The Design Sprint is a staple structure in the world of facilitation for solving big challenges. It’s a five-day process, initially developed at Google Ventures, used for validating ideas and tackling a business problem. The process guides teams through a design-based thinking process to uncover insights, prototype an idea, and test it with users. 

Whether you are preparing to run your own sprint or are going to partake in one as a participant, it is important to know the ins and outs of Design Sprints to get the most out of them. Let’s take a look.

Why Run a Design Sprint?

Design Sprints have multiple functions and benefits. Here are some of the top reasons to run a sprint:

• Align a team around a shared vision.
• Answer critical business questions.
• Discover the essence of a creative challenge or problem.

Cut through endless internal debate by building a prototype on which your customers can give feedback.

When to Run a Design Sprint

Design Sprints are beneficial at various project or product life cycle stages. The following are some excellent times to turn to a sprint:

• When kicking off a new initiative.
• When looking for new breakthrough features for a product.
• When you need to switch gears or iterate on a current product.
• When you haven’t talked to your users enough.

How to Find the Magic

The Design Sprint is a platform/tooling agnostic. It helps companies find the magic and deep value for their end-user before building anything. The sprint helps teams identify their core “jobs to be done,”; what’s most important to focus on, and how to get there.

Think of the Design Sprint process and prototyping as the evolution of Mario in the image below:

The Design Sprint is a process to begin iterating toward your customers’ ideal version of fire-spitting Mario. The end-users experience with your product is the focus–the magic you want to create! Follow-on activities are how you actually build the product and what you build it with. After sprinting, your team will have more confidence in the core value and needs of the end-user before the heavy work of actually building the product.  

The Design Sprint helps us make sure we are building the right thing rather than obsessing on getting the thing exactly right.

Ready to get started? Let our expert facilitators guide you through a design sprint to spark a change in your organization and drive new ideas. Please reach out to hello@voltagecontrol.com for a consultation.

Focus on Desire

The Design Sprint is targeted at testing desirability–keep this at the forefront of your mind. When you create a simulation of your concept and use it to test your ideal vision, you gain deeper insights into the ideal state and desirability from the end-user. You can then take those insights to the table when you build out the final solution. While it is efficient and a big win when your prototype becomes the initial spec for what you end up building, its primary goal is to answer your questions and gain insights.

While the main focus of a Design Sprint is testing desirability, we certainly don’t want to waste time testing completely infeasible things. At Voltage Control, we recommend including someone in the Design Sprint who understands the logistics (ex: engineer, operations, hardware, software, materials, etc.). A person with relevant insight on logistics can lend a perspective that might inspire others with the confidence they need to explore certain ideas they may have been afraid to approach. This person also serves as a built-in filter to keep the group from wasting time on outlandish, impractical ideas. That said, the facilitator must ensure that the logistics and status quo aren’t stifling innovation but rather informing and directing it. 

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Where to Run a Design Sprint

The five-day sprint was originally developed as an in-person workshop. People come together for an engaging, interactive experience and participate in hands-on, visual, and deep work collaboration. Sticky notes are aplenty, and whiteboards are used to write and sketch out ideas. However, you don’t need to wait to be IRL to undergo a sprint. Remote Design Sprints are also an increasingly popular option due to The Great Pause. With adjustments to cater to the virtual landscape, your team can still experience effective and productive remote collaboration. There are even virtual whiteboards (yes, digital stickies!) and other remote tools to promote visual collaboration just as you would in-person.  

Who Participates in a Design Sprint

Everyone involved in a Design Sprint plays a vital role.

The sponsor is the person with the big idea; they have the vision. They seek to answer: What is the problem you are addressing, and what is your desired outcome? The sprint is designed to build and leverage something that comes closest to the “right thing.” On some occasions, multiple sponsors in an organization champion the Design Sprint to help solve their shared problem. When they have opposing opinions on how best to solve it, it’s super exciting too if one or neither of them is right!

The sprint team is a curation of 7 people who you feel will provide diverse and critical perspectives on the project. Who’s opinion and insight do you value? Who’s voice and input do you need most to get you from point A to point B? Think about who understands the problem deeply. Who has to deal with it on a regular basis? Who will have to implement and support the solution? Who understands the needs of the customers? Who will build your prototype? Who can represent operations and logistics? Who understands the voice of the brand and how to position the solution?  Who understands the finances? Who always figures out how to break things? Who is really creative about breaking the rules? 

Finally, you’ll need to consider a few special roles when planning a Sprint:

The Decider is one of your sprint team members who will make all the critical decisions. Perhaps it is the CEO or a stakeholder; they have the final say. It is their approval you seek to take the generated idea to the next level of integration. Ideally, they will be in the entire Design Sprint. If they can’t make it to the entire sprint, they should proxy to someone else or make sure to attend at key moments when decisions are made. Pro Tip: Good Deciders listen carefully, ask questions of the team, and make swift and concrete decisions.

The Prototyper is one or more of your sprint team members with the skills needed to build your prototype. Depending on the opportunity or challenge you seek to solve, your prototype may take different forms. If you know you are building a mobile app, then you’d want to select a prototyper with UX & UI design skills who is familiar with app prototyping tools like Figma or Invision. If you aren’t quite sure, you’ll want to use a prototyper with deep design skills and diverse prototyping experience to ensure they are ready for anything. 

The Experts are 3-4 people that we invite to join us on Monday so that we can ask them curious questions while we write How Might Statement to unlock potential solution ideas. Curating experts is a great way to include people whose input is crucial but just don’t have enough time to attend the entire sprint. 

The Facilitator is a non-biased and neutral leader who is an expert in facilitation and the Design Sprint process. This person can be internal or external to your organization.

Pro tip: Hire an outside facilitator when dealing with big or sensitive decisions.

They are removed from office politics, making enforcing good behavior from the group easier and protecting the leadership from including a specific agenda. A workshop facilitator increases engagement and positivity in the group, and an outside facilitator is a fresh new face and personality who can help to break old patterns and create new ones for optimum productivity. 

Now that you know the “who, what, when, where, and why’s” of Design Sprints, you are more prepared to utilize the 5-day workshop to tackle your big challenges and ideations. Happy exploration! 

Want to learn more about Design Sprints?

We are here to help you succeed from expert facilitation to in-house training. Please reach out to us at hello@voltagecontrol.com.

We also host regular meetups, boot camps, summits, and virtual workshops–from Professional Virtual Facilitation Training to our annual Control the Room Facilitator Summit. To sign up or learn more.

The post What is a Design Sprint For? appeared first on Voltage Control.

“ If you really listen to people and understand what’s happening, if you illustrate an image that they’re actually describing in their mind, [while] reflecting back maybe a sketch of what they were trying to say, people love it. People absolutely go crazy being listened to. ” -David Sibbet

In this episode of Control the Room, David Sibbet and I break down his unique career path in consulting and facilitating visual meetings and how individuals can use visual elements to amplify their learning in the workplace. From the installation of his consulting company in the mid-70s to the present day, David’s focus on design thinking continues to drive him to help companies achieve a “sophisticated level of systems thinking” in meetings. David reflects on the components of his creation, the Group Graphics tool, and its effectiveness to help teams find focus during workshops. We examine the impact of using “clean language” in the workplace and the ability to have a metaphorical thinking mindset, which he believes can indirectly lead to inclusivity within your organization. David also shares lessons he learned through enduring the peaks and valleys of decision-making when working with past clients. We conclude by taking a closer look at his passion project and non-profit organization, the Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN), and the responsibility we must uphold to build a better world for humanity on both local and global levels.

Show Highlights

[1:48] David’s Start in Visual Meetings 
[7:19] The Group Graphics Take 
[16:58] The Group Graphics Keyboard Tool 
[24:13] Clean Language & the Impact of Metaphorical Thinking 
[33:54] The Peaks & Valleys Metaphor
[39:55] The GLEN & The Diversity in Connections 

Links | Resources

David’s LinkedIn
Grove Consultants International
The Global Learning and Exchange Network
Visual Facilitation Series

About the Guest

David Sibbet is the founder and CEO of The Grove Consultants International. He is a master graphic facilitator, information designer, and is considered a leader in the booming field of visual facilitation. The Grove is a full-service organization consulting firm based in San Francisco and is a hub to a global network of associates, partners, and other visual practitioners. He co-directs The Grove’s Global Learning & Exchange Network (GLEN) focused on evolving new approaches to collaboration and cross-boundary work. David is the author of the best-selling, four-part Visual Facilitation Series, which includes: Visual Meetings, Visual Teams, Visual Leaders and, Visual Consulting: Designing & Leading Change, co-authored with Gisela Wendling, Ph.D. He holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Northwestern University, a BA in English from Occidental College, and a Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. In 2013 he was awarded the Organizational Development Network’s lifetime achievement award for creative contribution to the field of Organizational Development.

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas 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 in distributing power, leaning and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live from a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real-time, with other facilitators. Sign up today at VoltageControl.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at VoltageControl.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today I’m with David Sibbet, founder and CEO of the Grove Consultants International, a full-service organization consulting firm in San Francisco that’s been a leader in visual facilitation and strategy work. He’s also a process designer who helps clients imagine, design, facilitate, and document critical planning and change processes. He’s also the author of the bestselling book, Visual Meetings, and its companions, Visual Teams, Visual Leaders, and Visual Consultant. Welcome to the show, David.

David Sibbet:

Yes. Thank you, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, David, let’s start off by hearing a little bit about how you got your start. How did you get into this work of visual meetings and visual leading?

David Sibbet:

Well, I was working for a leadership development organization in San Francisco called the Coro Center for Public Affairs. And we were next door neighbors to a consulting firm called Interaction Associates, run by two architects who believed that the way architects work would be good for teachers and good for people in organizations. And they were inventing facilitation in the mid-70s, which at that time was not a common thing for businesses to do. It’s a term that was more used for people doing personal development work in groups, like National Training Labs or other people like that.

David Sibbet:

And they were the beginning of what is now called design thinking. And I’ve always been able to draw and was trained as a reporter. I have a master’s in journalism. And I was interested in using the latest techniques in our leadership development work, so we began mirroring the interaction method, which had a facilitator and a recorder who would then write on flip charts what was going on. And they were getting a lot of success.

David Sibbet:

And when we began using it in our seminars, we also experienced that it really shifted things. But I really felt constrained by the little flip chart, and began working with really big charts. And I can still remember one of our first meetings where we mapped the power structure in the city. And we had 12 interns who were all on different placements, and so somebody was in the Department of Public Works, somebody was in police, somebody was in the planning commission. And I started drawing little boxes of different sizes and put ones inside others that, in fact, were inside other organizations.

David Sibbet:

And the end of about three hours, we had a whole wall full of a diagram with marks of where the interns were, and lots of lines about how they perceive people communicating. And one of the things that I realized is we’ve gone right past the bio-break. We’ve gone for three straight hours, not a drop of interest. And I just kept going. And for about five years, experimented with all the ways you could use visualization and recording to amplify people’s learning.

David Sibbet:

So it was an action learning type curriculum that we were running at Coro. And after about five years of that work, people found out I was doing this. And I remember Stanford Research Institute offered me what at the time seemed like a whole lot of money to go and spend one day recording for them in Sacramento on a project. And I began doing the math. Coro was a nonprofit, and I had a couple kids. And I decided to strike out on my own and form my own consulting firm in 1977,

Douglas Ferguson:

And was that when The Grove was started?

David Sibbet:

Yeah. We didn’t call ourselves The Grove. I called myself Sibbet and Associates, which is fairly typical of people who start out independently. And I incorporated as a company in 1988, a little bit later. I discovered about three years in who my clients really were. I initially thought organizations would want to do this. But they didn’t know about it. They didn’t know anything about it. So how can you want something you don’t know about?

David Sibbet:

And I started running workshops on group graphics is what we called it at the time, and as a way of marketing really, getting the word out. And a strategy consultant from Vancouver showed up at one, and he said, “Would you come up to Vancouver and run this meeting for me? And I’ll set it up so that if the meeting doesn’t work, no problem, I won’t get in trouble or anything, you just won’t come back. But if it works, I will be differentiated from every other strategy consultant up here.”

David Sibbet:

And he used to be somebody who worked at a big strategy firm, and he was good enough to be on his own. I went up and did the meeting with him, and we worked together for four or five years all across Canada with big conglomerates and other government, British Columbia, and the City of Vancouver. And I realized that my real clients were strategy consultants who wanted to look different.

David Sibbet:

And so within about six months, I had five clients, all of whom were real good at getting work. And so they would run the client, I would run the meetings. And it was sort of a sea captain to harbor pilot arrangement. And in those eight years, I learned strategy from people who were … By doing it basically.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, you had a front row seat. That’s cool.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. And I worked with Apple. I worked with General Electric. I worked with General Mills. I was really working in very sophisticated meetings from then on.

Douglas Ferguson:

You mentioned this notion of the group graphics, which you said you were calling it back then. And that was something, when I’ve read your work, that’s really jumped out to me is this notion of group graphics. And when I see what is typically referred to as like graphic recording or graphic facilitation, a lot of times it’s relegated to someone over in the corner, just capturing stuff.

David Sibbet:

Yeah, exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I’ve even heard design thinking facilitators that I respect and are active members of our community question like, “Does that have value? Does someone creating this stuff have value?” And I really was impressed by your writing around this notion that the group graphics get people involved.

David Sibbet:

Well, when se started, we called and I invented the name graphic facilitation, which hadn’t been used at all. And I was totally working with the chart in front of the room as part of the conversation. So we would have a U-shape with the fourth wall being the chart. And for this first thing I described, doing the diagram of City Hall, I wanted to ask the questions. I’d go and point at the chart and say, “What goes here? Or what goes over here? Or should this be bigger or smaller?”

David Sibbet:

I was using the act of creating the visual as the act of facilitation method. So we went on and did things like diagramming a political campaign, the history, telling a graphic history of it. Or we did sociograms of the group process, how we relate to each other and what the quality is. For these more complex graphics, I much prefer to be the facilitator running the chart. And that’s what I call graphic facilitation. To me, that was not graphic recording, even though at times, I would do recording. But I’d never do it on the side of the room as an artifact.

David Sibbet:

So it’s been a little puzzling to see how … Well, actually, it hasn’t been so puzzling. I know why people like it is people who do processes like they have artifacts like that that say we did something. And so in many cases, I’m not sure whether these artifacts correlate with something really happening or not. I mean, they correlate with a good listener who can draw and illustrate well, creating a visually interesting memory. But most of the work that I was doing for strategy involved the management teams really making their thinking explicit, and papering as many as three or four walls of a conference room over the course of a day or two, and really getting to a what I would think of as a very sophisticated level of systems thinking about their business.

David Sibbet:

In fact, I’ve concluded after doing this for so many years, and also studying systems thinking and many of these other methods, that at the core of anybody who says, “Let’s think systemically about something,” which means you’re talking about, thinking about how parts connect, and how they connect dynamically, and how they connect structurally, you cannot do that without making a display somewhere.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s a model. How can you make a model without a visual?

David Sibbet:

Yeah. The display is either between your ears or it’s explicit on the wall. So visualizing is groups systems thinking. I realized early people don’t respond to that kind of language, so I call it big picture thinking. People want to do big picture thinking. And you don’t have to be a student in systems thinking to look at several hours of conversation and begin making connections, and seeing this fits with that, or this doesn’t fit here, or this doesn’t fit there.

David Sibbet:

And part of the art of it is to really be disciplined about having the marker be democratic and record everything that people are saying. So the graphic facilitation discipline is to be extremely clear about the filter you’re using. Like we are right now going to do a flow chart. Right now we’re doing a road map. Right now we’re doing a matrix. Right now we’re doing a cluster diagram. And the reasons we’re using that chart are the following reasons.

David Sibbet:

So early on, we articulated a group graphics keyboard, which are the seven archetypal frameworks you ever use, and what the powers and limitations of each are, so that the facilitator can explain to a group why they’re choosing a particular way of visualizing, and how the group can work with it. And then basically inviting the group to co-create these. We went on in the 90s, when we were doing a lot of strategy work during the whole build up of the internet, of creating graphic templates we call graphic guides, which are the generic, repeating frameworks that we use all the time. And we found we could give these to breakout groups in a big meeting, and without facilitators being trained, as them to have a discussion in filling out this framework, and we’d get many of the same results. So I agree with you. I agree, Douglas, about the puzzles that people have about the stuff on the side.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s like to your point about the marker being democratic, if it’s happening off to the side, it’s so hard to validate your filter if you’re not the one that’s having the dialogue.

David Sibbet:

Exactly.

Douglas Ferguson:

Quite often I’m like, “Is it okay if I capture it this way?” So then I’m validating that I heard the right thing and that it’s flowing out correctly, because if there’s anything translating, if my arm is doing some translation, it ain’t what they said.

David Sibbet:

When we train facilitators, and we do, Grove has been active in training people since the first workshop that ever ran in 1980, we say, “Look, one of the things to get is that you really can’t fail with this method if you really listen to people and understand what’s happening when people are looking at a chart.” So if people speak, and then they see you write something down, if you’ve been listening responsively, and get the keywords that they think are the keywords, and often you can get that through the tone of voice people have, and if you illustrate an image that they’re actually describing in their mind, not imposing an image, but just reflecting back maybe a sketch of what they were trying to say, people love it.

David Sibbet:

People absolutely go crazy being listened to. On the other hand, if you’re a little bit off, and don’t quite get it, what do you think a person’s going to do looking at that chart? They’re probably going to want to correct it. And if you learn how to accept the corrections like a Christmas present, they love you, because everybody likes to feel smarter than the facilitator. So you win when you get it right, and if you handle it right, you win when you get it not correct.

David Sibbet:

And so this has gone on. We do a lot of what we call story mapping at the Grove, where we actually know that leaders need a common image to explain what they’re doing with strategy. So we will create a large mural that can be printed out on big plotters, or used online, that has all the information that they want to convey about a strategy, usually embedded in a graphic metaphor that is appropriate for what they’re talking about.

David Sibbet:

And the first drafts of these are always wrong. And what happens is it stirs up an immense amount of conversation in the company. So this thing circulates around, they go, “Oh no, that should be this. No, we got to add this.” So these vision maps, these story maps go through as many as a dozen revisions before they’re agreed on. We did one for Autodesk recently that was one image that was their entire strategy. And it had maybe 20 images on it, and a whole lot of labels and words.

David Sibbet:

Every single word and every image had been gone over, and gone over, and gone over, and gone over by their management teams and their key managers, to the point where they all knew the story. And it’s turned out to be not just in a meeting, but over the course of several meetings, a way to align people is by having them co-create an image. And again, the secret sauce is knowing how to deal with the fact that first drafts are not right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes, 100%. And one of my favorite tricks is actually showing up with a crummy first draft based on some initial stuff I’ve heard, and actually show up and say, “I know this is wrong. But I just thought it’d be fun to react to something.” So that way we don’t have that awkward like, “Okay, where do we start?”

David Sibbet:

Well, that’s the secret of design thinking too is doing multiple scenarios, doing multiple takes on what it is that you’re thinking about.

Douglas Ferguson:

You mentioned the group graphics keyboard, and so I wanted to come back to that and just kudos to you for kind of codifying that for two reasons. There’s two things I really liked about it when I first saw it. One is that it really distilled down these categories nicely, and provided the why behind them. Because so often, especially inexperienced facilitators will like learn a tool, leaning on the structure or the methods, because they’re green, and they don’t have that clear understanding of the why. And if you don’t share the why with people, it’s really hard for them to come along with you. So articulating the why on these, and so clearly, and it’s simple. I think that’s brilliant. And also, I love the mandala. It’s maybe the first time I’d seen that specifically. And this notion that it’s a way of … Its purpose, its why is to demonstrate unity or depict unity. I thought that was really brilliant.

David Sibbet:

Yeah, that’s a Sanskrit word, by the way, that means archetype. And the circle is the most common archetype. I mean it’s a universal symbol of unity. So we chose that word for that particular format of everything in a circle. But in learning that, I ran into a teacher, Arthur M. Young, who had a theory of process in 1976, who was really working to reconnect physics and metaphysics in one system. And his insight was that what makes the world unified, what connects one discipline with another, or one thing with another, isn’t the structure and the look of it, but the way it moves, the process.

David Sibbet:

So he called it a theory of process. So I began looking at graphics as processes, not as artifacts. And then, later, I was asked to write an article for an educational journal. And I realized that these seven formats are actually different modes of thinking. They’re different ways of working your awareness at different processes. And I remembered back to Arthur talking about his system as being the yoga of thinking.

David Sibbet:

So if you think of these different formats as different types of yogic asanas, like postures, when you do a poster or a single image, all you’re trying to do is focus, get people to focus on one thing. And so the way you learn to focus is you learn to differentiate what you’re looking at from everything else. And that is a mode of using your mind, just learning to focus. And then in drawing, how do you focus something visually? Well, you have to do something that’s different than everything else.

David Sibbet:

Then there’s listing. Well, what is listing? Listing is just flowing your attention, just moving it one thing after another, after another, after another. Just flowing with the group. So when you’re listing recording with a group, you’re simply activating the flow of attention. And it doesn’t invite making connections between those elements. It’s just like one thing after the other. That’s why it’s used for brainstorming all the time.

David Sibbet:

Now, if you shift to sticky notes that are spaced out, if you’re looking at a bunch of different objects on a wall, three or four different sticky notes, there’s no way that your brain isn’t going to start comparing those. And you will start saying, “I’m going to do this. Yeah, this should be near, or whatever.” And it basically is a process of activating thinking, where listing doesn’t really activate thinking. It’s more tapping the flow that’s activating the thinking is clustering.

David Sibbet:

The minute you put something in a matrix where you have to cross categories, you’ve got one category and the other one, and then you’re trying to figure out what fits in that cell, you’re now in an analytic process of forcing yourself to examine things out in the cells that you haven’t thought about. Now, if you shift to diagramming, which is like a mind map or an org chart or something, where you got all the pieces and they have the connections, unlike the clusters, when you have them, you are now thinking more organically like a tree grows. And these things, the process starts slow and then it grows, and grows, and grows, and grows, and there’s no end to it. You can keep branching way out into the little things.

David Sibbet:

Now if you take that same format, any one of those first five, and you layer on a graphic analogy, and analogy would be graphically pointing at something people already know. So I’ll, on a big chart, draw an arch of a horizon, and a few little squiggles representing China, Europe, and the US. It doesn’t have to be hardly any detail. And if I put a little blue in there, bang, people are looking at the earth. Why? Because they’ve seen tons of photographs of the arch of the horizon and all that kind of thing.

David Sibbet:

So this analogy, the graphic analogy, brings it to life. So if I put a little road map, which is like a diagram of action over time, on top of a horizon like that, where people are thinking about the whole earth, that’s a different kind of a process than just doing a flat diagram where the content is in linked boxes.

Douglas Ferguson:

There was a quote from your book that said that people are more engaged when the content is more suggestive. So that arch, the squiggles, they’re suggestive. They’re not this flat, linear line with little compartments. That’s very mathematical and containerized. It’s not suggestive and doesn’t lead to more thought.

David Sibbet:

Well, this kind of think has really animated The Grove, particularly around our story maps, is finding the exactly correct metaphor that people can kind of enter into. But that’s also turns out that metaphors are what you can record visually. So somebody’s using a metaphor, you can often draw a picture of it. So that has taken me deeply into thinking about and looking at how do we structure our understanding of complicated things?

David Sibbet:

And a lot of the thinking is metaphoric. And I was reinforced by that by a Harvard Business School article on strategy thinking. And they said they’d done some research, and they said like 80%, 85% of strategy thinking is analogy. How can we be like Amazon? How can we be like Southwest Airlines? How can we be like? And then people compare what they’re doing to something they know about. That’s analogous thinking. So most strategy work is actually analogic thinking, not analytic thinking.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fascinating. It reminds me of clean language. Have you seen that work at all?

David Sibbet:

I’ve heard a little bit about it, yeah. Say more.

Douglas Ferguson:

So this idea that … Well, this notion that we use metaphor a ton, but it can be a source of malalignment.

David Sibbet:

Absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because if I say it needs to be magical, and we draw some magic icon or something, then someone else is defining magical in a different way, then we’re in trouble. And so clean language is a set of questions to help us digest what they mean by magical. Well, what kind of magic? That’s a very powerful question.

David Sibbet:

Oh boy. Metaphors really do cut two ways. They illuminate something and they blindside you. So you were asking me what I’m really interested in right now. I’m very interested in where our culture as a whole is blindsided. Where are we trapped in a mental model that is not serving us? And I came across a book that is just fabulous called The Future We Choose by Christiana Figuera. And she was the person who was asked by the United Nations to run the Paris Accord.

David Sibbet:

After the catastrophic climate thing in Denmark, they went and did the Paris Accord. And she’s basically laying out the dim picture that we all see every day on the news about global warming and what happens if it goes up 3% and all the migration that’s occurring and on and on. Everybody knows the news now. But she says, and you got to realize, the next decade is the pivot. She says really, you don’t have to be submerged by the negative news because there’s another choice. And the other choice is to shift your mindset.

David Sibbet:

Now this gets us to … I mean, metaphor and mindset are really close cousins. So she suggests several mindsets that actually would serve us heading forward in the future. And one of them is the mindset of stubborn optimism, which is actually holding the hope that we will figure this out, we will work it out. The second is endless abundance. Now this one’s the tricky one. There’s a mindset of scarcity that drives the market economy and the thinking. If you don’t get yours, you’re not going to get it, that there’s not enough for everybody, so that you’ve got to build your gated community, you got to build your gated business, you’ve got to seal things off. You got to own your intellectual property. You can’t be opensource.

David Sibbet:

This is all derived from the idea of scarcity. She says in the energy field, it’s just not true. There is plenty of solar energy. There’s plenty of wind energy. There’s all kinds of tidal energy. We just haven’t focused on utilizing and capturing it at a systemic level. We’ve gotten into we’re going to dig up our pile of coal and burn it. We’re going to dig up our oil and own it. So this mindset of scarcity is driving a lot of the disfunction. And if you have a mindset of endless abundance, like are you better off with a whole lot of material goods? Or are you better off with really rich friends that love you and support you when you get ill or whatever?

David Sibbet:

I mean, what is it that gives quality to life? So she talks about this. But then she talks about the third one, which is radical regeneration, that we need to focus on not depleting things, and regenerating things that are depleted. So if you start looking around at what’s depleted by the pandemic, what’s been depleted by global warming, and then you think, “I’m going to focus on radical regeneration.” What is it that people need right now?

David Sibbet:

Well, I believe that there are a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who are being hopeful. They think there’s plenty of resource, and they’re going in to regenerating things. Here’s one example is they just announced, Mayor Breed in San Francisco, that they’re going to allow parklets to continue, these little restaurant extensions. So here’s a total emergency response to the pandemic, but it turns out that these parklets make neighborhoods much more interesting, and it’s fun to eat outside when you can, it’s actually kind of European. And it’s regenerating all kinds of areas of the city and they’re saying yes to it.

David Sibbet:

Now, who would have thought that parklets would come out of this catastrophe? So I’m fascinated with trying to find more examples of that, where people are being optimistic, they’re thinking of plenty of resources, and they’re just being hard-ass regeneratives.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I really love that radical regeneration because it re-frames this idea of sustainability. Because I think sustainability’s become such a buzzword that I’m not even sure people know what it means as they’re saying it anymore. So taking stock of the fact that wait, radical regeneration, we’re going to go into extreme re-use and extreme ability to actually generate more. It’s this like hyper abundance. I love it. It’s great.

David Sibbet:

Yes. Yeah, and that was a total accident. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Germany and Mallorca recently. And one of the beautiful things about being in Mallorca is nobody was traveling yet. Really only people staying at this very, very neat 15th century villa in the middle of the island, that could have held 30 or 40 people, and we were the only people.

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, wow.

David Sibbet:

But it was in the bookstore at Frankfurt when I came back. And so these accidents happen where when you’re receptive, stuff comes out. So back to the group graphics, one of the things that I love about working this way, and I hope that it’s still unknown enough that it works this way, is it destabilizes all the habituation that we have. If there’s a big chart in the room that is reflecting what everybody’s thinking, nobody really knows how to game that very effectively. I mean, you’ve got to actually listen to each other.And as this thing develops, even the facilitator doesn’t know where it’s going. And what happens is that parklets of thinking erupt out of the meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think in a way, it’s similar, Peter Drucker’s calendar review. He would ask an executive, “What’s your priority right now?” And then they go, “Look at the executive’s calendar,” and then say, “Well, why am I not seeing your priority in your calendar, or it’s 10%.” So you imagine at a visual meeting, if there’s direct evidence whether or not the company’s living the priority or not.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. One of the most effective activities as a graphic facilitator is doing a graphic history of a group, or whatever. I remember doing the history of Chicago one time with 60 people. They were standing on their chairs, yelling and screaming. It was amazing. It was like an-hour-and-a-half mele. And the picture itself ends up being what I kind of call a spaghetti drawing. I mean, it starts clean sheet of paper and a timeline. And then you ask people, “What are the huge events that everybody knows about?” Like the earthquake events and things.

David Sibbet:

So you put in a couple of memory benchmarks on the thing. And then people start telling stories. So we’ll do things, most of the time, start strategy work with a storytelling, and get everybody to sign in to a timeline of when they joined the organization. Then you have the old people tell the story what it was like when they joined. And then the next cohort, what was it like when you joined? And then the next cohort, what was it like.

David Sibbet:

But the end of that, you have disturbed every single person’s idea of what the heck was going on, because people’s story about the organization is formed kind of when they joined. And they don’t incorporate deeply the point of view of, say, the new people, the millennials who are the new people are. So using metaphor again, I think of these history telling sessions as a type of story composting. You’re tearing apart the old story, but not by attacking it, but by just adding so much to it that everybody’s little suboptimal story, or simple story starts breaking down. And then out of that breakdown, where you still have all the information up there, people can craft a new story that’s more inclusive.

Douglas Ferguson:

It reminds me of EcoCycle and the burning structures, this notion of the information’s building, and then okay, we got to creatively destruct some stuff, and that out of that detritus, something new grows and emerges.

David Sibbet:

Absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so good. So it also reminds me from Visual Meetings the story you told about I think it was the Apple leadership expedition I think you called it, which is really cool. But this notion of, what was it? The peaks and valleys of your career. It was like just these kind of visual … It was like even the prompt is visual. Like not where’s your career going? It’s like what are the peaks and valleys. Like really get visual on this metaphor of how they communicate those stories.

David Sibbet:

That metaphor really helped me out a couple of years later when I was working with Hewlett-Packard. And their laser jet division was charged with coming up with the next several billion dollar businesses by the very successful management team. At that time in the company, they were making the most money for the company. And these people were really petrified with this project they’d been asked to do because before, task groups like this had gone in front of the top management and then been torn apart because the management wanted to show they were smarter than the taskforce.

David Sibbet:

And so I had them tell a story about the HP division, and it turned out that one of the reasons that they ended up defying corporate policy and hooking their new InkJet printer up to every computer rather than just HP computers was that they had a huge failure two years before, a huge belly flop. And the whole company was just not going to go there again. And so they ran the number and everything, says, “It’s never going to work if we just hook up to HP computers.” And so the valley that they went through gave them the guts to go through a peak.

David Sibbet:

And I’ve since kind of seen that pattern. I grew up in the high sierras, in Bishop, California. And if you think about it, a peak and a valley is the same concept, it’s just point at different parts of one thing. I mean, you don’t think of a peak unless there’s a lower part. And the lower part isn’t lower except in relation to the peak. And so the same thing’s true in our lives. Development tends to go through periods of contraction and expansion, failure and success, in between periods.

David Sibbet:

Like right now, my wife is working on a archetype of change called The Liminal Pathways Framework. And what she studied is how indigenous people have dealt with change since the beginning of time. And what they know is that the letting go side of change doesn’t just go to the new side of change. You go through a period of unknowing. There’s a technical term for it, is a liminal phase. You go through this ambiguous time where you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re confused. And in traditional ceremony, those times are supported by the ritual guides in a ceremony and everything to keep people in the hot house, in the crucible of their change, long enough that one of these parklets comes out, one of these new things where they get a message from the divine or something comes in.

David Sibbet:

Well, think of the number of people right now that are in total limbo, that are in between what they were and what they’re going to be. And they don’t know yet that it’s vast. And I think one of the roles now, one of the things I’m working on is how as a facilitator and a consultant can I convince leaders and other people that you can design containers for this sort of in-betweenness and ambiguity, and actually there’s a tremendous amount of value in staying confused longer, and not trying to make decisions and force it through mentally. That sometimes, you really have to sit and stew on something for the juices to mix and cook and something delicious to come out. Notice the metaphor?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It reminds me of groups that want to open and just immediately close without exploring. There’s no opportunity for the collisions, the recombinant stuff doesn’t happen. And it’s the same thing internally as you’re in that state. Let it play its course.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. Well, we’ve really been successful at The Grove in teaching people visual facilitation, team performance, strategy work, know how to train all that and do all that. And it’s all in the area of known technique, and really good value, but I’ve just been drawn heavily, and The Grove has too, into this social change side, is how are we going to deal with these crises? So we started a nonprofit about five years called The Global Learning and Exchange Network. And you can get to it through GLENCommunity.com. And it’s a group of consultants, now about 70 or 80 of us, including a lot of Europeans and some people in Asia, asking really basic questions about what’s the new kind of thinking we need?

David Sibbet:

What are at the edges of our clarity? How can we embrace struggling and inquiry? One of the thoughts we had is how could we make inquiry on a group basis as interesting as a TED talk? Instead of here’s an expert, here’s the answer. No, here’s the question and we’re going to struggle with it. Well, it doesn’t package the same way, but we’re spending a lot of time asking really basic stuff. And it’s gotten me pretty excited as I begin to see all the different things people are coming up with.

Douglas Ferguson:

You were telling me a little bit about this work in the pre-show chat, and I was really fascinated, or the thing that really drew me in was this, I would say, impedance mismatch, or this kind of friction between this need or urge to address the symptoms, or the short term, or the urgent stuff. Whereas there’s looming, big kind of disaster consequence, kind of important stuff that can easily get ignored. And that’s happening at I would say a global level. And then you’re also working at a local, state level around the wildfires on the same issue. And I think that phenomenon happens inside companies. It happens in communities. It happens globally. But it’s something we humans have to pay real close attention to. And I think facilitators have a duty when they’re in sessions with teams to help them recognize that and get out of that way of thinking.

David Sibbet:

Oh, I know. And yeah, there’s so many echos of that showing up. I mean, of course, Covey pointed this out in 7 Habits quite dramatically. The urgent trumps the important all the time. But it’s also happening in politics in a scary kind of way, is that when people are really scared, the easy thing is to go and blame somebody. And I think people are really, at a very deep level, very scared about what’s happening with global warming, and the economy, and all the disruption that’s going on. They’re really scared.

David Sibbet:

The easy way is to do that. The more challenging way is to think about what’s the real value of diversity? So you have tons of people who are in the innovation business, creativity, design thinking business, who know that diverse imports in a meeting or a design process are going to give you a better result. Also, ecologists know that in an ecosystem, a diversity of connections between different species actually results in a stronger ecosystem. There’s just tons of evidence for that. But the question then becomes what does it take to form a relationship across barriers?

David Sibbet:

Well, it takes time. It takes have you had dinner with somebody before? Are you willing to read some things that they were reading? Are you willing to go out of your way to stretch yourself a little bit beyond your certainty? So this short term, long term thing shows up dramatically in that. And then, it’s exacerbated by this attention economy stuff. They are reinforcing short cycle, urgent, get rid of the little dots on your iPhone, the little red dots. Read all your Facebook WeChats or whatever. Get in there and just stay busy with social media. This is like short-term-itis on steroids.

David Sibbet:

And if you read the stuff on creativity and everything and neuropsychology, it’s becoming clear that one of the best things for really good thinking is to go take a walk. Actually have some breaks, not push so hard, have longer meetings. Now with Zoom, everybody wants to cram everything into a couple hours. So the consequences of this short-term thinking are going to show up. They show up in a lot of false starts, a lot of activity, a lot of burnout. And you’re seeing a big spike of mental health problems in young people who are looking at this world and saying, “Whoa, where am I in this?”

David Sibbet:

So the paradox is that the pandemic has allowed a lot of people to experience what it’s like to slow down, and be at home, and do what you want when you want. And a lot of people don’t want to go back to that regimented, cubicle kind of world. So this big in-betweenness that we’re going on is a tremendous potential resource if we can hold it that way, and cultivate, and nurture the new things that are hopeful and regenerative and abundance oriented. So I’m getting up every morning pretty excited about working on stuff. There’s plenty of opportunity for being a facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think there’s even more opportunity the more complex the world gets, and the more automated things get too, the more we have to lean into our humanity.

David Sibbet:

Yeah. And again, the mountain valley thing. For people to think that tech is wrong is sort of to split the mountain and the valley. I mean look, we couldn’t be having this podcast now without the technology. I couldn’t be doing all the virtual drawing that I’m doing now. I’m doing a lot of my design work online. And I find that one-on-ones, where you’re looking at another person’s face as big as they`re across the table, and if you take enough time for it, you can form really close connections through video conferencing. And you can do it globally. That’s what we’re finding with The GLEN, our Global Learning Exchange Network, is that some of our relationships with some of the European people are as close as anybody that we can actually invite over to dinner regularly. So it’s not like because tech’s driving the attention economy, therefore all tech is bad. That’s another example of sort of simplistic thinking.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, we’re running low on time, and so I want to be mindful of that, and just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with just a final thought. What would you like to leave them with?

David Sibbet:

Well, I have a quote in my studio from Buckminster Fuller. And it’s inside one of these little models that I put together of a geodesic sphere. And it said you can’t change humanity where it is. You can’t change man where he is. What you can do is go into the outlaw area and make it so interesting that they eventually copy you. And the parallel quote I have along with it is the function of prophecy is not so much to foretell the future as to shape it. And so I’m prophesying a future of young people who are not burdened by history, and they’re busy making it up with what they’ve got right now.

David Sibbet:

As is always the case, spring comes, my garden grows stuff, the deer eat things, and they grow back. So I’m very hopeful when I talk to some of the younger people, who are very aware of a lot of these things, and are not burdened by the history, the legacy stuff. But I’m also hopeful about the older people who’ve gotten cracked open by the pandemic and aren’t so confident anymore. And they’re asking basic questions. So I’m hoping that people realize there are choices. I really hope that people realize they can connect in our website on The GLEN, GLENCommunity.org is open to anybody to go look. And TheGrove.com is also full of really useful tools and trainings.

David Sibbet:

In fact, I’m going to be going back and doing two things. I’m going to go back and teach the fundamentals of graphic facilitation again, in part, Douglas, because of this confusion about what it is and what it could be. And this is our beginning course. And I’m also going to be launching a year-long master’s program for people who really want to learn how to be visual consultants and have a fabulous life. I mean, I can’t imagine having a more interesting professional career than I’ve had. I’ve gone all over the world, all kinds of organizations, all different levels. People really like to be listened to, and they really like support and thinking about complex things. And that’s what my work has allowed. So thank you for inviting me on this podcast.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me. It was a pleasure chatting, David.

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 57: Think Visually appeared first on Voltage Control.

“When we follow our curiosity…and take small steps towards that curiosity, that’s how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.” -Van Lai-DuMone

In this episode of the Control the Room Podcast, Van Lai-DuMone and I unpack the creative footprint that inspired her to dedicate her life’s work at worksmART to uncover creativity in every organization. Van shares her observations on the creativity disconnect she’s seen unfold in the corporate workforce and how teams can reignite collective creativity in their work. She highlights her go-to creativity strategies that demonstrate trying a “different” approach in the workplace and the significance of discovering creative artifacts for teams. Van and I discuss the transformative impact a strong collaboration flow has on teams when working on projects/ideas as well as when coordinating virtual and in-person events and meetings. We specifically speak to how organizations must prioritize connection in both the virtual & physical landscapes to make a successful shift to hybrid work, and the need for intentionality in daily workplace interactions in order to provide space for real connection in organizations. Listen in to hear Van’s perspective on her journey to living a life in creativity and rediscovering your organization’s creative niche.    

Show Highlights

[10:40] Van’s Career Journey & the Creativity Spark 
[13:26] The Creativity Disconnect in Corporate America
[17:42] Van’s Creative Strategies in the Workplace
[28:41] The Flow Effect
[34:48] Creating Connection in the Virtual & Physical Landscape
[43:09] Van’s Hybrid Work Perspective & Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Van’s LinkedIn

WorksmART

What If? The Life-Changing Power of Curiosity & Courage

About the Guest

Van Lai-DuMone is the founder of WorksmART, a progressive team and leadership development company, where she invites clients to think with their hands and use right brain creative tools to disrupt traditional training methods. Van’s work proposes that we all innately possess curiosity and creativity, that good ideas can come from any level of an organization, and that all organizations should continuously cultivate idea-sharing in the workplace to foster creativity. Van formerly studied Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned her MBA from Pepperdine University. She has over 15 years of corporate and start-up experience with leading companies across industries, including Google, LinkedIn, and Pandora. Her mission is to continue to help workplaces everywhere implement creativity as a pivotal core value.

About Voltage Control

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

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Contact Voltage Control

Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, 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 Ferguson:

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I’m with Van Lai-DuMone, founder of worksmART, where she disrupts traditional corporate training with creativity. Her goal is to make crayons a staple office supply, and she is also TEDx speaker and advocate for the veteran community. Welcome to the show Van.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Hello, Douglas. Very nice to see you here today and I’m glad to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Yeah, it was great to have you. So let’s just hear a little bit about how you got your start, and how did you get this obsession with crayons?

Van Lai-DuMone:

So I got my start, I’m going to go way back to early childhood, I’ve always been really creative. I would never have called myself an artist, I was never professionally trained as artist, I was just always creating things. My mom would buy me a shirt or shoes, I would instantly rip it up with a pair of scissors or color them with paint. And she was not too pleased with that but that’s just how I’ve always been.

Van Lai-DuMone:

In college, I started a small business, I can’t even call it a business, I think I just went to garage sales, bought furniture, strip them and repainted them and sold them to my friends. So creativity is always been a part of my life, but because of my upbringing I followed a very traditional path of going to school, going to college, getting my MBA, and just going into the corporate world.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I ebbed and flowed between the corporate world and entrepreneurial startup ventures for about 15 years. I think it was because I never felt I was in the right place, I was always looking for where I belonged. So it wasn’t until about six years ago that was working for a large pharmaceutical company. And I really found myself in a place where I’m like, “This is 100% not for me. How did I get here? I need to make a drastic change.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it was also the time where my son was born. And between those two things coming to that realization, having him being born, looking at this little child and thinking, “I want him to grow up with a mom that’s doing something she loves.” So I went back to this idea I had several years ago around starting a business, around bringing creativity into the workplace and that’s where worksmART started.

Van Lai-DuMone:

But even back then, it wasn’t called worksmART, it was called Craftivity Events. I was trying to sell workshops into corporations called Weave of Dreams or Follow Your Heart, right? Which I was not doing so well, so I hunger back down, revisited it, really kind of thought about like, “What am I really trying to do in the workplace?” And redeveloped it into what it is now, bringing creativity into team development and leadership training in the corporate environment.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s amazing. And so I guess I’m curious, you told this story about being very creative as a young child, and then you jumped to getting the MBA and then kind of being in the corporate world and clocking in and clocking out and maybe being a little disconnected from the creativity, at least that’s what it seemed like.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so when did the creativity disconnect first started to happen? When did you feel that way in, was it gradual? Was it sudden? Like what was that like?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s an interesting question, Douglas, because I don’t really think I’ve thought about that before. And I remember still being very creative in college and even into parts of my career, still painting on the side or do some creative things. But I think it was really getting into the corporate world and starting to climb the ladder of the corporate experience and really being focused on that, that not only was it not creative in the workplace but I stopped being creative in my personal life too.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And that really was where I found the need for creativity. So I think possibly if I had remained creative in my personal life, I may have not needed as much in my professional career, but it’s almost a blessing that I did because it really got me support. I was like, “Wow, if I’m feeling this way, how many other people are feeling this way in about their work?” Where there’s no creativity where creativity is, is limited to the people in marketing or whatever department people consider normally creative, but why can’t people in the accounting department have some creativity there?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Now, maybe people will argue that, maybe you shouldn’t be that creative in accounting, but you know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Well, people have certainly gotten into a lot of trouble with creative accounting-

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes, that’s true.

Douglas Ferguson:

… practices, but maybe they could be a little playful in how they collaborate and how they communicate with each other, for sure. So this really gets into one of our meeting mantras around embrace the child’s mind. And really big fan of Daniel Coyle’s book, The Culture Code, where he talks about, one of the examples he gave us a Stanford study that looked at this creativity exercise and how kindergartners did such a better than CEOs and then he tried the engineers and designers, and then even a cross-functional group of professionals. Yet, the kindergartners repeatedly did better.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then what you were just telling me really reinforced this argument, because he says that the reason that those groups struggle so much is that they spend so much of their time trying to understand their position as it relates to the group. And so it’s all politics, right? And so, and you talked about climbing the ladder, and I imagine that the more you climb the ladder the more political things get, the more you had to be concerned about navigating those types of things.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it can be all consuming and it can rewire your brain. And so I think that it’s not surprising that it’s hard to keep up even the creativity in your personal life.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah, and that really resonates with what you just said, Douglas, because I feel that as you climb up the corporate ladder and as you get higher up in organizations, you should be taking more risks, but you don’t, it’s almost the opposite.

Van Lai-DuMone:

You stop taking risks and creativity is about taking risks. So you really do lose your creativity or your willingness to be more creative or your willingness to take more risks as the stakes become higher for your career.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s like we often see that with folks that are maybe about to make tenure or they’re thinking about their legacy or they’re like, it’s only one year until I retired, do I really want to rock the boat here?

Douglas Ferguson:

And if there’s not already a very rich culture of experimentation and curiosity and risk taking, that’s really hard for folks to go out on a limb in those situations.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Absolutely. And I do hear that with some of my clients who will come to a workshop about how to bring creativity in the workplace and we teach them these innovative tools on problem-solving and brainstorming. And they’ll say they love it but I don’t feel like I can bring this in the workplace because I’m afraid it won’t be accepted.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk about that a little bit, because I hear that often too. What are some of your go-to strategies when you hear that from the participant in one of these workshops, what do you tell them? How do you coach them through navigating that?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Well, sometimes tell me like, just start with yourself, right? I think the more confident you are on the tools, the more likely you are willing to spread the word about it. So rather than bringing some of these tools around creative problem solving to a group to start with, do it on your own. These tools are meant to be done individually or collectively, so try some of the tools just on your own.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And as you see how effective they are, you’re more likely now, and we’re willing to go and tell other people about it. So have the experience for yourself first so that you can have the confidence and competence to go out there and share it. The other thing I tell people is, don’t use the word creative, don’t use the word creative, just go out and say, “We’re going to try something different today.” And here it is.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that, Van. One of the things I think that goes hand in hand with that is I coach people on, don’t tell them the name of the activity because a lot of these activities have like fun, creative names that are meant to be almost like, “Oh, it’s just branding, right? If an activity has a really clever, witty name, you’re going to remember it.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, that’s going to get you into trouble when you got a group of naysayers and you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do how might we’s or whatever,” it’s like just start doing it. Just tell them how to do it and we get them doing it. So they don’t have a name to fight against or whatever, or a thing to like push against.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And that I learned that, I was mentioning, the first iteration of my business was called Craftivity Events and I was trying to force feed workshops to organizations called Weave of Dreams. And now I do the same, I do those Weave of Dreams workshops, but they don’t call that it’s around values, it’s around narrowing values and collaborating on values and seeing how values impact the workplace.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And also the idea of creative artifacts, a lot of my work is around visual arts. We do our workshops and at the end we’ll often do a creative art project as an anchor back to the work we did that day. I no longer call them creative art projects, they’re called creative artifacts now. And all of a sudden companies like, “Ooh, we need artifacts.” They didn’t need the creative art project, they need the creative artifact.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. And I think it’s interesting that you mentioned values a second ago, and it’s not just about language, it’s about values. And it’s a bit meta because you were talking about, they were using these tools to focus on creating shared values, but at the end of the day, an executive or any member of a workshop has things they value. And if you can align your language to things they value, or if you can align the work to things they value, they’re going to embrace it a lot more.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so if there are things that they’re afraid of, that they maybe don’t value as much, that’s going to be a hard sell.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing I learned to do as I started working with more clients is, know who you’re talking to. Like exactly what you’re saying, know your clients, so visit their websites. In my proposals, I often am sprinkling in words I found from their website that correlate to what I do, but in their language.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right, I love that. And so I want to come back to, you mentioned in your work that you do a problem solving type of activities, et cetera. Can you give some examples of like how you’re helping teams going to embark on this creative work and what some of these kind of tools might look like?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Certainly, I mean, it’s hard because a lot of them are visual, but like a common one is from improv the yes, and method where we are talking, when you’re coming up with ideas rather than saying no, but, or what I talk about is like the idea of killing ideas before they have a chance.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So oftentimes in a meeting room, you will ask a question and people, someone will give an answer or someone will give an idea, and the next person says no, but, or yes, but. Either way, whether it’s a no, but, or yes, but, what you do is you’re killing the idea before it has a chance.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So this yes, and principle, as you know is this idea of letting people share their idea and the next person has to say yes, and, an add to the idea. But I think the overall, rather than share like individuals like the overall premise of the work I do in creative problem solving is the concept that you want to give everyone a chance to have their voice heard in a way that makes sense for them.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So again, going back to that conference room, you’re in this meeting room, the lead person asks a question, let’s come up with ideas for X, Y, or Z. And we all know these people too, you have those two or three people who have all the ideas, they’re going to continue to raise their hand and give ideas.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then you have the rest of us, like me who are actually introverts and I don’t think that way, I can’t come up with ideas off the top of my head. For several reasons, number one, that’s not the way I think. And number two, I don’t want to sound stupid, I want to think about my ideas before I state them out loud.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So with creative problem solving, creative thinking, with visual tools what you’re able to do is give everyone access to ways to share their ideas in a way that makes sense for them. So some examples for that might be okay, so you asked your question, now I’m going to play classical music for 10 minutes. Think about your ideas and write them down.

Van Lai-DuMone:

There’s Legos in front of you, build your ideas, you sketch your idea. So for people who have their ways of thinking to be able to share ideas, rather than just saying, speak them out loud right now.

Douglas Ferguson:

I really liked that. And one of my favorite go-to is just getting people in the small groups to combat some of the like over talkers or people that are having trouble sharing or talking. And one of my favorite prompts that I learned from the awesome and great Keith McCandless is when you come back from a small group activity and you now are in the big group, again, asking the group, “What is something that everybody must hear?”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, I like that. Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right? Because you ask people like, “What did you hear that’s interesting?” Or like, “Anyone want to share anything they heard?” But it was like, “What is something that everyone must hear?” It’s like really provocative from the sense of like, “Oh yeah. The thing Van told me, people need to hear that.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Right, because you know in those small groups, people have that thought like, “Ooh, that was good. That was good.” I wish people could know this. And so you give them the opportunity to share that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s really good.

Van Lai-DuMone:

I’m using that one too, Douglas. I’m going to take that one from you.

Douglas Ferguson:

I know. That’s one of the beautiful things about facilitation and creating communities of practice is that we can all share because there’s cool techniques and cool prompts that just kind of work, and just add little nuggets to our toolkit.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. And that’s why I love that Voltage Control and that community, because I was having a conversation with someone the other day. I have no idea who it was, but they were talking about the communities I built on in this work I thought the beauty…

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, you know what it was, there’s a conflict management course I teach and we talk about, people do a survey and it’s about… What am I talking about? This was for your facilitator… What’s the Thursday thing? Facilitator…

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh yeah, facilitation lab.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Okay. For facilitation lab, I did this conflict management course for facilitation lab, and what I had to do before was a survey around what is your go-to conflict resolution style? And there’s five of them, one of them is competitive. And what was so interesting is that this was a group of facilitators, nobody had chosen competitive.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I thought that was so interesting because it says so much about this community of facilitators, because we are also willing to share and help each other and just share ideas.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s pretty phenomenal. Also, I feel like that’s in the water here in Austin. It’s like, there’s such a sense of helpfulness and just in the ecosystem and the community. And I really appreciate it. I think that it tends to create better results than to be super competitive or super, I don’t know, restrictive or exclusive.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it’s interesting because I feel like where else do you find that? It’s an interesting dynamic between facilities, even though we all most of us have our own businesses, running our own thing. Yet, everyone is still willing to share and collaborate.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think it’s also a passion for the work and how we elevate, I would say, the practice or the discipline. And the more we share about what we’re learning and what we’re noticing allows us all to elevate it as a form of leadership, because the more people that do it, the better off we are. It’s almost like capitalizing society, right? The more people that do it and they get good at, the more that we can… It’ll raise the GDP.

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s right, yes. It raises the value for all of us.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then on the other side of it too, is that the way I look at it as well is, when I started my business, there was a lot of hoarding, right? “Oh, yes, you want me to do a workshop on how to file your taxes? Sure. I’m going to tell you that out.” I was like, there’s so much like I will do anything anyone wants me to do, I would learn it and try to do it. But as my business grew, and as I saw impact on clients by collaborating, most of the work I do now is through collaboration because really the goal is to bring the highest value to the client, and if I can’t do it, I’m going to bring someone on who can.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s awesome. And so that brings me to a topic that we spoke about earlier and it was this idea of flow. And I want to talk about flow in general, but it also might be interesting to examine it from the perspective of creating flow with a collaborator, because I’ve certainly found collaborators that I can instantly get into the flow with, whereas others it’s been more difficult.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I really treasure the ones where it’s just almost instantaneous, you don’t work with them for a year and you come back together and it’s almost like we just took a coffee break and we came back, right?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes. So when I talk about flows, I went on this retreat, or I should say it was a weekend with Cairn Leadership Strategies, they’re based in San Diego. And they take people on weekend, three-day outdoor adventures and there’s leadership topics that we discussed. So it was interesting, so I went on the Black Canyon River canoeing trips, and then our topic was flow, so that just flowed nicely.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And what we talked about was this idea of like, how do you find flow in your life? And for me, it’s always been this idea of, it’s always been accidental for me, so there’s always been this idea of like, “Oh my gosh, how did all these hours pass? I’ve been doing all this work and let the hours just went so quickly and I got a lot accomplished.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

But what I learned in this trip and in their lessons about flow is that you can actually stack these triggers to find your flow. So there apparently is a psychological triggers, social triggers and environmental triggers.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And under each of those categories, there’s things you can do. So what I’ve been trying to do now is like, “Okay, if I want to get in flow, what psychological trigger can I put in place right now?” Something like, I’m going to focus on something that demands all my attention.

Van Lai-DuMone:

A social trigger might be something like it has to be familiar enough for me, or be in a familiar space but make it a little bit challenging. And then environmental flow might be something like create a rich environment, play music in the background. So if I stack those triggers, I’m more likely to get myself into this state of flow.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So we asked about doing that in collaboration with someone, that’s a really interesting topic because it’s that something that just comes naturally and I wonder, and I haven’t tried this, I wonder if you can stat triggers to get into a better collaboration. For those that you’re saying is not as natural.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think the question then becomes, do we share the same triggers?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s right.

Douglas Ferguson:

And do we value the same things? And then that also make me think a little bit about this notion of group flow and how like, when we were having events in person, this notion that we would really think intentionally about the initial conditions or the environment we wanted to create, so that everything was easy and everything flowed. And so how’s the room organized? Do we have round tables or square tables? How many chairs do we have? Do we have chairs? Is there a projector? Where is it located? Do we have music? Where’s the food going to be?

Douglas Ferguson:

All these kind of questions around how we organize the space and how we layout groups and thinking about, even the flow of the event will directly impact how people can go in and out of flow states.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. So because I didn’t really do, most of you guys do a lot of events. So my events were basically facilitating workshops at corporations at someone’s office. So I didn’t always have complete control over what that looked and felt like, but I tried my best. But you have more experience in that sense, I feel like what I do was learn how to do that virtually.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So you may help me be able to take some of your experience in a live setting, it’d be like, “Okay, so here are all the elements that we want to recreate virtually.” And that’s interesting, so I kind of went to the virtual environment thinking I cannot take what I was doing in-person and just throw that into a virtual environment.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So how do I recreate that same idea of flow, that same feeling of collectiveness and comradery in a virtual environment? And for me over the last year, a little more than year now, what I found around that is first preparation or setting expectations, and setting expectations for what we need the audience to do, keep your camera on, get ready to participate, here might be some pre-work.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then within the facilitation, making sure those transitions were really smooth, and making sure that we had a many different elements for people to connect, whether that’s, it wasn’t all like, “Okay, throw things in the chat. Okay, here’s seven breakout rooms.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

It was like, “Okay, let’s throw a breakout room here, that makes sense. Now, let’s have people postings for this exercise. Now, let’s have everyone, few people share out loud to the whole group here. And I found that to be really interesting to navigate and try to figure out during this time like what worked, what didn’t work.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I think in terms of facilitation and when I talk about… or not even facilitation, even when I work with clients who run their own meetings, is this idea of giving people dedicated time and giving, and being really intentional, intentional in this virtual environment, about giving people time to connect, because that’s what I mean… I was at Control the Room live in Austin two years ago and there was the way the room was laid out, there was food where the food and drinks were and the way there was time and space made for connection really made a difference.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And if we’re not doing that in a virtual environment, then we lose out on so much.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. We don’t want to make those things victims of a shift in space. All right, like we’re shifted to this virtual space so we can’t lose sight of what are the core kind of principles that we need to live by, and the connection is one of them.

Douglas Ferguson:

As facilitators, we have to establish connection and it’s certainly bubbled up right at the beginning of the pandemic. We held events for facilitators to come, it was almost like group therapy for facilitators which is actually the precursor for a facilitation lab and that came up big time. It was two big themes, one was just like real concern about how do we foster connection and then will it be lost? And then there was a concern around, will we be able to support this digital divide and lack of access kind of thing?

Van Lai-DuMone:

I get that, yeah. And how has that been? What have you seen from what you’ve developed?

Douglas Ferguson:

The lack of access thing is one that has to be handled on a case by case basis, like to your point earlier about knowing your audience and who’s showing up who could be there, who’s being left out, who is being excluded because of circumstances and how do we include them either by sending them devices or providing a space that they can go to, to connect in, or even just like reducing the fidelity.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do we make this a phone call so that they can participate in some way? So I think it’s just designing around those constraints and understanding that they’re there. And then as far as the connection piece, I think it’s everything you were just describing around just making it a focus and being intentional about it.

Douglas Ferguson:

And quite often, that might involve things like energizers, icebreakers, et cetera. And we always advise when you’re doing those things, ideally tie them into the purpose of the intent of the event. So it’s not just, it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, why are we doing this thing? Let’s connect it in to the work that we’re doing, but give time for people to connect and to build some rapport and understanding.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes, I love that point too because I think it is always important to make those connections and those transitions so that they… It just makes sense, so people just think, “I’m just doing this exercise to do this exercise,” but make them meaningful. I think that’s where facilitators can really make a difference is in terms of like building those icebreakers, those energizers.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So that it’s really about creating a way for people to build personal connections to each other, rather than just having fun. And I often talk about team building versus team development, I think it’s the same thing, like team building, let’s have fun together, let’s get together, and whatever might be. Like clearing out virtually like go bowling, or go on a scavenger hunt.

Van Lai-DuMone:

But for me, these energizers, you’re talking about more like team development where like, “How do we have fun together?” But we’re also using the time to get to know each other better and get to know how to work well with each other.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think to me the best way to define the differences about the half-life. So team building exercises have a very short half-life, team development has a much longer half-life, because we’ve actually become more intentional about doing things that are going to have lasting value because we created some deeper connection.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s going to be a lot harder to evaporate or like just pull apart or tease the part. It’s almost like weed in a basket that’s real tight versus the one that’s really loose. Is it going to come apart or is it going to stay together?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That great. There’s an exercise I’ve done in person, I haven’t… But now that I’m like I finally started using mural, and big thanks to you guys too, I kind of like, “Okay, if I’m going to be facilitating facilitation lab and doing, and uses like a a mural,” but there’s an exercise that you do in person that it was yarn.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And have you heard of Climer Cards, making use any pictures you can just like, I just threw a bunch of pictures on the floor and I had people pick a picture that represents something about you outside the work you do. They’d pick a picture up, someone will start with a ball of yarn, and they would say what their picture means. So they had a picture of a farmhouse, I would say, like, “I picked the picture of the farmhouse because I want to live on a farm one day.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And if that resonated with anyone, they would raise their hand, you hold onto the yarn, throw it to each person who has their hand up. And by the time you’re done, you have this big yarn weaves, it’s a visual representation of all the connections in the room. And it was one of the most powerful exercises I did because you’ve found connections you would never talk about in the workplace.

Van Lai-DuMone:

There was one organization I worked with where this young man, he was probably 22, 23, you picked the picture of a car and said, “I love to restore old classic cars.” And there’s other woman on the other side of the room, late 60’s, like me too. Like where were those who have ever had that connection? And I guarantee you, next time she walks past her desk, they’re having a conversation. Next time he emails her, she’s probably used that email a lot, a little bit faster than she would have before.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s really cool. And so what do you call this?

Van Lai-DuMone:

It was on my Weave of Dreams, I have no idea. No, I don’t.

Douglas Ferguson:

Weave of Dreams.

Van Lai-DuMone:

That isn’t what my Weave of Dreams. Weave of Dreams was around values, that on I don’t know what I called it. I think it was just like connections exercise.

Douglas Ferguson:

Cool, yeah. And I love that the yarn is like, there’s this thing around the connections that were made. So like, even as we moved on and there’s new connections getting made, you can still look back to like, “Oh yeah, I remember this connection now.” You can almost take a photo of it too and you’ve got like these lines, like you’ve got these indicators of like, “Well, the connections are amazing, that’s really cool.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

So speaking of that, I think of mural is now that I’m thinking about that could be a really interesting way to capture it because on mural what you can have are those images, the image that they selected on the mural board. So then you can really just have an artifact of who picked that image and where the connections are.

Douglas Ferguson:

It makes me think like one way to do it is like, if you trapped in a bunch of images into your mural, and so you got, I don’t know, 30 people dropping 30 images, and then you can use their alignment tool. So you could say align left and align top, and now they’re stacked all on top of each other.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, interesting.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then you could like create like a circle of people and you go, “All right, starting with Susan, we’re going to go clockwise. So Susan, do you get the first image?” And you can even put like someone on top of the stack, so they wouldn’t get to see what’s there until you get started.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then they drag it over and then they each drag one, and then you could draw the connections after you… Anyway, that would be kind of fun. The Climer Cards, you mentioned those briefly, were those kind of cool thought starter cards?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. So Amy Climer, she’s a consultant, she works in the similar work where in bringing creativity into the workplace, and creative thinking, creative problem solving. And she watercolor acrylic painted, I don’t know, these cards, and they’re just like a deck of cards. And on each card there’s just a watercolor picture, whether it’s as a fish or farmhouse, whatever it is.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it’s just this, they’re so simple you wouldn’t think like, “Well, where are these four?” But you can use them for so many things for storytelling, for activities like this on connection, because with visual images what’s amazing about them is that people read them differently. We all see things through our own perspective, our own lens.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So, a school of fish on a watercolor school of fish and a card to me is might mean something completely different to you. Not mine most likely will mean something completely different to you. So it was a great way to use a visual tool to see other people’s perspectives.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s cool, I love it. So I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier around these kind of pivots and the shifts, and we had to make a big shifts. Gosh, was it 18 months ago now or embarking on what might be another shift with hybrid as people start to think about going back to work and hosting meetings that may or may not include people that are in person and remote?

Douglas Ferguson:

And we’d just released our hybrid work guide which has some thinking in it. I’d love to hear what’s on your mind with regards to having to support this. And when we spoke earlier before the show, you were mentioning that you haven’t had to do much of this yet. But it’s always interesting to hear like how people are processing, what might be coming. And I think other facilitators might find it comforting just to hear some of your perspective on like, “Gosh, what is this going to mean for me?”

Douglas Ferguson:

So what are some of the questions you’re asking yourself right now, as it relates to having to start to maybe hold some hybrid sessions?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Well, it’s interesting because I think this past year has taught me to really embrace ambiguity, and all of us have had to make that shift. So I remember when we first went into lockdown, I’m part of this little consultant group and I remember being on the phone with everyone in Zoom with them saying like, “I’m not doing anything on Zoom, I’m just waiting,” I’m like, “I have no desire to do anything virtually. I’m just going to wait until things go back to normal.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And about two months into, I’m like, “Okay, maybe I should be doing something differently.” And clients started calling and saying, “Hey, could that workshop we did last year, are we able to do that again this year, but clearly virtually?” And it made me, it forced me to look into it. It forced me to make a shift and just change the way I did things and to think creatively. And to really be like, “Okay, let me create this for them now.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

So like we said before the show, I have no idea what, I had not had experience doing a hybrid facilitation, but what’s interesting is I am not scared of it. I’m really excited because I know we can do it, I know we can do it, there’s tools out there. I know we as facilitators have the mindset to do it.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I think the experience of redesigning, redeveloping and all that creation we had to deal all the past year built my confidence, whatever that hybrid looks like we’re going to nail this thing and we’re going to make it so amazing and great. So that’s where my mindset is in terms of logistics of how we’re going to do that. No idea, but that’s also exciting to me.

Douglas Ferguson:

No doubt. I think one of the strong messages I wanted to send with a guide was that, this is not a prescriptive guide, this is a set of considerations, as well as some ideas on how to solve some types of things that we’re going to run into.

Douglas Ferguson:

And we even encouraged people to reach out with feedback and with further ideas, because we want it to be a growing, ever expanding guide because we’re going to embark on a journey if you will or time period of experimentation, because there are no right or wrong answers, there are no best practices and we’re going to figure them out as we go.

Van Lai-DuMone:

As we’ve done. And what we were talking about before really plays into that, that this is a community that enjoys sharing and enjoys elevating our profession. So I’m excited to see what that guide is currently and what it becomes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, I think that lands us to a nice stopping point Van. And I want to thank you for the time today, and I’m excited to hear about all the work you’re doing and creativity, and just the enthusiasm you have for embarking on this next frontier of hybrid. It’s going to be fun times, I’m sure we’ll be comparing notes. And I wanted to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Sure. So I think what we didn’t touch upon is my work around curiosity and it plays into what we just talked about is this idea that like the world is clearly full of unknowns. But when we follow our curiosity, as what if in a forward thinking way, like what if I do X, Y, and Z, and then take small steps towards that curiosity, that’s how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So that is a TEDx talk that I did about just right before we shut down and my TEDx talk is called “What If The Life-Changing Power Of Curiosity And Courage”, so you can go check that out. And I am always on LinkedIn, all day long, that’s my social media platform of choice and of addiction.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So find me on there, I love meeting new people. And then also if you’d like to follow my work and join us for some upcoming events, you can go to my website, worksmartadvantage.com, and join my newsletter called Curious About Creativity.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, I highly encouraged folks to check out the newsletter and any of your upcoming workshops, because not only does Van work with companies and the private workshops, she also periodically offers public workshops.

Douglas Ferguson:

So definitely worth checking out because this is really incredible stuff. And remember, there’s a difference between team building and team development and it’s worth doing, it will pay dividends. So thanks again Van for being on the show, it was a tremendous pleasure chatting with you.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Thanks, Douglas. Really enjoyed it.

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. 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 56: Normalize Creativity in the Workplace appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

Show Highlights

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

Links | Resources

Sarah’s LinkedIn
University of Virginia

About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Right.

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Great.

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

15% solutions is one of my favorite closers.

Dr. Sarah Collie:

Yes, that’s it.

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

Dr. Sarah Collie:

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

Douglas:

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

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

“Once people have the experience [to step] outside and they’re willing…to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, ‘Oh my, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.’” -Liya James 

In this episode of Control the Room, Liya James and I discuss the value of environment shifts in organizations to unleash creativity and the significance of a creative & courageous mindset in the workplace. We explore the space companies must offer employees so they can be their most authentic selves, and the unique purpose of Liya’s new book, The Get Real Method. Listen in to hear Liya’s perspective on empowering members of your organization to thrive in creativity and courageousness while simultaneously unlocking diversity & meaningful innovation. Liya also explains the impact of manifestation, creating the work-life career you want to live to start now, and sharing the skill sets necessary to living a fulfilled life. 

Show Highlights

[1:33] Liya’s UX Career Start
[9:01] The Environment Shift to Unleashing an Opening 
[16:34] The Creative & Courageous Mindset   
[26:56] Finding the Space 
[29:37] Liya’s Book: The Get Real Method

Links | Resources

Liya’s LinkedIn
Liya James
The Get Real Method

About the Guest

Liya James is a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. She offers opportunities to help people tap into their creative courage when it matters the most so that they can implement the power of their imagination to create anything they want in business and life. Her approach spans nearly two decades of experience in design innovation. She has worked alongside disruptive startup founders whose collective exits total several billion dollars. Liya has delivered innovation and creativity training to leaders at some of the world’s largest brands, including Mercedes, LinkedIn, AT&T, IBM, and HP. Her book “The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters” is now available.

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, 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.

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

Today, I’m with Liya James, a design entrepreneur turned author and speaker. Her book The Get Real Method: Create The Life You Want And Do Work That Matters is available now. Welcome to the show, Liya.

Liya James:

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

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. It’s been a while since we connected and I’m super excited to have this conversation. So let’s get started with just a little background on how you got your start.

Liya James:

That’s a great question. Well, I don’t want to go way back, but I have spent about 20 years working in the UX field, UX problems of all sorts in all kinds of settings, startups, corporate environments, freelancing agency, you name it. That was really how I got my start. And that work was really about focusing on how to make machines more human, so when we interact with them, it works for us.

And essentially I got exposed to a lot of human suffering in that process. I saw teams trying to innovate and bring ideas to the table and designers basically trying to work on their charter of figuring out what’s the next big thing, right? And during this project and, and working with teams, I really saw that the processes that we were using for innovation worked to some extent, but they really failed people. A lot of times we were able to create products and launch them into the market and help our customers, but in the process we leave some bodies behind.

And so that experience helped me thought about… When I moved to Austin, I started a design studio. And as part of that business, we said, “Well, let’s figure this out. Let’s try and see if we can help executives and leaders understand creativity a little bit more and how they can apply it to their businesses.” So we started this, we launched and designed this whole training around design leadership, creative leadership, and all over the world we were teaching it.

And that’s when I really had a big aha moment about the work experience. I saw people reconnect with themselves in these trainings and workshops like where, I mean, I saw grown men cry at the end of the training, and I saw people tap into their creativity imagination. Just in this training, we had people sort of use all their senses to create and understand methods of how you connect with your customers, but also just connect with people at a human level.

And I would push people to tap into their own imagination and just let it go. Because it was a safe environment. You’re not at work. We take you out of that space. Right? And we said, “Just go,” right? Because I know in my teams know at that time that you’re born with creativity and all we have to do is get you to experience it. So you know what your designers and your creative teams are actually going through when they have to stare at a blank piece of paper and do the work you’re asking to do. Right?

And the result of that experience was me actually being present to these intimate moments of seeing people wake up to their own creativity and their God given power of imagination. And sometimes you see corporate executives being shaken by that.

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

You just have these glimpses of people doing that.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating, just this idea of professionalism and how people have been kind of conditioned to almost not be creative because we needed to act in a certain way and behave and say certain things and dress a certain way. And I see so many people that are afraid to step out because that means there’ll be recognized as being a little different. But as soon as they do it, it’s so liberating. And so I’ve seen it a bunch and what you speak to is very powerful and it’s so great to see other people doing this kind of work.

What have you noticed to be kind of the triggers or the moves or prompts that are most effective, when you’re getting pushback or someone’s being a little bit resistant? What’s helpful to get them to basically get up and dance?

Liya James:

Well, sometimes it’s just a little push or shift in your environment, right? So when we were developing this training, I was very adamant that we find places that are natural. Take people out of the conference room. So leaving an environment and just getting a new perspective can sometimes draw people into, “Oh…” For example, in Silicon Valley, we would have the setting where there’s fruit trees everywhere. And it’s not a conference room, it’s like a house, you know?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm.

Liya James:

And so, in fact, the last design studio that I ran, we would often find spaces to have our studios where it doesn’t look like a corporate environment. And we’d bring in a lot of nature because for people to feel safe… I think safe is a really big deal when it comes to creativity. Right? So we want to craft places of belonging and places where people feel like, “Oh, this is like a home.” Right?

And you can do that inside a corporate environment too. Right? We’re seeing a lot of corporations starting to design where they would dedicate creativity spaces to do the work, where it’s not cubicles and it’s not necessarily conference rooms. IBM is a really good example of that. When they established their design studio here in Austin, they put a lot of intention into how the space makes somebody feel, right?

So I think space is one thing. And then the energy is the other thing. So one of the things that I always do in these trainings is I would incorporate things that may not seem like relevant. For breaks between exercises or between modules, where we’re teaching people new ideas, we might meditate for five minutes. So I do a lot of things that people don’t normally do or expect to do in a training setting where you’re in a corporate environment. And we would often hear people say, “We want to bottle up the energy in this training and bring it back to work.” So really paying a lot of attention to the experience side of it and not just the content I think is a big trick in thinking about that.

Douglas:

I think you’re dead on with all of that. The space, the context matters so much. And also this notion of the experience and this comes back to some advice that we give around meetings and how people… The classic advice is always make sure you’re having an agenda. Well, an agenda typically is a list of topics. It’s very content centered, where if we take a moment to step back and look and say, “What’s the experience? How do we want to start? How do we want to end? What kind of journey do we want to take people on?” I think that’s such good advice.

I want to come back to the space piece from a learning science and a retention and integration standpoint. I’ve always struggled with, there’s a risk of when we take someone out of their environment and they go learn some new thing. Now they have to bridge that gap between that place where they discovered these things and try to apply them in the day-to-day. Right?

Liya James:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And so what are some of your go-to approaches for helping people bridge that gap? Because I agree with you, it is helpful to not have the distractions of the office and to give people the courage to actually kind of jump into this new way of being. But once they’re now, they’ve felt that feeling, how do we help them translate that back into the day-to-day?

Liya James:

Well, what’s interesting is that we create an opening, right? And then people get curious, right? So one of the things that we were really intentional in doing, and I still do that to this day. First of all, I want to circle back to something you said, which is, I don’t think about meetings as its own separate thing, because if you think about it, we’re spending all of our time in meetings. So that’s essentially synonymous to work right?

Now, what’s awesome about what you guys are doing, and I think facilitators in general, is that now it’s becoming accepted that somebody can take the role of design in that experience for people so that we can go from elevate these okay or maybe not even okay meetings to amazing experiences. And to me, doing that is actually about elevating the human experience. Because it’s purely just because of how much time we’re spending in meetings in our lives in general. So I want to say that.

And then the second thing is it doesn’t take that much. That’s the great thing about shifting environment. So we shift the environment, take people out of their work so that they can open up, but once they open up that opening stays there. Right? And so for example, in a lot of the trainings and facilitation I do, I assemble kits. And in those kits are really simple things like Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, Post-its glue sticks, things that you’d find around your house, that your kids are playing with all the time. So it’s very accessible, right?

So once people have the experience outside and they’re willing to use these things to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, “Oh my God, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.” Right? Then what they can do is, at the end of the training, we always say, “It’s really simple. You don’t even have to have dedicated space. Put some big foam board up. Suddenly you have creative space. Buy eight pieces of foam core, put it up around your office, wherever, outside of your cubicle, put stuff up. Here’s a box.” And we actually let people take it home.

We usually give them a bag at the end, and we’re like, “Put all this stuff in there because we want you to have…” I actually created diagrams of what the things are, what are they good for and where they can go and buy them, pretty much at Michael’s or any store, Target. So we make it really accessible, right? So it’s not saying you have to invest tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in order to have innovation and creativity. All you have to do is have the willingness, but that connection to the self is super important, I think, in order for that opening to be there.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of, you mentioned creating this opening and creating this curiosity, and it made me think about how that negativity is addictive, right? If someone starts getting negative, all of a sudden you start seeing the negativity brewing because people love to commiserate. Curiosity is also addictive. If we start all actively practicing curiosity, everyone starts to kind of do it. Right? And so as leaders, if we can kind of shape the direction of kind of where we want our organizations to grow, it has a way of kind of infecting things in a good way, right? That curiosity can go viral.

And likewise, when you were talking about all you had to do is put up some foam core, et cetera. It made me think about this notion of exhaust. Activities have exhaust. They require supplies, they create artifacts, and that is a reminder of what we’ve been doing. And also if the supplies are laying around, then it’s really easy to go back into those activities. Right? We’ve got it. It’s at our fingertips. It’s not in a closet somewhere.

So just bringing those things out and honoring the fact that this is what we want to do. This is how we want to spend our time and making it easy to be curious and explore. I think that is so much more powerful than worrying about like, “Do we have the best view and is it all glass?” And all these kinds of things, right? Is it just comfortable to think and do people have stuff available to them?

Liya James:

Yeah, and I think a lot of… In the old days, I think it’s more accepted now to play. Playing at work, serious play is a bit more, I think, accepted in the corporate environment. But we also have this just limiting belief about work, that it has to be serious, quote-unquote. Right? But on the other hand, we’re demanding of every department at the company should be innovating. And unfortunately, if we’re not tapped in to our ability to have ideas and come up with new ways of thinking. If we’re not tapped into that, we really can’t be innovative. Right?

Douglas:

That strikes a big chord with me, Liya. What’s the classic place where everyone thinks of ideas? It’s the shower, right? That’s the classic example, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

I came up with it when I was… Why is that? Right? Well, it’s because I took a moment away from everything else and the idea came to me.

Liya James:

Right.

Douglas:

And so where does innovation and ideas come from? It comes from free space.

Liya James:

Yes, yes.

Douglas:

When you create space, innovation rushes in. Yet companies are so fearful of their need to change and move fast that they just literally cram their schedules full of activities, and they don’t leave that room for innovation to creep in. And what you say resonates with me deeply because it’s like if we don’t allow ourselves that ability in that space, then we’re just kind of just stamping stuff and just on repetition.

It brings me back to something you mentioned in the pre-show chat, which is this kind of conundrum around when we’re faced with this idea of serious play or kind of just letting loose a little bit of this kind of pre-conceived notion of what is work. People are confronted with this question of: Is this professional? And how can people move past that moment of maybe anxiety and actually bring their best self to work? I mean, you told me that that is the only way that people can be truly courageous.

Liya James:

Yeah. So we were talking earlier about this pyramid that I’m developing with belonging on the bottom, creativity, courage and innovation… Innovation ultimately at the very top, right? If there was a hierarchy of company culture and on the other side, you get innovation. The company’s self-actualization, right? I think that belonging’s on the bottom and you have to have creativity and courage in the middle.

And the reason for that is that feature parity is such a common thing still, right? If a competitor’s doing that so we have to do that. We have to do more than that. Right? But we all know though that deep inside that’s not how innovation happens and that’s not how you beat the competition. Okay? And it does sound counterintuitive to go back to belonging. How does that even belong in the conversation of innovation, right?

And the more I’m studying this, the more I’m realizing that the experience of work has to allow for the whole person to come to it. And because why? Because creativity, the root of innovation, has to do with lots of ideas. Where do lots of ideas come from? Diversity. And if people can’t bring their whole selves to work, you have uniformity. Uniformity, it is the opposite of diversity.

So as facilitators and designers and leaders of all kinds, our mission then is really to say, “How do we create an inclusive culture where people feel comfortable bringing themselves to work, their whole selves, all of their perspectives, all of their background and knowledge and lived experience?” Because without that, you’re not going to get unique perspectives. And guess what? The world, the people you’re selling to, are made up of people with all of these unique experiences, shared experiences as well as unique experiences, right? It’s a very intersectional world out there.

And if we’re not tapping into these perspectives, innovation’s not really possible, because we’re just recycling the same ideas over and over again, and sure there’s a place for remixing. Right? But there’s definitely… You and I both know because we’ve been in this space for so long. There’s definitely limits to that. Right? So I think right now there’s just a really amazing opening right now where people are asking corporations, organizations of all kinds are asking, how can we be more inclusive? And what I would say is start with allowing people to bring their whole selves to work and be creatively courageous. Right?

Douglas:

Yeah. The thing that really jumps to me, it was a quote that I’ve lived by for years now, which is, if we’re all thinking the same, nobody’s thinking.

Liya James:

Yeah, yeah, that fish bowl effect.

Douglas:

It’s not condemning anybody. It’s actually condemning the system if anything. Because if we’ve created a culture or a system where people don’t feel safe, the psychological safety is just so abysmal that they can’t bring their whole self and they’re not able to even let those thoughts surface because they’ve got barriers in place, protective barriers. They’ve had to set boundaries just so that they can even show up. And that’s very dysfunctional and we may be doing just fine as a company, but we might be missing out on excellence, right?

Liya James:

Yes.

Douglas:

And that’s where it’s sometimes hard for people to really understand or factor these things in. But any leader will tell you their number one expense is payroll. And you hire and spend so much time recruiting these amazing people. Why would you want them functioning at 50%, 60, 70, even 80%? When we could be functioning at 80% and it’s not that hard to do. It’s just to your point about making people feel safe, including them, making sure they’re seen, heard, and respected. And next thing you know, the things start flourishing.

And if someone’s not flourishing in that environment, that’s a really healthy thing. It becomes very clear and we can understand, “Hey, you’re going to flourish somewhere else. The values are mismatch here and our work to create more belonging has made that more apparent. Let’s find a place that you’ll be better fit for.” And then we can likewise find someone that’s going to thrive in this environment. And so belonging is not about, in my mind, not about just kind of changing the company to suit everybody, but it’s about making sure that we create space for everyone to thrive that aligns with the values.

So anyway, I get really passionate about this and I love that your work has focused on it now. I want to come back to, I started thinking a bit during this conversation about maybe how courage and curiosity kind of work together in an interesting way. And I hadn’t thought about this much before, but during this conversation that’s been coming up a bunch for me. And because the curiosity that opened that door for folks in the example you gave, gave them the courage to change their thinking and change their behaviors. And so I’d just be interested to hear your thoughts on this kind of connection between curiosity and courage,

Liya James:

Curiosity and courage, they go hand in hand. So I’m so glad you made that connection. Actually, there was a book, I think it came out in the ’80s called Tribal Leadership. Have you come across that book? And it was a really cool study that they did with like 12,000 people in all different corporate environments. And they were looking at groups of people and how they form effective tribes at work. Okay?

And in that finding, they put tribes in different levels. And what they found is level five, which not even Apple as a company can stay in, in that space. But one of the key indicators of top performing teams from the study is that they have this really interesting thing where everybody in the company have access to what they call innocent wonderment. And what that means… David Kelly talks about it, the IDEO founder, about sort of this childlike, innocent, creative opening to thinking about ideas. And it’s connected to our ability to not always be thinking about who are we competing with, but what is our ultimate kind of purpose and goal for existing, right?

So we all know that the why is really important at work. But I think people have a really hard time tapping into that like, “How do I connect my work with the why? How do I be productive?” Right? And what’s really cool about this skillset, I think it’s a skillset, innocent wonderment, is to be able to have the space to say, “What if? What if this happened? What if I were to combine this and that?” And to say, “You know what, I don’t have data to support that. But my company says it’s okay for me to tap into my courage and try things anyway.”

Because as you and I both know, innovation isn’t… When you come up with ideas that actually work in the market and in a way that it blows everybody’s mind, the path there is never bulletproof data. Right? It’s courage. You wrote a book on remix, right? So it’s our ability to put ideas that normally don’t go together together and try it. And then you create data along the way. So in order for us to have real creative courage, that possibility, that safety to be able to do this, to sometimes tap into that creative wonderment or that innocent wonderment is really important.

Douglas:

This concept of innocent wonderment’s so beautiful. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier on space and slack time, because I don’t think you can find that innocent wonderment if your cortisol levels are just totally jacked up and you’re just high anxiety and running from task to task. It’s just like that space for innovation. Right? We can’t find that momentum unless we kind of nurture it and give space for it to emerge.

And likewise, there’s an element of courage that comes from, I would say, endorsement, or when authority gives permission so to speak. And that might sound a bit too controlling, but it can be kind of almost inherent permission or just the culture is set up to where everyone feels like they have permission. That gives you courage, right? Versus feeling like you have to get things approved or everything gets shut down.

And then it also reminds me of a topic that’s very prevalent in the innovation space, which is creating a learning culture, right? Or some people will talk about fast to fail or safe to fail. But to me it’s really about learning versus failure, but still the point is if we develop a culture where we’re really focused on learning and we get excited about what we learn, that creates courage, because then we don’t have any fear about repercussions or failing.

Liya James:

And I want to go back to one more point that you were trying to get at before too, is this idea of how do we give people space? How do we give people permission? And sometimes it’s really from a leadership perspective and a facilitator perspective, because I don’t see the difference between the two, is sometimes it’s a one minute thing, right? So about five years ago, I shifted my practice to primarily work with mission-based companies. And one of the first ones that I worked with really changed my perspective because I was really struggling with this idea of like, “Well, how do you be professional and do all these things I know works?”

And we’re all really secretive about it. We don’t talk about it at work, but we do it at home, right? Like you said, we do yoga, we meditate or we journal, we do all these things that we know helps us tap into our creativity and our thinking. Right? But we don’t do it at work because we don’t think there’s a place for it. But I was working with this company and they happened to be in the space of meditation. And so oftentimes I would be part of really important meetings, because we were consulting on some strategic work.

And they often would open an important meeting with a meditation. It’s not hierarchical. Anybody who would feel called to do it would lead it. And sometimes it’s about intention setting with the meditation. And it really puts you in this place of like, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re here to do. This is our intention.” And sometimes, for example, if there’s like major world events going on or during this time with pandemic and racism and all this stuff going, sometimes we would do wellness scans at a check-in. We just go around and say, “Okay, how are we feeling at a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level?” And people can just go around and check in on that, 30 seconds, a minute per person. Right?

And since then I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have different cultures like this, not all the same and not all the same methodologies, but it’s a reflection of what the group wants at work. And what I noticed is that it does not take away from the productivity and the professionalism. In fact, it’s key to it. And it’s addictive like you said. I look forward to seeing these groups of people instead of… Sometimes I’ve had experiences with client work where you just dread it, like, “Ugh, Wednesday, there’s a meeting and I’m dreading it.”

Douglas:

So I want to move into a bit of a closer and we haven’t had much opportunity to talk about The Get Real Method and the book is out now. And I’d love just to hear a little bit about what’s it all about and what should our listeners know? Is there any tidbit that you might think that they’ll find especially helpful? What’s it all about?

Liya James:

Yeah. So The Get Real Method, so on my journey of figuring out this innovation thing and how belonging plays into it, what I realized is that right now we have this great turning, great opening where organizations are saying, “We want people to feel a sense of belonging. McKinsey is telling us this is good and there’s data to support it.” Well, if people aren’t used to that, it will be really hard for them to bring their full selves to work. And so this book was actually the beginning of this pyramid.

So I wanted to arm people with the techniques and tools that we designers actually know very well. So the book is actually really about arming people with the skillsets to find their whole selves, what it means for them individually to be fulfilled, to do meaningful work. Who are you? I have a three-step method in there that talks about how do you sense where you are, how to attune, use attunement to understand where you want to go next and manifesting your visions.

And this is actually all the same methodologies we use in design thinking. And so the book is really how to be your own design strategist in life and be powerful at work. Right? How to stand for something, and also at the end of the day, what it’s really about is to be able to show up with your full self, wherever you are, whether at home, at work at play. Right? So The Get Real Method is really about the first step in that creative courage, innovation journey.

And I’m hoping that, for your audience, I think when I say the word design strategist, that they’ll get it. And there’s a little sprinkle of ancient wisdom in there too. So it should be really fun and it’s filled with workshops and step-by-step how-tos, so I’m not leaving you with just ideas and concepts, but it’s very practical.

Douglas:

Yeah. So good. I love this idea of an environment scan and then kind of just checking in and attuning and going, “Well, what’s really going on here?” And then also kind of this future casting. Well, if I want this bad enough, what does it really mean to manifest it? And it’s important work if we really want to shape our future versus just sitting around and waiting for it just to happen to us.

Liya James:

Yeah. There’s no reason to wait.

Douglas:

No doubt. Liya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on today. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Liya James:

Well, creative courage means doing what it takes to make a vision real, even if you don’t have all the answers. So I would encourage everyone to not wait for the answers. Don’t do a whole lot of planning and go for it, whatever it is you’re searching for and whatever you’re trying to make happen.

Douglas:

And how can they find the book and maybe connect with you or learn more about the work that you continue to do?

Liya James:

Definitely. I am on LinkedIn. That’s my only social media platform. So Liya James, look me up. I think I’m the only Liya James, and then liyajames.com is where I share all of my latest thinking and the book is available on Amazon now so definitely go get it.

Douglas:

Yeah, definitely check out The Get Real Method. And, Liya, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining me.

Liya James:

Thanks, Douglas.

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 53: Create a Courageous Culture appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

Show Highlights

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

Links | Resources

Diana’s LinkedIn
CAF

About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To Control The Room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all for the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators, sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings. You can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Diana Joseph at the corporate accelerator forum where she guides and gathers corporate innovators who work with startups. She is the co-host of the ecosystem show on clubhouse and author of many research papers, articles, and blog posts. Welcome to the show, Diana.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much, Douglas.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Diana Joseph:

Okay.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Nice, awesome. Looking forward to it.

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

What’s Mark doing now?

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Smart man.

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, definitely. So, yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Right.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

So much.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

Well-Put.

Douglas:

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

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

Excellent.

Diana Joseph:

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

Douglas:

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

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

“As leaders, I think it’s very important to determine ‘what kind of community are you building?’ ‘What kind of space are you providing?’ Leaders then have to decide ‘what kind of communities are we creating [in the organization], what kind of spaces and what kind of empathy do we have for the people on our team?’” -Elizabeth Maloba

Elizabeth Maloba is the Co-Founder of Nahari, an organization built for creating authentic spaces where collaborative learning and collective decision-making unfold. She understands the critical foundation of building community in the ecosystem of an organization and the level of trust needed to thrive when seeking solutions. Elizabeth ultimately believes that community is more than a place, it’s also an identity and ongoing process. Her work leans into the continuous journey of improving team dynamics and a leader’s need to transform conversations. As an expert facilitator with architectural influence, she challenges organizations’ approaches when conflict arises to instill sustainable, implementable resolutions from direct collaboration.  

In this episode of Control the Room, Elizabeth and I discuss the value of experiential methods, the impact the pandemic had on mental health in the workplace, the necessity and personal meaning behind community in organizations, and the benefits having challenging conversations have on cross cross-sectoral collaboration. Listen in to hear Elizabeth unveil the elements behind creating the community you envision for your organization. She also explores how to identify the root of core challenges your organization faces so that your team can build greater solutions together.  

Show Highlights

[1:32] Elizabeth’s Creative Start in Facilitation
[10:25] The Impact in Experiential Methods 
[16:18] The Pandemic’s Impact on Mental Health   
[23:50] Elizabeth’s Take on the Significance of Community 
[29:24] Cross-Sectoral Collaboration & Elizabeth’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Elizabeth’s LinkedIn
Nahari

About the Guest

Elizabeth Maloba is the Co-Founder of Nahari, a change-making organization striving to create authentic spaces for collaborative decision-making & uncovering sustainable solutions to build communal teams. Elizabeth’s true passion is developing long-lasting beneficial relationships to support global development. As a speaker, entrepreneur, and moderator with a career spanning over 20 years in transforming challenges to solutions, she continues her mission to transform conversations by seeking out facilitators leading organizations. Her specialty skills range from facilitation and capacity building to knowledge management and conflict resolution. She is a current committee member of the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife and Friend of City Park, where she is committed to offer contributions towards policy development on all global, continental and national levels. Elizabeth continues her mission at Nahari by building better organizations through the lens of community, starting with one empathetic conversation at a time. 

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out. All the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide. Today, I’m with Elizabeth Maloba, co-founder of Nahari, where she fosters the development of collaborative approaches to addressing development challenges. Welcome to the show, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth:

Thanks. Thanks. Great to be here finally.

Douglas:

Yeah. Excited to be talking today. So I want to hear a little bit about how you got started in this work around creative change-making.

Elizabeth:

Wow. I always think back and I’m like, “My God, I don’t know how this happened.” Partly because of course I followed the usual career path that everyone does, which is go to school, go to university, get a degree. And the idea was supposed to be that with a degree, in my case, this was a degree in architecture, I would go to the next step, which is the professional career path. And in this case go work at an architectural firm and go up the ranks. But somewhere along the way in college, I worked to pay my way through college. And some of the work I did then was facilitation work. I was working on team building and leadership development, a lot of it based on experiential methods. And I think I enjoyed that a lot, a lot, lot more than I did architecture because I ended up choosing that as my career path rather than architecture. So that’s how I ended up where I am.

Elizabeth:

One of the things I remember very markedly is that I read then the book, The World Is Flat. It had just come out. The first edition of the World Is Flat had just come out. And I remember thinking it would be so exciting to be able to work around the world without necessarily moving from my home city, et cetera. But at that point, internet was not what it is now and so on. And so it was just like, “Oh, such wonderful dreams in this book, but it will never happen.” And the other day I thought about it and thought actually it finally happened.

Douglas:

We’re here.

Elizabeth:

So in my lifetime, it changed.

Douglas:

That’s amazing. I’m really curious how your training in architecture has played a role in your facilitation style, because I specifically think about architectural charrettes and there’s some facilitation type of things that happen in the architectural process. And plus as an architect, learning to be a systems thinker and how things fit together could potentially contribute to the ability to help with linking and connecting people’s thoughts and things and seeing those patterns. So I’m just curious if you’ve ever noticed any of it? And if there’s any specific things you can draw to in your architectural training that have contributed to your facilitation style?

Elizabeth:

That’s actually a really good question because my family, everybody asks, “So why did you take six years of architecture if you’re not going to use it?” And the honest truth is that I think I use it all the time. One big aspect of it, as you say, is the design thinking, systems thinking, creative thinking aspect, where you’re faced with a blank canvas, you have a challenge and you need a solution and what do we do now? And all the bringing together of different aspects to build a comprehensive solution is a big part of architectural training. But I think for me, the other really bigger part is being able to connect with the context. So architecture is very much, so much more about, we spend a lot of time as architects trying to understand the weather patterns, the sun path in the place we are in, the ground that we’re standing on.

Elizabeth:

And things like the slope, the rainfall, the type of soil and geology that we’re working with. And it’s always about understanding the context and then putting up something that works best in that context. And in that sense with conversations, I tell people, “I design conversations.” With conversations and especially with collaborative processes, the contexts are really, really important. And so that ability to understand context and somehow synthesize learnings from that context and use that as a foundation to build a solution, is a very important part that I bring from architecture into my work.

Douglas:

It’s really fascinating this notion of the environment and the conditions you’re talking about and studying the weather and how the position of the sun is going to impact where you might place a window or the structural integrity of something might be impacted by the conditions under which it’s going to need to live and exist. And it was really interesting because I can immediately see the parallels between when we’re thinking about asking a team to come into this environment, and how are we thinking about the initial conditions that they walk into and how we set that up. And even how we maybe even protect them from conditions that we don’t want them to be in. I was just talking with someone the other day about how challenging it could be if the work that they normally do is within earshot. And it can be so tempting to say, “Oh, I need to go deal with that,” versus if you’re in another building or another room far away, those interruptions, distractions don’t happen. So that’s really fascinating to think about how just accounting for the conditions in the environment is so important.

Elizabeth:

I think it’s important as you say, both when we bring them in to work collaboratively to develop the solution, but also when we ask them to go out and implement the solution. So of the things that drew me to this work, as opposed to traditional consulting, where I’m an expert and I give my input, has to do with exactly this need, that the team I’m working with, if it’s a team let’s say in Nairobi is not the same as a team in Berlin, in Germany. And they have different conditions and they have different cultural processes and practices and norms. And how do we make sure that the solution we are building is sustainable within those conditions? How do we make sure that what they do and come up with as a solution can therefore then survive or thrive, actually not survive, but thrive in the context that it’s going to be implemented, because you see so many organizations, I find this especially when it comes to strategic planning, you see so many organizations that pay a lot of money for very expensive experts and get a really glossy looking strategic plan.

Elizabeth:

And then it’s not implementable because for one reason or another, the issues of a context we’re not taken into account or were not properly understood because maybe they were lost in cross-cultural translation. And therefore that thing is actually not implementable in the place that it’s being asked to be implemented. I have a very interesting story around that actually, we had to go and work in Benin, which is in West Africa, in the Sahel, with a friend, a colleague. And we were making this list of things we need. And she insisted she needs a room with a hot shower. And the people in the Sahel said, “Come on, you’re not going to need a hot shower here. Yes, the city you’re going to, there are no hotels really with hot showers, but you’re not going to need it.”

Elizabeth:

And she said, “No, I must have a hot shower. I don’t take cold showers.” And we go to the Sahel and it was that time of year when it’s so hot that nobody opens the hot water tap. So she didn’t use it and she said, “From now on, I’m going to be very careful what I say, because the context, the context.”

Douglas:

That’s amazing. I love that story. Also, it pays to unlearn a bit and be curious about what the locals or what the folks on the ground are telling you. If they’re saying it’s not necessary, it’s like maybe there’s something to what I’m hearing.

Elizabeth:

Oh, yes, definitely. You always have to figure out what assumptions am I bringing? And as a facilitator, this I’m getting more and more aware of, what assumptions am I bringing? What norms am I bringing into this space? How am I affecting the outcome in this space? Because we like to think of ourselves as neutral and we market the practice of facilitation as a neutral surface, but actually we are not. We are a very powerful force in that room. And we have to be careful what we then do with the power that we have.

Douglas:

I completely agree with that. I think the notion of being neutral comes from this perspective of not necessarily being biased toward an outcome.

Elizabeth:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

We don’t have to support it and we haven’t been living and breathing it for a year or years. So we maybe don’t have that baggage, but you’re right, we wield a lot of power and it’s important to think about, are we unwillingly biasing the group by just the dynamic we’re creating?

Elizabeth:

Mm-hmm.

Douglas:

So you mentioned experiential methods and how you were drawn to that. And so I’d love to hear a little bit more about what that means to you and how that surfaces in your work?

Elizabeth:

Wow. I think it’s been some time since experiential methods featured in my work, but I started out there. In those days, outward bound was the main thing and leadership. So yeah, it was outward bound, it was national outdoor leadership school. It’s the tuff that I see Bear Grylls doing now on TV and I’m like, “Been there, done that.” But what I loved about it then was that we learned by doing. And not by doing experimental things. It wasn’t something that was put on a table and you had to try it out, no I’m sorry, you had to get 22 kilometers from point A to point B with a map and a compass and a group of 10 people that you somehow had to lead and manage and someone. And then we would have a debrief about how that went, how did it go for you as a leader? How did that go for the team as a team and so on?

Elizabeth:

And that was much more effective at team building and translating learning within a team than situations where we sat down in a room and said, “These are the dynamics of a good team. And this is how you should have good interpersonal relations.” It’s different from when you have to walk 20 kilometers and you’re exhausted and you have to carry 60 kilograms, and there’s a person on your team who’s decided they’re not carrying the 60 kilograms and they’re not walking any more kilometers. And how do you then get there as a team at the end of the day? And when we debrief, then we have to talk. It’s very different in terms of improving team dynamics from the very theoretical exercises that come without experiential work.

Elizabeth:

So in that sense, I don’t do much team team development now, but when I’m working on team dynamics, I really try and give them a real challenge to solve that means that they have to then apply, bring their best strengths, bring their skills, and use their interpersonal relations skills in a very pragmatic way, as opposed to a theoretical discussion about what would be an ideal interpersonal relationship exchange, for example.

Douglas:

Yeah, that makes me think about this. We often talk about you can’t live in the conceptual all the time, and at some point you have to make it concrete. And making that jump from the conceptual to the concrete is very difficult. And so, it sounds like this experiential stuff that you’re talking about, the outward bound stuff is totally concrete, they’re in it, you can’t get much more physical than that. They’ve got a 60 kilogram pack on and they’re just sweating it out. And it’s interesting to think about what are some of the parallels or some of the analogous moves that you can make in the conference room that allow people to embody stuff, allow people to really experience it more than just think it.

Elizabeth:

One of the methodologies that I found that work is actually getting people to move around. So body movements. Another thing I find is trying to get rid of all the formality in the room. So as much as possible, and that’s normally not so easy. And also depending on the cultural setting, is sometimes not possible. When I work with diplomatic circles, then it’s really problematic because there are protocols. And those have to be, in some cases enforced, otherwise there could be a diplomatic incident. But try as much as possible to get rid of a hierarchy and try as much as possible to get people to do practical things and work on real challenges that that need solutions. And then they can bring their creativity to that problem and that challenge.

Elizabeth:

I have a friend who put it really nicely, she said, “Listen, I can tell you the swimming pool is warm. I can tell you that the water is 22 degrees Celsius. I can tell you it’s three meters deep at deepest point, but you will not know how that feels like until you’re actually thrown in at the deep end and it’s above your head and it’s warm. Or maybe it’s cold.” The experience of it is not describable. So if you’re dealing with crisis preparation or crisis planning, people can describe very perfectly that there will be a pandemic. And the pandemic is a really good example. The World Health Organization had a pandemic as one of the top seven challenges that would face the world within a certain timeline. They weren’t sure so they thought it would be a flu virus rather than a Corona. Yes, so two different things, but basically they had this as a threat. But describing it was not the same as what we’re going through living through it.

Elizabeth:

So long as it was a nice theoretical construct, there were nice theoretical constructs about how the World Health Organization was going to respond to a pandemic. But when it practically happened, then we saw what happened. Then we saw countries closing their borders. We saw everybody running into nationalism, protectionism, and so on. And suddenly we realize, “Okay, so this is really what happens when it’s real, as opposed to a nice theoretical discussion of what happens if we have a pandemic.”

Douglas:

Yeah. And speaking of the pandemic, in the pre-show chat we were talking a bit about mental health and how folks are still, I would say, navigating trauma and trying to understand it. And I’m a firm believer that as we start to open back up more, people are starting to shift that shift. And those changes and behaviors are going to expose that trauma a bit more because people are going to go through a transition of being in hunker down mode versus like, “Oh, everything’s quote unquote, back to normal. And so now I’ve got to reconcile this trauma that I’ve been shoving down.” And it sounds like you had had some experiences with that with some friends talking about just mental health. And I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on what you’re noticing, and also maybe how you think that might play out in the business setting to you?

Elizabeth:

So on one hand, what I’m noticing is that, we were actually just having a conversation and then I noticed, “Oh my God, I’m so privileged. I live in a house with other people.” I have a family so I live in a house with other people. So I don’t just have all my conversations online via digital means, I can talk to real people, whether we love together or fight together or whatever it is, but they’re real people in my space who I can talk to. And some of my friends and some of facilitators I work with around the world, they live alone. And in extreme lockdown, it was them, and if they’re really lucky, their pet cat, dog, fish, that’s it. And all their conversations were on digital platforms. And I think that was hard in its own way. It was hard in its own way, in so many ways for them.

Elizabeth:

But then last week, I think I was in a different conversation and we were talking about how the children learning from home went. And I was saying how I enjoyed it a lot. And a friend of mine said, “Yeah, Elizabeth, you’re not a good example, keep quiet.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Because the conversations in your house are not how conversations in most other households go. Many households are not safe spaces and they’re spaces of violence and they’re spaces where children are just told, ‘Sit down, shut up. Don’t talk. Why are you speaking now?’ Et cetera. And it’s not a constant engaging of curiosity between parents and children about what are you doing? And can I find out more about it?” And so this discussion was then that this is definitely, there’s going to be a big trend of people who really want to go back to offices.

Elizabeth:

And I’ve had this among a lot of people who say, “I used to think, I want to work from home. I used to think I’d love to be self-employed and be my own boss and make an office space at home. But the pandemic has taught me that I need an office. I need to escape this place that is my house for various reasons.” And that is a whole other area of mental health and trauma related issues to explore, because I think people then are coming to terms or being forced to come to terms with what kind of environment do they have in their houses? And why do I need to escape my house to go to work? But I think the bigger thing, especially in my context, is that people don’t talk about it. They’re not comfortable talking about it. They’re not comfortable admitting that they need help or that they sought help.

Elizabeth:

And there’s still a very big community of people who think you can push through it or power through it, or be strong through it. I’m like, “It’s an illness. You need help. And if the help is tablets, then the help is tablets, but you need help. You can’t recover from a tumor by soldiering through it. In the same way, you can’t recover from mental health challenges by soldiering through them. You have to get the help that you need from the specialist that gives it.” So I think more and more, this conversation is gaining traction and people are starting to talk about it. But especially in my context, in Kenya, let me say that especially, it’s still not something that people are so comfortable admitting and putting out there that they’re doing or they’re going through.

Douglas:

Yeah. I think people struggle with that many ways, across many locations, there are certainly folks in all sorts of contexts that feel uncomfortable sharing that. And it feels like a private thing and a lot of people suffer in silence. And so I think that leadership can play a big role in remaining curious, and really listening, employees and teammates and collaborators might not be completely forthright about what’s going on, but listening to their preferences and tuning in to what they’re asking for might shed some light on their needs at the very least. And I think it’s really important. To your point, some people are craving to be in office, while others are wanting to avoid it like the plague. And so we have to think about how we support things and also be willing to make some hard decisions around who we can support and who might have to look elsewhere to find the ideal situation.

Douglas:

There’s a lot of talk of people shifting jobs during this time. And I think it’s probably inevitable because that’s a big shift for a lot of folks. And they’re going to have to think about what that means for them and their family and how they take care of themselves. I think it’s a big deal. And I think as leaders, we just need to listen and pay attention.

Elizabeth:

I think also as leaders, I keep saying, well, the pandemic obviously made it obvious that we need a sense of community, but as leaders, I think it’s very important to determine so what is your community? What is the sense of community? When I was being told, “Your house is not the standard house.” My house didn’t become like that by… It’s by design, it’s intentional. So then is the question, what kind of community are you building? What kind of space are you providing? Not just in terms of physical office space and furniture and furnishings and fittings, but also in terms of communication and collaboration.

Elizabeth:

I remember being in a conversation with a business leader somewhere, and they were telling me about a team member and I asked, “But doesn’t so-and-so have three toddlers?” And they said, “Yes.” And I said, “Okay, so why were you calling them at X, Y, Z hour?” And they looked at me blankly like, “What’s wrong?” I said, “This is toddler primetime. This is bedtime, bath time, nap time crashing all into one. And this is the moment you want to have a call with them. It’s not going to work because they have three toddlers. We have to be cognizant of that.”

Elizabeth:

Or I had to have a call with someone else and I knew she was a new mum. And so I had the flexibility to say, “Listen, I know you’re a new mum. I know that babies are unpredictable. If we need to start 30 minutes later or two hours later, just let me know and we’ll figure it out because I’ve been there, I know this. And there’s no point in me trying to force you to be in a call if your baby’s crying.” But leaders then have to decide what kind of communities are we creating, what kind of spaces and what kind of empathy do we have for the people on our team?

Douglas:

So I want to take that community piece and run with that for a moment because I love just the notion of communities. And I’ve done a little bit of community building myself, but I’m always in awe of people that are really great at it. And so I want to hear a little bit about your approach and what community means to you and what you think is critical for sustaining and nurturing community?

Elizabeth:

I think I’ve went around about my work for so many years without the awareness of community, because I just didn’t think about it. It was there, it worked, it supported what I was doing, and so I wasn’t thinking much about it. One of my first moments of awareness came about in the conversation, not between me actually, but between my son and my dad. And they were talking about the name of the tribe. And as children tend to ask, my son asked, “Grandpa, what does Luhya mean?” And straight off the top of my head I was like, “I’m sure it doesn’t have meaning, it’s a name.” And then my dad says, “Wait, this is what it means.” And it turned out that it’s not only an identity, it’s a place, it’s a process, it’s something that happened in my cultural community where people came together and had conversations of all kinds. And there were different roles for different people in that space. And it made it work. And somehow they made meaning together. And somehow they found a way out of different challenges together.

Elizabeth:

And after this conversation, I started thinking actually, “So what is my community? What is my Luhya?” The exact question they ask in my tribe is, “From what Luyha do you come from?” And it’s exactly the same thing. What Luhya do I come from? What Luhya am I creating? What’s the identity of this space? What’s the space that we use to meet, because it’s also a space, which is in this sense, normally a very big open space with a fire, so it’s warm, with food, so nobody’s hungry. Sharing of food, so nobody’s hungry. And depending on the day and the circumstance and how it went, there might be a story, there might be music, there might be exchange or information like, “This happened,” or, “I met so-and-so and they said hello to you.” And they were kind of like, I would say the facilitators of the space where the elders, and we had elders always in this space. And the elders have special roles in this space.

Elizabeth:

And I call them superpowers because I’ve been in such a space and we could be discussing, I don’t know, the ingredients for making a meal with my grandma and straight from the ingredients she would immediately pick the most difficult challenge someone was facing, like, “Why did you drop out of school?” And you would be like, “Okay, this conversation just got complex fast.” And everybody else in this place has to figure one, “Do I need to be in this conversation? Two, if I’m in this conversation, why am I here? Is it as a listener? Is it to provide a counterpoint to whatever is going to be discussed, et cetera. And when is it my turn to speak? And when is it not my turn to speak?” But the person who actually had the power, superpower to dynamically transform that conversation was always the eldest, was always the grandparents, grandmothers, grandfathers, sometimes aunties and uncles. So there’s the space for elders and I see facilitators a lot as elders. And then how do we use those superpowers to transform those conversations in that way?

Douglas:

That’s pretty awesome. I love this idea. And it brings me back to some of my family gatherings as a child. And I remember definitely my grandmother would, without apology, would go right to the issue and sometimes catch you off guard. I feel like that was an art form. Didn’t wait for that perfect moment. It was almost like the opposite of what a perfect moment might be just because, in a way that’s the moment because you’re not expecting it and you got to be raw and you got to be real and authentic.

Elizabeth:

Mm-hmm. And it’s here and it’s like, “Okay, you can escape if you want to. You can stand up and get out of the circle, but then you’re getting out of a circle.”

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s a very obvious sign, you can’t just slip away. That’s amazing.

Elizabeth:

So in organizations, but also in cross sectoral collaboration and so on, I keep thinking, “We need this kind of spaces and we need more elders and we need more people who can put it on the spot and get people to be authentic in the conversation and to address the issue that’s on the table. Sometimes to bring the hidden cards onto the table.” You have this conversation, people are like, “This is driven by interest in values.” And you’re like, “Okay, wait, let’s put the interests and values on the table.” And then it becomes interesting because some people don’t want to show their interest or show their values.

Douglas:

So it’s interesting that you mentioned cross sector because I wanted to bring that up and hear a little bit about your thoughts around, what are some of the challenges or some of the considerations that you take into that work? Because I can imagine there’s some unique needs when you bring together cross sector groups, or are you just doing work that’s at that intersection?

Elizabeth:

So one of the big things about cross-sectoral work is that it usually doesn’t happen because the parties want to work together, it happens because they find themselves in a circumstance that forces them to work together. So, say for example, we have a large water resource and it’s sitting in a certain community. Then you find that the community representatives, et cetera, who you would put in civil society who have the interests of what the community wants to do with that resource, but then you find maybe you have a public sector agency that wants to do, I don’t know, hydroelectric power out of the same resource, and maybe another one that wants to do irrigation. And this has happened in my country out of the same resource. And then you find that you have some private sector interests that maybe want to, I don’t know, bottling plants that want to do soft drinks or something, and it’s the same resource.

Elizabeth:

And so of necessity, now we must sit around the table and talk to each other. And the biggest thing I have found across all those conversations is, first of all, we’re here, not because we chose to be here, but because we must be here. And second of all, we don’t trust each other. So if you talk to the public sector, they’ll tell you a lot of things about the private sector being fragmented. They’ll tell you a lot of things about the private sector being driven by greed, a lot of things about the private sector having profits as their main interest and that not being a good thing. If you talk to the civil society, which kind of represents the people, then again, there’ll be a lot of conversation about private sector greed, private sector profit maximization, which is not a good thing and not of interest in this conversation and so on.

Elizabeth:

But there’ll also be issues around state control, around privacy and protection of rights, especially in relationships with the state. And then when you go to the private sector, again, they will have the issues around state control, privacy, and protection around the state, but they will have other issues which are around waste, corruption, et cetera, that they bring to the table in relation to government. So the trust is almost, many times at the beginning, at zero. And then you’ve got to fudge it together, patch it together, make a quilt, right?

Douglas:

Yeah.

Elizabeth:

Bring different things together and sew it together. And this takes time. It requires time. But as I said, then it also requires elders and authentic conversations. People who can find a way to get some honest truths on the table. But it’s not just elders roles that are there, there are other roles. I was in a conversation with some friends of mine, they said, “Sometimes you have to be the hotelier, the host. All you’re doing is providing the space and the food and making sure everyone’s comfortable. Sometimes you have to be the postman, taking messages between one group and another behind the scenes and making sure things work.’ So there are different roles that need to be played, but they need to happen for this to take place successfully. So it’s a lot of work, it’s not easy.

Douglas:

What do you think is the first starting point to building those relationships and helping people get to that understanding so they can have those deeper conversations? What are some of your early moves to start sowing the seeds to stitch those things together?

Elizabeth:

Yeah, as I said, a lot of my conversations with my friends we found out that the work we do behind the scenes as postman, just having conversations one-on-one with Douglas and then, okay, have another one-on-one conversation with someone else. And you’re taking the message from Douglas to this person, bringing the message from that person to that Douglas, so that by the time we sit around the table, they’re not so shocked when this comes out from the other person, but they also maybe have warmed up to it and are ready to have the conversation. So don’t go into the round table quilt without the one-on-one conversations before, and without the shuttle services before, having conversations with the other people. The other thing I found a lot that works is yes, the hospitality, it matters. Where are we? How do people feel? Are they comfortable? Is it a safe space in that sense, physically, emotionally?

Elizabeth:

So one of the big things actually with digital conversations then has been, is this a safe digital way? Nobody’s going to hack into it? Issue number one. Issue number two, nobody’s going to record it and start distributing the recording without my permission? Because if we’re going to have an authentic conversation, then I don’t really want it being played out on somebody’s social media accounts. So what’s a safe digital space versus what’s not a safe digital space, has been a big conversation. And then translation. A lot of things get lost in translation. You and I both speak English, but it’s not the same English. And it’s marked when you’re in a room with different countries, but sometimes it’s also marked when you’re in a room with different sectors. So impact for a business person, a private sector person is not the same as impact for a government employee, is not the same as impact for a civil society.

Elizabeth:

So in a conversation, you will have this thing and everyone says, “We want to have impact.” And if you don’t unpack what impact is, you’re going to leave that room with three different understandings of impact.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve tun into that all the time. People will use jargon. They’ll shorten language and metaphor, or they’ll use maybe trite language. Impact, I would say, is a very overused word. And so even in our company where everyone understands each other and where we’re going and they’re working a lot together, if someone says something like impact, there’s a high chance that there’s a lot of different interpretations of what that might mean. That unpacking is so critical.

Elizabeth:

So those would be my tips and thoughts around, how do you get this started? And then try and go for the easier things to achieve , succeed at those, and then people, over time, relationships build, successes build, and people are a bit more confident and are willing to take bigger risks, but don’t get, any way mostly, you will never get them to take a big risk at the beginning. Everybody will stay out. You can already tell when it’s not going to work because it’s too big a risk was everybody’s like, “I can’t do that.”

Douglas:

Awesome, incredible. Well, I think that actually brings us to a good stopping point. It has been great chatting with you today about, not only cross sector and how to approach some of these kind of groups where they might not fully understand each other and the stitching some of that together through hospitality and just common understanding and the mental health experiential methods, and even just how the background in architecture has influenced your style. So that’s all been really fascinating to chat. It’s been great having you. I want to give you just a moment to share a final thought with our listeners. Anything you want to leave them with?

Elizabeth:

Yes. One thing I always tell people is, cross-sectoral, and not just cross-sectoral, collaboration is not a default thing, and it’s not always the solution. And I know this is counter intuitive because I am a facilitator and so I should be saying, this is the thing. No, collaboration is not the default thing and not the only way to do this. And there are situations when it’s not the thing to do. And so don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have a collaborative solution all the time. And especially because it takes a lot of time and energy and investment to do collaborative stuff, you really have to know when do you need it. And sometimes you just don’t need it. If there’s a fire and I need to get you out of the house as quickly as possible, it’s no longer about getting consensus and buy in. It’s, “Can we get out now?” So you need to know when it’s useful and when, okay in this situation, something else needs to be done and not necessarily this intervention.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, again, it’s been a super pleasure having you today, Elizabeth, thanks for joining the show.

Elizabeth:

Thanks, Douglas.

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 50: An Empathetic Leader Builds Better Organizations appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

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

“More and more people are starting to recognize that the problems that we’re having usually aren’t issues of good versus evil.  It’s differences of perspective. And if we can take the time to learn these skills and use negotiation as a tool to resolve these conflicts, we could leave these conflicts with stronger relationships and better deals.” -Kwame Christian

Kwame Christian is the Director at the American Negotiation Institute, a consulting firm that focuses entirely on embracing the negotiation skills of entrepreneurs and small-business owners. He believes negotiation is arguably the most important skill set for professionals. As the current host of the ‘Negotiate Anything’ Podcast, Kwame continues the conversation surrounding negotiation as the foundation forward when conflict or uncomfortable conversations arise.  As he empowers others to seek confidence in conflict, Kwame is committed to his mission of leaning into conflict to uncover resolution, while building better relationships through authentic, honest conversations.   

In this episode of Control the Room, Kwame and I discuss breaking down biases in negotiation, the unique approach in negotiation scenarios, strategizing conversations and key recommendations within conflict, and the unique superpower of negotiation in all aspects of life. Listen in to hear how Kwame is encouraging voices to lean into uncomfortable conversations, and how to have effective relationships from the kitchen table to the conference room. The power is in the art of negotiation.

Show Highlights

[0:57] Kwame’s Start in Negotiation
[5:24] Breaking Down Biases 
[14:25] The Approach in a Spectrum of Negotiations 
[19:59] The Mistakes & Misses in Negotiation
[22:26] The Key Recommendations in Strategizing Conversations 
[29:19] Kwame’s Skillset in ANI
[34:29] Kwame’s Look Ahead to the Negotiation Future

Links | Resources

Kwame’s LinkedIn
The American Negotiation Institute
The ANI All-Access Negotiation Guides

About the Guest

Kwame Christian is the Director at the American Negotiation Institute. He is the host of the Negotiate Anything Podcast, known as the world’s most popular negotiation podcast with nearly 2,000,000 downloads. He is the author of Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life, a guide to empowering individuals to overcome their fear, anxiety, and stress surrounding uncomfortable conversations. He currently practices business law at Carlile Patchen & Murphy LLP, where he oversees many areas of legal needs. With a previous background at the Kirwan Institute specializing in criminal justice and health equity, Kwame continues to have a unique voice for difficult conversations and conflict resolutions through negotiation. He continues his crafted skillset at the American Negotiation Institute to eliminate the stigma of uncomfortable conversations and to sharpen the negotiation approach.

About Voltage Control

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

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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 Kwame Christian at the American Negotiation Institute, whose mission is to empower professionals to negotiate anything and find confidence in conflict. He’s also the author of the Amazon bestseller, Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life. Welcome to the show, Kwame.

Kwame Christian:

Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Douglas:

Absolutely. Thanks for being here. So excited to chat with you today. For starters, how did you find your way into negotiation?

Kwame Christian:

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I’m a business lawyer by trade, and so most people assume that that is what led me to this because of the business negotiations that I had. They wouldn’t be completely wrong, but they wouldn’t be completely right either. My undergrad degree is in psychology, and I was always interested in how people can overcome their fears. Because for me, I had a lot of fears regarding difficult conversations.

Kwame Christian:

And so then when I went to law school, I discovered negotiation and that’s when I learned that having these difficult conversations is a skill, not a talent. For me, what I’m doing now with the American Negotiation Institute is I’m blending that love of psychology and helping people to overcome their fears through empowerment with the skillset of negotiation so they can have these difficult conversations effectively.

Kwame Christian:

The model that we have is that the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. For us, we just want to make these difficult conversations so you could be in a position to live the best version of your life.

Douglas:

I love that. I was just having a coaching session with an engineering leader earlier today, and he was kind of explaining a situation he was having with one of his coworkers. It dawned on me that he needs to lean into that conflict and have that conversation because he’s just been ignoring it so far.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. And that’s the thing. I think this is a great example. Because with a lot of people, they come into their field, let’s say engineering or web development or something like that, and they hone their skills and they become very proficient and excel at that. The hope is that that skill alone is what’s going to take them to the next level. But typically as you matriculate through your professional career, you get better, you get better, you get better, and then they say, “Hey, you’re really good at this. You should lead.”

Kwame Christian:

That’s a completely different skillset. Even with something like engineering, we’re talking about numbers, we’re talking about data, very hard facts and things like that, we’re recognizing that other people might have different perspectives and still we have to negotiate the resolution between our team members to see which idea goes forward. Regardless of what your field is, whether you want to be or not, you’re a negotiator because we’re all having these difficult conversations.

Kwame Christian:

I want to help people to recognize that so they can develop these skills and have the conversations more effectively.

Douglas:

It also brings to mind to this notion that, especially with engineers, they’re systems thinkers, and they have to be analytical and kind of unpack things and figure out how they work and maybe design them to work new ways. When they start to apply them to human relations or psychology, I think that can lead to assumptions, right?

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely.

Douglas:

If I’m unpacking the system and I think, “Oh, I’m convinced this is how it works.” And to your point on the data, I don’t always have the data to back up some of our assumptions around what people are thinking or why they’re behaving the way they’re behaving.

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing, a lot of times, it’s tough for people to recognize the difference between facts and feelings. They’re not the same. But in the moment, they can feel the same, right? A lot of times we fill in the gaps in our understanding with these assumptions, with the biases that we have. And I talk a lot about biases because of my background in psychology.

Kwame Christian:

And I think the modern day conversations about biases are too limiting, because we often focus on race and gender ethnicity, sexual orientation, those type of things. And that’s important. Those things are very important, but your mind is naturally biased in general. It’s impossible to not to be biased.

Kwame Christian:

We will have biases in all of our interactions based on things that we like, things that we don’t like because of our lived experiences. The more aware we can become of these biases, the more clearly we can see the world.

Douglas:

Yeah, I love that. And also, I think some of the things you mentioned around the biases that are kind of very topical right now, to me seemed like they’re higher level biases, right? Where there’s a lot of low level biases at work that caused those things even happen, right? I’ve always been fascinated when people shine the light for me on these more underlying biases. I think that comes from the world of psychology, like Tversky and whatnot.

Douglas:

I’m curious, in your work, what’s some of the biases that you find most helpful for folks to become aware of and what are some tactical ways they can put this to you?

Kwame Christian:

Here’s a good example. I’ve found that in my negotiations, let’s say if there’s a heated negotiation, my client is really mad. They’re telling me the story the way that they see it. I get heated because I want to defend my client. The clearer and more certain I am about what is happening, typically, the more incorrect I am about what is happening. Because like I said, okay, I’m not exactly sure what’s happening in this moment, but my bias is toward my client and against this person.

Kwame Christian:

I believe that whatever happened there that I don’t know is in favor of my client, right? I have to recognize that tendency in order to pull back and approach this correctly. And the thing is, Doug, I still practice, even though I’m running the American Negotiation Institute and we do these negotiation and conflict resolution trainings, I still practice law. I bill about five, 10 hours a month, because I want to keep my skills sharp, because I can’t be a good teacher if I’m not still practicing at the same time.

Kwame Christian:

I’m still learning too. And I think that’s one of the most exciting things about this topic for me. Because with our podcast, Negotiate Anything, we’re at over 300 episodes, over three million downloads. And even though we’ve had that many episodes, every single time that I interview somebody, I learn something new. There’s just no end to the depth of knowledge you can gain on this topic and that’s what’s so exciting to me.

Douglas: 

I had Gary Noesner on the show, gosh, last summer, I think, and it fascinates me when I think about folks that are in these super high stakes negotiations and how the rules and some of the moves are really similar to facilitation and how we have to think about interacting with coworkers and whatnot. But there’s quite a bit more stake, and it’s quite a bit more extreme, right? I’m just kind of curious, in your work, what’s the spectrum of the types of negotiations you’re doing?

Douglas:

Do they typically fall in the business arena, or are they stretching out into like terrorism and like some of the things Gary deals with?

Kwame Christian:

Yeah. It’s really cool, and I think that’s one of the things that’s so exciting about the work that we do with the American Negotiation Institute, just the diversity of clients and backgrounds that we work with. I will say, I haven’t had the opportunity to do those types of negotiations with lives on the line, but we have had some really high stakes business negotiations, hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, consulting on those types of deals, all the way down to interpersonal family conflicts.

Kwame Christian:

The thing is, with those interpersonal family conflicts, the emotions are so raw. In many ways, they’re more challenging, because it’s more emotional than substantive and rational. The thing is, with those multimillion dollar deals, let’s say I save them 10%, which is significant, or it doesn’t work at all, which is significant. Everybody goes home. Everybody’s well-paid and they tried their best. That’s it. Everything’s fine.

Kwame Christian:

But when it is your home that is housing the conflict, the stakes are actually higher in a lot of ways. It’s been really fascinating to go into smaller organizations, family conflicts, those types of things, and help and offer guidance in those situations. It really runs the gamut. And I think more and more people are starting to recognize that the problems that we’re having usually aren’t issues of good versus evil.

Kwame Christian:

It’s differences of perspective. And if we can take the time to learn these skills and use negotiation as a tool to resolve these conflicts, we could leave these conflicts with stronger relationships and better deals.

Douglas:

That’s a fascinating point. It brings me back to the whole bias notion. It’s like realizing it’s not good versus evil. Even though it goes against my values, I can’t demonize it. Because as soon as I start demonizing it, then that means I can’t work with it.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Exactly. One of the chapters in my book or sections in my book rather is called the benefit of the benefit of the doubt. A lot of times when I say, “Hey, we have to give people the benefit of the doubt,” they think it’s naive. They say, “Why would I give that to them?” But really the benefit of the doubt is a gift that you give yourself. Because if you give the other person the benefit of the doubt, then you’re really forcing yourself to stay more engaged.

Kwame Christian:

And if you think about let’s say a physical competition or working out or something like that, if I’m working out, that’s hard enough. If I’m working out while under tension, my body is just tense, my muscles are flexed the whole time unnecessarily, then I’m going to tire out a lot faster unnecessarily in that physical activity. The same thing holds true in our difficult conversations. These conversations are psychologically and emotionally taxing.

Kwame Christian:

And if you are going into this conversation, not only saying, hey, there is a problem that needs to be resolved, but, there’s a problem that needs to be resolved and this person is evil, you’re making it harder on yourself. You’re not seeing the situation clearly, number one, and you’re going to get emotionally and psychologically exhausted throughout the interaction. And people don’t make good decisions when they’re tired. This puts you in a better mindset for having the conversation.

Douglas:

It also strikes me too, as you said that, and this person is evil as hyperbole, right? We’re kind of becoming victims of ourselves or our own hyperbole.

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing, most people don’t wake up and say, “I wonder how I can be evil today.” Most people don’t think that way. Most people think that they are trying their best to approach this the right way. The assumption that I have in these conversations is that the person on the other side of the table, given their skills and their understanding and their perspective, is trying the best that they can.

Kwame Christian:

Sometimes the best that they can isn’t good enough. Okay, that’s great. This is a coaching opportunity. Now I can share my perspective, have this conversation, and help them to understand things differently. And if you approach it that way, then they say to themselves, “Oh, you know what? I’m thinking about this differently, and now I’m going to change my approach.” They own the transition. And if they own that change in mindset, it makes it more likely for that change to be longer lasting.

Kwame Christian:

If they feel like, “Oh, Doug bullied me into this, or I have to do this to assuage his concerns,” those types of things, then they’re just doing it for you and not for themselves. If we make this more of a collaborative process, it makes the changes that come as a result of it a lot more longer lasting.

Douglas:

Yeah, that would make sense. It’d be more durable because people will fight to undo it later when they get a chance. Reminds me of like the politics, right? One group changing something. And then four years later, it gets changed. And it was just back and forth where there was no real agreement in the first place.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. And here’s the thing, I like to use the example of toothpaste in a lot of situations. For instance, if you say something wrong in a conversation, it’s kind of like you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t pull that back. If it’s out, it’s out. Another thing is, imagine if you have a tube of toothpaste and you squeeze one area, right? The toothpaste just moves to another area of the tube.

Kwame Christian:

In this situation with these difficult conversations, let’s say I have all of the power, all of the leverage in this moment, and I decide to not build a relationship. I decide not to respectfully engage them and give them an opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. I decide, “Hey, it doesn’t matter. I have the leverage. There’s nothing they can do about it. They’re going to have to do what I want to do and that’s just tough for them.”

Kwame Christian:

People remember and they have this internal scale of justice in their mind and they say, “I remember what Doug did to me two years ago.” A lot of these interactions are not one shot deals. You’re going to have multiple interactions with this person throughout your career, throughout your lifetime in the majority of situations. They’re going to carry that with them. The reality is, power shifts with time.

Kwame Christian:

And sometime they’re going to have the upper hand and they will not have forgotten the way you treated them in that moment. Again, when we talk about these deals being longer lasting and the person wanting to get out, we want to make it so that it’s a deal that they look at it and they can see their fingerprint on it. I had some agency autonomy and control over how this deal was settled, and I’m okay with this. This looks good.

Kwame Christian:

But if they say, “I was bullied into this,” and then the situation shifts, they’re going to be trying as hard as they can to change things to make it fairer for them, and at the same time, get back at you.

Douglas:

That experience just leaves a bad taste, even if economically or comfort level has improved, like it turns out it wasn’t that bad of an outcome for them, they’re still going to not remember that fondly, right?

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Remember, perception is reality.

Douglas:

Yeah. I want to come back to your point around the spectrum of multiple millions of dollars at stake in a business negotiation or highly emotionally charged personal negotiations. Those sound quite different. I want to hear how you might approach those differently from a principles or just a tactic standpoint.

Kwame Christian:

I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is that they over complicate the process. When it comes down to it, there are people on both sides, people dealing with different things. I think for me, that’s the advantage that I have is because my background is in psychology, so I look at the people differently. I’m trying to figure out what are the emotional levers that are being pulled at any given time.

Kwame Christian:

When it comes down to it, the difference is complexity. What’s at stake? In that $600 million deal that I worked on, what’s at stake? Okay. It’s money and each in each organization has different interests. What are the varying interests organizationally, and then what are the varying interests of each of the players at the table, because each has their own different set of interests?

Kwame Christian:

For instance, I’m usually on the procurement side, so the people who are buying something. The people on the procurement side, they’re playing defense. They’re saying, “I want this. This is a high price. I’m trying to knock it down.” And then the people on the sales side, they are trying to maximize the deal. They want to make it bigger. But then we have to also think about it from the individual perspective, the sales person often gets commission based on sales.

Kwame Christian:

The procurement person doesn’t have that same incentive. The incentives of each person on the table are going to be different. For the procurement person, whether or not the deal goes well, per se, doesn’t have a direct impact on their paycheck. Yes, if they perform at a high level, then it makes it more likely for them to rise through the ranks, but it doesn’t have that same urgency as the salesperson because they can see their paycheck tied very clearly to each interaction.

Kwame Christian:

And so that’s important. But then with the family side, the things that need to be resolved are not as complex. Smaller dollar values, usually like two or three issues that need to be resolved, right? But it’s that emotional component that is the biggest issue. That’s where it gets messy and interesting. It’s the complexity of the big deals that makes it more difficult, but it’s the emotional complexity of the smaller deals that make those more intriguing.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s really fascinating to me. It sounds like the personal deals might be complex in a way that is somewhat unknowable, right? Because we don’t know how those emotions might shift and change, so maybe that’s the difficulty in navigating that versus where the business deals are complicated, there’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of stuff to deal with, but some of it’s kind of knowable, right, because we can unpack those incentives and things.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. I think though, the range of emotions that you need to tango with are a little bit limited in the business context as well. We have pride. We have frustration. We have anger, annoyance, impatience, those types of things. But then when it comes to the personal world, you have those exact same things. Then you have love, affection, attention, betrayal, jealousy, all of those things. The range, the spectrum of emotions becomes a lot more complex. And that’s what makes it more challenging.

Douglas:

I want to come back to the point around… I wrote down needs and incentives, understanding the needs of both sides and what the incentives are. Are their corollaries? I guess, needs would make sense in the personal relationships. I’m kind of curious on the incentive side. Does that play out or is there a corollary there?

Kwame Christian:

On the personal side? Yes and no. But in the personal side, there’s a risk of seeming a bit too transactional too. That’s the challenge as well, because you want it to… You can use the same negotiation techniques, and you pull on the same psychological levers, but you have to tow that line to make sure it doesn’t seem transactional, especially if the relationship goes into the future. So let’s say it’s a family business.

Kwame Christian:

Regardless of what happens to this business, the family structure is still there. You know? Even though we’re talking about dollars and cents, we still have to consider the structure and strength of the relationship going forward. Sometimes you could be a bit more aggressive and a bit more assertive in those business negotiation things, because when it comes down to it, it’s a business. It’s a corporation.

Kwame Christian:

But on the family side, it is a business and a corporation. At the same time, it’s a family too. You can still use incentives, like an if, then proposition. “Well, Hey, this is one of my concerns. If I give a little bit on that, would you feel comfortable giving a bit on that?” That’s something you can do. But if you make it too transactional, then you run the risk of diminishing the relationship in some senses.

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like it could trivialize it too.

Kwame Christian:

Yeah, exactly. Like cheapening it, right? It’s like, “Oh, I thought I was your brother, but now it seems like I’m somebody you just pay off to get out of your face. Okay. I’ll see you at Christmas.”

Douglas:

I guess that’s a real risk on these personal things, right? You could navigate the negotiation and have a successful outcome, but then it’s not necessarily ideal from a relationship standpoint afterwards.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Yup.

Douglas:

I’m kind of curious about what you see as common negotiation mistakes. People that think… Maybe they went online, did some reading, and they think they’ve got it. Like not mistakes people who are just like totally ignorant are making, but people that are really trying. What do they trip over and need more practice or experience to get right?

Kwame Christian:

Well, here’s one of the biggest things, and this is shocking to most people, even before that is that people have low levels of negotiation awareness. These are negotiations happening all the time, but people don’t identify them as negotiation, so they don’t negotiate. That’s the biggest mistake. For me, I like to broaden the scope of negotiation. I call a negotiation anytime you’re in a conversation and somebody in the conversation wants something.

Kwame Christian:

We’re negotiating every day, right? So that’s the first thing, it’s awareness. Now let’s say somebody says, “Hey, Kwame, I get it. All right. I’m negotiating. I’m going to prepare. I’m going to do this the right way. I’m going to do some research. I’m going to learn about it.” What they do is they go into and they get a laundry list of different negotiation techniques that they could potentially use in the conversation.

Kwame Christian:

They don’t think strategically, they think tactically. Whenever you’re thinking about how to approach any type of problem, you have to start off with your goal. And then from the goal, you reverse engineer and create your strategy. And then from there you pick which tactics you can use. What is the approach that I’m going to take strategically? And then which of these tactics do I use in order to get there?

Kwame Christian:

It’s essentially like going to a store and saying, “Okay, yeah, it’s time for me to cook. I’m going to cook now,” and then you just go to the spice aisle and you just grab every spice that you can, and then you come home and you think you’re ready to cook. If you haven’t taken the time to create a recipe or come up with some kind of plan, what do you hope to accomplish with this meal, it’s still not going to taste very good.

Douglas:

Yeah, no doubt. I see that at all levels of business and everything, right? Just focusing on the tactics without having a clear strategy or even understanding the purpose. That’s a common problem in business right now of people just crop dusting your calendar with meetings. It’s like, why are we having those meeting? Just a pure example. Also, kind of curious about… What is your recommendation?

Douglas:

You kind of hinted to this already around focusing on setting your goal, thinking about the strategy. But if someone’s wanting to… Maybe they have a goal in mind and maybe they’re like scratching their head, “How do I even formulate a good strategy, or how do I even know…” I mean, is it called the ANI? What are some steps they could take to get a little more comfortable to lean in to maybe select the right tactics?

Kwame Christian:

Right. Well, Doug, of course, if they want coaching and they want a training, they could, of course, call ANI. But just on the basic level, I think really there’s a lot that we can do personally to improve our skills and our ability to perform in these specific conversations. I have a gift for your audience.

Kwame Christian:

If they go to our website, americannegotiationinstitute.com/guide, they can get access to all of our free negotiation guides, how to negotiate for your salary, how to have difficult conversations about politics, how to have business negotiations, how to negotiate as an introvert, or negotiate for your car.

Kwame Christian:

We have over 15 guides that can help people to prepare systematically for these conversations, so you’ll get a little bit more clarity on your goal and what you should do in order to achieve that goal. Really it reminds me of this quote from Martina Navratilova. she says, “Everybody has the will to win, but few people have the will to prepare.” Preparation is the thing that really distinguishes people when it comes to these negotiations.

Douglas:

What’s the biggest advice you have for negotiating salaries? I think that’s one that people have to do quite often. I see varying approaches that people take. I’m curious, what approaches you found to be the most successful?

Kwame Christian:

Well, what I’d say is this, first, you have to ask yourself, am I negotiating from the inside or the outside? This is one of the major strategic considerations you have to have. Do I have this job already and I’m trying to increase my salary from what I already have? That’s negotiating from the inside. Is this a new opportunity? Did I just get a job offer? That’s negotiating from the outside?

Kwame Christian:

One of the biggest questions people ask in negotiation in general is, who should make the first offer? And it comes down to knowledge. Some people would say, “Oh, always make the first offer.” Some people say, “Never make the first offer.” I’m a lawyer. I say it depends. Okay?

Kwame Christian:

What you have to do is you say to yourself, “Okay, if I have as much knowledge or more knowledge than the other side, then I make the first offer because I can be strategically aggressive. But if I have less knowledge than the other side, then I let them make the first offer, then I counter it. Because if I make the first offer without knowing the situation, I might price myself out and sound ridiculous or go way too low.”

Kwame Christian:

So imagine this, Doug. Imagine if you get a job offer for this dream job and they say, “So, Doug, how much would you like to make at this job? What do you think is a fair salary?” And you say, “I think $100,000 is a fair salary,” and they say, “Yeah, absolutely. Let’s do that. Let’s do that.” How do you feel? You’re like, how much could I have gotten? They said yes too quickly. In that situation, you don’t know enough.

Kwame Christian:

But in the situation for when you’re on the inside, you already know what your salary is. You have some general idea of what’s possible, so you are in a position to competently make the first offer, and then have them play defense and respond to you. That’s the number one strategic consideration you have to have. And then you get to a point usually where they make an offer and it doesn’t seem like they’re moving very much anymore.

Kwame Christian:

What I would suggest is just asking this question, and I think this is one of the most powerful negotiation questions that you can ask in general, what flexibility do you have with your offer? That’s it. Number one, it’s open-ended, so they can’t just say yes or no. They have to elaborate. Number two, it assumes that there is flexibility. So it forces them to think about where that is in order to answer the question, right?

Kwame Christian:

The power of this question is annoyingly consistent. Here’s an example, I mentor kids who are going into law school, talking them through how to do the application, just before they get into legal career. The thing that’s annoying about this is that I discovered this question after I graduated law school. Again, with the podcast, it’s called Negotiate Anything for a reason, because we don’t realize just how many things we can negotiate.

Kwame Christian:

I teach the kids how to negotiate their scholarship package. And all they do is they get the scholarship offer from the school and they say, “Thank you very much for this offer. I really appreciate it. I’m considering a lot of schools. Finances are important to me. I just have a question, what flexibility do you have with your scholarship package?” 100% of the time they get something more, 100%, which is wild to me.

Kwame Christian:

One of the students even got $7,000 per year. $21,000 of over three years of law school. They realized just how significant that is after they graduate and they have to start paying that back. That matters. Simply asking, what flexibility do you have, in this salary negotiation situation and in other situations in general probably one of the most powerful things you can do.

Douglas:

It’s also very unassuming and very curious, because I would imagine it disarms the other side, right? Because then they’re like, “Hmm, let me think about that.” It haven’t told you I need you to do anything. I’m just kind of asking where the boundaries are. It also reminds me of your concept of who has the most knowledge.

Douglas:

It also makes me think of the concept of BATNA, which means that if you have more knowledge, you probably have a better understanding of where the BATNA lies, which means that you’re going to be more equipped to make that move.

Kwame Christian:

100%. And that’s a critical theory too, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, because you’re only as strong as your next best alternative. If I don’t have an alternative, then I kind of have to take what I get at the table.

Douglas:

But also if you’re on the flip side of that, if they have an alternative, you should know that. I think that’s part of your conversation about the preparation. It’s like, look at the edges. Are you coming into an entry-level position and you know they have at least 15 candidates that would probably do just as good a job as you would? That’s a different scenario than if like you’re the only neuro-ophthalmologist in town, they pretty much have to figure out how to make this work, right?

Kwame Christian:

Exactly, exactly. So again, that preparation is going to be critical. Because you can have all the skills in the world, but if you don’t prepare and see the entire landscape, you’re going to be limited in the way that you can perform at the table.

Douglas:

When we were chatting before the show, you mentioned that you were excited about your team growing. And so congrats for that. That’s awesome times. It’s exciting in a company’s journey to be in those moments of growth. I’m kind of curious to hear how your expertise and your work’s been impacting growing your team. Two things come to mind. 

Douglas:

One is internal meetings and the way that you collaborate might be impacted by these skills, and also when new recruits are interviewing and thinking about coming in, there might be some nervousness, right? Like, “Man, this is the expert there. Can I hold my own here?”

Kwame Christian:

Yeah. It’s been really, really fun growing, because that’s the name of the game this year. It’s scaling, scaling, scaling. We brought on a number of new trainers, new full-time staff as well. I think the most important acquisition was a business development guy to put fuel in the tank to make everything move forward. And it’s funny, Doug, because the thing is people often ask me during these trainings, what if you’re up against somebody who is doing the exact same thing that you’re doing?

Kwame Christian:

What if you’re up against somebody who knows these negotiation skills just as well as you do? So for me, asking that question is kind of like asking, what if I’m in a relationship and somebody loves me too much, right? Because for me, if you’re up against somebody who uses this interest-based negotiation where they actually care about what you care about, because they realized that’s the key for them to get what they care about too, you’re in a good position.

Kwame Christian:

They’re going to listen to what your problem is, and they’re going to try to work together to solve it. That’s a good thing. It’s been really interesting with all of the full-time members of the team, they negotiated their way on. I never had any traditional interviews or anything like that. They were always looking at ANI, learning more about it, and they kept on making offers, increasing their involvement, and they negotiated their way back onto the team, right?

Kwame Christian:

It’s really, really interesting. And I just have to sit back and laugh to myself, because every time I said yes, it was because they negotiated and we created a win-win solution for both of us. Okay, you can provide this. That works. Then I can pay you this. Fair deal. Let’s go. It’s been really, really cool to see how negotiation is really within the lifeblood of this organization. It’s something that we really live.

Kwame Christian:

We’re negotiating with each other all the time, communicating effectively, and everybody’s winning as a result.

Douglas:

I love that. It made me think of a comment that you mentioned a little earlier around people are going to remember if you took advantage of them. I think sometimes people think of negotiation as getting the best deal for yourself. But as we both know, negotiation is about finding the best outcome. I once read about this idea of finding where there’s perception on uneven value.

Douglas:

If there’s something I really, really value in something you don’t really value much, that’s an amazing negotiation to foster, right? Because we can exchange that and be very, very happy about it, right?

Kwame Christian:

Exactly.

Douglas:

Because you don’t feel like you’re giving up very much and I feel like I’m getting a lot. That’s amazing, right? I think, to your point, when both people are very skilled at facilitation, then we can actually find these amazing opportunities because we both know what to look for.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. Exactly. You hit the nail on the head there, because that’s one of the keys to creativity, trading things of unequal value. I want something a lot. You don’t want that thing too much. Hey, let’s swap. It’s like lunchtime. That’s really the way it should be and it’s great. And again, the only way you figure those things out is through effective communication. So many people are so focused on just telling people like it is.

Kwame Christian:

“This is what I need. This is what you need to know. You don’t know this. I do. Let me educate you.” But they’re not taking the time to listen effectively to figure out what it is that the person needs. And if you can figure that out, figure out what they want and need and why, now you’re in a position to actually solve the problem and create synergy.

Douglas:

It reminds me of a concept that is a profound principle in the world of facilitation that we use a lot, which is the difference between inquiry versus advocacy. If we’re in inquiry mode, that’s exactly what you’re describing, where we’re digging deeper into the wants and needs versus advocacy, where we already know where we want to go and we’re just going to try to sell someone on that destination.

Douglas:

I would imagine that plays out a lot in negotiations where someone’s already got it figured out, they know what they want, they’re just trying to push someone toward that outcome, it’s probably going to be a lot more fraught with tension and issues versus listening and trying to figure out where we might better take it.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. That’s very real because people can sense that. And I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to these difficult conversations. They start to persuade too soon. And if you begin the conversation telling people what they need to do and why, we are inviting unnecessary resistance through the process.

Douglas:

I’m curious to hear more about your vision of the future of negotiation. Where are things headed in the next five, 10 years?

Kwame Christian:

I think the industry is ripe for explosion, because it’s an industry that is really… It’s too thin. It’s very strange. Let’s just give an example. We’re both podcasters. How many sales podcasts are there? Thousands. I think a better question is, how many sales podcasts start every month? That would be more intriguing because there are so many of them out there. How many negotiation podcasts are there?

Kwame Christian:

When I started, Negotiate Anything was the only active negotiation podcasts on the market. The only active negotiation podcast in the market. The only one for all of the podcasts. Like what? At the time when I started, it was about 700,000 podcasts. One active negotiation podcast. That’s preposterous, right? How many people are negotiating every day? Literally everybody who can talk.

Kwame Christian:

I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here, and I want to blaze the trail on rebranding negotiation. Because when people hear that term, they think of stuffy, old people talking about big deals that they can never ever relate to. But I’m saying you today right now, you’re negotiating. You’re talking to your child, you’re negotiating. You’re talking to your spouse, you’re negotiating. You’re resolving things between your team members, you’re negotiating.

Kwame Christian:

I want to be the leader in making this concept more approachable and accessible to the masses. My hope is that the industry follows suit. We grow, we diversify, and we start approaching things in different ways. Because I think now more than ever, people are struggling to have these difficult conversations. The stakes are higher than ever, and we’re struggling more than ever before. I think we are uniquely positioned to lead the charge in that way, and I hope a lot of other people follow suit.

Douglas:

That’s amazing. It sounds like the kind of thing where there’s a real opportunity as it grows and expands and awareness and knowledge that there could be specializations as well for different industries and purposes. Maybe they start to refine the tools in some new and novel ways, which then has awesome rebound effect, because then you start looking cross industry and cross sector at like, “Oh, what are they doing over here?” And then it just amplifies.

Kwame Christian:

Exactly. And think about it, again, since it’s everywhere, we’re going to see this skillset showing up in different places. So it’s 2021 now for the listeners. But in 2020, once all these difficult conversations about race started coming up, leaders around the world were faced with this situation. I came to this business because I like what I do. I like my skillset. Let’s use the engineer, for example. I’m an engineer.

Kwame Christian:

Wait, now since I’m leading a team, I have to address this with my team? Talking about racist coming up for me? Why? I don’t want to do that. I’m scared of doing that. Hey, well, if you take that lens of negotiation and conflict resolution and put it in this field, now you have a skillset and a set of tools that you can use in order to have these conversations in a way that makes it more comfortable for you, because it’s very uncomfortable.

Kwame Christian:

And at the same time, it makes it less likely for you to cause unintended offense. Oh wow. I didn’t think I could use it in this way. What I’m hoping to see is more of this focused approach for negotiation. We have the broad topic of negotiation, and then each industry has a really unique and interesting angle to it. You can take those same skills and then make it more specific for the industries involved.

Douglas:

I want to end there. I think that’s a great place to wrap today, and I would just love to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Kwame Christian:

Yeah. Just remember, the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations, and you are in a position to have these conversations more effectively. And if you do, it will have a profound impact on the quality of your career and the quality of your life. I think one of the things that we to start doing is taking a bit of personal responsibility for the quality of our relationships.

Kwame Christian:

It only takes one person to improve the quality of your relationship. And the reality is, a lot of times, we’re waiting for other people to get better, but we can get better first, right? And negotiation is one of the tools that we could use. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the podcast. You’re listening to a podcast now, so I’m assuming you listen to podcasts. Check out Negotiate Anything.

Kwame Christian:

And we also have a book, Finding Confidence in Conflict. And if you’re interested in a negotiation or conflict resolution training, check out our website, americannegotiationinstitute.com.

Douglas:

Excellent. Thanks for that, Kwame, and it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

Kwame Christian:

Absolutely. Thanks Doug. Appreciate it.

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 47: The Negotiation Niche appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I realized…that I could teach people [leaders in organizations] to pay attention to their own body all day and all night, but that doesn’t change the system unless that person has a motivation to look outside themselves and make a change with the people around them.” -Jade Duggan

Jade Duggan is the Strategic Counselor at Mindbody Leadership, a Communications Culture Design expert, and Wellness Coach in Holistic practices. She inspires organizations to lead in mindfulness & self-awareness as the foundation of their company culture. She is committed to establishing healthy practices in business rooted in sensory skills & the intentionality of leadership in organization structure.  From her early holistic roots of acupuncture in the family business, Jade began to recognize its connection towards social reform. Jade continues her mission towards social change in organizations through transformative leadership and unleashing the power of listening to your own body.

In this episode of Control the Room, Jade and I discuss locating your sensory skills as humans through the “light-switch hijack,” navigating facilitation through mindfulness, applying the skills of self-awareness in leadership towards organization infrastructure, and the evolution of the micro-habit practice. Listen in to hear how Jade is inspiring her wellness expertise through organizations to reestablish company structure in mindfulness & self-awareness.

Show Highlights

[0:54] Jade’s Start in the Family Business 
[6:03] Navigating Facilitation through Mindfulness 
[12:58] The Light Switch Hijack 
[18:35] The Willingness to Change Business Infrastructure 
[26:28] The Micro-Habit Practice
[34:00] Jade’s Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Jade’s LinkedIn
The Duggan Method
Human Wellness

About the Guest

Jade Duggan is the Strategic Counselor at Mindbody Leadership. Jade’s passion began with her family business in acupuncture as they opened the first acupuncture school in 1980. She continued its foundation towards social development and explored executive coaching in organizational principles. Jade specializes in change management, executive coaching, strategic planning, team building, human resources, and organization redesign. With a previous background as the Founder of WisdomWell, a wellness center for corporations to rediscover sensory skills, Leslie continues her wellness approach at the Duggar Method through consulting organizations to reimagine company infrastructure and empower leadership to grow in self-awareness and mindfulness. 

About Voltage Control

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

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control of The Room Podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power leaning in and leaning out. All the service of having a truly magical meeting. Today I’m with Jade Duggan at mind, body leadership, where she provides strategic counsel and cultural design guidance for leaders upending industries. Welcome to the show, Jade.

Jade Duggan:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Douglas:

It’s great to have you. So to start things off, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got your start in this work.

Jade Duggan:

So interestingly, it’s actually a family business. I grew up in an acupuncture and leadership graduate school. So I don’t know how much of the story you want, but essentially my parents started an acupuncture school about 1980. They were already connected in with organization development, the early stages of what would later be human resources and big part was social movements in various regards, but early on in the acupuncture clinical programs, some of the other people in the leadership world came to them and said, “You’re doing something and we want to learn how to do it.” And so they began a program that later became I think the first master’s degree in transformative leadership and social change in the US.

Douglas:

Wow. Very cool. And so what was the connection to acupuncture? How did they make that transition from acupuncture to transformative leadership?

Jade Duggan:

So interestingly, I don’t know that it’s so much of a leap. So organization development has a lot of, I’m a history person. So it actually has a lot of roots with the human potential movement and other things that actually have a lot of Eastern if you want to go appropriative maybe influences in it. And my parents came across acupuncture actually, as they were traveling the world and had had a couple of different physiological ailments and got sent to a guy in rural UK, actually who treated them. But more importantly said to my father, “Your hands are very wise. They were protecting your heart,” and the idea that the body was wise really got my dad’s brain going because he also had a mentor named Ivan Illic who is a social critic historian of the 14th century, really interested in how Europe became a colonial force in some regards via the church.

Jade Duggan:

And so interested in why do we do the things we do and how do we make up these ideas? And so since perception is something that changes with each technology we intervene with. So long story short, my dad heard when this man said to him, “Your body is really wise,” he said, “Okay, if that’s true, and that feels true to me, then almost all of Western paradigm is upside down,” so that was actually what my parents started with. They didn’t really care necessarily about the acupuncture at first, they later did because of course you draw in all of the different people. And they actually became the first boards of acupuncture in the US where conferences that they pulled together centrally around the time that Korean acupuncturist in California started being arrested for technically practicing medicine without a license.

Jade Duggan:

So I don’t know if some doctor decided that the turf was being stepped on or something, but that was when they realized they had to actually integrate with a Western medicine model to some extent in order to continue to be able to practice. So they were actually instrumental in getting a license in all of these states, so acupuncture was one thing, but actually acupuncture is a vehicle for social change and social reform thinking, thinking about the body as a wise as a wisdom teacher for life, because the other piece of that is interesting was that he said to my dad, “Your hands are protecting your heart,” and hadn’t said anything, but felt three weeks later, there was an article in the New York times that the medicine my father had been given for the century was being pulled off the market because it was causing heart attacks, but the acupuncturist hadn’t known anything about that.

Jade Duggan:

So they actually then just insisted that he teach them, but really what he was teaching them and what they realized he was teaching them was stay in your senses. Don’t make up a lot of stories, right? All of this. And it was pretty classical, a version of acupuncture that had been largely actually destroyed via communism in China. So what was often practiced by that time in China was a more modern version of medicine that was actually intended to get people back on the line, back to work very quickly. And so what he was teaching them was actually something that had been kept on the side between Japan and France. So all of this comes back to essentially in 1983, The Rouse Company is a developer coming to the acupuncture clinic because they’re all in this plan city of Columbia, Maryland, which is also an interesting socio economic, ethnic, idealistic, really a plan city to try to right some of the wrongs in the world.

Jade Duggan:

And they came and they said, “You’re doing something and it’s not really about the needles and we want you to teach it to us because if you don’t teach it to us, you’re doing the world a disservice,” and so out of that first started a program called Sophia and it was about five elements and it was about the seasons and it was still very like a hippie and a little bit inmeshed in the acupuncture world and conversations to some extent. And I still think that way actually when I practice, I think I’m teaching leaders mostly to be the needle in the company.

Douglas:

Interesting. I want to come back to the wise hands and this notion that the body is perhaps an antenna or an instrument that can help us see and feel things in ways since it’s sensory organ and it’s something that we talk about a lot in our facilitation training. So I think that’s might be a really interesting angle to explore with you given your history there. So how can leaders tap into this, this ability to use their body as an antenna or a way of sensing what’s happening?

Jade Duggan:

Well, maybe the best way to do that would be, tell me a little bit more about how your facilitation training currently works or maybe even something… I do a fair amount of facilitating myself and it’s, at some point, something will come up and you know that you have to train your facilitators to navigate that moment in a particular way. And so is there one that’s like a common one or that came up recently for you in something?

Douglas:

Well, the way introduce it is through a bit of mindfulness, just taking a moment at first, just check in, like are you feeling hot right now? Do you feel a little, is there a little sweat in your armpits or what’s your body doing right now? Like let’s check in with it. And after experiencing that moment, actually have a little debrief and discussion with them about how often do you check in with yourself before you walk into our room that you’re about to facilitate or a Zoom that you’re about to facilitate.

Douglas:

How often have you walked in feeling like your heart is racing or that it feels uncomfortable or on edge, or you already know, or in your head, you’re already convinced that everyone’s thinking in a certain way, because of some feeling or some energy you’re bringing into the room. And so tapping into that is, A, the first step. And usually the second step is asking the room or asking yourself, is this something I’m bringing in or is this something that the room is doing to me? Because if it’s something I’m bringing in, I don’t need to dump that on everyone. If it’s someone that’s already in the room, I need to A, not let it influence me. And then also find out what it is because my assumptions on what it is might be incorrect. And until I ask, I don’t know.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. So essentially you’re already doing a lot of what I’m talking about and what I often am doing is actually taking it the next few steps, which is how do I recognize? And I don’t think in terms of causality. Causality is a modern Western idea. Mutual arising is an older construct in which this happens here and this happens here, almost like entanglement, actually. And what that does is it also allows me to recognize that no one’s doing it to me and I’m not doing it to someone else. And so it gives me a little bit of space then to say, huh, I have this sensation in my body.

Jade Duggan:

And then I can say anybody else notice that they have a sensation in their body? So I can check it out without it having to be an idea that I’m making people feel a certain way, but it still honors the fact that I don’t know how much you’ve talk about resonance or when you play a violin string over here, if you’ve got a guitar that has the same or another violin nearby, that same string will re will vibrate. Do you know this is construct?

Douglas:

Oh, yeah. That’s one of my favorite innovation stories, actually. There was an innovation challenge and a chip manufacturer, potato chip was wanting to make a fat-free chip. And they were like, how do we do that? And they’re trying to get the oils out of the chip. And the winner was a violin player. They said, resonate the chip at the resonant frequency of the oil and it’ll just jump off the chip.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. Right. So you get that that happens. And most people don’t know how to tune their own resonance, right? So they don’t actually know how to play the violin that they are. I actually think it’s sometimes I talk about this as like knowing where the light switches, it’s actually the name of the first in my series of things that I teach often is finding the light switch. Because essentially, can you imagine walking in your house and it’s dark and you don’t know where any of the light switches are? But then somebody else walks in house and turns the light switches on and off all the time or somebody in another house is turning your light switches on and off all the time. It’s what it’s like living in a body where you walk into a room and suddenly somebody else can say how you should feel. Like somebody else is in charge of the light switch that is your body.

Jade Duggan:

So the first place is to just find the vocabulary you already have, right? You already have a vocabulary. Most people at this stage have been around long enough will say, “Oh yeah. I always, when I get tension, it’s always in my neck or it’s in or get stunned. My stomach feels a little uncomfortable or, right? So you’ve got a little bit of a vocabulary. And the danger I think is that we can tend to want to standardize that and say when you feel this it’s this, or when you feel this is this, but actually each of us is unique. And to honor that we can actually realize, got a whole language that our body is constantly doing. Is it this kind of a sensation your body? Or is it this kind of sensation? Like for me, the difference between I have something I just really want to say, and I have something that’s a little scary to say, but will land powerfully and effectively.

Jade Duggan:

And it’s important to say are very similar sensations in my belly, but distinct and the only way I know that is through practice a lot of rigorous practice of checking, that kind of checking in that you’re talking about. So often. So even with your facilitators, I’d probably say, “Okay, it’s one thing to check in before you go into the room to facilitate. What if you put a little reminder somewhere on your wrists or your hands or someplace where you’ll see it and it’ll interrupt your visual field 20 or 30 times a day? And every time you see it, you check in. So you’re almost preemptively just finding out more about your wiring, honestly.

Douglas:

That’s cool.

Jade Duggan:

Then when you have that, when you have that vocabulary, you actually can begin to design the music that you want to play and thus the music that you want everybody else in the room to play.

Douglas:

That’s awesome. I love commitment devices like that or like just put something in somewhere. So I remember that I want to do this thing. And specifically something that’s helping interrupt these conversations we’re having to work when we’re collaborating and we want to realize, well, how’s this impacting me or how am I even perhaps coming across right now?

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. And when I think about work, it’s not just at work, right? Diplomacy is the same practice. How can I actually see whether or not my body is tuned to something that creates possibility between us and the so-called other, or is my body tuned for, yeah. Am I still tuned to some other fear frequency or some other sensation? I don’t like the word frequency because I like to stay in the realm of phenomenology because it keeps us out of our biases to an extent.

Douglas:

So you caught me with this concept of someone else turning the lights on and off. And I wonder, even if you understand your light switches, is it still possible for someone to hijack?

Jade Duggan:

Oh yeah. All the time. I think when you’re no longer in conversation with other humans and you’re no longer able to have some sensation, we’re built for seeing and hearing each other and for this kind of resonance, we are. So I think the day that you no longer have access to that, you either turn into ether. I don’t know what happens. This is enlightenment maybe, or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s death. I don’t know. But my practice is always that I would like to be fully present even in the moment of my own death. And I don’t know when that will be. And the question is when somebody else has hijacked my system, I’m no longer fully present to my own senses, which also makes me very ineffective with whomever I’m with. So in the moment of my dying, if say one of my children is present, I’d love to be as fully present with them in that moment as I possibly could be.

Jade Duggan:

And that’s going to require me not to be hijacked by my fear or any other sense, some idea of how the world ought to go. And, just in day to day, I mean, over these past few years I had numerous clients who would turn on the news. I mean, even now. I was watching some news earlier today and I was feeling for these babies in Palestine. And I don’t want actually for anyone not to feel that. What I want is for us to have some choice in now. Where do I go? Where do I go from here? Do I get stuck with the child or do I think, okay, well, where can I make an intervention so that there might not be a next child? Because when we get stuck in that place, we are no longer effective and moving into the next step.

Jade Duggan:

So it’s almost like actually feeling it so much, but I can see what the gift is in actually or having an honestly blade switches a little, right? It’s a little facile for the analogy. Because also to me, all of those symptoms are teachers, all of them. So when somebody has hijacked my shoulders, I can guarantee you, my value system is being checked somewhere. Something that matters to me in the world is showing up missing. When I am tense, I can guarantee that.

Douglas:

Do you think there’s room or need for folks to realize how they’re impacting others, or is that the sole duty of the individual to check how the world is impacting them?

Jade Duggan:

No, I actually, for me, and this is how come I worked specifically in leadership because I did work as a clinical practitioner for a number of years predominantly with a little bit of organization stuff on the side. And one of the things that I realized though was that I could teach people to pay attention to their own body all day and all night, but that doesn’t change the system unless that person has a motivation to look outside themselves and make a change with the people around them. And so in a system where that expertise is used specifically for what it’s really needed for when I would see childhood illness, oncology or whatever, that’s a good use of me in a space with an individual who needs some skills like this.

Jade Duggan:

But other than that, a better use of me is to have this with somebody who’s making a lot of impact. And so can not only train a lot of other people to notice it, but for the sake of noticing it so that we can communicate and become more effective. And because all of these skills, just like all of the other emotions are contagious, right? So when a leader actually can keep playing with the edge of becoming self-aware in that way, what they are also doing is showing everybody else in their room how to do it, right? So think about this even politically in the US if you think about or you should think just into art and right? Like you go, “Oh, wait. It’s not a complicity or a complacency. It’s, but a willingness to keep getting present, which is different than if you have somebody who’s in power, who’s raging and both of those things are contagious.

Jade Duggan:

So yes, I think it’s important for individuals, learners, especially important for individuals in positions of power to also recognize that that requires their own humility to do. And it also changes the dynamic of how we develop power with each other and the networks that we build around it. So the system, and that’s how come I always end up with a system and it’s why I won’t work with any leaders who are not willing to do the infrastructure change as well, because this is why I used to work in corporate, right? And I would do these skills, amazing amount of money made, gotten back, whatever from these big companies.

Jade Duggan:

But in the end, I was making life better for maybe a few thousand employees at a time, which is fantastic because these skills really do ripple out very, very quickly. It was actually really fascinating and beautiful to watch. However, having thousands of employees who feel better in themselves supporting a company that doesn’t do things in the world that are what I say matter and who in the end, they’re not really going to find much purpose in that other than with each other. Yeah. I know, definitely a duty.

Douglas:

So you mentioned the importance of working with leaders that are willing to make the infrastructure changes. And I’m curious what that looks like. How does that play out? And as it related to the work that you do around business model innovation.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah, absolutely. So I find that when a business model evolves thoughtfully from the toddlerhood of a company. When they’re in high growth, early stages, if they are really thoughtful about how the business model impact looks like, then you don’t have to try to retrofit infrastructure change later. I spent a number of years looking at how do we change infrastructure. And you can do it in a division in a bigger company, but it essentially often isn’t going to change the nature of the outcomes at large for the company it can and especially with a leader who’s willing to make big infrastructure changes or at least model and play it out and let it run. But when you have a smaller business that’s growing fast and has the capacity to disrupt an industry, which is where my current focus is, that business when the model is designed really, really thoughtfully, you don’t really have to deal with infrastructure change later.

Jade Duggan:

And you also don’t really have to deal with a lot of HR issues. You don’t have to deal with, actually I like to call a restore humaning rather than human resource, because I think humans are not resources. But you preemptively change the dynamic, right? The reason you have to do so much of what consulting really is often, especially in the HR realm is we didn’t create habits early and often around how we be human together. And we didn’t create our infrastructure with that in mind. I mean, just even some of the simple stuff about scaling. I watch companies. I was actually watching this with Clubhouse as this growing really fast, but not recognizing how human nature really works.

Jade Duggan:

And so when you do that without a grounded view of how humans actually interact with one another and what you need to put in place in order to have them do that in a particular way, you end up essentially replicating the world you’ve already got, right? And most innovators are not looking to do that. And they’re actually looking to do something different to disrupt the market. But you run the risk of creating the same world when you don’t from the early stage. Actually you should really and structurally, right?

Jade Duggan:

A lot of the stuff is very structural. I think about hiring policy. When you hire somebody and you’ve got a contract and it’s got a non-compete in it, right? You’ve essentially said we own you and your ideas. It’s a very different philosophical place to start from then. Actually, nobody owns any of this. You do what you want with it. We’ll do what we want with it, right? And then you have to deal with a financial question of it. But they are intertwined and they are also very… Right. They will impact how that human gets to function in the world also going forward.

Douglas:

There’s a question about structure and infrastructure, reminds me of Conway’s law and the notion that any system built by an organization is destined to repeat the structure of the organization that built it and so if this organization created itself in toddlership and through adolescence and maybe teenagehood, when it was tweening, it created some questionable culture or built out some habits, then that’s going to influence everything they create and all they come together, how they collaborate or to use your word, which I’m falling in love with how they human together. That’s fascinating. So some of the things, like not everyone gets the luxury of just starting fresh. People have these things established. How do they start to break down some of these infrastructure issues or where do you start?

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. It really depends on the size of the company which is, I’m always looking for because I do think in systems, I’m always looking for like where’s the place for me to go in and have the most leverage. And so that really, for me right now is between three to $12 million, but in a growth stage, which is also of course when a time, when a leader is totally overwhelmed and doesn’t really want to take the time to do any of this stuff, but it’s the best time I think, structurally wise, because they can see the impact that it has on their capacity, on their team and on the world. But also they’re all close enough to each other that they know each other’s families names, right? Maybe not everybody knows everybody, but there’s still that feeling.

Jade Duggan:

And these are the sides of businesses that actually use to create local stability in economies. And now we’re creating an interesting network of non-local, but still integrated economies of right, it’s still a community and in a way that it creates, but it also, because it’s non-local can create more equity if you hire somebody. I know there’s this thing where smaller companies tend to hire somebody in the Philippines because it’s cheaper. But actually if you pay them as much as you would, somebody in the US, you actually begin to change the infrastructure of a globe. And most people at that stage are thinking of themselves as a global company. And yet they have contractors all over the world, right? Because even the structure of employment is breaking down because it’s so nationalized, right? Most people can’t even figure out companies until they’re really large.

Jade Duggan:

Can’t even, even then they don’t really want to figure out how to employ people who are living in different nations, because there’s so many different the hoops to jump through. So we’re pushing the border of a global economy in so many different ways, but a bigger company who wants to do infrastructure change has to start with one person. The higher up in the company you go, the more influence you’re going to have. So that’s how that works, but you can do it in a division where first you begin and simply the first simple thing is to create this self-awareness practice, where you have five or six skills. You teach people how to notice when they get a little upset and how to find their way back to their body and how to help each other create that feedback loop with each other.

Jade Duggan:

And then you have a few other skills that you actually keep recognizing as embodied habits, acknowledgement, making clear requests, knowing the difference, right? These are some of these are pretty, well I wish they were standard. They’re not really standard. But when you do that, then you can actually begin to look at how do you create an infrastructure change? So one of my clients, I have a few clients who are still in bigger companies, and one of them is looking at how does she change ethics in medicine and research? And it’s actually has a lot to do with her willingness to just keep finding the openings, which requires her to have a skill set, to keep finding the openings and to stop getting caught, right? A tree seeks the sun no matter what. It doesn’t get caught, right? An iron railing can be there and it’ll just keep going.

Jade Duggan:

So it requires one leader with that level of commitment to the outcome, right? And then her case, she knows that the community is not involved in the research. So first, she’s going to restructure the board, but in order to restructure the board, she’s got to get some other pieces moved around in the organization, but her commitment to doing it and to not getting stuck on her own ideas about it or what they will or won’t let her do. She just finds a way. And so that’s the way the infrastructure actually changes. And it’s also the way it’s built. It’s actually individuals decisions and capacity to keep finding a way through.

Douglas:

Yeah. You mentioned something earlier in the pre-show chat around micro habits. And that really struck a chord with me around this idea of we have to create wins that we can recognize as wins. And we’re not going to jump around that iron obstruction and the day, but if we make a little move and another little move and another little move and we get there.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. What I really love about micro habits, it’s such a funny term, but practice is what it would have been called in any ancient tradition. But the thing that I love about these little micro habits is that they give you and people, right? This is how humans work. We need the little hit of when. Oh, I did that. I managed to side step that place where I normally would have gotten upset today. And that you get that little hit of my body feels easier now when it did. It was another reason learning that vocabulary is to go, oh, you know what? I used to get tightness in my belly every time I had to figure out what we’re going to have for dinner. And I don’t have that anymore. I didn’t have that today. Oh my gosh. Look at that. Easy peasy.

Douglas:

I was also really fascinated about this notion of observation, but then using observation as a way of recognizing potential interrupt points, where then we could create little experiments and say, what if I poke at this? Like what happens? Hmm. Okay. It really reminds me of the types of strategies that they talk about in complexity theory where let’s probe and try to make sense of what’s going on, but it’s like different language, which I found fascinating.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. It’s interesting. It told you the K I’ll spend on, would come up many times constipator door who used to run the Max Planck Institute for High Energy Physics was a colleague and he used to come and teach with me and he used to carry one of these triple pendulums around, but there are a lot of dovetails, right? Complexity theory is also essentially, for me, it’s fascinating to watch science, figure out things that ancient cultures have been trying to tell us. So it’s fascinating to watch 50 year old science proof thousand year old practice. I find that even as teaching people that have micro habits of the awareness, even though I say upfront, don’t try to change anything yet. We’re just collecting. It’s just impossible not to begin to go. Actually, that’s, doesn’t feel good.

Jade Duggan:

I feel like this right now. And the power of micro habits, the power of micro habits is actually, it’s fascinating. I’ve been really paying attention to, and I don’t have real study. I’ve been looking for somebody who might want to do some study on this, but there’s some that like neural networks or mirror neurons, or I know there’s not technically mirror neurons, but that the way we do this actually works asynchronously and over technology, to the extent that a group of women in say a Facebook group who interact regularly will end up on a same similar cycle, right? So there’s a hormonal, right? And so I got really fascinated with this, that one of the first projects I did big corporate projects, which is why I asked where in Southern Virginia. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say the company name, but let’s just say was a big food production company.

Jade Duggan:

And they were buying another production company at the time. And I went to do a site visit in this tiny little town in Southern Virginia. And the town essentially was just made up of the one company who had hired me and the other company, right? The two plants and the other one that they were buying. But one was in the more of the health field and the other one was known for sugary things. And so the margins also were different. So one was making a lot of money, totally different management style, right? Totally different. And essentially, it was like, how do you get this change management, but how do you get these people who are already actually having fights in their families because of this disparity to come together. And what I ended up doing was a training for all of the plants on the east coast, just the plant managers in there sort of semi-annual gathering.

Jade Duggan:

And I taught them four or five skills. That was it. And I found out later, I mean, it was amazing. The experience was just amazing because of the way things went down and the amount of emotion in the room, the amount of, of people who had been with the company for literally 40 or 50 years and saying never been in such a powerful place because they’re tangible, practical things that they could go implement. Then we have them go do it right away. But the really powerful thing was that I found out later, a year over year, the accident rates on the plant floors went down 50% year, over year for two years, straight in every plant, except for the one plant whose manager was not in the room.

Douglas:

Wow.

Jade Duggan:

I didn’t teach anybody except for the 12 people who were in that room. But this was across 1,000, 1,500 employees, at least. Six hours.

Douglas:

I think there’s some power in the simplicity of just five things too, right?

Jade Duggan:

Yeah.

Douglas:

How do we focus on like, “Hey, here’s the essential stuff. Want to make sure you really get this? And like a, the number five is pretty magical. Disney did some research, right? It’s like, you don’t want to get more than five options because then people will get overwhelmed. So three to five is the magic territory. So I think that’s pretty smart just in its simplicity. Plus if you’re at the stuff you’re giving them is powerful, they’re going to be more likely to put that powerful stuff to use because it’s simple. They’re going to remember it. That’s amazing. Wow. Did they get the other person trained up?

Jade Duggan:

No. Because what had happened was that person was leaving to go to another company, had gotten poached I think to go to another company. And so they were halfway out the door and that’s why they didn’t show up for the training.

Douglas:

Wow. I mean with the lack of safety improvements in that factory, you’d think they would want to get after that.

Jade Duggan:

So you know what really happened? And this goes to the infrastructure question, and this commonly happened to me in these corporate situations. The leader I was originally working with is now a VP of that company. So she got promoted within a couple of months of that project because it changes all of their numbers because the self-awareness, right? Mindfulness training, all of these things, they just increase engagement, they increase effectiveness, right? You hit your quotas and you get your number, your KPIs just go out through the roof. And so people come and they say, well, what are you doing? So we were in conversation with spreading that across another segment, but then she got promoted and moved to another country.

Jade Duggan:

And now she’s VP of that. It’s a fortune 50 company and she’s the VP of it, but she has to then go to the next place. So the contact then changes, which changes the dynamic. So whoever of those managers are still in play may still be doing some level of the work, but this is also why a lot of corporate training just doesn’t work because they just don’t build and follow up. And it’s actually another one of the reasons why I prefer to work with the smaller companies where I can say, I refuse to work with you if you won’t commit to six months.

Douglas:

Yep. The coaching, the follow-through, the after touchpoints. So, so critical.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. Yeah. I want to know what’s different. I don’t want to know that you checked off the box on leadership development.

Douglas:

And also the thing is, is like, I think Ed Morrison has a really interesting analogy or model with his strategic doing framework. All of the stuff they talk about in the framework draws on this river rafting metaphor. So it’s like you have a guide, right? Like a river guide. And it’s complexity informed in the sense that like, sure they might’ve gone down the river, but the river is not going to act the same way every time you go down, right? And so I can teach you how to go down a river, but you’re not necessarily just going to go down it by yourself after sitting here, maybe go within a few drills, right? And so I think that’s the thing, like when the reason that they extended coaching works so well is because once they encounter the real live situation and they go, oh, what do I do now?

Douglas:

We get a lot of questions from folks that have attended various trainings around collaboration or design thinking or whatever it is. And they say, “I’ve reached master Excalibur level in this training or whatever, but I still don’t know how to use it. It’s like I got all this information, but when it’s time to run a meeting with the CEO, I clam up because I don’t know what to do. So if you’re not there in that moment, when they’re freaking out and clamming up, those are the real moments of transformation and learning.

Jade Duggan:

Yeah. Yeah, totally. It’s like, is it really a tool or a skill if when the thing really hits the fan and that’s is also what I love about the micro habit way of doing things is what I think about is like I’m creating the conditions under which, when something really hits the fan, my body is already trained to know that I have the tool in my pocket. And so it’s like, I don’t have to practice on the big rocks. I get to practice on the little rocks, so this is so powerful, I think to have the skills be that use that way.

Douglas:

Yeah. That’s fantastic. I love it. Well, gosh. I didn’t think we would go from acupuncture to micro habits and extended coaching programs for retention, but here we are. And I think that brings us to a nice place to close. So I want to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Jade Duggan:

I’m aware of the word, use the word facilitation, and I’m aware of the word facility and both how that works as a place, right? That’s an infrastructure, sometimes a facility, but also that becoming facile with something, it means that it’s easy, right? It’s easy. It makes it easy for us. And I would have that for not just our personal lives, but for our social systems and lives to have some facility and some ease. So that’s what I’m doing.

Douglas:

Awesome. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, Jade. Thanks for joining the show.

Jade Duggan:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.

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.

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