A conversation with Elizabeth Maloba, Co-Founder of Nahari and Change & Growth Facilitator

“As leaders, I think it’s very important to determine ‘what kind of community are you building?’ ‘What kind of space are you providing?’ Leaders then have to decide ‘what kind of communities are we creating [in the organization], what kind of spaces and what kind of empathy do we have for the people on our team?’” -Elizabeth Maloba

Elizabeth Maloba is the Co-Founder of Nahari, an organization built for creating authentic spaces where collaborative learning and collective decision-making unfold. She understands the critical foundation of building community in the ecosystem of an organization and the level of trust needed to thrive when seeking solutions. Elizabeth ultimately believes that community is more than a place, it’s also an identity and ongoing process. Her work leans into the continuous journey of improving team dynamics and a leader’s need to transform conversations. As an expert facilitator with architectural influence, she challenges organizations’ approaches when conflict arises to instill sustainable, implementable resolutions from direct collaboration.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Elizabeth and I discuss the value of experiential methods, the impact the pandemic had on mental health in the workplace, the necessity and personal meaning behind community in organizations, and the benefits having challenging conversations have on cross cross-sectoral collaboration. Listen in to hear Elizabeth unveil the elements behind creating the community you envision for your organization. She also explores how to identify the root of core challenges your organization faces so that your team can build greater solutions together.  

Show Highlights

[1:32] Elizabeth’s Creative Start in Facilitation
[10:25] The Impact in Experiential Methods 
[16:18] The Pandemic’s Impact on Mental Health   
[23:50] Elizabeth’s Take on the Significance of Community 
[29:24] Cross-Sectoral Collaboration & Elizabeth’s Final Thoughts

Elizabeth’s LinkedIn
Nahari

About the Guest

Elizabeth Maloba is the Co-Founder of Nahari, a change-making organization striving to create authentic spaces for collaborative decision-making & uncovering sustainable solutions to build communal teams. Elizabeth’s true passion is developing long-lasting beneficial relationships to support global development. As a speaker, entrepreneur, and moderator with a career spanning over 20 years in transforming challenges to solutions, she continues her mission to transform conversations by seeking out facilitators leading organizations. Her specialty skills range from facilitation and capacity building to knowledge management and conflict resolution. She is a current committee member of the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife and Friend of City Park, where she is committed to offer contributions towards policy development on all global, continental and national levels. Elizabeth continues her mission at Nahari by building better organizations through the lens of community, starting with one empathetic conversation at a time. 

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 the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide. Today, I’m with Elizabeth Maloba, co-founder of Nahari, where she fosters the development of collaborative approaches to addressing development challenges. Welcome to the show, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth:

Thanks. Thanks. Great to be here finally.

Douglas:

Yeah. Excited to be talking today. So I want to hear a little bit about how you got started in this work around creative change-making.

Elizabeth:

Wow. I always think back and I’m like, “My God, I don’t know how this happened.” Partly because of course I followed the usual career path that everyone does, which is go to school, go to university, get a degree. And the idea was supposed to be that with a degree, in my case, this was a degree in architecture, I would go to the next step, which is the professional career path. And in this case go work at an architectural firm and go up the ranks. But somewhere along the way in college, I worked to pay my way through college. And some of the work I did then was facilitation work. I was working on team building and leadership development, a lot of it based on experiential methods. And I think I enjoyed that a lot, a lot, lot more than I did architecture because I ended up choosing that as my career path rather than architecture. So that’s how I ended up where I am.

Elizabeth:

One of the things I remember very markedly is that I read then the book, The World Is Flat. It had just come out. The first edition of the World Is Flat had just come out. And I remember thinking it would be so exciting to be able to work around the world without necessarily moving from my home city, et cetera. But at that point, internet was not what it is now and so on. And so it was just like, “Oh, such wonderful dreams in this book, but it will never happen.” And the other day I thought about it and thought actually it finally happened.

Douglas:

We’re here.

Elizabeth:

So in my lifetime, it changed.

Douglas:

That’s amazing. I’m really curious how your training in architecture has played a role in your facilitation style, because I specifically think about architectural charrettes and there’s some facilitation type of things that happen in the architectural process. And plus as an architect, learning to be a systems thinker and how things fit together could potentially contribute to the ability to help with linking and connecting people’s thoughts and things and seeing those patterns. So I’m just curious if you’ve ever noticed any of it? And if there’s any specific things you can draw to in your architectural training that have contributed to your facilitation style?

Elizabeth:

That’s actually a really good question because my family, everybody asks, “So why did you take six years of architecture if you’re not going to use it?” And the honest truth is that I think I use it all the time. One big aspect of it, as you say, is the design thinking, systems thinking, creative thinking aspect, where you’re faced with a blank canvas, you have a challenge and you need a solution and what do we do now? And all the bringing together of different aspects to build a comprehensive solution is a big part of architectural training. But I think for me, the other really bigger part is being able to connect with the context. So architecture is very much, so much more about, we spend a lot of time as architects trying to understand the weather patterns, the sun path in the place we are in, the ground that we’re standing on.

Elizabeth:

And things like the slope, the rainfall, the type of soil and geology that we’re working with. And it’s always about understanding the context and then putting up something that works best in that context. And in that sense with conversations, I tell people, “I design conversations.” With conversations and especially with collaborative processes, the contexts are really, really important. And so that ability to understand context and somehow synthesize learnings from that context and use that as a foundation to build a solution, is a very important part that I bring from architecture into my work.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating this notion of the environment and the conditions you’re talking about and studying the weather and how the position of the sun is going to impact where you might place a window or the structural integrity of something might be impacted by the conditions under which it’s going to need to live and exist. And it was really interesting because I can immediately see the parallels between when we’re thinking about asking a team to come into this environment, and how are we thinking about the initial conditions that they walk into and how we set that up. And even how we maybe even protect them from conditions that we don’t want them to be in. I was just talking with someone the other day about how challenging it could be if the work that they normally do is within earshot. And it can be so tempting to say, “Oh, I need to go deal with that,” versus if you’re in another building or another room far away, those interruptions, distractions don’t happen. So that’s really fascinating to think about how just accounting for the conditions in the environment is so important.

Elizabeth:

I think it’s important as you say, both when we bring them in to work collaboratively to develop the solution, but also when we ask them to go out and implement the solution. So of the things that drew me to this work, as opposed to traditional consulting, where I’m an expert and I give my input, has to do with exactly this need, that the team I’m working with, if it’s a team let’s say in Nairobi is not the same as a team in Berlin, in Germany. And they have different conditions and they have different cultural processes and practices and norms. And how do we make sure that the solution we are building is sustainable within those conditions? How do we make sure that what they do and come up with as a solution can therefore then survive or thrive, actually not survive, but thrive in the context that it’s going to be implemented, because you see so many organizations, I find this especially when it comes to strategic planning, you see so many organizations that pay a lot of money for very expensive experts and get a really glossy looking strategic plan.

Elizabeth:

And then it’s not implementable because for one reason or another, the issues of a context we’re not taken into account or were not properly understood because maybe they were lost in cross-cultural translation. And therefore that thing is actually not implementable in the place that it’s being asked to be implemented. I have a very interesting story around that actually, we had to go and work in Benin, which is in West Africa, in the Sahel, with a friend, a colleague. And we were making this list of things we need. And she insisted she needs a room with a hot shower. And the people in the Sahel said, “Come on, you’re not going to need a hot shower here. Yes, the city you’re going to, there are no hotels really with hot showers, but you’re not going to need it.”

Elizabeth:

And she said, “No, I must have a hot shower. I don’t take cold showers.” And we go to the Sahel and it was that time of year when it’s so hot that nobody opens the hot water tap. So she didn’t use it and she said, “From now on, I’m going to be very careful what I say, because the context, the context.”

Douglas:

That’s amazing. I love that story. Also, it pays to unlearn a bit and be curious about what the locals or what the folks on the ground are telling you. If they’re saying it’s not necessary, it’s like maybe there’s something to what I’m hearing.

Elizabeth:

Oh, yes, definitely. You always have to figure out what assumptions am I bringing? And as a facilitator, this I’m getting more and more aware of, what assumptions am I bringing? What norms am I bringing into this space? How am I affecting the outcome in this space? Because we like to think of ourselves as neutral and we market the practice of facilitation as a neutral surface, but actually we are not. We are a very powerful force in that room. And we have to be careful what we then do with the power that we have.

Douglas:

I completely agree with that. I think the notion of being neutral comes from this perspective of not necessarily being biased toward an outcome.

Elizabeth:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

We don’t have to support it and we haven’t been living and breathing it for a year or years. So we maybe don’t have that baggage, but you’re right, we wield a lot of power and it’s important to think about, are we unwillingly biasing the group by just the dynamic we’re creating?

Elizabeth:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

So you mentioned experiential methods and how you were drawn to that. And so I’d love to hear a little bit more about what that means to you and how that surfaces in your work?

Elizabeth:

Wow. I think it’s been some time since experiential methods featured in my work, but I started out there. In those days, outward bound was the main thing and leadership. So yeah, it was outward bound, it was national outdoor leadership school. It’s the tuff that I see Bear Grylls doing now on TV and I’m like, “Been there, done that.” But what I loved about it then was that we learned by doing. And not by doing experimental things. It wasn’t something that was put on a table and you had to try it out, no I’m sorry, you had to get 22 kilometers from point A to point B with a map and a compass and a group of 10 people that you somehow had to lead and manage and someone. And then we would have a debrief about how that went, how did it go for you as a leader? How did that go for the team as a team and so on?

Elizabeth:

And that was much more effective at team building and translating learning within a team than situations where we sat down in a room and said, “These are the dynamics of a good team. And this is how you should have good interpersonal relations.” It’s different from when you have to walk 20 kilometers and you’re exhausted and you have to carry 60 kilograms, and there’s a person on your team who’s decided they’re not carrying the 60 kilograms and they’re not walking any more kilometers. And how do you then get there as a team at the end of the day? And when we debrief, then we have to talk. It’s very different in terms of improving team dynamics from the very theoretical exercises that come without experiential work.

Elizabeth:

So in that sense, I don’t do much team team development now, but when I’m working on team dynamics, I really try and give them a real challenge to solve that means that they have to then apply, bring their best strengths, bring their skills, and use their interpersonal relations skills in a very pragmatic way, as opposed to a theoretical discussion about what would be an ideal interpersonal relationship exchange, for example.

Douglas:

Yeah, that makes me think about this. We often talk about you can’t live in the conceptual all the time, and at some point you have to make it concrete. And making that jump from the conceptual to the concrete is very difficult. And so, it sounds like this experiential stuff that you’re talking about, the outward bound stuff is totally concrete, they’re in it, you can’t get much more physical than that. They’ve got a 60 kilogram pack on and they’re just sweating it out. And it’s interesting to think about what are some of the parallels or some of the analogous moves that you can make in the conference room that allow people to embody stuff, allow people to really experience it more than just think it.

Elizabeth:

One of the methodologies that I found that work is actually getting people to move around. So body movements. Another thing I find is trying to get rid of all the formality in the room. So as much as possible, and that’s normally not so easy. And also depending on the cultural setting, is sometimes not possible. When I work with diplomatic circles, then it’s really problematic because there are protocols. And those have to be, in some cases enforced, otherwise there could be a diplomatic incident. But try as much as possible to get rid of a hierarchy and try as much as possible to get people to do practical things and work on real challenges that that need solutions. And then they can bring their creativity to that problem and that challenge.

Elizabeth:

I have a friend who put it really nicely, she said, “Listen, I can tell you the swimming pool is warm. I can tell you that the water is 22 degrees Celsius. I can tell you it’s three meters deep at deepest point, but you will not know how that feels like until you’re actually thrown in at the deep end and it’s above your head and it’s warm. Or maybe it’s cold.” The experience of it is not describable. So if you’re dealing with crisis preparation or crisis planning, people can describe very perfectly that there will be a pandemic. And the pandemic is a really good example. The World Health Organization had a pandemic as one of the top seven challenges that would face the world within a certain timeline. They weren’t sure so they thought it would be a flu virus rather than a Corona. Yes, so two different things, but basically they had this as a threat. But describing it was not the same as what we’re going through living through it.

Elizabeth:

So long as it was a nice theoretical construct, there were nice theoretical constructs about how the World Health Organization was going to respond to a pandemic. But when it practically happened, then we saw what happened. Then we saw countries closing their borders. We saw everybody running into nationalism, protectionism, and so on. And suddenly we realize, “Okay, so this is really what happens when it’s real, as opposed to a nice theoretical discussion of what happens if we have a pandemic.”

Douglas:

Yeah. And speaking of the pandemic, in the pre-show chat we were talking a bit about mental health and how folks are still, I would say, navigating trauma and trying to understand it. And I’m a firm believer that as we start to open back up more, people are starting to shift that shift. And those changes and behaviors are going to expose that trauma a bit more because people are going to go through a transition of being in hunker down mode versus like, “Oh, everything’s quote unquote, back to normal. And so now I’ve got to reconcile this trauma that I’ve been shoving down.” And it sounds like you had had some experiences with that with some friends talking about just mental health. And I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on what you’re noticing, and also maybe how you think that might play out in the business setting to you?

Elizabeth:

So on one hand, what I’m noticing is that, we were actually just having a conversation and then I noticed, “Oh my God, I’m so privileged. I live in a house with other people.” I have a family so I live in a house with other people. So I don’t just have all my conversations online via digital means, I can talk to real people, whether we love together or fight together or whatever it is, but they’re real people in my space who I can talk to. And some of my friends and some of facilitators I work with around the world, they live alone. And in extreme lockdown, it was them, and if they’re really lucky, their pet cat, dog, fish, that’s it. And all their conversations were on digital platforms. And I think that was hard in its own way. It was hard in its own way, in so many ways for them.

Elizabeth:

But then last week, I think I was in a different conversation and we were talking about how the children learning from home went. And I was saying how I enjoyed it a lot. And a friend of mine said, “Yeah, Elizabeth, you’re not a good example, keep quiet.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because the conversations in your house are not how conversations in most other households go. Many households are not safe spaces and they’re spaces of violence and they’re spaces where children are just told, ‘Sit down, shut up. Don’t talk. Why are you speaking now?’ Et cetera. And it’s not a constant engaging of curiosity between parents and children about what are you doing? And can I find out more about it?” And so this discussion was then that this is definitely, there’s going to be a big trend of people who really want to go back to offices.

Elizabeth:

And I’ve had this among a lot of people who say, “I used to think, I want to work from home. I used to think I’d love to be self-employed and be my own boss and make an office space at home. But the pandemic has taught me that I need an office. I need to escape this place that is my house for various reasons.” And that is a whole other area of mental health and trauma related issues to explore, because I think people then are coming to terms or being forced to come to terms with what kind of environment do they have in their houses? And why do I need to escape my house to go to work? But I think the bigger thing, especially in my context, is that people don’t talk about it. They’re not comfortable talking about it. They’re not comfortable admitting that they need help or that they sought help.

Elizabeth:

And there’s still a very big community of people who think you can push through it or power through it, or be strong through it. I’m like, “It’s an illness. You need help. And if the help is tablets, then the help is tablets, but you need help. You can’t recover from a tumor by soldiering through it. In the same way, you can’t recover from mental health challenges by soldiering through them. You have to get the help that you need from the specialist that gives it.” So I think more and more, this conversation is gaining traction and people are starting to talk about it. But especially in my context, in Kenya, let me say that especially, it’s still not something that people are so comfortable admitting and putting out there that they’re doing or they’re going through.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think people struggle with that many ways, across many locations, there are certainly folks in all sorts of contexts that feel uncomfortable sharing that. And it feels like a private thing and a lot of people suffer in silence. And so I think that leadership can play a big role in remaining curious, and really listening, employees and teammates and collaborators might not be completely forthright about what’s going on, but listening to their preferences and tuning in to what they’re asking for might shed some light on their needs at the very least. And I think it’s really important. To your point, some people are craving to be in office, while others are wanting to avoid it like the plague. And so we have to think about how we support things and also be willing to make some hard decisions around who we can support and who might have to look elsewhere to find the ideal situation.

Douglas:

There’s a lot of talk of people shifting jobs during this time. And I think it’s probably inevitable because that’s a big shift for a lot of folks. And they’re going to have to think about what that means for them and their family and how they take care of themselves. I think it’s a big deal. And I think as leaders, we just need to listen and pay attention.

Elizabeth:

I think also as leaders, I keep saying, well, the pandemic obviously made it obvious that we need a sense of community, but as leaders, I think it’s very important to determine so what is your community? What is the sense of community? When I was being told, “Your house is not the standard house.” My house didn’t become like that by… It’s by design, it’s intentional. So then is the question, what kind of community are you building? What kind of space are you providing? Not just in terms of physical office space and furniture and furnishings and fittings, but also in terms of communication and collaboration.

Elizabeth:

I remember being in a conversation with a business leader somewhere, and they were telling me about a team member and I asked, “But doesn’t so-and-so have three toddlers?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “Okay, so why were you calling them at X, Y, Z hour?” And they looked at me blankly like, “What’s wrong?” I said, “This is toddler primetime. This is bedtime, bath time, nap time crashing all into one. And this is the moment you want to have a call with them. It’s not going to work because they have three toddlers. We have to be cognizant of that.”

Elizabeth:

Or I had to have a call with someone else and I knew she was a new mum. And so I had the flexibility to say, “Listen, I know you’re a new mum. I know that babies are unpredictable. If we need to start 30 minutes later or two hours later, just let me know and we’ll figure it out because I’ve been there, I know this. And there’s no point in me trying to force you to be in a call if your baby’s crying.” But leaders then have to decide what kind of communities are we creating, what kind of spaces and what kind of empathy do we have for the people on our team?

Douglas:

So I want to take that community piece and run with that for a moment because I love just the notion of communities. And I’ve done a little bit of community building myself, but I’m always in awe of people that are really great at it. And so I want to hear a little bit about your approach and what community means to you and what you think is critical for sustaining and nurturing community?

Elizabeth:

I think I’ve went around about my work for so many years without the awareness of community, because I just didn’t think about it. It was there, it worked, it supported what I was doing, and so I wasn’t thinking much about it. One of my first moments of awareness came about in the conversation, not between me actually, but between my son and my dad. And they were talking about the name of the tribe. And as children tend to ask, my son asked, “Grandpa, what does Luhya mean?” And straight off the top of my head I was like, “I’m sure it doesn’t have meaning, it’s a name.” And then my dad says, “Wait, this is what it means.” And it turned out that it’s not only an identity, it’s a place, it’s a process, it’s something that happened in my cultural community where people came together and had conversations of all kinds. And there were different roles for different people in that space. And it made it work. And somehow they made meaning together. And somehow they found a way out of different challenges together.

Elizabeth:

And after this conversation, I started thinking actually, “So what is my community? What is my Luhya?” The exact question they ask in my tribe is, “From what Luyha do you come from?” And it’s exactly the same thing. What Luhya do I come from? What Luhya am I creating? What’s the identity of this space? What’s the space that we use to meet, because it’s also a space, which is in this sense, normally a very big open space with a fire, so it’s warm, with food, so nobody’s hungry. Sharing of food, so nobody’s hungry. And depending on the day and the circumstance and how it went, there might be a story, there might be music, there might be exchange or information like, “This happened,” or, “I met so-and-so and they said hello to you.” And they were kind of like, I would say the facilitators of the space where the elders, and we had elders always in this space. And the elders have special roles in this space.

Elizabeth:

And I call them superpowers because I’ve been in such a space and we could be discussing, I don’t know, the ingredients for making a meal with my grandma and straight from the ingredients she would immediately pick the most difficult challenge someone was facing, like, “Why did you drop out of school?” And you would be like, “Okay, this conversation just got complex fast.” And everybody else in this place has to figure one, “Do I need to be in this conversation? Two, if I’m in this conversation, why am I here? Is it as a listener? Is it to provide a counterpoint to whatever is going to be discussed, et cetera. And when is it my turn to speak? And when is it not my turn to speak?” But the person who actually had the power, superpower to dynamically transform that conversation was always the eldest, was always the grandparents, grandmothers, grandfathers, sometimes aunties and uncles. So there’s the space for elders and I see facilitators a lot as elders. And then how do we use those superpowers to transform those conversations in that way?

Douglas:

That’s pretty awesome. I love this idea. And it brings me back to some of my family gatherings as a child. And I remember definitely my grandmother would, without apology, would go right to the issue and sometimes catch you off guard. I feel like that was an art form. Didn’t wait for that perfect moment. It was almost like the opposite of what a perfect moment might be just because, in a way that’s the moment because you’re not expecting it and you got to be raw and you got to be real and authentic.

Elizabeth:

Mm-hmm. And it’s here and it’s like, “Okay, you can escape if you want to. You can stand up and get out of the circle, but then you’re getting out of a circle.”

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s a very obvious sign, you can’t just slip away. That’s amazing.

Elizabeth:

So in organizations, but also in cross sectoral collaboration and so on, I keep thinking, “We need this kind of spaces and we need more elders and we need more people who can put it on the spot and get people to be authentic in the conversation and to address the issue that’s on the table. Sometimes to bring the hidden cards onto the table.” You have this conversation, people are like, “This is driven by interest in values.” And you’re like, “Okay, wait, let’s put the interests and values on the table.” And then it becomes interesting because some people don’t want to show their interest or show their values.

Douglas:

So it’s interesting that you mentioned cross sector because I wanted to bring that up and hear a little bit about your thoughts around, what are some of the challenges or some of the considerations that you take into that work? Because I can imagine there’s some unique needs when you bring together cross sector groups, or are you just doing work that’s at that intersection?

Elizabeth:

So one of the big things about cross-sectoral work is that it usually doesn’t happen because the parties want to work together, it happens because they find themselves in a circumstance that forces them to work together. So, say for example, we have a large water resource and it’s sitting in a certain community. Then you find that the community representatives, et cetera, who you would put in civil society who have the interests of what the community wants to do with that resource, but then you find maybe you have a public sector agency that wants to do, I don’t know, hydroelectric power out of the same resource, and maybe another one that wants to do irrigation. And this has happened in my country out of the same resource. And then you find that you have some private sector interests that maybe want to, I don’t know, bottling plants that want to do soft drinks or something, and it’s the same resource.

Elizabeth:

And so of necessity, now we must sit around the table and talk to each other. And the biggest thing I have found across all those conversations is, first of all, we’re here, not because we chose to be here, but because we must be here. And second of all, we don’t trust each other. So if you talk to the public sector, they’ll tell you a lot of things about the private sector being fragmented. They’ll tell you a lot of things about the private sector being driven by greed, a lot of things about the private sector having profits as their main interest and that not being a good thing. If you talk to the civil society, which kind of represents the people, then again, there’ll be a lot of conversation about private sector greed, private sector profit maximization, which is not a good thing and not of interest in this conversation and so on.

Elizabeth:

But there’ll also be issues around state control, around privacy and protection of rights, especially in relationships with the state. And then when you go to the private sector, again, they will have the issues around state control, privacy, and protection around the state, but they will have other issues which are around waste, corruption, et cetera, that they bring to the table in relation to government. So the trust is almost, many times at the beginning, at zero. And then you’ve got to fudge it together, patch it together, make a quilt, right?

Douglas:

Yeah.

Elizabeth:

Bring different things together and sew it together. And this takes time. It requires time. But as I said, then it also requires elders and authentic conversations. People who can find a way to get some honest truths on the table. But it’s not just elders roles that are there, there are other roles. I was in a conversation with some friends of mine, they said, “Sometimes you have to be the hotelier, the host. All you’re doing is providing the space and the food and making sure everyone’s comfortable. Sometimes you have to be the postman, taking messages between one group and another behind the scenes and making sure things work.’ So there are different roles that need to be played, but they need to happen for this to take place successfully. So it’s a lot of work, it’s not easy.

Douglas:

What do you think is the first starting point to building those relationships and helping people get to that understanding so they can have those deeper conversations? What are some of your early moves to start sowing the seeds to stitch those things together?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, as I said, a lot of my conversations with my friends we found out that the work we do behind the scenes as postman, just having conversations one-on-one with Douglas and then, okay, have another one-on-one conversation with someone else. And you’re taking the message from Douglas to this person, bringing the message from that person to that Douglas, so that by the time we sit around the table, they’re not so shocked when this comes out from the other person, but they also maybe have warmed up to it and are ready to have the conversation. So don’t go into the round table quilt without the one-on-one conversations before, and without the shuttle services before, having conversations with the other people. The other thing I found a lot that works is yes, the hospitality, it matters. Where are we? How do people feel? Are they comfortable? Is it a safe space in that sense, physically, emotionally?

Elizabeth:

So one of the big things actually with digital conversations then has been, is this a safe digital way? Nobody’s going to hack into it? Issue number one. Issue number two, nobody’s going to record it and start distributing the recording without my permission? Because if we’re going to have an authentic conversation, then I don’t really want it being played out on somebody’s social media accounts. So what’s a safe digital space versus what’s not a safe digital space, has been a big conversation. And then translation. A lot of things get lost in translation. You and I both speak English, but it’s not the same English. And it’s marked when you’re in a room with different countries, but sometimes it’s also marked when you’re in a room with different sectors. So impact for a business person, a private sector person is not the same as impact for a government employee, is not the same as impact for a civil society.

Elizabeth:

So in a conversation, you will have this thing and everyone says, “We want to have impact.” And if you don’t unpack what impact is, you’re going to leave that room with three different understandings of impact.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve tun into that all the time. People will use jargon. They’ll shorten language and metaphor, or they’ll use maybe trite language. Impact, I would say, is a very overused word. And so even in our company where everyone understands each other and where we’re going and they’re working a lot together, if someone says something like impact, there’s a high chance that there’s a lot of different interpretations of what that might mean. That unpacking is so critical.

Elizabeth:

So those would be my tips and thoughts around, how do you get this started? And then try and go for the easier things to achieve , succeed at those, and then people, over time, relationships build, successes build, and people are a bit more confident and are willing to take bigger risks, but don’t get, any way mostly, you will never get them to take a big risk at the beginning. Everybody will stay out. You can already tell when it’s not going to work because it’s too big a risk was everybody’s like, “I can’t do that.”

Douglas:

Awesome, incredible. Well, I think that actually brings us to a good stopping point. It has been great chatting with you today about, not only cross sector and how to approach some of these kind of groups where they might not fully understand each other and the stitching some of that together through hospitality and just common understanding and the mental health experiential methods, and even just how the background in architecture has influenced your style. So that’s all been really fascinating to chat. It’s been great having you. I want to give you just a moment to share a final thought with our listeners. Anything you want to leave them with?

Elizabeth:

Yes. One thing I always tell people is, cross-sectoral, and not just cross-sectoral, collaboration is not a default thing, and it’s not always the solution. And I know this is counter intuitive because I am a facilitator and so I should be saying, this is the thing. No, collaboration is not the default thing and not the only way to do this. And there are situations when it’s not the thing to do. And so don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have a collaborative solution all the time. And especially because it takes a lot of time and energy and investment to do collaborative stuff, you really have to know when do you need it. And sometimes you just don’t need it. If there’s a fire and I need to get you out of the house as quickly as possible, it’s no longer about getting consensus and buy in. It’s, “Can we get out now?” So you need to know when it’s useful and when, okay in this situation, something else needs to be done and not necessarily this intervention.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, again, it’s been a super pleasure having you today, Elizabeth, thanks for joining the show.

Elizabeth:

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.