Video and transcript from Dynamic Panels at Austin’s 2nd Annual Facilitator Summit, Control the Room
This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.
In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.
The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.
Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.
This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.
Kellee Franklin, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Mindful Innovation Labs, served as the moderator of our Dynamic Panels: Designing & Facilitating Meaningful Discussions. Four panelists shared their perspectives: Sam Schak, Senior Project Manager at Handsome; John Hawley, Workshop Wizard at JWH Enterprise LLC; Jay Melone, Innovation and Facilitation Coach at New Haircut, and Shipra Kayan, a Remote Design Sprint Facilitator.
Watch “Dynamic Panels: Designing & Facilitating Meaningful Discussions”:
Transcript:
Kellee Franklin:
I have the great pleasure of talking to you about panel discussions. How many of us have attended panel discussions? How many of us have found them just exhilarating? Exactly. We’re going to spend a few moments with you to kick this off. I’m going to have each of my panelists spend a little bit of intimate time with you. We’ve got sticky notes that we’ll be designating what color your table is and each of my panelists will be working with you for five minutes just to get this conversation started. But I’d like for you to think about this at your tables and with your panelist, what is a facilitation moment that I’ve been engaged with that has brought meaningful outcome and where is an area that I still desire growth in? Do we have those two questions? What is a facilitator moment where I have brought meaningful outcome and where is an area that I would continue to like to have growth in? I’d invite you to share with one another as well as with your panelist. We’ll have five minutes to do that and then we’ll reconvene as a group.
Audience:
[inaudible 00:01:57].
Kellee Franklin:
Excellent energy. I love it. I love that I was able to listen to my two table conversations. I love it. I’d like to invite the panelist to come forward please. As Douglas mentioned, these are exceptional professionals who do wonderful work to facilitate meaningful conversations, so it is my joy and honor to have the opportunity to work with these fine individuals. What I’m going to invite them to do is to introduce themselves and share with you who they are, how they serve, and when we think about all of the collective conversations we’ve had this morning, what are they really resonating with or what is the one key learning takeaway that they’ve gotten so far? I’d also like for you all to think about how you might answer these questions; who you are, how you serve, and what’s brought meaning to you from the conversations this morning. I’d like to introduce this great panel.
Samantha Schak:
Hi, I am Samantha Schak. I am a senior project manager at Handsome, a local Austin design agency. I serve as a facilitator through three different areas. Number one is mental health and psychological safety. I created a podcast called But Have You Considered Therapy? Shout out, where’s Justin? Thank you, my therapy fighter. The second is through improv and play. I am an improv performer and teacher. The third is project management, so how do I structure and move that all in a forward direction. I’m really, really digging a lot of the messages and themes around self-care and how that can really elevate you obviously as a worker and contributor but also as a person, your physical and emotional life.
Shipra Kayan:
Thanks. Yeah guys, my name is Shipra Kayan and I’ve spent about 20 years in Silicon Valley building user experience teams, so that’s where I come from. When I think about facilitation as a service, for me it’s been about inclusivity and not just inclusive to minorities or people who identify as a minority, that’s important, but also people who are maybe more junior and not the VP in the room, people who are maybe more introverted or have social anxiety. More lately it’s been inclusive to people who are remote or not in the room, maybe not even in the U.S. Emily’s talk, actually, about blind spots and… blind spots and white dominant cultures has me reflecting on blind spots in office dominant cultures. Yeah.
John Hawley:
Thanks. My name is John Hawley. I am currently still in the Navy right now. I’ve got 24 days left, so that’s happening. Thank you. So I, for the last four years, I’ve full time facilitation, so facilitated or trained other teams, about 11, 12,000 people across the Department of Defense in something I created on my way out of service about four years ago. They asked me to stay in, I did. They let me start my own company in tandem, so I’ve been in a pretty awesome position to do off-sites retreats. Team-building and strategy are my bread and butter. I would think the biggest thing that I will take out of this, I think, is when we were asked to stand up in John’s segment and I saw everybody else standing up and then I saw everybody else standing up and I still wasn’t standing up and I was like, “Crap, I need to be able to stand up the next time I’m asked this question.” Whether it’s clearing my calendar or my space to be able to be more present, I think that’s something that I don’t think I need to work on, I absolutely need to work on. I will take that away with me for sure.
Joy Melone:
Hey everybody, my name is Jay Malone. First I just want to point out, you two are adorable. You’re like hugging at the table. It’s really nice to see. You don’t see that. I run a firm called New Haircut. I was introduced to facilitation through Design Sprints and just when I thought I was at the peak of my game, I met people like you and I was like, “Holy shit, I don’t know anything about facilitation.” So I’m learning a ton. The thing that I think I connect with the most that I see in this room is I’m totally intimidated to be on a stage, to see people like Justin, to just have such a narrative and a story. Daniel Stillman scares the shit out of me every day that I work with him, he holds poise and presence. The first conversation I had in sitting with my table was I was book ended by two people that identified as introverts and it’s just really powerful to see there’d be a space for introverts to come up here and talk and share their story and be heard.
Kellee Franklin:
Thank you. Let’s give a round of applause for our panelists. I recognize I didn’t really introduce myself. My names Kellee Franklin and how I serve is I inspire innovation and I do that within organizations. I do that in academic spaces, and one of my favorite things to do is do coaching with individuals, because I think that light is alive in all of us. Sometimes the society that we live in clouds that light. But for me it’s within each and every single one of you in here. And so what I have found deeply meaningful out of the conversations that have happened this morning, because I think there’s a common theme, at least I’ve recognized, and that’s what matters to me, how can I be meaningful? And so those are some things that I found connection between all of the speakers this morning and that’s a wonderful gift to have. And so one of the frustrations that I’ve had when I’ve been in situations like this, in a panel discussion at a conference, is that you’ve got these wonderful experts and you’ve got this wonderful network of community that never gets harvested.
Kellee Franklin:
And so what I’ve done with groups is reverse the panel and bring the panelists to you so you get a little bit more intimate conversation and dialogue with at least one of the experts. You get to harvest the knowledge and the wisdom here in the room and design questions that we can come back to as a panel so those questions are collectively coming from the whole. And so I’d like to invite you to explore that journey with me for a few moments. Does that sound okay? Okay.
Kellee Franklin:
Each one of you has at your table a sticky note pad that designated you for my groups up here where the yellow group and we have the blue group, we have the pink group. And so these are your discussion groups that you’re going to be spending a little bit of time with with each of the panelists.
Kellee Franklin:
And so in eight minutes roughly, I’d like for your group to come up with at least one question for our gifted panelist here, okay? I know there’s going to be a lot of questions that come up that you want to ask, but what’s the one question that collectively comes up out of your group? And so spend some time thinking about that and it’s really about what makes meaningful conversations. What makes meaningful conversations, okay? I invite you to spend a little bit of time talking about your table and coming up with questions.
Kellee Franklin:
Thank you, Jay. Okay, so are we ready to hear the burning questions that’s coming from this community today? All right. How to keep moving forward when not every one disagrees?
Speaker 7:
Not everyone agrees.
Kellee Franklin:
Not everyone agrees. How do you get the group to discuss the undiscussables? How do we go beyond talking about the work and talk about how we will work together? How do you handle conflict in a workshop? How do we avoid shallow philosophies and get to the stuff we can’t read about in a book? What’s your biggest fear as a facilitator? Those were the questions that came out of our community. Give yourself a hand. Oh my gosh. And so with that being said, I’m going to turn it over to my illustrious panel here. I know those are questions that come in a variety of forms, but any reflections on what the community has shared?
John Hawley:
Start us out?
Kellee Franklin:
Yeah.
Joy Melone:
Well, I’m going to start. Even last night too while we were sitting in a circle, how you design space is obviously really important and sitting in a circle feels harmonious and community driven but it also puts a spotlight on you when it’s your turn to speak. My biggest fear is finding time to speak as a facilitator versus giving power to the rest of the group and towing the line between confidence and being confident enough in myself and the process to let conflict, which I know is another question, to let conflict actually take its space and not need to have the answer. Software engineer turned product manager and project manager, very organized, driven and allowing for conflict and gaps in conversation in silence to be a place is something I’m working on. That is my biggest fear.
Samantha Schak:
An overlap of the two of handle conflict in a workshop and how do you handle when everyone is not agreeing and move forward? The disagreements are healthy, conflict is healthy so making sure… I work internally as a facilitator at a company so I’ve got a lot more relationship to build on, so making sure my team knows at the end of the day we are a team, we’re all on the same side, but coming together and realizing that our conflicts make us better and create more innovation. If we constantly have a homogenous decision-making, we’re not actually going to do what we set out to do. We’re probably going to give someone what they asked for, which is not what they wanted from us.
John Hawley:
This one says, how do you get the group to discuss the indiscussable? I really like that one. For me, one of my favorite quotes is apparently from Abraham Lincoln, I’m not sure if it is or not, “If you give me four hours to chop down the tree, I’m going to spend the first two hours sharpening the ax.” Some groups think that you can just lock everybody in a room and don’t come out until you have everything solved, and I believe that if you create real true emotional bonds with people, they create allies with other people in the room. Now instead of arguing with somebody, you’ve already shared something intimate about yourself or know something intimate about them, and so it gives me the freedom now to discuss something that is traditionally undiscussable in the workplace because I know something about them that I otherwise wouldn’t know had we not done that emotional bond in the beginning. I say sharpening the ax is getting to know everybody truly before actually tackling the problem in a workshop.
Shipra Kayan:
Actually I’m going to build on that in terms of, how do you get beyond shallow philosophies on a panel? I think part of it is actually designing the panel, and then part of that is getting to know the people who are going to be on the panel and priming them to share stories and not philosophies and priming them to just go deep into, “How do you fire someone remotely?” Like how do we get to the stories that… And so it’s priming the panel and the second thing that I’ve done in the past is just sometimes kindly call it bullshit. If somebody’s starting with philosophies where they’re like, “Oh, you could do it this way or that way, it depends.” I think it’s useful to just prompt with, “Can you tell me a story about a time when you did it a certain way and it went wrong?”
Kellee Franklin:
When you think about the work that you do in creating meaning and conversation, I think some of the questions from our community revolved around helping things to move forward in conversation and also getting to the deeper level of connection. Are there ways that you do that because that also addresses the question around conflict? I think when we create connection and we create common stories, we’re dissolving conflict. I’d be curious to hear from the panelists what you do to facilitate that connection and community and storytelling as a way to move past and beyond the conflict that might exist.
Joy Melone:
Actually Taylor, I think it was you last night that talked about humor and humanize. I really liked that. You can tell everybody what you meant by that. But I tend to overuse humor and so I’ve been learning to back away from that a little bit. But on the two spectrums of that, giving people the space to break down walls and just come together using humor. I’ve done activities like embarrassing stories just to allow people to not talk about their resume and pound their chest, but just to bring in some of the things that are a little bit more vulnerable to them. And then on the more emotional side, a framework that I’ve used by Alex and Bob Gower I think, it’s a husband and wife couple, is called Intentions, Concerns, Boundaries and Dreams. It’s really beautiful technique to allow that initial conversation to take a front seat so that people are willing to move on to the innovation and the frameworks and the co-creation and all those other things that tend to follow.
Samantha Schak:
Yeah, channeling back to the North Star, that’s been something I’ve been working on in the last year or so. Not only what is the North Star of the work ahead of us, but what is your North Star, what are you working on and what are we as a team working on together? When there is disagreements, how can we say how is this serving that path together? And then if we can let the options lie, can we test it, can we get data from it? Can we get excited about having, different schools of thought? Diversity of thought is really important to me and my team members are there for a reason. No matter the discipline, they all have a voice to share in that. So yeah, making space for disagreements.
Shipra Kayan:
Yeah, one technique that I’ve used in physical workshops is to have people physically swap seats and talk from the other person’s point of view, just to see if we can get to the underlying assumptions.
Samantha Schak:
Can we swap seats now?
John Hawley:
That’s great. I ask usually to give a really bad idea. I have everybody throw out a really bad idea on what we’re currently working on. And then once we’re done with that, obviously it’s anonymous, and then we go around and actually pick the best, worst idea, something that they thought in the time of writing it that it was a bad idea, but it is actionable and tangible for the group. Maybe they just don’t have the knowledge or they don’t have the framework to be able to fill in that gap. I forgot who said it before, I think whether you’ve been in the organization for 20 years or 20 minutes, the person that had been there for 20 minutes might not be able to have the context that the other person does to say, “Hey, we could actually do this. We have different people now, different resources, et cetera.”
Samantha Schak:
I think pulling people out individually after sessions and saying, “What did you not say during that?” is helpful. Especially, I think one of them was, how do you talk through the taboo or talk about the untalkable? What? I don’t remember the question. Undiscussable. I’m a big DEI advocate, it’s been a new area of mine that I’ve been exploring as a project manager. And so one of the pillars of Handsome is we don’t design in a vacuum, so I like to say to my teammates like, “I understand in a meeting maybe you didn’t bring up something sensitive.” I make myself a safe person that they can come to after to say, “Hey, what were you not saying? What wasn’t said there?”
Kellee Franklin:
That’s great. One of the things that I leverage and I work in a variety of different industries, variety of different corporations, I like to start off the conversation with the folks I’m working with to say, “What matters to you?” What that unearths is connectivity and commonality, but also where there might be folks that have different thoughts of what really matters to them, why they’re gathered in the same place. It’s a really nice way to unearth that from the very outset of a conversation.
Kellee Franklin:
We are coming close to three minutes before we close. We recognize the precarious position that we’re in, is we stand between you and lunch. So, I’m going to ask my colleagues here to just share what has been most meaningful for them in the work that they’ve done in facilitating conversations with other people.
Shipra Kayan:
Yeah. Obviously we’re all surprised by that question. No, I’m just kidding. For me the most meaningful part has been the coaching aspect. If I can leave a team having given a junior designer a voice to be able to do their work better, that’s what I find meaning in.
John Hawley:
If I’m doing something for personal reasons, for them to come back to me in a work context and tell me that they utilize it or leverage it for their work and vice versa. If I’m there for strategy and somebody comes back and says, “Hey, we’ve just designed our entire vacation based on the strategies that we learned.” That’s why I do what I do. I love hearing that kind of thing, the crossover.
Samantha Schak:
Embracing and addressing the trauma that people walk into a room with, whether it’s systematic oppression or other personal trauma they’ve experienced, but looking at the whole empathy lens for my team and making sure I’m addressing… I’m not a mental health professional at all, but coming in and saying, “There’s space for you here.”
Joy Melone:
I think going back to how I actually opened is doing this kind of work and holding space in front of a group of people, which is, I think Linda said it, I think the reason I’d become a facilitator is because this is the thing I actually fear the most. Getting to do this work has been meaningful to me and to connect with other people that also are afraid of being up and holding that space and being a facilitator, it’s been really cool to connect with those kinds of folks.
Kellee Franklin:
What came up for me out of just all of the morning conversations and getting a chance to dialogue with all of you and also getting the chance to collaborate with these wonderful folks here, was Mary Oliver’s… I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Mary Oliver’s work. If you’re not, I would encourage you to check her out. We lost her unfortunately last year. But she has a great quote and I’m probably not going to get it 100% accurate, so bear with me. She says, “To pay attention is our good and useful work.” Or something of that variety. And so for me, doing the work I do, whether it’s with graduate students or corporate executives or senior level officials in public office, for me, it’s really how do we connect ourselves through our common humanity and make meaning out of just our common journey as a human species.
Kellee Franklin:
I appreciate your willingness to go on this reverse panel journey with me, and us. I know that there are probably some questions that you still have of these experts, so we would like to invite you to write those down when you have this moment. We’ll have large Post-it notes up where you can post them in the back, and to continue this conversation because we think it’s the glue that holds our work and our community together. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Douglas, for having us.
