“I allow myself to be very vulnerable and open because I know I’ll grow in it, but I also know it helps others step into being vulnerable alongside me.”- Susan Wilson-Golab

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas Ferguson converses with Susan Wilson-Golab about her evolution from a K-12 district administrator to an expert in educational leadership and facilitation. Susan delves into her career progression, the significance of adapting to different organizational cultures, and the patience needed for effective change facilitation. Her reflections offer valuable insights into the world of professional learning and the art of facilitation.

Show Highlights

[00:02:28] Early experience with facilitation
[00:08:59] Transition to facilitation
[00:16:10] Patience in facilitation
[00:23:13] Navigating a Career Transition
[00:26:23] Growth Through Vulnerability
[00:29:00] Embracing Vulnerability for Growth
[00:36:50] Future Horizons and Challenges

Links | Resources

Susan on Linkedin

About the Guest

Prior to receiving her doctorate in Educational Leadership, Susan spent twenty plus years leading adult professional learning. Her professional adventures have included high school English teacher, teacher leadership, Director of the Oakland Writing Project, regional literacy consultant, and K12 district administrator. She has co-authored multiple educational journal articles focused on the teaching of writing.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

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 Susan Wilson-Golab. Prior to receiving her doctorate, educational leadership, Susan spent 20 plus years leading adult professional learning. Her professional adventures have included high school English teacher, teacher leadership, director of the Oakland writing project, regional literacy consultant, and K-12 district administrator. She has also co-authored multiple educational journal articles focused on the teaching of writing. Welcome to the show, Susan.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so great to have you. It’s been a moment since the summit and it was such a pleasure having you here in Austin and leading us through an amazing workshop that was based off of your PhD.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Yeah, I spent months actually wringing my hands over it, because I was going to be working with a different audience than I usually had, and then I realized you really deep-parlay your facilitation. Learning whether you’re in an education-based audience or an industry-based audience, it all transfers.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s dial back a moment In my typical tradition, we’ll start off hearing a little bit about how you got your start, or specifically, what was a pivotal moment for you where you realized facilitation was a thing or you were drawn to it, or you just experienced the power of facilitation? What’s one of those early stories that comes to mind?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Well, I think people would say, “Well, you’re a teacher. Isn’t that what you do on a daily basis?” But really as teachers, especially young teachers, you think about that you’re just the content expert, you’re not really thinking of yourself as a facilitator. So it wasn’t until I landed into a wonderful learning community within a English department in my first job where our department chair would facilitate professional learning with us. And I didn’t know at the time that’s really what I was experiencing, all I knew is I couldn’t get enough of it. We would usually start sometimes very early in the morning before teaching or we would stay hours after school. But I loved the community of it. I loved the constant stretch of the learning. And when she was going to step down from department chair and she was retiring, for a moment I kept looking around the room saying, “Okay. Well, who’s going to step in because we need this experience. We need to continue this community.”

And I realized, “Well, Susan, you might have to step in.” So I always say I’m a reluctant to lead facilitator. People who knew me long ago would’ve said Susan’s a very quiet person. I love to read a room, sit quietly and really watch. And I think I’d been working all my time up to that point where I had that epiphany moment where, “Maybe I have to step up, maybe I have to step up and build that community within the place I’m working with other people.” So I’d say that was very early on, about five to six years into my teaching career. That really opened up for me. I wouldn’t know at the time that I would’ve said I was facilitating. I think I would’ve been saying I was hosting, I was creating a place, a community, and I think I really came into understanding facilitation when I got involved with the National Writing Project. And our local affiliate site was the Oakland Writing Project.

And I started facilitating our four-week summer institutes with a team of two other teachers who were very seasoned and veteran at facilitating. And I was at that point looking for what’s the script, tell me how I do this. And so I really had to learn by doing with the experience in the summer institute. So that would really be where I really turned a corner on facilitation, and that’s where I got the bug to be really the host, the designer, the instigator of bringing things together. And I never seem to shed that identity after making that turn.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s really interesting that you use these other nouns like host and instigator quite often, folks that are exhibiting facilitation skills or collaborative leadership skills and putting these tools and these competencies to work. They often don’t identify as a facilitator, but there’re these other nouns, these other titles or roles or these identities that they’re called to. I’m curious if you have other thoughts on that.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Yeah, I think in recent years, especially as I started leaning in on the Voltage Control professional learning, I realized a lot of my early learning and facilitation was being mentored alongside somebody. And so I wasn’t naming certain moves so I didn’t know. I was creating with them. So as I got further along in facilitation, liberating structures, for instance, would be like a model where I’d be looking at some of the protocols and going, “Oh, I kind of created those similar experiences.” So I think early on it was a very organic, I was watching and creating and thinking about the experience. And as I’ve gotten more seasoned at it, the more I’m naming what I’m doing, the more I can experience another facilitator’s moves and I can see behind it to see how they’re weaving together different protocols, maybe how they’re thinking about their arcs and how they want to have us have an experience. But in my early years of facilitation, I was totally not aware of that orchestration. I was doing it organically alongside those who I think probably had ways of naming it and I didn’t.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s really fascinating, this level of maturity and situational awareness that you speak about. And it can help us plan and be more mindful of how we approach facilitation. Do you recall a moment or a trigger where you feel like you transitioned or is it more just iterative over time?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I would say I led the facilitation work with the writing project for I’d say three or four summers. And I’d say during that time I started also leading more inside of my district work, and I was leading more meetings. I was putting together different projects, and so I was having to design and facilitate that. And I’d say I really made that turn when I saw that it was feeling more comfortable, like it was in my bones, it was me, and I saw the impact it was having on others when they were conveying to me how powerful the community was that we had, how sad they were when something wrapped up. And I saw this tremendous impact that I was having in creating these experiences. And I think that was really the trigger that also led me to leave the classroom and to become more of a regional consultant.

And that’s when I really made the shift because my whole job was leading and developing professional learning. It wasn’t unusual for me to be in front of a few hundred people or try and create a workshop that had 70 people in it, but trying to make it really impactful when there’s one of you or two with some co-leads, all the decision making that I had to do.

So my facilitation journey really started, I think in a really small context where I was with small groups, and then the more I got confident and the more I pushed to be in that world of facilitation, the bigger the audiences became for me, and the stakes got higher as well. A lot of the things that I was leading were statewide projects that had to have deliverables, and I’d not ever had that kind of pressure on me as a facilitator. Now it wasn’t about just helping people through a journey, you also had to do it in a way that got to a deliverable and make it meaningful to them and as authentic as possible. But that was also tricky. So it was like layers of complexity kept coming on each year I continued in that role as a facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting. At first I was noticing this maybe level of practice that was happening where you were just getting more reps and more opportunity, but then as the story unfolded, I was hearing that there was also to use your language, these layers of complexity or the stakes were getting higher and higher the deeper you went. And it seems like those two things probably correlate.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Yeah. It’s one thing to say, “I really want to create this professional learning community that people want to be in because they feel it’s feeding their needs, whatever their individual needs are for learning, for stretching themselves in their practice.” That can be pretty organic and you can allow for people to go in lots of different directions. But when you start having to come in and get a group to a finish line, but you don’t want to do it in such a way that they don’t feel like it’s a ride they even want to be on, you have to then really think about, well, how do we get there in a way that honors also what they feel they need in this experience? So that really, I think, significantly upped my learning curve.

And it was during those years when I was a regional literacy consultant that because I was working basically with the Michigan Department of Education in some respects, in terms of turnaround with schools, I had a lot of opportunities to learn lots of different models of coaching, of protocols to use. And so I kept beefing up this toolbox that I had, but I was also adamant that it wasn’t about just being one model, which I would butt heads with colleagues, because when you are working for a larger governmental agency, you have to follow certain ways that they want the work to happen. And so as a facilitator, sometimes I felt that my hands were tied to coach people into leading the experiences with district members in ways that weren’t necessarily how I thought would get them to the best finish line.

Douglas Ferguson:

How did that unfold for you when you’re in those experiences? What were some of the tactics that you found were really helpful, and then how did it turn out?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think one of the things was getting an opportunity to design a learning experience with one of our districts that we were working with and having some of my colleagues alongside in that, and they were experiencing it, the learning alongside the district administrators and leaders. And at the end it was like, “Oh, I see what you did there.” And that was amazing how it had this level of impact. So I found the opportunities where I could put them into an experience and it would start shifting their perspective of what’s the best way to facilitate a certain project or a certain group to get to what they felt were the deliverables. So I was a part of a very large organization that, again, facilitation is not… Everybody has learned on different paths, and we were all coming together as consultants and we all had very different styles, and so we all would have opportunities to learn from each other, and that’s where you would start seeing some epiphanies, some alignments, some changes.

But I found it was more impactful to have someone experience it versus me saying, “You could do it this way or research says.” That wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind about what’s the best way we go about this. Ultimately, I left the regional role to be in a district system because I was wanting to have more ownership over how you could design projects going forward. And I also felt that I could be closer again to the individuals, the teachers, administrators, the students in which I wanted to create a positive impact for. So to your question, how did I finally handle that? In some respects, it led me to take a different path.

Douglas Ferguson:

And oftentimes the frustrations, the frictions are signals that we’re not on the path, we’re in the briars. One thing I wanted to touch back on was something that emerged from me as I was hearing about your experiences of them getting the epiphany at the end. And it made me think about the word patience, the patience that we expect out of our participants and the patience that is required of us to be willing to let our participants be in a state that… They might not be where we want them, but having the patience to know that they’ll get there. I’m curious. I bet you have a lot of experience around this, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that duality.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Oh, yes. So in the work that I’ve done, I always call it, it’s really identity work because a lot of the times I was called in or leading something with practitioners, it was because there was the hope for some type of evolution or growth or shift in practice. And people step into that with values and beliefs on what they think is the best way for someone to learn or to experience something, and that it’s a lot wrapped in their identity. It’s their values, it’s their lived experience. So how far you need to try and nudge that can take time, and it needs to be done, as you said, at a pace that is respectful of the person who’s on a journey to make that transformational shift. So when I would be called in to work with a district system or a group of teachers, many times I was talking with someone higher up in a leadership role and their mindset was, “Well, can you work them with them for two full days? And by the end of that, can they have made this big a shift?” Which was usually a no.

So there was a total underestimating of how much time really people need to sit in something, and to sit in it in a way where there’s a constant little bit of burn that keeps the fire going versus we’re going to do a session and you’re not going to talk about it or think about it for a month and then we’re going to come back together and I’ll expect that probably you’ve made a change. It doesn’t work that way. Where are those continuity lines of, what are you trying? What are you thinking about? How are you continuing to reflect on this? When you’ve tried something out, what has happened? What has that made you think now differently? What are you going to try the next time? It’s all those multiple iterations that need to really be there if you’re really trying to shift people in whatever practice or shift in what you’re hoping to grow them to.

But unfortunately, many times what I have encountered is this idea of a one and done. In education, it’s very hard for teachers to be outside of their classrooms. So there’s a lot of pressure that whatever they’re pulled out to do, it better not be for very much time and great things better come out of it. So that has been my experience in an education-based facilitation for the most part. And that has always been very hard. You have to negotiate usually as if I was a facilitator talking with an administrator asking me to come in and consult, I’d have to manage their expectations and also get clarity of where really realistically we can get.

And so I really had to build that part of my facilitation learning, which is really the pre-facilitation where you’re talking with the potential clients, so to speak, and you’re trying to figure out what they really, really want. Because many times they don’t articulate exactly what they really want. They think they are, but after you have a conversation and you say some things back and pose it differently, it would be very different than what they thought they were saying was the thing that needed to happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

And what’s your go-to strategy or tactic to get the juice there, to get to the reality?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Oh, I usually would try and have one or two pre-conversations before coming in, and I would really be open-ended questions like, “Tell me about what’s going on, what are you hoping for? What do you think are the biggest obstacles? What do you think looks like the ultimate? If we could beat this, what would it look like? What would it sound like?” And so really me talking less, them talking more and continue those open-ended questions. So I’d want to exhaust them with it. There’s a fine line where you can ask too many questions, but it was really getting them to talk out loud about what is it that your thinking is the need here. But also finding out the sticky spots because many times I also wanted to understand things in the contextual system because sometimes that was going to undo anything. So I could come in and work on something, but they would unknowingly be perpetuating something in their routines that was going to not make it work.

Douglas Ferguson:

In addition to these elements that might be detracting from the work, what other things are you listening for in these conversations?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I’m always trying to understand the culture. Any place has a culture and you’re stepping into it. Many times when I was called in to consult and hired in, even outside of the system where I was working, I learned very quickly I was being called in because one, it might be too dangerous for anyone internally to do the work. Two, things were broken and I needed to understand really quickly, what were the dynamics going on in that context? What was the culture? Because how I designed also the learning and how I thought about who also were the individuals who were going to be coming into the room. I needed to understand what they were living in and how safe or dangerous it was for them to even push in certain directions with some of their instructional practices.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to talk a little bit about the transition you made from K-12 into embracing facilitation in more diverse context. And I’m curious if you could share a pivotal moment that signified to you that the transition was not just necessary but possible.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think that I started thinking about this in the last, I’d say three years before I ended my K-12 career. And I had been a part of some community stakeholder meetings, and Eric, your colleague and I had actually led some of these community stakeholder meetings. We were as a district going for a really large bond to totally overhaul almost every single building in the district. And so it was navigating working with community members, it was teachers, it was administrators, it was parents. And seeing that design play out and standing alongside Eric who we had done educational consulting work together, and now he was starting to make that straddling out of not just education but into industry. I think that was the moment that I was like, “Huh, I’ve been doing this in education, but maybe other people value it outside of education.” And that’s when I started getting involved in Voltage Control in workshops in the lab.

And I had great imposter syndrome the first, I’d say two years because I was in awe of the people I was meeting virtually around the globe. And when they would in breakout rooms, be really interested in what I had to say, I was always surprised. I didn’t really think I was going to bring anything that fantastic to the table here. I was an educator and my facilitation was all in that world, but I was finding that people were seeking me out who weren’t educators and who wanted me to be a thinking partner with them. And through those conversations, it was like for me, I felt like I was gaining more than I was giving because I was like, “Oh, I guess I really do know something here and I do think it can translate and I need to explore this.” And so that’s really the road I’m on at this point, is seeing how I pivot what I’ve learned into a non-education based audience.

But also, it never stops. You have to continuously be learning. So I certainly don’t feel like I climbed the mountain. I’m at the top. As AI has come on and ChatGPT, a lot of work is gone to all online. And so doing really impactful facilitation in a digital world, those are all those new stretch points for me. And it’s exciting. It’s exciting to really keep growing.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting you brought up imposter syndrome because I was going to that next, because you had mentioned earlier in the episode about wringing your hands over the talk at the summit, and this came up in your alumni story too. And so I wanted to come back to clearly you experience it like many people, myself included, but you’ve overcome it. And so I’m curious, what strategies or mindsets did you find to be the most effective in overcoming these barriers?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think for me, I’ve been blessed with having some great mentor and shoulder partners who are always confirming, you really do know something that’s valuable. But honestly, I put my hand up to facilitate at the summit because I was like, this is the moment I have to push myself to lead a group that is not an education-based audience. And so that leading up to that session, I was continuously designing, redesigning, designing, redesigning. My internal voice was talking back to me saying, “Susan, what are you doing? You don’t usually need this much time to put a session together. What is going on?” And it was my constant fear of am I not going to know the audience? And that’s where I realized, I really rely heavily on knowing my audience when I designed facilitation and I was really questioning if I knew them well enough.

And so by living through that experience and having people give me positive feedback after, that was the ripping the bandaid off moment for me. Like, “Okay, I’ve done it. I can do this.” And even though I’ve been involved in some other facilitation with Voltage Control, that summit was probably the most pivotal turn for me because I had to on my own stand up and do that work. I on my own designed it. I didn’t have any scaffold crutches in that process. So thank you for allowing me to facilitate the summit and make that big growth leap for myself.

Douglas Ferguson:

Happy to do so. And it’s by design. We pivoted the summit to focus on students and alumni and really provide these opportunities for practice and growth. And I was hopeful it would be transformative. And it sounds like we’re doing a decent job there. So I’m thrilled and we’re happy to have you. And it makes me think of something else I wanted to bring up with you, which is this idea of embracing vulnerability and stepping outside of comfort zones and how crucial that is for growth. And so I’d just be curious to hear how vulnerabilities played a role in your facilitation practice as a core, and especially when dealing with unfamiliar audiences.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

So in my writing project background and in the teaching of writing, I really developed my own ability to be vulnerable with others because writing is really many times brings up vulnerabilities for people. And also in the work that we were doing through our writing project site, those four-week institutes were transformative where you were really working on making some deep shifts for people. And we learn to handle many times deep emotions. So I don’t get afraid anymore when I see some emotions bubble up for people in a session, I can lean into it. And so that background experience really helped me. So it taught me to turn a switch. So when I know that I’m hosting and trying to create that experience for others, I allow myself to be very vulnerable, to be very open because I know I’ll grow in it, but I know it also helps them step into being vulnerable alongside me.

So going into the summit, I made a decision to be pretty vulnerable in that room because I knew I was designing something that could potentially make them feel very vulnerable. So I knew I had to right off the bat, have a voice of connection with them, and this is me, the sincerity, the honesty, me without putting on any facade, and I’m willing to share these struggles I have in the invitation that they may also be bringing up their own. So I have to say it was really a background from the writing project that helped me do that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Isn’t it interesting how some of these moments through our career and our life journey can just stick with us and inform all the future things we do? It’s quite cool. I did want to touch on your doctorate really quickly, and when we were talking about it at the summit, you told me about how the work you were doing was based on going through and cataloging and analyzing your journals throughout your life. I found that really fascinating, and especially in this conversation around vulnerability and how writing can bring up emotions. And there’s a reason people lock their diaries, they don’t want their older brother reading them. And so here you are, this future version of yourself going back and reading these things and going through them in a very methodological way. And so I’m curious, how did that feel peering back at yourself? Did you notice a vulnerableness to that?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Oh yeah. So it was an auto ethnography approach to the research. And so yes, I am a proliferate hoarder of my notebooks. I’m eclectic too. I grab a notebook and sometimes it can have multiple things in it. It’s not just for one purpose or one group. So I had journals from my undergrad college days all the way up to present day. And what I was looking at was the impact of being a teacher leader, but being a leader of for other adults is really at the heart of teacher leadership and how that had impacted my identity evolution across 20 plus years. And I had to suspend, it wasn’t about me coming to what I wanted was the conclusion. I had to see it as data on the paper. And there were errors. I started seeing phases. And so I started creating timelines. And there were times in my life that as I was reliving them in the notebook, I was like, “Can this please be done again?” I was a lot to take back then.

And it was also very vulnerable for me to choose that as my dissertation because I had to use some very personal information and I was talking about me. And a lot of the data excerpts that I put in my dissertation are extremely vulnerable pieces about me struggling in some way with who am I, where am I going, what am I doing? And my committee chair and committee members were even commending me for the courage to do what I did because they chose not to do an auto ethnography themselves. They wanted to keep it distant from them. So I don’t know why that is. As I said, I’ve been an introvert, a really quiet person, but I also feel like these authentic connections are so powerful. And so I, when I feel like I have sincerity with the person, I will be very vulnerable and open up. And so that dissertation definitely was a journey, and there are definitely some errors of my life that I’m glad are done.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting your point you made about you were a lot to take at that point, and it reminded me of the point we were making about patience, and you had to be patient with yourself as you were reliving that. And wow, what a profound thing to experience. Because if you can be patient with yourself, this part of yourself that you don’t appreciate a lot or that you’re like, “I’m glad that I’m not that anymore,” I imagine that can be a great tool for being more patient with others that are maybe not cooperating with whatever we’re trying to do.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Well, I think one of my favorite phrases in the last few years is about giving grace. Giving grace to those who you see that they’re having a struggle. They might not even know that they’re in midst of some conflict, internal conflict, but outwardly it’s coming out. And many times as that’s become a thread in education as well, is like instead of the quick reaction of jumping to conclusions and negative conclusions, how can you give grace more frequently and really step back and try and understand where are they at? What is going on in their lives at this point? And I feel very blessed that I was surrounded by a lot of mentors who gave me a lot of grace in some certain parts of my life professionally.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we’re reaching the end here, and I wanted to end by just peering into the future a little bit. And so you’ve achieved a significant number of milestones in your career and have gone through this transition, are now looking at a diversity of different facilitation environments. So I’m just curious, what new horizons and challenges are you looking forward to exploring?

Susan Wilson-Golab:

I think of Eli Wood. When I had a conversation with Eli, one of our Voltage Control colleagues, and I hadn’t quite made that leap yet. I hadn’t retired from my K-12 to go into full-time consulting. And he said one of his wise mentors that says, “You’ve got to get hungry.” And I have constantly come back to that phrase of like, now’s the time to take the leap and to really to dig in and to make facilitation a full-time part of my life, and for it to be beyond an educational based audience. I think my heart will always be somewhat tied to trying to grow future teacher leaders who in essence, what I am probably growing is them as facilitators. Because a lot of your leading is about facilitating and your peers as a teacher leader. And that was what my dissertation was really around.

But I really want to branch out into just audiences who it’s not about what industry they’re from. You’re creating some transformative experience for them. And to design into multiple kinds of situations, I really am excited. There are days where I’m a little bit, not scared, but it’s not a path I know. So I’m learning tremendously every day. How do you make this happen? This isn’t a K-12 or higher ed education endeavor now. This is like edupreneur, like an entrepreneurial educator who’s branching out, and it’s exciting and it’s daunting at the same time. But I’ve made it to this point, it’s time to take that plunge and persevere and make it happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s exciting. Well, I hope that maybe some listeners out there are on the same precipice, and maybe this gives them a little bit of confidence and encourage listeners to check out Susan’s good work, and maybe she can inspire you to make that leap that you need to make. And Susan, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and hope to talk to you again soon.

Susan Wilson-Golab:

Thanks Douglas.

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 Facilitation Transform Professional Learning in Education? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Delight is actually a combination of multiple emotions; it is joy coupled with surprise. So, I’ve really been thinking about how I can bring in more of that delight with very small tweaks to our everyday rituals at my company.”- JJ Rogers

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson speaks with JJ Rogers, Director of Product Design at Watermark and a facilitation expert. They discuss JJ’s facilitation journey, from his early career to his current role, emphasizing the importance of engaging activities and setting clear expectations. JJ shares his strategies for combating disengagement, particularly in virtual meetings, by creating novel experiences and incorporating user feedback. They also touch on the scaled agile framework and the significance of preparation in facilitation. The episode concludes with JJ’s focus on bringing joy into everyday meetings and his successful mentorship program at UXPA.

Show Highlights

[00:01:31] JJ’s Introduction to Facilitation
[00:08:01] JJ shares notable experiences and lessons learned from conducting workshops, including the importance of setting expectations.
[00:16:27] JJ reflects on his journey from following a formula to customizing activities and tailoring content to individuals.
[00:21:06] Discussing the challenges of getting upper management to adopt facilitation techniques and the impact of leading activities in broader team settings.
[00:27:26] The significance of marking team transitions and celebrating achievements to maintain team cohesion and culture.
[00:33:07] The importance of pre-planning and preparation in facilitation to ensure effective outcomes in collaborative activities.
[00:38:53] Exploring the concept of delight in user experience and the vision of incorporating delight into everyday rituals through small tweaks.

Links | Resources

JJ on Linkedin
JJ on X
JJ on Voltage Control

About the Guest

JJ is the Head of Product Design at Watermark and leads a team of 8 product designers focused on building engaging, delightful & accessible product experiences for higher ed. His background includes teaching User Experience Design at General Assembly and designing digital experiences for ICANN, Stanford University, and Dotdash Meredith. He received his BA in Design from the University of Northern Iowa.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

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. If you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with JJ Rogers. JJ is the Director of Product Design at Watermark, where he is all about elevating the user experience in higher ed. Recently, he led the charge on a mentorship program at UXPA in Austin, connecting early career designers with seasoned pros. And he’s also a founding member of our Facilitation Lab. Welcome to the show, JJ.

JJ Rogers:

Hello, Douglas. Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. Per usual, let’s get our start hearing a little bit about how you got your start. How did you get introduced to facilitation, start getting curious about this work and diving into the art of facilitation?

JJ Rogers:

Good question. I think I became interested in facilitation through, well, naturally being in design, in product design. There is a level of facilitation I think that’s needed to present and share your work and get feedback on your work from various stakeholders. My first job out of college was at a software company, very kind of old school software company called Meta, pre-Facebook’s Meta. It was actually Meta, it had a longer name, Meta Communications, et cetera, but we all called it Meta. I worked with a bunch of Russian engineers in Iowa City, Iowa. Lots of black tea, dark chocolate, and scotch. Scotch was used for both celebration and if the engineers were really pissed off.

It was my first design job, I would say, I didn’t think I was doing much facilitation. I was simply just kind of a heads down in my cubicle, creating designs, creating interaction designs. I did a little more marketing design at that time and sort of transitioned into software, prototyping software, wireframing the interfaces, and I think I failed a lot. I think I wasn’t able to get a lot of my ideas across that I wanted to. I wasn’t maybe managing stakeholders properly. I was very reactive in how I was sharing my work, and I worked there for a couple years. I learned a lot, but I definitely knew I wanted to…

At that time, I think UX as a term was starting to emerge, or maybe it was becoming more popular. I was really looking for careers or job titles that were really not just thinking of design as an afterthought, but really were fully focused on building a better user experience for the customers. And I was looking for a job outside of Iowa, so I came across an agency called Four Kitchens in Austin, Texas. I was really excited because, I don’t know why, but I think maybe in college you hear about agencies or consultancies and you’re like, “That is where I want to work.” They get all the good business. There’s definitely a variety of projects to work on, so you don’t really have to be honed into a particular domain or project for long periods of time.

I was really excited about that, and that is probably where I was really introduced to facilitation as I know it today. The leader of the company of Four Kitchens, Todd Nienkirk was very adamant about having all of our project kickoffs on site. While we were mostly a remote company where we did the work out of Austin, Texas, and we had clients all over the US, we would always have an on-site kickoff. I remember attending a couple of those, just kind of as in a very passive role and being very excited about the activities that we did, how we got to know the different clients and understand their pain points. He was a really big Gamestorming lover. Gamestorming was our Bible. I remember him walking around the office and if he couldn’t find the Gamestorming book, he was freaking out, “Where’s that book?” And then he ordered multiple copies because people kept stealing it.

That kind of kicked off, piqued my interest, and then after a while at the company, I started to lead activities. They needed more people to go in and do these project kickoffs with clients. I think the first activity that I did was a pre-mortem for a university out of California, Monterey Bay, which is a beautiful area of California. I remember I went up to the whiteboard and I started drawing this graveyard and trying to make it look really cool and started leading this group of strangers through an activity of, imagine if this project failed, why did it fail, what killed it? Here lies the name of the project. It was really fun. It was very interactive and it was definitely, I think, a turning point to how I saw how I could really influence a group of stakeholders to get to whatever outcome I was trying to achieve.

So that was really fun. From there, I sort of slowly grew my arsenal of mostly design thinking activities, personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and that sort of became my wheelhouse, my job as I grew as a designer at this agency. I worked there for four years. Really, really great partnerships. For me, I think it was a wonderful learning experience because of exactly what I said of why I wanted to go to an agency or consultancy, is you just got to work across such a variety of different clients and projects and we’re able to try new things and experiment quite often. Contrast today in-house where we’re really trying to set up processes that can be repeatable over and over and over. A little different there. That’s how I got my interest.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow, really cool. I love the story of the boss looking around for Gamestorming constantly and copies disappearing and more appearing. And certainly the pre-mortem’s a fantastic activity. What a fun way to start. Are there any other workshops in those days that come to mind that are notable for whatever reason?

JJ Rogers:

Yeah. Notable? Let’s see. Gosh, there was one time we had a client come in who they had to come in on a weekend because they couldn’t come during the week or whatever. Everyone had to come in on the weekend and do this workshop. It was a little bit of a curmudgeon. I remember from the opener we did two truths and a lie, not having it. Not having at all. It was very clear from the beginning, like, “I did not fly here from wherever to do this, to spend time getting to know you on this personal level and having fun. Let’s get down to business.” That was kind of a scary moment, but an excellent learning experience around setting expectations and what we’re going to do and why we’re going to do this activity and how important it’s to build trust at the beginning of a project so that as we’re working together and problems are going to arise, that we have a little bit of that kind of psychological safety already established and know each other as humans.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so critical, setting expectations ahead of time. How do you think that moment shaped your thoughts on setting expectations?

JJ Rogers:

Well, good question. I think for me, it’s made me more mindful about explaining what we’re going to do, not just what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, but why we’re going to do it. Just making sure I’m inserting that why. Maybe not even ahead of time in an agenda or anything, but during that intro explanation to any sort of activity of just giving a little snippet on the why. Maybe not giving everything away, because sometimes you do want to reflect on the learning afterwards, and then you don’t always know what the outcome’s going to be.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s so critical. Often we’ve talked about, if you can’t ask the group why we just did that after doing anything with a group and it not erupted into a really pithy conversation, then we should be asking ourselves as facilitators, why did we just do that?

JJ Rogers:

Yeah. There were definitely lessons like that. I think at the consultancy it was just a lot of practice and repetition, draw your homepage, co-designing, those sort of activities, which really led me into… So after Four Kitchens, I went into teaching. I taught at General Assembly and was teaching the user experience design immersive, which is a ten-week bootcamp, really re-skilling adult learners going from a former career in anything or sometimes coming fresh out of a degree, like a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, not being able to find a job, so taking a bootcamp to transition into tech. We’re teaching adults, and I think that having that background and facilitation helped me be more successful. One, I had to teach these activities. I had to teach design thinking, but there’s definitely parallels between teaching a classroom, which may seem like more traditional kind of format.

With General Assembly, we really tried to be very… Well, it was very immersive, within the name. It was smaller classes. Maybe our classes ranged from 12 to 18, maybe sometimes we had 20. They’ve probably grown. But with teaching adults, you had to learn how to add some checks for understanding, if you’re teaching a concept in there. So making sure that you are including the class for some sort of feedback that you can incorporate into maybe rephrasing something or realizing you have to re-explain something or teach it again. I think the one thing it really taught me was the art of repeating myself or just repetition. Repetition with instruction, changing how you do it, and not taking that personally. When you have a classroom full of people, a certain percentage just aren’t going to get it the first time you explain it, so making sure you’re building on that until everyone has a better understanding.

Douglas Ferguson:

And when we think about cross-functional teams too, that need to collaborate and work together, not everyone’s always in the same meetings. So repetitions is a critical leadership skill that people don’t talk about enough.

JJ Rogers:

Or I run across people who get frustrated because they’re like, “Well, I thought we shared this out. I thought we explained this.” It takes a while, especially I think with Zoom these days. There’s a large percentage of folks are distracted constantly, so it’s really even less than that. In the classroom at least we could really control for that variable because we were all in one room and it was great. We could do a lot of in-person sticky notes on the wall. Gosh, I don’t really use sticky notes anymore.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. What are you using instead of sticky notes nowadays?

JJ Rogers:

We’re using Mural, so I guess the virtual version of sticky notes we’re definitely using. I’m using sticky notes for maybe what their original intention was, just to write little notes to myself and stick them on my desk.

It was really great. I loved it. That was a great time in my career. It was also located within WeWork, downtown Austin, and the environment, the bustling energy of WeWork at that time, I don’t know why I look at it now and think of that as like, oh, those were the good old days. There were so many startups and you would meet people. Every day you’re meeting new people just bumping into them having coffee. I was able to get a number of freelance jobs out of it. A lot of people were really interested in UX design, and it was a really good environment for learning and collaborating.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well. How did this transition from being in a consultancy to then now teaching, how did transition impact your perspective on facilitation?

JJ Rogers:

Well, I think even at my consultancy, I don’t know if I use the word, I don’t know if we use the word facilitation even that often. It was kind of more around leading this activity, doing this kickoff. We thought about it more project based, even though that is what we were doing. When I transitioned into teaching, I think the biggest difference is that I knew I was leading and I was being very intentional about whatever I was trying to teach or whatever activity we were trying to complete. Even if we weren’t teaching something, but we were doing an activity to craft the classroom values, and we needed to get input with everybody and maybe break up into small groups and then come together, I think I was just much more intentional about designing activities for the classroom. Whereas with the consultancy, in my mind back then, and maybe it was my maturity with facilitation, I was kind of just, oh, I’m just going to follow this playbook that’s already kind of pre-written, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm.

JJ Rogers:

We have these design thinking activities. We’ve done this sort of ceremony before. We’re going to start with an opener, this icebreaker, so I’m just going to do it. I wasn’t as maybe creative about tailoring the content to the individuals. There definitely were people that I worked with that were doing that, but I think I was early in my stage where I really just kind of wanted to follow a formula.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that is a pattern that we see with a lot of folks when they start out, the formulas, the patterns, the structures are really valuable. Then over time, as people get more comfortable, they tend to customize more. They tend to lean into the emergence or adapt to whatever’s happening in the space a little more fluidly. I’m curious, it seems like you’re kind of echoing that journey, that arc that I’ve seen before. Is that resonating to you?

JJ Rogers:

Yeah, that definitely is. I think I’m at a place now at Watermark where that is what I’m seeing is… Well, and I would contrast being in-house too, to being a consultancy where you have a lot of variety of clients. And there’s other variables that you have to account for because they’re new stakeholders that you’ve never met before, new clients, their projects might be very different. The content shifts a lot, whereas being in-house, it can get more mundane. I want to intentionally try new things and change this, even if I can just tweak it slightly. You kind of need that variability to hold people’s attention. Otherwise, we’re just going through the motions and we’re doing this same sailboat retrospective again.

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s your go-to approach to mixing it up so you’re not just going to the same metaphors or same activities over and over again?

JJ Rogers:

I guess my approach would be just to make it different. Like I said, I think the biggest hurdle is kind of playing with novelty and variety, so no one gets bored with the same thing. When we have rituals, I think it’s important to have rituals to create some structure, but I don’t know. I mean, definitely playing around with whatever’s topical. Whatever’s going on, either, I don’t know, with the company at the time, or maybe there’s some sort of seasonal thing, making it celebratory towards something like Global Accessibility Awareness Day is something we’re going to celebrate this week, so how can I incorporate that into the all hands this week or bring in some sort of game that also is a learning activity for the team to learn a little bit about accessibility? This actually came from General Assembly where we’d play a version of Jeopardy Bingo, a game, a learning game. Bringing that over to my team to learn a little bit about accessibility was one way that I brought that over. That was fun.

I would say, yeah, some ways to break it up. Okay, so now I’m thinking. One way is spreading the responsibility around. Even though I am in charge of this team, I don’t have to be the person to lead every single activity. In fact, I don’t want that to be the case. I want to make sure that I’m upskilling my team in their facilitation skills as well. While I may lead an opener, icebreaker type activity initially, now my team does that and we take turns and everyone gets to practice that opener. Same with critique sessions. That’s led by the person that needs critique, or we have a learning forum. This week we have a representative from our design system who’s going to run that forum. Finding ways where, one, it’s not all on my shoulders, but also that does provide more variety for the team. Then they have an opportunity to learn and hear from someone else and watch someone else practice.

Douglas Ferguson:

That practice is so key. You even mentioned earlier that the consultancy gave you lots of opportunities to practice, and I love that as a leader, you’re passing the marker, or at least the spotlight on others so that they can have a moment to either pick the warmup, run the up, or even just schedule in a spot that’s variable from time to time. I think that shows a facilitative style to leadership, not necessarily having to be the one to facilitate, but encouraging others to adopt the skills. Then that has a way of proliferating through the organization more largely.

JJ Rogers:

Yeah, that’s a good point. Speaking of through the organization more largely too, that’s something that with my role, sure, I can practice these facilitation techniques with my team, but how do I then get my boss to want to maybe make a meeting better? And so some ways that I practice that would be if I have an opportunity, for example, we have an all hands, which includes everybody on our product team, product management, scrum, masters, multiple roles, and I might volunteer and say, “Okay, I’m going to lead the opener of this,” or, “this activity, I’d really like to do breakout rooms.” I’ll go ahead and lead that portion of it because my manager isn’t as comfortable with those sort of skills. Anything that I can do to, one, practice those skills on a broader team that maybe I’m not directly leading, but also I think I have seen then a natural appetite start to arise for more collaborative sessions that aren’t just the status quo of what it’s always been.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s interesting how infectious this stuff can be when folks attend sessions that are more inclusive, that are more fun, frankly, but also get better outcomes where we’re not left with more questions than we started with. Everyone appreciates it, and so it has a virality to it.

JJ Rogers:

Yeah, definitely. I think there’s something too I think I mentioned earlier about Zoom, like people on Zoom being distracted. I read a quote, I don’t know, I think it’s by Adam Grant, and maybe you’ve read it too, about Zoom fatigue, and it’s not really fatigue, it’s actually boredom. Or it’s not burnout, it’s bore out. When meetings are virtual, it’s not that we’re overwhelmed, we’re understimulated, which leads us to actually do something else, look at my phone, or I’m in a multitask on Slack, and it’s because of this boredom with what’s going on right now. That only emphasizes the point of really trying to create these novel, fun engagements to combat that. You’re constantly trying to combat that.

Douglas Ferguson:

The other key is that we have to ensure people are connected to it because it’s easy to come in and try and dazzle people with something a bit different and novel, but if they struggle connecting to it, and it comes back to your point around the expectations too, the why, but also why is it important to them? How do they connect to it in a meaningful way? If they’re not, that’s another source of disengagement.

JJ Rogers:

Yeah, that is true. The novelty doesn’t last.

Douglas Ferguson:

What are some things that you found useful in your work, whether it’s connecting to the values or something that the team finds really motivating? In fact, you mentioned already educating folks on not only bringing a theme in, but educating them on the importance of it or educating them on how it works. Has that been really effective or are there other things that you lean in on to get people really engaged and connected to the concepts?

JJ Rogers:

I think for user experience design, one of the themes that I think is kind of the most effective that I’ve seen time and time again is when they can be connected to an individual or they can be connected to somebody that they’ve talked to that is actually using their product. I think whenever we get direct feedback from a client that is very specific around a certain feature or an area of a product that we had a designer or product team member work on, that positive feedback is just so rewarding. It’s so rewarding because we can tell them they did a great job all day every day, but when you actually hear it from an end user, it’s very rewarding. That isn’t something that we’re always able to solicit even. We can try and solicit it, but we’re doing research to kind of learn, not necessarily just tell us what we did.

I would say just keeping that customer’s story, keeping the user’s journey top of mind, I think is a natural motivator. This leads me to another thing too, related to just celebrating. Making sure that we are taking time to celebrate these moments when they happened, otherwise we’re just moving on to the next thing. We’re not taking the time to stop and think. Related to celebrating, you know the stages of teams, like forming, norming, storming?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hm.

JJ Rogers:

I don’t even know them all. Anyway, the last one is adjourning, and I’ve never focused on the last stages of team, like adjourning? That’s a thing? Well, I had a team transition. We were moving a teammate from one to another, and I don’t know, I just had this idea of like, “Well, why can’t that be a ritual? The adjourning. I mean, this person isn’t leaving the company. They’re literally just going to be doing different work.” But we created a ritual, a ceremony, an adjournment ceremony, and we really celebrated this person’s accomplishments and really the team’s accomplishments with this person because they’re all contributing towards the same goal, marking that moment of time of this team is really no longer going to be the same. With every person that leaves, the culture changes a little bit. With every new person you add, the culture changes a little bit. We just wanted to mark that in time.

It’s a really fun team. They have their team mascot and their team song, and they’re really into donuts, so we ordered everyone donuts and we had a donut toast. I found it really rewarding. I got really good feedback from the team too, just really, really grateful that we were able to take the time to celebrate and mark this moment. Also, I think Priya Parker says this too, “Those moments of transition are very important for anyone who’s going through them, so you need to make sure you’re taking time to mark those.”

Douglas Ferguson:

The transitions can be just as important as the destination and your starting point.

JJ Rogers:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I wanted to just echo back something you were talking about with the end user being that focal point and those stories that come from the user. Sometimes those stories can be positive and we can celebrate the things that we accomplished and the good work we did for the end user. Also, it seems that as a group that’s focused on improving user experience and adding new user experiences that help them address their needs, these user stories around needs and what they’re going to and bubbling up that voice of customer and putting them at the center of our engagements, by nature is going to be a strong source of commitment and connection because that’s the entire bedrock of what drew people into the profession to begin with.

If we’re here talking about a new feature or talking about analysis or doing some critique and that voice is left, that’s a real opportunity to bring in a unifying force, something that everyone values. Even for folks that aren’t in user experience, there’s probably an analog for their team. What’s the values that they share that drew them to the role, drew them to this work in the first place, and how can we bring that into our meetings to center ourselves?

JJ Rogers:

Yes, to create that kind of connection with the content. Yeah, and really use that in your why, I guess. Well, I’m really interested. I know Teresa Torres is coming to speak, and her book has been out for a few years now, but she does have a number of different activities to help bring the customer voice or keep it alive, keep it memorable to the team. Anyway, I’m excited that you guys have her on Facilitation Lab.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. A big fan of her work. If you have questions that you’re wanting me to ask her during the fireside chat, please pass them along.

JJ Rogers:

Okay, sure. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I wanted to talk about SAFe as a software startup or as a software company. You practice agile through the scaled agile framework, and one of the rituals with SAFe is PI planning. I know that comes up a lot with folks that are practicing SAFe as a moment where Mural, Miro, these digital tools show up as really important because it’s very facilitated. It’s a cross-functional dialogue where we’re exploring these things together. I’m curious how that shows up in your work, how you facilitate it. Are there any tips for folks that are starting this for the first time or even veterans of PI planning that might help them facilitate it better?

JJ Rogers:

Yes, we definitely use sticky notes to come up with the work, track dependencies. The ceremony is a really big deal. With Watermark specifically, we have a number of different products, and one of our goals is making sure that these products are working well together, like they’re integrated, they’re using a consistent design language. The dependencies that come up can be quite a few. It’s really great for tracking when you have a lot of interdependent teams. I think another great aspect about it is assigning the business value, so you’re really looking at… You’re writing these higher level objectives for what you plan to accomplish over this next quarter. I think that is really fantastic because that kind of forces higher level leaders to think about the objectives from a value perspective, like what is the end user expecting to get out of this? What is in it for the client?

So it’s not just we’re going to build this feature, it’s really how are we trying to change their work life or improve their lives somehow? But yeah, your question around process and facilitating SAFe, from the design side of it, we do a lot of the preparation work to get ready for this big ceremony. So making sure our engineering teams have groomed a number of the features that we’re going to build ahead of time. We’re definitely working earlier to ensure that the teams can have a successful, safe planning ceremony.

Douglas Ferguson:

That makes sense. I think it’s an important aspect of facilitation is that pre-planning and preparation, making sure that we’re well-crafted in our approach so that when we do get together, things are as effective as possible.

JJ Rogers:

It’s been really valuable in terms of having a kind of quarterly deadline to shoot towards. I think SAFe, they throw out some number. They want, I think, it’s like 75% of the work that’s going to go into that PI to be quote unquote solid, like somewhat figured out. I don’t know where they got this number from. It does give us something to shoot for because we want to make sure that we have done our job on the design team to have we prototyped a number of items, have we tested these? Certainly the stuff that’s going to go in earlier in the iterations, I should say, because they don’t use the word sprint, are going to be mostly baked, mostly crafted and ready to go. The things later on, those are the things that are going to be a little squishy still that we have time to work through. It really helps us sort of evaluate our design backlog and making sure we’re working just enough ahead, not too far ahead, and also not too close to the actual development timeline.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’ve always found design orgs… That’s a big question typically, is how far ahead should we be operating? It sounds like that process is helping you dial in that cadence.

JJ Rogers:

Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely been fantastic and really, I think, forces the company to get organized because we’re going to have this ceremony.

Douglas Ferguson:

Before we wrap up, I’m really curious to hear a little bit more about the mentor program and how that came about and the good work you’ve been doing there.

JJ Rogers:

Sure. I was Director of Mentorship and Career Development at UXPA, so that’s the User Experience Professionals Association, the Austin chapter, for a few years there. One of my goals was to create, and this is related, having come off of teaching general assembly, there’s a number of junior designers looking for roles and not that many roles, so we wanted to set up kind of another pathway or avenue for them to just learn about the industry and hopefully make more contacts, help them get jobs. It wasn’t designed only for junior designers. We definitely mentored anybody no matter where they were on their career journey, and tried to find somebody a little more senior so that they could get some advice, but by and large, it was heavily skewed towards that junior population. We created a mentor matching service, just put out the word on LinkedIn targeting specific, I would say, design influencers in the community.

I think we had 60, close to 70 mentors sign up that first round.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, wow.

JJ Rogers:

It was pretty high because we really hadn’t had anything like that formalized in Austin before. This is even before ADP List, which is a national mentorship program. This was before that was developed. So there was definitely an appetite for it. Then we had a ton of mentees sign up too. Some of our mentors mentored multiple designers. We just did kind of a manual matching spreadsheet. Everything was very manual, but we tried to target specific, if they had similar career goals, if they… Because it was actually in person, we even matched them depending on where they lived in Austin, if they lived north of the river, south of the river, east, whatever their kind of preferences were to meet. Anyway, there was a lot of thought that went into it that created a lot of work for our team actually doing the matching.

And then we just connected them via email. We didn’t have a whole lot of check-ins initially. It was just kind of, here’s maybe some advice on how you can be a good mentor, just to see how it went, see how it experimented. The pandemic happened during it, so we really had to transition a little bit. I mean, not a lot because everyone was just easily transitioned to Zoom it seemed like. But going forward, we were able to grow the program. We tried not to grow it too much beyond Austin because we were still the Austin chapter, but we could include some more rural communities outside of Austin since everyone was meeting remotely. It was really rewarding. I think it was something that the community definitely… We identified a need. We hit on something and tried to fill that gap.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. Super cool. Is the program still going?

JJ Rogers:

The program is still going. I’m no longer the director, but yeah, UXPA is doing mentorship, so if anyone is interested, we’ll just look up UXPA Austin and we’ll see when they run it. It is something that they do run, there’s a start date and an end date. It’s not ongoing, forever. We do a kickoff. I think we say you’re going to meet with your mentor at a minimum once a month during the program. Then at the end of the program we do something where we all come together and talk a little bit about what we learned and try and improve the program. It was really great.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. We are running out of time here, so I wanted to end by giving you an to reflect a bit on where you think things are going. How do you plan to lean into facilitation in the next year or two or five, whatever vision you have as far as how facilitation might adapt in your role in your work?

JJ Rogers:

Well, I recently read a definition for… So in design we often use the phrase, we’re trying to delight the user. We want to add delight, want it to be a delightful experience. Well, what does that mean? Delight is actually a combination of multiple emotions. It is joy coupled with surprise. It’s not just standard joy, it’s something kind of surprises. You weren’t expecting something, and that really delights the person. I’ve really been thinking about how I can bring in, I think this goes back to what we were talking about, variety and novelty, but how we can bring in more of that delight with very, very small tweaks to our everyday rituals at my company.

In doing so, I think it’s more attainable for, we were talking about bringing in other members of the team to facilitate. It’s an easier ask to just kind of tweak something slightly than to completely redo and redesign a regular ritual or meeting that you have. Really encouraging the team to just tweak something small, and in myself too, that’ll add delight so that no two sessions are the same. No two days are the same. Why should the sessions be exactly the same? Mark those fleeting moments of time with something a little unique.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this, and I think what a perfect way to end the show. Maybe everyone can take up this challenge, to dial up the delight. I would have to say it’s been delightful chatting with you today, JJ, and look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

JJ Rogers:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s been a pleasure. Yes, anytime.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

The post The Impact of Delightful Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I am a poor participant when I am poorly led, but when I’m well led through a process, I’m really willing to play along.”- Rebecca Sutherns

In this podcast episode of the Facilitation Lab, host Douglas Ferguson talks with Dr. Rebecca Sutherns about her journey in facilitation and the nuances of group work. Dr. Sutherns, with 27 years of experience and authorship of three books, including “Elastic Stretch Without Snapping or Snapping Back,” shares her early discomfort with group work and how it influenced her interest in facilitation. She discusses the importance of well-structured and skillfully facilitated group processes and the potential of collaborative activities. The conversation touches on the challenges of group dynamics at various stages of life and the benefits of providing structure to group interactions to enhance efficiency and reduce awkwardness.

Show Highlights

[00:04:00] The importance of well-structured group work
[00:09:30] Creating containers for creativity
[00:15:40] Navigating through challenging group decisions
[00:16:39] Embracing the messiness of the process
[00:22:41] Value of Silence
[00:35:00] Authenticity in Facilitation
[00:43:25] Facilitators’ role in creating safe spaces

Links | Resources

Rebecca on Linkedin
Rebecca on Twitter
Rebecca on YouTube
Rebecca on Instagram

About the Guest

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns is an insightful and high energy collaborative strategist and world class facilitator who has served as a trusted advisor to hundreds of mission-driven organizations, across Canada and internationally. Rebecca brings intellect, enthusiasm and varied experience in strategy development and adaptability when speaking, writing and mentoring. She is a skilled communicator, with a particular gift for helping leaders make wiser decisions faster. Rebecca is a Certified Professional Facilitator and is the Regional Director for North America on the Board of Directors of the International Association of Facilitators. She is a frequent keynote speaker and author of the books Nimble: Off Script but Still On Track. A coaching guide for responsive facilitation, Sightline: Strategic plans that gather momentum not dust, and ELASTIC: Stretch without snapping or snapping back. Learn more at rebeccasutherns.com.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

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. If you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today, I’m with Dr. Rebecca Sutherns from Sage Solutions. Rebecca has been facilitating for twenty-seven years and is the author of three books. Most recently, she published Elastic: Stretch Without Snapping or Snapping Back. Welcome to the show, Rebecca.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. I’ve been looking forward to chatting. In fact, we got to chat just yesterday because we’re planning a little workshop for the Never Done Before Festival.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Which we have never done before, fittingly. I am looking forward to that too. It’ll be fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. As I always do in the podcast, I would love to hear a little bit about how you got your start. You’ve been facilitating for quite a while. What was that first moment when you remember just getting turned on to this idea of facilitation? Even if you didn’t have the word for it. Sometimes people go all the way back to kindergarten. What was it for you? What was that moment?

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

It makes me think of almost three different things, and I’ll be super quick with three, but one of them is when I was younger in that I was often the person in school, say, that didn’t, ironically, that really didn’t like group work because I really found it inefficient. I didn’t want to, I don’t know, hug the microphone in a sense, but I was often the one that was moving quicker than some other people in terms of my ability to either grasp concepts or wanting to, I don’t know, whatever the nicer term for being bossy was. That was probably me that I got on my report cards all the time. I was a bit awkward when it came to group work because it didn’t really suit me very well at that time, probably still doesn’t. I wonder if part of my interest in this was that I really didn’t like being in the equivalent. Whatever the elementary school equivalent of bad meetings is, that was my school experience.

Then later, in my early part of my career, I was involved with in international development, and so had an opportunity to do a lot of facilitating and hosting of various kinds of events. Was asked, again, as you said, didn’t have the words for it, but was asked to do some internal team leadership and facilitate some processes inside the organization that were outside of my normal job description because somebody there had seen skill in me in that way, and I hadn’t really thought of that being a separate skill set.

Then fast-forward later to when I started my consulting business and was taking on whatever work I could get, anybody that phoned me. If it sounded interesting and I could find childcare, I would take it. But then when I looked in retrospect at those early years of that and went, what is it that I love about the parts of this that I really loved and what is it that people are calling me for specifically, it was my own clients saying, “Hey, this seems to be a bit of a superpower of yours.”

I think over the course of multiple chapters of my life, this particular skill set of managing group process and helping a group of people structure their conversation to get to a set of objectives has become something that others have identified in me.

Douglas Ferguson:

That point around the early days of not loving the group work, I can totally relate to that. I hadn’t really thought about it in that term or from that perspective, but it reminds me of how Liberating Structures talks about how ineffective open discussion, or even, to use their term, the goat rodeo can be.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

It’s true. Especially, I mean, give it to a group of kids or teenagers and we don’t know what to do. You’re playing with all of your, just like adults are, you’re negotiating your social world too at the same time. You’re paying attention to, I don’t know, reputation management, impression management. You care a lot what other people think of you. You’re behaving weirdly anyway trying to manage all of that, and then trying to get this task done under time deadlines or whatever it might be at a stage where I cared about the marks I was getting and was trying to figure out if we were all getting the same mark or if I was going to end up doing all the work. Having now parented four of my own kids through that same journey and they have that same affliction I had, it’s really hard to do a good job in groups.

I thought of myself for a long time as a really bad participant. The irony of that expertise is not lost on me. But I realized lately that I am a poor participant when I am poorly led, but when I’m well led through a process, I’m really willing to play along. For me, that really has to do with being skillfully facilitated and being given activities to do that make sense and that matter and are purposeful and sequenced well and paced well and all that stuff. If that’s my experience, I am all about it and quite okay with group work, and in fact, am now a huge proponent of collaborative activity even in areas where we think it might be more traditionally a solo activity.

For example, when I was writing Elastic that you mentioned a few minutes ago, I write in there about imagination and I write about curiosity, and those are typically things we think of as happening in individual people’s heads. My suggestion is that they’re even more powerful when we do them collectively. I’m a fan of group work now, but only group work that is well-structured and facilitated, which I guess is also an occupational hazard.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, it’s so fascinating to think about how often the group work in elementary school, high school, even college, it’s like, oh, here’s your group, but there’s never any rules of engagement. No one’s been taught how to lead the groups, and there’s no roles being assigned. Just think about how much it could influence the way that folks collaborate and work together if we just started assigning some of these roles and best practices, if you will. I’m loathed to even say best practices, but at least distilling some essence of how to do better collaborative group work versus just saying, “Okay, here’s five people, go work on this project.”

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Exactly. I notice it even now when, I don’t know, perhaps put people in breakout rooms in a Zoom meeting, I’m trying to get in the habit of giving them a little bit of structure that will just speed things up and take out some of the awkwardness. It could be something as basic as, “Each of you in your group of three is going to share blah, blah, blah. Start with the person whose first name is closest to the alphabet,” or some little thing that helps us avoid that awkwardness at the beginning going, “So, do you want to start? Do you want to start?” It’s no different than middle school. We’re still the same awkward social creatures that we are when we’re younger. I think if the person structuring the experience can provide just a bit of guidance, it just makes it less awkward for everybody, in addition to being more efficient.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we’re perhaps more awkward now because now we’ve got these weird rules layered on top that’s like, oh, now who has certain power and who has this rank and where are the people? You had to go through this whole protocol to even understand it, and it’s not explicit. Folks are trying to feel those things out. To your point, if you just say, “Who most recently ate green vegetables,” that’s much easier to figure out.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Absolutely. Those unwritten rules exist in school and they exist as adults. Peer pressure is not limited to when we’re 13. I think just being given some edges, and I think of it as creating containers for people. If we know that our creativity is enhanced when we have limitations on it and parameters and edges to it. I love the story of how kids in a playground will, if they’re in a big playground with no fences, they will play really close to the school when they’re let out outside. But if you give them a fenced area to play in, they will play all through that whole area because they understand where the limitations are and they feel safer there.

I think I see that in adult interactive activities as well, where if we know the edges of the assignment or the roles are clear, we are much more likely to be exploratory and experimental and probably more creative and interesting and take few more risks than we would. Because we really play it safe when there’s not clarity, we get a bit more cautious. If we want people to be a bit more edgy, we need to give edges to them.

Douglas Ferguson:

I always find that there’s a lot of interesting things to learn at the edges. When you go to those edges, why do those edges exist? Who created this edge? Is this a physical phenomenon or is it manmade? Because there’s so much to learn there.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

That’s such an interesting, I don’t know if it’s a tension, but it’s something that I’m learning into in facilitation where I’m doing people a favor by providing a container, but I also am really, most of the time, open to them testing the edges of that container and trying to expand it and question it and say, “Actually, I don’t want to be in this container. I don’t want to be in any container.”

I want people, on the one hand, conceptually or philosophically I say I want that. Yet as a facilitator, I know there are times when I want to exert too much control over the nature of the conversation that I want to have, partly because I see how it fits into the structure of an overall experience that I’m trying to create. That not being too much of a control freak in it, but also wanting to provide the structure that I’m being asked to provide is always a challenge.

One of the earlier books I wrote is called Nimble, and it’s really about if you tend to be someone who likes to highly orchestrate things and develop really detailed agendas and do all your research ahead of time, you probably need to hold that script loosely and loosen your grip on your plan because chances are you’ve really over planned and you’ve grown to love your design so much that nobody else in the room feels like it’s theirs or that they have any opportunity to influence it.

But it’s also true on the other side. If you’ve got a really improvisational, spontaneous personality, you may need to provide more of a roadmap or an agenda to your client, or whatever it might be, than you feel that you need. Because if you ask people of the opposite preference, if they are loving your style of your improvisation or your heavy detailed planning, if they’re not somebody like that, they’re hating it actually. Your happy place is not everybody’s happy place. I feel like that creating those edges, but also making them a bit stretchy is a really magical sweet spot for really skilled facilitators.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s also important to think about the participants, not just the sponsor. You mentioned the agenda and the design, and do they feel they’re getting enough structure or explanation around the plan. Sometimes it’s literally just understanding that no matter what we’re doing, there may be folks in the room that maybe don’t enjoy the decisive part of the session because they really love the more exploratory parts of the session. That’s fine. It doesn’t make them a bad person, it doesn’t make you a bad facilitator, but coming to the realization that that’s okay being comfortable with it, I think that’s a part of maturing as a facilitator. I see a lot of new facilitators really struggle with that.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

I noticed that too. I think that if I can do the quick eye test vertically down my agenda, if I have, say, I have a one-day workshop or something and I’m looking at the plan that I’ve written out, even if I’ve written it out literally on the back of an envelope or something, if there’s no variety in it, not only does it seem like it’ll be boring, but it also risks losing a big chunk of the room for too much of the time.

I do find myself saying out loud to people, and I did, in fact, just a couple of days ago in talking to people in a session I was running, I said, “Look, we’re going to do four different activities here. There’s a good possibility there’s going to be one of them you’re not going to love, and probably the other three will be fine. It’ll be a mix as to which one is the favorite or least favorite in the room, but hang in there long enough to understand that not every part of this next experience is going to be amazing for all of us. But that by providing some amount of diversity in that experience, I’m hoping I will hit everybody at some point with something they really love.”

That’s a trade-off. I feel like facilitators are always making trade-offs in their head and guessing if they’re making it in ways that your participants would make in your place.

Douglas Ferguson:

Now, the listeners may have keyed in on this, but I really want to underscore a really critical part of what you just described is when you’re making it okay for folks to feel that they don’t enjoy one piece. You already sowed that seed, and so when they feel it, they say they’ll think for themselves like, oh, she knew this would happen. It’s not like she’s making me suffer through this. It’s just a fact of life. Now, it’s just something that we’re moving through together. I think that changes things quite a bit psychologically for the team or for the group.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Yeah, I do too. I think it can happen to the level of preference. I don’t like this kind of activity, but I like this other kind. I think it can also, in a related way, happen in terms of the nature of a process sometimes. If I’m doing strategic planning with a group over a period of time, I will often say to them, “Hey, we’re at that trudge through it stage that this is often the place where a group can get frustrated or get stuck or progress feels like it slows. That doesn’t mean we’re doing it incorrectly or that we’re way off track, it just might be that this particular stage of the process is hard slogging a lot of the time.” That’s another way to normalize it for people. Because I can’t always make it easy for them, and it’s not even desirable to do so all the time because I find that group decisions that are hard won are often the ones that have the most traction later.

We think that that’s part of why diverse teams are stronger teams. If we think of the work that was involved at Google with Project Aristotle a few years back, for example, they found some of the things that make teams function best. High diversity is one of them. They took a while to figure out why. I think that part of it, and part of the evidence that’s coming out, is that diverse teams can’t just make assumptions about what everybody thinks. I mean, people are thinking very different things. If you can come to some measure of agreement or consensus in that space, you’ve worked for it.

That’s not a terrible thing. It’s as much as facilitation means making things easier, it may not always be that. It might be I’ve created a clear container for this conversation to happen, but the conversation itself might be tricky. I think part of the learning process for me has been sorting out when that’s really okay and when to help a group, I don’t know, find more solid ground if they’re feeling like their feet are slipping a bit.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this idea of this thing is hard and helping people understand that, hey, it’s hard, it’s messy. There’s no right way to do this. If you’re doing it, you’re doing it right. I think a lot of times people are worried about are they doing it wrong. Are we messing this up? Are we going to fail at this? The fear of failure is deeply rooted. It’s really traumatizing and scary to a lot of people. Just allowing people to realize that, no, this is messy. It’s going to feel clunky. It’s sideways, it’s totally fine, but just the fact that we’re here going through the mess together means we’re doing it right.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

I love that. I find sometimes that if I can find a metaphor that people can relate to, it helps them. The one that I find myself frequently drawing on is the idea that when you’re cleaning out a closet, for example, you pull all the crap out of your closet and put it on your bed. Then, your doorbell rings and then it’s time to make dinner, and then you got to walk the dog, and then you realize it’s bedtime and you go to bed and you’re like, I should have put all this stuff back or I forgot to or whatever. It would’ve been better to just keep it messy inside the closet with the door closed than to put it all out here on the bed, and now I can’t even go to bed and I still haven’t cleaned up my closet.

In that moment, it’s a mess. It would’ve been better not to start. I think partway through a conversation or a process, whatever it is, it’s messy. If I know, for example, I’m involved in a multi-day, multi-touch point kind of process, I might say to people, “Look, we’re right at that place where all the mess of our clutter is literally out on our bed and we have to go to bed and we have to leave it and find a way to step over it and shove it onto the floor and whatever, because it’s not going to be all finished with nice, neat new labels and containers and a shiny bow on it today. But by the end of the process, next week, next month, whatever, I’m hoping that this newly cleaned out closet will look fabulous, but right now we’re right in the messy part.”

Then when that happens to them, we can go, “Oh yeah.” I will often have the participants feed that back to me, “Oh yeah, this is when all our junk’s on the bed.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s exactly where we are.” I do find sometimes giving people a bit of a visual image is also helpful.

Douglas Ferguson:

100%. I love that. That’s super cool. It just conjures up that experience perfectly. This is making me think about something that we spoke about in the pre-show chat, and that was your desire to have more spaciousness, or this moment you’re examining more spaciousness.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

I am. I am someone who has a word that guides my practice for the year, and I’m not super disciplined about it, but this year my word that I’ve been thinking about and seeing everywhere is spaciousness. Not just space, but literally spaciousness and what that’s like.

It came for me from not having a lot of it in my life for at certain seasons, and then finding myself now having more of it in certain parts of my life. We’ve got four kids that have now moved out and gone away to their lives, and my house is much more both physically spacious, and my calendar is much more spacious than it used to be in some ways. Yet my work calendar, less so.

I think it came out of that personal experience, but where it has me thinking in my facilitation work now is, particularly as we navigate whatever this stage of our broad cultural moment is, how much spaciousness people in groups crave in their work and how to gauge that pretty quickly. Because I’m often someone who comes in from the outside to design and run processes with a team that I have not worked with before, and trying to get a sense from them what they most need.

Because my experience is that if we do things digitally, say on Zoom, we can be really productive with that. It’s a very efficient, productive space if well-facilitated, but we don’t … There’s not a lot of informal spontaneous, organic interaction there. In-person gatherings tend to have those hallway conversations, chats at the buffet line, just the between the cracks conversations that Zoom isn’t good for.

Yet, if people are looking for something efficient, if they’re looking for something where they don’t need childcare, that they don’t have to sit in traffic, there’s something really appealing about the efficiency of a digital experience. I feel like if we’re going to ask people to come in-person to anything, we’d better make it worth it. It has to be worth the drive. It has to be worth, whatever, the childcare expense or the logistics that it took to get there.

Here we are in this, I don’t know, maybe I hope a beautiful venue together as opposed to some generic airport hotel meeting room or something, and we’re creating this moment together that is actually worth the hassle that it took to get there. If so, part of what makes that beautiful is often having some breathing space in it.

There’s this tension in me of, okay, I’ve been brought in here to help this group get somewhere, get something done, meet some objectives. But maybe one of the objectives that I need to make more explicit in my own practice is that they have a relationship building objective or a relational currency building objective that I need to honor, even though my personal need for a relationship with them is temporary or low, theirs might be really high. Sometimes that requires more informal unscripted time.

I got talking with a colleague. I was actually, speaking of beautiful venues, I was actually two weeks ago in Fiji for work, which has never happened to me before, so I’m almost embarrassed to say that out loud. But I was talking to someone, a colleague from Australia who gets paid an awful lot of money for what she does and she does it beautifully. One of the things that she does is she might ask a group a question and send them off to reflect on that with their journal and pen and whatever for an hour and gives them lots of time to sink into that question and reflect.

I was saying to her that I think, in my head, I might have this inner critic that is creating a bit of monkey brain for me going, “Hang on, they’re paying you a lot of money. You can’t just send them off to do their own thing for an hour of a four-hour experience. That’s not delivering value.” She pushed back and she said, “Maybe that’s exactly the value they need. You are getting paid for value, not by the word that you speak. Keeping your mouth shut for an hour and letting them spend some time either together or in their own heads might be exactly the value they need. That is the magic of facilitation in that moment because they have not had an hour of quiet with their own thoughts for months, and you’re providing exactly the gift that they need in that moment. That is skillful facilitation.”

I am living with that idea and realizing how sometimes what I have in my head and what the group actually needs isn’t only about achieve the objective. Sometimes the objective is to catch your breath, and is there something that I can be doing to adjust the pace and what I would consider the density of my agendas to match what that group needs and still be able to feel that I am delivering high value to a client to whom I’m accountable?

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, there’s a lot surfacing for me here. One is this idea of explicit needs so that this is the productivity, this is the outcome they’re able to articulate. Sometimes, they actually tell you connection. I just got back from DC where we were working with a group and collaboration and connection. They hadn’t met in-person in five years because they were overdue, and then the pandemic hit, and so they knew connection was a big part of it. But what are the implicit needs that haven’t been communicated that if we as practitioners can surface and understand and attune to and provide, then we’re going beyond expectations? Talking about delivering value. I mean, that’s the value that will create awe and wonder.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

I love that. It’s true. When it’s a group that we don’t necessarily know well yet, we have to find ways to be able to attune to that quickly. Because I would love it if a client says to me after the fact, “You gave us what we knew we needed and you gave us what we didn’t know we need.” I think of that as known, spoken problems and also unknown, unspoken problems. Maybe not problems, but just needs that they have in that moment.

The faster that I’m able to tune into that, and also the more adaptable I’m able to be in the experience I’m creating for a group to respond to what I’m picking up on, the better. But it’s a bit risky because it’s quite possible for us to read that incorrectly and/or to facilitate out of our own preferred style. Or to, not to put to fine a point on it, but to basically believe the group when they say what they need, even if we are then getting a sense that what they need is something different. It’s one thing to add to the list of objectives. It’s quite another thing to actually, in a sense, cross out one and replace it with one we think is better. That’s harder. Where the group says they need one thing, and in fact, I might find that I think they need something actually quite different, not additional, but opposite to what they said.

I had that happen last week where I had a group where it was quite divided and they said, “We don’t need this time together on this thing. We need to do this other thing.” Part of the group was saying, “No, we have …” Like you said, our group was the same. They had not been together in four years, and the group had changed in the meantime. Some of them had actually never met. I think we are in such a treadmill of productive, efficient, short meetings where you just click a button and join, and click a button and leave, that I think that some of the group had actually forgotten how important those relational ties are, and that those relational ties sometimes can’t be rushed.

I am someone who thinks that we can build connection digitally. I’m not someone who would say, “Oh, it was on Zoom and therefore we haven’t got any connection.” I run courses on how to build connections digitally, I know you can. But we build them differently and at a different pace in-person. I sometimes need to push back on what the client is saying for in-person designs to say, “I think we need to remove a couple things because the group is going to need some time.” Whether that’s something as basic as make the lunch break a bit longer, or I was a participant in a course last week where we started at 10:00 and ended at 4:00, and starting at 10:00 felt ridiculous to me from a facilitator point of view. I was like, oh, you’ve missed the first whatever hour and a half of good content you could have been involved in.

But as a participant, it was amazing. I loved it because I could start my day with some measure of sanity. I could exercise before work, and I could get a few things done before showing up for the thing. The trainer, he would show up at 9:00, so he said, I’m going to be here from 9:00 to 10:00 if you want to come have a coffee together, happy to do that. He just started it with a really relaxed, sane pace. We were able to enter into the space and probably got more done on the efficiency scale in that shorter time period than we would’ve if we had extended it out.

I’ve come home from that experience thinking about redesigning and changing my start times on things and just doing things differently to honor the breathing room that I think people really appreciate.

Douglas Ferguson:

You’re getting hip to my game. I love the 10:00 to 5:00 workshop. It’s an amazing schedule. To your point, you can hit the gym, people can check their emails and get that stuff out of the way. Especially if it’s a multi day workshop, because it’s whole idea of leaving that stuff behind and not bringing phones and distractions into the workshop. It’s much easier for people to do that if they can knock that stuff out in the morning. To your point, you get so much more undivided attention if we concentrate that stuff in there.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

I love that.

Douglas Ferguson:

There’s something else I wanted to hit on. That was, you mentioned what are people asking for versus what they need. It’s the classic product conundrum. Product managers are always on the search to understand users, but then to really look beyond what they’re asking for and going, “What’s the real underlying thing, the real need here?” I think facilitation has this extra nuance, which I guess in the product world it exists as well, but this idea of what are they ready for?

Oftentimes, I’ve been in situations where I’ve diagnosed something with a client and I know that this is what needs to happen, but they’re three steps before that. I have to be very careful about pushing them too far into a territory they’re not quite ready to go into. How do I nudge them because, otherwise, they could easily reject it like an antibody.

A lot of facilitators get rather dogmatic about, “No, this is how teams need to operate.” They go in and they push it too far, and then it does a disservice because the teams reject it because not, for whatever reason, culturally or they’re being conditioned and they’re not … We got to move them along at a pace where they’re comfortable with. With twenty-seven years of experience, I know you have some thoughts on this.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Oh, I do. I’ve got two. I love this idea of readiness. I hadn’t framed it that way before because I was thinking about the difference between need and demand in the product world and probably also in the group dynamic world. Where what a group might need or a person might need might not match what they’re asking for in the front-end, but it also might not match what they’re, as you said, ready for at the other end. I often, in my mentoring practice, I do a lot of mentoring with business leaders. Part of it is, especially solopreneurs or entrepreneurs, they’re like, “But people need this thing that I do or that I sell.”

“It’s like they might need it, but they might not be aware that they need it such that if there is no demand for it, you will not sell anything. You might be right that they need it. I’m not arguing with you whether they do or they don’t, but what I’m saying is they’re not asking for it. The demand isn’t there even if the need is there.” I really love this addition of the idea of readiness and sussing that out because if people aren’t ready to buy something or aren’t ready to enter into an experience or to face something, there’s not much point in taking them there.

If I can pick up on that, my second piece of this has to do more with the metaphor that my book Elastic is about, and that is that if you stretch, I think it’s really important that all of us be stretched a bit as facilitators and as participants. If you think of an elastic band that’s just sitting on your desk, it’s sitting on your desk, it is not doing anything. It’s not fulfilling the purpose for which it’s intended. It’s super comfortable sitting there, presumably, but it is completely useless. If you leave it there long enough and you go to stretch it, it will not stretch. It gets brittle and it’ll break. We aren’t very useful if we’re not stretching at all.

But if we’re stretching either too far, too fast, and obviously then snapping, or if we’re stretching slowly maybe, but staying stretched for too long, like stretchy pants during COVID or an old bathing suit or something, you don’t go back to the shape that you were before. Then you are also useless because you’re no longer fit for purpose either. I’m constantly playing with that metaphor as a facilitator because I want to invite my groups and myself to stretch appropriately, but not too much.

For example, I had one group I always think about on this where they had invited me to facilitate what they were calling a retreat. Well, I get to the retreat and the gentlemen are all in jackets and dress shirts, and the retreat meant that they’re not wearing a tie or that they had undone the top button of their shirt. Meanwhile, I’m picturing retreat being much more casual than this. Their definition of this was different than mine. I realized that some of the activities I’d planned that were more, I don’t know, camp game-like than I normally do, but I was thinking this was a retreat, like an offsite fun day. This was not the least but fun. It was in a very stodgy, paneled meeting room. It was not in a casual environment. Well, that was the morning of my day.

In the afternoon, I went to another corporate retreat and the client had given me an address and I show up, turns out it’s in the woods in this yoga yurt that is completely way more casual than I thought. What I had planned was completely inappropriate because they did not even want, I mean, there was no tech there, but there wasn’t even a flip chart or a marker to be seen. It was just sitting around a campfire in the woods.

It helped me. I was newer in my career and obviously had not asked enough questions in my prep for that day, but it’s become the symbol for me of what can I stretch a group to do? Because, in fact, I think my morning group that day, in their sport coats and paneled meeting room, wanted the forest. They wanted the fire pit. They wanted that experience. They were feeling pretty stifled in this very stuffy environment, but that was already a little bit of a stretch for them. Whereas the other group probably could have used a bit more structure in their day to get more out of it.

That’s become the experiential benchmark for me of am I willing to stretch a group. Because there’s certain activities as a facilitator, I just can’t pull off. Some facilitators can do crazy stuff that I would feel, I’d probably either roll my eyes or just be embarrassed, and other facilitators could totally do it. Similarly, I might push a group in directions that some of my other colleagues might feel were, I don’t know, more than they would be comfortable. I feel like there’s something about matching my stretch with a group’s stretch and what their objectives are that is another part of the alchemy of this whole experience, and that’s part of what makes it fun, I think.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. I always tell people to really tune into what feels authentic when you’re exploring new tools and methods and looking through libraries. Don’t force yourself to do some thing just because you’ve heard design thinking is popular. If it doesn’t feel authentic, move on to the next thing. Because there’s something about what is deeply true about how you’re showing up. It’s the same thing as getting a gift and not liking it and trying to pretend like you it. It’s like you don’t want to be doing that with your methods when you’re facilitating.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

No. It’s true. And yet, we’re also always playing that off against the discomfort of learning something new. It’s going to feel inauthentic maybe, or at least uncomfortable when it’s brand new. And yet, it might grow to fit us. I don’t know.

I remember somebody who said to me fairly early into the pandemic, they said something about, “Well, I just don’t do digital.” I went, “Well, happy retirement,” basically.

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to digital.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

You don’t get to opt out. There’s something about figuring out what you can learn, and it’s like a new pair of shoes that feels super uncomfortable at first and then becomes your favorite pair. But then there’s other pairs where you’re like, oh, I’ll break them in. Then you wear them and wear them and they still feel terrible and you never wear them.

I don’t know if we know right at the front-end, but I think we have to be willing to live through some discomfort to see if it fits us. I think that edge is not one that I … I need to make sure that I’m still living in that because I think I can rely on … I’ve got enough comfy pairs of shoes in my closet right now that I don’t always need to stretch myself into new areas. I’ve been grateful for some circumstances over the last few years that have forced me to up my game in ways that I might not have otherwise.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this idea of comfy shoes. I’m going to have to walk around with that for a little bit.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Me too. I hadn’t thought of it till right now.

Douglas Ferguson:

As we come to a close, I always like to end thinking about the future. Something you mentioned to me in the pre-show chat was this idea of feeling that the pulse was gone. You mentioned that during COVID there was a real clarity around everyone’s focused on formats, everyone’s adopting digital. Even as the pandemic was coming to a close and people were coming back more online, there was this talk of in-person/not in-person. You were relaying a sense of, I’m not sure where are the pulse is.

I’ll also add in. This is something I was thinking about as we were talking, I’m really layering this up.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

All right.

Douglas Ferguson:

One thing we talked about when you were last in Austin was some of the amazing dinner conversations you’ve had with your kids and how inspiring those are just from a … Because you have this basically reverse mentor, these kids that are seeing the world from totally different vantage points. Now that you’re an empty-nester, that’s also a pulse that has left. What is this pulselessness that you’re feeling, and where might it evolve to?

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Oh, I love this. This would be worth a lot longer conversation than what you have time for right now. I love the connection you just made because I hadn’t thought of those two things together. But it’s true that we rely on signals all the time, and maybe the signals we’re getting are a little faint right now, and we have to find other ways to tune into a different frequency or bring in more intel in other ways.

Because during COVID, we knew that meetings were digital and we knew that people were doing poorly. It sucks that we’re doing poorly, but we didn’t have to ask. I’m a big fan of avoiding being the oblivious facilitator. If I had said to people during the height of COVID, “How are you doing?” People are like, “What are you talking about? Of course, I’m not doing well. Nobody is.” But as we emerged from that, people’s experience is … The data would show where I live in Canada, we had a sixty-forty split for a long time in terms of wellbeing, whereas about 60% of people were feeling pretty good, ready to get back out there, thriving, excited, and about 40% were still really languishing. There wasn’t much in between. Both groups felt some shame about that.

The people that were thriving felt badly because they knew there were some people that weren’t and they didn’t want to admit how well they were doing because we’d had a couple of years of not doing well. It felt a bit like you were bragging. The 40% were like, “Hey, there’s people that are doing fine. Why am I not? Why is it taking me so long to pull out of this?” But we knew that there was this bifurcated experience in the room.

Now, it is much more variable. I see it in terms of wellbeing and how people are doing. I see it in terms of formats of meetings. I had an experience just two weeks ago where I showed up and it turned out it was a hybrid meeting. I didn’t know that. They hadn’t told me that, but a couple people had COVID and they phoned in. It’s like, oh, I haven’t had that happen in forever. I’m out of the habit of that. I knew how to handle that a while back. Now it’s like, oh, are we going back into that? So I’m constantly trying to read the room in a big way, cultural way, in a societal way, not just a read this immediate room.

I appreciate what you were saying about the link with my family, because when you’re sitting at a dinner table with one other person, it’s very different than when you’ve got the whole crew around and you’re hearing all kinds of stories and all kinds of examples and getting lots of perspectives. I mean, I’m a collaborator by profession. I say that the collective is protective. Getting multiple perspectives eliminates blind spots much more effectively than doing something out of your own head.

My strategy in this is I’m walking into spaces and with groups asking lots of questions and trying to show up with a lot of curiosity right now because my own experience individually is not enough, never is enough, but the experience of my participants is not at all homogeneous right at the moment. I see it in polarization conversations and dynamics that we’re seeing around the world. I’m seeing it in wellbeing and burnout. I’m seeing it in formats that people want. I’m seeing it even in what we were talking about before about some people wanting high efficiency, high productivity experiences and others wanting a bit more space. I think we need to show up with lots of curiosity into that space.

Douglas Ferguson:

The thing that popped into my head as I was listening, right when you said it’s getting more important to read the room, it just immediately popped into my head, it’s actually forcing us to read the system.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

To your point, it’s like someone’s now having to dial in, they’re not in the room. The thing that caused them to have to dial in was not in the room, but there’s all these moving parts. It even comes back to your early lesson around the folks that were in the stuffy conference room, but trying to cut loose, and the folks that they were out in the crazy yoga forest, what is the system that they’re in? Not only am I tuning into the room and the setting and the space that we’re going to be in for the day, but what’s the system surrounding them and how might that influence the things that might unfold in front of us?

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Absolutely. I think as facilitators who, as someone who is committed to justice and equity and diversity and inclusion, I think those kinds of considerations become very important. Because what it took for people even to show up and to be in that room is very uneven and not equally distributed.

There’s, actually, there’s some really good pieces of work in there in Adam Grant’s new book. It’s called Hidden Potential, just came out a couple of weeks ago. I just finished it last night. I run a book club every month of a bunch of new titles for people, and this month I’m only doing that book because it’s got so much in it. I absolutely loved it. He talks about a NASA selection process that has evolved over time, but that somehow we need to look not just at people’s end of their story and the accomplishments, the heights they’ve reached, but how far did they travel to get to that point. Because people who have overcome a number of obstacles to get there are probably more impressive candidates, even if they haven’t reached as high a peak. Look at their starting point, more than just their end point.

I think about that even in the room, as you said, the systems that people are navigating even to show up and what kinds of designs we need to be thinking about as facilitators to make sure that a space is more safe, more inclusive, more participatory in ways that are true to the systems that people are living in. I think it’s a really important skill set for facilitators to develop. That’s probably a conversation for another day, but I think it’s really important.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. Well, I’d love to end on a note like that. It’s like there’s more to talk about. It’s been a great pleasure. I would love to continue the conversation, but we are at our end. I want to just say thanks so much, Rebecca, and I look forward to our next conversation.

Dr. Rebecca Sutherns:

Me too, Douglas. Thanks for the opportunity.

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 at voltagecontrol.com.

The post Embrace Discomfort to Adapt to New Ways of Working appeared first on Voltage Control.

“We need facilitators to create that room. There are very few and the scientists who are quite enthusiastic as well as the decision leaders, what they know right now is PowerPoint one PowerPoint after another. And which is quite boring but they don’t know what to do, how different, what other ways can we do it, can we pass on this information? Any sector that you talk about within Africa, they will need that, they will need facilitators because of the growth trajectory that we are looking at and the change that we need to bring about.”- Eddie Jjemba

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Eddie Jjemba from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center. Eddie discusses his work in making African cities resilient to climate change and his journey into environmental education. He shares his experiences in facilitation, including the importance of adapting to diverse cultures and contexts. Eddie also talks about the financial barriers to facilitation training in Africa and how the Red Cross is addressing this issue. The conversation also covers the use of games in facilitation, the process of designing meeting agendas, and the future of facilitation in the context of climate change.

Show Highlights

[00:10:28] The importance of facilitation in the African context

[00:15:09] The need for facilitators in addressing climate change impacts 

[00:21:05] The use of games in facilitation

[00:25:15] Understanding cultural diversity in facilitation

[00:35:18] Embracing Facilitation at the Mid-level Management 

[00:37:01] Qualities of Senior Leaders Ready for Facilitation

[00:38:46] The impact of facilitation on meetings and gatherings

Links | Resources

Eddie on Linkedin

Eddie on Twitter

Eddie on Voltage Control

About the Guest

Eddie brings over a decade of dedication to tackling climate-related challenges, with a primary focus on climate change adaptation and disaster risk management. In his role as a Climate Change Advisor, he has actively facilitated workshops and conferences, demonstrating his commitment to both urban and rural areas. His expertise lies in developing practical strategies through collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders, including practitioners, academics, and representatives from both the private and government sectors.

Eddie’s skills are not just limited to strategy development; he also excels in facilitating learning and effectively communicating climate risk management to a wide array of audiences, ranging from specialists in the field to the general public. His specialties include Climate Change Adaptation, Disaster Risk Management, and effective Risk Communication, along with a deep understanding of both policy and practice in these critical areas. His work has consistently showcased his ability to translate complex climate issues into actionable strategies, making him a valuable asset in the field of climate resilience.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

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 Eddie Jjemba at Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, where he offers advice to make cities in Africa resilient to climate change shocks and stresses. Welcome to show, Eddie.

Eddie Jjemba:

Thank you very much, Douglas. Very pleased to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so great to have you. Well, as usual, let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start in this work. I know that you had early ambitions to be a medical doctor, and that formed some of your thinking and some of your choices in your journey, but I’d love to talk about that with you today.

Eddie Jjemba:

Yeah, well, having been raised in a family where it was very important or it was known that anyone who is bright or who is able to pass science should automatically sign up to be a medical doctor. It was quite prestigious to be one. I had a couple of uncles who had gone ahead of me, so they were medical doctors, peers who were aspiring to be, and as someone who was performing well in science, everyone expected me to be a medical doctor, and I myself actually wanted to be a medical doctor. Well, because of financial circumstances… Number one, I couldn’t have fought to pay for the medical course at the university, and the government sponsored me for an alternative course, which was conservation biology. Well, because it was also science, I loved it. I chose to move on with a conservation biology course.

In there, among the many things that we studied was environmental education. And that caught my attention and I started following it a little bit, I mean with hesitation, but also with interest. Yes. So that became a line that eventually would land me my first job in a local small organization. We’re about, what, seven people working for it and my role there was an environmental educator. Those were the initial steps into the world of facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

And what was it about childhood education that really attracted you?

Eddie Jjemba:

Okay, naturally, I love children. I do. Anywhere you find me, you’ll find children somehow come around me. I am also, or at least I’ve been called playful. I now admit I enjoy playing. And in the African culture, playfulness is reserved for children. So I think I often find myself playing with the children. So that’s exactly how I gravitated towards children. I loved children. Oh, I was told that my father actually used to love children, that he would have children all around him. Early in my early childhood I had that. So probably that too influenced my inclination to children.

Douglas Ferguson:

And how do you think that impacts your work today? This kind of playfulness, this kind interest in children, this kind affinity to think and behave in those ways?

Eddie Jjemba:

So I remember one day, okay, as an environment educator responsible for teaching children to love nature and conservation in general, one day in my local organization, we received an invitation to go for games for climate. My manager at the time, she basically frowned at the invitation. She was wondering who on earth does playfulness instead of doing serious business, anyway. That was the first time I think I got exposed to playfulness in a professional sense. Now, coming back here, I realized that actually my facilitation style edges around seriousness and playfulness and a little bit of comedy and storytelling. So the interaction with children and the love for playfulness, I have learned to bring it into a room, whether it’s a meeting, a smaller one, big conferences, and I find that people connect, actually, it’s my way of connecting with the audience before we get into this too much business of life with whatever topics that we are addressing.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m really curious, you talk about bringing into play and the comedy and connecting with the audience, is there a story that comes to mind of how that happens?

Eddie Jjemba:

Well, I’m trying to dig into my mind, what the immediate thing that comes is imagine myself in my work, I tend to move around the cities, especially in Africa. And one of the most memorable time that I have is when I was in Windhoek, in Namibia, in a huge conference hall in there with politicians. The mayor is present, the councilor is present there, technical people from disaster risk management. Because of the work we do, which is humanitarian work, we always want to bring along local people. So the common man and woman community members basically. And we’re thinking about the climate change strategy for the city of Windhoek. It’s not time for soliciting for votes, getting the mayor to talk with the local community leaders and just a local dweller of informal settlements as we call them.

It’s challenging, so I often start with some very light joke maybe, very carefully selected, which makes people loosen up and laugh a bit. So for example, we are here to talk about the changing climate, but is it really changing? Has anyone seen it changing or something related to an African proverb? So I find a way of finding touch points with my audience that is not entirely scientific or it’s not entirely, how do I say that? Yeah. But anyway, something light that makes people is continuous on the first change. They’re not thinking about their professionalism in the moment, but they are thinking about being human together in the room.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And what are some African proverbs that come to mind? Because I’m sure listeners aren’t familiar with many of them. So is there one that you can share with us, the kinds of things that you’re using?

Eddie Jjemba:

Yeah, there’s one which says, if you want to carry a baby, don’t wait for them to get dirty or to get muddy. And in a way that one directly relates to my work, because for the changing climate, we need to take action before things get worse. So when I offer that, then I invite my audience to offer me some proverbs from their own context. I mean, although we are all Africa, but the countries can be completely different. Even within the country, there can be a lot of difference because we are different tribes, different culture setting and background. So I invite them to offer me more, and as they do that, they feel like this is a different kind of workshop altogether.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow, that makes me really curious when you say that if you want to carry a baby, don’t wait for it to get muddy. In what ways do you think you may have waited for things to get muddy in your facilitation practice before you carried them?

Eddie Jjemba:

Okay, I love that question. First and foremost, I never ever thought that facilitation can be work. I never had that facilitation. There was a profession called facilitation until I met people from the Red Cross who had invited me for a workshop, which was about climate change and games or games for climate. And they told me that I was good at facilitation, and I asked, “What’s that?” By that time, I had already been working as an environmental educator for about three years, I think. So the term facilitation was not there. That means that for those three years I did things ad hoc without any orientation about the basics of facilitation, the techniques of facilitation, in which way I think that that’s clearly I waited. I waited to carry the baby, but I didn’t know the baby existed. So in a way, while I waited to carry the baby, I wasn’t aware of the waiting itself. And later on, actually, I started, then I joined Red Cross.

One of the reasons, they really liked my facilitation skills, and they exposed me to various facilitation styles and techniques, and I was like, “Wow, I never knew that work could be fun like this.” Anyway, and then exposed me also to applied improvisation, liberating structures, all these amazing resources. And over time I have also learned that facilitation is kind of a craft. You get this piece and this and put them together and you get a blend. So if I get applied improv and then I add some liberating structure, I create this amazing thing. In my culture, in the African context, there’s a meal we call Katogo. Basically, it’s a mixture of things. You throw tomatoes there, you can throw other vegetables, leafy vegetables, you can throw various sources of protein and carbs, and you cook all together. So that’s my new perception of facilitation. Add several things together, come up with a flavor that is so blended, but very rich in test. Yes. Anyway, yeah. Right now I’m here. I’m immersed in facilitation, I love facilitation.

I notice though that it’s still growing in the African context. I’m privileged to be part of the community of facilitators from IAF, the International Association of Facilitation. But we are few, even within the African group, we are few. Anyway, which means there’s a lot of room for growth, given that lots of things are emerging within the African context to provide solutions to the changing climate, to the challenges in health, to the tech that is blooming, everything. So I tend to feel like there is a need to groom facilitators, to equip facilitators in the developing world, and that’s my new passion on my new discovered calling.

Douglas Ferguson:

Tell me a little bit more about that need. Why do you think that’s so important?

Eddie Jjemba:

Well, it is pretty important because, I mean, from my story, facilitation generally was never regarded as some sort of work. So if it’s not regarded as work, that means it’s not going to be prioritized in an organization. So if someone emerges and they come and they say, “Yeah, here I am, I need a job. I am a facilitator, a conversation facilitator.” They’d be like, “What are you talking about? We are here to do work, not to talk.” Then in my context, when we think about changing climate, while the worst is yet to be seen all around the world, Africa is in a very difficult place or it’ll be in a very difficult place.

We are at a time when we need to define policies that will help the most vulnerable people to be protected from adverse impacts of climate change. And to do that, we need to facilitate conversation between those who are most vulnerable, the scientists that are informing us, the local leaders, especially the cultural leaders who are highly treasured, and then the governments who are decision makers, the women and children, everyone has to be in the table, on the table to make this conversation rich. And so that the outcome is really informed by local experience. We need facilitators to create that room. There are very few, and the scientists who are quite enthusiastic as well as the decision makers, what they know right now is PowerPoint, one PowerPoint after another, which is quite boring, but they don’t know what to do. How different, what other ways can we do it? Can we pass on this information? Any sector that you talk about within Africa, they will need that. They’ll need facilitators because of the growth trajectory that we are looking at and the change that we need to bring about.

Douglas Ferguson:

What do you think the most promising source of facilitators are in that space?

Eddie Jjemba:

Source of facilitators? I don’t know where we can, because I don’t know where they are. But I think starting with executives, we have leaders all around, leaders in different sectors, leaders of campaigns, leaders of nonprofits, leaders. And I think because our setting is so much driven by top down, until we touch the leaders to appreciate the value of facilitation, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to commit some of their human resources and financial resources to empower their teams to be facilitators within the entities. But even between bridging the gap between their entities and other entities. Here we keep talking. For us, the humanitarian workers, we keep talking, we need partnerships, we need collaborations, but these need to be facilitated. In order to bridge these gaps, we need facilitators on the table equipped with facilitation skills. Now, one day when I wanted to just sharpen my facilitation skills, trying to get a little bit more. I looked at courses. I feel like the courses offered were quite out of reach in terms of finances, they’re costly basically, and if they’re costly, that becomes a prohibitive factor. So level one, we have the executive buy-in. Level two, it’s going to be the financial access or block.

So we’ll have to overcome the financial challenge for more Africans to access like cutting edge facilitation techniques. Now, where I work from, we try to infuse and empower our own humanitarian workers with facilitation techniques. So we organize either online trainings or in-person trainings to offer that what we have learned over time, and of course we have to continue guiding the champions and coaching them, mentoring them as they hone their facilitation skills. I think that those are the small baby steps we are taking for us within the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Climate Center, but also for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Movement in general.

Douglas Ferguson:

Your mention of the Red Cross reminds me of the story you were telling earlier about the climate games and how foreign and strange that was for some of your coworkers. I’m really curious, how did those games work? What was it like being there and attending these programs?

Eddie Jjemba:

So for that particular game that oriented me into the world of facilitation, it was about forward-looking decision-making, and it’s basically like a tabletop simulation game with cards and with beans and dice representing probabilities and the beans representing finances. So you have to make an individual decision, but with consultation from others. So it was a game about forward-looking decision-making into 10-year future, and you’d experience the results of your decisions over the course of the game. However, there are other several ones which are basically small games to infuse some energy within a workshop, within a conference, within a meeting. Those ones, we pick them from here and they are from all over and try them out, put them into context and some fly and others flop, which reminds me earlier in my career, having been exposed to these various games at the climate center, I got an assignment to go to Somaliland and to play a game.

So I had a deck of cards, these usual cards, playing cards, but I was going to use them to just simulate people’s imagination who are not playing cards actually. But the moment I pulled out a deck of cards and I mentioned this is a deck of cards, my co-facilitator stopped me and said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Eddie, here in this context we never do gambling.” So anything related to gambling, I immediately noticed that look, while I was not there to gamble, but the cards are related, they are affiliated to gambling, this game cannot continue. So anyway, we try to get games and then we put them into our own context, but always trying to make sure that they remain relevant to the goal that we have of reducing, like understanding changing risks and then making decision in the moment which impact the future.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s always critical. No matter what we’re bringing into a session, just thinking about how can we make it applicable, how can we align it to our context, to our purpose? And when you tell me about the playing cards and gambling and the connotations there, it also reminds me of how just the importance of clarity and facilitation and how often cultural boundaries. I imagine from your perspective working in a continent that has many countries that are quite diverse, there seems to be a sense of unity around Africa in general, but also there’s so much diversity with all these countries and the cultural backgrounds, and so I can imagine it can be, to your point, these card decks are problematic because of gambling, but I bet there’s so many examples of just how the words we use and the metaphors and the symbols we use, we have to be careful about how people respond to those.

Eddie Jjemba:

Absolutely, absolutely. So they are 52 countries, and then even within the country itself, like one country where I am here in Uganda, they’re over 30 dialects, and some of which I cannot completely understand. So if I cannot even understand the language or the dialect, that means, is it called a steep slope? But it takes a lot of effort for me to understand the culture. That’s where storytelling and connecting with people comes in. And our culture is so much oriented. By starting a small conversation with a person with whom you are convening the meeting or the workshop or the conference, they can reveal to you or they often reveal to me lots of things through a story, short stories, long stories, stories in the corridor, stories across the table, stories when we are having lunch and tea. Through these stories, I practice active listening. I have to really listen carefully to pick out what are these cultural markstones that are coming up that are popping up as this person speaks. And later on I use them to design or to facilitate the agenda itself that I have at hand. Listening.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was going to ask you about that actually, because you were talking about being intentional about these touch points that you create so you can connect with them in a meaningful and personal way. And I was curious about your process for that. And so you touched on it just now a bit, but I’m really curious to know a little bit more on how that evolves. Is that stuff you’re doing? You mentioned that it influences how you think about the agenda, so it must be happening before the event. So how far ahead of time and are you just meeting with them in person, or are you doing this virtually? What’s your process like really getting to that clarity that you need to make those epiphanies to draw them in more?

Eddie Jjemba:

So often it involves both online and offline meetings. So the online to get check-in what is it that you really want to achieve with this meeting. And then after that, we follow up with another online probably, and then we get offline where possible in the preparations. That is if I’m within the country where the workshop is going to happen, sometimes I’m not, but even when I am not, I make sure that I add in a day before to review the agenda that we already discussed online. And during the process of reviewing it in person, often things emerge. Also, when I’m beginning to craft an agenda, I often talk to whoever has invited me or whoever I’m co-organizing with. Now this is a guide, but because it’s a guide, some details can change. Changing in the moment during the facilitation or just before or immediately during the time when we are reviewing a session. But look, talking about this process of trying to find out information before when we are designing the agenda.

I had never thought about it so much critically until I undertook the course from the Voltage Control. And when we’re doing, we had several books that we used, and one of my life-changing books as a facilitator was the gift from the Voltage Control, The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, who underscores the reason to find out the reason for the meeting by asking so many whys. Why, why, why, until you get to the real desire. In my case, often that is it’s usually bringing together scientists. I’m bringing together these decision makers from government, and then the scientists, while they say, “We are here to design something.” At the bottom is of their hearts is, “I am here to offer you the information that you need and therefore I need a lot of time so that I can go through all my slide decks.” But because of this learning to ask the why of the meeting, I have been able to also help the scientists know that yes, you need to deliver this information, but you also need people to listen to you.

Now my colleague says, “Do you want people to listen to you 10% and then they lose 90% of your content? Or do you want them to retain 90% of your content and therefore they should not be talked to more than 10% of the time.” Okay. So anyway, the point is I finally found comfort in asking a lot of, why would you like this workshop? Why would you like this meeting? Again and again, especially trying to get to the point of do you like it more interactive or less interactive, and what is the value of having it less interactive versus more interactive?

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s always interesting what you learn when you start to dial in and even to your point around making the agenda ahead of time based on some conversations, but then that day before really walking it through with them. And it’s a great opportunity to build some familiarity with folks and the flow that you plan and make changes in the last minute. And I think that demonstrates adaptability and builds a lot of trust and confidence.

Eddie Jjemba:

Yes, absolutely. And I’ve learned to ask, what would you like your participants to see, to feel, to think, to experience? And by asking those questions, it has helped people, my co-facilitators or the co-organizers to try to think holistically about the experience of a participant and to craft an agenda that suits the participants and make them feel enthusiastic about the work that we are going to do or about the work that we are already doing.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that, it shows up in the workshop design canvas that we created and how we think about how participants are going to leave and how they’re showing up, because then that gap can be really visible to us as designers, and so we know exactly what we need to address.

Eddie Jjemba:

And talking about designing, I discovered that I used to think that the designing part of the workshop is daunting. It’s a lonely activity. It’s a soul-searching activity, so to say. And I would try to quicken it, do it, chap, chap, so that we get to the day of facilitation and delivering. But I have learned that it’s worth the effort to spend a lot of time in designing phase of the workshop because it’ll determine a lot how the actual delivering of the workshop conference or meeting will happen. And if you do it in a co-development process, it yields even much more better fruits and the results are well co-owned. If something didn’t go well, all of you as the facilitation team would be like, “yes, we would’ve improved. And it reduces opportunities of pointing fingers that probably it was you Eddie who didn’t give sufficient time for design.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. It’s easier for people to assume positive intent and think about how we can improve versus trying to cast blame. For sure. Well, let’s see. In our remaining time, I want to kind of shift maybe just reflecting a bit, and my first semi-reflective question here is about the leaders that you mentioned, and how important it was to start with the leaders and to build appreciation for facilitation awareness, and maybe even get them trained to be better facilitators so that they can influence the organizations that they’re a part of. And I’m curious, what do you think are the hallmarks of leaders that are going to be the most receptive to facilitation or ones that might be more apt to embrace it, learn it, and adopt it.

Eddie Jjemba:

In terms of embracing and learning, I think of the mid-level managers, I think about them as the movers, the senior managers, I think about them as those who just offer a blessing. They need to experience it once and be like, yeah, go. No go. Once they have given a go, then the mid-level managers, these make it happen. And I love in our facilitation trainings for leaders, usually we want the senior management to identify a person and they hand them over to us, and usually that is a person who is in the mid-level management that we offer the different facilitation techniques, expose them to various methods and then guide them going forward. Now, once we have guided the mid-level managers, then they are enthusiastic also to guide even the lower management levels. So I feel like the movers are the mid-level managers, but of course they have to first get the goal from the senior level management.

Douglas Ferguson:

And what do you think are the qualities of the senior leaders that are the most apt to give the go ahead and who are the people that are pretty much ready but maybe just aren’t aware just yet?

Eddie Jjemba:

That’s a difficult one to answer, but who are the most ready? I don’t know. It’s hard to find the most ready ones.

Douglas Ferguson:

And maybe not a specific person or a specific industry, but what are the qualities? What do you think is true about those people?

Eddie Jjemba:

Okay. There have to be some people who are enthusiastic about their work and about sustainable change. Now, the word sustainability, I think sometimes it’s misused, but a leader who would love to see change an impact for the kind of work that they do, they are likely to embrace because they’ll be able to see its capacity to drive change. And for the leaders who are not enthusiastic, it’s less likely, but also leaders who are probably young and energetic and young is relative, but those who are enthusiastic to learn new things, probably that’s the quality that I want to put forward. They’re the ones that are likely to appreciate facilitation and hopefully encourage their teams to have these facilitation skills. I also tend to think it’s not good to have this single person in an organization as our go-to facilitator, rather than everyone should have some level of facilitation because we are facilitating day in and day out. The scale differs, but we are.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it makes a big difference when even folks that aren’t positional leaders or aren’t hosting meetings, if they’re showing up with an understanding and appreciation of good facilitation skills, they’re going to be better meeting attendants. They’re going to help out and bring more people in. And the success of the gathering just skyrockets. I mean, imagine if every wedding you went to was attended by wedding planners, it’d probably be a pretty spectacular event, right? There’d be a lot of sympathy and empathy for what everyone’s going through, right?

Eddie Jjemba:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, this need for that diversity, diversifying facilitation, how do

Douglas Ferguson:

You think that facilitation will continue to shape the future of climate?

Eddie Jjemba:

Great, great, great great, great question. Look, I think actually it’s going to be very, very important. Number one, if you do a Google search immediately, you’ll find lots of meetings about climate, lots of workshops, and even mega conferences that happen like the one that we call the conference of parties, where big decisions happen, when these meetings are not well facilitated. There is passivity, passiveness in the attendance, passiveness in contributing great ideas, passiveness in owning the outcome. Now, I think we are going to need, and my hope is that we’ll have lots of skilled and even semi-skilled facilitators having these very interactive, highly engaging meetings starting from the lowest level of administration. In my case, it’ll be the village to the highest level of administration, which would be at the global level. Getting the voices of those who are most impacted heard, but also getting the voices of those who are best skilled at producing solutions equally hard in the same room to define the solution for climate.

And when it comes to cities, it is even going to be more important. The world is becoming urbanized day by day. We have already gone past the 50% of the world’s population living in cities, and it’s expected it’s going to rise into eighties. Some other places like the Latin America and the Caribbean have already also got there. But anyway, wherever we have a lot of diversity concentrated in the single place, and we need to make a decision or to come up with solutions that are co-owned, which is the case for the climate change, we need facilitation We need excellent facilitation. That is the force that will ensure adequate inclusion of older voices and which means acceptable solutions for those who are there. Yeah, I think that we will come to a place where we have even climate change specialists having facilitation as one of their job descriptions, I think. Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

As we come to an end here, I’d love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Eddie Jjemba:

One, facilitation is not designed. It’s a skill which can be learned. So it’s not only for extroverts, it’s not only for introverts. Anyone can be a facilitator, but it is an art, which means we have to be intentional as facilitators getting various facilitation techniques, crafting them together to come up with unique facilitation styles, which are also applicable for specific cultural contexts. The other one is we need to spread facilitation as a profession, especially within developing countries, both in Africa, in Asia and elsewhere. I feel like there’s a big gap in terms of facilitation skills in the developing world, and one, there has to be awareness and appreciation that it’s needed both by leaders, but everyone as well. And then two, to make it accessible, especially to remove the financial barriers that makes people not able to access facilitation skills offered in conferences, in trainings, elsewhere. And I think lastly, it’s so rewarding to facilitate a productive conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Eddie, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Eddie Jjemba:

Thank you very much, Douglas. Thanks for hosting me. And yes, I look forward to seeing the panel of Facilitation moving all around.

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 Empowering Leaders For Sustainable Change appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think that is my superpower. I do connect. I believe that no one can be successful without the other. We need each other to thrive and we have to realize that we are strong in certain areas and others are strong in other areas. And together, when we do connect, we can do really incredible stuff. So I like connecting people, where people are talking to me and in my mind, I’m already thinking who am I going to introduce this person to so he or she can make his dream a reality. And that sort of kicks in automatically.” – Ma Roselle Junio

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson talks with Roselle, Global Head of Quality Training and Optimization for Concur Expense Audit and Capture Services at SAP. They discuss the importance of facilitation in the workplace, with Roselle sharing her journey and experiences in leading diverse teams. She emphasizes the value of connecting people, understanding multicultural dynamics, and having a growth mindset. Roselle also shares her approach to meetings and the importance of debriefing. She expresses her passion for creating safe, inclusive spaces and her plans to build a facilitation community within her team.

Show Highlights

[00:05:50] The importance of connecting people

[00:12:27] The importance of facilitation skills

[00:13:58] The growth mindset and room for improvement

[00:19:36] Building empathy and understanding in a multicultural team

[00:25:49] The debrief and becoming better facilitators

[00:28:49] Creating a facilitation community

Links | Resources

Ma. Roselle on Linkedin

About the Guest

Roselle Junio is a devoted mother to two exceptional and independent children, aged 5 and 14. With an unwavering commitment to shaping a better tomorrow for her children and future generations, she channels her passion into fostering a culture of collaboration and crafting transformative spaces for her global team and the communities she supports. Meet our esteemed alumna, a fearless female leader of a diverse team spanning across 5 countries in Asia, Europe, and South America. With a deep commitment to continuous growth, she’s a dedicated life-long learner, certified coach, and a skilled facilitator who enables others to find joy at work and in life. Her fierce optimism fuels her passion to be a shining example for her team and children, empowering them to create conditions that will allow them to flourish.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

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 Roselle Junio at SAP where she’s the global head of quality training and optimization for Concur Expense audit and capture services. Welcome to the show, Roselle.

Roselle Junio:

Glad to be here. Douglas,

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so great to be chatting with you and love featuring our alumni on the show. We published a blog post not that long ago so we can hit on some of the things we talked about there and dive even deeper. So as usual, I would like to start with how you got your start in facilitation. What was some of those moments where you started to realize that facilitation was an important skill or something to bring into the workplace to improve outcomes?

Roselle Junio:

I think I started becoming a leader since I can talk, but my leadership journey started getting stretched when I started working with a multinational company where I led hundreds of people and I had foreigners as bosses. And I realized all through my young life, it’s easy for me to organize meetings and talk to people locally. Because again, like I said, I think since kindergarten I’ve been doing that.

But when I was dealing with different people with different cultures, it just struck me that other people need to be engaged differently. And that, again, became very apparent when I joined SAP and I evolved my role from a local leader to supporting more than 100 people in five different locations and engaging partners and stakeholders, I don’t know, in maybe 12 different locations and several region across the globe.

And that’s where I said, okay, hold on. I’m making so many mistakes. I’m pissing off so many people, and I have to learn different approaches, whether I’m doing one-on-ones or small groups or engaging hundreds of people in a meeting. And that’s where I said, okay, I need some work. I obviously started just learning by myself, like anyone, right? We would go and look up for e-learnings.

I reached out to different people in the organization to mentor me, give me advice. I was introduced to Liberating Structures. I looked at Mural templates, see how I can use them, et cetera. And that’s where I stumbled upon Voltage Control and your certification. And I say, okay, if I want to be successful in my role and as a person, as a professional, I need to be formally trained on this. So I engaged and everything is opened up for me after that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. I want to come back to the kindergarten moments. Tell me about some of these early leadership moments. I love to hear a story about how that showed up.

Roselle Junio:

Small things. We’re in your school. You’re being asked to do group work. And when you’re kids and you’re looking at each other and figuring out who’s going to say the first thing, and I would always go and say, “I am Roselle. What is your name? I am five years old. How old are you?” So I would start those conversations and I became the person that gets people to get to know each other and work together. So that’s me.

Douglas Ferguson:

A connector from a young age. Yeah, I love that. Does that still play out in your work today around connecting people and helping people get to know each other and building alignment in that way?

Roselle Junio:

I think that is my superpower, Douglas. I do connect I think because I believe that no one can be successful without the other. We need each other to thrive, and we have to realize that we are strong in certain areas and others are strong in other areas. And together when we do connect, we can do really incredible stuff. So I like connecting people where people are talking to me and in my mind I’m already thinking, who am I going to introduce this person to so he or she can make his dream a reality? And that kicks in automatically.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, the connection piece also makes me think about, you were talking earlier in the pre-show chat around this idea of the multicultural team and how you had to learn from each other. And so I wonder if this ability you have around connection, the superpower that you have, did that make you more apt to tune into that need?

Roselle Junio:

Yeah, I think so. Like I said, because it automatically kicks in for me, I look for opportunities for us to build trust. It’s almost like I see every human interaction an opportunity for us to grow with one another. I don’t know if that’s cheesy, but because I am a connector, I intentionally look for these things and understand, what are those pain points for that other person?

What does he want to gain from this conversation? And then that’s where I go and think about either I can help with that or somebody from my other team can help with that. That’s I think my answer to the question.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, so it made me think about… I love these opportunities of trust, and I’m curious if any stories come to mind around where you are presented with something that might’ve even been a challenge and you were able to turn that into a trust building moment or even just any time where the trust really thrived and you felt really proud of that moment.

Roselle Junio:

I’m working with different leaders where in meetings, in conversations, there’s always sort of a power play. And there will be times when my overeagerness to help might be misconstrued as my taking over their job or expanding my control, if you want to call it that. At the time when I was speaking in the meeting where I wanted to just really help, I didn’t tune into the apprehensions in there. And this was in a call, so I couldn’t see their faces. There’s just no signs that, hold on, you’re crossing a line there, girl.

And after I started asking questions about what they thought about my proposal and how they think my team’s role is in this type of work, it was almost like silence. And that was very interesting to me. So what I did was obviously I started thinking about what was going on. You have to read the room. And I realized that I overstepped my boundaries. And like you said, it’s a challenge, but also an opportunity for me to engage them differently. So what was the issue? I felt like they felt that I was a threat in some way.

Of course, they won’t say that, but I have to understand what was going on and clarify one and one with the people in that room, what support did they need from my team, and then come up with a way to utilize the strengths of each of the groups to solve the problem with me just helping in a way they want me to help there. It’s difficult, especially in this time when AI is taking over our lives and cuts are being made and people are anxious. In conversations you can feel that anxiety in the air and we have to tune into that in conversations.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. I was going to actually ask you about signals, which is really interesting because talking about tuning into conversations, and you were also talking about thinking about who might I connect this person with or what’s happening for them and how can I be in service of that?

And I’m curious, when you think about these signals, is it more of a real-time thing, or is it something that you’re planning ahead of time? Or are you reflecting after the fact around signals you noticed and then coming back and repairing things or embellishing things that need attention? Or is it a mixture of all three? I’m curious how that shows up for you.

Roselle Junio:

It’s a mixture of all three, because I do prepare for meetings. Before I go into a meeting, if I was the one invited, I will ask, can I add value in this meeting? Or if not, I’ll just politely decline. If I do accept a meeting, I try to understand who’s there, what their needs are. I try to forecast that somehow. But of course, I can everything, right? And then within the meeting, I have learned over time, especially since I facilitate a lot, I think it’s really that skill, facilitating,- allows you to look at the dynamic more than the content.

So you’re going to have to see what energy is in the room, whether it’s face-to-face or in a virtual call. And because I intentionally work on my facilitation skills where you’re more tuned into other people’s thoughts and also be conscious of your own, it happens real-time. And then even afterwards, a lot of times I go and have a conversation with somebody in that meeting and I ask, was I too forward, or did I come off too strong? What could I have done better? Or did I not tune into something that I should have? So things like that.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think I’m picking up on a general theme of curiosity and just what can I know ahead of time and be curious about, and then being curious in the moment and then retaining that curiosity after the fact. Because even though we get great at what we do, there’s always room for improvement. So it’s that growth edge too.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah, that’s true. It’s like the growth mindset. There’s always room for improvement. That’s the first thing I learned from my first leader in the call center world. I was this smug girl who graduated from a top university in the Philippines, and I was like, I’m too good for this. And every time she would coach me, I would have all this excuses why I didn’t do it or whatever.

And then she said, “Think about what you just said to me and think if those statements will help you grow.” And of course, because they are excuses didn’t, right? So she said, “Okay, what do you think can help you grow?” And then I started thinking about it. She said, “See? There’s always room for improvement.” And ever since, that’s always been how I saw my growth. We never stop.

Douglas Ferguson:

That reminds me of something you mentioned in the blog post, which was this appreciation for the diverse cohort and how you were learning from others. I think it was Baxter that was preparing his service menu and thinking about how he’s going to launch his professional services organization. And I thought that was pretty remarkable because some folks would think, well, I’m not going to be selling consulting services, so how does this apply to me?

That closed mindset around what are the direct things I need to know and learn can be very limiting, right? Because you’re already making the assumption that I know the things I need to learn. It’s like not open to new things and where the edges might be. And I thought that was really remarkable that you took those insights from him and thought, how is that going to impact me at SAP and how I communicate the services we offer and what we provide to the folks around us, to our partners, to our coworkers. It’s really cool.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah, I thought he was really cool too. And I was like, oh my God, the confidence that he had. The fact that he just wanted to make a difference. Those are the kinds of people we all want to be around with. And when he shared that, I said to myself, if my team were a service organization separate from SAP, I would love my team to operate in the same way. It’s really cool. Which reminds me, I should reach out to him and have a short chat and just check in.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, of course. It’s that connection piece. You got to reach out and connect.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was thinking about your multicultural team a little more, and you were talking about this idea of learning from each other. And it sounded like there are some really interesting dynamics just around how you all need to show up to support the different ways that everyone thinks about solving problems or thinks about communicating or even the words they choose to use. I’m really fascinated about that.

Roselle Junio:

What’s interesting about having a multicultural team is that you can recognize their bias immediately. Because one difficulty or challenge in dealing with the other group, they just say, “Ugh, it’s because they’re Filipinos, or they’re Americans, or they’re British. That’s why they’re like that.” And we have to always intentionally think about, why are they like that? And you talk about curiosity, and that’s what I keep telling the team. Let’s be curious about each other. Why are they pushing back on a policy that you think is so usual in the Philippines?

An example would be we work in a environment where we have to be staffed 24 by seven. I have a number of people across the globe filling those slots, but I still need a couple of people in different places to be in the night shift to fully cover the load that we have. And one of the sites said that they just couldn’t. And of course, because they couldn’t, the other site need to stretch themselves and cover the night shift. And in the past they would just kind of, ugh, that’s how they roll or whatever, and the animosity increases.

There’s loss of trust and all these things. Until one person said in the meeting, “Would you mind sharing with us why is it difficult for you to cover the night shift?” And then they said, “Oh, because it’s not safe in the streets. The majority of the group are female and it’s just not safe.” And that just shifted the energy in the room where we realized that, oh my God, that is what they’re dealing with in that part of the world. And we were here thinking they were just unreasonable.

So yeah, that’s an example of us changing the conversations, asking questions, being more facilitative in our approach and really understanding each other and connecting with each other and building the empathy so that we can work together better because trust is there.

Douglas Ferguson:

I remember also you talking about the China team and deploying some different techniques and meetings there to get them more engaged.

Roselle Junio:

Yes. The China team, they’re very soft-spoken. If you don’t call on them, they will not speak. So we really have to make sure that when we have them in meetings and we have to always have them in the meetings because they’re integral part of the team, we either make sure that we call on them. Or if we feel like they’re not comfortable speaking in the big groups, we would have breakout sessions just specifically to get them to speak. It’s a one-on-one thing.

We would have several co-facilitators be in calls with them in separate breakout rooms with them and just talking to them one-on-one and getting them to share their thoughts and their ideas, and those co-facilitators are just writing all of these down. And then when we go back to the big group, we share what we learned as facilitators in those breakout sessions. And then if they’re comfortable, and usually they are after the one-on-ones, they can expound out in the bigger group.

And now we hear their voices and they feel that their opinions matter, that we are including them in the conversation. It takes a while, and they still go and climb up. But as facilitators, we need to figure out how to pivot within the meeting to get everybody to speak and share their thoughts and ideas.

Douglas Ferguson:

And you mentioning the co-facilitators reminded me of how you talked about that being a really important leadership opportunity for you to bring others in and encourage new behaviors on the team, so giving them opportunities to lead and co-lead sessions really level them up. So I’m curious to hear how that’s going and maybe what was critical in making that successful?

Roselle Junio:

To be honest, I have to show them that it’s okay to make mistakes in sessions, because that’s what they’re afraid of. That’s why they don’t want to lead conversations. They don’t want to facilitate. And I can’t facilitate all of our meetings. We have probably, I don’t know, 40 meetings a week. So we really needed people to step up to lead these things. And I don’t want to generalize. I’m talking about my team. My team is generally not confident in themselves, and they get struck by imposter syndrome all the time.

I’m not enough. I don’t have the right to lead meetings with directors or managers in my calls. And that’s what they need to overcome. They have the potential to be great facilitators, but it’s the fear of messing up that really keeps them from thriving. Anyway, going back to your question, it’s just me being on calls with them before the meeting, prepping for the meeting, being in the meeting with them side by side and showing them it’s okay to pause. It’s okay to go back to your notes.

It’s okay to say, “I need your help to do this, Mark. What do you think, Dave?” So those kinds of opportunities within the meeting where you tell them that you’re going to… Well, I prep them though. I do tell them that, “I’m going to call on you, okay,” so they don’t get too scared or nervous because they know I’m going to call on them. And then after that we debrief. We talk to each other and say, “What do you think you did well? What are the things that didn’t work out? How do we become better facilitators?

Okay, next week you’re going to be the lead facilitator. I’ll just be in the background and help.” Now that’s what I do. I rarely lead meetings nowadays. I’m mostly in the background, and it hurts me because I am not practicing my facilitations skills that much, so anyway.

Douglas Ferguson:

Another thing I was curious to hear more about in person was this idea that other people in the organization are starting to notice that your meetings are run really well. I’m curious, any stories there or just any anecdotes to make that come to life?

Roselle Junio:

So I was in a meeting with some leaders and we were talking about how my team is going to help with several business problems we need to solve. And I did say, “Okay, out of the maybe 10 things that we talked about, we can help with one, two, and three.” And then one of the directors after the meeting she said, “As we go through all of these things, I hope that every after a meeting or a workshop or whatever, we send a summary, and we follow up on actions, and we just organize it better.”

And then she said, “Well, I’m not going to say that to you, Roselle, because your team always does that anyway.” So that was in front of a lot of leaders and I felt validated. My team really does their homework and make sure that we prepare not just ourselves, but also the participants and run the meetings as expected based on the goals, objectives that we’ve set, and then make sure that we summarize, we follow up, and be prepared for the next meeting. So I felt that that was really cool, and then I shared that with my team. I was, “You guys just make me look good.”

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s awesome. So a couple things as we wrap up. First, what’s your next big thing? What’s on the horizon?

Roselle Junio:

In our conversation last time where I build my facilitation portfolio, I wanted to build a facilitation service. But I realized that’s not what is needed in the organization because a lot of people lead meetings, facilitate workshops, and like us are accidental facilitators too. Instead of building that service, I just wanted to create a community within, first, my immediate team or the team that we support. I don’t know if it grows and it grows like a facilitation community. Very similar to what you do, Douglas.

I like copying people, but also to encourage everyone to take formal classes too. Because in SAP, even though we’re a big company and we can learn from each other, the tools that I learned from the cohort in Voltage Control, I don’t think I would’ve picked up some of them within SAP. I don’t know, right? But it just felt like it just opened so many things for me. Right now I’m reading a book recommended by one of the cohort participants. It’s called Good Talk.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, Daniel Stillman’s book.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah. So I’m just starting and it’s like, oh wow. It’s like this is powerful. And it’s not just meetings, it’s also relationship conversations. It’s beautiful. Again, something that I’m still benefiting from months after the cohort, and I am very grateful for that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Well, I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Roselle Junio:

I’m very passionate about creating safe, inclusive, and empowering spaces for people, whether it be virtual or face-to-face, either in families, in communities, in the workplace, especially for multicultural team. And what I learned really is that whether it’s multicultural or not, the approach is going to be different per group, per person. It’s not a one size fits all approach.

And I use different tools and approaches, advice from different people, things that I learned from the cohort to intentionally exercise, trust building actions and different approaches that embraces the differences, the diversity in the groups that I interact with, because I think anyone can lead as long as you have the right tools and the right intention and if your purpose is aligned.

Because after all, we’re all humans. We eat the same food. We love the same way, I’m sure. Our hearts break maybe differently, but I’m just saying that we’re all just humans trying to navigate and wanting to be happy and belong. So let’s be beautifully flawed together.

Douglas Ferguson:

Incredible. Well, Roselle, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and thank you for that final sentiment. And I look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Roselle Junio:

Thank you, Douglas. Thank you for the opportunity. I had fun, and I’ll reach out to some of my classmates, because it made me think about them and I’ll connect. Thanks, again, Douglas.

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 Impactful Facilitation Techniques for Building Multicultural Teams appeared first on Voltage Control.

“It was a humbling experience because I was the one leading those unproductive meetings or leading the teams astray and just talking about the work and really not having any action items or decisive plan of action afterwards. It was both a humbling experience but also really exciting because I felt like it was that itch that was finally scratched for me. You see it in action and you realize, yep, that’s what I’m looking for. That’s really cool, I like that.” – Dom Michalec

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson talks with Dom Michalec, a product coach at Pathfinder Product. Dom shares his journey into facilitation, emphasizing the importance of effective collaboration within teams. He discusses his experiences implementing liberating structures from the book “Liberating Structures” into his meetings, leading to improved idea generation and decision-making. Dom also highlights the importance of refining facilitation skills and behaviors, not just acquiring tools. The conversation further explores Dom’s work at Pathfinder Product, the challenges of designing effective one-hour workshops, and the concept of coaching up. The episode concludes with a discussion on the importance of facilitation as a leadership skill and the need for continuous learning in the field.

Show Highlights

[00:01:24] Dom’s start in facilitating workshops

[00:13:29] Challenges in Workshop Design

[00:20:06] The enduring pop up rules

[00:26:17] Coaching up in one-on-one meetings

[00:29:30] Facilitation as the Leadership Skill of the Future

[00:31:46] The Importance of Curiosity in Facilitation

Links | Resources

Dom on Linkedin

About the Guest

Dom’s passion for product began early in his career while working in healthcare IT startups. Since then, Dom has focused on helping Product teams see the Why through the How when it comes to tackling tough problems on behalf of customers and business. Dom specializes in aligning business/product strategies, behavior design, product discovery, and agility.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

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 Dom Michalec, at Pathfinder Product, where he coaches product managers, designers, software engineers, and managers, in product management principles and practices. Part of his practice includes facilitating workshops for teams looking to hone their product strategies and goals for innovation. Welcome to the show, Dom.

Dom Michalec:

Thanks, Douglas. Appreciate you having me on. Looking forward to the discussion.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. It’s great to have you here. So let’s roll the clock back and just think for a moment about how Dom got his start in facilitating workshops and working with product leaders. What were some of those formative moments that got you into this work?

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. I would say thinking about the past, working as a product manager, there’s a lot of different disciplines that product managers have to interact with on a day-to-day basis. We’re not the ones building the product. We’re not the ones engineering it, we’re not designing it. But nonetheless, we need to learn how to interact with those type of folks and interact with the dynamics that they bring to the table day in and day out.

So I think I learned fairly quickly as a product manager. Facilitation, whether I knew it or not at the time, I don’t think I had a term for it, but I knew there had to be something that I could do as a manager of a product to ensure that all these different disciplines, all these different personalities, all these different skills that people brought to the table somehow could coalesce into something really, really cool. Otherwise, we weren’t going to make progress on anything that we were trying to accomplish as a team.

So again, thinking back in time, really facilitation was what I was seeking. I just couldn’t put a term to it, but I knew deep down that there had to have been something out there for these different groups to be able to interact and work effectively together.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so thinking back into the time where that work was happening, do you recall a time when it became apparent to you that, wow, this is called facilitation, or this is facilitation that’s happening?

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. And it took a really great facilitator to show me what was possible. Honestly, I would say working in innovation, there’s a lot of opportunities for third parties to come in and work with teams on a variety of topics, whatever it may be.

There was an early time in my career where we actually brought in a… They weren’t necessarily called a professional facilitator, but they led a workshop with us. It was, I guess you would call it a design sprint these days. But it was only a one-day workshop where essentially, they were there as an unbiased third party to ensure that we were getting out of the time the things that we needed to get as a team. And as I’m sure you’re probably well aware, it’s really hard to both participate in a meeting and facilitate a meeting at the same time. There needs to be some semblance of a delineation between those two roles.

So I remember very distinctly walking away from some of these workshops wondering, “What the hell was that? That was awesome. What did they just do?” And being able to reverse engineer that and study the topic a little bit more, I realized, “This is an actual thing. These people are professional facilitators. They call them workshops, but they’re professional facilitators and helping guide us as a team in our decision-making, in our idea generation, and ultimately what we plan on doing after this time together.”

That was really cool to see. And it really sparked my interest, because these were great workshops. I had a lot of fun. We got a lot of really great work done. I just didn’t know, what is this alchemy that this person used to get us to get here. And come to find out that alchemy is just nothing more than really great facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And that story rings true to me, and I’ve seen countless others have similar experiences where you witness someone else do it, or you’re the recipient of a great meeting, a great facilitation. And especially when that comes in a world where you’re used to really bad meetings or really poor facilitation, it’s quite something to behold. Right? You definitely notice it.

Dom Michalec:

Oh yeah. Yeah. It was a humbling experience, because I was the one leading those unproductive meetings or leading the teams astray and just talking about the work, and really not having any action items or decisive plan of action afterwards. So it was both humbling experience, but also really exciting because I felt like, I don’t know, it was the itch that was finally scratched for you. You see it in action and you realize, “Yep, that’s what I’m looking for. That’s really cool. I like that.”

Douglas Ferguson:

And so once you got exposed through observing these facilitators, what was the first thing you did?

Dom Michalec:

The first thing I did was… And this is just my personal style, I like to go off on my own and go very deep into a subject before I reach out to folks to learn more about their perspectives or maybe where I should go next.

And from that, I would say the very first thing I did was I bought the Liberating Structures book, and I read it. It’s a pretty thick book, and I read it over the course of a weekend, and it didn’t feel like a chore. In fact, I was looking for opportunities to cancel plans or move things around in my weekend just to get through this book, because I really, really thought it was awesome.

And I think the reason why I did that was because after this workshop, I asked the facilitator, “Hey, what are these things? What did you do? What are these tactics?” And he said, straight up, “These are just Liberating Structures. How I structured the invitation and how I structured our time together, those weren’t my ideas. Those are just tools that I used to help teams get the things done that they want to get done.”

So he introduced me to the book immediately. I fell in love. I read the book front and back, and then I just came up from the surface. I tried putting these things into practice right away. The whole 1-2-4-All Liberating Structure I think even as advertised in the book is the gateway Liberating Structure for the rest of them. So start here. And I started implementing it immediately in my meetings after that with my team.

I saw that they were, in fact, easy to use and really powerful tools for helping teams basically surface the best ideas and take action on the ones that the team thinks are most important moving forward.

So coupling my deep dive into the book, putting them into practice, seeing firsthand just how important and awesome these things were led me to thinking about designing my own workshops and facilitating my own workshops.

And I think when we get to where I’m at today, me understanding where those workshops fell flat is when I first wanted to reach out and go through the program with Eric and you, Douglas, at Voltage Control.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m really curious, as you were starting to see some of this initial success and getting to use some of the tools, what do you think was the gap between feeling like some of the things fell flat, versus also feeling the tools were easy to use, and you were able to make some progress, but there are still some gaps left to fill? How would you quantify those, or what was really going on there?

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. I would break it down into three distinct buckets, skills, tools, and behaviors. I had the tools. I was using the tools. My skillset wasn’t quite there yet, and the types of behaviors that I needed to exhibit as a facilitator weren’t quite there yet.

So I would say the tools are the tools and they’re easy to use, but it’s almost like an apprentice type of a situation where you’re introduced to a tool, you start using it, playing around with it, generating some value through using it. But it’s really the skills behind the tools that matter and the behaviors that you exhibit through those skills that ultimately mattered the most. I think that’s where the gap was. I had the tools, but the skills and the behaviors were lagging my use of the tools.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I talked to a lot of folks that just are so focused on want to learn new tools. I want to get some more tools in my tool belt. And it’s like, man, that’s great and all, but how about spending some time really refining the nuance?

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong. I think it’s a natural progression of expertise where you have your fun and games type of time with a tool, but then you realize, “Okay, there’s more here to explore. I know how to use the tool. What am I missing?” It’s like, well, you need some skill in order to use the tool effectively.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And so you realized these gaps, you came, you took the program. And then I think one thing that was really cool is we had an opportunity to bring alumni in. And we have these opportunities periodically, and there was one in particular that we were able to bring you into last spring, late spring I think it was. It was really fun to see you in action alongside of other alumni as well. That’s a personal reward for me is when I get to bring alumni together and put them in front of clients or in front of real scenarios and to situations. So I’m kind of curious from your perspective, what was that like as an alumni to see alumni from other cohorts, and even get put into an environment that might be a little different than what you run into at Pathfinder?

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. I would say what was really insightful for me, and why I really enjoyed that experience for folks listening to this episode is both you, Douglas and Eli, kind of picked the tools ahead of time that we were going to use, which is fantastic because I didn’t have to think about that stuff. But then it brought it to prominence this topic of skills and behaviors.

And I think having gone through the certification program, if I may, I learned the behaviors necessary to put the skills into practice I.e., it was really nice to see a lot of things that we learned in the program surface. I don’t want to say it came naturally, because I definitely had to think about this stuff and it might’ve felt a little bit mechanical from my perspective. But I definitely knew, okay, before we go into an exercise, I need to explain to the team, what are we supposed to get out of this exercise? What should we be able to do because we did this exercise? And really start from that outcome and then work backwards towards using this tool to help us get there. And feathering your cap, Douglas, I would never have thought of approaching these activities in that way from that perspective had I not gone through the program.

So for me, it was nice because I felt more confident in the ability to focus on the skills and the behaviors. And you kind of took care of the tooling ahead of time. It’s like, “Okay, now this is my opportunity to not worry about the tools and really focus on the things that I need to get better at.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think that’s an important distinction. And I saw some folks really have some profound shifts at that event specifically, and I think it’s because they don’t have to do the design. They don’t have to worry about the methods or whether or not that got designed properly. You can really just lean into the execution.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. And focus on the things that, quite frankly, I see a lot of facilitators, professional workshop facilitators, maybe even they need to harness themselves and get better at themselves. It’s less about the tools. It’s more about how you bring those tools into the space that help people do the things they ultimately want to do.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, and how you show up.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. So coming back to the Pathfinder work, I’m kind of curious. Clearly when you’re doing workshops at Pathfinder, you have to design the workshops, so you’re responsible for the selection of the tools. And so it’s the tools, the behaviors, and the skills.

But beside the mechanics there, what are some differences? You’ve got these cross-functional teams, product managers, engineers. I mean, clearly in that event, it was a bunch of folks that don’t work together trying to create solutions for big grandiose problems. But I would imagine you have your own set of challenges when you’re working with the Pathfinder clients. They’re cross-function, and so they have competing needs and desires, and you’re having to help them walk through those challenges together. I’d love to hear a little bit more about the kinds of things that you typically run into in your workshops.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. I’ll speak to the things that I normally run into, and how maybe I have learned some tough lessons and overcome those. Early on, I would come into workshops not having done anything ahead of time to really get the pulse of the room that I’m walking into. Usually I’m working with a sponsor or a key stakeholder, and the lens of the workshop kind of flows through them, or had flowed through them, and didn’t have an opportunity to get a heat check from the folks who were actually going to be in the room.

So I’ll give you an example. There was a workshop I was doing. It was an objectives and key results workshop, where the purpose of the workshop was by the end of this workshop, everyone should feel confident in the direction of their objectives and key results. So what does that predicate? Obviously, people are going to have to be able to pitch these ideas and get feedback from these ideas. So there’s some tangible artifacts here that folks were going to have to present. Coming into the workshop, it was very apparent that the vast majority of folks had no idea what an objective and what a key result was.

So had I known that, there would’ve been some training involved on top of the workshop, I.e. talking with the sponsors like, oh yeah, they’ve done objectives and key results before. This should be old hat for them. That was not the case.

So I don’t want to say the workshop felt flat. We still got some really good value out of it, but it would’ve been even better had I had a chance to get a pulse check of the team. Like, “Hey, what is your comfort level with this topic? What are you most skeptical about? Where do you see an opportunity to learn more about this topic before we do a workshop together?” Those types of questions that I now ask, that I didn’t previously ask before.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s always our assumptions that get us in trouble, right? And sometimes our assumptions are based on good faith actions. Right? We ask the sponsor and they say, “Yeah, they know,” and then we just assume, “Okay, the sponsor knows, has a pulse.” And that always bites us when we don’t quite know how people are walking in. And we’re never inside everyone’s head perfectly, but the more we can know, the better. Right? Because to your point, it’s like it might not fall flat, but it maybe prevented it from flourishing.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, well put. I wholeheartedly agree with that. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

So OKRs, that makes sense that y’all would do OKRs workshops. What other kinds of workshops are you typically running?

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, I’ve really started to introduce teams to product discovery type of concepts. So for folks who are listening to this and you’re like, “What’s product discovery?” It’s basically a key skill in a product manager’s tool belt that helps them make better decisions around what it is we’re actually going to build to provide value to our business, as well as the people we’re building the products for. I don’t think it’s a well-kept secret that a lot of times that teams will just build something, it’ll fall flat, no one uses it, no one really likes, it doesn’t really solve their problem. So how can we make better decisions to help us get closer to something that’s actually going to solve a problem for someone, that’s going to be a massive commercial success for our team and our business as a whole?

So the workshops in and of itself really focus in on helping teams put a lot of what they learn in the training into practice. I am very bullish on the idea of mixing in short training with, “Okay, now let’s apply this stuff right away to see what went well, what didn’t go well, what was awkward, where did we flourish as a team? Where did I flourish as an individual?” And then take a step back and then maybe do a little bit more training and dive into the workshops.

So these workshops are not days long workshops. In fact, they’re only an hour or two at a time, but they’re coupled with training on a concept ahead of time. So whether that’s an asynchronous video of me, recording of me walking through a concept or we do it live, I immediately want to follow up that training, that short bite-sized training with application of a concept in a workshop.

So by the end of these workshops, we should have some semblance of confidence in our ability to identify outcomes or identify prototyping ideas that could help us gain credible evidence towards a particular topic or whatever it may be.

So for me as a facilitator, especially as I’m coaching folks, I need to see the application of content. I need to see where they’re excited, where they’re doing really well, and maybe where they’re falling flat a little bit, because then that is input for my next training on a particular topic where maybe I need to double down on some things or rehash some things that we talked about in previous training times together, and maybe where I can move on to more higher level or more advanced concepts, if you will.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And so you mentioned that these are one-hour workshops, and I find that intriguing because the thing about one hour workshops is they can often be really difficult. Because by the time you set the space, and enter people into the space, and get them comfortable, and get things moving, then now it’s time to shut everything down. So in [inaudible 00:19:46] parlance, by the time you open, it’s time to start closing. So I’m kind of curious, given that that’s the world you have to live in by just the constraints that you’re in, what do you find as some of your go-to moves to design a one-hour workshop that’s still effective given your context?

Dom Michalec:

I cannot stress the importance of pop-up rules, enduring pop-up rules, if you will. Especially for teams that I’m working with over the course of four or five, six months, ensuring that we know how to navigate the time effectively together and how we can help each other reach our destinations in a very productive way.

I don’t think without having those pop-up rules throughout our sessions that endure as time goes on, if we didn’t have those, I think we would run into exactly what you’re talking about, which is we’re just getting warmed up and then we’re already starting to shut it down.

I’ve been very fortunate to work with very, what I would consider to be high emotionally intelligent teams that understand that the rules are not there to stifle them, but they’re there to help navigate the time effectively together. Much like I use the metaphor of these rules, they’re no different than stoplights, and stop signs, and yield signs. It’s not there to tag you if you do something incorrectly, but you need to get to your destination effectively, and these signs are there to help you get there. And these rules are no different.

So setting up a time with the teams ahead to say, “Hey, what are going to be our enduring pop-up rules for our time together? Why are these rules that we select important?” And having the team sign off on those and feel ownership in those has helped out a lot.

So having a space for the team to come together and figure out what rules they want to adhere to. And I guide them. I’m not saying go figure out your own rules, but help guiding the teams around what are the rules that we need to ensure that we are constantly abiding by when we come together for these workshops. What is it, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Let’s slow down a little bit ahead of time so we can go fast as time goes on.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I like this idea of the enduring pop-up rules. So once we’ve established them, when we meet together in this space, we’ve already kind of set these expectations that that’s how we will be together in this space, every time we reenter. Then you’re designing a long arc of a workshop. You’re just kind of administering it in small pieces.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, exactly. I would say one of the nice things I really learned from the certification program was how to properly design a workshop, and that’s exactly what I do. I use that template to say, “Okay, what is the arc of our time together?” And I use the same format for what is the arc for this specific time together. What’s the arc for this specific time together? And are we making progress towards those outcomes that I originally set out, that were supposed to be four or five, six months down the line? For this one week, where are we making progress towards those outcomes? So yeah, absolutely, 100%.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think also I’m picking up on something that you didn’t explicitly state, but I bet is really critical to your success and being able to do this in one hour. And so correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume you’re being really explicit about the one thing we’re going to do in that hour, and not trying to bake in too much, like your objectives or your outcomes you’re trying to drive to are limited in some significant way so that you can accomplish it in an hour.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. Actually, I think that’s a very poignant call out there, Douglas. Usually the outcomes are some flavor of, I want people to feel confident in something. I want them to sense some new emerging excitement on the concept, whatever it may be.

And we do check. I mean, in true Voltage Control fashion, we do our debriefs to make sure that we either made progress towards, or didn’t in some cases. I’m not saying it’s always successful, sometimes we don’t hit our outcomes. But I always like to use the last 10 minutes of these workshops say, “Hey, do you feel more confident now than when you walked in this room on using your opportunity solution trees,” or whatever, “To think about some experiments you might want to run next week with your team?” If I get thumbs up, or people will get really excited and they want to use the 10 minutes to expound upon that, I know it was a success. But yeah, the outcomes are always focused in on some flavor of confidence or a sense of a new ability before we leave the space together.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I really like that assessment point at the end of the session just to make sure that we’re clear on, did we land this plane or not?

Dom Michalec:

And again, it is key. I use that debrief time as… I’m just going to be selfish for a second. That is my time as a facilitator to think, “Okay, what do I need to do for the next training session to close the gap on something we didn’t close this session? Or where can I move on to more advanced topics if everyone feels very confident in their ability to use these new skills or tools with their teams going forward?”

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting that you use the word selfish, because I think it’s really in service of the attendees. If you’re really being mindful of what needs to be done next time and you’re using the time at the end to be really thoughtful about how you attune to the needs, that’s putting them front and center, just acknowledging the fact that that’s necessary. And even if they’re excited about doing something else, hitting the pause button so you can make that determination is really in their best interest.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way, but I appreciate it. I’m going to start thinking of it that way moving forward.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. There you go. Amazing. Well, I’m just trying to be mindful of time here. There’s one thing I want to hit on before we talk about closing here, but let’s hear a little bit about this concept of coaching up. I know that’s something that you’re big proponents of there at Pathfinder, and I’d just like to give you a chance to talk a little bit more about that, and how facilitation plays a role in this program.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, I’ll give you a direct example. So a lot of times, I’m working with product managers that report to directors of product, VPs of product, group product managers, whatever. They have someone that they report to.

And I use a lot of the concepts, facilitation concepts in helping product managers facilitate or better facilitate their one-on-one meetings with the people that they report to.

I’ve noticed a need for this, not necessarily facilitation techniques, but a need that product managers have that every time I’m in a one-on-one meeting, we spend less time thinking about ways of helping me develop or coaching me and becoming a better product manager. We spend more time on status updates. A lot of these one-on-ones are, “Hey, what are you working on? Where are we making progress?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it may be.

And a lot of these product managers realize that this time really should be spent to help coach and develop me to competency or even beyond competency in the role that I play with this company.

And so a lot of times when I work with product managers, I structure our one-on-one time. So when I’m coaching them, I structure our one-on-one time to ensure that we have a true purpose for why we’re meeting, that we have a clear outcome for what we should be able to do after this one-on-one session together. And that between those two paths, that we make progress towards that stuff.

And quite literally, I say, “The way that you and I meet, I as your coach, you should also be meeting with your directors of product, your VPs of product, your group product managers in a similar fashion. So use these techniques, use these tools that I present to you during our one-on-one time, and see how they help transform your one-on-one meetings with the people that you report directly to.”

So the idea of coaching up is giving and arming the folks, these individual contributors, arming them with the behaviors, the skills, and the tools to help make their time critical and valuable, and a lot of times scant time with their leadership teams, making those more productive and more beneficial other than just delivering a status update of where things may be with their day-to-day work.

The facilitation techniques and the tools are arming them to do the behaviors necessary to coach up in their organizations and show in, a lot of times, if I may, show their leadership team what these one-on-one times really should be used for and can be used for.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. I’m a big fan of helping others start to just see how leading in new ways might be more powerful, might be more effective. And what a great gift just to show up and say, “Hey, can we do this a little differently?” Rather than saying, “You’re doing this wrong,” but, “Here are some needs that I have.” And then the great leaders are going to realize, “Oh, wow, I should be doing all of my one-on-ones this way, or I should be running all my meetings like this.” I love it.

Dom Michalec:

I think something that you and I could not be more aligned on is facilitation really being the leadership skill of the future, personally. I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I’ve just read a lot of your content, and that is a theme that I notice a lot of times, and I couldn’t agree more.

But leadership doesn’t necessarily mean the manager. It can be an individual contributor showing other people what good leadership looks like as well. And if you’re able to facilitate productive time together with the folks in your organization, whether you report to them or not, it doesn’t really matter. Exhibiting leadership is not a managerial skill. It’s a leadership skill. And using facilitation to put that into practice is a great place to start.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And the facilitation and helping humans relate, and collaborate, and function better at work is only going to be more and more important, especially as AI gets more and more sophisticated and more things become considered rote. The idea of writing a complex thesis becomes considered rote.

What are required of our brains at that point, and how we come together, and fuse our brains in interesting ways. And I think facilitation is going to be more and more key to doing those things and unlocking that value.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah. I think as the amp is cranked up on the amount of information that’s going to be flowing across our desks and into our heads on a day in and day out basis, we still need to be able to use that information for something to make some decision somewhere down the line with a group of people. And that’s why I think facilitation is going to be enduring, because as the amp is cranked up on information, the need to facilitate and guide what we do with that information as a team is only going to become more and more important as time goes along.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely, and hopefully it becomes a ubiquitous skill. Because the more people on the team that understand the mechanics, the better the team, right? Then the big team becomes almost self-facilitating, right? Because everyone understands these things and we just do it and live it. I think that’s a phenomenal state to imagine us getting to at some point.

Dom Michalec:

Yeah, I’d love that. I think that’d be awesome.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to give you a chance to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Dom Michalec:

I’ll say this. Even if you’re a seasoned facilitator or you’re someone who is just dipping the toe and is curious about what facilitation can and cannot do, just being curious about what’s next, where you can get better I think is, I mean, especially as, I am by no means a master facilitator, but I’m better today than I was last year just because I stayed curious and I stayed open to learning new things. I think no matter what, that curiosity needs to be almost table stakes for being a good facilitator.

So that’s just my parting thought is do a gut check on your curiosity to learn new things, to challenge yourself, to challenge how you’ve been doing things in the past, to ultimately help serve folks with your skills in the future. Just stay curious. I think that’s really the parting thought. That’s the TLDR of it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Dom, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Dom Michalec:

Thanks, Douglas. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely.

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 Making Meetings Less Painful and More Productive appeared first on Voltage Control.

“When you just take the time to apply a few of these facilitation techniques, it really can help people focus, help them make better, more efficient decisions, and ultimately feel like they’re all bought in on it.” – Phil Canning

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson talks to Phil Canning, leader of the Human Centered Design Studio and Facilitation Practice at Ally Financial. They discuss Phil’s journey into facilitation, the importance of design thinking, and how it has transformed the way Ally Financial operates. Phil shares his experiences of facilitating workshops, emphasizing the need to create a safe and inclusive environment. They also discuss the importance of cross-industry learning and the transformative power of facilitation. The episode concludes with an encouragement for listeners to explore the potential of facilitation in their own work environments.

Show Highlights

[00:01:22] The moment facilitation started to come into your work

[00:07:01] Expanding the use of facilitation techniques

[00:19:56] Start with the end

[00:24:55] Designing for empathy and define

[00:31:14] Exportation: Drawing Inspiration from Other Industries

[00:41:05] Applicability of Facilitation

Links | Resources

Phil on Linkedin

About the Guest

Phil Canning grew up in North Carolina and currently resides in Charlotte. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from University of Notre Dame (go Irish!) and M.B.A. from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He’s worked in industrial chemicals, music and entertainment, and banking doing a variety of jobs from engineering to supply chain, accounting to product management, and now innovation. In his current role, Phil works at Ally Financial as Director of TM Studio, Ally’s human-centered design and facilitation practice. When he’s not at work helping teams collaborate and innovate more effectively, Phil can be found cooking up tasty meals for his family, goofing off with his two sons, and listening to his vinyl record collection.  

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Full 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 Phil Canning of Ally Financial, where he leads the company’s human-centered design studio and facilitation practice, TM Studio. Welcome to the show, Phil.

Phil Canning:

Hi, Douglas. Thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to be here. Always love talking to alumni and hearing the amazing stories and great work that they’re doing post certification.

Phil Canning:

Awesome. Yeah, happy to chat.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s roll the tape all the way back to before certification and when facilitation started to even come into your purview, into your context of work. And I believe it came through by way of design thinking that your manager had attended a conference and you started to get curious. And so let’s go back to that moment. What was it like there at Ally and how were things changing?

Phil Canning:

Yeah, so I was hired at Ally as the title was innovation manager. And I thought, that’s interesting. I have no idea what that is. And little did I learn that they didn’t really know what that was either, but they knew they wanted more innovation to happen. And a few months into the role, my supervisor, my boss came back from a d.school workshop. A bunch of the executives went out to Stanford d.school and took their design thinking workshop and they just came back fired up and said, “Holy cow, we’re a customer obsessed organization. We need to be doing this. We need to be applying this, using it.” And I just happened to be in a spot where, “What are we going to do with Phil? Well, he is the innovation manager. Maybe he needs to spearhead this effort and get training on this and learn more about it.”

It was a meeting one day where my boss brought me into her office and we talked about this conference and she was just elate, just very inspired, very encouraged about how common sense it is, but also just how effective it is. It was a no-brainer, like we need to be using this. And so we basically were given the green light to spin up a… It’s called TM Studio, just our human-centered design studio offsite. So let’s put a team out there, let’s leave them alone, let’s let them use this framework and let’s hand them some kind of different challenges that maybe the bank doesn’t have the bandwidth or the focus to tackle. And so that’s exactly what we did. We got into a really small space, had a team of just four or five. We all took some design thinking training, and then we just started doing it.

It was very grassroots, very startup feel, which I completely loved. I never envisioned myself working at a bank. My background isn’t in banking, and it was like this liberating feeling of here’s a problem, go solve it the way you guys think it should be solved. And we did that. We would walk the streets and literally interview people and build empathy about how do you manage your finances and how do you save and how did you choose your bank? And I mean, just all kinds of different questions that you can just approach anybody in Uptown Charlotte. There are a lot of other competing banks. So we were a little concerned maybe we’d run into some other folks, but it was just a great energizing experience and we learned a lot and we also had a bunch of success doing that. So that was the initial lean towards design thinking.

And so we were doing that for a while. COVID hit, we went remote, but we continued to work on a lot of different challenges for the bank using design thinking. And I started saying to myself, we’re just one team out working on these things one at a time and it feels like we could have a bigger impact and help more people at the company use this methodology the way we’re using it. And so why don’t we start delivering training, right? Because design thinking is a pretty basic framework to learn, but I think everyone has their own sort of style of applying it, and that’s dependent on things like the type of industry you’re in and the team you have and the certain types of challenges you face, and just the culture of the company. So we felt like, wow, we’ve ironed this thing out and we’re clicking along really well.

We know how to apply this, especially to banking challenges. Let’s teach others. So that was my pitch to my group to say let’s design our own session. So that really for me was the trigger that got me searching for different like I need to learn how to do this. I wasn’t a facilitator, we weren’t teaching design thinking, we were just practicing it. It looked like a great program. I had taken some workshops with you all before and then took the facilitator certification program and it just opened my eyes to like, oh, wow, this isn’t about just me learning how to conduct a design thinking workshop. This is actually just about how to help people in all sorts of different meetings and workshops and just help the company work more effectively. So I felt like I had stumbled on this sort of treasure trove of techniques and tactics that I could take even further.

I was like, yes, we’re definitely going to execute on these design thinking workshops, but I started thinking, wow, we could maybe do other things here. We could just help people with their strategy sessions when they’re thinking about the next three years and we can help teams just make faster, more collaborative decisions. I mean, just simple things like, hey, instead of us just arguing or throwing our opinions around the room, let’s all grab the sticky notes and for five minutes, let’s get our own ideas down. Then we’re going to post them up and have discussion and start grouping. Just some really basic techniques that I learned that have so much applicability to more running better meetings at Ally and just teams walking away.

It’s funny. Sometimes I feel like it’s not that impressive or earth-shattering these techniques, but you’d be surprised how many people are walking away from meetings being like, “Oh my God, that was so much better than anything we could have done.” And I was like, yeah, I mean it’s not rocket science, but when you just take the time to apply a few of these facilitation techniques, it really can help people focus, help them make better, more efficient decisions, and ultimately feel like they’re all bought in on it. I think that’s another huge component is just feeling like they’re part of the decision-making process.

Douglas Ferguson:

So tell me more about that feeling like they’re a part of the decision-making process and feeling more bought in. I think that’s a really key point. And why do you think that is? Why do you think there was a shift there?

Phil Canning:

And I don’t know if maybe it’s particularly in a corporate environment where there is hierarchy and it feels like the leader or the top manager is the one that makes the decisions, and then everyone else just follows on those decisions. But that’s actually not the best way to keep people. The people that are actually doing that work and executing on that objective or that strategy, they’re going to be way more bought in if they feel like they were actually the ones to craft that strategy or come up with those solutions. I mean, it’s basic stuff and people just don’t think about it enough because they’re just trying to get things done.

It’s like, well, we just have to do this, and so you do this, you do this and this is how we’re going to do it. And it’s like they walk away feeling not very motivated. They feel clear on what they’re supposed to do, but not super motivated. And so I think that’s where facilitation has played a pretty key role in me helping just… Actually leaders at the company, they want their employees to craft the strategy and to come up with the solutions because they know the work way better than those leaders. Do you know what I’m saying? So I think that’s why that feeling bought in is just a super critical piece to executing on a strategy.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. I mean, people had to feel like they’re included in the process to feel a sense of ownership. In fact, at Voltage Control, I’ve outlawed the term buy-in because it assumes that you’re selling something.

Phil Canning:

Oh, yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Well, I work at a bank, so excuse if I use some corporate-y jargon, I’ll try to refrain from too much of that.

Douglas Ferguson:

All good. I’m curious you were talking about in the early days when you started to create the studio, it was a small group and you went offsite and it created a lot of opportunity even going out on the street to ask questions. How has that evolved? Is it more than one cohort at the moment? How many people are going through the program? How have you changed or adapted it over the years?

Phil Canning:

Yeah, so we’ve stuck to, believe it or not, we have not expanded a whole lot. In other words, we still keep a pretty small team that is at the studio, and that’s extremely intentional. In fact, just through learning lessons, there was a time last year where we expanded just through various, it’s just the way the cards were dealt. We found ourselves with a few more people at the studio, and so the team was actually getting a little bit large. I think we had a team of almost 10 people and it slowed us down. So this is not one of these things where can we add more manpower to move faster and all that? It’s like actually no. The key is to keep it pretty small so that decisions can be made efficiently and quickly and you can keep that bias towards action that design thinking is all about.

Douglas Ferguson:

We always find that seven’s that magic number of having the right number of people in the room. You can go a little bit below it, a little bit above it, but you start veering too far away from that and you get into trouble. And that’s why I was curious if you had spun up multiple cohorts because multiple small groups in parallel can still be poised for action, but it sounds like you’ve opted for let’s keep one group, let’s keep them small and keep them nimble.

Phil Canning:

Yeah, we’ve gone a little bit back and forth. After that group of 10, we said, “Hold on, we’re moving a little too slow.” We did actually split them up into groups of five. So we’ve done that a little bit where we’ve had no more than two cohorts now, but that’s our sweet spot right now. And then from that, I have spun off what we’re just calling our facilitation practice. And so I made a couple hires to find people that particularly wanted to facilitate with me, and so there’s sort of this training and education arm of the studio, and so we were the ones that are going out and talking to other groups at Ally and recruiting them to learn about design thinking and hosting those one or two-day workshops. We have a variety.

I have a condensed three-hour workshop that I can get more folks to sign up for, and then a longer form sort of soup to nuts where we’re literally cutting up cardboard boxes and building prototypes and the whole nine yards of design thinking. So we offer a variety, but that’s in addition to we keep the team undistracted and heads down working on one challenge at a time still. That’s our secret recipe and it seems to work pretty well.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so the facilitation practice is more about helping the broader organization understand these ways of working and that the learning piece that you were talking about.

Phil Canning:

Yeah, it’s really twofold. So there’s the learning piece where that’s specifically about, it’s more of a teaching workshop to learn human-centered design, and then the other piece of facilitation is just ad hoc, hey, there’s a leader here that wants to have a big come together meeting with all of the senior leaders in his or her organization and they want to work on breaking down silos or something like that. And those are the real where I get to really stretch myself as a facilitator and design it from scratch and say, “All right, what are your objectives? What do you want to get out of this? Who’s going to be in the room? When can I get in there ahead of time to make sure…”

Those are the fun ones where if I hadn’t have gone through that facilitation certification program, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence or just the knowledge to say, “Well, let’s just try this because I feel like I can apply some of these techniques.” And between liberating structures and gamestorming is another one of my huge… Stringing together some different activities and just seeing how to design these sessions is a really fun part of my job that it’s a little bit different than just the design thinking part. So that’s the neat like, “Oh, and we can also do this.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s cool. I was wondering if the facilitation and start to show up in places other than the studio, and it sounds like it has, because earlier you were talking about people noticing the power of making decisions in this way and it sounds like there’s some interest. How do folks in the organization find you and request these facilitation services? Is it word of mouth? Is there some way they can sign up for you to come help them, or how does that work?

Phil Canning:

It’s still pretty ad hoc right now. We’re a small but mighty team, and so we are getting into our official learning and development system so that my hope is ultimately we can generate enough demand where we can say, “Hey, we’re going to hold this workshop once a month.” You know what I mean? Start generating waitlists for it and all that. That’s like 2024 planning let’s say, but for now we’re so well-connected. I think that’s one of the nice things about Ally is we’re not a huge bank, so I have enough connections in my position in the company that we touch all the different business lines. We’re a support function for all the businesses, and so we’re able to really garner enough interest through just word of mouth right now that, “Hey, we can put together a good workshop here.” I will also say a huge cohort of folks that we’ve had a ton of success with is early talent.

So we put all of our early talent folks, whether it’s interns or new hires. I did my largest design thinking workshop a few weeks ago with all of our technology new hires. It was 52 people, and I mean that was a huge group, but we made it work. We split them all up into smaller groups and we ran through the whole thing, but that we found is an awesome way to bring people into the culture of this company is to say, “Look, we’re customer obsessed and we want you to be too.” And what better way to do it than to say, “In week, one you’re going to go through all your boring onboarding and all that, but then you’re going to take a human-centered design class with Phil and his team and learn how to reframe problems, learn how to build empathy with your end user, whether that be the actual end customer or just some downstream receiver of the work that you do at the bank. It’s all applicable.” There’s just so much energy and so much creativity there that they just have so much fun with it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I feel like the curiosity is endless because they’re in a total learning space because everything around is new and novel, and so you can’t help but be in a learning space else. You embed a function, right? You don’t even know where the bathrooms are, so literally everything’s a discovery.

Phil Canning:

They’re not jaded either. They haven’t been in their job just beaten down for years and years and, oh, what’s this? The next process improvement de jure. It’s like there’s some people that it takes a little more convincing, but the early talent coming into the bank are their guns blazing and ready to do it and ready to apply it to their jobs.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. That reminds me of our pre-show chat and how we were talking about the workshop design canvas, and you had taken the workshop design course as one of your electives during the certification, and I’m curious how much that influenced your development of this learning curriculum and how you’re even approaching these workshops that you’re building that are custom.

Phil Canning:

Yeah, I mean it definitely has helped me quite a bit. I would say even I think it really helped me initially when I was really green and not still figuring out, all right, I don’t know how to design a workshop, and then having some kind of a tool that you can work through was super helpful. I think the main thing I took away from that was I believe it’s like you start at the end. It’s always in all of our calls when we talk to someone about doing a session with them and when we were thinking about designing these workshops, what do we want people to get out of it, right? What’s the objective? Start there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in that kind of initial call with someone where we start talking about maybe a session is appropriate and they’re like, “Yeah, so we have four hours on this day.” And I’m like, “Time out. You’re already-“

Douglas Ferguson:

You’re like, “What’s the icebreaker?” They’re so focused on logistics and the program.

Phil Canning:

That’s right. They’re like, “We have this day and you’re only get two hours,” and I’m like, “Okay, well if you’re only giving you two hours, we can only accomplish this.” It has been interesting you apply that start with the end, what’s the objective and let’s work backwards.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m a big fan of the learner aspect of it as well because not only this objective that we’re trying to accomplish, but often that can be reductive or whatnot. If everyone’s always focused on objectives, sometimes we can lose sight of the people or the learners, so actually thinking about how do we want people to walk out of the space. And then also very powerful to think about how they’re entering the space because then we can think about addressing the gaps because so many times people just throw these icebreakers out or this activity or this thing and it’s not really serving the needs of this group of people walking in with this state of mind, with this perspective and needing to shift this other perspective. If we don’t focus on that gap and how we bridge that gap, we’re wasting time and maybe sabotaging ourselves.

Phil Canning:

Yeah, no, I hear you and I think as I continue to build workshops and not just build workshops, I think it’s about iterating on the workshops you have, especially with these design thinking workshops, I generally know what I have to cover, but it’s all of those how do you bring people in? Being super thoughtful about every activity or lack of activity if you want to, you know what I mean, let people think a little bit more freely and not feel like it is so rigid. I love that concept of loose control versus tight control and allowing them the space to sort of, all right, this is a new way of working and just asking questions.

I always allow plenty of time at the end of a workshop to just everyone, “Let’s just sit in a circle and what stood out today? What do you think of it? Let’s just pause and take a breath. I know it was a fast workshop, but what questions do you have for me?” And then just allowing people like, “Oh, okay, now we get to actually process what we learned.” And so many workshops, I feel like necessarily you don’t get to do that. They just end and then you leave and you’re like, “All right, well, I’m not sure how that translates into my real work.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely, and it comes back to the learning science and cognition and memory because if you give people the opportunity to reflect, then they integrate the knowledge more deeply.

Phil Canning:

For sure. I’m working on a design thinking workshop that’s just focused on the first two phases of design thinking, empathy and define, and there’s a few reasons why I created a workshop that just covers those. One of the reasons is in all the feedback, we always do surveys before people even leave we have them take surveys on our design thinking workshops and typically the ahas and the surprises and the delight is those first two phases. It’s about I never thought how important it was to think about the problem so much, and it’s like yes. You know what I mean?

It’s not that ideation and prototyping aren’t important and all that, but that stuff is a little bit more approachable and it’s fun, it’s exciting coming up with ideas. That’s human nature. You just have to give people some guardrails and guide them through that, but showing them the power of interviewing people about their grocery shopping experience and thinking that they had all the like, oh, yeah, it’s about long lines suck and this and that, and then they go and talk to people and they come back and go, “Oh, it’s actually about finding healthy food to eat.” I never would’ve thought about that. And so they come away with these ahas that are really about really those first two phases where my point there is that I’ve designed a workshop that gives people a little bit more ability to sign up for because it’s not a two-day thing.

Sometimes in a corporate environment like this, convincing people to come over to your space and hang out for two days and learn design thinking can be a little bit challenging, but a three-hour workshop where we can really bang, bang, bang, run through some of those concepts and then have a good 20 minutes at the end of it to say, “So what does this mean for you? How would you apply this to your work? Could you do this?” This seems pretty accessible. People always think like, ah, yeah, but what do you mean? How do you schedule an interview and come up with a plan and build empathy?

It’s very doable. You can do this. And so that’s been a super powerful workshop that doesn’t take too much time, and I can get people in and out and they really walk away buzzing a little bit on how they can just build some empathy and then reframe the problem and then come back and we’ll talk and we can schedule an ideation. Let’s baby step this, just start there. If I can convince you to just not jump right to the answers and the solutions, I feel like I’m doing a good job.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. In your alumni story, you talked about your partner. In the program, we put students together and partners so they can deepen their learning by seeing the program through the eyes of others, and I believe you were paired with Nina and you talked about this cross-industry awareness or there’s some value of seeing things across these industries. I’d love to hear more about that.

Phil Canning:

Yeah, I wasn’t even sure how much benefit I was going to get just from talking to the other folks in the cohort only because I wasn’t sure. I was like, well, if they’re not in banking or they’re not in my industry, maybe it’s not going to be as relevant. But yeah, Nina, I think we were paired together because she had a fair amount of design thinking background as well, and when we started talking, she said her background works in education. So she, I believe, works in a consulting capacity in the public school system out in California, and as she started talking about just design thinking sessions for where she would bring together students and parents and administration and law enforcement to come up with solutions on how to basically make the school safer, and I was like, oh my God.

It almost made me feel like, what am I working on? She’s working on the really important stuff and just the way that she was able to talk about how important having a safe space is, it really opened my eyes of… Because in a corporate environment, something you’re like, yeah, safe space, we can all share feelings here, but when you hear it from someone like Nina and she’s talking about running a session that’s pretty high stakes where you’re talking about physical safety in the school system and some of the activities and the way that she made people open up and just have the facilitation chops to help people navigate those hard conversations. I just had a newfound respect for her as a person and the power of facilitation, I guess. I mean, I’m not going to be able to recall exactly how she designed that workshop or anything, but I remember the feeling of how important she was conveying to me if people don’t feel safe in that space, you’re not going to get anywhere.

You’re not going to uncover the real problems, and you need to really think about where are you having these sessions and who exactly is attending and even understanding some of the personalities ahead of time so that you can navigate that. I mean, even now I don’t have to worry about that too much, but I probably should think about it more and be even more thoughtful about if I really want to get the most out of people in this session, maybe I need to stand up and say, “You know what? The leader of this group probably shouldn’t even be here.” And it was having the courage to stand up and say, “If you really want to get the right feedback, I think this is how it should go and this is how I want to do it.” I don’t know.

It takes a lot of courage and I just think, Nina, it was a really inspiring conversations that we had and we’re using the same framework. I mean, that’s what I love about it. We speak the same language, but completely different industries, backgrounds, and that’s why I said it is just a framework and it really takes all of those being able to piece together the different facilitation tools in the toolkit to run that session effectively and make people feel safe so that you uncover the things that you need to uncover. I mean, that’s really what you’re trying to get at what is the right problem to solve here? We can’t allow just the loudest person in the room to just steamroll everybody, and it’s the facilitator that has to manage that.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love the story because I’m a huge fan of drawing inspiration from other places or other industries, and in fact, there’s this name for innovation that already exists that we just borrow from somewhere else. It’s called exaptation. It’s not quite recycling. It’s like literally saying, “Oh, they’re doing this thing over here. I can totally do that in my context, but in a different way.” And to your point, the stakes might not be as high in an organization and corporate setting around safety and trust, but it’s still so essential because it’s human nature, and so what are the things she’s doing to make it work there that then we can be inspired by in our settings where it’s not quite as demanding? I think that’s really cool.

Phil Canning:

Just one other thing that makes me think of is I think what is sometimes a problem in a corporate environment is people don’t want to be wrong. There’s a lot of pressure on having the right answer, and that can be toxic. So I see my role a lot of times when I talk about creating that safe space is just to let people… Dumb ideas are great. Sometimes you come up with a great idea because you started out with a really bad idea and you just flipped it to the opposite, right?

Anyway, I just think that’s kind of something I’ve really learned is that there is a lot of the need to feel like you have the right answer all the time, and I want to create environments where we’re just experimenting here. If we want to really get to the best idea or solve this problem really well, we need to just forget all that. Let’s not have those hesitations. Any idea is an interesting idea. It’s where you start with that idea is probably not going to be anywhere close to where you end up, but if you don’t have that weird or strange or bad idea initially, you might not end up in a good place, so get them out. Let’s talk about them.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it’s important for leaders to foster the kind of behavior, and that’s why we talk about facilitation as a core leadership skill, and when you have environments where it’s not safe to fail or we always have to have the right answer, then it’s not a psychologically safe environment and we’re not going to have great outcomes, or certainly people aren’t going to be doing their best work. It’s incumbent upon leaders to create those spaces and get the best out of their teams and their organizations, and I think facilitation’s critical for that, and it’s shocking that we don’t see facilitation more apparent in leadership programs.

Phil Canning:

I’d love to see more of that.

Douglas Ferguson:

So now that you’ve seen the transformative power facilitation and human-centered design and it’s become a real central part of the work that you do, where do you see yourself in the next few years and what challenges do you want to explore more?

Phil Canning:

So being brutally honest, workshops are extremely powerful, and I’ve learned how to design and deliver workshops much better thanks to your program and the guidance that Voltage Control’s given, but I’ve also, I worry about workshopping people to death and it’s like what happens after the workshop? So when I think about the future, my vision is to expand the… My phrase now is beyond the workshop. It’s like, how can we help these teams implement? I feel like if I can just get them taking the first few steps of using what they’ve learned in the workshops, then I can help them take the next few steps and then the next few steps because it’s very different going to a two-day workshop or a one-day workshop being really inspired and learning a lot of stuff and then going back and saying, “What do we do with this?”

And so I’m super excited to lean into… It’s a multi-pronged approach. I mean, you have to have these workshops to create awareness and understanding and excitement and to just convince people, even to convince the leadership of the company that this is like, “Wow, look at all the great feedback we’re getting. People are really buzzing about this. They really want to apply it.” And it’s like, are they applying it? Are they doing it? And some are trying, but they’re stumbling. And so I think I’d really love to maybe evolve it to maybe more a consulting model where we are doing design thinking workshops and teaching the framework, but then we’re coaching, guiding, working alongside teams to be that human-centered person in the room to be like, “Why do we think that’s the case?”

Stopping progress for a minute and being like, “Do we really understand that that’s what the end user is struggling with here?” And so often people just jump right to the answer and start building a new feature or a new product. I think you can see my passion for that because I do see the value in the workshops and I want to just extend it now to say, how can I help them take and apply this? Yeah. I really want teams to walk the talk and be able to operate the way we’re able to operate at the studio.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love hearing this because it strikes me as something that it’s part of a maturity curve, because often when people find facilitation, there’s this maybe the embryonic state, it’s like they saw a method or a system like design thinking, or maybe they just saw liberating structures and it’s like, wow, this is really amazing what it can create. And the risk there is that they go off and that’s all they ever do is liberating structures or they’re only doing design thinking or maybe even just two activities they saw, and they just do that on a tape recorder.

And then there’s folks that start to take a more method-agnostic approach and start to mix and match and design more nuanced and more diverse types of experiences. And then there’s this next level which you’re describing, which is how do we transcend the workshop with our facilitation? Because the tools, the techniques, the mindsets, how we’re helping people come together and understand things in more micro moments. We don’t have to have three days. We can do this in a 30-minute meeting. We can sprinkle it in into a 15-minute conversation because we’ve internalized it at such a deep level.

Phil Canning:

I completely agree. It’s like deconstructing some of the process there. Design thinking is different than talking about the design thinking process, and that’s where once you really become adept at that. You can just pull tool the tool out of the toolbox at will and do it. You don’t necessarily have to say, “Hold on, we got to block out a week and do a design sprint and all that.” So I completely agree. It’s getting people to just think more in this way to say, “Hey, maybe we should just have a quick meeting and time box it for 30 minutes and see what ideas we have. Get some voting dots out.” You know what I mean? Just some simple techniques like that. Yeah, you’re totally right. It’s not like I don’t have to try to move mountains. I could just maybe help encourage people, well, just try this activity and see what that gives you, and that’s powerful too.

Douglas Ferguson:

Or even just thinking this way or have you stopped to rethink the problem? Just that question is facilitating, right? It makes me think, is Yoda using the force or is Yoda the force?

Phil Canning:

Exactly. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s like how much have you internalized things to the point where you’re a part of it.

Phil Canning:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it.

Phil Canning:

That’s deep.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. Well, we got there. We did it, Phil. Awesome. Well, any last thoughts for our listeners before we wrap up today?

Phil Canning:

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel like by accident, I’ve stumbled on facilitation, and I think if I was just going to leave it people listening with one thing is to just explore what facilitation is because it’s not something that, “Oh, I’m not really a facilitator, so that’s not something I can do.” If you learn these techniques, you can apply them. It’s like when I was talking about the design thinking framework, you don’t have to go to college to learn this.

It’s just stopping for a minute to understand, man, there’s got to be a better way to get this work done and to function as a company or as a department or as a team, and if just someone had some of those simple techniques for facilitation, I think they would be able to help their teams move faster, come up with better ideas, have more fun, be more collaborative, and just enjoy the work more. So I think I don’t have necessarily a nugget that’s earth-shattering other than I would just really explore what facilitation is all about because it’s applicable in so many ways. I mean, if there’s a grouping of people together, facilitation can help that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, Phil, it’s been a pleasure chatting today, and I want to thank you for joining me.

Phil Canning:

Thanks, Douglas, I appreciate it.

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 Transforming Team Dynamics appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Listening in the silence, observing, seeing what’s not being said in that silence, that tells a whole story as well.” – Reshma Khan

In this podcast episode, Douglas Ferguson interviews Reshma Aziz Khan, the CEO and Founder of Kenzo Consulting Limited. They discuss Reshma’s background in the nonprofit sector and her interest in facilitation. Reshma shares a story about her first experience working with a facilitator in Zimbabwe and how it sparked her curiosity and excitement about the power of facilitation. They also discuss Reshma’s approach to facilitating workshops and building connections among participants, including the use of Whole Brain Dominance and unconventional seating arrangements. Reshma shares her experience transitioning to becoming a facilitator and the importance of networking. They also talk about the concept of holding silence and the impact of building confidence through practice and continuous learning. The episode concludes with Douglas inviting listeners to leave a review and subscribe to the podcast.

Show Highlights

[00:02:23] First Encounter with a Facilitator

[00:09:20] Understanding Each Other’s Stories

[00:13:44] Using the Whole Brain Dominance Instrument

[00:23:18] The Impact of Certification

[00:29:32] The Power of Holding Silence

[00:38:39] Building Confidence and Practice

Links | Resources

Reshma on Instagram

Reshma on Twitter

About the Guest

Reshma Aziz Khan is Kenyan and grew up in Nairobi, the Green City in the Sun. Reshma received her undergraduate degree from Calgary, Canada, and over the past 15 years, has worked in development and humanitarian aid in communications, leadership, strategy, and culture. Diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging. She also led global leadership and strategy workshops for senior leaders, both in person and virtually. Reshma founded K’enso Consulting in 2020 to support social impact leaders in their conscious leadership through her leadership coaching, team effectiveness, and Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Dialogue facilitation work. Reshma lives her low-waste life in Nairobi with her husband and three dogs – she makes all her own body products and grows much of her own food in her commitment to doing better for the earth.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with vultures 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/facilitationlab. 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 Reshma Aziz Khan, CEO and founder of K’enso Consulting Limited, a company she set up so that she could be full-time leadership coach and global facilitator. Welcome to the show, Reshma.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Thank you very, very much, Douglas. I’m really, really excited and happy to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m excited as well. And this is the first of one of our alumni stories that’s now moving to the podcast, which is a theme that we’ll start seeing across episodes. So it’s always great to have a first. So this is our inaugural voyage into alumni stories on the podcast and as usual on the podcast, I want to come to your beginnings and how you got your start in this work. How did you get interested in this amazing work you’re doing at K’enso?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Thank you very much, Douglas. So it’s a bit of an interesting story. I actually have a background in the nonprofit sector. I trained as a political scientist, have not used any of that, although some people claim that whatever you learn, the skills are usable in whatever way, shape, or form. But I worked with a large international nonprofit for many years. In 2015, I moved from a country office to the Kenya country office that was running poverty alleviating programs to the regional office, which was still based in Nairobi. And in my first month I was told that one of my duties would be to work alongside a facilitator to run a workshop for the most senior leaders in the region in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Now, I had never been to Zimbabwe and I didn’t even know what a facilitator meant, so I had some trepidation, I was a little nervous and I got talking with this facilitator and still didn’t quite understand what she actually did. And then we went to Harare later in 2015 and there were over a hundred people in this room. And I saw the way she showed herself and basically her role was to just guide people through the week while they were having the discussions. While they were making the decisions, she was holding space and creating space for effective dialogue.

And I remember a particular incident where there were two very, very heated opposing groups that could not agree on a critical decision for organizational continuity. And she was able to get them to stop, step back and still have that conversation of divergence conversation where they didn’t necessarily agree but eventually come to a point where they could converge and compromise and see what the other was saying. And so that blew me away because in my mind, I thought, gosh, to be able to have a skill to bring over a hundred people in a room that are not all agreeing, that are very different personalities, very different parts of the world, very different cultures, to be able to all come together, share their viewpoints and ultimately still end up with a similar goal and a shared goal was incredible. And that’s the first time I saw a live facilitator in action and I honestly was so taken away. It was like watching magic happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do you remember the feeling that maybe came up for you as you were watching this magic happen?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Absolutely. I think it was a feeling of awe, complete awe, but also a feeling of excitement because the energy of the room, despite the fact that people were not necessarily agreeing with each other, there was an energy, there was a buzz in the room that humans were getting to their most generative thinking, that they were getting to the space where they were going beyond what they thought they knew about the organization. And that was so exciting and I felt like I was a little part of this potential future journey that could be so incredible for the organization. So I was awestruck. I would say I was very excited but also very curious and almost felt like a groupie after this facilitator. It’s just that sense of my gosh, if you can bring humans together in a space like this to move towards a specific direction, this is incredible. This is what is the core and the meat of business and organization and future and innovation and everything else.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. It sounds like that moment was pretty pivotal for the organization because they were able to start to see themselves and the institution as different or from different perspectives.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that they were able to see also each other. They were also able to better understand the other human in the room, the other human across from them. So it wasn’t just about them coming with their roles, they’re coming with their challenges and their budget issues, but actually seeing the other person, the other human and taking the time to understand that behind all these challenges, there was a person who really wanted to make a difference in the world like they did. And getting to that bare minimum of understanding we are all here to make a difference. That’s what really shifted the conversation.

And actually till today, I still have the picture of this facilitator in the room at the front of the room at the very beginning. It’s just stored as one of my historical drive photos. And I looked at it a few weeks ago and thought, gosh, that’s when all of this started for me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. You talked about this ability for people to see other people in the group and understand them and put aside maybe the tactical logistical pieces of the work and just see each other as humans. And some groups find that more difficult than other groups. And so I was just curious, what did you notice about this group, their ability to step into that space? Was that hard for them? What made it easier? What do you remember about that?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

So it was a very diverse group of people. It was people who were working in Africa, but coming from around the world. So there was someone from Bangladesh, someone from the US, someone from Vietnam, someone from South Africa, people coming in with different viewpoints, different worldviews, different cultures, even different cultural ways of making decisions. So you could imagine that’s quite complex. But I think what did make it easier is that I had come in at a time when they were at a point at which they could have those conversations where they could openly speak up because this facilitator had worked with them over time. I think they were also in a space where they all understood they were in this space for the better good. And so even someone who didn’t necessarily agree with the cultural decision-making ways of, for example, a Pakistani who’s running a Sudan country context country was still able to show their viewpoint, have a courageous conversation, have a brave conversation, but also respectfully listen to this other person.

So I think this in many senses was a much easier space because you had people who had so much experience working cross-culturally that they had a little bit of that cognizance of just respecting and listening to each other. I think there have been instances in the past couple of years where as a facilitator I’ve worked with people who haven’t necessarily had that much experience working with people of different cultures, and that takes so much more work. But at the core of that work is building trust between humans, and I’ve seen that as the ultimate, ultimate true keystone pillar for leading to at least effective dialogue.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Those prior experiences can really shape and condition us to be more receptive to working in those ways. And certainly as a facilitator is a nice when the group is hungry for it, but maybe just had the space or haven’t had the invitation. And I’m curious, when you work with groups that haven’t been as primed to work in these ways, what are some of your favorite ways of encouraging people to step into this new way of thinking or just embracing the cultural differences?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

So I think the first thing I do as a standard, particularly when it’s groups that are very diverse, don’t really know each other that much or seem to have some challenge between them or conflict between them is I usually tend to start the first day of workshops, often people ask me to come in for two or three day workshops is to start the first chunk of the day before the tea break. Tea’s popular here in Kenya, a little bit more than coffee. To start with people’s stories, their life stories. And often I’ll use a template like draw yourself, draw your life story, draw your best self.

In January of this year, I did this with a particular group of people who really were struggling connecting with each other and I got them to draw themselves but draw themselves in the last year, what has Reshma in the last year looked like? And then share those stories with each other.

And I find taking that approach, really getting people to understand each other as humans, understand their life stories. Some of the other things I do is do three rounds of my life story. So in each round, you’ll talk to someone different, but you can never share what you shared in the first round. So at the end of it, you can really get to know the whole person and people take the opportunity to share back what they heard from this person. So when it’s a small enough group, we put the person in the center and we hear from the rest of the group.

So sharing human stories, sharing my story, sharing the story of me in the last year I find is really effective because it gets people to a place where they understand the human behind this persona and that the human might have very similar challenges to them. And often in my experience, I find that when I am able to start with that, even though they might have very conflicting views, going forward, they do it much more respectfully and they actually take the time to listen to each other because even in our world today, we’re always jumping from one Zoom call, one Teams call, one Google Meets call to another. People are not checking in on each other even as a regular workweek meeting. So I find if I’m able to give them that space, it changes the dynamic a fair bit.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And there’s a little move you did within that that I think is a powerful approach that can be used in so many moments, which is how you made it forbidden to share the same thing you had shared in a previous round. And I think that is a really powerful generative technique to say, okay, we came up with some ideas, now we can’t rely on any of those ideas and we had to come up with new ones. Or from your perspective, there’s information about yourself, you’ve already shared some. Now, you had to start over and think of others.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yeah, absolutely. And often people say at the end of the first round, because we don’t tell them at the end of the first round that, look, you’re going to do this two more times. I often tell them, share your entire life story, whatever is important. At the end of it, often I’ll get groans, people will actually groan or complain or say, oh my gosh, I have nothing else to share. But at the end of the second round and even more the third round, they realize, oh my gosh, I have so much more to me than even I realized. And that’s really phenomenal to see that the whole of me has so many layers. It really helps people get to the rest of that and to be able to share that. And it allows for some level of vulnerability into the room as well that again, further builds the trust between the participants.

Douglas Ferguson:

And the other thing I think that’s beautiful there is this observation that quite often we’re not taking the time to reflect and look that deeply at ourselves, much less other people. So there’s so much more to know and learn and respect and care about others and ourselves.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think when we create space to really reflect deeply for ourselves and with others, I think we unlock really the transformational and the catalytic thinking for us. So apart from being a facilitator, I’m also a leadership coach. So I was certified as a leadership coach in 2020. And as a leadership coach, I often work with individuals and teams to get to that space of self-reflection, of reflecting on those different layers of what’s going on with me, what skills, what strengths do I have that I may not be aware of. So doing that both with individuals and with teams really helps us get to the edge of our best thinking.

Douglas Ferguson:

And your coaching practice is based off of HBDI, is that correct?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

So, a little bit. So I am officially trained as an executive coach by the Academy of Executive Coaching. I don’t like to use the word executive coach because for me that limits a lot of people who might not see themselves as executives. The HBDI, the whole Brain Dominance Instrument is one of the tools I use. I was trained and certified in it in 2018 when I was still with the organization I was working with. And in my opinion, it’s such a fantastic tool because it looks at the four quadrants of our brain. So all of us have a whole brain unless we’ve had a severe injury. But because of nature, because of nurture, because of the experiences we’ve had, because of maybe our education systems, we perceive information and therefore think in different ways from each other.

So for example, I tend to think about the bigger picture first. Someone else might look at the data and hard facts first or the details. I want to know the details, what’s the policy and procedure first? And so this looks at how an individual prefers to think and therefore how they show up, how they communicate. And I find this particularly helpful when I facilitate with teams towards team effectiveness because we get people to better understand how each other thinks, how each other communicates, how each other perceives information, and therefore how each other is either currently effective or not. And I have a really great example.

So when I first got certified in this, when I was still with the company I was working with, I was part of this regional senior management team for the entire Africa region, the East Africa region for the nonprofit I was working with. And I got people to sit on a big round table, but we actually cut off one piece. It was actually more of a U, I would say, a U-shaped table. And I didn’t tell them I was getting them to sit in a particular order of their preferences from those who are more blue quadrant, which is the data-driven first towards those who are bigger picture. I got them to sit in that order.

So what happened is at the two opposing ends of this table, you had people who had very, very different thinking preferences. When we did the exploration of individual preferences of the profiling, I actually had two people in the room who had not seen eye to eye on anything for as long as I’d been in the organization. The one who was data-driven, she literally got up in the middle of this and said, “Oh my Lord.” Those were her exact words. She pointed to the guy across the room and said, “I thought you just really hated me and that’s why you didn’t respond to my emails. Turns out you think so much bigger picture that getting down to work on the details and writing the emails is not something that’s necessarily your preference. And now I get it. You don’t hate me, it’s just that you think differently and work differently from me.”

So that’s the whole brain dominance instrument I use.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love this technique too, I’m dissecting some of these little pieces too, because I love the larger construct of using the brain dominance pieces. Also, just this idea of how we place people in the room so that there’s a physical and a visual corollary to whatever construct we’re trying to share. And in this case, you’re trying to show these opposing perspectives or viewpoints, but there’s so many other ways that we might benefit from assembling folks in a room in a certain order so that they can see themselves juxtaposed in certain ways. So I love that. Such a powerful thing to do.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think in many other spaces it’s about using round tables with five people, but five people with, again, opposing viewpoints, but often not telling them that’s why I’m putting them on a table together. So they figure it out for themselves. And I find that that generates so much more interaction than the typical layouts you’d often see in very traditional conferences and workshops.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s also fun when if you don’t tell people ahead of time and then in the debrief you expose it.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yes. Yep.

Douglas Ferguson:

So then in that rich conversation that’s happening after they’ve made some hunches or epiphanies on their own, then we all talk about, Hey, what was this like and what did that make possible for you?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Absolutely, absolutely. And the ahas, right? That’s when a lot of people see their ahas and in a few experiences that’s when people have said, I never thought would be able to sit on the table, me, the finance person, the comms person, this person who’s doing programming and agree on something. But this has actually made us realize that we probably need to be doing this even more, even when we go back to our offices because we can collaborate together.

Douglas Ferguson:

So you transitioned from an event project manager to starting your own practice, K’enso Consulting, and I’m really curious if there’s any challenges or advice you might have for others that you want to share about this transition?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yeah, absolutely. So I transitioned in 2020. Officially, I think my first day at my company was October of 2020. I left my job just a week before that. And I have to say most people around the world thought I was absolutely nuts to leave a job in the middle of a global pandemic.

But, and this goes to the question you asked around what advice would I have for people, one of the biggest pieces of advice would be don’t box yourself in with what you think are your limits. I very quickly realized that I had two options. I could either choose to be a facilitator and coach only in Kenya in the middle of the pandemic, but then realized that I had been using Zoom since 2016. I was very comfortable in the virtual space. I had been working in the virtual space for a really long time, why not look to working as a global facilitator, as a facilitator with anyone in the world? Because we were at a point in the world where we didn’t need to all be in a physical room.

And I started putting out feelers. I spoke to my former employers, former colleagues, and that networking really helped. And actually is probably one of the biggest strengths for me, the ability to facilitate virtually. So I would say if you’re looking to facilitate, don’t stick to what you think you should be, your limits. For me, my limits as to who I can facilitate with, there are none. So I’m very clear. I prefer to facilitate in the social impact space because that’s the expertise area that I come from, but also from an ethical point of view, I want to be able to try and create lasting impact in the world. And I think I can do that through working in social impact, whether that’s international nonprofit or social enterprise or social venture or civil movements, but not limiting myself to just my own geographical country.

And then the second is networking. I started networking and telling people I’m thinking about doing this from the moment I had the idea in May of 2020 to say, look, I’m going to become a facilitator, just so you know, I’m putting the feelers out there. Please let me know if anything comes through. So I think really setting the ground for yourself, networking, talking to people from across the board, depending on the industry you want to work with, but also not limiting yourself to just a very specific area, a geographical area, because as a facilitator, you don’t have to be the technical expert for the specific stuff that people are talking about in the room. There are instances where it’s very helpful to know what they’re talking about, but you don’t have to be the technical expert. Just like as a coach, you don’t have to be an expert in the subject matter to be a good coach.

Douglas Ferguson:

Another thing I was noticing in there was this focus that you had, and I think that’s worth calling out for listeners because you didn’t say that you’re a event project manager who also facilitates. You said, I’m becoming a facilitator. So that was a distinction, a really clear distinction that folks could easily remember that, okay, Reshma is becoming a facilitator, so I need to now program in my brain that that’s where she’s headed and that’s what she is. That is powerful, right? Because that distinction, when people are starting to think about how they might make intros or how they might be able to help you out, it becomes clear for them. It’s easier for them to be of assistance.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And those networks, those allies. The other thing was, till today, there’s a few colleagues who I still facilitate with and they see the old me, right? The event manager, me and I also have to set my boundaries really clearly that I’m not event managing your event, I’m now the facilitator. So sometimes, I’m in a very interesting situation, but it was so helpful to have that distinction to say, I am becoming a facilitator. I am a facilitator, and in fact, to show you my skill, I’m also offering a few free one hour sessions on, for example, team effectiveness, getting people to have time to think, sharing each other’s stories, offering that to some people so they could see my expertise before even taking me on or contracting me so they could also validate the skills that I had and they could then become my champions and my marketers.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk a little bit about the certification. I’m curious about how it affected your approach to facilitation and what were some of the valuable lessons that you learned during the program?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Well, first I want to say to you, Douglas and Eric and everyone, thank you so much for even just the opportunity to be in the program. I came across Voltage Control completely by chance last year when I was looking at a few tools to be able to facilitate a couple of workshops. And I came across Voltage Control and applied for the program and got into the program and it completely changed how I saw myself as a facilitator. So I imagine it like an iceberg. I was literally at the tip of the iceberg. I thought I was a good facilitator and I was just at the tip of the iceberg. What the certification program did for me was really get me deep into the iceberg. So now I feel so much more confident and I feel quite able to go to any potential client and say, I am a certified facilitator and I have the right tools and skills to be able to support you.

So that’s the first thing. It’s definitely built my confidence. I have a multiplicity of tools that I’m able to use. Particularly, there’s a couple of things I’d like to mention. So the first is, first of all, I want to also be very grateful for the ability to get books, the actual physical books sent to Kenya, which was great. It was so nice to be able to actually hold up those books and read them. And they’re sitting right next to my desk. They’re my everyday facilitator Bible. Literally just today I picked one up and said, oh, I have something coming up in a few weeks. What can I use?

And the first book that came through, because they came in batches, was the Art of Gathering. And that book, I remember being in the facilitator course and thinking, I feel uncomfortable with this because the Art of Gathering was so helpful and talked about how we just gather people, but it also talked about kindly excluding people, excluding people who might not necessarily be the most impactful in the meeting.

And I remember being uncomfortable with that because I’ve never been able to do that. And there was an aha moment for me when I realized in the past of all the things I had facilitated, part of where we had the sort of lull in the conversations or where we couldn’t come out with really clear final decisions was because there were people in the room who didn’t necessarily need to be there or had no contribution or impact to that meeting. So that was the first. So now what happens is even when I talk to my clients, I often talk about their participants, who they’re thinking about in the room, who really needs to be there, who it’s nice to have, and who doesn’t necessarily need to be there, but they just invited for the sake of. So that was super, super helpful. And actually one client referred me to another department for that reason.

The second book that I absolutely live by is the Rituals, the Rituals for Remote Meetings and Virtual Connection. I think particularly in today’s world, most of what I do is virtual. Last year I started to travel the world and facilitate in person again, but a lot of the work I do is virtual, and I had been struggling with how to get humans connected. So when you talk about sharing stories, when you can have a talk about building rituals for people to connect, how do you build that in a virtual space? And I think now I feel like I’m at a much better place to even advise others. So just this week on Monday, an international nonprofit asked me to talk about how to get people to virtually connect in meetings as part of the coaching program I was running for them. So I feel like I have a little bit more legitimacy to talk about some of this.

It’s really given me the tools, the legitimacy, and also this very clear thought process. I think in the past I was a little bit more ad hoc in my thinking around how I was going to run workshops. So of course I had a run of show, I had an agenda, but I really wasn’t thinking through the process. And so when working on the portfolio, that really got me thinking through the process of organizing events, the process of planning for facilitation and post facilitation and what that looks like.

One of the other tools that I absolutely love that I was introduced to because of the program is Session Lab, which I use, again, all the time now for all my workshops. So there were so many great tools, but ultimately it really got me to a space of confidence and reassured me that I’m exactly where I need to be. As a facilitator, I’m exactly in the space that I need to be in this world.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And I am a huge fan of Session Lab. They’re a great partner. And when I see folks using spreadsheets and trying to add up dates and times inside of spreadsheets, I’m like, oh, no, no, no. There’s a better way to do this.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yeah. I was a spreadsheet user before because I didn’t know better. And then someone changes one time here, and then you have to go back and manually change everything. And now this is so easy. You can add stuff. I absolutely love it. It’s such a great tool.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to come back to there’s this concept we’ve talked about before, and I think you mentioned around just holding silence during conflicting conversations or conflict heavy environments and how that can create equity and maybe more voice so that you can bring perspectives into play. So I was just curious to hear your take on holding silence.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

It’s a space that in the past I have been extremely uncomfortable with. In the past, about four or five years ago, if you’d asked me, would you be able to not just hold a space of silence, be in a space of silence, I would tell you I feel extremely uncomfortable and anxious because I feel like I don’t know what’s going on. I feel like people are not speaking. I feel like there’s a lot of discomfort in the room because in my mind, I believed that silence was a bad thing, that silence meant people disagreed. But over the years and more so even with the certification and with the experience that’s come with it, I’ve come to realize that more often than not, silence is most likely people probably reflecting for themselves, probably thinking through for themselves what this means for them.

And so holding silence and not saying anything and not feeling like I have to jump in as a facilitator if no one’s saying anything for a few moments is liberating. Because for me, I now know people are most likely reflecting thinking through what they might think about the situation, thinking through how they might respond, and I’m okay with that. It’s definitely shifted this perspective from, oh my gosh, they’re silent because they can see I don’t know what I’m doing as a facilitator, or they all have these really negative thoughts. You sort of tend to spiral. So I think that it’s a space that I’m much more comfortable with. I also think that as a facilitator, it’s a great space to be able to hold when your group is going through a lot of reflection, self-reflection, team reflection.

And then you speak about this idea of equity. I think also holding that space allows the diverse voices in the room to also have their say ultimately, because you’re not pushing the voice, you’re not the most powerful voice. That they’re actually able to all then step in when they need to. And linked to that is I organically somehow became a diversity, equity, inclusion dialogue supporter, facilitator. And I found that holding silence can also mean holding a space such that all voices in the room get their equal turn to speak. Even those who may not necessarily speak up otherwise, either due to being an introvert or being from another culture or not having English as their first language or feeling an inferiority complex.

By using tools such as something I use called the time to think. Everyone has an equal amount of time to speak and everyone else stays silent. So everyone holds silence. And when it’s your turn, the rest of the team will hold silence for you. I think that has been so powerful because it also validates people. It helps people find that no one is judging me, or even if they’re judging me, they’re suspending their judgment and I can speak freely without anyone criticizing me.

So I think that holding silence for a room to allow everyone to reflect is quite helpful. But also helping participants hold silence for each other really creates an inclusive space for dialogue.

Douglas Ferguson:

The thing I try to come back to is when you talk about the spiraling and the inner thoughts that might be rolling through our heads of what people are thinking is I always think about how when I’ve been in an audience and speakers, because facilitation is not really performative. So I like to go in an example that’s performative, whether that’s a band that’s playing. A great example is like a jazz improvisationalist. They’re improving and things get a little off, or maybe they drop their instrument or something really goes really bad, but then they somehow recover and you don’t dwell on the fact that they messed up. You rejoice the fact that they actually recovered in a really cool way, right? No one’s sitting there hoping you fail. People want you to be successful. They’re there in the shared interest to be successful.

And I think that is why focusing on purpose matters so much because if we get really clear on that purpose and everyone’s really rooting for us to do good in that purpose, then all the little micro moments don’t really matter. They’re going to be interested in how do we get to that purpose and they’re not going to be judging little moves that we make.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Absolutely. 100%. I think you’re so right. I think when you really focus on purpose, your purpose and the purpose for you supporting this specific group of people, what you’re hoping for, the outcome, what I find is it helps me listen more keenly, listen more deeply. And when I’m truly listening, listening not just with my ears, but listening and observing what’s going around, I find that even though there may be moments of silence, I don’t have that anxiety because I feel like I am in a space where I am supporting them through this process, and I’m keeping my eye on the goal and keeping my eye on the purpose that we have set together. And it definitely takes away from the voices in the head.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And do you ever feel like that when you’re really intensely listening, you can actually find that you can listen in the silence as well?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

110%. 110%. And listening in the silence, observing, seeing what’s not being said in that silence, that tells a whole story as well. I tried this actually in March of 2022, so last year I came to Atlanta to run a workshop with some very senior leaders at the organization I worked with. Some of these were peers, some of these were my supervisors in the past. But doing exactly that, listening to the silence, I was able to observe what was not being said and was able to put it into the room because now I’m no longer an employee. I’m an independent facilitator who’s just sharing my observations. So I have a little bit of a different power now. Changed the conversation and opened up a very courageous, very brave, and also for some people in the room, very uncomfortable conversation that needed to be had. It was the elephant in the room that no one was talking about.

But it came from just really listening to what was not being said, seeing facial reactions, seeing the way people looked at each other, seeing the way people looked down, and recognizing that there was something that was going on here, that there was some communication going on here, but no one was saying anything.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. So as we shift to our close, I’m really curious to hear about your future plans for K’enso Consulting. How do you see your facilitation practice evolving in the next few years?

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Well, hopefully it grows, grows and grows. More global work. I am keen to continue to work globally with the social impact sector. I’m hoping to be able to work with even more global teams, more global virtual teams, and in person. I do have a travel bug. I’m hoping to travel a fair bit again. But also to infuse elements that I find unique to the way I facilitate. So for example, I find that a lot more I’m also supporting facilitation around wellbeing and infusing wellbeing and leadership resilience into facilitation. So I’m hoping that I can build on that as well, build a few more skills to really focus on what is my niche, what is my unique selling point. But yeah, K’enso goes global is the ultimate goal. And to continue to work with really great people. I’m so grateful to have made so many great networks through Voltage Control, through the certification, through the different clients I’ve worked with, that it’s made my world so much richer. And for that, I’m very grateful. And I just want more of that, and I want more of that for the company as well.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. It’s all about connecting with the people, and it goes with your global theme as well.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yeah, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

So as a final question, let’s leave our listeners with some advice that you might have for someone who wants to pursue a career in facilitation, or someone who maybe just wants to add facilitation capabilities and competencies to how they show up at work.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

I would say go for it. I would say test it out. You don’t have to wait till even getting a certification. You can start to facilitate, facilitating gathering, people holding space for conversation. Just go for it. If facilitation is something you see as a potential career path or as something you would like to add as a skill in addition to your work, just test it out. Try it out. That’s what I did and found, actually, I really love it. And that’s the decision I made to be a full-time facilitator is because I loved it. So I would say test it out, try it out. I think there’s a lot of opportunities. Facilitation doesn’t just have to be workshops and conferences. Yes, that’s the really glamorous part of it, but it’s also about gathering people, gathering community even so even in your local communities, if you’re doing something to gather people towards a common goal can be facilitation and really stepping back as that independent person holding space and creating space, creating tools, creating experiences for humans to connect. I think anyone can do that if they put their mind to it in the best way that they know how, in their most authentic way.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And it comes back to that piece you said earlier about building confidence and how much the confidence has impacted your practice. And we have a saying here at Voltage Control, which is practice makes practice. So the more that we find opportunities to put stuff to use, the more comfortable we get it, the more confidence we build, and the epiphanies, the connections we start to create inside of our brain and inside of our being around how these tools can impact the workplace. Just the clarity that emerges is just really powerful.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And practice makes practice. I love that phrase. And you keep learning. You keep learning about your abilities and keep learning about how best to do the work you do.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, Rashma, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, and I want to thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Reshma Aziz Khan:

Thank you very much, Douglas. It’s been such a pleasure. Conversations like this give me even more energy and even more excitement to go out and continue to facilitate. So thank you very much.

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 From Awkward Silence to Powerful Breakthroughs appeared first on Voltage Control.

“We live in such a polarized world right now, at least in the US, and I’m not going to get into that, but I think it is important that we be able to hear each other, really hear each other. Not necessarily agree, but how do we start to move a little bit closer to each other? And probably that’s going to have to be through complicated, messy conversations and real listening.”

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas welcomes Sandra Molinari, a workplace violence prevention specialist, to discuss her journey in facilitation and the importance of creating inclusive and safe spaces. Sandra shares her experiences working with diverse groups and the need to be mindful of cultural blind spots. They also discuss the significance of understanding participants’ emotional states and the planning phase in shaping effective facilitation. Sandra emphasizes the importance of involving participants in the design process and the challenge of balancing structure and responsiveness. They conclude by highlighting the importance of listening, healthy disagreement, and the value of facilitation skills in creating effective and inclusive spaces.

Show Highlights

[00:01:18] Sandra Molinari’s start in the work

[00:05:47] Cultural differences in teaching and facilitating

[00:10:16]  The importance of facilitation in team cohesion

[00:20:29]  The benefits of facilitation

[00:22:23] Including the group in the design of training programs

[00:40:52] The importance of healthy disagreements

[00:43:13] The power of facilitation in fostering understanding 

Links | Resources

Sandra on Linkedin

About the Guest

A native of San Francisco, Sandra Molinari has called Austin, TX home since 1998. Following an extended and rich tenure with the SAFE Alliance heading domestic and sexual violence education and prevention programs, Sandra has recently made a transition to the tech sector. She currently leans on her facilitation skills to lead collaborative workplace violence prevention efforts for Control Risks, embedded at Meta. Sandra is bi-cultural (French/American), trilingual, and has lived in Latin America and Europe. When she’s not working, she loves to gather with friends to enjoy great food and laughter, take dance classes and plan her next trip abroad.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of facilitation and transformative leadership. Some leaders exert tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly transformative experience. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. You can also learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program at voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Sandra Molinari at Control Risks, where she is a workplace violence prevention specialist, having recently transitioned from the SAFE Alliance after 20 years. Welcome to the show, Sandra.

Sandra Molinari:

Great To be here. Douglas, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you today.

Douglas:

Me as well. So, per usual, I’d love to hear about how you got your start in this work.

Sandra Molinari:

That’s a great question. It’s interesting to try to trace it back. I think I would say I got it through teaching slash educating in nonprofits. Many moons ago I was a parent educator for a wonderful organization called AVANCE, which works with families and does lots of different classes to support parents. And I was doing a parenting class and that was the first time I was leading groups, which was really fun and interesting considering I was not a parent and it was in Spanish, but we had wonderful conversations and that led me into wanting to do more of this kind of teaching, training, skill building type of efforts.

And then I moved into SAFE Alliance at the time was called SafePlace, and I began as a life skills trainer. So, at that point I was a trainer slash group facilitator because really what we were doing was helping people who’ve experienced domestic violence to build life skills, if you will, to become a little bit more independent and empowered and confident in their lives so they could move forward, ideally a little bit independently so they wouldn’t have to depend on a partner and perhaps fall into another unhealthy relationship.

So, I did that for several years and that really taught me a lot, because it taught me a lot culturally about how different people navigate the world in different cultures. I was doing a group in English, a group in Spanish, so just lots of different cultures and life experiences were coming through that. And so I had to fine tune how I was doing that in order to be responsive to the groups. That led to training, actual training providers in the community who were providing services for people who might also be experiencing violence and abuse.

It led to community education efforts and then ultimately to working with workplaces and training groups in workplaces, training and facilitating conversations, I would say around how do we create safe, respectful workplaces that are less likely to foster sexual harassment, or how do we also help identify sexual harassment or the spectrum of sexual harassment and address it before it harms more people. So, within that tenure that our paths crossed through the SAFE Alliance, and then I started the certification program and learned some new things there. It’s really been a journey. It’s been very interesting and insightful.

Douglas:

It always is a journey and there’s so much there I want to come back to, and maybe we’ll just go all the way back to the beginning and start there. You mentioned being a parent educator in this role and working with, it sounded like educating parents, and I was curious, was this your first role in education working with adult learning?

Sandra Molinari:

It absolutely was. It absolutely was. This was after graduate school, which had nothing to do with education. I was studying international relations, and after having lived in Central America for a few years where I did teach English, I mean we could count that obviously as education. I was teaching English to Spanish speakers in El Salvador, and that’s where I had the Spanish skills to work with parents in Spanish here and doing parent education. But that was pretty much the start, and I got a lot of training in early child development, but very little training around how to facilitate or how to teach adult learners. I think I picked that up along the way because I was curious and I was thinking, what’s going to be effective?

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s interesting. What was one of your first aha moments when you were shifting from working with kids, teaching them English and then shifting into this adult learning space and helping them navigate the world of parentry?

Sandra Molinari:

Well, actually I was teaching adults English. When I was in El Salvador I was teaching adults English.

Douglas:

Oh, you were teaching them English and the parent?

Sandra Molinari:

Yes.

Douglas:

Oh, gotcha.

Sandra Molinari:

And when I was in Austin is when I was teaching parents around parenting skills, supporting them around parenting skills. But no, it was adults and El Salvador, professionals mostly.

Douglas:

So, yeah. What were some of the differences then between working with adults around language and then moving into parenting skills? And also I would imagine there’s some differences between working in the commercial sector where these are business related students versus now you’re working with parents. There’s probably quite a bit of differences. What were some of the things you were noticing as you were making that shift?

Sandra Molinari:

There are absolutely differences between the groups. The English teaching I was doing in Central America was based on a very sort of strict curriculum that was effective at teaching people phrases and grammar in a very short span of time. And so we were following curriculum that were drills that would be repeated. So, there was little room to be flexible and move outside of those boundaries. So, that was one thing. And the adults reacted fairly well to that. Again, these were professionals that were mostly in corporate sectors in El Salvador, so they were used to having a certain way of doing things.

And then when I shifted to the parent education, of course then it’s not so black and white. It’s not a grammar question or a spelling question. It’s not a right and a wrong way to do things exactly. And especially culturally, because I was seeing lots of differences between the English-speaking group I was working with in the Spanish-speaking group around notions of what is appropriate in parenting, which is very, very different because for the Spanish-speaking folks who are mostly from Mexico and Central America, they were having to navigate a system that has very different cultural norms around what’s appropriate with children.

And it took me a while to realize that and think, hold off, wait a minute. We do have to help them navigate the system here and know what’s allowed and what child protective services would consider neglect or abuse, but we also need to honor how they are parenting, so how do you strike that balance? And so that allowed for a lot more conversation, a lot more flexibility. And it wasn’t so much teaching as navigating facilitating conversations, which conversations with, of course, some skill building in the background. I mean we were talking about very clear child development guidelines of course. So, it was really different.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s really fascinating. And this multicultural notion of supporting and being with groups and noticing came up also when you were talking about navigating the world, even with these folks that came to you at SAFE helping them build life skills and build with confidence, and they would have these needs that were cultural needs and how to think about approaching the world. And it’s not all that different from people that come into the workplace understanding how folks are showing up and how do we best support them. I’m curious if you’ve noticed this in your work now with Control Risks. How is this ability to notice these cultural differences? They may not be as extreme as some of the examples that you had with the parenting, but how is it showing up now in the workspace for you?

Sandra Molinari:

Those cultural differences are still showing up because the workplace that I’m in is a very culturally diverse workplace. I work at a downtown office, but we have dispersed teams all over the world. So, I do have colleagues that are on four continents, but even my team, which is mostly in the US, within the team of about 12 people is extremely, extremely diverse culturally by age, gender, et cetera. And so I’m realizing that as I’m going into help support, for example, team building activities, which we’ve wanted to do quite a bit of this year because it’s been a challenging time in the workplace, there have been layoffs and restructures and all sorts of things. We’ve been trying to really have some cohesion on the team. And so I offered to bring in some facilitation in order to do exercises, skill building, things like that. I have other colleagues who have joined me in doing that because they have some of that background.

My colleague and I who are leading the facilitation have really rich conversations around what kinds of questions do we ask if we’re doing icebreakers or how do we approach the facilitation, what do we want to take into account considering how diverse our group is, what are our blind spots? He and I demographically are not so different. And so what are our blind spots? Who else can we bring into this facilitation team or the prep team to consider how we frame some of the questions where we go with the exercises? And that’s interesting because that’s something that I learned very early on at SAFE. Things that were such blind spots for me at the time, I was not as culturally aware as I thought I was at the time. I remember doing financial literacy with the women in my life skills group at SAFE and just bringing up examples that were showing my class privilege and examples that would not have resonated with them at all.

And so I bring that up because these are things that now I think of, and I probably still have a lot of blind spots, but now I think of when I’m approaching whatever group, who’s the group, what are the assumptions I’m making, which could also be wrong, but I need to start with some assumptions based on what I know about the group and then how do I work, ideally not alone, but with somebody else or somebody’s else, several of us, to create a space that is as inclusive as possible where everybody does feel like they have a voice. And that can get down to simple little things like if you’re doing an icebreaker, what are you watching these days on TV? Is it, what are you reading? Are you assuming that everybody reads? Just all of these things. And so I feel like I’m rambling. All of this to say that all of those experiences over the years have led me to really approach groups differently and to realize that I may be missing things and lean on others to have collaborative efforts that might be more effective.

Douglas:

It’s very important. And digging a little deeper there into your example around what are you reading or what TV shows are you watching? Not only is it about knowing what are the behaviors and norms or how people conduct themselves when they’re not in this meeting together and being informed about that so that we can better align with them and not make them feel outcast just because they don’t fit into the box of the question that we asked or the framing. There’s also how are they emotionally or mentally walking into the space, because they might read, but what if they’re going through something super traumatic right now that doesn’t allow them to read? That’s going to be triggering, right?

I don’t have time to read. Are you kidding me? This is going on. That might be a trite example, but being mindful of the trauma people might have in the moment and being aware and acknowledge it. We might not have to bring it up, but just holding that and understanding that and being attuned to it when we’re thinking about these things. I assume you have countless experience with that, so I’d be curious if you have any experiences you can share any thoughts around how are you shaping these invitations or these icebreakers in ways that can be acknowledged, the emotions, not only the cultural background, but the emotion people might be bringing in the space?

Sandra Molinari:

That’s a great question. I think it starts with the planning phase. So, if we’re going to do something as simple as an opener or an icebreaker, this is something that I’ve struggled with and talked with my co-facilitator and my manager about. So, ideally we want to have everybody participate in something light like an icebreaker. Again, we’re already assuming that an icebreaker is light depending on the question that we ask. And then if the goal is to get to know each other a little bit better because our team has evolved over the last year, how do you balance wanting people to participate in something that you hope is light and not too emotionally challenging so that they don’t have to expose too much of themselves if they are going through a hard time? How do you balance that with knowing that some people are choosing, for example, seem to be sitting back?

Some people may not be on camera. Some people you barely hear their voice and so I always struggle with is that simply a person who’s shy? Is that part of their personality? Is this asking a lot of them, which it could be to even step forward and say something in a group where they don’t really know everybody or is that person currently dealing with something? And then is it fair to ask everybody to come to the table for this kind of group building activity? So, some of the things that we’ve done is we’ve tried to make an open invitation that still is optional. So, we’re proposing this activity. We have some ideas. Would anybody like to join us in the planning? If you have any ideas, we’ve already extended an invitation. Do you want to join in and propose some questions? That usually will get one or two people interested.

Then in the invitation that goes out, we’re proposing an activity on Mural, for example. You can be anonymous, it’s really easy to use. We’re going to do a soft start in case you haven’t used Mural before, and this is optional, this is invitational. Here are the benefits of doing this activity as we get to know each other, but it’s low pressure, but join as you would like. That seems to have worked. Generally if we’re doing something like on Mural, then it seems that people can really sit back, not be on camera if they don’t want to be, have an anonymous contribution, and it still gives us that beautiful Mural board. We did that with silly things like movies, are you a Game of Thrones fan or Star Wars? And then that generates some conversation. So, it’s really trying to always balance all of these things.

But my nature, having facilitated trainings in groups for so many years, I want to see people, and I have been a little bit frustrated since the beginning of COVID that we’re on camera, which is frustrating. Excuse me, we’re on Zoom or virtual platforms, which is frustrating to begin with. But then when we’re trying to lead a facilitation and people are sometimes not on camera and sometimes not even chiming in the chat, then that makes it really difficult. But again, I have learned in large part through my colleagues at SAFE who were very trauma-informed that sometimes you just can’t ask people to do that. That’s just too much to ask of them. And so now I understand that. Still leaves me a little frustrated.

Douglas:

Yeah, there’s lots of layers there that I’m hearing. It reminds me of a story of a facilitator told me once about one of their participants was just their head down. Just seemed totally disengaged. And so had a discussion with them afterwards and it’s like, “Oh, I had a migraine.” And it’s like, wow, they cared so deeply about, I mean, talk about the level of engagement that you have to have to stay in the session with a migraine. So, they were engaging as much as they could, but as a facilitator you’re probably thinking it’s easy to jump into this like, oh, they just don’t want to be here. I heard some advice once, always assume positive intent.

Sandra Molinari:

Absolutely. I love that and I’ve learned that over the years also, always assume positive intent. Again, is that as easy to do as it’s to say? Not always, but you’re absolutely right. And that’s a wonderful example, and I’ve seen numerous examples on Zoom calls trainings that we were doing where three quarters of the group is off camera, but the chat is going is really, really well, and people who are off camera actually on chat. And so there is a lot of chatter going on. And so I had to realize, no, there are different ways to engage even in video calls, there are many different ways to engage and again, assume good intent, you never know.

Douglas:

The other thing that jumped out to me was this, you were talking about sharing the benefits of doing this activity or even doing the work. And I think that’s so key, and as much as we can do that in the invitation upfront and the scene setter when people arrive, just reminding people why we’re even asking them to show up in this strange way, because oftentimes we’re asking people to step into a new way of being like, come into this imaginary world with me and behave in a brand new way. And if people don’t understand why, if they don’t understand the benefits, that can often create some distrust to begin with. And if they’re already feeling a bit weary or a bit untrustworthy, then it’s really difficult to pull them in. So, I love that you mentioned sharing the benefits.

Sandra Molinari:

Yes, because sometimes those benefits seem obvious to us as facilitators and maybe some of the people in the group are able to see those benefits immediately, but others are just seeing, I’m being asked to do this other thing, like you said, this new thing, and why do I keep being asked to do these things? Zoom fatigue is a real thing. I don’t want to share with these people. I don’t know these people. So, as much as we can show why this is going to be helpful to the team and to our work and ultimately to that person. The person might say, “Well, I’m tired and I’m having a hard time and I don’t really care about the team right now.” They might not say it, but they might think it. So, how could this potentially be beneficial to them? And then people will do what they want with that information. But you’re right, we can’t just offer something up without explaining the why of the gathering.

Douglas:

I also really am a big fan of bringing people into the design process early, and that was something you mentioned. How do we broaden the group of somebodies that you’re bringing in? And because you talked about blind spots, and so of course the more folks that are involved, the more that the blind spots are diminished. And then also we’re including those people in the why. They’re starting to understand the benefits because they’re in some of the dialogue. And so yeah, this upfront clarity that we can get to when we bring more folks into the design process, really, really cool. Any other examples of how that’s shown up in your work where you’re doing … because you mentioned some community facilitated work, just curious if you’re doing much in the way of group design or bringing folks in early before the actual sessions where do they convene?

Sandra Molinari:

I’m not doing as much of that now. So, I think the clearest example of that was the sexual harassment prevention training slash groups that I was doing at SAFE where it took us some time, lots of iterations of building this training to realize we really could bring the client, if you will, the employer representatives into some of this design process. In other words, not only having a customization call, which we were starting out by having customization calls explaining the program, yes, this is what you’re interested in. Great, let’s have a customization call. Tell us about your needs. Well, why are you bringing us in, et cetera. But we realized over time that that was helpful, but we were still not always addressing the needs in the room because the people having the customization calls were leadership and they were not necessarily always in conversation with the people most impacted on the ground by sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviors in the workplace, et cetera, et cetera.

So, because a lot of employers, they just didn’t have the ability to give us time with employees in advance, we said, okay, we understand that, we would have an agenda going in after doing the customization calls and all, but we would lay out this is a tentative agenda. We would lay that out for the group and ask them which of these areas are most important? Is there something else that you would like to discuss today? Give them some time to think about it and then offer them an opportunity to give feedback. They could always give us feedback or input directly, but we used anonymous tools so they could give us that input in real time around what was important to them. And we realized that that was even more effective at really, really honing into what the group felt they needed so that they felt like they owned the training.

This is going to be meaningful to us as opposed to why are we coming into a two-hour sexual harassment training? What’s going on? It’s not the most fun thing to do for most people. By the time they left after a couple hours, most of the groups said, “Wow, that was so interesting. I never thought of things that way.” And so I think that the fact once we pivoted a little bit that way to really include the group in some of the design, that was even more effective and helpful. And that was a challenge for me because as somebody who really likes structure and likes a certain agenda and I like to know where I’m going with things, I’ve always felt like I was responsive to the group, but I still had an agenda. So, it was balancing those two elements and I’ve learned over time through lots of discomfort also that it isn’t more important, I think, to be responsive to the group, still keep your agenda in mind, but if the group is going right, you can’t keep going left.

You have to spend time with that group where they are. There are ways of bringing them a little bit back to what you had planned if you feel that’s necessary, but sometimes that’s not necessary. Ultimately, it’s what the group is identifying that is important, especially for, I’m talking here about trainings that are a little bit more gray in the sense that it’s not a right or wrong. These were conversations around building safe, respectful workplaces.

And so there’s a lot of messiness in those conversations. There’s not a very specific skill we needed people to walk away with. There were certain sets of guidelines they needed to walk away with, so we made sure that we hit those points towards the end of the training or whenever we could, but everything else needed to be people sharing, people feeling safe enough to share, which is we can only create so much safety. People will decide if they feel it’s safe, but building a little bit of trust with the group so that they can share, open up, and then we can be there. And we were approaching it from a very trauma-informed lens as well so that we can really, really ensure that the group walks away as much as possible with what they needed to hear and say in some cases.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned a couple of times this idea of that when you’re in a space where there is no right or wrong answer in the material you’re covering and the content in the direction, and I think that’s the case for so much of life, but our education system is kind of built around standardized tests and the curriculum that has to be taught to you. And I think the more and more that things are automated, the better AI gets. We’re going to move further and further away from the right or wrong answer, because these mechanistic elements in society and in life we won’t really have to mess with. We will be engaging more critical thinking and more exploratory pursuits together. And I think that this element you’re talking about will become more prominent. We’ll have to have more of these amorphous conversations.

Sandra Molinari:

Yes, we’ll have to have more of these amorphous conversations, and that’s going to be myself included, absolutely are going to have to start to lean into that discomfort of being in the messiness because life is messy. People are messy. We live in such a polarized world right now, at least in the US and I am not going to get into that, but I think it is important that we be able to hear each other, really hear each other, not necessarily agree, but how do we start to move a little bit closer to each other? And probably that’s going to have to be through complicated, messy conversations and real listening. And part of that, something else that I’ve learned through doing community organizing work around social justice is that we need to be able to not only listen, but to feel, to be in our bodies. When things are coming at us verbally, emotionally, that are uncomfortable or seem hurtful we need to be in our bodies and be able to feel in order to not react or overreact. And that takes a lot of practice.

And if we really want to hear each other, there’s no other way of doing it, in my opinion, than really taking things in, taking a breath. You and I were talking before the show, about taking a pause, taking a pause before we react. So, I might be going off slightly in a different direction, but I think that’s really important to us as facilitators as well. We talk about the pause. I’ve learned to be very comfortable with silence, and I’ll tell my groups when I pose a question and there’s a huge silence, “I have to tell you, I’m going to be really comfortable with the silence.”

So, it could be a few seconds and people are looking around and then I break it and people will take a deep gasp, but that pause is important because otherwise we talk over each other. Some of us who are internal processors don’t have time to think before we can really process something and then be able to express ourselves. And so yes, so I think there’s going to be a lot more, we are going to need that skill also in the future, not just facilitators, but I think as a society we’re going to have to be able to be less reactive. I don’t know how hopeful I am about that.

Douglas:

I’ll offer a little bit of advice, because this is, I also like structure and form, and this is something I learned fairly early on because as a musician I got into improvisational music and the thing I’ve found about improvisational music is that it was helpful to find some kind of scaffold, some sort of concept or some sort of notion or idea to hang the amorphousness onto. And so we talked a little bit about purpose and benefit earlier. I said when we go into that messiness, our bravery comes from our knowledge of what we’re attempting to do together and the scaffolding, the shape of what we want to navigate through, but how we move through that jungle gym together can take to any shape we want, but it’s all there to help us from falling. And I think that’s a helpful frame. It’s nice to have a full agenda and everything’s all buttoned up and just go through it, but it’s rarely the case that we can do that.

Sandra Molinari:

The scaffolding is the key, the scaffolding and the purpose. So, the scaffolding is built with the purpose in mind, so being really clear on what is the purpose. Is it skill building? Is it generating rich conversations around a certain theme and being able to hold space with one another? Those are two very different things. We might still be able to hold space with each other and do skill building, but there are very different types. Is this a training? Is this process facilitation? What is it? So, having a scaffolding and being very clear from the beginning on what the purpose is. And as you and I have been saying, make sure that the group or audience or group participants are clear on what the purpose is as well, whether or not they have the luxury of informing that purpose, but being really clear what this is, what the purpose for today or the general purpose for today, and this is what we would like to get to in our time here together.

Douglas:

The other thing too, I mean it’s important to acknowledge the fact that if we get clear on that, we know it’s more easy to identify what we’re not going to do, and so we start veering into that territory. It’s much easier as a facilitator to move us back onto the path. And because we’ve created an agreement upfront, hey, we’re here for skill building, and so if we want to acknowledge that need, then we need to shift this conversation back on the skill building. And I think that so often teams, when they’re gathering just in typical normal gatherings, it’s easy for people to get different notions in their head or like, oh, this is why we’re here for this meeting, or this is what we’re trying to do today. And when folks aren’t aligned, that creates so much tension because everyone’s pushing on different vectors, if you will, and we’re not trying to get into this unified path.

Even if we recognize that, just stopping and asking ourselves, hey, let’s get clear on why we’re here. Let’s get clear on, hey, why are we pushing in different directions? It’s okay. It’s not anyone’s fault that we’re all pushing, but what’s important right here in this moment as a group? And that leads to another thing that I noticed you were talking about, which is just making sure that everyone’s comfortable with the cross-cultural elements and whatnot. So, bringing people in beforehand is good, but also having discussions after hand is good too. Because if we don’t debrief or if we don’t get feedback or reflect on what happened, we can’t improve, we can’t get better, and we can debrief in the moment, just like I was sharing in that example, if we’re noticing things are getting off track, we can actually say, okay, what I’m noticing is, and then just invite some discussion with folks to say, hey, this is happening.

So, I don’t know, maybe even with the icebreaker example, if we have a feeling that it’s causing some tension, actually hitting the pause button and saying, “Hey, I’m noticing this might not have landed with everyone, let’s just talk about that,” and actually stepping into that. I think that creates more trust and more safety because I’m willing to admit a fault as a facilitator. So, I’m just curious to hear some of your thoughts around debrief and even live debrief in the moment if we hadn’t planned it.

Sandra Molinari:

I have learned to do that, again, more in recent years doing the live debrief in the moment, checking in. Again, that was difficult for me to pivot to as somebody who struggles with perfectionism and having everything done in the box for so many years and on time. But I have again seen the benefit and I absolutely a hundred percent agree with you that admitting our imperfections as facilitators is extremely important, because showing that we are vulnerable invites people to be more open. It does help build trust, and part of that is some insight into what we’re doing. It’s what you were saying. So, I’m noticing that, whatever it is, that this icebreaker, this was the intention and I’m noticing that we’re going in this direction, or I’m noticing that there is some tension here. I’m wondering, and maybe pose a question there, or if it seems like it’s God forbid, harmful, that people are really not reacting well, then maybe it’s a time to offer something and even possibly apologize.

I’m sorry, I hadn’t considered that this could go in this direction. I hope no harm has been caused, and I think we would now pivot to a different direction. May I offer this up? Then see if the group agrees with something else. Something that we were brought to do very often in our work at SAFE, whether it was a sexual harassment prevention workshop or other, it was sometimes have to check in with somebody afterwards, which I know happens in lots of other types of groups also, but if it seems like somebody is not doing well or I feel like I may have caused harm or I may have inadvertently done that, I will check in with the person afterwards.

We have to be very mindful of not putting somebody on the spot. We have to be mindful of their confidentiality and privacy, but I think that’s important too, because sometimes in the work that I did for so many years, it opened up a whole other can of worms also, and sometimes that person needed to talk, which was fine by me, and we would offer that up also. That’s not always the case for all facilitators. If somebody is not equipped or comfortable having deep conversations about somebody bringing up some kind of trauma that’s a little bit more complex, and then it’s helpful for the facilitator to be able to refer that person to someone they can’t talk to if it’s a little complex.

Douglas:

All really great points. I think it’s an important nuance for folks to keep in mind is if we are inviting the group into on the spot reflection, debrief, ideally it’s not about calling out a single individual, it’s more the energy in the room and how the whole room is feeling about it, and certainly if it is one individual, one thing I’ve found sometimes that can be helpful is even just calling a break, but not making a big scene about it. Just saying, “Hey, I think it might be a good time for us to take a break and the spirit of the whole group benefiting from having a break.” And then that might be a moment to even have a sidebar with someone if they’re needing some special attention. That way it’s not called out and you can check in with them, really understand where they’re at and if it even makes sense to continue.

Sandra Molinari:

Absolutely. Again, it comes back to that flexibility, and I think it’s very easy to call a break without drawing too much attention. We’ve been covering all of these things. I’m sensing the energy in the room, people probably getting antsy or whatever, however you want to frame it. Everybody okay with a break, who’s not okay with the break? I agree. I agree. That’s good to pause. It’s kind of that timeout, right? You maybe not call it that, but it is a timeout for the group to [inaudible].

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s been fantastic chatting with you about all of this work and spend a lot of time talking about cultural considerations as we think about groups that are coming together maybe for the first time or that aren’t used to working with these cross-cultural groups and the norms aren’t super established, or they’re folks that we have our blind spots, whether they’re blind spots amongst the groups or blind spots from the facilitator to the group, and also even trauma-informed facilitation, just understanding how we’re being mindful of what’s emerging for the groups and being considerate of that stuff. If you were to think about a future where there was more of this inconsideration, you briefly touched on this when you mentioned how polarized things have gotten in recent years and how good it would be if we all could come together more and understand and listen to each other. So, imagine that there’s more of that. Where does this take us into the future? What does it make possible?

Sandra Molinari:

Oh, wow. If we could actually listen to each other without reacting and calling each other names or just walking out of the room, I think it makes everything possible. I think, I mean, it makes human relationships so much richer. It allows families to talk to each other again. So many families have been broken up over lots of things over a number of years now. It allows people in leadership, people in government, our democracy to move forward in a healthier way if we can listen and talk to each other and disagree in healthy ways, because nobody’s ever going to agree completely. It allows us to be able to really work together and move forward with whatever it is that we want to move forward with. It involves some compromise, and I feel like we’ve just, that might be a bad word in government, but again, without just sticking to government, I’m thinking it’s an overall thing.

I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve had the extreme privilege to travel a lot around the world to many, many different countries and different regions, and something that dawned on me one day when I was walking around in the Sa Pa region of northern Vietnam and chatting with our tour guide, who is an indigenous woman there who learned several languages, western languages in order to be able to give tour guides. This woman couldn’t read or write. She learned that.

And so she would tell us stories about the groups there, and I realized I’m waiting in the middle of nowhere. It’s so remote, and what she’s telling me sounds exactly like, what the families want for their children, what people want in life, sounds exactly like what we want in life. Take away a few material things that are different, and the same thing that people were telling me they wanted in Guatemala or El Salvador or Cuba. We’re all actually not that different. Yes, there are huge cultural differences, but ultimately we want to be loved. We want our families to be healthy. We want to see our children grow and be healthy. Obviously, we want the basic needs, and I don’t know how we move forward and solve so many of our problems globally if we can’t actually listen and talk to each other. Obviously, I’m very passionate about this.

This is the type of thing that keeps me up at night because I feel like this is what’s going to prevent us from doing so much that we need to do for future generations if we can’t even agree on anything or any facts. And so as facilitators, I think we have a golden opportunity in a very small space to add our little drop to the bucket, to add our piece in helping people start to listen to each other and see that it’s okay. It’s actually all right. The sky is not going to fall, and we can hold that space for people, and if they see that, they might want to try it elsewhere. That’s the way I look at it.

Douglas:

That’s lovely, and it reminds me of how Maslow’s hierarchy is such a great model for thinking about leadership and if we really just get back to the basics of what we all want and need in order to thrive and flourish. So, that brings us to the end today. I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Sandra Molinari:

Yes, my final thought, let’s see. I would say facilitation is a wonderful, wonderful set of tools, and whether you’re new to facilitation or if you’ve been doing this for a number of years, just know that the world of facilitation is so, so rich, and there’s always something to learn. There are always new insights. Doing the facilitation certification program was wonderful because I got to meet so many people in different industries using facilitation skills in completely, completely different settings that I had never even considered. And so it just opens up a range of possibilities that we can apply that to, and it is sorely, sorely needed. I see that in the workplaces that I’ve been in where meetings are still awful. Oftentimes, trainings can sometimes be awful because there’s just not the skills. It’s not for lack of good intention. It’s just people don’t necessarily have those skills, and so these gatherings aren’t as effective, and we can’t do that piece without meeting each other and listening to each other and moving things in the direction that we want to move them in while keeping everybody feeling safe and heard, listened to.

Douglas:

Awesome. Sandra, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and I look forward to seeing you again sometime soon.

Sandra Molinari:

Thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed the conversation, Douglas, really appreciate you having me on.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Facilitation Lab. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post The Most Essential Facilitation Skills for Building Trust and Collaboration appeared first on Voltage Control.

“In today’s world, compassion and kindness in the business environment is the most valuable thing that you can bring to your business or any working session.” – Eli Wood

In this podcast episode, Douglas Ferguson and Eli Wood discuss the importance of facilitation in working with interdisciplinary teams and building successful products and business offerings. They emphasize that facilitation is not limited to design sprints but can be applied to any situation where collaboration and decision-making are needed. They also highlight the role of facilitation in product management, as product managers need to navigate diverse requirements and agendas. The conversation also touches on the power of facilitation skills for individuals at all levels and the importance of building relationships and trust. Eli shares a success story where facilitation skills helped overcome challenges in a large-scale project.

Show Highlights

[00:01:28] The significance of facilitation 

[00:07:47] The role of facilitation in long-term and enduring product development

[00:13:11] Understanding the importance of prioritizing inquiry over advocacy

[00:14:33] Exploring the transformative potential of retrospectives

[00:17:06] Highlighting the importance of facilitation skills in building deeper relationships

Links | Resources

Eli on LinkedIn

Eli on Twitter

About the Guest

Designing prototypes and empowering cross-functional teams fuels Eli’s soul. As a specialist in prototype design, Eli employs dynamic workshops and human-centered design principles to create innovative solutions. Always eager to explore new technology, Eli also cherishes moments of unplugging and reconnecting with nature, surrounded by family and friends. Eli’s journey began as Design Lead at TEEX Product Development Center, where Eli played a pivotal role in designing disaster response training and emergency management technologies – a truly rewarding experience. Eli also had the honor of serving the City of Austin as a Digital Designer, focusing on building accessible websites to inform the public about crucial infrastructure assets. Eli grew into facilitation with Design Thinking Facilitation at Voltage Control, where Eli honed skills in leading creative teams. Eli then took the entrepreneurial leap and founded Black Flag Design, crafting pioneering digital products in augmented reality and architectural visualization. Eli’s love for architecture, physical infrastructure, and civic engagement runs deep. Eli holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University and continues to blend passions to create meaningful impact.

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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of facilitation and transformative leadership. Some leaders exert tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly transformative experience. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. You can also learn more about our 12 week facilitation certification program at voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with Eli Wood, a strategic designer who possesses an amazing portfolio of versatile capabilities complimented by his commitment to societal enhancement. He’s also a Voltage Control alumnus as a facilitator and prototype specialist. Our conversation centers on the importance of facilitation as part of working with interdisciplinary teams, building products, services, and new business offerings. Welcome to the show, Eli.

Eli Wood:

Hi Douglas. Thanks so much for having me today. I’m really excited to be here talking with you again and returning to my roots in facilitation.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s been quite a while since we’ve been able to roll up our sleeves and work together. It’s been great staying in touch over the years, but fantastic to be collaborating again.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. As much as I love talking about barbecuing and smoking brisket, facilitation definitely scratches a professional itch that I just can’t seem to get rid of.

Douglas:

Absolutely. And in the early days of Voltage Control, back in 2017 when you were joining me on design sprints, we got to see quite an array of different individuals witnessing facilitation for the first time, and noticing some of these patterns around how it would impact teams and how they worked, how they collaborated, and what comes to mind as they bring up those memories?

Eli Wood:

Oh, tons of really fond memories. At first, I was really drawn to the sprint format and structure from a prototyping point of view and being able to rapidly come to decisions about design work that used to take weeks to go back and forth with on clients about. And then through those experiences, really getting to get intimately connected to designers, a whole host of diverse sets of companies, and even some government organizations, and inevitably getting connected to other business stakeholders, like product managers who would come to me and express just amazement at the fact that we could get so much work done in five days. And I would always have to remind them that we didn’t get the work done, that they did. It wasn’t about us coming in, it was about their team actually coming together and how powerful that was.

Douglas:

Yeah, I mean, that’s a true testament to a well-designed process and that’s well facilitated so that folks can get out of their own way and get amazing work done and just see some progress that quite often will just baffle the mind.

Eli Wood:

Definitely, yeah. It’s game changing whenever you get out of this typical iterative loop of give me feedback in the next day or so to a highly facilitated structure that creates dynamics and collaboration that happens in real time, whether you’re remote or in person, you’re able to talk about things in productive ways and make decisions in ways that previously weren’t possible. And so every time I get the chance to be a part of a sprint, it’s like getting ready for a rocket ship to take off and I get excited.

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that I started to realize was that it wasn’t just limited to sprints. Anytime we bring the power of facilitation skills to a group of smart and purpose led or purpose fueled individuals, really amazing things can happen. And oftentimes it’s just the lack of facilitation or the lack of articulated purpose that’s preventing folks from finding that momentum.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.

Douglas:

So you mentioned product managers. Why do you think it’s so essential for product managers to lean into this kind of facilitative approach?

Eli Wood:

Well, inherently product management is an interdisciplinary capability. Product is the amalgamation of design development business requirements and so many other stakeholders. And so I just tended to see these product managers fall up and say, how did you do that? How are you able to move us forward? They almost thought that it was magic. And so it was a trend that just continued to emerge, and they navigate in the ways that they’re trained and taught, whether it’s academic these days with more and more product management programs popping up in academia to people being trained through scrum and agile methodologies. I see that a lot of times the true fundamental topic of facilitation gets overlooked.

Douglas:

You mentioned the nature of product management being interdisciplinary, and I immediately thought of the organizational development term of boundary spanner, which is something I talk a lot about. And so for folks that listen to me often they’re like, oh, he’s talking about boundary spanners again. But for those that aren’t familiar, it’s a powerful frame to take into how we think about work. And project managers are a great example of those that have to span boundaries. And when they’re doing their job well, they’re spanning those boundaries. I think some fall prey to that siloed or stovepipe thinking where they’re like, oh, this is the product department. And those folks in the engineering department aren’t listening or aren’t thinking straight. And so to your point, if we’re doing the work well, we’re doing it in a way that is spanning boundaries. We’re inviting people in so that we can make progress together, and I think that is very key.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. And I like the positive framing of boundary spanner because a lot of times product managers are put in adversarial positions, whether it’s breaking down silos or trying to foster open dialogue or working on streamlining and efficiency of processes. Oftentimes that puts them in pretty contentious situations, but thinking of it as spanning boundaries and bringing people together in positive ways I think helps unleash the product manager or the product owner or the program manager. There’s a variety of these positions that find themselves in similar situations these days. And I think that facilitation is, and all of its related principles, are a key part of helping these people be successful in really sort of long-term or enduring product development.

Douglas:

It also makes me think about the thing we’re saying earlier around the momentum and it’s about creating flow. And the interesting thing about flow that’s created through facilitation is that we’re not just going to bulldoze things through for progress. We’re not just going to kind of put a schedule together and just mandate we’re going to hit these deadlines and just push it all through. Flow actually is creating the state where everyone’s moving in harmony, but willing and open and curious about challenges and conflict because that’s where real opportunity can present itself. And if we’re in that state of flow, water moves around rocks very fluidly. Right?

Eli Wood:

Right. But it also causes erosion.

Douglas:

That’s right. It can.

Eli Wood:

And so it takes a lot longer for flow to push through the rock or to create that hole or to change the course of the river than to follow its natural course. And I love those principles of facilitation that enable us to be more dynamic and adaptive and sort of understand the pulse of the group of people making decisions, but more importantly in the sprint kind of framework, the sort of flow and the desires of the users and finding ways to actually embrace what they want and where we can go as businesses.

Douglas:

And I like this idea of erosion and sometimes having to spill out of the boundaries of what is expected to be the normal path. And it makes me think about coming back to the product manager lens, is idea of the feature factory and how we need to not be that and instead be more curious about the path that we need to carve out that’s going to create the most value and the best outcomes for our customers.

Eli Wood:

Exactly. Yeah, 100%. And I think one of the most challenging things that product managers face is navigating and balancing the diverse requirements of the business and different interdepartmental groups. People are measured differently across businesses. They have their own agendas and effective facilitation upfront in the product development process can then enable their respective squads to be that much more successful. So we need to not only think about facilitation in terms of scrum and agile methodologies, but also in terms of requirements gathering, decision-making, setting expectations with business stakeholders so that they can report to the appropriate channels, which becomes even much more important in publicly traded companies.

Something I’ve learned in the past several years is just how much is driven by those filings that the quarterly reports that have to roll up to the SEC at the end of the day even, and these people are inherently being driven by decisions that are outside of the boundaries of what say a designer working on a product feature ever considers. It’s not even in their wheelhouse, but there’s other people who are, and product managers are sitting somewhere in this intensely vast area of decision-making that has broad reaching implications, and it just has become a fascination lately.

Douglas:

Yeah, totally. And that’s also impacted by just the growing complexity in products that product managers are having to manage and support.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can remember some of our first sprints that we did together where I was first exposed to marketing decision makers or even VPs of product or business lines that had indirect or implicit influence that completely could have rocked my world when I was used to working directly with a designer and maybe like a startup founder to make calls about what they needed. You used to bring out about a lot of frustration as a facilitator or a prototyper where it was difficult to understand why people were making the decisions that they were. And now I think as I’ve sort of progressed through my career or gotten exposed to more and more situations, I understand that the complexity of these decision-making situations can’t necessarily be untangled just by calling it politics or bureaucracy because sometimes they have fiduciary responsibilities or even regulatory responsibilities that I as the facilitator don’t hold knowledge about.

But I have to kind of go with the flow and understand why somebody is impassioned about something and how can I help them communicate to their team or step out of the way to let their team gain that understanding. It’s one of the most difficult parts of facilitating an enterprise or Fortune 500s I think.

Douglas:

It’s also important to remember that if we’re taking a facilitative frame, we’re prioritizing inquiry over advocacy. So in those moments where it’s like, why is that marketing person making this decision? We don’t have the need or even a responsibility to advocate for a different decision, but exercising some inquiry can be really powerful because others in the room might be asking themselves the same question. And it gives that leader an opportunity to express why some of the decisions were pushing in the ways they were. And I think it’s really powerful when it shifts to when the leader is making those pivots from inquiry to advocacy.

Eli Wood:

And I’m reminded of the significance of retrospective and the role of product management when you bring up that topic of inquiry versus advocacy. And not to be too critical of product management as a discipline, but oftentimes the retrospective and the posture of it is seen as checking the box so that we can file that we did that part of the process, when if approached with that facilitative mindset and being inquisitive and curious and creating a space of psychological safety, if framed appropriately, the retrospective is your most liberating activity and your most transformative activity, giving you the ability to action and make decisions that were previously hidden or obfuscated.

And so over the past several years, working in design teams advocating as a designer for the importance of a retrospective, but oftentimes being in a position where the product manager is responsible for facilitating it. I’ve been a part of some really shitty retrospectives that just were boring, unmotivated, lacked true capability or structure. And I really believe that product managers can relate to that in many ways because they’re put in situations where they don’t have the agency or the accountability to truly make change as a result of the retrospective. And so when I think about that inquiry versus advocacy, if a product manager can be their most inquisitive in those positions, I think they’ll unleash their teams in ways that they just can’t even foresee at this point.

Douglas:

And even when folks don’t find themselves in a position of power and they enter into a meeting, a space, a workshop, and they bring inquiry or even just any facilitation skill, they can amplify the experience for everyone and certainly themselves. And that’s a great way to shift culture inside an organization. You don’t have to be ordained the leader or the meeting organizer to have an influence over meeting culture and how we bring this facilitative approaches into the work.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think really just bringing structure and not leadership sets a team up for more success every day.

Douglas:

I was also thinking about the importance of relationships and building trust and how thinking about facilitation as a core skill and how I’m going to show up at work in these ways allows us to build deeper relationships, set aside some of the mechanics of how we’re going to get things done, and be a little bit more human in how we’re coming together. And I think over time, that’s a real strong bond that starts to form and makes teams more cohesive, helps them just find better work together.

Eli Wood:

Absolutely. I’m reminded of the importance of relationship building and the significance of this idea of reciprocity or being reciprocal in your relationships. I think product especially there’s users, there’s business requirements, there’s technical requirements, and when somebody brings something to you, if you don’t follow up and act on it, sometimes that can be seen as a one-sided relationship. And I think being able to reciprocate is super important and facilitated structures allow you to express reciprocity in many ways, whether it’s conversational design or feedback loops or the thinking around participatory decision-making structures like giving people space to communicate, giving people time to respond, to be heard and seen in ways that everyday work doesn’t let us do that.

And that builds trust. That reciprocity shows that I’m consistent. It shows that I can recognize you and reward you. I can appreciate your diverse set of thinking, and then ultimately ensure that everybody is seen. It’s a really tough position or framing of product management because it’s a lot of work, right? It’s not just being the feature factory.

Douglas:

So what’s a success story that comes to mind when you think about how facilitation skills have turned a potential product roadblock into an opportunity or created something new or something positive for the team?

Eli Wood:

I was in a position recently with a massive piece of work that brought together teams over the course of 18 plus weeks. And these teams had never worked together before. They were designers, an entire development squad, six plus people, a technical lead, design lead, also a team that was marketing the product that was going out to these users.

And so inevitably, the product manager had to level up into this program management and more facilitated kind of function. And I think that when we hit a snag, oftentimes we wanted to solve it in our discreet environment. So maybe a technical challenge emerged and the technical team wanted to solve it in a certain way, or the design team found a problem with the UX that we needed to address, or the marketing team was trying to refine messaging and sort of aesthetic or how to meet the audience with the brand.

But by nature of the work, no decision could be made in isolation. It was impossible on the timeline that we had and in the environment that we were working in. And the employment of facilitation was something that I brought to the table as noting the significance of how we could bring people together to make these decisions faster than we previously could have thought through just email threads or sort of your red amber green status trackers and things like that. And so after facilitating a couple of product development and decision-making sessions between designers, technologists, and marketers, inevitably our program and product function said, how do we do this consistently? How can we leverage this?

How can we take that responsibility and have ownership of that kind of role? And through simple structures and discussions and imparting upon them the importance of agenda and timing and returning to purpose and sort of setting clear expectations for how we’re going to use our time in meetings, some of those magical meeting principles, I think we were able to all step back to allow the product team to step up, right? We were working in a way of a true product development function where our product and program owners were trustworthy, they were consistent, and they took that project to success and really made it possible through simple facilitation. It really helped.

Douglas:

So powerful, and it’s like the tenant in complexity where local solutions to global problems and taking these simple facilitation tools and just making even the most microscopic moves when it comes to how we relate, how we work together, and how we understand each other, and how we just create invitations and space for each other can have transformative impacts across the org if we all start doing it. So I want to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Eli Wood:

I think that in today’s world, compassion and kindness in the business environment is the most valuable thing that you can bring to your business or any working session. People are faced with more and more controversy, pain, suffering, fear than in the recent memory. Everywhere you look, things are concerning and stressful, and I think that we really have to push back against that in our work environments to allow people to be as creative and human as possible. And not to sound cliche, but I think those principles that come with facilitation and the sort of practice are the most valuable thing that I can think of right now, which is why I keep returning to it.

Douglas:

Thank you for your time today, Eli. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Eli Wood:

Thank you, Douglas. Sincerely, a pleasure.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. 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 Product Managers Unlock Flow Through Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.