A conversation with Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at Mural

“Now more than ever, we need facilitation, which is different than being a facilitator.”- Jim Kalbach

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, Douglas Ferguson talks with Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL and author, about his facilitation journey and expertise in mapping. Jim shares a pivotal experience leading a workshop at LexisNexis and how it propelled his career. He discusses the influence of room setup on collaboration, the power of visual maps for team alignment, and his interest in Wardley maps. Jim also reflects on the evolution of facilitation with technology, the shift to remote workshops, and the future of facilitation as a widespread skill. The episode emphasizes the transformative role of facilitation and visual tools in improving group collaboration.

Show Highlights

[00:03:24] Meeting demand for facilitation
[00:11:03] Impact of physical space on collaboration
[00:16:14] Transformative impact of mapping
[00:18:56] The Wardley Map
[00:24:33] Openness to New Ideas
[00:32:43] Technology and Facilitation
[00:45:32] Facilitation’s impact beyond work

Jim on Linkedin

About the Guest

Jim Kalbach works at Mural where he’s the Chief Evangelist. He is also the author of several books, including Mapping Experiences and The JTBD Playbook

About Voltage Control

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

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi. I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where I speak with voltage control certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives, as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative.

Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about our twelve-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today I’m with Jim Kalbach at Mural, where he is the chief evangelist. He’s also the author of several books, including Mapping Experiences and the Jobs to Be Done Playbook. Welcome to the show, Jim.

Jim Kalbach:

Great to be here. Looking forward to our conversation, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. It’s always fun to chat with you, Jim. I guess, to get started, let’s hear a little bit about how you got your start. What kind of planted the seed for you with regards to facilitation?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think one of the first things that I remember where it was clear that I was the facilitator was a workshop that I did as part of a larger effort around workflow mapping and workflow analysis. This is when I worked at LexisNexis. I was living in Germany at the time and working with our business units around Europe. I had done some field research and created these maps, these diagrams, and that was also a precursor to the book that you mentioned just a moment ago, but that effort came with a workshop, and we did a workshop in Paris at our Paris business unit with about 25 people from around the company. People flew from England, different people from the Paris French business unit were there, and it was a day-long workshop that I led. First of all, there was a pressure going into it, and I had to be really well-prepared.

But given that there were some senior leaders there as well too, I had to really perform and lead them through the agenda that I had, but also show them customer centricity and these things that were new to them as well too. Based on that, then I got all these other gigs from other business units at LexisNexis, and then I kind of became the guy that went around to the different countries and the different business units, and were running these workshops. That wasn’t necessarily the first time that I led a workshop or facilitated a meeting, but that was one, for me, that the bar was much higher for that one, day long. A lot of money invested in it in terms of time and travel and senior leaders there, and I do remember that workshop as being kind of a moment, I should say, where I was like, “Oh. I’m the facilitator, and people are following me and senior leaders are following me.”

Douglas Ferguson:

That sentiment of, “I became the guy or the gal,” is something I hear a lot. It’s like once you do it, people realize you’re good at it, and see what’s possible, when you bring people together in that way, then people start raising their hands, “Can you come help me? Can you come help me?” Do you remember any of those early? What was it like in those early days of getting those requests and there’s more demand for those kinds of experiences?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. I mean, it was similar to what you described. There was an experience there that I was able to achieve with that first one in Paris, and it turned into demand. Other people wanted it, and they wanted it from me as well too, so that actually then kicked off a whole series of things. I even flew to Australia. I did some work down there, did some things in the US. I mean, I was literally all over, and I was in demand, basically, I think, in part because I did that one great show, which was, like I said, the bar was a lot higher for me in that game.

Then, it wasn’t about the experience, I think, that people had. I didn’t have any special knowledge and any magic buttons. It was just, “Hey, we want this for our business unit as well too.” I think, in part, it was the subject matter, right? But it was also that idea of bringing people together in a meaningful and thoughtful way, in a structured way that you could literally be in a room together for eight hours, and be productive, collaborative, and get connected with the team as well too. There was a demand for that, and that really kind of elevated my status and kicked my “career off” as a facilitator.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. What do you think was different about that experience versus what people were used to that really created that demand or made them step back and realize like, “Ooh, I want more of that,” or “We need that too”?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, I think a couple of things. One, as I mentioned, this was based on a strategic imperative that we had at the time to understand the workflows of our customers deeper. I raised my hand right away and said, “I can map that, because I like maps, Douglas, and I map things,” so I mapped the workflow of our customers, and then I had them all plastered on the walls, right? So, you walked in. Oh, and the other thing that I did too, by the way, which I have a habit of doing, I’m sure you’ll empathize with this, I walk into a room, the first thing I do is rearrange the furniture, right? Because it is like conference style or the UN take council table.

I’m like, “Nope, no table in the middle. We’re doing circles and breakout groups.” So I rearranged the room so that when people walked in, they saw all these breakout groups and maps on the wall, and they’re like, “Wait a minute, this is going to be different.” Then, it was, in part, not only because I had the maps and things like that all over the walls, but we were on our feet most of the time, right? It was, “Okay. Here’s the research, a couple of principles.” I gave him some things. We had a nice discussion. Go into your groups, and you’re on your feet and you guys are trying to solve the problem together, and then we’d come back together and go into breakout groups.

So I think it was a combination of all of those things, the fact that I ran a very, very different type of session than people were maybe used to. “Oh. I’m flying to Paris.” Then, be in a meeting, and they had their notebook ready to take notes or whatever and watch bullet points go by until their eyes glaze over. It wasn’t like that at all, so it was a bunch of factors, I think, that came together. The visualization of it, the setup of the room, the way that it was 50% interactive. I think those were the things, and I say that because those were the things that people then asked me to do. They would say, “Oh. I want that interactive thing with all the maps on the walls.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. The furniture thing is often overlooked, and I don’t know how many times I’ve run into folks that are just like, “Oh. Well, this is the room I’ve been given,” and it reminds me of doing a workshop at the Air Force, and I walk in and it says “training room,” and all the desks are metal. I swear they weighed like 200 pounds each. We were actually wearing long shirts and ties, and Reagan, and I start moving the desks, and the captain’s like, “Wait a second.” He sees us with our sleeves rolled up in our ties, and he calls a bunch of cadets in and makes them move the desk for us, but anything’s possible. Don’t take the standard layout for granted. You have any good stories about situations where rearranging the room made a huge difference like that?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, a couple of them. I’ve been in a situation where I went into the room, and it was a conference table style thing, and it was these heavy glass things, and basically, the stakeholder said, “We can’t move these.” It was hard to physically move them, but he was like, “We can’t rearrange the room,” so then it’s suboptimal for breakout groups, and you’re constantly tripping over each other as you squeeze behind the wall and stuff like that. So sometimes you have to deal with that. But going back to that Paris session that I just described, that sticks in my mind as kind of a kickoff into facilitation for me, the room was way too small. I say that because it fit like 25 people, and we had 25 people in it. So the people, the office manager, whoever booked it for me, said, “Oh. You got 25 people? I got a room for 25 people,” but very often those numbers are like, if they’re just sitting there still with a notebook on their lap,” but to have a room that you could walk around, it was not nearly big enough.

So what we ended up doing in one part, I remember one of the diagrams that I had, this is very long. It was two meters, it was like eight feet of mapping, right? And there wasn’t enough wall space, so this one map, this one breakout group map literally went around a post, like a column. We had to bend the map, so it was like, “Okay.” We were really trying to squeeze every inch of wall space out of that. From that, my rule of thumb is you want a workshop room that is twice as big as any hotel says will fit in that room. If the hotel says it fits 25 people, then no, I want the room that fits 50 people in it, because you need that room to get up and walk around and that kind of thing if those are the types of things that you’re going to facilitate, which is what I tend to do,

Douglas Ferguson:

Especially if there’s a conference table in the room.

Jim Kalbach:

Right.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s like barely enough room to get the chairs out and moved, much less if you have stuff on the walls and people are trying to huddle and stand between the table and the wall. It’s near impossible.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, and it can work, crunched into a corner or with artifacts up on the windows and stuff, which we’ve all done, right? But I find that my belief, Douglas, is that the quality and the nature of the collaboration space affects the quality and the nature of the collaboration, right? And if you do want that interactive, flowing, and free form kind of dialogue, the room can facilitate that or enable that or not, right? And that’s why when I walk into the room, the first thing I start doing is moving chairs and moving tables. It sounds like you do the same thing, so it’s a common belief I think that a lot of us have, whether it’s explicit or not.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. To your point, it reminds me of Conway’s Law. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this one. It comes from the engineering world, software development folks. It’s basically that any software product is going to mirror the structure of the organization that created it. And so likewise, any collaboration that’s happening is going to mirror the structure of the space they’re in, so if you’ve got people seated in rows, all they can do is turn to their left and right to talk and collaborate, so that influences the network, if you will, of communication. I love that point you made about the quality of the space is going to impact the quality, and it’s also structural. I think it’s structural and qualitative.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that, and there are some spaces that are designed to have certain messages or they communicate in and of themselves, like a boardroom communicates. There’s somebody at the end of the table or courtroom. The judge sits higher, and everybody faces them and they stand up. All of those aspects of a gathering, bringing people together, it makes a difference on what’s expected of them, how they behave, how the interaction actually happens. Yeah, I placed a lot of weight on the physical setup. Of course, if it’s in person, right? I would say the same thing applies remote. I’m very attuned to remote spaces, which are very often a collection of tools, and being at Mural, where I work now for me, the setup of the mural and how that’s going to interact with Zoom and chat and things like that, I’m very careful about how I’m going to use those digital spaces, just like I do in person.

Douglas Ferguson:

You have to set up those spaces ahead of time, just like rearranging the room. Absolutely. This talk you have about the visual impact that a space might have, walking into a conference room and it’s setting a certain tone, it’s sending a message, it makes me think a lot about mapping. How do we visually represent things that exist in the world and concepts so that we can better understand them in ways that would require a lot of dialogue or a lot of prose? And so, I’m curious, what led you to start mapping? Do you remember what some of your early mapping moments were and how you got there?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think the precursor to that was, “I like maps,” like real maps. You remember back in the day, Douglas, before navigation systems and things, and folding them up in the car or wherever, the big map, like road maps?

Douglas Ferguson:

Randall McNally.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Unfortunately, nobody can read a map anymore, but that’s just a casualty of the time, but I used to love them and I used to just look at maps, atlases, globes, and things like that. So I just loved understanding and thinking about things in a very spatial way, in general, but I think when I started to get into design, UX, and information architecture, for me, at that time, it just felt very natural for me. Rather than talking through something to say, “Let me draw that for you,” or “Here. I can create a diagram and explain it better and quicker,” which I believe visualization helps you do.

It helps you explain things in a different way, and it helps explain things with a certain amount of expediency that somebody else can grasp at a different level. When I started to get into mapping professionally, customer journey maps, experience maps, workflow diagrams, and those types of things, it just really came to me naturally, and I ended up studying the space. This is even before 2010, really, but when I wrote my book in 2016, I had been looking at all kinds of journey maps and service blueprints, which all have their roots, even all the way back to the 70s, 80s, and things like that, but they didn’t really become more popular until more recently, but I had been studying all of those things. It just felt very natural for me to express myself, but also to encapsulate research as a diagram.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’ve seen teams that struggle to collaborate, struggle to communicate, just transform when they’re looking at a map of some sort, whether it’s a current state, future state, or something more detailed and specific as a service blueprint that you mentioned. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it’s aligned with the specifics of what they’re trying to accomplish. Man, it can really just blow the roof off of a lot of strife and conflict that people have, just because of that alignment and just clarity that it can provide. I’m sure you’ve got stories or anecdotes around how maps have transformed a group before.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, absolutely. I call all maps, one of the terms that I talk about in my book is alignment diagrams, so I talk a lot about alignment, and there’s two ways to see alignment. One of them is outside-in, so coming from human-centered design, when I think about experience maps and journey maps, it’s really about representing the individual’s perspective, the customer perspective in a way that others can easily grasp, right? So there’s this outside in view, but then there’s also this, what I call inside across alignment, because the people who have to understand that experience and then create an experience for those customers, they have to be aligned as well too. So there is this meeting of the minds that I have absolutely seen in all of the workshops and mapping efforts that I’ve done as well, which is really important, I believe, that visualizations can achieve much quicker and at a different level of comprehension. I think there’s a couple of things behind that. First of all, because something like a journey map is customer-centric, it doesn’t have an opinion of a department or a specific function.

The opinion is, I’m the customer. Customer is king, right? This is a really important point here. What that does is people can find themselves and their own work in a map, right? Because it’s about here’s what the product development roadmap is, or here’s what the marketing campaign. It’s, here’s what the customer is doing, and if you’re in marketing, you might look across the map and see marketing campaigns, and if you’re in product, you might see sprints or something like that, right? But the viewpoint is of the customer, so I think there’s this harmonizing effect that maps in particular journey maps and experience maps, there’s this harmonizing effect that they bring to them, and the visual aspect of it is not unimportant, because that same information, as a list of bullet points, would be probably incomprehensible or you’re not able to see cause and effect in the same place. That’s the thing. You can see cause and effect in one map, and that really has an effect on teams, not just individuals, but on teams in a different way, that tends to get them aligned.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. When you were talking about cause and effect, my brain went to worldly maps, and I’m curious, have you done much work with worldly maps, being a mapping aficionado?

Jim Kalbach:

No. What are they? What are the, worldly?

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow. They’re not super popular. There’s a few folks that are using them. I would definitely say check them out. It’s a little bit more advanced than the spectrum of mapping. A user journey map, you can pretty much read a couple paragraphs and be like, “Okay. I kind of basically get this, and I’m going to go just do it,” whereas a worldly map, there’s some different layers around, and it’s really looking at the economic drivers. It’s almost like, I’m going to butcher this, but basically if you think about there’s a supply chain to anything existing, there’s also a life cycle to anything existing, and then there’s also economic drivers. If we’re dealing with products that are going to be bought and sold, how far are they on this maturity curve? Then, are they in R&D, or are we actively making money from them? And so, it’s really interesting to look at your innovation portfolio and think about where you might invest or move things along. That’s my real quick, 30-second attempt.

Jim Kalbach:

I mean, it sounds valuable for the reasons that we just discussed, right? That same information in a spreadsheet would not resonate as much with a group of people and have that aligning effect. And just to go back to the beginning of our conversation here too, an artifact of any kind of map, I think, almost asks for facilitation around it, right? Because that’s the thing about a journey map that I always say, is that there’s no answers on the journey map. People look at it and go, “Yeah, I didn’t learn anything.” It’s like, “That’s because you didn’t facilitate a conversation on top of that. You have to bring a lens on top of it. You have to rate yourself, find the moments of truth, or see what competitors are doing better or whatever the levers of change are that you’re going to grab onto. That comes out through the conversation, not from the map, right? So therefore, it’s not about the map, it’s not about the noun, the artifact. It’s about the mapping, which is a verb, and the mapping requires a guide, a facilitator to bring a group of people through the mapping conversation.

Douglas Ferguson:

And maps can be such a powerful tool to bring into a toolkit as a facilitator, and the beautiful thing about a map is that, unlike a lot of facilitation activities, it’s not this rigid structure of, “Here’s step one, here’s step two, here’s step three.” It’s like, the point is, “Build this map, and explore it and discuss it together,” and sure, some maps, there might be sections that you work through in a logical order, but it’s less rigid in the sense of like, “Hey, I got to make a group do this and then do that.” It’s more, we’re shaping this thing and trying to depict the story together, which I think it’s kind of liberating, and if you get an instinct and comfort with it, you can almost swap any kind of map in as this thing we’re going to do with this group based on whatever it is that they’re trying to accomplish.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. Agree, agree, and again, my focus is on the conversation. My focus is on the interaction or activating what is on the map, but the map, as a visual diagram, that becomes the centerpiece then, right? So it’s not everything, but it is this compelling centerpiece that the conversations kind of swirl around. I’ve used the metaphor of a campfire before. You’re sitting around a campfire, and it’s not about the fire, it’s about the conversation around the fire, right? But without that thing in the center, those conversations have a different cohesion to them, right? It’s the glue that holds things together, and to your point too, it can be random access. You can start in this corner and go to that corner, or do it the other way around or go back to the beginning, so it allows for very fluid conversations as well too, which then you, as the facilitator, also have to recognize, that it’s not going to be step one, step two, step three, step four, like you described, right? That that conversation, because the conversations with maps can be fluid, you want to design the interaction to also be fluid.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes, but it’s not quite as open and nebulous as a normal just wide open conversation, because you’ve got this anchor, this focal point of the map. And to your point about the random access, that’s actually a really powerful aspect, because then you can remind people that we can always revisit a step. When you’re needing to move on, let’s actually hit the pause here and now let’s look at this spot over here, because oftentimes looking through that other perspective will help them then come back and think about things they hadn’t thought about, or what’s the intersectionality between, now that I’m thinking about, I don’t know, our revenue drivers versus whatever we were just talking about?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess, in that sense, it’s something like a journey map, an experience map, for instance. It’s a structure that liberates.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes. I love that. So I also am curious about something that I want to come back to LexisNexis, where you were talking about this is a moment where it was something that was new to them. So not only were you bringing in, were they mapping things and working together, and there’s this new space, but they also had to be receptive to some new ideas. What do you think that you were doing as a facilitator, as a guide in that experience, that was helping them be open to new ideas? Because I think that’s really critical for any good facilitated workshop, is putting people in a learning growth mindset where they’re going to be open to embracing new ideas.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, great question. I think there are a lot of factors. We talked about the room and the visualizations on the walls themselves too, but I also had done a bunch of research prior to that. Obviously, the maps were based on firsthand customer interviews. I was literally going around to people’s offices and watching them work and things like that, so it was valid research based on observation and evidence, but I didn’t go in there with a really strong hypothesis or answer or recommendation. I, basically, said, “Here’s what I observed. I believe it’s valid. If you want to correct anything there, that’s fine,” and we had a discussion about something or another perhaps, so that’s fine. But I really left it up to them to come to their own conclusions, and I think that’s really important that, what’s the phrase? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

But I think if they come to their own conclusions, at that point in time, then there’s a sense of ownership, which I think helps people change their perspective or to grasp onto something and move to a different place cognitively than they weren’t, right? So I didn’t come in with anything prescribed. I didn’t prescribe anything, other than the activities that we did, which by the way, I just tend to have so much activity that derailers don’t even have a chance to derail, because they’re like, “Okay. We’re moving up to the next one,” and I have a lot of energy and I wave my arms and stuff like that. “Okay, great question. Let’s move on,” right? So keeping things going and relying on your activities to guide the group, I think, is something you got to have faith in those activities that you set up.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, and I found it can be really liberating just to, I mean, even if people are pushing back, just to understand that it’s not necessarily a sign that things are going wrong and just being okay with that, right? And saying, “All right. The group’s having a moment.” This is like, “Okay, and that’s part of my job, is to be here and let that just exist for a moment.”

Jim Kalbach:

Agree, agree. Absolutely, which as a facilitator, then you almost can’t build enough buffer into your schedule. I don’t know about you, Doug, but I’ve been doing this forever, and I still overestimate the amount of time that I need like, “Oh. We got to cut that last activity.” I think it’s, in part, because of those moments where you’re like, “I’m going to let this go, because this is great,” particularly if it’s good stuff. If it’s healthy debate or conversation or even healthy controversy, to let that go and then to build that into your facilitation. Totally agree about that, but the other thing that came to mind too was, particularly for some of those early sessions, is I had high level air cover from a fairly senior person who actually commissioned that session, so everybody that was there reported up into this guy, and he was there as well too.

So it was kind of like they didn’t really have a choice but to be there and participate, and that really, really helped. It wasn’t just me doing a grassroots thing, it was from the top down, and that really helped to get those right people in the room, but it was still up to me to engage them and make it interactive. The demand that came out of that, like we described, wasn’t because it was decreed from above. There was organic demand that came there, but it doesn’t hurt if there’s somebody super senior that says, “Nope, we’re doing this”, particularly in terms of other people being open to it, right? Because it was like, “Nope, we’re a customer-centric organization now. It’s one of our values. The CEO said that. The vice president over here said that, and this guy, Jim, knows about customer centricity, so follow him.” It helps when you have that type of top-down air cover.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like real credible air cover, because it’s not just like, “Hey, leadership said so.” It’s actually aligned with a clear mission and a clear why behind it. I think so many people get into trouble when it’s like, “Okay. This is decreed,” but the why isn’t clear. We’re even having trouble articulating the why right now,” and so then you get people just confused and pushing back, because they just honestly don’t understand why they’re being asked to do stuff.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, totally. I mean, purpose, right? I know, in your masterclass, we talk about purpose and Priya Parker talks about purpose, and it was we need to shift to be a customer-centric organization. These types of things help, mapping, workshops around mapping. That helps us all get aligned around what the heck that means. That helps us all become more sensitive to customer experience, like concerns, right? So there was an overarching imperative there that I could always just point to and say, “Okay. Go back and do what you were doing, but it wasn’t customer-centric.” So there was motivation and momentum going in my direction, which if you have a clear purpose like that, that makes all the difference in the world, particularly with those derailers, people folding their arms, and things like that, right? It is like, “No, we agreed on that. This is the way to get there.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Hey, you mentioned the certification program. I am always really inspired and intrigued to speak with folks like yourself that have had a deep history before coming into the program. So I guess I’m curious, as you reflect on the program, what was surprising to you, as someone who already had a ton of experience? What did you take away that you weren’t expecting?

Jim Kalbach:

I think there was some structure and order to a lot of it, and the readings were great, and the discussions that we had were great. Everything that I just described was just learning by doing, right? I didn’t know what I was doing. Fly to Paris and do a workshop. “Okay, I don’t know. I’ll run. How much time do I have?” And it was very intuitive, right? That’s pretty much how I learned a lot of what I know, was by making a lot of mistakes along the way, right? You’ve probably had those sessions that just flop, and you’re like, “Oh, man. That was rough,” and it’s kind of like a stage performance, right? Because you kind of go back, and you’re like, “Oh, man. Now how can I go back out and face the audience again,” kind of moments, so I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but I just learned it just by brute force.

The thing that the course really opened my eyes to was the systematic, there’s a discipline there. There’s a field of study there. There’s people who have broken it down and in the readings, but then people like Eric, your colleague there who is masterful in and of himself, in terms of facilitating that course, but also facilitating, just having that kind of structure and methodical approach to it was eye-opening to me, so I gained a lot. The other thing that it did too was, what you were asking questions like you’re doing here, what was your facilitation passed about? And we had to create a facilitation portfolio, and I was like, “What? I don’t know. I don’t have anything to put on there,” and then I thought about it, and I was like, “Oh. I have a ton of stuff to put on there,” so it was self-reflective for me as well too, to look back at all those things I did learning by doing, and then combine it with a methodical, systematic kind of approach that you guys bring to it. It really leveled up my game, I believe.

Douglas Ferguson:

Wow, super cool. Speaking of your game, your role at Mural, you’re at the intersection of facilitation and technology. So I’m curious, how do you see technology transforming the facilitation landscape, especially as we look at more and more remote and hybrid settings?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I was a remote work advocate well before the pandemic, but what the pandemic did for me, personally, was made the remote option not only viable, but in many cases preferred, right? And I used to travel a lot to give workshops, talks, and things like that, and now I’m getting people coming to me saying, “No, we want this remote so we can loop in our colleagues from London,” or the team is hyper distributed and they’re not going to be able to travel. So for me, I think where we are right now, coming out of the pandemic, it’s great, because I have a lot of in-person experience, and I know how to control the room.

Sorry for the pun there, but I know how to be in-person and stand up in front, work with breakout groups, and that kind of thing, and artifacts, sticky notes, and things like that, but I also have a deep affinity and expertise, if I can say so myself, in remote facilitation as well too. So the combination of those things, I think, is what a facilitator needs in this day and age, and I understand the in-person argument. I prefer in-person, right? In-person conversations is better. In-person workshop is better, but you don’t have that luxury all the time, right? So it’s not about preference. It’s about adapting, right? And can you adapt and do in-person or remote, or even hybrid, which is even really tricky, right? But can you facilitate something that’s hybrid? I think having those chops and the ability to adapt is really key, but to be honest with you, these days, I actually prefer too things remote.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I enjoy it as well. Personally, it’s nice to have a blend. As someone who facilitates a lot from my home office here, it’s nice to go on the road a little bit, but man, I tell you, I don’t miss being on the road every week, doing design sprints. It’s been a nice change, and frankly, it’s opened up the door to some things that wouldn’t have happened if travel were involved.

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, no. Absolutely. My book, The Jobs To Be Done Playbook, came out in 2020 right at the beginning of the pandemic, essentially, a month after the pandemic, actually, and I’ve been doing some workshops on that topic. Of course, during the pandemic, they were all remote, and I’ve gotten some requests to do it in person, and I had to stop and go, “Oh. I don’t even know how I do that in person,” because I have to hand out example interview texts. I was like, “well, I got them all. Oh, wait. I got to print paper. Oh, wait. Everybody needs a pack.” I had to make packets.

The first time I did that workshop in person, I had to make packets for people, because I had all this information, obviously in a mural board. I had all this information that people were interacting with, and I couldn’t even think about how to get that off and do it in a physical way, because the whole thing was conceived of in a virtual setting. I think, for that reason, particularly that workshop, I’m like, “No, I’m better and I prefer it to do it remote,” because I got the whole thing down now too. It feels flat to me when I do it in person, actually, because there’s some things that you just can’t do and following people around. There’s all kinds of things that I’ve just gotten attached to in the remote world there

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s super fascinating. It brings me back to the early days of the pandemic, where we were trying to translate all of our stuff that was designed to be in person into the virtual space, and some people, ignorantly, just like forklifted stuff directly in without thinking about how to transpose it properly. This is the first time you’re making me think about the opposite like, “Oh, wow. We got all this natively designed virtual stuff, because it’s only been run virtually. How do we now do this in person?” And I actually ran into that with Magical Meetings, because I had only done it virtually, and I got asked to come do it in San Luis Obispo, and I remember thinking, “Oh, man. I need to print out handouts,” and then after running it, I’m like, “Well, these handouts were okay, but they really need to be a bound booklet,” because people were flipping through them and losing. It’s just like, “Wow, I don’t have nearly as many reps on the in-person version as I do the virtual.”

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah, exactly. That was exactly what I experienced as well, and again, face-to-face conversations are great, and you can see your stakeholder and shake their hand, and there’s all those things that matter. Even just going to lunch with the group, those things make a difference as well too, but in terms of my curriculum, my teaching style, and what I can communicate, I feel like I’m better remote now, and I get great feedback, so I don’t think the students miss it either.

Douglas Ferguson:

One thing you mentioned in the blog post was about integrating the facilitation principles in the cultural DNA of organizations, and so I’m curious, what are some practical steps that listeners can think about specifically in regards to helping their organizations foster this kind of culture of facilitation or just the cultural DNA, the notion that you’re referring to?

Jim Kalbach:

Yeah. That’s a really great point. First of all, I think, given that conversation that we just had about remote and in-person and post-pandemic, I think now, more than ever, we need facilitation, which is different than being a facilitator, because I like to say facilitation happens. Anytime somebody calls a meeting or a gathering, and it starts and it ends, there was some type of facilitation that happened to get to the end, right? The point there is you don’t necessarily have to be a certified professional facilitator to practice facilitation. It’s anybody who raises their finger and leads at that moment is facilitating, right? I think now, more than ever, given the flexible and dispersed teams that we have, but as well as hyper competition and more 1099s coming up than W2s, and people moving in and out of Teams and things like that, now more than ever, I believe that teamwork and interaction needs to be guided, right? I would put all of that under the big bucket of facilitation.

So I think, particularly leaders, and it doesn’t have to be a manager, it could be a sprint master or a team lead, basically anybody who’s leading a group of people in a conversation, so conversation leads, we can say, if we want, to have a little bit of intentionality, I think that’s really the key, right? To bring in intentionality around things like synchronous versus asynchronous. What are you going to do on your group chat, or what are you going to do in terms of video recording with a tool like Loom? What can you do that you don’t have to be meeting synchronous for? Just intentionality around. Things like that can start down the path of healthier collaboration. So bringing in intentional practices as well too. We hinted at Liberating Structures, which I know you bring into your course quite a bit, which are great. You don’t have to improvise how you’re going to get from point A to point B, right? And have an agenda. Okay, that’s great advice, but an agenda is just really a signpost of where you’re going, but it doesn’t tell you how you’re going to get there, right?

But something like 1-2-4-All, Rose Thorn Bud, or something, or a Journeymap, that’s something that you can fill those slots with to actually guide the interaction as it’s happening and unfolding, so you can be inclusive, you can be iterative, voices can be heard. You can bring together diverse perspectives without having a complete collapse of the conversation in a very guided and structured way, so this idea of being intentional, but leveraging simple tools that we have at our disposal that anybody can drive, something like liberating structures, and you don’t have to be a professional facilitator to drive things like liberating structures. So I think I’m kind of talking around the answer here, but I think the one thing is recognize that if you stand up and you raise your hand to lead a group of people in any way, that you can be intentional in how you’re going to do that, and you should. The other thing is you can bring in tools, methods, and activities that structure the conversation, so collaboration skills and facilitation skills is one side of it. The other is collaboration methods, is another side of it.

Douglas Ferguson:

So kind of building upon that and looking ahead, thinking about how things will evolve in the future, how do you envision the role of facilitation changing maybe over the next decade or so?

Jim Kalbach:

I do hope it is something that people don’t necessarily see as a job title or a specialized field, that it is something that anybody can do, right? Just as an analogy, I’m not sure why my mind went to this analogy, but in 1887, I think is the year, but around that time period, photography was very specialized. To be a photographer, you had to literally know how explosives worked, because you had the flash thing, and you put your head under a hood, and then developing the film was very hard. There was no labs that you just sent it out to, right? So photography was a very, very specialized profession, right? But then Kodak came out with the Brownie camera, which allowed anybody to photograph. They weren’t professional photographers, but they were able to photograph.

To this day, they’re professional photographers, right? But any one of us could pull out a cell phone and be a “photographer” in that moment, and just imagine if you couldn’t take a picture of your food or whatever at the restaurant, it is so natural for us to be like, “I’m going to take a picture of that,” right? But it wasn’t always like that, and that’s kind of an analogy for me. Maybe not over 100 years. I hope it goes quicker, Douglas, than a century, or more now. We’re in 2024, right? But this idea of there are professional facilitators, and I can go to Voltage Control and get my certification on that, but I can also practice facilitation, and it’s something that I am comfortable with doing, and it’s just there. It’s everywhere, like a light switch in our offices or turning on the tap that, “Okay, we’re facilitating now,” that it becomes more commonplace and not so specialized.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. That’s my hope as well, because I think there’s so many situations where just good facilitation would’ve improved the quality of someone’s day, which then could have ripple effects into their week, their year, their life, and so the more that we can improve these moments of time that we gather and that we work together, when we spend so much of life at work and with our colleagues, the more we can improve those moments and those experiences, the better outcomes we can drive and the higher quality of existence that we’ll have, I think.

Jim Kalbach:

I agree, and I think it does spill outside of the work environment. We’re talking about work environment, but what about government and local government? I think about what’s going on at City Hall in the city that I live right now, and how dysfunctional are those conversations, when I think about that, or my wife is very active and her friends are very active in volunteer organizations, right? Then, I hear some of the stories. They’ll go out to meetings and, “This happened,” or “That didn’t happen, right?”

I’m like, “Wow. If they just had somebody going, ‘Let’s do 1-2-4-All,” or “Let’s do a Rose Thorn Bud on this,” the whole thing would’ve been so much more purposeful and meaningful on the outcome. So yeah, it is about dialogue and human interaction for the purpose of a better place to exist in, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, we’re getting to the end of our conversation here, so I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Jim Kalbach:

I mean, I think we’re on a good track right there, Douglas, with that, and I think it’s that focus on facilitation, and not necessarily, “I have to become a facilitator.” That’s not the goal. The goal is the facilitation and facilitating is a skill that anybody can learn in practice, and I would say it’s a future skill, right? If you lead a team, if you’re a manager, if you raise your finger to guide a group of people, it’s in your own best interest and for the common good of that group to have a structured and guided conversation to get to the outcomes that you want, and anybody can do that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Speaking to the choir, my friend. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, and I hope that we’ll get to do it again. Thanks a bunch, Jim.

Jim Kalbach:

Anytime. I’m happy to come back on, Douglas. Thanks so much for having me.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales, and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.