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.

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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 Petra Wille, an independent product leadership coach and author of Strong Product People: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product Managers who has been helping product teams boost their skill sets and up their game since 2013. Alongside her freelance work, Petra co-organizes and curates Mind the Product Engage Hamburg, Germany. 

“There’s a saying from the world of coaching: ‘You can’t push the car you’re sitting in.’ It’s the same principle – if, as a product manager, you spot patterns emerging before everyone else, it’s because you’re not really a part of the team. And that’s an advantage you should put to good use.” -Petra Wille

I spoke with Petra about a meeting she designed called Team Radar, the purpose of the meeting, what it helped accomplish, and why it was so powerful.

Showing is Better than Telling

Team Radar was originally prompted when Petra realized she was missing some of the tools and meeting structures she needed to be an effective lateral leader to her product development team. She was searching for a structure that could help her surface topics in a retrospective without dictating the group discussion or directly providing her recommended solution or ideal outcome. Rather, she wanted a way to have the team working on the project or deliverables be able to discuss and ideate, as the direct team can usually come up with workable solutions that work best for them. She wanted to provide the framework to productively discuss and show them that they could figure out the problem on their own, rather than her simply telling them a solution.

“You know that moment when you realize that something is not quite right in the team? Often you think you know straight away what needs improvement, but for some reason, the team can’t see what you’re seeing. What’s wrong with them? It’s so obvious!

There’s nothing wrong with them. There’s a saying from the world of coaching: ‘You can’t push the car you’re sitting in.’ It’s the same principle – if, as a product manager, you spot patterns emerging before everyone else, it’s because you’re not really a part of the team. And that’s an advantage you should put to good use.” -Petra Wille

Petra explained an Agile coach recommended she utilize a spider web graphic with eight axes, with labels for each “leg” (or axis) and a scale (1-7) for each of the axes. Each axis represents a topic to be discussed in the meeting as shown in the example below: 

This structure helps Petra set up some of the topics to have the team discuss them, but then also gives her a chance to observe their take on them rather than her influencing the discussion or decisions. “I was on the lookout for a facilitation method to actually bring this conversation up without me telling them what to do because there was no right or wrong. I was fine with either way, but I wanted them to discuss it to avoid this tension building up,” she said.

Petra has used the Team Radar meeting with various teams she’s coached and worked with. She explained that the meeting purpose varies depending on the specific team situation she’s working with, but that it is fundamentally designed around gaining alignment, understanding, and clarity. “The purpose of this meeting is that a team of people discusses several topics and that somebody else sees what’s in it for them. So, do they consider it a problem? Do they think they’re doing fine and it’s not something we need to tackle now? It’s a management tool, actually, more or less.”

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

The Meeting

Pre-Meeting Prep

Petra’s outline for how to prepare for the Team Radar retrospective meetings:

1. The meeting leader or facilitator should plan the Team Radar graphic and topics beforehand on a flip chart – this way, it can be hung up afterward for reference (if you’re in a physical office with the team). Alternatively, more advanced teams can decide on the topics during the meeting. If the meeting is being held virtually, MURAL or Miro (virtual whiteboard collaboration tools) can be utilized instead
2. Bring pens and Post-Its in four different colors (if holding the meeting in person).
3. The leader, moderator or facilitator should also put some thought into how they want to open up and introduce the meeting. This is where they set the stage for the meeting.
4. Ensure to send a calendar invite blocking off enough time. Petra recommends 2 hours for an 8 axes exercise, or 1 hour for 4 axes.
5. If you’re having the meeting in an office, book a room with plenty of wall space for all those Post-It notes!

Exercise 

Petra recommends holding the Team Radar meeting once a quarter, depending on team needs, with no more than 10 people in attendance (but also depending on team needs and team size). Attendees are typically made up of a cross-functional group or the delivery team, including product managers, engineers, and designers. The meetings can be held in-person or virtually, and are typically structured in the following way:

1. The moderator or facilitator starts by introducing the meeting and setting the stage (as mentioned above).
2. Then they’ll take the team through the Team Radar infographic–either on the flip chart, a whiteboard, or virtual collaboration tool if the meeting is being held remotely. The facilitator should plan to cover the following:
   • Why were the listed topics chosen? Context should be given around reasoning. If the team is more advanced, the topics can be agreed upon by everyone together during this step instead.
   • Ask the team to assign and agree on a rating (1-7) for each topic. Ratings could be confidence level in the topic, future outlook, etc. This will vary by team and organization, and should be defined and communicated by the facilitator. Note: Don’t spend more than 10 minutes on each axis.
   • Decide who will write notes on the Post-Its. Petra recommends utilizing the different colors for organizational purposes, such as blue for positive comments and pink for negative.
3. Next, the team discussion occurs, starting with the first axis and working through all eight, topic by topic, rating by rating.
4. Once all topics have been discussed, connect any dots or determine which topics have scored negatively and why.
5. Gauge general sentiment from the team – ask the team to indicate via quick feedback or thumb voting if a topic is improving or if they expect it to get worse.
6. Finally, derive and assign action items for 2-3 of the topics. Start with topics that scored the worst (or lowest) and note what steps can and should be taken next.

Outcomes and Deliverables

I asked Petra what outcomes and deliverables come out of these Team Radar meetings. She mentioned the two key outcomes being “aha moments” and action items. The “aha moments” will come as a result of learning what others on the team think about particular topics. The action items are especially useful for future improvement, as the lowest-ranked topics should be prioritized in the discussion. 

Tools

There are a few tools Petra uses to create magic and connection in these meetings:

• Whiteboards or flip charts – this is how the Team Radar graphic is documented and displayed if the meeting is in person
• Post-Its: Used for note taking on each topic and rating (organize by color)
• MURAL or Miro – These tools can be utilized if the meeting is virtual or hybrid, in place of the physical whiteboards, flip charts and Post-Its

An Alignment Initiative

We also discussed what makes this meeting unique, along with what Petra is most proud of related to Team Radar. 

“I think it’s the only type of retrospective I know where you can set a topic. So if you as a product manager or Agile coach want to talk about something, then that is a way to really set the stage without influencing the team too much about their take on that,” she said.

She mentioned she’s most proud of the fact that it helps teams discuss underlying or broader issues in a productive way. Even if the meeting doesn’t end with a ton of action items that are being solved immediately, it helps with team building and is an alignment initiative. 

Looking Ahead

I like to end these Magical Meeting Series conversations by asking where there’s opportunity for improvement or what else could be done if the interviewee were to be really bold. Petra said she sees teams usually start with the obvious topics, but would love to encourage more philosophical or high-level topics on the axes. That, she says, is when the most interesting and productive conversations happen.

Do you have a Magical Meeting Story to tell? Share it with us!

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Recently I was asked why people hate meetings. I responded that people don’t hate meetings, they hate bad meetings. 

Most ineffective meetings are a form of therapy

Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of collaborative dysfunction in the working world, and most of it happens in meetings. And that’s a major pain point for a lot of people. When they look at their calendars, they’re just inundated with meetings. And, shockingly, the goal of most of these meetings is to be cathartic rather than productive. 

I remember seeing this headline on BBC.com not too long ago: “Pointless work meetings really a form of therapy.” It’s a hilarious headline, but if you dig deeper into it, it’s actually fascinating. 

In my experience, as the pandemic has rolled on, I’ve seen people have this thirst for connection, and because they don’t have it, they’re self-medicating with a meeting. They’re self-medicating in a way that creates another burdensome meeting — and more disgust, if you will, for meetings and the whole Zeitgeist of work and collaboration.

In the BBC linked article above, Professor Patrik Hall of the University of Malmo also stated that meetings are becoming a vehicle for individuals to express their frustrations. He says that with fewer people making or doing things, those in strategic, consultative, and managerial roles don’t know what they should do. Because they’re unsure about their role, they call meetings to try and find a purpose.

Both of these instances create a vicious cycle of negativity. If everyone became more intentional about team health and points of connection, people would stop scheduling these random meetings for “therapy” time. We wouldn’t self-medicate, we wouldn’t overmedicate and we’d get just the right amount of meetings. 

So how do we get to this place of optimal meeting balance? I believe it starts by clarifying the purpose of a meeting. Doing so will put an end to the post-meeting refrain of “Why did I just spend my time doing that?” 

Giving your meetings a sense of clarity

A big part of my book Magical Meetings is ensuring teams come together for the right reasons, accomplish meaningful goals, and leave with clear next steps. In fact, the first of the ten meeting mantras I share is “no purpose, no meeting.” And while I’d love for you to read Magical Meetings cover-to-cover, you may not have time before your next meeting. To that end, I’m going to encapsulate the first couple of chapters and present a number of questions you should ask yourself before initiating any meeting request.

• Is the meeting necessary? Could it be replaced by an email?

If the answer to the latter is yes, send an email not an invite.

• Will this meeting be generative, explorative or decisive? 

A generative meeting generates ideas or artifacts, an explorative meeting considers options and reviews artifacts, and a decisive meeting makes decisions on options and artifacts. If your meeting isn’t one of the three — where there’s a clear purpose and work to be done — it may not be worth having at all.  

• How will the team know it’s been successful?

Consider the possible outcomes of your meeting and what you hope to achieve. These are benchmarks your team can utilize to gauge success. 

• Who needs to be involved and what are their perspectives?

Just because you can invite someone to your meeting doesn’t mean you should. Everyone’s calendar is littered with meetings, so be strategic about who you invite. Is someone a stakeholder, have relevant expertise or possess an outsider’s perspective that could be valuable? Include them. But don’t invite someone who won’t have much to contribute solely to be inclusive. They’ll appreciate being able to be more productive by instead having the time to tackle the tasks that are of greater importance to them.

• What concerns are likely to arise? What challenges might get in your way?

The more forethought that goes into planning your meeting, the more you (and your participants) will get out of it. You really don’t want to eat up valuable time by doing this kind of triage in the middle of your meeting. It’s counterproductive — and an annoyance. 

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Letting everyone know what to expect

Of course, it’s not enough to know what you want out of your meeting. It’s also important to let others know as well. Preparedness on the part of the organizer — and the participants — is what helps make a meeting magical. 

Key to this is drafting an agenda you can share in advance of your meetings. This should include an outline of the activities that will take place, the allotted time for each activity or topic, and when break periods will occur. Additionally, you’ll want to explicitly state what you need from each participant. To ensure a successful meeting, I recommend circulating all of this a few days in advance and sending a reminder about your needs the day before the meeting is scheduled to happen. 

I also suggest you record a short video of yourself going through the agenda, especially for “high stakes” meetings where you’ll be making important decisions. Creating and sharing this will make your requests seem more human. You’ll also want to provide a link to a shared folder where everyone can place their pre-work artifacts (if applicable).

When people know what’s required of them and what their involvement will lead to, there’s a lower likelihood of them loathing a meeting. By clearly communicating — and setting up systems — people will feel confident that their involvement will lead to something positive vs. just getting caught up in false checkpoints or busywork. 

To that end, Voltage Control can set you up for success with our robust resource library. You can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, The Facilitator’s Guide To Questions, and other coaching materials. We also have blog posts, workshops, templates, and our Control Room app, which is loaded with meeting activities that keep teams engaged. With our help, you’ll never have another bad meeting again. 

Want to ensure all of your meetings are magical?

Enroll in our Magical Meetings course and you’ll learn how to facilitate meetings that will have participants walking away with a sense of accomplishment. For information, check out the course details or reach out to hello@voltagecontrol.com.

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The post The difference between mundane and magical meetings? Preparation. 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 Taylor Cone, Founder & CEO of Lightshed – an innovation, leadership, and design firm specializing in accelerating product development through facilitated Design Sprints and coaching. Lightshed also offers collaboration design engagements to help teams work together most effectively, productively, and creatively. Taylor also co-founded Compa, a tool to make compensation fair and competitive for everyone. And he serves as the Director of Innovation Experience at Delve, a design and innovation consultancy. 

Taylor’s other experience highlights include teaching and coaching at the Stanford d.school, receiving multiple patents for his engineering work, and guiding whitewater rafting trips across the Western U.S. for the last 10 years.

I spoke with Taylor about a meeting he designed called Collaboration Design Kickoff, the purpose of the meeting, what makes it possible, and why it’s so powerful.

“I think that one of the reasons that great meetings are great is that intention is brought, and how we work together is a big part of what we need to focus on.” -Taylor Cone

The Need for Intention

The Collaboration Design Kickoff meetings were originally prompted when Taylor noticed that people were not talking together or making decisions in productive ways during their regular meetings. He identified there was clearly a better way to do things. He created the Collaboration Design Kickoff with the focus to place intention on the role of collaboration design. The purpose of the meeting is “making collaboration design an explicit emphasis as opposed to just something we either don’t even think about, or just hope will magically happen.”

“I think that one of the reasons that great meetings are great is that intention is brought, and how we work together is a big part of what we need to focus on,” he further explained.

The Collaboration Design Kickoff meetings–originally designed for Taylor’s clients, which are often large teams at single companies–are relatively unique compared to our other Magical Meeting stories. These meetings take place prior to other meetings (or at the beginning), to understand how all participants want to intentionally work together during the meeting that follows. For example, this “pre-meeting” could be about determining and defining roles and responsibilities for the next meeting or identifying how each participant best works and learns in order to have the most productive meeting possible. This meeting can be applied to various meeting types – such as before a workshop, retrospective, Design Sprint, etc. 

Let’s take a closer look at Taylor’s process to learn what makes these meetings magical.

The Meeting

Pre-Meeting Prep

At the beginning of the meeting, Taylor highlights the importance of laying a foundation of psychological safety–or the importance of creating an environment where everyone feels safe to share their thoughts freely. Introductions, warm-ups, and other activities help foster a level of connection so that everyone can be honest with each other. “If people aren’t honest about the things that they need or struggle within collaboration, then there’s no reason to have a meeting like this because you’re just not going to get where you need to go,” he explained.

Exercise

The Logistics: These meeting sessions were held in person in the past, but are now held remotely on Zoom. The number of participants ranges from 10-25 people, with the sweet spot around 15 for Taylor’s purposes. In his experiences, everyone participating is on the same broader team but works together in a cross-functional capacity. Since the Collaboration Design Kickoff sessions can be held prior to various types of meetings, the cadence depends on the meeting following, but holding them at least once a month or once a quarter is a good benchmark.

Attendees: We discussed who should attend and Taylor highlighted that it’s more about the mindset of those in the room vs. their status: “The value is really in the mindset of the people in the room and less about who they are or what their roles and titles are and that they’re open to it, that they’re excited about it. A lot of times after a Sprint or a workshop, people are saying, ‘Where do we go from here? How do we keep this forward?’ I’ll say, ‘Follow the energy. Who in that session were most enthusiastic about what we were doing, the ideas, and the process? Find that person and have them move this thing forward.’ It doesn’t matter what role they’re in, it doesn’t matter whether it’s on their roadmap or not, have them do it because that’s where the energy is. I have that same philosophy a lot about who can be in the room, especially when it’s the first experience because that’s how many people are open to it, that is sort of innovators themselves, have that kind of archetype, that’s what’s going to make the meeting stick.”

Intention Setting: After the introductions and warm-up activities, the team begins with intention setting. An example of this is asking the participants and discussing “What’s one thing you want to walk away with at the end of our time together, and one thing that you will do to ensure that that happens?” Taylor explains the second part of the question is especially important, as it’s common to ask “What do you want to get out of this meeting?” but less common to discuss what will actually be done to make sure that happens. “I think that intention setting is really important and there’s some pretty interesting psychology on when we set intentions, when we agree to things, when we set norms or when we set expectations, we’re more likely to actually follow through on them, and so that’s woven in as well,” he says.

Discovery Work: The group then dives into what Taylor calls “discovery work.” This is the meat of the meeting and typically done in breakout groups of 3-5 participants – where everyone reflects and discusses with each other what each person wants and needs in collaboration, how they want to work together, and what they want outcomes to be. Next, Taylor explained that the groups feed that into a “definition ideation prototyping and test design of how do we implement some of these things that we’ve just said about how we want to work together, and how do we learn in a week, after we’ve tried it or in a month after we’ve tried it, and how do we course correct from there? Structurally it was very very much a plug-and-play design thinking process, just where the input was the team, as opposed to a product or service.” Then the breakout groups come back together in the full group to share out ideas and learnings and get feedback from everyone else. Having smaller breakout groups helps make sure that everyone can be heard.

Reflection and Refraction: Taylor likes to end the meetings with what he calls a “reflection and refraction.” The reflection involves each participant looking back at the session and discussing what the most influential, memorable, or transformative moment was for them. The refraction is looking ahead and thinking about how things can be different based on experience. “That nice one-two punch at the end of looking back and just recapping the experience we had, crystallizing that, but then also looking ahead and turning that into some sort of intention I found has been really powerful for participants, really helpful for me to see how those things sort of align,” Taylor said.

Roles and Responsibilities: Taylor says he tries to level everyone and have all participants show up in the same way. Sometimes there are assigned discussion leaders or facilitators, but he likes the idea of everyone being equal participants whenever possible.

Ground Rules: Expanding upon everyone being equal, Taylor also says one of the ground rules is that there’s no right or wrong answer: “It’s important that no person’s perspective or experience is any more or less true than anyone else’s, because we are all humans on this team, in this meeting. So, we all have our experiences, and being real about what those experiences are is just really freaking important. We obviously talk a lot about psychological safety these days as the foundation of creativity and trusting teams and productivity in many ways. I think that is even more foundational when you’re talking directly about the team itself and the collaboration itself.”

Outcomes and Deliverables

The main outcomes from holding a Collaboration Design Kickoff session are often defining the specific roles that people are going to play in the upcoming meeting, as well as building awareness of individual and group needs–both while in collaboration and in meetings. For example, it might be identified that one person is a visual thinker whereas someone else is a verbal thinker. Recognizing this upfront gives the group the opportunity to decide how to approach it. Deliverables will vary based on the meeting that will follow. One such example Taylor cited was a MURAL board with frameworks filled out that everyone could reference for themselves and each other. Regardless of what the deliverables are, the takeaway is that these roles, items, and ideas for the meeting are identified prior to it, resulting in more efficiency and productivity during the upcoming meeting itself.

Tools

There are a few tools Taylor uses to create magic and connection in his meeting:

• Zoom – Fosters connection using conversation, chats, and breakout sessions.
• MURAL – Digital workspace for virtual collaboration.
• Keynote or Google Slides – Presentation software applications.

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Reflecting on Collaboration Design Kickoffs

I asked Taylor what makes these meetings possible. He said having participants that are curious and open to trying something new, and who also might have felt there’s a better way to approach the meeting but haven’t tried yet. Laying the foundation groundwork upfront by having a Collaboration Design Kickoff session as a first step will most likely unlock better outcomes in any following meetings.

We also discussed what makes these meetings unique, what he’s most proud of, and any potential pitfalls or risks. 

Taylor said the meeting is unique because “it shines a light on things that nobody talks about. It needs to be blunt and exaggerated. It gives an opportunity for people to talk about what they really want to talk about.” He said he’s most proud of taking the step to elevate collaboration design to the level it deserves and having clients and coworkers validate the need for it. “And I am proud that that happened and also that it has been successful so far and that people seem to see the value in it and seem to really be hungry for it,” he said. The potential pitfalls are surfacing things that are bigger or deeper than there’s time or scope for: “I think long-term, that’s probably a good thing, but it might put some things out there that could cause some short-term issues.”

Looking Ahead

We ended our conversation chatting about where Taylor sees the opportunity for this meeting and what he would do next if he were to be really bold. He says, “If I were really, really bold, I would probably just make this the one thing that I do. Just on a personal level, it would be the explicit singular focus of my business. I think from a more conceptual level, some of it is just going deeper. Bringing more of the coaching background and deepening the conversations around what’s really going on. And bringing talking about topics like nonviolent communication. How do we change the way we talk to each other at work? And I think just going deeper on the types of things we talk about and making it almost like a more comprehensive process.”

Do you have a magical meeting story to share?

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The post Collaboration Design 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 Johannes Petereit, Ph.D. Student and graduate coordinator at the German Research Center for GeoSciences (also known as GFZ Potsdam, which is the national research center for Earth Sciences in Germany). He started as a Ph.D. student in 2015 and is currently in the final stages of finishing his thesis. Since the beginning of 2020, Johannes has been responsible for building and coordinating the graduate program of the institute, where he organizes and conducts trainings for graduate students. I spoke with Johannes about a meeting for other trainers facilitators in the natural sciences field he participates in called Train Together Forever, what prompted it, and what makes it unique.

“We want to change the way science is done.” -Johannes Petereit

Tribe Mentality

Train Together Forever is made up of a group of trainers, facilitators, educators, and coaches who meet each week to discuss various ways to conduct and facilitate online trainings and try out online tools (such as MURAL and Slido). The trainings mostly pertain to the natural sciences field, as most of the group members have a natural sciences background. The meeting was prompted by the first COVID-19 lockdown in Germany as an initiative to promote online training skills and learn from others in the field, as no meetings, events, or conferences were happening in person. 

According to Johannes, a big part of the meeting’s purpose is to create a space for scientists, trainers, and educators to collaborate with fellow members of their field about approaches to training. “We want to change the way science is done at the moment in academia because it’s a somewhat toxic environment for many who are in this field. I would say it’s a tribe, and we come together to move forward into the same direction, which we defined for us.” He noted there are a lot of scientists that want to solve problems, but having a way to collaborate with each other positively in order to come up with answers to the big questions isn’t happening very often (but should be). 

The meeting was originally designed by Alexander Schiller–a professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Jena in Germany–but it has since expanded to be community-run. At the time and as a result of the lockdown, Alexander started offering a short workshop on interactive training and facilitation online for free and started inviting people from his network.  Participants had the option to pay what they wanted. The group gained momentum and developed into a safe space for others to learn more about online training, where everyone was a beginner (aside from Alexander and a few of his colleagues) and had the chance to test out online training tools and share knowledge. “We were sharing and learning together and improving, giving each other feedback, but all in a positive way,” Johannes explained.

Johannes said the meeting has evolved into a community, which he attributes to a reason for its success.“We are somewhat of a tribe. That’s actually the thing that makes this meeting magical for me, because most of us, we have never met in person, but somehow we know each other.” The group is currently working on several projects, including a workshop curriculum for trainers who want to be trainers in the natural sciences field, a small conference for members of the natural sciences field, and an upcoming website. 

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

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The Meeting

Pre-Meeting Prep

Two-three members of the group gather to brainstorm, prep, and gain early feedback on ideas and topics to discuss in the meeting. The roles of the meeting facilitator and leader are on a volunteer, rotating basis and they both change each week. Whichever team member is leading that week’s meeting will send out the calendar invite and plan the meeting agenda, which varies but has included a mix of presentation slides, MURALs, new tools, and online activities. A calendar invitation with a Zoom link is always sent before the meeting, and the information is cross-posted on Slack and sent via email. 

Exercise

Train Together Forever is held on Zoom every Thursday at 5 PM CET for about two hours. There are typically around eight attendees but attendance varies and sometimes there are as many as 15 participants. The group is made up of scientists, trainers, and educators in the natural sciences field. One of the ground rules is that everyone is welcome – the group fosters an inclusive culture and wants to ensure they are providing a safe space where people feel comfortable coming to. 

Roles and Responsibilities: Johannes explained that not one single person is in charge of the group: “We are in it all together and we are deciding together and trying to move forward together.” There is, however, the rotating meeting facilitator/leader who determines the meeting agenda. The meeting facilitator for each week is selected at the end of the previous week’s meeting, on a volunteer basis.

Meeting Format: The meeting typically starts with an informal check-in, where attendees catch up and socialize. Then the facilitator will segway into calling the meeting to order and start what they have planned for the week. The bulk of the meeting lasts for about one hour and 45 minutes, Johannes said. The last ten minutes are spent discussing what’s next, including determining the following week’s facilitator. 

Purposefully Casual: This informal meeting structure was prompted by new attendees joining every week, and everyone taking turns presenting. Everyone has different presentation styles and ideas, and because of this, it sparked an emphasis on trying new things and bringing new concepts to the meetings, Johannes explained. 

Outputs and Results

Johannes and I discussed the main outputs and results produced by the Train Together Forever meetings. “The output is usually improving existing concepts, workshop concepts, because we are trying them out in this workshop and then getting feedback or just training. It’s also a training space, so we have a lot of newbies and they have a safe space to try things out before they have the real workshop afterwards.” Other outcomes are additional meetings that have evolved (such as a workshop curriculum to get certified as a scientist trainer), the website, and the upcoming online conference.

Tools

There are a few tools Johannes and team use to create magic and connection in the Train Forever Together meeting:

• Zoom – Fosters connection using conversation, chats, and breakout sessions.
• MURAL – Digital workspace for virtual collaboration.
• Slido – Q&A polling platform for meetings and events.

Opportunities and Reflection

I asked Johannes what makes this meeting unique, and he again highlighted the tribe and community aspects: “That it’s organic. That it’s not an obligation. This tribe part I was talking earlier about, that a community evolved out of it. It’s not that it’s just meeting the purpose of learning or something like that. It’s really that there is a culture and the community that has evolved out of it and projects that are started together in subgroups or altogether.”

We also discussed what makes him most proud of these meetings. Johannes identified the friendships that have evolved out of it, especially during a pandemic and lockdown. He’s proud that the group is able to do life online – not in a “gaming, being sucked into an online game world kind of way,” but in a new and exciting way, one where everyone is always trying to improve and generate new ideas.

We ended our conversation on the topic of opportunity for improvement. In Johannes’ ideal world, he would like to be liberated from the traditional virtual meeting setup (sitting at the computer) and instead be able to move around while having the meeting while also doing other activities, such as cooking. An interesting idea he mentioned was if a drone had a computer screen attached to it and could follow someone around, it would allow people to participate in the meeting while also encouraging movement and activity. “This would also change the dynamic of a lot of those meetings,” he said.

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The post Train Together Forever appeared first on Voltage Control.

“There’s a spectrum of teaching styles, and there’s maybe the more traditional historical style of command style and sage on stage, all the way to a self-discovery. It appears to me that facilitation is really in that middle space between the command style and the self-discovery. [Facilitation] is about unleashing the collective power of a group.” -Sarah L. Collie 

In this episode of Control the Room, Sarah Collie and I chat about the influence facilitation has played throughout her professional career. Sara shares the valuable learning principles of facilitation that continue to inspire her, along with the direct impact that the Liberating Structures framework has on facilitation. We take a close look at how meeting disruption can happen no matter how prepared the facilitator is and how to redirect the energy in the room and recover attendee productivity if there is disruption. Sarah highlights what she’s learned from her facilitation experiences and the outcomes that can appear for any facilitator. She also notes the importance of prioritizing accountability for participants and creating conditions that cater to each unique audience. Listen in to hear Sara’s viewpoint on the opportunity that facilitation brings for people to collectively come together and create a supportive network that can lead to the true essence of exceptional facilitation.   

Show Highlights

[3:35] Dr. Sarah’s Beginnings in Facilitation 
[10:22] Valuable Tools in Learning Principles of Facilitation 
[17:17] Sarah’s Lessons Learned from Liberating Structures
[30:33] Sarah’s Take on Disruption in the Meeting Room 
[38:15] The Core Skill of Identifying Outcomes & Sarah’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Sarah’s LinkedIn
University of Virginia

About the Guest

Sarah Collie founded and leads the Organizational Excellence Program at the University of Virginia. She partners with the University community to develop strategy, implement improvements, foster innovation, and build organizational capacity for change to support and advance the mission. She describes the work as “helping the university be better.”  Sarah’s higher education career spans diverse academia and administrative positions at several universities. She is a forever student of being a part of successful organizations and creating effective change and culture. Sarah holds a Ph.D. in higher education with a focus on organizational change from UVA’s School of Education, where she frequently serves as a lecturer and mentor. Outside of UVA, she enjoys applying her skills through board service and consulting to assist non-profit organizations to enhance their effectiveness. 

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly control the room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at ultimatecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meeting’s quickstart guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Dr. Sarah Collie, Associate Vice President of Organizational Excellence at the University of Virginia. In this role she partners with the university community to develop and execute strategy, design and implement improvements to foster a culture of innovation and change. Sarah’s work has been recognized with several awards including the NCCI Leader of Change Award and the Gold Facilitation Impact Award from the IAF. Welcome to the show, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Thank you, Douglas. Thanks for hosting me, it’s really a pleasure to be with you.

Douglas:

As usual, I’d like to start off with a little bit about how you got your start in this work. It’s really amazing to talk to someone who is receiving awards from the International Association of Facilitators and is at the peak of what it is to impact change in organizations. There isn’t a straight path there always, it’s generally a secure  journey. Really curious to see how you made your journey to this pinnacle facilitator.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes, I think the term journey is a really accurate one. It’s been progressive in nature, and one that was probably with me, and in me for a long time. I just didn’t realize it, nor did I characterize it as facilitation. I’m a lifelong educator. I have experiences in teaching, in coaching and administration. I’ve worked at all levels from elementary school to college.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Honestly, they’re more similar than different. But the majority of my career has, in fact been in higher education. If I look way back to my teacher preparation studies, I think I learned a teaching style that was very facilitative in approach. I learned some key facilitation skills in my teacher prep background. Things such as starting with the stated objective, how do you organize and engage groups? How do you elicit certain outcomes?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I was relying upon these facilitation techniques, I just didn’t call them that or know that’s really what they were. Sometimes in education, you hear the term active learning, I think there’s some similarities, they’re not exactly the same, but some similar principles and concepts. The arc of my career then took me into administrative roles, and I was able to transfer and apply some of those facilitative techniques and approaches, but honestly, in a limited basis. There are strong cultural and status quo poles to how meetings are run.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I won’t say that I brought those facilitative techniques wholesale over to the administrative context. It was really when I was pursuing my doctorate in higher education administration when I became interested in studying organizations, studying organizational culture, organizational performance, organizational effectiveness. Got turned on to the works of people like Peter Senge and Edgar Schein. It’s when I made this shift in my career to one that was much more focused on improvement and innovation and change. But I would say facilitation took much more of a center stage in my daily life.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Many of those methodologies have facilitation embedded in them. It was a toolkit and skill that I’ve just started to build out and continue to grow. That’s my journey. Facilitation now is a part of my everyday life.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

One comment I would make, however, and I hope it won’t be too controversial as we start this podcast, and that’s that I actually don’t describe myself as a facilitator, I don’t use that term or that label. I realize it’s probably all in the semantics and the definitions of the word, but I see facilitation as a toolkit that I use to achieve other outcomes, other organizational outcomes. Whether they be strategic planning, process improvement, engaging in creating a healthy, productive culture. Facilitation is a means, rather than an end. That’s my approach to facilitation.

Douglas:

I want to come back to some of the stuff you were talking about, as far as, teacher training, and how that prepped you for this facilitation work, or maybe they didn’t have the same language or didn’t refer to them in the same ways. Specifically, something that we’ve thought a lot about is this connection between facilitating groups to a desired result, and training. Meaning that, we’re looking at a lot of these training or learning types of tools and frameworks and approaches, just learning science in general, and workshops and meetings, the similarities are very apparent, and the more we thought about it, it was like well, meeting participants are learners, is they have to show up and learn something. Whether it’s an innovation, or whether it’s a new strategy. They’re hearing new ideas from their co-workers that they have to assimilate, integrate, and then do something with.

Douglas:

When I made that realization, it made that connection between education and meetings and workshops and facilitation so clear. It’s really fascinating that you went through this journey. Then, as you started to see these tools, saw the similarities. I’d love to unpack that a little more with you.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yeah, I think it really comes back to, that there’s a spectrum of teaching styles, and there’s maybe the more traditional historical style of command style and sage on stage, all the way to a self-discovery. It appears to me that, facilitation is really in that middle space between the command style and the self-discovery. When it really allows you to unleash the collective. Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and what better way to learn than to learn with others?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think that’s really what facilitation is about, is about unleashing the collective power of a group. Douglas, let’s stay with this connection between education and facilitation for a moment, because I think what’s central to both of them is learning. If you think about education, education is more focused on individual learning. While Of course, there’s some residual learning from being with others. For the most part, education is focused on learning at an individual level.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

But if you think about facilitation, facilitation is also about learning, but learning at an organizational level. Facilitation really enables organizational learning through groups of people. I’m pretty fond of saying, all the work of organizations is done by people. Then it would follow that all organizational learning has to take place through people, collectively.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I do see a really strong connection to both education and facilitation. In some ways, you might think of, individual learning and organizational learning as two sides of the same coin, and you need both.

Douglas:

I love that. We often talk about this idea that designing workshops and designing learning experiences are pretty much one and the same. We apply a lot of the learning experience design principles to our workshop design framework. It’s really interesting to hear about this notion of individual versus group learning. That’s really cool.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

We have a professor at UVA who talks about the world of hyper learning. Ed Hess, with the fast pace and changing world speaks of hyper learning, which captures this notion that you can learn with yourself and learn with others and it needs to be continual in this fast paced world to adapt to the speed of change.

Douglas:

If someone were to… A lot of folks find facilitation through design, or through specific tools and methodologies, and are just starting to get curious and approaching this journey from a different perspective. As someone who has a deep experience in learning, and various teaching and training styles, what’s something that you might suggest that people check out or keep in mind as they’re thinking about maybe applying these learning principles to their work?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I’ve learned a great deal from Keith McCandless in Liberating Structures. I think his framework and approach can be adapted by anyone and applied by anyone. That you don’t have to be a professional facilitator. I find that ease of his structures and his approach to be really helpful. It brings intentionality to facilitation, and I think that’s where you have to start, otherwise, it’s just a tool. It’s like, technology is a tool. If you think technology is going to solve a service improvement you have, well, it may not. It may, in fact, make it worse if you don’t effectively design and deploy it.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That’s true about facilitation. It’s much more than just getting people in a room and having them talk. I think his framework really brings intentionality, and I think the most critical place to start is getting clear on the purpose of any given session. I go so far as to even write out a purpose statement to make sure that I have clarity about what the group I’m working with wishes to achieve in our time together. I think that’s why that dialogue with who you’re working with is so important up front, to be sure that you have alignment. Because you can’t go to designing a session, if you’re not crystal clear on the purpose.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

They may not even be clear on the purpose, which is why you need to have a conversation. Don’t ask them to fill out a form and submit it to you. But the power is in the dialog to dig in and understand, what are you trying to do in this session or series of sessions?

Douglas:

How are you typically having those dialogues? What’s your go to approach to distill that purpose?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Certainly, a lot of listening. Some people will be able to answer the question, what do you want to achieve? Many people will be more rambling around purpose. I think asking questions around what does success look like? Just asking questions of curiosity. Inquiring what is great look like during the session? Lead them there, and then I tried to take that, craft some language, a couple of bullet points and share it back with them to say, did I hear you? This is what I heard you say.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

If we achieve this, if it’s written in an outcome statement, if we achieve this, by the end of this meeting, this session, this series of sessions, is that what you hope to achieve?

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s always nice to start off with purpose. I find that to be lacking, quite often. Even when there’s a focus put on it, people can struggle with it, because it sounds so simple. But sometimes it can be hard to articulate, especially if there’s a lot of jargon, or a lot of, just here’s the project brief, and we just keep coming back to that language. People aren’t getting to what’s the root of what’s driving this? I’m curious if you’ve run into that before.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. I have to go back to Priya Parker. Priya Parker said something very clear on this point. She emphasized that we assume that the purpose is known and shared when we gather. The reality is that it isn’t. I don’t know about you, but I go to plenty of meetings where it’s really not clear to me what purpose, or what my role is, as an attendee. Am I there to provide ideas? Am I there to provide feedback? Am I there to ask questions of clarification?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

What happens a lot of the time is the participants will remain passive and quiet, because the purpose isn’t clear, nor is their role.

Douglas:

I think that’s spot on. In our book, Magical Meetings, we talk about the need to, not only can you clarify your purpose, as far as writing it down and what it is, but if you don’t communicate it, and you don’t clarify it to your participants, then you haven’t gone far enough. To that point, I think it is important to even rename our meetings.

Douglas:

Often, our calendars are full of stuff, and it’s like, I don’t even know what this is. Can their names at least give us a hint on our purpose or take us there?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Often, that’s all you have to go on. There is no agenda, but it’s just here’s the name of the meeting, show up. My experience is many, many meetings, probably some 90% are what I would classify as the traditional talk at meeting. The convener, the leader, the presenter, will talk at, using up probably 55 minutes of a 60 minute time period. Maybe at the very end ask if there any questions.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Sometimes they’ll have a very dense PowerPoint to go with it, and they’ll read those PowerPoint slides to you. I see some meetings where they’re sending out the information in advance, which I think is a wonderful way to set expectations about what the meeting’s about, the kind of information that’ll be conveyed. However, don’t then come in and read the PowerPoint, because you’ve now conditioned people to not do any pre-work, to do any pre-thinking, to come prepared for dialogue. We’ve conditioned them to expect, oh, I will come and be a passive participant in this meeting.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s interesting, this notion of being passive, versus something you said earlier around unleashing the collective. I’d already scribbled that down, because I was going to take us back to Liberating Structures, and you already mentioned Keith. I’m also a huge fan of his work. I think the framework’s fantastic for… To your point, anyone can be a facilitator, and that’s part of the allure. It’s like, what a great way to unleash everyone, if now everyone’s empowered to be part of the unleashing.

Douglas:

I’d like to dig into your experience with Liberating Structures. I know that there’s some case studies that got released about your work using Liberating Structures with the community there. I believe it was there in Charlottesville. Would love to hear more about that, and how you found that to be effective, and anything that listeners might find helpful.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Sure, well, Liberating Structures, as we’ve already stated, are just a wonderful way to really tap into the collective wisdom of a group. My core starting principle is if you’re bringing a group of people together, don’t you want to leverage the talent, the expertise, the knowledge, everything they bring? That’s the power of having a group together. Otherwise, you just have the one plus one, an individual plus an individual plus an individual and the limitations that come with the way we all think.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think better with others, and I believe others think better with others. Keith has a set of principles. He helps you understand the micro organizing design elements of every meeting. Again, I think anyone can use those.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

From his work, I’ve adopted, I would say, four really core guiding principles for every facilitation idea. That is, I want to engage everyone that shows up. I want to be sure I can tap into diverse perspectives that are in the room. I want to create conditions to promote cross pollination. The last one is focus on forward looking positive conversations.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That doesn’t mean you ignore the past. But we have to get past the past, and we have to learn from the past, use it constructively, so we can focus on moving forward. Those are really the four design elements I use over and over and over.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

When I’m working with a group, I actually share that with whoever I’m working with to co-design, because I do believe it is a co-design, even though I may do the first design and get some refinement from them. I share those principles back with them, so they can see how those principles show up in the actual designing session.

Douglas:

That’s a total power move as a facilitator, well, meaning that when you do that it’s inclusive. It also means that they understand the mindset behind some of these moves, and then you start to really get contributions that you would have got otherwise, because it starts to click for them. They go, oh, okay, that’s how I can contribute.

Douglas:

I’m a big fan of that. Plus, if you get a buy in and an agreement on the principles, then it’s a lot easier when people gravitate to some of their old behaviors, we can point back to the principles. It’s not the behavior we’re challenging. It’s like, didn’t we say we were going to do this?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Right.

Douglas:

That’s so good. It’s interesting, you mentioned these key skills that jumped out earlier. There was structured objectives, they organize and engage and then elicit these outcomes or these contributions. The structured objective, I think, is, from my perspective, is pretty similar to the purpose, but a little different. I’d love to talk about that a little bit with you.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Well, I think there’s probably an overall purpose, more of an umbrella purpose to any given session or series of sessions. Then you can Zoom in into an individual session or even part of a session. What is the objective you’re trying to achieve in this session, or in this section of a meeting? Is it ideation? Is it planning? Is it prioritization? Is it getting to action steps? Just being really, really intentional about why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I’m going to come back to Priya Parker, only because she’s been Top of Mind lately, as she’s out there, quite prominent these days. I love the way she also talks about openings, and the importance of how you open a meeting and open a session. I think openings and closings are probably one of the most neglected areas of meeting facilitation.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

People even on Zoom, or they come in the room and they’re sitting, there quiet, or some people are talking and others are sitting there doing nothing. It often starts with someone speaking to the group. I would just ask people to be very mindful about what do you want to accomplish in those first opening moments? Is it engagement? Is it connection? Is it being present?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think you want to do that in the context of the meeting. It’s often maddening for me when I hear people take valuable time or see people take valuable time at the beginning of a meeting for a really disconnected, irrelevant, maybe icebreaker. What color M&Ms do you like? Maybe that’ll get people connected. But I think you have an opportunity to get people present, focused in those early moments and do it with, again, intentionality and aligned with the purpose.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

This is the comment Priya made that I thought was so well said is, an opening should connect people to purpose and each other. I just think that’s beautiful.

Douglas:

Yeah, 100%. To your point around intentionality, so many times, people will throw icebreakers around because they think, oh, this is what I’m supposed to do. It’s like a prescriptive, this is how you open. Sure, that shows up in a lot of openings. But if we don’t get down to the reason, the why that’s there, we’re not going to get the most out of our experience.

Douglas:

I always love to tell people, when we’re doing facilitator training, we’ll say, if you run an icebreaker, a warm up, or any sort of activity that’s transitioning or setting folks up for the next step, and you turn to the group after running that session or that activity, and you say, “Why did we just do that? And it doesn’t erupt into a pithy conversation?” Then you need to ask yourself, why did we just do that?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Going back to Keith McCandless and Liberating Structures, I’m sure you’re very familiar with impromptu networking, and use it regularly to open meetings. In my world, you would rarely call a facilitation structure by its name, you just give them the instructions. Give them a prompt, a question, and off they go. It’s a great way to have high energy, connect with your purpose, spend some time thinking about what the question is, so it’s really, again, intentional and aligned with your purpose. But great way to bring connection, engagement, purpose, bring people present.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

People are going from meeting to meeting to meeting, they enter the meeting, and they’ve got to get reset. They’re maybe reflecting upon what they just heard in the last meeting. So, get them present quickly.

Douglas:

So good. I run into that so often. It’s like, people running from meeting to meeting, and they just frantically show up. I haven’t actually measured this, but I bet you could study, what is the average time it takes people to actually transition into whatever you’re discussing? Because people are just going back to back to back, and it takes time. I call it the boot up time. If we don’t account for that, and to your point, the opener’s a great time, we should be planning on that in the opener.

Douglas:

But so many times I’d see people just cutting right into the content or right into the discussion. It’s like, man, no one’s had time to even get there.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Great.

Douglas:

Do you have any stories you could share about openers you’ve done that you thought were really effective? Maybe, what made them effective and how you were intentional about how you opened?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think openers that are very personal, meaning you’re asking them to share a time when XXX, or imagine you are somewhere. I think it really starts with them. Who doesn’t like to share about their own experiences or their own observations or talk about them, and connect it to purpose? I think those are the most powerful ways to start.

Douglas:

Thinking a bit about the next key skill, which is to organize and engage. We talked a little bit about Liberating Structures. They’re great for creating engagement. What are some of your other moves, or some examples of ways that you’ve created more engagement?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think there are many methodologies and facilitation tools that just have engagement embedded in them. Increasing engagement, I think there are probably two elements I’d emphasize. One is the way you set it off, the structure itself, to ensure… The organizational structure to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to participate.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

We all know groups can have dominant voices, so set it up, so everyone has a chance. That may be including everything from, whether it’s starting off with some individual reflection, because some people are more processors, using pairs or trios, small groups. But I would emphasize small groups to ensure that everyone has a voice.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

There are ways then to come back as a whole, and cross pollinate across groups as well so everyone, again, is getting the benefit of the collective input and the collective wisdom. I think how you physically organize, and how you create your groups have a tremendous bearing upon the amount of engagement.

Douglas:

You mentioned that we often have to deal with dominant voices, thinking about how we structure, or how we group folks, keeping small groups together and how the conversation can flow between individual to the small groups, the big groups and back and forth. Some people talk about Ws or zigzags, where you’re going up and down the small group to large group.

Douglas:

I want to just get maybe a story or maybe some advice around what happens when you’ve got some structure, you’ve been planning on it, but there’s just some disruption in the room. Maybe that dominant voice has just found its way in, or the participation’s out there. Maybe there’s some psychological safety that’s absent. What are some of your go to moves in the moment that maybe you didn’t even anticipate it? So you couldn’t plan for it, but what are some of your go tos to help get the team on track and help get everyone contributing?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That’s a really important point. Because while I do emphasize the intentionality and the planning, there are certainly always elements of any meeting or session that are unknown, and you may have to deal with them in the moment. If you’ve done that planning well, I think you do mitigate some of this, because you flatten the power in the room, the hierarchy in the room. The leader is not sage on stage. I usually try to speak to the leader in advance and ask them to be a full participant. They are not there to espouse their viewpoints and have everyone align behind them in most cases, if it’s a true group facilitation.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I think there are things you can really intentionally do in advance to help mitigate. But nonetheless, it’s going to happen, and I think the structures will help you, because you don’t want to stay in one structure too long, where it can escalate and get amplified. I think limiting whole group interaction is another way to mitigate that redirecting. Even if you come back and you ask people to share, you can qualify it. What is something you’ve heard that everyone in the room must hear? That’s another Keith McCandless one. Not just come back and to give me a report out of everything in your group, but something truly spectacular, extraordinary.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

You’re helping them have some management of self, self-manage how they interact. Redirecting is just an important part of facilitation. If someone is going too long, can you summarize that point so they feel heard, and move on to the next activity or next part of the session?

Douglas:

That’s all really great advice. Focusing on engagement is so vital. I see, especially a lot of new facilitators, it’s easy to throw in the towel and go, “Oh, well, that’s just culturally how it is here.” It’s so worth the effort to lean in to the conflict. I think it’s the conflict where the lack of engagement tends to suffer.

Douglas:

For instance, if the leader speaks very firmly around, well, we can’t do that, or just shut something down, then all of a sudden, engagement, just will stifle or whatever. I think leaning into that and inviting a dialogue around it is scary for a new facilitator, but the more you do it, the more you will keep that engagement high.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

You’re going to have to adapt. You may have planned an activity for X amount of minutes and you realized you didn’t get maybe the results you had hoped for. So, you refine it a little bit, and you send them back and have them repeat it. Or you drop an entire activity in the moment. Or I’ve been in a situation where I was given some strong feedback that they didn’t feel like they had heard enough from, or qualified as the user voice in a facilitation session.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I reflected upon that, I took a step back, and this happened to be a multi-session facilitation. I took a step back, and the very next session, I organized what’s called a fishbowl, so they could hear from the users, this particular program was serving. I garnered the respect of the participants, they gathered more context and information that they needed, but it wasn’t in the original design. I actually appreciated that they have, as you described, psychological safety, to offer a suggestion. It didn’t let them tell me how to do it necessarily. I think we have to be careful in that space. I love it when people show up and say, “We want you to facilitate this, and these are the activities we want you to do, and this is the timeframe. We’ve already described that it’s going to be 75 minutes, or it’s going to be three hours. Can you do it?”

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I want to be careful that we’re not giving them all the power, but you do want to be responsive, and listen to what the needs of the group are, and adapt.

Douglas:

That’s right. It’s funny how I see facilitators that understand the inquiry, and active listening, and, just being curious, is the cornerstone to good facilitation. They get that in the session with their participants. But then when it comes to feedback on shifting the structure, or the activities or the agenda, they’re very protective, because it’s their baby, it’s what they created, right. But if we’re practicing those same skills of inquiry and active listening, we should be willing to adapt it.

Douglas:

At the end of the day, to your point, we are here for our purpose. There is a stated objective we’re trying to get to. I guarantee you that objective is not run these 10 activities.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Exactly. When I think about a multi-session engagement, I have a skeleton plan, and we’re starting here, and I want to get there. Perhaps I think it’s probably going to be three or four sessions, and I have a skeleton plan. But I honestly do not put the details around session two, session three, until I’ve had the prior session and see where the group is.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I have the luxury, in my work, of also adapting, in the sense that I may think it’s going to be a two or three session engagement. But if I need to, I can make it a five or six session engagement. I have that kind of flexibility, which is helpful to make those adaptive moves instead of feeling like it’s a linear process, and these milestones have to be hit. I think it also yields better outcomes.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s really great. I want to shift to the key skill number three that you mentioned, which was eliciting these outcomes. I think that’s pretty critical, because if we don’t get to deliverables, if we don’t know what done looks like, if we haven’t understood that in our pre-work, or discovery call, or whatever we want to call it, A, we have no map to reference against, we don’t know when we’re there. Also, no one experiences any business value. It’s like, oh, we just had a lovely chat. But that’s like one of those things where people were like, oh, these workshops, they’re just a flash in the pan. This is one that’s very important for me, and I love that it’s one of your three core focus areas or key skills.

Douglas:

Tell me a little bit more about how you think about eliciting outcomes, and how you get there and what are some good principles to follow?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

When I think about eliciting, I actually come at it from two levels; a micro level and a macro level. The micro level, I think the eliciting comes from the structure and the prompt. It may not always be a very direct question. You may have to use imagery or use stories to uncover whatever it is you’re working on. Whether that be ideation or solutions.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Eliciting at the micro level. Then when I think about eliciting at the macro level, I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked with many, many groups or been a participant in where there’s lots of ideation, and then nothing happens. There’s no lack of ideas, but there’s a lack of execution and a lack of commitment. How can we elicit commitment and action?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I don’t like to leave groups without… I may not be able to stay with them all the way through implementation. But I can help position those groups to take the first steps and hopefully toward a successful outcome. Ways that we might do that is, if they have lots of ideas, helping them, prioritize them, selecting a few, understanding the context that they may be executing those in, and then really getting down to articulating what would be the first steps? Who would do it. But let’s even go one step further around, what are you going to do?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

You want commitment and accountability, it may be easy to create the plan and say someone who’s not even in the room is going to execute on these steps. Let’s have them take ownership of what they’re going to do and what they’re going to commit to and commit to that in front of the group, with the group and have some mechanisms of accountability in place as well.

Douglas:

15% solutions is one of my favorite closers.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes, that’s it.

Douglas:

That’s just so spot on. I love this, you’re thinking of the micro, the macro, because if we don’t think about how this fits in to a continuum, then the work could easily just evaporate or just lose momentum. It’s important to think about how things take root. There’s a really awesome book called The Messy Middle, which talks about, oh, it’s really easy when things are just getting started. Because it’s fun to ideate and figure out where we’re going to go. It’s really fun when products are ending, because the end’s in sight, and you’re putting on the finishing touches and stuff, and you’re getting it out the door. There’s launch parties, and everyone’s having cheese and crackers, whatever.

Douglas:

But that messy middle, man, there’s so much… Especially anything that might resemble a complex environment, there’s so much emerging stuff that we didn’t understand, and we just got to be able to adapt and deal. I love this idea of, whether you can stick around for a little bit as they start to veer in what might be the messy middle, or least shine a light on the fact that it’s coming.

Douglas:

The commitments really help with that, because if they’ve got ownership, then they’re going to stick through it versus saying, “Oh, Susan will figure it out.” Thinking about this macro, and the organizational development and change work that you do, what’s maybe a story that you could share, that highlights some of that work, and how you think about the macro and helping people in that longer journey?

Dr. Sarah Collie:

In terms of some examples, let me just start by providing a little bit of background about our program, because I think it’ll situate the examples. UVA Organizational Excellence Program is a resource and a partner for the university community. We offer a suite of core services around strategic and operational planning, process and service improvements, organizational effectiveness, project management, and navigating organizational change.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

In the course of our work, we apply an array of improvement, innovation and change methodologies and tools. We don’t subscribe to just one singular approach. I raise that because then we also integrate facilitation with those approaches. I would even go so far to offer that facilitation actually enhances many of those methodologies.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Whether we’re using design thinking or appreciative inquiry, we’re doing value stream process mapping or using change management, strategic doing. Regardless of the methodology or tool that we then add in facilitation. Some of them have it embedded in them. But in many cases, we’re adding on additional facilitation techniques. You asked me specifically about some of the work we’ve done. There was one in particular recently that was recognized, an initiative called Project Rebound, where we partnered with the local region and the local businesses to really come together, and launch plans for their economic recovery in the wake of COVID.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

That project, we convened more than probably 300 plus stakeholders in industry specific committees, as well as general community sessions to gather input, to help them sort through and prioritize ideas that would lead to actionable strategies and actually be a blueprint for reopening and revitalizing the local economy. It was a crisis moment for many of these businesses. Facilitation really brought out the best of people, really brought out that collective community power, even amid these challenges. They were really able to come together before looking, create a plan.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

But beyond that, they actually created a support network for one another. Almost everybody spoke about making new connections that would be long lasting. In fact, one of the goals of the project was to foster more ongoing collaboration that would go on long after the recovery period from COVID. It was just a really meaningful and impactful project.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

At the simplest level, what we did was create the space, create very intentional space for people to gather and engage and share in a productive way. I’ll be much shorter here, and just give you a couple of other examples. But we’re engaged with various process and service improvements, and facilitation is embedded throughout the effort. The early stage of discovery, what’s the current state? Imagining the future, what’s possible. Designing how we get to that future state, and then even after implementation, collecting feedback, and further refining the process or the service. Facilitation is embedded throughout.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Some recent things we’ve worked on include our capital construction, building process, hiring processes, enhancing support for research. Even in the academic space, we have a partnership with our Center for Teaching Excellence to work with academic departments in schools on curriculum redesign. While the center brings the expertise around curriculum content, to help ensure that it’s relevant and aligned with the desired student learning outcomes, we’re bringing in knowledge and techniques to engage our faculty, to be very inclusive, and to really help the department navigate organizational change successfully.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

While there are many examples, I could give my strategic planning, organizational effectiveness, I guess the final point here would be that facilitation really knows no boundaries. It’s applicable to all functional areas, it’s applicable to all constituencies. In our case, faculty, staff, students, alumni, even partners of the university. It just pairs well with other methodologies and tools, and it pairs well with all audiences and groups.

Douglas:

I couldn’t agree more that especially in complex environments, facilitation is a prerequisite for leadership. Leaders aren’t doing these things. They’re leaving so much potential behind and potentially, I would say operating at a high level of risk.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Leaders have the responsibility to create the conditions where people can come together and thrive and do their very best work. I don’t know how you do that if you aren’t using some facilitative skills along the way.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think that statement is such a powerful statement. I love to end there. I want to transition to this moment here at the end, to just give you a chance to share your final thought with our listener.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes. Well, I think I would just build upon that facilitation is leadership. Leadership has a commitment to help groups be the best they can be. I don’t know how you do that if you aren’t using facilitation. There’s a saying in the improvement and quality world where I work about organizations and systems deliver the exact results that they’re designed to get.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I would encourage everyone to look at their meetings as well. Your meetings and your sessions are delivering the exact results that you’ve designed them to deliver. That means if you don’t have engagement, you probably designed the session like that. As leaders, let’s all go back, look at our day-to-day interactions, take a critical eye towards our meetings and our sessions, and consider how we might alter the design and get different results rather than continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

I’ll end with this final quote that I have on my desk. This is my call to action for all leaders. An organization’s results are determined through webs of human commitment, born in webs of human conversation. Fernando Flores.

Douglas:

That’s so lovely. Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining me and sharing that lovely quote at the end. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and I hope you all the best.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Douglas:

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

The post Episode 55: Facilitation as a Means, Not an End appeared first on Voltage Control.