A conversation with Mark Collard, Founder of Playmeo and Game Engagement Mastermind

“If you’ve got a breath and you’re a warm body, then I know that fun is going to be the magic, my most potent weapon…to be able to invite you to participate.” -Mark Collard

Mark Collard is the Founder of Playmeo, a company that provides a group-game wonderland with over 440+ games & activities towards team building and experiential education. He inspires facilitators, educators, and managers to empower groups to connect more effectively and build stronger teams. With training workshops and invaluable resources in their online database, Mark offers the essentials and more to exercise trust for organizations. Mark’s mission to lead with fun through games can ultimately lead to magic and results. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Mark and I discuss the creation of the temporary community to foster trust, the deliberate/strategic approach of connection before content, and the ongoing virtual facilitation challenge towards engagement. Listen in to hear how Mark is masterfully leading with humanity in his group game bag of tricks to not only build connections in groups, but amplify results in your organization. 

Show Highlights

[01:00] Mark’s Career Breakthrough in Games
[05:04] Creating the Temporary Community
[10:51] The Intentional, Unofficial Start Trick 
[13:27] Connect Before Content
[17:56] The Facilitation Virtual Challenge
[28:50] Are They Ready to Play?
[35:46] FUNN & Mark’s Final Thoughts

Mark’s LinkedIn
Playmeo
Playmeo.com/free

About the Guest

Mark Collard is the founding director of Playmeo, a company that utilizes experiential learning and creates unforgettable training workshops to help teams connect. With a career spanning 30+ years, he has offered more than 2,000 presentations and numerous video tutorials that help thousands of teams connect to cultivate team-building. Author of three best-selling activity books, No Props No Problem, Serious Fun, and Count Me In, Mark has a true passion for sharing his mission with the world. Mark provides many professional and educational development programs to leaders, managers, and facilitators alike. His body of work has set the standard in leading fun, interactive group games to harvest trust & productivity in organizations. Mark’s mission is to lead with fun through games and ultimately weave the magic of play into effective results.

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 in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Mark Collard, founder of Playmeo and an experiential trainer who helps people connect through the use of fun group games and activities. He’s the top-selling author of five books, including the latest, No Props No Problem, and the founder of the largest online database of group games and activities in the world. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Collard:

Douglas, thank you. It’s great to be here.

Douglas:

It’s great to have you. So I want to hear a little bit about how you got your start. How does somebody get into this idea of fun group games and activities as a profession?

Mark Collard:

It’s a great question, and it’s one that I’ve had to ponder myself. In fact, I spent a bit of time writing about that very question, and I think if you dig dive deep enough, you go back all the way to kindergarten and it was like the kid who sat next to you. But I think in a more practical sense, it was the decision of my parents to send me to Scouts. It was my inclination to be part of a youth group, as part of my church. All of those spaces were places where I was engaged in group games and activities.

Mark Collard:

I don’t know many people who don’t actually enjoy them. And so I did, and not that I knew that then, but I made a career of using interactive group games and activities probably based on the fact that there was one particular youth leadership camp I went on that extended over four days that like night and day, chalk and cheese, just transformed me. Again, didn’t know this at the time, but I look back and understand the facilitation of those group games is what caused that transformation. For me, it harks back to that, but now with over 30 years experience in the field and having run many summer camps around the world, all of those are programmed activities. All of those give me my body of work today.

Douglas:

Let’s go back to that moment. I’m really curious. I want to hear more about this. What do you think were some of the key elements that kind of unlocked that experience for you?

Mark Collard:

Yeah. Again, I didn’t see it at the time, Douglas. I was just swept up in it as a participant, but with a lens that I have now looking at it, I understand it was the ability to form, first of all, a temporary community, those connections I had with about 40 other people I’d never met in my life, some of whom are my longest friends in my life. That I have friends from that program I still see on a regular basis today. So I think the ability for those leaders of that experience to build community, which was all about building connections. I suppose, for me, it was about then realizing who I was. ***As they had created such a safe place for me to be, I was able to then find others who could value me, acknowledge me and accept me. Perhaps, in my life, that had never happened before.***

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s really fascinating. You say temporary communities because it seems like the community wasn’t so temporary. It actually had long lasting applications and the thing that strikes me is that it was an emergent community. It kind of just like sprung forth because of the situation that was put there. It’s just dawning on me in this moment listening to you that like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting concept that we create these conditions and these little mini-impromptu communities emerge.”

Mark Collard:

That’s right, and they are temporary from an intentional perspective. I’m sure the leaders only intentionally wanted to create community for the four days they were running it. However, they also fully understand that the skills, the life skills… We didn’t use these terms back then, but the social, emotional, learning skills we were able to experience back then were going to last a lifetime. And they are no doubt in my mind the foundation of a lot of my experiences of who I am and how I occur to other people today. It was chalk and cheese. I remember going back to my university to mix with my friends who knew me the week before this camp and I came back and overwhelmingly said, “What happened to you? You look different.” I was dressing differently. “And you sound differently.” It was like, “Oh, something must have really happened.” Yeah, right. It wasn’t just in those four days. There is this sense that it’s going to continue as well.

Douglas:

Yeah. Maybe I’ll come back to that temporary notion again because something you said sparked something new from me, which is maybe it’s the intention of the facilitators, this kind of pure intention that they’re creating, this temporary environment without any bigger intentions, but what can grow from that is a bit unknown and will allow that to flourish. But we don’t impress these expectations on folks to make them feel like they’re responsible to do something or what not.

Mark Collard:

Oh, absolutely. I speak a lot about asking the question before you stand before any group, “What is possible? What is possible here?” I know the framework that I bring to my work and my training and education. It scaffolds the greatest level of possibility so it’s possible that the leaders in that particular youth leadership camp had the same expectations, is that we’re going to view this temporarily, but we’re going to ask the question, “What is possible here?” And so they just jammed and created this amazing framework that helped people feel safe so that they could step outside their comfort zones and discover who they were and what was possible for them. Of course, lofty levels were attained.

Douglas:

You mentioned people stepping outside of their comfort zones and so often when we’re working with clients and we go anywhere near playful kinds of things like improv or games, they always say, “Well, I’m not sure that the executives are going to do this or my analytical folks, I don’t think… They’re just going to roll their eyes or whatever.” I think there’s so much magic in that discomfort that they aren’t picking up on. They’re anticipating it, but they’re afraid to walk into it.

Mark Collard:

I’m nodding my head as you speak. I don’t think there’s been a program I’ve worked on where there hasn’t been some element of that in the beginning. While it’s not a term I typically embrace, but it’s about breaking that ice, the ice of that exterior. Sometimes it’s a soft exterior. Sometimes it’s quite hard that you do need to break through to get to who people really are. If you’ve got a breath and you’re a warm body, then I know that fun is going to be the magic, my most potent weapon, to be able to be invite you to participate.

Mark Collard:

I can’t think of a program, no matter who the group are, whether they’re a group of top executives from Fortune 500 companies or a group of school kids or kids at risk, whatever, if you can appreciate that they are human, if you can appreciate that they’re all going to enjoy play, but some of them get to it longer than others, like it just takes some time for some groups, more than others, that they can respond, if given the opportunity, given the correct environment. I often think of my own primary responsibility as a facilitator is about creating the most appropriate environment so that my group can make whatever choices is required for them to discover whatever is possible.

Douglas:

Yeah, that environment and space matters so much. It’s something that I think some people somewhat lose sight of in the virtual space because they… In the physical space, they think, “Oh, we need to get a venue. How are the tables arranged?” In the virtual space, it almost seems like they’re just like, “Oh, this is how Zoom works. I guess this is what we got.” And it’s like, “Ooh, that’s a real missed opportunity.”

Mark Collard:

Oh, absolutely. We also forget that we’re still working with humans. They may be pixelated versions on our screen and we get caught by this camera that we get sucked into, but I would argue that the ability to connect, the need to connect, is as important, I would even argue more important, when you can’t be in the same physical space as each other. And so it’s not just a matter of wheeling in your whiteboard or flip chart and presenting like you normally do because as a facilitator, for a start, you cannot gage the room in the same way when all you’ve got is a gallery view of pixelated images of heads. You can’t see the body behaviors as easily so facilitation is very different.

Douglas:

I’ve often lately started to use an assistant or a scribe or someone else in the room. Some people will use producers or technical facilitators, but having someone else there that’s helping check the signals, really helpful because you’re right, it’s really hard to pick up on all the nuance.

Mark Collard:

It’s very different. Again, in the same way when people actually turn up, my intentionality to invite them to connect early is equally as important as when people log into their Zoom room. I spend, for example, the first five or 10 minutes in what I refer to as the unofficial start, which is really just, it’s not an activity, it’s just a principle of engaging people productively in something that they have a choice in. It could be coloring mindfully online, using the annotate tool, or solving a few puzzles or responding to a question that I’ve posed.

Mark Collard:

Today, there was four of us on a call from around the world and I played a game where I threw a dice and the dice number reflected a question on the screen. If that person who was next chose to, they would answer that question. It was completely random. They didn’t know how the dice would roll. That was my unofficial start. The key there, Douglas, is the intentionality. I was intentionally inviting connections while at the same time waiting for people to arrive. The hour just flew as a result because people felt more connected to people who they’ve never met before, never been in the same room before but felt some form of connection to each other.

Douglas:

It’s funny. I just finished up some training with a large enterprise and we were doing some coaching after and they were asking me… They’re making a point that, “We really love the connection pieces. Whenever we came back from break, we did something to like create connection and that was really impressive. I want to use that more but how can I do that in a 30-minute meeting?” I asked, “How often do your 30-minute meetings start on time?” Then she was like, “Well, not very often.” Then I said, “Well, why do you not start on time?” She said, “Well, I’m waiting for people to arrive.” I was like, “Would you be willing to start a warmup on time?” She was just like, “Oh, okay. I get it.” Yeah, it’s exactly the thing you were saying, right? We’re not going to be afraid to start a warmup the minute the clock ticks and then we can get it going.

Mark Collard:

Absolutely. With the time I spent honing that skill, particularly in university, I was a lecturer there for seven years, I lectured in two subjects. Over the course of 14 semesters, every class started with an unofficial start. Typically, as kids who have just left high school, moved into college or university, they would just dribble in because that’s what happened with every other class. Why would you turn up on time when you know the instructor’s going to wait five or 10 minutes.

Mark Collard:

I would start on time but indeed early, and within about four or five weeks of the 14-week semester, I never had another late student. I never had to say to them, “Hey, dude, you need to be here on time.” Because here’s what happened: I didn’t use this terminology back in the 90s, but FOMO, the fear of missing out, there was something that happened that transpired that you know when you entered the space that, “Oh, what’s going on?” That you could feel something and that also happens online. As people arrive online, they get that there’s an energy about what’s happening and you do that enough, you don’t turn up late. There’s obviously reasons why some people need to be late but often it’s just laziness.

Douglas:

Yeah. I would say that’s a much safer thing to do than just to start content early. Because if you start content early, you will get a lot of backlash and people feeling like you’re attacking them.

Mark Collard:

Yep. And it’s a missed opportunity, Douglas, because you have an opportunity to connect. Now, it’s great if that connection can also relate directly to your content as well. That’s like a double whammy. But it shouldn’t be necessary, but it’s great if it can. And so you’ve got that ability to… Or the opportunity to connect is missed. It’s a golden opportunity. Otherwise, it’s thrown away.

Douglas:

I want to point out that it comes back to one of your maxims, which is connect before content.

Mark Collard:

While I use it a lot, it’s something I’ve learned from somebody else. Chad Littlefield from a group called We. I don’t know where he got it from, but for me, that just resonated. It did. It just made a lot of sense, but it put a title, a mantra, to something that I’d already been doing, to connect before content. I often say to people that are not being rude, I actually don’t care what your content is, but whatever it is, do something. Spend some time and energy and with, unashamedly, always takes a little bit of time and a little bit of energy, do something to help your group connect.

Mark Collard:

I speak a lot with educators and school administrators and their first push back to that is, “Oh, if you had any idea just how crammed our curriculum is. How do we find the extra time for this?” Without exception, those that embrace this concept discover that over time, the group actually, because of their connections, get through a lot more content a lot more quickly. And so they end up actually getting through as much of the content as they planned, indeed even more, because some of the group issues, the group management issues, just don’t bare their heads as often or as large when you haven’t spent the time spending time to invite those groups to connect with one another.

Douglas:

This also gets into brain chemistry and learning science type stuff as well because the connection is going to create environments for better learning and so you probably don’t have to repeat yourself as much as a lecturer when you’re lecturing and that connection to the people is going to make them more connected to the content.

Mark Collard:

Yep. I’ve never met a camp leader, a teacher, corporate trainer, anyone who’s responsible for the welfare of a group who said, “Oh, Mark, could you teach me how to pull back the engagement for my group? They’re just way too engaged.” It’s always, “Mark, if I could just engage my group, it would be half the problem.” And so those connections is part of the answer. It’s not the only answer obviously, but to invite people to connect to help them feel more comfortable invites them to participate, to put their hand up where they ordinarily wouldn’t because the question might be a bit challenging for the group to hear. Or to give something a go that at first glance they might feel they could look a bit foolish if they don’t get it right. That’s the environments that we’re talking about that invite… that happens as a result of intentionally building those connections early on.

Douglas:

I want to come back to a point you made earlier and just spend a little time on it to make sure the listeners really understand what you were getting at. It was your point around tying the connection to the content. If you even poked a little fun at the term icebreaker because I think a lot of times it’s used maybe as a corpus of work that people just throw around without having connection to the content. One of the things I usually like to tell people is if we do something and we can’t ask the group why we just did that and have it be a really interesting conversation, maybe we should be asking ourselves why did we just do it. And so when we’re picking these activities and games, it’s really great when we can be really intentional about it and thinking about what they get out of it and how that transitions into the work we’re going to follow with.

Mark Collard:

Yes. I’m a big proponent of and a big advocate for taking fun more seriously. But when that fun, it’s packaged because we want to invite people to participate, it’s like a magnet, when that fun also engages them in something related to the content, it’s an extra prize. It’s a bonus. It’s something we should aim for. It may not always be possible, but in my experience, and perhaps it’s come from experience, Douglas, most activities I can find a way to win a message to segue from that thing that appeared to be trivial, just fun, frivolous, wasteful to, “Oh, now I can see why we did that.”

Mark Collard:

I love that when that happens. I love it when a kid says to me, “Oh, you lied to us today.” It’s like, “What do you mean?” “Well, you said we’re going to have fun.” I said, “Yeah. Did you have fun?” “Yeah, we had fun, but I also learned something.” It’s like, “Yes, that’s awesome.” I disguised the learning inside this package called fun because it’s the attractive part.

Douglas:

I love that. And so we’ve been talking a lot about connection and I want to bring it into the context of the space we find ourselves these days, which is remote. There’s a lot to unpack here so I’m excited to talk about a few of these things with you. But first, let’s just talk a little bit about the challenge of creating connection in a virtual space.

Mark Collard:

It is a challenge, Douglas. There’s no doubt. When March/April happened in 2020 and a tsunami of inquiries came into my inbox saying, “Help.” We all worked under the presumption that we had to turn up. That was the presumptive setting. Everyone would just turn up and that was no longer possible. What do we do? They came to me as the expert and I just put my hands up and said, “I’m an explorer. I am not the expert because I have not done this either.” And so it was challenging. I think in the beginning, the challenge, Douglas, was wrangling the technology because we weren’t used to that. We weren’t used to setting the camera and the mic and the settings and the backgrounds and whatever we had to do to create slides if we normally did something else. But that just took a little bit of time, to sort of wrangle the technology.

Mark Collard:

I think the greatest challenge was bringing our humanity to that pixelated version of ourselves on the screen and that of course of everyone else on our screen. That for me is what separated the good to the excellent. You might’ve been a great teacher or even a good teacher or a corporate trainer, but what made you excellent online was that you were able to manage the humanity of this moment, even though we’re not in the same space.

Mark Collard:

I was able to respect, and when in doubt, accept that everyone was human. And yet that the intentionality was still present. I got so caught up in the technology in the beginning, I forgot to bring myself and my humanity and to invite everyone else’s humanity to our space. So inviting choice, so it wasn’t just like picking an image on my screen. I say, “Okay, Charlie, what do you think about that?” Well, Charlie was now on the spot. You probably shouldn’t do that in any group, in any case, in most cases. But there was other ways in which I could respect choice and respect the humanness of that moment. For me, I’ve continued to refine those skills of bringing my humanity to the screen.

Douglas:

Absolutely. Let’s get a little bit tactical when we think about… What are some of the moves or plays that can help make connections? I feel like breakout rooms are a powerful way to get a little connection happening. I certainly agree calling on people can be abrupt and challenging. Something I’ve taken a fancy to, I miss the days of being able to just go around the circle. Get everyone in a circle and go around the circle.

Douglas:

People have certainly done the… After you go call like maybe pick the next person and just go around like that. I’ve even shared my gallery view. I know Zoom now lets you set a fixed view, but people get lost and you can pin on their version of Zoom. I can be problematic, but I’ll share my screen so that people can see what order they’re in so they know what order to go in so you can do the go around the circle thing. But I was just curious if you had any moves or plays that you use to help boost the connection a bit.

Mark Collard:

I’ve used a similar technique too. I think what you just described, Douglas. I call it curiosity ping pong. Again, something I’ve picked up from elsewhere, where I will start by asking a question. For example, I did this just a few days ago. “What is the strangest thing you believed as a kid?” And I invite people to write it into the chat room. Don’t hit enter. Just put it into the chat room and then give them a minute to do that. Then on go, everyone hits the enter key. Then it’s like my inbox, first thing in the morning, just fills with responses. Give them a moment to reflect on all of that. Then I’ll either ask for a volunteer or I will start and say, “Hey, I’m really curious about your response about this, Shaquana. Can you tell me more about that?”

Mark Collard:

If Shaquana wants to, she’ll come off mute, share what the story was about her response to the question and then it’s her turn. But the back and forth ping pong, it’s her turn to pick somebody else. And so it’s a bit like I think what you shared. There’s that. You could also play a game where maybe we identify based on the number of letters in our name or the alphabetical order of our names or it could be some other random number.

Mark Collard:

I might say, “Okay, in the chat room, just put any two digits together from zero to 99. Just randomly put a number down.” They don’t know what’s coming of course. So they put down their number. “Okay, whoever is closest to zero, I invite you to go first. And whoever’s after that, you’re second. And it’ll finish with whoever’s closest to 99.” What they love is that it was fun, just making up a number. And then “Oh, okay.” It engages them because they need to see, check to see where they’re at. You could also change their names if you happen to be using Zoom, of course. You could change their name to just putting the two numbers in so then everyone can see all the numbers on their screen at the same time. There’s a couple of quick ones.

Douglas:

Nice. Nice. Yeah, that reminds me of a fun warmup that you can do. Comes from improv games of counting together. You try to get to 10 without stepping on anybody and you got to keep starting over. Eventually, if you got a clever group, some will present a strategy that we might use to get through this. Then I think people jumping in and offering support and strategies is where that is a form of connection too because they’re starting to problem solve without you even telling them to problem solve.

Mark Collard:

Yep, and that’s a great activity. I know it as count off. I’ve been using for years in person, but it’s even better online because-

Douglas:

It’s harder.

Mark Collard:

Well, it’s harder in some respects, but it’s better because when it was live, in-person, sometimes I couldn’t quite tell if two numbers came out at the same time or not.

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Collard:

But online [crosstalk 00:24:13]

Douglas:

The latency. The latency in the internet makes people mess up more, and it’s funny because someone thinks they’re… And you hear it like two seconds later or something. It’s pretty good.

Mark Collard:

Typically less so with the chat room, but it’s very obvious to everyone that we just had three fives in a row. Great. We’re back to zero again and it’s engaging. It’s one of those things that you might just use as a 30-second energizer to mindfully just move away from your content before you refresh and move on to something new.

Douglas:

Yeah, just having a reset. It’s a great reason to do these things. It’s a little brain break. Yeah.

Mark Collard:

Yep. Yeah, or brain boost. I had someone tell me the other day. He’s like, “Really? That sounds so damaging. Why are you breaking brains?” It’s like, “Oh, that’s not what I meant.” Then I have to say brain boost now.

Douglas:

No, no. That’s so good. Brain boost, I love it. Well, I also want to talk a little bit about current events there in Australia. Here we are, practically May, and you’ve been pretty open since October. Something I found really interesting when I asked you about hybrid is that you really hadn’t been seeing much of it. It’s either in-person or remote.

Mark Collard:

That’s right.

Douglas:

Which has been a hypothesis of mine that people are going to do one or the other and if anyone’s remote, it has to be all remote even if a good chunk of those people might be in the same building.

Mark Collard:

I think it clearly depends on regions, and in some cases, I come from Melbourne, Australia. Australia’s done an outstanding job at controlling the spread of the virus. I think we’ve been almost six months practically without any community transmission. So that’s been good. So kids have been back in school since October, no issue whatsoever. But when we were at remote learning, it was one or the other. You were either remote learning or everyone was in the classroom. In Australia, didn’t see hybrid, where you’ve got a bit of both. I do know it is in some places around the world and that is a tough gig. It’s hard enough to teach just to remote or just to the folks who were stand before you in the classroom or the training room. But to do both at the same time takes a masterful set of skills.

Douglas:

It’s multitasking. And as we know, people can’t multitask. And so if you’re looking at the Zoom, you’re not looking at the room. And if you’re looking at the room, the people in the Zoom are getting a deficient experience. If you’re looking in the Zoom, the people in the room are getting a deficient experience. And always if people in the room are going to be tempted to have conversations, the people that are connected to Zoom aren’t going to hear those conversations. Definitely not if there’s one omnidirectional mic in the room, right?

Mark Collard:

Yeah, we’ve all been part of meetings where… I was part of school council earlier this week. One of our, it was actually the vice chair, was Zoomed in. Everyone else’s in the same room. It was hard. It was so difficult to keep involving them. They often don’t get heard because they’re being put on mute or whatever. It’s just very difficult and I think it takes a great master to be able to manage that well so everyone feels acknowledged and valued.

Douglas:

Yeah. And I think that it’s those principles we have to keep coming back to if we’re going to explore those scenarios. I think that’s the interesting part. We’re going to be entering in a time of experimentation where we’re going to be exploring how we show up for those types of things and what the best moves and tactics are. But I think to your point, we have to come back to those principles and those underpinning values.

Mark Collard:

Yeah. And it could be just as simple as acknowledging that it is clearly a different setting when you’ve got that hybrid-ness. But making sure that that person continues to be heard and valued because it’s easier to see everyone in the room, but it’s harder for them to do that or to hear them. And so constantly checking in with them. It’s like, “Hey…” Which is true for any person. If you got the folks who don’t speak up as much as others, it’s true for the facilitator of that group to make sure that those folks have a chance to check in as well or to break into smaller groups. Well, make sure you don’t forget the person who’s on Zoom. Have that screen turned around to the two or three people who are now in a breakout room, even though two or three of them are in the same space. The intentionality to remember about that stuff.

Douglas:

I want to ask you another question here, which is for someone who’s already had to go back to in-person and you’re doing some remote stuff, you’re doing some in-person stuff, how did this moment of being 100% remote influence how you show up in-person now?

Mark Collard:

That’s a great question, Douglas. The first thoughts that come to mind is this technique that I use to ask or somehow inquire check, in with my group. Are they ready to engage? Are they ready to play? Are they ready to learn? It depends on the context. I don’t know that I really did that very, very well back in the days when everything was presumptively you turn up. But I acknowledge the humanness of folks that they… Particularly, because my community is worldwide that some are getting up in the early morning. Some are up late at night. Some are at the end or in the middle of their working days. Checking in with them and creating something on the screen that said, “Hey, just annotate this scale.” And I did a variety of them. Let’s say we use the emojis so you got depressed at one end and sad and the other end, highly vigorous and enthusiastic and everything in between.

Mark Collard:

Annotate this scale as to where you’re at right now. It gave me a very quick sense of where my group was at. I wasn’t solving any problems. But sometimes just the simple acknowledgement of the fact that people are tired or they’re not feeling well or they’re here under duress can be enough to bridge the engagement necessary to move them forward in the next hour.

Mark Collard:

Now, of course, I’m doing that as people turn up. Here’s an example. I worked with a group of kids just the other day, whereas they enter the gym, they have to stand on this paper mat and there were three emoji faces. One was sad, one was neutral, the other one was happy. As they came in, there was a little sign that says please step on to basically engage with that emoji that you’re feeling right now. Without ever having to say anything to the group as they were coming in, dribbling in, I could tell from the foot marks where my group was at and I was checking in with them and there’s a whole variety of other ways of doing it. But that was just one that I recently used that was so simple. People thought it was fun and it’s something now that has really influenced what I do in-person.

Douglas:

It’s interesting. It reminds me of what we refer to as assessment points, because the game became an assessment point for you. You were able to glean info about how they were showing up and that can be used not only at the beginning, but throughout an event wherever we want to gage how people are doing. We can throw those things in.

Mark Collard:

Yep. And any number of unofficial stats. As we hark back to what we talked about earlier, Douglas also provides me with evidence about where my group is at. So if I’ve provided a selection of activities as people are gathering and most people are choosing to do something other than what I’ve given, that gives me an indication of where the group is at, how connected they are, how well do they look after each other, are they up to play, are they willing to engage, are they looking for excuses for something else to do? Even that provides me with maybe an unofficial way of checking in with the group as well.

Douglas:

Yeah, I want to come back to something you’ve mentioned a couple of times and you just brought it up again. This notion, “Are they willing to play? Are they ready to play?” What would you recommend to a facilitator if you detect or suspect that they’re not quite ready?

Mark Collard:

I think most groups are not ready. Because the thing about play, if we look at its pure definition, is it’s the absence of pretense. It’s who you are. Most of us run around for lots of good reasons with some at least a thin veil of a mask. So Most groups have something that needs to be pulled down before they’re ready to jump in and just simply play to be engaged in something for no apparent reason other than the sheer joy that comes from participating. No win-lose. They’re not particularly conscious of what’s going on around them. They are the essence of play or flow if you want to get really scientific.

Mark Collard:

I think all groups come with that. Some of them just have a lot more ice to chip through than others. If you truly wanted to help that group connect and therefore amplify the results of whatever you’re trying to get done, then do something, a little bit of time and energy to chip away at that, can be very useful and you need to meet them where they’re at.

Mark Collard:

I can think of many corporate groups that stand there with their arms crossed or their chest and like, “Eh, this is just childish. Blah, blah, blah.” Then it becomes a personal mission for me, Douglas, to find something so contagiously fun, it becomes difficult for them to stand away from. Then once they’re in it, I know I’ve got them because they realize this is a safe place. Having a big bag of tricks up my sleeve is definitely one of my advantages. But I appreciate that for many people they don’t have much, which is partly why I created this huge database to better say, “Hey, this is what’s working for me. Give it a go type stuff.” Having that large repertoire is useful so that you’re picking the right activity at the right time to chip away at whatever that resistance might be.

Douglas:

In our facilitation lab just last week, one of the facilitators said it’s one thing to invite someone to the dance, but it’s a completely other thing to invite them to dance. As you were talking about this executive with his arms crossed not willing to engage, I just had this mental image of you and your bag of tricks and at first his toe starts tapping with the music and then his leg starts moving and next thing you know, he’s dancing.

Mark Collard:

Yeah. And it’s so easy for us as facilitators to point the blame at that person. “Ah, I’ve seen you before. You never do anything and blah, blah, blah.” I like to flip it and go, “No, no, it’s my responsibility to create an environment in which you make appropriate choices consistent with the goals of the program.” If I can understand that it’s my responsibility and look, every one of us can can say, “Yep, there’s some people out there. They’re not even their mother’s love.” I get that. But really most people, most humans are willing to meet at least halfway if you can give them a good reason to engage. And so I like to flip that responsibility. It’s like, “What is it that I’m doing that’s creating this for them right now?” And you can’t control the stories in their head, but you can control the environment as much as possible that might help them make a different decision.

Douglas:

Let’s just be honest. There are going to be plenty of situations where it might be our fault as facilitators that maybe we didn’t do a great job of setting it up so they’re not connecting to the why or the purpose or they’re unclear on it. Or they feel like they’re going to have to make a sacrifice and we haven’t laid that out properly.

Mark Collard:

Yep. I think it’s a really great question for every one of my groups to ask is why are we doing this. What I hope, what I plan, what I intend is that that question is answered in the fun that is wanting to draw them in. My mentor, Karl Rohnke, who sadly passed away last year, he was the person that I learned all of this stuff, and he coined a term called functional understanding not necessary, FUNN. He talked about that. That was one of his core values was FUNN. Because it’s not necessary to understand what’s going on to have a great time. And so that contagiously fun stuff is what loosens those arms on people’s chests to lean in and give something a go because they sense that there’s nothing to embarrass or threaten them, it looks safe and it looks like just a bit of fun. That’s a challenge to find that, but there are lots of options that you can work with.

Douglas:

Wow. What a great concept. I think that’ll be a great spot to end on as well so I want to shift it over to you, Mark to see if you have a final thought for our listeners.

Mark Collard:

Well, I mentioned Douglas in our conversation having a bag of tricks. That’s something I learned from Karl. He had a massive, thousands of activities, it just seemed to me, he could pull out of his back pocket and use it at the right time with a particular group. And so over the last 30 years, I’ve created this massive online database because while I have many books, that was one way of sharing the word for beyond those people who could turn up at a training. But doing it online just leveraged the digital world. And so playmeo.com, I’m sure you’ll provide links here, is a great place to go. There’s tons of free resources there, lots of free group games, many of which you can use virtually as much as in-person. They’re all about providing opportunities for your group to interact and build those connections so that it helps amplify your results. So if you go to playmeo.com/free, typical spelling, you can find tons of things that you can download. Everything from a free app to free activities online, eBooks and so forth.

Douglas:

Well, Mark, I just want to reiterate how much of a pleasure it’s been chatting with you today. I encourage everyone to go check out playmeo.com for lots of free tools. It’s on my list that I published of awesome resources for methods and tools so I definitely endorse that. Go check it out. Mark, it’s been a pleasure. Enjoyed the conversation.

Mark Collard:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s been my pleasure as well. Hope everyone of your listeners has enjoyed this too.

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.