Video and transcript from Jennifer Houlihan’s talk at Control the Room 2022
Control the Room 2022 was an absolute success! We hosted our annual facilitator summit last week and our makeup sessions alongside our partner, MURAL. Our wonderful connection between the live event and the virtual world, hosted by Mark Tippin, Director of Strategic Next Practices, Mark facilitated “Mind Shift” sessions, where he guided our attendees through a dialog about how everyone was impacted by the talks. He engaged both in-person and virtual attendees through our various activities in our conference mural. It was inspiring to have so many people joining in different ways and everyone getting the chance to communicate.
We also partnered with SAFE this year to support and honor a lost colleague, Jenni Robertson. The dedication of this summit comes after losing a coworker, mother, and friend to family violence, and Voltage Control has pledged to work with SAFE to stop family violence for everyone. We wanted to take a moment and look back on all of the moments of insight, knowledge, and growth we all took part in over the course of the summit.
This year’s summit theme was SHIFTS, and as we move into 2022, we have seen shifts in the way we work, connect, and honor one another.
This year we hosted 18 facilitators in a hybrid space. We were live in-person, on Zoom, and even created our own Control the Room VR space, and we must say the event, even with a few technical issues, turned out to be a hub of idea sharing and growing with each other.
Each speaker delivered a 20-minute lightning session, and each session was filled with a sense of community, play, and story-telling.
The Generation Trap: Moving Past Dated Labels
They went to people and asked them to identify what generation they thought they were in. Y’all, they even gave them options. They weren’t asking them to just make up some cohort. They were asking their option and most people could not put themselves in the right group. So if that doesn’t tell you that this is a completely artificial construct that does nothing but limit us and keep us apart from one another, I don’t know what else you need. It’s aggravating.
Jennifer Houlihan
Generational divides and identity are not real. When asked what ‘generation’ they fall into, a surprising number of people will pick the wrong one. Narratives like ‘Boomers are bad at new technology’ or ‘Millennials are entitled’ contribute to ageism and create constraints in how we treat our own potential. Reverse mentoring is something we should all keep in the front of our minds. If you do not have a mentor that is younger than you, you need to get one! Keep yourself relevant, inspired, and on a path of lifelong learning!
Watch Jennifer Houlihan speak on ‘ How To Lead Trauma-Informed Meetings The Generation Trap: Moving Past Dated Labels :
There’s an example that Douglas was talking about the other day, this idea of a physical histogram that you might put people together in your organization and say, “All right, all the people who love Joni Mitchell come to the front.” They’re all not going to look the same. They’re all not going to be the same age. There’s going to be a wide variety in your organization so can you start playing with that?
Jennifer Houlihan
Jennifer Houlihan:
Hello, my friends. Oh, there is so much to tell you, but let me start here.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Once upon a time, it was my first day of school and I had my new jeans on. I had my new sneakers. I had my big red backpack and I was ready for the first day of school.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Unfortunately, I was late. So when I got into the classroom, there was only one seat left and it was right in front of where the teacher had all of their stuff set up. And I squeezed my way in just trying to be cool, being late, being the last person there. And I managed with my new big red backpack to knock over some water that immediately went spilling toward the teaching materials and I panicked.
Jennifer Houlihan:
I’m the oldest daughter in an Irish Catholic family. So of course I decided I would fix this. And I ran out to get paper towels. Couldn’t find them anywhere. Eventually found my way to a kitchen where there were some paper towels. Got them, realized I was lost and could not find my way back to the classroom.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Eventually got back into the classroom and victoriously flung open the door, had the paper towels ready to be of service, ready to help. And it was already cleaned up because there was a classroom that already had paper towels in it ready for just this sort of thing. But everybody knew my name by the end of the first day of class, which was great because I was 54 years old when I did that. Sherry knows because she was there. It wasn’t Sherry’s computer the water was heading for, fortunately.
Jennifer Houlihan:
But that is not where I thought I was going to be when I was 54 years old, running around like a crazy person with a big red backpack and sneakers looking for paper towels. That is not what I thought 54 was going to look like.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So I will invite you to take a moment to think back when you were a kid. Maybe you’re old enough to have remembered, “I wonder what I’m going to be like when it hits the year 2000?” But a lot of you are not old enough to do that.
Jennifer Houlihan:
But think back when you were a kid, what did you think being older was going to look like? What did you think you were going to look like when you were older? Because my bet is that you were wrong. My bet is that you have turned out to be someone much more glorious and interesting and exciting than you ever would’ve imagined at that time.
Jennifer Houlihan:
But what I’m going to be talking about today, yes, we’ll be talking about generations certainly. But one of the things I want to point out is that there is so much money being spent on this kind of thing. I hope there are no generational consultants in the room. The US businesses spend more than $100 million a year on generational consulting.
Jennifer Houlihan:
The flip side to that is that when there was meta-analysis done of 20 different studies looking at more than 20,000 different people, their attitudes, their perspectives, how they chose to live their life, how they chose to operate in the workplace, they’ve found that generations basically didn’t exist.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So officially, I guess my presentation here to you today is to talk about the generation trap. But I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this. So if you’re on Zoom, maybe don’t listen, but generation are bullshit, y’all.
Jennifer Houlihan:
That is what I’m here to tell you. They are arbitrary. They come from nowhere, they are marketing tricks and they do not bear any resemblance to the humans that you are going to be encountering in your life, in the groups that you’re facilitating and the groups that you’re working with.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So let’s just put that out there now. We’ve maybe given this image, but it is useless. It is not something that is going to help us at all. The fact is that there was a big study done by Pew and they’re they’re fancy, right? Pew Research. They know what they’re doing.
Jennifer Houlihan:
They went to people and asked them to identify what generation they thought they were in. Y’all, they even gave them options. They weren’t asking them to just make up some cohort. They were asking their option and most people could not put themselves in the right group.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So if that doesn’t tell you that this is a completely artificial construct that does nothing but limit us and keep us apart from one another, I don’t know what else you need. It’s aggravating.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Here’s a quote I love because it doesn’t have square words in it, but I still love it. And it’s that, “The idea of generations is marketing. It’s a modern form of snake oil. It is a way to try to explain the ills in society.”
Jennifer Houlihan:
“Oh, millennials don’t care about this.” “Oh, boomers are a pain in the neck.” None of that is true. And all of it is reductive and it makes us small. And you know, I hate that.
Jennifer Houlihan:
The fact is that we’re all aging. We’re all getting older. And one of the things that is so important, Matthew talked about it; Steven talked about it today, is the sense of belonging… That if we want forward momentum, if we want movement, if we want progress, if we want to advance toward our aspirations, people need to feel as though they belong with one another and to one another.
Jennifer Houlihan:
And aging, if we are all so fortunate, is the only group that all of us are eventually going to be part of, right?If we play our cards right, we eat the healthy food provided by Voltage Control, and we don’t eat too much of that rice, although gosh, it was good, wasn’t it? We are going to age.
Jennifer Houlihan:
And the great thing is a lot of businesses now are paying attention to this, but not enough. Well, DEI programs are on the rise as they rightfully should be. As we begin to start to recognize the whole human as they come into the workplace.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Only 8% of companies are addressing ageism as part of their DEI efforts because it’s kind of invisible, right? These generational labels that we use as shorthand are just taken for granted that we can talk to each other that way and say, “Oh, we need…” They used to have bean bags over here and Josh would say, oh yeah, because the millennials want bean bags. Well, not necessarily. Millennials don’t necessarily want a particular kind of furniture.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So here’s my sigh of relief that I have around issues like this. And this is a quote from Zaza… Oh shoot, didn’t I practice this too? Kabayadondo… Kabayadondo from Sesame Workshop. And her perspective is this: that design is implicated in all social problems.
Jennifer Houlihan:
The reason for that is because oppression and exclusion and cutting people out and making people feel less than, or small or different than, or othered is not part of the natural order of things. That’s something we create. And if we can create it, we can uncreate it. Yes, so I knew I was with my people.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So my invitation to you, as we continue to explore these things is to think about where design and design thinking might come into play. And some of these more thorny issues in our workplace, even when it comes to things like policy, we’re all probably pretty familiar with this basic framework, but I just want to share it with you.
Jennifer Houlihan:
I’m a pretty new facilitator myself so I appreciate the reminders. Sometimes there are a lot of frameworks out there. So the design framework we’ll be talking about today starts with empathizing, right? You want to get into the mindset of the people that you are trying to serve and connect with. You want to define what the issues are. You want to ideate, brainstorm, come up with some solutions and then hopefully prototype and test. We’re not going to do all of that today, unfortunately, but I’m working on a longer workshop.
Jennifer Houlihan:
But we’ll start here. Right? So let’s talk about empathizing. This is a great place to start. If you think about your workplace or think about the team that you work with, it is so important to remember that ageism and age bias doesn’t just move in one direction.
Jennifer Houlihan:
HR complaints, more than 40% of those come from people who are under 40 in the workplace who are being made to feel less than, who are made to feel that their contributions aren’t significant, that they aren’t ready to participate in those conversations. Comments like, “You girls, could you take that chatter over to… I’m trying to work here.”
Jennifer Houlihan:
That kind of thing, you might not necessarily think of it as ageism. There’s some misogyny in there too. There’s there’s probably a whole bunch of intersections happening, but that’s a real thing that happens. It is not just people on the older end of the spectrum who are being marginalized. It can also be people who are newer to your organization, who perhaps don’t yet have the confidence to speak up.
Jennifer Houlihan:
And there is a lot to unpack here because when you think about it, yes, there’s a lot of external work that we could be doing, but internalized stereotypes are so powerful.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So one of my invitations to you is to see if there’s a way that you can start a conversation about that when you’re working with a group of people; if you’re noticing the folks on the younger end of the spectrum are not participating perhaps as vocally or as actively.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Is there a way that you can reach to them? There is a profound disconnect for so many young people in their belief in the contributions they can make in terms of reverse mentoring.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Anybody here over 30? Anybody here over 40? All right, if you’re over 40, you need a mentor under 30. And obviously, you can start here. I try to keep a couple on deck at any given time. And I’ve got a 16 year old and an 18 year old who help me keep it real. But thank you. Yeech is the word of the… Yeech is so over. Okay.
Jennifer Houlihan:
The next thing we want to move into is starting to define what the problem is, knowing your landscape. And I want to do a little bit of myth busting while we have our time together today and here are a couple things. There’s a lot on this screen, but the one I really want to call out is about young people. Young people are the ones learning new things. Sure, but so is everybody else.
Jennifer Houlihan:
When you look at the studies that are out there and people who are interested in self development, people who are pursuing new interests, you see that number does not decline significantly over a lifetime. It hangs out about 60%.
Jennifer Houlihan:
No matter if you’re talking to people who are just out of college, people who are thinking about grad school, people who are getting ready to retire or people who are thinking, “I’m not going to retire, I’m going to do this other super cool thing.” It’s about 60% of people are actively interested in learning new things.
Jennifer Houlihan:
There’s so many of these generalizations that we have been fed from the time that we were small and we’ve been talking about it all day, but we’ve got these opportunities as facilitators to help people unlearn some of these things and perhaps relearn something new, something fresh.
Jennifer Houlihan:
Then we want to ideate, and I would like to give you, yeah, you’ve got a couple of minutes. I would like you to give you the opportunity to get together at your tables and think about one of these opportunities in your workplace. Oh my goodness, and these glasses are new. I can’t read that. Let me go over here.
Jennifer Houlihan:
The idea is that we’ve got three options, right? The first thing that you can think about disrupting is the policies and procedures in your workplace. That might be something you want to tackle. That could be everything from family leave and what happens with childcare issues if school gets canceled. Apparently some schools have already been canceled in Austin for Friday. They’re just proactively canceling. So good luck with your childcare, y’all. So that’s one set of things you might look at. Let’s see what the other things are. Because you know, I can’t read those because they’re really small. All right.
Jennifer Houlihan:
The next one is to think about, do you have something in place in your organization where you can start to avoid generational emphasis? Do you have a young employees group? Do you have a group especially for people over 40? Do you have a boomers club or something like that in your organization? And if you do, how might you unpack that?
Jennifer Houlihan:
There’s an example that Douglas was talking about the other day, this idea of a physical histogram that you might put people together in your organization and say, “All right, all the people who love Joni Mitchell come to the front.” They’re all not going to look the same. They’re all not going to be the same age. There’s going to be a wide variety in your organization so can you start playing with that?
Jennifer Houlihan:
When I did this workshop previously, one example of a group I came up with was the idea of playlists and having different ages of people put playlists together and seeing what kind of variety of music that everybody found compelling.
Jennifer Houlihan:
And then the last one is, are there some opportunities? You may not be at the top of the org chart or in a position where you can change organizational policy, but you can model, right? You can lead by example. So maybe that’s something that you can think about.
Jennifer Houlihan:
How might you lead by example in busting some of these myths and getting people to shift their thinking away from boomers, always and millennials, never to thinking about the actual individual humans that you’re working with.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So if you wouldn’t mind, just have an informal discussion. In your Zoom rooms, you might want to do more of a thoughtful reflection or a journaling, or you can certainly put it in Mural. Thank you to our sponsor. But I’ll give you two minutes, two minutes for that.
Group:
[inaudible 00:17:02].
Jennifer Houlihan:
All right, let’s bring it back. All eyes on me. I didn’t wear this dress for nothing. Thank you.
Jennifer Houlihan:
So let me just close with a couple of pro tips. If you want these, I’m happy to send you these slides. There’s way too much text on here. But the main important thing is finding that mentor… The mentor who’s not you. You’re not your user and this is a perfect example.
Jennifer Houlihan:
I want to share with just someone who inspires me. You’ve probably seen this meme a time or two. How did you feel as kids? This is our friend, Steve Buschemi. And I am pleased to tell you that this Halloween, this is from Halloween 2021, he dressed up as that meme and gave out candy on his front step because he’s a badass. If you’ll notice the Twitter account is Wu-Tang Is For The Children, which is an important Twitter account to follow.
Jennifer Houlihan:
If you want to talk to me about TikTok, I’ll talk to you about that. Whatever you need I’m down with the kids. So thank you. Thank you for listening.
