more lasting outcomes.

We experienced firsthand how asking the right kinds of questions, listening with intention, and creating reflective space can transform a group’s dynamic. Through practice and discussion, Dr. Karyn helped us develop personalized strategies for bringing coaching mindsets into our facilitation work. Her session reinforced a powerful message: that facilitation isn’t about steering—it’s about holding space for others to steer themselves.

JJ Rogers

Radical Acts of Delight

JJ reminded us that facilitation can—and should—include joy. Her session, focused on delight as a design strategy, was a breath of fresh air. We explored how small moments of surprise, humor, and care can build trust, deepen engagement, and make sessions more memorable. Through interactive exercises, she invited us to intentionally design for delight, not just as a “nice to have” but as a core component of impact.

Participants reflected on their own facilitation style and considered where delight shows up—or where it’s missing. JJ offered a toolkit of strategies that anyone can adapt, regardless of content or audience. From playful warm-ups to sensory design, her session was a reminder that joy is not frivolous—it’s transformative. And sometimes, the most radical thing we can do as facilitators is invite people to feel good while they learn.

Caterina Rodriguez

Enhancing Facilitation Through Nonverbal Communication

Caterina’s session offered a fresh look at something often overlooked in facilitation: nonverbal communication. Through movement, observation, and structured practice, we explored how our facial expressions, gestures, posture, and tone shape the way participants feel in our sessions. Caterina helped us build awareness of our own nonverbal cues and decode those of others, all while maintaining a culturally sensitive lens.

We also examined how cultural norms influence body language and how misinterpretation can impact trust and inclusion. Caterina’s practical exercises helped us fine-tune our presence, improve our “nonverbal listening,” and build deeper connection with our groups. Her message was clear: when words fall short, our bodies still speak—and as facilitators, we need to be fluent in that language too.

Elena Farden

Consent as Ceremony: Learnings from Nurturing Safe Connections in Indigenous Play Parties

Elena brought the summit to a meaningful close with a deeply reflective session that blended facilitation, culture, and intimacy. Drawing from her experience facilitating Indigenous play parties, she introduced a ceremonial approach to consent—one rooted in gratitude, sovereignty, and sacredness. Her framing helped us reimagine how we create consent-based spaces, not just in intimate contexts, but in all group settings.

Participants explored practices for nurturing trust and honoring autonomy, from how we open a session to how we invite participation. Elena’s teachings emphasized slowing down, listening deeply, and treating facilitation as a form of care. Her session reminded us that facilitation is not just about process—it’s about presence. And sometimes, the most powerful thing we can practice is reverence.

Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 was a celebration of the art of practice—a place to experiment, reflect, connect, and grow. Whether you left with a new toolkit, a powerful story, or a shift in mindset, we hope this year’s summit reminded you that facilitation is not about perfection—it’s about showing up again and again with curiosity and care.

You can read full recaps of each session on our blog. And if you’re looking to keep your practice going, join us at our weekly Facilitation Lab meetups—where the learning never stops.

The post Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 Recap appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Elena Farden led an immersive session titled “Consent as Ceremony: Learnings from Nurturing Safe Connections in Indigenous Play Parties.” Elena, known for weaving cultural rituals and deep respect for consent into her facilitation practice, provided profound insights into how we can integrate these sacred traditions into our own work.

The session began with Elena’s warm aloha and a traditional chant, or oli, inviting ancestors to guide the participants. Through this powerful opening, Elena demonstrated the importance of connecting with the land and community—using rituals to ground and center both the facilitator and the participants. This deep, intentional connection is foundational in her work, and she encouraged everyone to explore how their own rituals can help deepen their connection to the spaces they facilitate.

Relational Accountability

One of the core practices explored was relational accountability, or the idea that facilitators are shaped by their place, their ancestry, and their community. Elena asked participants to reflect on their “mauna” (mountain) and “wai” (water), asking them to think about the places that sustain and connect them. This exercise wasn’t just about physical geography—it was about understanding how our stories, identities, and the places we come from shape our perspectives and our practices. It was a deeply reflective practice, encouraging each participant to consider how their own background and context influence their facilitation.

The session also explored the power of consent—not just as an ask but as an offering. Elena guided participants through a simple yet profound exercise: Janken Po Rockstar, a playful take on rock-paper-scissors that allowed participants to practice offering and receiving with full consent. By integrating play, Elena demonstrated how consent can be woven into the very fabric of facilitation, creating space for vulnerability, trust, and authentic connection.

Elena also shared her unique perspective on indigenous play spaces, explaining how these communities use clear, structured rituals to ensure that participants are both physically and psychologically safe. Consent, she emphasized, is not just about asking for permission; it is about creating a reciprocal space where both the offering and the receiving are valued equally.

Gratitude Circle

The workshop culminated in a gratitude circle, where participants were invited to express appreciation for those around them. This circle, filled with non-sexual but consensual physical touch, offered a moment for reflection on how physical touch can help deepen connection and build trust in a facilitated space. The exercise left participants moved and reflective, with many sharing that it had been an important step in rebuilding trust and intimacy after the isolation of the pandemic.

Elena’s session was a powerful reminder of the importance of bringing intentionality and care into every step of our facilitation practices. By weaving together consent, cultural practices, and deep relational care, Elena provided the tools to build safer, more inclusive spaces for everyone involved.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Elena’s Session:

Elena Farden:
[foreign language 00:00:14]. So aloha to all of you with gratitude and love and compassion. My name is Elena Farden. I am from Ka’aihe’e in Makiki on the island of Oahu, and I grew up in Kaimuki. I ask for your indulgence in just a quick moment to allow me to open the space in a way that I do within my practice. And then, I would love to be able to share this with you to see how you might share this in your practice.

MUSIC:
[foreign language 00:00:53].

Elena Farden:
This chant or oli that I offer with you is something that’s written for all of us, not just for those that grew up and was born in Hawaii. But this is an opening mele or song or chant that we often use when we’re entering into new spaces. And we’re basically asking for our ancestors and those past and present to be with us. Huna o na mea, huna no’eau show us those hidden teachings, those learnings that are there. And E Hō Mai is really asking them, in this journey, let us not be alone. Come be with us. We invite you in with us. We invite you to guide us.

So I share this with you and ask as you’re looking at these words that may be a little bit different from you. How as you as a facilitator? What are your rituals? And how you’re connecting relationship and intention when you come into a new space? I believe we all have these rituals. It may not look like this, but there are ways in which your rituals and your practice can deepen your intention when you’re coming into different spaces that may have different beliefs or different culture. So we’ll share a little bit more about that.

Before I do, and thank you for allowing me that time, a proper introduction of who I am. I shared my greeting earlier. I asked for knowledge to be here, but who am I as a person? Again, Elena Kavai’ala Uluwehi Onau’una Saba’ina’el Farden. You can call me Elena. I answer to almost anything. I’m born and raised on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. I was born under the Malu or the protection of Le’ahi, which is here. You may know it as a different name or Diamond Head, an iconic mountain that we have in Waikiki. It is known for its shape that looks like the tuna of the fish.

And in ancient times prior to tourism and our overpopulation, it was used to light the way for ships that were out at sea to come home. So I think about this place as I might do in my facilitation. What is the light that I’m wanting to bring? How do I help guide them back if they are something that needs to be rescued? How do I bring things home that belong home? And then with the same mauna or mountain, the rains that sustain me, the fresh water that sustain me, so that I can be abundant and sustain myself and grow. The name of that rain is Apuakehau, and it means a basket of dew.

This is also the name of the rain and the stream. And there was so much rain, so much so that within Waikiki itself, it was known as a very abundant place of fertile land, lots of food in order to grow and feed thousands and thousands of people. So these are the two things that guide me. And when I introduce myself to new places, I always connect them to a place. What is my mauna? What is my mountain? What is my fresh water source? So I’m going to ask and take some time for you folks to do the same thing. You have on your tables. So we’re going to delight in some joy.

And I’m going to ask you to take about five to seven minutes, and think about where you come from. What is your mauna or your mountain? And what is your wai or your fresh water source? I am learning from Adam that Dallas does not have a mountain range. No. So if you do not think about a landmark, I think on day one there was a participant in this back corner perhaps who had shared one of the trailing edges with Dom’s presentation that one of her things is to look out the window to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

So if this is a landmark, a city skylinescape, something that connects you to that place. It may not be a mountain, then I want you to think about that and draw that. If you don’t know your water source, you may be as Alyssa is here, an ocean person. She needs to be near the ocean. You can identify a saltwater source. So let’s take a few minutes. And perhaps if we have some music, but if not, it’ll just be me and you thinking through your mountain and your freshwater source.
All right, I know we still have folks drawing. You’re going to still be able to hold on to them, and we’ll still have some time. You’ll have a minute to share this out in just a little bit. But as we are moving forward, I just want you to continue to think about what is your mountain, your mauna, your landmark? What is it that tethers you to a place that allows you to have a relationship that you do? And with that, also thinking about what sustains you, and why is it so important that you tie your identity to a place?

So relational accountability. When we’re coming into places, we are not coming in as individuals. We’re coming in as people that are shaped by our place where we come from. It could be our organization, it could be where we grew up, it could be our childhood. We are also shaped by our ancestry. So not just your own ethnic heritage. But for example, coming into this space here, I might change the way I introduce myself by the ancestry or genealogy of my knowledge. I am an alumna of the Voltage Control Facilitation Certification program.

These are ways that I want to connect. Why is it important for me to connect? Because I want to know, Adam’s from Dallas, but his parents are from Wyoming. I’m from Hawaii, but I’m trying to build connection. What is it something that we have in common besides eating tacos from a truck in a dive bar, right? These are things that I’m looking for as I think about the reciprocal framework of these things. So on the other side here in this picture I have He aha kau hana? I know I wrote it in Hawaiian.

I was thinking English. But basically it’s saying, what is your work? What is your hana? Your hana is your work. So I want you to think of your reciprocal framework as, how am I reframing how I introduce myself by my connection, by my belonging and my purpose? It sounds nebulous, but we’re going to talk it through together. And your mauna, your mountain and your wai or your river will come into play with that. So this is mine. Connection is meaning where am I coming from?
So coming into a place, whether it’s here or in Hawaii or in a new community context, I might say, “My name is Elena. I’m coming from the waters of Apuakehau sheltered by mauna le ahi famous for lighting the path home for those far out to sea. I’m connected to this space today here at the Facilitation Summit because I believe in facilitation as a powerful leadership practice that can steward a collective towards meaningful change.” It doesn’t have to be that long, but the connection is basically asking you, where are you coming from? What place? What organization? What’s your framing stepping into this place? Why are you here? What’s your purpose?

Belonging or influence. Growing up in Hawaii, we have a very big extended family. For those that are also similar in that space, people will often ask you, “Who do you belong to?” Or, “Who are your parents?” And basically, they’re asking that to say, “If you act up or get out of line, I need to know who to report to, so who do you belong to?” In this context, I’m asking, what are you carrying with you? Who do you belong to? What is your tie? Building on your connection. So for me, I might introduce myself using belonging influence as, I carry with me the wisdom of my ancestors and mentors that knowledge is a responsibility.

I also carry the teachings from Voltage Control as an alumna of the Facilitation Certification and facilitation practitioners of art of hosting and such communities that are dedicated to a deep community of practice for facilitators to lead with purpose and cultivate conversations that matter and foster growth. Obviously, I love to talk a long, long time. It doesn’t have to be this long. It can be short. But basically, who do you belong to in your influence is asking you, what are you carrying with you? What are you bringing into this space?

And then, last is purpose. Always building on the connection and the belonging. Why are you here? Why are you called to be here today? Why now? Why this place? And what is it that you’re bringing to add to this table of learning of knowledge? So for me, I would say, “And today I’m here to share what I know and what I’ve learned about rituals of consent and how I can support an authentic connection.” So back to your mauna and your wai as your tether to your place and identity.
I’m going to give you time now to also start to maybe write out or draw out your connection. I come from where? Where are you coming from? Your belonging, I carry with me this. My purpose, I should say your purpose. And today, I’m here to share this, to gain this, to do this, to feel this, to accept this. Can I help care for any questions with connection, belonging, and purpose as you folks begin to script out your identity and your introduction?

All right, so working individually is helpful, helps us to zone in on our thoughts, get something down. But we are social creatures by nature. We know that we need each other. So I’m going to ask you to work or invite you to work in pairs and to share your introduction with someone else, either on your table or someone next to your table to help you with… And I’ll put it back once. Your connection, your belonging, and your purpose, introductions or your statements. I’m asking you folks to also give each other feedback, ask questions throughout our sessions together in the past day. We’re leaning in with curiosity. We’re practicing. We’re being vulnerable. And can I help care for any questions, any instructions that need clarity, any support that I can provide?

Stephanie:
So you have a deep cultural and heritage. I come from nowhere and everywhere. What does that look like?

Elena Farden:
I would invite you to think about what are places that shaped you? It could be an organization. It could be a club or a team. It could be something about your hometown where you grew up that may not be your home, but something about that place. It could also be, for example, I grew up in Hawaii, but my young adulthood was spent in California going to college, I do consider Los Angeles a second home for me.

So in a way, I could pick two places. I could say within Glendale, California is also home for me. I could pick Deukmejian Mountain or Brand Park as maybe my mauna or the rivers that run through it. It could be something that way. So I would think about what are the places that shaped you, influenced you, impact you in your life. It doesn’t have to necessarily be the home you grew up in. It could be a different place. It could be a person, it could be a landmark, it could be a team. Is that helpful? Yeah. Good question. Other thoughts?

Speaker 4:
Stephanie, I was the same as you trying to figure what my Dallas connection is, but Mike gave me some great advice. He said, “Think back to your childhood.” And I grew up in Tatum. It’s a small town, but I drew it out, a farmhouse with a fire coming out of the fireplace, and we had 77 acres, and we had water on there for the cattle and for the horses. And I drew all that out because that’s really kind of my home. When I think about what’s really my home, where I came from.

Elena Farden:
That’s beautiful.

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Elena Farden:
This is where your heart feel it’s most full.

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Elena Farden:
Yes.

Speaker 4:
I have fond memories of my childhood.

Elena Farden:
Where you feel you’re most yourself.

Speaker 4:
Yes.

Elena Farden:
Where you can come in and people actually, “I know you.” I don’t have to put on a front.

Speaker 4:
Yes.

Elena Farden:
This is me exactly who I am. It could be a karaoke bar, that could be a place that defines you. Everyone knows me, my name, and the songs that I want to sing. This is my place where I feel most at home. Any other questions before I ask you to work in a pair, just to get some help and feedback with your introduction. This is I know a different muscle than most may be used to in how you introduce yourself.

But I’ll share with you the importance of it when it comes to coming into a community. Okay. So with that, I’m going to ask that you folks find a pair or someone to work with on your table or next to your table. Share them what you have so far of your connection, belonging, and purpose, and get some helpful feedback.

All right. I’m going to ask a pair from table 3, 5, 8, and that last table in the back to share. I’m going to start with the table in the back. If you folks would like to share, if you folks were able to get through a full introduction. Or what are some of the emerging thoughts in introducing yourself in this way?

Debbie Baker:
[foreign language 00:17:33]. Hello, my name is Debbie Baker. I work for the Choctaw Nation and I’m also a tribal member. So I’m also trying to embrace my indigenous culture. It’s been a challenge because I didn’t grow up in it. I’ve only spent the last 10 years learning it. Sorry, I’m a little bit nervous because I’ve never really talked in Choctaw out loud to anybody, so.

Elena Farden:
Good for you.

Debbie Baker:
On a side note, my daughter is in an apprenticeship program where she’s learning to speak the language. She spends 40 hours a week learning, so I’m really proud about that. So one of the connections that I have, which I’ve always stated from the time that I got into the certification program is that my purpose is to bring back facilitation to my tribe because we used to make decisions in a communal fashion. We made decisions that were in the best interest of the tribe. We no longer do that. We have people at the top making corporate level decisions for our tribal members, and it breaks my heart. So I really want to figure out a way to bring that back into the culture of who we are in making decisions. Thank you.

Elena Farden:
Thank you for sharing that. A pair from table eight. Something that either you were able to finish it, your introduction, or what’s emerging for you, sort of introducing yourself in this framework or format.

Speaker 6:
So I was born in Mexico where you could see the Popocatépetl and the Iztaccíhuatl, which were the mountain ranges, and you can’t see them now because of the smog. In 1981, I moved to St. Paul, Minnesota with my family. And a big definition of that is the Mississippi River. So when my stepmother, when she died, we had her ashes going into the Mississippi River. That was her wish. I said, “I come to this place to represent myself. And yes and that space, which is my site. In this community of practice, I bring my sense of coaching and teaching and appreciation of this craft to connect, to enrich, and to build momentum.”

Elena Farden:
Mahalo. Thank you. It’s beautiful. All right. A pair from table five, and then three.

Annie Love:
Hi, I’m Annie Love. I’m from Seattle via Idaho. I grew up in the mountains of North Idaho. We have a big lake, amazing freshwater lake. Mountains and water have always been a part of my life, especially water. I’ve always been drawn to it. When I moved to Seattle, it’s all the mountains, it’s all the lakes, it’s the sound, it’s everything. It’s gorgeous. One of the things when I was growing up on the farm, it was for me, I had no close friends nearby, you know? So it was only at school that I got to hang out with friends. So it was a lot of time by myself.

And so, I just became an explorer. I had a pond. Sorry, I get nervous speaking. I had a pond that I could just take my canoe on. I had a tree house that I could climb. I would just dream up all these scenarios in my head, and it kind of has led me to where I am today. I’m a world traveler as a hobby. But for my job, I am in exploration. Geocaching is exploring the world through a really fun game. And so, my background has really brought me to where I can help share that with other people. And so, my journey and purpose is to help grow myself and not be a nervous speaker in front of my team at work, so that we can do our best to help everyone else become an explorer, so yeah.

Elena Farden:
Mahalo. Thank you. Being nervous just means that we care about what we’re sharing in the space, so thank you for that. All right. Table three, bring us home. Someone would like to share?

Doug:
Hi, I’m Doug. And we had a number of good things we talked about at our table. But myself, I grew up in the Midwest in a farm family and really bring with me a lot of heritage, and legacy, and trustworthiness, and wisdom from my ancestors. But I always wanted to live on a river. And I used to go canoeing down in Missouri. And finally, I had an opportunity to get some property in Virginia. So now I live in the mountains, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, on a river, and went kayaking 21 times last year on my river. So I love where I’m living now. I came here to this session, to this two-day session to really get better at being able to guide people and bring out the best in people when I facilitate.

Elena Farden:
Thank you, Doug. So from wanting to live on the water to helping people facilitate with that flow, to growing up in Mexico over the mountains that can no longer be seen, but knowing that the river in which the ashes of your mother lay are also carried with you, to wanting to be able to explore more because this is how we interact with the world. This is how we build relationship with the world to being able to revive and revitalize indigenous languages and practices and how we make decisions. So beautiful. Thank you everyone for sharing. I appreciate that.

So with that, we also want to build on this. And so that is, you’ve done your mountain, your water, your introduction, you’ve had that share and some feedback with a trusted partner. Now, it’s also knowing your name and knowing your intention. So as I shared earlier, my name, my given name is Elena. It is a Greek origin. It means light or enlightenment. And it also ties into the way I see myself and also my tether to my land. And with that, I think it also manifests certain types of characteristics in me. I am an Aries Sun, Leo Moon, Sagittarius Rising. It’s fire, fire, fire all the way through.

And that’s what you get when you have two Sagittarius that have a child. So this is what I am. But in knowing my name, it’s also many different names. So Elena, I call it my taxpayer name. This is my taxpayer name. Kavai’ala Uluwehi Onau’una is my given, my identity name. So this name was given to me when my mother was pregnant. And my grandmother remembers smelling gardenias that would grow outside of our window. And so, that scent would sort of linger on her skin unforgettable. And so, this is the name that I carry.

Whether that has a good meaning or a bad meaning, it doesn’t say if the smell is nice or if the smell is not nice. I don’t know. But that’s the power of names in being able to grow into your name and your responsibility. So how do we get to know each other’s names? So in indigenous play parties, which we’ll not be doing here. We will be keeping our clothes on. There will be no playing of that sense, but the learnings that happen in play parties and being able to understand who’s in the room and how do we get to know each other’s name in a very consensual way.

We’re going to play a quick game. So this is called Janken Po. Many of you might know this as rock, paper, scissors. In Hawaii, we call it by its Japanese name, Janken Po. So the way it goes is you only have three things you can do, rock, paper, and scissors. Is anyone familiar with this game? Perfect. We call this Janken Po Rockstar. I’m going to ask if perhaps table three can help me demonstrate. So if you can come stand here with me, we’re just going to demonstrate for the crowd, and then we’re all going to do it. Yes.

So the way Janken Po Rockstar works, you’re going to pair off and find someone to do rock, paper, scissors. So I’ll go with JJ. And then, we’ll do this. So Janken Po, Janken Po, Janken Po. All right, so he wins. Rock defeats scissors. So now, I become JJ’s cheerleader. So what happens is I stand behind JJ and say, “JJ, JJ.” While he searches for a new opponent. “JJ, JJ, JJ, JJ, JJ, JJ. Get him. JJ.” Who’s the winner?

JJ:
Me.

Elena Farden:
Okay, so now you become part of our JJ cheerleading line. “JJ, JJ, JJ, JJ, JJ.” Who’s the winner? Brian?

Brian:
Yeah.

Elena Farden:
Now, we all become Brian’s cheerleader line. “Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian.”

Brian:
I got it.

Elena Farden:
So Brian is now the winner, so…

Brian:
My introvert’s like yelling at me right now.

Elena Farden:
Thank you for helping me with this. So what we’ll do for Janken Rockstar, you’ll start with your table first. Pair off to go Janken Rockstar. Then once you’ve done with your table, you’re going to need to expand through the room. Continue to find someone else to challenge until there are only two left. And again, if you are the non-winner, because we have no losers, if you are the non-winner, you become the cheerleader for whoever has acquired you. Any quick questions? I know that was a lot of…

Speaker 10:
1, 2, 3, hit?

Elena Farden:
1, 2, 3, hit. 1, 2, 3, reveal. Yep. And only rock, paper, scissors. No T-Rex, or Velociraptor, or dynamite. None of those will work. Any quick questions? Are we all good with Janken Po Rockstar? Until there’s two left. All right, start at your table.
Who was the winner? Steve?

Audience:
Steve.

Elena Farden:
Steve. Where’s Steve? Congratulations, Steve. So thank you everyone for playing Janken Rockstar. Now that you found another good way to find everyone’s name and also a way to cheer them on, and this is our winner, Steve.

Audience:
Whoo!

Speaker 12:
Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve.

Elena Farden:
Steve, in knowing your name and now that you’re a winner, would you be open to sharing the story about your name? How did you get your name, Steve?

Steve:
Gosh, I wish I knew better.

Elena Farden:
I’m sorry I put you on the spot.

Steve:
Yeah. No, I think my parents had a list of names that were actually relatives, and they were nixing each other’s different options. So they settled on Steve because it was not a relative, and they liked it. I was born in the time of when maybe Steve McQueen was popular and stuff like that, so there might’ve been some influence there. And then, my middle name is after one of my cranky great-grandfathers. My great-grandfather, Ed Hauser, who supposedly was just a cranky, disagreeable person unfortunately.

Elena Farden:
Truly opposite of you, huh?

Steve:
I think so.

Elena Farden:
Okay.

Steve:
You don’t need the last names. I mean, I got that. There was no choice in that.

Elena Farden:
It’s up to you if you’d like to share.

Steve:
Yeah, Bozak is a Slovak name that came from my great-grandfather who emigrated here about 150 years ago, and went from rags to riches, then got ruined by the Great Depression actually. Yeah. And it actually means either poor person or barefoot person in Slovakia, so yeah.

Elena Farden:
Thank you, Steve. Thank you for playing. Yep.

Audience:
Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve.

Elena Farden:
Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve.

Audience:
Steve, Steve, Steve.

Elena Farden:
Oh, but that is also the power of names and also the power of story. We would’ve never known that that was a story behind your name, how you got it. So with that, again, knowing your name is also knowing your intention and the things that you come with. For those of you that may not know the story of your name, I encourage you to ask your parents, your family, your grandparents, if they’re still with us. Ask them how you got your name. Where does my name come from?
If you’re so bold, ask them, “Do you remember when or how I was conceived? What’s the story behind that?” There might be a story of how your name came to be. What music was playing? I don’t know, so. So our names and our stories are important. And again, congratulations to Steve, but also thank you for sharing that story. In indigenous places, we consider stories a sacred place because you are revealing things about yourself that are open, that are vulnerable, that may not always be known. So thank you for sharing that.

All right. Our next thing with identifying our mauna, the things that sustain us, how we introduce ourselves, and now ways that we get to know each other’s name. And coming into consent as ceremony, we’re also wanting to do an offer before an ask. So I’ll model this. And the way we do this in places that I am familiar with is we always want to bring an offering. It could be food, it could be a blessing, it could be a song, it could be a moment of gratitude. It could also be an ask for forgiveness.

We want to offer that before we ask for anything, meaning we’re always filling before we’re taking something out. So in this exercise, I’m going to ask you to work in pairs. You’ll have partner A is to find an object. It could be anything on the table, and you can pretend what it might be. And you’re going to provide an offering to your partner, and it can be simple. I offer time. I want to offer you a moment of gratitude. I want to say I was inspired by your story, whatever it might be.
And your partner has to receive that offering fully, meaning I accept it. Thank you. I appreciate this. And then, you as partner A is going to ask them for something. And it could be a simple, “I would love to have a conversation with you after this. I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn, so we can continue this conversation that we had here at the summit.” So to help model this, I would like to offer and ask for forgiveness, and that would be to Douglas and Jamie. And coming into this session, I had offered to host and facilitate one.

And during that time, I know that I was not in my best behavior and following up with communication with both Douglas and Jamie having to chase me constantly, making sure that I would turn in my materials if I had any questions, if I’m coming to the meeting, do I need anything else? Are there any materials? And it was a much, much delay on my part and impacted their planning. So with that, for Douglas and Jamie, I offer my deepest and sincere apologies for my behavior, and I know it wasn’t productive.

And going forward, I commit to having more timely communication in how I interact with you and all of Voltage Control because you are an important part of my community, so I offer that to you, and I ask that you humbly accept it. Yep. Great. Now that they fully accepted it, my ask of Douglas and Eric and Jamie is if perhaps the slides that were shared by the facilitators might be available somehow is my small ask. And if not, that’s also okay. Okay, perfect. So in pairs, either at your table or someplace else, remember we just had Janken Po Rockstar. You’ve met tons of people that you’ve cheered for. Find someone, pick who’s going to do the offering first, who’s going to receive, and then you’re going to switch.
So thank you for that. I’m wondering, I’m going to ask from the tables in the back, also table one, what it felt like to receive fully before you were asked something. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14:
Yeah, like, oh, I’ve received it. Now, I have to give you what you’re asking for, so.

Elena Farden:
It can feel like a trap. I should’ve mentioned, you have free will to say, you could say no. I wasn’t explicit. Right. Yeah, good point. Good feedback. Our table’s in the back. Yes. Oh, in this table?

Speaker 15:
Sure.

Elena Farden:
Frank?

Frank:
I had no problem giving. I actually felt really good because for me, it’s disarming.

Elena Farden:
Sure.

Frank:
Yeah. Plus I was concerned. You know, vitamin C, the tangerine. I want to make sure she was healthy, so.

Elena Farden:
Yep.

Speaker 17:
It was so funny. I had no problem giving. I gave a wonderful little flower made of these little dots here. But I had a lot of trouble thinking about my ask, I was like, “Oh, what do I want to ask for? I don’t know if there’s anything I want to ask for.” And so, that was just an interesting observation for myself.

Elena Farden:
Feeling like a trap, being a giver, but also you just want to give. You don’t know if you want anything in exchange. That could be a thing too. Yeah, not knowing. Yes.

Speaker 18:
I guess the idea of reciprocity. It’s like if I actually need something, I’m going to give this to you. And then, therefore be able to ask you of something. I guess that’s another way you can look at it. That’s a little more cynical to me, but that’s kind of how I saw it.

Elena Farden:
No, reciprocity is a very big thing in the offering and the ask, and then also your intention. There was a hand here. Okay, I’m coming. Oh, you can…

Speaker 19:
So I gave Katie here a highlighter and I just grabbed the first thing. And then as soon as I handed it to her, it became very obvious to me that this is a magical device to mark what’s important in life and the important moments. And I’m normally not capable of finding things like that. And I think that’s a hundred percent a testament to your ability to set the frame and the spirit in this room, so thank you very much.

Elena Farden:
Thank you. Thank you. One last reflection or comment. And then, we’re going to move into our closing. Okay. So in our last 30 minutes together and on our last day, I’d like to offer a closing circle. Something that I also do in my practice within indigenous play spaces. And I did have a question from Melissa, what is an indigenous play space? So I’ll just address that really quickly to put some questions at ease. But an indigenous play space or play parties is where people from different backgrounds, either ethical, non-monogamy or consensual non-monogamy have abilities to gather together in order to have consensual play.

And that may be an open relationship, that may be a swinger type of situation, but these things need structure, they need guidance, they need consent, they need strict rules to be followed so that there is psychological and physical safety, that everyone is aware of what their expectations and rules are. And if those are not followed, what happens for the consequences because of the type of physical and mental damage that could happen. So that is what a play party is. And most of the facilitation that I do is somewhat in that space, but mostly in indigenous spaces. So I hope that helped answers your question.

With that, I’m going to quickly and nervously move to a closing circle. So I’m going to ask from this table on, if I can have you stand and come into a circle, maybe around these two tables. I know it might be difficult. But if I can ask this table 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, have you stand and come into a circle. You’re going to face inwards and face each other, and try to make a circle as best as you can.

Speaker 20:
Close on.

Elena Farden:
Close on. Yes.
All right. Now that you’re in this circle, what’s going to happen is I’m going to ask you to close your eyes. Does anyone have any injuries on your top right shoulder? Or does anyone not like to be physically touched on your top right shoulder? If so, you’re welcome to step out of the circle and just observe. There is no judgment. I just want to make sure you’re fully informed of what will happen to you.

So the touch will be… Is it okay if I touch your shoulder? It will look like this, and that’s it. If you’re not okay with that, and that’s completely fine as well. Feel free to step out of the circle and you can just observe. Okay? I’m going to ask you folks to stay within this circle and close your eyes. No peeking. All right, I’m going to ask this half of the room to surround the circle on the outside where I’m here in this way. All the way around, if you can make it.

I’m going to give the outer circle three prompts one at a time. And with those prompts, you’re going to touch the shoulder of the person that matches that prompt. You can touch as many shoulders as you want. Again, only the top right shoulder. This is non-sexual consensual touch. We are not touching anywhere else on the body. Again, you can touch as many participants in the inside circle as you want pending the prompt.

So for example, a prompt might be, touch the person on the shoulder of who you are happy that you met today at this two-day summit. Okay? All right, we’re going to go counterclockwise. When you come back to the person you are standing in front of after you’ve made your round, you’ll just pause there. Okay? Does that make sense? Clockwise. Is this clockwise? Am I making it weird?

Speaker 21:
Nope.

Elena Farden:
Okay. Okay. Okay. I will lean into the movement of the group. All right. So we’ll start inner circle, keep your eyes closed. Outer circle, please touch the top right shoulder of someone that you met today that helped change your perspective about your facilitation practice.

I see we’ve made our way around. Your next prompt for the outer circle is to touch the top right shoulder of someone you were so excited to cheer for, whether it’s Janken Po Rockstar, whether it’s hearing them share their story, whether it’s anything throughout these two days together where you saw them stand up, be vulnerable, be open to feedback and share with the whole group.

And now, for our last prompt, touch the top right shoulder of the person who you didn’t have a chance to meet, but had their presence not been here in the past two days, the experience would have not been the same. Inner circle, continue to keep your eyes closed. Outer circle, your gratitude has been seen, felt, and acknowledged. Take one step over to your left. And inner circle with your eyes still closed, put your left hand on the right shoulder of the person next to you and just thank them for being in the space with you.

You can open your eyes, sorry. That might be helpful. Yeah, so that there is no inappropriate placement of hands. Perfect. My inner circle, now with your eyes open, I’m going to ask you to step out. And our outer circle, you’re going to step in and find your place to close your eyes. Again, same for the inner circle. If there’s anyone uncomfortable or does not want to participate, there’s no judgment. You can feel free to step out at any time and just be an observer and a witnesser.
For our outer circle. You’re going to go clockwise, which I guess is this way. Yeah, that’s what I was told. Sorry, I live on an island. Any questions for the outer circle before we start? I know you had eyes closed in the beginning. All right. Inner circle, please close your eyes, settle in. For our outer circle, please touch the shoulder, top right shoulder of the person you are glad you met, that they came to this facilitation summit, that you made a connection with them, that they helped change something about your perspective in the work that you do.

All right, thanks for coming full circle. Our next prompt. Touch the top right shoulder of someone that you may not have had the opportunity to meet, but you’ve witnessed them in their quiet moments with them talking with others, with them eating or doing their work. You saw their presence here, and you just want to acknowledge that you see them. So touch the top right shoulder of someone you didn’t have an opportunity to meet, but you are grateful for their presence here.
And our last round, touch the top right shoulder of someone who did something, said something, wore something, pushed back at something, agreed with something, made you say, “Heck, yeah, this might be my people, my person. I’m so overjoyed that you attended.” Outer circle, your gratitude has been seen, felt, and acknowledged. Thank you so much. Inner circle, you can open your eyes. Please put your left hand on the right top shoulder of the person next to you, and just thank them for their presence here. Yep. All right. Everyone, you can have a seat if you wish. Thanks.

We have just a few minutes to wrap up. I’m going to ask two folks to just share. So I’ll ask you just quick reflections on the gratitude circle. Anything that stood out or how you might incorporate it in your practice, or just open thoughts and feedback would be great.

Speaker 22:
Thank you. So it reminded me how much… Well, I mean. Yeah, thanks. I was thinking. It reminded me how much physical touch is important. And I think especially following the pandemic and even before that, I think we were drifting further and further away from physical touch. And I was thinking, “Okay, how might I safely bring this into the groups that I work with?” I would like to understand this a lot more. And I’d love anything else that you might be able to offer if we were to bring this to our groups, especially the ones that don’t have the same levels of trust that I hope that we’ve built here. So thank you for that.

Speaker 23:
And strangely, I’m nonverbal. I don’t have words. Moved is the word that I have. Moved. Thank you.

Elena Farden:
Thank you both for sharing. So that closes us out. Here, I have our closing circle, our lei hipu’u. Our lei or wreath that we wear. Hipu’u is a type of tie. You can see these leaves are tied by their stem. The leaves that are here are from candlenut or kukui. They symbolize light or enlightenment. And so, why they’re tied in this knotted fashion is symbolic of fastening the knowledge that you’ve gained over time. So oftentimes, this lei style is given to graduates when they get their degree, when they move on to a new job that the knowledge and intellect and everything that they’ve imbued is fastened tightly. They don’t lose it, and they carry it with them forward.

So I offer this lei hipu’u with you folks, and thank you for being open in this gratitude circle. I have a 1, 2, 3 in case this is something that’s helpful for you. Just a quick reflection. One thing that you’d like to carry forward in your practice. Two things shared today that you are still holding questions about. They still feel nebulous maybe. And three things you want to dig into more deeper or you want to understand more. And this will just be for your own self-reflection. So thank you so much. And I have five minutes to spare. I feel like I should get a little star or something. Thank you for everyone. I close this out and I send it back to you folks.

The post Consent as Ceremony appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Kathy Ditmore led an impactful session on “Mapping the Change Journey”, offering valuable tools and frameworks for creating successful change processes within teams and organizations. This session focused on using a canvas as a “compass” to guide projects toward success and aligned transformation, emphasizing how to adapt and lead through change effectively.

Exploring the Canvas: Your Compass for Success

Kathy kicked off the session with an engaging icebreaker: participants placed their birthdays or favorite day on a sticky note, fostering connection and lightening the mood. This simple exercise set the tone for a session that combined reflection with actionable tools for leading change.

The heart of the session was Kathy’s introduction of the canvas, a tool she described as a guiding framework for navigating the complexities of change. The canvas wasn’t about adopting a one-size-fits-all solution—it was about offering a flexible, living document that helped teams clarify their vision, align on purpose, and identify what steps to take next.

The Journey of Change: Setting the Stage for Success

Kathy shared a key lesson from her career: change succeeds when people connect to purpose and have ownership of the direction they’re going. Her early experience as a programmer highlighted how even the most well-intentioned training efforts fall short without a clear understanding of why the work matters.

The session continued with a deep dive into the backpack essentials for change: staying open, being curious, and engaging fully. Kathy encouraged participants to leave behind preconceived methods or frameworks and focus on adapting their approach to the specific needs of the team and project at hand.

Exercise: The Tale of Two Changes

To help participants internalize the concepts, Kathy led them through an exercise titled “The Tale of Two Changes”. Attendees were asked to reflect on a successful change and a struggling one. They identified key factors that fueled the success of the former and what was missing in the latter. The group shared insights, revealing common themes: clear roles, communication, support, and leadership alignment all stood out as crucial for successful transformations.

The Canvas: Your Roadmap for Change

As the session unfolded, Kathy introduced the canvas, which was structured into three main areas:

1. Mindset: Aligning everyone around a shared vision and understanding of the “why.”
2. Execution: Defining the guiding principles, roles, resources, and risks that shape the change process.
3. Connection: Understanding stakeholders and engagement strategies to ensure that everyone is on board and moving in the same direction.

Kathy emphasized that this tool should be viewed as a living document, one that evolves as the team progresses and learns together. She also provided an example of how the canvas could be used in project rescue, helping teams reorient struggling initiatives through a purposeful re-evaluation of their vision.

Creating Clarity: Vision and Purpose

A key moment of the session focused on visioning: crafting a shared purpose and aligning everyone around the “why.” Kathy facilitated a story-building exercise to help participants break down complex ideas into manageable, clear themes. By engaging with a simple exercise that explored direction and clarity, attendees were encouraged to rethink their approach to projects—emphasizing the importance of alignment from the very start.

Practical Insights for the Road Ahead

Kathy concluded with reflections on the importance of dialogue in change processes. The canvas is a tool to guide these conversations, helping teams stay on track and adjust as needed. She shared examples of using the tool to identify potential detours, offering a framework for troubleshooting when change processes start to veer off course.

The session left participants with a renewed focus on how to approach change with clarity, empathy, and a structured plan—ensuring that transformation isn’t just about the end result, but also about the journey of alignment and ownership along the way.

The session left participants with a renewed focus on how to approach change with clarity, empathy, and a structured plan—ensuring that transformation isn’t just about the end result, but also about the journey of alignment and ownership along the way.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Kathy’s Session:

Kathy Ditmore:
Hello? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah, okay, great. Thanks. Thank you for having me today. So, as Eric mentioned, the topic today is Mapping the Change Journey and I’ve chosen a tool, I was thinking about this, what did I want to bring in so we’re going to be looking at a canvas as a compass for your project’s success. So, while you all are settling in and as we’re getting in, if you take a sticky and go ahead and put your month and day of your birthday. And if you’re not comfortable putting that out there to everybody, just pick your favorite day and put that on the table in front of you so the other folks at the table can see the month and day, don’t need the year. So, as you’re doing that.

So, a little bit about me and why this topic is important to me. Early in my career as a young programmer, I had the opportunity to engage with a client at a different level and it was great. Kathy, you’re connecting, we’d love you to train our client’s teams how to use the system. Wow, that’s great, I’m being recognized. So, I go in and I train. Blank stares, everybody’s looking at me. It’s very uncomfortable. So, while I found I could teach them how to click buttons, how to navigate the screens, there was something missing for everyone in that room and that was their why and how the work they were doing was going to transform how they did business, was going to transform the results that they were bringing in and the outcomes that they were seeking.

So, that set in motion what is at my core. We did a little work on purpose statements yesterday so I’m going to read mine out. I’m a facilitative project delivery leader creating space for teams to align around a shared purpose and co-create their path forward. And what does that mean? I thought about this. Through my roles over my career, I’ve always been in the technical industry as a programmer, a business analyst, project manager, a change practitioner, change leader both in commercial and nonprofit. I’ve seen over and over again that change succeeds when people connect to purpose and have ownership in the direction they’re going and agency in how they adapt, they have a say. And even if their say isn’t heard … Even if their say doesn’t change the direction, it’s been heard, they can weigh in, they can frame the messaging.

As we go through today, I may use some terms. These are not industry standard terms, these are just definitions that I’m throwing out there for you. So, some reference points as we go on this journey. The first one is a project, it’s a temporary endeavor. We’re creating something new or different or making something different, it might be the next step. A change and that’s the human journey from what is to what will be, also known as transition. Done well, it’s nice. Not done well, looks a little like Swiss cheese. In fact, I think Prosci likes to use that term. As much as I love Swiss cheese, it’s probably not a great way to do change. Change leadership, it’s creating that space and the conditions for teams to navigate the change together. And project rescue, I do reference this at some point. So, when I talk about a project rescue, I’m talking about reorienting your struggling initiatives through purpose.

Any things folks would want to add? Questions? All right. So, a little about our journey today, a bit of a guide for you. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to check our backpack essentials. We’re going to check what we don’t want to carry with us as we go on this journey and we’re going to check those things that we want to keep in mind as we go through. We’re going to explore patterns in change, we’re going to explore change dynamics, we’re going to discover our compass, today we’ll use the canvas. We’re going to practice orientation, orienting with the compass and then we’ll talk about some insights for the road ahead. So, hopefully, you all are ready to go on this journey.

So, the backpack essentials. The first one, stay open and stay curious. I had some particular notes on this one and it’s really about … This may be familiar territory for a lot of you but try to approach it with fresh eyes. Engage fully beyond your methods. So, this isn’t about doing the right way so leave your methods, we’re talking about things you don’t want to carry on your backpack. This isn’t about Prosci, not about Cotter, not about Lewis models of chains, leave all that aside. This is about the process we’re going to be going through as far as how we use this tool and it should apply regardless of a method. Ask you to lean in the detours because it’s in those spaces that your learning happens and then make it real. As we’re going through, I’m coming from one perspective. Each of you have different backgrounds so think about what you’re going to be able to pull from today to bring into your practice with your customers and how you show up and how you bring your teams along on their journey.

Is there anything folks would like to add to the agreements today? Great. So, our first exercise is going to be exploring the tale of two changes. Each of you, I’m sure, has been through a change that went really well but you’ve also been through a change that just went not quite so well, it struggled. This poor guy, he’s trying to limp over the finish line, it’s quite sad and there’s cost to that. I think earlier it was mentioned, the adoption, that can be painful. So, I’d like each of you to think about, and I’m going to put it on the next slide too, the instructions, what are some key factors that gave momentum to a change done well. Think about that change, think about how you felt, how the team engaged, what was right about that particular endeavor and the same for your struggling change. What was missing from the change that struggled?

So, we’re going to do this. Step one, everybody got their birthday or their favorite day on the table, that’s actually step four. But go ahead and take a piece of paper, your sticky notes, fold it in half or use the individual sticky notes. Individually, take a couple minutes and think about both of those, a change that went well and a change that didn’t go quite so well and pull out those key factors of what contributed or what was missing. Then you’re going to pair share at your table and, if you have an odd number at your table, you’re welcome to triple up or look at somebody from another table and create your sticky notes and then you’re going to table share. You can use the backside of the giant canvas and put out your sticky notes, theme them out and I’d like, as a table, for you to pick your top three for both. And your spokesperson, lucky winner today, if you don’t have a volunteer, if you have a volunteer, that’s great. But one way to find your volunteer is whoever has a day that’s closest to today. And if your birthday’s today, happy birthday. So, with that, we’ll let you go for a few minutes.

Okay, you should start moving to your table shares. You may not have all completed getting to your top three so, if you have a few more to read out, that’s fine. But that looks like there was a lot of great discussion happening so I’m really curious to go around and hear from folks in the room. Who would like to share for … We’ll start with the change that went well. What were some of the key factors that gave momentum? And mics will go around.

Speaker 2:
Okay. So, there was a couple of key things that came out from our table on what were success factors. One of those being that the organization supported a culture of change and a culture of experimentation so that people were more accepting of change. We just know we’re changing and we have a purpose for it and we’re evolving and to expect it. So, that was one of them. Another program that was used for some change was some early adopters that accepted the change, were able to proactively advocate for the benefits of those change and speak to it in a positive format. And then the last one is buy-in from the top down, that’s always a big one. Making sure that leadership understands, accepts and clearly communicates the change and the need and the why and that they can speak to it.

Kathy Ditmore:
Oh, thank you. Excellent. Are there things folks would want to add to that? Any other table want to add to that?

Speaker 3:
Hi. It is my birthday today so … I think there’s another birthday too.

Kathy Ditmore:
Whoo, happy birthday.

Speaker 3:
I think there was another birthday as well. Was there?

Speaker 3:
Yes.

Kathy Ditmore:
Who was it?

Speaker 3:
Okay, close.

Speaker 3:
Cool. So, for positives, we said that effective communication was essential and using one standardized system, people know what to expect, how you’re going to be communicated to in a certain timeframe. One that I brought up that was a bit, I think, unique was we call it the source booth at a company, our company and it’s that there’s one place to find all the information you’ll need. It’s equal opportunity so everyone has access to it, everyone has permission. If you’re out of office, you come back, you know where all the details are, it’s right there in the source of truth. And then third, having lead time. So, if you’re going to make a change, we made a big payment provider change at our company recently, we had a few months lead time and that wasn’t really enough. So, the more time, the better to make that change possible.

Kathy Ditmore:
Wonderful. Thank you for sharing and I appreciate that source of truth, that central place that speaks a little bit to the agency that people can find their information as well. Anybody else want to add to that?

Stacy:
I’ll go. Hi, I’m Stacy, my birthday’s on Friday.

Kathy Ditmore:
Happy birthday.

Stacy:
One that came up again and again for us was really clear roles and responsibilities. So, everybody knowing what their job is and what their purpose is, that’s the biggest one. And then just affirmation that you’re valued and knowing that you’re valued and trusted, that was another big one for went well.

Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you. We have one more in the back and then we’ll move to change that struggled.

Jackie:
Okay. I’m Jackie, my birthday is in about three weeks so I just put myself out there.

Kathy Ditmore:
Happy birthday.

Jackie:
So, I’ll just try to add the ones that we haven’t already had but we talked about not just clarity of vision but having a shared vision and purpose certainly contributes to a successful outcome. Believing in yourself to make the change, doing the internal work as the facilitator and to have the right people in the right roles. In other words, a match of talents and skills with what a project needs and what people want to give to the project to have a successful outcome.

Kathy Ditmore:
Excellent, thank you very much. So, I’m sure there’s a lot more folks can add on but a lot of things stood out here. I am curious, before we compare the two, who would like to share some of the findings for what was missing in a change that didn’t go quite so well?

Harry:
My name’s Harry, birthday is in 10 days.

Kathy Ditmore:
Happy birthday.

Harry:
One was actually understanding the difference between workload and the resources you had. So, even if you have the great plan, have you actually understood the resources available to make the change? Another one was either missing wise or even bad ones that don’t resonate with the group. And the last one was also the forced feelings you get, isn’t this exciting. If it’s not exciting, you don’t want to nod your head and agree but you may not have the space to disagree so, yeah.

Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you, appreciate that. Anybody else?

Speaker 8:
Okay, I [inaudible 00:13:46]. I was going to say empathy.

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah.

Speaker 8:
But also, one thing that came up at this table is having leadership say that they’re open to feedback but appearing not to take it seriously. That seems to be a rough one.

Kathy Ditmore:
Appreciate that. I heard a lot of hmmm on that and I’m seeing a theme to the sessions we had earlier too. So, anybody else? One more. Please, go ahead. Oh, we’ve got one. We’ve got two more. Thanks.

Speaker 9:
Oh, sorry.

Speaker 10:
Sorry, I did not mean to cut in. We didn’t discuss it at our table but, when you were talking about leadership, it reminded me of how many changes I’ve seen fail because senior leadership is not aligned. So, it’s not enough to just have that change be communicated from the top down but the top needs to be on the same page first.

Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you for that.

Speaker 11:
At this table we did a little bit of a grouping and we didn’t quite get into all of the not well but I do see some repetition of progress report. So, understanding how that change is being received and how is it going so you can adapt and you might get all the way down the line and realize this didn’t actually go well but we didn’t have that visibility into what’s going on.

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, I appreciate that. I’m curious, as you’ve heard things today such as around support, things that contributed to things that went well, support experimentation, early adopters, buy-in from the top down, knowing the whole system, how to communicate, knowing where that source of truth is, clear roles and responsibilities. And then I’m going to jump, I know there were a lot more, I’m going to jump over to things that contributed to change that didn’t go quite so well. Understanding the progress, feeds a little bit into maybe the experimentation, senior leadership alignment, being open to feedback, having empathy, those forced feelings and workload and resources. Are folks seeing any themes or connections come out across those? What about how people are coming together? I see a hand over there.

Speaker 12:
Whether you’re focused on the change or on the people experiencing the change? It’s the customer focused as opposed to the-

Kathy Ditmore:
Both.

Speaker 12:
… us focused.

Kathy Ditmore:
Well, we’ve been through … This has been great discussion and it sounds like everybody’s had experience with both sides of change and I’m struck with something interesting here. So, when changes work, it sounds like people seem to be moving the same direction whether it’s they know their roles, their senior leaders are aligned, they know where to find information, they know what the experience should be, there’s a feedback loop, there’s empathy. So, there’s a clear path of how you’re going to be moving forward together. So, I’m going to move on to another exercise, this is … Take this with us as we bridge over to … We’re going to go over to another interesting idea here. So, I want to dig into the idea of direction and clarity and I’m going to jump over to another exercise. We got the time.

We’re going to do this one relatively quickly. What’s going to happen is I’m going to put three images on the screen. You can use those images however you want for three minutes as a table to build a story, three sentences. If you want to go to four, it’s okay, you want to keep it short. Story needs to begin with once upon a time. You can use those images however you want. You can use them literally, you can ascribe meaning to them, you can think about what’s happening outside the frame, what happened before, what happened after. You can think about the individuals that might be in these images, what they’re talking about, what they’re experiencing, what they’re feeling. You can use those images however you want to build a story that’s three sentences. Are you all ready? And pick one person at your table to be a scribe. If you do not have a volunteer, pick the person who has a birthday closest to July 4th.

Image one, image two, image three and you have three minutes. So, I know it was a lot to squeeze in in three minutes, that three minutes goes fast. But don’t worry, you have an opportunity. I’m now going to give you a theme. The moment we chose to leap. Still three sentences about, still once upon a time, you can still use these images however you want in any order and I’d like you to take a look at your story, see if there’s something you want to shift in your story or adjust. And you have two minutes for this. I know that was a quick exercise but I am curious, in the room, is there anybody here that actually adjusted their story? I’d love to hear from at least one of your tables, talk to me about that.

Speaker 13:
The first story is about once upon a time my grandfather and granddaughter created a magic garden. They lived on top of a hill, had a steep Securitas road to get there until one day Gargamel showed up in his hot air balloon and then they made the garden disappear by going invisible. How we changed this was the grandfather and granddaughter lived a happy vegetarian life, plant-based vegetarian life until one day Gargamel showed up with his pet pig, crashed the balloon, killed the pig, they barbecued it and everyone lived happily forever.

Kathy Ditmore:
That’s fantastic. So, how did you get there as a table?

Speaker 14:
So, part of it was that we asked people who hadn’t contributed for the first time to contribute and then we got super silly. Not silly, we were very serious.

Kathy Ditmore:
Okay. Is there anybody … You had a shift to your story there, it was a bit of a rewrite. Did anybody do a complete rewrite?

Crystal:
Well, so … Hi, I’m Crystal.

Kathy Ditmore:
Hi, Crystal.

Crystal:
We in our group, we wanted to try out what doing something bigger could look like and then, once we got the theme, we rewrote quite a bit. So, ours reads, once upon a time, humanity was born. We needed to be equipped with tools to leap. So, then we added leap obviously. To see problems from above, support each other, to be part of each other’s journey. So, you can see problems from above, hot air balloon, helping each other and cultivating and then that journey.

Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you. So, for those of you who shifted, and thank you for the table shares, fantastic stories. For those of you who felt the shift, what made shift? Was it the theme that made you shift?

Speaker 16:
More direction.

Kathy Ditmore:
Anybody else? Agree? Anything else that may have contributed?

Kathy Ditmore:
I’m sorry?

Speaker 18:
That we had a second set of time.

Kathy Ditmore:
You had a second set of time, that’ll help too. You now know what it’s about as well, right? So, I appreciated the more direction and so, going on the theme of what we’re hearing about people being aligned, having purpose, I’d like to introduce a tool you may want to use. On your tables, there’s small versions, it’s a canvas. Many of you are already familiar with canvases. The business model canvas. If any of you do lean change, you’re familiar with the lean change canvas that came out in the early 2000s. There’s lots of canvases you can use. My first experience with a canvas was early in my project management days, I had a sponsor who didn’t want to read a charter. Put a document in front of him, his eyes glazed over. Project on a page, it was our canvas. So, there’s a lot of great uses for a canvas and you can tailor them however you’d like.
Today’s canvas is set up on three sections. The middle is your mindset and that’s aligning everybody. It’s aligning on your vision, feeding on what was offered earlier around that compelling future state, what are you aiming to achieve. Helping people understand the significance, the why this has to happen, what happens if we don’t do it now. And then describing the benefits to the organization, to the team, to your customers, to them as individuals. On the left, I call this execution. This is the guiding principles, this is what’s going to guide your decision making. It could be your even overs, it could be your polarities you have to work through, that was a topic that came up with the group yesterday. But how are you going to make those decisions in the project? How are your teams going to be allowed to make decisions?

Your resources and roles, we heard about roles and responsibilities earlier. Who do you need on this project? What are their roles going to be and where are your gaps is most important as well and how are you going to support those people? Your change risks and mitigations. So, this is looking ahead and saying where are those detours going to happen on this project, what do I need to worry about, what does my team need to worry about and you’d want to be tracking those even at a high level. The canvas isn’t meant to be in great detail, you may have a lot of supporting materials underneath of this but it’s meant to pull out the top themes, the top highlights.

On the right, I call this connection. It has your stakeholders and impacts, these are your groups. This is very high level. How are they going to be impacted? Their jobs are going to be impacted, their compensation approach is going to be impacted, who they report to, processes, maybe tools they use, technology, usually track that separately. So, it gives you an idea of what you need to worry about and how you may need to make them aware of things or engage them which is the next group, engagement. Each of these groups like to be communicated to in a particular way. Not everybody is going to read an email. In fact, I’m someone, if you send me an email, it’s the last thing I’m going to read if I have time at the end of the day. If it’s urgent, you need to message me. So, how do people want to be engaged with? How do they want to communicate back to you? How are you going to capture their input? What are the channels? Maybe it varies by team. What can you leverage within the organization?

In the bottom right, there’s progress and success measures. Somebody mentioned experimentation earlier, those quick wins. I worked on a project recently and we found that, before we implemented the system, we could actually roll out pieces of the process that needed to change beforehand. So, those were experiments we were able to push out in advance, they were quick wins for the organization. So, where are those quick wins either within your teams or within the larger project? That’s a quick overview of this version of a canvas. Any questions?

Speaker 19:
It took me a minute to figure out my question. When you’re in the beginning of a project, do you fill this out all at once? Is there some living part of this over time? What’s the lifetime of this and this information?

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah. So, this is meant to be a living breathing document and the beauty of a canvas is you create it for your engagement. This is one. Underneath of this which I didn’t share today, teams have a canvas. They have the vision at the top but then they have the impact specific to their team and what they need to do to support the change or what they need from the organization to support the change. So, this is all visible and all bubbled up. I have a slide later we’ll talk through where you could use it but, yes, initiation, you’d start filling it out. You could fill it out on your own after interviewing or you can gather your teams like we’re going to do in our next exercise and capture the collective intelligence and have a starting point.
So, let’s read the instructions first. You have a big canvas on your table so feel free to open that up and use it. Today, I was thinking you’d want to focus on, where I like to start, vision purpose, significance, the why now and the benefits. You might find as you’re working through this that you come up with ideas that belong in other blocks and that’s okay, put those stickies in those other blocks, you’ll come back to them later. I gave you a prompt if you’re doing a vision, you come up with your own but I’m sharing one if that helps you. Your approach today is, first, individually and I’m going to give you scenarios. Is individually, quickly capture your thoughts on sticky notes once you read the scenario. One idea per sticky around the vision.

So, you’re going to read the questions here. What’s your why? What’s your cause? What’s your purpose? What pains exist in your significance? What happens if you don’t do it now? Why is it important now? And your benefits. What are your anticipated improvements to your employees, the organization or external parties? Then, as a table, you’ll look at the stickies, please start just placing them in the middle sections. Talk as a table and start grouping them coming up with themes and go ahead and create your vision. Try to draft one and we’re going to have a table readout. If you don’t have a volunteer spokesperson, we’re going to pick the person whose birthday is closest to Halloween. All right, we’ve got at least one lucky winner in the room.

So, for this exercise, I’m going to cut us short a little bit because I do want time for us to have dialogue so I apologize for that. I’m going to give you first three minutes to start doing your stickies individually then you can go into working as a table and I will give you 10 minutes for that. So, a total of 13 minutes to work through this and then listen for the chime. Any questions before you start? Oh, yes, hold … The most important thing, I was so excited. You also have on your table, I apologize, a scenario.

Audience:
Aaah.

Kathy Ditmore:
Aaah, the magic thing. Got so excited, sorry. So, you have three scenarios, I’m going to put those up and then I’ll come back. Your first adventure is your group has been given a $10,000 budget and you’re going to go on an unforgettable trip. You have different ideas about your vacation and you need to ensure that trip aligns with your group’s priorities while staying in budget. Your second scenario and the third is … The second scenario is around onboarding. Everybody’s lived that, experienced that. You have employees that are struggling in the first 90 days feeling lost, disconnected and unclear in expectations. So, your leadership wants to redesign onboarding for a smoother, more engaging experience while balancing efficiency and personalization.

If you pick the third scenario, Douglas is going to want to see this at the end. So, the third scenario, as facilitators, you understand the power of well-designed experiences, you are loving the conference this year and you want to help with next year. So, Voltage Control is welcoming your input as they begin planning next year’s event to maximize engagement, connection and actionable takeaways. Your team has been tasked with mapping key changes.
So, as a table, quickly pick your scenario. You have a couple minutes to start drafting your individual stickies, put them on this canvas and then start working together to theme those and build your vision.

Speaker 21:
Question.

Speaker 22:
Quick question.

Kathy Ditmore:
One question.

Speaker 22:
So, I’m hearing a lot of language that’s big picture, vision and then I’m hearing other language that’s pretty specific on how to. Is it intended to be intertwined? It’s a little-

Kathy Ditmore:
It’s intended to bubble up the themes. So, sometimes folks can only look at the detail and then you can bubble up your themes.

Speaker 22:
Okay.

Kathy Ditmore:
So, this canvas is intended to really be high level, maybe later supported by more detail.

Speaker 22:
Okay.

Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you. And you should start, working as a table, putting your stickies in the middle. So, I’m going to call for a pause in conversations and I know that’s a quick exercise. First, you would not go this quickly in your business changes, at least I hope not. How does this feel for folks using something like a canvas to work through this? Yes?

Speaker 23:
Thanks. I think I saw a difference between high level thinking and low level thinking and there was maybe even some discordance, discord over that, yeah.

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that and we’ll come back to that. That does happen at times depending on the groups. We have a few more.

Speaker 12:
It was really useful to have buckets to put our ideas into but it was too much all at once. It would’ve been nice to roll out just the center strip and then the next piece and have a build.

Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you.

Speaker 24:
Yeah. To plus one on that, it was hard because there were just so many, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, where do I even start?” and then of course I went straight to solutions.

Speaker 25:
And they [inaudible 00:33:22].

Speaker 24:
Oh, of course.

Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you. Anybody else?

Stacy:
I have a microphone but I can’t figure out where all the voices are coming from. But I noticed there’s a really delicate balance between the beauty of the constraints and the prompts and then also allowing yourself to veer off the prompts when it happens and allowing that to happen organically.

Kathy Ditmore:
Absolutely, thank you. Anybody else? Over in front.

Speaker 3:
I sense some personal resistance to using such a formal system for … We used prompt one so it was a vacation. I was like, “Oh, I’m overthinking this, I don’t want to do that but I think it actually is I’m not overthinking it.” All these things are necessary but using them for a personal project feels like almost inappropriate but it actually is appropriate. You know? Does that make sense? I don’t know.

Kathy Ditmore:
I think it does. We have one more over there and then I want to see how … Did other folks align, run into the same things? I’ve heard discord, the ability to stay within the constraints but also permission, allowing yourself to veer off.

Speaker 26:
I think we did good and I love templates to help group our thinking. I think what is additionally helpful is examples. I think it would have been good if we would have seen an example, that would have just given us a little bit of a different-

Kathy Ditmore:
Different overview.

Speaker 26:
… perspective or helped us a little bit where we struggled at which bucket … And like you said, it doesn’t really matter which bucket it goes into but that would have helped us, I think, be not as confused.

Kathy Ditmore:
Okay. Indeed, thank you. One more.

Monica:
I just wanted to comment that I’m used to someone’s being like, “Fill out this canvas, Monica, for your product strategy,” and I’ve always really struggled with that and I think one of the reasons why is because I was doing it in a vacuum and there wasn’t a sequential process of prompts and thought to talk about that. I think that that’s the expectation that these conversations are happening and so it should be easy for me to go and synthesize it. So, I appreciate wanting to take this back and say how might we fill out this canvas a little differently, that’s more meaningful where everyone is more engaged.

Kathy Ditmore:
Interesting. The dialogue. Yeah, not in a vacuum. We have one more.

Speaker 28:
Do I go?

Kathy Ditmore:
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 28:
Okay. One of the things that was interesting for our table that I had to adjust is … We picked two for the onboarding and I actually facilitated my company’s onboarding transformation and so I’m sitting here going how do I share thoughts without, during a scramble, it’s human nature, who has experience at this and then you’re pulling in that but then I didn’t want to stifle other people’s ideas either. So, there was the natural tension of how do we have random ideas show up but who has actual experience doing this and how do you leverage it. So, I think, as facilitators, we have to leave space for the two types of people because I think there’s value in both.

Kathy Ditmore:
Indeed. Thank you for sharing that. And I appreciate that … Oh, we have one more over here.

Speaker 10:
I was just reflecting on a couple of comments around doing it all at once was challenging and it just made me think about how important it is for teams to be aligned on a north star. I was just wondering, if we had all agreed on our vision and then built out the template, would we have come from so many different perspectives? So, just something that dawned on me is like, “Oh, starting with the vision, starting with why”-

Kathy Ditmore:
Always start with that.

Speaker 10:
… “Is so important.”

Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you for that. Going to the compass, right? Always know the direction you’re going. Anybody else? We have one more, a couple more over in the back.

Speaker 28:
Yeah. So, I was struggling also, I noticed myself, I was reading every sentence and I was overwhelmed, my fault maybe. But I was thinking what if all of this was blank except for the colored items and we would have started with questioning what kinds of questions do we want to ask ourselves regarding guiding principles and, afterwards, maybe adding the missing important questions, et cetera. So, you take more ownership as a team or an organization towards what’s guiding principles for us instead of saying these aspects.

Kathy Ditmore:
Right. And that’s fantastic. Yes, the tool is intended for you to create your path forward together. Questions offered are certainly just for the purposes of today and I think that’s a wonderful idea to maybe, as a team, figure out what is it you really want to be answering about your project. Speaking to the discord, you might want to think about as a facilitator who you have in the room. So, do you want to do this with your senior leaders separately from your teams first, especially if you’re working on the vision, and then work with your teams and maybe one senior leader or your teams alone and then bring everybody together but it’s all about bringing that alignment. I heard looking at the whole canvas and so, for the purposes today, yes, I shared the whole canvas. But as a facilitator, you would probably block off the blocks that you don’t want to see with your group because, indeed, it can be overwhelming to dig into this.

So, I think there have been a lot of creative ideas here offered around how it could be used and so, hopefully, folks have some thoughts on how that might apply as you bring it back. So, I’m not going to make you redo your vision but I’d be curious what people think if you’d been offered a detour. So, somebody here had mentioned dialogue. I was doing this in a vacuum. Really, the tool is intended to promote dialogue. So, if you’ve been offered a detour after doing your vision, how would that have changed your discussions? How would the tool help you? How might you use it or not? Any thoughts on that?

John Rabasa:
Hi, Kathy, John Rabasa. So, I took from this that it was like a discovery tool where you had a lot of different prompts and so this is, as you said, a living document where things may bubble up that then informs, answer the question of your vision so you make sure you don’t leave things out. I look at these detours and I think that’s probably the information that you might pick up along the way and some of them are actually very helpful because they give you more definition.

Kathy Ditmore:
Indeed. And so, when you encounter these detours, whether you use a tool like this or something else within your teams, how are you evaluating that together on what those impacts are? Again, that tool to guide that discussion. Anybody else?

Robert Britton:
Yeah, I was going to … My name is Robert Britton.

Kathy Ditmore:
Hi, Robert.

Robert Britton:
I was going to add to this that I think the timing always gets people. Especially in a workshop, you’re like, “In the interest of time or because of time or take this for 10 minutes,” and I think what we do is we shut down our thinking and it’s not really exploratory. So, when you add these detours, I think that also gives us that breath of, you know what, if we don’t get it all today, we can come back to it. So, as facilitators, I think we also need to find ways to give them space afterwards to say, hey, you’re not going to be done when you’re here, this is just a starting point so you can keep going once you leave here.

Kathy Ditmore:
Indeed, thank you. Progress over perfection. We have another one over there.

Speaker 32:
Right. So, when I saw the detour, we were doing the employee experience and that was like, “Okay, yeah, you need to ask the people that are going to go through the change what … you need to get their inputs, design it around what they prefer.” And then it triggered something, I don’t know why, a second point, sorry for hogging the mic here, but when do you go and how deep do you go into this type of exercise. And sometimes just getting to vision can take days and weeks depending on what it is. So, I’m curious what other people think about that and what you think about that.

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, it’s like the theme I’m picking up here which ties into this is adapting. This is iterative, this is not a once and done experiment or tool. It’s not once and done, use it as initiation. I’ll show some other points, there’s various points where you’ll use it. So, you mentioned vision could take a long time and it does. I’ve had a vision take five weeks to develop with eight sponsors, that was quite a challenge just to get to the vision and that’s all we focused on. And then, after that, we were able to start digging into some of these other areas and it’s almost like peeling back the layers of an onion. You might start and only get so far and then it marinates, people start moving down a path. You might be building out your plan, you might be mobilizing your resources, you might be working through your procurement process if you’re bringing in a new solution, you might be still doing some of your pain points discussions, they may still be underway to work through things, you might be starting to do pre-mortems.

Whatever tools you’re using, out of those, more things will come out that bring richness to your project, your goals and how you need to work together so you’re always coming back to this. It’s also recommended to make this visible, whether you’re using a Miro board, some people post it on a wall although I know many of us are hybrid or remote now. I often will take sections and make sure that, when I go in a meeting with sponsors, we go back to the vision. If something comes up, how does it play into our guiding principles? So, I’m always coming back to these and so you have to think about what’s important to you and your team, your sponsors, your project leads, your stakeholders that you need to keep bringing back to them. Because they may say, “Oh, yeah, we said that but …” I don’t know if that helps. So, it’s like layers of the onion, digging, the details will surface over time. It’s a little more agile approach to change.

Carrie:
I’m Carrie. My sense is you asked how the detours might have changed things and, if our vision is visionary and broad and big enough, then the detours should … They’re a gut check to ladder up to that to ensure that our vision is really truly the north star and that the detours should be a part of that.

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Anybody else? So, I’m going to share … This clicker’s not … Got to get our check our bearings. So, how would you connect this to your practice? We’ve heard a few things here, I hear folks starting to think about this. Any ideas? It’s okay if it marinates.

Speaker 8:
Thank you. I have more than one word. For me, looking at this and thinking about the different boxes, it seems to me that some of these would be way more flexible than others. And so, while nothing is locked down, there are areas like guiding principles or vision that maybe, if those are starting to be in question because of the tactics of engagement, that goes up to another level of leadership versus my teams would be able to really be in the tactics of what engagement is. And so, I think that that is really helpful and something that I would bring back to my practice.

Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. We have one over here.

Speaker 19:
Just a question. When you said a minute ago the long vision exercise that was five weeks, wondering how you landed that, how you knew you were done and did the map help? Did you go into significance of benefits and cross connect that or was it totally unrelated to that?

Kathy Ditmore:
So, with that particular audience, not everybody, when you present the canvas, they’re like, “Ah,” the eyes glaze over. I think your head’s like … Right? And you don’t have to use this canvas, any canvas but it’s really helped to guide your conversations. You can use other tools. You had asked earlier how would I do this with my sponsors. Sometimes I’m interviewing the sponsors individually, I’m collating the information and I’m sharing it out to them to make sure we’re theming it correctly and we’re then evolving a vision together. Sometimes that’s an interesting exercise because it surfaces, they haven’t necessarily talked to each other, so it surfaces a lot of those polarities or personal agendas or something else that may not tie into what I’m getting from the most senior sponsor. So, you can use different methods to surface this information and bring it together. Okay, that’s it. Anybody else?

Tamara:
I guess the first thing I would say, hi, I’m Tamara. First of all, I applaud you and everyone else who is willing to get up and present because I think facilitating a group of facilitators, speaking of F words, is the f’in hardest thing on the planet-

Kathy Ditmore:
Terrifying.

Tamara:
… because it’s hard. And so, I also want to thank you for starting with your reminders that you really asked us to stay curious and to lean into it and make it real. I really appreciate that because this gave me an opportunity to think about my own impulses as a participant facilitator. But I recognized I have a lot of impulses around the use of posters, I use a lot of these too and what I realized is, oh, when you put something in front of me, I want to read every single word, I want to make sure I got it right, how do I get an A plus, what are we going to do. But I think that it helped me realize that I have to rethink the use of some of these tools to be thoughtful about different ways that people start to enter into something like a shared space like this. So, anyway, thank you.

Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you. I’ve got a couple minutes and I’m happy to keep talking about the tool after. I want to share a couple of things. Somebody asked, “Where would you use this?” I’ve mentioned it, anywhere. Use it at project initiation, you could use it as a health check, you can use it in your strategy sessions, you can use it when you encounter detours, when you need to do a project rescue, that poor guy, just lost. You can use it for your readiness checks, you can use it for your resource shifts, you can use it any point you need to align or realign, when you’re onboarding teams, when you’re offboarding someone, who’s still filling that spot, what does that mean to how you’re approaching things and you can use it at the beginning when you’re trying to develop your strategy.

Quick example of how I might use this from a rescue perspective or when I have a project going off track. This one, I might do with not the entire team but pieces of my team. So, the paper that you have has a bunch of questions. So, I might take one of these that’s filled out for what I know about the project but then I’m going to look at it and go, “Mmm, what’s really happening?”

Speaker 35:
H, M, L, C?

Kathy Ditmore:
Oh, I’m going to get into that. High, medium, low, complete and a green check mark. So, when I identify gaps, I might talk to my sponsors and say this is a high impact to our success or a medium impact or a low impact that might prioritize what we need to work on next. You see that it was something we talked about and it’s complete, we can remove it the next time we look at it. And a check mark is telling me we’ve got some good things going on too. By the way, we worked through some incremental process milestones, we’re going to see some winds along the way and generate some noise. Someone had asked about sponsors, it takes time to work through vision, indeed it does.

In this example, I happened to have a sponsor who had made a commitment that was not part of our original vision, our original benefits and so it resulted in a pause to the project where we needed to regroup and determine how serious that was because what they were asking for was a very different project. So, while we may have achieved what we all agreed to in our charter and our vision and our benefits, it wouldn’t be what the most senior stakeholder was looking for so it would have been considered a fail. So, this is another way to use the tool to evaluate how your project is doing. Okay, time. So, I think we’ve talked about our insights for the road ahead. Using a tool like this may help in identifying that clear north star, that purpose, that vision. It’s a tool for dialogue whether you use it as is or to help frame what discussion do you want to be having with your team so they can connect around that central vision and then, hopefully, you’re delivering together well.

My last one. So, I want to say thank you to my guides along the way, I’ve had plenty of people help me. Voltage Control and Douglas, Douglas took my phone call and was like, “Yeah,” but thank you for the invitation. This was terrifying and fun and I can go down many rabbit holes and it was really hard to pick which rabbit hole to go down. John Rabasa, amazing guide and mentor. Erin Nicole Gordon of The Wayfind, she was very helpful and I really appreciated her guidance that she gave me. Mark Reilley is my boss, he’s an amazing boss, he’s super encouraging at Pew. And my dear friends Claudia who couldn’t be here this year, Randy Logan and Penny Potts, they, any phone call, just let me ramble on for hours even though I’m sure their eyes were glazing over. So, thank you all and I’m happy to chat with you at any point. Thanks.

The post Mapping the Change Journey appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Dom Michalec led an engaging and thought-provoking workshop titled “Facilitating Transformation,” focusing on the practical aspects of creating lasting change—both personally and professionally. With a mix of theory, hands-on activities, and personal reflection, Dom took attendees on a journey of understanding how transformation happens and how we, as facilitators, can support others in driving meaningful change.

Defining Transformation: Starting with Ourselves

Dom began the session by addressing the essential question: What does transformation really mean? In his simple yet profound definition, transformation is about creating lasting change that sticks—whether for ourselves, our colleagues, our businesses, or even communities. The focus was clear: to facilitate meaningful transformation in others, we must first practice the skills of change within ourselves.

“Start with yourself,” Dom encouraged. “Practice the skills of transformation so you can help others develop those skills too.”

This message set the tone for the entire session, where personal growth and reflection were key to building effective facilitation practices. Dom emphasized that true transformation begins from within and that facilitators must be willing to embark on their own journeys of change.

The Power of Tiny Habits in Facilitating Transformation

A significant part of Dom’s session focused on how to make transformation more practical and accessible. Drawing from Behavior Design principles, Dom shared insights from Dr. BJ Fogg’s work on creating small, lasting changes through tiny habits. According to Fogg, one of the most practical ways to introduce change is to start small—tiny habits that can be integrated easily into everyday life. These small steps create momentum and build the foundation for larger, lasting changes.

“Tiny habits are not about big transformations all at once. They’re about starting small and building the muscle for change,” Dom explained. “You don’t need motivation to start. You just need to start.”

Breaking Down the Process of Behavior Change

Throughout the session, Dom guided participants through a hands-on exploration of behavior change. One of the key takeaways was the Fogg Behavior Model, which explains that behavior happens when three elements converge: motivation, ability, and a prompt.

• Motivation is the desire to perform the behavior.
• Ability refers to how easy or difficult the behavior is.
• Prompt is the reminder or cue to take action.

The key takeaway? To change behavior, we must focus on making the behavior as easy as possible to do, which eliminates the need for high motivation. For example, Dom shared a practical approach to creating tiny habits by breaking down large goals into small, actionable steps. By focusing on simplicity and celebrating success, even the smallest behavior can become a powerful habit.

Creating Lasting Change through Celebration and Identity

A central concept Dom introduced was the importance of celebration in cementing new habits. Unlike traditional notions of reward, Dom highlighted that immediate positive emotions, rather than delayed rewards, help behaviors become ingrained into our routines.

“Celebrate every small success,” Dom emphasized. “It’s the emotion that drives habits, not repetition. The more positive emotion you associate with a habit, the more automatic it becomes.”

Another critical point Dom made was about the role of identity in habit formation. He asked participants to reflect on their habits and how those habits align with their identity. When we design habits that reflect who we are and what we value, those behaviors are more likely to stick.

Practical Exercises and Insights

Dom’s session was filled with interactive exercises that helped participants apply these concepts to their own lives. One such activity invited attendees to reflect on a habit that sparks joy in their lives and how that habit reinforces their identity. By sharing these reflections with others, participants were able to connect with their motivations and understand how small habits can play a significant role in creating lasting change.

Through group discussions and individual reflection, participants discovered common themes of identity reinforcement, such as creative pursuits or physical activity, that enhance both personal and professional growth. These simple, everyday habits were identified as critical in building a foundation for greater transformation.

Key Takeaways from Dom Michalec’s Session

• Transformation begins with small steps: Focus on tiny habits that are easy to do and align with your identity.
• Celebrate successes: Positive emotions, immediately following a behavior, help solidify it into a lasting habit.
• Clarify your aspirations: Align your habits with long-term outcomes to ensure lasting change.
• Behavior design works: Focus on motivation, ability, and prompts to create change that sticks.

Dom’s session at the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit provided both actionable insights and valuable tools for facilitators to integrate transformation into their own lives and the lives of others. His approach reinforced that lasting change doesn’t require large, dramatic shifts but instead focuses on small, consistent actions.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Dom’s Session:

Dom Michalec:
Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Eric. Everyone hear me all right? Perfect. Before we get started, just to bring a little energy in the room, I want to use this as an opportunity to express a little bit of gratitude for Voltage Control for hosting us. Jamie, helping to put everything together. Douglas, Eric, y’all make it run really smooth in the background. Really appreciate that.

So to get started today, obviously you can see the title of this time, Facilitating Transformation. And I think it behooves us to have a really nice working definition of what we mean by transformation. How many folks in here have been a part of a transformation effort at work, and we have no idea what it really means at the end of the day, right? When I think about transformation, I think about it in a very simple terms. Creating lasting change, whether that’s lasting change for ourselves, for others, for our colleagues, for businesses, societies, communities. Creating lasting change that actually sticks. And in thinking about it that way, I think when we go into the session right now, the best way to practice those skills of change, those skills of transformation, of creating a lasting change, is to start with ourselves. Start with ourselves, practice the skills, so when we’re ready, we can take it out to the world and we can help other people gain these skills as well.

So, what are we talking about today? In the word of modern day philosopher and my favorite athlete of all time, Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice. Not the game, not the game, but practice. And early this morning, we practiced a bunch of different skills. Skills of changing the narrative, creating change through how we tell stories, creating change for the conditions, creating psychological safety, creating that safety net, and creating change for our own and mapping our own change journey. So today what we’re going to do, is we’re going to practice skills of change of creating habits for ourselves. We’re going to create behavior change in ourselves. I’m going to show you, as Eric alluded to, why starting small, starting tiny is usually the right place to start no matter where you are.

So for the past, what, at this point seven years, I’ve been in pursuit of answers to this question. What’s the most practical way to create a lasting change? Does anyone have any ideas? Just throw it out there. I’ll give my answer here in a moment. Yes, sir.

Speaker 2:
Just start.

Dom Michalec:
I’m sorry?

Speaker 2:
Just start.

Dom Michalec:
Just start. I love it. What other ways, what other practical ways have you? Yes, please.

Speaker 3:
Create the environment that [inaudible 00:02:58].

Dom Michalec:
Create the environment. You read the book, that’s great. All right, who else? Yes.

Speaker 4:
Document it, and then reinforce the positive feeling.

Dom Michalec:
Document it and reinforce those feelings. Yeah, okay. One more, we’ll take one more. I think I saw your hand go first.

Speaker 5:
I read the [inaudible 00:03:15] book and I think you say start small.

Dom Michalec:
Yes.

Speaker 5:
[inaudible 00:03:20].

Dom Michalec:
Small is fast there yeah, exactly, tiny. You can start at any time, no matter the conditions you’re in.

So, what we’re going to do today is we’re going to walk through basically a workshop to together where we use what I consider to be the most practical way to introduce change into your life, whether it’s personal, professional, whatever it may be. Everyone’s here for different reasons, but we’re all here to learn. We’re all here to help create change in our societies and our businesses and ourselves. Everyone’s here for different reasons, that have different motivations, different aspirations, different outcomes you’re trying to shoot for after you leave this summit. But I’ve designed this session in a way that no matter what your aspirations or your intended outcomes are for coming to the summit, you can walk away with practical change strategies that you can take with you and put into your life immediately after leaving.

So, I think this is a great working definition, or not working definition, but a great quote from, as Eric alluded to, a colleague of mine, Dr. BJ Fogg. I’ve had the great pleasure of being able to work with BJ for the past four years. There’s really two people that inspire me in this line of work that I do, one being BJ, and another one is here in the room today. Steph Weldy. Steph Weldy has been working with BJ for, what is it 10 years now?

Steph Weldy:
Just shy, yeah.

Dom Michalec:
Yeah, just shy. Anyways, so this quote, it will help set the scene for what we plan on doing today. There’s really only three ways that you can create lasting change, according to BJ. Have an epiphany, change your environment. Someone said, redesign your environment back here, I believe. Change your environment or change your habits in small ways. I don’t know about anyone else in this room, but I’m not a magician. I can’t create epiphanies for myself. Maybe you can, I don’t know. If you can’t, that’s cool. So where can we start? If we want to create change, lasting change transformation in ourselves, where do we start? We’re going to change our habits today in tiny ways.

So as we get into this session, again, I’m going to give pretty detailed instructions, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to always make sense to you. So I do encourage folks as we go through today’s session, you got a question? Throw your hand up. Dom, that didn’t make sense. Dom, what about this? Dom, whatever, just go ahead and raise your question. Go ahead and interrupt, we have plenty of time to get through this.

So, just to get the blood flowing in true Voltage Control fashion, I want to ask everyone to get up. And we’re going to talk to each other. So I know it may be a challenge, you may have talked to a lot of folks already. I want to ask you to try to find someone new in the room. And I’m going to invite you to first think about this for yourself. What is that one habit that you have in your life today that sparks an absolute sense of joy? And how does that habit that you have serve your identity or some aspect of your identity? Think about that for a moment. What I want everyone to do, is I want you to pair up and I want you to share your reflection with a colleague or someone in the room. Let’s start with someone who you haven’t met yet. So, let’s start there. Share your reflection to those questions.

So we’ve had a chance to talk to two other people about that habit in their life that sparks absolute joy. And we asked them, what about that habit is reinforcing your identity? How does it serve your identity? We’d love to hear from someone and don’t share your, don’t feel free to… You don’t have to share the habits themselves, but what’d you learn from your conversations? What maybe themes did you draw from your conversations with folks? Anyone? Please, yes.

Speaker 10:
It’s such simple things that we’re doing, they’re not big activities, but it was tiny things that have spark joy.

Dom Michalec:
Yeah, cool. Awesome. Yeah, Stacy, is it? Okay, cool. I can see the tag.

Stacy:
Most people I talked to did something specifically in the morning, first thing.

Dom Michalec:
Yeah.

Stacy:
Do mornings, or-

Dom Michalec:
Sorry. We’re going fast here, we’re going fast here. Yeah, usually, I mean, we’ll get in this in a moment, but identifying the aspects of your routine. Usually morning routines are great and are great anchor moments for creating habits. Your name?

Frank:
Frank.

Dom Michalec:
Frank. Sorry, I couldn’t see your name tag. Go ahead.

Frank:
So actually, we had the same habit, is to focus on something creative, both with art. So using art as a way to be creative, and I noticed how that spilled over into my work as well. So, it’s making sure that we take time out to kind of be creative.

Dom Michalec:
Cool.

Frank:
And find a creative pursuit, so.

Dom Michalec:
That’s awesome. We’ll take one more and I will let… Yep, that’s fine by me.

Speaker 9:
Both of us had a common habit around being active and healthy, and I think someone else said it, but just to do the thing and not… And I brought up the fact that you don’t want to rely on motivation because you won’t have it every day. So just do a little bit of it, even if you don’t feel like it.

Dom Michalec:
Cool, excellent. Yeah, so you’ll notice that in these conversations, at least what I noticed, I saw a lot of people light up when they got to talk about their favorite habit, even with a complete stranger. I’ve never met you before, I want to tell you about my favorite habit. I also heard some aspects of reinforcing parts of our identity, our creative side, our physical. Some folks identify they like to be physically fit and active and like to cultivate habits that push that part of our identity forward. What’s important to take away from this exercise is that, I believe you hit on it. I didn’t hear anyone talk about anything that took a lot of motivation to get. You’re already doing things that you wanted to do and you’re just finding those habits that help support you in doing that. And as we get into more of the meat and potatoes of behavior design, I do, if you have a pen, paper, there’s a couple takeaways and I’ll call them out here throughout.

But here’s your first takeaway, the best way to create lasting change, and that’s for yourself, that’s for others, communities and businesses, is to do two things. These are called the maxims of behavior design. Help yourself or others do the things that you already want to do. And the second aspect is, help yourself or others feel successful. And we’ll talk about those two aspects a little bit more detail here. We’ll get a little bit systematic with this, but if you take anything away from this session, when you think about designing habits or starting new habits in your life, ask yourself, am I doing, is this something that’s, do I already want to do this? Is this something I already want to do? Are you helping yourself do the things you already want to do? And how can I make myself feel successful or others feel successful while doing it?

So, three superpowers you’re going to walk away with today, at least I hope you do. I want to do my best to make sure you get there. The first one is, you’re going to be able to explain what causes a behavior to become a habit. I’m going to get the trick answer out of the way. It’s not repetition. You won’t be able to analyze your behavior, any other person’s behavior like a true behavioral scientist. We’ll get into the model of that here in a moment. And the last one, which is my personal favorite and the whole reason why I’m here, is to help you intentionally design any new habit you want into your life. It’s really important to take into consideration the aspect of your identity that you want this habit to serve.

Today, we’re all facilitators. When we all go home, we’re brothers, we’re sisters, wives, husbands, aunts, uncles, and we nurture those aspects of our identity. So, whichever aspect of your identity or where you are, the context matters, I guess is what I’m trying to say. So when you think about the habits you want to design today, think about the context in which those habits are being designed and which aspects of your identity those habits are served. Are those okay superpowers? Are we cool with that? We walk away feeling pretty good about these like yeah, this is a good session? Okay, cool. All right, so those are your three superpowers and here are the models and methods that are going to help you gain those superpowers.
And these models and methods are the models and methods of a system called Behavior Design. The models are there to help you think clearly about your own behavior and the methods are there to help you design for behavior change. First model we’ll talk about is obviously the Fogg Behavior Model. It’s a universal model for understanding human behavior, and this is not all-encompassing, by the way. There’s a bunch of different models we could possibly go through. So I had to kind of pick and choose which ones I wanted to introduce during the session. And we’ll talk about the Spectrum of Automaticity too.

The main method we’ll talk about today, which I believe some folks maybe are already familiar with, is the method of tiny habits and the various steps to create a tiny habit. Going from a big lofty aspiration or a desired outcome, and systematically breaking that down into very tiny small steps that we can take and removing the guesswork along the way. So clarifying the aspiration, we’re going to explore our behavior options, and this is going to be a very personal session, by the way. So there will be aspects of engagement and sharing and all that stuff, but for the most part, this going to be very personal because I think habits are a fairly personal and intimate aspect of our lives. But we’re going to go through behavior matching as well, we’re going to show you how to take a habit that you want and scale it down or start with the starter step to get going. And help you find a good prompt, we’re going to help you celebrate that success.

But first, let’s start with the Fogg Behavior Model. Who here is already familiar with the Fogg Behavior Model? Steph, don’t you? Okay, cool. Got a couple folks. Again, the Fogg Behavior Model, and this is obviously named after the guy who created it, Dr. BJ Fogg, Stanford behavior scientist 20, 30 years, considered preeminent expert in this space. And when you write out the model, it goes something like this. A behavior happens when, and when I talk about a behavior, it’s any behavior. So like a behavior, or a habit is a type of behavior. A one-time behavior is obviously a behavior. Stopping behavior, it’s a type of behavior. A behavior happens when three elements converge at the same moment in time. Motivation to do the behavior, the ability to do the behavior in a prompt, a cue, someone that says, “Hey, do this behavior now.”
So when all three of those elements converge at the same time you will see a behavior performed. And if any three of these elements are missing, if a prompt is missing, if you have low ability or low motivation, you’ll see here in a moment, you will not see the behavior, you will not perform the behavior. And you can actually visualize this model on two dimensions across the vertical axis here we can plot out motivation, and motivation is a range from high to low or anything in between. So we can have high motivation to do a behavior, all the way down to low motivation to do a behavior. And like motivation, ability is also a range from high to low. But instead of saying high to low, we say easy to do for high ability, all the way down to hard to do.

And now I want to use an example here to kind of put this model into action. Let’s say the behavior we’re trying to get someone else to do, is we want them to donate $100 to the local dog shelter, let’s start there. If they have high motivation to donate to the local dog shelter and it’s fairly easy for them to do, we plot them up here in the upper right-hand corner of the Fogg Behavior Model. When prompted to make that donation, they’ll reliably do that behavior every single time. Conversely, if someone has low motivation to donate to the local dog shelter or animal shelter, I don’t know, maybe they don’t like animals for some reason. If you don’t like dogs, that’s a different conversation, but that’s just me. Maybe it’s really hard for them to do, right? Maybe they’re just not able to do it, maybe they don’t have enough money to do it. Maybe they just don’t have the time to do it, it takes too much physical effort to do. We plot them down here. What prompted to make that donation, they will not make that donation.

What I haven’t shown you yet, is there’s actually a really cool relationship between these first two elements, motivation and ability, and that relationship is represented by this cool little green curve line called the action threshold. Essentially, this action threshold is here to signify one thing. If anyone is above this action threshold or action line at the point of being prompted, they’ll reliably do the behavior every single time, that includes yourself. We like to say prompts are effective above the action line. And if anyone is below the action line of the action threshold at the point of being prompted, they will not do the behavior.

Speaker 10:
Is ability, ability, is it subjective or is it objective?

Dom Michalec:
Ability is dependent upon the person. So I’ll give you an example here. If I ask Jeff Bezos who loves dogs to make a donation to the ASPCA, he has high ability to do it. He has the time, he has the money, it’s not that hard for him, but maybe a college student who’s strapped for money and they don’t have a lot, they don’t have the ability to make the donation, they’re in class, it’s too hard. When they’re prompted to do it, they’ll fall below. So it’s all dependent upon the person. Ability is not a universal, everyone has the same ability to do a behavior. Everyone has different elements of ability to do a behavior.
I’m showing this to you now because I want you to think clearly about this model as you go through the next steps, and we’ll do some activities here to create our habits. What you notice here is like I said, there’s a relationship between motivation and ability. It’s called a compensatory relationship. The more you have of one, the less you need of another to get above the action line. So what you see here is if someone’s highly motivated to do a behavior, think about yourself in this example, if you’re super motivated to do a behavior. You can do both easy and hard to do behaviors. And if something is easy to do, you don’t have to rely so much on motivation in order to do that behavior. Hence, why we’re here today.

When we design our habits, we’re going to design our habits in a way where we can get into that upper right-hand corner, kind of stack the deck in our favor to get into that upper right-hand corner. We’re going to align on an aspiration or desired outcome, something that endures from a motivation perspective, because we know our motivation fluctuates from context to context over time, but we’re going to align to an aspiration or a desired outcome that we have, something that has enduring motivation, and we’re going to pick very specific behaviors, make them super easy to do, so we can reliably be above that action line when we prompt ourselves to do those behaviors. So that’s why I wanted to introduce this to you now, and this is a great troubleshooting, this is a great model for analyzing behavior.

So we think about maybe outside the context of this workshop, we’re at work, we want people to show up to a meeting and people are showing up late or not showing up at all. First thing we need to ask ourselves is, what’s making it hard for those people to show up to the meeting on time? Usually, a lot of times we start with motivation. We think, oh, if we just motivate people, they’ll do the things that we want them to do. We just need to motivate them, motivate them, motivate them.
What I hope you take away here is, ability is probably where we should start. How can we make things easier for people to do, for things we want them to do, including ourselves? And for things we don’t want people to do, how can we make them harder? How can we get them below the action line? So thinking about this, this adds a little bit more of an element of first starting with, how do we make something easy? How do we make a behavior easier to do so we can create a habit out of it? And then we’ll talk about motivation later, because motivation fluctuates over time, as we know.

It’s oftentimes that we hear when people create habits that they start at a desired outcome or an aspiration or a goal, and they just kind of guess as to how to achieve that goal. I want to get better sleep, so I’m going to buy this fancy pillow, or I’m going to get these new sheets, or I’m going to get to bed at 9:00 PM every single night without fail, and they just scatter shot a bunch of different behaviors to hit that goal. When you clarify the aspiration, and you’ll see here in a moment when we explore behavior options, what we’re going to do, is we’re going to ask ourselves, if I could do anything, we’re going to generate a big list and we’re going to whittle it down to the ones that are most effective for you, instead of just guessing. It’s important to have a clarified aspiration or an outcome so we know which are going to be most effective for us moving forward, so we’re not just guessing.

I know we just flew through probably the hardest thing to do in behavior design, and I’m not going to just gloss over that fact. But again, we’re just practicing this, but I hope you see now that folks who studied, folks who use behavior design, we like to get very specific about the behaviors that we like to change, whether it’s our own or for others. And you’ll notice that a lot of times, and I think everyone here at one point in time raising a hand like, I’ve been a part of a change transformation. I’ve been a part of a transformation effort in the past. In the context of work, when you go back to work, maybe you’re already still in that transformation effort. When you go back to work and you hear people talk about what we need to get done in order to transform our business.

In my experience, I’m going to project a little bit, rarely will you ever hear them speak specifically about very specific behaviors that people need to do. They’ll speak in generalities. We need to create value chains, we need to align business incentives. The hell does that mean? What are people actually doing? So this is an opportunity for you to look at your behavior in other people’s behavior in a different lens and start maybe to coach them a little bit like, well, what do you mean by aligning incentives or creating value streams? What are people doing to… If you were to watch someone create a value stream, what are they doing in order to do that? You start to think about behavior, your own and theirs, in a little bit different way.

So what have we done up to this point? And continue working, I’m just going to keep talking here. So, what have we done up to this point? We’ve clarified an aspiration or a desired outcome that we want, whether it’s a professional, personal, whatever it may be, something that matters to us. We’ve explored various avenues to achieve that aspiration or desired outcome. Again, we did a generative exercise to just explore what we could possibly do to achieve something that matters to us. And now, we’ve done focus, this is called focus mapping, by the way. We’ve brought focus to the high-impact things that we want to do that allow us or help us achieve that aspiration or desired outcome.

Now we get to the meat and potatoes of the tiny and tiny habits. We’re going to start tiny. If you were to distill down this whole idea of creating these tiny habits, it really boils down to this. Take something you want to do, distill it down into its smallest form. Find where in your environment, in your life, that habit fits best, and nurture its growth. That’s no different than how you create habits naturally, now we’re just designing very specifically and systematically in a way that habits naturally form anyways. So, what are we going to do now? We’re going to take those golden behaviors and we’re going to make them, create the tiniest form possible, that’s still providing meaning to us at the same time.

In a moment here we’ll talk about, I’ll talk it about now, with the tiny habits recipe. Remember, can someone remind me what the three elements are? A behavior happens when three things come together. What are those three things?

Audience:
[inaudible 00:23:34].

Dom Michalec:
Okay, I heard it. We have this recipe set up this way because after I do a behavior, I will do my now new behavior and immediately celebrate by, we’ll get that here in a moment. The after I, we will focus here first. The after I is the anchor moment. You’re going to use your existing routine as your prompt. So it’s not going to be an external prompt, it’s not going to be your phone dinging, it’s not going to be you putting up a sticky note. You’re going to use your existing routine as a reminder to do your new habit. Things that you are

ady do consistently in your life, you’re going to use those as your reminder, and those are called anchor moments.
I will, that’s your scaled back gold behavior. That’s the new habit that you want in your life. So let’s find a good prompt for you. I already hear some folks talking about their morning routines, you’re already kind of ahead of the game here. That’s cool, that’s cool. We’re going to identify some good prompts for you. One more new term here I want to introduce is, identifying the trailing edge of that anchor moment. Identify instead of the first thing you do in a sequence in a starter step, you identify the last sequence of something you do in your daily, weekly, monthly routines, whatever it may be. And I’ll give you an example here.

I chose the prompt of brewing a cup of coffee in the morning to wipe down one countertop in the kitchen. This is important, because it matches the physical location of where I’m want to do my new behavior, matches the frequency, and in some aspects, it’s kind of thematic for me. So this is a good match for me because I was already in the kitchen brewing a cup of coffee, let me wipe down the countertop. But that wasn’t the trailing edge prompt, that prompt didn’t have its trailing edge identified.

So, what’s a trailing edge of brewing a cup of coffee, at least in my life? Press brew on the Nespresso machine. Anyone have a Nespresso machine or a Keurig or anything like that? Okay, y’all know you have to do something, you have to get the pod, you got to put the pod in, you got to check for water, make sure that there’s a cup. Hit the button. There’s actually four or five things that you do just to get a cup of coffee. So what’s the last thing that I do? I hit brew. Hitting that button is my prompt to wipe down the countertop in the kitchen. This is the power of using your existing routine, not reminders on your phone, not the dent, not sticky notes on your computer, using your existing routine to help you identify and do a new habit.
I want to talk about one more model. And again, the models are here to help you think clearly about behavior. The methods on the right are here to help you design for behavior change. So, I did have this cool little thing pulled up on Menti, but we’re going to skip it. I just want everyone to shout out some answers. What do you think causes a behavior to become a habit? I gave you a hint earlier, it’s not repetition. One more time.

Speaker 3:
Positive reinforcement.

Dom Michalec:
Positive reinforcement. Cool. Anyone else?

Speaker 3:
Desire.

Dom Michalec:
Desire? Is that what you said? Desire? Okay, great.

Speaker 3:
Knowing your why.

Dom Michalec:
Knowing your why, okay, cool. Okay, we have the scientists in the group. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 10:
It has a low cognitive load. I don’t have to think about it, it’s easy to do.

Dom Michalec:
Okay, we’ll definitely talk about automaticity for sure. One more. These are all great by the way. Do you have any other guesses as to what causes a behavior to become a habit?

Speaker 3:
[inaudible 00:27:08].

Dom Michalec:
I didn’t want anyone to say… Because I’m about to say “No, that’s wrong,” and I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. So I was like, “No, it’s not repetition.” Go ahead.

Speaker 3:
Reward.

Dom Michalec:
Reward? Okay, let’s talk about that for a moment, before we talk about… So Dr. Fogg likes to talk about these ideas of rewards. You hear about it in pop culture, you hear about it, where if you reward behavior you’re reinforcing the behavior. What’s important to take into consideration is that the word reward is kind of circling the right answer, but it depends on when that reward is given for the behavior. If it’s an incentive, frown to the future, that’s not going to create a positive emotion, which increases your automaticity. But if it happens immediately after you do a behavior, that’s getting closer to the answer. So we’ll talk about how celebration, creating positive emotions helps create that aspect. But be very careful when we use the word reward, the timing of the reward matters a lot.

So, let’s get into it. When we think about behaviors, let’s first talk about habits. When we talk about habits, usually we talk about them in terms of, these are things that we can do just automatically. It doesn’t take a lot of thought, it doesn’t take a lot of effort, it’s just boom, we do it. We jump in the car in the morning, we drive to work, sometimes we don’t even think about how we get there, and boom, we show up to work. Whatever it may be. So these are, habits are behaviors that are fairly automatic.

So you can think about behaviors living on a spectrum of automaticity. How automatic is this behavior? How automatic is that behavior? And you can think about this on a range from left to right, things with no automaticity, behaviors are choices or decisions that we have to make. Where am I going to go on vacation? What am I going to eat for dinner tonight? Which plane ticket am I going to buy to get to Austin, Texas for this summit? Which airline am I going to use? It takes deliberation and some choice in decision-making. Whereas behaviors with high automaticity are very automatic, you can almost think of them as reflexes. And on this range, you can think of anything towards the right-hand side as a very strong habit. You have very strong habits with high automaticity. Weaker habits with still some automaticity but not quite as much as your stronger habits, and then everything else to the left is not a habit.

So the question that I’ve been asking is, what causes a behavior to become more automatic? What causes a behavior to move closer to the right-hand side of this model? And I heard some great answers. I heard pretty much, I think some folks even got it correct. It’s not repetition. Emotions make behaviors more automatic, it’s the emotion that creates a habit. It’s not the repetition. I’ll ask a quick question before we move on here. How many folks have used Uber to get around town? Okay. How many times did you have to use Uber to know that it was superior to calling a cab? It felt amazing, right? It felt like you were just, it was magic. I just put in an address, a car came by, picked me up, whisked me up, nice person drove me to my destination. It felt amazing. Feeling that emotion, that positive emotion probably made you want to use Uber again the next time and the next time and the next time. So, it’s the emotion that created the habit.

The repetition makes a behavior easier to do. It gives you more skill to do that behavior. Lifting a five pound weight every day for five minutes, you’re going to get pretty skilled at that over time. It’s not the repetition that’s creating a habit. You’re creating a skill. It’s making it… that five pound weight’s going to get easier and easier to lift in every subsequent time. So you’re increasing your ability through repetition, but it’s actually the emotion that creates the conditions for a habit to form. And someone had mentioned dopamine, the brain reward circuitry. We won’t get into the science of it, but essentially, yeah.
So, why am I talking about this? In order to wire in these habits effectively, we need to find, we need to somehow create a positive emotion. And we think about creating a positive emotion as a skill that we can bring into our tiny habit, is celebrating our success. After I hit the Nespresso button, I will wipe down one countertop and give myself a fist bump, create a positive emotion immediately after doing that behavior, so it wires in the habit and I feel good, I feel successful, and I want to come back and do it again. So after I brew my Nespresso machine or I have to hit brew on my Nespresso machine, I will wipe down one countertop in the kitchen and immediately celebrate by, yeah, give myself a fist bump and smile in the… Oh, I forgot that part, yeah, I look in the microwave mirror. I’m a huge weirdo. I do smile in the microwave every once in a while. I forgot I put that in there. Wow. Didn’t think.

Speaker 2:
[inaudible 00:32:21].

Dom Michalec:
There you go. Things that are revealed in front of 100 people that you didn’t think would be revealed. All right, cool. A big part of wiring in a new tiny habit is rehearsing that habit. So for instance, when I showed you a habit of wiping down the countertop, I did it 10 times in a row. I walked out of the kitchen, I walked in. I didn’t actually brew a cup of coffee every single time, I brewed the water, just hit the button. I walked in, hit the button, wiped down a countertop, fist bump, walked out of the kitchen. Turned back around, did it again. It looked really silly but it helped and it wired it in. And the very next day, it was very automatic. I didn’t even have to think about it. I was like, oh, of course I hit the brew button, I wipe down the counter.

So take these cards with you, put in your back pocket, your bags, whatever it may be. And whatever environment that your new tiny habits you want to do these in, make sure that you rehearse them after you leave today. And make sure you’re rehearsing the celebration aspect of those tiny habits, that’s the important part, a lot of people skip that. It’s like, I’ll just do the tiny habit, I’ll do the celebration later. No, celebrate every single time. Again, it’s that positive emotion. It’s the emotion that creates the habit. It’s what moves it into automaticity. Celebrate every single time.

This is going to maybe sound a little, I don’t know, I don’t want to say overstated, but I do want everyone to take a moment to recognize how far you come in just an hour and a half. Not to compare, but think about how many people are outside of this room right now who want to make a change in their lives and they don’t know where to start. Y’all have taken an amazing first step today, and the idea here is, as you walk out of this room today, share what you learn. Teach people the Fogg Behavior Model. Learn about the Fog Behavior Model, teach it to people. Use your skills of change to help other people change their lives as well. Don’t just hold all the magic for yourself. Apply these skills, get better at them. Create habits. Put those habits, troubleshoot those habits. If you miss a habit, ask yourself and go, what can I do to make this easier? Do I need to switch up the prompt?

There’s another method in tiny habits called iterate, troubleshoot, and expand. We didn’t cover that today because obviously there’s nothing to troubleshoot, we haven’t put them into practice yet. But do take note that if you don’t do a habit, take it as a moment of curiosity. Why did I forget to do that, or why am I not doing this? Explore that. But take a moment to recognize how far you’ve come today in just an hour and a half, officially, hour and a half in about five seconds. But also don’t hold it all for yourself. If you learned something that you really enjoyed, share it with others. Get them curious as well. Maybe you can have a big impact on their life as well, in very tiny ways.

For those who don’t want to share vocally what they thought or what they learned, feel free to scan this QR code, give me some feedback. But I’m looking for feedback. How’d it go? What’d you learn? What’s one thing that resonated with you in today’s session? Outside of, my hand is hurting because you just made me write a mile a minute for an hour and a half.

Speaker 12:
Dom, thank you. I do think we did come pretty far, at least I feel like I did.

Dom Michalec:
Good.

Speaker 12:
The emotion nugget was definitely something that was sort of a new nuance to me.

Dom Michalec:
Cool.

Speaker 12:
And I like the idea of cheesy celebrations. So, you the man.

Dom Michalec:
Good.

Speaker 12:
I’m the woman.

Dom Michalec:
Let’s go.

Speaker 12:
You are awesome.

Dom Michalec:
Let’s go. All right, we’ll take time for one more because I know we’re out of time. I know Eric and Douglas have some pretty important things to wrap up. So we’ll take one more insight, one more aha moment.

Speaker 13:
I really like the idea of going deeper, because we could have stopped at this first step and been like, okay, we feel good about that and then tried to figure out how we can activate against it. But it was like, no, take it kind of a step further. What does that mean? Kind of just dig deeper, dig deeper, and then put it on a grid so that you could really, really understand which ones are the easiest ones, but still going to help you the most. So, just the overall framework was very good.

Dom Michalec:
Cool.

Speaker 13:
And then specifically just not stopping at the first thing that you come up with. It’s like, dig a little bit deeper, like doing the double click.

Dom Michalec:
There’s so many paths to achieving the things you want to achieve in life, and you learn the skills of how to navigate that. It’s cool.
Thank you all so much. Appreciate that.

Speaker 13:
Thank you.

The post Facilitating Transformation appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Connection moves at the speed of vulnerability. It takes courage to be the first on the dance floor or to reach out to someone, but those brave steps can lead to powerful connections”- Bahaa Chmait

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Bahaa Chmait, a facilitator and 2024 TEDx speaker focused on combating loneliness through shared experiences. Bahaa discusses how his Lebanese heritage and family gatherings around food shaped his approach to fostering connections. They explore the importance of vulnerability, intentional design, and playfulness in adult interactions. Bahaa shares strategies like assigning roles in social settings and creating zones for different engagement levels to alleviate loneliness. He emphasizes the need for proactive connection and the transformative power of shared joyful experiences.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

Bahaa’s Ted Talk

Bahaa on LinkedIn

Bahaa on the web

JoyMob on Instagram

JoyMob Events

About the Guest

Bahaa is an experience designer on a mission to end loneliness one shared experience at a time. He believes the world could use more human connection, so that people can live more joyful lives.

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 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 Bahaa Chmait at JoyMob Events and BahaaChmait.com, where he is on a mission to end loneliness, one shared experience at a time. He’s also a 2024 TEDx speaker, workshop facilitator, and vibe maker. Welcome to the show, Bahaa.

Bahaa Chmait:

Hey, thank you for having me, Douglas. Always good to see you.

Douglas Ferguson:

You as well. You as well. And we’ll get back to vibe maker. But before we do, let’s hear a little bit about you getting your start. I believe you brought it back to the Lebanese family gatherings. Can you paint us a picture of one moment that really stuck out to you as you reflect on some of those origins?

Bahaa Chmait:

There’s the dinners, food, gathering, breaking bread together. I think that’s the biggest thing. Every time I think about the origins of my facilitation career and where I’m at today and gathering people and creating a vibe, it all started around food. Lebanese people just love to gather.

And of course, every family has their traditional dish that they bring when everyone gathers. And so everyone pulls you aside. They usually grab your wrist, and they don’t let you go, and they say, “But you like mine the best, right.” And it always just brings me joy to think of those moments.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s funny, I just saw the premiere of a new McConaughey film called The Rivals of the Amziah King, and interesting film. He was a mandolin player, beekeeper, quite an interesting fella. But when the producer came out, he dedicated the film to anybody who’s ever been to a potluck.

And there’s an amazing scene where they’re at the potluck and McConaughey is telling this young lady about all the dishes and the heritage of, “You might not want to eat this one. And this is like… This one always comes from Billy.” And he’s telling her all about Billy.

And so there’s this connection to the food and the people who made it and their personalities. And so you’re bringing me back to that moment, of I can certainly remember some potlucks growing up.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, yeah. There’s something about breaking bread and just sharing time and space together, so it’s old as time, right. There’s some potlucks that I’ll host, and instead of having a curated meal, we’re just like, “Bring a dish, bring some utensils, bring a dish, and let’s share. Let’s break bread together.” There’s something beautiful about that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And especially in community, I mean, you were talking about relatives pulling you aside and saying, “Hey, you like mine the best, right.” There’s this kind of identity around what they brought, and maybe Aunt Edna always brings the country ham biscuits, or I’m sure the Lebanese dishes are a little different. But it’s kind of that idea of this connection to I’m bringing this sustenance. It’s also something I really enjoy making that I can provide and be excited about and proud of.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, absolutely. And the heritage of that recipe gets passed down through the generation. I think it kind of gets lost now, but some of the old world ways of doing things, and then they put their twist on it, maybe a little bit too, and they’re like, “But you like my version better,” even though it’s the same dish. And as a kid, you feel this social pressure to be like, “Yes, yours is the best.” But at the same time, you’re just like, “I’m here to enjoy some really delicious food with some wonderful people.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And it brings me back to your quest to address loneliness. When I think of community where folks are gathering a lot specifically around food and heritage, you would imagine maybe loneliness wouldn’t be such a problem there, but it could also shine a big light on it.

If you juxtapose those moments that maybe aren’t happening all day every day, those are special moments, maybe once a week, or I don’t know how frequent, but it could even put a highlight on loneliness that’s there.

Or if you’re seeing it in others, it might make it more obvious because maybe they don’t have those experiences because they don’t have those opportunities to gather. I’m kind of curious, does any of that resonate with you, or did that lead to any of your discoveries and wanting to help others that were experiencing loneliness?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, great question. Absolutely. I think that loneliness can… you can be surrounded by a sea of people and still be lonely. You know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

And when I was growing up, I grew up in a small rural town in Canada, and no doubt about it, hey, it was a small place, 500 people. And I’ve had this first-generation Lebanese Canadian family comes to this rural town, and everything was different. My lunches were different. I would [inaudible 00:05:40] Kafta. Have you had Lebanese food before? [inaudible 00:05:43].

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

It’s delicious, right. But when you’re a kid, you just want to fit in. And so they had peanut butter and jam sandwiches. They had lunchables.

Douglas Ferguson:

The juice boxes.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, the good stuff, right. I mean a charcuterie board for kids. Those Lunchables were, I mean, come on now. That was delicious. But of course, I wanted to fit in. And so I was kind of the exotic kid. Had a unibrow, even my name was Bahaa. And so, as an adult, everyone’s like, “Bahaa, that’s amazing. Lebanese food, that’s awesome.” But when you’re a kid, everyone’s like, “Bahaaaaa.”

So that disconnection was challenging, and my parents wanted to ascribe… me to ascribe to old world beliefs, traditions, values, and I’m trying to fit in. And so, where do you belong? Where’s your community? Who’s your tribe? And so that lack of belonging led to that loneliness that we’re talking about right now. And it can be isolating trying to figure out where you belong.

I sometimes talk to kids who are not just first generation kids, but kids who have parents from different races or heritages. And so both tribes don’t fully accept them, they say, and they’re kind of stuck in this no man’s land, and that’s a pretty isolating place to be. I’m sure some of your listeners have probably connected with that before.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, for sure. And I’m curious, when you’re working with this kind of eradicating loneliness, how are you confronting that? Is it through these conversations you’re having with folks, or yes, and? Are there other things that you’re doing? How does that show up for you?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think the main thing is designing experiences. As an experience designer, I can tap into that isolating feeling. We’ve all been to a mingling thing or a networking thing, and we just kind of didn’t form a circle at some point in that mingling thing. It’s hard to break into that circle and connect, and so you’re kind of just left off to the side. And so my goal when I’m facilitating with groups in public gatherings or team gatherings is, how do we create connection before content?

So before we just jump into the event, people came for the event because they want to see the event, but they come back because they connected with people. They met people that they connected with. So facilitating an icebreaker, an ice melter, whatever you want to call it, allows people the opportunity to come out of their shells a little bit, especially if you give them a safe and vulnerable environment to do it in. And then they get to choose their own adventure. I think that’s the biggest thing is not forcing anything. Forced fun is never fun. You know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

Trust falls are kind of lame, and team building can sometimes feel like going to the dentist. Necessary, but you don’t exactly want to do it. So, how can we make it more engaging and fun and playful for people and just meet them where they’re at?

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s something recent that you’ve done that you can kind of point to that might draw a more realistic picture for folks?

Bahaa Chmait:

I do a lot of movement-based practice as well, and sometimes they’re flash mobs, sometimes they’re public sing-alongs on trains. With the flash mobs, I worked with a global hotel chain, an executive leadership team of global hotel chain, dancing in front of your colleagues can be vulnerable. They wanted to produce a flash mob for their 40th anniversary of the hotel. So we first gave them a tutorial video that they could practice in the comfort of their own home.

And I tell this story in my TED Talk. But one thing that I left out in the talk was that one of the leaders came up to me afterwards and said, “Hey, I was practicing at home in my time in one of my spare rooms, and my daughter walked by and saw me practicing the dance moves at the tutorial video, and she started joining me” and they started having this bonding experience where there were dancing together and connecting.

And it was this beautiful story of how, by intentionally creating something like a tutorial video so that they don’t feel vulnerable and unsafe in front of everyone, they could kind of build that courage first at home, they got a chance to bond, and it had ripple effects beyond the workplace, beyond this thing that they were initially doing to connect with family.

And there was this beautiful sort of intergenerational father-daughter moment that may have not happened otherwise if it wasn’t for intentional design. And I think it was really beautiful. It’s a really beautiful story to share. Those little moments I hear in every experience that we design. There’s always a little nugget or takeaway from something that I’ve designed, and I think that’s really rewarding for me and really just spreads joy in the world.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s super fun and cool. And I guess, what other ways are you seeing joy kind of appear these days? Because I think that it’s really easy to get caught up in the rhetoric of the times and the divisiveness and stuff. And so, how are you seeing these opportunities for joy?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think being intentional. Priya Parker says it best. “Purpose is your bouncer.” Just being purposeful with your day, with your interactions with people. I’d say that connection moves at the speed of vulnerability. And when… Have you ever been to anywhere where there’s a dance floor, so a wedding, a bar, anything like that, and you saw that no one was dancing? Have you ever had that happen? Yeah. And why is no one dancing? Because no one’s dancing, right. No one wants to be the first one on that dance floor. It’s scary.

It takes a lot of courage and bravery because what if no one joins you? If everyone joins you, it’s a party. And so no one goes on the dance for, so no one goes on the dance floor. And it’s the same thing with human connection. Whether you’re trying to bridge a connection and reach out to somebody that you know, or don’t know or you’re trying to even apologize. If nobody goes first, then nothing happens. And you can only control what you do, not what other people do or how they react.

And so finding that courage and that bravery to get out on that dance floor or reach out to that friend and say hi, or reach out to that colleague, that work teammate and say, “Hey, there’s some friction between us. Can we talk about how to resolve this?” It can be incredibly scary and incredibly hard, but so powerful because connection, it moves at the speed of vulnerability. And so, yeah, I just invite everybody to take that step and be brave and see what happens. The worst that can happen is you’re at where you’re at.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, true, true. And what are some of your go-to mechanisms to get the first person out on the dance floor? I mean, are you modeling that? Is that something you’re doing, getting out there first?

Is it about inviting more people in so that they’re more encouraged and feel invited, versus just getting brought to the event versus getting invited on the dance floor? I mean, I don’t know. I’m just going to throw in some things out, but I’m curious, what have you found to be the mechanisms to really get people to engage?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, I would say that always looking at things in terms of team, in terms of collaboration, in terms of group, when you’re thinking in terms of group. So if I’m facilitating something where I want somebody to be vulnerable, whether it’s a debrief in the team in group sharing or it’s getting out on the dance floor after a talk that I’ve given, which we did. We threw a dance party for 500 people after the TEDx talk that I gave because it was all about dance and movement, primed everybody to just be playful and give themselves permission.

What I like to do is I like to connect with a few people and say, “Hey, if I call for somebody to just raise their hand and say something, will you be the first one?” And I think just inviting people, giving them a role at the gathering, gives them a sense of purpose. “Can you be the host of the person that kind of greets people when they look like they’re standing off alone? Or can you be the person who greets people when they first come in so that their entry is this warm and welcoming thing?” Everybody wants to be part of something, and I think if we co-create it, we’re able to achieve really cool things.

But if it’s just all about you and you’re the only one doing something, it can be really hard to start a movement and get people going. So I think it’s about offering an invitation, setting it up ahead of time for success, and modeling what vulnerability looks like for sure. There’s definitely been times where I’ve invited people to come dance in the streets in public sort of pop-up, flash mob style dances, and I created a video to say, “Hey, this is where we’re going to be dancing, and here’s me dancing right now as people walk by to show, ‘Listen, I know this is weird and kind of awkward and vulnerable, but I’m doing it right now and I want you to come join me as well.'” It can be magic.

Douglas Ferguson:

When you mention roles, it’s making me think about how important it can be to have a focus as an attendee. Or oftentimes when someone shows up and is looking around the room and wondering, “Oh my gosh, what can I do here? Where am I supposed to go? Do I go to the bar first, or do I go over here first?” And so having a role or a responsibility can be a really great way to curb some anxiety and know where to fit.

In fact, I think it’s a powerful thing to do, even if you’re going to a house party and it’s some folks you just met, maybe ask the host how you can be helpful. “Can I go stir this pot, or can I take out the recycling? It looks a little full or something.” But just having some role or thing to do can be really helpful to calm the mind and the nerves. So I thought that was interesting, you brought that up. Does that show up a lot in how you think about shaping these experiences?

Bahaa Chmait:

Absolutely. I think to resonate with that, I think as kind people, we reach out to the host and I say, “What can I bring?” Ice, bottle of wine, whatever it is. But then, once we get to the party, we forget that we can still support the gathering and support the intention of the gathering. And so it’s nice. I think about this often when I’m designing experiences.

I used to be the type of experienced designer who designed in the background and not be in the forefront, so I wouldn’t give a public speech or anything. I would just design it and then let the audience kind of take over. And I think about that with people who love to do photography and videography. They love to be behind the lens. They don’t want to be the subject of the experience. They want to be behind curating, but how can we encourage everybody to have a role?

“Yeah, when you get to the party, hey, can you make sure that the cups… everybody has a drink or everybody’s having fun,” and each part of the household has a different vibe. The kitchen has that big party vibe where all the things happen, whereas the couch, the living room, may be more chill, the backyard. So there could be zones. I don’t know. What do you think? There could be zones for creating some rules for people as well?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. We always talk about pop-up rules and temporary spaces that we might be designing for or supporting. And I like this idea of zones. You could have different rules or different expectations, different criteria, different games in the different zones, for sure.

I mean, it kind of naturally happens when you’re talking about a house party because just because of the nature of the space. And also, I think kitchens just have that quality to them. When people are in a party, they’re magnetic.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, yeah. They’re standing. They’re energized. Usually the shots are there.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right. There’s that.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, there’s all the factors that come into play. Yeah, interesting. Maybe at a public event where you’re at a conference or a networking thing, they create zones and each zone has its own vibe, the breakout sessions, the seminars, the main room, the dah, dah, dah. And so, yeah, creating experiences specifically for those zones, I think we’re onto something here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Space and how you allocate space and break folks up, how you decorate it, how you set up furniture, all those things can be subtle cues into how we want people to engage with the space or what the rules are.

Bahaa Chmait:

I think one thing that we tend to miss as adults is playfulness. We always think we have to show up in this sort of polished way, and it doesn’t have to be completely refined and polished. It can be playful. It could be a banter, an exchange.

I think that, as adults, we start to lose our sense of play. NASA conducted a study, and they concluded that 98% of children are born creative geniuses, 98%. And then, they did a study later on in life. They said, as adults, only 2% still qualify, and I think that’s because we unlearn play. You know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think it gets taught out of us in a way, this idea that school is about having the correct answer, but we get kind of built and programmed to do well on the test and to fall in line and be a good student, and all these things.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

There’s a really great book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball that talks about this, and there’s a really amazing section where the author is… I guess one of the things he would do in his spare time, he was a creative director at Hallmark, and so you can imagine the whimsy and creativeness that had to flow through him.

And one of the things he would do is visit children at elementary schools and bring metal sculptures and try to wow them and talk to them about art, and to follow their passion for art. He had this interesting little experiment he would run where he would ask the students which of them were artists.

And he’s like, the kindergartens all raise their hands, but then you get up to the fourth, fifth graders, and no one’s raising their hand, and he’s like… and he would ask the students, “What’s happening here? Are all the artists moving away.”

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. It’s amazing how we unlearn that, for sure. Kids, you can give them a simple drawing and they’ll come up with 10 different things that it is. And as adults, we look at it and we’re like, “Um, that’s this one thing and only this one thing.” But yeah, I want to encourage and invite everybody to create playlists, and I’m not talking about music playlists, but a play list, a list of things that bring you joy. Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Play Institute says that the opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.

And I think that we have the opportunity to become more playful and give ourselves the opportunity to take play breaks even at work. Some things that are on my playlist are dancing, midday dance parties. I work remote, and so just turning off the camera doing the… and then just turn on some music and just moving the body a little bit. It can be so rejuvenating. Going for a skip down the street, coloring, it’s something that your mind just gets focused into something that’s so simple. Telling dad jokes is the one I sent you this morning, I hope it made you laugh.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, yeah.

Bahaa Chmait:

Or at least you roll your eyes.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m a big fan of dad jokes. Yeah. No, I’m a big fan of dad jokes, so I’m definitely one to carry those around and share them to… much to my wife’s chagrin.

Bahaa Chmait:

I feel like there’s two spectrums, right. There’s the rolling on the floor laughing, and then there’s the eye roll and everything in between, and everyone knows where they kind of fall, especially when it comes to dad jokes. But no matter what, as long as I can get a response out of somebody, I think that’s a win.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s a useful tool.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So I think there’s four rules around a playlist that I want to talk about. The first rule of playlists and play is make sure that you lose track of time. If you’re losing track of time, then you’re playing, you’re doing it right. If you lose track of time, you’re totally immersed in the experience. That’s great play. The second is don’t have a goal or an outcome. Just enjoy the experience.

When I’m coloring, it’s not about finishing the project, it’s about just coloring and just doing whatever comes to me or calls to me. Being… The emotional side, being light or silly or energized, having the emotion attached to it. And then the fourth thing is allowing yourself to be curious and self-expressive. I think those are four great elements of play that I want to invite everybody to engage in more.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s interesting. The lack of outcome, I think, is one that many people might struggle with letting go of.

Bahaa Chmait:

That need for results or perfection or…

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, perfection’s certainly a thing. I was thinking more in the lines of, “There has to be a reason why I’m going to do this thing.” It seems like a very societal way of behaving or way of being, right. That we have these objectives. This thing we have to accomplish, so I can imagine that being difficult, at least in my observations of how folks think about meetings, how they think about the way they spend their time.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. When you ask someone that you don’t know if they want to play rock, paper, scissors, I tend to get a few different answers. I get a yes, an enthusiastic yes, I get a no, which is totally fine, and then sometimes I get a, “But for what?” And they want to know, “What’s the outcome? What’s the purpose? Why? Why are we doing this thing? Can it just be playful, or does it have to be something that is more?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

So it’s interesting tapping into what you’re saying.

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s your percentages on those three answers?

Bahaa Chmait:

I would say that for what is a big one. “Why? For what? What are we doing?” They want to understand the parameters around it, but it also depends on context because I’ll ask people-

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Where you’re at and who you’re running into.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah. Are they a complete stranger? Are you at a mingling event or a networking event? Are you at something playful? There’s an experience. We partnered with the local transit authority and the city, and we created these JoyMob’s, so a mob of people spreading joy, and we brought entertainment onto the train cars and the train doors open, and a big loud of laughter just erupts from the train car.

And when people first hop on, they’re like, “What’s happening here?” And they’re like, “I don’t understand. It’s usually this solo, disconnected kind of ride. I’ve just planned to be on my phone, look out the window, put my headphones in.” And we were doing this improv comedy thing, and the audience, even for a two-minute ride, short little skits, we were getting audience suggestions, and they were participating and laughing and making eye contact with each other.

And it was this beautiful experience of connecting versus what pre-programmed your mind to think that the ride is going to be, and then being delightfully surprised, and the facial expressions that people, when they hop on the train, they’re like, “What is happening here?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Was that the first JoyMob that you ever did?

Bahaa Chmait:

The first JoyMob we ever did was dancing in the streets, and it was a silent disco, and it was a traveling silent disco. So, for those that don’t know silent disco, you put music in your headphones, no one can hear the music, except… unless you have the headphones. So, going down the street, we were flash mobbing farmer’s markets. They’re buying food and groceries, and we’re like, “Woo-hoo.” And that’s all you hear. And everybody’s like, “People are crazy.” But [inaudible 00:25:37]-

Douglas Ferguson:

And they’re so… You were just walking down the street just from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Bahaa Chmait:

Joyfully moving our bodies to music, and we were inspired by the music. We gave them prompts in the headphones too. Give a high five to a stranger, dance as if you were Fred Astaire, jump up onto a park bench, or twirl around a light pole.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fascinating that you had the prompts in there. Most silent discos I’ve been aware of, people are listening to music, and oftentimes they’re hearing different music. So you’ve got maybe five to 10 different tracks. And so people are dancing to different things, and it’s quite unreal to look at because no one’s dancing in the same thing.

Bahaa Chmait:

Everybody’s moving to their own groove, right. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And so that’s fascinating that you introduced the prompts, then that gave people maybe a little more confidence to go further than they normally would.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Again, inviting people into the experience. I’m thinking about the five E’s of experience design. You create excitement in the beginning and really set the tone for what’s going to happen. Then, in the entry, when people were coming, we were welcoming them with a warm welcome. We did a team-building activity, and then we move into the experience. And how do we design the experience so that it’s engaging and it’s not just stale? This was pre-COVID that we did this first one years and years before.

And we found that some people came up to the people with headphones and they said, “What are you doing?” And we said, “We’re dancing.” And they’re like, “Well, can I join in?” And so they took out their headphones and either shared their headphones, again pre-COVID, or they put their phone on speakerphone and just listened with this… the phone next to both of their ears. And they shared a moment of dancing together in this sort of wildly vulnerable state out in the wild, on a street corner, in a park. It was beautiful.

Douglas Ferguson:

So what was going through your mind right before it first started? This is your first one. The anticipating is building. What were you thinking?

Bahaa Chmait:

Fear that no one was going to show up. It was a wildly unique ask of the community. I had a goal, I wanted to see if I could unite the city through dance. I put up some posters, word got out, the media caught wind. They had me on the Live Morning Show. I told them what we were doing, and I said, “I’m going to be dancing here, come join me.” And I thought to myself, I didn’t even have a business or a Facebook or anything set up.

So I was like, “Well, what if no one comes? Will I still honor the thing that I said I was going to do? Will I still be the strange guy dancing in the streets?” And slowly, one by one, eventually 60-something people showed up and this beautiful celebration. And at the end, everybody’s hugging, getting to know each other. They’re asking me what’s next. And that’s when I realized like, “Oh, there’s an opportunity here for more human connection in unique ways than we typically see.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Of those people. How many are you still in touch with? Was this the foundation of building real, lasting relationships?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I was more connected to the dance community at that time, and it was a lot of wonderful dancers. We met at Ecstatic Dance and would have a beautiful time together. I think that in the law of diffusion of innovation, it’s a bell curve. In the beginning to start a movement, you need the innovators and the early adopters.

So basically, what that means is you need someone that’s willing to go first, and then you need the people who will back that up and be like, “Okay, I’m in. Sign me up. I don’t want to be the first one. But since there’s a movement, since you’re dancing in the streets, since you’re singing on train, since you’re dah, dah, dah, dah, writing love letters and leaving them in public for people to find and brighten up their day, I want to join in.”

And so we had that group right off the bat. It just started building and building and building, and then we reached a tipping point to start reaching some more of the majority, the early and late majority of the people in the bell curve. Does that make sense?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. And then I know that through these JoyMob Events, you started to transition into working with companies. So I was curious, how do you translate the spontaneity of these kind of in-person joy experiences into more structured facilitation work, especially in these more buttoned-up situations like corporate teams?

Bahaa Chmait:

Sure. Yeah. It was a challenging transition to move from public activations into the corporate space. I hadn’t worked in corporate spaces before. One big factor, I think, was actually taking Voltage Control certification course because we did a project. And in that project, I started to identify exactly what kind of facilitator I was, what kind of outcomes I wanted to have, how did I actually create these experiences. And I started using those building blocks to create them in the workplace. And I think the biggest thing that helped me leap was giving myself permission.

We don’t give ourselves permission enough to explore, to be brave, to create. I was terrified to go into the corporate space, and slowly but surely, I started doing these little activations with them. “Let’s do a team-building thing here. Let’s do a team-building thing there.” And I came in with the mindset of instead of it being about me, I made it about them. And I was like, “How can I serve the needs that are needed for this environment?” So when I talked to the HR teams, the sales leaders, the sales teams, the team leaders, we’re disconnected, we’re not communicating well.

So I designed an experience for that, and it started to propel and it led me down some very beautiful paths. And you’re right, teams can be buttoned up. And I come in with the energy of having them see me be vulnerable. So if I’m going to invite them into an experience, I’m going to share something about my experience first, just to kind of model that. And like I said, if I know some people in the audience already, or if I know some people on the team, I’ll invite them behind the scenes to share as well, so that someone needs to go first. And through that, we can create some really cool things together, especially in a buttoned-up environment.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. What’s that journey that helps them kind of move step by step and get more comfortable and more vulnerable and more open, and what are folks ready for at that point, right? I think sometimes if folks aren’t ready to step in, how do we create that threshold that makes it easier for them to do so?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah. It can be awkward, right. Especially I think when people hear team building, they think of the old school style with the trust balls and sort of the forced fun, and we talked about this already, that team building it’s needed because you need to support culture. It’s not just about productivity. When you have a positive culture, it leads to productivity.

When you have culture of psychological safety and belonging, I envision a world where belonging is considered a metric and measured as a metric in productivity, so that we make sure that there’s space for it. And if you create a psychologically safe space, people start to move into it. It takes a minute, but they start to ramp up.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And it can be transformative. So what were some of the most powerful shifts you’ve witnessed in others during or after one of your sessions? Anything that’s given you goosebumps?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think when people come up to me afterwards and they tell me, “I needed that,” and they have this sort of expression on their face like, “I really needed that.”

There’s a moment in every experience that gets designed, especially if it gets designed intentionally where you have feedback, whether it’s the executive leader who was dancing with his daughter and shares that experience, or I think teams have the ability to really be productive when they feel psychologically safe and have a foundation of trust and connection.

And I think that’s what really resonates with me when they come up to me afterwards and communicate that they felt safe enough to be vulnerable. Like I said before, connection moves at the speed of vulnerability. So it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

Douglas Ferguson:

You talked a lot about your TED Talk, and I know that it was… you were really excited about it, and it was kind of a big moment for you and took a lot of work. And so I was curious when you were in that work or even reflecting on it later, what did preparing for it help you understand about your work?

Bahaa Chmait:

You mentioned some great books and movies. There’s one that I’m reading right now called Chopped Wood Carry Water. Have you read it or heard of it?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes.

Bahaa Chmait:

There’s some really great lessons in there where they talk about everything matters, the details matter, the little things matter. So when we were getting coached on our body language and the way we move on stage, the way we take applause or receive applause, the way we speak to the audience, which areas of the audience are we speaking to? The balcony, the lower level, the left, the right. There was so much details, and the whole time I was thinking to myself, “I’m just trying to memorize my lines, man. I’m just trying to memorize my lines and not mess this up.”

But when you focus on the details and you give yourself enough time, I think that was the biggest lesson that I learned, giving myself enough time, giving myself permission to fail in the practice enough times that when I got on stage, it was like second nature. It just felt comfortable. At one point, the audience was laughing at something I said, and then I actually started laughing because they were laughing. And in my head, I thought, how playful is this?

But I was also thinking to myself, “Is this allowed? Am I allowed to be human and laugh with the audience instead of just like, ‘I’m here to deliver a talk?'” So it was a really cool experience, and I think that for anybody who’s willing to be brave enough to do some public speaking or take the plunge, I say, give yourself enough time to fail enough times in practice so that when you’re in front of everybody, you’re just there to have fun and it’s just relaxed and playful.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. We’re big proponents of practice, as you know, with all the community events focused on practice and really encouraging people to spend the time when the stakes are low so that when we’re called on, we have the confidence to step into those high-stakes moments.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. And I’m a big fan of the Facilitation Labs and the practice labs that Voltage Control does because of that opportunity and the ability to fail and continue forward. As you know, Chris and I were co-presidents of a global speaker series that celebrated failure, and we’d have speakers go on stage and share their stories of professional failure and the lessons learned.

And it was really interesting as facilitators of that experience to see, “Oh, here’s some areas where we needed to grow and we weren’t excelling as creators of this experience, and here’s some areas where we were growing and the next time we did it, we did it even better.” And yeah, life’s about practice. Jump in, jump in with both feet and see what happens. It’s exciting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. And also, I was even recalling you mentioning wanting to help others find their facilitator voice. So what advice do you have to give someone who feels the pull toward facilitation but isn’t sure where to start?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think about this little acronym, CBA. First, I think getting clarity on exactly what you want. As a facilitator, it can be hard to know exactly where you want to go, but just get clarity on something small. “I want to do this. I want to do that.” And then remove the limiting beliefs that you have around it. And the best way to do that is to practice. Best way to do that is to be around other people who you can fail in front of and feel psychologically safe.

And then, finally, the A is action. Take action. The more you just sit and think about it, the harder it’s going to be to move forward. And sometimes that clarity, sometimes you need to take action and then you get clarity. So just take action, take baby steps, move forward. For me, I didn’t know how to move into the corporate space, so I took the Voltage Control certification, and it gave me the stepping stone.

I was like, “Okay, this is pretty cool. I was in a safe environment. I was in a cohort of people that, some of them were in the corporate speak world, and some of them weren’t in the corporate world.” And I was like, “Oh, there are other people like me that I can connect with and feel this camaraderie with.” So take action. Get clear on what you want, even if it’s just baby steps. You don’t have to have the big end goal in mind. And most of all, remove the limiting beliefs that you have and give yourself permission to just explore.

Douglas Ferguson:

And this might be a similar answer, but I’m curious if we now zoom out a little bit because we were talking specifically about facilitation and facilitation skills.

But if we then more broadly look at communities and your mission of helping spread joy and connection as a part of daily life, what’s one step people might take to move closer to your vision that they’re realizing your dream of communities that have joy and connection?

What’s something that folks might do to have a little more of that? Is it about the playlist, or are there other things that folks might consider?

Bahaa Chmait:

The playlist is great for your mental health. Everyone should make a playlist. What I would say is, think about the dance floor analogy. Think about the first person who needs to go, and like we said before, whether it’s bridging connection with somebody, maybe it’s a colleague, you’re a remote worker, and you’re onboarded and you’ve got a few Zoom, and then what’s the rest of the time? You’re left to kind of connect, reach out, and throw them a dad joke and start building a relationship.

Most people don’t reach out because the other person didn’t reach out. And so if you just hop on the dance floor, get a little bit of bravery, a little bit of courage, some really amazing things happen. And when you send that dad joke to a colleague who’s working remotely as well, I think about 40% of the time, I get a response back. I get the laughing emoji, and then I get, “I needed that. I needed that.” Because everyone’s having a challenging day, it works hard, life’s hard.

So just reach out, bridge the gap. Be the first one to get on that dance floor of life, and people will join you because everybody’s craving connection. We’re in the middle of the loneliness epidemic, according to the World Health Organization. And we’re more connected than ever before through technology, and yet there’s this disconnection that we all have and we all feel. So be the first, or gather up a group of people together and be the first together. But take action.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. And I want to wrap here with an opportunity for you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Bahaa Chmait:

I think that was it, the one I gave you. I think that was it. Be the first one on the dance floor. I imagine a world where loneliness is optional, and I’ll let that sink in because I don’t know too many people who would choose that option. But when we have enough human connection in the world, that loneliness would be optional, that would be a very beautiful world to live in.

So I think be the first one on the dance floor. Go first, reach out, connect with that person you haven’t connected with yet, whether it’s a cousin or a friend [inaudible 00:41:44] talk to in a while, or a parent, or if you’re a remote worker, reach out to your colleagues and just put yourself out there. Be the first one on the dance floor. I guarantee you someone will join you, and you’ll start to create a movement of connection that’s really beautiful.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Bahaaaa. And thanks so much for joining me.

Bahaa Chmait:

Childhood Trauma coming back. Oh man, it’s been so great talking to you, Douglas. Thanks for spreading joy in the world and creating opportunities for people to connect, whether it’s through the Facilitation Labs and the ability to experience what a supportive environment looks like, or through the regional meetups that you’re supporting right now.

I hope one gets started in Salt Lake City, where I’m at, or just your playful nature. We’ve worked together with some clients on a few different occasions, and I just love the way you show up. Joking, playful, jovial. You allow people to see who you are, and I think that’s really cool.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, thank you for that. And Bahaa, you’re always a pleasure. And again, thank you so much for being here.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, Douglas. Woo-hoo.

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, or I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can We Combat Loneliness Through Shared Experiences? appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Caterina Rodriguez led an insightful workshop exploring the powerful role of non-verbal communication in facilitation. In a room filled with facilitators, leaders, and team builders, Caterina took participants on a deep dive into how our bodies, gestures, eye contact, and even silence contribute to the effectiveness of facilitated sessions. Her session emphasized that facilitation is not just about words; it’s about how we use our physical presence to guide and influence group dynamics.

The Power of Non-Verbal Cues

Non-verbal communication, while often underestimated, plays a crucial role in holding space and fostering connection. Caterina kicked off her session with a fun, energetic exercise to shake off the “lunch slump” and get the room moving. As she led the group through a few lines of the Cha-Cha Slide, it became clear that how we move in a space—whether it’s dancing, standing tall, or leaning in to listen—has a powerful effect on the people around us.

Caterina’s focus on non-verbal cues was not just about body language; it was about the whole spectrum of communication that goes beyond words. She walked participants through three key forms of non-verbal communication:

Vocal Cues and Silence: The tone, pitch, and pace of our voice influence how participants interpret our words. Silence, often overlooked, is also a powerful tool in guiding reflection and allowing participants time to process.

Facial Expressions and Eye Contact: These are the most obvious forms of non-verbal communication. Facial expressions communicate emotions, and eye contact signals engagement and attentiveness.

Body Language: Posture, gestures, and proximity all shape the physical space of facilitation. How we stand, where we position ourselves, and how we physically interact with the room can significantly impact how comfortable and engaged participants feel.

Understanding Your Non-Verbal Style

Before diving into strategies to refine our non-verbal communication, Caterina emphasized the importance of self-awareness. Participants were guided through a self-assessment to identify their unique non-verbal style and how it translates into their facilitation work. She encouraged facilitators to recognize that there is no single “right” way to use non-verbal communication—it’s a matter of authenticity and adaptation.

Practical Strategies for Facilitators

The bulk of Caterina’s session was dedicated to hands-on strategies to improve non-verbal communication in facilitation. Here are some of the key techniques she highlighted:

1. Own Your Physical Presence: Your posture and body language immediately set the tone of the room. Facilitators who stand tall, make eye contact, and use open body language invite participation and set a welcoming tone.
2. Leverage Eye Contact: Use eye contact to engage participants and guide the flow of the session. By intentionally making eye contact with someone, you encourage their participation and create a sense of connection.
3. Experiment with Vocal Variety: Varying your tone, pace, and volume helps shape the energy in the room. For example, slowing down your speech or lowering your voice can signal a shift to a more reflective or serious moment.
4. Play with Proximity and Space: How you move through the room or position yourself relative to participants can impact engagement. Caterina encouraged facilitators to experiment with proximity, moving closer to build connection or stepping back to give space for others to contribute.
5. Embrace Silence: Silence can be uncomfortable but is an essential tool for reflection. As a facilitator, allowing moments of quiet after a prompt can encourage deeper thinking and invite more thoughtful responses from participants.

The Role of Non-Verbal Trust

One of the most powerful insights Caterina shared was the impact of non-verbal communication on group trust. Research has shown that facilitators who use positive non-verbal cues—such as open body language, making eye contact, and aligning their energy with the group—help build stronger trust within the group. When people feel seen and heard on a deeper, non-verbal level, they are more likely to engage and share openly.

Whole Body Listening: An Essential Skill for Facilitators

As the session drew to a close, Caterina introduced the concept of “whole body listening.” This technique encourages facilitators to listen not just with their ears but with their whole body—paying attention to verbal cues as well as non-verbal cues such as body language, facial expressions, and even silence.

Caterina provided exercises to practice whole body listening, encouraging participants to be present in the moment and to respond to not only the words but also the underlying emotions and energy that participants are conveying. This method helps build stronger, more meaningful connections and fosters an environment where participants feel truly heard and understood.

Key Takeaways

Caterina’s session reminded us that as facilitators, we are more than just speakers or presenters—we are the ones who set the tone and create the environment for connection, collaboration, and transformation. By refining our non-verbal communication, we can hold space more effectively and create deeper connections with participants.

• Non-verbal cues (body language, eye contact, vocal tone) are just as important as verbal communication in facilitating meaningful conversations.
• Being self-aware of your non-verbal style can help you adapt and engage more effectively with diverse groups.
• Silence and body language can guide the flow of a session, build trust, and help you connect with participants on a deeper level.
• Whole body listening is a powerful tool for facilitators to enhance their presence and ensure that everyone feels seen and heard.

Caterina’s session was a vibrant and enlightening exploration of the often-overlooked aspects of facilitation. It reminded us that facilitation is about the whole experience—the spoken, the unspoken, and everything in between.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Cat’s Session:

Speaker 1:
Thank you. So Eric did give you a teaser, and I’m going to ask you all to get on your feet because it is lunch. It’s that lunch slump of the day. It’s day two. People are a little tired. So we’re going to do little exercise. You might recognize this as it starts to fade in, and I expect all of you to follow. Yep. Ready? We’re going to… And I want you to get funky.

MUSIC:
To the left.
Take it back now, y’all.
One hop this time
One hop this time.
Right foot, two stomps.
Left foot, two stomps.
Slide to the left.
Slide to the right.
Crisscross.

Speaker 1:
All right. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. I let DJ Casper do a little bit of our warming up for us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I am Cat from Orlando. It’s lovely to be here with you all. I wear actually dual hats in my work. So I actually have a full-time job where I do a lot of program design, learning and development, and internal org development facilitation for my full-time employer, which is ADL. Never a dull time to be in a civil rights organization right now. And then my other hat is as a consultant. That’s actually how I got plugged into this community. And I’m so, so excited to be here with you all to really dive into what we all love and eat and breathe, which is gathering people.

When I thought about what I wanted to bring to the space, I really wanted to think about the bodily experience of both facilitating and being a participant in a facilitated space. So a little fun fact about me is that I’ve always been in the social justice space in some way, shape, or form, but I actually got started in the theological space. I was training to be a hospital chaplain, quickly realized that I do not compartmentalize well enough to last in that profession. So God bless to those who do it. But what I realized as a chaplain in training was the importance of my physical and non-verbal presence in that space, because it’s often in situations where words just fail. And I got to really reflect on what was the transformative power of hearing and seeing someone without using my words.

And so ever since then, I’ve always really wanted to explore ways to bring that to the forefront of my practice. And so that’s what we’re going to be doing today. But first, why is this important at all for you all as facilitators? We don’t just create containers, we hold them, and how we hold them matters. And so as facilitators, the ways in which we hold that container are going to determine the outcomes, not just of what you’re trying to do, but also the connections that you’re making. So, we’re going to be doing a couple of things over the next hour and 25 minutes that we have left. We’re going to start at just understanding why non-verbal communication is important. We’re going to take a look at what does that even mean. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Sometimes we have ideas of the most obvious forms of non-verbals, and sometimes there’s some more unspoken ones that we’re going to also dig into.

We’re also going to be reflecting on and doing a little bit of a self-assessment. Because before we can even talk about how am I going to go into space and use this to both hold a space and engage my participants, I need to figure out, well, what is my non-verbal style? And I’m going to give you a spoiler, there’s no one right way to do that. It’s going to be heavily relying on a lot of personal factors that we’ll explore. We’re going to learn some practical strategies about how do we start to fine-tune our non-verbal styles in facilitation spaces to create those deeper connections and deeper more meaning-making conversations. And then we’re going to practice, right? That’s the theme of this summit, right, practice makes practice. We’re going to practice quite a bit towards the end in using non-verbal cues to both listen and respond.

So with that, I want you to ground yourselves in a time. Ground yourselves in a time, the very first time you realized the impact of non-verbal communication. This can be in a personal setting or it can be in a professional setting, either way, but one of the earliest memories you became keenly aware of non-verbal communication. What I want you to do is hone in on the impact that realization had on you.

So I’ll give you an example. My earliest one is personal. I immigrated to the United States with my family when I was 13, I’m originally from Dominican Republic. I come from a family that has a huge Latin American and Mediterranean background. Hint, hint, I may or may not be the facilitator that has three citizenships. So bingo for you. And so I grew up being very physical touch and proximity, not an issue. In fact, every space that I entered growing up, it was expected that you would, I mean literally find every person in that space and go [foreign language 00:06:15]. It was just you went around and you found every person in that space or else you were kind of seen as a little bit rude.

And then when it was time to say goodbye, we’d reverse it, ” [foreign language 00:06:31]. Yeah. Not a fun time during COVID. Not at all. So when we moved to the United States, when I was 13 years old we moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Yeah, lovely place. I’m just saying yeah because of the shock, right? Imagine that drastic change in culture. I will never forget the first time that we met our neighbors and we went to go in and say hi. I was like, “Hey, nice to… ” and I literally leaned in and they went, “Nice to meet you.” I was like, “Oh, right, that’s not a thing that I guess people do here.”
In that moment I realized two things. One is I wasn’t even reading the situation. Non-verbals were not a thing to me up until that point in my life. And what the impact that stuck with me was I’m different from these people and there are big adjustments I’m about to have to make. And what that would mean later on in life and all the other thing,. But that’s where I think that realization of really big difference started for me because DR is a tiny country, it’s very homogenous. The US is not that. And so that for me was the first realization of difference.

So that’s what I want you to do is take the next two minutes and I want you to hone in. You don’t have to write it, you can if that helps you record it, but I want you to think about that first moment you became keenly aware of non-verbal communication and the impact it had on you.

All right, we’re going to keep that music going, but what I want you to do now, stay at your tables. So I just had you up and moving a lot. We’re going to move again a little bit later, but I’ll let you chill for now. Turn to your neighbor and if you have an odd number, it’s okay if there’s a triad at your table, and take the next five minutes to talk about that moment and that impact and what it meant for you.

So would love to hear from a couple of folks. Tell us a little bit about what surfaced in your conversations, whether you drew up an insight or something came up for you unexpectedly. Please share your name when you speak.

Speaker 3:
I have to share my name? Sarah. It’s Sarah. It’s Brian Terello, the one that won the gravy packet yesterday. So Granny and I are here talking about our experiences. They were both young, traumatizing experiences with a mother. Her mother gave her a look, and then I got a look in junior high school. I moved to a new school in a new part of the country where I didn’t know anybody and didn’t know the culture and wasn’t part of a group or anything. And I said something, I don’t even know what it was, but the girls gave me the look and I was like, “What is that?” I felt terrible and they just all dispersed, and I was like, “I don’t know what I said.” It was terrible and it was an icky experience. And they were wondering if anybody actually had a positive experience with this.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, I mean, y’all are in conversation with each other. Anyone have positive experiences? So many. Anyone want to share? Oh gosh, there’s so many hands.

Speaker 4:
I’d love to share. Oops. Can I share here in the middle since I have the mic? I’m Jackie. Thank you.

Speaker 1:
I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.”

Speaker 4:
Not that I want to be authoritative in that way, but I’ll take advantage. It took us a moment to think about it, first of all, it’s not an easy prompt. And then when we talked about really that I shared that feels so powerful to me, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily early, but it’s powerful and it has to do with certain morning rituals. I’m Jewish, and so when you make a condolence call, you do something you call you sit shiva. You sit down with a person, you might not even say a word to them. You sit with them and you let them lead if they want to speak. And just your physical presence of being there with them brings comfort to them and to you and you’re so attuned in that moment. It’s incredibly powerful.

I’ve also had the experience with people who have sadly been ill or had a loss in their family and just as a close friend sitting with them looking deeply into their eyes and feeling what’s in their heart. There’s something so incredibly powerful about it. And yeah, thank you for asking the question because that’s a positive non-verbal. I mean, it might’ve been in a sad occasion, but it’s positive in terms of the power of being present with someone.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Jackie. Really appreciate that. Maybe a couple other folks. Yeah, Catherine.

Speaker 5:
Okay, so my first memory, it came to me really fast unlike some of you, I don’t know why. But my mom was driving with me in a car. I was probably maybe two or three, I’m not really even sure. I was sitting in the front seat, so you know how long ago that was. I remember her at a stoplight, we stopped the car for some reason, and I remember her leaning down and giving me an Eskimo kiss. And it makes me a little bit clumped here because physical touch matters and that the small moments count.

Speaker 1:
Thanks, Karen. All right, maybe one more over on… Yep, right here, perfect timing.

Speaker 6:
Hi, I’m Lily, and I wanted to share mine because mine felt like a little bit of a cop-out because I’m actually deaf. I have bilateral cochlear implants, and so my parents really tried to do over-exaggerated facial expressions, like mouth movement, like ways to help me realize that when you speak you have to speak it, you can’t just move your mouth and make words. So especially before I had these cochlear implants, I couldn’t hear, and so they had to use those gestures, those facial expressions, the eye contact, the exaggerated looks of surprise or happiness or whatever to get me to make that connection to whatever the thing went on at the time.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, thanks, Lily, for introducing also that level of accessibility when we lean into not just our verbal, but also our non-verbal communication.

All right, so I want us to stay anchored in that. I think the big theme that’s coming up for us is the power and the lasting impact that non-verbal communication can have on us, whether it’s for the better or the worse. And so let’s talk a little bit about what we mean when we say non-verbal communication before we dig into exploring our own styles. I am a very systematic thinker. I love buckets of categories. You can tell I might be a little bit of a Virgo. Aye, my Virgos. Don’t worry for my Leos in the room, I’m actually a Virgo Leo cusp, so I got you too. Yeah, I see you.

Actually, what we’re looking at here is by column. Our first column is what most people immediately think of when we say non-verbal communication, it’s what’s happening on our face. So our facial expressions, how we’re using our mouth, our eyebrows to express different kinds of reactions and emotions. And then, of course, there’s our eye contact, so how we’re using our gaze. Where is it going to? Is that where I’m focusing? Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and you’re talking to them and then all of a sudden they’re like, “Uh-huh. Yeah,” and they’re over here and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, I got you.” And so how we use our gaze. That first column we’re talking about face. That’s the most common recall of non-verbal communication.

Our middle column here is our whole body, our whole body and movement. So we’re talking about our gestures and our postures. This is much more upper body, so our gestures, how we’re gesticulating with our arms, with our hands. I actually tend to gesture a whole lot more, but I have a handheld mic because these curls will not be tamed and the mic would land right where it hits. So I would typically be gesturing a whole lot more with both of my hands, just because that’s how I grew up. And then our posture, how are we standing. We’ll talk a little bit about what those different kinds of body cues might mean in a bit. And then proximity and movement. So this is how we are inhabiting the space in terms of the actual spatial awareness, as well as in relation to people. So I’m here right now delivering some kind of information, but as you all were talking, I was moving around the room trying to glean some of your incredible nuggets of wisdom that you were talking about.And also, if I’m having a direct conversation with someone, if I move in a little bit closer to listen as I make that eye contact versus maybe move back as I’m trying to address a larger group of people. So all about the movement of our whole body.

And then that last column, that’s the one that actually most people don’t think of, which is sound. We think non-verbal means that it’s all about non-sound things of our body, but actually, vocal cues are a huge part of our non-verbal communication. So it’s not what we’re saying but how we’re saying it. So the tone, the pitch, the pace. You could probably tell right after we did the Cha-Cha Slide and I started, I was talking up here and a little bit quickly. Part of that was absolutely you should probably not dance that hard right before you’re about to be the one speaking, because I was definitely a little bit winded.The other part is just like those jitters that come in the first two to three minutes. I’ll be super vulnerable with you, it was absolutely the Cha-Cha Slide and nerves at the same time that had me up here, where I almost couldn’t catch my breath.

So that is what we mean when we say vocal cues, like how are we holding that voice, how fast are we talking, how high or low are we talking? And then my favorite one is silence. So how and when do you choose to lean into the absence of sound? We’ll talk a bit about what that looks like. I just want to leave you with just three really interesting key insights to drill down on this idea of why non-verbal communication is so important, especially for facilitators who are people-gatherers.
So there’s this thing called the 7-38-55 rule, which is often misunderstood and people actually think that the research says that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. That’s actually not what that means at all. What this actually means is it’s taking a look at when verbals and non-verbals don’t match, what happens, which happens a lot. I’m sure that for all of you in this room that are facilitating groups of people, often you realize that what’s surfacing verbally is only 30 to 50% of the story, right? Yeah, I’m starting to see some nodding heads in there.

What actually happens when those two are not aligned is that people actually pay way more attention to the non-verbal cues in the space than they do verbally. So when those aren’t in alignment, people are only making meaning at 7% from what’s being said. The other 93% is from vocal cues, so how it’s being said, and from all of the silent body language, facial expressions, all those other things that we just talked about. So this is point one as to why it’s really, really important for us to refine this and become really aware of what our style is and where we can lean in to engage our groups.

Next we have emotional synchrony. So this is that as facilitators who hold these containers, we have the power to shape the energy in that room without saying a single word with how we show up. I mean, granted, DJ Casper was saying all the words, but I didn’t say anything. I was just moving with y’all, right? There’s also something that happens where people start to unconsciously mirror the energy and the non-verbal language that we’re giving off. It’s not that it’s going to magically happen all at once, but because of the role that we inhabit as facilitators, they do look to us at a certain point, especially at the very beginning. Once we start to dig in, because our goal as facilitators is to create that incredible conversation between each other, not just with me, so they’ll start to take those cues from each other as well. But at the beginning, in that foundational first five minutes, they’re taking their cues from you for the most part.

And then our last little piece of research before we start digging into our own styles is around non-verbal trust. Research has actually shown that facilitators who use non-verbal cues and communication build stronger group trust. And so what that might look like, it can really differ. In this study, they looked at these three categories, but we’ll talk a little bit about a variety of different ways we might be able to use non-verbal communication. So here they were talking about open body language and expansive posture… I almost held it over here… eye contact and facial responsiveness, so being engaged with you, very actually visibly engaged and reacting to what you’re sharing. And then lastly, marrying an attunement to group energy. So a little earlier, Karen was talking a little bit about that mirroring piece and language. We’re going to talk actually about that mirroring piece as well in terms of body.

All right. So this is a lot of really nice information, but it means nothing if you don’t end up applying it to yourself. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do next. So there should be a three-page worksheet that is only two pages because we print double-sided to save the environment. No, it’s not double-sided, never mind. The printer made a choice. They did not get the two ply to one ply memo, and here we are. So I’ll briefly explain how this worksheet works and then I’ll give you a little bit of time. So the first part, part one, as you can see is called scales. And there’s different kinds of non-verbal communication methods in here. I want you to think about it in regards to two categories, your personal context and your facilitation or professional context.For some of you, those might be very aligned. For others of you, they may not be. And for some, you might be in the middle about some being aligned and some not.

And then the second part is rankings. And again, this is very personal to you, which is understanding your facilitation purpose, your facilitation style, and your non-verbal style. Which of those are most impactful in your facilitation practice for achieving your purpose in that space? So I’ll give you about five minutes. And as you’re filling that out, it won’t take you long, but the reason I’m giving you five minutes is because I want you to be thinking through these questions that we’re going to discuss afterwards. So for those of you that are like, “Boom, boom, boom, boom, I’m done in 10 seconds,” here are the questions I want you to start percolating on and maybe taking some notes. How has your culture, social upbringing, or conditioning shaped your non-verbal communication?How do your non-verbal behaviors shift in different settings? So start to dig in a little deeper and analyze that. Why might I change my proximity in a professional setting than I do in a personal setting? Or why might my eye contact shift? And then what surprised you most? What surfaced for you, whether it was a delight or whether it was, “Oh, that’s a challenge. That’s something that I need to think about.” We’ll do some focus music. I’ll give you all about five minutes to fill out that worksheet, think through these questions, and then we’ll move on to discussion.

We are now going to talk as a table. We’re going to do intensive pair work in a bit, so I want you to have a little bit more of a larger group discussion at your tables. If there’s a lot of people at your tables, feel free to split up into two groups of three or four, because I want to make sure you all get to dig into these questions really well. But if you’re at smaller tables, talk as a whole group. And we’ll give you about 10 minutes in those to explore, see what comes up for you and the insights you gain from those conversations.

So those were some pretty meaty conversations y’all were having. I mean, I walked around and the stuff that y’all were sharing and starting to dig into, incredible. So I know that there’s lots of interesting insights and connections that were made, and I’m curious to hear from you all what surfaced in those conversations.

Speaker 7:
Hi, everyone. I’m Pooja. One thing that I’ve always struggled with is projecting my voice. I am really great in a small circle of people or on one-on-ones, but when talking to one-to-many like this, unless… I mean, I have a mic right now, but I do ordinarily struggle with that. But I’ve also been told that I’m very facially expressive, that I use a lot of gestures, my body language is more open. And so in filling this out, it just occurred to me that maybe I’ve been overcompensating for my lack of projection with all of these other ways of communicating with folks. So I thought that was really interesting as I was filling this out.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, thanks for sharing that with us, Pooja, and having a very holistic view of, okay, not just what my one skill says about this, but as a whole, what does this mean and how am I balancing those things. Absolutely.

Speaker 8:
We had a really interesting conversation about the impact of COVID on our non-verbal cues, all the way from, first of all, proximity was a no-go. Even though we’re past that, I still almost pause for a second, I’m like, “Are you okay with me being near you? Are you okay with me touching your hand?” And then when everybody was wearing masks, I was saying I really struggled to read people without being able to see their mouths. And you had to learn how to smile with your eyes. And then just everything moving to virtual, your body language is just here up. And so then you have to readjust and be like, “How do I convey what I’m trying to say without the ability to move the majority of my body?”

Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for bringing in the virtual element as well. A lot of times you think, “Well, it’s online, so there’s not much I can do.” But how do we inhabit that square of ours and how do we lean in and lean back and how do we use that space? Absolutely. I guess, sorry, your hand up first, and then we’ll go to you.

Speaker 9:
Oh, thanks. Two things. One is that I’m definitely better at facilitating than I’m in my interpersonal relationships, so I was like, “Wow, I’m much more comfortable with silence in a room of 300 people than I am at silence one-on-one. I’m much more comfortable with eye contact when I’m in a room with a bunch of folks than I am in… ” That was just an interesting personal reflection.

Our conversation veered towards the gender nature of things. I was thinking a lot about how I taught Designing Your Life at Stanford for a number of years, and the founders who taught it, one is a six-foot-five pastor of a male who has just this commanding presence of a room. And I’m like a short little Italian lady with boopy energy. Just like I could practice and I could say everything the same and I could make the most resonant points and people are just never going to look at me the same as they looked at him. So we had a really just cool conversation around different things that women have tried or not tried and projecting voice and not projecting, all the things. No real huge insights, just generative dialogue in that camp.

Speaker 1:
That is huge. Absolutely. Right? Yes.

Speaker 9:
Thank you.

Speaker 1:
Absolutely. And actually, I’m really glad that that’s what came up for y’all because that is what that question is asking, right? Because realistically, non-verbal cues are read differently depending on the identities we hold. And it’s not because of the identities themselves, but because of the conditioning and the systems we live in that teach us how to react to certain identities in certain ways. So that’s a huge insight. Thank you. Thank you for bringing that to the group.

Speaker 10:
Hi, everybody, my name is Adam. I grew up in California. My parents are from Wyoming, and they’re big personalities. So in this context, my house was never silent. There was always a TV on, always a fan on. There’s never silence. I associate silence with sadness, funerals, really dark moments. And so in my personal life, I’m a big personality, I’m very expressive as my coworkers totally know. But silence is very scary to me personally, but also in facilitation. And that’s a big weakness of mine that I recognize totally. But then I in this ranking, I put it at my bottom because I’m afraid of it. It’s scary. I don’t want to touch it. Get away from me. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But I think it comes from, the first question, it comes from my home life for sure. I want to address that and maybe learn some more from today and in the future.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for sharing. So I think that was about six nos, so I take it you don’t like silence. Okay, just noted. Noted, noted. All right, Peter.

Speaker 11:
I have a quote for you from Edwin, my neighbor, when we did a one-on-one, “Let the silence do the heavy lifting.” It was so cool because we were talking about the earlier case of all the non-verbal cues and how silence… Like my example was a virtual meeting and how put the question out there and just let it sit for 10 seconds and 15 seconds and 25 seconds. Pretty soon someone starts to talk and it really unlocked a whole thing, which is really cool. So just want to add that.
One other thing, we talked a lot about virtual here. Often if I have a high-stakes conversation, I’ll switch my mic and I’ll have one really close to my mouth and I’ll have headphones on so I can really hear and I can talk very low. Seems to really make a difference, versus if I’m speakerphone and all that. And for a facilitator for me, it really puts me in a different space.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for sharing that.

Speaker 12:
So this is a trick that NPR uses, just to build off of the idea that we heard a second ago. So if you’ve ever been interviewed on NPR, especially in the studio, one of the things that they’ll do is they will turn up your own voice in your own ears. And so when they do that, there’s a tendency to bring it a little bit lower and say, “This is [inaudible 00:30:37]. Welcome to NPR.” And so you can do the same thing depending on the tone that you’re trying to go for. So thank you for adding that.

Speaker 1:
And thank you for your NPR tone. I love it. I love a good NPR tone. All right, maybe… Yep, we’re here.

Speaker 13:
I didn’t even bring this up to my friends here, but something Adam said made me think of something really funny. So I’m from Texas, and when I used to travel around consulting in the Northeast, they would always be like, “You don’t sound like you’re from Texas.” And I was like, “Well, there’s like 30 million people down there.” All the accents are homogenous now basically. But almost to a point, every single client would say that. At one point there was even a dialogue with my team about if I should start hamming up the accent to play on that idea, but it never happened. But just going through the notes, my tone and inflection and volume is something that I really deem myself on, and I just now recalled that story.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. It’s such a crystallized example of how our non-verbals completely get impacted by experience, whether we’re conscious of those experiences or not. Absolutely. All right, we’ll go to these… Oh my gosh. Okay, final three, final three. No one else raise your hands. We’ll go 1, 2, 3.

Speaker 14:
I actually have a question. I was wondering, so much of what I do is and what we all do. How would you augment some of that information to make it more accessible for neurodivergent folks or more? If you’re working with a group that’s really autistic, a lot of people on the spectrum, do you have any advice for that? Do you just make it really explicit? Is there something else you would do?

Speaker 1:
Yeah, well, so it’s tough because being on the spectrum means so many different things. And so it really depends on the group you’re going to work with. So there are some groups where you are going to want to lean more into your non-verbals because they don’t do subtlety. And that is super important.

Then there are some groups where your words become hyper important because it is just that the social reading is really, really tough. But I would say that’s a little bit tough to answer generally, just because it truly depends. Being on the spectrum, I mean, these days words are changing so fast, it used to be that we had autism, Asperger’s spectrum, now it’s all in the spectrum. And then there’s other things being lumped into the spectrum, so it really depends literally group to group. So what I would say is discovery is always critically important, including understanding how you’re going to be facilitating non-verbally and understanding those group dynamics and group needs before you even get to that space with them. And that will help lead you to some more insights and answers to that. Yeah. All right, my other two hands. Go here and here. Where’s my back mic? Where’s the mic in the back?

Speaker 15:
Sorry, mic’s getting…

Speaker 1:
Okay, no worries.

Speaker 15:
Real quick. One of the things when I saw proximity that I think about a lot as a facilitator, and I learned this from another co-facilitator, was even the design of how you do work in groups. Obviously because we’re constrained in space here, we have tables, but my co-facilitator, Taylor, would tell me, “Hey, oftentimes it’s not really democratized when it’s in front of somebody.” Even how we were doing some of our exercises today to have it on a wall versus on a table. And so even that kind of spatial awareness for me is a non-verbal exercise, not just my non-verbal, but when I put a thing on the wall and start posting and we’re all looking at it together, we’re all equal now versus it being the paper in front of myself or another colleague. Anyways, when I think about proximity, I’d love to expand that to this idea of how do we create spaces by which we all feel like we’re contributing equally.

Speaker 1:
I love that, designing for non-verbal inclusion. Absolutely. Thanks, Danny. All right.

Speaker 16:
I wanted to say something about tone and vocal cues. I also do what Sarah does up there in the graphic recording and people often ask, “How do you know what to capture?” And whenever anybody goes… what they’re going to say is going to be capture-worthy. And when they go through a slide like da, da da da da, da, I’m not capturing any of that because that’s not what it’s about. But I can tell before they’re going to say something that matters, so that’s how you know. And you all know that too. I mean, we all know that intuitively.

Speaker 1:
I love that. And that brings us back to sound. That’s the sound of breath. So relying on that non-verbal cue to be like, “That’s an important point to them.” Absolutely.

So before we move into our final practice, let’s talk a little bit about what are some of those non-verbal strategies that we can try to leverage, especially as we look at our scales. What I mean is you do not need to be at a level five across all your scales. It needs to be authentic to you, and it also needs to meet the needs of your group. So also how you show up non-verbally might have to be adaptive to your group’s needs and to what emerges in that space in a way that still feels like you’re showing up authentically.

But so own your physical presence to set the tone. Your posture and your body language are going to immediately kick off the tone of that session. So if I’m talking to y’all and I’m a little bit slouched and I’m just really closed off, that’s not quite as inviting you into a conversation with me as if I’m here and I’m facing you and I’m standing up tall, leaning into that generous authority. Thank you, Priya Parker. And owning that space as your own. You’re holding that container for those people on purpose.

Leveraging eye contact to guide participation, so that’s super important, whether it’s that I’m specifically focusing in on someone’s [inaudible 00:36:42] to let them know I’m paying attention and I value what you’re sharing. And just that gaze, that focus as a facilitator will make others start to mirror that behavior and focus in. Or whether I’m scanning the room and making sure that people know, “Oh, she’s not just here to listen to some of us. She’s paying attention to all of us.” Super important.

Experiment with vocal variety to shape energy. So who just talked a little bit about how she leans a bit more into these other strategies and interesting things with voice, because volume is not the only thing. And so understanding, if we want to really emphasize a point, does our pitch go up a little bit? Are we excited about that? If there’s something difficult in the space right now, I’m not going to be like, “Guys, this feels like there’s a really big tension here.” That seems like really… Right? “You know what? I’m sensing that there’s a sticking point here. Let’s explore that.” So tones go down. So managing the energy in that way.

Play with space and proximity to influence engagement. So Danny kicked us off a little bit in how do we start to think about playing with that proximity piece in our design and in the choices we’re making about how we structure our activities, but playing around and seeing how to inhabit the space and what’s working for your group and adapting to what they respond to.
So also a big piece is you should not be keeping the same exact levels of non-verbal communications throughout the whole time. You should be paying attention to what’s emerging and how they’re responding to you and leaning in when you start to notice, oh, okay, this brought them in more, that kind of not so much. So maybe I do a little less of that.

I don’t know if you all have ever worked with law enforcement, but I’ve done sessions for law enforcement before, and those look really different than when I work with educators, with students, in mission-driven orgs where I really lean into bringing that emotion full forward and using all different kinds of non-verbals. Whereas law enforcement, it is very much like you stand up straight and you connect with them. They’re much more around, “Give me the information. Tell me how it applies to me. I don’t want any of that woo-woo stuff.” And understanding what the needs are. If you have time to work with them over long term, you can start to crack that shell a little bit. But so understanding what your different group’s needs are is really important.

Mirror and match to build trust and connection. This goes back a little bit to what Karen talked about in mirroring language. Same thing with non-verbal language. Starting to mirror a little bit of the language that your participants are giving off with their bodies helps for them to start to create this really subtle form of connection with you, and they start to see themselves a little bit.

And then lastly, I’m sorry Adam, I’m going to tell you to embrace silence just a little bit. My rule is if I ever prompt the group, I do not talk for at least 10 to 15 seconds. At least. Sometimes I let it go for 20 to 30, watch people squirm a little bit until someone talks. But honestly, oftentimes we mistake that silence for people are not engaged when in reality what it means is just they’re thinking, they’re taking it seriously. And it’s going to help you do two things. It’s going to help get you to deeper meaningful dialogue with your groups. And it’s also going to help create a space where those that might hesitate to speak up don’t feel pressure that they need to do it now. Have you ever been prompted and then all of a sudden, two to three seconds later, it’s like, “Anyone? So any thoughts?”

And if I’m the person that has a hard time speaking up, I’m going, “No thoughts. No, just anxiety.” So playing around with those different kinds of non-verbal communication methods. I use the phrase playing around on purpose. Like I said, there’s no one right way to do it. Every group is going to have different needs, so play with it. See how your groups react, engage or don’t engage and make adjustments.

Our last exercise for the day, I said we were going to deepen our listening skills. We are going to do whole body listening. What does that mean? That is the wrong arrow. Yes. So what does that mean? So three levels of listening, we have focused listening… oh, sorry, we have internal listening, focused listening, and whole body listening. What internal listening is level one, is that we are listening to respond. This is where a lot of folks, especially in the spaces that we work with, are typically at, where I am listening and trying to figure out what I’m going to say to you next to the point that I miss all non-verbal cues and half of the verbal ones too. I’m just like listening to formulate my own response.

Then we have focused listening. This is where a lot of facilitators are at, where we are paying attention, we’re doing active listening, we’re paraphrasing to make sure we got it right. We’re asking those curious questions to probe a little bit deeper, right? We’re listening to understand. And then there’s whole body listening, which is when we listen to connect. What whole body listening looks like is that I am responding to what you are saying with your mouth and with your body. And so, all of a sudden my curious questions aren’t necessarily just based on what you’re saying to me, but how you’re saying it. “Hey, I’m curious, you hesitated in that moment before you shared that. I just want to know why. What about that made you hesitate?” or “Your face lit up when you were talking about this? What about that excites you?” So all of a sudden, your curiosity, your questions become about what their needs and values are, what’s important to them, not what I’m trying to understand for myself alone. So that’s whole body listening. S.

O what’s going on underneath the surface? Level one, when we’re listening to respond, it’s very ego-driven. It’s just about me and what I’m bringing to it. So we’re easily activated, we have very low regulation because it’s all about me, and anything that even slightly challenges my perspective I feel very defensive about. The outcome of this is that people do not feel heard. They feel shut down.

And then when we think about focused listening, what’s going on here? We’re better emotionally regulated because it’s not all about me. I really want to understand you, so there’s a little bit more cognitive engagement. I’m really trying to pay attention and respond to what you are saying, not what I’m thinking. And we’re starting to practice not just active listening, but that active curiosity.

And then when we go into whole body listening, our level three listening, that’s where we get into a space of deep empathy, because our responses are to try to meet the needs of that other person and drill deeper into what’s important to them. That’s where we get into that heightened sense of awareness where I end up paying attention and listening to everything about you. That’s where we get to that relational [inaudible 00:44:19] where all of a sudden I am feeling this connection because I have been listened to in a way that took me to places that I never knew I needed to go, and that’s where we ended up.
So with that, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. But we’re not going to do two rounds. The conversation was so rich that as a facilitator I adapted to what emerged and I made some quick changes. So here’s what we’re going to do. We are going to do one full round. We’re not going to do the last step, which is repeat. Your prompt is, what is a moment in your facilitation practice that changed the way you lead? I know I didn’t bring any easy questions today, I am sorry. It doesn’t have to be the first moment, not the earliest moment, but what is a moment in your facilitation practice that changed the way you lead? It could be something you did and the way the group responded. It could be something a co-facilitator did. Anything, right? And it doesn’t have to be negative, it can be positive, but something that changes the way you lead.

I’m going to give you a minute or two to think about it, but the way it’s going to work is like this. I’m going to give you all 10 minutes. You’re going to find a partner. Now we are going to stand up. I’m going to challenge you to find someone you still have not partnered up with throughout this summit. What’s going to happen is one of you is going to share and respond for five minutes. So partner A is going to be answering this prompt. Partner B, I want you to do whole body listening as they’re answering this question to you. Don’t just hear what they’re saying, but see them. See them in their wholeness and start to ask questions based not just on their verbal, but their non-verbal language. So start to pick up on things and drill down on things that are exciting them, making them fearful or hesitant or anxious or question things.

You’re going to do that for five minutes. Then we’re going to switch. Partner B is going to share their prompt and partner A is going to do whole body listening and respond accordingly with curious questions based on what the other partner is not just saying with their mouth, but with their body. Anything I can clarify before I start giving you that thinking time? All right. So I’ll just give you a brief two minutes to think about this existential question. Seems enough. And then I’ll cue you to stand up and we’ll go ahead and chat on those pairs for 10 minutes. All right, so if you could, as you’re ready, stand up and find a partner you haven’t spoken to yet at the summit. And I’ll give you the five-minute cue when it’s time to switch.
All right. If you have not switched yet, please go ahead and switch.

Please thank your partner for listening and getting curious. So let’s spend just a few minutes or last few minutes together unpacking. I’m curious to hear from you all not necessarily what it was that you were talking about, but what the experience was like and you can choose to respond in either way. What did it feel like to be listened to in that way? How was that a different experience than your regular conversations? Or on the other hand, what did it feel like to listen and get curious in that way? What about it was maybe easy or challenging for you? And how did you find the conversation went for you as a listener?

Speaker 17:
Hi, I am Marsha. I was just having a conversation with Pooja here. Since the exercise was all about whole body listening, she spoke to me about three situations. The first two situations I’m like, “Oh, am I supposed to respond to this? Am I listening the right way?” So I got a little conscious there, but in the third situation, I was being a little more present in terms of what is she exactly trying to convey. And then I put myself in that situation and I was like, “Yeah, that is what I get.” And I think there was a little learning that I did through that exercise, so thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
Thanks, Marsha. Absolutely. Anyone else had that same moment of like, “Oh crap, am I doing this right?” Yeah, yeah, so you were not alone.

Speaker 18:
Yes, and I was super conscious when I was talking with Dan, which thank you, Dan, great job. I will say one thing that going to him I knew that I could already trust him because I knew that he was going to show up in that space for me. So that was something that was different in terms of how my expectations changed because I understood that. I noticed when I was talking, I was shouting at him. And I noticed that when I was listening that I was very conscientious about my body at that point and what I could give and how I could show that to him. So just giving and receiving in that conversation is very different for me in terms of how I’m going to try to show up is what I noticed.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Thanks. Thank you, Monica. Yeah, it takes a whole different level of intention. Others?

Speaker 19:
I was going to say the exercise worked so well that we… or Brian was such a great listener that I spoke the entire time, so we didn’t even get to hear what Brian had to say. But he was so engaging as a listener that it just kept inviting more out of me that I wasn’t even thinking about to begin with. So fantastic facilitator in Brian.

Speaker 1:
Kudos to you both. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that experience. I think I saw… Yeah, and we’ll go here.

Speaker 6:
Hi, it’s Lily again. So at first I was like, “Oh my God, am I doing this?” And then it got really hard because I mentioned I’m deaf, and so the way I look at people is I read their lips, and that’s my connection of what they’re saying to what I’m hearing. And so I’m like, “I can’t look at their face and look at their body and then look at their face and use my ears and try and all of that.” It was a hard connection for me to make. I think I did okay. So it was just like, “Oh yeah, it’s kind of looking at all places at once and then taking it in and trying to respond in a way that’s like I’m not trying to respond just to respond, I’m trying to actually unpack it and get after what you’re saying.” So it was an interesting experience.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, definitely. Someone mentioned I got that practice, and this is also a muscle we don’t flex often, so it’s going to feel awkward at first where we’re like, “I need to pay attention to everything about you as you’re talking.” Where eventually it’ll get to a place where you’re just focused on their face and you just also soften your gaze to make yourself aware of the rest of them. But it’s not that you necessarily have to draw your attention to their whole and it’s like, “Oh, they bent the knee a little bit. What does that mean?” I’m exaggerating on purpose, but it is something that needs to be practiced and refined. And so I’m not at all surprised for folks not feeling quite there. Absolutely. All right. I think I’d seen… Oh my gosh, so many. It’s amazing.

Speaker 14:
I was really conscious of my height. I had this desire to get myself at eye level or below, like lower myself to them height wise. But I didn’t do it because it would’ve been super distracting because we were standing up. But yeah, sure.

Speaker 1:
That’s really interesting that that’s what became really hyper aware for you.

Speaker 20:
Hi, I am Jane. We didn’t talk about this, but as you were speaking I thought about animals and how in-tune you have to be with them, especially if you’re around horses, because they’re prey animals and they’re fearful and you’re always watching to see if they’re going to blow up over something that wouldn’t scare you. So I was just thinking about that, that if you pay attention to your animals to understand them, that could translate to people.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, because our bodies are the only way we can communicate with animals.

Speaker 21:
I would just like to say kudos to the Facilitation Lab and Voltage Control. In two days, I’ve already seen things a different way. So that’s pretty amazing that in two days that you can change the way somebody thinks. I’ll get my wife to come next week and y’all can help her understand me better.

But when I was talking to Lindsey, in our business, in the utility business, a lot of the things we facilitate just so fast-paced, aggressive. It’s all about this event could have killed someone or this event could have cost us $10 million. But when I was listening to Lindsey, I really caught myself wondering how she felt because she was put in a difficult situation instead of just nodding your head okay. But I was really sensing and I was even asking her, “How’d that make you feel?” I really got into the listening part. And then when she listened to my story, it really felt really good to be listened to, just the simple things in life that things get complicated and you tend to not appreciate.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for sharing that, Galen. Thank you. All right, I think I had a couple hands here, so I’m going to go one, two.

Speaker 22:
So I come from the K-12 education space, so I definitely noticed this, and I do something similar to this in my facilitation with teachers in having the ability to assess students without having grades on paper. What it felt like with the scanning was we were assessing the conversation and then we were able to dig either deeper into the conversation or to find another avenue to where the conversation was going. Through my conversation with Edwin, I noticed that he was able to tell me about a moment that helped him grow, and then I was able to assess to say, “Tell me a little bit about that moment of growth and then what can you do in the future to make this a better situation for you.” So that’s something I think that could be lovely in the K-12 education space.

Speaker 1:
Yeah,, starting to connect that forward-thinking as well based on the insights you get. All right. Going to be our last comment because there’s my walk-off music right there.

Speaker 23:
No pressure or anything. Hi, I am Susanna. I’ve been for the past few years thinking about eye contact because I’ve noticed myself, when I listen to people, I will look away. I was like, “What is that telling them?” And I’ve been thinking a lot about why is that. I find it’s like a sensory overload when I have to do all of the non-verbal thinking about it, but then also hearing and processing. And so it’s almost like I’m choosing to listen or I’m choosing to pay attention, but doing both at the same time is extremely… My ram is not catching up with this.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that, Susanna. Absolutely, this is something that is not intuitive. It’s not the ways in which we have been taught and conditioned to interact with each other and listen to each other. So it is going to take that practice. Like I said, I encourage you to lead into the word play when you think about practicing whole body listening, when you think about how to use different non-verbal communication styles and tactics. Use Facilitation Lab community as a place to be like, “Hey, you want to get on Zoom for 15 minutes and do some whole body listening practice, right?” That’s totally valid. That’s what this community is for. What I’ll leave you with is I know that it is a challenging practice, and I’m using the word practice on purpose, that’s our theme, but practice makes practice. Because being heard, powerful. Being seen is powerful. But being heard and seen that’s magical. And so as facilitators, as people-gatherers, I challenge you to hear them, to see them, and to go out there and make that magic happen. So thank you.

The post Non-Verbal Communication: The Key to Deeper Facilitation Connections appeared first on Voltage Control.

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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Ralitsa on Linkedin

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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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.

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