“I think leadership is really the art of correction, not perfection. We are going to get it wrong. Right? The question is: ‘How do you recover in those moments? Can you recover with grace, with curiosity? ‘”-Robin Anselmi

Robin Anselmi is the Chief Executive Officer at Conversant, a consulting agency that specializes in having high-quality conversations with team organizations and ultimately sets them up for success to achieve their biggest goals. She believes in the power of a grounded, connected leader to set the standard in growing together. Robin continues her mission at Conversant to reinforce the importance of human connection within organizations and striving towards innovation. As she encourages leaders to personify staying present, Robin reminds us to create the culture and strategy that works best for our own organization. The foundation resides in the quality of your team’s honest, authentic conversations.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Robin and I discuss the impact of presence in leaders leading to team innovation, the ongoing balance in assumptions, the leader’s unique challenge of correction instead of perfection, and the magnitude of a connected leader in its organization. Listen in to hear how Robin reveals the importance of human connection leading to authentic conversations, and the significance of a leader listening while remaining grounded in presence.

Show Highlights

[0:55] Robin’s Start in Key Company Conversations 
[6:12] The Impact of Presence to Lead to Innovation
[12:47] The Assumptions Take 
[15:52] The Art of Correction, Not Perfection 
[18:24] The Importance of a Leader’s Non-Defensive Approach
[23:11] A Complex World Requires a Connected Leader
[24:27] A Conversation on the Workforce Future Forward & Robin’s Final Thoughts 

Links | Resources

Robin’s LinkedIn
Conversant
Love: The Next Leadership Skill

About the Guest

Robin Anselmi is the Chief Executive Officer at Conversant. Her passion centers in helping organizations and leaders navigate quality communication and conversation while uncovering collaborative solutions. Over a decade, she has worked with and coached a wide range of Fortune 1000 companies and Global Philanthropic organizations. While remaining grounded in human connection, she is out to change the world one impactful conversation at a time. Robin is continuously inspired through her work in financial services, where she discovered a client’s impactful results ties directly to the importance of remaining well connected in what matters most for an organization’s employees and customers. With her early career start in engineering and manufacturing, Robin quickly developed a love for design. From there, she realized her true appreciation for the design in human connection and conversation. Robin continues her mission at Conversant by empowering leaders and reminding them that conversation is the most powerful skill set a leader can truly have. 

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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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 in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Robin Anselmi, chief executive officer at Conversant, where she brings together the power and joy of authentic human connection to organizations worldwide. Robin has worked extensively with clients in financial services, healthcare and technology. Welcome to the show, Robin.

Robin Anselmi:

Thanks, Douglas. It’s great to be here.

Douglas:

So let’s get started with a little backstory. I’m really curious how you got your start helping companies have better conversations.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I actually started my career as an engineer, which is always so weird to people. So I was an engineer in manufacturing for about a decade, making optical fiber. And everybody always says, “Well, how did you get from that to this?” I took a stop through financial services as an analyst. And along the way, I started to see that I was really interested in the interactions between human beings. And what did that lead to? And how did that actually cause more joy and greater results in organizations? And actually, they’re all related because as an engineer, it was the design of equipment. And how did the equipment work? As an analyst, it was the design of processes. And how did the processes work?

Robin Anselmi:

And this work really is about the design of human connection because there is a design. There’s a design to conversations that turn out well, and there’s a design to conversations that don’t. And if you actually start to understand the design of what brings people together to actually produce more than you might imagine, you can create that magic, quote, unquote, regardless of the circumstances. So too often, I think people think, “Well, you’ve got to be that charismatic leader.” I don’t think that’s true. I think if you understand the design of it, you can actually cause those surprising results with people by bringing them together in a way that honors and taps into that power and joy that comes out when people get together to make a meaningful contribution together.

Douglas:

That’s really interesting. I often talk to people about this notion of systems theory, or thinking of the world or the work from the perspective of systems, so I really want to hear your perspective on that, considering that to me, that’s what you’re talking about when you talked about there’s a design of equipment, there’s a design of processes. And then there’s the design of these interactions or these connections. To me, it’s considering the systems and the implications to the whole and these kinds of things.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, totally, because if you think about it, each human being is a complex system unto itself. And now you’re going to put a whole bunch of us together in a conference room and ask us to do stuff together. Of course, there’s going to be complexity in that. And too often, we try to solve it like it’s a complicated problem, like there is a best practice out there. There’s not. Often, it’s sample size of one. Each interaction is its own unique one. And can you actually be present to what’s happening for the other person? Can you be present to what’s happening for you, and the strategy and the culture that you’re all operating inside of? And too often, we sort of lose sight of all that. We just want to go down the path of: What’s the best practice?

Robin Anselmi:

I’m not saying there’s not places for best practices. Absolutely, there are. But really, so much of human interaction is being present to the other and what’s actually happening right now in this moment, particularly in these days with things changing so rapidly.

Douglas:

You just hit on something that’s very near and dear to my heart, which is the dangers of importing best practices. And I’m sure this shows up in your work all the time. I know it does ours because people always want us to train them or show them something tactics that’ll get the job done. And at the end of the day, we definitely need to get the tactics because we need repeatable things that we can do and make progress. The danger though is people always want to look external and say, “Well, what the right way to do this?” And so often, we need to curate something. We need to look very closely at the dynamics and put in something that’s best suited.

Douglas:

It reminds me of the strategy doing work where their analogy is taking people in a river rafting, river rafting guides. And it’s like, “We certainly haven’t gone down this river. And the river’s … Well, maybe I have gone down this river, but it’s certainly not behaving exactly like it did yesterday. So I’m not telling you exactly how we’re going to do this, but you trust me because I’ve gone down a river before, or I’ve climbed a mountain before, and so I might be a little bit helpful.” But we’ve still got to respond to some emergent qualities and understand what’s happening, so I don’t know. I get excited whenever someone’s preaching the dangers of best practices.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I think tips and tricks are only going to take you so far. Right? So I always say, “Do I have some tips and tricks? Sure.” We all have them. We all have a few. And holy moly, can they get you into a lot of trouble because you can sort of start to rely on them so heavily. And to your river rafting example, maybe the current’s going way faster today than it normally does, and so that tip and trick is just not actually going to work for you in this situation. It’s why I think the number one job of leaders is to be present, to be present to what’s happening, to be present for themselves. So notice how they’re feeling the moment because actually, our bodies are telling us things all the time, and we’re just trying to sort of ignore it. And are we actually present to the other person? And are we legitimizing their experience in the conversations that they’re having with us?

Douglas:

I love that you threw out the word presence because literally, the word that was going through my mind was complacency. And that’s what the best practices can make us complacent. Right? We expect them to work and our brains shut off. But if we’re present and we’re really paying attention, that’s also kind of core to a lot of the principles and facilitation, inquiry versus advocacy. Right? We can’t really be in inquiry mode unless we’re present, curious, and our brain is fully functioning. We can’t active listen unless we’re really tuned in. And so that was awesome because I was literally thinking the problem is complacency, and then you went straight into presence.

Robin Anselmi:

One of the things we say is that people fast pass match, so they fast pass match things that they know from what’s happened, which again, as human beings, we need that. If I have to stop every time to think about how a doorknob works, I would never get out of my house. Right? So I need to be able to fast pass match on how a doorknob works. The challenge is that we fast pass match with people. You’re different than you were a year ago, five years ago. Right? But yet, we often treat each other like we’re the exact same person. And there are new things that you care about. There are new things that you worry about. And that’s going to show up in the way that we work together.

Robin Anselmi:

And too often, we skip past that. And so even the tips and tricks of, well, I know how Douglas is going to respond to this, no, I don’t. I don’t know who Douglas is today. Can I actually be really, in the spirit of inquiry, be really curious about what’s on his mind today?

Douglas:

That is such a beautiful concept of just not trying to anticipate. One of the things that I see so often as one of the, I’d say main issues of meetings is that people spend so much time thinking about what they’re going to say, or preparing their response, or their amazing rebuttal, or contribution, and they miss all of that awesomeness that they could be picking up on in the middle there.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, because that’s not actually listening. That’s waiting, so that’s somebody waiting their turn, as opposed to really listening and being in the conversation, and trusting that when we get to the pause, I’ll have something worthwhile to contribute. And if I don’t, somebody else will, and we’ll be smarter. We really genuinely will be smarter together without being able to predict. I think too often, to your point on that, people are driving to an outcome, so they’re actually not present because they’re trying to get something to happen. I’m trying to get you to see the world the way I see the world, as opposed to finding a new world view together, new solutions.

Robin Anselmi:

I read this thing, this quote, just today about the innovation and collaboration actually require us to sort of get into the messiness with each other. That’s not exactly the quote, it’s paraphrasing. But it does require that because I have to let go to really innovate or to collaborate, I have to let go of all of the ways that I see the world, or at least hold them loosely, and see the way you see the world. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep coming up with the answers that I came up with yesterday. Okay, that’s not innovation. 

Douglas:

That’s right. I love to tell people, if we don’t get into that exploration zone, where we’re looking at the intersections where ideas collide and can create new emergent permutations, then we’re just going to have the ordinary solutions. And what we’re always striving for are the novel solutions. Everyone wants the novel solutions, but we won’t get there unless we allow that to happen.

Robin Anselmi:

Because it’s really uncomfortable. I think this is the thing that people want it to be rainbows and unicorns and fun and happy, happy, glitter, joy. Right? It’s actually not. It’s really, really uncomfortable because I have to actually be willing to say, “Wow, my way of doing this, or my way of seeing this, there might be a better way. There might be another alternative. The way I’ve been doing it might not be sufficient for the future.” Right? And so that’s actually really uncomfortable for folks because you have to let go of the known and be willing to go into a place of uncertainty, and also a willingness that, oh, maybe that thing that I thought was the bee’s knees just isn’t.

Douglas:

That brings up two thoughts. One is that can be really disorienting and difficult for a leader because especially if you’ve been relied on and looked upon and expected to have the vision, and then now we’re at a point where we’re having a conversation, and now someone’s pushing things a little bit in a direction that might conflict with parts of your vision. Is that something you need to hold steadfast to, so that we stay true to the vision? Or is that something we’ve got to let go of? And I think that is very difficult because sometimes you do need to stay the course because, no, that’s actually going to steer us away from our values, and that’s something we need to hold onto.

Douglas:

But I think that’s something that leaders should spend a lot of time meditating and thinking about, so when they’re confronted with that moment, they don’t just react, they know. If you’ve thought about it enough and you’ve really decided what’s germane to the success, then you’re prepared to hold steadfast versus actually let go of something.

Robin Anselmi:

One of the distinctions we make for people that I find is helpful is really pulling apart the difference between purpose, you might say vision. What’s the why, the outcomes? What do you want the what to be? And then the methods. Right? Often, leaders, we get really tied up around the methods. Can I be a little more agnostic about the how, provided that it’s moving in the direction of sort of purpose or vision, going to create the outcomes I’m looking for? I would add sort of values, sort of corporate values or ethics around that to sort of guide the decisions that we’re making. But can I free us to actually think about different ways of doing it? And you’re right. There’s such a challenge around the places where it pushes the boundary on the vision. Is it taking us off course, or is it taking us in a better course? And I think that’s the job of leadership on an ongoing basis.

Robin Anselmi:

And when I say leadership, I don’t mean in a single person. I mean from an organizational standpoint to be able to say, “Where do we want to go together? And how do you make decisions about changing course?” I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that one.

Douglas:

Absolutely not. But most fun work is not easy and requires some thought. And I think that’s actually why it’s going to be hard for computers to completely replace us.

Robin Anselmi:

I hope so, anyway.

Douglas:

So I’m going to come back to something you said earlier, which is fascinating, which is this notion that these, I think it also alludes to, or ties back to the thinking fast or thinking slow, and the system one, system two, around there’s some moments where we really need to rely on instincts and patterns and assumptions. And if we weren’t able to assume that the fellow drivers on the road were going to stop at the red light, it would be really strange, or would take a lot longer to get from point A to point B because we’d be very anxious going through every intersection. Right? But the trick is when, what’s the boundary around assumptions that are safe for us to carry, and which ones we need to kind of be a little more cognizant of.

Robin Anselmi:

It’s so interesting. I think for leaders, this is an ever evolving question about making their implicit thinking explicit to people as often as possible. Right? And so the rules of the road, there’s a lot that’s already been made explicit, and we all know that it was made explicit because we all have a license in our pocket that says we took that class, or we passed that test. But in organizational life, I think there are way fewer things that are actually quite that explicit, but I think we assume that it is. And so I think actually pausing to make sure that we’re on the same page is a worthy investment of time. Right? Because you’re going to have to have those conversations at some point.

Robin Anselmi:

Do you want to have them in the beginning, before things have gotten messy, and everyone’s off track and pissed off and annoyed at each other? Or do you want to have it later when sort of everything’s gone to hell in a hand basket? So you’re going to have to really get to the point of clarity and testing it. I think language is tricky because we live in language, we work in language, it’s how work gets done today is in sort of conversations. We say the conversations are the work, and people assume really quickly what each other means by certain words. Right now, strategy’s one of those words that drives me a little crazy because everybody will say, “Well, we need a strategy. Or are we aligned on the strategy?” But if you stop and ask five people what they mean by strategy, you will get 12 answers about what that actually means.

Robin Anselmi:

And so I think you’re right. I don’t think it’s a simple straightforward thing around here’s the things about you can assume to be true, and here’s the things you can’t. I think that’s a constant exploration between people. And adding to the mix that we’re now sort of hybrid, so we’ve got people in person and people virtual. Add into the mix multi generational workforces, where there’s different levels of assumptions around what work norms are. I think there’s just going to be a lot of places for us to keep being explicit about our thinking on things, and not assuming that they’re going to stop at the red light.

Douglas:

Yeah. The multi generational thing is a fascinating one because you’ve also got these elements of what’s acceptable from equity and from expectations around just language. I look at … This even comes up when we’re working with clients that may have younger workforce. And when I watch how sensitive they are to certain moves and certain language, and how vocal they are about it, it’s quite a bit different. And I see a lot of folks that have been in the workforce a bit longer, where norms were different, and even turns of phrase and business jargon, that now is offensive to a younger workforce, and especially when you’re looking at M&A where two cultures are just being forced together pretty quickly. That’s kind of tough to navigate, and definitely not easy because even when you’ve got folks that have the best of intentions, people can find actions very offensive.

Robin Anselmi:

I think leadership is really the art of correction, not perfection. We are going to get it wrong. Right? The question is: How do you recover in those moments? Can you recover with grace, with curiosity? Back to your point earlier, right? And it’s hard because if I say something that’s someone else finds offensive, I immediately get defensive about that, as opposed to: Can I just get curious about, oh, that’s interesting, can you say more about that? Can you say, “What am I not seeing in that, so that I can understand it better?” And I think that’s hard for leaders to do, and it’s such a critical skill to really understand another’s point of view and the way they see the world, and the way the world occurs to them. I’m never going to full understand what it’s like to be you, or you, me. But I can be curious about it and really see, okay, and apologize and do better.

Douglas:

I love that Maya Angelou quote, it’s like, “Do as good as you know. And when you know better, do better.”

Robin Anselmi:

Do better. That’s right. Know better, do better. That’s right.

Douglas:

And I love what you just said about this notion of not perfection.

Robin Anselmi:

But correction.

Douglas:

It’s about correction.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah, correction.

Douglas:

I’m a big fan of the notion of continuous improvement.

Robin Anselmi:

That’s right.

Douglas:

Always being curious about how we can move toward a better.

Robin Anselmi:

A better.

Douglas:

And definitely, the curiosity piece. But I want to come back to something that you were saying about that as well, which is not being defensive. And that’s something I learned, because I had some moments just navigating a lot of this as a public figure and running public workshops, and being in front of folks, which had some moments that were surprising because I do my best to support people. And I’ve considered myself an ally. And it’s like, “Whoa. Right? I’m the target? How’s this?” And I quickly realized that’s the worst reaction that anyone could possibly have because what people don’t want to have is an ally trying to be a victim because me not being understood, my intentions being misinterpreted, pales in comparison to how they’ve been victimized. Right?

Douglas:

And so when you mention not being defensive, and also having that humility truly struck a chord is how important that is, and I learned the lesson personally. And then also, I think another little adjacent thing that might be fun to unpack with you is this notion earlier when you talked about the charismatic leader. And I would say charismatic leaders probably struggle with that the most because their identity is about being this charismatic, loved, worshiped individual. I men, worship might be a bit overkill, but you get the idea.

Robin Anselmi:

No, but hero, hero. They probably … The hero.

Douglas:

Yeah, the hero. Yeah. And so you compare that to leaders that are maybe entrepreneurial leaders, or facilitative leaders, or servant leaders. I think all of those have a little bit more humility in the mix. And it might be, if you’re following that path, it might be easier to respond and employ some of these skills.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I want to comment on a couple of things you said. So number one, that defensiveness that you said, welcome to the human race because that’s actually just programmed into us. Right? So it’s not your own personal dysfunction. All of us when confronted have a natural reaction to defend ourselves. It’s actually just hardwired into the way that our brains work. Right? And so if you think about it from an evolution standpoint, it makes a lot of sense about why we would need to do that, to protect ourselves and keep ourselves safe, and that we can’t distinguish between physical threat and social threat, so that’s sort of the normal.

Robin Anselmi:

Goes back to my thing earlier about being present. Can I actually just be present to what’s happening? And that this thing that just got said didn’t actually harm me. Right? It might’ve harmed my ego, it might’ve hurt my feelings, but it didn’t actually harm me. Can I just take a breath and get connected to: Okay, what about that is upsetting to me? Because most of the time, it’s something as you said, in the scheme of things, probably not the right thing to be centered on, so that’s one, so welcome to the human race because we all are going to be defensive.

Robin Anselmi:

The distinction we make is between superior leadership and connected leadership. So superior leaders are the ones who think they have to have all the answers. Right? And there is a model for that. There are places actually where superior leadership is necessary. I kid a lot and say, “If the fire alarm goes off in an office building, I’d like there to be somebody who knows the way out of the building. And yes, I’m just going to follow them.” I don’t want to have to have a whole conversation about what’s the right way out of a fire. But in today’s world where things are moving so fast, we need more connected leaders because it’s really hard for a single person to see the whole view, to see the whole elephant. Back to systems, a single person really can’t understand all of the interactions and all of the interplay of what’s going to happen.

Robin Anselmi:

So leaders who are connected, connected to people, so connected and connecting people, connected and connecting to strategy and to culture and to current circumstances, are the ones who are going to be successful in these more complex systems because that superior leader, hero leader model, yes, quite charismatic. But that’s a hard row to hoe, to have all of those people who are going to be able to … You’re going to be able to know everything that they know and make the best decisions. I’m not sure that model is going to last much longer in most of our organizations. There’s just too much complexity.

Douglas:

The thing I think about is situation, time and place. To me, there’s situations where a hero leader might be needed, like the fire alarm example you were talking about. And I think those examples will still be there. In fact, someone was just talking with me about the vaccine rollout here in the US, how chain of command is kind of helpful when you’re trying to execute something very specific and with some rules. And we know what we want to do, and we figured it out, and we’re just going to go do it.

Douglas:

Now there might be moments within that, there might need to be some freedom, some flexibility for folks to flex and move around some of the things. But at some of the points, we’re going to need, and so it makes me think of the Cynefin Model, and how in a complex world, the superior leader’s going to be very ineffective. In a simple, obvious world, maybe we do need someone to step up and say, “Run this checklist.”

Robin Anselmi:

Totally.

Douglas:

And maybe in the complicated, maybe there’s something in between.

Robin Anselmi:

Totally. In the simple world, a superior leader is great. Right? Do this, here’s the answers. Goes back to your thing earlier about best practices. There are knowable answers and you can have somebody that knows them and just moves everybody in that direction, absolutely. Even in a complicated world. Right? There are lots of answers, having somebody that can sort of sort those and come up with smart answers, move us forward, great. I just think more and more, what we’re seeing in organizations is much more complexity, things that are much less predictable, much less likely to be known or knowable, that you’ve got to be willing to be in a place where the strategies are emergent. And to have strategies that are emergent, you have to be really listening to the people in the system, which I think to your point, is a whole lot harder for that hero leader to do.

Douglas:

So let’s talk about something that’s emerging right now, that companies are faced with. This is a complex issue that we’re having to solve for, and I think it might be kind of fun to unpack it from that perspective around: How can we best have these conversations? And what are some of the wrinkles that we’re going to need to consider? What makes it so complex? And that’s the back to the office, so one of the things that came up in the pre show chat was just around the gender equity issues that are going to unfold with kind of expecting employees to come back.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, I think going back to sort of complicated or simple models, the office as it stood before was a way of making sure people were doing their job, so there was a lot of sort of oversight, supervision. I think the last year has proven that we don’t need that to the same degree. And so I think it’s going to require organizations redefining the purpose of the office. So why? Why do we want people to gather? What’s the purpose of that? And I do think there are going to be some equity issues around that. I strongly believe that the organizations that are going to be the most successful going forward in hiring and retaining talent are going to have to have some sort of flexibility. They’re not going to be an all or neither. There’s going to be some sort of hybrid model, where there’s X number of days a week or something because you’ve got so much diversity in terms of what people want, in terms of being back in the office or not.

Robin Anselmi:

And there’s been some recent articles and reports that are guessing that there may be some gender equity issues about that, around who chooses to come back to office versus who doesn’t, and whether or not you’ll see that more women choose not to come back to the office. And what does that do? Do we suddenly recreate the boys’ clubs of days past? Well, I hope most of them are days past, of people in the office. And is there a different level of connection, or knowledge, or perceptions about people who are together in that space and opportunities for them? And what’s that going to do for folks who make different choices about where they’re going to be located?

Douglas:

Yeah. There’s quite a few layers there because there are folks that have now shifted their patterns, their needs, and demands from their family may have shifted. Also, there are people who have invested in home office setups. There are people that are still working on the kitchen counter. So I think we have to anticipate a diverse set of needs.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, you’re going to have people that are longing, can’t wait to get back to the office, are so tired of being, feeling isolated, or to your point, they don’t have the space that they’d love to have to work. You have others who hope to never go back to an office. Right? And so I think it’s going to be a challenge for organizations to legitimize both points of view to find answers because honestly, in the past, it was really easy to say, “Oh, you can’t do this job from home.”

Robin Anselmi:

Back to your tips and tricks, you could kind of rely on the, well, that’s just not how it’s done here. There are very few places where that’s not how it was done in the last year, year and a half. Right? And so it’s going to be a lot harder to just rely on that’s the policy, or that’s just the way we do it. You’re going to have a lot more people that are going to be challenging that. And so I think really looking at: What’s the vision for the space? What’s the organization’s values? How does space actually enhance the values? How is it a physical representation of the things that an organization says they care about? May require us to rethink how we’re using that space too.

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s not only individual contributors. Leaders, executives have now got a taste of what it’s like and what’s possible, so they can no longer deny or convince themselves that it doesn’t work because they’ve now seen it work, and they know it’s possible. And their behavior’s going to change. And I was talking to a senior executive from a very large financial institution just last week. And he was telling me how not having to commute essentially two and a half hours a day changed his life tremendously. He could decide whether he wanted to spend more time working, he could spend more time with the family. That was now discretionary time for him that he could use to improve his career, improve his family life. And I don’t think that’s going to be something he’s going to give up easily. And this is someone that has political power within the organization. It’s not just someone who’s just at the mercy of the whims of the deciders. So I think we’re going to see some really interesting models unfold as people start to wrangle some of these issues and lay out policies.

Douglas:

And it also comes down to how we support our people from a mental and social wellbeing. There’s a lot of trauma that people have experienced that they’re going to have to confront because we’re still in the mode of, we’re still in the fight. We’re not in recovery yet. And so as soon as things shift and we start to think about how we … What does post … I don’t even know if post pandemic even makes sense because I think it might be something, it might be a new way of life taking vaccines every quarter, or every other quarter, or something. But we’ll see how it all unfolds. But I do think that we might see a shift where people start to acknowledge that, oh, wow, I did go through something traumatic, and I need to work through this. And I think leaders are going to have to think about how to have those conversations.

Robin Anselmi:

Well, we were saying pre show about one of my colleagues, Kell Delaney, has said, “We are not the same people that we were in January of 2020.” None of us are. We all have different things that we think about and consider. We have different … Well, all of us have different habits, whether or not those are all good can be left to debate. But we do, we all have different ways of being in the world, and certainly different ways of working. And if we think we’re just flipping a switch to go back, or just take that forward, I think that’s short sighted. I don’t think that’s how it’s going to work out. And to your point, I think you’re going to have people at varying sort of stages in their thinking about how they want to work and what that’s going to look like.

Douglas:

This is something we also talked about a little earlier, this concept of leaders becoming leaders because they were really good at a thing. They were the best at the thing. And then they become leaders, they’re not necessarily trained in how to have good meetings. They’re not trained in how to have good conversations, don’t necessarily understand coaching models. Also, typically, they might have been a supervisor before they were even promoted into becoming an official leader. So there might’ve been kind of their job as a supervisor would’ve been more focused on the task. And now that they’re responsibilities have grown, and they’re expected to have these conversations, it can be pretty disorienting. And how do we begin to have performance conversations, conversations about wellbeing and equity?

Robin Anselmi:

Well, and I think from earlier, a lot of leaders sort of do come up in a superior leader mindset, like as a manager, I’m supposed to have the answers. The coaching models, all of them, really are based in: Well, what if I don’t have to have the answers? What if we have to have the answers? What would the answers look like if we crafted them together? And so I honestly think if managers could let go of just one thing, which is that they have to be the one that knows the answer, it would make all the difference. That if it really is, no, we get to work out the answers together as human beings, and really find ones that work, inside of constraints. All organizations are going to have some level of constraints. This isn’t anarchy where you get to do whatever the hell you want, and I get to do whatever the hell I want.

Robin Anselmi:

But if we have a shared purpose and we know what the outcomes are that we’re driving to, can we get creative about what would work for you and what would work for me? And I think if leaders could really let go of, it has to be my way, or I have to have the answer, we could all get smarter together about how to solve those problems.

Douglas:

That’s also very liberating as a leader.

Robin Anselmi:

It is.

Douglas:

It’s exhausting.

Robin Anselmi:

It’s exhausting to think I have to know everything.

Douglas:

And stressful to have all the answers.

Robin Anselmi:

That’s right. That’s right.

Douglas:

And most of the time, I don’t know, if your experience was anything like mine, it was super anxiety provoking too because I kind of felt like it was expected. It wasn’t like I wanted to do it. I felt like that’s what everyone was hoping, so that I would show up as the CTO and know all the CTO things.

Robin Anselmi:

Can you just fix this?

Douglas:

The minute … Yeah. Right. And the minute that I found the liberty in asking, “What do you think we should do?”

Robin Anselmi:

Shocking.

Douglas:

Right? An employee comes to you needing, wanting your advice, and just asking them, “What do you think we should do?” Because a lot of times they know what they would do in your absence. They’re maybe assuming that you want to be involved, or they’re afraid they’re going to get it wrong. Just turning it back on them and giving them the opportunity to just say it empowers them to go with their gut. And then next time, they might not even stop to answer you, so then that’s one less thing that you’re pulled out of or pulled into.

Robin Anselmi:

Absolutely. Whenever the stress gets high, I think as human beings, we tend to contract. So when stress goes up, we tend to sort of pull in closer. The reality is if you actually expand the conversations in those moments, so if under stress, we actually went to more people, asked somebody else for help, the vast majority of the time, we actually really will get smarter together because to your point, somebody else will see it different than I do. So I’m stuck in my own thinking as a leader. I’m worried, I have all this stress. I’m worried about getting it right. If I go and ask somebody else, they don’t have that same stress in that moment, so they might actually be a whole lot smarter than me about what could be possible.

Douglas:

I love that. It makes me think of this notion that I personally have always found. It’s often easier, especially if you’re in the moment of writer’s block, or you just kind of creative block, if you got inspiration flowing, it’s a lot easier to filter. I can say, “That doesn’t meet the values. That’s off vision.” And helping guide and direct things that are kind of coming at you, versus having to create it all. And so to your point, in that moment of tension, if the instinct is to clam up, then the only inspiration you got is what’s inside, versus opening it up and letting the stuff flow at you. And then you can kind of just filter and curate.

Robin Anselmi:

And find, back to the innovation conversation, find that new answer that you might not have ever dreamed of on your own.

Douglas:

Yeah, or even look. You can be looking out for interesting combinations. What if I put this and this together?

Robin Anselmi:

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Douglas:

That’s cool.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah, really great.

Douglas:

Awesome. Well, I think that takes us to an interesting place to kind of hit the pause button on this conversation, and want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Robin Anselmi:

Yeah. For me, I think it really is that there is power and joy in human connection and that if we spend too much time at work in the bulk of our lives to not be able to tap into that joy, and that you can find it if you actually expand the conversations. And if you want to find out more or get some inspirations, if you go to conversant.com, you can subscribe to our newsletter. And we send out some monthly tips and information and videos, just to help inspire folks to find that power and joy in their work.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Robin. This has been a pleasure chatting. And I hope people do check out Conversant, and looking forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Robin Anselmi:

Thanks for having me, Douglas. This was super fun.

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 48: A Leader’s Power in Presence appeared first on Voltage Control.

“If you’ve got a breath and you’re a warm body, then I know that fun is going to be the magic, my most potent weapon…to be able to invite you to participate.” -Mark Collard

Mark Collard is the Founder of Playmeo, a company that provides a group-game wonderland with over 440+ games & activities towards team building and experiential education. He inspires facilitators, educators, and managers to empower groups to connect more effectively and build stronger teams. With training workshops and invaluable resources in their online database, Mark offers the essentials and more to exercise trust for organizations. Mark’s mission to lead with fun through games can ultimately lead to magic and results. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Mark and I discuss the creation of the temporary community to foster trust, the deliberate/strategic approach of connection before content, and the ongoing virtual facilitation challenge towards engagement. Listen in to hear how Mark is masterfully leading with humanity in his group game bag of tricks to not only build connections in groups, but amplify results in your organization. 

Show Highlights

[01:00] Mark’s Career Breakthrough in Games
[05:04] Creating the Temporary Community
[10:51] The Intentional, Unofficial Start Trick 
[13:27] Connect Before Content
[17:56] The Facilitation Virtual Challenge
[28:50] Are They Ready to Play?
[35:46] FUNN & Mark’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Mark’s LinkedIn
Playmeo
Playmeo.com/free

About the Guest

Mark Collard is the founding director of Playmeo, a company that utilizes experiential learning and creates unforgettable training workshops to help teams connect. With a career spanning 30+ years, he has offered more than 2,000 presentations and numerous video tutorials that help thousands of teams connect to cultivate team-building. Author of three best-selling activity books, No Props No Problem, Serious Fun, and Count Me In, Mark has a true passion for sharing his mission with the world. Mark provides many professional and educational development programs to leaders, managers, and facilitators alike. His body of work has set the standard in leading fun, interactive group games to harvest trust & productivity in organizations. Mark’s mission is to lead with fun through games and ultimately weave the magic of play into effective results.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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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 in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Mark Collard, founder of Playmeo and an experiential trainer who helps people connect through the use of fun group games and activities. He’s the top-selling author of five books, including the latest, No Props No Problem, and the founder of the largest online database of group games and activities in the world. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark Collard:

Douglas, thank you. It’s great to be here.

Douglas:

It’s great to have you. So I want to hear a little bit about how you got your start. How does somebody get into this idea of fun group games and activities as a profession?

Mark Collard:

It’s a great question, and it’s one that I’ve had to ponder myself. In fact, I spent a bit of time writing about that very question, and I think if you dig dive deep enough, you go back all the way to kindergarten and it was like the kid who sat next to you. But I think in a more practical sense, it was the decision of my parents to send me to Scouts. It was my inclination to be part of a youth group, as part of my church. All of those spaces were places where I was engaged in group games and activities.

Mark Collard:

I don’t know many people who don’t actually enjoy them. And so I did, and not that I knew that then, but I made a career of using interactive group games and activities probably based on the fact that there was one particular youth leadership camp I went on that extended over four days that like night and day, chalk and cheese, just transformed me. Again, didn’t know this at the time, but I look back and understand the facilitation of those group games is what caused that transformation. For me, it harks back to that, but now with over 30 years experience in the field and having run many summer camps around the world, all of those are programmed activities. All of those give me my body of work today.

Douglas:

Let’s go back to that moment. I’m really curious. I want to hear more about this. What do you think were some of the key elements that kind of unlocked that experience for you?

Mark Collard:

Yeah. Again, I didn’t see it at the time, Douglas. I was just swept up in it as a participant, but with a lens that I have now looking at it, I understand it was the ability to form, first of all, a temporary community, those connections I had with about 40 other people I’d never met in my life, some of whom are my longest friends in my life. That I have friends from that program I still see on a regular basis today. So I think the ability for those leaders of that experience to build community, which was all about building connections. I suppose, for me, it was about then realizing who I was. ***As they had created such a safe place for me to be, I was able to then find others who could value me, acknowledge me and accept me. Perhaps, in my life, that had never happened before.***

Douglas:

Yeah. It’s really fascinating. You say temporary communities because it seems like the community wasn’t so temporary. It actually had long lasting applications and the thing that strikes me is that it was an emergent community. It kind of just like sprung forth because of the situation that was put there. It’s just dawning on me in this moment listening to you that like, “Wow, that’s a really interesting concept that we create these conditions and these little mini-impromptu communities emerge.”

Mark Collard:

That’s right, and they are temporary from an intentional perspective. I’m sure the leaders only intentionally wanted to create community for the four days they were running it. However, they also fully understand that the skills, the life skills… We didn’t use these terms back then, but the social, emotional, learning skills we were able to experience back then were going to last a lifetime. And they are no doubt in my mind the foundation of a lot of my experiences of who I am and how I occur to other people today. It was chalk and cheese. I remember going back to my university to mix with my friends who knew me the week before this camp and I came back and overwhelmingly said, “What happened to you? You look different.” I was dressing differently. “And you sound differently.” It was like, “Oh, something must have really happened.” Yeah, right. It wasn’t just in those four days. There is this sense that it’s going to continue as well.

Douglas:

Yeah. Maybe I’ll come back to that temporary notion again because something you said sparked something new from me, which is maybe it’s the intention of the facilitators, this kind of pure intention that they’re creating, this temporary environment without any bigger intentions, but what can grow from that is a bit unknown and will allow that to flourish. But we don’t impress these expectations on folks to make them feel like they’re responsible to do something or what not.

Mark Collard:

Oh, absolutely. I speak a lot about asking the question before you stand before any group, “What is possible? What is possible here?” I know the framework that I bring to my work and my training and education. It scaffolds the greatest level of possibility so it’s possible that the leaders in that particular youth leadership camp had the same expectations, is that we’re going to view this temporarily, but we’re going to ask the question, “What is possible here?” And so they just jammed and created this amazing framework that helped people feel safe so that they could step outside their comfort zones and discover who they were and what was possible for them. Of course, lofty levels were attained.

Douglas:

You mentioned people stepping outside of their comfort zones and so often when we’re working with clients and we go anywhere near playful kinds of things like improv or games, they always say, “Well, I’m not sure that the executives are going to do this or my analytical folks, I don’t think… They’re just going to roll their eyes or whatever.” I think there’s so much magic in that discomfort that they aren’t picking up on. They’re anticipating it, but they’re afraid to walk into it.

Mark Collard:

I’m nodding my head as you speak. I don’t think there’s been a program I’ve worked on where there hasn’t been some element of that in the beginning. While it’s not a term I typically embrace, but it’s about breaking that ice, the ice of that exterior. Sometimes it’s a soft exterior. Sometimes it’s quite hard that you do need to break through to get to who people really are. If you’ve got a breath and you’re a warm body, then I know that fun is going to be the magic, my most potent weapon, to be able to be invite you to participate.

Mark Collard:

I can’t think of a program, no matter who the group are, whether they’re a group of top executives from Fortune 500 companies or a group of school kids or kids at risk, whatever, if you can appreciate that they are human, if you can appreciate that they’re all going to enjoy play, but some of them get to it longer than others, like it just takes some time for some groups, more than others, that they can respond, if given the opportunity, given the correct environment. I often think of my own primary responsibility as a facilitator is about creating the most appropriate environment so that my group can make whatever choices is required for them to discover whatever is possible.

Douglas:

Yeah, that environment and space matters so much. It’s something that I think some people somewhat lose sight of in the virtual space because they… In the physical space, they think, “Oh, we need to get a venue. How are the tables arranged?” In the virtual space, it almost seems like they’re just like, “Oh, this is how Zoom works. I guess this is what we got.” And it’s like, “Ooh, that’s a real missed opportunity.”

Mark Collard:

Oh, absolutely. We also forget that we’re still working with humans. They may be pixelated versions on our screen and we get caught by this camera that we get sucked into, but I would argue that the ability to connect, the need to connect, is as important, I would even argue more important, when you can’t be in the same physical space as each other. And so it’s not just a matter of wheeling in your whiteboard or flip chart and presenting like you normally do because as a facilitator, for a start, you cannot gage the room in the same way when all you’ve got is a gallery view of pixelated images of heads. You can’t see the body behaviors as easily so facilitation is very different.

Douglas:

I’ve often lately started to use an assistant or a scribe or someone else in the room. Some people will use producers or technical facilitators, but having someone else there that’s helping check the signals, really helpful because you’re right, it’s really hard to pick up on all the nuance.

Mark Collard:

It’s very different. Again, in the same way when people actually turn up, my intentionality to invite them to connect early is equally as important as when people log into their Zoom room. I spend, for example, the first five or 10 minutes in what I refer to as the unofficial start, which is really just, it’s not an activity, it’s just a principle of engaging people productively in something that they have a choice in. It could be coloring mindfully online, using the annotate tool, or solving a few puzzles or responding to a question that I’ve posed.

Mark Collard:

Today, there was four of us on a call from around the world and I played a game where I threw a dice and the dice number reflected a question on the screen. If that person who was next chose to, they would answer that question. It was completely random. They didn’t know how the dice would roll. That was my unofficial start. The key there, Douglas, is the intentionality. I was intentionally inviting connections while at the same time waiting for people to arrive. The hour just flew as a result because people felt more connected to people who they’ve never met before, never been in the same room before but felt some form of connection to each other.

Douglas:

It’s funny. I just finished up some training with a large enterprise and we were doing some coaching after and they were asking me… They’re making a point that, “We really love the connection pieces. Whenever we came back from break, we did something to like create connection and that was really impressive. I want to use that more but how can I do that in a 30-minute meeting?” I asked, “How often do your 30-minute meetings start on time?” Then she was like, “Well, not very often.” Then I said, “Well, why do you not start on time?” She said, “Well, I’m waiting for people to arrive.” I was like, “Would you be willing to start a warmup on time?” She was just like, “Oh, okay. I get it.” Yeah, it’s exactly the thing you were saying, right? We’re not going to be afraid to start a warmup the minute the clock ticks and then we can get it going.

Mark Collard:

Absolutely. With the time I spent honing that skill, particularly in university, I was a lecturer there for seven years, I lectured in two subjects. Over the course of 14 semesters, every class started with an unofficial start. Typically, as kids who have just left high school, moved into college or university, they would just dribble in because that’s what happened with every other class. Why would you turn up on time when you know the instructor’s going to wait five or 10 minutes.

Mark Collard:

I would start on time but indeed early, and within about four or five weeks of the 14-week semester, I never had another late student. I never had to say to them, “Hey, dude, you need to be here on time.” Because here’s what happened: I didn’t use this terminology back in the 90s, but FOMO, the fear of missing out, there was something that happened that transpired that you know when you entered the space that, “Oh, what’s going on?” That you could feel something and that also happens online. As people arrive online, they get that there’s an energy about what’s happening and you do that enough, you don’t turn up late. There’s obviously reasons why some people need to be late but often it’s just laziness.

Douglas:

Yeah. I would say that’s a much safer thing to do than just to start content early. Because if you start content early, you will get a lot of backlash and people feeling like you’re attacking them.

Mark Collard:

Yep. And it’s a missed opportunity, Douglas, because you have an opportunity to connect. Now, it’s great if that connection can also relate directly to your content as well. That’s like a double whammy. But it shouldn’t be necessary, but it’s great if it can. And so you’ve got that ability to… Or the opportunity to connect is missed. It’s a golden opportunity. Otherwise, it’s thrown away.

Douglas:

I want to point out that it comes back to one of your maxims, which is connect before content.

Mark Collard:

While I use it a lot, it’s something I’ve learned from somebody else. Chad Littlefield from a group called We. I don’t know where he got it from, but for me, that just resonated. It did. It just made a lot of sense, but it put a title, a mantra, to something that I’d already been doing, to connect before content. I often say to people that are not being rude, I actually don’t care what your content is, but whatever it is, do something. Spend some time and energy and with, unashamedly, always takes a little bit of time and a little bit of energy, do something to help your group connect.

Mark Collard:

I speak a lot with educators and school administrators and their first push back to that is, “Oh, if you had any idea just how crammed our curriculum is. How do we find the extra time for this?” Without exception, those that embrace this concept discover that over time, the group actually, because of their connections, get through a lot more content a lot more quickly. And so they end up actually getting through as much of the content as they planned, indeed even more, because some of the group issues, the group management issues, just don’t bare their heads as often or as large when you haven’t spent the time spending time to invite those groups to connect with one another.

Douglas:

This also gets into brain chemistry and learning science type stuff as well because the connection is going to create environments for better learning and so you probably don’t have to repeat yourself as much as a lecturer when you’re lecturing and that connection to the people is going to make them more connected to the content.

Mark Collard:

Yep. I’ve never met a camp leader, a teacher, corporate trainer, anyone who’s responsible for the welfare of a group who said, “Oh, Mark, could you teach me how to pull back the engagement for my group? They’re just way too engaged.” It’s always, “Mark, if I could just engage my group, it would be half the problem.” And so those connections is part of the answer. It’s not the only answer obviously, but to invite people to connect to help them feel more comfortable invites them to participate, to put their hand up where they ordinarily wouldn’t because the question might be a bit challenging for the group to hear. Or to give something a go that at first glance they might feel they could look a bit foolish if they don’t get it right. That’s the environments that we’re talking about that invite… that happens as a result of intentionally building those connections early on.

Douglas:

I want to come back to a point you made earlier and just spend a little time on it to make sure the listeners really understand what you were getting at. It was your point around tying the connection to the content. If you even poked a little fun at the term icebreaker because I think a lot of times it’s used maybe as a corpus of work that people just throw around without having connection to the content. One of the things I usually like to tell people is if we do something and we can’t ask the group why we just did that and have it be a really interesting conversation, maybe we should be asking ourselves why did we just do it. And so when we’re picking these activities and games, it’s really great when we can be really intentional about it and thinking about what they get out of it and how that transitions into the work we’re going to follow with.

Mark Collard:

Yes. I’m a big proponent of and a big advocate for taking fun more seriously. But when that fun, it’s packaged because we want to invite people to participate, it’s like a magnet, when that fun also engages them in something related to the content, it’s an extra prize. It’s a bonus. It’s something we should aim for. It may not always be possible, but in my experience, and perhaps it’s come from experience, Douglas, most activities I can find a way to win a message to segue from that thing that appeared to be trivial, just fun, frivolous, wasteful to, “Oh, now I can see why we did that.”

Mark Collard:

I love that when that happens. I love it when a kid says to me, “Oh, you lied to us today.” It’s like, “What do you mean?” “Well, you said we’re going to have fun.” I said, “Yeah. Did you have fun?” “Yeah, we had fun, but I also learned something.” It’s like, “Yes, that’s awesome.” I disguised the learning inside this package called fun because it’s the attractive part.

Douglas:

I love that. And so we’ve been talking a lot about connection and I want to bring it into the context of the space we find ourselves these days, which is remote. There’s a lot to unpack here so I’m excited to talk about a few of these things with you. But first, let’s just talk a little bit about the challenge of creating connection in a virtual space.

Mark Collard:

It is a challenge, Douglas. There’s no doubt. When March/April happened in 2020 and a tsunami of inquiries came into my inbox saying, “Help.” We all worked under the presumption that we had to turn up. That was the presumptive setting. Everyone would just turn up and that was no longer possible. What do we do? They came to me as the expert and I just put my hands up and said, “I’m an explorer. I am not the expert because I have not done this either.” And so it was challenging. I think in the beginning, the challenge, Douglas, was wrangling the technology because we weren’t used to that. We weren’t used to setting the camera and the mic and the settings and the backgrounds and whatever we had to do to create slides if we normally did something else. But that just took a little bit of time, to sort of wrangle the technology.

Mark Collard:

I think the greatest challenge was bringing our humanity to that pixelated version of ourselves on the screen and that of course of everyone else on our screen. That for me is what separated the good to the excellent. You might’ve been a great teacher or even a good teacher or a corporate trainer, but what made you excellent online was that you were able to manage the humanity of this moment, even though we’re not in the same space.

Mark Collard:

I was able to respect, and when in doubt, accept that everyone was human. And yet that the intentionality was still present. I got so caught up in the technology in the beginning, I forgot to bring myself and my humanity and to invite everyone else’s humanity to our space. So inviting choice, so it wasn’t just like picking an image on my screen. I say, “Okay, Charlie, what do you think about that?” Well, Charlie was now on the spot. You probably shouldn’t do that in any group, in any case, in most cases. But there was other ways in which I could respect choice and respect the humanness of that moment. For me, I’ve continued to refine those skills of bringing my humanity to the screen.

Douglas:

Absolutely. Let’s get a little bit tactical when we think about… What are some of the moves or plays that can help make connections? I feel like breakout rooms are a powerful way to get a little connection happening. I certainly agree calling on people can be abrupt and challenging. Something I’ve taken a fancy to, I miss the days of being able to just go around the circle. Get everyone in a circle and go around the circle.

Douglas:

People have certainly done the… After you go call like maybe pick the next person and just go around like that. I’ve even shared my gallery view. I know Zoom now lets you set a fixed view, but people get lost and you can pin on their version of Zoom. I can be problematic, but I’ll share my screen so that people can see what order they’re in so they know what order to go in so you can do the go around the circle thing. But I was just curious if you had any moves or plays that you use to help boost the connection a bit.

Mark Collard:

I’ve used a similar technique too. I think what you just described, Douglas. I call it curiosity ping pong. Again, something I’ve picked up from elsewhere, where I will start by asking a question. For example, I did this just a few days ago. “What is the strangest thing you believed as a kid?” And I invite people to write it into the chat room. Don’t hit enter. Just put it into the chat room and then give them a minute to do that. Then on go, everyone hits the enter key. Then it’s like my inbox, first thing in the morning, just fills with responses. Give them a moment to reflect on all of that. Then I’ll either ask for a volunteer or I will start and say, “Hey, I’m really curious about your response about this, Shaquana. Can you tell me more about that?”

Mark Collard:

If Shaquana wants to, she’ll come off mute, share what the story was about her response to the question and then it’s her turn. But the back and forth ping pong, it’s her turn to pick somebody else. And so it’s a bit like I think what you shared. There’s that. You could also play a game where maybe we identify based on the number of letters in our name or the alphabetical order of our names or it could be some other random number.

Mark Collard:

I might say, “Okay, in the chat room, just put any two digits together from zero to 99. Just randomly put a number down.” They don’t know what’s coming of course. So they put down their number. “Okay, whoever is closest to zero, I invite you to go first. And whoever’s after that, you’re second. And it’ll finish with whoever’s closest to 99.” What they love is that it was fun, just making up a number. And then “Oh, okay.” It engages them because they need to see, check to see where they’re at. You could also change their names if you happen to be using Zoom, of course. You could change their name to just putting the two numbers in so then everyone can see all the numbers on their screen at the same time. There’s a couple of quick ones.

Douglas:

Nice. Nice. Yeah, that reminds me of a fun warmup that you can do. Comes from improv games of counting together. You try to get to 10 without stepping on anybody and you got to keep starting over. Eventually, if you got a clever group, some will present a strategy that we might use to get through this. Then I think people jumping in and offering support and strategies is where that is a form of connection too because they’re starting to problem solve without you even telling them to problem solve.

Mark Collard:

Yep, and that’s a great activity. I know it as count off. I’ve been using for years in person, but it’s even better online because-

Douglas:

It’s harder.

Mark Collard:

Well, it’s harder in some respects, but it’s better because when it was live, in-person, sometimes I couldn’t quite tell if two numbers came out at the same time or not.

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Collard:

But online [crosstalk 00:24:13]

Douglas:

The latency. The latency in the internet makes people mess up more, and it’s funny because someone thinks they’re… And you hear it like two seconds later or something. It’s pretty good.

Mark Collard:

Typically less so with the chat room, but it’s very obvious to everyone that we just had three fives in a row. Great. We’re back to zero again and it’s engaging. It’s one of those things that you might just use as a 30-second energizer to mindfully just move away from your content before you refresh and move on to something new.

Douglas:

Yeah, just having a reset. It’s a great reason to do these things. It’s a little brain break. Yeah.

Mark Collard:

Yep. Yeah, or brain boost. I had someone tell me the other day. He’s like, “Really? That sounds so damaging. Why are you breaking brains?” It’s like, “Oh, that’s not what I meant.” Then I have to say brain boost now.

Douglas:

No, no. That’s so good. Brain boost, I love it. Well, I also want to talk a little bit about current events there in Australia. Here we are, practically May, and you’ve been pretty open since October. Something I found really interesting when I asked you about hybrid is that you really hadn’t been seeing much of it. It’s either in-person or remote.

Mark Collard:

That’s right.

Douglas:

Which has been a hypothesis of mine that people are going to do one or the other and if anyone’s remote, it has to be all remote even if a good chunk of those people might be in the same building.

Mark Collard:

I think it clearly depends on regions, and in some cases, I come from Melbourne, Australia. Australia’s done an outstanding job at controlling the spread of the virus. I think we’ve been almost six months practically without any community transmission. So that’s been good. So kids have been back in school since October, no issue whatsoever. But when we were at remote learning, it was one or the other. You were either remote learning or everyone was in the classroom. In Australia, didn’t see hybrid, where you’ve got a bit of both. I do know it is in some places around the world and that is a tough gig. It’s hard enough to teach just to remote or just to the folks who were stand before you in the classroom or the training room. But to do both at the same time takes a masterful set of skills.

Douglas:

It’s multitasking. And as we know, people can’t multitask. And so if you’re looking at the Zoom, you’re not looking at the room. And if you’re looking at the room, the people in the Zoom are getting a deficient experience. If you’re looking in the Zoom, the people in the room are getting a deficient experience. And always if people in the room are going to be tempted to have conversations, the people that are connected to Zoom aren’t going to hear those conversations. Definitely not if there’s one omnidirectional mic in the room, right?

Mark Collard:

Yeah, we’ve all been part of meetings where… I was part of school council earlier this week. One of our, it was actually the vice chair, was Zoomed in. Everyone else’s in the same room. It was hard. It was so difficult to keep involving them. They often don’t get heard because they’re being put on mute or whatever. It’s just very difficult and I think it takes a great master to be able to manage that well so everyone feels acknowledged and valued.

Douglas:

Yeah. And I think that it’s those principles we have to keep coming back to if we’re going to explore those scenarios. I think that’s the interesting part. We’re going to be entering in a time of experimentation where we’re going to be exploring how we show up for those types of things and what the best moves and tactics are. But I think to your point, we have to come back to those principles and those underpinning values.

Mark Collard:

Yeah. And it could be just as simple as acknowledging that it is clearly a different setting when you’ve got that hybrid-ness. But making sure that that person continues to be heard and valued because it’s easier to see everyone in the room, but it’s harder for them to do that or to hear them. And so constantly checking in with them. It’s like, “Hey…” Which is true for any person. If you got the folks who don’t speak up as much as others, it’s true for the facilitator of that group to make sure that those folks have a chance to check in as well or to break into smaller groups. Well, make sure you don’t forget the person who’s on Zoom. Have that screen turned around to the two or three people who are now in a breakout room, even though two or three of them are in the same space. The intentionality to remember about that stuff.

Douglas:

I want to ask you another question here, which is for someone who’s already had to go back to in-person and you’re doing some remote stuff, you’re doing some in-person stuff, how did this moment of being 100% remote influence how you show up in-person now?

Mark Collard:

That’s a great question, Douglas. The first thoughts that come to mind is this technique that I use to ask or somehow inquire check, in with my group. Are they ready to engage? Are they ready to play? Are they ready to learn? It depends on the context. I don’t know that I really did that very, very well back in the days when everything was presumptively you turn up. But I acknowledge the humanness of folks that they… Particularly, because my community is worldwide that some are getting up in the early morning. Some are up late at night. Some are at the end or in the middle of their working days. Checking in with them and creating something on the screen that said, “Hey, just annotate this scale.” And I did a variety of them. Let’s say we use the emojis so you got depressed at one end and sad and the other end, highly vigorous and enthusiastic and everything in between.

Mark Collard:

Annotate this scale as to where you’re at right now. It gave me a very quick sense of where my group was at. I wasn’t solving any problems. But sometimes just the simple acknowledgement of the fact that people are tired or they’re not feeling well or they’re here under duress can be enough to bridge the engagement necessary to move them forward in the next hour.

Mark Collard:

Now, of course, I’m doing that as people turn up. Here’s an example. I worked with a group of kids just the other day, whereas they enter the gym, they have to stand on this paper mat and there were three emoji faces. One was sad, one was neutral, the other one was happy. As they came in, there was a little sign that says please step on to basically engage with that emoji that you’re feeling right now. Without ever having to say anything to the group as they were coming in, dribbling in, I could tell from the foot marks where my group was at and I was checking in with them and there’s a whole variety of other ways of doing it. But that was just one that I recently used that was so simple. People thought it was fun and it’s something now that has really influenced what I do in-person.

Douglas:

It’s interesting. It reminds me of what we refer to as assessment points, because the game became an assessment point for you. You were able to glean info about how they were showing up and that can be used not only at the beginning, but throughout an event wherever we want to gage how people are doing. We can throw those things in.

Mark Collard:

Yep. And any number of unofficial stats. As we hark back to what we talked about earlier, Douglas also provides me with evidence about where my group is at. So if I’ve provided a selection of activities as people are gathering and most people are choosing to do something other than what I’ve given, that gives me an indication of where the group is at, how connected they are, how well do they look after each other, are they up to play, are they willing to engage, are they looking for excuses for something else to do? Even that provides me with maybe an unofficial way of checking in with the group as well.

Douglas:

Yeah, I want to come back to something you’ve mentioned a couple of times and you just brought it up again. This notion, “Are they willing to play? Are they ready to play?” What would you recommend to a facilitator if you detect or suspect that they’re not quite ready?

Mark Collard:

I think most groups are not ready. Because the thing about play, if we look at its pure definition, is it’s the absence of pretense. It’s who you are. Most of us run around for lots of good reasons with some at least a thin veil of a mask. So Most groups have something that needs to be pulled down before they’re ready to jump in and just simply play to be engaged in something for no apparent reason other than the sheer joy that comes from participating. No win-lose. They’re not particularly conscious of what’s going on around them. They are the essence of play or flow if you want to get really scientific.

Mark Collard:

I think all groups come with that. Some of them just have a lot more ice to chip through than others. If you truly wanted to help that group connect and therefore amplify the results of whatever you’re trying to get done, then do something, a little bit of time and energy to chip away at that, can be very useful and you need to meet them where they’re at.

Mark Collard:

I can think of many corporate groups that stand there with their arms crossed or their chest and like, “Eh, this is just childish. Blah, blah, blah.” Then it becomes a personal mission for me, Douglas, to find something so contagiously fun, it becomes difficult for them to stand away from. Then once they’re in it, I know I’ve got them because they realize this is a safe place. Having a big bag of tricks up my sleeve is definitely one of my advantages. But I appreciate that for many people they don’t have much, which is partly why I created this huge database to better say, “Hey, this is what’s working for me. Give it a go type stuff.” Having that large repertoire is useful so that you’re picking the right activity at the right time to chip away at whatever that resistance might be.

Douglas:

In our facilitation lab just last week, one of the facilitators said it’s one thing to invite someone to the dance, but it’s a completely other thing to invite them to dance. As you were talking about this executive with his arms crossed not willing to engage, I just had this mental image of you and your bag of tricks and at first his toe starts tapping with the music and then his leg starts moving and next thing you know, he’s dancing.

Mark Collard:

Yeah. And it’s so easy for us as facilitators to point the blame at that person. “Ah, I’ve seen you before. You never do anything and blah, blah, blah.” I like to flip it and go, “No, no, it’s my responsibility to create an environment in which you make appropriate choices consistent with the goals of the program.” If I can understand that it’s my responsibility and look, every one of us can can say, “Yep, there’s some people out there. They’re not even their mother’s love.” I get that. But really most people, most humans are willing to meet at least halfway if you can give them a good reason to engage. And so I like to flip that responsibility. It’s like, “What is it that I’m doing that’s creating this for them right now?” And you can’t control the stories in their head, but you can control the environment as much as possible that might help them make a different decision.

Douglas:

Let’s just be honest. There are going to be plenty of situations where it might be our fault as facilitators that maybe we didn’t do a great job of setting it up so they’re not connecting to the why or the purpose or they’re unclear on it. Or they feel like they’re going to have to make a sacrifice and we haven’t laid that out properly.

Mark Collard:

Yep. I think it’s a really great question for every one of my groups to ask is why are we doing this. What I hope, what I plan, what I intend is that that question is answered in the fun that is wanting to draw them in. My mentor, Karl Rohnke, who sadly passed away last year, he was the person that I learned all of this stuff, and he coined a term called functional understanding not necessary, FUNN. He talked about that. That was one of his core values was FUNN. Because it’s not necessary to understand what’s going on to have a great time. And so that contagiously fun stuff is what loosens those arms on people’s chests to lean in and give something a go because they sense that there’s nothing to embarrass or threaten them, it looks safe and it looks like just a bit of fun. That’s a challenge to find that, but there are lots of options that you can work with.

Douglas:

Wow. What a great concept. I think that’ll be a great spot to end on as well so I want to shift it over to you, Mark to see if you have a final thought for our listeners.

Mark Collard:

Well, I mentioned Douglas in our conversation having a bag of tricks. That’s something I learned from Karl. He had a massive, thousands of activities, it just seemed to me, he could pull out of his back pocket and use it at the right time with a particular group. And so over the last 30 years, I’ve created this massive online database because while I have many books, that was one way of sharing the word for beyond those people who could turn up at a training. But doing it online just leveraged the digital world. And so playmeo.com, I’m sure you’ll provide links here, is a great place to go. There’s tons of free resources there, lots of free group games, many of which you can use virtually as much as in-person. They’re all about providing opportunities for your group to interact and build those connections so that it helps amplify your results. So if you go to playmeo.com/free, typical spelling, you can find tons of things that you can download. Everything from a free app to free activities online, eBooks and so forth.

Douglas:

Well, Mark, I just want to reiterate how much of a pleasure it’s been chatting with you today. I encourage everyone to go check out playmeo.com for lots of free tools. It’s on my list that I published of awesome resources for methods and tools so I definitely endorse that. Go check it out. Mark, it’s been a pleasure. Enjoyed the conversation.

Mark Collard:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s been my pleasure as well. Hope everyone of your listeners has enjoyed this too.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control of 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 43: The Essence of Play, A Masterful Art appeared first on Voltage Control.

A return to work is around the corner, but what will that look like? For many businesses, that will not mean “business as usual”. The adjustment to remote work has many people considering a hybrid workplace. However, hybrid work has become a blanket term used to meekly describe the dynamic that the future of work suggests. Hybridity in the workplace is much more than the location and time we work; it’s not that simple. The merging of in-person and virtual work will mean the emergence of completely new a paradigm for all workers. Just like we had to shift to different processes and systems for remote work in the virtual landscape, we must consider the full picture of what hybrid roles and hybrid workers will look like in order to be successful in a new kind of work environment.

First of all, returning to work in person is a question of who is comfortable doing so. While some people are eager to be back in a collaborative office space, others aren’t so ready for various reasons–be it health concerns, a preference for remote work, or a resistance to getting back into an in-person work routine. Make no mistake, getting back together face-to-face is going to be a transition. It won’t immediately revert back to how it used to be because too much has happened since then. We’ll have to readjust our schedules–like organizing care for kids and adding a commuting routine back in–and get reacquainted with social norms and behaviors that come with an in-person work environment. From seemingly little things like questioning, “Do I shake my co-workers’ hands?” to larger concerns about whether employees will start back full or part-time, returning to work will mean ironing out kinks and getting readjusted. You’ll also need to consider the configuration for your hybrid environment–will there be multiple offices? What does hybrid mean to your organization–does it mean Mondays and Fridays in the office and every other day remote? This transition will take time. 

As employees begin to reestablish patterns and norms, they will be faced with new and potentially unexpected thoughts and feelings. They may find this process difficult and unsettling. Make sure to listen to their needs and give them time to adapt. While many may be excited to rush back, we’ll need to support those that need more time. We also don’t want to rush into hasty decisions that don’t sere our long-term needs and unnecessarily alienate team members.

It is our responsibility as leaders to establish clear expectations and “new norms” while also holding space for team members’ needs so that everyone can transition as painlessly as possible. 

I was recently chatting with some of the facilitators in our community and they declared that there is no such thing as a hybrid workshop. Their point was that if you are seeking full and equal participation from everyone we need to ensure that the interface for everyone’s ideas has consistent and equal bandwidth. In order to do that, all of your in-person attendees need to join the virtual session individually, making them all virtual participants as well. 

There is currently no software specifically made for hybrid work; software that exists assumes for remote work. We will need tools and processes that not only seamlessly support the merging of productive in-person and virtual work, but that also make connection a priority. Perhaps the greatest challenge for remote teams is genuine connection. It’s the essential missing element of in-person connection that cannot be replaced by technology–no matter how innovative. There is no substitute for human interaction. That’s why many businesses are prioritizing physical togetherness for their employees even if they have the choice to remain fully remote. The value for connection–however you create and maintain it–is paramount to do meaningful work together. 

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The word of hybrid also ushers in new concerns around co-location and who is actually in the room. Many workers have relocated during the pandemic and may no longer be near an office. What are the lines of collaboration that have been severed locally? Co-location will impact our design choices and skew our perspective. For example: When designing hybrid meetings, workshops, and other gatherings, there will be a natural pull to group co-located individuals during breakout sessions. While this may work out sometimes, we certainly shouldn’t take it for granted.

Do you see room for hybrid work within your organization? If so, how are you preparing for the shift in the workplace? If you decide to support a hybrid workplace, how will meetings work with some team members in a physical room and others dialing in virtually? What will you need to do to encourage equal connection amongst dispersed and in-person team members? How will hybrid work change talent acquisition? Will in-person team members have advantages or disadvantages that virtual workers won’t and visa versa? What technology needs to exist to fully support an effective hybrid work environment? The intricacies of a hybrid workplace are vast, but it’s a puzzle that can create a full, functional picture. 

If you are considering a hybrid work environment, keep this in mind: at the center of productive work is the people who make it happen. Keenly focusing on your team members and what they need to thrive is essential, especially in a hybrid environment. There is definitely no one-size-fits-all approach to getting the best performance from individuals and creating the best experience for them to succeed in. Learn your team members’ strengths and create opportunities for them to utilize them. One person may work best in person, while others may soar when they’re able to buckle down and hone in on their duties alone in their chosen workspace. It may seem like a game of Tetris at first, but leaning into the specific needs and preferences of your team, paralleled with how everyone can work best together, will create the most effective and inspiring work environment for all. 

It’s important to remember that we are entering a new age of experimentation. While it may seem familiar, this is new territory, so everyone will have a different perspective and approach. We must find what works best for our teams while also merging with the methods and preferences of other companies and people we work with. For example, I’ve recently been asked to facilitate a session where I’m remote and everyone else is in person. Each experience we have in the hybrid workspace will be a prototype to help us build new and innovative ways of collaborating. 

This transition will be interesting and we’ll all have to decide for ourselves and for the betterment of our teams which approaches, systems, and processes create the most advantageous results. Stay curious and stay safe.

The post Exploring Hybrid Work Connection appeared first on Voltage Control.

“The only assumptions that can hurt our products are the ones we don’t know about. I lean into the assumptions, I say, ‘Let’s get them all out on the table.’ Let’s align around them because until we get all of you guys aligned, we’re not going to be able to change your minds anyway.” -Tamara Adlin

Tamara Adlin is a UX expert and consultant who helps startups, and companies who want to behave more like startups, create products their customers love. She is also the co-author of the Persona Lifecycle book series and has created a method she calls Alignment Personas.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Tamara about shared narratives, alignment, and personas. Listen in to hear how exploring assumptions and allowing data to inform decision-making creates a unified team and a clear perspective.

Show Highlights

[01:03] Tamara’s Start
[04:35] Discoverability vs. Intuitiveness
[13:14] How to Expose Assumptions & Misalignment
[21:30] Shared Narrative Through Alignment Personas
[34:51] Tamara’s Closing Thoughts

Links | Resources

Tamara’s LinkedIn
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About the Guest

Tamara Adlin is a UX consultant who focuses on helping existing businesses run with the perspective and vitality of startups. Her background in technical communication allows her to focus on detangling the implicit and personal meanings that individuals assign to words within a communication process, while simultaneously exposing and evaluating the validity of assumptions held by key stakeholders.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

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. The service of having a truly magical meeting. Today, I’m with Tamara Adlin of Adlin Incorporated. She is a UX expert and consultant who helps startups and companies who want to behave more like startups, create products their customers love. She is also the co-author of The Persona Lifecycles book series, and has created a new method she calls the Alignment Personas. Welcome to the show, Tamara.

Tamara Adlin:

Thank you, so great to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, to kick things off, tell us a little bit about how you got your start.

Tamara Adlin:

Well, I got my start in the field of user experience before there was really a clear field of user experience. My family was interested in psychology and art, my mom and my dad, and I ended up doing an independent major to combine both, having no idea where that would go, and then discovered the field of human computer interaction and ended up going to the University of Washington’s department of Technical Communication for my master’s degree, and I didn’t even know what Technical Communication was. And today that department is called human centered design and engineering. And so I sort of made a straight line without having any idea where I was going and fell in love with the field and have been happily doing this work ever since I got my master’s degree in 1996, and have been working in large companies and startups ever since then.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s amazing. I had a very different experience that’s very parallel. So around ’96, ’97, I was at my first startup and writing software and we had built a lot of awesome technology and had some provisional patents, and were definitely leading the way on web analytics. Prior to us no one was doing the 1×1 pixel, which everyone does now. And it was ad click and all these folks that were doing server file analysis. And we thought we were hot stuff. We had Walmart, we had Victoria’s Secret, we had an Eddie Bauer, we had every e-commerce brand you can imagine. Well, brick and mortar brand that were just going online and needed these analytics. And along came a company called Omniture.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And they started picking away clients left and right, because they had a better user experience, and we didn’t even have that terminology then, but we knew exactly what they were doing, we saw what was happening, but we were in no position to react. And that’s what sent me on my journey to where I’m at now and understanding the importance of this kind of work. So it’s kind of interesting that just our experiences and what got thrown at us from the world just kind of prepared us for this work.

Tamara Adlin:

Well, yeah. And I’ll add to that, I love that this is your first question. I did a series of interviews in 2006 and 2007, and I’ve published some of them but not all of them on a site called uxpioneers.com. And they are always some of the generation before me, the ones who actually created our field, and all of them came from completely random places and their experience sort of led them to create this whole field of user experience. And it’s a bunch of fascinating weirdos, right? And I started every interview with, “What’s the first thing you can remember fascinating you?” And we were off and running from there.

So, I too love thinking about how this entire world sort of evolved from people’s curiosity and starting to notice the source of the problem and that source being what we call now user-friendliness or things making sense to regular human beings. We all get so enamored with technology, but the linchpin is the people who are trying to use that stuff.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s interesting, the notion of how intuitive something is. It’s one of the most difficult things to grapple because of the curse of knowledge. Once we know how something works, it’s hard to remember what it was like to not know that and put ourselves in those folks’ shoes. And I just don’t know how you get around just not talking to humans.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. Everybody used to talk about intuitiveness, and there’s almost nothing that’s super intuitive, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s discoverable, which basically means that if you see it once you won’t forget it, right? And so I think we actually build user interfaces a lot on discoverability as opposed to intuitiveness. And I think that that’s totally fine.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was kind of blurring those two concepts more, just the notion that I know that we’re working on a product to use inside of virtual meetings, and just the terminology, I’ll name something some way and it makes total sense to me and people will see it and it’s like they have no idea what it means. And I explain it and then they say, “Oh, that.” And so if I hear “that” enough times, then that’s what goes in the product, right? Because I feel like they understand it immediately, or it relates to more people than whatever word that I dreamed up that no one understands.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. And before this interview, we were talking a little bit, you said one of the things you asked people is what their superpower is. And I think one of my personal superpowers is that I am good at looking at products and designs and seeing them through the eyes of a first timer. There’s just some mode that I feel like I can put myself in, now that’s not flawless by a long shot and doesn’t replace actual user testing, but it’s an interesting place to try to put yourself in.

And I also think what you said about the wording. So often in my workshops I end up very quickly creating a document called glossary. And honestly, that glossary is one of the most important products, deliverables, of most of the work that I do, even though it’s never once mentioned in the description of the workshop or in the contract, or even in conversations that we have before a client hires me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think that definitely relates to something we were also talking about in the pre-show chat, which was this notion of perceived value of this work. A lot of executives would look at a statement of work then insert a glossary. I’m sure they were glossed right over that. What’s the benefit of this, right? Whereas you and I know that the alignment is so critical and I don’t think I’ve ever made a glossary for a client, although we’ve done it. I did it for… A few of them are startups internally, just because I got tired of hearing people being confused about words and said, “Let’s just write these down.”

But so much of the work is about helping people just understand each other. If you’re in a session and you’re a good facilitator, you’re going to start linking and noticing that people are using different words to describe different things. This is a massive opportunity for improving efficiency across teams. So tell me a little bit more about the glossary, and why aren’t people valuing these things as much?

Tamara Adlin:

Okay. Well, I’m going to answer that question in a way that’s not going to seem totally obvious, but here’s the thing about this executive alignment work about the workshops and all of this. I started out as a user experience person interested in user experience design, and then I started getting interested in, well, if we have great designers working on this stuff, why aren’t the products better that we deliver? And then I started looking at what gets in the way of delivering great design, and that could be anything and everything from not having enough budget to do research before you do the design to executives coming in and doing the swoop and poop seagull management six weeks after the design starts and telling you to make the logo bigger or whatever it is. And that’s how I started getting really interested.

I mean, all UX is about swimming upstream, right? And I swam all the way upstream into the executive suite where I realized that it is politically impossible for them to realize that they’re talking past each other and for anybody to make a decision or draw a line in the sand that they write down and stick to. And I got fascinated with trying to solve that problem all in the name of, how can we launch products that are designed better? Right? And so when you track it all the way up to the C-suite, what you start to realize is the problems are as much social and organizationally political and based in fear or just based in… My dear friend and super smarty pants, Katie Geminder calls it the game of telephones that exists in all executive suites. It’s something that they have built themselves, they can’t see it and you cannot fix it from the inside. And it is sometimes as basic as writing down and reflecting to them that the two of you, CMO and CFO or whatever are using this word to mean two different things. Right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was also thinking as you were talking about just vulnerability and trust, because especially that there’s been a lot of writings about the first team, this notion that as you get into leadership you’re no longer responsible for your organization you’re responsible for the executive team. You’re a member of the executive team. Your peers are now leaders of other organizations, not the people in your organization. And I just see so many executive teams struggle with that one issue. And I think it just manifests itself in other ways. And it’s almost like these people are so skilled at life and at doing things, they create coping mechanisms that they don’t even realize they’re creating. And so everything’s kind of somewhat functional, but if you really look at it, it’s pretty dysfunctional. They’re getting things done.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. What they’re really good at is getting higher and higher in an organization. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but then once you reached the top, now what do you do? And so I like to think a lot about… What I do too is user centered design, where each executive is both a product that is used by their peers, right? And is a user of their peers as products. So are you usable and are your colleagues usable to you? Right? Which is a totally different way of looking at it. But the nice thing about that is that it then tells user experience people, “You can use the same skills that you used to create better products to make yourself more usable and to become a more informed consumer of others in your organization, and to clearly ask for what you need.” And that also is true then at the executive level, but it just gets trickier up at the top.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s really fascinating this notion of inner departmental services. I know Zappos a few years back were experimenting with something they were calling market-driven dynamics. And essentially every team got a budget and they were supposed to release a services list. And so teams would request services of each other and they were kind of creating market-driven dynamics within the company, which is really fascinating. But I think conceptually that’s interesting. What I heard from folks was the overhead of managing a P&L for every team is a little much, right?

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. Yeah. But I think even doing that as an exercise, maybe not operationalizing it and actually turning it into a P&L, but doing that as an exercise for yourself, for your team, even for the teams that you work with most closely, and getting aligned on what is it that you offer and what is it that you need and are those things matching up, is really, really interesting. And it’s really, really fruitful.

Douglas Ferguson:

So tell me a little bit about… I’m really curious how the executive alignment workshop works. Your goal is to get executive alignment, but it’s the alignment personas workshop, I believe.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. So I wrote these books on data-driven personas, right? And I co-authored them with John Pruitt, who’s awesome. And they are about, how do you really prepare an organization to use personas? And then how do you use data to create them? And then how do you actually physically use them on a day to day basis? Well, I wrote these books and then I went into consulting in 2005 and I never ended up creating data-driven personas. Partially because no one had the budget for it, also partially because the stories I heard from organizations that did have the budget is that they would launch them and then their personas would fail. So I started thinking about that as a problem. And what I ended up doing, long story short, was deciding that or realizing that if an executive… I’m just going to call them executives, it could be stakeholder, whatever. If they have an idea about the way something should be built, you can’t convince them that’s not the way it should be built, until you show them that their way doesn’t work.

So I knew that assumptions at the stakeholder and higher levels were actually the thing driving product decisions. And there’s a good reason for that. If you think about even just a startup, by the time a startup tries to build a product, what they’ve done is they have created pitch decks, they’ve created demos, maybe they’ve created an MVP, they’ve gotten money. And what that means is that people have looked at their assumptions about the way to build something and told them it’s valuable. Until they build that thing the way they think it should be built, you can’t convince them to do otherwise.

So I have an example for you, imagine that you wanted to buy a new house, and imagine that you have it in your head that you want a yard because you have a dog or you have a kid, right? I know there’s an order about saying these things, but whatever. So I could show you all the data in the world that says that owning a house with a backyard actually costs more than it is valuable. That it actually makes a huge amount more sense to buy a house near a park, near an unleashed dog area, near a playground. It’s not going to change your mind about wanting a house with a yard. It doesn’t matter how much data I give you. If you want a yard and that’s in your head, you’re going to buy a house with a yard.

And I think startups are similar. I think the people who run startups want a house with a yard. And that you need to lean into that and get all of those assumptions out on the table. Why they want a yard, how big of a yard? Do they all define a yard the same way? And help them by saying, “The only assumptions that can hurt our products are the ones we don’t know about.” If you think of a yard as a tiny strip of land, and you think of a yard as an acre and a half of wilderness, then we’re in trouble. Right? So I lean in to the assumptions, and I say, “Let’s get them all out on the table. Let’s align around them, regardless of whether or not having a yard is fundamentally the best idea. Because until we get all of you guys aligned, we’re not going to be able to change your minds anyway. Right?”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. And it reminds me of… Especially your question around, well, how big is this backyard?

Tamara Adlin:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Reminds me of the clean language questions, because so many people talk in metaphor and jargon and the clean language questions are so great at kind of helping tease out those differences and get to deeper understanding. The jargon’s great. As long as we’re referencing the same glossary, it can be really great to make our communication really efficient, but I think humans tend to go to that efficient communication too early before we’ve established the norms and gotten really well aligned, and then it really causes a lot of problem, because we’re moving quickly and we’re assuming that we were… You made a comment that the only assumptions that will hurt us are the ones that we haven’t discovered.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And the assumptions we’re making that we understand each other, those are maybe the most dangerous.

Tamara Adlin:

I think you’re right. I think the clean words, the glossary, you and I know that that is the root of the problem. The other root of the problem is the lack of numbers. So another thing that happens with my workshops is I always start with articulating measurable… I call them business goals, but their product goals or their project goals. And I do them with this Mad Libs format, right? So that everyone has to be articulate with… The first word is increase or decrease. The second part of the Mad Libs is some important measurable number. The third part of the Mad Libs is an actual number like 20% or 80%. And the last part of the Mad Libs is in some time period, like three months after launch. And there’s reasons for all those pieces.

But instead of diving into that, what I want to say is, every single time when I do this, the client says, “Well, we already have our goals nailed down.” And I say, “Send them on over.” And either they send old ones from when they were at the beginning of the year, or more often I get, “Hey, Sandra, did you have the latest board deck? Because we had some thoughts in there and then we had the original vision and metrics. And Bob, did you have the KPIs for the flim-flam challis wham or whatever?” I mean, they’re all over the place. And that’s because every time more than one executive is in a room together, something shifts slightly and nobody writes it down. So they all tell me, “We’ll take out the goals part of this. We don’t need this as part of the project.” But the amazing thing, my other little cute… As consultants, we have lots of cute things we say, well, the magic of business goals is that it’s never inappropriate to ask for them and they never exist.

So that’s what I mean by actual numbers. And what I tell people is, “I don’t care whether you decide that you want to increase new signups by 20% or 80%, what I care about is that all of you agree that it’s in the realm of 20% versus in the realm of 80%.” Right? So first the metric is the clean language, right? Increased number of people who create an account. That’s hard to actually get to sometimes. And then 20% versus 80%. So I think we’re down to words and numbers you and I. I think we’ve solved the world with words and numbers.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, I’m going to bring up something that came up in the pre-show chat. This seems like a nice segue to your statement that data doesn’t solve any of the problems.

Tamara Adlin:

That’s right. Yeah. Everybody relies on data for everything. Companies are like, “Well, if we have a problem, let’s go out and get data to solve it.” But data doesn’t solve most business problems. And that’s because, unless you know what the assumptions are that that data is up against, and unless those assumptions have been articulated and fully appreciated, data isn’t going to change your mind. Data isn’t going to change your mind about wanting a damn yard. It’s just not.

So first you have to know they want a yard, right? And you have to respect that because they did get money, either from their investors or from their organization to pursue project X, which is project X is to solve some problem for some set of people in some unique way that we think will make money or whatever. All right. Well, they got all the way to the point where this thing is funded, however, it’s funded, they’ve been validated by the most important people in their lives, their bosses, their investors, based on the ideas they’ve shared, their assumptions about the right way to do this thing. Data is not the thing that’s going to tell them they were wrong. Unless you fully understand that their assumption is that users want peanut butter, right? Now that you know that they think some users want peanut butter and some users want jelly, now you can go out and get data and show them, “We actually looked at these people and they actually want almond butter. Here, we’ll show you.” That’s got nowhere to land unless you know what it is that they’re thinking and… Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

That definitely aligns with my experience and observations. Also, I think there’s a layer there, which is, if you couple that with how curious the person is, that has an impact. Because, people that are highly curious are typically easier to have that conversation about the backyard. And when I say curious, I’m talking about a child’s mind curiosity. And I think that’s why these workshops that we do are so powerful at helping people address this type of work, because we’re putting them in that mindset. Of course, we’ve got systems to walk them through, but also getting to a point where they become curious and they start examining things, to me, is one of those first steps. And if you’re already starting with highly curious people, then it’s sometimes easier.

Tamara Adlin:

Well, I like what you say about that, about curiosity and getting into that mode. I think I have thought about it differently. I’ve thought about it as changing the conversation and changing the words. So you asked me about… Executive alignment is my thing, that’s the what, and the alignment personas is the how. And the reason I create these alignment personas, which is personas based on how stakeholders are thinking about their users, right? And again, cute way of describing our projects when we’re consultants, like, this is executive alignment and five conversations, which is really about creating alignment personas.

And the first step is business goals, and the second step is listing all the words they use to describe users today, users, customers, known users, account holders, mom, and that takes about five minutes. And then doing, here’s the stickies, right? Then doing what I call the yellow sticky exercise, which is just if your product or your project was a building and you were looking at all these people showing up at the front door, like you were standing on a mountain over here looking down on them, describe each of them. Like, a mom who wants to do yoga at home, or an athlete who has an injury that they don’t know how to address, right? And that changes the conversation. That’s like, describe all these people that you can imagine showing up at your product.

And then the third conversation is clustering those understatements that start with the word I want, or I need. And I’m racing through this, but just to give you a sense, and then clustering those want and need statements into sort of motivation based personas, right? As if there was a concierge inside your building, and after a week of people streaming through, if you ask them, “Well, who’s coming to this product?” They would say, “Well, there’s a bunch of people over there who are brand new to it, there’s a bunch of people over there who have issues or problems, there’s a bunch about people who are looking for a specific solution.” And you sort of create these persona candidates out of that.

And then the last step is prioritizing them based on the numeric goals you created in the first place. And the reason I’m listing through that is because when I want to point out is it’s simply changing the conversation. It’s changing the discussion from whatever discussion they were having before that was tangling them up to this very sort of equalizing sticky note based. And at first they roll their eyes, exercise where they’re just describing the people who are going to produce the money that will pay their salaries, right? And then trying to think like them instead of thinking about them, right? And then ending up with these personas that now you can go get data and decide whether or not they’re realistic. But you were there in the room with your colleagues, with the other stakeholders, together you created them and together you prioritized them according to these agreed on business goals. And suddenly now the language has changed because now you’re able to say, “We prioritized Penelope over Roberta.” Right? “Because Penelope will help us get to our goal of having more people actually sign up than Roberta will.” For whatever reason.

So if somebody comes in in six weeks and has a cool idea, anybody could say to them, “That’s a cool idea for Roberta, but you prioritized Penelope. So do you want us to work on this Roberta idea or Penelope?” And so, because those names and those shared understanding of who those people are and their priorities and how they reflect our business needs, that changes the glossary completely. That changes the language.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s like a shift in perspective, right?

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s ultimately a paradigm change for folks.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. And the way I describe that is that it sort of transitions from thinking about their users to thinking like their users. And a huge amount of agreement can be drawn from that. Now, the reason traditional personas tend to fail is because they are designed to communicate data, right? So they are designed to summarize data. What alignment personas are built to do is to drive to and communicate agreement and alignment, no matter where it came from, because lack of alignment is a much bigger problem than lack of data.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’m seeing a few different angles of alignment or dimensions maybe. There’s the perspective of the executive to executive alignment, because now they’re really clear because they went through this process together and they got to understand it. There’s also alignment of the strategy to the goals, because now the strategy is going to be informed by these decisions that we made. And I think that goes all the way up and down the ladder, right? The tactics should then be really clear because we’re using the personas as a litmus to make sure that we are making the right decision. So it can kind of help inform decisions all the way up and down. So there’s alignment there. Is there another dimension that you’ve noticed or are those the main two?

Tamara Adlin:

Well, first of all, that’s very astute and unsurprising that you would realize that given who you are, but that’s exactly right. It’s connecting the, what we’re trying to do, the how we’re trying to do it. I think the other… You’ve sort of covered it in you’re saying like it’s an up and down alignment, but it’s also alignment between the executives and everybody else working for them in some really interesting ways. So these alignment personas can and are used to communicate throughout down in the organization. We are focusing on Penelope first and foremost, and then we’re not going to make Roberta unhappy, but when push comes to shove, and push always comes to shove, we’re going to make sure that we nail it for Penelope. Because if we don’t, we’re not going to hit our goals.

What then also happens is what goes down can come up. So if the lowest person on the design totem pole gets a visit from a very important head honcho who tells them to make the logo bigger, right? Which happens, then that lowly designer can say, “I can understand why we’d want to do that for Roberta and I can do that for you because you’re my boss. But the cost is that I’m not going to be able to do this feature change for Penelope.” It’s your choice, right? Because you’re the hot honcho. But just be able to explain to you that this doesn’t line up with what you said your priorities were in a way that’s not going to get the lowly designer fired. All they’re doing is saying, “I heard you and I respect your decision. If something has changed, let me know. I’ll do whatever you want.”

And what ends up happening is then that honcho can back down without embarrassment. And he’d say, “You know, you’re completely right. We do really want this for a Penelope.” Great reminder, go for it. Or they can tell this lowly designer, “Our executive priorities have changed, and now Roberta’s opinion of us is much more important than we thought.” Now the lowly designer can raise the flag to everyone on their team and say, “Guess what? I just heard from this head honcho their priorities have changed.” And that’s great. They’re allowed to change priorities. Knowing about it enables us to do something about it because it happens anyway and we don’t know about it.

So that kind of magical thing where these personas give us a third sort of entity in the organization that we can blame things on, that we can invoke that are apolitical, is sort of a magical thing. It’s like you have two kids who are mad at each other and then they both get mad at the parent. Right? It’s a sort of common… Not this case, an enemy, but commonplace to put sort of blame for pushback.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love this notion of the shared narrative that allows it to… I don’t know. It definitely helps the communication because I would say that’s the hardest thing I see executive teams struggle with as… I mean, first they need to be aligned, but then even the ones that are aligned, it’s great and all if you get aligned inside the workshop, but if you don’t disseminate that throughout the organization, then it’s not going to take hold.

And I think one of the qualities of one of my favorite leaders, the chairman of my last startup, was I would just see him tell the same story over and over and over and over again. Whether it was in our board meeting, or in an executive meeting, or an all-hands meeting, or at the water cooler with the admin. It didn’t matter who it was, what we were talking about, they didn’t dilute the message. That’s a superior skill because I recognize myself abbreviating, shortening, because I feel like I’ve said it a million times, that it’s super important for people to get the real thing and to get it undiluted and make sure that we’re empowering the organization to know what to do.

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah. I want to put a whole other angle on that. I think a lot of people who listened to this podcast are people who are in the business of controlling the room. Right? And I think one thing that I’ve noticed in myself is I keep thinking that I have to come up with new concepts or new workshops or new whatever, but the truth is that the same work that I’ve been doing for years is still highly relevant. Executive alignment is never not going to be a problem. And even though I find myself repeating myself on different podcast interviews or whatever, right? I have to respect that what I offer is valuable and worth repeating without constantly having to come up with something new to have value as a service provider. I know it’s kind of an odd way to reply to what you’re saying, but I think a lot of us must struggle with this. I feel like I should be creating articles on new topics all the time, but the truth is, honestly, what I should be doing is creating articles on the same topics all the time.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Repetition is often key. And I think the beauty is, how do we make sure people hear what we were trying to say? And we’re there for people when they need to hear it.

Tamara Adlin:

The adjustments come in adjusting the same message for a different set of ears.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Tamara Adlin:

The way I’m talking to you now, I would never summarize this workshop that fast or business goals that fast for any other audience. But since I know I’m talking to a bunch of workshop facilitators, I know they’re like, “Oh, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yep.” So it’s an adjusted message but the core value is still the same. And I think we all want that from our leaders, to your point about the CEO or something. There’s huge relief in knowing what you’re doing as a lower person in the organization. That it aligns with the entire business, that there’s a reason that you’re doing it. And then you have clarity in the direction that you’re going.

We all want Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer up in front saying, “No, it’s this way. It’s this way. It’s this way.” And I think part of my job is helping to establish that red nose. But my analogies are going all over the place, which means I’m happy in the conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

But you got to have the signal, right? There’s got to be a signal somewhere.

Tamara Adlin:

And it’s got to be clear and not change too much. And if it does change, you have to be able to say, “It changed everybody, so let’s adjust, but let’s adjust together.” Because my whole thing about alignment is like, if you picture a bunch of thoroughbred race horses all attached to a carriage, they could be the fastest race horses on the face of the planet, but if they are heading in slightly different directions, just a couple degrees off, that chariot is not going to go very fast.

Douglas Ferguson:

It may even get damaged in the process too.

Tamara Adlin:

Exactly. Right? And so you’ve hired these thoroughbred race horses who all obviously can go fast, so why aren’t you going faster? It’s because you’ve attached them all to a chariot but they’re all heading in slightly, slightly different directions. And the reason why I’m a consultant and will never take a full-time job is because you can’t fix that from the inside. Not possible.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we are at time and-

Tamara Adlin:

Oh, sorry. I’m having so much fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

No, no, this is great. That’s why I had to drop in that message thinking, “Okay, we’re done.” Because often, my guests are so much fun to talk to, we could just probably talk for hours and we had to end at some point. So I want to give you just a moment to leave our listeners with something that you’d like them just to keep top of mind.

Tamara Adlin:

What I want to leave people with is that I’m really into this notion of executive alignment as a place for us to focus our attention and work. And I’m really interested in… I mean, of course, because I have my alignment personas and persona stuff, I’m really interested in finding ways to align them by changing the conversation to be around their most important people in the company, which are their users. But I think whatever it is that you do, whatever workshop you provide, thinking a lot about what is it that’s part of already part of your workshop or the work that you’re doing that is about alignment? And really articulating that, creating a deliverable around that, creating a message around that, so we get the word out to the industry that this is something that people should shop for. This is a problem they should recognize without it being threatening. And it is a solvable problem. It’s so fascinating to me and it’s so powerful.

Douglas Ferguson:

How can listeners find you?

Tamara Adlin:

Oh yes. Well, I have a website, adlininc.com. A-D-L-I-N-I-N-C.com. And that has links to medium articles and stuff. And you can also find me ish on uxpioneers.com, where I have a lot of interviews with the people who started the UX entire field. And there are links on my site to recordings of presentations and podcasts and things like that. And I’m always looking for fun speaking opportunities, so if you have any get in touch with me.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s been a pleasure speaking with you Tamara, thanks for joining me.

Tamara Adlin:

Oh, the pleasure is all mine. Oh, please. Thank you so much.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

The post Episode 38: We Know What Happens When You “Assume” appeared first on Voltage Control.

“The biggest issue I find is that people overestimate their ability, the simple term is cultural competence, but more accurately is, they overestimate their ability to navigate across cultures effectively. They think they’re in one place because they made an investment. They’re super excited about this work. They know it’s the right thing to do. They made the business case for it. They’re totally invested. However, they don’t have the skills to actually navigate those conversations effectively. When subjects around race and racism come up or other issues, they find themselves using a lot of their lizard brain where they’re fighting, fleeing, or freezing. And so when those conversations come up, their ability to actually navigate is really diminished because they haven’t figured out for themselves personally how to sort through the moving parts they’re going on.”

Kazique Prince is the Founder & CEO of Jelani Consulting LLC, where he works with businesses and nonprofits as a DEI consultant. He also serves as the senior policy advisor and education coordinator for the City of Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, and has launched a nonprofit called Courage Equity that’s aimed at funding educators who focus on cultural fluency.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Kazique about empathy-driven inclusion, psychological awareness in the workplace, and how reconciliation affects all aspects of an individual’s life. Listen in to catch a glimpse of what reality could look like if we shifted our collective focus from punitive scrutiny to empowering practices.

Show Highlights

[00:56] Kazique’s Career & Origins
[03:42] Navigating Multi-Layered Conversations Around Race
[08:31] The Best Indicator of a Company’s Priorities
[12:48] Cultural Competency as a Skill
[24:50] Truthfully Examining a Dishonest System

Links | Resources

Kazique’s LinkedIn
Jelani Consulting LLC

About the Guest

Kazique joins us today, from Jelani Consulting LLC. As a trained psychologist with years of on-the-field experience with areas ranging from grief, youth mentoring, substance abuse, and education, he’s amassed both an enormous set of skills in walking people through uncomfortable conversations, and an enormous heart for reconciliation and empowerment.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps 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. 

Subscribe to Podcast

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Voltage Control on the Web
Contact Voltage Control

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 in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Kazique Prince, founder and CEO of Jelani Consulting, LLC, where he is a diversity equity and inclusion consultant, working with businesses and nonprofits. Welcome to the show, Kazique.

Kazique Prince:

Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.

Douglas:

Absolutely. For starters, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got your start. What’s the origin story of Kazique?

Kazique Prince:

Well, it’s complicated. I’m a trained psychologist. I’ve been a psychologist since 2003, went to the University of Georgia, out there in the sticks of Athens, Georgia. I’ve been doing this work around diversity, equity and inclusion, for 25 plus years. I worked initially in substance abuse, education and treatment, also worked in higher education off and on for a number of years, worked with some nonprofits, used to work with a Catholic agency as a social worker in the Bronx. I’ve had a variety of different experiences, which has been really rich for me. I’ll say I’ve been running my company Jelani Consulting for the last 13 years, really focusing and honing down on this conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion. To be honest, I think the reason I got started in this work, because I found that they were just very difficult conversations for people to have, whether it was about race, gender, LGBTQ concerns.

Kazique Prince:

I had found that my conversations that I was having with people around alcohol and drug treatment were just as difficult, if not more difficult. And so doing this work around diversity, equity and inclusion, just seemed a prime opportunity to encourage people to really engage in a conversation and dialogue and really figure out ways of making a difference in their lives. Because I think the biggest challenge is that people want a sense of fairness. They want a sense of right and wrong, but how to have those conversations when you’re talking about racism, when you’re talking about people losing their lives because of the injustices they’re experiencing, it’s very, very difficult.

Kazique Prince:

I found that I enjoyed and felt motivated to have that conversation with people. And to be honest, a lot of people don’t know this about me, but there was a time I thought I was going to become a minister, and becoming a clinician was part of my, for lack of a better word, part of my ministry, but specifically focusing on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. So people feel more empowered, feel more alive, feel more actualized. It just felt the right pathway for me. I’ve just been really enjoying being able to be a witness to that experience for a lot of people and support them in their efforts. From a business perspective, I want them to make more money, because I know organizations that do this well, just do a better job of making money and doing the business that they’re focused on.

Douglas:

There’s a lot to unpack there. I’d like to start with, you use the word difficult and how truly difficult navigating racism and privileges, just because it’s so multi-layered and complex. There’s even taxonomy in language, people don’t understand. There’s fears about, how they might show up and how they don’t want to be labeled. No one wants to be labeled as a racist, but the fact that we’re part of a racist system, just pretty much makes us part of it, right? We’re existing in this thing, so we’re contributing in some way. I’m just curious if you have advice, because the one thing I run into tons when I even, unlike you, my work doesn’t center on this, but I bump into it a lot.

Douglas:

The thing I hear is that, well, I’m not a racist. I’m curious, if you have any advice for the listeners, if they’re trying to talk to a coworker or a peer or a loved one around racism and privilege, how do you have that conversation in a way that helps people understand that there’s multiple levels of this happening, so they can show up and be an ally?

Kazique Prince:

I really appreciate you asking this question, because it’s first acknowledging this is a difficult conversation. Because a lot of people say, well, just get out there, all you got to do is just talk. I’m like, this is kind of like dealing with money. There’s this quote out there that says, “Messing with my money is like messing with my emotions.” This is important. I don’t want to give the impression this is necessarily always going to be easy. I think the more you do it, the easier it does get. But the first thing I start off with, is acknowledging that what we’re trying to attack our systems that are in place. We have institutions that are in place and we’re less concerned about attacking people, but we’re really trying to challenge systems that perpetuate the biases that many of us are frustrated by.

Kazique Prince:

Whether it’s racism or sexism, this is not about going after a person who I can debate all day about whether they’re being racist or not. That’s going to be an ongoing dialogue. There’s still people debating whether president Trump has done anything racist or not. But the problem is that you can always run into the challenge of trying to prove to people that they’re racist, because it’s a personal dialogue or personal attack. It’s hard to have that discussion. It’s harder, I should say.

Douglas:

Where’s that threshold, right? It’s not binary. I think that’s the problem. People think of it as binary.

Kazique Prince:

Right, right. If you get engaged in that conversation on an individual basis, it’s very difficult. Oftentimes it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t lead you anywhere.

Douglas:

You’re not fruitful, yeah.

Kazique Prince:

But if you’re saying, hey, we have institutions in place that have these results, like your hiring practices that led to a disproportionate number of men being hired compared to women, or you have the absence of people of color in certain positions at all, or leadership specifically. When you’re looking at the numbers, you can say, we know there’s something going on in the process, because we see these people missing in leadership, missing in the organization. We know that there’s problems in the tech industry, because when you look across the industry, there’s an absence of people of color in leadership. When you look at fortune 500 companies, you’re seeing the same absence of people who are just as talented, who are just as smart, but they’re not in those positions.

Kazique Prince:

There’s not a critical mass of people of color or women in certain industries that are led by mostly men. And so, at a minimum, you can say, the numbers show me there’s a bias, which probably indicates that there’s a system in place that led to that bias. Now it’s all our responsibility to get engaged, to figure out how do we change that, that wave that led to that to that present situation and create a new situation or a new dynamic. What equity is fundamentally about, is about changing programs, policies and procedures that led to the biases that we have in the first place.

Douglas:

I want to talk a little bit about what you notice when you’re working with clients, with these policies and procedures. What’s the low hanging fruit? I’m sure that there’s something that you see just over and over and over again, when you start working with a new company like, oh, yep. It’s there, there it is again, we need to fix that. Is there something that is just ubiquitous that you think would just be great if everyone just paid attention to?

Kazique Prince:

Yeah. One of the things I’ve learned early on, is that, one of the best indications of an organization’s investment and engagement with this conversation around diversity, equity, inclusion, not just the conversation, I mean that in a very obtuse way, but their engagement with this work, is when they’re willing to put money towards it. If you’re not putting any money towards it, this is not a priority. People ask me, well, how much money are we talking about? I said, well, like anything that’s important to me, there’s a substantial investment. At least 1% of my profits should be going towards this work. If I want to build a new building, if I want to start a really major initiative, that’s going to change the culture of our organization, putting $0 to it is a guarantee that nothing’s going to happen.

Kazique Prince:

But if I say, I’m going to put X percent of my profits towards this effort, it’s going to guarantee something’s going to happen. What I’m also looking for is, what’s my return on investment? We know from the research that the return on investment can be anywhere from every dollar that you spend to about $7, to 10, $15 return. We already know that, right? And so those are the kinds of basic things I’m looking at. I’m looking at literally their budget going, how much, not time, not volunteers going out and doing community service, how much of your money have you invested in this? And then I want to see your staff that’s committed to this. If I can see that, it gives me a sense of what your investment may have been up to that point. If you had $0, that’s fine, my job is to help you reimagine your budget, so you can make this a priority.

Douglas:

The thing we run into most when thinking about this kind of work, is how people show up in meetings. I think that’s the hallmark of true inclusion. As we think about the work we do as facilitators, our job is to make sure everyone’s included. Ideally, we do it in a way where we’re not just going around round robin and calling on everyone, can we create really dynamic and truly inclusive types of scenarios? I’m just curious, is that something that you’re noticing and that you’re starting to see clients of you are starting to have more inclusion in their meetings or more contributions from everyone?

Kazique Prince:

When I think about people’s attempts to be more inclusive, the good thing that I’m seeing, is that people are trying to be more and more creative about how to create those more inclusive environments, whether it’s just having check-ins. Even for some of these more religious oriented organizations, them starting with prayer, not in the way of saying, okay, this is one way of praying, but just saying, I want to open it up for us to center ourselves, whether it be from your own faith tradition or another tradition, or no tradition whatsoever, but it’s a way of getting away from one way of running a meeting, which tends to be very output or outcomes oriented. We need to achieve these goals, during this meeting, at this time, versus relationship building, which is also important, right? Or it’s getting to know each other. And creating that inclusive environment means having a different exchange.

Kazique Prince:

Sometimes meetings might be led by a different person, each meeting, so you have a different feel of things. But the idea is that you’re not just using the meetings as a way of engaging with one another, but also meeting one on one, or smaller groups, but just really being creative about how do we conduct business with the same goal in mind of yes, we want to make money and improve our operations and so on and so forth. But we’re finding that there’s different pathways of doing that work if it’s done well.

Douglas:

Absolutely. What you’re talking about too, reminds me of creating more trust and potentially more psychological safety on a team. If you build rapport and you build understanding, then people are less likely to be judgmental or snappy. As we know, those dynamics lead to people drawing and not contributing in meaningful ways. I’m curious, when you see teams that are trying to make efforts, but maybe the inclusion is not there. What are some of the common issues you’re noticing or things that are holding them back?

Kazique Prince:

Well, it’s funny you say that, because the biggest issue I find is that people overestimate their ability, simple term is cultural competence, but more accurately is, they overestimate their ability to navigate across cultures effectively. They think they’re in one place, because they made an investment. They’re super excited about this work. They know it’s the right thing to do. They made the business case for it. They’re totally invested. However, they don’t have the skills to actually navigate those conversations effectively. When subjects around race and racism come up or other issues, they find themselves using a lot of their lizard brain where they’re fighting, fleeing or freezing. And so when those conversations come up, their ability to actually navigate is really diminished because they haven’t figured out for themselves personally how to sort through the moving parts they’re going on.

Kazique Prince:

And so even though their heart’s in the right place, their ability hasn’t caught up with their heart. A lot of the time, it’s sitting with them and really developing the skills that are necessary to have the conversation. But I would say the other issue is, again, I might have the right ideas. I’ll use one example real quickly. A lot of organizations want to recruit and they want to recruit more diverse people, but they don’t have any relationships with the people that they want to recruit. How are you going to recruit more people of color, whether it be black, Latino, or other groups, if in your own spirit, your spheres of influence in your life, you know no one who’s black or Latino or Asian? Your first step is to go build those relationships first, then tackle your goal around recruitment of that population.

Kazique Prince:

And so they prematurely go out there and start talking to all the black and brown people they can find on the internet and they wonder why people are looking at them crazy, going, who are you and why are you calling me? Those relationships are critical. I can’t sleep on the importance of taking those 10 steps back first, to make sure you have all the things you need in place first, before you tackle some of the big goals that you might be trying to attempt to deal with.

Douglas:

It makes total sense, because if you think about it, it’s two dynamics, right? On a purely un-relational standpoint and a purely mechanical and operational standpoint, you have to have a pipeline. I always tell people, if you’re trying to recruit, if you’re trying to hire today, you should’ve started recruiting four months ago. Otherwise you’re not going to have very good candidates, and they certainly won’t be diverse, because you’re just finding whatever falls out of the woodwork and that’s probably going to be through your network and people you know. Also it really resonates with me, because if you’re on the relational side, if you’re starting to understand these people, relate to them, you’re going to be able to A, change your policies, B, design a nice looking container that these people will want to be inside of.

Douglas:

Because often I see people wanting… It’s a lot harder if you don’t start early, if you start later and it’s 10 dudes in a garage and you’re trying to hire your first woman, they’re going to be like, I don’t want to be the first woman in this gym locker.

Kazique Prince:

It’s funny you say that, because when you ask people of color and women about going out and recruiting other people of color and women, they have no problem doing it, because their networks already exist. They already have the relationships. Just like with white men, who have a great idea and they’re sitting in the garage and they’re like, hey, let’s do this. What they’re really good at, is recording other people like themselves. But if they’re going to recruit anyone that’s not like themselves, they’ve got to be asking themselves, if I don’t know these folks already, I need to spend the cultural capital necessary, the investment that’s necessary to achieve it well. The thing is, it can be done. It can be done, not easily because it’s going to take time.

Kazique Prince:

For some organizations, it may be four months and maybe a year, because I’ll be honest, people of color, I can’t speak for everyone, but some people are a little suspicious. They are like, hmm, you want to use my context, so you can achieve your goals? Do I really want to work in your organization? Because y’all seem a little iffy about this diversity thing in the first place. That’s why that trust piece is so important, because they want to know, I would speak for myself, I want to know that you’re invested, not just for the short term, but the long-term gain other people that you’re trying to recruit.

Douglas:

And why me?

Kazique Prince:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Douglas:

Right. I think I really haven’t heard the word tokenism thrown around in a while, but that’s a very bad thing. We want to support communities and underrepresented individuals. But if we’re just checking a box and then not putting the work in and not looking carefully at who it is and making sure that they’re great for the roles, then that’s actually doing a disservice for everyone.

Kazique Prince:

Well, that’s what we experienced one or two generations ago with affirmative action. Hence why people don’t even like using that term anymore. When was the last time you heard someone say affirmative action? Right?

Douglas:

Unless someone is being derogatory.

Kazique Prince:

Exactly. It was because we went about it so haphazardly. We threw people in positions that, one, they weren’t given a chance. They were under-prepared or sometimes over-prepared, but their voice was small and diminished in so many different ways. It just became a self fulfilling prophecy of some of the troubles. The thing is, that’s still the struggle we have today, because people will do a lot of the same things we’ve seen for generations now, where they set up people for failure and wonder why they had the result they had. One of the big things I think we are faced with now as a country is that, what is the responsibility of business leaders especially whether they’re big or small to invest in their talent.

Kazique Prince:

Because think about how many people you know in your life who are really not that smart, really not that talented, but we give them all the grace that is necessary to be talented, to be really great, because someone sits with them and talks with them, gives them the inside scoop. They are treated like the special child, the golden child. Could you imagine if that happened for more people, particularly people of color, who never get that, how it would make a difference in their lives and how they would be successful. To me, that’s what equity is all about. It’s not giving the kid who was going to go to college anyhow, an opportunity, it’s giving a kid who never thought that was even a chance, an opportunity. And not just to go to college, but I want them to be chair of the federal reserve.

Kazique Prince:

I want them to be super successful, not just get by. I think that’s the struggle. It’s like, somehow I should pat myself on the back because I got this kid out of high school. He was going to do that anyhow. He didn’t need you for that. It may have been harder, but he was going to do it, because he was already directed to do that. But if you say, no, I’m going to invest in this young person, and I’m going to make sure they not just go to college, but goes to one of the best colleges and not just that, but they’re going to get a great job, that they can pay it forward. That’s a different kind of investment.

Douglas:

You’re talking about capitalization in society. How do we raise up? If you really think about the broader impacts of this work, it’s not just, how do we improve ROI and profits for a company, but it’s really capitalization of society. We, as a civilization will rise up in ways that are unprecedented if we can come together and work and collaborate, and also keep people from getting just ripped up by the system. I’m really excited about what Oregon is doing. The fact that there are people that are just getting thrown into jail for petty things, just because they had a bout with some drugs, and the next thing they can’t get out of this rap sheet they’re in. I don’t know. I’m really excited about programs like that and the work you’re doing can really just help us as a civilization.

Kazique Prince:

Well, the thing is, I think that sometimes gets lost in this conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion, because there’s the troubling and depressing and heart-wrenching stories of oppression that we hear, right? We watch movies and we hear stories, and we’re just like, man. What the movement is really about, is exactly what you just described, is going against convention, being less concerned about punishing people and being more about lifting every boat. In higher education, they talk about inclusive excellence. What they mean, because the fear is that, we’re somehow lowering the standards to include other people. When in truth, we’re actually raising the standards, we’re raising the opportunities for profitability by expecting excellence in everything that we do. We can only do that if we provide an inclusive environment for the success of every individual.

Kazique Prince:

And so that mindset is a switch, but to be honest, it’s been one that’s been helpful for some folks who’ve been poo-pooing this whole thing. And I’m like, no, this is about making money and being better at what we do, because that’s where innovation, that’s where good ideas and creativity comes out of that. And so there’s people who are being straight up, totally questioning all of this, but when you’re talking about the bottom line or being more mission focused, they’re convinced and they see it. That’s the great thing about today versus just 10 or 15 years ago, we have the numbers to show that this approach is very effective in creating the profitability, or if not profitability, mission focus agenda.

Douglas:

Yes. Here’s the thing, the values have to be aligned. The value of the company is, we need more profits or we need to grow, or whatever outcome the company is seeking, or the nonprofit. The organization is going to have values, and they’re going to have a focus. If you can align with that, then that’s where you’ll be successful with any change initiative. Right? I think you’re spot on with, the focus has to be on revenue or the mission. I believe that any of those things are going to be better when you enable people to do their best work and they’re doing it. People take pride in doing a good job, that is inhuman nature, and if you can put people in a situation to do better work, that’s just going to be a better environment for everyone.

Kazique Prince:

You know what’s funny about this too, you know the other thing that drives this, we’ve done a really good job with our young people and trying to create these more collaborative teams. They work on projects together. In lab school, they do project based learning where they can go out and explore and find their own learning opportunities. The millennials have come into work saying, we expect you to do this. Forget what the generation X that I represent, we come in with the same mentality that we were given by our parents, just do the work, right? Don’t worry about the personal, just do the work. Millennials are coming in after we train them, and say, you know what, we want an environment that is socially conscious. That’s tackling big issues.

Kazique Prince:

I have a client who works in the tech field and says they want to be a part of a community that’s making a difference. It doesn’t matter if they’re making widgets. They want to make sure those widgets and the people who are part of the organization are doing good in the world. That’s what they’re demanding. You have very talented, smart people from various backgrounds saying, if I want to work here, y’all better be doing something.

Douglas:

Right. Yes. Making a difference. I love it. I want to come back to something that I’ve been thinking about lately. Are you familiar with the truth and reconciliation that happened in South Africa?

Kazique Prince:

Yes. Very much so. Thank you for bringing that up.

Douglas:

I just think there’s a massive opportunity with the change in leadership right now to make that a national focus. I’m just curious, how you think that could play out. If we had a national focus on doing some work like that here in the US.

Kazique Prince:

I fundamentally believe that we as an American community culture, it would be to our best interest to really invest in a racial reconciliation, racial healing process. It may not look like what they did necessarily, exactly what they did in South Africa, but there’s something that’s very important here that needs to be called out. We are still a country that still doesn’t tell the truth about the civil war. We still don’t tell the truth about what slavery was about. We still have too much of the population who believes that the civil war wasn’t about slavery. We have too much of a population just doesn’t want to acknowledge the history of slavery and racism that made this country successful. That this country was in many ways, promoted on the backs of black and brown and other people, to be where we are today.

Kazique Prince:

That unwillingness to acknowledge that, and just say, you know what, that’s a real thing. We need to have a vehicle or a means of having that honest conversation with one another. Because there’s still some deep generational grieving that’s going on around that. There needs to be some opening up of some hearts and some minds that have been totally closed. Not necessarily, always intentionally, sometimes it’s just, I didn’t know, because the system is set up to keep people blind. The system is set up to keep people ignorant. There’s so many people, in my opinion, after being around for as many hundreds of years as we have been as a country. There’s too many people walking around, not their own fault, who are like, you know what, I didn’t know. They saw George Floyd die and they’re like, I didn’t know.

Kazique Prince:

It’s not their fault, because the system was set up for them to be blissfully ignorant. And then you got all these black and brown people and women too, who are like, let me tell you something, let me tell you about my reality. One of the best things is, last weekend Dave Chappelle was on Saturday Night Live.

Douglas:

Amazing.

Kazique Prince:

Amazing how he was just telling the truth in so many ways. What I loved about it, is that, and he said it, he says, I know many of you wouldn’t be listening to me if I wasn’t telling jokes, but boy does he use his platform of being a genius comedian, to really tell his story. And to me, that’s part of the truth and reconciliation, right? That’s part of calling something out. What we used to say in the black churches, you got a name and then claim it, shame the devil and tell the truth. To me, until you are willing to do that, it’s hard to reconcile things, because you’ve got too much a part of the community, the national stage, who are just denying the stuff that even happened. You somehow want me to work with you? You want me to be on the same page with you and you’re not even willing to acknowledge?

Kazique Prince:

And the thing is, the truth of matter is, just so real clear, we’ve gone on as a country unwilling to do that and we still function. But if we really want to be a more powerful country, that’s able to really commit ourselves and create the change and be the powerful entity that I think we want to be, if we’re willing to have that conversation, the result at the end, it may feel like magic or a miracle, but I think what people are already experiencing is the sense of man, we’re so much better off now, having that conversation than avoiding the conversation

Douglas:

100%. I think avoiding the conversations is what’s made it so tenuous, and it’s created situations where you’ve got good people that are blocked. It’s almost like having a psychological block where people go to a therapist. I’m not a psychologist, but the way I envision it is like, there’s some trauma that’s happened in past life and they can’t even unlock it. It’s because they know there’s racism in their family, their grandparents or their parents, and they’re ashamed of it. But admitting that, is them admitting they’re a bad person, and they can’t go there, that’s just not safe for them to do. That’s a hard thing for people to unlock. And so when I see some people act out and push back, I have some sympathy for them, but also it’s like, man, we can’t keep on like this. There has to be a way to move past that.

Kazique Prince:

It’s funny that you mentioned this, dealing with racial trauma and the blocks that we experience. Because, again, the system is set up and what I mean, is the system I’m talking about the system of white supremacy, is set up to not even mention that white people have experienced trauma around race. That there’s serious trauma that’s not just for the individual, but it’s generational. Because if I am out pain and venom and hate towards a group of people, and it happens for generations, you can’t tell me that doesn’t have an impact on me, because chances are, that venom is not being just directed at black people or brown people, it’s directly at spouses, it’s directed at children, that venom is being spread across. Until you’re willing to recognize that and call it out and then ask yourself, what are you going to do about it, and take some responsibility for it.

Kazique Prince:

I’ll use myself as a man, it is hard for me to acknowledge that in my family background, there is a major, really bad things that have happened in the name of manhood. As crippling as it may feel and daunting to imagine all of that, I can’t be the best father I want to be to my daughter and my son until I reconcile some of that. To me, as a country around race and other issues, how can we be a good friend, a good neighbor, a competent government, who is unwilling to just acknowledge that, not just acknowledge it, but do something about it. We’re too weak to deal with it. The truth is, we’re so powerful. We’re so powerful as people, if we just take the risk to go out there and do it.

Kazique Prince:

I think we sometimes tell ourselves, we can’t handle it. No, no, no, it’s too rough. It’s too much. I’m like, no, look at what we’ve dealt with as a country over the last 20, 30, 40 years, we’ve dealt with some really challenging situations. I am confident in our ability that we have the strength, we have the virtue and the means to do this work. I think we can tell the secret that somehow we’re too weak to handle it. It’s too much to bring up the past. And I’m like, no, no, I don’t think that’s true at all, because we deal with really tough stuff all the time. I think we can deal with this too.

Douglas:

I’m part of a Slack group of consultants, and when the George Floyd situation, it really was erupting, right there in the thick of it. We all started to have an internal dialogue around what are the policies around this group. We were all reading how to be anti-racist. We were thinking about what are the racist policies around this group and how did this group come together. There is one gentleman in the group, we had a long conversation around privilege. He was a white gentleman and he had real issues with that term and him being labeled as having privilege. It comes back to my comment about binary, because I think he saw it as someone labeling him as having privilege, because he said, I grew up poor.

Douglas:

I was right there with a bunch of poor black people. We didn’t distinguish between white or black. We were all just poor. The point we were trying to make was like, look, I know you worked hard to get an education and to dig yourself out of that situation. But you have to be honest with yourself that being white definitely helped you on that journey. Now, you don’t have as much privilege as someone who’s born in Beverly Hills and their father is a director, and just without any audition in the film or whatever, that’s a whole different paradigm. Around the same time, it was before this whole conversation. I saw this really interesting, it was this group of children were in a field, they were outside doing, doing some games. It looked like a summer camp kind of thing.

Douglas:

The counselor was telling everyone, everyone started off on a line together, and they said, take one step forward if your parents could afford textbooks when you were in elementary school. And then it just got more and more tech, take one step forward if you attended college, take one step forward if you were given a credit card while you were in college. It was just like, boom, boom, boom, one after the other until all of a sudden, one kid is still standing at the starting point and they’re all just vastly spread out across the field. And it’s like, that’s to me what privilege is about, it’s not about me having privilege and you’re not. It’s about like, wow, people are on various parts of this playing field, there is no equity.

Kazique Prince:

I think for a lot of people who live with privilege, one is like, I remind people privilege is like being a fish in the ocean. And you realize all of that ocean water that you’d never paid attention to is your privilege. You’re breathing it and you’re living it. And now you’ve come to the understanding that it’s there. It’s a little bit of shock to the system. But when I talked to my friends who happened to be white and poor, they’ll have the same argument. I think one of the big issues here, is that they’ll see the stats and say that a white man with a high school diploma on average can make more money than a black man with a PhD. On average, the numbers are clear, but for them that’s not their lived experience.

Kazique Prince:

Their lived experience is, I bust my butt. It was rough. I was eating government cheese and Spam like the best of them. Who are you to point the finger at me about privilege? I didn’t have any privilege. I’m like, my experience has been, for those people, oftentimes it takes someone else with lived experience over a period of time to make the case for why, it affirms their experience, but also give some insight that something about you being white gave you opportunities that the same person with the same talent as you will not receive. They’ll see it in those kinds of exercises you just described. They’ll look at their friend, who’s sitting right next to them, who they know is just as talented as they are, and be like, wow. Wow.

Kazique Prince:

I try to be graceful and patient with folks like that. It can be a little frustrating, don’t get me wrong, but it’s that until they see someone, they’re intimately connected to, who they trust, they’re able to give them some insights that the numbers just won’t give them. Because what they’re looking at is for that lived experience that tells them your experience is maybe not quite accurate.

Douglas:

That’s the problem with statistics, right? It’s like, it has nothing to do with my lived experience. I love that you brought that word, because that’s part of the taxonomy around DEI that I stumbled into. I don’t know, maybe three or four months ago. It really resonated with me. The framing that I learned, and someone was making claims about this and that. And then the retort was, how can you argue with someone’s lived experience? Wow. If we’re really going to be tolerant and support people, we have to embrace people’s lived experience, even if we don’t understand it. That happened to them. Maybe we could be a little understanding.

Douglas:

I guess, I want to maybe end with circling back on how we design better meetings and better experiences for our employees that are inclusive and supportive, collaborative. A lot of the work we do is based around design thinking and using human centered design practices, because these tools, these techniques were created to design things for humans. Well, guess what, our employees are humans. We want to design experiences for them, we can turn those same tools we use externally for products and point them inward, so we can have empathy. My theory is, if we want to create an inclusive situation, let’s do some ethnography. Let’s understand where people are coming, what they’re hoping, what their fears are, what they’re looking for in the world, what they need.

Douglas:

If we can understand that, then it becomes crystal clear what we need to do. Because someone was asking me, with this remote environment, how do we support our employees with children? It was in one of our weekly facilitation practices. I was sitting back just listening. People had a lot of great ideas. And then I asked the gentleman, I said, have you spoken with them about what they need? There was just a little bit of silence. I was like, I think you should probably start there, just interview all of them and find out what are their schedules, what challenges. As soon as you start to sketch with them, to talk with them, to get curious with them, then you can start to understand their needs. And then that’s how you make things inclusive.

Speaker 1:

If you are addressing needs, that is ultimately inclusive, because everyone’s going to be taken care of. I’m just curious, that’s been a real epiphany for me over the last year. Especially as I’ve seen more and more HR people showing up at design conferences and stuff, it just gets me really excited to think about a discipline that’s typically unfunded and how do we shift that conversation. I wonder if that overlaps with your work at all and what you’ve been noticing,

Kazique Prince:

Actually, it does overlap with my work, because whether it’s a design thinking approach or whatever, but as you know, one of the first steps is collecting data, right? Oftentimes we forget to go ask our employees what their experiences are like. The thing is, you don’t want to overwhelm your employees with a 17,000 item questionnaire. You want to give nice little pulse surveys, with maybe five or six questions, that really helped to give some insight of what their experiences are. But let’s also not sleep on the importance of those interviews and sitting down with people and saying, hey, what’s been your lived experience in this area? By receiving that insight, those perspectives and collecting that data and making sure you have people at the table who are part of the decision making process.

Kazique Prince:

It’s not just asking people, but actually making sure they’re part of the conversation at the table. I think what you’re going to find out are the solutions that folks are looking for, because what may work over at X organization may not work at Y, but the process that’s going to be similar for both organizations, is their willingness to go out and ask their employees and have leadership in place who are going to make these things come to fruition and be willing to take the risks that are necessary. Because I think what we’ve been faced with, the coronavirus pandemic, and I would also say the racism pandemic, is that we are forced to look at work differently, because people are at home with their kids, and some of us don’t have partners who can support us, so we can work, just on work.

Kazique Prince:

People have had to be really creative. What I want to know is how they did it. How did you run between raindrops in the middle of a thunderstorm and still got things done, or did you? It wasn’t even realistic to expect you’re going to do that in the first place. What’s the end result? What are we going to find out after all this settles down a little bit? We get the vaccine out and everyone’s finally settled down. I think what we’re going to find out, is that people suffered a lot through this. We’re going to find out our kids suffered, because the educational system fell apart. We’re going to find out that many parts of our economy fell apart, and we were just living on a lifeline.

Kazique Prince:

The question I’ll be asking myself, and I hope my friends is, out of this pandemic, what did we learn, that we can use to make ourselves a better organization, a better community. Because right now I think what we’re not facing is the carnage of this last year. I like to believe that out of every, for lack of a better word, failure, is opportunity. I want to see how we as a country take advantage of the opportunity. So whether it’s the racial healing, reconciliation conversation, I think needs to happen, or the innovations that we find that families had to implement to survive all of this. I think there’s something about, I think we as a country, whether it’s the great depression or even the great recession we had, we learned a lot. I just wonder if we’re ready to hear the truth about this experience.

Douglas:

Well, a lot there. I really appreciate you spending the time to talk with me through this today. It’s already gotten my gears spinning in some new directions and hopefully listeners might be inspired to think about the work ahead of us and how they might show up and contribute. I just want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a parting message.

Kazique Prince:

This work around diversity, equity and inclusion is not for the faint of heart. This does require us to build the muscles, the spirit, the stamina that’s necessary to work through it. The great thing is that we are not alone. There are other people who are struggling, who are uncertain, who are scared, and we are much better together than we are alone. And so if you do nothing else, but search for someone else who’s also trying to make a difference, who might feel scared and alone as well, just like you, maybe they just don’t know what’s going on, but they want to know. Make sure you go out and find someone who’s wanting to do the same thing and get on that gravy train together, to figure out some solutions.

Kazique Prince:

Because doing it alone is not, we’re never supposed to do this stuff by ourselves. But I think if you find other people who are committed to this work, whether it’s in your church or synagogue, at your job, where you have your kids play at the park, you’ll find that there’s a lot of people who are looking to make a difference. I would encourage you to take that risk and reach out to someone in the attempt to make a difference.

Douglas:

Amazing. Thank you so much for chatting today, Kazique.

Kazique Prince:

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the invitation and conversation.

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 posted weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 33: Courageous Conversations and Cultural Competency appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I’ve always loved how do you do things, very tool or method-oriented person. Getting there, I think the accomplishments or the path toward it was always kindling, always maintaining that curiosity about what is it that helps people shape their future strategically with others…I think it’s that if there was any one thing, it’s following a thread, following a hunch from the very first position I had and an interest in strategy and shaping the future.”

Keith McCandless, co-developer of Liberating Structures, specializes in working with groups to unleash creativity, discover opportunities, and build on momentum. He calls himself a structured improvisationalist.

In this episode of Control the Room, Douglas speaks with Keith about goat rodeos, grief walking, and prototyping responses to unsafe behaviors. Listen in to find out what’s giving Keith hope right now.

Show Highlights

[7:08] A good invitation has many right answers
[9:43] Prototyping responses to unsafe behaviors
[13:00] The awkwardness of interacting in a new way
[21:42] Grief Walking
[30:21] Newness through restructuring
[35:18] Staying on the horse & preventing a goat rodeo
[39:23] What’s giving Keith hope

Links | Resources

Keith on LinkedIn
Liberating Structures

About the Guest

Keith is co-developer of Liberating Structures, co-founder of the Social Invention Group, and co-author of the book The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures – Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation (2014). Keith specializes in helping organizations to innovate and manage complexity by working with groups to unleash creativity, discover opportunities, and build on momentum. His eclectic skills have been honed with groups all over the world, and are grounded in organization development, complexity science, business strategy, and graphic facilitation—all with an improvisational twist. He calls himself a structured improvisationalist.

About Voltage Control

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

This episode is brought to you by MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. At Voltage Control, we use MURAL to facilitate engaging and productive meetings and workshops from anywhere. MURAL gives teams the means, methods, and freedom to collaborate visually. Use their suite of facilitation superpowers to control the virtual room and solve tough problems as a team with their pre-built templates and guided methods. To see for yourself why companies like IBM, Atlassian, and E*TRADE rely on MURAL, start your 30-day trial at mural.co. That’s mural.co.

Today I’m with Keith McCandless, creator of Liberating Structures and coauthor of the book The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash a Culture of Innovation. Welcome to the show, Keith.

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Keith: Thanks, Douglas. Really thrilled to be here.

Douglas: Just so our listeners have a little bit of context, I’m really curious to hear how you got started and found yourself in the position to create Liberating Structures, write the book, and become the powerhouse in the facilitation world that you are today.

Keith: I think it’s born out of curiosity. My start in every position that led up to curating rather than creating, I think I’ve helped to curate the Liberating Structures, was a researcher in education, responsibility, a job where I was helping people learn and research what could move things forward, what could help them primarily in the healthcare space, healthcare domain. That involved strategy and policy and then a research and education foundation that I helped start and was an executive director of.

Through all those multiple positions and then trying to run an organization myself, a small foundation, was searching for methodologies. I’ve always loved how do you do things, very tool or method-oriented person. Getting there, I think the accomplishments or the path toward it was always kindling, always maintaining that curiosity about what is it that helps people shape their future strategically with others. So from that foundation job up here in Seattle, I live in Seattle, I took a position at an applied research think tank down in San Francisco and was the person who organized learning groups and, again, deepening strategy and at some point bumped into a new theory, complexity science or a new type of science that opened my mind to very different approaches.

I think it’s that if there was any one thing, it’s following a thread, following a hunch from the very first position I had and an interest in strategy and shaping the future. So Douglas, how’s that for a start?

Douglas: So great. It reminds me of, as you talk about complexity and this notion of emergent phenomenon, I know one of the tenets of Liberating Structures that I’m super fond of is distribution of control. I remember at the first Control The Room Conference, you and I were speaking off to the side and we were discussing the importance of distribution of control and power. You were pointing out that our keynote speaker, Priya Parker, was such an amazing facilitator and her ability just to captivate the room.

Your point was that the Liberating Structures can distribute that power without having to have that amazing personality involved.

Keith: There are a few people that I don’t want to liberate, that don’t need to distribute. I mean they speak directly to your complex mind and your experience and they help you connect parts of yourself to the situation, and Priya’s one of those people where she’s so good at that that there’s no … Anyone can learn how to distribute control. It’s never easy. I mean I love control. If control could get me to great results in all the settings in which I work, I would use it. I just couldn’t get great results by holding certain types of control.

Now, you and I both know that Liberating Structures, you do control some very small, minimal things, like group size and how long. There’s fast cycles and you control a small number of things tightly. But subject matter and the direction that the people go to shape what they’re going to do next is not in your control at all. If it is, you’re screwing up. So it isn’t as if we’re redefining what’s important to control. It turns out it’s a small number of fairly…what could seem trivial things that make a big difference.

Douglas: Yeah. I think it’s that notion that it seems trivial is why so many people mess it up. They focus on controlling the wrong things and there are these simple things that if they just paid attention to and got really specific about, it could unleash so much.

Keith: Practice makes perfect. You’re a user and you know that you get better over time at making a really good invitation. A good invitation has many right answers. Many options start to emerge if you have a good invitation. You get a sense of how smart people are together and how quickly you can move from self-reflection to work in a pair to a group of four and then generate something that the whole group should hear. The practicing that cadence, which seems like it wouldn’t make that much difference, makes you better and better and better quickly.

You appear to be a magician or you have some special powers as a facilitator or a leader. You’re paying attention to these, we call them micro-organizing design elements that are pretty straightforward, but it’s easy to mess them up a little bit or focus on something else. It’s very easy to do that. Yeah.

Douglas: Thinking back to the last time we had a really lengthy conversation, it was right before the pandemic really hit the US. Living in Austin, South by Southwest is an annual event and a big deal. We were all watching it closely because all the big conferences in Europe were just starting to close and shut down, but South-by was still planning to go ahead as planned. We were invited to facilitate a workshop to explore what does it mean to attend a big conference in the face of a pandemic.

So you were really instrumental in helping me think about how to walk into that conversation with eyes wide open and support that dialogue.

Keith: Well, I appreciated having a chance to chat with you about it because it was a monumental moment in time. I guess monumental and moment have some relationship in the language. But we’re still figuring that out seven months later, eight months later. We’re still figuring out how to exercise precautions in any size group really. But kids are going back to school. What we talked about I thought was practical and interesting. We still haven’t resolved a lot of it. The kinds of things we were discussing was how could people practice precautions? How could they learn how to do that?

How could we prototype behaviors and respond to unsafe behaviors in a setting like South by Southwest? We’re still there. How do we support each other? When we see somebody who has their mask down and coughs and doesn’t cough into their elbow, how do we respond to that? There’s a whole series, what I learned from doing work in infection control – mostly MRSA…anyway – other infectious diseases, is that some people have behaviors that are very safe and they do things differently. Somehow we have to uncover, well, how do you safely go to a large event? Is there a way to do that?

Who is figuring that out? The basic rules that we can learn about clean surfaces, try to stay in ventilated areas, wear a mask, once you’ve learned those things, that’s all that the science has to offer. Everything else is our creative adaptation to the situations we face locally. So when you were interested like, “How could we help people think through South by Southwest if we go forward?” It’s like, “Well, what more creative group of people could there be on the planet than the South by Southwest group organizers in Austin?” So that’s why I got a big smile and was so happy to chat with you about that.

Douglas: The thing that really stood out to me as we did that and I watched the improv prototyping unfold, it became clear to me that it’s not only the tapping into the creative abilities to come up with new solutions, that it’s about creating muscle memory about these ways that we might want to behave when the moment strikes because it can be very daunting to respond to something when you’re not prepared or haven’t thought about it. So if you’ve already done that creative work ahead of time and practiced it a bit, then it can be much easier to do those things when you encounter them.

Keith: Some of it’s awkward. It’s awkward the first time you do it. Did you notice your mask is askew? Is that a good way to say it, even just thinking it out loud? So practicing those things and finding in a large group, any size group, if you’re on Zoom or whatever it is, you can prototype a behavior and a conversation that would help people and start to discover ways to interact that are really safe in all the settings in which they’re working. So I don’t know in companies.

I’ve done it a little bit. I’ve recently been working with residential communities, older people who are being taken care of in residential homes. There’s a business that has 40 or 50 of them across the South. So we were working on finding those behaviors that solve the problem. We used a wicked question. Douglas, I think you’ll be interested in this. We used a wicked question to frame it. How is it that we’re as safe as possible? We’re creating for our residents. We’re creating as much safety and it will increase over time even as we are drawing out all the vitality and joy possible for our residents.

So the two opposite or in creative tension or paradoxical elements are that joy and vitality and safety, which seemingly if you’re locked in your room most of the time, which it’s … Isolation is for real. It’s one pretty safe way to do it. Simultaneously, how do you work with all the precautions and the isolation and draw out the joy and vitality in the lives of people who are in these communities? That focus made it possible for every function within this business, the dining staff, the engagement, the physical plant folks, the even accounting, the technology people, everyone was focused on how do we get more of both of those in our business?

It’s a business strategy. The wicked question shapes if we’re going to be successful in the future. People want to have their parents or you choose, if you’re older, you choose to go to one of these communities. It may very well be the hunch that we’re working with. It may very well be about, well, how vital, how joyful, and simultaneously how safe is this place that I’m going to live? We’re in a moment in time in which wicked questions can make a big difference, can help sharpen our observation, sharpen our strategy, make our businesses or our work more effective.

So when we first did the South by Southwest thinking, I’m still working on that. There’s no end in sight to helping people organize safely and be successful at the same time.

Douglas: It’s also a time that we spoke about it requiring there’s just deeper consequences right now to a lot of things. We’re not only dealing with a pandemic, but there are social issues at hand and just lots of layered things. We were discussing earlier about this notion of connection and then lack of access and isolation. So how can we be connected and isolated at the same time? Not that isolation’s a goal, but it is a situation we’re in and we’re having to live through that.

I was really just struck by your points around just having to even rethink collaboration partners in this time of reevaluating our privilege.

Keith: Deep sigh. Yeah. I’m feeling it. I think you’re feeling it. Because of our privileged positions, I have, I think you have an opportunity to be very connected with more people. It’s been a bit of a surprise, but that kind of connection comes through technology, the depth of relationship possible. With the technologies, maybe I took them a little bit for granted before, but now I see. I’m more connected than ever and I’m really extending relationships and deepening them and being able to do things that I wasn’t sure were possible with clients and colleagues.

This is while I’m acutely aware of people who are isolated, are blocked from access to the technology, that are falling out of relationship with a diverse set of other people and can’t find a way to connect. So that isolation in this moment, I’m feeling it acutely and I’ve noticed it in other people too that some people are very connected and deepening their relationships and others are isolated and falling out of relationships with others. That’s a wicked question. How is it that I can use my connection and the deepening of my relationships with others even as I’m working or attending to those that don’t have access and are blocked from, are isolated from others?

So just trying to broaden my own reaching out more, broaden my own network of people I work with, address issues that are really hard. Maybe you have clients like this too. But we’re having business problems. We need to rebuild our market. We want to address racial and social equity in how we operate. And how the pandemic has thrown our…We don’t even know how to get any work done right now. We need to learn really how to use these online and virtual technologies to get things done. So all of that’s happening at the same time. It’s a good challenge. I really enjoy it.

I’m imagining you’re enjoying it too. In some way, you’re finding the challenge to be good for you. Is that true, Douglas?

Douglas: Yeah. I’m there with you. There’s moments where I have to echo that big sigh and just acknowledge the weight of the situation. But I’m always been one to walk straight into a challenge and see it as a massive opportunity, whether that’s-

Keith: I know that about you. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who bumps into you. But yeah.

Douglas: But that being said, there’s a lot of weight to this. Even though I see it as we can fix this, it’s like people are suffering. I don’t always have the time to invest that I’d like. I feel like there’s so much more I could do, but just dealing with trying to keep my own sanity, there are things I have to consider. So it’s a big struggle. That’s a wicked question in itself. How can I take care of myself while also being a great ally?

Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Keep that in your mind and try to act on both being a great ally and take care of yourself. I know we’re working together on something that’s a little for everyone, but also selfishly, for ourselves, take care of ourselves. So it’s the Grief Walking, a Liberating Structure that has been in development a while, but we’re trying to make it virtually accessible. There’s quite a bit. The reason I’m excited about it is we need to tap social support in regard to losses to take care of ourselves. How do we work with loss?

So as much as I want to help make that Liberating Structure reliable for the community to use to tap social support, to address loss, also doing it for myself. I mean I need a way to work with loss in my life and just handle all of the things going on. So I really appreciate your allyship on the Grief Walking. It’s an important potential new Liberating Structure. I’m not sure it’s going to make it into the repertoire, but it’s definitely worth prototyping.

Douglas: Yeah. From the get-go, I thought the … I think I first heard about this from Fisher about a year ago. I thought the turn-taking on the cadence of how you move people through the space and through the content was really fascinating because I thought that was unique in itself and giving those people the opportunities to kind of follow those that they might want to go deeper with was a less arbitrary way of splitting people into groups.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah. That’s an example of something where I think grief walking, the importance of it or helping people work with loss, it’s the right time to work on that. I think it wasn’t prioritized before the pandemic. So one thing that made it clear to me that I needed to work on that again, one of the clients starts their big … I got invited to a series of their meetings. It’s a business that’s a health and … Anyway, they start their meetings, I thought it was going to be a prayer. I didn’t know the client very well and I thought maybe they’d start with a prayer because some organizations do that kind of thing.

But they started with statistics around how many positive COVID tests, how many staff and how many customers, residents are sick or have died. And then we were going to have immediately following this just set of statistics, we’re going to have a business meeting. I’m like, “Well, wait a second there. I’m still working on what you just said. I can’t move on completely before we do something about the losses that you just specified.” So again, that’s a little bit of a selfish thing of there’s some Liberating Structures that I think we need right now that aren’t really in the repertoire and can make a unique contribution to the field.

That’s on me. It’s on you. It’s on other people to have the courage to try those things. It’s a big deal. It feels more important to me now because of what we’re … We’re just trying to creatively adapt to this moment and we’re not at the end of a whole bunch of losses that need to be addressed somehow.

Douglas: That’s right. I think as we spoke earlier, it’s a time of reexamining in general, whether it be looking at how we think about loss, dealing with the loss that we’re facing or we just experienced, but even just thinking about how our purpose has shifted or how we need to just walk around in this new space. We talked a bit about wicked questions already. But certainly, there are things like critical uncertainties, eco cycle, what I need from you, that I think are very poignant right now.

Keith: Yeah. They’re my go-to. They aren’t normally where I would start with any client, but now I’m when I have … I try to influence my clients. They design their own agendas and what they want to learn about or what they want to work with, but I do push and pull a little bit. It’s pretty easy to get an eco cycle, a what I need from you, critical uncertainty, which are all let’s reexamine the whole way we’ve organized. Let’s go right at our portfolio, if it’s … Let’s look at our whole portfolio if it’s eco cycle.

Let’s look at all of the interrelationships among the functions and what we need from each other, with what I need from you. If it’s wicked questions, we need to face up to this paradoxical challenge or face it down, or face up to it and then face it down. So you take those critical uncertainties. Wow, if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s let’s not put all of our eggs in one basket. So we need to reexamine that we can’t predict the future.

Critical uncertainties let you explore different plausible futures. So we have a much sharper understanding of what our next move is that’s not going to over invest in one scenario or in one vision of where we’ll end up. Rather, how are we going to operate successfully whatever future unfolds? So for me, those were more down the line in the development in my relationship with clients. Their development usually would be things that we would do later. Let’s put that off. That’s too much for now. No, the choice is, no, now. We need to examine the whole thing in-depth now.

So it’s been a little overwhelming for me to do the kinds of consulting work I do, which is still mostly what I’m … I do some writing, but mostly I’m doing consulting work. It’s either a sigh or I’m swallowing loudly. I don’t know. You probably can’t hear it on the recording. But it’s like, “Oh my God. Can I do that?” It takes some courage from the client and from me to like, “Let’s reexamine the whole way we’re operating and how we’re going to move forward.” So it’s…whew.

Douglas: Yeah, it’s interesting. Not only are you asking them to reexamine, you’re having to reexamine how you approach the facilitation and the workshop design because you’re doing things in a different order because there are different needs and different concerns at the moment. In fact, I run into this too. I’m using structures I’ve never used before. In fact, I never really used Generative Relationships STAR, but I found that to be really helpful right now as teams are trying to understand the new dynamics.

In fact, there’s this really interesting phenomenon I’m seeing across a lot of companies where they’ve gone through restructuring because there’s downsizing or there’s this newness about the organization. They’re restructured in the midst of remote working for the first time. So they never had an opportunity to go through this teaming. They don’t really feel like they even belong on the team because they don’t know their identity in the team. They haven’t formed those relationships.

So exposing some of that in a very formulaic and tool way, I found to be kind of illuminating for folks.

Keith: Yeah. Gen STAR would be Generative Relationships STAR helps their … Just within the Zoom or whatever platform is being used, I spend more time on relationship-building, particularly across functions. Maybe it was easier before the pandemic to just operate each function independently and then the leadership would iron out the difficulties. That doesn’t really work that…It’s accentuated the degree to which it’s good to have the different functions definitely know what the other functions do, if not have some of the same capabilities.

Douglas: I love the fact that you used the word, accentuate, because I’ve been saying for a while now that it’s not that remote work has created new dysfunction. The dysfunction was always there. It just accentuated it. It just made it really, really clear that we aren’t great at collaborating. Even though we hold collaboration as a core value, we define collaboration as just talking a bunch. So now that we try to do that same stuff virtually it becomes very, very clear that these things are dysfunctional and don’t work for us. So there has to be new ways to approach it.

Keith: Well, whatever it takes to deepen the relationships. One thing I don’t know if you’ve used What I Need From You very much. But I was with a client. I’ll leave them unnamed. But we were doing a big What I Need From You and sort of in your bailiwick, the information technology group within a very large, well-known organization. They’re reasonably polite people. And we went through, you know there’s here’s what I need from you, this function to that function and back and forth. They all get to ask for something, the thing that they need to be successful strategically in the organization.

We went through. There were seven different functions. It was a great experience. The choices in response to the request are, yes, no, huh, which is I don’t know what even … That’s not clear what you’ve just asked me for, what you need your function for us to succeed, and then, whatever. There were a whole bunch of, in this particular organization, there were a bunch of huhs and many of them were actually whatevers, but they were too polite to say whatever to each other. I kind of went, “I think maybe that was lovingly, provocatively both. I think that may have been a whatever.” 

They said, “Well, we can’t say whatever. We just can’t do that.” But you could hear in the tone and in the relationship that that was what … You failed to understand our function at all. It was a bit disrespectful what you asked for and I’m going to give you a huh which really means a whatever as a response to what you asked for. That’s the beginning of a better relationship. I mean it might be a little harsh, but that’s the kind of thing that gets revealed, is more apparent now in the midst of this pandemic. It’s accentuated by the situation we’re in.

There’s more to fix. Total job security, Douglas, for you into the future. There’s a lot to work on, a lot to work on.

Douglas: A little bit of a shift here because I wanted to bring up one of my favorite articles that happened to be penned by you. It’s called Falling Off the Horse. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in there that first time and even an experienced facilitator should reflect on. So I was just curious if you just have any … When I bring that up, what comes to mind as some advice you might have for facilitators out there that are just trying to stay on the horse?

Keith: Yeah. Well, be kind to yourself. Recognize that at an inappropriate moment you may try to control something that you can’t control and it’s not going to help. You have to own it a bit. But in that moment of recognizing that you’ve tried to over control, you’ve fallen back into over under-control, forgive yourself, if possible, as quickly as possible. So that could take the shape, just to be more specific about it, one could be you get to a place where you don’t know what to do so you say, “Well, let’s just open it up to everybody, anybody that wants to say anything.”

That’s an invitation to a goat rodeo. You know what a goat rodeo is, but it’s a few people are going to get into a little argument over something and it’ll go on and on and on. It won’t be productive. But you, as the leader, I don’t even think of what we do as facilitator anymore. It’s just you’re leading the group. You had no structure in mind. You gave no structure other than the goat rodeo, which is open discussion, usually not productive. So forgive yourself that you weren’t ready and you fell into that trap.

On the other side, it’s like, “Well, it’s not going anywhere. I need to seize control again and I need to make the decisions for the group.” This could take the form of a presentation or just a decision or you rely on a consultant to come in, swoop in and save everything with a best practice imported from somewhere else. So those are things, they happen. You should try to avoid them if you can, if you’re serious about this kind of work, and forgive yourself, if you can, for it because it’s a developmental path where you gain increasing confidence in the group to solve its own problems and shape its own solutions too.

You become more and more confident in suggesting simple structures that help the group be awesomely creative and adaptive. And then you get out of those two ways to fall off the horse. On the one side, the, “Let’s open it up for everyone,” or, “Now we’re not getting anywhere so I need to intervene with my personal wisdom.” So that’s one version of trying to address falling off the horse, because it’ll happen. It’ll happen.

Douglas: I personally love this metaphor of leaning in and leaning out. How can you find that balance in the middle? Because if you lean in too much or import those best practices, you fail. If you lean out too much, then there’s the goat rodeo. Sometimes you even invite it. You lean in in the way that allows you to lose every bit of minute control that you want to have.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Douglas: So Keith, I guess in a wrap-up here, I’d love to hear from you about where you’re seeing hope or just maybe even a recent discovery that’s making you curious and seeing new opportunity.

Keith: Well, the longer-term hope and dream, which I hope and believe is possible, is to bring the structures out of use for the special meeting or the workshop or the whatever, into everyday how we operate.  So some things that give me hope that I’m doing, that I’m taking a risk on, I guess, is always with clients, start with a design group, a broadly composed- It can be pretty big, small or big, but doesn’t really matter. But they’re people that are going to take responsibility for co-leading the event that we’re planning or the activity.

It could be a special thing or we could be integrating into a regular meeting or whatever form it is. I’d start to distribute control, leadership, share leadership immediately with a group of people who often have zero experience with Liberating Structures. The amount of time that it goes from, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” to, “Keith, get out of the way, I’m doing this and you aren’t doing this,” is getting less and less and less. I’ve had some really fun experiences where I thought I was going to be leading for longer and I really got shooed to the side.

That is what gives me hope, that people can quickly learn the approaches, bring them into their events, and start to bring them into their everyday work, how they organize everything. So recently, I was working on a digital transformation. I was working on a business transfor- You know, it seems like everybody’s transforming everything. Because of this shakeup, because of the pandemic and all the other things that are going on, there’s more openness to really looking at everything and transforming everyday work. I can see it. I could feel it, the passion of the people involved.

That transfer to people right in the midst, right on the front line and their leaders and their formal leaders in the organization, that’s what gives me hope and it’s what I believe is possible as these things, the Liberating Structures transform from methods that you have to learn to this is just how we operate. This is how we run our organization. That’s the big thing for me.

Douglas: I think that’s huge. We’ve been really focused on meetings as an evergreen problem because as I thought about leverage and impact in systemic problems and huge global problems that exist everywhere, how can we with our tiny abilities in this global scale make a big impact? I think it’s the fact that everyone spends so much of their time in meetings. If we can address those deficiencies, perhaps we can have a huge impact overall. So I love that your passion right now is thinking about how not only for the bigger gatherings or the bigger challenges, how it can get imbibed into everyday interactions.

Keith: Yeah. I see it happen all the time. Even more hopeful in some ways is the people that are brave enough to bring it into their personal life. So when people are using a wicked question or a generative relationship on themselves or on their loved ones-

Douglas: My wife loves it when I what, so-now-what her.

Keith: Yeah. Well, you got to watch. You got to be very careful that you’re not controlling. It’s a good lesson for don’t fall off the horse with your family. They know the moment you’re controlling them. People are acutely aware of when they’re being over controlled and you’re not going to get away with that. It’s just not going to work. But yeah, those are things I’m infinitely patient on, the transformation from these are some special things that you use every so often to it’s just how you roll and whatever.

There’s one good quality of this work and I imagine you’re there exactly with me is it starts to take over more of just how you are or how you see things, just by using the methods. There doesn’t have to be a big philosophy. There’s no manifesto for Liberating Structures. There’s just methods that increase your confidence that we can pull this together. We can organize differently and we can pull together creative and adaptive responses to any challenge. So confidence builds over time and that’s a beautiful thing worth working on.

Douglas: So Keith, in closing, I’m curious if you have any message or anything to leave our listeners with.

Keith: I think the important thing if you … We’ve talked about all these, the more complicated Liberating Structures. Just try one on for size if you haven’t. Simplicity, starting with the simple things is good. I think rolling up your sleeves, it takes a little courage to use any Liberating Structure because you’re no longer controlling the subject matter. You’re no longer controlling what shape, the adaptation, or the sets of decisions. So you’ve got to be able to let go a little bit and believe that something better will come out of engaging everyone.

So that courage to do that only comes through practice. It’s not like, “Ta-duh. Now I get it.” So build your repertoire, I think, is the thing I want to say. If you don’t have one now, start with 1-2-4-All and build up toward some of these other ones we’ve talked about during this podcast that are more elaborate, that look at more of the fabric of the organization. It’s increasing doses of courage and practice that makes it possible to really believe that more is possible and that it’s … It’ll give you hope. It gives me hope. It keeps me going through the hard time that we’re having. 

That’s my message, Douglas. Thanks for asking that. It took me a second to figure out what my message is right now, but I think that’s it. Yeah.

Douglas: Excellent.

Keith: Build up your courage and your repertoire at the same time.

Douglas: Well, Keith, it’s been fantastic talking with you today as always. I hope we share a chat again sometime soon.

Keith: We will, Douglas. Thanks again.

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 26: Following a Hunch 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 Reagan Pugh, Facilitator at Voltage Control.

Reagan lectured on the inner work of a facilitator; the essential job is done before facilitation, and how it affects the dynamic of the group one is leading.

He called into question what facilitators do before walking into the room, and reminded the group that facilitation is not about the facilitator, but about helping the group. “We don’t go into a room armed with our answers, we go in the room and help them recover the answers in the room, not discover the answers for them.”

Reagan shined a light on the importance of centering oneself and bringing positive energy to the room to cultivate the same in the group. “We need to consider where our mind is at, our spirit, and our intentions, so that we don’t bring negative bias into the room.”

Watch Reagan Pugh’s talk “Inner Work of a Facilitator”:

Read the Transcript

Reagan Pugh:

Last night a wintry minx fell upon Austin, Texas. If you’re anything like me, most likely this morning you woke up and you scurried to your window and you pull the blinds down to see if the snow is on the ground. Oh, it’s on top of the cars. And then you do, if you’re from Texas one really important thing after this, you scurry over to your laptop, you open it up and you look to see if school’s closed for the day.

I’m a grown adult, but I was still like, a school day feels really cool, especially when we’re in Texas. Because we liked the imagining school days, because you imagine it’s going to be some kind of a snowpocalypse and you’re going to have to survive it. And all of a sudden, your mom’s like, “Put the bath… Turn on the bathtub, get the water, fill it up. The pipes might freeze, make sure we got the canned food!” You figure out which of your sweaters you’re going to use to put on for warmth and which ones you can like rip up and tie around a broken broom handle and dip in kerosene for a torch.

There’s this emergency mindset that we get into. Sometimes I feel that when I’m just at home, not wanting to go get food somewhere and there’s no food left in my house. And so you go to the pantry and it’s… There’s some tortillas and I got some spaghetti some… have you ever made a spaghetti taco? I just got back yesterday from a trip and all we had was chili, and I made a chili taco. Listen to me, you can make a taco out of anything, you just need a tortilla. There’s this practice of going into the pantry and saying to myself, “Okay, I can’t go out and discover food anywhere else I’m going to have to make do with what I got. I’m going to have to recover what I’ve already got right in here right now.’.

Have you ever been making a PowerPoint presentation, and it’s one hour before your presentation, and you’re on Unsplash looking at stock photography and you’re like, “What the hell is going to say synergy for me.” And then all of the sudden, your past self walks the room, the ghost of your past self, and whispers into your ear, “That consumer beverage company you did a workshop for in 2016, three slides will work here. You’re welcome.” And then you think to yourself, “Oh yes!”

I’ve been here before. I don’t ho… have to go out and discover something else that I have to put in my playbook, I need to recover things that I’ve had. These are the stories that we love, these are the stories that we pay attention to. There’s this one about a Prince, his father gets murdered by his uncle. He’s got to flee. And so he takes up with some vagabonds and they live off the land. His sweetheart comes to find him years later to save the kingdom is in disarray. Only you can come back and save us, but he doubts that he says, “I don’t have what it takes. I think I’m going to have to go discover some new knowledge and skills…” But I’m talking about Simba, right? And this is the Lion King. I’m going to have to go out Nala and fi… And she says, “No, it’s about recovering who you’ve always been.”

Isn’t this what we do for our clients. We don’t go into a room armed with our answers. We go into our room, if we’re really going to serve our clients, believing that the answers to their greatest challenges are already locked in that room. And it is our job to bring them out. It is not our job discover, it is our job to recover. So, this is really great for us to do for our clients. But man, this is really hard to do for ourselves.

This is why the cobbler’s kids have holes in their shoes. This is why management consultants are terrible entrepreneurs. This is why the dermatologist’s kids have back zits. This is why the urologists… I’ll stop there.

What do we do before we go into the room? The success of any intervention depends upon the interior condition of the intervenor. We’ve got the knowledge and skills and spades. We have access to all kinds of things that we can bring with us, but are we willing to do the work prior to make sure that when we come into that room, we’re ready to help those folks recover what it is that they need to

I like to start with gratitude. Some folks, when we begin a session we want to get people talking and if there’s trust in the room it’s great to get folks to have an intimate conversation. But sometimes that doesn’t always work and people are a little rebuffed by that. I often find that talking about things we’re grateful for is a great way to start, because all of the sudden we’re not worried about all that we have to do. Our brains get wipes. There’s a clean slate. As Solomon says, our amygdala relaxes and people become available for something. So let’s just try this real quick. Think about something that’s going well in your life, think about something that’s going right. This is just how I would do it in a session. And just turn, in 30 seconds, and share to your neighbor like, “This is one ray of sunshine in my life right now.” Go.

Thank you. Let me hear two things, you can brag on your partner. What do we hear? What did you hear your partner say that you said, “Oh, that’s good.” Yes.

Speaker 2:

My sweet young son,-

Reagan Pugh:

“My sweet young son,”-

Speaker 2:

When he’s sleeping.

Reagan Pugh:

When he’s asleep! We keep lots of NyQuil around. What else? One more.

Speaker 3:

We’ve got a freelancer here who’s killing it.

Reagan Pugh:

We’ve got a freelancer who’s killing it, went out on her own and is making it rain. Congratulations. Give a round of applause.

But here’s the thing about getting folks to this place. You can feel the temperature in the room change whenever we talk about things that we’re grateful for, but I can’t give a gift like that to a room if I don’t have that gift myself.

I was a magician growing up, and I was good. And I would do birthday parties and I would make balls disappear and handkerchiefs disappear. But every time I would master a new trick, there was this problem. I stopped being impressed with the trick that I was performing. And so I would move from trick to trick no longer enjoying it because the knowledge and the skill didn’t seem complicated to me anymore.

So seeking wisdom, I went to the local magic shop where there was this wise old magician who would proffer advice to young people. And he would sit in the corner, and I walked in and I said, “Master, what am I supposed to do? My magic tricks are no longer impressive to me.”

He said, “Oh, it’s a sad day in a young magician’s life when he’s no longer impressed with his own magic, but,” he stands up and he walks over, puts his hands on the counter. And he says, “Learning how to do the illusion is only step one of being a magician. Knowing how to return to the wonder you felt when you first saw the trick performance, now this is the magic.” And then he snapped his fingers and he turned into a Raven and he flew out the…

If I don’t believe that I have a gift, how am I going to give a gift? We’re freelancing right now. Was there a job that you left to freelance? Was freelancing a thing that you’ve wanted to do?

Speaker 4:

Uh, no.

Reagan Pugh:

Okay, that didn’t work. That didn’t work. What does it look like for us before we begin our work to make sure that we think, “I’m choosing to be here.”

One year, two year, three years or four years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I had the chance to do this. And if we can remember that we have this privilege of walking into a room to guide folks, perhaps then we can give this gift of gratitude back to them.

My grandmother, she would paint her fingernails methodically. She had the bottles across her bathroom and she would pull one down and the red would coat her fingernail. You could see the bristles, so slowly. I would say to her, “Nana, why is it that you paint your fingernails so slowly?”

And she would blow on them and say, “Honey, it’s because I paint my fingernails like this, that you’re alive.”

I would say, “Nana, what do you mean?”

And she said, “Honey, if I take this good care of my fingernails, don’t you think I made sure your dad didn’t kill himself?”

She had a tidy house, she had painted fingernails, her car was always clean, and her clothes were folded. The way that she did anything was the way that she did everything.

As facilitators, what mindsets do we carry about the people whom we were about to go interact with? When we’re doing discovery interviews, do you ever have someone who works for the organization you’re going to serve, say, “Now watch out for Sarah, watch out for Jonathan. They’re going to be a naysayer.” And then don’t we carry the story into the room with us if we’re not careful. Those thoughts that we carry, the way that we behave, the postures we take, this permeates into the rest of our experience. How do we make sure as we approach any engagement that we consider where our mind is at, where our spirit is at? Where are we worried? Where are we anxious? And where are we frustrated? Because this, my friends, echoes into the rest of our actions.

I had a mentor, and his name was Earl. I was in college and I couldn’t get a girlfriend. So I was involved, Students Association for Campus Activities, Student Government, Student Organ… I was busy, I was building a resume. I was going to go make something of myself. I was applying for all these jobs and I wasn’t getting them. And I was frustrated. So I would walk into Earl’s office and I would sit down and I would complain about my station in life. And Earl was patient, and he would sit in his chair and it would swivel and he would let me finish. And finally the swivel would stop. And he would look at me, and with kindness say the same thing that he said every single time, “Reagan, this is going to make a lot more sense for you when you realize that it’s not about you.” Earl died a few years later. And 1000 people went to his funeral. Earl possessed knowledge and skills, but it was not Earl’s knowledge and skills that allowed him to have a lasting impact on me and those who he served.

It is easy for us before we take on an engagement, to walk into the room believing that we are being held up and judged the entire time. It’s easy for us to believe that our career is dependent upon doing perfect in this interaction, or that us achieving the result that we told them that we would achieve is going to determine whether or not we are going to ever be successful in this field.

But let me tell you something, it’s not about you. And here’s the paradoxical beauty of realizing that it’s not about us. The second we can believe and remember that it’s not about us walking into the room to do this work, the stakes that we once believed to be so high, they can vanish. And the second we don’t believe the stakes exist anymore about whether or not we have value. The second that we are able to recover those pieces of ourselves that can really connect and be with the people in the room.

People, I don’t know if you know this, we don’t like to have things done to us, but we do enjoy it whenever folks decide to show up to a room and be with us the way that we need to be been with. This all happens before we walk into the room. This all happens before we speak to one person, my friends, this is the inner work of the facilitator. Thank you.

The post Inner Work of a Facilitator appeared first on Voltage Control.

“Life is gray. It’s not black and white. It’s possible to admit that the FBI made mistakes and at the same time recognize the ultimate responsibility of Koresh to have led his people out peacefully, as we encouraged him to do every single day.” -Gary Noesner

Gary Noesner, author of the book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30-year career. During this career, Gary was named the first chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. As a negotiator, he was personally involved in numerous high-profile crises, cases, and seizures, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, recently dramatized by the Netflix series.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Gary about the gray nature of life, what distinguishes wants vs needs, and the game-changing power of making adjustments at halftime. Listen in to find out how Gary’s discomfort with conflict in his youth led to his career as a hostage negotiator for the FBI.

Show Highlights

[7:29] The fatal mistake of assuming that high rank equals expertise
[14:07] The realization that life is gray
[19:00] Saving the most lives possible
[22:29] Making adjustments at half-time
[26:40] Distinguishing between wants and needs

Links | Resources

Gary on LinkedIn
Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator

About the Guest

Gary Noesner, author of the book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30-year career. During this career, Gary was named the first chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. As a negotiator, he was personally involved in numerous high-profile crises, cases, and seizures, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, recently dramatized by the Netflix series.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps 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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Voltage Control on the Web
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Podcast Sponsored by MURAL

Full Transcript

Intro: 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 in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Today I’m with Gary Noesner. Gary retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30-year career, during which he was named the first chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. As a negotiator, he was personally involved in numerous high-profile crises, cases, and seizures, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, recently dramatized by the Netflix series. He’s also author of the book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator. 

Welcome to the show, Gary.

Gary: Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Douglas: So, Gary, I’m always fascinated to hear how people got their start, especially in the world of facilitation. And I’m sure negotiators are no different. While there’s certainly a course at Quantico, there’s not readily degree programs, like, “Oh, I’m going to go become a negotiator or become a facilitator.” It’s a quite circuitous path a lot of people take. And I’m curious. All the way back to the Lakeland High School, you know, talking about some of those early situations you found yourself in, at what point did you really start to realize that you had this gift of kind of working with people?

Gary: Well, I think as an early age, I was always uncomfortable around conflict and always sort of stepped up to the plate to de-escalate confrontations and arguments, whether it’s between friends or others. It just seemed like a natural and appropriate thing to do for me. So when I got into the FBI, after wanting to do that since I was young, I had no sense that anything about negotiation existed because it didn’t when I joined. But when I first got in the early part of my career, the FBI had sort of taken on this hostage-negotiation concept that had been started by NYPD. And there’s something about it that really attracted me, and I thought it fit my personality and skill set. So I got the early training, and it was an auxiliary function for me for many, many years. And eventually I became a full-time negotiator and chief of the Crisis Negotiation Unit for the last 10 years of my career. But it was very challenging, and, yeah, there’s a lot of similarities with mediation, facilitation. It’s all about building relationships and influencing people in a positive way. 

Douglas: And it must have been kind of—it’s like coming full circle as you were one of the first to take the course, and then you ended up taking the program over. What did that feel like when you remember it? Like, what was that like?

Gary: Well, in those days, when I first got involved, the FBI, perhaps more so than today, played a pretty significant role in training police departments. Police departments didn’t have a lot of money for training back then, so part of the FBI’s mission was to provide it at no charge. And one of the areas, of course, was negotiation. It eventually became the thing we taught more than anything else, except for maybe firearms. And it gave me an opportunity to really interface with a lot of police officers in ways that I might not have had a chance otherwise. And that was a really valuable piece of my learning as an agent, as a human being. And, you know, I certainly got as much from those officers as I gave. It became apparent to me very quickly that the skills and the approaches we were teaching had a real impact. It wasn’t theoretical. It allowed officers to exercise some specific skills to prevent violence and come home alive to their families. So immediately I recognized it as rewarding and meaningful and certainly something I always enjoyed.

Douglas: Something that really caught my eye—and I kind of can parallel it back to even the theme of the show, which is control, and how much control do we lean into, and how much do we back away from? And I really struck a chord with this notion of maintaining balance. And you were talking about managing yourself and the people around you. And in fact, I think there is a quote that really caught my eye, which was, if you cannot control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence those of others?

Gary: That’s literally the first line that comes out of my mouth when I teach negotiations, because it’s so true. I mean, if you want to influence others and yet you yourself are emotionally charged or dealing not in a logical, thoughtful, empathic way, then you’re probably not going to be as successful as you would otherwise. So self-control is terribly important. And you tend to see people that perform at the highest levels in certainly law-enforcement negotiations are typically people who have a lot of self-control. 

And one of the chapters in my book, Stalling for Time, I start each chapter with a quote. And a quote I always like, it’s a partial quote from Rudyard Kipling about if you can keep your head about you when all else are losing theirs. 

And I think that says a lot to me about the kind of person that makes a good negotiator and what is required. It’s somebody that can think clearly in the midst of a situation where others might be so overcome with various forms of reaction that they’re not optimally performing. You know, it’s kind of like—I always do the comparison of a trauma surgeon. You know, when mass casualties are brought into an emergency room, the trauma surgeon, it’s not that they’re not human and don’t see the damage that some people have suffered or perhaps been deceased, but they focus immediately on what has to be done, which is to save as many lives and determine which ones need their most immediate care. So they put those emotions aside so that they can function at an optimal level or highest level they can. And I think negotiations is very akin to that.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of the, never confusing getting even with what you want.

Gary: Yeah. And it’s a good phrase we used to use for our commanders because even law enforcement, somebody can be a fairly high rank and have a lot of different experiences in an agency. It doesn’t mean that they’ve had a lot of experience managing with these kinds of crises. 

And law-enforcement officers are human beings, and when a perpetrator, particularly one that is maybe not a model citizen or somebody that may not have any attributes that we would find commendable, when they refuse to do what we want and they don’t cooperate and they back out of promises, they engage in any number of problematic behaviors, you really got to maintain your self-control because if you respond and react to that, you may get even with them, but are you really accomplishing what your goal is, which is to get your way? And “to get our way” in the context of negotiation means we get people to peacefully surrender, to comply, to do what we think is not only in our best interest, but in their best interest. We don’t want anybody to get hurt. So I found a lot of my career time was helping on-scene commanders and decision makers, chiefs of police, sheriffs, understand that concept. 

There’s always an assumption that people of a high rank know how to do everything. And of course, that’s a fatal mistake you can make, because they don’t necessarily understand, especially—someone might be a great internist as a doctor, but can they perform brain surgery? Probably not. So, you know, just because you have the MD in front of your name doesn’t mean you can do everything there is that could possibly come before you. So we have to know our limitations, and we have to understand that there are people who have more expertise that we probably would be wise to listen to.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of your points in the book around just the crises within the crises and these other negotiations that have to happen. So you’re managing quite a lot at the same time.

Gary: Yeah. I mean, and of course, I know we’ll be talking about Waco shortly, but I got asked this on a recent interview, and I never really thought about it from that complexity point of view that while out there, I had three very distinct roles. I had to manage the negotiation team, maybe 15 or 20 people, and ensure that it was functioning properly and proceeding in a strategic way, the way I wanted it to. And at the same time, I had to convey what we wanted to the bosses and convince them to support the strategic approach we were taking, and that could often be a challenge. And then, last but not least, is dealing with David Koresh and all the unique issues and problems that he brought to the table. So, you know, you find yourself sometimes being the ringleader in a three-ring circus, you know, and trying to keep everybody functioning in the right way so we can achieve the outcome we want.

Douglas: Yeah. And speaking of Waco, let’s talk about that for a moment. I was really curious to hear your thoughts on how well it portrayed the negotiation process, because from a storyline perspective, when I compare your book to the show, there’s definitely some sensationalism on the Branch Davidian side. My depiction was that it demonstrated the conflict with the kind of more forceful approach and also just the kind of slow, intentional approach ya’ll were taking. But I’m just kind of curious as far as, like, anything about the negotiation process that you felt was maybe skewed in the presentation.

Gary: It’s a big question, and there’s a lot of variables. Obviously, they bought my book to show the FBI side of the story and what perspective we had from outside looking in. And then they bought David Thibodeau’s book—he was a surviving Branch Davidian—to get the perspective of someone inside looking out. And I liked that approach, to look at it from both angles. But specifically addressing the negotiation part, they got a lot of parts of the negotiation very right. What was the Hollywood dramatization part is they had my character doing all these things on his own, when in reality I’m leading the team, and there’s eight, nine negotiators per shift. It’s quite a complex and many-moving-part operation. So obviously, Hollywood doesn’t want to pay those additional actors and introduce their characters and get the audience to know them. It’s a whole different level of challenge, that they wanted to showcase Michael Shannon, who was one of the two main stars of the TV show who played me. 

Douglas: I got to say, if I’m ever played by anyone, I would say Michael Shannon wouldn’t be a bad—that’s not a bad deal to get.

Gary: I had seen Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire, that TV show. 

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Gary: I was very impressed with him in that show, and I didn’t even know his name, to be honest with you. And they came out and said, “This Michael Shannon’s been hired to play you.” And I looked him up right away. I said, “Oh, it’s that guy.” Well, he is just an incredible actor and human being. And, you know, during my time on the set, we had an opportunity to become quite friendly and had basically drinks and dinner every night while I was out there. And what an incredible actor. And he certainly was not trying to imitate me, but he captured the tenor of my philosophy, which goes back to your earlier question. I think those issues that came up, including the conflict between the tactical side of the FBI that wanted to take a different approach, I think that’s very accurately reflected. Again, not so much in the exact form, but certainly in terms of substance. And he had it down very, very well and, I think, did an incredible job.

And let me add another thing, Douglas. You know, what I found is I felt that part of the reason I wrote my book was to educate current and future FBI leaders. And one of the things they need to be educated on is to understand not only the mistakes that the FBI made there, but the good things we did. And there were far more of those than not. But if someone doesn’t write that down and record it, those things fall through the cracks and they’re forgotten, and sometimes mistakes are repeated, and good behaviors are not appreciated or replicated. So I wanted to write it for that reason. And I also feel that in the FBI, we serve the American people. If we do something wrong, we should step up to the plate, admit what we did, demonstrate that we are making changes and corrections, and I think we owe it to the American people that we serve to do those things. So for all those reasons, I wrote that book and stand by the portrayal of the FBI overall. 

What I’m not quite as happy about is I think the portrayal on the other side of David Koresh came up a bit short for me because in reality, David Koresh was a far more dark and sinister, manipulative guy than was portrayed. The other great actor there—there were several of them—but Taylor Kitsch, who played Koresh, was just phenomenal. And he’s such a nice guy in real life that I think that came through. And the producer, directors wanted to show the charismatic side of Koresh, what allowed him to attract followers and gain their total allegiance. And they did that, but I just don’t think they showed sufficiently. They showed some dark things from him but not enough to my satisfaction. And I talked to them about that and tried to change that. But what you find out is when you sell your book to Hollywood or somebody else, you have some influence, but you don’t have control.

Douglas: Yep. I think that echoes my read on it as well. It’s a little sensationalized on the, like, kind of making people want to have a little more sympathy than maybe you would have if you were watching it go down from the sidelines.

Gary: You know, you’re into facilitation, and I think the biggest takeaway for facilitators, if you want to use Waco as sort of an example, is the realization that life is gray. It’s not black and white. It’s possible to admit that the FBI made mistakes and at the same time recognize the ultimate responsibility of Koresh to have led his people out peacefully, as we encouraged him to do every single day. So you don’t have to say, “Oh, these guys were all good, and these guys were all bad. The big old bad government came in and just wanted to kill people.” I mean, it’s actually intellectually lazy to take on those extreme views and not very realistic. There were good people in there who were practicing their faith, and there were highly dedicated FBI agents who wanted nothing but everybody to come out alive. So to make those general derogatory statements, I think, is just showing you haven’t done your research, and you haven’t read about what really happened, and you don’t understand.

Douglas: Coming back to your goals for the book around really cementing the positive impact so they’re not lost, it also jumped out to me when you were talking about these post-incident reviews and applying these lessons learned, it was interesting because it seemed like the popularity of the techniques within the FBI began to grow as you started to celebrate some of these wins. But the irony of it all was, maybe one of the ones that I was the most tickled by and I thought that you guys did such an amazing move was the steaks and gravy and cakes for the prisoners. So they’re all having a Thanksgiving coma while the tactical thing went in, and clearly, not much credit was given after the fact for that.

Gary: Yeah. You know, it’s funny. A lot of people in law enforcement are really not well versed on what negotiators do and why we do it. It’s sort of a soft science, and you know there’s more to taking action than here’s a bad guy. We’re going to do this to suppress them, arrest them, whatever we have to do. And, you know, when you do negotiate people out, which we do, in the 90 percentile, people say, “Well, it must not have been so hard. That guy must not have been that dangerous anyway.” And they sort of make some excuses for it. Of course, I always want to say, “Well, you try doing it when somebody’s life is on the line.” But it’s a hard thing to define. 

But just as in facilitation, we’re building relationships, and people expect in these situations law enforcement to show up and be very confrontational, very demanding, very dictatorial. You will do this and you better do that, or we’re going to do x, y, z. And instead they get somebody like me show up and say, “Hey, David. This is Gary. What’s going on in there? I’m here to help. I don’t want to see anybody get hurt.” It’s something they don’t expect, and it gives us an opportunity to listen to them and to better understand what their motivation is, what their feelings are, how they interpret what has happened. It allows us slowly and steadily to lower the tension, to de-conflict and de-confrontate. And it allows us to begin eventually to have some influence over their behavior. And, you know, you typically will get to a point where a guy like David Koresh, which you didn’t hear, he said, “You know, I just don’t know what I can do. I don’t know what to get out of, how to get out of what I got into.” And you say, “Well, you know, here’s some ideas for you, and here’s something you might want to think about. And come out to jail and tell the world your side of the story. It needs to be heard.” You know, those are things we did, and with some effect, we got 35 people out during the first half when I was there, including 21 children. That’s a fact that many people forget. And it was not an easy task, and I’m very proud of it. I’m no less disappointed that we didn’t get more out or everybody out. But you got to recognize that human emotion is a really challenging thing. And when there’s been loss of life, like it was at Waco before we even arrived as the FBI, I mean, we were already in a deep ditch, and we got to dig out of that. It’s pretty tough.

Douglas: You know, as you were speaking, it reminded me of some notes I wrote down around there’s a lot of similarities between facilitation and negotiation, but there’s some clear differences as well. We’re not dealing with—life and death is usually not at stake. And the fundamental contradiction that you mentioned, which I thought was really fascinating, we don’t really struggle with that so much, right? Like, we’re all about building trust, but we never, ever have to bend the truth, or we never have to potentially send them into harm’s way. And when I think about that story, was it in West Virginia, where Cheryl’s husband, her and her child. And there was a lot of interesting dynamics there from the perspective of opening up options and demonstrating a future when you know that that future may not exist. So I’m kind of curious how that unfolds, just as you’re kind of regulating your emotions.

Gary: Well, it’s a tough case. And, you know, my book is about the importance of negotiation and how it is a tool that law enforcement should even use more, and then I start off the first chapter of my book with a situation where we have to use deadly force to resolve it. But it was a very dramatic case. It showed how even in those cases where the behaviors, the actions of the perpetrator are so extreme that our chance of getting them to comply and resolve it peacefully are pretty slim and, thereby, someone else is going to die. So then the negotiator has to segue into a role that allows you to become more supportive of the only option we have left, and that’s using force. 

In Sperryville, I talked him into coming out to a helicopter, where a marksman ended his life. In the Talladega prison, that you alluded to earlier, we knew hostages were going to die, so we gave in and gave them a very sumptuous meal for the first time in eight days to sort of, excuse the expression, fatten them up and to lure them into a sense of victory and empowerment. And they took the bait and gorged on the food and basically went into sweet slumber that allowed the Hostage Rescue team to make a really terrific, well-executed entry and save everybody’s lives. 

So there are times where negotiators have to recognize reality, that while we will be successful most of the time, there’s nothing in what we do that guarantees success and certainly not 100 percent of the time. So we have to be adaptable and flexible. And the bottom line is, how do we save the most lives possible?

Douglas: Yes. That was the thing that was going through my mind in both of those scenarios because Sperryville, you saved a woman and her child; and then the prison example, I mean, how much more carnage would have happened if they would have been bracing for it?

Gary: That’s right. I mean, if we had continued to deny them food until they released the hostages, I mean, I think we stood a good chance of having them kill one of the hostages to try to force us to do what they wanted, and that’s one less human being alive today to survive that. So we have to take all that into consideration. And you make the best decisions you can, and you have to weigh all the facts. That’s why we function—in Waco, I get a lot of credit operating by myself, but in reality, we’re leveraging a team of very skilled and talented negotiators that bring a lot to the table from their training and their personal experience. We said, “What do you think? What are your ideas? Did you hear something I didn’t hear?” And we really use that to full advantage to try to come up with the best approach that we think will achieve what we want in this particular incident.

Douglas: That brings to mind something else I wanted to bring up, which was the comment of you write good notes. And it really resonated with me because I often love to facilitate with a co-facilitator, and I find that when, especially when we’re exploring really tough issues that, like, a team is really struggling, like, they can’t seem to get past some personal issues, or they’re just stuck on some things, when you’re there working directly, it’s sometimes hard to see the big picture because you’re in the content, you’re in the moment. But if you’re on the sideline kind of just observing, you can see interesting things. So I was just wondering, is that similar in the negotiation world? When you’re observing and writing these notes, do you find that you see things you wouldn’t have seen if you were just on the phone, in the moment with them, like, watching every word, that kind of thing?

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s akin, Douglas, if you want to do a comparison, you think of a college or a professional football game. You ever notice how sometimes—not all the time—the second half is dramatically different from the first half? I mean, dramatically different? And you say, “Boy, what happened? That must’ve been a hell of a speech that the coach gave.” Well, what it really was is the coaches up in the booth, they’re studying what happened. They’re making adjustments at halftime. It’s coaching. It’s not being personally involved in playing that position out on the field, but watching it and seeing where changes or improvements can be made to get the outcome we wanted. 

So negotiations is no different. If I’m the negotiation coordinator, or the coach, it allows me to listen to the interplay between the primary negotiator on the phone and the perpetrator, and then either in between calls or through passing a short, cryptic note, help nudge them to something I’ve seen that I think they may not have fully appreciated. 

The quote you’re talking about is in Waco. This mother was very angry that her son was by himself. He had been released in the Child Protective Services, and we sent a video in of all the children. And she was very angry at us for his forlorn status. And, you know, rather than just trying to defend ourselves, I passed a note to John Dolan, our primary negotiator at the time, and he read it, and he smiled. And it just said, “You know, Kathy, what little Brian needs now is a hug from his mommy.” And you could almost hear the arrow strike her heart. And, I mean, it was the one phrase that kind of brought it home to her that she was the missing piece. It wasn’t us that was causing trauma to her child. It was the fact that she sent him out, and she stayed in to fight for Koresh, that it was her maternal responsibility to do this. And I think that shot hit home, and she came out the next day, and she was the first, essentially the first, adult that came out. And that was a very meaningful goal that we’d achieved.

Douglas: It really struck home for me when I read that because sometimes people aren’t even necessarily self-aware or why they’re upset. And if they’re lashing out to you, and you can—it’s almost like judo, which is redirect their energy, kind of become more aware of where the center is.

Gary: Yeah. You know, when you look at negotiations broadly—I’m not talking specifically Waco here—really, very few of them are actually hostage-taking events, where someone’s being held to force somebody else to do something. Probably 90 percent of what police do around the country are dealing with highly emotionally charged situations. Often the jilted lovers, romantic situation gone bad; somebody holding an employer who fired them; an argument with a neighbor. There are people who are expressing anger, rage, and frustration who don’t even have a clear goal of what they’re trying to achieve. In other words, they’ve gotten themselves into something they have no idea how to get out of. And that’s the role that the negotiator could play to try to understand those emotions and those drivers of their behavior, and to try to deal with those and diffuse those. That’s what makes us successful. It’s an approach that people don’t expect from law enforcement. We certainly got that from the mental-health counseling community. And it’s very effective in getting people to, for the first time, hear themselves what is driving them, and they may not appreciate, you know?

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of another note that I had taken around you had talked about the role of the negotiator was to help people express their fears, so allowing them to open up. And it was interesting because as I read it, it was definitely similar to things that we’re trying to do in the workplace, because often people have these unstated fears. It’s just they’re not vulnerable enough to say it out loud because they’re worried someone’s going to judge them or maybe they haven’t even figured it out yet. And so simply stating what might be clear to you but not to them and allowing them to acknowledge it or even just to say yes, I thought that was pretty interesting. 

Gary: You know, we used to talk about helping people understand the difference between wants and needs. So somebody involved in one of these situations may say, I want this and I want that, but it’s our job to find out what they really need. Do they really need their job back? Or is it the loss of respect and the embarrassment of having to go home and tell your wife you haven’t got a job anymore? I mean, you know, we don’t always get that right. But that’s kind of our goal, you know? And when we’re communicating with them, and we say, “It sounds like you’re really embarrassed by what happened,” and if he hasn’t articulated that and that, in fact, is what he feels, then we’ve just really scored some big points because he said, “Yes, that’s exactly right. I’m embarrassed by having been fired.” Well, that’s important for us to know if we’re going to deal with how he’s viewing what happened to him.

Douglas: So, I had this—it was one of the last kind of sentences in your book. And I wrote it down because I thought it was pretty spot on. So I’m just going to read it, and then I’d love to just hear your thoughts today on this. But, “The happiest and most successful people are the ones that can remain calm in difficult times and put aside emotions like pride and anger that stop them from finding common ground. We need to be good listeners and understand the problems and needs of the other side.”

Gary: Yeah. I guess it’s never been more true than it is today in our very acrimonious political climate. And I’ll bring up some recent events: the protests around the country. When people go out on the street and they carry signs and they’re yelling and singing songs, whatever they’re doing, what they’re basically saying is, “We want somebody to hear us.”

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Gary: And if instead of finding ways to creatively listen to them, we simply attack them, we’re probably not going to be successful. I suspect if you had 100 people in a room and 50 were pro-life and 50 were pro-choice, you could even have great meaningful discussion all night long, and at the end of the evening, you’d probably still have 50-50. But that’s okay as long as we’ve avoided name calling and shouts and threats and violence and so forth. That’s the major goal. It’s a slow, steady process to try to create an atmosphere where we can listen to others and appreciate their point of view, even if it’s different. And I just hate to see that today, particularly in our political environment, we seem to be going in the wrong direction.

Douglas: Yeah. I think that there’s a real beauty—I had underscored the statement you made at the end of one of the early chapters, which was, “Listening is the cheapest concession we can make.”

Gary: Yeah. It is. It costs you nothing. And, you know, you can acknowledge someone’s point of view, “Let me make sure I understand. You’re angry at your boss because he fired you. You don’t think he appreciated your work, and you felt as though he mistreated you,” and so forth and so on. I’m not saying to him, “Yes, I think you should kill your boss.” I’m saying to him, “I understand how you feel about what happened.” I mean, that’s a powerful thing. If you think about it, the whole evolution of communication between human beings, and we’re social animals, we want other people to understand what we’re saying and how we feel about it. And if you do that as a facilitator, as a negotiator, you’re going to be successful.

Douglas: Gary, it’s been so great having you on the show today, and fun chatting and hearing about just the riveting life and career you’ve had in negotiation. Would you like to leave the listeners with any final words?

Gary: Well, I would suggest that people really work on listening. Listening is such an important tool. So when you go out, not so much these days with COVID, but when you have an opportunity to have a social interaction, pick out somebody you don’t know very well or somebody that’s a little quiet over in the corner or whatever, and go and talk to them and find out about their life and ask good questions. “Can you tell me more about that? That sounds very interesting. I’d like to hear about that hobby that you have or that trip that you took.” And you’ll find that people are far more interesting than you might have realized, that people have done and seen things that you had no idea, and you will learn a lot. And they, in turn, will appreciate the fact that you have taken the time and demonstrated the interest in learning more about them. It is a very, very powerful tool. 

And you know, what we all want to achieve is cooperation with other human beings, and we get that through being likable, plain old likable. Just be a person that strives to be likable and to automatically not think the worst of others and blame others, but seek to understand. Even the business guru Stephen Covey says, first seek to understand, then to be understood. So I’m not sure if that helps, but I would urge people to really make an effort at that. 

Douglas: Well, thanks again for being on the show. It’s been great. 

Gary: My pleasure.

Outro: 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.

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