“There is so much humanity in vulnerability. If you’re going to ask others to be vulnerable, you have to be willing to do so yourself and let your walls down to have rich, honest conversations.”- Alyssa Coughlin

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Alyssa Coughlin, Chief of Staff Director for the Data and AI Platform Organization at Autodesk. Alyssa shares her journey into facilitation and leadership, emphasizing the importance of patience, active listening, and storytelling in effective facilitation. She discusses leading through influence rather than positional power, empowering team members, and creating a collaborative environment. Alyssa also highlights techniques for engaging quieter participants and the significance of addressing underlying tensions in group dynamics. The episode concludes with a focus on fostering a culture of collaboration and empowerment.

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About the Guest

Alyssa Coughlin is a seasoned leader with a passion for facilitation, a skill she’s honed throughout her career, from student council to her current role as Chief of Staff at Autodesk. Her journey began in high school, organizing chaotic meetings, and evolved as she realized facilitation was central to her leadership style. After transitioning from pharmaceutical sales to project management in tech, Alyssa embraced facilitation as a critical tool for aligning diverse teams and fostering collaboration. She further developed her skills through Voltage Control’s certification program, where she gained confidence in her ability to create inclusive, engaging, and impactful meetings. Alyssa is now focused on scaling facilitation skills across her organization, empowering others to lead conversations and drive collective success.

About Voltage Control

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

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Transcript

Douglas:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab and if you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Alyssa Coughlin at Autodesk, where she is the chief of staff director for the data and AI platform organization. Welcome to the show, Alyssa.

Alyssa:

Thanks Douglas, and thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Douglas:

Of course. Thanks for joining. Well, let’s get started by hearing a little bit about how you got into this work. How did you get into being a chief of staff and thinking about facilitation and bringing groups together to make better decisions?

Alyssa:

Yeah, chief of staff is something I kind of stumbled into. At the beginning of my career, I didn’t know about this position or what it entailed. I just knew I had this myriad of skills and they all centered around bringing people together and driving organizations towards common goals and really just kind of being that connective tissue that paves the way for others to succeed. I got here through various positions. I’m actually on my second career. I started as a pharmaceutical sales rep, which is very different, and from there I moved over to the technology space and I did project and program management, and that really morphed into being a chief of staff, and it’s been a really exciting career journey because I finally found the position that if I could have just dreamed it up and picked all of the things I like to do and I’m good at, it would’ve come down to being a chief of staff.

Douglas:

I was thinking about your alumni story and how you depicted this tale of facilitating long before you really thought about it from the perspective of that role or that title. I think I remember you talking about a prom planning committee, is that right?

Alyssa:

Yeah, and student council, and I have just been doing this forever and then didn’t realize it was facilitation until somewhat recently.

Douglas:

When you think back to those early formative days, what do you think were some of the key skills or some of the key ways that you were showing up that made you successful?

Alyssa:

I think being able to read people and read a room and having a high EIQ is invaluable when it comes to facilitation. And so when I was on the prom planning committee or student council, I would see that need and I would lean into it and step in and realize that this group all has the same intentions and they want the same goals, but they don’t really know how to get there. And so I would step in and I would lead that discussion and that conversation and just help drive them to the endpoint without necessarily feeding them the answers. It’s more about discovery and giving them an opportunity to figure out the answers for themselves.

Douglas:

Oh, I love that. So this idea of not feeding them the answers, what’s your favorite go-to technique? I mean, I’m sure you’ve grown a lot and advanced a lot since those days, but I’m sure this not feeding people the answers is still core component of how you show up. And so I’m curious, nowadays, which one of your favorite ways of not feeding the answers, but making it feel productive or inviting?

Alyssa:

Funny enough, I find the simpler the probing questions, the better because they leave a lot of room for interpretation. So if the group is starting to get there, but they’re not quite there, something as simple as, “Say more about that.” Or, “How did you get there?” Make them kind of reflect on what they’ve said so far and what they’ve learned so far, and then drill back into maybe something that deserves more detail that they glossed over or recenter them back on the original conversation. It’s really just corralling almost.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. And so much of that is active listening and curiosity

Alyssa:

And come to it with an open mind, even if it’s a topic that you are familiar with. When you’re trying to lead these conversations, just act like you’re unfamiliar with the topic and be like, “Well, that’s interesting. Say more about this.” Or, “Why are we doing it this way?” And sometimes just drilling back to those basics helps reground and recenter the group and helps them move forward in a more cohesive way.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. And I love this idea of even if we know the answer, we don’t necessarily have to provide it as the leader.

Alyssa:

Exactly. And a good leader I think focuses more on teaching. That old adage of give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life. I think leaders really live by that, and it’s so much easier to be like, the answer is ABC, but your group will never learn. Your group will never become self-sufficient and they’ll never be able to grow. And I think a good leader wants their group to actually grow beyond them. You don’t need to know everything to be a good leader or to be a good facilitator. You need to know how to embody the people around you to be their best.

Douglas:

Love that. And so let’s go back to those early formative days. If you could send a message to yourself or go visit with your younger self, what’s one piece of advice you would depart on that you now know, some of this wisdom that you’ve gained through the years?

Alyssa:

I think advice that I would give my younger self is to be more patient in the conversation. And that’s really hard. When we study facilitation, we learn about the power of the pause and the power of just a moment of silence to give others a chance to jump in or to reflect. And so as an extrovert, that’s so hard. I’m like, I’m ready to go. I have the answer. I’m excited about this. But that’s not really how you lead facilitation and that’s not really how you help the group grow. So my advice to my younger self would be just be patient, slow down and let the conversation happen more organically.

Douglas:

So this is a common one, so I find this fascinating. Did you find that that silence was uncomfortable for you or was it just this mindset of we’re going, following the energy and it’s being exciting and let’s move and go and go? Or was it just that anytime silence came up it was uncomfortable or maybe it was a mixture of both? I don’t know. How did it feel?

Alyssa:

I would say it’s a mixture of both. I definitely don’t want to lose the momentum from the conversation. And at the same time, there’s a little bit of an imposter syndrome around that silence. Am I failing if I’m not filling every second of this conversation? And moving past that and learning that, no, I’m not failing. I’m empowering and I am giving the group an opportunity to fill the space with what they see fit. But it’s definitely something that it takes practice, especially when you consider active listening and how your brain is just moving so fast and you’re like, I want to contribute all of these things to this conversation, but I need to slow down for a minute and actually listen to what the rest of the group is saying and allow them to fill some of this space as well, because it’s not a monologue or it’s not me just talking to myself.

Douglas:

You’re right. It’s not a monologue and it requires a group conversation to get past these obvious solutions to get to things that are novel and interesting.

Alyssa:

And I think what’s really important is for whatever the outcome you’re trying to accomplish, to really resonate and to have a lasting impact, it needs to be cultivated by the entire group. It’s not going to be as meaningful. It’s not going to take root if it’s just me or any one person just talking at them. It needs to be a story that we build and we tell and we see ourselves in together and not just about one person.

Douglas:

Yeah. So you mentioned the word story there. How often does story and narrative show up in your facilitation?

Alyssa:

All the time. I think people will resonate with that more. When you think about stuff that you can remember from years and years ago, whether it’s a song or it’s a story or something funny that happened, there’s a personal connection there and that’s what allows it to really stay with you for a long time versus, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, because there wasn’t a story there. That wasn’t important and that didn’t matter to me. And so I think when you are telling a story, you are inviting a sense of belonging and purpose in whatever narrative you’re trying to explain, and it becomes a shared narrative at that point.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’m also curious, we talked a little bit about leadership, it’s come up already. And as someone who’s been drawn to leadership roles from a young age, how has your sense of what leadership is evolved through the years?

Alyssa:

I think I really started to understand my brand of leadership when I transitioned into the technology sector and I was introduced to Scrum and Agile project management. And so one of the foundations of Agile is servant leadership. And the whole concept around a leader paves the way for the team. They remove obstacles, they provide resources, they set everyone else up for success. It’s kind of the mantra, leaders eat last. And so that’s where I had this moment of self-recognition or self-realization and I was like, “Yeah, that’s my leadership brand.” And that’s why I’m passionate about it. I attribute my personal success to the success of my team and those around me. And that’s something that I really love about being a chief of staff is that’s my job. It’s to make my leadership team the best they can be and the more they succeed, the more I succeed.

Douglas:

I love that. This idea of our success is measured through the success of those around us and those that we influence.

Alyssa:

Absolutely. And I think that is so important for facilitators, because how do you measure a successful gathering or successful facilitation? It’s not about how you feel when you walk away from the session. It’s, what was the outcome of the session? What is the sentiment of everyone else who was there? Was it valuable for them? Was it meaningful? Will it last? And I think my brand of leadership just so naturally fed into what makes a successful facilitator.

Douglas:

What advice do you have for folks that maybe aren’t in positional leadership roles and how they might view leadership from this lens? Because I personally feel that there’s a lot of opportunities to lead as an influential leader even if you don’t have this positional power. And so I’m really curious, I’m sure you see a lot of that at your vantage point there at Autodesk, because you get to see a lot of different individuals in a lot of different roles. So what advice do you have for folks that maybe want to be in leadership, but maybe don’t have that position or just don’t feel like they’re a leader?

Alyssa:

Yeah, for those folks the first thing I would say is don’t equate management with leadership. They’re not the same thing at all. You do not need to be a people manager or any position of authority to lead. In fact, leading through influence is the hardest way to do it, and it will be the most pivotal skill set you will develop in your career. To be able to lead up, down, and across is going to be really important. My advice would be don’t doubt yourself. Take up space. You are in that room for a reason and your experience and your contributions are valued. And so share those. And help make room for others, because people will notice that if there’s somebody in the room who is maybe feeling timid about chiming in, make space for them and be like, “Well, what are you thinking?” And people will remember that, people will automatically look at you as somebody who is leading and who is helping to guide the group.

Douglas:

That is such a great tool just to bring others into the conversation.

Alyssa:

Never underestimate the power of that.

Douglas:

What’s some of your favorite ways to A, identify those that might need to be included, and then also just bringing them in subtle but powerful ways?

Alyssa:

Yeah, I think as far as identifying those as a facilitator, there’s definitely a little bit of pre-work. So whenever you go into a meeting or a session, you want to make sure you understand the audience and that you have the right people there. Priya Parker talks about generous exclusion and it’s so important. So if you have somebody there and they’re not speaking up, the first thing you want to do is make sure, is this person set up for success? Are they actually supposed to be in this meeting or this session, or are they set up to just not be able to contribute? And that’s not going to be a good experience for anyone. But beyond that, it’s a lot about reading cues and reading energy, and that’s so much easier in person.

So with Zoom, I always suggest camera’s on because as the facilitator, you can kind of read people, maybe they’re about to say something and then they pause or you can see their face light up or a scowl, and you’ll find clues that they have something to say. Then just gradually invite them in. Don’t put them on the spot, just be like, “Hey, so-and-so, I think you have a lot of expertise in this area. What do you think about that?” Something that kind of builds them up first instead of just putting them directly in the spot and being like, “Hey, you haven’t said anything.” Nobody’s going to respond well to that.

Douglas:

Yeah, I like that. Gradually building folks up.

Alyssa:

Yeah, absolutely. Leaders build up those around them. There’s nothing to accomplish by tearing people down. Even if you think it makes yourself look better, it doesn’t. And people will remember that, especially if it’s the first time you’ve interacted with a group, there’s no second chance at a first impression. And so just remember that when you build up, rising tides, lift all ships. And so it’s important that you are elevating everyone around you, because you don’t actually know their full potential and you don’t know what they could contribute. But if you tear them down and they don’t feel empowered to contribute, then it’s just a loss for everyone.

Douglas:

Speaking of lifting others up, I believe you shared a story about an HR colleague that helped you realize that what you were doing was facilitation and being able to label your skills in that way opened up a career path or those realizations just changed how you approached your career development. So tell me a little bit more about that.

Alyssa:

Yeah, and that’s such a prime example of sometimes you really just need one person to believe in you to get you over that hurdle. So this happened back when I wanted to transition from working in pharmaceuticals to working in tech, and I was really intimidated by this change. I’d had friends tell me, and colleagues that, “You have a transferable skill set. Why don’t you jump into this industry if you’re not really resonating with the industry you’re in right now?” And I was like, “Well, I’m not an engineer. I don’t have this deep technical background. I’m not sure how I can really sell myself to a new industry.” And I had a really good friend who was an HR business partner at the time, and she just helped me kind of build my resume and go through it. And she asked me questions about like, “Well, what do you do all day?”

And as I was explaining what I do, she’s like, “That’s creating a business plan, that’s facilitating, that’s…” All of these different skill sets that hadn’t occurred to me because I was being so literal with everything I was doing. I was like, “Well, I sell drugs in the neuroscience division.” But that’s not what matters, and that’s not what transfers and translates. And so she taught me, and this is a really important skill set for a facilitator, is to know when to zoom out to zoom in. And so she said, “Pull back. Just look at the raw form of everything you’re doing. What is that? How would you describe it?” And I’m like, “Oh, well, this is facilitation.” And she’s like, “Exactly, so put that on your resume.” And so it was just having somebody who could help me get through a moment of doubt and a moment of imposter syndrome. And that’s important in leadership, and that’s important in facilitation is just sometimes everybody needs a little push and a little help.

Douglas:

Absolutely. And that’s so great to know that they were there when you needed them. And then as leaders, we can reciprocate to those in need and step into those moments too.

Alyssa:

Yeah, there are probably so many moments that seem benign or mundane to you that had an impact on somebody else’s life and you don’t know. And so I always try to show up as my best and to bring out the best in others, because you don’t necessarily know when somebody else is having a moment of self-doubt and they just need one person to cheer them on or believe in them for a second, and that’ll get them over that hump.

Douglas:

Yeah, so true. Even folks that seem like they have confidence, there might not be a lot underneath that exterior that we see.

Alyssa:

Totally, yeah. I mean, I work with VPs who in a one-on-one will be like, “I am extremely introverted. I am uncomfortable with these big group conversations, and this is not my natural personality. This is not how I show up at home.” And then they’ll give a presentation and it’s like they’re presenting a daytime talk show or something. I mean, they’re just so confident and they’re so smooth. And so people are complex and they are layers. And so how people show up in one situation or one environment is not their whole personality. And I think it’s really important to remember that and to dig through them and to encourage it, because sometimes you can get stuck in, I’m not a speaker, I’m not a facilitator. And you just need somebody to say, “Well, yeah, you are and you’ve got this.” And remember at the end of the day that everybody’s human and nobody’s perfect, and it’s really unreasonable to expect that. And I think as soon as you break down that need for perfection, you create a more welcoming environment that’s going to be conducive to better conversations.

Douglas:

I’m thinking about how you shared in your transition to project management that a lot of it was navigating conflicting priorities with diverse teams. And so I’m curious, when you think about some of these tough facilitation moments or these challenges that the teams were facing or that you were facing together as you were facilitating and they were trying to figure this stuff out, what comes to mind that might be interesting for folks to hear about? If you can’t name specifics, are there any patterns that you’ve noticed?

Alyssa:

I have. I think it’s human nature to kind of revert back to meeting your own needs first. And so as a facilitator, something that I commonly encounter is having to break down organizational silos. So for example, I used to work in the class action litigation space, project managing those, and that’s a really complex process. You have the data processing team, you have the print formatting team, you have finance, you have all of these teams, and they each have these individual goals and objectives that they need to accomplish.

And so my job as the project manager and as the facilitator was to help them break down their individual silos and their individual goals and remind them at the end of the day, helping people who have been hurt and meeting the needs of our client is our goal across the board. This is what we’re all striving to achieve. And so I think when you remind them of how their part contributes to the whole and how it’s important to have everybody’s part contributing to the whole, you help break down these barriers and move the project forward. But it’s something I still encounter to this day. Different leaders all have their own organizations and they’re all just worried about the success of their organization, but at the end of the day, it’s really the success of Autodesk that matters. And we have a belief, we call it “One Autodesk”, and it’s so important to remember that and to remember that we are separate parts contributing to a bigger whole.

Douglas:

You’ve got the mantra of what you mentioned, and I’m sure that’s effective of just helping people anchor in on this bigger purpose, this bigger why. What are some other ways that you’re aligning folks in these sessions?

Alyssa:

I think one important way to, or an important aspect of alignment is to address any sort of elephant in the room. A lot of times people will not say exactly what they mean and the conversation will just kind of go in circles and the important stuff ends up going left unsaid. And so there’s definitely an aspect of diplomacy, but bravery as well and being able to just prompt that and be like, are we actually talking about what we need to talk about right now? Or are we staying at the surface level and all trying to be friendly, in which case we’re just spinning our wheels and we’re not actually moving forward towards accomplishing our goals. And so kind of knowing when to push the group a little bit to move past those barriers and past those comfort zones versus when to step back and let them sort of do it on their own, there’s definitely an art to it. It’s by no means a science, and a lot of it is just trying. There’s so much reading people in facilitation.

Douglas:

Reading people is so essential and there’s so many signals to watch out for. What are some of your go-to methods for making sure you have your finger on the pulse, so to speak?

Alyssa:

Yeah, well, when you’re in person, there’s obviously body language is really important to keep an eye on, but we live in a hybrid world and myself, and I’m sure many other folks are primarily on video calls and Zoom. And so from there I try to keep an eye on the pace of the conversation. Are people cutting each other off more? Is it getting a little bit more assertive? Is there some hostility starting to bubble underneath the surface? On the flip side of that, has somebody completely shut down? Is somebody who is normally a contributor and who I would expect to contribute to this portion of the conversation remaining silent? And just watch for the tone, watch for, you can even just see a smile.

You can see how people are reacting or are they scowling? But it’s so many subtleties that you want to look out for. There’s very seldom going to be this glaring sign that’s like, “Hey, the group is not on the same page anymore.” If you reach the point where it has escalated to that level, you probably missed a few subtle cues you could have used to rein it in sooner. But I would say just really watch the flow of the conversation, watch how they’re interacting. Is their demeanor changing? Is their voice changing? And when it does, how can you help bring them back?

Douglas:

Yeah. What are some of your go-to approaches to bring it back? I mean, you used the word rein it in, so what does reining it in look like for you?

Alyssa:

Sometimes it means reminding the group of the north star and why we’re here and saying something along, “I hear what you’re saying, however, I’m not sure that that’s going to get us to our north star. And so let’s step back for a moment and possibly look at this from a different angle.” Another way to do it is to ask them to frame it in a different way. Say, “Hey, I don’t really understand what you’re saying right now. Can you frame it from this angle for me? Or how does what you’re saying contribute to the objective of this gathering, meeting, session?” Whatever it may be.

And so by rein it in, what I refer to is step back to step forward and just remind everybody of why they’re there. Try to deescalate, try to recenter and refocus, and then have the group get back on track. And that’s tricky, because sometimes it’s so hard to know when the conversation is going in an important direction that you should allow as a facilitator and when it’s starting to run down a rabbit hole and you need to pull it back in. And so that’s where the active listening really comes in handy. And you need to be completely engaged the entire time.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s a stylistic thing too. How far do you let things go out into the nether regions before you bring them back in, because that’s where inspiration might hit or innovative ideas might happen. And so I think when folks shut that off too quick, they miss those opportunities.

Alyssa:

Exactly. And I come back to it’s an art, not a science. It’s really hard to know when are you blocking innovation versus when are you blocking unnecessary conflict. And it’s so much easier when you’re working with a group continually. So for me, I work with a senior leadership team all the time. I know them well. I know when they’re starting to go down an avenue that’s not going to be successful versus when they might be starting to figure something out. It’s really, really hard though as a facilitator when you’re jumping into a group you’re not familiar with. And my advice in that situation is to really lean into that naivety and to be like, “I don’t understand this. Could you explain this further?” Or, “How does this accomplish whatever our ultimate goal is?” And there’s nothing wrong with just asking those questions that they may sound uninformed, but they could be helping to prompt the group to pause for a moment just to reflect on are we going towards this path of innovation or is this a fruitless conversation that we should abandon?

Douglas:

Yeah, I like that. And it can often be used as a way to, as the facilitator, you can de-escalate using that approach. You can steer things back toward the purpose or north star, as you were saying earlier, but do it in a way that doesn’t seem confrontational. Saying things like, “Help me connect the dots here.” Because it’s not about them saying it wrong or being confusing. It’s about me, the facilitator, having trouble connecting the dots when probably everybody else in the room felt the same way, but because I’m the one that fell on the sword, now everyone gets the benefit.

Alyssa:

Absolutely, yeah. Facilitators have to be willing to just take the bullet sometimes and be okay with doing it for the better of the group. Yeah, to your point, I mean, you’re probably not the only one who’s thinking that. I guarantee you there’s somebody else in the room who’s like, “Why are we talking about this?” But there’s a group dynamic at play, and as a facilitator, you’re oftentimes seen as this impartial entity. And so it’s not going to be as intrusive if you ask the question as if somebody else in the group were to do so.

Douglas:

And also I think we practice those ways of not being judgmental or not coming across as confrontational. I think even if folks aren’t being confrontational, if they clearly have an opinion on the matter and they just blurt out whatever is on the top of mind, it probably comes across confrontational.

Alyssa:

Absolutely. And in those situations, I try to bring things back to facts. Is this just an objective opinion? Do you just feel some way about this? Or do you have information that the rest of the group could benefit from understanding that has led you to this opinion? And so if you challenge them on that, you’ll oftentimes find your answer whether they were right, and there’s an avenue that you should be pursuing that you missed. Or it’ll kind of allow them to self-check and be like, “Wow, I feel this way because I feel this way, but I don’t have any data I can bring to the group to validate it.”

Douglas:

When you were saying validation and bring it back to facts, it made me think how powerful a prompt along the lines of, how might we measure that?

Alyssa:

Definitely. And my organization, we live in the world of OKRs, which are objectives and key results for anyone who’s not familiar, and they’re a way to measure the success of an organization. And there’s such an easy thing to point work back to. So if a team is kind of going in the wrong direction, it’s like, which OKR are you feeding with this project? Are you moving us towards our common goals that we aligned on and that we agreed on as a group? And yeah, I love that you said that, Douglas. How will you measure success? Is this measurable? Is a great question to ask because it really forces them to pause and think, is there a way for me to know for certain that this is the right thing to do, or is it just a shot in the dark?

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. I want to talk about vulnerability real quick. And you mentioned that as one of the key parts in the learning experience for you during our certification, and I wanted to see if you could elaborate a bit on how embracing vulnerabilities has helped you grow as a facilitator.

Alyssa:

There is so much humanity in vulnerability. And coming back to what we were saying earlier about facilitation, it’s just not possible if you can’t connect on a human level. I think if you’re going to ask others to be vulnerable, you have to be willing to do so yourself and to let your walls down and to be able to have these rich, honest conversations. And it’s so uncomfortable. You’re opening up a piece of yourself that you’ve probably really tried to protect, and that’s I think, a natural instinct. But learning to talk about things maybe you’re not great at or things that you wish you could do better. It doesn’t have to be a therapy session where you’re like, “Here’s my every insecurity and here’s what led to it.” But being able to show people that you’re willing to give a piece of yourself makes them more prone to giving a piece of themselves in return and then you’re having a more honest conversation.

Douglas:

Yeah. Speaking of the summit, you’re going to be at the summit this year, so what kind of excites you the most about coming down to Austin and being with a bunch of fellow facilitators?

Alyssa:

So much. I love getting to talk to other facilitators and learn from them. Everybody does it a little bit differently and so there’s always so many gold nuggets that I can borrow from other facilitators and share. Some of mine in return this year will be different. I’m excited for a different reason because I’m presenting this year, it is my first time presenting at the Facilitation Summit, and I’m actually going to be talking about some of the stuff we discussed today. We’re going to talk about using storytelling and leveraging that through facilitation to enable change management and how when you want a change to really take root and take effect, you have to tell a story that people can see themselves in and you have to bring them along on the journey with you. That’s where you get that true buy-in. And so we’re going to talk about kind of how do you do that? What are some tips? Coming back to how do you measure it, how do you know if it’s been successful? And how can you seamlessly fold that into just your everyday facilitation?

Douglas:

Love that. Storytelling is so critical. I think so often stories are such a part of getting teams to align, getting ideas to come out, yet folks aren’t spending enough time thinking about how they draw a good story out of people.

Alyssa:

Yeah, you always have to think about the what’s in it for me. So I work with the platform organization at Autodesk and we build all of these cool capabilities and then we take them to product teams and we’re like, “Hey, use this.” And the first, the human response is, “No, why? You haven’t given me a reason. What’s in it for me?” And so to be able to tell that story, to tell the story of why this is a great capability for your use case and how it can unlock new things for your work and make your life easier. Really putting them in the story of your capability or your product really makes it seem like it’s something that they belong to as well. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about some. And whether you’re trying to increase adoption or sell something or start a new idea, it doesn’t really matter. Being able to tell that story will help you be more successful.

Douglas:

So you’ve also mentioned the importance of mentoring others in facilitation at Autodesk. I’m curious, what strategies have worked best when you’ve been developing others around these skills and how do you see facilitation shaping the organization’s culture?

Alyssa:

Yeah, I think not taking for granted the ability to be a storyteller is really important because that is something that comes more naturally to some folks than others. And so we’ve really been focusing on how to be a storyteller and helping our team feel confident in their ability to articulate a story, especially because we have a global team. We have people with different first languages coming from different cultures and different backgrounds, and that can create different insecurities. And so being able to connect through story and be like, well, a story doesn’t necessarily have to know any sort of cultural bounds, it’s something that we can all belong to together.

And so I lead the extended leadership team for my organization and at our summit this past summer, we spent an entire day just focusing on storytelling and talking about all the different ways that that can be an asset in their toolset or career, however you want to phrase it. And it’s not just at work. I’m on the board for the Autodesk Women’s Network, and we’re talking about selling your own skill sets and standing up for yourself, selling your brand and what you can bring to the table in your career. And so there are just so many different ways that being able to be an efficient storyteller can help you not only move your career forward, but also help you bring others along.

Douglas:

That’s a nice segue. I was wanting to hear about, as you think about the next phase of your career, as you move that along, what most excites you about the role of facilitation and how it might play in that work that you do in the future?

Alyssa:

I think now I’m at a phase in my career where I have a decent amount of influence. And so being able to use that position to empower others is really exciting to me. When somebody who’s on the leadership team taps you on the shoulder and says, “I think you would be really great for this. I’m so proud of what you’ve done to date, and I’d love for you to share that with others.” You’re really not only building that next generation of leadership, but you’re holding a hand out to somebody else. Because at some point in my career, there was somebody who did that for me, and it gave me the confidence to kind of lean into that unknown, to be vulnerable and to take a chance.

And so now it’s my turn to do that for others and to hold the door open for those behind me. And so I’m really excited to be at a point, obviously you never are done learning how to facilitate. It’s a lifelong learning process, but I do have enough knowledge and information now that I can start to share that with others. And that’s really exciting for me. I would love for everybody to be able to tell their story and to just create this belonging all the way through our organization.

Douglas:

So as we come to a close, I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Alyssa:

I think it’s kind of a silly analogy, but it’s the one that I hold onto. And what I see facilitation and leadership really drilling down to is you’re kind of a collaboration Sherpa. You know the way, you’re guiding the team, but you’re still letting them make the journey on their own, and you’re helping to remove obstacles and roadblocks, and you’re getting them to where they need to go, but you’re not doing it for them. And that’s really what I try to bear in mind as a leader and a facilitator.

Douglas:

It’s been a pleasure having you on the show, Alyssa. Thanks for joining.

Alyssa:

Thank you. I had a great time. I loved this conversation.

Douglas:

I did as well, and I look forward to talking to you again probably at the summit.

Alyssa:

Great. I’ll see you there.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration. voltagecontrol.com.

The post From Extrovert to Empowerment: The Art of Facilitating Group Dynamics appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I was blown away, absolutely enthralled and fascinated. My granddad turned to me and said, “You’ve got an inquiring mind, don’t ever lose that.” It has essentially formed who I am.”- Dan Walker

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Dan Walker from Collective Imagination Consulting. They discuss Dan’s journey from the legal field to the outdoor industry, driven by his deep curiosity and evolving understanding of justice. Dan shares how his formative experiences shaped his perspectives and how he now helps organizations create pathways toward a more just and joyful society. The conversation highlights the importance of curiosity in both personal and professional contexts, the complexities of justice, and the pivotal role businesses can play in fostering social change. The episode emphasizes a method-agnostic approach to facilitation.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

About the Guest

Dan supports organizations to work in partnership with Community Leaders in the collective work towards a more just and joyful society.

He brings over 10 years of experience from across the public, non-profit and business sectors guiding organizations to do the “institutional soul work” to identify values they hold.  Supporting organizations to work in partnership with Community Leaders to translate those values in to strategy and actions that deliver the highest expression of those values and incrementally build towards a more just and joyful society.  

Dan cares deeply about respecting each person’s human dignity and brilliance, believing that co-creation can better design the systems within which we live.  His human-centred design approach supports clients to embrace these principles and pursue work that aligns with their values and support the transformative change sought.

As a member on the Board of Directors at the Vancouver Foundation, Dan advises the organization on how to better centre community need and develop governance practices that enshrine that commitment within its values and processes.  As a member of the Board of Directors at the Outdoor Diversity Alliance, he supports their mission to foster a more equitable outdoor industry through centering community expertise and catalyzing collective action across the outdoor industry.  

Balancing his love of music and the arts with time on the trails, you’ll usually find him at a local gig or exhibition, or in motion on the land.  In either context, you’re likely to find him with a huge smile on his face!

About Voltage Control

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

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method-agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12 week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with Dan Walker from Collective Imagination Consulting, where he supports organizations to co-create pathways toward a more just and joyful society. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Dan Walker:

Really nice to see you, Douglas. Yeah, looking forward to the conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, looking forward to chatting as well. And as usual, let’s get started with how you got your start. And I want to come back to something you mentioned in your alumni story, which was, gosh, I think you were 10 years old in London, your grandfather’s comment about the inquiring mind. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Dan Walker:

Oh yeah. I mean, it’s a good place to start. It’s always a nice memory. I don’t know, the sun’s rising here too, so I don’t know if there’s a warmth attached to that memory. Yeah, when I was 10, I visited London with my grandparents. It was kind of the first time I’d been on a big trip like that. My grandma and granddad took me and my younger brother around London, and one of the places that we went to was the Tower of London. We went around, we were toured through the exhibits with the beefeaters who spoke to their lives and how things worked and the history. And I was blown away, I was absolutely enthralled and fascinated and obsessed with it.

And I remember coming out of that space and going down the tube, going down the tube close by to get on the underground and go to the next place, and my granddad turning to me and just saying, “You’ve got an inquiring mind. Don’t ever lose that.” And it’s essentially formed who I am. I think I’ve built my identity around this curiosity that I’ve always had. I find the world endlessly fascinating, I find everything endlessly fascinating. My biggest challenge is probably that balance of how do I say no to some things when literally whatever people are into, I just find it interesting. And yeah, it’s really shaped who I am and living into that childlike curiosity is something I always tap into. It really informs my work and how I move through the world, and I just love it. It lights me up anytime I’m doing that. So yeah, it’s a real starting point for me, and it set me on this path that I’m currently still on. Yeah, it’s a beautiful memory too.

Douglas Ferguson:

Has that punctuated moments throughout your life? Do you recall moments where that’s popped up periodically?

Dan Walker:

I think so. I mean, even now I look at it and even when I was chatting to friends the other week and they’re talking about some of the things there now studying and looking at, and I don’t know, I’m currently studying Spanish and learning to draw and sketch and these pieces and then as my friends are talking about these other areas that they’re looking at, I’m like, “Oh my God, how do I learn more about that?” So I see it all the time. I know that’s who I am and that’s what I value.

And then in work too, I think I know my ability to ask questions is my strength. I sit in a space of genuine curiosity, so I always return to that as like, yeah, that’s who I am, my heart, that’s what I believe and what I bring to the world. So it definitely comes up, it shows up all the time, and I think it’s how do I balance that curiosity with focusing on certain things in a certain moment? And also being blown away by everything, by the fascination of spaces. Yeah, I was in CERN, the particle accelerator last year, and mind-blowing what we’re doing and what does that mean and what does that tell us about the world and how 95% of the world is dark matter, and we don’t really know what that is or what that means. And I just find it all endlessly fascinating and I love the world in which we live because of that, I guess. So yeah, it shows up everywhere.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, the quest for knowledge is a fascinating thing. It’s like this ever-receding zone of the universe we don’t understand.

Dan Walker:

Yeah. I mean for you too, I don’t know, do you feel that sense of the curiousness around the planet we live in, how we interact, the social interactions, does that show up for you too?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I mean, there’s endless things that make me curious. In fact, there’s a construction project on the highway that connects the area I live in to downtown Austin and every time we drive through trying to figure out all the pieces and what are they going to do next and what are they up to and how’s this going to work and where’s this going to go, or are they going to close this down or open this piece up? And my wife finds it hilarious. And I think sometimes when I’m pontificating about the possibilities, she’s sneakily pulled out her phone and is recording me.

Dan Walker:

Which, yeah, to watch you in full flight would be great. I mean, what are other questions are you asking? I don’t know, it brings for me such a beauty to the world. I think with that fascination, I find everything, even the hard bits, I think that’s the spaces that I’ve come to in later years is how to, in the pain of things, can you find the beauty and the fascination and the interest that we can be pushed into these spaces that are really deeply painful for us? And what does that mean and how is that experience and how is that a beautiful experience at the same time? And I would say that’s an incomplete journey, but it’s a space that I’m now moving more into of how do I hold the full experience of life and the complexity of it all and bring that same level of curiosity to everything, not just the beautiful things that I’m in awe of, but also the difficult things too? And I don’t know, yeah, that’ll be the next 50 years trying to figure that out or get closer to figuring some of that out.

Douglas Ferguson:

When you reflect back, what are the things that you found you’re most curious about?

Dan Walker:

Oh, I think humans. I think humans and the interaction of us and how we understand ourselves and how we understand the collective us. I think that interaction is just a fascinating dynamic. There are similarities that come from the shared human experience, but also these profound differences as a result of the lived experience and the systems that we live in and all these pieces. How does that sit together? How do I sit as who I am within this collective system? And then how we layer over the politics and the systems that we’ve created and how that shapes and how it changes culturally from different contexts. So yeah, I find that fascinating without end, I can’t see an end point in being curious about that.

Yeah, I do think psychology, those spaces strongly appeal to me. There’s times where I’m like, “I should maybe look into doing that,” because I just find it a fascinating subject that we’re all beautifully unique and how do we sit together, how do we acknowledge that uniqueness and how do we stitch this collective blanket together as society? That is the space, which kind of ties into my work, this question of justice and what is justice, how do we build towards a more just society, sort of acknowledges those two things. It acknowledges the unique brilliance of each of us, and it questions how do we stitch that together? And that’s the space where, yeah, I could talk about that, read about that, listen to people talking about that, thinking about that, working through it without end.

That’s just a beautiful space for me and in service of a goal that I believe is most precious, I guess, how do we find this space to have respect, a depth for one another and experience joy that can come from that collective sense of belonging? So that’s probably the big piece where it shows up most profoundly. That and then sketching, or I don’t know, whatever else it is at the minute, but really it’s the central focus on just this is the thing.

Douglas Ferguson:

So you talk about justice and connection, how did that first show up for you? What were some of the ways that you started to understand or realize that this is an important thread for you?

Dan Walker:

That’s a good question. I think fairness has always been relevant to me. I think that is probably a very almost naive way of coming to connect with it. When I was younger, this didn’t seem fair, that person was treated differently, we’d worked as hard and that different results came. So I think there was a very juvenile understanding of it, like, “That doesn’t seem fair, these people are being treated differently,” in whatever context it may have been.

And then there was an essay that we had to write when I was at high school, so I wouldn’t be that old, I’d maybe be 12, 13, somewhere in that kind of range, I just remember it too, we were sat in the library at a local school, which was an unusual event, we weren’t often taken to the library for our English classes, but for that one we were, and we were given this essay assignment, there was essentially posing the question of, should we have capital punishment in the country? Should that be legal? Should it not be legal? How do we decide that? And learned all about the miscarriages of justice and how that had transpired, went into the legal background on why it existed, what the historical significance of it was, what’s a society if we don’t have capital punishment in place? And I was enthralled with it, I was totally fascinated by this question.

And I think it brought me to an answer that I didn’t have at the time, I definitely didn’t come to this at the time, but really what was under that is who determines the answer to that question? And within that system, it was determined by a few. And I think where I’ve come to is this question of how are the systems within which we live determined by us all? And that’s the piece where now my understanding of justice sits and comes from.

But yeah, it’s always been there. It’s like always this pursuit of we all matter, our opinions all matter. If we’re having a conversation today on any truly complex subject, you don’t have the answer, I don’t have the answer. Instead, it sits between us and together we shape it and you sharpen my thinking and I sharpen yours, and all of a sudden we have this better understanding, this idea, our ideas are better than my ideas, collectively, we shape it better. And I hold that to be true and I think it comes from a place of respect for other people, a place of belief that we are all phenomenally brilliant and talented, we just need to bring that together. And yeah, that’s really the work that I now do, but it stems from this belief in we all matter and we all should be valued and considered worthy and feel a sense of belonging together. Yeah, I mean, I could talk about it for hours.

Douglas Ferguson:

And you pursued law at some point, right?

Dan Walker:

I did, yeah. So I studied that and I think that was kind of a reflection of that maybe naive answer. I was younger then, I didn’t really know the fullness of the systems in which we sit. I came to it because I believe in justice, well, of the past, you can take, well, this one has justice in the title, we’re doing the legal sector, we’re going into criminal justice, which is intended to deliver justice. But having gone into that, finished my studies, came out, worked in a London Crown Court whilst I was living there to try and figure out do I want to carry on and become a barrister and do this work? It just became apparent to me that the system wasn’t what I believed justice to be.

Douglas Ferguson:

What was the big disconnect there or the dissonance you were feeling?

Dan Walker:

I would say it was systems that were imposing punishment and it wasn’t actually addressing the underlying inequities that exist. So it was just punishing for crimes committed without acknowledging that there are inequities that exist in society that were creating those. It wasn’t doing anything to address that. So for me, there was one case that we tried, prosecuted, the defendant was found guilty, served time in prison, two years later, the exact same case for the exact same defendant landed on my desk and I was like, “This is broken. This is not it.” I look now and I think there are people doing phenomenal work within criminal justice, and I could have maybe found pathways into changing and working on the system. At the time I was younger and I was like, “I don’t feel we’re doing the work of justice,” so I left.

It’s a tricky space because I acknowledge too the victim has suffered harm as a result of the crime so there’s a real importance of centering the victim’s perspective within that conversation too. But I think that we often neglect the perspective of the defendant and the person who has committed those crimes or has been charged with those crimes, they matter too. And I think often we don’t focus on that and say, “Hang on, what has contributed to that person being here today? And how as a society do we take account for that and acknowledge that and work through that and all those pieces?”

So yeah, it’s a fascinating space. I feel like I’m way closer to what I believe justice to be now. I feel like I’m working a far more true reflection of that and there’s amazing work being done within the legal spaces around access to justice and these pieces that maybe if I’d have found those, I would’ve still been there, I just didn’t and it didn’t feel like I was doing the work that I believed to be most true.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, we all take our own path, right? I think at the time you pivoted through the outdoor industry, if I’m remembering right.

Dan Walker:

Yeah, yeah. I ended up, I was in London when I was working in the courts, I left there. London’s amazing, it’s a phenomenal city. I love music, we were talking about that before, music’s my thing, I can’t play, which it sounds like you may be able to, but yeah, I can’t play, I love listening. So in London, I go to all the gigs and it was an amazing city, but at the time it’s exhausting too. It’s phenomenal as a cultural hub, there’s so much going on, there’s so many people. But also over time, that becomes draining at the same time. Every space that you are in, it’s overcrowded, it’s overwhelmed with other people. We’d go to the pub and I’d be sat on half of a stool and then somebody else with their group of friends would be sat on the other half of the stool facing the other way, and it just became a reflection of this is a busy space, I’m quite disconnected from nature here completely to get out into nature was really challenging.

So in parallel, Canada was one of the places where I was like, it seems like it has all the pieces. Nature is here in abundance. Yes, it has its challenges politically, but the conversations around the work of justice, around truth and reconciliation and other pieces are conversations that are being named. So I think that became a place where I was curious to look and ended up moving here. The outdoor industry I came to because I was like, “Well, I guess I’m going to try something different,” I know I don’t want to go back into the legal space, I love time outside, I love nature, I love being connected in those spaces so what about trying the outdoor industry? So that’s what I did.

I initially worked at MEC, Mountain Equipment Company, which is essentially the Canadian equivalent of REI. I worked alongside their CEO, it was amazing, got a really good exposure at the time. They were pushing deeply into the work of sustainability, so focusing on people and planet. And it gave me a real eye-opener as to, wow, the power of businesses to affect change, they had the revenue figured out in a way that nonprofit sector found more challenging. They could work across all different sectors, so they could work with governments, they could work with nonprofits, they could work with academic institutions, they could move so fast on anything. If they wanted to go, they could go there and they could go quickly and they could partner and they could make shifts.

And significantly, they have this huge voice, when outdoor brands say something, it far eclipses what can be said by government or nonprofits, which we can challenge and question whether that’s right. I think a lot of the nonprofits have such credible voices, such credible expertise on these subjects, but they don’t have the recognition and the respect that brands do. And I think we live in a society where the logo has power, and I saw that and how that could be used as a tool for change. So yeah, I left MEC did the same thing over at Arc’teryx, another outdoor brand based here too, worked for their CEO for the first few years.

And one of the things that came to me was every year we’d do a sample sale, so we produce gear that we’d test and see how it worked. It couldn’t then be sold commercially, but the tested gear would be sold internally, and we probably generated about $100,000 a year. And really with that money, I just started asking questions, I was like, “Well, what are we doing with that? What’s the intent of it?” It became really apparent there was no strategy of what we were intending to do. So we went through this exercise, which I can touch on, of how do we determine the highest and best use of our resources in service of a societal and/or environmental need? That’s kind of the question that we started to answer and really became my work for the past eight years, work which I love. It’s work that got me far closer to what is justice and happy to chat more if that’s relevant too, about that process.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s curious to me because for one, what the process was even like. I think identifying a guiding purpose like that with a really clear, “This is the question that we’re going to wrap our arms around,” I think that in and of itself is remarkable because so many folks are just kind of, “Oh yeah, we want to achieve this thing,” or they might throw some metrics at things to start a project, but it sounded like that was rooted in some real curiosity. And then also how did you even bring everyone together?

Dan Walker:

I would say too it was clumsy because I didn’t know, so now I look back and I can layer over and I can see the good things in what I did, and I can also see like, “Oh, you could have probably learned to do that better.” I didn’t know what I was doing in truth at that point, but, as you said, I had this curiosity of how do we do this? How do we marry what we have, the assets, the resources, the influence we have as an organization with these societal needs that we see existing in the world?

So really it was through a process of conversations across the entire company. Our CEO at the time was amazing, we’re still good friends now, but he really had a commitment to saying, “Sure, let’s try it. Let’s try and figure out what this intersection means and looks like.” So there was buy-in from the company, it was a prioritized conversation. Different groups from all across the organization we brought together to explore this topic and try and work through what that might be.

And in parallel, I was connected to the community leaders, so people within the space who are doing the work every day on those societal issues that intersect with the outdoor industry. So whether it’s equitable access to nature or truth and reconciliation or thinking about guardianship of the land, these areas, I was connected with those groups too so gaining insights from them as to what are those real challenges? What are those pieces and the needs from the real movements?

And so really starting to bring those two together to say, who are we as an organization? First, let’s do that work, right? Who are we as an organization? Why do we exist? So for the brand, it became really apparent that yes, they designed and built a climbing harness in some ways because they believe they could build a lighter, more comfortable harness, which is great. But the question remains, well, why build a lighter, more comfortable harness? And the root note to that is really this belief in the transformative power of connection to land. So we build this gear because it gets us in these spaces that moves us in these ways that my words fall short of explaining but when I’ve been outside, I’m a different human as a result of it. It moves me in these really powerful, humbling, respectful ways. It shifts who I am.

So once you know that and you’re like, “Well, our commitment and the reason we are here is because of this belief in the power of the land, what then are the societal needs that intersect?” So if you look at the outdoor industry, it has a very extractive relationship with the land. It takes from it and it doesn’t acknowledge at a depth that this land is indigenous land and it doesn’t acknowledge the fullness of what that means. It doesn’t respect sacred spaces, a lot of the language it uses and even celebrates denies the presence of indigenous peoples. So language around first ascension, language around wilderness, this is often celebrated in the industry, and at the expense of acknowledging indigenous peoples. So a big part of our work became that focus on truth and reconciliation. How as an industry do we take our responsibility for that and start to shift the narratives and move that work?

And then the other side, a lot of the community leaders name it far more eloquently than I do, the outdoor industry is traditionally male, stale and pale. I look at myself, people listening won’t see this, but yeah, I’m a white male from Northern Europe, it sits profoundly, that is where the industry has traditionally sat, and there’s a lot of work to do. And the question really is how do we embrace the wider we and how do we do this work towards equitable access to nature? So that really became the second area, this focus on supporting the movement towards equitable access to nature.

It’s those two pieces that have driven that work over the last eight years, and really then looking to bring that to life with a commitment that Arc’teryx or any organization is leading neither of those movements. Instead, their role is to listen deeply to community leaders and map their strategy and resources in service of it. Really, that’s the work I did at Arc’teryx, and it’s now the belief that I bring with me into Collective Imagination, the consulting work that I now do.

But yeah, I look back, I don’t know, the process, it was rough. I figured it out by speaking to mentors, community leaders, and we got it to a really good place. There’s so much, I would get there way quicker now, I know now the facilitation practices, how I would structure things, how we move it, building relationships, what’s the intent of these sessions and what are we building towards? But I got there. It definitely took us longer than it would take now, but the curiosity is always key. And even in the work that I do now, that’s what I’m trying to inspire in organizations to ask those deep questions and be open to where it goes and to work with community leaders who have that expertise. So yeah, it’s been a journey and it’s kind of nice to look back and see that, yeah, I have grown and I am more competent in this and there’s still so much for me to go in the journey of getting better at this work. So yeah, it’s been fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. What about the power imbalances that exist when you have organizations with resources trying to work with grassroots communities?

Dan Walker:

These are good. These are not small questions. So yeah, the power, it’s the think, right? I think as you do the work more and more, you realize that the power we hold is everything. It frames who is able to determine those systems that are created. Especially as a brand, you hold immense power. In many ways, you’re a gatekeeper of resources so the grants that you provide, that is a piece. A big part of the work has been how do you acknowledge that it exists, it is a reality within the context of which we live, and how do you work beyond it too? So how do you start to move from, “We have these power imbalances that exist,” into this space of, “We know they exist, but we still want to work in partnership and we want to work in deep trusting relationship”?

I remember there was an example where we had an event, an activity with one of the partners, and we always push, I would always say in conversation, “I want to hear the honest feedback. I want to hear where we’re going wrong. I want to hear where we can get better.” And one of the partners, this is a couple of years into the relationship, shared some feedback on one of the things that was challenging in this event, “It wasn’t exactly what we wanted. We felt like there was different ways we could have done it, there were better ways we could have done it.”

And in the first instance, it’s always challenging to hear that feedback of like, oh, we kind of missed the mark on something. But it also told me we’ve been doing that intentional work the right way such that now we were starting to build relationships where we could truly hear the fullness of what’s going on and start to truly work together in deeper partnership. I think it’s critical, and it takes time. Building trust is the critical piece of work. How do you really build trust? There’s a lot of harm that’s existed between the relationship of corporations and businesses and nonprofits and community leaders, there’s a lot of justifiable mistrust there because of how historically businesses have acted.

So I think you start from that place, you have to start to build relationships from a very trusting place and slowly over time come to this position where we can move into this true reciprocal relationship, this reciprocal partnership where we share the good and the bad and we work through it together. That isn’t going to come tomorrow. If you’re just starting, there’s no way you’ll get close. I think what we heard for those first few years was, “This is great, keep doing the work,” and then you realize over time there’s a depth that is not being shared, and how do you unlock that?

And I apply that to the same things. How do we truly make people feel comfortable and supported and safe within spaces such that they can share their most preciously held ideas? That’s really what we want to hear, we want to hear the brilliance of you. And in order to do that, we need to create this safe space that makes you feel belonging, that makes you feel compelled and comfortable to share, which I think, I don’t know, that feels like a track that Voltage Control is on. I don’t know whether that tracks for you, but I think this push around unlocking the brilliance of people feels like what, I don’t know, what Voltage Control is trying to unlock in all these different contexts. So I don’t know, I’d be curious for you, is my read right? Or, yeah, how do you think about that kind of hearing people’s voices and what facilitation unlocks?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, and it’s an essential component of facilitation. And I think our mission is to elevate the ecosystem at large by upskilling more people and providing opportunities for folks to really practice and grow their facilitation skills, whether it’s through certification or the community or even some of these more complex projects we’ve been finding ourselves participating in that allow us to give our alumni really in-depth on-the-job kind of experience, resume-building experience, and at the same time driving some real impacts. And it is really about how do we elevate conversations? How do we get more people in the conversations? And back to your point, hearing that things didn’t go as well as people had hoped, while it can be really disheartening to hear because you put everything into it, you really wanted things to go really well, but the fact that they’re telling you that means that you’ve done something right, you’ve created an environment where they feel comfortable telling you that. So I think that’s a keen reflection that you have there.

Dan Walker:

It totally is. And I think feeling bad is it is this work of dissolving the ego too, I think like that. And it’s a critical part as we look to show up in this world, how do we acknowledge the ego that we all hold? How do we think through that? How do we dissolve that such that we can allow this conversation to sit in a true space of what is your experience? How can I get better at this? How can we do this better together? Rather than being like, “I don’t want to listen to that, just tell me I’m doing good work.”

And I think that’s equally a part of facilitation is how do you do the self-work such that you can step into those spaces and truly create a safe environment where we all can collaborate? I think people often, and I did too, think about facilitation purely as the mechanics of how you structure conversation, how you bring them together, but it’s also this self-work that runs into life too of how do I show up and how do I make sure I’m in that space open to what I’m hearing? That feels the big piece.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. The success of any intervention is directly related to the internal conditions of the intervener.

Dan Walker:

Oh good, I mean, yeah, yes. It feels it. And I think I almost intuitively knew that but going through the program, it’s a conversation that continues to come up of here are the mechanics of the process, amazing. They would’ve got me to that process at Arc’teryx far faster, far more effectively, far more knowingly. But this layer of the self-work too is a thread that has constantly been hit on, how are you doing that? How are you showing up? How in the moment, in the eye of the storm when things are going poorly, how do you come back to yourself, be grounded enough that you can then create an environment where to the group you’re like, “It’s okay, we’re going to work through this, here’s where we’re going”? It is so critical. And when you see it done, it is beautiful to watch people stand in the eye of that storm calm, understood, working through, human. I mean, that’s the aspiration I guess, that’s where hopefully we’re all going.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s hear a little bit about Collective Imagination. I mean, what’s been some recent success stories that you’re really proud of?

Dan Walker:

Yeah, I mean, it’s fun, it’s so fun. So Collective Imagination is the consulting business I set up in the summer of last year. So I left Arc’teryx, really due to this belief in what is justice, justice being that which exists when we truly co-create the systems that we live in. I wanted to push on that. I wanted to say, “How do I find organizations trying to do this work to co-create pathways to a more just and joyful society?” That’s really what I believe at my core, I want to find organizations doing that work.

I’ve been blown away. I never intended to run a business, I never intended to do anything on my own lik this, it’s not something that organically came to me, it’s not an aspiration, it’s not something I would say I really desired or pursued, but having done it, what it has unlocked in terms of the work that I’m able to do is phenomenal. I think you name in the world what you believe to be true, and all of a sudden, I don’t know, this beautiful gift comes to you where people who are like, “That’s what I also believe. How do we collaborate on things?” It has just started to emerge. So that’s resulted in the work that I’ve been able to do.

So Burton Snowboards are doing some amazing work in this space, particularly around equitable access to nature and climate action. I got to work with them on their philanthropic strategy, so really kind of applying the same logic we did at Arc’teryx into their work, asking these deep questions of who are we? Why do we exist? Based on that, what is the highest and best use of our resources? How do we center community expertise throughout the entire process? It’s amazing, it’s a beautiful example of what it can look like in reality.

Actually, Laporte who heads up that work, the VP of Purpose and Impact there, is phenomenal. I think it’s always amazing to look at people who inspire you in the work because it can give us insights as to what are those things that I want to grow into? What are the things that I want to learn? Ashley is one of those impact leaders who I look at as, “This is what the work looks like and this is the leadership we need in the world.” So that is a plug for anybody looking and interested in the work of impact, check out Ashley and what she’s doing.

Similarly, I helped to found a nonprofit a few years back called the Outdoor Diversity Alliance. And really this sits at the heart of the outdoor industry asking that question of how do we embed equity within the outdoor industry? How do we start to do that at scale through collective action of the various brands, different brands or member companies of the Outdoor Diversity Alliance? And so I facilitated a conversation with those impact leaders from the different brands.

And from that I asked the question of like, “Okay, so we’re saying equity in the outdoor industry is what we want, what are the barriers there? Why are we not making progress on it?” And what came up really was this revelation that it wasn’t being prioritized by senior leaders. The people sat in that room were lik, “I know what I’d do. If I had the opportunity, here’s where we go. We’d center community, we’d co-create strategy, we’d work into action, and then we’d keep iterating off that. What I don’t have is prioritization by our senior leaders.” So that’s the barrier.

So the next question was, “Well, okay, well, how might we work to resolve that?” So what came up through conversation and dialogue was really we need a business case for equity in the outdoors. I’ve experienced this too, everyone within these roles is stretched and tapped and can’t get to this deeper work when they’re just trying to keep the lights on in what they’re doing. So what I did with them was they helped run a project where we brought together the very tangible business case of this work. So we’ve always had the moral imperative of the work, but in a business context that just hasn’t proved sufficient. And we say these values, that hasn’t necessarily crossed the line of where we see the work needing to go.

Instead, we started to look at these macro trends and these shifts that are really impacting the world. So we have demographic shifts, we have access to capital being more tied to the work of equity, we have future generations, both consumers and employees saying, “I demand this as part of what we’re doing and my buying decisions are my decisions on where I work will be changed as a result of it.” So we created that business case, we presented it to all the members, and now we’re figuring out how we enroll CEOs and senior leadership teams in that work to really frame that this work is not just a moral imperative, but it’s a business imperative too. There’s a demand to do this.

So again, it’s that true co-creation work, working with community leaders and business leaders to understand the needs and building together on this incremental journey towards this more just and joyful society, acknowledging that it’s generational work, it will continue long after my lifetime, but what’s that next step we can take and how can we continue to move it forward?

So those are some of the projects that have come up. And coaching too, I think a lot of people are burning in this work, they’re struggling with real burnout. The question of what’s going to happen is one that I’m hearing constantly right now, there’s a lot of political change in different countries and different contexts. What does that mean? This work’s hard, I think it’s going to get harder, what does that mean and look like? And how am I doing? I’m absolutely on fire, what does that mean? So I’ve started doing that more coaching with those impact leaders to support them through it. They’re all things I’ve experienced myself first-hand. This work is deeply challenging. The closer you get to understanding community need, the more you realize how far away we are from it.

And I think that tension of the patience needed in the work and the urgency of it is really hard to hold on the shoulders of often one individual who’s hearing all the challenges from the organization and from community and often doesn’t have anybody to turn to themselves. So that’s the space where I’ve started doing more work too. I totally love it. There are some phenomenal humans that I’m getting to work with who are doing that work. So yeah, those are some of the bits that are exciting me and then more to come, more to come, more things building, which is always great.

Douglas Ferguson:

The future looks bright?

Dan Walker:

I think so. I mean, we’ll always see. But yeah, I love what I’m getting to do. It looks bright and I think in ways I never imagined. I didn’t really know where I’m going and pieces, but it’s been stunning. And yeah, I’m excited for whatever comes next.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, as we come to an end here, I wanted to offer you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Dan Walker:

Ooh, maybe don’t sit on a squeaky chair. I’d say probably take care of yourself I think is the big piece in all of it. It’s whether we look at in the context of facilitation, it’s how do you make sure you are as an individual, you are well, and you are doing that work of dissolving the ego such that we can hold space for the collective conversation? Whether it’s you are an impact leader and you are pushing this work and you’re meeting resistance to it, how are you finding wellness yourself? How are you giving yourself grace and patience and doing that work of self-care? You’re a community leader, every day you are in community doing this work, doing the hard yards of this work that often goes unthanked, unrewarded in the ways I think it should be, unacknowledged in the ways I think it should be. In all of that, how are you truly finding the grace to acknowledge yourself and to be like, “My wellbeing is critical”?

A great mentor once said this to me, and I think it’s often said, you’re only good to the movements if you’re still in them. If we’re burnt out to the point that we leave, the movement doesn’t benefit from that. So I think especially in this moment, in these last few years, I just see it rising. I mentor on the top 25 environmentalists under 25 in Canada, and we were talking about, one of the questions at the end of the closing of the sessions was, “What is the one biggest barrier and concern you see around us not making a transition to a just future and a resilient climate future?” And the number one thing by a million miles was burnout.

And it stuck with me. And I’m like, “That is the thing.” How do we, yes, push the work forward, but push that from a place of I’m well, we’re well, our collective wellbeing is taken care of? I think if we don’t get that right, we’re going to create systems that don’t serve us and the joy that I believe what I’m seeking towards. So yeah, probably that more in this moment, it feels right to take care, I’d say.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wonderful. Well, I think that’s a call-to-action for folks to take care of themselves and put on your oxygen mask first before helping others.

Dan Walker:

It’s true.

Douglas Ferguson:

Especially true for facilitators, no matter where you’re working. And with that, Dan, I just want to say it was a great conversation. Look forward to chatting with you again soon, and thanks again for jumping on the show.

Dan Walker:

So fun, so fun. I mean, I love the conversation and I look forward to catching up in Austin in a few weeks at the summit.

Douglas Ferguson:

See you there.

Dan Walker:

Yeah, see you there.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration at voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Curiosity Drive Justice and Social Change in Organizations? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Seeing the magic of bringing people together, setting clear agendas, and leaving with action items was eye-opening for me.”- Lipika Grover

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Lipika Grover, a consultant, executive coach, and facilitator. They explore Lipi’s career journey, starting from her early experiences at Accenture, where she observed effective facilitation during high-profile client sessions. Lipi emphasizes the importance of preparation, follow-up, and creating safe spaces for dialogue. She discusses managing group dynamics, particularly with chatty executives, and highlights the value of diverse voices in discussions. The episode underscores the transformative potential of effective facilitation in driving meaningful group interactions and fostering collaboration.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

About the Guest

Lipi Grover is a leadership and resiliency coach specializing in helping individuals and teams navigate transitions and unlock their full potential. With a background in strategy consulting, sales enablement, and chief of staff roles, she brings a unique perspective to her work. Lipi empowers her clients to build emotional resilience, access their inner light, and thrive in their professional and personal lives. She also facilitates transformative workshops and coaching programs for organizations worldwide.

About Voltage Control

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

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening.

If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today. I’m with Lipi Grover at Grover Consulting where she’s an executive coach and facilitator. Welcome to the show, Lipi.

Lipika Grover:

Thank you for having me, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s great to be chatting here today. I always love chatting with our alumni. As usual, let’s hear a little bit about how you got your start in facilitation. Was there a moment, or does the story come to mind, how you started to just get curious about facilitation?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, it’s a good question. Something I reflect on often is I started out my career back at Accenture in the strategy consulting team, and when I first started in consulting, I got put on a pretty high-profile client. It was a big tech client in the Bay Area. I was an analyst at the time, really in the room to support the partners and the senior managers that were there. I got to witness some incredible facilitation in action where I was just awestruck. I was sitting in the back of the room taking notes on my laptop and watching this magic come together.

In that time I really saw how the act of bringing people together intentionally, setting clear agendas, making sure you’re sticking to certain things like having parking lots and having clear structured questions throughout that time you’re together, really active engagement throughout the room. All of those different pieces and seeing it all come to life and leaving with clear action items of how the business was going to move forward was very eye-opening for me. That was the introduction for me of how I saw facilitation in action.

Then of course, as I grew in my career as a consultant, I got a chance to facilitate sessions of my own and really leaned into more of the creative side of facilitation when it comes to innovation and design, design thinking, getting to learn some of those practices from experts at companies like Accenture. That was the start of that career.

After that, I got a chance to get my MBA at Berkeley where I really, again, leaned into that interpersonal development side of facilitation, and I got to learn from incredible professors such as Mike Katz and some other folks there that really got a chance to see again how you can build deep connections with people through beautiful facilitation.

I guess this is a theme in my career is when I see people that are doing things that I feel passionate about or I feel like this is something I want to learn from, I start to follow that path a little bit and I try to figure out, okay, how can I do that? I feel the same way about how I got into coaching in terms of I got very powerful coaching and I was like, how can I do that and build safe spaces for others in that same way? That carried into my career at Mural, which is a virtual collaboration tool, incredible tool if anybody hasn’t used it.

At Mural, I got a chance to do more remote facilitation and lead sales enablement sessions for anywhere from 60 people to 300 people at times for go to market kickoff events and things like that. So I got to learn large scale facilitation remotely at Mural. Now as an independent consultant, I am getting a chance to figure out what that means for a small business owner like myself to facilitate sessions that feel authentic and true for others to build safe spaces and build vulnerable conversations with one another to build connection. I feel like a lot of us struggle with that in today’s world and we want to make sure to create more of that. So that’s been the journey so far.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s quite the arc. I’m going to come back to some of those early moments in Accenture, and I’m really curious about what did it feel like to be in the room as you were telling that story? I was thinking about you in the back of the room, heads down on your clipboard or what you had and just every now and then raising your head because it’s like, oh, that’s interesting. So can you maybe paint that picture a little bit more about what was catching your attention and bringing you back into the room?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, I can almost picture it vividly right now as you’re speaking about it. I remember being on a laptop at the time, just in the back of the room, and everybody had post-it notes that they were using. So part of what my role was to do afterwards was to transcribe all the post-it notes that were in the room and put into notes and all of that. But what really caught my eye in the session itself was the amount of detail I think that went into building two days of incredible content. So I think it’s the pre-work that I was very impressed by.

Then in the room itself, seeing how people commanded the room, the facilitators and the partners at Accenture at the time that I saw were really in front of it was about 20 different executives that were all there from a large tech client. I got to see how they were able to, I think in general, executives are often very chatty, and so sometimes getting everyone to really pay attention can be a challenge for that long of a time. But really getting to see how the partners developed that safe space and that space for people to raise their hand, build ground rules, figure out how to create small group conversations as well as large group conversations, was really something that I admired about the session.

Douglas Ferguson:

So yeah, I can imagine walking in thinking, oh wow, my job’s to transcribe all these stickies once it’s all done. How did your impression of that work shift from knowing that that was what you were going to have to do beforehand to then being in the session and watching it unfold and then having to do it? The act of transcribing all that stuff, did it turn out to be the same amount of work that you expected? Was it different? How did it feel doing it versus what you anticipated?

Lipika Grover:

I think because I was paying so much attention in the room, I felt very connected to what the ideas were that being put on the sticky notes. So it didn’t feel like this, oh, now I have to go and do this extra step. Of course, handwriting was the hardest part, and reading handwriting is never something that’s easy to do. But I did feel connected to the content in a way that I was able to make sense of it afterwards, and I was able to work through what the large initiatives that we needed to build were and figure out who are the owners and that thing. So I think, again, that goes to a well-facilitated session because it was very clear to me who was responsible for which parts of the session and who was responsible for the action items after the session. So again, those are all just, I think, things that you learn by doing, and that’s something I very much have admired and tried to learn from.

Douglas Ferguson:

It comes back to the planning piece and the prep you were talking about earlier, because if we plan well and we have an eye toward the outputs we want to generate and the outcomes we’re driving to, we can collect the data in a way that’s conducive to that transcription. So I’m curious, did it play out that way where it’s like it was less work than you maybe imagined because it was structured so that the things that were generated were generated in a way that was easier to maybe map into whatever you were transcribing?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, I would say so. I think it was easier than I expected. Of course this is many years ago, so maybe back then it felt like a lot more work. But I would say that what was interesting was that we built six month long initiatives out of that two day session. So getting to then see what work unfolds from that session, it was a strategy session. So I feel like that was really cool to see how it actually turned into real actionable results.

I think a lot of people have hesitation with these types of large group innovation strategy design type sessions because they feel like sometimes the actions don’t get done afterwards and there’s not enough follow-up that can happen. So, great, we did all these ideations and we built all these great things, but then when it comes to the work, it doesn’t actually get done. So that’s something that I learned in that session was like, okay, this is how you actually can turn this into actionable things and then assign owners to them and follow-up. It was a large transformational project, so I was part of it for every step of the way, and I got to see how it can be really effective.

Douglas Ferguson:

That follow through is so critical. No one wants the innovation theater where there’s a razzle dazzle workshop and then you never do anything with it.

Lipika Grover:

Exactly. I think in general, what we talked about a little bit before is that prep is important, but one of my colleagues at Mural, her name is Carolyn Hogan, and she had told me that you’re only as good as your prep and your follow-up. That really has stuck with me so much because I think in any facilitation or workshop that you’re doing, I think that the prep and the follow-up is ultimately what’s going to get you, one, the credibility, but also, two, the outcomes that you are trying to achieve.

Douglas Ferguson:

In fact, without the prep, it’s hard to know what the outcomes that you desire are because you haven’t identified them.

Lipika Grover:

Exactly. Yeah. I think in a lot of corporate sessions, sometimes there’s just not enough time going into that prep work or you don’t have the right stakeholders in the room to do that prep work. So sometimes that’s where we can fall flat. That’s where sometimes the innovation part doesn’t get to the desired outcomes if you aren’t able to spend the appropriate time and with the right people in the room.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s always critical to get the right people. A lot of times that’s including people that have been overlooked or sometimes being a little bit more discerning on who we invite. I think a lot of times people get invited that frankly don’t need to be there, it’s going to be a distraction for them, or it’s just unnecessary. The more people we have in the room, while diversity is great, it’s also going to add to the number of voices we have to consider and accommodate for and design for. So being really mindful of the best folks for that outcome I think is really critical. Have you had any experiences having to think critically about who’s perfect for the engagement?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, absolutely. I think oftentimes we know who we need in the room, and then there’s the people that we want in the room, and then there’s people that are going to maybe create noise in the room that are not actually going to add as much time. So I think that tends to be true, and it’s hard to be discerning with that, but I think purposeful inclusion or exclusion is critical to ensuring for a successful session. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned people with the noise and it’s like sometimes noise is valuable. Sometimes the people that push back and create friction are exactly who you want in the room. That could be part of their criteria, but certainly folks that are pure noise, they don’t have context or it doesn’t really pertain to them, but we just like them, so we invited them or whatever.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. Or sometimes I think people point out problems without solutions, and that can be sometimes distracting because you’re not getting to a specific point. But yeah, I do think it’s important to have people push back on your ideas. You don’t just want to call people that like you and that your ideas because that’s not going to get you to the mass outcome that you’re trying to achieve either.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Yeah. One thing I wanted to come back to is you mentioned executives being really chatty, and I thought for the listener, we might just spend a moment maybe expanding on what you meant there and ways of facilitating or using facilitation to work with that.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, absolutely. Of course that’s very much a generalization, but I think oftentimes, not just executives, honestly, this goes for almost anybody, but sometimes you think by speaking, I will get my point across and I will be able to share my opinion, but it may not even add to what we’re trying to discuss in that moment. Especially when you’re in really large groups, you need to be extremely focused on who is speaking and at what time and for how long you’re speaking. So in terms of ways to combat that, I think there are several different techniques that I’ve used in the past.

One of them, I think mostly remotely, this can be very helpful, but having some sort of timer when you’re having people share out ideas. Let’s say you’re going through a certain session, or you do little breakouts and then you want people to come back and share their ideas. Oftentimes that can go on for five minutes per pair or group. But in reality, in order for the facilitator to stay on time, we need to be able to cap that to a certain amount. So depending on the conversation, I tend to use the timer feature. I think when you set that ground rule upfront, people are more able to see the value of it, and they’re less likely to go over the time because they can respect that we’re all trying to stick to a certain schedule and we have other things that we want to achieve. So that’s one tip that I would share.

Then another one would be to use a tool, some sort of tool, any sort of virtual whiteboarding type of tool to get people to share their ideas asynchronously during the meeting first. So even we can use the timer again, but we can say, let’s say I have a question that I want to put out to the group. Instead of having every person go around the room and share, okay, this is what I think, this is what think. Having a timer on and then having people put their post-it notes or ideas into a whiteboard at the same exact time. Then as a facilitator, I can go and call on specific people based on the idea that they’re sharing. We can cluster, can group the ideas and then have people expand on them based on what they have to share. So that can be really, really helpful when you’re trying to collect everybody’s ideas but not have everyone speak at the same time.

Douglas Ferguson:

All of that I would categorize as limiting dialogue, and I think that’s an aha moment for a lot of folks that haven’t been exposed to facilitation much because when you think about facilitation, when you think about good meetings, I think it’s customarily conjures up this idea of a lot of dialogue. Yet some of the more powerful facilitation tools actually limit the dialogue. We don’t remove it, we just limit it. So to your point, time boxing so that let’s keep it in this frame, or even activities that might allow the dialogue to take a certain shape or a certain form that then helps focus it, but ultimately constrain it because, to your point, all the voices in the room all the time fighting for that oxygen, it’s not an effective strategy.

Lipika Grover:

I’d add one thing, you mentioned dialogue is really critical, or that’s what people think of when they think of effective workshop. I think it’s dialogue, but it’s also participation. I think people just want to feel like they are present in the room. I think with these types of asynchronous things, people still are required to be present the whole time because almost more so than when somebody is talking because sometimes easy to tune out when you’re in the room and one person is talking on a monologue for a long time. So by asking everybody to either journal, this could also be in person where they have to journal in their own paper based on a specific prompt question that we’re asking the whole group, and then we ask certain people to share and certain people to add onto their ideas. I think that being present is actually the way that people feel like they attended a very impactful workshop if they feel like they were fully there.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s fascinating. This idea of presence and walking out feeling like they were there versus something they just checked the box on, attended and split, right?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

What are some of your go-to mechanisms for driving engagement?

Lipika Grover:

I would say always starting with something that’s maybe fun/related to the current environment that we are all going through. Some sort of icebreaker. I don’t really love the word icebreaker, but just something that starts at a neutral, but also a shared ground where people can all feel like they’re tied to whatever that question might be. There’s a whole host of different types of icebreakers that of course you all share on your website as well as so many other types of icebreakers out there on the internet. But I think one thing I would say is starting somewhere neutral. Then having a really strong session design to make sure that you’re always having people engaged in a certain activity, whether that is something that they’re doing independently, whether that’s something that they’re doing in a breakout group, whether that’s something that they’re doing in a whole group.

I think making sure there’s not a lot of dead time in there, especially timing your breaks appropriately, making sure that you’re creating a space where you’re always giving them something that they should be working on or doing, and very focused time for those things. It’s like let’s say you want to do deep work on your own, you want to put in a timer for 30 minutes or 40 minutes, and you probably get your most work done in that time during the day because you have a set timer for it.

It’s like what you said earlier about being constrained, and so setting those constraints throughout the session. Then I think a skilled facilitator will ensure that there are breaks built in and making sure that they’re also having time to share their voice. That can be in breakouts so that it doesn’t feel like it’s overpowering all of the time. So I do use breakouts quite a bit for engagement because I think having deeper, smaller conversations can be really helpful, and then coming back and sharing with the broader group is something that I find to be really impactful there.

But otherwise, I think using Mural is a huge… I can talk about that more, but I feel like that’s something that from a visual perspective, most of us are visual learners, and so engagement can also be from something that’s really visual and something that’s beautiful to look at. So I tend to put a lot of time into designing my murals in a way that has a certain theme or has some sort of excitement to it, and it carries that excitement throughout the session that you’re looking forward to what’s going to be uncovered next in that visual collaboration tool.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was going to ask about that, building on the engagement piece, because a lot of times people will ask about cameras being on as their signal that there’s engagement and then their solution to driving that is just requiring cameras on. Yet, I think you talked about giving people tasks, using breakouts, making things visual as ways of driving engagement. What are your thoughts on this whole video on, video off versus some of the techniques you talked about, which are more making things hands-on and tangible and giving people tasks?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, I think it really depends on the size of the group in terms of the video on or off. I do think for small group sessions, it’s very helpful to have videos on. If everybody has their video off and one or two people have it on, it becomes a very, I think, a little bit strange dynamic for the group. But if everybody decides to be videos off, that’s fine too. I think you can have a pretty engaging session that way. But if most people are having their videos on, then I think it’s nice to ask for people to turn their cameras on. Of course, if it’s a very, very long session and people need to step away for a few minutes and eat or do something and turn their cameras off, as a facilitator, I usually just say, hey, if you need to just message me so that I know you’re here. That way, it’s not like you’re disappearing and I’m calling on you, and I’m in an awkward position now where it looks like you’re not paying attention. Now everybody else thinks they have the permission to not pay attention either.

So yeah, I do think that I just ask for communication if you’re going to turn your camera off. I wouldn’t compare the techniques like, oh, it’s this or that, but I do think that having some sort of visual type of tool can really build that engagement further because it can create another, almost like a third space for people to go and create connection. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned calling on someone when they’re not there, and it reminds me of the importance of signals. How are we collecting signals on how people are participating? The visual tools provide another mechanism for that. There’s a notion of presence. Are they in the tool or not? Am I seeing outputs from them? So video on is not the only signal, and I think that’s the trick. So many people rely on that as the only signal and the only thing they’re trying to change, I think there’s a lot of depth to your point. You’re sharing a lot of stuff there.

I want to pivot to talk a little bit about your time at Mural, and then we probably have a little time to talk about the future and what’s next as well. But you mentioned doing sales enablement, and I imagine some listeners might hear that and go facilitation and sales enablement, what does that look like? So can you tell us a little bit about how you’re approaching that from, what was the tools? I’m sure you’re using Mural, but what was the experience like? If someone wanted to use facilitation for sales enablement, how might that look? What might they do?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I would say what we did at Mural, I can’t speak to what sales enablement looks like at other companies, but we had oftentimes weekly live meetings with the entire sales team, sometimes the customer success team as well. So it was more revenue enablement at that point, and marketing sometimes as well where we would bring everybody together. We’d have an usually really beautifully designed Mural to be able to teach certain concepts based on whatever enablement was needed at that time.

So if it was specific to, let’s say, how to do really good discovery, let’s say how to do really good discovery on certain sales calls, we would create Mural about that, and we would have certain questions that you can go into breakout rooms to do role plays on. We’d built certain spaces within the Mural for people to be able to practice certain concepts, whatever it is that we were teaching at that time. We would often use Mural as a place for you to share resources with the teams to be able to say, hey, these are a little resource hub of this is what you need to pay attention to for this week, new marketing collateral, new, anything that is relevant, new scripts for you to use in emails or things like that. That way it’s all in one place.

We tried really, I think, to make it very creative so that people felt like, again, that engagement during that time that they were together. I think sales enablement is something, or enablement in general, I think learning and development teams often are trying to figure out how do we make this time that we have synchronously as impactful as possible because these people are doing this outside of their day-to-day job. This is something that they are opting into doing. Sometimes it’s a required thing, but most of the time it’s to level up their own skillset. So making that synchronous time very impactful is the biggest thing that was on our minds is how can we make sure that people get a lot out of this time together because it’s a lot to ask them to do.

So we would think of different creative ways to use Mural or breakout rooms or other sort of engagement strategies to make the most of that time together and have people be present. Like Q&A at the end of the session, that’s just another idea, using Mural to have people put questions in at the end as well. Then we could take that and turn it into a whole session on its own of what are the topics that you’re struggling with right now? We can use voting even to figure out, okay, what are the things that are on your mind right now and how can we design a session around that? So just another idea there.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I know right now you’re focused a lot on resilience and the coaching work that you’re doing and helping build confidence and creating vulnerability with folks. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that’s surfacing?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. So my focus with resiliency workshops is really empowering people to understand that they can do hard things and that they have all the answers within themselves to be able to achieve everything that they want to. I think so often people stop themselves from going after their goals or their visions simply because they are scared they’re going to fail and that they’re fearful that their life is going to change in a large way. We all are creatures of habit. We like being comfortable and we don’t necessarily feel comfortable extending ourselves into new spaces.

But as a coach and as a facilitator, a lot of what I do is ask people questions to help them to get to a place where they’re able to say, actually, yeah, I want that. It’s all coming from themselves. I don’t know the answers as a coach of what they want to do. My job is purely to create that space, that vulnerable space, for people to be able to talk through what their visions are, what their goals are, and get them to believe in themselves and believe that they can do anything that they really set their minds to. So that’s the focus right now of a lot of the work that I’m doing. I do this in one-on-one sessions as well as in group sessions, and so I’m excited to see how that unfolds.

Douglas Ferguson:

So the group work, how does that play out? Is this a team that you’re working with, the folks that are working together, or is it more like a public cohort where there’s a number of individuals that you’re helping just support each other in this moment?

Lipika Grover:

It’s a great question. I’m actually launching my first cohort next year or so, early next year, where we will be creating, it’s more of a public space where people can join and they’ll be surrounded with others that also have big dreams for themselves, and they have a growth mindset, and they are just needing maybe a little bit more support and accountability from others around them to get them to where they want to go.

I piloted it already, I did a resiliency workshop earlier this year in a group setting that went really well, and people really got a sense of feeling like they found that light within themselves. That was the name of the workshop was The Light Within. I think a lot of times we think, Hey, after I do this, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. We use that phrase all the time, the light at the end of the tunnel. But my whole premise is that we have light within ourselves at all times. So I just want people to be able to tap into that, especially when they’re going through maybe a change or a transition or some sort of new thing in their life. So that’s the premise of what the workshops are going to be next year.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Most of the folks you’re working with individually are also in this moment of transition as well?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. It’s mostly people who are either going through a career transition, a relationship transition, sometimes a move, all at the same time. Most of the time we’re all going through multiple changes at all times in our lives. I wouldn’t even say it’s always a very tangible change that it’s sometimes is truly like, hey, I want to step into a better version of myself, or I want to step into a new goal that I’ve been wanting to achieve, and I just need the mindset to be able to achieve that goal. So a lot of work is like, how do I get you from point A to point B? For example, if somebody is like, hey, I really want to go to get my MBA, but I’m working and I just don’t know how to make that leap, making that mindset shift is part of the work that we do, is just getting them to understand that they’re capable of doing it and that they are going to be able to achieve success in that. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

How often do you work with folks that know that something’s missing, they’re not feeling fulfilled, but they haven’t been able to pinpoint what it is yet?

Lipika Grover:

Very often. I think a lot of times people feel like, especially in careers, I think a lot of times it’s like, hey, I’m in this job, I’ve been in this job for a long time. I’m starting to feel like I don’t connect with it anymore, or I just know that I’m not doing what I really want to do. That’s something I hear often. It’s like, I know this is not what I really want to do, but they don’t know what that other thing is. So a lot of the work is uncovering what that North Star is going to look like for them. Some of it is just understanding your strengths, understanding who you are as a person, what you enjoy doing, what you don’t enjoy doing. Going back to the drawing board in that space. I think a lot of times people also don’t realize that what got them to this point is beautiful, and we are grateful for it all, and it may not be the thing that is needed right now in this moment.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, what do we need to leave behind?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, exactly. What can we let go of right now?

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Awesome. Well, when you think about this work, the resiliency workshops, the coaching, all this great work you’re doing, where do you think it leads to? What’s this bright future? What is this North Star that of your own? Just like you’ve been uncovering for others, what is this North Star for you, as far as when you really peer out a ways?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. Honestly, it’s a great question and it’s something that I’ve been designing for myself as I’ve started this path myself. I think I’ve also learned to surrender a little bit. Part of the North Star work is also following the leads, if that makes sense. So sometimes it’s pulling on different threads to see where we go, and we don’t always have to have this big reveal answer of what is coming up next. So while I would love to say, I have this 10-year plan and this is what I want to do with it, I think the reality is I’m following the energy and I’m following what is bringing me joy, and I’m following that path and we’ll see where it leads. I think that’s to be discovered.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Well, let’s check in the future and see where it went. I love that.

Lipika Grover:

Absolutely. Yeah. One thing I can say is that the work is very impactful and the work, it doesn’t feel like work in some ways because it just feels like you’re creating a large impact on maybe a smaller number of people, and that can be really fulfilling some ways. So I just want to keep doing it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. I feel that this passion driven existence is very prevalent and common in the world of facilitation because it’s the type of career that people find through passion. It’s something that people get excited about. Some careers people get into because they’re good at it, and it’s like, I’m going to be an accountant to make a living and get paid, or I am really fascinated by models for discovering whatever, but there’s not this excitement and passion about it some other fields. I think facilitation’s one of those things that’s like, I rarely meet someone that’s doing it just because it pays the bills or whatever. It’s a passion driven field.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. I think so too. I am curious, if you don’t mind sharing too, when you started Voltage Control, how did you feel in terms of what was your North Star? Did you have the North Star where you are today, or is it something that’s evolved and changed over time?

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s funny. I have multiple threads. I think you talking about pulling on the threads resonates a bit. I always refer to myself as a change junkie. I’m just obsessed with change, and I always invite change. I’m always curious about what’s around the corner. I did have a vision early on that was very anchored in facilitation and group process and helping people. I did not necessarily have this vision of being a certifying entity. I did tell myself though, that if we ever went down that path, I wanted to take it really seriously. That certificates wouldn’t be a thing we would just hand out as something you would get for attending a workshop. That I wanted to make sure that if we did that we’re really serious about it. It really meant something. It was pass/fail. You really had to do the work to receive it so it’d be meaningful to people. To me, it’s about staying true to my values and what’s important to me. Then just, to your point, following that path, but being true to those values.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. It’s something that I would say I’ve seen over time is that the dots always connect later, this is true throughout my whole career. Even you asking, how did you get into facilitation? It’s like, I wouldn’t have said back when I was at Accenture that I was going to go into facilitation or coaching as a career, but the dots always connect later in terms of how you see the threads that we got excited by or that brought us joy along the way.

I think that’s one thing that if I could leave with is I think life is long, I think a lot of times we think life is short, which is true in a lot of ways in that we should be present when we are with our loved ones or with ourselves. I think that’s very true. But a lot of times we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do everything right now and get it all done, and we have to achieve all this, achieve, achieve, achieve. But in reality, life is long and it’s almost better if we focus on one thing at a time sometimes and just see where it leads because it’ll unfold later. Yeah, it’ll all make sense later.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Always ask my guests to leave our listeners with a final thought. You’ve given us one there. Anything else you want to share?

Lipika Grover:

I think one thing is just trust your intuition. I think a lot of times we don’t give ourselves enough credit that we know what we want and we know what we want out of life. So I would just say trust your intuition. Sometimes you have to quiet everything else down in order to really pay attention to what it is that your head, your heart, your gut is all telling you to do. So just silence the rest of the world for a moment and figure out, okay, ask yourself what is it that I really want? That can help guide some pretty big decisions, or at least it has in my life. Whenever I have listened to that intuition, it has turned out in a better way than I think I would have if I just listened to my head or after some sort of credible thing. I think there’s so many other things that we chase in this world, but if we quiet everything down and just listen to our intuition, we’re able to follow a different path and that path is not written. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I love that. The thing I would add, because I love that so much, is I would just say that sometimes you can’t hear the intuition. I love this idea that you say here, the quiet everything down so you can tune into it. So if you’re like me where you hear your intuition quite often, then the moments where you can’t, it can be frustrating. I don’t know what to do right now. The thing I’ve learned through the years is when I find those moments, don’t spiral into the moment, just sit back and say, it’s okay. It will speak soon. Just be in this quiet time. Let your subconscious chew on whatever it needs to chew on because it’ll speak to you soon enough. So I think both is true, right? Quieting down the noise, but if everything’s really quiet, being okay with that quiet and just knowing that when the time’s right, it’ll let you know.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, exactly. I think, to be honest, you asked me that question about North Star, and it’s like sometimes it can be frustrating to not have the answer where you’re like, oh, I wish I could give you a real answer there. But to your point, I think the answer will come as I keep doing it, and I think action is progress. Progress is motivation. So if you keep putting one step in front of the other, you’re so much more able to actually see where it unfolds.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Excellent. Well, it’s been such a great honor and pleasure to chat today, Lipi. I really appreciate you joining me.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, likewise. I appreciate the time and I appreciate getting to be on this podcast. To all of the listeners, just keep doing what you do and put one foot in front of the other. I feel like that is my big takeaway from today. So yeah, I appreciate being on the podcast with you, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Unlocking the Secrets of Engaging Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

“If you don’t have those underpinnings of being anchored to something, it’s really difficult to do anything else. That’s just baseline sort of human functioning.”- Kellie Artis

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Kelly Artis, founder of Mission Identity, who empowers women through the Enneagram. The discussion highlights the transformative power of facilitation, particularly through Kelly’s experiences in the George W. Bush Institute’s Veteran Leadership Program. Kelly shares her journey into facilitation, emphasizing the importance of psychological safety, empathy, and deeper connections in group settings. She reflects on how effective facilitation goes beyond traditional teaching, fostering meaningful interactions and personal growth. The episode underscores the impact of creating safe spaces for dialogue and collaboration.

Show Highlights

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About the Guest

Kellie Artis is a passionate advocate for high-achieving women, bringing nearly two decades of expertise in communications and personal development to her role as the founder of Mission Identity. As the Director of Communications at Virtual Veterans Communities (VVC), Kellie excels in supporting military-connected students who seek to advance in their careers and personal lives. A scholar of the George W. Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program, Kellie is dedicated to empowering women through leadership and community engagement. She has earned certifications as a Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher and Professional Certified Marketer, leading workshops that promote self-discovery and growth. Her work has been featured on platforms like Fox News and Military.com, where she is recognized as a respected voice in helping women achieve their full potential.

About Voltage Control

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

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Voltage Control on the Web
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Transcript

Douglas:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with vultures control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our facilitation lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltage control.com/facilitation lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12 week facilitation certification program, you can read about it@voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Kelly Artis, the founder of Mission Identity, where she empowers women to reach their full potential by utilizing the Enneagram as a powerful tool for self-discovery, personal growth, and leadership excellence. Welcome to the show, Kelly.

Kellie Artis:

Thanks so much, Douglas. I’m excited to be here.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s always amazing to me to watch folks that are making these transitions into coaching practices and becoming solopreneurs and really empowering the way they think about work and taking control of their destiny, so to speak.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, yeah. It’s wild and crazy and fraught with uncertainty, but yeah, it’s something to follow your passion, I think.

Douglas:

Well, it’s interesting you mentioned uncertainty. I always like to remind folks that most things are uncertain, and a lot of times we fool ourselves into thinking that there’s certainty or there things are knowable. It is like the safe little pod around ourselves that we think that is there. It’s not really an illusion for the most part when it’s there, and so if you become comfortable with complexity and chaos, life becomes more fun and more easy to engage with. Not easy, but easier,

Kellie Artis:

Right? Yeah. You’re less attached to it and you can just kind of flow. That’s the goal. Yeah. It’s almost like an entitlement. You’re like, things should be certain and they’re not.

Douglas:

Yeah, and I wonder how much that flow comes up in the work that you do with your clients when you’re coaching.

Kellie Artis:

Oh, I mean, it’s almost constant, right? It’s always like, okay, even the Enneagram as a tool in and of itself, which I’m sure we’ll talk more about later, it’s a professional and personal development sort of framework that you can use for self-discovery and inner observation, all of these things. But almost everyone I talk to is looking for the goal, right? Okay, how do we get there? How do I achieve it quickly? How do I do this more efficient? I’m like, no, no, no. The goal is to just allow and just kind of flow and be more okay with the flow and be less limited the pursuit of something. So yeah, I mean, it always plays a part. Is it achievable? Even saying is it achievable is like it’s kind of missing the point, right? It’s enjoyment, it’s contentment, satisfaction, all of that stuff. It’s a work in progress in my own life too. Plays, I don’t know what it actually looks like or what it means, but the pursuit and the enjoyment of the work is why I do it.

Douglas :

Awesome. Well, let’s take a little step back and look at the formative moments for you. As you were starting to realize facilitation was a thing there, skillsets and tools and the discipline around it, and I think it was the George W. Bush Institute of Veteran Leadership Program. I recall you saying that was the pivotal moment for you.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah. I’ve attended all kinds of things. I’ve attended facilitated workshops before and working sessions, and many of the various groups and nonprofits and organizations that I volunteer and work with. I’ve observed good sessions and not so great sessions. Some that I’ve walked away frustrated by and some that I was like, oh, that was really great, but never put it together that that was an actual sort of framework. I thought these folks were just particularly gifted and creative and being able to gather people and convene them in a purposeful way. When I was accepted into, yes, it’s the George W. Bush Institute’s Veteran Leadership Program. They do an annual cohort where they gather. There were 34 of us I think, for our class last year, folks that are working in military family and veteran spaces, so we aren’t necessarily all connected to the military. I happen to be, my husband has been active duty for 20 years now, but gathered all of us together for a five month leadership cohort, but the day one, first session, very first session, I was super apprehensive.

I don’t know where these people are all coming from. There’s a lot of imposter syndrome. The veteran folks who have served often, for those of us who aren’t veterans, feel like they kind of have ownership of this space so often, and just by nature of being a military spouse, I feel like I’ve always kind of had to elbow my way into certain conversations like, Hey, we’re here too. We have things to say. So anyway, I came in with all that apprehension and just really almost skeptical of how this was going to all work. Was I going to get anything out of it? Was I going to be heard and noticed, and oh, so quickly. All of that was allayed by nature of the fact that we had the most amazing facilitator I think I’ve ever experienced. This guy’s name is Todd Connor. He’s a veteran and super engaged in the veteran space, does amazing work in everything that he does, but one of his roles is as the facilitator for this specific program, and I was just in awe of being able to walk into a space and literally from the first 20 minute session we had realize we’re going to be well taken care of.

This container is well made, it’s protected. We can be vulnerable. There was psychological safety established almost immediately, and I know I was supposed to be taking part in it, but I was really doing my Enneagram five thing of stepping back and observing what was happening, and from that moment on, I was just like, it shifted my project that I was working on during the cohort. It just kind of gave me this awesome opportunity to sit back and say, wow, this is how you do complicated things, gathering really diverse groups of people and coming up with something great at the end. Wow.

Douglas:

Do you remember if there was anyone in attendance there when you were in observation mode? I’m just curious if you noticed folks that were especially moved by the experience that, because often that folks come into spaces like that and have never really witnessed good facilitation before.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yes, you can almost categorize personify different types of people. Who are the people that are going to jive with what they’re going to support the facilitator. There are people that are kind of dissenters in the back. They’re going to critique everything. This group was no different. We had all of that, but I feel like the people that would have otherwise not been as engaged, kind of just like, I’m here. I’m going to say my thing. I’m not going to ask questions. I’m only going to give comments. I want people to hear me and see that I’m here. I think it checked them really quickly. Oh, I’m expected to engage authentically. Just example, the very first group sort of table question that we practiced or were given was, Hey, everyone at your group write this down and then share with your table what’s one thing that people often get wrong about you.

I was like, that’s profound. That right there, you’re just laying bare. Your biggest insecurity in this really sort of just sneaky way. How do people misread you? So you’re being misread, obviously, I was misreading everyone in the room because I’m making judgements, but you’re able to then so quickly say, people get this wrong about me. And then you’ve developed empathy around the table for people who now have compassion for you about this thing that you’re self-conscious about and that you probably over project for, compensate for. Anyway, I just thought it was amazing. So in a way, it had us immediately leave all the egos at the door, and they were able to somehow kind of sustain that through every gathering. We talk about Priya Parker’s thresholds when you enter and leave the space, that was a very intentional thing that was done in order to remind us every single time that we walked into the room that we were convened in, that this is the way we’re going to behave. This is who we’re going to be. We’re not going to bring in all of our rank and labels and other sort of egos into the space.

Douglas:

That sort of thing is also really powerful when you might be judging the room, especially if you hear someone say something and it’s like, oh, wow, I totally thought that about them.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, I was guilty on

Douglas:

Several counts. They’re explaining why that’s a wrong perspective, and then it really helps everyone start to maybe just observe and think a little more versus jumping to conclusions

Kellie Artis:

A hundred percent, and I mean, I loved being able to share mine. I never share that, and I was like, oh, people think I’m aloof, and I mean, I could be perceived that way, but I’m really just trying to take it all in. I’m overwhelmed by it all. I’m more of an observer, so being able to say that and like, oh, there’s so much more to you than what I’m seeing in the moment. I loved it. I thought it was a great practice.

Douglas:

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the aloof thing. That’s one. That’s to the point I just made really powerful for connection across the group, not only for things outside the group, but in the group especially. So because if someone is thinking, well, she’s a little aloof, but then you say that, and then they realize, they start to realize, oh, wow, she is a processor,

Kellie Artis:

So

Douglas:

She’s absorbing things in a different way. They’ll just have a different perspective on you and a different level of empathy around who you are and be able to approach you in a more connected way.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, I think so.

Douglas:

Did you notice any of that having an influence on how folks related or connected across the group?

Kellie Artis:

I mean, so quickly. Personal stories were laid bare. It didn’t just stop at a characteristic because of shared experiences of this type of convening of people who are all connected to the military at a certain point in their career. We’ve been through the past 20 years of global war, so there were really close to the surface personal stories that came out in that literal first hour of us being together. So not only did we get the high level, this is a misjudgment that people often have about me, but here’s some of the personal context that also plays into my passion, the thing that I’m pursuing and that I’m working on right now. This is why this is important to me because it’s touched me personally. So just again, so quickly, there’s just humanity and compassion that often I think, in other scenarios and other maybe less well facilitated types of convenings would take forever for that to come up. So because we just,

Douglas:

If even,

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, if ever, right? Yeah, exactly. So the shared sort of agreement that this is how we are not going to share this beyond the group. This is our space, and this should be sacred, and just putting all that out there, making that clear, I think gave us all permission to say, okay, we can handle it. This is a group that will support us. And I mean, again, the relationships were instantly founded and forged. I mean, I can’t imagine never not being in touch with most of my cohort members because we were able to just so quickly connect.

Douglas:

Yeah. So it seems like Todd’s approach really broke some barriers down, and I’m curious, how did that shift your perspective on what facilitation could be?

Kellie Artis:

I mean, I think I thought of it before coming into that experience, and then obviously after working with Voltage, I had this idea that a facilitator is just a teacher that maybe there’s some teaching methodologies that my families, I come from family educators, so it was like, oh, this is just a learning design sort of, I don’t know. It’s something that you could implement in a classroom and help people absorb the information better or to latch onto the content or promotes understanding or comprehension. Right after this, I realized that there was just so much more to it, that there was so much more that you can accomplish and agree to and move forward together with and co-create with people. And so having that experience, but then also sort of holding separately this struggle that I had been having and something that I’d been noticing through all of my work in self-discovery and self-awareness, a lot of things that I’ve never really felt or hadn’t really felt qualified to do and handle.

So here I am learning the Enneagram. I’m passionate about it. I know a lot about it, but there had always been this hesitation to step fully into helping other people understand it because I felt like I could mess it up for them. Or what if, God forbid, they share something really sensitive or emotionally complex with me that, and I don’t comfort them in the right way. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know if I can handle that properly without causing damage. I was just really nervous about it. After experiencing and learning some of the facilitation tactics and techniques and realizing it’s more about making sure people feel safe versus fixing anything or deciding anything or teaching anything definite. It’s mostly about the space that you’re able to create during that time, how that is protected and handled and how people feel when they leave it, when they enter, when they leave was so much more important than any of the content, any of the other stuff. So it’s purpose, it’s connection, it’s all of those things. So that’s how it shifted for me. And then, I mean, gosh, I overlay now everything, every meeting I’m in, why are we here? What’s our purpose? How are we entering, where are we leaving? I mean, literally every aspect of any of the work that I do has some sort of element of the facilitation techniques and practices that I learned.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s so helpful to get those perspectives. And I’m remembering, you also mentioned feeling imposter syndrome, which is somewhat related to what you were just talking about, and I think you were talking about it from the perspective of when you showed up for the program and even I guess ideas in your head about not being a veteran, et cetera. And I guess what specifically shifted that? You talked about getting to a point where that subsided, and so what do you think were the critical pieces that were at play that helped you overcome that?

Kellie Artis:

There were a couple of speakers that had some, I thought profound things to say that I was able to latch onto and give myself permission to pursue relentlessly what I came in with as my passion, my project initially. So we come in and you start out with an idea of a project that you want to work on during the cohort. It’s important, but it’s not the most important thing. I mean, the projects are great and have, I mean, some people have full-blown nonprofits now because of their personal leadership project, but it’s the skeleton. It’s the structure that they put the teaching and the rest of the leadership instruction onto. So we have a capstone at the end, and then they follow up and see what kind of support is needed after you’re an alumni. But I came in with a project that I wasn’t super passionate about.

It was part of one of my day job work, and it made sense. It was good enough to have gotten me a spot in the cohort that’s a part of their application process. It’s like, what are you working on? But from the start, it was enforced through all of the activities and through all of our facilitated time that it needed to be something that you’re passionate about. How are you going to make an impact? And it can be making an impact on one person. It doesn’t have to be huge and broad reaching and solving veteran homelessness. It doesn’t have to be that big or grand, right? It could be literally making an impact in your world, in your sphere, in what you can. And I was like, well, this is who I am. I can impact the lives of people like me, people who’ve gone through things like me, using my personal story, using the ways in which I’ve kind of crawled out of stuff and made sense my life and how I’ve gotten where I am.

So being able to have that constantly reinforced from the facilitator, again, purpose, it was, this is why we’re here. Yeah, we’re going to teach you all these techniques and we’re going to teach you how to do data measurement and collaboration and all of these things, but for the most part, we want to make sure that your why is always being answered. So that sort of being the central focus of everything that we were exposed to really helped reaffirm for me what it was that I was there for and how much I belonged, how much I was meant to be. The one speaker, he was an astronaut, and he came and he was talking. He gave the story. I’d literally written in my journal, by the way, another facilitation practice that we were encouraged to do every morning during our Todd Time, set some intentions, write some agreements with yourself for today.

And then at the end of the day, we would go back and reflect upon them like, okay, did you meet your intentions for the day? One of my intentions was like, I’m going to hold onto things less tightly. I’m going to hold things a bit more loosely and just see what emerges. So there was an astronaut that gave us a story about how he was doing his first spacewalk, and he was nervous about it, and before he went up on the shuttle and everything, a former astronaut wrote him an email and all it said was, loosen your grip. And so he tells this whole story about how he’s outside on the ladder thing and freaking out and didn’t want to let go, and it was paralyzed scary, and he remembered the email from the guy, and that’s all it said was, loosen your grip. So he just kind of let go and was able to have this amazing experience that he shared with us. And I was just like, well, that was for me. So not to be too dramatic about it, but that was, I think, the moment that’s like, okay, not only do I need to loosen the grip of who I think I am and whether or not I belong and whether or not this is what I’m supposed to be doing, there’s so much more expansiveness out there and opportunity if you just kind of just go with it.

Douglas:

And after that first session, you mentioned that you were so curious about what was happening and what Todd was up to you, and you were in that observation mode that you mentioned that you actually managed to get yourself on the seat next to him on the bus ride to dinner. Did that spark the original interest in Priya Parker’s

Kellie Artis:

Work? Oh, it totally did. It was the first thing you said. I was like, I know whatever you just did was amazing, and everybody’s raving about it, but you’ve got something. You’ve got a framework. You know what you’re doing. You’ve learned this. Tell me everything. Again. I’m an Enneagram five, so it’s all about acquiring information and knowledge. So I was like, how can I research this? And he was like, okay, well, so he gave me a couple of resources, and then we got to talking about, yeah, definitely Priya Parker. I ordered it on Amazon while we were driving to dinner, and as soon as I started reading through, I was like, oh, yeah, that was that exercise. That was that. So it was neat to not only see it illustrated in the book, but then also, oh, I had that experience. I know exactly what was happening there. But yeah, and then that’s when I started rethinking my project too. It was like, not only am I interested in how you did what you did, I think that would’ve just been cool anyway. But also, I can absolutely see applying this to all of my Enneagram work, because most of it revolves around group classes, workshops.

And again, back to that apprehension of I had been really nervous to convene a bunch of people, and what if they asked me a question I don’t know the answer to. I was hung up on the knowledge part of it and the expertise versus how I would just like to be able to build a safer container for people. Maybe I could just be the person to provide the space and some guidance, but there doesn’t need to be definite. It’s not math. There’s not an equation that’s either true or false. It could just be exploration. So yeah, that really helped just open my perspective on it a lot.

Douglas:

I love the curiosity. It’s such a facilitator’s mindset, isn’t it? Wanting to know how behind the experience.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah. Yeah. It was a little meta and probably annoying. That was not the point. They didn’t convene us to learn how to be facilitators, but that’s what I took away from it. I was like, ah, this could be so useful in almost any application. So

Douglas:

Well, they were simultaneously helping you dive into your why, and I would argue that if that was resonating, maybe it was exposing some deeper insights into that. Why. So I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s all that adjacent or different than what they had planned.

Kellie Artis:

True. No, that’s true. I mean, it’s definitely a realm of leadership to be able to guide a group and do that safely. And yeah, no, it was just overall great experience. I loved what I learned about all of the things about leadership and running big businesses and all of the things. But I think, yeah, that was definitely my takeaway.

Douglas:

It’s not uncommon for students to come in having already read Priya Parker’s book. What was it like for you as one of those folks who had read it previously, to go through it again with some targeted focus and also in discussion with the cohort about the text?

Kellie Artis:

I thought it was great because it was another repetition of seeing it in practice, how it works. It wasn’t just like this anomaly that I, maybe there was something just super, super duper special about Todd. There is. He’s amazing. But it wasn’t like uniquely, he’s the one person that’s born to do this work. No, it’s like it’s work that we can all adapt and use in our lives. So that was encouraging, but then, gosh, just being able to be exposed to people who also were in on it, you know what I mean? I don’t know. Again, not having not been exposed to this as a discipline, essentially, being able to then kind of say, Ooh, what are you guys doing over here? This is kind of cool. And then not only what are you guys doing and how are you doing it, but how are you applying it?

And all of the different industries and ways in which people work. I came into the voltage cohort thinking like, well, I’m not a facilitator and I’m not trying to be a facilitator. I’m not going to put a LinkedIn post up and say, Hey, hire me to come facilitate anything you want, just come. That wasn’t my intention or purpose, and I was a little worried that that’s what I was walking into, that it was going to be a bunch of people who are just professional facilitators. I mean, I’ve done this before too, with even my Enneagram training. I took a whole course on therapists how to be an Enneagram and for therapist. I’m not a therapist, but I’m like, how are you guys using it? Because this feels like something that would be helpful to know, just exposure. So anyway, came in very quickly realized that I was in the right place. Once again, that curiosity did lead to something really profound and helpful. Okay, you can be a facilitative anything. So that was one of the biggest, the coolest things for me to see, especially overlaying everything that Priya had talked about in her work, and then seeing it executed, hearing about how people execute it, hearing about the cool outcomes of sessions or different techniques from everyone in the room, from all kinds of industries, which is really cool.

Douglas:

And after learning some of this stuff, you started to integrate it into your work with military connected families and veteran students. What were some of the first changes you made and what sort of impact did you start at sea?

Kellie Artis:

Oh, gosh. I mean, the top thing is just stop starting meetings with admin. Crap. Nobody,

Douglas:

Never start a funeral with logistics.

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, logistics. It was just like, I always hate that. I mean, I’ve always hated that, but I do it. It’s one of the very first things like, no, you need a hook. You need something to grab people’s attention, and why do I deserve your time right now? Why are you giving me an hour of your life or however long? And how do I prove to you that I will use that hour well, and it’ll be well spent. So stop doing the logistics, the agendas. Setting up agreements I think has been really helpful just for me personally, for whatever reason, that has helped me step into my role more confidently. I can be really transparent about my insecurities. I mean, frankly, usually I used to do this as, I don’t know if I’m the right person to teach you all this, but here we’re going to start doing all this self-deprecating stuff.

And I realized, oh, no, we don’t have to do that, and I don’t have to sacrifice my credibility because of my insecurities. We could just all come to some group conclusions and some agreements that this is the goal. This is what we’re trying to achieve this session. I’ll do my best to guide you guys as long as you’re doing your best to participate and learn. So that helped me kind of shake off some of the issues that I’ve had around leading groups. But yeah, just being able to keep things fresh, keep it active, seeing when there’s some energy needed, not just getting stuck in the content, which is what I typically have a tendency to do, and then making sure that it anchors somewhere. Whatever the experience is, not only are we clear about what we’re trying to accomplish, but then does it resonate? Do you leave with something? Then why did I take your hour if it doesn’t? So having those things top of mind, I think just result in just such better experiences for everyone.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s interesting. Working on the agreements can be such a nice focal point to help with intention as you’re designing the session as something as simple as thinking about, well, how do people need to show up? I mean, you can’t answer that question unless you’re really clear on your purpose

Kellie Artis :

And

Douglas:

You’re really clear on the conditions and the scenario you want to unfold in the space. And I think the number one reason so many people get things wrong or stumble is because they haven’t spent enough time thinking about that. And so to your point, the agreements are a great little hack to here, just three to five things to write down. But in order to write those down, you got to think about what’s the purpose and how do I want people to be,

Kellie Artis:

And what are you stepping away from? So I’ll give you just a quick example from my world. So in the military spouse world, so when we say military spouse, we mean we’re married to someone actively serving. A lot of military spouses have also served, but most of us haven’t, and we’re predominantly female. It’s like a 94% female ratio whenever you gather folks in the military. I mean, service members wear their last name on their chest and everyone knows what that last name is and what rank is associated with that. And just by nature of us being humans, that crosses over into the spouse world as well. So one thing that I realized really early on when particularly working with folks who are attached to people that have rank, no, they don’t have the rank themselves, but they’re still married to that person with rank. So there’s still these hierarchical things that we have to navigate really quickly. I was like, I know you guys may know each other, but I want no last names. We are not our service members. I want first names only. There will be no last names. No asking, what does your husband do? That’s not a question that is valid in this space. We don’t care. We care, but we don’t care.

It’s kind of like the shortcut for any conversation when you meet someone who’s this world. So that not only kind of alleviates the pressure from the folks who are attached to higher ranking service members, but it frees up some space for folks that aren’t to be able to be authentic and true. But then a part of that agreement also is that we don’t leave with anything that we’ve talked about here. This stays here. So being able to say, no last names really clearly, at least plants that seed of y’all, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to pretend like we’re all on the same page. We’re all on the same playing field. We’re all dealing with the same struggles, and then we can work on ourselves from there.

Douglas:

I remember you talking about revamping the veteran student orientation sessions to focus more on community building rather than, I guess cramming information, I think was how you refer to it. And so what were some of those specific changes you made?

Kellie Artis:

Yeah, so we help, in my day job, I help universities stand up their veteran support services. So part of what my role is, and my self-declared purpose as the digital community manager is to make sure students feel engaged, connected, and supported. Because if we have those three things, we have a successful student experience, and then we also have a successful career experience on the backside of school, which is everyone’s goal. We want student success, and we want ultimate mission success for those veteran students who are transitioning by way of college into the civilian world. Veterans are accustomed to being given, they call it death by PowerPoint. That’s

Douglas:

Getting briefed to death.

Kellie Artis:

Briefed to death. So anytime you say you have to come to this mandatory orientation, they know they already have a preconception of what that’s going to be. They’re super excited about it because it is just like, Ugh, here’s the number for this, and here’s, then it’s boring and rote and whatever, but however the information is important and they need to have it. So what do you do? So what we’ve shifted a lot of that session, and it’s an hour, I point to places where they can find the information, but we spend most of the time connecting. So first and foremost, we have a session called Transitioning from service to school where it’s a panel. I’ve recorded it, so we kind of play the same thing over, but it’s a panel of students who talk about the things that they’re nervous about and what they were worried about and how they’ve tried to adapt certain techniques to be able to counter that fear and that apprehension. So just right out the gate, we’re doing that same practice of what do people get wrong about you? Let’s call out the elephant in the room. Are y’all nervous? You should be. It’s hard. Let’s say we’re nervous because this population has a real difficult time asking for help. It’s just part of the nature of military service. You are either told to do it, you figure it out. There’s not a lot of

Seeking help. So we want to go ahead and squash that right out the gate. This is what we’re here for. We exist to help you, and we’re going to call you and we’re going to proactively try to help you, but we also really want you guys to get accustomed to calling us too. It makes our day, when you call us, it actually makes me really happy when you send me an email. So establishing that we spend a lot of time meeting our team. I’m really emphatic about people seeing faces. We’re not just on the phone and we’re virtual. So yeah, it’s going to be a lot of zoom, but here we are, us, we’re besties. Now you’ve seen us in orientation, and then we do breakouts where we have cool fun prompts where people can talk in small groups about what it is that they’re nervous about or what they wish they had known before they left service, or it could even just be little icebreakers, energizers, things like that. So again, we spend probably 30% of the hour not doing anything traditionally considered productive, but to me, it just feels so much more important that they have made a connection with just anybody, one other person in our virtual hallways.

Douglas:

What kind of shifts in energy that you notice?

Kellie Artis:

Well, they’re so much more engaged with our office. I mean, again, we do have a physical office in one of our campuses, but for the most part, it’s a virtual sort of, we’re here if you need us because they’re not able to walk by and come grab donuts when we have them out. So there’s often a lot of like, oh, hey, if we are on campus and do run into people, I’ve gotten like, oh, you do the orientation or you post the newsletter, or, I know I don’t know them, but that’s okay. You can be internet famous for your community, and that’s totally fine. It means that they’ve seen my face and I’ve gotten across some way that makes them know and trust me in the same way that people do business with folks online. I want the students to feel like they have advocates and allies and friends and friendly faces that are helping them navigate the system.

There’s also just there’s more of an eagerness to help other students. So we’ve never had an issue onboarding veteran ambassadors, which is a work study program that we work with the VA with. I mean, often there’s a wait list of people who want to become an ambassador because they get exposed to us so early on, and the ambassadors during that orientation that they then want to step up like, oh, I could do that. That sounds awesome. You get to meet all the people and help people and serve in that way. So there’s, I don’t know, I’m not going to say it solved all has solved all the problems. Everyone gets an A and graduates on time and all the things, but at least while they’re here, they feel like they’re a part of something and they’re a part of a community and they belong.

Douglas:

Yeah, there’s that belonging. I was thinking that earlier when you were talking about the, or I asked you about imposter syndrome and you went into a story about the NASA loosening your grip and just connecting into the content and also just the work that Todd was doing to make people feel comfortable and connected. I mean, it struck me as all of that was creating a sense of belonging, and that once you felt like you belonged, the imposter syndrome wasn’t even a consideration.

Kellie Artis:

Well, now that you’re saying it, Douglas, that’s like, yeah, I mean, if I were to think back and summarize my experience as a military spouse, even, we belong to a larger community. I still belong to the town and the community that I live in. I belong to my family, et cetera. But when we overlay all of the dynamics of our lifestyle, so the frequently moving and the shifting jobs and spending seasons of really having to intensely focus on your nuclear family, your two little kids while your husband’s deployed, that sort of thing, you can, I have noticed falling out of touch or out of feeling like I belong to things before and just how disorienting that is and how it’s just not a comfortable place to be, and no one deserves that. I mean, we all deserve to be in community, some sort of community. So I do think that that subconscious maybe consciously drives a lot. It

Douglas:

Really rocks your confidence.

Kellie Artis:

Totally. And your identity. I mean, it’s the core of who you are. If you don’t have those underpinnings of being anchored to something, it’s really difficult to do anything else. I mean, that’s just baseline sort of human functioning. So for people to ever feel like they didn’t have that, and we know our society in general is becoming more detached from each other and more detached from their communities and feelings of loss and belonging are resonating high, particularly for the community that I serve, the military spouse community, those are some of the top complaints that people have. When asked about would you recommend service to someone you love, or are you satisfied with the military lifestyle? When people say no, those are the key things and the key reasons. So there’s definitely a desire and a void there that I think if we’re all working towards some sort of goal that includes belonging in some way than we’re doing good for society.

Douglas:

And I think that’s a nice transition into the work you’re really focused on now. And that brings me to the work you’re doing now, which came up briefly. We talked about mission identity and the work you’re doing there, but specifically, I’m curious about the Enneagram insights and how you’re working with spouses and what you are looking forward to as you continue to grow that business and help folks with identity and belonging or any of these other challenges that might be well suited to the work that you’re doing.

Kellie Artis:

So with Mission Identity, I am really passionate about helping, particularly women. I am expanding my view of who I want to help serve into more the woman entrepreneur space. The professional woman who, like myself, have gotten to a point in our careers where it’s just like I’ve gotten here. I’ve just hustled and done the thing and gotten to a certain point, but now I’m reflecting. I’m not going to call it a midlife crisis. I don’t like that. But reflecting on who am I now, who am I, and what does this need to look like for the rest of my life? It’s a moment to just slow down and sort of investigate who we are, where we’re going, and what’s the impact I want to leave behind. So we’re using the Enneagram as a framework for self-discovery to help make sure that we are truly understanding who we are and the motivations behind what we do and how we feel about things, how we perceive the world around us.

And the Enneagram provides a really profoundly helpful framework for that work. So once we understand who we are and we have a strong sense of self and identity, then we can move into things like purpose and then combining self identity or self identity and purpose together within left with our perception of reality. That’s whether or not we’re seeing the world clearly, whether we’re experiencing what we’re experiencing in a way that is connected to reality or maybe distorted based on some of the things that we’ve been limited by in our experience or from our personality. And then from there, I mean, gosh, there’s contentment in that, right? There’s success, there’s freedom, and then there’s where the impact can really happen. So working with women who are mid-career farther along, et cetera, just to provide, again, the space for them to do that exploration safely without any of the ego or worried about the image or the pretense.

So I want to be able to provide that opportunity for them, provide some context and some teaching, but really do this invitation into the self-discovery in community with others. They’re, again, group cohorts. I’ll still be focusing a lot on military spouses sort of as an offshoot of mission identity. The military community is near and dear to my heart, and I am so excited to be able to provide group training exercises for them, but it actually functions as more of a piece of my story and a piece of my credibility versus now. I mean, really my inspiration into doing the work that I do, and hopefully it will inspire others, but always here for anyone who’s interested in doing the work of personal discovery and growth,

Douglas:

It’s such a strong passion for empowering others, especially women, to clarify and build confidence. So I’m just kind of curious, what would be a dream outcome for you as you continue this journey?

Kellie Artis:

Oh, dream outcome. VP Harris recently said that there are not a lot of women out here aspiring to be humble. And that quote resonated with me so deeply because I think for so long, I had convinced myself that being humble was the way to be and not the way I wanted to raise my daughter, by the way. However, we limit ourselves in so many ways and we’re often the worst offenders in capping our potential, and I can’t wait to be able to look around and see more often than not women who are not only not aspiring to be humble, but who are stepping into their greatness and their power, and just changing the world, taking control, and showing us all what it means to love and to live with purpose and to live in community. Just, yeah, there’s going to be bumps along the way, and we’re still very much learning how to do this as women. But yeah, I think that really intangible and hard to measure, but I think even seeing that on a small scale is my dream.

Douglas:

Kelly, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you today. I could keep talking for a long time, but we have to cut it off here. So before we go, I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Kellie Artis:

Be kind to yourselves. There’s a mantra in the school that I studied with for the narrative Enneagram, and it talks about having grounded presence and compassionate curiosity. I think those are valuable tenets that I try to live by and are just so important.

Douglas :

Such a pleasure. Kelly. Thanks for joining me on the show today.

Kellie Artis:

Thank you.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration voltage control.com.

The post How Can Effective Facilitation Transform Personal Connections and Group Dynamics? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Take that risk, take that step forward. Don’t think about it, just do it. Sometimes you just have to take that step, and by doing that, my life changed completely.”- Tony Toto

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Tony Toto, a facilitator at the Outdoor Wisconsin Leadership School. Tony shares his journey from real estate to facilitation, emphasizing the transformative power of adventure-based team-building activities. He discusses the importance of physical and emotional safety, non-verbal communication, and the role of conversation in fostering trust and collaboration. Tony also reflects on his continuous learning process and the impact of his work on participants. The episode underscores the significance of taking risks, seeking mentorship, and the lasting benefits of experiential learning.

Show Highlights

[00:05:11] First Steps into Facilitation
[00:05:58] Advice on Taking Risks
[00:08:04] Building Trust through Activities
[00:12:11] Stories of Growth and Confidence
[00:16:25] Creativity in Facilitation
[00:30:14] Community Support in Growth
[00:34:44] Common Mistakes in Facilitation

Links | Resources

Tony on Linkedin

About the Guest

Tony has facilitated more than 300 groups and positively impacted thousands of lives in his 12+ years as a professional facilitator. He takes a Facilitative Leadership approach with every group he works with. This approach opens lines of communication for all participants to engage in robust conversation, idea generation and creates a psychologically safe space for collaboration to thrive. Tony enjoys providing guidance and direction for groups to achieve their desired outcomes based on their purpose of why they’re gathering for a session.

About Voltage Control

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

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives, as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it @voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with Tony Toto at Outdoor Wisconsin Leadership School, where he facilitates team building programs for all age groups from grade school through graduate school to executive groups. He is currently developing a facilitation business that will service not only team building programs, but product ideation, design sprints, creativity, innovation, meeting facilitation, and strategic planning. Welcome to the show, Tony.

Tony:

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Douglas. I appreciate your time and the ability to do this.

Douglas:

Absolutely. It’s my pleasure to chat with alumni and hear the amazing stories you all have to tell. So looking forward to really diving in. And for me, it’s always really fascinating to hear how folks got their start. So you’ve had a 10-year journey as a facilitator in adventure recreation. I’m curious, how did it all start? How did you get bit by the facilitation bug?

Tony:

I got into facilitation in a different way, I started off as a volunteer. Back in 2008, I was doing mortgages. I was in the real estate industry, and the industry went belly up with the financial crisis and I was lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was kind of broke out of money. I had to have a family member take me in and rebuild myself to the point where I wanted to be. So I was out of a job for about three years because the economy was bad. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So after three years, I was writing down a whole bunch of information on a sheet of paper trying to decide what excited me, what encouraged me, what I wanted to do for a new career. I just couldn’t find my place. I was lost. I was absolutely lost.

Towards the end of 2011, I said to my mom, “Hey mom, I’m thinking about volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club of America. Maybe that will get me into a new field, a new job.” And she said, “Go for it.” So I applied for the volunteer over there and I got accepted. I was in a teen center on a three-month contract. Towards the end of my contract, I looked down on the table and I saw a brochure. On that brochure had a ropes course, and my eyes exploded. My jaw dropped. I’m like, oh my gosh, I did this back in college. Through my recreation program at Western Illinois University, our instructor took us… This is an outdoor recreation class, he took us on a team building weekend. He took our class divided into three different groups, and one weekend at a time took our group out to that course.

And during that time, we had to work together using those leadership skills that we talk about, the problem solving, the conflict resolution, communication. We had to solve these activities together as a group, and I never forgot that experience and how amazing it was for me personally. So when I saw that brochure I said to myself, I want to facilitate this. So I went home. I got on the computer and I typed in ropes courses, Kenosha, where I live in, Kenosha, Wisconsin. And a site came up west of my house about 50 minutes away. So I went to their website and I went to the contact information page and I sent a message to the director. I said, here, “My name is Tony Toto. I went to Western Illinois University. I have a degree in recreation parks and tourism administration. Do you accept volunteers?” And I sent it off.

A few days later, I got a response from the director and he said, “Oh, you’re a McGowanite.” Dr. McGowan was my professor that took me out on that team’s weekend back in college. He knew my professor directly because they worked together on a committee in an association in the industry. So he says, “Yeah, we need some volunteers come on out.” So I went out there, he sent me a couple of days in May. So I shadowed a facilitator for a couple of days in May, went out there for a couple of days in June. And then one day I was out there in July and I was waiting at the top of a hill for one of the facilitators. And at this point I was really excited. I love this. This is where I loved doing because I never forgot that experience in college. So I saw the facilitator who I was going to shadow walk up the hill and she handed me an envelope. And she says, “This is from Big Dog.” And Big Dog was a nickname for the director at the program.

So I opened the envelope and I pulled out and I saw a bunch of paper was a higher packet. I was like, what? So when I saw him later on that day, I went up to him and I showed him the packet and this is what he said to me, “Well, if you’re going to show up, I might as well pay you for it.” So I became from volunteer to a part-time facilitator/tech guy. And then the next year I was with his staff full time and I’ve been facilitating ever since. So just by the power of volunteering, I got into the industry full time based on that role.

Douglas:

I once heard this advice which was, if you want to get somewhere just turn up.

Tony:

Yeah, just show up. Take that risk. Take that step forward. Don’t think about it, just do it. A lot of times people get into analysis paralysis where they’re overthinking it. Sometimes you just have to take that step. And by doing that, my life changed completely just by sending out that message and just wanting to volunteer and driving that distance just to do it, just to get in.

Douglas:

And so what was some of the early facilitation like for you when you started to lean into some of that work that was going to be volunteer work, but turned into a part-time job with Big Dog?

Tony:

The facilitation itself, I was learning. I was in a complete learning mode. And I remember what our instructor did with us back in the class and those activities. And as I was watching these activities, I’m like, I remember this so well, so vividly. And I just had to learn the style of delivering it. And I just spent that first year, that volunteer time and the part-time time just learning it and watching other facilitators. And then eventually I just started incorporating like, okay, I want to do it this way. I want to do this design. I want to try it this way. And then when I became full-time next year, I designed my own progression and my own activity set based on what I learned and based on the training that I experienced. So just by observing, asking questions and having the strong willingness to learn and grow, I developed a very successful program for my groups over the next decade plus.

Douglas:

So for those listeners that aren’t as familiar with this kind of facilitation, tell us a little bit more about what the nature of these activities, how they work, what we’re asking participants to do and the benefits they might get out of it.

Tony:

Yeah, this is adventure-based recreation team building. This is experiential learning, so learning by doing. And what we do is when a group comes in, we start it off small. We start off like simple name games, and then we start doing ground initiatives where we’re dissolving the physical barriers, getting the group start connecting and bonding, start building that trust. I dissolve an initial barrier with me so they can start trusting me and be comfortable with me, because I’m going to take them through these challenges that are going to build on themselves and become more and more challenging and requiring a lot of trust throughout the day. So what we do is I design a progression to start out those name games, go to the ground initiatives and eventually at some point we’re doing trust leans, trust falls, lifting and spotting. And then to the point where we’re lifting people sometimes 12 feet off the ground using just each other in the team. And then eventually doing some high ropes and high climbing with rock courses, rock climbing walls and zip lines.

Douglas:

So is this like rock climbing stuff where someone down below is helping provide the guideline or what is that technique called?

Tony:

Well, with the rock climbing wall there’s the belay technique, and then with the most there’s belaying. But what we do prior to that is we do it ground initiatives and some low ropes courses where we get them prepped for that type of physicality and that trust. So I start off very low, like I said, with those name games. Then I start building up from there. We start getting people foot off the ground, two feet off the ground, six feet off the ground, 12 feet off the ground and then eventually up into the climbing mode. So those activities they build upon themselves to a higher degree of trust and energy and more and more challenge.

Douglas:

Yeah, for sure. What was the pinnacle challenge when you think about the most difficult thing that you would have folks do?

Tony:

If they’re not going to climb for the day, I built them up for the 12-foot wall. What it is a 12-foot wall where the whole entire group has to get to that wall one at a time. They have to go up and over just using themselves. So when you’re going up the wall yourself, you’re pretty much surrendering your body to the team. And as a team they’re lifting you and pushing you up. And the team, the members at the top of the wall are helping you get up and over that wall to achieve that success. And once you’re up and over, you help bring up the next three people until it is your time to go back down again. Getting that trust from the beginning of those name games for the group to start trusting each other, it’s building up that support so when they’re ready to go over the wall, they have the entire support of their team and they can trust their team to keep them safe throughout that entire activity, because it’s very high energy, high trust.

And I always say, don’t let the energy get in the way of the safety. So it’s not just physical safety but it’s a mental and emotional safety, as you know with every single type of facilitation activity.

Douglas:

Yeah, those layers of safety are important. I’m curious the impact that you’ve seen when groups go back to working outside of the environment you’re working with them in.

Tony:

That is actually fascinating. I can give testimonial based on that by the groups that come out year after year, like some of the school groups and the chaperones come back. And some of the students who are in their leadership mentoring programs come back as upperclassmen who see me. And the testament is this, that the chaperones say, “Tony, I want to be in your group again because of what you did for my kids for the last several years.” So they see how powerful it is because throughout the year, these leadership programs are working together, freshmen with the upperclassmen and the upperclassmen are there to help them get through their freshman year. So by the testimonies of the chaperones coming back over and over again, and the students I see maybe from freshmen to upperclassmen, they know the power of that. It works because they are growing. I see the growth and I see the happiness in the chaperones faces based on what I’ve helped them do as a team and grow from that point.

Douglas:

Interesting. And what kind of stories are they telling you about what they notice when they’re back at school, outside of the camp or outside of the course?

Tony:

Some of the freshmen they come in very shy. For example, let’s take a leadership program, they come in shy. And over the course of the next couple of years they’re in this leadership program, and whether they stay or not stay, I’ll hear back from the chaperones saying their experience with you has given them more confidence to go through high school and do what they need to do to succeed beyond high school. So I’ve heard firsthand that their confidence has been built and it has grown based on their experience working with me on these courses.

Douglas:

Yeah, very cool. And it makes me think about how a lot of facilitation in the business space or in the community space tends to be or revolve around a lot of conversation. How much does the conversation play a role in this fairly physically challenging space that you’re operating in?

Tony:

There is a lot of conversation because the activities that we give them, they’re so challenging that the groups I give them time to take that silence to think about what they want to do. I give them that time to plan, which is a big thing. A lot of it could be trial and error, but I give them those moments to plan. And as they’re going through the plan, if they fail they got to either start over and regroup and engage in that conversation again. Or they’re talking throughout the whole entire program saying, here’s what I’m seeing, this is what I’ve done. This is what worked, let’s try this. So the conversation is constantly going throughout. But the funny thing is that sometimes when I give them these very vague, yet strict rules, if they have a mishap I will give them a consequence which is silencing the group and they have to communicate non-verbally.

But conversation either words or non-verbal is very powerful. And the chaperones love it. And even the groups love it when I silence them because some kind of magic occurs during that moment of silence when they’re trying to communicate without words.

Douglas:

Wow. Yeah.

Tony:

So conversation’s an ongoing thing, and I have a great example of this. I had a senior executive group come out one time at one of the courses I was working. And one thing they mentioned to me, the main context says… Well, actually I did a name game. I said, “I want you to say your name and a strength you have and a name and a weakness you have.” And the most senior executive in the group said, “Well, my weakness is that I’m not very approachable. I don’t like people… I’m not good with people coming up to me and talking and just I’m not very approachable in my office.” So I designed the specific activity from scratch, my own design from a base activity that I always did. I included instructions and I included consequences, and I included rules. I put the group through this and it got to the point where he was shut down. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t talk. He was reliant on the rest of the group.

They got him through the end, they got the group through the end. After we were done with this activity and after we processed, he came out and said, “Thank you everyone. Now I’m more approachable and I welcome all of you to come to my office anytime you have a problem.” Because he relied on his team to help him get to the end. My activity completely shut him down which was one of the purposes of the group, was to have them connect and bond and become closer and trust each other, because the group was in the process of a big merger with the new company coming in. So there was a lot of, not necessarily mistrust but a lot of questions to be had. But I was able to connect them to the point where this guy was just surprised by how much his team helped him in a moment of crisis in that activity.

Douglas:

Yeah. And I’m picking up on a thread of passion and deep interest in that work you were doing. Can you share a little bit about what led you to pivot from the work with the physical challenges and the ropes courses and things, to more business setting or more innovation type facilitation?

Tony:

Yeah. During my time as a team building facilitator, I saw this amazing creativity coming from people during these activities. And that always just really got my fire going, just watching the creative process happen. And I realized that going through the certification program with Voltage Control, that in any situation the creative process is there. So going into the business model, the business side or the group or the corporation side or the meeting side of it, I could still do these activities, facilitate the activities and see the creative process happen. That’s the one thing that drives me that I’m passionate about. To see these groups come together, collaborate and work together and cooperate and have that creativity thrive and shine, so they can all work at an optimal level and achieve what they want to and have that success.

Douglas:

I was also thinking about the moment you shared in the alumni story about the health crisis that you encountered, and make me think about just how often these tough moments that we go through help us discover the depth of our resilience. And I was just curious to hear a little bit more about that time for you and how much that played a role in how you were thinking about your career.

Tony:

Yes, I was obviously back out in team building in 2021 after everything started to open back up again. And in July of 2021, I started experiencing this health issue with breathing, and I found that my feet were getting swollen and I was retaining water and I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. And my mom says I was always tenacious, so I just always worked through whatever, I need to work through my issues. But it got to the point where I was having extreme breathing problems where I couldn’t speak more in two words without coughing. And I eventually went to the emergency room and they found out that I had a critical heart issue that I needed to have surgically repaired. They had to replace my aortic valve. And because I’m tenacious and because I’m a fighter, I’ve always has been, that didn’t determine me. I just knew I had to heal myself, get back to work.

I never lost my passion for facilitating, and I knew I wanted to get back into it. I couldn’t do team building right away because of my recovery, because of the restrictions I had. But now it’s been three years so I am resilient. So I healed myself back up. I put on a lot of muscle again, and I’m able to go back and do what I love as a passion.

Douglas:

So you’re back out on the ropes course with teens and young adults?

Tony:

Yeah, I’m back out there. I’ve been facilitating the summer. I got back on top of a ropes course 30 feet in the air, climbed the pole to get up there, went out to the course to help people in need. So I’m back to where I was and I’m happy I’m able to do that. The director at the place where I got my start was Owens, that Outdoor Professional Leadership School, it’s a new director now. And he knew my situation. He’s like, “Take your time. You do what you need to do. I’m here to support you and back you up.” And it was no problem for me. I just built myself back up to where I needed to be. It’s not just a physical thing, it’s a mental thing. I had a little thought in my head, I’m like, am I going to be able to do this? But I pushed myself through because I’ve always been an adventurous person. As a kid I was out there breaking bones, and playing around and scratching and bruising with my childhood best friends. So I’ve always been that type to just keep pushing myself forward.

Douglas:

What did it feel like being back in the course with the youth and getting on the top of the 30 foot?

Tony:

Oh, it felt exhilarating. Actually I mentioned to the director, I said it felt so good to be back up there again. I just recently did a two-day program with a group that I’ve been working with for years. The leader of the group saw me for the first time in five years. He was happy to see me. I did a facilitation program on the ground with him the first day, then we did the high ropes the second day. So he was happy to an experienced facilitator back with his group again. And to me, it just felt good to be up there and work the course and work with the group.

Douglas:

That’s fantastic. I’m glad you’re back at it.

Tony:

Well, it’s funny because I thought, as I mentioned in my article, was I going to lose my skills, was I going to be rusty. But once you get out… I was a little rusty when I got going again, but as I kept doing the same activities or doing the same thing over and over again, I quickly remembered how to do it. I didn’t lose sight on anything. It just happened really fast to the point where the director’s like, “Okay, I have to go down to the bottom of the hill. Tony’s going to be a site supervisor on the ground.” Oh, okay, because he trusts me. I’ve been in that course for over a decade so he knows that I know what I’m doing.

Douglas:

What advice would you have to others who might be facing similar challenges or making a pivot of some sort, exploring new things?

Tony:

Just go for it. There are times where I’ve experienced analysis paralysis. I just at this point say, if you want to try something, you have to do it. Otherwise, you’re never going to do it. Just take that step forward, even if it’s baby steps. But the biggest thing with that is surround yourself with mentors and surround yourself with people you can learn from. That’s the key to all of this. When I first got started, I just listened, I absorbed, I learned, I observed. I just took it all in. I am a question asker, so I would ask questions all the time and everybody in the industry was just so patient with answering my questions. So that’s the one thing I would tell people is ask questions because people are out there willing to help you. It’s kind of funny because the old director when he first hired me, he would introduce me, “This is Tony. He likes to ask questions.” Just because I just drilled him all the time with questions because I wanted to learn.

I wanted to know because I wanted to make my activity set for the day very powerful and impactful. And when I designed it and I tested it on a group, it worked so well based on our debrief and processing that it was a coach of a soccer team. They loved it. So I just kept doing the same thing over and over and over again to the point where I mastered the delivery and I became very good at facilitating. I was able to ask the right questions, engaged in those strong conversations and watched the group grow and thrive in the moment.

Douglas:

Yeah. So when you joined us for the certification program, you’d been facilitating for quite a while, and as you just mentioned, had built a lot of confidence around techniques. And yet when you came to us, you had that facilitation identity. And afterwards you mentioned to me that you had redefined that identity from a whole new perspective. I’m curious how that felt and what that really meant for you as far as how that identity shifted.

Tony:

Oh yeah. So the identity changed in a little bit where I realized that team building facilitation is not the only type of facilitation out there. I realized that my identity can expand and I can use this in any aspect of facilitation, whether it be in meetings for nonprofit groups, corporations, product development. So my identity is expanded as a facilitator. And I’m happy to see that with the certification program that allowed me to see beyond just the team building. So it is just what I experienced in that facilitation certification class was very eye-opening because I was introduced to a whole new world of style activities, programs, and possibilities. It’s not just team building. There’s just so much more out there that I had no clue that existed. So I’m just happy for me to continue to learn and grow and explore those opportunities.

Douglas:

Yeah. And how much of what you learned during certification has found its way into the team building work that you’re doing? So when you find yourself doing the games with youth or on these rope courses, do any of those little lessons or little shifts in the way you think about your work, have they found their way into those moments?

Tony:

Yes. Actually, I was working with a high school football team a couple of weeks ago, and I included the 1-2-4-All, the writing structure. I never heard of that until I got into the course and started researching that. So I gave them a topic and I had them all think about it for a minute. Then I had them pair up, then I had them come to groups of four. And then I had them come to the entire group and the conversation was rich and robust after I did that set up. And another thing that just happened with this two-day group that I worked with, it’s a college group, there were RAs. They were going to be RAs for the year, Residence Assistants in the dorms. And based on what I saw in the facilitation class about the power of silence that Eric talks about in the class, I’m a talker.

I was very uncomfortable with silence in my early days of facilitation. I felt like I had to give the answers. They didn’t know what was going on. I just sometimes couldn’t control myself. But eventually over time, I learned how to step back and let the group take complete control. With this group when it came to the end of the day, we just got off the higher-ups course. It was time for us to do our closing before they were going to leave for the afternoon to go back to college. I circled up the group for a final debrief, and a lot of times some groups will just debrief for five or 10 minutes. I actually got them in a circle for 30 minutes and I started off by asking them to, I said, “Okay, we just did a bunch of activities that involve leadership. You’re going back to college to become leaders. What have you learned on this course the last two days in terms of leadership, and how are you going to take that back to college and put that into play with your students and on campus?”

And I silenced them for a minute to think about it. Just complete silence, and then we had this amazing discussion with all 26 of the RAs. And then I silenced them again for another 30 seconds and I said, “Okay, we experienced some challenges out here. What challenges that you saw out here that you think you could possibly face back in school and how you going to solve those challenges? What resources are you going to use?” So I silenced them for 30 seconds, and then we had another robust conversation. So I used that power of silence. Well, later that day, I was in the office with the director and I was kind of debriefing on some key issues that I saw over the last two days when the leader of the program he came in to pay the bill, and he looked at me and he looked at the director.

He goes, “Tony, I was blown away by that 30-minute debrief that you just had. You stole my thunder. I was going to do exactly what you just did.” I said, I’m glad that you silenced the group. I’m glad that you used that power of silence to get them to think instead of just throwing out their words to have that deep thinking because on our campus, they’re going to need to do that. They’re going to have to think about those challenges and those leadership roles that they have to play without just jumping in sometimes And I want them to do that deep thinking. So he was very appreciative, and he said to the director and me, he goes, “I love the fact that you are very well-groomed and well-known facilitator in terms of your learning, your style and how you deliver, how professional you are.” So he was very happy with how professional my role was in getting his team to an optimal level for this school year.

Douglas:

That’s fantastic.

Tony:

This was our first event as RAs for the year. He also said, “I’m glad somebody outside of the group did what you did and not just listening to me all the time, because I’m going to be training them for the next two weeks. Last thing they wanted to do is hear more out of me, so what you did in that debrief is exactly what I was looking for.” So he says, “I understand the power of professional facilitation of facilitators, and you’re one of those.” So I did that based off what I learned from Eric in the class is that power of silence. And when I hit my stopwatch, I was comfortable standing there in that silence. Before I’d be like, come on time, hurry up. I can’t take the silence. But at that point I was just like, this just feels great.

It’s wonderful because it gives everybody a chance to think, especially the introverts. I’ve noticed that introverts don’t just want to say something, they want that thought before they share. So it’s also a good example of know your group, and I’ve worked with this group in the past. So know your group very well and do your pre-work with the group so you have a good strong understanding, because with our briefing notes as the groups, we get their purpose, their goals and objectives. And I read that and I design my day or two days around those briefing notes. So it’s the power of facilitation works with every group.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s great. And you mentioned the power of community in your professional growth. Can you share a story about how the Voltage Control community supported you during a critical moment in your journey?

Tony:

Yes, actually I can. In my cohort for the certification program, when I was working on my portfolio, I was kind of lost on my last artifact that I wanted to do on there. And I just didn’t know what to do. And so I reached out to Eric and he gave me some pointers and I said, “Okay, I know what I’m going to do now.” When I wrote it out, I had my monthly partner look it over. He goes, “No, you got to do this, this, this, and this. You got to change this to this. You got to change this to that.” So I took his recommendation because he had experience on what my artifact said. So after I rewrote it, I showed it to him again, he goes, “This is perfect. He did exactly what you needed to do.” So I got that community of being able to reach out to somebody to look at your work and get feedback on it to improve yourself, plus that person providing the feedback also grows and learns from you, it’s just very powerful.

So I am very community focused because as my growth in team building, I used a lot of mentors to help me grow. And I saw that in our cohort, and I saw that in the Facilitation Lab and circle that people are out there to answer questions and help everybody grow and become successful.

Douglas:

Yeah. And you’ve been playing a really active role in the Facilitation Lab as a volunteer.

Tony:

Yeah, I enjoy it. Here’s the funny thing about me, when I find something I really like and I’m passionate about, I go guns blazing. I enjoy it. I love it. I put my heart into it. That kind of goes back to that being tenacious. I want something, so I’m going to go after it. I want to get my ideas out there. I want to help people grow and share what I know. And it’s just the power of that community is just amazing wherever you go, as long as you are tuned into what’s going on and you take an active role and part in that whole process.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of those things where you get out of it what you put in.

Tony:

It truly is because when I first got started and when I was asking all these questions, one of my old managers, he managed three different courses throughout the time I was in team building. He recently left the business back in 2021. But every single course he went to, he always brought me on because he knew that I was willing to learn, willing to grow, stay on top of my profession, stay on top of new technology, new activities, new ideas. So I’m one of those people that always stays on top of trends and technology in any industry. So for example, in the circle, the fact that Eric puts up workshop design or people putting in advice or people putting in activities and libraries and books to read, I’m all about that support and providing that as well because that’s what helped me grow. And I just want to be able to go full circle and give it back to the people that are new in the field of facilitation.

Douglas:

Absolutely. Speaking of people that are new in facilitation or even ones that have been around and are looking to take their skills to the next level, what key pieces of advice do you offer?

Tony:

That’s a good one. It goes back to the whole… So I’m a big networker. I’m an extrovert, so I like talking to people, meeting people, connecting people. I used to be in Chambers of Commerce in my old industries. I just like getting that whole connection. So I would say build your network of facilitators in any industry because we all have different experiences, backgrounds, ideas, suggestions that can be incorporated in any style of facilitation. No matter what activity you’re doing, you can always have that delivery in a certain way. So build your network, surround yourself with mentors. I always say surround yourself with people smarter than you so you can learn from them, that’s my saying. So get that network in that community of people in place so you can grow and thrive from that experience.

Douglas:

Are there any common mistakes you see people making that you want to advise folks to try and avoid?

Tony:

Yes, I’ve seen mistakes, and I hate to say it this way, but I’ve seen bad facilitation. What I would suggest is… And this happened to me, when I provide feedback… I remember one time we just got done with an eight-hour session. And the new facilitators were, I hear a bunch of complaints. I hear a bunch of arguing, I hear a bunch of this, hear a bunch of that. I was staying silent because I learned that leaders speak less like, you know what? I’m just going to let this ride. Finally, toward the end the director said, “Tony, you’ve been quiet. What do you have to say?” So I wanted to just listen to what they were saying and I said, “This is what I see.” And I shared my thoughts. And whether or not they take that with them or not, that’s up to them.

But it is challenging for me because sometimes people don’t want to hear what you have to say because they think they know the best or they think their way is working, when you clearly see it’s not or may not be working in the moment. So you kind of give them some feedback. So even I remember one time I got feedback back in 2013, I was struggling with some of my facilitation because I was still new to it. And one guy brought me up to a white board. He goes, “Okay, this is what I’m seeing out of you. This is where you need to be. This is the steps you need to take. I took that to heart.” Next thing I know, I was at that moment. That’s where I learned to talk less and listen more. So I’ve learned from my mistakes and I take on everything that’s coming to me as a learning opportunity. So that’s what I would do regarding mistakes.

So just listen to the people, listen to everybody’s… Just listen to feedback. It may not work for you, just listen to it. You may have that aha moment somewhere in the future. It’s like, oh, I understand what he said now. It makes sense in this moment.

Douglas:

Yeah, having that growth mindset and being willing to hear suggestions from anyone, it’s really valuable asset and equality to have as an individual.

Tony:

Yeah, don’t fight it. When I was doing workshop facilitation for a non-profit for a year and a half, one of the things we said was be open to feedback. Don’t fight it, don’t resist it. It may not work for you, but you may have that aha moment down the road where it will. So that’s one thing people have to take to heart.

Douglas:

And as you continue your journey, what are the things you’re most excited about with your career?

Tony:

What I’ve always experienced with what I’ve been currently doing is watching people connect, collaborate, thrive, create and grow. I’m all about that, getting them beyond that choke point where they can expand and grow to the point where they succeed. So I’m all about the expansion of ideas and having every voice heard so that everybody can learn from them, and they can work effectively after the time with me.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s so important and quite common with a lot of facilitators feeling that way.

Tony:

One thing that I had a crisis with was this, how do I know I’m making an impact on people? I remember I was talking to another facilitator about that, and she’s had a lot of experience doing a lot of different things. She said it very clear. She goes, “Well, think of it as being a teacher. Your students leave after the year, you may never see them again. You just got to trust that what you’re doing is providing opportunities for them to grow in their future.” And actually, after having this conversation with her, I reflected on my team building days when I was doing this workshop facilitation. It’s like, yes, by the chaperones coming back out and some of the students coming back out again and hearing what I did for them the year before, shows that I am making a positive impact on a lot of people. So with all the groups that I’ve facilitated over the years which has been over 400 and the thousands of people I’ve positively impacted just based on feedback, I know that I’m succeeding in my job and doing it very well.

In fact, I remember one year I went into work one day at one location. I used to work at all these different ropes courses. I was brought on to nine, 10 different places throughout my years. And I remember I came in one day and I met this woman that worked at one of the locations. She goes, “Tony…” She said, “I got to get my daughter in one of your programs.” I said, “Why?” He goes, “Did you see what came in the mail?” I said, “No.” He goes, “Eric got this envelope full of thank you cards. Your name’s all over them.” I’m like, “What?” She goes, “Yeah.” She goes, “It’s just unbelievable the feedback they were giving you, this great feedback.” So at lunchtime I looked through all these cards. I’m like, holy cow. So I saw firsthand the positive impact I was making on people’s lives.

Douglas:

That’s amazing. Well, as we come to the close, I’ve just got a couple of questions. First is, how do you plan to continue evolving as a facilitator, and what role do you think the Facilitation Lab community might play in that?

Tony:

I’m going to continue to evolve by doing what I always do, and that’s learn, grow, ask questions, get involved, because I noticed that the more you get involved you’re just going to learn from that experience no matter what you’re doing. For example, as I volunteer in the lab and I’m putting up articles and stuff, I’m reading some of the stuff and I’m learning something new. So that’s part of my growth evolution. So that just makes me feel happy because now I have more information in my toolkit to make myself more successful for the groups and make them more successful in the end.

Douglas:

Yeah, it is amazing how just having a project or having something that needs to get done can force so much learning. It’s like if you need to post something in the hub, then guess what? It’s forcing me to go look something up that I might not have otherwise.

Tony:

Right. And when I look at some of these briefing notes, I study them like, okay, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this. And it becomes a learning experience because based on what their purpose is. And I learned something new every single time I at the facility and I’m like, well, this worked. This didn’t work as well, so let’s just kind of tweak it this way. But through that growth process, I’ve mastered a delivery that’s just crazy good. Just got a lot of feedback, and it just makes me feel so good because I know I’m doing my job at a high level.

Douglas:

Great. That’s wonderful to hear. And to wrap things up, I’d like to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Tony:

Yeah, this is pretty much based on a lot of stuff we touched on today. One, take that step forward. I don’t care how small it is, take that mini step if you have to, because I always say and I used to do this with one of my groups, I would show them the photo of that circle where inside the circle says your comfort zone, and then the circle says where the magic happens. You have to step outside of your comfort zone to achieve that magic. So take that baby step and keep moving forward with every single step. I’ve designed stuff I’m like, I have no clue what this is going to look like. But in the end, it became very, very successful. So take that baby step, create your network, surround yourself with mentors, ask questions, and always have an open mind about any information you’re receiving. If you’re not sure, ask somebody with that experience or just get some feedback or just engage in that conversation to bounce ideas off one another.

Douglas:

Fantastic. Tony, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show, and I really enjoyed the conversation.

Tony:

I had so much fun, Douglas. Thank you for inviting me on here. I really appreciate you and your time.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration. Visit voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Adventure-Based Facilitation Can Transform Team Dynamics appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think that is one of the best gifts that you can give other people is yes, we’re all just chemical biological beings at the beginning of these, and we have all the choices in the world to go somewhere else.”- Nathan Hughes

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Nathan Hughes, COO and co-founder of Detroit Labs. Nathan shares his journey from a technology-focused career to embracing facilitation and leadership. He discusses the pivotal role of facilitation in managing teams, especially during crises like the pandemic. Nathan highlights the importance of practice in low-stakes environments to build facilitation skills and emphasizes the need for trust and connection within teams. He also offers advice for technology leaders transitioning into management, stressing the value of redefining success and maintaining personal creative outlets.

Show Highlights

[00:01:30] Nathan’s Journey into Facilitation
[00:04:48] Communication and Change Management
[00:07:30] Integration of Facilitation into Work
[00:25:29] Acknowledging Group Tension
[00:28:02] Facilitator’s Role in Connection
[00:38:38] Involving Teams in Change
[00:41:12] Adaptive Leadership and Facilitation

Links | Resources

Nate on Linkedin

About the Guest

Nathan is the co-founder of Detroit Labs, a leading software development and consulting company known for creating innovative digital products across a wide range of industries. With over 25 years of experience in the technology sector, Nathan is a certified coach and trainer who oversees culture, strategy, and operations within the organization.

About Voltage Control

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

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our facilitation lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Nathan Hughes at Detroit Labs where he is the chief operating officer and founded the business with three other founders 13 years ago. Welcome to the show, Nate.

Nathan Hughes:

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

So great to have you. It’s always fun to talk with alumni and folks doing great work out in the world. And I guess for starters, let’s hear a little bit about your journey and how you started to begin, what often people call this unexpected journey into facilitation.

Nathan Hughes:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m a double alumni because I started and then paused and had to go do some other stuff and then came back and finished. So I like to think that I’ve … Man, I’ve gotten a lot of face time with the facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Get the benefit of multiple cohorts, building the network even bigger.

Nathan Hughes:

Multiple cohorts. Lots of friends. Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks. So right now I’m chief operating Officer, like you said, I’m in the technology side. Information technology. I started my career in the ’90s at the University of Michigan, library science, helping install database systems and things like that. I got into development. I did a lot of contracting, so did a lot of individual selling myself to win a deal and then go and hopefully do that deal well enough that they would want to hire me again and move through a couple different contract companies that collected all of us up and offered services and things like that. Traditional, maybe 10, 15 years after doing that, build up some skills, got into a little bit more leadership, a little bit more management, started managing some small software teams and then some larger software teams, and then got involved in managing software network teams and system administrators and things like that.

About 13, 14 years ago, I got an opportunity to help co-found this company, Detroit Labs, which is a services company. My whole life has been services. I’ve just always been in … I think of it as technology hospitality so I’ve always been in that side of the business. And this was a business that the first week we were talking about, we’re going to go very heavy and focus on some of the startups that were starting in Detroit. I’m in the Detroit area. Detroit Labs, the name of the company. And how all of that changed so rapidly.

And I was going to go in and I was going to be in charge of the web development side. That was some of my background. And then we had mobile development with another founder, and within about a month decided what web development in 2000 … When was this? 2011, 12, 13 years ago. Web development was very commoditized. This might not make sense for a business so changed it and focused on mobile. And we’re going to focus and do only with the startups that are in the startup community here. They’re startups, they don’t have money, and we’re trying to build a business. We want clients that can pay. We started immediately to change that and just flux and change in all these plans that we had immediately going off in different directions. And how do you keep on top of that and how do you create some consistency, some stability when you’re in the middle of that startup whirlwind?

And we’ve been doing it last 13 years. We’ve pivoted and changed the business a couple of times. When we went through the pandemic, we obviously changed like everyone else. Another pretty radical situation where we could send everyone home and work from home easily as a technology company but the kinds of services and products and things like that that we offered had to change radically because all of a sudden people wanted to buy something else. And so as you would expect, it’s been nonstop find something that works, do that for a little bit. All of a sudden it seems like it’s not working as well. Let’s change. Oh my gosh, we got to change everything again. We got to talk in a different way. We have to communicate this to a whole team a different way and move into something else and repeating that. And I think we feel like we do that pretty good. I don’t know if any organization does change management and that kind of thing. Well, but I think we do it and I’m pretty pleased with, okay. And a lot of it is because we spend a lot of time focusing on communication and message and mentoring and coaching and partnership within the company as well as partnership with our clients and all those good things.

And so there was a point when I was doing a lot of … In labs, I started out as a developer and then I got really heavy into people ops, and then I got heavy into operations. And during my people ops side, I started doing a lot more training. I actually offered up packaged training as well as putting together workshops that were specific to the kinds of things that we were doing at labs. This is what leadership means at this company and the way we structure teams or this is how we collaborate and do these kinds of projects and how do we talk to that or give presentations, workshops, etc. And I was doing that and finding out that I liked it. And then I realized I really like this a lot. This more structured piece. I was going to some training and things like that, but I was more flying by the seat of my pants just, oh, this feels like the right thing to say, or I read this book or these things in a different context. I’m going to pull that. Maybe that’ll help with the training. And what I finally realized, oh, with the facilitation, that’s what this is.

And so there was a moment when I realized I’m doing a lot of facilitation. It would be really neat to actually look into that as a real thing and understand what the heck I was doing because I bet people have already figured out a lot of stuff and really smart about this. And I think that’s when I crossed paths with voltage control. We actually partnered with you for a small project. But then I think more importantly to me, I saw … You might have just started … Maybe. I don’t think I was in the first cohort, but you just started the facilitation certification program And that’s where I landed.

I decided, you know what? I want to actually learn some of this stuff and see what I’m actually doing and maybe do it in a better way, a more professional way, more learned way. And that’s how I got involved in that kind of business. I’ve never put facilitation on a resume. I’ve never really thought of it as a skill set until that moment. And then after that I thought, oh wow, this is really a rich and comprehensive book of work and set of skills that if you know it exists and you can start focusing it, you can actually get better and practice and things like that. It’s been in my head as this is what I’m doing. Okay, let me look at that and let me see if I can get better when I’m doing my normal job, which is never, Hey, Nathan, can you come facilitate it’s, Hey Nathan, can you jump in and do this work? And in my head I translated to, oh, here’s some facilitation I’m going to do and I’m going to use these skills because I want to get this kind of result.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. That’s so common. We hear that all the time with folks saying that their title’s not facilitation or facilitator, but there’s so many opportunities to bring the skills to bear, whether it’s planning out a full agenda or I’m just bringing in some little nuance to how I show up or how I encourage others to show up.

Nathan Hughes:

Absolutely. Like I said, I do a lot of change management kind of things. Throughout the pandemic I was chief pandemic officer, so the weekly meetings, here’s what’s going, here’s what we’re doing, here’s what’s happening, here’s how the company that you’re part of plays a role in this situation. But everyone’s lives were so much … It was so much different and so much more expanded. Everyone was thinking about something else. And so here’s how much we need you to think about labs while you’re working and dealing with all these other things. And so there was a lot of that kind of work. And then client services is always a … I don’t want to say it’s a battle, but it’s a struggle between, hey, here’s what we’re going to build for you client and the client saying, Hey, here’s what I thought you were going to build and they never match.

And then how do you bring them together and how do you show that okay, what we’re building is what you want and how does the client show us, okay, what you’re building needs to change in this way. That’s always happening. And then there’s just normal people stuff. Talking about roles and titles and how do people bring their identity to work and how do you get that information. So there’s always these fundamental aspects of the work that I’ve always been involved in as a very high-tech person for most of my career. There’s always been this need to be better at that. In a room how do I try and have a conversation that includes all six of the people in the room, not just the loudest or the most comfortable two? Or in a communication that I’m putting together how do I leave it open so it’s collaborative, not an ultimatum or not cut and dry or open myself up to risks in the future? There’s all of these bits that have always existed and I feel like I have a better chance of getting some of them right now that I’ve studied some of this stuff and practiced some of this stuff in a formal way.

Douglas Ferguson:

You mentioned practice a couple of times now. What does practice look like for you? How does that show up for you and your team I guess?

Nathan Hughes:

So I’ve always had this notion that, or this feeling that when you’re at whatever you’re trying to do, but when we’re talking about work. So when you at work, there are things that are important, but they’re hard to practice because they only show up maybe when the stakes are the highest. Or if you’re a emergency crisis management kind of person, you need a crisis and emergency in order to practice some of these things. And so practice to me is okay, I’m looking at that and identifying this is a thing that happens at the best time or the worst time or whatever your context around that is, or at the highest stakes, how do I fake it and create opportunities to practice that aren’t make or break. I don’t want to do it for the first time when it’s the most important time.

And so throughout my professional career, I’ve identified places where, oh, you know what? I’m afraid to do X, Y, Z. I want to practice that. How do I figure out? I used to be really, really nervous, afraid of public speaking or I don’t know, talking in a podcast conversationally where the questions aren’t fully written out and I didn’t have my answers. How do I practice that? I don’t want to practice it only when I have to get up on stage and give an important message to … And so I did improv. I identified the fact that, okay, improv is a way to practice this, and if you fail at it, who cares? No one. If you’ve ever been to your friend’s improv show, they fail all the time and who cares? It’s just how it is. That’s literally the goal of it is to get up on stage and be able to do something so terrible and realize, oh, that’s fine. I’m still alive, I’m still going. And then sometimes it works really good and that feels good and so I practice that.

Facilitation. Same thing. The certification program introduced a bunch of workshops and games and structures and these formal role plays that were practiced for facilitation for me. I’ve never introduced one of those specifically in 100% like, “Hey, we’re going to do this exercise.” But through that practice, I have 100% absolutely done the exact same work with a couple group of folks and said, “Okay. You know what, I want you two to go out and write this on this sheet, and you two go and write it on a different sheet and we’re going to come together in five minutes.” A very familiar workshop exercise that I’ve practiced in a low stakes way. And in this point this was a negotiation of I feel like I should be promoted and I’m not being promoted. Like high stakes. People’s entire identity and their salary and comp and feeling of value is able to play with those things that I practice in a way that I don’t feel like I’m completely making it up on the fly.

I do a lot of one-on-ones or I do a lot of intervention stuff or that. So I went through a full certification program for coaching. And in my head I’m not necessarily opening … I’m putting my shingle up to be an executive coach or a performance coach or business coach. What I want to do is practice that in a safe way so that when I’m actually doing it for real with real people and real people stakes, I’ve gone through and gotten some practice. I actually have a fairly full full-formed idea of practice when I say that in a very intentional thing. I play a lot of games that are role-play and improvisational. Same reason. To practice being up and getting a really hard question from a teammate. Hey, you said this two weeks ago, but this other thing happened. Why? And being able in that moment to feel the flush and the heart rate and realize, oh geez, I feel like, oh, I’m going to give a defense. And then okay, no immediately switching gears and being able to give a legitimate, a valid response to that. And I feel like I get that right about half of the time because I practice a lot of it and I think half of the time’s pretty good. As a human being in a stressful human being world, I’m pretty okay with half of the time.

Douglas Ferguson:

How have you found your team to respond to the idea of role-playing and that kind of practice? Is that something that they’re receptive to?

Nathan Hughes:

Here’s a funny thing. In business, in professional life, you don’t say, “Hey, you want to role-play something.” You start talking about vision and vision is role-play. Hey, here’s what we would love the world to look like a year from now, 10 years from now, next week, whatever. It’s pretend. It’s pretend with facts and basis but you’re just making it up. That’s role-play. What would you do in that world? And put yourself … And so role-play is just one-to-one, it’s vision and it’s future strategy conversations. We want to change, we want to be something different tomorrow than we are today. As soon as you start describing what that is, and then start even more importantly, describing or putting yourself in the place … Okay, what are you doing in that new world and what is your role and how are you interacting with someone who’s also in this new world? That’s role-play.I wouldn’t say role-play. I wouldn’t use those words. I don’t want people to associate it with other things that they’re grabbing onto because that word’s going to mean something. But that’s all that is. It’s the same skill.

I’m convinced that your body doesn’t know the difference. When it starts flooding, like stress hormones or excitement or nervous energy, whatever that is, those stress hormones are the same, whether you’re doing role-play because you’re on stage at an improv show or you are talking to 40 people in your company, or you’re giving the most important sales presentation to this client. Your body floods you with the same hormones, the same chemicals. You can learn how to deal with that differently and it feels the exact same way so the practice really works. So vision is role-play. Fantasy football is role-play in some ways.

All these things, they’re very similar kinds of dynamics at the fundamental core. I think you can put them into different contexts based on what you’re doing with them. Oh, I’m at work, so I’m going to do that. I’m at home, I’m talking to my 17-year-old daughter who just graduated high school and is trying to … We’re role-playing. But I’m not saying role-play saying, oh, I see you’re looking at these three or four different programs at this college. What are you thinking about? What do you see yourself doing? Oh, if you had that job, what’s the day look like? You know what that is? It’s role-play. That can be role-play fundamental as a tabletop RPG, but it’s a different context. It’s okay, pretend you’re in the future, different world, everything looks different. What do you want that to look like? And now how do you start putting the plan in place or what steps do you need to get there?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s interesting that you talk about the chemicals. I think that’s such an important part of practice. And as we think about the scenarios we might put ourselves into to simulate future scenarios, how do we encourage the physical elements? How do we make sure that it simulates it well enough that our body’s actually starting to create that cocktail so that we’re learning to be comfortable with it, learning to notice it, learning to make peace with it maybe?

Nathan Hughes:

So I personally think it starts with one thing you just said is learning to notice it. At certain levels we are all responding very similarly to different signals in the environment. Same chemicals or same general chemicals. Some people have … Well one, some people know that that happens. That’s a basic level. Oh, I am not thinking this. It’s just a body response. So when that happens in my thinking brain, I don’t get to say, oh, I want this or I don’t want this, or I’m proud of this reaction, or I’m not proud of this. We haven’t even gotten there yet. It’s just chemicals. And knowing that is a good first step. And then the second step is to notice those chemicals. Like this recording about five minutes in, maybe even earlier, I felt some of the chemicals that I feel when I start getting … It’s nervous or it’s fear, but then it just gives me energy. Because I’ve learned to notice it and say, “Oh, that’s happening. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to talk maybe too fast if I don’t notice that. I’m going to run out of breath because I talk even way too fast if I don’t notice it. But also if I notice it, I can use that energy and that can be excitement just as much as it can be fear.”

So the second part, after knowing it actually happens, there’s a biological thing, that piece of knowledge. The second part is learning to recognize it, notice it in yourself. And I don’t know. I know what it feels like in my body. I can’t really say, “Oh, this is what it’ll feel like in someone else’s.” I don’t know that. But I can say you probably feel it as well if you’re trying to learn this. Recognize that and then pay attention to what you do with that.

Don’t start immediately saying, oh, I’m going to change. Just pay attention to what you do. We’ve all learned from our upbringing how we … I think maybe a lot when you were kids, whatever your kid situation is, it trains you, teaches you how to deal with a lot of these reactions, responses. Maybe if you were a sports kid, you’ve got that context. If you were in a house that was maybe more difficult, you’ve got that context. If you were in a rich upbringing, a poor upbringing, whatever. As kids, we learn. But as adults, I think we sometimes don’t reexamine and relearn that stuff. And so the third piece is realize you have natural responses to that physical, that physicality. They don’t have to be those responses forever. And sometimes you have to make a specific effort. So I’m going to change how I feel. You know what? I don’t want to run out of breath anymore. When I’m in this kind of situation because I get so excited I just let it go and run away. So I’m going to notice that and I’m going to change my specific behavior to do something else. You can relearn those things.

Or when I feel this way, I’m not immediately going to jump and start throwing fists and fighting because that was what maybe I did at 14. Well, guess what? That’s an easy one because at 18, 19, 20, you can’t do that. Society stops you. But very few things are that clear. It’s usually not that line. And so as facilitators, I think we get to notice that, recognize that, use that in ourselves, but then we also have to know that others that are in the room are going through that and help or facilitate that moment, that energy. Oh, wow. You get a group of folks that are the smartest in the world at something, and then you introduce something different and they’re the dumbest in the world and you’re like, “Oh, what happened?” Well, so much changes in the room as soon as you introduce something that’s new and people are unfamiliar with. So as a facilitator, if you know that you can work with that and you can adjust to that I think in a productive way. Maybe I shouldn’t have said dumb.

Douglas Ferguson:

You really got me to thinking there and this idea that the noticing is so important and also the conversation you have with yourself around what you’re noticing. I think a lot of times once we label something and interpret it to be a certain way, that sends us into a path. And if we take that path, it may not lead us to where we want to go. So for instance, re acknowledging that, oh, what I’m feeling could be labeled as excitement, not fear, not anxiety. And so simply reframing it and having a different conversation with ourselves. And then I love that you steered it toward the group as well. So realizing that people in the room are having similar experiences or reacting to, interpreting things and helping the group renegotiate with themselves and maybe with each other, how they’re reacting to the things and making it normal to be able to have these kinds of conversations.

Nathan Hughes:

Normal. And even just flat out talking through. You’re in a room and you’re trying to do a in-person, stand-up, physical exercise. You want people to stand up and do something and people don’t want to. It’s just people won’t want to. Unless you have this magic room of people that have been doing this and they love that kind of … If you have a bunch of theater students that have been doing their own work together and it’s a troop, oh, sure. But in case you don’t have that, being able to just say, “And no one’s going to want to do this and a lot of you might be feeling it in your body right now that you don’t want to. Same as me. That’s fine. So just notice that, recognize it. Maybe use that energy to be a little bit more silly or more wild or more free with what you do up here.”

I think being able to recognize that or things as simple as, “Wow. You just said that.” In a meeting. Maybe I’m in an operations meeting, client meeting. “Wow. You just said that. You know what? I am so upset about that. I’m so angry. I want to take revenge on that. I’ve noticed that, I’m going to change that because this isn’t what … That’s just came up. And so I’m going to do something totally different.” Especially if you have a modeling role. If you are at a level where people look and maybe look to you to identify how. If you can say, “Yeah, I have this reaction and I’ve decided I’m going to do something different with it because that natural reaction is not going to serve.” Maybe that original caveman reaction of, oh, this is because it’s a saber tooth tiger that’s going to eat me and so this is why I feel, and I have that same energy, but it’s not. I don’t know. It’s a mobile app that’s slower than it should be. There’s no saber tooth tiger out there, so I’m going to do something else.

Showing people that that’s okay, and that’s normal I think that is one of the best gifts that you can give other people. Is yes, we’re all just chemical biological beings at the beginning of these, and we have all the choices in the world to go somewhere else. And in terms of facilitation, like biological facilitation, just noticing, acknowledging and speaking to that, it’s so powerful.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Even in a room, if things get tense, oftentimes the tendency is to pretend it didn’t exist, change the subject, move on. Actually taking a moment, just like we need to notice in our bodies when we’re having a personal response, if there’s a group response or someone’s experiencing something in the room that’s created tension or uncertainty, just taking a moment to say, “I’m noticing that …” X, Y, Z. Fill in the blank. “How does everyone feel about that? What does that mean?” And allow the group to then do some group problem solving together. Turn it into a dialogue where we notice together. It can create a lot of opportunity for better understanding, better collaboration, and better empathy. Because we can really start to get at the core of like, well, why did that surface and can be really powerful. I think way better than to sweeping under the rug.

Nathan Hughes:

Oh, and the connection possibilities with that as well.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh yeah.

Nathan Hughes:

We all know that you go through a very difficult whatever together as a team. That team is so strong. hey can individually be on the opposite sides of everything. They would never be friends, they would never hang out, they would never whatever. But you set a group of people through a very difficult situation, they start and get through that difficult situation together. Why are they so tight? Why are they so strong? I think because that creates so many situations for all of that to be stripped and for that raw reaction and response to be bare, to be visible, and to see that that’s okay. And no one’s going to kick you out of the group. No one’s going to send you to the side. Everyone’s going through that. And once you see that, you trust, you get this feeling of trust and this feeling of connection. It might take a year to develop that in a more calm, normal way. Might take two weeks to do that in a really difficult project that you’re in the trenches with someone together.

And I think one-on-one, that’s also a place where this comes in. A lot of times, oh, we’re the facilitator. You know what that means? I’m the boss. I’m in control. Oh, I’ve got to have the answer. Oh, you know what? The movie moment, Independence Day president speech. That’s what I have to end every session with. And the goosebumps and everyone’s cheer … No. It’s not true. It’s not true at all. And sometimes the best thing that I can come up with one-on-one … Maybe in a group, but one-on-one when someone’s just dropped something is telling them wow. All I can think to say is, I have this … My whole body, I feel like I’m on fire just hearing that. Tell me more. I don’t have anything else. I don’t have any insight to that. All I can do is share and connect how that has impacted me or that connection with someone else. And I don’t need anything other than that. I don’t need to give them any of the words and some logic or some solution. That’s hardly ever going to be the thing that really works. All I can do is show them, yes, I’m also human sitting on the other side of you, and this is the humanity that I am feeling and it’s on display.

Douglas Ferguson:

You talked about the team or creating opportunities for them to be more wild and free. I’m curious if you have any stories that exemplify the team rising to that occasion?

Nathan Hughes:

So in terms of a workshop, there’s a workshop that I used to do. Haven’t done it in years. And I learned it from … Oh my gosh. Where is this? Harvard Business School? They had a negotiation workshop and I went years ago. Six, seven, eight years. And the idea is you have everyone stand up, there’s some physicality of it. You have a room and you need a group and you present a question to the group. And I haven’t done this in a while, so it might be fuzzy. But basically the question is, Hey, here’s corn. Everyone knows what corn is. And is corn a vegetable? Is it a grain/ is it a fruit? And I think there’s a fourth. Whichever one you move different corners or whatever. And so the intent of this is to show the power of a group or one person in a group having a strong opinion and how that affects. And then you go through a couple rounds of debate, mini debate.

We think it’s this because. No, we think it’s that because. And the spoiler on this … I hope I’m not spoiling corn for anyone. The spoiler is there is a definition for corn that fits every single one of these things. It is a plant, it is a vegetable. The FDA will define it in all of these different ways. It is a grain versus plant, versus … So anything anyone said is right. But what happens in the room as they’re up … And their whole bodies are engaged because you have to move around and you have to come in. It’s intentional. You bring them all into the center to debate a certain thing, and then they move. And so you have detractors that move to a different corner and the whole room is like, “Ooh, look at that.” And one group usually collects the most and they’ve won. And then you just put up all the boring government pages and words that say, oh yeah, every single person is right because there’s no definitive.

And what happens? I think the energy around that and what you do up in the front is prep that group to use the group dynamic as something that motivates their behavior. So you open it up. You’re trying to break down some of these, oh, I want to stand as … No. You see someone, they give a good argument, go over there. Jump ship immediately, and this and that and do. And so that workshop or that little exercise is something that I love because it does lean so heavily into what it feels like when you are in a group doing something as a group with your brain and your body and how that energy can be so dynamic.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Even just getting people to move around.

Nathan Hughes:

It’s so hard.

Douglas Ferguson:

Is an amazing thing to do. And it can be hard as you say, but if we can get people doing it, the more they embody something that you connect to it in other ways. It comes back to the chemistry stuff we were talking about earlier.

Nathan Hughes:

There’s another thing that I have done a couple of times with certain teams. You know you … Whatever it is. It’s a meeting, it’s a group, it’s something recurring. And you’ve got the same people that show up and this is more physical space. But same group shows up, physical space, sits down. The place they sit down that very first meeting is the place they will try to sit down for the rest of their lives. Until they’re in the grave they will want that same spot. And what I’ve done, and what I’ve noticed is sometimes … I do a lot of change management. Sometimes when you do change management, the first thing you need to do is signal that it’s time for change. Changing seat is such a violation of the norm and the status quo that I believe that nothing … It’s one of the most powerful ways to signal yeah, we have to do something different and we’re starting off by, you can’t sit in that same seat. And you have to sit somewhere else. And it’s nothing. It’s so meaningless. It doesn’t matter. This is a meeting room. This isn’t someone’s desk, office, chair, whatever. It’s just we’re in this meeting room and you always sit next to her this or so that.

The physicality of it is so important at even the most minor, meaningless, smallest levels, people get so upset and so offended at that smallest … And that’s the intent. Because I’m sitting up there saying, yes, we have to dramatically change. We can never do the same thing that we just did. And it starts here with that’s why I’m on this side of the room versus that, or that’s why I’m this seat and everyone … Because that model in your head has to break it. It has to start breaking somewhere. And as facilitators, I think one thing that we need to do is look for the ways that we can drive whatever we’re trying to achieve in a room. Whatever we’re trying to help a group or a team move towards with all of the different senses. And we talk a lot about the visual side and the sound side, but the physicality is harder in a more remote world, but the physicality is just as important and sometimes more important because it is stunted in a lot of our white-collar professional lives. And so any little bit of physicality is like a gigantic bolt of lightning.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. The seats a fascinating thing. There’s a strong sense of identity when it comes to where you’re sitting. There’s a reason why people bring their photos of their family and decorate their little area. It’s their little slice of the office that they’ve planted a flag on. But there are other ways that identity shows up and it has a big impact on change management because if people have created some roots around their identity in this place, that needs to shift now because there’s some change coming that can be really scary for folks. They feel like they’re having to sacrifice that piece of their identity or they’re getting uprooted. I’m curious how much you’ve noticed these things or if you have some interesting facilitation, style tactics that help with people as they’re struggling with that identity shift.

Nathan Hughes:

That’s a good question. That’s a big one. Because you’re right. It is fundamental to change management. If you’re doing something that’s worth a change management process, it probably means it’s big enough that it’s important and it counts in some way. It might count towards titles or promotions or raises or something performance. And it is responsible for results that matter. Why would you do a change management process to change something that doesn’t matter? And so knowing that you’ve got to prepare yourself for that. There are a couple of things that I see. And one is getting down to the bare metal in terms of transparency around what you’re trying to achieve. I think what I’ve learned is it’s seldom worth spending a lot of time talking about why the old thing needs to change. But sometimes that’s the trap. You feel like, oh, I’m going to explain why the old thing didn’t work or was bad or this or that. And all you’re doing is re-centering and focusing on and making sure that that old thing is still the center of attention.And so what I’ve learned is I have to do all of that work, but only on the new stuff. Here’s why. Here’s what we’re going … Here’s where we’re … And I think in terms of change management, you never rely on someone just knowing.

So whenever I’m doing a change management process, I’m listening in my head and things I’m writing. Did I use just? Oh, it’s just this. Oh, that’s a warning. Simply. Oh, that’s a warning. I’m assuming. Any assumption obviously is going to be wrong because any group is going to have every one of those beliefs and your assumptions in a change management process become deviations or invalidations of identity as minor or as innocent as you think they are. You are insulting someone if you accidentally invalidate their identity.

And so I’m looking for places where I’m assuming it’s going to be simple or obvious, straightforward. It’s just going to be that. I’m looking for that kind of thing. And I need to keep painting a picture of here’s why and what we’re doing. Here’s what we’re trying to achieve, here’s what we’re trying to change for this result. And the result is very important. We want to make this thing happen this way. And showing how that world might look when that change has happened is super important. So what is my role? What is my job? I’m this and you’re going to make this change in how we do … I don’t know. I’m a project manager. I’m going to make this change in how we price projects. How do I … Okay. I know that we price projects wrong, but it’s still a way that I know and I’m comfortable with. What am I doing in detail? And that’s so hard because a lot of times you don’t know yet. You’ve got to go through the change manager, but you have to be able to talk through it. You have to be able to show this.

And then I think every change management process needs to have a very dedicated and intentional mechanism to assign out parts of that change management process to the actual folks that are impacted. We need this result. I need you to figure out how this thing works as part of that.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so key.

Nathan Hughes:

And this other person, you or this role, I need you to figure out how we get to … You know what? The change is we need to go from 63 over here to 92. That part of it, please figure out how to do that. Also, I’m going to tell the organization, you’re in charge of doing that. I’m going to rally up all the support you need because you’re not operating on your scale, you’re operating on a strategic scale, not an individual scale. So people need to support you and people need to and it’s visible. I need you to do this work. And when that happens, I am validating and judging it based on does it get me to the result? I’m trying my damnedest to get rid of that oh, I’m in charge. So let me look at how you’re actually doing it and give you all the judgment there. I’m trying not to do that. Now I’ll look at it and if I know it won’t work for some reason, I might try to carefully … oh, this is … Yes that. Whatever. But a lot of times, I would say more often than not, that’s not the problem. Is the actual change … We want to get to this result, let me look at how that’s working and involving folks very intentionally and specifically in getting to the … Do I do that all the time? No.

Douglas Ferguson:

That plays a role too in the everyday facilitation stuff. Because if we’re not clear on the results we’re seeking, then people can’t step in with novel ideas of how to shape the future and they’re just slaves to whatever vision or whatever tactics you have already laid out.

Nathan Hughes:

Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

And that’s tiring. Anyone who’s leading them that way must be exhausted all the time.

Nathan Hughes:

Yeah. I have come across a couple and I just watch in awe. Like, wow, you have the energy to really direct and mandate all 90 little details of … Okay. Bless you for that, but I could never even comprehend that. That’s so much work. And you’re right, it’s only going to be as good as that person. And a lot of times that person is pretty good. They’re in that position because they were pretty good. But no one person is pretty good forever and no one person’s pretty good is always better than a few people’s innovation and best. And so you’ve got to be willing to take that risk in opening that up in order to get better results.

Douglas Ferguson:

I couldn’t agree more. And we could carry this conversation on for a very long time. It’s been really fine, but we do have to bring it to a close here. And as we wrap up, there’s a couple of things that I’d love to hear your thoughts on. One is you’ve got this unique background as a technology leader, as someone who’s made these pivots from purely creating, developing, launching technical products and services to thinking about people ops and then all this change management work. And so I’m curious what advice you might have for technology leaders and just this importance of adaptive leadership and facilitation. And also maybe just a final thought. So what advice do you have for other technical leaders and then how do you want to leave our listeners today?

Nathan Hughes:

So for other technology folks that are maybe like me directly … I used to work for a living writing code and now I no longer do that. I don’t know if I have advice, but the thing that I will acknowledge is you’re exactly right. You’re absolutely right. It was so much fun writing code and it was so satisfying to have that direct feedback that I did a day’s worth of work and did something for real and now I can see it. At the end of the day, something has changed. It is so different and I will say so much more difficult to find value or find satisfaction as you get away from that direct one-on-one. So there’s an acknowledgement that I’m going to offer up that you’re exactly right. It was a lot easier and sometimes a lot more directly fun to be that.

And so if you want to expand up and out in more management or more leadership or more strategy or more whatever it’s called in your world, you’ve got to do two things. One, you have to readjust and understand how you’re going to find satisfaction and value out of much less direct and much more abstract results. And how are you going to find that personal satisfaction when you can’t take responsibility for anything really that’s going on because it’s a team that did it, or it’s these other folks that are … It’s this or it’s this process running and etc. So there’s that.

And then the second bit is fill that gap of direct creation with something. Anything. You need a hobby. If you’re a direct technology person moving into leadership management, you better get yourself a hobby where you can be a direct builder of something else. And I don’t care if it’s a hobby, you’re still in technology or it’s a hobby … Woodworking is mine. Or it’s a hobby … Something. You’ve got to keep and create for yourself a way to directly contribute so you can have that little selfish bit of satisfaction of your thing that you do. And also continue to work on how do I value and how do I enjoy the larger, less directed work that I am achieving results in. So that’s what I would say if you’re in my spot and that’s what I’ve learned for me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wise words.

Nathan Hughes:

I think a final thought is you can change how you react and respond to this biology. Like this point that we were talking about, my final thought is I think it is possibly the most powerful thing you can do to rewire and retrain your body and your brain to abandon the ways that you’ve learned in the past as a child or whatever … All of us survived childhood. None of us get through child. We all survived childhood. So the way that we survived childhood, retraining yourself to use those exact same responses. Take those skills, take those strengths forward, but then decide how you want those to be in your actual professional world, your adult world, your different in your non-child world. My final thought is there’s nothing more powerful and satisfying than being able to do that. And you’ll be doing it forever. You never get to stop doing that, but that’d be my final thought.

Douglas Ferguson:

That sounds like a worthwhile journey. Thanks for being on the show, Nate. I really appreciate it.

Nathan Hughes:

Thank you. This was fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more. Head over to our blog or I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Facilitation Transform Leadership in Times of Change? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I take the opportunity to build culture and connection with that team to make them stronger. And that’s something that’s really rewarding for me—when I leave the process to see after nine months of working with them that this team is much more close, more connected, and trusts each other more..”- Julie Baeb

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson speaks with Julie Baeb, a Senior Consultant at Team Works. Julie shares her diverse career journey from advertising to architecture and eventually education, where she developed a STEM enrichment program. They discuss pivotal moments in Julie’s facilitation career, including a transformative professional development session and a human-centered design retreat she led for school administrators. Julie emphasizes the importance of icebreakers, observation, and incorporating play and movement into sessions to foster engagement and psychological safety. The episode highlights Julie’s commitment to building strong, connected teams through thoughtful facilitation.

Show Highlights

[00:01:40] Building Community through Facilitation
[00:07:02] Authentic Experiences and Human-Centered Design
[00:13:38] Observation and Innovation
[00:15:38] Observation in Facilitation
[00:22:28] The Role of Play and Embodiment
[00:29:59] Facilitating Children vs. Adults
[00:36:17] Challenges in Building Culture

Links | Resources

Julie on Linkedin

Julie on X

About the Guest

Julie Baeb is a senior consultant at TeamWorks where she partners with education leaders in public school districts to improve systems and experiences of students, staff and families. Innovation and creative problem-solving is a common thread throughout her career, with past roles in advertising, architecture and K12 education. Julie holds a Masters Degree in Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from Drake University. 

About Voltage Control

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

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Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com.

Today I’m with Julie Baeb at TeamWorks, where she works as a senior consultant. Julie partners with education leaders and public school districts to improve systems and experiences of students, staff, and families. Welcome to the show, Julie.

Julie Baeb:

Thanks, Douglas. I’m really happy to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation. What an amazing pre-show chat we had and lots of interesting things to dig into.

Julie Baeb:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

So just to start off, I’d love to hear … I know that there’s a couple of moments that were pivotal for you that informed your opinions, your early experiences with facilitation. I’d love to hear a little bit more about those.

Julie Baeb:

Well, I started out … well, I’ve had kind of a meandering career path. I started out actually in advertising, ended up getting my degree in architecture, worked in that field for about 10 years, and then found myself in the world of education, K-12 education, and taking my background in architecture, I started creating and building a STEM-based enrichment program for elementary school students. I had an opportunity to attend a professional development session in my district. It was like a summer institute kind of deal, and I signed up and sent in an application. I was able to make it into the course, and I was really excited to take this learning, apply it to what I was doing with my STEM students. I remember right away just being captivated by even just the opener, the way she built community with the group.

It was fun and I thought … I’m like, “Wow, okay. So these meetings and sessions, they don’t have to be boring and sit and get. They can be interactive and with this group of …” We have a big district, there was a lot of different people in the room I’d never met, and by the end of the session, we’re exchanging phone numbers and we’re feeling connected and how can I support you in this work? But she did that. She facilitated that for us, to the point where we were each other’s cheerleaders. But that doesn’t just happen. You can’t just walk into a room and … someone needs to facilitate that experience. So I remember thinking to myself, “Huh, that’s cool. This is a job. She goes around in districts and does this”, and it stood out to me.

Douglas Ferguson:

What do you think was so pivotal to creating that environment that allowed people or just encouraged people to start exchanging phone numbers and have those deeper connections? Do you remember any qualities or anything that showed up for you there?

Julie Baeb:

I mean, it’s silly, but I think there is power in those welcome activities, connecting icebreakers. People gloss over those and are like, “That’s silly”, and “Oh, that’s lame”, but actually it’s super critical and not only to do it in the opener, but in the closing activity to bring the community. I remember … I think one of the activities, and it was at the end, we just did a rock, paper, scissors tournament where you do rock, paper, scissors and the winner moves on to find someone else, but the loser is the cheerleader. So you stay behind the person and you keep cheering to the point where the two finalists and everyone is literally screaming and cheering and clapping for the two finalists, but it actually carries over. It actually is like … you leave, “Yeah, way to go”, and you’re excited for the winners and also just excited to help each other and support each other.

I don’t know. It created a vibe in the room by doing that, and I think sometimes we overlook the power of that. And so it’s critical to me, even when I facilitate a really simple Zoom meeting, I always have some kind of connection, welcome activity opener, I think it’s really important, and a close. I always want to have a moment to reflect on what happened in the meeting, so that’s important for me to do that too.

Douglas Ferguson:

I know, there’s this kind of undercurrent of icebreakers are cheesy, and why waste our time doing that? But to your point, so powerful if they’re done well. I don’t know if you noticed this, but you talked about when you remembered the occasion about each other’s cheerleaders, and then you’re telling a story about a rock, paper, scissor tournament where the whole point is to be cheerleaders.

Julie Baeb:

I know.

Douglas Ferguson:

So that’s funny use of words there, right?

Julie Baeb:

Actually, any activity in any of my workshops, I think I spend a lot of time thinking about how is this connected to the purpose of the session. It’s not trivial or just, “Oh, that’d be fun. I literally think about”, okay, how can I drive the message through the activity … just like rock, paper, scissors, and we have each other’s back, you don’t know it at the time, and it’s just fun, but to have an activity that supports ultimately the purpose of the session, that’s something that I think about a lot.

Douglas Ferguson:

A super important point you brought up there, and it makes me think about something we often talk about, which is if you do something with a group and you turn to the group afterwards and say, “Why did we just do that?” and everyone’s like, just staring back at you with blank stairs, then maybe you should turn that question inward. So I think it’s super critical, and probably the number one reason why people don’t like icebreakers is because folks just grab something out of the grab bag without thinking much about it.

Julie Baeb:

Right, and I think the other thing … I mean, with my background as a STEM teacher and an architect, I’m really visual, and it’s important to me to make every experience authentic. When I was a STEM teacher, we’re not just going to talk about bridges, we’re going to build a bridge. I mean, my coworkers would go … I’m like, “You guys, we should build a real bridge. We should walk on it.” I was always thinking that way, like how can we make this as real as possible, life-size as possible? That’s always going through my brain. That still carries over in my work with adults.

I mean, there was a session I facilitated. When I was still in education before I was a consultant, I facilitated a day long human-centered design retreat for the administrators in our district, so all the directors, department leads, the superintendent, all the principals in the district, they come together for a two-day retreat in the summer, and one day was focused on human-centered design, and I facilitated for them to just identify problems in their department or in their school, and then to be able to solve that through rapid prototyping. Then they presented to the whole group what they came up with.

But as I was thinking about this and collaborating with my colleagues on designing it, I’m like, well, the first step in human-centered design is gaining empathy for your user. Well, we can’t just guess at that. We have to have kids. So I literally arranged for a busload of kids, and they came to this offsite location. It wasn’t even at the district, it was in the middle of the summer, and it was quite an effort, but we got a busload of kids, and it was a surprise. So they didn’t know the kids were coming. So I do this big intro on what HCD is and do our welcoming activities, and then we talk about empathy, how to gain empathy, ask them to write some questions. What would you ask a student regarding this problem that your department or your school is facing?

Then literally doors open and the kids came in and sat down with the administrators, and then the administrators had an opportunity to interview those students. Then later the kids actually collaborated on the prototype and got to listen to the presentations of the solutions at the end of the session.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that, and as a huge fan of prototypes, super curious, what was the nature of the prototype? Prototypes can take on all sorts of forms, and so I’m curious in that moment, what kind of materials was it made out of and how did it take shape?

Julie Baeb:

I’m a big fan of prototypes too, Douglas, and being a former architect, I’m all about build it, make it and then that will tell you what you need, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes.

Julie Baeb:

I mean, prototypes are not just to get information, the test from the user, it’s also for the designer. As you make it … I used to tell my students, your hands have brains. So sometimes you overthink and you’re like, “I don’t know”, and you’re trying to put this thing together. Sometimes you just got to start working and you got to start making it, and then it will tell you, it’ll inform you as a designer what to do next. So in that particular session, and it was a super-fast sprint, I did do everything from pipe cleaner’s paper, make a model to act it out. So I encouraged them to do just a play it out, show us. So put a name tag on, make a costume.

One of the building and grounds team had … it was regarding vape detectors in the bathrooms at the high school, but they play out a whole scenario with someone’s the student, someone’s the … the alarm goes off. So they played it out. They literally played it out, and I think some people too, there were some scheduling, things about bell schedule or changing the schedule, so they drew out the schedule. So it was just like … but everything, when you actually create it, when you actually make it, when you write it down, when you build it, then there’s something to respond to. So those students could look at the prototypes that the administrators made and say, “Oh, yeah, but that’s not going to work.” So I’m a big fan of prototypes, and I still try to implement or build that into the work I do at TeamWorks now today through different design change facilitation work that we do. It’s important.

Douglas Ferguson:

It reminds me of building physical things like woodworking and whatnot. It’s like if you’ve got 50 pieces to cut, you’re probably going to cut one piece and make sure that it fits and that you didn’t transpose a measurement or something, right?

Julie Baeb:

Oh, yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And once you’ve got confidence, then you can kind of do things at scale, you can move faster. This idea of hands having intelligence I think is really neat.

Julie Baeb:

It helps me. I think because when I was in architecture school, I was an overthinker. I mean, I still maybe am a little bit, but I went into that experience. I had to stop overthinking. There was a deadline. I had a model I had to produce by 8:00 AM the next day, and I just had to make it, and I learned a lot from that. I apply a lot of that now, that just don’t overthink it, your hands have brains. Just start building the slide deck. Just start making the thing.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that you had them acting things out, and there’s a method in Liberating Structures called improv prototyping. It’s basically a structure, loose structure, around this idea of, well, if we engage in some curious exploration as a group, we might solve the problem more so than just thinking. So that’s the idea that not only our hands, but our bodies can have intelligence. My favorite story about that is there was a clinic that was plagued with MRSA, and they were trying to figure out solutions to it, and so they were going around and saying, “All right, well, what’s our protocol for patients?” They were kind of going through these motions together, watching, “Well, how do we respond to this? How do we respond to that?” One of the things they noticed is when the doctor was leaning over the patient, the neck tie was dragging all around the patient. It’s like, “Oh, that’s a vector of transmission.”

Julie Baeb:

Yeah. Right? Oh, man. I mean, the power of observation is huge. There is a district that provides special education services for a group of metro area districts, and we did a big project with them trying to figure out … they have a big wait list, more students want to be there than they can accommodate, and trying to figure out how to have those students be served and not be on a wait list. The one thing that I really pushed for was just observe. Let’s observe what’s happening in the classroom. Let’s observe what’s in those member district sites and not make assumptions as a design team what needs to be done. Let’s just go see what’s happening. So just like the observation of the doctor and the tie, noticing that there’s some ways actually that this intermediate district can support the classroom teachers before the student even gets referred.

There’s some tools, there’s some processes and ways that we can support them and coach them without the student having to leave that member district. So noticing that, like, “Oh, what if we shared this resource? What if we coached them on this way of handling that situation?” But you wouldn’t know that without observing and seeing and being in the room to start to realize some solutions. I really do believe a lot of powerful ideas come out of, again, connecting with the user, understanding their needs, talking to them directly or observing them. There’s actually … I coached a student innovation team back when I was in that school district role, and they were middle schoolers, and the kickoff was “Go observe.” I mean, literally there’s a schedule, there’s an interviewing schedule, and there was an observation schedule and a rotation for half a day. So we had some kids that were just going in classrooms and just sitting there, and they were like, “What are we supposed to do?” I’m like, “No, just watch.”

So there’s one group that came back and said, “You know what’s kind of interesting, Mrs. Baeb?” I’m like, “What?” “Everybody puts their stuff on the floor. They don’t put it on …” Because the desk is tiny. They’re those old school with the built-in desk and the chair. So they have their iPad, they have books, they have notebooks, they have their water bottle, they might have a pencil bag. So all this stuff is sitting on the floor. Ultimately, they were able to create something that they called the seat saddle. It literally is a cushioned thing that you put on a regular student chair with little saddle bags on the side so that you can slide the iPad and the notebooks. This was actually produced by Education Furniture Company here in Minnesota and made it into their catalog and actually got produced and made and so .. Anyway, it was an interesting partnership with them and the idea of coming up with ideas just through observation.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s super cool. The power of the improv prototyping is that you can simulate these observation moments, because sometimes perhaps the group isn’t totally bought in to the power of observation or it’s going to be really costly or inconvenient to put ourselves in an observation situation. So let’s simulate it. Then when we learn things in the simulation, then there’s a lot of hunger. They’re like, “Oh, let me pay attention when I’m in these moments, too.”

Julie Baeb:

Right. So true.

Douglas Ferguson:

How would you say observation shows up in your facilitation style?

Julie Baeb:

I think you do have to read the crowd and know when you need to pivot, when there’s strong emotion or when something … you need to spend more time there. I was just facilitating a session last week with a group of staff that were just internally bumping up against each other, some differences, and just from a culture standpoint, things weren’t very solid. There’s some kind of gossiping and just not connected and aligned, and so you kind of do have to start up here. You can’t dig into that right off the bat. So we kind of worked our way down through the levels to get to that point. But to just kind of pause and observe when … there are moments where you see some tension or you need to stop and talk about, “Okay, let’s talk more about that”, or “Let’s address that.”

I mean, as a facilitator, I think it’s your job. You have to be courageous and name things that you see, but make people feel safe too. I mean, it’s a balancing act to be able to facilitate those hard conversations and notice when you need to pause. But we … actually, speaking of Liberating Structures, I used TRIZ in that session, and the group started out by defining their department’s purpose and then their desired culture. Then that question, you throw in, “Okay, so how could we fail miserably at achieving that desired culture and the purpose that we’ve defined for our department?” What’s nice about it is people laugh. They’re saying silly things, but then they’re saying some real things too, and taking that moment to then stop and say what on this list are we remotely maybe a little bit actually doing here? When they circled it and kind of stood back, and then that’s where the hard conversations kind of began, but what can we do about it?

So ending on what are some action steps we could take to stop doing this or start doing X, Y, Z. I just have to say Liberating Structures, and I learned about that through my certification with Voltage Control, that was such a great resource. I come back to it weekly. I literally use those … I mean, I use them in all my sessions now. I think what’s so great about my training and what I learned with Voltage Control through the certification, I mean, before I was very well versed in how to facilitate a human-centered design workshop, and there were steps, and I just kind of did it with students. I did it with staff, families, community. I knew how to do it, administrators. But once I learned about Liberating Structures and other techniques, it’s great. It’s just like … more of a recipe.

These are ingredients. This is the purpose of the session. What do I need to pull in order to achieve that outcome? Always when I work with my clients, one of my first questions is, what does success look like when we’re done in three hours, when we’re done in four hours? Then that gives me that purpose and what I’m aiming for, and I can pull in every activity, every icebreaker, every moment to converge and make a decision. It’s all grounded in that purpose and Liberating Structures, I do, I pull from that all the time.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s a fantastic repository. I think you’re hitting on something there that I think is true for a lot of folks. If I were to really take a step back, I could tie it into something you said even earlier, which is … I think it was in the pre-show chats. I don’t think this came up yet, but a lot of people relate to this idea of being an accidental facilitator, doing the things, but not really having the vocabulary of realizing necessarily what you’re doing or that you’re showing up in those ways. Then you start to key in on it. Usually the keying in on it is related to some sort of framework methodology, or it could be industry specific.

So design thinking is a popular one. A lot of times those have recipes and, “Oh, here’s how you do it. Just go through this checklist and you’re good.” Then the next level of mastery is when you start to realize, “Okay, I can kind of improv a little bit here because now I’ve learned enough tools. I’ve started to see how things fit together in different ways, and now I can assemble things that are really custom and really bespoke for the group that’s coming together.”

Julie Baeb:

I was just a human-centered design, design thinking facilitator machine. I kept doing it over and over again. I think where I started to break away was there was some professional development that I was facilitating for our district. I was collaborating with some colleagues that … it was all about how space shapes your learning and learning experiences, the power of your environment. With my architecture background, when I heard about this opportunity, I was like, “Yes, yes. Sign me up, I’ll help.” So I started facilitating these cohorts of teachers meet four times a year, and there’s where the riff started coming in as far as facilitating the thinking and the creativity, but it wasn’t fully a script of human-centered design, do this, this, this. Then things started to kind of domino. After that administrative retreat I talked about, there were department heads who came to me and said, “Could you help me? Our department’s having this problem. Could you come for a half a day?” “Sure.”

And then I was like, “Oh, this is a little bit different. Okay, how do I … ” There was a foundation for our district that called on me and said, “Could you facilitate a session?” Again, I started just asking that question, what does success look like? I had to just say, “What do you want out of this time with your group? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to accomplish?” Then I just had to really pull back and think, okay, what would get us there? How could we do that? But still always making it fun. I mean, I think with my background in teaching and architecture, I love to bring the fun and the creativity. I mean, people just light up. They’re more engaged.

I mean, even I bring Legos to my sessions. I have a prompt to have about with educators, what is your purpose as an educator, and then build it. So then they have to build it with Legos. There’s just nuances that come when you build your purpose versus just tell your elbow partner, “This is my purpose as an educator.” Some little things come out, little stories and little snippets about the person when you take Legos and build it. It’s different.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s that hand-brain connection again that we were talking about earlier.

Julie Baeb:

Yes, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. I’m seeing this theme of play emerge again, which you spoke to briefly when you were mentioning TRIZ. People laughing, and then the truth was coming in around the edges of that laughter. Or maybe oftentimes I’ve noticed the room is getting really boisterous in a TRIZ, and I’m like, “Oh, we’re going to have some real juice at the end of this” because they’re willing to say some stuff when they’re in that mode. I don’t think there’s enough dialogue around … I mean, sure, there’s lots of stuff around play, creativity, laughter, and the power of it, but I don’t think there’s a lot of conversation around laughter and psychological safety. It seems to me, as I’m reflecting on it now and thinking about my experiences and what you’re saying is that’s really all unlocked for teams. If they’re laughing together, they tend to feel more safe and act in ways that would indicate safety.

Julie Baeb:

Absolutely. I think another Liberating Structure, but the 25-10 crowdsourcing, I’ve used that a couple times. I think there’s something about … I don’t know why … that one’s a playful one too, though. When you’re putting the ideas and you’re shuffling around the group and scoring it, but there’s less pressure than if we sat and looked at chart paper, which ideas are the best ones here, and I like this one. It’s like there’s something when you gamify it where you’re writing down the idea and it’s anonymous and people are just scoring it and passing around, I play music so people are dancing and they’re passing along the cards, that make it … it lightens the mood. It makes it less, I don’t know, heavy and serious. But then you can still analyze it and you can say, “Yeah, I like this idea. I don’t like this idea.”

I think it also gives voice to everybody in the room. It levels the playing field because there definitely is a dynamic with leaders and authority and people backing off on sharing their opinions when they think, “Well, they’re the decision makers, so they’ll just decide anyway.” So when you find ways to give a voice to everyone in the room that’s been invited to contribute, that’s a good way to do it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. It’s certainly one of my favorites, and it’s interesting too that you talked about there’s a lot of dynamics going on there, but you made me think on the overanalyzing piece. There’s certainly this phenomenon of because of the speed and because the music’s going, everyone’s moving around, everyone’s standing too, and they know … especially after round one, they know, “Okay, I’m going to have to shuffle this pretty quick, so I just got to score this thing”, I think it forces people to really go with their gut versus really overthink it. So they might actually score something higher than they would’ve, and they might be willing to take bigger risks because they’re going with what really feels true to them.

Julie Baeb:

I think that’s so true. I think I’ve spent also, just when I think about my career, so much of it overthinking and being logical versus going with my gut. I’ve just started embracing my gut in the last, I don’t know, five, 10 years. It works pretty well. I think a lot of us don’t trust it and overthink, and I am trying to go with my gut more.

Douglas Ferguson:

There’s a lot of fun ways to bring in embodiment into activities, and I think that’s a big part of 25-10 too, is that people are getting on their feet, they’re moving around, they’re handing these cards to each other. So it can be fantastic to get people just up and moving. I mean, even something as simple as a human histogram. What ways have you experimented with embodiment or just kind of movement in the space?

Julie Baeb:

Well, it’s important to me that there’s a play back and forth, that you’re not just in your chair. I do a lot of virtual sessions too, and I do have some background in, when I was in that school district, prior to my consulting job, we actually had … as a training PD session, I was an innovation coach and supported … we had at the time a crowdsource innovation program where staff could submit ideas to make the district better, and I came alongside those … what we called idea champions to help develop proof of concept of their idea, and the innovation coaches … we had the opportunity to partner with Brave New Workshop, they’re an improv group here in Minneapolis, and I learned all sorts of great improv games. I still weave that into my work too. So even with going back to a Zoom call where you’re sitting, sitting, sitting, I’ll just do a shakedown like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one two, three, and stuff like that, literally physically move your body because it just, I don’t know, it helps your brain.

People have been sitting all day, and then they have to get into a session with me from 5:00 to 8:00 PM virtually. That’s a lot. So I do try to look at ways to build in physical breaks. I’m mindful of breaks. People need that. You can’t just go, go, go for three hours straight. I think when I plan out my sessions, I think, okay, we’re sitting, now we’re going to turn and talk, now we’re going to get up. Now we’re going to work at chart paper. I do still use chart paper, and part of it, honestly, it’s just to get people standing. So instead of … I do love Mural and tools like that, but I do just really appreciate the need to stand up. So I think about that as I design a session. We’re down, we’re up, we’re moving, and then those welcoming connecting activities, I will literally …

I do a pick a side where it’s like coffee or tea, but I literally get them to physically cross the room. Coffee is on the side, tea is on the side, and people move through the room to go on the coffee side. So I mean, I think about that. I feel like movement is important. I think it helps your thinking and your creativity to move your body. So I try to weave that in.

Douglas Ferguson:

We had a really cool presentation at the summit this year from Solomon Masala, and he had this book called Zoom, and basically it was almost like a puzzle. The front cover of the book was the full picture, but each page of the book was a different zoom level, a different little square within the bigger image, and if you assembled them all together, or as you flip through it, it’s almost like you had a telescopic zoom and you were slowly zooming out. But the thing is, this guy is sitting on a boat, but then his shirt has boats on it. And what he had us do was we couldn’t show anyone in our little square. We had to assemble each other in the right order. So all we could talk about, “I’ve got a guy in a boat.” “Oh, me too.” “Oh, but do you see the whole boat?” “No.”

But meanwhile, you don’t know that, oh, this is the boat on the shirt, or is it the guy that’s on the boat? It’s this really awesome experience around not only bodily movement, but assumptions and communication, a little bit of leadership. When someone makes an epiphany, how are they communicating to that group and getting the group to respond? It was really fun.

Julie Baeb:

Very cool.

Douglas Ferguson:

So as we wrap up, I got one more question just about your work, and then we can kind of pivot to the future real quick and close out. So you’ve had the opportunity to work with children and adults. How would you compare and contrast facilitating children versus adults?

Julie Baeb:

That’s a good question. I think going back to that idea of your hands having brains, I think younger children can embrace that really easily. I think as kids get older, they become overthinkers, like adults, but when they’re younger, I think it’s easy for them to fully embrace that anything is possible. I can make anything. I can do anything. There’s that spirit within children, and that’s fun to see. When I was teaching this hands-on STEM enrichment program, it was always so rewarding. I don’t think kids get enough of that, of just making things and creating things. It’s always here’s the answer, two plus two equals four. Here’s how you do this thing and here’s your worksheet. I was not like that and I just enjoy the lighting up and just the, “oh my goodness, this is so exciting.” That was super rewarding for me, and I miss that actually.

I don’t get to do that anymore, and I do, I miss that of just that pure joy of making something and being the facilitator that helps them get to that solution and create that thing. But I still see that with adults. I still see that joy of, “oh, we came up with an answer”, or, “Oh my goodness …” I see that too with adults. It’s a little bit different, it takes us longer to get there, and we have bigger, weightier problems that we’re working through, but that’s why I do what I do.

As a facilitator, I come to my groups not saying, “I have the answer for you. This is what you should do.” They have the answers. It’s my job to coax it out of them. I did that with kids, and I do it with adults. I just have different tools in my toolkit to get there. But ultimately, it is coming up with these creative solutions and using the wisdom of the group and the room that’s assembled to get there. It’s just maybe a little bit different what we’re making or what we’re coming up with in the end, but similar techniques to get there, actually.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that, and I especially love the question that seems so simple actually unearthed a critical part or a core component to why you facilitate.

Julie Baeb:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Very cool. So as we think about the future and how the world’s evolving, how is that impacting your practice or the way you think about preparing for your practice and how things evolve? You mentioned that unlike the children, the adults have weightier issues. So what’s top of mind for you as you think about your growth and just supporting your clients and your peers and what’s necessary to do the good work right now?

Julie Baeb:

I definitely think, and I support K12 district administrators, leaders, ultimately with the goal to create the best experiences for student, staff and families. We come at that from different ways, different angles, different processes, but I definitely think as I do the work that I do … I mean, culture is so critical and I do feel in the world of education right now there’s definitely … I mean, it’s a very trying time for educators. It’s not a field that people are running to right now. I think that things are getting more complicated and I do see, as I talk with educators, the importance of building trust and a strong culture I think can carry you through and weather any storm, and really facilitation can do that. Sometimes you need an outside perspective, someone else to come in to help you get there, and I do think sometimes it gets overlooked like, “Well, we really need to just focus on getting this done or getting to completing this initiative”, but really looking at your culture and how your staff are connected with one another and using each other as resources, trusting one another.

I think that’s really important, those connections. So when I facilitate, whether it’s a strategic planning process or any work that I do, I take the opportunity to build culture and connection with that team to make them stronger. That’s something that’s really rewarding for me when I leave the process to see after nine months of working with them, that this team is much more close, more connected, trust each other more. I do think that’s needed right now and it’s something that I strive to do and all the work I do with my clients.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s always difficult in trying times because it’s so easy. I’ve seen so many organizations, it’s almost like defaulting to like, “Well, let’s commiserate the problem”, and that becomes the culture in itself. It’s so top of mind because struggling so much, that’s where our focus goes. Then it’s so hard to ritualize happiness or joy or any of the other things that are really important to bring us together. I once heard it saying, and this comes from my background in technology startups, but a lot of times the strife at technology startups is like, “Oh, well, sales are down and we’re having trouble raising money because we’re not growing. We’re not getting new clients so the investors aren’t losing interest.”

The statement I heard was, “Sales will fix all problems at startups”, which is kind of not entirely true, but certainly I’ve definitely seen situations where the culture was miserable, everything was dire, and then all of a sudden we turn some stuff around sales wise, things get successful, and all of a sudden everyone’s focused on doing what they’re supposed to do, and everything just gets a lot better. So I guess the point is, it’s like culture is easy when things are going well, and it’s always hard when things get tough. So I commend you for stepping into those moments and assisting, and I do agree that having a facilitator to help even just knock people out of the ruts or the norms they might be in as far as a habitual problem, admiration, and being a little more optimistic and thinking about solutions over just stacking up what’s wrong.

Julie Baeb:

absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

So anyway, great there. I love it. I guess want to end with giving you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Julie Baeb:

I think all of us can be facilitators, right? I mean, we can facilitate those moments of connection and build stronger culture no matter what you do. I mean, when I was in the facilitation certification course, I met so many interesting people from all these different walks of life that have these different roles, taking these skills to these different industries and different teams of people. But I think really when we gather whatever it is for a workshop or a Zoom call to ask that question, what does success look like at the end, what do I want to accomplish with this group of people, and then to as much as you can inject that play and that fun to make it authentic, to use that time to actually do the work, not just talk about the work, but get it done and to make it fun and playful. I think that ultimately will help your team build a stronger team, be able to come up with better solutions when you’re really thoughtful about the way you gather the group.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing about your journey and about how you’re applying facilitation, and certainly intrigued by some of the challenges that the education system is facing, and so it’s great to hear that folks like yourself are out there helping and applying facilitation skills that’s much needed.

Julie Baeb:

Well, thanks, Douglas. Thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s been a blast. Thank you.

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Observation and Play Enhance Your Facilitation Style appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Now more than ever, we need facilitation, which is different than being a facilitator.”- Jim Kalbach

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas Ferguson talks with Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL and author, about his facilitation journey and expertise in mapping. Jim shares a pivotal experience leading a workshop at LexisNexis and how it propelled his career. He discusses the influence of room setup on collaboration, the power of visual maps for team alignment, and his interest in Wardley maps. Jim also reflects on the evolution of facilitation with technology, the shift to remote workshops, and the future of facilitation as a widespread skill. The episode emphasizes the transformative role of facilitation and visual tools in improving group collaboration.

Show Highlights

[00:03:24] Meeting demand for facilitation
[00:11:03] Impact of physical space on collaboration
[00:16:14] Transformative impact of mapping
[00:18:56] The Wardley Map
[00:24:33] Openness to New Ideas
[00:32:43] Technology and Facilitation
[00:45:32] Facilitation’s impact beyond work

Links | Resources

Jim on Linkedin

About the Guest

Jim Kalbach works at Mural where he’s the Chief Evangelist. He is also the author of several books, including Mapping Experiences and The JTBD Playbook

About Voltage Control

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

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi. I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with voltage control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives, as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative.

Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Jim Kalbach at Mural, where he is the chief evangelist. He’s also the author of several books, including Mapping Experiences and the Jobs to Be Done Playbook. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Kalbach:

Great to be here. Looking forward to our conversation, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. It’s always fun to chat with you, Jim. I guess, to get started, let’s hear a little bit about how you got your start. What kind of planted the seed for you with regards to facilitation?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think one of the first things that I remember where it was clear that I was the facilitator was a workshop that I did as part of a larger effort around workflow mapping and workflow analysis. This is when I worked at LexisNexis. I was living in Germany at the time and working with our business units around Europe. I had done some field research and created these maps, these diagrams, and that was also a precursor to the book that you mentioned just a moment ago, but that effort came with a workshop, and we did a workshop in Paris at our Paris business unit with about 25 people from around the company. People flew from England, different people from the Paris French business unit were there, and it was a day-long workshop that I led. First of all, there was a pressure going into it, and I had to be really well-prepared.

But given that there were some senior leaders there as well too, I had to really perform and lead them through the agenda that I had, but also show them customer centricity and these things that were new to them as well too. Based on that, then I got all these other gigs from other business units at LexisNexis, and then I kind of became the guy that went around to the different countries and the different business units, and were running these workshops. That wasn’t necessarily the first time that I led a workshop or facilitated a meeting, but that was one, for me, that the bar was much higher for that one, day long. A lot of money invested in it in terms of time and travel and senior leaders there, and I do remember that workshop as being kind of a moment, I should say, where I was like, “Oh. I’m the facilitator, and people are following me and senior leaders are following me.”

Douglas Ferguson:

That sentiment of, “I became the guy or the gal,” is something I hear a lot. It’s like once you do it, people realize you’re good at it, and see what’s possible, when you bring people together in that way, then people start raising their hands, “Can you come help me? Can you come help me?” Do you remember any of those early? What was it like in those early days of getting those requests and there’s more demand for those kinds of experiences?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. I mean, it was similar to what you described. There was an experience there that I was able to achieve with that first one in Paris, and it turned into demand. Other people wanted it, and they wanted it from me as well too, so that actually then kicked off a whole series of things. I even flew to Australia. I did some work down there, did some things in the US. I mean, I was literally all over, and I was in demand, basically, I think, in part because I did that one great show, which was, like I said, the bar was a lot higher for me in that game.

Then, it wasn’t about the experience, I think, that people had. I didn’t have any special knowledge and any magic buttons. It was just, “Hey, we want this for our business unit as well too.” I think, in part, it was the subject matter, right? But it was also that idea of bringing people together in a meaningful and thoughtful way, in a structured way that you could literally be in a room together for eight hours, and be productive, collaborative, and get connected with the team as well too. There was a demand for that, and that really kind of elevated my status and kicked my “career off” as a facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. What do you think was different about that experience versus what people were used to that really created that demand or made them step back and realize like, “Ooh, I want more of that,” or “We need that too”?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, I think a couple of things. One, as I mentioned, this was based on a strategic imperative that we had at the time to understand the workflows of our customers deeper. I raised my hand right away and said, “I can map that, because I like maps, Douglas, and I map things,” so I mapped the workflow of our customers, and then I had them all plastered on the walls, right? So, you walked in. Oh, and the other thing that I did too, by the way, which I have a habit of doing, I’m sure you’ll empathize with this, I walk into a room, the first thing I do is rearrange the furniture, right? Because it is like conference style or the UN take council table.

I’m like, “Nope, no table in the middle. We’re doing circles and breakout groups.” So I rearranged the room so that when people walked in, they saw all these breakout groups and maps on the wall, and they’re like, “Wait a minute, this is going to be different.” Then, it was, in part, not only because I had the maps and things like that all over the walls, but we were on our feet most of the time, right? It was, “Okay. Here’s the research, a couple of principles.” I gave him some things. We had a nice discussion. Go into your groups, and you’re on your feet and you guys are trying to solve the problem together, and then we’d come back together and go into breakout groups.

So I think it was a combination of all of those things, the fact that I ran a very, very different type of session than people were maybe used to. “Oh. I’m flying to Paris.” Then, be in a meeting, and they had their notebook ready to take notes or whatever and watch bullet points go by until their eyes glaze over. It wasn’t like that at all, so it was a bunch of factors, I think, that came together. The visualization of it, the setup of the room, the way that it was 50% interactive. I think those were the things, and I say that because those were the things that people then asked me to do. They would say, “Oh. I want that interactive thing with all the maps on the walls.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. The furniture thing is often overlooked, and I don’t know how many times I’ve run into folks that are just like, “Oh. Well, this is the room I’ve been given,” and it reminds me of doing a workshop at the Air Force, and I walk in and it says “training room,” and all the desks are metal. I swear they weighed like 200 pounds each. We were actually wearing long shirts and ties, and Reagan, and I start moving the desks, and the captain’s like, “Wait a second.” He sees us with our sleeves rolled up in our ties, and he calls a bunch of cadets in and makes them move the desk for us, but anything’s possible. Don’t take the standard layout for granted. You have any good stories about situations where rearranging the room made a huge difference like that?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, a couple of them. I’ve been in a situation where I went into the room, and it was a conference table style thing, and it was these heavy glass things, and basically, the stakeholder said, “We can’t move these.” It was hard to physically move them, but he was like, “We can’t rearrange the room,” so then it’s suboptimal for breakout groups, and you’re constantly tripping over each other as you squeeze behind the wall and stuff like that. So sometimes you have to deal with that. But going back to that Paris session that I just described, that sticks in my mind as kind of a kickoff into facilitation for me, the room was way too small. I say that because it fit like 25 people, and we had 25 people in it. So the people, the office manager, whoever booked it for me, said, “Oh. You got 25 people? I got a room for 25 people,” but very often those numbers are like, if they’re just sitting there still with a notebook on their lap,” but to have a room that you could walk around, it was not nearly big enough.

So what we ended up doing in one part, I remember one of the diagrams that I had, this is very long. It was two meters, it was like eight feet of mapping, right? And there wasn’t enough wall space, so this one map, this one breakout group map literally went around a post, like a column. We had to bend the map, so it was like, “Okay.” We were really trying to squeeze every inch of wall space out of that. From that, my rule of thumb is you want a workshop room that is twice as big as any hotel says will fit in that room. If the hotel says it fits 25 people, then no, I want the room that fits 50 people in it, because you need that room to get up and walk around and that kind of thing if those are the types of things that you’re going to facilitate, which is what I tend to do,

Douglas Ferguson:

Especially if there’s a conference table in the room.

Jim Kalbach:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s like barely enough room to get the chairs out and moved, much less if you have stuff on the walls and people are trying to huddle and stand between the table and the wall. It’s near impossible.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, and it can work, crunched into a corner or with artifacts up on the windows and stuff, which we’ve all done, right? But I find that my belief, Douglas, is that the quality and the nature of the collaboration space affects the quality and the nature of the collaboration, right? And if you do want that interactive, flowing, and free form kind of dialogue, the room can facilitate that or enable that or not, right? And that’s why when I walk into the room, the first thing I start doing is moving chairs and moving tables. It sounds like you do the same thing, so it’s a common belief I think that a lot of us have, whether it’s explicit or not.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. To your point, it reminds me of Conway’s Law. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this one. It comes from the engineering world, software development folks. It’s basically that any software product is going to mirror the structure of the organization that created it. And so likewise, any collaboration that’s happening is going to mirror the structure of the space they’re in, so if you’ve got people seated in rows, all they can do is turn to their left and right to talk and collaborate, so that influences the network, if you will, of communication. I love that point you made about the quality of the space is going to impact the quality, and it’s also structural. I think it’s structural and qualitative.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that, and there are some spaces that are designed to have certain messages or they communicate in and of themselves, like a boardroom communicates. There’s somebody at the end of the table or courtroom. The judge sits higher, and everybody faces them and they stand up. All of those aspects of a gathering, bringing people together, it makes a difference on what’s expected of them, how they behave, how the interaction actually happens. Yeah, I placed a lot of weight on the physical setup. Of course, if it’s in person, right? I would say the same thing applies remote. I’m very attuned to remote spaces, which are very often a collection of tools, and being at Mural, where I work now for me, the setup of the mural and how that’s going to interact with Zoom and chat and things like that, I’m very careful about how I’m going to use those digital spaces, just like I do in person.

Douglas Ferguson:

You have to set up those spaces ahead of time, just like rearranging the room. Absolutely. This talk you have about the visual impact that a space might have, walking into a conference room and it’s setting a certain tone, it’s sending a message, it makes me think a lot about mapping. How do we visually represent things that exist in the world and concepts so that we can better understand them in ways that would require a lot of dialogue or a lot of prose? And so, I’m curious, what led you to start mapping? Do you remember what some of your early mapping moments were and how you got there?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think the precursor to that was, “I like maps,” like real maps. You remember back in the day, Douglas, before navigation systems and things, and folding them up in the car or wherever, the big map, like road maps?

Douglas Ferguson:

Randall McNally.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Unfortunately, nobody can read a map anymore, but that’s just a casualty of the time, but I used to love them and I used to just look at maps, atlases, globes, and things like that. So I just loved understanding and thinking about things in a very spatial way, in general, but I think when I started to get into design, UX, and information architecture, for me, at that time, it just felt very natural for me. Rather than talking through something to say, “Let me draw that for you,” or “Here. I can create a diagram and explain it better and quicker,” which I believe visualization helps you do.

It helps you explain things in a different way, and it helps explain things with a certain amount of expediency that somebody else can grasp at a different level. When I started to get into mapping professionally, customer journey maps, experience maps, workflow diagrams, and those types of things, it just really came to me naturally, and I ended up studying the space. This is even before 2010, really, but when I wrote my book in 2016, I had been looking at all kinds of journey maps and service blueprints, which all have their roots, even all the way back to the 70s, 80s, and things like that, but they didn’t really become more popular until more recently, but I had been studying all of those things. It just felt very natural for me to express myself, but also to encapsulate research as a diagram.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’ve seen teams that struggle to collaborate, struggle to communicate, just transform when they’re looking at a map of some sort, whether it’s a current state, future state, or something more detailed and specific as a service blueprint that you mentioned. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it’s aligned with the specifics of what they’re trying to accomplish. Man, it can really just blow the roof off of a lot of strife and conflict that people have, just because of that alignment and just clarity that it can provide. I’m sure you’ve got stories or anecdotes around how maps have transformed a group before.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, absolutely. I call all maps, one of the terms that I talk about in my book is alignment diagrams, so I talk a lot about alignment, and there’s two ways to see alignment. One of them is outside-in, so coming from human-centered design, when I think about experience maps and journey maps, it’s really about representing the individual’s perspective, the customer perspective in a way that others can easily grasp, right? So there’s this outside in view, but then there’s also this, what I call inside across alignment, because the people who have to understand that experience and then create an experience for those customers, they have to be aligned as well too. So there is this meeting of the minds that I have absolutely seen in all of the workshops and mapping efforts that I’ve done as well, which is really important, I believe, that visualizations can achieve much quicker and at a different level of comprehension. I think there’s a couple of things behind that. First of all, because something like a journey map is customer-centric, it doesn’t have an opinion of a department or a specific function.

The opinion is, I’m the customer. Customer is king, right? This is a really important point here. What that does is people can find themselves and their own work in a map, right? Because it’s about here’s what the product development roadmap is, or here’s what the marketing campaign. It’s, here’s what the customer is doing, and if you’re in marketing, you might look across the map and see marketing campaigns, and if you’re in product, you might see sprints or something like that, right? But the viewpoint is of the customer, so I think there’s this harmonizing effect that maps in particular journey maps and experience maps, there’s this harmonizing effect that they bring to them, and the visual aspect of it is not unimportant, because that same information, as a list of bullet points, would be probably incomprehensible or you’re not able to see cause and effect in the same place. That’s the thing. You can see cause and effect in one map, and that really has an effect on teams, not just individuals, but on teams in a different way, that tends to get them aligned.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. When you were talking about cause and effect, my brain went to worldly maps, and I’m curious, have you done much work with worldly maps, being a mapping aficionado?

Jim Kalbach:

No. What are they? What are the, worldly?

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. They’re not super popular. There’s a few folks that are using them. I would definitely say check them out. It’s a little bit more advanced than the spectrum of mapping. A user journey map, you can pretty much read a couple paragraphs and be like, “Okay. I kind of basically get this, and I’m going to go just do it,” whereas a worldly map, there’s some different layers around, and it’s really looking at the economic drivers. It’s almost like, I’m going to butcher this, but basically if you think about there’s a supply chain to anything existing, there’s also a life cycle to anything existing, and then there’s also economic drivers. If we’re dealing with products that are going to be bought and sold, how far are they on this maturity curve? Then, are they in R&D, or are we actively making money from them? And so, it’s really interesting to look at your innovation portfolio and think about where you might invest or move things along. That’s my real quick, 30-second attempt.

Jim Kalbach:

I mean, it sounds valuable for the reasons that we just discussed, right? That same information in a spreadsheet would not resonate as much with a group of people and have that aligning effect. And just to go back to the beginning of our conversation here too, an artifact of any kind of map, I think, almost asks for facilitation around it, right? Because that’s the thing about a journey map that I always say, is that there’s no answers on the journey map. People look at it and go, “Yeah, I didn’t learn anything.” It’s like, “That’s because you didn’t facilitate a conversation on top of that. You have to bring a lens on top of it. You have to rate yourself, find the moments of truth, or see what competitors are doing better or whatever the levers of change are that you’re going to grab onto. That comes out through the conversation, not from the map, right? So therefore, it’s not about the map, it’s not about the noun, the artifact. It’s about the mapping, which is a verb, and the mapping requires a guide, a facilitator to bring a group of people through the mapping conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

And maps can be such a powerful tool to bring into a toolkit as a facilitator, and the beautiful thing about a map is that, unlike a lot of facilitation activities, it’s not this rigid structure of, “Here’s step one, here’s step two, here’s step three.” It’s like, the point is, “Build this map, and explore it and discuss it together,” and sure, some maps, there might be sections that you work through in a logical order, but it’s less rigid in the sense of like, “Hey, I got to make a group do this and then do that.” It’s more, we’re shaping this thing and trying to depict the story together, which I think it’s kind of liberating, and if you get an instinct and comfort with it, you can almost swap any kind of map in as this thing we’re going to do with this group based on whatever it is that they’re trying to accomplish.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. Agree, agree, and again, my focus is on the conversation. My focus is on the interaction or activating what is on the map, but the map, as a visual diagram, that becomes the centerpiece then, right? So it’s not everything, but it is this compelling centerpiece that the conversations kind of swirl around. I’ve used the metaphor of a campfire before. You’re sitting around a campfire, and it’s not about the fire, it’s about the conversation around the fire, right? But without that thing in the center, those conversations have a different cohesion to them, right? It’s the glue that holds things together, and to your point too, it can be random access. You can start in this corner and go to that corner, or do it the other way around or go back to the beginning, so it allows for very fluid conversations as well too, which then you, as the facilitator, also have to recognize, that it’s not going to be step one, step two, step three, step four, like you described, right? That that conversation, because the conversations with maps can be fluid, you want to design the interaction to also be fluid.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes, but it’s not quite as open and nebulous as a normal just wide open conversation, because you’ve got this anchor, this focal point of the map. And to your point about the random access, that’s actually a really powerful aspect, because then you can remind people that we can always revisit a step. When you’re needing to move on, let’s actually hit the pause here and now let’s look at this spot over here, because oftentimes looking through that other perspective will help them then come back and think about things they hadn’t thought about, or what’s the intersectionality between, now that I’m thinking about, I don’t know, our revenue drivers versus whatever we were just talking about?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess, in that sense, it’s something like a journey map, an experience map, for instance. It’s a structure that liberates.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. I love that. So I also am curious about something that I want to come back to LexisNexis, where you were talking about this is a moment where it was something that was new to them. So not only were you bringing in, were they mapping things and working together, and there’s this new space, but they also had to be receptive to some new ideas. What do you think that you were doing as a facilitator, as a guide in that experience, that was helping them be open to new ideas? Because I think that’s really critical for any good facilitated workshop, is putting people in a learning growth mindset where they’re going to be open to embracing new ideas.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, great question. I think there are a lot of factors. We talked about the room and the visualizations on the walls themselves too, but I also had done a bunch of research prior to that. Obviously, the maps were based on firsthand customer interviews. I was literally going around to people’s offices and watching them work and things like that, so it was valid research based on observation and evidence, but I didn’t go in there with a really strong hypothesis or answer or recommendation. I, basically, said, “Here’s what I observed. I believe it’s valid. If you want to correct anything there, that’s fine,” and we had a discussion about something or another perhaps, so that’s fine. But I really left it up to them to come to their own conclusions, and I think that’s really important that, what’s the phrase? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

But I think if they come to their own conclusions, at that point in time, then there’s a sense of ownership, which I think helps people change their perspective or to grasp onto something and move to a different place cognitively than they weren’t, right? So I didn’t come in with anything prescribed. I didn’t prescribe anything, other than the activities that we did, which by the way, I just tend to have so much activity that derailers don’t even have a chance to derail, because they’re like, “Okay. We’re moving up to the next one,” and I have a lot of energy and I wave my arms and stuff like that. “Okay, great question. Let’s move on,” right? So keeping things going and relying on your activities to guide the group, I think, is something you got to have faith in those activities that you set up.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, and I found it can be really liberating just to, I mean, even if people are pushing back, just to understand that it’s not necessarily a sign that things are going wrong and just being okay with that, right? And saying, “All right. The group’s having a moment.” This is like, “Okay, and that’s part of my job, is to be here and let that just exist for a moment.”

Jim Kalbach:

Agree, agree. Absolutely, which as a facilitator, then you almost can’t build enough buffer into your schedule. I don’t know about you, Doug, but I’ve been doing this forever, and I still overestimate the amount of time that I need like, “Oh. We got to cut that last activity.” I think it’s, in part, because of those moments where you’re like, “I’m going to let this go, because this is great,” particularly if it’s good stuff. If it’s healthy debate or conversation or even healthy controversy, to let that go and then to build that into your facilitation. Totally agree about that, but the other thing that came to mind too was, particularly for some of those early sessions, is I had high level air cover from a fairly senior person who actually commissioned that session, so everybody that was there reported up into this guy, and he was there as well too.

So it was kind of like they didn’t really have a choice but to be there and participate, and that really, really helped. It wasn’t just me doing a grassroots thing, it was from the top down, and that really helped to get those right people in the room, but it was still up to me to engage them and make it interactive. The demand that came out of that, like we described, wasn’t because it was decreed from above. There was organic demand that came there, but it doesn’t hurt if there’s somebody super senior that says, “Nope, we’re doing this”, particularly in terms of other people being open to it, right? Because it was like, “Nope, we’re a customer-centric organization now. It’s one of our values. The CEO said that. The vice president over here said that, and this guy, Jim, knows about customer centricity, so follow him.” It helps when you have that type of top-down air cover.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like real credible air cover, because it’s not just like, “Hey, leadership said so.” It’s actually aligned with a clear mission and a clear why behind it. I think so many people get into trouble when it’s like, “Okay. This is decreed,” but the why isn’t clear. We’re even having trouble articulating the why right now,” and so then you get people just confused and pushing back, because they just honestly don’t understand why they’re being asked to do stuff.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, totally. I mean, purpose, right? I know, in your masterclass, we talk about purpose and Priya Parker talks about purpose, and it was we need to shift to be a customer-centric organization. These types of things help, mapping, workshops around mapping. That helps us all get aligned around what the heck that means. That helps us all become more sensitive to customer experience, like concerns, right? So there was an overarching imperative there that I could always just point to and say, “Okay. Go back and do what you were doing, but it wasn’t customer-centric.” So there was motivation and momentum going in my direction, which if you have a clear purpose like that, that makes all the difference in the world, particularly with those derailers, people folding their arms, and things like that, right? It is like, “No, we agreed on that. This is the way to get there.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Hey, you mentioned the certification program. I am always really inspired and intrigued to speak with folks like yourself that have had a deep history before coming into the program. So I guess I’m curious, as you reflect on the program, what was surprising to you, as someone who already had a ton of experience? What did you take away that you weren’t expecting?

Jim Kalbach:

I think there was some structure and order to a lot of it, and the readings were great, and the discussions that we had were great. Everything that I just described was just learning by doing, right? I didn’t know what I was doing. Fly to Paris and do a workshop. “Okay, I don’t know. I’ll run. How much time do I have?” And it was very intuitive, right? That’s pretty much how I learned a lot of what I know, was by making a lot of mistakes along the way, right? You’ve probably had those sessions that just flop, and you’re like, “Oh, man. That was rough,” and it’s kind of like a stage performance, right? Because you kind of go back, and you’re like, “Oh, man. Now how can I go back out and face the audience again,” kind of moments, so I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I just learned it just by brute force.

The thing that the course really opened my eyes to was the systematic, there’s a discipline there. There’s a field of study there. There’s people who have broken it down and in the readings, but then people like Eric, your colleague there who is masterful in and of himself, in terms of facilitating that course, but also facilitating, just having that kind of structure and methodical approach to it was eye-opening to me, so I gained a lot. The other thing that it did too was, what you were asking questions like you’re doing here, what was your facilitation passed about? And we had to create a facilitation portfolio, and I was like, “What? I don’t know. I don’t have anything to put on there,” and then I thought about it, and I was like, “Oh. I have a ton of stuff to put on there,” so it was self-reflective for me as well too, to look back at all those things I did learning by doing, and then combine it with a methodical, systematic kind of approach that you guys bring to it. It really leveled up my game, I believe.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow, super cool. Speaking of your game, your role at Mural, you’re at the intersection of facilitation and technology. So I’m curious, how do you see technology transforming the facilitation landscape, especially as we look at more and more remote and hybrid settings?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I was a remote work advocate well before the pandemic, but what the pandemic did for me, personally, was made the remote option not only viable, but in many cases preferred, right? And I used to travel a lot to give workshops, talks, and things like that, and now I’m getting people coming to me saying, “No, we want this remote so we can loop in our colleagues from London,” or the team is hyper distributed and they’re not going to be able to travel. So for me, I think where we are right now, coming out of the pandemic, it’s great, because I have a lot of in-person experience, and I know how to control the room.

Sorry for the pun there, but I know how to be in-person and stand up in front, work with breakout groups, and that kind of thing, and artifacts, sticky notes, and things like that, but I also have a deep affinity and expertise, if I can say so myself, in remote facilitation as well too. So the combination of those things, I think, is what a facilitator needs in this day and age, and I understand the in-person argument. I prefer in-person, right? In-person conversations is better. In-person workshop is better, but you don’t have that luxury all the time, right? So it’s not about preference. It’s about adapting, right? And can you adapt and do in-person or remote, or even hybrid, which is even really tricky, right? But can you facilitate something that’s hybrid? I think having those chops and the ability to adapt is really key, but to be honest with you, these days, I actually prefer too things remote.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I enjoy it as well. Personally, it’s nice to have a blend. As someone who facilitates a lot from my home office here, it’s nice to go on the road a little bit, but man, I tell you, I don’t miss being on the road every week, doing design sprints. It’s been a nice change, and frankly, it’s opened up the door to some things that wouldn’t have happened if travel were involved.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, no. Absolutely. My book, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, came out in 2020 right at the beginning of the pandemic, essentially, a month after the pandemic, actually, and I’ve been doing some workshops on that topic. Of course, during the pandemic, they were all remote, and I’ve gotten some requests to do it in person, and I had to stop and go, “Oh. I don’t even know how I do that in person,” because I have to hand out example interview texts. I was like, “well, I got them all. Oh, wait. I got to print paper. Oh, wait. Everybody needs a pack.” I had to make packets.

The first time I did that workshop in person, I had to make packets for people, because I had all this information, obviously in a mural board. I had all this information that people were interacting with, and I couldn’t even think about how to get that off and do it in a physical way, because the whole thing was conceived of in a virtual setting. I think, for that reason, particularly that workshop, I’m like, “No, I’m better and I prefer it to do it remote,” because I got the whole thing down now too. It feels flat to me when I do it in person, actually, because there’s some things that you just can’t do and following people around. There’s all kinds of things that I’ve just gotten attached to in the remote world there

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s super fascinating. It brings me back to the early days of the pandemic, where we were trying to translate all of our stuff that was designed to be in person into the virtual space, and some people, ignorantly, just like forklifted stuff directly in without thinking about how to transpose it properly. This is the first time you’re making me think about the opposite like, “Oh, wow. We got all this natively designed virtual stuff, because it’s only been run virtually. How do we now do this in person?” And I actually ran into that with Magical Meetings, because I had only done it virtually, and I got asked to come do it in San Luis Obispo, and I remember thinking, “Oh, man. I need to print out handouts,” and then after running it, I’m like, “Well, these handouts were okay, but they really need to be a bound booklet,” because people were flipping through them and losing. It’s just like, “Wow, I don’t have nearly as many reps on the in-person version as I do the virtual.”

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, exactly. That was exactly what I experienced as well, and again, face-to-face conversations are great, and you can see your stakeholder and shake their hand, and there’s all those things that matter. Even just going to lunch with the group, those things make a difference as well too, but in terms of my curriculum, my teaching style, and what I can communicate, I feel like I’m better remote now, and I get great feedback, so I don’t think the students miss it either.

Douglas Ferguson:

One thing you mentioned in the blog post was about integrating the facilitation principles in the cultural DNA of organizations, and so I’m curious, what are some practical steps that listeners can think about specifically in regards to helping their organizations foster this kind of culture of facilitation or just the cultural DNA, the notion that you’re referring to?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. That’s a really great point. First of all, I think, given that conversation that we just had about remote and in-person and post-pandemic, I think now, more than ever, we need facilitation, which is different than being a facilitator, because I like to say facilitation happens. Anytime somebody calls a meeting or a gathering, and it starts and it ends, there was some type of facilitation that happened to get to the end, right? The point there is you don’t necessarily have to be a certified professional facilitator to practice facilitation. It’s anybody who raises their finger and leads at that moment is facilitating, right? I think now, more than ever, given the flexible and dispersed teams that we have, but as well as hyper competition and more 1099s coming up than W2s, and people moving in and out of Teams and things like that, now more than ever, I believe that teamwork and interaction needs to be guided, right? I would put all of that under the big bucket of facilitation.

So I think, particularly leaders, and it doesn’t have to be a manager, it could be a sprint master or a team lead, basically anybody who’s leading a group of people in a conversation, so conversation leads, we can say, if we want, to have a little bit of intentionality, I think that’s really the key, right? To bring in intentionality around things like synchronous versus asynchronous. What are you going to do on your group chat, or what are you going to do in terms of video recording with a tool like Loom? What can you do that you don’t have to be meeting synchronous for? Just intentionality around. Things like that can start down the path of healthier collaboration. So bringing in intentional practices as well too. We hinted at Liberating Structures, which I know you bring into your course quite a bit, which are great. You don’t have to improvise how you’re going to get from point A to point B, right? And have an agenda. Okay, that’s great advice, but an agenda is just really a signpost of where you’re going, but it doesn’t tell you how you’re going to get there, right?

But something like 1-2-4-All, Rose Thorn Bud, or something, or a Journeymap, that’s something that you can fill those slots with to actually guide the interaction as it’s happening and unfolding, so you can be inclusive, you can be iterative, voices can be heard. You can bring together diverse perspectives without having a complete collapse of the conversation in a very guided and structured way, so this idea of being intentional, but leveraging simple tools that we have at our disposal that anybody can drive, something like liberating structures, and you don’t have to be a professional facilitator to drive things like liberating structures. So I think I’m kind of talking around the answer here, but I think the one thing is recognize that if you stand up and you raise your hand to lead a group of people in any way, that you can be intentional in how you’re going to do that, and you should. The other thing is you can bring in tools, methods, and activities that structure the conversation, so collaboration skills and facilitation skills is one side of it. The other is collaboration methods, is another side of it.

Douglas Ferguson:

So kind of building upon that and looking ahead, thinking about how things will evolve in the future, how do you envision the role of facilitation changing maybe over the next decade or so?

Jim Kalbach:

I do hope it is something that people don’t necessarily see as a job title or a specialized field, that it is something that anybody can do, right? Just as an analogy, I’m not sure why my mind went to this analogy, but in 1887, I think is the year, but around that time period, photography was very specialized. To be a photographer, you had to literally know how explosives worked, because you had the flash thing, and you put your head under a hood, and then developing the film was very hard. There was no labs that you just sent it out to, right? So photography was a very, very specialized profession, right? But then Kodak came out with the Brownie camera, which allowed anybody to photograph. They weren’t professional photographers, but they were able to photograph.

To this day, they’re professional photographers, right? But any one of us could pull out a cell phone and be a “photographer” in that moment, and just imagine if you couldn’t take a picture of your food or whatever at the restaurant, it is so natural for us to be like, “I’m going to take a picture of that,” right? But it wasn’t always like that, and that’s kind of an analogy for me. Maybe not over 100 years. I hope it goes quicker, Douglas, than a century, or more now. We’re in 2024, right? But this idea of there are professional facilitators, and I can go to Voltage Control and get my certification on that, but I can also practice facilitation, and it’s something that I am comfortable with doing, and it’s just there. It’s everywhere, like a light switch in our offices or turning on the tap that, “Okay, we’re facilitating now,” that it becomes more commonplace and not so specialized.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. That’s my hope as well, because I think there’s so many situations where just good facilitation would’ve improved the quality of someone’s day, which then could have ripple effects into their week, their year, their life, and so the more that we can improve these moments of time that we gather and that we work together, when we spend so much of life at work and with our colleagues, the more we can improve those moments and those experiences, the better outcomes we can drive and the higher quality of existence that we’ll have, I think.

Jim Kalbach:

I agree, and I think it does spill outside of the work environment. We’re talking about work environment, but what about government and local government? I think about what’s going on at City Hall in the city that I live right now, and how dysfunctional are those conversations, when I think about that, or my wife is very active and her friends are very active in volunteer organizations, right? Then, I hear some of the stories. They’ll go out to meetings and, “This happened,” or “That didn’t happen, right?”

I’m like, “Wow. If they just had somebody going, ‘Let’s do 1-2-4-All,” or “Let’s do a Rose Thorn Bud on this,” the whole thing would’ve been so much more purposeful and meaningful on the outcome. So yeah, it is about dialogue and human interaction for the purpose of a better place to exist in, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, we’re getting to the end of our conversation here, so I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Jim Kalbach:

I mean, I think we’re on a good track right there, Douglas, with that, and I think it’s that focus on facilitation, and not necessarily, “I have to become a facilitator.” That’s not the goal. The goal is the facilitation and facilitating is a skill that anybody can learn in practice, and I would say it’s a future skill, right? If you lead a team, if you’re a manager, if you raise your finger to guide a group of people, it’s in your own best interest and for the common good of that group to have a structured and guided conversation to get to the outcomes that you want, and anybody can do that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Speaking to the choir, my friend. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, and I hope that we’ll get to do it again. Thanks a bunch, Jim.

Jim Kalbach:

Anytime. I’m happy to come back on, Douglas. Thanks so much for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales, and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post The Most Impactful Visual Tools for Facilitating Team Alignment appeared first on Voltage Control.

At this year’s Facilitation Lab Summit, Susan led a deeply impactful workshop titled “Developing Narratives that Bring Voice to Targeted Audience.” Susan, a seasoned educator and facilitator, guided participants through an exploration of their own identities and experiences using storytelling as a powerful tool for connection and empathy.

The session began with Susan sharing her personal journey as an English teacher and the importance of storytelling in her life and work. She emphasized the vulnerability involved in sharing personal stories and how it can lead to transformational change. Participants were encouraged to reflect on their own stories and identities, setting the stage for a profound and introspective workshop.

Susan introduced the concept of “narrative transport,” where participants immersed themselves in their own stories to uncover new insights and perspectives. She provided an example of a “Where I’m From” poem, showcasing how sensory details and personal memories can vividly bring a story to life. Attendees were then invited to write their own “Where I’m From” pieces, focusing on the tactile, sensory, and emotional aspects of their experiences.

Following this individual reflection, participants engaged in a constructivist listening exercise. They shared their stories without interruption in pairs, creating a safe and supportive space for deep listening and empathy. This exercise highlighted the importance of truly listening to others without the urge to respond or self-promote, fostering a sense of trust and connection within the group.

The workshop then transitioned to a group activity where participants created character profiles based on real-life stories of military families. Susan had gathered these stories from a friend with extensive military experience, ensuring the profiles were authentic and grounded in real experiences. Participants worked in teams to represent these profiles visually, capturing these individuals’ hopes, dreams, and challenges.

To deepen the understanding of these profiles, Susan introduced the “Think, Feel, Care” framework from the Agency by Design initiative at Harvard’s Project Zero. This framework encouraged participants to consider the systems and emotional responses affecting their characters, as well as their values and motivations. Through this exercise, attendees developed a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of the military families they were representing.

The workshop concluded with a gallery walk, where participants viewed and reflected on each other’s profiles. This exercise allowed them to identify common themes and patterns and to consider the broader implications for community engagement and problem-solving. Susan wrapped up the session by inviting participants to share their insights and takeaways, emphasizing the importance of empathy and deep listening in facilitation.

Susan’s workshop was a profound experience for all involved, encouraging participants to look inward and understand the power of their own stories. By fostering a space of vulnerability and trust, she demonstrated how storytelling can be a transformative tool for personal and communal growth. The session was a highlight of the summit, leaving attendees with a renewed sense of empathy and a deeper connection to their own identities and those of others.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript

Susan:

Really, as we think across these last two days, we really started a little bit in understanding ourselves. We’ve been looking at the soil and the place and how that impacts us, culture. We’ve been looking at those challenges of design. We’ve been thinking about the entities, in terms of university, those who they want to serve. And we’re going to bring it a little closer, well a lot closer. And I belabored and really thought about this for a long time. And I think Erin said we’ve had time to build trust, because where I’m about to take you is not something I would step into blindly with a group because there is some vulnerability to when we start telling our stories because it’s our identity work.

So storytelling, I’m an English teacher, high school teacher by trade. I usually try not to say that because then people think they have to talk perfectly grammatically correct and that I’m going to pull out my red pen at any moment. Grammar was not my jam. Writing creatively was, and storytelling was so important to me. When I reflect back, even in my work in the classroom, it was always about seeing and knowing each child. I left the classroom about 17 years in and I felt like it was a vessel that kept getting filled with liquid because I would in a year have about 120 different students and I wanted to know their stories, but I never let go of their stories.

So it took longer and longer for me to learn everything and I felt like my bandwidth was filling up, but I realized how important was for me to see them and for also to share something about me. So who am I? If you talk to anyone from Michigan, we’re going to pull out our hands, tell you where we are and I’ve already done it a few times. Some people called me out and say, “Oh yeah, Michigan.” They put their hands up first and they really knew where I was located and it wasn’t like a really well-known town. I was very impressed.

Usually when I’m out of state, I tell people I’m from the Detroit area. I am really an hour north of Detroit, but Detroit has a lot of identity for Michiganders and I, on the other side, just finished my doctorate. And what you see on the floor there is 33 years of journaling. So my dissertation was a study of myself, it was an autoethnography and it was about identity. So I was looking at my stories and how my stories changed across my professional life and what that meant. And there were some eras of me that I didn’t like so much and I was happy to get over those again in my study. But I am very much about transformational change and that’s what you see in that far corner. And a lot of that work is very intimate because you need to have all the voices in the room and you need to make space for trust and vulnerability.

National Writing Project is one of those biggest transformational change agents for me because that’s where I learned to do this hard, vulnerable work. And then I started leading it with adults and that led me to being a consultant in a region. And that led me to meeting Eric and setting up lots of what we call beloved communities where people could come and just like we’re doing here, we’re learning from each other. And we feel like, I’ve heard several people say, “I’m with my people, I found my people.” So as an educator, we’re notorious for freestyling and putting things together. So as I’ve been experiencing the two days, we might have gone through a cycle. So I remember early on a mentor saying to me, I did teaching in my bones. And she said, “You’re really a strong teacher, but you also need to learn how to name what you’re doing.”

And I almost feel like I’m learning that again in this community because I will do things in my bones as a facilitator, but translating that into like, so what did I just do and why did I just make those decisions? And so I bring that up because I found this book, just recently, that’s really like oh my gosh, that’s exactly naming what it’s taken me 30 years to really refine and do, is to create these transformational learning experiences for people. And a lot of that is tinkering with people’s identities, which can be very delicate work, and it’s usually over a long span of time. So I really was drawn, and I still haven’t finished all of this, but I said to Eric, I raised my hand. I said, “I got to come lead the session because this is like I finally found what I am. I’m a transformational change agent.” And it is through storytelling that you get there.

So narrative is a big part of this. So I also know that we are in that beloved community where we’re trying to learn from each other. So the way I thought about this is, we’re going to step in, we’re going to step out and reflect, and we’re going to step back in and it’s going to be this cycle. So we’re here also, and like Douglas said, I very seriously took the challenge of why we’re here. So what we’re doing is in service of finding something that we can offer back to ACC as we wrap up these two days.

So we’re going to do that through something called narrative transport. And I like this, you maybe have heard about in facilitation about immersion. You can do an immersion through a narrative, put people in the doing of it, don’t necessarily have them experience it from someone else, but immersion is where you have to build… In your safe space, put that down on paper for yourself. And if you think back to the title of my session, it was not about making meaning, but meaning making. If you get into writing, it’s through the act of writing that you, many times, see something you didn’t know before you started writing. And so writing actually gets you to seeing something you would probably not have seen before. So to me, that is really embodying narrative transport.

So in a minute I’m going to ask you to be also thinking about telling your where I’m from story, but I wanted you to see an example of one way you might be thinking about how would I tell that story? It’s going to be a little bit different than all the things that we’ve done up to this point, but some things might flow into it.

Speaker 2:

I am from cow print, tea kettles from Windex and allergy shots. I’m from the two-story white house with red doors built identical to the one next door but with a basketball hoop out front. I’m from cloud painted ceilings, fully stocked bird feeders, and the backyard rope swing. I’m from midwinter confused daffodils and dad’s front porch roses that he would insist we go and smell before we leave for school. I’m from lazy Saturday mornings dedicated to making M&M pancakes, sometimes shaped like animals. I’m from a tall father and a short mother. From thrift store lovers, beach snobs, ice cream addicts, and family dinners. From Maynard, the National Geographic photographer, and Susan, the Vietnam War military wife, and way too many Uncle Johns. I’m from brainiacs and goody two shoes. I’m from hats off during the anthem and generations upon generations of US military from Air Force to Navy with devoted patriotism.

I’m from Yorktown, Virginia, an area filled with military brats, always coming and going and yet I can never fully relate. I’m from don’t talk back to me, and go ask your mother, and if you ever need to leave a situation, just blame it on your parents. I’m from Vacation Bible Schools and Caleb Christian Radio. From long car rides of listening to the Chronicles of Narnia and from cheesy pre-meal prayer songs. I’m from Mom’s chicken pot pie and Dad’s perfected chocolate chip cookie recipe. I’m from annual family beach weeks with endless amounts of white Florida sand making dribble castles.

Attending grandma’s afternoon tea parties with evening line dances and sunsets, always fishing with my father. I’m from (singing). And from daddy daughter dates, from sister fights, from learning baby talk to get my brother to love me the most. I’m from Mr. Rogers, Veggie Tales, Barney, and sneaking in some Sagwa the Siamese cat. I’m from the Teletubbies are silly and Arthur talks back to his parents too much. From princess books and Polly Pockets. I’m from Easy Bake Ovens and Hip Klips. I’m from a family who believed in curfews and believed in grace even more.

I’m from Tickle Monster games and hide-and-go-seek in the dark. I’m from the land of half-winded hurricanes where everyone ran outside to watch the branches fly. And I’m from short-lived snow storms that leave an inch of snow on the ground and the whole town is shut down. I’m from the smells of the coast and seafood festival and the noise of Busch Gardens roller coasters. I’m from endless Christmas gifts from sunrise Easters and special birthday plates and from brokenness and broken people and yet there is beauty.

Susan:

I’m not expecting you to feel like you’re going to become a poet in an instant here. In the center of the table, which might be hard to find, we’ve got a lot going on these tables. If you have a notebook, you can use a notebook, but find some paper and this is what I invite you to do. Now you could start, like she did, always with that reframe like I am, I am am. You could write narratively if you wanted to, or you could draw pictures, you could map it out, whatever symbolizes something about where I’m from.

Now you notice that she did lots of different things, like things that were tactile. I can taste, I can smell the sounds, the songs, little phrases. It can get as small as that. So you’re bringing it down, and you’re not censoring, and you’re not trying to be perfect. So what this is called is a head-to-pen, which means you have to keep moving that pen across the paper, and not stop and start perfecting and letting the voices stop you from getting some ideas out. I’m going to give us three minutes. I’m going to ask that you do this by yourself and give everybody that silence around them to be thinking about this.

So you will have a chance if you want to add or freestyle in your own pieces. This is not as soon as that pen goes down the end of what you could be crafting. So I want to note to all of you, I didn’t say stop. So especially when people are in a writing flow, and I think you heard Eric do it earlier where you say, “Can you find a pausing spot?” And letting people have that moment to finish out that last thought or just finish out your last thought, your last line, and be patient because especially when people are putting something down so personal and vulnerable, it feels like a [inaudible 00:13:34] when you cut them off. So we’re about to step into, you’re going to be pulling this with you, a constructivist listening protocol. So I think we’ve done a little bit of that across the two days.

But a constructivist listening protocol is something that I picked up in some of the work I did with the National Equity Project and it really especially is designed for very vulnerable conversations. And when you’re really trying to have an inclusive sense of belonging, constructivist listening is really about holding space for the other versus thinking of how you want to self-promote or add on. Have you ever been to that event whether with friends or family where you feel like people are just listening to get the hook for the next thing they’re going to say, that’s the next topper to the story? That’s not what constructivist listening is. So you are going to be taking with you in a minute your notes, but I’m going to give you, and I appreciated what Solomon shared with us today with experiential learning about you can push but give safe space.

So here’s the safe space. You can take with you, your notes I’m from, but you can determine what you want to share. You don’t have to have them see it, and you don’t have to read verbatim everything that you just wrote. You could do any way you want to tell something that came out of that thinking time work. But you’re more than welcome to read it as well. The hard part about constructivist listening is, and I think we’ve got an even number now, we were odd. We should have just dyads, two people, and each person gets three minutes. So that person will introduce themselves because I’m going to make you get up and move, to mingle around the room. You’re going to introduce yourself, decide who wants to go first. Now when that person is having their time to share, you have to give them three minutes without, “Uh-huh, yeah, and.” You can nod, you can smile.

You don’t want to look too stoic because that’s also very awkward. But you cannot start asking questions or engaging them to tell you more. And here’s where it gets really awkward. They have three minutes. If they stop talking at two minutes, 30 seconds, you continue to wait until the three minutes. Because in that silent space, you’re giving them more time to think and they probably will add on, but they might not. But you have to stay there, quiet to that end of that three minutes and that is the hardest part I’ve ever seen adults have doing this activity.

All right, so I’m going to tell you when to switch because we’re going to do this, well, we’re going to do this once, but I’ll tell you when to switch to the second partner. So stand up, find somebody in the room, meet up and get ready and I’ll tell you when to start.

Okay. However… Rock, paper, scissors, who touches their nose last, however you want to figure out who’s going to go first. And I’m going to start the clock. Now remember listening partner, you’re listening, completely lost in their story, not about thinking about, “Now, what am I going to say later?” Right? I’m listening and holding space for you to tell me your story for three minutes. Yes.

Speaker 3:

Does the story start with the piece? [inaudible 00:17:37].

Susan:

It’s wherever they want to start and whatever they want to add and delete. All right, go ahead and get started.

All right, thank your partner and now it’s time to switch. All right? So second partner.

All right, thank your partner. I had the beauty of watching across the room and I’d like to invite, if anyone’s willing to share, anything about the experience of what you just went through.

Speaker 4:

So first, these two days have been way heavier than I expected it was going to be. But I think how significant creating a safe space can be. I felt so much more comfortable saying these things. I just feel like it does feel like a very genuinely safe space to do this stuff. So it’s not as terrible as it could be to get into all this stuff with people, some coworkers I barely know, versus a ton of strangers. It was very educational in that way.

Susan:

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 5:

I can go because technically I’m part of the conference too.

Susan:

You are.

Speaker 5:

I don’t just work here. I’ll say I hope my partner doesn’t mind that, like, she ran out of things. And it was interesting to see what came up when she had to come up with the more on the cuff, digging deeper. It was really, really cool to see that. Anybody else want to go?

Speaker 6:

So I will say from the experience, one thing that was interesting was I was still looking for a response, some type of feedback, maybe it wasn’t the word, but the head nod, a smile, something that told me that at least what I was saying was landing and was somewhat interesting.

Susan:

Yeah, it’s amazing how much we look for affirmation.

Speaker 7:

The flip side of that, though, is I was dying to jump in and say something because she would say something, I’d be like, “Oh yeah, I like that, too.” So I was dying to connect with her in that way.

Susan:

Yeah, the first few times I did this, and I did this in my work environment and it is, it’s a little unnerving, but it does get really quickly to a trusting community and it makes you realize just how much you’re not really listening when you’re in conversation. The image I had up earlier, you’re already like, “Okay, I got to sound even smarter. What can I say?” Especially in those professional settings, you’re feeling like you got to show up and represent and win those brownie points. And so to honor really listening and giving space to each other, as it said, it allows in that vulnerability. And I did see vulnerability and thank you for those who really let those raw emotions show, that’s powerful. So what I’m going to ask you to do is go back to, whether it’s in your notebook or it’s on your paper. Now think about whether it was on paper or what you said, what did you self-censor out of your story or maybe ad lib into your story?

Now, this is just you. You get to keep these to yourself. So this is not, I’m not going to make you put it up on the wall and have to confront, “Yeah, that’s what I did.” What did you maybe ad lib or self-censor? And as you really think about that, and think about the stories that you do tend to lean into telling, what kind of patterns are you noticing about yourself, and the stories that you are sharing out, or that mean a lot to you? Okay, now this is safe. It’s all in your paper, it’s not going anywhere but with you. So be honest with yourself.

So after you finish that last thought, I want you to shift, keep your pencil or your pen moving. How do I want to be seen? What holds a lot of importance for me? Again, find a pausing spot. So we’re going to have to be really efficient in our space and time. But it’s super important for us to have cross-pollination in the room. So that’s why I’m going to stay true to this, even though we are running a little bit short on our time.

I made this up, the two-step mingle, but maybe it’ll become a thing. But it’s a layering of how you have people meet up in the room and carry what comes from one conversation then into the next conversation and then maybe back to a home plate. So what I’m asking you to do is to go back to that constructivist listening partner.

Now you don’t have to tell them exactly what you put in your write. You get to share what you want to share. So the question is that you’re going to talk about, and I’m not going to make you stare at each other, three minutes, three minutes. I’m going to truncate that. So we’ll just say it’s about three-minute time that you’re together. So you’re sharing with them, “What came up for me on this? What am I realizing?” Because I’m just going to be up front. I’m asking you to do identity work. So what are you learning about yourself, and how you see yourself, or how you want others to see you? All right? So go find that partner and then I’m going to ask you to come back to your table for the next round.

Okay. I’m going to ask you to pause. Jazz hands. Before you go back to your table, let me give you the next step. So you know as soon as you sit down, what you’re set up to do. You’re taking those conversations that you just had back to your table and what, as a table, you’re trying to figure out is at least in this shared team, what seemed to be in common experiences that we have? What are things that we really highly value? What is it that binds us together?

Because in a minute or a few minutes after that, that’s going to come into play because that’s the lens through which you’re creating something, are those things that you bring in through your identity. So you’re going to go back to your table and as a table in about two, three minutes, do a quick share around to get a sense of, okay, so what seemed to be common experiences that people can all circle up around in this room?

We can just wait.

Okay. Hopefully you got a chance to get at least some idea of some commonalities. You’re going to hold on to that. So why did I do all that? Why did we do all that hard work? Because what I was thinking of as we wrap up these two days is, imagine the people we’ve been talking about solving issues for are standing in the middle of your table. How do you bring their voices into the room? We’re not talking about them. We want their voices in the room doing the talk. And so I needed to first start with you grounding yourself in what’s my identity lens in terms of the things I feel I know, the things I feel I value. But it was also then to flip it and say okay, so at your table, you know what those in common experiences are, but you probably have some blind spots.

You don’t have all the experiences of some of the profiles that I’ve now put on all your tables. It’s not your story, it’s not your background. So what we’re trying to do is to step outside of our identity, but be very self-conscious and aware of how we try and pull what we know into how we’re trying to solve and build out a voice of these profiles. So you’re taking a stock of what is it that I know I bring into and it’s the lens I look through life. It’s the things I think are really important, but what I think is really important might not be how someone else views what’s really important. What I have as my background experiences maybe very different than background experiences of someone else. So first knowing who am I and being very conscious of what are the things that I lean into and sometimes I need to set that aside.

Does that make sense? Okay. So what I’m asking you to do is in teacher language, it would be a character profile. But at the center of your table I gave, and you might not have enough copies for everyone to have one, but you can share in between. When I heard about the challenge, I reached out to a couple who are long time friends, we actually went to college together. He was in the ROTC program and went on to be a lieutenant colonel in the army and just retired. And she was the wife that traveled, they did overseas, but I lost track how many times they were stationed at different places. And I said, I want to know the real stories. And so what I asked them to do was to, I created, some of you have a profile of a spouse, of an enlisted, and some of you have the enlisted member.

Something they taught me was, if you’re an officer, almost 100% of the time, you probably went through your undergrad and came into that position with a bachelor’s degree. But if you came in as enlisted, it’s very likely that you came in right out of high school, or you might’ve been in some trades. Now that was from them telling me this, is that 100% always the truth? No. But that was important for me to hear when I was thinking about the enlisted and the enlisted spouse. Now, it doesn’t have to be the spouse of enlisted, it could be a spouse of an officer. So I asked them, thinking of all the people they’ve met over the last 20 years, if they could create profiles for me, they might’ve taken pieces from different people, but what you’re seeing on that paper are real people that they met. These are real stories because I did not want to fictionalize that. It was very important that it was the real stories.

So you’re looking at that profile, and on one of the big posters, and you have some markers, however you want to represent the story because there’s going to be a point where there’s going to be a gallery walk and you’re going to be moving around. So we need to make it visible quickly. How do you capture that person? What are their hopes, their dreams, what’s some important back story? And you can add on, I just gave you some bare bones so you have enough, and that’s where I said it’s like you’re creating a character profile off the basis of someone real.

So that’s okay to add those fictional embellishments. If you want to have some favorite quote they say, whatever. You’re bringing them to life and you’re trying to represent that on the poster. So you don’t have much time to do this. Let’s just see where we’re at in five minutes. Any questions? You really can’t do this wrong, it doesn’t have to look like that. On the one large Post-it, make a character profile, however you want to represent it, it encapsulates this kind of information.

Okay, pause. It’s okay, it’s not a clean ending. I know that you’re in the midst. Then there’s a hot debate going on here. I love it, love it. Because if you’re debating, that means you feel empathy for these profiles. They’re real people. That’s really amazing. There’s one more step we’re going to take and thank you, thank you for that hard cognitive lift at the end of day two.

So for about the last two, three-ish years, I had the opportunity to collaborate with the principal investigator of Agency by Design, that’s out of Harvard’s Project Zero. If you’re in the education world, that’s one of the meccas of learning. But something I’m learning is that the things I’m learning over in the educational world definitely translate over into a non-education-based audience. So I wanted to share this with you, and we’re going to lay it on top of our profiles.

And this is, you can go to their website and find a whole lot of protocols, but this one’s called Think, Feel, Care. And the Agency by Design is really, especially, would be a facilitator’s delight because it’s a hands-on way of putting people into what could be very difficult conversations and realizations. So you’ll definitely want to check that out. But this is what you’re doing and it’s okay if you want to add it onto another poster, large Post-it poster, or if you want to just layer it on with some Post-its on what you already have drafted because we’re going to get up at the end here and travel around and see what other people’s profiles have. But now you’re embodying that person and you’re saying, “Does this person understand the system and their role within it?” So the system being the military.

So when I think back to Dirk and Eric, there’s all those systems nested together. So however you want to take it, you can. What is this person’s emotional response to the system and to their position within it? And our challenge has been about having an opportunity to get employment. So you’re probably going to have that wrapped somewhere in there. And the care, what is this character’s values, priorities or motivations with regard to the system they find themselves in? What’s important to this person? So we’re going to do a little bit speed round here. So I’m going to give you about four minutes, and then we’re going to get up and we’re going to roll.

Okay. If we were facilitating with a longer… This would take longer. So I’m taking us through the steps and unfortunately we only get to put up to ankle height and the depth of water, more time is definitely needed. I do recognize that. But I do want to show you the full arc of what I was trying to walk us through. So last step. There were I think eight profiles in the room. Four were of a spouse and four were of enlisted. I am inviting you, you don’t have to go with your team, but find at least two other profiles. And I’m not going to… A gallery walk, I would’ve had where we would’ve had Post-its where you’re also putting in a chalk talk element to it where you can have conversations going on, we just don’t have the time, but it’s still important for you to see at least two others for what we have to do at the very, very end.

So you’re going to go and find at least two other profiles. On your own, you’re going to be thinking about these questions. What’s striking me now as I think about the one we created and then these other two I’m seeing? Are there patterns that are emerging? What questions are really starting to burn that maybe weren’t burning earlier? And what next steps or recommendations? Does our profile, or back to all of the profiles, what would we say? So you’re going to have about four minutes to do that travel and think work. All right, ready?

Just so I know when you’ve been able to get to at least two others, just get back to your tables and we’ll wrap this together. First of all, I want to thank you for respecting and bringing to life the real people that are on these pages, and for us honoring their voices in the room and in the conversation and in the problem solving.

I’m going to collapse a few things, but I think it’s important for us to at least have some kind of voices in the room. If we had the time, I would’ve brought you back and because what I was doing was trying to get you out and about so that you came back and had really an idea of all the variations to see the patterns and get down to okay, there’s some repeatables here that are really important. There are the themes that are covering all the stories. But I’m going to shift that and I’m going to ask you to think about what you just experienced, what you just put together in your profile, and what would you want to share back? If this is our last moment to speak for these individuals, what do we want to leave in the room that’s important about their story, and what we’re trying to solve for and with them?

Speaker 7:

Trying to maintain relationships and family within a system that spews people around.

Susan:

So trying to maintain family and relationships because you’re always popcorning in all over the place.

Speaker 8:

Military have the responsibility to support these families.

Susan:

The military has-

Speaker 8:

And the country.

Susan:

And the country.

Speaker 8:

Because of the service these people give, there’s an obligation to do more.

Susan:

Thank you. One more.

Speaker 9:

They recognize the personal sacrifices they make themselves and their families and they do it anyway.

Susan:

So last, now we’re going to step back out of that. So I just put you in a total immersion experience and you’re stepping back out and now thinking about it from your facilitator identity, what is, if anything, that you’d want to share about how you went through that experience and what you’re starting to think about?

Speaker 10:

So I think it is really important to keep the complexity of the individuals who we may be discussing in any workshop, or any kind of project, that if any problem we’re trying to solve, or any solution that we’re trying to get to, inherently has individuals who are affected by it. And I think before this exercise for the military families, in my mind, we’re very straw men, not very complex, not very rich, not all of those pieces.

And so by personalizing and bringing in these much more rich profiles, that it also brings back to, I think for the participants and as a facilitator, that’s like this is not someone outside yourself, we’re so different from who you are. And so that you understand your own complex inner life, and stresses, and the other people you’re engaging with also have these complex lives and entanglements and all of that. And that has to always be center of mind in thinking about communities.

Susan:

Thank you. I couldn’t have said it any wiser, thank you.

Speaker 11:

Thank you, Susan. This was just very, very deep work at its finest in terms of the empathy part of design thinking. And it really reinforces that at least I feel like we skip over the empathy very quickly in that. And it’s really important to… I wonder if we’d done this first thing yesterday, what would’ve been the result? And at the same time, I appreciate where we are in this of realizing we went through this whole process and now we have this opportunity to challenge all the assumptions and the decisions that we made about because we’ve learned so much in this last hour with you. So thank you.

Susan:

Well, thank you. And thank you to everyone and thank you Douglas for letting me have a few extra minutes. And thank you for being my first group to facilitate where I’m transitioned. Thank you.

The post Developing Narratives that Bring Voice to Targeted Audience appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Change is inevitable; it’s how you adapt to it. It’s the tools that you look for, the how do you want to grow so that you can adapt better to these changes that come your way.”- Neallie Kani

In this podcast episode, Douglas Ferguson hosts Neallie Kani, a UX Specialist from Hogan Assessments, who shares her facilitation journey and the impact of leadership classes on her career. She discusses the importance of creating a comfortable environment for teams, inspired by Erik Skogsberg’s calming facilitation approach. Neallie applies techniques like icebreakers and working agreements to enhance her meetings, emphasizing trial and error and monthly check-ins for continuous improvement. She uses visual aids like PowerPoint to align her team and stresses the significance of consistent reminders of team values. The conversation also touches on the importance of feedback, individual connections, and the transformative power of facilitation certification. Neallie encourages embracing learning and networking for professional growth.

Show Highlights

[00:01:16] Exposure to Facilitation
[00:05:34] Creating a Safe Environment
[00:09:08] Applying Inspiration to Work
[00:15:10] Building Lasting Commitments
[00:23:42] Leadership and Value Creation
[00:26:48] Effective Workshop Methods
[00:36:30] Future of Facilitation

Links | Resources

Neallie on Linkedin

About the Guest

Neallie leads design thinking workshops and oversees user experience enhancements for Hogan products and services.

About Voltage Control

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

Subscribe to Podcast

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Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab Community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Neallie Kani, a UX specialist at Hogan Assessments. Neallie leads design thinking workshops and oversees user experience enhancements for Hogan’s products and services. Welcome to the show, Neallie.

Neallie Kani:

Thank you for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, it’s so great to be with you today and always fun to talk to one of our alumni and hear about the great work they’re doing and just learn more about everyone’s experiences. As usual, I’d like to get started just hearing a little bit about how you first got exposed to facilitation. Maybe you saw someone that was really good at it or you started practicing the methods yourself. What was it that drew you in to the power of facilitation?

Neallie Kani:

Funny enough, I think way back when, when I was in high school, and even a little bit in middle school, there were leadership types of classes that had drawn my attention. In high school, I was in two years of Leadership, that’s actually what the class was called, it was just called Leadership. Basically, a lot of student council students were in that class as well. I wasn’t student council myself, but just leadership just called me, not in a competitive way, but in a way to better myself. Like, I want to be my own leader. I’m not asking to lead others, but it drew my intention on how to lead myself better. That’s where I started with these things, before I even truly knew what facilitation was, I did gravitate into making myself a better leader. Then afterwards, years down the road, I found myself always drawn into leader roles just naturally.

I found it fascinating, I thought it was really a great way to learn how to communicate with others. On top of that, I just thought that looking back at how management positions or leadership positions where I wanted to be the type of leader that wasn’t a micromanager, wasn’t somebody who was condescending, was somebody inviting and motivational for peers around her or him. That was the start, and then once I got myself into the UX world, I got to meet a lot of instructors and mentors, I was able to end up with a lot of volunteer opportunities. What ended up happening from there is I got to start learning how to provide valuable experiences for anybody that I’m working with, really.

If I’m in a small team, how to be somebody that leads themselves, but also is able to provide motivation and boost morale within the team that I would be working with. Getting into these volunteer opportunities, I was able to realize that even though I had gotten to learn a lot about leadership in my youth, there’s just so much more that I needed to still learn. There was so much more that I was still unaware of in how to be a great facilitator and how to be a great leader. That’s really what began my journey into looking more into UX in a leader role versus UX as somebody that’s not a facilitator in UX, somebody that’s not a lead in UX, I started transitioning out of that and looking more into the leadership roles.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting to me that when I asked about formative moments for facilitation you went to, leadership courses that were available to you at a young age, high school. There must be a correlation for you between facilitation and leadership, so be curious to hear more about how you relate those two things.

Neallie Kani:

I think the way that I relate them is even though there are differences between being a leader and a facilitator, I think to be a good leader, you should also be a great facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

Why do you think that is? What do you think it is about facilitation that makes people a great leader?

Neallie Kani:

When I think about all the experiences I’ve had in facilitation or the opportunities I’ve had to be in front of great facilitators, I have always felt safe. I have always felt comfortable, I have always felt energy, and sometimes leaders don’t provide that.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think that’s really important and that feeling of safe. Oftentimes, we talk about creating safe places and whatnot in the world of facilitation. Can you recall a time when you witnessed that safe feeling and what was happening, what the facilitator was doing to make that come about?

Neallie Kani:

I have numerous, numerous moments that really stand out to me, but the most recent one was actually when I went to the facilitation certification alumni session, I want to say back in February. It was a small group, but the way that the facilitator led that session, it was just relaxing. Nobody was speaking loudly, nobody was talking over one another. Everybody just had a serene smile on their face, and that is how it started. It just kind of like you come together, you’re just breaking the ice, and that sets the energy. That sets the tone for the entire experience, the body language, how everyone is sitting in a circle around one another. We’re open, we’re ready to listen, and that really set a great environment for the three-day session and really stood out to me. I felt comfortable with sharing things that I didn’t think I was even going to share.

Douglas Ferguson:

Who was facilitating that?

Neallie Kani:

Erik was facilitating that.

Douglas Ferguson:

The one and only, Erik Skogsberg. It’s great. You said setting the tone was super important. What did you witness that really spoke to you as far as how the tone got set?

Neallie Kani:

What I thought was absolutely genius is sometimes I have gone into these conferences where the moment the mic is picked up, it is just energy, energy, energy. What Erik did that was just eye-opening to me is we came into this quiet room and he spoke in a, because it was a smaller group, we were all sitting closer, so of course, there’s no mic, there’s no need to. There’s not a hundred people in the room that we’re trying to energize. What he did is he adapted. He adapted to the size of the group and he started the conversation in such a soft tone.

It’s almost like I was in yoga, but speaking, instead of actually doing movements. He had this soft tone and it just brought us out and helped us relax. I believe he also had us close our eyes for a moment, and that just set everything together. It did build to energy later on once we got into the activities, but what was nice is he centered us before we began. He helped us breathe out all of the tension in our body and start with a new look on everything, start with new energy because we were relaxed.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so great to hear. That’s making me wonder that maybe this is now showing up in some of your work. Have you been able to take that inspiration and channel it, whether it’s the soft opening or taking folks on a journey where the energy level shifts throughout the experience or really anything, were you able to take anything from that and apply it?

Neallie Kani:

Absolutely. I am continuously growing in my field, in facilitation, and being a facilitator. One of the things that I took away from this is, I’ll use one of our, we do UX meetings in my organization and I facilitate and lead those. One thing that I took from that is when we first get into the session, when everybody starts dropping in, it is virtual. As everybody starts popping into the meeting, before just hitting the ground running, we have a moment where we have a little bit of an icebreaker. How is everybody’s weekend? What have you done? How is your day going? Because sometimes people just pop into a meeting and they’re just silent.

Especially, in the virtual world. It is not as comfortable as being in person. What’s nice of having that few minutes of just checking in, how’s your day going, is you’re connecting with those people. You’re letting those people know I see you, though we are in maybe different states, though we might not have all of our cameras on, I’m still acknowledging your presence and I am just checking in with you. That’s something that I’ve taken to my meetings. Then on top of that, providing an agenda, having a moment where we discuss working agreements, how we’re going to work with one another, and what is the goal of this session and how can we hold one another accountable to create that safe space.

Douglas Ferguson:

You also talked about the importance of the pre-agenda and how that’s helped people opt in the meetings. I really appreciated the point around the development team understanding when it might be appropriate or helpful for them to attend. It’s created this cross-departmental collaboration, but without them feeling like they have to attend. They’re educated and they can understand when they’re going to get value and when not. I thought that was really cool. Anything else that you’ve noticed there around that piece?

Neallie Kani:

Just the transparency. When I first began my journey with my current organization, we had a lack of transparency between scrum teams. It is a very small UX team, very, very tiny. Unfortunately, we’re not in a place where there could be a UX designer on every single scrum team. Due to that, we had this lack of transparency between what was going on in research versus what the developers were working on. Because of that, we started having these sessions where it’s important to have developer feedback. It’s not just handing a design off to developers and being like, “Hey, implement this.” Their input and feedback is valuable as well. At the start of the journey, we just had the developers sit in without agendas, and what ended up happening is it became a waste of their time and it became something that, “Hey, I have a whole load of work that I got to get done, but I’m sitting in this hour meeting and this wasn’t valuable for me.”

And after the facilitation certification, after being able to learn more, I adapted that into our meetings and I started bringing out these agendas that would even connect to product backlog items that the developers are, it’s coming up on an upcoming sprint for them. Being able to see that visibility, had that communication become transparent. No longer were the developers guessing, “What’s going on in these meetings because I feel like I need to sit in.” They’re able to view what the conversation is going to be about and make that choice of, “I’m going to attend because I need to attend this.” Versus, “I don’t need to attend this. It’s also recorded and I could come back to it if needed.”

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s super interesting. It’s like just giving people that ability to opt out, so powerful, given that folks often talk about just being inundated with meetings. That alone is an amazing facilitation trick.

Neallie Kani:

It could’ve been an email.

Douglas Ferguson:

The fact is, for some people it could have been an email, but for others, they really need to be there and dig through this research and understand these new customer perspectives that have been unearthed. It’s just funny how this could’ve been in emails all over the place, but yet the meetings still persists because some people find value in it. I think where we’re misguided is thinking that the need is the same for everyone.

Neallie Kani:

That’s a great point. Especially, because a lot of these sessions can be brainstorming sessions. You get to work with people that are outside of the UX team as well. You can have stakeholders on this call, developers, product owners, and so it is very valuable. It depends on what the agenda topic is, but there are going to be people a part of that meeting that they’ll be like, “Oh, I need to attend this because we need to have a discussion.” Versus others are like, “I don’t think I can provide anything to this discussion.” Giving them that option, I’ll say it has made a lot of people happy, and so things are going better.

Douglas Ferguson:

Also, I’m wondering too, there’s a difference between learning stuff and trying it out and seeing it work versus actually committing to change and building habits that stick. I’m curious what you found most effective for introducing and maintaining the changes in the meeting management and team communication and in these other facilitation pieces. What made it stick for you?

Neallie Kani:

I am definitely somebody who likes to try out things. There were some variations until we landed on what worked best, so it did grow. In the beginning, it was just an agenda that was dropped into the chat. Then it became, let’s add a working agreement, and it just grew from there. It was trial and error and there was adjustments. Another thing we had added so that we could capture what is working and what isn’t working is we started doing monthly UX retro check-ins, where we invited the developers and product owners and we’re basically like, “Hey, what’s going great? What should we continue doing? What is really bringing the party down? What should we stop doing and maybe find some opportunities of how we could do it differently?” Due to those check-ins, we were able to adjust how we want to facilitate these UX meetings/design thinking workshops. Anything really the UX team is going to be the facilitator on.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s a great point. You mentioned agreements a few times now, and I want to come back to that because I think it’s so critical. Do you have any agreements that the team’s developed that you can share, or even I think it’d be cool to hear a story of how that agreement even came about, why it’s helpful.

Neallie Kani:

Well, I can’t take the credit for how the agreement came about. Within scrum teams, they definitely work with creating working agreements. That’s something we got inspired from the scrum team.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, wow, cool.

Neallie Kani:

It’s something that the developers found natural for them. That’s something that they’re used to. It’s like, “Okay, we’re going to take a page out of your book so that we can still make this a safe space for you.” It won’t feel foreign. It’s something that you’re used to within your own team. We brought that out and we started talking about what do we want to hold one another accountable for within these sessions. I would say the biggest one is, and this is just natural. People derail, people get into the weeds when we’re getting into discussions.

The biggest thing is identifying when we’ve gotten lost in the sauce, when do we need to pull back and realign ourselves on what the goal for the meeting was. The first thing in our working agreement was being able to start calling out, “Hey, this is going off track. We need to pull away from this. Maybe put this in a parking lot.” A term that we use is ELMO, which is enough, let’s move on, is what it stands for. That is something that’s in our working agreement, and when we feel that we’re not aligned or we’re derailing, somebody will be like, “ELMO this.”

Douglas Ferguson:

ELMO is an old classic, I love that. I’m curious, how are you documenting and sharing these agreements and these tools like ELMO so that either newcomers are aware that that’s something the team does, and just reminding folks that, “Hey, we’re going to stick to these behaviors.”

Neallie Kani:

The tools that we use for sharing the agenda is a PowerPoint. We use PowerPoint. What we do in PowerPoint, it’s only about three or four slides, the first slide is really listing out the agenda, the goal. The second slide is the outcome, what do we want the outcome from this meeting to be. Then finally, we have the working agreement slide, and that would show the bullet points. Basically, everything that we as a team have identified to put into our working agreement, that’s where we pause. Before we jump into the actual agenda, we’ll pause on the working agreement and we’ll let everybody review it. Even though everyone has seen it, you just never know, “Hey, I want to call out that we haven’t been meeting this bullet point in our working agreement.” Or, “I feel we need to adjust this because this isn’t working out for us anymore.”

We have a little bit of a presentation, a very tiny one at the start of our sessions where they’re able to review the working agreement. Then on top of that, once we’re done sharing, we copy that working agreement and we drop it into chat on Teams, so that they can still refer back to that. People aren’t going to remember 15 bullet points or 10 bullet points. Having that dropped into chat for them to use as a resource. If they feel that the meeting is getting off track or something else is not being met, they can look into that chat and say, “Hey, we’re not following our working agreement, it seems like.”

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this idea of putting the working agreements, the agenda, having these consistent three slides at the beginning of every meeting. Very powerful. We talked a little bit earlier about how do you build lasting commitments or ensure that change sticks. Putting things inside of your slide decks and your email signatures, what are these touch points that people constantly see and have to get in front of. Those are great ways, just memory devices. We’re constantly reminded, we’re constantly seeing this thing that we committed to doing. I love also this reflection moment where we can get honest with ourselves about are we living these team agreements? You could even do this with values. If you adopt team values or company values, those aren’t things that just plaster on the walls.

You should constantly come back to them. Rather than using slides, we have a Miro board that I use with the executive team. We meet every week and all of our conversations are centered around this board and anyone can pose a topic and there’s a number of things, like a dashboard with data and whatnot that we bring in so everything is there and we can move it around and it’s a little malleable. The values as well as our agreements are on that board, just center us around that. I love that y’all are doing that, and I think it’s a really smart approach, any place that you can put those things in front of people. I’m curious, has there ever been a time when you are inviting folks to reflect on those behaviors? Was there a story there around, “Hey, maybe either this behavior is not really accurately capturing us or we need to shift a little bit to live up to what we’re aspiring to be?”

Neallie Kani:

I would say the biggest place that those types of topics come up is during our UX retros, because that’s where it opens the space, especially for these people who aren’t a part of that UX team. They could be like, “Hey, I think maybe some changes around this needs to happen.” Or, “This isn’t turning out the way we had hoped.” That’s where we’re able to capture those. Originally, we were only doing those monthly, but this past week, we decided we should have more check-ins. We’re actually shifting our UX retros to become bi-weekly so that we can adjust anything faster. It’s not months or a full month before we’re talking because people could forget things. Something could have happened earlier on in the month and you’ve just forgotten about it. You’ve slept on it, you’re over it, and you just put it in the back burner. We don’t want that feedback loop to stop.

Douglas Ferguson:

Shorter feedback cycles are always more valuable. In fact, that’s the reason why so many companies are shifting from annual reviews or quarterly reviews to regular weekly one-on-ones. Because if you can address issues quickly, if you can praise people quickly, the results are so much better. You don’t want to tell someone nine months later that, “Yeah, we really didn’t like your performance.” It’s like, no, we need to address those issues now. We also need to applaud people much faster versus waiting and telling them later. Because when people feel underappreciated, it’s not a good scenario.

Neallie Kani:

The morale definitely goes down if they feel underappreciated. I even look back at when I was in high school and I was in those leadership roles, and it’s important for me to lead by example. It’s important for me to create a safe space but also provide value because you never know how many leaders or potential leaders are in the room that could be learning and being like, “You know what? I really love this idea and I’m going to carry this over to how I lead my sessions, my meetings that are outside of UX.”

Douglas Ferguson:

In addition to the regular UX meetings, you also talked about workshops that you’re doing, and these could be about product discovery or evolving an existing product. Really curious to hear what sorts of techniques that you’re finding to be the most valuable when you’re going into a space of exploration and discovery on the new product versus evolving existing products. Do they look similar? Are they different? What kinds of things are you exploring there?

Neallie Kani:

The starting point could be different. If it’s an existing product, there’s already a look and feel to it most of the time, and it’s really identifying the new pain points or the new problems that we’re facing. When it’s something from scratch, I will say it’s very fun when it’s from scratch because you have no idea how the end results of this could be. Before we get into design thinking workshops, we identify that need of, do we need a workshop during our UX sessions? That’s where product owners will be like, “Hey, we have, let’s say this product is done for this year, but we still need to start doing research for all of this other set of stuff that our users are looking for.”

When it comes to setting up that design thinking workshop, we’ve identified within our UX meetings what the need is for that workshop, and then we give ourselves at least a month or two to start creating it out. Time boxing, what are the things that we want to go over in these workshops? Where are we starting? Are we starting in empathy? Are we more looking at prioritization of ideas that we have created before? Are we validating with users? We give ourselves a good amount of time to really identify everything that we want to go through in this workshop and give ourselves that amount of time to also reach out to those attendees and make sure that their availability aligns with what we are wanting, but the topics vary.

Douglas Ferguson:

When you’re thinking about the contents of the workshop where folks are actually getting into decision-making and ideation around possible ways that they might go or understanding research better, what are some of your go-to methods or activities that really have been effective for you?

Neallie Kani:

I would say the most effective that I’ve had is definitely journey mapping. Because a lot of times, especially within my organization, there are products that exist, and our users have been dealing with those products for years and maybe it hasn’t been updated in a while. Maybe there are new products out in the market that just have way more features than the current ones they’re using. Journey mapping is really important for us to understand the current state. What we usually do is we have a pre-work session where we get with those users and we start identifying those phases and activities within each phase for the journey map. Then we start coming up with a future state as well. During the design thinking workshop, we have everybody come in to do the exercise in that future state or a hybrid, which is a mix of the current and the future state. I would say that journey mapping is something that I find myself using probably in 90% of the design thinking workshops I’ve led.

Douglas Ferguson:

Mapping is really powerful, and especially when it’s done in a team setting. That can often be difficult and time-consuming. The thing you mentioned around having some upfront conversations and doing a little bit of rough drafting, if you will, can really help the team be a little more efficient when we’re together. Because we’re already walking in with a little bit of shared understanding, we’ve got something that we can critique together and move forward together and massage versus if everyone’s staring at that blank whiteboard or that blank canvas, it can be a little challenging.

Neallie Kani:

Especially, for those who are not as used to Miro. What’s funny is I had to adapt to learn this because my first design thinking workshop, not as smooth as I wanted it to be. The journey mapping was done together, it wasn’t done as pre-work. What we learned is, “Hey, let’s have these people come in earlier so we could identify these stages, these activities, so that when we get into the workshop, there’s not that confusion of what journey are we looking at.” Then people could start getting together about the pain points, about the opportunities, and then about big ideas that are generated from those.

Douglas Ferguson:

Similar to reaching out to people beforehand to work on a rough draft of a map or get to shared understanding around something before getting into the big group. You mentioned in your blog post about how effective reaching out for one-on-one sessions with some members of the team and how particularly impactful that was for you. I’m just curious, how have these deeper individual connections transformed the way that you facilitate and lead?

Neallie Kani:

Well, I would say the biggest way that it’s helped me is knowing how to address these individuals as well. It’s to understand, for instance, some of these one-on-ones happened with those that maybe don’t feel comfortable in a big setting to give their input, to give their feedback, they just sit there silently. Especially, in the virtual world, they don’t want to speak out. They don’t want everybody’s eyes on them. These one-on-ones are really nice because it gives them that time to open up and actually give their feedback where they don’t feel like they’re being judged or looked at.

What that helps with is I’m still getting that feedback loop from them, but when we get into the session where there’s a lot of people there, I’m not too worried if they’re being quiet or if they’re not giving their feedback as much because I’m still able to gather that from them outside of the session. I won’t make them uncomfortable because I understand, okay, this is not something they’re comfortable with and I’m not going to push them or call them out in the middle of the session and be like, “What do you think?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, for sure. Have you found other strategies for getting their ideas in the room?

Neallie Kani:

Yes. I will say activities usually help, like using Miro where it’s just sticky notes. They could be anonymous. They feel a lot safer than that, or they feel a lot safer doing that, is my assumption, because they’re not unmuting themselves and talking. They’re able to be more anonymous when using Miro.

Douglas Ferguson:

Any kind of quiet activity, whether it’s Miro or even if you’re in person writing down sticky notes versus having to vocalize them, giving people time to collect their thoughts, even time to reflect, like prepare a thought. Before anyone starts talking, let’s all quietly prepare our thoughts. Then even talking in groups of two, sometimes people feel safer, braver when they’re just talking to one other person. Then unless you’ve got two quiet types talking to each other, usually their partner will speak up on behalf so they’ll become their spokesperson. They’ll share their great ideas with the rest of the team.

Neallie Kani:

Definitely.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. We’re starting to pivot a bit toward the end here. I wanted to come back to your decision-making process. Because I remember you talking about how pivotal J and Lizzie were in your decision. I was just curious if there was a specific conversation with J in particular that maybe shed some light on the world of facilitation or our certification. Did he have anything to share that really spoke to you?

Neallie Kani:

Funny enough, even though I was in those classes that I took in high school, I never really thought I was going to end up as a facilitator. I am not a very competitive person. If I like something, I’m going to do it because it brings me joy. When I was in SMU for the UX certification, J was one of my mentors and he was an instructor for the corset. I just love the way he facilitated. I love the way that he captured all the students’ attentions, how he would stay afterwards. He was very attentive. Due to being one of the students that stayed after to get the J Schuh knowledge, I got to learn about Voltage. After I had graduated, I asked J, “What else can I learn? Is there anywhere I could volunteer? Really, just wanting to know more about knowledge, sharing and to better myself in my UX role.”

J introduced me to Voltage, and then from there, I was also introduced to Lizzie outside of Voltage, but it was around the same time. I believe Lizzie was volunteering with Voltage, and she told me, “Hey, there’s a facilitation certification that Voltage is doing and I’m going to be volunteering for that.” It just drew my attention because at this point when she brought this up, I was working at my current organization and though I had not expected it, I had found myself in a leadership role. I was facilitating meetings, but I didn’t feel confident in myself. I didn’t feel I was bringing the value. Lo and behold, I took the bull by the horns and got into the facilitation certification course and great changes have come from it.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so great to hear, and I’m thrilled to see the growth and how your career is flourishing. I certainly take great pride in following our alumni and watching the great work they’re doing, so it’s super thrilling to me. I’d be curious, when you reflect on your journey, what advice do you offer professionals, especially UX and similar fields about the importance of facilitation skills and enhancing team collaboration?

Neallie Kani:

Change is inevitable. It’s how you adapt to it. It is the tools that you look for. How do you want to grow so that you can adapt better to these changes that come your way? It is okay to try multiple ways until you find your path.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that nod to experimentation. That’s really the spirit behind why we created Facilitation Lab to create opportunities for folks to practice and explore and learn and build that confidence because there’s really not a lot of opportunities to do that. Oftentimes, people are in high stakes moments. They’re going from one session to the next. They don’t have a built-in time for reflection. Facilitation Lab is about the low-stakes opportunity where there’s going to be plenty of reflection with peers and learning. We really wanted to do that for free so that anyone had access to that ability because it’s important and so needed, and not everyone can afford certification. Anyway, I love that you bring that up. I would like to just end, thinking about the future, as you look out across the horizon of your career, where do you imagine, Neallie, five, 10 years out, and how’s facilitation involving with you and alongside you and what’s changing with you? What’s changing with the landscape? Where do you see things going?

Neallie Kani:

In five years, I think there will be a lot of changes. I may adjust how I lead these sessions. I may have more leaders working with me, more facilitators that I get to work with, and maybe I’m inspired from them and vice versa. In five years, I definitely see myself growing tenfold. From who I am now, I think I’m going to be even stronger in five years. I think I will have a bigger community because one of the things that this certification also brought me was I got to network and meet more people and build that community that I didn’t have before. Three years ago, I was like, “I’m alone and I’m just going to go with the flow.” Now, I know people that I can connect with and say, “Hey, how would you go about this?” In five years, I don’t know, Douglas, I could be doing complete, different methods, but I know that whatever I choose is because I was able to grow and network and learn more from others.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this focus on learning from others and community. I can say it won’t be five years because it’s going to be not long after the recording of this podcast, so some folks listening, it will already be in the past. I’m actually launching Facilitation Lab Dallas, so I’m headed that way and we’ve already got it scheduled, and hopefully, I can hand the baton off to a regional lead. Because it is quite a drive from Austin to Dallas, but I’m happy to do it because one of our good, awesome community members is going to be in town, Alison Coward. She’s been on the podcast and wrote an amazing book on facilitation that just came out. We’re happy to host her and she’s going to do a book giveaway. I hope you can make it because the spirit and love of community that you’re talking about is the whole reason that we do Lab and why I’ll be in Dallas. Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Neallie Kani:

Hopefully, and I love anything that Voltage does because you guys bring that community together. You guys bring inspiration and that safety, and it’s just something like, why would I not want to attend that? Why would I not want to be around that?

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. Well, we certainly love having you and others. I want to just end really quickly with an opportunity for you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Neallie Kani:

Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know because you can always learn, and don’t feel like you’re alone because there is always somebody else with the same struggles. When you could connect with that person, you may inspire one another and adapt to the problems or struggles that you’re facing and overcome them.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow, so good. I hope everyone can take that advice and roll with what is unfolding, so Neallie-

Neallie Kani:

Roll with the punches.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. Neallie, thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me today and chat about the good work you’re doing and your amazing experiences. I hope we can see each other again soon.

Neallie Kani:

Definitely. Thank you for having me, and I hope you have a great day.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales, and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Effective Facilitation Transform Team Dynamics and Collaboration? appeared first on Voltage Control.