Video and transcript from Nakia Winfield’s talk at Control the Room 2022
Control the Room 2022 was an absolute success! We hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our partner, MURAL. Our wonderful connection between the live event and the virtual world, hosted by Mark Tippin, Director of Strategic Next Practices, Mark facilitated “Mind Shift” sessions, where he guided our attendees through a dialog about how everyone was impacted by the talks. He engaged both in-person and virtual attendees through our various activities in our conference mural. It was inspiring to have so many people joining in different ways and everyone getting the chance to communicate.
We also partnered with SAFE this year to support and honor a lost colleague, Jenni Robertson. The dedication of this summit comes after losing a coworker, mother, and friend to family violence, and Voltage Control has pledged to work with SAFE to stop family violence for everyone. We wanted to take a moment and look back on all of the moments of insight, knowledge, and growth we all took part in over the course of the summit.
This year’s summit theme was SHIFTS, and as we move into 2022 we have seen shifts in the way we work, the way we connect, and the way we honor one another.
This year we hosted 18 facilitators in a hybrid space. We were live in-person, on Zoom, and even created our own Control the Room VR space, and we must say the event, even with a few technical issues, turned out to be a hub of idea sharing and growing with each other.
Each speaker delivered a 20-minute lightning session, and each session was filled with a sense of community, play, and story-telling.
So the power flows in many directions. Right? And if you’re talking about power in a certain circumstance, you’re talking about maybe power over. Maybe you’re talking about power with, but you’re also talking about what are the cues that you are getting from other people to be able to determine what you are able to do? What is your agency? How many people, when they were thinking about a time that they felt powerful were like, “Oh yes, I had influence over a thing.” “People looked to me to make a decision.” That’s how we often think about power.
Nakia Winfield
What makes you powerful? What is the moment you felt powerful? What social cues did you pick up on? Nakia invited us all to look inside and feel our power, not only for ourselves but to understand how to include everyone. When you begin to understand that ‘with great power comes great responsibility, you begin to tap into your privilege and how that makes others feel within conversations. Nakia encouraged us all to acknowledge what is happening and ask how do we include everyone.
Watch Nakia Winfield speak on ‘ Exploring Complexities of Power to Cultivate Authentic Inclusions ’:
So when we talk about a time when we felt powerful, oftentimes our shoulders will be back. Our voice will be louder. We’ll be more confident in our delivery. We’ll have more eye contact and that will sometimes bubble over to the next hour, the next day, and sometimes the next weeks. We’re like “Oh yes, we felt powerful.” Conversely, if you have a time that you felt powerless and you recount it, sometimes your shoulders get hunched over, you talk more slowly, you talk more softly. You’re less confident in your decisions. You might not make eye contact. And that also bubbles over into the next day or weeks, depending on the story that you told and how impactful it is for you. So what are the ways in which we code those things? When people are like “I’m going to come up to you confidently and tell you a thing.”
Nakia Winfield
Nakia Winfield:
Thank you. Hey, y’all, I want to point out that it was supposed to be chicken teriyaki, but it was peas. That’s not okay. Anyway, hi, so glad to be with y’all this afternoon. I’m going to invite you into a discussion. So, everyone keeps asking me, “Are you nervous?” And I was like, “No, I’m not nervous. They’re having the conversation. I’m not having the conversation.” So I think maybe I read the assignment wrong. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to have y’all just jump right in to getting into pairs. And we’re going to have a little bit of a conversation about power because that’s what I do. Oh, I should probably introduce myself.
Nakia Winfield:
Hi, I’m Nakia. What I do is I look at power dynamics in social systems. I love systems accountability. I love systems maintenance. I love the word accountability. I’m like the one so I’m very weird about that, but we’ll talk a little bit about power. We’re just going to dip our toe in because 18 minutes is not a long time to talk about a subject that I could talk about for three months and still not be done with. So I am going to have y’all moving around a little bit. All right. Did the thing happen? Oh, there we go. Yay. I like it when tech works.
Nakia Winfield:
Okay. So I want you to recount a time that you felt powerful. So I’m going to give you a minute and a half. If you want to write some things down, you’re welcome to do that. If you just want to think about it by yourself, that’s totally fine. But just individually, what’s a time that you felt powerful? And not like “I climbed a mountain and I was so strong” but just what in a social situation made it so you felt powerful? What are the circumstances that set it up so that you felt that way? What are the social cues that you were able to see that indicated that you were having some power there? Were you deferred to, were you dictated to, were you centered? Things like that. Actually, I’m going to give you just one minute. Not a minute and a half, time is already gone. So one minute and then we’ll put you into pairs so you can talk about it.
Nakia Winfield:
All right, I see some of y’all are still writing some things down. Go ahead and finish up that last thought. For those of y’all on Zoom, you should be in pairs too. I think Mike or Eric is going to set it up so that y’all are able to have this conversation and join us with that. So go ahead and jump and find yourself a pair. If you are non-ambulatory, if you need to sit down and stay where you are for a minute, go ahead and do that. If you are somebody who likes to move around a lot, make sure that you find those people. We take care of each other here. So go find a pair. You’ve got three minutes total to find somebody and talk about your experience.
Nakia Winfield:
What stood out? What did you notice? And this is popcorn. I told y’all, this is a discussion. And if y’all are on Zoom, go ahead and throw some things in chat. Don, who is my amazing assistant today is going to be collecting jewels from chat and asking them in the room. So what did y’all find? What did y’all notice? Yes, [inaudible 00:03:26].
Unnamed female participant 1 :
With great power comes great responsibility.
Nakia Winfield:
With great power comes great responsibility. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?
Unnamed female participant 1 :
Well, it’s Spiderman. But it also invites us to take very seriously the choices we make when we’re in a position where power is conferred on us. That is not something to be held lightly. It’s something to be taken very seriously.
Nakia Winfield:
Power is not to be held lightly. What is the power that is conferred on us? Yes. Other things, yes.
Unnamed male participant 1 :
We have different definitions of power. And that defined the relationship aversion. Some of us didn’t like the words “power, influence, impact”. And then it differed in terms of how that power was either deferred or projected on us versus the power that we felt of influence in our own direct sphere.
Nakia Winfield:
Yes. What is power defined as? Can we even agree on what that means? And is it fraught with implications that are larger? You need to come to a larger workshop. We’re going to talk a whole lot about power. Yes.
Unnamed female participant 1 :
Back to how power’s defined, I actually dismissed the first thing that came to mind, which is, I feel power and empowered almost in my daily interactions, especially retail customer service. But the way you phrased it like, “Are you centered? Are you deferred to?” And I was like, I don’t even think of that as power, but that’s power that I feel all the time.
Nakia Winfield:
Yeah. Are we centered? Are we deferred to, and how we do not think about that as power. Power is often invisibilised when we have it, and you have to go searching for the places that you are powerful because we just don’t notice it when we have power. Other thoughts. Yes, Annie.
Annie:
And power is also this reciprocal relationship. It takes the other to be involved in that relationship.
Nakia Winfield:
Power is a reciprocal relationship that takes another person to be involved in. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Annie:
I’m sorry to call you out, but he’s a coach to his daughter’s basketball team and he was talking about how he has the power to be both a coach, but it totally depends on them to play the game for them to win. And I was just thinking of so many power dynamics where we forget about this flow.
Nakia Winfield:
Yeah. So the power flows in many directions. Right? And if you’re talking about power in a certain circumstance, you’re talking about maybe power over. Maybe you’re talking about power with, but you’re also talking about what are the cues that you are getting from other people to be able to determine what you are able to do? What is your agency? How many people, when they were thinking about a time that they felt powerful were like, “Oh yes, I had influence over a thing.” “People looked to me to make a decision.” That’s how we often think about power. I want us to think about power in a couple of different ways, but we’re not going to have time to go into a whole lot of them, because we got eight minutes left, y’all. Power is real.
Nakia Winfield:
So when doing this exercise, I often have people talk about a time when they feel powerless as well. When you think about a time when you feel powerless, you often have more nuance, you have more complexity in the observations that you make. So I’m going to encourage you all to think about a time that you felt powerless at some point in time that’s not in this room right now. Or maybe a little bit later, maybe with your colleagues, maybe at home, you’ll be able to find a richer conversation. Because again, when we have power, we often don’t notice it. We don’t see it.
Nakia Winfield:
When you think about a time when you felt powerless, often people will say “People didn’t make eye contact with me. People interrupted me a lot. They didn’t even notice that they were interrupting me. People’s body language shifted away from me.” And again, maybe they didn’t even notice it. “I tried to come and talk to a group of people and they just dissipated and I couldn’t make a connection with anybody in the room.” There’s a lot of different ways when we’d feel powerless that we’re able to see nuance and specific things.
Nakia Winfield:
Oh, you know what? I’m not going to do that yet. So how did your body feel when you were talking about a time that you felt powerful?
Unnamed female participant 2:
Shy.
Nakia Winfield:
Shy? Okay. Tell me more about that.
Unnamed female participant 1 :
I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t like the word power, But as I kept talking about it and I saw that they felt the same, I started getting straighter. Like, it’s okay. I can talk about this.
Nakia Winfield:
Yeah. Sometimes when we think about power and we’re like, “I don’t want to have power.” That seems like the bad people thing. And I just want to be responsible for my own things. And so we feel a little bit shy about it. How about other people when you’re thinking about a time that you felt powerful, how did your body feel? Thank you, Doug. Just getting it to people.
Unnamed female participant 3:
I felt confident because the thing that was driving my power is something that I’m passionate about. And so, because of that passion, I have the confidence. But without that passion, I would feel powerless. Yeah, I imagine so.
Nakia Winfield:
Yeah, thank you. So when we talk about a time when we felt powerful, oftentimes our shoulders will be back. Our voice will be louder. We’ll be more confident in our delivery. We’ll have more eye contact and that will sometimes bubble over to the next hour, the next day, and sometimes the next weeks. We’re like “Oh yes, we felt powerful.” Conversely, if you have a time that you felt powerless and you recount it, sometimes your shoulders get hunched over, you talk more slowly, you talk more softly. You’re less confident in your decisions. You might not make eye contact. And that also bubbles over into the next day or weeks, depending on the story that you told and how impactful it is for you. So what are the ways in which we code those things? When people are like “I’m going to come up to you confidently and tell you a thing.”
Nakia Winfield:
Like if they do that in a job interview, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” This is a confident person. They know what they’re talking about. It means that they’re competent. It means that they’re trustworthy. They’re making eye contact with you. That means that you can trust me. I’m not hiding anything from you. But if I’m shy and I’m looking away, we code that as untrustworthy. We code it as non-confident. There are bigger implications in the way that we come off. And those things show up in our room.
Nakia Winfield:
When we are facilitating, the way that people show up is they bring themselves into the room with them. So a lot of times when we are facilitating, we will try to flatten hierarchies. When you’re talking about liberating structures, I love liberating structures. And the idea is you’re trying to flatten the hierarchy. So the boss isn’t the only one that’s got the ideas. We’re going to get everybody’s ideas, but we bring ourselves into the room and we bring our own hierarchies that we have. And so those patterns that we have of discussion and engagement come with us. So if you have a room that has four women and one man, theoretically, who’s going to be talking more? If you were looking statistically, guys are going to take up a lot more space and they’re not going to notice. And this goes for any power dynamic. This doesn’t just have to be for gender. Any power dynamic that is present in the room. People who are in the dominant will take up more space. They will not notice. All of these things will come out as we’re going through this.
Nakia Winfield:
So one of the things that I think is really important is instead of just building a container where people feel powerful, we have to build a container where people do not feel powerless. And that’s a different thing that you’re looking at when you’re thinking about “How am I going to make people powerful? I’m going to give them all the power to make all the decisions.” You don’t necessarily have to do that. What we do have to do is think about what are ways in which that subtle nuance comes in and how do we diffuse it in the room? How are we engaging in those microinteractions that make it so that people have a sense of safety, dignity, belonging, worth, value, humanity? All of the things that we’ve been talking about today, does that make sense, y’all? Yeah, right.
Nakia Winfield:
So one of the things that I want to encourage y’all to do is when we think about these amazing stories where you’re like, “Oh, this is so inspirational.” So how many people have seen this video where there’s a woman who is taking her friend out to dinner in a very fancy restaurant? The friend is blind and it’s her birthday. And the friend who is taking her out has conspired with the wait staff to come out with little chocolate drops in braille that say “happy birthday” before they bring the cake out. So he is like “Aw, that’s super sweet.” This is a way of inclusion. The woman was so happy. She was like, “Oh, you guys.” She couldn’t believe it. She was so excited.
Nakia Winfield:
And it is inspirational. It’s also a systems fail because for most of us, when we get a menu, it’s in a language that we can read. This is not a surprising thing for us. What it is is an opportunity for us to be inclusive. And it is a highlight that this person has not been included so often that literally just getting little chocolate drops that say “happy birthday” is mind-blowing. And we know that this is the case for so many people, because everybody on the internet was also like “Oh my gosh, this is so great.” What I want you to do is I want you to acknowledge those times that happens, which is amazing. And then go, how do we fix the systems that are holding this together? How do we make it so that this is not a one off, but this is a regular thing?
Nakia Winfield:
And one of the ways that we have to do that is by looking at our own privileges and where we have our own power. Everybody can read that sign in this room, theoretically. How are we making sure that we’re including other people in this? Because when you can get people of the room to feel a sense of their own power, to feel that inclusion, it lays the foundation for more authentic, inclusive, and generative conversations. We can just have better outcomes and better experiences if we include everybody in the room. Thank you.
