A conversation with Phil Canning, Leader of the Human Centered Design Studio and Facilitation Practice at Ally Financial
“When you just take the time to apply a few of these facilitation techniques, it really can help people focus, help them make better, more efficient decisions, and ultimately feel like they’re all bought in on it.” – Phil Canning
In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson talks to Phil Canning, leader of the Human Centered Design Studio and Facilitation Practice at Ally Financial. They discuss Phil’s journey into facilitation, the importance of design thinking, and how it has transformed the way Ally Financial operates. Phil shares his experiences of facilitating workshops, emphasizing the need to create a safe and inclusive environment. They also discuss the importance of cross-industry learning and the transformative power of facilitation. The episode concludes with an encouragement for listeners to explore the potential of facilitation in their own work environments.
Show Highlights
[00:01:22] The moment facilitation started to come into your work
[00:07:01] Expanding the use of facilitation techniques
[00:19:56] Start with the end
[00:24:55] Designing for empathy and define
[00:31:14] Exportation: Drawing Inspiration from Other Industries
[00:41:05] Applicability of Facilitation
Links | Resources
Phil on Linkedin
About the Guest
Phil Canning grew up in North Carolina and currently resides in Charlotte. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from University of Notre Dame (go Irish!) and M.B.A. from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He’s worked in industrial chemicals, music and entertainment, and banking doing a variety of jobs from engineering to supply chain, accounting to product management, and now innovation. In his current role, Phil works at Ally Financial as Director of TM Studio, Ally’s human-centered design and facilitation practice. When he’s not at work helping teams collaborate and innovate more effectively, Phil can be found cooking up tasty meals for his family, goofing off with his two sons, and listening to his vinyl record collection.
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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Full 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. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week facilitation certification program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Phil Canning of Ally Financial, where he leads the company’s human-centered design studio and facilitation practice, TM Studio. Welcome to the show, Phil.
Phil Canning:
Hi, Douglas. Thanks for having me.
Douglas Ferguson:
It’s great to be here. Always love talking to alumni and hearing the amazing stories and great work that they’re doing post certification.
Phil Canning:
Awesome. Yeah, happy to chat.
Douglas Ferguson:
So let’s roll the tape all the way back to before certification and when facilitation started to even come into your purview, into your context of work. And I believe it came through by way of design thinking that your manager had attended a conference and you started to get curious. And so let’s go back to that moment. What was it like there at Ally and how were things changing?
Phil Canning:
Yeah, so I was hired at Ally as the title was innovation manager. And I thought, that’s interesting. I have no idea what that is. And little did I learn that they didn’t really know what that was either, but they knew they wanted more innovation to happen. And a few months into the role, my supervisor, my boss came back from a d.school workshop. A bunch of the executives went out to Stanford d.school and took their design thinking workshop and they just came back fired up and said, “Holy cow, we’re a customer obsessed organization. We need to be doing this. We need to be applying this, using it.” And I just happened to be in a spot where, “What are we going to do with Phil? Well, he is the innovation manager. Maybe he needs to spearhead this effort and get training on this and learn more about it.”
It was a meeting one day where my boss brought me into her office and we talked about this conference and she was just elate, just very inspired, very encouraged about how common sense it is, but also just how effective it is. It was a no-brainer, like we need to be using this. And so we basically were given the green light to spin up a… It’s called TM Studio, just our human-centered design studio offsite. So let’s put a team out there, let’s leave them alone, let’s let them use this framework and let’s hand them some kind of different challenges that maybe the bank doesn’t have the bandwidth or the focus to tackle. And so that’s exactly what we did. We got into a really small space, had a team of just four or five. We all took some design thinking training, and then we just started doing it.
It was very grassroots, very startup feel, which I completely loved. I never envisioned myself working at a bank. My background isn’t in banking, and it was like this liberating feeling of here’s a problem, go solve it the way you guys think it should be solved. And we did that. We would walk the streets and literally interview people and build empathy about how do you manage your finances and how do you save and how did you choose your bank? And I mean, just all kinds of different questions that you can just approach anybody in Uptown Charlotte. There are a lot of other competing banks. So we were a little concerned maybe we’d run into some other folks, but it was just a great energizing experience and we learned a lot and we also had a bunch of success doing that. So that was the initial lean towards design thinking.
And so we were doing that for a while. COVID hit, we went remote, but we continued to work on a lot of different challenges for the bank using design thinking. And I started saying to myself, we’re just one team out working on these things one at a time and it feels like we could have a bigger impact and help more people at the company use this methodology the way we’re using it. And so why don’t we start delivering training, right? Because design thinking is a pretty basic framework to learn, but I think everyone has their own sort of style of applying it, and that’s dependent on things like the type of industry you’re in and the team you have and the certain types of challenges you face, and just the culture of the company. So we felt like, wow, we’ve ironed this thing out and we’re clicking along really well.
We know how to apply this, especially to banking challenges. Let’s teach others. So that was my pitch to my group to say let’s design our own session. So that really for me was the trigger that got me searching for different like I need to learn how to do this. I wasn’t a facilitator, we weren’t teaching design thinking, we were just practicing it. It looked like a great program. I had taken some workshops with you all before and then took the facilitator certification program and it just opened my eyes to like, oh, wow, this isn’t about just me learning how to conduct a design thinking workshop. This is actually just about how to help people in all sorts of different meetings and workshops and just help the company work more effectively. So I felt like I had stumbled on this sort of treasure trove of techniques and tactics that I could take even further.
I was like, yes, we’re definitely going to execute on these design thinking workshops, but I started thinking, wow, we could maybe do other things here. We could just help people with their strategy sessions when they’re thinking about the next three years and we can help teams just make faster, more collaborative decisions. I mean, just simple things like, hey, instead of us just arguing or throwing our opinions around the room, let’s all grab the sticky notes and for five minutes, let’s get our own ideas down. Then we’re going to post them up and have discussion and start grouping. Just some really basic techniques that I learned that have so much applicability to more running better meetings at Ally and just teams walking away.
It’s funny. Sometimes I feel like it’s not that impressive or earth-shattering these techniques, but you’d be surprised how many people are walking away from meetings being like, “Oh my God, that was so much better than anything we could have done.” And I was like, yeah, I mean it’s not rocket science, but when you just take the time to apply a few of these facilitation techniques, it really can help people focus, help them make better, more efficient decisions, and ultimately feel like they’re all bought in on it. I think that’s another huge component is just feeling like they’re part of the decision-making process.
Douglas Ferguson:
So tell me more about that feeling like they’re a part of the decision-making process and feeling more bought in. I think that’s a really key point. And why do you think that is? Why do you think there was a shift there?
Phil Canning:
And I don’t know if maybe it’s particularly in a corporate environment where there is hierarchy and it feels like the leader or the top manager is the one that makes the decisions, and then everyone else just follows on those decisions. But that’s actually not the best way to keep people. The people that are actually doing that work and executing on that objective or that strategy, they’re going to be way more bought in if they feel like they were actually the ones to craft that strategy or come up with those solutions. I mean, it’s basic stuff and people just don’t think about it enough because they’re just trying to get things done.
It’s like, well, we just have to do this, and so you do this, you do this and this is how we’re going to do it. And it’s like they walk away feeling not very motivated. They feel clear on what they’re supposed to do, but not super motivated. And so I think that’s where facilitation has played a pretty key role in me helping just… Actually leaders at the company, they want their employees to craft the strategy and to come up with the solutions because they know the work way better than those leaders. Do you know what I’m saying? So I think that’s why that feeling bought in is just a super critical piece to executing on a strategy.
Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely. I mean, people had to feel like they’re included in the process to feel a sense of ownership. In fact, at Voltage Control, I’ve outlawed the term buy-in because it assumes that you’re selling something.
Phil Canning:
Oh, yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Well, I work at a bank, so excuse if I use some corporate-y jargon, I’ll try to refrain from too much of that.
Douglas Ferguson:
All good. I’m curious you were talking about in the early days when you started to create the studio, it was a small group and you went offsite and it created a lot of opportunity even going out on the street to ask questions. How has that evolved? Is it more than one cohort at the moment? How many people are going through the program? How have you changed or adapted it over the years?
Phil Canning:
Yeah, so we’ve stuck to, believe it or not, we have not expanded a whole lot. In other words, we still keep a pretty small team that is at the studio, and that’s extremely intentional. In fact, just through learning lessons, there was a time last year where we expanded just through various, it’s just the way the cards were dealt. We found ourselves with a few more people at the studio, and so the team was actually getting a little bit large. I think we had a team of almost 10 people and it slowed us down. So this is not one of these things where can we add more manpower to move faster and all that? It’s like actually no. The key is to keep it pretty small so that decisions can be made efficiently and quickly and you can keep that bias towards action that design thinking is all about.
Douglas Ferguson:
We always find that seven’s that magic number of having the right number of people in the room. You can go a little bit below it, a little bit above it, but you start veering too far away from that and you get into trouble. And that’s why I was curious if you had spun up multiple cohorts because multiple small groups in parallel can still be poised for action, but it sounds like you’ve opted for let’s keep one group, let’s keep them small and keep them nimble.
Phil Canning:
Yeah, we’ve gone a little bit back and forth. After that group of 10, we said, “Hold on, we’re moving a little too slow.” We did actually split them up into groups of five. So we’ve done that a little bit where we’ve had no more than two cohorts now, but that’s our sweet spot right now. And then from that, I have spun off what we’re just calling our facilitation practice. And so I made a couple hires to find people that particularly wanted to facilitate with me, and so there’s sort of this training and education arm of the studio, and so we were the ones that are going out and talking to other groups at Ally and recruiting them to learn about design thinking and hosting those one or two-day workshops. We have a variety.
I have a condensed three-hour workshop that I can get more folks to sign up for, and then a longer form sort of soup to nuts where we’re literally cutting up cardboard boxes and building prototypes and the whole nine yards of design thinking. So we offer a variety, but that’s in addition to we keep the team undistracted and heads down working on one challenge at a time still. That’s our secret recipe and it seems to work pretty well.
Douglas Ferguson:
And so the facilitation practice is more about helping the broader organization understand these ways of working and that the learning piece that you were talking about.
Phil Canning:
Yeah, it’s really twofold. So there’s the learning piece where that’s specifically about, it’s more of a teaching workshop to learn human-centered design, and then the other piece of facilitation is just ad hoc, hey, there’s a leader here that wants to have a big come together meeting with all of the senior leaders in his or her organization and they want to work on breaking down silos or something like that. And those are the real where I get to really stretch myself as a facilitator and design it from scratch and say, “All right, what are your objectives? What do you want to get out of this? Who’s going to be in the room? When can I get in there ahead of time to make sure…”
Those are the fun ones where if I hadn’t have gone through that facilitation certification program, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence or just the knowledge to say, “Well, let’s just try this because I feel like I can apply some of these techniques.” And between liberating structures and gamestorming is another one of my huge… Stringing together some different activities and just seeing how to design these sessions is a really fun part of my job that it’s a little bit different than just the design thinking part. So that’s the neat like, “Oh, and we can also do this.”
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, that’s cool. I was wondering if the facilitation and start to show up in places other than the studio, and it sounds like it has, because earlier you were talking about people noticing the power of making decisions in this way and it sounds like there’s some interest. How do folks in the organization find you and request these facilitation services? Is it word of mouth? Is there some way they can sign up for you to come help them, or how does that work?
Phil Canning:
It’s still pretty ad hoc right now. We’re a small but mighty team, and so we are getting into our official learning and development system so that my hope is ultimately we can generate enough demand where we can say, “Hey, we’re going to hold this workshop once a month.” You know what I mean? Start generating waitlists for it and all that. That’s like 2024 planning let’s say, but for now we’re so well-connected. I think that’s one of the nice things about Ally is we’re not a huge bank, so I have enough connections in my position in the company that we touch all the different business lines. We’re a support function for all the businesses, and so we’re able to really garner enough interest through just word of mouth right now that, “Hey, we can put together a good workshop here.” I will also say a huge cohort of folks that we’ve had a ton of success with is early talent.
So we put all of our early talent folks, whether it’s interns or new hires. I did my largest design thinking workshop a few weeks ago with all of our technology new hires. It was 52 people, and I mean that was a huge group, but we made it work. We split them all up into smaller groups and we ran through the whole thing, but that we found is an awesome way to bring people into the culture of this company is to say, “Look, we’re customer obsessed and we want you to be too.” And what better way to do it than to say, “In week, one you’re going to go through all your boring onboarding and all that, but then you’re going to take a human-centered design class with Phil and his team and learn how to reframe problems, learn how to build empathy with your end user, whether that be the actual end customer or just some downstream receiver of the work that you do at the bank. It’s all applicable.” There’s just so much energy and so much creativity there that they just have so much fun with it.
Douglas Ferguson:
Yeah, I feel like the curiosity is endless because they’re in a total learning space because everything around is new and novel, and so you can’t help but be in a learning space else. You embed a function, right? You don’t even know where the bathrooms are, so literally everything’s a discovery.
Phil Canning:
They’re not jaded either. They haven’t been in their job just beaten down for years and years and, oh, what’s this? The next process improvement de jure. It’s like there’s some people that it takes a little more convincing, but the early talent coming into the bank are their guns blazing and ready to do it and ready to apply it to their jobs.
Douglas Ferguson:
Amazing. That reminds me of our pre-show chat and how we were talking about the workshop design canvas, and you had taken the workshop design course as one of your electives during the certification, and I’m curious how much that influenced your development of this learning curriculum and how you’re even approaching these workshops that you’re building that are custom.
Phil Canning:
Yeah, I mean it definitely has helped me quite a bit. I would say even I think it really helped me initially when I was really green and not still figuring out, all right, I don’t know how to design a workshop, and then having some kind of a tool that you can work through was super helpful. I think the main thing I took away from that was I believe it’s like you start at the end. It’s always in all of our calls when we talk to someone about doing a session with them and when we were thinking about designing these workshops, what do we want people to get out of it, right? What’s the objective? Start there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in that kind of initial call with someone where we start talking about maybe a session is appropriate and they’re like, “Yeah, so we have four hours on this day.” And I’m like, “Time out. You’re already-“
Douglas Ferguson:
You’re like, “What’s the icebreaker?” They’re so focused on logistics and the program.
Phil Canning:
That’s right. They’re like, “We have this day and you’re only get two hours,” and I’m like, “Okay, well if you’re only giving you two hours, we can only accomplish this.” It has been interesting you apply that start with the end, what’s the objective and let’s work backwards.
Douglas Ferguson:
I’m a big fan of the learner aspect of it as well because not only this objective that we’re trying to accomplish, but often that can be reductive or whatnot. If everyone’s always focused on objectives, sometimes we can lose sight of the people or the learners, so actually thinking about how do we want people to walk out of the space. And then also very powerful to think about how they’re entering the space because then we can think about addressing the gaps because so many times people just throw these icebreakers out or this activity or this thing and it’s not really serving the needs of this group of people walking in with this state of mind, with this perspective and needing to shift this other perspective. If we don’t focus on that gap and how we bridge that gap, we’re wasting time and maybe sabotaging ourselves.
Phil Canning:
Yeah, no, I hear you and I think as I continue to build workshops and not just build workshops, I think it’s about iterating on the workshops you have, especially with these design thinking workshops, I generally know what I have to cover, but it’s all of those how do you bring people in? Being super thoughtful about every activity or lack of activity if you want to, you know what I mean, let people think a little bit more freely and not feel like it is so rigid. I love that concept of loose control versus tight control and allowing them the space to sort of, all right, this is a new way of working and just asking questions.
I always allow plenty of time at the end of a workshop to just everyone, “Let’s just sit in a circle and what stood out today? What do you think of it? Let’s just pause and take a breath. I know it was a fast workshop, but what questions do you have for me?” And then just allowing people like, “Oh, okay, now we get to actually process what we learned.” And so many workshops, I feel like necessarily you don’t get to do that. They just end and then you leave and you’re like, “All right, well, I’m not sure how that translates into my real work.”
Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely, and it comes back to the learning science and cognition and memory because if you give people the opportunity to reflect, then they integrate the knowledge more deeply.
Phil Canning:
For sure. I’m working on a design thinking workshop that’s just focused on the first two phases of design thinking, empathy and define, and there’s a few reasons why I created a workshop that just covers those. One of the reasons is in all the feedback, we always do surveys before people even leave we have them take surveys on our design thinking workshops and typically the ahas and the surprises and the delight is those first two phases. It’s about I never thought how important it was to think about the problem so much, and it’s like yes. You know what I mean?
It’s not that ideation and prototyping aren’t important and all that, but that stuff is a little bit more approachable and it’s fun, it’s exciting coming up with ideas. That’s human nature. You just have to give people some guardrails and guide them through that, but showing them the power of interviewing people about their grocery shopping experience and thinking that they had all the like, oh, yeah, it’s about long lines suck and this and that, and then they go and talk to people and they come back and go, “Oh, it’s actually about finding healthy food to eat.” I never would’ve thought about that. And so they come away with these ahas that are really about really those first two phases where my point there is that I’ve designed a workshop that gives people a little bit more ability to sign up for because it’s not a two-day thing.
Sometimes in a corporate environment like this, convincing people to come over to your space and hang out for two days and learn design thinking can be a little bit challenging, but a three-hour workshop where we can really bang, bang, bang, run through some of those concepts and then have a good 20 minutes at the end of it to say, “So what does this mean for you? How would you apply this to your work? Could you do this?” This seems pretty accessible. People always think like, ah, yeah, but what do you mean? How do you schedule an interview and come up with a plan and build empathy?
It’s very doable. You can do this. And so that’s been a super powerful workshop that doesn’t take too much time, and I can get people in and out and they really walk away buzzing a little bit on how they can just build some empathy and then reframe the problem and then come back and we’ll talk and we can schedule an ideation. Let’s baby step this, just start there. If I can convince you to just not jump right to the answers and the solutions, I feel like I’m doing a good job.
Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely. In your alumni story, you talked about your partner. In the program, we put students together and partners so they can deepen their learning by seeing the program through the eyes of others, and I believe you were paired with Nina and you talked about this cross-industry awareness or there’s some value of seeing things across these industries. I’d love to hear more about that.
Phil Canning:
Yeah, I wasn’t even sure how much benefit I was going to get just from talking to the other folks in the cohort only because I wasn’t sure. I was like, well, if they’re not in banking or they’re not in my industry, maybe it’s not going to be as relevant. But yeah, Nina, I think we were paired together because she had a fair amount of design thinking background as well, and when we started talking, she said her background works in education. So she, I believe, works in a consulting capacity in the public school system out in California, and as she started talking about just design thinking sessions for where she would bring together students and parents and administration and law enforcement to come up with solutions on how to basically make the school safer, and I was like, oh my God.
It almost made me feel like, what am I working on? She’s working on the really important stuff and just the way that she was able to talk about how important having a safe space is, it really opened my eyes of… Because in a corporate environment, something you’re like, yeah, safe space, we can all share feelings here, but when you hear it from someone like Nina and she’s talking about running a session that’s pretty high stakes where you’re talking about physical safety in the school system and some of the activities and the way that she made people open up and just have the facilitation chops to help people navigate those hard conversations. I just had a newfound respect for her as a person and the power of facilitation, I guess. I mean, I’m not going to be able to recall exactly how she designed that workshop or anything, but I remember the feeling of how important she was conveying to me if people don’t feel safe in that space, you’re not going to get anywhere.
You’re not going to uncover the real problems, and you need to really think about where are you having these sessions and who exactly is attending and even understanding some of the personalities ahead of time so that you can navigate that. I mean, even now I don’t have to worry about that too much, but I probably should think about it more and be even more thoughtful about if I really want to get the most out of people in this session, maybe I need to stand up and say, “You know what? The leader of this group probably shouldn’t even be here.” And it was having the courage to stand up and say, “If you really want to get the right feedback, I think this is how it should go and this is how I want to do it.” I don’t know.
It takes a lot of courage and I just think, Nina, it was a really inspiring conversations that we had and we’re using the same framework. I mean, that’s what I love about it. We speak the same language, but completely different industries, backgrounds, and that’s why I said it is just a framework and it really takes all of those being able to piece together the different facilitation tools in the toolkit to run that session effectively and make people feel safe so that you uncover the things that you need to uncover. I mean, that’s really what you’re trying to get at what is the right problem to solve here? We can’t allow just the loudest person in the room to just steamroll everybody, and it’s the facilitator that has to manage that.
Douglas Ferguson:
I love the story because I’m a huge fan of drawing inspiration from other places or other industries, and in fact, there’s this name for innovation that already exists that we just borrow from somewhere else. It’s called exaptation. It’s not quite recycling. It’s like literally saying, “Oh, they’re doing this thing over here. I can totally do that in my context, but in a different way.” And to your point, the stakes might not be as high in an organization and corporate setting around safety and trust, but it’s still so essential because it’s human nature, and so what are the things she’s doing to make it work there that then we can be inspired by in our settings where it’s not quite as demanding? I think that’s really cool.
Phil Canning:
Just one other thing that makes me think of is I think what is sometimes a problem in a corporate environment is people don’t want to be wrong. There’s a lot of pressure on having the right answer, and that can be toxic. So I see my role a lot of times when I talk about creating that safe space is just to let people… Dumb ideas are great. Sometimes you come up with a great idea because you started out with a really bad idea and you just flipped it to the opposite, right?
Anyway, I just think that’s kind of something I’ve really learned is that there is a lot of the need to feel like you have the right answer all the time, and I want to create environments where we’re just experimenting here. If we want to really get to the best idea or solve this problem really well, we need to just forget all that. Let’s not have those hesitations. Any idea is an interesting idea. It’s where you start with that idea is probably not going to be anywhere close to where you end up, but if you don’t have that weird or strange or bad idea initially, you might not end up in a good place, so get them out. Let’s talk about them.
Douglas Ferguson:
And it’s important for leaders to foster the kind of behavior, and that’s why we talk about facilitation as a core leadership skill, and when you have environments where it’s not safe to fail or we always have to have the right answer, then it’s not a psychologically safe environment and we’re not going to have great outcomes, or certainly people aren’t going to be doing their best work. It’s incumbent upon leaders to create those spaces and get the best out of their teams and their organizations, and I think facilitation’s critical for that, and it’s shocking that we don’t see facilitation more apparent in leadership programs.
Phil Canning:
I’d love to see more of that.
Douglas Ferguson:
So now that you’ve seen the transformative power facilitation and human-centered design and it’s become a real central part of the work that you do, where do you see yourself in the next few years and what challenges do you want to explore more?
Phil Canning:
So being brutally honest, workshops are extremely powerful, and I’ve learned how to design and deliver workshops much better thanks to your program and the guidance that Voltage Control’s given, but I’ve also, I worry about workshopping people to death and it’s like what happens after the workshop? So when I think about the future, my vision is to expand the… My phrase now is beyond the workshop. It’s like, how can we help these teams implement? I feel like if I can just get them taking the first few steps of using what they’ve learned in the workshops, then I can help them take the next few steps and then the next few steps because it’s very different going to a two-day workshop or a one-day workshop being really inspired and learning a lot of stuff and then going back and saying, “What do we do with this?”
And so I’m super excited to lean into… It’s a multi-pronged approach. I mean, you have to have these workshops to create awareness and understanding and excitement and to just convince people, even to convince the leadership of the company that this is like, “Wow, look at all the great feedback we’re getting. People are really buzzing about this. They really want to apply it.” And it’s like, are they applying it? Are they doing it? And some are trying, but they’re stumbling. And so I think I’d really love to maybe evolve it to maybe more a consulting model where we are doing design thinking workshops and teaching the framework, but then we’re coaching, guiding, working alongside teams to be that human-centered person in the room to be like, “Why do we think that’s the case?”
Stopping progress for a minute and being like, “Do we really understand that that’s what the end user is struggling with here?” And so often people just jump right to the answer and start building a new feature or a new product. I think you can see my passion for that because I do see the value in the workshops and I want to just extend it now to say, how can I help them take and apply this? Yeah. I really want teams to walk the talk and be able to operate the way we’re able to operate at the studio.
Douglas Ferguson:
I love hearing this because it strikes me as something that it’s part of a maturity curve, because often when people find facilitation, there’s this maybe the embryonic state, it’s like they saw a method or a system like design thinking, or maybe they just saw liberating structures and it’s like, wow, this is really amazing what it can create. And the risk there is that they go off and that’s all they ever do is liberating structures or they’re only doing design thinking or maybe even just two activities they saw, and they just do that on a tape recorder.
And then there’s folks that start to take a more method-agnostic approach and start to mix and match and design more nuanced and more diverse types of experiences. And then there’s this next level which you’re describing, which is how do we transcend the workshop with our facilitation? Because the tools, the techniques, the mindsets, how we’re helping people come together and understand things in more micro moments. We don’t have to have three days. We can do this in a 30-minute meeting. We can sprinkle it in into a 15-minute conversation because we’ve internalized it at such a deep level.
Phil Canning:
I completely agree. It’s like deconstructing some of the process there. Design thinking is different than talking about the design thinking process, and that’s where once you really become adept at that. You can just pull tool the tool out of the toolbox at will and do it. You don’t necessarily have to say, “Hold on, we got to block out a week and do a design sprint and all that.” So I completely agree. It’s getting people to just think more in this way to say, “Hey, maybe we should just have a quick meeting and time box it for 30 minutes and see what ideas we have. Get some voting dots out.” You know what I mean? Just some simple techniques like that. Yeah, you’re totally right. It’s not like I don’t have to try to move mountains. I could just maybe help encourage people, well, just try this activity and see what that gives you, and that’s powerful too.
Douglas Ferguson:
Or even just thinking this way or have you stopped to rethink the problem? Just that question is facilitating, right? It makes me think, is Yoda using the force or is Yoda the force?
Phil Canning:
Exactly. Yeah.
Douglas Ferguson:
It’s like how much have you internalized things to the point where you’re a part of it.
Phil Canning:
Yeah.
Douglas Ferguson:
I love it.
Phil Canning:
That’s deep.
Douglas Ferguson:
Awesome. Well, we got there. We did it, Phil. Awesome. Well, any last thoughts for our listeners before we wrap up today?
Phil Canning:
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel like by accident, I’ve stumbled on facilitation, and I think if I was just going to leave it people listening with one thing is to just explore what facilitation is because it’s not something that, “Oh, I’m not really a facilitator, so that’s not something I can do.” If you learn these techniques, you can apply them. It’s like when I was talking about the design thinking framework, you don’t have to go to college to learn this.
It’s just stopping for a minute to understand, man, there’s got to be a better way to get this work done and to function as a company or as a department or as a team, and if just someone had some of those simple techniques for facilitation, I think they would be able to help their teams move faster, come up with better ideas, have more fun, be more collaborative, and just enjoy the work more. So I think I don’t have necessarily a nugget that’s earth-shattering other than I would just really explore what facilitation is all about because it’s applicable in so many ways. I mean, if there’s a grouping of people together, facilitation can help that.
Douglas Ferguson:
Absolutely. Well, Phil, it’s been a pleasure chatting today, and I want to thank you for joining me.
Phil Canning:
Thanks, Douglas, I appreciate it.
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.
