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

Today’s story is with Tricia Conyers, founder of Island Inspirations Ltd., remote work facilitator, and learning experience designer out of Trinidad and Tobago.

I spoke with Tricia about her Learning meeting, the reason behind it, and how she imagines her meeting changing in the future.

An Emergent Learning Space

Tricia first started this particular meeting several years ago as a monthly session designed for people moving to Trinidad from different countries. Dubbing her sessions the “Learning” meeting, she designs these gatherings to help businesses shift to a more human-centered mindset in the workplace. Tricia’s goal for her monthly meetings is to help her clients and their team learn from a diverse group of people and different perspectives.

Each month, Tricia makes an effort to further shape her client’s company culture by bringing people together to discuss and ideate around the year’s overarching arc as well as a singular monthly question. Though the meeting originally began as a day-long session, during COVID-19, the meetings transitioned to online-only with hour-long sessions each month. 

In Tricia’s efforts to encourage discourse and increase flexibility in her meetings, she relies on platforms that spark creativity to help explore the main questions. In addition to prioritizing experiential learning, Tricia aims to increase connectivity among her team members in these Learning sessions. 

Let’s take a closer look at Tricia’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Learning meeting, the main goal is to strengthen trust among team members and encourage an open-minded approach to learning.

Preparation

To set the tone for an effective learning experience, Tricia spends a significant amount of time on preparation. With the help of a small design team, Tricia shapes the year’s curriculum and the breakdown for the following months.

To prepare for a learning meeting, the facilitator will select the question by month and determine how participants will explore the monthly question throughout each meeting. 

In a Learning meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: Held virtually on Zoom

• Participants:
  • 14 – 20 attendees
  • Facilitator
  • Tech host

Tools:

• Mural 
• Zoom
• Google Maps
• Jam Board
• Drawing apps

Deliverables:

• A stronger connection with team members
• An answer to the monthly question

As Tricia holds this meeting on a monthly basis, the participants change month to month. Typically, 15 – 20 people are part of this monthly meeting.

Plan the Workshop

• Length of time: One hour

Activities:

• Storyboarding
• Drawing

Agenda:

• Beginning
  • Introduce the concept
• Middle
  • Form breakout groups, pairs, or triads
• End
  • Reinforce the culture of connectedness
  • Identify next steps

Before the Meeting

Preparation

As the Learning meeting is a recurring, monthly session, the preparation begins with preparing a curriculum for the entire year. This curriculum centers around an overarching question that drives the process of learning and growth in an organization.

Tricia likes to split the preparation into short-, medium-, and long-term preparation. In the preparation for this particular meeting, Tricia focused on designing a structure or flow of the meeting that allows for constant discourse throughout the year. Based on the overarching question, Tricia breaks the rest of the meeting’s curriculum into various monthly topics that will further the overarching aims and encourage increased engagement amongst participants.

Tricia then works with her design team and tech host to make sure the Zoom meeting flows seamlessly with the apps and other software used.

Beginning

The facilitator begins the Learning meeting by asking everyone to embrace the space and to share their experiences. To encourage the free-flowing exchange of ideas, the facilitator asks participants to bring their best selves into the meeting and to see what emerges. 

At the beginning of each monthly session of a Learning meeting, Tricia sets the tone by considering questions such as:

• What is the cultural impact that we want to have? 
• How do we want to shape this? 
• What is it that we want to do for people? 
• What values of the organization does this reinforce?
•  How can we make sure that we bring that in?

In this Learning meeting, Tricia worked with team members from across North America with connection and learning as the main deliverables for the session. Though the preparation process is quite heavy-handed, Tricia likes to approach her meetings with a loose structure. This way, she can allow for more of the unexpected as she creates a culture of connectedness through open discussion and ideation.

While the Learning sessions differ from the structured setting of a traditional meeting, the main aim is to free participants from the confinements and expectations that come with following strict guidelines. 

“There’s a lot of flexibility in adapting and seeing where the group wants to go with this in terms of exploring and learning… Being able to respond to that has left the people who want more structure…feeling a bit uncomfortable… And I think they’ve had to learn to try and embrace that over the years.”

With the flexibility in the structure of the meeting comes growth and the ability to improve connection, communication, and understanding amongst team members.

Middle

The middle of the session opens the space even more to encourage increased ideation, more connectedness, and greater flexibility. The facilitator works to create an emergent learning space by forming breakout groups of two, three, or more people to encourage discussion and collaborative problem-solving. 

In this phase of the meeting, Tricia uses technology to support the free form ideation process. She encourages participants to focus on the cultural impact of their ideas as they work together. Using Software like Jam Board and drawing apps, she encourages participants to storyboard their thoughts and ideas. During this phase, Trica splits team members into groups of two, three, or more to encourage further discussion, foster deeper relationships, and center connections in the company culture.

While the monthly nature of this meeting is beneficial to strengthening connectedness, Tricia points out that it presents a potential risk that facilitators should keep in mind: 

“As new people join the business throughout the year, they come into these sessions without having some of the experience of what’s happened before…It means you have to think about…how do you constantly create an environment where they can feel welcomed into a conversation that in essence has already started.”

End

As the meeting comes to a close, the facilitator should assess if the deliverables are achieved. Facilitators can prepare participants for the next month’s discussion.   

Towards the end of the session, Tricia makes an effort to improve the meeting for the following months. With the overarching topic in mind, it’s important that she continues the same rhythm of creativity and innovation in the next sessions. Tricia points out that having a recurring session with the same participants throughout the year gives her the opportunity to refine her approach to facilitation:

“In a monthly meeting like this…there are 12 opportunities to make changes and to get it right…Or to keep changing things and to try and make it better each time.”

Shifting the Culture

Essentially, this Learning meeting is designed to create a culture of openness and connection among organizations on a regular basis. Going forward, Tricia may take the Learning meetings in an even more emergent direction. Instead of focusing on a learning session, Tricia hopes to create a learning council. Meeting participants will bring a challenge to the council that they explore as a group with a more human-centered problem-solving session as the main deliverable.

With the idea of fostering more emergent sessions in mind, Tricia shared what is successful about her current Learning meeting model. 

“The risk of the session is that you leave people feeling frustrated about the unexpected “emergent space” of the meeting… but things change and we actually allow for that immersion.”

“When we take time to think about how we want this meeting to help shape the culture of the organization, when we take time to frame it through that lens, and through that question, we can make really great things happen.
Meetings are when we bring people together, they’re when stories emerge and that’s when we help to shape the culture that people feel in the organization.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post The Learning Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Moe Ali, a facilitator, service designer, and creative human enabler based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

I spoke with Moe about the Balcony Bunch meeting, the reason behind it, and what risks he encountered. 

A Meeting in Motion

Moe started the Balcony Bunch as a meeting designed to connect otherwise disconnected creatives in Dubai. The idea for this meeting is that it starts as a guided walk through the streets and parks, ending where attendees sit at a balcony for the rest of the meeting. 

Moe was inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker to create a meeting that would establish deeper roots with his fellow creatives. The Art of Gathering teaches facilitators how to create high-powered gatherings that move beyond the mundane to meetings that matter. 

Moe created the Balcony Bunch for creatives living in Dubai for longer than ten years as a way to grow deeper relationships. In Dubai, building relationships that span months or years is incredibly challenging due to the city’s transitory nature. Moe discovered that many creatives were no longer incentivized to meet new people so he designed the Balcony Bunch as an opportunity to soften hearts and awaken minds to true community. 

Let’s take a closer look at Moe’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Balcony Bunch meeting, the main goal is to generate trust and build real connections and genuine relationships by breaking the superficial barriers of roles and titles by asking participants “How do you do?” rather than “What do you do?”

Preparation Guidelines

• No phone calls, no data 
• Understand the prompts beforehand
• Wear comfortable walking shoes

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: Held outdoors 

• Participants: Eight people hoping to deepen their relationships
• Supplies: Food and drinks for the balcony

Tools:

• Google docs
• Text messages
• Google Maps

Deliverables:

• Deeper relationships between like-minded people
• Shared empathy amongst participants

In this particular meeting, Moe invited eight like-minded creatives that had been living in Dubai for 10 years or more.

Plan the Workshop

• Length of time: Approximately two hours

Activities:

• Finding the location
• Meditation and visualization
• Following the guided path
• Popcorn style discussion

Agenda:

• The Location
  • Meditation and visualization
    
• The First Prompt (Past)
  • Walking conversation 
  • Debriefing
    
• Reconvening
  • Debriefing

• The Second Prompt (Future)
• Debriefing

Before the Meeting

The facilitator may contact the participants ahead of time to set the tone for the meeting. Moe asked questions such as:

• Who would you like to attend? 
• What would you like them to walk away with? 
• What would make you happy? 

These prompts help attendees keep in mind that they’re participating in someone else’s happiness and helping them walk away with something of value.

The Location

Location plays a large role in the Balcony Bunch. Having the location be part of the meeting gives the attendees a sense of purpose and curiosity.

In Moe’s session, he sends participants a location via Google Maps where they all gather to meet. Before starting the meeting, he asks participants to sit in silence as they meditate by a fountain. At this time, a breathing exercise serves as a meditative and mindful practice while the others arrived. 

Once all participants arrived, Moe asked them to visualize everything they had experienced in the past year. After the brief visualization, Moe paired everyone up to begin the walking phase of the meeting.  

The First Prompt

Participants begin their walking conversations as they answer the first prompt, discussing what they experienced in the past year. The guided path serves as a way for participants to focus completely on their partner’s answers. As the facilitator leads the way, participants discuss the prompt from the first phase and recount the experiences from the last year.

In the walking conversation, Moe encouraged participants to move beyond discussing roles. 

“I always feel that the worst way to get people to talk to each other is by introducing work, or labels related to the work that people do because people always end up talking about the things that excite them if given the chance.”

By having participants share their experiences from the past year, they were able to “widen the net” and have a truly human experience.

Reconvening

In a secluded area like a balcony or a garden, the facilitator brings the pairs back together to reconvene and find patterns in their experiences over food and drinks.

In Moe’s meeting, he walked his group to a secluded garden area, near a reflecting pool. Moe used water throughout his meeting as a point of inflection and reflection as he asked participants what they noticed on their walk.

Participants shared what they discussed in a popcorn-style conversation while Moe weaved each person’s responses into other attendees’ answers. Moe noted who would perk up and show empathy in their body language and facial expressions as patterns emerged within each person’s story.

The Second Prompt

The second prompt acts as a way to bond two people in their shared vulnerability. After the first conversation closes, the facilitator introduces the second prompt with questions like:

• What are you looking forward to creating over the coming year?
• What do you want to invite?
• What are you moving towards that you would like to bring into being this year?

After sharing these questions with the group, Moe paired partners that showed the most empathy to each other’s stories. The goal of this pairing was to allow each person in the conversation to feel heard and seen. 

As each partner showed some level of empathy for the other, answering questions about their hopes and goals for the future was an effective way to create an incredible bond in just a few hours. As Moe shares, “The ties that bind were fairly thin. However, they got thicker by the end of the evening. And I think what was unique about this. Strangers coming together and within that hour and a half, they were relating to each other in a way that they hadn’t before.”

Lighting a Cerebral Fire 

The Balcony Bunch serves as an unconventional meeting that taps into the magic of human emotion and shared experiences. Having a meeting in motion allows for a certain physicality that helps participants get out of their heads and into the moment. 

Likewise, by negating the roles and work responsibilities of each person, attendees can see the humanity in one another, allowing for a level of vulnerability usually not seen in the workplace.

When asked about the potential pitfalls of this meeting style, Moe pointed out that running this type of session may be too risky for a typical work environment. To truly create this type of meeting with the potential pitfalls in mind, it’s important to find the space between the high risk, high reward setting of a retreat and the laid-back familiar environment of a post-work mixer. 

By finding the space in between, facilitators can create an intentional environment that encourages authentic connection. Though this space is hard to navigate, Moe believes it’s worth the risk:

“Now, keep in mind, I’ve only done this a few times. I haven’t done it in a way that I’ve been able to track any sort of metrics. The only metric I have is the sentiment from the people. If I were to ask them now three years later about this meeting, they’d be like, “Oh yeah, I remember the Balcony Bunch. Yeah, that was great.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post The Balcony Bunch appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with David Plouffe, a heritage planner from Calgary, Canada. David has worked for the city of Vancouver and Calgary at various levels of public service for the past 23 years. 

I spoke with David about What is Delight and Why We Should Care, the reason behind it, and what he is most proud of. 

Chasing Delight

In February 2021, David got the idea to start a Mug Club that centers delight. The initial inspiration came from the NPR program, This American Life, and Ross Gay’s series of essays, The Book of Delights. The essays are essentially a study of joy on how we can be kinder to each other. The book features the small joys most of us overlook as we get lost in the stress and routines of our daily lives. 

In public service, kindness and joy go a long way. While the work of a public servant can be taxing, David was determined to discover what brings those in his field delight and joy and how to engender more delight in public service. Essentially, this delight-centered Mug Club seeks to pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary. 

To center delight in these meetings, David focuses on two questions:

• How do we bring delight into the work that we do?
• Why should we care that we bring delight to the 1.3 million citizens of Calgary?

Let’s take a closer look at David’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a What is Delight and Why Should We Care meeting, the main goal is to develop a “delight” muscle: to find delight and joy in the public service profession and identify why participants should care to do so. 

Preparation

One month before:

The facilitator and the tech team work together to formulate the structure and flow of activities for the upcoming meeting. The goal is to create a shared language and identify questions that facilitate a conversation about delight in the public service sphere.

One week before:

The facilitator sends three articles and related questions to encourage a common language amongst participants. 

Guidelines:

• No recordings 
• Read articles a week before the meeting

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location:  Held virtually
• Participants: Any member of the team can participate
• Tech support: To ensure the virtual meeting is flawlessly executed

Tools:

•  Microsoft Teams

Deliverables:

• Open and vulnerable conversation
• Identifying how delight surfaces in public service and how it impacts the community

In a What is Delight and Why Should We Care session, David opens the invitation to all 16,000 people that work for the City of Calgary. Anyone can participate, whether it’s someone in senior leadership or a first-year new employee. In this particular meeting, 30 to 40 people participated, most of which were in middle management from various departments. 

Plan the Workshop:

• Length of time: 50 minutes (8:05 am – 8:55 am)

Activities:

• Answer prompts pulled from articles 
• Share stories around delight
• Use the “chat” feature to share links, gifs, and memes

Agenda:

• Opening
  • Discuss three “delight” articles
  • Prompt discussion with two-three questions

• Middle/Divergence
  • Identify a common purpose
  • Identify similarities/differences around delight

• End/Convergence
  • Consider the larger audience
  • Delightful ideation: identify ways to continue the conversation around delight

Before the Opening

15 minutes before the meeting starts, David suggests the facilitator practice meditative breathing. This helps the facilitator prepare to host an engaging session. 

Opening

The initial goal of a What is Delight and Why Should We Care meeting is to create a shared language around delight. The facilitator kickstarts the discussion with two or three questions related to the required reading. 

David invites all City of Calgary employees to participate and focus on big picture issues, welcoming individuals from different workgroups with various levels of expertise to join. David encourages participants to brainstorm on how they can improve the city as public servants by centering joy and delight. In these sessions, topics such as paving the roads, setting recreation programs, and similar issues are addressed. 

David finds that the participants of his monthly What is Delight meetings are excited to speak with each other and share their thoughts:

“People are energized. They’re maybe even pent up, that they’re wanting to express their ideas, their thoughts, to ask questions, to see people that they might not have seen all month.”

As David facilitates, he works alongside one other person that pays attention to all tech concerns, such as observing what happens on the chat, noting related questions, monitoring the expressions and hands up, and providing general tech support.

Middle/Divergence

Towards the middle of the meeting, the facilitator identifies a common purpose amongst participants. Guests share their ideas of delight and identify similarities and differences.

David encourages active listening as the participants answer the titular questions, “What is delight?” and “Why should we care?” During this phase of the meeting, participants are encouraged to be vulnerable and share new ways of looking at delight. 

Flexibility is a key component during this phase as participants explore the big picture around the idea of delight and how it shows up in public service. At this point, guests may use the chat function in Microsoft Teams to share gifs, post links, and use memes to convey ideas. 

End/Convergence

As the meeting comes to a close, the facilitator will encourage the participants to consider ways to carry delight to their larger audience. This stage consists of ideating ways to keep delight at the center of their focus outside of the meetings.

David ends the What is Delight sessions by encouraging participants to continue the conversation around delight to their audience of stakeholders, community activists, and colleagues. In February 2021, the What is Delight session culminated in the creation of a new “Delight Experiment” Teams channel to further conversation. 

Though the Delight Experiment was designed for one month, it’s still running eight months later. This delight channel serves as a way for the city employees to center delight in their personal and professional lives, prompting over 80 people to continue the conversation in between each What is Delight session. 

The Delight Experiment

Balance, flexibility, and vulnerability are key components of the What is Delight and Why Should We Care meetings. David notes that pairing the three-part structure of the meeting with the freeform ideation phase allows for vulnerability and meaningful conversation amongst participants.

As the meetings continue, David hopes that more of the senior leadership team will enter this conversation. The invitation to the What is Delight meetings are open to all, and he hopes those further up in leadership will join in in the near future. 

In David’s effort to answer What is Delight and Why Should We Care through his monthly Mug Club, he discovered the joy in centering delight daily. In his efforts to stimulate the ongoing search for delight in the public service sphere, David is most proud of the Delight Experiment channel as it is still going strong. 

“A single meeting around the idea, ‘What is delight?’, has prompted over 80 people to continue the conversation every day about what brings them delight, why we should care, and how we bring delight into the public service, and that helps us as the citizens of Calgary.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post What Is Delight and Why Should We Care appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Jackie Colburn, a design sprint facilitator and independent consultant out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. After six years of working in strategy and client leadership at GoKart Labs, Jackie founded her own Design Sprint practice in 2017. Jackie champions the design process in everything she does and is fond of activities that center storytelling as a vehicle for human emotion.

Jackie works with clients to design an environment that facilitates creativity, collaboration, and symbiotic relationships in the workplace. In her practice, Jackie loves to step in when teams are ready to make the change, but aren’t sure what the way forward looks like. Through optimism and openness, Jackie brings teams through the hurdle of miscommunication and damaged dynamics to realize their true potential.

I spoke with Jackie about her Teaming meeting, the reason behind it, and what she would do differently.

A Time for Teaming

Part of Jackie’s facilitation success comes from identifying the perfect time for a Teaming session, as was the case with her client, a sports company amidst transition. In this particular meeting, Jackie’s client experienced two major events: a newly appointed CEO and the recent acquisition of another company. Jackie put together a strategy designed to ease her client out of their current ambiguity and to identify a clearer path towards the future. 

In this time of change, Jackie discovered that the CEO and the founder were both open to creative problem-solving. Jackie shares that both the CEO and the founder “were aware that they had a problem and then they were willing to say, ‘We need help solving this problem.’”

Let’s take a closer look at Jackie’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

While most of Jackie’s clients bring her in to facilitate a design sprint, this Teaming session was different. To unify the leadership team, Jackie used the following guidelines for her workshop:

Guidelines

Gather office supplies for organization and note-taking:

• Trust the process
• No tech
• Empathy for one another 
• Use “Yes, and” statements

In a Teaming meeting, the facilitator will choose the:

Materials:

• Basket for the “tech check”
• Post-it notes in various sizes
• Timer

Jackie recommends a team of seven people for a successful Teaming session. Jackie’s team included the founder, CRO, new CEO, head of marketing, head of product, founder of the newly acquired company, and CFO.

Plan the Workshop:

• Length of time: 7 hours (10 am – 5 pm)

Activities:

• Issues List: keep, kill, combine
• Storyboarding
• Gain/Pain deep dives
• Sailboat activity (AJ&Smart)
• Action planning

Agenda:

• Grounding
  • Icebreaker
  • Guidelines
  • Tech check

• Opening
  • Introductions 
  • Issues list
    
• Storytelling
  • Storyboarding
  • Gains/Pains
  • Issues list review

• Strategic Plan Review
  • Intro from CEO
  • Team feedback: “I like, I wish, I wonder”
  • Issues list review

• From Issue to Action
  • Sailboat (AJ&Smart)
  • Action Planning

• Closing

Exercises: Grounding

In the grounding phase of a Teaming session, the facilitator reviews the day’s itinerary, identifies the intent of the session, and asks why each participant is there. 

As Jackie’s client experienced chaos amidst the changing leadership positions and the company integration, it was important for her to start the meeting with trust and empathy at the forefront. Jackie led the team with a check-in and asked participants to share the last emoji they used before requesting that everyone place their phone into the basket. Following the check-in, Jackie shared her “people-first” mentality to encourage each participant to see past their roles in the company.

Exercises: Opening

The opening phase of a Teaming session gives both the founders, CEO, and other participants the opportunity to introduce themselves and zero in on the day-long workshop.

During the opening of Jackie’s meeting, the CEO and Founder gave a brief company history and insights of what they observed within the company, as well as outcomes they hoped to reach during the session.

After the initial intro, the rest of the team introduced themselves and shared about their personal and professional bests from the last six months and what they were hoping to get out of the experience, as well as what was working, and what wasn’t. 

Exercises: Storytelling

In this phase of the meeting, the facilitator uses storytelling to encourage authenticity from the workshop participants. 

In her session, Jackie asked participants to storyboard “What’s happened for me over the past six months?”, as well as part of their story that offered the most gain and the most pain. 

During this exercise, each person noted something they did that made the moment a “gain” and what they did that made the moment challenging. Through the storyboarding process, team members also challenged each other by noting ways the other person might make a future challenge less painful.  

Through the storytelling exercises, Jackie kickstarted the cross-team discussion that is the heart of the Teaming process. 

“We had the storyboards up on the wall and looked at one another’s stories and spoke to one another across the team. It was good, it was one of those moments where I felt like, ‘Yay, it’s working.’”

Exercises: Strategic Plan Review

Following the lunch break, the CEO reviews the strategic plan, and the team offers feedback.

In this particular meeting, Jackie encouraged the team members to use “I like, I wish, I wonder” statements to share feedback on the strategic plan. The team then reviewed the issues list again to consider new issues and agree on the most important two.

Exercises: From Issue to Action

During this phase, the facilitator uses the sailboat activity to discuss the top two issues.

Jackie drew a boat as team members identified what pushed the boat forward or held it back in relation to each issue. The team then decided on “to-solves”, reframed them as “how might we” questions, and focused on idea generation. This was followed by an action planning step where each team member identified the top five actions they wanted to take as well as one action they wanted another member to take. 

When asked how she might improve the meeting, Jackie noted that she would have ended the meeting earlier. With such a packed agenda, Jackie shared that the action planning step might have been more productive as a separate meeting.

Exercises: Closing

The CEO and Founder shared their thank yous as the session ended. Team members shared their intentions and closings.

Exercises: Teaming with the Intention of Healing

While it isn’t always easy to identify the right solution to a problem, it’s painfully clear when something isn’t working. However, it is in this setting that Jackie thrives.

“I would say this is the type of session I would run during a moment of transition or if the team feels like their health is suffering. That’s why I liked the name Teaming or Gelling, it felt more like a group therapy workshop but with the intention of healing and working better together.”

Teaming puts a team’s EQ at the forefront, with transparency as the main priority. Through these sessions, Jackie strips each team down to their authentic selves, encouraging members to share their successes, and losses as they prioritize open communication above all. This vulnerability Jackie achieves through her Teaming sessions is what makes these meetings so magical: 

“I’m proud that the team was able… to show up, and not just sugarcoat or talk around the issues, we really got into the issues. I know that they felt like it impacted the health of the team moving forward.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Teaming appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Dr. Myriam Hadnes, connector, behavioral economist, and facilitator from Amsterdam, Netherlands. Passionate about creativity and human behavior, Myriam facilitates business and team workshops with a focus on helping meeting participants “get out of their own way”. 

Myriam is well versed in the art of connecting and leading game-changing meetings as she is the creator of the podcast Workshops Work, founder and curator of NeverDoneBefore, and project facilitator at European Investment Bank (EIB).

With an emphasis on helping meeting members build stronger networks and share knowledge, Myriam is passionate about leading meetings that cut to the heart of the matter and enrich each participant with passion and purpose.

I spoke with Myriam about a meeting template she calls “Project Kickoff”,  the reason behind this meeting, what it accomplished, and where the magic happens.

Finding That Magic Moment

The Project Kickoff is a specific meeting template Myriam uses to connect a team or department as they gear up for an upcoming venture. In my conversation with Myriam, we discuss a Project Kickoff meeting held before the start of a European summer school as they prepared to host 70 students for 10 days.

With Project Kickoff sessions, as with any meeting Myriam hosts, she aims to find the magic moment of any workshop: the moment each team member finds their reason to be there and the motivation to keep going. 

As each participant prepares for the project ahead, this meeting serves as a way to encourage them to work as hard and learn as much as possible heading into a week of unexpected challenges. 

The Meeting Preparation

Before the meeting begins, Myriam identifies the goal and prepares to get participating team members on the same page. Following the Project Kickoff template, the meeting facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: The location should provide space for team members to break out into groups of two or three 

• Setup: The meeting should begin with the chairs arranged in a circle and enough wall space to cluster sticky notes

• Participants: Invitations should be sent to a diverse group of staff that are the most instrumental in executing the upcoming event or project 

Materials

Gather office supplies for organization and note-taking:

• Sharpies
• A4 paper
• M&M’s

Myriam recommends limiting the team to six people for a more focused session. In the summer camp Project Kickoff, Myriam’s team included individuals from various departments such as advisory, finance, and operations. 

Plan the Workshop:

• Length of time: 90- minutes
• Day: Generally a weekday excluding Monday or Friday

Software: SessionLab

Schedule:

• Icebreaker
• Check-In
• Breakout Group
• Check-Out 

Exercise:

At the start of this 90-minute Kickoff session, Myriam led with an icebreaker to help tackle nerves and get the creativity going, passing out M&Ms as a snack. The question, “If you had a superpower what would it be?” helped to break down the barriers and hierarchy of all team members involved.

Following the icebreaker, each individual took two minutes to share who they were and why they were there. This way, everyone understood they were working on the same project, even if their backgrounds and roles were different. The rest of the check-in served to get the entire team on the same page as they geared up for a week of intense focus, hard work, and unexpected challenges.

Myriam’s approach to facilitation prioritizes organization and orderliness.

“If unstructured, it’s quite easy to lose yourself in the details without bringing the meeting back together… For me actually, a meeting is successful if the people leave with a better understanding and less confusion than when they walked in,” Myriam said.

The Breakout Group

With a team of six engaged and energized individuals, the meeting shifts into the breakout portion. 

Identify Needs, Problems, and Roles

The team splits into groups of two or three to identify potential needs, problems, and roles the upcoming project or event will require of them.

In the meeting, Myriam considers the issues the team would face throughout a week of summer camp. Questions like “Who will handle the logistics in the event of missing equipment?” and “How can the staff make sure each camper had a meaningful experience?” are addressed.

Activity: Matching Talents to Roles

These discussions segued into identifying roles that needed to be filled, such as someone responsible for managing the sound equipment and another individual responsible for connecting with the campers. 

With the roles identified, Myriam encouraged each team to create a list of hidden passions and talents. This process served to help each team member connect with their “why”, allowing them to feel like a valued member of the group and giving them a clear responsibility to fulfill when the time came. 

During this activity, each participant notes their primary and secondary roles on a sheet of paper. As a way to encourage connectivity and teamwork in the groups, each individual’s primary role is something they struggle with, allowing them the opportunity to evolve and strengthen their talents.

The Check-Out

A Tech Retro is for and by developers. While pair-programming is essentially continuous code review, it can still be useful to take some time to step back and look at the codebase. Tech Retros often take the traditional “Smiley / Frownie / Meh” format but focus exclusively on the codebase. This is a great time to talk about modeling Similar to the check-in meeting, the check-out brings the group of six back together, wrapping up by giving each team member homework. In her story, Myriam began the check-out by asking questions like, “What are the biggest challenges we face?” and “What are some risks to prepare for?” Myriam gave the team homework to fill their roles with more “meat” as they prepared for their new responsibilities. 

Breaking the Barriers to Problem Solving

Myriam explains that the success of her Project Kickoff meetings lies in the meeting’s transformative power to break the ice, break down barriers, and eliminate anxiety and stress. Thus, creating an open-minded, creative team that is ready to face whatever lies ahead.

As the Project Kickoff meeting gives each person a mission and passion, Myriam hopes to eliminate fear, doubt, and anxiety with each check-in and check-out.

Explaining the power in identifying roles, Myriam shares,

“They walked in as a group of strangers, kind of being maybe intimidated and stressed or, “What will happen? Am I good enough? How will I know what I have to do?” Walking out with new friends and the confidence that now they have their own little thing that they’re responsible about.”

The Power of Six

In any meeting filled with participants pulled from every department, Myriam warns of the risk of creating hierarchies. In her Project Kickoff meetings, she aimed to level the field, no matter the individual’s academic or professional background. 

I ask Myriam what improvements she would like to make going forward and she shares that she would urge her clients to make the check-ins and check-outs a regular part of their department meetings. As her clients experience tremendous success by applying her Project Kickoff template to specific projects and events, she has no doubt applying this method to daily operations would yield successful results as well.

Wrapping up our conversation, I asked Myriam what her favorite part of the Project Kickoff template is. “The power of it”, she shared, “that six people gained confidence and buy-in.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Project Kickoff appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Jeff Gothelf–coach, speaker, author & consultant to help organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that create better products. Jeff works with companies of all sizes training them in Lean at scale, the intersection of agile and user experience, and great team collaboration. In addition to public and private workshops, keynotes, and coaching, he is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond. Most recently Jeff co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for practical business books for busy executives. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.

I spoke with Jeff about a meeting he designed called “Demo Days,” the purpose of the meeting, what it helped accomplish, and why it was so powerful.

“This (meeting) starts to really build much better conversations broadly, across the organizations, because people are up there being honest, on stage on a bi-weekly basis. And I’m super proud of that.” -Jeff Gothelf

The Need for Transparency

As a coach, consultant, and workshop facilitator, Jeff naturally works with a lot of change inside organizations. Some examples include helping clients develop a product or changing the way they work, or implementing a new goal-setting framework. He’s learned through these change-inducing experiences over the years that the more teams can increase the transparency around any behind-the-scenes work being done, the more they can also mitigate questions and anxiety around the work. “If you disappear into a room, and then you pop back out into the public eye of the organization and say, ‘here is the thing that we created and all of you should love it,’ you’re going to fail every single time,” he says.

“If you can show your process, if you can show what you’re learning, if you can show why you’re making the decisions that you’re making, and how that’s impacting the work that you’re doing, people tend to be less defensive. If they can get that in small, incremental chunks, rather than what we used to call in the design world, ta-da design. Ta-da design is, when you disappear into a room for a month, and you come back and you’re like, ‘Ta-da We did it, Don’t you love it?’ And folks don’t always love it,” he elaborates.

This transparency factor is what prompted him to design Demo Days – a recurring meeting format he uses with various clients and has found it valuable each time. For this reason, he encourages companies to have it as a regularly held meeting as opposed to just once. The meeting came about as a way to increase the transparency of the work that the teams he was helping were doing. The main purpose is to showcase how a team works–what they work on and the progress they make–to the rest of the organization that likely doesn’t have as much detailed insight. Jeff explains that sometimes that progress can also be a learning process. For example, if a team tried something that didn’t work, they could share why it didn’t work, what they learned from it, and what they would like to do differently or test next. For this reason, the Demo Days meeting makes possible a type of permission for teams to be more creative and innovative, he says.

Let’s take a closer look at Jeff’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

Pre-Meeting Prep

Jeff outlined some ground rules for the Demo Days meeting that should be communicated to the participants prior to the meeting so they know what to expect:

• Don’t over prepare: This is not a one and done meeting
• Show what you have: Whatever you have ready that day
• Be open and honest about the work: For example, openly share if you’re light on content because it was a busy week or others were out
• Talk about the work in terms of learnings: How has what’s been done taught you or the team something? What did you learn this week?
• Set expectations around what will be done with the learnings in the coming weeks or next cycle or time period
• Allow time at the end for questions

Additionally, before the meeting, a signup sheet should be sent out and the people or teams that want to present should sign up for the meeting date and topic, with 2-3 teams presenting each meeting.

Exercise

In terms of the meeting attendees, Jeff recommends inviting everyone at the organization, as a core purpose of Demo Days is to update and inform others about what your team is working on. Of course, this will be less feasible at corporations with thousands of people, in which case the invite list could be your team, a couple of other relevant peer teams, your boss, and their boss (for example). The ideal cadence is bi-weekly or monthly on Fridays for an hour (virtual or in-person), but can be adjusted to fit schedules, projects, and other needs. One specific example Jeff noted as a good time for the meeting was as an end of Sprint activity.

Jeff has found the meetings that work the best are ones with a meeting host or facilitator – this leads to more engagement and overall organization. The meeting host will help facilitate introductions, conversation, and transitions.

A sample Demo Days meeting format is:

• Meeting facilitator kicks off and introduces the presenting team
• Team presents for 5-10 minutes on the key work, progress, updates and learnings on their decided upon time frame (i.e. since the last meeting, on a project that recently concluded, etc.). Sample topics/questions to discuss could include:
  • What did your team work on during the last cycle/project/product?
  • What did you learn from it?
  • What are you going to do next and why?
• Open up to Q&A and discussion with the rest of the attendees
• Meeting facilitator introduces and presents next team
• Repeat presentation and discussion steps until all signed up groups have presented or the scheduled meeting time slot is over

Outcomes and Deliverables

Jeff and I chatted about the outcomes and deliverables to come out of Demo Days. The number one thing he mentioned as an outcome of this meeting was progress, and awareness of that progress. By the end of the meeting, people are able to see the progress being made by other teams. The second outcome is learnings being shared with the other various teams within an organization. Psychological safety and mutual trust were something else he called out because multiple various teams are getting up, being transparent, sharing their work and processes, and not necessarily the end product. 

The Uniqueness and the Risks

I asked Jeff what makes this meeting unique: 

“This should be a fun meeting. This should be people showing off their work. This should be people laughing at themselves. This is an opportunity to showcase more than just code. You can show designs. You can show experiments. You can show analytics reports. You can show videos from user interviews. You can show experiments that you ran. To me, all of that is really fun and unique about this. There’s some real opportunity to show all the different stuff that goes into building products and services,” he said.

We also discussed potential pitfalls and risks of this meeting. He mentioned the importance of knowing your audience. For example, if the teams presenting in a given week are going to be presenting on lines of code, there’s the necessary element of setting expectations with the rest of the attendees and letting them know ahead of time so they can plan accordingly (or not attend that specific session).

The Value in Demo Days

We ended our conversation by discussing what makes Jeff most proud about this meeting. He says it’s the fact that he’s done Demo Days meetings with so many different types of teams (leadership, innovation, product development, etc.) and after a few cycles, the conversations get better and everyone starts to truly value and look forward to the meetings. “So this starts to really build much better conversations broadly, across the organizations, because people are up there being honest, on stage on a bi-weekly basis. And I’m super proud of that.” 

Do you have a Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear about it! Share your story below for a chance to be featured in our Magical Meetings Stories series.

The post Demo Days appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Natalie Nixon, Creativity Strategist and President of Figure 8 Thinking, LLC, where she serves as a strategic advisor to help privately held and publicly traded companies as well as non-profits achieve customer-facing business goals and innovate for the future of work. She applies her expertise in strategic foresight, qualitative research, and design thinking. She is also a global speaker, the author of the award-winning book “The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work” and a regular contributor to INC online magazine. Previously, Natalie was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and professor at Thomas Jefferson University, where she created and led an executive MBA program called the Strategic Design MBA.

I spoke with Natalie about a meeting she created called “Design and Dine” while leading the Strategic Design MBA program at Thomas Jefferson University. We explored the purpose of the meeting, what prompted it, and what made it unique.

“They’re not just learning from people in finance or management, but they’re learning from people who are really integrating human-centered innovation to their work. That’s what made it unique.” -Natalie Nixon

Convene, Learn and Get Nourishment

The Design and Dine meeting was originally prompted for practical reasons while Natalie was working at Thomas Jefferson University. Natalie explained that extra hours were needed with students for the Strategic Design MBA program, due to how curricula get structured and passed. Extra face and work time was also required for accreditation. Being an executive MBA program, the students were spending alternating weekends there while also working full time. Therefore, one of the reasons for having Design and Dine was to continue to enrich the learning that was occurring. She also used the meeting as an opportunity to invite outside thought leaders from a variety of sectors to dine with the students and share the way that design gets integrated into their work. They also weren’t all traditional designers, Natalie noted. Some of them led healthcare divisions, some were in government, and others were in consumer product goods companies. 

“The whole focus of this MBA program was integrating design thinking into the way people were learning strategy and leadership and branding and operations. So it was an opportunity for the graduate students to hear from different perspectives, practitioners while we were dining,” Natalie explained. “The purpose of Design and Dine was to convene, and to learn, and to get nourishment.”

Let’s take a closer look at Natalie’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

The Design and Dine meeting was held on alternating Friday evenings throughout each semester. Students from each cohort attended until they graduated from their 20-month program. The first group was made up of 15 students, but the group size increased as new students joined the graduate program to upwards of 30-35 students in attendance. Natalie sourced her guests, or speakers, from her professional network. In each session, the guests are always new and different and they never overlapped. 

Asks and Brags: Each meeting would always start with what Natalie referred to as “Asks and Brags.” The ‘asks’ were any needs or questions students had to help them in a job search or project they were working on. The ‘brags’ were to share good news and accomplishments that had happened to them. This was always a touchpoint in the meeting, Natalie explained, and an opportunity for students of different cohorts to interact.

Ground Rules: When I asked Natalie about any rules to the meeting, she said there weren’t explicit ground rules but rather implicit ones: “The implicit ground rules were that you show up, that you are respectful to the guests, that you give them their full attention, that the guests are made to feel really comfortable. The implicit rule from the guest was that they understood that this was a gift of their time because they weren’t compensated for it, that we gave them a book. I believe I used to give them a copy of a book called “The Decision Book,” which is a really cool book full of frameworks. So there were a lot of implicit rules.”

The Exercise: The students typically came directly from class, Natalie explained, therefore they spent time connecting with one another at the beginning. “It was an opportunity to let off a little steam, relax, so it was a lot of chatter, a lot of conversation. The food would typically be already out by the university food services department, and it was just kind of a relaxed, conversational type of tone. And then I usually welcomed everybody and asked for ‘Asks and Brags,’ made announcements, and then introduced the speaker.”

The guest speaker then typically spoke for about 30 minutes. Depending on the speaker’s style, sometimes there were questions throughout or sometimes there were questions at the end, Natalie said. The format was relaxed and casual. The speaker wasn’t required to prepare a presentation, but rather simply share what they thought was important in their field of work.

At the end of each meeting, Natalie always presented the guest speaker with their gift (typically “The Decision Book” and/or another book Natalie edited and published called “Strategic Design Thinking”) and then dismissed everyone, as she was mindful of many students having an 8:00 AM class the following morning.

Roles and Responsibilities: The meeting was made up of 30-35 attendees (the Strategic Design MBA students), a guest (the speaker, who was different each meeting and came from various sectors and industries), plus Natalie (the facilitator). “I wanted the students, their role to be very active listeners and active participants. [I] never wanted a guest to be left with just silence at the end of their presentation. So I wanted them to be really actively engaged,” she said.

Outputs, Results, and Tools

Natalie said that the main output or result that came from Design and Dine was teaching students that learning doesn’t always need to happen in a traditional, structured way. Design and Dine resulted in students having the chance to learn through casual conversations, such as ‘Ask and Brag’,while waiting for food in the buffet line, or by listening to the various speakers and guests.

Since this meeting is different from most meetings covered on our blog, it makes sense the tools utilized were pretty different too. Instead of Zoom, Google Docs, or MURAL (which are often mentioned in our other Magical Meeting conversations), Natalie mentioned sometimes there were games or an ideation tool. But the real tools were the interactions, the conversations, and hearing from the speakers.

What Made Design and Dine Unique 

When I asked Natalie what made Design and Dine so unique, she said it was the timing and ability to hear from speakers outside traditional sectors. She also said that the minimal ground rules and the fact that it was almost solely about the speakers and students were equally notable: 

“I think to have the context, an MBA program, where graduate MBA students who are working full time, who are learning from not traditional roles in business, they’re not just learning from people in finance or management, but they’re learning from people who are really integrating human-centered innovation to their work. That’s what made it unique. The opportunity for it to have minimal rules was also unique. The opportunity for it to be about the attendees. I literally spoke for a few minutes in the beginning, and maybe a minute at the end of it. The focus was really on the students and the guest.”

Potential Pitfalls

I asked Natalie about any potential pitfalls or risks of her Design and Dine meeting. She said the risks she was usually concerned about were people not participating or not being engaged. She also mentioned a concern about not finding enough guest speakers to fill the allotted time slots, but proactively solved this by getting ahead of the calendar and having speakers scheduled relatively far into the future whenever possible.

Opportunities and Reflection

Although this meeting happened in the past, I also asked Natalie where she saw the opportunity for improvement. She had two ideas: having student volunteers lead the meeting, and holding it off-campus if travel were to be an option. 

We ended our conversation discussing what made her most proud about Design and Dine. “I just think it was a really unique feature of the program. It was an attempt for the students in a really tightly managed time constraint, the time was just so condensed for their learning, it was a way to make things a bit lighter, a bit looser, but still continuing the learning. And so I like that we had a social element to the program that was a constant.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Design and Dine appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Jonathan Berger, co-founder, and EVP at Let the Music Pay. He designs and builds products and teams. His tools of choice are design, development, and copious amounts of communication. Jonathan has spent the last few years working at the intersection of design and development, which often puts him in a product role on Agile teams. These days he spends most of his time in a text editor (Vim) or Adobe Apps (Illustrator), but in past lives, he’s also been involved with animation, video editing, politics, writing, and critical theory.

This story is a little bit different from the others in the series in that it’s not about a single meeting, but rather an effective default meeting schedule (or recipe) Jonathan utilizes when building teams. Applying this “responsible recipe” to your meetings will result in minimizing wasted time, maximizing maker- time, and makes for a nice scheduling default for projects.

“If you need people to prep for the meeting you’re doing something wrong. Prep time is theft time.” – Jonathan Berger

Protect Makers’ Time

Jonathan and I spoke about his meeting format and what originally prompted it. He created the recipe when he recognized, over and over, that a team would try to figure out problems that other teams already figured out. He explained he comes from a place of “the realist ideology of Convention over Configuration.” He identified that many teams were trying to reinvent the wheel, and individuals would bring their own personal experience from working on teams and attempt to reach compromised democracy. Instead of wasting all this time, he saw an opportunity to minimize trivial decisions and avoid expensive negotiations and put a productive structure in place in order to save valuable time and resources (and keep projects moving). “We see this kind of existential threat to developers of being pulled away for other stuff because they’re smart and interesting and have answers to a lot of things, and they don’t have natural defenses around protecting their time,” Jonathan explained.

The overarching purpose of this meeting recipe is to protect makers’ time (in this case, primarily data scientists, software developers, and designers), and recognized they didn’t want to spend all their time sitting in meetings when they could be working on their actual projects: “So the responsible recipe is the output of that. The responsible recipe says ‘Hey engineers, makers, if you give me three hours a week to do the kind normal administration, I will give you back 37 work hours a week to do your thing. And this will be sufficient. We know there are exceptions, and occasionally you’ll be pulled into a few extra meetings. But as the normal standard operating procedure, this is the promise to you: that if you give me three hours, we can run an effective team that can respond to change, that can be responsible, that can do all the right stuff.’”

Let’s take a closer look at Jonathan’s meeting recipe to learn what makes it magical.

The Responsible Recipe

Below is the structure Jonathan found that keeps meetings to ~3 hours total (or ~7.5% of the workweek), minimizing waste and maximizing making time. More information can also be found on his blog post on the same topic. The structure consists of 3 different types of meetings and is based on a typical two-delivery team, generally aligned around a single backlog and including 2-6 engineers, a designer, and the product owner. This format can work in-person or virtual (or a combination), depending on where your team is located.

Prep Time is Theft Time

As opposed to many other meetings, this format has an anti-emphasis on homework and pre-meeting prep. “If you need people to prep for the meeting you’re doing something wrong. Prep time is theft time,” Jonathan says. If someone commits to a 45-minute meeting, it goes on their calendar and subtracts 45m from their workweek. In if there’s, say, 30m of pre-reading, does that make it onto their calendar? Or do they squeeze it in during the time that should be spent working (or, more often, not at work at all)? He believes they shouldn’t have to also commit to an additional 30 minutes of meeting prep that isn’t on the calendar. If meeting prep does need to be done, he recommends scheduling a 15 minute (or however long is necessary) study hall as a convenience, for the work to be done then. “This way it’s on your calendar and not this weird ghost time.”

The Meetings

1. Daily Standup: 5x weekly, 10 minutes each

This is a short, team-wide orientation meeting. Three quick questions are covered each day:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you doing today?
• Are you blocked on anything?

2. Iteration Planning Meeting (“IPM”): 1x weekly, 60 minutes each

The IPM is a weekly tactical planning meeting. Its aim is to ensure that the backlog is in good shape and that all the team members are in alignment. Ideally, the meeting is on Monday, and questions like the following are covered:

• What are we going to do this week?
• Do we have a shared understanding of the requirements in this week’s tickets?
• Are we all aligned?

It’s not a meeting to assign work, but rather a coordination meeting that allows any given engineer to pick a story off the top of the backlog, and for the team to be confident that it will be executed in a sufficiently consistent and meaningful manner.

3. Friday Afternoon Meeting: 1x weekly, 60 minutes each

Jonathan started doing traditional Retros every Friday but found this Friday meeting to be most useful when rotating among three meetings: the Team Retro, the Tech Retro, and Release Planning. Whereas the IPM is very tactical, the Retro meetings are more so reflective – a time to look inward and/or vent. In general, successful teams tend to need that not as frequently as every week, which brings in the third rotating Friday meeting: Release Planning. The purpose of this meeting is to zoom out and look at the 30,000-foot view of big projects and goals. Below are more details on each meeting from Jonathan’s blog post:

Week 1: Team Retro

The Team Retro is a chance for the day-to-day members of the team to reflect on how things are going, celebrate successes, voice frustrations, and suggest Action Items. While there are plenty of variations, the classic Retro format is to throw three columns on a whiteboard:

• “Smileys”, or things that are going well, represented by the expected emoticon
• “Frownies”, or things that are going poorly, represented by
• “Mehs”, or things that don’t fit cleanly in either category, but bear mentioning :-/

After ~25m of going around the room and throwing out Smileys, Frownies, and Meh’s, the team might spend a few minutes identifying items that have a common theme, and then spend the rest of the time suggesting action items, either for each item (starting with the Frownies) or, if time is short, on a theme-by-theme basis. The action items are recorded and assigned to individuals, and their progress is followed (often at the start of the next Retro). 

Week 2: Tech Retro

A Tech Retro is for and by developers. While pair-programming is essentially continuous code review, it can still be useful to take some time to step back and look at the codebase. Tech Retros often take the traditional “Smiley / Frownie / Meh” format but focus exclusively on the codebase. This is a great time to talk about modeling decisions and suggest refactors. Often the action items resulting from tech retros are a long list of chores. Try to keep each one to a manageable size, and make sure at least a few of them make it into the backlog for the next iteration.

Week 3: Release Planning

“Release Planning” means different things to different Agilists, but in this context, it’s a loose title for a long-range planning meeting. While the IPM is a short-term tactical meeting, it’s important to occasionally step back and look at the big picture. What are the product’s medium- and long-term goals? Are we on track? What should our next milestone be? The Release Planning should be attended by the whole team, and by the stakeholders like clients and CEOs who may not be part of the day-to-day workings of the team. It’s a chance to review epic story tracks, dates and deadlines, and to make sure that everyone has a shared vision of where the team is going—and that it’s a place worth going to.

What Binds the Recipe

Jonathan and I also discussed what makes this meeting recipe possible. Jonathan cited a few things: trust, psychological safety, and that it won’t work in an adversarial or non-maker context. It’s not going to work in a phase of a project that is very oriented towards discovery or framing, he explained, and that it’s most effective at delivery phases for teams with a consistent amount of effort. Teams who know what they are, and aren’t changing or reorganizing weekly. It also requires a consensus around methods (or at least a willingness among the team to try a method with minimal debate) and isn’t stuck in long-term investments or slow to change. The team and team members need to be able to have relatively short iterations, he explains.

Outputs and Results

I asked Jonathan about the specific deliverables and outcomes from this meeting format. The main positive output is a delivery team that can focus on delivery, which minimizes overhead and reduces risk. Going back to the makers, Jonathan notes that so much time is wasted in internal communication and meetings because the makers would rather be making. The management side also depends on the delivery team being effective and hitting their targets, so they benefit as well. 

Best Practices for Facilitating Retros

Jonathan and I also chatted about another blog post he wrote which goes into more detail on facilitating Retros: 7 Best Practices for Facilitating Agile Retrospectives. In summary, these are the 7 best practices he outlines:

1. Explain and Enforce Format
2. Write Everything Down Verbatim
3. Categorize Carefully
4. Action Items Should Have Intent
5. Action Items Should Be Falsifiable
6. Action Items Need a Single Responsible Party
7. What Happens in Retro, Stays in Retro

Potential Pitfalls

I asked Jonathan about any potential pitfalls or risks of this meeting approach. He said there’s a risk that it can be interpreted as too rigid, and highlighted the importance of keeping the intent (protect makers’ time with as few administrative meetings as possible) and flexibility (the meeting recipe can and should be customized to each team’s unique needs for the best chance of success).

He also called out that there’s no built-in mechanism to correct for distractions – although the idea behind this meeting recipe is to avoid distractions, they may still creep in and if they do, there’s no mechanism to explicitly call them out.

Pride

When I asked Jonathan what makes him most proud about this meeting process and the recipe he said:

“I think I’m proud of how fractal it is. The principles that it employs to engender good communication among these other meetings are the same principles that drive the composition of this as a technique. And to get away from the super abstract to the really critical. I’m very proud of the fact that it makes people happy and effective.”

Looking Ahead

We ended our conversation on my favorite topic – what he would do next if he were to be extremely bold. He says he would want this recipe and meeting structure to be better known and branded because while it doesn’t solve every problem out there, it is a real, healthy solution with an equilibrium point. Hopefully, this conversation inspires other teams out there to start implementing and utilizing some of Jonathan’s meeting recipe in order to drive less wasted time and more making (and maker) time.

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post A “Responsible Recipe” for the Fewest Possible Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Kellee Franklin, an innovative and integrative thinker, creative change agent and corporate strategist, executive advisor, and entrepreneurial-minded business leader and educator. She has been recognized for delivering sustainable business strategy and IT/digital transformation, leveraging Big Data to drive innovation, designing new and inventive ways of performing business, and achieving actionable results through using human-centered design processes and best-in-class management consultant strategies. She is also the founder of Mindful Innovation Labs. Kellee also received a PhD in Human Development with an emphasis in Adult Learning and Organizational Behavior from Virginia Tech.

In our discussion, Kellee reflects on a specific 10 meeting series she ran shortly before the pandemic lockdown. She dives into what drove the meeting design and why her unique approach was successful.

“I think what drove the design of that meeting, which really has driven the design of the vast majority of the meetings that I have with clients, is just my fundamental belief in adult learning principles, which I don’t think get communicated as often as they should.” -Kellee M. Franklin

The Importance of Meeting Design

Kellee is a big believer in spending a lot of time upfront in meeting design, because she isn’t the biggest fan of meetings. This thinking is also applied when she coaches executives, where the emphasis is placed on designing meetings. 

Her Team-Centered Meetings are an ongoing approach she uses with teams, both virtually and in person. Let’s take a closer look at Kellee’s process for making this specific Team-Centered Meeting magical.

The Meeting 

During this specific Team-Centered Meeting, Kellee was responsible for navigating 15 design teams of 32 nationalities through a design thinking process. At the end of it, each team was going to pitch a product. There was a series of 10 meetings and she met with each individual team weekly for only 30 minutes. “Throughout the week, these design teams were meeting together and they were also getting content and having access to clients and working collaboratively. But their time with me was relatively limited. So, we had to make the most use of our time together,” she explains.

Team-Centered Meeting Driver 

Kellee’s fundamental belief in adult learning principles are what drove the design of this meeting, and the design of many of her other meetings and engagements. She believes adult learning principles don’t get communicated as often as they should. She explains the aspects of adult learning, which are differentiated from how children learn: “Some of the things that I deeply believe in are that adults have a higher sense of self-direction and motivation. They have life experience and a drive for facilitating learning. They have a focus on achieving goals. They have a need to know how the information that they’re receiving is relevant to what they’re working towards. They have a need to have things that are practical. They’re open to help and mentorship. And they are open to modern forms of learning. And they want to be able to choose how they learn.”

Taking these beliefs and principles into account prompted Kellee to ask herself: “How was I going to design these meetings in a manner that was going to facilitate the most effective outcomes for them?”

The Exercise

When each team came into the room for their weekly meeting, they had goals that they were working towards for that week. First, they filled in a dashboard and Kellee then put the dashboard on a whiteboard for everyone to see. Throughout the day, she was meeting with all 15 teams. The teams filled in the following on their dashboard:

• The name of their team
• Each of the three or four goals they had
• The stage they were at with those goals (identified by red, yellow or green)
• Any questions they had or resources they needed

After the dashboard was visualized on the whiteboard, Kellee put the responsibility back on the teams to determine how to best spend their next 30 minutes together, based on what the team wanted to prioritize, tackle and focus on. “And that really…is an adult learning principle, rather than me driving the meeting, it allowed the design team to drive the meeting.”

By the end of the day, all teams’ information was in the dashboard and on the whiteboard. She would take a photo of the whiteboard and send it out to everyone. This way, each of the teams could see how one another was working. Even though the 15 teams weren’t working all together, it gave them an opportunity to learn from each other.

A Unique, Successful Approach

Kellee explains that it was a little awkward at first for the design team, because “they were accustomed to having the person in charge, if you will, run the meeting. And this was kind of a role reversal for them.” But in the end, this approach was truly what made it so successful. “As we moved and progressed through the process, they really, really appreciated and they would start to come to the meeting, much more organized, recognizing that they only have 30 minutes with me and that they needed to know what specific questions that they needed to address and how were they going to use the best use of their time.”

She elaborates on the process further: “They would come in with, as we progressed, things written down or part of their deliverables that they wanted to show me to get feedback on. And it was really a lovely way to see them develop and grow throughout this progress. So again, rather than me dictating to them, it was an opportunity to really have them showcase their work. And I have to tell you, every team came in with different questions and a different idea of how they were going to utilize my time.”

Role of the Facilitator

Throughout her engagements–both in this meeting series and her work in general–Kellee sees her responsibility as the facilitator to really think about the purpose at hand when designing the meeting. “I think that’s our role as a facilitator of learning,” she says. These are some of the questions she utilizes to determine meeting design:

• What are the objectives of the meeting?
• How can we design it in a way that everyone has the opportunity to feel seen?
• How can we design it in a way that everyone has the opportunity to feel heard?

Advice

When reflecting on the Team-Centered Meeting series, Kelle’s main recommendation for others is to think about and utilize the adult learning principles. Kellee has made it a point to incorporate them in her work and the feedback has been extremely positive. “I have more people tell me, ‘Gosh, if I had been exposed to those principles earlier in my career, I would do meetings, I would do presentations so differently than I’ve done throughout my entire career.’”

Applying these principles throughout her work has helped Kellee and the teams she works with drive more efficient and effective outcomes, something everyone could benefit from.

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share your story with us here.

The post Team-Centered Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

Today’s story is with Stephen Shedletzky, Lead Igniter & Head of Brand Experience at Simon Sinek, Inc.–a company that finds, guides and supports leaders who intend to put their purpose and people first, ahead of short-term profit. Feeling stifled on his corporate track, Stephen was struck by founder Simon Sinek’s vision of a more inspired, safe and fulfilled world. He joined Simon’s team in 2011 to co-host the Start With Why podcast and to answer fan email. He now leads Brand Experience and Simon’s team of speakers and facilitators, helping to ensure the team’s culture, products, partnerships and communications authentically reflect their values and beliefs. 

I spoke with Stephen about a meeting he participated in called Prepare for Existential Flexibility (or Ex Flex), why it was necessary, how it helped save Simon Sinek, Inc. during the pandemic, and the powerful ripple effects it’s cast since.

“The test of a strong organization is ‘do you come out of this pandemic better than when you entered?’ And we will. We are. We have a more diverse, robust business.” -Stephen Shedletzky

The Need for Reinvention

The Ex Flex meeting was originally prompted in mid-March 2020 as a result of the pandemic. The vast majority of company revenue came from live, in-person events (which disappeared in a matter of days), and Simon needed to pivot quickly. Preparing for Existential Flexibility means the capacity to initiate an extreme disruption to a business model or strategic course in order to more effectively advance your Just Cause. This is a concept from one of Simon Sinek’s books, The Infinite Game. Stephen remembers Simon saying “Okay guys, we run out of cash by June so if we want this company to continue to exist, and if you want your job to continue to exist, we have to reinvent. I wrote about this in my book, The Infinite Game, and I never thought we actually had to do it or do it this quick or this urgently, but we do.” The instructions for the meeting were for everyone to come back to the next all-hands meeting, 48 hours later, with 15 new ideas.

When I asked Stephen the main purpose of the meeting, his answer was short but powerful: “To reinvent our future.”  

Company survival was what initially prompted the meeting, but in the end, a lot of positive outcomes resulted that may not have been put into real motion otherwise. Stephen explains: “This was just a wonderful, designed way to tap into the genius of people who had been in our team for as long as 10 years to go, all right guys. And what’s cool is a lot of the stuff we’ve done through COVID have been things that we’ve been talking about for years, but we never had the impetus or the urgency to have to do it.”

Let’s take a closer look at Stephen and Simon’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

Pre-Meeting Prep

The assigned prep work was given 48 hours in advance – more time could be given, but in Stephen and Simon’s case the timeline was due to urgency and when the next full team meeting was scheduled. The team, made up of about 20 people of both creative and operational/executional people, was instructed to each come back with 15 new ideas for the company. The 15 idea focus was designed to push the teams’ creative boundaries beyond a handful of initial ideas. “We’d all come up with the same five ideas and they were probably his same five ideas as well so it’s actually accomplished nothing. He wanted us to get to ideas 11, 12, and 13, where we’re sitting there pondering going and then we come up with a totally radical, totally different sort of divergent idea. That’s innovation.” Participants were then instructed to categorize the ideas as green, yellow, or red.

The categorization was based on time and resources, which helped the group prioritize the ideas

• Green meant the idea could be pulled off quickly and become a revenue-generating product or offering within a couple of weeks.
• Yellow meant the idea would need more time to execute on (i.e. four weeks instead of two).
• Red meant the idea would need months – it could still be a great idea, but due to situational urgency it may demand more time to execute.

“We need[ed] to find new revenue generating ways that we’ve never done before, that we need to do imminently to keep going and to serve our end-user and to fuel the inspired, safe and fulfilled movement.”

Exercise

The meeting was booked for two hours and held on Zoom. The invited attendees were made up of the core operational team of 20 people, with approximately 15 in attendance. Notes were captured by two scribes via Google Docs.

Ground Rules

The first thing Simon did was set the ground rules. “He reminded us of our vision. He grounded us in our ‘why’ and our Just Cause.” The meeting operated round-robin, popcorn style. Attendees shared their top innovative/most interesting ideas from their generated lists, while leadership stayed quiet.“Our leaders either spoke last or didn’t speak at all. And if they spoke, they asked questions or they added nuance to ideas. But our most senior leaders didn’t really bring their ideas, they just listened and which was really cool. It was, we want to hear from everyone. And Simon said ‘this isn’t a democracy. In the end, I want to hear from all of you, I want to get all your ideas but in the end, the senior leaders are going to choose which ones and now based on resources and context and the things that they know that we may not, or we may not appreciate.’ But they didn’t really contribute, which I thought was really good.”

Collaboration

Stephen says the emphasis of the meeting was on collaboration, not on competition or about credit or ego for the discussed ideas. Simon wanted to hear from everyone. The benefit to everyone sharing their ideas with the group was that new ideas surfaced through this process too. People built off of presented ideas for 90+ minutes until no one had anything else to add. “

Prioritization

During the sharing, ideas were prioritized based on color categorization. The creator of the idea determined the color category (unless they weren’t sure what it would take to execute, in which case it was then a team decision). Stephen says they then focused on the  green and yellow ideas to decide which ones to move forward with. Next, it came time to mobilize the actual teams to get started on idea execution: “So we blocked, tackled and went.”

Outputs and Results

The biggest new idea to come out of the meeting was live online classes, Stephen says. Within a month, the first live online class launched–an over two hour session with a hundred people. The live class offerings, which started with classes based on Simon’s books such as Start with Why, are now even more diversified with topics and teachers both inside and outside Simon’s organization and material. Stephen and his team have since reached out to friends, colleagues, and others in their network to see if anyone else would want to teach live classes on the newly launched platform. The feedback has been positive and the team is now working with other companies and teams that they didn’t know pre-COVID. 

Stephen emphasized how impressive it is that these new connections have come about, especially during the pandemic. He said they created a new ecosystem (or what I like to refer to as “the global coffeeshop”): “It’s hugely powerful because it’s kind of replacing what naturally happened in the Vienna coffee shops, or Einstein would meet with whoever because that randomness is happening less and less and certainly less and less with COVID.”

A free-to-the-public book club with Simon was another idea from the Ex Flex meeting that quickly went live. It streamed on YouTube and other platforms and ended up attracting thousands of people who tuned in live to watch Simon go through pieces of the Start with Why book. 

Tools

There were a few tools Steven used to create magic and connection in his meeting:

• Zoom – Fosters connection using conversation, chats, and breakout sessions.
• Google Docs – Used to capture notes from the meeting in real time, and categorize them.
• Monday.com – Project management tool, similar to Asana.

A Successful Pivot

I asked Stephen what made him most proud about this meeting and process. 

“I’m proud of that one, in a moment where there was every excuse to panic, freak out, we were very calm, we were in charge of creating our destiny and future. We were very transparent and open. We tapped into the genius of our team…We were transparent, we asked for input from the team. It was testament of the fact that we had psychological safety in a circle of safety because people were very open, no one held back…We literally invented our own future. And we did that, it wasn’t external, it was internal. Now we were responding to external circumstances, but we pivoted, we did it and I’m hugely proud of that. We all did it and the company is still going and going. The test of a strong organization is ‘Do you come out of this pandemic better than when you entered?’ And we will. We are. We have a more diverse, robust business. That’s rad.”

Looking Ahead

I asked Stephen what he wants to do next, now that it’s been more than a year since the meeting occurred. He says he’d like to have more of a retrospect on it: “Revisit some of the artifacts from that meeting or come full circle and be like, ‘What are the things we’ve done? What are the things we’ve not done?’ I mean, it was a year ago and we’ve not really meaningfully done that yet and that could be cool to do too. Not to lament on the future, but just to reflect on the growth and also circle back on, ‘are there things that were in the inception of the idea when we dreamed this up, that we’ve not yet done or could do better?’”

Through this meeting, Stephen, Simon, and their team were able to save their company and even create new offerings they’d discussed in the past but never had the urgency to have to do. Their magical meeting is proof that great opportunity can come through crisis.

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