“I realized…that I could teach people [leaders in organizations] to pay attention to their own body all day and all night, but that doesn’t change the system unless that person has a motivation to look outside themselves and make a change with the people around them.” -Jade Duggan

Jade Duggan is the Strategic Counselor at Mindbody Leadership, a Communications Culture Design expert, and Wellness Coach in Holistic practices. She inspires organizations to lead in mindfulness & self-awareness as the foundation of their company culture. She is committed to establishing healthy practices in business rooted in sensory skills & the intentionality of leadership in organization structure.  From her early holistic roots of acupuncture in the family business, Jade began to recognize its connection towards social reform. Jade continues her mission towards social change in organizations through transformative leadership and unleashing the power of listening to your own body.

In this episode of Control the Room, Jade and I discuss locating your sensory skills as humans through the “light-switch hijack,” navigating facilitation through mindfulness, applying the skills of self-awareness in leadership towards organization infrastructure, and the evolution of the micro-habit practice. Listen in to hear how Jade is inspiring her wellness expertise through organizations to reestablish company structure in mindfulness & self-awareness.

Show Highlights

[0:54] Jade’s Start in the Family Business 
[6:03] Navigating Facilitation through Mindfulness 
[12:58] The Light Switch Hijack 
[18:35] The Willingness to Change Business Infrastructure 
[26:28] The Micro-Habit Practice
[34:00] Jade’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Jade’s LinkedIn
The Duggan Method
Human Wellness

About the Guest

Jade Duggan is the Strategic Counselor at Mindbody Leadership. Jade’s passion began with her family business in acupuncture as they opened the first acupuncture school in 1980. She continued its foundation towards social development and explored executive coaching in organizational principles. Jade specializes in change management, executive coaching, strategic planning, team building, human resources, and organization redesign. With a previous background as the Founder of WisdomWell, a wellness center for corporations to rediscover sensory skills, Leslie continues her wellness approach at the Duggar Method through consulting organizations to reimagine company infrastructure and empower leadership to grow in self-awareness and mindfulness. 

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control of The Room Podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power leaning in and leaning out. All the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today I’m with Jade Duggan at mind, body leadership, where she provides strategic counsel and cultural design guidance for leaders upending industries. Welcome to the show, Jade.

Jade Duggan:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Douglas:

It’s great to have you. So to start things off, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got your start in this work.

Jade Duggan:

So interestingly, it’s actually a family business. I grew up in an acupuncture and leadership graduate school. So I don’t know how much of the story you want, but essentially my parents started an acupuncture school about 1980. They were already connected in with organization development, the early stages of what would later be human resources and big part was social movements in various regards, but early on in the acupuncture clinical programs, some of the other people in the leadership world came to them and said, “You’re doing something and we want to learn how to do it.” And so they began a program that later became I think the first master’s degree in transformative leadership and social change in the US.

Douglas:

Wow. Very cool. And so what was the connection to acupuncture? How did they make that transition from acupuncture to transformative leadership?

Jade Duggan:

So interestingly, I don’t know that it’s so much of a leap. So organization development has a lot of, I’m a history person. So it actually has a lot of roots with the human potential movement and other things that actually have a lot of Eastern if you want to go appropriative maybe influences in it. And my parents came across acupuncture actually, as they were traveling the world and had had a couple of different physiological ailments and got sent to a guy in rural UK, actually who treated them. But more importantly said to my father, “Your hands are very wise. They were protecting your heart,” and the idea that the body was wise really got my dad’s brain going because he also had a mentor named Ivan Illic who is a social critic historian of the 14th century, really interested in how Europe became a colonial force in some regards via the church.

Jade Duggan:

And so interested in why do we do the things we do and how do we make up these ideas? And so since perception is something that changes with each technology we intervene with. So long story short, my dad heard when this man said to him, “Your body is really wise,” he said, “Okay, if that’s true, and that feels true to me, then almost all of Western paradigm is upside down,” so that was actually what my parents started with. They didn’t really care necessarily about the acupuncture at first, they later did because of course you draw in all of the different people. And they actually became the first boards of acupuncture in the US where conferences that they pulled together centrally around the time that Korean acupuncturist in California started being arrested for technically practicing medicine without a license.

Jade Duggan:

So I don’t know if some doctor decided that the turf was being stepped on or something, but that was when they realized they had to actually integrate with a Western medicine model to some extent in order to continue to be able to practice. So they were actually instrumental in getting a license in all of these states, so acupuncture was one thing, but actually acupuncture is a vehicle for social change and social reform thinking, thinking about the body as a wise as a wisdom teacher for life, because the other piece of that is interesting was that he said to my dad, “Your hands are protecting your heart,” and hadn’t said anything, but felt three weeks later, there was an article in the New York times that the medicine my father had been given for the century was being pulled off the market because it was causing heart attacks, but the acupuncturist hadn’t known anything about that.

Jade Duggan:

So they actually then just insisted that he teach them, but really what he was teaching them and what they realized he was teaching them was stay in your senses. Don’t make up a lot of stories, right? All of this. And it was pretty classical, a version of acupuncture that had been largely actually destroyed via communism in China. So what was often practiced by that time in China was a more modern version of medicine that was actually intended to get people back on the line, back to work very quickly. And so what he was teaching them was actually something that had been kept on the side between Japan and France. So all of this comes back to essentially in 1983, The Rouse Company is a developer coming to the acupuncture clinic because they’re all in this plan city of Columbia, Maryland, which is also an interesting socio economic, ethnic, idealistic, really a plan city to try to right some of the wrongs in the world.

Jade Duggan:

And they came and they said, “You’re doing something and it’s not really about the needles and we want you to teach it to us because if you don’t teach it to us, you’re doing the world a disservice,” and so out of that first started a program called Sophia and it was about five elements and it was about the seasons and it was still very like a hippie and a little bit inmeshed in the acupuncture world and conversations to some extent. And I still think that way actually when I practice, I think I’m teaching leaders mostly to be the needle in the company.

Douglas:

Interesting. I want to come back to the wise hands and this notion that the body is perhaps an antenna or an instrument that can help us see and feel things in ways since it’s sensory organ and it’s something that we talk about a lot in our facilitation training. So I think that’s might be a really interesting angle to explore with you given your history there. So how can leaders tap into this, this ability to use their body as an antenna or a way of sensing what’s happening?

Jade Duggan:

Well, maybe the best way to do that would be, tell me a little bit more about how your facilitation training currently works or maybe even something… I do a fair amount of facilitating myself and it’s, at some point, something will come up and you know that you have to train your facilitators to navigate that moment in a particular way. And so is there one that’s like a common one or that came up recently for you in something?

Douglas:

Well, the way introduce it is through a bit of mindfulness, just taking a moment at first, just check in, like are you feeling hot right now? Do you feel a little, is there a little sweat in your armpits or what’s your body doing right now? Like let’s check in with it. And after experiencing that moment, actually have a little debrief and discussion with them about how often do you check in with yourself before you walk into our room that you’re about to facilitate or a Zoom that you’re about to facilitate.

Douglas:

How often have you walked in feeling like your heart is racing or that it feels uncomfortable or on edge, or you already know, or in your head, you’re already convinced that everyone’s thinking in a certain way, because of some feeling or some energy you’re bringing into the room. And so tapping into that is, A, the first step. And usually the second step is asking the room or asking yourself, is this something I’m bringing in or is this something that the room is doing to me? Because if it’s something I’m bringing in, I don’t need to dump that on everyone. If it’s someone that’s already in the room, I need to A, not let it influence me. And then also find out what it is because my assumptions on what it is might be incorrect. And until I ask, I don’t know.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. So essentially you’re already doing a lot of what I’m talking about and what I often am doing is actually taking it the next few steps, which is how do I recognize? And I don’t think in terms of causality. Causality is a modern Western idea. Mutual arising is an older construct in which this happens here and this happens here, almost like entanglement, actually. And what that does is it also allows me to recognize that no one’s doing it to me and I’m not doing it to someone else. And so it gives me a little bit of space then to say, huh, I have this sensation in my body.

Jade Duggan:

And then I can say anybody else notice that they have a sensation in their body? So I can check it out without it having to be an idea that I’m making people feel a certain way, but it still honors the fact that I don’t know how much you’ve talk about resonance or when you play a violin string over here, if you’ve got a guitar that has the same or another violin nearby, that same string will re will vibrate. Do you know this is construct?

Douglas:

Oh, yeah. That’s one of my favorite innovation stories, actually. There was an innovation challenge and a chip manufacturer, potato chip was wanting to make a fat-free chip. And they were like, how do we do that? And they’re trying to get the oils out of the chip. And the winner was a violin player. They said, resonate the chip at the resonant frequency of the oil and it’ll just jump off the chip.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. Right. So you get that that happens. And most people don’t know how to tune their own resonance, right? So they don’t actually know how to play the violin that they are. I actually think it’s sometimes I talk about this as like knowing where the light switches, it’s actually the name of the first in my series of things that I teach often is finding the light switch. Because essentially, can you imagine walking in your house and it’s dark and you don’t know where any of the light switches are? But then somebody else walks in house and turns the light switches on and off all the time or somebody in another house is turning your light switches on and off all the time. It’s what it’s like living in a body where you walk into a room and suddenly somebody else can say how you should feel. Like somebody else is in charge of the light switch that is your body.

Jade Duggan:

So the first place is to just find the vocabulary you already have, right? You already have a vocabulary. Most people at this stage have been around long enough will say, “Oh yeah. I always, when I get tension, it’s always in my neck or it’s in or get stunned. My stomach feels a little uncomfortable or, right? So you’ve got a little bit of a vocabulary. And the danger I think is that we can tend to want to standardize that and say when you feel this it’s this, or when you feel this is this, but actually each of us is unique. And to honor that we can actually realize, got a whole language that our body is constantly doing. Is it this kind of a sensation your body? Or is it this kind of sensation? Like for me, the difference between I have something I just really want to say, and I have something that’s a little scary to say, but will land powerfully and effectively.

Jade Duggan:

And it’s important to say are very similar sensations in my belly, but distinct and the only way I know that is through practice a lot of rigorous practice of checking, that kind of checking in that you’re talking about. So often. So even with your facilitators, I’d probably say, “Okay, it’s one thing to check in before you go into the room to facilitate. What if you put a little reminder somewhere on your wrists or your hands or someplace where you’ll see it and it’ll interrupt your visual field 20 or 30 times a day? And every time you see it, you check in. So you’re almost preemptively just finding out more about your wiring, honestly.

Douglas:

That’s cool.

Jade Duggan:

Then when you have that, when you have that vocabulary, you actually can begin to design the music that you want to play and thus the music that you want everybody else in the room to play.

Douglas:

That’s awesome. I love commitment devices like that or like just put something in somewhere. So I remember that I want to do this thing. And specifically something that’s helping interrupt these conversations we’re having to work when we’re collaborating and we want to realize, well, how’s this impacting me or how am I even perhaps coming across right now?

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. And when I think about work, it’s not just at work, right? Diplomacy is the same practice. How can I actually see whether or not my body is tuned to something that creates possibility between us and the so-called other, or is my body tuned for, yeah. Am I still tuned to some other fear frequency or some other sensation? I don’t like the word frequency because I like to stay in the realm of phenomenology because it keeps us out of our biases to an extent.

Douglas:

So you caught me with this concept of someone else turning the lights on and off. And I wonder, even if you understand your light switches, is it still possible for someone to hijack?

Jade Duggan:

Oh yeah. All the time. I think when you’re no longer in conversation with other humans and you’re no longer able to have some sensation, we’re built for seeing and hearing each other and for this kind of resonance, we are. So I think the day that you no longer have access to that, you either turn into ether. I don’t know what happens. This is enlightenment maybe, or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s death. I don’t know. But my practice is always that I would like to be fully present even in the moment of my own death. And I don’t know when that will be. And the question is when somebody else has hijacked my system, I’m no longer fully present to my own senses, which also makes me very ineffective with whomever I’m with. So in the moment of my dying, if say one of my children is present, I’d love to be as fully present with them in that moment as I possibly could be.

Jade Duggan:

And that’s going to require me not to be hijacked by my fear or any other sense, some idea of how the world ought to go. And, just in day to day, I mean, over these past few years I had numerous clients who would turn on the news. I mean, even now. I was watching some news earlier today and I was feeling for these babies in Palestine. And I don’t want actually for anyone not to feel that. What I want is for us to have some choice in now. Where do I go? Where do I go from here? Do I get stuck with the child or do I think, okay, well, where can I make an intervention so that there might not be a next child? Because when we get stuck in that place, we are no longer effective and moving into the next step.

Jade Duggan:

So it’s almost like actually feeling it so much, but I can see what the gift is in actually or having an honestly blade switches a little, right? It’s a little facile for the analogy. Because also to me, all of those symptoms are teachers, all of them. So when somebody has hijacked my shoulders, I can guarantee you, my value system is being checked somewhere. Something that matters to me in the world is showing up missing. When I am tense, I can guarantee that.

Douglas:

Do you think there’s room or need for folks to realize how they’re impacting others, or is that the sole duty of the individual to check how the world is impacting them?

Jade Duggan:

No, I actually, for me, and this is how come I worked specifically in leadership because I did work as a clinical practitioner for a number of years predominantly with a little bit of organization stuff on the side. And one of the things that I realized though was that I could teach people to pay attention to their own body all day and all night, but that doesn’t change the system unless that person has a motivation to look outside themselves and make a change with the people around them. And so in a system where that expertise is used specifically for what it’s really needed for when I would see childhood illness, oncology or whatever, that’s a good use of me in a space with an individual who needs some skills like this.

Jade Duggan:

But other than that, a better use of me is to have this with somebody who’s making a lot of impact. And so can not only train a lot of other people to notice it, but for the sake of noticing it so that we can communicate and become more effective. And because all of these skills, just like all of the other emotions are contagious, right? So when a leader actually can keep playing with the edge of becoming self-aware in that way, what they are also doing is showing everybody else in their room how to do it, right? So think about this even politically in the US if you think about or you should think just into art and right? Like you go, “Oh, wait. It’s not a complicity or a complacency. It’s, but a willingness to keep getting present, which is different than if you have somebody who’s in power, who’s raging and both of those things are contagious.

Jade Duggan:

So yes, I think it’s important for individuals, learners, especially important for individuals in positions of power to also recognize that that requires their own humility to do. And it also changes the dynamic of how we develop power with each other and the networks that we build around it. So the system, and that’s how come I always end up with a system and it’s why I won’t work with any leaders who are not willing to do the infrastructure change as well, because this is why I used to work in corporate, right? And I would do these skills, amazing amount of money made, gotten back, whatever from these big companies.

Jade Duggan:

But in the end, I was making life better for maybe a few thousand employees at a time, which is fantastic because these skills really do ripple out very, very quickly. It was actually really fascinating and beautiful to watch. However, having thousands of employees who feel better in themselves supporting a company that doesn’t do things in the world that are what I say matter and who in the end, they’re not really going to find much purpose in that other than with each other. Yeah. I know, definitely a duty.

Douglas:

So you mentioned the importance of working with leaders that are willing to make the infrastructure changes. And I’m curious what that looks like. How does that play out? And as it related to the work that you do around business model innovation.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah, absolutely. So I find that when a business model evolves thoughtfully from the toddlerhood of a company. When they’re in high growth, early stages, if they are really thoughtful about how the business model impact looks like, then you don’t have to try to retrofit infrastructure change later. I spent a number of years looking at how do we change infrastructure. And you can do it in a division in a bigger company, but it essentially often isn’t going to change the nature of the outcomes at large for the company it can and especially with a leader who’s willing to make big infrastructure changes or at least model and play it out and let it run. But when you have a smaller business that’s growing fast and has the capacity to disrupt an industry, which is where my current focus is, that business when the model is designed really, really thoughtfully, you don’t really have to deal with infrastructure change later.

Jade Duggan:

And you also don’t really have to deal with a lot of HR issues. You don’t have to deal with, actually I like to call a restore humaning rather than human resource, because I think humans are not resources. But you preemptively change the dynamic, right? The reason you have to do so much of what consulting really is often, especially in the HR realm is we didn’t create habits early and often around how we be human together. And we didn’t create our infrastructure with that in mind. I mean, just even some of the simple stuff about scaling. I watch companies. I was actually watching this with Clubhouse as this growing really fast, but not recognizing how human nature really works.

Jade Duggan:

And so when you do that without a grounded view of how humans actually interact with one another and what you need to put in place in order to have them do that in a particular way, you end up essentially replicating the world you’ve already got, right? And most innovators are not looking to do that. And they’re actually looking to do something different to disrupt the market. But you run the risk of creating the same world when you don’t from the early stage. Actually you should really and structurally, right?

Jade Duggan:

A lot of the stuff is very structural. I think about hiring policy. When you hire somebody and you’ve got a contract and it’s got a non-compete in it, right? You’ve essentially said we own you and your ideas. It’s a very different philosophical place to start from then. Actually, nobody owns any of this. You do what you want with it. We’ll do what we want with it, right? And then you have to deal with a financial question of it. But they are intertwined and they are also very… Right. They will impact how that human gets to function in the world also going forward.

Douglas:

There’s a question about structure and infrastructure, reminds me of Conway’s law and the notion that any system built by an organization is destined to repeat the structure of the organization that built it and so if this organization created itself in toddlership and through adolescence and maybe teenagehood, when it was tweening, it created some questionable culture or built out some habits, then that’s going to influence everything they create and all they come together, how they collaborate or to use your word, which I’m falling in love with how they human together. That’s fascinating. So some of the things, like not everyone gets the luxury of just starting fresh. People have these things established. How do they start to break down some of these infrastructure issues or where do you start?

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. It really depends on the size of the company which is, I’m always looking for because I do think in systems, I’m always looking for like where’s the place for me to go in and have the most leverage. And so that really, for me right now is between three to $12 million, but in a growth stage, which is also of course when a time, when a leader is totally overwhelmed and doesn’t really want to take the time to do any of this stuff, but it’s the best time I think, structurally wise, because they can see the impact that it has on their capacity, on their team and on the world. But also they’re all close enough to each other that they know each other’s families names, right? Maybe not everybody knows everybody, but there’s still that feeling.

Jade Duggan:

And these are the sides of businesses that actually use to create local stability in economies. And now we’re creating an interesting network of non-local, but still integrated economies of right, it’s still a community and in a way that it creates, but it also, because it’s non-local can create more equity if you hire somebody. I know there’s this thing where smaller companies tend to hire somebody in the Philippines because it’s cheaper. But actually if you pay them as much as you would, somebody in the US, you actually begin to change the infrastructure of a globe. And most people at that stage are thinking of themselves as a global company. And yet they have contractors all over the world, right? Because even the structure of employment is breaking down because it’s so nationalized, right? Most people can’t even figure out companies until they’re really large.

Jade Duggan:

Can’t even, even then they don’t really want to figure out how to employ people who are living in different nations, because there’s so many different the hoops to jump through. So we’re pushing the border of a global economy in so many different ways, but a bigger company who wants to do infrastructure change has to start with one person. The higher up in the company you go, the more influence you’re going to have. So that’s how that works, but you can do it in a division where first you begin and simply the first simple thing is to create this self-awareness practice, where you have five or six skills. You teach people how to notice when they get a little upset and how to find their way back to their body and how to help each other create that feedback loop with each other.

Jade Duggan:

And then you have a few other skills that you actually keep recognizing as embodied habits, acknowledgement, making clear requests, knowing the difference, right? These are some of these are pretty, well I wish they were standard. They’re not really standard. But when you do that, then you can actually begin to look at how do you create an infrastructure change? So one of my clients, I have a few clients who are still in bigger companies, and one of them is looking at how does she change ethics in medicine and research? And it’s actually has a lot to do with her willingness to just keep finding the openings, which requires her to have a skill set, to keep finding the openings and to stop getting caught, right? A tree seeks the sun no matter what. It doesn’t get caught, right? An iron railing can be there and it’ll just keep going.

Jade Duggan:

So it requires one leader with that level of commitment to the outcome, right? And then her case, she knows that the community is not involved in the research. So first, she’s going to restructure the board, but in order to restructure the board, she’s got to get some other pieces moved around in the organization, but her commitment to doing it and to not getting stuck on her own ideas about it or what they will or won’t let her do. She just finds a way. And so that’s the way the infrastructure actually changes. And it’s also the way it’s built. It’s actually individuals decisions and capacity to keep finding a way through.

Douglas:

Yeah. You mentioned something earlier in the pre-show chat around micro habits. And that really struck a chord with me around this idea of we have to create wins that we can recognize as wins. And we’re not going to jump around that iron obstruction and the day, but if we make a little move and another little move and another little move and we get there.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. What I really love about micro habits, it’s such a funny term, but practice is what it would have been called in any ancient tradition. But the thing that I love about these little micro habits is that they give you and people, right? This is how humans work. We need the little hit of when. Oh, I did that. I managed to side step that place where I normally would have gotten upset today. And that you get that little hit of my body feels easier now when it did. It was another reason learning that vocabulary is to go, oh, you know what? I used to get tightness in my belly every time I had to figure out what we’re going to have for dinner. And I don’t have that anymore. I didn’t have that today. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Easy peasy.

Douglas:

I was also really fascinated about this notion of observation, but then using observation as a way of recognizing potential interrupt points, where then we could create little experiments and say, what if I poke at this? Like what happens? Hmm. Okay. It really reminds me of the types of strategies that they talk about in complexity theory where let’s probe and try to make sense of what’s going on, but it’s like different language, which I found fascinating.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. It’s interesting. It told you the K I’ll spend on, would come up many times constipator door who used to run the Max Planck Institute for High Energy Physics was a colleague and he used to come and teach with me and he used to carry one of these triple pendulums around, but there are a lot of dovetails, right? Complexity theory is also essentially, for me, it’s fascinating to watch science, figure out things that ancient cultures have been trying to tell us. So it’s fascinating to watch 50 year old science proof thousand year old practice. I find that even as teaching people that have micro habits of the awareness, even though I say upfront, don’t try to change anything yet. We’re just collecting. It’s just impossible not to begin to go. Actually, that’s, doesn’t feel good.

Jade Duggan:

I feel like this right now. And the power of micro habits, the power of micro habits is actually, it’s fascinating. I’ve been really paying attention to, and I don’t have real study. I’ve been looking for somebody who might want to do some study on this, but there’s some that like neural networks or mirror neurons, or I know there’s not technically mirror neurons, but that the way we do this actually works asynchronously and over technology, to the extent that a group of women in say a Facebook group who interact regularly will end up on a same similar cycle, right? So there’s a hormonal, right? And so I got really fascinated with this, that one of the first projects I did big corporate projects, which is why I asked where in Southern Virginia. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say the company name, but let’s just say was a big food production company.

Jade Duggan:

And they were buying another production company at the time. And I went to do a site visit in this tiny little town in Southern Virginia. And the town essentially was just made up of the one company who had hired me and the other company, right? The two plants and the other one that they were buying. But one was in the more of the health field and the other one was known for sugary things. And so the margins also were different. So one was making a lot of money, totally different management style, right? Totally different. And essentially, it was like, how do you get this change management, but how do you get these people who are already actually having fights in their families because of this disparity to come together. And what I ended up doing was a training for all of the plants on the east coast, just the plant managers in there sort of semi-annual gathering.

Jade Duggan:

And I taught them four or five skills. That was it. And I found out later, I mean, it was amazing. The experience was just amazing because of the way things went down and the amount of emotion in the room, the amount of, of people who had been with the company for literally 40 or 50 years and saying never been in such a powerful place because they’re tangible, practical things that they could go implement. Then we have them go do it right away. But the really powerful thing was that I found out later, a year over year, the accident rates on the plant floors went down 50% year, over year for two years, straight in every plant, except for the one plant whose manager was not in the room.

Douglas:

Wow.

Jade Duggan:

I didn’t teach anybody except for the 12 people who were in that room. But this was across 1,000, 1,500 employees, at least. Six hours.

Douglas:

I think there’s some power in the simplicity of just five things too, right?

Jade Duggan:

Yeah.

Douglas:

How do we focus on like, “Hey, here’s the essential stuff. Want to make sure you really get this? And like a, the number five is pretty magical. Disney did some research, right? It’s like, you don’t want to get more than five options because then people will get overwhelmed. So three to five is the magic territory. So I think that’s pretty smart just in its simplicity. Plus if you’re at the stuff you’re giving them is powerful, they’re going to be more likely to put that powerful stuff to use because it’s simple. They’re going to remember it. That’s amazing. Wow. Did they get the other person trained up?

Jade Duggan:

No. Because what had happened was that person was leaving to go to another company, had gotten poached I think to go to another company. And so they were halfway out the door and that’s why they didn’t show up for the training.

Douglas:

Wow. I mean with the lack of safety improvements in that factory, you’d think they would want to get after that.

Jade Duggan:

So you know what really happened? And this goes to the infrastructure question, and this commonly happened to me in these corporate situations. The leader I was originally working with is now a VP of that company. So she got promoted within a couple of months of that project because it changes all of their numbers because the self-awareness, right? Mindfulness training, all of these things, they just increase engagement, they increase effectiveness, right? You hit your quotas and you get your number, your KPIs just go out through the roof. And so people come and they say, well, what are you doing? So we were in conversation with spreading that across another segment, but then she got promoted and moved to another country.

Jade Duggan:

And now she’s VP of that. It’s a fortune 50 company and she’s the VP of it, but she has to then go to the next place. So the contact then changes, which changes the dynamic. So whoever of those managers are still in play may still be doing some level of the work, but this is also why a lot of corporate training just doesn’t work because they just don’t build and follow up. And it’s actually another one of the reasons why I prefer to work with the smaller companies where I can say, I refuse to work with you if you won’t commit to six months.

Douglas:

Yep. The coaching, the follow-through, the after touchpoints. So, so critical.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. Yeah. I want to know what’s different. I don’t want to know that you checked off the box on leadership development.

Douglas:

And also the thing is, is like, I think Ed Morrison has a really interesting analogy or model with his strategic doing framework. All of the stuff they talk about in the framework draws on this river rafting metaphor. So it’s like you have a guide, right? Like a river guide. And it’s complexity informed in the sense that like, sure they might’ve gone down the river, but the river is not going to act the same way every time you go down, right? And so I can teach you how to go down a river, but you’re not necessarily just going to go down it by yourself after sitting here, maybe go within a few drills, right? And so I think that’s the thing, like when the reason that they extended coaching works so well is because once they encounter the real live situation and they go, oh, what do I do now?

Douglas:

We get a lot of questions from folks that have attended various trainings around collaboration or design thinking or whatever it is. And they say, “I’ve reached master Excalibur level in this training or whatever, but I still don’t know how to use it. It’s like I got all this information, but when it’s time to run a meeting with the CEO, I clam up because I don’t know what to do. So if you’re not there in that moment, when they’re freaking out and clamming up, those are the real moments of transformation and learning.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. Yeah, totally. It’s like, is it really a tool or a skill if when the thing really hits the fan and that’s is also what I love about the micro habit way of doing things is what I think about is like I’m creating the conditions under which, when something really hits the fan, my body is already trained to know that I have the tool in my pocket. And so it’s like, I don’t have to practice on the big rocks. I get to practice on the little rocks, so this is so powerful, I think to have the skills be that use that way.

Douglas:

Yeah. That’s fantastic. I love it. Well, gosh. I didn’t think we would go from acupuncture to micro habits and extended coaching programs for retention, but here we are. And I think that brings us to a nice place to close. So I want to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Jade Duggan:

I’m aware of the word, use the word facilitation, and I’m aware of the word facility and both how that works as a place, right? That’s an infrastructure, sometimes a facility, but also that becoming facile with something, it means that it’s easy, right? It’s easy. It makes it easy for us. And I would have that for not just our personal lives, but for our social systems and lives to have some facility and some ease. So that’s what I’m doing.

Douglas:

Awesome. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, Jade. Thanks for joining the show.

Jade Duggan:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.

Douglas:

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

The post Episode 46: The Mindfulness Check-In appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

Why You Should Hire a Workshop Facilitator

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

1. A Non-Biased Leader

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

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

2. Greater Engagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Increased Positivity

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

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

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

Hiring a Workshop Facilitator

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

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

FAQ Section

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Meetings are important. They are the yellow brick road to achievement; vital to company success. We need them. However, I think we can all agree that a good chunk of the meetings on our calendar is time-wasters and highly frustrating. One-third of the 11 million meetings that take place in the U.S. daily are unproductive, according to Business Insider. That translates to an estimated annual loss of $37 billion in unproductive meetings. That is insanity; insanity that can be prevented.

Significantly, it does feel like there is a change happening in corporate culture today; teams are starting to focus more on how to approach meetings in a new way to save time, provide more time for heads-down work, and improve morale. It’s important to recognize that when meetings are done right, they can take your business to the next level.

What does this look like? Doing the work in the meetings, not after. This is one of our meeting mantras at Voltage Control. It redefines the common perception of meetings altogether. Instead of actionless discussions, we view meetings as collaborative group work sessions, where there is a clear purpose, inclusivity, high engagement, productivity, and tangible outcomes.

Too many meetings are spent talking about what needs to be done instead of actually doing it.

If you’ve noticed that your team or organization has fallen into bad meeting habits, here are tips to have more effective meetings.

Run Effective Meetings

1. Identify a clear purpose 

You must have an identified, tangible purpose to call your team together if you want it to be productive, something to work toward.

Last year at Control the Room, a summit we host for facilitators, the master facilitator Priya Parker spoke on the “Art of Gathering.” One of the many things I love about what she says in her book is how, before you plan anything, you have to dig deep to identify the real purpose of your meeting. Priya feels that when you have a good purpose for your gathering, it helps you make better decisions. Your purpose is your “bouncer.” It lets you know what is right and wrong for your particular event.

Next time you are planning a meeting, take more time to think about the purpose of your gathering and use that clear purpose to set your agenda, plan your activities, and outline your attendees.

2. Create an effective agenda 

When you’ve decided to hold a meeting, you need to outline your activities. 

Preparation is key to running a successful meeting. Once you have identified your meeting objective, create and share a meeting agenda of what needs to be discussed to achieve that goal. A meeting agenda serves as an outline of the essential topics to address. What will be talked through with your team and for how long? Intentionally construct the agenda–include only what is crucial and pertains to the objective–then send it to all attendees ahead of time so they know what to expect and are on the same page. Once you’re in the meeting, stick to the schedule. Respect everyone’s time; stay on track.

3. Hold a longer meeting 

While we’re all trying to cut down on our daily meetings, there may be moments when more in-depth conversations are needed, and longer meetings are necessary. In the Harvard Business Review article “A Step-by-Step Guide to Structuring Better Meetings” author Liane Davey talks about the power of what she calls strategic directions meetings: “Between two and six times per year, your leadership team needs to lift your eyes to the horizon and re-evaluate your strategy. This should be a lengthy meeting that provides ample time to meander.

So, while you’re taking the time to focus your day-to-day meetings (and getting rid of as many as you can!), don’t forget to schedule extra time for the big meetings that need to happen.

4. Bring a prototype 

Another one of our meeting mantras is “no prototype, no meeting.” That means if there is not a clear and tangible “prototype” or idea to flush out and explore, then there is no reason to have a meeting in the first place. If you want to jump-start your meeting and make it more engaging and useful, start bringing a prototype to your session.

“The reason for prototyping is experimentation — the act of creating forces you to ask questions and make choices. It also gives you something you can show to and talk about with other people.” — Tom and David Kelley

A prototype can take many forms. Some examples are a storyboard, mood board, written brief, sample pitch of an idea, or coding. The structure of a prototype sets your team up to do the work in the meeting. Your team is able to discuss it and collectively work on it DURING the meeting instead of saving the to-dos for when people return to their own work zones. 

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5. Debrief 

Allot time at the end of the meeting to debrief with the group. Remind team members of the major takeaways to help with retention and successfully transition them to pursue next steps. Summarize the discussed topics, obtained information, and the decisions or insights reached. Then, divvy out the tasks that need to be done to bring the discussed idea(s) to life, including when they must be completed by, and by whom. This is also part of doing the work in the meeting. Assign tasks to appropriate parties, communicate clear deadlines, then release everyone to tackle their responsibilities.

Good Meetings Require Good Facilitators

If your meetings lack organization, participant engagement, and diverse outcomes, expert facilitation can help. Here’s the thing: technically, anyone who runs a meeting–whether good or bad–is a facilitator. If you’re running a meeting, you’re facilitating. So how do you ensure you are facilitating meetings effectively?

A facilitator’s job is to actively guide teams through the decision-making process to reach goals and desired outcomes. They are unbiased leaders removed from emotion about office politics, which allows them to objectively lead with a clear vision of the sought-after goal. Their purpose is to ensure that a team meets its objectives, has fruitful conversations, and that the group gets what they need and want from the gathering. A good facilitator has the following qualities:

• Confidence: Able to control the room and keep participants interested and engaged.
• Humility: Knows the meeting is not about them and relishes that fact.
• Flexibility: Comfortable course-correcting during the meeting if things change, participants need something different, or the agenda needs to be amended on the fly.
• Curiosity: Interested in their team’s/client’s problems, insight, and challenges and is excited to learn more about them.

Facilitation is an art. Therefore, it is a continuous practice. That’s why we host a free weekly community facilitation practice at our Facilitation Lab, which is focused on helping facilitators hone their craft to help improve the quality of meetings. Join us to practice your facilitation approach, learn new skills, and connect with and learn from fellow facilitators. Let’s all be our best as facilitators so we can help make meetings exceptional.

Still need help building a better meeting? Bring in a professional facilitator from Voltage Control.

Voltage Control designs and facilitates innovation training, Design Sprints, and design thinking workshops. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to talk.

The post Top Tips for Running More Effective Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings people thrive in. 

Our first story is with Cam Houser, founder of Actionworks. He is a facilitator and workshop leader with over 10 years of experience. Cam is also an internationally recognized professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Universidad Rosario in Colombia. Cam’s company combines artificial intelligence with room intelligence to deliver online courses and workshops for entrepreneurs and innovators. Cam was first inspired to work with experiential entrepreneurship education 10 years ago while in grad school at the University of Texas. When he realized that universities struggle with entrepreneurship education, he founded and led an organization called 3 Day Startup. This initiative served 15,000 people in 200 countries—ranging from college students in the rainforests of Brazil to grad students at Harvard to professionals twenty years deep into a manufacturing career. These people founded thousands of companies, achieved dozens of exits, and raised over $187 million in funding. A decade later, Cam started Actionworks to expand his vision further to help universities and governments build and implement entrepreneurship education. 

Today, he spends most of his time helping established organizations, from Apple to a 100-year-old Danish paint company, adopt and implement entrepreneurial approaches to projects and problem-solving. 

I talked with Cam about his Instant Community-Building Workshop, how he designed it, what it helped to accomplish, and his approach to facilitation design. 

“I think Zoom fatigue is a lie. Zoom fatigue only happens when facilitators don’t know what they’re doing.” – Cam Houser

“The greatest Zoom session I’ve ever had”

Cam created the Instant Community-Building Workshop to help people break down walls and connect on a deeper level to work better together. He was first inspired by researcher and psychologist Arthur Aron and his ‘36 Questions That Lead To Love’ experiment. The theory behind the experiment was that taking human beings, sitting them down, and asking them 36 intimate questions would lead to a deep connection. Aron found that questions escalating in intimacy indeed gradually led to a greater closeness between people. He and his wife found that people felt very bonded after answering three sets of 12 questions at the end of their sessions. A couple in one of their cohort experiments even ended up getting married. That’s when they knew they had something really powerful.

Cam was on his own quest to use this formula to connect people in the business, specifically in the new virtual landscape. “We’re all separated over carbon or fiber optics right now…What I’ve been really interested in is how can we run community-building sessions and meetings…I’m talking about human beings becoming intimate together, closeness.” So he decided to run 36 similar questions in Zoom rooms. “I’ve been experimenting with it as far as startup founders, I’ve been doing it as a corporate training exercise, but the whole point of things is that we are disconnected, strewn about the world right now…What does it mean to get close to someone? What does it mean to transition from an acquaintance to a colleague or even getting closer to a peer?”

Cam pairs participants in Zoom breakout rooms to answer escalating questions, starting with “what would you like to have for dinner?” and ending with “what do you want to be remembered for when you die?” Vulnerability breeds connection, and Cam has the framework to prove it. He’s run this magical meeting 10 times with great success. The last time he led this workshop was in late January 2020 for 130 entrepreneurs from the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative, or YLAI–a program that supports Latin American entrepreneurs. The purpose was to build genuine, lasting relationships among members to kick off the group’s orientation. Until last year, YLAI brought over 200 entrepreneurs to the U.S. to learn how entrepreneurship works here. However, due to COVID, the meeting needed to be run virtually for the first time. Cam stepped in to connect the dispersed audience across 40 different countries in Latin America, Central America, and South America.

“The point of this was to spike them with enough dopamine and bonding and oxytocin so that all the subsequent learning they get, they’re set on a nice foundation of bonding and togetherness.”

Let’s take a closer look at Cam’s process to see what made this workshop magical. 

The Meeting

Ice-breaker

Cam began the workshop with a bonding mechanism. He told a personal story about how he accidentally insulted an audience while giving a talk in Chile. He accidentally used the wrong phrase to casually address the group, unknowingly saying “What’s up jerks” in their language. He pivoted from the story and opened up a chat storm with the workshop group, prompting them to share how they informally say hello where they’re each from. All participants hit “Enter” at the same time to create the chat storm. The waterfall effect connected the group in real-time while they are disconnected physically. 

Intro

Next, he shared the workshop agenda. He started with a congratulatory ‘welcome for showing up’, followed by a 5-min explanation of what to expect in the workshop. During this time, Cam also set the ground rules. He explained that the workshop exercise was completely voluntary and that all participants must treat each other with respect. 

Exercise

The main exercise consisted of 36 questions in 3 sets of 12. Each set of questions is allotted 15 minutes. The questions escalate in intimacy, starting more casual and elevating to more personal. For example, from “If you could have dinner with someone alive or dead, who would it be?” to “If you died right now, what would be your deepest regret?” Participants were randomly assigned breakout rooms with a partner to discuss the questions. There is a break between each set of questions where all participants were routed back to the main group to debrief. The debrief can last anywhere from 30 seconds to 30+ minutes, depending on the level of engagement. “Because this is such a charged, delightful experience, a lot of times I have to extend the debrief to be 45 minutes because that’s where the richness is coming through.” 

The pairs stayed the same throughout the exercise to establish a solid connection between the participants. 

What Makes it Different

Unlike other exercises that lose their richness when participants already know the answers, Cam’s 36 questions can be used in the same group more than once. Pairing people makes this exercise scale well. The key is to pair people with a different partner each time they do the workshop so they can share their answers with someone new. 

“What’s really powerful about this meeting is that when you do it, it’s still rich and interesting…Some people start crying in this thing.” 

Facilitation Design Approach 

I asked Cam about his overall approach to facilitation design, the tools, tips, and tricks he used to create his magical meeting. He said that he is a musician and he approaches workshop structure the same way. “A musician has a number of songs they know. Like Homer and the poets in ancient Rome, a lot of their storytelling was just stitching together different stories that are from different places. I do the same thing. So I take less of a starting from a blank slate facilitation design, and more about what’s in my repertoire that I can stitch together.” 

He stays away from a scaling approach. Cam says he’s not a fan of theorizing and over strategizing. Instead, he prefers doing the “unscalable, slow, annoying way of doing things”. “I’m just very, very big on engagement. I’m trying to keep that ratio of me talking, sage on the stage, to minimal…The people you have in that Zoom grid, they’re where the magic is and that’s what good facilitation is.”

Psychological safety is also a cornerstone of Cam’s facilitation method because he believes in leaning into discomfort. “I will sometimes bake mistakes into my presentations for them to see me make a mistake, which is code for showing some vulnerability. And they see me not get phased and not feel judged. And it sets the tone for the room that, ‘Hey, we can make mistakes here’ because vulnerability leads to better outcomes…I do lots of weird, out-there stuff just to set the frame.”

Another critical aspect of Cam’s approach is getting the audience’s attention at the very beginning of the meeting. “We don’t have time, in the modern era, to wait for people’s attention span…with facilitation design, you need to shock and awe very, very early.” That way, the audience knows the session is participatory, he says. They know not to expect a ‘normal session’, but one that is interactive and transformative. 

Cam also gets inspiration for his workshops by borrowing from other places. “When I go to a live show, I watch the performers and see if they’re doing anything interesting. I think that innovation is very much a function of outsiders. So I study the world of facilitation and I read the books a lot, but I look to other places that you wouldn’t expect as well. A lot of entertainment–I listen to a lot of rap music to see how rappers manage their audiences and see how that can apply to everything that’s going on in the facilitation world.” 

Tips & Tricks

One key to Cam’s success is creating an agenda for each meeting–a complete, structured sequence of events. However, he also approaches each meeting knowing that there’s a greater than 50% chance that he will need to divert wildly from the schedule. “I have the confidence to do that because I’ve run a lot of rooms. I’ve had rooms that were magical. I’ve had rooms that were awful. But when you do that, you have the confidence to adjust a little more.”

When running a virtual session, he is never in speaker view on Zoom. He always chooses gallery view because it serves as his analytics dashboard, allowing him to read the room. “I will adjust the agenda based on how much reaction and feedback I’m getting from the faces in the Zoom windows. And if I feel like I’m losing the audience, I will speed things up, slow things down.”

Cam also likes to incorporate gratitude attacks, his favorite facilitation play, into his meetings. This is a public acknowledgment of someone, usually on your team, to shine a light on their work. For example, Julia is one of Cam’s behind-the-scenes gals. She helps everything run smoothly during virtual workshops. A gratitude attack would look something like this: Cam announces to the entire workshop, “Hey gang, I don’t know if you can see all the work that Julia is doing, but she’s doing magic behind the scenes, making this meeting happen. So I’m going to unmute the mic and we’re all going to share our words of support, appreciation, and gratitude for her all at once.” On the count of three, everyone unmutes and simultaneously shares their appreciation for Julia. “It doesn’t matter that you can’t hear exactly what people are saying. The point is it’s a Zoom grid full of people, shouting your praises…I am incredibly proud of having come up with this idea…I love these things that transcend exchanging information in a meeting room, coming together as human beings, accomplishing amazing things.”

Tools

There are several tools Cam uses to create magic and connection in his meetings:

• Zoom–fosters connection using conversation, chats, and breakout sessions. 
• Google docs–a collaborative workspace for people to work async.
• Audio–a perk of virtual workshops is that everyone hears the volume at exactly the right tune when you share audio through Zoom. This bonds people together, as if they’re in the same room. 
• Music–another powerful way to connect people. He uses it during debriefs and at the beginning and end of workshops. Some of Cam’s most impactful workshops were due to music. “The music was as powerful or more powerful than the words I was saying.”

Facilitator Mindset

Cam attributes his success as a facilitator to focusing on the people he serves. “For me, it’s having that mindset of ‘how do I get people closer together?’ And as much as I am a businessman who gets paid by corporations to run interesting sessions, at the end of the day, I think all businesses are about people.”

His acceptance and anticipation of failure also drive him to be innovative in his facilitation approach. “I have no faith that anything I do will ever work. I expect most things to fail miserably, but because I’m used to it, it doesn’t bother me that much. And that’s the only way to find the things that are really powerful.”

The post Instant Community-Building Workshop appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was Mohamed Ali.

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

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

Watch Mohamed Ali’s talk “You’re That Audience” :

Read the Transcript

Mohamed Ali:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s wonderful to be here, and thank you to the Voltage Control team for making this feel a little homie. Pun intended.

So the concept here, the principle that I want to share, initially, is we really should pre-connect. I’m Hammad Ali, and this is a story about incidental digital facilitators.

What makes an incidental facilitator? If you’re the type of person who seeks to create harmony, build bridges, and make sure everyone is happy, you might be an incidental facilitator. If you’re frequently hosting clarifying conversations or dealing with and trying to resolve conflict, it’s either your calling or your craft. Recently, a lot more people have been thrown into the deep end of digital facilitation with mixed results.

Over the past five years, I’ve been deliberately working towards building a remote friendly career, specifically in something called service design. I’ve had the chance to build and lead workshops across time zones which allowed me to exercise my digital facilitation muscle. And like you, I’ve noticed the challenges people have with the increasingly digital components of their workshops. Do you remember when using Slido and polling apps was a fun, engaging distraction, and now we’re in an environment where it’s necessary to juggle having different types of hosts for a dominantly digital workshop.

What gives me hope is that the pain shared by facilitators and participants continues to be independent of location, digital or physical. Do any of these sound familiar when you’re the audience, and feel free to snap your fingers as I [inaudible 00:02:08] them out. A sense that you’re wasting each other’s time, a nagging feeling of having different expectations, zero impact or no takeaways, and the free food no longer obliging you to review the workshop positively.

Let me take you through a story of what this might look like using a story arc. So it’ll be in three acts, and our protagonist is Abdullah. In the first act, Abdullah is the resident fixer and incidental facilitator in the company. He’s told no one is traveling and to re-think how to put together the company town hall that was being planned months in advance. He’d been tapped to facilitate things before and is told that it now needs to be a digital extravaganza. He talks to the heads of departments, and they make it clear this needs to be special.

The process and responsibilities for delivering the event is opaque. And Abdullah starts hearing about promises made of bells and whistles and fancy set ups. “It’ll be like you’re there,” but no one knows what the outcome is, including Abdullah.

In the second act, the day of the event arrives. There are mercifully minimal amounts of technical glitches. There’s music, icebreakers, monologues by someone important, but for all intents and purposes, it seems successful so far. However, questions by attendees are being ignored. And as people get more frustrated, we arrive at the climax. Abdullah notices people turn off videos during breakout rooms and then sees them just exit in the second round of breakout rooms. It’s the dreaded death by breakout room. That is where we are now. So what do you think happens next?

In the third act, Abdullah goes into damage control. He’s blamed, loses his job, becomes poor, eventually dies.

So what happened? Where was the gap? There’s definitely a gap between the intention, facilitate the event digitally, and the outcome, people feeling unheard and leaving. I think core and central to that is understanding that one of our roles as a facilitator is not to deliver a workshop, but to identify and close a gap that exists by listening.

So how can Abdullah aim to listen better by pre-connecting, the principle I shared earlier. Well, he could have interviewed the audience with the intention of building a stakeholder map to plot and understand the organizational challenges. He could use this map to continue connecting with other attendees to build on what he learns in these interviews. And through these conversations or surveys, you could use surveys as well, he could build a shared space that contains synthesized insights. This would have allowed Abdullah to better understand and notice similarities between the intended audience, their story arcs, and maybe could have figured out a way to help the participants feel both seen and heard.

His story is connected to another principle, the need to create space for everyone to be seen and heard. You’ve heard me say that more than once now. So I believe that no matter how many Zoom calls we have, we won’t be able to have everyone feel heard. Instead, I opt for what I like to call a slow-burn workshop. So here’s a scenario to clarify what I’m sharing.

A nonprofit leadership organization wants to form a board to offer ongoing direction, programming, and assistance to board members, but they don’t want to do it in the old world command and control model. The people participating in this initiative have all been a part of this organization at various times over the last five years. They really love it. They understand that they’re building something new, that it’s untested, and it’s on a voluntary basis. They can’t show up to every call. They all have work and life obligations. But they’re really invested in this goal and would like to keep things moving asynchronously or not necessarily being there at the same time. They’ve tried Google Docs with meeting minutes, recording past video calls, but there was no way to pick up where they left off.

Through our interviews with them, we were exposed to beautiful… sorry, metaphors such as it feels like there are invisible rocks in our path, so how might we see these invisible rocks together? An insight that arose from the conversation was that it’s not a bunch of workshops. It’s a journey. So we re-oriented and approached it as an invitation for people to go on a journey. They shared their StrengthsFinder profile which gives people a way to describe what they naturally do best and what they might need help with. And this is important because these people are working across industries, and we needed a shared language.

Another thing we did was we had people complete forms that had them reflect on their intentions. What was in it for them? What were their goals? Why did they need this to succeed? We asked them to share images that represented them, the things that they care about, their aspirations, and the answer prompts about themselves, similar to a user manual, about their quirks and how they prefer to relate to others.

This was all capped by an invitation to opt into connecting with others on a one-to-one get to know you call. And now, every time there’s a call, it’s not the same faces, but they all share in the progress because it’s all tracked in one location. And so this is an example of the location.

In the second scenario, it’s a consultancy with corporate problem-solving offerings. It’s building a cohort=based learning program to support internal Mavericks or entrepreneurs. One of their challenges was how to get people hooked in and caring for not only the content, but for the people who they’ll be meeting. The content offering is strong in its own right. The power of learning with and from people facing similar challenges is what makes a long-term difference in how people learn and apply their learning.

Three days prior to the event, we created and shared a one minute video clip inviting people to respond to prompts via Voice Note for two reasons. But first, I’m going to share the prompts. The prompts we sent went like this:

How will they prepare their environment for the upcoming event? And we asked them to also reiterate, what is it that made them curious to attend and to share what it is they wish to resolve by attending this space.

So the responses we got were powerful, and the reason being is that the Voice Notes work because it’s not as anxiety-inducing as a video recording. The prompt work because we could meet them where they are. And what this allows us to do is get a sense for who is showing up way in advance. And if we’re able to sensitize people to this approach as being a part of the process, then what we’re getting is a lot of information on what seems to be top of mind for them. Are their challenges pervasive? Are they just the flavor of the month? And you can do two things with this information. I mean, a lot, but I’ll focus on two things.

You can remove identifying information, synthesize the themes on a whiteboard, and give people access to it well in advance. Or, if you have a strong sense for the people, from the responses and from their voices, you can invite them into a group like a Signal or a WhatsApp group and encourage them to share the responses to their prompts with others.

In preparation for this talk, I tried to do this using a Google Form. If you’re coming to the workshop, please complete the form. And the theme that kept arising was connection or feeling connected. It’s something we constantly seek. And what you do by pre-connecting is you create the conditions for people to feel that they’re being seen and heard, for them to feel that they’re connected. And I think that’s what listening is all about when it’s done well.

Thank you.

The post You’re That Audience appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was Rachel Ben Hamou.

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

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

Watch Rachel Ben Hamou’s talk “Onboarding Without Hoarding” :

Read the Transcript

Rachel Ben Hamou:

Hello everyone and happy Thursday. I hope you’re doing well and really enjoying the conference. It’s time to celebrate. We’re coming towards the end. And so yeah, welcome to Onboarding Without Hoarding. It’s such an honor to be on the agenda with so many amazing people and I’ve just been learning so much. I’m Rachel, I’m one of the co-founders of PeopleStorming and my partner Andre is also here. So he’ll be lurking in the chat during the talk. At PeopleStorming, we’re fascinated by the way that progress is made in the modern work environment. We obsess about communication, collaboration and culture and our aim is kind of for people to close those gaps and those areas so that they can deliver on their mission in a sustainable way.

So as facilitators, we have to be really adaptable in our engagements because they can vary a lot. And this means having both a comprehensive toolkit and also confidence in our ability to improvise. Now since we’ve given quite a few talks about applied and organizational improv in the past, we thought for control of the room, we’d focus more on the toolkit building because this is foundational stuff that I think is valuable for all of us to revisit. So even before the pandemic, the internet was filled with team building exercises and decision-making methodologies and reflection questions and all of that stuff.

And now since the pandemic has forced even more of us online, a lot more materials have popped up. And as with anything that you search for online, you’ll find the web as both a treasure trove of goodies and simultaneously, there are a lot of poorly thought out or ill-fitting ideas. So the question is how do you sift through all of that noise to find activities that will help you facilitate well? Our talk and our workshop today will aim to answer this question with your help and we’ll focus heavily on the development and the use of helpful sifting criteria.

So I thought I’d share a little bit more context on the idea for the talk and the workshop. It started with a funny conversation that we were having about the different ways people shop at the grocery store. So when my partner shops, he’s laser-focused on getting just the items on the shopping list, the rest of the store just might as well not exist. It’s kind of a blur or stuff that he goes past on the way to the things that he wants. And whereas I on the other hand tend to take more time. So I look at alternative brands, I’m looking for inspiration, for new meal ideas, ways to use my new crockpot. I also take a little time to process special offers and coupons just to make sure that I understand that I’m getting good value.

So you could imagine shopping with the two of us is kind of an interesting experience. So in other words very broadly, he tends to hunt and I tend to gather. And both approaches have their upsides and their downsides. We’ve also noticed these tendencies when we work together as well. I’m good at gathering the details and lots of sources and building an open creative space for our projects. And he tends to be the one that leans deeper into analysis and the highly focused portions of all of that.

Now although I don’t have access to the chat today, Andre does and so when I’m in the audience for talks like this, I always find I can learn a lot from other attendees. So if I ask a question today, pop your answer in the chat box and we’ll see what insights can be generated. So my first question then is regarding hunting versus gathering. What’s your style and how does it change from one situation to another? And I’m just going to pause for maybe 30 seconds whilst you share your thoughts on that.

               (silence)

 So how does all this relate to the talk and the workshop? Well, we realized that there is something approaching optimal shopping behavior for facilitators. Not for tomatoes and laundry liquid, but more for the exercises and the activities and tools. So our premise is this. You need to be somewhat adventurous in exploring the tools that will increase your value as a facilitator. If you play it safe, you may only have value to a limited set of audiences and that value might diminish over time. Conversely, if you constantly experiment with whatever’s shiny, you may not be able to make commitments to clients that they can rely on. So you may compromise your ability to have predictable value.

So if that premise is correct, then we need to be deliberate about two things. How do we assess the potential value of new activities and tools for all the different definitions of value that matter to us and our clients and how much time and energy do we spend on finding, assessing and incorporating those new tools and activities? So if you come to our workshop today, those are the fundamental things that we’ll be exploring together. Specifically, you’ll be building up set of criteria that you can use to compare the relative value of new activities. And everyone’s list will look different because everyone’s experience and skills and domains and clients are all different.

We will also want to help you build muscle around using that criteria so you can assess new ideas rapidly and confidently. So we also have an activity hunt as part of the workshop. Then we’ve included some time for self reflection and coaching so you can think about when and how you incorporate new ideas. And we’re also going to help you harness that wisdom of the group from each other with some Troika Consulting, for those of you who know what that is and those of you who don’t, will have to come along and find out. So speaking of ideas, it’s useful to understand how new ideas will fit into our existing mental structures.

So when we boil down some of the tools, exercises, processes and activities to their essence, we can see that they are a method of enabling the group to do a particular thing. We might call them phases at the meta level. So for example, let’s just consider a sort of classic session structure. So you start with a game or activity to get people’s heads in the room and their spirits high, you energize. Then you use a method to carve the group into smaller teams on the fly, you scatter. That’s what we call it. And those teams then need a way to discuss and share their ideas, you ideate. Then you give them a way to make sure that they can record their inclusions, you capture. And then the teams reconvene and have a way to share and coalesce their ideas, you gather. And then there’s a period to process what they’ve heard, you reflect and so forth.

Now you will undoubtedly have your own set of phases that may or may not look like ours and for the kinds of activities that you do and a sense for when you’ve used them in the session. So that’s phases. Now within those phases, you have a myriad of choice for the exact exercise or tool that you’ll use. So it helps if we can have a way to carve up the choices and this is something we’ll explore more deeply in the workshop. So I want you to give you a taster of that right now. We often ask ourselves whether we’ve squeezed as much value as possible out of the activity choices on the basis that each choice meets the goal that we’ve defined. So it’s either reliable, fresh or efficient.

And when something is reliable, it consistently works well and almost always gets a great result. And so you might call these things old faithful. When an activity is fresh, it means we’re trying something that almost nobody in the group has done before so that they have a fun shared experience or challenge. And it opens up their brain and generates energy. It’s like the workshop equivalent of extreme mining. And then the last one is efficient. When an exercise is efficient, it will tend to break down the boundary between the phases that we just talked about, energize, ideate, capture and get multiple things done at once like riding a bike whilst talking on the phone and eating pizza, which I don’t recommend.

When we build workshops, we typically incorporate activities that meet these goals within one session. And this allows us to deliver reliably and efficiently on the purpose of the session whilst also throwing in a little surprise and delight something to make the session more memorable. And typically, we’ll do the surprise and delight through something playful. I won’t begin to tell you how much I value play as a tool because this is meant to be a lightning talk and I would talk all day. But prior to running PeopleStorming, I had a company called AgileImprov, where we provided organizational improv training to companies.

And so spending nearly a decade in the improv world means I have collected and developed just a wealth of games and resources to draw upon, particularly when it comes to energizes. So to illustrate those goals that we just talked about in practice, let’s take a phase from the previous six I listed and I’ll go with energizes and explore the three goals through that lens. So first off is reliable and energizer that we can rely on to warm up a group, whether it’s virtually or in person is a Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament and feel free to put in the chat, whether you’ve tried that or not and if it’s one of your favorites.

It’s a reliable game because essentially everyone seems to know how to play it. I haven’t actually met anyone so far who’s never played rock paper scissors. It has a lot of energy because it’s played so that the winner from each pair goes on to play the winner from another pair and, and this is the crucial part, all of the losers up to that point become the winners biggest fan. So ultimately you end up with two people playing around a rock paper scissors with roughly 1/2 the group cheering on each one. And yeah, we’ve never seen it fail to energize a group of almost any size.

The second goal is freshness and you can take this to mean new creative, innovative, your own interpretation. So an example of an energizer that is fresh to many groups that we work with is the Danish Clapping game. Say yes in the chat if you’ve played that. The possible exception obviously is if the group has Danish people in it because it actually does originate from Denmark. So I was going to say from Danish, that makes no sense. So like rock paper scissors, this game also runs in pairs facing each other and it works like this. So you both slack your thighs in unison and then you do one of three moves at random. You go left, right or up.

And here’s where it gets interesting. If your moves match, let’s say we both choose up, after next thigh slap, we high 10 each other instead of doing the left, right or up. Then we go back to the normal cycle starting with the thigh slap. So basically the high 10 just replaces one of the three standard choices during that beat. And if that made no sense to you, just check out the video that’s on the MURAL. It’s so much easier to understand through a two person demonstration. So if you haven’t tried it before, definitely give it a go. Find a friend who’s COVID free or a family member, be safe and obviously when we’re back in the real world again, see whether your groups enjoy this.

 And so we always have so much fun playing this, particularly because the speed keeps increasing. And speaking of going faster, what about the third approach? Picking something for efficiency sake. So let me tell you about a game called Enemy-Protector created by the Brazilian theater practitioner, Augusto Boal and feel free again, put in the chat if you’ve played that. In this game, everyone starts by standing in a clear space that they can move around in. And each person is secretly going to choose one enemy and one protector. When the host shouts go, everyone has to obey three simple rules. One, keep moving, two, keep the protector between you and your enemy because they’re your shield and three try very hard not to kill or injure anyone which in practice means just keeping things to a brisk walk, no leaping or jumping.

Chaos rapidly ensues and people usually start laughing inside of 10 seconds. People also focus so much on the game that they become less worried about things like personal space, which is something we’re all hyper aware of right now. That’s why this is a great energizer in non COVID times. So why am I talking about this game in relation to efficiency? Well, we realized one day that not only is this game enormously energizing, but by its nature, it randomizes people’s position in the room. So instead of people standing with their friend or standing with their team, you can have them play this game, freeze people at some point in the game, then carve out clusters of a certain size. And so the game becomes an energizer and a scatterer. And this can save time and it also makes for a more fluid transition.

So from that energize step to that first team activity. So their energy is high as they get started. And it’s like a two for the price of one. So that’s exactly the kind of thing that we have in mind when we’re trying to create efficiency in our gatherings. So with that quick tour under our belt. So I’d like to invite you to just spend 30 seconds thinking about an exercise that you currently like to facilitate that satisfies each of those three goals that we’ve talked about, something reliable, something fresh and something efficient. And so put those in the chat and let us know which approach each one signifies. Andre’s there now and I’ll check it out after I’ve finished this talk. Something reliable, something fresh and something efficient that you like to do.

So we’ve had a little bit of time here to talk about phases. So energize, scatter, gather, ideate and goals that we can use to subdivide those phases, reliable, fresh, efficient. And these are just a couple of the lenses that we can use to analyze and choose from our collection of potential activities when we’re designing sessions. And speaking of design sessions, in our workshop, we’ll be going deeper on the methods and the criteria to select the exercises. So you’ll be sourcing lots of new ideas and then you’ll be collaborating with the other participants. To kickstart your thinking, we have some questions for you to consider. These are also on the MURAL board as prompts.

 So the first one is where do you find activities, tools, and exercises? So we’re regularly watching Twitter feeds participating in Slack and Facebook groups, reading books and newsletters and chatting with other facilitators like you. And we particularly follow certain keywords on Twitter and Slack like workshops facilitation, leadership development, agile training and we’re continuously building on our own experiences to create new activities or ways of doing some of those things like the Enemy-Protector one that I mentioned.

So the second question is how do you know a good, useful or valuable activity when you see it? Well, we already mentioned our phase and goal lenses. There are so many others that you can use. Do you have any criteria that you use instinctively? How do logistics like group size and available technology affect your choices? Does activity selection vary by how playful your clients are? And then the last question is where or how do you gather together or store your activities?

We’ve had to scale to hundreds of activities, tools and processes and we’ve ended up building a specialized database with classifications that worked particularly well for us. Maybe you have a Google Doc or an Evernote, whatever you use, you need to be able to quickly access the right tool for the job so that you don’t get option overload or decision fatigue. Again, these preliminary questions and some other useful links are on the conference MURAL. So feel free to check that out.

And we’re reaching the end of the talk now. So if you have questions, I’m just going to tell you how to get in touch with us in case you can’t make it to our workshop. There are so many good ones to choose from. We would love for you to join our twice a month community newsletter and we’ll send you five coaching and facilitation tools this week if you do that. We post our ideas and our thoughts and some coaching questions daily on LinkedIn. And so we’d love to connect with you there. Thank you so much for coming along today. This was awesome.

The post Onboarding Without Hoarding appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was Elena Astilleros.

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

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

Watch Elena Astilleros’s talk “$h*t to Hit!! Creating Meetings Participants Love” :

Read the Transcript

Elena Astilleros:

Hello hello, everybody. Thank you for joining and welcome to Shit to Hit. Creating meetings participant love. So let’s take this time, these next 18 minutes and learn how to turn around dead meetings into something your participants can come into and feel revived, to be rejuvenated and get the results they want. Sound good?

Okay. Before I move on though, I want to share with you the story behind this erasy title, because I don’t sit around thinking titles like these, but I had been working with a client and they had a 50 person status meeting that had not been facilitated. So if you put yourselves in the shoes of those participants, you might have an idea of what they were facing. It was not good. It was not pretty. And after working with me for a while, my client came in and she’s like, “Oh, Lena. Our meeting really turned around. You turned our meeting around from shit to hit. I loved our meeting today and I want it to continue that way.”

And in honor of that client and in honor of all the people in the world, sitting through dead meetings, I titled this Shit to Hit. So let’s go on a journey and let’s talk about the three steps to make us hit meeting. And now, before I start, I want you to know that these three steps that I’m going to present can actually be presentations in and of themselves. They involve learning a set of tools, but for our purposes here, I’m going to talk about all three together at a shallower level, just to give you enough information and I’ll share some of the materials that I referenced and I used so that you can go in and learn it yourself as well. So those three steps are know yourself, know your team and know your outcome.

Now first know yourself. When I was coming together with how do I make this presentation pop? How do I make this work? I have a whole set of facilitation skills and tools that I use. And I bring out and I’ve been studying flow for several years now. So how do I bring this to you so that you can get the most out of your time? And it was important to me to do something for you because do something that would easily make you have a killer session with the tools at present. Because when I see someone like John Cutler, or Lisa Atkins, and I’m hearing them speak and I learned something and I can immediately apply it and share, sometimes I’m in a virtual meeting with them and I’m like, our company’s the product. It’s not the team. It’s not the product. It’s the company.

I feel really alive and excited. And I really wanted to provide that with you, but everything I was trying, all of the steps just seemed so inauthentic. They weren’t working. And I was telling my best friend and how do… what’s going on here? What can I do to make it work? And she told me, she’s like Alaina, it’s you, you could give any set of tools. And it would only be half effective because it’s you who brings the magic. It’s you who knows what to do with them. And I realized, well, it’s not just me. It’s any skilled facilitator, just like you, who are sitting here to learn, you bring the magic. So how do you take a set of tools and bring them to life so that your meeting can come to life and get the results that everybody wants?

Well, you’ve got to know yourself and when you know yourself, there’s something cool that happens. You see that the team won’t go any further than you can. So if I’ve never felt quaking boots and worried that I’m going to say something and worried if I should say or not say it or what, but it’s so strong that I say it anyways and it totally shifts the room. That’s courage. If I’ve never felt that before, I can’t take you on a journey to such courage, to that level of fear and overcoming that fear. So you must be a student of yourself because they cannot go any further than you. The reason we can see a Brene Brown presentation and feel moved to our core is because that presenter has worked with vulnerability so long, and she’s gone to uncharted waters so long that we can feel it and we could build there too, she opens it up.

And just like her as a performer, I live and hunt near Hollywood. So Hollywood performers know that your job as a performer, and that’s what we are as facilitators, when we’re taking individuals through a journey and taking them to a new places, we are performing because we are here to change the molecules in the room. You want to go from Shit to Hit. You’ve got to change dead molecules and make them come alive. And you can only do that if you know yourself and you’ve taken yourself there first.

So some ways to make yourself know yourself is to go back and do that humble inquiry of what makes you feel alive. What makes your eyes dance? What did it feel like seeing fireworks for the first time in your life? What brings that spark or what was it that gave you the courage to do those crazy things that you’ve done in the past, or to be vulnerable or to listen? Know yourself so that way you can bring it forward because there’s one thing that old clockmakers knew, and this is going to sound random, but I’m going to bring it back together. Don’t worry. Old clock makers knew this one thing. And it was that if you put a bunch of clocks in the room against a wall, what would immediately happen is that the clocks would start synchronizing to one another. Cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck, cluck.

And if you put something really big, like a grandfather clock in the middle of the room of that wall, everything sinks to the big pendulum. There’s a word for that. It’s called coherence. And I learned about coherence from Dr. Alan Watkins, who took the UK rowing team from unremarkable to Olympic medalists. And he says that coherence is that state where elements are in harmony with one another. And it’s important for us to know this because human beings have a pendulum and it’s our heart. And I know it sounds so woman fuzzy to say it, but actually the pure chemical of our heart, our hearts rowing off electromagnetic energy every second. And it comes alive through our voice. It comes alive through our body stance. It comes to life through what we’re seeing. And if you can control that pendulum and know that you are the big pendulum in the room for everyone to sync up with, then you can use that power to take folks on a journey.

And you need to know this because sometimes when you’re facilitating, you need to adjust your style. I’ll tell you a story. When we came back from winter break, I had spent the whole winter break indulging in holiday cookies. I was really happy. I was indoors, I could bake. There was just too many cookies. I enjoyed them. And I come into a meeting and I’m facing two VPs. One who was almost finished with the whole 30, which is a completely clean meal plan and another who has spent the whole break doing meditation and yoga and spas. So we’re in that meeting and it’s slipping from me. There’s nothing I can do to facilitate and what’s happening. It’s because my heart was so full of sugar and carbs. I couldn’t be the strongest heart in the room. So I had to adjust my style. I actually had to stand up.

So that way I could take control of the room because otherwise I would’ve been like, Oh, please try and to get in there. And we all know how that feels. It’s miserable to try to get into a room where you’re not the biggest pendulum in the room. So you do this because you’re actually going to take your team on a journey. And really when folks are coming into a meeting, they want to come out with an outcome that they couldn’t have done by themselves, that they couldn’t have gotten to otherwise without being in that session. And what you want to trigger through yourself is something called the flow state. And I’m going to say slow is that one state where you’re in the pocket, you’re in the zone and ideas come rushing to you. The best creative answers just emerged from your body. You just make connections that you couldn’t have made.

And that cycle is actually well-documented, well-researched for the last 50 years. And it has four stages. It doesn’t just magically happen although it feels like it. There’s actually things that are happening in our bodies. And the first stage is struggle. To get us to that flow state, we have to struggle. We have to have something that’s a little bit challenging. Not so challenging that it’s going to cause us anxiety, but it has to be challenging so that we can build up our cortisol and norepinephrine so we can have a charge against it because it’s a challenge. So it could bring us up. And at some point, the science shows that at some point you’re working on this challenge of struggling. It’s like, “I’m never going to get it.” And then you have this aha moment. You make a realization and that realization moves you into the second phase of the flow cycle.

And that is your release phase. That’s when nitric oxide, not nitrous oxide, that’s a whole different experience. But that’s when nitrous oxide floods your system and allows that cortisol to fade away and gets you set up to go into the next stage, which is the juice stage. And that’s called flow. And that flow stage is where you’re getting this cocktail really good, feel good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins. And this one chemical called anandamide. And that’s called your bliss chemical. That’s why when you’re in the zone, it feels so good because your body’s actually producing bliss. It’s producing the chemicals and this stage, your brainwaves, the brainwaves that are flowing are Beta and Gamma brainwaves. And they are so expensive. You are doing such high computation at this stage that it turns off parts of your brain so that you can do this computation.

And the parts of the brain that it sends off is your frontal lobe and not all the frontal lobe, but it takes away your sense of self, your sense of time so that way you could do these computations. And that’s why this magic happens in that phase. But what’s happening is that it’s actually very expensive for your body to be in flow. That’s why we can’t always be in it. That’s why it turns off those parts of your brain. And we need to recover. We need to down-regulate and recover after flow. And that’s going to allow our brain, our nervous system to reset our brain, to just calm down and get ready for another flow cycle. But if you’re in this room, my guess is you’re not very good at self care and recovery, because there’s so much like drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive.

That’s why you’re here, right? You want to get better. And that’s my guess. I may be wrong, but I’m guessing you want to get better. And we don’t give ourselves a chance to recover, but that’s so important for us to get back in flow and for us to expend more time in the flow. I’m here, I’m going to tell you something and it’s going to be really sad. It was really sad for me, but I’m going to tell you something that will make it easier for you to get in flow. And if you’re in flow, you can lead your teams in flow. And that’s this, TV is not recovery. Television viewing is actually high Gamma, which means your body is in flow when you’re watching television. It feels so good to watch a good show, but your body is expending a lot of energy.

That’s why when you Netflix binge a whole season of Cobra Kai, you feel so exhausted afterwards. It’s because even if your body’s not working, your brain is working. So what are some ways of recovery? Well, ways of recovery, you can look at massage, you can take an Epsom salt bath, meditation, uplifting conversation, and queen bee of them all is a walk in nature. That will help down-regulate your system and get back to normal and recover from the hangover flow. So now we covered that, know yourself. We’re going to move a little bit faster because we’re going to talk about knowing your team. That’s the second step. Now in my book, invisible leader, I write about how to interview your team before big session. So that way you know what’s alive on the team. You have to get a pulse. I’m not going to repeat any of those here.

You could go get my book. It’s under 20 bucks. It’ll give you some sample questions. But what I am going to do is I’m going to share with you some of the quotes that I’ve seen, and I want you to listen to this because these are not atypical. The first one is, “I feel we are holding off the Fort until the Calvary arrives. Now the cavalry is forming and coming to our aid, I would like the confidence that the Calvary turns up with our guns and their horses working, and they don’t show up late.” Or how about, “I’m struggling with believing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.” And then this one, “The team is really working, but stakeholders don’t see it that way, putting in your all, and it’s not good enough? The team is discouraged.” Now, the reason I’m sharing this with you is that these are just a sampling of what I get in my interviews.

And it goes in line with the fact that 85% of the workforce is disengaged worldwide. And it’s only going up that disengagement with COVID. I don’t know what the latest numbers are. Knowing what your team’s at gives you the starting line. And it also humbles you because if you think that your team feeling discouraged, you can go in and flip a meeting like that, that’s actually disrespectful, and you want to meet them where they’re at. You have to know where they’re at. Because the next step is know your outcome. Knowing your outcome allows you to have you finish line. And Steven Kotler, who a lot of this flow research is his. He says, “Our brain is really resourceful. If we know the starting line and we know the end, the brain will fill in the rest.”

Well, one thing that’s important is that flow follows focus. And as a facilitator, you’re helping the team stay focused. You don’t know that. They’re going to go on rabbit holes. They’re going to want to do something else, but you keep them in focus. You allow them to struggle in that focus and something that’s challenging, and you bring them back so that they, as a group, will go through that flow the cycle.

Because once you hit your outcome, you want to celebrate that win. There is so much good in celebration. And I don’t think I need to stress that part, but when you celebrate your win, you’re actually, again, releasing dopamine. You’re creating the chemicals that people go pay money on illegal drugs for. So let them celebrate the win with you. And not only that, there’s this halo effect. When you teach teams to celebrate is that they see you and you become the celebration person in it. It’s slightly manipulative, but that’s what life is. We’re all manipulators for whatever reason. But then they see you when they go back into that state. And it’s a good thing. It’s good for them to go into the state of celebration to know, I’ve had teams where I had to pull out things that they accomplished because three months ago, they were facing problems that they had spent years with.

And after three months, they resolved the problem, but it was like no big deal because all of a sudden they’re in a new place and they have new challenges. So I have to show them, this is where you went and in showing them, they can actually have that celebration and remember what they’ve done. It allows them to recover from all that hard work. So now I said, I wanted a full proof set of steps. I don’t quite have that, but what I am going to give you at the end of this deck is the set of flow triggers. These were created by me, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Steve Kotler and Sawyer help you get better meetings. Thank you.

The post $h*t to Hit!! Creating Meetings Participants Love appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was Joshua Davies.

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

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

Watch Joshua Davies’s talk “Moving Minds: Exploring Conversation Maps in Facilitation” :

Read the Transcript

Joshua Davies:

All right. Thank you very much, Kara. And I should say, hello from beautiful, very, very sunny, 2:00 AM Hong Kong. So, a little bit later in the day.

So, let’s just jump right into the deep end, right from the start. I’m going to toss you into a conversation, which you’ll see on the screen now, between Robert and John. And this is a debate about a project management role. So, it’s a project, they both know about it. And this is a conversation. It’s a real conversation. It’s a debate between the project management. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, except for Robert, his name, that’s my colleague, he insisted I keep it in place, come what may

So, we’re a few minutes into this conversation about two, three minutes in. And the debate is going. The discussion is going on. And just take a quick little look at that. I’m going to pause ever so slightly. Just take a quick little moment and see if you noticed any patterns of their interaction.

And what I’d really like you to be focusing on here, is how do they pass the ball to each other? What do they do with what they are given? So, when Robert finishes his sentence, and in this case, there’s no interruptions happening, they are actually waiting for the other person to finish, he’s tossing the ball to John. And John has a couple of different things he can do to it. He can completely ignore the ball, just let it fall to the floor and go to what he wants to say. He can take that ball go, “Oh, I understand you.” Or at least pretend to understand, drop it and go back to what he wants to say. Or he can in some way, return the ball, asking questions, taking things that Robert has set and leading to what he’s saying.

Basically, what I’m asking is, how many different ways could this conversation go? So, many times in our conversations, we forget that every conversation has many possible conversations. There are many possible ways to go, but when we get to the end of it, we feel like it inevitably led to that final place.

Elizabeth Stokoe, author of one of my very favorite books on conversation analysis called, Very Aptly Talk, says that all conversations have a landscape, a conversational racetrack. And well, many of these conversations, quite honestly, many of them are, well, stuck. We’re on autopilot. And it’s like the conversations in the very classic movie, Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray is living the same day again and again, and again. And he begins to finally see that there is a huge predictability to the interactions. He knows every sentence that’s going to come up. And I’m citing him here, not just because I stole his tips on beard grooming, but because way too often in our own conversations, we are parallel monologues desperately in search of a dialogue. And unlike Bill Murray, we don’t even know it. We’re not even aware of this.

This image right here is called the Troxler image. It’s a Troxler effect. So, if you stare at this long enough, it’s about like 30 to 60 seconds, the colors will begin to actually disappear and it will completely fade into gray. It’ll completely fade into gray. And what’s interesting about this, is that that fading, it’s not just in the eyes, but a good chunk of that fading happens in the brain. And the same thing is true with so many of our conversations. We’ve been having the same conversation so many times after, again and again, and again, that we don’t even realize that we’re so stuck.

So, how do we get out of this? What actually is positive influence? Now, when I say positive influence, what I really mean is, what’s left? After the conversation, what do we actually walk away from and with? Are we just walking away with it from the conversation with what we’ve brought to it? Have we learned absolutely nothing? Have we listened to absolutely nothing, and we’re just walking away with our own thoughts? Or have we actually created something new? Okay.

I love this quote from Paul Watzlawick, that really one of the biggest, biggest dangers is that the belief that one’s own reality is the only reality, is one of the biggest of all delusions. Similar to Anais Nin, who said, we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

So, my question is, how do we get beyond this? How do we get beyond this series of monologues? So, ultimately, I’m a big believer that good influence is coming from a recipe. And it’s a recipe that’s very much built up of two people. It’s not just built up of the ingredients that I’m bringing in, but good influence is co-created. Now, I might want to add spice to this recipe. And I might have to convince you, “It’s not too spicy. Just have a little taste.” But ultimately, half of the ingredients are coming from me and half of the ingredients are coming from you. And if I’m not using all of these ingredients in forming this conversation, then ultimately, it’s going to be burned or half-baked.

So, the question is then, how do we actually do this? How do we make a recipe that really co-create a positive conversation that moves forward, whether that’s in a negotiation, a meeting, a facilitation session, talking with our friends and our loved ones, how do we do this?

So, before I dive just a little bit deeper, I do just ever so briefly need to touch on culture. So, being based in Hong Kong, and like many of us working a bit of everywhere, my work is very, very cross-cultural. So, the question always comes up, “Yeah, that’s great. These ideas are great about influence and better conversation, but will it work here?” And the short answer is, well, it depends.

I like to look at this triangle when we’re about, how do we influence people? How do we have a better conversation with them? And it’s really this triangle of what we would call context, culture and character. Context being the situation. Is this a new relationship, old, upward, or downward influence, that kind of stuff. Character being the individual. Everyone is very, very different. And culture being, wherever we happen to identify with, identify whether that’s geographically and et cetera.

And it’s really dangerous to just start making giant generalizations about culture. I think my favorite actual book on this is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. And she makes that clear, clear point that ultimately, in a conversation it’s not the culture that’s the determiner. We have to ultimately be aware of that, but listen to the individual. And one point that she makes in this, is that there’s a lot of things that we actually have in common. And cross-cultural research on influence does play that out as well.

So, well, yes, there are some things that we want to be aware of, mostly to avoid putting our foot in our mouth. Ultimately, we very much need to listen to the individual. Let me give an example of this and why this matters, and why having a bit of awareness on this matters.

My friend, Bob, Robert, from the previous example, if he falls down the stairs, I might say, “Bob is very clumsy.” But if I fall down the exact same stairs, 20 minutes later, I’m not going to say I’m clumsy. I’m going to say, well, the stairs are slippery. One of these is blame oriented. And one of these is situational. Guess which one we tend to use cross-culturally? We have a tendency to, as it said, to accuse others and excuse ourselves. So, it’s good to have that awareness of where the potential conflict areas might be in terms of directness, in terms of pacing. But overall, we have to listen to the individual.

So, some of the things that we have deeply in common when it comes to influence in all the studies is, well, number one, nobody likes upward pressure. No one likes to be bossed around regardless of culture. People do enjoy feeling included in the conversation. So, everyone likes consultation with a bit of rational praise and supporting it. And ultimately, in terms of information density, there’s all the enough similar information rate from language to language. So, that’s just a little tiny bit on culture. I’m not going to do a deep dive now, but just being aware that it is something that’s in the mix. But ultimately, what we’re looking at is stuff that works across the overall spectrum.

“It’s not perfect.” A quote from George Box, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” And in fact, all quotes are wrong because that’s a bit of a misquote of him, but some of them are still very, very useful.

So, let’s dive on deeper. Shall we? How can we actually look at conversations and begin to improve upon them? This right here is a really interesting look at conversations. This is from one of my favorite books called Dear Data. And this is an image by Stephanie Pacific. And this was actually a postcard she did, where she was tracking all the times she said, thank you, during a week, who she said it to, was it a genuine, thank you? So, she’s tracking her conversation.

And of course, this is not the only way to track a conversation. I’m not suggesting you go into the office and start making postcards that you send to everyone with thank yous all over them. But there are ways to track things. And a lot of people are trying to do this.

Out of MIT, we’ve got things like Riff Analytics, where this is a meeting platform, and it’s looking at how much time are we talking? Who’s influencing you? Who’s interrupting who? These kinds of things. And also at MIT Media Labs, one of my favorites way back with Alex Pentland and Honest Signals, was you can see this image on one side. It’s actually what the gentleman is holding up, is something called a Jerk-O-Meter. Yes, that is the actual term in the actual research paper. And it was measuring, how we’re coming across in the conversation. Alex has actually progressed far beyond that by now, and now he’s actually doing a bunch of stuff with coaching, where he’s beginning to predict conversations there as well.

But we’re going to go a bit more analog and a bit simpler. We’re not going to be using a bunch of fancy tech, though, we’ll use a little bit of digital in the workshop later. I just want to work on a very simple way to look at conversations that we call the conversation map. And it’s basically looking at anytime in a conversation, we are somewhere within one of these four boxes. We’re either hanging down, out in the red zone, where what we would call loudership. And that’s blocking your telling. Anytime you’ve got a conversation where it’s back and forth, “I understand you, but I understand you, but…” Statement, statement, statement. That’s where it’s living. Or potentially, we’re actually trying to understand the other person or going up and genuinely understanding them.

Of course, there is that profound difference between me telling you, “Hey, I understand you.” And you’re sitting there going, “No, you don’t.” And you actually going, “Yeah, you understand where I’m coming from.” Then, not just telling people, but actually showing them and bringing them along is storytelling and persuading. And fully going up into the green corner, it’s that problem solving and exploring area.

So, the question that we’re trying to figure out really is quite simple, it’s this idea of in any conversation, where are we on the map? Oops, skipped a slide there. Where are we on the map? And how can we actually positively move around the map? Basically, how do we actually catch the ball? And how can we do so better?

If we go back to John versus Robert in that conversation there, you can see them back and forth that they’re not really using what the other person is saying. Robert says something, he goes at the end, he’s talking all about this. And John goes into a question. Question is not a bad question, but it’s more of an interrogation. It’s a self-oriented question, where he’s just gathering information for his stuff. He doesn’t tag any of the concerns. He doesn’t really use anything that Robert has given him in the way he’s structuring his response. Basically, he doesn’t wear a very good one of these.

And this right here is not a paintball uniform. It’s not a military gear. This is actually an empathy suit. And this is designed by researchers who want to, in this case, be able to design products for people who are a bit older. So, this makes it harder for them to see, to hear, it makes them heavier, so that they can empathize and step into the shoes of that other person.

And if we’re going to actually get up into the blue box, pull out of that red box and really begin to understand others, we need to think about what are our empathy suits in conversations. We need to dodge nod-crafty. Now, nod-crafty is one of my favorite words. It’s an 18th century adjective. And it literally means the tendency to just nod your head and pretend that you’re listening. And we do that so, so, so often in our conversations.

So, we want to actually take advantage of that time, that differential between how long it takes us to speak or to hear and how fast we can actually think. And we want to use that to try to more positively engage with the conversations through a couple of different techniques.

One, if we’re really going to understand people, we have to be willing to name the bears. Now, when I say name the bears, I mean this literally, the word bear is essentially Voldemort, it’s that which shall not be named. That’s what it actually means. Bear is not the name of the animal. It literally means that brown furry thing that shall not be named. We don’t want to have that. We want to actually name our bears and bring things to the surface. Leaving them below the surface, isn’t going to help.

Second, of course, we want to actually do a bit better perspective taking. We’re on this side of the bridge, there on that side of the bridge. And there’s a tendency to just go, “Get over here.” To try to pull ourselves into that yellow zone, but not really bring anyone with us. And fundamentally, we’re not in that yellow zone unless they come with us.

Beyond that, we want to learn how to share the orange a bit better. What I mean by that? It’s a famous example from William Murray. He’s got two people in one orange. And he tells the story that, there’s two people, John and Sue. John’s perspective, “I want this orange.” Sue’s perspective, “I want this orange.” What’s the fair way for them to share this orange? Now, a lot of people say split it in half.

Best example, I was doing this training in Singapore. One person said, “Well, one of them should take the orange and the others should take the seeds and plant orange trees.” Very creative.

But ultimately, William Murray says that too much focus on what people want, stops us from understanding why they want it. Too much focus on the position, stops us from understanding the interests that are underneath that position. In order to actually do this well, we need to stop focusing on just what they want and actually ask a little bit more about why they want it, what led them there?

John wants to make orange juice, we need to actually give him the middle of the orange. Sue wants to make orange frosting, we could get her perfectly happy by giving her the peal. But too often in our conversations, even though they’re more complicated than oranges and orange juice, we stay at that statement level and we don’t really go any deeper.

Last but not least, we have to be willing to be influenced ourself. If we think influence is just coming in and getting what we want, we’re not really open to change. We’re just using those ingredients we brought with us. We have to be willing to take on that which is out there. So, how can we do this? Moving down into that yellow quadrant, we’ve got to think about what our mental model is. How do we actually see this?

Now, this is an image. It is, yes. You’re not missing it. That is the Taco Bell Zodiac by Valerie Niemeyer. And if this is my mental model that the world it’s controlled by tacos, I’m a Leo, which means I am a grilled stuft burrito. I’m extra large and et cetera, et cetera. If that’s my mental model, then that’s the story I’m telling myself. That’s what whoever’s trying to influence me, needs to work with, if they want to try to move my mind. Okay?

So, what we think works in terms of moving minds, and this is a great meta study by [inaudible 00:15:55] and a bunch of others, what we think works is rational persuasion, just dumping a bunch of information out there and, “Oh yeah, they’re just going to buy it.” And if you actually go further in that conversation with Robert and John, that’s what John does. He just goes through all the reasons why, “I’m amazing. I should have the head of this project. It’s great. It’s fantastic.” Nothing to do with what Robert cares about, but very much John oriented.

But what actually works cross-culturally, that’s what I mentioned a little bit earlier, this idea of consultation and inspiration. Now, inspiration, it’s not this vague concept of, “I inspire you.” It’s this idea of not just telling people that there’s a way forward, but actually showing them and bringing them along.

As Seth Godin really nicely said, persuasion is the transfer of emotion. It’s not that we are illogical. It’s that our logic is actually curated by our emotions. And we have to actually recognize that.

So, if we’re the stories we tell ourselves, if we’re just telling people, and I’m trying to persuade you that Lanikai is the best beach in Hawaii, 76% of people living in Hawaii agree, maybe you believe me. But what you’re going to do with that information is create your own mental model based on your experiences. And oftentimes you’ll go, “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

So instead, I really want to show you and bring you along, tell you that as a child, I used to play on the beach with my brother. It’s beautiful, fantastic. And if I really want to take you along, I need to engage you and ask, “What would you do on that beach? How can you follow along with me?” And this is so critical to actually work with what grows there.

There’s two ways to make your lawn look nice. You can put out a bunch of grass, that’s just going to end up having to be watered and die, and stuff, try to force it through. Or you can actually look at what grows there and try to build from that. This is not to say everything should be dull. We can actually do interesting contrasts.

But ultimately, we need to watch for the desire paths, the way people want to go. And we need to remove obstacles and help them forward. And this really the only possible way to do it well. (silence)

The post Moving Minds: Exploring Conversation Maps in Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was Kaleem Clarkson.

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

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

Watch Kaleem Clarkson’s talk “Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful Relationships through the Power of Play” :

Read the Transcript

Kaleem Clarkson:

All right. Well, thank you everyone. Thank you everyone for attending today. I really, really appreciate Douglas inviting me. I’m pretty amped up. It’s really a pleasure. I know one thing, a lot of people talk about having a imposter syndrome, of course, right? And this this past week, I get a chance to meet all of the presenters and speakers. And it’s actually a privilege and an honor to be part of this event. So thank you so much Douglas in controller room for having me. So today what we’re going to talk about, is we’re going to talk about Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful relationships through the Power of Play. We’re going to go to this next slide here myself. My name is Kaleem Clarkson. I am the COO of Blend Me, Inc. And basically we help organizations, startups and small businesses, with the remote employee experience.

And that includes a whole bunch of cool stuff. So what we’re going to do today is I teamed up with my man, David Klasko from Artly Working. And the idea is that we’re going to merge some science, some research, right? Because all of us as whether we are facilitators ourselves or whether we work for an organization and just want to learn more about facilitation, I think we can all agree that remote work is here. And that’s why I was so honored that Douglas invited me to come today because remote work is out of the bag. We’re not going back. Of course, they’re going to be some organizations that are going to ask people to go, come back to the office. So I’m very curious to see what those reasons are.

I think there’s going to be a lot of challenges around organizations who don’t think about that, but the idea of this whole workshop that we’re going to be doing later on this afternoon is we’re going to provide you with some research and some, maybe some statistics that can really have you, okay, I’m sorry. You know what? Sometimes with these virtual things, you got to focus. The Slack Chat just got me distracted for a second. So I’m glad that everyone was active in the Zoom. I can’t actually can’t see it. So I’m sorry. I couldn’t do shout outs. I couldn’t do shout outs. That’s my thing. So if you come to the workshop today, you’re going to see what I’m talking about. We’re going to do shout outs to the area code. So thank you.

Thank you all for doing that. And hopefully you’ll come the workshop and enjoy some more. So anyway, right back to what I was talking about earlier, we’re going to provide you with some research in the importance of isolation and how it can actually have an impact on your actual employee experience. And as a facilitator, hey, we got to have some statistics and some research behind what it is that we’re doing. So your next client, your next call, if you’re talking to somebody and they’re like, “Well, hey we want to do this.” Throw a couple of these statistics items so that you can prove your value. So here we go, Octo Q let’s see what we got here. So Remote Work Challenges, right? The three major challenges for managing remote teams are…

Of course there are plenty of challenges that managers are having, but these are the three biggest challenges. Okay? Lack of social interaction, right? No ability to be able to interact with your colleagues. As a manager, if you’ve always been that type of person that’s, “Hey, let me tap your shoulder real quick.” Then the lack of interaction is definitely a challenge. Think with lack of face-to-face supervision. We’ve had this years and years and years of experience of learning how to manage in the moment. Let me look in the camera for emphasis. Managing in the moment, right? We’re now moving to a position in society where everything has to be intentional. So that lack of face-to-face supervision is a big challenge for all of us. I mean, for me as well.

And then the third one, lack of access to information. As a manager, you may have other people who you always just tap them on the shoulder real quick, or buzz them real fast to ask a question, but unfortunately you can’t do that. Now I’m in that remote space. So those are the three major challenges, as far as some of the biggest struggles as individuals. Some of the biggest struggles you can see here, shout out the buffer, always go to their state of remote work. They’ve been doing it. One of the longest out of the ones who are doing it, love, buffer, suggest that you check them out. Love it. But in this state of remote work report in 2020, you can see the top two biggest challenges with remote work that employees are actually starting with, right?

So you can see collaboration and communication. That’s tied for number one and then loneliness today. Our workshop, what we’re hoping is that you can see we’re going to have some fun. I can’t wait to do this. We’re going to act a fool on camera. We’re going to act silly, but we’re also going to accompany that with some important parts of the employee, the remote employee experience where the power of play helps you alleviate some of these challenges, for example, loneliness, communication and collaboration. So those are the two things we’re going to focus on. So the impacts of loneliness in the workplace. Why does it matter, right? Obviously people in this community, I learned this a lot. This community is very well-read. So a lot of this stuff is going… A lot of people are going to have seen this, was in a cool co-op house room the other day with Adam Grant. It was pretty cool. But basically when you’re lonely, we feel invisible, right?

If you feel invisible and then one of the most powerful ways to fight is just to help others feel seen. I’m sure all of us have gone down this route, especially as facilitators. I mean, I know this group takes it personal to ensure that everybody is being seen or people being heard. So that’s really important. So what is loneliness specifically? It’s complex. But it’s a set of feelings that occur when intimate and social needs are not met. Notice that intimate and social needs are highlighted there because you need social interaction. I am a remote work advocate. We consult, my partner and I, we can solve them on remote work, but let’s not fake the funk. We need to be sociable. That’s actually, we are a tribal species, right?

We’re not like, what’s that animal I learned with my daughter, Sonic the hedgehog there. The hedgehog is like a animal that lives by itself. I learned that watching cartoons with my daughter, by the way. So the impacts of loneliness, quickly. Because this is a lightning talk. So I got to keep rocking and rolling fast, right? The physical impacts of loneliness are real. The first one here, just think about this. Remember cigarettes? You all remember that? Some of you might remember when cigarettes were cool, some of you may not. Well, number one, it’s as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That’s a lot of butts. That’s a lot of huffing and puffing, and we all know how bad smoking is for your health. So just think about that. How bad is isolation and loneliness? It’s equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s dangerous being alcoholic, not a huge fan of exercise, and I’m trying to be better, but it’s as harmful as never exercising. And twice as dangerous as obesity.

So how can we fight… Loneliness’ Impact on the Workplace. Sorry, the control is a little bit behind for me. We’ll go through some of these real quick. So loneliness, not only does it impact you physically, but also that impact goes over on to the workplace, right? So lonely workers, they take double the number of sick days. In a lot of business, absences can be very costly for organizations, especially if you’re not set up correctly. We’ve learned that some organizations who are set up correctly, they didn’t have very many challenges with the pandemic. Organizations who were not set up correctly, obviously, had a lot more challenges. So absence can really be a big challenge. Reduces job and task performance. Lonely employees, they feel alienated and less committed.

The relationships between between teammates can deteriorate, co-workers perceive lonely people as distant. I mean, think about that in your mind like, “I’m just lonely. I still like all of you, but I’m just lonely.” Just think about how that that perception could be incorrect, right? Like, “No, I like all of you. I’m just lonely and I’m feeling it.” So you can see there how that has an impact there. Reduction in executive functions. Chronic stress causes decline in executive functions such as like reasoning and decision-making. So if you’re an executive, it can have a major, major impact on your ability to get through things like that. This one number four. Having a best friend at work, increased engagement by seven times, that is one of the things that we found in our research that I found absolutely surprising.

And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? You spend more of our waking hours at work than we do with our colleagues. So if you have a place where you can celebrate or console about your personal professional lives, when you don’t have that in that absence, you can feel really really lonely and impact C-suite executives as much, actually half CEOs report feeling lucky. Everyone wants to be their own CEO, right. But it’s lonely at the top. You’ve heard that phrase, I’m sure. And then for new CEOs, it’s even worse. It’s like nearly 70% of new CEOs feel lonely. So you can really see how, it doesn’t just impact lower level employees. It impacts employees at all levels. And then last but not least, and we’re going to talk about this decrease engagement due to a lack of trust, the willingness to communicate with others.

And because you feel alone, you don’t have that confidence. You’re not motivated, right? You’re not motivated to participate. So that drops. A degree of engagement drops from that. So you can really see how loneliness can have a financial impact. So for all of all of the facilitators out there, we’ll have these notes and the slides for your notes. If you need to show this to some of your clients, I totally urge you to do that because with the state of remote work, moving forward in 2020 and beyond, this has to be a top priority for managers and leaders in companies who are going to be distributed.

So how can we fight back against isolation and loneliness? I mean, there are many ways, of course, this is not the only way. There are so many great sessions that are going on today. The master facilitators, they’ve been thinking about all of these things for years. So it’s nothing, anything new, but Hey, the power of play, what we’re going to figure out today, what we are going to dive into is we’re going to dive into some silly. I mean, I like to be silly. I think we all like to be silly. I mean, let’s not face it. So I mean, that’s not true, but I like to say that it’s one of my favorite saying, so come along and play at 1:30, central standard time, come with us. Sorry I’m hyping my session. But we got to, it’s a lightening talk.

So, you know, we’re going, we’re going to hype our session a little bit. So Why Improv Games? Not only are they fun, but builds confidence, increases engagement amongst your teams, creativity. So I’m not an actor. And my homeboy, my homie, David Klasko, he’s going to talk to us a lot about this, but when we’re passionate and we were just having these discussions, you don’t think about, I don’t anyway, and I apologize, but you just forget sometimes when you’re watching a movie, how skillful they are at their craft, at their trade, they practice. And it just seems so easy because we’re just watching the show or a movie. You don’t even think about it. But creativity, it’s a muscle. He was explaining that it’s a muscle and you can actually practice it.

So that’s something that we’re going to, we’re going to dive into. It helps you practice empathy. Is it for everyone? We’re all… Some people are more introverts than others, but these are all skills that service well and interpersonal skills are skills that service well in any industry. So yes, they are for everyone. And then it also provides higher inclusion. It’s a structure. I’m sure that you’ve seen in some of these conversations. Our job as facilitators is to have some sort of structure in the meeting so that people feel comfortable and sharing and participating. So you have to do different things to ensure that you have different modalities to allow people to participate. Well, this space, it helps you produce some sort of structure so that you can… If you want your team to spend quality time, having a structure helps.

So this leads to that. So I hope that I provided you with a little bit of information. We’re going to get into some of the research, but loneliness is important. Loneliness is a real thing that can have a major impact on your business, financial line, it can have an impact with your clients. So hopefully we gave you a little bit of research. Hopefully we piqued your interest. So let me just show you, we were going to play a video here but, hey, pictures are worth a thousand words. So you can get the idea. We are going to act a fool. We’re going to act silly and hopefully, we get some laughs. But then we’re also going to break into groups and talk about how we could use some of these games in our own meetings. And also talk about some of the challenges that you could see with some of these games. So with all that said, hope to see you soon.

The post Fighting Isolation and Building Meaningful Relationships through the Power of Play appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those speakers was J. Elise Keith.

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

“Traditional skills are being replaced.”

Watch J. Elise Keith’s talk “Facilitating in Real Time, Near Time, and Far Times” :

Read the Transcript

J. Elise Keith:

All right. Hello, everybody. I’m super thrilled to be here. Today, we are going to talk about facilitating in real time, which is what we’re doing right now in near time and far time. And I will tell you, I haven’t talked about this before. I probably have way more content than will fit in our time. So let’s go through it and see what we get. This particular topic is super important to me and to the people I work with because, as Douglas mentioned, my company focuses on helping teams run successful meetings every day. And that’s the key, so we’re talking about every day, we’re talking about the everyday business meeting. So all of those project status meetings and the one-on-ones, and the weekly team meetings and the 90% of meetings that everybody else has to run every day that get work done.

And right now is a really good time to be looking at the everyday business meeting, because in the business world, it’s becoming more and more important to get it right. I think this slide that I’m about to show you from the WEF brings that home in a nice way. So in this last year, the WEF published this list of the Top 25 Skills for 2025. And it might be hard to read for you, but it includes things like the ability to work well with others, the ability to influence, the ability to problem solve, to work through decisions, to do all of these things. So there’s very little on this list that’s about coding or mechanical engineering or all of these other kinds of traditional job skills. And when I saw this list, for me, I saw two things. I saw number one, okay, the world of work is changing, and this list brings that home. Work has become increasingly complex.

The shift to remote work is just one sign of that. So increasing complexity and the trend towards automation, which had begun before, accelerated in 2020 like it had never done. So folks who were thinking about replacing manual labor, simple jobs with robots have absolutely jumped on board. Did you know that there’s even a robot in fields right now that can go through and pick strawberries?That’s amazing stuff. But what it means is that the jobs of now and the jobs of the future are no longer the jobs where people can be told what to do. They’re the jobs of what social psychologists call the meeting class. So that was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this list, okay, the jobs of the future are the jobs of people who meet. Which means, of course, the second thing that comes to mind is, A, they’re talking about facilitators, All of these things are facilitator skills.

And this list isn’t new, so in 2017, 2018, something like that, the Corporate Learning Skills Group published this list of what they consider to be the essential power skills for workforce agility and success in the future. And if you look at this list, how many of those are things that you know 20 techniques to run with a team? This is facilitation. This is the power of the future. So you won’t be too surprised that after I work with a client and we help them on their everyday business meetings tackle some of those basics like, hey, you should know what your meetings are about, and wouldn’t it be cool if there were notes. After we get the basics handled, one of my number one recommendations to them is that they should send their people for facilitation training, they should work with more facilitators, and they should get a facilitator or two on staff, because facilitators design fabulous meetings.

We know how to bring a group together. We know how to merge the opinions, get all of that diversity into the conversation, because it’s fundamentally complex, work through all of that information and then come to a convergent decision so that we can move forward. Fabulous, necessary critical skills for the future of work and for the today of work. So I’m always telling clients, “Facilitation, facilitation, facilitation,” and they are giving me this reaction. Turns out a lot of my corporate clients have got some real beef with facilitators. They have been burned time and time again by a facilitator who’s come in and run a great workshop with them and then I left them with a stinking pile of sticky notes. I had a sales person on my team the other day come back and said, “Yeah, I talked to this executive at this local corporation about doing a project with them and they said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We did that once. We had a person come in and they did a day for us on how to run better meetings and all I got was this lousy poster.'”

So this is not new. Everybody here has experienced some of that. And I know some of the other folks have already talked to this theme a bit. In fact, the facilitator, Cameron Frazier, I think did a really nice job of summing up this phenomenon when he showed me this graphic several years ago. Now he facilitates strategic planning, and he said this experience with companies and their focus on strategy was that they know they need to do it so they hire the facilitator, and there’s no strategy, business as usual, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Two days we’re all about the strategy. Nothing. So the word facilitation means to make the process easy, and Cameron and other folks who do great strategic planning workshops like this make the process of getting a strategic plan created in the workshop easy. Fabulous work. That, however, isn’t the actual goal. The actual goal for the company is to have a strategy that they can then execute on to achieve their larger goals.

So this pattern is not actually making the larger process easy. But what are you supposed to do? You’ve been hired for two days. You haven’t been hired to go work there the whole time. Or maybe you’ve been given permission to get the team together for an hour. What are you going to do with that? It’s incredibly challenging to make sure that our work has an impact beyond the workshop, but it can be done. And to do it, it requires thinking about different tools in different ways. Now, this is an especially challenging thing to do because we’ve got a number of cognitive biases that make it difficult for us to accurately project visions of ourself into the future. So if you have a little time, check out things like the End of History Illusion and the Uh-oh Effect. But these things make it so that when we think about ourselves in the future, we think that we’re going to be just like we are, today as if we know everything we know today, as if we have the same motivations and needs and pressures. And that’s just simply not true.

So to help us think about the kinds of tools we might use when we wish to take our facilitation from the real time and project it out into near time and far time, let me tell you a story about my dog. So this is Mabel, and Mabel is a Lagotto Romagnolo, which is this Italian dog, and she was bred explicitly to hunt truffles. And truffles, they’re these kinds of mushrooms things. They live underground, which means she sniffs, sniffs, sniffs, sniffs, sniffs. She’s a sniffing wandermutt. And one day, we were walking to the farmer’s market and back, and it’s a mile and a half, it’s just this really short walk, and my dog is sniff, sniff, sniffing and every time she sniffs, we are like, “Come on. Let’s go.” So she has developed this technique where she wants to sniff something and we’re trying to make her go so she pretends to pee. Because we’re not going to drag her if she’s being right. So she was like, “Okay, I’m going to sniff and I’m going to pee.”

And this particular walk, we were noticing that she was doing this an awful lot and we started to keep track. We’re like, “Okay, well, sniff, pee, sniff, pee, sniff pee, my good golly.” And by the time we got back from the walk, we were like, “Oh my gosh, she went 13 times in a mile and a half. 13 times.” And my daughter looked at us and she said, “Oh my gosh, mom, we should have taken a picture.” Now, if you stop and think about that, what would that picture have looked like on my iPhone roll? Wait a second. Why is there a picture of my dog peeing? So in the moment, in the real time moment of this walk, we had a vivid vision of what this looked like and we were able to keep track. But we decided, that must be a record. We would want some way to count and see if Mabel ever broke that record in the future. So we devised a plan for facilitating that result having this record both in the near time and then later on.

So when we got home, for near time, we didn’t recreate the entire walk for my other family members. We told them, “Hey, we went on this walk and Mabel did this. And we have this new record and this record is 13.” So that way, in near time, the people who weren’t there for the real time event had an awareness of what was going on and they were able to get some immediate information that allowed them on the walk the next day to go ahead and put that information to use. And then finally, knowing that three months, six months later, we weren’t going to remember this, I mean, it was a cute story, but who’s going to remember this? We decided to create an artifact that helped us remember it, and put it in our environment. And my daughter made this poster, which is the Pee Record. So how many times does Mabel pee on a walk? And we have this on our refrigerator. So now, no matter when we are in time, that real time event has some resonance and we can put those effects to use and act on them again in the future.

A gross, simple example, but it gives you the idea. So in the business world, as we switched to the working online and then pandemic, I know many facilitators already began to work with time in a different way. So that fabulous one day or two day workshop became a fabulous workshop series. This event is not full, full, full days. They’re shorter events with lots more breaks broken out over time. So that’s great. That’s step one, being more aware of how to break out the cognitive load over spans of time. But remember, our focus is everyday business meetings and impacting team success over time, and workshops in that world are just one of 16 different types of meetings. So to provide a glimpse of what’s possible, when you look at the entire spectrum of different kinds of meetings that teams run, let me show you how the business coaches handle strategic planning.

So this is what we call a meeting flow model, and this is a meeting flow model for strategic execution. So just like when Cameron went in and he does his two day strategic planning workshop, business coaches will do the same thing. They do the facilitated strategic planning work in a two day offsite workshop. But then they plan for exactly how that strategy shows up in the everyday meetings that team runs. So once per day, the leadership team will have a huddle, and in that huddle, they will talk about anything that’s coming up that’s getting in their way of executing on that strategy. That’s blocking and tackling. What’s going on today? Who needs help? Where are we? Every week, they dedicate 90 minutes to looking at their strategic execution. Now, this is not just a weekly team meeting where people run around and they report status. This is a highly designed meeting where they look explicitly at how they are tracking on their strategic metrics, they talk about what’s in and out, and then they solve problems that have come up between their goals and their ability to actually achieve them.

And they solve those in real time in the meeting. So it’s, problem solving, it’s status, it’s all kinds of things. And then finally, because no plan survives contact with reality, every 90 days they run a half day workshop to refresh the strategy. 30, 60, 90 days, they are keeping that work that they did in that workshop front and center active, alive, and they are acting on it. So those are some of the many ways in which you can take a strategic planning outcome and drive it through the organization in both that real time workshop, in the near time, the next day, the next week, and then looking out 30 days, 60 days, 90 days later to make sure it stays alive. So we call this a meeting flow model, and this is just one of the ways if you plan for and help your clients design, not just your workshop but the meetings that follow it, that you can extend your impact. Now, in our work, we teach clients how to make their own meeting flow models. In this case, it’s literally documentation.

It’s very much like the workshop plan that you may have written for any other time only including many more small meetings that the teams can run themselves. So clear structures that can run themselves. And what do they get when they do this? Well, a team who has something like a meeting flow model, and meeting flow models are one of many ways we can extend that impact, but they’re some of the most obvious, and when teams have meeting flow models, they get better meetings. The meetings they’re running are designed, they’re designed to take this work that you are doing and make sure it shows up in real time with them as they move forward. And that has impacts in terms of their business budget, their money. So you get productivity. But you also get things improved sales reach and impact. So for those of you who work for nonprofits, when you design the way in which your clients then engage their stakeholders, that improves their impact.

You can improve employee engagement and retention. There’s really strong data that if you do a little bit of work to change the conversation perhaps around diversity, perhaps around strengths in the manager meetings, that will have a significant impact on engagement and retention. And all of those metrics change. Now, more importantly, for those of you doing the facilitation work, when you design this kind of work, you have a place to embed the culture change you’re seeing. What question, if you are focusing on innovation, should teams be asking themselves in their weekly team meetings? What question should managers be asking their leadership team on a monthly basis to know that they’re on track? And finally, the biggest benefit you get when you do this kind of work, both for you as facilitators and business leaders of your own, but also for your clients is a significant competitive advantage, because most leaders do not realize that designing the way of working is their job.

So today, if you choose to join me in the workshop, what we’re going to do is we’re going to play with this idea and we are going to literally draft some plans that you can use to extend your impact of your workshops and out from the real time work into near time and then out into far time. We’re going to look at some questions like, what mechanisms can you use? What do you need to know about your clients to make it go? And what can you do that makes the process, the true process, easy for your clients over time? Come play with me. It’ll be totally fun.

The post Facilitating in Real-Time, Near Time, and Far Time appeared first on Voltage Control.