In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson engages with Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input I Output and Co-Founder of Cardano. They delve into themes of facilitation, collaboration, and governance, particularly focusing on Charles’s work in developing a decentralized governance model for Cardano. Charles shares insights from facilitating workshops across 50 countries to draft Cardano’s constitution, emphasizing the importance of communication, trust, and consensus-building. The conversation also explores the impact of historical governance models and modern organizational design on decentralized systems, offering valuable lessons for fostering innovation and collaboration in diverse groups.

Show Highlights

[00:01:56] Talking Stick Artifact
[00:03:13] Decentralized Governance Insights
[00:06:03] Challenges of Governance Creation
[00:8:44] Building Consensus Across Cultures
[00:13:28] The Role of Trust in Transactions
[00:19:32] Failure and Leadership
[00:33:06] Objectivity and Trust
[00:35:00] Working Groups and Community Input
[00:39:35] Future of Decentralized Governance

Links | Resources

Charles on X

Case Study: Facilitating the World’s First Blockchain Ecosystem Constitution

Cardano on the web

About the Guest

Charles Hoskinson is a Colorado-based technology entrepreneur and mathematician. He attended Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder to study analytic number theory before moving into cryptography through industry exposure. His professional experience includes founding three cryptocurrency-related start-ups – Invictus Innovations, Ethereum and IOHK – and he has held a variety of posts in both the public and private sectors. He was the founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation’s education committee and established the Cryptocurrency Research Group in 2013 .His current projects focus on educating people about cryptocurrency, being an evangelist for decentralization and making cryptographic tools easier to use for the mainstream. This includes leading the research, design and development of Cardano, a third-generation cryptocurrency that launched in September 2017.

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 Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Input Output. He’s also a bison rancher, runs a healthcare clinic in Wyoming, serving over 11,000 patients, owns a construction company and takes a keen interest in synthetic biology. Welcome to the show, Charles.

Charles:

It’s great to be here. Doug, how you been?

Douglas:

I’ve been great. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation because I’m really kind of wowed by the project around the Constitution, and as I was reflecting on this, it brought up some memories for me along the way. Specifically it was, I remember my first visit to the IO offices and you were leading a really engaging tour and at some point you showed us this Native American artifact. I’ve viewed it as a primitive technology for improved conversations. And I’m just curious if you could start off maybe by sharing a little bit about that artifact and what it means to you and how it connects to your philosophy on communication.

Charles:

Yeah, so I got that right here. This is a talking stick, it was used by the Sioux amongst other Great Plains Indians, and basically how it works is whoever has a stick gets to talk and if you talk out of band, they hit you in the head with a stick. That’s why it’s got a bone on it, but I always love having it in the office. I’ve only had to use the talking stick once. I have a lot of artifacts and what’s really cool is that when you come in the office, we have everything from hyperdimensional spaces here that are kind of compressed in a cube to Samurai armor over there. We have the talking stick and a lot of paintings, a lot of sculptures and all of these things. I pick them up because they connect to something that I’m interested in. I have an ant hive in the office where they poured molten aluminum into an ant hive and then they dug it out and cleaned it off.

And it shows you power of complex systems where simple rules apply again and again can actually result in these amazing structures. But the Native American art is some of my favorite. I collect Kachina dolls and I have a lot of various things throughout North America. When you look at governance of the Iroquois or the Cherokee Nation, especially the Iroquois, they had this decentralization about how they made decisions and consensus building behind how they made decisions and almost like a participatory democracy. And it was just really extraordinary that you could think, wow, these guys had to find a way to get along and they had to find a way to communicate even though they would only meet maybe a few times a year, and there was a lot of challenges and difficulties there and no modern technology, yet they were still able to build a stable government.

So there was a lot of lessons there about how do you build a decentralized government? How do you build a government of equals? You don’t have a king or a president, more like a council of elders. And that was something that stuck with me when I learned about it as a teenager and throughout the years I kind of learned all the upgrades and updates to these types of things. And the Maori people over in New Zealand, for example, have a very sophisticated system, they also have a very sophisticated reputation system that’s concept of mana, which is like the amount of credit that you have in society in many different senses. So having traveled through Africa extensively, I also picked up a lot of tribal traditions there. And there’s a lot of really cool interesting things in Asia, especially Central Asia. You spend some time in Mongolia and you see how they made decisions and they pull these things together.

It’s really sophisticated for the technology that they had. So I always wanted to put that into a system and build it. And with Cardano is a great example is Cardano has no executive function. Most governments, they have a judicial branch, a legislative branch, and an executive branch. And you have one group of people make the laws, one group of people that execute everything and one group of people interpret it whether everybody else is being honest. Well, with Cardano, we have a pseudo judicial function, it’s the Constitutional Committee and we have very strong legislative function, but there is no president, there is no executive branch, there are no bureaucracies or things. You have members-based organizations, these other things, but they’re voluntary and they have no monopoly over power and they can be fired at any time and these types of things.

So it’s an interesting experiment because if you don’t have a strong executive function, then everything has to come from the bottom up instead of the top down in the way that the system operates, which is not really what people tend to think when they think of effective governance or they think of a strong government or a government that’s highly efficient. But yet there are many examples like Switzerland for example, with its Confederacy structure or other countries where this has worked. And there’s organizational design examples where that works. Like Holacracy is probably the most prominent example of that, and Sociocracy is another where that could work.

So we were highly inspired by a lot of these different concepts and we worked through them and we tried to put something together and the single hardest part is bootstrap, which is why you guys came in because we had this issue of how do you build consensus and consent when you have no incumbent decision system. In America, we have this concept of a vote and we have a concept of a voter, and it’s pretty clear how to do that. So when you want to elect a president or elect a senator or a congressman or a governor, you know how to do that. Well, what if you don’t have a concept of a voter and you don’t have a well-established consent system or a Constitution, how do you get to America from nothing? And that was kind of where we were at.

So we thought workshops were a super cool idea and we needed facilitators, and that’s how I met you guys. And we had workshops all across the world, 50 countries, 65 workshops just for the Constitution and a lot of other workshops for CIP 1694. And the first one was here in the office. And I remember that day very clearly, because everybody’s very skeptical. They’re like, “You’re just not going to pull this off. It’s going to descend it to chaos and everybody’s going to vote against it and it’ll get bike shedded.” And it was a tremendous exercise and building of consensus.

Douglas:

Why do you think there was so much skepticism?

Charles:

Well, because it depends on your philosophical beliefs about humanity. And unfortunately, when you have a strong executive function and you live in a very cynical society, and we are in the age of cynicism, when my grandfather was growing up, my grandfather lived in a very optimistic time in America. And so when John F. Kennedy said, “We will go to the moon.” Everybody believed him because like, “Oh yeah, the government always does it. They’ll figure it out.” Because this is the government that when FDR said, “Hey, I need you to go build the world’s largest office building in a swamp and you have six months to do it.” Leslie Groves said, “You got it, sir.” And he went and built the Pentagon. So there was this can-do spirit of, “We don’t really know how to do it, but we’re just going to figure it out and it’s going to get done.”

And people had a great degree of confidence in the government’s ability to deliver. And then over time, this postmodernism kind of leaked its way into society and now there’s a skepticism that no matter what, it’s never going to be as good as you think it is. It’s probably not going to happen. Even if it does happen, there’s something wrong with it. So a great example is that when William Shatner went to space, this was like a Rorschach’s test for generations. So the older people who grew up watching him on Star Trek, they were like, “That’s the coolest thing in the world. That’s so amazing. Wow, Captain Kirk finally made it to space.” They felt some pride because it’s like a hero that they grew up with. And he finally got to go to space and do that thing. And then the younger generation said, “Oh, global warming this, and it’s a waste of that. And why did you send a 90-year-old fat guy to space and just a marketing stunt and…”

It’s the exact same set of facts, exact same set of people and two radically different interpretations of that event. So when you look at the Cardano governance to work, what you’re really saying under the hood is, “Okay, well, here’s what’s going to happen, people who have never met each other from all over the world, different languages, cultures, different perspectives, different socioeconomic classes are going to come together and those people who have never met each other from all those differences are going to find a way to set those differences aside and collaborate without compensation on a common product, somehow agree and then produce something that other people get to use, perhaps not them.” And most people when they hear that, they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t think so. We’d have peace in the Middle East if you could pull something off like that.”

But it turned out we had the right thread and it was one of the most challenging things I ever did in my lifetime to kind of come up with some methodologies to bring those types of people together and act as a peacemaker and deal with fights and also just educate people on missing skills of collaboration. It’s very easy to work with people who have been trained to collaborate, even if they’re competitors, even if they’re philosophically opposed to you. There’s ways you communicate, there’s ways that you, there’s a respect behind the communication. So it’s like you think ahead, what do they need to know to do their job? There’s an understanding of how to negotiate and how to disagree without being disagreeable. There’s a lot of moving pieces to people that are well-trained in negotiation and communication and collaboration skills. If people aren’t trained that way, then what ends up happening is the minute that they feel like it’s not going their way, they immediately take all their toys, go home, go to Twitter, complain about it and try to burn everything down and get upset about that.

But if they’re trained in that way, then they use the process and together you kind of eventually get to where you need to be. So a big part of the process was just education and teaching people collaborative skills and teaching people iterative skills and teaching people the art of negotiation and growing people up and managing expectations and saying, “Look, just the very fact we came together and wrote a Constitution, even if it’s not a perfect Constitution, is a monumental achievement because people from 50 countries had to come together and get something done.” And that’s a consensus of those people. And if that process is reused, we can write a significantly better one because everybody has confidence that we can do that, because we know we could come together and get these things done. So the very first one is really a minimum viable product and it’s a trust building product, but once you have that, you have this great foundation to stand on and you can grow from there.

And once people got that in their head that this is a long goal, it’s a long game and it’s not about winning every round of the game, but rather it’s about participating and playing the game and learning and growing from the game, then they got substantially more collaborative. The learned helplessness went away and the cynicism disappeared almost overnight, and then people got excited to roll up their sleeves and get to work and get it done. And boy, it was challenging to get it done, because it’s just so many meetings and so many communications. There was, wee tallied it up, over 5,000 man hours of just deliberation on the Constitution.

Douglas:

There’s also the phenomenon when people build things together, it connects them, it draws them closer, it becomes their artifact. They’ve had some say in some participation in it, so they own it.

Charles:

Yeah. And that’s the most fun of it is that once people get over that hostility and they start working together, then they actually come up with interesting things and they enjoy working together so you don’t have to twist their arms and force them. They’ve made lifelong friends and those delegates that went to the Constitutional Convention, they’re still talking to each other. They’re still friends with each other, they still have those relationships, and a lot of these people are like, “Hey, I grew up in Norway. I never thought I would be best friends with a guy in Senegal or somebody in Cameroon or somebody in Argentina.” It’s not a common thing, and yet now it’s there and you’re on a first name basis. It was really like the United Nations, when you walked in and saw those flags. It was a truly remarkable thing.

Douglas:

It was amazing to see so many groups come together. Pretty impressive really to think about hitting on 50 countries and bringing that much voice to so many people.

Charles:

And you can’t rest on your laurels. The most important part of it is just saying, “Hey, how do we structure this in a way so that we can continue the collaboration?” So if it was just the end all be all, and once we sign the Constitution, we’re done, we all move on, that’s a great achievement. The bigger achievement is an iterative process where year by year people continue to come together, it gets larger and more meaningful, and then you treat it like an open source work project. And what’s really cool is that in a very short period of time, like three to five years, you can probably have the best Constitution ever written because people just keep working on it, they’ll keep thinking about it, they’ll keep beta testing it and adding new capabilities to it, and you can build a lot of sophistication. One of the things that I think modern society has lost is the value of trust.

And I’ll give it an example. I talk about this often. So let’s say you’re doing a real estate transaction and you and your neighbor trust each other. Okay, you have a ranch, they have a ranch, 100 acres, whatever, and you go over there, you talk to them, you have dinner with them, say, “Hey, I want to sell you these 100 acres. I need the cash.” And you’re like, “Yeah, okay, yeah, I’ll buy that. That’s fine.” So you handshake on it and you start putting all the paperwork together and it turns out there’s some issue with it. So how do you solve that issue? Trust the guy. So you go over and say, “Hey, I have this issue, blah, blah, blah.” He say, “Oh yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ll fix that for you.” Okay, you shake hands, you’re done. Buy the land.

Okay, so then let’s say you hate your neighbor. You absolutely detest this person. You have no relationship. Same piece of land, same transaction. So the facts and circumstances are identical, but when you go to buy the land and first thing that happens, you get a lawyer, because you don’t trust him, he gets a lawyer, because he doesn’t trust you, you negotiated out this contract, takes a lot of legal work. Then halfway through you run into that same issue. Then all of a sudden you’re in litigation and you’re suing each other. It takes two, three years to resolve a litigation. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, depends on the nature of the litigation. And then at the end of the day, you close the deal, you get the land, the outcome is the same. The difference is I had beer and steak with him, shook his hand and we got it sorted and I spent $100,000 or whatever you bought the acres for.

And the other one, I hate his guts. I spent two to three years to close the transaction and millions of dollars. And the only difference, the only delta between those two realities is trust. That’s it. So when you build systems that over time produce trust, what ends up happening with that is you create a momentum where you can do remarkable work quickly and get things done quickly. And you’ll notice that the ratio of organizational design to trust, the historical ratio of this, where high trust things tend to have low bureaucracy and low trust things tend to have high bureaucracy, because you don’t need the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy’s purpose is to de-risk. And if you trust everybody, then you know that even if some mistake happens, that person’s got your back and he or she’s going to go and take care of you and figure that out. So you don’t need layers and layers and layers of accountability and audit and oversight and this department and this manager and this manager and that.

So look at NASA in the ’60s versus NASA today. So NASA in the ’60s, there was a political mandate, move fast and break things. So even when astronauts died, like when that terrible Apollo disaster happened and the astronauts burnt to death in the capsule, there was an understanding that NASA was going to get this done, and so they just let them be NASA and they moved forward. Then after Challenger in Columbia, it badly damaged the reputation of NASA and it changed the culture so that we can never have a failure, which meant they had redundancy after redundancy, redundancy after redundancy, and that culture was so restrictive, it’d take 20 years to do anything and it’d always be $5 billion. Then SpaceX comes along and you have a culture where people are like, “We trust the leader. He’s going to take us to Mars. Everybody’s aligned with the mission and if we break some things along the way, it’s encouraged.”

So when the rockets blew up, the Falcon 9s and Musk was right there on the beach with these guys collecting pieces of rocket right off the beaches. And Starship is a phenomenal example of that where you see blow up all the time and they make this exponential progress on the platform, because they’re totally comfortable as a culture losing two or three Starships a year or four Starships a year, but they know that within five years that’s going to be a productized platform. You tried this with NASA, they’ve tried it for the last 20 years, they haven’t been able to match it. So culture of trust is what gets you there. When I went to the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, they’re building a rocket every two days, a full rocket every two days. It’s just, I’ve never seen anything like it. And everybody just works as a team, they communicate extremely well. It’s very horizontal and structure, so there’s not this high vertical bureaucracy, just everybody has a domain and there’s a lot of admiration and respect there.

So I really admire organizations that figure out how to inculcate that, develop that, and I think good systems produce trust over time. People just believe it’s going to work. Chinese people trust the Chinese government. It’s a really weird thing. We Americans, we look at it, we say, “Well, China’s a dystopian hellscape because, they have social credit and these other things.” Well, when they look at the approval rating of Xi or these other people from people rank-and-file China, most of them believe in the next 10 years, China will be more progressed, more prosperous and more powerful than the last 10 years, and that will be shared adequately with the people of China because gone from nothing in the 1970s where people would starve to death on a pretty regular basis to one of the world’s greatest superpowers, and they did this decade after decade after decade.

So whatever they’re doing in that system, it’s producing trust in its citizens for that. And so trust doesn’t necessarily equate to our notion of honesty and our notion of morality or our notion of ethics. Trust just basically means that for whatever the system is intended to do, you over time start believing it’s probably going to do that and it’s going to do it well and efficiently and it’s going to do it more likely than not to my satisfaction. You might disagree with that system or disagree with the methods, but that’s the thing. And blockchain is much the same. It’s a high trust system, and the number one thing for blockchains is not market utilization and TVL or any of the things, it’s the trust in it, which is why Bitcoin is still number one. It’s the most trusted asset on the planet, even though it has seven transactions a second and it takes an hour for finality, and there’s not really strong smart contracts or any of these things. It’s the trust that makes Bitcoin so powerful.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think you hit on something that is a little in my mind, differentiated from trust, which is the ability to allow failure. Leaders that when something goes wrong, freak out and treat it as a anomaly and something that’s really, really bad, you create a phenomenon where no one wants to mention that things are going poorly and then that leads to more catastrophic failures because we can’t even surface the small ones.

Charles:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And I think this gets into Amy C. Edmondson’s work around psychological safety. It’s like, are we fearful to even talk about things that are not going to plan? Because teams that can talk about these things and surface stuff and fail forward, to your point, they move a lot faster, because they’re making big, bold discoveries.

Charles:

But that’s the trust issue at its core too, because at the end of the day, you don’t trust the leadership to protect your interests. You know you’re going to make mistakes and if the response to mistakes are find someone to blame and kill them, that’s a very different environment than these leaders historically, they might yell at me for it, but at the end of the day, they’re not going to fire me or prevent or destroy my career. We understand part of the business is failure, and when you’re a leader, you have to clearly understand and articulate what your tolerance is for your product and for your endeavor to failure, you have to put those rules out there. And there are some cases where failure is not an option. The aerospace industry is a great example of that. Failure translates to what we just saw in Washington, D.C. with a Blackhawk helicopter crashing into a passenger jet. That’s somebody’s children. It’s one of the most tragic and horrible circumstances, and every single person, they feel sick to their stomach if they’re connected to it and they say, “This is the worst day of my life.”

That’s failure where it’s not an option and you can’t have a culture that says, “Well, that’ll happen every now and then, but in general, we’re getting it done.” But in other systems like agile prototyping or aerospace prototyping or other things, when you’re dealing with a group of people where they’re deeply inspired and they’re willing to encumber risk and they sign up for that, like the test pilots testing supersonic aircraft or these types of things, and they died all the time, it didn’t matter because they signed up for that and they were all in the same boat. They were explorers in a certain dimension and that culture permitted that to exist. So really you have to ask what tolerance for failure do you have and how does the organization respond to failure? I think the Navy did a phenomenal job with the submarine programs. They had the Thresher and the Scorpion, and both of those were lost because of poor design and accidents.

And so they responded by saying, “Look, we’re not going to go and punish every admiral and go and yell at the submarine companies or anything. We’re just going to create a program of excellence.” It’s called SUBSAFE. Actually, the Navy had to go and teach NASA after Challenger how to build stuff. So after Challenger happened, the Navy came in and they say, “If you’re actually going to build spacecraft, this is the program you have to follow.” And SUBSAFE is a really rigorous way of constructing submarines. Since the Navy did it, I think they’ve only lost one submarine the entire history and they had hundreds before, and that was the one. So every system has to be upfront with those expectations and then you build a culture accordingly. And then there’s, what do you do when failure occurs? Because failure does happen and do people feel like they’re going to be treated fairly or do people feel like the exercise is more about subscribing blame?

And this is the dark side of NASA. When failure happens, especially with Challenger, the game was not to admit it, but rather hide it and find ways to bury it in the guts of something. And Feynman and others had to dig it out with a presidential commission, but eventually they figured it out. But bad cultures, they tend to hide enough and make things oblique, whereas good cultures, people proactively search for the truth and they bring it on up and they don’t care about the consequences of the truth, they just want it out there, because they think it makes everybody’s life better and they have the capacity to say they’re sorry. It’s a two-way relationship. Every society has a forgiveness mechanism, a lever of forgiveness that they pull. And in some societies, it’s quite easy. In other ones it’s quite draconian and harsh. Like in China, anytime there’s a financial collapse, they’ll just go execute some of the bankers.

They have these trial, they pull them out and they’re like, “Oh, this guy, mortgage crisis, whatever.” They go execute them, makes them feel better. I guess in other societies, they don’t punish people at all. Like in ours, 2008, there was too big to fail and these guys robbed us of billions of dollars and they got to retire with hundreds of millions of dollars and there was no consequences for anything that they did. So that’s the other side of the pendulum is what a society’s response to these types of things and both a personal liability and a professional liability, and what’s the organizational response to these things? And then there in that structure, you start thinking about, well, how do you build psychological safety if it’s even possible at all? In some cases it’s not.

Douglas:

How do you view building this trust that’s so essential and the safety that’s so essential when you’re talking about distributed teams and you look at the Cardano community, all the folks that were involved in drafting the Constitution, coming from wildly different backgrounds with different interests and goals in mind, different careers. What does trust building look like there? How did that even happen?

Charles:

Well, first and foremost, you have to be willing to let people express themselves without beating them down even if they disagree with you. That’s a huge component of it. And it’s hard at times because sometimes they say things that are just materially not true, and I sometimes struggle with that or they don’t give you the benefit of the doubt when you’ve earned it. If somebody, I’ll give you an example, if every day for two years a person finds someone’s wallet and it’s got some money inside of it and they go out of their way to return it to that person with the money inside of it, and then somebody leaves their wallet in front of you and then they immediately snatch it and say, “Oh, thank God I took it, because you would steal my money.” You’d probably get a little off about that because it’s like, “Well, my track record here indicates something very, very different and you know that I have this track record and you know how I act.”

So you get pretty offended when people accuse you of things like for example, some people with the budget process say, “Well, the only reason Charles is doing this is just to loot and steal all the money from the budget.” And deep down inside they know that that’s a lie, and they know that that’s not what we’re doing. And they know that if we were going to go down that road, we had many opportunities before to structure it in a different way where we could have achieved that end and probably not had any consequences for it. But instead, we acted as good citizens and built a collaborative process and bring people together. So if you respond the wrong way and you respond negatively and harshly, unfortunately those people say it in today’s society, they have no accountability and then they immediately clutch their pearls and play the victim and they make it a David versus Goliath thing.

The very powerful person is picking on this very weak person and they go and try to create sympathy from people who aren’t intimately connected to the situation. So that is one of the issues, and you see that a lot. So many people, they get very panicky or flighty when an event happens. Like we’re having a budget issue right now where the budget process has always been broadcasted roughly the same way, and we say, “Look, the Constitution first, then the product roadmap, then the budget. And the budget’s going to be a proposal and there’s going to be competing proposals and there’ll be a reconciliation step.” So give Intersect and IO some time to put a coalition together and figure out some basic principles and a basic sizing that needs to be done. And by the way, we’re going to do that under NDA or under private groups, because we don’t want intermediate work products to be leaked because it would be an unfair representation for intermediate products to go out there because some of those things are stubs, some of those things, there’s no intention.

Other things, the price of ADA was 25 cents and it just hasn’t been updated, and people think it’s now four times more expensive. And if every single time you do an intermediate work product, it immediately goes to the internet and people freak the hell out and they get super upset and then they take sides and judge you based on that, then nobody will contribute because they don’t want to get attacked and they don’t want to be part of that toxicity. So unfortunately, somebody in that group leaked it, or at least I guess an early draft of things that wasn’t accurate. And now we have a whole bunch of people dogpiling on Twitter doing that, and it diminishes the credibility of the process and then it makes everything we do thereafter look reactive. So even if we do the right thing, “Oh, they only did the right thing, because we went to Twitter and criticized those people.” As opposed to. “They were planning on doing this all the time.”

And I’m not sure exactly how to resolve that. It is a deeply frustrating modern phenomena in politics. Two generations ago for the really serious stuff, nobody thought that the people in Washington would just be so blatantly against the American people. Let’s say there’s nuclear weapons crisis with the Soviet Union like the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example. Eisenhower and Kennedy were talking to each other every day, Republican former president, Democrat president, and 100% of Washington was aligned. And they’re like, “What can we do? How can we help? This is a national security issue. We’re all in the same boat.” Now in Washington, every national security issue, they look at it through the lens of, “How can I gain political power as a result of manipulating this event to my own interest?”

So there’s zero trust in these types of things. If you ever have a meeting with a person who’s politically opposed to you, they don’t have your back. Even common decency’s out the window now. Like Bernie Sanders for example, and Tulsi Gabbard, she gave up her career in the Democrat party. She was a rising star. She could have been president one day as a Democrat. She gave up her career by backing Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton and criticizing Hillary Clinton and how she kind of strong armed the 2016 nomination against Bernie. And Bernie’s probably going to vote against Tulsi running for DNI. It just shows you how far partisan politics have gone. If I know that this person gave up their career to support me and they had integrity and fought hard for something that was important to me, I wouldn’t betray that person, stab them in the back for a job that I knew they were qualified for, but I’m only voting against them because it’s a party line thing. Where’s the good in that?

So when you see a system behave that way, you tend to just lose all trust in it and you start doing pretty extreme things. So it’s a delicate thing and it’s a hard thing and events happen and they make you a little angry at times. And then you’re very disappointed in people and their conduct, especially when they do things a certain way. And at the end of the day, if you have benefit of the doubt, then you realize that even if it’s not a perfect work product, the person’s heart is in the right place and you can work with this person. So if somebody’s heart’s in the right place and they produce something you don’t like, your first response should be just pick up the phone and call them and have a conversation with them because they could be persuaded and you’re both on the same side. You both want the same outcome.

What you do as an adult, you explain, “I think you’re trying to achieve this and this and this is that, right?” They say, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying to achieve.” Say, “Okay, well here’s the problem with what you’ve proposed, if we go down this road, we’re going to run into A, B and C. And I think if you do choose this alternative, you won’t have A, B and C, but you’ll still achieve the same end.” And then they hear it out and they say, “Oh yeah, actually that makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll go with the thing you’re doing.” Or they’ll disagree and they’ll say, “I thought about the thing you’re doing, but here’s this other thing you had no idea about that I know about and I’m going to tell it to you and that’s why I was forced to do the proposal that I had.” And people say, “Oh yeah, that does kind of make sense.”

So maybe there’s something on your side that you had considered, because you’re not God. You can’t step into somebody’s brain and trust works in both directions. Does the person talking to you respect you enough to listen to you? Does the person talking to you respect you enough to acknowledge that you’re a human being with your own independent ideas and maybe just you have more knowledge about this than they do and that’s the reason why you’re proposing the type of thing. And it goes back to that benefit of the doubt. We live in a society now where people have a hard time conceiving that certain people have access to other information. Like when Trump said COVID was made in a lab, that’s a pretty credible source.

I understand a lot of people, all politics, he’s an evil orange monster and all this stuff. Whatever you think, he is the President of the United States and maybe just the President of the United States is given information we don’t see. He was arrested for that. The whole classified information Mar-a-Lago thing. So the president gets to see stuff we don’t get to see. So if the president says something, especially something very significant like that, it’s a credible source in more cases than not, but we just let our politics get in the way or our personal distaste get in the way, and that’s another big problem. So you have to have objectivity is I guess what I’m getting at and you have to divorce the names and your reactions to the names and the people and where they come from from the conversation, and you have to objectively look at these types of things and then you have to say, “Okay, objectively does the argument and the data make sense?”

And if you are taking things on faith, you have to look at the totality of the person’s track record and say, “Historically in these contexts, have they been reliable or unreliable?” There is no secret in the world that I do not get along with Vitalik Buterin. He has very little respect for me. He thinks I’m less than a piece of dirt on the ground, and there’s a rule in the Ethereum Foundation, they are never allowed to mention Cardano. But let’s say somebody accused Vitalik Buterin embezzling money from the Ethereum Foundation, I wouldn’t believe it unless there was overwhelming evidence for it because I know from his track record, he’s had hundreds of opportunities throughout his career to steal money, to take the easy road, and he’s not motivated by money at all.

I’ve seen it myself working with him, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say, “Unless there’s overwhelming evidence for that and circumstances for that, it’s probably made up rumor and it’s probably not true.” That doesn’t mean I agree with him or I like him or we even get along, but I can objectively separate the person from the event and say, “Well, what’s my lived experience with it? And also what have I seen through his conduct over the last 10 years?”

Douglas:

I was thinking about the working groups that I observed and how there was this interesting tension around the need and the value for transparency and also this notion of getting content to a point where it was consumable. And so if we wait too long until we perfect it, then the community is getting concerned. It’s hard for them to extend the trust long enough for folks to get things to be presentable and ready. Curious what your thoughts are on this idea of like, “Well, if we want to be transparent, but we also need to get things to a shareable state.”

Charles:

Yeah.

Douglas:

Tell me about that tension there.

Charles:

It depends on the work activity that you’re behind. So if you are doing something that everybody agrees on the outcome, it is really good to share that as soon as humanly possible. Like Ouroboros Leios is a great example of that. It’s a protocol we’re implementing for Cardano, and if we’re successful with it’ll make Cardano probably 100 times faster than what it is right now. That’s awesome. Very, very happy about that. So everybody agrees about the outcome. They say, “Oh, we want it.” Where they disagree is about the process, how to get to that outcome, the resources required, the design, these types of things. So what you do is create a working group, bring as many people as you can together and then publicly broadcast the intermediate work products and then everybody grabbing a shovel and they want that to happen. When you have a process where there are winners and losers in that process, and budgets by definition and political campaigns by definition are winners and losers because if somebody got funded, it’s seldom the case that everybody got funded.

So there’s somebody who eventually gets left off and for that particular person, that’s existential and it’s the most meaningful and important thing in the world and they feel cheated and they feel like it was an unfair process and the process has to be torn down, they were a victim of that process. So when you know ahead of time that people have that type of reaction, the problem with intermediate work products is you’re debating winners and losers sets sets, and the problem is you haven’t made your conscious choice of which one of these you want to bank on, and because of that, you’re going to get the worst of all worlds where you get basically prejudged for things you didn’t even do. What if it’s as simple as Bob just put in a stub for $100 million for development and just left in one company because he hasn’t gotten the final list of it?

Then if I saw that and I was on the other side, “Oh, that one company got all the money and none of us got anything, these guys are terrible and they’re planning on stealing from all of us.” That’s why you got to keep that secret until you’re absolutely certain that you can live with the consequences of the red button, the launch button. And you say, “Okay, it is what it is. We just have to live with it.” The other circumstance is competitive and in some cases your intermediate work products can be stolen by your competitors, and when they get taken, they can be used for their own products and that’s less of an issue in an open source decentralized ecosystem. But it could be an issue if you have a fork of the chain.

Let’s say that there’s a Cardano and a Cardano Classic, or there was Ethereum Classic and there was a Bitcoin Cash, and let’s say you’re working on a new protocol that’s super awesome and you want your ecosystem be first to launch that protocol so that you can basically not lose the fight between these two competing chains that are going after each other. So in those circumstances you don’t share, even though perhaps sharing would be better if you didn’t have a native competitor. The nice part about Cardano is it’s so technologically different from the EVM ecosystem, we don’t have any of those concerns. Nobody’s trying to steal eUTxO or Plutus or Ouroboros.

We’re kind of living in our own world, and even if they want to like Haskell, it’s a weird language what’s going on? It’s not easy for them to do that, and that’s actually means that we can be far more collaborative and far more open with people. And that’s why we have 168 scientists we’ve worked with for the 230 papers we’ve published, and that’s why our code is so open and all the protocols are so open and the prototyping process is so open, there’s just no interest in espionage for that. Whereas maybe you’re a layer two on Ethereum and you’re just exactly the same as all the other layer two neighbors, you’d be a little bit more careful with that and you want to try to create some first mover advantage.

Douglas:

That’s fascinating. I want to come back to the convention and the workshops leading up to it. What impact do you think the facilitative approach made to the final outcome?

Charles:

Everybody entered in with trust, and that’s why the convention worked. It was hard because there was strong disagreements, but because they trusted each other, they were able to converge to a compromised state. If people didn’t enter in with trust, it would just be physically impossible. There’s too much to go against the tides, the cultural stuff, the language stuff, the asymmetries and experience and knowledge and power and money. There’s just too much there, but everybody entered in with trust and that’s the thing that made the difference at the end of the day.

Douglas:

When you think about the future developments around community-driven governance within Cardano or other broader blockchain spaces or contexts, where is it headed? What is the future?

Charles:

We see it. We see it with Metagov over in the Ethereum space. We see it with Tezos, we see it with Polkadot, we see it with Dash and Cardano, and all of these are examples of decentralized governance. In real time, you’re really asking three things. Does the system have three properties, integrity, efficiency and effectiveness? Integrity means you start with a founding intent and does the system preserve that founding intent? So the Constitution is the founding intent of Cardano. Then you have the efficiency, which is how quickly can the system converge to make a decision? Is it a day, a week, a month, a year? And it could be different for different types of decisions like hard forks versus protocol parameter changes or treasury withdrawals. But how quickly does that take? And effectiveness is how good are the decisions you’re making? So if you set an outcome, can you make that outcome?

So for example, we say something like, “We think this budget for 2025 will double the size of Cardano as measured by transaction volume and TVL.” Did it happen? If it did, it’s an effective system because those were the measurement criteria. That’s the outcome we wanted to achieve, we achieved it. So typically you have a governance trilemma where you only get two of the three if you’re good. Sometimes you get all three, but it’s hard. So China is a great case study in efficiency and effectiveness, but no integrity. What I mean by that is from a western perspective, integrity to me means that you don’t persecute minorities. Integrity to me means you protect human rights, integrity to me means you value freedom of commerce and expression. But when I see Jack Ma be disappeared because he disagrees with the government or camps set up in Western China because they had belonged to an ethnic minority or eminent domain used to basically just take people’s land and if they complain, shoot them, that’s not a preservation of human rights and integrity.

On the other hand, gone from a backwater to a superpower in five decades. So it’s a very effective, efficient system upon that optimizing function. Then you have places like Switzerland, which are high integrity. They have rule of law, they protect human rights. No one Swiss thinks, “God, is the government going to purge me?” In fact, they’re more about some of these rights than most western nations and they’re very effective. So effective translates to when they make a decision, it tends to have a good outcome. That’s why they’re one of the richest countries in the world. They’re horrendously inefficient. It takes a long time to make a decision in Switzerland, and Zurich is a great example. If you go to the basement of one of the buildings, they have this beautiful large wooden model of the city of Zurich, and you have to go through these stages of steps.

Whenever you want to build something in Zurich, you have to actually, they’ll add it to the wooden model and the account council will debate it and talk about it. It’ll take 20 years to get a permit to build a skyscraper or to modify something inside Zurich because they say, “Oh, we have like 800 years of legacy with this city. We don’t want to squander it because you’re going to make some pretty building, but it won’t fit in.” So everything in Switzerland operates this way. They think in terms of decades and centuries, and Japan is the same way in certain places where everything is deliberate and takes a long time to get done, but it tends to be very effective. So efficiency goes away. So you typically get two of these things and really bad systems, you don’t have any of them. You’re inefficient, you’re ineffective, and you have no integrity.

A lot of dictatorships end up this way. They start highly effective and highly efficient, and then the dictator gets old and crazy and he has sycophants all around him, and then the efficacy disappears and the efficiency disappears inside the system. We see that with Russia, with Vladimir Putin where he was thinking, “Oh, I have this badass army and they can do all these incredible things.” And they were just straight up lying to him. They were fake armies on paper and fake training on paper and equipment. So when he made a war plan to invade Ukraine on four fronts and try to take the whole country in two weeks, he’s thinking, “Oh, this will be easy because everything I was told is this way.” And it turns out it was a disastrous decision for him because, because they didn’t actually have what they said they had, and that’s why they’ve gotten mired down in this three-year meat grinder, which has killed about 800,000 Russians and 600,000 Ukrainians, 1.4 million people.

It’s a remarkable loss of life. So bad bureaucracy has those types of consequences. It kills people, it slows things down. It’s ineffective. So we’re now assessing Cardano on those three criteria. Once the Constitution’s in place, we have a litmus test for integrity and we have a point to measure and we say, “Did the government ever try to make or make a decision that violated the constitutional intent?” If it did, we lost integrity. If it didn’t, we preserved it. And then you look at things like the budget, the roadmap, and other events like protocol parameter changes, hard forks, and you say, “How long did it take?” That’s your efficiency. And then you look at the outcome of those events and say, “Is the system making good decisions and is Cardano consistently growing in these types of things?” So that’s your efficacy inside the system, and we can measure it year by year.

And what’s cool is you can measure your neighbors too. Like Ethereum for example, when they did the DAO hack, the bailout there, I would argue it broke the integrity of a blockchain. They’re supposed to be irreversible, code is law. They don’t agree. But that’s after they did, that meant that Ethereum now has the option to do that. The same with staking discrimination where they’re getting some other people who approve transactions to be OFAC compliant as validators, and so they can censor the Mempool to remove transactions that are on the OFAC list. So now there’s transaction discrimination. So I remember in the early days at Ethereum, we put up “censorship resistant” out the door, “immutable” out the door. So for me, it’s not an integrity system, but people love that ecosystem. They seem to think that way and they don’t value that. So that can be like China, I guess there’s no coincidence that Vitalik speaks Chinese.

These things are okay. They have a different viewpoint of these types of things. Where Bitcoin, that will never happen. We all know that. They’re hard hardcore people. They have one view, it’s called maximalism, and there’s only one God, it’s Satoshi, and they follow that to the core. So the most important of the three for Bitcoin is integrity. So much so they’re willing to sacrifice any notion of efficacy and efficiency. It takes three to five years to put a major upgrade into Bitcoin with Taproot being the last one in 2021, and they’re debating all these upgrades. But it takes years for those types of things to come in. It takes us months.

And the power of an on-chain government is it allows you to move trade-off windows. So what we’re banking on is we can preserve an integrity like Bitcoin has, but we can move as fast as Ethereum does in terms of upgrades and be that efficient. Then we’re also banking that the wisdom of the crowds will make the decisions we make over time more effective. So over time the budgets will get more effective and over time the product roadmap will get more inclusive and effective for what we need and we’ll see. But if it works out, it’s a great case study in governance models and it’s something to learn from.

Douglas:

So thinking about the community-driven approach to drafting and voting in the constitutional draft, what challenges do you foresee in scaling this approach as you think about bringing in more community members, more ADA holders, more voices?

Charles:

I think that the thing is designed to scale, and we know that because we’ve gone from nothing to 780 DReps. We’ve gone from nothing to 108,000 people participating in governance in some form or fashion, and we’ve done all of that without the network collapsing and actually having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s a really amazing thing. The workshop is the single most expensive artifact, and I’d like to have it as an ongoing concern, but really for a representative sample of the world, you’re talking about seven of the order of magnitude of about five to 10 million per year. And not just for governance workshops, but also product and budget workshops. So I think they have a place and purpose, especially in areas that are very disenfranchised, that just don’t have native access to the ecosystem and they don’t have the money to travel.

So that’s a model that you pull out and you use. And also when people start developing their own communication channels, like the DReps are starting to all talk to each other and they’re forming coalitions and they are in the same Discord and they have regular meetings and these types of things, that is an organic bottom-up coordination. And once it occurs, then it becomes very efficient. So if you want to percolate information through the entire ecosystem, it’s very straightforward. You just do three, four things and then boom, you’ve talked to half of Cardano. Now innovation also can help. One of the things we’re working on in terms of technology is I really want a Pub/Sub mechanism that when you go ahead and delegate your ADA or your vote to a stake pull operator or to a DRep that you also auto-subscribe in your wallet to their comms channel so those people can push messages to you.

I really think that that would be an amazing feature. And we’ll probably roll something like that over into LACE and then hopefully gradually get into the Cardano protocol. Well, minute you have that, if you’re a DRep or if you’re a stake pool operator, you now have a button to click to talk to every person who trusts you. That’s really powerful, because you don’t know those people. It’s a permissionless system. They could be in Nigeria, they could be in Vietnam and not speak English. They could be anywhere in the world when you really think about it. And when they delegate to you, they’re not giving you their name, their email, or any of these types of things. So having a comms channel where those messages can be pushed, super valuable, because then you know how to reach everybody.

But wait a minute, if everybody, like 70% of the Cardano users are delegating to SPOs, and about 20% right now are delegating to DReps, and that’s growing every day. Once we have those systems in place, just by talking to a few hundred DReps and a few thousand SPOs, you literally can talk to every person in Cardano. That’s the power of networking. So that’s awesome. So you just create a horizontal communication channel for that. And even if you want to coordinate and scale at a level of 10 million people or 100 million people, you now have an effective way to do that. So part of the game is just making sure you have the right comms channels and the right collaborative media workshops. Their primary thing isn’t information discussion. You can do that over Zoom. The primary thing is trust building, because when people actually meet each other and they spend time with each other and they get to know each other, that creates a reality where they’re like, “I now know this person. I now understand where this person is coming from.”

And everything that seemed dramatic and weird, it evaporates away and we’re all reading from the same hymn sheet now. So it’s important that you have in-person touch points on a regular basis in a decentralized thing, because there’s what we call relationship entropy. And so if you don’t meet up, the opposite thing happens over time. You start becoming more suspicious of people, you start having fights with people, and then you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. So workshops pull people together and they restore the relationships, and then people pull apart organically. So you have to do that on a recurring and regular basis, and we’re trying to figure out how to do that as an ecosystem in a cost-effective way because there’s just a lot of people and there’s a lot going on, but I think it is one of the most important things you can do to keep a decentralized ecosystem cohesive.

Douglas:

Incredible. Well, Charles, we’re coming up on the end here, so just want to say thanks for joining today and really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to seeing you again sometime soon.

Charles:

Absolutely. You’re a permanent member of this ecosystem now, whether you like it or not, because you were part of there at the beginning of governance, and we’re going to do as an ecosystem is keep learning. Minimum viable governance is so exciting because it’s a foundation, it’s not an end, and you can build on that. So now that we have great dirt work and we just put the flat work down, we got the concrete down, we can build one hell of a structure on top of that, because it was pretty thick pad that we poured. So I am real excited and real happy and thank you for everything you do. And I love talking about these topics.

And usually when I do interviews they’re like, “When is the price of ADA going up?” Or, “How do we win against Solana?” Or these things. And getting to talk about the actual collaborative models is phenomenal. And I’d highly recommend you interview Tam Haasen, the president of IO, because this is what she does. She’s super, super good at these things and she’s in love with the idea of building better collaborative models, and it’s always fun to talk about them.

Douglas:

Ooh, yeah, I’d love to. Fantastic. Well, thanks for the recommendation, and again, thanks for coming on the show.

Charles:

Thank you, Doug. Cheers.

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. voltagecontrol.com.

The post From Talking Sticks to Blockchain: Revolutionizing Governance Through Collaboration appeared first on Voltage Control.

“It’s so much more beneficial when everyone gives up ownership of ideas and creates something that belongs to the whole group.”- Emilia Åström

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Emilia Åström, facilitator at Howspace and co-creator of “Perspectives.” Emilia shares her journey from competitive advertising to collaborative facilitation, inspired by her experience at Hyper Island. They discuss the transformative power of facilitation in fostering inclusive, innovative group dynamics and how structured methods like design thinking enhance leadership and learning. Emilia also highlights the impact of digital tools and AI in large-scale facilitation and emphasizes facilitation as a mindset that enriches both professional and personal growth.

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About the Guest

Emilia Åström is Head of Community at Howspace, where she facilitates peer learning communities for leaders in learning and transformation. With over a decade of experience, she was part of the early days at Mural, helping define best practices for remote collaboration. She co-authored MethodKit for Remote Workshops and created the toolkit Perspectivas for inclusive advertising with Publicitarias. Emilia began her career in digital strategy and has since used design thinking and facilitation to guide advertising agencies and teams through complex digital transformations.

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 Emilia Astrom at Howspace, where she facilitates peer learning communities for leaders in learning and transformation.

She’s the co-creator of Perspectives, a card deck for inclusive advertising developed with Publicitarias.org, and co-author of MethodKit for remote workshops and hybrid teams. Welcome to the show, Emilia.

Emilia Astrom:

Thank you, Douglas. Really great to be here. I’ve been longing to talk to you again and have this conversation, so.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, looking forward to it. It’s been a while. We were just remarking and it’s like pretty much a year, which is remarkable.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah, time goes by quickly when you’re busy and have fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

Indeed, indeed. So I want to go back a little bit to the origin story here of how you got started. I know for you, Hyper Island was pretty pivotal in your early journey.

So let’s look at that first moment at Hyper Island. What was it like for you, the one where you realized facilitation could be more than a technique, but a calling?

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. I had been working in advertising previously, so I came from an environment where it was quite common that you would compete against other creatives with your ideas, and then the best idea would be picked up. So when I started Hyper Island after that, and I had the first experience in a facilitated design thinking workshop, I was just really amazed with how a whole group were able to in such short time, come up with such great ideas together.

And before that, I hadn’t really known that human-centric design or facilitation existed and that there was a job you could actually do. So when I met the facilitators who came there when I first started Hyper Island, my idea or intention was to continue to work as a digital strategist or a creative. But I quickly found that it was much more interesting and I was much more fascinated with how can you make others come up with better ideas more quickly?

So that’s how it started, just that feeling of really belonging in a group, feeling that flow or coming up with great ideas together, and I just wanted more. So I continued to explore and study that, and look at what the facilitators who came to Hyper Island to teach courses and workshops would do. And then at the beginning, I would just imitate them and try to do the same, but then I started to explore and create more things on my own as well. So that’s how it started.

Douglas Ferguson:

A couple of things I was thinking about there was the point you made about the competitive environment in the ad agency.

And then the flip side, you’re talking about pulling out the great ideas from others or creating conditions where people come up with the great ideas.

How would you categorize those things, like how are they different, this competitive atmosphere versus this atmosphere where we’re drawing ideas out?

Emilia Astrom:

I guess in some way, the competitive atmosphere can be beneficial too. It can inspire you to be improving and to learning new things. But at the same time, I think that through a more collaborative experience or way of working, you’re much more able to join those ideas together and get the best of everyone.

So that we can come up with something that’s bigger, that’s considering more different perspectives and coming up with better, more strong ideas together. So you also get to better ideas quicker than you would do maybe through developing them individually, separately.

Because you can take all those different good parts from the different ideas and put them together much more quicker.

Douglas Ferguson:

What were some examples of early moments when you started to realize this power of shifting to a more collaborative and a more maybe inclusive approach?

Emilia Astrom:

I think it was really during Hyper Island, we had one week that was focusing just on idea development, and we had some really excellent guest facilitators who came to the school to facilitate those sessions. And those people later, I stayed in touch with them because I was curious to learn more. And there wasn’t that many people in my group either who were curious about facilitation, so I stayed in touch with them and continued to learn more afterwards.

But it was just in those workshops, the way that they were guiding the group through different steps and activities, and I realized how the structure could actually also help you build more creative and come up with better ideas. That moment in that workshop was really changing the perspectives for me. And I also think that I had, as [inaudible 00:06:19] advertising, I had always felt like I struggled a bit with coming up with good ideas.

I didn’t feel like I was maybe that creative or had that good ideas. But with those tools that you get through human-centric design and design thinking, I really felt like I got tools that helped me come up with better ideas. And I was really excited to share that with others as well, to let others have that experience that I had in that workshop in that moment.

Douglas Ferguson:

This kind of feeling that you had, it seems like you were compelled to share with others.

Is that something that’s been pervasive throughout your career or your life, this idea of spreading the news to others and assisting?

Emilia Astrom:

I think so. Actually, I remember a story that my mom used to tell me several times about when in kindergarten, she would observe how I would come up with games and stories, and come up with worlds that the other children would then join in and participate in. And I would come up with like give people roles.

I would come up with missions and we would all go out in the forest and do something together or build something, and so I think that’s something that I’ve probably always been pulled towards. And in school, that could sometimes be a little bit of a challenge, being too inspired and wanting to share your ideas with the group and try to steer the work of the groups as well.

And I think that through facilitation, they also got some tools that helped me make the most of that inspiration and curiosity and the desire to create things. Create worlds and play with others, but in a more constructive and more focused way that could also create better results for everyone. That’s a very interesting question. I never really thought about it that way.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s interesting you were talking about this innate curiosity thing, behavior or trait that you have, and how these facilitation tools are allowing you to maybe funnel that or harness it in a way that’s really productive.

And I’m curious, were there some early tools or some early processes where the light bulb went off to say, “Oh, this feels real natural”?

Emilia Astrom:

When I facilitated or when I participated in a facilitated experience?

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m curious about either. And to your point, sometimes participating in stuff, you could go, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be a game changer. I have to incorporate this.” But certainly when you’re practicing yourself, it’s a totally different experience.

So I’d just be curious, what jumps out to you as maybe a poignant moment around connecting back to that innate interest and curiosity to create these worlds? And was there a particular structure or experience that really stood out that helped you bridge that gap?

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. I think the first design thinking workshop I was part of that I mentioned, where we very clearly separated the conversation we had, or the moment where we explored the challenges or the needs of the people we would be designing for. And then have a more structured idea generation session where we also used the structure.

And this is something that Hyper Island later also included in the Hyper Island toolkit page, where you can find it yourself if you want to try later. But there’s an exercise called Mash-Up where you come up with different, you start by mapping different needs, different digital technologies, different maybe channels and platforms.

And then you connect them together to come up with new combinations and new ideas and you create new things together. So I think that was a really powerful thing for me, that also by using sticky notes, you take things apart but then you can put them together.

So I think that was a really powerful way as well that I learned through how also the visual aspect of facilitation can work in a really powerful way.

Douglas Ferguson:

So was that the first time you experienced someone sequencing a meeting or a session into its constituent parts so it flowed?

So you were focused on one piece and then moving to the next, versus what we tend to default to, which is like, “Oh, let’s just figure it all out”?

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah, definitely. In advertising, which I was used to before, you usually use a brief format where you do state what the problems and challenges, and needs and opportunities and insights are that you can use to develop your ideas. But after the brief has been created, everyone goes in their own direction, and then you have more of that sometimes you call it a technique like the blue sky.

You just go out in the world and wait for the perfect idea to hit you. Maybe you look at some references, some inspiration, maybe you look at some trends to try to get some ideas, but it’s not a very structured process and that can be a really great way to come up with ideas as well. So I definitely think that both, just a natural, creative process where you dream up new ideas over a longer period of time can have its place.

But sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time to come up with solutions quickly. And sometimes you also need to ensure that you follow a structured process, so that you make sure to do your proper research, that you test things to make sure that they really solve the problem that you’re setting out to solve. So I think that was also something that I was really just amazed with initially.

And thinking back at it now, those are things like today, I take those things for granted, it’s such an ingrained way of how I work. But initially, this was something that was really, really powerful, and this was over 15 years ago now, time goes by quickly. But thinking back at what it was like that first time when I realized this, it was really powerful.

It felt like a whole new world opening up, a whole new level of solving problems and collaborating with others.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I would argue it’s a whole new level of leadership.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah, that as well. And I think today finally, facilitation is starting to become more part of the discussion more often of what skills we believe that leaders need.

And I absolutely think and today, fortunately when looking around me, when looking at the people I work with, facilitation is starting to become something that most leaders know about and start to apply a little bit.

I think we could do it even more than better, but I’m really happy to say that the awareness of facilitation and the benefits of it are starting to spread more and more.

Douglas Ferguson:

It is very encouraging to see this trend of folks recognizing facilitation and honoring it more. Too often, we see folks talking about leadership as presentation skills or executive presence or this and that.

But as you mentioned earlier, this ability to draw things out of others, to not be the one that has to have all the answers, but to help everyone on the team have great answers. I would argue that’s probably the best leadership skill you could have.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. And when I was young and my intention was to continue working in advertising and become a creative or strategist, I think one thing that drove me back then was probably a bit more like, “How could I have better ideas? How can I contribute a bit more through my ideas?”

But through discovering facilitation, really that was a big change as well, just realizing how it’s so much more beneficial when everyone give up that ownership of ideas, and let them do something that belongs to the whole group.

And how that can really, yeah, also support leaders in thinking about, “How can we support the group to have better ideas together?” So that was really interesting as well.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it also is an interesting lens into how different cultures and different teams and different industries approach problems. Because when you’re focusing on facilitation skills, it typically exposes you to lots of different groups.

Whether that’s through your community of facilitators or just through the nature of the variety of work that you’re doing, and you’re no exception to that. You facilitated across continents and industries and formats. So I’m curious, what do you see as the through line in all those experiences?

Emilia Astrom:

I think that’s something that I started to realize more and more just recently. When I started out with facilitation, it was more of helping teams coming up with better ideas, but then now when I reflect back on it. Because recently, the last years, I’ve been finding myself more and more intentionally using facilitation as a way to help teams change the way they work and learn together in order to be able to change as well.

And I think looking back at the way I used facilitation when starting out, that was actually also about facilitating change. Because at that point, and this was back in 2010, then there were a lot of changes happening with new digital channels and tools coming in. And organizations were trying to find new ways of adapting to these new digital tools, and adapting to these new ways of working that this meant for them.

And human-centric design in facilitation was a tool that I found that I could use to help teams analyze what were the needs and what were the challenges of these new circumstances, and the new digital environment that we suddenly found ourselves in? So I think maybe those two parts, human-centric design as a way to facilitate change and learning, because change and learning are also very closely related.

It’s very hard to change if you’re not learning something new. And learning often means that something is changing as well, the way I changed by learning about facilitation kind of.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s certainly difficult to change when you’re in a fixed mindset.

And learning forces you into more of a growth mindset or a curious space, because you’re already framing and opening yourself up to learning new stuff.

So your brain is changing, you’re less change-adverse, I guess, is the way I like to think about it.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. And I think facilitation also makes you less more adaptive to change, because many facilitation techniques and facilitation practices, it’s embedded in the methods and the tools that we use.

The reflection and the looking back at what we did and thinking about how we can improve, so that’s something that really supports that mindset of change in growth as well, I think.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. When done well, it certainly does reinforce just by the nature of doing it, it keeps us in that growth mindset.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And as a facilitator, it’s always important to learn and grow and learn new things. I think throughout my career, I haven’t been planning too much or thought too much about the future what I would like to do. I feel like I’ve been more of a receptor just listening to my surroundings and seeing what my surroundings need.

And maybe that’s also in a way something that comes through facilitating, because you become a more attentive listener. You’re listening to your environment to feel what the people in the room needs, while still focusing on where you need to go in a way, what is it that you are trying to achieve, what the group is trying to achieve?

So you move between the both, listening and learning to grow, and that’s also something that’s embedded in many of the facilitation methods and tool that we’re using thinking about, “What’s the desired future state that we want to go towards?” And even when designing workshops, we often start with the end goal state.

So I think that’s something that also becomes very present in the way we think and work and learn through the facilitation mindset. So that’s another benefit that I think you’re getting from being more aware of facilitation, just being more mindful about how you listen, how you learn, how you grow.

But also thinking about the future and the desired state, and how we can design our will to get there. How we can facilitate us getting there. Sorry, that became very abstract, I realize now, that I’m thinking about growth and learning.

Douglas Ferguson:

The thing that’s emerging for me is this idea of when you internalize facilitation, when it becomes a deep part of your practice, it’s not just something you show up and do for work, or it’s not just something that you sprinkle in to meetings and experiences you have with folks. It has a shift on how you view the world, how you navigate the world.

Because you’ve internalized it at a deep level, so you’re a better listener, whether that’s in personal relationships with family and loved ones, or whether it’s like you’re buying a car, you’re noticing these details. Or maybe it impacts how you negotiate anything and how you move through, and also to your point, how open you might be to possibilities.

And so I would say it tunes your radar in a way that, I think, is valuable in a broader scope than just in work life.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah, totally. I’ve noticed in the last years especially how I subconsciously or unintentionally or sometimes with intention too, start to facilitate or be more present and more mindful about how I go about every day and life events. And I also observe a lot in my environment all the time what different experiences are like, what it feels like, what I can learn from it.

So I get a lot of ideas for my facilitation just from interacting with, as you mentioned, products or services or holidays, and these everyday ceremonies and rituals that you go through like Christmas, and I don’t know, midsummer and things like that. I also think that international perspective helps in a way with that. Having lived in different cultures and different countries, you become an outside observer as well.

And after moving back to Sweden recently, I’m also observing more from the outside in a way, even though this is my culture and where I’m from. And that’s also something that’s really helpful for the facilitation mindset as well. Changing environment, which is something you do automatically by facilitating in different environments as well, which is something that helps us be more aware and observing too.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to observe if you leave and come back.

Emilia Astrom:

Exactly. And that’s also, talking about growth and facilitation, I think that’s also been something that’s been really helpful for me as I’ve been growing through my career and moving from different industries, and different contexts, and obviously using the experience I had from before. But then also applying, looking for new things that I need to learn and apply it to this new context.

Because even if I started out in advertising, I quite quickly started moving on working with large enterprises in general, supporting them with adopting new ways of working, more human-centric, design-centered and more facilitation. And that was also interesting, I think, when I started my career, I started out with facilitation during the big wave of design thinking when that was really trending.

And that was something that everyone wanted to do and work with, but then I think today it’s a little different. That’s something that more organizations already have embedded in their organizations today, so there may be not as many organizations that are asking me today to come and help them to adopt the more human-centric way of working.

Today, I feel like it’s more about coming up with collaborative ways of learning together, coming up with collaborative ways of facilitating change and transformation. Making those processes more co-creative, more involving by using or also leveraging the collaboration, and improving it to use it as a tool to change the culture. And by that, being able to really anchor and succeed with change.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it can have a really big impact. And speaking of impact, your work with Publicitarias and Tech Elevator highlights your commitment to inclusion and impact.

And I’m curious how that’s going now and what’s new, is emerging around that work for you?

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. And that’s another area where I feel like I really, and that was also unexpected in a way, that’s something I could never have imagined would be something I would do during my career. But that’s another space where I really felt and saw the positive impact that facilitation can have, using facilitation as a tool to create positive change in different areas and industries.

So for example, with Publicitarias, which is a foundation founded in Argentina that works for more inclusive communication and advertising. With them, the main project I did, was together with their community and together with experts, facilitate a human-centric design process through which we co-created a tool that individuals and teams at advertising agencies.

But then the tool was actually used across brands and marketing departments, universities, schools, and many other places. But using facilitation both to gather the whole community to co-create this tool together, that would be something that the community members themselves could use to become change agents in their own terms and in their own environments.

And the tool is basically it’s a deck of cards, which is an idea that I had gotten from MethodKit and Ola Moller, which is also one of the facilitators I met through Hyper Island. So that was another actually way that Hyper Island had a really big impact on and inspired me in many ways.

But it was really encouraging and inspiring to see how this tool that we created together using design thinking and facilitated methods, then became a tool that enabled almost anyone. Or I would say anyone to facilitate a structured idea generation and evaluation process with their team in a safe way, that would be playful.

And allow other teams to have valuable and transforming conversations that would help change the way they work and the way they looked at advertising. And that’s also connected to, we touched on that earlier before, the power of just visual tools in facilitation.

So through these visual tools, it would also be easier for teams, by coming with those visual tools, you would help build credibility for the conversation. You would feel that it had more importance, but also help create that shared vocabulary that you need to really produce the change and new behaviors and ways of working.

Because through the cards, you could then have a more structured approach to how you would evaluate your ideas. It would help remind you of new ways of looking at things so that you could come up with ideas in a different way. And this is something that through also packaging this facilitation tool in a way like this, we were able to train thousands of people through our workshops.

We also printed and sold the cards. So there are hundreds of advertising agencies, universities and freelancers out there who also have these tools and can use them with their teams that they’re working with. So what started with a relatively small community became something that grew.

And we actually also heard some success stories about agencies that used these tools, and were able to radically change the way they looked at how they would communicate about different products. So that was really, really strong to see how a simple facilitation technique can have such a big impact.

Douglas Ferguson:

And how has Howspace challenged or expanded your understanding of digital or asynchronous facilitation?

Emilia Astrom:

I think, yeah, that was really interesting. So just to set the perspective, so before I started working with Howspace, where I’ve been working for a year now. I was working for almost nine years together with Mural, which is a digital whiteboard that you can use for human-centric design and facilitation as well.

But I think when you collaborate with human-centric design methods in a visual whiteboard, that’s something that it’s easier to do with smaller groups. But as soon as you want to scale, that can easily be a little bit more messy, and I’m talking big scale, like hundreds or thousands of people.

So what’s been really interesting with Howspace, has been to explore how facilitation can work in a digital way with larger groups of people or even entire organizations. At Howspace, we’re working with customers who are using Howspace to facilitate transformation with organizations where the invite may be 4,000, 5,000 people to participate.

And that has been really powerful to see that you can have the conversation at that skill and still make sense and meaning of it. And that also comes back to that shared vocabulary, that shared experience and collective knowledge that you need to be able to really anchor the change, and have people change the behavior, change the conversation so that the change becomes visible and in the everyday.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that sounds exciting. When folks are able to realize this vision they have for where they want to go and bring along that many people, it’s really quite profound.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. And I remember when I started out working with facilitation, and during the first years, I don’t think I did that much digital facilitation, to be honest. Most of it was in person and at that point, I wasn’t even imagining that you could do these things with thousands of people at the same time. And that’s also something that wouldn’t have been possible at that point either maybe, because we didn’t have AI tools yet that could help make sense of those amounts of information.

And that’s also been very interesting starting to work with Howspace to explore just how artificial intelligence, especially GenAI, can be used to help make sense of information so that you can really get something out of those big groups’ conversations. Not just seeing all those individual messages and go beyond just word clouds. But actually being able to make sense of it, get some key insights, but also turn that into options that people can make decisions on in real time.

So that has been really eye-opening for me. And I think most people I’ve been talking to in the last year who use generative AI or AI in facilitation, the use cases I’m still hearing the most are maybe you use artificial intelligence to plan your session in advance. Maybe you use it to support your transcripts of the video calls. Maybe afterwards, after the session, you take all the insights and you synthesize them and summarize them with the help of AI.

But with Howspace, it’s been really interesting to explore how you can also use AI in real time, in the moment of the session to get insights and to advance the process with the group. So that’s been really interesting to explore and something that I’m looking forward to do more of in the future as well.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. We actually held a workshop at South by Southwest on this very topic, how most people look at AI as a utilitarian tool, that it’s a one-to-one. Like I as an individual, I’m going, to your point, use it for my planning, use it for some retrospective.

And it’s very much a, “It’s going to do a task for me and I’m going to get a thing out of it.” But bringing in the AI as a collaborative partner has some really interesting, I would say, outcomes. And it’s not about adopting some tool right now, I think it’s about adopting a mindset of like, “Hey, let’s use this in different moments, in different times, in different ways.”

And eventually, the tools are going to show up that are intended to be used in that way, and then it won’t feel so foreign. Because I think that we’re going to see more and more of the stuff just embedded almost like AI teammates and coworkers.

Emilia Astrom:

Yeah. And that’s something that people talk about quite a lot. I think still in the future, we’re probably still going to want to have real human facilitators to have that human touch, and who can really read the room and understand the feelings.

But I also think it’s really valuable to use artificial intelligence as a co-facilitator or another team member in the room, who can help come up with better ideas, help synthesize and things like that in real time.

So that’s really interesting to explore as well, how we can collaborate with it, and how we can embed it more and more into the facilitation until the point where we almost don’t notice it. It’s so natural and such part of the process.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes, I love that. And then I’m just curious if you have any reflections? We talked about facilitation being a really important leadership skill.

And I’d love to hear if you have any advice on, or just for any of our listeners that might be interested in how they might harness the power of facilitation, or even how organizations might better harness it?

Emilia Astrom:

I think there are many different ways. I think something that I’m working with quite a lot right now, is on one hand, the role of facilitation in transformation. And I think that’s an interest that are starting to emerge more in the last years, as with the challenges of the world and the economy, the pressure, of course, on people leading transformation to be able to show impact potential results is becoming increasing all the time.

And then I think facilitation has really showed up as one of those tools that you can use as a leader who’s leading change, to ensure that you’re getting the results that you’re hoping for. And doing so by as we talked about initially, my first insights about facilitation and human-centric design. It allows you to have more perspectives present earlier, which ensures that you maybe make less mistakes later on.

It also ensures that you’re testing and getting feedback ongoing. So hopefully, that would ensure to set you up for success and avoid making some mistakes, and getting more value out of the change that you’re trying to produce earlier. And the other area where I’m working quite a lot right now is how I can use facilitation to facilitate social learning and knowledge sharing.

And that’s also in a way connected to the change. Because I think organizations are starting to become more aware of just the need for before implementing a big change, make sure that people have the skills and the tools they need to be able to adopt those new ways of working. I think still in the news, in Sweden at least, you can quite often read about organizations or public institutions are implementing new systems or new ways of working.

But without having that training initially, and then the adoption doesn’t look as you had hoped, and there’s a lot of costs as a result of that. So having that learning facilitated as part of that, is also very powerful. And what’s also very interesting, especially now with new technologies like AI

What I also heard quite a lot recently is how central learning teams often have a hard time to keeping up producing learning materials and content in the same speed that the employees are adopting new technologies and ways of working, and especially in the case of AI. So being able to facilitate these knowledge-sharing possibilities and facilitating this social learning also becomes a way to keep up to speed with new change.

And in that way, being able to support the change and transformation that needs to take place, but I also think that it’s a way for us to have more fun and to connect more at work, and that’s something we wanted especially now. After the pandemic and many years working at home, and now we’re also being asked to come back to the office.

And if we can use facilitation to make those things more meaningful and get more out of it, I think that’s something that’s very beneficial as well. So not just for the profit and the value, but also for our well-being and our joy at work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Well, as we come to a close, could you leave our listeners with a final thought?

Emilia Astrom:

Yes, of course. And I think that’s very much connected to what we’ve been talking about most recently. After especially I think starting to work with Howspace and get insight into how organizations really change, because that’s something that we’ve been supporting quite a lot.

But also looking back at what I’ve been doing in my career, helping facilitate digital transformation, but also helping facilitate cultural change through Publicitarias. I think what I really learned is just or what I’ve seen is just the power of involving people early in the change and inviting them to co-create it.

And just how change becomes more effective and sustainable when people feel ownership of the change. We invite more voices, we invite the voices of those who are impacted, not just those who are in charge of the change, which is very important. But if we want to do so, we need to know how to facilitate it and many organizations are a little hesitant to do those things still.

But I think that the answer to that and how you can feel more comfortable in inviting people into the change and co-creating it is through facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, it was a pleasure chatting with you today, and look forward to chatting again sometime soon.

Emilia Astrom:

Yes, thank you. Great questions. I feel like it became very introspective, a little bit abstract at some points. But I hope that this will also awaken some more curiosity and interests from people about what more can you get out from facilitation? And how can it support your personal growth, but how can it also open up new career paths?

And I strongly believe as well that through the needs, technology is changing faster all the time, and we’re going to have to change more all the time and learn more all the time. And I think facilitation is one of those skills that’s going to still be needed many years from now to help facilitate those things, and help us overcome all the challenges that we’re facing as a world.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s hope so. 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 From Competition to Collaboration in Idea Generation appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Somewhere along the line, as we grow up, we get so used to doing things a certain way that we lose touch with that creative side of the brain. As kids, we tried all sorts of things and never stuck to a certain methodology or structure, but I think facilitation brings out that childlike curiosity, which makes the whole thing very special. And I think that’s what’s kept me going.”- Varsha Prasad

In this Facilitation Lab podcast episode, host Douglas Ferguson interviews Varsha Prasad of IdeaCompass about her journey as a facilitator and entrepreneur. Varsha shares insights from her first design thinking workshop, the impact of mentorship, and the importance of creating engaging environments. She discusses navigating cultural differences in facilitation, her transition to independent consulting, and the value of community support. The conversation highlights the power of innovation, structured reflection, and open-mindedness in workshops, offering practical advice for facilitators seeking to inspire creativity and collaboration across diverse teams.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

Varsha on Linkedin

IdeaCompass on Instagram

About the Guest

Varsha is an innovation strategist and the Founder of IdeaCompass, a consulting practice dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs transform bold ideas into actionable strategies. She specializes in facilitation, design thinking, and business innovation, working with diverse industries including tech, education, transportation, hospitality and e-commerce and public sector.  

With a strong background in customer success and corporate innovation, Varsha has collaborated with organizations globally to drive impactful change. She is passionate about building human-centered solutions that deliver tangible business results.  

Varsha’s expertise lies in guiding cross-functional teams, fostering creative collaboration, and simplifying complexity into clear, actionable strategies. Her approach blends structured innovation frameworks with a deep understanding of customer needs, ensuring sustainable transformation for the businesses she works with.

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 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 Varsha Prasad at IdeaCompass, where she helps entrepreneurs and enterpreneurs build customer-centric products through custom innovation workshops. Welcome to the show, Varsha.

Varsha:

Thank you, Douglas. Happy to be here and chat with you.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s so good to have you. And I guess let’s get started by hearing a little bit about how you got your start. Take us back to that first design thinking workshop at Cisco. What do you remember about how it felt walking into that room and why did it hit so different?

Varsha:

Yeah, that was a different kind of day for me, especially because I was used to one hour meetings in a conference room with long tables and chairs on either side of the tables, one person standing at the front of the table walking through a presentation, and most of us joining off or just looking into our phones. But that was a special one because as soon as we entered the table, the room set up was totally different. There was music playing in the background.

And we had our director, who was supposed to be one of the senior most people in our organization, standing at the door welcoming people with smiles, and I could see sticky notes, colorful sticky notes and Lego blocks and all sorts of cool stuff lying on the table there. So that was very new to me. And from the time we entered, I didn’t know how the day passed. It was eight hours. We walked in at 9 AM and then we finished, I’d say I think five or something with a break in between for lunch. That was the day that things turned around for me and I fell in love with the whole process of design thinking and creative workshops.

Douglas:

Was there a specific moment in the day where something clicked for you?

Varsha:

I think the fact that ideation is, I think one of my favorite ways to work around things, like from the day I realized that this is how you can brainstorm and come up with new ideas. Idea bombing is one of my favorite exercises. Every time I feel like I’m in a clump, I’m stuck, I just stick to this plain, simple exercise. I take a sheet of paper and a pen and just start writing as many ideas as I can. And some of the best ideas come up when you are sitting with a tight timeline. You say, put a timer of 10 minutes and in the 10 minutes come up with as many ideas as you can. And that is one of my favorite exercises, and I keep using that over and over again, both with my participants and myself as well.

Douglas:

I love that. Have you ever done ten-by-ten writing from Liberating Structures?

Varsha:

I’ve done, I think the eight-by-eight, is the Crazy Eights the same thing?

Douglas:

Crazy Eights is a little different. I love Crazy Eights too. To your point, that’s another rapid fire time constraint activity. The ten-by-ten writing is, it’s not part of the Liberating Structures repertoire, but it’s listed as one of the in development. And basically you give your participants a prompt and they’re supposed to write 10 responses to it, and then you give them a second prompt and they write 10 responses and a third prompt, and they write 10 responses. And it’s about just creating so much volume because essentially they’re writing a hundred things that they’re writing 10 things to 10 different prompts.

Varsha:

Exactly. Yeah, that’s an interesting one. Probably the next ideation exercise for me to try out.

Douglas:

Yeah. You can get really playful with the prompts too. One of my favorites is what is something that users don’t want.

Varsha:

I think that there’ll be a list of 20 of them. [inaudible 00:05:04].

Douglas:

Yes. So often we’re making things that people don’t want, right? That’s amazing.

Varsha:

True. I agree.

Douglas:

So you mentioned your lead being a real pivotal mentor, and I want to come back to that kind of scenario you described of just walking in and the room was set up totally different and they were greeting you at the door and there were all these things sprinkled around the room that were different and just how much of an impact the way the room is set up can have.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

Varsha:

Yeah, a lot, because I think this also came up in the Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, when we were doing the certification. So how you set up the room, how the room is placed when participants enter it changes the mood, the psychology of the participants, I think to be in a different environment. I think that’s key. I think for me, it just transported me into a very playful environment and having the music around and seeing those creative, colorful sticky notes, it just activated that creative side of the brain. I guess that’s what it did to me. And ever since then, I realized that that plays a very crucial role because corporate meeting setups, usually there is a hierarchy where the head of the meeting stands at the front and everyone is seated around the table in rows. So it’s a stark difference for sure.

Douglas:

And it’s interesting how powerful that can be. Just putting some thought into how we might just rearrange the space, how we might group folks different, how we might change the seating. It’s a totally different experience walking in with rows of seats versus clusters of chairs or… Very powerful. Also, I took note of you talking about how you were greeted at the door.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

It’s like so often the host is stuck behind a laptop trying to get the HDMI cable to work or whatever, and that feeling of being invited in, being welcomed, so powerful.

Varsha:

Yeah. And it shows that they were in the room much before the meeting started and they prepped for it. They got all the stuff in. So it shows how much effort they’ve put into designing that space for us, and that automatically signals that we need to be just as involved. It allows us to reciprocate that.

Douglas:

Yeah. The facilitation doesn’t start, once everyone’s in the room and we’re getting folks attention. It starts when folks are first arriving and how are we making them feel comfortable. And to your point, you even just mentioned that you were starting to feel a certain way around like, oh, I’m already in a creative mindset. I’m ready to play games. I’m ready to be totally different in this space.

Varsha:

Yeah, yeah. Especially when you’re not used to that in your office and when you hear music in the office, it just plays on your mind. Yeah.

Douglas:

Yeah. So cool. So coming back to your mentor, what did you learn from shadowing him and working alongside him and how did that shape your early style as a facilitator?

Varsha:

Yeah, so my mentor, his name is Viva, that’s how we call him, Viva. And he was the one who had been to a design thinking workshop, and then he realized how powerful the framework is, just the mindset that it puts us all in. And he decided to introduce that into our organization, and I think we were one of the first or the second teams that he introduced this concept to. The day we did the workshop, I went up to him and I said, “Hey, I really liked the whole workshop that we did today. How can I be part of this?” And he said, “There is no formal design thinking club as such, so let’s start something here.”

I think his mindset was to… He had already embraced the design thinking mindset where you test things out, you prototype it, and then if something doesn’t work, then you reiterate on it. He had a playful mindset himself, so that encouraged us to be bold and accept that. And I think that played a crucial role. He never expected us to be perfect. He didn’t say, if we walk into the room, we need to have answers to everything. That was a huge learning that I had from him.

Douglas:

Yeah. It also sounded like you were really curious throughout your tenure and just trying lots of different things and being persistent and following through on things, what helped you keep that drive and that curiosity and that willingness to explore new things? I could imagine some folks might lose steam or get frustrated or not stick through things. So what kept your passion alive there?

Varsha:

To be honest, that’s a question I keep asking myself even today, because I’m the kind who just jumps from one hobby to another. I don’t keep through with things. I’ve tried dancing, I’ve tried singing, I’ve done all sorts of things. But this is one thing that I think I’ve been doing it for six plus years now since the day I first walked into that room and learned about design thinking. Every time there is a workshop, every time there is some ideation session, I want to be the one who’s facilitating it. I want to be the one who’s driving it. I think one of the key things is when we walk into the room, there is a lot of chaos, there’s a lot of misalignment, and what do we do?

There’s a lot of confusion when we enter the room, and then by the end of it, people are so happy with the amount of ideas that were just generated and the amount of clarity that they get by the end of all those exercises and activities. And somewhere along the line, I think as we grow up, we got so used to doing things a certain way that we’ve lost touch with that creative side of the brain. As kids, we tried all sorts of things and we never stuck to a certain methodology or a structure, but I think it brings out that childish behavior, that childlike behavior, I shouldn’t say childish. But childlike curiosity, which makes the whole thing very special. And I think that’s kept me if I need to answer that question.

Douglas:

Yeah. It sounds like unlike some of the other things you’ve tried, this really connected in with something deep and meaningful that you just couldn’t let go of.

Varsha:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Douglas:

And so also noticed reading your alumni story, the arc of building creative culture across three countries. There was the group, they’re in Bangalore, then Poland and now Netherlands.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So I’m curious what you’ve learned about facilitation from doing this work across these three different cultures around how people show up in different ways or just anything you’ve noticed about the differences or the similarities even.

Varsha:

Yeah, I think when I was facilitating back in India… And also it was more around very technical teams. So one thing that I’ve noticed is technical folks are very rooted in a structure. They have a certain way of working and introducing creative ways of working is something new to them, and it’s not as acceptable to these folks. But when I moved to Poland and I started the design thinking club, I think there was a lot more acceptance on or curiosity around how does this work? What does this contain? I think when it comes to cultures, I think Poland has been a lot more accepting in terms of being playful, but I think the culture is also getting better in India where people are open now to newer ways of working. But there was this initial resistance, especially from technical folks where they said, “Hey, what are you making us do? What are these sticky notes? What are these activities and energizers that you’re making us do?” But yeah, over time I think there’s been an acceptance around these new ways of working, these new ways of thinking even.

Douglas:

Coming back to the technical folks having a bit of resistance early on. When you look back on that, what were some of the things that helped them connect in with the purpose or understand more deeply why that was important? Or was it getting to the other end and realizing that, oh, there’s value in this, or was it some clarity that they were getting along the way? What was it that do you think that really helped them?

Varsha:

Yeah, it is definitely the clarity that they get along the way where we… Highlighting the fact that no matter how good your technology is, if it doesn’t connect with your customer, then that’s going to flop. So telling them or making them understand that important fact has played a very crucial role. So especially when you say, we did a lot of these training programs for technical leaders, so aspiring solution architects and technical leaders, because they need to get out of that structured or single one way of thinking into now how do we bring innovation within our company, within our teams, and how do we change that culture within our teams. So once they saw how design thinking works, I think they were a lot more accepting, thinking that this is something we need to embrace and it’s new, but it’s something that we need to embrace. So, yeah.

Douglas:

Yeah. You’re making me think too if the technology folks start to realize that, oh, we’re making this technology for humans. We need to think about the experience they have, and in order to explore that, maybe we need to use some tools that have a bit more human connection

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So that we can get in that mode of understanding and thinking about and maybe empathizing with other humans.

Varsha:

Yeah. And I think it also helped when our organization itself was renamed as customer experience, so that put the customer at the center of everything that we do. So I think that changed a lot of our mindsets as well.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s fascinating too, that you bring that up. Just naming the group had an impact. ‘Cause if you think about how those folks were showing up early on, they might’ve just been resistant because they were confused. They’re like, where am I at? Why is this team doing this thing? How does it fit in to the bigger picture? How does this impact the work I’m doing? But then you reframe it, you tell a different story around the fact that, “Hey, we’re helping with customer experience.” Now they’re showing up in a different way with a different expectation, and they say, “Oh, this is going to help customer experience. I see why we might be thinking about things a little different or even interacting with ourselves a little bit different. We might need to do some make believe because the customer’s not here.” If we need to think about them, we might be in a different mindset.

Varsha:

And I feel like the culture shift comes a lot from top down. What are your leaders speaking? What are their core values? So customer centricity was one of the biggest value that we had. As we shifted names, we became the customer experience organization, and I also became part of the customer success team where we had to be in front of customers day in, day out. Our job was to understand what the customers need and how we can help them. So I think that also played a huge role in the shift of the mindset. Yeah.

Douglas:

Yeah. Also, I remember you saying that facilitation actually disrupted the hierarchy you’re used to. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means and how it showed up in the rooms that you held?

Varsha:

Yeah, so if you remember, I said that our director, who’s one of the senior guys in our organization, he was at the door inviting people and then he was smiling and he was just encouraging people to be more present and to be involved in the whole process. And then we had our managers, our team leaders on the same table that we were sitting in. So we had our be it our team leads or solution architects, so who are senior in the team, and someone who just joined the team also contributing to the ideas that they were trying to pool in. So they were all solving the same problem of how do we help the customer, but they all belong to different grades.

One was talking from the perspective of managing a team, a manager. And a senior solution architect, he was bringing in his perspective, and then there was a person who just joined the team and she was bringing in her own perspective of what she thinks is happening with the customer and how she’s dealing with things. So it was a round table rather than that long table where we sit according to our grades.

Douglas:

I love that shifting from the long table to the round table and maybe flattening power structures. I love it.

Varsha:

Absolutely. Yeah. And then I think power structure, when you say about that, I have seen where managers said, “We don’t mind sitting out from this because we know that the dynamics might change if we are present in the room.” And because they understand the purpose of say that particular workshop or meeting where they want their employees to be more authentic and speak out. And I’ve seen managers sit out from certain meetings and the dynamics of the rooms completely change. So that’s also very powerful.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s so fascinating and amazing when leaders realize that dynamic is there and are willing to do what it takes to make sure that we can still move forward to subdue that a bit.

Varsha:

Yeah, yeah, and I think I’ve been fortunate where I’ve worked with leaders who understand that and they know that it’s not about them, it’s more about the culture that’s already present and the biases that are present. So in order to remove them, they need to be out of the meetings. So that’s been a good thing.

Douglas:

Yeah, got to love the leaders that believe in we, not me.

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So you made the leap from Cisco to independent facilitator. What was going through your head during that messy middle? I’m sure it was a little bit… It’s got to be scary, those moments. I know when I started Voltage Control, I was like, oh my gosh, what am I doing? So I’m just kind of curious, how did you finally make that decision and what was going through your head?

Varsha:

It was definitely the messiest middle that I’ve been in. I mean, I’ve done over a hundred workshops and I’ve seen a lot of messy middles, but this was a messy middle in my life. So I think when I decided to quit my tenured job as an employee to become an entrepreneur or a independent consultant, firstly, I was super scared. There were days when I could not sleep just thinking about what am I doing? I didn’t tell this to anyone except for my husband. So it was just me and my husband discussing this because I didn’t want anybody else’s opinions to sort of mess with my thinking. And I think that was the best decision because I really wanted to know if this is what I really want to do. And once I had that clarity that yes, I have been doing these workshops for six years now.

This is not a hobby anymore. This is something that I really love doing. I think I can figure things out on my own if I get the right kind of support. I actually designed think that phase of my life, I think. So I literally sat down and did a sailboat exercise, and I said, “What are the challenges that I’m facing right now? What is the things that are pulling me back or holding me back? And then what are my wins? What is helping me at the moment?” So I sat and did a whole exercise on what I need to do. By the end of that workshop that I did with myself, I had an action plan for the next 90 days. From the day I put my papers, or I rather told my manager that I’m going to be quitting, I had three months time, so I knew exactly when I woke up, what are the things that I need to do in order for me to go through this messy middle.

So automatically, I think my brain was like, this is not a difficult task, you know exactly what you’re going to do when you wake up, and this is what you’ve achieved in a week’s time. So I did have these check-ins with my husband every week I remember and I said, “This is what I’ve achieved. Look.” And I just felt good about having that clarity on where I’m moving, and I actually wanted to name my business Chaos to Clarity because I love the name, because that’s how I always saw my teams moving from chaos into clarity. And that’s how I felt at that moment when everything was just so chaotic and confusing and I moved through that into a space of clarity. I think that’s how I overcame my messy middle, and it was a huge benefit knowing these kind of methodologies exist that eventually ground you. I think that’s how I felt once those three months were done.

Douglas:

That’s really incredible. And I would argue you need a good compass to move through the chaos and get to clarity. So I think you still kept the name in that spirit.

Varsha:

Yeah, I took off with something that I really loved as well. It took a lot. I had all my design thinking, all my toolbox, books out with me, and then I was sifting through all the pages and I keep writing down all the names that I thought could help in naming this business and eventually was Idea and then how do you guide people with these ideas. So Compass came in and I’m happy with the name.

Douglas:

Yeah. And I wanted to talk a little bit too about compasses and journeys. You came to Voltage Control. It all started through one phone call with Eric that led to the certification and then the summit, and then co-leading or leading the Amsterdam region. And also that’s been a little bit of a journey for you anyway around leadership. And I’m just curious, your leap into the Voltage Control community and leading the region, what did that leap into the leadership teach you? What did you learn as you were going through some of those motions?

Varsha:

A lot of learning. I keep telling my husband this, that the amount of learning that I’ve had in the past six months, I don’t think I’ve learned so much throughout my career time. Because it’s like I’ve been put on fast track because I think I have to do everything on my own now and I don’t have someone teaching me, but having a community is so… I realize how important it is, especially when you don’t have a team or a boss to tell you this is what you need to do and these are our goals and stuff like that. But in those three months, this messy middle, my first goals was to get a formal certification in facilitation itself. So that I think was the basis or the foundation over which everything else is built up. So I don’t think all this would’ve been possible if I didn’t know that I’m already good, but this has made me even better.

So that’s the confidence that the certification gave me. And being around other facilitators who do the same kind of work that I do, and especially seeing other facilitators… Because I think facilitators do this out of a space of love and passion for what they do. Most facilitators that I’ve been working with, even in the community or on my LinkedIn community, they’ve all been extremely helpful. And I think empathy is where they all operate from, and that’s how I think the certification itself helped. I think before I even enrolled myself, I was already part of the community and I said, “I want to volunteer,” because putting myself in a volunteer position helped me grow a lot more than if I hadn’t been there. I was leading the solopreneur or independent facilitators community at Voltage Control, and through that I learned how to do organic marketing. For example, I didn’t have a single post on LinkedIn during my professional career at Cisco, but then I realized how important it is to be visible to your network to make sure your work is seen by others.

And that’s when I decided that I’m going to do a weekly post of all the learnings that I’m going to learn through the certification, and it helped me keep accountable both on my marketing and also my learnings. So that was a great start to both learning and marketing and yeah, that’s how I think the certification played a huge role. Being a part of the community and volunteering at the community helped. I think anyone who’s come to me after that, I said, “Just go join the community first. See how the vibe is. Volunteer if you want to learn about facilitation and especially if you are starting on a new path in the facilitation space, this is a great space to be in.” I think that’s how it played a huge role.

Douglas:

Yeah, amazing. And looking ahead for what’s next. Gosh, I think it’s so much potential when you think about the moment you’re in and growing a business and whatnot, and I’m curious, what’s one hope or vision you have for the future of your work, either in your own practice or for the future of the field at large.

Varsha:

Yeah. And I think I realized as I was building the business and what I wanted to do, also the coaching calls with Eric helped a lot when I was trying to figure this out. I realized how much I love innovation. Also, people say innovation is a very broad term, but to me it’s about creating something new. It’s about using what you have and the creative powers that you’ve got to make the world a better place. And for me to be able to play a part in that is a huge win for me. And I think that is what keeps me driving. And I think our world has a lot of problems that can be solved and the place can be made a lot better than what it is now. And that’s what I see for my future and for the future of IdeaCompass at the moment.

Douglas:

As we come to a close here, I’d like to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Varsha:

That’s a deep question, final thoughts. I think if there’s one thing that I had to say is to my technical folks, I keep saying before every workshop, “Trust the process.” And if you are in any workshop, creative workshop like this, switch off the rational mindset and switch off the skeptic mindset to embrace what’s coming through in your workshop. It doesn’t matter if I’m facilitating or if there’s anyone else facilitating, because that makes a huge difference in the output of the workshop itself. I think that would be something that I really want my listeners to… If there are technical folks or if there are skeptical folks who are entering the workshop, that is something that I would like to tell.

Douglas:

I think we could all learn from that, right? Let’s put our guards down because our assumptions and all of our prior learnings inform those guards, and if we want to innovate, we got to put those guards down and be open to almost anything. And then we can of course put up the spectacles, pull up the guards, start to criticize stuff, but let’s wait a little bit before we start doing that and create some space for it. So I think that’s great advice, and not only for your techies, but for anybody, because I think we all get set in our ways and could use a dose of like, let’s ignore our best advice and try to come up with some good stuff here.

Varsha:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think the energy just shifts when people enter with that kind of mindset. And as facilitators, I’ve seen a lot of facilitators try their best to create an environment where those fears, where those biases are shut down. But as participants, if there is an effort from there end, then that’s a powerful workshop.

Douglas:

I couldn’t have said it better. Varsha, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I hope we can do it again soon sometime.

Varsha:

Absolutely, Douglas, thank you so much for having me and having this wonderful platform for facilitators to share their learnings, their experiences. I love listening to your podcasts, and I hope there are many more other folks who can join the podcast and we learn from them.

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 at voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Facilitators Ignite Creativity in Diverse Workshop Environments? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Connection moves at the speed of vulnerability. It takes courage to be the first on the dance floor or to reach out to someone, but those brave steps can lead to powerful connections”- Bahaa Chmait

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Bahaa Chmait, a facilitator and 2024 TEDx speaker focused on combating loneliness through shared experiences. Bahaa discusses how his Lebanese heritage and family gatherings around food shaped his approach to fostering connections. They explore the importance of vulnerability, intentional design, and playfulness in adult interactions. Bahaa shares strategies like assigning roles in social settings and creating zones for different engagement levels to alleviate loneliness. He emphasizes the need for proactive connection and the transformative power of shared joyful experiences.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

Bahaa’s Ted Talk

Bahaa on LinkedIn

Bahaa on the web

JoyMob on Instagram

JoyMob Events

About the Guest

Bahaa is an experience designer on a mission to end loneliness one shared experience at a time. He believes the world could use more human connection, so that people can live more joyful lives.

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.

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 Bahaa Chmait at JoyMob Events and BahaaChmait.com, where he is on a mission to end loneliness, one shared experience at a time. He’s also a 2024 TEDx speaker, workshop facilitator, and vibe maker. Welcome to the show, Bahaa.

Bahaa Chmait:

Hey, thank you for having me, Douglas. Always good to see you.

Douglas Ferguson:

You as well. You as well. And we’ll get back to vibe maker. But before we do, let’s hear a little bit about you getting your start. I believe you brought it back to the Lebanese family gatherings. Can you paint us a picture of one moment that really stuck out to you as you reflect on some of those origins?

Bahaa Chmait:

There’s the dinners, food, gathering, breaking bread together. I think that’s the biggest thing. Every time I think about the origins of my facilitation career and where I’m at today and gathering people and creating a vibe, it all started around food. Lebanese people just love to gather.

And of course, every family has their traditional dish that they bring when everyone gathers. And so everyone pulls you aside. They usually grab your wrist, and they don’t let you go, and they say, “But you like mine the best, right.” And it always just brings me joy to think of those moments.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s funny, I just saw the premiere of a new McConaughey film called The Rivals of the Amziah King, and interesting film. He was a mandolin player, beekeeper, quite an interesting fella. But when the producer came out, he dedicated the film to anybody who’s ever been to a potluck.

And there’s an amazing scene where they’re at the potluck and McConaughey is telling this young lady about all the dishes and the heritage of, “You might not want to eat this one. And this is like… This one always comes from Billy.” And he’s telling her all about Billy.

And so there’s this connection to the food and the people who made it and their personalities. And so you’re bringing me back to that moment, of I can certainly remember some potlucks growing up.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, yeah. There’s something about breaking bread and just sharing time and space together, so it’s old as time, right. There’s some potlucks that I’ll host, and instead of having a curated meal, we’re just like, “Bring a dish, bring some utensils, bring a dish, and let’s share. Let’s break bread together.” There’s something beautiful about that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And especially in community, I mean, you were talking about relatives pulling you aside and saying, “Hey, you like mine the best, right.” There’s this kind of identity around what they brought, and maybe Aunt Edna always brings the country ham biscuits, or I’m sure the Lebanese dishes are a little different. But it’s kind of that idea of this connection to I’m bringing this sustenance. It’s also something I really enjoy making that I can provide and be excited about and proud of.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, absolutely. And the heritage of that recipe gets passed down through the generation. I think it kind of gets lost now, but some of the old world ways of doing things, and then they put their twist on it, maybe a little bit too, and they’re like, “But you like my version better,” even though it’s the same dish. And as a kid, you feel this social pressure to be like, “Yes, yours is the best.” But at the same time, you’re just like, “I’m here to enjoy some really delicious food with some wonderful people.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And it brings me back to your quest to address loneliness. When I think of community where folks are gathering a lot specifically around food and heritage, you would imagine maybe loneliness wouldn’t be such a problem there, but it could also shine a big light on it.

If you juxtapose those moments that maybe aren’t happening all day every day, those are special moments, maybe once a week, or I don’t know how frequent, but it could even put a highlight on loneliness that’s there.

Or if you’re seeing it in others, it might make it more obvious because maybe they don’t have those experiences because they don’t have those opportunities to gather. I’m kind of curious, does any of that resonate with you, or did that lead to any of your discoveries and wanting to help others that were experiencing loneliness?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, great question. Absolutely. I think that loneliness can… you can be surrounded by a sea of people and still be lonely. You know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

And when I was growing up, I grew up in a small rural town in Canada, and no doubt about it, hey, it was a small place, 500 people. And I’ve had this first-generation Lebanese Canadian family comes to this rural town, and everything was different. My lunches were different. I would [inaudible 00:05:40] Kafta. Have you had Lebanese food before? [inaudible 00:05:43].

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

It’s delicious, right. But when you’re a kid, you just want to fit in. And so they had peanut butter and jam sandwiches. They had lunchables.

Douglas Ferguson:

The juice boxes.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, the good stuff, right. I mean a charcuterie board for kids. Those Lunchables were, I mean, come on now. That was delicious. But of course, I wanted to fit in. And so I was kind of the exotic kid. Had a unibrow, even my name was Bahaa. And so, as an adult, everyone’s like, “Bahaa, that’s amazing. Lebanese food, that’s awesome.” But when you’re a kid, everyone’s like, “Bahaaaaa.”

So that disconnection was challenging, and my parents wanted to ascribe… me to ascribe to old world beliefs, traditions, values, and I’m trying to fit in. And so, where do you belong? Where’s your community? Who’s your tribe? And so that lack of belonging led to that loneliness that we’re talking about right now. And it can be isolating trying to figure out where you belong.

I sometimes talk to kids who are not just first generation kids, but kids who have parents from different races or heritages. And so both tribes don’t fully accept them, they say, and they’re kind of stuck in this no man’s land, and that’s a pretty isolating place to be. I’m sure some of your listeners have probably connected with that before.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, for sure. And I’m curious, when you’re working with this kind of eradicating loneliness, how are you confronting that? Is it through these conversations you’re having with folks, or yes, and? Are there other things that you’re doing? How does that show up for you?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think the main thing is designing experiences. As an experience designer, I can tap into that isolating feeling. We’ve all been to a mingling thing or a networking thing, and we just kind of didn’t form a circle at some point in that mingling thing. It’s hard to break into that circle and connect, and so you’re kind of just left off to the side. And so my goal when I’m facilitating with groups in public gatherings or team gatherings is, how do we create connection before content?

So before we just jump into the event, people came for the event because they want to see the event, but they come back because they connected with people. They met people that they connected with. So facilitating an icebreaker, an ice melter, whatever you want to call it, allows people the opportunity to come out of their shells a little bit, especially if you give them a safe and vulnerable environment to do it in. And then they get to choose their own adventure. I think that’s the biggest thing is not forcing anything. Forced fun is never fun. You know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

Trust falls are kind of lame, and team building can sometimes feel like going to the dentist. Necessary, but you don’t exactly want to do it. So, how can we make it more engaging and fun and playful for people and just meet them where they’re at?

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s something recent that you’ve done that you can kind of point to that might draw a more realistic picture for folks?

Bahaa Chmait:

I do a lot of movement-based practice as well, and sometimes they’re flash mobs, sometimes they’re public sing-alongs on trains. With the flash mobs, I worked with a global hotel chain, an executive leadership team of global hotel chain, dancing in front of your colleagues can be vulnerable. They wanted to produce a flash mob for their 40th anniversary of the hotel. So we first gave them a tutorial video that they could practice in the comfort of their own home.

And I tell this story in my TED Talk. But one thing that I left out in the talk was that one of the leaders came up to me afterwards and said, “Hey, I was practicing at home in my time in one of my spare rooms, and my daughter walked by and saw me practicing the dance moves at the tutorial video, and she started joining me” and they started having this bonding experience where there were dancing together and connecting.

And it was this beautiful story of how, by intentionally creating something like a tutorial video so that they don’t feel vulnerable and unsafe in front of everyone, they could kind of build that courage first at home, they got a chance to bond, and it had ripple effects beyond the workplace, beyond this thing that they were initially doing to connect with family.

And there was this beautiful sort of intergenerational father-daughter moment that may have not happened otherwise if it wasn’t for intentional design. And I think it was really beautiful. It’s a really beautiful story to share. Those little moments I hear in every experience that we design. There’s always a little nugget or takeaway from something that I’ve designed, and I think that’s really rewarding for me and really just spreads joy in the world.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s super fun and cool. And I guess, what other ways are you seeing joy kind of appear these days? Because I think that it’s really easy to get caught up in the rhetoric of the times and the divisiveness and stuff. And so, how are you seeing these opportunities for joy?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think being intentional. Priya Parker says it best. “Purpose is your bouncer.” Just being purposeful with your day, with your interactions with people. I’d say that connection moves at the speed of vulnerability. And when… Have you ever been to anywhere where there’s a dance floor, so a wedding, a bar, anything like that, and you saw that no one was dancing? Have you ever had that happen? Yeah. And why is no one dancing? Because no one’s dancing, right. No one wants to be the first one on that dance floor. It’s scary.

It takes a lot of courage and bravery because what if no one joins you? If everyone joins you, it’s a party. And so no one goes on the dance for, so no one goes on the dance floor. And it’s the same thing with human connection. Whether you’re trying to bridge a connection and reach out to somebody that you know, or don’t know or you’re trying to even apologize. If nobody goes first, then nothing happens. And you can only control what you do, not what other people do or how they react.

And so finding that courage and that bravery to get out on that dance floor or reach out to that friend and say hi, or reach out to that colleague, that work teammate and say, “Hey, there’s some friction between us. Can we talk about how to resolve this?” It can be incredibly scary and incredibly hard, but so powerful because connection, it moves at the speed of vulnerability. And so, yeah, I just invite everybody to take that step and be brave and see what happens. The worst that can happen is you’re at where you’re at.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, true, true. And what are some of your go-to mechanisms to get the first person out on the dance floor? I mean, are you modeling that? Is that something you’re doing, getting out there first?

Is it about inviting more people in so that they’re more encouraged and feel invited, versus just getting brought to the event versus getting invited on the dance floor? I mean, I don’t know. I’m just going to throw in some things out, but I’m curious, what have you found to be the mechanisms to really get people to engage?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, I would say that always looking at things in terms of team, in terms of collaboration, in terms of group, when you’re thinking in terms of group. So if I’m facilitating something where I want somebody to be vulnerable, whether it’s a debrief in the team in group sharing or it’s getting out on the dance floor after a talk that I’ve given, which we did. We threw a dance party for 500 people after the TEDx talk that I gave because it was all about dance and movement, primed everybody to just be playful and give themselves permission.

What I like to do is I like to connect with a few people and say, “Hey, if I call for somebody to just raise their hand and say something, will you be the first one?” And I think just inviting people, giving them a role at the gathering, gives them a sense of purpose. “Can you be the host of the person that kind of greets people when they look like they’re standing off alone? Or can you be the person who greets people when they first come in so that their entry is this warm and welcoming thing?” Everybody wants to be part of something, and I think if we co-create it, we’re able to achieve really cool things.

But if it’s just all about you and you’re the only one doing something, it can be really hard to start a movement and get people going. So I think it’s about offering an invitation, setting it up ahead of time for success, and modeling what vulnerability looks like for sure. There’s definitely been times where I’ve invited people to come dance in the streets in public sort of pop-up, flash mob style dances, and I created a video to say, “Hey, this is where we’re going to be dancing, and here’s me dancing right now as people walk by to show, ‘Listen, I know this is weird and kind of awkward and vulnerable, but I’m doing it right now and I want you to come join me as well.'” It can be magic.

Douglas Ferguson:

When you mention roles, it’s making me think about how important it can be to have a focus as an attendee. Or oftentimes when someone shows up and is looking around the room and wondering, “Oh my gosh, what can I do here? Where am I supposed to go? Do I go to the bar first, or do I go over here first?” And so having a role or a responsibility can be a really great way to curb some anxiety and know where to fit.

In fact, I think it’s a powerful thing to do, even if you’re going to a house party and it’s some folks you just met, maybe ask the host how you can be helpful. “Can I go stir this pot, or can I take out the recycling? It looks a little full or something.” But just having some role or thing to do can be really helpful to calm the mind and the nerves. So I thought that was interesting, you brought that up. Does that show up a lot in how you think about shaping these experiences?

Bahaa Chmait:

Absolutely. I think to resonate with that, I think as kind people, we reach out to the host and I say, “What can I bring?” Ice, bottle of wine, whatever it is. But then, once we get to the party, we forget that we can still support the gathering and support the intention of the gathering. And so it’s nice. I think about this often when I’m designing experiences.

I used to be the type of experienced designer who designed in the background and not be in the forefront, so I wouldn’t give a public speech or anything. I would just design it and then let the audience kind of take over. And I think about that with people who love to do photography and videography. They love to be behind the lens. They don’t want to be the subject of the experience. They want to be behind curating, but how can we encourage everybody to have a role?

“Yeah, when you get to the party, hey, can you make sure that the cups… everybody has a drink or everybody’s having fun,” and each part of the household has a different vibe. The kitchen has that big party vibe where all the things happen, whereas the couch, the living room, may be more chill, the backyard. So there could be zones. I don’t know. What do you think? There could be zones for creating some rules for people as well?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. We always talk about pop-up rules and temporary spaces that we might be designing for or supporting. And I like this idea of zones. You could have different rules or different expectations, different criteria, different games in the different zones, for sure.

I mean, it kind of naturally happens when you’re talking about a house party because just because of the nature of the space. And also, I think kitchens just have that quality to them. When people are in a party, they’re magnetic.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, yeah. They’re standing. They’re energized. Usually the shots are there.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right. There’s that.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, there’s all the factors that come into play. Yeah, interesting. Maybe at a public event where you’re at a conference or a networking thing, they create zones and each zone has its own vibe, the breakout sessions, the seminars, the main room, the dah, dah, dah. And so, yeah, creating experiences specifically for those zones, I think we’re onto something here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Space and how you allocate space and break folks up, how you decorate it, how you set up furniture, all those things can be subtle cues into how we want people to engage with the space or what the rules are.

Bahaa Chmait:

I think one thing that we tend to miss as adults is playfulness. We always think we have to show up in this sort of polished way, and it doesn’t have to be completely refined and polished. It can be playful. It could be a banter, an exchange.

I think that, as adults, we start to lose our sense of play. NASA conducted a study, and they concluded that 98% of children are born creative geniuses, 98%. And then, they did a study later on in life. They said, as adults, only 2% still qualify, and I think that’s because we unlearn play. You know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think it gets taught out of us in a way, this idea that school is about having the correct answer, but we get kind of built and programmed to do well on the test and to fall in line and be a good student, and all these things.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

There’s a really great book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball that talks about this, and there’s a really amazing section where the author is… I guess one of the things he would do in his spare time, he was a creative director at Hallmark, and so you can imagine the whimsy and creativeness that had to flow through him.

And one of the things he would do is visit children at elementary schools and bring metal sculptures and try to wow them and talk to them about art, and to follow their passion for art. He had this interesting little experiment he would run where he would ask the students which of them were artists.

And he’s like, the kindergartens all raise their hands, but then you get up to the fourth, fifth graders, and no one’s raising their hand, and he’s like… and he would ask the students, “What’s happening here? Are all the artists moving away.”

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. It’s amazing how we unlearn that, for sure. Kids, you can give them a simple drawing and they’ll come up with 10 different things that it is. And as adults, we look at it and we’re like, “Um, that’s this one thing and only this one thing.” But yeah, I want to encourage and invite everybody to create playlists, and I’m not talking about music playlists, but a play list, a list of things that bring you joy. Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Play Institute says that the opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.

And I think that we have the opportunity to become more playful and give ourselves the opportunity to take play breaks even at work. Some things that are on my playlist are dancing, midday dance parties. I work remote, and so just turning off the camera doing the… and then just turn on some music and just moving the body a little bit. It can be so rejuvenating. Going for a skip down the street, coloring, it’s something that your mind just gets focused into something that’s so simple. Telling dad jokes is the one I sent you this morning, I hope it made you laugh.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, yeah.

Bahaa Chmait:

Or at least you roll your eyes.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m a big fan of dad jokes. Yeah. No, I’m a big fan of dad jokes, so I’m definitely one to carry those around and share them to… much to my wife’s chagrin.

Bahaa Chmait:

I feel like there’s two spectrums, right. There’s the rolling on the floor laughing, and then there’s the eye roll and everything in between, and everyone knows where they kind of fall, especially when it comes to dad jokes. But no matter what, as long as I can get a response out of somebody, I think that’s a win.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s a useful tool.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So I think there’s four rules around a playlist that I want to talk about. The first rule of playlists and play is make sure that you lose track of time. If you’re losing track of time, then you’re playing, you’re doing it right. If you lose track of time, you’re totally immersed in the experience. That’s great play. The second is don’t have a goal or an outcome. Just enjoy the experience.

When I’m coloring, it’s not about finishing the project, it’s about just coloring and just doing whatever comes to me or calls to me. Being… The emotional side, being light or silly or energized, having the emotion attached to it. And then the fourth thing is allowing yourself to be curious and self-expressive. I think those are four great elements of play that I want to invite everybody to engage in more.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s interesting. The lack of outcome, I think, is one that many people might struggle with letting go of.

Bahaa Chmait:

That need for results or perfection or…

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, perfection’s certainly a thing. I was thinking more in the lines of, “There has to be a reason why I’m going to do this thing.” It seems like a very societal way of behaving or way of being, right. That we have these objectives. This thing we have to accomplish, so I can imagine that being difficult, at least in my observations of how folks think about meetings, how they think about the way they spend their time.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. When you ask someone that you don’t know if they want to play rock, paper, scissors, I tend to get a few different answers. I get a yes, an enthusiastic yes, I get a no, which is totally fine, and then sometimes I get a, “But for what?” And they want to know, “What’s the outcome? What’s the purpose? Why? Why are we doing this thing? Can it just be playful, or does it have to be something that is more?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Bahaa Chmait:

So it’s interesting tapping into what you’re saying.

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s your percentages on those three answers?

Bahaa Chmait:

I would say that for what is a big one. “Why? For what? What are we doing?” They want to understand the parameters around it, but it also depends on context because I’ll ask people-

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Where you’re at and who you’re running into.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah. Are they a complete stranger? Are you at a mingling event or a networking event? Are you at something playful? There’s an experience. We partnered with the local transit authority and the city, and we created these JoyMob’s, so a mob of people spreading joy, and we brought entertainment onto the train cars and the train doors open, and a big loud of laughter just erupts from the train car.

And when people first hop on, they’re like, “What’s happening here?” And they’re like, “I don’t understand. It’s usually this solo, disconnected kind of ride. I’ve just planned to be on my phone, look out the window, put my headphones in.” And we were doing this improv comedy thing, and the audience, even for a two-minute ride, short little skits, we were getting audience suggestions, and they were participating and laughing and making eye contact with each other.

And it was this beautiful experience of connecting versus what pre-programmed your mind to think that the ride is going to be, and then being delightfully surprised, and the facial expressions that people, when they hop on the train, they’re like, “What is happening here?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Was that the first JoyMob that you ever did?

Bahaa Chmait:

The first JoyMob we ever did was dancing in the streets, and it was a silent disco, and it was a traveling silent disco. So, for those that don’t know silent disco, you put music in your headphones, no one can hear the music, except… unless you have the headphones. So, going down the street, we were flash mobbing farmer’s markets. They’re buying food and groceries, and we’re like, “Woo-hoo.” And that’s all you hear. And everybody’s like, “People are crazy.” But [inaudible 00:25:37]-

Douglas Ferguson:

And they’re so… You were just walking down the street just from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Bahaa Chmait:

Joyfully moving our bodies to music, and we were inspired by the music. We gave them prompts in the headphones too. Give a high five to a stranger, dance as if you were Fred Astaire, jump up onto a park bench, or twirl around a light pole.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fascinating that you had the prompts in there. Most silent discos I’ve been aware of, people are listening to music, and oftentimes they’re hearing different music. So you’ve got maybe five to 10 different tracks. And so people are dancing to different things, and it’s quite unreal to look at because no one’s dancing in the same thing.

Bahaa Chmait:

Everybody’s moving to their own groove, right. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And so that’s fascinating that you introduced the prompts, then that gave people maybe a little more confidence to go further than they normally would.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Again, inviting people into the experience. I’m thinking about the five E’s of experience design. You create excitement in the beginning and really set the tone for what’s going to happen. Then, in the entry, when people were coming, we were welcoming them with a warm welcome. We did a team-building activity, and then we move into the experience. And how do we design the experience so that it’s engaging and it’s not just stale? This was pre-COVID that we did this first one years and years before.

And we found that some people came up to the people with headphones and they said, “What are you doing?” And we said, “We’re dancing.” And they’re like, “Well, can I join in?” And so they took out their headphones and either shared their headphones, again pre-COVID, or they put their phone on speakerphone and just listened with this… the phone next to both of their ears. And they shared a moment of dancing together in this sort of wildly vulnerable state out in the wild, on a street corner, in a park. It was beautiful.

Douglas Ferguson:

So what was going through your mind right before it first started? This is your first one. The anticipating is building. What were you thinking?

Bahaa Chmait:

Fear that no one was going to show up. It was a wildly unique ask of the community. I had a goal, I wanted to see if I could unite the city through dance. I put up some posters, word got out, the media caught wind. They had me on the Live Morning Show. I told them what we were doing, and I said, “I’m going to be dancing here, come join me.” And I thought to myself, I didn’t even have a business or a Facebook or anything set up.

So I was like, “Well, what if no one comes? Will I still honor the thing that I said I was going to do? Will I still be the strange guy dancing in the streets?” And slowly, one by one, eventually 60-something people showed up and this beautiful celebration. And at the end, everybody’s hugging, getting to know each other. They’re asking me what’s next. And that’s when I realized like, “Oh, there’s an opportunity here for more human connection in unique ways than we typically see.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Of those people. How many are you still in touch with? Was this the foundation of building real, lasting relationships?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I was more connected to the dance community at that time, and it was a lot of wonderful dancers. We met at Ecstatic Dance and would have a beautiful time together. I think that in the law of diffusion of innovation, it’s a bell curve. In the beginning to start a movement, you need the innovators and the early adopters.

So basically, what that means is you need someone that’s willing to go first, and then you need the people who will back that up and be like, “Okay, I’m in. Sign me up. I don’t want to be the first one. But since there’s a movement, since you’re dancing in the streets, since you’re singing on train, since you’re dah, dah, dah, dah, writing love letters and leaving them in public for people to find and brighten up their day, I want to join in.”

And so we had that group right off the bat. It just started building and building and building, and then we reached a tipping point to start reaching some more of the majority, the early and late majority of the people in the bell curve. Does that make sense?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. And then I know that through these JoyMob Events, you started to transition into working with companies. So I was curious, how do you translate the spontaneity of these kind of in-person joy experiences into more structured facilitation work, especially in these more buttoned-up situations like corporate teams?

Bahaa Chmait:

Sure. Yeah. It was a challenging transition to move from public activations into the corporate space. I hadn’t worked in corporate spaces before. One big factor, I think, was actually taking Voltage Control certification course because we did a project. And in that project, I started to identify exactly what kind of facilitator I was, what kind of outcomes I wanted to have, how did I actually create these experiences. And I started using those building blocks to create them in the workplace. And I think the biggest thing that helped me leap was giving myself permission.

We don’t give ourselves permission enough to explore, to be brave, to create. I was terrified to go into the corporate space, and slowly but surely, I started doing these little activations with them. “Let’s do a team-building thing here. Let’s do a team-building thing there.” And I came in with the mindset of instead of it being about me, I made it about them. And I was like, “How can I serve the needs that are needed for this environment?” So when I talked to the HR teams, the sales leaders, the sales teams, the team leaders, we’re disconnected, we’re not communicating well.

So I designed an experience for that, and it started to propel and it led me down some very beautiful paths. And you’re right, teams can be buttoned up. And I come in with the energy of having them see me be vulnerable. So if I’m going to invite them into an experience, I’m going to share something about my experience first, just to kind of model that. And like I said, if I know some people in the audience already, or if I know some people on the team, I’ll invite them behind the scenes to share as well, so that someone needs to go first. And through that, we can create some really cool things together, especially in a buttoned-up environment.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. What’s that journey that helps them kind of move step by step and get more comfortable and more vulnerable and more open, and what are folks ready for at that point, right? I think sometimes if folks aren’t ready to step in, how do we create that threshold that makes it easier for them to do so?

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. Yeah. It can be awkward, right. Especially I think when people hear team building, they think of the old school style with the trust balls and sort of the forced fun, and we talked about this already, that team building it’s needed because you need to support culture. It’s not just about productivity. When you have a positive culture, it leads to productivity.

When you have culture of psychological safety and belonging, I envision a world where belonging is considered a metric and measured as a metric in productivity, so that we make sure that there’s space for it. And if you create a psychologically safe space, people start to move into it. It takes a minute, but they start to ramp up.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And it can be transformative. So what were some of the most powerful shifts you’ve witnessed in others during or after one of your sessions? Anything that’s given you goosebumps?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think when people come up to me afterwards and they tell me, “I needed that,” and they have this sort of expression on their face like, “I really needed that.”

There’s a moment in every experience that gets designed, especially if it gets designed intentionally where you have feedback, whether it’s the executive leader who was dancing with his daughter and shares that experience, or I think teams have the ability to really be productive when they feel psychologically safe and have a foundation of trust and connection.

And I think that’s what really resonates with me when they come up to me afterwards and communicate that they felt safe enough to be vulnerable. Like I said before, connection moves at the speed of vulnerability. So it’s exciting. It’s exciting.

Douglas Ferguson:

You talked a lot about your TED Talk, and I know that it was… you were really excited about it, and it was kind of a big moment for you and took a lot of work. And so I was curious when you were in that work or even reflecting on it later, what did preparing for it help you understand about your work?

Bahaa Chmait:

You mentioned some great books and movies. There’s one that I’m reading right now called Chopped Wood Carry Water. Have you read it or heard of it?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes.

Bahaa Chmait:

There’s some really great lessons in there where they talk about everything matters, the details matter, the little things matter. So when we were getting coached on our body language and the way we move on stage, the way we take applause or receive applause, the way we speak to the audience, which areas of the audience are we speaking to? The balcony, the lower level, the left, the right. There was so much details, and the whole time I was thinking to myself, “I’m just trying to memorize my lines, man. I’m just trying to memorize my lines and not mess this up.”

But when you focus on the details and you give yourself enough time, I think that was the biggest lesson that I learned, giving myself enough time, giving myself permission to fail in the practice enough times that when I got on stage, it was like second nature. It just felt comfortable. At one point, the audience was laughing at something I said, and then I actually started laughing because they were laughing. And in my head, I thought, how playful is this?

But I was also thinking to myself, “Is this allowed? Am I allowed to be human and laugh with the audience instead of just like, ‘I’m here to deliver a talk?'” So it was a really cool experience, and I think that for anybody who’s willing to be brave enough to do some public speaking or take the plunge, I say, give yourself enough time to fail enough times in practice so that when you’re in front of everybody, you’re just there to have fun and it’s just relaxed and playful.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. We’re big proponents of practice, as you know, with all the community events focused on practice and really encouraging people to spend the time when the stakes are low so that when we’re called on, we have the confidence to step into those high-stakes moments.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah. And I’m a big fan of the Facilitation Labs and the practice labs that Voltage Control does because of that opportunity and the ability to fail and continue forward. As you know, Chris and I were co-presidents of a global speaker series that celebrated failure, and we’d have speakers go on stage and share their stories of professional failure and the lessons learned.

And it was really interesting as facilitators of that experience to see, “Oh, here’s some areas where we needed to grow and we weren’t excelling as creators of this experience, and here’s some areas where we were growing and the next time we did it, we did it even better.” And yeah, life’s about practice. Jump in, jump in with both feet and see what happens. It’s exciting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. And also, I was even recalling you mentioning wanting to help others find their facilitator voice. So what advice do you have to give someone who feels the pull toward facilitation but isn’t sure where to start?

Bahaa Chmait:

I think about this little acronym, CBA. First, I think getting clarity on exactly what you want. As a facilitator, it can be hard to know exactly where you want to go, but just get clarity on something small. “I want to do this. I want to do that.” And then remove the limiting beliefs that you have around it. And the best way to do that is to practice. Best way to do that is to be around other people who you can fail in front of and feel psychologically safe.

And then, finally, the A is action. Take action. The more you just sit and think about it, the harder it’s going to be to move forward. And sometimes that clarity, sometimes you need to take action and then you get clarity. So just take action, take baby steps, move forward. For me, I didn’t know how to move into the corporate space, so I took the Voltage Control certification, and it gave me the stepping stone.

I was like, “Okay, this is pretty cool. I was in a safe environment. I was in a cohort of people that, some of them were in the corporate speak world, and some of them weren’t in the corporate world.” And I was like, “Oh, there are other people like me that I can connect with and feel this camaraderie with.” So take action. Get clear on what you want, even if it’s just baby steps. You don’t have to have the big end goal in mind. And most of all, remove the limiting beliefs that you have and give yourself permission to just explore.

Douglas Ferguson:

And this might be a similar answer, but I’m curious if we now zoom out a little bit because we were talking specifically about facilitation and facilitation skills.

But if we then more broadly look at communities and your mission of helping spread joy and connection as a part of daily life, what’s one step people might take to move closer to your vision that they’re realizing your dream of communities that have joy and connection?

What’s something that folks might do to have a little more of that? Is it about the playlist, or are there other things that folks might consider?

Bahaa Chmait:

The playlist is great for your mental health. Everyone should make a playlist. What I would say is, think about the dance floor analogy. Think about the first person who needs to go, and like we said before, whether it’s bridging connection with somebody, maybe it’s a colleague, you’re a remote worker, and you’re onboarded and you’ve got a few Zoom, and then what’s the rest of the time? You’re left to kind of connect, reach out, and throw them a dad joke and start building a relationship.

Most people don’t reach out because the other person didn’t reach out. And so if you just hop on the dance floor, get a little bit of bravery, a little bit of courage, some really amazing things happen. And when you send that dad joke to a colleague who’s working remotely as well, I think about 40% of the time, I get a response back. I get the laughing emoji, and then I get, “I needed that. I needed that.” Because everyone’s having a challenging day, it works hard, life’s hard.

So just reach out, bridge the gap. Be the first one to get on that dance floor of life, and people will join you because everybody’s craving connection. We’re in the middle of the loneliness epidemic, according to the World Health Organization. And we’re more connected than ever before through technology, and yet there’s this disconnection that we all have and we all feel. So be the first, or gather up a group of people together and be the first together. But take action.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. And I want to wrap here with an opportunity for you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Bahaa Chmait:

I think that was it, the one I gave you. I think that was it. Be the first one on the dance floor. I imagine a world where loneliness is optional, and I’ll let that sink in because I don’t know too many people who would choose that option. But when we have enough human connection in the world, that loneliness would be optional, that would be a very beautiful world to live in.

So I think be the first one on the dance floor. Go first, reach out, connect with that person you haven’t connected with yet, whether it’s a cousin or a friend [inaudible 00:41:44] talk to in a while, or a parent, or if you’re a remote worker, reach out to your colleagues and just put yourself out there. Be the first one on the dance floor. I guarantee you someone will join you, and you’ll start to create a movement of connection that’s really beautiful.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Bahaaaa. And thanks so much for joining me.

Bahaa Chmait:

Childhood Trauma coming back. Oh man, it’s been so great talking to you, Douglas. Thanks for spreading joy in the world and creating opportunities for people to connect, whether it’s through the Facilitation Labs and the ability to experience what a supportive environment looks like, or through the regional meetups that you’re supporting right now.

I hope one gets started in Salt Lake City, where I’m at, or just your playful nature. We’ve worked together with some clients on a few different occasions, and I just love the way you show up. Joking, playful, jovial. You allow people to see who you are, and I think that’s really cool.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, thank you for that. And Bahaa, you’re always a pleasure. And again, thank you so much for being here.

Bahaa Chmait:

Yeah, Douglas. Woo-hoo.

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 We Combat Loneliness Through Shared Experiences? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“One of the things that really motivates me is seeing the light in people’s eyes when they come into the innovation center and we have them play with Legos or do something fun. Bringing enjoyment into work is something that really motivates me personally.”- Ralitsa Dimitrova

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Ralitsa Dimitrova, who leads the Ignition capability at KPMG Switzerland. Ralitsa shares her journey as a generalist and connector in facilitation, emphasizing the value of adaptability, empathy, and continuous learning. She discusses her career path, starting unexpectedly at Accenture, and highlights the importance of being a generalist in fostering collaboration and innovation. The episode also explores the role of community, storytelling, and creativity in facilitation and touches on future possibilities involving AI in the facilitation process.

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About the Guest

Ralitsa Dimitrova is leading Ignition Switzerland- KPMG’s program and experience hub in Zurich and Geneva focused on accelerating innovation through the Insights Center and the Innovation Lab. Ralitsa has more than 10 years’ consulting experience in the areas of innovation, digital centers of excellence and emerging technologies. She is a certified facilitator in design thinking and futures thinking. She works with multinational clients across industries, supporting them in their strategy through insights-generating sessions, inspirational technology showcases and collaborative workshops. Prior to joining KPMG Switzerland, Ralitsa successfully launched the KPMG Insights Center in Milan, Italy. She started her career at the Accenture Innovation Center Network and later on headed the social media and digital marketing division of a boutique communication agency.

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. 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 Ralitsa Dimotrov at KPMG Switzerland where she leads the ignition capability, which is a part of a global network of expert business facilitators with more than 20 client experience centers around the world. Welcome to the show, Ralitsa.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Thank you, Douglas. Thank you for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. I’m excited to have this conversation. It’s always lovely to be in conversation with our alumni.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the invite.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, of course. You described your journey as a generalist and a dot connector. Can you take us back to that moment at Accenture when your manager helped you see your strength in simplifying complexity?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, so that’s actually a great question to start this with because maybe I’ll just step even back in time, actually, in terms of how I ended up joining that company because I think that was really a funny story. Essentially, I did not proactively had set up my mind on, oh, I want to go for a career in consulting. I just watched a video on YouTube. I remember that moment, and there was this video on YouTube where they were shooting from the Accenture Innovation Center in Milan, and they were showing emerging tech and how they work around the client experience and things like that. That first impression was really very positive as a young kind of graduate. I decided to contact the person on the video proactively and just said, “Okay, I mean, what can I do? What can I lose?: I mean, let’s just reach out. It seems like a great place to work.

I always had this passion about technology and about design, and this seems really like the perfect place to merge those passions. That’s already a little bit part of my generalist nature showing up because I didn’t have my mind set up on anything particular. I just saw this looks like a nice place to start my career. I reached out without expectations and it was funny that they actually responded and one thing led to the other and they invited me to visit the Innovation Center, and this ended up to be a first interview.

Then I joined the team and this leads us basically the moment that you already mentioned that where, essentially, I had my first manager and I started having these conversations as part of my career journey on how do I shape my role and myself as a professional? Am I going to be more of a generalist or am I going to specialize? This is where this conversation essentially opened up my mind towards the opportunity of being more of a facilitator rather than specializing in a particular solution or in a particular set of technology or a service. This happened really naturally, just I think from the fact that they very soon noticed that I seemed to be very good in summarizing concepts, in also transforming complex concepts into visuals.

That basically led me to join multiple different projects and really try a lot of different things from different industries, different types of clients, mid-sized, corporates, consumer goods, luxury, fashion, pharma, whatever it is. I really, really saw a wide range of projects and clients and that I think at the end, if we come back to the role as a facilitator, is really, really precious. I really think that it makes a difference, even now as I’m basically I have grown into this role even more. This is something that I constantly go back to in terms of experience from this wide range of sectors and companies.

Douglas Ferguson:

This idea of being a generalist is something that comes up quite often when I talk to facilitators and certainly our alumni. I’d be curious how much that continues to play a part in your career and maybe even others that you noticed come up behind you or around you?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, it’s true. It does come up quite often, also, with my current and past team members. Because I think as facilitators we often observe and sometimes in the world that we live in, we are used to or we are made to think that in order to add value and to sell that value to the external world, you need to specialize in something. You need to be really good in one thing. That’s why I think a lot of people are struggling to accept themselves to an extent in the facilitator role. It’s not, I mean, at least from my experience, it doesn’t come that easy because you think, “Oh my God, I need to choose a direction and that direction should be specialized. I need to be able to prove my value to the context that I am in, the company I work for.”

It doesn’t come naturally to the mind that, “Oh, actually my value can be cross. It can be cross-functional, it can be, I actually can be a facilitator.” It does not come as an immediate job description or at least from my experience. I think in the last couple of years, that has shaped a little bit more in terms of a role and maybe now people are also, actively looking for a facilitator role or preparing themselves and kind of training for facilitator role. I think in the past when I started my career, that was not the case, at least in my experience.

Douglas Ferguson:

There’s tons of folks that are leveraging these skills and out there doing great work as generalists, but don’t have a facilitator in their title. Frankly, the titles are all over the place. It can be hard to make that connection that, “Oh, these skills are going to be valuable for me to make a difference in what I do.”

Ralitsa Dimotrov:

Exactly. I think it’s just something that also, maybe comes natural to people and they don’t even realize if there isn’t someone maybe from your friends or colleagues to point you in the direction, “Oh, by the way, you would be a really good facilitator.” Maybe you don’t even think about it. Oh, actually that is a real skill. I can even deep dive into that skill or train even better for that skill. The program for example, that I did with Voltage Control was probably one of the first things also, for myself, that first programs for myself that I really decided I’m going to invest into that skill even though I have been doing it for so long.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. What do you think this idea of investing in the skills after having done it for so long, what was that like to approach this with some level of curiosity or newness?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I came from the perspective that we can never stop learning and I always have something new to learn. I was amazed, by the way, that there were so many different people and so many, on the program specifically, I met so many people that are similar and I really felt that, “Oh my God, finally I found my crowd. Finally, I found my people,” because before I had no idea. Just in terms of speaking the same language, learning from each other, just having this very easy understanding because, obviously, we all start from a base of let’s say, fundamental skills that we all have. It’s very easy to then build on that, on each other’s experience and exchange because we all have some fundamentals in place. That experience was really amazing in that sense to just meet my group of people and feel kind of a belonging.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. It’s such a big part of our values and what we are attempting to build and grow. Community is just at the center of so much of what we do. I love that you felt that you found your people, ’cause that’s kind of part of my mission is to bring people together and celebrate the ecosystem and really the reason why we created the summit and all the local meetups and everything. That warms my heart to hear that that was a big thing for you.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think it’s one, to be honest, one of the few networks that I really think is built for facilitators. I really like that.

Douglas Ferguson:

What about with inside the company? Have you found that there’s a growing group of folks that are supporting each other in this kind of community manner?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

I mean, think in my team, we definitely have created a supportive ecosystem for ourselves. Is that part of the larger culture in the organization? Probably not, but maybe I would like to say not just yet because then I really would like to also, at least I’m trying with my team to contribute to an evolution of that corporate environment or culture where collaboration and facilitation becomes actually part of the day-to-day. Because I believe that there can be only benefits to the way, at least consultants because I talk about my work environment, but at least consultants engage with clients and the way they provide professional services, the way they interact with clients. I think there is only benefits to be realized there if facilitation and collaboration becomes part of the culture and becomes part of the day-to-day. That’s why I also take it a little bit also as the mission of myself and my team bring that to the organization that we are working for and to evangelize a little bit even in that regard, the company. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think it’s infectious when teams start to work in this way and are intentional about making it part of your every day and not just, “Oh, this is a special workshop.” If we really embed it in what we do and how we come together, other teams start to notice and then it starts to just almost infect an organization. I love that you’re at least thinking about doing this locally for your team and at least changing the lives of the folks that are immediately around you.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

I think so, and you know what? I think two things. First, for me, it’s very important for my team to live that culture as a team. Whenever we not only like to preach, “Oh, you need to be more collaborative, you need to use this or that technique to our colleagues,” but also to live it in my small team basically. Every time we try to make a decision or we need to brainstorm something, we use our own techniques on ourselves as facilitators. We test our techniques, we use them also, to brainstorm ideas for the team to kind of collect and bring up ideas bottom up. I always try to first approach my team as a small company within the company, let’s say, and make sure that we follow the culture that we want to create for the organization, so that’s one.

Then I think what you said before, it’s exactly right, that the word basically spreads. Once colleagues have tested, have tried some of our techniques here and there. One of the things that really motivates me is seeing the light in people’s eyes when they come into the innovation center and to the insight center that we have in Zurich, and we have them play with Lego, so we have them kind of do something fun, collaborate, form groups, maybe engage them with some kind of metaphor, add some storytelling, and you can really see how people are having fun while working. Kind of bringing the enjoyment into work is something that really, really motivates me personally, and that’s why I think one of the reasons that why I like facilitation.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. Joy can certainly unlock creativity.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Exactly, yes. I think especially in such corporate environments, when you think of the big fours or other big corporates. There is I think to an extent a reputation of, “Oh, this is not a fun place to work. It’s very serious, it’s very professional place, it’s very trusted environment,” but joy does not come to mind when you think of these big corporates. While I think that, actually, there is a lot of space for joy in there and for creativity because we solve problems for clients every day, and these problems are so different, so various from one to the other. Creativity is needed daily. We need to be able to fire creativity through facilitation for sure.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was just thinking about your story about the early days and reaching out to someone who had inspired you. I think that’s really good advice for folks that are just getting their practice started or just getting in their career, reaching out to folks with curiosity and connecting with the community or with folks that are a few steps ahead of you. Was this just a one-time occurrence for you? Is this something that you typically do through your career, just reaching out to others and with curiosity?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, I love reaching out to others. I think, generally, I never had a problem to ask for advice and be inspired by someone. If I saw something, maybe a snippet of the work that someone else has done, I really like to first of all reach out to congratulate them on the great work and second, to also kind of understand more. That, I think, is something that I’ve always done, and I think it can only benefit a person if you make it part of a habit to reach out and to share sometimes. You don’t need to have a specific task that you need to accomplish that you would maybe need help with. Sometimes it’s literally just as you said, just out of curiosity. Maybe that’s something that will come handy in a few months or years time, but in the meantime you have learned something new. Definitely, yeah, that’s something that I’ve always done and I definitely advise people, especially that you’re starting their career to do so. You can only have a no for maybe, yeah, they won’t respond immediately, and so what? You just tried.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, you can really only benefit. I love this framing that you had of saying that it doesn’t have to be transactional, you don’t have to expect something out of it. I think coupled with this point you made, which I want to highlight, which is starting off with some appreciation and gratitude saying, “Hey, thanks for putting this out into the world, I really appreciate it.” They might be thinking about something new they haven’t shared. They might notice something about you. Even just something offhanded or simple that they say might have a profound effect on you, even if they don’t go out of the way and do anything special, just something they say in response could click and be of high value. It’s totally worthwhile to just to put out those questions and put the curiosities out in the world.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely, and I think it comes back to, again, what I believe is the role of the facilitator and back to the topic of being a generalist, because you are constantly collecting different types of information that maybe you don’t know if that would be useful for you today or tomorrow. I mean, again, going back to connecting the dots, yes, because by reaching out to people, by being curious about different types of information, not only in your professional area but also, outside of it, I think really contributes to a facilitator being able in a workshop, let’s say, on the spot, bring up the right example or bring up the right metaphor or the right association that would make concepts click for people. In order to be able to naturally do that, you just need to absorb a lot of information and just have that huge, let’s say, backlog of information and then just pick up something from it whenever it comes handy, but first, you need to constantly build it and maintain it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. Having these stories, these examples, this context in your quiver, I think more powerful than having tools, to be honest, because if you’re able to help people connect in and resonate and understand something to have the context for it to go deeper so they can integrate it into their thinking, that’s so much more powerful than maybe a tool or a technique.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, I agree. That’s why sometimes you can have the perfect activity set up, the perfect technique, but sometimes there’s just playing with associations and having the right, let’s say, visual in place or the right story as you said in place, just puts a little bit of magic in the whole mix and makes the collaboration even better. I do encourage my team a lot to use storytelling as well. Metaphors, as I said, we have a concept that is called preludes also, which is again, a concept around storytelling of how you introduce, let’s say a session or how you introduce a workshop with some kind of story to it. That’s why it’s called a prelude. Something that comes before the actual core objective or core agenda, but we do use these a lot to reinforce the objectives to make connections between people and to make the mission of the day click for everyone.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. It’s always important to start with purpose, and if you can do that in a storytelling way that acts as a scene setter, it can actually make it a little more intriguing. Maybe you can decorate it with some details that maybe entice people in some fun ways. I love that.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yes, and I think it also makes it more memorable and the whole experience becomes immediately more memorable.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. The way you open, the way you close and creating the high point throughout the time together definitely are great ways to make things more memorable. Thinking about that beginning and how you make them feel.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think the way, especially at the beginning, I think, is really key to kickstart the project or the agenda with the right level of motivation and the right level of alignment. For that, I think storytelling helps a lot.

Douglas Ferguson:

Coming back to your generalist point and this idea of collecting lots of information and how that’s really helpful to have on hand and making the most out of your sessions. It also makes me think that there are a couple of things that it impacts your ability to adjust and adapt activities. Rather than just taking it for face value of what does it say in the book or what did I read online, but how do I shift it and change it in ways that make it unique to me or customize it for the group? Then likewise, your ability to notice little things that are happening in the room to synthesize how Susan’s feeling versus Bob is feeling. Then link those things and compare them really fast so that the group can benefit from those insights that are bubbling up that maybe are just under the surface.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely. I mean, being able to pivot when needed due to dynamics that you observe in the room or just realizing that, “Oh my God, actually there is new information coming which needs to change the agenda in order to, we need to change the objective midway. I don’t know, something happened. There is new information, new stakeholders that are important.” Having this possibility to pivot, I think, and this capacity actually, to remain flexible I think is very important. I think for me personally, I had to learn this because this was something that did not come naturally, for sure. I’m a very much of a perfectionist. I very much prepare. I really want to have the plan ready. I had to kind of, with experience, lean more into, actually it’s okay sometimes to relax a bit, to improvise when necessary and not to be so strict on the planning. That’s definitely important.

Also, what you mentioned about observing the room, reading the room, that I think is something that it’s a little bit, I would say in my opinion, slightly more difficult to learn. You either have it a little bit or not, you can improve for sure, but I think it’s linked to empathy and I think really good facilitators have a lot of empathy, and this capacity to observe and read the little signs of what’s happening across the table with the people and empathize with that and maybe have the right activity in place or the right phrase to bring up the mood, for example, or address challenge or friction in the conversation if you notice it. I think then it comes really handy for facilitator, but first it’s the capacity to observe and empathize with the group.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s certainly important. I want to come back to that point made about the adapting and maybe being a bit more emergent wasn’t natural for you and you had to learn it. What were some of the ways that you practiced or exposed yourself or were able to learn how to be a bit more adaptive?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, so it is just a very simple example. Even with my public speaking skills, I’ve always, initially, I used to have these long scripts. My brain was making me over prepare. I would go around three days before I have a speech to do. I would go around with these papers, read through my scripts, memorize my scripts to the extent that I would start feeling more natural doing it. Then I started saying to myself, “No, this is not natural. This is actually making it much more stressful for yourself. Throw away all the scripts, try with kind of more simplified bullet points kind of list or maybe key messages lists.”

I forced myself to do not write down everything but just key points, try to naturally get more, let’s say, to get used to improvise a little bit my speech. Then I think now I’m at the stage where I probably don’t even need usually the bullet points. I think it was a gradual progression, but yeah, I had to go out of my comfort zone and say, “No, you’re not going to write down your script this time for this presentation. Try something else, try something different.” Then it worked. I saw that actually it comes out even better when I leave myself some space for improvisation and then I took it from there.

Douglas Ferguson:

How did this room for improvisation show up in your facilitation?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

I think I had actually a very kind of a recent example of a workshop where it was a few months ago where we had prepared an amazing agenda, amazing setup, full range of activities, everything with a purpose. Sometimes for a facilitator, when you’ve done this work, there is a part of you saying, “Oh my God, I really want everything to go perfectly so that I can see all my ideas taking place in the room.” You have been preparing maybe for a couple of months to that day and everything should happen on the day. Then midway, the client says, “Oh, by the way, one of the most important stakeholders in the workshop cannot join this part anymore. He can only join till this time,” and without him there is no point that we need to, so what do we do? I’m like, “Oh my God, this is completely rearranging our agenda midway to accommodate this thing that was not clear at the beginning that he couldn’t join that part.”

We had to … And then there, I think it’s very important to have a very strong team, and your co-facilitators are so important to be able to, because if you’re a front facilitator, you need to be able to be present in the moment to calm down the client, maybe to discuss with them, “Okay, let’s arrange rearrange this part,” and be present in the moment. In the meantime, in the back office, you need to very strong team to say, “Okay, let’s take care of this. Let’s move the lunch, let’s move the break. That means that we need to rearrange the room in this way. Let us bring these chairs because that’s a sit-down presentation, it’s not an activity anymore.” All these logistics need to happen in the background and to do that so smoothly that the participants and the client, they don’t notice.

For them, everything is still calm and then they remain in the mood of collaboration, creativity, new information, new insights that they need to think about, focus. In the meantime, everyone is running around trying to fix it. To your question, I think in order to be able to pivot well, team is so important. Having the support on the day and also, just remaining calm and collected, and it is what it is. Don’t get too affectionate towards your ideas, I would say. Don’t fall in love too much in your ideas of facilitate of how things should be. I think that’s important in terms of mindset, just from the beginning.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you fall in love with your ideas, it’s hard to remain in that positive, optimistic, solution-oriented mindset. If you’re too tied in, it’s easy to take it personally and say, “Oh, they don’t value what we’re doing here, or they’re not taking this seriously.” Then once you go down that path, then it’s really hard to think about, “How do I leverage this great team that I have? How do I have keep things smooth?” Because now it’s, “Oh, it’s this negative event,” versus thinking about, “Okay, this is just a curve ball that we have to react to.” I love that this is stuff that you’re positively responding to.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely, and I think that’s actually what you said brings me to what I have reflected in the past a lot in the facilitator role, and this is the topic of the ego. I don’t know if you’ve observed that as well, but as facilitators, sometimes we need to be careful with our own ego because as you said, if you sense as a facilitator that the people in the room are probably not understanding, not fully grasping the value that you’re trying to bring to them, it happens. It can totally happen. Maybe they just focus on different priorities. I mean, we as facilitators focus on delivering the best experience, having or achieving the objective for them. Maybe that’s just a little part from a broader picture and they focus on completely different objectives. Politics maybe that are happening in the background that maybe we don’t know about. Conflict, things like that.

Sometimes if you don’t manage your ego as facilitator, you can definitely be heard and also, start to think that, “Oh my God, my role is not understood. I don’t bring value,” and kind of undermine yourself in that way. While actually what we do, I think, as facilitators is we voluntary step back sometimes. We need to be mindful of when we reinforce our presence and when we kind of need to step back and we do this, I think, with generosity. I think it’s a great act of generosity when we observe and we understand actually the room maybe needs a bit less at the moment, so I need to step back or allow them to sort themselves or things like that. That’s also, I think, part of great facilitation without that impacting you personally.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. Well said. I want to talk a little bit about, I think you’ve been doing this long enough and you’ve got a strong team around you, and so it makes me curious how much you’ve started to think about developing those around you or the facilitators that are more junior or the staff members that are just getting curious about facilitation. How are you supporting them? In what ways are you finding that you can make them more successful or help them with their curiosities about what facilitation can do?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Something that they really believe into is personal development and learning. We have a very supportive company in that way. When we are willing to explore learning opportunities, we always get support. In terms of courses, in terms of even a couple of days conference or events that my team members join. We are always looking for training on methodologies. For example, if someone from my team members expresses interest in certain methodology, they can freely explore what are the options on the market and come back to us and say, “I found this and that course I want to do this. What do you think?” We would consider it and very often or usually we’ll sponsor it. For that, I think, is very important and it’s one way to keep them curious.

The other way for me is by giving them the freedom to explore topics. Sometimes we assign to each other a techniques or create a prelude about this or maybe explore if we can do this and that activity or let’s test this other thing out. I like to establish this culture of experimentation. Very recently, for example, with my team, without receiving it as a task from somewhere, we just decided to go a little bit deeper into signals of change and observing and collecting signals of change.

We started just as a team on a Friday afternoon kind of setting up some time, silent collaboration time I call it. We get on a Teams call for an hour, we don’t speak. It’s silent collaboration time, but we are together on that call. Everyone researches signals the first half an hour, and the second half an hour we kind of share. This we did purely for experimentation purposes because we didn’t have a specific objective in a sense that, “Oh, we need to collect X amount of signals in order to create an observatory in order to publish a thought leadership piece or anything like that.”

We were, “Okay, let’s just see if this can be part of our day-to-day, if we can get into the habit of collecting signals and let’s see where this would lead us towards.” We have been doing this for more than six months now, and now we are to the point where we have to reflect back and see, “Okay, what did we learn? Is this something that we want to continue doing in the future? How can we create an output out of this?” I’ve always been transparent to my team members that if you have the time you join, if you don’t this time, but we do this as a team and maybe we can also fail. Maybe we do it for some time and we realize, “Oh, actually we cannot benefit, and that’s fine.” In the meantime, we have learned a practice and that probably would become part of what we do also outside of work. Yeah, that’s another experimentation, I think, is also very important.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that was one of my questions. What experiments are you most excited about trying next? Whether it’s tools or formats or audiences?

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

At the moment, obviously, AI is big topic, so experimenting with technology and how that can influence what we do as facilitators, as storytellers is where I see a lot of potential for doing things differently. The other day I was thinking also, if we project ourselves in the future, what would a workshop be from a facilitator point of view if I need to facilitate between humans and maybe AI agents? Would I do the same activities? Would I base myself on the same methodological foundation? If I need to facilitate between AI and humans, what would that look like? I don’t have the answers yet, but it’s just I’m reflecting on those questions going forward. I think in order to have an answer, we need to be the first ones to experiment with these tools and to learn about these tools and to be prepared to understand how they work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. We were running a workshop at South by Southwest, and it was focused on AI teammates. Really, this curiosity of, rather than using AI as a tool, so many of us default to it’s a one-on-one thing where, “I need this result, I’m going to ask it to do this thing,” versus bringing it into the collaboration context and having the team react to it or having it react to things the team’s generating and back and forth. It was really quite fun. People started to consider what was possible from a whole new lens.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Absolutely. I think for the moment, we also have experimented a lot with AI as a supporting tool, as you say, as a helpful assistant, maybe in the preparation of the workshop mainly. I really want to push ourselves a little bit more to see, “Okay, what would that mean if AI is actually a participant?” We have tried out a few things, but I still think there is a lot of potential there to explore and to understand how that would work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. It comes back to what you were saying earlier about the importance of being a generalist and how that role has a lot of value, and I’d argue with AI becoming more and more prominent and getting specialized in certain things and able to do certain specialized tasks or have specialized knowledge, this generalist that can question and draw things together across these different perspectives is going to be even more and more valuable.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Yeah, I think so. I think, really, I’m very much thinking about would I have a role in the future? Because we have experimented with AI, building agendas, building activities, brainstorming, the whole concept. I’m like, “Okay, AI can do this.” Then as a facilitator, what is the value that I would bring in a future when maybe I would have an agent that would do these tasks for me? Maybe I don’t even need to analyze the objectives. Maybe I don’t even need to, for sure, I won’t need to script the agenda. Probably an AI agent would even schedule the initial calls with my clients. I don’t know. For sure, a lot of these tasks will be outsourced to my agent. That would probably have also already my knowledge.

The agent will probably already, also, will be already fed with my experience. Then would that mean that I would just go and facilitate face-to-face? Would that even be a need anymore? Maybe there will be a virtual assistant on a video that would be do the talking. I don’t know. I’m definitely curious about how that vision of the future would look like. I do think that there is a lot of truth in what you’re saying, that it’ll be more important to have a generalist knowledge in order to create connections between the worlds. Because all the specialization seems that can be outsourced to an AI. The true human creativity I think is really in making unexpected connections. I don’t know, I still have to live and see.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think that’s what the future is about, is we will see what unfolds.

Ralitsa Dimitrova:

Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s leave our listeners with a final thought. Would you like to share an insight or something that’s found helpful in your career?

Ralitsa Dimitrova::

I think maybe this last topic that we touched upon makes me think about the fact that we live in so exciting times. I think it’s really, we have the chance nowadays to redefine how we do work and really to redefine what work means for humans and even further define the foundations of human and AI collaboration. I think I would like to leave the listeners with this inspiration to think about what that future collaboration between humans and AI could look like. As facilitators, how can we shape that and what would our role be? More than an insight, it’s actually a question, but I think it’s also part of our job as facilitators to ask the questions.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, let’s facilitate our future.

Ralitsa Dimitrova::

I like that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, thank you so much for being on the show and this amazing conversation. It’s been so much fun. I really appreciate it, Ralitsa.

Ralitsa Dimitrova::

Thank you so much, Douglas. Thanks again for the invitation. I hope this was insightful for the listeners.

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 Why Did the Facilitator Bring Legos to the Meeting? To Build Connections! appeared first on Voltage Control.

“The power of facilitation is to bring all the voices to the table, and as you may have heard this saying, “nothing for us without us,” and I love that, it resonates so much.”-Alexis Scranton

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Alexis Scranton from Aligned Impact Solutions. Alexis shares her journey from teaching kindergarten and third grade to training teachers on national reform projects, which led her to specialize in facilitating corporate social responsibility and social impact initiatives. The discussion highlights the importance of inclusivity in decision-making, the differences between facilitating adult learning and teaching children, and the role of effective questioning in overcoming resistance. Alexis emphasizes creating environments where all voices are heard, fostering collaboration, and drawing out collective wisdom for impactful outcomes.

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About the Guest

Alexis Scranton, is a dynamic facilitator, strategist, and change-maker dedicated to building capacity at all levels of an organization—from executives to frontline professionals. With a background in global education and leadership development, Alexis has spent her career teaching, training, and coaching across the U.S., South Korea, Malaysia, and Brunei. Her experience spans both traditional and nontraditional learning environments, working with students, educators, and leaders to develop skills, foster innovation, and implement strategic initiatives. In addition, she has managed programs and strategic partnerships that support professional growth and organizational transformation, equipping teams with the tools they need to succeed.

Through her work, she helps leaders and teams navigate complex challenges, align their visions to drive meaningful outcomes. Recognizing the power of facilitation in fostering engagement and strategic clarity, Alexis pursued certification through Voltage Control and has since engaged in ongoing professional learning, exploring a variety of facilitation methods and approaches. She specializes in bringing clarity to complexity, guiding groups toward a shared vision and transformative action, while ensuring that diverse voices are heard in decision-making processes.

The organizations Alexis works with—whether in education, government, nonprofits, or corporate sectors—are united by a common mission: contributing to positive peace, creating lasting impact, and driving change in their communities. 

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 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 realtime 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 Alexis Scranton at Aligned Impact Solutions, where she helps corporate social responsibility and social impact leaders avoid costly problems around stakeholder misalignment, community engagement, and private-public partnerships. Through facilitation of collaborative and inclusive dialogues, she guides teams toward clarity, alignment, and strategy.
Welcome to the show, Alexis.

Alexis Scranton:
Hi. Thank you, Douglas. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, of course. It’s so great to have you. As usual, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got started. Your career began in education, teaching kindergarten and third grade, if I recall correctly. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment you first realized that facilitation might be your true calling?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, wow. Well, after teaching elementary school, I actually moved into training teachers on several different national reform projects. I think that’s when, although I may not have had the name for it at the time, recognition of the need for facilitation probably first emerged.

Douglas Ferguson:
What did that feel like? Do you remember some of those early moments around what you were noticing or feeling at the time?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. Being that, again, these were in other countries and these were major reform projects where you’re talking about big system-level changes. There are a lot of different stakeholders involved, from the teachers themselves all the way up to district-level educators and other stakeholders. With any change, I’m sure you know, there’s a lot of resistance and a lot of emotion that comes along with that. I started to recognize the importance of being inclusive of everyone’s voice, the need for everyone’s input in order to have that buy-in.
I worked a lot with teachers one-on-one in a coaching space, but even in coaching, it is very similar in a lot of ways to facilitation. In order for the teachers to be excited and willing to make these changes being asked of them in the classroom, I really had to engage with them. Again, have their voices be heard, include, and consider their opinions and their voices. That’s, again, when I started to realize, not really understanding facilitation as it separate field necessarily, but the importance of inclusiveness in decision making.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, it’s easy to start cuing in on the dynamics, especially if you’re responsible for helping groups make progress. It’s easy to start noticing some of those things. Often, we’ll talk to folks that have been in facilitation for a while and starting to learn new things. You’ll hear things like, “Wow! It’s amazing to have vocabulary to put toward these things I’ve been noticing for years.”

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah, definitely. Even in education itself, you can use that same approach. There’s different ways people go about teaching, but really the best way to have people to learn is, again, taking that same participatory approach, have people engaged in their learning. Even in that way as I was facilitating learning and training, again not knowing facilitation as a field of its own, or not having the language necessarily, but being able to still apply those concepts, apply it to education and learning.

Douglas Ferguson:
You mentioned reform earlier. I’m really curious to hear a little bit more about that, especially for our listeners that maybe haven’t been in those spaces with teachers, and superintendents, and school district issues. What are some of the things that they were facing? You mentioned systems change. Help our listeners understand a little bit more about the kinds of things they were dealing with. Was this things that were coming from outside policy that they had to just react to, or were there things they were want to change? What was the nature of some of this stuff?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. Well, it all initiated at the national level. The countries where I work, you have the ministries of education wanting to make changes for one reason or another. But often time, we’ll directly relate it to the teaching pedagogy, the way in which the teachers were teaching. I doubt that they had a lot of say-so in the initiatives being started, but they were definitely frontline and impacted probably the most by these initiatives. Then right after then, probably those people that were over the teachers, so your coaches or your school-level administrators also responsible for ensuring these changes are happening, they’re accountable for them. It’s impacting all levels, but the teachers, again, I don’t believe they probably had a lot of input into the decision being made.

Douglas Ferguson:
In your work making it more inclusive and facilitative, were you able to at least bubble up their input? So that, even though they didn’t have a say whether or not the change would happen, were they able to influence how it rolled out or some of the nuances?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. In these situations, I wasn’t fully in a facilitative space as we know it, but I was able to … Again, the concepts of the inclusive voices and so forth really came about more in a coaching setting. Then also, in our training workshops. Again, as a coach who my role was to support the teachers in implementing these changes within their classrooms, but I can’t force them. I didn’t have necessarily a title or position of power, so to speak. It was more of the, I don’t know, I’m forgetting the term that I’m looking for, but just being able to influence them to make these changes.
In order to do that, you’ve really got to have their buy-in, their belief in the changes, the belief that it’s possible, support with the changes. As a coach, although it wasn’t formal group facilitation, it is understanding their needs, understanding the barriers, understanding from their perspective how I can best support and be of service to help them implement these changes that were thrusted upon them. Same thing with the school-level administrators as well. Again, they were also having to make changes and were responsible for overseeing the changes, so really had to support them as well.
Then I also led a lot of training workshops in order to teach these new skills to the teachers. Again, in that way, really being inclusive of their voices, understanding the dynamics of their working environment. I worked across different schools, so there’s a lot of differences when you move from school to school. Really understanding, again, their strengths and their barriers, and just what they needed. I was able to semi-facilitate in that way, in that manner.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. Well, it sounds like there was some natural tendencies, just to be curious about the needs, and not force things upon people. Even the one-on-one coaching probably had a direct impact in the success in the classroom, because once you understood the fears, the goals, the desires, the values, then you were able to address those in the classroom and reinforce some of that stuff so that people didn’t feel so, maybe helpless, as they were navigating these changes.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, 100%. I would say it all has to do with the teacher in the classroom. That is the most effective, the most important, if I dare to say role, is not going to happen without the teacher doing it in his or her classroom. Yes, 100% what you just said.

Douglas Ferguson:
I’m curious, how did this work with adults differ from the work you were doing teaching younger adults, children, K-through-12 I think it was?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah. Well, I initially started out teaching just elementary school. I did later move into adult education. Yeah, totally different.
Teaching adults and teaching children. In some ways, teaching children is a lot easier, especially the little ones. They’re a lot more enthusiastic, and open, and receptive. Whereas again, adults can have a little more pushback and more resistance to things, especially if it’s a top-down approach that is being forced on them without their say-so. When you’re teaching adults and when you’re teaching children, usually the objective is different, depending. With children, it’s usually you’re teaching and they’re learning for the sake of learning. Whereas with adults, oftentimes they’re learning in order to gain a new skill and apply that new skill. It’s just different approaches, different outcomes. You’ve got to really make it applicable to their real life situation and immediate application to the workplace.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that real life application is so critical. I’ve seen, so many times, where folks just aren’t connected to the purpose or that layer of outcome that’s coming next. Often, I’ve seen them get labeled as the troublemaker or the difficult person. Man, as soon as you label them as such, of course that’s all they’re going to ever be. Whereas if we take the time to, like you say, really get into articulating why are we even here, how are we connecting that to these real world needs.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, definitely, the why. Why am I here? Why am I spending my time learning this and how can I use it?

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah.

Alexis Scranton:
It’s not to say children don’t have the same inquiries, because we know you hear children all the time, “When am I ever going to need to know this? When will I ever use this?” But it’s definitely primary for adult learners.
I’ll say something that’s the same probably amongst in both though, is that need for the social aspect of learning. That’s one thing I really appreciated with going through my certification with Voltage Control is just the combination of some asynchronous, because we all living busy lives and need to have a bit of control over when and how we’re learning. But the social aspect is critical, especially even more I think once everybody got thrusted online with COVID. I think people crave it even moreso now.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s so easy to point to how different it is, and yet I think at the end of the day, we’re still humans.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:
We’re still doing the same things we were doing, we just have more nuanced maybe approaches. I think maybe one thing to consider is that kids are more likely just to say why out of the gate. Whereas adults might just be confused about the why, and then not even ask or just be there in their state of confusion and get disgruntled, or whatever. Does that fit with your observations? Were kids more likely to vocalize the why when it wasn’t clear?

Alexis Scranton:
To ask why, “Why do we have to do this?” Not as much. I think children are … It’s a bit of a social construct. They go to school and know they have to go to school to learn all the things they need to learn. It’s just an expectation that, “I’m here just to learn for the sake of learning.”
I won’t say that they’re necessarily more inquisitive, adults are inquisitive, but it’s different. Whereas again, adults, especially if they’re not self-selecting to take a course. Again, if they’re in they’re work environment and they’re being mandated to attend, you’ve got to really, really hone in on why, “Why I am being asked to be here, my precious time being used to learn this thing. Why is it necessary? How is it going to make a difference?” In these situations, “How is it going to make a difference for me as a teacher? How was it going to make a difference for my students?” Again, “Show me how I can take what I’m learning and apply it right away.”

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. One thing I’ve noticed, especially with groups that are not sure, they’ve been mandated to do it, is not only attempting to explain it to them, but just again, some dialogue around why the group thinks it’s important. Because I think nuance amongst the group, it’s one thing to hear it from me, it’s another thing to hear it from one of their coworkers.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, I agree. That’s why what I really strive for with facilitation and doing this work is for any initiative that is going to be implemented, the hope and the desire would be that all stakeholders that are going to be impacted in any way have a seat at the table, have a voice. Because it’s much easier to … People support what they help to create. When they have a say-so in the creation of whatever this initiative might be, one, they understand what the problem is and why we’re even surfacing that the need to create a solution by way of an initiative. But they could bring different perspectives that aren’t always understood and seen when it’s being given top-down.
When they have that voice, then again, there’s the buy-in created. It’s like, “Okay, now I understand why we need to address this, and I’m offering up my opinions as far as solutions as to how we might address this. My day-to-day life, work life and circumstances are being considered, so that you’re not asking me to do things that are impractical.” Just all these things are considered and included. I think, I don’t think, I know, the research shows that it actually helps to make different strategic initiatives much more impactful. That is the power of facilitation is just to bring all the voices to the table.
You may have heard this phrase or this saying, “Nothing for us without us.” I love that. I just love that. It resonates so much.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. It’s bringing to mind a comment you made in your alumni story about when facilitating, just experiencing a sense of connection and momentum. This idea of with us maybe creates that momentum. Tell me a little bit more about this connection and momentum you feel when facilitating.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah. Definitely. Again, it just gets everybody on board. If you tell me, “Alexis, you’ve got to do this thing,” and I didn’t understand why, and I had no say-so, and this thing you’re asking me to do, I feel like it’s putting me out of my way. You’re not considering A, B, and C, these other components. Again, there can be this resistance, even if it’s passive resistance, that happens a lot.
But when you come to me and say, “Hey, there is either a problem or there’s some change we want to make, would love your input. I would love your perspective, would love to hear what you think is causing the problem.” Or, “Would love to hear your perspective on how we might create this solution.” Just include the voice. Automatically, I’m more excited, I’m more bought in, and I see my ideas included. It’s just natural, there’s going to be more momentum, more excitement around it, and more success.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve certainly witnessed it. It’s making me also think about, you talked about how coaching played a big part in your evolution into this facilitation work. There’s actually a talk at the Facilitation Lab Summit this year around how coaching skills can be directly applied to facilitation and vice versa. Almost this idea of coaching is one-to-one, whereas facilitation is one-to-many, but we might use the same tools and techniques, and maybe even the same questions.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a great point and a great comparison. It is, because if you think about what coaching gives. For those who may not be familiar, coaching, you’re asking questions with the belief that the person being coached has the inherited wisdom. They have all the answers within, you’re really just asking questions to draw it out of them, to help them come to their own realizations, draw their own conclusions. It’s the same thing when you’re working with the group and you’re facilitating a group, you’re really just drawing out that collective wisdom. You’re asking questions, you may be making some comparisons to make sure those are realized. But it’s not you imparting any knowledge, or wisdom, or expertise. Same thing with coaching.
It’s a skill that has to be developed. Because a lot of times, people want to just jump in with the answers and solutions, but you have to very much contain that and allow the people to get to that space. When they do, it is so much more rewarding for them. Yeah, whether it’s an entire group or whether it’s the individual, again, back to that buy-in, it’s like, “Wow, these are my ideas that I can up with, I believe in them, and I’m excited to now move forward with them.” Yeah, it is. Yeah, you’re right. It’s just like coaching.

Douglas Ferguson:
I love that point around the importance of questioning. I’m curious, what are some of your go-to questions to pull that stuff out of people?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, wow. Well, it really depends, but something … Let’s see. Maybe just, “Tell me more about that,” just to get people to elaborate and expand.

Douglas Ferguson:
Great one.

Alexis Scranton:
Another question I do like to ask though, once we’ve gotten near a point of resolve and decision making. I do like to ask on a scale of one-to-10 for example, how committed they are to this decision. How committed are they to implementing this decision? That says a lot, because although they may have come up with the ideas, if I’m getting a low number, now I can dig a little deeper and ask, “Okay, well, what is it that you need that will bring that number up closer to a 10?” That says a lot about what other supports or just whatever it is that has them causing the hesitancy around that.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, I love this idea of asking for ranges, many ways to present that. Then also, pointing the group toward the ones that need some further guidance or further dialogue to get their number up. Rather than just saying, “Hey, we’ve got a majority here, there’s 50% support. We’re good, let’s move on.” No, let’s pause and see what it could take to elevate some of the folks that aren’t in support, and then we’ll have a more robust decision. I love that, that range and then helping work with those that are lower, just how might they elevate their score.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, definitely. One thing I’ve learned about consensus is that it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody in the room is 100%, “I’m excited about this, ready to go.” But it does mean that, “I’m willing to move forward. I’m willing to move forward with this and I don’t see a reason to stop the group’s progress.” To your point, is how do we get everybody to that point where they feel good about moving forward.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah. You also brought up a really interesting point. As your asking questions, and connecting with folks, and drawing out this wisdom from the crowd, taking time to point out differences and comparisons, or maybe what’s a pocket that might need attention and helping the group focus there. Very important.
I even talk about the importance of the facilitator doing live synthesis. How are we recognizing what’s happening, replaying it back to the group so the group can keep going? We’re stoking that flame, if you will.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. Well, one of the things … Clarity is the keyword. I’ve recently just started my own practice, I’m excited to say. My tagline I’ve come up with is really just, “Clarity, alignment, and strategy.” This is all done through collaboration, but the first thing I really think facilitation helps groups with is to just get really clear, to your point. Because you just have so many things floating around, and ideas, and a dialogue, and often times things can get muddled or feel chaotic. Having a facilitator first brings clarity to the group.

Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely. You just mentioned starting your practice and how clarity is so important. Earlier, you were talking about the importance of acknowledging the answer within. As the facilitator, our jobs are extract that or expose it. It’s making me remember a story that you shared in your alumni story about the vision board you put together that helped guide your self-reflection and provide your clarity on what was maybe already there, and exposed this, vision, this desire, this goal that you had. What was that process like on creating this vision board? What advice might you have to others that are in this journey of not really quite sure about what to do next? What was that like and how might others follow in your footsteps to find that clarity?

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned that process. It just made me think about clarity, but the a-ha moment when a person comes to the realization of whatever the thing is, but that’s very similar to teaching. A lot of teachers, you’ll hear them say, “Oh, they just light up when they see the look on a child’s face when they have the a-ha moment.” When they’ve realized they can do whatever the thing is they set out to do. There are some similarity there, just as to what one thing that’s really fulfilling and similar in both of those roles.
But to answer your question, yeah, I had moved. During COVID, I moved out of the education sector. Had always really been directly in education some way or another. I moved into a more corporate space, although still supporting educators. I didn’t stray too far. But as I moved up, and over, and around about within the corporate sector, I started to move further and further away from working directly with educators, and in schools, and with students. For a time, I started to feel a bit dissatisfied, like something was missing and was desiring that. But then, I also had this really big desire to move beyond just education. I wanted to really be able to do work that I felt was making an impact on society at large. Yes, education is critical and important, but then so are other causes. I wanted to be able to do something that would take me into all of these spaces.
I started a period of reflection trying to figure out what this thing was. What was this skill that was going to allow me to work to support what I like to call positive peace? I didn’t make that up, but just supporting organizations that are contributing to positive peace. Eventually, I discovered the world of facilitation. I don’t remember exactly just how, I couldn’t tell you. But the journey just consisted of reading a couple books, doing a lot of introspection, a lot of reflection over my past experiences and those things that brought me the most fulfillment and the most joy, where I felt the most competent and the most confident. I started to see the path and I started to see the connections. Then whenever I did discover facilitation, I saw the overlap. I saw how a lot of my skills would be useful as a facilitator. That just led me down this journey.
Then I moved on, I found Voltage Control and went through the certification course. At that time, I was working in partnerships, that was my role, so was really seeing the need for facilitation within that role. Especially for internal. Internal, again, the clarity and the alignment that we needed internally, and was able to utilize a lot of the skills that I learned at facilitation in that role. Then, as I say, the rest is just history. It’s just been on that path since then.

Douglas Ferguson:
What would you say is the biggest shift you’ve experienced professionally since you’ve fully embraced facilitation?

Alexis Scranton:
The biggest shift would probably be just in how I identify with my profession. I don’t know if this is true for all professions, but definitely as an educator, that just becomes a big part of your identity. I’m an educator, that’s just who I am. I still feel like I’m an educator and still want to support people in that way, but it is a shift. It is a shift from identifying myself as solely and purely an educator, to transitioning to facilitation. Then, helping others to understand what that means and the power that facilitation holds.

Douglas Ferguson:
Amazing. I’m reminded of a time that you were telling me about where you were facilitating a meeting for your organization’s executive team. If I remember, it was an opportunity to really step up into a new stage, so to speak. I’m just really curious, what was going through your mind leading up to that big facilitation moment? How did you prepare yourself, both mentally and just logistically for the challenge?

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, I’m sure I was very nervous. It was the executive leadership team, so you’re talking about your C-suite members. But at the same time, these were my colleagues. In the space where I was working, it didn’t feel very hierarchal. It was very flat and everybody was just friendly, called me by my first name. Although I was nervous, but I just reminded myself, “These are nice, supportive people.”
But furthermore, the reason. Again, I was in partnerships. We were considering several different partnerships at the time. It was my responsibility to present the key points to them, but then we also had to come to alignment and consensus as to whether or not we were going to move forward with these partnerships. That’s where I saw, “Okay, this is a time to shine. This is the space where I can bring forward these skills I’ve been learning and really make a difference.” And help, again, bring that alignment amongst the team and decide how we’ll move forward. These partnerships were going to help impact students beyond just the schools we were currently in, but just help us have a broader reach.
How did I prepare? Well, I again was either going through or had just completed the Voltage Control certification, I had a lot of resources and books at my fingertips that I utilized, and was really just constantly thinking about what the objective was. What was I trying to accomplish, what was the end goal? Just like with teaching, you start with the end in mind and work backwards. And decision how I would structure the conversation to guide them through to ultimately, again, reach a consensus about how we would move forward.
I also had to consider logistically, this team, I worked remotely, but for this particular meeting, the entire team, they were in the room together in another state from me and I was online. That was interesting, but not too bad of a challenge. Just considering the logistics. But it made it easy because they were in the room together, so they were able to converse with one another, and pair up, and do all the things, and just had to look at my face on the screen. It was very rewarding. We got a lot of positive feedback after that, and invited to facilitate in other spaces. And we did, we gained consensus as the goal was to do. It gave us some direction to move forward with.

Douglas Ferguson:
Wow! You really stepped into a challenge there, having to facilitate for the team for the first time, it’s a step-up in maybe the level of stakes in the meeting you’re facilitating, and you had to do it remote while they were in the room.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, yeah. But it was fun! It was good. I think what maybe would have been more challenge is if … Actually, I think some of them may have been online. I’m getting them mixed up now, because I’ve done a few things. I think the most challenging was a meeting I had to facilitate, and there were some people in the room together and some people were virtual. Now that, that’s complex. But having them all in the room together, not as bad.

Douglas Ferguson:
Yes, yes. You just had to make sure you maintained their attention. When folks are distributed across different environments, you really have to think carefully about how you’re ensuring that everyone still has a level playing field.

Alexis Scranton:
Definitely, definitely. It’s all about the participatory approach. How am I going to make sure everyone has space to participate, make sure their voices are included, their ideas are included? I love it. It really, as I sat down and was planning this session, and all of the sessions, I just kept flashing back to, “Wow! This just feels like when I was teaching, having to sit down and lesson plan.” You have all your resources and ideas. When I was a little girl, that’s when I knew I wanted to be a teacher because I used to love playing school. But it wasn’t just the part where you stand in front of your dolls and teddy bears, it was the planning part, and being creative with how you would plan the lesson. For me, I love it. I feel like I was just in my zone. It was just more confirmation, “Yeah, I’m doing the right thing. This is where I should be,” because it was just joyful.

Douglas Ferguson:
That’s so sweet. I’d love to hear more about the 10X Is Easier Than 2X.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, yeah, yeah. That was a book that we were required or encouraged to read at work, which I did. It has been a while now, so forgive me if I’m forgetting some of the key things. A major point of that book was a lot of times … A couple things. One, a lot of times in our lives, we’re trying to do more. We’re 10X-ing. Or, excuse me, we’re 2X-ing, we’re doubling the work. We’re doubling and we’re just making these incremental changes. Which then, we often times end up maybe feeling overwhelmed, or exhausted, or just making progress, but nothing overwhelming, nothing major.
When you 10X, you’re really doing a lot less. That’s why they say 10X is easier than 2X, because when you 10X, you’re eliminating 80% of the stuff. It’s focused on what is the 20%? Whatever it is I’m trying to do, what is the 20% that I need to focus on that is going to make the biggest impact? It also went through the process by which you do that for yourself. That’s what, when I told you earlier, I sat down and I went through my professional history, and I wrote down all of those experiences that had been most impactful to me, I got that activity from that book. That was a part of me trying to 10X my life professionally. How do I let go of all the things that aren’t necessarily bringing me the most joy, or all the things that aren’t helping me to make the most impact? And just focus on the 20% that will make the biggest leaps and bounds.
That book was really profound for me, I really appreciated it. It was actually written for entrepreneurs, which I wasn’t at the time, but I was definitely striving to be one. Yeah, it just helped me to 10X my life in a lot of ways. I think that’s probably what AI is going to be doing for a lot of folks. Just really helping them to just 10X their life, getting rid of the tedious things that don’t bring them joy that they have to get done. Let AI do it so you can just focus on the innovation and the creativity, and those things to maximize your impact.

Douglas Ferguson:
As we look into the future, you’ve spoken about positive peace being a guiding concept in your facilitation, and I would imagine in your practice. I’m curious to hear more about where you’re imagining things will go. Maybe explain a little bit more for our listeners, positive peace and where you’re going with it.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah. We hear peace and we usually think of peace of just being the absence of violence, the absence of turmoil and chaos. But the idea of positive peace is really it encompasses the institutions and the structures that help to create and sustain peaceful societies. That’s what I mean when I say positive peace.
What that looks like for me is, in my facilitation practice, I want to support organizations whose missions help to contribute to a more just and positive social environment. That could be a number of things, but they’re mission-oriented essentially. A lot of times, people hear that, “Oh, mission-oriented,” and your mind may automatically go to nonprofits. Yes, nonprofits are one entity, one sort of entity in the space of making social impact and contribution, but there are actual for-profit enterprises that are doing the same. I worked for one. Our mission was to eradicate illiteracy. Although for-profit, the mission is still there. I want to support any entity, again, that’s helping to support positive peace and helping to sustain a more peaceful society.
As far as the for-profit entities, I also just want to highlight you have the corporate social responsibilities. A lot of these big companies, as you probably may know, contribute millions of dollars towards community initiatives, community engagement, really giving back to the community. I’ve been doing a lot of research in that space. I’m really impressed, it makes me feel better about spending my money with a lot of companies, to know the good work that they’re doing. I strive to also support these corporate social responsibility initiatives too, and the work that they’re doing for communities.

Douglas Ferguson:
Impressive. It’s important to have a vision and stick to your values, so I commend you for that. We need more people doing that kind of stuff in the world.
As we come to an end, I just have another question, and then ask you to leave our listeners with a final thought. My last question is if we fast-forward five years, what impact would you like your facilitation work to have? Both personally and for the organizations you support.

Alexis Scranton:
Oh, wow. Well, I would like to say that my facilitation has helped these organizations to fulfill their missions. I would say that is the mission that I’m on, to help them fulfill their missions. That really just looks like, again, whatever these social impact initiatives are and these community engagement and partnerships, they’re more successful. They are able to, again, be more inclusive all of the voices that would be involved and impacted, and therefore make more meaningful programs and meaningful initiatives that see success and sustainability.
For myself personally, I hope to continue to build my competence, and just continue to grow in my love for facilitation and my understanding of just how profound it can be. Yeah, I’m just wanting to enjoy it more and more.

Douglas Ferguson:
Well, I’m hoping that’s the case. As we come to a close, I’d like to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Alexis Scranton:
Yeah, just a final thought about facilitation. That it is really about unlocking the collective intelligence of the people to drive real lasting impact. Again, nothing for us without us. Any time one is planning to create anything for a group of people, be sure to have their voices included in the decision making.

Douglas Ferguson:
Thank you so much, Alexis. It’s been so great talking with you today. I hope to talk to you again sometime soon.

Alexis Scranton:
Likewise! I’ll come back anytime. Thank you for inviting 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 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 Can Inclusive Facilitation Transform Decision-Making in Organizations? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“It’s most costly in the wasted human energy and time that goes into things that people in the end don’t care about. That is what’s the most frustrating to me, seeing people pour their energy with the hope that it’s going to pay off, and then in the end, when people shrug, it’s just so demoralizing.”- Jake Knapp

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Jake Knapp, co-founder and general partner at Character Capital, and a former Google employee instrumental in developing Gmail and Google Meet. The episode delves into Jake’s extensive experience in product development, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer needs and market differentiation. Jake shares insights from his early coding and game development days, highlighting the value of iterative testing and customer feedback. They discuss the “foundation sprint” and “magic lenses” techniques for refining product ideas and making informed decisions. The episode underscores the necessity of clarity and alignment in successful product development.

Show Highlights

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About the Guest

Jake Knapp cofounder and general partner at Character Capital and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he helped build Gmail and Microsoft Encarta, cofounded Google Meet, and was a partner at Google Ventures.

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 Jake Knapp, co-founder and general partner at Character Capital and a New York Times bestselling author. Previously, he helped build Gmail and Microsoft Encarta, co-founded Google Meet and was a partner at Google Ventures. Welcome to the show, Jake

Jake Knapp:

Douglas, thank you so much for having me on. Great to see you as always, and pleasure to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s so good to be in conversation with you again. I want to start off with the first story in the book, and as someone who spent countless hours on a Commodore 64 at a young age that story really resonated with me, and so I just thought it’d be a fun way to kind of open up the podcast to you.

Jake Knapp:

Well, yeah, I started with the Commodore 64 as well, although I could never quite make anything happen on it that I wanted to. When you remember the cassette tape drive, I mean, that seems wild today that the data was stored.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I mean, I even remember coding with a go-to command and just the thought of that makes my brain hurt nowadays.

Jake Knapp:

If you’re listening to this and you’re wondering when we say cassette, what we’re talking about, it’s literally the kinds of cassettes that you’d make, like a mixtape on, an audio cassette. But the story at the beginning of the book is about when I was in middle and then high school and got into coding and making computer games on the Mac computer, and this is the black and white Mac. If you think of the first Macintosh computers, that’s what it looked like. And I spent just ages working on this game.

It was a castle adventure kind of thing. Go in the castle, you get a sword, fighting monsters. And I was trying to do this first person perspective, but it wasn’t like it was rendered by code, I was hand drawing the artwork for each view that you had. So if you turn left, then all of a sudden I had to draw that screen too. And as you move through the castle, I just couldn’t get very far. And anyway, I’ve finally felt like, okay, it’s ready to show to people.

I’ve been working on it for, I don’t know, a year and a half or something, and I bring it to school and on a floppy disk, and I show it to my friend Ian. And I didn’t tell him where it came from, and he’s just starts playing it, and he’s like, “I don’t know.” And my other friend comes in and he’s like, “Matt, do you want to turn on this game Jake found?” And Matt starts playing it and he’s like, “Yeah, you guys want to go play basketball?” And I was just like, “Oh my God.” I’m.

Douglas Ferguson:

Crushed.

Jake Knapp:

I’m crushed. I’ve spent so long working on it, and my hope was, “Oh, I won’t tell him.” And they’ll be like, “Whoa, what’s this cool game? Where’d this come from?” So the thing that happened though was I was just dead set on making something that my friends would play. And so I went back home and I started trying different games, but this time I thought, I can’t wait a year and a half every time before I show them, or I’m going to be graduated from high school before this gets done.

So I would just make the beginning of the game and to try out the mechanics a little bit. So I’d spend about a week on it and I’d come back and I’d show it to my friends and see what happened. And I tried all different kinds of games and finally I hit on this one. It was a mouse going through a maze, and each maze was really fast. You could get through it in like a few seconds. And in fact, there was a timer that would count down. So it was very fast-paced. And I got a bunch of sound effects from Ren & Stimpy and The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-Head, all the stuff that I was watching and enjoying at the time.

All these little sound effects that would play and kind of make fun of you as you went along. And finally, my friends, they started to get into that and it clicked. I remember watching them play and lean forward and get into it and talk trash to each other. So that experience, yeah, it was the genesis of the way I think about products to this day. You’ve got to find something that clicks with your customer and above all else, that is the most important thing.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m really curious, with that lesson learned so early on, were you able to avoid making stuff that didn’t click or did you still run into those moments where you thought you had it figured out only for other people to show you otherwise?

Jake Knapp:

Right. That sounds like it should be the origin story of… And then I went on and created blizzard, but that’s Minecraft. But that is not what happened. I went to work at Microsoft, actually, was the first big software company I’d worked at. I worked at Oakley, the sunglasses company briefly beforehand on their website, their online store. But when I got to Microsoft, I was like, “Okay, now I’m building software and this is a continuation. This is my dream to make things that people love.”

And I was working on the encyclopedia. And in the early days that I was there, so 2000, 2001, 2002, I mean, this was still a product that people really did love and we would work on it and build a new version of the encyclopedia each year and launch it. And there were a lot of really enthusiastic fans of that product. Kids used it to study and it was really cool. But Wikipedia came out right around that time and started to just explode and so it was pretty evident a couple years in that the internet was changing the way people looked for information.

And we, with our CD ROMs that you had to swap in and out of the drive were not on the fast track to long future. So yeah, the thing is, it took us a year to make a product and put it out in the world. And I kept thinking, “I’ve got a new idea, this is going to change the game.” And it would take us a year before it got out there and you know, it wasn’t moving the needle and it wasn’t moving the needle. And this is a thing that can happen far too easily, especially if you’re in a large organization, especially if you’ve had success in the past, but it also happens to startup founders.

So I mean, if we fast way, way, way forward to today, I’m an investor with a fund called Character Capital and we invest in early stage startup founders, and it can happen to them. It can happen to folks who are just getting started just in that garage phase, so to speak, that you can have this idea and be convinced that once you get it right and get it out to people then it’s all going to work and you can talk yourself into just as I did in high school, just as I did at Microsoft, spending a year, a year and a half building something that in the end people see it and they’re like, “Ah.”

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s also making me think about how you can make something that clicks, but then the market can shift and it can unclick. And so it’s about being just super conscious of how things are evolving, what’s new, what’s fresh.

Jake Knapp:

That’s right. And a big part of the message of the new book is getting in touch with your customer and getting really crisp about what your belief is, about what the customer needs, what the customer’s problem is, how you can solve it in a special way, get really crisp about that. Put it into the form of a hypothesis, and then test that hypothesis. And you always have to test your hypothesis about the customer because it does change.

The world is constantly changing people’s expectations, their hopes, the solutions available to them, they’re always changing. And that first started to become clear to me at Microsoft as I was working on Encarta. And when I went to go work at Google in the mid two 2000s it was reinforced for me because we were building products there that really were on that edge of changing the way people did things. I worked on the Gmail team and then co-founded the product that became Google Meet.

And as we were doing these new things you’d find that something that you tested one week and it didn’t make sense to people and they’d never try it, and if you kept at it and tried to make it clearer and clearer, and as the world changed and people got more used to new things, hey, you know what, a couple of months later, maybe they were open to it, maybe you got it right and their world changed. And getting that intersection right requires a constant awareness of and experimentation with your customers.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m thinking about the Foundation Sprint and even the book itself, Click, what was the moment that sparked for you that this is necessary? Because there was a lot of talk of know, is Jake going to do Design Sprint version two? Is it going to be like a newer, bigger, better Design Sprint or whatnot? But you went to the thing before. And so what was the moment that you said, “Okay, I need to go figure this out and write this book because that’s what’s needed next.”?

Jake Knapp:

Well, it’s probably overdue for there to be a Design Sprint 2.0 book because I’ve learned things, Douglas, you’ve learned things. It’s been a while that we’ve been running these and we know there are improvements over what’s in the book, but at the end of the day it’s a lot of work to write a book. Having done it a couple of times I wouldn’t do it unless I knew that there was something that is just driving me crazy to not share it with people. That’s getting a little ahead though.

To go back to that moment when I realized something was missing. So I had worked at Google and created the Design Sprint in around 2010. I ran the first one in 2010, and it was starting to think about it in 2009 based on some experiences with Google Meet and with Gmail where I’d run these one week prototype sessions and then tested it with people at the end of the week and saw how powerful that was. Created the Design Sprint, started to formalize it, went to go work at Google Ventures, started running these with founders and startups and did that for five years, wrote the Sprint book.

I left Google and then together with my co-author John Zeratsky and our friend Eli Blee-Goldman, we founded this venture fund Character Capital, and we started working with early stage founders. And at Google Ventures we had gotten further and further away from the early stage as our reputation grew and as we were able to invest more money in later stage companies, that was always the strategy with Google Ventures, was to put a lot of money to work. But that means later stage companies and those companies don’t have what for me is really the heart of it, the cherry on top.

The most fun part is the earliest moments when you’re shaping the direction, you’re trying to figure out if you can find product market fit in the first place. So with Character Capital, we fast-forward to 2020, 20 21, and I’m starting to work with early stage founders. Again, it’s so fun. And I started to notice occasionally we would do a brand sprint with them or just have a conversation a sideline conversation in the Design Sprint and started to realize that there were some really basic fundamental things that all founders think about and have some sense of, but rarely have made crisp.

And let me be specific about what those are. It’s rare that on the founding team, every person on the founding team, let’s say there’s three people in an early stage startup, it’s rare that all three people will say the same thing if you say who’s your target customer, but they’ll all define it in the exact same way. It’s rare that they’ll all three tell you what the customer’s problem is that they’re trying to solve. It’s rare that they’ll have an immediate list of here’s our top three to five competitors and this is the one who’s the most important.

It’s rare that they’ll be able to quickly rattle off for you, here’s our advantage that we have, the insight, the special capability that the competition doesn’t have. And they all have a general sense of those things, but it’s rare that all of that is super crisp. And unfortunately it’s also rare that they’re really crisp about their differentiation. What’s going to make our solution so much better than those alternatives, those competitors, the ways people are doing things today? What’s going to make our solution so much better that it’s going to make the alternatives look like junk and people will switch to ours?

So they may have thought about differentiation in terms of industry or technology, but it’s rare to have this crisp vision of the customer perception that we’re trying to create. And so it just came up from these conversations, and I remember starting to think we don’t have a good tool for getting at this. The brand Sprint was actually almost the closest tool that we had. And the brand Sprint is all around figuring out how do you want to express yourself through visuals, through language? How do you compare yourself?

You think about car brands and are they more friendly or more of an authority or whatever. And so it’s not the right tool. And so that was the genesis of this first notion that there’s something missing before the Design Sprint. People need to get crisp about what their hypothesis is. And if you look at the teams who have had the best Design Sprints that we’ve worked with, they had clarity about their hypothesis, and it made the results of their sprint better because they knew what they needed to get at, they knew what they needed to assess when they prototyped and tested.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s making me think about how you mentioned that even the simple stuff is not easy, these seemingly obvious basics that teams consistently struggle with. And so I’m curious, why do you think they find them so challenging?

Jake Knapp:

I think it’s hard because it’s like you’re a fish and there’s water all around you, or we don’t think about the air we’re breathing. It’s just there are so many things to do when you’re starting a company. There’s so many things to figure out. You’ve got to think about incorporating your company and making payroll and all of these millions of things. Can we get the domain name that we need? And there’s just a million things. You’re trying to talk to customers, you’re trying to get customers, you’re trying to build something.

And so of course you thought about what you’re doing, you thought about who your customer is and what kind of thing you’re building, but it’s that difference between being at the 100-foot level and being at the one-foot level and being really specifically crisp about it. I think people talk about it and then they move forward doing those first early steps of a project. And if you’re in a large company, the same thing happens. You start off and you say, “Oh, I think this would be an interesting opportunity for us to go after.” And pretty soon you’re building your team.

The engineers are chomping at the bit to write code. You don’t want to slow them down, you’re writing a PRD. And in all of this we have a lot to do. We have to create big documents, we have to create lines and lines and lines of code. We’ve got to do all this stuff that the simple kernel gets obscured. And something that I believe is true about the most successful products that we’ve ever seen in the world is that they have clarity about that simple kernel and they don’t lose that clarity. And so the thing that they set out to do in the beginning is, we’re going to solve this problem for people in a radically differentiated way.

It’s so different from what anyone else has seen before. It’s a cliche to talk about the iPhone, but it’s a clear example of this. So much easier to use, so much more powerful than the products that had come before. And they set out to do that and then that’s what they build and that’s what they talk about when the product comes out. And great products, great solutions do that. And it is actually hard to keep clarity about the simple basics of what you’re offering and to nail it in the right way. And so yeah, I think, I think it’s just true that it’s difficult.

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s talk about differentiation. What are some of the mistakes that startups make when trying to differentiate? And how can the two-by-two and clearer project principles help them?

Jake Knapp:

The biggest mistake, I think, is just that we don’t realize how hard it is to stand out in the market and to make a compelling case to people that they should spend any time even thinking about what you’re doing. And so I think the more we go along in life and we have the experience of creating things and offering them out into the world, the more we’ll get the experience of that not going the way we hope. Sometimes just as that happened to me in high school and it happened with Encarta and I’ve seen it happen with all kinds of things over and over again.

Quite often we come up with what we think is going to be a lovely idea, something people get really excited about, we show it to them and they shrug. And it’s not that people hate us, it’s just that there’s so much going on in everyone’s life. And we have limited time, we have limited energy so to spend the calories even thinking about adding something new into your work world, your life, whatever, it’s something we don’t want to do. We don’t want to do it unless it’s really compelling and really catchy and really just, gosh, I’d be crazy not to try this thing.

So even to listen to the sales pitch is a lot. Even to look at your marketing page is a lot to ask. And then you get past that to try the thing that’s a lot. Gosh, this untrusted thing from the startup I’ve never heard of, I’m going to sign up for it, oof, that’s tough. Even if you’re talking about early adopters, tough to get them to make that step. There’s so many things being offered all the time. And then to get people to truly adopt it, that’s tough too.

So I think the mistake that we all tend to make about differentiation is to undervalue just how fantastic something has to sound to penetrate through our natural armor against trying anything new, against listening to any new pitch, against all of the constant messages and shouting that’s coming at us all the time from our inbox, from the news, from wherever you go, everybody’s trying to grab your attention. And to get through that it’s just got to be really, really special. And you should not stop experimenting with your differentiation until you’re extremely confident that I’ve got a message now that’s getting through the noise and people are excited about it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do you ever find that startups will claim a differentiator that their competitor might claim or put them in a bucket that a competitor would never say or the market would never perceive them in that way just because it’s an ideal way of looking at it? And if so, what are your tips for helping them break out of that way of thinking and being more authentic maybe?

Jake Knapp:

I think it’s quite common that if we set out to differentiate ourselves, our products ourselves, you know, individually or whatever, and we say, this is what makes me special, that we might not actually have the right viewpoint on what we’re offering. Let’s use the example of speed. You might think that, gosh, the way our product delivers something it’s really fast and that’s going to catch customers attention, but we might find that when we actually offer it to customers, when we run experiments that they’re not moved by that. That doesn’t matter to them.

They’re like, “Well, the alternative is already fast enough.” I’m not excited enough to change my approach by speed. And actually, I’ll give you a concrete example of this. So we worked with a company called Orbital Materials. They’re in our portfolio. It’s a startup who was founded by a guy from DeepMind who had worked on this really cool project where they developed an AI to analyze X-rays for trying to detect breast cancer. And they were able to beat radiologists at diagnosing breast cancer from X-rays.

And so this guy’s a great mind and a great computer scientist, and he thought, “I would love to apply AI to designing molecules so that we can find replacements for jet fuel and cobalt.” And things that are hard to develop today, or rare, expensive. If we could design molecules, he thinks we can solve a lot of problems that the world either faces now or is going to face very soon in terms of shortages of items or high costs items. So he starts off this company, builds an amazing team of chemists and computer scientists. And then to make this business actually work, to make this vision actually work, they’ve got to be able to work with the chemical manufacturers.

And so to go and set up a pilot program to get a design partner who will work with you as you’re designing these chemicals and hopefully finding some that work and actually be willing to say, “Okay, now we’re going to go through and manufacture some of these and see if they scale,” he’s got to make the case to these companies who have been coming up with their products in the traditional way, which takes years of trial and error through traditional chemistry. They’ve been doing it that way for 100 years.

And the promise that this new way of doing things is faster or higher tech or smarter, which on the surface, if you listen to the story, the way I tell it seems, yeah, well this new way has got to be faster, it must be smart and high-tech, but if you’re a chemical manufacturer and you’ve been doing it a hundred years the same way and it’s working for you, well that doesn’t sound. The old way of doing things I don’t have to change anything to make it keep working that way, it’s reliable, I trust it. So how do you reframe the world and make this new way of doing things sound appealing?

And so they had to try a bunch of different differentiators before they hit on this is the thing that’s actually compelling to people. And it was that they were going to be able to produce higher quality products and that those products would actually be more reliable. That it would be a more reliable development chain. And then they had to prove those two points. But they had to first hit on where’s the sort of the in the armor? Where’s the gap where we might be able to penetrate through the defenses that we all have against new stuff?

And they thought those are the spots they first identified as being vulnerable and then they had to say, “Okay, now we’ve got to prove that we can do that.” And then guess what? Like that ends up shaping the product that you build because first and foremost, you’re now trying to develop a product that will deliver on that promise of reliability, that will deliver on that promise of higher quality products. So that’s why I think what it looks like in real life is that we often, our first guess what we think might be compelling isn’t compelling, and we have to keep experimenting and tweaking until we find the thing that breaks through.

Douglas Ferguson:

You first introduced the idea of work alone together in the book Sprint, and it makes a strong comeback and click. And so I’m curious, why do you think this technique continues to resonate and proves so effective for teams, especially compared to our default methods or brainstorming and the ways that people typically approach these challenges?

Jake Knapp:

Well, you’ve experienced it. You’ve done this work alone together thing I know a lot and it is a surprisingly simple and powerful shift when you have a group of people. There’s some fantastic magic that happens when you have a group of people together trying to solve a problem. You’ve got different viewpoints, you’ve got the sense of perhaps inspiration people will get from one another, you’ve got also a little hint of competition that Douglas is in here and he’s going to come up with some good ideas, I need to bring my A game if I’m going to have anything worthwhile to contribute.

It’s different for me being on my own now with no one watching. Now Douglas is watching I’ve got to do a bit better. And all of those elements are really healthy, but they actually get watered down and messed up by the unfettered group brainstorm. Everyone can talk, anything goes conversation that we will default into as just as humans. We’ll all default into just talking our way through a problem. And that talking our way through our problem is subject to people who are really great at making a sales pitch for their idea. Their ideas will tend to be overvalued.

Folks who are introverted or for whatever reason, just maybe don’t think well when other people are talking, and I put myself in both of those categories, they’re not going to do as well in the environment of a group brainstorm. And then we have all kinds of cognitive biases that come in. So like the last idea that somebody said well that’s going to have recency bias helping it out, or the more somebody pitches their idea, we’re going to start to have confirmation bias. We’re going to associate ideas with people rather than with the merits of the idea itself.

And we’re going to be limited to the verbal, the audio only description of the idea and not the content of the idea. So when we work alone together, I mean, simply what happens is you say, okay, everybody be quiet, here’s the prompt, here’s the question that we’re trying to answer first and now I want you to spend some time thinking about it quietly writing down your solution or your answer. It could be an answer on a sticky note, it could be a back of the napkin style sketch of something or a detailed solution as we do in Design Sprints.

And then we’re going to review all of those, but they’re going to be anonymous and we’re going to look at them in silence, and then we know we’re going to vote on those and then the decider’s going to choose and maybe she or he is going to say, “Hey, there’s a bunch of votes here and a bunch of votes there, but I like this one. Could somebody tell me why? What I’m missing here.” And so then maybe the kind of conversation you have at that point is so much richer, the contribution, everybody’s been able to contribute, they haven’t had to sales pitch and think at the same time, there’s more detail.

Just everything about it is better. And I know I don’t have to sell you on this because I think you’ve been doing this and modifying it and finding your own new ways to apply it, but it’s super powerful. For me, honestly, it goes back to writing code and procedural thinking, trying to break down a function into what are the steps that need to happen to make it work. And when you run a request, the computer, the processor, it’s got to do some work. Our brains are the same way. So it’s also partly about creating space where the brain can process and then return something back to you.

And it just makes so much sense and works so much better than the traditional group brainstorm. So yeah, I work alone together. I found myself coming to the point in the new book, which I have a finished copy of right here. I found myself coming to the point where I was like, “Gosh, you know what? I’m going to have to reintroduce that idea because I can’t assume that everybody else is already sold on that. And I got a little more into it in Qlik and drew some cartoons and tried to really drive the point home of why it makes such a difference.

Douglas Ferguson:

The decider role also came back for round two.

Jake Knapp:

Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

How can facilitators engage the decider? That’s something I’ve always been really curious about, ensuring that the decider’s voice is influential without overpowering others, and how do we guide them toward making clear decisions?

Jake Knapp:

Yeah, if you’re facilitating the decider is your best friend. I mean, not that you have to cozy up to them in some way, but just that the decider makes it so much easier to navigate through a problem with a group of people because at any point that you need to, you can flip to the decider and say, “Hey, can you tell us which of these options is the best?” Or “Can you narrow this down now to a field of three where we can zero in on.” Whatever.

You’ve got a lot of possibility with a decider to snap out of what becomes an open-ended conversation or an open-ended debate at any point, the decider is your key to moving on to the next level, unlocking the door to the next room that you have to pass through to solve a problem. And in the structures that I set up, whether it’s the Design Sprint or now the Foundation Sprint, I’m very intentionally setting the decider as the lock opener into the next room as we go from one batch of activities to the next and to the next and to the next.

And if you’re a facilitator and you’re either running a Foundation Sprint or crafting your own structure, I think that’s the first, the simplest thing is just to use the decider when you’re at a point when it would be otherwise hard to make progress they make the call, they move things along. And you can call on them even before your process is ready for it if you need to break a tie or to tell us, “Do you feel like we should spend three more minutes talking about this or have we heard enough?”

I mean, anything goes. The thing about the decider is that the method has to create enough space for everyone to contribute that it doesn’t just become a decider monologue going all the way through. And so for me, it’s a balancing act between now if I think about a small startup and we think about, hey, there might be three, five, 10 people in this early stage startup, the CEO’s usually the decider, although not always, depends on the content of the sprint, but the CEO’s voice is incredibly important here. We don’t want to make a decision that subverts the CEO, what she wants.

We shouldn’t have the group’s decision, a democracy subvert what the CEO wants to have happen because it’s her company, her role to make those decisions. But at the same time, we should provide her with as many tools as possible to make the best decision possible. And that means getting something good from everybody that she can evaluate and getting some sense of the group’s evaluation of those options. So as we talked through the work alone together structure, it’s everybody comes up with their own proposal in silence, everybody reviews and votes in silence.

Sometimes even people will write down their decision or their proposal on a sticky note in silence, and then the decider makes the call and she’s encouraged to draw out those conversations. As the facilitator, you can intercede there and when you see that maybe the decider hasn’t paid enough attention to this stuff, you can slow things down or speed them up, and I think that’s one of the key powers of the facilitator. But the structure itself also should always elevate competing opinions for the decider, should always give pause to the decider before she makes a decision.

But you also have to be really careful as a facilitator that you don’t let that methodology overwhelm the decider’s intuition. At the end of the day, the most important thing about the way that I work with teams, the Foundation Sprint where you’re creating a hypothesis or the Design Sprint where you’re testing that hypothesis, is that we need the decider’s intuition to get great. It may not be great in the beginning, but we need it to get to the place where it’s great because the deciders ultimately are predictor of what’s going to work.

They’re going to make a prediction and we’re going to follow executing on that prediction, and then we’re going to hope it comes true in the end. There’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So in these sprints we’re trying to zero in and identify the decider’s intuition. We’re trying to tune it and give it every advantage of the team, but ultimately the deciders forming the hypothesis and then the decider saying, “This is the form of solution, I think will prove that hypothesis.”

And every time we run an experiment and test with customers we’re showing, well, here’s what the world said. It said, “You’re wrong.” And when that happens that’s a powerful moment for the decider to get better, for their intuition to improve and improve and improve. The success of our product ultimately will be the result of how well we can inform and improve our decider’s intuition or how strong it is to begin with and how much we can isolate and clarify it. So anyway, that’s a lot, but as a facilitator, that’s what I see my job is doing.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love the callback to the swords and sorcery games and the decider unlocking the next room.

Jake Knapp:

It’s a quest. It’s always a quest.

Douglas Ferguson:

That it is. Maybe there’s another book title in the future.

Jake Knapp:

It could be. It could be a good one. I like that word. I always a big fan of a tribe called Quest and so the word quest is just always a special.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk about magic lenses for a moment. You talk about it being an activity or a way to explore conflicting opinions, which I think is really important when we’re bringing groups together and harnessing the power of diversity. So how can facilitators burst guide teams through this process?

Jake Knapp:

Magic lenses is an activity that if I do say so myself, I’m really proud of it. I think that for the past, I suppose 15 years, you could kind of boil down what I’ve been doing with Design Sprints and now the Foundation Sprint, you can boil it all down to helping people make decisions about things that are hard to decide on. And part of that is time boxing, so you accelerate those decisions, but part of it also is evaluating multiple paths, making sure we’ve clarified what those paths are and identifying them in a Design Sprint that’s sketching different solutions that we might prototype and build in a Foundation Sprint.

On day two of the Foundation Sprint, it’s about identifying the approaches that we might take to solving this problem. So not the specific solution, but like are we building a plugin for somebody else’s software? Are we building standalone software? Are we building a dashboard? Are we building a chatbot? There’s all these different broad paths that we might take and then in a Design Sprint we’ll get really detailed on, okay, what’s the form of that thing look like? And making a choice like this, when I thought about it for these early stage founders, it’s you have the opportunity to pre pivot.

Often you’re a founder and you start building something, it’s just not working out, and like me showing my friend Ian, this computer game, I realize I’ve got to go in a different direction. I’ve got to pivot. Well, if you could have that moment of thinking, so what are my other options? If you could do that first, you might either have more conviction about the path you’re already on or you might say, “Gosh, this other one, when I evaluated in the context of my differentiation and everything I’ve been thinking about with the basics of my project, I actually think I have a better shot at this other path I’m going to pre pivot.”

Anyway, that’s a huge decision to make. And even though in a Foundation Sprint we’re only forming a hypothesis, we’re going to experiment right away with a Design Sprint and if I haven’t made it clear already, the idea is you run this two-day Foundation Sprint and then you go right away into five-day Design Sprints to test it, to run the experiments. But even if it’s just a week at a time experiment it’s still a big decision. We want it to be very carefully considered. So the idea with magic lenses is to use two by two charts, that old business school, standby to plot out different viewpoints on our options.

So let’s say we’ve got three different options for how we might approach this problem, option A, option B, option C, we’re going to look at those through the customer lens. What solves the customer’s problem in the best way possible? And plot that out on a two by two. Think of the two factors that for us are most important for the customer solution. And which of these is the easiest to use and solves their problem in the best way? And that’d be in the top right. Maybe option A is in the top right there. And then we think about the money lens. Well, we’re going to need to turn this into a business.

So which of these has the highest long-term value to a customer? What do we suspect people would pay for the most? Which has the largest possible audience of customers? And now maybe option B is in the top right. And option A in this one maybe it’s in the top right quadrant, but it’s not pegged right into the corner there and option C is somewhere in the mix. And now we look at growth. Not only what are the most potential customers, but what do we think is the easiest to adopt? And now we look at the pragmatic view, which of these is the easiest to build, the fastest to build?

We look at our differentiation. If our differentiators are reliability and high quality, which of these approaches best delivers on those factors? And then there are always other lenses particular to a company. So people can create their own two by two charts. What happens if we’ve color coded option A, option B and option C? You can imagine these charts side by side by side, we zoom out on those and we look at where the colors are, you can often see a pattern often the same option is in the top right in every chart. That actually happens a good amount of the time and you think, well “Gosh, clearly we can feel good about pursuing that option.”

Sometimes it’s a mix. And that’s actually helpful too, because if we’re feeling conflicted about proceeding on our project, it might be that it’s because it’s just not clearly as good at growth as it is at the pragmatic view or as it is at differentiation. And so now we know growth is going to be a challenge, but maybe we still have conviction. Maybe when it’s mixed we’ll say one of these lenses is truly the most important. And even though we don’t have consensus among all the lenses, this one is so important. That’s the way that we’re going to make this decision. For us, it’s all about the customer.

We’re just going to deliver the thing that is best for the customer and trust that the rest of it will work itself out. Any of those is a viable way to move through magic lenses, make a decision on an approach and graduate to having your founding hypothesis. If you’re the facilitator helping teams to move through that is a really special moment. There is just mechanics of getting people through plotting charts, and we can talk about that if you like. It helps to do one axis at a time and to have the decider or one person who’s an expert on each domain talk about those charts.

But what’s really special about this activity is that you make a very complex situation, visual. You capture it in a way that the brain can parse, whereas when all of these factors are in our heads, it’s very hard to have clarity about what’s going on through all these different lenses. As a facilitator, your guidance to the decider about what you see, about where you think they should give a little bit of extra care, if it’s consensus, it’s easy, but when there’s not consensus deciding, okay, is it the best idea here if I have the whole team vote on which lens is most important?

Will that give the decider the sort of pause that they need to consider this? How do I make sure that the democracy of the team doesn’t outweigh the intuition of the decider? And this is an area where your judgment, your expertise, your experience, your gauge of human nature and interaction and what’s going on all become really important. It’s a very powerful moment. And it’s just potentially, I think, a super tool that you can use not only in the Foundation Sprint, but in any situation where people face a complex decision. And the stakes are pretty high for getting that decision right.

Douglas Ferguson:

You have a gift for simplifying complex decisions, whether it’s exploring these conflicting opinions or selecting what to prototype into these clear step-by-step recipes.

Jake Knapp:

Well, thank you.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m super curious, what’s your secret for turning these tough, abstract decisions into straightforward processes anybody can follow?

Jake Knapp:

I was talking to my son, Luke, recently about, you know, life and careers and work and he was talking about there’s a piece of advice that folks sometimes give which is follow your bliss, and I am actually a bit of a skeptic of that advice. I think that following what’s completely your bliss is telling a startup founder to like, “Well just build whatever like sounds fun to you.” And that could work out you. There are certainly examples where that does work out, but it really only works out if there’s a market for your bliss.

And so I told him, I thought perhaps a different way of thinking about it is, you should be aware of your bliss, you should make time for your bliss to plug another book of mine. Your bliss may be a hobby, but you must find a way to become obsessed with the thing that you do. If you can become obsessed with it, if there’s enough interest and excitement that you can really, for the long haul, dig into this thing and be obsessed with getting it right, then that’s I think a more likely predictor of both your satisfaction and happiness as an individual and that your work will find a market of people, an audience of people.

That it’ll matter to people. And for better or for worse, I became obsessed with the beginnings of projects and those decisions that people made and I just can’t stop thinking about it. And it drives me nuts when I’m in a conversation and we start to make a decision and sometimes it’s me who’s screwing it up, but I can tell that in some way we’re screwing up the way where we’re processing it. We’re taking too long, we’re not considering enough options. It just feels like, “Oh man, something’s going wrong here.”

Maybe I’m not naturally even like the most decisive or naturally the most analytical or rational person, part of this has just been trying to decode what’s going on in my own brain and try to make those meetings and those moments go right. And I would have thought that I’d be done with it by now, but it just seems like I still am uncovering parts where I’m like, “Oh, I want to fix that too.” So I’m just obsessive and gosh, if it’s helpful for folks that’s fabulous because I at this point can’t stop.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. I’ve got a few rapid fire ones here to end on, so here we go. Beyond the example in the book, have you ever used a funny or memorable eject lever message to carve out focus for a good emergency?

Jake Knapp:

I have migraine headaches and I don’t have them very bad compared to a lot of people who have them, but if you have migraines, you might know that there’s a pre migraine part and a post migraine part, they affect your whole body and your whole brain in a way that goes beyond the headache. And in fact, for me, often there is no headache. I’m really lucky in that way. There’s often no headache, but there’s still a mental fog that happens and body aches and I mean, it’s wild.

I may have overplayed the effect of the mental fog at times to buy myself time to think something through, to list out my options, analyze them, to perhaps work with folks. And that’s an eject lever that I have used from decisions in the past might, if you are talking to me and I need to make a decision about something and I say that I have a migraine now when I would need to get back to you in a couple of days, it might just be that I need time to think. And actually, now that I say it, I don’t know why I’m not just honest about that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Just you can never confirm nor deny that you have a migraine. Amazing. Well, okay, this is a fun one. So you compare differentiation to pizza toppings, and if the founding hypothesis were a pizza, what are some essential ingredients that always belong and what are some questionable toppings that teams insist on including?

Jake Knapp:

Yeah. Well, I talk about it because differentiation is something that if you get it right, it’s still probably not going to be the thing for everybody. Not everybody agrees on the perfect pizza. So we talk about the iPhone as this product that’s such a huge success story. And yet lots of people choose not to get an iPhone, they get something else. And so pepperoni pizza is not for everybody. Some folks are like, “I need a different flavor.” And so part of differentiation is getting the ingredients right.

And when we talk about the founding hypothesis it’s if we solve this problem for this customer with this approach, then they’re going to choose it over this competitor because we’re going to be different in these ways. So you’ve got some variables there. The customer, the problem, the approach you’re taking, the competitors and the differentiators, and each of those ingredients they are important, but you might be wrong about them. So when you form your founding hypothesis, you might be sure that your customers have this problem.

And then you might start talking to customers and realize, “Man, the people we’re talking to, actually, they’re not the right people at all.” And so that’s almost like the cheese. That’s the thing that seems the most basic, well, who’s the customer? And you start talking to people and you’re like, “Oh man, these people are lactose intolerant.” Or these people they like feta, whatever. You’re off base with this thing that you wouldn’t even considering it. You’re just like, “Everybody loves mozzarella.” And well man, maybe they don’t or maybe your mozzarella is not good enough or whatever.

And so any one of those, actually, I can think of examples with any one where we’ve seen startups go out and realize, oh, the customer is right, but the problem, this is not a problem that’s a big enough deal for them. It’s not painful enough for them to warrant trying something new or we have the competition wrong. We thought it was this and actually it’s just that they’re doing nothing. They’re not aware of all these solutions that exist because they just really don’t care, again, which could be back to the problem’s not that important. The differentiators is one that I always harp on because it’s so commonly missed and it’s something you have to work at to get right. But any one of those things could be a bit off, which is why we test. That’s why we experiment.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s why it’s a hypothesis.

Jake Knapp:

That’s why it’s a hypothesis. Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you could wave a magic wand and instantly grant every facilitator or startup founder one essential insight from Qlik, what would it be?

Jake Knapp:

I think that the most essential insight is you cannot take for granted the basics of your business, of your strategy, of what you’re doing. In a startup, in a big project, in any organization, even in things that we do in our lives, we very quickly become blind to the simple core underlying things. And we can very quickly forget that the most important thing for a startup for a big project is that in the end that people care about it, that it clicks, that it does the thing we hope it will do for people.

And it’s worth taking time to reexamine those basic obvious things, get them really crisp. And so if you’re a facilitator, you should never hesitate to ask the dumb questions. And this book is full of dumb questions that I was embarrassed to ask. And so I wrote a book and created a framework to help me ask those dumb questions. And there’s this set of dumb questions, but there are a lot of dumb questions out there that if you’re a facilitator you’re actually in a really special and unique situation where you can ask those.

You’re coming in as an outsider and you can say, “Hey, look, I know nothing. So could you explain that acronym you just used? Could you tell me why we’re doing this thing?” You can ask those almost rude basic questions. And I promise you, 80 to 100% of the people on the team who should know the answer to it, they’re going to thank you for asking those, for clarifying the basics. You should never be shy about asking the simplest questions. And it’s always wise to rewind and get those basic questions nailed first. The assumptions we make are often where we fail.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s such a gift to a team when you can shine a light on some of those things that maybe they’ve been afraid to bring up because it’s like, “I think we’re supposed to have this figured out, but I don’t know if I want to admit that we’re so far off base here.”

Jake Knapp:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And there are just far too many situations where those oversights, not through any malice on anybody’s part or even really malpractice, it’s just our human nature that we’re like, “Okay, good, we know what we’re doing, let’s go.” And those oversights end up being the thing that makes it fail in the end. And what’s a bummer about that, I mean, sure, from a Machiavellian perspective as an investor or a capitalist perspective, I guess, I’m just hoping that if we get those things right, your business is more likely to succeed and if I’ve invested in your business, then I’m going to make money in the end so I’m very self-interested in getting this stuff right.

But it’s most costly in the wasted human energy and time that goes into things that people in the end don’t care about. And that is what’s the most frustrating to me, is seeing people pour their energy with the hope that it’s going to pay off. I’m putting all of this time in, but in the end it’s going to be worth it because we’re going to solve this problem for customers, and then in the end when people shrug, it’s just so demoralizing. You’ve lost all that effort. You can’t 100% solve that, but if we get the basics right and we experiment to prove to ourselves to every extent possible that they’re right we have a chance of saving a lot of human effort, and that is very worthwhile.

Douglas Ferguson:

Very well said, sir. And I think that brings us to our end. And I just want to say thanks for the conversation, Jake. It’s always a pleasure being with you, and I look forward to our next time.

Jake Knapp:

Always a pleasure to speak to you as well, Douglas. And listeners, if you made it this far, check out the clickbook.com and see what you think of the book. We’d love to hear what you think after giving it a read.

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 Finding The Click appeared first on Voltage Control.

“You can talk the talk all you want, but the group is going to know if you’re not walking the walk. As the facilitator, you have to be the one that’s ready to lead in what you’re asking them to do.”- Caterina Rodriguez

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Caterina Rodriguez (Cat), a facilitator consultant and strategic leader at ADL. Cat shares her journey from anti-bias education to organizational effectiveness, emphasizing the importance of authentic connections in facilitation. She discusses the challenges of adopting a new facilitation style and highlights the transformative power of collaborative group experiences. Cat stresses the need for facilitators to embrace uncertainty and model genuine engagement, advocating for a method-agnostic approach. The episode underscores the value of building trust and fostering inclusive, change-ready cultures within organizations.

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About the Guest

Caterina Rodriguez is a facilitator, consultant, and strategic leader dedicated to helping organizations build inclusive, change-ready cultures. With a background in program and learning design, facilitation, and organizational change, Caterina specializes in designing experiences that foster collaboration, co-creation, and meaningful outcomes. As the Director of Strategic Initiatives & Continuous Learning at ADL, she leads learning and capacity-building initiatives to strengthen organizational effectiveness. In her consulting work, Caterina designs and facilitates experiences that foster collaboration, co-creation, and strategic alignment to help teams navigate complexity and drive lasting impact. From guiding executive teams through complex change to developing large-scale programs, facilitating high-stakes conversations, and equipping teams with facilitation tools and leadership skills, Caterina enables organizations to build capacity for alignment, collaboration, and long-term 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 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 Caterina Rodriguez, a facilitator, consultant, and strategic leader dedicated to helping organizations build inclusive change ready cultures. Cat serves as the director of strategic initiatives and continuous learning at ADL, where she leads learning and capacity building initiatives to strengthen organizational effectiveness.

In her consulting work, Cat specializes in designing and facilitating experiences that foster collaboration, co-creation, and strategic alignment, helping teams navigate complexity and drive lasting change. Welcome to the show, Cat.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Thanks so much for having me, Douglas. Excited to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

So great to have you. To get started, let’s hear a little bit about how you started your facilitation journey.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, so I’ll go back to right as I started working after I graduated grad school, and I had just started as a program manager at ADL. And I was in charge of both managing some of our anti-bias education programs locally, but I also would sometimes go out and facilitate them myself.

And that was the first time that I had ever facilitated, not presented, or given a training or a talk, where the majority of the program was actually focused on creating discussions, walking the groups through really interactive activities. And I remember getting onboarded to deliver these programs, and it blew my mind a little bit. I had never, not just not facilitated, I had never been in a session that was facilitated up to that point. Every experience I had had, had been very much kind of the talking at you, presenting at you style,

Douglas Ferguson:

What blew your mind the most?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Honestly, seeing the difference in the amount of engagement from participants, and the fact that by the end of the session, they had done just as much, if not actually a whole lot more talking than I had, and something inside of me clicked. I just went, that felt right. It wasn’t, I’m here to teach you what I know, but rather all of a sudden I kind of noticed this shift of, I’m here to help you uncover what you already know and what you’ve experienced, and then start to become a little bit more aware of, okay, then how do I continue growing from where I’m currently at?

And so all of a sudden it became less about me and more about the group that I was working with. And that felt super right, because I had never thought about learning being this co-creative process, versus the more traditional style of learning, which is more, there’s one or two people, right? They hold some kind of expertise, and you just get all the knowledge that you need from them.

But I think when it comes to anything like whether it’s, you know, anti-bias education at the time, or now a lot more, you know, learning and development or organizational effectiveness work that I do, a lot of that is really around the messiness of people. And so it’s really not nearly as effective to talk at people about that messiness rather than actually helping them explore that messiness, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

It does. I want to come back to your point about it feeling right. When did you first notice that feeling? Was it when you were in the training, and learning these techniques, and how they were going to structure the time with students? Or was it when you were facilitating it for the first time? Or like when did you notice that?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, so during the onboarding when I was getting trained, I think it was just a whole lot of anxiety. So that was definitely not the moment that it felt right. It was just a totally new approach to me. So I was absorbing. And we had tons of space to practice, but I think that always an onboarding always feels kind of like, okay, well this is artificial, so of course it’s going to go in a nice way.

For me, it clicked the first time that I actually got out into the field, where I was working through my agenda with the students, and all of a sudden I noticed that it became a group conversation, and things were starting to surface that weren’t necessarily directly related to the question I asked, but rather things were building up and up and up and people were responding to what other people were saying, and digging a little bit deeper and asking questions of each other. And so for me, it was the first time that I actually got out on the field and worked with the group.

I’m painting a very idyllic picture. It did not go perfectly right at all, but just the drastic shift in experiencing that was really wild. And so after that first time I was hooked. I was super hungry to really start to take facilitation more of as a craft versus just, you know, this is just a particular style in which I deliver this specific program for this specific organization. And so I started to, kind of, start to pay attention to facilitation is something more than just how to do something, but rather a whole, you know, mindset shift, approach shift, externally. I hadn’t quite yet, because now in my current role, I’m fully internal at the time, right? I was still associating facilitation with this is how I work with external stakeholders. And it hadn’t quite sunk in that this is just in general an approach to working with people regardless of whether they’re on my team, outside of the organization, so on and so forth.

So yeah, I would say the first time I went out in the field was when it clicked, but it was also when I very quickly realized I had a whole lot more to learn and practice.

Douglas Ferguson:

Coming back to those feelings of anxiety during the training and prep, how much of this new way of working, or the mystery of like approaching training in this way, how much did that have an impact in the anxiety or the uncertainty?

Caterina Rodriguez:

I mean a whole lot, honestly. It really leans into all the skills that, I think traditionally they’re called soft skills, when honestly they’re just leadership skills, right? And so the unfamiliarity with facilitation as a style, as an approach, as a practice was a big part of it. Because it was two things that I was learning. It was the content and the kind of the subject matter piece of the programs while at the same time learning how to deliver it in an entirely different way.

And for me, the subject matter, that’s easy, right? You study, you learn it, you’re good. But learning an entirely different way to engage groups, that takes time to craft and to kind of find your authentic voice. Because that was another piece too, that because it was so new to me and I was immediately implementing it on the ground at the same time, I was still looking at some of the other facilitators I was working with because we always did it in a co-facilitation pair. And so, I was trying to pull from the best things that I was noticing, but I hadn’t quite found my own authentic facilitation style and voice. I was still mimicking for a long time.

Douglas Ferguson:

What helped you move past the mimicking? Were there steps that led to something that felt more authentic?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, honestly, a lot of trial and error, and this is going to sound really funny, trial and error with actual groups of participants. So one of the things that, you know, I’ll come back to that I so appreciate now about voltage controls or community of practice, but I didn’t have that back then. There were no spaces to practice, to unpack, to ask questions of facilitation as a practice.

I just got out there a lot in my role as a program manager. I didn’t necessarily have to be out in the field facilitating that much. We had a core group of independent contractors that we would deploy, but I liked getting out there. And so I would co-facilitate quite a bit.

And it was through a lot of trial and error and feeling and seeing the reactions of the groups to me, that kind of started to cue me in on that I wasn’t bringing my authentic self into it. And that is a very hard realization, all of a sudden, to notice that the group you’re working with is kind of almost calling your bluff a little bit.

I started to just kind of take a little more risks in terms of just showing up as myself. I wasn’t trying to be as gentle as maybe the facilitator that comes off as almost like a super caretaker. I wasn’t trying to be the most boisterous, like hilarious comedian in the room. I wasn’t trying to be the most elevated of subject matter experts. I just kind of showed up as Cat, and all of a sudden I started to realize that participants were responding to me entirely differently. They were starting to feel like they were making genuine connections with me. And I noticed that in the work itself, it started to lead to much more interesting conversations, because all of a sudden they noticed that I wasn’t performing. They noticed that I was just there to connect with them and help them connect with each other, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

It does. And you know, it’s much easier for people to connect when we’re able to model what connection is like.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Definitely. That is, honestly, the biggest thing in facilitation across the board. Whether it was previously leading anti-bias education programs or now doing a lot of organizational effectiveness work, it is about authentic connection across the board, because that is going to be what kind of… You can say that you’ve designed a container or a space for people to come in and you know, build up that trust and do these things together.

But you can talk the talk all you want. The group is going to know if you’re not walking the walk, essentially. And I do think as the facilitator creating that container, you have to be the one that’s ready to lead in what you’re asking them to do, at the end of the day. So for me, modeling that connection is huge.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know, I was thinking about the comment you made earlier on the shift between anti-bias to org effectiveness, and I’m curious what led to that shift? What gave you the inspiration and confidence and what were the bricks that were laid to get you there?

Caterina Rodriguez:

So I had started to get a little bit involved with helping deliver our Train the Trainer, which is our internal onboarding program when we hire new staff or new independent contractors for our programming. And so I became part of the behind the scenes team that helps people learn about facilitation, and I absolutely loved it.

Quickly thereafter, I shifted from being on our regional team to our national education team, and that’s when I became the director of our anti-bias programs. And half of my job was around the program management piece, but the other half became very quickly a lot of this internal onboarding and capacity building for facilitating our programming. And that was my favorite part of the job. Like, I absolutely adored starting to work more internally to teach people about facilitation and create spaces for them to practice, start to bring to the team new designs and methods that were out there. Or in the anti-bias field, you’re leading really fraught conversations that have only gotten more polarized with time.

Starting to think about how do I help staff and contractors be able to lean into the inevitable conflict and uncertainty that’s going to come up in those spaces, with practices like how do we ask curious questions, how do we reframe, how do we actually throw it back to the group? And use the wisdom of the group, things like that to help the group probe deeper as opposed to constantly having them turn to you. Like you hold all the answers, so what do you think?

I fell in love with teaching people about facilitation. And that part of my portfolio, although it wasn’t my primary role at the time, kept expanding and expanding. So first it started with helping with the Train the Trainer. Then I started leading the Train the Trainer, Covid hit, and I completely redesigned it to be delivered virtually once Covid hit.

And that then kind of stepped me into a completely different echelon of thinking about facilitation, because I’ve been remote since 2018, but there wasn’t a lot of that being done virtually. I was still traveling to help lead Train the Trainers, and then Covid hit and I was like, oh, I now have to reimagine this craft that I absolutely am in love with, into doing it completely virtually. And that’s a whole different beast. That was a really, really fun process to basically have to redesign from the ground up, how do you train people on facilitation, which a lot of people have this concept, oh, you got to be in person and you do the cool things with the sticky notes on the wall, right? To at the time, not just going virtually, but teaching people how to be interactive on Zoom, and how do we do breakouts and this and that. So it took on a whole different technical meeting.

At the same time that I was redesigning this program, I was also having to teach myself a whole lot more about technology than I ever knew. And I’m very much a person that learns by doing. So it’s funny because at the time I look back and think about my biggest anxiety was not even around training facilitators, it was around the virtual piece. And now a majority of the facilitation I do is virtual. And that has started to feel a whole lot more natural to me, because there’s some interesting things around the virtual settings and dynamics that are at play or not at play. But all that to say, I think I started to, the biggest building block was starting to go from helping out with our Train the Trainer to leading it to then redesigning it.

Organically I just started to get more involved in kind of the learning and development side of things. So if someone in our department writes some part of our team released a new piece of content or updated one of our programs or things like that, I would often work with those stakeholders to think about, how do we bring that to our staff in a way that’s engaging and interactive. We don’t just sit them down for a 45-minute PD or professional development session, where we just talk at them and say, here’s the things we updated, or here’s the new information now go do, right? It would be okay, how do we think about you present bite-sized pieces of information and we have an experience, to experience the impact of the thing that we’re going to be asking them to then take to their stakeholders, to the schools, and the campuses, and the community organizations that they partner with on the ground across the regional offices.

So I slowly started to get more involved with the learning and development side of things. And that kind of just continued to grow until last, about almost a year ago now, I really shifted into a fully internal role and stepped away from my program director role where now I sit at this really cool intersection of learning and development program design and organizational effectiveness facilitation. And so it’s fun because I am still housed in my education department with a team that I adore, but I kind of almost act as a consultant to the other departments across the organization, where I basically bring them my expertise on facilitation to help them either deliver information to the organization or recreate their own programs where they’re engaging different stakeholders externally.

It’s been really neat to kind of become this internal, almost like a capability builder, where we’re really trying to help the folks across the organization engage whatever stakeholders they work with in much more effective and interesting ways.

Douglas Ferguson:

What’s been the reception across the organization to this kind of capacity building or even this consultative approach to where you’re providing these abilities? What have you been noticing as far as the reactions and how willing they are to embrace this as an alternative?

Caterina Rodriguez:

I think that at first, people were, no one was ever really resistant. It was more of like, I don’t know what to expect of this. So I think it was just more a little bit of uncertainty and curiosity, and also on my end too. So it’s a brand new role that has never existed, kind of building it as we go kind of deal. And so it also just required a lot of flexibility and nimbleness, to kind of see what comes of it.

As I’ve been working with teams, it’s been really fun because once we’re on the other side of it, they’re like, holy crap, that was really cool and really amazing. And once I’m on the other side of it, I’m like, holy crap, I had no idea that this is what you were doing. We always hear just very high level readouts from different departments. I mean, it’s an organization of I think about 500 people, so it’s not a small one.

And then there’s the other piece too, that in like any good nonprofit setting, we are all probably juggling two to three roles at once. And so, at the end of the day too, anyone is always really happy to get extra capacity or help to do something or help them think about something in a different way. So it’s been really neat.

It’s still a very new role, and we are still very much figuring out how does it show up in different spaces across ADL. But my favorite part of it is that it truly is like this internal consultant. So every project is different. It’s a different puzzle piece to solve, not just because it might be either a different team or different content. Sometimes it’s the same team, but because it’s more about enabling people to do their work better together, it just becomes a whole different beast, right? Like it’s not repetitive, it’s not monotonous. There’s always something new bubbling to the surface to work through or to think about or get curious about.

I would say that that’s been my favorite piece, is just that it is not boring. It’s never the same week to week, which I love. And it’s also one of the things that I love, I think, about consulting as well, is that every project is different because everyone has a different messy human challenge to solve.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Your point about there not being a lot of pushback and that it was people seeking more clarity or more certainty around what it is. I’d say that most of the time when I see pushback from individuals, it’s because they lack the clarity and certainty of what the thing is.

And so that might, how they show up for you as more curious versus more just blatantly pushing back, I think might be culturally or an impact of the culture there. But I’m just kind of curious what advice you would have for folks wanting to grow or offer up a service like this with inside of their company. Like what were some of the things that were successful or that you would just recommend people will tend to as they’re thinking about setting something like this up?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, definitely. Once, I’ll take one step back. I think a couple pieces. One is definitely the culture too, is I had been there at the time back then for already seven and a half years. So I’ve also built a ton of trust across the organization. And so I think, having those trusted relationships. Now, fast forwarding to your question about what are some tips or pieces of advice I may have for folks that want to do more of this internally, is first, especially if you’re not new to a place and you don’t have relationships developed, start building those relationships, not just within your team, but outside of them.

So join those optional calls that are hosted by other departments, or come to critical cross-departmental conversations and offer up ideas or offer up hard questions that we need to explore. And I would say probably one of the biggest things in my journey, where I noticed a really different shift in how our own leadership team started to look at the value that I brought to the organization, is when there have been really sticky challenges that have come up internally and there’s disagreement in how to solve for them, or how to move forward.

I went from being reflective and a little quieter and going like, okay, this is how we’re going to do things, regardless of what I think too. I started to become pretty vocal, but I did it in a very solutions oriented way. So I would step into these spaces with my peers or with leaders and say, you know, I’m not so sure about that and here’s why, but I’m curious though what you think about this instead. Or, you know, I don’t know if that would work or not. Honestly, here’s where my head was at instead. And like, let’s explore, you know, where the delta is and why we’re thinking about this differently. And I started to engage in conversations.

I think there’s an interesting balance to strike between just being a “yes” person and being, you know, just completely negative all the time about things that you’re not in a hundred percent alignment with. I guess what I’m trying to say is I really started to practice, I think one of my key mantras for myself and facilitation is commitment over consensus. So I started to unpack conversations and push back and suggest and recommend things, not because I wanted everyone to think the same way as me, or I felt like I should think the same as them, but because I wanted us to understand all the different perspectives where we might have room to learn from each other and then start to create this path forward that made sense for everyone, right?

Everyone may not be a hundred percent in alignment or agreement about everything, but we’re all understanding where we’re at, where we’re headed, why we’re doing it that way. And so now you really lowered the barrier of resistance and you have buy-in for people to commit to those decisions, to that strategic path forward. And so that would be, for me, probably one of the biggest pieces of advice is to start strategically inserting your voice into critical conversations, both inside and outside of your team.

And then the other piece too is just getting curious in your conversations with people. So asking a whole lot more questions than you are, kind of making statements at, or telling people things. I think that also really helped shape the ways in which people expected me to show up, where I think all of a sudden I start entering spaces and people almost expected me to want to probe deeper, have these discussions, or explore and answer questions.

So yeah, I would say build relationships outside of your team, not just inside of your team. Start to build that trust, show up to spaces and use your voice in them, but use it strategically, right? And model the kind of effective curiosity that leads people to start to behave in a way where they’re starting to ask more questions and eventually starting to see, you know, how do we commit, despite the fact that we’re not all agreeing. Because especially in large teams, you very rarely are going to have a hundred percent consensus on sticky challenges.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know, I think that that’s an interesting phenomenon, because you know, consensus means agreement. And we can decide as a group what agreement means for us, and rarely does unanimity serve us well, right? And I think a lot of people hear agreement and they hear consensus and they think unanimity, when really there might be other protocols that might serve us better.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, no, that’s honestly so true. And it’s been, I think when I work, whether it’s internally or consulting, when I work with groups of people where there’s been some kind of breakdown along the way, oftentimes it’s because people are expecting unanimity in order to move forward. And I think that’s one of the most critical pieces or differentiators of facilitation, is the fact that we are not actually trying to achieve unanimity versus right.

When you do more like a presentation, you know, a speaking engagement kind of deal, or you approach it more in that way of a trainer style of, I have the right way and I’m going to equip you with that one right way. I think that’s when you start to allow for a whole lot more of the gray instead of the black and white. And that’s when you start to see a whole lot more nuance. And I think that’s the biggest piece is that we need to get people outside of the binary thinking of everything is a yes or a no, and realize that oftentimes most things actually lie somewhere in between, and that it’s okay for them to be there.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know, coming back to your model, your advice of building relationships, crafting a perspective, and you know, speaking up, sharing that perspective, as well as being curious. If you think about it, those things all layer on each other pretty well because it’s hard to have a perspective if you haven’t gotten really curious and have a lot of understanding about how things work.

And then also, if you’re building up relationships and trust and getting to know folks through curious questions, then you start to understand their perspectives and you can become an advocate for their perspectives as well. Maybe even elevate them at times. So you know, it’s interesting, those things you laid out all kind of feed into each other, and if you use them together, they’re kind of self-reinforcing versus kind of independent pillars.

Caterina Rodriguez:

A thousand percent. And honestly, when you use them all together too, you start to realize that you become very well aware of people’s motivations in the room, even though they may not know each other. So because you’ve gotten really curious and you’ve built these relationships, and you start to shut them up to these spaces and lead in ways that engage rather than dictate, all of a sudden, I know that this person who constantly pushes back is because they are fearful that any change is going to be at the detriment of our impact with our stakeholders, right? Or I know that this person is consistently quiet and doesn’t engage, not because they’re uninterested, but because oftentimes they feel like they don’t even have the space to think and process. And so they just kind of sit back trying to catch up on everything that’s happened.

And all of a sudden you start to, as you build these relationships, you start to be able to understand a lot of the personalities that come into the space and their motivations behind it. And so you’re able to, it’s kind of like you said, as you build these relationships, as you lean into these spaces more, and you build this trust, all of a sudden I’m able to follow up with even more curiosity, but that’s tailored at helping each other see these different motivations and realizing we’re all actually committed to the same thing. We’re just coming at it from very different places. And none of those places are right or wrong, they just are.

And it’s very similar to in consulting practices where I may only work with a group for a very short period of time, or sometimes it’s like a one and done kind of deal. And even though I may not have the time to build relationships with everyone that’s going to be in the space, because of my experiences and practices internally, I’ve become really attuned to the fact that I’m not making assumptions about anybody. And so I’m going to get really curious, right? If something comes up in the room, if there’s some kind of reaction, or some kind of interesting statement or question or a non-reaction, I’ll get really curious and I’ll dig into it and I’ll ask that question.

Because I think that when people start to see that you are not just trying to take them through a process, but actually you’re taking the time to see them as people, they become a whole lot more willing to enter that space and to engage in that space. I think it honestly is about the fact that a lot of people aren’t used to the practice of being seen in a professional setting, right? It’s like, I’m heard, or I hear you, and that’s it. But to actually see someone and go beyond just kind of the surface level, we’re here to achieve this outcome and this is how we’re going to get there, versus, oh, but you may or may not be ready to completely go all that way because there’s something unresolved here, right?

It forces you to have to see people in their wholeness and not ask them to check themselves at the door, right? I think that’s the other big piece in professional settings is we’re expecting people to leave 75% of themselves at the door. You just bring like your brain with you to professionally engage versus actually know the space is meant for you to step inside of it fully and whatever surfaces is part of the process. I don’t expect you to check your emotions at the door. I don’t expect you to keep your disagreements to yourself. I don’t expect you to keep your fear or anxiety about what might be changing in the space to yourself.

I think when you invite people wholly, you start to see that they’re engaging wholly. But without that invitation, it’s not the norm. It’s not how we’ve created spaces in a professional setting before. And for me, that’s been one of the biggest pieces in being very intentional when I work with groups as a consultant versus internally, because like I said, internally have those relationships built. So when it’s groups that I don’t have those relationships with, how do I off the bat based off of my design, so how I’m designing the experience, how I think about the container I’m building, design becomes a whole lot more intentional there. And the decisions that I make around it before I even step in the door or in the virtual Zoom room.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s all making me think about a comment you made earlier about the mindset shift versus just thinking about facilitation through techniques. And so, that’s making me more curious about that. What do these mindset shifts look like for you? What do you think is most important to acknowledge there?

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, the biggest shift for me was, if I’m stepping into a space as a facilitator, right? Not a trainer, not a speaker, as a facilitator, I don’t have to hold all the answers. And in fact, I shouldn’t be the one holding all the answers.

And that was a huge shift for me for a couple of reasons. I think internally, one, it takes the pressure off. I think there’s a lot of fear around saying to someone, I don’t know, I’m curious what you all think about that instead, right? I almost think that people see that as a kind of failure instead of actually using that as a way to get curious and empower other people to be the experts of their own work or experiences.

So for me, it actually became way less high stakes when I didn’t feel like I had to have all the answers. But the other piece too is, it models for groups, the idea that if I don’t have all the answers, then you know, there’s a reason why we’re here as a group and I can start to rely on the wisdom of the group. I always love to say the wisdom of the group is great. It’s better than just myself.

That’s a big one. A big mindset shift was that, you know, I’m here to be a guide. I’m not here to be the expert. And then another big mindset shift is, you know, the fact that curiosity only leads to more curiosity. I think that, when I first started facilitating, I was very, you know, by the book of the activities or the methods that I was doing, it’s like, okay, so in this part it says, I do this for five minutes and then I ask these three questions and then we move on. It was very prescriptive.

And then as I started to shift in my entire mindset about facilitation, I became way less attentive to the steps and much more attentive to what was happening in the space, what was emerging. And so what that might have looked like is, yeah, I took them through these steps and I’m actually just going to ask him what’s coming up? And then I’m just going to start to riff off of the comments that come up. All of a sudden it becomes way less prescriptive, way less of a performance, and it becomes much more of a conversation.

So I think that’s the other piece too, is that I’m there to have and guide conversations. You know, I’m there to ask questions that help lead them to their own answers. I am there to help them work through the messiness that humans bring into a space versus, you know, my main goal is not to be an expert at what you all are doing.

So that’s kind of the other big shift as a facilitator, is that all of a sudden I, it’s not that I had to be a subject matter expert, it’s that I had to be almost like a gathering expert, if that makes sense. You know, it’s been fun because in my consulting work, there’s been some projects I’ve done where, and groups I’ve worked before. I’m like, I know nothing, absolutely nothing about what you do, but what I do know is people and how people work or don’t work when you bring them together into groups. That’s been another big shift, is shifting away from being a subject matter expert to really being kind of this, almost a human centered gatherer, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

It absolutely makes sense. And the shift from technique to people is certainly, I think a growth edge, the maturity moment for facilitators. And some people don’t get out of it, some people stay in that mode of, I’ve got the tool and I’m going to go around looking for opportunities for this tool. And then it typically goes, I’ve got a tool, and then I’ve got a toolkit of tools, and then that longing for more, like how can I be more connected? How can I drive deeper outcomes?

And sometimes I see people coming to those conclusions when the tools fail them, when there’s a great laid plan and things go a little wrong. Or maybe they barely land the plane, but they feel like they were lucky to do so. And then reflecting, they think there’s something more here. So I’m curious, what do you think propelled you on this journey of making this shift from being about the process or the tools to being about the people, or looking for this meta broader, more holistic kind of look?

Caterina Rodriguez:

So I think obviously in addition to kind of just going out there, testing things, some going well, some going not great, learning from it, this is actually really taking me back to before I even got into this space, before I started at ADL, before even I was doing social work operations work, I actually got my start in the theological space. So I was actually training to be a hospital chaplain. And there is nothing certain about theology. There is nothing certain about chaplaincy. In fact, the only certainty is uncertainty, right? And the only ways in which you really engage with people are around big questions that have no answers.

And so it was interesting because it’s almost like there were these two separate sides to me, right? It was like the piece around like what I know and the piece around what I practice. And what I knew I was very comfortable with being in the messy uncertainty, but professionally, that was not the way that I was trained to practice. By the time that I got to ADL and the time that I have been a program manager and all these things, I feel like in professional settings, we’re very much trained to lean into the certainties and keep things as binary as possible.

I remember that at a certain point, right as I was facilitating and like I said, trying things, testing things out, learning from those experiments and refining, I started to also realize that I had kind of compartmentalized that side of myself because it almost felt like the things that I was practicing and the habits that I had formed in my theological practice or in my chaplaincy practice, were almost not at all something of value to my professional career. It was, and I think that actually came about because once I shifted, a lot of people would ask me, oh, so like, do you ever even use that? Like, I’m sure you don’t.

And it’s almost like, you know, people react to something weirdly enough that all of a sudden it makes you start to question, oh, so is that like a weird thing, I guess that’s not relevant, you know, and maybe I should kind of like table that or felt that, you know, it’s almost like you want to hide that part of yourself because it almost makes you an “other.” And it was really interesting that fast forwarding and getting more and more into facilitation, which meant I was getting more and more back into, I am literally choosing to stand in the messiest part of human collaboration as a facilitator.

It started to bring back the, almost the purposeness that I felt, around what was at the heart of chaplaincy, but in a very different way. And so all of a sudden I found it was, it was like a light bulb moment where I was like, that’s, that’s how this connects to this, because I have stood in the uncertainty. In fact, that’s all that I ever used to know.

And that’s where I saw that people needed me most, not me as Cat, but me as like what I brought to the space and how I might have guided them through that moment. And that realization is, I think what really ultimately propelled me from being practice focused to being people focused. And my facilitation is kind of bringing that part of myself back, that I had really hit and then compartmentalize like really deeply in a professional sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

So Cat, I think that takes us to a stopping point, because we’re nearing our end of our time here together. And I’d like to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Caterina Rodriguez:

My final thought, I would say, is to take the time to not just invite people, but expect people. So what I mean by that is if you are a person that works with groups in any way, right? Whether it’s you call yourself a facilitator, you call yourself a manager, you call yourself a cross collaborator, whatever it may be, whether it’s internal or in a consulting capacity, do not invite people into these kinds of spaces unless you’re ready to actually fully engage with people and their wholeness. There’s nothing more frustrating than being told, I want to invite you in, but I don’t want to see or hear you, or I don’t want to see or hear those parts of you.

What I would say is lean into the uncertainty and the messiness of what it means to be human and collaborate humanly. Because when you take the human piece out of it, all you have left is empty process, if that makes sense. And that’s when you get people who are not connecting, who are not committing, who also are just not included. I would tell people that the only certainty of facilitation is uncertainty. The only certainty of working with people is that they’re going to be messy and unpredictable. And as facilitators, we have a very unique opportunity to be able to step into those moments that no one else would, and help make some magic happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. And I think one thing to remind folks of is that in order to do this, you have to have some hard conversations about what makes you as a person uncomfortable.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Oh, yeah. And that all starts with you, right? So if you are not keenly aware of what makes you uncomfortable and how you move through that, you’re not going to be able to do that for other people. It’s kind of almost like the mantra of, you can’t fill someone else’s cup before you fill your own, right? Or else you’re trying to pour from an empty cup or the airplane thing of like before you try and help someone with their own oxygen mask, put it on yourself. It’s the same thing with facilitation. If you have not done the work for yourself, you are not going to be prepared to do it for other people,

Douglas Ferguson:

Or you might dismiss or ignore someone that you know is going to behave in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable or you find challenging. So you just find ways of engineering your process to avoid them.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Yeah, that’s so true. That’s the other thing about, there is such a thing as over-engineering, and it happens often in facilitation. And I think it happens because people are afraid of conflict, they’re afraid of tension, and oftentimes it’s in that conflict and tension that you’ll actually find the right path forward. Thinking about as conflict and tension almost being kind of your responsibility to actually tend to, versus something to ignore or dismiss or try to avoid.

And I think people will not be able to do that unless they see you model it first. I think that’s the other piece too, is as facilitators, we have to, like I said earlier, we truly have to be willing to model, to walk the walk. And so that’s the other piece around facilitation, is that there really is no destination point. It is truly an ongoing growth journey. There is no point in which I say, I’ve learned all the skills, I’ve learned all the methods. Every time that I facilitate, I’m learning something new. I’m taking questions back with me, and I am seeking out more wisdom from others, which is, I think the other piece too, that I want to leave people with is, if you are in this field of facilitation, find a community of facilitators to plug into.

Because there’s that really old proverb that goes, how does it go? It goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And facilitation is definitely a craft in which you cannot go far without going together. It takes all types and it takes all kinds. And once groups see that, you embody that, they’ll understand that for themselves, and they’ll be able to start to work with people that think differently and show up differently from them. Don’t just invite people, expect people. Expect them in their messy wholeness.

Douglas Ferguson:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Cat. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you. I look forward to chatting again sometime soon.

Caterina Rodriguez:

Thank you so much, Douglas. It was awesome to be here. And yeah, look forward to many more chats to come.

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 Greatest Shift appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I saw her facilitate and I thought, “Wow, she’s really drawing things out of the group instead of telling them what to do.” That was so powerful, and I thought to myself, “I want to do that. I want to be able to do that type of work someday.”- Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Dr. Karyn Edwards, an organizational psychologist and executive coach. Dr. Edwards shares her journey into facilitation and leadership, starting at Carlson Wagonlit Travel. She highlights the influence of her mentor, Julianne Wiese, and discusses overcoming imposter syndrome and challenges in leadership roles. The episode delves into the importance of “power skills” like emotional intelligence and adaptability. Dr. Edwards also talks about her current work, including writing for the Association for Training and Development and exploring organizational culture change programs. The episode underscores the transformative power of coaching.

Show Highlights

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About the Guest

Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC is the founder and CEO of Abloom Coaching. In her work, she takes an evidence-based approach to bringing professional coaching and personal development to leaders so they can take control of their future. The work that she does is rooted in her experience working in organizations for 25+ years as a senior leader with the majority of that time in the talent management arena. She has a solid understanding of what leaders experience and what organizations are looking for in their top leaders.

Karyn earned a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology, a master’s degree in organizational management, and certificates in business process improvement and professional and executive coaching. Karyn is certified in PROSCI’s model as a change practitioner and has supported the process of change management for many years in the roles she has held. Karyn is a member of the APA and of the Society of Psychologists in Leadership. As a speaker and expert facilitator, Karyn motivates organizations and individuals by focusing on leadership essentials, powerful storytelling, and practical strategies. Karyn regularly speaks at industry conferences and as a keynote for organizations. Karyn is a trusted advisor who connects the dots to help leaders and organizations meet the current challenges and those that lie ahead.

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 12-week Facilitation Certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Dr. Karyn Edwards from a Abloom Consulting, where she supports leaders and organizations as an organizational psychologist, executive coach, and leadership development expert. Welcome to the show, Karyn.

Karyn:

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

Douglas:

Yes. Fantastic to chat. It’s been a minute since we had a moment to sit down and talk about facilitation and coaching, and all the wonderful things that you do.

Karyn:

Yeah. It’s one of my favorite topics to talk about, so thanks for having me.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s get into it. So, let’s start off with how you got your start. Could you take us back to that moment at Carlson Wagonlit Travel, where you first saw Facilitation in action? Gosh, am I remembering, was it Julianne Wiese?

Karyn:

Yeah., so I worked for Carlson Wagonlit. So, it’s a French company, part of it. So, it looks like Wagonlit, but it’s Wagonlit. I worked there for a long time and I met Julianne Wiese. Gosh, she was part of a merger that the organization did, one of many. And I was in a session that she was facilitating, and I thought I had done technical training for a long time. I actually started off in banking, was a bank teller during college, and then I started training for the bank. And so, I had done all this regulation and technical, how to use a computer and there’s technology systems.

But I saw her facilitate and I thought, wow, she’s really drawing things out of the group, that instead of telling them what to do, that I thought was so powerful. And I thought to myself, I want to do that. I want to be able to do that type of work someday. And she was really a role model for me. And actually, we’re still good friends to this day, so we’re actually colleagues now. So, she was a huge part of my career development.

Douglas:

Did you ever get to collaborate with her on designs or sessions before?

Karyn:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, not in that job, which was funny. So, I left that role and I went to go work for a big utility here where I live in Arizona. And when I got into a leadership role, I called her because she was a coach. And so, she actually supported me as a leader, as I was learning how to do some transitions, and figuring out how do you get along with people and all that fun stuff. And then the present day, she actually helped me figure out that as I was deciding what I wanted to do next, what was my next act after working at Corporate America for 30 years. I got this PhD and she said, “I feel like you just really could do this on your own and you’d be great.” And she’s a super encouraging person, so she’s played a lot of roles in my career trajectory. She’s listening, shout out, because she’s an amazing coach and amazing person, too.

Douglas:

That’s fantastic. Isn’t it great to have those folks from time to time to just push you a little bit, push you out of the nest a little?

Karyn:

Totally. Yeah. She had to drag me out of the nest, but she did it.

Douglas:

So, you mentioned a moment there when her memory came back to you when you were finding yourself in that new leadership position. What was it like for you when you had that opportunity to step into leadership? What were some of the things you were noticing and feeling as that was fresh and new for you?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, I had been in leadership for a while. When I took that job, I had led people in different types of roles and different organizations and things like that. But what was different about that job is it wasn’t in my area of expertise. So, I had shifted. They asked me to shift. They were sort of doing leadership rotations out from a development role and into an operations role. And it was in a call center and it was customer service. And I was working with a lot of frontline leaders and just finding myself as a duck out of water, so to speak on, how do I motivate people? Because most of the time I was working with people that were trying to learn a job and they already had internal motivation. These folks already had their job, and didn’t necessarily need me to do their job and already knew what they were doing.

So, it was just a completely different experience. And I found myself kind of rudderless, I think as we were talking earlier about some things. And just sort of flailing about, trying to figure out what’s right and how do I empower people. I had some natural abilities, in terms of getting people to talk with me and that type of thing. But how do you lead people when you don’t even know what they do? How do you lead people when you’re not the expert at the thing? And so, it was a very unsettling experience. And so, I reached out to her and said, “Hey, I know you’re not only a great facilitator, but also a coach. And I could really use some help figuring out how do I navigate this space that I’m in.”

Douglas:

Yeah. So, what was the unlock for you that really brought things into focus, the rudder, so to speak?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, at the time I was having just this feeling of I didn’t know what I was doing. Sort of this imposter syndrome feeling of, pretty soon people thought I was going to be great at this job and now they’re going to find out that I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing. And so, working with her… And I’ve learned this too as a coach over time, is that it’s not so much about what people know technically about their job. It’s how do you work with other people. That’s really what at the end of the day is what trips up most people in leadership roles. So, they used to call them soft skills and I call them power skills. It’s all these skills of how do you appreciate, how do you get along with other people? How do you maximize their potential and basically get out of their way?

And so, she really helped me with really overcoming that imposter syndrome piece. And it’s funny, I just took a session the other day on the same topic. And it’s something like 70% of people experienced this at some point, so it’s very common. But at the time I didn’t know that. I thought I was the only one that was thinking that I was feeling that way. And so, that was a big rudder establishing, putting the rudder back in the water, so to speak, of, okay, you don’t have to know what they do. What you have to do is help them figure out where we’re headed and then how they can help us get there. And so, for me, that was sort of a light bulb moment.

Douglas:

Were there any specific techniques or tools, or even just things that clicked as you were starting to put that into practice?

Karyn:

I think watching people do what they do, and getting out of their way, and realizing that the solutions that they came up with were way better than what I would’ve ever thought of because they know what they’re doing. And that my job was to set a vision of where we’re headed. It wasn’t to be in their day to day or tell them how to do everything. Now, it’s not to say that there weren’t issues that came up from time to time that were in the weeds and they would ask me for help or that type of thing. But when I think of where I spent the majority of my time, it was on what are we doing next, not what we’re doing right now. And so, I think that’s a distinguishing piece as well of what I learned in that job.

Douglas:

At what point did you start to develop your experience in organizational psychology?

Karyn:

So, it was in the same role that I was talking about earlier. And I decided to go back to school and get a doctorate, because it’s pretty common in my field to get a doctorate. And around that time, as I was working on my doctorate, I was thinking, and so was the company, how are we going to use somebody with a PhD? And at first I was insulted. I was like, well, gosh, there’s a lot of things you can use someone for. But I’m not really an academic. I’m more of a practitioner style. And so, I decided to switch jobs and I wound up moving over to Choice Hotels. And in that position, I really got the opportunity to take all these things that I had learned plus all this experience, and put them all together and help with things like establishing leadership development programs, and doing succession planning, and coaching people internally within the organization.

I didn’t have the coaching credential that I do now at that time, but I was doing a combination of coaching, and consulting, and helping people figure out… And I really felt a natural attraction to that part of my work the most and really enjoyed it. And so, IO psychology or industrial organizational psychology is the study of people in the workplace. And it has a lot of different facets to it. There’s some parts around assessing leaders, there’s parts around how organizations are structured to make them successful. And the part that I gravitate towards is around leaders and leadership effectiveness overall.

Douglas:

And in your doctorate, was there a particular area of focus in your research?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, my dissertation was on the leadership style that leaders have and its impact on employee engagement. So, that was the overall, the 300-page document that you can go out and read if you want to. But Choice, I’m really grateful to them because they let me do the research at the company, which in an academic setting is very unusual, because a lot of research is done on college students. And they’re not necessarily representative of leaders and organizations who’ve been in their jobs for 10 or 20 years, so it was really nice that I got to do that internally. And the research that I found was that leaders who are servant leaders really have the biggest impact in terms of employee engagement. And so, that premise in terms of the different types of leadership was one of the findings, so kind of interesting.

Douglas:

Yeah. Were there any things that really surprised you or caught you off guard as you were conducting your research?

Karyn:

I guess how many people were interested in helping me. So, I put out a survey in the organization and asked people to identify their current leader’s leadership style based on some definitions, that we had three different definitions. So, one was the servant leader approach. The second was, I guess I’ll call it a line manager style. I’m not giving the academic terms, but somebody who is in the day-to-day, giving direction, constant. And then their last one is these hands-off leaders that maybe think they’re giving a lot of autonomy, but they’re really removed and distance from the people that report to them.

And the servant leader was the most effective leader. The distance leader was the least effective leader. And the people in the middle get some successes, but others don’t appreciate that style as much. So, anyway, I guess, how many people completed the survey of a 2,000 person at the time organization? About 900 people completed the survey, which is a pretty good survey response.

Douglas:

Oh, wow.

Karyn:

Yeah. So, I was really appreciative. And like I said, I’ll always be grateful to that group for helping me out with that.

Douglas:

Yeah. That’s super cool, that not only were receptive to you doing the work, but then also supportive of the research and the degree as well.

Karyn:

Yeah. I remember when I went to one of the town halls after I had finished my program, and I was speaking about some business topic and I just stopped for a second. I said, “Hey, I just wanted to let you know you can now call me Dr. K, because I finished my doctor.” And I got this huge standing ovation, which was again one of those moments where I was like, wow. I think always appreciating there’s so many people that want to help out there, and sometimes you just have to ask.

Douglas:

Yeah, no doubt. It’s interesting that I feel like so many surveys are like self-assessment kind of surveys, or they take some sort of long evaluation and then it puts them in a bucket. Interesting that your approach was having the direct reports categorize their leaders. And I guess I’m curious, what were some of the qualities that people would use to distinguish between someone who’s more directive versus someone that’s more servant leader? Because the off hands is like, that’s kind of a very clear bucket. They’re just not present. But there’s some subtle differences I think, between the other two or there could be on perception. And so, I’m curious, what are some of those qualifiers that direct reports were latching onto, ways that they were differentiating?

Karyn:

Yeah. Well, what’s interesting, in the research, we gave them very specific academic definitions that are part of a leadership model. So, they didn’t really have a lot of latitude to give us like, “Hey, this leader has these certain traits.” But what we were able to tie it to was, once we had… We had the list of leaders in the organization, we had the people who responded, and then what we were able to do is look at the engagement scores for the organization of those leaders. And to see if there’s a correlation between, hey, this person’s been described by the majority of their team, that they’re a servant leader. And oh, let’s take a look at their engagement score and their engagement score correlated. And same thing with the hands-off leaders. Their engagement scores were lower in the organization’s results. And so, it was just really interesting to see them define it and then watch it show up in a completely different survey that another organization put out. And just correlate those two things together was fascinating.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s hard to ignore when there’s definitive clusters. It’s like, okay, well, that’s there and what kind of meaning are we going to apply to it? So, in your mind, I guess for the listener, what are some of those qualities, or how do y’all define those academic definitions for the directive type leader versus the more servant leader?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, depending on which research you read and different models, some of these models have been in place for a long time. And when we’re doing a PhD, you have to lean on more academic definitions in order to get through that process. But I would say in practical terms today, what a servant leader is, is somebody who has the ability to put their own interests behind that of the person that they’re trying to help. And so, it’s a little bit of a ego definition, too, where you sort of have to say, “Yeah, I’m the leader, but my job isn’t to be the one to take all the credit or to stand out. But my recognition is actually going to come because of the way in which I support my team and the work that gets done through my team, versus the work that I do as an individual.”

And I think that’s one of the biggest distinguishing factors of people that move up successfully in organizations, is they understand that switch that you have to make when you go into senior leadership. So, you’re not getting the work done through your own self work that you do, but you’re getting work done through the people that work for you. And it’s a hard transition to make, because all through your career, all the way up, up until that point, you’ve been rewarded and validated for the things that you’ve done versus other people around you, or maybe you’ve been part of a team or something like that. But to actually have the recognition given to you based on how effective you are at helping other people is quite different and quite vulnerable. It’s a vulnerable position to be in.

Douglas:

Yeah. And are you finding most of your coaching clients are in this moment of transition where they’re needing to redefine their leadership style?

Karyn:

Yeah. I would say most of my clients are in some moment of transition. They’re either moving from a senior level position into an executive team, or they’re already an executive, and now they’re… The world is changing so rapidly that they’re finding themselves in, I don’t know what the right word is, complexities that they have never experienced before. And so, even though they’ve been an executive before, they’re now experiencing that imposter syndrome that we talked about earlier for themselves, because it’s untested, it’s net new challenges that have not been present. Like AI for most organizations is net new. There’s nothing like it that’s ever been before and it’s continually evolving. And there’s sometimes struggling with, “Okay, how do I integrate this new thing? And how do I show up as a leader while I’m leading all these people through this significant processes and times of change?”

Douglas:

What’s the most common transition? It sounds like, ultimately, you’re trying to help people get to that servant leader mindset or from that frame of reference. What sorts of positions are they? Are they exhibiting those behaviors but needing to refine them? Are they more stuck in the declarative type of leadership or hands-off? Or what are you finding that’s the most common transition folks go through?

Karyn:

That’s a good question. I think the common thing, if I were to boil it down, is transition. So, for some people, it can be being promoted and their scope is expanding. For other people, there’s something that’s been observed or noticed that they really need to change in order to be effective. And they have a blind spot and they’re not seeing it, but they need to transition in terms of behavior. Other people are buying a business or starting a business and they’re trying to figure out, “I used to work for a company and now I’m an entrepreneur.” And those are pretty significant transitions. Some people I’ve been working with are thinking about retirement. And okay, so, how do I get out of this identity? And maybe that’s the word, Douglas, is it’s an identity shift from, “Hey, I’m this person at work and then now what? Now that I’m not going to be working anymore or working in a traditional sense, what’s my identity?” So, a lot of work is around that concept of identity.

Douglas:

Yeah. You mentioned transitions. And anytime folks are changing or going through some kind of transition, identity is such a core part of that. The story I like to tell in regards to this is when so many companies were going through cloud migrations, digital transformations, there’s so many roles that had to shift. You were a sysadmin at a company that had a lot of servers inside of a data center. Now they’re migrating everything to the cloud. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a job at that company. But if you only think of yourself as a sysadmin, it’s going to be really difficult. And so, a big part of change is that identity component.

Karyn:

Absolutely. Yeah. And it’s hard. I mean, I think we all have this sort of self-awareness and self-perception of who we are and how we operate within what we know, what we’re experts in. And then somebody comes along and rattles that cage or puts a big change in place. I’ve worked in a couple organizations that have gone from waterfall to agile, and just mind-bending to people to have to work in these short sprints. And their jobs were completely changed in terms of how they operated. And that’s hard, because there’s the brain. A lot of neuroscience stuff here, too. We like to be able to predict what’s coming next.

Douglas:

Certainty.

Karyn:

And when that gets interrupted, it’s like you can go into the fight, flight, freeze mode of I don’t know what to do. And that’s where, as a coach, it can also be helpful to help people recognize, through either helping them just through the questioning process of what I call non-directive coaching. And actually comes from Clare Norman and her work. It’s called The Transformational Coach. And that process of, hey, you know the answer. It’s within you. We just got to clear all this clutter out that’s getting in the way of your clear thought process because you’re under stress.

And so, the other thing I like to talk about is we are both thinking creatures, but we also have chemistry going on in our body at the same time. So, when we have stress responses, your brain actually doesn’t work the way that it should. So, if you’re getting all these micro stressors all day long of, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing. Oh, my gosh, they changed this again and ugh, I don’t like that.” Then you’re getting a lot of cortisol. Cortisol interferes with your ability to use your prefrontal cortex, and your center of clear and logical thinking is diminished. And so, as a coach, I also help people recognize these patterns that we get into of stress response. And then the third thing that I do is I use assessments to help them understand how they’re wired, because we all come into the world with certain personality traits and then we get raised in certain ways.

And so, the nature-nurture debate has been solved. It’s both. And then when you get into the workplace, you’ve made all of these compensatory strategies to be able to function as a leader. And some of those have worked. And now that you’re ascending into a new scope or a broader team, or a different job, some of those strategies all of a sudden aren’t working for you anymore. And you got to figure out new strategies. And so, working with someone to help think about all of that and then figure out what’s right for you and how do you want to show up, but with the fundamental belief that you are whole and capable and competent. And we all need sometimes for somebody to listen and then help us figure out where we go next. And I love doing that. It’s my favorite part of my job.

Douglas:

Yeah. So, when you think about these transitions and helping individuals work through it, even mentioned the agile transformation, similar to the cloud example I gave. People are having to go through identity shifts. Do you often find that when you’re doing the one-on-one coaching that opens up needs and conversations at the team level? So, in addition to one-on-one, it’s one to many kinds of engagements to help broader organizations start to grapple some of these transitions?

Karyn:

Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times in my work… And I just did the talk at the Voltage Control Summit. So, that was exciting to talk about how executive coaching concepts can be utilized in facilitation. So, oftentimes, I’ll work with an executive or a leader and they’ll say, “Hey, this is great.” And also, my team, they’re an extension of the leader, and so they oftentimes will bring me in to do leadership sessions or facilitate meetings, or that type of thing. First of all, one of the first concepts is that people are whole, and capable, and smart, and can figure out the things that they need to, is applied to the many as well as to the individual. So, the collective wisdom of the group.

But one of the things that we talk about in coaching is you have to let go of the outcome and you have to let go of being right or giving advice, which I also think applies to facilitation. I think you need to have a structure, and a framework, and you need to have an outcome in mind that the group is trying to get to. But how they get there and what they actually accomplish is something that can be applied from the coaching framework into facilitation. Because those skill sets of asking questions and helping people recognize what they want to do is really fundamental to facilitation, and it’s also fundamental to coaching.

Douglas:

That’s making me think about one of our recent facilitation labs. I was just in New York City. We were having a facilitation lab there at Muro’s office. So, I went in to help support, because I knew we’d have a larger audience and just excited support our friends at Muro for offering up the space. And so, I was assisting Noelle, our regional lead there in New York. And the person that was practicing was struggling a little bit. And I noticed it and Noelle noticed it at the same time. I also noticed Noelle starting to lean in to give him some advice and maybe even help the audience better understand the instructions.

And then I motioned at her and said, “Just wait.” And then once she understood what I was encouraging her to do, just to pause, then I leaned over and I said, “That’s going to be really great for the debrief.” Because especially in Facilitation Lab where we’re just practicing in front of a peer group and learning, it’s okay if things are rough. That’s what lab’s all about. But the learning is so much richer if we talk about it in the debrief versus if we correct it in the moment.

Karyn:

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s funny, that’s something that Julianne and I always talk about, too, when is the learning or the teaching, if you want to call it that from a facilitator perspective, comes and pointing out in the debrief. Which isn’t unlike coaching, where someone will say something and I will reflect back to them, “Hey, this seems really important to you. You’ve brought it up several times. What’s your reaction to that?” So, it’s inviting people to react to different parts of information that you’re noticing or observing, or pulling out along the way, but really letting of that I am the stage, on the stage or whatever everybody says. And that I have the all-knowing…

It’s like, no, you’re there to set up an environment where people can do the work that they need to do. And that’s another translation to coaching, is as a coach, my job isn’t to figure out what… I’m not a consultant as a coach. I can be, but I try not to be. My job is to set up an environment where people can do the work that they need to do. And a lot of that has to do with the preparation that you do and the questions that you ask. And so, there’s a ton of tie-backs to facilitation.

Douglas:

Yeah. I like to compare it to being a gardener versus a mechanic. A mechanic goes in with the tools and they put everything at the right to work. They make the engine work. But a gardener just sets the conditions for plants to grow. They can’t make the plant grow. They can’t tell the plant what to do. It’s going to do what a plant does. And so, I think humans are not like cars. They’re more like plants.

Karyn:

Yeah, I love that analogy. I might steal that.

Douglas:

Please do. I think more people need to understand that.

Karyn:

And it’s also, if you think about it and take that analogy one step further, the preparation, the soil has to have certain components to it and that you have to have certain sunlight and heat. And there’s just so many factors. And I think sometimes that’s where facilitators might get overwhelmed, is there’s a lot of variables in there. But if you set up an environment that you are pretty sure is going to create conditions that would be successful, that’s what your role is.

Douglas:

Yeah. And being prepared for some potential outcomes, but being willing to adapt if things don’t… If it doesn’t snow, then we maybe don’t need to put up the heat lamp or whatever. I think so many times folks get really excited about a design or their plans and they’re unwilling to let go of that. And to me, the real thing is just being willing to respond to what emerges.

Karyn:

Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve noticed that learning to be a coach has really helped me do. And I often wonder if there’s a place in Facilitation, training around coaching, because I’m super comfortable now, more comfortable than I’ve ever been. And being able to handle any question from any level of person in any meeting that I’m in, because I don’t have to have the answer. My job isn’t to have the answer. And no matter how challenging someone can be or things that I’m not expecting, I can be okay with that because my job is to reflect, and to ask questions, and to set up an environment. And when I do get nervous, that’s what I tell myself is that’s not my job. My job is to set up the environment. My job isn’t to control how this goes.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. I think so often folks get so concerned about making sure every detail’s correct and everything’s right, and it turns out perfectly, that the obsession and concern over all the details means they miss landing the plane, when in fact landing the plane was all they needed to do.

Karyn:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, I’m learning a new program right now. And I’m listening to the recording of the way that they’re doing their certification. And one of the things which I really love is they’re expecting you to know that you know what you’re doing. And they’re giving you, “Here’s the what’s important part of this, here’s why this matters, this particular concept or piece of information,” but how you as a facilitator go through the exercise or what have you, there’s so many different options and ways that they’re giving you to do that. And I think that’s another important thing, is to be flexible. Is that even though this activity was planned to be 20 minutes, but people are having a really robust conversation, being flexible to go, “Okay, well, I’m going to adjust this other activity because this one seemed to be really valuable.” And instead of being so structured and rigid to a specific timeline, I think that’s another key learning… And just getting comfortable, being flexible really.

Douglas:

It’s funny, it reminds me of a recent conversation I had at Facilitation Lab, Austin, where someone was talking about a challenge they have around keeping people engaged and maintaining the engagement. And when we peeled back a few layers, it was clear that she was not given the latitude and flexibility to adjust the timing, to adjust how it was facilitated. Everything was by the minute, spelled out. There was no leeway. If something needed to go longer and something else get compressed, none of that was allowed. It had to be on the money, and it was even audited to that point. There were people that were observing to make sure she did it right. And it’s funny, because when we really looked at the design, there were some real design flaws to begin with. So, not only was there no ability for her as a facilitator to adapt that space to the needs of whoever showed up, it also was designed in a way that didn’t create great engagement. So, it was like we were at little bit of a loss to give her advice because, wow, you’re kind of in a trap.

Karyn:

Yeah. And companies spend millions, if not billions of dollars on development. And it’s stuff like that that just makes me cringe. I’ve worked in some environments like that. And I would say if that were the case today, I would definitely not do that facilitation, because you’re just being set up to fail. And everybody in the room is actually being set up to fail, not just the facilitator.

Douglas:

Yeah. And that’s a problem I would say with a lot of L&D types of facilitation. It’s like you’re working with people that have just been instructed they have to be there. It’s like they didn’t sign up for this.

Karyn:

Captive audience.

Douglas:

Yes. It’s like, man. Well, amidst of captive audience, you’ve been talking about how you’re just going through a moment right now, which I think might be reflective of just where the market’s shifting, from a bit more of a bearish market to maybe a more bullish market. Or just people are spending more. You’re talking about fish jumping in the boat, so what’s that been like.

Karyn:

Oh, yeah. It was funny, I was just talking to someone today. They said, “Wow, you have a lot of fish jumping in your boat.” So, I just have been very grateful that there’s getting a lot of different types of work. So, I do executive coaching, I do facilitation, I do leadership development, I do some speaking. And I’ve had this really nice blend and mix of all of those opportunities. But really, this year has started off really strong. And I’m super grateful for that and the different types of experiences that I’m getting the chance to do. So, it’s so far so good. So, I’m optimistic that it’s going to be a good year.

Douglas:

I love that.

Karyn:

Knock on wood.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. And it sounded like lots of coaching opportunities, which it’s really great that there’s more of that work coming and you’re able to solidify that.

Karyn:

Yeah. One of the things that I love about executive coaching is, to me, it’s one of the most individualized forms of development. So, you can go to a class and learn a lot of great things. And you can go to conferences and pick up on new ideas and innovations and all kinds of… And all of those things are great and valid. But the deep work that you can do as a leader, I think there’s probably no substitute in my mind for sitting down with a coach and figuring out what’s next for you, what might be getting in your way, and how do you want to go about resolving that. Not somebody telling you or giving you a model.

There’s a time and place for that in leadership development. I think when you’re newer in career, learning about situational leadership and learning about the different models of strategic direction and strategic leadership, those are all important to know. But then there comes a point at which knowing, again, the technical aspects isn’t going to solve it. It’s how do you move through different transition periods in a way that’s going to work for you? And I love doing that.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s almost like it becomes more introspective than tool-based at that point.

Karyn:

Yeah. Some people want more structure than others. Some people want to talk through… A lot of times one topic that comes up a lot is delegation. And there are different ways to delegate that some people have never heard about. And so, as a coach, I sometimes will weave consulting into coaching, because if people truly don’t know that there’s lots of different ways to solve a challenge, then I’m happy to share that. But a lot of times you can never really fully appreciate where somebody else is coming from because we don’t sit in their seat. We don’t have the same lived experience, no matter how similar you are to someone else. So, we’re all more biased that our own solutions are the best. And so, the more we can pull those out and go, “Okay, well, what do you want to try? What do you want to experiment with?” And doing something on a small scale, seeing if it works, continuing to build, and that also builds confidence. Those are all the techniques and things that I tend to work within.

Douglas:

Where do you see all this going? I know when we did the blog post, you had talked about maybe there’s a book in the future. Is that something that’s taken some roots or what do you think is coming in the future for you?

Karyn:

Yeah. So, I’m still rolling that around. I think the struggle I’m having is finding the time, which is probably the biggest factor for everybody. But I’m actually writing some articles. So, I’ve written a couple articles for training and development. So, ATD, which is the Association for Training and Development. And I’m writing one right now with a partner of mine about, if you’re a leader in an organization, how do you select an executive coach? I mean, it’s a pretty flooded market and it’s pretty unregulated. There’s a lot of great coaches out there, but how do you find the one that is right for your organization and right for you? John Reed, who is another co-collaborator with mine, he wrote a book about that subject. I’m doing some writing in some different kinds of ways right now. And then I do think at some point down the road, I’d love to get a book out.

I’m actually also learning some different programs. So, there’s a program out of New Zealand, which is called Riders and Elephants, and it’s around culture change. So, I’m learning about how leaders can impact that, because I think organizational cultures and just the culture that we are all living through right now deserves some thoughtfulness. And so, I’m learning how to facilitate. So, I’m going to be a lifelong learner. My husband keeps asking me if I’m done. He is like, “When are you…” I said, “I don’t think I’m ever going to be done.” So, those are, for me, what’s next, is just how do I continue to keep contributing in this space in lots of different ways. And then when I finally can get some space and figure out how I’m going to write a book, maybe I need a coach.

Douglas:

There you go. I’ve had friends that the book becomes an artifact of all the smaller writings that were done along the way. So, maybe these posts that you’re working on are the breadcrumbs that take you to the larger work.

Karyn:

Yeah. I have my index cards, and the way I write down all my ideas. And then I have a stack of index cards, so someday those will find their way into a book.

Douglas:

Fantastic. Well, we can’t wait to see it. And I guess in the meantime, make sure to share the articles. We’d love to read them, amplify them, get the word out, because a big fan of what you’re doing.

Karyn:

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Douglas:

Thanks for being a part of the summit and being an active alumni. We appreciate all you do.

Karyn:

Oh, thanks, Douglas. And thanks for having me on. It was great to talk with you, and I appreciate it very much.

Douglas:

Yeah. And before we go, do you have a final thought for our listeners?

Karyn:

I would say if you are thinking about your development and you’re considering what’s next, I would say consider a coach. It can be a transformational experience. It was for me, and I think it can be in a lot of ways. So, I think that’s my final thought, is give it a consideration.

Douglas:

Nice. Yeah. Excellent. Well, Karyn, it was a pleasure having you. I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Karyn:

Thanks, Douglas.

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. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post How Can Embracing Vulnerability Transform Your Leadership Journey? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“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.

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