“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.

“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.

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

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

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

Show Highlights

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

Links | Resources

Mark’s LinkedIn
Playmeo
Playmeo.com/free

About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

It’s harder.

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Collard:

But online [crosstalk 00:24:13]

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

That’s right.

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

Mark Collard:

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

Douglas:

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

The post Episode 43: The Essence of Play, A Masterful Art appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings people thrive in. 

Today’s story is with Justin Foster, co-founder (along with Emily Soccorsy) of the intrinsic branding firm Root + River, and BeMa, a community of ethical branders and marketers. He is also a speaker, writer, mentor, and a curator of conversations, coffee and Texas music. Justin has coached leaders of every sector and industry to go inward, embrace the mystery and show the world who they truly are. His journey began on a cattle ranch in eastern Oregon and led him to all 50 states and 6 countries, where he’s helped people along the way. 

I spoke with Justin Foster about a monthly meeting he designed called Challenge Circle, what prompted him to come up with it, what it helps accomplish, and the future opportunities he sees for it.

“I believe when you show someone their soul, you set them free.” -Justin Foster

The Power of the Group

Justin came up with the Challenge Circle meeting idea while launching BeMa (short for Being Marketers). He explained that marketing and branding is bifurcated between systems and tactics on one side, and strategy and humanity on the other. Justin identified a need in the marketplace for a real community for marketing leaders. Challenge Circle was designed to provide a resource for like-minded rebellious and original-thinking marketing leaders that didn’t focus on the systems and tactics side of things, but more on humanity. 

Challenge Circle is Justin and Emily’s version of a mastermind group – members bring issues they’re having with the human side of branding and marketing, and the idea is that the collective intelligence of the room will come up with a solution. Justin and Emily provide recommendations but it’s more about the power of the group:

“I would put this on the positive side of groupthink, and what I call group consciousness – this idea that our problems feel really special and unique to us, but they’re usually not.” -Justin Foster

The purpose is to create more momentum and traction in branding and marketing efforts. Branding/marketing can feel so overwhelming, Justin explains, because there’s so much to do and not everyone can afford to have a team do it for them. Therefore, the mind begins to shut down and prioritize primarily off of impulse, rather than intuition or strategy. “Everybody’s trying to take care of the marketing, but what about the marketer? What about the human? Here’s what we know: If you’re burnout, tired, fatigued, overwhelmed, you make poor decisions. It’s just human nature. Like I said, you become impulsive, and you become short-term, and you become desperate sometimes, because you’re tired. So when we think about a community, it truly is a community to provide spiritual and emotional support to the humans that are doing the marketing.”

Challenge Circles are able to get people helping one another, working together and participating, either by sharing their challenge that they would like help with, or helping someone else with their challenge and learning from that.

Let’s dive into Justin’s process to see what makes these meetings magical.

The Meeting 

Pre-Meeting Prep and Intro

Participants receive some contemplative prompts prior to the Challenge Circle, where Justin and Emily ask questions such as “What have you attempted, and why didn’t it work?” This gets them thinking in preparation to address and work through their challenges in the Challenge Circle. 

Then, they always start each Challenge Circle with what Justin calls “a two-word check-in.” They ask the participants “What are you feeling right now?” Sometimes they do an intention, but generally the two-word check-in gets the meeting going.

Exercise

The meetings, held Thursdays at 1PM CT for an hour, range from 8-20+ people, and Justin and Emily aim for 2-3 challenges per Challenge Circle. Everyone is encouraged to be ready to share a challenge that they’re having. The decision process of which challenges to tackle during the Challenge Circle is not democratized – participants submit a few and then Justin and Emily (acting as co-facilitators) discuss and decide which ones to tackle, live in front of the group. The goal is to see how many challenges can be addressed in that hour. 

Challenge Circles go off of the belief that there are a lot of universal problems and challenges that people face (regardless of industry), and the intention behind these meetings is that once people realize they can come together and have a vigorous conversation about a challenge, it becomes much more doable. “There’s a lot more hope and a lot more enthusiasm for the possibility that it doesn’t have to be this way,” Justin says.

I asked Justin when a challenge is considered complete. He said it’s complete when there is the idea of what he calls “make it real.” “Make it real” means that the person that submitted the challenge feels satisfied, with a solution that they can go implement. The second indicator of a challenge being complete is that everyone has spent all of the conscious ideas in the room. “We don’t want to belabor it, and we’re not trying to glean every little detail. We’re trying to get to the nuggets that can be applied immediately.”

Finally, the meeting ends with a two-word check-out of how each person is feeling–similar to the way it started, with a two word check-in. “What we’re trying to do here is change people’s perspective, and the way that we know our perspective has changed is the shift in emotion. That’s why we ask a two-word check-in, two-word check-out, around what you’re feeling. If someone comes in, they’re like, ‘I’m frustrated, and I’m impatient.’ And they checkout with, ‘I feel motivated, and grateful.’ That’s progress to us.”

What Makes It Different

Unlike other meetings where an email with notes or next steps is the follow-up deliverable, Challenge Circles have a guide in the form of a graphic recording of the solution. Justin explains that as ideas start to flow from participants, patterns and principles begin to emerge. Emily creates a graphic recording of the solution that the group comes up with, and that becomes the output that can be used as a guide. Each guide is unique per challenge.

Ground Rules 

I asked Justin about any rules or protocols he had in mind when coming up with the Challenge Circle meeting idea. He cited vulnerability and being willing to be challenged. “If you have some fragility, the Challenge Circle really isn’t for you. If you don’t like feedback or you’re really sensitive, or easily offended. So you got to be willing, you’ve got to have this willingness to be challenged.”

One operational rule is that everyone speaks first before anyone else speaks twice, when discussing feedback after challenges are shared. This encourages those who may be more introverted or hesitant to speak up immediately to contribute, and helps encourage those that may typically dominate meetings to also listen. 

Facilitation Design Approach

Justin and I also discussed his process for designing this meeting. He highlighted three key elements, which also relate to his overall approach to facilitation and coaching:

• It’s an inquiry practice; it’s the use of lots of questions. “Everything is designed not that we would have answers, but that we would have questions that would prompt answers from other people.”
• It’s a contemplative practice. “Meaning, we operate from the assumption that the answer is already inside of you, and it’s just your busy-ness and overwhelm that you can’t see it. That’s this idea of contemplative-ness, of going inward.”
• Make it real. “What are the next two or three things you are going to do, now that you know what the solution is?”

Another critical aspect of the Challenge Circle meetings includes flexibility/fluidity. As discussed earlier, the goal is to get through at least 2-3 challenges but if somebody has a challenge that takes a little muscularity to get behind it, the group will take more time to brainstorm and not rush through it. “This is the key thing for us, we allow room for intuition.”

Looking Ahead

I asked Justin what he sees as future opportunities for the Challenge Circle meetings. He has a lot of ideas in mind.

• Corporate teams – a Challenge Circle cohort where everyone is on the same team within the same company
• Topical challenges – bring on experts from a specific area of expertise, or focus challenges around a specific topic (for example, marketing technology)
• Early launch stage of a business – such as a venture fund, incubator, or community
• Social good brands, especially since BeMa focuses on humanity and ethics – for example, B Corps, nonprofits, and socially responsible brands like KIND Bar or Patagonia

Tools

There are a few tools Justin uses to create magic and connection in his meetings:

• Infusionsoft (now called Keap)-tool for CRM, sales, and marketing
• Mighty Networks-online community-building platform
• Zoom-fosters connection using conversation, chats, and breakout sessions
• Notability-visual note taking app used to document and create the graphic solution during the meeting
• iPad Pro-used to screen share visuals from Notability via AirPlay to the Zoom participants

Value Mindset

Through Challenge Circles, Justin is able to bring much-needed insight to his BeMa community, because the meetings actually work. His approach as a facilitator is to bring people together as a group and provide participants real value. “This model of collective consciousness of the room, and this awareness that we marketers all sort of have the same set of problems, really has an efficacy to it. And that’s great. I mean, we would never want anyone to spend time or treasure on something that did not bring them relief or value or insight.”

The post Challenge Circles appeared first on Voltage Control.

As a student of how to make working together better, I’ve been reflecting on the work of past thought leaders who have influenced the business world we operate in. I find we can learn a lot when we revisit original ideas and mantras and apply them to our modern lives today. 

One such thought leader is Peter Drecker, a famous business coach and management mogul of the 1900s. He is in fact one of the original business gurus–considered as the founding father of modern management studies by common consent. Many of his ideas and thoughts on management are still used by managers worldwide today. He was one of the first authors to describe management as a distinct function and the role of a manager as a distinct responsibility; he understood and had sympathy for the challenges and demands that managers face. 

I’ve been thinking about his mantra: “What gets measured gets managed.” To me, it means that if we don’t track something and keep it top of mind, we’ll have no hope of improving or maintaining it. For example, if we don’t record the fact that we are always spending more money than we take in, then we don’t manage that problem, and we never fix it. 

His idea inspired my modern-day mantra of visualizing your thinking: “What gets visualized gets velocity”.  In other words, if everyone is not clear on the opportunity or direction, it’s very difficult–if not impossible–to get steady traction on collaborative work; and the best way to get clarity quickly is through visualizing!

One of the most effective ways to visualize your thinking is through a prototype designed to transform ideas into tangible, workable artifacts. Prototypes are visual representations of ideas and can take various forms. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.

The type of prototype depends on your objective. For example, a project manager may use a storyboard, written brief, or sample pitch of an idea to present to her team. A designer may use a mood board to portray his ideas, and a developer might code something to show her approach to other team members. To choose your prototype, think about how your idea can best be portrayed visually. 

This is critical for productive work because when we come together and just talk about ideas, we’re not truly doing anything. It can actually stop us from doing any meaningful work at all. So many times when a leader or manager asks for something and there is slow or no progress it usually because the team doesn’t fully understand the ask, and it’s hard to get motivated if you don’t understand the what and why. Creating a quick prototype that visualizes what you are going to do adds tons of clarity.

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Also, if we don’t capture ideas and input during meetings, it is likely they will be forgotten and participants might walk away with different interpretations of what happened. When we come together and prototype, we are able to see individuals’ thoughts and ideas and surface differences. Without the alignment and clarity from visualization,  teams get stuck in endless cycles of stopping and starting work, lose momentum, and eventually fall short of maximum acceleration. You are more aligned and able to execute in unison when you visualize and bring the thinking “together”. Using a prototype during meetings means nothing is forgotten and more is explored–achieving more velocity. 

Prototyping Tools

There are several excellent tools that help you construct, share, and collaborate prototypes. Here are a few of our favorites as Voltage Control:

1. Google Docs – Smart editing and styling tools support joint teamwork to flow smoothly and easily and keep ideas in one place. Teams can work on different pages or in different docs accordingly. Use comments and tags to work in real-time.
2. Google Slides – Interactive work templates with multiple pages to allow individual and collective work.
3. Google Sheets – Collaborative spreadsheets to organize, plan and update tasks and information. 
4.  Mural – Digital whiteboard with collaborative templates for visual collaboration including planning, brainstorming, and designing.
5.  Figma – Collaborative design platform to design, prototype, and gather feedback in real-time in one place.

The team at Voltage Control uses each of these tools every day to create prototypes and work together. Here’s an example of one of our MURAL templates used to brainstorm and get inspired around a new idea:

Find what prototype tools work best for you and develop a practice of bringing a prototype to every meeting. Doing so will provide clarity, direction, and actionable steps to help your team visualize for velocity and achieve more by doing the work in the meeting, together.  

The post What Gets Visualized Gets Velocity appeared first on Voltage Control.

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

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

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

Show Highlights

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

Links | Resources

Tamara’s LinkedIn
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About the Guest

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

About Voltage Control

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

Tamara Adlin:

Thank you, so great to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s ultimately a paradigm change for folks.

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Tamara Adlin:

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

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

It may even get damaged in the process too.

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, we are at time and-

Tamara Adlin:

Oh, sorry. I’m having so much fun.

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

How can listeners find you?

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

Tamara Adlin:

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

Douglas Ferguson:

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

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

“I think about creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and the way we can get better at that toggling, the way we can get better at exercising our creativity is through what I call the three I’s. And the three I’s are inquiry, improvisation and intuition.” – Natalie Nixon

Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist and president of Figure 8 Thinking, where she helps leaders achieve transformative business results by applying creativity and foresight. As a global keynote speaker as well as author, editor, and contributor of multiple writing publications, Natalie communicates awe and inspires teams around the world to reach their maximum business value.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Natalie about polymaths, dance, fashion, and gratitude. Listen in to see how wonder, structure, and grace can make a major difference in an organization when interconnected.

Show Highlights

[01:08] Natalie’s Career Journey
[13:54] Curiosity & the Three I’s
[19:55] Four Clarifying Questions
[24:02] Equity in Our Virtual Environments
[33:32] Natalie’s Closing Thoughts

Links | Resources

Natalie’s LinkedIn
Figure 8 Thinking

About the Guest

Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist, organization president, and global keynote speaker. In addition to consulting for clients around the world, she has also written a book titled, “The Creativity Leap”, and serves as a contributor and editor of several publications. Natalie’s collection of experiences that include, but are not limited to dance, fashion, and African diaspora studies enable her to fluidly move from seemingly unrelated pieces, and find commonalities between even the most unlikely variables.

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, 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 Ferguson:

Today, I’m with Natalie Nixon, creativity strategist and president of Figure 8 Thinking, where she helps leaders achieve transformative business results by applying creativity and foresight. She is also author of Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work, the editor of Strategic Design Thinking, and regular contributor to Inc. Magazine. Welcome to the show, Natalie.

Natalie Nixon:

Thank you, Douglas. It’s a real joy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. So for starters, let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start. How did you become a creativity strategist?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, it’s been a very loopy journey. I have a background in cultural anthropology and fashion, and I decided many decades ago not to get burdened with trying to narrow myself down. And I actually got that advice as a teenager. I used to be really into radio, and I volunteered early Sunday mornings on a local AM radio show just to help out behind the scenes. And the woman, I’m so sorry, I’m forgetting actually now her name, that’s horrible.

Natalie Nixon:

But she was asking me, I was getting close to graduate high school, what did I think I wanted to do? And she looked at me and she said, “The older you get, the more people are going to try to narrow you down. But if that’s not your thing, don’t be narrowed down by that. Follow your heart. Follow what interests you.” And combined with that, I have amazing parents.

Natalie Nixon:

My parents, my sophomore year in college, fast forward, I was very nervous about what my major was going to be, I wanted to make sure I got a good job at the end of a very wonderful and expensive education. And I called home in tears because I didn’t know what to decide on, because all of the impressive sounding majors where I thought you could get a good J-O-B at the end, I was either failing or I thought they were really boring. And my parents said, “Well, what are you interested in?”

Natalie Nixon:

And so I apologetically began to explain how much I loved anthropology and of all these cool interdisciplinary Africana studies courses. And almost at the same time they said, “That’s what you should major in, that’s what you should study.” And I was like, “Really? You’ll be okay with that?” And they’re like, “Yep, that’s what you should study.” And my father said, “If you follow your heart and you study what you love, you’ll have to turn away opportunities.”

Natalie Nixon:

And it was this huge load that was lifted off my shoulders and it was wonderful permission to follow my heart. And that is something I have been steadfast about my entire life, my entire, most of my life, and my entire career. And so that loopy background in cultural anthropology and fashion has been super useful in the work that I do today as a creativity strategist. There was a chapter in my career where I was a professor for 16 years, and the last six years of that time, I created and launched the Strategic Design MBA program. And it was very multi-disciplinary and really an attempt to creatively disrupt graduate business education.

Natalie Nixon:

We integrated design thinking into the way people were learning strategy and leadership and financial operations and branding. And I actually started Figure 8 Thinking, my company today while I was still a professor, it was my side hustle. I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk in 2014 and after giving that talk, I was invited to a lot of companies to share out and workshop with them what my talk was about, which was basically the future of work is jazz. And in my view, the most innovative organizations are improvisational.

Natalie Nixon:

So what’s really cool about where I am in my working life right now is that all of the divergent, disparate paths, especially from someone from the outside, looking in on me, didn’t make sense to them. It totally made sense to me because I was just following my heart, which by the way, is just a lot of courage. It’s not easy to do, but the more we do it, the easier it becomes.

Natalie Nixon:

I’m at this really magical, amazing moment in my life and my career where all of those super diverse experiences and skill sets I’ve developed come in handy as a creativity strategist. So as a creativity strategist, I made up the term, by the way. I had never met a creativity strategist, but when I thought about what I really love and what I’m good at, that’s what I decided I am. In my practice at Figure 8 Thinking I help leaders in executive leadership teams and people to get to transformation, transforming their businesses. Sometimes, a lot lately I’ve been doing a lot more coaching and it’s transformation in their lives to make shifts by applying principles and techniques from creativity and from foresight. And I love it.

Douglas Ferguson:

So much cool stuff there. And maybe the most recent connection that I made when I was listening to you and you’re clearly passionate about what you do by the way, and that’s infectious. So I love that. And you mentioned not being tied down by one thing, and I just had Sarah Beth Burke on my show and she has a book called More Than Your Title. And she had come up with this concept of the hybrid professional. So carving out these identities that are unique and that you can own, I just love that. I connected with Sarah Beth on this level of, I kind of felt like I myself was a hybrid professional and had gravitated toward it. And then here you are as well. And I think people are finding their way there and she’s helping people that aren’t realizing it.

Natalie Nixon:

I love that. I’m glad that she’s doing that. You know what’s funny? The moniker for the strategic design MBA program was The MBA For Hybrid Thinkers. We were promoted as the best of design school meets the best of business school.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it.

Natalie Nixon:

So I am also a hybrid thinker. I think most of us are really, but it gets drummed out of us in our educational pathways and-

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, and the models that we learn and we get comfortable with also impact how we see the world.

Natalie Nixon:

That’s right. That’s right. One of the creativity leaps I encourage people to make is a way from erring on the side of being a deep specialist, to being a polymath like, Leonardo DaVinci who was a mathematician and an artist and an astronomer. And my mom told us when we were really young, all learning is interconnected. And that’s what you see that polymaths really get and understand, that something they learn in the sciences is really going to inform the way they understand history, it’s really going to inform the way they understand carpentry and et cetera, et cetera.

Douglas Ferguson:

As a facilitator, I often think back to the moments and my early career where I was sitting in the room, listening to two people who were in the heat of an argument and thinking to myself that you’re saying the same thing. And I think that’s where the polymaths, these hybrid thinkers, that’s a real strength, right? They can see past the veneer.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because they can see those deeper connections.

Natalie Nixon:

Right. When you decide to be okay with being a hybrid and having these multiple interests, you really are honing your ability to be a systems thinker, a systems designer. It was only about five months ago that I realized that studying Africana studies was really, and this is 35 plus years ago. That was my first foray into systems design and systems thinking. And it wasn’t equipped with the language or the lens to understand it as such back then. But now, that’s the value of that training of ways to understand problems and the interconnection between things. Because we were studying people of African descent throughout the diaspora around the world. And so you really were getting into understanding things as networks and nodes and the cascading effects, when something over here in the system shifts, how that has an effect in all other dimensions of the system. And that came from one of my majors being so, I don’t know if the right word would be multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, it felt very interdisciplinary. But yeah, that’s something I only was able to articulate as such, only like a few months ago.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was just working with a client recently and they were debating whether or not interdisciplinary was too restrictive and that they should refer to themselves as transdisciplinary.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah. That’s a good one.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I was looking at this chart and I was like, “Oh yeah, that does make sense. You’ve got multi-interdisciplinary, and then transdisciplinary.”

Natalie Nixon:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Is where you’re looking at all of the interconnectedness between them and more of the holistic kind of systems.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah. Transdisciplinary probably is a bit more accurate. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I also loved this moment that you shared about just that unburdening that happened when you had these notions that there was a way to move through the world, and a trusted advisor told you, no, it doesn’t have to be this way. And I think that if more leaders were to treat their employees that way, and we brought together teams that help them understand that there’s many ways to carve out the road in front of them, we would see a lot more innovation.

Natalie Nixon:

We would see a lot more innovation. I think we would see a lot more productivity, because in my view, we are basically having to show up to work each day in drag. It’s like, Natalie’s greatest hits, best of. And no one really gets to see, like I just got back from my social ballroom dance classes, mask on, because this is still COVID quarantine. But today I was practicing the Rumba and a West coast swing. And there are so many dimensions to the people would work around every day that we have no idea what makes them tick. What is actually informing the way they understand the marketing strategy or the financial model or the sales pitch, that if we invited them to share those other sides of themselves, then they’d be a lot happier. It takes work disguising parts of yourself, it takes work trying to put on whatever, fill in the blank, whatever the facade is that seems to pass us as appropriate.

Natalie Nixon:

I believe that, what if the KPIs in organizations, the key performance indicators also included elements of creativity in the way I think about creativity, if it included how wondrous you are, how you really are applying rigor to things and not rigidity, but rigor. And given the time to do that and how you ask better and different questions and how you really lean into improvising and being adaptive. And it would be hard at first because it would be such a culture shift for people to be like, “Really, that’s what you want me to do? It’s okay, I won’t be penalized?” But ultimately it would be inviting people to relax a bit, to share more of their full human selves.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that. I was thinking of my head as you were wrapping up, I was like, we’re letting them be more human. And then you said, share more of their human selves. And this is something I’ve been talking about a lot for a while around how this belief that with the onslaught of AI and automation, there’s going to be tons of things that computers continue to do better than we do. And especially when you think about the rote, kind of redundant, just repetitive stuff, they’re going to take on more and more and more of that stuff, even the complicated and complex versions of that. And we’re going to have to show up more and more as humans. So what you’re speaking about right there is going to be even more important as time goes on.

Natalie Nixon:

Right. To me, that’s the silver lining of this fourth industrial revolution. You’re absolutely right Douglas, that there’s going to be more room for the human to show up, but are we prepared for that? Because yeah, task related stuff, the robots have it, the algorithms have got it down. So the organizations that are first to invite, make space for, hire for, incentivize more of the human to show up, they’re going to be the organizations that attract the best talent and retain people in more interesting ways.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk a little bit about how that manifests. And you mentioned something a moment ago that caught my ear because it’s one of my favorite topics and that’s questions. So how do we get asking questions and what are some of your favorites?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I have been deeply influenced by the work of Warren Berger who wrote A More Beautiful question. I also, probably because Warren in his book referenced Ian Leslie. Ian Leslie wrote a great book called Curious, and Ian explains that curiosity is the product of an information gap. You need to know just a little bit about something to want to know more. And we see that in toddlers, right? They touch something, they taste something, they bump into something, they see something, they hear something. And all of a sudden they want to understand and learn a little bit more. And so I define creativity, I think about creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and the way we can get better at that toggling, the way we can get better at exercising our creativity is through what I call the three I’s.

Natalie Nixon:

And the three I’s are inquiry, improvisation and intuition. And that inquiry piece is super important. I was just saying to someone earlier today, nothing bad ever follows the phrase, “I wonder if,” “I wonder what would happen?” Like really nothing bad ever follows that phrase. It always leads to exploration, discovery, experimentation. And somewhere along the way, we are penalized for asking questions. And obviously when you ask a question, you don’t know the answer, obviously you’re admitting ignorance, but so what, it’s really the beginning of identifying something new.

Natalie Nixon:

And so what Warren Berger found in his research is that the most innovative companies practice inquiry based leadership. They ask questions of themselves, they encourage questions from their teams. And he has a really beautiful, heuristic, which is that they start with asking why, like why do we only hire people from those sorts of schools? Why? Why do we not have anyone here over age 50? Why? Why don’t we ever sell to the Southern hemisphere? And then they diverge even further to what if, what if we started recruiting people who have maybe a high school diploma and rich professional experience? And what if we started selling our stuff to Brazil, the Brazilian market?

Natalie Nixon:

And then it converges into how questions, so how might we do that? And it’s just really, the first time I started reading Warren Berger’s work was when I was a professor heading up the strategic design MBA program. And what I was first attracted to about that series of question asking is that it was really aligned to design thinking, a design thinking process of being very, doing a lot of divergent convergent thinking. So curiosity is everything, and so yeah, some of my favorite questions are, I wonder if, fill in the blank.

Natalie Nixon:

And I just posed a question, I actually think it comes from the second book from Warren Berger, which I have is called The Book of Beautiful Questions. And there’s a great question in there, what would I do if failure was not an option? What would I do if I knew for certainty, this won’t fail? So you put failure off the table, what would you then try? What would you go for? And I think it’s just such a titillating question. It’s a really good one, what are some of your favorite questions?

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh gosh. As a facilitator, maybe one of my favorites is, why don’t we just do that?

Natalie Nixon:

Good one.

Douglas Ferguson:

Anytime I can. I love getting the group talking, so anytime I can pose a question that just like gets people, even, who haven’t we heard from? Love that one. Because especially dealing with an over talker, I don’t really have to point them out. I don’t have to call on the people who aren’t being as included. And then maybe the other thing is, there’s another great question for a facilitator, which is, why am I talking?

Natalie Nixon:

So I’m writing these down, these are good. Why don’t we just do that? And who haven’t we heard from? I like those.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. They’re fun ones. And I stumbled on as it’s been a while now, but DeAngelo’s book White Fragility has a facilitation guide with it and there are some really amazing questions. One of the things I picked up from her was, what did you mean by that? Which depends on the tone you use. But if you’re gracious with that question, it can be a really soft out for someone who said something that didn’t consider the impact of what they were saying. And they might say something very offensive without intent, but as we know, intent does not matter. And so, what do you mean by that? And then if they have to explain it, then they start backing away from it really quick, and it can create a safer place for everyone.

Natalie Nixon:

You bring a really good point about tonality, delivery, eye contact if possible, body language. So what is it, like 70% of what we communicate is through our body language. I have a couple others, I just want to share real quick.

Douglas Ferguson:

Sure.

Natalie Nixon:

I love Esther Perel, the psychoanalyst. I have a professional crush on her. She’s just so brilliant. And I listened to her podcast, which is called Where Should We Begin? But one of the questions that she poses regularly, and sometimes she poses it as a directive, as a declarative statement so that she poses it as an interrogative statement. And it is, say more. Like the person just said something, and she’ll say “say more” it’s so simple. And it just invites people to say more.

Natalie Nixon:

And the other four set of questions. I shared this next one, especially with, I started a group coaching online creativity course. And I shared how when we decided to make creativity leaps, these are major mind trips, you have to fortify your brain. And so one of the people, a person and who I consider a, she’s a distant teacher. I’ve never met her, but I’ve learned so much from Byron Katie. And so she’s done something called The Work and there are four questions. And so the four questions are, is that true? Is that really true? What are you experiencing with that thought? Like, how are you feeling physically, emotionally, all that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Natalie Nixon:

And what would you be without that thought? Which is, right? That’s the best one. Where would you be without that thought?

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Yeah I really love this idea of challenging people’s mindsets or thinking patterns. What sorts of frameworks are they bringing to the situation that may be incongruent with everyone else. So I love this lateral thinking stuff so saying if you were to remove that, what would surface for you? That’s really cool.

Natalie Nixon:

And the frameworks are stories. A story is a framework, it’s stories that we’ve been telling ourselves, and you get to interrupt the story. You actually can interrupt it. That’s another Esther Perel gem.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I like that, interrupting the story. That’s cool.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, another one, oh, gosh, she’s so wise, there’s another one that she says, “Are you ready to have a revolution with your mind?” Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think so. Maybe that sounds like a great Wednesday afternoon. I want to come back to your point a moment ago about eye contact and tonality. And it’s something we were talking about, it surfaced, this point of our pre-show chat that I wanted to also kind of stitch together, which was this notion of equitable distribution. And so when we think about the tools, we both have good selling mics. We have headphones, we have solid internet, because I haven’t seen any issues here. And then when we’re bringing together folks for creative collaborations in this time of COVID, equity is a real challenge when we think about supporting everyone’s needs.

Natalie Nixon:

Yes, absolutely. And before I get into the equity piece, around meeting, meeting up, connecting, remember that book Love In The Time of Cholera, someone will write a book Love Tn The Time of COVID, maybe someone already has, about tonality and physicality. I’m just very conscientious about kinesthetic learning and making and moving in order to understand, and how we embody learning, how sometimes we’re not even aware why we’re terrified to do something. And we have to be conscious of how we’re stiffening up or how we’re feeling queasy in our stomach. And what was that first experience where that way of reacting helped us, and now may not be so helpful, it’s more of a barrier.

Natalie Nixon:

But being very conscientious about moving, it comes from my background studying dance. I studied dance since I was four years old. So I, even I mentioned earlier in our conversation about being at ballroom dance class earlier today, it’s some of the most joyous moments in my week is being at dance class because there are moments literally when I’m in class, either in my private lesson with my instructor or in a group class where I remember myself as five years old excited like, “Okay, when do I get to try it? When do I get to do it?” And being so happy to be moving and communicating in that way. So I just wanted to mention that.

Natalie Nixon:

But yes, you’re absolutely right that we have to have a conscientiousness about equity or lack thereof when we’re talking about meeting and connection in this virtual environment. I like to watch 60 Minutes on Sunday nights because it’s very nostalgic for me. Just that like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Natalie Nixon:

That sound in the introduction. It reminds me of when I was much, much younger and sometimes on a Sunday night, I just want to hear the tick tick, tick, tick, tick, and see who they’re interviewing. And last Sunday, they were looking at the city of Tampa, Florida. And in Tampa, Florida, because of the repercussions of COVID 7000 children did not show up for school. And they followed the social worker and her team as she went from home to home, motel to motel, grandma’s house to grandma’s house to figure out where these little kids were. And one of the things they reported about, at the end of the segment was that actually, they had connected and identified all but 700 kids, which is amazing to me. That they were able to figure all that out.

Natalie Nixon:

But one of the children they interviewed was it was a teenage girl, about 15 or 16 years old. When they tracked her down, she was living in a motel room with her dad, her mom, her sibling. And the interviewer, journalist was asking, “So how’s it coming along with your work? How are you doing in your work?” She said, “Oh, it’s fine. It’s fine.” And she said, “I’ll sit outside on the stairwell and I’ll do my work that way.” And the journalist said, well, “What, what are you using to do your work?” And she goes, “Oh my phone.”

Natalie Nixon:

So she’s using her phone to read a history lesson and try to figure out algebra or geometry or whatever they’re learning at that point. And then she said, “Well, sometimes I’ll take a walk.” And then the journalist said, “Well, it must be hard. There’s so many people around.” She says, “Yes, it can be hard, but you know, I’ll take a walk about a mile down the road to a park.” But then the journalists was like talking over the segment saying, but at the park there’s no wifi. So she has peace and quiet, but she doesn’t have wifi.

Natalie Nixon:

And if we don’t factor in issues around equity, around access, the fallout of the people who’ve been left behind because we don’t, for a number of reasons we don’t have systemic structural support for people who, who are not at an advantage just out the gate, it’s to affect all of us. This idea that we can’t split up the pie differently because I’ll get a smaller slice, no, equity is not about making sure we divide up the current pie differently. Equity is about expanding the size of the pie so that everyone benefits.

Natalie Nixon:

And I borrow a lot from the principles of universal design. Universal design is about designing for people who are differently abled. So like the Oxo kitchen utensils, that’s an example of universal design where the designer’s wife had horribly arthritic hands and so he made the spongy handles for the spatula and the whisk so that it would be comfortable for her. Well, it turns out that when you design for people who are definitely able, it’s actually better designed for everybody. Everybody loves Oxo kitchen tools.

Natalie Nixon:

So this idea about designing for the least amongst us actually raises the playing field for everybody. And we see that in the microfinance examples out of Bangladesh. The gentlemen, the economist who won a Nobel peace prize, where it turns out there are models from understanding how to provide access for emerging entrepreneurs who don’t look like folks in Silicon Valley, who are Brown women and in Southeast Asia from rural villages, that actually is a model for economic development that can be scaled. Also, you know, the Tata car in India. I lived in Sri Lanka, making bras and panties for the Victoria’s Secret brand is an amazing chapter of my life. And yeah, it’s common in Colombo to see a family of five on a scooter, no helmets.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow.

Natalie Nixon:

A little baby, a toddler up front in front of mom, two little kids smushed between mom and dad. And they’re jamming, they’re going about their day. And countries like Sri Lanka, India said, this could be a big problem if there’s a lot of motor accidents on the road. So how could we design, how can we lean engineer a car that would address the needs of this emerging middle class, a really stripped down an affordable car that’s safe. And that has some bit of a covering that might, for all intents and purposes, be like a scooter with the metal structure outside, I’m over-exaggerating.

Natalie Nixon:

But it turns out that that automotive design is of interest to Daimler Chrysler and to other major automotive companies. So when we design for the least amongst us, when we realize that we are all interconnected and that we must provide equitable solutions during this time of COVID, it raises the bar, it raises the opportunity, and the quality of life for everybody. For me, it’s take your medicine now or take it later, but we have got to deal with this. Otherwise we’ll take our medicine later.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fantastic. I was thinking, you were saying that it’s not a matter of just a smaller piece. It’s like the pie is getting bigger, but it also tastes better too.

Natalie Nixon:

Yeah, exactly. Tastes a lot better.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. So I want to come back to your MBA. And I always like to ask people about a meeting or a gathering that they were a part of, or they designed that they thought was more magical than normal. And if nothing else comes to mind, I am curious about the workshops you ran for the future of work as jazz. Like how did you bring those concepts to people in a way that was engaging and memorable?

Natalie Nixon:

Well, the meeting that did come to mind is the strategic design MBA program attracted some really remarkable, amazing people, a lot of whom I’m still in touch with and connected, with a lot of the alums I still am in touch with. And it was a very boutique program. I’m in Philly, I’m in the shadows of Wharton for heaven’s sake. And they’re like design what? That’s not completely fair, they’ve started to embrace design thinking and human centered innovation, but I felt like a David in a sea of Goliaths most of the time. And I wanted to always create a very special exit for our graduate students. So we would have these final dinners. And I bit off of something that NPR does, NPR has often done stories about your life in three songs.

Natalie Nixon:

So I would always ask everyone to send me, what’s your life in three songs? So the playlist at dinner was people’s magical songs. And people said, “Oh, whose song is that, Oh, why did you pick that one?” And so it was always this wonderful conversation. And I had so many amazing colleagues in the city of Philadelphia, who would gift their space, really cool spaces, and say, “Sure, you can have the dinner here.” And I worked with a really cool dude named Ben Walmer, who has this interesting background in farming and engineering and design. And he had this incredible, I think the name of his company was Highlands Dinner Club. But it was basically this mobile dinner party. And he would have scavenger hunt clues and that you’d end up in a little bit of the woods somewhere. And he would always curate these amazing locally sourced meals.

Natalie Nixon:

So that to me is an example of a meeting that was a convening, a gathering that became a bit of a ritual for the program. And I wanted them to know that I thought they were special and I wanted to give them a special sending off that would be memorable. And I was thanking them for taking the chance with me because they took a chance to get an MBA, a strategic design MBA program and exchange, they told me that the program changed their lives. They shared that they shifted to a different trajectory. And even if it wasn’t overtly a different trajectory, mindset shifts. So that’s an example of really memorable meetings and convenings.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s fantastic. Well, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, and I am really inspired to go create wonder, and maybe be a little more rigorous about it. So thank you for all the words. And I just want to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Natalie Nixon:

Well, I guess my final thought is first, if you’re so moved, definitely check out what I’m up to at figure8thinking.com. And if you’re curious about the creativity leap, you can download a free sample chapter on the website, just the top banner. And something I posted on Instagram this week, it was kind of an extension out of coming out of Thanksgiving time. I post a lot of little quotes from my book and just what’s top of mind for me. And I posted that gratitude is the gateway to wonder.

Natalie Nixon:

And so Douglas, you and I are talking just after Thanksgiving, it’s the first week of December. And sometimes it can be really hard to figure out what we’re grateful for doing such a really challenging time like COVID. But if you do a thought experiment of just observing five to 10 objects in your immediate surroundings, and think about the people unknown to you who are responsible for making that thing come to be, or because of that thing that reminds you of that trip you had, and then the people you met, gratitude is the gateway to wonder, and wonder is something that we really need to indulge in more than ever.

Natalie Nixon:

So that that’s the thought I would leave people with that gratitude is the gateway to wonder.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s so beautiful. Thank you so much for being on the show, Natalie, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Natalie Nixon:

Thank you, Douglas.

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 36: Wonder, Creativity and Hybrid Thinking appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I think that everyone has been strained with this pandemic, and no matter who you are, it’s not been an easy time for anyone. And I think that we have an opportunity here to improve on existing (meeting) systems by making them more accessible to everybody.” – Regine Gilbert

Show Highlights

[01:10] Regine’s Career Journey
[07:37] Problems with Accessibility in Virtual Environments
[14:24] Necessity’s Role in Developing Creative Solutions
[16:53] How to Have Conversations Around Accessibility
[26:00] Designing for the Future, Now

Links | Resources

Regine’s LinkedIn
WebAim
EqualEntry

About the Guest

Regine Gilbert is a designer, educator, and author. In her work as an Industry Assistant Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, her pioneering vision challenges the status quo with empathy at the forefront of her motivations. The combination of her experience in UX and accessibility-focused work provides her with an unshakable belief in opening up the world in an effort to widen communities and reconcile connection.

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

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I am with Regine Gilbert who works at New York University, where she is an industry assistant professor. She’s also the author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World: Designing with Accessibility in Mind. Welcome to the show, Regine.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, thank you. Happy to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. So, I’m really curious to hear just a little bit about how you got your start. I think working in accessibility and design is really important work, and I think if you’re anywhere similar to my age, there was certainly no degree in this. So, how did, how did you find yourself doing this work? How did you get there?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, I first started in user experience design about seven years ago. So, I haven’t been in it as long as some others in the area. And when I got into user experience design, I didn’t really know much at all about accessibility. I believe the course that I took had one slide, from what I remember.

Regine Gilbert:

But I woke up one day and I said, “I want to make the world a more accessible place.” And of course I go to Google, and I’m like, “Accessibility. What does that mean?” And when I put in “accessibility in New York”, I found a meetup, and luckily the meetup was happening, I think, within a week of when I had Googled this. And I went to my very first A11yNYC meetup. So, a11y is a numeronym for accessibility. There’s 11 characters between the A and the Y.

Regine Gilbert:

And I went to this meetup and I met some people who are still my friends to this day, and I really just got into accessibility, and learning about it, and applying it to my work. And at the time, I was doing freelance UX research work, and I was looking at websites and doing information architecture stuff. And I was like, “You know, your website’s not accessible.” And they’re like, “What does that mean?” And it’s like, “Well, I mean, do you know people with disabilities can’t really access your site, and you’re excluding them.” And they were like, “We had no idea.”

Regine Gilbert:

And I just found that more and more people knew very little about it, and that led me to speaking about it. And then speaking about it led to me writing the book.

Douglas Ferguson:

I want to talk a little bit about just how that moment you had when you searched on accessibility. And it’s like, “How do I even define this?” And I think that awareness is the first step, right? And you even talk about these companies that didn’t even realize that they had a problem, or even that there was such a thing. So, I’m curious how your definition of accessibility has changed over the years and how it’s continuing to evolve.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. I think that when I first got into it, I was really web focused. And then I started looking into other areas and looking into service and service design and building. Now I notice if I’m in a building and I’m like, “Well, somebody with a wheelchair couldn’t come in here. There’s no space, or they couldn’t use the bathroom here.” So, over the years, I’ve become a lot more aware of the inaccessibility of the world, and society, in a lot of ways. And yeah, that’s how it’s changed and evolved. I notice more.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, what have you been noticing since COVID, as we’ve all been thrust into these virtual environments?

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, that people with disabilities said, “You should have listened to us all along. See? People can work from home.” That’s one of the bigger lessons, is that all these companies who said, “Oh, no. We can’t have people working from home.” And all of a sudden you can. And Haben Girma, who’s deaf and blind, says people are disabled or non-disabled. And when a majority of non-disabled people need to work from home, all of a sudden there’s a way to make it work. Right?

Regine Gilbert:

So, that has been interesting. I think that a lot of people in the disability community are like, “Welcome to our world, because this is how we function a majority of the time. We can’t be around a lot of people, and that isolation you feel, that’s something we feel quite often.”

Regine Gilbert:

And I think that we have seen, it’s like the best of times and the worst of times in some ways, in that we’ve seen people really come together, form different groups, form different communities, but then we’ve seen the antithesis of that and people saying, “Oh, this isn’t real. We don’t care about other people.” And they’re being really silly and selfish about it all.

Regine Gilbert:

So, I think we’ve seen a duality of the best of times and the worst of times during this pandemic.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it’s interesting you pointed out how being forced into the situation kind of created empathy. You could argue that it’s artificial, but it’s there. The forcing functions manifest it.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it reminds me of the activity of “a day in the life”, or “in the shoes”, where I’ve even heard stories of designers walking around on their knees to think about the experience of children, right? And even people putting themselves in a wheelchair to like, “Let’s navigate the space,” or do these things trying to see through the lens of that experience. And so, I’m kind of curious. How do you take that a step further? I’m sure there’s some advanced techniques there that could be explored.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. There’s varying opinions on doing simulations. Some people in the disability community feel that they’re not accurate because you’re putting yourself in a wheelchair, but you’re not a wheelchair user. So, you may find it extremely difficult because it’s your first time doing it, and then you just make that assumption that it’s always difficult. And so, then, I think the best thing that you can do is actually get actual people with disabilities involved in whatever it is you’re creating, and have them be a part of the process, and hire them. Get them to give input, because there’s nothing better than getting it from the source.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love to hear that. That’s awesome. And so, let’s think about the virtual meeting space. As we’ve been kind of forced to spend our days on Zoom and use tools like Mural, et cetera, are there things that you are noticing, or that you’ve known, that are just being exacerbated now, that maybe more people should be paying attention to?

Regine Gilbert:

I think we’ve discovered the limitations of things like Zoom that are not really necessarily welcoming to people who are deaf, because there’s no captions that are provided through Zoom. You have to have a third party. Whereas with, let’s say, Google Meet, for example, you can actually see who’s talking because they use machine learning for captions. And even if you’re doing a presentation on Google Slides, you can also use captions so that someone can read along.

Regine Gilbert:

And there are other different artificial intelligence plug-in things that you can use for Zoom, but I think we see that these tools that we’re using are not as accessible as we wish. I mean, sometimes it’s not even about a person being disabled, but they might be in an environment that’s super loud, and they would love to have captions because their three kids are having their Zoom classes behind them. And even though they have their headphones on, it’s really hard to focus. So, I think that we’ve seen a bit of limitation with the tools themselves as we’ve gone through this process of being pretty much online, and it looks like we’re not getting out of this anytime soon.

Douglas Ferguson:

It also makes me think of some things we’ve run into with some of our workshops where there’s socio-economic imbalances as well. There’s accessibility issues where people maybe don’t have good internet, or they don’t have a powerful laptop or computer because there are requirements to run these things.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And in the United States, more than half of the country does not have high-speed internet. And so, a lot of people are like, “We’ll do Zoom, and I want everybody to keep their cameras on.” I was like, “Not everybody can keep their cameras on. It really will just shut down.” And I think we need to be mindful of that, not everyone has what we have.

Regine Gilbert:

If you’re in a bigger city, you really need to be mindful of where people might be coming from and what might be best for them to communicate. Maybe it’s just better for them to call in, and that should be fine.

Regine Gilbert:

And at the end of the day, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Gus Chalkias. He’s an adjunct professor at NYU, and he’s also blind, and he and I teach a class called Looking Forward for Assistive Tech. He says that accessibility is options, right? At the end of the day, that’s what it is. You’re giving options. And I think about that all the time. Why aren’t there more options here?

Douglas Ferguson:

Right. So, when we’re thinking about the options we need to create, what are some things we should be considering? I imagine there’s some categories that might be… I mean, to your point, nothing’s going to replace talking to people. I think having some categories to at least explore can help maybe even expose who we should be talking to.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. I think about things lately in terms of senses. We think of our five senses, and if we take away a sense, can we still experience that thing? And that’s how I like to look at things now.

Regine Gilbert:

If I take away the sense of touch, how different is this? If I take away my sense of sight, how different is that? If I take away my sense of smell, how different is this thing? And I think that when we start to think about, maybe, exclusion from the start, then we can look at things differently. It’s all perspective, right, and again, providing those options.

Douglas Ferguson:

It also makes me think, too, that it’s not just binary. And even if we don’t have blind people in our meeting, they might be colorblind, or they might be limited in some capacity.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Or someone might have low vision. Or how many people are feeling comfortable going to get their eyes checked, and they know they need to? I just got a notification saying, “You haven’t had your eyes checked in a while.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely.

Regine Gilbert:

And I said, “I need to go because things are…” I could tell things are changing for me. So, yeah, it is really thinking about someone who’s not us.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it’s interesting. You talked about not getting your eyes checked. I mean, how many people haven’t bought blue-blocking glasses, or have they been staring at a screen too long and they’re getting dizzy, and maybe they need a break. It makes me think our design, if we’re throwing too much stuff at people, we might be creating disabilities that they didn’t even start with.

Regine Gilbert:

Well, with this pandemic, I decided I’m going to buy a Nintendo Switch. And I bought the Switch, and I’m very excited because everybody talked about Animal Crossing, and I was like, “I can’t wait to play.” And “I can’t wait to play Mario Kart.” And so, I got my Switch, and years ago I had carpal tunnel issues in my right hand, and so I started doing a lot of things with my left hand.

Regine Gilbert:

And when I use this controller, after a while my hand starts to hurt. And I just think, “There’s no accessible controller for the Switch.” There is for Xbox, but I did actually just find an accessible controller that can lay flat, but it’s only available in Japan at the moment for the Switch. I was like, “Why isn’t this available in America?” I mean, so, give me the options, right? Just give me the options to do things different.

Douglas Ferguson:

The irony was not lost on me that the accessibility device was not accessible in the US.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Yeah. It’s not accessible in the US, so I was hoping I can figure out a way to get it from Japan.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, are there companies that specialize in aftermarket accessibility devices?

Regine Gilbert:

I’m not aware of any, but now you’re making me curious to look.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I was wondering. So, was this a device made by Nintendo and they just haven’t brought it to the US yet?

Regine Gilbert:

I think I want to say the company is Hero? I’m not sure of the name,

Douglas Ferguson:

What a noble mission that would be. Hey, there’s tons of products out here. They’re not all necessarily accessible. We’re going to provide aftermarket add-ons for everyone that’s in need. I love that.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. In the US, there’s an organization called the Able Gamers charity, and they do a lot of work to make gaming accessible. I need to look into it more, but they might have some stuff.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s cool.

Regine Gilbert:

Because people end up building it themselves if they can’t make it.

Douglas Ferguson:

I don’t know. That’s amazing through just open-source software and YouTube and online communities of all sorts, there’s this amazing stuff that’s been happening. And in fact, I’m diabetic, and there’s diabetics that have taken it on themselves to reverse-engineer the hardware and build in more capabilities that the device manufacturers haven’t been doing. And they’ve now got two different devices that we depend on talking to each other.

Regine Gilbert:

Wow.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because that would require FDA clearance, and the companies getting partnerships built and working together. And so instead, their hashtag is, #werenotgoingtowait. And I love this idea of the consumers standing up for themselves and coming together and just making amazing stuff to better their lives.

Regine Gilbert:

I mean, this is where things come from. I think a lot of times people will wait, and “I wish somebody would really come up with this thing.” And even for me, when I got asked to do the book, I was like, “Who wants me to write a book? What do I know?”

Regine Gilbert:

And I learned, actually, a lot as I wrote the book, and I wrote the book because I got a lot of questions from students. I had questions, and I answered those questions in the book. And sometimes when those things don’t exist, you have to make them yourself.

Regine Gilbert:

And the disability community, they are the most innovative group because they’ve had to make things work when they haven’t been given that option. And that’s what I put in the book. There’s so much innovation that comes out of the disability community.

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, necessity, right? I mean, follow the old quote. So, I want to talk a little bit about your point that you made around how important it is to talk to the people. And I know that there are some folks… Again, I would be willing to wager that there’s a large portion of the population that are afraid of those conversations because they don’t know how to approach them.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so, if you’re going to invite someone with a handicap to the conversation and be curious about their needs, do you have any advice on how to approach that conversation with, I don’t know, generosity, maybe?

Regine Gilbert:

I think going into it being open, and not assuming anything. We all come with our own bias, and I think we have to kind of put that to the side and be open to what people have to say, and listen. And this is something, especially in this country as of late, listening has been something that’s really hard to come by.

Regine Gilbert:

And I heard this, and I can’t remember where, but it said, “If you’re questioning things, then you’re open, and if you’re saying statements, then you’re closed minded.” And I think that a lot of statements are made, and not enough questions.

Regine Gilbert:

And I think that asking questions, and asking questions that are appropriate, and not insulting to people. And listening to people’s experience and having them tell their stories. I think that our stories we all have are so important and need to be heard, and people need to listen to them. So, that’s what I would say, is be open.

Douglas Ferguson:

And do you have any advice on the types of questions that are just really good? Because you said you want to ask questions that aren’t offensive.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think maybe that’s where people get stuck, even if they… I’m sure there’s plenty of people that just aren’t even trying. But the people that are trying, I think when they get stuck, it’s probably because they’re worried about offending, and it’s easier just to clam up and not say anything. Right?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah, I think you can ask someone, how do they go about doing XYZ thing? Right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. So classic ethnography type stuff.

Regine Gilbert:

Like, “How do you go about your day to day functions of work? How do you use Zoom? Are there any difficulties that you face?” And ask why to things.

Regine Gilbert:

If you really want to understand, you have to ask the question “why”.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Regine Gilbert:

And I’ll give an example. This past spring, I was talking with Gus. And Gus, who is blind, was saying… I don’t know, somehow we started talking about augmented reality because I have real interest in it. And we got on the subject of Pokemon Go. And he’s like, “I wish I could play Pokemon Go.” And I thought to myself, “Why can’t he play Pokemon Go?”

Regine Gilbert:

And because it’s a very visual game, right? And it’s not exactly easy to use with a screen reader. So, we started a discussion about this, and what would it mean for an augmented reality experience to be accessible for someone who’s blind?

Regine Gilbert:

And ultimately, this led to a decision where Gus became my students’ client, and my students worked on creating a concept for an augmented reality experience for Gus. And a lot of them came up with different games, games that use audio-spatial sound and haptic feedback. And it was really great for the students to think outside the box because a few of them were asking me, “How do we make augmented reality, which is a digital overlay over a physical space, into… How do we do that? How do we make it, and it’s not going to be visual?”

Regine Gilbert:

And I said, “Sound. Touch. Feedback. Inputs and outputs.” And they all came up with really cool stuff this past summer. And so, there’s opportunity there, but you have to be open to having the discussions and asking the questions and listening, and working with people.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. The spatial audio is really interesting to me, especially as a facilitator who really loved working the room, has now been confined to his digital compartments that we whisk people to and fro. And with the spatial audio, the idea of people clustering, that’s a breakout group. But certainly, folks that are vision impaired wouldn’t know where to go.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so, having the haptic feedback to have some indication of where they are in the space, that’s really fascinating.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, I’m curious more about just how we think about, as we’re designing experiences for teams to meet and come together, what do you think the best way is? I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me is maybe just actually taking the step to be aware that there might be some attendees in the meeting that may need special attention. We might need to design for their needs. But are there any things that folks should be considering, just in general, as they design meetings to be more accessible?

Regine Gilbert:

I think that looking at people, looking at the four areas from the web content accessibility guidelines is a start, right?

Regine Gilbert:

So, you’re looking for cognitive, mobility, hearing, and vision, and having an understanding if someone on your team has any disabilities. And a lot of disabilities are not even visible, right?

Regine Gilbert:

You can not see if someone is dyslexic or colorblind. And I think it’s making sure that the meetings themselves are as accessible as can be by providing captions when available, or a transcript if it’s something after the fact, because certain plugins can capture transcripts, and then any sort of documentation, and making sure the documentation is accessible, making sure that PDFs are accessible for a screen reader.

Regine Gilbert:

And I think that having an understanding and having an awareness of the needs of accessibility for meetings, because I think that everyone has been strained with this pandemic, and no matter who you are, it’s not been an easy time for anyone. And I think that we have an opportunity here to improve on existing systems by making them more accessible to everybody.

Regine Gilbert:

So, just having that understanding of awareness, that not everybody’s experiencing the thing as you do, and that you need to provide options for people when they need them. You need to allow people to keep their cameras off if that’s the case because they might have five kids running around, right? You need to provide captions when you can, and on and on.

Douglas Ferguson:

So, are there good resources out there to learn about the standards, or are how things are evolving, so that we can stay in tune with new ideas and new ways to be more accessible?

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. I always like the website webaim.org as a go-to resource because all this stuff can be extremely overwhelming, but I think they lay it out in a very good format.

Regine Gilbert:

I would also recommend equalentry.com. They have a lot of great blog posts related to accessibility that are short little reads. And I’m trying to think what else for anybody new to it. But those are the two that I would recommend.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. So good. And I guess considering where the world is, and what could be possible if we were willing to be more bold and take more risks, where do you think the opportunity is? Where do you see things going?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, part of my research now is looking into accessible XR, and XR stands for extended reality, which is augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and other immersive-type experiences.

Regine Gilbert:

And personally, I’m just going to be real. I think about myself and getting older, and the fact that I still want to experience stuff. So, I think when we make things accessible, it can be used throughout our lifetime.

Regine Gilbert:

In the past, I’ve done this workshop, Designing for Your Future Self, where I have people think about themselves as a 70-plus-year-old. And what does life look like? People go, “This is depressing. I never thought about this.” And I said, “But why aren’t we thinking about it? And why aren’t we thinking about it with more hope and excitement?”

Regine Gilbert:

Because we have an opportunity now to make things for our older selves, and in turn, we’re making things more accessible for people now. So, part of why I love what I do as an educator is that my students give me extreme hope for the future, and what we can do, and how we can apply what we know now, and make things better for the future.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. I just got goosebumps. This concept of designing for your future self and the ripple effects it makes, and the target that we set when we do that. That’s amazing.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And I like that you said ripples, because I think about everything as a ripple.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. So, I want to talk a little bit, too, about just the notion of XR, and how that, in itself, can create accessibility in itself.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh. Well, I mean, there’s a lot of work being done around XR and accessibility by my friend Thomas Logan. He is the owner of Equal Entry. And their XR, extended reality, is being used in therapy for folks. It’s being used to help people with Alzheimer’s or dementia by using iPads and having them direct them back to their rooms, if they’re living in a facility.

Regine Gilbert:

There’s so many potential applications for this type of technology, and I think especially around augmented reality. And I look at MacRumors and things like this, that Apple is putting a lot of money into spatial audio. And I think about that, but I also think, “Well, what if someone’s deaf? What are they experiencing then?” Right?

Regine Gilbert:

And so, I think there’s a lot of opportunity to improve on our current lives, but not all of it is going to be technical or technological.

Douglas Ferguson:

I guess the thing that comes to mind, it’s something I saw recently where Amazon was doing these little… I forget what they called it, but it’s these little micro-vacations that were virtual.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I thought, “Wow, that’s really…” I mean, I shared it with a few people, and they were kind of like, “Oh, that seems silly,” because they’re avid travelers. And I’m like, “Well, A, in this time of COVID I’m not getting on the plane. And then B, it would be kind of cool to go there before you visit so you can kind of understand a little bit, and you kind of experienced it.”

Douglas Ferguson:

I didn’t actually dive too deeply into it, but my vision of how cool it could be is if you had a tour guide that was just slightly customizing it for you and answering your questions, and you kind of see it virtually.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then, as you were talking about XR for accessibility, I began to think about physical therapy could be… Maybe you need to go in periodically, but you can almost do it daily if it was just a 15-minute check-in to make sure, “Are you doing the thing you’re supposed to do?”

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so it becomes more accessible by convenience, or by the fact that it’s there and available, versus having to be tuned for their need, if that makes sense.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. And I forgot to mention, this semester, actually, my undergrad students are working with a nonprofit out of Seattle called Home Again VR. Which, when people think about virtual reality, they tend to think, “Oh, I have to put on a headset.” That’s not necessarily the case.

Regine Gilbert:

You can actually do WebVR, which is more like a 360 type of experience. But this organization Home Again VR services folks who are elderly, or children in hospitals, and it’s the participant and a tour guide. And the tour guide will choose a location. Let’s say, Tokyo, Japan. And the two people will be in separate locations, but they’ll see the same things. And the tour guide will take them, and point out things, and they’ll start to have a conversation.

Regine Gilbert:

It’s a really cool thing. So, my students are working on giving some ideas on how to improve on the tool. And I think there’s a lot of… Not everybody can leave the house, right? So there’s a lot of opportunity there as well. And I personally have been using, in virtual reality, an app called Wander, and I have been able to kind of see the world in that way, even though I can’t leave my house.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s cool. It’s amazing. Right? Just this notion that these things are being brought to us and it kind of reminds me of all the science fiction where people just tap into the second life or the simulation.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. I mean, the smallest thing can just take you to a new place.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Yeah. It’s fascinating to think about all the levels of technology. Right? Because I’m sure there’s focus on making existing stuff more accessible, or creating systems that are just by nature solving an accessibility problem.

Regine Gilbert:

Yeah. There’s a lot of work being done in different universities. There’s an organization that I am part of called XR Access, which is, I think Verizon’s part of it. Cornell Tech is part of it. And they focus on different areas of extended reality accessibility, from the hardware, to looking at policies, to education in different areas.

Regine Gilbert:

There’s students in VR and educators in VR that are exploring those worlds, and the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium just last year had an event on inclusive design in this field, and they’ve created some guidelines around XR and accessibility. So, there is some progress, but we still have a ways to go.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. So, when you think about the difference between accessibility and inclusive design, how would you differentiate those?

Regine Gilbert:

Well, I would call inclusive design the big umbrella, and accessibility falls under that umbrella. Because we don’t really… When people ask, “How do you define inclusive design?” I was like, “Well, you can look it up. I mean, you’ll find different things for it.”

Regine Gilbert:

But I like to refer to Kat Holmes, who wrote the book Mismatch Design, who says, “We don’t really know what inclusion is, but we know what exclusion is.” And so, when we make things inclusive, typically will include accessibility in that. But inclusive is looking at things from a cultural perspective, from a language perspective. It involves a little bit more than accessibility.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I think a lot of times, when we think about designing meetings, it’s the inclusivity piece that’s so, so critical. Whereas, we don’t always run into the accessibility stuff because I don’t think that really… Well, when you’re thinking about products that are going to have massive scale, the likelihood that you’re going to run into users that you never even meet, right, you don’t even know, you’re having to address and support.

Douglas Ferguson:

Whereas the inclusivity stuff is definitely a challenge that I think we face all the time, and whether we notice it or not. Even moreso in this new global environment we’re finding ourselves in.

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

I mean, I’ve been noticing things where the English speakers have an advantage because they can read the material faster, and then they’re getting impatient while the other people are trying to catch up. Or, there’s lots of things.

Douglas Ferguson:

In fact, one that’s really fascinating that I’ve run into recently, and just been noticing this a lot. So, different cultures have different lengths of pause. That’s, I would say, their natural pause to indicate that there are no questions, or no one has anything to add.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so, if you mix two cultures, one that has a really fast pause, they don’t have to wait very long to make sure no one has anything to add, and the culture that has a long pause, as a facilitator, you have your work cut out for you because the people from that short-pause culture are going to run over those other folks.

Regine Gilbert:

Right. Yeah. I think that’s something to account for. Even time, right, and time differences, and understanding that if you’re having a meeting early, it might be late for people, and people may not be their sharpest when it’s midnight, and it’s earlier for you. So, there’s so many considerations when it comes to inclusive design that we need to consider.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. So, do you think there’s any, just kind of switching back to the accessibility piece, are there things that you would encourage folks just to keep top of mind more than anything, as they think about their meetings?

Douglas Ferguson:

Are there any blind spots that are just kind of easy to… Easy is a difficult word to grapple sometimes, but what are some things that people could just have on their checklist?

Regine Gilbert:

What is a checklist? I think being mindful of people’s situations, their time zones, how people communicate, as you alluded to, when it comes to how people pause or don’t pause.

Regine Gilbert:

I think making sure that documentation is available, providing a meeting agenda so people know what to expect, are things that are just considerate. And I think being considerate in the space where we are all a little bit struggling, I think, from time to time.

Regine Gilbert:

So, I think for sure coming to the meeting with a clear agenda, and making sure that you are mindful of people’s time, because our time is so different now with being home, and if people have families, that really needs to be taken into consideration.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. And I think, too, there’s a big opportunity to, as a facilitator, be vulnerable yourself.

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Because if we don’t model that behavior, how can we expect those in the audience to speak up if they’re not being supported. And so, we need to work hard to support them, but then also, maybe not come off so polished that people are afraid to disrupt things.

Regine Gilbert:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, it’s been a super pleasure chatting with you, and the work you’re doing is super important. And really, I would say, hopeful to think about. And especially, I’m going to be thinking about this “planning your future self” and designing for that. It’s really provocative. So, I want to just give you an opportunity to leave the listeners with a final message.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for having me on the show. I want folks to think about… One of the things that I ask first in my book is, “Have you ever wanted to go somewhere and you couldn’t get in? And how did that make you feel? Or, did you really want something and you couldn’t get it? How did that make you feel?”

Regine Gilbert:

And most folks will say, “I didn’t feel very good.” And at the end of the day, a friend of mine said, “We are an experience as human beings.” Right? And we create experiences.

Regine Gilbert:

And what we don’t want to do is we don’t want to leave people out. We don’t want to have people feel like they’re not wanted, and we want to be more inclusive in that way. Right? We want people to feel included.

Regine Gilbert:

So, I would say, don’t leave people with the feeling that you’ve probably experienced yourself, and be more inclusive and accessible in yourself and what you do in your work.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. It was such a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks again.

Regine Gilbert:

Oh, thank you.

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 35: Accessibility in the User Experience appeared first on Voltage Control.

“I often say that the facilitators who have been in this profession for over seven, eight, 10 years, we’ve been very fortunate to learn through trial and error. We made some errors, we got feedback, etc. Today I think there’s less room for errors, which means peer reviews.” -Vinay Kumar

Vinay Kumar is the founding Director of C2C OD, where he enables organizations and their talent to be more effective. He is also the global chair of the International Association of Facilitators and has held leadership and management positions in the worlds of education and banking.

In this episode of Control the Room, I talk with Vinay about listening skills, elephants, and patience in facilitation. Listen in to hear what small, nuanced actions a facilitator can take to leverage their team’s fullest potential.

Show Highlights

[00:50] Vinay’s Introduction to Facilitation
[05:21] IAF’s Function & Explanation
[15:05] Elephants in the Room
[21:06] The Flexibility and Discernment of a Facilitator
[38:50] The Role of Neutrality in Facilitation

Links | Resources

Vinay’s LinkedIn
IAF’s Site

About the Guest

Vinay Kumar is the founding Director of C2C OD. Vinay’s specialized eye for developing talent and cultivating potential on teams in various fields has given him a clear understanding of organizational strategy and the skills/characteristics that are required of a great facilitator. He serves as the global chair for the International Association of Facilitators, where he leads aspiring professionals in their facilitation journey.

About Voltage Control

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

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Contact Voltage Control

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. Today, I’m with Vinay Kumar, the founding Director of C2C – OD, where he enables organizations and their talent to be more effective. He is also the current global chair of the International Association of Facilitators. Welcome to the show Vinay.

Vinay Kumar:

Thank you Douglas, pleasure to be here.

Douglas:

Absolutely. For starters, let’s hear a little bit how you got your start. How did you find your way into this work of facilitation?

Vinay Kumar:

Oh, completely by chance, I spent about 20 years plus in the corporate world. I worked in technology, banking, a professional services firm, held management and leadership roles, and one of the things I was always very passionate about was in talent development of myself, of course, and developing my own people, putting them through training programs, et cetera. I used to sponsor a lot of training programs and bring in external vendors and I used to co-facilitate with them or co-train with them as an internal resource. That’s how I actually dipped my toes in facilitation.

Vinay Kumar:

But to be honest, it started more with training. I started the tell mode and then realized that people are pretty smart. I don’t need to tell them much, I just need to get them to think, and started exploring more and more about facilitation. About 12 years ago, left the corporate world and went full-time into training and development, and facilitation.

Douglas:

I’m curious about this switching from the tell mode to the thinking mode. What have you found to be your go-to strategies to get people thinking, versus just trying to shove information in?

Vinay Kumar:

I always remember when I used to attend training programs and workshops, I developed this very, I kind of joke with groups I work with now saying, “Look folks, I don’t want to create Death by PowerPoint, and I know all you are very skilled, like me, with sleeping with their eyes open, and having the 1,000 yard stare.” What I found very useful and engaging when I was sitting as a participant, or I still sit as a participant, is when people ask great questions and we get into conversations, and start thinking about what those answers mean, and hearing different perspectives. So I just leverage what I experience as a participant and what I would like to experience, and trying to create that same experience for groups I work with. If that makes sense, right?

Douglas:

Absolutely. So you kind of try and model the experience after something that you would appreciate or any human.

Vinay Kumar:

Exactly, and I think there is room for the entire education system, the entire professional training to evolve into this. Of course, when I started my career, I didn’t have Google. Today, people coming in, they can find the answers for themselves, so who are we to stand in front of them and give them the answers? They can actually verify and fact check whether our answers are correct, and they’ll probably find a different opinion as well. So it’s better to get them to start thinking.

Douglas:

And you’ve been the international, or you’ve been the global chair for the International Association of Facilitation for almost a year now, so you came on just in time for the global pandemic, just to flip everything on its head.

Vinay Kumar:

Oh yes. In fact, I often blame my predecessor, “You arm-twisted me in to taking this role, but you didn’t warn me about the pandemic.” But, no, but it’s the International Association of Facilitators, but I sort of got into this, was introduced to the organization almost nine years ago. Well, no, almost 11 years ago. And I absolutely feel in love with the community, it is a completely volunteer driven organization. I am a volunteer board member. Every chapter, very region is run by volunteers, and I consider it the best professional family I’ve been part of.

Vinay Kumar:

So it’s a sort of a way of giving back to the profession, and particularly now with the pandemic, I think a lot of the facilitator community, we thrived and our energy came from working with groups, obviously in a face-to-face environment, and we have all had to pivot to completely digital and virtual, like everybody else. But trying to create that same energy is so critical, right? And I think it’s been an interesting year, let’s put it that way.

Douglas:

What are some of the ways that the IAF has been supportive of members in that transition?

Vinay Kumar:

Well, the way we’ve been is, one is at a very tactical and practical level, we created a virtual facilitation resource page on our website, where it’s sort of crowd funded, our own members started posting stuff, resources links. It is also e-community helping each other. We started learning sessions, virtual meetups, and very recently, we’ve always had in October something called Facilitation Week or International Facilitation Week, and this year’s Facilitation Week probably has been one of the largest we’ve had in years. Over 260 events, 5,000 people all around the world coming together, sharing best practices, learning. So we’ve been helping them and helping ourselves and the community learn as well.

Douglas:

And so if someone’s new to the IAF or interested in learning more about it, how might they find out more? Or what’s the best way for them to get started?

Vinay Kumar:

Oh, just go to our website, www.iaf-world.org, that’s our website, or you can drop me an email. They can write to office@iaf-world.org again. There’s a huge amount of resources available on our website. There’s chapters, there’s regions, we are structured in seven global regions. We have chapters and communities all over the world, so you have that face-to-face participation as well, eventually I hope, once this pandemic starts to die down, that we’ll be able to get groups together and learn from each other. There’s also a whole professional development pathway for facilitators to enhance their skills.

Douglas:

And so on the professional development side, that would be training to level up and become certified as a facilitator?

Vinay Kumar:

So the IAF, we don’t provide training programs. We actually endorse. We have our IAF Code of Ethics and Values, as well as our Core Facilitation Competencies published. So when someone becomes a member, they read and learn about them. We have IAF endorsed facilitation training programs that you could go to, to learn the skill. But once you’re a practitioner or doing facilitation part-time, or full-time, or whatever it might be, as an independent practitioner or within a company, they go through what we call our Professional Development Path, which is you want to be an Endorsed Facilitator or a Certified Professional Facilitator. So there’s a whole pathway there. It’s grown a lot. I remember when I joined that we only had our CPF, which is our Certified Professional Facilitator accreditation. Now we’ve added a lot more as well.

Douglas:

That’s great, and with it being a volunteer-led organization, who does the certification? Or how exactly does that work?

Vinay Kumar:

Oh, it’s again, it’s a peer review. So we have what’s certified assessors, they go through an assessor path. They themselves are CPFs. One of the things I got so valuable for me, when I first got my CPF was, it really was a recognition by my peers that I meet the Core Facilitation Competencies and it’s not easy, right? So it is a pretty rigorous process and I loved it. I mean, once you’ve been in the community for a long time, you’re a CPF, you’ve been practicing, you could go ahead and try to become an assessor yourself. And there’s a whole assessor development pathway as well.

Douglas:

Very cool, excellent. I guess, switching gears a little bit, but on a similar path, what advice might you have for new facilitators? For those folks that are tuning in, maybe they’re a leader, not too dissimilar to where you were later in your first part of your career, before you switched to become a facilitator. They’re a leader who is starting to pick up on some of these things and maybe they want to lean in more, or maybe they’re early in their career and they just see facilitation as a path for them. What advice might you have for just getting started? And what do they need to think about early on to make sure they shape their course correctly?

Vinay Kumar:

One of the things I have seen in the last few years, personally right, the concept of facilitative leadership or the concept of facilitated meetings, I think facilitation is increasing in scope of application. It’s when groups come together. So I think it’s an opportunity for anybody in a hierarchical position, to use facilitation as a more effective tool. We always say to leverage the wisdom of the group. No one individual has the right answer. And particularly today I think, we talk about traditional leadership, and I personally believe that leadership is pretty democratized now. You hire good smart people, and if you keep telling them what to do, then you’re not leveraging all the good smart that you hired them for. So there is an opportunity to start using facilitation even as a frontline supervisor to solve a problem, get a group.

Vinay Kumar:

And I think to be honest, we all do it. I used to use facilitation. I never knew it was called that. For example, I’m sure you do too Douglas. When you get your team together, when you brainstorm. You say, “Let’s do a brainstorming session to solve a problem.” Guess what? You’re using a facilitation method, right?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Vinay Kumar:

And there’s so many other methods and processes that we can use for effectiveness, decision making, and problem solving. I would suggest to any leader, any professional starting up, learn these skills. Learn to ask, not tell. Learn to hold space, and listen, and let people share. Learn to hold your own opinion back, because I think there is so much power to hearing other people’s opinions. And I think personally right now, we need a lot more better listening skills in the world.

Douglas:

Yeah, we talked a little bit about that in the pre-show chat. I want to dive into that a little bit. Why is it so important right now that we embrace these listening skills? Why is it just so much more critical in this point in time?

Vinay Kumar:

Well, look at what’s going on around the world. I personally, I won’t say it’s just the last six months, or three months, or year. I think it’s been going on since the advent of social media, because social media was a one-way of communicating. People put out opinions out there. You can’t really have a live conversation so well using social media tools. So I think we started telling, rather than asking questions. It’s easier to post your opinion on any of those platforms, than to ask a question and hold a debate, right? So I personally think people forget to listen. We started becoming 140 characters focused and I’m glad they increased that character count, but it’s still not enough. I think it’s a great opportunity to get groups and hear opinions. We need to start to listen to each other better, ask better questions of each other, understand opinions, probe, clarify.

Vinay Kumar:

I mean it’s the same thing. In one way, facilitation is growing. But if you take another profession, coaching, right? Coaching is also growing. And coaching is exactly, it’s more one-to-one and one-to-small group, but there is also the power of asking good questions and listening.

Douglas:

I love that you bring up questions and how questions are so important as far as how we practice active listening if we don’t have good questions. So I’m curious, what are some of your go-to questions to get a group really thinking?

Vinay Kumar:

Well, the first few questions are pretty easy. It’s about asking what’s happening, why are we doing it this way. I think, what else could we be doing? What are we not doing that will help us get better at what we can do? Or, what are we missing here? So sometimes getting the group to step back and reflect. Why is it going … Sometimes the meta questions are also really cool, I like those. Why is it that we are thinking the way we are thinking right now? Right? And people go, “What do you mean?” I say, “Just think about this question. Why are we thinking this way? What’s making us think this way and move us down this path?”

Douglas:

And you know, there’s an assumption baked in there, when you ask, “Why are we thinking this way?” There’s an assumption that we’re all thinking the same, so it’s also equally interesting to say, to ask people, “How are you thinking about this?”

Vinay Kumar:

Exactly.

Douglas:

So then they take a step back and label it, right? I interviewed Jan DeVisch not long ago and he was talking about his different thought patterns that people have, and if the group is operating at different thought patterns, then it’s going to be hard to get them aligned, because they’re seeing the world from different vantage points.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the questions I really like and I used it for the first time to be honest, I heard one of my colleagues, I mean, I read one of their articles and read about this question, and I threw it out. “We’ve had a great conversation here, everybody seems to be moving in one direction, so what is it that’s not being said is this room?” Right? And then, so they went and started looking at each other, who’s going to say it? I really found that to be a very powerful question.

Douglas:

Yes, 100%, if we can get those elephants kind of out in the open and make it safe to talk about them, we’re going to move forward. Even if we don’t move forward as far as we had hoped, we might have moved in a more provocative direction that’s going to create more opportunity in the future.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love surfacing the elephant in the room, and it’s actually easy to surface the elephant. It’s what to do with it once it pops up, right?

Douglas:

Yeah, let’s talk about that. What do we need to think about, the space we have created with that elephant? Or the space we’ve consumed with it and how we move through that?

Vinay Kumar:

Well, one thing is, there’s a pre-condition though to surfacing the elephant in the room, right? Or whatever the elephants that may be. You’ve got to create a safe environment first, and also be considered extremely neutral by everybody in that room, because otherwise, you’re causing more damage. I think a lot of facilitators struggle with the elephant in the room, because they don’t know what to do with it once it pops up and they’re looking at it.

Vinay Kumar:

So having a plan, sometimes even holding the position and saying, “Okay, now that it’s out, does the group want to solve this now? Or do we want to take a break and come back to this at a later stage?” We don’t have to go into solution focus right now. Sometimes it’s just a classic change curve, right? Sometimes we just have to get people to share it first, then give time for it to marinate, simmer, whatever it might be. Or people to reflect or sleep on it, and then come back the next day.

Douglas:

Yeah.

Vinay Kumar:

So many people take a timeout for example.

Douglas:

100%, because there could be contradictions there, right? Even though they realize it’s the elephant, there might be reasons why they need it there. Even though this thing causes problems, they might see a justification or a need for it, and so they need to unwrangle and unpack those things, and it takes time.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, and one of the other challenges is, you just said it, Douglas, you said time, right? If we surface it and then we’re looking at it, once again, oh my God, I’ve only got two hours in this group and this thing is going everywhere. And this is one of my pet peeves is, when people say parking lot. “Let’s put it in the parking lot.” Oh my God, you know, it’s like, then you can’t find the car in the parking lot. You forgot where you parked. Yes, I’m not dismissing the value of a parking lot, but the elephant definitely doesn’t go there. That’s too big, right?

Douglas:

Yeah, right.

Vinay Kumar:

And I’ve seen people do that, say, “Okay, this is a big issue. I think we need to deal with that later, so let’s put it in the parking lot.” It’ll consume the entire parking lot.

Douglas:

It’s a bit dismissive too, right?

Vinay Kumar:

It is, yeah, absolutely, and groups see through it. They say, “Why did we even bother bringing it up then?”

Douglas:

Yeah, that sounds like it’s better to acknowledge it and let the group think about what our next steps might be. Whether we’re going to talk about it at a later date, we’re going to unpack it a little bit right now, or … But just kind of dismissing it and moving on is we’re probably going to make it more difficult for them to bring it up in the future.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, one of my favorite examples I’ll quote was, I was running a workshop for a senior leadership team in a resort. I had flown in, they had all flown in from another town and we were all there. It was supposed to be just a two day workshop doing some strategy work. But at the start of day two, this elephant surfaced, and I really just put it out to the group and said, “Let’s take a break. How does the team want to deal with this? Do we think it’s critical? That it has to get dealt with?” So we spent three hours just discussing how to tackle the elephant and one of the decisions the group said was, “Okay, it looks like this is going to take more time. Can we just take a few hours off? All go back to our computers, see if we can free up our calendar for another day, extend our reservation in this hotel and Vinay, can you stay an extra day and work with us on it?”

Vinay Kumar:

So that two day workshop became a third day, because that group was so open to tackling it and giving it that time, right? And I think the agility of a facilitator and the group is so critical at that time. I mean, this happened really, extremely rare. I mean, we’ve added a few hours here and there, but this was a whole day that the group said, “We need to take time to do this.” And still, I am impressed with the group willing to do that.

Douglas:

100% and, you know, I think it’s maybe one of those challenges for facilitators when, from the perspective of the facilitator, we are expected to keep time, we have to design agendas that are tight, and drive the outcomes. But then when this curveball is thrown at us, when this thing surfaces and emerges, being willing to adapt on the fly is, I think we’re talking about a level of sophistication that really separates, I would say, a skilled facilitator from the novice. And so what kind of advice do you have as far as, when you’re in that moment, and you’re in that zone of making sure like, okay, we got to keep things moving along so we can stay on track, then something surfaces that’s clearly going to potentially throw it off track, how do you distinguish between do we actually spend time on this, or do we stick to the agenda?

Vinay Kumar:

One of my fundamental rules is, well, I do one of three things, or sometimes a combination of all three. First is, I’ve learned through experience not to over-design the time, right? So if you start saying, “For 15 minutes, we’re going to spend on this, the next 10 minutes, we’ll move here” et cetera, right? So if you do that, then you feel the pressure of time even more. So what I often, well, my design today is, by the end of the day I want to get the group to achieve these outcomes, as the group has discussed. And this is the general flow I’m going to go with, because for me the quality of the conversation of the group is more important than the speed of the conversation of the group. So it gives me that little bit of flexibility.

Vinay Kumar:

The second is, when these curveballs or these things that come up, I often put it out to the group and say, “This is what has come up. How does the group want to handle this?” And if they say, “We want to tackle it?” then I’ll say, “As a facilitator, it’s my responsibility to let you know that, yes the group can tackle it. What else from the objectives that the group wants to achieve today, do you want to deprioritize or reprioritize, and does the group think we can achieve all of it today?” Especially after that incident I just gave you about that leadership team where it took an extra day. That’s something that the leadership team decided they needed another day. I just was very lucky to have asked the question, “What does the group want to do with that? Do you want to deal with it now, later? How do you want to tackle it?” And the group went in with it. So I learnt a lot from the group, power of their decision, because it’s their choice, their ownership, their accountability. So that’s the second thing I do, put it back to the group.

Vinay Kumar:

The third thing that I often do is, I also try to hold myself as a facilitator in check. I am, my colleagues will, if you were to speak to my colleagues, they’ll tell you, I’m pretty … I’m not a very patient person. So I have to be very emotionally aware of how I am feeling and the more I feel under pressure, I actually become more aware of my assumptions and biases coming involved. So I check myself, and I put myself sensing back to the group. “Guys, I’m feeling a little bit of a pressure here on whether I should tackle this or not.” And actually I had, once a group said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. It was just a small comment for us. We have discussed this particular elephant many times in the office. Since you asked, we voiced it, but it doesn’t need to get that here, so don’t stress about it.” So the group gave me that guidance as well, what their expectations of me were at that moment.

Douglas:

I love that you brought up feelings and being aware of what’s surfacing in your body, because that’s something that people always talk about, like it’s hard to read the virtual room, or someone recently just said, “It’s hard to read the Zoom” which I thought was funny. But the thing is, our body is a massive antenna, and even if we’re in a Zoom, those feelings will start to bubble up. And you were talking about, if we can tune into those, there are amazing signals that tell us how we might need to vocalize those things and do a check in, so that’s amazing. And I think that more facilitators really tune into that, because it’s a gift that’s coming up, and if you just let your emotions or your feelings get the best of you, you’re going to do disservice for the team.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, in fact you just reminded me, you asked me how do we do this, right? How do I do it? One of the things I’ve learnt and this is experience, and I also learned by errors that I’ve made, but there’s two aspects. There’s the doing of the facilitator and the being of the facilitator. When you’re in the doing of the facilitator zone, you’re worrying about what’s coming next, what activity you’ve got to accomplish, but you’ve got to pause that and say, “I need to be a facilitator here.” The doing can be flexible. The doing can change, but the being has to be consistent. If that makes sense?

Douglas:

Absolutely, I love that. It’s like, we had to show up and we had to tune in to our showing up, but one of the things we love to talk about in our facilitation training, is when you’re walking into the room and everyone’s felt it. You walk into the room and you’re like, this room is tense. If you make that assessment, but don’t verify that. If you don’t check in with the team and say, “Is it tense in here?” Then now you’ve made an assumption about that room that might not be true, and everything you do from then on is going to be impacted by that feeling that you have that … Like you were saying that assumption that this elephant was a big deal, but they’re like, “Oh no, we’ve talked about this a bunch.”

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, so I always ask permission. I set the ways of working upfront. The WOW with the group. And I hate calling them ground rules, that’s such a … it’s the group’s way of working, or how we are all going to collectively do our ways of working. I often say, “How are we going to share …” One of the questions I’ve started to ask, “How are we doing to share, pause and share how each one of us is feeling and what we are sensing in the room?” I’ve done it a couple of times and that’s been very useful.

Vinay Kumar:

And often I ask the group just, “How is everybody feeling? Where is everybody at? What are you sensing the mood in the room?” And after a while, I never assume that they want to know mine, but I’ve always when I asked a few people, they say, “So Vinay, what about you? How are you feeling? How are you sensing the room?” That gives me permission to say, “I’m sensing some tension here. I’m sensing some people are uncomfortable with the pace,” Or whatever it might be, and then that just opens it up for everybody.

Douglas:

What about when, have you ever had situations where you polled what are people feeling and sensing, and you feel like they’re only scratching the surface, or they’re not really opening up?

Vinay Kumar:

Yes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, just ask, so is that, what is … You ask a couple of probing questions, if it doesn’t go anywhere, it doesn’t go anywhere. I mean, there’s a few people who may open up, there’s a few people who may not. And we’ve got to be open to the diversity of thinking styles and how much people want to share of themselves in that room.

Douglas:

Yeah, this whole segment that we’ve been delving into, it has really been touching on this vulnerability of the facilitator, and I think it’s really important for facilitators to balance the honing of their craft and the professionalism that they bring to the situation. But also there’s vulnerability in showing people that they’re human, because it’s really easy to fall down this trap of like, “I’ve got to be perfect. I got to show up and I’ve got to run this thing.” Versus being human, showing people that you’re fallible, and that while you have studied this stuff and you’ve got a lot of experience, there’s no such thing as the perfect expert, and if we try to hold on too tightly to that, then we can’t be curious about the humans. We’re going to hold onto our agendas too tightly. We’re not going to allow things to slip and be fuzzy or squishy. And so, I just wanted to get your thoughts on this notion of being invulnerable as a facilitator.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, that comes back to my earlier thought, right? If you are focusing on the doing part only, that’s when you want to perfect the … The way I kind of do it, I do a lot of content based programs that I deliver as well. One of the things that I’m also called upon is, very, very simple high impactful presentations for senior executives, right? I do some work around that. One of the ways that I always say is, “The doing is the content, the being is the delivery.”

Vinay Kumar:

And what happens as a facilitator then, if you’re facilitating a group, your methods, processes, tools, your structure, is the doing part. But your doing is only piece. You can do everything else and still not achieve your outcomes, because it’s the being, the human element of participants and you, the group you’re in service to, and the group that has to come into play. I completely agree with you, I think.

Vinay Kumar:

Now, there’s a caveat there. We can’t overdo the being as well. If you only become the … when you work with a bunch of engineers, or being in Bangalore, I have a lot of IT companies as clients, and if you spend a lot of time getting into the, “So let’s discuss your feelings” et cetera, they say, “We want to get a move on” and they actually, “We want to accomplish this.” So it’s being able to bring it in when appropriate, when you’re sensing that room. So it’s a very fine balance between the two.

Douglas:

You know it takes intuition, I think, that’s part of reading the room. And also, ahead of time, I’m a big, big fan of doing stakeholder analysis, understanding who’s going to be in the room, what are they bringing? Where are they at? And we borrow a lot from learning experience design, where they really look at the students and like, what are the outcomes they want to drive for those student? And then, what are the students bringing into the room at that time? And if we can acknowledge that, then we can better support them, because if they’re very unreceptive to anything “Woo” then we better be very careful about that stuff, because if we alienate them, we’re not going to be able to take them on any journey.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely, I agree with you and I think it’s you can’t assume that they will not be, but you can’t assume that they will be either, right? So you have to, like you said, sense the room. And you spend at first, a little bit of time earning their trust.

Douglas:

Yeah.

Vinay Kumar:

Earning you know?

Douglas:

Yes.

Vinay Kumar:

They’re also watching whether you really hold the neutrality of it as well, and one of the things that I talk with my colleagues a lot, is when groups are doing flip chart work, and each facilitator has got their own style, I tend to be away from every group. I’ll stand away and just observe the dynamics at play, rather than … So my colleagues, and especially when I co-facilitate, I love having a co-facilitator who has got a very different style. He or she may want to walk up to each group and spend a minute, and work with them in groups, whereas I like to step back and observe the room. So those small things play a role.

Douglas:

I love that you brought that up, because as a young facilitator, when I was working with co-facilitators, sometimes I would challenge myself. I’d go, well look what they’re doing. Why are they doing that differently? I’m doing this wrong. But then as I got more comfortable in myself and my role, I began to appreciate these differences and sometimes it helped me just watching them and the way they behaved, it helped me understand how I differentiate and why I appreciate that. And I can appreciate them for how they are and then when we come together, we can create this dual kind of experience, which is cool. And that was really fascinating to hear you talk about that experience as well. Have you noticed other things about co-facilitators that you appreciate? That it’s just nice to have them along for the journey?

Vinay Kumar:

I love co-facilitating with people who have got very different styles or different skill sets. For example, I design at a very high level flow. I’ve got others who are very detail-oriented. They get all the material together, so they bring in the structure, I bring in the flexibility, right? They bring in some of the ability to ask some probing questions that I may have missed out. I’ve seen that. I’ve also seen, you know, I’ve got my nightmare stories of co-facilitation, where people have, they walk up to this group and say, “I needed it bullet-pointed it, but you guys are using a star as a bullet point. Can you use a dash please? Just to be consistent with all the other groups.” And I’m like, “Really? You want a bullet point with the same font, and color and …” Just let it go, right? It’s sort of OCD facilitation, I don’t know.

Douglas:

Yeah.

Vinay Kumar:

But I am the other way, I’m sort of a little bit of a klutz with materials. I kind of move materials around and I forget, “Where the hell did I keep this thing?” And it’s great to have someone who keeps an eye on these things for me. And I pick up some things that they are not necessarily … When they sometimes say, “Okay, we’ll wrap up this conversation, because we need to move into the next area of discussion” and I’m like, you know, we have an agreed signal, and I say, “You know what? The quality or the cost? Let’s put it to the group. So do we want to wrap this up and what’s the group’s thoughts? How’s the group feeling? Do we want to move forward? Where is the group at?” Rather than us saying, “Let’s move forward” you know?

Douglas:

Yeah, I think even if you don’t have a lot of, I would say, difference in your facilitation skills, just having someone else in the room noticing things that you maybe didn’t notice, or just checking in on things, you know, if you’re just looking the other way and something happens. And I think that especially in Zoom, where you’re in Teams or whatever virtual tool you’re using, having another set of eyes on all the screens can be really helpful, just to notice things.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, absolutely and the one thing I absolutely love about co-facilitation is the debrief and the feedback that we share with each other, right? That’s for me, the most invaluable, because when you are … We have to set that up before obviously. That this is the kind of feedback I’d like from you. This is what I’d like you to look out, things. That’s part of my development. So if you have done that well, you’ll get some amazingly significant feedback at the end.

Douglas:

100%. It’s similar to the peer review stuff you were talking about the IAF are doing, right? Where even when you’re working with clients, if you’ve got someone in the room who can give you some honest feedback, it’s such a great way to improve and grow.

Vinay Kumar:

Absolutely, and I’m sure … Do you do a lot of co-facilitation yourself, Douglas?

Douglas:

I try to when we can if the budget allows it, and then we do a weekly facilitation practice, where we invite, we bring in folks from our community together and just try things out, and we always do feedback before we shut the meeting down, just so that, not only do people get advice on how to improve whatever they’re experimenting with, but they also get really solid facilitation advice. “Oh maybe you should’ve prompted this differently.” Or …

Vinay Kumar:

Right.

Douglas:

… “When you said this, it was a little confusing.” So yeah, it’s something we try to do as often as possible, but sometimes the budgets just don’t allow for bringing in extra heads.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, so if it’s in the same town, I sometimes bring in a co-facilitator as an observer, somebody, as part of it, just to learning, because I also say, “I will have a colleague come in with me, and assisting me, or working with me on this program, we’re not …” Yes, we have clients, you know, “Am I going to get billed for this?” “No, you’re not.” But then they understand the value of having two people there, and more importantly, it’s growth for both of us.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s a good point, and I love it when we can make it happen, and I encourage people to do it as well, it’s great.

Vinay Kumar:

It’s a lot easier in the virtual world.

Douglas:

Yeah.

Vinay Kumar:

For sure, right? Because-

Douglas:

No flights needed, right? And time zones, no concerns about time zones.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, no flights, no time zones, yeah. No, but one thing you mentioned about Zoom for example, or any technology, even observing who is unmuting themselves, because if they’re just getting the unmute button, that’s a signal for you, if you’re sensing that somebody wants to say something.

Douglas:

Absolutely.

Vinay Kumar:

Right? Just observing, keeping track of that and sometimes on digital platforms, you’ve got able to look out for, the cues are different.

Douglas:

That’s right.

Vinay Kumar:

The cues are just different.

Douglas:

Yeah, and there’s one interface for Zoom called Macro, you basically install it and then log into it, like you would Zoom, but it’s a different interface. And it shows you who’s been talking the most.

Vinay Kumar:

Oh yeah.

Douglas:

And they just get bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

Vinay Kumar:

Oh wow, cool.

Douglas:

But to your point, if there’s different cues or signals, if the software could do a better job of pointing those out to the facilitator, it would be great. But where we’re at today, it’s having an extra person that’s scanning for that stuff can definitely help out.

Douglas:

I wanted to circle back really quick about something that you said in the beginning, in our pre-chat, and I just wanted to see if there is some more to explore there around this notion of a neutral process facilitator.

Vinay Kumar:

Yeah, so there’s group process facilitation and then there’s facilitative learning, right? The group process facilitator is typically neutral. So for example when I am called upon to help a leadership team define their strategy for the next three years. I am neutral, I couldn’t care less what strategy they come up with, as long as the group is satisfied with what they have come up with. My neutrality in fact, I often say, “The more I know about the company and the more I know about their business, the greater the pressure on me to maintain my neutrality, and not jump in with my content expertise.” But that’s a very, very simple perspective.

Vinay Kumar:

But there may be community based facilitation, there may be community conversations and there are two points of view there. How do I, or how does any facilitator hold their space and be neutral in that, not take this side or that side, right? One of the most challenging conversations I ever facilitated was a group working on their diversity and inclusion strategy for moving forward, because they had feedback from an employee survey that the company was not diverse enough. They hadn’t created a very inclusive culture and this leadership team came together and were having this conversation. And some of the stuff that was being said in the room, I had to take a, you know, remind myself hold your tongue, this is not your place. You want to just jump in.

Vinay Kumar:

So I really felt my neutrality being questioned, myself, my self-awareness. I kept stepping further back and letting their conversation happen without even being in earshot of the conversation, because they were just capturing it and putting upon a wall, and then leading through clarifying questions. But I think that neutrality is such a critical piece.

Douglas:

That’s interesting. Do you think that has to do with your desire or your style to step back and observe the room from a distance, so that it helps you keep that neutrality?

Vinay Kumar:

It helps, but to be honest, it’s not, it’s a learnt style. I have stepped in early on. I have received feedback, I have made my mistake. I often say that the facilitators who have been in this profession for over seven, eight, 10 years, we’ve been very fortunate to learn through trial and error. We made some errors, we got feedback, et cetera. Today I think there’s less room for errors, which means peer reviews. I like what you said, if you are doing those practice sessions, that’s when you have got to put people through situations where they are stepping back. Are they jumping in to share their opinion? What’s the kind of question? Is it a leading question? Is there an implicit bias behind the question? Those things we need to deal with in a lab or in a practice environment, because when we are in service with the actual group, we have to be even more careful of holding our space in a neutral space with everyone. If that makes sense? So I’ve learnt this skill of stepping back as a way of managing my derailers.

Douglas:

Yeah, absolutely. Well Vinay, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with some final thoughts.

Vinay Kumar:

Well, I would say a couple things. One is, facilitation is here to stay. Facilitation can be used in many different contexts. Every profession needs to learn how to use it, and in this time where, whether it’s in society, communities, in where you live, in your business, there is an opportunity to bring people together and leverage the wisdom of the group. So I always tell people, “You don’t want to be a sage on the stage, you want to be a guide by the side” and that’s what a facilitator does.

Douglas:

Excellent, well Vinay, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for joining me.

Vinay Kumar:

Great, thanks so much Douglas. Stay safe.

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, 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 34: The Capability to Tame Elephants appeared first on Voltage Control.