While most companies were struggling to figure out Zoom meetings in 2020, one large CPG company brought cross-functional, international teams together to remotely prototype packaging and products for the U.S. and abroad. 

These Design Sprints were a response to the CEO encouraging management to embrace a more agile approach to problem solving. Inspired by the nimbleness of startups, he directed his teams to find ways to accelerate product development and how they worked in general.

This inspiration empowered our client — the organization’s Design Thinking Champion — to explore opportunities for rapid iteration. In the year or so prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, she’d begun to assemble stakeholders from various departments and divisions at locations around the world for in-person collaboration. Still, the virus (and subsequent lockdown) upended this practice.

In response, the Champion engaged Voltage Control to help her continue her design thinking sessions remotely. She had been impressed by the wealth of free online resources Voltage Control had created as well as founder Douglas Ferguson’s books. She also liked that we had a relationship with Google Ventures’ Jake Knapp — author of the popular book Sprint — and conducted the five-day Design Sprints he popularized at GV (formerly Google Ventures).

Voltage Control worked closely with the Champion to plan and execute nine Design Sprints in total. One of which was a five-day workshop to explore innovative, sustainable packaging designs for three hot wax hair removal products. The challenge at hand was to use consumer-centric techniques to address the deeper needs of the brand’s customers. To accomplish this, Voltage Control defined the objectives for each day: 

• Monday – Map
• Tuesday – Sketch
• Wednesday – Decide
• Thursday – Prototype
• Friday – Test

Day 1: Map

A big part of the first day was setting goals, asking questions and exploring how the team might arrive at a solution. Because of Covid-19 protocols, each team member joined the workshop via Zoom and collectively recorded thoughts in the online collaboration tool Mural. 

To kick things off, Voltage Control socialized observations from the pre-work everyone did before joining the session. This ensured participants had the chance to connect 1:1, and everyone was heard. We then asked everyone to share what was interesting about the challenge and what questions they had going into the session.

Some of these included:

• Do we understand consumers’ key drivers for purchase?
• Can we find a solution that doesn’t impact other usage aspects like safety?
• Can we combine functionality with aesthetics?
• Will consumers be able to recycle/reuse/compost independently of their country of origin?

These questions were then followed with a review of the problem space. Voltage Control believes no one knows everything, so a group discussion helped unlock individually held knowledge and provided a chance for the larger team to get aligned. 

Day 1 then concluded with the design thinking activity “How Might We” (HMW), which encouraged participants to think big without getting mired down by the painful details of bringing a complete solution to market. Each team member selected their top four HMW notes, and the entire team reviewed these essential questions to keep in mind during testing. Affinity grouping and dot voting were used to select the most significant questions without debate.

Day 2: Sketch

Picasso once said, “great artists steal,” and that’s what guided Voltage Control as the second day of collaborative work began. The team located and shared analogous inspirations via Mural. These included competitor products, adjacent services, intuitive interfaces, strong branding, and compelling content.

This complemented the previous day’s work, where the group discussed the problems and the potential solutions. When they considered what they’d “stolen” along with the goals and solutions they’d volunteered on Monday, it put them in the right frame of mind for a bit of fun Voltage Control calls Crazy 8s. 

During the Crazy 8s exercise, we gave everyone on the team eight minutes to explore eight new ideas quickly. We instructed them to fold a paper in half three times, so they had eight squares to sketch in. We then allocated 1 minute per square for participants to unlock latent ideas and try different versions of an idea.

Once the eight minutes were up, we let participants spend the rest of the day sketching one or two solutions they felt had the most promise. Although each person was together in the same Zoom room, they worked alone. It’s a somewhat controversial opinion, but the Voltage Control team doesn’t believe group brainstorms work, and we’re not the only one. Instead of forcing consensus, we gave each person time to develop solutions on their own.

Day 3: Decide

Our third day commenced with a group review of Tuesday’s independent sketching. The team used small dots to identify parts of sketches they liked. Then, the team was led through each of the sketches, and key ideas were called out. A second “heat mapping” exercise was conducted, where smaller dots were placed on the ideas with  high potential. After these rounds of speed critiquing and straw poll voting, an R&D Manager — who’d been selected as the group’s decider — used three “super vote” dots to determine  the winning solutions. 

Each participant then imagined their ideal user flow in six steps. The group compared the flows and voted on them. Once again, the R&D Manager was the final decision maker, deciding which of the flows matched the chosen solutions. Next, the team collaborated on the storyboard using the solutions and user flows as a framework. To wrap the day, Voltage Control assigned everyone the roles they’d perform during prototyping on Thursday.

Day 4: Prototyping

Our virtual prototyping session heavily leveraged a combination of digital design tools, including Sketch, Craft, and InVision. By collaborating in Google Docs, the distributed team could track jobs on a Kanban board and easily share assets between one another.

Day 5: Test

On the final day of this Design Sprint, the cross-functional team gathered once more on Zoom to observe the remote, real-time interviews of five actual consumers. Using a Voltage Control-created scorecard, the stakeholders quickly assessed the consumers’ responses. 

These consumer insights gave the team potential next steps they could explore in the weeks and months that followed the Design Sprint. When asked about this and three other Design Sprints he attended, one Product Scientist commented they “were incredibly effective at stress testing ideas for safety, sustainability, and other factors. They were also a useful way to explore opportunities to see if what competitors were doing was right for us.”

The Champion had a similar take and said, “We sometimes learned we needed to pivot and not invest a ton of time. Some groups arrived at a seemingly right idea that just needed more vetting, while others had uncovered multiple pathways they could take at the end of the week. Across the board, we exited and applied larger qualitative research with a larger consumer group.”

The Outcome

Voltage Control conducted eight other design sprints in collaboration with the Champion, which concluded with similar positive results. While two of the Design Sprints helped the company offer better customer experiences, many Voltage Control facilitated sessions allowed the company to improve their sustainability efforts.

While not everything will be commercialized, Voltage Control helped the company be more nimble through design thinking exercises. The Champion liked how Voltage Control was able to assist her in answering her CEO’s call to be more agile. By building upon the groundwork she’d already laid pre-Covid, the company was able to get to consumer benefits faster and work smarter, not harder. 

“Conducting remote Design Sprints seemed daunting at first, but it really wasn’t,” said the Champion. “The virtual whiteboard served us really well, and all the info captured through Mural worked better than our pre-Covid methods.”

“I also appreciated the structured roles team members had,” she continued. “Previously, we had worked rather very linearly. It was great to bring decision-makers into the week, having prototypers on hand and achieving progressive movement towards daily goals.” The Champion further thought the remote Design Sprints were well-thought-out.

Taking insights and having an actionable output doesn’t often happen  in the CPG space, so the Champion felt doing nine Design Sprints in 2020 created a bit of “muscle memory” for applying repeatable frameworks, then iterating on these processes. She hopes design thinking — and Design Sprints — will become ingrained at the company, allowing organization to shift from a fixed, linear mindset to readily applied tools & methodology. 

The Champion wants teams across the company to have more opportunities to talk to consumers while working with a broader range of peers. Her ultimate goal: to synergistically work together to achieve something great in a short matter of time. She may just see this come to fruition. The Product Scientist, who admits he was a skeptic at first, became an advocate of the Design Sprints. He believes many of his peers are now in favor of them as well.

“I was worried about them being a mess and team members not participating,” said the Scientist. “The learning curve was so steep that first day — having to get comfortable with new tools like Zoom and Mural. We were up and running by that first afternoon though.” 

“By the time we got to Wednesday, we really liked the structure and flow,” he added. “The team was pumped when we did the storyboard and then again when we got consumer feedback. Everyone I collaborated with during my first Design Sprint was enthusiastic at the end and was already chatting about doing another in Europe.”

The Scientist told Voltage Control that since participating, he’s been conducting internal “roadshows” to evangelize the idea of Design Sprints. Due to the travel time and cost, the Scientist said he and his international colleagues don’t get to do much brainstorming in a physical environment. He feels the experiences facilitated by Voltage Control have opened up the possibility to do more of this kind of work, even after the Covid-19 pandemic has subsided. “These [virtual] Design Sprints make brainstorming with a large, global team more accessible,” he concluded.

Being able to transform a skeptic into an evangelist over four Sprints shows the impact Voltage Control’s efforts can have. As a whole, we taught a wide swath of employees how to meet in meaningful ways, despite distance and the pandemic. These fresh approaches to work (and working together) re-invigorated every participant, from marketers to scientists. Regardless of what they’ll face in the years ahead, they’ve now been trained to let no business disturbance interrupt their innovation. 

Do you have an innovation you want to implement, a company problem you need to solve, or a meeting structure that needs improvement?

Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk or for a consultation.

The post Teaching a global CPG company to innovate like a startup appeared first on Voltage Control.

If your team is considering a Design Sprint, you’re probably also considering if the cost is worth it. It’s not just a small, simple 30-minute status meeting after all. A Design Sprint is a five-day process, initially developed at Google Ventures, used for validating ideas and tackling a business problem. Teams are guided through a design thinking process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. Design Sprints help answer important business questions and solve big challenges through design, prototyping, and testing ideas directly with users. Benefits include team alignment (creating a shortcut to the debate cycle), less risk, and the ability to compress months of time into a single week. 

If you are wondering if your team could benefit from a Design Sprint, first check out our article on 5 times you should run a Design Sprint. If and when you decide this is right for you and your team, you’ll need to consider the overall investment cost. In this post, we outline the considerations to take into account and the factors that contribute to the cost of a Design Sprint.

5 Considerations For Investing:

1) Time

This five-day process that requires careful planning. Note: we believe in giving your Design Sprint the full five days and not taking shortcuts. The activities and workshops take up the full five days, not including the pre-planning time, so you’ll want to factor that in. Consider what that means for your team – the participants will need to focus all of their time and attention on the Design Sprint, so their other projects and tasks will either need to be covered by someone else or put on hold for the week. The good news is what happens in a week can be equal to three or even six months of “regular” work.

“Design thinking research can lead to a 75% reduction in design and delivery time, often reducing an 8-month project to 3 or 4 months.” – IBM

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2) Resources

A Design Sprint team is typically made up of seven people who will provide diverse and critical perspectives on the project (including a Facilitator, Decider, Sponsor, some mix of Experts, Prototypers, Designers, Product and Tech leads). As mentioned above, this Sprint team will be fully focused on the Design Sprint over the five days, therefore their time and salary are factors to consider. In addition to time and salary, any other projects they are working on should also be factored into consideration.

3) Complexity

The complexity and impact of the project will also be a factor in the overall cost. For example, redesigning an existing piece of product functionality will likely be more straightforward than conceptualizing net new functionality from the ground up, and therefore requires less planning, time and resources. First decide on what the overarching challenge or question is that you hope to solve by utilizing a Design Sprint. Then you will have a more informed way to determine cost based upon the complexity of that challenge.

4) Expert Facilitators

Another consideration that will factor into the overall cost will be deciding to hire an expert facilitator or using someone internally. Consider bringing in an expert facilitator when dealing with big or sensitive topics. They offer a non-biased opinion, are removed from office politics, and take care of logistics while making sure everyone stays on track. The facilitator’s role is to increase engagement and positivity in the group, and an outside facilitator is a fresh face who can help to break patterns and promote productivity. Alternatively teams can run Design Sprints on their own, if there’s a neutral leader in the group who is well-versed in the process and facilitation.

Looking for someone to run a Design Sprint for you? We can help!

5) In-Person vs. Virtual

A final consideration and cost variable, especially relevant in today’s environment, is if the Design Sprint will be in-person or virtual. Traditionally, they have been held with all participants attending in-person, but they don’t have to be. Virtual Design Sprints can be just as effective but must be treated differently, as they are in a completely different landscape. If you decide to hold the Design Sprint in-person, you’ll need to consider travel, lodging and event costs if everyone is not located in the same place.

If you decide to go the virtual route, we recommend moving at a slower pace and scheduling a series of mini-workshops as opposed to five full days of activities. These mini workshop sessions are built chronologically one after the other. This sequence could happen over the course of four days, or even eight if needed. Combined, they create the complete virtual Design Sprint calendar. Designing around the in-between times is powerful and an opportunity that in-person doesn’t support. Between each mini-workshop, we assign homework and set the expectation that they will present their work at the next group session. Setting the expectation that the participant will present creates social pressure to encourage participation and ensure the work gets done. It’s easier for participants to get distracted during a virtual gathering, therefore it’s even more important for the Facilitator to pay attention to participant engagement and be proactive in including everyone in each activity.

We Think It Is Worth It!

Design Sprints can seem daunting, especially when thinking of all the immediate investment costs. But you also are getting a positive return on investment – lots of ideas and experiments in a relatively short period of time. Think about the long term – what you could be risking by continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done.

Consider these reasons why a Design Sprint is a sound investment:

1. Accomplish a month’s worth of work in 1 week
2. Get user feedback before it’s too late
3. Improve visibility & alignment for your team 
4. Gain speed & momentum for your project
5. Foster a culture of innovation

Learn how we helped IDB Invest’s Technology team improve its customer engagement and experience with a Design Sprint.

The true financial benefit of a Design Sprint is the upfront decision-making and alignment, resulting in a more efficient and simplified future process and product. By helping your company or team find the deep value for the end-user before building anything, and removing potentially useless or time-consuming features, you can save your team months of design, engineering, and development work and costs. You will be able to get your product or idea to market more quickly. Considering that Design Sprints minimize risk, reduce time to market, and accelerate innovation, we believe it’s worth the time and money when done correctly.

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You Don’t Have to Design Sprint Alone

If you want to run a Design Sprint at your company but are overwhelmed by the idea of planning and facilitating it, we can help you. Voltage Control designs and leads sprints for companies large and small. Having a professional facilitator run your Design Sprint ensures that you can focus on the ideas and the work, not the logistics or “doing it right.” Reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com or get in touch with us here if you want to talk about running a Design Sprint at your company.

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“The facilitator plays the role of a model of authenticity for the group: listening for the depth of decisions that need to be faced, speaking only from experience, preferring remaining silent to giving ‘good advice’ ungrounded in personal experience, rejoicing in the successes of the group.” -John Epps

The best workshops are learning experiences for lasting growth and transformation. They keep all participants engaged, drive key learning objectives and facilitate lasting change. If your workshops fall short, you may need the help of a workshop facilitator to produce better outcomes. It takes a pro-level toolkit and mindset to unearth potential and maintain results.

Workshop facilitation transforms meeting structure and dynamics. A professional meeting moderator has the ability to lead objectively and strategically to produce better outcomes at your company meeting or working session.

Why You Should Hire a Workshop Facilitator

The difference between a truly impactful workshop and a mediocre one is often an expert leader–someone well-versed in bringing people together, navigating conversations, and helping solve complex problems. With a professional workshop facilitator at the helm, you can get the whole group engaged and participating, which leads to more productive meetings. Here are three reasons an outside professional facilitator is an asset to your next workshop.

1. A Non-Biased Leader

A workshop facilitator is a non-biased and neutral figure at your meeting that offers a fresh perspective. Unlike the inevitable biases that exist within your team, a skilled facilitator’s viewpoint is untainted by bias; instead, it is objective. They are removed from office politics and are an outsider to the company status quo. This vantage point allows them to ask critical questions, hold everyone accountable to the truth, and ensure ground rules are enforced. Sometimes this means helping the group embrace harsher realities that are necessary to solving problems and making thoughtful decisions. 

When the workshop facilitator is an unbiased navigator, they are able to guide the group more efficiently and effectively because their own opinions are not in the way. They can see the problem(s) at hand more clearly and are therefore able to address issues quicker and easier. This especially comes in handy when solving complex problems or settling matters of great importance. Sometimes it takes someone removed from the situation–with the other critical skills of a master facilitator–to identify how to best problem solve. 

2. Greater Engagement

Extracting equal engagement from all participants in any workshop is an art form. In short, it can be challenging. And for workshops to be impactful and influence lasting growth, you need the best of all participants. A workshop facilitator has the unique ability to work the room, encouraging all participants to interact. Workshop facilitators are trained to increase engagement and keep team members energized throughout the meeting. They do so by assessing the group’s current engagement level, minimizing distractions, and sticking to the schedule. Many facilitators also practice improv, so they have the skills to adapt to unplanned or unforeseen scenarios. For example, the facilitator will recognize a distraction or decrease in group energy levels and pivot the conversation/flow of the meeting when needed to bring it back to focus. This increases productivity and helps contribute to a more effective team dynamic.

Facilitators are skilled in a variety of engagement strategies and feel confident in leading a group. Also, workshop facilitators aren’t invested in the content of the meeting, which makes room for more opposing opinions. When outside facilitators lead, the team will be more comfortable expressing new ideas.

For example, if you are leading a meeting and your employees know that you have a certain point of view on an issue, they may not speak freely. This doesn’t produce innovation or contribution; it reinforces the company’s current structure and beliefs. When your employees walk in and notice someone else is running the workshop, they will be more excited or curious to see if the meeting pans out differently. This curiosity and excitement can lay the foundation for innovation. Your employees will feel more at ease expressing new thoughts, skills, and solutions when a new approach is presented.

Meetings and work cultures generally take on a routine. People usually know what to expect on a day-to-day basis. They also know how most meetings will go. Depending on your meeting history and feedback, this could either be good or bad. If you’ve heard more negative reviews than positive, it might be time to hire a workshop facilitator.

A workshop facilitator is a fresh new face and personality at the meeting. They can help to break old patterns and create new ones.

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Facilitators know a variety of engagement strategies and feel confident in leading a group. Also, workshop facilitators aren’t invested in the content of the meeting, which makes room for more opposing opinions.

When outside facilitators lead, the team will be more comfortable expressing new ideas.

For example, if you are leading a meeting and your employees know that you have a certain point of view on an issue, they may not speak freely. This doesn’t produce innovation or contribution; it reinforces the company’s current structure and beliefs.

3. Increased Positivity

When differing opinions emerge in a meeting, tensions can arise. Two employees may be very passionate about their stance, leaving you to manage the conversation without damaging any relationships. A workshop facilitator can seamlessly manage these potentially negative interactions by remaining a positive and unbiased presence.

Pro-tip: Refer to our Facilitators Guide to Questions for effective questions to ask to transform negative environments.

Hiring a workshop facilitator can also increase positivity at meetings by creating sharing and brainstorming opportunities. Workshop facilitators bring a toolkit of methodologies and strategies to employ that help teams work well together. They know when to use each method to get the desired results. Some examples include: brainstorming activities that move the group from divergent to convergent thinking to come up with and identify solutions to problems, encouraging active listening to create an inclusive and productive environment, and inspiring and balancing participation among extroverted and introverted personalities so that all voices are heard and understood by the group. The many techniques of a workshop facilitator can successfully get individuals to open up and express their opinions with ease.

Hiring a Workshop Facilitator

Hiring a professional facilitator for your next workshop, large group meeting, complicated meeting, or project kick-off will help your organization grow and solve complex problems quickly and effectively. A facilitator will provide a safe space for team members to contribute their ideas which will strengthen the entire group and overall outcome. Their organizational and problem-solving expertise will allow gatherings to flow smoothly, minimize issues, and extract important information. Workshop facilitators are an asset before, during, and after workshops, as they play an essential role in all parts of the process to ensure lasting results. 

If you’d like to hire a workshop facilitator for your next meeting or training, consider our services at Voltage Control. We offer a range of facilitation and innovation workshops that can help your company to get to the next level of employee engagement, growth, and innovation.

FAQ Section

What is the goal of facilitation in a professional setting?
The primary goal of facilitation is to guide teams through effective workshops that foster collaboration, decision-making, and problem-solving. A successful workshop is led by an expert facilitator who helps the group achieve its objectives while enhancing communication skills and fostering creative thinking.

Why should we hire an external facilitator instead of using an internal team member?
An external facilitator brings an unbiased perspective, free from internal politics or company culture. They have experience in facilitation across various industries and are trained to lead diverse groups. This helps create an environment where participants feel comfortable sharing innovative ideas, leading to more successful sessions.

What facilitation techniques do expert facilitators at Voltage Control use?
Our experienced facilitators use a range of facilitation techniques, including design thinking, brainstorming sessions, and collaborative decision-making strategies. These approaches ensure that both entry-level facilitators and seasoned professionals can guide their teams through complex challenges, fostering effective communication and leadership skills.

How do professional facilitators support leadership development and company growth?
Facilitators play a crucial role in talent development and leadership growth. By guiding team leaders and decision-makers through educational workshops and a series of sessions, they help develop soft skills such as communication and creative problem-solving. This investment in professional development enhances company culture and drives overall growth.

Can internal facilitators lead successful workshops, or is it better to rely on external consultants?
While internal facilitators may have a deep understanding of the company’s culture and goals, external workshop facilitators bring fresh insights and innovative approaches. External consultants are often more effective at identifying blind spots and introducing new facilitation techniques that lead to more impactful outcomes.

What experience level should facilitators have to lead a successful session?
Facilitators with a proven track record, whether internal or external, should possess extensive facilitation skills and experience. At Voltage Control, we offer facilitation training for both entry-level facilitators and those pursuing a facilitation career. An ideal candidate profile for facilitation includes leadership skills, experience in facilitation, and the ability to adapt their facilitation style to the needs of the group.

How do facilitation workshops benefit project managers and team leaders?
Facilitation workshops equip project managers and team leaders with essential leadership and communication skills. These workshops enhance their ability to lead teams, manage projects effectively, and create an environment for collaborative decision-making. This ultimately strengthens the leadership team and drives long-term company growth.

What is the role of facilitation in shaping company culture?
Facilitation is instrumental in shaping company culture by fostering open communication, encouraging creative thinking, and promoting collaboration. Whether led by an internal facilitator or an external consultant, effective facilitation ensures that all voices are heard, leading to stronger team cohesion and improved decision-making over a period of time.

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You may have heard about Design Sprint by now. It’s a methodology being used by a wide variety of different businesses and corporations when they are trying to solve a problem, expand their customer base, or simply innovate. The beauty of this approach is how streamlined the whole process is, lasting only five days from start to finish. We’ll give you a quick summary of what the Design Sprint is, with a focus on Design Sprint user testing, a critical step in the timeline. 

Design Sprint 101

We’ve discussed what a Design Sprint is before. Basically, it was invented by Jake Knapp and Google Ventures in order to completely authenticate ideas in only five days. This is vital, as we’ve all likely witnessed first-hand how long the process can take from the initial spark of an idea, to actually creating and testing the idea. Then, unfortunately, these ideas sometimes don’t work, effectively wasting any time you spent. The Design Sprint won’t leave a company with a completed product, of course, but it will validate the initial idea. You can then move on to bring the idea to market from there. The process starts with mapping, moves to sketching, to deciding, then to prototyping, and finally testing. This is all done in five days. In this article, we will focus on Design Sprint user testing, which occurs on day five. 

For more information on all of the steps of the Design Sprint see here.

What is User Testing?

Let’s pretend you started your Design Sprint on a Monday. On Thursday you’ll be making a prototype of your initial design. This will not be the finished product, but a realistic idea of your design. On Friday your product will be ready to be presented to users. This is the user testing step of your Design Sprint. You will have a prepared idea to present this day, ensuring the users are given a prototype as close as possible to what you want to eventually create. You’ll also be prepared with a way to gauge their reaction, interest, and overall thoughts about your prototype. Pay attention to any problems they have, or if they are unsure about certain functions. Here’s how to prepare for your Design Sprint user testing. 

Design Sprint User Testing Audience

When you come up with your initial idea, it is critical to consider the audience you’re targeting. Who will be interested in your product? This should be thought about and solidified before you actually start the Design Sprint process. Once you know who this product will be marketed to, you’re ready to recruit your audience. A great step is for your team to create a screener questionnaire. This will help you acquire the type of audience you need for the user test. The type of questions you ask will depend entirely on your product. If your product is a book app for horror stories, for instance, you don’t want to recruit people who don’t read. You also don’t want to recruit people who like the exact same type of book, however, as you want your product to appeal to the widest audience it can. Once you create your questionnaire and a form that people can fill out, you’re ready to post it. 

Finding Your Audience

Where you post your form also entirely depends on your product. Given the book example, it might be a good idea to post about your study on social media, using hashtags to reach a community of readers. If you want your participants to be somewhat random, you might consider posting on an online forum. If you want experts on a certain product, you will have to reach a bit wider and farther. Think about professional contacts, past clients, networks, anywhere you feel might reach the audience you’re hoping for. You also might want to consider offering an incentive for participants, as it can sometimes be difficult to find an audience for your Design Spring user test. 

Your Interview Guide

Now it’s time to select your audience and finalize your interview. Create a spreadsheet and select the participants for your interview. Contact them and schedule their test. You should also have a non-disclosure agreement ready for them to sign before their testing day. This can easily be created in DocuSign. Then, create your interview guide. Think about how you want your users to interact with the product, how long each task might take, and what you want them to walk away with. A good blueprint to follow is providing an introduction, context questions, follow-up questions, and a debrief. Another tip to keep in mind is to start broad, and then move on to more specific questions. 

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Design Sprint User Testing Day

Make sure you set up your room, either in-person or virtually, before your audience arrives, ensuring they will be comfortable. If you’re recording the user testing, make sure everything is working accurately and test your prototypes for everything you’re wanting them to accomplish during the test. If you have the time, conduct a test run of how you want the interview process to go. Basically, make sure you’re completely ready before any of your participants arrive. Your team should also be watching the interview process.

For a Design Sprint user test to go as smoothly as possible, make sure you show no bias. Be friendly. Ask follow-up questions. Pay close attention to the time and to nonverbal clues from your participants. Then, show appreciation for the time they spent trying out your product. Now that you’ve completed your user test, analyze the results and determine the next step. Was it a success? Do you have any problems to fix? You’ve completed your user test!

The Design Sprint is a streamlined, effective way to completely authenticate an idea in only five days. The user test is an extremely important component of the whole process, one that has to be prepared adequately in order to be successful. If you’ve recently found your company in a rut, failing to come up with unique ideas, and holding ineffective meetings with frustrating outcomes, Voltage Control can help. We believe in ridding the world of bad meetings, replacing them with productive and inspiring workshops that will lead to creation and innovation. If you’re interested in conducting a Design Sprint, we can guide your team and illuminate the path. Contact us today if you have any questions. We want to help you bring your biggest and boldest ideas to fruition. 

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Perhaps you’ve experienced a Design Sprint as a participant and are interested in planning one of your own, or perhaps you’re completely new to the Design Sprint from every angle – either way, we’re excited to share with you our tips for planning your first sprint. Let’s start with a little background about what exactly a Design Sprint is.

What is a Design Sprint?

Design Sprints were originally developed at Google Ventures but have since become a staple in the worlds of facilitation and innovation.  They’re essentially a five-day series of workshops and activities that guide a group through the design thinking process. This can help them solve big problems, overcome challenges, explore new ideas, prototype an existing idea, and even test a prototype with users.

Depending on your industry and the needs of your team, Design Sprints can have a variety of purposes. They can align a team around a shared vision, tackle critical business challenges, find new breakthrough products or features – the list goes on. An experienced facilitator can craft a Design Sprint around nearly any objective that could benefit from design thinking problem solving.

Design Sprints are a tool to help your team find deeper value for the end-user. They help a team find what jobs need to be done, who needs to do them, what’s most important to focus on, and how they will get from point A to point B to point C.

Who should be invited to a Design Sprint?

Design Sprints are most successful when there is variety in the voices, perspectives, and experiences in the room. Be intentional about who you invite, but don’t limit yourself (or your team).

Be sure to include team members who understand the logistics of the project. This could include engineers, operators, programmers, etc. This will insure that the team does not waste time testing things that are infeasible or impossible to scale. They will be the filter to prevent the group from wasting time on impractical ideas. On the flip side, they can also give less logistically-minded team members the confidence to explore ideas that they might otherwise lack the knowledge or confidence to pursue.

If your Design Sprint is entirely comprised of logistically-minded team members, however, it may be difficult for them to go beyond the status quo and think innovatively. Adding creatives to your sprint is a great way to introduce new or hybrid perspectives and challenge team members who get so caught up in logistics that they struggle to entertain new ideas. Creative team members are great at moving past the how we do something and getting to the why we do something.

Can I run a Design Sprint virtually?

You sure can. Virtual Design Sprints must be treated a little bit differently than traditional, in-person sprints, but they can be just as effective.

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Firstly, the pace of the sprint must be slowed down for a virtual setting. As many of us have learned, remote gatherings come with a unique set of challenges; thus, it is crucial to allow for extra time and patience to tackle these challenges. Trying to bulldoze through them will only hurt the process (and the participants). Physical separation can make it difficult to read nonverbal cues, so it can take a bit longer to notice if participants are distracted, confused, or otherwise falling behind. It can also be more difficult for participants to fully grasp tools and instructions when they are not given in-person, so there may be more questions as well as lower levels of confidence, both of which can slow down the room. Be sure to pad your agenda to account for technical difficulties, clarification, misunderstandings, distractions, and other hiccups.

Speaking of distractions – it is incredibly easy to get distracted during a virtual gathering. From ZOOM fatigue and important emails to household responsibilities, children, and pets, staying focused online can be challenging. When leading a virtual workshop, it will be of extra importance to prioritize agenda items that maximize participation. Facilitators in virtual Design Sprints need to pay extra attention to the engagement of each participant and be proactive in including everyone in every activity, discussion and debrief.

What do I need to know to run my own Design Sprint?

The first thing that you need to decide when planning a Design Sprint for your team (after the reason for the sprint in the first place) is who will facilitate. The facilitator can be internal or external to the organization, but they must be neutral and unbiased to the challenges, decisions, and projects being tackled during the sprint.

The facilitator, beyond being unbiased, needs to excel at generating engagement and positivity from a group. It is also important that they are an expert in the design-thinking process, at this is the backbone of the Design Sprint.

Next, you or your facilitator should choose the facilitation framework that will best serve the purpose of your sprint. Experienced facilitators may want to mix and match various frameworks across the agenda, but if you or the facilitator are a beginner to the Design Sprint process it may be best to stick to one framework. We recommend our guide to facilitation methods and modalities if you are not yet familiar with standard facilitation framework options.

Once your framework is chosen, it’s time to craft an agenda. Without a clear outline of what will be discussed and for how long, what activities will be undertaken and to what purpose, and when participants will be given time to reset their brains and bodies, you risk the room becoming scattered, unproductive, and/or completely derailed. Activities and discussions should be added to the agenda based on the Design Sprint’s purpose. We recommend beginner facilitators pull all of their activities straight from the facilitation framework they have chosen.

When should I hire an outside facilitator?

When in doubt, call in an expert. The facilitator is the key ingredient to the Design Sprint process; it is critical that they be confident in their role and have a deep understanding of the design thinking process. If you are wary or unsure whether an internal facilitator will lead your Design Sprint participants to excellence, it may be best to bring in an expert from the outside. This will also allow internal team members to see an expert facilitation in action and may give them the insight they need to successfully lead a sprint in the future.

Additionally, if the nature of your sprint’s ultimate goal makes it impossible for an internal team members to be unbiased, it is time to call in an expert from the outside. Professional facilitators from outside of your organization will be completely removed from office politics and will have no stake in the decisions your group comes to outside of successfully fulfilling the sprint’s objective.

If you’d like to hire a workshop facilitator for your next meeting or training, consider our services at Voltage Control. We offer a range of facilitation and innovation workshops that can help your company to get to the next level of employee engagement, growth, and innovation.

Check out our upcoming workshops & events!

We host regular meetups, boot camps, summits, and virtual workshops–from Professional Virtual Facilitation Training to our annual Control the Room Facilitator Summit. Learn more: https://voltagecontrol.com/events

The post Planning Your First Design Sprint appeared first on Voltage Control.

Open Assembly hosts conversations and connections between organizations and people that want to adapt to the changing virtual landscape and thrive using evolving digital tools. The company focuses on community and knowledge sharing that helps culture and business transition to the future of work. 

The team at Open Assembly wanted to refine their vision of open talent standards and certification entity in collaboration with the open talent community. 

“During COVID we were meeting as a group and there was a lot of good energy around what to do to reduce friction and accelerate adoption in the open talent industry. We were doing a lot of talking, and someone proposed that we should run a design sprint so we could put our community into action.” —Catherine McGowin, Managing Director, Open Assembly 

Voltage Control facilitators Douglas Ferguson and John Fitch custom-designed and facilitated a series of workshops, including a three-day Design Sprint to help Open Assembly and 20 leaders from its community engage with one another and build consensus around actionable next steps. 

“Open Assembly had a dream that they might be the right organization to provide solutions to these needs, but they wanted to hear from the community how they thought such a group should be structured and if they would be a good fit to lead it. They also wanted to make sure they fully understood the needs of the community. Not only did they agree that Open Assembly should lead this instead of bothering with organization structure, but the community insisted on focusing on a manifesto and identifying workstreams for getting started.” —Douglas Ferguson, Facilitator, Voltage Control

The Discovery

For the first workshop in the series, facilitator John Fitch led an ideation session during Open Assembly’s weekly community meeting to collect ideas and concerns from the broader group. The generated information was integrated into the following Design Sprint. 

The Design Sprint

Day 1: Alignment 

The Design Sprint started with mapping the problem space. We started by imagining our end result and risks along the way. Then, we worked backward to figure out the steps we needed to get there. At the end of the first day, we had an identified goal as well as a list of questions the group needed to answer during the sprint. 

Identified goal: We are uncovering better ways to engage global talent by helping others do it. We seek to reduce the friction that interferes with the adoption of new work paradigms. While we realize talent supply is equally or even more important than demand, we recognize a need to stimulate more demand first to initiate the flywheel of opportunity. 

Questions:

• How do we address too many different delivery models to align on a single set of standards?
• How do we overcome large organization inertia and bureaucracy?
• What does the group see as the key barriers to adoption that we can collectively address? 

The group then engaged in “Expert Interviews,” where they asked the experts within the core team a series of questions to better understand the problem and potential solutions. Next, the team participated in an activity called “How Might We…” The purpose of this exercise was to encourage the group to get curious and interview a few experts in order to explore possible solutions to their challenge by thinking big rather than getting mired by the painful details of taking a full solution to market. They considered and answered the following prompt:

As allies who believe in the virtues and support the adoption of open talent and innovation models, we believe that we can make more meaningful progress together than apart. How might we come together and organize the open talent marketplace, overcome our most critical challenges, and reduce friction that interferes with the adoption of this new paradigm for work? 

Day 2: Solution Sketches

On the second day, the group did lightning demos of their ideas. The team located and shared analogous inspiration. These demos included competitors, adjacent services, intuitive interfaces, inspiring branding, and compelling content. 

Key takeaways from the demos:

• Ubiquity and ease of use
• Establishing credibility and trust
• Models for standards and maturity 

Each person then participated in a four-step sketch. Anyone can sketch. Most solution sketches are just rectangles and words. This process enabled everyone on the team to become a designer.

The team started by writing down the goal and questions on their paper. Then, they copied their favorite How Might We’s and lightning demos onto their notes. This moment of collection and reflection grounded the team and focused energy while allowing each participant time to process all we had done so far.

Next, the team transitioned from observing and collecting to reacting and generating. They rapidly documented all ideas they had as they reviewed their notes.

Everyone silently responded to prompts to unlock thinking in new ways in an activity called 10×10 Writing. This helped the group to loosen up before committing ideas to paper. 

The team spent the rest of the day sketching one or two solutions that they felt held the most promise. Although they were together in the same room, they worked alone. Instead of a group brainstorm, we gave each person time to develop solutions on their own.

Day 3: Decide

The third and final day of the Design Sprint was centered around deciding on the best-generated idea to move forward with. The team used small dots to identify parts of the sketches they liked. Then, we led the team through each of the sketches posted on the wall and called out key ideas.

Using a technique called Heat Mapping, members of the team worked their way around the room placing smaller dots to create a heat map of things that stood out as ideas with high potential.

The group went through a speed critique and straw poll voting to further narrow down the top ideas. John Winsor, Founder and CEO of Open Assembly, also the project “decider,” used three super vote dots to select the winning solutions. We then combined each of these sketches into a single solution for prototyping. 

Finally we ended with participants discussing needs, prioritizing, and then committing to next steps. 

The Outcome

The Open Assembly team walked away with a working manifesto. They also gained several insights from the Design Sprint:

1. There is already lots of alignment. While there was nuance, everyone was in agreement.
2. Consistent desire to focus on demand and removing barriers, but not to the detriment of the supplier experience.
3. Strong desire to get to specific key barriers that need to be addressed and how the group can address them collectively.
4. Everyone appreciates the work that Open Assembly is doing and has no issue committing to come to the table and support what we are building.

Top priorities the team identified to move forward with:

1. Release draft manifesto into the wild (beta release)
2. Organize work groups
3. Summarize outcome of the three days; secure feedback from the crowd/collective on the manifesto
4. Operating model—roles, processes/governance, success measures, tools
5. Create a dream list of all (individuals or businesses) who should be involved

John Winsor, Founder and CEO of Open Assembly, said their next steps after the Design Sprint were to “begin work on building a trade association focused on setting standards for the industry. The group wanted to see a group formed that could establish standards for the industry around the accreditation of platforms and education of the demand side organizations. The group also expressed the need for greater advocacy and promotion.”

Open Assembly  tested their manifesto prototype with the community in the weeks following the Design Sprint. 

Since the Design Sprint, Open Assembly has created a 501c6 non-profit trade organization called the Center for the Transformation of Work (CTW). 

The Summit

Several months later, Open Assembly engaged with Voltage Control to design and integrate a collaborative exercise into Open Assembly’s Global Summit, a virtual, 2-day community event with over 160 attendees. Voltage Control designed a custom canvas, conducted live scribing during the event, and hosted a final happy hour to engage attendees in conversations about the event content and the mission. 

Open Assembly gained the support of the community as well acquired new tools to integrate into their business moving forward. 

“We have started using Mural in other instances and decided to incorporate the powerful tool and Voltage Control into our first annual global summit event. It was a great interactive experience for all of the attendees. ” —Catherine McGowin, Managing Director, Open Assembly 

Do you have an innovation you want to implement, a company problem you need to solve, or a meeting structure that needs improvement?

Voltage Control facilitates events of all kinds, including design thinking workshops, innovation sessions, and Design Sprints. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk or for a consultation.

The post Open Assembly Established Interactive Community & Nonprofit Trade Organization With a 3-Day Design Sprint appeared first on Voltage Control.

“People have been aware of racism for a long time, but I think we have all had our awareness radically heightened and our eyes open in these last few weeks.” – Jake Knapp

I’m Douglas Ferguson, and I’m on a mission to help people everywhere have better meetings. There’s clear evidence that poorly run meetings not only waste time, but they also squander a lot of money. A recent report by Doodle found that $541 billion is lost globally every year on common meeting mistakes–and that’s just the report from the County for Direct Labor Costs. This staggering amount translates into opportunity costs we incur from ineffective meetings.

I’m excited to have Jake Knapp with me today! He is the creator of The Design Sprint, author of Make Time and author of the New York Times bestseller Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Jake also happens to be one of the world’s tallest designers. 

We talk about Sprint, spending time with the family, and how Jake’s book is more relevant now in light of the COVID pandemic. Amid the pandemic and riots, we are challenged by outside events that we can’t control but are forced to deal with at the moment. “We also can’t ignore the fact that these things offer great opportunities for us.” Jake talks about embracing the right parts of staying at home, such as spending more time with family.

Listen in to our dialogue about learning how to remove shame when talking about racial barriers, how we are both feeling the change, and how we can have a positive impact. Find out why Jake hates meetings, the pros and cons of online meetings, and design elements involving movement of the human body during the workday.

Show Highlights

[01:54] Jake’s book, Sprint, and its relevance within the pandemic.
[04:47] (Attempting to) minimize the pandemic fallout working at home with kids.
[06:25] Working from home reinvents the workplace.
[07:54] Remove compartmentalism in the workplace.
[11:01] Do the right thing when it’s hard.
[12:18] Long term changes, including our view of racism, instigated by the pandemic.
[15:03] Apply Design Sprints to racism.
[20:38] Having your own children reconnects you to your childhood.
[25:20] The one thing Jake would change about meetings.
[30:25] The potential for VR in future business meetings.
[33:11] 3D Audio and its impact on the future of online chat.
[35:35] The negative effect of sitting in one spot all day during online meetings.
[38:18] Explore the human brain and its need for movement and stimulation.
[40:23] Webinar and live video replays are hard to watch.
[45:06] Benefits of working with a team over video.

Links and Resources

Sprint by Jake Knapp
Make Time
The Jake and Jonathon Podcast

About the Guest

Jake spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, where he created the Design Sprint process. He’s written two books, Sprint and Make Time, coached teams at places like Slack, LEGO, IDEO, and NASA on design strategy and time management, and has been a guest instructor at MIT and the Harvard Business School. Previously, Jake co-founded Google Meet and helped build products like Gmail and Microsoft Encarta. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps 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

Intro: 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 Jake Knapp, creator of The Design Sprint, author of Make Time, and author of the New York Times’ best seller Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Jake also happens to be one of the world’s tallest designers. Welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake: Hey, man. Thank you for having me on. I am eager to have the chance to chat with you, because you are my buddy, and we have been hanging around a lot together. And then, there’s this pandemic came along, kind of scrambled things for us. So, it’s good to get to chat.

Douglas: Yeah, no doubt. I’m really looking forward to it. And speaking of the pandemic, we were just talking about how—

Jake: Should we assume people have heard of it, or should we tell them what it is?

Douglas: Yeah, I think it’s kind of gone around at this point.

Jake: They probably know. They probably know.

Douglas: You were just telling me about how it was this—you even used the word opportunity—to spend some more time with the family, and I immediately thought about how the interruption-free iPhone and even elements of the Sprint and certainly Make Time were highly influenced by this desire to spend more time with the family. So I’m must curious to hear your thoughts on how this has created opportunity and what folks can learn from it.

Jake: Yeah. I mean, we have no choice about being in a pandemic right now or not. We also find ourselves at the same time now confronted by this new awareness. I mean, I would say people have been aware of racism for a long time, but I think we all have had our awareness radically heightened, our eyes opened, in these last few weeks. And then in the months of the pandemic, there are things going on that are hard, painful, and they cannot help but take a toll on you emotionally, and they create stress and hardship, but here we are. And we can’t also ignore the fact that these things represent great opportunities for us, and the pandemic represents opportunities now, and they represent opportunities over time, and we’ll look back and see it as a big changing point, just as we’ll see these murders as also an opportunity and a changing point. And the fact that the two things are overlaid on top of each other represents a changing point, where when you have pain, you have learning, and you have the opportunity for change and for dynamic things to happen.

So, just to talk about the pandemic and be less philosophical and more specific, I mean, my kids are home from school. School’s cancelled, so they’re home from school doing school over video or whatever. And that’s tough if you’re a parent and you have kids at home, and everybody knows how tough that is if you planned on doing your work at home or whatever. Like, new ballgame. But it also represents an opportunity. And I know that I will look back because my kids are old enough to—that I know the old saying, the days are long, but the years are short. It’s very, very true. And so I know I’ll look back and say it’s really kind of special. We were all in it together. It was like Little House on the Prairie. We’re all kind of on the same team, and it’s just us. And we can’t socialize with anybody, and we can’t see anybody outside of the house and hang out. So can’t go anywhere, really, so we’re just figuring out how to be together, and that’s good. That’s actually kind of sweet. And if I don’t put my arms around that and embrace it, then it’ll happen anyway, but I might not appreciate the good parts of it.

So to the degree that I look at my work, and I think about how much control I have over the things I can do right now, I know that there’s a huge hit that any work or projects I had underway will take. Thinking a lot of the things that you and I do are normally in person, and we’re both struggling, I’m sure, with figuring out, how do you deliver these things online, and how do you make them work well online? And there’re writing projects and things that take focused work that are very difficult to do when kids are home and when you’re sort of troubleshooting things all day. But I try to minimize the frustration I feel of the gap between the non-pandemic version of events, which I can’t access that timeline of a multiverse, and just sort of say, “In this one, hey, I’ll let go of that stuff that’s not going well, and notice what’s cool about what is happening and maybe try to look for the opportunities to grow out of it.”

Douglas: As you were just kind of relating that story, it reflected back on another point that you raised in the pre-chat we had, and it was around the writing that you’re doing. And you’re currently in this six-week time away that’s allowing you to kind of forget a little bit and come back and see it with fresh eyes.

Jake: Yeah, yeah.

Douglas: And it just dawned on me that this opportunity we’re in right now is allowing us to forget a few things about what it was like to be together. And so when we come back together, we’re going to see it with fresh eyes, and I think that potential I hadn’t really thought about, not at least at that level. It seems a little more profound now as I’m thinking about it through that lens.

Jake: I think it is powerful, and I’m sure it’s been discussed at great length how this will affect the way we work in offices. An obvious thing for people who work in offices and are now working over video is “Oh, hey, how much do we need to be in person? What are the things we really are missing that are hard to do when we’re not together in person, and what are the things that actually, maybe, we could reinvent or improve?” And I think it’s going to be super interesting to see what that looks like.

You and I have unconventional jobs that we’ve created for ourselves, and our work has not required office work, unless it was in the form that we’re doing this event, we’re doing this workshop, we’re doing this design sprint, whatever. But I feel like for a lot of companies, some of the things that you and I are trying to help folks with is to see the default settings that are going on in the way they work, and then say, “Hey, they didn’t have to be that way. If we change it and redesign it, it could be a whole lot better. These default settings of the way offices work are messed up.” And I don’t think that the pandemic is going to magically fix all those, but it does give us the opportunity to come back and see it with fresh eyes, and I hope that some of those things at least will improve.

And the same goes for the way we treat each other with respect and the way we try to see past our biases about the people that we work with and whether we’re aware of those biases or not, or whether they’re on the surface or not. I hope that that awareness that comes out of the pain that’s going on in this country, even around the world right now, can come into our work life when we come back. We have this chance to really—it’s like that old joke about…where you got to turn it off and turn it on again; that’s the way you fix everything. And maybe that’s the way we’re going to fix some of the things about our society.

Douglas: You know, I use this moment that we’re in to have some time with my team in a way that was, I think, genuine and authentic. And I think in the past, I’ve been a little bit afraid to do some of those things because we’ve been taught—at least, I’ve been conditioned my entire career—that there’s professional stuff and there’s personal stuff and you don’t kind of mix those things, and you kind of compartmentalize, and you keep politics out of work and whatnot. And once I did that with the team, there was this level of transparency and honesty that just was—I mean, it was almost like an out-of-body experience. The levity was insane. And I’ve started to reflect on that more, and it’s impacted decisions I’ve been making about the company and about some of the things we do publicly. And I’ve had some people request to unsubscribe from the newsletter, and that actually felt nice.

And I was talking to someone about this recently, and they pointed out to me, for whatever reason this notion of professionalism took on this air of sort of inhumane. Like, we weren’t allowed to bring our human selves to work, because we had to have these filters and things. And I was always impressed with you when we were talking about just the values that you had when we were selecting venues or companies we might partner with, and really shown through in those decisions. It always made me happy to work with you when those moments arose. And so just kind of feeling some similar kind of vibes as this negativity’s around us, and I’m just feeling empowered to take a stand, and it’s changing the dynamics of the workplace for me.

Jake: Right on. Thank you for the kind words. I feel like in this moment we all can’t help but feel like we haven’t done enough. If we were aware of the things that we could do, just for myself, of all the times I was aware of something I could do, but to be specific, like when I spoke at that event, could I have pushed the organizers to have more people of color in their speaker lineup? Did I do that enough? Did I try hard enough? Was I careful about that? Did I work hard enough to include different perspectives in seeking out stories for the book and looking for examples to say, “Hey, here’s somebody doing good work”? I certainly feel like a lot of guilt and shame about not having done it well enough.

But the flipside, the opportunity that’s there, is that you say, okay, well, the past is the past. But now it feels like one of the barriers to being a good ally, to being a person who’s open and honest about their concerns and talks about—one of the big barriers has always been feeling shame or embarrassment of talking about it, feeling like it wasn’t your place to—maybe it wasn’t my place to say that, and nobody asked me to be a representative of anybody, whatever. Like, and now it feels like that dialog has changed.

And so I can judge past Jake as much as I want, but the reality is it doesn’t matter. The future Jake has a whole new opportunity to do better. And as much as in this moment we might feel bad about the things that we could have done more of in the past, what’s cool is that there are opportunities to do things. And doing the right thing when it’s hard almost always feels good in some way. It usually is a good feeling. It evokes good feelings, I think, all around. And that’s why—I mean, as much pain as we’re in right now, I see this as an opportunity for really good things in the future and a way for all of us to be able to act in ways that’s more, hopefully, more in accordance with what we believed all along but what’s been hard to do. I think it might become easier to act now.

Douglas: Absolutely. I’m feeling the change, and I’m hopeful that it has lasting impact. I’m kind of bracing for the long haul, and what are the things that we can do to really to have a continued impact? And so I’m curious if anything’s top of mind for facilitators, people that are thinking about tweaking their defaults and the ways that they meet and the ways that they guide others. Anything that’s been top of mind for you?

Jake: Yeah, well, two things. I mean, there are two threads here, and they overlap. One of them is pandemic, and the other one is racism. And the pandemic thread started sooner, and I’ve had more time to think about it, I guess. Although, I should have been thinking about racism for 42 years because that’s how old I am. But the pandemic thread, talking about things over video, and that’s going to be around now forever. We will still do things in person, and I hope that a lot of my work will be in person because I love seeing people in person. But the reality of the future will be things over video, and we have to adapt to how we handle the conversations over video, and it’s different.

I found with a lot of conversations, I’m preferring to do it over the phone because I get so tired over video. Right now you and I are talking. We have a good connection. I mean, you and I, for one thing, we know each other, so we have that kind of connection. We also literally have a high-quality video connection, so that helps. There’s not—the audio’s coming in clear and all that stuff. But that’s like a small percentage of the conversations I have over video. And all the stuff, all the trying to read the other person’s expression, and build rapport with them if I don’t have it already, and my brain trying to fill in the gaps between the garbled audio, it wears me out. And it makes the subtilties, all the tough things you’re trying to do when you’re reading a room and facilitating that much more difficult. So I think there’s this whole new toolset that we’ll all need to do things over video.

And I’m new to the party there, but a lot of people have been thinking about this. And when John Zeratsky and I worked on this sort of remote Sprint guide and asked folks about how they were doing it, we got some good tips there, but I definitely haven’t learned it all, haven’t internalized it all yet.

And then there’s this—yeah, there’s this other track about, okay, we can easily name now, and I think comfortably name—you look at the difference in public opinion about racism in America. We can pretty confidently publicly name the fact that black folks, folks of color, they’re not getting treated as they should be. There’s definitely things going on. And when we’re in the workplace, things we can do to make sure that we’re, whatever degree possible, not letting the same voices dominate the room that always dominate the room. And when we structure what’s going on, that becomes possible. And that’s always been a part of the Design Sprint, and I know that’s always been a part of the work that you do, to be respectful of everybody on the team and to look at how we can hear from everybody on the team.

Some of that stuff, it doesn’t really—they’ve worked in the past maybe without thinking as much about race. But one thing that’s top of mind for me is to do some of the recommended reading on racism and basically to drop the assumption that I get it already, that I know the problem, and I’m already a good guy and say, like, let’s assume I’m not a good guy. Let’s assume I don’t know the problem. Let’s reboot and try to figure out how to make it better. And it’s rebuilding a system and looking at what are ways in a design sprint where I can apply whatever I’ll learn on that path. I think there’s probably, there probably are good opportunities there. It’s one small, little part of the world, but it’s maybe part of the world where we can make things different.

Douglas: Absolutely. Also, you talked about it being—just for me to paraphrase—safe to talk about, and I think once you talk about it, it becomes a conversation. Even if we are perpetrating microaggressions or whatever it is that we don’t realize, I think others can see it, and we can kind of all support each other and can point it out. And that’s my hope because defeating inherent biases, that’s trying to unravel some deep psychology, right?

Jake: Right. And I’m not going to be the one, honestly, I’m not going to be able to figure that out. I’ll need people to help me figure it out for the work I’m doing, and I’m sure that’s true of everyone. We’re going to need to do our best to get educated, and then we’re going to need to do our best to have open conversations with people, that are tough conversations to have and say, “Hey, help me figure out how to make this better.”

I think that part of the stress of this moment is knowing that that work is coming and thinking about how it needs to happen, but also knowing that can’t be done in a day, in a week. And a lot of the people’s, the experiences, the events, things that’ll need to happen, some of these need to happen over time. But we have a new future ahead of us now that we didn’t have.

And I think it’s interesting how the pandemic actually becomes an asset to this change and this movement. The pandemic created so much background tension and stress and revealed such fissures in the systems that we’ve come to stop looking at and take them for granted that we can all see now. We can all see the problems.

And most of the insights and learning moments in my life have come from really painful things. And just in the world of work, it’s like wasted time, disappointments, things like that, and then you look back and you think, that sucked, but something good came of it. And I think that’s kind of what’s going on here.

There’s this scene in one of the Narnia books. I think it’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but I’m not sure. I don’t know if—did you read the Narnia books as a kid?

Douglas: I did, but, man, you’re showing me up with remembering all the titles, because that kind of evaporated a while ago.

Jake: I’ve read them to my kids. But there’s a scene where—there’s this character named Eustace, and he’s kind of a jerk. There’s a scene where he gets turned into a dragon, and he ends up not liking being the dragon. He’s kind of stuck, and they found this island or something. I can’t remember exactly, but I know there’s a part where this lion—and there’s some Christian imagery in here, but that doesn’t really matter. The thing that happens is the lion comes, and basically, the lion tears off the scales of the dragon, and it hurts. And as he tears off the scales, it hurts, and it hurts, and it hurts. But finally, when the scales come off and he’s free, he’s himself again. But he came through the pain, and he stops being a jerk. And it’s like a powerful image maybe for what’s happening to our country and, hopefully, things happening to us as individuals. The scales are going to take a while to come off. It’s going to be painful for a while, but in the end, I think we’ll look back and say it was good.

I should probably stop rambling. I don’t know that I know what I’m talking about right now.

Douglas: No. That’s beautiful.

Jake: Those are things on my mind.

Douglas: Yeah. I had this question I had scribbled down. I’m always curious to hear what people are kind of stumbling into and new things they’ve discovered that are giving them a lot of hope or new-found focus. And as I was thinking about that question before we got on the call, for you I was curious, with all this time that you spent with your kids, what new stuff are you learning from them? I’m jealous of people who have kids, because I feel like they bring a whole new lens into the world. For instance, I’ve never even opened TikTok or whatever it is. And so what kind of things are they bringing to you that you’re like, whoa, I never would have seen this without them. And maybe it’s Narnia; I don’t know.

Jake: Yeah. I have a high-school-age son—a 16-year-old son—and a nine-year-old son. And for my 16-year-old, I think, honestly, quarantine sucks. It’s not fun to do high school over video. It’s not fun to—I remember for me, high school was—the fun part’s being around people, being with your friends, and the school stuff’s kind of an afterthought. But you take the people away, and it’s tough.

My younger son is like, “This is great.” The way he’s where he’s at, I don’t think that’s true for every kid who’s in elementary school, but for him he’s like, “Yeah. Just give me the time and space to do some creative projects. I’m going to come up with something.” And for him it’s fun to see how you strip away the structures, and there’s this kind of joy behind it. And then for my older son, and he’s been doing a great job and powering through it, too, but, yeah, he also reminds me how much I miss people.

So they both kind of remind me of different sides of what’s going on. And they both also—also, it’s fun because when you spend a long time with kids doing their day-to-day life, for me it reconnects me with my own childhood, and it brings me closer into Jake as a 16-year-old or Jake as a nine-year-old. Because I remember, and I see the contrast—they’re not just like me—but I get to live in their world enough. And one of the things that happens when kids go to school is you stop seeing a lot of what happens to them. A lot of what happens to them is in this school world, and it’s impenetrable. But now the veil is gone. We all know what’s going on all the time. And so I get to, in a strange way, reexperience a ghost of youth, and it’s good. And the book I’m working on is kind of about, in some ways, about childhood, and so that’s been helpful for me, too.

Douglas: And do you have a title yet?

Jake: I have a working title—

Douglas: Gotcha.

Jake: —which is The Minus World. But we’ll see. We’ll see if the—you have to be careful, I think, in writing anything, and any ideas that anybody has, you got to be careful to not attach yourself to a piece of the idea or even the idea itself.

Douglas: Right. Was that Stephen King said you had to kill your darlings?

Jake: I don’t know, maybe. That’s certainly a well-known saying. I don’t know where it comes from. And I think that’s right. That’s true. You can’t get too attached.

And so I have to be careful that there’s this idea behind The Minus World, and I’ll give it away. Hopefully, none of your listeners will write a book called The Minus World and steal this idea. But I won’t give away how it’s connected to my book, but the minus world is what is commonly called—in Super Mario Bros., in Nintendo, in the ’80s, there’s a glitch. And on World 1-2—so World 1-1 is the first world. You’re playing, and you’re squishing the Goombas, the walking-mushroom guys. You’re playing, and then you go down, at the end of that level, you go down a pipe, and you end up underground, and that’s World 1-2. So almost at the end of that world, there’s a spot where Mario, if you jump in just the right spot, you would kind of slide through the bricks and end up in this sort of warp zone.

And if you went down the tunnel, you would end up in what looked like—so every world in Super Mario Bros., it’s a number, dash, a number. It goes 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4. It goes all the way up to 8-4 is the last level.

Anyway, when you’re trying to go through the wall, you’ll get through this glitch. Then, you end up in a world where it just says -1. There’s no number. It just says -1. And it’s an underwater world, and there’s no end to it. You could just go as long as you want, and you’ll just run out of time and die. You can’t get to the end.

And I don’t know why I got kind of like—if you’re writing and procrastinating, you go down these rabbit holes on the Internet. And I remembered that thing, and I went down this rabbit hole, reading about it, and it was some kind of a glitch. There’s extra code, and, basically, there’s something that doesn’t reset in the code. When you get in that glitch and go through the wall, it doesn’t reset something, so you end up in this kind of garbage-code state. And it’s just weird.

I just find that idea interesting of the minus world, where you slide into this weird world, and then you’re stuck there. It kind of feels like that now with the pandemic. Like, we just fell through the glitch, and now we’re stuck there.

But, anyway, that’s kind of the working title, but I don’t know if that’ll stick.

Douglas: Wow, cool. I remember things like that from playing Mario Bros. as a child, or just Nintendo in general, that there are weird little things, sometimes intentionally programmed in. But I didn’t remember it was called the Minus World. That’s really cool.

Jake: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that it’s—like, that’s sort of—

Douglas: Or it was -1, and that’s those details, yeah.

Jake: —what people call it, yeah, because it’s not really even the minus world. That’s just what people named it from looking at it. But, yeah, there’s also that spot on, I want to say it’s World 4-2, where you could jump—actually, it’s in a couple places—but you could jump on one of the little turtle guys, on his shell, and if you got it in the right spot, you would just keep getting extra lives until you got so many that it went past 99, and it started being little sprites and things for the numbers because it couldn’t count past it.

Anyway, there’s all kind of fun stuff like that. Now I think the glitches in games are not so much fun, but those games were so simple that the glitches are—you could kind of see them and experience them. It’s kind of cool.

Douglas: Yeah, it’s awesome.

So, I want to talk a little bit about facilitation. One of my favorite questions is, if you could change one thing about most meetings, what would it be? And now we’re in this world of virtual. So as you’ve been watching, I’m sure you’ve attended all sorts of virtual meetings, from PTA meetings to watching your children take their classes online, what are you noticing as a thread that just really needs attention? Because I think we’re in this zone of, it’s similar to in the early 2000s. Remember, e-commerce first coming online, and it kind of feels like we’re in that same zone, where it’s like the tech’s there, but are we using it right, and is it quite polished enough?

Jake: Well, the first thing I would do if I could change one thing about all meetings is I’d cancel almost all of them. And that is actually the behavior—that’s the world that I live in is that I just don’t—yeah, they have PTA meetings, I guess, online. I’m just like, nope, I’m just not doing it. I’m just not going to anything. And that’s not cool, I know. I’m just kind of—and you can see me, and people are just listening—but I’m sitting here, wearing my sweatshirt, and I shaved my head. I look like somebody who doesn’t care to go to meetings right now. But it’s true.

But it’s kind of like, actually, that’s a big part—it’s weird, but that’s a big part of the design sprint is that I hate meetings. They’re a massive waste of time. They’re full of politics and just stress and contact switches that take away from the high-quality individual work that needs to happen. Meetings are awful. And yet, I think the right way to do it is to double-down on meetings, that to cancel almost all of them and then double-down on the ones you do have. So if wish one is cancel all meetings, wish two is to facilitate the meetings that you bring back to replace them, have a plan and a facilitator.

And, yeah, you’re right. With the tools we have today, you have to cobble things together to do that well. You have to get another app to—like right now you and I are talking on Zoom, because the other thing we were on crashed. And so Zoom’s killing it because it’s really robust on video, and they do that well.

There’s no collaboration space here that’s great, right? We don’t have—and then there’s MURAL and Miro and tools of that nature that provide a collaborative space. I’m not 100 percent satisfied with those. I feel like those have evolved out of design tools, which makes sense, but design tools aren’t a mental framework that everyone has, and I’m not sure everyone should have to learn that framework of Infinite Canvas and the drawing-tools thing. It could be the right one, but if feels like there’s an opportunity for something really good like that that’s integrated right in with video chat.

And that’s from working on Google Meet in the old days, I always dreamed that that was just a participant in the meeting was a whiteboard, and we could just pull that up, and we could all collaborate on it. And that seems obvious, seems like something that needs to happen. And it also feels like an agenda with recipes in it maybe is something that ought to be a participant in the conversation, and we ought to be able to bring that up.

And so I think that one future frontier of the technology-assisted meeting is something that happens over video but just does a better job with whiteboarding. Most meetings don’t happen with a good whiteboard. I mean, it’s amazing. You know the difference between a meeting with a good whiteboard and a meeting with no whiteboard or a crappy whiteboard could be profound if somebody just knows how to use it and uses it. It’s huge how much better you can do.

Likewise, a meeting with a good agenda and a clock and timeboxing, profoundly better than one without. And one of those things, you can imagine the tools that you and I use, it’s not rocket science to imagine integrating those into a video call. But it’s not there yet. You got to cobble any of that stuff together.

I found in a workshop that I ran recently with John Zeratsky, I put an iPad on my desk and dialed that into Zoom as well and just focused it on the time timer. And I would just set the physical time timer on my desk just so we could see a timer as one of the heads. It was like head, head, head, head, head, head, time timer. Because that stuff should just be baked right in.

And then I think there’s this interesting x years down the road, AR and VR, the one thing that seems obviously promising to me about those—I’m sure there are cool things that’ll happen that I can’t fathom because I’m not creative enough—but I do think that the potential for workspace and for not needing to travel as much and still have an authentic, real-life, in-person experiences is profound. And you can kind of see an inkling of that when you—this is my first day with an outside camera plugged into my laptop, instead of just using the webcam. Do you have that as well, Douglas? Because you have a really nice camera, it appears there.

Douglas: For sure, yeah. I’m running a Sony a6400 in through a capture card.

Jake: Yeah. Okay, so I’m doing the same, although my camera’s not as nice. But it’s something going through a capture card. And it’s a total mess to set that up. You probably got the same: tripod and then this cable, and you’ve got to order all these different things, cobble together. There’s a dummy battery that goes—it’s just a mess.

But the difference between having this conversation where we’re both—the video quality is just like a big step better, it’s amazing how much more personal the conversation feels. And I think that as VR—there’s a potential for more huge steps towards in person, and even I think better and beyond what you can do in person, and that’s exciting. I think it’s cool to imagine what that would be like.

Douglas: Man, I’ve been going very deep on this stuff, as have you. We were just kind of talking about the tech related to facilitation now. It used to be having to get on planes and order supplies and all these kind of logistical things. And now it’s all about the technology and dialing in your frame rate, and are you using OBS or external cameras and all these things.

And the thing that has really blown my mind and opened me up to a whole new sea of opportunity is 3-D audio.

Jake: Oh, really. Say more about that.

Douglas: I got a demo from these guys that are doing some virtual reality, and they essentially make their money from building—you know, in architecture, they build scale models. Well, then, now you do all this stuff through kind of virtual CAD. So you kind of sketch everything up in these three-dimensional experiences, and people can walk through it.

So for instance, one of their clients was Silicon Valley startup executives were building a house. Those insane, and they had it fully rendered to every inch. And you could walk through it with these 3-D goggles on. But the thing that became very apparent to them was, “Well, can we do 3-D meetings? Can we do virtual-reality meetings?”

I think the first thing that comes to mind is well, there’s this problem with access to the tech, to the hardware. And then that’s solved with the first-player shooter-game interface. So you can experience these things through that kind of software and without having the goggles. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. But I’m still, like, I don’t know if this is killer enough, you know? Like, is the experience that much better that we want to ditch the other things that we’re doing? And the 3-D audio was the thing that just kind of blew my mind.

Basically, it’s as simple as this. When you’re playing a game, and there’s another character in the game or there’s something that’s emitting sound, it’s going to get louder the closer you get to it.

Jake: Okay, okay. That makes sense.

Douglas: Now, imagine that this is not just an object placed in the three-dimensional space, or in our case, it could just be two-dimensional. We’re not necessarily needing to have full, the 3-D nature, the skeuomorphism, all that’s kind of beside the point. But if the sound source is just an inanimate object placed in the space, that’s cool. But imagine if that was another person placed in the space. So the closer you get to that person, the louder they get.

Jake: That’s interesting.

Douglas: Yeah. So if you’re both in the same meeting, and I’m facilitating and I say, “Group number one’s over here. Group number two’s over here,” the software does not have to know about breakout rooms. I just created one by how I facilitated the group, and they just have to be far-enough away where they don’t hear each other.

Jake: Well, it’s funny how a lot of the difficulty, at least for me, and what’s fatiguing about a video meeting is the work that my brain is doing to fill in the gaps, because our brains are tuned for in-person stuff. And there are all these things that we’re trying to figure out, trying to—you and I just had a tech problem where our audio and video got out of sync. And then when that happens, you can no longer read the other person, and all the cues that you’re expecting, everything kind of breaks down. And it’s funny to think about things like the sound of their voice come from the place where I geographically expect it to be in the room, and I bet when it does, I bet when I have a spatial sense of where people are that that makes my brain happier and a bit more comfortable. And all of a sudden, I probably have more energy to deal with a meeting and more brain space available to think and not just try to patch together all those gaps.

Douglas: That’s right. And I talk about Zoom fatigue, and unfortunately, it’s not really Zoom fatigue as much as it is virtual-meeting fatigue and how the software’s not, I would say, optimized for what we need as far as input and support through the day.

This is something I’ve been talking a lot about since this all first started happening, this how we support the facilitation community and how we lean into this experience and how we design better workshops now that we’re dealing with this phenomenon. And just understanding that not only you as a facilitator but everyone in your meeting is now kind of sitting in this one spot. So it’s even worse than just sitting all day or half day, but now you’re sitting in this frame of a camera. If you’re sitting in a workshop in an office building, then you might lean over, you might get up and walk to the trash can, you might kind of crouch a little bit, you might move around in ways that you never even considered. But now that you’re sitting there in this Hollywood Squares or The Brady Bunch, and you’re seeing yourself, and just you’re conscious of the fact, even if it’s your subconscious kicked in, you move way less. I would say that you’re still confined within this little two-foot area, and I think that has a toll on your energy as well.

Jake: Totally does. And I have taken to—I can’t remember if I said this when we were recording or just before we started, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll repeat myself—I’ve taken to doing, as much as possible when I have a conversation with somebody, now there’s like this default is “Oh, we’ll have a video call because everybody’s doing it now. And I’m like, “No, no, no. Please, can we do a phone call because I need to move around. I need to not try to keep eye contact the whole time. I need to be able to think.”

And actually, it makes me wonder about the opportunities for improving what happens. So right now, as you’re saying, we’re stuck in these little—we’re not moving much. We’re kind of locked in. We’re not moving as much as we could, even if we were together in a conference room. But even a conference room is not ideal because even though we might be able to move around a little bit more or have got the feel not just staring at a screen right in front of our face, we’re still kind of trapped, and you still got to kind of think about, am I giving people a good signal that I’m listening?

Well, imagine that you were in some great virtual meeting space, and it’s got 3-D audio, and it’s got high-res video and everything. Well, imagine one person’s giving their expert interview, whatever their demoing. Everybody else doesn’t need to be necessarily locked in, watching the thing. What if I can go on a run while somebody’s giving a talk, and I can listen to it like I’d listen to a podcast? I might actually be a better listener if I was moving, if I was taking a walk outside, and I just had my headphones in. And maybe for that person’s comfort, there’s a stock video of me paying attention, just like you see people who have made their Zoom background like them looking attentive, a video of them looking attentive.

But what if you did that? Like, on purpose. Everybody knew. Everybody was in on it. We said, “Look, we’re just going to kind of hack our brains. You’re going to be looking at an attentive audience. The people are there listening. They’re just on walks, they’re around their house, they’re eating a snack, with the audio off, so that the human-body needs, the human-brain needs for movement and food and all these things could actually happen, and we could still give people the apparent attention that they need to feel comfortable talking.”

I think that’s sort of futuristic, but I think there’s a lot of potential for things to actually get better if they’re mediated by technology. However, what we know from the past is that some things get better when mediated by technology, and usually a lot of things get worse, so I don’t imagine that we’re going to get to utopia, but it’s probably possible.

Douglas: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I love the idea of being purposeful and designing in these moments. I think where people get it wrong, and I’m not dogmatic about any of this, but I do feel that where people get it wrong is when they just look and they go, “Well, how am I going to do a design sprint online and just wholesale, just push everything into the virtual space?” Or it doesn’t have to be a design sprint; it could be your mission, vision, values workshop, or whatever it is, just taking it and putting the agenda online.

So we think a lot about asynchronous and synchronous time, like what’s done in the design sprint versus what’s done outside of it. And you’re taking that a step further, which is like, kind of, it’s not really asynchronous in the sense that they’re doing it outside of the meeting, because they’re still connected in, but we’re giving them another thing to do with their body other than sit still in front of the camera. And that can be a design element that we’re not considering enough.

Jake: Yeah. And I mean, I think also, a lot of conversations that happen in any kind of work where you’re working with a team, I wonder if some of those conversations could be asynchronous, you know? Could I sort of record my thoughts, or record a conversation between two people and then you play it back, like “Hey, catch up on this. Here’s the…” I don’t know.

You know, there’s always the challenge, will people actually listen to it? I think, for whatever reason, and I think this is something deeply hardwired into the human brain, we want to know what’s going on live. We want to know what’s going on now. Unless you can tell me a really good story about it, I don’t want to—it’s very hard to watch the replay.

And so I think that there is a potential for the live experience to be better. There’s probably the potential to help with the creating the story of the thing. And we’ve tried to do that with things like, we’re going to make a map on the wall, we’re going to capture what’s going on on sticky notes and put those things together. But, yeah, our gut reaction on how to build a tool that helps meetings happen online—you can see it because multiple people have come up with similar solutions—it’s to recreate whiteboard space and sticky-note space and things like that. But as we get more sophisticated, those tools might stop looking like their physical counterparts and take on a better form. It’ll be interesting to see. Unfortunately, not here yet.

Douglas: Yeah. I mean, that was the reason that we were so hesitant about releasing a template, because we felt like we were just still doing way too much experimentation. And we found that we’ve stumbled on some interesting stuff, and they will be there soon, but I think there’s still so much to be learned about how to do this stuff a little differently so that we can still get the same results. Our intent, our purpose is still the same; we just have to adjust it for the medium.

Jake: Totally.

Douglas: So, you’ve already started to think about some digital experiences. You just said you ran a workshop with John Zeratsky recently. And you’re working on some online tools and training. Curious to hear what your current experiments are looking like.

Jake: They’re pretty modest. I mean, I think they’re not super-sophisticated in terms of what you were just talking about and the way you’re thinking about it. And partly this is due to the fact that a lot of my attention and energy is going into writing and being in quarantine with my family, and that’s all good. It does mean that I’m not in that mode that I once was where I was doing 30 design sprints a year. And the art of that is really improving radically as I’m able to look at all these experiments. So the kinds of things I’m trying to do are really just, I would take something that is easy for us to imagine or we’ve done it a bunch of times in person.

For example, a one-day workshop in person, which you and I have done together many, many times. Train people how to do a design sprint. We know what that looks like, that bootcamp, looks like in person. But you can’t just, as you said, you can’t just take that same agenda and say, “Okay, buckle up, everybody. We’re going to be together now for eight hours online on video. And I’m going to have you do those same activities.”

Doesn’t work. People aren’t sitting at tables. People are not able to work together as a team. They’re not able to build the same rapport with each other. Nobody has the stamina to listen. I mean, I think people—it’s probably already a punishment for them to listen to me talk for eight hours in person, but forget about it over video. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy.

So we have to rethink the structure. And then, you start to think like, well, okay, are you going to make it shorter? Are you going to make it two days? And if it’s shorter, how do you get the essence of things that are most important? And what activities do you get the most value from practicing, and which activities should be more of a cooking show? And there’s that question of synchronous activities and asynchronous activities. Which things should people be able to shut off their camera and just work on their own and move around, do what they need to do?

And so it’s nice to work from sort of a known model that is effective in person. But it does feel like, even for that very sort of modest “Let’s take this thing that works in person and put it online. There’s a recipe for it in person,” we’re still really modifying the recipe.

Douglas: Yeah. That seems pretty much the sense that I get across the board. There’s just a lot of experimentation, and we’re still in that zone of kind of just figuring this world out. And the one thing that’s clear is it’s here to stay. And whether it’s bringing a team together that just can’t come together due to constraints, whether it’s a quarantine or just travels or schedules, sometimes it’s budgetary because it’s quite a bit cheaper to skip the flights and hotels and stuff.

Jake: There’s some advantages to it. I mean, one thing I’ll say. I made the “teaching the bootcamp” thing sound very complicated, and I guess because it is because that’s, in a way, more artificial than just helping a team solve problems. Because when doing more of a normal working with a team over video, I found pleasantly surprising how well it works and how a lot of the things, if you’re facilitating, I found it sort of adapted, okay, things are different. My role might be a little bit different here. And, oh, there’s a learning experience. I didn’t do a good-enough job of making sure of watching everybody’s face or calling for comments because I was overwhelmed with some of the other things that were new.

But more or less, one of the things that shines through for me in doing these sort of collaborative workshop or design sprints with people is that people are smart, and they are going to do their part and solve their side of the problem. And if I just facilitate to my best effort, there’s a lot of headroom to make it better over video, but fundamentally, a lot of these things that have worked well in person, they do work well over video. They’re just not optimized. And that’s the frustration. It’s like, I think this thing is really optimized in person, and now we have to go to an unoptimized version, and that just doesn’t meet my standards. But it’s healthy to have that experience.

Douglas: Yeah, no doubt. Or kind of all reinventing ourselves through all of this.

Jake, I’m curious, as a wrap here, what do you think you’d like to share as closing thoughts to the community? So just keep in mind that mostly facilitators are listening in, hoping to up their game and kind of navigate the space of online, virtual facilitation, and even just what it means to lean in, lean out as a facilitator.

Jake: I definitely have. I have thoughts on it. I don’t think I have super-helpful tips as a facilitator for tactical things you should do, and I hate not having those, because I love being tactical on a high level. I’m just going to have to be high level, but I hope that it’s useful to say this.

I think, number one, your effort, whatever skills you have already and whatever effort you will put in as a facilitator is going to translate to the new world of video and also the new world of we’re more conscious of racism. I mean, I think your skills are going to serve you well in this future. And more so than that, you play an important role that we all are going to need going forward, because what this year has taught us so far is that the system doesn’t work, and we need better tools, and we need better methods. And people who make it a part of their work, who devote themselves to helping other people do their work better, to helping other people break down the default settings and reimagine them and redesign them in ways that are more effective; that are more respectful; that can eliminate or diffuse politics and encourage alignment, togetherness, and meritocracy of ideas; where we’re not constantly negotiating, watering things down; where we’re not constantly judging one another; I think that as facilitators, we have a huge opportunity in the future. We don’t know that that future will look like, but I just want to sort of applaud you for being in this realm, and hope to give you a breath of wind in your sails as you go forward, because your work will really matter.

Douglas: So awesome, Jake. Appreciate it.

How can they find you and your books?

Jake: Well, you can go to jakeknapp.com to learn a little more about me. And you can find my books Sprint and Make Time, hopefully, wherever fine books are sold. But you can certainly find more information about them on my website.

Douglas: Excellent. Jake, it’s been a pleasure chatting, as always.

Jake: Yeah. Thanks, Douglas. Same here, man. I really enjoyed it.

Outro: 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 3: Applying Design Sprint to the Pandemic and Racism 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 Jordan Hirsch, the Director of Innovation at Phase2, a Digital Experience agency that helps companies create meaningful experiences, develop and integrate systems, drive business results, and operate at speed and scale.

He presented on how to facilitate the fun in meetings by incorporating improv. Jordan led the room through a “yes and” exercise that demonstrated the value of accepting and responding, and how it translates to the mind of a facilitator to help them respond to the expected and unexpected.

He explained that accepting does not mean always mean agreeing, and that responding is greater than reacting. Jordan demonstrated that improv helps individuals be present and accept and build trust; it is a liberating structure in one’s mind.

Watch Jordan Hirsch’s talk “Facilitating the Fun”:

Read the Transcript

Jordan Hirsch:

All right. Thanks, everybody. The coveted post-break slot. Welcome back to the improv portion of the day. My name is Jordan Hirsch. I’m going to talk about bringing improv into your facilitation work. To get started, this might shock you, but could I get seven volunteers up on stage, please? It’s just the magic number for improv games. That’s how it goes. There’s one, thank you. Anybody else? Two, thank you very much. Three, four, five, six, seven. Oh my God, we did it. Yay. I liked the specificity. I had written in my notes six to eight and then I heard Shannon say seven. I was like, “That’s six to eight.” This is going to work out great. Could you all please do me a favor and just get in a circle? I will remove them. No, maybe the people towards the back. Just take a step backward that way so everybody doesn’t fall off stage.

Jordan Hirsch:

There you go. Now let’s complete the circle. Excellent. Thank you so much. So we’re going to play. There it is. We’re going to play a quick game called the yes circle. Can you guys take as many steps back as bad. There you go. You take one back for me. Oh, beautiful. I love it. You go back. Perfect. Thank you so much. So, the yes circle. Let’s close up the circle once again, the yes circle doesn’t mean to get closer. There you go. The yes circle…

Daniel:

[crosstalk 00:01:34] Was this perfect or are we good?

Jordan Hirsch:

You are. This is it. Thank you for the circle, no. The yes circle has one objective. Your objective is to take someone else’s place in the circle. To do it, there’s only two rules. It is so easy you could not possibly fail. All you have to do is point at someone else in the circle, whose place you want to take.

Jordan Hirsch:

Could you point at someone else in the circle? Beautiful. You are going to make…

Daniel:

If I’m a target, I’m dead.

Jordan Hirsch:

You are going to make eye contact and you’re going to say, yes.

Daniel:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

As soon as you get that yes, you may begin walking towards his place in the circle. Guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to point at someone else in the circle.

Daniel:

Okay.

Jordan Hirsch:

Go for it. And you’re going to say?

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Here you go. Now you’re going to point at someone else in the circle. No, no, no.

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordan Hirsch:

It’s only two rules.

Daniel:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

There you go.

Speaker 3:

I’ve got it. I’ve got it.

Daniel:

Yes. No, wait, that’s wrong.

Jordan Hirsch:

Yep. That’s alright. Alright, let’s reset real quick. There’s only two rules. You can’t get it wrong. So here, come on over here. Let’s get back into our beautiful circle. So you’re going to point to someone else in the circle.

Speaker 3:

Okay.

Jordan Hirsch:

Go ahead. And you’re going to say?

Speaker 4:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Now you’re going to point to someone… There you go.

Speaker 5:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

Yes.

Speaker 7:

Yes.

Speaker 8:

Yes.

Daniel:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Okay. So there’s only two rules. You can’t get it wrong. You guys want to try it one more time. [crosstalk 00:02:55] Okay, great.

Speaker 7:

Oh, watch yourself. You alright?

Jordan Hirsch:

Watch your step. Don’t worry about me. I’m a professional. I fall off stages all the time.

Speaker 7:

[inaudible 00:03:03].

Jordan Hirsch:

Why don’t you go ahead. Point to anyone in the circle.

Speaker 5:

Yes.

Speaker 6:

Yes.

Speaker 7:

Yes.

Speaker 8:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

So there’s only two rules. You can’t get it wrong. Folks, can we please get a big round of applause for our volunteers? And, before you all dissipate, a quick question. First of all, thank you very much. Second of all, why did we do that?

Speaker 7:

Why did we do that?

Jordan Hirsch:

Why did we do that?

Speaker 3:

Because directions are hard to follow.

Jordan Hirsch:

Because directions are hard to follow.

Speaker 3:

And, it creates habit when we don’t give the directions.

Jordan Hirsch:

That’s a good reason. Anybody, what were you starting to say? You said communication.

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Jordan Hirsch:

What about it?

Speaker 5:

Direct eye contact. Setting a clear purpose.

Daniel:

Assent.

Jordan Hirsch:

Assent, such a Daniel answer. Permission. Yes. Permission is good. We’re leaving… Great answers, all of you, now I’ll give my answer while you get off the stage. Thank you so much. Seriously. All of those answers are correct by the way. We do that, because we can take many lessons from it. My personal favorite thing about that game is that it really nicely illustrates the concept of the importance of building a shared reality.

Jordan Hirsch:

If we are not agreeing on a shared reality, we cannot move forward with things. If you move forward without getting or giving a yes, you are trying to move into a house that’s not for sale. You are violating the shared reality that we have, and shared reality is the basis of that most famous of improv concepts, yes and… Show of hands, I’m sure it’s going to be every hand, who here has heard of Yes and…? Awesome. Could anyone give me a definition? No professional improvisers allowed. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker 9:

Definition is, taking someone’s idea and building on it, rather than dismissing their idea and putting your idea.

Jordan Hirsch:

Very well put. Thank you. Anybody else?

Jordan Hirsch:

Alright. You did… Oh yeah.

Speaker 10:

Accepting a gift and then giving a next one.

Jordan Hirsch:

Accepting a gift and then giving a next one. I love all of these definitions. Thank you. I think they’re both right. I think to me, yes and… is simply about accepting and responding. It is the basis, the fundamental foundation of all successful improvisation. And what does it have to do with facilitation? I believe it is a mindset. It fosters a mindset that is valuable both for you as a facilitator and for the people that you are facilitating. It helps you respond to the unexpected and to the expected, because it gives you a framework within which to work. Now, I think it’s important to back up assertions like that with math. So, please join me as we do some improv math. Yeah. Math. Awesome. Improv math is just like regular math, except I made it up. So, the first equation of improv math is that accepting does not equal agreeing.

Jordan Hirsch:

Oh no. If I say yes and… to a dumb idea, therefore, I too am a dumb person, because I agree with the dumb idea. I don’t think it works exactly like that. It is about accepting information that’s come before and an improv show, if two people were doing a scene on the moon and I entered the scene talking about, “Oh, it’s so nice to be back in Wisconsin.”, I have not agreed on a shared reality with these people. I have broken an agreement that they have set up on stage. In facilitation, yes and… is also about accepting an established reality. It does not mean that you agree with everything everybody says. It means that you accept that the people who are saying these things, actually hold these beliefs. You accept that you are living inside of a shared reality with them. You can accept something even if you don’t agree with it.

Jordan Hirsch:

It’s one of the hardest things about becoming a grownup, but it does happen. It is a fundamental skill. To me, yes and… is the opposite of gaslighting, because it’s really all about honoring a shared reality and that builds psychological safety in groups and I think it’s a sign of respectful leadership. Improv math equation number two, responding is greater than reacting. We heard about this a little bit earlier. The power of response, instead of reaction. To me a response is simply a reaction filtered through a framework. The “and” in yes and… is where you get to be intentional about how you respond to something. Improv helps you practice and hone the skill of responding at the speed of reacting, but it really does take practice. Responding intentionally, I think, is how you want your workshop participants to be working and interacting with each other and it’s probably how you want to be acting yourself when you are facilitating a group.

Jordan Hirsch:

Think about when something goes wrong or when something goes off script in something that you’re facilitating. How do you react to that? By default, when we react instead of responding, I think we give away a moment where we might actually build something new, because it wasn’t in the script. Responding puts you in the driver’s seat. Reacting gives away a lot of your power and improv helps you hone that muscle of responding at the speed of reaction. Improv math equation number three, “Yes minus And” equals

[inaudible 00:08:07]

. Johnny, could you just please say yes every time I point to you.

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Thank you so much. Oh, see he’s got it. Nice day today, isn’t it?

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

It’s quiet in here, huh?

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

What the fuck, Johnny?

Johnny:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Alright. Not really scintillating stuff as opposed to, nice day to day, isn’t it? Yes. Our alien overlords have finally flown home.

Jordan Hirsch:

Things are really looking up, not the best improv scene in the world, but there’s a lot more to it. Just agreeing. Just accepting, stopping there is not fulfilling the promise of yes and… accepting and building is the key to doing something really wonderful. And, I know as facilitators we are meant to be neutral parties. So, building does not mean steering. It doesn’t mean telling everybody what to think, what to say, what to do. It means creating and holding space for generative engagement and is, I want to say it’s the more important part. It’s nothing of course without the yes, but I feel like a lot of people who learn about yes and… they stop at the agreement piece and they really miss an opportunity to do something new and interesting. Finally, improv times facilitation equals awesome. You want your participants to be listening to each other to be building on each other’s ideas, to be collaborating creatively and improv works all of those muscles.

Jordan Hirsch:

It is like a workout for your brain and if you’re getting sematic about it also for your body, you are literally practicing new ways of doing these sorts of things. It also helps you as a facilitator. It helps you be present. It helps you be accepting and it helps you to quickly build trust with a group of people. Not to mention brain scans of jazz musicians, while they were improvising, showed an increase in activities in the area of the brain associated with creativity and with language, and a decrease in activity in the areas of the brain associated with self-censorship. Which means, get ready for some facilitator inside baseball here, improv is literally a liberating structure for your brain. Truly, it liberates you from your own self censorship and it activates your creativity. The act of creating and engaging, wakes up the parts of your brain that like to do creating an engaging and it shuts down the critic and that is a great mindset for facilitating or for being facilitated. Could I please get a volunteer one each from each table? Just pick a quick table facilitator and come on up.

Jordan Hirsch:

Yes, good. Cheer each other on. This is going to be great. All right. You guys are awesome. Thank you. Do we have all our tables represented? Okay.

Speaker 12:

Yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

This part’s just for you guys. Huddle around, huddle around, huddle around. Okay, so you are going to go back to your… Talk amongst yourselves. You’re going to go back to your tables and facilitate an improv game. Easy enough. Not that hard. Has anybody ever done a yes and… story before?

Speaker 13:

Oh, yes.

Jordan Hirsch:

Have you? Okay, so a yes and… story is very simple. You’re going to start off a story, I’ll give you the first line. Once upon a time this thing happened, people contribute with one line at a time, to the story. I want to be very clear about this. Instructions are tricky. One line, one sentence, at a time. Every sentence must begin with the words.

Jordan Hirsch:

Yes and… consider how you, as a facilitator, might guide people, if and how, you might guide people if they, perhaps, negate information that came before in the story or if they don’t say yes and… at the beginning, how are you going to handle that? How will you yes and… what they are doing. Any questions? Alright, you’ve got five minutes to go back to your tables, explain and run the activity. Wait. The first line of everybody’s story is, “Once upon a time there was a duck who was afraid of water.” And begin. [crosstalk 00:12:17] What was the last line that this table came up with?

Speaker 7:

“And there was another duck Memorial.”

Jordan Hirsch:

And there was another duck Memorial. What was your last line?

Speaker 14:

“And that’s why we all might drink too much”

Jordan Hirsch:

And that’s why we all might drink too much at the company picnic. What was your last one?

Speaker 15:

“The humans and the duck went on a giant firefighting expedition to Australia.”

Jordan Hirsch:

Yeah, sure. What was your last one?

Speaker 16:

“Yes and he kept paddling.”

Jordan Hirsch:

He kept paddling. Oh, what was your last line?

Speaker 17:

“And the animal activists went to Washington DC, after

Jordan Hirsch:

This is amazing. And your?

Speaker 18:

It was, “Yes and, the business ended up going under and now he’s a homeless duck.”

Jordan Hirsch:

So the clock tells me I don’t have time, unfortunately, to hear from every table, as much as I would like to, but if you could hear it, you all arrived at very, very, very different places and the reason that I pushed you after several tables were like, “Hey, we’re done. We won the exercise, we finished the story.” is that there is often much, much, much more, much more ground to be uncovered, after you think you have scaled the mountain. Yes and… to me, is about once you scale the mountain, Hey, the clouds are partying. Oh, there’s another huge mountain right there, and I really want to see it. I want to see what’s on the other side of it. So what do we learn? This graphic here of these very simplistic things was chosen deliberately, because this is basic foundational stuff.

Jordan Hirsch:

However, it goes against all of our cultural conditioning. We are not conditioned to do this. The yes circle is super hard, so we’re not used to having to wait for permission, and we’re not used to having to give permission. It is learned behavior, which is why we make comedy out of it, because it’s challenging. If time permitted, I would love to know from all of you how you think you might have used this skill in the past or how you might use it in the future of your facilitation work. The clock says, no. Douglas is standing here, so just think about it a little bit on your own. And thank you so much for playing with me.

The post Facilitating the Fun 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 Emily Jane Steinberg, a Visual Facilitator and Scribe at Delineate Ink, LLC. Her presentation was entitled: “Beyond Our Blind Spots — Seeing Context in a Changing World.” Her activities and lecture centered on the concept of awareness and how to expand it from a place of tunnel vision to see, identify, and ultimately eliminate our blind spots to more successfully help clients spot theirs.

Watch Emily Jane Steinberg’s talk “Beyond Our Blind Spots — Seeing Context in a Changing World” :

Read the Transcript

Emily Jane Steinberg:

And I’m going to ask you to just look out across the room and find a spot to gaze at, above eye level. It might be a convenient blue dot located on the wall, or perhaps on the screens. And as you gaze at that dot really focus in on it, like a laser. Let the particles of light and information come through you like a channel to that dot and really gaze into it with some intensity. And then find as you’re doing that, then you almost want to start expanding your gaze. And so go ahead and let yourself do that and really begin to expand your awareness out to the periphery, taking in more information throughout the room. And as you do, notice other kinds of information besides visual that are coming in. Sounds, thoughts in your mind, or sensations in your body.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

And just to test how far out your peripheral awareness is going, if you’ve got the room, bring your arms out to your sides and you can wiggle your fingers there at the edges of your vision. Just see how far back you can stretch and still see your fingers. And notice that the ability and the acuity to see at those edges of your periphery, is almost as clear as what’s directly in the center of your field of vision. So you can go ahead and drop your arms down to your sides now. And I invite you to come back and find your seat while maintaining this sense of expanded awareness.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

I have my index cards, just in case I forget what I’m talking about, which is expanded awareness, fittingly. That’s the name of the tool, the exercise that we just tried out, before we found our seats. And expanded awareness is also known as the learning state because when you go into a state like that, where you’re expanding out to your periphery, you have this combination both of total focus and relaxation. It actually creates the conditions to absorb new information and large quantities of information, making it a perfect skill to practice in a day like this where we’re getting a constant stream of new information. And when we shift from that foveal, focused tunnel vision out, that’s naturally what happens. So throughout the day, I invite you to try that out again and again. If you find yourself distracted, overwhelmed with content, fixating on a single point that you’ve heard somebody say, just go ahead and anchor again. These blue dots are going to be up here all day and then expand out from that space.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Now, in a way we could actually stop right here and spend the next 15 minutes just practicing that. This tool really is that precious. It’s like gold. It’s fundamental and at the center of all the work that I do as a visual facilitator, as a public listener, not to mention as an artist and a meditator. Being able to access and function in that state is just key. But of course we’re not going to stop there. So you’ll see piles of blank paper on all your tables. And so go ahead, take a sheet of paper and I’m going to ask you to draw nine dots on it like this. And once you’ve drawn those dots, what I’d like you to do is connect all of those dots with four straight lines without lifting up your pen in between those lines.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

This is an individual exercise, so no group work at this point yet. Four straight lines continuous to connect those dots and I’ll give you one tip. If you’re trying to figure it out in your head before you start, it’s much easier to actually start by making a mark. You can’t really solve it in your head. Anybody got it, or think they’ve got it? I’ve got one over there, one over here, a few people. And those of you who do have it, have you seen this exercise before? Just to be fair.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Has somebody got it who hasn’t seen this exercise before?

[crosstalk 00:04:50]

That’s okay. We’ll unpack it together. Someone who did solve it, would you mind coming up here and showing us how you did it? This is funny to write on, but we’re going to just… Come on up. Yeah. I’m going to give you this pen. You’re going to show us what you drew.

Speaker 2:

I got to bring me cheat sheet.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Yeah. Bring your cheat sheet. I’ve done that before. How did I just figure this out?

Speaker 2:

You have to go outside the…

Emily Jane Steinberg:

So she’s going to draw four connected lines without lifting up her marker.

Speaker 2:

So, I went like this.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Yeah. Thank you. People see what she did there? So when I drew those lines in the first place, what did you see? What do people see? Sorry. The dots. Yeah, you saw a square, or a box. Why?

Speaker 3:

Negative space.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

[Crosstalk 00:05:52]. Negative space? Because your mind’s filled it in. Exactly. Hearkening back to Solomon talked about this morning, that’s social conditioning. We perceived a box where there wasn’t a box. We were given nine dots and we filled in the boundary around it. Now the reason we do that is because we’re actually taught not to think critically about boxes like this. We’re given rules, we’re taught how to follow them, we internalize them and then the rules disappear. We don’t even realize that they’re there anymore.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

It’s like when you start a new job and the first day of work, you see all of the structure of this new place that you’ve joined. And as the months go by, you get acculturated until you don’t really see any of that box anymore. So as facilitators, it’s our job to think critically about the boxes of our own experience and the boundary conditions that we’ve been given for dealing with them and thinking with them. It’s also our job to think critically on behalf of our clients. We’re often brought in from outside as consultants and facilitators, so outside of their box.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

But if we don’t know how to recognize these invisible boxes, then how can we engage with them on our client’s behalf? Usually we’re hired to help solve some kind of a problem isn’t it? A problem if it’s not well-defined can be an invisible box. It can be a blind spot when it’s not framed well. Habits can be blind spots, urgency creates blind spots, boxes that aren’t really, there are blind spots. And across the globe in business and politics, hidden agendas, motives and alliances can sometimes intentionally create blind spots. So one of the biggest blind spots that exists that we can very easily miss in the day-to-day of our work in our lives is white organizational culture. And that’s why we ended up seeing so many DEI approaches that fall short.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

They’ll touch on hiring and personnel, maybe policy, and that’s it. So you end up with tokenism but not true diversity, equity or inclusion. Or a consultant, one of us maybe is hired to come in and do a sensitivity training in the afternoon one day. And leadership considers, “Okay, check. That issue is handled.” Meanwhile, mission, organizational structure and stakeholder relationships don’t change.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

So there are two main boxes that I want to dive into a little deeper today. And those are institutional and individual boxes. At an institutional level, unexamined and unspoken norms inside an organization, or an entity are these invisible features of white dominant culture. For instance, it’s a very common hiring practice to ask somebody to disclose their previous salaries, right? Who’s had to do that? That reinforces classism. It perpetuates disproportionality and disparity. If we don’t think about that, and we just continue that practice, we’re just reinforcing that disparity. Or we ask for a good cultural fit, but whose culture? We don’t ask that question.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

How many people hesitated to write down in the nine dots, because you wanted to figure it out first. Because perfectionism is a trademark characteristic of white dominant culture. We want to get it right. Mistakes are not something that we’re taught how to do well and then we judge other people and we confuse the mistake with the person and then judge the person who’s made the mistake, another trademark. Now the interesting thing is that a lot of these things you could just say, “Well that’s corporate culture.” Unexamined, yes, corporate culture is playing out white dominant cultural norms. So that’s all on the institutional side.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Now, on the individual side, of course we’re dealing with individuals inside any agency or organization that we work with. But I also want to pose this in terms of us as individuals doing the work. Because if we don’t work with our own blind spots, then we’re not very well able to help our clients work with theirs. So one simple way, one simple practice to begin, is to start asking ourselves, “What biases do I have? What biases do I carry? What biases have I experienced?” And then stretching to the boundary conditions of what is not maybe yet in our conscious awareness, “What unconscious biases do I carry?” So now I’ve thrown a ton of information at you, maybe challenged some things that you say, “Well how do I just go about business as usual now? This could change a lot.” Where do we begin? By returning to expanded awareness.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

So go back to a dot in this room up above your eye level and put that problem, put that question on the dot. It could be a particular client issue that you’re struggling with right now. It could be something I just said. Put that problem on the dot. Leave it there. Let it really sit there tight and let it be a little claustrophobic and uncomfortable. That’s fine. And then once again, begin to expand out to the periphery of your vision, leaving it be on the dot, as you begin to take in that expanded awareness. And while staying in that expanded awareness now, I want to ask you, where is the problem? And try in vain as you might to discover that from this state of expanded awareness, you actually can’t access that problem. Sure you could leave it. You could get fixated and it’s right there waiting for you, no doubt. But in expanded awareness, you can’t maintain a negative state.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

So knowing that this actually only gets easier with practice, we have to ask ourselves, why would we ever choose to do our work from inside that small box again? And incidentally, but not accidentally, moving into expanded awareness is a shift from deductive and linear thinking to somatic and intuitive awareness, which naturally means it’s also a shift away from white dominant cultural norms. Now, I believe that it’s our job as facilitators to help our clients make these bigger connections. To their stakeholders, to outside realities and to each other.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

I think it was Douglas who mentioned earlier this morning, how isolating it was for him as a CTO. Leaders are often very, very isolated. It’s our job to break down that isolation and help create connections. And remember with the nine dots, the way that they are connected is by going outside the box. These points outside of here are where leverage and strength comes from. They’re also where our stakeholders are. Just like a bridge, if it doesn’t have those cables coming out to somewhere outside of the bridge, it’s not as strong.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

It’s also our job to keep getting out of our own boxes, to cross-pollinate and to leverage our privilege and our experience not only with our clients, but with our peers. So sometimes some of us work individually, sometimes we work in teams. But when we work in teams, is it just for the length of that engagement with that client or is it over a longer period of time? For what purpose? Is there a larger theory of change that drives our work beyond that or are we just trying to actually make our nut for the year? And even more so, even when we do start to break down the silos and the boxes for our clients, if we don’t make connections between them, we can be very effectively helping them, but we’re still going to just be moving from one box to another to another. And I really believe we can do more.

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Now, these internal moves of expansion that we’re practicing, moving into expanded awareness from foveal vision. And moving from seeing these nine dots as a box to seeing them not as a box, are really immediate examples of a shift from an ego-centered, small-minded perspective to an ecosystem awareness. And I believe as facilitators, that is exactly the shift that we ought to be trying to engender both in ourselves and for our clients. And on the organizations that we serve. And when I think of ecosystems, I naturally also start thinking of a web and a network. And the fact is that we can be that web and that network that connects our clients in this larger ecosystem. And the definition of networking that I’ve heard that I like best comes from The Peoples Institute. And they say, “Networking is building a net that works.”

Emily Jane Steinberg:

We often think of it as, “Oh, networking, just one litter away from not working.” Or, “I just got to get that business card handed out.” But no, it’s about actually building relationships based on principle and humane values. And that’s our job. To move between different parts of the ecosystem, different clients, different sectors, different projects, and to begin building those connections and serving as network weavers, as funnelers of resources. Because creating a healthy ecosystem takes all of us. And if we expand our context just a little bit, Toni Cade Bambara said that, “The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”

Emily Jane Steinberg:

Now as facilitators, I think we’re social artists. So I have to ask the question, what revolution are we here for? To me, it’s an ecosystem revolution. Expanding our context and our sense of responsibility is critical to our survival. Otherwise, why are we here? Just make a better meeting and then what? To what higher purpose? So as you continue to practice expanded awareness, practice breaking down and transcending these boundary conditions and cultivating this expanded sense of our accountability, responsibility, and frankly, ability. Let’s leverage what we all actually know how to do. Really bring it all. Please consider the next time someone asks you about your work, or you’re about to give that elevator pitch. Don’t just answer the question of who are you, what do you do? But consider answering the question, who’s are you?

The post Beyond Our Blind Spots — Seeing Context in a Changing World 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 Johnny Saye,

an Innovation and Design Thinking Coach at Alliance Safety Council.

Johnny shared his facilitator’s guide to energizing groups. Through a series of interactive games and activities, Johnny demonstrated the necessity of lateral thinking to come up with creative solutions to problems, creating better and faster results.

He spoke about three strategies to avoid TLDR and best stimulate a group:

• Play with purpose
• Make it a memory
• Never grow up

Watch Johnny Saye’s talk “I’m an Attention Seeker” :

Read the Transcript

Johnny Saye:

Can you all hear me? Yeah? We’re good? Okay. I have tiny ears, so this thing doesn’t fit me. Thanks for the intro. So, who am I? He gave a little taste of it, but how did I get here? This is intro I usually do. The goal of this is just to show you as many tools that you can use in your workshops to get people energized, back on target, focused, whatever you might need just to get people moving again. Okay? So how did I get here? I was a pro soccer player. I’m a little rounder than I used to be, but that didn’t work out, right? Then I was a journalist. My mom always said I had a face for radio. That didn’t work out either. I was a vodka salesman, got really good at it, lost my taste buds, but did sell a whole bunch of vodka.

Johnny Saye:

It just wasn’t for me. So I stopped that because I actually fell in love with a girl, a Spanish girl in Philadelphia while I was selling vodka door to door. And so I was like, screw it. I’m moving to Spain. So now with the vodka money, I moved to Spain and I’m studying a masters in innovation, right? So I got this Spanish girlfriend, I’m living the dream. I’m by the beach. Didn’t work out either. I did learn Spanish and in fact I was studying a masters in innovation because I had no idea what to do with my life. I could sell vodka and I could kick a soccer ball and pretty much nothing else. So I get to Spain, I’m by the beach, don’t have a girlfriend, don’t have a job. Start working at a design studio. There I learn about design thinking, kind of controlling the chaos that is creativity.

Johnny Saye:

I learned from one of the masters of innovation strategy. He came from [inaudible 00:01:56], which was the number one restaurant in the world. And they used innovative strategies to create their plates. So now I learn from him and another guy and I got really good at design thinking. We built flavors of juices, we built bottles and packaging, we built buildings and marketing campaigns. We did everything in the desert of Spain, right? Except giving me a visa. So I was stuck in Spain with no visa and I got another job to build other types of things with a company called IBM. There I built apps. I built conversations, I built anything that helped IBM make money. Right? That’s what they do there, right? Guys, where are you all? Yeah, no, we had a great time and we came up with a lot of stuff, but unfortunately the visa ran out there, too. Was not making enough money.

Johnny Saye:

So they kicked me out of the country. Where I ended up was here, not here, in Louisiana at Alliance safety council and at Alliance safety council I do innovative strategy for anything, whether it be human resources like employee experience or building new digital products. We use a process for creating and solving problems. [inaudible 00:03:01], just like that. Right? And there’s me. I was a little rounder then, too. So we’re going to get into it. The objective of today, why am I here is to share warmups and energizers and this is all going to be a workshop experience. So this is the most I’m going to talk the whole time. All right? So to start off, why even bother with these creativity, we’ve all seen this it’s kind of complicated. Well it’s worse because in workshops people, they get distracted a lot and they’re adults, but they get distracted all the time.

Johnny Saye:

They did not grow up. They complain about the same things and they get in your way. My little participants get in my way and I need to boss him around, right? So you got to lead them. Because they’re not really great at leading themselves. So this is why the warm ups work, because more comfort, good vibes means better ideas. More energy means more engagement and more positive attitudes mean more positive results, right? So we want to connect their experience through positive memory that makes them more committed, that makes them more dedicated. That means execution phase that we don’t control gets done. Right? So we’re on the clock. I’m going to set the stage. This came from one of my friends at IBM. I’m sure it’s probably a normal practice, but this is my favorite rule breakdown. So these are the rules for the workshop we’re about to do.

Johnny Saye:

You ready? So know the rules. No cell phones, right? We don’t need those. You got your laptop built in. So just leave that to the side. Write down as much as possible. And sometimes you’re going to have to draw. Don’t be a Picasso, but it’s a process that you’re going to have to get used to. Okay, I’m going to be a policemen. Normally I’m nice, I’m hilarious. It’s what my mom tells me, but I’m going to push you all for time. Okay? That ring, I’m not going to propose to anybody, but I need you all to be engaged, right? That’s a hilarious joke. That’s where you laugh. Okay? Don’t miss the bus, right? This is the opportunity for us to learn tools that we can apply to our day to day. Stay engaged, stay involved. Right? So let’s get to action. Last rule. It’s very important. We’re going to be like this giraffe, right?

Johnny Saye:

We’re going to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. Huh? That’s very clever, too. Okay, so let’s get started right now. All right? So everybody stay at your tables. Great job. Give yourself some claps. You all did it. Incredible. Incredible. It’s getting pretty intense. Okay. It’s going to be fun, I promise. All right, so lateral thinking. We all know what lateral thinking is. This is super common over there. A super common illustration, right? Lateral thinking, linear. We walk straight forward. The path is blocked. We don’t know how to get around it. The only way is to go through or over the barrier, right? Lateral thinking is we create more options to get around that barrier by creating more options. Sometimes we get to a better result faster, right? Basic lateral thinking. So let’s test it. Let’s see, I got this over here. Oh man. Not very flexible. Okay, so let’s test it.

Johnny Saye:

All right, so I’m going to give you a little brain burner. I’m bad at counting. So let’s say let’s say Roman numerals, right? Roman numerals. What number is this?

Speaker 2:

Nine.

Johnny Saye:

Nine? Okay, cool. Nine. That’s what I wanted to write? So how… You only have one line. Okay? How can we turn this with one line, one line into a six? One line. It could be like that. You’ll be like [inaudible 00:06:28] you can cut it in half. How could you turn this into a six?

Speaker 2:

Turn it around.

Johnny Saye:

I could turn it around, right? You’ll have one minute. Write it down. Try and test it out real quick. You know what, you have 30 seconds. I’m on the clock. What am I talking about? 30 seconds. Anybody come up with a solution? Let’s see. Show me your solution. She says cut it in half, right, so then we… That’s what… Oh, that’s a clever way, but that’s not what I’m looking for, right? That’s close. What do we do? Yes.

Speaker 2:

[inaudible 00:07:03].

Johnny Saye:

So with one continuous line, I’ve come up with a six right? So the problem with that was I gave you context and I forced you into a box, right? Let me skip this. I forced you into a box. And so we don’t want to get focused and lose the overall perception of the problem, right? That’s a lot of times what we do when we’re designing a solution. Also, it’s best to be open minded. Anything can happen, try different things. That’s why I encourage you all to write it down. If you all had sat and thought about it, you never would have came up with a solution. And last thing, I’m very sneaky. I knew how to write that number down, guys. I just pretended I didn’t. Okay, so one more time. Here’s another example. A man walks into a bar and asked the bartender for a glass of water, right? The bartender pauses and smiles, then he reaches under the bar, just grabs out a big shotgun, shoots right past his face. Woo. The man says thank you and leaves. What happened? Maybe some of you have heard this before, right? What happened? Why did he say thank you? The dude just shot at his head, right?

Speaker 2:

He missed.

Johnny Saye:

He missed, right? That’s what most people say. Thank you for missing. Actually he had the hiccups he came in was asking for a glass of water to solve his hiccups. He scared him so bad the hiccups went away, right? So without the context to the situation, we can’t propose solutions, right? So don’t go around blind trying to solve problems. Get the context first people, let’s do it. Lateral thinking. Don’t think of the direct answer. See of all the opportunities before you dive in. Okay? So I’m going to jump through so we have more time. So idea juice, it’s like WD 40 for your brain. Lincoln said that. Here’s another one that I really like: More energy than a kid on his second liter of Mountain Dew. I don’t know if they still have Mountain Dew, it’s chemical whatever. But Cleopatra said that, so it must be true. Okay, so these are simple hacks for the creative sections of your workshops, right?

Johnny Saye:

These are whenever you get back from lunch and people are just being pretty crappy and don’t want to do anything. They’re just playing on their phones or their ideas are just real low level. Okay? So this is what we’re going to do now. So we’ve got table story. I need each table. So you’ll be number one for your table. Okay? So Emily, what would that make you if she’s number one? Two? Okay, so then we’re going to go all the way around. Okay? So everybody do the same thing at your table. Start with the number one. Get everybody a number around the table. You got five seconds. Good. So this, this table has it ready? One all the way to six, right? So you would be first, raise your hand. You’re first. Okay. Now what she’s going to do as first, she has to write one word down to start a story. One word.

Johnny Saye:

Okay? You have, you’re the last guy, right? You have one word to end the story. Okay? Write it down. Right now you have five seconds. Could be once. It could be, nope. All the other people that aren’t the first person or last person, stay still. If you’re not the first or last stay still. Did you write your word down.

Speaker 2:

I did.

Johnny Saye:

Okay, don’t pass it on. Everybody does the first person and the last person to have a word? Okay? Now what you’re going to do as the first person, you’re going to save your word. Then the rest of the table has to continue the story. But in order to make it a little more complicated, you also have to say your word at the beginning. So now we know where the story starts and we know where it ends. Your job is to connect it. Okay? Does everybody understand? So first person starts with the first word. You have one sentence starting with that word. You have one sentence going all the way around to finished with your sentence that ends with the last word.

Speaker 5:

Sentence or-

Johnny Saye:

Yes. [inaudible 00:10:47]. Says one sentence. Each person says one sentence.

Speaker 5:

I thought it was a word.

Johnny Saye:

I know. I was seeing where you all were going with it. It’s all right guys, we’re jumping to the next exercise just because it’s a lot of people asking questions, okay? All right. So find a partner please. Everybody find a partner right now. Find a partner. Okay. Does everybody have a partner? Awesome. Now get on your feet. Everybody get on your feet. We’re going to play Ninja tiger grandma. Ninja tiger grandma. Has anybody played ninja tiger grandma? Awesome. Okay, so rock, paper, scissors, right? But instead of rock, paper, scissors, we have movements. Okay? So we have a ninja, right? Then we have a tiger, [inaudible 00:11:41], go LSU. Then we have a grandma, right? Okay. So here’s the order of victory. Easy enough. Ninja beats tiger, right? Slices and dices. Grandma, oh, eaten by the tiger. So tiger beats grandma and grandma bores Ninja to death. Okay? So I’m going to count it down. I’m going to say three, two, one.

Johnny Saye:

And you just like in rock, paper, scissors have to pick what you’re going to use. But if you don’t make a sound, you automatically lose. Okay? So you got to make sure you follow your movement with a sound. Okay? We’re going to play one round. Ready? Three, two, one, go. Very good. Very good. All right, everybody back in your seats. Back in your seats. I only have 20 minutes so I’m cramming in way too much in 20 minutes. Okay, so great job. You guys rock. So now you’re still in with your partners, right? Still with your partners? Okay, now you have one hands. Each person grab a piece of paper. Each person grab a piece of paper. Excuse me. Each partners, you need one piece of paper between the two of you. Okay, there we go. All right, so now what you have to do is you have 60 seconds using only one hands per person. You and your partner must construct an airplane, a paper airplane using only one hands and one minute that is two hands total. One hand per person. You must, with one sheet of paper, make a paper airplane.

Johnny Saye:

Oh, you only have 30 seconds. You better hurry up. Three, two, one. Get those hands away from those airplanes. Get them away. Very good. Exactly right. Now we throw them. Great job everybody. So here’s how you can use that game. Quick debrief. That game is just to talk about communication. Collaboration. Can we quiet down for a second everybody? See all the energy we have right here. This is my specialty, right? So all that collaboration, that communication, that’s important for teams to function. That’s kind of the debrief that you would do there. But since we’re going so fast, we don’t have time. Not going to do much of that. All right, so now everybody, each person needs a piece of paper, okay? Each person needs a piece of paper.

Johnny Saye:

Everybody got it? All right, so you all remember that giraffe from earlier? That was chilling on a tree? All right, cool. He’s back. All right, so now I need everybody with their piece of paper stand up on their feet, right? We’re going to make an origami giraffe. Don’t move. Don’t touch your papers yet because you have 45 seconds to make this origami giraffe and you have to put the piece of paper behind your back to do it. Okay? So put the piece of paper behind your back. Everyone. You need to make this giraffe that’s on the screen and you have 45 seconds. Three, two, one, go. You can fold it. You can rip it, you can bend it, you can break it. Do what you must, but make that giraffe and you only have 30 seconds left.

Speaker 3:

[inaudible 00:15:05].

Johnny Saye:

Of course. 10 seconds. We’re going really quick. 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one time. Everybody show your table what you made. Very good. We got a few good ones. All right guys, now we need everybody sitting down for one last exercise. We don’t have much time. So we’ve already done four exercises. We’re trying to cram in more. All right, so now there are cups on your table. Does everybody see the solo cups on your table? You’re going to need a little space for those solo cups. I need you to take them out, spread them out across the table every single cup and put them right side up.

Johnny Saye:

They have them the opposite way so the numbers are facing down. So the numbers are facing down. Okay? You might want to put them close together. This is our minute to win it except it’s going to be in 10 seconds because I’m out of time. All right, so you’ve got the cups on the table, right? Everybody have them? Everybody have them? Now mix them around a little bit. Real quick, mix them around. Mix them around. Mix them around. All right guys. Now here’s what you have to do. On the bottom of the cups are numbers one to 15. You as a team have to go as fast as possible. Stacking those cups from one to 15, okay? You’re going against every other table starting now. One to 15. One to 15. Winners.

Johnny Saye:

Very good. We’ve got three seconds. [inaudible 00:16:57] right now. All right everybody sit down, sit down, sit down. All right, so I crammed in six exercises in 18 minutes. If you want more about those and learn how to do them, when to use them. I just created a YouTube page, allies of innovation. Self-promoting. Has no videos, so don’t go there yet. Go there tomorrow, okay? And they’ll be there, but great job. Success. We did it. Now you all are all masters. Here’s a random picture of me. Summed up, all right. Lessons, play with a purpose. Make it a memory and never grow up. All right, thank you. That was magical.

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