A conversation with Sarah B. Nelson, Senior Director of Design Thinking Adoption at PepsiCo and Organizational Strategist
“It’s all about how you work with teams, not as a collection of individuals, but as a team, as an organism essentially. And that just completely changed the way that I facilitate and work with teams.” – Sarah B. Nelson
Sarah Nelson is the Senior Director of Design at PepsiCo, where she leads the charge of design thinking programs forward to drive key outcomes. Sarah seeks to uncover the patterns & relationships her teams practice to develop greater strategies and leverage better results.
In this episode of Control the Room, Sarah and I discuss the impact of design thinking for team success in organizations, the collaboration efforts teams must exemplify, the “worthy workshop” intention and expectation, and the ongoing mindset of learning. Listen in to hear how Sarah is reinforcing design thinking as the foundation forward in her organization and beyond.
Show Highlights
[00:50] Sarah’s World Into Design & Facilitation
[03:30] The Collaboration Realization
[11:20] The Worthy Workshop Intention
[16:00] The Learning Epiphany
[25:05] A Collective Step Forward
Links | Resources
Sarah’s LinkedIn
PepsiCo
Facilitating.design
About the Guest
Sarah B. Nelson is the Senior Director of Design Thinking Adoption at PepsiCo, where she guides teams from a facilitator approach to grow together collectively through collaboration and innovation. Sarah’s design background spans 20 years with her expertise in digital design, service design, design thinking, and facilitation. She challenges teams to adopt new ways of working to incorporate better practices for the success of the organization. As the former director of Sales and Design Strategy at IBM, Sarah led strategies and client-centered activation programs, along with design thinking services for teams in the greater Austin area. Inspired by the transformational impact of design thinking, Sarah founded The Radical Visionary, an organization that supports women creatives to lead inspired design initiatives through coaching and leadership development. Sarah’s mission centers around the core of design-driven culture change to create spaces for teams to thrive.
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:
Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, a 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 with the service of having a truly magical meeting.
Today I’m with Sarah B. Nelson of PepsiCo Design and Innovation where she is leading design thinking adoption throughout the organization. She is also a well-known speaker on developing radically human creative culture. Welcome to the show, Sarah.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Hey, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Douglas:
Yeah, me too. So let’s start off with just a little bit about how you got your start. How did you end up getting into this world of design and facilitation?
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. Back in forever ago, I was a designer in what is now called user experience. Long enough ago that we call it different things. I’ll just go straight, it was a pain point, collaboration was a huge pain point. And I realized that the quality of our outputs was directly related to the quality of our creative relationships. So I wanted to know how that worked. And I just started down kind of pursuing with that question, how can we make what I sometimes call start users? What would that environment need to look like in order to best serve our end users? And I just kept going more and more down into that world and I discovered participatory design and of course design thinking, which is all in that same family. And just got really excited about how do we design with people, not at or for them. How do we really capture all of the different kinds of knowledge that people have and I just nerded out over it.
And I think there’s so much in there and you kind of keep peeling away things, it starts to get into emotional dynamics. So I kind of moved more and more into that and I started a company called Radically Human which was specifically about how do we create these teams and doing consultant work around that and training facilitators. And as part of that, I just started looking at all other kinds of facilitation practices outside of the world of design. One that I love that I got certified in is called Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching. And it’s all about how you work with teams, not as a collection of individuals, but as a team, as a organism essentially. And that just completely changed the way that I facilitate and work with teams.
It becomes about, how do you create an environment? How do you tap into all and pull all of the different knowledge together? So that’s kind of the long journey and I’ve been working in enterprise for a while, I was at IBM and now PepsiCo. And it just kind of gets bigger and bigger. How do we create creative environments? How do we make creative cultures that bring all that to life and enable that? And it’s just bigger and bigger problems than earlier problems, I would say. They get more and more complex but that’s the basic.
Douglas:
Yeah. I’m kind of curious, is there a story behind that first moment when you realized that it was all about collaboration?
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. I was on this small team, there were three of us and we worked on a project together and it had an amazing outcome. This was in an agency so we had a client. And it was just like, we were so proud of the work and it was just a fantastic project. And then, same team, same three from our agency, we worked on another project and it was a huge disaster. And I was like, “Okay. So it’s not… The three of us, our dynamic is we’re still good. What changed?” And it was, a person changed. But that started me asking the question of, “What is it that changed?” And so that was, okay, so you add somebody else and how our relationship with them is just somehow different. So it was literally that oh of okay, now I’ve got to start figuring out what just happened. And that was really the moment that started me on that.
Douglas:
This sounds eerily familiar because I’ve found this tendency in myself when it’s like, sure, I love the work and the outputs and the things that we’re doing but I always found myself thinking a lot about how we did the work, and how we interacted, and who showed up when and in what ways and who said what. That’s the stuff I find that can get very deeply analytical about and it sounds like you have similar patterns.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. I’m definitely a pattern seeker. And I think one of the things that there’s a framework, it’s a Welsh word, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s called the Cynefin framework, and I can’t remember his name but-
Douglas:
Snowden.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Snowden, thank you. I was like, I should remember that. Snowden, right? Not of the Edward variety. And what I loved about that was that it helped me kind of understand pattern seeking in a different way. And so in the beginning, what I was trying to do is box it up. If I can find, if then statements, if this happens, then this happens, that there’s some magic formula somewhere I’m going to really open it all up. And when he talks about, simple versus complex systems or simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic, that I realized that every human problem is a complex system. And so what he would say to that is that complex systems are not knowable in advance, you can never put them into boxes. Because they’re always dynamic, they’re always changing. So something will start to work but something else will actually take over. Or something works and it causes a whole chain reaction of something else and you can’t really control it. All you can do is continuously reflect on it and then make another kind of a move and then reflect on it. And you can only really know it in retrospect.
And that kind of freed it up. I don’t have to make a taxonomy of this stuff or a hierarchy because it’s impossible. So now….
Douglas:
Yeah.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Now I’m just working with the system that’s there.
Douglas:
I remember when I first learned about Cynefin and it was one of those moments where you’re like, “Whoa, someone just explained all the stuff that I’ve been thinking, but haven’t been able to articulate and much deeper than I was able to unravel?” And it was almost this moment of peace where it was like, “Oh wow. Now I can just let it be and do this stuff.” And we actually had one of his understudies, Daniel Walsh speak at our Design Sprint meetup. And he was explaining how the phenomenons of complexity explain why design sprints work because design sprints were created by practitioners. It’s always fascinating to me when academics can then come back and explain, “Oh, here’s why this stuff worked.” It wasn’t like they dreamed this stuff up in a lab to follow some Scientific viewpoint or whatever. And it’s really funny because he really summarized it as the design sprint is a probe. And if you’re in complex environments, you need probes to understand the environment, to know how to act.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. Yeah. There is a quote, I don’t know if I can pull it back together, but I was in this really interesting session this morning. I do work at PepsiCo, but on one of our core things around sustainability. And so there’s all these really cool initiatives, things like reasonable plastics and stuff. But specifically, there’s a new thing, it’s called positive agriculture. It’s a big initiative now around sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture which I know that’s not part of this topic, but the point about that is it’s a very complex system that there is no such thing as basically as a single kind of farmer. And land is different, climate’s different, all over the world, and culture is different. So this is, how do you transform? Right now, the thing that’s hard is seven million acres of traditional farmland that is terrible for the climate.
How do you transform that into this rich soil that is pulling… There’s tons of benefits, but the guy’s quote was something along the lines of, “Don’t try to figure out where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re going. Just do it. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy.” He was…do it. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy. He said, “Do lolly.” He was in English. He said, “Otherwise, you’ll go do lolly. So just go do it.” And I thought, “That is right. You don’t always know.” So a pro, to your point around design spreads, that was my long walk back to what you’re saying, but as a pro, I think that’s the only way that you can deal with these massive problems. And even whether you’re at the massive world climate change challenge, or you’re dealing with exploring a new way to do a product or an even a new interaction, which you don’t know what it is first, and I think the folly of you have to know what the outcome is and we’ve got to just target it and get us there.
Douglas:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the hallmark differences between complex and complicated, right?
Sarah B. Nelson:
Mm-hmm.
Douglas:
If it’s complicated, sure, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to require a lot of experts and a lot of research, but there is a seeable knowable outcome and we can just get after it. And I think, definitely, if people are trying to solve complex problems with complicated approaches, it’s not going to end well.
Sarah B. Nelson:
I love that. I know we might be beating a dead horse here, but I love, there was a metaphor that I heard once that was about cloud problems and clock problems. It’s essentially the same thing. You could pull up clock apart and you could put it back together, and it’s knowable by the pieces, but clouds are always changing. They’re always different. So you can’t know a cloud. You can understand maybe weather patterns, you can observe things, but you’re never going to know a cloud.
Douglas:
That’s really great.
Sarah B. Nelson:
[crosstalk 00:10:43] the quote was, “Most people treat our working as cloud problems, but they treat them like clock problems.” And that’s the funny part.
Douglas:
Yeah, that’s a really good, I like that. I think it’s a little more approachable than my go-to example has always been a jumbo jet is complicated, but mayonnaise is complex.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah.
Douglas:
And that really trips them up, because they’re like, “Wait a second. But you can’t unmake a mayonnaise.”
Sarah B. Nelson:
That’s true. You can’t unmake it.
Douglas:
If you leave it on the counter, it won’t be the same tomorrow as it is today.
Sarah B. Nelson:
And maybe the people around you won’t either. Yeah.
Douglas:
So I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about something that came up in our pre-show chat around this notion of, the one and done workshop and how this work is really about more than that. It’s not about this flash in the pan, which is a real risk in this. It’s an occupational hazard because a lot of people say, “Oh, not another workshop,” and you and I both know that if we’re intentional about this stuff, we can get much better, more longterm impacts. You shared some thinking that you’ve been doing around collaborative journeys and I found it really intriguing, so I’d love to talk about that a little bit.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think I like the term occupational hazard, that people have a lot of poor workshop experiences and one of the hallmarks of that is that we got together, we got a lot of work done, or we had a great time and we felt really energized and we left, and nothing happened. And that’s what the objection is, then why should I go back and do that if nothing comes from it? And at its worst, then it becomes, well, let’s take the design thinking example, there’s others, obviously, other methodologies, but design thinking is a workshop. It’s a workshop with Post-it Notes. And at the end of it, you leave and, again, nothing happens. So ergo, design thinking is a BS process. And it’s like, well, no, because you misunderstood what it is and how you use it.
So when I think of collaboration journeys, whatever methodologies that you’re using, it’s really about thinking of a workshop as a touchpoint in a journey around probes are around creative problem solving. And so workshops have a very specific function in that journey, which is, let’s actually tackle a few things with enough people in the room in a way that we can focus without being disturbed for a longer length of time. But really there’s all these other touch points all the way through, so it might be people working asynchronously on something and the tools that allow you to chat or leave notes for each other. That’s also a part of the collaboration journey. And there’s other things where it might be how we critique something, or it could be how we work together in a short meeting. But all of those things is what we’re working towards. Where is it we’re trying to go? And what I like to do is start with the end and work backwards. So I even design working sessions that way.
So one of the first questions that I ask people that I’m either facilitating workshop or creating this is, at the end of this session when everybody walks out, either what is different or what have we accomplished? So let’s not talk about what methods we’re going to use. Let’s talk about what the transformation we need to see, and what do we think that’s going to enable next? So you can that and say at the end of this entire journey, “What have we accomplished?” We might not know what the solution is, but just starting to get sharp about what our objectives are. They can be a little softer, but working back from that, and then constantly saying, “We have this hypothesis of how this collaboration is going to work,” but we might get to the end of this one workshop and we actually need to work together on a couple of other things.
But as facilitators, it means that we have to set expectations that you’ve asked me potentially to facilitate a workshop. Actually, I’m going to reframe it. We actually need to get you to an outcome and a workshop could be the right way to do it, but it might not be. So let’s get clear on where we’re trying to go, what you’re hoping, what your dream is, and then work back from there. So that’s very much a traditional facilitation, but that’s why I think design sprints are really similar. It’s that same idea of we’re going to work in this unit, but we know that there’s going to be another one and another one. So we’re constantly thinking about where it’s going to go as we go. So I think about that as a journey, and then as a facilitator, you’re taking people along a journey. You can borrow tools from service design to think about what that experience is like too.
Douglas:
I love that you point out this idea of borrowing from service design, because something we’ve been doing very heavily is leaning on learning experience design and some of the concepts around learning science.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yes.
Douglas:
Because the epiphany that I had when I was working with Eric on this was that anybody who’s attending your workshop is a learner, even if you’re not teaching them something.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yes.
Douglas:
Because they have to learn from other co-workers around what their ideas are and internalize them. And if we don’t create environments and conditions for good learning, then we’re probably not going to have great workshop or great collaboration.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, actually, I think that’s a great model. I’ve actually been doing a lot more learning design. I’m trying to be better about just saying, “If you want to call it a training, I’ll call it a training.” But it’s not about traditional training, in fact, in terms of learning the latest thinking about learning, it’s the same thing as design thinking as a workshop. Training as a two day session doesn’t really work. Get all energized, I walk out of here, what do I do with this? I’m just going to go back to the way I used to do it. So there’s some really good work from the NeuroLeadership Institute. I don’t know if you’ve run across David Rock.
Douglas:
Mm-mm.
Sarah B. Nelson:
But it’s a neuroscience approach to learning, and what they did was they looked at a number of different factors, as neuroscientists do, information uptake, and how does information get encoded into the brain? And how do you change habits? And how does all that work? And he pulled out patterns within that. He has this model it’s called the Ages Model. And if you just Google “Ages Model and David Rock” you can find it. But essentially, it’s looking at keeping in mind four different pieces when you’re designing learning. So the first thing is around attention. People’s brains really aren’t going to uptake after about 20 minutes of experiencing the same mode of delivery. So you think about these hour long, four hour long, God help, us eight hour long training sessions where there’s somebody up there delivering a deck. You’ve lost them after 20 minutes. They’re probably not retaining a whole lot of that. And so you have to think about attention and how do you design…off a lot of that. And so you have to think about attention and how do you design, even in an hour. There’s the delivery mode, there’s a hands-on mode, there’s a individual reflection mode, there’s a working together. There are these different ways that you put that in for the arc from an attention perspective, then you’re also thinking about whether he calls generation and that’s essentially, is this information relevant to me? And how I’m going to retain it if I can basically attach it to what I care about or what I can use. So you can do things like have people do individual reflection to get that down, and so how do I apply what you just told me? And then there’s emotions, they’ve got to be in the right state of mind, so somebody is coming in all frazzled or sad, or you’ve created… There’s some kind of weird tension in the room, they’re less likely to uptake things.
But the last one that I think is most really important for us, it’s spacing, so that if you want to learn, it has to be over time. So they have tons of studies of where they’ll do a training and they’ll have one group every week do some reinforcement about that training, and then have another group do one reinforcement over the same period of time. And the uptake for the group that had a week and a week and a week between them has a much higher retention than the group that maybe got it. And so it’s that people need to process, people need to have room to integrate learning, to try things out, to hear things over and over and over again.
I think about that when we do a workshop where it’s a one and done. Let’s just, we’re going to analyze our research and we’re going to walk out of here with a framework, and then we’re going to use that framework. And then we’re like, “Why do the stakeholders not remember anything?” So how are we reinforcing? How do we continually come back to it? It’s a lot more complicated than designing a workshop. There’s a lot more, if you’re an individual business, it’s a lot more complicated than selling a workshop. A workshop is a discreet unit that businesses know how to buy. If you tell them you’re going to reframe to outcomes, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know what that means.” But the cool part is if you do it right, they will pay you so much more money.
Douglas:
Yeah. Well, they’ll reap the benefits, right? It’s interesting that you say it’s a lot more complicated, because the thing that was bouncing through my head was that there’s this fractional nature to this work. When I look at designing the journey, as you refer to it, there’s some transformation, some change that we want to happen. And how do we get from point A to point B, and then what are the touch points? And you work your way backwards. That’s the same way we approach workshop design. We’re starting off here, we’re going to end here, and so we’ll typically apply backwards design and say, “All right, well, if we’re ending here, what happens before that? Where do we get to before that?” And bake in these assessment points, which is another thing that comes from the learning world, because… And I think that’s really powerful, to know if we even got where we were planning on going.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. The works and work that I did at IBM was actually, we were… There was a paper about it. Unfortunately, it’s behind a DMI firewall. But the core of the work is that we were activating sellers in a sales cycle to be able to integrate design thinking into the sales cycle. And so we actually developed a coaching program, it was 12 weeks long. It did have a kind of a traditional training session where they had to learn specific methods, but it had coach sessions over time so they were coached. It also was applied to a real problem that they cared about. But one of the things that was that same thing of, how do you actually, not just how as the leaders of this program, assess the value of what you’re doing and communicate that back to the executives? But more specifically, how do you help the teams realize their own progress and help them adjust on their own where they’re going?
So we developed a… Actually even has a name. I think they call it the behavior change percentage. We actually have a metric, but it allows people to… We tell people what the core behaviors they need to engage in and very tangible behaviors on a regular basis, there’s eight of them. And then we give them a tool that helps them assess on a regular basis as a team how well they think they’re doing on part of that. So it might be, really simple one might be visual collaboration. And we will say on a scale of zero to five, to what degree is your team actually engaging in visual collaboration, and what’s your evidence for it? So over time, they can say, oh, every four weeks, “Oh, you know, this is what we really wanted to get better at, but we actually, when I really reflect on it, our meetings are like this.”
So then as coaches, we can say, “Well, what do you want to do differently to actually bring more of this in?” But it’s very tangible. And we could actually measure over the course of 12 weeks where teams had improvements, and a lot of that was just by showing them where they are and giving them the tools to evaluate and then make decisions on how to improve. That puts responsibility for them, that makes them invested in it, all of that. But that’s the measurement piece, and that’s the way we did it in the program.
Douglas:
Yeah. That reminds me, it just dawned on me as you were talking about that. One thing that we’re big fans of, and I don’t know if I’ve ever articulated this as to why it works, but we love to start with the self assessment piece and that’s a great moment. Well, it’s great data for us to know where people are at and then where they need coaching, but it also helps them connect with that challenge. Because you’re right, it’s always important to start with a challenge people are going to connect with that’s real and pertinent for them. If they’re self-assessing around that challenge, they’re unlocking new thoughts and able to sit with this thinking around the challenge and where they’re at with it.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. So you made me think, there’s a principal in relationship systems intelligence which was that coaching methodology, and that’s, your job is to reveal the system to itself. So you’re essentially a mirror to them that for things that they can’t see. And obviously, we have an idea about what kinds of behaviors are going to help them be successful, but they may or may not realize where they are in that, or they wouldn’t know. It’s the scale of learning, again, it’s, what is it? Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. So we always say that, they don’t know what they don’t know, you have to help them understand where they are and then show them a path to where they need to get to. That’s all learning, but you can definitely do that in applied facilitation, design facilitation through throughputs for those journeys too.
Yeah. I like that you brought that up because I’ve been kind of like, the more I’ve learned about learning, the more I have also been seeing those connections between the two.
Douglas:
I wanted to shift gears once again and bring up this black swan that we’re all still in the middle of, the pandemic, and the cultural shift that you’ve seen, that we’ve all seen around collaboration and around, maybe it was just the forcing function of everyone having to explore remote working and collaborating in new ways.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. So I always feel a little guilty about talking about it this way because this thing that we’ve all been going through is traumatic and tragic, and there’s so many things that are really difficult about it. And there’s huge opportunity in a black swan event like this. And for me specifically, on day one, when I walked into Pepsi Co, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to bring this collaboration journey and I want us to be able to integrate facilitation and visual collaboration and this kind of radical collaboration into everything that we do.” And you have to meet an organization where it is, and there’s a lot of collaboration, they’re very skilled in that. They’re very physical, workshop-based, paper-based, and so that’s kind of where the culture was.
I was like, we’re going to figure out how to bring MURAL in here. I found the pilot group and the IT. I was putting together things that when I would share the information with people, they were like, “But the paper’s working for us.” Which it was, but about three weeks… So I knew I wasn’t going to get any traction on it for a long time. For about three weeks before the lockdown, I could see what was happening in Europe, I could see it coming, what they were saying in California, and I was like, “Guys, we’ve got rooms full of paper and we’re going to lose all this stuff and we’re going to probably have no warning for it.” So I actually started three weeks before the lockdown, really starting to push for the tools.
Sarah B. Nelson:
The lockdown really starting to push for the tools to try to get us ready for it. There was still this trying to learn it but fast forward to a year later, this collaboration as more of a journey as just part of how we work is very much part of the culture now. And we have folks who I’ve heard say like, “I will never go back to that project room based boards moving around way of working because I didn’t realize how cumbersome it was and how impermanent it was.” All of that stuff. So there’s been this real fundamental change and the COVID and the lockdowns just accelerated it. So there’s this interesting, it’s like a weird moment of we’ve got people talking about how we’re going to go back to the way things were.
And so there’s a lot of people who have that mental model. How do we go back? When it’s really not about going back, it’s about going forward. So we are where we are now, what is it going to look like next? And I think that’s just a really exciting place. And what is the next kind of collaboration? Okay. We’re using visual collaboration tools or Google docs and things like that, but how do we then start to bridge that being in person has a certain kind of feeling to it, which is very hard to replace, but what could other models look like? I think there’s just an enormous possibility. I don’t know answers to that stuff. So, that’s what I meant I was excited about. I feel like it’s been a really successful year for the team in terms of… Because now the way we integrate cross-functional folks into it.
There’s so much traction that’s happening, not just inside the design center, but throughout PepsiCo of like, “Wow, we’re able to work more efficiently. We’re able to really bring different folks to the table.” And I do think that’s a permanent change. And in fact, PepsiCo itself has recognized that the way that we’re not really going back. The program is called work that works. And it’s about like acknowledging all of the successes that we’ve had. And now let’s figure out how to continue to do that in a more sustainable long-term kind of a way. So I think there’s a lot of possibility in that but nobody knows what that really is going to look like.
Douglas:
Yeah, I mean, we’re clearly going to go into a realm of experimentation. I think some folks will be a little more intentional about their experiments and some folks are just going to leap straight in and make some unfortunate discoveries.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. There’s going to be people who are super resistant too, who were just like, “Please, please, please. It was so much more comfortable before and I’ve had a miserable year and how can we go back to that?” And I think it’s just going to be hard for those folks.
Douglas:
Yeah. Well, I think there might be space. I mean, there’s definitely folks that don’t have the luxury of having a great office at home who are still working from the kitchen table. I think they’re going to maybe have spaces that are more adequately equipped, but I think that essentially my feeling is what’s going to happen is going to democratize access a little more for folks that don’t have nice internet for whatever reason or a space in their home, but they’re just going to get the experience we’ve had for the last year, right, because they’re going to start tapping in and a more efficient way. We also talked a little bit in the pre-show chat about you remember like study groups and stuff where we all had our laptops open or meetings where we’re together, but we’re still tapping into the systems, whether it be MURAL or whatever, and kind of working away, even though we’re in the same room together.
Sarah B. Nelson:
Yeah. So I like my shout out to MURAL. I worked with their customer experience folks when I was at IBM and they were actually pushing me towards thinking in terms of the workshop, just like you described it, that it’s not just about something you do remotely, but how can you integrate the tools and to do all kinds of things in an in-person setting? So it could be you could imagine teaching, let’s say teaching, a hands-on session where everybody’s actually working inside the MURAL, but you’re also able to like, “Let’s have a conversation while we’re doing it.” Or, people can raise their hands and you can have small breakout groups and they can see each other working. And so it’s still the tool is maybe enabling the conversation or enabling them to make something.
And they might even just turn around and draw something on a whiteboard and photograph that if it makes sense and put it back in and now you’ve got something that’s persistent because I do think, I mean, we were talking about whether hybrid is really a thing, is that such a thing? I do think… So we’re planning, I don’t know how it’s going to work, but we’ll be in the office X number of days for intentional reasons, collaboration and culture and things like that.
So being intentional about it, but it’s never going to be that permanence. It’s never going to be that. I just wanted to actually… One thing I missed when we were talking, I was wanting to just touch on a little bit is your point about unequal work environments or diversity of work environment. So you’ve got people I’m lucky enough to have a really great space to work in. So I quite love my space, but I do, I have most of my colleagues, a lot of them are in 800 square foot apartments in New York city with two kids and another partner that works. So they’re just all trying to manage that and the complexity of that going back. I think we have to figure out how to take that into consideration too. I don’t know what that looks like there.
Douglas:
Yeah, I think that’s what I’m most excited about this transition because people talk about back to work and back to normal or whatever. I think that ideally we lean on everything we learned, but let’s support the folks that have been a little disadvantaged and help them get set up. But let’s not swing the pendulum into a territory that’s not helpful because we all remember what it’s like to be the one person who was sick at home during the big all hands. And they got the polycoms sitting on the conference room table and you can’t hear a thing and it’s a horrible experience. We don’t want to recreate that. And an omni directional microphone in a room full of people, it’s not connection.
Sarah B. Nelson:
I was laughing because I remember this from the polycom stuff. I’ve literally a group having a meeting and then walking out of the room and not hanging up the phone. I don’t even.. Oh, they’re being like… You’ll hear the voice, “Guys are we done?” And you’re like, “Oh my God, we forgot that person completely.”
Douglas:
Yeah. You forgot them so much that you didn’t even hang up the phone. It also reminds me of meetings that we work where the company would leave their computer connected to the monitor and say you’re in the next meeting and they’re checking their Facebook and you’re like, “There’s their Facebook on the monitor.”
Sarah B. Nelson:
That’s a little… That’s true.
Douglas:
Yeah. It’s hilarious. Well, pay attention to your tech. It’s important. Excellent. Well, I think that’s kind of getting us to a nice place to wrap. It’s been fun chatting, and I just want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.
Sarah B. Nelson:
So here’s what I’d leave you all with. I have a website called facilitating.design and that’s where I’m compiling a lot of this work around collaboration journeys. What does it mean to be a collaboration designer and what are tools that you can use to do that? So if you want to visit that, I have sort of a simple tool that you can use to help you start to plan a journey through a collaboration.
Douglas:
Please do check out facilitating.design. And Sarah, I want to give you a big, thank you for joining the show today. It was a pleasure chatting.
Sarah B. Nelson:
It was lovely. I was very energized and I look forward to more conversations.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control of The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
