Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was Shannon Stott.

Shannon Stott is the owner of Shannon Unlimited. She uses the elements of comedic improv, including storytelling and quick thinking, to help people become more dynamic speakers, deepen their engagement with clients and audiences, and strengthen team productivity.

Her presentation, “Stick to Your Shit,” focused on how individual success translates to group success. Shannon led the group through exercises to figure out how to realize body signals that either promote and hinder confidence.

She explained how personal hesitations translate negatively when facilitating: the audience does not trust a facilitator that hesitates, and the inability for a facilitator to identify uncertainty in a group prohibits them from successfully facilitating. To avoid this, one must be able to locate their hesitations and any that exist within a group they are leading.

Watch Shannon Stott’s talk “Stick to Your Shit”:

Read the Transcript

Shannon Stott:

All right, you all. I realized last night and in being here, I don’t like groups of people. I don’t like them. I don’t really want to encourage them. I don’t think we should gather. I think it’s a bad idea. It’s too bad that we’re all here doing the opposite thing that I want to see. But what I do love is individuals. I love individuals. I love you and you and you and you, and especially you with the camera. I love them, and I want to see you succeed. And when you succeed as an individual, you succeed as a group.

And when you can see success in your group, then the group succeeds. And then you can go off and love your group and they can love you. And you can leave me out of it. But I know that I sent you out well-armed to understand yourself and to understand others. What we’re going to do today is figure out in this group setting how to realize when I… Yesterday, I heard the word gremlins. Our body sends us signals, letting us know that we’re confident, right? Like this is a signal that I am confident. I feel very confident right now.

But there are other signals, and I heard someone call them gremlins, that come up in your mind when you’re just about to say something. You’re like, “Oh, I have a question or I have an idea. I have a thought. Nevermind. No. That person’s going to say it better than I can.” When we do these group games that we’re about to do, yes, please be involved, have your mind open to the group and what the group is experiencing, but keep that in the back of your head and keep yourself, your lovely self, in the forefront of your head.

Okay? Really understand what it is, what signals your body is sending you to see what it is that is promoting, yes, making you feel confident, and then keeping you from doing things that you wanted to do. So first, we are doing this. You’re going to stay at your group in your tables, and we’re going to do a pitch. Rhe pitch goes one word at a time. It could be a pitch for anything. Somebody is going to say, “There is a Coke that explodes,” and then you’re all going to go cha-ching, whatever, because it’s a winning pitch. All right?

But it’s one word at a time. And you have to put your hand into the center, say your one word. Once the group feels like it’s done, it’s a winning pitch, everybody goes, cha-ching! Let’s practice right now. Cha-ching! Excellent. All right. You’re going to go right now. Begin this game. Excellent. You’re doing great. Once you get your last cha-ching, you can sit down or stop playing your game. Yes, you’re doing good. You’re doing good. I’m going cha-ching you. We’re going to go five, four, three, two, one. Excellent.

I want you to remember how that felt for you. I want you to remember how that felt for you, specifically putting your hand in the game. Right? How did it feel putting your hand in the game? I will talk about it a little later. What I need right now is seven brave souls, seven brave participants to come up here. That’s one. That’s two. That’s three. That’s four, five, six, and seven. Let’s go. What you’re going to do, this is going to look very strange, you’re going to get in the line facing that way. You’re going to face this way, everybody.

Yep, that’s good. That’s good. That’s good. That’s good. Oh man, you guys are amazing. So amazing. What I want you to do is tell me a story. You’re going to start, Scott. Okay? You’re just going to start telling a story. You’re going to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk until the next person tags you out. You’re going to go to the back of the line, and you’re going to talk. You’re going to tag the same, the same. It’s the same story. The story stays the same. But what I need from you is the title of a story, huh? Anybody? Anybody? Purple elephants. Good.

Just in that moment, I need you to remember how you felt when I asked I need something from you and then you didn’t give it to me. Just remember how you felt. All right, here we go. Purple elephants. And begin.

Scott:

The purple elephants are how I know that I’m not crazy. Whenever I see the purple elephants in the back of the room, it’s what gives me the confidence to keep going and know that I’m not crazy. I’m actually here, I’m present, and as part of the room, because the purple elephants are the ones who would tell me if I was crazy.

Female:

And ever since I’ve met purple elephants, I’ve always known that we’re friends, because they’re big and fluffy and colorful. And sometimes they kind of fly. When I dream about them, they have like wings and they are flying around. And I think, how could they be trying to undermine my success? Would you tap me right now?

And maybe the way that they’re trying to undermine my success is by standing in the back of the room not saying anything. Kind of like she was standing behind me, not tapping me on the damn shoulder. But actually I know they really are there for my well-being. They’re like my secret allies nobody else knows are there. Like my brother’s best friend as a kid whose name was scotch tape. Nobody knew he was there either.

Yeah, I’m glad she’s really bringing up the positive aspect of purple elephants, because I’ve got a really good story. You see, most people are born brought by a stork. I was born delivered to my mother by a flying purple elephant. Whenever we say there’s a purple elephant in the room at my house, there really is an elephant in the living room at my house.

Shannon Stott:

Give them a round of applause. Yay! You almost got there. You almost got there. You guys can sit down. I love that you were up here. Thank you. But my point was in front of me. I need you to think back at that moment where you were sticking your hand into the center of the table. Yes? And I need you to partner that with this look. Who saw this on stage? Who saw that? Raise your hand if you saw that. Right, right, right now. I’m not picking on you, but this is what we’re here to talk about.

Remember that and remember how you were doing the same thing when you were listening to the one word, you’re listening at your table to one word, and you’re standing there with your hand like this. And you’re like, “No, they’ve got it. No, that’s just fine. I won’t stick my… Now, now I’ll say hippopotamus.” Right? Right? There is a signal that your body is sending you to tell you, you’ve got this. And when you ignore that signal, you tell your team and your group that you are untrustworthy and that your message is not clear, right?

That we can disregard that message that you’re saying. This idea. All right. Remember that in your body. This is what I want you to do right now. We are going to get seven more people up here, and it’s going to be different. It’s a different thing. Yep. One, two, three, four, five. I need five. Do I hear six? Six more people. Just one more people make six. Six, and then I need one more person. That’s right. You’re my person. Excellent. You’re not going to stand in the line. You don’t have to talk. You don’t need this.

I’ll take that for me. It’s very pretty though. What you’re going to do is jumble up. Just jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble. Find a space on the stage. Find a space on the stage. Find a space on the stage and stop. Great. What you’re going to do is you’re going to move this banana, move this banana without moving your feet from here to that table. All right? From here to that… Everybody needs to touch it. Now, this is the thing, what you’re looking at on the stage, what you’re looking at on the stage is a machine.

You’re not just going to move it with your hands. Boring. Nobody wants to watch that, right? What we want to see is you make noise and act a machine. If it were me playing, but I’m not going to play because that’s not my job today, I might do something like this and pass my banana. That’s what I’m going to start saying now, pass your banana, right? You’re going to pick a movement and a sound. You’re going to pick a movement and on and on and on. You ready? Give them a round of applause to our machine. Excellent. And let’s count them down, three, two, one.

Excellent. I need this banana back. All right, so jumble up on stage. Jumble up. Jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, jumble, and stop. Great. You’re going to do the exact same thing except now you are going to be silent. Okay? You’re going to think a little bit about you’re just going to be silent. You don’t need to move. You don’t need to make any noise. You’re just going to pass the banana. Just pass the banana. There you go. Think hard about who you’re going to pass it to.

That’s right. How are you going to get the banana? It’s really exciting, you guys. You guys having a good time watching this? Good. Good. I’ll take it. I’ll take it. Yes. Give them a round of applause. Now you’re done. You’re done with that. You’re done. You’re the machine. You’re finished. The banana represents the message, right? The banana represents the message. Which one was more dynamic? Which machine was more dynamic?

Female:

The first one.

Shannon Stott:

The first one. Why?

Female:

There was movement.

Shannon Stott:

Right.

Female:

Creativity.

Shannon Stott:

Yes.

Female:

Sound.

Shannon Stott:

Right. And when we see people doing things that their body is telling them, I can do this, when we work as a machine, this idea, it’s not necessarily the sound and the movement, it’s the confidence in making the sound and the movement. It’s the confidence to say, “It’s okay. I’m still here with you. We’re all doing this together. And I can pass this banana. I can pass my message with you.” Right? When we take that away from ourselves, by being quiet, not speaking up, this motion, or hesitating, right? We lose our message. We lose our banana.

Our banana gets eaten by banana, by banana. All right. This last thing that I want you to do is this. You are going to play rock, paper, scissors. It’s easy. Oh my gosh. Look at this, five minutes of time. I can just walk around. It’s really nice. You’re going to play rock, paper, scissors. When you play rock, paper, scissors, it’s you and a partner. It goes rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Yes? Rock, paper, scissors, shoot. Don’t play any other weird rules. All right? You’re going to go rock, paper, scissors, shoot. And then when you lose, you’re going to immediately cheer for that person.

Thank you, Solomon. You’re going to immediately cheer for your partner. That partner, the winner is going to go and find another winner, and they’re going to play rock, paper, scissors. Do you understand? Until this whole room only has two people playing rock, paper, scissors. One side, one person has a team of people cheering them on, and the other side has a team of people cheering them on. Have I made myself clear? Everyone knows how to play rock, paper, scissors? Let’s do this. All right. Find a partner and do it.

Thank you. Thank you. That’s right. All right. Are we good? Did we feel the energy? Here’s what I want you to take away from that. When you are playing rock, paper, scissors, you are not hesitating. Okay? There is a moment where your body tells you nothing. It doesn’t say anything. Your body knows that you need to get a rock, paper, or scissors. And I implore you, ask your body to rock, paper, scissor you during your workshops, facilitating moments, what have you.

When you can get your body to tell you this, this or this, these are the three decisions or the three things that we need to do, then your message is clear. You know that you have to throw a rock, a paper, a scissor. You have to say yes. You have to say no. Whatever decision you have to make, you can make it. And that is what I’m asking you. One, to make the decision for yourself.

Two, to notice in other people in your group when they are hesitant in either to volunteer for something, ask a question, ask or have an idea, notice it in those people so that you can be a better facilitator, so you can bring out the quiet person, the person who’s in the back of the room, the person who is not playing rock, paper, scissors. They are disengaged for whatever reason. When you can notice in yourself when you are hesitating and overcome that, then your audience will trust you, your message will be clear, and you will have a better time.

And I won’t have to do this anymore. Thank you so much for having me. Congratulations to the winner, Douglas. Thank you.

The post Stick to Your Shit appeared first on Voltage Control.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was Hailey Temple, the Services Lead at MURAL.

Hailey’s presentation focused on designing online meetings for “distributed people with a purpose.”

Through an interactive activity, she explained that the reason online meetings feel weird is that there is a disconnect among participants. To combat this, Hailey offered several ways to bring participants together in online meetings, including defining why the meeting is online, keeping the meeting short and straightforward, incorporating icebreakers, and using MURAL’s concept posters to help individuals organize ideas during the session.

Watch Hailey Temple’s talk “Designing Online Meetings for Distributed People with Purpose”:

Read the Transcript

Hailey Temple:

Thank you. Oh my goodness. Hi everybody. This is wonderful. All right. So we’re nearing at the end of our time together today in this wonderful home space for facilitators. So I wanted to give everyone one last chance to make a connection with somebody in the room. Maybe someone you haven’t gotten the chance to talk to yet, you’ve wanted to, but just been super busy. So what I’d like you to do is stand up. You’ve been sitting for a while, shake it out and do like some jumping jacks. Go for it, shake it out. All right. And what I’m going to give you is 20 seconds to meet somebody in this room you haven’t talked to yet, but you’re not going to introduce yourself as you. You are going to introduce yourself as your alter ego. It could be your superhero name. It could be you after a couple of drinks at the bar. It doesn’t matter. Think about it 20 seconds, go.

It sounds like a lot of you guys are doing this already, but take a moment and share something meaningful with that person. Maybe a reflection about today, something that surprised you, but take a moment, maybe like 30 seconds and share that with one another.

Now, your final part for this. I want you to turn around and face back to back with your new friend, your new alter ego friends. Back to back. Yep, perfect, just like this. And I want you to continue sharing, if you haven’t already, share that meaningful moment with them for 30 more seconds. Go ahead.

Now you can have a seat. Go back to your seats if you haven’t already. All right, so I want to take a moment and just kind of like unpack that. And also you can introduce your real name if you haven’t already, or you can just keep yourself mysterious, that’s fine too.

 So how was that? Fun, playful, interesting. Okay. Tell me why.

Speaker 2:

The altar ego was really fun. Something really quick that wasn’t actually me but was still part of me.

Hailey Temple:

Yeah, awesome.

Speaker 2:

That inspired to think and do… Go on a similar track.

Hailey Temple:

Nice. Cool. What else? What about that face to face and then turn around? How was that for you guys?

Speaker 3:

More intimate?

Hailey Temple:

More intimate? Which one was more intimate?

Speaker 3:

The back to back.

Hailey Temple:

Okay, interesting. Tell me why.

Speaker 3:

Well, it’s like you’re kind of touching each other’s back, and you kind of have to get close so you can hear each other. So you’re not facing in this interaction. So its actually like a secret .

Hailey Temple:

Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. Very cool. All right. Anything else?

Speaker 4:

I thought the back to back was awkward [inaudible 00:03:23].

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Hailey Temple:

And you’re like, you don’t know this person, you don’t even know their real name. It’s like this weirdo. All right. Thank you guys. I think I love the different insights. That’s a really interesting one about the intimacy piece. But I think that a lot of us think about online meetings, like how you mentioned is, they’re kind of awkward. We talk about face to face and we love being able to help build connections with people and establish the sense of trust. And then I think realizing a lot of our talks today, the reason that online meetings feel weird a lot of times is we feel that sense of broken connection between people. And honestly, as facilitators… I’m going to shift this over. Nope, I’m not cool. We feel like this. We fucking hate online meetings a lot, and we hate facilitating them. And I really can’t blame anybody for not liking online meetings because how many of us have been in a meeting and we’re trying to build that trust, that connection for people. And someone’s going to say, “Oh, I have this really great idea.”

“Sorry, your wifi is disconnected, trying to reconnect you now.” And you’re like, “Cool, great, thanks.” That completely breaks. That sense of trust, that connection, that momentum that we’ve built with people in that session. And we kind of want to do this, you can feel like we’re on Swanson, like fuck all this, we’re going to just throw it away, goodbye.

But how many of us have also been asked to host an online meeting? To facilitate one? A lot of us here. Oh yeah, this guy can’t come, can you just do it online? No, I really can’t. But let’s face it. We have more of these online meetings. We’re working in an online world and we can either choose to say no and defer, or we can evolve. Evolve, how we practice, evolve our craft, evolve our mindsets. And today, I want to share some nuggets of wisdom with you from my experience, facilitating lots of online meetings, honestly messing up facilitating a lot of online meetings and then gracefully recovering and like, I’m fine, and share that with you today. But before I do, I need you to let go, let go the feeling that online meetings are the ugly stepsister to face-to-face meetings, because online meetings really have an important place in this world. We talk about diversity. It brings people together from different perspectives on a problem to solve it together when they can’t be the same room. It reduces the amount of time we’re traveling to face-to-face meeting, so think about fewer greenhouse gas emissions, more time spent at home with our loved ones.

So if you’re ready to evolve with me, let go of that feeling. Let me share some ways that we can evolve how we meet online and build meetings with purpose.

First, we can define why we’re really meeting online. Priya Parker’s book, buy it over there, it’s amazing, the Art of Gathering, opens with a really simple question, why do we… It says gather, I promise. Gather. I love this question. I ask it for all of my meetings because I use that response to shift how I’m going to build that agenda, how I’m going to design that experience. And just like we need to evolve, this question needs an evolution for an online world. Why do we really gather online? Why online? Maybe it’s because there’s no more budget for the company to have people traveling to meet face to face, so online meetings are the only option. Why online? Maybe because an executive needs to be in one continent and we need to be in another side of the world having our meeting together, but the team still needs to make important decisions for the next quarter. Why online? Maybe there are no more conference rooms for your team to meet. And I’ve been there a lot before, and suddenly you have to figure out how to still get that work done.

 So think about maybe some online meetings you’ve had this past month or so. Did you know why you were really meeting online? Have you ever asked someone who you’re facilitating a meeting for why it’s happening online? It isn’t always obvious. But sooner we ask and not the better, we are prepared to design an experience that considers those dynamics and considers the mindsets and feelings of the people in that digital space.

Next, we can keep it short and simple. The technology and the methods. I can guarantee you, people are not meeting online for you to do a lengthy technology demo, and to go through all the little nuances of how this tech works. I think in face to face meetings, we rely a lot on meeting norms that have been established through our world. We have to help people have a seat, stand up, write something, peel the sticky note. But in online meetings, we’re inviting people into this new and really uncomfortable space. And even if it’s just for an hour long meeting, it kind of disorients them. But as facilitators, we have the ability to help people build confidence, to feel really excited to work together. And we also have the ability to help people who might feel uncertain get or even resistant, build that confidence and have this foundation to start collaborating with People.

First, I like to start with giving people only the need to know information to accomplish a first task in a meeting. So I refer mural, it’s a digital and visual collaboration tool. And when I invite somebody into the tool for the first time, I tell them two things, know how to navigate in and out, zoom in and out of a space like this, which is called a canvas. It gives them a sense of place in a pretty crazy online space. And I tell them how to add and contribute content through sticky notes. That’s it. Don’t worry about anything else going on on the side. Focus on the meetings and the conversations we’re having today.

 I also like to give people a little digital desk, because if I launched you into this giant canvas, it’s daunting. Where do we start? But if I give someone a desk, it’s a little home base for them to start feeling comfortable to contribute to the conversation. So you can see, I add pictures, I add some blank sticky notes for them to add in. I’ll add their names. It’s a space for them to feel comfortable to come back to if they’re daunted by the work.

Remember, we are hired. Our job is to help create meaningful discussions, not to teach people the technology. So the shorter and simpler, the better

As facilitators. We also need to make time for play as much as the work because the playtime gives people a chance to establish connections, it creates trust, it builds energy is needed. So how do we do that today in meetings, in face-to-face meetings?

Speaker 5:

Icebreakers.

Hailey Temple:

Icebreakers. Yeah, exactly. Energizers, warmups. And they are awesome for online meetings because we need those connections when there’s a huge barrier of a laptop in front of you or whatever. But they also are kind of like your little facilitator hack. I talked about creating confidence and giving people kind of like a base to work off of. And warmups are a really low risk exercise to get people engaged and to start working.

 So at Mural, we have an example of this is, we have online meetings with over 100 people. We have company all hands. And so they look a lot like this. They’re pretty chaotic. It’s a lot of floating heads. But we need to get people focused on the task at hand for that day and into the tool to start working. So here’s a warm-up we used recently in an all hands meeting. We invited everybody into this canvas and we said, share what shoes you’re wearing today. Put it in the canvas and tell us what they say about you. But I want to make sure people knew how to behave in this technology with the canvas too. So I took a picture of my shoes, in this case, I was wearing these compression socks. I put them in the canvas and I said, “Here, add a sticky note with your name, add another one of what these shoes say about you. And in my case, I said, “I’m a 95 year old woman trapped in a 20 somethings body.” So true.

And so people did stumble. It took some time at first, but it was pretty incredible to see what we were able to create together in just a couple of minutes. And honestly, I’d rather they were struggling this little easy warmup then later on, when we’re making really essential decisions together as a team.

It also creates a really fun element of play. You can see we literally enjoy trolling each other at Murals, and people are like, “Those are Lucas’s ugly ass feet.” We actually found out one of our designers in Argentina makes her own shoes and she wants to launch a shoe line someday. And so those are incredible moments that we don’t get with people around the world when we’re not able to meet between coffee breaks or at a water cooler or something. So play creates those moments and opportunities for us.

You can also use the time between meetings. So I’m talking about real-time work and asynchronous work. People think that since I’m a remote worker, I must work insane hours of waking up at 3:00 AM to meet with people around the world, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how my team gets work done between and during meetings. So we’re planning an event and my team wants to get together to have important discussions about the events that we want to launch. So we scheduled one hour for us to meet at a time that was convenient for everybody to answer those essential questions. Why have this event? How do we think you want to accomplish this event? How is this going to help the company accomplish their goals?

About 15 minutes before the meeting ended, I gave the team homework. I said, “We have kind of a scaffolding for this event. Now I want you to create your vision for what this event should look like, and we’re going to share this event vision when we come back together.”

So I shared the instructions with the team. I said complete this before the next meeting. And if people had questions for me between meetings, they could ask me on Slack or just reach out for help, and we could jump on a call together.

In the next meeting, I was able to have everyone present their concept posters, this is called a concept poster, share out what their vision was with the team, and have the rest of the group capture feedback. So you can see those little digital desks there for people to share feedback.

So real-time work and asynchronous work is an essential part of working with distributed people, because it considers the fact that people don’t always have their most creative moments when they’re in that meeting. If someone’s working at 8:00 PM and someone else’s working at 8:00 AM, they might not be at their creative best. So if you use the time between meetings, you give people a chance to step back, reflect and bring their best creative work forward.

Finally, I love online meetings because they are the place to work visually. Visuals tell stories. Visuals clarify concepts for people. But I believe the visuals belong in every part of an online meeting, and here’s why. First of all, people have incredibly short attention spans in meetings. I have multi-tasked in a lot of my online meetings. Have any of you done that? I think we’re pretty much all guilty of it, it happens. And so I like to create an online meeting experience that’s more engaging.

Imagine I invited you into a meeting and the agenda looked like this. What story am I telling you? Can you see the direction, the flow of this meeting we’re going to have today? It’s much more immersive and engaging for someone to sit through and collaborate in something like this, versus a boring PowerPoint or word document.

 I also love to use visuals to show versus tell. So in all of my meetings, I try and capture gifs or gifs, if you’re a psychopath, to show people how to work in the tool. And this saves me a lot of time explaining mechanics of the tool, but also again, shows people how to behave in this online world.

We also have visuals because they’re responsive. We don’t really have control anymore over how people can join our meetings. And I think visuals are a really powerful way to anchor people in a conversation. I love the lightening decision jam, if you guys have seen this before, this sailboat analogy, because it really… No pun intended, anchors people around the conversation across different devices.

 I believe that as facilitators, we are creating stories. We’re creating stories where we have the opportunity to lead people through an experience, and we get to have these characters go in and out of this experience with us. And we have the choice to make that a textbook or an awesome engaging, colorful picture book in our meetings.

 So when I talk about evolution, these aren’t breakthrough crazy things. I think I’m taking a lot of what’s been talked about today and just trying to flip it, adapt it into an online world. And I really believe that that’s my… What I contribute to the craft of facilitation that we’re all here to enjoy and celebrate and to learn from.

 So when you have an online meeting, maybe the next week or month, I want to challenge you to think about how you can evolve your practice. Because when we keep it short and simple, we reduce the barriers for people to jump in and get engaged. When we make time for play, we create a chance for connection. When we use the time between, we consider that people have different creative bests at different times of the day. And we work visually, recreate stories and lead people through an experience.

So I couldn’t share all of my nuggets today with you, but if you’re curious and excited to learn more about online facilitation, you can come up to me, you can check out these references here, I wrote a blog post about this a little bit more too, and we have a facilitator’s guide over at the Mural desk for you to keep exploring this space.

 But guys, if we are going to continue facilitating meetings and controlling the room, let’s evolve together. Thank you.

The post Designing Online Meetings for Distributed People with Purpose appeared first on Voltage Control.

Please join us for the Control the Room 2021, which will be held Feb. 2-4, 2020. You can find out more and buy tickets here.

This is part of the 2020 Control The Room speaker video series.

In February we hosted the second annual facilitator summit, Control The Room, at Austin’s Capital Factory. We launched the summit last year in partnership with MURAL to create a space for facilitators to gather, break down the silos, and learn from one another.

The three-day summit is a rare opportunity to bring together an otherwise unlikely group of highly experienced and skilled professionals across various industries and crafts—from strategy consultants and negotiators to Scrum Masters and design thinkers.

Anyone interested in deepening their knowledge on how to successfully facilitate meaningful meetings and connect with other practitioners is welcome. Together, we dive into diverse methodologies, expand upon perspectives, and learn new insights and strategies that enrich our expertise.

This year we had the pleasure of welcoming 24 speakers, all innovation professionals, who shared their insights and strategies of successful facilitation.

One of those speakers was John Fitch, the Chief Product Officer at Voltage Control and Co-author of Time Off.

 John spoke about the importance of rest in facilitation practices.

He presented on rest ethic and the importance it plays in the facilitation of culture. Through breathing activities, John demonstrated the ebb and flow of work and rest ethic and how to navigate and balance them in our own lives and professional practices.

Each inhale represented work ethic: how to get things done, execute, coordinate, manage, and fulfill tasks and duties.

Each exhale represented rest ethic: space for deep, internal work, expanded awareness, creativity, and time off. He explained that we need both ethics to avoid burnout and help individuals be effective facilitators for their companies.

John challenged the room to apply their rest ethic more in workshops and business culture.

Watch John Fitch’s talk “Rest Ethic in Facilitation Culture”:

Read the Transcript

John Fitch:

Sweet. So I’m sorry. You thought you were signing up for a facilitator summit, at least with my talk. Welcome to Workaholics Anonymous. I’m a recovering workaholic and this whole talk is around that topic. So everyone please stand. Let’s move those blood vessels.

And on a count of three, we’re going to take a deep breath. You’re going to hold your breath. So one, two, three. Deep inhale and hold. Okay. Hold as long as you possibly can. The moment you have to exhale, you sit down. This is a competition of sorts. Don’t feel bad if you have to exhale, but right now you’re holding. After you have to let it out, your exhale, just sit down. We’ll see who’s got the tightened lungs. Dang. Dang. Dang. Some of y’all are impressive.

We have some like Wim Hoff practitioners in here. Okay. Okay. Okay. Exhale. Exhale. Cool. Cool. Okay. Now real quick. We’re going to do like Solomon did this morning, a big inhale as a group.

Hold for three, two, one, group exhale. Ah, nice, nice. Good stuff. So that picture that I showed at the beginning was a moment in Greece that really changed my life where I had this epiphany that inhale and exhale is of course the duality of breath, yin yang with fung shui. I looked at it as inhale is our work ethic. exhale is our rest ethic and both are needed.

And our work ethic is where we get shit done. We coordinate, we manage, we email, we make, we fulfill and I’ve worked a lot in building AI applications. And most of these things about work ethic are being handed over to the machines, in my opinion, for the better, because what we don’t know how to automate and the genius of our humanity is in our rest ethic. It’s ideation, it’s human connection. It’s having that sudden epiphany. To Justin’s point. We don’t have ideas, ideas have us. And when we’re in a rested state, we’re an open channel.

So both of these are needed just like you have to inhale and you have to exhale. Very rarely do you have a perfect balance like this. For most people, this is what’s going on. For some people, they find a way to have an interesting back and forth on a micro sense of inhale, exhale, work ethic, rest ethic.

This is my preferred state. Very focused, deep work, expanded creativity and time off, which I consider the most important work actually. But the reality is most of us tend to forget the importance of the exhale and before we know it, boom, we’re burned out. Aside from that feeling real shitty, we can’t tap into the benefits of rest ethic. We can do all the hard work, but have nothing actually work.

Anyone read any of these books? Raise your hand. There’s some good ones up there. So again. So again, red background. These are books about work ethic, super important. All these work. Some of the methods I’ve even practiced, but then there’s a few books you can find, they’re hard to find that are around rest ethic, but there’s not enough of them.

So I spent the last year and a half adding to that part of Barnes and Noble. And it’s important because again, why are we burning out? It’s because we’re forgetting to exhale. We’re forgetting our rest ethic. In the book, we look at people throughout history and modern times that literally emphasize it’s a part, it’s their first step of strategy is leading with rest ethic. Brunello Cucinelli, half a billion dollar fashion, empire, 90 minute lunch, no emails after 5:30 PM. Cultural allowance for everyone in the company. Doing well and also making a significant amount of money that he calls it, investing in human dignity.

You’ve got ancient composers who went on forest walks and that’s where they were the open channel for the song and the supplies modern times. We have Terry Rudolph there at the bottom left. He’s one of the leading experts in quantum computing. Rest ethic was the first thing their entire company of scientists emphasized because he says, “If we’re just doing what everyone else is doing, how are we going to make ourselves different?”

So they have group runs. They go on off sites and go traveling together for the sake of traveling, knowing that the gift of it will be a breakthrough idea that’s going to push the way we handle computing. I want to make the point that just like these people, we all here in this room are facilitators of culture. That could be facilitators of our company’s culture about we handle vacation time or time off.

Also, when we are hosting people in a workshop, you facilitate that culture there too. Are you giving them enough breaks? Are you ending maybe what feels like a little too early? That might be the right thing so that they can show up the next day with enthusiasm. So first let’s discuss rest ethic. Who in the room finds rest through creating art of some kind? Please stand up.

Awesome. What do you make? What do you make?

Speaker 2:

I’m a gardener.

John Fitch:

You’re a gardener? What does that do for you?

Speaker 2:

Connects me to the earth and to possibility, growth.

John Fitch:

Teach me how to have a green thumb. I could use it.

Speaker 2:

Attention.

John Fitch:

Attention. Attention. Thank you. Thank you. Please take a seat. Stand if you’re someone who finds rest in sweating, getting the heart rate up. Awesome. Wendy, what does that do for you?

Wendy:

It gives me a sense of connection. Not only with others, sense of connection with others. Also just it taps into the neurons in your brain and body that allow you to feel more joy in the world.

John Fitch:

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Please sit again. You’re getting your squats in. So Chris doesn’t have to run around when you speak, just speak loud. Who takes forest baths? Stand up. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a Japanese term around just walking in nature aimlessly. Okay, great. What does that do for you?

Speaker 4:

Calms my heart, mind and soul.

John Fitch:

Calms your heart, mind and soul. Beautiful. Also leaves you smelling a little nice and natural. Please take a seat. My most favorite one is who shuts it down. You have some strict rules of when you turn the phone on airplane mode or you know when to end work and you really end work. Stand up if you know how to shut it down, that’s your way to find rest. Cam, why is that important? What happens when you do that?

Cam:

Communication is exhausting and I love just sitting down.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Thank you. Please take a seat. Who travels for inspiration? They make it a point to get out of town. Hank what does that do for you?

Hank:

I think a change of scenery allows you to kind of just see things in a different way so that when you go back to your usual surrounding, you [inaudible 00:08:34].

John Fitch:

Nice, nice. A new environment, new ideas, lovely. Stay seated, stay seated, please sit. All right, and stand up if you felt burned out lately. I’m like if I could stand up even more, I would. I’ve been more burned out than usual. You’re not alone. Even as a person who’s writing and thinking a lot about this, I still get burned out and thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that. But the good news is those who just stood up, you also stood up in some of the other categories, so you know what to do. Please take a seat.

 So what we’re going to do now is I’m going to play one of my favorite songs. And it’s just like, for me, channels some really awesome ideas. And what you’re going to do on a piece of paper is in two minutes, I want you to think about the thing that gives you the most rest. That’s the first part.

So maybe you take 30 seconds or a minute. You could draw that out. You could write it as a phrase. And then I want you to think about as a facilitator of culture, of workshops, of teams, of loved ones, how can you incorporate that more? Because you know the value of it. Does anyone have any clarifying questions about this task? Chris, play that song.

But I want to finish with an important question. Has anyone read this book? The Top Five Regrets Of The Dying by Bronnie Ware? So she worked in palliative care. This is a very powerful book. She’s helped guide thousands of people to their crossover, into the other realm. And there’s a lot of wisdom in this book. And one of the top five regrets of the dying is I wish I wouldn’t have worked so hard.

Time off. Exhale. Rest ethic can help with this, but the other four, it can help with as well. So you could have been true to yourself. The things that you just talked about at your table, that’s you. That’s really who you are. That’s your creative genius. Do more of that. It will feed into your work. You can catch up with others, have the human connection. The rest ethic is to not only help you as a facilitator not have regrets, but everyone that you facilitate, you don’t want them being case studies in this book.

They have the opportunity now to prevent that. Our book comes out next month. You can find more about it. We have a podcast too, timeoffbook.com as Daniel says, had to put out some shameless promo. Time Off literally works. One of my jobs is building products for facilitators. Control The Room is the summit. It’s now a product brand to build physical and digital tools for all of us in the room.

And we’ve been doing a lot of work on the digital side. Most of my background’s in software, no problem there, but when Douglas was like, “We need to make some physical products for people,” I was hitting my head against the wall, like where’s creativity? And my partner, Sarah, hey, gorgeous. She helps me not be a hypocrite.

 I’m guilty of only inhaling. And she’s really good at saying, “Hey, this weekend let’s have a tech Shabbat. Phones are off. Airplane mode. Away.” And when I did that, when I took that time off, I did things like catch up with Thich Nhat Hanh’s how to series. This great approachable Buddhist series on how to eat, how to walk, how to love, how to fight. And then I also tapped into my inner child and played with some Legos and built some stuff. And none of that felt like work.

But those two things combined allowed us to come up with one of our physical products series, which is the Control Of The Room handbook series, which is open to all facilitators to work with us so that less in a month’s time, you can take one of your methods and publish. If publishing a book’s intimidating, we’ve built a system to help you. And if it wasn’t for Time Off, I would not have done my job of coming up with some of our new physical products. So Time Off I think is some of the most important work that you will do.

Let’s keep it calm. Let’s exhale. More blue than red. It’s not a Crips, Blood thing, but inhale, exhale, but thank you. And thank you for also holding so much space all you speakers. Again, that was a big exhale last night was us all realizing we’re all just as flawed. We all deal with the same stuff. And I feel more confident as a facilitator just by holding space together and being able to know that there’s other people that have a shared experience and you all deserve rest. Don’t forget that. Thank you.

The post Rest Ethic in Facilitation Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

First I’d like to thank our speakers. Without them and the brilliant content they prepared and shared on Tuesday, we would not have had a successful event. Our volunteers were incredible and certainly kept my stress levels low! Thank you, Scott, Enrique, Kim, Chloe, Chandler, Alan, and Josh. I would also like to thank the Voltage Control facilitators. The facilitated networking sessions were a big hit, and I’m grateful that Anna, Jane, Daniel, and Reagan were able to help make that a reality.

A big thanks to all of our sponsors. They were all a pleasure to work with, and I hope you have an opportunity to work with them. I’ve included them at the bottom of this post.

It was an absolute pleasure working with Peter from CTO Connection. If you have an opportunity to check out one of his other summits, I highly encourage it. He’s an outstanding guy and puts on a super event.

“To get over 100 senior engineering leaders in a room for the inaugural conference was an incredible feat.” — Peter Bell, CTO Connection

For those of you that weren’t able to make it to the Summit, I’ve collected a few quotes from attendees and wrote a quick overview of each of the presentations. I hope you enjoy

“I’ve been waiting several years for an event like this in Austin. The conversations and presentations were great, and I’m already looking forward to next year!” — RC Johnson

RC Johnson is the manager of Indeed Labs and member of Austin Technology Executives. Tracing things back, one could argue that he’s the reason I know Peter. He introduced me to the New York CTO School and then years later I followed a CTO School posting about the NASDAQ CTO Summit which is how I met Peter. RC was the first person to register for the 2018 Summit and promised me that he’d be the first to register for the 2019 Austin CTO Summit.

“Great combination of networking, content, and presenters. The format was engaging with nice, short talks, and packed a ton of intel.” — Allen Darnell

The structure of the 2018 Austin CTO Summit consisted of blocks of 3 20-minute talks followed by a break. There were a total of 5 blocks, 2 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon.

Jim Colson — Designing, Engineering, and Delivering Products for a Full Lifecycle of Engagement

Jim Colson, who recently retired as CTO of IBM Watson Customer Engagement, is currently advising startups on technology and business strategy. Jim talked us through a model of how to think about users and where a specific set of users are in their overall journey through your engagement lifecycle. I enjoyed his concise and accurate definition of the difference between product and offering. He encouraged us to consider how we might improve our customer experience by thinking about offerings rather than fixating at the product level.

“The Austin CTO Summit was an incredible event of information exchange, networking, and insights across both large and small companies. It is extremely valuable for any CTO and I am already looking forward to the next one.” — Jim Colson

Lynn Pausic & Chris LaCava — Vital Role of Humans in Machine Learning

Lynn and Chris of Expero warned us of the dangers of using bias data to train your ML models. They presented a case study in which their client was interested in a decision support system for determining creditworthiness. When training their model, they used income levels and inadvertently discovered that there was a major bias against loans for women. This is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a bit, and Chris mentioned something that I hadn’t considered yet. As AI becomes more ubiquitous and models are white labeled, developers without the statistical skills to identify or address issues are using these models will start to use them without understanding their origins and it will be critical that bias is easily exposed and mitigated.

“The intermingled networking exercises were a great way to connect with the many tech leaders who attended. I’m looking forward to 2019 Austin CTO Summit”- Enrique Ortiz

Cynthia Maxwell — Keeping Your Team in the Flow

I first discovered Cynthia Maxwell when I read “Track and Facilitate Your Engineers’ Flow States In This Simple Way”, an article she published on First Round. I enjoyed the article, and the concept stuck with me. As Peter and I began recruiting speakers, I reached out to Cynthia to invite her to speak. I was delighted when she accepted. Her presentation further elaborated on the concepts in her article. My favorite part was when she pointed out that many engineers are not accustomed to or trained on giving negative feedback. This simple visual feedback mechanism can be used to as a starting point to tease out more critical detail.

“The first Austin CTO Summit felt like an event that had already hit its stride — I look forward to seeing how much better the next one will be! “— Bryon Jacob

After Cynthia’s talk, Anna Jackson lead the room through our first of 5 facilitated networking exercises. The audience totally embraced this and the room erupted with conversation. As the exercise wrapped up, the energy spilled into the hallway and we took our first break of the day.

Bryon Jacob — Seeds of Scale — Lessons For Startups Learned Through Growth

Bryon Jacob, CTO of data.world, spent many years at HomeAway where he saw the company scale from 30 people to 2000 people and acquire 30 other companies. Upon reflecting on those years at HomeAway, there were decisions he appreciated and decisions he wished he could go back and change. When founding data.world Bryon sought to repeat the good ones and avoid the bad ones. His talk shared some of this wisdom. One of my favorites was the idea that technical debt is a measure of uncertainty.

“Bryon’s talk featuring his “definition of done” criteria was clear and concise, perfect for sharing with my team. It will provide a great reference for assessing and formalizing our “done” criteria here at Capson Technology.” — Scott Artman

Vikas Parikh — M&A and Technology

Vikas works with business leaders to help who are buying, selling or reshaping a company. He offered the audience a bit of perspective into the M&A market and the things you should consider. His advice is to think far in advance and be prepared for the inevitable day.

“The short, fast-paced presentations revealed connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, opening up tons of new possibilities for me!” — Marcus Blankenship

Will Ballard — Scaling Self-Directed Development

I would hazard to say that Will’s talk was the most provocative. My pal and resident complexity junky, Daniel summed it up the best when he summarized Will’s talk as a case for disintermediation. Will presented and practices a system where all projects are approved based on the business merits and income potential. There are no estimates or deadlines enforced, and his team selects the projects they want to work on. Perhaps the most intriguing to me was Will’s comment that his system resulted in nearly 0 employee churn which was a problem due to lack of new ideas that typically come from new hires.

“It’s not often that CTOs get to take a step back from their day to day to learn from each other and be inspired. Austin CTO Summit did just that. Bravo” ~ Etienne de Bruin, Founder 7CTOs

After Will, Jane Westfall led us through another set of networking and lunch was served. During lunch, we provided supplies and topics for lean coffee. Attendees ate lunch while discussing a familiar topic with a dash of structure to keep things moving.

Heather Rivers — Lessons from the Black Box

I saw Heather Rivers give this talk at the NASDAQ CTO Summit last December. I enjoyed it so much that I asked her to come talk in Austin. She presented about the flight record which, once introduced, allowed officials to understand the root cause of airline crashes. These issues and the system implemented to solve them can be directly applied to software teams.

“Today, the day after the event, I was able to apply what I learned from Heather Rivers’ talk on Crew Resource Management and the communication model she proposed. Effective and timely information — I am looking forward to next year.” — Boyd Hemphill

Vivek Sagi — How to Dive Deep & Mechanisms to Help you Scale your Tech Org

Vivek began by pointing out that diving deep is easy when managing one team. We have tools like standups, 1:1s, design reviews, retrospectives, and demos. Then he posed the question: how do we replicate this for larger organizations? He presented a perspective that most leaders operate within the organization and product scope and never diving deeper down into the component level. He provided six mechanisms for diving deeper. My favorite was his warning to pay close attention to anecdotes. He recommends to assume anecdotes are correct and look for data to prove/disprove them.

I saw that there is increasing awareness of the importance of measuring the progress of software development teams and the obstacles they face more carefully and more rigorously. “— Eddie Reyes

Marcus Carey — If I Only Had A CEO

Marcus definitely racked up the most laughs. Marcus is the CEO of ThreatCare and told us the story of his struggles as a technical founder and not always getting the support and encouragement he deserved in the role of CEO. Through the lens of the Wizard of Oz, Marcus walked us through his advice on running companies. He also left us with a few book recommendations including the fifth agreement.

“Enjoyed many of the talks and got some interesting takeaways on how others are currently approaching diversity, metrics, and culture.”-Boris Portman

Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez — Toughest Words a CTO Says : Hold on the Code

Cherise provided a perspective on user testing and customer validation. As a Design Sprint facilitator and believer in user testing and solution validation, Cherise was preaching to the choir. I did find it new and interesting that she presented this work from the perspective of a CTO who was itching to write code and build things yet knew it was in the best interest of the company to pump the brakes and wait for more certainly on WHAT to build.

“ The support from the audience was overwhelmingly positive and I couldn’t have asked for anything more.” — Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez

Meetesh Karia — Diversity in Team and Thought At The Zebra

Meetesh is an active member of the Austin Technology Executives group and often volunteers to run things when I’m out of town. I had encouraged him to start speaking publicly more often, and I was excited to host him at the CTO Summit this year. He absolutely killed it. I heard from numerous people that this was their favorite talk. He gave many actionable tactics utilized at the Zebra to improve their diversity numbers including working with Andela and adopting a policy that any candidate with an underrepresented background got an automatic pass on the first round.

“It is clear to me that the technical leaders of our generation deeply care about people. THAT really made my day.” — Qingqing Ouyang

Marcus Blankenship — Why Your Programmer Just Wants To Code

When Marcus published “Why your programmer just wants to code”, his bait worked, and I clicked. I was prepared to hate everything about this article and to my surprise, I was delighted. He was speaking my language. Marcus adapted the article into an interactive workshop where Summit attendees filled out notecards with ideas of how to improve the Summit next year. He then explained the overbearing process by which our ideas would be judged, including boosting ideas from more experienced individuals and pushing down scores for less qualified individuals. In the end, Marcus was painting a ridiculous picture to help shed light on how some of our own companies behaviors are indeed stifling sharing of ideas and ultimately our ability to innovate.

Eddy Reyes — Lessons From A Failed Startup — A Cynefin Retrospective

Eddy Reyes spoke to us about Cynefin. Cynefin offers five decision-making contexts or “domains”: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. These domains help you to identify how you perceive situations and make sense of your own and other people’s behavior. Each domain has a clear set of rules to identify which domain you are currently operating in and how best to function in that domain.

“Enjoyed many of the talks and got some interesting takeaways on how others are currently approaching diversity, metrics, and culture.” — Boris

Qingqing Ouyang — Unknown to Know: Building a Recognized Tech Brand for Recruiting

Qingqing’s presentation was also a house favorite. She recounted her experiences shortly after joining Main Street Hub and charged with the goal of building out the development team. After her first initial attempts at hiring, she realized she had a real problem as none of the engineers had heard of Main Street Hub and they were less than excited about working on a legacy PHP monolith. It was clear to her that she needed to focus on the reason she took the job and the Main St. mission. Diving deep into the why allow her to create a vision for the Main St. Hub engineering brand and to sell from the heart. At this point, she started to grow the team.

“The CTO Summit was a nice reminder that we’re all after the same thing in the end — meaningful work, progress, belonging. I look forward to the next summit!” —Reagan Pugh

Jack Humphrey — Improving the Development Process with Metrics-Driven Insights

I’ve known Jack Humphrey since the early 2000s when we worked together at Coremetrics. He is one of the smartest people I know and cares deeply about his people. Jack shared a process that he’s been rolling out at Indeed. At Indeed they have a data collection and reporting system which they’ve open sourced called Imhotep. Using this tool they can ask lots of questions about whether any given change to the system should be made and when made if the desired outcome was realized. This same tool can be used to look at the number of defects generated by a specific developer and the nature of those defects.

I appreciated the diversity of viewpoint and opinion among presenters and attendees. It was great to share ideas with peers who are grappling with a lot of the same challenges. And as a presenter, I couldn’t have asked for a more engaged and appreciative audience! — Jack Humphrey

After Jack closed out the speakers section, Daniel Walsh stepped in as the final networking facilitator just after I gave a few closing remarks and thanks to our sponsors one last time. Then we all headed across the lobby of the hotel for a few cocktails to end the night.

“It’s impressive that this was the first year of this Summit. It ran like a conference that has been going for 5 years”. — Scott Brittain

Next Year

After such a successful first year, I’m more than confident in our ability to grow and deliver an even better summit in 2019. We’ve extended a 50% discount to 2018 attendees. Tickets are available for sale now!

Get your tickets for 2019.

“Truly inclusive communities are built with intention. It’s so good to see individuals and groups taking active care of the community they’re part of. The CTO Summit represented lots of intention for me.” — Angelek Marler

+ Platinum Sponsors

AnitaB.org

AnitaB.org is committed to increasing the influence of women on all aspects of technology. Our local community expands our efforts globally to help individuals all over the world — especially those who are considering or currently pursuing technical careers — to access the resources they need to reach their highest potential.

Members of the global AnitaB.org Local community network organize events and provide one another with resources to navigate careers in tech. They organize valuable meet-ups, code-a-thons, and one-day HopperX1 events modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration.

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Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft for Startups is committed to connecting with people and building relationships that lead to growing local entrepreneur communities. We believe that people, not companies, matter most. People come up with ideas, build MVPs, raise capital, and ultimately launch Startups (companies). Our local team in Austin is focused on supporting startups interested in partnering with us to grow on Azure.

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Reduxio

Reduxio is redefining data management and protection with the world’s first unified primary and secondary storage platform. Based on the patented TimeOS storage operating system, Reduxio provides breakthrough storage efficiency and performance, and the unique ability to recover data to any second, far exceeding anything available on the market today. Reduxio’s unified storage platform is designed to deliver near-zero RPO and RTO as a feature of its storage system, while significantly simplifying the data protection process and providing built-in data replication for disaster recovery.

Reduxio innovates with:

• Accelerated workloads with High Performing Flash Storage
• Self-Protecting primary storage
• Optimized storage utilization
• Built-in integration with public and private cloud services and object stores
• Protect and move data between on-premise storage and the cloud

Learn more at www.Reduxio.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

+ Gold Sponsors

Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team. Our collaboration software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 65,000 large and small organizations use our project tracking, content creation and sharing, real-time communication and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn about products including JIRA Software, Confluence, Stride, Bitbucket and JIRA Service Desk at https://atlassian.com.

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Creative Alignments

Creative Alignments is disrupting recruiting using a pay-for-effort model that creates a talent partnership with our clients. Aligned with growing tech companies, we place top talent at less than half the cost of traditional recruiters. Our senior team recruits across all functions in the tech space. Reinvent recruiting with us!

+ Registration Sponsor

Beacon Hill Technologies

+ Morning Break Sponsor

7 CTOs

+ Evening Reception Sponsor

Stride

Atlassian’s Stride is a complete team communication solution built from the ground up to help teams more effectively work together. Stride was built to solve the biggest problems of team communication by bringing together context, conversations, and collaboration into one powerful product, allowing teams to move work forward. Our brand new communication solution has best-in-class team messaging, audio and video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

+ Community Sponsors

Ruta Maya Coffee

Allstacks

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Austin Fraser Ltd

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Beacon Hill Technologies

–

RetailMeNot

–

KungFu

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IBM

The post Austin CTO Summit 2018 Recap appeared first on Voltage Control.

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve locked in some really great sponsors especially considering that this is our first year in Austin! I’ve also confirmed additional facilitators for our post session and lunch networking spots. You are in for a treat! They are all total pros.

We have also announced the official schedule. I’ve included it below, along with all our sponsors.

Now that we have met our sponsorship goals, we are able to offer even more scholarships for under-represented attendees. If you are part of an under- represented group please or are just having trouble affording the ticket price, please reach out! Email me at douglas@voltagecontrol.co

If you haven’t gotten your tickets, it isn’t too late, Register Today!

+ Speakers

Bryon Jacob, Co-Founder & CTO, data.world
Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez, Co-Founder & CTO, SecurityGate
Cynthia Maxwell, Director of Engineering, Slack
Eddy Reyes, Cofounder & CTO, Mindsight Co.
Heather Rivers, CTO, Mode Analytics
Jack Humphrey, VP of Engineering, Indeed
Jim Colson, CTO E-commerce, Digital Marketing & Supply Chain, IBM
Lynn Pausic, Principal, Expero
Marcus Blankenship, Leadership Coach Adaptive Leadership Group
Marcus Carey, Founder & CEO, Threatcare
Meetesh Karia, CTO, The Zebra
Qingqing Ouyang, SVP Engineering, Main Street Hub
Vikas Parikh, Sr Manager, Transaction Advisory services, Ernst & Young (EY)
Vivek Sagi, CTO, Business Procurement Solutions, Amazon
Will Ballard, CTO, GLG

+ Schedule

8:00 AM Registration/Breakfast
8:50 AM Kickoff by Host
9:00 AM Jim Colson — Designing, Engineering, and Delivering Products for a Full Lifecycle of Engagement
9:20 AM Lynn Pausic — Vital Role of Humans in Machine Learning
9:40 AM Cynthia Maxwell — Keeping Your Team in the Flow
10:00 AM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
10:20 AM Break (30 mins)
10:50 AM Bryon Jacob — Seeds of Scale — Lessons For Startups Learned Through Growth
11:10 AM Vikas Parikh — M&A and Technology
11:30 AM Will Ballard — Scaling Self-Directed Development
11:50 AM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
12:10 PM Lean Coffee & Lunch (80 mins)
1:30 PM Heather Rivers — Lessons from the Black Box
1:50 PM Vivek Sagi — How to Dive Deep & Mechanisms to Help you Scale your Tech Org
2:10 PM Marcus Carey — If I Only Had A CEO
2:30 PM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
2:50 PM Break (30 mins)
3:20 PM Cherise Esparza-Gutierrez — Toughest Words a CTO Says : Hold on the Code
3:40 PM Meetesh Karia — Diversity in Team and Thought At The Zebra
4:00 PM Marcus Blankenship — Why Your Programmer Just Wants To Code
4:20 PM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
4:40 PM Break (30 mins)
5:10 PM Eddy Reyes —Lessons From A Failed Startup: A Cynefin Retrospective
5:30 PM Qingqing Ouyang — Unknown to Know: Building a Recognized Tech Brand for Recruiting
5:50 PM Jack Humphrey — Improving the Development Process with Metrics-Driven Insights
6:10 PM Voltage Control — Facilitated Networking
6:30 PM Closing
6:40 PM Networking & Drinks
8:00 PM End of Event

Get your tickets here!

+ Platinum Sponsors

AnitaB.org

AnitaB.org is committed to increasing the influence of women on all aspects of technology. Our local community expands our efforts globally to help individuals all over the world — especially those who are considering or currently pursuing technical careers — to access the resources they need to reach their highest potential.

Members of the global AnitaB.org Local community network organize events and provide one another with resources to navigate careers in tech. They organize valuable meet-ups, code-a-thons, and one-day HopperX1 events modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration.

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Microsoft for Startups

Microsoft for Startups is committed to connecting with people and building relationships that lead to growing local entrepreneur communities. We believe that people, not companies, matter most. People come up with ideas, build MVPs, raise capital, and ultimately launch Startups (companies). Our local team in Austin is focused on supporting startups interested in partnering with us to grow on Azure.

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Reduxio

Reduxio is redefining data management and protection with the world’s first unified primary and secondary storage platform. Based on the patented TimeOS storage operating system, Reduxio provides breakthrough storage efficiency and performance, and the unique ability to recover data to any second, far exceeding anything available on the market today. Reduxio’s unified storage platform is designed to deliver near-zero RPO and RTO as a feature of its storage system, while significantly simplifying the data protection process and providing built-in data replication for disaster recovery.

Reduxio innovates with:

• Accelerated workloads with High Performing Flash Storage
• Self-Protecting primary storage
• Optimized storage utilization
• Built-in integration with public and private cloud services and object stores
• Protect and move data between on-premise storage and the cloud

Learn more at www.Reduxio.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

+ Gold Sponsors

Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team. Our collaboration software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 65,000 large and small organizations use our project tracking, content creation and sharing, real-time communication and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn about products including JIRA Software, Confluence, Stride, Bitbucket and JIRA Service Desk at https://atlassian.com.

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Creative Alignments

Creative Alignments is disrupting recruiting using a pay-for-effort model that creates a talent partnership with our clients. Aligned with growing tech companies, we place top talent at less than half the cost of traditional recruiters. Our senior team recruits across all functions in the tech space. Reinvent recruiting with us!

+ Registration Sponsor

Beacon Hill Technologies

+ Morning Break Sponsor

7 CTOs

+ Evening Reception Sponsor

Stride

Atlassian’s Stride is a complete team communication solution built from the ground up to help teams more effectively work together. Stride was built to solve the biggest problems of team communication by bringing together context, conversations, and collaboration into one powerful product, allowing teams to move work forward. Our brand new communication solution has best-in-class team messaging, audio and video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

+ Community Sponsors

Ruta Maya Coffee

Allstacks

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Austin Fraser Ltd

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Beacon Hill Technologies

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RetailMeNot

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KungFu

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IBM

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