Kathy Ditmore’s Journey Changing Session at the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit
At the 2025 Facilitation Lab Summit, Kathy Ditmore led an impactful session on “Mapping the Change Journey”, offering valuable tools and frameworks for creating successful change processes within teams and organizations. This session focused on using a canvas as a “compass” to guide projects toward success and aligned transformation, emphasizing how to adapt and lead through change effectively.
Exploring the Canvas: Your Compass for Success
Kathy kicked off the session with an engaging icebreaker: participants placed their birthdays or favorite day on a sticky note, fostering connection and lightening the mood. This simple exercise set the tone for a session that combined reflection with actionable tools for leading change.
The heart of the session was Kathy’s introduction of the canvas, a tool she described as a guiding framework for navigating the complexities of change. The canvas wasn’t about adopting a one-size-fits-all solution—it was about offering a flexible, living document that helped teams clarify their vision, align on purpose, and identify what steps to take next.
The Journey of Change: Setting the Stage for Success
Kathy shared a key lesson from her career: change succeeds when people connect to purpose and have ownership of the direction they’re going. Her early experience as a programmer highlighted how even the most well-intentioned training efforts fall short without a clear understanding of why the work matters.
The session continued with a deep dive into the backpack essentials for change: staying open, being curious, and engaging fully. Kathy encouraged participants to leave behind preconceived methods or frameworks and focus on adapting their approach to the specific needs of the team and project at hand.
Exercise: The Tale of Two Changes
To help participants internalize the concepts, Kathy led them through an exercise titled “The Tale of Two Changes”. Attendees were asked to reflect on a successful change and a struggling one. They identified key factors that fueled the success of the former and what was missing in the latter. The group shared insights, revealing common themes: clear roles, communication, support, and leadership alignment all stood out as crucial for successful transformations.
The Canvas: Your Roadmap for Change
As the session unfolded, Kathy introduced the canvas, which was structured into three main areas:
- Mindset: Aligning everyone around a shared vision and understanding of the “why.”
- Execution: Defining the guiding principles, roles, resources, and risks that shape the change process.
- Connection: Understanding stakeholders and engagement strategies to ensure that everyone is on board and moving in the same direction.
Kathy emphasized that this tool should be viewed as a living document, one that evolves as the team progresses and learns together. She also provided an example of how the canvas could be used in project rescue, helping teams reorient struggling initiatives through a purposeful re-evaluation of their vision.
Creating Clarity: Vision and Purpose
A key moment of the session focused on visioning: crafting a shared purpose and aligning everyone around the “why.” Kathy facilitated a story-building exercise to help participants break down complex ideas into manageable, clear themes. By engaging with a simple exercise that explored direction and clarity, attendees were encouraged to rethink their approach to projects—emphasizing the importance of alignment from the very start.
Practical Insights for the Road Ahead
Kathy concluded with reflections on the importance of dialogue in change processes. The canvas is a tool to guide these conversations, helping teams stay on track and adjust as needed. She shared examples of using the tool to identify potential detours, offering a framework for troubleshooting when change processes start to veer off course.
The session left participants with a renewed focus on how to approach change with clarity, empathy, and a structured plan—ensuring that transformation isn’t just about the end result, but also about the journey of alignment and ownership along the way.
The session left participants with a renewed focus on how to approach change with clarity, empathy, and a structured plan—ensuring that transformation isn’t just about the end result, but also about the journey of alignment and ownership along the way.
Watch the full video below:
Transcript of Kathy’s Session:
Kathy Ditmore:
Hello? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah, okay, great. Thanks. Thank you for having me today. So, as Eric mentioned, the topic today is Mapping the Change Journey and I’ve chosen a tool, I was thinking about this, what did I want to bring in so we’re going to be looking at a canvas as a compass for your project’s success. So, while you all are settling in and as we’re getting in, if you take a sticky and go ahead and put your month and day of your birthday. And if you’re not comfortable putting that out there to everybody, just pick your favorite day and put that on the table in front of you so the other folks at the table can see the month and day, don’t need the year. So, as you’re doing that.
So, a little bit about me and why this topic is important to me. Early in my career as a young programmer, I had the opportunity to engage with a client at a different level and it was great. Kathy, you’re connecting, we’d love you to train our client’s teams how to use the system. Wow, that’s great, I’m being recognized. So, I go in and I train. Blank stares, everybody’s looking at me. It’s very uncomfortable. So, while I found I could teach them how to click buttons, how to navigate the screens, there was something missing for everyone in that room and that was their why and how the work they were doing was going to transform how they did business, was going to transform the results that they were bringing in and the outcomes that they were seeking.
So, that set in motion what is at my core. We did a little work on purpose statements yesterday so I’m going to read mine out. I’m a facilitative project delivery leader creating space for teams to align around a shared purpose and co-create their path forward. And what does that mean? I thought about this. Through my roles over my career, I’ve always been in the technical industry as a programmer, a business analyst, project manager, a change practitioner, change leader both in commercial and nonprofit. I’ve seen over and over again that change succeeds when people connect to purpose and have ownership in the direction they’re going and agency in how they adapt, they have a say. And even if their say isn’t heard … Even if their say doesn’t change the direction, it’s been heard, they can weigh in, they can frame the messaging.
As we go through today, I may use some terms. These are not industry standard terms, these are just definitions that I’m throwing out there for you. So, some reference points as we go on this journey. The first one is a project, it’s a temporary endeavor. We’re creating something new or different or making something different, it might be the next step. A change and that’s the human journey from what is to what will be, also known as transition. Done well, it’s nice. Not done well, looks a little like Swiss cheese. In fact, I think Prosci likes to use that term. As much as I love Swiss cheese, it’s probably not a great way to do change. Change leadership, it’s creating that space and the conditions for teams to navigate the change together. And project rescue, I do reference this at some point. So, when I talk about a project rescue, I’m talking about reorienting your struggling initiatives through purpose.
Any things folks would want to add? Questions? All right. So, a little about our journey today, a bit of a guide for you. First thing we’re going to do is we’re going to check our backpack essentials. We’re going to check what we don’t want to carry with us as we go on this journey and we’re going to check those things that we want to keep in mind as we go through. We’re going to explore patterns in change, we’re going to explore change dynamics, we’re going to discover our compass, today we’ll use the canvas. We’re going to practice orientation, orienting with the compass and then we’ll talk about some insights for the road ahead. So, hopefully, you all are ready to go on this journey.
So, the backpack essentials. The first one, stay open and stay curious. I had some particular notes on this one and it’s really about … This may be familiar territory for a lot of you but try to approach it with fresh eyes. Engage fully beyond your methods. So, this isn’t about doing the right way so leave your methods, we’re talking about things you don’t want to carry on your backpack. This isn’t about Prosci, not about Cotter, not about Lewis models of chains, leave all that aside. This is about the process we’re going to be going through as far as how we use this tool and it should apply regardless of a method. Ask you to lean in the detours because it’s in those spaces that your learning happens and then make it real. As we’re going through, I’m coming from one perspective. Each of you have different backgrounds so think about what you’re going to be able to pull from today to bring into your practice with your customers and how you show up and how you bring your teams along on their journey.
Is there anything folks would like to add to the agreements today? Great. So, our first exercise is going to be exploring the tale of two changes. Each of you, I’m sure, has been through a change that went really well but you’ve also been through a change that just went not quite so well, it struggled. This poor guy, he’s trying to limp over the finish line, it’s quite sad and there’s cost to that. I think earlier it was mentioned, the adoption, that can be painful. So, I’d like each of you to think about, and I’m going to put it on the next slide too, the instructions, what are some key factors that gave momentum to a change done well. Think about that change, think about how you felt, how the team engaged, what was right about that particular endeavor and the same for your struggling change. What was missing from the change that struggled?
So, we’re going to do this. Step one, everybody got their birthday or their favorite day on the table, that’s actually step four. But go ahead and take a piece of paper, your sticky notes, fold it in half or use the individual sticky notes. Individually, take a couple minutes and think about both of those, a change that went well and a change that didn’t go quite so well and pull out those key factors of what contributed or what was missing. Then you’re going to pair share at your table and, if you have an odd number at your table, you’re welcome to triple up or look at somebody from another table and create your sticky notes and then you’re going to table share. You can use the backside of the giant canvas and put out your sticky notes, theme them out and I’d like, as a table, for you to pick your top three for both. And your spokesperson, lucky winner today, if you don’t have a volunteer, if you have a volunteer, that’s great. But one way to find your volunteer is whoever has a day that’s closest to today. And if your birthday’s today, happy birthday. So, with that, we’ll let you go for a few minutes.
Okay, you should start moving to your table shares. You may not have all completed getting to your top three so, if you have a few more to read out, that’s fine. But that looks like there was a lot of great discussion happening so I’m really curious to go around and hear from folks in the room. Who would like to share for … We’ll start with the change that went well. What were some of the key factors that gave momentum? And mics will go around.
Speaker 2:
Okay. So, there was a couple of key things that came out from our table on what were success factors. One of those being that the organization supported a culture of change and a culture of experimentation so that people were more accepting of change. We just know we’re changing and we have a purpose for it and we’re evolving and to expect it. So, that was one of them. Another program that was used for some change was some early adopters that accepted the change, were able to proactively advocate for the benefits of those change and speak to it in a positive format. And then the last one is buy-in from the top down, that’s always a big one. Making sure that leadership understands, accepts and clearly communicates the change and the need and the why and that they can speak to it.
Kathy Ditmore:
Oh, thank you. Excellent. Are there things folks would want to add to that? Any other table want to add to that?
Speaker 3:
Hi. It is my birthday today so … I think there’s another birthday too.
Kathy Ditmore:
Whoo, happy birthday.
Speaker 3:
I think there was another birthday as well. Was there?
Speaker 3:
Yes.
Kathy Ditmore:
Who was it?
Speaker 3:
Okay, close.
Speaker 3:
Cool. So, for positives, we said that effective communication was essential and using one standardized system, people know what to expect, how you’re going to be communicated to in a certain timeframe. One that I brought up that was a bit, I think, unique was we call it the source booth at a company, our company and it’s that there’s one place to find all the information you’ll need. It’s equal opportunity so everyone has access to it, everyone has permission. If you’re out of office, you come back, you know where all the details are, it’s right there in the source of truth. And then third, having lead time. So, if you’re going to make a change, we made a big payment provider change at our company recently, we had a few months lead time and that wasn’t really enough. So, the more time, the better to make that change possible.
Kathy Ditmore:
Wonderful. Thank you for sharing and I appreciate that source of truth, that central place that speaks a little bit to the agency that people can find their information as well. Anybody else want to add to that?
Stacy:
I’ll go. Hi, I’m Stacy, my birthday’s on Friday.
Kathy Ditmore:
Happy birthday.
Stacy:
One that came up again and again for us was really clear roles and responsibilities. So, everybody knowing what their job is and what their purpose is, that’s the biggest one. And then just affirmation that you’re valued and knowing that you’re valued and trusted, that was another big one for went well.
Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you. We have one more in the back and then we’ll move to change that struggled.
Jackie:
Okay. I’m Jackie, my birthday is in about three weeks so I just put myself out there.
Kathy Ditmore:
Happy birthday.
Jackie:
So, I’ll just try to add the ones that we haven’t already had but we talked about not just clarity of vision but having a shared vision and purpose certainly contributes to a successful outcome. Believing in yourself to make the change, doing the internal work as the facilitator and to have the right people in the right roles. In other words, a match of talents and skills with what a project needs and what people want to give to the project to have a successful outcome.
Kathy Ditmore:
Excellent, thank you very much. So, I’m sure there’s a lot more folks can add on but a lot of things stood out here. I am curious, before we compare the two, who would like to share some of the findings for what was missing in a change that didn’t go quite so well?
Harry:
My name’s Harry, birthday is in 10 days.
Kathy Ditmore:
Happy birthday.
Harry:
One was actually understanding the difference between workload and the resources you had. So, even if you have the great plan, have you actually understood the resources available to make the change? Another one was either missing wise or even bad ones that don’t resonate with the group. And the last one was also the forced feelings you get, isn’t this exciting. If it’s not exciting, you don’t want to nod your head and agree but you may not have the space to disagree so, yeah.
Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you, appreciate that. Anybody else?
Speaker 8:
Okay, I [inaudible 00:13:46]. I was going to say empathy.
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah.
Speaker 8:
But also, one thing that came up at this table is having leadership say that they’re open to feedback but appearing not to take it seriously. That seems to be a rough one.
Kathy Ditmore:
Appreciate that. I heard a lot of hmmm on that and I’m seeing a theme to the sessions we had earlier too. So, anybody else? One more. Please, go ahead. Oh, we’ve got one. We’ve got two more. Thanks.
Speaker 9:
Oh, sorry.
Speaker 10:
Sorry, I did not mean to cut in. We didn’t discuss it at our table but, when you were talking about leadership, it reminded me of how many changes I’ve seen fail because senior leadership is not aligned. So, it’s not enough to just have that change be communicated from the top down but the top needs to be on the same page first.
Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you for that.
Speaker 11:
At this table we did a little bit of a grouping and we didn’t quite get into all of the not well but I do see some repetition of progress report. So, understanding how that change is being received and how is it going so you can adapt and you might get all the way down the line and realize this didn’t actually go well but we didn’t have that visibility into what’s going on.
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, I appreciate that. I’m curious, as you’ve heard things today such as around support, things that contributed to things that went well, support experimentation, early adopters, buy-in from the top down, knowing the whole system, how to communicate, knowing where that source of truth is, clear roles and responsibilities. And then I’m going to jump, I know there were a lot more, I’m going to jump over to things that contributed to change that didn’t go quite so well. Understanding the progress, feeds a little bit into maybe the experimentation, senior leadership alignment, being open to feedback, having empathy, those forced feelings and workload and resources. Are folks seeing any themes or connections come out across those? What about how people are coming together? I see a hand over there.
Speaker 12:
Whether you’re focused on the change or on the people experiencing the change? It’s the customer focused as opposed to the-
Kathy Ditmore:
Both.
Speaker 12:
… us focused.
Kathy Ditmore:
Well, we’ve been through … This has been great discussion and it sounds like everybody’s had experience with both sides of change and I’m struck with something interesting here. So, when changes work, it sounds like people seem to be moving the same direction whether it’s they know their roles, their senior leaders are aligned, they know where to find information, they know what the experience should be, there’s a feedback loop, there’s empathy. So, there’s a clear path of how you’re going to be moving forward together. So, I’m going to move on to another exercise, this is … Take this with us as we bridge over to … We’re going to go over to another interesting idea here. So, I want to dig into the idea of direction and clarity and I’m going to jump over to another exercise. We got the time.
We’re going to do this one relatively quickly. What’s going to happen is I’m going to put three images on the screen. You can use those images however you want for three minutes as a table to build a story, three sentences. If you want to go to four, it’s okay, you want to keep it short. Story needs to begin with once upon a time. You can use those images however you want. You can use them literally, you can ascribe meaning to them, you can think about what’s happening outside the frame, what happened before, what happened after. You can think about the individuals that might be in these images, what they’re talking about, what they’re experiencing, what they’re feeling. You can use those images however you want to build a story that’s three sentences. Are you all ready? And pick one person at your table to be a scribe. If you do not have a volunteer, pick the person who has a birthday closest to July 4th.
Image one, image two, image three and you have three minutes. So, I know it was a lot to squeeze in in three minutes, that three minutes goes fast. But don’t worry, you have an opportunity. I’m now going to give you a theme. The moment we chose to leap. Still three sentences about, still once upon a time, you can still use these images however you want in any order and I’d like you to take a look at your story, see if there’s something you want to shift in your story or adjust. And you have two minutes for this. I know that was a quick exercise but I am curious, in the room, is there anybody here that actually adjusted their story? I’d love to hear from at least one of your tables, talk to me about that.
Speaker 13:
The first story is about once upon a time my grandfather and granddaughter created a magic garden. They lived on top of a hill, had a steep Securitas road to get there until one day Gargamel showed up in his hot air balloon and then they made the garden disappear by going invisible. How we changed this was the grandfather and granddaughter lived a happy vegetarian life, plant-based vegetarian life until one day Gargamel showed up with his pet pig, crashed the balloon, killed the pig, they barbecued it and everyone lived happily forever.
Kathy Ditmore:
That’s fantastic. So, how did you get there as a table?
Speaker 14:
So, part of it was that we asked people who hadn’t contributed for the first time to contribute and then we got super silly. Not silly, we were very serious.
Kathy Ditmore:
Okay. Is there anybody … You had a shift to your story there, it was a bit of a rewrite. Did anybody do a complete rewrite?
Crystal:
Well, so … Hi, I’m Crystal.
Kathy Ditmore:
Hi, Crystal.
Crystal:
We in our group, we wanted to try out what doing something bigger could look like and then, once we got the theme, we rewrote quite a bit. So, ours reads, once upon a time, humanity was born. We needed to be equipped with tools to leap. So, then we added leap obviously. To see problems from above, support each other, to be part of each other’s journey. So, you can see problems from above, hot air balloon, helping each other and cultivating and then that journey.
Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you. So, for those of you who shifted, and thank you for the table shares, fantastic stories. For those of you who felt the shift, what made shift? Was it the theme that made you shift?
Speaker 16:
More direction.
Kathy Ditmore:
Anybody else? Agree? Anything else that may have contributed?
Kathy Ditmore:
I’m sorry?
Speaker 18:
That we had a second set of time.
Kathy Ditmore:
You had a second set of time, that’ll help too. You now know what it’s about as well, right? So, I appreciated the more direction and so, going on the theme of what we’re hearing about people being aligned, having purpose, I’d like to introduce a tool you may want to use. On your tables, there’s small versions, it’s a canvas. Many of you are already familiar with canvases. The business model canvas. If any of you do lean change, you’re familiar with the lean change canvas that came out in the early 2000s. There’s lots of canvases you can use. My first experience with a canvas was early in my project management days, I had a sponsor who didn’t want to read a charter. Put a document in front of him, his eyes glazed over. Project on a page, it was our canvas. So, there’s a lot of great uses for a canvas and you can tailor them however you’d like.
Today’s canvas is set up on three sections. The middle is your mindset and that’s aligning everybody. It’s aligning on your vision, feeding on what was offered earlier around that compelling future state, what are you aiming to achieve. Helping people understand the significance, the why this has to happen, what happens if we don’t do it now. And then describing the benefits to the organization, to the team, to your customers, to them as individuals. On the left, I call this execution. This is the guiding principles, this is what’s going to guide your decision making. It could be your even overs, it could be your polarities you have to work through, that was a topic that came up with the group yesterday. But how are you going to make those decisions in the project? How are your teams going to be allowed to make decisions?
Your resources and roles, we heard about roles and responsibilities earlier. Who do you need on this project? What are their roles going to be and where are your gaps is most important as well and how are you going to support those people? Your change risks and mitigations. So, this is looking ahead and saying where are those detours going to happen on this project, what do I need to worry about, what does my team need to worry about and you’d want to be tracking those even at a high level. The canvas isn’t meant to be in great detail, you may have a lot of supporting materials underneath of this but it’s meant to pull out the top themes, the top highlights.
On the right, I call this connection. It has your stakeholders and impacts, these are your groups. This is very high level. How are they going to be impacted? Their jobs are going to be impacted, their compensation approach is going to be impacted, who they report to, processes, maybe tools they use, technology, usually track that separately. So, it gives you an idea of what you need to worry about and how you may need to make them aware of things or engage them which is the next group, engagement. Each of these groups like to be communicated to in a particular way. Not everybody is going to read an email. In fact, I’m someone, if you send me an email, it’s the last thing I’m going to read if I have time at the end of the day. If it’s urgent, you need to message me. So, how do people want to be engaged with? How do they want to communicate back to you? How are you going to capture their input? What are the channels? Maybe it varies by team. What can you leverage within the organization?
In the bottom right, there’s progress and success measures. Somebody mentioned experimentation earlier, those quick wins. I worked on a project recently and we found that, before we implemented the system, we could actually roll out pieces of the process that needed to change beforehand. So, those were experiments we were able to push out in advance, they were quick wins for the organization. So, where are those quick wins either within your teams or within the larger project? That’s a quick overview of this version of a canvas. Any questions?
Speaker 19:
It took me a minute to figure out my question. When you’re in the beginning of a project, do you fill this out all at once? Is there some living part of this over time? What’s the lifetime of this and this information?
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah. So, this is meant to be a living breathing document and the beauty of a canvas is you create it for your engagement. This is one. Underneath of this which I didn’t share today, teams have a canvas. They have the vision at the top but then they have the impact specific to their team and what they need to do to support the change or what they need from the organization to support the change. So, this is all visible and all bubbled up. I have a slide later we’ll talk through where you could use it but, yes, initiation, you’d start filling it out. You could fill it out on your own after interviewing or you can gather your teams like we’re going to do in our next exercise and capture the collective intelligence and have a starting point.
So, let’s read the instructions first. You have a big canvas on your table so feel free to open that up and use it. Today, I was thinking you’d want to focus on, where I like to start, vision purpose, significance, the why now and the benefits. You might find as you’re working through this that you come up with ideas that belong in other blocks and that’s okay, put those stickies in those other blocks, you’ll come back to them later. I gave you a prompt if you’re doing a vision, you come up with your own but I’m sharing one if that helps you. Your approach today is, first, individually and I’m going to give you scenarios. Is individually, quickly capture your thoughts on sticky notes once you read the scenario. One idea per sticky around the vision.
So, you’re going to read the questions here. What’s your why? What’s your cause? What’s your purpose? What pains exist in your significance? What happens if you don’t do it now? Why is it important now? And your benefits. What are your anticipated improvements to your employees, the organization or external parties? Then, as a table, you’ll look at the stickies, please start just placing them in the middle sections. Talk as a table and start grouping them coming up with themes and go ahead and create your vision. Try to draft one and we’re going to have a table readout. If you don’t have a volunteer spokesperson, we’re going to pick the person whose birthday is closest to Halloween. All right, we’ve got at least one lucky winner in the room.
So, for this exercise, I’m going to cut us short a little bit because I do want time for us to have dialogue so I apologize for that. I’m going to give you first three minutes to start doing your stickies individually then you can go into working as a table and I will give you 10 minutes for that. So, a total of 13 minutes to work through this and then listen for the chime. Any questions before you start? Oh, yes, hold … The most important thing, I was so excited. You also have on your table, I apologize, a scenario.
Audience:
Aaah.
Kathy Ditmore:
Aaah, the magic thing. Got so excited, sorry. So, you have three scenarios, I’m going to put those up and then I’ll come back. Your first adventure is your group has been given a $10,000 budget and you’re going to go on an unforgettable trip. You have different ideas about your vacation and you need to ensure that trip aligns with your group’s priorities while staying in budget. Your second scenario and the third is … The second scenario is around onboarding. Everybody’s lived that, experienced that. You have employees that are struggling in the first 90 days feeling lost, disconnected and unclear in expectations. So, your leadership wants to redesign onboarding for a smoother, more engaging experience while balancing efficiency and personalization.
If you pick the third scenario, Douglas is going to want to see this at the end. So, the third scenario, as facilitators, you understand the power of well-designed experiences, you are loving the conference this year and you want to help with next year. So, Voltage Control is welcoming your input as they begin planning next year’s event to maximize engagement, connection and actionable takeaways. Your team has been tasked with mapping key changes.
So, as a table, quickly pick your scenario. You have a couple minutes to start drafting your individual stickies, put them on this canvas and then start working together to theme those and build your vision.
Speaker 21:
Question.
Speaker 22:
Quick question.
Kathy Ditmore:
One question.
Speaker 22:
So, I’m hearing a lot of language that’s big picture, vision and then I’m hearing other language that’s pretty specific on how to. Is it intended to be intertwined? It’s a little-
Kathy Ditmore:
It’s intended to bubble up the themes. So, sometimes folks can only look at the detail and then you can bubble up your themes.
Speaker 22:
Okay.
Kathy Ditmore:
So, this canvas is intended to really be high level, maybe later supported by more detail.
Speaker 22:
Okay.
Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you. And you should start, working as a table, putting your stickies in the middle. So, I’m going to call for a pause in conversations and I know that’s a quick exercise. First, you would not go this quickly in your business changes, at least I hope not. How does this feel for folks using something like a canvas to work through this? Yes?
Speaker 23:
Thanks. I think I saw a difference between high level thinking and low level thinking and there was maybe even some discordance, discord over that, yeah.
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that and we’ll come back to that. That does happen at times depending on the groups. We have a few more.
Speaker 12:
It was really useful to have buckets to put our ideas into but it was too much all at once. It would’ve been nice to roll out just the center strip and then the next piece and have a build.
Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you.
Speaker 24:
Yeah. To plus one on that, it was hard because there were just so many, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, where do I even start?” and then of course I went straight to solutions.
Speaker 25:
And they [inaudible 00:33:22].
Speaker 24:
Oh, of course.
Kathy Ditmore:
Great, thank you. Anybody else?
Stacy:
I have a microphone but I can’t figure out where all the voices are coming from. But I noticed there’s a really delicate balance between the beauty of the constraints and the prompts and then also allowing yourself to veer off the prompts when it happens and allowing that to happen organically.
Kathy Ditmore:
Absolutely, thank you. Anybody else? Over in front.
Speaker 3:
I sense some personal resistance to using such a formal system for … We used prompt one so it was a vacation. I was like, “Oh, I’m overthinking this, I don’t want to do that but I think it actually is I’m not overthinking it.” All these things are necessary but using them for a personal project feels like almost inappropriate but it actually is appropriate. You know? Does that make sense? I don’t know.
Kathy Ditmore:
I think it does. We have one more over there and then I want to see how … Did other folks align, run into the same things? I’ve heard discord, the ability to stay within the constraints but also permission, allowing yourself to veer off.
Speaker 26:
I think we did good and I love templates to help group our thinking. I think what is additionally helpful is examples. I think it would have been good if we would have seen an example, that would have just given us a little bit of a different-
Kathy Ditmore:
Different overview.
Speaker 26:
… perspective or helped us a little bit where we struggled at which bucket … And like you said, it doesn’t really matter which bucket it goes into but that would have helped us, I think, be not as confused.
Kathy Ditmore:
Okay. Indeed, thank you. One more.
Monica:
I just wanted to comment that I’m used to someone’s being like, “Fill out this canvas, Monica, for your product strategy,” and I’ve always really struggled with that and I think one of the reasons why is because I was doing it in a vacuum and there wasn’t a sequential process of prompts and thought to talk about that. I think that that’s the expectation that these conversations are happening and so it should be easy for me to go and synthesize it. So, I appreciate wanting to take this back and say how might we fill out this canvas a little differently, that’s more meaningful where everyone is more engaged.
Kathy Ditmore:
Interesting. The dialogue. Yeah, not in a vacuum. We have one more.
Speaker 28:
Do I go?
Kathy Ditmore:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 28:
Okay. One of the things that was interesting for our table that I had to adjust is … We picked two for the onboarding and I actually facilitated my company’s onboarding transformation and so I’m sitting here going how do I share thoughts without, during a scramble, it’s human nature, who has experience at this and then you’re pulling in that but then I didn’t want to stifle other people’s ideas either. So, there was the natural tension of how do we have random ideas show up but who has actual experience doing this and how do you leverage it. So, I think, as facilitators, we have to leave space for the two types of people because I think there’s value in both.
Kathy Ditmore:
Indeed. Thank you for sharing that. And I appreciate that … Oh, we have one more over here.
Speaker 10:
I was just reflecting on a couple of comments around doing it all at once was challenging and it just made me think about how important it is for teams to be aligned on a north star. I was just wondering, if we had all agreed on our vision and then built out the template, would we have come from so many different perspectives? So, just something that dawned on me is like, “Oh, starting with the vision, starting with why”-
Kathy Ditmore:
Always start with that.
Speaker 10:
… “Is so important.”
Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you for that. Going to the compass, right? Always know the direction you’re going. Anybody else? We have one more, a couple more over in the back.
Speaker 28:
Yeah. So, I was struggling also, I noticed myself, I was reading every sentence and I was overwhelmed, my fault maybe. But I was thinking what if all of this was blank except for the colored items and we would have started with questioning what kinds of questions do we want to ask ourselves regarding guiding principles and, afterwards, maybe adding the missing important questions, et cetera. So, you take more ownership as a team or an organization towards what’s guiding principles for us instead of saying these aspects.
Kathy Ditmore:
Right. And that’s fantastic. Yes, the tool is intended for you to create your path forward together. Questions offered are certainly just for the purposes of today and I think that’s a wonderful idea to maybe, as a team, figure out what is it you really want to be answering about your project. Speaking to the discord, you might want to think about as a facilitator who you have in the room. So, do you want to do this with your senior leaders separately from your teams first, especially if you’re working on the vision, and then work with your teams and maybe one senior leader or your teams alone and then bring everybody together but it’s all about bringing that alignment. I heard looking at the whole canvas and so, for the purposes today, yes, I shared the whole canvas. But as a facilitator, you would probably block off the blocks that you don’t want to see with your group because, indeed, it can be overwhelming to dig into this.
So, I think there have been a lot of creative ideas here offered around how it could be used and so, hopefully, folks have some thoughts on how that might apply as you bring it back. So, I’m not going to make you redo your vision but I’d be curious what people think if you’d been offered a detour. So, somebody here had mentioned dialogue. I was doing this in a vacuum. Really, the tool is intended to promote dialogue. So, if you’ve been offered a detour after doing your vision, how would that have changed your discussions? How would the tool help you? How might you use it or not? Any thoughts on that?
John Rabasa:
Hi, Kathy, John Rabasa. So, I took from this that it was like a discovery tool where you had a lot of different prompts and so this is, as you said, a living document where things may bubble up that then informs, answer the question of your vision so you make sure you don’t leave things out. I look at these detours and I think that’s probably the information that you might pick up along the way and some of them are actually very helpful because they give you more definition.
Kathy Ditmore:
Indeed. And so, when you encounter these detours, whether you use a tool like this or something else within your teams, how are you evaluating that together on what those impacts are? Again, that tool to guide that discussion. Anybody else?
Robert Britton:
Yeah, I was going to … My name is Robert Britton.
Kathy Ditmore:
Hi, Robert.
Robert Britton:
I was going to add to this that I think the timing always gets people. Especially in a workshop, you’re like, “In the interest of time or because of time or take this for 10 minutes,” and I think what we do is we shut down our thinking and it’s not really exploratory. So, when you add these detours, I think that also gives us that breath of, you know what, if we don’t get it all today, we can come back to it. So, as facilitators, I think we also need to find ways to give them space afterwards to say, hey, you’re not going to be done when you’re here, this is just a starting point so you can keep going once you leave here.
Kathy Ditmore:
Indeed, thank you. Progress over perfection. We have another one over there.
Speaker 32:
Right. So, when I saw the detour, we were doing the employee experience and that was like, “Okay, yeah, you need to ask the people that are going to go through the change what … you need to get their inputs, design it around what they prefer.” And then it triggered something, I don’t know why, a second point, sorry for hogging the mic here, but when do you go and how deep do you go into this type of exercise. And sometimes just getting to vision can take days and weeks depending on what it is. So, I’m curious what other people think about that and what you think about that.
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, it’s like the theme I’m picking up here which ties into this is adapting. This is iterative, this is not a once and done experiment or tool. It’s not once and done, use it as initiation. I’ll show some other points, there’s various points where you’ll use it. So, you mentioned vision could take a long time and it does. I’ve had a vision take five weeks to develop with eight sponsors, that was quite a challenge just to get to the vision and that’s all we focused on. And then, after that, we were able to start digging into some of these other areas and it’s almost like peeling back the layers of an onion. You might start and only get so far and then it marinates, people start moving down a path. You might be building out your plan, you might be mobilizing your resources, you might be working through your procurement process if you’re bringing in a new solution, you might be still doing some of your pain points discussions, they may still be underway to work through things, you might be starting to do pre-mortems.
Whatever tools you’re using, out of those, more things will come out that bring richness to your project, your goals and how you need to work together so you’re always coming back to this. It’s also recommended to make this visible, whether you’re using a Miro board, some people post it on a wall although I know many of us are hybrid or remote now. I often will take sections and make sure that, when I go in a meeting with sponsors, we go back to the vision. If something comes up, how does it play into our guiding principles? So, I’m always coming back to these and so you have to think about what’s important to you and your team, your sponsors, your project leads, your stakeholders that you need to keep bringing back to them. Because they may say, “Oh, yeah, we said that but …” I don’t know if that helps. So, it’s like layers of the onion, digging, the details will surface over time. It’s a little more agile approach to change.
Carrie:
I’m Carrie. My sense is you asked how the detours might have changed things and, if our vision is visionary and broad and big enough, then the detours should … They’re a gut check to ladder up to that to ensure that our vision is really truly the north star and that the detours should be a part of that.
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Anybody else? So, I’m going to share … This clicker’s not … Got to get our check our bearings. So, how would you connect this to your practice? We’ve heard a few things here, I hear folks starting to think about this. Any ideas? It’s okay if it marinates.
Speaker 8:
Thank you. I have more than one word. For me, looking at this and thinking about the different boxes, it seems to me that some of these would be way more flexible than others. And so, while nothing is locked down, there are areas like guiding principles or vision that maybe, if those are starting to be in question because of the tactics of engagement, that goes up to another level of leadership versus my teams would be able to really be in the tactics of what engagement is. And so, I think that that is really helpful and something that I would bring back to my practice.
Kathy Ditmore:
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. We have one over here.
Speaker 19:
Just a question. When you said a minute ago the long vision exercise that was five weeks, wondering how you landed that, how you knew you were done and did the map help? Did you go into significance of benefits and cross connect that or was it totally unrelated to that?
Kathy Ditmore:
So, with that particular audience, not everybody, when you present the canvas, they’re like, “Ah,” the eyes glaze over. I think your head’s like … Right? And you don’t have to use this canvas, any canvas but it’s really helped to guide your conversations. You can use other tools. You had asked earlier how would I do this with my sponsors. Sometimes I’m interviewing the sponsors individually, I’m collating the information and I’m sharing it out to them to make sure we’re theming it correctly and we’re then evolving a vision together. Sometimes that’s an interesting exercise because it surfaces, they haven’t necessarily talked to each other, so it surfaces a lot of those polarities or personal agendas or something else that may not tie into what I’m getting from the most senior sponsor. So, you can use different methods to surface this information and bring it together. Okay, that’s it. Anybody else?
Tamara:
I guess the first thing I would say, hi, I’m Tamara. First of all, I applaud you and everyone else who is willing to get up and present because I think facilitating a group of facilitators, speaking of F words, is the f’in hardest thing on the planet-
Kathy Ditmore:
Terrifying.
Tamara:
… because it’s hard. And so, I also want to thank you for starting with your reminders that you really asked us to stay curious and to lean into it and make it real. I really appreciate that because this gave me an opportunity to think about my own impulses as a participant facilitator. But I recognized I have a lot of impulses around the use of posters, I use a lot of these too and what I realized is, oh, when you put something in front of me, I want to read every single word, I want to make sure I got it right, how do I get an A plus, what are we going to do. But I think that it helped me realize that I have to rethink the use of some of these tools to be thoughtful about different ways that people start to enter into something like a shared space like this. So, anyway, thank you.
Kathy Ditmore:
Thank you. I’ve got a couple minutes and I’m happy to keep talking about the tool after. I want to share a couple of things. Somebody asked, “Where would you use this?” I’ve mentioned it, anywhere. Use it at project initiation, you could use it as a health check, you can use it in your strategy sessions, you can use it when you encounter detours, when you need to do a project rescue, that poor guy, just lost. You can use it for your readiness checks, you can use it for your resource shifts, you can use it any point you need to align or realign, when you’re onboarding teams, when you’re offboarding someone, who’s still filling that spot, what does that mean to how you’re approaching things and you can use it at the beginning when you’re trying to develop your strategy.
Quick example of how I might use this from a rescue perspective or when I have a project going off track. This one, I might do with not the entire team but pieces of my team. So, the paper that you have has a bunch of questions. So, I might take one of these that’s filled out for what I know about the project but then I’m going to look at it and go, “Mmm, what’s really happening?”
Speaker 35:
H, M, L, C?
Kathy Ditmore:
Oh, I’m going to get into that. High, medium, low, complete and a green check mark. So, when I identify gaps, I might talk to my sponsors and say this is a high impact to our success or a medium impact or a low impact that might prioritize what we need to work on next. You see that it was something we talked about and it’s complete, we can remove it the next time we look at it. And a check mark is telling me we’ve got some good things going on too. By the way, we worked through some incremental process milestones, we’re going to see some winds along the way and generate some noise. Someone had asked about sponsors, it takes time to work through vision, indeed it does.
In this example, I happened to have a sponsor who had made a commitment that was not part of our original vision, our original benefits and so it resulted in a pause to the project where we needed to regroup and determine how serious that was because what they were asking for was a very different project. So, while we may have achieved what we all agreed to in our charter and our vision and our benefits, it wouldn’t be what the most senior stakeholder was looking for so it would have been considered a fail. So, this is another way to use the tool to evaluate how your project is doing. Okay, time. So, I think we’ve talked about our insights for the road ahead. Using a tool like this may help in identifying that clear north star, that purpose, that vision. It’s a tool for dialogue whether you use it as is or to help frame what discussion do you want to be having with your team so they can connect around that central vision and then, hopefully, you’re delivering together well.
My last one. So, I want to say thank you to my guides along the way, I’ve had plenty of people help me. Voltage Control and Douglas, Douglas took my phone call and was like, “Yeah,” but thank you for the invitation. This was terrifying and fun and I can go down many rabbit holes and it was really hard to pick which rabbit hole to go down. John Rabasa, amazing guide and mentor. Erin Nicole Gordon of The Wayfind, she was very helpful and I really appreciated her guidance that she gave me. Mark Reilley is my boss, he’s an amazing boss, he’s super encouraging at Pew. And my dear friends Claudia who couldn’t be here this year, Randy Logan and Penny Potts, they, any phone call, just let me ramble on for hours even though I’m sure their eyes were glazing over. So, thank you all and I’m happy to chat with you at any point. Thanks.
