Control the Room 2022 was an absolute success! We hosted our annual facilitator summit last week, and our makeup sessions this week, alongside our partner MURAL. Our wonderful connection between the live event and the virtual world, hosted by Mark Tippin, Director of Strategic Next Practices, Mark facilitated “Mind Shift” sessions, where he guided our attendees through a dialog about how everyone was impacted by the talks. He engaged both in-person and virtual attendees through our various activities in our conference mural. It was inspiring to have so many people joining in different ways and everyone getting the chance to communicate.

We partnered with SAFE this year to support and honor a lost colleague, Jenni Robertson. The dedication of this summit comes after losing a coworker, mother, and friend to family violence and Voltage Control has pledged to work with SAFE to stop family violence for everyone. We wanted to take a moment and look back on all of the moments of insight, knowledge, and growth we all took part in over the course of the summit. 

This year’s summit theme was SHIFTS, and as we move into 2022 we have seen shifts in the way we work, the way we connect, and the way we honor one another.

We hosted 18 facilitators in a hybrid space. We were live in-person, on Zoom, and even created our own Control the Room VR space, and we must say the event, even with a few technical issues, turned out to be a hub of idea sharing and growing with each other. 

Each speaker delivered a 20-minute lightning session, and each session was filled with a sense of community, play, and story-telling. Our first speaker up, Matthew Reynolds.  

Moving Your Authentic Self Forward

I am worthy.

You are worthy.

To open the summit with such a beautiful practice was profound. We all shared our worth with each other and were instantly pulled into this space of sharing, learning, and growing. Matthew celebrates bringing everything you’ve got and creating a space that celebrates diversity and inclusion.

“Our old habits are ingrained, worn in, soft, as are the thoughts that created them. We deserve as much grace as possible in reworking them. Rest in the promise that new pathways will appear to you in the midst of these new practices, often when you least expect it. At times, it is a great feat to stay open and willing against the growing scenes of stress and difficulty, but it is all you really need in order to begin. We begin slowly, as the largest, most powerful things do.”

The peaceful warrior opened us up to the understanding that a sense of belonging must be created by the individual. We, as people, need that sense of belonging to be authentic, and the space we found ourselves in was absolutely authentic and beautiful.

Watch Matthew Reynolds talk on Moving Your Authentic Self Forward

Screw it. I’m going to build my own place. And I built it through theater. I started out as an aeronautical engineer and a mathematician. That spring I took my first theater class, and it was on.

Matthew Reynolds

Read The Full Video Transcript:

Matthew Reynolds:

Thank you, thank you. I am worthy. You are worthy. I am worthy. You are worthy. I am worthy. You are worthy. Rise up, if you can, whatever your accessibility may be. One hand on your heart, one hand on your belly, please, and say, “I am worthy.”

Audience:

I am worthy.

Matthew Reynolds:

Open your hands up. You are worthy.

Audience:

You are worthy.

Matthew Reynolds:

Please join me, go through the room. Connect with someone. Say, “I am worthy. You are worthy.” And then they will say it in exchange. After you’ve exchanged with three people, please find your seat again and that way I’ll know to continue on. Thank you everybody.

Audience:

Matthew Reynolds:

So what’s coming up for you right now? Were you like, what is this woo-woo that this man is starting with so early in the morning? What, what, what is going on? What happened when I looked in that one person’s eyes, what did I see? What was reflected back to me? Did the words get cloyed and caught inside your mouth, inside your throat, inside your chest? What stories started coming up for you? What shields started to be built? Blocking, not letting it in. Do you truly believe that you are worthy?

Do you truly believe the others that eyes you looked into that they are worthy? My name is Matthew Reynolds. My pronouns are he, him, his, they, them, theirs. I am the fourth child of six of Emmanuel Reynolds and my mother is from central Illinois. She was Irish, German and Swedish. My father was a second generation out of slavery. He was in… born in Montgomery, Alabama.

I don’t know much about my father. He didn’t speak much about it. He was part of the great escape, the great migration north out of the south when all the terror lynchings were going on. So him and my grandfather actually went up to Keokuk, Iowa. And in Keokuk, Iowa, my father got onto a river boat and that’s where he was doing some cooking, et cetera, et cetera. My mother got off the farm and was actually cocktail waitressing on this river boat, and that’s where my parents met.

My mother at the time had jet black hair, but she has ice blue eyes. So she would wear sunglasses so that the two of them could go out to the black establishments, and she would wear gloves so that the palms of her hands couldn’t be seen. And that is where they would go. When my mom’s parents found out about my… when my mom’s parents found out about my mom and my dad, they kicked her out of the family.

And so that started even more migration north, and they went up to Minneapolis where the three… us four eldest, I should say, kids were born. Now, like I said, I didn’t know much about my father. He didn’t talk about his upbringing much. He figured if he talked about the trauma, it would follow him. If he talked about the things that occurred in his youth, it would follow him.

He did not know that my mother had talked to us older kids and said, “Hey, the only time that you raise a fist to another person is if they call you the N-word.” So I was in the back alleyway, three years old, my older brother, two years older than me, and these two white-bodied boys, and one of them called Ethan the N-word. I looked at the kid. I looked at my brother. I was like, “mom said,” and I looked back, and I popped him in the mouth.

And that was the start of me fighting… constantly. And it actually incited a huge fight between my mom and my dad. And in my younger years, I just didn’t know. I didn’t have the tools in my toolkit. I hadn’t gone to the right therapist yet. I hadn’t unpacked those things for myself to understand that my father did not have the tools… to deal with a lot of the things that were being thrown at him for being in an interracial marriage… From being from the south. And what him and my mom argued about was, “How dare you tell my children to be physically violent towards white-bodied folks.” Because for him, coming from Montgomery, Alabama, terror lynchings, that meant that you disappeared, or you were used as some way of oppressing black-bodied, brown-bodied folks. So they moved us all even further north. So Isanti, Minnesota is where I grew up. My family was the only family of color until I reached the eighth grade.

Like I said, this was the start of me fighting. So I fought basically every single day of the week, every time that I went to school, three times a week was probably the least. My father worked evenings, my mom was the one who came in. She’s the one who always fought. I saw my mom fighting all the time too. Women would come up, touch my hair, touch my brothers’ and sisters’ hair. “Oh my gosh, when did you adopt these kids?” Pop, pop.

So there was this violence that was always within me, this fight that was always within me. And then my father, he was an alcoholic and that’s how he dealt with a lot of this. And so he was physically abusive, and out of the four older kids, I was the one he took lot of that out on. So, at home, I don’t have a sense of belonging, fighting at school, I don’t have a sense of belonging.

And then the crush happened… on the next door neighbor boy. And now even more got thrown into the mix of me not belonging, of me trying to squish down, take away, keep everybody laughing, Matthew. And that way, if I’m keeping them laughing, they’re not going to call me names. If I keep them laughing, they’re not going to see the things that I’m actually trying to do to lift myself up. I want them to not pay attention to me, but they’re paying attention to me because I’m the only one that looks like this besides my brothers and sisters. Again, not having a sense of belonging.

Move it forward. Excited to go to the University of Minnesota, got a whole bunch of scholarships. I started in the summertime. The day I graduated, I moved out. I’m going to meet more black folks. I’m going to meet more queer folks. This is going to be amazing. Queer folks. “You played football in high school, really? You don’t know about Stonewall? You don’t know these… who Milk, Harvey Milk was? You don’t know these things? Yeah, whatever.” And I was shunned there. Black folks, “Wow, you talk really white, you dress really white, you must want to be white.” Again, pushed aside, not having any place to belong.

Screw it. I’m going to build my own place. And I built it through theater. I started out as an aeronautical engineer and a mathematician. That spring I took my first theater class, and it was on. Mm-hmm (affirmative). All my freaks and geeks, and everybody was there. All of us who had this whole sense of not belonging somewhere.

And that started my journey of understanding that is what I longed for, later on in life learning that that’s what the cognitive brain wants. It needs a strong sense of belonging. Everybody wants to belong. Even if it’s the introvert saying, “We’re introverted.” They have somewhere to belong. So then jumping ahead, multimedia performance artist, performing all over the place, drum corps, doing all these things, lower 48, performed in every state, et cetera, et cetera. Decided, U.S., I’m done with you, I’m out. Move to Amsterdam. [Dutch 00:10:51]. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Came back because my father was sick, wanted me to come back to the U.S., came back, saw him, et cetera, et cetera, and then I got the calling. “You are to become an educator.” Went to Southern Oregon University, got my master’s in teaching. Where I student taught at my mentor teacher was like, “Hey, I want to retire. I think you would be really great here. You should apply.” And dangled in front of me was that they got this Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant.

They’re turning it into a small school, meaning that it was, we got to revamp everything and we’re going to change education, we’re going to do all this great stuff, we’re going to be really progressive, which happened for a little bit. And it was… And it wasn’t. The conservatives there weren’t conservative enough for about 18% of them. In my time in southern Oregon, I saw two cross burnings, both on interracial couple’s property. There were multiple times that the KKK in Southern Oregon flyered to get people to join.

And then in 2016, when 45 was elected, it got really dangerous. And the death threats upped, and people came to my MLK celebration that I started, that never happened before, and it was the sixth one. And during the student piece about 50 people walked out. Then I had a dream, three times in a row. Active shooter at the school, former students, current students, all being shot and killed. Active shooter turns the gun on me, click click, no more bullets, drops the gun, turns and walks away.

After the third time I had the dream, I wrote my resignation letter. And then I started doing this. And I realized as I was going through my years in teaching that the biggest thing that I wanted people to do was have a sense of belonging. But then I realized, like myself and my own story, there are so many components in life that are telling us constantly that we should be somebody else. And part of that is through the fact that we’re not even given the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

How many people know Nathaniel Bacon and the Bacon Rebellion? How many people know when the word white was first used to describe folks in, in a legal form, in a law that was created? How many people know the characteristics of whiteness? So there’s something that has happened, and that’s for the longer session, right? There’s history that is missing, that we’ve internalized, that we don’t even know we’ve internalized, and we’re upholding particular ideas about society and what’s going on with society and how we fit in, and it’s called colonizer illness.

And the person who turned me on to this was Edgar Villanueva from his book, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance. And he says, “Internalized oppression limits us just as much as the oppression coming from someone else. It limits the thoughts we can think, the dreams we can dream, the actions we can take, the futures we can create. It is an aspect of trauma from which we must heal, in order to stop the cycles of division, exploitation, and hurt.” Inside of us, outside of us. And so Yrsa Daley-Ward is this powerful magician, poet, performer, and I was reading her latest book and something jumped out at me and I was like, “Yes, that’s it.” The work with a capital W, looking in the mirror, pulling out these internalized aspects and these internalized ideas and they leave a wound, and how do we heal that wound?

“Our old habits are ingrained, worn in, soft, as are the thoughts that created them. We deserve as much grace as possible in reworking them. Rest in the promise that new pathways will appear to you in the midst of these new practices, often when you least expect it. At times, it is a great feat to stay open and willing against the growing scenes of stress and difficulty, but it is all you really need in order to begin. We begin slowly, as the largest, most powerful things do.”

I am worthy. You are worthy. Thank you.

The post Moving Your Authentic Self Forward appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Once people have the experience [to step] outside and they’re willing…to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, ‘Oh my, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.’” -Liya James 

In this episode of Control the Room, Liya James and I discuss the value of environment shifts in organizations to unleash creativity and the significance of a creative & courageous mindset in the workplace. We explore the space companies must offer employees so they can be their most authentic selves, and the unique purpose of Liya’s new book, The Get Real Method. Listen in to hear Liya’s perspective on empowering members of your organization to thrive in creativity and courageousness while simultaneously unlocking diversity & meaningful innovation. Liya also explains the impact of manifestation, creating the work-life career you want to live to start now, and sharing the skill sets necessary to living a fulfilled life. 

Show Highlights

[1:33] Liya’s UX Career Start
[9:01] The Environment Shift to Unleashing an Opening 
[16:34] The Creative & Courageous Mindset   
[26:56] Finding the Space 
[29:37] Liya’s Book: The Get Real Method

Links | Resources

Liya’s LinkedIn
Liya James
The Get Real Method

About the Guest

Liya James is a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. She offers opportunities to help people tap into their creative courage when it matters the most so that they can implement the power of their imagination to create anything they want in business and life. Her approach spans nearly two decades of experience in design innovation. She has worked alongside disruptive startup founders whose collective exits total several billion dollars. Liya has delivered innovation and creativity training to leaders at some of the world’s largest brands, including Mercedes, LinkedIn, AT&T, IBM, and HP. Her book “The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters” is now available.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download The Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Today, I’m with Liya James, a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. Her book The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters is available now. Welcome to the show, Liya.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s good to be here.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s been a while since we connected and I’m super excited to have this conversation. So let’s get started with just a little background on how you got your start.

Liya James:

That’s a great question. Well, I don’t want to go way back, but I have spent about 20 years working in the UX field, UX problems of all sorts in all kinds of settings, startups, corporate environments, freelancing agency, you name it. That was really how I got my start. And that work was really about focusing on how to make machines more human, so when we interact with them, it works for us.

And essentially I got exposed to a lot of human suffering in that process. I saw teams trying to innovate and bring ideas to the table and designers basically trying to work on their charter of figuring out what’s the next big thing, right? And during this project and, and working with teams, I really saw that the processes that we were using for innovation worked to some extent, but they really failed people. A lot of times we were able to create products and launch them into the market and help our customers, but in the process we leave some bodies behind.

And so that experience helped me thought about… When I moved to Austin, I started a design studio. And as part of that business, we said, “Well, let’s figure this out. Let’s try and see if we can help executives and leaders understand creativity a little bit more and how they can apply it to their businesses.” So we started this, we launched and designed this whole training around design leadership, creative leadership, and all over the world we were teaching it.

And that’s when I really had a big aha moment about the work experience. I saw people reconnect with themselves in these trainings and workshops like where, I mean, I saw grown men cry at the end of the training, and I saw people tap into their creativity imagination. Just in this training, we had people sort of use all their senses to create and understand methods of how you connect with your customers, but also just connect with people at a human level.

And I would push people to tap into their own imagination and just let it go. Because it was a safe environment. You’re not at work. We take you out of that space. Right? And we said, “Just go,” right? Because I know in my teams know at that time that you’re born with creativity and all we have to do is get you to experience it. So you know what your designers and your creative teams are actually going through when they have to stare at a blank piece of paper and do the work you’re asking to do. Right?

And the result of that experience was me actually being present to these intimate moments of seeing people wake up to their own creativity and their God given power of imagination. And sometimes you see corporate executives being shaken by that.

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

You just have these glimpses of people doing that.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating, just this idea of professionalism and how people have been kind of conditioned to almost not be creative because we needed to act in a certain way and behave and say certain things and dress a certain way. And I see so many people that are afraid to step out because that means there’ll be recognized as being a little different. But as soon as they do it, it’s so liberating. And so I’ve seen it a bunch and what you speak to is very powerful and it’s so great to see other people doing this kind of work.

What have you noticed to be kind of the triggers or the moves or prompts that are most effective, when you’re getting pushback or someone’s being a little bit resistant? What’s helpful to get them to basically get up and dance?

Liya James:

Well, sometimes it’s just a little push or shift in your environment, right? So when we were developing this training, I was very adamant that we find places that are natural. Take people out of the conference room. So leaving an environment and just getting a new perspective can sometimes draw people into, “Oh…” For example, in Silicon Valley, we would have the setting where there’s fruit trees everywhere. And it’s not a conference room, it’s like a house, you know?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

And so, in fact, the last design studio that I ran, we would often find spaces to have our studios where it doesn’t look like a corporate environment. And we’d bring in a lot of nature because for people to feel safe… I think safe is a really big deal when it comes to creativity. Right? So we want to craft places of belonging and places where people feel like, “Oh, this is like a home.” Right?

And you can do that inside a corporate environment too. Right? We’re seeing a lot of corporations starting to design where they would dedicate creativity spaces to do the work, where it’s not cubicles and it’s not necessarily conference rooms. IBM is a really good example of that. When they established their design studio here in Austin, they put a lot of intention into how the space makes somebody feel, right?

So I think space is one thing. And then the energy is the other thing. So one of the things that I always do in these trainings is I would incorporate things that may not seem like relevant. For breaks between exercises or between modules, where we’re teaching people new ideas, we might meditate for five minutes. So I do a lot of things that people don’t normally do or expect to do in a training setting where you’re in a corporate environment. And we would often hear people say, “We want to bottle up the energy in this training and bring it back to work.” So really paying a lot of attention to the experience side of it and not just the content I think is a big trick in thinking about that.

Douglas:

I think you’re dead on with all of that. The space, the context matters so much. And also this notion of the experience and this comes back to some advice that we give around meetings and how people… The classic advice is always make sure you’re having an agenda. Well, an agenda typically is a list of topics. It’s very content centered, where if we take a moment to step back and look and say, “What’s the experience? How do we want to start? How do we want to end? What kind of journey do we want to take people on?” I think that’s such good advice.

I want to come back to the space piece from a learning science and a retention and integration standpoint. I’ve always struggled with, there’s a risk of when we take someone out of their environment and they go learn some new thing. Now they have to bridge that gap between that place where they discovered these things and try to apply them in the day-to-day. Right?

Liya James:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And so what are some of your go-to approaches for helping people bridge that gap? Because I agree with you, it is helpful to not have the distractions of the office and to give people the courage to actually kind of jump into this new way of being. But once they’re now, they’ve felt that feeling, how do we help them translate that back into the day-to-day?

Liya James:

Well, what’s interesting is that we create an opening, right? And then people get curious, right? So one of the things that we were really intentional in doing, and I still do that to this day. First of all, I want to circle back to something you said, which is, I don’t think about meetings as its own separate thing, because if you think about it, we’re spending all of our time in meetings. So that’s essentially synonymous to work right?

Now, what’s awesome about what you guys are doing, and I think facilitators in general, is that now it’s becoming accepted that somebody can take the role of design in that experience for people so that we can go from elevate these okay or maybe not even okay meetings to amazing experiences. And to me, doing that is actually about elevating the human experience. Because it’s purely just because of how much time we’re spending in meetings in our lives in general. So I want to say that.

And then the second thing is it doesn’t take that much. That’s the great thing about shifting environment. So we shift the environment, take people out of their work so that they can open up, but once they open up that opening stays there. Right? And so for example, in a lot of the trainings and facilitation I do, I assemble kits. And in those kits are really simple things like Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, Post-its glue sticks, things that you’d find around your house, that your kids are playing with all the time. So it’s very accessible, right?

So once people have the experience outside and they’re willing to use these things to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, “Oh my God, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.” Right? Then what they can do is, at the end of the training, we always say, “It’s really simple. You don’t even have to have dedicated space. Put some big foam board up. Suddenly you have creative space. Buy eight pieces of foam core, put it up around your office, wherever, outside of your cubicle, put stuff up. Here’s a box.” And we actually let people take it home.

We usually give them a bag at the end, and we’re like, “Put all this stuff in there because we want you to have…” I actually created diagrams of what the things are, what are they good for and where they can go and buy them, pretty much at Michael’s or any store, Target. So we make it really accessible, right? So it’s not saying you have to invest tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have innovation and creativity. All you have to do is have the willingness, but that connection to the self is super important, I think, in order for that opening to be there.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of, you mentioned creating this opening and creating this curiosity, and it made me think about how that negativity is addictive, right? If someone starts getting negative, all of a sudden you start seeing the negativity brewing because people love to commiserate. Curiosity is also addictive. If we start all actively practicing curiosity, everyone starts to kind of do it. Right? And so as leaders, if we can kind of shape the direction of kind of where we want our organizations to grow, it has a way of kind of infecting things in a good way, right? That curiosity can go viral.

And likewise, when you were talking about all you had to do is put up some foam core, et cetera. It made me think about this notion of exhaust. Activities have exhaust. They require supplies, they create artifacts, and that is a reminder of what we’ve been doing. And also if the supplies are laying around, then it’s really easy to go back into those activities. Right? We’ve got it. It’s at our fingertips. It’s not in a closet somewhere.

So just bringing those things out and honoring the fact that this is what we want to do. This is how we want to spend our time and making it easy to be curious and explore. I think that is so much more powerful than worrying about like, “Do we have the best view and is it all glass?” And all these kinds of things, right? Is it just comfortable to think and do people have stuff available to them?

Liya James:

Yeah, and I think a lot of… In the old days, I think it’s more accepted now to play. Playing at work, serious play is a bit more, I think, accepted in the corporate environment. But we also have this just limiting belief about work, that it has to be serious, quote-unquote. Right? But on the other hand, we’re demanding of every department at the company should be innovating. And unfortunately, if we’re not tapped in to our ability to have ideas and come up with new ways of thinking. If we’re not tapped into that, we really can’t be innovative. Right?

Douglas:

That strikes a big chord with me, Liya. What’s the classic place where everyone thinks of ideas? It’s the shower, right? That’s the classic example, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

I came up with it when I was… Why is that? Right? Well, it’s because I took a moment away from everything else and the idea came to me.

Liya James:

Right.

Douglas:

And so where does innovation and ideas come from? It comes from free space.

Liya James:

Yes, yes.

Douglas:

When you create space, innovation rushes in. Yet companies are so fearful of their need to change and move fast that they just literally cram their schedules full of activities, and they don’t leave that room for innovation to creep in. And what you say resonates with me deeply because it’s like if we don’t allow ourselves that ability in that space, then we’re just kind of just stamping stuff and just on repetition.

It brings me back to something you mentioned in the pre-show chat, which is this kind of conundrum around when we’re faced with this idea of serious play or kind of just letting loose a little bit of this kind of pre-conceived notion of what is work. People are confronted with this question of: Is this professional? And how can people move past that moment of maybe anxiety and actually bring their best self to work? I mean, you told me that that is the only way that people can be truly courageous.

Liya James:

Yeah. So we were talking earlier about this pyramid that I’m developing with belonging on the bottom, creativity, courage and innovation… Innovation ultimately at the very top, right? If there was a hierarchy of company culture and on the other side, you get innovation. The company’s self-actualization, right? I think that belonging’s on the bottom and you have to have creativity and courage in the middle.

And the reason for that is that feature parity is such a common thing still, right? If a competitor’s doing that so we have to do that. We have to do more than that. Right? But we all know though that deep inside that’s not how innovation happens and that’s not how you beat the competition. Okay? And it does sound counterintuitive to go back to belonging. How does that even belong in the conversation of innovation, right?

And the more I’m studying this, the more I’m realizing that the experience of work has to allow for the whole person to come to it. And because why? Because creativity, the root of innovation, has to do with lots of ideas. Where do lots of ideas come from? Diversity. And if people can’t bring their whole selves to work, you have uniformity. Uniformity, it is the opposite of diversity.

So as facilitators and designers and leaders of all kinds, our mission then is really to say, “How do we create an inclusive culture where people feel comfortable bringing themselves to work, their whole selves, all of their perspectives, all of their background and knowledge and lived experience?” Because without that, you’re not going to get unique perspectives. And guess what? The world, the people you’re selling to, are made up of people with all of these unique experiences, shared experiences as well as unique experiences, right? It’s a very intersectional world out there.

And if we’re not tapping into these perspectives, innovation’s not really possible, because we’re just recycling the same ideas over and over again, and sure there’s a place for remixing. Right? But there’s definitely… You and I both know because we’ve been in this space for so long. There’s definitely limits to that. Right? So I think right now there’s just a really amazing opening right now where people are asking corporations, organizations of all kinds are asking, how can we be more inclusive? And what I would say is start with allowing people to bring their whole selves to work and be creatively courageous. Right?

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that really jumps to me, it was a quote that I’ve lived by for years now, which is, if we’re all thinking the same, nobody’s thinking.

Liya James:

Yeah, yeah, that fish bowl effect.

Douglas:

It’s not condemning anybody. It’s actually condemning the system if anything. Because if we’ve created a culture or a system where people don’t feel safe, the psychological safety is just so abysmal that they can’t bring their whole self and they’re not able to even let those thoughts surface because they’ve got barriers in place, protective barriers. They’ve had to set boundaries just so that they can even show up. And that’s very dysfunctional and we may be doing just fine as a company, but we might be missing out on excellence, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

And that’s where it’s sometimes hard for people to really understand or factor these things in. But any leader will tell you their number one expense is payroll. And you hire and spend so much time recruiting these amazing people. Why would you want them functioning at 50%, 60, 70, even 80%? When we could be functioning at 80% and it’s not that hard to do. It’s just to your point about making people feel safe, including them, making sure they’re seen, heard, and respected. And next thing you know, the things start flourishing.

And if someone’s not flourishing in that environment, that’s a really healthy thing. It becomes very clear and we can understand, “Hey, you’re going to flourish somewhere else. The values are mismatch here and our work to create more belonging has made that more apparent. Let’s find a place that you’ll be better fit for.” And then we can likewise find someone that’s going to thrive in this environment. And so belonging is not about, in my mind, not about just kind of changing the company to suit everybody, but it’s about making sure that we create space for everyone to thrive that aligns with the values.

So anyway, I get really passionate about this and I love that your work has focused on it now. I want to come back to, I started thinking a bit during this conversation about maybe how courage and curiosity kind of work together in an interesting way. And I hadn’t thought about this much before, but during this conversation that’s been coming up a bunch for me. And because the curiosity that opened that door for folks in the example you gave, gave them the courage to change their thinking and change their behaviors. And so I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts on this kind of connection between curiosity and courage,

Liya James:

Curiosity and courage, they go hand in hand. So I’m so glad you made that connection. Actually, there was a book, I think it came out in the ’80s called Tribal Leadership. Have you come across that book? And it was a really cool study that they did with like 12,000 people in all different corporate environments. And they were looking at groups of people and how they form effective tribes at work. Okay?

And in that finding, they put tribes in different levels. And what they found is level five, which not even Apple as a company can stay in, in that space. But one of the key indicators of top performing teams from the study is that they have this really interesting thing where everybody in the company have access to what they call innocent wonderment. And what that means… David Kelly talks about it, the IDEO founder, about sort of this childlike, innocent, creative opening to thinking about ideas. And it’s connected to our ability to not always be thinking about who are we competing with, but what is our ultimate kind of purpose and goal for existing, right?

So we all know that the why is really important at work. But I think people have a really hard time tapping into that like, “How do I connect my work with the why? How do I be productive?” Right? And what’s really cool about this skillset, I think it’s a skillset, innocent wonderment, is to be able to have the space to say, “What if? What if this happened? What if I were to combine this and that?” And to say, “You know what, I don’t have data to support that. But my company says it’s okay for me to tap into my courage and try things anyway.”

Because as you and I both know, innovation isn’t… When you come up with ideas that actually work in the market and in a way that it blows everybody’s mind, the path there is never bulletproof data. Right? It’s courage. You wrote a book on remix, right? So it’s our ability to put ideas that normally don’t go together together and try it. And then you create data along the way. So in order for us to have real creative courage, that possibility, that safety to be able to do this, to sometimes tap into that creative wonderment or that innocent wonderment is really important.

Douglas:

This concept of innocent wonderment’s so beautiful. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier on space and slack time, because I don’t think you can find that innocent wonderment if your cortisol levels are just totally jacked up and you’re just high anxiety and running from task to task. It’s just like that space for innovation. Right? We can’t find that momentum unless we kind of nurture it and give space for it to emerge.

And likewise, there’s an element of courage that comes from, I would say, endorsement, or when authority gives permission so to speak. And that might sound a bit too controlling, but it can be kind of almost inherent permission or just the culture is set up to where everyone feels like they have permission. That gives you courage, right? Versus feeling like you have to get things approved or everything gets shut down.

And then it also reminds me of a topic that’s very prevalent in the innovation space, which is creating a learning culture, right? Or some people will talk about fast to fail or safe to fail. But to me it’s really about learning versus failure, but still the point is if we develop a culture where we’re really focused on learning and we get excited about what we learn, that creates courage, because then we don’t have any fear about repercussions or failing.

Liya James:

And I want to go back to one more point that you were trying to get at before too, is this idea of how do we give people space? How do we give people permission? And sometimes it’s really from a leadership perspective and a facilitator perspective, because I don’t see the difference between the two, is sometimes it’s a one minute thing, right? So about five years ago, I shifted my practice to primarily work with mission-based companies. And one of the first ones that I worked with really changed my perspective because I was really struggling with this idea of like, “Well, how do you be professional and do all these things I know works?”

And we’re all really secretive about it. We don’t talk about it at work, but we do it at home, right? Like you said, we do yoga, we meditate or we journal, we do all these things that we know helps us tap into our creativity and our thinking. Right? But we don’t do it at work because we don’t think there’s a place for it. But I was working with this company and they happened to be in the space of meditation. And so oftentimes I would be part of really important meetings, because we were consulting on some strategic work.

And they often would open an important meeting with a meditation. It’s not hierarchical. Anybody who would feel called to do it would lead it. And sometimes it’s about intention setting with the meditation. And it really puts you in this place of like, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re here to do. This is our intention.” And sometimes, for example, if there’s like major world events going on or during this time with pandemic and racism and all this stuff going, sometimes we would do wellness scans at a check-in. We just go around and say, “Okay, how are we feeling at a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level?” And people can just go around and check in on that, 30 seconds, a minute per person. Right?

And since then I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have different cultures like this, not all the same and not all the same methodologies, but it’s a reflection of what the group wants at work. And what I noticed is that it does not take away from the productivity and the professionalism. In fact, it’s key to it. And it’s addictive like you said. I look forward to seeing these groups of people instead of… Sometimes I’ve had experiences with client work where you just dread it, like, “Ugh, Wednesday, there’s a meeting and I’m dreading it.”

Douglas:

So I want to move into a bit of a closer and we haven’t had much opportunity to talk about The Get Real Method and the book is out now. And I’d love just to hear a little bit about what’s it all about and what should our listeners know? Is there any tidbit that you might think that they’ll find especially helpful? What’s it all about?

Liya James:

Yeah. So The Get Real Method, so on my journey of figuring out this innovation thing and how belonging plays into it, what I realized is that right now we have this great turning, great opening where organizations are saying, “We want people to feel a sense of belonging. McKinsey is telling us this is good and there’s data to support it.” Well, if people aren’t used to that, it will be really hard for them to bring their full selves to work. And so this book was actually the beginning of this pyramid.

So I wanted to arm people with the techniques and tools that we designers actually know very well. So the book is actually really about arming people with the skillsets to find their whole selves, what it means for them individually to be fulfilled, to do meaningful work. Who are you? I have a three-step method in there that talks about how do you sense where you are, how to attune, use attunement to understand where you want to go next and manifesting your visions.

And this is actually all the same methodologies we use in design thinking. And so the book is really how to be your own design strategist in life and be powerful at work. Right? How to stand for something, and also at the end of the day, what it’s really about is to be able to show up with your full self, wherever you are, whether at home, at work at play. Right? So The Get Real Method is really about the first step in that creative courage, innovation journey.

And I’m hoping that, for your audience, I think when I say the word design strategist, that they’ll get it. And there’s a little sprinkle of ancient wisdom in there too. So it should be really fun and it’s filled with workshops and step-by-step how-tos, so I’m not leaving you with just ideas and concepts, but it’s very practical.

Douglas:

Yeah. So good. I love this idea of an environment scan and then kind of just checking in and attuning and going, “Well, what’s really going on here?” And then also kind of this future casting. Well, if I want this bad enough, what does it really mean to manifest it? And it’s important work if we really want to shape our future versus just sitting around and waiting for it just to happen to us.

Liya James:

Yeah. There’s no reason to wait.

Douglas:

No doubt. Liya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on today. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Liya James:

Well, creative courage means doing what it takes to make a vision real, even if you don’t have all the answers. So I would encourage everyone to not wait for the answers. Don’t do a whole lot of planning and go for it, whatever it is you’re searching for and whatever you’re trying to make happen.

Douglas:

And how can they find the book and maybe connect with you or learn more about the work that you continue to do?

Liya James:

Definitely. I am on LinkedIn. That’s my only social media platform. So Liya James, look me up. I think I’m the only Liya James, and then liyajames.com is where I share all of my latest thinking and the book is available on Amazon now so definitely go get it.

Douglas:

Yeah, definitely check out The Get Real Method. And, Liya, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining me.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 53: Create a Courageous Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

Show Highlights

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

Links | Resources

Diana’s LinkedIn
CAF

About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To Control The Room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all for the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators, sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings. You can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Diana Joseph at the corporate accelerator forum where she guides and gathers corporate innovators who work with startups. She is the co-host of the ecosystem show on clubhouse and author of many research papers, articles, and blog posts. Welcome to the show, Diana.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much, Douglas.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Diana Joseph:

Okay.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Nice, awesome. Looking forward to it.

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

What’s Mark doing now?

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Smart man.

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, definitely. So, yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Right.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

So much.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Well-Put.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Excellent.

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe, to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

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

“Learning by being with an expert and learning how they think and why they think is super important, but not necessarily an expert who’s the best. …The best ways that you can learn are from people who just learned it. Scaffolding your learning and putting yourself in environments where you’re learning from someone who just learned something is the fastest way you can basically learn things in the modern world.” -Spawrks

Spawrks is the Co-Host of Space Pencils, a community built to enrich leadership skills where leaders can focus on leadership development within their organizations. Spawrks’ cutting-edge point of view on learning in the moment changes the common narrative of the learning process. In his work, he emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions to help people ultimately accomplish their leadership goals in their organizations. Spawrks believes the way you approach learning can have a direct impact on your work as well as collaboration with other members of your organization. He is also a leading software engineer at Vrbo where he challenges the learning approach through learning in action as the most impactful solution forward.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Spawrks and I unpack the benefits of learning from an unorthodox perspective, the moments of stepping outside of the traditional learning loop, the crucial “linking” aspect in facilitation, and the responsibility of learning from the lessons of the pandemic as we embrace a new hybrid workplace. Listen in to hear Spawrks explore the endless possibilities of an innovative hybrid workplace and the significance of the learning process reimagined in the modern world.  

Show Highlights

[1:34] Spawrks’s Start in Leadership Development 
[12:13] The Linking Moment in Facilitation 
[23:41] The Potential Lost Learnings into a Hybrid Workplace
[35:52] An Impactful, Imaginative Hybrid World

Links | Resources

Spawrk’s LinkedIn
Vrbo

About the Guest

Spawrks is the Co-Host of Space Pencils, a community built to enrich leadership skills where leaders can solely focus on leadership development through a Discord community, live stream, and video podcast.  Spawrks believes in the power of redefining how we learn in the workplace and continues to transform our approaches in learning to build healthier work cultures. As a technology leader with a career spanning over 15 years in managing business and technology efforts, he remains passionate about uncovering technologies that are innovative and inspiring. Spawrks is the Senior Software Engineer at Vrbo, where he continues his cross-functional management skillset by creating an unforgettable traveler experience in the travel industry and mentoring software development engineers to expand their expertise. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Spawrks, the software engineering leader and cohost of Space Pencils, a community focused on developing leadership skills, including a Discord community, live stream and video podcast, all focused on leadership development. Welcome to the show, Spawrks.

Spawrks:

Thanks, Douglas. Thank you for having me.

Douglas:

Of course. Of course. Let’s start off with learning a bit about how you got your start. How did you get into leadership development?

Spawrks:

Sure. I have been mainly working on cell phone technology, back when phones were just for talking, and I had a long career in developing some really cool things like working with Shazam and MusicID, the first video streaming app store, a lot of cutting edge stuff. Eventually I ended up getting to a place where I had a school, both for iOS and Android development, and I learned that everything I knew about learning was wrong. We were a great school but a terrible business. From there I ended up moving on, and now I help people take vacation for a living at my current job. So my journey has been one from being one who had to be led, to being out on my own, to then eventually working with larger and larger groups. I think that there’s some things I’ve learned along the way, because I had such a diverse background and experiences that I have.

Douglas:

I’m really curious about your comment about how everything you knew about learning was wrong, so I’d love to unpack that and then also stitch back to how these learnings, these understandings about learning have allowed you to become a better leader.

Spawrks:

Sure. When I was first asked to teach at the school, I was asked by somebody who was actually a learning scientist. What I found myself doing, having not really ever taught any formal setting before, was I was copying bad behaviors from teachers that I saw or YouTube videos or just instructional material. It was just the first thing to do. You’re kind of like, oh, if I’m going to do this, then I’ll do how I’ve seen it done. And that’s where this learning scientist friend of mine was like, “No, no, no, no. We’re here to actually help people learn, and what you’re doing is not accomplishing that goal.” And I was like, “Okay. Well, what do I need to do differently?”

Spawrks:

A lot of it had to do with, I think the biggest insight I had, was trying to understand where people are starting from, because we all go through the same learning loop. And most people want to start at the beginning, and that’s actually terrible. If you want to learn how to do something and you use a YouTube video, maybe it’s a 30-minute-long video, but you just want to watch minute 16 to 17. That’s the one gap that you have in order to accomplish a task. In fact, that’s another thing that we don’t have with learning, is a lot of times people don’t have an actual learning objective that they’re going after. They have like, oh, you need to understand everything about iOS development. It’s like, maybe not. Maybe what you need to do is tell me what it is that you’re working on. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? What are you trying to build right now? And then you can tailor and find the right material that you need in order to accomplish that goal.

Spawrks:

The other part that I learned that was kind of funny was, they have all these scalability problems with how you can scale up curriculum and scale up development. But when it comes down to it, it turns out that the apprenticeship model apparently is the superior model. It just has all these scaling problems. But actually learning by being with an expert and learning how they think and why they think is super important, but not necessarily an expert who’s the best. We all want to learn from the best, but actually that’s terrible. An expert doesn’t know what a beginner… They’ve been doing it for so long, they don’t know what it’s like to not know it. And a beginner doesn’t know what questions to ask.

Spawrks:

And so actually the best ways that you can learn are from people who just learned it. And we see this sometimes, where you see maybe an assistant teaching a student, as opposed to the master or whatnot. But actually scaffolding your learning and putting yourself in environments where you’re learning from someone who just learned something is the fastest way you can basically learn things in the modern world.

Douglas:

Also, if you want to take intermediate knowledge and make it really advanced, teaching it to someone else is a great way to do that, because they’re going to ask questions and help you understand the gaps in your knowledge. So for sure, these programs where people want to go deeper, I think a lot of programs call them fellowship programs, are really powerful.

Spawrks:

Yeah. Well, I feel like what I learned was that what we’re doing right is sprinkled throughout all the different ways we’re trying to do it as human beings. Somebody connecting the dots for me and being like, that’s pretty good, that’s not as good. I don’t know. For you, what is your go-to method to something, and how much has it changed since you were maybe younger and were in school?

Douglas:

I think it’s been the same all my life, which is the best way for me to learn something is to do it, especially if I’ve got someone nearby that can help me understand how poorly I’m doing it. Someone can observe me doing it and saying… For instance, a golf swing is a perfect example. I’m not a golfer, but I know enough about golf to know that you can watch all the videos you want, get all the training you want, but until someone watches you and breaks down your issues and helps you get to that reflection moment, you’re not going to be able to make those improvements. To me, it’s always like, sure, you got to read and you got to understand theory, but practice makes practice.

Spawrks:

Totally. And actually, there’s a description, I believe, about that problem that you’re talking about. What you’re doing is you’re breaking the learning loop. What you’re doing is you’re going from, I have a question of what to do, I’m going to simulate that by reading about it, and you’re not going through the feedback cycle. You’re just going simulation back to question, simulation back to question. And yeah, you can’t read a book about how to throw a baseball, then know how to throw a baseball. I think you have to start throwing a baseball.

Douglas:

Yeah. And to take the baseball analogy and tie it back to your comment about the experts, so often when they ask someone who is a home run hitter how they hit a home run, they’re always like, “Don’t take my eye off the ball.” And if you use a high-speed camera, it’s like, they totally aren’t looking at the ball all the time. There’s a great book on this, man. Have you heard of The Inner Game of Tennis? Really great read, talking about exactly what we’re discussing. He was basically a tennis coach for many years, and he started to realize that the best way to coach was to have folks do things until they could basically remove the inner critic. Because if you’re constantly thinking about how you do the thing and trying to apply logic to how you make the move, you’re not going to be good at it. And so how do they find those moments of intuition, where it becomes muscle memory and it’s just, you’ve got the flow, so to speak.

Spawrks:

How do you under this philosophy deal with that feedback? You’re saying you want to remove the critic? I think I’m missing something.

Douglas:

You want to remove the critic, yeah, but the thing is, how can you feel it? The feedback is training the muscle memory so that you know how to recognize it. Though instead of saying, “I need to do A, B and C,” instead of me coaching you saying, “Put your hip here, move this left, spin like this, turn 10 degrees,” it’s like you do it and basically the coach is the feedback, saying, “Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no,” until you’re like, “Oh, I don’t even know how to describe it, but I got it.”

Spawrks:

Yeah. I have another one that’s really great with this. I learned how to drive stick at an early age, and the way my dad taught me was terrible. It took me about 20 years to finally realize how you should actually teach people stick. Now that we’re all going to be in automated cars, I guess it’s really irrelevant, but I actually realized that the way to teach people how to drive stick is to treat it like you’re trying to teach someone how to kiss. You need to just, first of all, stall the car, feel what it’s like for things to feel bad. You don’t need to explain to them how a clutch works. You don’t need to explain to them what first or second gear is, just, “Do you feel this? This is when the car is unhappy. Now here are some things you can do that’ll feel differently.”

Spawrks:

Eventually, the actual act of driving stick, you don’t need to know how it works at all. It’s like a very, I need to let off the gas, I need to give more gas, all that kind of part of the feedback loop. But it’s a feel thing. It’s not something that you can describe and explain and then have it be like, oh yeah, now I know how to drive stick.

Douglas:

You know, it’s funny. That resonates on many levels, because so often we are working at an abstraction boundary, and yet folks that understand the deeper levels want to explain those lower levels. And the abstraction boundary was put in place for a reason, because we don’t want to worry about those things. And so if we’re teaching stuff below the boundary, we’re doing a disservice to the abstraction boundary.

Spawrks:

I like this idea, this abstraction boundary, because this is something that even though I know that it’s wrong, I still fight. Actually you’re giving me a model of where I need to pay attention, because I still want to tell you how a clutch works. I can’t remove it. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I really appreciate how a clutch works. I know that it’s ineffective, but there’s still a desire to explain all this beautiful stuff you can see past the abstraction boundary. But yeah, it’s not helpful to the person learning.

Douglas:

Well, also I think if we can drive them to that level of passion, where then they start asking, then we can share that stuff, because now they’ve already mastered that layer and now they’re curious about diving lower. But to your point, if we drive too early, it’s just cognitive load and they miss out on learning the feel, learning how to manage that abstraction or live in that layer.

Spawrks:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I see this all the time in software, where one of the things that I try to help my engineers do is I tell them that you want to understand one above and one below. Let’s say you’re writing an API where you’re sending code over the network. You should probably understand, what is that code eventually going to be looking like? And maybe you want to know what the protocol layer is below it. You don’t need to know hardware. You don’t need to become a firmware engineer. That’s way, way too irrelevant at that level of abstraction, although maybe not so nowadays, because there’s a lot of security implications with how that stuff works.

Spawrks:

But if you’re a UI person, know a bit of design, know a little bit about how the servers work. Finding that tunage where you’re just curious enough, I think is really helpful, because knowing one abstraction layer above or below really does help you understand the thing that you thought you understood, because now you’re seeing a little bit more. Like you said, there’s a cognitive load. You can’t do it all at once.

Douglas:

It kind of makes me think about some of the skills that are required to be great facilitators. One of them is the linking and connecting that’s needed to help people understand each other and to get alignment. That’s why, to your point, it’s important to be one above, one below, or one left or one right. What are these boundaries that exist near and around you? And if you can pierce those enough to where you can communicate with people that are living in those other spaces, it’s going to make you a better teammate, a better collaborator.

Douglas:

And if you can hone that skill of piercing the boundary, you may find that you can pierce new ones with ease, just because you built that strength of being able to question and get curious about things that you don’t understand or things that are on the edges of what you know, so that you don’t have to have studied it for months, and you can just get there and be in the conversation, in the exploration.

Spawrks:

With facilitation, now I’m curious. Is the actual thing that you’re talking about that’s valuable not having… Man, how do we talk about abstraction in the abstract? It’s not this knowledge, it’s not the knowledge on the other side, it’s the process of piercing that. Is that the repeatable thing in facilitation, where it’s like, once you get good at piercing, you can apply piercing to many more things?

Douglas:

I think it’s the linking. If I can hear two people saying the same thing but meaning different things, or saying different things but meaning the same thing, then I can link those or unlink them and help people get to those moments of clarity. It’s really about being a really good listener and being able to jump on different wavelengths at different times, which is a skill. It doesn’t mean you have to understand it so much that you’re going to go write a thesis on it, but can you quickly uptake something to the point where you’re like, okay, I’m following your logic here, but don’t know if I fully know exactly how this reactor comes together, but I understand? And if I don’t, I pull you out of the detail and get you to explain it in a way that can bring me along and probably everyone else in the room that were afraid to say anything.

Spawrks:

Yeah. You know what? That skill, I think, is a great skill for so many different reasons across the board of so many different disciplines. I happen to know that you’re actually pretty good at it, because you caught me unawares many times in previous conversations that I really respect, where I will say something and then you’ll ask me questions about it in a way that I’m like, oh, maybe I don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s really refreshing to have that kind of dance when people are like, they’re genuinely curious with an attitude of respect. I feel like that’s the thing, that if you can have the patience for assuming positive intent all the time as much as possible, you can really find out and learn a lot more, even when you might be completely able to see around the corner. By validating it with that type of respect and in your communication, you can yourself learn more than you even knew about what you’re thinking about.

Douglas:

100%. And look, it’s an important facilitation skill. I think it’s a critical leadership skill. And you don’t even have to even think of yourself as a facilitator or have aspirations to be a full-time facilitator. But as a leader, the more of this kind of stuff that you do and adopt will improve the efficacy of your leadership and the outcomes that your team is creating.

Spawrks:

Yeah. I once had a peer say something to me that, I don’t know, it just haunted me, because what they said, I instantly believed and then suddenly felt like I really had a long way to go in terms of leadership. They said, “Great leaders can work with anyone.” And when it really dawned on me what that meant, it was like, oh man. You know what I mean? Because we all have people that we work with that we jive with better and some that we jive with less. We have, like you said, different wavelengths. But as you want to get better as a leader, you got to be able to have a full frequency sweep. You got to be able to tune in to any frequency, and you got to get good at tuning into any frequency so that any sort of misalignment of what you and the other person that you’re interacting with are thinking and feeling can be resolved in some way and get on a page that’s healthy and happy for everyone.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think also that notion you mentioned a moment ago of assuming positive intent, I think really aligns with that thought pretty well, because if there’s someone that is more difficult to collaborate with, often it’s our own judgment, the lens by which we see that person, that’s impacting our ability to collaborate with them, because that filters everything.

Spawrks:

I got a name for you, because I’m really worried about this particular person, in terms of what the common thought process is. What do you think of Steve Jobs?

Douglas:

You know, I’ve never personally met him, for one thing. I found his work to be very driven. He seemed to be very passionate. I’ve heard a lot of stories that his leadership style was very abrasive, but clearly people were drawn to him and stuck by him and were empowered by him.

Spawrks:

I think the memory of Steve Jobs might be doing a disservice to almost all leaders and new leaders, because I know some people that did work with him and I’ve heard the same thing, abrasive stuff, but I think he might’ve been successful in spite of that. There’s this new idea that, oh, you basically being a real jerk is somehow leadership. It’s a story that’s promoted by his iconic power that he did. I mean, he led a very innovative company through a lot of very crazy things. I don’t know if that’s the lesson to take away from Steve Jobs, and I’m curious, what do you think is with this balance? Because a leader needs to be in service, but also, they do need to be forceful. And so how do you tell the difference of when to ask for input and when to be like, “Nope, this is what we’re doing. It’s just where we’re going now”?

Douglas:

Part of it’s intuition. But I think the more quantifiable piece is when you have a clearly well-defined set of values and a mission has been drafted and adopted by leadership, the strategy is in place, then that decision’s been made. It’s very disruptive to the culture and even the success of the company to rehash those things. And so I think anything that’s going to make you go backwards on those terms are pretty non-negotiable. And the thing is, yes, we want to be inclusive, but if it’s…

Douglas:

I wrote a blog post recently about this notion of accidental exclusion versus intentional exclusion or exclusive by design. Often when we create a community or a group or a guild, we have a thesis. We have a reason for bringing those people together. We have common interests. We have a shared experience of some sort. And if we’re going to bring together people to serve that purpose and to commune with each other around that experience, it would do our group a disservice to invite people who didn’t have that experience or that background or that shared whatever it is. If we start becoming less exclusive for the purpose of diversity or inclusion, it waters down the group, it makes the purpose less clear.

Spawrks:

You let jerks in. You let jerks in. This is the thing.

Douglas:

Right. And not only jerks, but also it could be lovely, lovely people. But if this is group is for women who have experienced domestic violence, why does a dude need to come to that?

Spawrks:

That’s right. Or if it turns out that that group is really about domestic support, maybe a dude can come to that.

Douglas:

Yeah, let’s be clear about the purpose.

Spawrks:

Let’s get clear what the purpose is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, this is difficult in the new world.

Douglas:

The trouble, though, is with this accidental exclusion. That’s where when we got blinders on and we’re not thinking about the fact that we’re excluding people that would fit our purpose. Either our onboarding or our recruiting tactics mean that we’re not considering folks that we should be, or we’re excluding them. Maybe there’s some sort of quiz or onboarding tooling. It’s sort of like the biased AI stuff. Are people getting dumped out the side that would be great members and we’re accidentally excluding them? Sure, there’s plenty of people that are just hateful, mean people that are excluded on purpose, and it’s like, whatever, just forget those people. But the people that are trying to do the good work, we have to be really careful about this accidental exclusion.

Spawrks:

Here’s the other thing about this, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this and the accidental exclusion is not about a binary thing of a person. It’s actually about a person’s time. It’s about their brain time. And what I mean by that is, we can look at very obvious accidental exclusions, like the person is not here, and that was for accident with onboarding. But the new world, with people figuring out that they can work from home for certain types of jobs, means you’re accidentally excluding people by saying, “You need to be here from 9:00 to 5:00.” That’s what we learned. Now there’s people who can actually be at a meeting with their video off while they’re in the restroom, and they can be there to listen to a conversation. There’s someone who knows how to have proper mic meeting and can actually be participating in a conversation while they’re going to pick up their kids in the car.

Spawrks:

There’s this new world where, for me, where I see a lot of opportunity is for us to admit that everyone who wants to collaborate and do work, if we can get some of this telepresence tooling down, we open up this huge thing where literally people can be eating dinner, which normally would be considered rude, but they can actually be listening to a bunch of people discussing something and take that with maybe even the next meeting. Maybe they don’t even have to say something, but the fact that they could tune in and hear what people are wanting to discuss and what they’re thinking about will help them at the 9:00 Zoom meeting that they’re about to discuss about what they’re going to do. So there’s also an accidental dynamic thing. It’s not like you’re always in or out. We have ways of being in and out, depending on what we’re doing with our physical bodies.

Douglas:

Yeah, accessibility has changed. Now this is something that we talked about in our pre-show chat, around this moment that we’re in right now, about how people are shifting back to the office. And certainly a lot of people were excited about that. Some people were very concerned or weary about that. We’ve been studying it very closely and are excited about the hybrid guide we’re putting out. And your concern, the one you voiced to me, was are we going to throw out all these learnings or these observations that maybe people haven’t actually converted into learnings? I guess from your perspective, what’s keeping you up or concerning you the most, as far as these learnings that you think might be lost?

Spawrks:

Yeah. Well, the one that I’m the most concerned with, because it seems to me that that hybrid approach is the obvious way to go down, we should take the best of working at home and the best of working in the physical room and we should find out how to get the benefits of both. The thing that I saw was very specific to international teams and cliques. There would always be a team that would be in a local office and maybe have one, two, four other people working in maybe a different time zone, different location. Or maybe even somebody just had a sick kid and had to work from home that day. And I just saw that whenever that was the situation, those people were excluded from the conversation. People would just be normal people. They draw on a whiteboard, they wouldn’t invite those people, all that kind of stuff.

Spawrks:

And then when the pandemic hits, it was a great equalizer, where it’s like, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the Ukraine, Madrid, Austin, New York. We all have the same restraints now. I saw it get, especially international teams, these cliques were suddenly like gone, and I’m really worried about those cliques coming back as people start to be able to be in the same room when others are not, because I think it’s going to take some sort of discipline or real value system to make sure that when three people are going to have a discussion, that they let somebody call in to participate in that who may not be physically there.

Douglas:

That’s fascinating. What can we do to ensure that these cliques don’t start to take root again?

Spawrks:

I don’t know. I think there’s probably something there with tooling. If you have a tool that forces you, that you have to use for some other reason, you might be able to apply a secondary pressure to allow people to be there. If it’s like, oh, well, we all take notes in a Google Doc, and when Google Docs are open, suddenly anybody who is a part of that Google Doc would be notified to jump in and see what’s going on. Things like that. I feel like human beings are going to want to be cliques. We like to make relationships, hang out with comfort. It’s going to take tooling to incentivize that behavior.

Douglas:

You mentioned also this stuff you’re noticing on what’s happening in Discord. I’m curious to hear a little bit more about this, because I agree that while tooling isn’t everything, that we’re going to see a lot of experimentation over this transition that people are starting to experience. And we’re going to see new features in web chat software and all sorts of collaboration tool moves to embrace this world that we’re going to find, where people are connecting in different ways. You got five people in a conference room and 10 other people dial in from their houses. Maybe there’s another conference room with three people in it in another country. There’s going to be a weird heterogeneous type of configuration that is going to need to be supported. So anyway, I’m really curious to see where things grow and how things are evolving. So what’s this thing you noticed in Discord?

Spawrks:

Are you familiar with the idea of practicing with a heavy baseball? You throw a heavy baseball so that when you have a real weighted one, you’ve done something harder. This exists right now in the porn industry. They don’t have a lot of technological support and have to be very cutting edge. Because they’re out all alone, they have to do some really crazy stuff. They have to do it without a lot of community support. And it was always an inside joke in Silicon Valley that when you were trying to do something cutting edge, look at how the technology in the porn industry worked first, because they probably had greater demands on what they needed to do. The same thing, I think, is happening right now for the gaming industry.

Spawrks:

Discord, which was primarily a gaming tool, needed to be able to deal with video at high frame rates, needed to deal with audio in high frame rates, a lot of different people coming in, coming out, changing what community they’re a part of, interacting with Twitch and livestream, graphics cards running full bore. It was designed for the gaming community. And now you look at our telepresence tools in the enterprise market. I love Slack and Microsoft Teams. It’s okay, but they’re not the heavy baseball, and Discord kind of is. It’s that bridge of what could Slack be?

Spawrks:

And what I’ve found with Discord is, during the pandemic, it kind of felt like it broadened its scope outside of just the gaming community. And it also felt like you were walking around in a physical environment. You could jump in here, see who’s talking there. Okay, throw up your screen. Okay, cut that screen off, switch that screen. Everybody jumps over here, and now we’re having an audio conversation. Meanwhile, let’s check on this typing thing that’s going on here. I mean, if I want to connect to you in Slack and share something on my screen, it’s a chore compared to how instant it is with that particular tooling system. And so it’s not necessarily Discord so much as it is Discord’s dedication to making jumping around so easy that just blows my mind.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s amazing how one application will come along and solve the challenges in a completely new way and just disrupt things. They set the new bar that everyone has to respond to. And I’m really curious, one of the things I’m excited about is, let’s say that I’m in a Zoom meeting or a Teams meeting and I got four people in the room with me. Well, how are we going to deal with the fact that this PTZ camera that looks like a security camera view of the meeting is just not as compelling as having a straight view of our participants? WebEx has already introduced technology that will basically slice up all the participants and zoom in on their faces and make them appear like individual participants in the meeting. So if they’re doing it, other people might copy that.

Spawrks:

We’re behind in this way. I actually brought this up on last Space Pencils episode. I was reading this thing from the MIT Review that was talking about that the Zoom distance that you are from faces is not healthy perhaps, that it brings a lot of cortisol in, because the way they were describing is the only way that you see people this close up is if you’re going to fight or mate. And so we have to evolve our tools to figure out how you, while bringing the closeness, also don’t use technology to over-intensify it. I found that as a manager, I was doing much better at my current job when I started taking more just voice conference, as opposed to full video chat 24/7. I think from this MIT thing, I mean, I don’t know if they’re right or not, but definitely I felt something different from being 9:00 to 5:00 in video meetings to half and half video meetings and audio.

Douglas:

Yeah, I agree. I definitely reduced some of my video screen time, and it’s been a game changer for sure.

Spawrks:

Yeah. But with that, I think that what you’re bringing up about, okay, so you have four people in a room and maybe there’s two people that aren’t, I don’t know how we solve that, because the pandemic just gave us a cheat code and said, “Nope. No one’s together. No one is together.” And so we haven’t had this challenge yet of okay, we’re going to go back to the same problem, but you possibly have learned something. What are you going to do differently? And that’s why I’m worried. This is why it keeps me up, is because I feel like, oh man, am I going to live in a society that literally just ignored what happened during the pandemic? Because it’s such an opportunity to evolve.

Douglas:

I’m not so concerned by that, because Pandora’s box has been opened. People know what’s possible. So if you try to shove someone into a virtual, let’s say, conduit to a room where you’ve got other people that are together, they’re going to demand a better experience, because they’re like, this is not cool. And you know, every company is going to be different culture-wise. Some will revert back, and they’re going to suffer because of it. But the thing I’m curious about is, how do the software tooling come to the table to allow us to move into that gracefully? Because I can tell you right now, the only way to do it is everyone log in to their own laptop as if they were home. But what’s the version of that?

Douglas:

Imagine if Zoom, Teams, et cetera, had the ability to say… You know that you can pin users. Imagine that you could say somehow either through IP addresses or geolocation or whatever, it would know that I’m in the room with Adam, so I don’t need to see Adam’s video, because I can see him over top of my laptop.

Spawrks:

Oh, interesting.

Douglas:

It could change the experience for me as a meeting participant, and then the people at home would see everybody, because they’re of course by themselves. That could be an interesting change in how some of the software works. But I think it’s like, that’s just the tip of the iceberg once people really start thinking about this challenge.

Spawrks:

I really like that idea. I mean, I feel like that could be a whole study, which would be something about, okay, so if you think of information about a human, so there’s your face, there’s how you’re feeling, there’s the sound, there’s some kind of art that you could just focus on entirely, which is dynamic. I don’t know, make up a new word, I guess, like dynamic human intelligence, where what are you doing? Well, I’m going to be focusing on making sure that for any group of participants, with every accessibility and piece of data that I know about where they are, what their sound environment is, all of it, I’m going to make sure that each one has the missing information that they need in order to have a human-to-human collaborative intent.

Spawrks:

Because there’s other parts of that that are already happening that I think are related to what you’re saying, which is like, some of these graphics cards now have really crazy audio filtering, which is really helpful for people who have loud keyboards or are in a slightly noisy environment. I think that’s also in line with this. It’s not just knowing how to turn off Douglas’s camera because you’re in front of me. It’s also like, what other distractions are preventing a dynamic diverse group of people from talking? Because if Sandra’s in the car, her not being able to be in the conversation because of not having good noise suppression, that’s also a part of this, right?

Douglas:

Yes. It’s the classic problem of like, string a bunch of microphones in the conference room and just assume people are going to be able to hear, and then you’re on the other end of that and it’s just God awful. I think there’s going to be a lot to your point around what information is missing, recognizing that, and then making sure it’s supplied in a way that’s most effective and most helpful to fill in those gaps. And ultimately our goal is to make sure everyone has a multi-sensory experience.

Spawrks:

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I can actually imagine a world in the future where rather than… I know we’ve had discussions about equipment, and it can be something you nerd out too much on, but I could see a future where people are having standardized for certain enterprise development, telepresence kits. It’s like, you have to use this mic, you have to use these headphones, you have to have this camera, because we want to make sure that that is not the reason why you guys are not collaborating right. You know what I mean? And I feel like the two things that really help a group actually be diverse are being heard, and that’s why I’m really obsessed with audio more than I am about video nowadays, because it sounds metaphorical, but literally, across all of these different groups of people, hearing what someone has to say is so important. And it starts with our voice for now.

Douglas:

I think that’s a great point to end on, and I’d like to invite you to share a final thought with our listeners.

Spawrks:

Sure. I think the pandemic was terrible, and I think that terrible things can teach you. This really is one of those things that if you haven’t yet, wherever you are, reflect on what you learned and do not forget it, because it’s really easy for humans to just get into a new zone of things. But we had a really terrible thing teach us some really great things. And if we’re doing that in terms of leadership all across the board, not trying to go back to normal, there is no normal, okay? There was a normal, then things got weird, now things are a different normal. And the more that you can participate in creating that new normal, wherever you are in your particular role, the more that everything can be a lot better for everyone. That’s my final thought on that.

Douglas:

Awesome. Thank you for sharing, Spawrks, and want to just say it was a pleasure chatting with you today. And if there’s another opportunity, then I’m always going to welcome it. Hope you enjoy your day, and thanks so much for joining.

Spawrks:

Thanks so much for having me, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 51: Break Your Learning Loop appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think leadership is really the art of correction, not perfection. We are going to get it wrong. Right? The question is: ‘How do you recover in those moments? Can you recover with grace, with curiosity? ‘”-Robin Anselmi

Robin Anselmi is the Chief Executive Officer at Conversant, a consulting agency that specializes in having high-quality conversations with team organizations and ultimately sets them up for success to achieve their biggest goals. She believes in the power of a grounded, connected leader to set the standard in growing together. Robin continues her mission at Conversant to reinforce the importance of human connection within organizations and striving towards innovation. As she encourages leaders to personify staying present, Robin reminds us to create the culture and strategy that works best for our own organization. The foundation resides in the quality of your team’s honest, authentic conversations.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Robin and I discuss the impact of presence in leaders leading to team innovation, the ongoing balance in assumptions, the leader’s unique challenge of correction instead of perfection, and the magnitude of a connected leader in its organization. Listen in to hear how Robin reveals the importance of human connection leading to authentic conversations, and the significance of a leader listening while remaining grounded in presence.

Show Highlights

[0:55] Robin’s Start in Key Company Conversations 
[6:12] The Impact of Presence to Lead to Innovation
[12:47] The Assumptions Take 
[15:52] The Art of Correction, Not Perfection 
[18:24] The Importance of a Leader’s Non-Defensive Approach
[23:11] A Complex World Requires a Connected Leader
[24:27] A Conversation on the Workforce Future Forward & Robin’s Final Thoughts 

Links | Resources

Robin’s LinkedIn
Conversant
Love: The Next Leadership Skill

About the Guest

Robin Anselmi is the Chief Executive Officer at Conversant. Her passion centers in helping organizations and leaders navigate quality communication and conversation while uncovering collaborative solutions. Over a decade, she has worked with and coached a wide range of Fortune 1000 companies and Global Philanthropic organizations. While remaining grounded in human connection, she is out to change the world one impactful conversation at a time. Robin is continuously inspired through her work in financial services, where she discovered a client’s impactful results ties directly to the importance of remaining well connected in what matters most for an organization’s employees and customers. With her early career start in engineering and manufacturing, Robin quickly developed a love for design. From there, she realized her true appreciation for the design in human connection and conversation. Robin continues her mission at Conversant by empowering leaders and reminding them that conversation is the most powerful skill set a leader can truly have. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to The Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Robin Anselmi, chief executive officer at Conversant, where she brings together the power and joy of authentic human connection to organizations worldwide. Robin has worked extensively with clients in financial services, healthcare and technology. Welcome to the show, Robin.

Robin Anselmi:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s great to be here.

Douglas:

So let’s get started with a little backstory. I’m really curious how you got your start helping companies have better conversations.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I actually started my career as an engineer, which is always so weird to people. So I was an engineer in manufacturing for about a decade, making optical fiber. And everybody always says, “Well, how did you get from that to this?” I took a stop through financial services as an analyst. And along the way, I started to see that I was really interested in the interactions between human beings. And what did that lead to? And how did that actually cause more joy and greater results in organizations? And actually, they’re all related because as an engineer, it was the design of equipment. And how did the equipment work? As an analyst, it was the design of processes. And how did the processes work?

Robin Anselmi:

And this work really is about the design of human connection because there is a design. There’s a design to conversations that turn out well, and there’s a design to conversations that don’t. And if you actually start to understand the design of what brings people together to actually produce more than you might imagine, you can create that magic, quote, unquote, regardless of the circumstances. So too often, I think people think, “Well, you’ve got to be that charismatic leader.” I don’t think that’s true. I think if you understand the design of it, you can actually cause those surprising results with people by bringing them together in a way that honors and taps into that power and joy that comes out when people get together to make a meaningful contribution together.

Douglas:

That’s really interesting. I often talk to people about this notion of systems theory, or thinking of the world or the work from the perspective of systems, so I really want to hear your perspective on that, considering that to me, that’s what you’re talking about when you talked about there’s a design of equipment, there’s a design of processes. And then there’s the design of these interactions or these connections. To me, it’s considering the systems and the implications to the whole and these kinds of things.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, totally, because if you think about it, each human being is a complex system unto itself. And now you’re going to put a whole bunch of us together in a conference room and ask us to do stuff together. Of course, there’s going to be complexity in that. And too often, we try to solve it like it’s a complicated problem, like there is a best practice out there. There’s not. Often, it’s sample size of one. Each interaction is its own unique one. And can you actually be present to what’s happening for the other person? Can you be present to what’s happening for you, and the strategy and the culture that you’re all operating inside of? And too often, we sort of lose sight of all that. We just want to go down the path of: What’s the best practice?

Robin Anselmi:

I’m not saying there’s not places for best practices. Absolutely, there are. But really, so much of human interaction is being present to the other and what’s actually happening right now in this moment, particularly in these days with things changing so rapidly.

Douglas:

You just hit on something that’s very near and dear to my heart, which is the dangers of importing best practices. And I’m sure this shows up in your work all the time. I know it does ours because people always want us to train them or show them something tactics that’ll get the job done. And at the end of the day, we definitely need to get the tactics because we need repeatable things that we can do and make progress. The danger though is people always want to look external and say, “Well, what the right way to do this?” And so often, we need to curate something. We need to look very closely at the dynamics and put in something that’s best suited.

Douglas:

It reminds me of the strategy doing work where their analogy is taking people in a river rafting, river rafting guides. And it’s like, “We certainly haven’t gone down this river. And the river’s … Well, maybe I have gone down this river, but it’s certainly not behaving exactly like it did yesterday. So I’m not telling you exactly how we’re going to do this, but you trust me because I’ve gone down a river before, or I’ve climbed a mountain before, and so I might be a little bit helpful.” But we’ve still got to respond to some emergent qualities and understand what’s happening, so I don’t know. I get excited whenever someone’s preaching the dangers of best practices.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I think tips and tricks are only going to take you so far. Right? So I always say, “Do I have some tips and tricks? Sure.” We all have them. We all have a few. And holy moly, can they get you into a lot of trouble because you can sort of start to rely on them so heavily. And to your river rafting example, maybe the current’s going way faster today than it normally does, and so that tip and trick is just not actually going to work for you in this situation. It’s why I think the number one job of leaders is to be present, to be present to what’s happening, to be present for themselves. So notice how they’re feeling the moment because actually, our bodies are telling us things all the time, and we’re just trying to sort of ignore it. And are we actually present to the other person? And are we legitimizing their experience in the conversations that they’re having with us?

Douglas:

I love that you threw out the word presence because literally, the word that was going through my mind was complacency. And that’s what the best practices can make us complacent. Right? We expect them to work and our brains shut off. But if we’re present and we’re really paying attention, that’s also kind of core to a lot of the principles and facilitation, inquiry versus advocacy. Right? We can’t really be in inquiry mode unless we’re present, curious, and our brain is fully functioning. We can’t active listen unless we’re really tuned in. And so that was awesome because I was literally thinking the problem is complacency, and then you went straight into presence.

Robin Anselmi:

One of the things we say is that people fast pass match, so they fast pass match things that they know from what’s happened, which again, as human beings, we need that. If I have to stop every time to think about how a doorknob works, I would never get out of my house. Right? So I need to be able to fast pass match on how a doorknob works. The challenge is that we fast pass match with people. You’re different than you were a year ago, five years ago. Right? But yet, we often treat each other like we’re the exact same person. And there are new things that you care about. There are new things that you worry about. And that’s going to show up in the way that we work together.

Robin Anselmi:

And too often, we skip past that. And so even the tips and tricks of, well, I know how Douglas is going to respond to this, no, I don’t. I don’t know who Douglas is today. Can I actually be really, in the spirit of inquiry, be really curious about what’s on his mind today?

Douglas:

That is such a beautiful concept of just not trying to anticipate. One of the things that I see so often as one of the, I’d say main issues of meetings is that people spend so much time thinking about what they’re going to say, or preparing their response, or their amazing rebuttal, or contribution, and they miss all of that awesomeness that they could be picking up on in the middle there.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, because that’s not actually listening. That’s waiting, so that’s somebody waiting their turn, as opposed to really listening and being in the conversation, and trusting that when we get to the pause, I’ll have something worthwhile to contribute. And if I don’t, somebody else will, and we’ll be smarter. We really genuinely will be smarter together without being able to predict. I think too often, to your point on that, people are driving to an outcome, so they’re actually not present because they’re trying to get something to happen. I’m trying to get you to see the world the way I see the world, as opposed to finding a new world view together, new solutions.

Robin Anselmi:

I read this thing, this quote, just today about the innovation and collaboration actually require us to sort of get into the messiness with each other. That’s not exactly the quote, it’s paraphrasing. But it does require that because I have to let go to really innovate or to collaborate, I have to let go of all of the ways that I see the world, or at least hold them loosely, and see the way you see the world. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep coming up with the answers that I came up with yesterday. Okay, that’s not innovation. 

Douglas:

That’s right. I love to tell people, if we don’t get into that exploration zone, where we’re looking at the intersections where ideas collide and can create new emergent permutations, then we’re just going to have the ordinary solutions. And what we’re always striving for are the novel solutions. Everyone wants the novel solutions, but we won’t get there unless we allow that to happen.

Robin Anselmi:

Because it’s really uncomfortable. I think this is the thing that people want it to be rainbows and unicorns and fun and happy, happy, glitter, joy. Right? It’s actually not. It’s really, really uncomfortable because I have to actually be willing to say, “Wow, my way of doing this, or my way of seeing this, there might be a better way. There might be another alternative. The way I’ve been doing it might not be sufficient for the future.” Right? And so that’s actually really uncomfortable for folks because you have to let go of the known and be willing to go into a place of uncertainty, and also a willingness that, oh, maybe that thing that I thought was the bee’s knees just isn’t.

Douglas:

That brings up two thoughts. One is that can be really disorienting and difficult for a leader because especially if you’ve been relied on and looked upon and expected to have the vision, and then now we’re at a point where we’re having a conversation, and now someone’s pushing things a little bit in a direction that might conflict with parts of your vision. Is that something you need to hold steadfast to, so that we stay true to the vision? Or is that something we’ve got to let go of? And I think that is very difficult because sometimes you do need to stay the course because, no, that’s actually going to steer us away from our values, and that’s something we need to hold onto.

Douglas:

But I think that’s something that leaders should spend a lot of time meditating and thinking about, so when they’re confronted with that moment, they don’t just react, they know. If you’ve thought about it enough and you’ve really decided what’s germane to the success, then you’re prepared to hold steadfast versus actually let go of something.

Robin Anselmi:

One of the distinctions we make for people that I find is helpful is really pulling apart the difference between purpose, you might say vision. What’s the why, the outcomes? What do you want the what to be? And then the methods. Right? Often, leaders, we get really tied up around the methods. Can I be a little more agnostic about the how, provided that it’s moving in the direction of sort of purpose or vision, going to create the outcomes I’m looking for? I would add sort of values, sort of corporate values or ethics around that to sort of guide the decisions that we’re making. But can I free us to actually think about different ways of doing it? And you’re right. There’s such a challenge around the places where it pushes the boundary on the vision. Is it taking us off course, or is it taking us in a better course? And I think that’s the job of leadership on an ongoing basis.

Robin Anselmi:

And when I say leadership, I don’t mean in a single person. I mean from an organizational standpoint to be able to say, “Where do we want to go together? And how do you make decisions about changing course?” I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that one.

Douglas:

Absolutely not. But most fun work is not easy and requires some thought. And I think that’s actually why it’s going to be hard for computers to completely replace us.

Robin Anselmi:

I hope so, anyway.

Douglas:

So I’m going to come back to something you said earlier, which is fascinating, which is this notion that these, I think it also alludes to, or ties back to the thinking fast or thinking slow, and the system one, system two, around there’s some moments where we really need to rely on instincts and patterns and assumptions. And if we weren’t able to assume that the fellow drivers on the road were going to stop at the red light, it would be really strange, or would take a lot longer to get from point A to point B because we’d be very anxious going through every intersection. Right? But the trick is when, what’s the boundary around assumptions that are safe for us to carry, and which ones we need to kind of be a little more cognizant of.

Robin Anselmi:

It’s so interesting. I think for leaders, this is an ever evolving question about making their implicit thinking explicit to people as often as possible. Right? And so the rules of the road, there’s a lot that’s already been made explicit, and we all know that it was made explicit because we all have a license in our pocket that says we took that class, or we passed that test. But in organizational life, I think there are way fewer things that are actually quite that explicit, but I think we assume that it is. And so I think actually pausing to make sure that we’re on the same page is a worthy investment of time. Right? Because you’re going to have to have those conversations at some point.

Robin Anselmi:

Do you want to have them in the beginning, before things have gotten messy, and everyone’s off track and pissed off and annoyed at each other? Or do you want to have it later when sort of everything’s gone to hell in a hand basket? So you’re going to have to really get to the point of clarity and testing it. I think language is tricky because we live in language, we work in language, it’s how work gets done today is in sort of conversations. We say the conversations are the work, and people assume really quickly what each other means by certain words. Right now, strategy’s one of those words that drives me a little crazy because everybody will say, “Well, we need a strategy. Or are we aligned on the strategy?” But if you stop and ask five people what they mean by strategy, you will get 12 answers about what that actually means.

Robin Anselmi:

And so I think you’re right. I don’t think it’s a simple straightforward thing around here’s the things about you can assume to be true, and here’s the things you can’t. I think that’s a constant exploration between people. And adding to the mix that we’re now sort of hybrid, so we’ve got people in person and people virtual. Add into the mix multi generational workforces, where there’s different levels of assumptions around what work norms are. I think there’s just going to be a lot of places for us to keep being explicit about our thinking on things, and not assuming that they’re going to stop at the red light.

Douglas:

Yeah. The multi generational thing is a fascinating one because you’ve also got these elements of what’s acceptable from equity and from expectations around just language. I look at … This even comes up when we’re working with clients that may have younger workforce. And when I watch how sensitive they are to certain moves and certain language, and how vocal they are about it, it’s quite a bit different. And I see a lot of folks that have been in the workforce a bit longer, where norms were different, and even turns of phrase and business jargon, that now is offensive to a younger workforce, and especially when you’re looking at M&A where two cultures are just being forced together pretty quickly. That’s kind of tough to navigate, and definitely not easy because even when you’ve got folks that have the best of intentions, people can find actions very offensive.

Robin Anselmi:

I think leadership is really the art of correction, not perfection. We are going to get it wrong. Right? The question is: How do you recover in those moments? Can you recover with grace, with curiosity? Back to your point earlier, right? And it’s hard because if I say something that’s someone else finds offensive, I immediately get defensive about that, as opposed to: Can I just get curious about, oh, that’s interesting, can you say more about that? Can you say, “What am I not seeing in that, so that I can understand it better?” And I think that’s hard for leaders to do, and it’s such a critical skill to really understand another’s point of view and the way they see the world, and the way the world occurs to them. I’m never going to full understand what it’s like to be you, or you, me. But I can be curious about it and really see, okay, and apologize and do better.

Douglas:

I love that Maya Angelou quote, it’s like, “Do as good as you know. And when you know better, do better.”

Robin Anselmi:

Do better. That’s right. Know better, do better. That’s right.

Douglas:

And I love what you just said about this notion of not perfection.

Robin Anselmi:

But correction.

Douglas:

It’s about correction.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah, correction.

Douglas:

I’m a big fan of the notion of continuous improvement.

Robin Anselmi:

That’s right.

Douglas:

Always being curious about how we can move toward a better.

Robin Anselmi:

A better.

Douglas:

And definitely, the curiosity piece. But I want to come back to something that you were saying about that as well, which is not being defensive. And that’s something I learned, because I had some moments just navigating a lot of this as a public figure and running public workshops, and being in front of folks, which had some moments that were surprising because I do my best to support people. And I’ve considered myself an ally. And it’s like, “Whoa. Right? I’m the target? How’s this?” And I quickly realized that’s the worst reaction that anyone could possibly have because what people don’t want to have is an ally trying to be a victim because me not being understood, my intentions being misinterpreted, pales in comparison to how they’ve been victimized. Right?

Douglas:

And so when you mention not being defensive, and also having that humility truly struck a chord is how important that is, and I learned the lesson personally. And then also, I think another little adjacent thing that might be fun to unpack with you is this notion earlier when you talked about the charismatic leader. And I would say charismatic leaders probably struggle with that the most because their identity is about being this charismatic, loved, worshiped individual. I men, worship might be a bit overkill, but you get the idea.

Robin Anselmi:

No, but hero, hero. They probably … The hero.

Douglas:

Yeah, the hero. Yeah. And so you compare that to leaders that are maybe entrepreneurial leaders, or facilitative leaders, or servant leaders. I think all of those have a little bit more humility in the mix. And it might be, if you’re following that path, it might be easier to respond and employ some of these skills.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I want to comment on a couple of things you said. So number one, that defensiveness that you said, welcome to the human race because that’s actually just programmed into us. Right? So it’s not your own personal dysfunction. All of us when confronted have a natural reaction to defend ourselves. It’s actually just hardwired into the way that our brains work. Right? And so if you think about it from an evolution standpoint, it makes a lot of sense about why we would need to do that, to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe, and that we can’t distinguish between physical threat and social threat, so that’s sort of the normal.

Robin Anselmi:

Goes back to my thing earlier about being present. Can I actually just be present to what’s happening? And that this thing that just got said didn’t actually harm me. Right? It might’ve harmed my ego, it might’ve hurt my feelings, but it didn’t actually harm me. Can I just take a breath and get connected to: Okay, what about that is upsetting to me? Because most of the time, it’s something as you said, in the scheme of things, probably not the right thing to be centered on, so that’s one, so welcome to the human race because we all are going to be defensive.

Robin Anselmi:

The distinction we make is between superior leadership and connected leadership. So superior leaders are the ones who think they have to have all the answers. Right? And there is a model for that. There are places actually where superior leadership is necessary. I kid a lot and say, “If the fire alarm goes off in an office building, I’d like there to be somebody who knows the way out of the building. And yes, I’m just going to follow them.” I don’t want to have to have a whole conversation about what’s the right way out of a fire. But in today’s world where things are moving so fast, we need more connected leaders because it’s really hard for a single person to see the whole view, to see the whole elephant. Back to systems, a single person really can’t understand all of the interactions and all of the interplay of what’s going to happen.

Robin Anselmi:

So leaders who are connected, connected to people, so connected and connecting people, connected and connecting to strategy and to culture and to current circumstances, are the ones who are going to be successful in these more complex systems because that superior leader, hero leader model, yes, quite charismatic. But that’s a hard row to hoe, to have all of those people who are going to be able to … You’re going to be able to know everything that they know and make the best decisions. I’m not sure that model is going to last much longer in most of our organizations. There’s just too much complexity.

Douglas:

The thing I think about is situation, time and place. To me, there’s situations where a hero leader might be needed, like the fire alarm example you were talking about. And I think those examples will still be there. In fact, someone was just talking with me about the vaccine rollout here in the US, how chain of command is kind of helpful when you’re trying to execute something very specific and with some rules. And we know what we want to do, and we figured it out, and we’re just going to go do it.

Douglas:

Now there might be moments within that, there might need to be some freedom, some flexibility for folks to flex and move around some of the things. But at some of the points, we’re going to need, and so it makes me think of the Cynefin Model, and how in a complex world, the superior leader’s going to be very ineffective. In a simple, obvious world, maybe we do need someone to step up and say, “Run this checklist.”

Robin Anselmi:

Totally.

Douglas:

And maybe in the complicated, maybe there’s something in between.

Robin Anselmi:

Totally. In the simple world, a superior leader is great. Right? Do this, here’s the answers. Goes back to your thing earlier about best practices. There are knowable answers and you can have somebody that knows them and just moves everybody in that direction, absolutely. Even in a complicated world. Right? There are lots of answers, having somebody that can sort of sort those and come up with smart answers, move us forward, great. I just think more and more, what we’re seeing in organizations is much more complexity, things that are much less predictable, much less likely to be known or knowable, that you’ve got to be willing to be in a place where the strategies are emergent. And to have strategies that are emergent, you have to be really listening to the people in the system, which I think to your point, is a whole lot harder for that hero leader to do.

Douglas:

So let’s talk about something that’s emerging right now, that companies are faced with. This is a complex issue that we’re having to solve for, and I think it might be kind of fun to unpack it from that perspective around: How can we best have these conversations? And what are some of the wrinkles that we’re going to need to consider? What makes it so complex? And that’s the back to the office, so one of the things that came up in the pre show chat was just around the gender equity issues that are going to unfold with kind of expecting employees to come back.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I think going back to sort of complicated or simple models, the office as it stood before was a way of making sure people were doing their job, so there was a lot of sort of oversight, supervision. I think the last year has proven that we don’t need that to the same degree. And so I think it’s going to require organizations redefining the purpose of the office. So why? Why do we want people to gather? What’s the purpose of that? And I do think there are going to be some equity issues around that. I strongly believe that the organizations that are going to be the most successful going forward in hiring and retaining talent are going to have to have some sort of flexibility. They’re not going to be an all or neither. There’s going to be some sort of hybrid model, where there’s X number of days a week or something because you’ve got so much diversity in terms of what people want, in terms of being back in the office or not.

Robin Anselmi:

And there’s been some recent articles and reports that are guessing that there may be some gender equity issues about that, around who chooses to come back to office versus who doesn’t, and whether or not you’ll see that more women choose not to come back to the office. And what does that do? Do we suddenly recreate the boys’ clubs of days past? Well, I hope most of them are days past, of people in the office. And is there a different level of connection, or knowledge, or perceptions about people who are together in that space and opportunities for them? And what’s that going to do for folks who make different choices about where they’re going to be located?

Douglas:

Yeah. There’s quite a few layers there because there are folks that have now shifted their patterns, their needs, and demands from their family may have shifted. Also, there are people who have invested in home office setups. There are people that are still working on the kitchen counter. So I think we have to anticipate a diverse set of needs.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, you’re going to have people that are longing, can’t wait to get back to the office, are so tired of being, feeling isolated, or to your point, they don’t have the space that they’d love to have to work. You have others who hope to never go back to an office. Right? And so I think it’s going to be a challenge for organizations to legitimize both points of view to find answers because honestly, in the past, it was really easy to say, “Oh, you can’t do this job from home.”

Robin Anselmi:

Back to your tips and tricks, you could kind of rely on the, well, that’s just not how it’s done here. There are very few places where that’s not how it was done in the last year, year and a half. Right? And so it’s going to be a lot harder to just rely on that’s the policy, or that’s just the way we do it. You’re going to have a lot more people that are going to be challenging that. And so I think really looking at: What’s the vision for the space? What’s the organization’s values? How does space actually enhance the values? How is it a physical representation of the things that an organization says they care about? May require us to rethink how we’re using that space too.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s not only individual contributors. Leaders, executives have now got a taste of what it’s like and what’s possible, so they can no longer deny or convince themselves that it doesn’t work because they’ve now seen it work, and they know it’s possible. And their behavior’s going to change. And I was talking to a senior executive from a very large financial institution just last week. And he was telling me how not having to commute essentially two and a half hours a day changed his life tremendously. He could decide whether he wanted to spend more time working, he could spend more time with the family. That was now discretionary time for him that he could use to improve his career, improve his family life. And I don’t think that’s going to be something he’s going to give up easily. And this is someone that has political power within the organization. It’s not just someone who’s just at the mercy of the whims of the deciders. So I think we’re going to see some really interesting models unfold as people start to wrangle some of these issues and lay out policies.

Douglas:

And it also comes down to how we support our people from a mental and social wellbeing. There’s a lot of trauma that people have experienced that they’re going to have to confront because we’re still in the mode of, we’re still in the fight. We’re not in recovery yet. And so as soon as things shift and we start to think about how we … What does post … I don’t even know if post pandemic even makes sense because I think it might be something, it might be a new way of life taking vaccines every quarter, or every other quarter, or something. But we’ll see how it all unfolds. But I do think that we might see a shift where people start to acknowledge that, oh, wow, I did go through something traumatic, and I need to work through this. And I think leaders are going to have to think about how to have those conversations.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, we were saying pre show about one of my colleagues, Kell Delaney, has said, “We are not the same people that we were in January of 2020.” None of us are. We all have different things that we think about and consider. We have different … Well, all of us have different habits, whether or not those are all good can be left to debate. But we do, we all have different ways of being in the world, and certainly different ways of working. And if we think we’re just flipping a switch to go back, or just take that forward, I think that’s short sighted. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work out. And to your point, I think you’re going to have people at varying sort of stages in their thinking about how they want to work and what that’s going to look like.

Douglas:

This is something we also talked about a little earlier, this concept of leaders becoming leaders because they were really good at a thing. They were the best at the thing. And then they become leaders, they’re not necessarily trained in how to have good meetings. They’re not trained in how to have good conversations, don’t necessarily understand coaching models. Also, typically, they might have been a supervisor before they were even promoted into becoming an official leader. So there might’ve been kind of their job as a supervisor would’ve been more focused on the task. And now that they’re responsibilities have grown, and they’re expected to have these conversations, it can be pretty disorienting. And how do we begin to have performance conversations, conversations about wellbeing and equity?

Robin Anselmi:

Well, and I think from earlier, a lot of leaders sort of do come up in a superior leader mindset, like as a manager, I’m supposed to have the answers. The coaching models, all of them, really are based in: Well, what if I don’t have to have the answers? What if we have to have the answers? What would the answers look like if we crafted them together? And so I honestly think if managers could let go of just one thing, which is that they have to be the one that knows the answer, it would make all the difference. That if it really is, no, we get to work out the answers together as human beings, and really find ones that work, inside of constraints. All organizations are going to have some level of constraints. This isn’t anarchy where you get to do whatever the hell you want, and I get to do whatever the hell I want.

Robin Anselmi:

But if we have a shared purpose and we know what the outcomes are that we’re driving to, can we get creative about what would work for you and what would work for me? And I think if leaders could really let go of, it has to be my way, or I have to have the answer, we could all get smarter together about how to solve those problems.

Douglas:

That’s also very liberating as a leader.

Robin Anselmi:

It is.

Douglas:

It’s exhausting.

Robin Anselmi:

It’s exhausting to think I have to know everything.

Douglas:

And stressful to have all the answers.

Robin Anselmi:

That’s right. That’s right.

Douglas:

And most of the time, I don’t know, if your experience was anything like mine, it was super anxiety provoking too because I kind of felt like it was expected. It wasn’t like I wanted to do it. I felt like that’s what everyone was hoping, so that I would show up as the CTO and know all the CTO things.

Robin Anselmi:

Can you just fix this?

Douglas:

The minute … Yeah. Right. And the minute that I found the liberty in asking, “What do you think we should do?”

Robin Anselmi:

Shocking.

Douglas:

Right? An employee comes to you needing, wanting your advice, and just asking them, “What do you think we should do?” Because a lot of times they know what they would do in your absence. They’re maybe assuming that you want to be involved, or they’re afraid they’re going to get it wrong. Just turning it back on them and giving them the opportunity to just say it empowers them to go with their gut. And then next time, they might not even stop to answer you, so then that’s one less thing that you’re pulled out of or pulled into.

Robin Anselmi:

Absolutely. Whenever the stress gets high, I think as human beings, we tend to contract. So when stress goes up, we tend to sort of pull in closer. The reality is if you actually expand the conversations in those moments, so if under stress, we actually went to more people, asked somebody else for help, the vast majority of the time, we actually really will get smarter together because to your point, somebody else will see it different than I do. So I’m stuck in my own thinking as a leader. I’m worried, I have all this stress. I’m worried about getting it right. If I go and ask somebody else, they don’t have that same stress in that moment, so they might actually be a whole lot smarter than me about what could be possible.

Douglas:

I love that. It makes me think of this notion that I personally have always found. It’s often easier, especially if you’re in the moment of writer’s block, or you just kind of creative block, if you got inspiration flowing, it’s a lot easier to filter. I can say, “That doesn’t meet the values. That’s off vision.” And helping guide and direct things that are kind of coming at you, versus having to create it all. And so to your point, in that moment of tension, if the instinct is to clam up, then the only inspiration you got is what’s inside, versus opening it up and letting the stuff flow at you. And then you can kind of just filter and curate.

Robin Anselmi:

And find, back to the innovation conversation, find that new answer that you might not have ever dreamed of on your own.

Douglas:

Yeah, or even look. You can be looking out for interesting combinations. What if I put this and this together?

Robin Anselmi:

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Douglas:

That’s cool.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah, really great.

Douglas:

Awesome. Well, I think that takes us to an interesting place to kind of hit the pause button on this conversation, and want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah. For me, I think it really is that there is power and joy in human connection and that if we spend too much time at work in the bulk of our lives to not be able to tap into that joy, and that you can find it if you actually expand the conversations. And if you want to find out more or get some inspirations, if you go to conversant.com, you can subscribe to our newsletter. And we send out some monthly tips and information and videos, just to help inspire folks to find that power and joy in their work.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Robin. This has been a pleasure chatting. And I hope people do check out Conversant, and looking forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Robin Anselmi:

Thanks for having me, Douglas. This was super fun.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 48: A Leader’s Power in Presence appeared first on Voltage Control.

“More and more people are starting to recognize that the problems that we’re having usually aren’t issues of good versus evil.  It’s differences of perspective. And if we can take the time to learn these skills and use negotiation as a tool to resolve these conflicts, we could leave these conflicts with stronger relationships and better deals.” -Kwame Christian

Kwame Christian is the Director at the American Negotiation Institute, a consulting firm that focuses entirely on embracing the negotiation skills of entrepreneurs and small-business owners. He believes negotiation is arguably the most important skill set for professionals. As the current host of the ‘Negotiate Anything’ Podcast, Kwame continues the conversation surrounding negotiation as the foundation forward when conflict or uncomfortable conversations arise.  As he empowers others to seek confidence in conflict, Kwame is committed to his mission of leaning into conflict to uncover resolution, while building better relationships through authentic, honest conversations.   

In this episode of Control the Room, Kwame and I discuss breaking down biases in negotiation, the unique approach in negotiation scenarios, strategizing conversations and key recommendations within conflict, and the unique superpower of negotiation in all aspects of life. Listen in to hear how Kwame is encouraging voices to lean into uncomfortable conversations, and how to have effective relationships from the kitchen table to the conference room. The power is in the art of negotiation.

Show Highlights

[0:57] Kwame’s Start in Negotiation
[5:24] Breaking Down Biases 
[14:25] The Approach in a Spectrum of Negotiations 
[19:59] The Mistakes & Misses in Negotiation
[22:26] The Key Recommendations in Strategizing Conversations 
[29:19] Kwame’s Skillset in ANI
[34:29] Kwame’s Look Ahead to the Negotiation Future

Links | Resources

Kwame’s LinkedIn
The American Negotiation Institute
The ANI All-Access Negotiation Guides

About the Guest

Kwame Christian is the Director at the American Negotiation Institute. He is the host of the Negotiate Anything Podcast, known as the world’s most popular negotiation podcast with nearly 2,000,000 downloads. He is the author of Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life, a guide to empowering individuals to overcome their fear, anxiety, and stress surrounding uncomfortable conversations. He currently practices business law at Carlile Patchen & Murphy LLP, where he oversees many areas of legal needs. With a previous background at the Kirwan Institute specializing in criminal justice and health equity, Kwame continues to have a unique voice for difficult conversations and conflict resolutions through negotiation. He continues his crafted skillset at the American Negotiation Institute to eliminate the stigma of uncomfortable conversations and to sharpen the negotiation approach.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Contact Voltage Control

Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Kwame Christian at the American Negotiation Institute, whose mission is to empower professionals to negotiate anything and find confidence in conflict. He’s also the author of the Amazon bestseller, Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life. Welcome to the show, Kwame.

Kwame Christian:

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Douglas:

Absolutely. Thanks for being here. So excited to chat with you today. For starters, how did you find your way into negotiation?

Kwame Christian:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I’m a business lawyer by trade, and so most people assume that that is what led me to this because of the business negotiations that I had. They wouldn’t be completely wrong, but they wouldn’t be completely right either. My undergrad degree is in psychology, and I was always interested in how people can overcome their fears. Because for me, I had a lot of fears regarding difficult conversations.

Kwame Christian:

And so then when I went to law school, I discovered negotiation and that’s when I learned that having these difficult conversations is a skill, not a talent. For me, what I’m doing now with the American Negotiation Institute is I’m blending that love of psychology and helping people to overcome their fears through empowerment with the skillset of negotiation so they can have these difficult conversations effectively.

Kwame Christian:

The model that we have is that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. For us, we just want to make these difficult conversations so you could be in a position to live the best version of your life.

Douglas:

I love that. I was just having a coaching session with an engineering leader earlier today, and he was kind of explaining a situation he was having with one of his coworkers. It dawned on me that he needs to lean into that conflict and have that conversation because he’s just been ignoring it so far.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. And that’s the thing. I think this is a great example. Because with a lot of people, they come into their field, let’s say engineering or web development or something like that, and they hone their skills and they become very proficient and excel at that. The hope is that that skill alone is what’s going to take them to the next level. But typically as you matriculate through your professional career, you get better, you get better, you get better, and then they say, “Hey, you’re really good at this. You should lead.”

Kwame Christian:

That’s a completely different skillset. Even with something like engineering, we’re talking about numbers, we’re talking about data, very hard facts and things like that, we’re recognizing that other people might have different perspectives and still we have to negotiate the resolution between our team members to see which idea goes forward. Regardless of what your field is, whether you want to be or not, you’re a negotiator because we’re all having these difficult conversations.

Kwame Christian:

I want to help people to recognize that so they can develop these skills and have the conversations more effectively.

Douglas:

It also brings to mind to this notion that, especially with engineers, they’re systems thinkers, and they have to be analytical and kind of unpack things and figure out how they work and maybe design them to work new ways. When they start to apply them to human relations or psychology, I think that can lead to assumptions, right?

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely.

Douglas:

If I’m unpacking the system and I think, “Oh, I’m convinced this is how it works.” And to your point on the data, I don’t always have the data to back up some of our assumptions around what people are thinking or why they’re behaving the way they’re behaving.

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing, a lot of times, it’s tough for people to recognize the difference between facts and feelings. They’re not the same. But in the moment, they can feel the same, right? A lot of times we fill in the gaps in our understanding with these assumptions, with the biases that we have. And I talk a lot about biases because of my background in psychology.

Kwame Christian:

And I think the modern day conversations about biases are too limiting, because we often focus on race and gender ethnicity, sexual orientation, those type of things. And that’s important. Those things are very important, but your mind is naturally biased in general. It’s impossible to not to be biased.

Kwame Christian:

We will have biases in all of our interactions based on things that we like, things that we don’t like because of our lived experiences. The more aware we can become of these biases, the more clearly we can see the world.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. And also, I think some of the things you mentioned around the biases that are kind of very topical right now, to me seemed like they’re higher level biases, right? Where there’s a lot of low level biases at work that caused those things even happen, right? I’ve always been fascinated when people shine the light for me on these more underlying biases. I think that comes from the world of psychology, like Tversky and whatnot.

Douglas:

I’m curious, in your work, what’s some of the biases that you find most helpful for folks to become aware of and what are some tactical ways they can put this to you?

Kwame Christian:

Here’s a good example. I’ve found that in my negotiations, let’s say if there’s a heated negotiation, my client is really mad. They’re telling me the story the way that they see it. I get heated because I want to defend my client. The clearer and more certain I am about what is happening, typically, the more incorrect I am about what is happening. Because like I said, okay, I’m not exactly sure what’s happening in this moment, but my bias is toward my client and against this person.

Kwame Christian:

I believe that whatever happened there that I don’t know is in favor of my client, right? I have to recognize that tendency in order to pull back and approach this correctly. And the thing is, Doug, I still practice, even though I’m running the American Negotiation Institute and we do these negotiation and conflict resolution trainings, I still practice law. I bill about five, 10 hours a month, because I want to keep my skills sharp, because I can’t be a good teacher if I’m not still practicing at the same time.

Kwame Christian:

I’m still learning too. And I think that’s one of the most exciting things about this topic for me. Because with our podcast, Negotiate Anything, we’re at over 300 episodes, over three million downloads. And even though we’ve had that many episodes, every single time that I interview somebody, I learn something new. There’s just no end to the depth of knowledge you can gain on this topic and that’s what’s so exciting to me.

Douglas: 

I had Gary Noesner on the show, gosh, last summer, I think, and it fascinates me when I think about folks that are in these super high stakes negotiations and how the rules and some of the moves are really similar to facilitation and how we have to think about interacting with coworkers and whatnot. But there’s quite a bit more stake, and it’s quite a bit more extreme, right? I’m just kind of curious, in your work, what’s the spectrum of the types of negotiations you’re doing?

Douglas:

Do they typically fall in the business arena, or are they stretching out into like terrorism and like some of the things Gary deals with?

Kwame Christian:

Yeah. It’s really cool, and I think that’s one of the things that’s so exciting about the work that we do with the American Negotiation Institute, just the diversity of clients and backgrounds that we work with. I will say, I haven’t had the opportunity to do those types of negotiations with lives on the line, but we have had some really high stakes business negotiations, hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, consulting on those types of deals, all the way down to interpersonal family conflicts.

Kwame Christian:

The thing is, with those interpersonal family conflicts, the emotions are so raw. In many ways, they’re more challenging, because it’s more emotional than substantive and rational. The thing is, with those multimillion dollar deals, let’s say I save them 10%, which is significant, or it doesn’t work at all, which is significant. Everybody goes home. Everybody’s well-paid and they tried their best. That’s it. Everything’s fine.

Kwame Christian:

But when it is your home that is housing the conflict, the stakes are actually higher in a lot of ways. It’s been really fascinating to go into smaller organizations, family conflicts, those types of things, and help and offer guidance in those situations. It really runs the gamut. And I think more and more people are starting to recognize that the problems that we’re having usually aren’t issues of good versus evil.

Kwame Christian:

It’s differences of perspective. And if we can take the time to learn these skills and use negotiation as a tool to resolve these conflicts, we could leave these conflicts with stronger relationships and better deals.

Douglas:

That’s a fascinating point. It brings me back to the whole bias notion. It’s like realizing it’s not good versus evil. Even though it goes against my values, I can’t demonize it. Because as soon as I start demonizing it, then that means I can’t work with it.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Exactly. One of the chapters in my book or sections in my book rather is called the benefit of the benefit of the doubt. A lot of times when I say, “Hey, we have to give people the benefit of the doubt,” they think it’s naive. They say, “Why would I give that to them?” But really the benefit of the doubt is a gift that you give yourself. Because if you give the other person the benefit of the doubt, then you’re really forcing yourself to stay more engaged.

Kwame Christian:

And if you think about let’s say a physical competition or working out or something like that, if I’m working out, that’s hard enough. If I’m working out while under tension, my body is just tense, my muscles are flexed the whole time unnecessarily, then I’m going to tire out a lot faster unnecessarily in that physical activity. The same thing holds true in our difficult conversations. These conversations are psychologically and emotionally taxing.

Kwame Christian:

And if you are going into this conversation, not only saying, hey, there is a problem that needs to be resolved, but, there’s a problem that needs to be resolved and this person is evil, you’re making it harder on yourself. You’re not seeing the situation clearly, number one, and you’re going to get emotionally and psychologically exhausted throughout the interaction. And people don’t make good decisions when they’re tired. This puts you in a better mindset for having the conversation.

Douglas:

It also strikes me too, as you said that, and this person is evil as hyperbole, right? We’re kind of becoming victims of ourselves or our own hyperbole.

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing, most people don’t wake up and say, “I wonder how I can be evil today.” Most people don’t think that way. Most people think that they are trying their best to approach this the right way. The assumption that I have in these conversations is that the person on the other side of the table, given their skills and their understanding and their perspective, is trying the best that they can.

Kwame Christian:

Sometimes the best that they can isn’t good enough. Okay, that’s great. This is a coaching opportunity. Now I can share my perspective, have this conversation, and help them to understand things differently. And if you approach it that way, then they say to themselves, “Oh, you know what? I’m thinking about this differently, and now I’m going to change my approach.” They own the transition. And if they own that change in mindset, it makes it more likely for that change to be longer lasting.

Kwame Christian:

If they feel like, “Oh, Doug bullied me into this, or I have to do this to assuage his concerns,” those types of things, then they’re just doing it for you and not for themselves. If we make this more of a collaborative process, it makes the changes that come as a result of it a lot more longer lasting.

Douglas:

Yeah, that would make sense. It’d be more durable because people will fight to undo it later when they get a chance. Reminds me of like the politics, right? One group changing something. And then four years later, it gets changed. And it was just back and forth where there was no real agreement in the first place.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. And here’s the thing, I like to use the example of toothpaste in a lot of situations. For instance, if you say something wrong in a conversation, it’s kind of like you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t pull that back. If it’s out, it’s out. Another thing is, imagine if you have a tube of toothpaste and you squeeze one area, right? The toothpaste just moves to another area of the tube.

Kwame Christian:

In this situation with these difficult conversations, let’s say I have all of the power, all of the leverage in this moment, and I decide to not build a relationship. I decide not to respectfully engage them and give them an opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. I decide, “Hey, it doesn’t matter. I have the leverage. There’s nothing they can do about it. They’re going to have to do what I want to do and that’s just tough for them.”

Kwame Christian:

People remember and they have this internal scale of justice in their mind and they say, “I remember what Doug did to me two years ago.” A lot of these interactions are not one shot deals. You’re going to have multiple interactions with this person throughout your career, throughout your lifetime in the majority of situations. They’re going to carry that with them. The reality is, power shifts with time.

Kwame Christian:

And sometime they’re going to have the upper hand and they will not have forgotten the way you treated them in that moment. Again, when we talk about these deals being longer lasting and the person wanting to get out, we want to make it so that it’s a deal that they look at it and they can see their fingerprint on it. I had some agency autonomy and control over how this deal was settled, and I’m okay with this. This looks good.

Kwame Christian:

But if they say, “I was bullied into this,” and then the situation shifts, they’re going to be trying as hard as they can to change things to make it fairer for them, and at the same time, get back at you.

Douglas:

That experience just leaves a bad taste, even if economically or comfort level has improved, like it turns out it wasn’t that bad of an outcome for them, they’re still going to not remember that fondly, right?

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Remember, perception is reality.

Douglas:

Yeah. I want to come back to your point around the spectrum of multiple millions of dollars at stake in a business negotiation or highly emotionally charged personal negotiations. Those sound quite different. I want to hear how you might approach those differently from a principles or just a tactic standpoint.

Kwame Christian:

I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they over complicate the process. When it comes down to it, there are people on both sides, people dealing with different things. I think for me, that’s the advantage that I have is because my background is in psychology, so I look at the people differently. I’m trying to figure out what are the emotional levers that are being pulled at any given time.

Kwame Christian:

When it comes down to it, the difference is complexity. What’s at stake? In that $600 million deal that I worked on, what’s at stake? Okay. It’s money and each in each organization has different interests. What are the varying interests organizationally, and then what are the varying interests of each of the players at the table, because each has their own different set of interests?

Kwame Christian:

For instance, I’m usually on the procurement side, so the people who are buying something. The people on the procurement side, they’re playing defense. They’re saying, “I want this. This is a high price. I’m trying to knock it down.” And then the people on the sales side, they are trying to maximize the deal. They want to make it bigger. But then we have to also think about it from the individual perspective, the sales person often gets commission based on sales.

Kwame Christian:

The procurement person doesn’t have that same incentive. The incentives of each person on the table are going to be different. For the procurement person, whether or not the deal goes well, per se, doesn’t have a direct impact on their paycheck. Yes, if they perform at a high level, then it makes it more likely for them to rise through the ranks, but it doesn’t have that same urgency as the salesperson because they can see their paycheck tied very clearly to each interaction.

Kwame Christian:

And so that’s important. But then with the family side, the things that need to be resolved are not as complex. Smaller dollar values, usually like two or three issues that need to be resolved, right? But it’s that emotional component that is the biggest issue. That’s where it gets messy and interesting. It’s the complexity of the big deals that makes it more difficult, but it’s the emotional complexity of the smaller deals that make those more intriguing.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s really fascinating to me. It sounds like the personal deals might be complex in a way that is somewhat unknowable, right? Because we don’t know how those emotions might shift and change, so maybe that’s the difficulty in navigating that versus where the business deals are complicated, there’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of stuff to deal with, but some of it’s kind of knowable, right, because we can unpack those incentives and things.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. I think though, the range of emotions that you need to tango with are a little bit limited in the business context as well. We have pride. We have frustration. We have anger, annoyance, impatience, those types of things. But then when it comes to the personal world, you have those exact same things. Then you have love, affection, attention, betrayal, jealousy, all of those things. The range, the spectrum of emotions becomes a lot more complex. And that’s what makes it more challenging.

Douglas:

I want to come back to the point around… I wrote down needs and incentives, understanding the needs of both sides and what the incentives are. Are their corollaries? I guess, needs would make sense in the personal relationships. I’m kind of curious on the incentive side. Does that play out or is there a corollary there?

Kwame Christian:

On the personal side? Yes and no. But in the personal side, there’s a risk of seeming a bit too transactional too. That’s the challenge as well, because you want it to… You can use the same negotiation techniques, and you pull on the same psychological levers, but you have to tow that line to make sure it doesn’t seem transactional, especially if the relationship goes into the future. So let’s say it’s a family business.

Kwame Christian:

Regardless of what happens to this business, the family structure is still there. You know? Even though we’re talking about dollars and cents, we still have to consider the structure and strength of the relationship going forward. Sometimes you could be a bit more aggressive and a bit more assertive in those business negotiation things, because when it comes down to it, it’s a business. It’s a corporation.

Kwame Christian:

But on the family side, it is a business and a corporation. At the same time, it’s a family too. You can still use incentives, like an if, then proposition. “Well, Hey, this is one of my concerns. If I give a little bit on that, would you feel comfortable giving a bit on that?” That’s something you can do. But if you make it too transactional, then you run the risk of diminishing the relationship in some senses.

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like it could trivialize it too.

Kwame Christian:

Yeah, exactly. Like cheapening it, right? It’s like, “Oh, I thought I was your brother, but now it seems like I’m somebody you just pay off to get out of your face. Okay. I’ll see you at Christmas.”

Douglas:

I guess that’s a real risk on these personal things, right? You could navigate the negotiation and have a successful outcome, but then it’s not necessarily ideal from a relationship standpoint afterwards.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Yup.

Douglas:

I’m kind of curious about what you see as common negotiation mistakes. People that think… Maybe they went online, did some reading, and they think they’ve got it. Like not mistakes people who are just like totally ignorant are making, but people that are really trying. What do they trip over and need more practice or experience to get right?

Kwame Christian:

Well, here’s one of the biggest things, and this is shocking to most people, even before that is that people have low levels of negotiation awareness. These are negotiations happening all the time, but people don’t identify them as negotiation, so they don’t negotiate. That’s the biggest mistake. For me, I like to broaden the scope of negotiation. I call a negotiation anytime you’re in a conversation and somebody in the conversation wants something.

Kwame Christian:

We’re negotiating every day, right? So that’s the first thing, it’s awareness. Now let’s say somebody says, “Hey, Kwame, I get it. All right. I’m negotiating. I’m going to prepare. I’m going to do this the right way. I’m going to do some research. I’m going to learn about it.” What they do is they go into and they get a laundry list of different negotiation techniques that they could potentially use in the conversation.

Kwame Christian:

They don’t think strategically, they think tactically. Whenever you’re thinking about how to approach any type of problem, you have to start off with your goal. And then from the goal, you reverse engineer and create your strategy. And then from there you pick which tactics you can use. What is the approach that I’m going to take strategically? And then which of these tactics do I use in order to get there?

Kwame Christian:

It’s essentially like going to a store and saying, “Okay, yeah, it’s time for me to cook. I’m going to cook now,” and then you just go to the spice aisle and you just grab every spice that you can, and then you come home and you think you’re ready to cook. If you haven’t taken the time to create a recipe or come up with some kind of plan, what do you hope to accomplish with this meal, it’s still not going to taste very good.

Douglas:

Yeah, no doubt. I see that at all levels of business and everything, right? Just focusing on the tactics without having a clear strategy or even understanding the purpose. That’s a common problem in business right now of people just crop dusting your calendar with meetings. It’s like, why are we having those meeting? Just a pure example. Also, kind of curious about… What is your recommendation?

Douglas:

You kind of hinted to this already around focusing on setting your goal, thinking about the strategy. But if someone’s wanting to… Maybe they have a goal in mind and maybe they’re like scratching their head, “How do I even formulate a good strategy, or how do I even know…” I mean, is it called the ANI? What are some steps they could take to get a little more comfortable to lean in to maybe select the right tactics?

Kwame Christian:

Right. Well, Doug, of course, if they want coaching and they want a training, they could, of course, call ANI. But just on the basic level, I think really there’s a lot that we can do personally to improve our skills and our ability to perform in these specific conversations. I have a gift for your audience.

Kwame Christian:

If they go to our website, americannegotiationinstitute.com/guide, they can get access to all of our free negotiation guides, how to negotiate for your salary, how to have difficult conversations about politics, how to have business negotiations, how to negotiate as an introvert, or negotiate for your car.

Kwame Christian:

We have over 15 guides that can help people to prepare systematically for these conversations, so you’ll get a little bit more clarity on your goal and what you should do in order to achieve that goal. Really it reminds me of this quote from Martina Navratilova. she says, “Everybody has the will to win, but few people have the will to prepare.” Preparation is the thing that really distinguishes people when it comes to these negotiations.

Douglas:

What’s the biggest advice you have for negotiating salaries? I think that’s one that people have to do quite often. I see varying approaches that people take. I’m curious, what approaches you found to be the most successful?

Kwame Christian:

Well, what I’d say is this, first, you have to ask yourself, am I negotiating from the inside or the outside? This is one of the major strategic considerations you have to have. Do I have this job already and I’m trying to increase my salary from what I already have? That’s negotiating from the inside. Is this a new opportunity? Did I just get a job offer? That’s negotiating from the outside?

Kwame Christian:

One of the biggest questions people ask in negotiation in general is, who should make the first offer? And it comes down to knowledge. Some people would say, “Oh, always make the first offer.” Some people say, “Never make the first offer.” I’m a lawyer. I say it depends. Okay?

Kwame Christian:

What you have to do is you say to yourself, “Okay, if I have as much knowledge or more knowledge than the other side, then I make the first offer because I can be strategically aggressive. But if I have less knowledge than the other side, then I let them make the first offer, then I counter it. Because if I make the first offer without knowing the situation, I might price myself out and sound ridiculous or go way too low.”

Kwame Christian:

So imagine this, Doug. Imagine if you get a job offer for this dream job and they say, “So, Doug, how much would you like to make at this job? What do you think is a fair salary?” And you say, “I think $100,000 is a fair salary,” and they say, “Yeah, absolutely. Let’s do that. Let’s do that.” How do you feel? You’re like, how much could I have gotten? They said yes too quickly. In that situation, you don’t know enough.

Kwame Christian:

But in the situation for when you’re on the inside, you already know what your salary is. You have some general idea of what’s possible, so you are in a position to competently make the first offer, and then have them play defense and respond to you. That’s the number one strategic consideration you have to have. And then you get to a point usually where they make an offer and it doesn’t seem like they’re moving very much anymore.

Kwame Christian:

What I would suggest is just asking this question, and I think this is one of the most powerful negotiation questions that you can ask in general, what flexibility do you have with your offer? That’s it. Number one, it’s open-ended, so they can’t just say yes or no. They have to elaborate. Number two, it assumes that there is flexibility. So it forces them to think about where that is in order to answer the question, right?

Kwame Christian:

The power of this question is annoyingly consistent. Here’s an example, I mentor kids who are going into law school, talking them through how to do the application, just before they get into legal career. The thing that’s annoying about this is that I discovered this question after I graduated law school. Again, with the podcast, it’s called Negotiate Anything for a reason, because we don’t realize just how many things we can negotiate.

Kwame Christian:

I teach the kids how to negotiate their scholarship package. And all they do is they get the scholarship offer from the school and they say, “Thank you very much for this offer. I really appreciate it. I’m considering a lot of schools. Finances are important to me. I just have a question, what flexibility do you have with your scholarship package?” 100% of the time they get something more, 100%, which is wild to me.

Kwame Christian:

One of the students even got $7,000 per year. $21,000 of over three years of law school. They realized just how significant that is after they graduate and they have to start paying that back. That matters. Simply asking, what flexibility do you have, in this salary negotiation situation and in other situations in general probably one of the most powerful things you can do.

Douglas:

It’s also very unassuming and very curious, because I would imagine it disarms the other side, right? Because then they’re like, “Hmm, let me think about that.” It haven’t told you I need you to do anything. I’m just kind of asking where the boundaries are. It also reminds me of your concept of who has the most knowledge.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of the concept of BATNA, which means that if you have more knowledge, you probably have a better understanding of where the BATNA lies, which means that you’re going to be more equipped to make that move.

Kwame Christian:

100%. And that’s a critical theory too, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, because you’re only as strong as your next best alternative. If I don’t have an alternative, then I kind of have to take what I get at the table.

Douglas:

But also if you’re on the flip side of that, if they have an alternative, you should know that. I think that’s part of your conversation about the preparation. It’s like, look at the edges. Are you coming into an entry-level position and you know they have at least 15 candidates that would probably do just as good a job as you would? That’s a different scenario than if like you’re the only neuro-ophthalmologist in town, they pretty much have to figure out how to make this work, right?

Kwame Christian:

Exactly, exactly. So again, that preparation is going to be critical. Because you can have all the skills in the world, but if you don’t prepare and see the entire landscape, you’re going to be limited in the way that you can perform at the table.

Douglas:

When we were chatting before the show, you mentioned that you were excited about your team growing. And so congrats for that. That’s awesome times. It’s exciting in a company’s journey to be in those moments of growth. I’m kind of curious to hear how your expertise and your work’s been impacting growing your team. Two things come to mind. 

Douglas:

One is internal meetings and the way that you collaborate might be impacted by these skills, and also when new recruits are interviewing and thinking about coming in, there might be some nervousness, right? Like, “Man, this is the expert there. Can I hold my own here?”

Kwame Christian:

Yeah. It’s been really, really fun growing, because that’s the name of the game this year. It’s scaling, scaling, scaling. We brought on a number of new trainers, new full-time staff as well. I think the most important acquisition was a business development guy to put fuel in the tank to make everything move forward. And it’s funny, Doug, because the thing is people often ask me during these trainings, what if you’re up against somebody who is doing the exact same thing that you’re doing?

Kwame Christian:

What if you’re up against somebody who knows these negotiation skills just as well as you do? So for me, asking that question is kind of like asking, what if I’m in a relationship and somebody loves me too much, right? Because for me, if you’re up against somebody who uses this interest-based negotiation where they actually care about what you care about, because they realized that’s the key for them to get what they care about too, you’re in a good position.

Kwame Christian:

They’re going to listen to what your problem is, and they’re going to try to work together to solve it. That’s a good thing. It’s been really interesting with all of the full-time members of the team, they negotiated their way on. I never had any traditional interviews or anything like that. They were always looking at ANI, learning more about it, and they kept on making offers, increasing their involvement, and they negotiated their way back onto the team, right?

Kwame Christian:

It’s really, really interesting. And I just have to sit back and laugh to myself, because every time I said yes, it was because they negotiated and we created a win-win solution for both of us. Okay, you can provide this. That works. Then I can pay you this. Fair deal. Let’s go. It’s been really, really cool to see how negotiation is really within the lifeblood of this organization. It’s something that we really live.

Kwame Christian:

We’re negotiating with each other all the time, communicating effectively, and everybody’s winning as a result.

Douglas:

I love that. It made me think of a comment that you mentioned a little earlier around people are going to remember if you took advantage of them. I think sometimes people think of negotiation as getting the best deal for yourself. But as we both know, negotiation is about finding the best outcome. I once read about this idea of finding where there’s perception on uneven value.

Douglas:

If there’s something I really, really value in something you don’t really value much, that’s an amazing negotiation to foster, right? Because we can exchange that and be very, very happy about it, right?

Kwame Christian:

Exactly.

Douglas:

Because you don’t feel like you’re giving up very much and I feel like I’m getting a lot. That’s amazing, right? I think, to your point, when both people are very skilled at facilitation, then we can actually find these amazing opportunities because we both know what to look for.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Exactly. You hit the nail on the head there, because that’s one of the keys to creativity, trading things of unequal value. I want something a lot. You don’t want that thing too much. Hey, let’s swap. It’s like lunchtime. That’s really the way it should be and it’s great. And again, the only way you figure those things out is through effective communication. So many people are so focused on just telling people like it is.

Kwame Christian:

“This is what I need. This is what you need to know. You don’t know this. I do. Let me educate you.” But they’re not taking the time to listen effectively to figure out what it is that the person needs. And if you can figure that out, figure out what they want and need and why, now you’re in a position to actually solve the problem and create synergy.

Douglas:

It reminds me of a concept that is a profound principle in the world of facilitation that we use a lot, which is the difference between inquiry versus advocacy. If we’re in inquiry mode, that’s exactly what you’re describing, where we’re digging deeper into the wants and needs versus advocacy, where we already know where we want to go and we’re just going to try to sell someone on that destination.

Douglas:

I would imagine that plays out a lot in negotiations where someone’s already got it figured out, they know what they want, they’re just trying to push someone toward that outcome, it’s probably going to be a lot more fraught with tension and issues versus listening and trying to figure out where we might better take it.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. That’s very real because people can sense that. And I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to these difficult conversations. They start to persuade too soon. And if you begin the conversation telling people what they need to do and why, we are inviting unnecessary resistance through the process.

Douglas:

I’m curious to hear more about your vision of the future of negotiation. Where are things headed in the next five, 10 years?

Kwame Christian:

I think the industry is ripe for explosion, because it’s an industry that is really… It’s too thin. It’s very strange. Let’s just give an example. We’re both podcasters. How many sales podcasts are there? Thousands. I think a better question is, how many sales podcasts start every month? That would be more intriguing because there are so many of them out there. How many negotiation podcasts are there?

Kwame Christian:

When I started, Negotiate Anything was the only active negotiation podcasts on the market. The only active negotiation podcast in the market. The only one for all of the podcasts. Like what? At the time when I started, it was about 700,000 podcasts. One active negotiation podcast. That’s preposterous, right? How many people are negotiating every day? Literally everybody who can talk.

Kwame Christian:

I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here, and I want to blaze the trail on rebranding negotiation. Because when people hear that term, they think of stuffy, old people talking about big deals that they can never ever relate to. But I’m saying you today right now, you’re negotiating. You’re talking to your child, you’re negotiating. You’re talking to your spouse, you’re negotiating. You’re resolving things between your team members, you’re negotiating.

Kwame Christian:

I want to be the leader in making this concept more approachable and accessible to the masses. My hope is that the industry follows suit. We grow, we diversify, and we start approaching things in different ways. Because I think now more than ever, people are struggling to have these difficult conversations. The stakes are higher than ever, and we’re struggling more than ever before. I think we are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in that way, and I hope a lot of other people follow suit.

Douglas:

That’s amazing. It sounds like the kind of thing where there’s a real opportunity as it grows and expands and awareness and knowledge that there could be specializations as well for different industries and purposes. Maybe they start to refine the tools in some new and novel ways, which then has awesome rebound effect, because then you start looking cross industry and cross sector at like, “Oh, what are they doing over here?” And then it just amplifies.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. And think about it, again, since it’s everywhere, we’re going to see this skillset showing up in different places. So it’s 2021 now for the listeners. But in 2020, once all these difficult conversations about race started coming up, leaders around the world were faced with this situation. I came to this business because I like what I do. I like my skillset. Let’s use the engineer, for example. I’m an engineer.

Kwame Christian:

Wait, now since I’m leading a team, I have to address this with my team? Talking about racist coming up for me? Why? I don’t want to do that. I’m scared of doing that. Hey, well, if you take that lens of negotiation and conflict resolution and put it in this field, now you have a skillset and a set of tools that you can use in order to have these conversations in a way that makes it more comfortable for you, because it’s very uncomfortable.

Kwame Christian:

And at the same time, it makes it less likely for you to cause unintended offense. Oh wow. I didn’t think I could use it in this way. What I’m hoping to see is more of this focused approach for negotiation. We have the broad topic of negotiation, and then each industry has a really unique and interesting angle to it. You can take those same skills and then make it more specific for the industries involved.

Douglas:

I want to end there. I think that’s a great place to wrap today, and I would just love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Kwame Christian:

Yeah. Just remember, the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations, and you are in a position to have these conversations more effectively. And if you do, it will have a profound impact on the quality of your career and the quality of your life. I think one of the things that we to start doing is taking a bit of personal responsibility for the quality of our relationships.

Kwame Christian:

It only takes one person to improve the quality of your relationship. And the reality is, a lot of times, we’re waiting for other people to get better, but we can get better first, right? And negotiation is one of the tools that we could use. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the podcast. You’re listening to a podcast now, so I’m assuming you listen to podcasts. Check out Negotiate Anything.

Kwame Christian:

And we also have a book, Finding Confidence in Conflict. And if you’re interested in a negotiation or conflict resolution training, check out our website, americannegotiationinstitute.com.

Douglas:

Excellent. Thanks for that, Kwame, and it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely. Thanks Doug. Appreciate it.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 47: The Negotiation Niche appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Because there is this law or that law, or people started giving us all the reasons that things don’t have to change or all of the things that are preventing change, [it] prevents people from dreaming about something different. How do we create these just, equitable, and diverse futures moving forward?” -Lesley Ann Noel

Lesley is the NC State University Asst. Professor of Design and Author & Creator of the Designers Critical Alphabet, a tool created to spark reflection and introduce designers & design students to critical theory.  She inspires her students & established designers alike to lead with empathy in design and build a greater social impact. With her leading research in equity-centered design thinking through diverse audiences and public health, Leslie represents the significance of a non-specialist approach in design and a larger need for industry-led social responsibility through design. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Lesley and I discuss the greater social impact in design, the journey of her career through design thinking, a detailed look into the designer’s Critical Alphabet, the ideas behind critical race theory, and the necessary reminder of an empathetic approach in design. Listen in to hear how Lesley is expanding her design education footprint for future designers of our generation.

Show Highlights

[01:06] Lesley’s Journey in Design
[10:50] Social Impact in Design
[21:27] The 2072 Thinking Shift
[25:16] A Look Into the Designer’s Critical Alphabet
[35:14] Critical Race Theory
[38:42] Leading with Empathy & Lesley’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Lesley’s LinkedIn
Critical Alphabet
Lesley’s Twitter

About the Guest

Lesley Ann Noel is the North Carolina State University Asst. Professor of Design and Author & Creator of the Designer’s Critical Alphabet, a tool created to spark reflection and introduce designers & design students to critical theory.  Leslie’s passion in offering design education to under-represented audiences has inspired her to lead the conversation through her class development, projects, and research. Lesley’s current research centers around civic and social innovation, critical design, pedagogy, equity centered design thinking, and design thinking in public health. With a previous background as the Associate Director for Design Thinking for Social Impact and Professor of Practice at Tulane University, Leslie continues her non-specialist approach in design as a blueprint for design students to expand inspiration from non-traditional audiences and create a widespread social impact for the generations of our future.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Lesley-Ann Noel at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is the assistant professor of design. She’s also the author and creator of the Designer’s Critical Alphabet. Welcome to the show, Lesley-Ann.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Thank you, Douglas. How are you?

Douglas:

I am well. I’m excited to chat with you. We had such a lovely exchange in the pre-show chat. I’m really looking forward to having this conversation.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

I am too. I’m excited.

Douglas:

To kick things off, I’d like to hear a little bit about how you got started. How did you become a professor of design?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

We don’t have enough time for me to tell you where I got my start, because some people might say, “Oh, I’m migrated into this profession later on in my career,” or something like that. Well, I’ve actually been in design since middle school. I’m almost … I don’t know. Middle school was a long time ago, actually. Right? So, you could say I’ve been in this for most of my life. I’m from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean, and in that education system we specialize really early. So, from middle school I said, “Okay, yes, I’m interested in art and design.” And I chose it then, at each age 13, as a subject area that I was interested in, and I just continued. And I’ve morphed through many different areas of design, graphic design, textile design, product design. And then even more unconventional things like designing sets for shows or designing costumes for carnival.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So, it’s hard for me to say where I got my start. I am trained as an industrial designer. And that start is really, again, kind of … So, that one is really casual where I was looking through a magazine and I saw this glass vase. And I just thought, “Oh my gosh, this is so beautiful.” And the magazine that I was looking at was a prospectus for a university. This is how long ago this was. Where you had to write to a university and ask them for a magazine, and they’d send you this magazine. And you would then try to figure out what you wanted to study from the magazine that they sent you. And so, this glass vase in this magazine, glossy magazine from a university in New York, made me move from graphic design and textile design into industrial design. But I guess I’ve just been here in this space since for so long that’s it’s almost like what other space would I be in? You know? My entire life is about design.

Douglas:

You know, it struck me when you were talking about making that shift and into industrial design, that you were coming from a deep background with experience in other types of design. I wonder how these different perspectives, or approaching design from different disciplines, has impacted the way you think about design as a whole

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So, it has had a big impact, because since I’ve moved through so many different areas of design, I can really see where the process is the same across the different disciplines. So, actually today I work in a kind of non specialist area of design, and I have been in this kind of non specialist area of design for a while. Where people ask me, “Okay, what kind of designer are you?” And I no longer use an adjective, because I’m really just seeing it as a kind of process that we are applying to anything. And so, I guess with some hubris or overconfidence, I feel like I can design anything, which is probably not something I should say on a podcast. But because in industrial design, you change the materials that you’re working with on each project. So, it’s actually a different way that we have to think about things in industrial design. Because you learn about new materials and processes for the project that you’re working on.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And then you discard that information, and you learn about something new that the next time around. So, it just means that I think about design possibly in an abstract way as this process that we’re then applying to many different things. So, I think about the process that we use, as well as the creative approaches that we start to use a little bit intuitively as designers. Through practice, we then become very comfortable with … I mean, to use some of the cliche stuff with getting with fast failure. And we get comfortable with knowing that we have to repeat an idea 50 times before we come up with something innovative. So, I think there are ways that designers think across all of the design disciplines, and that’s where I am today.

Douglas:

So, I found it really interesting because you referred to it as non specialist design, which I think is pretty descriptive of this territory. There’s certainly designers, and also entrepreneurs. That are like, “I need to hire a designer.” Clearly, they’re thinking graphic designer or product designer, or their specialties. And you learn that craft and you can do that thing, but there’s definitely this bigger umbrella of how you approach challenges and problems and how you solve things. And I love this idea of non specialist design. I haven’t had a great way of referring to it in the past, but the thing I would challenge … Don’t you have to deeply specialize or do a lot of specialization to get to that point where you’re like a non specialist?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Probably. And maybe, I mean, I am saying I’m a non specialist, but maybe actually I’m a specialist in a field that’s unnamed, right?

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Because I used to be attracted to the area of design that’s called design management. Because as designers, if you’re working with a lot of different people, there’s sometimes a lot of different moving parts to get a product made. And so, I used to find myself starting to gravitate. I’ve been in academia for a little while. So, I was starting to gravitate towards kind of design management conferences. Because I thought, “Well, okay, maybe that’s where I am. Because I do understand design as strategy and design as more of like a management kind of space.” And so currently, I guess today you could say I’m in design thinking, and it is a space that I inhabit fairly comfortably.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And knowing that it’s also a space that a lot of people love and a lot of people hate, right? But what I like about this space of design thinking is that I can then focus on the area that I’m interested in, which is thinking. In my PhD work, I spent a lot of time writing about how we think as designers. Even before doing my PhD, I was kind of dabbling. When I was still teaching in Trinidad at The University of the West Indies, I was already looking at maybe creative cognition, which is about thinking. So, design thinking became a place where I could be, even though the way that I talk about design thinking is sometimes different to the way that people talk about design thinking in maybe more corporate spaces.

Douglas:

Mm. And how would you articulate that difference?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So, there are like different bodies of literature around design thinking. And I’ve identified maybe about three, and actually I haven’t identified it. There’s a paper by somebody called Lucy Kimbell that talks about three bodies of literature around design thinking. And as someone coming from a design background, I then start in one area where I’m looking at the way we think as designers, the way we approach problems, the way we work together. The kinds of methods that we use as designers, and ways of thinking, and ways of being, right?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And then the second body of literature is around wicked problems. And maybe this is a space … It’s like maybe using design to address complexity. And maybe it’s a space where more non-designers start to come in, because we might be looking at social problems in this body of literature. And then the third body of literature, which is where I think most of the people talking about design thinking are, is like design thinking as this organizational resource or organizational tool to transform maybe business processes, maybe the design of services. But it’s really then focused on kind of corporate innovation. And so, the difference is that whereas many people in design thinking might be really just looking at that third area. Because they are focused on that type of innovation. I’m coming from art and design. So, I’m using that original body of literature, and then I’m also working in social impact. And so, I’m also using the wicked problems literature. So, I’m conveniently using the term in a few different ways to support the work that I do.

Douglas:

I was about to bring up the social impact work that you were doing at Tulane. And really curious to hear how that’s continued and into the work you’re doing today. And I’m just really fascinated about using these tools to not only think about business value, but just think about social value as well.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah. So, being at Tulane was a really good experience, because I had accountability in my title. You know? I was associate director of design thinking for social impact. And our center name, Phyllis M Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking also had some accountability in the name. And so, it was a good space to be because it means then as I created programs, as a program director, as I created programs I had to think about, “Okay, where is the impact? Where is the social part of it? What social justice … Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing as I made these programs?”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And so I don’t want to say I created a course. I inherited a course called Design Thinking for Collective Impact, but how I created that course is, how I designed it, is we focus then on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. And every semester, we selected one SDG, well generally, I selected one SDG, but actually, in the middle of the pandemic, in that summer of 2020, something interesting happened where two people from New Orleans reached out to me and said, “Okay, we know now what your class is about. And we are going to tell you what SDG you should focus on.” And I thought, okay, this is actually where we want to be, right? Because we’re talking about social impact. We’re talking about community engaged work. If the community is telling us what the class should be about, then yeah, this is a pretty good space.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So what happened then is that the SDG that they were interested in was good health and wellbeing because they said, “Okay, with the pandemic, this is what we have to focus on.” And so that shifted then my class where my class really started to focus on good health and wellbeing. So for one semester, we interviewed people in New Orleans to understand good health and wellbeing, and then went through a typical design cycle, but only focused on what we were hearing people talking about that they needed related to good health and wellbeing. And then the semester after that, we focused on Feeding Louisiana, which is a food bank, the food bank program in Louisiana. They reached out to us and we were able to continue that work around good health and wellbeing, but now with a more specific or a more focused frame where we were thinking about people’s access to good food through Feeding Louisiana.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And so the entire class became about, let’s say, designing better access based on what people were telling us that they needed, right? I’ll tell you a little bit more about some of the other programs from that time at Tulane, that I was really happy with. We used to do a program called Design Thinking Gumbo-

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

… which, it’s gumbo, so we able to bring in New Orleans local culture. And actually, maybe even before I describe it, as you say, the general philosophy around the programs that I was creating was about how to make this stuff accessible, okay? How to make this information about design or design thinking seem like people, to continue the food metaphor, seem like this was yummy stuff, right?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

How to make it palatable to people. And so Design Thinking Gumbo became about getting people to broaden what they thought of as design thinking. And so we just introduced people and we were aiming to introduce people in New Orleans in general, but this happened during the pandemic, so we did it remotely, online. But we wanted to introduce people to different ways of doing design research and then show them well, okay, hey, you could use this kind of research tool in the public health researches that you’re doing, even though it’s a design tool, you can use it, right? And then actually, out of that, I started to collaborate with a professor at Tulane, [Alessandra Bassano 00:15:55], where we started to actually take design research tools and work with people in New Orleans to see, could we get public health researchers to understand how to do design research or to use the way that we think visually and creatively and design to collect data in their research that they were doing?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And so all of this is, I was always interested in social justice. I’ve always been interested in social justice my entire life, right? And being in New Orleans and being at Tulane and changed my work because I was very responsive to people in New Orleans, even though I really didn’t spend a long time in New Orleans. And then because Tulane was so focused on public health, then I started to do a lot of work in public health. And so how that has impacted the work at NC State is that I’m now working on a course called, it doesn’t have a real name yet, but it’s designing equitable futures where I’m drawing on this other interest that I have, right? Which is the future. And so it’s designing equitable futures through a lens of gender accessibility and race.

Douglas:

I love this.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So I’m able to take these three things that I’m very interested in, push people far out into the future, and say, “Well, okay, how do we design? How do we learn to see where there are problems in society?” So continuing the social impact work that I would have started at Tulane, how can we see where there are problems in society? And then maybe get a little creative with the solutions because sometimes we are not creative. Yeah. That’s the thing.

Douglas:

Yeah. So is it safe to say that this is specular to design focused on social justice?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes. That’s a good way of saying it. And I should acknowledge that I’m joining a tribe of other people who have been also doing this work before me. So, I’ll drop a few names. None of them know that I’m going to drop-

Douglas:

Yeah.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

… their name. So John Jennings, he’s a professor in California. There’s an illustrated version of Parable of the Sower, and he was involved in that project. But his class is about critical race theory-

Douglas:

Hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

… and, oh my goodness, he might send me an email and say, “No, that’s not what the class is about.” But it’s critical race theory and futurism and design. And so I’ve been inspired by his class. [Roger Shaw 00:18:50], who’s at Drexel University, has a class about climate and utopia and designing these new futures. There’s another California professor, he’s from the North Bay area now, [Abbie Lonnie Brooks 00:19:07]. And he has a game called Afro Rhythms of the Future where he’s using Afrofuturism to have people co-design new futures. So you now that I have the space to create this new class, I’m like, okay, I want to build off what everybody has been doing and join this movement of people who are saying, “You know what? Let’s create these new futures that are much more diverse.” Because sometimes when people are talking about this, the future and speculative futures and stuff like that, they’re really not representing diverse issues.

Douglas:

Hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

There’s one futurist whose name I won’t drop because I’m going to be a little critical of his work, right? So he’s really, really famous. And I went to his presentation once, and I was excited to go because I respect his work so much. And then during the workshop, I just thought, why is this future so white? Right?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And I mean, maybe it wasn’t, but I wasn’t comfortable with the content of his workshop. And I was really disappointed because, as I said, this is somebody who I had a lot of respect for. And the person who was sitting next to me was Mexican-American. And we spoke about that in the break. This content is actually not bad, but it’s one story, and it’s a story that excludes us. So yeah, I’m excited to look at that. How do we create these just, equitable, and diverse futures moving forward? And I do some of this type of work in planning workshops. I’ve been doing a Tulane, and at Stanford, I facilitated planning workshops for teams, for my team, where I would ask people to imagine a date in the future, and then we brainstorm around that through a lens of equity.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And in one of those workshops, when I was planning the workshop with the person who was my supervisor, I think I had set a date of 2072. And the person asked me, “Well, why are you picking that year? It’s so far away.” Right? And she wanted me to choose a year that was 15 years away. I think she wanted 20, I don’t even know if she wanted 15 years. She wanted 2030 something. And I told her, “That’s too close.” And she’s like, “Why? Because none of us will be here in 2070. How are we going to get to the change that we want?” Or something like that. And I had to explain to her, look, if we choose a year, that’s too close, people are going to start to say, “Well, none of this stuff is possible.”

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Because there is this law or that law, or people started giving us all the reasons that things don’t have to change or all of the things that are preventing change, prevent people from dreaming about something different. And I found I have much more success in getting people to be visionary when we push them really far out into the future. And once, someone said to me, “Well, isn’t that just escapism?” Or the person was telling me that I need to get people into a more realistic space in the future. But I’ve found, with the social justice work, I found that I’ve gotten people to be much more visionary and much more creative when we push it further out because we just think, okay, by the time we’re in 2072, some things really should be unacceptable, and these things really should not exist anymore. And so then we could start to figure out, okay, how are we going to make sure that these problems don’t exist in this 2072?

Douglas:

As I was listening to that, it really struck me as, what you’re doing by pushing it out really far is just emancipating everyone from the shackles, right? And some of these are just biases that we’re not even taking into account. And even if we know about them, it’s hard to just shut them off with a switch. So you’re tricking us into shutting them off. But then you can couple that with, okay, now that we decided this, how do we make it happen in-

Douglas:

Okay, now that we decided this, how do we make it happen in 2037?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Exactly.

Douglas:

That would be a fun shift, right? Because now we’re coming back into the realm of, wow, we got to figure this out. This is what we said we were going to do, how are we going to do it?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

You just crawled into my mind. Because actually, that’s what I did for another workshop where I pushed them out. And I like to create scenarios as well, when I’m doing this kind of work.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So, I push them out. I didn’t go as far as 2072. I think I went to like, 2056 or something like that. I mean, sometimes easy is a significant, because it might be like somebody’s birthday or somebody’s hundredth birthday or something like that, right?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So I said that they were getting the Nobel Prize in 2056 or what. And then I said, “Actually, our work shifted tremendously,” and I gave them two years. And it was the years that the administrator really wanted me to focus on.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So I said, “What did we do in 2030?” Actually, I might have even said, “What did we do in 2025, and what did we do in 2030 that really got us to that place?” So yeah, you crawled into my mind, and you saw what I did.

Douglas:

So, yeah, I love that. And I’m a huge fan of the Designer’s Critical Alphabet. And ever since I’ve gotten it, I love pulling it out from time to time when I’m working on anything. And I think that’s the beauty of what you’re referring to as non-specialist design, because it could be a presentation. It could be a template we’re building for a client. And I don’t know, it’s just fun to pull out, flip through the cards and go, “What’s going to help me think about things differently or consider something, some negative element of the world that’s kind of got me in it’s grips?”

Douglas:

And I think the emancipatory research is one that’s really, really fascinating to think about. But the one that I come to quite often, because it just resonates with me a ton, is values.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Oh.

Douglas:

And it aligns a little bit, too, with some of the conversation we had earlier and the pre-show chat around helping designers think beyond the problem. We often talk the problem statement, or what’s the pain point, or the problem people have.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

But I think understanding people’s values can be quite liberating, as far as if you’re creating stuff for them.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah. All right, you brought me to a card that I don’t look at very often. So let me see. But you know, the thing is, I guess, I’ve internalized a lot of the alphabet. And I actually do ask people about values very often when I do co-creation workshops. I say, “What is it we’re trying to create? And what are the values that we need to get to the thing?” Or, “What are the values that we need to foster co-creation?”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So I think that values, I’m looking at my card right now. So do you and the people you are designing for have the same value system? And how does this affect your approach? That’s … I think I’ve been working with that question for a little bit in different ways. Because I’ve been starting to see the many different value systems that we have in play around us. You know, like I listened to a conversation this morning where this woman was talking actively about anti-racism work. And then she said … What did she say?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

She said, “Oh, I have an MBA from an elite university, and so I’m invested in capitalism. And then, when you tell me capitalism is racist, then this really challenges my value system.” Or you know, I mean, this is like, I’ve been thinking about that. People who have … Sometimes we have, within the same project, we have so many different value systems. Whether you are yes, that flag waving capitalist, whether you are the person who’s saying defund police, whether you are even not from the space. Like, if you’re not American, if you’re coming from a completely different world view. How do you balance all of these values in the same place?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

And so, a lot of people say that one of my favorite words is pluriversality.

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Because I think that we do have to acquire the skills of being able to allow people to bring their different value systems in. And then, for us to listen to these different points of view and different value systems. And then, facilitate conversations among people who thing differently. I think that that’s a real skill that some of us have to cultivate as designers, to do this work well.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So you talked about values. But the card that I like, actually, is about self awareness, which is kind of tied to the values card. But I think that one is a really important one where again, we can’t see or hear the different values without the self awareness. To know that … Well, to be open enough to listen. And then maybe even ask some questions about ourselves and our values.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah, yeah, that’s a card that I like.

Douglas:

I love the quote at the bottom, “To become more self aware, you have to be self aware enough to know how self aware you are not.”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah, somebody sent me something on Twitter and said, “Why is there a riddle at the end of that card?”

Douglas:

It’s great. You know, I want to come back to that kind of connection between self awareness and values. And I think there’s this interesting thing about values where, because they’re so personal and have so much emotion entrenched in them, a lot of times they’re deeply rooted.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

These values came up from our upbringing, or from sometimes, trauma. Or these very intense experiences we might have had. And sometimes, one value can overshadow other values that you have. And there can be opportunities to connect with people through values that you share.

Douglas:

But because of this one value kind of overshadows everything else, and we see that in politics, right? There’s the single voter issues.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

But that same phenomenon exists outside of politics as well. And I think if we’re being really great designers of experiences, we have to recognize that. So, I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on that.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah, understanding our own value systems, and understanding that our values are not the only values, this is part of our work. If you want to do this work well as designers, and you want to meet people’s needs, we have to know, okay, what are we bringing into this project? I’m going to shift you to another card again.

Douglas:

Yeah.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So, this is a tight bias where we have to think about, okay, what are our biases when we come into this project? So I might be designing in New Orleans. I’m an outsider from New Orleans, so I’m bringing my outsider values. I might be bringing my own biases into the work that I’m doing. But I need the self awareness … bring you back to that one … to know that I’m bringing in my values. To understand what are the things that I believe? And then to see that, okay, everybody doesn’t have to believe these things that I believe. To understand that when I make a statement on something, when I make a design choice, bring in another card. And really, this is a challenge to see how many questions, how many sentences can I tie together with cards, right?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

But when I make a design choice, my positionality affects this. You know, my positionality affects my values. It creates the biases. So it’s like, we need to bring all of this into the work that we do as designers, not necessarily creating a hierarchy, saying that my values are better than someone else’s, or my world view is more important than someone else’s.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

But we have to understand that there are just many different ways of knowing and being. And we have to create spaces for these conversations to happen. And then, it’s tough to navigate all that. It’s not an easy process. Maybe I’m not getting to a resolution, but you know, because it is a long process. You know, this kind of work that’s around social impact is a long process work around aligning values, takes a lot of time, a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion to get us to a place that makes sense.

Douglas:

You know, as you brought up positionality, it reminded me when I was reading the cards for the first time that it brought to mind this notion of the observer phenomenon, which I thought … I was really delighted, any time someone can connect physics and design for me, it’s always an awesome moment.

Douglas:

Are you familiar with observer phenomenon?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

No.

Douglas:

Maybe our readers aren’t.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

I know … Well, I’m wondering if this is an ethnography kind of thing, because there’s a … Oh, actually I might be. Tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you if it’s what I think it is.

Douglas:

Yeah, so it’s a phenomenon in physics where if you, literally, the act of observing changes the behavior.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Mm-hmm, yes.

Douglas:

So, the fact that you set up an experiment to look at it means that it’s not the same as when you weren’t observing it.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes.

Douglas:

And I was thinking, that’s really fascinating, this notion of positionality, because you observing it, you’re putting your position onto whatever you’re observing.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Mm-hmm, yes.

Douglas:

And so, I thought that was pretty fascinating.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes, so I actually know that phenomenon from anthropology, where just you being … And it’s the same thing, you being inside of the group that’s being observed. You’ll change the behavior of the group. So yes, yeah.

Douglas:

That reminds me of the assimilation card.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes.

Douglas:

These things are all kind of intertwined a bit, right? Because it’s like, interconnectedness.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah, and actually even as we think about it … So, my positionality would affect the way the cards were made, right?

Douglas:

Uh-huh, yes.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Because I chose, so that’s how some things end up being related, because yeah, I’m putting my lens on some stuff.

Douglas:

Yeah. And coming back, you mentioned that one class may or may not be about critical race theory, but let’s assume it is. And I love this prompt, and I think it’s such a powerful prompt on the Critical Race Theory Card, that talks about how would the design change if it was developed by someone of a different race?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes, so that’s an idea that I’ve been thinking about for about two years. Before then, I don’t know why I ever thought about it before, but it was about two years ago that I was in a design class, and I found that … I thought that the majority of students were choosing to design for white people. And I had never really noticed. I had never really thought about it before.

In that year, I was just trying to figure out, “Okay, how do we get the students to shift their perspective? How do we get the students to just consider other perspectives?” So I introduced this race card, no pun intended, right? This critical race theory card, where I was asking them, “Would the design change?” As I moved around the room, I remember listening to one student in particular kind of almost banging the table and said, “No, nothing will change.” Actually, I thought about it. I’m like, “Okay. Is that student right that nothing will change?” Sometimes I have to ask myself, “Okay, am I just kind of over-focusing on difference?”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

But I do think that this difference matters, and I think that we use products. Different groups might use products in different ways, and it’s not even that the white designer now has a design for Black people, right? Because the card kind of sends them in that direction, but it’s not quite like that. It’s really that the card is trying to help people see, “Oh, we actually should be doing wider research. We should have more diverse teams so that the people within own team who can respond to this better, we should have people from different groups within our different user groups, actually within our design process so that the user groups can help us work better.”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

So it’s like that race card is about getting people to see difference and not think that it doesn’t exist, because if you are from a dominant group, you sometimes don’t have the sensitivity to understand the challenges of the group that is not well-served. So it could be about race. It could be about gender. It could be about accessibility. It’s like the umbrella issue is the seam, right? How are you going to understand how a product is not well-served if you are not part of the dominant group? Does the product serve people who are not in the dominant group well? That’s really the question that we have to think about as designers.

Douglas:

I can’t help but point out that design is about empathy, and if we’re not willing to empathize with those that might be a little different than us and ones that we don’t think in the same way, there’s a spectrum. The further someone is away from you, the harder it is to even in your mind … Even if you want that empathy, you just aren’t aware of it. I’ve got a great example. I’d love to hear your reaction to this. I was at a conference about three years ago called Culturati. Well, after this airs, it will have happened, but I’m really excited, because we’re going to be attending again this year. It’s really focused on culture, diversity and inclusion, and how companies can show up better for their employees and create better opportunities.

Douglas:

The closing panel a couple years ago included Caroline Wanga, and she’s the head of diversity at Target. She was incredible. There’s a hotel here in Austin called South Congress Hotel, and apparently they have rain showers in this hotel with no extra handheld sprayer. So she came out, and they were talking about designing products for people. She’s like, “I’m in a hotel right now that has a racially insensitive shower.”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes. That’s immediately what I thought.

Douglas:

That was pretty amazing to … I was just so, “Hey, she is really awesome and just a firecracker.” So it was hilarious listening to her, but I was like, “Man, this inanimate object is racially insensitive?”

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes.

Douglas:

It’s kind of a funny way to say it, but ultimately the designer didn’t consider these things, right?

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yeah. That’s a really good example, because, I mean, sometimes I’ve struggled with this example, but that’s a good example. Immediately as you talked about the rain shower, I just thought, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t use it,” right? Yeah, I wouldn’t use it, because, I mean, frankly, my hair takes three hours to dry. I mean, there’s some showers when, yes, I want all of my hair to get wet, but there are others where uh-uh. So yeah. Okay, good. You gave me an example for me to use about how the product would change.

Douglas:

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. The thing is, even if the product doesn’t change, it’s not about forcing change to a product. It’s about making sure we’re exercising empathy deeply.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Yes. Yeah, I’ve struggled with how people talk about empathy in this design thinking world, because I think that some of it is a bit superficial, and it’s actually kind of focused on, yeah, many different ways of trying to make the empathy deeper. So these cards are one thing. The positionality wheel that I’ve created, which is to force people to look at positionality and talk about positionality, that’s another thing. When I was teaching at Tulane, students had to go out. I brought a filmmaker in class to teach students more about storytelling, and the students had to present their initial empathy interviews to the filmmaker. The filmmaker, she was the one who said, “Look, you’re not going deep enough. You’re calling this an empathy interview, but it’s so transactional. It’s so superficial. How are you going to evoke some emotion from me?”, because I think that, yeah, people’s empathy muscle needs to be activated a little bit more. I think that we could do a lot more work in design and design thinking to get that, do it better.

Douglas:

I think that’s an excellent sentiment to end on. So with that, I want to just see if you have any final thoughts or anything you want to leave our listeners with.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

Well, I guess the thing to leave people with is where is their exclusion in your life? How are you excluding people? Then can you design that exclusion out, right? So is it that you’re running meetings and you’ve forgotten to turn on closed captioning, or where are you somehow keeping people out? There could be so many different ways, and it’s a muscle that we have to learn to exercise of recognizing exclusion. I wrote a paper with my good friend Marcello Piver, who’s a UX specialist in Miami, and we’ve been looking at that. How can we get people to recognize exclusion and then design that exclusion out? It’s not going to happen in a short space of time, but it’s a muscle that we can practice and work much harder on. People can reach out to me to continue the conversation. They can reach out on Twitter, on LinkedIn. Just look for me, and I’m responsive.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, it’s been a pleasure having you today, Leslie, and thank you so much.

Lesley-Ann Noel:

All right. Thank you, Douglas.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 44: The Empathetic Design Approach appeared first on Voltage Control.

“If you’ve got a breath and you’re a warm body, then I know that fun is going to be the magic, my most potent weapon…to be able to invite you to participate.” -Mark Collard

Mark Collard is the Founder of Playmeo, a company that provides a group-game wonderland with over 440+ games & activities towards team building and experiential education. He inspires facilitators, educators, and managers to empower groups to connect more effectively and build stronger teams. With training workshops and invaluable resources in their online database, Mark offers the essentials and more to exercise trust for organizations. Mark’s mission to lead with fun through games can ultimately lead to magic and results. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Mark and I discuss the creation of the temporary community to foster trust, the deliberate/strategic approach of connection before content, and the ongoing virtual facilitation challenge towards engagement. Listen in to hear how Mark is masterfully leading with humanity in his group game bag of tricks to not only build connections in groups, but amplify results in your organization. 

Show Highlights

[01:00] Mark’s Career Breakthrough in Games
[05:04] Creating the Temporary Community
[10:51] The Intentional, Unofficial Start Trick 
[13:27] Connect Before Content
[17:56] The Facilitation Virtual Challenge
[28:50] Are They Ready to Play?
[35:46] FUNN & Mark’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Mark’s LinkedIn
Playmeo
Playmeo.com/free

About the Guest

Mark Collard is the founding director of Playmeo, a company that utilizes experiential learning and creates unforgettable training workshops to help teams connect. With a career spanning 30+ years, he has offered more than 2,000 presentations and numerous video tutorials that help thousands of teams connect to cultivate team-building. Author of three best-selling activity books, No Props No Problem, Serious Fun, and Count Me In, Mark has a true passion for sharing his mission with the world. Mark provides many professional and educational development programs to leaders, managers, and facilitators alike. His body of work has set the standard in leading fun, interactive group games to harvest trust & productivity in organizations. Mark’s mission is to lead with fun through games and ultimately weave the magic of play into effective results.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control the Room podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Mark Collard, founder of Playmeo and an experiential trainer who helps people connect through the use of fun group games and activities. He’s the top-selling author of five books, including the latest, No Props No Problem, and the founder of the largest online database of group games and activities in the world. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Collard:

Douglas, thank you. It’s great to be here.

Douglas:

It’s great to have you. So I want to hear a little bit about how you got your start. How does somebody get into this idea of fun group games and activities as a profession?

Mark Collard:

It’s a great question, and it’s one that I’ve had to ponder myself. In fact, I spent a bit of time writing about that very question, and I think if you dig dive deep enough, you go back all the way to kindergarten and it was like the kid who sat next to you. But I think in a more practical sense, it was the decision of my parents to send me to Scouts. It was my inclination to be part of a youth group, as part of my church. All of those spaces were places where I was engaged in group games and activities.

Mark Collard:

I don’t know many people who don’t actually enjoy them. And so I did, and not that I knew that then, but I made a career of using interactive group games and activities probably based on the fact that there was one particular youth leadership camp I went on that extended over four days that like night and day, chalk and cheese, just transformed me. Again, didn’t know this at the time, but I look back and understand the facilitation of those group games is what caused that transformation. For me, it harks back to that, but now with over 30 years experience in the field and having run many summer camps around the world, all of those are programmed activities. All of those give me my body of work today.

Douglas:

Let’s go back to that moment. I’m really curious. I want to hear more about this. What do you think were some of the key elements that kind of unlocked that experience for you?

Mark Collard:

Yeah. Again, I didn’t see it at the time, Douglas. I was just swept up in it as a participant, but with a lens that I have now looking at it, I understand it was the ability to form, first of all, a temporary community, those connections I had with about 40 other people I’d never met in my life, some of whom are my longest friends in my life. That I have friends from that program I still see on a regular basis today. So I think the ability for those leaders of that experience to build community, which was all about building connections. I suppose, for me, it was about then realizing who I was. ***As they had created such a safe place for me to be, I was able to then find others who could value me, acknowledge me and accept me. Perhaps, in my life, that had never happened before.***

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s really fascinating. You say temporary communities because it seems like the community wasn’t so temporary. It actually had long lasting applications and the thing that strikes me is that it was an emergent community. It kind of just like sprung forth because of the situation that was put there. It’s just dawning on me in this moment listening to you that like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting concept that we create these conditions and these little mini-impromptu communities emerge.”

Mark Collard:

That’s right, and they are temporary from an intentional perspective. I’m sure the leaders only intentionally wanted to create community for the four days they were running it. However, they also fully understand that the skills, the life skills… We didn’t use these terms back then, but the social, emotional, learning skills we were able to experience back then were going to last a lifetime. And they are no doubt in my mind the foundation of a lot of my experiences of who I am and how I occur to other people today. It was chalk and cheese. I remember going back to my university to mix with my friends who knew me the week before this camp and I came back and overwhelmingly said, “What happened to you? You look different.” I was dressing differently. “And you sound differently.” It was like, “Oh, something must have really happened.” Yeah, right. It wasn’t just in those four days. There is this sense that it’s going to continue as well.

Douglas:

Yeah. Maybe I’ll come back to that temporary notion again because something you said sparked something new from me, which is maybe it’s the intention of the facilitators, this kind of pure intention that they’re creating, this temporary environment without any bigger intentions, but what can grow from that is a bit unknown and will allow that to flourish. But we don’t impress these expectations on folks to make them feel like they’re responsible to do something or what not.

Mark Collard:

Oh, absolutely. I speak a lot about asking the question before you stand before any group, “What is possible? What is possible here?” I know the framework that I bring to my work and my training and education. It scaffolds the greatest level of possibility so it’s possible that the leaders in that particular youth leadership camp had the same expectations, is that we’re going to view this temporarily, but we’re going to ask the question, “What is possible here?” And so they just jammed and created this amazing framework that helped people feel safe so that they could step outside their comfort zones and discover who they were and what was possible for them. Of course, lofty levels were attained.

Douglas:

You mentioned people stepping outside of their comfort zones and so often when we’re working with clients and we go anywhere near playful kinds of things like improv or games, they always say, “Well, I’m not sure that the executives are going to do this or my analytical folks, I don’t think… They’re just going to roll their eyes or whatever.” I think there’s so much magic in that discomfort that they aren’t picking up on. They’re anticipating it, but they’re afraid to walk into it.

Mark Collard:

I’m nodding my head as you speak. I don’t think there’s been a program I’ve worked on where there hasn’t been some element of that in the beginning. While it’s not a term I typically embrace, but it’s about breaking that ice, the ice of that exterior. Sometimes it’s a soft exterior. Sometimes it’s quite hard that you do need to break through to get to who people really are. If you’ve got a breath and you’re a warm body, then I know that fun is going to be the magic, my most potent weapon, to be able to be invite you to participate.

Mark Collard:

I can’t think of a program, no matter who the group are, whether they’re a group of top executives from Fortune 500 companies or a group of school kids or kids at risk, whatever, if you can appreciate that they are human, if you can appreciate that they’re all going to enjoy play, but some of them get to it longer than others, like it just takes some time for some groups, more than others, that they can respond, if given the opportunity, given the correct environment. I often think of my own primary responsibility as a facilitator is about creating the most appropriate environment so that my group can make whatever choices is required for them to discover whatever is possible.

Douglas:

Yeah, that environment and space matters so much. It’s something that I think some people somewhat lose sight of in the virtual space because they… In the physical space, they think, “Oh, we need to get a venue. How are the tables arranged?” In the virtual space, it almost seems like they’re just like, “Oh, this is how Zoom works. I guess this is what we got.” And it’s like, “Ooh, that’s a real missed opportunity.”

Mark Collard:

Oh, absolutely. We also forget that we’re still working with humans. They may be pixelated versions on our screen and we get caught by this camera that we get sucked into, but I would argue that the ability to connect, the need to connect, is as important, I would even argue more important, when you can’t be in the same physical space as each other. And so it’s not just a matter of wheeling in your whiteboard or flip chart and presenting like you normally do because as a facilitator, for a start, you cannot gage the room in the same way when all you’ve got is a gallery view of pixelated images of heads. You can’t see the body behaviors as easily so facilitation is very different.

Douglas:

I’ve often lately started to use an assistant or a scribe or someone else in the room. Some people will use producers or technical facilitators, but having someone else there that’s helping check the signals, really helpful because you’re right, it’s really hard to pick up on all the nuance.

Mark Collard:

It’s very different. Again, in the same way when people actually turn up, my intentionality to invite them to connect early is equally as important as when people log into their Zoom room. I spend, for example, the first five or 10 minutes in what I refer to as the unofficial start, which is really just, it’s not an activity, it’s just a principle of engaging people productively in something that they have a choice in. It could be coloring mindfully online, using the annotate tool, or solving a few puzzles or responding to a question that I’ve posed.

Mark Collard:

Today, there was four of us on a call from around the world and I played a game where I threw a dice and the dice number reflected a question on the screen. If that person who was next chose to, they would answer that question. It was completely random. They didn’t know how the dice would roll. That was my unofficial start. The key there, Douglas, is the intentionality. I was intentionally inviting connections while at the same time waiting for people to arrive. The hour just flew as a result because people felt more connected to people who they’ve never met before, never been in the same room before but felt some form of connection to each other.

Douglas:

It’s funny. I just finished up some training with a large enterprise and we were doing some coaching after and they were asking me… They’re making a point that, “We really love the connection pieces. Whenever we came back from break, we did something to like create connection and that was really impressive. I want to use that more but how can I do that in a 30-minute meeting?” I asked, “How often do your 30-minute meetings start on time?” Then she was like, “Well, not very often.” Then I said, “Well, why do you not start on time?” She said, “Well, I’m waiting for people to arrive.” I was like, “Would you be willing to start a warmup on time?” She was just like, “Oh, okay. I get it.” Yeah, it’s exactly the thing you were saying, right? We’re not going to be afraid to start a warmup the minute the clock ticks and then we can get it going.

Mark Collard:

Absolutely. With the time I spent honing that skill, particularly in university, I was a lecturer there for seven years, I lectured in two subjects. Over the course of 14 semesters, every class started with an unofficial start. Typically, as kids who have just left high school, moved into college or university, they would just dribble in because that’s what happened with every other class. Why would you turn up on time when you know the instructor’s going to wait five or 10 minutes.

Mark Collard:

I would start on time but indeed early, and within about four or five weeks of the 14-week semester, I never had another late student. I never had to say to them, “Hey, dude, you need to be here on time.” Because here’s what happened: I didn’t use this terminology back in the 90s, but FOMO, the fear of missing out, there was something that happened that transpired that you know when you entered the space that, “Oh, what’s going on?” That you could feel something and that also happens online. As people arrive online, they get that there’s an energy about what’s happening and you do that enough, you don’t turn up late. There’s obviously reasons why some people need to be late but often it’s just laziness.

Douglas:

Yeah. I would say that’s a much safer thing to do than just to start content early. Because if you start content early, you will get a lot of backlash and people feeling like you’re attacking them.

Mark Collard:

Yep. And it’s a missed opportunity, Douglas, because you have an opportunity to connect. Now, it’s great if that connection can also relate directly to your content as well. That’s like a double whammy. But it shouldn’t be necessary, but it’s great if it can. And so you’ve got that ability to… Or the opportunity to connect is missed. It’s a golden opportunity. Otherwise, it’s thrown away.

Douglas:

I want to point out that it comes back to one of your maxims, which is connect before content.

Mark Collard:

While I use it a lot, it’s something I’ve learned from somebody else. Chad Littlefield from a group called We. I don’t know where he got it from, but for me, that just resonated. It did. It just made a lot of sense, but it put a title, a mantra, to something that I’d already been doing, to connect before content. I often say to people that are not being rude, I actually don’t care what your content is, but whatever it is, do something. Spend some time and energy and with, unashamedly, always takes a little bit of time and a little bit of energy, do something to help your group connect.

Mark Collard:

I speak a lot with educators and school administrators and their first push back to that is, “Oh, if you had any idea just how crammed our curriculum is. How do we find the extra time for this?” Without exception, those that embrace this concept discover that over time, the group actually, because of their connections, get through a lot more content a lot more quickly. And so they end up actually getting through as much of the content as they planned, indeed even more, because some of the group issues, the group management issues, just don’t bare their heads as often or as large when you haven’t spent the time spending time to invite those groups to connect with one another.

Douglas:

This also gets into brain chemistry and learning science type stuff as well because the connection is going to create environments for better learning and so you probably don’t have to repeat yourself as much as a lecturer when you’re lecturing and that connection to the people is going to make them more connected to the content.

Mark Collard:

Yep. I’ve never met a camp leader, a teacher, corporate trainer, anyone who’s responsible for the welfare of a group who said, “Oh, Mark, could you teach me how to pull back the engagement for my group? They’re just way too engaged.” It’s always, “Mark, if I could just engage my group, it would be half the problem.” And so those connections is part of the answer. It’s not the only answer obviously, but to invite people to connect to help them feel more comfortable invites them to participate, to put their hand up where they ordinarily wouldn’t because the question might be a bit challenging for the group to hear. Or to give something a go that at first glance they might feel they could look a bit foolish if they don’t get it right. That’s the environments that we’re talking about that invite… that happens as a result of intentionally building those connections early on.

Douglas:

I want to come back to a point you made earlier and just spend a little time on it to make sure the listeners really understand what you were getting at. It was your point around tying the connection to the content. If you even poked a little fun at the term icebreaker because I think a lot of times it’s used maybe as a corpus of work that people just throw around without having connection to the content. One of the things I usually like to tell people is if we do something and we can’t ask the group why we just did that and have it be a really interesting conversation, maybe we should be asking ourselves why did we just do it. And so when we’re picking these activities and games, it’s really great when we can be really intentional about it and thinking about what they get out of it and how that transitions into the work we’re going to follow with.

Mark Collard:

Yes. I’m a big proponent of and a big advocate for taking fun more seriously. But when that fun, it’s packaged because we want to invite people to participate, it’s like a magnet, when that fun also engages them in something related to the content, it’s an extra prize. It’s a bonus. It’s something we should aim for. It may not always be possible, but in my experience, and perhaps it’s come from experience, Douglas, most activities I can find a way to win a message to segue from that thing that appeared to be trivial, just fun, frivolous, wasteful to, “Oh, now I can see why we did that.”

Mark Collard:

I love that when that happens. I love it when a kid says to me, “Oh, you lied to us today.” It’s like, “What do you mean?” “Well, you said we’re going to have fun.” I said, “Yeah. Did you have fun?” “Yeah, we had fun, but I also learned something.” It’s like, “Yes, that’s awesome.” I disguised the learning inside this package called fun because it’s the attractive part.

Douglas:

I love that. And so we’ve been talking a lot about connection and I want to bring it into the context of the space we find ourselves these days, which is remote. There’s a lot to unpack here so I’m excited to talk about a few of these things with you. But first, let’s just talk a little bit about the challenge of creating connection in a virtual space.

Mark Collard:

It is a challenge, Douglas. There’s no doubt. When March/April happened in 2020 and a tsunami of inquiries came into my inbox saying, “Help.” We all worked under the presumption that we had to turn up. That was the presumptive setting. Everyone would just turn up and that was no longer possible. What do we do? They came to me as the expert and I just put my hands up and said, “I’m an explorer. I am not the expert because I have not done this either.” And so it was challenging. I think in the beginning, the challenge, Douglas, was wrangling the technology because we weren’t used to that. We weren’t used to setting the camera and the mic and the settings and the backgrounds and whatever we had to do to create slides if we normally did something else. But that just took a little bit of time, to sort of wrangle the technology.

Mark Collard:

I think the greatest challenge was bringing our humanity to that pixelated version of ourselves on the screen and that of course of everyone else on our screen. That for me is what separated the good to the excellent. You might’ve been a great teacher or even a good teacher or a corporate trainer, but what made you excellent online was that you were able to manage the humanity of this moment, even though we’re not in the same space.

Mark Collard:

I was able to respect, and when in doubt, accept that everyone was human. And yet that the intentionality was still present. I got so caught up in the technology in the beginning, I forgot to bring myself and my humanity and to invite everyone else’s humanity to our space. So inviting choice, so it wasn’t just like picking an image on my screen. I say, “Okay, Charlie, what do you think about that?” Well, Charlie was now on the spot. You probably shouldn’t do that in any group, in any case, in most cases. But there was other ways in which I could respect choice and respect the humanness of that moment. For me, I’ve continued to refine those skills of bringing my humanity to the screen.

Douglas:

Absolutely. Let’s get a little bit tactical when we think about… What are some of the moves or plays that can help make connections? I feel like breakout rooms are a powerful way to get a little connection happening. I certainly agree calling on people can be abrupt and challenging. Something I’ve taken a fancy to, I miss the days of being able to just go around the circle. Get everyone in a circle and go around the circle.

Douglas:

People have certainly done the… After you go call like maybe pick the next person and just go around like that. I’ve even shared my gallery view. I know Zoom now lets you set a fixed view, but people get lost and you can pin on their version of Zoom. I can be problematic, but I’ll share my screen so that people can see what order they’re in so they know what order to go in so you can do the go around the circle thing. But I was just curious if you had any moves or plays that you use to help boost the connection a bit.

Mark Collard:

I’ve used a similar technique too. I think what you just described, Douglas. I call it curiosity ping pong. Again, something I’ve picked up from elsewhere, where I will start by asking a question. For example, I did this just a few days ago. “What is the strangest thing you believed as a kid?” And I invite people to write it into the chat room. Don’t hit enter. Just put it into the chat room and then give them a minute to do that. Then on go, everyone hits the enter key. Then it’s like my inbox, first thing in the morning, just fills with responses. Give them a moment to reflect on all of that. Then I’ll either ask for a volunteer or I will start and say, “Hey, I’m really curious about your response about this, Shaquana. Can you tell me more about that?”

Mark Collard:

If Shaquana wants to, she’ll come off mute, share what the story was about her response to the question and then it’s her turn. But the back and forth ping pong, it’s her turn to pick somebody else. And so it’s a bit like I think what you shared. There’s that. You could also play a game where maybe we identify based on the number of letters in our name or the alphabetical order of our names or it could be some other random number.

Mark Collard:

I might say, “Okay, in the chat room, just put any two digits together from zero to 99. Just randomly put a number down.” They don’t know what’s coming of course. So they put down their number. “Okay, whoever is closest to zero, I invite you to go first. And whoever’s after that, you’re second. And it’ll finish with whoever’s closest to 99.” What they love is that it was fun, just making up a number. And then “Oh, okay.” It engages them because they need to see, check to see where they’re at. You could also change their names if you happen to be using Zoom, of course. You could change their name to just putting the two numbers in so then everyone can see all the numbers on their screen at the same time. There’s a couple of quick ones.

Douglas:

Nice. Nice. Yeah, that reminds me of a fun warmup that you can do. Comes from improv games of counting together. You try to get to 10 without stepping on anybody and you got to keep starting over. Eventually, if you got a clever group, some will present a strategy that we might use to get through this. Then I think people jumping in and offering support and strategies is where that is a form of connection too because they’re starting to problem solve without you even telling them to problem solve.

Mark Collard:

Yep, and that’s a great activity. I know it as count off. I’ve been using for years in person, but it’s even better online because-

Douglas:

It’s harder.

Mark Collard:

Well, it’s harder in some respects, but it’s better because when it was live, in-person, sometimes I couldn’t quite tell if two numbers came out at the same time or not.

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Collard:

But online [crosstalk 00:24:13]

Douglas:

The latency. The latency in the internet makes people mess up more, and it’s funny because someone thinks they’re… And you hear it like two seconds later or something. It’s pretty good.

Mark Collard:

Typically less so with the chat room, but it’s very obvious to everyone that we just had three fives in a row. Great. We’re back to zero again and it’s engaging. It’s one of those things that you might just use as a 30-second energizer to mindfully just move away from your content before you refresh and move on to something new.

Douglas:

Yeah, just having a reset. It’s a great reason to do these things. It’s a little brain break. Yeah.

Mark Collard:

Yep. Yeah, or brain boost. I had someone tell me the other day. He’s like, “Really? That sounds so damaging. Why are you breaking brains?” It’s like, “Oh, that’s not what I meant.” Then I have to say brain boost now.

Douglas:

No, no. That’s so good. Brain boost, I love it. Well, I also want to talk a little bit about current events there in Australia. Here we are, practically May, and you’ve been pretty open since October. Something I found really interesting when I asked you about hybrid is that you really hadn’t been seeing much of it. It’s either in-person or remote.

Mark Collard:

That’s right.

Douglas:

Which has been a hypothesis of mine that people are going to do one or the other and if anyone’s remote, it has to be all remote even if a good chunk of those people might be in the same building.

Mark Collard:

I think it clearly depends on regions, and in some cases, I come from Melbourne, Australia. Australia’s done an outstanding job at controlling the spread of the virus. I think we’ve been almost six months practically without any community transmission. So that’s been good. So kids have been back in school since October, no issue whatsoever. But when we were at remote learning, it was one or the other. You were either remote learning or everyone was in the classroom. In Australia, didn’t see hybrid, where you’ve got a bit of both. I do know it is in some places around the world and that is a tough gig. It’s hard enough to teach just to remote or just to the folks who were stand before you in the classroom or the training room. But to do both at the same time takes a masterful set of skills.

Douglas:

It’s multitasking. And as we know, people can’t multitask. And so if you’re looking at the Zoom, you’re not looking at the room. And if you’re looking at the room, the people in the Zoom are getting a deficient experience. If you’re looking in the Zoom, the people in the room are getting a deficient experience. And always if people in the room are going to be tempted to have conversations, the people that are connected to Zoom aren’t going to hear those conversations. Definitely not if there’s one omnidirectional mic in the room, right?

Mark Collard:

Yeah, we’ve all been part of meetings where… I was part of school council earlier this week. One of our, it was actually the vice chair, was Zoomed in. Everyone else’s in the same room. It was hard. It was so difficult to keep involving them. They often don’t get heard because they’re being put on mute or whatever. It’s just very difficult and I think it takes a great master to be able to manage that well so everyone feels acknowledged and valued.

Douglas:

Yeah. And I think that it’s those principles we have to keep coming back to if we’re going to explore those scenarios. I think that’s the interesting part. We’re going to be entering in a time of experimentation where we’re going to be exploring how we show up for those types of things and what the best moves and tactics are. But I think to your point, we have to come back to those principles and those underpinning values.

Mark Collard:

Yeah. And it could be just as simple as acknowledging that it is clearly a different setting when you’ve got that hybrid-ness. But making sure that that person continues to be heard and valued because it’s easier to see everyone in the room, but it’s harder for them to do that or to hear them. And so constantly checking in with them. It’s like, “Hey…” Which is true for any person. If you got the folks who don’t speak up as much as others, it’s true for the facilitator of that group to make sure that those folks have a chance to check in as well or to break into smaller groups. Well, make sure you don’t forget the person who’s on Zoom. Have that screen turned around to the two or three people who are now in a breakout room, even though two or three of them are in the same space. The intentionality to remember about that stuff.

Douglas:

I want to ask you another question here, which is for someone who’s already had to go back to in-person and you’re doing some remote stuff, you’re doing some in-person stuff, how did this moment of being 100% remote influence how you show up in-person now?

Mark Collard:

That’s a great question, Douglas. The first thoughts that come to mind is this technique that I use to ask or somehow inquire check, in with my group. Are they ready to engage? Are they ready to play? Are they ready to learn? It depends on the context. I don’t know that I really did that very, very well back in the days when everything was presumptively you turn up. But I acknowledge the humanness of folks that they… Particularly, because my community is worldwide that some are getting up in the early morning. Some are up late at night. Some are at the end or in the middle of their working days. Checking in with them and creating something on the screen that said, “Hey, just annotate this scale.” And I did a variety of them. Let’s say we use the emojis so you got depressed at one end and sad and the other end, highly vigorous and enthusiastic and everything in between.

Mark Collard:

Annotate this scale as to where you’re at right now. It gave me a very quick sense of where my group was at. I wasn’t solving any problems. But sometimes just the simple acknowledgement of the fact that people are tired or they’re not feeling well or they’re here under duress can be enough to bridge the engagement necessary to move them forward in the next hour.

Mark Collard:

Now, of course, I’m doing that as people turn up. Here’s an example. I worked with a group of kids just the other day, whereas they enter the gym, they have to stand on this paper mat and there were three emoji faces. One was sad, one was neutral, the other one was happy. As they came in, there was a little sign that says please step on to basically engage with that emoji that you’re feeling right now. Without ever having to say anything to the group as they were coming in, dribbling in, I could tell from the foot marks where my group was at and I was checking in with them and there’s a whole variety of other ways of doing it. But that was just one that I recently used that was so simple. People thought it was fun and it’s something now that has really influenced what I do in-person.

Douglas:

It’s interesting. It reminds me of what we refer to as assessment points, because the game became an assessment point for you. You were able to glean info about how they were showing up and that can be used not only at the beginning, but throughout an event wherever we want to gage how people are doing. We can throw those things in.

Mark Collard:

Yep. And any number of unofficial stats. As we hark back to what we talked about earlier, Douglas also provides me with evidence about where my group is at. So if I’ve provided a selection of activities as people are gathering and most people are choosing to do something other than what I’ve given, that gives me an indication of where the group is at, how connected they are, how well do they look after each other, are they up to play, are they willing to engage, are they looking for excuses for something else to do? Even that provides me with maybe an unofficial way of checking in with the group as well.

Douglas:

Yeah, I want to come back to something you’ve mentioned a couple of times and you just brought it up again. This notion, “Are they willing to play? Are they ready to play?” What would you recommend to a facilitator if you detect or suspect that they’re not quite ready?

Mark Collard:

I think most groups are not ready. Because the thing about play, if we look at its pure definition, is it’s the absence of pretense. It’s who you are. Most of us run around for lots of good reasons with some at least a thin veil of a mask. So Most groups have something that needs to be pulled down before they’re ready to jump in and just simply play to be engaged in something for no apparent reason other than the sheer joy that comes from participating. No win-lose. They’re not particularly conscious of what’s going on around them. They are the essence of play or flow if you want to get really scientific.

Mark Collard:

I think all groups come with that. Some of them just have a lot more ice to chip through than others. If you truly wanted to help that group connect and therefore amplify the results of whatever you’re trying to get done, then do something, a little bit of time and energy to chip away at that, can be very useful and you need to meet them where they’re at.

Mark Collard:

I can think of many corporate groups that stand there with their arms crossed or their chest and like, “Eh, this is just childish. Blah, blah, blah.” Then it becomes a personal mission for me, Douglas, to find something so contagiously fun, it becomes difficult for them to stand away from. Then once they’re in it, I know I’ve got them because they realize this is a safe place. Having a big bag of tricks up my sleeve is definitely one of my advantages. But I appreciate that for many people they don’t have much, which is partly why I created this huge database to better say, “Hey, this is what’s working for me. Give it a go type stuff.” Having that large repertoire is useful so that you’re picking the right activity at the right time to chip away at whatever that resistance might be.

Douglas:

In our facilitation lab just last week, one of the facilitators said it’s one thing to invite someone to the dance, but it’s a completely other thing to invite them to dance. As you were talking about this executive with his arms crossed not willing to engage, I just had this mental image of you and your bag of tricks and at first his toe starts tapping with the music and then his leg starts moving and next thing you know, he’s dancing.

Mark Collard:

Yeah. And it’s so easy for us as facilitators to point the blame at that person. “Ah, I’ve seen you before. You never do anything and blah, blah, blah.” I like to flip it and go, “No, no, it’s my responsibility to create an environment in which you make appropriate choices consistent with the goals of the program.” If I can understand that it’s my responsibility and look, every one of us can can say, “Yep, there’s some people out there. They’re not even their mother’s love.” I get that. But really most people, most humans are willing to meet at least halfway if you can give them a good reason to engage. And so I like to flip that responsibility. It’s like, “What is it that I’m doing that’s creating this for them right now?” And you can’t control the stories in their head, but you can control the environment as much as possible that might help them make a different decision.

Douglas:

Let’s just be honest. There are going to be plenty of situations where it might be our fault as facilitators that maybe we didn’t do a great job of setting it up so they’re not connecting to the why or the purpose or they’re unclear on it. Or they feel like they’re going to have to make a sacrifice and we haven’t laid that out properly.

Mark Collard:

Yep. I think it’s a really great question for every one of my groups to ask is why are we doing this. What I hope, what I plan, what I intend is that that question is answered in the fun that is wanting to draw them in. My mentor, Karl Rohnke, who sadly passed away last year, he was the person that I learned all of this stuff, and he coined a term called functional understanding not necessary, FUNN. He talked about that. That was one of his core values was FUNN. Because it’s not necessary to understand what’s going on to have a great time. And so that contagiously fun stuff is what loosens those arms on people’s chests to lean in and give something a go because they sense that there’s nothing to embarrass or threaten them, it looks safe and it looks like just a bit of fun. That’s a challenge to find that, but there are lots of options that you can work with.

Douglas:

Wow. What a great concept. I think that’ll be a great spot to end on as well so I want to shift it over to you, Mark to see if you have a final thought for our listeners.

Mark Collard:

Well, I mentioned Douglas in our conversation having a bag of tricks. That’s something I learned from Karl. He had a massive, thousands of activities, it just seemed to me, he could pull out of his back pocket and use it at the right time with a particular group. And so over the last 30 years, I’ve created this massive online database because while I have many books, that was one way of sharing the word for beyond those people who could turn up at a training. But doing it online just leveraged the digital world. And so playmeo.com, I’m sure you’ll provide links here, is a great place to go. There’s tons of free resources there, lots of free group games, many of which you can use virtually as much as in-person. They’re all about providing opportunities for your group to interact and build those connections so that it helps amplify your results. So if you go to playmeo.com/free, typical spelling, you can find tons of things that you can download. Everything from a free app to free activities online, eBooks and so forth.

Douglas:

Well, Mark, I just want to reiterate how much of a pleasure it’s been chatting with you today. I encourage everyone to go check out playmeo.com for lots of free tools. It’s on my list that I published of awesome resources for methods and tools so I definitely endorse that. Go check it out. Mark, it’s been a pleasure. Enjoyed the conversation.

Mark Collard:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s been my pleasure as well. Hope everyone of your listeners has enjoyed this too.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control of the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together. Voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 43: The Essence of Play, A Masterful Art appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think there’s a real power in a community and having a community of diverse backgrounds.  I feel our unique position with the Facilitation Lab gives facilitators the opportunity to not only practice in a safe and inclusive environment with other facilitators of different backgrounds, but also that there aren’t a lot of unique spaces for and by facilitators to openly do just that.” -Kierra Johnson

Kierra Johnson is the Community Manager at Voltage Control and host of our weekly Control Room Facilitation Lab where she focuses on nurturing a network of facilitators. The Lab is a community space for facilitators to connect, ideate, and troubleshoot methods and activities in a virtual forum to gain real-time learning and feedback. Kierra connects hundreds of facilitators from around the world with a passion for practice and continuous growth in facilitation. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Kierra and I discuss the power of positivity, the Facilitation Lab’s impact, and how facilitators are connecting beyond the Lab. Listen in to hear how Facilitation Lab supports the needs of facilitators and the significance of experimentation.

Show Highlights

[00:54] Kierra’s Beginnings in Facilitation
[02:17] The Power of Positivity
[07:15] Core of Community: Inclusion & Diversity
[13:33] The Layers of Facilitation Lab
[24:36] Lab Moments: Magical Guests Memory Lane 
[30:02] Connecting & Learning Beyond the Lab
[35:54] Kierra’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Facilitation Lab Slack Channel
Facilitation Lab Sign Up
Kierra’s LinkedIn

About the Guest

Kierra Johnson is the Community Manager and lead host of the Facilitation Lab weekly sessions for a one-of-a-kind community of facilitators. Kierra’s passion for community and bringing people together through the Facilitation Lab encourages long-lasting relationships alongside facilitators in the unique, virtual forum to lean into curiosity, ideation, and discovery in facilitation. Kierra’s unwavering positive spirit combined with her inclusive perspective lifts the community of facilitators across all backgrounds, to reveal the significance of experimentation in methodologies and activities of facilitation. By engaging our community with a space built uniquely for and by facilitators, she’s made it her mission to lean into discovery and innovation alongside facilitators across the world in the Lab. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Kierra Johnson, the community manager at Voltage Control, where she leads and nurtures Control The Room, the facilitation community. Welcome to the show, Kierra.

Kierra:

Thank you so much for having me, Douglas. Thrilled to be here.

Douglas:

It’s great to have you.

Douglas:

So I thought we could start off by talking a little bit about how you found your way into this world of facilitation.

Kierra:

You know, my path to facilitation was a bit of a journey actually. I didn’t fall into facilitation right away. One of my values in everything I do is remaining true to yourself in authenticity, and I’ve always had a unique passion for authentic people and communities since I was very young. I believe there’s so much worth in bringing people together through collaboration, and there was such a unique opportunity that I wasn’t aware of through facilitation.

Kierra:

I’m a Southern girl, born and raised from Southern Louisiana, and I’ve completed my bachelor’s in communications and public relations at LSU. And my previous career was solely focused on making my mark within the community relations and customer service industry, but at the root of everything, my passion has and always will be building long lasting relationships through community, and the facilitation industry provided a unique opportunity for me to do just that.

Douglas:

You know, there’s something that I think it’s important to point out. It’s this positivity that I think just follows you around, that you exude positivity. I see it in all the stuff you do with the community, I see it in all of our interactions with the team and team meetings. And I want to just hear a little bit about, where did that come from? How did that become such an important part of your ethos?

Kierra:

Well, I think, for me, it’s all about amazing, incredible women that have been behind me and kind of shown me the way as I’ve grown up to be a young woman. And that falls back on my mom and my grandmother. They are two huge inspirations for me that have always instilled in me to remain positive through everything that you do and that it has a direct reflection and impact on people that you come across throughout your everyday life and experiences. So that’s something that’s always stuck with me and something that I’ve just lived by, you know, to exemplify hopefully. And it keeps me going, every single day, to have that positivity and to remain excited and hopeful for what’s to come, no matter what.

Douglas:

You know, that reminds me of the Culturati conference, when Mark from SailPoint was talking about how crises doesn’t make culture, it reveals it. It kind of reminds me of what you were just saying, because in those moments, adversity or whatever’s kind of coming at you, how we respond really defines us.

Kierra:

I completely agree with you. I think every challenge that we face, I feel like there’s an opportunity to find something positive in anything that we experience. And I think it’s important to take that with you and learn from it. So I one thousand percent resonates with me, and I’m thankful for the brilliant minds through Culturati that shared such incredible insights on what they’re doing to impact their communities and companies.

Douglas:

Yeah, no, I was really jealous because you were running our booth and there to help folks that were stopping in to learn about Voltage Control, as well as helping out with the Mural template we were running for the conference, and I was a little jealous because I had all this client work and things I had to go to attend to so I couldn’t listen to all the talks. And I was like, “Man, Kierra is getting a front row seat to all that awesome Culturati stuff.”

Kierra:

I was. I was. I was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall of some incredible minds that shared their own experiences and insights as to how we can constantly improve our culture within our companies. And they had such inspiring experiences and perspectives on what they’re doing in their respective fields to pave the way and to continue that conversation forward. And it was just an unforgettable, rewarding experience, and just little nuggets of wisdom that I know I’m going to take with me throughout my role through facilitation lab and hopefully beyond. So definitely grateful to be a part of it.

Douglas:

You know, one big takeaway for me was this notion of systems and just the important role that systems play and how, if we want to enact change, we really need to look at the systems and think about the systems that are already in place and the ones that we might want to put in place. And it really spoke to me in a big way. I was really happy to hear that there was that thread there because, you know, that’s core to facilitation and the work we’re doing, because in facilitation, we can start to ask those curious questions and have dialogues around the systems that are in place and where things might go. And of course, we do a lot of work with meeting systems. So anyway, I remember hearing all of that and thinking, “Wow, it’s so great to see everyone moving in the right direction.”

Douglas:

So it makes me curious now. When did you notice? I was noticing the system stuff, and I’m kind of curious, anything surface up for you that you think is relevant for the facilitation community or just companies in general?

Kierra:

Well, I think, for me, something that really spoke to me was an emphasis on diversity and how that can be such a strength through communities and through companies to highlight what makes us different. And I think that speaks directly to our facilitation lab, with that experience of an opportunity of building that inclusion throughout our lab.

Kierra:

You know, I believe we’re champions for people across all industries, across all backgrounds to come to our lab and provide activities and methods that they’re currently working on. But we want people with all different perspectives to feel like they’re welcome to our community, to be able to openly practice and do just that in a safe space. So with that diversity, I feel it’s our mission to always remain inclusive at the facilitation lab.

Douglas:

Yeah, I know. We were just recording a little promo video for the community, and in it, I talk about how diversity is at the core of the community, because we created it out of an observation that so much about … You know, it’s interesting; facilitation is about inclusion, and we often talk about creating space. So there’s a deep respect about inclusion and understanding the need for diversity. And almost every facilitation discipline encourages bringing cross-functional teams together because nobody’s as smart as everybody and all these things.

Douglas:

Yet at the level of methodology, it’s very siloed. There’s not much diversity when you look at your average facilitator. They’re very focused on one methodology. And so the community at the core was seeking to cross pollinate and bust those silos.

Kierra:

Yes. I think there’s a real power in community and having a community of diverse backgrounds. And I feel our unique position with the facilitation lab gives facilitators the opportunity to not only practice in a safe and inclusive environment with other facilitators of different backgrounds, but also that there aren’t a lot of unique spaces for and by facilitators to openly do just that. So I think we’re in a really incredible position to allow facilitators to connect virtually with facilitators from all around the world and have the opportunity to unpack and to connect in more unique ways than ever before.

Douglas:

Yeah. You brought up an interesting point around the global nature of the community now, and it’s interesting how difficult and challenging the pandemic’s been; to have to reinvent our businesses, to think about supporting people in the virtual world. It’s just been really challenging, but perhaps one of the silver linings of it all is that we’ve now connected globally with our facilitation peers and the community has grown in ways that I would never have expected, because we had our monthly meetup, which was mostly folks from Austin, and then we had our yearly summit, which we had people coming internationally, but now every week, we’re doing facilitation lab and it’s people from all over the world.

Kierra:

Yes. It’s pretty exciting that through the pandemic … Of course, it’s been challenging for everyone to be able to adjust and pivot to this new normal that we’re kind of learning as we go, but with the unique opportunity with our virtual meetups every week, we’re able to connect with so many people that we wouldn’t cross paths with in our everyday life had the pandemic not happened. And I think it’s a real advantage for us to make those connections to contacts from voices in London, voices in South Africa. And this is just speaking to a few people that I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with in our facilitation lab. It’s such an amazing experience to be able to connect with people that you’d never have the opportunity to in a normal setting. It’s a real silver lining, as you said, to have the space to do so and connect with people from all across the map, which is so cool to be able to do.

Douglas:

I agree. I love popping into facilitation lab. I can’t make it to all of them like I used to, but when I do pop in, seeing folks from Kenya, folks from Paris-

Kierra:

Paris. Yes.

Douglas:

… Folks from Thailand, Australia. Some of these people are logging in and it’s like 4:00 AM their time. Someone just emailed me, she’s joining from New Zealand, tomorrow, actually, and Hawaii. They all bring different perspectives on what facilitation is and they have different thoughts around how they approach things, and it’s really fantastic to see everyone kind of coming together through this common goal and understanding.

Douglas:

So I’m curious what you’ve noticed through all this cross-pollination and folks showing up with different needs and different curiosities. Can you speak to what’s common across all of it? What are they all interested in? What value do they all share?

Kierra:

I think at the root of everything, people are just longing for a sense of community more than ever now, especially through the pandemic. And with our unique position at the facilitation lab, we’re allowing facilitators of backgrounds of all industries to be able to connect freely and safely in a virtual space where they can come together, you know, experiment, brainstorm together, figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and have the space to be able to connect openly, to come together and really just connect on a deeper level.

Kierra:

And I think too, as far as concerns, there’s a real need now to figure out, how do we move forward post-pandemic? There’s been a conversation of hybrid meetings that has come up and has been a theme across a few lab sessions that we’ve had the opportunity to kind of unpack; you know, how do we juggle this idea of working remotely and also feeling safe to go back into an office setting and kind of merge the two ideas together?

Kierra:

So that’s been a very common idea that’s come up throughout the lab pretty often.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s definitely on the mind for facilitators these days, right? “Will I need to start traveling again to be on site with clients, and will some of their participants be remote, and how do we support everyone?” It’s a non-trivial challenge, and I think one that I’m tracking really closely, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it more in labs to come.

Douglas:

So I want to talk a little bit about how lab works. You’re the host of the weekly facilitation lab, and you mentioned it being a safe place, and I wanted to just unpack that a little bit. What is lab? How does it work? What does it mean?

Douglas:

And I’ll just point out that, from my perspective, it’s about practice, because to master facilitation, you need to practice. And it’s really uncomfortable, really scary to try new things out when the CEO is in the room, or your boss who might be short on time and very critical on how we spend our time and how we do work. Even though they might be the best boss in the world and super kind and supportive, you just might not be fully comfortable trying something new out when there’s a lot at stake. And so, to me, it being “a safe place,” it’s a judgment-free zone. We’re all going to critique and play and experiment together.

Douglas:

But from your perspective, as the host, I’d love to hear a little bit more about how it works and how you run it. What’s at stake? What do we make possible with the lab?

Kierra:

Absolutely. You know, when it really comes down to it, our mission for the facilitation lab is that we let facilitators have the freedom to hold the mic and troubleshoot with other facilitators. And that’s really the root of why we’ve built this community. They’re able to have 40 minutes of unpacking their methods and activities in real time that they’ve been working on and putting together, to test it out with a community of like-minded facilitators to gain real-time feedback and have some key takeaways in a safe environment, to be able to present and test out those methods to do so with, as you said, a judgment-free zone, and have people really experience the method and activities that they’re working on, to fully immerse themselves in the overall experience of having the role as a host or a lead facilitator.

Kierra:

That’s really our goal, is to give them the space to be able to practice.

Douglas:

And so if I were to show up at a facilitation lab, what would I expect to see?

Kierra:

So essentially, you would expect … We always start the sessions with an icebreaker activity. That’s kind of our overall goal, just to get people in a comfortable space and setting with an open networking exercise, where we really just have everyone connect with their neighbor Zoom in the Zoom.

Kierra:

And then from there, we discuss an opportunity of why we’re here at the facilitation lab, what our mission is. And from there, we introduce our peer facilitator, or our guest host, and give them the full freedom and rights to take over the session and present their method and activity that they’ve been working on in real time.

Kierra:

And at the facilitation lab, it’s always our goal to offer them the best support that we can behind the scenes. So we’re managing and making sure that their experience is as fruitful for the facilitator, or for the audience, as best as it can be.

Kierra:

So that’s our ultimate goal, is for the actual activity as a whole to go on without a hitch.

Douglas:

So you start off with an icebreaker to lean into that connection that you spoke about. That’s so important. People really are hungry for more connection and meeting other facilitators, and creating that sense of belonging and understanding with each other. And then after that connection piece, then you’re moving into your guests, your peer facilitator, who’s going to send us through a method. And then, what is this “rose, thorn, bud” I’ve heard about? It seems like that’s something that happens at the end. What is that about?

Kierra:

Yes. Our “rose, thorn, bud” framework is the opportunity for our guest facilitators and audience to unpack their thoughts and feedback to their response on the activity that the host facilitator has engaged with their activity throughout the session.

Kierra:

So it gives the audience the space to be able to openly share how they felt about the overall exercise in a sense of roses. It’s a metaphorical framework essentially, where roses are what they really connected with and what really spoke to them throughout the session, something that they loved, that they connected with as a whole, whereas thorns are constraints or pain points that they feel that they didn’t really connect with, or there was an opportunity there that just missed the mark a little bit. And with buds, we love to leave our lead facilitators with buds, and essentially, buds are those areas of growth and areas of opportunity that can kind of just use a little bit more nurturing throughout the method, that we allow facilitators to share how they felt about that overall activity.

Douglas:

You know, I love when buds too kind of provide an opportunity for the attendees, the participants to see opportunities for them. It happens from time to time, where people in attendance say, “Oh, I see. I’m going to borrow something that I saw them do,” or, “I’m not going to do something I saw them do.” Because seeing things that you don’t want to do can be just as powerful as things that you want to do. So I love when people turn the buds on themselves.

Kierra:

Absolutely. And I think it’s a unique take, where inspiration just sparks in real time for the facilitator that’s experienced this activity or methodology that they weren’t aware of or didn’t know much about beforehand, but in reality, they’re able to sit back and kind of determine how they can take elements of the method that they’ve experienced into their own individual work and bring it to their respective industries.

Kierra:

So it’s a really unique opportunity to have inspiration for them to immerse themselves, and also figure out what works and how they can adapt and change those elements in real time to their respective places and companies.

Douglas:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So I noticed that sometimes there’s an open lab, whereas other times there’s a special guest. What happens in the open lab?

Kierra:

Open lab is one of my favorite opportunities where we can openly connect in a deeper way through the facilitation lab. And our open lab sessions happen every single month, once a month, where we have an open dialogue between all of us as facilitators to network and connect on a deeper level about topics that we’re really passionate about as facilitators.

Kierra:

That can range from hybrid meetings, inclusion and diversity in the workplace. It could be about icebreakers; how to keep people still engaged throughout your meetings.

Kierra:

We always open it up to the community to give them the opportunity of what’s top of mind for what they’d like to discuss in the session. So we always start with, “What would you like to really unpack today?” And from there, we have about an hour of uninterrupted time to really just dive into breakout rooms and unpack those thoughts and ideas that are kind of bubbling up inside of us that we want to share, and kind of bounce off ideas just to be better as a whole and how we can do better.

Douglas:

Yeah. That’s a beautiful thing. And I love the moment after facilitation lab, where we just kind of … The After Hours. I always like to tell people, when we had in-person events, we had to pull the sticky notes off the walls and clean things up and tidy up, get the tables put back. And inevitably, someone would stick around and talk and chat. And so we always still reserve that time in our workshops for, I call it the cleanup time. And we do that during facilitation lab, and that’s some of my favorite time, where people are kind of a little bit more open and loose about how they’re kind of reflecting on what happened and what’s top of mind for them. And so open lab is almost an extension of that, right? We’re just doing that for the whole time, which is a lot of fun.

Kierra:

Exactly. After Hours is also one of my favorite opportunities in the lab, because it really allows us a less … It’s a less formal setting for us to really just connect deeper with other facilitators.

Kierra:

A lot of times, I’ve noticed people stick around who aren’t privy to our community or it’s their first time joining, and they really just want to immerse themselves in the whole experience, and they want to see what After Hours is all about. And really, it’s just us connecting with, “What did you experience today? What’s your day looking like? What made you smile throughout your day to day?” And really just having the opportunity to just openly connect a little bit more. “What are you working on in your industry right now?”

Kierra:

It’s a beautiful time for us to really just delve into open conversation.

Douglas:

You know, it’s fascinating too, how sometimes the learnings and the impact is often greater than the sessions where there was specifically content that was curated and prescribed, because the serendipity of folks sharing and being curious and asking questions and just letting things surface that are top of mind … I don’t know. It’s the randomness of those collisions and those intersections that create so much value. So yeah, the open labs are really fantastic.

Kierra:

Yes. There’s always a need from our community, and I’ve heard this voiced so many times, for us to further that connection with your fellow facilitator. And I think if we have the opportunity to make that happen in tenfold, then we’re doing our part to really just continue those connections with facilitators in our industry, because it’s so important to build those connections and nurture those relationships.

Douglas:

So I want to talk a little bit about some of your memories of prior facilitation labs and some of the guests that we’ve had. What do you think of fondly when you think about past facilitation labs?

Kierra:

The beautiful thing about our facilitation lab is that we have a wide range of guest facilitators who have allowed us to experience different methodologies and activities that are really meaningful and really impactful. At the same time, they’re really vulnerable and inspirational.

Kierra:

So just one that sticks out or kind of rises to the top would be, we had the opportunity to have Keith McCandless, the incomparable Keith McCandless, founder of Liberating Structures, who brought grief walking to our session. And I believe this was back at the end of last year. It was all centered about having that experience of walking through grief and what those feelings look like and really immersing yourself and diving into those emotions and not closing the door on those thoughts or feelings, and having a support system, a safe support system, to do so. That was super, super emotional, but an incredible session that I feel was really needed at a pivotal time. So amazing to have him walk through our facilitation lab and present something so impactful to our community.

Kierra:

Another session that I can think of is Brave Legend and Megan Rose, who are relational facilitators that led us in an activity called “Honing your relating superpower and curiosity.” And that was all about really immersing yourself in what makes you curious and kind of finding and investigating what your overall superpower is as a human through facilitation.

Kierra:

Another standout facilitator that we’ve had is Sunni Brown. She’s the founder of Deep Self Design. She led an activity kind of encompassing the circle of trust, which really just uncovered what trust means to us as people and displaying the layers of trust and how it can evolve into and through our personal relationships in our lives.

Kierra:

So those are just a few that I can think of that really just speak to the wide variety of what we have in our lab for the space and for the opportunity for our facilitators and our audience to be able to connect in so many different levels and areas.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s been really humbling to see so many great facilitators come through and connect with the community and share. The value is so immense, as a facilitator, to come in and see these excellent practitioners.

Douglas:

And also even novices. I think about my friend who is a jui-jitsu black belt, and he said he learns more from folks who show up on their first day than he does working with other black belts, because they do surprising things. They do things that are unexpected. They’re not playing by the rules because they haven’t learned the rules yet. And so when we get newbies …

Douglas:

I’ve had folks ask me, especially really advanced facilitators, they’ll say, “Why don’t you want to curate the community to be more focused on advanced facilitators?” And, well, my first response is that it’s not diverse, so our opportunities of understanding and learning are more reduced. And also, how do we groom and grow the future master facilitators if we don’t include everyone? And also, these new folks with new perspectives and new ideas will bring us shocking things.

Douglas:

And so that’s why we also not only curate people who are well-known, who’ve written books, like Liberating Structures and Gamestorming, but we also curate folks that are just getting started or just have a new, fun idea they want to try out, because there’s so much to learn from everyone. And then the more master facilitators can really enjoy giving feedback to folks that are just trying things out for the first time.

Douglas:

So I think it’s a little something for everybody.

Kierra:

Absolutely. Echoing that, I believe that our lab provides a unique opportunity for new voices and seasoned voices alike to know that they’re just as welcome to come and present something off the wall or trying something different that they wouldn’t necessarily try in their own workspaces. But they know, with us leaning into curiosity and leaning into discovery within the facilitation lab, they have the opportunity to try out different activities and methodologies that they wouldn’t really do in another setting or environment. We create a space where we don’t turn anyone away for how wacky or wild their idea is.

Douglas:

So I want to switch gears a little bit here. We talked a little bit about the weekly facilitation lab, where the community comes together once a week to explore and learn together and try things out. How else does the community gather and meet and come together?

Kierra:

So we have a really unique opportunity and space in addition to the facilitation lab, where we continue that conversation through our Slack channel. And there is a really cool opportunity for you to connect further with your peer facilitator that say you’ve sparked a connection with someone that you’ve had the experience of connecting with in lab, and you really want to network and chat further with that person in a safe forum. And through that, we continue our conversation through our general Slack channel.

Kierra:

On a weekly basis, I always conclude our facilitation labs with a facilitation lab followup post, which kind of overall recaps the session if you’re unable to make it. And there, we can openly discuss different topics of conversation on a forum like Slack; to be able to think about new ideas or questions that we may have, share resources. It’s a really cool opportunity for us to connect that much further outside of the facilitation lab.

Douglas:

And in addition to Slack, are there any other platforms that they can find us on as well?

Kierra:

Yes, we are super active on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter and Instagram. We’re definitely going to be ramping up that conversation on social as well in the weeks to come. But we’re definitely very, very active through LinkedIn as well.

Douglas:

Yeah. And the LinkedIn group and the Facebook group are great places for folks to connect and commune with other facilitators. So hope folks can join us there. It’s really great to see all the work that’s happening and the cool stuff you’re doing for the community.

Douglas:

Before we wrap up, I want to just hear a little bit about, what is the Bring A Buddy campaign?

Kierra:

I’m so glad you brought that up. It’s an opportunity for us to encourage our audience of the facilitation lab, with our peer facilitators who join in with us every week, to really call on them to invite colleagues, coworkers, neighbors to come to our facilitation lab and kind of broaden that community that much more.

Kierra:

I feel it’s only in our benefit to have people join our community with multiple backgrounds and experiences. So with that, we really want to encourage everyone to be a voice, to tell friends, if they have the time and space to do so, to come in and join our lab. We really want to increase that connection and offer that inclusivity that much more, and the only way that we can do that is by having unique voices continuously join our lab. So we always are calling on and really shouting to the rooftops about the Bring A Buddy campaign.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that because I know that, for me personally, if I’m going to something with a friend that I already know really well, that I see at work or at church or at other gatherings and things that we do, if we’re already connecting in other places, they’re going to hold me accountable to these things I’ve learned and these buds know that I might mention during a “rose, thorn, bud.” And so it helps integrate the work and carry it forward more. So it’s not only about the community growing, but it’s also having a better experience as an individual.

Kierra:

Absolutely. There is so much richness in us providing the best experience that we can through the facilitation lab and assuring that everyone has an unforgettable experience when they join in every single session. So if we can encourage that or just make that experience that much better, then let’s do it. Let’s go for it.

Douglas:

Kierra, maybe share a little bit about what people can expect if they start to engage more; if they’re bringing a buddy often or they’re contributing to the Slack channel or the LinkedIn group and the Facebook group. I think we’re going to be recognizing folks for their efforts and contributions to community. What might they expect?

Kierra:

Yes, Douglas, you are spot on there. We’re so excited to be able to start this initiative for our community of facilitators. And through that, we are going to be implementing a token system where anytime a friend or facilitator is bringing a new face to the lab, you’re able to win tokens and redeem those tokens for special prizes and unique opportunities as far as workshops, that once you reach a certain number of tokens, you have the opportunity to win a Voltage Control t-shirt and any assortment of prizes as well.

Kierra:

So definitely, we’re thrilled to be able to offer this. And once you’ve redeemed the pinnacle of tokens, you even have the opportunity to have a one-on-one workshop with our master facilitators, and even you Douglas. So we’re excited to be able to bring this to our community and encourage new faces and new voices to come into our labs.

Douglas:

Excellent. Yeah. I’m really looking forward to that, recognizing our ambassadors and the folks that are leaning in and doing the most to support the community and earn those tokens. I can’t wait to do a one-on-one with you.

Douglas:

I guess to round things out, Kierra, I want to hear a little bit about, after attending all of these facilitation labs and seeing lots of different things and getting more and more immersed in facilitation, whether it’s one of our big events like [SOCOM 00:36:10] or with the National Science Foundation, I would say, what is your favorite facilitation tool or method out of everything you’ve seen?

Kierra:

Wow, that’s a really difficult question because there’s so many that come to mind, but I would say one that sticks out above most is really just having the opportunity to humanize and connect with facilitators as humans. I think it’s important to connect with someone on an emotional level with breaking down those barriers, and I think Authentic Relating has such a huge impact on finding that connection and honing in on seeing that person for who they are. In fact, I would recommend checking out our facilitation lab with the founder of Authentic Relating, Sara Ness. She’s remarkable.

Douglas:

So Kierra, I’m going to start wrapping up now, and I’ve got a couple of questions left for you. The first one is, what are you excited about right now?

Kierra:

Goodness. There is something about the season of spring that really just excites me with an element of rebirth and curiosity to start something new. And I think with all the exciting new voices that we have coming up in the facilitation lab leading into summer, it’s something that really excites me, and seeing all the incredible new faces and voices to our community is something that really just kind of sparks me up and gets me excited to form new connections and have the opportunity to connect that much further throughout the lab.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s exciting to see where it’ll go. For sure.

Douglas:

So Kierra, in closing, what would you like to leave our listeners with?

Kierra:

I would just love to encourage everyone to leaning into positivity, curiosity and discovery as a whole. I think that we really speak to those values in the facilitation lab, and knowing that we have created an environment where facilitators can come together and ideate and troubleshoot in a safe community to do so, with testing out their methods and activities that they’re actively working on, we’re excited to have this unique opportunity and to continue it forward that much further.

Kierra:

And I would encourage everyone, if you haven’t had the opportunity, to attend one of our sessions. You can register for an upcoming facilitation lab at voltagecontrol.com/events, and you can also join our Facebook group and LinkedIn group to connect on those platforms. I hope to see you there.

Douglas:

Kierra, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I really enjoyed having you on the show.

Kierra:

Thank you so much for having me, Douglas, and cheers.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together: voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 40: Exploring the Facilitation Lab Experience appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think that people have been trying to facilitate these virtual meetings and they’re pretty dry in a lot of ways, but they get the point across and that’s good, but they’re finding maybe a lack of productivity that happens when people just feel like this mundane day-to-day.” -Rachael Green

Rachael Green is the CEO and Founder at Rach Green Cocktails, where she uses high level hospitality, spirits and cocktail knowledge to entertain thousands of people from around the world.

In this episode of Control the Room, Rachael and I discuss hospitality, hybrid events, and mixology. Listen in to hear how prioritizing fun and connection can usher in balance and harmony within your teams.

Show Highlights

[00:51] Rachael’s Beginnings
[13:49] Significance of Hospitality & Fulfillment vs. Security
[23:50] Formulas for Hybrid Experiences
[31:09] Actionable Steps to Creating Better Virtual Experiences
[34:51] Rachael’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Rachael’s LinkedIn
Cocktails & Connections

About the Guest

Rachael Green is the founder of Rach Green Cocktails, and a master mixologist with a knack for fun. Rachael’s entrepreneurial spirit combined with her hospitable nature results in a buoyant perspective that lifts teams, individuals, and organizations out of the drudgery of the mundane. By engaging the five natural senses, she’s discovered that people can bring their full selves when given the expectation and opportunity to do so.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Rachael Green, CEO and founder of Rach Green Cocktails, where she uses high-level hospitality, spirits, and cocktail knowledge to entertain thousands of people from around the world. Welcome to the show, Rachael.

Rachael Green:

Hey, Douglas, how’s it going? Thanks for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. I guess for starters, let’s just hear a little bit about how Rachael Green became Rach Green Cocktails?

Rachael Green:

Yeah. Well, man, you could say that it starts all the way back when I was a kid and I was just mixing my fruit juices, which is actually true, but it’s interesting because I was born into a family where my father has always been an entrepreneur. And so, I’ve always really idealized this as something that I wanted to do, but it really started for me, 10 years ago when I got into the hospitality industry where my “why” came from. I worked in retail for a second, and then I got into food and beverage where I was working as a cocktail waitress. And I started to see things in the food and beverage industry that I thought was just related to this one restaurant that I was working for, when in fact I realized over the years that this was a systemic kind of issue of how people were approaching hiring and treating their employees and treating their guests was so short-sighted.

So, I really wanted to learn more about hospitality. So I got my bachelor’s degree in hospitality management and administration to really understand the truth behind what hospitality really means and how to facilitate it in a way that is in fact true hospitality. And I’ve been on this journey for 10 years, finding people that I feel like are doing it really well, seeking to understand the pieces that make it run really well, and the pieces that don’t. And for 10 years, I worked with other people, for other people, all sorts of different positions all across the food and beverage from sales, bartending, restaurant management, catering, events, all sorts of different things. But something really stuck with me when I was going through college.

My last semester, I was in international wine and culture and I applied to become the head teaching assistant because I did really well. I always was really fascinated by alcohol and fermentation and the science behind it. I almost wanted to go into chemistry, but I was such a social creature that I couldn’t see myself being in a lab coat. So, I really love the scientific aspect behind growing grapes and understanding the knowledge in wine and the geography of everything. And that’s when I got my first taste of educating. And so, I kind of dabbled in that little pieces throughout the next five or six years when I got into liquor sales and I got into educating people on spirits. And then I also got an opportunity with a little shop named Collins & Coupe, they’re out of San Diego where I was based out of and they would have these cocktail classes. They would get a little permit for it and they would have cocktail classes with like 20 people.

And I was starting to facilitate once a month these in-person cocktail classes for consumers and I fell in love with it. I was like, “So, this is like the educational aspect that I really loved mixed with also the passion for what I was doing in alchemy.” So, I was able to figure out a way to do this in other ways. So, I started figuring out other ways to do these in-person cocktail classes. Now, I left California in October of 2019 and I went to North Carolina here where my family is just to kind of get grounded in a space to launch off from. And I started doing these in-person cocktail classes and they were such a blast and I was starting to get a lot of traction with them and then everything in March of 2020 went virtual. So, I didn’t look at it from the very beginning as something that was a business opportunity, right?

I went and decided to go live on Facebook to just teach people how to do cocktails because I’ve been doing it in person. And I was like, “I’m just going to come on.” And it was a total hit. People in my network really loved it. And as I started to do them more consistently on Facebook, I started to see how people wanted to become connected with something in either connected through comments with other people, connected to the story of the cocktails, connected to the fact that they themselves are able to make these amazing creations based on the ingredients that they have at home. So, once this kind of clicked for me and I started to get a lot of traction just through Facebook Live, I was like, “I wonder if I can start doing these for like personal parties” and got into the B2C sector of this a little bit.

And I started doing these and they were starting to get a little bit of traction, but not too much. And then in August of last year in 2020, I decided to venture into corporate and started to check out what corporate was looking and what team building as I started to see people really sought connection, people really sought those things that they just couldn’t have physically right now. So, when I started to see that when doing these things virtually, when done really well, you can suspend people and disbelief that they’re in fact in a virtual space with other people, but they’re in the same room with each other. So that’s something that I wanted to bring into the team building and the meeting environment. So I started to do things in the business world and it was amazing to see how these connections really started to form. But yeah, so that’s kind of where it really all stems from. And as I’ve been turning this more and more into something that not only I love, but people love too, I started to see how the connections, this is the hospitality that I was searching for.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about that pivot from B2C to B2B and specifically what were you noticing about the business world that was so receptive or what was that need that you were really kind of tapping into that they responded so much?

Rachael Green:

Yeah, absolutely. So there, I started to do a little bit of research of what the main issues were with people working remote, right? And not just for the pandemic, but in general. We’ve been moving into a direction of being working remote and people desiring to work remote, whether for travel or for flexibility. And so I was looking into the key things that people really struggled with as being employed in a remote environment. And one was the ability to turn off at the end of the day, right? Another one was feeling connected or part of a team or part of a community and there’s a few others as well, but those two really stuck out to me. And so when I started to look into that business side of things, I started to realize, “Wow, people really miss being in touch with people.” Maybe not necessarily touching them, but being in a space where they can be fully present, right?

So, when we have the access to be fully present with the people that we’re in a room with, then magic really happens. And I think that people have been trying to facilitate these virtual meetings and they’re pretty dry in a lot of ways, but they get the point across and that’s good, but they’re finding maybe a lack of productivity that happens when people just feel like this mundane day-to-day. And when they go into the office and they leave, that’s an eight-hour Workday, but when they’re working from home, it can be 11, 12-hour workdays and they don’t even realize that they’ve got up and it was dark outside and they started working and then it’s dark outside when it stops. And so I think that those things are really important to identify with.

And when you bring people in for experiences for your team, you get to give them an opportunity to just be present, to leave work aside for just a moment, maybe even incorporate their partners or their husbands or wives and do something truly together. And so, when I started to realize that there is actually proof in people being more productive once they can let loose a little bit, and it’s not like, “Oh, I’ve been working straight for 14 days,” but it really breaks the monotony. And I think that that’s the real need that I sought to fill in providing just some entertainment and some ability to be present, activating all five senses, right? You’re touching ingredients, you’re smelling ingredients, you’re tasting things, you’re building, and then you’re enjoying something that you created. So, there are other sorts of entertainment, but what I love most about what I do is that it actually activates so many of the senses, which makes it easier to be present and in the moment.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s resonating with a lot of things and specifically this notion of being disconnected and this need for connection and community. And it reminds me of a BBC report that came out it’s about a year ago now or more, and the headline was Most Ineffective Meetings Are Actually a Form of Therapy. So, folks are striving or have hunger for this connection and community so much that they fill their calendars with kind of ineffective meetings. And it’s a very inefficient approach, whereas you’re bringing an intentional approach. I usually coach people on we need that, so let’s plan on it. Let’s actually honor it and be intentional so that when we come together, we make good use of that time. So I love what you’re doing from the perspective of it’s allowing people to be intentional about that time they spend focusing on connection and community.

Rachael Green:

Yeah. It’s almost like you’re creating those boundaries for them, right? So when you put their personal needs and personal lives in addition to the priorities of our business, when you prioritize them themselves, because they’re working so hard for their families and to get ahead and to really serve and to show up really well, when you’re rewarding them, you get to put that boundary in there and it’s like, “Hey, remember, you are a person too and we want to value you by giving you something to really enjoy yourself for a second.” And yeah, when you have those ineffective meetings just to fill time, yeah, I understand where that can come in too. So, by putting something intentional in there, you’re able to break that monotony. So, it’s what I’ve found to create that product to be. It’s funny how that works, right?

It’s funny how you’re like, “How can something that’s completely unrelated to business in fact help your business?” But as an entrepreneur, I’ve come to realize that days off aren’t just for me, they’re for my business. If I’m not taking days off, or if I’m not setting aside time to access those really creative sides of my brain or those connection points or those things that really bring my spirit up, then my business will suffer if I don’t do those things. So, I think that definitely works in the corporate world. And it’s such a pleasure for me to see businesses that are doing it.

I’ve become friends with, her name is Kristen, and she’s amazing. She’s the head of engagement at headquarters at LinkedIn in New York. And her main job is to set up these amazing field days and challenges and bring your parents to work day on Zoom and all of these amazing things that they initiate so that they feel seen, they feel respected and heard just as… Even though they’re part of this corporate machine, they are seen and the company desires for them to feel that sense of belonging. And I think that’s what drives loyalty in this space. So, I think that that’s really important too.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s critical. It’s funny that so many companies have embraced design thinking and plenty haven’t, but a lot have, it’s common and so focused on customer experience. And I think they’re missing the ball on the employee experience piece. And it’s so great to hear of companies that you just mentioned, LinkedIn, and you’ve got lots of clients that are spending time thinking about these issues. And it’s just so critical to create environments where we can build friendships, we can build connection as we’re going to do much better work if we can build that trust and that sense of safety.

Rachael Green:

Yeah. I think that’s what it comes down to, hospitality comes from the core, right? You can’t deliver a good customer service if your employees don’t feel like they’re served too.

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Rachael Green:

And I feel like that’s where the health of an organization really comes in and I’ve read a lot of books in hospitality and they say that labor should be your number one priority, your number one cost. Making sure that they are well-educated, that there’s team-building experiences, that they feel like they’re learning and growing. And especially a lot of these younger generations too, like for them fulfillment is prioritized over security. And I think that’s something that a lot of businesses should really remember as these younger generations start to join the workforce and especially the corporate play.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, let’s unpack that a little bit. What does that mean, fulfillment prioritized over security?

Rachael Green:

I think the desire for constant learning, growing, expanding their minds and understanding… And there’s more left-brain, right-brain people as well, but I think that there is such a drive for connection and community because technology too is such a strong piece of this that the loyalty and connections it’s different. It looks different now. So, I think what I’ve come to see and why team building and team engagement and employee engagement has become such a strong piece in the corporate structure is because people are desiring to learn more, to grow more and to become more of an expert, to have that sense of ownership in the roles that they have. So, by providing educational opportunities and opportunities to connect and become really a part of a community in a workplace, that’s becoming a really strong desire. I feel like more than just tenure.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, I’m going to bring us back to some of the stuff that you were saying a little bit earlier. And I was really intrigued by the comment around the truth behind hospitality and what does it mean to facilitate it well? You talked about facilitating hospitality and so as a community of facilitators, the truth of hospitality and facilitating it well really kind of jumped out to me.

Rachael Green:

Yeah. Love it. Love it, love it. Okay. So, let’s start from a basic, right? Let’s say you go into the Ritz-Carlton, right? And you put your name into your reservation, maybe the intention of your stay, right? Hospitality comes from anticipating needs at the bottom line. Anticipating needs and making people feel seen, or helping people to feel seen. So, in the customer experience, anticipating their needs by even having surveys to understand what their interest in working with you might be, and anticipating their potential questions that they’ll have through the customer journey and all the way down until after the experience is over, what are you doing to help them feel seen and heard? So, dialing that back to your employees and the people that work with you, how can you anticipate their needs by even giving out surveys or giving out… Applying what you’re applying to your customer journey to help that brand loyalty happen can be applied to your internal team as well.

Do you know all of the names of the people that work in your office? What are their birthdays? What are their partners’ names? What are their interests? If you prioritize making that connection happen, then that sense of comradery and that sense of productivity will build this little microcosm. So when you have this, especially if it’s productive, right? So, something that you’re facilitating and cultivating in a productive way, not just something that’s haphazard that can breed some sort of toxicity, but you’re encouraging that sense of camaraderie and community, then that sense of warmth and connection, not only to the people in their office, but the company and the brand itself, then that will trickle out as a vibe to people that they’re working with, either as partners or as customers out into the world.

So, it really comes down to the health of the organization. How can you create more health within your organization by providing an opportunity for them to connect back, for them to feel seen? And that is something that will be an example for the way that they connect with customers and they connect with potential partners and vendors, right? And when you have that good health emanating out, then those relationships with those people on the outskirts will also be benefited.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was thinking the same thing as you were starting to tell some of those stories and explain this, as you start to create a dynamic where those behaviors are reinforced within the organization, and then to your point, that emanates outward. And I was also thinking about this notion that the root of hospitality is to be hospitable and what a lovely thought if we create hospitable environments within the workplace and we’re supporting each other and treating… It just comes down to the ways that people like to be treated and honored and respected.

Rachael Green:

Yeah, it truly is. And it’s interesting because hospitality is such a wide net, right? You have food and beverage, you have hotels, you have movie theaters, you have events, and it’s interesting. It’s like, where do these all connect? And it comes down to people, the end consumer coming into a space to have an experience, whether it’s at an event, whether it’s at a movie theater, whether it’s at a hotel, at a restaurant. They’re going in, could they be doing these things on their own? Yes. But they’re going somewhere and they’re building a sense of loyalty based off of what they’ve received as an experience. So, it’s really important to make sure that that experience is super tied in to a brand. I don’t know, I got a little wrapped up in something.

Douglas Ferguson:

No, no, no. What that reminds me of is the late Tony Hsieh and how one of the reasons that he opened Zappos in Las Vegas was because of the strong customer service and hospitality industry in Vegas. And he was able to hire folks that really took customer care obsessively. And I think it directly impacted their ability to grow that company in the way they grew it.

Rachael Green:

Yeah. Absolutely. And here’s the thing too. It’s like when you have a lot of opportunities for the people in your organization to learn, right? To learn about shoes, to learn about how to deliver good customer service, to learn about what things mean, it builds a sense of culture, but also when you’re providing these things for your team and not just giving them, “Here’s a computer,” and go then there’s a lot less confusion too. So, you’re able to deliver better service. When you’re providing infrastructure, whether it’s in educating them or in providing an experience for them to become part of this community, you’re giving them the tools to give better service, to be that brand that people really are loyal to. So yeah, I love it.

Douglas Ferguson:

It reminds me of experiences I’ve had at really nice hotels where I walk in and they treat me like they’ve known me for years. They’re like, “Good to see you, Mr. Ferguson, thanks for joining us.” Versus an average hotel where you walk in and it’s like, “Do you have your confirmation number?” It’s like it’s so transactional in like, “Give me your thing.” It’s like it’s all just in how you approach it. It’s not likely to cost them any extra money because it’s not like they had to charge extra to behave in that way.

Rachael Green:

Right. But it comes down to what kind of support are they getting, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Rachael Green:

Is it just a paycheck?

Douglas Ferguson:

And encouragement.

Rachael Green:

Right. Encouragement too, but just awesome. And you brought too a really great point, right? So there is something different that they’re doing to ensure that customer experience and there’s people that follow up on that to ensure that that is followed through. Right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely.

Rachael Green:

So, in my experience in the way that I’ve grown, I have surveys when people are interested in my service, I have service surveys throughout the customer journey of like, “Okay, what do you expect? Okay, was this what you expected? Where can we improve?” And when you have these types of things in addition to that personal contact, then you have the opportunity to add in little pieces that they’re like, “Wow, they’re listening.” Like, “Great to see you, Mr. Ferguson.” Right? That’s what I’m talking about when you go into these particular experiences and you feel seen. And that hospitality, how it dials back into, how can we incorporate hospitality into our meetings? How can we incorporate hospitality into our home lives? Dial it all the way back. How can you provide that experience for your employees to emanate that type of respect and service to their selves and their families? That’s like next level, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m going to switch gears on us just kind of quickly, because I feel like there’s so much in the media right now about hybrid events. And I feel like folks like you and I who do events and create experiences for people, I think we both know that, well, we’re not doing hybrid yet. It’s on the horizon and it’s soon. And a lot of what people are talking about is like projections and whatnot. And so, I’m curious to hear what’s rattling around your head? I know you talked about this notion of cross-platform and how these different formulizations… Well, formulas will arrive as we move into this new space. So, I think the listeners are curious about this stuff and especially from a practitioner’s point of view. So I would love to hear your thoughts there.

Rachael Green:

Yeah. It’s super fun because when I first was thinking about the word hybrid and as it was first produced, I started to think about, “Well, what determines a platform?” Right? A platform is a place where people can go to to get the content that they need or the service that they need. And that is in fact delivered, right? So people will… An unpopular opinion that in-person in itself is a platform. So, when I was thinking about multi-platform events and the main difference that I have received in starting these unpopular conversations is that hybrid is a mix of in-person and virtual, versus hybrid being a mix of different online platforms. That’s a multi-platform event. But it got me thinking, I was like, “Okay, well, how is in-person if you’re looking at it from a strategic perspective and a systems perspective, they are in fact different.”

So, when you’re doing multi-platform events, you have strategies for each individual platform. And so, when we’re getting into hybrid, we’re starting to think, “Okay, well, we have a strategy for our in-person and what is our strategy for virtual? How are we going to engage them in the same way that we can engage our in-person?” Well, the reality is that you can’t, right? But it’s not that you can’t, it’s what can I do to have them feel as engaged as the in-person audience? And not only that, how can we create that bridge so that the virtual audience and the in-person audience can actually connect with each other? So you have things that I feel like are really important, and I’m going to use Clubhouse, for example.

Now, as people start to get back into in-person and are utilizing these virtual events, you can use things like networking platforms such as Clubhouse to connect both audiences, right? So even though people are doing things in person in their daily life, they’re signing onto Clubhouse to do the laundry, to do whatever, but they’re also utilizing Clubhouse as a pre-event and a post-event networking or value-add conversation. So, there are ways that I think are really important to consider and I was on a call with someone this morning about this. We think of these as different audiences, as different platforms, but how can we going forward connect the two? I went to a hybrid event last year, I was virtual and it was a chore to get people that were in-person to go downstairs, because it was at a brewery upstairs, downstairs to where the TV was with the virtual people, coming down in sections to engage with these people.

The people that are in-person, how can we encourage or really inspire them to want to connect with the people that are still virtual and obviously the people that are virtual are missing out on the opportunity of being in-person. So how can we not let them feel left behind because of things they weren’t able to get together to get to the in-person event and why should they be left behind? But it’s kind of interesting. So there are ways that I’ve seen it done really well, like gamification. So you can use gamification, whether everyone together is on a Facebook group, whether it’s in person or live and you can connect and have different calls to action and get on the leaderboards and different things of that nature.

But how can we… And this is more a question to think about as you go forward, because this is just a question that I’m posing. I don’t have the answers to, is what ways can you be drawing the people that are in person to be interacting with the people that are virtual as well? Because the beauty of virtual is that they’re tuning in from wherever, right? Global, right? Time zones don’t matter as much as long as you have it in your Google calendar. So, you have the ability to access people globally and that’s the beauty of virtual. And it is going to be interesting going back into in-person to see how these priorities and not getting caught up into like what’s so proximate. So, I think that that’s a really great question to consider when you’re thinking about going into hybrid, and you’re thinking about providing a virtual side of your in-person experience, how can you prioritize those people so that they feel connected as well?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I love the fact that you use the word inspire because I think so often people have the mindset of like, “How do I get these people to do this thing?” And gamification or other ways to kind of create delight and intrigue seems like the right approach and really leaning in and designing those experiences rather than saying, “Okay, we’re going to put a screen here.” I think people get so caught up in the tactics and the logistics of like, “What are the current tools allow us to do?” Rather than stepping back and thinking about, “Well, what do we want to create in the world?”

Rachael Green:

Exactly. And I think that virtual is here to stay just because over the past year, people have started to realize, “Wow, I just made a best friend in Hong Kong.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Rachael Green:

But it opened our minds to see that we can connect with people based off of alignment versus being based off of just proximity. And for me as being someone who’s a professional now in the virtual space, it is something I will never take it for granted again, as being able to connect with people all over the country, all over the world that have similar ideals that I do and can join my my flock, my flock of birds, we’re moving in the same direction, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome.

Rachael Green:

I think it’s really fun. So yes. How can you inspire people to take action to not only connect with each other, but connect to the main mission? I think it’s really important.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I’m going to shift to closing here and before you leave the listeners with a final thought, I want to see if you could share a little bit of insight, some kind of tangible, actionable stuff that folks might do where they might draw some inspiration from some of the work you’re doing. What’s some simple stuff that teams can start to do to make their experiences more hospitable or more engaging and more tangible? Because I love this virtual mixologist stuff you’re doing. Is there anything that people can try at home before they get an opportunity to work with you?

Rachael Green:

Yeah. Well, it starts with a lemon. No, just kidding. Well, I couldn’t give you guys a little recipe, but I’ll give you this, is that no matter what it is that you’re doing, if you’re interacting with your team, if you’re interacting with the people at home, if you’re interacting with an audience, right? How can you put the medicine in the candy and the candy and the medicine. It’s a funny thought, right? When you think about that, you’re like, “Mary Poppins.” Right? But when you’re putting the medicine in the candy and the candy and the medicine, how can you, in every situation that you’re in add value and also add relatability, also add connection and sprinkle in a little fun, right? So when you’re adding the medicine to the candy for me, what I do in a virtual mixology experience, when I’m speaking with a client and for me customization and that extra personal touch is super important. I want to make sure that I’m not just coming in, teaching how to make an old fashion and sayonara, right?

For me, it’s how can I add more value to these experiential engagements, not just… Like it makes sense, it adds value in some way. It adds a takeaway. What takeaways can you add to your entertainment, your engagement, your team building? What kind of values can you be adding? So, to these fun experiences. Because it makes that connection that much greater. They’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s what you said in that meeting last week. Wow, this is how I can apply it.” Right? So on the flip side, how can you add candy to the medicine?

So, when you’re having these daily meetings at 8:30 in the morning with your team, when you are having these four-hour educational seminars, how can you add fun creativity, gamification, and a little bit of an experience to tie in to break up that potential intense amount of value? But how can you incorporate those candy elements into the value so that it’s actually relatable so that when they are using these things, they’re actually like, “Oh yeah, I remember like you have to add a little sour and a little sweet to create balance and harmony.”

Well, how can I create balance and harmony into this situation right now? So, it’s kind of fun to think about things that way, but there’s reasons why Tony Robbins is immensely successful at what he does as a speaker, as an inspirational leader, because he brings in stories and stories are relatable. He brings in fun. He brings in workbooks that tie in to different things. He brings in exercises, things that drive home those points, but get people to take action as well. So, these candy pieces, they make something relatable, they make people want to take action and they make it fun so that it breaks it up. We’re dealing with all these distractions, especially in the virtual environment that you can’t see, right? If someone’s, camera’s not on, you don’t know what’s going on. And if their camera is on, you don’t know what’s behind the camera and what’s going on.

Netflix, Clubhouse, friends, family, everything that’s coming in to distract these people. You can’t control that the same way that you would in an in-person experience. So, make sure that you are the best distraction of their day, that you are providing the most value and value not necessarily being things that they write in a notebook, but value being provided in the way of, wow, they leave that event and they feel something. How do they feel after your meetings? How do they feel after your experiences that you’re providing for them? What do you want that to be like? And that’s it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, with that, I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought and we’ll go from there.

Rachael Green:

I think my final thought would be just be intentional. Try to put your team, your clients, your vendors, their relationship with you as a priority, right? And trying to find ways to remember their birthdays, to remember their partner’s names, that little piece of hospitality that is really easy to uncover just by looking at their LinkedIn, just by looking at a profile, write those things down. And then when if they’re in your CRM or however you organize these things, you can pull from those things, “Hey, how was your birthday last week? Did you do anything fun this weekend? How’s your wife doing?” Those things really matter to people. So, whether it’s your team or your clients or your vendors, try to remember pieces like that. Those things go a very long way.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. Well, I just want to say thank you for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you and best of luck on the adventures in the hybrid.

Rachael Green:

Thanks.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, how can they find you?

Rachael Green:

Yeah. So a great way to connect with me is finding me out in social media land, that’s where I live most of the time. But you can find me on Clubhouse, which is @rachaelgreen, that’s R-A-C-H-A-E-L Green like the color. You can also find me on Instagram, which is @rachgreencocktails. And those are my primary ones. I also do a lot of stuff on Facebook. If you want to join a community of people that are networking in so many different ways, there’s a lot of entrepreneurs, but there’s also people that are in the B2B world as well. My Facebook group is called Cocktails & Connections. That’s Cocktails, and then an ampersand Connections. And I do live networking at 7:30 Eastern Standard Time every Tuesday and we do all sorts of different things.

This upcoming week, we’re doing pitch strategy. So, that works really well for people who are in sales and marketing to understand the backend of your customer journey, so that when you’re presenting your value and you’re delivering what you believe is a good ROI for them, you understand certain layers of what they’re looking for. The week after that, we’re actually doing pitch practice, which is really fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. And I can say that your Clubhouse rooms are great. So, I recommend folks go check them out if you’re in Clubhouse or are getting access to it, jump over in there, it’s very good.

Rachael Green:

Yeah. Oh, my club. Yeah. So I have a club in Clubhouse too. That’s the Virtual Events & Experiences Collective, shortened to VEEC, V-E-E-C just because I chose the longest name possible for a Clubhouse, but we host a daily room in there, week daily room at three o’clock Eastern Standard Time for about an hour, all different topics on virtual events. We talk about hybrid, how to utilize Clubhouse as an event platform. We talk about virtual, all sorts of different platforms you can use for your virtual events, speaker engagements, music events, all sorts of different things. So, we look forward to seeing you there and you can feel free to find me or follow the club. And I’ll definitely see you guys in the hallways.

Douglas Ferguson:

Sounds great. It was great having you thanks so much for joining me.

Rachael Green:

Yay, cheers. Thanks so much.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

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