A conversation with Sarah L Collie, Associate Vice President for Organizational Excellence at the University of Virginia

“There’s a spectrum of teaching styles, and there’s maybe the more traditional historical style of command style and sage on stage, all the way to a self-discovery. It appears to me that facilitation is really in that middle space between the command style and the self-discovery. [Facilitation] is about unleashing the collective power of a group.” -Sarah L. Collie 

In this episode of Control the Room, Sarah Collie and I chat about the influence facilitation has played throughout her professional career. Sara shares the valuable learning principles of facilitation that continue to inspire her, along with the direct impact that the Liberating Structures framework has on facilitation. We take a close look at how meeting disruption can happen no matter how prepared the facilitator is and how to redirect the energy in the room and recover attendee productivity if there is disruption. Sarah highlights what she’s learned from her facilitation experiences and the outcomes that can appear for any facilitator. She also notes the importance of prioritizing accountability for participants and creating conditions that cater to each unique audience. Listen in to hear Sara’s viewpoint on the opportunity that facilitation brings for people to collectively come together and create a supportive network that can lead to the true essence of exceptional facilitation.   

Show Highlights

[3:35] Dr. Sarah’s Beginnings in Facilitation 
[10:22] Valuable Tools in Learning Principles of Facilitation 
[17:17] Sarah’s Lessons Learned from Liberating Structures
[30:33] Sarah’s Take on Disruption in the Meeting Room 
[38:15] The Core Skill of Identifying Outcomes & Sarah’s Final Thoughts

Sarah’s LinkedIn
University of Virginia

About the Guest

Sarah Collie founded and leads the Organizational Excellence Program at the University of Virginia. She partners with the University community to develop strategy, implement improvements, foster innovation, and build organizational capacity for change to support and advance the mission. She describes the work as “helping the university be better.”  Sarah’s higher education career spans diverse academia and administrative positions at several universities. She is a forever student of being a part of successful organizations and creating effective change and culture. Sarah holds a Ph.D. in higher education with a focus on organizational change from UVA’s School of Education, where she frequently serves as a lecturer and mentor. Outside of UVA, she enjoys applying her skills through board service and consulting to assist non-profit organizations to enhance their effectiveness. 

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.

Douglas:

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 ultimatecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meeting’s quickstart 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.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Dr. Sarah Collie, Associate Vice President of Organizational Excellence at the University of Virginia. In this role she partners with the university community to develop and execute strategy, design and implement improvements to foster a culture of innovation and change. Sarah’s work has been recognized with several awards including the NCCI Leader of Change Award and the Gold Facilitation Impact Award from the IAF. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Thank you, Douglas. Thanks for hosting me, it’s really a pleasure to be with you.

Douglas:

As usual, I’d like to start off with a little bit about how you got your start in this work. It’s really amazing to talk to someone who is receiving awards from the International Association of Facilitators and is at the peak of what it is to impact change in organizations. There isn’t a straight path there always, it’s generally a secure  journey. Really curious to see how you made your journey to this pinnacle facilitator.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes, I think the term journey is a really accurate one. It’s been progressive in nature, and one that was probably with me, and in me for a long time. I just didn’t realize it, nor did I characterize it as facilitation. I’m a lifelong educator. I have experiences in teaching, in coaching and administration. I’ve worked at all levels from elementary school to college.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Honestly, they’re more similar than different. But the majority of my career has, in fact been in higher education. If I look way back to my teacher preparation studies, I think I learned a teaching style that was very facilitative in approach. I learned some key facilitation skills in my teacher prep background. Things such as starting with the stated objective, how do you organize and engage groups? How do you elicit certain outcomes?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I was relying upon these facilitation techniques, I just didn’t call them that or know that’s really what they were. Sometimes in education, you hear the term active learning, I think there’s some similarities, they’re not exactly the same, but some similar principles and concepts. The arc of my career then took me into administrative roles, and I was able to transfer and apply some of those facilitative techniques and approaches, but honestly, in a limited basis. There are strong cultural and status quo poles to how meetings are run.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I won’t say that I brought those facilitative techniques wholesale over to the administrative context. It was really when I was pursuing my doctorate in higher education administration when I became interested in studying organizations, studying organizational culture, organizational performance, organizational effectiveness. Got turned on to the works of people like Peter Senge and Edgar Schein. It’s when I made this shift in my career to one that was much more focused on improvement and innovation and change. But I would say facilitation took much more of a center stage in my daily life.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Many of those methodologies have facilitation embedded in them. It was a toolkit and skill that I’ve just started to build out and continue to grow. That’s my journey. Facilitation now is a part of my everyday life.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

One comment I would make, however, and I hope it won’t be too controversial as we start this podcast, and that’s that I actually don’t describe myself as a facilitator, I don’t use that term or that label. I realize it’s probably all in the semantics and the definitions of the word, but I see facilitation as a toolkit that I use to achieve other outcomes, other organizational outcomes. Whether they be strategic planning, process improvement, engaging in creating a healthy, productive culture. Facilitation is a means, rather than an end. That’s my approach to facilitation.

Douglas:

I want to come back to some of the stuff you were talking about, as far as, teacher training, and how that prepped you for this facilitation work, or maybe they didn’t have the same language or didn’t refer to them in the same ways. Specifically, something that we’ve thought a lot about is this connection between facilitating groups to a desired result, and training. Meaning that, we’re looking at a lot of these training or learning types of tools and frameworks and approaches, just learning science in general, and workshops and meetings, the similarities are very apparent, and the more we thought about it, it was like well, meeting participants are learners, is they have to show up and learn something. Whether it’s an innovation, or whether it’s a new strategy. They’re hearing new ideas from their co-workers that they have to assimilate, integrate, and then do something with.

Douglas:

When I made that realization, it made that connection between education and meetings and workshops and facilitation so clear. It’s really fascinating that you went through this journey. Then, as you started to see these tools, saw the similarities. I’d love to unpack that a little more with you.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yeah, I think it really comes back to, that there’s a spectrum of teaching styles, and there’s maybe the more traditional historical style of command style and sage on stage, all the way to a self-discovery. It appears to me that, facilitation is really in that middle space between the command style and the self-discovery. When it really allows you to unleash the collective. Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and what better way to learn than to learn with others?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think that’s really what facilitation is about, is about unleashing the collective power of a group. Douglas, let’s stay with this connection between education and facilitation for a moment, because I think what’s central to both of them is learning. If you think about education, education is more focused on individual learning. While Of course, there’s some residual learning from being with others. For the most part, education is focused on learning at an individual level.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

But if you think about facilitation, facilitation is also about learning, but learning at an organizational level. Facilitation really enables organizational learning through groups of people. I’m pretty fond of saying, all the work of organizations is done by people. Then it would follow that all organizational learning has to take place through people, collectively.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I do see a really strong connection to both education and facilitation. In some ways, you might think of, individual learning and organizational learning as two sides of the same coin, and you need both.

Douglas:

I love that. We often talk about this idea that designing workshops and designing learning experiences are pretty much one and the same. We apply a lot of the learning experience design principles to our workshop design framework. It’s really interesting to hear about this notion of individual versus group learning. That’s really cool.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

We have a professor at UVA who talks about the world of hyper learning. Ed Hess, with the fast pace and changing world speaks of hyper learning, which captures this notion that you can learn with yourself and learn with others and it needs to be continual in this fast paced world to adapt to the speed of change.

Douglas:

If someone were to… A lot of folks find facilitation through design, or through specific tools and methodologies, and are just starting to get curious and approaching this journey from a different perspective. As someone who has a deep experience in learning, and various teaching and training styles, what’s something that you might suggest that people check out or keep in mind as they’re thinking about maybe applying these learning principles to their work?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I’ve learned a great deal from Keith McCandless in Liberating Structures. I think his framework and approach can be adapted by anyone and applied by anyone. That you don’t have to be a professional facilitator. I find that ease of his structures and his approach to be really helpful. It brings intentionality to facilitation, and I think that’s where you have to start, otherwise, it’s just a tool. It’s like, technology is a tool. If you think technology is going to solve a service improvement you have, well, it may not. It may, in fact, make it worse if you don’t effectively design and deploy it.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That’s true about facilitation. It’s much more than just getting people in a room and having them talk. I think his framework really brings intentionality, and I think the most critical place to start is getting clear on the purpose of any given session. I go so far as to even write out a purpose statement to make sure that I have clarity about what the group I’m working with wishes to achieve in our time together. I think that’s why that dialogue with who you’re working with is so important up front, to be sure that you have alignment. Because you can’t go to designing a session, if you’re not crystal clear on the purpose.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

They may not even be clear on the purpose, which is why you need to have a conversation. Don’t ask them to fill out a form and submit it to you. But the power is in the dialog to dig in and understand, what are you trying to do in this session or series of sessions?

Douglas:

How are you typically having those dialogues? What’s your go to approach to distill that purpose?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Certainly, a lot of listening. Some people will be able to answer the question, what do you want to achieve? Many people will be more rambling around purpose. I think asking questions around what does success look like? Just asking questions of curiosity. Inquiring what is great look like during the session? Lead them there, and then I tried to take that, craft some language, a couple of bullet points and share it back with them to say, did I hear you? This is what I heard you say.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

If we achieve this, if it’s written in an outcome statement, if we achieve this, by the end of this meeting, this session, this series of sessions, is that what you hope to achieve?

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s always nice to start off with purpose. I find that to be lacking, quite often. Even when there’s a focus put on it, people can struggle with it, because it sounds so simple. But sometimes it can be hard to articulate, especially if there’s a lot of jargon, or a lot of, just here’s the project brief, and we just keep coming back to that language. People aren’t getting to what’s the root of what’s driving this? I’m curious if you’ve run into that before.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. I have to go back to Priya Parker. Priya Parker said something very clear on this point. She emphasized that we assume that the purpose is known and shared when we gather. The reality is that it isn’t. I don’t know about you, but I go to plenty of meetings where it’s really not clear to me what purpose, or what my role is, as an attendee. Am I there to provide ideas? Am I there to provide feedback? Am I there to ask questions of clarification?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

What happens a lot of the time is the participants will remain passive and quiet, because the purpose isn’t clear, nor is their role.

Douglas:

I think that’s spot on. In our book, Magical Meetings, we talk about the need to, not only can you clarify your purpose, as far as writing it down and what it is, but if you don’t communicate it, and you don’t clarify it to your participants, then you haven’t gone far enough. To that point, I think it is important to even rename our meetings.

Douglas:

Often, our calendars are full of stuff, and it’s like, I don’t even know what this is. Can their names at least give us a hint on our purpose or take us there?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Often, that’s all you have to go on. There is no agenda, but it’s just here’s the name of the meeting, show up. My experience is many, many meetings, probably some 90% are what I would classify as the traditional talk at meeting. The convener, the leader, the presenter, will talk at, using up probably 55 minutes of a 60 minute time period. Maybe at the very end ask if there any questions.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Sometimes they’ll have a very dense PowerPoint to go with it, and they’ll read those PowerPoint slides to you. I see some meetings where they’re sending out the information in advance, which I think is a wonderful way to set expectations about what the meeting’s about, the kind of information that’ll be conveyed. However, don’t then come in and read the PowerPoint, because you’ve now conditioned people to not do any pre-work, to do any pre-thinking, to come prepared for dialogue. We’ve conditioned them to expect, oh, I will come and be a passive participant in this meeting.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s interesting, this notion of being passive, versus something you said earlier around unleashing the collective. I’d already scribbled that down, because I was going to take us back to Liberating Structures, and you already mentioned Keith. I’m also a huge fan of his work. I think the framework’s fantastic for… To your point, anyone can be a facilitator, and that’s part of the allure. It’s like, what a great way to unleash everyone, if now everyone’s empowered to be part of the unleashing.

Douglas:

I’d like to dig into your experience with Liberating Structures. I know that there’s some case studies that got released about your work using Liberating Structures with the community there. I believe it was there in Charlottesville. Would love to hear more about that, and how you found that to be effective, and anything that listeners might find helpful.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Sure, well, Liberating Structures, as we’ve already stated, are just a wonderful way to really tap into the collective wisdom of a group. My core starting principle is if you’re bringing a group of people together, don’t you want to leverage the talent, the expertise, the knowledge, everything they bring? That’s the power of having a group together. Otherwise, you just have the one plus one, an individual plus an individual plus an individual and the limitations that come with the way we all think.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think better with others, and I believe others think better with others. Keith has a set of principles. He helps you understand the micro organizing design elements of every meeting. Again, I think anyone can use those.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

From his work, I’ve adopted, I would say, four really core guiding principles for every facilitation idea. That is, I want to engage everyone that shows up. I want to be sure I can tap into diverse perspectives that are in the room. I want to create conditions to promote cross pollination. The last one is focus on forward looking positive conversations.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That doesn’t mean you ignore the past. But we have to get past the past, and we have to learn from the past, use it constructively, so we can focus on moving forward. Those are really the four design elements I use over and over and over.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

When I’m working with a group, I actually share that with whoever I’m working with to co-design, because I do believe it is a co-design, even though I may do the first design and get some refinement from them. I share those principles back with them, so they can see how those principles show up in the actual designing session.

Douglas:

That’s a total power move as a facilitator, well, meaning that when you do that it’s inclusive. It also means that they understand the mindset behind some of these moves, and then you start to really get contributions that you would have got otherwise, because it starts to click for them. They go, oh, okay, that’s how I can contribute.

Douglas:

I’m a big fan of that. Plus, if you get a buy in and an agreement on the principles, then it’s a lot easier when people gravitate to some of their old behaviors, we can point back to the principles. It’s not the behavior we’re challenging. It’s like, didn’t we say we were going to do this?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Right.

Douglas:

That’s so good. It’s interesting, you mentioned these key skills that jumped out earlier. There was structured objectives, they organize and engage and then elicit these outcomes or these contributions. The structured objective, I think, is, from my perspective, is pretty similar to the purpose, but a little different. I’d love to talk about that a little bit with you.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Well, I think there’s probably an overall purpose, more of an umbrella purpose to any given session or series of sessions. Then you can Zoom in into an individual session or even part of a session. What is the objective you’re trying to achieve in this session, or in this section of a meeting? Is it ideation? Is it planning? Is it prioritization? Is it getting to action steps? Just being really, really intentional about why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I’m going to come back to Priya Parker, only because she’s been Top of Mind lately, as she’s out there, quite prominent these days. I love the way she also talks about openings, and the importance of how you open a meeting and open a session. I think openings and closings are probably one of the most neglected areas of meeting facilitation.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

People even on Zoom, or they come in the room and they’re sitting, there quiet, or some people are talking and others are sitting there doing nothing. It often starts with someone speaking to the group. I would just ask people to be very mindful about what do you want to accomplish in those first opening moments? Is it engagement? Is it connection? Is it being present?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think you want to do that in the context of the meeting. It’s often maddening for me when I hear people take valuable time or see people take valuable time at the beginning of a meeting for a really disconnected, irrelevant, maybe icebreaker. What color M&Ms do you like? Maybe that’ll get people connected. But I think you have an opportunity to get people present, focused in those early moments and do it with, again, intentionality and aligned with the purpose.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

This is the comment Priya made that I thought was so well said is, an opening should connect people to purpose and each other. I just think that’s beautiful.

Douglas:

Yeah, 100%. To your point around intentionality, so many times, people will throw icebreakers around because they think, oh, this is what I’m supposed to do. It’s like a prescriptive, this is how you open. Sure, that shows up in a lot of openings. But if we don’t get down to the reason, the why that’s there, we’re not going to get the most out of our experience.

Douglas:

I always love to tell people, when we’re doing facilitator training, we’ll say, if you run an icebreaker, a warm up, or any sort of activity that’s transitioning or setting folks up for the next step, and you turn to the group after running that session or that activity, and you say, “Why did we just do that? And it doesn’t erupt into a pithy conversation?” Then you need to ask yourself, why did we just do that?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Going back to Keith McCandless and Liberating Structures, I’m sure you’re very familiar with impromptu networking, and use it regularly to open meetings. In my world, you would rarely call a facilitation structure by its name, you just give them the instructions. Give them a prompt, a question, and off they go. It’s a great way to have high energy, connect with your purpose, spend some time thinking about what the question is, so it’s really, again, intentional and aligned with your purpose. But great way to bring connection, engagement, purpose, bring people present.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

People are going from meeting to meeting to meeting, they enter the meeting, and they’ve got to get reset. They’re maybe reflecting upon what they just heard in the last meeting. So, get them present quickly.

Douglas:

So good. I run into that so often. It’s like, people running from meeting to meeting, and they just frantically show up. I haven’t actually measured this, but I bet you could study, what is the average time it takes people to actually transition into whatever you’re discussing? Because people are just going back to back to back, and it takes time. I call it the boot up time. If we don’t account for that, and to your point, the opener’s a great time, we should be planning on that in the opener.

Douglas:

But so many times I’d see people just cutting right into the content or right into the discussion. It’s like, man, no one’s had time to even get there.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Great.

Douglas:

Do you have any stories you could share about openers you’ve done that you thought were really effective? Maybe, what made them effective and how you were intentional about how you opened?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think openers that are very personal, meaning you’re asking them to share a time when XXX, or imagine you are somewhere. I think it really starts with them. Who doesn’t like to share about their own experiences or their own observations or talk about them, and connect it to purpose? I think those are the most powerful ways to start.

Douglas:

Thinking a bit about the next key skill, which is to organize and engage. We talked a little bit about Liberating Structures. They’re great for creating engagement. What are some of your other moves, or some examples of ways that you’ve created more engagement?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think there are many methodologies and facilitation tools that just have engagement embedded in them. Increasing engagement, I think there are probably two elements I’d emphasize. One is the way you set it off, the structure itself, to ensure… The organizational structure to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

We all know groups can have dominant voices, so set it up, so everyone has a chance. That may be including everything from, whether it’s starting off with some individual reflection, because some people are more processors, using pairs or trios, small groups. But I would emphasize small groups to ensure that everyone has a voice.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

There are ways then to come back as a whole, and cross pollinate across groups as well so everyone, again, is getting the benefit of the collective input and the collective wisdom. I think how you physically organize, and how you create your groups have a tremendous bearing upon the amount of engagement.

Douglas:

You mentioned that we often have to deal with dominant voices, thinking about how we structure, or how we group folks, keeping small groups together and how the conversation can flow between individual to the small groups, the big groups and back and forth. Some people talk about Ws or zigzags, where you’re going up and down the small group to large group.

Douglas:

I want to just get maybe a story or maybe some advice around what happens when you’ve got some structure, you’ve been planning on it, but there’s just some disruption in the room. Maybe that dominant voice has just found its way in, or the participation’s out there. Maybe there’s some psychological safety that’s absent. What are some of your go to moves in the moment that maybe you didn’t even anticipate it? So you couldn’t plan for it, but what are some of your go tos to help get the team on track and help get everyone contributing?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That’s a really important point. Because while I do emphasize the intentionality and the planning, there are certainly always elements of any meeting or session that are unknown, and you may have to deal with them in the moment. If you’ve done that planning well, I think you do mitigate some of this, because you flatten the power in the room, the hierarchy in the room. The leader is not sage on stage. I usually try to speak to the leader in advance and ask them to be a full participant. They are not there to espouse their viewpoints and have everyone align behind them in most cases, if it’s a true group facilitation.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think there are things you can really intentionally do in advance to help mitigate. But nonetheless, it’s going to happen, and I think the structures will help you, because you don’t want to stay in one structure too long, where it can escalate and get amplified. I think limiting whole group interaction is another way to mitigate that redirecting. Even if you come back and you ask people to share, you can qualify it. What is something you’ve heard that everyone in the room must hear? That’s another Keith McCandless one. Not just come back and to give me a report out of everything in your group, but something truly spectacular, extraordinary.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

You’re helping them have some management of self, self-manage how they interact. Redirecting is just an important part of facilitation. If someone is going too long, can you summarize that point so they feel heard, and move on to the next activity or next part of the session?

Douglas:

That’s all really great advice. Focusing on engagement is so vital. I see, especially a lot of new facilitators, it’s easy to throw in the towel and go, “Oh, well, that’s just culturally how it is here.” It’s so worth the effort to lean in to the conflict. I think it’s the conflict where the lack of engagement tends to suffer.

Douglas:

For instance, if the leader speaks very firmly around, well, we can’t do that, or just shut something down, then all of a sudden, engagement, just will stifle or whatever. I think leaning into that and inviting a dialogue around it is scary for a new facilitator, but the more you do it, the more you will keep that engagement high.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

You’re going to have to adapt. You may have planned an activity for X amount of minutes and you realized you didn’t get maybe the results you had hoped for. So, you refine it a little bit, and you send them back and have them repeat it. Or you drop an entire activity in the moment. Or I’ve been in a situation where I was given some strong feedback that they didn’t feel like they had heard enough from, or qualified as the user voice in a facilitation session.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I reflected upon that, I took a step back, and this happened to be a multi-session facilitation. I took a step back, and the very next session, I organized what’s called a fishbowl, so they could hear from the users, this particular program was serving. I garnered the respect of the participants, they gathered more context and information that they needed, but it wasn’t in the original design. I actually appreciated that they have, as you described, psychological safety, to offer a suggestion. It didn’t let them tell me how to do it necessarily. I think we have to be careful in that space. I love it when people show up and say, “We want you to facilitate this, and these are the activities we want you to do, and this is the timeframe. We’ve already described that it’s going to be 75 minutes, or it’s going to be three hours. Can you do it?”

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I want to be careful that we’re not giving them all the power, but you do want to be responsive, and listen to what the needs of the group are, and adapt.

Douglas:

That’s right. It’s funny how I see facilitators that understand the inquiry, and active listening, and, just being curious, is the cornerstone to good facilitation. They get that in the session with their participants. But then when it comes to feedback on shifting the structure, or the activities or the agenda, they’re very protective, because it’s their baby, it’s what they created, right. But if we’re practicing those same skills of inquiry and active listening, we should be willing to adapt it.

Douglas:

At the end of the day, to your point, we are here for our purpose. There is a stated objective we’re trying to get to. I guarantee you that objective is not run these 10 activities.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Exactly. When I think about a multi-session engagement, I have a skeleton plan, and we’re starting here, and I want to get there. Perhaps I think it’s probably going to be three or four sessions, and I have a skeleton plan. But I honestly do not put the details around session two, session three, until I’ve had the prior session and see where the group is.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I have the luxury, in my work, of also adapting, in the sense that I may think it’s going to be a two or three session engagement. But if I need to, I can make it a five or six session engagement. I have that kind of flexibility, which is helpful to make those adaptive moves instead of feeling like it’s a linear process, and these milestones have to be hit. I think it also yields better outcomes.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s really great. I want to shift to the key skill number three that you mentioned, which was eliciting these outcomes. I think that’s pretty critical, because if we don’t get to deliverables, if we don’t know what done looks like, if we haven’t understood that in our pre-work, or discovery call, or whatever we want to call it, A, we have no map to reference against, we don’t know when we’re there. Also, no one experiences any business value. It’s like, oh, we just had a lovely chat. But that’s like one of those things where people were like, oh, these workshops, they’re just a flash in the pan. This is one that’s very important for me, and I love that it’s one of your three core focus areas or key skills.

Douglas:

Tell me a little bit more about how you think about eliciting outcomes, and how you get there and what are some good principles to follow?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

When I think about eliciting, I actually come at it from two levels; a micro level and a macro level. The micro level, I think the eliciting comes from the structure and the prompt. It may not always be a very direct question. You may have to use imagery or use stories to uncover whatever it is you’re working on. Whether that be ideation or solutions.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Eliciting at the micro level. Then when I think about eliciting at the macro level, I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked with many, many groups or been a participant in where there’s lots of ideation, and then nothing happens. There’s no lack of ideas, but there’s a lack of execution and a lack of commitment. How can we elicit commitment and action?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I don’t like to leave groups without… I may not be able to stay with them all the way through implementation. But I can help position those groups to take the first steps and hopefully toward a successful outcome. Ways that we might do that is, if they have lots of ideas, helping them, prioritize them, selecting a few, understanding the context that they may be executing those in, and then really getting down to articulating what would be the first steps? Who would do it. But let’s even go one step further around, what are you going to do?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

You want commitment and accountability, it may be easy to create the plan and say someone who’s not even in the room is going to execute on these steps. Let’s have them take ownership of what they’re going to do and what they’re going to commit to and commit to that in front of the group, with the group and have some mechanisms of accountability in place as well.

Douglas:

15% solutions is one of my favorite closers.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes, that’s it.

Douglas:

That’s just so spot on. I love this, you’re thinking of the micro, the macro, because if we don’t think about how this fits in to a continuum, then the work could easily just evaporate or just lose momentum. It’s important to think about how things take root. There’s a really awesome book called The Messy Middle, which talks about, oh, it’s really easy when things are just getting started. Because it’s fun to ideate and figure out where we’re going to go. It’s really fun when products are ending, because the end’s in sight, and you’re putting on the finishing touches and stuff, and you’re getting it out the door. There’s launch parties, and everyone’s having cheese and crackers, whatever.

Douglas:

But that messy middle, man, there’s so much… Especially anything that might resemble a complex environment, there’s so much emerging stuff that we didn’t understand, and we just got to be able to adapt and deal. I love this idea of, whether you can stick around for a little bit as they start to veer in what might be the messy middle, or least shine a light on the fact that it’s coming.

Douglas:

The commitments really help with that, because if they’ve got ownership, then they’re going to stick through it versus saying, “Oh, Susan will figure it out.” Thinking about this macro, and the organizational development and change work that you do, what’s maybe a story that you could share, that highlights some of that work, and how you think about the macro and helping people in that longer journey?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

In terms of some examples, let me just start by providing a little bit of background about our program, because I think it’ll situate the examples. UVA Organizational Excellence Program is a resource and a partner for the university community. We offer a suite of core services around strategic and operational planning, process and service improvements, organizational effectiveness, project management, and navigating organizational change.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

In the course of our work, we apply an array of improvement, innovation and change methodologies and tools. We don’t subscribe to just one singular approach. I raise that because then we also integrate facilitation with those approaches. I would even go so far to offer that facilitation actually enhances many of those methodologies.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Whether we’re using design thinking or appreciative inquiry, we’re doing value stream process mapping or using change management, strategic doing. Regardless of the methodology or tool that we then add in facilitation. Some of them have it embedded in them. But in many cases, we’re adding on additional facilitation techniques. You asked me specifically about some of the work we’ve done. There was one in particular recently that was recognized, an initiative called Project Rebound, where we partnered with the local region and the local businesses to really come together, and launch plans for their economic recovery in the wake of COVID.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That project, we convened more than probably 300 plus stakeholders in industry specific committees, as well as general community sessions to gather input, to help them sort through and prioritize ideas that would lead to actionable strategies and actually be a blueprint for reopening and revitalizing the local economy. It was a crisis moment for many of these businesses. Facilitation really brought out the best of people, really brought out that collective community power, even amid these challenges. They were really able to come together before looking, create a plan.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

But beyond that, they actually created a support network for one another. Almost everybody spoke about making new connections that would be long lasting. In fact, one of the goals of the project was to foster more ongoing collaboration that would go on long after the recovery period from COVID. It was just a really meaningful and impactful project.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

At the simplest level, what we did was create the space, create very intentional space for people to gather and engage and share in a productive way. I’ll be much shorter here, and just give you a couple of other examples. But we’re engaged with various process and service improvements, and facilitation is embedded throughout the effort. The early stage of discovery, what’s the current state? Imagining the future, what’s possible. Designing how we get to that future state, and then even after implementation, collecting feedback, and further refining the process or the service. Facilitation is embedded throughout.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Some recent things we’ve worked on include our capital construction, building process, hiring processes, enhancing support for research. Even in the academic space, we have a partnership with our Center for Teaching Excellence to work with academic departments in schools on curriculum redesign. While the center brings the expertise around curriculum content, to help ensure that it’s relevant and aligned with the desired student learning outcomes, we’re bringing in knowledge and techniques to engage our faculty, to be very inclusive, and to really help the department navigate organizational change successfully.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

While there are many examples, I could give my strategic planning, organizational effectiveness, I guess the final point here would be that facilitation really knows no boundaries. It’s applicable to all functional areas, it’s applicable to all constituencies. In our case, faculty, staff, students, alumni, even partners of the university. It just pairs well with other methodologies and tools, and it pairs well with all audiences and groups.

Douglas:

I couldn’t agree more that especially in complex environments, facilitation is a prerequisite for leadership. Leaders aren’t doing these things. They’re leaving so much potential behind and potentially, I would say operating at a high level of risk.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Leaders have the responsibility to create the conditions where people can come together and thrive and do their very best work. I don’t know how you do that if you aren’t using some facilitative skills along the way.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think that statement is such a powerful statement. I love to end there. I want to transition to this moment here at the end, to just give you a chance to share your final thought with our listener.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Well, I think I would just build upon that facilitation is leadership. Leadership has a commitment to help groups be the best they can be. I don’t know how you do that if you aren’t using facilitation. There’s a saying in the improvement and quality world where I work about organizations and systems deliver the exact results that they’re designed to get.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I would encourage everyone to look at their meetings as well. Your meetings and your sessions are delivering the exact results that you’ve designed them to deliver. That means if you don’t have engagement, you probably designed the session like that. As leaders, let’s all go back, look at our day-to-day interactions, take a critical eye towards our meetings and our sessions, and consider how we might alter the design and get different results rather than continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I’ll end with this final quote that I have on my desk. This is my call to action for all leaders. An organization’s results are determined through webs of human commitment, born in webs of human conversation. Fernando Flores.

Douglas:

That’s so lovely. Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining me and sharing that lovely quote at the end. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and I hope you all the best.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

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.