A February 2021 poll by management consulting company Robert Half showed that 89% of businesses expect the hybrid work model – where employees split their time between home and the office — to be here for good. Moreover, an October 2021 joint study from Google Workspace and The Economist uncovered that 75% of employees believe their companies will fully adopt hybrid work within three years. 

This, of course, will require investment in new technology if the business of work (a.k.a. meetings) is going to continue. While many have tried to make do in 2020 and 2021 via an ad hoc solution of video chat solutions and online collaboration platforms, Zoom fatigue is real. Everyone from National Geographic to researchers at Stanford have explored the concept.

Connecting from wherever & meeting anywhere

One global operation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, has recognized it must help its employees escape the feeling they’re trapped in a tiny box on screen. While it piloted a program in 2017 where it shipped VR headsets to staff, the events of the past couple of years have accelerated this effort. Now PwC is holding meetings in exotic virtual locales like luxury ski chalets, swanky penthouses, and, surprisingly, atop notable skyscrapers. There’s also an initiative underway to outfit physical environments with higher-grade microphones, video meeting screens, and their own supply of VR headsets (so everyone can join meetings at the Empire State Building’s observation deck).

We’ve done something similar here at Voltage Control. This past holiday, we shipped a headset to every team member so we could hold our annual party virtually within a space we created using AltspaceVR. While it wasn’t perfect — I built the room myself with very little training — it allowed us to explore the technology ahead of our upcoming Control The Room Summit, which will be incorporating VR as part of its hybrid component (more on that later).

Zooming in the Metaverse

Even Zoom realizes it will have to do something to make video conferencing more engaging. During its September Zoomtopia event, it announced a partnership with the Meta-owned Oculus. This took place only a few weeks after the company formerly known as Facebook rolled out its Horizon Workrooms.

This team-up will allow Oculus Quest headset users to join Zoom Meetings and use the Zoom Whiteboard directly within VR. Workers at home and the office can then brainstorm together, collaborate on a document, have more visually interesting conversations, or just socialize. You can learn more in the video below. 

The Zoom-Oculus-Horizon partnership isn’t the only option out there, though. Around the same time, Cisco revealed its Webex platform was getting a VR/AR upgrade called Webex Hologram. Alluding to the specter of “Zoom fatigue,” Cisco said it wants to support employers in reducing the friction between virtual and in-person collaboration. Not to be outdone, Microsoft soon offered its Teams users a product called Mesh, which is its take on a VR/AR meeting mash-up. In what has to be a nod to that old Xzibit Facebook meme, Slack is even allowing its users to read messages in virtual reality.

More ways to mix it up

Mixed reality is another technology that can bring excitement, engagement, and interactivity to hybrid meetings. Not to be confused with virtual reality, mixed reality incorporates digital elements into a real environment. Headsets like the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 1 utilize sensing and imaging technologies to merge physical and virtual worlds.

Mixed reality can empower facilitators to enhance meetings in really innovative ways, such as allowing you to explore 3D visual aids that you couldn’t bring into an actual meeting room due to size or weight. Not just confined to headsets, you can present mixed reality elements on screens in a meeting space when a speaker is captured on a video camera (you’ll just need someone in an edit suite to add the layers).

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How we’re experimenting with VR at Voltage Control

After running our third annual Control The Room facilitator summit as a remote event in 2021, we’re back at Austin’s Capital Factory on February 2nd  for a hybrid event. For those that can’t join us there, or simply prefer virtual, we’ll be utilizing Zoom, MURAL, and AltspaceVR to bring everyone together despite the physical distance.

Ultimately we decided to virtually present the conference in a space built within AltspaceVR. We won’t, however, be forcing people into the VR environment, those joining remotely can participate via Zoom if they don’t have a VR headset, or download the desktop version of AltspaceVR! We will be raffling off several pairs ahead of the event because we want to encourage everyone to experience how VR can be deployed in the facilitation space. 

Regardless of how people are joining us digitally, we’ll have hosts monitoring the VR and remote platforms to ensure a feedback loop between the in-person and distanced attendees. VR and Zoom attendees will be able to interact and ask the keynote speakers questions, live, via the platform hosts. As you can see, we’re attempting to create as much connective tissue amongst the disparate environments as possible. 

Steve Schofield of MURAL Labs is additionally hosting a week-long VR build event with world builders and facilitators to explore facilitation in VR. Participants from MURAL, Meta, the Horizon Worlds Community, Voltage Control, and Control The Room will gather in Horizon Worlds to think, explore, and build prior to the Summit. The overarching theme of exploration will be on facilitating retrospectives. The outputs will be shared during the Control the Room conference!

If you’re worried about single-handedly integrating VR into your hybrid meetings, know that our effort isn’t the work of one person — it’s the work of many. We’ll have lots of facilitators available across Zoom, MURAL, and AltspaceVR, as well as  an experienced contractor to run our A/V for us. Porting the event in Zoom alone requires him to set up three cameras and switch between them and an HDMI of the slides.

Control The Room will be our first time holding a hybrid meeting with this much technical complexity, and I look forward to sharing our post-event experiences with you. 

Want to witness our VR integration firsthand? Join us in-person or virtually at the Control The Room 2022 Summit. Single-day in-person tickets, virtual tickets, and tickets for separate workshops are all available! You can find more details here.

-Douglas Ferguson, President

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When it comes to facilitation, you may be leading a single meeting or conducting a workshop series, but one fact remains true of all: our purpose is to manage discussions, help create a safe space for ideas to emerge and grow from ALL participants, and ultimately to resolve the issue at hand. The best facilitators regularly ask, ”Why did we hold this meeting?” and “What do we need to gain from it?”

Beginning the journey of professional facilitation is much less daunting than it may sound. The path is sprinkled with knowledge, growth, inclusion of everyone, and ultimately, an environment where thoughts are unleashed by allowing everyone’s voices to be heard. Chances are you are already on this path! We want you to go from being a good facilitator to the best facilitator. You can do that by leveling un through the facilitator pyramid.

What is a Facilitator?

A good facilitator plans and leads a group to meet set goals. The group process is important to effectively reach those goals, work together, make decisions, and solve the issue at hand. 

A better facilitator takes what a good facilitator does and begins to steer the group toward a more open flow of ideas and solutions, allowing voices to be heard and a more flowing process, more freedom, and playfulness, to arise. 

The best facilitator takes all that a step further. Beginning with a psychologically safe space as the foundation for the group, creating active and engaging content, and utilizing stimulating tools to unleash the potential of every idea in the room.

Without the proper space for people to bring their most authentic selves, think of how many problem-solving ideas go unheard? How many meetings would have been more productive and more stimulating had we just moved one more step up the pyramid?

Pro-Tip! Check out our FREE download: Workshop Methods & Activities A collection of links to inspire methods & activities for your next workshop. Check out all of our FREE downloads here!

Our ‘Why’ for Facilitation and facilitation certification

We lead with the value of facilitation, and we offer unique guidance to a spectrum of clients. The pursuit of knowledge, growth, and leadership are just a few of our whys for facilitation. And to share our practice and knowledge with the wider community, we recently launched our Facilitator Certification Program. Through this program, we offer guidance and coaching toward the best in facilitation. Utilizing class immersion, playbooks, readings, and more, we provide a unique opportunity for the necessary practice and feedback facilitators need to grow. The feedback comes from not only instructors but colleagues as well. All of this leads into an opportunity for students to create a portfolio that will best reflect them as a facilitator, highlighting key strengths and your knowledge.

We believe that the future is facilitation, technology and the nature of work is changing, and we believe that if businesses learn the art of facilitation those changes do not need to be as intimidating. Facilitators encourage the ideas that shape how we navigate new workspaces, technological challenges, and social encounters.

A Job Skill You Need

We are seeing a trend in workplaces becoming less hierarchical, there is a growing need for interpersonal problem-solving skills. As we move towards this shift in power and traditional workspaces, we need champions of thought and ideas. We need facilitators to light the way for the colleagues who may be hesitant to share, or unsure about change.

“If we fail to adapt, we fail to move forward.”

-John Wooden

Truly productive meetings embrace change, and that means understanding how to navigate, through facilitation, conversations that may be tough. With the confidence of a facilitation certification, those conversations take on an ease, and even introduce an excitement, about the possibilities of change. Inclusivity is the key to being an effective facilitator. It’s time we shed the traditional, in-effective meeting structure.

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Are You Ready to Climb?

Ready to climb the pyramid? Receiving your Facilitator Certification will grant you the key skills you need through the support of a cohort of facilitator colleagues. By the end of the facilitator certification program you will be able to:  

• Identify a spectrum of game-changing facilitation methods and approaches
• Select the best facilitation methods for your facilitation context
• Implement the right facilitation methods to meet optimal facilitation outcomes
• Reflect on areas of personal facilitator strength and growth
• Cultivate a valuable professional facilitator identity

Passing the coursework means receiving certifications for EACH individual course, and after satisfying all certification requirements you will receive a full certification for your professional portfolios and to display on LinkedIn. 

Not only will you have the credentials, but you will have the key skills to amplify the ideas around you, problem-solve effectively, and create an environment of growth and movement!

The post How ‘Good’ Facilitators become the ‘Best’ Facilitators appeared first on Voltage Control.

It’s a common refrain in training circles that “practice makes practice.” In order to get better at your craft, to build the necessary skills and competencies to excel in your field, you must practice. You succeed and fail. You reflect on those successes and failures. And you get better. It was this frame that inspired our VP of Learning Experience, Erik Skogsberg, when he designed our recently-launched Facilitator Certification Program. We wholeheartedly believe that facilitation is the future as companies continue to transform amidst the pandemic and rapid technological change. And we want to help facilitators across industries thrive in their craft.

As a facilitation agency that leads with the value of facilitation for helping a whole spectrum of clients, we’ve gotten many requests over the years for providing a robust facilitation certification program. Growing facilitators wanted to build their skills with our unique guidance and wanted to be recognized for it. So, this summer, we started the process of designing a practice- and cohort-based Facilitator Certification Program. And now, over a month into our first cohort, we’re having fun and learning a great deal. In this post, we’ll share a bit more about the design behind the program, how its different components fit together to provide a robust learning experience, and share a few tips to help you in your growth as a facilitator.

Focus on the Right Facilitator Outcomes

As seasoned facilitators, we have a common set of skills we regularly draw on in our work. We used those skills to anchor the outcomes for the program. Overall, we want facilitators coming out of our program to know and be able to:

• Identify a spectrum of game-changing facilitation methods and approaches
• Select the best facilitation methods for your facilitation context
• Implement the right facilitation methods to meet optimal facilitation outcomes
• Reflect on areas of personal facilitator strength and growth
• Cultivate a valuable professional facilitator identity

These course outcomes bring into focus the key steps that an effective facilitator takes time and again to support clients across contexts in their work. Facilitators know and draw from a variety of facilitation approaches and traditions. Then, based on client needs, they select the right facilitation methods to best support clients in their articulated needs . Next, they implement these methods and maximize their impact in the moment with clients. After that, they reflect on areas of facilitator strength and growth to get better. And finally, with the first four outcome areas as a foundation, they are able to cultivate the optimal professional facilitator identity to thrive in the ways that facilitators hope to out in the world. To meet these outcomes, we crafted various learning experiences for our learners.

Dive into A Spectrum of Facilitator Learning Experiences

We introduce and model a spectrum of methods through readings, playbooks, case studies, and class immersion to reach these outcomes. We provide opportunities for facilitators to practice these methods in class and in their work contexts, receive feedback and coaching from both course instructors and course colleagues, and finally produce a professional portfolio that not only shows how facilitators have met course outcomes, but also is crafted in a form and manner that would resonate most with their facilitator audiences (could be LinkedIn, professional website, and/or internal HR employee portfolio spaces). It’s essential for us to support our cohort members as they create a portfolio that will be meaningful for them.

It was important to us from the beginning that the certification would be portfolio-based, asking students to show us and the world their growth through the course. We’ve found that a real difference-maker for facilitators in our industry to not only be able to practice their craft but also to talk about it in a manner that is compelling to the audiences they care about. Building a compelling narrative and facilitator story around practice is essential.

Facilitate and Tell a Purposeful Facilitator Story

Our certification is comprised of both synchronous and asynchronous course components, readings from facilitation texts such as The Art of Gathering, Gamestorming, Liberating Structures, and Rituals for Virtual Meetings, homework assignments to practice methods in facilitator contexts, and colleague and instructor coaching, all in service of creating a professional portfolio. And we base our overall instruction in what is known as a gradual release model of teaching. Our VP of Learning Experience uses this approach extensively, as he has trained hundreds of teachers and facilitators over the years.

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What this oftentimes looks like in practice is the introduction of a method by our instructors, immersion in that method that provides students with an opportunity to not only try it out from the participant’s role but also from the vantage point of the facilitator, and then gradually turning over the work of the facilitator to learners both inside and outside of the course. We then build in both reflection and feedback along the way all geared toward facilitators using that reflection and feedback to grow and get better at talking about their work as facilitators in their portfolio and to outside audiences. We find that this storytelling component is an essential part of the work of a facilitator that pays dividends both inside and outside of the facilitated session. And this storytelling is strongest when it is anchored in a strong purpose.

Anchor Your Practice in Purpose

In fact, so much of our work as facilitators is anchored in purpose. What are the purposes that our clients have for their work? What are the purposes for our work as facilitators with our clients? What are the purposes of each activity and method  we’ve chosen to best help our clients meet their purposes and goals? Being clear on and articulating  these purposes in a consistent narrative is essential to the work of an impactful facilitator. And so much of our work with learners in the certification program is focused here. We not only help our students to build competency in the work of a facilitator, but also to be able to gain deeper perspective and self-awareness about what they are doing and communicate that to a wide variety of audiences. It’s that vantage point on practice we’ve found to be the differentiator between run-of-the-mill facilitators and facilitator-leaders who are able to thrive across a variety of contexts.

Jumpstart Your Facilitator Growth

There are some initial ways you can jumpstart your facilitator growth using techniques from our program. As we mentioned above, so much of what we do is anchored in cultivating purpose(s): you in your work, those of your client, and for your growth. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to begin this process: 

• What purpose(s) do you have as a facilitator? Why do you do what you do?
• What purpose(s) do your clients have in asking for your facilitator support?
• Based on your purpose(s) where do you excel, and where do you want to grow?

Beginning to answer these questions can help you put a finer point on just where you might best lean into facilitator growth. These questions nudge you in defining what may have just been tacit or assumed. This also begins your process of building a compelling narrative for your facilitated sessions and, your own professional identity. Your answers and recursive asking of these questions can help you build focused practice and reflection and jumpstart your journey for deeper facilitator growth.

Commit to Your Facilitator Growth

The answers to the above questions can be a great launching point for your individual growth journey. They are also an excellent precursor to making a deeper commitment to your growth through our certification program. If you’re ready to dedicate the necessary time to take your facilitation to the next level and would like to do so with seasoned instructors and a supportive cohort, then submit your application today. Applications are due for our next cohort on January 14th, 2022, and then begins on February 11th, 2022. We’d love to see you in our next cohort.

FAQ Section

What key attributes are essential for effective facilitation?
Effective facilitation hinges on several key attributes, including emotional intelligence, strong communication, and consensus-building skills. Facilitators must be adept at guiding productive meetings and fostering collaboration, ensuring that participants are fully engaged and working towards shared goals. Additionally, a deep understanding of various facilitation techniques, including visual thinking strategies and methods of innovation, is crucial to successfully navigate complex group dynamics and drive collaboration in both traditional and virtual settings.

How does the Voltage Control Facilitation Certification Program help build facilitation skills?
The Voltage Control comprehensive facilitation certification program focuses on developing critical facilitation skills through hands-on practice and interactive learning experiences. Participants engage in practical exercises and practice sessions that help reinforce the fundamentals of facilitation, as well as advanced techniques. The program includes expert critique from seasoned facilitators, providing actionable strategies and personalized feedback to improve facilitation practice. In addition, the program offers a capstone experience, enabling learners to apply their skills in real-world scenarios and complete the program with a fully-fledged facilitator skillset.

What practical tools and resources are available to participants during the certification program?
The certification program provides participants with a wealth of practical tools and resources to support their learning journey. These include access to LUMA Workplace, design tools, and an extensive library of training tools designed to enhance facilitation practice. Participants also receive exercise files, additional learning resources, and access to workshop resources that they can use to implement facilitation techniques in their daily work. The use of these tools helps participants develop effective group collaboration skills and tackle various business challenges with innovative solutions.

How does Voltage Control ensure mastery of facilitation skills?
Voltage Control ensures the mastery of facilitation skills through a hybrid approach that combines online training with virtual sessions, practice opportunities, and expert coaching. The program offers 1.5-hour video courses, weekly challenges, and practical tasks designed to build core strengths in facilitation. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their learning through individual study and reflection tasks, which help reinforce key facilitation techniques. By offering personalized facilitation training and a flexible learning cycle, the program allows participants to progress at their own pace while mastering essential skills required for effective facilitation.

What is the structure of the facilitator certification program?
The Voltage Control Facilitation Certification Program is structured to provide a comprehensive learning experience through a blend of core and elective modules. Participants start with an introduction to facilitation skills and move through core modules that cover both foundational skills and more advanced, hands-on workshop facilitation training. The program also includes elective modules that allow participants to tailor their learning to specific areas of interest, such as mastering Human-Centered Design Facilitator methods or refining facilitation practice in different contexts. Upon successful completion, participants receive a legitimate facilitation certificate and gain access to a private facilitator community, where they can continue developing their skills alongside a cohort of peers.

Can I earn a certificate of completion through the online facilitation training course?
Yes, participants who successfully complete the 6-week online facilitation course will earn a certificate of completion. The online program offers a flexible learning experience, with both synchronous and asynchronous sessions designed to accommodate varying schedules. Participants will engage in weekly challenges, practice facilitation techniques in virtual sessions, and receive expert critiques from instructors. The course concludes with a final evaluation, after which participants receive their facilitation certificate, marking their achievements and validating their newfound expertise in facilitation.

What is the role of practical experience and hands-on practice in the certification process?
Practical experience is a cornerstone of the Voltage Control certification program. Participants engage in hands-on practice through practical exercises, coaching sessions, and immersive learning experiences. These exercises give learners the opportunity to apply facilitation skills in real-world scenarios, including the use of human-centered design methods, visual thinking strategies, and collaborative leadership skills. The inclusion of expert facilitator critique and feedback further enhances the learning process, ensuring that participants refine their skills with each exercise. By the end of the program, learners will have gained practical skills that can be immediately applied in their professional roles.

How does the Voltage Control program support the development of collaborative leadership skills?
The Voltage Control program is designed to help participants build collaborative leadership skills through a combination of coaching sessions, interactive exercises, and practical tasks. Participants learn how to effectively lead group sessions, facilitate consensus-building exercises, and drive collaboration within teams. The curriculum emphasizes actionable strategies that participants can implement in real-world situations, whether they are chiefs of staff, design leaders, or team leaders within their organizations. Graduates of the program are well-equipped to lead teams through complex challenges, using facilitation techniques that foster collaboration and drive positive outcomes.

The post Designing Our Facilitator Certification Program appeared first on Voltage Control.

How do you successfully facilitate a meeting? When you think about meetings, what’s the first thought or feeling that comes to mind? If it’s reluctance, annoyance, avoidance, frustration, unproductiveness, ambiguity, or a waste of precious work time, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Make the switch from simply “running a meeting” to truly “facilitating a meeting” to make better use of your time and see more productive results. Even if you simply incorporate a few key facilitation skills into your meetings, you’ll likely see huge benefits in efficiency and effectiveness. With the help of a meeting facilitator, companies can solve complex issues and arrive at solutions to challenges they have not been able to overcome on their own. 

A successful facilitator possesses several key facilitation skills that make them such an essential asset in guiding effective, successful meetings. Even if you have limited experience in facilitation, the following information and resources can help you properly understand how to facilitate a meeting using professional facilitation techniques.t The resulting meeting process will be highly functional and productive.

What Is a Facilitator? hat Qualities and Skills Should a Meeting Facilitator Have?

Before we dive in, let’s first review what a meeting facilitator is and what they do. A facilitator is someone who plans, designs, and leads a designated group meeting or event. For more information on what a facilitator does and when you need one, see our post here. 

The best facilitators help groups efficiently and cordially reach their goals or solutions to their problems by creating an inclusive, safe spacer for all attendees to share their ideas and views. A skilled facilitator does not come armed with a personal agenda or opinions about the topic at hand. Instead, they are unbiased experts at guiding groups through the decision-making processes.

Overall, meeting facilitators are most concerned with how meeting participants interact with one another to agree on an informed decision, and they make sure that conclusions are successfully reached.

Facilitators serve as an unbiased leader, a reflection, and then an organizer of what is said.

As a best practice, a great facilitator should possess the following qualities:

• Confidence: Able to control the meeting space and keep participants interested and engaged. Fosters a feeling of psychological safety for all attendees and can manage strong personalities with grace.
• Humility: Knows the meeting is not about them and focuses on helping the group achieve its goals. Leverages active listening skills to ensure every single person is heard and understood.
• Flexibility: Comfortable course-correcting during the gathering if things change, participants want something different, or the agenda needs to change. This is especially important in today’s increasing virtual and hybrid workplace.
• Curiosity: Interested in their client’s problems, product, or challenge and is excited to learn more about it.
• Experience: Has successfully led meetings and gatherings for clients and companies before. Can manage any existing power imbalances in the group and navigate conflicting parties.

Additionally, these facilitation skills are also necessary for facilitating effective meetings:

• Advanced preparation
• Clear communication
• Active listening
• Asking open-ended questions
• Time management
• Establishing a feeling of psychological safety in the meeting space
• Creating focus amongst the group
• Unbiased objectivity
• Managing the group decision-making process

Best Practices for Facilitating a Meeting

When considering how to facilitate a meeting, look at the role facilitators play before, during, and after meetings. We break down key action items for meeting facilitators below.

Before the Meeting

Facilitators help with planning and logistics. They strategically plan a thorough meeting agenda to follow, which lists action items and key decisions that need to be made.. 

Plan to establish the purpose of the meeting very early in the agenda, as it’s important that all attendees are in agreement on that purpose. Without a clear purpose, there is no reason to hold a meeting, yet fruitless meetings still get held. A good meeting purpose will highlight the core issues that should be addressed and the key decisions that must be made. A facilitator then utilizes the agenda during the meeting to stay on track toward the desired goals. 

A meeting agenda serves as the roadmap for the meeting. It is a carefully designed plan that outlines the exact activities that will take place during your session, including the allotted time each agenda item will last as well as the start, end, and break times. Sticking to a sound agenda throughout the meeting helps to keep attendees focused and engaged, save time, and create desired results.

When gathering in person, it’s critical for meeting facilitators to create an inviting and open environment and set the meeting space up for success. Based on the meeting design, facilitators consider the best kind of seating arrangement, lighting, and props (items like a whiteboard, post-it notes, sketch paper, and pencils, etc.) that are needed to support it. 

For example, if the team meeting is best set up for open discussion, they may arrange chairs in a semi-circle or formation that will best foster communication among the group. Skilled facilitators also establish the kind of energy they want in the room before attendees even arrive, so most successful facilitators will approach the session with enthusiasm and positivity. 

Remote Facilitation Considerations

Virtual facilitation is now arguably just as important as in-person facilitation due to today’s consistently remote and hybrid work environments (such as Zoom fatigue, increased external distractions, technical difficulties, and time zone differences). 

Below are some pro-level virtual facilitation strategies we recommend planning ahead of time in order to have the most effective remote meetings:

1. Turn on your camera: Encourage all meeting attendees to use their cameras, which is important for human connection and engagement.
2. Learn by doing: Make your meetings interactive. This will not only keep people engaged, but it will also help with retention, engagement and a sense of ownership. Use a collaborative tool such as MURAL (a virtual whiteboard tool) to allow team members to engage and work together in real time.
   Pro Tip: New to MURAL? Download our MURAL cheat sheet for a quick reference for how to use MURAL first.
3. Piecemeal information: To promote meeting effectiveness and productivity during virtual facilitation, try to avoid cognitive overload on attendees. Due to the relative newness of regular remote meetings, facilitators need a new process of facilitation that best serves team members in a virtual space. One example of doing this is in our remote design sprints—we request our Design Sprint participants commit to a series of mini-workshops rather than asking them to commit to the five full days (which is the typical length of time for an in-person Design Sprint). 
4. Provide necessary support: A key component of virtual facilitation is helping attendees understand technicalities specific to the online tools you are using. Make sure everyone understands how to use the features of the video conference platform you are meeting on and any other virtual workshop tools they will need prior to the meeting.

During The Meeting

To facilitate meetings like a pro, start the meeting by informing the group what the gathering is about and how it will work. Discuss the meeting agenda, including the meeting duration, agenda items, activities, breaks, voting, etc. so everyone knows what to expect. Establish any ground rules that are necessary to create a psychologically safe space where everyone will feel included and comfortable.

The facilitator’s purpose is to guide the room. The facilitator watches the clock, makes sure the agenda is being followed accordingly, and tells the group when it’s time to move on to the next activity or discussion. Has a discussion run long or a topic gone too far off track? Redirect the group back to the matter at hand and tackle one task at a time.

Skilled facilitators also make sure all attendees are participating in equal measures so that no single person is dominating the conversation. To do this, they conduct room intelligence. 

Another skill that effective facilitators bring to the table is their ability to cut through the noise, conversation, and debate. The facilitator can find the common ground between everyone’s input and then “bubble up” what the group is really saying. They distill conversations and key discussion points, navigating any conflict and leading consensus decision-making. 

Remote Facilitation Considerations

Ensuring equal participation is typically more difficult on Zoom. To help mitigate this, encourage use of the “raise hand” and chat box features (and make sure you’re checking them). It can be tough to know when to contribute and how to do so respectfully in a virtual space. Establish early in the meeting that silence is okay while team members mull over different topics, and, though this is a voluntary process, the outcome will be better if everyone contributes.

Ask people to use the button or chat box when they want to be called on. It is a clear indicator of desired speaking space, thus preventing multiple people from talking at once. You don’t want anyone to feel overlooked or that their opinion doesn’t matter. These features are simple yet powerful ways to ensure voices do not go unheard.

Pro Tip: Download our Facilitator’s Guide to Questions – this guide was developed for facilitators to always know what questions to ask to keep your meetings effective.

During the meeting, a facilitator’s main goal is to help the group reach a consensus in the allotted time. Remember to allow more time in a virtual setting, or schedule several mini-meetings or workshops to tackle larger tasks or projects. 

Not everyone will necessarily agree on one solution or conclusion. The most important thing is that the facilitator gave people time to share their views, and all attendees are on the same page when it comes to the final conclusions. 

Pro Tip: Try out our Control Room app, a simple tool filled with meeting activities that keep your team engaged and captures feedback.

Finally, an effective facilitator will have a quality record of the decision-making process and any discoveries that were made. This log can be a helpful way to keep progress on track and to avoid repeating previously visited irrelevant topics. Record meetings whenever possible, which allows everyone to revisit the information when it’s time to plan the next action items.

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After The Meeting

After the session is over, a facilitator still has more work to do. To ensure that the collaboration done in the meeting does not go to waste, the facilitator reports the key information so it can be synthesized and implemented. 

A good facilitator will ask themselves a list of questions after the meeting, such as:

• What decisions were made? 
• What are your next steps? 
• How can you apply what was learned in an impactful way? 
• What tasks are still outstanding? 

A meeting facilitator curates and organizes all of the important findings to share with the team, setting them up for future success.

When to Use a Professional Facilitator

If you have a gathering that is especially important, sensitive, or complex, you might get a lot out of working with a professional facilitator. An external facilitator can also shake up a languishing atmosphere in team meetings, bringing about greater engagement and increased positivity that goes beyond the meeting. 

A skilled facilitator can help whether a company is looking to innovate, solve a complex issue, or gain a new perspective to help business. When you need a fresh and impartial perspective, think about looking for an expert facilitator. 

Additionally, Facilitation Lab is a good resource—it’s a free weekly virtual meetup focused on helping facilitators learn how to facilitate meetings successfully and hone their craft. By attending a Facilitation Lab meeting, you can get a better feeling for how prepared you are to facilitate a meeting.

Meetings don’t actually need to be frustrating or feel like a waste of time. By applying basic facilitation skills and best practices, your next meeting can be effective and successful, even in a remote or hybrid setting. 

Discover Facilitation Training and Certification from Voltage Control

If you’re committed to becoming a professional facilitator, level up your expertise by pursuing Facilitation Certification from Voltage Control. This widely-recognized certification shows your familiarity with the different facilitation methodologies and approaches.

If you’re earlier in your journey to becoming a facilitator, check out the Voltage Control blog for the latest trends and insights on the industry, plus the Control the Room podcast. Additionally, we host self-paced facilitation training courses and live, expert-led workshops.

FAQ Section

What is the role of a meeting facilitator?
The facilitation role involves managing the meeting dynamics, such as power dynamics and balanced participation, and ensuring that the group stays focused on its goals. Meeting facilitators also employ simple prioritization tools to streamline discussions and decision-making.

How can facilitators ensure balanced participation in meetings?
Facilitators use a variety of techniques to encourage balanced participation, ensuring that assertive people don’t dominate while quiet people are still heard. This creates an inclusive meeting environment where all voices are valued, leading to better collaboration and decision-making.

Why is body language important in meeting facilitation?
Body language plays a crucial role in any type of meeting, especially in fostering a collaborative meeting atmosphere. A well-facilitated meeting relies on non-verbal cues to gauge participation levels and manage the flow of discussion. Facilitators must stay aware of attendees’ body language to adjust the pace and tone of the meeting.

How can facilitators handle power dynamics in a meeting?
Skilled facilitators manage power dynamics by setting ground rules, encouraging participation from everyone, and using techniques like time limits for speaking. This ensures that no one person, regardless of their role, dominates the discussion, allowing for an in-depth discussion of key ideas and achieving meeting goals.

What strategies help quiet people contribute more in meetings?
Facilitators can create space for quiet people to share their thoughts by actively inviting them into the conversation and using techniques like round-robin discussions. Encouraging participation from everyone helps generate lots of ideas, making the meeting more productive and inclusive.

What should facilitators focus on during informal meetings?
Even in an informal meeting, facilitators should ensure the group stays focused on meeting objectives. Clear communication, managing meeting notes, and using simple prioritization tools can help ensure the group makes progress on key decisions without being sidetracked by less important topics.

Why is meeting facilitation important for project managers?
Project managers benefit from strong meeting facilitation skills because they are often the person responsible for guiding the team toward project milestones. Effective facilitation ensures that project-related discussions stay on track, meeting goals are clear, and the team moves forward with actionable decisions.

The post How to Successfully Facilitate a Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

“We have two really strong capacities [as human beings]. One is about discipline, finishing things, and staying aligned. …We’ll call that the discipline muscle. The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That’s where we’re going out on a limb, we’re taking a risk, we’re being creative, we’re curious about what might happen if.” -Diana Joseph

In this episode of Control the Room, Diana Joseph and I discuss the need for open dialogue between startup & corporate organizations and the unique space Diana curates to collectively bring them together through specified expertise. We take a look inside the world of anthropology and its benefits of implementation in the workplace and explore design-based research thinking. Listen in to hear about Diana’s passion in design-based research and the explorative efforts both corporate and startup organizations can gain in changing the conversation and working together. 

Show Highlights

[1:31] Diana’s Start in Corporate Innovation
[10:25] The Startup/Corporate Mashup 
[19:31] The Design of Diana’s Unique Experience  
[23:26] The Anthropology Link in Work 
[26:36] A Look Inside Design-Based Research
[37:54] Diana’s Take for Newcomers Exploring Facilitation

Links | Resources

Diana’s LinkedIn
CAF

About the Guest

Diana Joseph is the Founder of the Corporate Accelerator Forum, a creative space  organization that encourages conversations between startup & corporate organizations. The expertise & shared learning experience Diana creates for these organizations allows them to lean into innovation projects without fear. For over four years, the forum has focused on interactive experiences to embrace learning, gain insights, and nurture professional relationships. Diana was the leading strategist at Adobe and has a diverse background in academia and non-profit organizations. She understands the strategic, design perspective and the innovation mindset required for startups and corporate organizations to succeed. As a leading design thinker and entrepreneurship expert, she continues her mission to accelerate meetings between large, corporate groups & startup organizations. With a Ph.D. in Learning Skills from Northwestern University, Diana’s specialty skills range from organizational innovation culture and design thinking to facilitation expert and startup mentor. She is the  reigning Co-Host of the Ecosystem Show on Clubhouse, where she explores the complex world view of innovation ecosystems. Diana continues her mission at CAF for corporate innovators to challenge the social environment in normalizing conversation between key organizations.

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 for the service of having a truly magical meeting. 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 voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings. You can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide your 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 Diana Joseph at the corporate accelerator forum where she guides and gathers corporate innovators who work with startups. She is the co-host of the ecosystem show on clubhouse and author of many research papers, articles, and blog posts. Welcome to the show, Diana.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much, Douglas.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. So let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start in the world of corporate innovation.

Diana Joseph:

Sure. I’m going to take you back a little bit. So I’m a learning scientist by training. That’s an interdisciplinary field that draws on education, computer science, cognitive science, and tries to understand how learning works and then given how learning works, trying to create learning experiences that are very effective and sticky, memorable actually make a change in our skills and mindsets. And in my dissertation work, I focused on something called the passion curriculum project. I was really interested in learner interest and how we might create curriculum that uses learner interest to get at the skills and mindsets and knowledge that, let’s say adults want young people to get. So I was working with fourth graders, fifth graders, and trying to focus on something that really interested them. And it was really hard, so I also had to work on the methodology to help us make sense of that challenge.

Diana Joseph:

So that was called design-based research. So I had kind of the seeds of my thinking about self-determination there and the seeds of my thinking about design and iteration that were part of the part of that methodology. And then I had children and moved to be closer to my parents and took a job with Adobe where I ran a research group during the time when Adobe was moving all of its products, but even first it’s learning content to the cloud. So I ran the research group that was helping the people who used to write that fat book that came in the Photoshop box, instead of being writers those people now had to become almost anthropologists. They had to understand what was going on in the world of their product and who needed what, and who should produce what, because they were shifting to community content now that the cloud was a possibility. So very interesting work, helping them change and doing both quantitative and qualitative research. And then I got exposed to their internal innovation program, which was called Kickbox. Have you heard of that one?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Diana Joseph:

Okay.

Douglas:

There’s some really great materials online still as far as I know it’s not around anymore, but all the old materials are still there for folks to check out. And there’s some really interesting stuff for sure that I advise all facilitators to check out and think about how it might influence your practice.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, absolutely. I second that recommendation and it is actually coming back. Somebody bought the Kickbox concept and it’s coming back. So Douglas, I’ll make sure to tell you about a session that’s coming up, where we’re going to talk with some folks from IKEA, an innovation leader about, and the folks who are doing that, the Kickbox stuff now.

Douglas:

Nice, awesome. Looking forward to it.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. So Kickbox was a really inspiring experience. I almost, if people are going to look at it, okay, I’m going to have to tell you, I was thinking about keeping it secret until they look later, but I’m going to have to tell you for context right now. So Kickbox comes with a beautiful bootcamp. I had the opportunity, I was in maybe the third cohort at Adobe with the inventor of the Kickbox program, Mark Randall who’s just an amazing, inspiring person.

Douglas:

What’s Mark doing now?

Diana Joseph:

I think he’s retired for the most part. Even then was very focused on his family. And so I think-

Douglas:

Smart man.

Diana Joseph:

… he’s been able to enjoy that, right? So beautiful experience, really inspiring. And at the end of the bootcamp, you get this red box and inside the red box are a bunch of resources. There are sticky notes and sharpies, and there’s a timer, and there’s some chocolate, and some coffee, and by the third cohort, I knew the most important thing that was in there, which was a prepaid credit card. It was a card with a $1000 on it. And that was really mind blowing because I mean, it was a good corporate job. I had money, I could have spent a $1000 of my own money on any project in any given time without feeling the pinch, particularly. But this was a $1000 worth of company budget.

Diana Joseph:

And no one had ever delivered trust to me in that way before. If I wanted money, I had to fight for it or expense something that already sort of fell into a set of expectations. And with this Adobe was saying to me personally, “We trust you. Here’s some resources, go do something interesting. And if you turns out you think we’d be interested too, come back and tell us, but otherwise we trust you that it’s a worthy expenditure of your time and money.” And it was just, it just completely changed my relationship to the company.

Douglas:

You know, it’s really fascinating to hear you mentioned this notion of trust that never been delivered to me in that way before.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, yeah.

Douglas:

And I’m about to do a talk on innovation culture and how we can deliver that in meetings. And we’re kind of breaking it up into three phases, and one of them is the invitation. And so I’m almost thinking I want to bring the story into that presentation now because that’s such a beautiful story of inviting innovation, because that delivery of trust to you as a really strong invitation to do something. And it meant a lot to you, right? That was the significant kind of gesture.

Diana Joseph:

Yes, yes, exactly. They didn’t have to say anything else to make it clear that it was okay for me to do something that could fail. They didn’t have to say a lot of words about failure. It was just like, “Here’s money if it turns out interesting tell me.” So that took a lot of weight off that whole idea of failure as well. And because it happened to be me, it really hearkened back to the work I had done in graduate school. I talked about self determination and the passion curriculum project. The thorny challenge I ran into in trying to make these interest centered experiences happen, is that we are really complex when it comes to motivation, most of us are you do meet people who are absolutely zeroed in on a particular thing. Like I have a nephew who’s wanting to be a race car driver since he was five and he’s 22 now. And guess what? He’s a race car driver, okay.

Diana Joseph:

But most of us, it’s not like that. Most of us don’t have that kind of focus where we’re giving up a lot of other things that we could be interested in. Most of us especially if we were good in school, we have a lot of achievement motivation that’s going. We want to get that high score, we want to get ranked the way our context can rank us, right? So there’s achievement motivation, there’s maybe really deep interests, there’s social motivations, we want to be like somebody, and we want to be unlike somebody else that connects with identity. So there’s so many things that are going on. It was really hard to thread that needle.

Douglas:

I was just thinking that, I would imagine it can be difficult to sometimes align those things that can sometimes be at odds with each other. If you’re trying to self-actualize your dreams and this notion of wanting to be successful on the test or whatever context is thrown you, that situation may not align with this future goal, right? And that can be hard.

Diana Joseph:

Absolutely, and those things can be intention with each other. And I think in general, we’re not aware of those different motivations that are going. So because we’re not aware of them, we can’t use them as handles. Once we become aware. Okay, well, so I have my dreams, our intention, there’s some kind of conflict between the step I need to take to pursue my dream and the step I need to take to score well on somebody else’s evaluation. Okay. Well, can I invent my own evaluation that would align better and can I give that primacy in my mind, right? So the awareness becomes really useful.

Douglas:

You know, it makes me think about young adults that have responded to coaching advice with the phrase, “Can I do that?” You know, it’s like this notion of like, “Wait, I can write my own test.” And it’s like, “Yeah, you can.” I think our system has programmed folks to feel like there’s one way to navigate one way to succeed and then I think that permeates our work life and meetings. We run into this all the time with how folks show up as professional and they’re expected to behave or be a certain way. And I think a lot of times that’s at odds with our desire to innovate, ideate, create when we come in and we stifle all that because we’re trying to be so buttoned up and professional. And so that brings me to something that we were talking about in our pre-show chat, which is this work that you do, bringing together corporates and startups and I think startups are like maybe more stereotypically playful.

Douglas:

They’re in the garage tinkering, they’re the explorers, they’re the little sapling that’s just kind of does go in any which way it can to find the sunlight. Whereas like the big corporates, the big Oak tree, that’s like, it is what it is. It’s like not very malleable, it’s established. And so there must be some really interesting stories or even tactics that you found to help bridge that gap and bring those two together so they can work together without the classic example I’ve always heard is, like startups working with corporates is kind of like dancing with elephants. And so how do you help the startup not get crushed by the elephant?

Diana Joseph:

That’s such an important question. Let me give you a little more context of the kinds of experiences that I’m creating. Sometimes I’m bringing together the corporates with each other. So corporate innovators who work with startups need to talk to other corporate innovators who work with startups, because it’s really hard to develop best practices by yourself. It’s really hard to see what’s happening in the landscape when you only have one perspective to look from. And you’re also in this challenging social situation where you’re sitting in that exact tension that you were talking about, Douglas. Your job is to connect the internal stakeholders who have these very, very aligned tasks to fulfill every quarter that have been promised all the way up the hierarchy to the SCC. And on the other hand, you have your external stakeholders who are the startups, and they have a totally different set of goals and timelines that are truly existential for their company or their idea.

Diana Joseph:

And so the corporates like to talk to each other, there’s value in them just talking to each other within that same role. And then of course, there are times when we bring the corporates and the startups together to talk about what’s getting in the way. I’m working in situations where both sides recognize that it’s important to make that connection happen, but they haven’t been enabled to figure out how to do it. And then there were other times when we’re thinking about the whole ecosystem and we have stakeholders from all around our region or all around a particular industry challenge. So to zero in on the context where we have corporates and startups at the table, I’ll tell you the story of an experience that we built in December of 2019, which I want to say is last year, there’s like a whole missing one in there, but it was one of our last live experiences that we did before the pandemic.

Diana Joseph:

One important part of it was the curation. So we worked very, very closely with the corporates who were the sponsors of the experience to understand what they saw as the challenges that were stopping them from really connecting with the startups. This was for the materials industry. It was called Bridging The Gap Materials Giants, and Startups. So we curated on the giants side to understand what the most critical questions were. And then we curated on the startup side, went out and found startups who had their own challenges and questions, not necessarily the exact same ones that would work together.

Diana Joseph:

So that was certainly possible. But someone who had startups who had tried working with corporates and had good perspective on what had and hadn’t worked in that context. And then we designed a separate moment within that day long workshop, we designed a separate moment for each of those curated topics. One of them was a discussion. One of them was a poster fair. The corporates felt like they never got a chance to tell, they listened to pitches from the startups all the time, but they never get a chance to tell the startups what they’re about, what they care about, what matters to them. So they got to have a poster fair.

Douglas:

I love that. I was part of an event, I got brought in to help with an event where a group was working with corporates and they were kind of defaulting to their normal practices and standard like protocols, right? And one of them was like the startup pitches, right? And I couldn’t help but think to myself like, “Man, you brought these corporates in and they’re just going to listen to a bunch of pitches.” Like, I mean, it seems like there’s so much more of potential there and if I was at a corporate, I don’t know if I’d want to come like mentor startups and give them advice on their pitches and listen to pitches versus like help try to solve my problem, right?

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And celebrate my wins. Everyone loves a little struggle of the ego, right? And so this poster event sounds as music to my ears because I feel like so many times the corporates are just brought in and kind of paraded around these typical kind of situations that the startup communities kind of doing. And it’s like, I think if we’re going to bridge ecosystems, we need to rethink things and it sounds like you’re exploring some new approaches.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. I think it’s, what you’re describing is the only moment where the corporates and startups get to talk to each other is this performative moment of the pitch. So the startups have worked on that and they’ve polished it and they boil it down to something tiny and either it hits exactly what the corporates happened to need, or it doesn’t because in that context, that’s the only thing the corporates are listening for is, does it hit? Okay, great. It’s a pitch. Either it’s going to solve my problem or it won’t. What we did in this event was to change the conversation to be like, how can we work together better? It’s on the side. So is a little bit disarming. You don’t have, it’s not only that one moment you get to have a longer conversation and get a sense for what these people are like as people, while working on something that’s important to both of you.

Douglas:

It’s also explorative and generative too. Right? So, like there’s new things that emerge from that situation versus like just things that are going into it.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, definitely. So, yeah.

Douglas:

That’s really beautiful. That’s cool. So what are some of the things that you found that make for good relationships or foster a better connection through these folks that seem to be at completely different levels and vantage points?

Diana Joseph:

There’s a game that I like to play at the beginning of every session and I’m sure I steal parts of it from somewhere. So I apologize to whoever I’m not crediting, but I call it spectrum. And the way it works is I ask a question to which the answer is a quantity. So it’s a number or a size or something like that. And then people need to move in the room to represent their answer to that question. So I might say, how old is your company? So in the materials room, for example, this event I was describing, there was a company that’s 150 years old. And there was another company that just incorporated two weeks ago, right? So, you can see the difference and you can see that there could even be some overlap. Size of company, not much overlap their comfort level with innovation.

Diana Joseph:

We could see among the corporates, how things were different there. And because people have to move around, they have to talk to each other to find the right place. If I ask, how long have you been in your current position? People have to move and they have to talk with each other. So there’s an icebreaker component to that. There’s informational component to that because we can all see in the room, the answer to this question. It inspires other questions. So people start to put in, well, here’s what I’d like to see next. Here’s what I’d like to see us represent next. And that gets the ball rolling on dialogue.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve heard that referred to as the human histogram and I love it because it’s visual, right? To your point, there’s information that’s being shared, but it’s highly visual. We can just look across the room and get a really quick read on it. And then to your point, as people are getting inspired by, Ooh, I’d like to see this next, you’re building alignment, commitment, connection, all these good things are kind of coming out. That’s really, really great. And I love that you’ve got these two groups and you’re thinking about questions that might cause a little bit of blurring of the boundaries, which can be a really eyeopening moment for them. It’s like, maybe we’re not so different.

Diana Joseph:

Right. How long does it take you to get a contract signed?

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s so good. Oh, man. Well, amazing. So I want to talk a little bit more about the designing of your experience because I think that’s something that our listeners do a lot of. And also when we talk about meetings, this is something that we’re passionate about, drawing inspiration from folks that are creating workshops, events, any kind of experience, and how do we make our everyday meetings experiences? And the advice of just bringing agendas, it’s just not enough, right? We need to think about what is the arc of the experience? How does it start? How does it end and how do we want people to feel? I mean, even if people just did a human histogram in their status meeting, right? That might elevate things a little bit, it’ll be memorable. That’s for sure. So I would want to hear more about your process for designing experiences and if there’s any tips or tricks or things that listeners might be able to borrow from.

Diana Joseph:

Great. I mentioned curation. So these aren’t quite everyday meetings. These are sort of big, significant milestone meetings that we’re having. So, it feels appropriate to invest a lot into the curation. So we know that the questions were addressing are burning questions before we go in. We think a lot about who in the room should kick off the discussion or the workshop around a particular question. It’s not often an expert. It’s often somebody who has the problem. Someone who can tell a story about it, someone who is puzzled by it. By starting with a question or starting with a puzzle that invites, it creates a white space. It creates space that the rest of the community, the rest of the people at the meeting can speak into. So right from the beginning, we’re sort of creating a vacuum that pulls participation forward, if that makes any sense.

Douglas:

It makes total sense. And I love this idea of bringing the non-expert into, oh, we always talk about how, when you’re in a complex system, experts aren’t super valuable because their experience may not be applicable. And experts have a tendency to bring the solutions that worked in the past. And you know, what we’re facing right now might not be exactly what the expert saw. If they’re able to listen to someone who’s going through something and share that story, then they might be able to take all their experience and offer up some interesting insights. But if we start with the expert it might, all the people experiencing stuff, it might cloud their memory or even their vantage point of, they might get this false sense of hope that, oh, I just go take that pill the expert mentioned and it’ll be all good. Right? Whereas if we start with that curiosity, that story, it also shapes the narrative, right? Like, because we’re going to work best the perspective we’re going to look at it from.

Diana Joseph:

You make me think of the design thinking toolkit concept of the T-shaped person. Right? So everyone in the room has some expertise. We curate for that as well. You have some expertise, it’s different expertise from the person next to you. So if you’re very, very good in some particular point, but you’re also very good at connecting, listening, and sharing, then the group together can make a lot more sense. I think you have to have expertise in it, again, in a complex system there are going to be pieces of it that could be oversimplified if there are no experts in the room. If you put the experts in a context where there’s dialogue between them and between the generalists, between them and the generalists, there’s a lot of power there.

Douglas:

100%. And you know, I had written down a bunch of notes as you were talking today. And there’s some things I was able to come back to and other things that just kind of got lost in the forward momentum. But one thing I’m going to come back to, because it applies to what we’re saying now, as you mentioned, anthropology, and it just struck me just then it’s like a lot of this work is about being an anthropologist, whether we studied in school or not, right? Like, you’re kind of thinking about what’s going on here and how do we shape this little mini tribe, if you will.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, when you said that, it made me think of myself as an anthropologist, trying to understand people. But also I think, I never thought about it this way before, but I think I’m also trying to invite everyone else in the room to be an anthropologist. Let’s understand each other. And it comes back to something that you said before also about invitation. I think the primary job that I have in designing these experiences is to create the invitation for a participation, the invitation to bring your ideas, the invitation, to bring your questions. And that’s what really shapes the outcomes.

Douglas:

I totally agree. I think that your point around nailing the research, so often we see issues with teams and just not doing enough preparation, right? It’s like they could kind of Intuit the moves. They could come together and collaborate. But the thing is, if we haven’t done the research upfront, we don’t even know what meeting we’re having. We don’t even know what workshop we’re doing. We’re just kind of maybe going through some motions, or we kind of put something on the calendar because we felt like the project needed to move forward. But if we just spend some time thinking about the questions that we want to ask, thinking about who might need to ask that question or share that story, I think everything else, especially if you got any bit of experience or skill, everything else works itself out, right? Like, once you figure that stuff out, it’s like, oh, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like it’s all unfolding before me.

Diana Joseph:

Yes. Yes, exactly. It’s almost like the more careful curation and design I do upfront, the less active facilitation I do in the room, because we’ve made the space call forth the behaviors that we’re looking for. We’ve made the timeline call forth the behaviors we’re looking for, we’ve made the materials call forth the behaviors we’re looking for. And then as facilitators, we can just come in and make a little point here and there to move things along if they need anything.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’d love to talk about setting the initial conditions. You know, it’s almost like a science experiment it’s like when they built a large hydrogen Collider, they then just get in there and just say, “Oh, how do we guide these particles?” They came with a very, very solid hypothesis based on research, set up very specific guidelines and then let it run. And then it stuff popped up that was unexpected. Then they would address those things, right?

Diana Joseph:

Right.

Douglas:

And then when they run an experiment, they’re probably just kind of sitting back for the most part and monitoring and making sure everything’s good. And to me, I never really thought about the analogy of facilitators or research scientists, but that’s probably not a bad way to approach it, which brings me back to another point that I had written down and I want to hear more about, which is design-based research.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So help me understand a little bit more about, I can intuit based on some of the things you were saying, but it sounded like it’s a very developed methodology or body of work. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and how it continues to play a role in your work today.

Diana Joseph:

Design-Based research is a social science framework that recognizes that things are going to change. If you are doing work that’s intended to change the world, the intended to change even a small world, right? If you’re researching something that is intended to change its local environment, then your data is going to change. So a survey is not going to work. An interview is not going to work. We needed, there were actually a number of us who are thinking about building learning environments that were supposed to have impact. And we knew that we were going to need to iterate based on what we were learning. So we had to sit down and lay out what would be a disciplined way of thinking about that. It can’t be just that we randomly do whatever we feel like. That’s not science. It’s not comparable. It’s not credible.

Diana Joseph:

On the other hand, if we tried to hold, if we try to control, like in a lab science experiment, if we try to have a control group, that doesn’t work in the context of education, because it’s people who are doing things. You can’t teach one way for an hour and then teach a different way for another hour without being influenced across those two cases. So, we had to think about iteration. We had to think about how we could change goals. Maybe we would discover, maybe we discovered in the course of our work that we had the wrong intentions to begin with, we had to be willing to change any piece of it. So we actually formed something that we ended up calling the Design-based Research Collective and about 10 of us worked together very closely for, I don’t know, it was a long time ago now, maybe a year, to lay out the ideas we had about how design-based research could work.

Diana Joseph:

And it’s interesting. We still see people citing that early paper from time to time. The way it works for me most now is, it’s very close to design thinking. So design-based research and design thinking are very similar to each other in that they permit iteration, they focus on design, creating something that’s useful. The biggest difference is that in design-based research, we’re trying to develop theory. We’re trying to understand what are the repeatable principles from doing something this way. And in design thinking, we’re trying to make something.

Diana Joseph:

I think that on the research side, we’re not always good about finishing the project and getting it out in the world to have impact. Something that graduate students work on and then they move on to something else. On the other hand, design thinking is not as strong at developing the theory. So we make something that’s really powerful, but what happens to the lessons that we learned from that experience? Often they just kind of blow away in the wind. So sitting in the middle, having experience with both of these has been really helpful for me and remembering to pay attention to both sides of that equation.

Douglas:

Wow. That’s super fascinating. I’m going to have to dig the paper up and check it out because I can completely understand and appreciate what you’re saying about how the theory gets left behind. Right? Because while design thinking can make change in the world, that change is driven by economic interests. And sure there’s probably some nonprofits and stuff that are like doing some design thinking, but at the end of the day, those people get grants and they have budgets. And so there’s like, there’s funding that’s driving this work. Right? And so there’s limits to the focus, right? And so the focus is deliver this thing, deliver this change. There’s a lack of focus or incentives and rewards to codify and extract out the principles, the theory that are repeatable, like what does this mean for greenhouse gases? I don’t care. I’m working on like cleaning like water or whatever. So, yeah, that’s fascinating.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, I think the same is true on the other side. So if you’re in Academia, whatever methods or whatever field you’re in, there’s also a need to make that financially sustainable. So you’re writing grants and those grants are dependent on you writing papers that are publishable. And it takes a really long time to collect the data that allows you to publish. That’s a much slower timeline than actually producing something that works, right? So producing something that works well enough to collect the data is as far as you really need to go if your incentives are to raise funding for your lab and get tenure. You don’t have to finish the things that you’re making.

Diana Joseph:

So it takes really something. And there are many professors who get past that. They have to really invest in bringing it forward into the world, because it’s not what they’re incentivized on to begin with. In the same way that if you’re in design thinking or innovation in any context, you’re incentivized to make something happen. You’re not incentivized to sit down. And it really takes something for you to invest the time to write it down in a way that you’ll remember and that others will remember, maybe not make the same mistake.

Douglas:

You know, there’s also, we’re getting into some interesting territory but there’s another issue that I think Academia faces, which is a big challenge, right? Because even if you do get passionate about pursuing the work and you take it out to go kind of productize or commercialize and expanded out, there’s this concept of voltage drop, which is like the work we did in the lab and the hypothesis we had and the research we did. Once we start taking it to different audiences or different scenarios, we start to realize, oh, okay, this actually is not quite as repeatable in different scenarios. Right? And now we have to go figure out why that is. And do I have the energy or the runway to go do that or is there another problem that might be more interesting to go research, right? So like what I love to do, what I have the gumption to do, and is it even a solvable problem, Right? It’s like looking at like, “Oh, wow, how do we even address this?”

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. That makes me think about all the innovation projects where we think of this idea of failure as kind of being a problem, because if it didn’t become commercially viable, so it failed. But look at all the things that you learned along that path. Like, okay, so that was a dead end. You learned that was a dead, at minimum, you learned that’s a dead end. We’re not going to do that again. But also you might’ve learned why it turned out to be a dead end then you can apply that principle. So there’s so much value in making these attempts. And then saying no, closing the door when it’s time.

Douglas:

You know, I think also there’s like an identity crisis too, right? Because it’s like, am I an entrepreneur or am I a researcher/academic? Right. Because when you cross that threshold and then it’s like, oh, this isn’t scaling like I thought. I sure I learned these lessons, but do I want to continue to be an entrepreneur or do I want to go back to what I know and what I love maybe? So I think it’s a really fascinating challenge. And I watched it from a distance because I’ve never really, I’ve never been a researcher but it’s super fascinating.

Diana Joseph:

I feel it really personally now, not so much the researcher side, but there’s doing the actual work of designing these experiences and the curation and bringing people together. And then there’s the business side, and I’m not a business person. That’s not where I come, I mean, I am now because I put myself in that, but it’s not my background. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about, well, where can we partner? Maybe someone is a researcher who needs somebody who’s got a stronger focus on the business. Maybe not everybody has to wear all of the hats at the same time.

Douglas:

There’s got to be some interesting models. I’ve seen some accelerators that have focused on helping academics commercialize some of their inventions. And it really, the ones I’ve talked to tell me that it really depends on the university’s policies around IP.

Diana Joseph:

So much.

Douglas:

And because if they’ve locked it down too tight, then it’s like it doesn’t give them much wiggle room to even help the academic, right?

Diana Joseph:

Tech transfer is like this really boring thing that has such a huge impact. We’re actually hearing about it a lot on the Ecosystem Show that you mentioned before. So every week we’re visiting a different entrepreneurial ecosystem, often in biotech. We’re doing this one hour thing on clubhouse in lots of different places. So like this week was London, next week was Paris. And tech transfer comes up all the time in so many places. It really depends culturally, it depends on where you are by country, even by city, even by school, how the tech transfer office is thinking about IP.

Diana Joseph:

Sometimes the university has pressure on the tech transfer office to make lots of money. And so then they ask faculty, who are starting a business, to give them lots and lots of equity in the business. And once they do that, it’s not possible for VCs to invest. It’s not, they’ve made themselves into a non-investible business or the university has made it into a non-investible business. And so then it doesn’t succeed and doesn’t make money for the university either. At the same time, there is this agreement that’s been made where the university has invested a lot and has an interest. And so working out what that’s going to be is really important. A place that does it really well is University of San Diego, if people want to investigate.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s great. It’s great to have examples where it’s done well. So I want to just shift gears, yet again. So this is, as we kind of start to close here, I want to come back to something that really kind of struck me. You know, we’ve talked quite a few times previously and it’s all really focused around the corporate accelerator work. And I’m just for the first time starting to realize your background and learning and learning science, and that’s something that I’ve come to appreciate a lot in the last three years, working with Eric, our VP of learning experience design, and kind of thinking about how we train facilitators and ultimately launch our certification program. And he’s mentioned that, it got my gears turning, I got really curious. I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially with this design-based research stuff you were doing around building, almost like adapting classroom or learning environment.

Douglas:

What would be your advice to folks that maybe are tuning in, that are interested in facilitation or are just getting started, or maybe they’re feeling like they’re just need to up their game in some way, especially in these times of rapid change. We’re on, S-curves seem to be just killing S-curves and the rate of change is just quite insane. I would imagine your concepts and your background could be quite informative for folks that are interested in amplifying their learning and how they can go about becoming better facilitators, better professional. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to navigate that and what the learning process, how people should approach the learning process right now.

Diana Joseph:

I think, and often say that everybody has to be more entrepreneurial. We should be very, very good at being entrepreneurial as human beings. We’ve evolved for it. We have two really strong capacities. One is about discipline, finishing things and staying aligned. And we’ll call that the discipline muscle and is particularly strong in those of us who liked school. You liked school and did well in school. School’s really good at building that discipline muscle.

Diana Joseph:

The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That’s where we’re going out on a limb, we’re taking a risk, we’re being creative, we’re curious about what might happen if. And that muscle should also be very strong in us, right? We’re predators and we have to adapt, right? So on the one hand, we’re flock animals. We’re very good on the discipline side. On the other hand, we are predators and we should be very good on the initiative side, but school doesn’t really help us very much with the initiative side.

Diana Joseph:

So those of us who did well in school tend to be sort of weak in that particular muscle. And those of us who hated school might actually be a lot stronger in it because we made it happen that way. I’m the first kind. So for me, learning by trying things out in the world, is really hard and scary, but it’s so much faster and more efficient than going to school and getting a degree in it. Not to say that you shouldn’t do that. When you know exactly what expertise you want, that can be really perfect. But when you’re trying to figure out what’s going to be my style of facilitation, let’s say, what am I going to offer in particular? Or when you’re trying to figure out, who’s the audience that I can benefit most effectively so that I can create my line of work?

Diana Joseph:

I would say that the way to learn is to just try it. That’s what tells you what questions to go look up on Google? That’s what tells you where you need extra practice. That’s what tells you what the unsolved problems are. And you said something about it earlier too and it made me think, this is what I thought being an adult was, and I really never did it before the last few years. I was always waiting for somebody to tell me which boxes I needed to check next. And so I invite people to step over that line, into the uncertain place where you just make a decision and it might be wrong. And that’s where the learning comes from.

Douglas:

I love that. So good. We often say practice makes practice.

Diana Joseph:

Well-Put.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, it’s been so good chatting with you today, Diana, and I want to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought. So is there anything you’d like them to keep in mind or maybe how to find you, or the work that you do? I just wanted to give you an opportunity to send the message.

Diana Joseph:

Thank you. The easiest way to find me is at corporateacceleratorforum.com. You can sign up for our newsletter to learn about experiences that are coming up, and we have lots of them that are free and open. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You’re welcome to direct message me there. I think I’m the first Diana Joseph that comes up, although there are many of us. I’d love to talk to folks. That’d be great.

Douglas:

Excellent.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much for having me Douglas. This was really thought provoking for me.

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 52: The Critical Corporate/Startup Collaboration appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of the 2019 Control The Room speaker video series.

Control the Room 2019 was Austin’s 1st Annual Facilitator Summit with the goal of bringing together facilitators of all kinds to build rapport, learn, and grow together.

The conference opened with a talk by Priya Parker, author of “The Art of Gathering.” After that, we moved onto 15 quick-and-powerful presentations by facilitators of all kinds.

Within that group of amazing speakers, we were lucky enough to have Greg Galle. Greg Galle is an author, entrepreneur, and instigator. His book Think Wrong: How to Do Work That Matters has become a handbook for people who want to invent what’s next for their organizations, communities, and countries.

Greg talked about the predictable path and how most people default to thinking and designing with only this in mind. Using a Solutions vs. Challenges 2×2 matrix, he illustrated that if you are exploring solutions and challenges that are both certain or well-known, you are considering the predictable path. He encouraged us to explore the uncertain and welcome the unexpected.

Watch Greg Galle’s talk “Think Wrong to Solve Next”:

Read the Transcript

Greg Galle: Thank you. Anything I … Yeah. There we go. Forward and backward. Hi. Everybody doing all right?

Speaker 1: Yep.

Greg Galle: Still with us? All right. That was the title of the slide. So here we go. We’re going to talk about three different frameworks that you can use. This morning we started having a little bit of an introduction about dialogue and encouraging dialogue. And I want to introduce these frameworks as a way of engaging people in a meaningful conversation and dialogue about the nature of the work that you’re trying to accomplish with them, that you’re trying to help them achieve.

Greg Galle: So the first idea to have in your head is this notion of a predictable path. That is that we are walking on a predictable path. We had this expression of, “We’ve seen that movie and we know how it ends.” You’ve all kind of used some version of that. The predictable path is, if nothing changes, we can be pretty certain what the future’s going to be like. It’s going to look a lot like it did today. And today looks a lot like it did yesterday. So the predictable path. Now, many of you in the room actually try to lead organizations, and communities, and individuals on some departure from that predictable path.

Greg Galle: So how do we forge a bold path? How do we escape the sort of gravitational pull of the status quo, and lead and create change? Anybody in the room tried to create change? Yeah? Some of you? Help groups create change? Drive positive change in the world? Easy, right? Never run into any problems, right? Okay. So what’s going on there is that whenever we try to depart from the norm, whenever we try to depart from the predictable path, we start to experience some kind of resistance, some kind of friction. It gets expressed in many different ways, and in many different forms. I want to just do a little bit of an exercise with you. This is actually my draft slide deck. So we’re missing the exercise.

Speaker 2: It’s my fault.

Greg Galle: But I don’t need prompts for it. So here it goes. I’m was going to do a pop quiz before I showed this slide that reveals everything to you, right? And makes sense of everything. Here’s the pop quiz. I’m going to ask you for an answer to a question. As soon as you have the answer, I want you to stand up. Okay? As soon as it’s in your head, I want you to stand up. It’s a very complex question, so follow with me. What is one half of 13? What is one half of 13? When do you have the answer in your head, stand up. Okay. One half of 13. Some people are still working on it. I can see you’re sitting down. All right. If the answer that you have in your head is 6.5 or six and one half, sit down. All right.

Speaker 3: One.

Greg Galle: One.

Speaker 4: T-H-I-R.

Greg Galle: THIR. T-H-I-R.

Speaker 2: Three.

Greg Galle: Three.

Speaker 5: 13 halves.

Greg Galle: 13 halves. Okay. Very good. So and here we go.

Speaker 6: Seven.

Greg Galle: Seven. Okay. Interesting. Rounding up.

Speaker 6: No.

Greg Galle: No? Tell us how.

Speaker 6: If you write 13 in Roman numerals and then you cut it half, you actually get seven on the top half.

Greg Galle: You actually get seven on top half. And that in fact, if you count all three of the ones, you get eight. But I love it because you took the pattern in you and you bifurcated it. You split it.

Speaker 6: [inaudible 00:04:01].

Greg Galle: Your math skills in Roman are sort of suspect, right? That’s okay. So what happened is we stood … I asked you the question, I put some time pressure on you. And you stood up and you answered the question. The predictable answer to that question is 6.5, is six and one half. Why? Any thoughts on why we thought six and a half?

Speaker 7: It’s arithmetic [inaudible 00:04:26].

Greg Galle: Arithmetic. We assumed it was a math question. So we made an assumption that it was a math question. We have made a set of synaptic connections in our head because we’ve been taught math. That says, “Ping, ping, ping. I know how to solve math problems.” So I asked the question, but I didn’t give you any context. What if it was a philosophical question? 6.5 would be the least interesting answer to the philosophical question of what is one half of 13.

Greg Galle: You might’ve said, “Well, why 13?” Or, “What are numbers,” right? Would have been a more interesting thing. So I had somebody give me an answer, which it’s sort of, “What’s left after your hungry friend gets the donuts/” right? Baker’s dozen, 13. One half, six and a half doughnuts. So it’s sort of, what’s the context? What’s the thing that we’re trying to solve? What’s going on here on the predictable path is that as we learn things, we create synaptic connections, and a set of neuro pathways get established in our brain. Has anybody in the room ever had that experience of going from work to home, driving from work to home, pulling up in your driveway and thinking, “Huh, I don’t really remember driving home,” right? Yeah. “I became an autonomous vehicle because I was distracted.” What was going on when you did that? What was going on in your head?

Speaker 7: Listening to music.

Greg Galle: Listening to music, getting carried away. You didn’t really have to think about, “How do I get home?” Because again, the synaptic connections are made. So many synaptic connections that you have a neuro pathway in your head that can take you home without thinking about it. So that’s great. How many people in the room … We’ll just do this. We’ll do a stand, just because everybody needs a little more stretching. If you brushed your teeth this morning, stand up. All right. I didn’t get half of you to stand up. That’s good. I’m glad to know that only a 100% percent of your brushed your teeth. If you Googled, “How to brush my teeth,” this morning, just so you know how to do it, sit down. So nobody Googled how to do that.

Greg Galle: You didn’t have to. You may sit down. You didn’t have to do that. You learned how to brush your teeth. You do it without thinking. Every now and then you have one of those weird brain things happen where maybe you put shaving cream on your toothbrush. But generally, you can do it without thinking. Right? So that’s great that our brain works that way. We don’t have to relearn things. Is that a good thing when we’re trying to solve a problem in a new way? No. It gets in the way. So part of our job as facilitators, or as we say, instigators is to get people to break some of those synaptic connections and consider to start solving from a new place. How do I start solving from somewhere different, rather than where I usually begin? So that’s biology. When you’re meeting resistance as you’re trying to depart from the predictable path and get on the bold path, when you’re meeting friction and resistance, it’s easy for it to be … For us to think about that as an antagonistic relationship.

Greg Galle: “I’m the protagonist trying to lead change. There’s an antagonist trying to stop me from making that happen.” We have to step back and let go and say, “You know what? Part of it’s just biology.” It’s part of how our brains work. And people aren’t doing that to us on purpose. It’s how our brains function. We’re actually competing against a whole bunch of neuro-pathways that has started to track the way problems are solved. The next thing that gets in our way is this. I’m going to ask, what do you see when you see this picture? Shout it out.

Speaker 7: [inaudible 00:08:26].

Greg Galle: Kids.

Speaker 6: Peace sign.

Greg Galle: Peace sign.

Speaker 3: Friends.

Greg Galle: Friends.

Speaker 4: Innocence.

Greg Galle: Innocence. Give me some other adjectives.

Speaker 5: Cuteness.

Greg Galle: Cuteness. Happy.

Speaker 1: Chilly.

Greg Galle: Chilly?

Speaker 1: Cold.

Greg Galle: Cold. Oh, yeah. Because they’re wearing … Nice. Okay. So some people when they see this picture think terrorists. These are Syrian refugees, Syrian immigrants. So there’s a cultural response to these kids. An unknowing cultural response to … These are kids, Syrian refugees. So this morning when the immigrants were asked to stand up, I wanted to get up and clap as a celebration of what an immigrant means, and what an immigrant brings to us. But you understand that … Whoa. An issue like immigration can be polarizing in America. In the American context right now, we have camps, pro-immigration, anti-immigration. So that’s a cultural response. So again, when we’re trying to depart from the predictable path and forge a bold path, we’re not only dealing with an issue of how our brain functions. But we’re also dealing with the issue of how a whole bunch of brains that function that way together start to act.

Greg Galle: And the thing about culture is, most of what makes cultures operate is our assumptions and orthodoxies, and biases. They’re stories that we pass on. They’re lore that we pass on. They’re not fact bases, right? It’s a belief system that we pass on. So I said it’s great that our brain works the way it does. It does. We don’t have to relearn things. It’s also great that culture works the way that it does. So cultures that are healthy and productive, and working in our favor, they actually work to keep themselves safe. They protect themselves, they defend themselves from threat. The problem is, because culture works that way they can lock in things that are toxic. They can lock in things that are not in our best interest. They can perpetuate bad societal behavior and make it seem normal.

Greg Galle: I like to ask people when they’re looking at that predictable path and bold path line, you can think of different people. I used to use Elon Musk as an example, but he’s confusing the story with his Twitter account. So I’m going to use Malala instead. And I’m going to introduce this. And I want … I am going to ask you please to believe me that I’m trying not to introduce this idea with any prejudice, right? I’m just wanting to use it for illustrative purposes. Do you guys know who Malala is? Mostly. Okay. So Malala is a young woman in the Middle-East who stood up and said that young women, and women of all kinds have the right to be educated. All right? She did that within the context of her culture. And within the very specific context of her culture, that got her labeled a heretic. All right? So thinking about it. Predictable path, that’s the cultural norm. Malala, bold path, women should be educated. A natural cultural reaction to her was, “What she’s proclaiming is not okay. It’s outside of the norm for our culture.” Right? “It’s heretical.”

Greg Galle: So we know what happened to Malala. She’s shot in the head. Within the context of her culture, that was an acceptable act. Now there was another cultural response to her, which was not the culture she was born into. And that cultural response was, “She’s heroic. She’s brave. She’s courageous.” And she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because of her position. Two extreme examples of a cultural response to the same person. So when you think about culture and how it affects our ability to help, lead, facilitate, create change. It’s important to understand that we are dealing both with biological forces and cultural forces. People are not trying to sabotage you. We do it without thinking.

Greg Galle: It’s human behavior. It’s neurological, it’s social. It’s how we as creatures act. So it’s really important that you be able to have that conversation, that you’d be able to use that framework. So when somebody is engaging you, it’s okay to say, “Are we working on something that’s about improving the predictable path? Or are we working on something where we’re trying to actually create bold change? And are the conditions in the ways that we’re reacting coming from what’s required to sustain the predictable path? Or are they in fact conditions that are going to be conducive to creating that change?” Next framework, this space, a fairly simple space. Where we’re going from, “What’s the problem or the challenge that we’re working on? What’s the solution?” And we’re dealing with uncertainty. We start from a place of uncertainty, and we’re trying to move towards greater certainty.

Greg Galle: This is another important framework for having a dialogue with somebody, which is, “Where are we starting from Where’s the problem live that we’re dealing with?” Up here in this corner where we understand what the problem is and we understand what the solution is, there’s a set of what we call think right practices. There are language that you’re going to be very familiar with, which is people are going to talk about things like, “How do we drive costs out of this? How do we improve productivity? How do we increase our margins?” People start to worry about things like ROI.

Greg Galle: So all of that language is familiar to you, whether you’re in a corporation or a non-profit, or a foundation, or coming out of the defense space. This is the dominant language that’s used to frame how we’re going to think about and measure success. And that’s fine if you know what the problem is and you know what the solution is. I want predict … So the labels of predictable path and bold path sound a little pejorative. They’re not. The people who flew here, again raise your hands. Those who flew here. You wanted predictability. You wanted to get on a plane, have the plane fly. Take off, fly, land safely. Number one, predictable criteria for air travel is safety. What you didn’t want was the pilot coming on and saying, “I’ve got a great idea.”

Greg Galle: You’re with me? All right? “And you are with me. You’re in the plane. I’m going to try something today I’ve never tried.” You don’t want that. When it comes to the known problem and the known solution, I want you to optimize the heck out of that one. And for air travel, I want you to optimize the heck out of safety. The problem is that that set of language and that way of framing things doesn’t work when we’re in that arena of uncertainty. We’re uncertain about that. And we think we know what the problem is, but we’re open to the idea that we’re wrong. That we might do something that reveals in fact that, “Hey, our assumption about the problem was actually an observation of a symptom. And there’s something else deeper going on here.” And we’re going to learn that. “Our assumption about the solution was incorrect.” We did some work last October with NATO, a whole conference on AI. They knew what the solution was. It’s AI. I don’t care what the problem is. If you’re in the military right now, the answer is AI. I don’t know.

Greg Galle: Probably not. I mean, I’ve tried to use Siri and it gets me lost. It doesn’t recognize what I’m saying. It calls people I don’t mean to call. So I’m not really sure I’m willing to pin my hope of freedom in the future on AI just yet. It has a role. But what’s the problem we’re solving? Are we applying it appropriately? So again, this diagram is a way of entry into a conversation. What kind of problem are we working at? Where does that live? How certain are we about the problem, the nature of the challenge? How certain are we about the solution? And are we able to do something quickly that’s going to make us more confident? Not get to the answer, but get to a greater level of certainty. So part of our role, part of what we’re doing is saying we’ve got to try different practices.

Greg Galle: So here you see increase exploration, generate hypotheses, create option value, embrace experiments, pursue discovery, welcome the unexpected. And the measurement here instead of return on investment, which you’ve all been asked, “What’s the return on investment of having you come in and do blah, blah, blah?” If you’re dealing with the uncertain, if you’re in the nine squares of this … I mean, the eight squares of this diagram that aren’t up in that upper right-hand corner. The honest answer to, “What’s ROI,” is, “I have no idea. It’s too early. There’s too many assumptions. We can’t tell you.” LFI is our response to that. LFI is Learning From Investment. So rather than what’s the return on investment, what’s the learning from investment? “What do we now know because we did this thing that we didn’t know before? And what’s the value? How much certainty does that create?”

Greg Galle: So I’ve just introduced two frameworks, which means I’m not going to get to the third. But I’m going to go through it real fast here in the last 40 seconds. So in think wrong, we’ve looked at six practices of thinking wrong. The six practices actually correspond to a moment in the problem-solving journey where a certain thing, a certain action is going to produce the most value. Are our aspirations clear? Is our inspiration sound? Do we have new, fresh ideas? Have we actually started to model and prototype, and bring the idea to life? Are we making small bets to increase certainty rather than blowing our whole budget and putting all of our capital at risk? And finally, are we leaning into the people that we convened and brought in the room and their wisdom, and using that to accelerate our progress? So I can share that in more than 40 seconds if you want. That’s what I had. So, all right. Thanks, you guys.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2020, which will be held Feb. 5–7, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

The post Think Wrong to Solve Next appeared first on Voltage Control.

Sunni will be speaking at our upcoming event — Control the Room: The 2nd Annual Austin Facilitator Summit! Taking place at Austin’s Capital Factory on February 6th, learn more and get your tickets here.

The amount of impressive stats on the author, public speaker, and expert meeting facilitator Sunni Brown is a bit staggering. So, I’ll start by sharing two to whet your appetite. Her TED Talk on doodling and how it improves our creative thinking has drawn more than 1.4 million views. Second, she was once named one of the “10 Most Creative People on Twitter” by Fast Company.

Like myself, Sunni is Austin-based, so I was particularly excited to connect with her for this conversation. I’m also happy to announce that she’s one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming 2020 Austin facilitator summit — Control the Room — which is happening in February. (Check out the link if you want to attend and hear her speak!) A couple of weeks ago, Sunni and I had an energizing conversation. Read on to learn more about this fascinating, multi-talented powerhouse.

Sunni is the founder of SB Ink, a creative consultancy that’s unique for its use of a variety of effective, yet sometimes unconventional cognitive and facilitative techniques (think: Infodoodling, Applied Improvisation, and mindfulness). Sunni is also the best-selling author of Gamestorming and The Doodle Revolution, and her forthcoming book, subtitled Deep Self Design, “uses visual thinking to teach a do-it-yourself, evidence-based method of dissolving powerful personal obstacles.”

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, WIRED, CNN, Oprah.com, and Entrepreneur, as well as being featured twice on CBS Sunday Morning and the TODAY Show.

Zen and the Art of Facilitation

One of the things I love about Sunni’s approach to facilitation is how she pulls in a multitude of practices. Her toolkit of skills extends what we expect from facilitators and design thinkers and moves into entirely new realms. For example, she’s a student of Zen Buddhism. And while being a Zen practitioner might not seem like a necessary skill for a creative consultant, she’s found it incredibly useful in her work and that it makes her an even better facilitator.

“Zen practice is about creating open and safe conversations for all human beings,” Sunni shared. “I didn’t go into Zen thinking, ‘This will make me a better facilitator.’ But it inherently does because of the qualities that emerge when you practice for a long time.” The complexities of working with groups of professionals or executives in creative sessions can undoubtedly benefit from the skills that Zen teaches — things like patience and non-reactivity.

“Zen practice is about creating open and safe conversations for all human beings.”

Sunni doesn’t think these skills are a prerequisite for someone in facilitation. But, as one goes deeper into their career, it definitely helps: “Ultimately, when you get into group work, if you don’t move into human behavior and psychological development, you’re going to miss a lot. You’re not going to know how to work with a lot of things. That’s probably true for most facilitators who do work with groups for a long time. You have to start asking the human question.”

These skills have helped Sunni take her facilitation methods to the next level: “With facilitation, you can have a lot of chops, and you can be skillful at creating experiences that drive toward goals. The technical aspects of facilitation — you can master those pretty quickly. Those are not mysterious. What becomes mysterious is getting people to trust you, getting them to trust each other, allowing them to express their authentic voices. Getting them to take risks. That’s the whole other level of practice.”

“What becomes mysterious is getting people to trust you, getting them to trust each other, allowing them to express their authentic voices. Getting them to take risks. That’s the whole other level of practice.”

Empathy with Boundaries

This idea of Zen naturally led to a discussion about how Sunni deals with difficult participants or stakeholders when she’s facilitating. Sunni was quick to point out that while Zen and her other mindfulness practices help her to be calm, non-reactive, and empathetic with participants, it doesn’t mean she’s ok with any behavior. “I’m actually not accepting of a whole host of certain behavior. Anything that shuts down other people — I’m not accepting of it. It doesn’t mean that I don’t support the person. It doesn’t mean I’m not compassionate for what they’re doing. It means that if they’re bringing behavior that is compromising other people’s experience, I don’t tolerate that.”

She explained a bit more about why these boundaries are essential: “When you’re holding space and creating a container for a group to do something, how you do that is critical. I have to simultaneously convey that they can trust me, that I know what I’m doing, and that I’m not going to be a pushover or tolerate bad behavior while at the same time not shaming them.”

She compares it to the concept of servant leadership: “You are of service, but you’re not a doormat. I’m clear when I’m up there as a facilitator that I am here to hold space, but not for bullshit. I establish group norms: ‘This is what I’m looking for.’ It’s not a condemnation; it’s an invitation.”

One way that Sunni invites people into acting with different norms is by calling attention to potentially counterproductive habits at the beginning of a session: “Here’s an example from some scientists I’ve worked with: I’ll say to them, ‘I know that some of your behavioral norms involve being really intellectual. And I love that about you, and it’s very useful as a tool. But, here’s the downside of it, and here’s the upside of it.’ You call it and name it and talk to them about it. I assume the best of them, assume they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re just defaulting to something.”

In Defense of Ice Breakers

We shifted to another “hot” topic (pun intended) in meeting design — “ice breakers.” Sunni has a thoughtful approach on icebreakers and feels that they can be fruitful if they’re deeply linked to your meeting’s purpose and not just something fun or silly: “The term icebreaker is problematic because it’s so old. I call them primers or fire starters, and they have a purpose. There’s nothing worse than, ‘Hello, my name is…’ That’s superficial and meaningless. If it’s boring to you, it’s definitely boring to them.”

Sunni’s antidote to the dull, predictable meeting icebreakers is something more meaningful: “If I design something that’s ‘an icebreaker,’ it’s going to be directly related to [the meeting participants’] experience. It’s not going to be something they’ve done before. It’ll involve some kind of storytelling.” Another pro-tip to glean from how Sunni uses icebreakers is that she often asks the group’s leaders to do the exercise or activity first. She’s not afraid to have a high-powered banker play Hangman to get a meeting going, or she’ll do it herself to get everyone primed up. When execs or leaders show a willingness to be vulnerable, it encourages the rest of the group to loosen up as well.

Power of Outcomes & Vulnerability

We also talked about any major learnings that Sunni has gleaned from her less-than-ideal adventures in facilitation. She shared the importance of receiving clearly-defined goals from your client or stakeholder when you’re planning and leading an event. Because when the facilitator doesn’t know the ultimate goals, it’s close-to-impossible to design a successful event. Sunni learned this the hard way when she had to facilitate a major event and didn’t get solid insight into the goals from her client. Because of this, she went into the big day feeling less-than-confident in her agenda and activities.

Beyond the importance of defined goals, Sunni learned something else essential that she took away from this experience: the power of vulnerability. Leading up to the event, she felt she needed to name the situation she was in: “I thought: I can’t lie. I can’t stand in front of this crowd and pretend like I’m proud of this agenda. I called one of my mentors, and she said, ‘I think you need to claim that at the beginning.’ And so I did. And I didn’t blame anybody. I said: ‘This is an inaugural event, and the nature of these are messy.’ I just put all that out there, and seriously, the anxiety left the building. I was off the hook for it being a flawlessly-executed experience, which was not possible.”

It was a big learning moment: “It was okay as a facilitator to name that the process I designed might not deliver on any of their expectations.”

Visual and Kinesthetic Thinking

Since Sunni is an expert on visual thinking, we talked about the power of graphic facilitation, which she does as well: “It has so many benefits, but one of them is that you start to externalize what people are saying. You have that on display in front of people, and you can begin parsing the definitions— visually articulating what they’re saying and asking, ‘Is this what you mean? Does it look like this in your mind? What’s your mental model?’ That helps to accelerate and clarify. It looks cool, and it is cool, but it’s deeply functional as well.”

Beyond the visual or drawing-based, Sunni finds movement can also help with creativity and decision-making. “A lot of times, when people are about to make a decision, I will have them go outside and go on long walkabouts, so they can synthesize before they come back and decide.”

“I’m not interested in meeting humans on a cerebral only level. You don’t get your best work at that level.”

Additionally, she shared how physical exercises have been helpful when working with the above-mentioned scientists who are used to working with their intellectual selves: “We had them do something called bodystorming. Suddenly, they’ll discover, ‘Oh, you were a martial artist. You never said that before.’ They’ll realize that one of their colleagues has some physical prowess, and they had no idea because they never even get to know that aspect of them. So, it humanizes everyone, and you start to see people as three-dimensional. I’m not interested in meeting humans on a cerebral only level. You don’t get your best work at that level.”

Sunni’s multidisciplinary approach to facilitation is truly inspiring. I can’t wait to read her new book when it’s published and am thrilled that she’ll be speaking at “Control the Room.” I hope you can join us if you live in Austin!

Want to hear more from Sunni? Please join us for the Control the Room 2020, which will be held Feb. 5–7, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

FAQ Section

What are the key elements of facilitation that Voltage Control focuses on?
Voltage Control’s facilitation programs emphasize the core elements of facilitation, including building trust, fostering collaboration, and guiding productive meetings. Our programs equip participants with facilitation skills that help create a safe environment for open discussions and decision-making processes.

How do your programs support professional facilitators in improving their skills?
Our training programs are designed for both new and experienced facilitators, offering a wide range of approaches that enhance the skill of facilitation. These programs include online facilitation techniques, experiential workshops, and advanced training sessions to improve facilitation practice and prepare facilitators for more challenging environments.

What types of facilitation topics are covered in the academy?
We offer a comprehensive resource for facilitators that covers various facilitation topics, including community meetings, closing activities, and writing workshops. Our programs also focus on developing critical leadership skills, managing resistant clients, and fostering a culture of collaboration in both everyday meetings and larger organizational contexts.

Who would benefit from Voltage Control’s facilitation certification programs?
Our certification programs are ideal for product innovators, executives, consultants, educators, and Agile Coaches seeking to refine their facilitation skills. Experienced facilitators and those newer to the field will find valuable insights into the facilitation process through our wide range of training materials and workshops.

What makes Voltage Control an acclaimed facilitator training academy?
Voltage Control’s programs are led by visionary facilitators who bring years of experience. Our acclaimed facilitator Sunni Brown, known for her work in experiential workshop design, provides participants with an unforgettable learning experience. We offer a range of training that supports the development of facilitation educators and a community of facilitators committed to excellent facilitation practices.

How does Voltage Control help facilitators work with resistant clients?
Our facilitation training teaches a range of approaches to deal with resistant clients effectively. We provide a road map for handling challenging situations while maintaining a productive and safe environment for all participants. The techniques learned through our programs help facilitators navigate tough conversations with confidence.

What can I expect from the online facilitation training programs?
Voltage Control’s online facilitation programs are designed to be flexible and interactive, offering participants a variety of tools to enhance their facilitation skills remotely. Our programs include advanced training sessions, training materials, and real-time online workshops, making it an excellent fit for facilitators looking to improve their practice without attending in-person sessions.

The post The Zen and the Art of Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

Tristan Kromer coaches startups and intrapreneurs on how to put startup principles into practice. Along with his team at Kromatic, Tristan has worked with early-stage startups, as well as billion-dollar companies. Just one of the many cool things about Tristan is that he volunteers his time by hosting free office hours for early-stage startups.

Long before he was teaching companies how to use lean principles to solve big problems, Tristan was part of the music industry for ten years. “It’s informed how I’ve approached team building and innovation. The tech industry is very similar to the music industry. When you’re an independent performer, you need to be doing a little bit of everything. I‘ve produced, I’ve acted as a paid sideman, I’ve acted as a lead singer and bandleader.”

Practice What You Preach

After talking about our mutual love of music, Tristan and I spoke about innovation programs and what can go wrong with them. “What bothers me are innovation programs that [promote] design thinking as gospel, but they don’t apply those same thoughts and tactics to the design of the innovation program themselves.”

He explained the importance of using the principles you preach: “You can have accelerator programs that teach start-ups to fill out a business model canvas when they have never filled out a business model canvas. You have innovation change programs or Agile transformation programs that are preaching the MVP, to move small and fast, and that you can’t predict things out four years in advance. Yet, most of them are structured as four-year change management programs. It’s a lack of self-reflection and buying into Lean or Agile as a dogma as opposed to as a philosophy which you must practice.”

Measuring Innovation

When I asked Tristan his perspective on measuring innovation, he made an interesting distinction between measuring an innovation project versus an innovation program.

When you have an innovation team or project, he explained that the methods of measurement might be more traditional. “An innovation team is one team with a specific idea for a product that will operate under some business model. That’s a project; you can measure the success of that project by more standard metrics like acquisition rate, activation rate, retention rate, or, at the end of the day, how much are you making?”

On the other hand, measuring an entire innovation program is not as clear-cut. That’s because an innovation program is generating many ideas or projects: “The metrics around one project is not going tell you how your innovation program is doing because the odds of success are relatively small. Even with the best estimates, you’ve only got a 50/50 chance of any one individual project having success in the market — not even “unicorn” level success. Just some level of success.”

“You can’t judge [your innovation program] on just one project; you have to launch 20 projects or 100 projects…”

He went on: “If you judge the entire [innovation] program on the success of one project, you condemned the entire program to a coin toss. You can’t judge [your innovation program] on just one project; you have to launch 20 projects or 100 projects and see: are you hitting that 50% mark? Are you getting 60%? Or are you getting 10% because there are fundamental obstacles to success in your ecosystem?”

Tristan also stressed the importance of looking at leading indicators of success rather than lagging indicators. You can’t wait for the cash to reach the bank, so to speak, to know if an initiative is working. He encourages companies to watch for early signs that something is going well: “Look at early signs like your acquisition rate and your activation rate. You need to have those early indicators of interest and engagement; otherwise, you’re risking you might only learn you’re failing when it’s too late.”

A commitment to long-term thinking is fundamental for companies who want to innovate. But, because I’ve seen that that mindset doesn’t always come naturally, I asked Tristan how he encourages the long-term view with his clients. With start-ups, he usually finds that conversation easier: “For a start-up, investors are generally aware of the length of time it takes to get a return. Most investors, hopefully, are investing in areas where they understand the rate of return, so it’s not an issue to have some level of patience.”

On the other hand: “In the corporate world, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on getting this quarter’s results in and this year’s results in.”

Navigating Failure

With the knowledge that some projects won’t land when you’re running an innovation program, I asked Tristan how teams might navigate failure and the emotional letdown that comes when something doesn’t go as planned: “It’s not failure. It’s learning as quickly as possible. If you put up a landing page and [no one visits it], there’s one way to look at that: ‘We failed.’ That’s very demotivating. But if you look at it like: ‘Thank god we figured that out very quickly and now we can quickly modify and iterate that page and try again.’”

“It’s not failure. It’s learning as quickly as possible.”

He talked about how the mindset we approach projects with is critical. “It’s important to recognize that you are not attempting to build a landing page or a product, you’re trying to build a business model. That business model is composed of, not lines of code or widgets spit out from a factory; it’s composed of little bricks of knowledge.”

“You need to understand who the customer is, what they want, where they’re going to buy things, what channels you’re going to use, how you’re going to support them, and what partners you need. All those things are bits of knowledge, and you need to gather that knowledge as quickly as possible. Your unit of progress is learning and knowledge. Running an experiment that doesn’t work — that’s just adding to your understanding.”

“Running an experiment that doesn’t work — that’s just adding to your understanding.”

Learn, But Not for Too Long

While working from a belief that learning is incredibly essential, Tristan has seen some teams go down a rabbit hole of endless knowledge. “It can be very liberating to free yourself from the mindset that everything must succeed and to get into the iterative learning mindset. However, you need to be careful you don’t swing too far in the other direction and learn, learn, learn, but never execute.”

“Some people enjoy the thrill of the discovery, but don’t enjoy the thrill of executing”

“I’ve seen teams that get so attached to talking to the customers that they spend too long talking to people, and they’re no longer learning. They’re not making any progress on the business.” I asked how you can know when you’ve learned enough. Tristan encouraged frequent check-ins or moments for reflection. For example, if you’ve had a week of ethnographic research: “At the end of the week, sit down with your teammates and say, ‘What did we learn? Do we have a new distinct concept of who our customer is? Have we changed our target market? Have we changed the value proposition?’ If there is nothing or if the change is so small as to be irrelevant, maybe you should be moving on…”

“As long as you’re learning something useful, then you should keep going. The moment you’re getting diminishing returns on any particular experiment or research method, then you should try something else. Some people enjoy the thrill of the discovery, but don’t enjoy the thrill of executing.”

Common Metrics for Success

We also talked about how to ensure that new innovative ways of working don’t fizzle out inside a company: “I think to have a lasting impact you have to begin with agreeing on the metrics for success. Otherwise, you risk that short-termism. If you’ve been focusing on culture change or mindset change, but everybody else in the company is asking for ROI, you’re sunk. You have to have an agreement right at the start of what metrics you’re going to be measuring. Otherwise, it’s just not gonna work.”

“Having a rigorous approach to innovation allows you to persevere.”

He continued: “Getting that agreement upfront is critical, and then measuring yourself religiously is critical. It’s essential for companies or accelerators that are promoting a business model canvas to have a dashboard for the program. Having a rigorous approach to innovation allows you to persevere. If you don’t have the metrics and the data to back up what you’re doing, then you will wind up on the chopping block when it comes to shoring up the profit margin of the company.”

Too Much Advice

We wrapped up our conversation by talking about well-intentioned things that can backfire in the innovation space. His answer might be surprising: “mentor advice or expert opinions.”

He explained: “These are mentors that are very familiar with an industry or have seen this innovation project more than one time. They’ll earnestly try to pull the team aside and say, ‘Hey, this project is not gonna work because of X, Y, and Z.’ That doesn’t work. Start-ups or very passionate founders are never going to abandon an idea just because somebody else tells you it’s a terrible idea. You have to get the team— as quickly as possible —to discover that information on their own.”

So, instead of telling startups what’s wrong with their approach or preaching at them, Tristan encourages mentors to help teams discover potential issues on their own. “You have to show them how to find that information themselves. Otherwise, they will ignore you. Perhaps they will admit that you were right two years later, but they’re going to ignore you at the moment, so it’s not useful advice.”

It was great chatting with Tristan and if you’d like to read more about how he thinks, definitely check out his blog Grassholder Herder, where he writes about lean startups, innovation ecosystems, and user experience.

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Practice, Don’t Preach appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of the 2019 Control The Room speaker video series. Find out about Control the Room 2020 here.

Control the Room 2019 was Austin’s 1st Annual Facilitator Summit with the goal of bringing together facilitators of all kinds to build rapport, learn, and grow together.

The conference opened with a talk by Priya Parker, author of “The Art of Gathering.” After that, we moved onto 15 quick-and-powerful presentations by facilitators of all kinds.

Within that group of amazing speakers, we were lucky enough to have Brian Sullivan join us.

Brian is Director, Design Strategy at Sabre Corporation. In his talk, he reminded us that while facilitators have great tools to “Control the Room,” we must consider the “stuff” to bring into the room. One of these substances is empathy and often that has to be gathered “outside of the room.”

He shared his five go-to activities to cultivate this empathy.

1. Change Your Perspective
2. Limit Yourself
3. Do It Yourself
4. Similar Experience
5. Day-in-the-Life

Watch the Video:

Read the Transcript

Brian Sullivan: How’s everyone doing? Good. Awesome. So I’m going to talk about empathy immersion. And when I think of empathy, I’m always reminded of this quote from Maya Angelou, right? “People will forget what you said. They’ll forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” And I think as facilitators that’s extremely important. And we forget to do that. Let me tell you a story.

There’s a little boy and he’s walking down the street and he sees a sign and on the sign it says puppies for sale. And he gets excited beyond belief. He runs up to the gate and he knocks on it. “Mister, mister, mister I want a puppy. I have $10 in my pocket. I want to have a puppy.” This guy walks up and he goes, “Son, I’m a dog breeder and you need to understand my puppies are expensive, very, very expensive.” And he goes, “Mister, I have $10 in my pocket. Can I hold the puppy?”

He goes, “Sure.” And so he whistles and says, “Molly, Molly, come here. Come here, come here.” And you’ve seen the scene, right? The dog comes around the corner and all the little yip yappers are chasing after the mama kind of biting at her tail, and guess what? There’s one dog a little slower, right? Little bit behind. This guy, right? The runt of the litter and the little boy says, “Mister, that’s the dog I want. That’s the dog for me. I know what that dog feels like.” And the guy goes, “I’m a dog breeder. Nobody wants the runt. No one wants it. Do you know why, son? They’re a little slower. They’re a little sicker. You don’t want it. You have to take care of that dog.”

And the little boy goes, “Mister, you don’t understand.” And this is what happens. He pulls up his pants leg and he says, “I have an artificial leg. I know what that runt feels like.” And the man says, “Son, you can have that dog.” Right? And here’s what it is. It’s a simple story. We were just talking about stories, right? It’s about a boy, a man, and a dog. It’s not what people say. It’s not what people do, but it’s how they make you feel.

And that’s what I mean by empathy immersion. Now, I only have 20 minutes and I spent four minutes on this story because I wanted you to feel it. Okay? And I was challenged by Douglas because I have 60 slides to get through and we’re going to do it. So here we go. So what is empathy? And it’s important to know that because we’re talking empathy immersion.

It always reminds me of this quote from Scott Cook. He is the CEO of Intuit, right? And he says, “You can’t walk in another person’s shoes until you take your own shoes off.” Right? Amen. That is the whole purpose of empathy. And that old man did not understand what it was to be that little boy until the pants leg was rolled up. He didn’t get it.

When you look at the very definition of empathy, it literally is stepping into another person’s shoes, but I think way too often we wear our own shoes, right? And we’re trying to cram our own perspective into another person’s perspective and that’s wrong.

Now, I also think that we mistake empathy for sympathy and I’ve got this in black and white. Get out your phones to take a picture of this slide. This is extremely important and any one of these bullets would resonate to any person in the audience. And I think that Doug is going to go ahead and get a copy of this to everyone. But the ones that resonate to me really are the last two bullets with empathy. It’s searching for a deeper meaning and it’s acknowledging your feelings. And when we think about it from a learning experience, it’s not our brains that are learning tools with empathy. It is our other feelings. It is our other emotions.

Those become our learning tools, not our brains. With sympathy though, it’s surface-level meaning it’s playing in the shallow end and it’s suppressing our feelings. I can’t feel that way. I can’t feel that way. I can logically try to understand that emotional experience. Ladies and gentlemen, if you try to apply logic to an emotional person, good luck. Not going to happen, right? But I think people mistake empathy and sympathy.

Now there’s really 20 different types of empathy, but there are three that I believe are interconnected and they’re very important for us to understand. There’s emotional empathy. You make that connection at your heart level. Then you have to process it cognitively where the heart goes to the head. Something has just happened. I am fundamentally changed as a person. The little boy rolled up the legs. I get it. We’re not talking about money. We’re talking about feelings, right?

The heart goes into the head and then guess what? You feel so much compassion that you are compelled to do something, that is emotional, empathy, cognitive empathy, compassionate, empathy. Those are the three things. Let me go into a little bit more detail on each one of them and some of the tools that we use.

When it comes to emotional empathy, that’s really about kind of connecting at a visceral level with feelings with another person. We use emotional immersion. I’m going to give you five tools later on that you can use. We’re going to go through a quick experiment and guess what? We still have 13 minutes. That’s awesome.

A day in the life of ethnography. Those are different ways that you can connect. You walk in another person’s shoes, cognitive empathy. What are the tools that we use for that? Well, we’ve talked about empathy maps. We’ve talked about personas. Diary studies are another way to connect, right? But that’s cognitive empathy, so we’re trying to understand what we’ve learned. Compassionate empathy. It’s rapping. That’s okay. We’ll, we’ll deal with that. That’s where you’re compelled to act, right? You want to make a change.

We tend to use journey maps, service blueprints, prototyping, and testing, right? Some of this kind of follows the double diamond that we were talking about. They’re interconnected though. It looks like this. You have that emotional empathy, you have to process it, then you act on it, right? You see how they’re all interconnected?

Now there’s 17 other different types of empathy, but these are the ones that I see that are connected. Now, here’s the importance of empathy immersion. This is an exercise that I did with a design team at Sabre. They were actually struggling and you can see that they have these glasses on for different types of visual impairments.

This is a design team that actually has to do the visual standards at Sabre and they were not Section 508 compliant. Well, to create an award-winning accessibility program, I needed the designers to feel what it would be like to have a visual impairment. So I took them all to lunch and I had these glasses. That was there get into lunch free card, right? You’ll notice that I also had some of them in wheelchairs.

I also had some of them wrapped, right? So their hands were wrapped. So what it’s like to have a visual impairment, what it’s like to have a mobile impairment, right? And we’ll go through one of those in a moment. This was a really good healing exercise. Teddy Roosevelt once said this. “People don’t care what you know until they know you care.” That’s why I think emotional empathy is so important.

Now, we just talked a few minutes ago about there’s so many design thinking frameworks. They’re 95% the same. I don’t care what their shape is, they’re 95% the same and most of them begin with design empathy. Because you get to feel what the other person feels.

Now, a lot of people like this book and they teach masterclasses. I know Doug teaches a class here and I think some people like this because it time boxes, the activities, it’s pretty easy to just run through it. Here’s the framework. Does anyone see anything missing? Oh my God. Where’s the empathy? Correct and research.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do that before the workshop and indeed you should, and that’s really my point here. There’s nothing wrong with this framework. All we need to do is make sure that we do our homework ahead of the workshop because I believe that empathy leads to innovation.

Now, if we believe that this is true, emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, then compassionate empathy. If we don’t do our homework, let me show you what’s happening. We’re literally cutting our hearts out of the game, right? We’re not using these tools, we’re sprinting to a solution. We’re literally doing that. If we don’t use our hearts as a learning tool, we can’t then process it.

So then what we’re doing is we’re taking the heart out of the head and we’re just doing some type of a logical experiment. So we’re not using all of our learning tools, and if we’re not using all of our learning tools, we’re not having compassion, we’re just doing something. And so the challenge that I would give all of you is to make it meaningful. Start with emotional empathy. This is not enough. In fact, if you don’t go out and do your research, this is really a sympathy map.

This is not enough. Going through a journey map, you’re just going through an exercise and I’m here to tell you, emotional empathy drives innovation. Here’s a story about a person that is an Auschwitz survivor, right? Do you think that you could read a report on Auschwitz and literally feel what this person felt? No.

Guess what though? Meryl Streep did a movie called Sophie’s Choice, won in Academy award. What she did was she used the method, the acting method. She actually stayed in Auschwitz, ate the same type of food, did not have much water, lost 25 pounds, and I’m going to ruin the movie for you. The choice for Sophia is your child dies or your daughter dies. Choose. Go. So what did Meryl Streep do? She had two longtime pets that she had. One of them she had to choose. So she’s literally trying to simulate that experience.

The point is, you get deeper insights with emotional empathy. It also motivates people. Here are two people that went through an emotional empathy exercise. Our assumptions, and we’ve heard it from a lot of speakers today, are very limiting. If you do an emotional empathy exercise and we have six minutes and 32 seconds left, we’re going to get to it. I promise you, Doug. It’s a great team-building exercise. We’ll do that in a moment.

Now, let me tell you why it’s important to do this because we need to design for extremes, not just the mainstream. This is Jill Avery. She’s from the Harvard Business School. She says, “Extreme users alert you to the pain points and new opportunities people have.” Amen, sister Jill. Empathy leads to innovation. When you observe people where they live, work and play, you are inspired and you build empathy.

Most of the time, we focus just on our typical users. We lose the insights from the edges. What about our novices? What about our disabled users? What about our avid fans? So here’s something that I was taught at IDEO, a case study of the Xilinx kitchen tools. They looked at a 5-star chef’s short order cook and a person taking their first cooking lesson, a child and they developed these things.

Now a lot of people here thinking, “Okay, well this is an interesting case study.” Let’s go into a little bit of detail. The pizza cutter that you see there on the top right is really for a child, right? They can’t really, they have to get their elbow in to cut the pizza. Guess what? A person with arthritis has to do that too. They don’t have the arm strength to do that like a 5-star chef has to do. Those muscles are developed. The can opener, flipped a switch. It’s good for a left-handed or right-handed person.

There’s a spring on the scissors specifically because a person with arthritis doesn’t have the strength to handle it, neither does the child. These tools are one of the most popular kitchen tools that are around. Make the extreme mainstream is the point that I want to make.

Now I want to give you the five tools. I got four minutes and we’re going to go through an exercise still. Now, you cannot have a slideshow deck without a slide from Oprah. Leadership is about empathy. Leadership is about empathy. The ability to connect with people at a visceral level.

Here is step one, your first tool for empathy immersion. You can change your perspective. What I want everybody to do right now is get on your knees. Get on your knees, right? Pray to Brian, pray to Brian. Just kidding. All right, so you’re now on your knees. Imagine you’re having to build a restaurant for children, right? Now, I want you to try to reach. Now when you reach, you don’t have the arms of an adult. You have the arms of a child. I want you to almost have T-Rex arms, right?

So I want you to reach for that water bottle that’s just a little bit out of your stretch. Reach for it, reach for it, reach for it. Okay, go ahead and stand up. Go ahead and stand up. You’re getting the point. So what they did at IDEO is they changed their perspective, right? And they looked at just the length of arms of children, their growth so that they understood what it would be like to have a retail experience.

Here’s your second tool that you can use. You can actually limit yourself. Now, here’s your second exercise. I want you to mobilize yourself and I want you to try to drink or take off the lid of the water bottle using only three fingers. You choose the three. So this would be what it’s like to be a disabled person taking it off. You might have to put it under your arm. This is how people live every day, right?

Remember the picture I had of the people with the glasses from the Federation for the Blind? That was macular degeneration, blurry vision. All of these things are ways that we can get to understand our users a little bit more.

Another way that you can do it is do it yourself. Here’s an example of the ER experience. A designer from IDEO just checked himself into the hospital. Here’s what it was like for that particular person. They checked themself into the hospital and they wait. Then they get admitted and then they wait. Then they get their measurements taken. No one likes that and they wait. They go to the room and then they wait.

The doctor finally arrives and says, “Hang on, I have another patient. Just a second.” So he has to wait. The nurse comes in and takes the vitals and then the guy waits. Finally, they see the doctor for five minutes and then they wait. The wait experience was so long. You can do this by just doing it yourself, but do it in the field.

Your fourth way is to create a similar experience. Real quick, show of the audience. If we wanted to do wound care, what do you think would be a similar experience? I need three real quick responses. Go.

Awesome, you’re stumped. Waxing. Oh, that’s painful. Right? Another way to do this is to do a day in the life of experience, that’s your fifth approach. Similar experience in the day in the life. Empathy immersion lets you experience what other users feel and you are changed as a result of it. It doesn’t take a long time, but empathy immersion leads to innovation, and that’s all I have for today, Doug.

The post Empathy Immersion appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Claudia Reuter is a managing director at Techstars, an accelerator network designed to help entrepreneurs succeed. She’s familiar with the startup world and innovation by way of starting her own company back in 2006. She successfully led multiple rounds of investment to further the growth of her startup until it was acquired in 2014.

In recent years, Claudia has spent her time working with early-stage startups in partnership with Techstars + Stanley Black & Decker. Claudia has finessed how she brings others into the conversation around innovation, from large corporations to the founder-only startup. She believes that conquering fears around innovation and change is a conversation worth having.

Afraid of Heights

A fear of heights is one of the most common phobias, and for many, the closest they come to conquering their fear is climbing a ladder or a tree, or for the brave few, taking the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Claudia took a very different approach to conquering her fear — she took flying lessons.

Motivated by setting a good example for her children and the idea of skipping lines at the airport, she started taking private lessons. Claudia learned how to stall the plane, take off, and fly for periods of time. Around the same time, her company was acquired, and she moved from where she was taking lessons. “It’s something I did enough to conquer my fear of heights, but not enough to pick you up in a plane,” Claudia says.

“I think most fears are irrational, and most fears are in your head…I thought it would help me realize how this was something that is just part of our lives and something that could be fun versus something scary, and so just getting up way above the clouds and having a different perspective of the world from up there helped me.”

Claudia also believes that these irrational fears don’t just keep us on the ground; they can keep our businesses in safe zones avoiding the potential for new ideas and significant revenue, all because we’re afraid of change.

Claudia referred to these as the “corporate antibodies” where new ideas are treated with resistance because they represent a threat to something incredibly valuable. People are afraid of spiders because they might have a poisonous bite, they’re afraid of public speaking because they might embarrass themselves and hurt their reputation. So they’re afraid of innovation because it similarly threatens the system in place that’s already working.

If this fear is similarly irrational to the fear of heights, spiders, and public speaking, how do you get people comfortable with the idea of change and let them feel in control of it? For Claudia, she wanted to sit in the pilot seat and familiarize herself with the ascending and descending. So what does it look like to put other people in their own pilot seats?

“It’s really important for people who are doing a good job in managing an existing business to make sure that they understand that everyone appreciates the value in that and it’s not something to be thrown away.”

The first step to help people overcome their fear of innovation and change is to acknowledge and appreciate the systems that have gotten us this far, “It’s really important for people who are doing a good job in managing an existing business to make sure that they understand that everyone appreciates the value in that and it’s not something to be thrown away,” Claudia says.

In acknowledging how vital the systems are that are already in place, innovators can slowly start to introduce new concepts and then balance them with what’s already in place. This balance is a masterful skill of seeing what’s necessary for the day to day and the vision for the future.

Horse and Buggy Innovation

Claudia shared this example, “In 1900, the horse and buggy were still the predominant means of transportation in New York City, and it was only about 13 years later that the entire city was transformed with cars. So it’s really easy, however many years later to say, ‘Oh, that was such a quick change,’ but 13 years is a very long time to anyone who’s working in a corporate job. Right?”

The potential for disruption could appear very fast in a hundred years for now, but in our day-to-day happens rather incrementally. Helping people be a part of that change can look like giving them a platform to be heard or share their ideas on either incremental innovations or truly disruptive opportunities. So while they’re managing the existing business that keeps payroll going, they feel they have a say and are part of the innovation process. Waiting for the transition from the horse and buggy can feel like a slow, frustrating process, but by being included in the transformation, it’s much more exciting.

“Not only are we looking for founders that are all the things you would expect, like incredibly smart and motivated, and entrepreneurial, but are they also coachable? Are they also open to feedback?”

People Behind the Innovation

A big part of bringing forth innovation is being sure you’re working with the right people. Claudia explains, “With the startups who come into Techstars, we’re looking at the quality of the team as part of our application process. Not only are we looking for founders that are all the things you would expect, like incredibly smart and motivated, and entrepreneurial, but are they also coachable? Are they also open to feedback? Are they open to looking at data and making different decisions based on that?”

While there might be a few people named as responsible for innovation, “Innovation doesn’t happen in a bubble,” Claudia says. There needs to be buy-in across the organization. This widespread teamwork enlightens the innovators to new perspectives and creates space for everyone to be heard.

Bringing forward innovation in any big organization requires continued support from C-level folks. These conversations of innovation start at the higher level first, making sure you have that support, and then you can engage throughout the organization.

By including more people in the innovation process, you’re able to leverage assets and resources within the broader company. Claudia explained, “It’s just a matter of making sure that, again, you’re not acting within a bubble, or you’re not isolating yourself, that if there is a communications department, that you’re meeting with that communications department and saying, ‘How can you guys help me get this message across, or how could I be saying this in a better way?’”

It’s not just communication, but resources like finance, legal, sales, and other functions, so you’re not just hoping you come up with something great on your own — you’re working with a full team to build something new.

The surprising thing about the people in innovation is that the perspectives shared have the opportunity to turn a perceived failure into a different kind of success. Claudia shared her favorite story of this, the story of the Post-It note.

The creator of the Post-It note was someone working on an adhesive, and the first thing they thought was, “This isn’t working because it’s not sticking forever,” and someone else was able to look at it and say, “Well, actually, there are cases where I don’t want something to stick forever.” So while the creator had a different use in mind and thought the project a complete failure, someone else in the organization was able to look at it and say, “Hey, this is something I can use to make my life better,” and someone paid enough attention to that to actually have become Post-it notes.

Decide What You Want

With so many opportunities and directions for innovation to take us, how do we know which is the right way to go and where to focus? Claudia’s answer is simple: Depends on what you want and what you’re trying to do.

The opportunities are endless at Techstars, where Claudia is currently the managing director. The worldwide network is tapped into thousands of companies with thousands of founders and mentors who are working on innovation and new ideas. They measure all sorts of metrics for the businesses they work with: internal corporate metrics, the number of founders they gain access to, or even the amount of relationships made as a result. Every company, startup, or big corporation needs to ask themselves what they want from innovation efforts.

“If our real goal is we want to sell 20% more of this certain product, then we know we need to be more innovative about that product. Then that’s what you’re going to measure on. However, if you’re investing to say, ‘We believe there’s a potential for an existing line to be disrupted, can we come up with some ten ideas or 20 ideas that allow us to build a foundation?’ That answer depends on what the goal is, but whatever your goal is, it’s important that you have an understanding with the right stakeholders and that then you take steps to make sure that things are measurable.”

Claudia suggested that some of the best innovation efforts come from innovating from a solution that’s already sold to customers. To find these innovations, Claudia asks, “How are customers using the product now? Are they using it the way we thought they were or did they find a new use we haven’t thought of? How can we make that better?” This is innovation at work.

Fly Your Own Plane

Claudia first joined Techstars in Hartford to provide startups with counsel because she remembered what it was like when she started her company. She had little to no resources or support, and the idea that she could be part of that and help earlier stage companies was a great opportunity. She’s seen first hand in her startup as well as in big corporations how tricky integrating innovation can be. She emphasizes first addressing the irrational fear, and ask, “What does it look like to conquer our irrational fears of change or innovation in our work and lives and then lead others along in that process?”

Next, how do we include everyone in the process of innovation, making sure they are heard, and as a result, our ideas and perspectives are strengthened and grown? Through this, maybe we’ll even change a perceived failure into a huge success like Post-It notes.

It all starts with conquering our fears and inviting other people into the process. How will you get in the pilot’s seat today? What innovation can you bring forward?

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

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