A conversation with Eli Wood, Founder, Facilitator & Designer @ Black Flag Design

“In today’s world, compassion and kindness in the business environment is the most valuable thing that you can bring to your business or any working session.” – Eli Wood

In this podcast episode, Douglas Ferguson and Eli Wood discuss the importance of facilitation in working with interdisciplinary teams and building successful products and business offerings. They emphasize that facilitation is not limited to design sprints but can be applied to any situation where collaboration and decision-making are needed. They also highlight the role of facilitation in product management, as product managers need to navigate diverse requirements and agendas. The conversation also touches on the power of facilitation skills for individuals at all levels and the importance of building relationships and trust. Eli shares a success story where facilitation skills helped overcome challenges in a large-scale project.

Show Highlights

[00:01:28] The significance of facilitation 

[00:07:47] The role of facilitation in long-term and enduring product development

[00:13:11] Understanding the importance of prioritizing inquiry over advocacy

[00:14:33] Exploring the transformative potential of retrospectives

[00:17:06] Highlighting the importance of facilitation skills in building deeper relationships

Eli on LinkedIn

Eli on Twitter

About the Guest

Designing prototypes and empowering cross-functional teams fuels Eli’s soul. As a specialist in prototype design, Eli employs dynamic workshops and human-centered design principles to create innovative solutions. Always eager to explore new technology, Eli also cherishes moments of unplugging and reconnecting with nature, surrounded by family and friends. Eli’s journey began as Design Lead at TEEX Product Development Center, where Eli played a pivotal role in designing disaster response training and emergency management technologies – a truly rewarding experience. Eli also had the honor of serving the City of Austin as a Digital Designer, focusing on building accessible websites to inform the public about crucial infrastructure assets. Eli grew into facilitation with Design Thinking Facilitation at Voltage Control, where Eli honed skills in leading creative teams. Eli then took the entrepreneurial leap and founded Black Flag Design, crafting pioneering digital products in augmented reality and architectural visualization. Eli’s love for architecture, physical infrastructure, and civic engagement runs deep. Eli holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University and continues to blend passions to create meaningful impact.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of facilitation and transformative leadership. Some leaders exert tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly transformative experience. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. You can also learn more about our 12 week facilitation certification program at voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with Eli Wood, a strategic designer who possesses an amazing portfolio of versatile capabilities complimented by his commitment to societal enhancement. He’s also a Voltage Control alumnus as a facilitator and prototype specialist. Our conversation centers on the importance of facilitation as part of working with interdisciplinary teams, building products, services, and new business offerings. Welcome to the show, Eli.

Eli Wood:

Hi Douglas. Thanks so much for having me today. I’m really excited to be here talking with you again and returning to my roots in facilitation.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s been quite a while since we’ve been able to roll up our sleeves and work together. It’s been great staying in touch over the years, but fantastic to be collaborating again.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. As much as I love talking about barbecuing and smoking brisket, facilitation definitely scratches a professional itch that I just can’t seem to get rid of.

Douglas:

Absolutely. And in the early days of Voltage Control, back in 2017 when you were joining me on design sprints, we got to see quite an array of different individuals witnessing facilitation for the first time, and noticing some of these patterns around how it would impact teams and how they worked, how they collaborated, and what comes to mind as they bring up those memories?

Eli Wood:

Oh, tons of really fond memories. At first, I was really drawn to the sprint format and structure from a prototyping point of view and being able to rapidly come to decisions about design work that used to take weeks to go back and forth with on clients about. And then through those experiences, really getting to get intimately connected to designers, a whole host of diverse sets of companies, and even some government organizations, and inevitably getting connected to other business stakeholders, like product managers who would come to me and express just amazement at the fact that we could get so much work done in five days. And I would always have to remind them that we didn’t get the work done, that they did. It wasn’t about us coming in, it was about their team actually coming together and how powerful that was.

Douglas:

Yeah, I mean, that’s a true testament to a well-designed process and that’s well facilitated so that folks can get out of their own way and get amazing work done and just see some progress that quite often will just baffle the mind.

Eli Wood:

Definitely, yeah. It’s game changing whenever you get out of this typical iterative loop of give me feedback in the next day or so to a highly facilitated structure that creates dynamics and collaboration that happens in real time, whether you’re remote or in person, you’re able to talk about things in productive ways and make decisions in ways that previously weren’t possible. And so every time I get the chance to be a part of a sprint, it’s like getting ready for a rocket ship to take off and I get excited.

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that I started to realize was that it wasn’t just limited to sprints. Anytime we bring the power of facilitation skills to a group of smart and purpose led or purpose fueled individuals, really amazing things can happen. And oftentimes it’s just the lack of facilitation or the lack of articulated purpose that’s preventing folks from finding that momentum.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.

Douglas:

So you mentioned product managers. Why do you think it’s so essential for product managers to lean into this kind of facilitative approach?

Eli Wood:

Well, inherently product management is an interdisciplinary capability. Product is the amalgamation of design development business requirements and so many other stakeholders. And so I just tended to see these product managers fall up and say, how did you do that? How are you able to move us forward? They almost thought that it was magic. And so it was a trend that just continued to emerge, and they navigate in the ways that they’re trained and taught, whether it’s academic these days with more and more product management programs popping up in academia to people being trained through scrum and agile methodologies. I see that a lot of times the true fundamental topic of facilitation gets overlooked.

Douglas:

You mentioned the nature of product management being interdisciplinary, and I immediately thought of the organizational development term of boundary spanner, which is something I talk a lot about. And so for folks that listen to me often they’re like, oh, he’s talking about boundary spanners again. But for those that aren’t familiar, it’s a powerful frame to take into how we think about work. And project managers are a great example of those that have to span boundaries. And when they’re doing their job well, they’re spanning those boundaries. I think some fall prey to that siloed or stovepipe thinking where they’re like, oh, this is the product department. And those folks in the engineering department aren’t listening or aren’t thinking straight. And so to your point, if we’re doing the work well, we’re doing it in a way that is spanning boundaries. We’re inviting people in so that we can make progress together, and I think that is very key.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. And I like the positive framing of boundary spanner because a lot of times product managers are put in adversarial positions, whether it’s breaking down silos or trying to foster open dialogue or working on streamlining and efficiency of processes. Oftentimes that puts them in pretty contentious situations, but thinking of it as spanning boundaries and bringing people together in positive ways I think helps unleash the product manager or the product owner or the program manager. There’s a variety of these positions that find themselves in similar situations these days. And I think that facilitation is, and all of its related principles, are a key part of helping these people be successful in really sort of long-term or enduring product development.

Douglas:

It also makes me think about the thing we’re saying earlier around the momentum and it’s about creating flow. And the interesting thing about flow that’s created through facilitation is that we’re not just going to bulldoze things through for progress. We’re not just going to kind of put a schedule together and just mandate we’re going to hit these deadlines and just push it all through. Flow actually is creating the state where everyone’s moving in harmony, but willing and open and curious about challenges and conflict because that’s where real opportunity can present itself. And if we’re in that state of flow, water moves around rocks very fluidly. Right?

Eli Wood:

Right. But it also causes erosion.

Douglas:

That’s right. It can.

Eli Wood:

And so it takes a lot longer for flow to push through the rock or to create that hole or to change the course of the river than to follow its natural course. And I love those principles of facilitation that enable us to be more dynamic and adaptive and sort of understand the pulse of the group of people making decisions, but more importantly in the sprint kind of framework, the sort of flow and the desires of the users and finding ways to actually embrace what they want and where we can go as businesses.

Douglas:

And I like this idea of erosion and sometimes having to spill out of the boundaries of what is expected to be the normal path. And it makes me think about coming back to the product manager lens, is idea of the feature factory and how we need to not be that and instead be more curious about the path that we need to carve out that’s going to create the most value and the best outcomes for our customers.

Eli Wood:

Exactly. Yeah, 100%. And I think one of the most challenging things that product managers face is navigating and balancing the diverse requirements of the business and different interdepartmental groups. People are measured differently across businesses. They have their own agendas and effective facilitation upfront in the product development process can then enable their respective squads to be that much more successful. So we need to not only think about facilitation in terms of scrum and agile methodologies, but also in terms of requirements gathering, decision-making, setting expectations with business stakeholders so that they can report to the appropriate channels, which becomes even much more important in publicly traded companies.

Something I’ve learned in the past several years is just how much is driven by those filings that the quarterly reports that have to roll up to the SEC at the end of the day even, and these people are inherently being driven by decisions that are outside of the boundaries of what say a designer working on a product feature ever considers. It’s not even in their wheelhouse, but there’s other people who are, and product managers are sitting somewhere in this intensely vast area of decision-making that has broad reaching implications, and it just has become a fascination lately.

Douglas:

Yeah, totally. And that’s also impacted by just the growing complexity in products that product managers are having to manage and support.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can remember some of our first sprints that we did together where I was first exposed to marketing decision makers or even VPs of product or business lines that had indirect or implicit influence that completely could have rocked my world when I was used to working directly with a designer and maybe like a startup founder to make calls about what they needed. You used to bring out about a lot of frustration as a facilitator or a prototyper where it was difficult to understand why people were making the decisions that they were. And now I think as I’ve sort of progressed through my career or gotten exposed to more and more situations, I understand that the complexity of these decision-making situations can’t necessarily be untangled just by calling it politics or bureaucracy because sometimes they have fiduciary responsibilities or even regulatory responsibilities that I as the facilitator don’t hold knowledge about.

But I have to kind of go with the flow and understand why somebody is impassioned about something and how can I help them communicate to their team or step out of the way to let their team gain that understanding. It’s one of the most difficult parts of facilitating an enterprise or Fortune 500s I think.

Douglas:

It’s also important to remember that if we’re taking a facilitative frame, we’re prioritizing inquiry over advocacy. So in those moments where it’s like, why is that marketing person making this decision? We don’t have the need or even a responsibility to advocate for a different decision, but exercising some inquiry can be really powerful because others in the room might be asking themselves the same question. And it gives that leader an opportunity to express why some of the decisions were pushing in the ways they were. And I think it’s really powerful when it shifts to when the leader is making those pivots from inquiry to advocacy.

Eli Wood:

And I’m reminded of the significance of retrospective and the role of product management when you bring up that topic of inquiry versus advocacy. And not to be too critical of product management as a discipline, but oftentimes the retrospective and the posture of it is seen as checking the box so that we can file that we did that part of the process, when if approached with that facilitative mindset and being inquisitive and curious and creating a space of psychological safety, if framed appropriately, the retrospective is your most liberating activity and your most transformative activity, giving you the ability to action and make decisions that were previously hidden or obfuscated.

And so over the past several years, working in design teams advocating as a designer for the importance of a retrospective, but oftentimes being in a position where the product manager is responsible for facilitating it. I’ve been a part of some really shitty retrospectives that just were boring, unmotivated, lacked true capability or structure. And I really believe that product managers can relate to that in many ways because they’re put in situations where they don’t have the agency or the accountability to truly make change as a result of the retrospective. And so when I think about that inquiry versus advocacy, if a product manager can be their most inquisitive in those positions, I think they’ll unleash their teams in ways that they just can’t even foresee at this point.

Douglas:

And even when folks don’t find themselves in a position of power and they enter into a meeting, a space, a workshop, and they bring inquiry or even just any facilitation skill, they can amplify the experience for everyone and certainly themselves. And that’s a great way to shift culture inside an organization. You don’t have to be ordained the leader or the meeting organizer to have an influence over meeting culture and how we bring this facilitative approaches into the work.

Eli Wood:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think really just bringing structure and not leadership sets a team up for more success every day.

Douglas:

I was also thinking about the importance of relationships and building trust and how thinking about facilitation as a core skill and how I’m going to show up at work in these ways allows us to build deeper relationships, set aside some of the mechanics of how we’re going to get things done, and be a little bit more human in how we’re coming together. And I think over time, that’s a real strong bond that starts to form and makes teams more cohesive, helps them just find better work together.

Eli Wood:

Absolutely. I’m reminded of the importance of relationship building and the significance of this idea of reciprocity or being reciprocal in your relationships. I think product especially there’s users, there’s business requirements, there’s technical requirements, and when somebody brings something to you, if you don’t follow up and act on it, sometimes that can be seen as a one-sided relationship. And I think being able to reciprocate is super important and facilitated structures allow you to express reciprocity in many ways, whether it’s conversational design or feedback loops or the thinking around participatory decision-making structures like giving people space to communicate, giving people time to respond, to be heard and seen in ways that everyday work doesn’t let us do that.

And that builds trust. That reciprocity shows that I’m consistent. It shows that I can recognize you and reward you. I can appreciate your diverse set of thinking, and then ultimately ensure that everybody is seen. It’s a really tough position or framing of product management because it’s a lot of work, right? It’s not just being the feature factory.

Douglas:

So what’s a success story that comes to mind when you think about how facilitation skills have turned a potential product roadblock into an opportunity or created something new or something positive for the team?

Eli Wood:

I was in a position recently with a massive piece of work that brought together teams over the course of 18 plus weeks. And these teams had never worked together before. They were designers, an entire development squad, six plus people, a technical lead, design lead, also a team that was marketing the product that was going out to these users.

And so inevitably, the product manager had to level up into this program management and more facilitated kind of function. And I think that when we hit a snag, oftentimes we wanted to solve it in our discreet environment. So maybe a technical challenge emerged and the technical team wanted to solve it in a certain way, or the design team found a problem with the UX that we needed to address, or the marketing team was trying to refine messaging and sort of aesthetic or how to meet the audience with the brand.

But by nature of the work, no decision could be made in isolation. It was impossible on the timeline that we had and in the environment that we were working in. And the employment of facilitation was something that I brought to the table as noting the significance of how we could bring people together to make these decisions faster than we previously could have thought through just email threads or sort of your red amber green status trackers and things like that. And so after facilitating a couple of product development and decision-making sessions between designers, technologists, and marketers, inevitably our program and product function said, how do we do this consistently? How can we leverage this?

How can we take that responsibility and have ownership of that kind of role? And through simple structures and discussions and imparting upon them the importance of agenda and timing and returning to purpose and sort of setting clear expectations for how we’re going to use our time in meetings, some of those magical meeting principles, I think we were able to all step back to allow the product team to step up, right? We were working in a way of a true product development function where our product and program owners were trustworthy, they were consistent, and they took that project to success and really made it possible through simple facilitation. It really helped.

Douglas:

So powerful, and it’s like the tenant in complexity where local solutions to global problems and taking these simple facilitation tools and just making even the most microscopic moves when it comes to how we relate, how we work together, and how we understand each other, and how we just create invitations and space for each other can have transformative impacts across the org if we all start doing it. So I want to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Eli Wood:

I think that in today’s world, compassion and kindness in the business environment is the most valuable thing that you can bring to your business or any working session. People are faced with more and more controversy, pain, suffering, fear than in the recent memory. Everywhere you look, things are concerning and stressful, and I think that we really have to push back against that in our work environments to allow people to be as creative and human as possible. And not to sound cliche, but I think those principles that come with facilitation and the sort of practice are the most valuable thing that I can think of right now, which is why I keep returning to it.

Douglas:

Thank you for your time today, Eli. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Eli Wood:

Thank you, Douglas. Sincerely, a pleasure.

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 to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.