I guess you could say my path to facilitation was far from obvious. My journey began in the world of industrial design—physical products, beautiful materials, craftsmanship. I studied at Central Saint Martins in London, one of the most prestigious design schools in Europe. Back then, I was designing high-end objects like lighters and fountain pens. One of my first breakout projects was for ST Dupont, a French company known for their opulent lighters. I designed a piece called Diva—a lighter that offered a flame in the palm of your hand as a gesture of elegance and openness. It was theatrical. Poetic. And it got me noticed by the Comite Colbert, an association that includes heritage houses like Hermes.

Saint Martins opened many doors. It’s a place that lives at the intersection of art, fashion, and design—and it builds those bridges actively. I was surrounded by people who would go on to define what design meant in our generation. Alumni from the college include people like Alexander McQueen and other cultural pioneers. But even within that buzz, I always felt slightly out of sync with the end users of the products I was making. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t collect luxury pens. The objects I created were beautiful, yes—but they didn’t speak to my own values.

That lack of connection eventually pulled me away from luxury goods and toward something more utilitarian: product innovation. I joined Untapped Innovation as an associate, an inspiring consultancy born out of the Procter & Gamble tradition, working on fast-moving consumer goods. It was a different world—less about ego, more about process. And for the first time, I saw design being used not just to beautify, but to solve real problems.

At Untapped, I was supporting clients on the kinds of innovation cycles that couldn’t afford to fail slowly. These were products that needed to hit market targets fast. I saw design being embedded into R&D cultures—teams using storytelling frameworks like The Hero’s Journey to envision and test ideas. This was a different flavor of creativity, one that was deeply tied to facilitation. That realization pulled me into a new kind of inquiry. What if the magic wasn’t in the object, but in how we created space for people to explore and invent together? Though I didn’t call it that at the time, what I saw was design in service of unlocking thinking and a new journey had begun.

It deepened when I joined Makerversity, a creative incubator in London. I started overhearing conversations about design sprints, and that led me to Jake Knapp’s book. Suddenly, I had language for explaining human-centered design  that until then had felt intuitive but hard to articulate. I was working with hardware startups at the time, running sprints that let them move from insight to testable prototype in a week. It felt like magic.

Makerversity was something special—a post-university creative ecosystem, full of fellow Central Saint Martins, Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths grads. We were all building and learning together. One day I heard someone on the phone quoting sprint fees and thought, “Wait, you can get paid to do that?” It clicked. I started facilitating sprints for physical products, and it felt like everything I had learned as a designer could now serve people more directly.

But then came a pivot. I joined Innovate UK Business Connect (formerly Knowledge Transfer Network) a public innovation agency in the UK. I was brought in  to help set up their first in-house innovation studio. Then the pandemic hit. Workshops, conferences, and events—everything that was supposed to be our bread and butter—came to a halt. Our team had to adapt, fast. We started running sessions on how to design and facilitate virtual workshops. At first, it was a bit rogue. We didn’t even call it design thinking. But it worked. We created peer-to-peer learning ecosystems using tools like Mural and quietly built a network of change agents inside the organization.

We were helping civil servants become better collaborators, even if they didn’t know it yet. We avoided buzzwords. We just said, “Want help making your next virtual session better?” It was facilitation in disguise. Over time, the executive team started to notice. They gave us their blessing—and eventually their support. We began to tell “agents of change” stories, celebrating internal facilitators who were designing better experiences for their colleagues.

I didn’t realize it right away, but I was facilitating. And I was good at it. Eventually, I left London with my partner, sold the floating home we’d been living on, and began a new chapter in the rural south of Italy. We visited 20 potential towns, sleeping in a converted SUV, before finding a place that felt right. We now live off-grid among shepherds and olive trees. It’s beautiful. But I missed that connection with my community of practice.

That’s when I found Voltage Control. I remember tuning into a Practice Playground and thinking, “These people care.” It was a different vibe—not competitive, not performative, just deeply committed. That energy pulled me in. I started volunteering to run the Facilitation Lab Europe sessions. And I knew I had found my tribe.

Rehearsing Confidence, Rebuilding Purpose

After about six months of running the lab, I started to feel like I was the bottleneck. I didn’t always feel entitled to lead sessions for facilitators who were far more seasoned than me. I wanted to learn from them, yes—but I also wanted to give something back. And I realized that to do that, I needed more confidence and structure.

That’s when the idea of certification took root. Not because I needed another credential, but because I wanted to treat myself to a period of focused development—a time to rediscover my purpose, like I had done back in design school. I had pivoted from industrial design to change work, and this felt like the missing bridge.

I think of it like returning to studio time. A protected space to try things, reflect, and deepen my craft. Except this time, the material wasn’t foam core or acrylic. It was people. Conversations. Collaboration. That’s what I was learning to shape.

Voltage Control had already earned my trust. I’d been around the community long enough to know it wasn’t just talk. You could feel the integrity. And with a bit of help from the team, I enrolled.

A Community That Practices What It Preaches

The certification wasn’t full of checklists and corporate templates. It was something else entirely. What struck me most was the peer learning. Somehow, this program self-selects for growth-minded humans. Many of us came from corporate roles, but no one was there to tick a box. We were all there to grow.

I especially connected with Kate Wing, a cohort mate from California who works in ocean conservation. We came from opposite worlds, but our energy was aligned. We were both treating this as a gift to ourselves. Her passion and wisdom helped me trust my own voice.

The program also helped me access something I now call my equanimity hack. I discovered a simple mental shift that brings me back to balance in moments of stress: “I’m here to serve you.” That small mantra changed the way I carry myself . I use it constantly.

Turning Points and Use Cases

Another unexpected gift was the portfolio work. As a designer, I was no stranger to portfolios, but this was different. It helped me clarify the use cases for my facilitation practice: strategic alignment for leadership transitions, strategy enablement for large organizations, and cross-industry innovation for resilient supply chains.

I realized my superpower is helping organizations access their own resilience. That insight had been sitting under the surface, and the portfolio process helped me name it.

I restructured my entire website around this. I now organize my offerings not just by service, but by scenario. New CEO onboarding? I’ve done that. Multi-team strategy enablement? Got a toolkit for it. Industry transformation where traditional players need to collaborate across silos? Let’s talk. It’s been grounding.

Working from the Inside Out

One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had since certification has been with a company I supported through a leadership transition. The outgoing CEO trusted me enough to introduce me to the incoming leader. That referral carried so much weight. It said: this person can help you. He helped me. That’s gold.

My role? Helping them bring 400 people along a new direction of travel. Facilitating not just strategy, but alignment. Making sure change isn’t something that slows them down, but something that propels them forward. They don’t have a C-suite designer, but they’ve trusted me to help them become more adaptive. That feels like meaningful work.

What Comes Next Is Already Happening

I’m currently collaborating with a research group at Princeton University, helping with alignment and teamwork as they prepare to launch a new book and website. It’s bringing me closer to the world of education in a hands-on way—and I’m finding it genuinely engaging.

During a recent business trip in London, a contact from my past reached out—someone who’s just taken a senior role at a prestigious university. He asked if I do lecturing. I said I offer experiential learning. That conversation sparked something new: the idea of taking on a formal role in education alongside my consulting work.

Education feels like a natural extension of what I’m already doing. Helping people organise their thinking, collaborate better, and communicate with clarity—that’s facilitation. But it’s also teaching. As I step further into that space, it feels like the pieces are aligning. It’s still early, but it feels right.

Give It Time, It Gives Back

If you’re considering certification, my advice is simple: Make time for it. Don’t let the effort scare you. It’s an investment in yourself, and it pays dividends. You get back more than you put in—but only if you commit fully . Really bring your whole self to it . Because the community will meet you there.

And when it does, it might just change how you see yourself—not as someone who leads change, but as someone who makes it possible for others to step in, shape it, and carry it forward.

The post From Luxury Design to Design for Change appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Show Highlights

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

Links | Resources

Charles on X

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

Cardano on the web

About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab podcast where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab and if you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Input Output. He’s also a bison rancher, runs a healthcare clinic in Wyoming, serving over 11,000 patients, owns a construction company and takes a keen interest in synthetic biology. Welcome to the show, Charles.

Charles:

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

Why do you think there was so much skepticism?

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

Yeah.

Douglas:

Tell me about that tension there.

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

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

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

Douglas:

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

Charles:

Thank you, Doug. Cheers.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration. voltagecontrol.com.

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

I never set out to become a facilitator. In fact, I didn’t even know what the word meant. What I did know was that something about our workshops could be better. For years, my partner Mauricio and I had been delivering leadership trainings through our company, EXEC Consulting LLC. These were classic content-forward sessions: structured, informative, but mostly one-directional. 

We’d spent years honing a program that consistently delivered value. Mauricio had built something people returned to again and again—and for good reason. But as we continued delivering it, I started to feel a gentle pull. I wondered if we could bring more participation into the room. Moments of interaction—brief partner shares, space for reflection—seemed to energize people in ways that surprised me. It wasn’t that anything was wrong, but I sensed we were only scratching the surface of what was possible.

I remember delivering a session for the Center for Internationalization in the Piedmont region of Italy. We’d go there once or twice a year to run the same program. Over time, I began to see a pattern: whenever we included a moment of self-reflection or encouraged participants to share insights with a partner, the room came alive. It was subtle at first. A ripple of energy. More smiles. Eye contact. Curiosity. I could see how those moments—however brief—led to deeper engagement.

My own experience of running the same workshop over and over again—especially in Piedmont—became a mirror. I could see when the room was leaning in and when it was leaning back. I started to track the energy not just by what people said, but how they said it, how quickly they came alive in the partner shares, how they lingered afterward. Even without knowing the word, I had started to develop the instincts of a facilitator. I was tuning into what the room needed—not just what I planned to deliver.

The First Containers

That realization pulled me into a new kind of inquiry. What if the magic wasn’t in the content, but in how we created space for it? What if the work was less about giving answers and more about surfacing what was already there? I didn’t yet know the word for what I was feeling, but the search had begun.

And maybe more than anything, I was noticing my own excitement. These participatory moments didn’t just energize the room—they energized me. After dozens of repetitions, it was those interactions that made the sessions feel fresh. The unknown of what someone might share, the little sparks of vulnerability and humor—they reminded me that learning could feel alive. That was the beginning of something shifting in me, even if I didn’t yet know where it was going.

Looking back, I think facilitation first found me long before I had language for it. At Girl Scout camp, in the way we sang songs and followed rituals that created a sense of belonging. Later, at yoga retreats where a teacher guided us into self-awareness with care. Even in college, studying U.S. history through the lens of civil rights at Reed College, I was already asking the kinds of questions that facilitation now helps me hold: Who has a voice? What structures create trust? How do we build spaces for honest dialogue?

So when I look back now, those threads were always there. But it was in 2018 or 2019—watching the impact of small participatory shifts in our trainings—that the pattern began to crystallize. I knew I needed to find more of whatever that was.

Following the Curiosity

My path into facilitation wasn’t dramatic; it was more like a breadcrumb trail. I started Googling. Looking for ways to make workshops more participatory. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled into a Voltage Control Facilitation Lab meetup. I figured I’d lurk in the background, camera off. Instead, I got paired in a breakout room and asked a deep, personal question right away. I was surprised. And energized. There was no back row here.

I quickly discovered that facilitation was a field, a practice, even a craft. And there were names I hadn’t heard before—like Priya Parker, whose book “The Art of Gathering” blew open something in me. Mauricio had mentioned her after hearing her on a podcast, and reading her work became a turning point. I realized that meaningful gatherings were more than logistics; they were opportunities for transformation.

Around the same time, the world was erupting in protest over George Floyd’s murder. I joined more Voltage Control sessions and was struck by how space was held to process racial injustice. It wasn’t performative. It was real. And it made me realize that facilitation could be a civic tool as much as a professional one.

I also started to realize how much of facilitation was about how we gather—not just what we do when we’re there. That resonated with earlier parts of my life: Girl Scout camp, where rituals helped us feel like a team. Slumber parties, where connection happened in the small hours. And especially my first yoga retreat, where a guide gently invited us to reflect, breathe, notice. All of these memories felt like breadcrumbs leading back to the power of intentional space-making.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. I started reaching out to others in the community for virtual coffee chats. Everyone said yes. They shared their experiences generously, and I found myself growing through these one-on-one connections. It became clear that this wasn’t just a new skill. It was a new way of being.

A Clear Yes

When the opportunity came to join the certification program, it felt obvious. I had already gained so much from the free resources and community that saying yes to going deeper was easy. Of course I reflected on the time and financial commitment, but in the end, I knew it would give me the structure and grounding I needed.

I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I just signed up. It felt like an investment in a part of me that was just beginning to find its voice. I had this image of who I might become if I said yes to that voice. I knew it would be work. I had plenty of internal doubts—would I really follow through? Did I belong in this room? But deeper than the fear was the curiosity. That tug that had pulled me into my first breakout room now pulled me into something more lasting. I said yes.

I was hungry to learn. I knew I needed more than tools—I needed formation. I wanted to go from absorbing content to confidently facilitating the space where learning happens. Certification was my next right step.

Finding My Voice Again

One of the most meaningful parts of the certification experience was the coaching I received from Erik. He saw me. I don’t say that lightly. His message was simple, but it landed deeply: Don’t conform. Your uniqueness is your strength. That gave me permission to lean into the authentic version of facilitation that only I could offer.

That message stuck with me, especially because I’d noticed a pattern in myself. I often started things with originality and excitement—law school, college, even this facilitation journey—but somewhere along the way I’d begin to conform, to fit myself into the mold of what I thought “professional” looked like. With Erik’s support, I gave myself permission not to do that this time. To stay weird. To stay me.

The portfolio was another major moment. It forced me to reflect on where facilitation was already showing up in my life—from a racial justice book club I launched, to a fitness class I led, to the flow channel exercise I added to our workshops in Italy. Writing the portfolio helped me claim the title of facilitator, even if my work didn’t look like anyone else’s. That was powerful.

Naming my brand as 3D Wellness—emotional, physical, and social well-being—came out of that process. It was something I’d never have thought to do without the push to articulate my philosophy. That naming wasn’t just a marketing exercise—it was a moment of personal clarity. It said: This is what I care about. This is what I want to build. And I’ve been using that framework ever since, in everything from movement workshops to community dinners.

Owning My Practice

Since certification, I’ve been stretching. I brought new games and interactive elements to our Piedmont trainings. I facilitated a Dance & Discover event with cultural learning and community connection. I co-led a strategic gathering for a coalition of Texas nonprofits—an emotionally intense experience that tested and affirmed my capacity to hold space for vulnerability and trust-building.

That nonprofit gathering in Austin stands out. It was deeply emotional. We had to pivot mid-session to address a lack of trust in the room that hadn’t been disclosed beforehand. I used a listening circle format and invited participants to share openly, uninterrupted. Then, inspired by an exercise from the Voltage Control summit, I asked them to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, silently look each other in the eyes, and internally say either “I trust this person” or “I want to trust this person.” It was raw. Beautiful. People cried. The room shifted. That’s when I understood just how powerful this work can be.

I’m also proud of what I’ve helped build through Dance & Discover. Even though I’ve only run a few events, they’ve become expressions of who I am as a facilitator. We dance. We reflect. We learn a little about the culture the dance emerged from. We connect. It’s joy, movement, and meaning all in one. And watching people stick around afterward—reluctant to leave—that’s when I know we created something real.

Most recently, I facilitated a half-day workshop on trust for a high-tech team in Orlando. It was a pivotal moment. I used Triz (“reverse thinking”) to help them identify trust-breaking behaviors, a trust equation to demystify the concept, and peer coaching to close with connection and empathy. Watching them choose to be anonymously evaluated by their peers was a powerful testament to how much we had built together in just a few hours.

A New Chapter Emerging

This work is expanding. Slowly, but beautifully. Mauricio now sees the value facilitation brings to our clients. After witnessing the Orlando session, he’s ready to integrate more of this approach into our offerings at EXEC. That alignment means the door is open to do more of what I love, inside the business we’ve built together.

We’re keeping a cadence—not because of demand or dollars, but because we want to. It’s low stakes, high purpose. And I’m seeing the impact it has not only on participants but on me. Each gathering adds another layer of confidence. Another opportunity to try something new. To be bold. To co-create something meaningful. And every time we do it, I feel more aligned with the kind of facilitator—and human—I want to be.

Being of Service

Looking ahead, I see myself fully stepping into leadership—in corporate rooms and intimate circles alike. I want to facilitate for teams that are ready to become more self-aware and take shared responsibility for the cultures they’re co-creating. When one-on-one coaching can’t address the whole picture, facilitation is the missing piece. It surfaces group dynamics, builds empathy, and unlocks new pathways forward.

That’s the opportunity I see for organizations: to use facilitation not just to solve problems, but to evolve their culture. In Orlando, I coached five people individually before the team workshop. I saw how facilitation could bring those isolated insights into a collective awakening. One-on-one coaching had given them language. Group facilitation gave them shared understanding. That’s the magic of pairing the two. Self-awareness, self-responsibility, and empathy—they all emerged naturally through the process.

I would tell anyone considering the certification this: if you want to be part of a learning community where you are seen, supported, and called forth into your potential, Voltage Control is the place. This isn’t just a training program. It’s the first step into a much larger journey. One where you get to become more of who you really are—and help others do the same.

The facilitation journey isn’t always linear. It requires trust—trust in yourself, in the process, in the people in the room. Voltage Control helped me build that trust. Not just by giving me tools, but by showing me what it feels like to be part of a brave, generous, and visionary community. That’s what makes the difference.

The post Trusting the Path appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with Voltage Control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method-agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences.

This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers.

Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Emilia Astrom at Howspace, where she facilitates peer learning communities for leaders in learning and transformation.

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Emilia Astrom:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

Let’s hope so. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released.

We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration at voltagecontrol.com.

The post From Competition to Collaboration in Idea Generation appeared first on Voltage Control.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my facilitation journey began in high school, in Hawaii, on a campus that actively championed student voice. I was a senior at Parker School, a creative, independent school nestled on the Big Island, and the year I was there, they brought in an outside organization to establish a peer counseling program. You had to apply or interview, and it was one of those things my friends dragged me into. “Come on, it’ll be fun,” they said. I had no idea that retreat would shape the rest of my life.

They trained us with an immersive, three-day self-reflection experience, and then flipped the script: we were tasked with recreating the retreat for younger students from our school and our rival across town. The activities were all rooted in trust, vulnerability, and breaking down social barriers. I was originally drawn to the idea of being the retreat DJ—that sounded like fun. But the adults leading the program had other plans. They asked me to take on a lead facilitator role. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the first time someone saw in me what I hadn’t yet seen in myself.

At the time, I was balancing sports like outrigger canoeing and soccer, while diving deep into performing arts—dance, theater, gymnastics. (Yes, I played Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and still have the cheeky T-shirt to prove it.) It was a chaotic, rich high school experience, and that retreat opened a new door. We ran two-day sessions with younger students. They cried, they laughed, they shared openly. That was my first taste of how powerful a container facilitation could be. I wouldn’t learn the term “facilitation” until years later, but the seed was planted.

I went on to UCSD for undergrad, drawn by family ties and childhood summers in San Diego. I started as a theater major, switched to writing for something more versatile, and fell into educational therapy by chance—working for a mentor who blended special education and marriage/family therapy in her private practice. That job led me back to grad school at USD for my own degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, and it was there I started to notice something: students opened up more with an algebra book between us than across a counseling table. That was a lightbulb moment.

From there, I went on to help launch and scale schools with Fusion Education Group, including the first replication high school in West LA. As VP of Education, I built programming and trained staff, always anchoring in human connection and emotional safety. I loved the work. I also felt wildly underqualified at first, so I went back to school again for a Doctorate in Leadership. My learning kept bringing me  back to the value of deep listening, storytelling, and emotional intelligence. That whole time, I was building my facilitation practice without realizing it.

Realizing Facilitation Was the Thread

The discovery of facilitation as a discipline hit me years later, after I joined Change Enthusiasm Global. Cassandra Worthy, our founder, insisted that if I was going to lead and grow our facilitation team, I needed to go through Voltage Control’s Facilitation Certification. I’m so glad she did. I hadn’t realized there was this entire world—a community, even a methodology—dedicated to facilitation. I was floored.

Here I was, someone who’d spent her entire adult life in teaching, coaching, and leadership, and I had no idea that facilitation had its own language and rigor. What struck me immediately was how familiar it all felt, and yet how new. It was like discovering a well-organized vocabulary for instincts and moves I’d been making my whole life. That was both affirming and exciting.

It reminded me of my reaction when I first encountered Brené Brown’s work. Her concept of vulnerability put words to what we had been doing at Fusion all along: prioritizing relationships, seeing students as whole people, making connection the first step in learning. It was the same with Voltage Control. Suddenly, there was a framework to help me teach and support facilitators more effectively.

And it wasn’t just theory. When I looked back at those high school retreats, I could now see the trust-building, the emotional storytelling, the circle processes, the norms being co-created. I could put names to what we were doing. I realized that moment in my teens was not just formative—it was foundational.

Packaging What I Already Knew (And Didn’t Know)

I had a lot of “oh wow” moments during the certification. One of my favorites was the module on handling resistance in a group. It was so well-articulated. I’ve always believed that when someone resists, they’re usually feeling disconnected—from the group, the material, or themselves. And our instinct is often to shut them down or avoid them. The training reminded me that the real magic happens when we pull them closer instead.

The portfolio piece was also surprisingly impactful. I had heard from one of our more experienced facilitators that it hadn’t resonated with her—and I understood that perspective. But I decided to make it work for me. I used it to tell the story of my journey into CEG, reflecting on the concept of “novice” and how we often do our best work at the beginning and end of a career arc. That act of storytelling gave me clarity about where I was and where I wanted to grow.

More than anything, the certification reframed facilitation not just as a skill, but as a craft. And it gave me a language to talk about it with others, especially our facilitators who are doing powerful work but sometimes lack that cohesive narrative around it.

Designing Impact at Scale

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with one big question: How do we scale intimacy?

At Change Enthusiasm Global, we’re being asked to create experiences not just for rooms of 20 or 50 people, but for hundreds. We recently followed one of Cassandra’s keynotes with a learning session for 400 people—though I’m pretty sure it was more like 600 by the time we ran out of materials. We pulled it off. But it required an entirely different level of orchestration.

We created moments of drama. Everyone got streamers and the collective movement created a sea of energetic color. We manipulated lighting to create emotion. Our facilitators told personal stories under spotlights. People cried. People laughed. They hugged. That’s how we knew it worked.

The secret weapon? A rockstar producer. I’ve learned that producing is just as important as facilitating, especially at scale. The producer created the conditions—lighting cues, music, timing—that amplified our work. We couldn’t have done it without him. I want to carry that insight forward and ensure we keep building our facilitation practice with production in mind. That’s the next frontier for us: building emotionally resonant, large-scale experiences that still feel human and connected.

Where I’m Headed Now

This work is a confluence of everything I’ve done—from theater and therapy to education and coaching. And now, I’m looking at ways to build experiences that touch thousands while still feeling personal.

We want to take Change Enthusiasm to people at scale—ballrooms, stadiums even—and I’m working on how to preserve that feeling of a small, brave space no matter how big the room is. I’m also excited about building our Change Enthusiasm Global community and developing internal systems so our facilitators have the tools to replicate and scale the energy our brand promises.

I feel incredibly lucky. Every major opportunity in my life has come through a blend of curiosity, connection, and serendipity. But now I’m starting to see the strategy in that, too. Facilitation has always been the through line. Now it’s the framework.

I think everyone, regardless of where they are in their facilitation journey, has something to gain from the Voltage Control certification. There’s a humility in returning to the role of learner. It makes you sharper, more curious. And the community you join by doing so is invaluable.

But the real gift? Learning to let go. Learning to trust that your job isn’t to say everything, but to create the conditions where the right things can emerge. You’ll never cover every bullet point. And that’s okay. What matters is what they discover, remember, how they felt, and what they carry with them. Get good enough to let go of control and trust the process and the group. That’s the craft. And Voltage Control helps you find it.

The post My Journey with Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

In facilitation, leadership, and systems change, edges are not simply metaphors. They are indicators of movement, of invitation, of challenge and potential. They show up when we notice our comfort being tested, when our default tools no longer fit the moment, when our story rubs up against someone else’s, or when a group tiptoes toward transformation.

This July, we’re exploring the theme of Edges not only because it shows up again and again in our work, but also because it will guide us through our upcoming Facilitation Summit. To support this exploration, we’re highlighting one of our favorite peer coaching tools: Troika Consulting. This structured activity invites three people to rotate through the roles of client and consultant, holding space for reflection, clarity, and challenge.

This month’s featured facilitation activity is Troika and we’ve included five provocative prompts you can use for Troika that are tied to the acronym EDGES:

• E – Explore the Unknown
• D – Disrupt Patterns
• G – Generate Dialogue
• E – Embrace Tension
• S – Steward Emergence

Each prompt invites participants to work with a different kind of edge—personal, interpersonal, systemic, or strategic. Below, we unpack each letter of the acronym, explore the deeper meaning, and share how it can guide your practice.

Explore the Unknown

Troika Prompt: Where in your work or life are you currently standing at an edge—something uncertain, emerging, or uncomfortable?

The edge of the unknown can feel exciting—or terrifying. For some, it sparks curiosity and energy. For others, it can produce anxiety and resistance. What matters is not whether we enjoy it, but whether we learn to stay present with it. In our certification programs, we often frame this as a “growth edge,” a place just beyond what’s familiar.

Edges are not always visible. Sometimes, we sense them before we can name them: a pattern breaking down, a restlessness we can’t explain, an opportunity that feels both thrilling and destabilizing. Exploring the unknown requires a stance of openness—not to answers, but to noticing.

It also helps to remember that edges don’t always emerge spontaneously. Sometimes we have to seek them. That might look like joining a new community of practice, offering to facilitate in a new context, or even initiating a difficult conversation. Growth happens in motion.

Facilitators aren’t immune to stagnation either. We often see facilitators return to tools and scripts that used to feel alive but now feel rote. Standing at the edge of our own evolution means becoming reacquainted with uncertainty—sometimes even learning to love it. That’s a skill in itself.

Troika is especially powerful for surfacing these edges. As you speak your uncertainty aloud, others can help you see the contours of what’s forming—even if you can’t quite see it yet.

Disrupt Patterns

Troika Prompt: Where are you being invited to stretch beyond your facilitation comfort zone—and what’s at stake if you do?

Disrupting patterns means naming what’s familiar—and questioning whether it still serves. That might be a facilitation habit, a team dynamic, a structure, or even a mindset. Disruption doesn’t have to be violent. It can be intentional, thoughtful, even gentle. But it does require honesty.

We often see facilitators cling to methods that once worked but no longer fit the moment. The urge to “stick with what I know” is strong. But so is the cost of stagnation.

Stretching beyond the comfort zone requires vulnerability. It can also reawaken creativity. The edge here is not about abandoning everything—it’s about holding your tools lightly, staying flexible, and listening for what the group really needs.

In learning theory, this aligns with the zone of proximal development: that sweet spot where challenge meets support. Troika can illuminate this zone by reflecting back where your current comfort is limiting your next step.

And while pattern disruption may start with technique or practice, it often moves inward. It asks, “What am I avoiding by staying in this groove?” or “Whose needs am I prioritizing when I fall back on this routine?” Sustainable disruption requires pausing to explore our own attachments to comfort, control, or perfection. This deeper layer is often where real transformation begins.

Generate Dialogue

Troika Prompt: What’s a provocative question that lives at the edge of your current project or inquiry?

Some edges live between us. They show up in culture, power, language, identity, and expectation. These edges often surface as friction—but underneath that friction is potential. When we generate dialogue at these edges, we open doors to new understanding, deeper collaboration, and collective insight.

Provocative questions help us reach these edges. They challenge assumptions, uncover values, and reveal blind spots. The edge might be a conversation your team has been avoiding. Or a topic you’re nervous to name out loud. Or a question that feels just a little too big to answer.

In our Facilitation Lab meetups, some of the most powerful moments happen when someone asks a question they’ve been carrying alone—and discovers that others have been holding it too. That’s the power of dialogue.

This Troika prompt encourages you to name one of those edge-questions, and let others reflect it back, stretch it, or reframe it. What feels provocative to you may be the spark that helps your collaborators move forward.

Not every question will feel welcome in every space. That’s part of the edge, too. Facilitators must tune into when to push and when to pause. A provocative question in the wrong moment can close a group down, but in the right moment, it can open up entirely new territory. Timing and trust are everything.

Embrace Tension

Troika Prompt: Where have you felt tension at the edge of a group, culture, or identity—and how is that informing your work today?

Tension is not the enemy of progress. It’s often the signal that something important is at stake. In facilitation, we sometimes talk about the “tightrope” between comfort and discomfort. Stay too comfortable, and there’s no movement. Lean too far into discomfort, and people disengage.

The most skilled facilitators learn to surf this edge. They notice when tension arises. They stay grounded. And they help others interpret the tension, rather than flee from it.

Sometimes, we have to sharpen the edge to make it visible. Other times, we need to soften it so the group can move safely through. There’s no single rule. As we discussed recently, facilitation is not about erasing all tension, but about knowing how to hold it well.

This Troika prompt invites you to examine a moment of past or present tension—especially one connected to difference, identity, or power. How did it shape you? What did you learn? How are you applying that learning now?

We also encourage facilitators to notice their internal reactions to tension. Often, the discomfort we perceive in a group mirrors our own edge. Instead of smoothing over the moment, try asking yourself: What if I stayed curious? What might this tension be pointing to? What’s just beyond it?

Steward Emergence

Troika Prompt: Where are you holding on to an old pattern or process, even though you’re aware something new is trying to emerge?

Emergence is the process through which something new comes into being—often gradually, unpredictably, or at the edges of what we understand. It’s not the same as a goal or a plan. It can’t be controlled. But it can be stewarded.

Many facilitators sense when something new is trying to surface. A group dynamic shifts. An old strategy loses traction. A client begins to ask different questions. You might feel it in the language people use, or in the energy of a room.

The challenge is that emergence often requires letting go. That might mean releasing a process that once served you, or admitting that your usual approach is no longer aligned. It can be humbling—and freeing.

Troika is a beautiful space for stewarding emergence. By naming what feels outdated or misaligned, and asking others to reflect what they sense is trying to take shape, you create a container for clarity. You also signal your readiness to evolve.

This final prompt asks you to name the edge between what was and what wants to be. That’s where the real work begins.

And here’s the truth: emergence rarely feels efficient. It feels messy, slow, ambiguous. That’s because we’re not just solving problems—we’re making room for what didn’t exist yet. Facilitators who learn to live in this ambiguity become better stewards of systemic change, helping groups build resilience for the unknown.

Edges as Practice, Not Destination

Edges aren’t places we conquer. They’re places we practice. They invite us to show up with presence, humility, and curiosity. They are, as one of our team members recently said, where the magic happens—not because they are magical, but because of how we meet them.

As you explore these prompts, we invite you to try them in a Troika with your peers, team, or learning cohort. You don’t have to have answers. You don’t even have to know exactly what your edge is. You just have to be willing to look, to name what you can, and to listen to what others see.

We hope these prompts serve as a doorway to your next threshold—and that you walk through with intention.

Here they are once again, ready for your next Troika:

1. Explore the Unknown: Where in your work or life are you currently standing at an edge—something uncertain, emerging, or uncomfortable?
2. Disrupt Patterns: Where are you being invited to stretch beyond your facilitation comfort zone—and what’s at stake if you do?
3. Generate Dialogue: What’s a provocative question that lives at the edge of your current project or inquiry?
4. Embrace Tension: Where have you felt tension at the edge of a group, culture, or identity—and how is that informing your work today?
5. Steward Emergence: Where are you holding on to an old pattern or process, even though you’re aware something new is trying to emerge?

Walk to the edge. Look around. Listen. Something powerful lives there.

The post On the Edge of Something Powerful appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

Varsha on Linkedin

IdeaCompass on Instagram

About the Guest

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

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

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

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

Subscribe to Podcast

Engage Control The Room

Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

Transcript

Douglas:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab Community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab, and if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Varsha Prasad at IdeaCompass, where she helps entrepreneurs and enterpreneurs build customer-centric products through custom innovation workshops. Welcome to the show, Varsha.

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

True. I agree.

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

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

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

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

Varsha:

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

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration at voltagecontrol.com.

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

At a recent Facilitation Lab in Dallas, an interesting tension emerged. Some participants expressed a need to do more planning, while others realized they needed to loosen their grip and be more adaptive. It was a moment that perfectly captured the spectrum of growth in facilitation. And it pointed to something deeper than any single method, activity, or tool: the importance of competency-based practice.

At Voltage Control, we’ve seen firsthand how competencies—foundational skills that are observable, transferable, and practicable—enable facilitators to grow beyond reliance on static methods. While methods are valuable, they can become crutches. A competency-based approach, on the other hand, provides a durable structure for reflective growth, adaptive leadership, and collaborative impact.

That’s why, in our Facilitation Certification and across all our programming, we center our work around five core competencies: Purpose, Inclusive, Clarity, Crafted, and Adaptive. These competencies create a common language for facilitators to assess where they are, reflect on what’s working, and grow with intentionality. In this month’s newsletter, we’ll explore what each competency means and how they come to life—highlighting one of our favorite exercises, Nine Whys, and giving a nod to the Facilitation Superpowers tool that helps build reflective muscles.

What Are Competencies (And Why Should We Care?)

Competencies are the skill sets and behaviors that transcend any one facilitation method or context. Think of them as the core building blocks of great facilitation—portable, observable, and repeatable. While methods can be learned and deployed, competencies are practiced and honed.

The reason they matter is simple: facilitation isn’t about running perfect activities. It’s about being able to read the room, adjust in real time, and bring people along. And that kind of capacity can’t be downloaded from a template. It’s grown over time through practice, feedback, and reflection.

A competency-based approach to learning shifts the focus from “Did I use the tool right?” to “Did I show up in a way that supported the group’s purpose?” This opens the door to reflection, growth, and adaptability. Because competencies are observable, they also give us a way to assess progress—whether we’re doing that ourselves, in community with others, or within a structured certification program.

In short, competencies give us a clear, common language for growth. They allow us to get specific about what great facilitation looks like and help us avoid the trap of confusing motion with progress.

Building with Competencies—The Foundation of Our Certification

Our Facilitation Certification is designed from the ground up to help people grow through competencies. From day one, participants are introduced to five core areas that form the foundation of the program: Purpose, Inclusive, Clarity, Crafted, and Adaptive. Each one maps to a set of habits and mindsets that great facilitators practice regularly.

By anchoring in competencies, we’re able to be method-agnostic. We don’t teach one framework or approach—we help people understand the why behind the method and equip them to decide what’s best for their group and their goals. That flexibility is crucial, especially for facilitators working across diverse industries, cultures, and challenges.

Competency-based learning is also deeply practical. We create opportunities for participants to get reps in—not just running activities, but making decisions, facilitating discussions, and navigating ambiguity. And because competencies are observable, we’re able to give meaningful, grounded feedback that accelerates growth.

This approach culminates in a portfolio—a living artifact that represents a facilitator’s growth across the five competencies. But more than a final deliverable, the portfolio is a practice: a cycle of reflection, experimentation, feedback, and adjustment.

Purpose – The Compass of Great Facilitation

Of all the competencies, Purpose is first for a reason. Without a clear understanding of why we are gathering, who we’re serving, and what we hope to achieve, everything else risks going sideways. Purpose is the compass that guides every facilitation decision—from who to invite, to what methods to use, to how to handle challenges in the moment.

But purpose isn’t always obvious. We often assume it’s clear, or we avoid interrogating it because the conversation feels tedious or political. Yet when we make the time to surface it, we often uncover powerful insights—and sometimes, deep misalignments.

One of our favorite tools to do this is Nine Whys, a simple but profound activity from the Liberating Structures repertoire. The activity begins with a basic question like, “What’s the purpose of this project?” or “What drives you to do this work?” Then, working in pairs, one partner interviews the other by repeatedly asking, “Why is that important to you?” The goal is to peel back layers until you hit something essential, something felt. Often, the ninth why reveals the true motivation that has been hiding under layers of assumption.

We’ve seen this activity shift entire trajectories. In one cohort, a facilitator working in the public sector initially described her purpose as “helping people navigate civic spaces.” After a deep Nine Whys session and continued reflection through her portfolio, she reframed her purpose as “creating real community in an era of algorithmic isolation.” That clarity changed how she approached her work—and how she described its value to others.

Inclusive – Designing for Belonging and Bravery

If Purpose is the compass, Inclusion is the heartbeat. Once we’re clear on why we’re gathering, the next question is: who should be in the room to support that purpose—and how can we ensure every voice matters?

Inclusive facilitation means more than inviting a diverse group. It means creating the conditions for all participants to feel safe, seen, and heard. It also requires deliberate choices about who not to include in a given moment—what Priya Parker calls “purposeful exclusion.” This isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about being strategic in service of the group’s outcomes.

True inclusion surfaces hidden voices, supports dissent, and creates the psychological safety necessary for generative conflict. And it’s essential for navigating the messy, often emotional terrain of group work. Without it, you get artificial harmony at best—and dysfunction at worst.

Facilitators who build this competency learn to see the system: to recognize power dynamics, honor lived experience, and make space for authenticity. When inclusion is practiced well, people feel it. They open up. They step in. And real transformation becomes possible.

Clarity – Making the Invisible Visible

Clarity is about translating purpose and inclusion into concrete action. It’s what allows a group to move forward together without confusion or hesitation. And it’s often the difference between a workshop that feels powerful and one that feels chaotic.

Facilitators must bring clarity and seek it. That means designing with clear goals, crisp prompts, and focused outcomes. It also means actively listening for moments of confusion, misalignment, or hesitation—and addressing them in real time.

In our certification program, we emphasize how even small design choices can create clarity: the way you structure breakout prompts, the visuals you use to frame a discussion, the transitions between moments. Every one of these details can reinforce (or undermine) a group’s ability to make progress.

Clarity is especially vital in hybrid and high-stakes environments. The more ambiguity a group is facing, the more important it is for the facilitator to illuminate the path. That might mean naming the uncertainty, framing the choices, or simply slowing down to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Crafted – Intentionally Designing the Experience

Crafted is where preparation meets artistry. It’s the act of designing an experience—not just an agenda—that will carry a group from where they are to where they need to go. And it’s not just about structure. It’s about emotion, energy, and flow.

Facilitators who develop this competency don’t just copy/paste old decks or run the same three methods every time. They ask: what does this group need? What emotional arc will support their journey? What choices can I make in pacing, framing, and modality to help them succeed?

Being crafted also means holding your design loosely. Yes, you’ve made a plan—but you’re also ready to pivot. In fact, the best designs are the ones that make room for emergence.

This is where the craft of facilitation shines. It’s not about perfection. It’s about intention. A well-crafted experience sets the stage for insight, connection, and forward momentum—even if it doesn’t go exactly as planned.

Adaptive – The Pinnacle of Facilitator Growth

If Purpose is the foundation and Crafted is the container, Adaptive is the dance. It’s the ability to respond in the moment—to shift based on what’s needed, not just what was planned.

Adaptive facilitators don’t panic when the room goes quiet, or when conflict arises, or when someone challenges the agenda. They adjust. They trust their presence, their preparation, and their purpose.

This competency is often the most elusive. It can only be built through reps—through showing up, trying things, reflecting, and adjusting. And it’s why the other four competencies matter so much. The more grounded you are in purpose, inclusion, clarity, and craft, the more confident you’ll be when you need to flex.

At the Dallas Facilitation Lab, some participants realized they needed to let go more. Others saw they needed to plan more. Both realizations were right. Adaptive isn’t about being spontaneous for its own sake. It’s about knowing when to adapt—and how.

Reflective Growth – The Portfolio as a Practice

Growth isn’t just about doing—it’s about noticing. That’s why we anchor our certification in reflective practice. And the heart of that reflection is the portfolio.

In our program, participants build a portfolio that showcases their growth across all five competencies. But the real value isn’t the final product. It’s the process of creating it. Asking: What happened? Why did it matter? What would I do differently next time?

Some participants stick with our Miro template. Others remix it into pitch decks, websites, or storybooks. One facilitator in Hawaii built her portfolio around the metaphor of traditional irrigation—using water flow to illustrate each competency. That creativity is itself a sign of deep engagement and reflection.

For those not in the program yet, the Facilitation Superpowers template is a great starting point. It helps you reflect on where you shine, where you want to grow, and what stories you’re already telling through your work.

A Call to Practice with Purpose

Facilitation is not about running perfect exercises. It’s about showing up with intention, curiosity, and the courage to lean into uncertainty. It’s about being a mirror, a compass, and a guide—often all at once.

Competency-based growth is how we get there. It gives us a common language, a shared focus, and a structure that supports both individual reflection and collective learning.

If you’re looking for a place to start, try Nine Whys. Ask yourself, or a colleague, “Why is that important to you?”—and keep going. You might be surprised by what you find. Or explore the Facilitation Superpowers to identify your strengths and your edges.

And if you want to go deeper, join us in the Facilitation Lab or explore our Facilitation Certification. Because this work isn’t about checking a box—it’s about growing into the facilitator you’re meant to be.

The post Facilitation Is a Practice, Not a Playbook appeared first on Voltage Control.

When I think back to the moment that changed everything, it was a day-long design thinking workshop at Cisco. Our new director announced it almost casually, and I remember thinking, “Wait, what is this? A meeting that lasts a whole day?” I was curious, but skeptical. Then I walked into the room. Flip charts. Sticky notes. Music playing. Bright colors and warm welcomes. Nothing like the grey, boxy meeting rooms I was used to. That shift in space and energy felt like stepping into a different world.

We weren’t just talking about customer experience; we were creating solutions in real time. Ideas were flying. People were energized. We went from asking big questions to building real ideas together. It was the first time I felt every part of my brain switch on, both the analytical and the creative. After that session, I walked straight up to my director, Vivasvan Shastri,who we affectionately called Vivaand said, ‘I want to do more of this.’ He didn’t hesitate. Viva was the kind of leader who believed in experimentation and empowering his team. He invited me to shadow him in future workshops, and that’s where my journey as a facilitator truly began.

He told me he was facilitating these sessions himself and welcomed me to shadow him. That was the beginning. I didn’t know it was called “facilitation” at the time. I just knew I loved it. Even when I wasn’t getting paid for these sessions, even if it meant late nights or working with teams I’d never met, I said yes. For six years, I said yes again and again.

Even during the height of COVID, we found ways to recreate the magic virtually,using Webex to design breakouts and maintain connection. I kept learning and growing, and somewhere along the way, I realized this wasn’t just a hobby. This was me discovering who I really was.

What struck me most was how facilitation disrupted the rigid hierarchies I was used to in corporate life. It created a horizontal space where ideas mattered more than titles, where collaboration felt authentic. It was a world where creativity had a seat at the table, and everyone had a voice. That contrast made me realize just how powerful these spaces could be,and how much more alive I felt in them. It wasn’t just a better way to work. It was a better way to be.

Building Creative Culture in Bangalore and Beyond

Back then, I was based in Bangalore, working in Cisco’s customer experience team as part of professional services. I’d started as a network consulting engineer,. Once I got hooked on design thinking, I became one of the founding members of an internal Design Thinking Club. Whenever someone needed a session, they called us.

We ran training programs for aspiring leaders, facilitated strategy alignment workshops, and brought design thinking into the core learning path for technical architects. It started with four or five of us, and then more junior team members started joining in. We taught them how to facilitate, how to bring others into this new way of working. I had no idea facilitation could be a full career.I just knew it was something I couldn’t stop doing.

Eventually, I moved to Cisco’s Poland office. That meant starting over. Nobody was doing this work there yet, which actually became my opportunity. I introduced the idea with a simple Design Thinking 101 workshop for my team. Then I pitched it to others-the innovation lead, people who were curious. Word spread. Folks from across Cisco remembered me from my Bangalore days and reached out. Viva, my mentor, even connected me with people in the Poland office. It all came together.

We started doing innovation challenges, hackathons, even design sprints for Cisco partner companies. These weren’t giant corporations.They were small startups with raw ideas. They needed structure, speed, and support. That’s when I really fell in love with the process. Helping people go from vague ideas to tangible solutions in a matter of days? That felt like magic.

A Leap into the Sea

After three years in Poland, my husband and I decided to move to the Netherlands. I tried for over a year to make that relocation happen internally within Cisco. I did stretch assignments, shadowing programs and everything I could think of to show initiative. But the timing wasn’t right. Between the war in Ukraine and the economic downturn, things stalled.

I started to question everything. I had always identified as a “corporate person.” Was I really ready to walk away? And if I did, what would I do? I loved innovation and facilitation, but could I build a career around that? That messy middle forced me to go deep.

Through research, I discovered that facilitation is not just a skill,it’s a profession. That lit a fire. I’d been facilitating for years, but never formally trained in it. I knew I needed to invest in myself. I came across an article comparing facilitation programs. It had all the details: cost, curriculum, who it was for. That’s how I found Voltage Control.

I applied for the certification and joined the community hub. Almost immediately, Lina welcomed me. Within minutes, I was invited to a volunteer call, where I met Robin. She said, “The best way to learn is to jump in.” So I did. I asked, “Is there a community here for independent facilitators?” She said, “No, but you can start it.”

Jumping In, Building Together

That conversation with Robin was the beginning of our independent facilitator community. I reached out to Adriana, who I had met at a Facilitation Lab Practice Playground. I said, “Want to co-lead this with me?” She said yes immediately. Our energies clicked right away, and soon we were co-hosting our first huddle.

At first, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. I remember saying to Robin, “Can I really lead something like this? I just joined the community.” But she encouraged me wholeheartedly. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You’ll have all the support you need. If you’d like a co-lead, we’ll help you find one.” That kind of trust and encouragement,before I’d even proven anythingwas incredible. It made me feel like I belonged.

Adriana and I got on a call to brainstorm what this community could be. I shared my vision for a space where independent facilitators could lean on each other, share resources, and talk about the challenges that come with building a practice solo. She was equally excited, and we got aligned quickly. It was clear that we were creating something we both wished we had earlier in our journey.

When we posted about launching the community, the response was overwhelming. I think it was the most engaged post I’d seen in the hub. So many independent facilitators needed support. They needed connection. And here we were, building it together. That was the moment I realized Voltage Control wasn’t just a certification program. It was a real, living community,one that empowers you to lead even before you feel “ready.”

Confidence Through Clarity

When I first considered the certification, I hesitated. It was a big investment, and I wasn’t used to paying for training out of pocket. I reached out to Jamie and asked if I could speak with the instructors. Erik got on a call with me, and I had 30 minutes before I needed to catch a bus. But just 15 minutes into the call, I made up my mind.. He listened. He understood. He didn’t try to sell me. He simply saw me.

That same night, I enrolled.

From the very first week, it felt like going back to school. Books, readings, rich conversations. I devoured The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker and started posting weekly reflections on LinkedIn,something I never thought I’d do. The cohort was incredibly diverse, which opened my eyes to how facilitation shows up across cultures and disciplines. Conflict resolution, DEI, design thinking and so many more..

Working on my portfolio helped me clarify my purpose. What kind of clients do I want to serve? What kind of work gives me energy? The portfolio became the foundation for my website and outreach strategy. And the coaching calls with Eric were everything. He didn’t give generic advice. He helped me find my path.

Holding Space That Transforms

Since completing the certification, I’ve facilitated several projects. But one stands out.

Adriana and I hosted a Women’s Day workshop. Our goal was to create a safe space where women could share their fears, challenges, and hopes. What happened in that session moved me deeply. Women shared stories of job loss, personal injury, and two years of unemployment. They felt seen. They connected.

One woman realized she was obsessing over job hunting not because it was her real priority, but because she thought it should be. Through the session, she saw that her health and personal goals were where she wanted to focus. That insight changed everything for her. As facilitators, we carry a responsibility to hold space for transformation. That day, I felt it fully.

Designing What’s Next

Right now, I’m exploring the Foundation Sprint framework recently shared by Jake Knapp. I’m passionate about helping early-stage startups navigate ambiguity and bring ideas to life. I’ve used the sprint process for my own business and seen how clarifying it can be.

My focus is now on working with founders and product teams,people who are creating something new and need help getting out of their heads and into collaboration. I plan to partner with founder meetups and startup hubs to bring this work to more people.

If you’re considering the certification, don’t wait. Just go for it. Especially if you’re thinking about a career change, this can be your foundation. It gave me the confidence to leave corporate life and step into my role as an independent facilitator. It’s not just about learning tools,it’s about discovering your purpose and stepping into it with clarity and support.

This isn’t just a program. It’s a turning point.

The post From Routers to Rooms appeared first on Voltage Control.

At this year’s Facilitation Lab Summit, we explored the theme of Practice—not as something passive or theoretical, but as a verb. A doing. A commitment to growth. Whether you joined us in Austin or from across the globe, the summit invited all of us to sharpen our skills, embrace experimentation, and reflect on what it means to truly be in practice as facilitators.

We’re grateful to the eight incredible facilitators who led sessions across two days of hands-on learning, connection, and transformation. Each brought their unique lens to the craft of facilitation, offering tools, stories, and experiences we can carry forward in our own work. Here’s a look back at what we practiced together:

Skye Idehen-Osunde

The Safety Net: Building Credibility and Psychological Safety in Workshops

Skye opened the summit with energy and intention, guiding us through a powerful session focused on building trust and psychological safety. Through interactive exercises and honest conversation, she invited us to reflect on how we show up as facilitators and what it means to earn credibility in the spaces we hold. Skye reminded us that safety doesn’t happen by chance—it’s something we cultivate through consistency, care, and courage.

Her session offered practical techniques to design workshops that center psychological safety from the start. We explored how body language, tone, facilitation structure, and group norms can either foster or fracture trust. Most importantly, Skye reminded us that psychological safety is a moving target—something that requires continuous attention and repair. Her tools helped us feel more equipped to meet that challenge with compassion and clarity.

Alyssa Coughlin

Change Through Stories: Capturing Hearts and Aligning Minds

Alyssa took us deep into the world of storytelling as a facilitation tool for change. With warmth and clarity, she helped us understand why stories are more than just communication—they’re bridges. In any change process, people are looking for meaning, for belonging, and for their role in what’s unfolding. Alyssa showed us how compelling stories can align teams and move them forward together.

Participants explored the anatomy of a story that truly sticks: one that centers emotion, includes relatable characters, and speaks directly to the “what’s in it for me.” Using real-world examples and structured frameworks, Alyssa led us through exercises that helped us articulate narratives with clarity and resonance. By the end of the session, we had a clearer sense of how storytelling can transform resistance into connection.

Kathy Ditmore

Mapping Your Change Journey

Kathy’s session brought structure and insight to the often messy work of navigating change. Through the lens of facilitation, she unpacked how to guide teams through transitions using clarity, empathy, and smart design. We worked through frameworks that helped us identify project misalignment, engage the right stakeholders, and create shared understanding—especially in moments when change feels stuck or overwhelming.

One of the standout moments of her session was a group pre-mortem exercise that helped us uncover potential pitfalls before they derail a change effort. Kathy also shared practical strategies for rescuing projects that have gone off track, including how to uncover root causes and recalibrate purpose. Her guidance was both strategic and human-centered, reminding us that successful change is a journey—and we, as facilitators, are its guides.

Dom Michalec

Facilitating Transformation: How Small Changes Change Everything

Dom invited us to rethink how we approach transformation by zooming in on behavior design. Drawing from Stanford research and his own facilitation practice, he shared how small, specific changes can lead to profound results. Through real-life stories and a mix of theory and application, we explored how habit formation can be a powerful lever for sustained change.

Participants learned how to apply models like B=MAP (Behavior = Motivation, Ability, Prompt) to their own facilitation goals and client work. Dom’s energetic and relatable style made it easy to see how we might bring these insights into everyday practice—whether we’re helping teams adopt new behaviors or individuals cultivate lasting habits. His session left us feeling like we had gained a new superpower: the ability to shape change one small step at a time.

Dr. Karyn Edwards, PCC

The Secrets of Applying Executive Coaching to Facilitation

Dr. Karyn’s session was a masterclass in blending facilitation and coaching. She introduced us to the principles of non-directive coaching and demonstrated how these techniques can unlock greater participation and agency in group settings. By stepping back from the role of “expert,” facilitators can empower participants to discover their own insights and solutions—leading to deeper engagement and more lasting outcomes.

We experienced firsthand how asking the right kinds of questions, listening with intention, and creating reflective space can transform a group’s dynamic. Through practice and discussion, Dr. Karyn helped us develop personalized strategies for bringing coaching mindsets into our facilitation work. Her session reinforced a powerful message: that facilitation isn’t about steering—it’s about holding space for others to steer themselves.

JJ Rogers

Radical Acts of Delight

JJ reminded us that facilitation can—and should—include joy. Her session, focused on delight as a design strategy, was a breath of fresh air. We explored how small moments of surprise, humor, and care can build trust, deepen engagement, and make sessions more memorable. Through interactive exercises, she invited us to intentionally design for delight, not just as a “nice to have” but as a core component of impact.

Participants reflected on their own facilitation style and considered where delight shows up—or where it’s missing. JJ offered a toolkit of strategies that anyone can adapt, regardless of content or audience. From playful warm-ups to sensory design, her session was a reminder that joy is not frivolous—it’s transformative. And sometimes, the most radical thing we can do as facilitators is invite people to feel good while they learn.

Caterina Rodriguez

Enhancing Facilitation Through Nonverbal Communication

Caterina’s session offered a fresh look at something often overlooked in facilitation: nonverbal communication. Through movement, observation, and structured practice, we explored how our facial expressions, gestures, posture, and tone shape the way participants feel in our sessions. Caterina helped us build awareness of our own nonverbal cues and decode those of others, all while maintaining a culturally sensitive lens.

We also examined how cultural norms influence body language and how misinterpretation can impact trust and inclusion. Caterina’s practical exercises helped us fine-tune our presence, improve our “nonverbal listening,” and build deeper connection with our groups. Her message was clear: when words fall short, our bodies still speak—and as facilitators, we need to be fluent in that language too.

Elena Farden

Consent as Ceremony: Learnings from Nurturing Safe Connections in Indigenous Play Parties

Elena brought the summit to a meaningful close with a deeply reflective session that blended facilitation, culture, and intimacy. Drawing from her experience facilitating Indigenous play parties, she introduced a ceremonial approach to consent—one rooted in gratitude, sovereignty, and sacredness. Her framing helped us reimagine how we create consent-based spaces, not just in intimate contexts, but in all group settings.

Participants explored practices for nurturing trust and honoring autonomy, from how we open a session to how we invite participation. Elena’s teachings emphasized slowing down, listening deeply, and treating facilitation as a form of care. Her session reminded us that facilitation is not just about process—it’s about presence. And sometimes, the most powerful thing we can practice is reverence.

Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 was a celebration of the art of practice—a place to experiment, reflect, connect, and grow. Whether you left with a new toolkit, a powerful story, or a shift in mindset, we hope this year’s summit reminded you that facilitation is not about perfection—it’s about showing up again and again with curiosity and care.

You can read full recaps of each session on our blog. And if you’re looking to keep your practice going, join us at our weekly Facilitation Lab meetups—where the learning never stops.

The post Facilitation Lab Summit 2025 Recap appeared first on Voltage Control.