A conversation with Marcus Crow, Co-Founder of 10,000 Hours & Master Facilitator
“I think the first question a facilitator should ask is, ‘Do I have a model or does the model have me?’…As a facilitator, we want to encounter the other methods, so that frankly, we’re more resilient to shocks in our group. ” -Marcus Crow
Marcus Crow is the Co-Founder of 10,000 Hours and a scholar-practitioner for over 20+ years, where he masterfully inspires teams to develop new skills to reach their maximum potential and deliver unique content for training through organizations. He reminds teams to stay “relentlessly self-improving” and has partnered with leading companies to enrich their collaboration and engagement within their teams. Marcus has a versatile methodology approach in facilitation wherein he believes in the counterbalance of control and freedom. He also advocates for facilitators to continuously work on their craft to deliver impactful meetings, every time.
In this episode of Control the Room, Marcus and I discuss the re-discovery of focus in performance for organizations, the juxtaposition of control and freedom methodologies in facilitation, the greater performance impact in teams through the pandemic, and the ongoing need for facilitators to embrace new methods for their delivery success. Listen in to hear how Marcus is revealing the truth about the versatile facilitator and the significance of facilitation as a true lifestyle.
Show Highlights
[00:46] Marcus’ Story of Facilitation Beginnings
[08:02 ] The Re-Emerging Performance Focus
[15:13] The Command & Control Balance
[25:51] Marcus’ Key Strategies in Facilitation[29:03] The COVID Fallback in Performance
[33:45] A Facilitation Bachelor’s Breakdown & Marcus’ Final Thoughts
Links | Resources
About the Guest
Marcus Crow is the Co-Founder of 10,000 Hours, an organization designed to deliver strong facilitation skill sets and inspire teams to develop unique skills. Marcus’ passion for facilitation began as a young professional starting out and through that inspiration he has built a career in facilitation spanning over 25 years. As a seasoned keynote speaker and masterful facilitator, Marcus continues to inspire professionals in executive education and professional facilitation. He specializes in uncovering your team’s potential through tangible objectives, while unveiling grandiose ideas into accessible messages for teams to execute and utilize. As the former co-founder of Pheul/Oxygen Learning, a company centered around the need for live facilitation and workshop training, Marcus’ mission has always been facilitation-focused. Marcus continues his unique impact of holding his space in groups and relentlessly striving for facilitation excellence to inspire your next team.
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.
Subscribe to Podcast
Engage Control The Room
Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control
Full Transcript
Douglas:
Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, 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 Marcus Crow, co-founder of 10,000 HOURS, where he designs and delivers live and virtual content for training and conferences and off-sites. Welcome to the show, Marcus.
Marcus Crow:
Douglas, it’s a pleasure to be here, and thank you for having me.
Douglas:
Of course. Let’s get started here with a little story about how you began as a facilitator and trainer.
Marcus Crow:
Well, I’m the youngest of three children with two older sisters. And at the dinner table one Sunday night when I was about 24 years old, I was talking about something and my oldest sister said, “Oh God, would you shut up or at least find a job doing it?” And my youngest sister, well, sorry, she’s older than me, but the middle child, if you like, she said to me, “Well, I’ve just come from a two-day presentation skills course, and there was a guy getting paid to talk there, maybe you could do that.” And I’d never heard of workshop facilitation or workshop training or corporate facilitation, I heard none of those terms. She didn’t use those terms.
She just said, “I was in a room for two days, there was a guy at the front of the room. He was pretty good on his feet. He wasn’t an Olympic athlete or somebody who’d walked to the North Pole, he just had a workshop content and he did a great job.” And that’s how I got my lucky break. I started in that firm, I wrote to them and rang them up, and probably was just a little bit naïve and confident. And they gave me a start. I think I was cheap, that helped. So I was very lucky in terms of how I fell into it, because I think we all fall into it. There’s no 16-year-old saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a workshop facilitator.”
Douglas:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I talk to so many facilitators and everyone comes from a different place and finds their path in a different way. And I think that’s what I enjoy about that question the most, specifically as it pertains to facilitators. I want to unpack a little bit, tell me a little bit about that first agency that you were working with, how did they approach facilitation and what was one of the first lessons that you learned?
Marcus Crow:
Well, they grew up out of the advertising industry, which is probably not that surprising, helping ad agencies pitch, and oddly enough, had some heritage in New York with the original founder, Peter Rogen. Sadly the firm’s gone through a number of iterations and then finally has been folded and dissolved as the talent drifted away from it. But in its day, its philosophy was anchored around presentation skills, was probably the core product, I suppose, and helping people stand up and put their ideas across. And it used all of the Aristotelian structures and all the things that are all well-traveled these days and found online in any book you might pick up.
But my lucky break was, they had sponsored the Australian Olympic committee, and at the time, which was the mid ’90s, the Sydney organizing committee of the Olympic games and the Paralympic games. And to make good on that sponsorship, they needed to deliver $800,000 worth of consulting services in the form of presentation skills. So my lucky break was I was a cheap resource to go and make good on that sponsorship-in-kind promise. And so I ran four and a half days a week running workshops on teaching people how to present in terms of design their agenda and set up their PowerPoint as it was emerging at the time, and get up on their feet, and use humor, and deal with questions, and all those things.
The fortunate part of that was that the content I was using was allowing me to watch people stand up at the front of a room as part of their own educational experience of the workshop. So I saw hundreds of people present. And watching that, I was able to see so many different ways of being effective. And that’s luck. There was no planning in that, that was pure luck. And looking back, I’m very grateful that I got a wide exposure to seeing how humor can be done, but in different ways, how impact can be achieved in different ways, and how quiet voices are just as powerful as loud voices and all these sorts of things.
And I was always curious at how somebody who seemed to have all the goods couldn’t land their message and somebody else who perhaps lacked all the obvious qualities that we might think about in terms of charisma and presence and big gestures, and yet was just unable to connect with their room. And so it was a very fortunate start.
Douglas:
That brings me to a question I was pondering actually, when you were starting to talk about the presentation skills and the work that that agency did. And I’m curious, what surfaced for you as you worked with lots of new presenters, what do you think is the magic moment? What was the thing that people only get this one thing, what would be the thing that allows them to connect with their audiences better?
Marcus Crow:
I think it’s when they feel like they’re in dialogue with somebody who’s absent filters and veneers, and it’s important not to privilege that over everything else. I think some filters in veneers, we make a lot of effort to present ourselves. I might be doing it right now here with you. I’m very conscious right now of how I’m sounding and what I’m saying. And I’m mindful of doing a good job for your audience and for both of us. And I think with time, I don’t think it happens quickly in a workshop, I think the workshop needs to mature in terms of the time of it. So that might be by the middle of the afternoon on the second day, for example, it’s such that the rooms in a place where… Because in the end, we know it’s true.
It’s just a bunch of fallible mammals sitting around trying to figure something out for which there’s no playbook ultimately, and we just need to make some decisions together about what we’re going to do. And so it’s very much an improvisational setting. And I think when we all realize that we’re all making it up as we go along, but that’s okay, and together we’ll figure something out, that’s when I’ve certainly felt a lovely moment or to use your beautiful word, the magical thing. When an IT professional stands up and says, “Here’s the plan for the IT transformation. And quite honestly, I don’t know if it’s going to fully work,” that’s just so refreshing because that’s actually true. You don’t know, you haven’t unplugged those old legacy systems yet. You don’t know what’s going to…
And I remember one guy and he said, “We don’t know.” He said, “We’ve done a lot of work and we’ve thought about a lot of the contingencies, and we think we’ve got most of it covered, but there’s probably something we haven’t factored in and we’ll be ready for that should that occur. And hopefully, we’ll have what it takes to respond.” And I remember watching the audience go, “God, that was refreshing,” just to be honest and candid about the inevitable fallibility in your otherwise beautifully put together plan, which was a beautiful plan, and yet he recognized that it was only going to take him so far. That was a magical moment.
Douglas:
I love that. That vulnerability goes so far because you’re going to connect with folks in the way that they’re going to stay with you. They’re going to pull the daggers out the minute things start going wrong because you let them know it was an inevitability.
Marcus Crow:
I think it even just goes to show intelligence. I think really it just go… That’s really the only intelligent response. To suggest that you’ve got it all buttoned down and you’ve covered everything and nothing’s going to go wrong. I think just on examination, just because of the combinatorial explosion of all the different things that are in the mix, including that one of your JavaScript programmers might have a partner who gets a medical diagnosis that means he, or she can no longer be… like, did you factor that in because that could happen? And in fact, it’s those sorts of things that do happen.
And suddenly, your project team is down by one or two and your timetables have slipped. And so your timelines are different. And so the revenue you’d forecast to come in when the system was live doesn’t come in and so on, and so on. There’s any number of those things?
Douglas:
Absolutely. I was just thinking too about some of the stuff we were chatting about just before the podcast started and just this notion that during COVID, there was a focus around connection and making sure that people’s feelings were understood, supported, that we were helping each other through this really tough time. And you were pointing out that you were starting to see some issues with just the backlash from that, especially given that in Australia, you’re back online for all intents and purposes. And so I’m curious to hear what you’re noticing there just around this need to be a bit more maybe critical of folks during performance reviews, etc. I’m really curious to hear more about this.
Marcus Crow:
Well, in answering this, I’m very conscious of the time we’re in, and frankly, the asymmetry of the experience. One of the things I’ve struggled with through this is where we’ve had this hashtag #allinittogether. I just don’t think that’s an honest reflection of… I think it’s the least symmetrical, the least egalitarian experience, possibly ever, and how differently it’s played out around the world. So Australia has been lucky and competent in managing that, but also lucky, which means we’re back in the room now with groups of people, masks off, frankly, more or less as before.
There’s hand sanitizer and wipes and the lunches are individually packed, but really, for all practical purposes we’re back. And what we’re noticing is that the teams that we’re sitting with, who apart from being very glad to be back in a room and enjoying that collegiate contact physically, have lost their fitness for performance discussions into talking about the numbers. And frankly, if the numbers aren’t where they are difficult performance discussions, I think for some of our clients, COVID in a perverse way was quite good for them commercially. And we can think of all the contexts where that would be true.
Pathology labs and cleaning companies and these sorts of things have all had a pretty good time commercially, but for others, it hasn’t been that. And they’ve had to talk about, “Okay, what are we going to do about these numbers?” And I think for us as a profession, as facilitators, frankly, I think we were hard hit by the pandemic. And I know many listening are probably still in the midst of all of that, that great discomfort that we all pivoted and went online and all these sorts of things, but that was to varying levels of success and were at varying levels of readiness and maturity with it ourselves.
But I think I’m optimistic. And if I can offer this from Australia to those of you in other parts of the world that might not yet be as far through or out of COVID as we might like to think we are, and again, touch wood, here in Australia is be ready for an upswing of teams who have been starved of collegiate contact. They’re looking for our skills and they’re needing to have dialogue that they haven’t had for a while to talk candidly about their performance and about the way they’re working together. And we’re certainly enjoying the return of that. And we’re finding we’re providing a great service to those teams who go help us establish that psychologically safe environment, that holding environment to do these kinds of conversations, because we haven’t for a while and we need to.
Douglas:
That’s interesting. So you’re saying that people are willing to have these conversations, they’re open to them, but they’re a little bit hesitant or concerned about how maybe unprepared or ill rehearsed they are to have them?
Marcus Crow:
Yeah, look, the metaphor we use all the way through our work is the metaphor of fitness rather than technique. I think for a lot of us, we’re scratching around for the six steps to this and the four ways to that and the three box arrow model. Whereas we take a fitness logic, which is look, fitness is perishable, whatever level of physical fitness you and I might possess or anyone listening, however fit you are. And one way to ask yourself that is, how far could you run before there’d be a problem? Could you run for one mile, five miles, 10 miles? What’s that resident latent level of fitness you possess?
And you know that whatever it is, if you want to keep it, you’ve got to work at it. And teams are the same. You can think of a collaborative team as if you like a far from equilibrium state in that it needs a constant supply of energy to stay in collaboration, and if it’s lost that through COVID, then it needs to find that again. And a bit like going back to the gym having not gone for six months, you’re a bit sore and you’re not as strong as you used to be. But then, same thing a bit like going back to the gym after six months, pretty quickly, if you reestablish your rhythms, you could rediscover that capacity to have dialogue that’s conflictual and survive quite quickly if you used to be able to do it before.
Douglas:
I love that metaphor. It’s like a facilitator being similar to your personal trainer that helps you stay on task and make sure you’re moving with the right form and paying attention to the right things. And to take that metaphor further, I think it’s fascinating to think about, because you talked about how far you run can be a good measure of fitness, I think also there are different modalities too. You look at someone who’s trained to be a boxer, they might not do so well in MMA, likewise, if they’re an MMA fighter, there might not be such a great boxer. And then you go further out, like someone that’s a shot put thrower might not be good at pole vaulting or someone really great at sprinting is not going to be really great at running a long distance run. And I think that our fitness is going to vary based on task and intent.
This even hearkens to Andy Grove’s concept of task-oriented maturity.
Marcus Crow:
Say a bit more about that. And how does that-
Douglas:
He wrote a book called High Output Management. He’s a manager from IBM, and his book’s really great. Great thinker, great manager, a lot of great content on one-on-ones. And the concept is pretty simple, it’s really dangerous to assume your senior people are senior at everything. It’s also dangerous to assume your junior people are junior at everything, because do they have a high school internship doing like a bunch of Google AdWords or are they just amazing at Google AdWords even though they’re 18 years old or whatever. So yeah, it’s important to understand your people and know what they’re capable of and what areas that they’re the most fit. I love this fit metaphor.
Marcus Crow:
Well, that’s interesting because you look around a group, I’m sometimes surprised at who goes first when we’re trying to establish some candid disclosure. And to your point and the Andy Grove metaphor, it’s not always, in fact often isn’t, who you might think it should be. Whatever that may mean, the most senior, the most seasoned, the longest tenure. And again, that’s part of why we love what we do, because I’m actually never certain who it is going to be. I’ve always got my hunch, I’ll go, “I think it’ll be you.” But quite often, that’s wrong most of the time. And then somebody pipes up and we go, “Oh, wow, okay, thank you for getting us started.” And off we go.
Because there’s a risk in going first. Groups are risky, and I think we should always remember that as facilitators.
Douglas:
One of the things that gives me the biggest smiles as a facilitator is when I’ve been working with a group for a while, and all of a sudden the person that either typically goes last or maybe they go near last or somewhere near the middle, and all of a sudden they go first and then they have their first share moment. And it always brings a smile to my face because I know that the group is transforming in a meaningful way.
Marcus Crow:
Yeah, it’s lovely.
Douglas:
I want to talk a little bit about another topic you brought up, which was this notion of how a crisis might shift the needs of our leadership, or it might just shine a light on how various forms of leadership might be less or more effective. And you were pointing out the zeitgeist around facilitation and the muse and types of things that we talk about and celebrate as facilitators and this notion of setting the vision and getting out of the way, hiring great people and letting them great work. Whereas now, we’re seeing some evidence where community control has been effective during this crisis. What does that mean for us, from your perspective?
Marcus Crow:
The comment came from… Look, this could just be the way LinkedIn’s algorithm is curating the world towards what I’m saying, that has to be set up front as a caveat. But I noticed in the OD, in the org development community, and I’m going to put facilitators loosely within that for lack of anywhere else more appropriate, I suppose, is that there seems to be a fashion or a zeitgeist around that command control is bad and it’s Frederick Taylor and it’s old and it’s Henry Ford. And we shouldn’t do that anymore, the industrial age, boo, and freedom and autonomy and accountability and all the way out to sociocracy and holacracy and empowerment and Teal, this idea that there’s this better, superior way that is in all ways good.
It seems to be a narrative of, you’ve got to move away from the former and embrace the latter. And I find that intriguing. For me, it feels a bit like, I’ll use a tennis metaphor. My two teenage boys play a lot of tennis, so I have an unhealthy amount of time at tennis centers. Watching that game more closely as I’ve had to, you watch a tennis player and they might have great forehand that’ll get them out of trouble in a lot of situations. And sometimes they can run around a ball that’s a backhand and still make it into a forehand. And to me, that’s a bit like, the metaphor there being, if I’m going to do empowerment management or I’m going to do the so-called Douglas McGregor, Elton Mayo all the way out to Teal and these ideas of freedom.
I think you don’t have the whole game if you say no to command control. So I’m not anti either of them, I think they’re both necessary like a forehand backhand need to be present in a competent tennis player. And where I’m going with this and why the COVID reference is, that if you actually look at how COVID has been managed around the world, and you can decide whether it’s been good or bad, but if you look at the methodology, there’s been enormous amounts of command and control leadership. There have been mandates given from heads of state and health authorities that have told us to do certain things.
They have commanded and controlled plenty of things, and I think in many instances that that’s welcome. Again, not to say it’s the only approach, but I think we miss something if we want to wholesale reject command control and entirely embrace… And I think facilitators who do that get themselves into trouble where they want to go down this path of the World Cafe and open space and unconference, all of these freedom methodologies designed to let the community self-organize and figure it out on their own. Isn’t the group amazing? They’re not invalid, I just don’t think they’re the complete repertoire.
To me, it’s no different to saying, “I’m going to be a tennis player and I’m going to focus only on my forehand.” I think you’re vulnerable to the things that say, “All right, well, I’m going to send some balls down the edge of the court, but you’re just not going to be able to get to because you only know how to play the forehand side of the court.” Does that make sense? I’ve probably taken too long to answer.
Douglas:
No, no, I think it’s fantastic. And it brings me to a topic that I’m near and dear about, which is complexity theory. I think we often find ourselves in a VUCA environment living in a complex adaptive system in the complex quadrant of the Cynefin, and that’s why these tools work so well for us because in that environment, we had to probe and sense and respond and empowering the edges and allowing everyone to find the answers because what worked yesterday is not guaranteed to work tomorrow. But once we find ourselves in either a complex or a simple solution that we know is the answer and we need it tomorrow, then you’re right, a command and control style leadership’s going to really help us deploy that.
And that’s what you were seeing and talking about with these masks and the vaccines and whatnot. I think it probably took some complex and some very free thinking for them to find these solutions. Once the solution was found, now we’re operating in a complicated demand and we need someone to like create the recipe, the rules and execute it. And I would even say the command and control were operating in a complicated domain, they simplified it down into something that everyone in the localities could execute from a simple domain. It’s like, “Here’s a checklist, go do it.”
Marcus Crow:
Yeah. Well, and as ever, you’re you’re describing the fact that… I think the point I want to make is that both things are always there. And I think when facilitators walk all the way over to the emancipation methodologies, like World Cafe and unconference and open space and my apologies if I’m missing a few or if I missed describing some of them that I am, I think is just to not have the whole game. And I think you’re vulnerable professionally. So I think we have to think about the more structured and directive as well as the looser ones. And inevitably, all of them have some level of structure in them, some sort of direction that sets up the boundary within which the freedom can be carried.
An interesting phrase I heard a participant use, he goes, “Oh, Marcus, this is like tethered autonomy. We can do whatever we want provided we land in these six boxes on the worksheet.” And I thought that he was being funny but also quite apt. So tethered autonomy is probably what’s happening all the time. It’s do what you like.
Douglas:
That’s why we really loved the name, control the room, because we understand that there’s always a decision on behalf of the facilitator, how much control we want to elicit, and do we want to have loose control or do we want to have tight control? And with loose control, those tethers, there’s a long leash on that tether and we give them a lot of room to wiggle, but to your point, there’s still some structure. If there wasn’t, then we wouldn’t be showing up, there’d be no reason to call us a facilitator. The ones that are really in love with these very autonomous, very loose styles, sometimes they’ll get concerned about the word control and get a little uptight about it. And my belief is that, well, if you weren’t exhibiting any control, you wouldn’t be there.
Marcus Crow:
Yeah, exactly. You agreed on the hotel venue, somebody controlled that. You’ve agreed to a timeframe< we’re not going to be here for 72 hours, we’re here for a day, for eight. I think that’s right. Even in the intro to your own podcast, part of what attracted me to your show is you talk about, how do we balance the right amount of… I’ll get the words wrong, you can help me. That little bit you use at the very start of every episode. Just remind me, what are the words you use?
Douglas:
Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve even read it. To me, it’s about how you lean in and how you lean out.
Marcus Crow:
There you go. It’s gorgeous because it’s recognizing… And look, we talked about what’s a practical thing people could use, and part of my get-go at the start of many sessions, especially when I’m new to the group, I’ll often say to them, I’ll say, “Look, I’m going to disappoint some of you at every moment during the day, because at some point I’m going to reign in a discussion that some of you would like to have continue.” And yet simultaneously, there’ll be others in the room who, when I reign it in, will be annoyed I took so long to do it, who will have felt that it should have been curtailed half an hour earlier. And I want you to know that I’ll do my best to get most of you happy most of the time, but in advance, I want you to know that I recognize that I will disappoint some of you because your appetites for the content will vary across the day.
And I found that a useful frame because it just buys me the latitude, because certainly, at any point they go, “Geez, Marcus, you killed that too quickly.” Or, “Come on, wind that up. Why’d you let that one go?” It can be a useful way to explore the fact that there are different appetites for what they talk about and for how long they do it.
Douglas:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I love it. I often tell people that expectation setting is nine tenths of the problem. And we really do a good job of making sure, some people will refer to them as ground rules or operating agreements or whatever, but ultimately, we got to set the expectations up front and then we can lean on those things later when things don’t go so well.
Marcus Crow:
I think the latter bit that you just said is the key to all those upfront gestures. to say, “This is what we said we would do.” And even then, inviting a deviation from it saying, “This is different to what we said we would do, but how do we feel about persisting with this now that it’s here?”
Douglas:
Well, that’s a total power move, deferring to the group. We’ve got one person that’s deviating. I want to make sure everyone else is comfortable with that, and if they’re not, then I just got their support so it’s not me against that person.
Marcus Crow:
That’s right. And I’ve found it, again, in the spirit of little tactics that people listening could use. I’ve got an app, it’s called Clock. It’s not very imaginative. It has a series of clock faces in it, and I put that on full screen on my phone and I stick my phone in the middle of the circle so that everybody can see the time ticking. And I say, “I’ll tell you what, let’s give it 10 minutes and we’ll see where we get to.” And that has been a useful gesture to say, “We’re not sure it’s important, although it seems to be important to Jeff over here. And look, it’s only 10 minutes, so let’s see what we can do with it in 10 minutes. And if that reveals it to be necessary up further, then we can decide or we can curtail it.”
And that’s been a useful way to navigate some of those little moments of passionate surprise that pop up as the group goes along.
Douglas:
Yeah. I love this notion of time boxing. I think that’s a powerful tool. No matter if we’re in a workshop or just doing some work or even just personal work or even outside of collaboration.
Marcus Crow:
Yeah. Well, it goes back to what we were discussing, it’s a form of structure. So you’re saying, “I can either give you a boundary spatially and I can say, ‘Only discuss these topics,’ or I can give you a boundary temporally saying, ‘I don’t care what you discuss, but you can only do it for this long.'” And often we do some combination of that. We set the space and the time, but again, all useful vehicles for a facilitator to manage what they’re doing.
Douglas:
I want to marry these two topics we’ve been talking about. One is the need to maybe have more structure at times, to use more deterministic facilitation styles, and then also the need and hunger for teams to have more performance-driven conversations. And I’m curious, what are some of your go-to strategies or techniques to help a group have that kind of conversation?
Marcus Crow:
Okay. Just to give you some practical examples. Now, again, it depends on the quality of the numbers. So I’m going to work on a scenario where the numbers aren’t what we’d like them to be. And the reason for that is probably obvious, but when the numbers are what we’d like them to be or better, I think it’s far easier, mainly because generally, there are no losses to allocate to the group in terms of, well, you missed, and you missed, but you hit. We don’t have to deal with some of that difficult stuff. Whereas if the numbers aren’t where we want them to be, what I’ll often do is say, “I’m going to put up a slide, which shows you the numbers.”
And whatever the pivotal one or two graphs or tables are, we put them up. And then I’ll invite everybody to pick up, and we give everybody a blue 10,000 HOURS notebook and a pencil and say, “Open your books.” And I’ll put some music on and I’ll just go to the group and I’ll say, “Angela, what’s in your playlist on your music, give me something.” And whatever she says, it’s often quite funny, because she’ll say, “Oh, it’s not safe for work what I listened to.” That’s funny by itself. But anyway, I get a song. And so I say, “Right on, you’ve got one song’s worth of time. Thank you, Angela, for the music suggestion. And when the song is finished, I’m going to get you to stand up. But I’d like you to write down how you’re feeling and what you’re noticing about these numbers and what you think is going on in the business.”
Now, what that does is distribute the cognition. So they’re all thinking collectively, but in an isolated way, because I don’t want the first person to infect what the next person thinks. So they music on which quietens the room, they write down.” Then I’ll get them to go for a pairs walk, I’ll say, “Go and find somebody across the room who, but for today you barely ever see, and today’s a chance to spend time. Grab them, and you’re going to go for a walk for 20 minutes. Walk out for 10 minutes, wherever you get to, turn around, come back. And come back here in 20 minutes having talked about what you’ve written down.”
So now I’ve got some real sense-making in the room between the individuals and then the pairs of individuals. And then we come back and then I say, “My only question is what were you struck by through that exercise? Not what did you think of the number? Just, what were you struck by, through that exercise?” Now, some people give you a very functional answer. Well, the numbers have fallen by 12% because we failed to execute in the Western region or something like this, but other people go, “God, I just found myself moving from feeling angry to then feeling a bit sad, to then feeling a bit excited when I spoke with Chris, as we went for a walk that maybe we can do this.” And all of anything else could happen.
But I find that’s a useful way to surface the unflattering because the numbers aren’t flattering and then have the group gently play with that topic. And then obviously, we’ll follow the threads as they come up. Does that answer your question?
Douglas:
Yeah. I love that. My next question or curiosity is, in this time of COVID, I’ve definitely seen an uptick in bad customer service, and they generally blame COVID. And on one hand, it’s important to be sympathetic and understand that there might be people out of work, but there’s another maybe more cynical part of me that just wonders, has it just become an excuse to say that we have longer call volumes because of COVID? Is it just an excuse now to say that like, oh, this is going to take longer to arrive at your house? Certainly in the few weeks and months following, but it’s been a year now and yet people are still using it as an excuse.
So I’m wondering if this mindset has percolated into new year workshops that are talking about performance reviews where it’s like, “Yeah, we’re not doing so hot, but you know, COVID.”
Marcus Crow:
Yeah. Well, and again, isn’t that tricky? Because for some of those organizations, that’s a legitimate thing to say, and for others, they’re using it… as one lady said to me the other day, she said, “Oh, look, this has been great. It’s been cloud cover. We’ve been able to excuse all these other terrible things that we’re not good at, and it’s given us cloud cover for everything, “Oh, COVID, COVID. Oh, we missed the deadline, COVID. Oh, we didn’t win the pitch, COVID.” So she said, “I’m sick of COVID cards being played to avoid us talking about the fact that we missed the pitch because we weren’t prepared. We didn’t win the piece of work because we didn’t interpret the brief properly and we didn’t respond well enough.”
She said, “I want to get back to those conversations because COVID is allowing us to not examine ourselves in clear light.” And having said all of that, of course there are contexts where it is still a legitimate contributing factor, and for every organization and then for every facilitator, I think that’s a great question in our briefing process with our sponsor, for our workshop is to say, “Where are you up to with COVID being an influence on the performance of this group and this business?” And just see what they say to that, because it’s going to vary in all your settings. And some of them will say, “Now, they’ve got to stop talking about it. It’s no longer a thing, it’s normalized, it’s part of the fabric, we’ve got to get on with it.” You’ll get that type of response.
And others will say, “Look, it’s very much playing a role for good or for bad, frankly.” You’ve worked with parts of healthcare, they’re having depending on the part of healthcare, but things are good because of COVID commercially, may be bad operationally because they’re still in some scramble mode that meant maybe some of the business is usual, the normal rhythms have been abandoned to service the needs through the pandemic. But I think it’s a really important question to ask in the design of the session.
Douglas:
Yeah. You’re right. It’s important to have some sensitivities there. I think also as facilitators, our jobs to ask tough questions and to be curious and listen, and even if they haven’t admitted it yet or not, it’s probably worth asking, “Sure, yes, COVID is playing a role, but what if we had a control and we were able to remove the COVID, what else was playing an impact here? Because it’s certainly not in a vacuum, we’re certainly still making the pitch. So even with COVID, how could we have done the pitch better?” I think that might be worth exploring in these conversations. I’m just very curious because we haven’t had a ton of conversations like that today, I think there’ll be more coming. So it’s like, I’m getting very curious about this.
Marcus Crow:
Yeah. I think it’s definitely something leaders want to talk about, mainly because I’ve found they’re frustrated that it’s been the only allowable narrative for a long time, is that Oh COVID, and they’re like, “Look, it’s more nuance than that. There’s more moving parts. It’s not just this.” Or they’re saying, “Look, it is a thing, but it’s 12 months old now. So we have to just factor it in to the way we work and get back to working and stop having it as a reason to not try and perform.” So I found a lot of leaders I’ve pent up and frustrated and hence they’re coming to their facilitation provider to say, “Help me to broker this dialogue. I want to get my group talking about this and I’m scared I’m going to come across as an uncaring, unloving, unfeeling leader who’s all about the performance. So please help me to get my group to a place where we can explore that.”
And of course, this goes back to my earlier point, I think facilitators, I think, we’ll have a lovely season off the back of this pandemic having had a horrendous season in it, as groups are going, “Get us back to our fitness, help us get back to these conversations that we need to be having.”
Douglas:
Yeah. That’s a good point. And I think it might be a nice time to segue to this idea of professional facilitation, training preparation. What does a bachelor’s and facilitation look like? And when might we get there?
Marcus Crow:
Wow. I’d love to, what do you think? I don’t know how far away, how long this is going to take. I’m optimistic, it may end up getting there. Just in a few podcasts I’ve listened to and been on, every time the topic comes up, there’s an interest in it, there’s enough professional colleagues around the world who are interested, but for my two cents, I think we as a profession are about 20 to 30 years behind psychotherapy. If you look at that field, they have professional bodies that sanction access to practice. They have a body of literature that they feel every student should be across, so you’ve got to read your Carl Rogers and your Egan, and you got to know your Freud and your behavioral and your emotion-focused therapies, and you’ve got to read your common factors and Bruce Wampold.
There’s a whole lot of things you’ve got to do. And then you’ve got to do your hours. So you’ve got to get your time up much like the pilots do. So you’ve got to put in your clinical hours, you’ve got to put in your supervision, you’ve got to maintain supervision. You’ve got to maintain your own exposure to psychotherapeutic contact, and then keep all your records, and then have that ready to report. So there’s some lovely disciplines in that field, which I think we can learn from. So I’m optimistic that we could think about, well, what’s the literature? What’s the curricula? So you might say, well, you need to understand some of the work from the group dynamics environment, so Yalom, and Bion, and Foulkes, and all of that work that Northfield and everything that the group community have put together.
You might say you need to know management, you need to know the history of management and leadership. You need to go back to Frederick Taylor and lead your way forward through all of the time pet span, so you can see the patterns and the fashions come in and come out again, because they do come and go if you look at it through a longer span. And then what I’ve also noticed is this professional loneliness. I think there’s a lot of facilitators that are craving collegial contact and time with other colleagues to have that iron sharpens iron intellectual friction. You and I are doing it right now, you might say. So I’m optimistic because I think there’s a need, and I think there’s an interest in it being established.
Douglas:
I think it’s really important and it was one of the main drivers for our facilitation lab every Thursday, and it give facilitators a place to gather and get curious and experiment and work together. And also one of the reasons why we encourage all the facilitators in the community to create like other gatherings, other moments, it doesn’t have to be the official Thursday, get together and have these study groups, have these moments of curiosity because that’s how we’re going to grow, and that’s how you get to your 10,000 hours so that you can get to mastery and understanding.
So also I just want to point out some of the stuff we’ve been talking about today really points to something, a passion and a value of mine around, it’s so easy for facilitators to get siloed and one particular approach, whether it’s getting interested in the very open and the very broad and inclusive style, the loose style, or whether it’s design thinking, or whether it’s like MG Taylor or some specific methodology that they learned. And typically, it’s what they found first, it’s what they stumbled on and introduced them into the world that holds a special place in their heart, which is very understandable. And we’re not trying to change that, but what we want to do is encourage people to think about how there’s so much more out there.
And when you start to look at the intersectionality of these different techniques and bringing them together, you start to create the chocolate, peanut butter combinations and things, and then you can be a lot more versatile. And even if you go back and you’re still doing open space, the way you host the open space will change because your view of the world is different.
Marcus Crow:
Well, I think that’s a beautiful example of why peer counsel is so valuable and what you’ve built up in your communities because if the open space… I think the first question facilitator should ask is, do I have a model or does the model have me? And if you ask that, because that immediately allows you to get a little bit of distance from it and go, “I got taught open space, I did open space. I loved it, I learned it, I started running it, and Harrison Noelle, and I’ve got the book and I’ve read it, cover to cover, it’s what I do.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with that because most of us come into the field with a structured piece of content that we learn to deliver and we get handed a set of lyrics to a song and we start by singing that song.
If you examine any singer, you’ll notice that they learn other songs because eventually, there’s more to music than just the first one that I came into this with, and not torture the metaphor, but therefore as a facilitator, we want to encounter the other methods, so that frankly, we’re more resilient to shocks in our group. So if all we’ve got is open space and that’s really annoying our group, then we are vulnerable, and I don’t mean it in the fashionable use of the word vulnerable, I mean it technically, we are vulnerable to being dismissed and curtailed and killed off. So what we want to be able to do is say, “Okay, so my world cafe open space, the unconference play isn’t landing as well, what I might do is draw down on my scrum techniques or my human-centered design techniques.” Or you mentioned MG Taylor.
My view is, I don’t actually care, I think any of them can be fruitful because most of what’s happening in a workshop environment is the charisma, rapport, connection, willingness, hope that’s going on between the group and the facilitator, because I’ve seen too many facilitators who are wonderful that use different methods. So it’s obviously not the method because I’m going, well, you’ve had a spectacular career and you actually just very funny. And you just basically lead the room and get them chatting and ask them hard questions. That’s what you do. Over here, I’ve got a human centered design character, you’re amazing. And over here, I’ve got an open space freedoms player, and you’re amazing.
So your techniques are wildly different, so what is it? And it’s those common factors. So I think it’s important to have lots of moves.
Douglas:
I agree. Being versatile, being able to adapt and move with the group and lead the room, I think it’s the pinnacle skill of facilitator.
Marcus Crow:
And again, back to your peers, I was going to ask you, what’s the format when your groups get together? If there is a format that’s repetitive, is there a rhythm and structure to how they spend the time when they gather and convene?
Douglas:
Yeah. We usually have an opener of some sort, it might be a fun little activity just to ease in a soft start. And then our guest or host will basically be introduced. They have about 40 minutes to do what they will. And then we spend the remainder of the time, I think we have about 15, 20 minutes after they’re done to do a quick retro feedback session on our guests, because we will never learn unless we debrief. So we’re following one of the pinnacle rules of facilitation in the lab. So the guest will come and do something with us, but we always make sure we take step back out of that lens and critique it and talk about it as a group.
And then we always end with just group discussion hangout time. And then maybe once a month or every six weeks or so, we will not have a guest and we’ll do what we call open lab, and we just invite facilitators to come hang out and we might have some games and activities planned just to keep it a little bit structured, but it’s really about the community connecting and asking questions and hanging out with each other more than anything. But yeah, it’s about ultimately creating little experiment area for the guests to bring their thing in, and then we examine it after the fact.
Marcus Crow:
Yeah. Lovely. And therefore, get exposure to other ways of working with the group. And that’s the beauty, it’s what we’re talking about is making sure you’re not just hostage to the one framework that you were first taught or exposed to.
Douglas:
That’s right. Well, I think that’s a fine place for us to wrap today. And so I want to kick it over to you Marcus, to leave our listeners with a final thoughts.
Marcus Crow:
Well, look, two parts. I guess the first part would be, look, if you’re interested in getting in touch, then LinkedIn is an easy place to find me. But I love your thought that was given to me years ago that facilitation is a lifestyle. And what I mean by that is that everywhere we go, we get the opportunity to see people working with people. You can see that at the check-in desk event of an airline airport, you can see it in the supermarket goings on of a pair parent with their children as they walk down the aisle, and you’re watching groups of people do things together.
And I found that advice very useful, because I was able to draw inspiration from pretty much everything I saw or watched or where I went, I could see things happening that were interesting. And I think we’re very lucky for that fact. So I look forward to staying connected to your community, and I really appreciate the time you’ve taken today and the invitation to be part of it.
Douglas:
Well, it’s been a pleasure having you and really enjoyed the conversation.
Marcus Crow:
Likewise. Thanks, Douglas.
Douglas:
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe, to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.
