Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

Two of those speakers were Lee Duncan & Dan Benedict.

Lee Duncan is the Enterprise Design Sprint Leader at IBM, and Dan Benedict is the Digital Product Designer at IBM. In their presentation, “Cyber-Physical Design Sprints within the Enterprise,” they detailed the six steps of the cyber-physical system (anything that can sense, infer, and act, such as self-driving cars and changing thermostats) and how to navigate the innovation process:

1. Configure
2. Compile
3. Compress
4. Model
5. Build
6. Test

Watch Lee Duncan and Dan Benedict’s talk “Cyber-Physical Design Sprints within the Enterprise”:

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Read the Transcript

Lee Duncan:

Okay. You can hear me. All right. So Douglas, I forgot to tell you there are 27 other co-facilitators. I didn’t mention them. So if you come on up, have you come up here. I want you to move your body before we get started, move your body. So I want you to do a corporate burpee. What is that? Two up downs. I want some vassal dilation. So if you don’t mind from your seated position, this is the corporate enterprise burpee. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. That’s it. You’re wearing your corporate active wear. Congratulations. Okay, so get started. Let’s do some introductions. My name is Lee Duncan. I’m a methods facilitator. This is…

Dan Benedict:

Dan Benedict and I am a prototype facilitator.

Lee Duncan:

Okay. So we work together and that’s some of the value of co-facilitation. All right. So we want to tell you about cyber-physical sprints. What they are.

Lee Duncan:

You probably asking yourself, seriously I’ve never heard of cyber-physical anything. So what exactly is a cyber physical system? A cyber physical system is something that consents, can infer, it means it computes and it can act. It’s basically those three things. And if you think a cyber physical system is from the future, it is, but the future is now. It is self-driving cars, it is also the thermostats that you have in your house that collect data, they’re acting on it. Those are cyber-physical systems. So now you have an understanding of what a cyber physical system is, but now I need to give you a reason to care. So we’re going to do some cognitive hot prompts to get some friction with why you need to care and why your methods may not be ready. All right. So get a sticky note out, get your pen out.

Lee Duncan:

And this is going to be an on the spot quiz, fill in the blank to these prompts. And what I’m going to ask you to do is to tell me and describe what you think the future will be like five years from now. How many IoT devices do you think will be in the world? Okay, write that down. Then you see 79.4. So 79.4 what? What is the measurement of the future for data? And 5G? What will it cover? What percentage of the global mobile data will cover. And IoT overall, what percentage of the real time data, which is what we’re moving to is real-time data. What percentage of that will cover, and then show me the money. How much is this total available market worth? So write that down.

Lee Duncan:

Okay. Now it’s time to reveal. There are going to be 42 billion IoT devices, minor there are seven to 8 billion humans in the world. That’s more, a lot more. Zettabytes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of zettabytes. Most people have not, but here’s a fun fact. There’s 2.7 to three zettabytes of information available right now. That is the digital universe that we live in. 79.4 as compared to three now that’s more, that’s a lot more. 5G. 5G will cover 50% of all global mobile data traffic. That’s happening now. It’s going to accelerate big time. That’s what’s going to turn the machines on. Machine to machine communications with zero latency is going to happen starting now. And IoT collecting what percentage of real-time data it’s a lot 95%. And now for the big one, how much does this market worth would you guess? [inaudible 00:00:04:11].

Lee Duncan:

Okay. That backfired big time. 3 trillion. It’s still a lot. It’s more than I have in my wallet. By a significant portion, because all I have is like a receipt from 7/11. All right. So here are the steps, now you want to know, all right, I’m hooked. I’m interested. How do you do this thing? Well, there are six main steps. First we configure, we compile, compress, model, build and test. It rhymes, you should remember that. All right. So let me zero in and use your machine vision powers, which by the way, machine visioning is a cyber-physical thing. And here, if you’re able to see it, and I’m not sure I’m able to either. Here are the components. At the beginning, we configure, we make sure we’re solving the right problem, problem framing, but we get really serious about it. And we do some opportunity indexing.

Lee Duncan:

So even if it’s a real problem, there may be other opportunities out there. And you want to spend your resources on the right thing. Then we do some team engineering. We have to have the right experts. You cannot leave it to chance. This is technical stuff, deep tech. You need to have the right people in the room. And if you find out you’re missing that deep tech or the expert, when you’re in there, you’re toast. Supporting. We have premeditated musing. What the heck is that? That’s where you tell people to start looking for things, observing things. Many times you have to give people time to process and observe. You have to allow for those productive accidents to occur. If you tell them ahead of time, as opposed to just doing musing or looking for inspiration with 30 minutes, you’re going to miss stuff. Okay. And I think it’s also important to remember that sleep is one of the most powerful ideation tools that exists.

Lee Duncan:

So we also take a look at their innovation wellbeing. We make sure they’re sleeping right. We also make sure they’re tapering down for our event. We don’t want them working on multiple things at the same time, working late hours. We want gap days between that and the event. It’s important. We’re spending a lot of money. We’re having a lot of resources. And because of cyber-physical, we have a lot of experts it’s front end loaded and information. That’s a big difference. And we also have a cyber-physical design kit. We use fast materials to think and search with your hands as far as solutions. We also have a maker space, which has all those materials. And as far as compile, we have extreme experts which I went over. We have intentional listening, affinity tagging so we don’t get mapped shock with all the information that’s there.

Lee Duncan:

We have deep mapping and then we pick a target. And then to move a little faster because I’m taking forever. We compress that information, we have a 10X demo. We want to see the most interesting and exciting uses of technology, opportunity rendering, a cyber-physical sketch, and then we model it. We do blind mashup voting. We want to do a bias busting. Only the most novel ideas should live. And then we do some design sparring. We need to allow for contrast conversations, people to provide opinion. Otherwise a bad idea is allowed to exist. All right? So moving on, we build it. And a new term, which you may not have heard of is we have prototype operations. We break down all of the components of prototyping into individual pieces, because if you’re prototyping data, or if you’re prototyping something physical, that’s different requires different expertise and you have to be aligned on what’s going to be done when there’s a lot, there are a lot of complexity.

Lee Duncan:

And when it comes to testing day, we tasked with extreme users. We want the strongest signals possible. All right. And then we have some additional testing we do, which we call in fera testing. That’s fancy Latin, which means in the wild. We want to see how people react in a natural environment. And those are some of the components of the process.

Lee Duncan:

Now this is where I’m really going to go fast. Experience… if that wasn’t fast enough, experience debt assessment. We ask ourselves what happens if we do nothing? That is a choice. Where are we going? Because sometimes the best sprint is the one you don’t start. Do we have a responsibility to do something? What does it take to succeed with the current map? What is being done in the absence of a solution? And we take a look at the physical and digital components. How do we take a look at the physical interactions? What are taking place and back to data? Data is hard. And what we’re looking at is thick data. That’s the mix of quantitative and qualitative data. And we’re figuring out how to model that and how to get the best insights possible.

Lee Duncan:

So we take all this information, we put it on an achieveability canvas. We love a good canvas. I’m sure you do too. And we ask ourselves what capital’s present? Do we have the humans to build this thing? Do they have the skills? Do we have the political capital? The social will to make this. Because one big problem that is addressing Douglas’s book about the prototype of what happens after, is the idea is not enough. You have to make something from it, right? If you run a marathon and you’ve collapsed before you hit the finish line, that is not a successful event. You probably want me to get the sticker for the back of your car. So we take a look of all that. And another thing which is new, and I think quite important for the enterprise is responsible framing. Do we have an ethical and moral responsibility with the adoption costs, et cetera. So that’s what we do. We also share meals. We know that sharing meals is important, the fastest way to get swift trust. All right, I’ve burned all your time.

Dan Benedict:

All my time, but I got three minutes. So you thought Lee was fast. I’m going to whip through this very quickly. But we’re also looking at bringing somebody new to the table. We talked a lot about engineering the ideal team, created communication and trust. So we want to make sure that all that effort doesn’t go to waste. We want to be able to hold people accountable in the work that they’re doing to the standards that we mapped out during the achievability canvas, making sure that that capital is put to its best use. So the innovation villain is someone who’s going to come in and measure the ideas and the actions of the team to these constraints to make sure that we’re moving forward in a manner that is realistic, because you don’t just want to get to the test you want to get to the end product. And that’s this person’s goal. They’re designing for tension to make sure that you really reach the end game there.

Dan Benedict:

Then we’re looking at experience mapping in a new way too. We’re not just trying to take account of the user and their actions. We have to map specifically what is going to be occurring during the event and during the cyber and physical components. What is going to be sensed? What is going to be inferred? And then how are we going to act upon that back in the physical world.

Dan Benedict:

So then we have some checks and balances to make sure that as we can move from the map into the solution sketches, everything is weighed against what it is that the organization or team has decided to value. Is it the political capital? Is it high in user value? Is it going to show a large return for the company, organization or team? Is it high-and safety? Being able to measure these things as we look at each individual’s solution sketch can help them measure exactly what they’re going to be capable of and what the user may be able to take on.

Dan Benedict:

Then we think that one of the major things moving out of the prototyping stage with this is aiding the understanding of the team in the technical expertise that is necessary to create this end product. It may not be enough to simply say that it would work with a magic ward. You want to have the right terminology. You want to have the right expertise. And if it’s not built into the team, you can augment that team with prototyping cards, which expand on ideas of your sensors that are available, whether it’s a microphone, a camera, ultraviolet, and then how does that information transmit into the cyber? Is it through a closed secure network or using Bluetooth infrared? And then what type of processes are going on? And you can augment processes with any sort of cognitive elements that are going on, blockchain, whatever your digital medium is.

Dan Benedict:

And then again, how do we get back to the act? What is going on in the physical world? And then what type of actuator is making that occur? Is it an LED? Is it a motor? Is it a fan? So we’re helping people bridge that gap by giving them the terminology that they need to correctly convey exactly what they hope to make in the end.

Dan Benedict:

And then of course setting expectations, because in order to get to the end, you still have to pass that test. So with this complex idea, how do we do that? We set the right target. We pick exactly what we’re going to be testing. We determine the right test. Who’s the right audience. How do we conduct this? How do we make this? And then what level of fidelity is that executed at? Which allows us to move on knowing that we have the right idea that we’ve generated the capital that we don’t have and successes in the near future. So again, we have our wonderful statistics here. It’s a booming industry. There is going to be an unprecedented level of data. And as such, there is an unprecedented call to action for reliability, trust, and responsibility when creating in this area. Thank you.

The post Cyber-Physical Design Sprints within the Enterprise appeared first on Voltage Control.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was Reagan Pugh, Facilitator at Voltage Control.

Reagan lectured on the inner work of a facilitator; the essential job is done before facilitation, and how it affects the dynamic of the group one is leading.

He called into question what facilitators do before walking into the room, and reminded the group that facilitation is not about the facilitator, but about helping the group. “We don’t go into a room armed with our answers, we go in the room and help them recover the answers in the room, not discover the answers for them.”

Reagan shined a light on the importance of centering oneself and bringing positive energy to the room to cultivate the same in the group. “We need to consider where our mind is at, our spirit, and our intentions, so that we don’t bring negative bias into the room.”

Watch Reagan Pugh’s talk “Inner Work of a Facilitator”:

Read the Transcript

Reagan Pugh:

Last night a wintry minx fell upon Austin, Texas. If you’re anything like me, most likely this morning you woke up and you scurried to your window and you pull the blinds down to see if the snow is on the ground. Oh, it’s on top of the cars. And then you do, if you’re from Texas one really important thing after this, you scurry over to your laptop, you open it up and you look to see if school’s closed for the day.

I’m a grown adult, but I was still like, a school day feels really cool, especially when we’re in Texas. Because we liked the imagining school days, because you imagine it’s going to be some kind of a snowpocalypse and you’re going to have to survive it. And all of a sudden, your mom’s like, “Put the bath… Turn on the bathtub, get the water, fill it up. The pipes might freeze, make sure we got the canned food!” You figure out which of your sweaters you’re going to use to put on for warmth and which ones you can like rip up and tie around a broken broom handle and dip in kerosene for a torch.

There’s this emergency mindset that we get into. Sometimes I feel that when I’m just at home, not wanting to go get food somewhere and there’s no food left in my house. And so you go to the pantry and it’s… There’s some tortillas and I got some spaghetti some… have you ever made a spaghetti taco? I just got back yesterday from a trip and all we had was chili, and I made a chili taco. Listen to me, you can make a taco out of anything, you just need a tortilla. There’s this practice of going into the pantry and saying to myself, “Okay, I can’t go out and discover food anywhere else I’m going to have to make do with what I got. I’m going to have to recover what I’ve already got right in here right now.’.

Have you ever been making a PowerPoint presentation, and it’s one hour before your presentation, and you’re on Unsplash looking at stock photography and you’re like, “What the hell is going to say synergy for me.” And then all of the sudden, your past self walks the room, the ghost of your past self, and whispers into your ear, “That consumer beverage company you did a workshop for in 2016, three slides will work here. You’re welcome.” And then you think to yourself, “Oh yes!”

I’ve been here before. I don’t ho… have to go out and discover something else that I have to put in my playbook, I need to recover things that I’ve had. These are the stories that we love, these are the stories that we pay attention to. There’s this one about a Prince, his father gets murdered by his uncle. He’s got to flee. And so he takes up with some vagabonds and they live off the land. His sweetheart comes to find him years later to save the kingdom is in disarray. Only you can come back and save us, but he doubts that he says, “I don’t have what it takes. I think I’m going to have to go discover some new knowledge and skills…” But I’m talking about Simba, right? And this is the Lion King. I’m going to have to go out Nala and fi… And she says, “No, it’s about recovering who you’ve always been.”

Isn’t this what we do for our clients. We don’t go into a room armed with our answers. We go into our room, if we’re really going to serve our clients, believing that the answers to their greatest challenges are already locked in that room. And it is our job to bring them out. It is not our job discover, it is our job to recover. So, this is really great for us to do for our clients. But man, this is really hard to do for ourselves.

This is why the cobbler’s kids have holes in their shoes. This is why management consultants are terrible entrepreneurs. This is why the dermatologist’s kids have back zits. This is why the urologists… I’ll stop there.

What do we do before we go into the room? The success of any intervention depends upon the interior condition of the intervenor. We’ve got the knowledge and skills and spades. We have access to all kinds of things that we can bring with us, but are we willing to do the work prior to make sure that when we come into that room, we’re ready to help those folks recover what it is that they need to

I like to start with gratitude. Some folks, when we begin a session we want to get people talking and if there’s trust in the room it’s great to get folks to have an intimate conversation. But sometimes that doesn’t always work and people are a little rebuffed by that. I often find that talking about things we’re grateful for is a great way to start, because all of the sudden we’re not worried about all that we have to do. Our brains get wipes. There’s a clean slate. As Solomon says, our amygdala relaxes and people become available for something. So let’s just try this real quick. Think about something that’s going well in your life, think about something that’s going right. This is just how I would do it in a session. And just turn, in 30 seconds, and share to your neighbor like, “This is one ray of sunshine in my life right now.” Go.

Thank you. Let me hear two things, you can brag on your partner. What do we hear? What did you hear your partner say that you said, “Oh, that’s good.” Yes.

Speaker 2:

My sweet young son,-

Reagan Pugh:

“My sweet young son,”-

Speaker 2:

When he’s sleeping.

Reagan Pugh:

When he’s asleep! We keep lots of NyQuil around. What else? One more.

Speaker 3:

We’ve got a freelancer here who’s killing it.

Reagan Pugh:

We’ve got a freelancer who’s killing it, went out on her own and is making it rain. Congratulations. Give a round of applause.

But here’s the thing about getting folks to this place. You can feel the temperature in the room change whenever we talk about things that we’re grateful for, but I can’t give a gift like that to a room if I don’t have that gift myself.

I was a magician growing up, and I was good. And I would do birthday parties and I would make balls disappear and handkerchiefs disappear. But every time I would master a new trick, there was this problem. I stopped being impressed with the trick that I was performing. And so I would move from trick to trick no longer enjoying it because the knowledge and the skill didn’t seem complicated to me anymore.

So seeking wisdom, I went to the local magic shop where there was this wise old magician who would proffer advice to young people. And he would sit in the corner, and I walked in and I said, “Master, what am I supposed to do? My magic tricks are no longer impressive to me.”

He said, “Oh, it’s a sad day in a young magician’s life when he’s no longer impressed with his own magic, but,” he stands up and he walks over, puts his hands on the counter. And he says, “Learning how to do the illusion is only step one of being a magician. Knowing how to return to the wonder you felt when you first saw the trick performance, now this is the magic.” And then he snapped his fingers and he turned into a Raven and he flew out the…

If I don’t believe that I have a gift, how am I going to give a gift? We’re freelancing right now. Was there a job that you left to freelance? Was freelancing a thing that you’ve wanted to do?

Speaker 4:

Uh, no.

Reagan Pugh:

Okay, that didn’t work. That didn’t work. What does it look like for us before we begin our work to make sure that we think, “I’m choosing to be here.”

One year, two year, three years or four years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I had the chance to do this. And if we can remember that we have this privilege of walking into a room to guide folks, perhaps then we can give this gift of gratitude back to them.

My grandmother, she would paint her fingernails methodically. She had the bottles across her bathroom and she would pull one down and the red would coat her fingernail. You could see the bristles, so slowly. I would say to her, “Nana, why is it that you paint your fingernails so slowly?”

And she would blow on them and say, “Honey, it’s because I paint my fingernails like this, that you’re alive.”

I would say, “Nana, what do you mean?”

And she said, “Honey, if I take this good care of my fingernails, don’t you think I made sure your dad didn’t kill himself?”

She had a tidy house, she had painted fingernails, her car was always clean, and her clothes were folded. The way that she did anything was the way that she did everything.

As facilitators, what mindsets do we carry about the people whom we were about to go interact with? When we’re doing discovery interviews, do you ever have someone who works for the organization you’re going to serve, say, “Now watch out for Sarah, watch out for Jonathan. They’re going to be a naysayer.” And then don’t we carry the story into the room with us if we’re not careful. Those thoughts that we carry, the way that we behave, the postures we take, this permeates into the rest of our experience. How do we make sure as we approach any engagement that we consider where our mind is at, where our spirit is at? Where are we worried? Where are we anxious? And where are we frustrated? Because this, my friends, echoes into the rest of our actions.

I had a mentor, and his name was Earl. I was in college and I couldn’t get a girlfriend. So I was involved, Students Association for Campus Activities, Student Government, Student Organ… I was busy, I was building a resume. I was going to go make something of myself. I was applying for all these jobs and I wasn’t getting them. And I was frustrated. So I would walk into Earl’s office and I would sit down and I would complain about my station in life. And Earl was patient, and he would sit in his chair and it would swivel and he would let me finish. And finally the swivel would stop. And he would look at me, and with kindness say the same thing that he said every single time, “Reagan, this is going to make a lot more sense for you when you realize that it’s not about you.” Earl died a few years later. And 1000 people went to his funeral. Earl possessed knowledge and skills, but it was not Earl’s knowledge and skills that allowed him to have a lasting impact on me and those who he served.

It is easy for us before we take on an engagement, to walk into the room believing that we are being held up and judged the entire time. It’s easy for us to believe that our career is dependent upon doing perfect in this interaction, or that us achieving the result that we told them that we would achieve is going to determine whether or not we are going to ever be successful in this field.

But let me tell you something, it’s not about you. And here’s the paradoxical beauty of realizing that it’s not about us. The second we can believe and remember that it’s not about us walking into the room to do this work, the stakes that we once believed to be so high, they can vanish. And the second we don’t believe the stakes exist anymore about whether or not we have value. The second that we are able to recover those pieces of ourselves that can really connect and be with the people in the room.

People, I don’t know if you know this, we don’t like to have things done to us, but we do enjoy it whenever folks decide to show up to a room and be with us the way that we need to be been with. This all happens before we walk into the room. This all happens before we speak to one person, my friends, this is the inner work of the facilitator. Thank you.

The post Inner Work of a Facilitator appeared first on Voltage Control.