Changes in business and technology are occurring at a rapid pace while companies simultaneously fight to free themselves from the residual effects of the pandemic. Companies and teams must invest in innovation not only to stay ahead but to simply survive in today’s extremely fast-paced environment. Utilizing innovation exercises and innovation training can help create impactful, powerful results. 

A McKinsey study of over 200 organizations across industries found that 90% of surveyed executives said they anticipate the effects of COVID-19 to fundamentally alter how they conduct business in the next five years. 85% of executives said that they expect the pandemic will also impact their customers’ needs indefinitely. Innovation is the critical component companies need to heal from the current crisis, transcend its lasting effects, and adequately meet their customers’ needs.

“The truth is that there is no one ‘true path’ to innovation, no silver bullets and no shortcuts. There are, however, effective strategies that managers can pursue to dramatically increase their chances of success.” -Greg Satell, Mapping Innovation

In this article, we’ll explore five innovation exercises that you can incorporate with your team or organization to spur innovation and get creative juices flowing. There is no one way to approach innovation. Explore what methods work best for your team by applying these innovation exercises and strategies.

1. Group Brainstorming

This innovation exercise is great for getting the entire team involved, regardless of what project or role each team member has. Group brainstorming can take place in person using sticky notes and a whiteboard or wall or virtually for distributed teams using a virtual whiteboard tool like MURAL (and digital stickies). Have everyone write down any challenges they are facing on sticky notes and tape them to a wall or create them in a MURAL template. Next, everyone walks around the room and stops at each sticky note to add an idea with their own sticky note that can potentially solve that problem or challenge. For best results, have everyone write an idea on every sticky note and build upon what others said. This exercise increases productivity and creativity as employees have the chance to interact with individuals from different areas of expertise and perspectives, which helps spark new ideas to solve challenges. It also promotes full participation without anyone feeling self-conscious about sharing their ideas. 

2. Liberating Structures

Liberating Structures is a framework for facilitation that consists of 33 microstructures designed to build trust and enhance cooperation and communication between teammates. Incorporating Liberating Structures into in-person and remote team collaboration strengthens communication and improves attention management so you can do exceptional work as a team. When there is equal participation amongst the group, you get the best performance from everyone, i.e., you are able to create meaningful solutions together. Check out our library of Liberating Structures templates for MURAL and Miro.

3. Mind Maps

This innovation exercise can be done either alone or in a group setting. Start by writing a general idea in the middle of a blank piece of paper. From there, begin making connections that build off the main point and write them down. For example, if your idea or project is developing a mobile app, a connection that might branch out is Android vs. iOS. Continue building on each connection to generate a stream of new ideas. If you find your team is struggling to come up with connections, try to reframe the main idea and start a new mind map to get a new perspective. The output will be many new ideas to start working with.

4. R&D

Research and development is a series of innovation activities to develop new products and services or improve existing ones. This is a reverse version of Group Brainstorming (or standard innovation process). Instead of starting with problems and brainstorming solutions based on them, encourage your team first to examine the latest technological developments and then ideate their application to your organization’s challenges. This is the flow in many engineering industries, where technology comes first. The Design Sprint process is effective for exploring R&D and solving big challenges quickly. The 5-day structure allows you to align team members and key stakeholders to solve a problem, rapidly prototype and test potential solutions, avoid costly delays in the innovation process, as well as decrease the time to bring the idea to market. Learn more about how and when to incorporate a Desing Sprint into your innovation journey here

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5. Template Exercises

Exploring innovative ideas can be daunting. Where do you start? How do you bring an idea to fruition? We’ve created a library of interactive and customizable digital templates for you to use with your teams to ignite and accelerate innovation. The templates are created for MURAL and Miro, digital whiteboard tools that allow teams to work together async and in real-time in a shared space. Each template serves a different purpose in your innovation process. For example, the How to Remix Anything Template helps you vary your points of inspiration and approach to achieve a different outcome for an existing idea. The Beyond the Prototype Template helps you overcome roadblocks in innovation by navigating slumps and maintaining momentum. Explore the full library of free resources here.

Innovation is more important than ever for companies to stay relevant in today’s economy. Stay ahead of the curve by utilizing various innovation exercises and implementing innovation training to incorporate effective strategies for your team to succeed.

Want to learn more about innovation training?

We can help! Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training. We know that no two teams are alike. Companies are complex, with their own unique set of structures and company culture. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs.

Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Contact us if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post Innovation Exercises: 5 Ways to Spark Innovation in Your Team appeared first on Voltage Control.

As the workforce begins to return to (a version of) its pre-pandemic normalcy, advancements in business are happening faster than ever before. Teams and businesses must keep up with our world’s fast-paced environment in order to survive and stand out amongst the competition. The key to survival is investing in innovation. Explore disruptive innovation and/or sustaining innovation in your organization to create impactful and unconventional results and outshine competitors. 

“Managers are often told they must ‘innovate or die’ but are given little useful guidance on how to go about it.” -Greg Satell, Mapping Innovation

In this article, we’ll explore the difference between disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation and how to incorporate them into your own organization. 

There are variances between disruptive innovation vs. sustaining innovation, but there is also a time and place for both. Disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation don’t need to be alternative to one another, but rather can and should be leveraged as complementary measures.

Disruptive Innovation

According to the developer of the disruptive innovation theory Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation means to reinvent a technology, business model, or simply invent something new altogether. Disruptive innovation generates new products, markets, and values in order to disrupt existing ones. Company examples of disruptive innovation are Waze, Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, and Doordash. This type of innovation drastically changes and/or improves a product or service in ways that the market did not expect. Disruptive innovation is accomplished through a combination of uncovering new categories of customers and lowering costs and enhancing quality in the existing market. This is done by utilizing new technologies and business models, and/or exploiting old technologies in new ways. Disruptive innovation is about identifying areas that haven’t been fully explored previously.

Sustaining Innovation

In comparison to disruptive innovation, sustaining innovation seeks to improve existing products and processes. It does not create new markets, but rather develops existing ones with better value. Sustaining innovation happens on an incremental basis, often in response to customer or market demand, or technology improvements. Sustaining innovation occurs within pre-existing markets that customers and consumers have demonstrated they value already. An example of sustaining innovation is the smartphone market – every year, cell phone manufacturers (i.e. Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Amazon, LG, etc.) release updated and improved products to meet consumer demand and to integrate new technology. Maintaining open channels for feedback and communication allow businesses to constantly improve and provide greater value to customers and the market. 

A Time and Place for Both

The “innovator’s dilemma” is the choice a company faces when it has to choose between holding onto an existing market by doing the same thing but better (sustaining innovation), or capturing new markets by embracing new technologies and adopting new business models (disruptive innovation).

However, many companies today recognize it doesn’t need to be simply one or the other when it comes to disruptive innovation vs. sustaining innovation. In order to achieve cutting-edge innovation within a company while also creating long-term growth, both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation should be included in the overarching strategy to achieve a combination of revolution and evolution. In other words, there is a time and place for both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation. They do not necessarily need to be alternative to one another, but can and should both be leveraged. Great benefits will also be realized when the two are integrated well. For example, Apple utilizes both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation through producing net new products and services, while also constantly improving upon and updating their existing ones.

Identify Your Needs

Organizations should be very intentional about their various needs when it comes to disruptive innovation vs. sustaining innovation and utilize each accordingly, with purpose. 

Larger, established companies tend to be more successful when it comes to sustaining innovation. They have the resources, time, and an existing audience to be able to rely on more incremental change. More agile companies (often smaller companies and/or start-ups) tend to have the advantage when dealing with disruptive innovation. They may struggle to compete with larger corporations in more established markets but may be able to successfully challenge them in a new marketplace.

Christensen advises managers to follow four rules to avoid falling into the trap of trying to force disruptive innovation to happen the same way as sustaining innovation:

• Give responsibility for disruptive technologies to organizations whose customers need them so that resources will naturally flow to them.
• Set up a separate organization small enough to get excited by small gains.
• Plan for failure. Think of your initial efforts at commercializing a disruptive technology as a learning opportunity.
• Don’t count on breakthroughs. Move ahead early and find the market for the current attributes of the technology.

If you are a large organization that is looking to create disruptive innovation, consider finding a way to try it separately and autonomously from the main part of the business. This way, potential progress isn’t unnecessarily inhibited by any existing resources, processes, habits, or priorities. If you are a small organization that wants to sustain innovation, utilize your existing customer base for feedback and data on the most impactful improvements you can make to provide greater value.

Viima, the innovation platform, explains why both disruptive and sustaining innovation are important but must also be approached with the right intent: 

“If all focus solely lies on developing sustaining innovation, being replaced by disruptive innovation is a bleak question of when, not if. Especially for large companies, investing in disruptive innovation is always necessary for long-term success, although it probably doesn’t pay off for a while. If you only start investing when a disruptive technology has already gained significant momentum, you not only have to invest increasingly more to catch up with the competition but also do so from a base of declining revenue for your existing business, which usually proves to be impossible. Keep in mind, however, that moderation is key. If all attention is simply steered towards disruptive innovation, revenue and profit will usually start to decline, which in turn increases the risk profile dramatically.”

There are massive benefits to both disruptive innovation and sustaining innovation approaches as well as many negatives to neglecting innovation altogether. Sustaining innovation is typically an incremental approach with long-term growth benefits, whereas disruptive innovation (which can also take time) has the opportunity to create new values and markets for something consumers didn’t know they needed, wanted, or were missing.

There is no silver bullet to innovation, but utilizing resources like innovation training will help provide insight into effective strategies that teams can pursue to dramatically increase their chances of success.

Here at Voltage Control, we help enterprises disrupt, sustain and accelerate innovation through custom workshops that transform the way your organization works. If your organization is facing innovation challenges, let’s chat about your specific situation and how we can help.

The post Disruptive Innovation vs. Sustaining Innovation: a Time & Place for Both appeared first on Voltage Control.

It’s no question that innovation is a key factor in a successful business. Very few businesses, if any, are able to remain profitable, grow, and thrive without innovating. Accomplished leaders recognize that their organization’s continued success and position in the market heavily depends on its ability to drive a culture of innovation. Innovation doesn’t just happen – it must be instilled in the culture throughout an entire organization, from senior leadership to the entry-level, in order to have a lasting impact. A study by Gartner found that 91% of marketers surveyed are leading and supporting innovation initiatives, and 62% said they are solely responsible for such initiatives, showcasing the increasing importance of innovation in today’s workplace.  

“Innovation must be disruptive. And by disruptive, I mean disruptive. You gotta fracture and break the rules and disrupt.” – Howard Shultz, former chairman and CEO of Starbucks 

Today’s business environment is very different than it was 50, 20, 10, even 5 years ago as a result of the pandemic, remote work, advancing technology, and the increasing importance of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) initiatives, and many other factors. If companies are not able to adapt to these and future changing circumstances, they will likely face consequences (such as bankruptcy). In this article, you’ll learn how to drive a culture of innovation at your organization not just in general, but in today’s unique environment.

Allow flexible work options whenever possible

As a result of the pandemic and available technology, organizations and employees have realized the benefits of remote and hybrid work options. Various studies have found that distributed teams equal higher efficiency and innovation. It has also been found that companies that have highly engaged employees have 41% lower absenteeism, 40% fewer quality defects, and 21% high profitability. In other words, working remotely is effective and can drive a culture of innovation due to its flexible nature and high employee satisfaction and engagement.

If remote and/or hybrid work is new to your organization, check out our other articles on distributed workforce best practices, virtual meeting best practices, and remote team culture.

Prioritize DEI initiatives

The US workforce faces grim figures when it comes to DEI, but companies across the nation have shown initiative in fixing the problem. Over the past several years, diversity-related job postings have increased significantly. For example, positions with the title “Head of Diversity” increased 10% since 2015. In the US, there has also been 30% year-over-year growth in diversity & inclusion job postings. Diverse teams are also more likely to drive a culture of innovation. A survey of employees in over 1,700 companies found that companies with an above-average diversity score ranked 19% higher in innovation revenue compared to those with below-average scores.

Utilize Innovation Training

Innovation training is an essential process for almost every company to implement in their workflow and operations. The training encompasses a human-centric approach that focuses on the needs of the customer as opposed to metrics or business goals. Successful teams want to see their company address market needs and evolve with our current times. Innovation training is a great way to show teams the company is always looking at ways to move forward, and also that employees play a prominent role in its growth. It teaches leaders and teams creative ways of thinking and working that push individuals to go beyond the status quo, and therefore improves the bottom line and result in more satisfied customers. It also creates better employee engagement and satisfaction. Innovation training will drive a culture of innovation, along with helping teams and organizations keep up with our world’s increasing fast-paced environment. Learn about our 5 innovation training tips here.

Promote autonomy within your team as much as possible

Autonomy breeds innovation. It also results in more productivity. A study of 307 firms on autonomy and innovation supported the following statements:

• “Allowing the staff to pursue their own ideas during work hours provides time to observe, experiment, and speculate with others. These activities are vital for innovation outcomes.”
• “Tightly defined jobs with low autonomy tend to encourage narrow perspectives.”
• “Individuals produce more creative work when they perceive themselves to have choices regarding how to go about accomplishing the tasks they are given.”

By encouraging your team to be autonomous, you are not only driving a culture of innovation but will likely also see increased employee engagement and productivity.

Have an appetite for risk

Taking risks should not only be tolerated but celebrated and encouraged. Driving a culture of innovation means adopting a more experimental approach to working. Accept the fact that not every idea will be successful – there will be some “failures” along the way to truly successful, innovative ideas. Explore ideas, prototype and test them often, learn what works, what doesn’t, and continue from there. Focus on what you can learn rather than becoming focused on first-time success.

Finally…check out our other resources!

Through our own experience and work in the innovation space, we’ve created and compiled multiple resources on this topic. To help get you started in driving a culture of innovation in your team and at your organization, here are a few articles we recommend checking out first:

• 5 Strategies to Promote an Innovative Culture: How to Create and Sustain a Culture of Innovation
• Innovation Exercises: 5 Ways to Spark Innovation on Your Team
• When Inspiration Doesn’t Strike: How to Overcome Ideation Block
• What is Enterprise Design Thinking? The Principles, Practices and Applications of Enterprise Design Thinking
• The Best Design Thinking Exercises for Each Phase of a Project
• 5 Facilitation Methods for Virtual Collaboration Training

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Driving a culture of innovation is more complex today than it was in the past due to many factors including, but not limited to, increased market competition, a distributed workforce and constantly changing technology. This means it’s more important now than ever before to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Using the tactics outlined in this article is a great starting point to driving a culture of innovation and building great teams and products! 

Does your company need Innovation Training? We can help!

Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training. We know that no two teams are alike. Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and company culture. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs.

Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post Driving a Culture of Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

Everyone wants to innovate and promote innovation in some capacity these days. After all, the competitive landscape in most industries is only getting, for lack of better words, more competitive, Innovation keeps organizations in front of the curve and well-positioned to maintain long-term success. Create and sustain a culture of innovation for teams and individuals in your company to streamline growth and prosperity.

In this article, we’ll evaluate 5 strategies that will help you implement an innovative culture throughout your team. Everyone from senior leadership to entry-level hires is essential to driving innovation. Each person has a unique perspective and therefore can bring new, different ideas to the table regardless of title or seniority level.

“Innovation is like potential energy in physics. It represents the intrinsic creativity and wisdom of a team – the raw potential a team uses to succeed.” -Tom Counsell

Many companies try to build an innovative culture by stocking the company fridge, having a ping pong table and some company-sponsored happy hours, and a flexible work from home policy. That’s not to say those aren’t all great perks to have (and probably help with team bonding and employee happiness) but alone they won’t create and sustain a true culture of innovation. Although there’s no single “right” or sure way to drive innovation, here are some strategies you can apply to create and sustain a culture of innovation at your organization regardless of industry or vertical.

Innovation Strategies

1. Utilize Innovation Training

Innovation training is an essential process for almost every company to implement in their workflow and operations. Not only does it teach leaders (and teams) creative ways of thinking and working that push individuals to go beyond the status quo,  (and therefore improve the bottom line and result in more satisfied customers), but it also creates better employee engagement and satisfaction. Innovation training will create and sustain a culture of innovation, along with helping teams and organizations keep up with our world’s increasing fast-paced environment. Successful teams want to see their company address market needs and evolve with our current times.

2. Empower Your Team

The word “innovation” is making its way into more and more mission statements, company core values, and even the corporate C-Suites (aka the rise of the Chief Innovation Officer). As more organizations adopt innovation as a core value and key concept, it’s important to not only mention “innovation” on your website but create a real culture where your employees feel empowered to think independently and find new ways to solve problems. Great leaders make smart decisions, but they shouldn’t do it all alone – empower employees to make decisions on an individual and team basis, rather than concentrating decision-making authority at the top. This will help create and sustain a culture of innovation. Also – ask for feedback. Asking your team’s input and critiques will help ensure that ideas are aligned. The effort will ultimately empower your workforce to offer more ideas and ask more questions, leading to increased all-around productivity. Collaboration and diversity of thought are at the heart of every innovative company. And if you are looking for some ways to spark innovation with your team, check out these 5 innovation exercises.

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3. Define (or Redefine) Your Innovation Success Metrics

Measuring the success of innovation and ideas is much more difficult (and different) than measuring something more definite, such as the return on advertising spend. Therefore, first understand that new initiatives can’t be expected to perform at the same level as other activities that have been utilized for a long time. Give new ideas time and a chance to prove themselves. Create and define metrics specific to the innovation process rather than reassigning success metrics from other programs. This goes for people too – create a safe space for experimentation. For example, allow time and space for team brainstorming and discovery; potentially even consider aligning employee goals with innovation vs. hard sales or profit targets and understand failing is okay. Encourage your team to be bold and push the boundaries. If you’re not failing, you may not be innovating much. Focus on what you can learn rather than becoming focused on first-time success. Creating this space for your organization is another way to sustain a culture of innovation.

4. Be Agile

To truly create and sustain a culture of innovation, don’t be afraid to take action on innovative ideas quickly. This isn’t to necessarily say every idea is a great one or every new product concept should go directly to prototyping, but make informed decisions as quickly as possible (whether the decision is to invest more time and resources in an idea, or not) in order to keep learning and moving forward. 

5. Learn to Facilitate Innovation With Us

Innovation facilitation and training can feel intimidating. We offer expert training to help individuals, teams, and companies build the skills they need to design magical meetings, transform meeting culture, and run exceptional events, both in-person and virtual. Having an unbiased third-party perspective can make innovation training organized and engaging, and help create, promote and sustain a culture of innovation on your team.

Does your company need Innovation Training? We can help!

Voltage Control offers a range of options for innovation training. We know that no two teams are alike. Companies are complex with their own unique set of structures and company culture. That’s why we build and curate custom workshops to find solutions based on your team’s exact needs.

Voltage Control’s experts will guide you through your choice of experiential, interactive learning workshops, and coaching sessions where individuals and teams learn and practice how to successfully apply the best of today’s innovation methodologies and facilitation techniques to any business challenge. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com if you want to learn more about innovation training, design sprints, or design thinking facilitation.

The post 5 Strategies to Promote an Innovative Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Using the other person’s words is the nearest thing that the FBI has to a Jedi mind trick, because when the other person hears their words coming back, what they think is that person is using words like mine, therefore, they must be like me, therefore, I should like them.” -Judy Rees

Judy Rees is a consultant at Rees McCann where she leads a community of trainers, facilitators, producers, and others who want to make online work better than in-the-room. She is also the author of the Web Events That Connect How-to Guide and co-author of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Judy about clean language, gardening, and contextual intent. Listen in to learn what subtleties can be uncovered in the words we use every day, through active listening and asking the right questions.

Show Highlights

[00:53] Judy’s Start
[08:57] Opportunities in Challenges and Constraints
[21:18] Linguistic Subtlety in Control the Room
[30:48] Similarity with Words in Communication
[44:20] Judy’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Judy’s LinkedIn
Clean Language Questions
Rees-McCann’s Site

About the Guest

Judy Rees is a consultant that focuses on making remote work better than in-person. As such, her efforts in pioneering the virtual landscape of remote work have been noticeably fleshed out long before the pandemic and lauded by publications and industry professionals alike. With the emphasis she places on metaphors and language, Judy exercises a masterful hand in separating intent from perception and bridging the divide between parties to find an unlikely consensus.

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 Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today I’m with Judy Rees at Rees McCann, where she leads a community of trainers, facilitators, producers and others who want to make online better than in the room for more of the people, more of the time. She’s also co-author of The Web Events that Connect How-To Guide and Clean Language: Revealing Metaphor and Opening Minds. Welcome to the show, Judy.

Judy Rees:

Nice to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s start off with how you began. How did you get your start in this awesome work that you’re doing?

Judy Rees:

It’s a long story. But where I find myself now at the end of 2020, is I’ve spent 2020 mostly helping organizations take their in the room events online, mostly in the NGO world, so global organizations, UNICEF, Norwegian Refugee Council, World Health Organization, people who wanted to create events that really connected people to people, where relationship building was a critical part of the process. And webinars wouldn’t do the job for them. That sort of standard webinar process of 45 minutes of a presenter followed by 15 minutes of Q and A doesn’t do anything to build that relationships that get stuff done, or that keep donors attached to an organization, so that’s what we’ve been doing this year.

Judy Rees:

But I got into that pretty much by accident. I’ve been involved in a process called clean language, which is a precision inquiry methodology, a way of getting to understand what people really mean by what they say. And I wrote a book, co-authored a book about it, about 10 years ago. And we were trying to get groups of people together to learn it, learn the skills involved, but we couldn’t get groups together in the room. It was too niche, too difficult for people to find the money to train together in London here. And so we started teaching it online, and that was way back when it was thought that you can’t teach things online, particularly something as embodied, something as physical, something as metaphorical as clean language, you couldn’t possibly teach it online. But we found we had to, so we figured it out.

Judy Rees:

And first, we were doing that training over, I think it was Google Hangouts or Skype. And then gradually over the years, the tools got more sophisticated. And then about four years ago, 2016, I started creating an online un-conference, an open space like thing for the clean language community. And we’d get 100 and something people together for a whole day online over Zoom, and improvise an un-conference. And well, I’ve been doing that for a few years now, once or twice a year. And so when towards the tail end of 2019, the Greta Thunberg thing started happening, and people started saying, “Actually, we can no longer justify flying people all over the world.” Rees McCann was formed, and we started selling this ability to create online events that really connect people as a service. And we were teaching some fairly large global organizations just before the lockdown. And as the lockdown hit, they were immediately recommending us to people like UNICEF, or one of our early post lockdown clients. We were teaching the people in Italy, who were in some of the early lockdown stages, so that’s the kind of story, if that makes sense.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Absolutely. It’s really, really interesting that you were making the shift right as this wave came. We had a similar experience, and I can tell you I’m somewhat grateful for it, but it certainly still didn’t make it easy. I felt like I maybe had a posture of somewhat being ready, but man, it was difficult. It makes me feel very privileged because I think about all of my peers who weren’t quite so ready or anticipatory. So I wanted to just hear a little bit about your perspectives on that. And what are the kinds of things you’ve had to do to help kind of bring others along?

Judy Rees:

So I agree with you, I mean, I’d far rather be busy than the alternative. So many colleagues were just knocked flat, freelancers, freelance facilitators, and coaches and trainers, who had nothing for months, and didn’t know where the rent was coming from. I’d far rather be busy, but it was grim. We were working with organizations who were phoning us up, desperate. You can’t say no to The International Network for Education and Emergencies, when they’ve just been thwacked by a pandemic. But at the same time, I’m only human, and the business at that point was myself and my husband, who’s also my business partner, Rees and McCann.

Judy Rees:

So we were thinking, “Well, what can we do?” Well, we grabbed the people who were immediately around us and very quickly, very rapidly, taught them how to do some basic trainings that we were running. We sort of, we already knew they had training skills, and they understood at a basic level what we were doing. We showed them then more detail and said, “Go and deliver this for us.” And that was enough to get people started, to do things like: How do you actually set yourself up at the tools level, a technical level? How do you get lights? How do you get a headset? All those kinds of things.

Judy Rees:

And then to start them thinking about this is not just a technical problem. This is not just about the tools. This is also about the skills and learning how to use the tools, and the mindset that says, “Actually, in the room as educators, as trainers, we wouldn’t dream of talking at our students for 45 minutes.” Why on Earth do you think that’s okay online? Come on. Let’s rethink. Let’s stretch our heads a little bit. How can we make it work given the tools that we’ve got, given the constraints that we’ve got? And gradually, as things sort of settled down to some extent, people started to think more creatively about what they were creating, what they were designing, and to bring as many of those people together as we possibly could. We set up one of those online networks. Ours is called the Remote Together Community. We’ve got about 500 people there now, whose central theme, the central conceit, is that we want to make online gatherings better than in the room ones for more of the people, more of the time.

Judy Rees:

We don’t think that online gatherings can be better for everybody all the time, but we do think they have really significant advantages in terms of accessibility, in terms of obviously global warming and the traveling stuff. And conversations can happen online that really would never happen in the room. And some of the tools that are coming along for next year, things like the ability to do live captioning that’s already available in English, when that’s able to be translated cheaply and quickly, that’s going to make some conversations happen that we couldn’t dream of doing in the room without the cost being completely prohibitive. And live translation of an in the room event is ferociously expensive, very labor intensive. But look at what we might be able to do online. I’m really quite excited about that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. There’s tons of potential as we think about AI and hardware advances. I just personally picked up an Oculus. I didn’t realize that the price had dropped so much, and that they were self contained. It really blew my mind because I’ve been waiting for the moment where the hardware got ubiquitous, and I think we’re heading to that turning point pretty soon.

Judy Rees:

In some parts of the world. But a lot of the work that we’ve been doing is either focused on or includes some of the places where even a decent internet connection is beyond reach.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. Yeah. You mentioned accessibility as a benefit for online, and it poses new problems too because now we’ve got accessibility constraints with the software. And we’ve got accessibility constraints with even internet. It’s kind of the have and have nots. Right?

Judy Rees:

Yeah. But for me, the potential is so big. We can’t let the current challenges stop us from moving forward. However, we do need to pay attention to what’s going on for people, and as far as we possibly can, not leave people feeling that they are being excluded, or they’re excluded forever, and instead, bring people along as much as we possibly can. And you get some quite remarkable people being willing to put some remarkable effort in once they realize that it’s worth it. In the event we did a couple of weeks ago, there’s an 87 year old lady who was very reluctant to come the first time around, this event. This time, she knew why it was happening. She knew she wanted to be there, and she’d spent enough time ahead of time to set herself up so it was going to work, and it did work. And she had a fantastic day.

Judy Rees:

Similarly, we’ve had people in various interesting parts of Africa who’ve, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly turn on my video camera, it just won’t work.” I said, “Just try. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. We can do the other thing. But just try it and see what difference it makes.” And you’d be amazed how many people haven’t tried since it used to be Skype, and it never worked with Skype. So why would it ever work with Zoom? But Zoom does it differently, and it works.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s amazing too, how easy it is to get in those fixed mindsets. And when I see those behaviors, I often ask myself, “In what ways am I thinking that way?” And what are the things in my life am I saying, “Oh, the video won’t work”? Because it’s in us everywhere, and we learn things. It’s helpful, right? We have to create models and we have to commit things so that we don’t have to examine every little thing every time of the day. Right? Whenever I run into something like that, I try to have a ton of empathy and think to myself, “There’s got to be 10 things today that I did that are not serving me.”

Judy Rees:

Yeah. And mostly, we go through our lives just assuming that everything’s going to be the same as it always was, or else we wouldn’t get anything done.

Douglas Ferguson:

The more we’re finding ourselves in complex environments, the less and less that serves us.

Judy Rees:

And I think that’s why this year has been so exhausting for so many people because so many things have changed that we’ve had so little control over, that our heuristics broke at various stages.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to come back to clean language. And for listeners who have never heard of clean language, what’s the most important thing to know? What are the basics? How would someone get started?

Judy Rees:

Well, the most important thing for facilitators to know is that the underpinning principles of clean language are very similar to the underpinning principles of most effective facilitation. It’s not about you as the facilitator, it’s about them. It’s about creating a space for the other to express themselves clearly. So when groups and teams learn to use clean language principles in their interactions, they develop much richer curiosity about each other. Oh, I wonder why that person won’t turn on their camera, rather than, they won’t turn on their camera, they’re wrong. It becomes a curiosity. And we can use our precision inquiry technique, clean language, these questions, to find out more about what the person is thinking that makes it make sense for them to not turn on their camera.

Judy Rees:

And it’s particularly useful where people have a word, or an idea, or a thought, which superficially appears to be the same. But we can actually use clean language questions to tease out difference. So the example I tend to use in training is I get the whole group to think of a flower. Everybody think of a flower. And I’ll go around. What kind of flower is your flower? Oh, a lily. What kind is your flower is your flower? A sunflower. And eventually, we’ll get two the same. There’ll be two roses. And you ask a clean language question like: What kind of rose is that rose? To one person, and they’ll say, “It’s red.” What kind of rose is that rose? To the other person, they’ll say, “It’s pink.” And so on, you gradually tease out the distinctions between a similar word. So these questions are designed to elegantly tease out difference and diversity. And that can help a team or a group to become curious about each other, to become curious about what must be true for the other, for them to think like that.

Judy Rees:

Clean language has been quite extensively used in some mediation contexts. One colleague, for example, has used them in peace building in Northern Ireland, in South Africa, and in the Middle East, where he’s getting groups to effectively find ways to collaborate. Another mediator friend has used them with parties that are trying to negotiate in really difficult negotiations in business and in legal situations. So where you get a curiosity about the other, then you start to create a space where collaboration can happen. And clean language gets right in there. Clean language, which was created by this guy, David Grove, who died about 10 years ago, he designed it specifically to ask about people’s metaphors because he recognized that metaphor is the atom of thought, the negative language of the unconscious mind.

Judy Rees:

And by using these questions to ask about people’s metaphors, you can really start to discover stuff about people, and in a context where you want people, or where people want to change or get something different happening, the metaphors can be a very profound way of helping that to happen. But to go back to what I said at the beginning, the point is not that the facilitator is trying to change the person with the metaphor, or trying to deliberately shift the metaphors, the point is that the facilitator is there to facilitate, to enable something different to happen.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so can you give us some examples of types of metaphors, or maybe something you’ve seen in the past to help make that a little more clear to folks that maybe aren’t quite understanding how he’s working with these metaphors?

Judy Rees:

So in the sentence that you … This is where everybody starts to stumble over their words because if I start to draw attention to metaphors in what you just said, or in what I’m saying, I will trip over my words. So trip over in that sentence is a metaphor. I’m not literally tripping over my words, not literally catching my foot in my words and falling over. That’s a metaphor. Metaphors are used at a rate of about six per minute in ordinary English, depending which ones you count. So when you ask me, I’m not going to do this because it would end up being very silly, but when you ask me, “How could you make that clear?” Clear is also a metaphor. And one could ask, “What kind of clear is that clear?” Or is there anything else about clear like that?

Douglas Ferguson:

Sure. So it’s interesting. I would argue that you could use this for not only metaphor, but also jargon.

Judy Rees:

Absolutely. One of my favorite examples of it being used in business is a colleague of mine was working as a business analyst on a software project which involved two banks, one in the Netherlands, one in Belgian. They were collaborating on a big project, some system or other. And my colleague was quite a long way down the development path. He was doing a quick workshop to check some details. And he suddenly, there was something about the way a jargon word was used that prompted him to ask some clean language questions about it. And it emerged that the Dutch group and the Belgium group meant something subtly different by that jargon. And this case study is actually online. His bosses said that they credited the clean language questions with saving the project from being one of those classic: Oh, my God, how much money have we spent because of a mistake? It was a multi million euro project, and a few clean language questions to pick up the distinctions between jargon made a huge difference.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s amazing. I ran into that once with a client. I mean, I see it all the time, but this one time, it was massive. And the word they were using was a word that’s very highly associated with their brand. And so there was an emotional connection. Right? And they were using this word for a new project, but they were using it in a different domain. So instead of applying it to, I’m making this up, but instead of applying it to cars, they’re going to apply it to tractors, or something. Right? And so it’s like a bit of a shift to where now people had to imagine what it means for this word to live in that different context. And so they all translated it differently.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was starting to pick up on some discrepancies on how they were talking about it, so I kind of steered the whole workshop to talking about that, even though that’s not what they brought us in to do. But that created way more value than … We still got to the other outcome as well, but they were kind of scratching their heads. Why are we spending so much time talking about this? And I just kept pushing and pushing, then it finally all just came unraveled. And they were just blown away. They thought, “Wow. We thought we were so aligned because we were restating the mission statement.” But they were all completely disconnected.

Judy Rees:

Yeah. Lovely example. It’s great because metaphor is not only really fundamental to the way people think, it’s also very fundamental to the way people communicate and the way people align. So by taking the workshop down that route to establish … One of my friends does a really interesting thing about agile because he’s in that software development space. And he’s done a whole thing on what kind of agile is your agile?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes, I love it. As a reformed CTO, I can tell you that’s an issue. You’ve even got people that are like, “We’re big agile. We’re little agile.” It’s a flavor of the month kind of thing.

Judy Rees:

But yes, so that metaphor piece can be really, really rich.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s great. So I wanted to also see if you could provide any examples of the types of questions you would use in clean language.

Judy Rees:

So clean language has got a set, a very limited question set. So if you go to cleanlanguagequestions.com, that should redirect to my website, where you can see on one page, 12 questions that are the core clean language questions. And of those questions, two are used 80% of the time. We nicknamed those the lazy Jedi questions because you can do all the Jedi stuff, but with just two questions.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it. We have a book called Magical Meetings, and we talked about being the facilitator Jedi. And we also love the phenomenon of what we call it, being the lazy facilitator, which just means when you don’t have to lean in all the time. There’s an irony in the title of Control the Room, because we don’t feel that you should be controlling. But we have to bring some intention. We’ve got some tools we can use to control the outcomes, but we don’t want to stifle people. And so I love that you combine those two things that we love, which is the lazy facilitator and the facilitator Jedi into the lazy Jedi.

Judy Rees:

Can I share with you that I very nearly said no to doing this podcast on the basis of Control the Room?

Douglas Ferguson:

I get it. And I hear that a lot. And it was intentionally controversial. I wanted to make people think because I think a lot of folks come to facilitation with that mindset. And everything we’re talking about at all times is how we create space, how we lean back, and how the tools can help us be intentional. We certainly want to make sure that there’s some intention and we’re driving to some outcome, but we certainly don’t want to stifle people.

Judy Rees:

Yeah. So a way one might use clean language in this situation would be for me to ask you a few questions about what kind of control is that control, when control the room, because clearly, it’s not the kind of control that I was thinking it was when I got an out of the blue email saying, “Would you like to come on The Control the Room Podcast?” I’m going, “What? Why would I want to do that?” But of course, once you make a few inquiries, you think, “Actually, that can’t possibly be what he meant.”

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. And I love that it gets people thinking, and it gets some people really upset, which is, I don’t know, it kind of points at the work that you’re doing. Right? We’ve got to just drill layers deeper than just what we see at the surface.

Judy Rees:

And control, for me, that kind of control that I think you’re getting at is about placing some constraints on what happens in order to make it safe for people to have the conversations that need to be had. For example, the event I was doing the other week, which is called Meta Forum, we had a big discussion in the middle of it about the constraints that I, as the benevolent dictator, had put on the event, and whether they were the right or wrong constraints. And I love that kind of discussion because without the constraints, nobody shows up and nobody has the conversations they need to have.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. And it can’t be a free for all. I like the garden metaphor. If we don’t tend the soil, if we don’t remove the weeds, if we don’t create the initial conditions, then the plants will never grow, but we can’t make them grow. Right? But we are exhibiting some control over this environment. We’re creating those conditions and we’re setting things up. So very much like, if we don’t go higher of space, if we don’t go research the software and decide we’re going to use Zoom, or Keeko Chat, or Teooh, or Spaces, or whatever it is, then it’s out of control, and we won’t get anything done.

Judy Rees:

And when control, in a garden like that, is there anything else about that garden for you?

Douglas Ferguson

Yeah. Gosh. I don’t know how far I’ve taken the metaphor per se, so this might be an interesting discussion just to see what evolves, but I think there’s … Well, often too, when I think about gardening, I might have … I work with my wife on the garden, so sometimes there’s different roles, and we participate and show up in different ways. So I think we’re both tending to these plants, but we’re looking at it, we approach it from different perspectives. Also, I like the notion that if the plants, if you leave them be and protect them from the birds and the rabbits, then they eventually bear fruit, and they do that on their own. It’s not like anything that I did. I created a spot for them and protected them a bit, and then magic came from them.

Judy Rees:

And I could ask you what kind of fruit, and I could ask you what kind of magic, and so on and so forth. And notice what just happened. By asking about your metaphor, we started to have a more interesting conversation because it’s almost impossible to not get interested in your own metaphor.

Douglas Ferguson:

You know what else I like about this, there’s so much depth to that, but there’s a subtle little thing over the top that I think is worth mentioning, which is, if you’re using this tool or this approach, then it’s sort of assuming that you’re on the lookout for metaphors. And if you’re paying close enough attention to detect if someone’s using a metaphor, then you can’t help but to active listen.

Judy Rees:

And there’s an even easier layer of it than that. So when you start with the clean language questions, each of the questions has a space in it where there’s an X. The X represents the other person’s words. So the most commonly used clean language question is: What kind of X? So in order to put anything in that X, you have to be listening well enough to remember at least one of their words.

Douglas Ferguson:

Okay. I’m ready to use this because I’ve been saving a word that you said earlier that I really wanted to understand more. I’m going to ask you: What kind of embodiment? So earlier, you were saying that it’s really difficult, or it’s almost like a wicked question that you pose, which was: How can we do this work online when so much of it, when it’s so embodied? And I was thinking, “That’s interesting.” So how is clean language embodied?

Judy Rees:

Well, it’s embodied because metaphors typically have a location, and the thoughts typically have a location, either inside one’s body or outside one’s body, particularly feelings, but not only feelings. If you ask the third clean language question, so the first one is: What kind of X? The second one is: Is there anything else about X? The third one we normally introduce is: And where is X? So one could ask something like: And where is control? And control will have some kind of physical location in or around the person being asked. And when David Grove was doing this work, he then got very interested in how human beings map out their inner worlds inside and outside themselves. The classic NLP thing about the past is behind you, and the future, in front, in Western societies, but perhaps different to that in other cultures, is one way of thinking about it.

Judy Rees:

Another friend has thought about it in terms of head, heart, and gut. If you think about gut feelings, they have a physical location in the gut. Think about love, all those kinds of heart things, they typically have physical locations in the heart. And you’ll put ideas at a distance. You’ll get on top of things. You’ll get under the weather. The spatial metaphors in our language are so fundamental, so embedded, that it’s almost as if, well, it is as if while all these other kinds of metaphors, agile and garden… are all very well. But space is at a very profound level in our thinking. And as facilitators, we’ve traditionally used spatial metaphors in terms of moving people around rooms, sitting in a circle. If you feel this, go to that side, if you feel the other, go to the other side, and so on and so forth. Well, those work because human beings think in metaphor, spatially. And the spatial metaphors in our language are hidden in the prepositions, often, on top, in control.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s fascinating. It makes me think of the mind palaces, and how that can be such a powerful way to remember things. So just that memory device of helping people think temporally, or kind of where or when can help people get some more clarity, provide more detail to around how they’re thinking and what they’re thinking about, versus: What do you mean? And it’s like, “whoops”. Plus, I love that these questions are softer. Right? They’re exploratory in a way that maybe would prevent someone from being defensive because they don’t feel under attack, or they don’t feel at a loss, because if they’re at a loss and they don’t know what to say, then that could be frightening, so we definitely don’t want people to be. And so I think that’s really fascinating. I’m liking what I’m hearing.

Judy Rees:

There’s something very, very interesting about using the other person’s words. Now Chris Voss, who is a hostage negotiating person who wrote a book called Never Split the Difference.

Douglas Ferguson:

I just interviewed his mentor.

Judy Rees:

Excellent.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, Gary Noesner founded the FBI group that Chris kind of came up through.

Judy Rees:

Brilliant.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, great stuff.

Judy Rees: 

So one of the ideas that I got from Chris Voss’s book is to think about using the other person’s words because I’d been doing it all the while through clean language. And they, oh, blimey, Chris Voss says, “Using the other person’s words is the nearest thing that the FBI has to a Jedi mind trick,” because when the other person hears their words coming back, what they think is that person is using words like mine, therefore, they must be like me, therefore, I should like them.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right. The other thing too is if you’re listening that carefully, then you’re not going to miss the nuance. And the nuance is required to connect with people, so there’s so many levels of why that works, it’s just powerful. Even the verbs, I guess this comes back to metaphor, but if people are talking about I feel versus I think. For instance, if someone says, “It’s good to see you,” and you come back with, “It’s great to hear your voice,” that’s disconnected language, versus, “It’s great to see you too,” or, “That’s a lovely sweater.” Something, what follows that same thread versus disconnecting it, because if they said, “See,” then they’re talking about a sense of seeing versus a sense of hearing. And if we shift those, then we’re kind of disconnecting from them.

Judy Rees:

But it’s really hard work to track the sensory structure of what somebody’s saying, particularly if it’s different from yours. It’s really easy to track metaphor, because metaphor is multisensory. So if you think about space, so let’s say thinking about being in control, that’s a spatial metaphor. How do you know you’re in from a sensory point of view? Well, you can see some kind of container. You can possibly hear an echo, or sound differences that make it clear that you’re in a container. You can almost certainly touch the edges, so you can feel it. So the three most common sensory structures are all available at the same time, and that’s actually much closer to how human beings represent their thoughts internally, is they actually use multiple senses at once.

Judy Rees:

And as was observed all those years ago, people do often have a dominant sense that they use in their language, but it’s not consistent. You’re not a visual person in that sense because you’ll get someone who will talk all about their business, and I see, I see, I see, and then suddenly, when they’re talking about their family, they transfer to feeling words. So that’s hard work to keep track of that, whereas stay with the metaphor and appreciate that the metaphor is what they mean, it really is what they mean. It’s not so much the words, it’s the metaphor. The words are describing the metaphor, not the metaphor describing the words.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, the other thing is jargon and metaphor, we use it as a tool to encode a vast corpus of knowledge or thinking. Right? We use it to be efficient so that we can just say something, but mean a lot. But the issue is that meaning gets lost, and so if we don’t slow down and unpack it, then we can’t get to what that meaning really is, and really connect with one another. And then there’s also the risk of how I decode it. If I innocently decode it to mean something else, and now we’re totally thinking different things, and then now you’re saying something else, and I’m layering that on top of another, on top of assumption, on an assumption, assumption, then we’re in bad territory.

Douglas Ferguson:

So these tools, they’re almost crutches, right, to help us have more efficient language, or to have a faster conversation? But I love that your tools slow it down because often, we probably do need to slow it down and really get to the reality.

Judy Rees:

Well, it slows it down to get to the reality, but it speeds it up in terms of not having to deal with all the consequences of misunderstandings.

Douglas Ferguson:

Most of my career, no matter what I’ve been doing, whether it’s agile and software development, or helping run design design sprints with people, or any kind of workshops, I often come back to, we need to slow down to speed up because if we don’t take the moment, if we don’t take that moment, then these mistakes are going to compile on top of each other. It’s like compounding interest.

Judy Rees:

And it produces all sorts of weird effects, so just by … And I’m not saying everybody needs to be absolutely crystal clear about everything, about everybody, all the time. That would be ridiculous. We’d never get anything done. Nothing would be fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

And we’d be boring too. Sometimes those mistakes are fun.

Judy Rees:

But particularly when we’re doing things that are important and where we’re about to take a step that matters, spending a little bit of time to understand what’s going on for each individual and also for the group as a whole is going to make a big difference.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to hear a little bit about … I know that you’ve been running an un-conference for many years. In fact, I think this maybe was the fourth one recently that just happened.

Judy Rees:

It’s the fifth one, but we’ve been running it for four years.

Douglas Ferguson:

The fifth one, wow.

Judy Rees:

So there was one year we had two events. So it’s called Meta Forum, and it started because I wanted to get the clean language enthusiasts together to inspire each other, gather information, and so on. But I was also really, really curious about whether we could do any kind of open space-y un-conference thing online. I knew people had done it with text and get people online to send messages to each other in text. But I didn’t know if anyone had done it using video conferencing. And when Zoom was commonly available at that point, and had breakout rooms, I thought we can make something out of this. We can make an event that will really enable a bunch of 100 or so clean language facilitators to connect with each other from wherever they are in the world. And we’ll have some decent conversations, inspire each other, and regroup.

Judy Rees:

As I said, David Grove died about 10 years ago, so this was sort of five years after he’d died, six years after he’d died. And the community was probably either going to sort of all go its separate ways, and we’d probably never hear anything from it again, and so on, so I thought, “Let’s give it a go.” And I was also very curious to know if it could be done and when it could be done. I assumed that people would then beat a path to my door to hire me to do other ones. Didn’t happen until the pandemic.

Douglas Ferguson:

So what have you discovered through all this work of running these multiple events? I’m sure each one looks a little different than the one before it. What sorts of discoveries have you been learning? And what are you seeing as far as possibilities for what’s next?

Judy Rees:

I think the big thing is this thing about: How do you put enough constraints in place so that people feel psychological safety to sign up to engage and to actually engage in reality on the day? When it comes to running an open space event in a room, everybody knows how rooms work. They know how sticky notes work. They know how chairs work. As soon as you put the same thing online, there’s a whole lot of confusion from a whole lot of people. There’s a small group of people, of course, who go, “Oh, great. It’s online. Let’s just bash straight in.” But that’s not inclusive. That’s not accessible to a whole bunch of the people that you want to include.

Judy Rees:

And thinking about pre pandemic, 2016, most of the people who were comfortable with video conferencing with things like Zoom were youngish white men with a techy background. The clean language community, though it includes some of those people, tends to be older and more female than the pure tech group, and even older and more female than the agile coach group, who have been some significant adopters of clean language in the last five years or so. But we want to include more, so I was thinking, “How can we do this?”

Judy Rees:

So the first time, I actually said, “We’re going to run a hybrid event. We’re going to have one track where all through the day, all 12 hours, all 13 hours of it, we’re going to have a really good speaker speaking in the main room.” But we still want people to run sessions in parallel. But of course, that meant that the parallel sessions didn’t get many people, didn’t really work. So we adjusted it. We tried things out. And this time, we kept the whole wall of sessions open, but we did beforehand, we put a set of Google Slides up beforehand and said, “Look, if you’re thinking of running a session and you want to talk to people about it, want to get some feedback, just let people know that you’re thinking of doing it at such a time. Pop a slide in this Google Slide deck.” And that turned out to be really, really, worthwhile.

Judy Rees:

People were using the comments to just plus one that they wanted to be there. People were using those slides to say, “I really would like to attend a session like this, but I’m not qualified to run it. Could somebody do a basic introduction to clean language? Could somebody do a basic introduction to metaphor?” And quite quickly, we could use comments to attract attention from the people we thought could help. And of course, behind the scenes with those particular two, I could approach some people directly and say, “I know you can do it,” or, “I know you have a student who can do that. Could you just give them a nudge?”

Judy Rees:

Because of course, people who are students of a subject, there’s always, if you get everybody together, there’s always a hierarchy, and the people who are newer in the field will be a little bit reluctant to step up and say, “Well, I can teach basic facilitation skills. But what if the boss shows up?” So there’s always a bit of nudging. And some of that nudging is different in the online environment. In the room, we could just sidle up to people in the coffee lounge. Online, we have to find other routes. But we have to find those routes without it feeling like we’re being deliberately manipulative, so there are some fine balances to be found.

Judy Rees:

One of the big controversies was around, at the beginning of the most recent one, which two weeks ago, we thought it was too difficult for participants to manage putting sticky notes on the wall of sessions. Again, we were using Google Slides, and it was a bit clunky. We chose not to use a different tool, which would’ve been simpler for a number of reasons. So we chose to use Google Slides, and it was clunky and it was horrible. So early in the day, we made a decision at our first opening of the space, we ran three opening and three closings, so each four hour chunk was a separate open space at one level.

Judy Rees:

First time we ran it, we got technical people to put the stickies on the board. But that felt really like we were controlling the board. Then next time round, we tried to reduce that. And then the third time round, people were in fact putting their own stickies on the board. But they learned the skill. They weren’t trying to master everything all at once. This year, of course, Meta Forum is not the only online un-conference that I’ve run. I’ve run small ones with 20, 30 people, bigger ones, where we’ve had again, un-conference sections within much larger events, spaces, for example, a worldwide network of engineers doing a solar energy, wind power, all those kinds of things. Those kinds of engineers wanted to get together 50 of them. They would’ve normally gone all together to Norway, but they didn’t. They did it online. We created spaces where they could raise the topics that they needed to discuss.

Douglas Ferguson:

Isn’t it amazing, the shifts? I mean, we talked about some benefit, some folks don’t, but really, the opportunity that is before us is quite large. And I think when we look at the connections that can be established that just wouldn’t have otherwise, it’s quite exciting.

Judy Rees:

I could talk a lot about any of these events because I just find them perpetually fascinating. The fact that basically, with each event that people attend, they learn more. They get more confident with any of the technical tools. And we’re starting to get to the point now where there’s a critical mass of facilitators, trainers, educators, who’ve experienced this, experienced it, done well.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I like the idea that even in the one event, you were moving people up that maturity curve. I think that’s really fascinating. And so to your point, the maturity is increasing across the board because people are attending more things. But you can design your event to welcome people early. And then by the end, they’re doing more sophisticated things. That’s pretty amazing too. So I want to stop us here there because we could go on for a really long time. Well, you have a natural place to stop because this is so much fun. But I’m going to have to close it out, so I would love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a parting thought.

Judy Rees:

Well, I’ve talked about the potential of this thing. But so one of the potentials is to stay connected. Keep in touch with each other if we’re interested in this stuff. My invitation is to go to reesmccann.com. And on there, you will find a place to download our Web Events That Connect how-to guide, which is a really simple guide to doing these kind of things. But for the more sophisticated facilitators listening, signing up for that guide will also put you on my weekly link letter list, where I pull together a weekly selection of about 10 things from the internet, including things about clean language, things about online facilitation, things about how people think, that I think a lot of your listeners will find interesting. So do feel free to sign up for that link letter and stay in touch with me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thank you so much, Judy. It’s been a pleasure having you.

Judy Rees:

It’s been really good fun talking to you. Thank you very much.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. And 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 37: Clean Language, Clear Metaphors appeared first on Voltage Control.

I recently came across a Freakonomics article that discussed scaling science–investigating why interventions that work well in experimental or research settings often fail to scale up. 

“Scaling up a new intervention like a medical procedure or a teaching method has the potential to help thousands, millions, maybe billions of people.” –Stephen J. Dubner

Scaling, as we know, is essential to bringing any idea to market. When you fail to bring an idea to fruition, you also lose out on the impact it could make. There is a concept in implementation science (the study of methods and strategies that facilitate the application of research findings and evidence-based practice) called voltage drop that caught my attention. Because, not only is this a common pitfall among academics, many companies also fall into this trap when they begin to scale their innovations. 

According to Freakonomics, a voltage drop is an identified good result in research that ends up being much less than the anticipated result when scaled. This is a bigger problem than many realize, because failing at scale can not only cost lots of time and money, it can create unexpected consequences such as losing confidence due to the initial over-hype of the idea. Failing to consider these issues as you scale means your innovation may never make it to market. 

Factors that Contribute to Voltage Drop

One factor that contributes to voltage drop is setting admirably high standards for research. For example, say you want to source the best professionals to be a part of your research so you have the best results. You may start with 5-10 professionals, but when you go to scale, you need 100+. This forces you to either spend much more than expected to get the “best of the best” or dwindles the amount of talent in your pool. In other words, the impact goes down and the costs go up. 

Let’s look at an example from John List, economist at the University of Chicago, who was part of the conversation in the Freakonomics article. In talking about the scaling revolution, List used the following example to showcase how critical it is to ensure original research is robust before scaling:

“Say I’m doing an experiment in Chicago Heights on early childhood, and I find a great result. How confident should I be that when we take that result to all of Illinois or all of the Midwest or all of America, is that result still going to find that important benefit-cost profile that we found in Chicago Heights? We need to know, what is the magic sauce? Was it the 20 teachers you hired down in Chicago Heights, where if we go nationally we need 20,000? So it should behoove me as an original researcher to say, “Look, if this scales up, we’re going to need many more teachers. I know teachers are an important input. Is the average teacher in the 20,000 the same as the average teacher in the 20?”

Fidelity is another core cause of voltage drop. In the case of innovation, fidelity means the level of functionality and like-ness that the prototype has to the final product, i.e. visual design, interactivity, content, functions and features, etc. For example, a low fidelity prototype is low-tech and basic; it’s not market-ready. A scaled idea reflects the integrity of the original. Therefore, you must be able to measure everything, even fidelity. This is critical to the implementation process. Ask yourself: Is this idea the same as it would present in the real world? Does it have the same components that will produce the same outcomes? 

“Being able to measure fidelity well, from afar, provides another benefit to scaling up: it allows the people who developed the original program to ultimately step back. So they don’t become a bottleneck — which is a common scaling problem.” –Stephen J. Dubner

How To Prevent Voltage Drop

To overcome voltage drop, you must successfully find your way/experiment through it. Namely, it’s about the extended transformation journey. In other words, making sure that you truly adopt a mindset of trust as well as a learner’s mindset. Be willing to make adjustments; have humility. When you’re scaling, don’t assume the original idea is flawless. Where do you need to adjust? 

Enter: Prototypes. Prototypes help you simulate fidelity and learn through a surrogate. You get to workshop/try on your idea in a “real-world” scenario. Then, you have the opportunity to work through any potential pitfalls before you actually launch the idea. In essence, practice makes perfect. Prototyping allows you to experiment and make adjustments as needed with lower risk. If you are able to address problems in the prototype stage, you will save time and money and have greater success when scaling the idea.

Learning to adjust your ideas is core to the work we do and the mindsets we teach and coach at Voltage Control. Learn more about how we can help you.

It’s also important to know that assumptions can even exist based on hard evidence, especially in the complex and shifting environment we all find ourselves in today. That’s why we must always stay curious and continuously learn. 

How We Can Help

At Voltage Control, we are change experts that can use a vast array of facilitation and innovation methods to bring your team together to be more inclusive and accelerate the power of innovation; guide the process from start to finish. Our training can help you build the awareness and capability you need to not only overcome voltage drop but to make your ideas thrive in the market. We can also guide you through this process with our expert facilitation.

Some examples of how Voltage Control can help you combat voltage drop:

• Design a robust innovation process to promote continued dialog around efficacy and assumptions. This is why we institute a sustaining innovation cadence with all our clients.
• We lead you through the design thinking process to create prototypes, which help you simulate fidelity and learn through a surrogate.

Check out these services for more on how we can help: 

• Innovation Acceleration workshop 
• Design Sprints
• Design Dash

Let us help you soar past voltage drop and bring your idea to (scalable) life today. Contact us for a free consultation.

The post Avoid Voltage Drop and Scale Your Innovations 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.

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