We hosted our annual facilitator summit last week alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

Read on for summaries of this year’s Control the Room Summit presentations. Each speaker delivered a 20-minute lightning session in the morning of their following 90-minute facilitated session that afternoon. 

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Voltage Control founder Douglas Ferguson started the summit with an introduction to the importance of connection in the virtual landscape and the critical role facilitators play in it. 

He encouraged the group to not only soak in all of the great information provided by the guest speakers but to network with guest attendees and experts alike to gain as much perspective as possible. 

The first round of lightning talks and workshops consisted of Van Lai-DuMone, Mohamed Ali, Leslie Forman, Michael Wilkinson, Emily Bowen, and Erik Skogsberg.

Van Lai-DuMone

Incorporate Creativity Into Your Virtual Facilitations

Van Lai-DuMone, the founder of Worksmart Advantage, discussed incorporating creativity into virtual facilitations. Creativity allows facilitators to make people feel heard, that their ideas matter, to express themselves, and to feel connected. Van’s workshop was focused on how incorporating creative tools can not only serve to harness the attention of the group but also serve as a practical tool for: Team Building and Development, Collaboration, Idea Generation, Problem Solving and Trust Building. 

“Creativity allows you to make people feel heard.”

Mohamed Ali

You’re That Audience

Mohamed Ali, Service Designer and Facilitator at Independant, discussed how self-interest can create engagement and participation for your audience. Mohamed taught workshop attendees how to prepare an audience for a workshop, long before they show up. The questions attendees answered together were, “how might we effectively onboard participants without overwhelming them with the exercises and time needed to conduct the workshop? How might a beginners’ mindset assist an audience to contribute what they really wish to?” 

“Self-interest for an audience is beneficial; engage your audience as much as possible.” 

Leslie Forman

Secrets, Constraints, and Emojis

Leslie Forman, Senior User Experience Researcher at Linkedin, spoke about secrets, constraints, and emojis. By implementing the 3 Cs (concrete, colorful, and constrained) we can produce the best results from our team. Leslie discussed practical techniques that facilitators can use to guide participants into deeper discussions, especially about ambiguous or sensitive topics. 

Michael Wilkinson

Consensus Building: Techniques for Getting to Yes

Michael Wilkinson, CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies presented techniques to getting to “Yes” in a disagreement; understanding the issue is key to coming to a solution. According to Michael, three reasons people disagree are due to information, different experiences/values, and outside factors. Exploring the type of disagreement – information, different experiences/values, outside factors – and asking questions are instruments to solving the disagreement. In his workshop, Michael equipped attendees with a clear understanding of the three reasons people disagree, three methods for establishing a consensus-focused process, and five techniques for getting to “yes” when disagreements occur.

Emily Bowen

Peace, Love & Understanding

Emily Bowen, Holistic Leadership Consultant and Educator at The Peace Nerd, discussed how to facilitate using peace, love, and understanding. By remaining present and in the moment, facilitators can engage best with their users. Emily showed workshop attendees how to create lightness and ease when facilitators want to connect people to each other and build trust when working remotely.

“Take a moment to breathe and be in this space.” 

Erik Skogsberg

Learn to Transform

The last lightning speaker of the day was Voltage Control’s own Erik Skogsberg speaking on how the best learning experiences are learner-focused. Erik informed the group that the best facilitators, whether they know it or not, are Learning Experience Designers (LXDs). LXDs bring the best of user experience design and the learning sciences to bear on creating transformation: whether in a meeting, presentation, workshop, or course. Participants were guided through some hands-on practice in these methods for use in a meeting, workshop, or training of their own and then were introduced to how to design for better learning experiences and lasting change in their future facilitation work.

“It is up to the facilitator to move and adjust to the learners in the room.”

Day one ended with special prize giveaways and a virtual happy hour with all participants. 

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

After an introduction to open up the day, the second round of lightning talks and workshops consisted of Jennifer Marin Jericho, Kaleem Clarkson, Caitlin Loos, William Aal, Solomon Masala, Alison Coward. 

Jennifer Marin Jericho

How to Pivot When Things Go Wrong

Jennifer Marin Jericho, Co-Founder and Design and Communication Strategist of Jericho Vinegar Works, presented tactics for Effective Facilitation and Facilitation Pitfalls on some of the tips she has learned along the way for when things don’t go the way you expect. We often think of facilitation as the moment when we are in the room, Jennifer said, running a workshop or meeting, but there’s quite a lot of work to be done before and after to host a successful workshop.

“The devil is in the details.”

Kaleem Clarkson & David Klasko

Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful Relationships through the Power of Play

Kaleem Clarkson, Chief Operating Officer at Blend Me, Inc., and David Klasko, Actor, Comedian, and Founder of Artly Working, presented on what the research says about the dangers of isolation, and how playing simple (and incredibly fun) games can create meaningful human connection in the virtual workplace. Technology has provided a platform to find and foster these relationships, but it takes a thoughtful and structured approach to create a human connection. Based on improv comedy, and built for video conferencing, Artly Working has designed workshops to add humor, vulnerability, and spontaneity to the virtual world – in other words, the human element! Using games and exercises developed specifically for the platform, the goal is to fight isolation and loneliness and build bonds on our remote platforms, and not in spite of them. Participants learned games and exercises that can be implemented with teams right away.

Caitlin Loos & Jordan Hirsch

7 Hours on Zoom…In a good way!

Caitlin Loos, Director of Creative Services at Phase2 Technology, and Jordan Hirsch, Director of Innovation at Phase2, taught participants how they created a 7-hour zoom conference that was energizing, inspiring, & fun. The workshop explored how they turned their annual company conference — a deeply human, connected experience for 100+ people — into a Zoom call that lasted seven hours and spanned four time zones, but still worked. The group experimented and played with activities that helped turn a virtual event into a virtual experience.

“Embracing virtual events should engage all of the senses, incorporate the home, and recognize that virtual is not always better, worse, or the same.” – Caitlin Loos

William Aal

Equity, Power and Conflict in Meeting Design

William Aal, Co-founder and Managing Partner of unConference.net, explored how to disrupt patterns of privilege and oppression that are often overlooked in meeting design in his lightning talk and workshop

 “Explore those dynamics in your facilitation practice. Have fun making the invisible visible!”

In his workshop, participants learned how to set the table for people to fully participate, taking into account the currents of power difference in the space. They also learned how to be aware of their own privilege dynamics; how to acknowledge conflict and use it as a tool to deepen community and when process becomes liberatory and when it furthers patterns of oppression.

Solomon Masala

Zip in your Zoom

Solomon Masala, creator of the Source Consultng Group, reminded participants that most humans have been conditioned to get in front of a screen and go passive. He said we forget that real learning is an active, full-body experience, and in our virtual learning world it’s critical to keep the learning juices activated. In his workshop, Solomon engaged participants in 25+ kinesthetic activities that range from 1 minute to 1 hour, guaranteed to get participants energized and enlivened, regardless of the group.

Alison Coward

Workshop Culture for a Better Workplace

Alison Coward, Founder of Bracket, closed out the day by discussing the lasting impacts of workshops. Her presentation explored the real potential of workshops in improving our experience of work, and what else that may bring. Integrating workshop culture into an environment allows for the intended products of workshops like engagement and progress as well as the unintended possibilities such as open communication and more trust. 

“Workshops bring many of the factors that we want to see in productive, engaged and positive cultures – collaboration, inclusion, motivation, creativity – so how can we take these elements beyond a one-off event and bring them more generally into the workplace?”

Day two ended with prize giveaways and a happy hour with the summit’s participants.

Thursday, February 4, 2021

Summit participants were welcomed with a warm introduction to the final day, followed by lightning talks and workshops from Madelon Guinazzo, Vinay Kumar, J. Elise Keith, Joshua Davies, Elena Astilleros, and Rachel Ben Hamou.

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Madelon Guinazzo

Facilitating Fearlessly with Heart

Madelon Guinazzo, Co-Founder of Cuddlist, addressed that all facilitators have fears, and participants all come with their own fears as well. Her experiential-based workshop explored some common facilitator fears in a safe way. Participants built resilience and the sense of connection that leads to grounded positive action in the midst of fear. Madelon showed attendees how to tap into the powerful potential of transformation that fear holds for both the facilitator and participant. She demonstrated how to let those fear fuel participants into fun and greater trust in themselves and life, and challenged them to explore how to hold fear – their own and others – with equanimity.

“Let your fear out. Exaggerate it. Give it a voice.”

Vinay Kumar

Connecting People and Thinking for Shared Values

Vinay Kumar, Director of Client Engagement at C2C Organizational Development, discussed engagement and creating meaningful connections. In this new age of digital engagement and connection, accessing ways of creating that safe and brave space allows our users to form those bonds and further goals. Using the right brain is not only fun but also helps in drawing out many aspects that participants often find difficult to articulate in a group setting. This is especially true when groups are extremely diverse in terms of experience, cultures, hierarchy, language, etc. Vinay’s workshop explored two methods in creating strong connections that increase the effectiveness of group work.

J. Elise Keith

Facilitating in Real Time, Near Time, and Far Time

J. Elise Keith, Founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, spoke about facilitating in the present, near, and future. We can take a project from real-time excitement to near and far-time enthusiasm through creating records and remembrances of the occurrence. In her workshop, J. Elise explained that professional facilitators are pretty skilled at planning and running events. But the challenge is how to make sure that the work in facilitated events and the changes these events inspire have an impact on the everyday lives of those being served. Participants explored what it means to facilitate across different time scales and surface ideas we can all use to make a more lasting impact.

“Traditional skills are being replaced.”

Joshua Davies

Moving Minds: Exploring Conversation Maps in Facilitation

Joshua Davies, Founder and Lead Conversation Architect at Knowmium, examined how conversations operate and move in our facilitations. If we are to reach an understanding with others, we must have a path to empathy. Too many conversations are treadmills, endless, going without ever getting anywhere, or broken parallel monologues in search of true dialogue. In his session, participants explored practical techniques for better awareness and co-creation in discussions using conversation mapping, contrasting, and cadence control.

Types of conversations: understanding, problem-solving & exploring, blocking/telling, storytelling/persuading.

Elena Astilleros

$h*t to Hit!! Creating Meetings Participants Love

Elena Astilleros of Empoderment, discussed turning your meeting from “Sh** to hit.” Facilitators are the ones who bring the magic to the room, she said. Our users can’t go further than where we are at ourselves. Elena taught participants how they might be creating the wrong kind of drama (without realizing it) when facilitating. Elena’s workshop taught participants how to lead lively meetings where they (and everyone participating) feel alive and reinvigorated from their time together. She provided attendees with practices they can start using to trigger group genius in their next meeting or workshop and a simple way to up-level the questions they ask their team.

“Do you feel totally drained after facilitating your sessions? When you ask questions, do you get crickets…or worse, only the same handful of people answering every time?” 

Rachel Ben Hamou & Andre Ben Hamou

Onboarding Without Hoarding

Rachel Ben Hamou, Director of Talent Development at PeopleStorming, and Andre Ben Hamou, Co-Founder of PeopleStorming, explored how to develop processes and criteria (that they will genuinely use) that allow facilitators to evaluate exercises and activities at speed. They taught participants how to ‘Yes And’ the great resources they discover, without things becoming unmanageable. By using play and creating a toolkit, we can embrace both the face-to-face interactions as well as creating a space that also includes our virtual interactions as well.

“Since everything has gone virtual, the internet is a treasure trove AND a landfill of every process and exercise humans can imagine. How do you sift through all that noise to find activities that will help YOU facilitate well?”

The final day was wrapped with a raffle prize giveaway and a celebratory happy hour.

We’re already excited about next year’s summit. To be a part of our facilitator community in the meantime, join us for our weekly Facilitation Lab and check out our upcoming events.

The post Control the Room 2021 appeared first on Voltage Control.

Recently, we hosted our annual facilitator summit alongside our sponsor MURAL, but this time, it was virtual. Instead of gathering in Austin’s Capital Factory, 172 eager learners, expert facilitators, and meeting practitioners gathered online for a 3-day interactive workshop. Our mission each year at Control the Room is to share a global perspective of facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. We gather to network, learn from one another, and build our facilitation toolkits. 

This year’s summit theme was CONNECTION. Human connection is an integral component of the work we do as facilitators.

When we connect things become possible. When we are disconnected there is dysfunction. When ideas connect they become solutions. When movements connect they become revolutions. 

Control the Room is a safe space to build and celebrate a community of practice for facilitators, which is paramount to learn, grow, and advance as practitioners and engaging in a dialogue that advances the practice of facilitation. We must learn the tools and modalities needed to foster connection and be successful facilitators in the new virtual landscape. 

“We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.” —Peter Block

This year’s summit consisted of 18 expert facilitator guest speakers who presented lightning talks and in-depth workshops, where they shared their methods and activities for effective virtual facilitation. 

One of those speakers was Van Lai-DuMone.

Van Lai-DuMone, the founder of Worksmart Advantage, discussed incorporating creativity into virtual facilitations. Creativity allows facilitators to make people feel heard, that their ideas matter, to express themselves, and to feel connected. Van’s workshop was focused on how incorporating creative tools can not only serve to harness the attention of the group but also serve as a practical tool for: Team Building and Development, Collaboration, Idea Generation, Problem Solving and Trust Building. 

“Creativity allows you to make people feel heard.”

Watch Van Lai-DuMone’s talk “Incorporate Creativity Into Your Virtual Facilitations” :

Read the Transcript

Van:

Hello, everyone. Nice to be here today. I’m so excited to be here today, to talk to you about this concept of incorporating creativity into your virtual facilitations. So my work is steeped in creativity and still, this is something that I had to really actively learn to start doing, in March. So I’m going to do today, is share with you some of the tools that I use, to bring creativity into virtual facilitations, and then also share with you why I think it is important to use creativity in our facilitation skills. So my name is Van, as Douglas said, and my work is in team development and leadership training, all through creative integration. And what I mean by creative integration is basically, I use creativity, play and experiential learning, in everything that I do. So let’s start with this idea of what is creativity and why do we bring it into virtual facilitation?

So when I describe creativity, I talk about it as a capacity, not a skill. So for example, oil painting is a skill, opera sing is a skill, but the creativity behind those skills is a capacity and is a capacity that we all have. We’re all creative. So if there is something that we should be universally training on, it’s creativity. You can train me on accounting until we both turn blue, and I’m never really going to quite get it. You might try to train someone else on sales and they might not quite get it, but when you bring creativity into any type of learning environment, what you’re doing is tapping into a capacity that we all have. Creativity also challenges our way of thinking. It allows us to hear from different perspectives and see things from different perspectives. And I’m talking about our own perspectives, right?

Sometimes we can be singular minded, but by being creative, we can see things from different perspectives. And there’s also something about creativity that allows us to see and hear perspectives from other people in the room as well. And then finally, what is creativity? Creativity is something that gives us access to ideas that are untapped by left brain, analytical thinking alone. And oftentimes particularly in the workplace, that’s where we at. We’re in that left brain, analytical thinking. So drawing in creativity is like bringing in that hippie sister. Who’s getting great, bring all these creative ideas, these wild and crazy ideas, and that’s what we want. And then why use creativity in virtual facilitations? Number one, it keeps your audience active and engaged in their learning. It’s hard to be disengage when you’re asked to maybe sketch your neighbor, or if you’re asked to do the floss, it also leaves people energized rather than drained.

So it can be easy to leave people drained, especially now that we’re in front of a computer screen. So as facilitators, we can’t just take what we used to do in person and bring it virtually. It doesn’t really work. We have to be very intentional about how we’re talking to our audience and engaging them to leave them energized. And then there’s something very natural about creativity that creates this opportunity for connection and collaboration, because creativity is so much about idea sharing. It really offers this opportunity to collaborate naturally. And then also it offers this experience of emotional connection, and that is something that I find very beneficial to bringing creativity into this virtual environment. So there is a quote that I like to use in my facilitations, and this is it. People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And that’s Maya Angelou.

So I love this quote because it really shows you how creativity allows you to make people feel heard. Creativity allows you to make people feel like their ideas matter. To feel that they can express themselves and to feel connected. So now let’s talk a little bit about the how. So, how do you bring creativity into the workplace or into facilitation? So I am aware that although we’re all innately creative, some people may not be that comfortable with their creativity. So I scaffold the delivery of my creativity into my facilitations, starting with something that helps to connect people, and there’s a low barrier of resistance. Then I slowly challenged them into their creativity, giving them a little bit more challenging activities, that’s going to walk them through their creativity, which is what we’re going to do later today in the workshop title. Hang on a second, I’ll get my thing back here. In a workshop that’s really going to show you how to incorporate your creativity and creative tools into your facilitation.

And we’re going to model it through a workshop called, Discover your unique characteristics, that make us stronger together by the sum of our differences, because of the sum of those differences that creates possibilities for ourselves and for others. So I taught just a minute ago, about this whole idea of scaffolding integration into your virtual facilitations, and starting with something that connects people and has a low barrier of resistance. So one tool I use for that is storytelling. And I’m going to demonstrate that for you right now, and to do that, I am going to go way back in time. All the way back to 1975, to Hope Village Refugee Integration Center, where my family and I found ourselves after fleeing the end of the Vietnam war, and it’s here that hundreds of volunteers showed up and donated their time, their skills and their natural characteristics and strengths to help us transition into our new country.

And there was one volunteer who took particular interest in helping the women at the camp, and that volunteer was Hollywood movie star actress, Tippi, Hedren. So back then, she was most famously known for her starring role in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds. Now she’s probably more famous as Melanie Griffith’s mom and Dakota Johnson’s grandmother, but back then she was a huge Hollywood movie star who brought her kindness, her attentiveness, and her influence, to Hope Village, to help this group of refugees. So TippI, what she decided to do is start a program that help these women learn to type and sow, so they could take those skills and start a career for themselves in this new country. But there was something else that sparked the curiosity of my mom and 19 other women at the camp. And you can see it slightly here in the picture that was Tippi’s long, red, manicured, nails.

So Tippi could easily overlook that curiosity, but she didn’t. What she did was, she was attentive, and what she did next was, she asked herself, well, what if, what if we can get these women trained and licensed as manicurist? So the first thing she did was, she went back to Los Angeles and invited her personal manicurist, Dusty Coots Butera, to come up and help these women learn how to do a basic manicure. So weekend after weekend, Dusty showed up and she brought with her, her patience and her natural ability to teach and to connect, and she taught them how to do a basic manicure. And what that did, is it made my mom and her friends, even more curious and more determined to make this their career, and Tippi was determined to help them.

So despite the fact that none of these women spoke English, and certainly none of them had any money to pay for tuition to go to school, Tippi got creative, and she went down to the local beauty school and she asked them, would you be willing to take on these 20 Vietnamese refugee women as students? And the owners of Citrus Heights Beauty College, with their compassion and their willingness to help, they said, yes.

So because of this, these 20 women, all of them passed their manicure practicum and written tests, in English in under 10 weeks. And the story doesn’t end there. There was the refugees who came after us, that learned about the profession from my mom and her friends, and then their friends from them. Some of you may know that the Vietnamese manicure industry or the manicure industry in the United States is now an $8.3 billion industry, dominated by Vietnamese Americans, who make up 53% of the profession across the country and 80% here in California. So the lesson I get from this is that it is in fact, the sum of our differences and our connection that makes us stronger together, and makes it possible for us to achieve what might seem impossible on our own. Tippi brought her kindness, her attentiveness, her influence, and her creativity. Dusty brought her patience, her natural ability to teach and to connect. The women brought their resilience, their determination, and their curiosity. And then the owners of the beauty college brought their compassion and their willingness to help.

So I share this story and this presentation for a couple of reasons. I just gave you an example of how to scaffold creativity into your virtual facilitations through storytelling. Now, clearly your story doesn’t have to be as dramatic as fleeing a war torn country, or trailblazing an entire industry, but what it does have to do is level the playing field, connect people and elicit an emotion to draw people in the room with you. And you also got to show a little bit of vulnerability, because by doing so, you allow others to do the same. And if you’re going to ask people to tap into their creativity and get a little vulnerable, it’s important that we model that first. And again, with this particular story, what I want to show you… And I hope I showed and inspired all of us to do, is draw on our natural character strings and follow our curiosities over the next three days to find ways to connect, collaborate, and create possibilities for ourselves and for others.

So why did I showed this tool of storytelling this morning as a starting point? Right? So I talked about the whole idea of scaffolding your creativity into your facilitations. So the next step after storytelling and connecting, is what I like to call transfer exercises, where you’re asking people to participate by building on or drawing with some defined shapes. So for example, I can’t see any of you, but I’m going to ask all of you to just look around you right now and pick up five things you might see next to you, just five small objects.

And I’m going to ask you to just take 30 seconds to use those objects, to build a tower. So I’ll give you about 30 seconds here, loosely 30 seconds to build a tower. Okay? So some of you may have your towers up by now, and then what you might want to do is ask them some questions, such as, how many have you built for height? How many people built for aesthetics? How many people built for a strong foundation? And now what you’ve done, is you’ve given them something to do physically, right? Now you’re doing manual tactile building, and you’ve asked them some questions that helps them learn a little bit about themselves. And what you can use that exercise now for, is to break them… You can take them into breakout rooms and use it as a way to do an icebreaker or introduce themselves.

So, that was the next step in the scaffolding. Is this idea of transfer exercises. The next step is the use of visual cues. And since you have your tower already, I’m just going to use that as an example. So as an example, you might now say, what visual cues do you see from that tower? What characteristics of that tower might make you reflect on a way to overcome a challenge that you might be talking about? So you’re looking at characteristics now and trying to force a connection between what they built or what they’re looking at, and some ideas to solve a problem. So, that’s another way you can bring in this idea of creativity to your virtual facilitations. And then the last step would really be to have people use their imagination. Now that they’re comfortable and kind of getting into this concept of using their imagination, using their creativity, you can stretch them a little bit more.

So I like to ask people to either sketch something or tell a story. So I’m going to ask you to do right now, is to sketch, sketch one thing that you can bring to the conference today to make it valuable to others. So again, sketch one thing today, that… Sketch one thing right now, actually, that you can bring to the conference to make this conference valuable to others. And it might be your humor. It might be your energy. So whatever that looks like to you in a sketch, go ahead and draw that sketch right now. And what I have to say, is that this is not an art project.

Your sketching and drawing skills do not matter. It’s just this idea of using your creativity. And after you sketch that one, I’m going to ask you to do another sketch. I’m going to ask you to sketch something that you want to get from this conference and this summit. So what’s going to bring value to you? So that might be… You might be looking for more collaborations. You might be looking for more tools to bring back to the work you do. So take a minute to do that.

And hopefully you guys show up to my workout later today. We can share those. All right. So I’m going to close with this idea, that when we meet later on, we’re going to use some of these creative tools and the scaffolding idea to bring creative tools into your virtual facilitations. I’m going to teach you some of the tools that I use in that scaffolding method, but we’re going to do it through the lens of uncovering your natural character strengths, that can be used to create possibilities for yourself and for others, just like my mom, Tippi Hedren, Dusty, and the owners of that beauty school did, all the way back in 1975, to create possibilities over the next three days for ourselves and for others, and some possibilities that are foreseeable and some possibilities that we can’t even foresee what those might be. So thank you so much for your time today. I look forward to enjoying and being part of the rest of the conference. You can connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to, or we’ll connect over on Zoom as well. Thank you for your time.

The post Incorporate Creativity Into Your Virtual Facilitations 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 Justin Foster. Justin is the Co-Founder of Root + River. Justin’s presentation, “Leadership Presence: Where Inner Work Meets Outer Story,” outlined the importance of incorporating and sharing one’s own identity, creativity, and intuition to serve as the sustainable foundation from which to operate and lead most effectively as a facilitator. From this base, individuals can then express their originality, the craft of self-expression, and empathy to create a deeper connection with the audience.

Justin explained that to become an elite facilitator, one must take risks and be okay with failure.

He shared four practices to do so:
1. Practice of physicality / movement: the more in shape you are, the more confident you feel. It’s no coincidence that all the great leaders are walkers and pacers.

2. Practice of intellectuality: regularly discover. A state of perpetual learning to expand your database.

3. Practice of emotion: if you have untreated emotional wounds, it will affect you in your craft. Continue to examine yourself and your practices. Witness your own emotions and feels

4. Practice of spirituality: three S’s (stillness, silence, solitude) if you do the three, it allows you to grow and hone your craft.

Watch Justin Fosters’s talk “Leadership Presence”:

Read the Transcript

Justin Foster:

Thank you Douglas. Good morning everybody.

Speaker 2:

Good morning.

Justin Foster:

I coached youth football for 15 years, so I’ll say good morning again. And if it’s not without enthusiasm, then somebody’s got to do push-ups. Good morning.

Speaker 2:

Good morning.

Justin Foster:

That’s awesome. Wanted to thank Douglas, but also, none of this happens without a lot of moving parts behind the scenes. So I think we should give a cheer out to Lily, Tara, and Pixie in particular. So, this is an analog presentation. I like doing risky things apparently, because a couple of weeks ago I went to Creative Mornings and it was the speaker. And I talked about creativity in front of creatives. Today, I’m giving a speech with essentially new material in front of facilitators. So I think bungee jumping is on the schedule for this afternoon.

Justin Foster:

But it is an analog presentation. And what we’re going to start off with is this. I’ll give you two choices here. You can either draw, or you can just imagine. And what I’d like you to either draw or imagine is a robust fruit tree. Imagine the root system, imagine the trunk, the branches, the leaves. But most of all, imagine the fruit, whatever fruit it is, peaches, apples, oranges, just big, juicy fruit. So take a moment, just a few seconds, to sketch that out or imagine that out, and think of that image.

All right, you can keep drawing if you want. Multitasking is allowed. So this tree, this fruit tree, is your brand as a facilitator, as a presenter. When you go out into the world and you go do your thing. And so there’s a ancientness to it. Hermes said, “As above, so below.” I say, “As below, so above.” Your root system produces the thing that your audience wants, which is fruit. The audience wants fruit. And the fruit comes from the inner work that you do that produces your outer story, which is how other people experience you.

Now, facilitation speaking, oral presentation is an ancient thing. One of the most ancient ways to transfer information. And it’s still one of the best. Meetups in person or better. In-person events like this are better than virtual. There’s a sacredness to it. And the very first tattoo I got, and it wasn’t that long ago, and you can’t hardly see it up here, but I’ll just tell you what it is. It’s a Bible verse, and it’s Isaiah 50:4 which says, “You have been given the tongue of the learned to give a word in season to those that are weary.”

Now, I like quoting Bible verses in talks like this because people that are really into the Bible don’t like it, and people that are not at all into the Bible, don’t like it.

Speaker 2:

Nailed it.

Justin Foster:

So one of my goals is to alienate the far right and the far left. So anyway, what that means, the reason I got that as my first tattoo is because I do a lot of this. I do a lot of speaking and what I found in myself over the 17 years of being a professional speaker, I found some arrogance creeping in. I found this idea, this narrative, that the audience is there for me, “Ooh, they’re there for me. Validate me.”

Through some nice therapy work and other types of deep work, I realized what I was seeking was a validation for a mother and a father wound. And we’ll get into that another talk. But when I had this realization that I am there and we are, as facilitators, we are here for our audience, we’re a conduit. We are an instrument that is being used by the cosmos to share ideas, to share words and language and concepts. So it’s important. This fruit tree is important.

So I call this fruit tree presence, leadership presence, as it were. But let’s talk about it as if it were barren, as if it bore no fruit. What would cause that? What would that look like? Well, a couple of things that would happen if your root system isn’t solid, and you don’t nurture this fruit tree of presence. One thing that would happen is a sense of abstractness. Where there’s a distance between you and your audience. You don’t feel them anymore. They’re objects. This is what objectification is. This happens in large organizations and people that get disconnected from their own soul. People become abstracts.

A second thing that happens in this, is a lack of nutritional value, pablum, err, cotton candy, where you eat it in the room, and then you don’t remember at all what was said, because there was no depth to it. It didn’t feed you. That starts to happen. And the source of this sort of unfruitfulness as a leader, and a presenter, is really around drift and disconnect. And you’re drifting away from your true identity of who you are. And there’s a disconnect from yourself and from people.

So that’s the negative side of this. That’s sort of evidence of something’s gone awry. And you can reverse engineer back to that. Let’s talk about what it means to actually bear fruit so that your audience can feed on it. So let’s start with the root system. And there are three elements of the root system. There are more than three, but for today we’ll focus on three. I can’t do Kung Fu so. So the first one is your identity.

Now identity is one of those things that is, it’s kind of a hot potato topic. We have a term like identity politics, or “I identify as”. And so there’s a level of taboo-ness to this idea. But what happens is, when we are young, we produce an illusory self in order to be accepted. We all do it. And in ancient cultures, prior to the industrial revolution, really, but in certainly in all indigenous and native cultures, there was a process of going through and removing the illusory self to find out who you truly are.

We’ll go this way instead. All right. Thank you. So to remove that. So for example, the famous Sioux native chief, Sitting Bull, was given the name Slow, because when you were born in the Sioux nation, you were given a name that was associated with some sort of physical trait that you had. Then when he was 13 or 14 years old, he went on a vision quest and he fasted and took some substances, and had this vision of a white Buffalo sitting. And he came back and told the tribe, you can call me Sitting Bull now.

We don’t do that process anymore. What we do is we take on an identity we think is going to make us acceptable. And that becomes us. And then when that identity is threatened, that’s where we get defensive. That’s where tribalism comes in. That’s where dissent and separation comes in. The funny thing about it, or the interesting thing about it, is if you don’t know who you truly are, the audience is sort of just making it up as you go. They are sort of filling in the blanks. And the thing about it is that most audiences, most participants, have a pretty good bullshit detector. So this idea that if you’re disconnected from who you are, the root, the taproot of your presence is identity.

The second area is creativity, or if you’re familiar with the chakras, this is the sacral energy. This is the energy of creativity, the energy of power, the muse, all that stuff. And speaking and the spoken word isn’t art. It’s iterative, it’s practice. No one is done, no matter how many times you’ve given a speech, facilitated a thing, you’re never done. There’s an iteration there. And that iteration, that energy and that power comes from tapping into your creative energy.

This is why it’s important to do some of the things that we’ve already even touched on today, and what Linda mentioned, doing that inner work and feeling it in your body like Solomon talked about. And what you’re tapping into is that fire, it’s the Kundalini, the coiled snake of energy. And you’re tapping into it, and what will happen if you do that, is that you get one of the ultimate contagions, you get enthusiasm. That’s what happens. And enthusiasm is a fruit that people get to participate in. So I don’t believe in motivational speaking at all. I believe in inspirational speaking. I’m sometimes demotivating, I think. But the idea is, is that you’re trying to inspire or ignite something in your audience. That’s the second route.

The third route is intuition. Now there are many words for this similar to what Linda talked about related to spirit. There are many words for this. One word for intuition is Sophia, was a Greek word for wisdom. There’s a Gnostic or Gnosticism. That’s another example of wisdom. We sometimes say gut feeling. Intuition is the cosmos, this quintessential unmentionable essence of creativity were creativity comes from, that then powers what we’re trying to say. And Rumi said, “I am the hole in the flute that the breath of life passes through. Hear my music.” Or some variation of that.

And so that is that wisdom that passes through us, that we’re conduits for. So that’s your root system. And there were some other things in there. There’s beliefs and narratives, and there’s our fears and our failures. There’s some other elements in there. But if you imagine three big roots driving down into the soil, growing in perpetuity between identity, sacral or creative energy, and intuition or wisdom. Those three things, they sustain you in any situation. You can go back to those again and again, and you will bear fruit if you have those.

So now we get into above the soil, we get into the actual fruits themselves. The first fruit that people want, and that we should produce, as facilitators and speakers is originality. I mentioned the Rumi quote about being music. Wayne Dyer said, “Don’t die with music still inside of you.” So this idea that we as facilitators and speakers, we’re creatives, we’re artists. And so when we produce something and we share it to the world, we don’t want to be cover bands. We’re not doing the lounge session on a cruise ship. We’re not Michael Bublé pretending to be something that he’s not. We are original singers of music.

So we’re Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. We’re Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. We’re not Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line. We’re producers of original music. That originality comes from your root system, that divine inspiration, that identity, that’s the originality of thinking of original thoughts. So that’s the first one is focusing on originality.

The second one is the craft itself, the craft of expression. And treating it as a craft. The lead guitars for Megadeath goes and gets a beginner’s guitar lesson every year. And that’s how he keeps a beginner’s mind in the process. Michelangelo said, when he died, “I still have so much left to learn.” So this iterative aspect, or this understanding, that our craft is a practice and every single time we present is an opportunity to do a little bit better than the last time. That’s a powerful thing. And that state of continuous improvement is what makes the next round of fruit juicer and more nutritious in the process.

So this craft is one of those sort of mysterious things, because it doesn’t only come from practice. You would think that if it’s just the Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, and you go give 10,000 hours of speaking, you’d be a better speaker, but you wouldn’t necessarily be an elite facilitator. What makes a facilitator elite in this process, is the ability, or the willingness to take risks, to try new material, to present something to the audience that might fail. What it involves is expanding and thinking as an artist, into other aspects of your life, like self care or expanding your vocabulary or reading.

I’m about halfway through Madeline Angles, it’s a compilation of Madeline Angles quotes on writing and creativity. I love reading about other people’s creative processes. I love reading about other people that have a craft. I don’t know how to build a canoe, but Nick Offerman does. And I like Nick Offerman. And I’m inspired by that. I’ll probably never build a canoe, but I can build a speech, and I can build a workshop, and I can build a conversation. That’s my craft, that’s our craft. That’s what we do. So treating it as craft with some humility, and some commitment to the improvement of it, the intuitive nature of it is an essential aspect, essential fruit of presence.

The final one may be the most important and that’s empathy. There’s something about energy that it’s either there or it’s not. And we have a certain level of intuition about the temperature of the room and how the room responds. And literally this event’s called Control The Room. But really it’s feel the room. That’s really what it is. It’s feel the individual. It’s having the sense of connection, of interconnectedness to each person that you’re looking at or speaking to. And not seeing a sea of faces, but seeing individuals, and individuals that all need love, all need recognition, all have struggled or are struggling with something, all have experienced suffering and sorrow.

And we get this opportunity with our energy and our presence and our word and our craft to open up our hearts and connect with someone. What a thing. Oprah says, “Don’t add more darkness to the world.” So in our cases, facilitators and speakers, it doesn’t really matter the topic. What matters is, is that we are able to crack open our hearts, and we’re able to show the world who we truly are, and see the world as they are, and feel that sense. And there’s nothing like that feeling when you’re able to tap into it and share it.

So you have the fruits, and again, there are more than three, but the three for you to ponder today are originality, working on your craft, and empathy. So where does all this come from? And I’m going to give you four practices that I teach. I do myself, and fail at frequently. And I teach to others in the work that we do at Root and River around branding, and messaging, and storytelling, and whatnot. And I simply just call them the four practices of the modern human.

That’s a little tongue in cheek, because these are actually four really ancient principles. But there is no formula here. This isn’t a formula. This doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you the way it worked for me. It means that they’re practices. That means you’re going to implement them. If you do implement them, and they’re going to have a different result based off of your fruit tree, not someone else’s. The first practice of a modern leader, or modern human, is a practice of physicality or movement.

This was one that I struggle with. I struggle with the commitment to do physical labor and exercise. But I have a story about this, a brief one. My younger son, his name is Caden. If you are on Instagram, you can follow him at Reluctant Hobo. Reluctant Hobo is a rising artist. He’s getting paid thousands of dollars for his art now. One of the things I told him, when he decided this was what he was going to do, he wasn’t going to go to college. He was just going to go right into doing his art, is one of the things I told him is you’ve got to take care of yourself physically. And at the time he would say, if he was here, he was not in shape.

And so what he did, and he draws a direct correlation to this. The more in shape he got and the more confident he got in his physical being, and doing hard things, the better his art became. And I think that’s pretty cool. What an interesting proof of concept of this idea of the practice of physicality. It’s no coincidence that most of your great thinkers were walkers, Paulo Coelho, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, all walkers. Walked everywhere. So even that is a type of movement, it’s not necessarily getting on a treadmill, put your headphones in and just grind it out and to check a box that you exercised. I’m talking about physicality. I’m talking about chopping wood and carrying water.

The second practice is an intellectual practice that goes back to the beginner’s mind about continuing to nurture a spirit of curiosity about life, to tap into that inner child that likes to paint, and draw, and imagine, and pretend, and tap into that as a practice that you do on a regular basis. So when I’ve done that, when I’m consistent with that, what happens is a state of perpetual learning. It’s a state of discovery. And that pulls in multiple benefits to me. One benefit is that it expands my database. If I am giving a talk that I can pull from something that I’ve actually read or learned. The intellectual practice is really a learning practice.

The third one is an emotional practice. And this is kind of a sensitive thing here. If you have untreated wounds, emotional wounds, it will affect who you are in your craft. And so the emotional practice is, and what I do is, I still go to a therapist once a month, even though I feel like I’m past some of the healing, I’m on the other side of healing and now I’m in whatever that phase is on the other side of healing. But I still go, because I learned something about myself each time. It’s almost like maintenance. So that’s an emotional practice of continuing to examine yourself, examine your habits, examine your tendencies. Sometimes get outside help with like therapy or a coach or something. But it’s this ability to be a witness to your own emotions and feelings.

And then the final one is a spiritual practice. Now I don’t mean a religious practice. If that’s how someone chooses to manifest a spiritual practice, as a set of religious practices. Great. What I’m talking about are simply the three S’s of spirituality, of a spiritual practice. The first is stillness. The second is silence. And the third is solitude. If we can do those things, if we can nurture stillness, solitude, and silence, it allows that tree to heal and grow, and the fruit gets bigger and bigger. And as we hone our craft, and as we open our hearts, and as we go out into the world doing our thing of moving audiences, the tree gets bigger, they get fruit, and we all win. Thank you.

The post Leadership Presence 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.

Two of those speakers were Lee Duncan & Dan Benedict.

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

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

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

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Read the Transcript

Lee Duncan:

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

Dan Benedict:

Dan Benedict and I am a prototype facilitator.

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Lee Duncan:

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

Dan Benedict:

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

Dan Benedict:

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

Dan Benedict:

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

Dan Benedict:

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

Dan Benedict:

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

Dan Benedict:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was Hailey Temple, the Services Lead at MURAL.

Hailey’s presentation focused on designing online meetings for “distributed people with a purpose.”

Through an interactive activity, she explained that the reason online meetings feel weird is that there is a disconnect among participants. To combat this, Hailey offered several ways to bring participants together in online meetings, including defining why the meeting is online, keeping the meeting short and straightforward, incorporating icebreakers, and using MURAL’s concept posters to help individuals organize ideas during the session.

Watch Hailey Temple’s talk “Designing Online Meetings for Distributed People with Purpose”:

Read the Transcript

Hailey Temple:

Thank you. Oh my goodness. Hi everybody. This is wonderful. All right. So we’re nearing at the end of our time together today in this wonderful home space for facilitators. So I wanted to give everyone one last chance to make a connection with somebody in the room. Maybe someone you haven’t gotten the chance to talk to yet, you’ve wanted to, but just been super busy. So what I’d like you to do is stand up. You’ve been sitting for a while, shake it out and do like some jumping jacks. Go for it, shake it out. All right. And what I’m going to give you is 20 seconds to meet somebody in this room you haven’t talked to yet, but you’re not going to introduce yourself as you. You are going to introduce yourself as your alter ego. It could be your superhero name. It could be you after a couple of drinks at the bar. It doesn’t matter. Think about it 20 seconds, go.

It sounds like a lot of you guys are doing this already, but take a moment and share something meaningful with that person. Maybe a reflection about today, something that surprised you, but take a moment, maybe like 30 seconds and share that with one another.

Now, your final part for this. I want you to turn around and face back to back with your new friend, your new alter ego friends. Back to back. Yep, perfect, just like this. And I want you to continue sharing, if you haven’t already, share that meaningful moment with them for 30 more seconds. Go ahead.

Now you can have a seat. Go back to your seats if you haven’t already. All right, so I want to take a moment and just kind of like unpack that. And also you can introduce your real name if you haven’t already, or you can just keep yourself mysterious, that’s fine too.

 So how was that? Fun, playful, interesting. Okay. Tell me why.

Speaker 2:

The altar ego was really fun. Something really quick that wasn’t actually me but was still part of me.

Hailey Temple:

Yeah, awesome.

Speaker 2:

That inspired to think and do… Go on a similar track.

Hailey Temple:

Nice. Cool. What else? What about that face to face and then turn around? How was that for you guys?

Speaker 3:

More intimate?

Hailey Temple:

More intimate? Which one was more intimate?

Speaker 3:

The back to back.

Hailey Temple:

Okay, interesting. Tell me why.

Speaker 3:

Well, it’s like you’re kind of touching each other’s back, and you kind of have to get close so you can hear each other. So you’re not facing in this interaction. So its actually like a secret .

Hailey Temple:

Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. Very cool. All right. Anything else?

Speaker 4:

I thought the back to back was awkward [inaudible 00:03:23].

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Hailey Temple:

And you’re like, you don’t know this person, you don’t even know their real name. It’s like this weirdo. All right. Thank you guys. I think I love the different insights. That’s a really interesting one about the intimacy piece. But I think that a lot of us think about online meetings, like how you mentioned is, they’re kind of awkward. We talk about face to face and we love being able to help build connections with people and establish the sense of trust. And then I think realizing a lot of our talks today, the reason that online meetings feel weird a lot of times is we feel that sense of broken connection between people. And honestly, as facilitators… I’m going to shift this over. Nope, I’m not cool. We feel like this. We fucking hate online meetings a lot, and we hate facilitating them. And I really can’t blame anybody for not liking online meetings because how many of us have been in a meeting and we’re trying to build that trust, that connection for people. And someone’s going to say, “Oh, I have this really great idea.”

“Sorry, your wifi is disconnected, trying to reconnect you now.” And you’re like, “Cool, great, thanks.” That completely breaks. That sense of trust, that connection, that momentum that we’ve built with people in that session. And we kind of want to do this, you can feel like we’re on Swanson, like fuck all this, we’re going to just throw it away, goodbye.

But how many of us have also been asked to host an online meeting? To facilitate one? A lot of us here. Oh yeah, this guy can’t come, can you just do it online? No, I really can’t. But let’s face it. We have more of these online meetings. We’re working in an online world and we can either choose to say no and defer, or we can evolve. Evolve, how we practice, evolve our craft, evolve our mindsets. And today, I want to share some nuggets of wisdom with you from my experience, facilitating lots of online meetings, honestly messing up facilitating a lot of online meetings and then gracefully recovering and like, I’m fine, and share that with you today. But before I do, I need you to let go, let go the feeling that online meetings are the ugly stepsister to face-to-face meetings, because online meetings really have an important place in this world. We talk about diversity. It brings people together from different perspectives on a problem to solve it together when they can’t be the same room. It reduces the amount of time we’re traveling to face-to-face meeting, so think about fewer greenhouse gas emissions, more time spent at home with our loved ones.

So if you’re ready to evolve with me, let go of that feeling. Let me share some ways that we can evolve how we meet online and build meetings with purpose.

First, we can define why we’re really meeting online. Priya Parker’s book, buy it over there, it’s amazing, the Art of Gathering, opens with a really simple question, why do we… It says gather, I promise. Gather. I love this question. I ask it for all of my meetings because I use that response to shift how I’m going to build that agenda, how I’m going to design that experience. And just like we need to evolve, this question needs an evolution for an online world. Why do we really gather online? Why online? Maybe it’s because there’s no more budget for the company to have people traveling to meet face to face, so online meetings are the only option. Why online? Maybe because an executive needs to be in one continent and we need to be in another side of the world having our meeting together, but the team still needs to make important decisions for the next quarter. Why online? Maybe there are no more conference rooms for your team to meet. And I’ve been there a lot before, and suddenly you have to figure out how to still get that work done.

 So think about maybe some online meetings you’ve had this past month or so. Did you know why you were really meeting online? Have you ever asked someone who you’re facilitating a meeting for why it’s happening online? It isn’t always obvious. But sooner we ask and not the better, we are prepared to design an experience that considers those dynamics and considers the mindsets and feelings of the people in that digital space.

Next, we can keep it short and simple. The technology and the methods. I can guarantee you, people are not meeting online for you to do a lengthy technology demo, and to go through all the little nuances of how this tech works. I think in face to face meetings, we rely a lot on meeting norms that have been established through our world. We have to help people have a seat, stand up, write something, peel the sticky note. But in online meetings, we’re inviting people into this new and really uncomfortable space. And even if it’s just for an hour long meeting, it kind of disorients them. But as facilitators, we have the ability to help people build confidence, to feel really excited to work together. And we also have the ability to help people who might feel uncertain get or even resistant, build that confidence and have this foundation to start collaborating with People.

First, I like to start with giving people only the need to know information to accomplish a first task in a meeting. So I refer mural, it’s a digital and visual collaboration tool. And when I invite somebody into the tool for the first time, I tell them two things, know how to navigate in and out, zoom in and out of a space like this, which is called a canvas. It gives them a sense of place in a pretty crazy online space. And I tell them how to add and contribute content through sticky notes. That’s it. Don’t worry about anything else going on on the side. Focus on the meetings and the conversations we’re having today.

 I also like to give people a little digital desk, because if I launched you into this giant canvas, it’s daunting. Where do we start? But if I give someone a desk, it’s a little home base for them to start feeling comfortable to contribute to the conversation. So you can see, I add pictures, I add some blank sticky notes for them to add in. I’ll add their names. It’s a space for them to feel comfortable to come back to if they’re daunted by the work.

Remember, we are hired. Our job is to help create meaningful discussions, not to teach people the technology. So the shorter and simpler, the better

As facilitators. We also need to make time for play as much as the work because the playtime gives people a chance to establish connections, it creates trust, it builds energy is needed. So how do we do that today in meetings, in face-to-face meetings?

Speaker 5:

Icebreakers.

Hailey Temple:

Icebreakers. Yeah, exactly. Energizers, warmups. And they are awesome for online meetings because we need those connections when there’s a huge barrier of a laptop in front of you or whatever. But they also are kind of like your little facilitator hack. I talked about creating confidence and giving people kind of like a base to work off of. And warmups are a really low risk exercise to get people engaged and to start working.

 So at Mural, we have an example of this is, we have online meetings with over 100 people. We have company all hands. And so they look a lot like this. They’re pretty chaotic. It’s a lot of floating heads. But we need to get people focused on the task at hand for that day and into the tool to start working. So here’s a warm-up we used recently in an all hands meeting. We invited everybody into this canvas and we said, share what shoes you’re wearing today. Put it in the canvas and tell us what they say about you. But I want to make sure people knew how to behave in this technology with the canvas too. So I took a picture of my shoes, in this case, I was wearing these compression socks. I put them in the canvas and I said, “Here, add a sticky note with your name, add another one of what these shoes say about you. And in my case, I said, “I’m a 95 year old woman trapped in a 20 somethings body.” So true.

And so people did stumble. It took some time at first, but it was pretty incredible to see what we were able to create together in just a couple of minutes. And honestly, I’d rather they were struggling this little easy warmup then later on, when we’re making really essential decisions together as a team.

It also creates a really fun element of play. You can see we literally enjoy trolling each other at Murals, and people are like, “Those are Lucas’s ugly ass feet.” We actually found out one of our designers in Argentina makes her own shoes and she wants to launch a shoe line someday. And so those are incredible moments that we don’t get with people around the world when we’re not able to meet between coffee breaks or at a water cooler or something. So play creates those moments and opportunities for us.

You can also use the time between meetings. So I’m talking about real-time work and asynchronous work. People think that since I’m a remote worker, I must work insane hours of waking up at 3:00 AM to meet with people around the world, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how my team gets work done between and during meetings. So we’re planning an event and my team wants to get together to have important discussions about the events that we want to launch. So we scheduled one hour for us to meet at a time that was convenient for everybody to answer those essential questions. Why have this event? How do we think you want to accomplish this event? How is this going to help the company accomplish their goals?

About 15 minutes before the meeting ended, I gave the team homework. I said, “We have kind of a scaffolding for this event. Now I want you to create your vision for what this event should look like, and we’re going to share this event vision when we come back together.”

So I shared the instructions with the team. I said complete this before the next meeting. And if people had questions for me between meetings, they could ask me on Slack or just reach out for help, and we could jump on a call together.

In the next meeting, I was able to have everyone present their concept posters, this is called a concept poster, share out what their vision was with the team, and have the rest of the group capture feedback. So you can see those little digital desks there for people to share feedback.

So real-time work and asynchronous work is an essential part of working with distributed people, because it considers the fact that people don’t always have their most creative moments when they’re in that meeting. If someone’s working at 8:00 PM and someone else’s working at 8:00 AM, they might not be at their creative best. So if you use the time between meetings, you give people a chance to step back, reflect and bring their best creative work forward.

Finally, I love online meetings because they are the place to work visually. Visuals tell stories. Visuals clarify concepts for people. But I believe the visuals belong in every part of an online meeting, and here’s why. First of all, people have incredibly short attention spans in meetings. I have multi-tasked in a lot of my online meetings. Have any of you done that? I think we’re pretty much all guilty of it, it happens. And so I like to create an online meeting experience that’s more engaging.

Imagine I invited you into a meeting and the agenda looked like this. What story am I telling you? Can you see the direction, the flow of this meeting we’re going to have today? It’s much more immersive and engaging for someone to sit through and collaborate in something like this, versus a boring PowerPoint or word document.

 I also love to use visuals to show versus tell. So in all of my meetings, I try and capture gifs or gifs, if you’re a psychopath, to show people how to work in the tool. And this saves me a lot of time explaining mechanics of the tool, but also again, shows people how to behave in this online world.

We also have visuals because they’re responsive. We don’t really have control anymore over how people can join our meetings. And I think visuals are a really powerful way to anchor people in a conversation. I love the lightening decision jam, if you guys have seen this before, this sailboat analogy, because it really… No pun intended, anchors people around the conversation across different devices.

 I believe that as facilitators, we are creating stories. We’re creating stories where we have the opportunity to lead people through an experience, and we get to have these characters go in and out of this experience with us. And we have the choice to make that a textbook or an awesome engaging, colorful picture book in our meetings.

 So when I talk about evolution, these aren’t breakthrough crazy things. I think I’m taking a lot of what’s been talked about today and just trying to flip it, adapt it into an online world. And I really believe that that’s my… What I contribute to the craft of facilitation that we’re all here to enjoy and celebrate and to learn from.

 So when you have an online meeting, maybe the next week or month, I want to challenge you to think about how you can evolve your practice. Because when we keep it short and simple, we reduce the barriers for people to jump in and get engaged. When we make time for play, we create a chance for connection. When we use the time between, we consider that people have different creative bests at different times of the day. And we work visually, recreate stories and lead people through an experience.

So I couldn’t share all of my nuggets today with you, but if you’re curious and excited to learn more about online facilitation, you can come up to me, you can check out these references here, I wrote a blog post about this a little bit more too, and we have a facilitator’s guide over at the Mural desk for you to keep exploring this space.

 But guys, if we are going to continue facilitating meetings and controlling the room, let’s evolve together. Thank you.

The post Designing Online Meetings for Distributed People with Purpose appeared first on Voltage Control.