A conversation with Judy Rees, Author & Consultant at Rees-McCann
“Using the other person’s words is the nearest thing that the FBI has to a Jedi mind trick, because when the other person hears their words coming back, what they think is that person is using words like mine, therefore, they must be like me, therefore, I should like them.” -Judy Rees
Judy Rees is a consultant at Rees McCann where she leads a community of trainers, facilitators, producers, and others who want to make online work better than in-the-room. She is also the author of the Web Events That Connect How-to Guide and co-author of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds.
In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Judy about clean language, gardening, and contextual intent. Listen in to learn what subtleties can be uncovered in the words we use every day, through active listening and asking the right questions.
Show Highlights
[00:53] Judy’s Start
[08:57] Opportunities in Challenges and Constraints
[21:18] Linguistic Subtlety in Control the Room
[30:48] Similarity with Words in Communication
[44:20] Judy’s Final Thoughts
Links | Resources
Judy’s LinkedIn
Clean Language Questions
Rees-McCann’s Site
About the Guest
Judy Rees is a consultant that focuses on making remote work better than in-person. As such, her efforts in pioneering the virtual landscape of remote work have been noticeably fleshed out long before the pandemic and lauded by publications and industry professionals alike. With the emphasis she places on metaphors and language, Judy exercises a masterful hand in separating intent from perception and bridging the divide between parties to find an unlikely consensus.
About Voltage Control
Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.
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Full Transcript
Douglas Ferguson:
Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have 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 magical meeting. Today I’m with Judy Rees at Rees McCann, where she leads a community of trainers, facilitators, producers and others who want to make online better than in the room for more of the people, more of the time. She’s also co-author of The Web Events that Connect How-To Guide and Clean Language: Revealing Metaphor and Opening Minds. Welcome to the show, Judy.
Judy Rees:
Nice to be here.
Douglas Ferguson:
So let’s start off with how you began. How did you get your start in this awesome work that you’re doing?
Judy Rees:
It’s a long story. But where I find myself now at the end of 2020, is I’ve spent 2020 mostly helping organizations take their in the room events online, mostly in the NGO world, so global organizations, UNICEF, Norwegian Refugee Council, World Health Organization, people who wanted to create events that really connected people to people, where relationship building was a critical part of the process. And webinars wouldn’t do the job for them. That sort of standard webinar process of 45 minutes of a presenter followed by 15 minutes of Q and A doesn’t do anything to build that relationships that get stuff done, or that keep donors attached to an organization, so that’s what we’ve been doing this year.
Judy Rees:
But I got into that pretty much by accident. I’ve been involved in a process called clean language, which is a precision inquiry methodology, a way of getting to understand what people really mean by what they say. And I wrote a book, co-authored a book about it, about 10 years ago. And we were trying to get groups of people together to learn it, learn the skills involved, but we couldn’t get groups together in the room. It was too niche, too difficult for people to find the money to train together in London here. And so we started teaching it online, and that was way back when it was thought that you can’t teach things online, particularly something as embodied, something as physical, something as metaphorical as clean language, you couldn’t possibly teach it online. But we found we had to, so we figured it out.
Judy Rees:
And first, we were doing that training over, I think it was Google Hangouts or Skype. And then gradually over the years, the tools got more sophisticated. And then about four years ago, 2016, I started creating an online un-conference, an open space like thing for the clean language community. And we’d get 100 and something people together for a whole day online over Zoom, and improvise an un-conference. And well, I’ve been doing that for a few years now, once or twice a year. And so when towards the tail end of 2019, the Greta Thunberg thing started happening, and people started saying, “Actually, we can no longer justify flying people all over the world.” Rees McCann was formed, and we started selling this ability to create online events that really connect people as a service. And we were teaching some fairly large global organizations just before the lockdown. And as the lockdown hit, they were immediately recommending us to people like UNICEF, or one of our early post lockdown clients. We were teaching the people in Italy, who were in some of the early lockdown stages, so that’s the kind of story, if that makes sense.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s really, really interesting that you were making the shift right as this wave came. We had a similar experience, and I can tell you I’m somewhat grateful for it, but it certainly still didn’t make it easy. I felt like I maybe had a posture of somewhat being ready, but man, it was difficult. It makes me feel very privileged because I think about all of my peers who weren’t quite so ready or anticipatory. So I wanted to just hear a little bit about your perspectives on that. And what are the kinds of things you’ve had to do to help kind of bring others along?
Judy Rees:
So I agree with you, I mean, I’d far rather be busy than the alternative. So many colleagues were just knocked flat, freelancers, freelance facilitators, and coaches and trainers, who had nothing for months, and didn’t know where the rent was coming from. I’d far rather be busy, but it was grim. We were working with organizations who were phoning us up, desperate. You can’t say no to The International Network for Education and Emergencies, when they’ve just been thwacked by a pandemic. But at the same time, I’m only human, and the business at that point was myself and my husband, who’s also my business partner, Rees and McCann.
Judy Rees:
So we were thinking, “Well, what can we do?” Well, we grabbed the people who were immediately around us and very quickly, very rapidly, taught them how to do some basic trainings that we were running. We sort of, we already knew they had training skills, and they understood at a basic level what we were doing. We showed them then more detail and said, “Go and deliver this for us.” And that was enough to get people started, to do things like: How do you actually set yourself up at the tools level, a technical level? How do you get lights? How do you get a headset? All those kinds of things.
Judy Rees:
And then to start them thinking about this is not just a technical problem. This is not just about the tools. This is also about the skills and learning how to use the tools, and the mindset that says, “Actually, in the room as educators, as trainers, we wouldn’t dream of talking at our students for 45 minutes.” Why on Earth do you think that’s okay online? Come on. Let’s rethink. Let’s stretch our heads a little bit. How can we make it work given the tools that we’ve got, given the constraints that we’ve got? And gradually, as things sort of settled down to some extent, people started to think more creatively about what they were creating, what they were designing, and to bring as many of those people together as we possibly could. We set up one of those online networks. Ours is called the Remote Together Community. We’ve got about 500 people there now, whose central theme, the central conceit, is that we want to make online gatherings better than in the room ones for more of the people, more of the time.
Judy Rees:
We don’t think that online gatherings can be better for everybody all the time, but we do think they have really significant advantages in terms of accessibility, in terms of obviously global warming and the traveling stuff. And conversations can happen online that really would never happen in the room. And some of the tools that are coming along for next year, things like the ability to do live captioning that’s already available in English, when that’s able to be translated cheaply and quickly, that’s going to make some conversations happen that we couldn’t dream of doing in the room without the cost being completely prohibitive. And live translation of an in the room event is ferociously expensive, very labor intensive. But look at what we might be able to do online. I’m really quite excited about that.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. There’s tons of potential as we think about AI and hardware advances. I just personally picked up an Oculus. I didn’t realize that the price had dropped so much, and that they were self contained. It really blew my mind because I’ve been waiting for the moment where the hardware got ubiquitous, and I think we’re heading to that turning point pretty soon.
Judy Rees:
In some parts of the world. But a lot of the work that we’ve been doing is either focused on or includes some of the places where even a decent internet connection is beyond reach.
Douglas Ferguson:
That’s right. Yeah. You mentioned accessibility as a benefit for online, and it poses new problems too because now we’ve got accessibility constraints with the software. And we’ve got accessibility constraints with even internet. It’s kind of the have and have nots. Right?
Judy Rees:
Yeah. But for me, the potential is so big. We can’t let the current challenges stop us from moving forward. However, we do need to pay attention to what’s going on for people, and as far as we possibly can, not leave people feeling that they are being excluded, or they’re excluded forever, and instead, bring people along as much as we possibly can. And you get some quite remarkable people being willing to put some remarkable effort in once they realize that it’s worth it. In the event we did a couple of weeks ago, there’s an 87 year old lady who was very reluctant to come the first time around, this event. This time, she knew why it was happening. She knew she wanted to be there, and she’d spent enough time ahead of time to set herself up so it was going to work, and it did work. And she had a fantastic day.
Judy Rees:
Similarly, we’ve had people in various interesting parts of Africa who’ve, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly turn on my video camera, it just won’t work.” I said, “Just try. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. We can do the other thing. But just try it and see what difference it makes.” And you’d be amazed how many people haven’t tried since it used to be Skype, and it never worked with Skype. So why would it ever work with Zoom? But Zoom does it differently, and it works.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s amazing too, how easy it is to get in those fixed mindsets. And when I see those behaviors, I often ask myself, “In what ways am I thinking that way?” And what are the things in my life am I saying, “Oh, the video won’t work”? Because it’s in us everywhere, and we learn things. It’s helpful, right? We have to create models and we have to commit things so that we don’t have to examine every little thing every time of the day. Right? Whenever I run into something like that, I try to have a ton of empathy and think to myself, “There’s got to be 10 things today that I did that are not serving me.”
Judy Rees:
Yeah. And mostly, we go through our lives just assuming that everything’s going to be the same as it always was, or else we wouldn’t get anything done.
Douglas Ferguson:
The more we’re finding ourselves in complex environments, the less and less that serves us.
Judy Rees:
And I think that’s why this year has been so exhausting for so many people because so many things have changed that we’ve had so little control over, that our heuristics broke at various stages.
Douglas Ferguson:
So I want to come back to clean language. And for listeners who have never heard of clean language, what’s the most important thing to know? What are the basics? How would someone get started?
Judy Rees:
Well, the most important thing for facilitators to know is that the underpinning principles of clean language are very similar to the underpinning principles of most effective facilitation. It’s not about you as the facilitator, it’s about them. It’s about creating a space for the other to express themselves clearly. So when groups and teams learn to use clean language principles in their interactions, they develop much richer curiosity about each other. Oh, I wonder why that person won’t turn on their camera, rather than, they won’t turn on their camera, they’re wrong. It becomes a curiosity. And we can use our precision inquiry technique, clean language, these questions, to find out more about what the person is thinking that makes it make sense for them to not turn on their camera.
Judy Rees:
And it’s particularly useful where people have a word, or an idea, or a thought, which superficially appears to be the same. But we can actually use clean language questions to tease out difference. So the example I tend to use in training is I get the whole group to think of a flower. Everybody think of a flower. And I’ll go around. What kind of flower is your flower? Oh, a lily. What kind is your flower is your flower? A sunflower. And eventually, we’ll get two the same. There’ll be two roses. And you ask a clean language question like: What kind of rose is that rose? To one person, and they’ll say, “It’s red.” What kind of rose is that rose? To the other person, they’ll say, “It’s pink.” And so on, you gradually tease out the distinctions between a similar word. So these questions are designed to elegantly tease out difference and diversity. And that can help a team or a group to become curious about each other, to become curious about what must be true for the other, for them to think like that.
Judy Rees:
Clean language has been quite extensively used in some mediation contexts. One colleague, for example, has used them in peace building in Northern Ireland, in South Africa, and in the Middle East, where he’s getting groups to effectively find ways to collaborate. Another mediator friend has used them with parties that are trying to negotiate in really difficult negotiations in business and in legal situations. So where you get a curiosity about the other, then you start to create a space where collaboration can happen. And clean language gets right in there. Clean language, which was created by this guy, David Grove, who died about 10 years ago, he designed it specifically to ask about people’s metaphors because he recognized that metaphor is the atom of thought, the negative language of the unconscious mind.
Judy Rees:
And by using these questions to ask about people’s metaphors, you can really start to discover stuff about people, and in a context where you want people, or where people want to change or get something different happening, the metaphors can be a very profound way of helping that to happen. But to go back to what I said at the beginning, the point is not that the facilitator is trying to change the person with the metaphor, or trying to deliberately shift the metaphors, the point is that the facilitator is there to facilitate, to enable something different to happen.
Douglas Ferguson:
And so can you give us some examples of types of metaphors, or maybe something you’ve seen in the past to help make that a little more clear to folks that maybe aren’t quite understanding how he’s working with these metaphors?
Judy Rees:
So in the sentence that you … This is where everybody starts to stumble over their words because if I start to draw attention to metaphors in what you just said, or in what I’m saying, I will trip over my words. So trip over in that sentence is a metaphor. I’m not literally tripping over my words, not literally catching my foot in my words and falling over. That’s a metaphor. Metaphors are used at a rate of about six per minute in ordinary English, depending which ones you count. So when you ask me, I’m not going to do this because it would end up being very silly, but when you ask me, “How could you make that clear?” Clear is also a metaphor. And one could ask, “What kind of clear is that clear?” Or is there anything else about clear like that?
Douglas Ferguson:
Sure. So it’s interesting. I would argue that you could use this for not only metaphor, but also jargon.
Judy Rees:
Absolutely. One of my favorite examples of it being used in business is a colleague of mine was working as a business analyst on a software project which involved two banks, one in the Netherlands, one in Belgian. They were collaborating on a big project, some system or other. And my colleague was quite a long way down the development path. He was doing a quick workshop to check some details. And he suddenly, there was something about the way a jargon word was used that prompted him to ask some clean language questions about it. And it emerged that the Dutch group and the Belgium group meant something subtly different by that jargon. And this case study is actually online. His bosses said that they credited the clean language questions with saving the project from being one of those classic: Oh, my God, how much money have we spent because of a mistake? It was a multi million euro project, and a few clean language questions to pick up the distinctions between jargon made a huge difference.
Douglas Ferguson:
That’s amazing. I ran into that once with a client. I mean, I see it all the time, but this one time, it was massive. And the word they were using was a word that’s very highly associated with their brand. And so there was an emotional connection. Right? And they were using this word for a new project, but they were using it in a different domain. So instead of applying it to, I’m making this up, but instead of applying it to cars, they’re going to apply it to tractors, or something. Right? And so it’s like a bit of a shift to where now people had to imagine what it means for this word to live in that different context. And so they all translated it differently.
Douglas Ferguson:
I was starting to pick up on some discrepancies on how they were talking about it, so I kind of steered the whole workshop to talking about that, even though that’s not what they brought us in to do. But that created way more value than … We still got to the other outcome as well, but they were kind of scratching their heads. Why are we spending so much time talking about this? And I just kept pushing and pushing, then it finally all just came unraveled. And they were just blown away. They thought, “Wow. We thought we were so aligned because we were restating the mission statement.” But they were all completely disconnected.
Judy Rees:
Yeah. Lovely example. It’s great because metaphor is not only really fundamental to the way people think, it’s also very fundamental to the way people communicate and the way people align. So by taking the workshop down that route to establish … One of my friends does a really interesting thing about agile because he’s in that software development space. And he’s done a whole thing on what kind of agile is your agile?
Douglas Ferguson:
Yes, I love it. As a reformed CTO, I can tell you that’s an issue. You’ve even got people that are like, “We’re big agile. We’re little agile.” It’s a flavor of the month kind of thing.
Judy Rees:
But yes, so that metaphor piece can be really, really rich.
Douglas Ferguson:
That’s great. So I wanted to also see if you could provide any examples of the types of questions you would use in clean language.
Judy Rees:
So clean language has got a set, a very limited question set. So if you go to cleanlanguagequestions.com, that should redirect to my website, where you can see on one page, 12 questions that are the core clean language questions. And of those questions, two are used 80% of the time. We nicknamed those the lazy Jedi questions because you can do all the Jedi stuff, but with just two questions.
Douglas Ferguson:
I love it. We have a book called Magical Meetings, and we talked about being the facilitator Jedi. And we also love the phenomenon of what we call it, being the lazy facilitator, which just means when you don’t have to lean in all the time. There’s an irony in the title of Control the Room, because we don’t feel that you should be controlling. But we have to bring some intention. We’ve got some tools we can use to control the outcomes, but we don’t want to stifle people. And so I love that you combine those two things that we love, which is the lazy facilitator and the facilitator Jedi into the lazy Jedi.
Judy Rees:
Can I share with you that I very nearly said no to doing this podcast on the basis of Control the Room?
Douglas Ferguson:
I get it. And I hear that a lot. And it was intentionally controversial. I wanted to make people think because I think a lot of folks come to facilitation with that mindset. And everything we’re talking about at all times is how we create space, how we lean back, and how the tools can help us be intentional. We certainly want to make sure that there’s some intention and we’re driving to some outcome, but we certainly don’t want to stifle people.
Judy Rees:
Yeah. So a way one might use clean language in this situation would be for me to ask you a few questions about what kind of control is that control, when control the room, because clearly, it’s not the kind of control that I was thinking it was when I got an out of the blue email saying, “Would you like to come on The Control the Room Podcast?” I’m going, “What? Why would I want to do that?” But of course, once you make a few inquiries, you think, “Actually, that can’t possibly be what he meant.”
Douglas Ferguson:
That’s right. And I love that it gets people thinking, and it gets some people really upset, which is, I don’t know, it kind of points at the work that you’re doing. Right? We’ve got to just drill layers deeper than just what we see at the surface.
Judy Rees:
And control, for me, that kind of control that I think you’re getting at is about placing some constraints on what happens in order to make it safe for people to have the conversations that need to be had. For example, the event I was doing the other week, which is called Meta Forum, we had a big discussion in the middle of it about the constraints that I, as the benevolent dictator, had put on the event, and whether they were the right or wrong constraints. And I love that kind of discussion because without the constraints, nobody shows up and nobody has the conversations they need to have.
Douglas Ferguson:
That’s right. And it can’t be a free for all. I like the garden metaphor. If we don’t tend the soil, if we don’t remove the weeds, if we don’t create the initial conditions, then the plants will never grow, but we can’t make them grow. Right? But we are exhibiting some control over this environment. We’re creating those conditions and we’re setting things up. So very much like, if we don’t go higher of space, if we don’t go research the software and decide we’re going to use Zoom, or Keeko Chat, or Teooh, or Spaces, or whatever it is, then it’s out of control, and we won’t get anything done.
Judy Rees:
And when control, in a garden like that, is there anything else about that garden for you?
Douglas Ferguson
Yeah. Gosh. I don’t know how far I’ve taken the metaphor per se, so this might be an interesting discussion just to see what evolves, but I think there’s … Well, often too, when I think about gardening, I might have … I work with my wife on the garden, so sometimes there’s different roles, and we participate and show up in different ways. So I think we’re both tending to these plants, but we’re looking at it, we approach it from different perspectives. Also, I like the notion that if the plants, if you leave them be and protect them from the birds and the rabbits, then they eventually bear fruit, and they do that on their own. It’s not like anything that I did. I created a spot for them and protected them a bit, and then magic came from them.
Judy Rees:
And I could ask you what kind of fruit, and I could ask you what kind of magic, and so on and so forth. And notice what just happened. By asking about your metaphor, we started to have a more interesting conversation because it’s almost impossible to not get interested in your own metaphor.
Douglas Ferguson:
You know what else I like about this, there’s so much depth to that, but there’s a subtle little thing over the top that I think is worth mentioning, which is, if you’re using this tool or this approach, then it’s sort of assuming that you’re on the lookout for metaphors. And if you’re paying close enough attention to detect if someone’s using a metaphor, then you can’t help but to active listen.
Judy Rees:
And there’s an even easier layer of it than that. So when you start with the clean language questions, each of the questions has a space in it where there’s an X. The X represents the other person’s words. So the most commonly used clean language question is: What kind of X? So in order to put anything in that X, you have to be listening well enough to remember at least one of their words.
Douglas Ferguson:
Okay. I’m ready to use this because I’ve been saving a word that you said earlier that I really wanted to understand more. I’m going to ask you: What kind of embodiment? So earlier, you were saying that it’s really difficult, or it’s almost like a wicked question that you pose, which was: How can we do this work online when so much of it, when it’s so embodied? And I was thinking, “That’s interesting.” So how is clean language embodied?
Judy Rees:
Well, it’s embodied because metaphors typically have a location, and the thoughts typically have a location, either inside one’s body or outside one’s body, particularly feelings, but not only feelings. If you ask the third clean language question, so the first one is: What kind of X? The second one is: Is there anything else about X? The third one we normally introduce is: And where is X? So one could ask something like: And where is control? And control will have some kind of physical location in or around the person being asked. And when David Grove was doing this work, he then got very interested in how human beings map out their inner worlds inside and outside themselves. The classic NLP thing about the past is behind you, and the future, in front, in Western societies, but perhaps different to that in other cultures, is one way of thinking about it.
Judy Rees:
Another friend has thought about it in terms of head, heart, and gut. If you think about gut feelings, they have a physical location in the gut. Think about love, all those kinds of heart things, they typically have physical locations in the heart. And you’ll put ideas at a distance. You’ll get on top of things. You’ll get under the weather. The spatial metaphors in our language are so fundamental, so embedded, that it’s almost as if, well, it is as if while all these other kinds of metaphors, agile and garden… are all very well. But space is at a very profound level in our thinking. And as facilitators, we’ve traditionally used spatial metaphors in terms of moving people around rooms, sitting in a circle. If you feel this, go to that side, if you feel the other, go to the other side, and so on and so forth. Well, those work because human beings think in metaphor, spatially. And the spatial metaphors in our language are hidden in the prepositions, often, on top, in control.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s fascinating. It makes me think of the mind palaces, and how that can be such a powerful way to remember things. So just that memory device of helping people think temporally, or kind of where or when can help people get some more clarity, provide more detail to around how they’re thinking and what they’re thinking about, versus: What do you mean? And it’s like, “whoops”. Plus, I love that these questions are softer. Right? They’re exploratory in a way that maybe would prevent someone from being defensive because they don’t feel under attack, or they don’t feel at a loss, because if they’re at a loss and they don’t know what to say, then that could be frightening, so we definitely don’t want people to be. And so I think that’s really fascinating. I’m liking what I’m hearing.
Judy Rees:
There’s something very, very interesting about using the other person’s words. Now Chris Voss, who is a hostage negotiating person who wrote a book called Never Split the Difference.
Douglas Ferguson:
I just interviewed his mentor.
Judy Rees:
Excellent.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, Gary Noesner founded the FBI group that Chris kind of came up through.
Judy Rees:
Brilliant.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, great stuff.
Judy Rees:
So one of the ideas that I got from Chris Voss’s book is to think about using the other person’s words because I’d been doing it all the while through clean language. And they, oh, blimey, Chris Voss says, “Using the other person’s words is the nearest thing that the FBI has to a Jedi mind trick,” because when the other person hears their words coming back, what they think is that person is using words like mine, therefore, they must be like me, therefore, I should like them.
Douglas Ferguson:
Right. The other thing too is if you’re listening that carefully, then you’re not going to miss the nuance. And the nuance is required to connect with people, so there’s so many levels of why that works, it’s just powerful. Even the verbs, I guess this comes back to metaphor, but if people are talking about I feel versus I think. For instance, if someone says, “It’s good to see you,” and you come back with, “It’s great to hear your voice,” that’s disconnected language, versus, “It’s great to see you too,” or, “That’s a lovely sweater.” Something, what follows that same thread versus disconnecting it, because if they said, “See,” then they’re talking about a sense of seeing versus a sense of hearing. And if we shift those, then we’re kind of disconnecting from them.
Judy Rees:
But it’s really hard work to track the sensory structure of what somebody’s saying, particularly if it’s different from yours. It’s really easy to track metaphor, because metaphor is multisensory. So if you think about space, so let’s say thinking about being in control, that’s a spatial metaphor. How do you know you’re in from a sensory point of view? Well, you can see some kind of container. You can possibly hear an echo, or sound differences that make it clear that you’re in a container. You can almost certainly touch the edges, so you can feel it. So the three most common sensory structures are all available at the same time, and that’s actually much closer to how human beings represent their thoughts internally, is they actually use multiple senses at once.
Judy Rees:
And as was observed all those years ago, people do often have a dominant sense that they use in their language, but it’s not consistent. You’re not a visual person in that sense because you’ll get someone who will talk all about their business, and I see, I see, I see, and then suddenly, when they’re talking about their family, they transfer to feeling words. So that’s hard work to keep track of that, whereas stay with the metaphor and appreciate that the metaphor is what they mean, it really is what they mean. It’s not so much the words, it’s the metaphor. The words are describing the metaphor, not the metaphor describing the words.
Douglas Ferguson:
Well, the other thing is jargon and metaphor, we use it as a tool to encode a vast corpus of knowledge or thinking. Right? We use it to be efficient so that we can just say something, but mean a lot. But the issue is that meaning gets lost, and so if we don’t slow down and unpack it, then we can’t get to what that meaning really is, and really connect with one another. And then there’s also the risk of how I decode it. If I innocently decode it to mean something else, and now we’re totally thinking different things, and then now you’re saying something else, and I’m layering that on top of another, on top of assumption, on an assumption, assumption, then we’re in bad territory.
Douglas Ferguson:
So these tools, they’re almost crutches, right, to help us have more efficient language, or to have a faster conversation? But I love that your tools slow it down because often, we probably do need to slow it down and really get to the reality.
Judy Rees:
Well, it slows it down to get to the reality, but it speeds it up in terms of not having to deal with all the consequences of misunderstandings.
Douglas Ferguson:
Most of my career, no matter what I’ve been doing, whether it’s agile and software development, or helping run design design sprints with people, or any kind of workshops, I often come back to, we need to slow down to speed up because if we don’t take the moment, if we don’t take that moment, then these mistakes are going to compile on top of each other. It’s like compounding interest.
Judy Rees:
And it produces all sorts of weird effects, so just by … And I’m not saying everybody needs to be absolutely crystal clear about everything, about everybody, all the time. That would be ridiculous. We’d never get anything done. Nothing would be fun.
Douglas Ferguson:
And we’d be boring too. Sometimes those mistakes are fun.
Judy Rees:
But particularly when we’re doing things that are important and where we’re about to take a step that matters, spending a little bit of time to understand what’s going on for each individual and also for the group as a whole is going to make a big difference.
Douglas Ferguson:
So I want to hear a little bit about … I know that you’ve been running an un-conference for many years. In fact, I think this maybe was the fourth one recently that just happened.
Judy Rees:
It’s the fifth one, but we’ve been running it for four years.
Douglas Ferguson:
The fifth one, wow.
Judy Rees:
So there was one year we had two events. So it’s called Meta Forum, and it started because I wanted to get the clean language enthusiasts together to inspire each other, gather information, and so on. But I was also really, really curious about whether we could do any kind of open space-y un-conference thing online. I knew people had done it with text and get people online to send messages to each other in text. But I didn’t know if anyone had done it using video conferencing. And when Zoom was commonly available at that point, and had breakout rooms, I thought we can make something out of this. We can make an event that will really enable a bunch of 100 or so clean language facilitators to connect with each other from wherever they are in the world. And we’ll have some decent conversations, inspire each other, and regroup.
Judy Rees:
As I said, David Grove died about 10 years ago, so this was sort of five years after he’d died, six years after he’d died. And the community was probably either going to sort of all go its separate ways, and we’d probably never hear anything from it again, and so on, so I thought, “Let’s give it a go.” And I was also very curious to know if it could be done and when it could be done. I assumed that people would then beat a path to my door to hire me to do other ones. Didn’t happen until the pandemic.
Douglas Ferguson:
So what have you discovered through all this work of running these multiple events? I’m sure each one looks a little different than the one before it. What sorts of discoveries have you been learning? And what are you seeing as far as possibilities for what’s next?
Judy Rees:
I think the big thing is this thing about: How do you put enough constraints in place so that people feel psychological safety to sign up to engage and to actually engage in reality on the day? When it comes to running an open space event in a room, everybody knows how rooms work. They know how sticky notes work. They know how chairs work. As soon as you put the same thing online, there’s a whole lot of confusion from a whole lot of people. There’s a small group of people, of course, who go, “Oh, great. It’s online. Let’s just bash straight in.” But that’s not inclusive. That’s not accessible to a whole bunch of the people that you want to include.
Judy Rees:
And thinking about pre pandemic, 2016, most of the people who were comfortable with video conferencing with things like Zoom were youngish white men with a techy background. The clean language community, though it includes some of those people, tends to be older and more female than the pure tech group, and even older and more female than the agile coach group, who have been some significant adopters of clean language in the last five years or so. But we want to include more, so I was thinking, “How can we do this?”
Judy Rees:
So the first time, I actually said, “We’re going to run a hybrid event. We’re going to have one track where all through the day, all 12 hours, all 13 hours of it, we’re going to have a really good speaker speaking in the main room.” But we still want people to run sessions in parallel. But of course, that meant that the parallel sessions didn’t get many people, didn’t really work. So we adjusted it. We tried things out. And this time, we kept the whole wall of sessions open, but we did beforehand, we put a set of Google Slides up beforehand and said, “Look, if you’re thinking of running a session and you want to talk to people about it, want to get some feedback, just let people know that you’re thinking of doing it at such a time. Pop a slide in this Google Slide deck.” And that turned out to be really, really, worthwhile.
Judy Rees:
People were using the comments to just plus one that they wanted to be there. People were using those slides to say, “I really would like to attend a session like this, but I’m not qualified to run it. Could somebody do a basic introduction to clean language? Could somebody do a basic introduction to metaphor?” And quite quickly, we could use comments to attract attention from the people we thought could help. And of course, behind the scenes with those particular two, I could approach some people directly and say, “I know you can do it,” or, “I know you have a student who can do that. Could you just give them a nudge?”
Judy Rees:
Because of course, people who are students of a subject, there’s always, if you get everybody together, there’s always a hierarchy, and the people who are newer in the field will be a little bit reluctant to step up and say, “Well, I can teach basic facilitation skills. But what if the boss shows up?” So there’s always a bit of nudging. And some of that nudging is different in the online environment. In the room, we could just sidle up to people in the coffee lounge. Online, we have to find other routes. But we have to find those routes without it feeling like we’re being deliberately manipulative, so there are some fine balances to be found.
Judy Rees:
One of the big controversies was around, at the beginning of the most recent one, which two weeks ago, we thought it was too difficult for participants to manage putting sticky notes on the wall of sessions. Again, we were using Google Slides, and it was a bit clunky. We chose not to use a different tool, which would’ve been simpler for a number of reasons. So we chose to use Google Slides, and it was clunky and it was horrible. So early in the day, we made a decision at our first opening of the space, we ran three opening and three closings, so each four hour chunk was a separate open space at one level.
Judy Rees:
First time we ran it, we got technical people to put the stickies on the board. But that felt really like we were controlling the board. Then next time round, we tried to reduce that. And then the third time round, people were in fact putting their own stickies on the board. But they learned the skill. They weren’t trying to master everything all at once. This year, of course, Meta Forum is not the only online un-conference that I’ve run. I’ve run small ones with 20, 30 people, bigger ones, where we’ve had again, un-conference sections within much larger events, spaces, for example, a worldwide network of engineers doing a solar energy, wind power, all those kinds of things. Those kinds of engineers wanted to get together 50 of them. They would’ve normally gone all together to Norway, but they didn’t. They did it online. We created spaces where they could raise the topics that they needed to discuss.
Douglas Ferguson:
Isn’t it amazing, the shifts? I mean, we talked about some benefit, some folks don’t, but really, the opportunity that is before us is quite large. And I think when we look at the connections that can be established that just wouldn’t have otherwise, it’s quite exciting.
Judy Rees:
I could talk a lot about any of these events because I just find them perpetually fascinating. The fact that basically, with each event that people attend, they learn more. They get more confident with any of the technical tools. And we’re starting to get to the point now where there’s a critical mass of facilitators, trainers, educators, who’ve experienced this, experienced it, done well.
Douglas Ferguson:
And I like the idea that even in the one event, you were moving people up that maturity curve. I think that’s really fascinating. And so to your point, the maturity is increasing across the board because people are attending more things. But you can design your event to welcome people early. And then by the end, they’re doing more sophisticated things. That’s pretty amazing too. So I want to stop us here there because we could go on for a really long time. Well, you have a natural place to stop because this is so much fun. But I’m going to have to close it out, so I would love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a parting thought.
Judy Rees:
Well, I’ve talked about the potential of this thing. But so one of the potentials is to stay connected. Keep in touch with each other if we’re interested in this stuff. My invitation is to go to reesmccann.com. And on there, you will find a place to download our Web Events That Connect how-to guide, which is a really simple guide to doing these kind of things. But for the more sophisticated facilitators listening, signing up for that guide will also put you on my weekly link letter list, where I pull together a weekly selection of about 10 things from the internet, including things about clean language, things about online facilitation, things about how people think, that I think a lot of your listeners will find interesting. So do feel free to sign up for that link letter and stay in touch with me.
Douglas Ferguson:
Thank you so much, Judy. It’s been a pleasure having you.
Judy Rees:
It’s been really good fun talking to you. Thank you very much.
Douglas Ferguson:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And if you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
