I’ve discussed the concept of “reading the room” with fellow facilitators countless times. As a seasoned facilitator, I’ve walked into many meetings and sessions and had to pivot based on the participants, goals, and other factors, always staying flexible and keeping a pulse on the room. In a conversation with a fellow facilitator, though, I found myself asking: is reading the room enough?

In today’s corporate world, the “room” is not always like it was in the past–an assigned conference room with a whiteboard at the front and participants gathered around a table. Many meetings are hybrid or virtual, bringing together participants from different cities and different backgrounds to work toward a common goal.

These meetings are also taking place in the larger context of the organization, the industry, and the current events going on in the world around. I realized that I needed to consider factors from beyond the walls of the room.

In order to be successful, I found myself modifying the art of reading the room. We have to look beyond the room—and read the system. In this article, I’ll break down what it means to read the system and how to implement this perspective in your own facilitation.

Understanding Systems Thinking in Facilitation

Let’s start with understanding systems thinking. Systems thinking is defined as “an approach to problem-solving that views problems as part of a wider dynamic system” which “recognizes and prioritizes the understanding of linkages, relationships, interactions, and interdependencies.” This method means problems should not be addressed in isolation, but rather as a part of the larger context of the organization.

As a facilitator, I strive to understand the interconnectedness of various elements within an organization or project. Changes in one part can affect the whole system, so it’s important to recognize key patterns, relationships, and dynamics, identifying opportunities for growth and potential points of weakness. When a facilitator understands the system, they can better select the right techniques and methods to pursue an optimal outcome.

A Note About Systems Thinking in the Workplace

What was true yesterday is not guaranteed to be true tomorrow. Systems are often complex and adaptive, meaning that we have to be aware that they can change at any time. Leaders must be nimble, aware that what they once thought about a room, system, or organization can change on a dime and must be adapted guide participants toward success.

As leaders, we have to consider how much we can trust data, even though data is key to our practices. We should continually question ourselves and probe the system to understand how it is functioning and responding to our actions and interventions.

6 Tips to Read the System

Let’s break down a few ways you can implement reading the system in your facilitation practice.

Take a Holistic Perspective

The key to reading the system is looking beyond the immediate and considering the underlying structures and processes at work. This holistic perspective can help ensure that the final consensus is sustainable for long-term success.

External facilitators will always have to work toward understanding the systems within the organization they are working with. When I’m in that position, I leverage techniques that invite the participants to examine their own system when addressing the problem at hand.

Embrace Empathy and Cultural Awareness

When I think about systems, I don’t just think about the systems of an organization—I also consider the systems of our society and culture. Each participant in a meeting has their own unique background and perspective, and their different viewpoints affect their interactions within the system.

By recognizing and respecting diverse perspectives and cultural backgrounds, we unlock powerful new ways to approach and address a problem and build a solution. In fact, it’s part of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) Core Competencies to honor diversity and promote inclusiveness.

It’s also important to consider who isn’t in the room. That could include other team members, company leadership, your customers, your clients, or the public at large. Consider the systems that those people are a part of and how that could affect them, and prompt participants to do so themselves. By imbuing empathy into your approach, you can anticipate the needs of the people who are not in the room, building a solution that works for everyone.

Support Conflict Resolution and Negotiation

There are inherent conflicts in systematic interactions, as different departments or factions have different priorities and approaches to solving problems. These conflicts, and conflict in general, are not bad. Healthy conflict can lead to creative, powerful consensus.

When I facilitate a meeting, I consider the conflict that may exist under the surface. Often, participants don’t even realize there are underlying conflicts in their systematic interactions, but by identifying and addressing those conflicts, a better solution can be found.

By reading the system, I can dip into my repertoire of facilitation methods and techniques for the right solution to balance different perspectives and move toward resolution.

Leverage Data

For me, one of the most exciting parts of the future of facilitation is the use of data to better inform our decisions and understand trends within the system. The amount of data available can feel overwhelming, but, as a facilitator, I help participants distill that information and focus on the right data points. It can be easy to get caught up on one particular piece of data and get stuck in a circular discussion, but proper facilitation can keep participants moving forward with that data. 

As an experienced facilitator, I’ve seen the power of being able to interpret and communicate data insights effectively. When moving out of the groan zone and toward a resolution, the right data can help streamline the decision-making process.

Navigate Virtual and Hybrid Environments

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the structure of meetings and events has looked very different. I’ve walked into sessions expecting a full room of attendees only to learn that half the participants were virtual! This unexpected change required me to shift my techniques to better operate within a hybrid system.

I’ve become attuned to the fact that the system could shift from in-person to virtual or hybrid at a moment’s notice. To read the system, facilitators must master adapting facilitation techniques for virtual, hybrid, and diverse environmental contexts. The facilitator does not get to control the setting, instead reacting to the environment and the system and working as a guide against those obstacles.

Cultivate Feedback

Even the most skilled facilitators are not mind readers, so it’s important to realize that there will be aspects of the system that are not apparent to you as the facilitator. The participants are the ones who are actively part of the system, for better or for worse, and they can be the key to unlocking insight for optimal success.

To garner this feedback, facilitators should conduct interviews, send surveys, and host communal listening sessions. Focus on providing a welcoming, comfortable environment where participants can be completely honest about their experiences, opportunities, and obstacles.

This feedback is critical to understanding how people are thinking, how they are experiencing the system, and how they are influencing it.

Learn to Read the System with Voltage Control

The Facilitation Certification Program from Voltage Control gives facilitators and collaborative leaders the knowledge and tools they need to properly read the system in every session. We also host Facilitation Lab, a vibrant community of facilitators and collaborative leaders committed to lifelong learning. Facilitation Lab offers a free virtual meetup every week that you can attend to get a taste of the community.

Contact Voltage Control to get started.

The post Read the System appeared first on Voltage Control.

Exponential growth by way of good design is the secret behind every startup’s scaling success story and adopting a design thinking perspective can help you attain or sustain such growth. Leading a design thinking workshop will place human-centered thinking at the heart of your company, resulting in rapid growth and increased customer satisfaction.

With a focus on design methodology, you can respond to changing customer needs through innovation as scalability and design thinking are indelibly connected. By leading a design workshop, you’ll make human-centered thinking part of your company culture. Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals.

More than a trend, the power of design thinking for scaling is backed by statistics:

• Every dollar that goes into design methodology and user experience results in a $100 return. (Source: Forbes)
• 50% of design-led businesses report increased customer loyalty as a result of advanced design practices. (Source: Adobe)
• In the last 10 years, design-led businesses have surpassed the S&P Index by 219%. (Source: Design Management Institute)

In this article we’ll explore the basics of design-centric thinking and its effect on your company’s growth with the following topics:

• Growing With Design Methodology
• What is Design Thinking?
• Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success
• The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking
• How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology
• Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability
• Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Remote Design Sprint 101 Guide

This is a comprehensive guide for anyone who wants to run their own remote Design Sprint. It outlines everything we’ve done at Voltage Control to successfully adapt our tried-and-true Design Sprint model for remote work.

Get It Now

Growing With Design Methodology

Centering a design-driven mentality will help your business prioritize innovation and creativity, allowing for increased ingenuity, productivity, and efficiency. With a shift to design-centered thinking comes increased creativity and more remarkable growth, allowing companies to scale faster than usual. By leading a design workshop at your company, you can completely transform your company culture and the very essence of how your business works.

What is Design Thinking?

Before leading a design thinking workshop for your team, the first step is to understand the concept for yourself. Design thinking incorporates a human-centered approach to problem-solving via design methodology. Design methodology stems from the idea of design itself. As “good design” is all about finding an elegant solution to the problems at hand, design thinking encourages your team to make the most appropriate plan to meet both your company’s needs and that of the end-user.

Why Design Thinking is Essential to Success

Design thinking is integral to your success as a business. Success and design are linked through the latter’s unique ability to engage clients and build connections with customers. By leading a design thinking workshop, you can center design methodology as a business asset.

Beyond essential aesthetics, “good design” focuses on optimum functionality while providing users with an enjoyable, satisfying experience. By meeting both the company’s needs and that of the user, design thinking has a transformative effect on how companies do business.

The Five-Step Process to Design Thinking

Successfully leading a design thinking workshop starts with understanding the following five steps of design thinking:

1. Empathizing with the Client
   As design thinking focuses on uniting function and form to problem solve, you should focus on examining issues with a human lens. By adopting the end user’s mindset, your team will find the most attractive solutions by taking the client’s motivations, needs, pain points, and experiences into consideration.
2. Defining the Problem
   With design in mind, define the problem by prioritizing the end user’s needs first and thinking about the company’s needs second.
3. Ideating the Solution
   This stage of design thinking is all about innovation and ingenuity, as ideas are the lifeblood of design thinking. By generating as many ideas as possible, your team will arrive at new and creative solutions to the issue defined in the second step.
4. Developing Prototypes
   Taking the best ideas from the ideation phase, have your team create prototypes. Track the prototypes’ performance with your team and note their observations. Prototypes will be refined, sent for further testing, or rejected.
5. Testing the Prototypes
   During this stage, the final refinements are made to the prototypes and tested with the end-user. This process is repeated as necessary.

How to Get Your Team on Board with Design Methodology

Making the shift from being a product-driven business to a design-driven one isn’t easy. If you’d like to shift your company into a design-centric mentality, leading a design thinking workshop is the best way forward. Whether your team is actively thinking with design in mind or is entirely new to the concept, making the change is possible.

As you head into leading a design thinking workshop for your team, be sure to share the benefits of a design-centric approach for scaling. As design thinking aims to create a high-quality product, your team will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what your clients want and use design-centric thinking to meet their needs.

Likewise, design methodology prioritizes understanding the customer journey, learning to meet their needs, and creating a perfect product, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and more significant growth for your company.

Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Teaches Scalability

One of the main deliverables of leading a design thinking workshop is the facilitation framework or template that your team can rely on in future workshops. This consistent methodology and approach to problem-solving will become a way of life for your company. By putting users first through centering design, you’ll be on your way to sustainable scaling.

To get started leading a design thinking workshop with growth in mind, consider hiring an expert facilitator. With the help of the facilitators at Voltage Control, you can teach your team the ropes of design methodology as you learn how to apply it to your standard operations.

Steps to Leading a Design Thinking Workshop

Consider facilitating a workshop yourself if you’re ready to scale your company and have a great handle on design thinking methodology. Teaching elegant problem-solving skills with a people-first approach is at the heart of all design workshops.

Leading a design thinking workshop can take on many forms, but there are vital elements that will help you succeed each time:

Preparation

Each design thinking workshop starts with preparation. Before the workshop begins, make it a point to:

1. Identify challenges
2. Choose the ideal location
3. Plan the agenda
4. Gather necessary materials

Begin with a Briefing

As the focus of a design thinking workshop is to help your team innovate, activities that can stimulate conversation and ideation take center stage. Consider icebreakers and activities that help break down barriers.

Step One: Introducing Design Thinking

It’s always essential to include an intro to the design thinking methodology to make sure all colleagues and clients know what design-centric thinking is. Whether you show a presentation or hire a professional, explaining the fundamentals for design-centric thinking will help set the stage for the rest of the workshop.

Step Two: Empathizing With the User

As empathy is key to design methodology, empathizing with the client is the next part of the design workshop. By understanding the user’s needs, your team will be able to arrive at the most innovative solutions.

Design thinking exercises are a key component of this stage to help all participants identify how the end-user feels and thinks.

Step Three: Identifying Problems and Solutions

As growth results from effective problem solving, step three involves identifying the problem and creating innovative solutions. Through their brainstorming, your team should ultimately arrive at one solution that will provide the greatest user experience.

Step Four: Finalizing the Workshop

After completing the ideation and problem-solving steps, the workshop will come to a close. When leading a design thinking workshop, be sure to check in with all participants to ensure a meaningful experience was shared by all.

Ultimately, the takeaway of a successful design thinking workshop is human-centered problem-solving. As the meeting comes to an end, make sure your team members can confidently apply the skills learned in the workshop to their daily routines.

Growing Through Design-Centric Culture

The key to growing your business lies in your team’s ability to shift into a design-centered mindset. Leading a design thinking workshop will help you and your team adopt a more innovative way of working. With a newfound design-centric approach to growing your company, you’ll be able to meet clients’ needs, connect with the end-user, and scale your company at an impressive rate.

As you learn more about leading a design thinking workshop, consider hiring a professional facilitator from Voltage Control. With an expert in design thinking present, you’ll ensure that your team successfully makes the shift from a results-driven and product-centric mindset to more human-centered and design-focused processes.

Want To Lead A Design Thinking Workshop?

If you are ready to begin shifting your team into a design-centered mindset join one of our innovative trainings, design thinking facilitation, or  design sprints. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you have any questions about our innovative training!

The post Why Leading a Design Thinking Workshop Will Scale Your Company appeared first on Voltage Control.

We all know that it helps to have an outside perspective, both in our personal and professional lives. We call a trusted friend to tell them what’s going on because they help us see things in a fresh light. The same is true in business. Often we need an outside opinion to help us take a step back, look at our business challenge from a new angle and provide valuable insight.

That’s where innovation strategy consulting comes in. An innovation consultant is an advisor who can provide new tools and methods for tackling your problem. If you’re stuck in a project, need to rethink an existing one, or are kicking off an initiative that has to go well, consider an innovation consulting firm.

What is innovation strategy consulting?

Companies like ours, Voltage Control, offer advice, guidance, training and consulting to companies of all sizes and across verticals. Whether you are a brand new startup or a seasoned, large organization, you can benefit from innovation strategy consulting. First, innovation consulting firms will work with you to identify the exact problem you need to solve. These will often be larger, cross-functional challenges. For example, your problem might be: we need a shared vision for our end-to-end customer experience. Or, we need to address a specific customer pain point and align our mobile strategy accordingly (which is what we helped Adobe with). 

An innovation consulting firm can help you hone in on the right questions to ask for your specific challenge.

An innovation consulting firm can help you hone in on the right questions to ask for your specific challenge. They often bring a blend of expertise from everything from enterprise design thinking and human-centered design to product design. They can work with you to think of novel ideas and approaches you haven’t considered before and make a strategic plan for executing on your new strategy.

“The consultant also has a professional responsibility to ask whether the problem as posed is what most needs solving. Very often the client needs help most in defining the real issue…” — Arthur N. Turner, “Consulting Is More Than Giving Advice,” HBR, 1982.

Here are the top six benefits of innovation strategy consulting:

Break Old Habits

One of the first benefits of innovation strategy consulting is that it helps you shake up your typical way of doing things. Most companies have ingrained habits. Maybe it’s the way you hold meetings, how you present to the group, or how projects get funded and designed. Some of these patterns exist for a reason; others are leftover, legacy ways of working that don’t serve a purpose. The reasons for doing these things are often referred to as simply “just the way things have always been done.”

An innovation consulting firm comes in and helps you look at what you should (or could) be doing better rather than how it’s always been done. Their outsider’s perspective means you’re less inclined to follow the well-worn paths of your organization and challenge the status quo. 

Wisdom from Outside Industries

Another benefit of innovation consulting is that your innovation consulting firm likely comes with a plethora of expertise in many industries and types of companies. Let’s say you’re in the financial technology business. Hopefully, your innovation consulting firm has some knowledge of your industry, but they will also bring expertise from adjacent or even unrelated sectors and fields. This is a good thing. You want outside inspiration if you’re going to make something innovative.

Because consultants usually work with companies of different sizes and in different markets, they can bring a diversity of knowledge to the table. Who knows, maybe your fintech company can learn something breakthrough from the food delivery startup your innovation consulting firm just worked with.

Focus Your Time

Typically, you’ll work with your innovation consulting firm through semi-formal meetings or workshops. This dedicated time to focus on critical business challenges is invaluable. That’s because many of us are overscheduled and incredibly busy trying to get our “day job” done. We don’t have time to squeeze innovation work into the tiny cracks of free space in our 9 to 5. But, we all want it to happen.

When you bring on an innovation consulting firm, you give yourself freedom and time. Now, you can focus on a problem you’ve meant to tackle but haven’t been able to. (For example, check out this case study about the food delivery company Favor and how they used a Design Sprint to focus their attention on a critical business need). Innovation consulting firms will usually bring in an expert facilitator to help guide meetings and conversations. A facilitator is someone who plans, designs, and leads a key group meeting or event and can help when dealing with larger topics. They offer a non-biased opinion and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. 

While you might be overwhelmed at the prospect of setting aside a whole day or week for innovation exercises or a Design Sprint when you’re busy, the results are worth it. Innovation consulting firms help you take the time to work on big problems in a collaborative way with your colleagues. With their help, you can shift from thinking about the day-to-day to working on game-changing innovation initiatives. Innovation consulting firms help you accelerate, disrupt and sustain innovation within your team and organization.

Innovation consulting firms help you take the time to work on big problems in a collaborative way with your colleagues.

Articulate Your Vision

In addition to being too busy, it’s hard for some companies to articulate their innovation strategy or to shape a compelling story for where they want to go. This is another benefit of innovation consulting firms. Through your engagement with your innovation consultancy, you will come up with a north star. Your north star articulates your vision for your product, feature, or experience.

Typically, your innovation consulting firm delivers a document that summarizes where you want to go and why. They might even help you create a prototype of your ideal, future experience. A good innovation consulting firm will articulate what you accomplished through a shareable document or prototype that will help you rally your team or organization, and get things done.

Make Connections

Innovation consulting firms are often very connected and have an extensive network of people in the business, tech and creative communities. So, if you need to engage with new people and companies to execute on your innovative vision, your innovation consulting firm might be able to help. For example, if you want to hire a team of developers or find a company to help you with brand identity, your innovation consulting firm probably knows a plethora of talented, trusted candidates. They can help connect you to the people and companies you might not have access to so that you can build your product or experience.

Learn Through Doing

One of the last benefits of hiring an innovation consulting firm is that you and your team will learn new ways of working through the process. Today, many companies have their teams do some design thinking training but don’t always show them how to put it into practice. Watching your innovation consulting firm at work is a way to see how design thinking happens in practice.

Your innovation consulting firm will walk you through their tried-and-true methods and activities. These may include innovation training strategies or Liberating Structures. If you pay attention and take a few notes, you can leverage these tools, resources and processes on your own the next time. When your team sees an expert innovation consultant in action, they’ll learn the methods through osmosis. They’ll be able to try the techniques on their own down the road when they want to spark innovative thinking, and ultimately drive a culture of innovation.

Need Innovation Consulting?

Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and challenges. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs. Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post Six Benefits of Innovation Strategy Consulting appeared first on Voltage Control.

We have all seen a crime drama or mystery where the investigator stands in front of a pinboard and on it are multiple photos of leads, clues, and locations–everything connected with a thread allowing a pattern to emerge. This is an example of what can be created in real-time with a group of people problem-solving. Imagine a high-functioning space for idea sharing, collaboration, and unleashing everyone’s potential by designing your meeting or workshop with parallel creation in mind.

Traditional Meeting Spaces

It is very easy for a meeting to start and remain headed in one direction. We’ve all been there: a question is posed and eyes are averted, no one wants to be the first to speak. The Harvard Business Review has found that not only have meetings increased in length and frequency overthe past 50 years, but executives, on average, spend nearly 23 hours a week in them. How do we make meetings more efficient?

We need to be collaborative and get as many great ideas out in one meeting rather than in multiple meetings. Multi-threaded meetings create concept direction and give everyone a safe space to share their unique ideas. That is where real growth happens. That is where the game-changing ideas are born. Teamwork is essential to creating and maintaining a productive and stimulating work environment.

Harvard Business Review – 

“We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.”

There is a general consensus that the multitude of workplace meetings is a necessary evil. Most people find that they dread multiple weekly meetings, but they feel that is the only way to ensure innovation, even at the cost of productivity and engagement. In order to create a streamlined meeting process, we first need to ask, “Will this environment nurture ideas?” Whether your meeting space is digital or in person, does every member of your team feel like they have room to share and contribute to the board? Once you established the most conducive working environment, ideas can be shared in parallel among team members, and that momentum unleashes the potential of every person in your workspace. Imagine what you and your company can accomplish in one meeting if there is nothing that holds creative collaboration back!

The Why

Have you ever attempted to plan a party? The list of tasks seems endless and daunting! You approach it one thing at a time, finishing a single task before moving on to the next. Applying this parallelism to a meeting, doesn’t it make so much more sense to assign each person to one task, where everyone executes in parallel, rather than trying to accomplish one thing at a time serially? Efficiency, strategy, and trust means a more satisfying meeting experience! A  multi-threaded meeting is like a well planned party. Invite everyone to bring forth all their ideas and share in real time to unlock the full potential of participants in your meetings. Discovering the power to unleash that potential in a meaningful way changes the outcome of the meeting, the company, and the individual!

Digital Inclusivity

When it comes to working remotely, there has been significant research showing that it’s not about where your team is located, rather, it is about who is doing the work and how it is getting done. In an excellent article from MIT Sloan – Management Review, a group’s collaborative capabilities far outway the importance of where they are located. The team’s social perceptiveness is key to the underlying collective intelligence. Identifying team strengths and creating a digital workspace is crucial for a high functioning remote team. Finding the right digital tools is also very important. We must especially prompt people to have creative parallel inputs… but how? 

When we worked solely in person, we would use sticky notes, or a napkin at a lunch meeting to capture ideas and answer the questions, “How might we/how could we accomplish the end goal?” The next step, inevitably, was to stick visual ideas to a wall, sift and sort through them, decipher what would/would not work. Now, we move forward with virtual meetings, utilizing MURAL, and can have everyone capture every idea, simultaneously. This allows us to easily inspire each other in real time.

Pro tip: check out our free downloadable MURAL templates for better meetings.

The next time you run into a problem that poses a challenge to your team, rather than simply setting up a conversation, pose a thoughtful question. Allow the entire team to start working in a MURAL template. Encourage everyone to read the others ideas so they can build on them. Create a conversation that inspires and that everyone can respond to in their own time.  

This is why we’re big fans of MURAL, the collaborative tool allows every thread to happen simultaneously, where multiple people can take notes and make edits, even if another person is talking. This tool allows for idea sharing without total chaos. Another bonus: you can save anything created in MURAL  so you can come back, build on, and polish ideas.

Are You Ready?

It is time to take your meetings to the next level, discover the power of the multi-threaded meeting in depth by utilizing some of our mural templates! You will walk away with templates to run your own multi-threaded meeting, new found knowledge of meeting facilitation and the ability to unleash you and your company!

The post Multi-Threaded Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting where the phrase “the illusion of control” was used. It made my stomach turn. 

This meeting was around a company’s “custom” software offering. The thing I discovered was the software couldn’t be customized, just configured. There were only a few ways their templates could be tweaked, and those were all pre-determined. If a customer’s needs didn’t jibe with what the company’s product would allow, they were out of luck. 

Because of this, the senior-most exec told his subordinates they had to give customers “the illusion of control” vs. allowing anything that would actually be true customization. And that’s when it hit me. If this was the company’s behavior towards its customers, could its treatment of employees be any different? Do the execs just nod their heads and pay lip service, knowing full well the company is going to do whatever it wants to do?

Collaboration begins with authenticity

This company missed an opportunity to be a partner to its clients — and likely isn’t one to its employees either. If its leadership had attended one of our workshops, they’d learn the value of genuine collaboration. It starts with respect, and a willingness to listen and absorb rather than firing back with a knee-jerk response. 

By giving employees a role in decision-making, the exec I mentioned could’ve helped his employees become more self-confident. And those with confidence help the larger team — and organization as a whole — succeed. 

To help you build this kind of inclusive culture, we created these meeting mantras. They are the holy grail we follow to ensure that our meetings and all attendees are getting the best (genuine) experience out of them:

No Purpose. No Meeting.

Part of respecting your team is ensuring every meeting has a clear purpose. Scheduling a discussion with only a vague objective in mind wastes time and money. It can also torpedo your team’s morale. Show you value their time by creating an agenda that’ll keep everyone focused on specific outcomes. People appreciate having goals they can work towards, whether that’s coming up with fresh ideas or helping refine existing ones. 

Foster Emotional Safety.

When you do have meetings, you’ll want to create an environment where everyone feels they can speak freely. A great way to encourage inclusivity is to allocate a portion of each meeting to the sharing of everyone’s ideas. Be mindful about cutting off over-sharers so the chronically quiet will have a chance to speak up, too. Studies have shown that this kind of inclusiveness can accelerate the speed at which sound business decisions are reached, so it’s not just a wise practice from a team-building perspective. 

Capture Room Intelligence.

I’ve always felt that many minds are greater than one when it comes to collaborating and solving problems. That’s the idea behind room intelligence: no single person is smarter than any other person in the meeting. To ensure the collective intellect is properly leveraged, you’ll want a designated facilitator on hand to guide the group through its discussion and any structured activities. This person, or someone who’s been deputized, should also be capturing everything discussed for future reference. 

See all 10 of our meeting mantras here.

Keeping things on track

Creating a culture of true collaboration can be tough. As a leader, it’ll be up to you to encourage honesty and promote comradery. When you’re effective at this, you’ll see your team develop new ideas and innovative solutions. To keep you from slipping back into old routines, here are three practices you should embrace:

1. Have 1:1 discussions.

When someone feels like they weren’t heard or thinks someone else has too much influence, it’s important to talk it out one-on-one. Committing to having an open-door policy that lets you take a temperature with your team may help you uncover some interpersonal dynamics you weren’t aware of. This will help maintain a team environment that’s harmonious and focused on thriving together.

2. Agree to disagree and commit.

Productive meetings require decisions to be made. In addition to having a facilitator drive progress, you’ll also want to have a preselected decider. Ideally, this should be someone who’s qualified to make the call on how to move forward, either due to relevant experience or professional responsibilities. 

Keep in mind that achieving consensus doesn’t mean total and complete agreement. The philosophy behind disagree and commit, which is practiced by Amazon and Intel, is that it’s acceptable for people to disagree while decisions are being made. Once a decision has been made, however, the team needs to 100% agree to support it. It’s OK that not everyone buys in so long as the dissenters can commit to moving forward as a team.

3. Give everyone a say.

To minimize the divergence I mentioned above, I suggest your team use our Improv Vision Mood Board for online collaboration tools like Mural. Unlike a traditional mood board that’s merely cool visuals, our template will help everyone get aligned through visual and written exercises. 

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Improv Vision Board

Use this template when your team is in need of a collective, inspiring vision for a project, product, or culture.

Get It Now

First, you’ll ask each team member to share two images. Then everyone will follow this up by placing sticky notes with their thoughts on what the collective vision makes possible — and what emotions the images evoke. After individual voting on these stickies, your team will then move on to crafting a unifying vision statement. 

Improvising a vision this way can spare you going through a long, protracted process. Too often teams focus on mission statements that capture the purpose of an entire enterprise when teams often just need something that can help them tap into creative potential and inspire action.

Trust your team — and the process

Fighting “fake” collaboration begins with valuing people’s thoughts, feelings, and time. Genuine collaboration really comes down to trust. Trust that colleagues and employees can help you make better decisions — and that you have an actual interest in hearing what’s on their minds. When this has been achieved, you’ll be surprised by the staggering business impact it’ll have. It’ll save time, save money and keep teams on task and ahead of schedule.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Get Our Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide

Create and run magical meetings with our bite-sized guide, based on the full guide Magical Meetings: Reinvent How Your Team Works Together

Get It Now

Want to learn more?

If you’d like information about one of our Magical Meeting workshops or a consulting engagement, you can reach us at hello@voltagecontrol.com. 

The post Collaboration: Don’t Fake It Until You Make It appeared first on Voltage Control.

“We have two really strong capacities [as human beings]. One is about discipline, finishing things, and staying aligned. …We’ll call that the discipline muscle. The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That’s where we’re going out on a limb, we’re taking a risk, we’re being creative, we’re curious about what might happen if.” -Diana Joseph

In this episode of Control the Room, Diana Joseph and I discuss the need for open dialogue between startup & corporate organizations and the unique space Diana curates to collectively bring them together through specified expertise. We take a look inside the world of anthropology and its benefits of implementation in the workplace and explore design-based research thinking. Listen in to hear about Diana’s passion in design-based research and the explorative efforts both corporate and startup organizations can gain in changing the conversation and working together. 

Show Highlights

[1:31] Diana’s Start in Corporate Innovation
[10:25] The Startup/Corporate Mashup 
[19:31] The Design of Diana’s Unique Experience  
[23:26] The Anthropology Link in Work 
[26:36] A Look Inside Design-Based Research
[37:54] Diana’s Take for Newcomers Exploring Facilitation

Links | Resources

Diana’s LinkedIn
CAF

About the Guest

Diana Joseph is the Founder of the Corporate Accelerator Forum, a creative space  organization that encourages conversations between startup & corporate organizations. The expertise & shared learning experience Diana creates for these organizations allows them to lean into innovation projects without fear. For over four years, the forum has focused on interactive experiences to embrace learning, gain insights, and nurture professional relationships. Diana was the leading strategist at Adobe and has a diverse background in academia and non-profit organizations. She understands the strategic, design perspective and the innovation mindset required for startups and corporate organizations to succeed. As a leading design thinker and entrepreneurship expert, she continues her mission to accelerate meetings between large, corporate groups & startup organizations. With a Ph.D. in Learning Skills from Northwestern University, Diana’s specialty skills range from organizational innovation culture and design thinking to facilitation expert and startup mentor. She is the  reigning Co-Host of the Ecosystem Show on Clubhouse, where she explores the complex world view of innovation ecosystems. Diana continues her mission at CAF for corporate innovators to challenge the social environment in normalizing conversation between key organizations.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. 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.

Run Magical Meetings

• Use our Magical Meetings Quick Guide to start having meaningful and impactful meetings today.
• More Magical Meetings resources.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control
Join us at our weekly Facilitation Lab.

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 for the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators, sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings. You can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide your 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 Diana Joseph at the corporate accelerator forum where she guides and gathers corporate innovators who work with startups. She is the co-host of the ecosystem show on clubhouse and author of many research papers, articles, and blog posts. Welcome to the show, Diana.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much, Douglas.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. So let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start in the world of corporate innovation.

Diana Joseph:

Sure. I’m going to take you back a little bit. So I’m a learning scientist by training. That’s an interdisciplinary field that draws on education, computer science, cognitive science, and tries to understand how learning works and then given how learning works, trying to create learning experiences that are very effective and sticky, memorable actually make a change in our skills and mindsets. And in my dissertation work, I focused on something called the passion curriculum project. I was really interested in learner interest and how we might create curriculum that uses learner interest to get at the skills and mindsets and knowledge that, let’s say adults want young people to get. So I was working with fourth graders, fifth graders, and trying to focus on something that really interested them. And it was really hard, so I also had to work on the methodology to help us make sense of that challenge.

Diana Joseph:

So that was called design-based research. So I had kind of the seeds of my thinking about self-determination there and the seeds of my thinking about design and iteration that were part of the part of that methodology. And then I had children and moved to be closer to my parents and took a job with Adobe where I ran a research group during the time when Adobe was moving all of its products, but even first it’s learning content to the cloud. So I ran the research group that was helping the people who used to write that fat book that came in the Photoshop box, instead of being writers those people now had to become almost anthropologists. They had to understand what was going on in the world of their product and who needed what, and who should produce what, because they were shifting to community content now that the cloud was a possibility. So very interesting work, helping them change and doing both quantitative and qualitative research. And then I got exposed to their internal innovation program, which was called Kickbox. Have you heard of that one?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Diana Joseph:

Okay.

Douglas:

There’s some really great materials online still as far as I know it’s not around anymore, but all the old materials are still there for folks to check out. And there’s some really interesting stuff for sure that I advise all facilitators to check out and think about how it might influence your practice.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, absolutely. I second that recommendation and it is actually coming back. Somebody bought the Kickbox concept and it’s coming back. So Douglas, I’ll make sure to tell you about a session that’s coming up, where we’re going to talk with some folks from IKEA, an innovation leader about, and the folks who are doing that, the Kickbox stuff now.

Douglas:

Nice, awesome. Looking forward to it.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. So Kickbox was a really inspiring experience. I almost, if people are going to look at it, okay, I’m going to have to tell you, I was thinking about keeping it secret until they look later, but I’m going to have to tell you for context right now. So Kickbox comes with a beautiful bootcamp. I had the opportunity, I was in maybe the third cohort at Adobe with the inventor of the Kickbox program, Mark Randall who’s just an amazing, inspiring person.

Douglas:

What’s Mark doing now?

Diana Joseph:

I think he’s retired for the most part. Even then was very focused on his family. And so I think-

Douglas:

Smart man.

Diana Joseph:

… he’s been able to enjoy that, right? So beautiful experience, really inspiring. And at the end of the bootcamp, you get this red box and inside the red box are a bunch of resources. There are sticky notes and sharpies, and there’s a timer, and there’s some chocolate, and some coffee, and by the third cohort, I knew the most important thing that was in there, which was a prepaid credit card. It was a card with a $1000 on it. And that was really mind blowing because I mean, it was a good corporate job. I had money, I could have spent a $1000 of my own money on any project in any given time without feeling the pinch, particularly. But this was a $1000 worth of company budget.

Diana Joseph:

And no one had ever delivered trust to me in that way before. If I wanted money, I had to fight for it or expense something that already sort of fell into a set of expectations. And with this Adobe was saying to me personally, “We trust you. Here’s some resources, go do something interesting. And if you turns out you think we’d be interested too, come back and tell us, but otherwise we trust you that it’s a worthy expenditure of your time and money.” And it was just, it just completely changed my relationship to the company.

Douglas:

You know, it’s really fascinating to hear you mentioned this notion of trust that never been delivered to me in that way before.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, yeah.

Douglas:

And I’m about to do a talk on innovation culture and how we can deliver that in meetings. And we’re kind of breaking it up into three phases, and one of them is the invitation. And so I’m almost thinking I want to bring the story into that presentation now because that’s such a beautiful story of inviting innovation, because that delivery of trust to you as a really strong invitation to do something. And it meant a lot to you, right? That was the significant kind of gesture.

Diana Joseph:

Yes, yes, exactly. They didn’t have to say anything else to make it clear that it was okay for me to do something that could fail. They didn’t have to say a lot of words about failure. It was just like, “Here’s money if it turns out interesting tell me.” So that took a lot of weight off that whole idea of failure as well. And because it happened to be me, it really hearkened back to the work I had done in graduate school. I talked about self determination and the passion curriculum project. The thorny challenge I ran into in trying to make these interest centered experiences happen, is that we are really complex when it comes to motivation, most of us are you do meet people who are absolutely zeroed in on a particular thing. Like I have a nephew who’s wanting to be a race car driver since he was five and he’s 22 now. And guess what? He’s a race car driver, okay.

Diana Joseph:

But most of us, it’s not like that. Most of us don’t have that kind of focus where we’re giving up a lot of other things that we could be interested in. Most of us especially if we were good in school, we have a lot of achievement motivation that’s going. We want to get that high score, we want to get ranked the way our context can rank us, right? So there’s achievement motivation, there’s maybe really deep interests, there’s social motivations, we want to be like somebody, and we want to be unlike somebody else that connects with identity. So there’s so many things that are going on. It was really hard to thread that needle.

Douglas:

I was just thinking that, I would imagine it can be difficult to sometimes align those things that can sometimes be at odds with each other. If you’re trying to self-actualize your dreams and this notion of wanting to be successful on the test or whatever context is thrown you, that situation may not align with this future goal, right? And that can be hard.

Diana Joseph:

Absolutely, and those things can be intention with each other. And I think in general, we’re not aware of those different motivations that are going. So because we’re not aware of them, we can’t use them as handles. Once we become aware. Okay, well, so I have my dreams, our intention, there’s some kind of conflict between the step I need to take to pursue my dream and the step I need to take to score well on somebody else’s evaluation. Okay. Well, can I invent my own evaluation that would align better and can I give that primacy in my mind, right? So the awareness becomes really useful.

Douglas:

You know, it makes me think about young adults that have responded to coaching advice with the phrase, “Can I do that?” You know, it’s like this notion of like, “Wait, I can write my own test.” And it’s like, “Yeah, you can.” I think our system has programmed folks to feel like there’s one way to navigate one way to succeed and then I think that permeates our work life and meetings. We run into this all the time with how folks show up as professional and they’re expected to behave or be a certain way. And I think a lot of times that’s at odds with our desire to innovate, ideate, create when we come in and we stifle all that because we’re trying to be so buttoned up and professional. And so that brings me to something that we were talking about in our pre-show chat, which is this work that you do, bringing together corporates and startups and I think startups are like maybe more stereotypically playful.

Douglas:

They’re in the garage tinkering, they’re the explorers, they’re the little sapling that’s just kind of does go in any which way it can to find the sunlight. Whereas like the big corporates, the big Oak tree, that’s like, it is what it is. It’s like not very malleable, it’s established. And so there must be some really interesting stories or even tactics that you found to help bridge that gap and bring those two together so they can work together without the classic example I’ve always heard is, like startups working with corporates is kind of like dancing with elephants. And so how do you help the startup not get crushed by the elephant?

Diana Joseph:

That’s such an important question. Let me give you a little more context of the kinds of experiences that I’m creating. Sometimes I’m bringing together the corporates with each other. So corporate innovators who work with startups need to talk to other corporate innovators who work with startups, because it’s really hard to develop best practices by yourself. It’s really hard to see what’s happening in the landscape when you only have one perspective to look from. And you’re also in this challenging social situation where you’re sitting in that exact tension that you were talking about, Douglas. Your job is to connect the internal stakeholders who have these very, very aligned tasks to fulfill every quarter that have been promised all the way up the hierarchy to the SCC. And on the other hand, you have your external stakeholders who are the startups, and they have a totally different set of goals and timelines that are truly existential for their company or their idea.

Diana Joseph:

And so the corporates like to talk to each other, there’s value in them just talking to each other within that same role. And then of course, there are times when we bring the corporates and the startups together to talk about what’s getting in the way. I’m working in situations where both sides recognize that it’s important to make that connection happen, but they haven’t been enabled to figure out how to do it. And then there were other times when we’re thinking about the whole ecosystem and we have stakeholders from all around our region or all around a particular industry challenge. So to zero in on the context where we have corporates and startups at the table, I’ll tell you the story of an experience that we built in December of 2019, which I want to say is last year, there’s like a whole missing one in there, but it was one of our last live experiences that we did before the pandemic.

Diana Joseph:

One important part of it was the curation. So we worked very, very closely with the corporates who were the sponsors of the experience to understand what they saw as the challenges that were stopping them from really connecting with the startups. This was for the materials industry. It was called Bridging The Gap Materials Giants, and Startups. So we curated on the giants side to understand what the most critical questions were. And then we curated on the startup side, went out and found startups who had their own challenges and questions, not necessarily the exact same ones that would work together.

Diana Joseph:

So that was certainly possible. But someone who had startups who had tried working with corporates and had good perspective on what had and hadn’t worked in that context. And then we designed a separate moment within that day long workshop, we designed a separate moment for each of those curated topics. One of them was a discussion. One of them was a poster fair. The corporates felt like they never got a chance to tell, they listened to pitches from the startups all the time, but they never get a chance to tell the startups what they’re about, what they care about, what matters to them. So they got to have a poster fair.

Douglas:

I love that. I was part of an event, I got brought in to help with an event where a group was working with corporates and they were kind of defaulting to their normal practices and standard like protocols, right? And one of them was like the startup pitches, right? And I couldn’t help but think to myself like, “Man, you brought these corporates in and they’re just going to listen to a bunch of pitches.” Like, I mean, it seems like there’s so much more of potential there and if I was at a corporate, I don’t know if I’d want to come like mentor startups and give them advice on their pitches and listen to pitches versus like help try to solve my problem, right?

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And celebrate my wins. Everyone loves a little struggle of the ego, right? And so this poster event sounds as music to my ears because I feel like so many times the corporates are just brought in and kind of paraded around these typical kind of situations that the startup communities kind of doing. And it’s like, I think if we’re going to bridge ecosystems, we need to rethink things and it sounds like you’re exploring some new approaches.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. I think it’s, what you’re describing is the only moment where the corporates and startups get to talk to each other is this performative moment of the pitch. So the startups have worked on that and they’ve polished it and they boil it down to something tiny and either it hits exactly what the corporates happened to need, or it doesn’t because in that context, that’s the only thing the corporates are listening for is, does it hit? Okay, great. It’s a pitch. Either it’s going to solve my problem or it won’t. What we did in this event was to change the conversation to be like, how can we work together better? It’s on the side. So is a little bit disarming. You don’t have, it’s not only that one moment you get to have a longer conversation and get a sense for what these people are like as people, while working on something that’s important to both of you.

Douglas:

It’s also explorative and generative too. Right? So, like there’s new things that emerge from that situation versus like just things that are going into it.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, definitely. So, yeah.

Douglas:

That’s really beautiful. That’s cool. So what are some of the things that you found that make for good relationships or foster a better connection through these folks that seem to be at completely different levels and vantage points?

Diana Joseph:

There’s a game that I like to play at the beginning of every session and I’m sure I steal parts of it from somewhere. So I apologize to whoever I’m not crediting, but I call it spectrum. And the way it works is I ask a question to which the answer is a quantity. So it’s a number or a size or something like that. And then people need to move in the room to represent their answer to that question. So I might say, how old is your company? So in the materials room, for example, this event I was describing, there was a company that’s 150 years old. And there was another company that just incorporated two weeks ago, right? So, you can see the difference and you can see that there could even be some overlap. Size of company, not much overlap their comfort level with innovation.

Diana Joseph:

We could see among the corporates, how things were different there. And because people have to move around, they have to talk to each other to find the right place. If I ask, how long have you been in your current position? People have to move and they have to talk with each other. So there’s an icebreaker component to that. There’s informational component to that because we can all see in the room, the answer to this question. It inspires other questions. So people start to put in, well, here’s what I’d like to see next. Here’s what I’d like to see us represent next. And that gets the ball rolling on dialogue.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve heard that referred to as the human histogram and I love it because it’s visual, right? To your point, there’s information that’s being shared, but it’s highly visual. We can just look across the room and get a really quick read on it. And then to your point, as people are getting inspired by, Ooh, I’d like to see this next, you’re building alignment, commitment, connection, all these good things are kind of coming out. That’s really, really great. And I love that you’ve got these two groups and you’re thinking about questions that might cause a little bit of blurring of the boundaries, which can be a really eyeopening moment for them. It’s like, maybe we’re not so different.

Diana Joseph:

Right. How long does it take you to get a contract signed?

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s so good. Oh, man. Well, amazing. So I want to talk a little bit more about the designing of your experience because I think that’s something that our listeners do a lot of. And also when we talk about meetings, this is something that we’re passionate about, drawing inspiration from folks that are creating workshops, events, any kind of experience, and how do we make our everyday meetings experiences? And the advice of just bringing agendas, it’s just not enough, right? We need to think about what is the arc of the experience? How does it start? How does it end and how do we want people to feel? I mean, even if people just did a human histogram in their status meeting, right? That might elevate things a little bit, it’ll be memorable. That’s for sure. So I would want to hear more about your process for designing experiences and if there’s any tips or tricks or things that listeners might be able to borrow from.

Diana Joseph:

Great. I mentioned curation. So these aren’t quite everyday meetings. These are sort of big, significant milestone meetings that we’re having. So, it feels appropriate to invest a lot into the curation. So we know that the questions were addressing are burning questions before we go in. We think a lot about who in the room should kick off the discussion or the workshop around a particular question. It’s not often an expert. It’s often somebody who has the problem. Someone who can tell a story about it, someone who is puzzled by it. By starting with a question or starting with a puzzle that invites, it creates a white space. It creates space that the rest of the community, the rest of the people at the meeting can speak into. So right from the beginning, we’re sort of creating a vacuum that pulls participation forward, if that makes any sense.

Douglas:

It makes total sense. And I love this idea of bringing the non-expert into, oh, we always talk about how, when you’re in a complex system, experts aren’t super valuable because their experience may not be applicable. And experts have a tendency to bring the solutions that worked in the past. And you know, what we’re facing right now might not be exactly what the expert saw. If they’re able to listen to someone who’s going through something and share that story, then they might be able to take all their experience and offer up some interesting insights. But if we start with the expert it might, all the people experiencing stuff, it might cloud their memory or even their vantage point of, they might get this false sense of hope that, oh, I just go take that pill the expert mentioned and it’ll be all good. Right? Whereas if we start with that curiosity, that story, it also shapes the narrative, right? Like, because we’re going to work best the perspective we’re going to look at it from.

Diana Joseph:

You make me think of the design thinking toolkit concept of the T-shaped person. Right? So everyone in the room has some expertise. We curate for that as well. You have some expertise, it’s different expertise from the person next to you. So if you’re very, very good in some particular point, but you’re also very good at connecting, listening, and sharing, then the group together can make a lot more sense. I think you have to have expertise in it, again, in a complex system there are going to be pieces of it that could be oversimplified if there are no experts in the room. If you put the experts in a context where there’s dialogue between them and between the generalists, between them and the generalists, there’s a lot of power there.

Douglas:

100%. And you know, I had written down a bunch of notes as you were talking today. And there’s some things I was able to come back to and other things that just kind of got lost in the forward momentum. But one thing I’m going to come back to, because it applies to what we’re saying now, as you mentioned, anthropology, and it just struck me just then it’s like a lot of this work is about being an anthropologist, whether we studied in school or not, right? Like, you’re kind of thinking about what’s going on here and how do we shape this little mini tribe, if you will.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, when you said that, it made me think of myself as an anthropologist, trying to understand people. But also I think, I never thought about it this way before, but I think I’m also trying to invite everyone else in the room to be an anthropologist. Let’s understand each other. And it comes back to something that you said before also about invitation. I think the primary job that I have in designing these experiences is to create the invitation for a participation, the invitation to bring your ideas, the invitation, to bring your questions. And that’s what really shapes the outcomes.

Douglas:

I totally agree. I think that your point around nailing the research, so often we see issues with teams and just not doing enough preparation, right? It’s like they could kind of Intuit the moves. They could come together and collaborate. But the thing is, if we haven’t done the research upfront, we don’t even know what meeting we’re having. We don’t even know what workshop we’re doing. We’re just kind of maybe going through some motions, or we kind of put something on the calendar because we felt like the project needed to move forward. But if we just spend some time thinking about the questions that we want to ask, thinking about who might need to ask that question or share that story, I think everything else, especially if you got any bit of experience or skill, everything else works itself out, right? Like, once you figure that stuff out, it’s like, oh, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like it’s all unfolding before me.

Diana Joseph:

Yes. Yes, exactly. It’s almost like the more careful curation and design I do upfront, the less active facilitation I do in the room, because we’ve made the space call forth the behaviors that we’re looking for. We’ve made the timeline call forth the behaviors we’re looking for, we’ve made the materials call forth the behaviors we’re looking for. And then as facilitators, we can just come in and make a little point here and there to move things along if they need anything.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’d love to talk about setting the initial conditions. You know, it’s almost like a science experiment it’s like when they built a large hydrogen Collider, they then just get in there and just say, “Oh, how do we guide these particles?” They came with a very, very solid hypothesis based on research, set up very specific guidelines and then let it run. And then it stuff popped up that was unexpected. Then they would address those things, right?

Diana Joseph:

Right.

Douglas:

And then when they run an experiment, they’re probably just kind of sitting back for the most part and monitoring and making sure everything’s good. And to me, I never really thought about the analogy of facilitators or research scientists, but that’s probably not a bad way to approach it, which brings me back to another point that I had written down and I want to hear more about, which is design-based research.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So help me understand a little bit more about, I can intuit based on some of the things you were saying, but it sounded like it’s a very developed methodology or body of work. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and how it continues to play a role in your work today.

Diana Joseph:

Design-Based research is a social science framework that recognizes that things are going to change. If you are doing work that’s intended to change the world, the intended to change even a small world, right? If you’re researching something that is intended to change its local environment, then your data is going to change. So a survey is not going to work. An interview is not going to work. We needed, there were actually a number of us who are thinking about building learning environments that were supposed to have impact. And we knew that we were going to need to iterate based on what we were learning. So we had to sit down and lay out what would be a disciplined way of thinking about that. It can’t be just that we randomly do whatever we feel like. That’s not science. It’s not comparable. It’s not credible.

Diana Joseph:

On the other hand, if we tried to hold, if we try to control, like in a lab science experiment, if we try to have a control group, that doesn’t work in the context of education, because it’s people who are doing things. You can’t teach one way for an hour and then teach a different way for another hour without being influenced across those two cases. So, we had to think about iteration. We had to think about how we could change goals. Maybe we would discover, maybe we discovered in the course of our work that we had the wrong intentions to begin with, we had to be willing to change any piece of it. So we actually formed something that we ended up calling the Design-based Research Collective and about 10 of us worked together very closely for, I don’t know, it was a long time ago now, maybe a year, to lay out the ideas we had about how design-based research could work.

Diana Joseph:

And it’s interesting. We still see people citing that early paper from time to time. The way it works for me most now is, it’s very close to design thinking. So design-based research and design thinking are very similar to each other in that they permit iteration, they focus on design, creating something that’s useful. The biggest difference is that in design-based research, we’re trying to develop theory. We’re trying to understand what are the repeatable principles from doing something this way. And in design thinking, we’re trying to make something.

Diana Joseph:

I think that on the research side, we’re not always good about finishing the project and getting it out in the world to have impact. Something that graduate students work on and then they move on to something else. On the other hand, design thinking is not as strong at developing the theory. So we make something that’s really powerful, but what happens to the lessons that we learned from that experience? Often they just kind of blow away in the wind. So sitting in the middle, having experience with both of these has been really helpful for me and remembering to pay attention to both sides of that equation.

Douglas:

Wow. That’s super fascinating. I’m going to have to dig the paper up and check it out because I can completely understand and appreciate what you’re saying about how the theory gets left behind. Right? Because while design thinking can make change in the world, that change is driven by economic interests. And sure there’s probably some nonprofits and stuff that are like doing some design thinking, but at the end of the day, those people get grants and they have budgets. And so there’s like, there’s funding that’s driving this work. Right? And so there’s limits to the focus, right? And so the focus is deliver this thing, deliver this change. There’s a lack of focus or incentives and rewards to codify and extract out the principles, the theory that are repeatable, like what does this mean for greenhouse gases? I don’t care. I’m working on like cleaning like water or whatever. So, yeah, that’s fascinating.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, I think the same is true on the other side. So if you’re in Academia, whatever methods or whatever field you’re in, there’s also a need to make that financially sustainable. So you’re writing grants and those grants are dependent on you writing papers that are publishable. And it takes a really long time to collect the data that allows you to publish. That’s a much slower timeline than actually producing something that works, right? So producing something that works well enough to collect the data is as far as you really need to go if your incentives are to raise funding for your lab and get tenure. You don’t have to finish the things that you’re making.

Diana Joseph:

So it takes really something. And there are many professors who get past that. They have to really invest in bringing it forward into the world, because it’s not what they’re incentivized on to begin with. In the same way that if you’re in design thinking or innovation in any context, you’re incentivized to make something happen. You’re not incentivized to sit down. And it really takes something for you to invest the time to write it down in a way that you’ll remember and that others will remember, maybe not make the same mistake.

Douglas:

You know, there’s also, we’re getting into some interesting territory but there’s another issue that I think Academia faces, which is a big challenge, right? Because even if you do get passionate about pursuing the work and you take it out to go kind of productize or commercialize and expanded out, there’s this concept of voltage drop, which is like the work we did in the lab and the hypothesis we had and the research we did. Once we start taking it to different audiences or different scenarios, we start to realize, oh, okay, this actually is not quite as repeatable in different scenarios. Right? And now we have to go figure out why that is. And do I have the energy or the runway to go do that or is there another problem that might be more interesting to go research, right? So like what I love to do, what I have the gumption to do, and is it even a solvable problem, Right? It’s like looking at like, “Oh, wow, how do we even address this?”

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. That makes me think about all the innovation projects where we think of this idea of failure as kind of being a problem, because if it didn’t become commercially viable, so it failed. But look at all the things that you learned along that path. Like, okay, so that was a dead end. You learned that was a dead, at minimum, you learned that’s a dead end. We’re not going to do that again. But also you might’ve learned why it turned out to be a dead end then you can apply that principle. So there’s so much value in making these attempts. And then saying no, closing the door when it’s time.

Douglas:

You know, I think also there’s like an identity crisis too, right? Because it’s like, am I an entrepreneur or am I a researcher/academic? Right. Because when you cross that threshold and then it’s like, oh, this isn’t scaling like I thought. I sure I learned these lessons, but do I want to continue to be an entrepreneur or do I want to go back to what I know and what I love maybe? So I think it’s a really fascinating challenge. And I watched it from a distance because I’ve never really, I’ve never been a researcher but it’s super fascinating.

Diana Joseph:

I feel it really personally now, not so much the researcher side, but there’s doing the actual work of designing these experiences and the curation and bringing people together. And then there’s the business side, and I’m not a business person. That’s not where I come, I mean, I am now because I put myself in that, but it’s not my background. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about, well, where can we partner? Maybe someone is a researcher who needs somebody who’s got a stronger focus on the business. Maybe not everybody has to wear all of the hats at the same time.

Douglas:

There’s got to be some interesting models. I’ve seen some accelerators that have focused on helping academics commercialize some of their inventions. And it really, the ones I’ve talked to tell me that it really depends on the university’s policies around IP.

Diana Joseph:

So much.

Douglas:

And because if they’ve locked it down too tight, then it’s like it doesn’t give them much wiggle room to even help the academic, right?

Diana Joseph:

Tech transfer is like this really boring thing that has such a huge impact. We’re actually hearing about it a lot on the Ecosystem Show that you mentioned before. So every week we’re visiting a different entrepreneurial ecosystem, often in biotech. We’re doing this one hour thing on clubhouse in lots of different places. So like this week was London, next week was Paris. And tech transfer comes up all the time in so many places. It really depends culturally, it depends on where you are by country, even by city, even by school, how the tech transfer office is thinking about IP.

Diana Joseph:

Sometimes the university has pressure on the tech transfer office to make lots of money. And so then they ask faculty, who are starting a business, to give them lots and lots of equity in the business. And once they do that, it’s not possible for VCs to invest. It’s not, they’ve made themselves into a non-investible business or the university has made it into a non-investible business. And so then it doesn’t succeed and doesn’t make money for the university either. At the same time, there is this agreement that’s been made where the university has invested a lot and has an interest. And so working out what that’s going to be is really important. A place that does it really well is University of San Diego, if people want to investigate.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s great. It’s great to have examples where it’s done well. So I want to just shift gears, yet again. So this is, as we kind of start to close here, I want to come back to something that really kind of struck me. You know, we’ve talked quite a few times previously and it’s all really focused around the corporate accelerator work. And I’m just for the first time starting to realize your background and learning and learning science, and that’s something that I’ve come to appreciate a lot in the last three years, working with Eric, our VP of learning experience design, and kind of thinking about how we train facilitators and ultimately launch our certification program. And he’s mentioned that, it got my gears turning, I got really curious. I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially with this design-based research stuff you were doing around building, almost like adapting classroom or learning environment.

Douglas:

What would be your advice to folks that maybe are tuning in, that are interested in facilitation or are just getting started, or maybe they’re feeling like they’re just need to up their game in some way, especially in these times of rapid change. We’re on, S-curves seem to be just killing S-curves and the rate of change is just quite insane. I would imagine your concepts and your background could be quite informative for folks that are interested in amplifying their learning and how they can go about becoming better facilitators, better professional. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to navigate that and what the learning process, how people should approach the learning process right now.

Diana Joseph:

I think, and often say that everybody has to be more entrepreneurial. We should be very, very good at being entrepreneurial as human beings. We’ve evolved for it. We have two really strong capacities. One is about discipline, finishing things and staying aligned. And we’ll call that the discipline muscle and is particularly strong in those of us who liked school. You liked school and did well in school. School’s really good at building that discipline muscle.

Diana Joseph:

The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That’s where we’re going out on a limb, we’re taking a risk, we’re being creative, we’re curious about what might happen if. And that muscle should also be very strong in us, right? We’re predators and we have to adapt, right? So on the one hand, we’re flock animals. We’re very good on the discipline side. On the other hand, we are predators and we should be very good on the initiative side, but school doesn’t really help us very much with the initiative side.

Diana Joseph:

So those of us who did well in school tend to be sort of weak in that particular muscle. And those of us who hated school might actually be a lot stronger in it because we made it happen that way. I’m the first kind. So for me, learning by trying things out in the world, is really hard and scary, but it’s so much faster and more efficient than going to school and getting a degree in it. Not to say that you shouldn’t do that. When you know exactly what expertise you want, that can be really perfect. But when you’re trying to figure out what’s going to be my style of facilitation, let’s say, what am I going to offer in particular? Or when you’re trying to figure out, who’s the audience that I can benefit most effectively so that I can create my line of work?

Diana Joseph:

I would say that the way to learn is to just try it. That’s what tells you what questions to go look up on Google? That’s what tells you where you need extra practice. That’s what tells you what the unsolved problems are. And you said something about it earlier too and it made me think, this is what I thought being an adult was, and I really never did it before the last few years. I was always waiting for somebody to tell me which boxes I needed to check next. And so I invite people to step over that line, into the uncertain place where you just make a decision and it might be wrong. And that’s where the learning comes from.

Douglas:

I love that. So good. We often say practice makes practice.

Diana Joseph:

Well-Put.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, it’s been so good chatting with you today, Diana, and I want to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought. So is there anything you’d like them to keep in mind or maybe how to find you, or the work that you do? I just wanted to give you an opportunity to send the message.

Diana Joseph:

Thank you. The easiest way to find me is at corporateacceleratorforum.com. You can sign up for our newsletter to learn about experiences that are coming up, and we have lots of them that are free and open. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You’re welcome to direct message me there. I think I’m the first Diana Joseph that comes up, although there are many of us. I’d love to talk to folks. That’d be great.

Douglas:

Excellent.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much for having me Douglas. This was really thought provoking for me.

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.

The post Episode 52: The Critical Corporate/Startup Collaboration appeared first on Voltage Control.

“It’s all about how you work with teams, not as a collection of individuals, but as a team, as an organism essentially. And that just completely changed the way that I facilitate and work with teams.” – Sarah B. Nelson

Sarah Nelson is the Senior Director of Design at PepsiCo, where she leads the charge of design thinking programs forward to drive key outcomes.  Sarah seeks to uncover the patterns & relationships her teams practice to develop greater strategies and leverage better results. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Sarah and I discuss the impact of design thinking for team success in organizations, the collaboration efforts teams must exemplify, the “worthy workshop” intention and expectation, and the ongoing mindset of learning. Listen in to hear how Sarah is reinforcing design thinking as the foundation forward in her organization and beyond.

Show Highlights

[00:50] Sarah’s World Into Design & Facilitation
[03:30] The Collaboration Realization
[11:20] The Worthy Workshop Intention
[16:00] The Learning Epiphany
[25:05] A Collective Step Forward

Links | Resources

Sarah’s LinkedIn
PepsiCo
Facilitating.design

About the Guest

Sarah B. Nelson is the Senior Director of Design Thinking Adoption at PepsiCo, where she guides teams from a facilitator approach to grow together collectively through collaboration and innovation. Sarah’s design background spans 20 years with her expertise in digital design, service design, design thinking, and facilitation. She challenges teams to adopt new ways of working to incorporate better practices for the success of the organization. As the former director of Sales and Design Strategy at IBM, Sarah led strategies and client-centered activation programs, along with design thinking services for teams in the greater Austin area. Inspired by the transformational impact of design thinking, Sarah founded The Radical Visionary, an organization that supports women creatives to lead inspired design initiatives through coaching and leadership development. Sarah’s mission centers around the core of design-driven culture change to create spaces for teams to thrive. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. 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.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

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 with the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Today I’m with Sarah B. Nelson of PepsiCo Design and Innovation where she is leading design thinking adoption throughout the organization. She is also a well-known speaker on developing radically human creative culture. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Hey, I’m glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Douglas:

Yeah, me too. So let’s start off with just a little bit about how you got your start. How did you end up getting into this world of design and facilitation?

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. Back in forever ago, I was a designer in what is now called user experience. Long enough ago that we call it different things. I’ll just go straight, it was a pain point, collaboration was a huge pain point. And I realized that the quality of our outputs was directly related to the quality of our creative relationships. So I wanted to know how that worked. And I just started down kind of pursuing with that question, how can we make what I sometimes call start users? What would that environment need to look like in order to best serve our end users? And I just kept going more and more down into that world and I discovered participatory design and of course design thinking, which is all in that same family. And just got really excited about how do we design with people, not at or for them. How do we really capture all of the different kinds of knowledge that people have and I just nerded out over it.

And I think there’s so much in there and you kind of keep peeling away things, it starts to get into emotional dynamics. So I kind of moved more and more into that and I started a company called Radically Human which was specifically about how do we create these teams and doing consultant work around that and training facilitators. And as part of that, I just started looking at all other kinds of facilitation practices outside of the world of design. One that I love that I got certified in is called Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching. And it’s all about how you work with teams, not as a collection of individuals, but as a team, as a organism essentially. And that just completely changed the way that I facilitate and work with teams.

It becomes about, how do you create an environment? How do you tap into all and pull all of the different knowledge together? So that’s kind of the long journey and I’ve been working in enterprise for a while, I was at IBM and now PepsiCo. And it just kind of gets bigger and bigger. How do we create creative environments? How do we make creative cultures that bring all that to life and enable that? And it’s just bigger and bigger problems than earlier problems, I would say. They get more and more complex but that’s the basic.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’m kind of curious, is there a story behind that first moment when you realized that it was all about collaboration?

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. I was on this small team, there were three of us and we worked on a project together and it had an amazing outcome. This was in an agency so we had a client. And it was just like, we were so proud of the work and it was just a fantastic project. And then, same team, same three from our agency, we worked on another project and it was a huge disaster. And I was like, “Okay. So it’s not… The three of us, our dynamic is we’re still good. What changed?” And it was, a person changed. But that started me asking the question of, “What is it that changed?” And so that was, okay, so you add somebody else and how our relationship with them is just somehow different. So it was literally that oh of okay, now I’ve got to start figuring out what just happened. And that was really the moment that started me on that.

Douglas:

This sounds eerily familiar because I’ve found this tendency in myself when it’s like, sure, I love the work and the outputs and the things that we’re doing but I always found myself thinking a lot about how we did the work, and how we interacted, and who showed up when and in what ways and who said what. That’s the stuff I find that can get very deeply analytical about and it sounds like you have similar patterns.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. I’m definitely a pattern seeker. And I think one of the things that there’s a framework, it’s a Welsh word, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s called the Cynefin framework, and I can’t remember his name but-

Douglas:

Snowden.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Snowden, thank you. I was like, I should remember that. Snowden, right? Not of the Edward variety. And what I loved about that was that it helped me kind of understand pattern seeking in a different way. And so in the beginning, what I was trying to do is box it up. If I can find, if then statements, if this happens, then this happens, that there’s some magic formula somewhere I’m going to really open it all up. And when he talks about, simple versus complex systems or simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic, that I realized that every human problem is a complex system. And so what he would say to that is that complex systems are not knowable in advance, you can never put them into boxes. Because they’re always dynamic, they’re always changing. So something will start to work but something else will actually take over. Or something works and it causes a whole chain reaction of something else and you can’t really control it. All you can do is continuously reflect on it and then make another kind of a move and then reflect on it. And you can only really know it in retrospect.

And that kind of freed it up. I don’t have to make a taxonomy of this stuff or a hierarchy because it’s impossible. So now….

Douglas:

Yeah.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Now I’m just working with the system that’s there.

Douglas:

I remember when I first learned about Cynefin and it was one of those moments where you’re like, “Whoa, someone just explained all the stuff that I’ve been thinking, but haven’t been able to articulate and much deeper than I was able to unravel?” And it was almost this moment of peace where it was like, “Oh wow. Now I can just let it be and do this stuff.” And we actually had one of his understudies, Daniel Walsh speak at our Design Sprint meetup. And he was explaining how the phenomenons of complexity explain why design sprints work because design sprints were created by practitioners. It’s always fascinating to me when academics can then come back and explain, “Oh, here’s why this stuff worked.” It wasn’t like they dreamed this stuff up in a lab to follow some Scientific viewpoint or whatever. And it’s really funny because he really summarized it as the design sprint is a probe. And if you’re in complex environments, you need probes to understand the environment, to know how to act.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. Yeah. There is a quote, I don’t know if I can pull it back together, but I was in this really interesting session this morning. I do work at PepsiCo, but on one of our core things around sustainability. And so there’s all these really cool initiatives, things like reasonable plastics and stuff. But specifically, there’s a new thing, it’s called positive agriculture. It’s a big initiative now around sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture which I know that’s not part of this topic, but the point about that is it’s a very complex system that there is no such thing as basically as a single kind of farmer. And land is different, climate’s different, all over the world, and culture is different. So this is, how do you transform? Right now, the thing that’s hard is seven million acres of traditional farmland that is terrible for the climate.

How do you transform that into this rich soil that is pulling… There’s tons of benefits, but the guy’s quote was something along the lines of, “Don’t try to figure out where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re going. Just do it. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy.” He was…do it. Otherwise, you’ll go crazy. He said, “Do lolly.” He was in English. He said, “Otherwise, you’ll go do lolly. So just go do it.” And I thought, “That is right. You don’t always know.” So a pro, to your point around design spreads, that was my long walk back to what you’re saying, but as a pro, I think that’s the only way that you can deal with these massive problems. And even whether you’re at the massive world climate change challenge, or you’re dealing with exploring a new way to do a product or an even a new interaction, which you don’t know what it is first, and I think the folly of you have to know what the outcome is and we’ve got to just target it and get us there.

Douglas:

Yeah, I think that’s one of the hallmark differences between complex and complicated, right?

Sarah B. Nelson:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

If it’s complicated, sure, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to require a lot of experts and a lot of research, but there is a seeable knowable outcome and we can just get after it. And I think, definitely, if people are trying to solve complex problems with complicated approaches, it’s not going to end well.

Sarah B. Nelson:

I love that. I know we might be beating a dead horse here, but I love, there was a metaphor that I heard once that was about cloud problems and clock problems. It’s essentially the same thing. You could pull up clock apart and you could put it back together, and it’s knowable by the pieces, but clouds are always changing. They’re always different. So you can’t know a cloud. You can understand maybe weather patterns, you can observe things, but you’re never going to know a cloud.

Douglas:

That’s really great.

Sarah B. Nelson:

[crosstalk 00:10:43] the quote was, “Most people treat our working as cloud problems, but they treat them like clock problems.” And that’s the funny part.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s a really good, I like that. I think it’s a little more approachable than my go-to example has always been a jumbo jet is complicated, but mayonnaise is complex.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And that really trips them up, because they’re like, “Wait a second. But you can’t unmake a mayonnaise.”

Sarah B. Nelson:

That’s true. You can’t unmake it.

Douglas:

If you leave it on the counter, it won’t be the same tomorrow as it is today.

Sarah B. Nelson:

And maybe the people around you won’t either. Yeah.

Douglas:

So I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about something that came up in our pre-show chat around this notion of, the one and done workshop and how this work is really about more than that. It’s not about this flash in the pan, which is a real risk in this. It’s an occupational hazard because a lot of people say, “Oh, not another workshop,” and you and I both know that if we’re intentional about this stuff, we can get much better, more longterm impacts. You shared some thinking that you’ve been doing around collaborative journeys and I found it really intriguing, so I’d love to talk about that a little bit.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think I like the term occupational hazard, that people have a lot of poor workshop experiences and one of the hallmarks of that is that we got together, we got a lot of work done, or we had a great time and we felt really energized and we left, and nothing happened. And that’s what the objection is, then why should I go back and do that if nothing comes from it? And at its worst, then it becomes, well, let’s take the design thinking example, there’s others, obviously, other methodologies, but design thinking is a workshop. It’s a workshop with Post-it Notes. And at the end of it, you leave and, again, nothing happens. So ergo, design thinking is a BS process. And it’s like, well, no, because you misunderstood what it is and how you use it.

So when I think of collaboration journeys, whatever methodologies that you’re using, it’s really about thinking of a workshop as a touchpoint in a journey around probes are around creative problem solving. And so workshops have a very specific function in that journey, which is, let’s actually tackle a few things with enough people in the room in a way that we can focus without being disturbed for a longer length of time. But really there’s all these other touch points all the way through, so it might be people working asynchronously on something and the tools that allow you to chat or leave notes for each other. That’s also a part of the collaboration journey. And there’s other things where it might be how we critique something, or it could be how we work together in a short meeting. But all of those things is what we’re working towards. Where is it we’re trying to go? And what I like to do is start with the end and work backwards. So I even design working sessions that way.

So one of the first questions that I ask people that I’m either facilitating workshop or creating this is, at the end of this session when everybody walks out, either what is different or what have we accomplished? So let’s not talk about what methods we’re going to use. Let’s talk about what the transformation we need to see, and what do we think that’s going to enable next? So you can that and say at the end of this entire journey, “What have we accomplished?” We might not know what the solution is, but just starting to get sharp about what our objectives are. They can be a little softer, but working back from that, and then constantly saying, “We have this hypothesis of how this collaboration is going to work,” but we might get to the end of this one workshop and we actually need to work together on a couple of other things.

But as facilitators, it means that we have to set expectations that you’ve asked me potentially to facilitate a workshop. Actually, I’m going to reframe it. We actually need to get you to an outcome and a workshop could be the right way to do it, but it might not be. So let’s get clear on where we’re trying to go, what you’re hoping, what your dream is, and then work back from there. So that’s very much a traditional facilitation, but that’s why I think design sprints are really similar. It’s that same idea of we’re going to work in this unit, but we know that there’s going to be another one and another one. So we’re constantly thinking about where it’s going to go as we go. So I think about that as a journey, and then as a facilitator, you’re taking people along a journey. You can borrow tools from service design to think about what that experience is like too.

Douglas:

I love that you point out this idea of borrowing from service design, because something we’ve been doing very heavily is leaning on learning experience design and some of the concepts around learning science.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yes.

Douglas:

Because the epiphany that I had when I was working with Eric on this was that anybody who’s attending your workshop is a learner, even if you’re not teaching them something.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yes.

Douglas:

Because they have to learn from other co-workers around what their ideas are and internalize them. And if we don’t create environments and conditions for good learning, then we’re probably not going to have great workshop or great collaboration.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, actually, I think that’s a great model. I’ve actually been doing a lot more learning design. I’m trying to be better about just saying, “If you want to call it a training, I’ll call it a training.” But it’s not about traditional training, in fact, in terms of learning the latest thinking about learning, it’s the same thing as design thinking as a workshop. Training as a two day session doesn’t really work. Get all energized, I walk out of here, what do I do with this? I’m just going to go back to the way I used to do it. So there’s some really good work from the NeuroLeadership Institute. I don’t know if you’ve run across David Rock.

Douglas:

Mm-mm.

Sarah B. Nelson:

But it’s a neuroscience approach to learning, and what they did was they looked at a number of different factors, as neuroscientists do, information uptake, and how does information get encoded into the brain? And how do you change habits? And how does all that work? And he pulled out patterns within that. He has this model it’s called the Ages Model. And if you just Google “Ages Model and David Rock” you can find it. But essentially, it’s looking at keeping in mind four different pieces when you’re designing learning. So the first thing is around attention. People’s brains really aren’t going to uptake after about 20 minutes of experiencing the same mode of delivery. So you think about these hour long, four hour long, God help, us eight hour long training sessions where there’s somebody up there delivering a deck. You’ve lost them after 20 minutes. They’re probably not retaining a whole lot of that. And so you have to think about attention and how do you design…off a lot of that. And so you have to think about attention and how do you design, even in an hour. There’s the delivery mode, there’s a hands-on mode, there’s a individual reflection mode, there’s a working together. There are these different ways that you put that in for the arc from an attention perspective, then you’re also thinking about whether he calls generation and that’s essentially, is this information relevant to me? And how I’m going to retain it if I can basically attach it to what I care about or what I can use. So you can do things like have people do individual reflection to get that down, and so how do I apply what you just told me? And then there’s emotions, they’ve got to be in the right state of mind, so somebody is coming in all frazzled or sad, or you’ve created… There’s some kind of weird tension in the room, they’re less likely to uptake things.

But the last one that I think is most really important for us, it’s spacing, so that if you want to learn, it has to be over time. So they have tons of studies of where they’ll do a training and they’ll have one group every week do some reinforcement about that training, and then have another group do one reinforcement over the same period of time. And the uptake for the group that had a week and a week and a week between them has a much higher retention than the group that maybe got it. And so it’s that people need to process, people need to have room to integrate learning, to try things out, to hear things over and over and over again.

I think about that when we do a workshop where it’s a one and done. Let’s just, we’re going to analyze our research and we’re going to walk out of here with a framework, and then we’re going to use that framework. And then we’re like, “Why do the stakeholders not remember anything?” So how are we reinforcing? How do we continually come back to it? It’s a lot more complicated than designing a workshop. There’s a lot more, if you’re an individual business, it’s a lot more complicated than selling a workshop. A workshop is a discreet unit that businesses know how to buy. If you tell them you’re going to reframe to outcomes, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t know what that means.” But the cool part is if you do it right, they will pay you so much more money.

Douglas:

Yeah. Well, they’ll reap the benefits, right? It’s interesting that you say it’s a lot more complicated, because the thing that was bouncing through my head was that there’s this fractional nature to this work. When I look at designing the journey, as you refer to it, there’s some transformation, some change that we want to happen. And how do we get from point A to point B, and then what are the touch points? And you work your way backwards. That’s the same way we approach workshop design. We’re starting off here, we’re going to end here, and so we’ll typically apply backwards design and say, “All right, well, if we’re ending here, what happens before that? Where do we get to before that?” And bake in these assessment points, which is another thing that comes from the learning world, because… And I think that’s really powerful, to know if we even got where we were planning on going.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. The works and work that I did at IBM was actually, we were… There was a paper about it. Unfortunately, it’s behind a DMI firewall. But the core of the work is that we were activating sellers in a sales cycle to be able to integrate design thinking into the sales cycle. And so we actually developed a coaching program, it was 12 weeks long. It did have a kind of a traditional training session where they had to learn specific methods, but it had coach sessions over time so they were coached. It also was applied to a real problem that they cared about. But one of the things that was that same thing of, how do you actually, not just how as the leaders of this program, assess the value of what you’re doing and communicate that back to the executives? But more specifically, how do you help the teams realize their own progress and help them adjust on their own where they’re going?

So we developed a… Actually even has a name. I think they call it the behavior change percentage. We actually have a metric, but it allows people to… We tell people what the core behaviors they need to engage in and very tangible behaviors on a regular basis, there’s eight of them. And then we give them a tool that helps them assess on a regular basis as a team how well they think they’re doing on part of that. So it might be, really simple one might be visual collaboration. And we will say on a scale of zero to five, to what degree is your team actually engaging in visual collaboration, and what’s your evidence for it? So over time, they can say, oh, every four weeks, “Oh, you know, this is what we really wanted to get better at, but we actually, when I really reflect on it, our meetings are like this.”

So then as coaches, we can say, “Well, what do you want to do differently to actually bring more of this in?” But it’s very tangible. And we could actually measure over the course of 12 weeks where teams had improvements, and a lot of that was just by showing them where they are and giving them the tools to evaluate and then make decisions on how to improve. That puts responsibility for them, that makes them invested in it, all of that. But that’s the measurement piece, and that’s the way we did it in the program.

Douglas:

Yeah. That reminds me, it just dawned on me as you were talking about that. One thing that we’re big fans of, and I don’t know if I’ve ever articulated this as to why it works, but we love to start with the self assessment piece and that’s a great moment. Well, it’s great data for us to know where people are at and then where they need coaching, but it also helps them connect with that challenge. Because you’re right, it’s always important to start with a challenge people are going to connect with that’s real and pertinent for them. If they’re self-assessing around that challenge, they’re unlocking new thoughts and able to sit with this thinking around the challenge and where they’re at with it.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. So you made me think, there’s a principal in relationship systems intelligence which was that coaching methodology, and that’s, your job is to reveal the system to itself. So you’re essentially a mirror to them that for things that they can’t see. And obviously, we have an idea about what kinds of behaviors are going to help them be successful, but they may or may not realize where they are in that, or they wouldn’t know. It’s the scale of learning, again, it’s, what is it? Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. So we always say that, they don’t know what they don’t know, you have to help them understand where they are and then show them a path to where they need to get to. That’s all learning, but you can definitely do that in applied facilitation, design facilitation through throughputs for those journeys too.

Yeah. I like that you brought that up because I’ve been kind of like, the more I’ve learned about learning, the more I have also been seeing those connections between the two.

Douglas:

I wanted to shift gears once again and bring up this black swan that we’re all still in the middle of, the pandemic, and the cultural shift that you’ve seen, that we’ve all seen around collaboration and around, maybe it was just the forcing function of everyone having to explore remote working and collaborating in new ways.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. So I always feel a little guilty about talking about it this way because this thing that we’ve all been going through is traumatic and tragic, and there’s so many things that are really difficult about it. And there’s huge opportunity in a black swan event like this. And for me specifically, on day one, when I walked into Pepsi Co, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to bring this collaboration journey and I want us to be able to integrate facilitation and visual collaboration and this kind of radical collaboration into everything that we do.” And you have to meet an organization where it is, and there’s a lot of collaboration, they’re very skilled in that. They’re very physical, workshop-based, paper-based, and so that’s kind of where the culture was.

I was like, we’re going to figure out how to bring MURAL in here. I found the pilot group and the IT. I was putting together things that when I would share the information with people, they were like, “But the paper’s working for us.” Which it was, but about three weeks… So I knew I wasn’t going to get any traction on it for a long time. For about three weeks before the lockdown, I could see what was happening in Europe, I could see it coming, what they were saying in California, and I was like, “Guys, we’ve got rooms full of paper and we’re going to lose all this stuff and we’re going to probably have no warning for it.” So I actually started three weeks before the lockdown, really starting to push for the tools.

Sarah B. Nelson:

The lockdown really starting to push for the tools to try to get us ready for it. There was still this trying to learn it but fast forward to a year later, this collaboration as more of a journey as just part of how we work is very much part of the culture now. And we have folks who I’ve heard say like, “I will never go back to that project room based boards moving around way of working because I didn’t realize how cumbersome it was and how impermanent it was.” All of that stuff. So there’s been this real fundamental change and the COVID and the lockdowns just accelerated it. So there’s this interesting, it’s like a weird moment of we’ve got people talking about how we’re going to go back to the way things were.

And so there’s a lot of people who have that mental model. How do we go back? When it’s really not about going back, it’s about going forward. So we are where we are now, what is it going to look like next? And I think that’s just a really exciting place. And what is the next kind of collaboration? Okay. We’re using visual collaboration tools or Google docs and things like that, but how do we then start to bridge that being in person has a certain kind of feeling to it, which is very hard to replace, but what could other models look like? I think there’s just an enormous possibility. I don’t know answers to that stuff. So, that’s what I meant I was excited about. I feel like it’s been a really successful year for the team in terms of… Because now the way we integrate cross-functional folks into it.

There’s so much traction that’s happening, not just inside the design center, but throughout PepsiCo of like, “Wow, we’re able to work more efficiently. We’re able to really bring different folks to the table.” And I do think that’s a permanent change. And in fact, PepsiCo itself has recognized that the way that we’re not really going back. The program is called work that works. And it’s about like acknowledging all of the successes that we’ve had. And now let’s figure out how to continue to do that in a more sustainable long-term kind of a way. So I think there’s a lot of possibility in that but nobody knows what that really is going to look like.

Douglas:

Yeah, I mean, we’re clearly going to go into a realm of experimentation. I think some folks will be a little more intentional about their experiments and some folks are just going to leap straight in and make some unfortunate discoveries.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. There’s going to be people who are super resistant too, who were just like, “Please, please, please. It was so much more comfortable before and I’ve had a miserable year and how can we go back to that?” And I think it’s just going to be hard for those folks.

Douglas:

Yeah. Well, I think there might be space. I mean, there’s definitely folks that don’t have the luxury of having a great office at home who are still working from the kitchen table. I think they’re going to maybe have spaces that are more adequately equipped, but I think that essentially my feeling is what’s going to happen is going to democratize access a little more for folks that don’t have nice internet for whatever reason or a space in their home, but they’re just going to get the experience we’ve had for the last year, right, because they’re going to start tapping in and a more efficient way. We also talked a little bit in the pre-show chat about you remember like study groups and stuff where we all had our laptops open or meetings where we’re together, but we’re still tapping into the systems, whether it be MURAL or whatever, and kind of working away, even though we’re in the same room together.

Sarah B. Nelson:

Yeah. So I like my shout out to MURAL. I worked with their customer experience folks when I was at IBM and they were actually pushing me towards thinking in terms of the workshop, just like you described it, that it’s not just about something you do remotely, but how can you integrate the tools and to do all kinds of things in an in-person setting? So it could be you could imagine teaching, let’s say teaching, a hands-on session where everybody’s actually working inside the MURAL, but you’re also able to like, “Let’s have a conversation while we’re doing it.” Or, people can raise their hands and you can have small breakout groups and they can see each other working. And so it’s still the tool is maybe enabling the conversation or enabling them to make something.

And they might even just turn around and draw something on a whiteboard and photograph that if it makes sense and put it back in and now you’ve got something that’s persistent because I do think, I mean, we were talking about whether hybrid is really a thing, is that such a thing? I do think… So we’re planning, I don’t know how it’s going to work, but we’ll be in the office X number of days for intentional reasons, collaboration and culture and things like that.

So being intentional about it, but it’s never going to be that permanence. It’s never going to be that. I just wanted to actually… One thing I missed when we were talking, I was wanting to just touch on a little bit is your point about unequal work environments or diversity of work environment. So you’ve got people I’m lucky enough to have a really great space to work in. So I quite love my space, but I do, I have most of my colleagues, a lot of them are in 800 square foot apartments in New York city with two kids and another partner that works. So they’re just all trying to manage that and the complexity of that going back. I think we have to figure out how to take that into consideration too. I don’t know what that looks like there.

Douglas:

Yeah, I think that’s what I’m most excited about this transition because people talk about back to work and back to normal or whatever. I think that ideally we lean on everything we learned, but let’s support the folks that have been a little disadvantaged and help them get set up. But let’s not swing the pendulum into a territory that’s not helpful because we all remember what it’s like to be the one person who was sick at home during the big all hands. And they got the polycoms sitting on the conference room table and you can’t hear a thing and it’s a horrible experience. We don’t want to recreate that. And an omni directional microphone in a room full of people, it’s not connection.

Sarah B. Nelson:

I was laughing because I remember this from the polycom stuff. I’ve literally a group having a meeting and then walking out of the room and not hanging up the phone. I don’t even.. Oh, they’re being like… You’ll hear the voice, “Guys are we done?” And you’re like, “Oh my God, we forgot that person completely.”

Douglas:

Yeah. You forgot them so much that you didn’t even hang up the phone. It also reminds me of meetings that we work where the company would leave their computer connected to the monitor and say you’re in the next meeting and they’re checking their Facebook and you’re like, “There’s their Facebook on the monitor.”

Sarah B. Nelson:

That’s a little… That’s true.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s hilarious. Well, pay attention to your tech. It’s important. Excellent. Well, I think that’s kind of getting us to a nice place to wrap. It’s been fun chatting, and I just want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Sarah B. Nelson:

So here’s what I’d leave you all with. I have a website called facilitating.design and that’s where I’m compiling a lot of this work around collaboration journeys. What does it mean to be a collaboration designer and what are tools that you can use to do that? So if you want to visit that, I have sort of a simple tool that you can use to help you start to plan a journey through a collaboration.

Douglas:

Please do check out facilitating.design. And Sarah, I want to give you a big, thank you for joining the show today. It was a pleasure chatting.

Sarah B. Nelson:

It was lovely. I was very energized and I look forward to more conversations.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control of 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.

The post Episode 42: Healing the Collaboration Pain Point appeared first on Voltage Control.

At this point, you likely know all of the virtual tool heavy hitters that make remote work easier. Your team probably has a Slack set up, uses Zoom on the regular, and keeps all of their files in Google Drive. You’ve heard of Figma and MURAL and Canva. Here are 8 virtual collaboration tools that you might not have already heard of.

Virtual Collaboration Tools

1. Nutcache – Nutcache is a virtual project management tool that allows you to plan, track, and organize tasks between team members. What makes Nutcache special amidst a plethora of other task management tools is its emphasis on budget tracking. The software integrates with most major invoice and accounting tools, such as Paypal, Stripe, and Quickbooks. Users can approve timesheets, review expenses, and create and manage invoices within the same platform as their other project management tasks. This is a great virtual collaboration tool for project managers with complicated budget flows and teams whose work requires them to send multitudes of invoices.
2. Mailbird – Teams who collaborate virtually rely heavily on email for communication; while email can be great, inboxes can easily get out of control and overwhelm team members, causing important information or requests to slip through the cracks. The quality and ease of use of team members’ email clients can play a huge role in their ability to manage large amounts of email communication. Mailbird, nicknamed the Outlook Killer, is a multi-account email client for Windows that prides itself on taking no more than 5 minutes to learn. Even those who do not consider themselves particularly good with technology can tame their inboxes with Mailbird.
3. Redbooth – This virtual collaboration tool uses AI to help small and mid-sized teams work transparently and efficiently. Their AI can predict the best team member for a task as well as how long it is likely to take them to complete it. Redbooth integrates with an impressive arsenal of other virtual collaboration tools such as Slack, Dropbox, Outlook, Google Drive – you name it. Redbooth even allows you to conduct HD video meetings from within the program, allowing you to conduct meetings and conferences from the very project management tool that you will be referencing during your meeting.
4. Evernote –  Evernote is a virtual notes app with a plethora of helpful features for virtual collaboration. Pictures, videos, and other files can be attached to notes for visual communication; the app even includes a document scanner so physical documents can easily be added to the virtual note space. Evernote makes it easy to find what you’re looking for with search functions that can detect information in attached PDF’s, even if the information is hand-written rather than typed. The virtual bulletin board features make it easy for teams to share announcements, updates, and words of encouragement.
5. Pastel – If your team is working on creating or updating a website, Pastel is the virtual collaboration tool you didn’t know you needed. Teams can leave comments, mockups, and copy suggestions directly on a view of any website’s pages. This virtual collaboration tool makes exchanging feedback on websites a breeze.
6. Gain – Gain is a virtual collaboration tool for content teams and their clients. Social media posts, video content, blog posts, ad campaigns, websites, emails, newsletters, and any other type of content can be uploaded into the tool. Content can be approved, updated, or given feedback for the rest of the team to work from. Team members can be assigned tasks and tag each other, making for a seamless workflow. The content calendar function allows you to see a visual representation of all content scheduled at a glance and makes organizing or rescheduling content simple.
7. Calendly – Teams collaborating virtually depend heavily on meetings but scheduling these meetings can be a huge pain. Sorting through other’s personal calendars can be overwhelming and back-and-forth emailing about a time that works for both parties is incredibly slow. Calendly helps you schedule meetings and add them to your calendar with ease. Import your calendar, set your availability preferences, then simply share a link with clients or team members. They’ll be able to pick a time that works for them within your availability, then Calendly will add the new meeting to your calendar. Best of all, Calendly is time-zone intelligent, so say goodbye to confusing time zone conversions.8.
8. Yammer – Yammer is a virtual collaboration tool built into Microsoft Office 365; it’s much like a private Facebook for your company. Yammer is a social network for employees that allows them to both collaborate and socialize with their teams and teams from other departments. Users can share updates, customize who appears in their newsfeed, and comment on other users’ updates from within their company’s network. Yammer is a flexible tool that can be used to keep team members up to date on other departments, start meaningful discussions, answer questions, contribute ideas and feedback cross-team, or even rekindle the office small talk that so many of us miss.

Start our Magical Meetings course today!

Learn the methods to make your meetings magical.

Get Started

Want to learn more about how to facilitate successful virtual meetings?

Join us every Thursday at our free community Facilitation Lab–a safe place for facilitators to gather, explore, adapt, and practice facilitation approaches and methods. Join us as a participant and learn through connecting with others or signup to lead a session and try out a new method for the first time. 

The post 8 Virtual Collaboration Tools You May Not Have Heard Of appeared first on Voltage Control.

In several ways, the virtual landscape has made meetings easier. For example, the removal of travel time–whether from a conference room to your office space or a flight across the country–opens up availability; we technically have more time to work when we’re confined to our home offices. And with a conference video chat just a click away, we can get meeting happy. Approach with caution: more meetings is not the answer to meaningful work. In fact, unproductive meetings are one of the biggest challenges of virtual teams. 

Don’t oversaturate your remote team with meetings for the sake of having them.

On the contrary, you should not have a meeting at all unless you have a clear purpose. You must first have an identified objective that you’re trying to obtain or else there is no tangible goal to work toward. The meeting by structure is therefore unproductive before it even begins. Frankly, there are far too many ineffective meetings and we’re on a mission to rid the world of them. A report by Forbes estimated companies will lose $102 billion annually to wasteful meetings in the United States alone. We can change the wasteful meeting dynamic with intentional focus and strategy. The new virtual landscape is an opportune time to adapt and adjust meeting structures to benefit virtual teams, and the same processes can be translated into in-person meetings. Let’s take a look at how we do that. 

Create a Prototype

We often use the mantra “No prototype, no meeting” at Voltage Control. This means if there is not a clear and tangible “prototype” or idea to flush out and explore, then there is no reason to have a meeting in the first place. 

What do we mean by prototype? Nowadays, prototypes can take various forms, and they depend on your objective. For a strategist or project manager, a “prototype” might be a storyboard, written brief, or sample pitch of the idea. A designer may make a mood board; a developer might quickly code something. Whatever prototype best fits your needs, create it, and then plan your meeting to present it and work through it with your team.

This type of structure sets your remote team up to do the work in the meeting, not after, which leads to maximum productivity and ultimately success. We’ve got things backward: we meet and then do “the work” after the meeting.

We’re so busy talking about the work we need to do when we could be rolling up our sleeves and getting to work in the session itself–enter your prototype.

A readied prototype allows your remote team to discuss it, collaborate, and collectively work on it DURING the meeting instead of saving the to-dos for when people disperse back to their own work zones. And when you do the work at the meeting, you eliminate unnecessary team meetups–saving everyone time, money, and sanity.

Tools for Virtual Prototypes

Here are three virtual tools to assist you in building, sharing, and working on prototypes with your remote team for more productive meetings. 

• Mural: A virtual whiteboard tool that allows you to build and share prototypes with remote team members. It also allows you to collaborate on digital Post-it notes and templates (you can also build your own). 

• Figma: Create vector design assets and remotely collaborate with team members, similar to how you collaborate on text in Google Docs.

• Loom: Share your prototype visually/in real-time. Make quick screen captures with a video inset to show your team your idea when you’re not in-person. This is an especially great tool to use for follow-up demos and instructions post-meeting as your team continues to work on the presented idea. When you would otherwise go to someone’s desk to show them how to do something, you can use a Loom video to demonstrate it. 

Practices for Successful Remote Meetings 

So you have your prototype. Now what? The following three practices, from our Virtual Work Guide, will help you structure and lead successful remote meetings. 

1. Schedule with purpose

Have a clear purpose to meet. This should inform your prototype and vice versa. Why do you want to bring your team together? Is it worth their time?

These questions are especially important to ask and answer with remote teams because people are working from home or another location and your meeting is competing against kids, food deliveries, spouses, background noise, etc.

Pro Tip: Address matters that aren’t worth scheduling a collective discussion for via email, Slack, or a newsletter. Remember, a productive meeting is one where you do work together. 

2. Create and distribute an agenda beforehand

Include only essential topics and the prototype you will share. Let people know what you have in mind so that they come prepared to participate–they may even come with ideas about the prototype. An important aspect of an agenda, especially for virtual meetings, is a realistic time table. What will be discussed, and for how long?

Be sure to leave some extra time at the beginning of the meeting to let people set up the appropriate tools they need to participate and for any “technical difficulties” that may arise. Also, allot time at the end of the meeting for people to ask questions about anything they are unsure about. This will make certain everyone leaves the meeting on the same page. Once your agenda is prepared, send it to all attendees in advance to ensure everyone is prepped and ready. This saves explaining time at the beginning of the meeting and your virtual team can dive in. 

3. Break the ice

An icebreaker or energizer warm-up is a great way to get the creative juices flowing at the start of the meeting. They can increase productivity from the jump. The bite-sized activities get people moving and thinking and keeps the energy high. Because your virtual team is not in the same physical space, you are unable to feel the energy of the room.

Consider the mood you want to encourage and pick your icebreaker accordingly. It should be quick, relatively simple, and straightforward. Here are a few examples:

• Guess the Shoes/Desk–have everyone (anonymously) upload a picture of their shoes or their home desk space in a MURAL template. Take turns guessing which pair of shoes/desk belongs to who.
• Creative Color–Choose a specific color and ask all staff meeting attendees to pick an object near them of that color and show it on screen. Knight the person with the coolest object the winner. The winner then chooses the next color and you repeat the process.
• Check out: Sessionlab Energizers and Icebreaker Games & Online Energizers and our Workshop Methods & Activities for more

Be intentional when you plan your next virtual meeting. Come prepared. Have a prototype. Lead your remote team to success. Let’s change the way the world experiences meetings. 

Looking for a Virtual Meeting Facilitator? We Can Help. 

Voltage Control facilitates remote design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out at info@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

The post No Prototype, No Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

Let Voltage Control jumpstart the Discovery phase of your next project

Voltage Control is a trusted, third-party facilitator who can design and manage custom kick-off workshops for your agency’s projects.

Have you ever…

Started a project without the right information
about the challenges, opportunity or customer?

-Struggled to understand what your client truly 
wants and needs?

-Faced scope-creep because of lack of 
communication in the up-front phase?

We design custom workshops that work for your exact needs.

• Agendas Build Just For Your Team
  We can plan 2–5 day workshops and everything in between to suit your goals.
• Led by Our Expert Facilitators
  We’re pros at encouraging collaboration, conversation, and keeping your workshop moving in the right direction.
• Exercises to Uncover the Info You Want
  We have many tricks up our sleeve including Design Sprint 
  methodologies, Canvas exercises, and interactive prototyping.

The benefits of our Rapid Discovery Workshops

• Start with Alignment
  Get a crystal clear, agreed-upon understanding of your client’s needs and the opportunity in a few short days.
• Offload the Details
  Let us sweat the not-so-small stuff: kickoff schedule and agenda, timing, keeping the workshop on-track and more.
• Stay Focused
  Run your business rather than distracting your team with prepping, running and following up on the workshop.
• Protect Your Relationship
  Workshops sometimes require a ‘bad cop’. Better this come from the outside, right?

A bit about how we work…

We believe in inclusive, empathetic, and human-centered design.

-Everyone is welcome: development, design, sales, marketing.

-Stakeholders are included and provide key guidance.

-Brainstorming doesn’t work, so we work differently.

-We set clear expectations and communication strategies.

Testimonials

“A Voltage Control workshop enables us to learn more about the project and submit a scope of work faster than we could have believed. Voltage Control facilitating frees us up to focus on the client and their project.” — Jim Scott, Design Innovation, RE/SPEC

“Voltage Control workshops free us up to collaborate with our clients to rapidly identify their most fertile opportunities and quickly build actionable roadmaps which help us define and de-risk initial engagements.” — VP of Sales & Marketing, KungFu.AI

“Our workshop included our top doctors and executives from around the country. We started with very different ideas on the direction we should take, but because of Voltage Control, we ended up completely aligned.” — H.O. Maycotte, CEO, Pilosa

Interested in working together?

We’re happy to offer a complimentary consultation to assess your needs.
(512) 766–9125 | info@voltagecontrol.com

The post Rapid Discovery Workshops appeared first on Voltage Control.