Unlocking the Secrets of Engaging Facilitation

A conversation with Lipika Grover, Leadership Coach & Facilitator @ Change Enthusiasm Global

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“Seeing the magic of bringing people together, setting clear agendas, and leaving with action items was eye-opening for me.”- Lipika Grover

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson converses with Lipika Grover, a consultant, executive coach, and facilitator. They explore Lipi’s career journey, starting from her early experiences at Accenture, where she observed effective facilitation during high-profile client sessions. Lipi emphasizes the importance of preparation, follow-up, and creating safe spaces for dialogue. She discusses managing group dynamics, particularly with chatty executives, and highlights the value of diverse voices in discussions. The episode underscores the transformative potential of effective facilitation in driving meaningful group interactions and fostering collaboration.

Show Highlights

Links | Resources

About the Guest

Lipi Grover is a leadership and resiliency coach specializing in helping individuals and teams navigate transitions and unlock their full potential. With a background in strategy consulting, sales enablement, and chief of staff roles, she brings a unique perspective to her work. Lipi empowers her clients to build emotional resilience, access their inner light, and thrive in their professional and personal lives. She also facilitates transformative workshops and coaching programs for organizations worldwide.

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, 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 Lipi Grover at Grover Consulting where she’s an executive coach and facilitator. Welcome to the show, Lipi.

Lipika Grover:

Thank you for having me, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s great to be chatting here today. I always love chatting with our alumni. As usual, let’s hear a little bit about how you got your start in facilitation. Was there a moment, or does the story come to mind, how you started to just get curious about facilitation?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, it’s a good question. Something I reflect on often is I started out my career back at Accenture in the strategy consulting team, and when I first started in consulting, I got put on a pretty high-profile client. It was a big tech client in the Bay Area. I was an analyst at the time, really in the room to support the partners and the senior managers that were there. I got to witness some incredible facilitation in action where I was just awestruck. I was sitting in the back of the room taking notes on my laptop and watching this magic come together.

In that time I really saw how the act of bringing people together intentionally, setting clear agendas, making sure you’re sticking to certain things like having parking lots and having clear structured questions throughout that time you’re together, really active engagement throughout the room. All of those different pieces and seeing it all come to life and leaving with clear action items of how the business was going to move forward was very eye-opening for me. That was the introduction for me of how I saw facilitation in action.

Then of course, as I grew in my career as a consultant, I got a chance to facilitate sessions of my own and really leaned into more of the creative side of facilitation when it comes to innovation and design, design thinking, getting to learn some of those practices from experts at companies like Accenture. That was the start of that career.

After that, I got a chance to get my MBA at Berkeley where I really, again, leaned into that interpersonal development side of facilitation, and I got to learn from incredible professors such as Mike Katz and some other folks there that really got a chance to see again how you can build deep connections with people through beautiful facilitation.

I guess this is a theme in my career is when I see people that are doing things that I feel passionate about or I feel like this is something I want to learn from, I start to follow that path a little bit and I try to figure out, okay, how can I do that? I feel the same way about how I got into coaching in terms of I got very powerful coaching and I was like, how can I do that and build safe spaces for others in that same way? That carried into my career at Mural, which is a virtual collaboration tool, incredible tool if anybody hasn’t used it.

At Mural, I got a chance to do more remote facilitation and lead sales enablement sessions for anywhere from 60 people to 300 people at times for go to market kickoff events and things like that. So I got to learn large scale facilitation remotely at Mural. Now as an independent consultant, I am getting a chance to figure out what that means for a small business owner like myself to facilitate sessions that feel authentic and true for others to build safe spaces and build vulnerable conversations with one another to build connection. I feel like a lot of us struggle with that in today’s world and we want to make sure to create more of that. So that’s been the journey so far.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s quite the arc. I’m going to come back to some of those early moments in Accenture, and I’m really curious about what did it feel like to be in the room as you were telling that story? I was thinking about you in the back of the room, heads down on your clipboard or what you had and just every now and then raising your head because it’s like, oh, that’s interesting. So can you maybe paint that picture a little bit more about what was catching your attention and bringing you back into the room?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, I can almost picture it vividly right now as you’re speaking about it. I remember being on a laptop at the time, just in the back of the room, and everybody had post-it notes that they were using. So part of what my role was to do afterwards was to transcribe all the post-it notes that were in the room and put into notes and all of that. But what really caught my eye in the session itself was the amount of detail I think that went into building two days of incredible content. So I think it’s the pre-work that I was very impressed by.

Then in the room itself, seeing how people commanded the room, the facilitators and the partners at Accenture at the time that I saw were really in front of it was about 20 different executives that were all there from a large tech client. I got to see how they were able to, I think in general, executives are often very chatty, and so sometimes getting everyone to really pay attention can be a challenge for that long of a time. But really getting to see how the partners developed that safe space and that space for people to raise their hand, build ground rules, figure out how to create small group conversations as well as large group conversations, was really something that I admired about the session.

Douglas Ferguson:

So yeah, I can imagine walking in thinking, oh wow, my job’s to transcribe all these stickies once it’s all done. How did your impression of that work shift from knowing that that was what you were going to have to do beforehand to then being in the session and watching it unfold and then having to do it? The act of transcribing all that stuff, did it turn out to be the same amount of work that you expected? Was it different? How did it feel doing it versus what you anticipated?

Lipika Grover:

I think because I was paying so much attention in the room, I felt very connected to what the ideas were that being put on the sticky notes. So it didn’t feel like this, oh, now I have to go and do this extra step. Of course, handwriting was the hardest part, and reading handwriting is never something that’s easy to do. But I did feel connected to the content in a way that I was able to make sense of it afterwards, and I was able to work through what the large initiatives that we needed to build were and figure out who are the owners and that thing. So I think, again, that goes to a well-facilitated session because it was very clear to me who was responsible for which parts of the session and who was responsible for the action items after the session. So again, those are all just, I think, things that you learn by doing, and that’s something I very much have admired and tried to learn from.

Douglas Ferguson:

It comes back to the planning piece and the prep you were talking about earlier, because if we plan well and we have an eye toward the outputs we want to generate and the outcomes we’re driving to, we can collect the data in a way that’s conducive to that transcription. So I’m curious, did it play out that way where it’s like it was less work than you maybe imagined because it was structured so that the things that were generated were generated in a way that was easier to maybe map into whatever you were transcribing?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, I would say so. I think it was easier than I expected. Of course this is many years ago, so maybe back then it felt like a lot more work. But I would say that what was interesting was that we built six month long initiatives out of that two day session. So getting to then see what work unfolds from that session, it was a strategy session. So I feel like that was really cool to see how it actually turned into real actionable results.

I think a lot of people have hesitation with these types of large group innovation strategy design type sessions because they feel like sometimes the actions don’t get done afterwards and there’s not enough follow-up that can happen. So, great, we did all these ideations and we built all these great things, but then when it comes to the work, it doesn’t actually get done. So that’s something that I learned in that session was like, okay, this is how you actually can turn this into actionable things and then assign owners to them and follow-up. It was a large transformational project, so I was part of it for every step of the way, and I got to see how it can be really effective.

Douglas Ferguson:

That follow through is so critical. No one wants the innovation theater where there’s a razzle dazzle workshop and then you never do anything with it.

Lipika Grover:

Exactly. I think in general, what we talked about a little bit before is that prep is important, but one of my colleagues at Mural, her name is Carolyn Hogan, and she had told me that you’re only as good as your prep and your follow-up. That really has stuck with me so much because I think in any facilitation or workshop that you’re doing, I think that the prep and the follow-up is ultimately what’s going to get you, one, the credibility, but also, two, the outcomes that you are trying to achieve.

Douglas Ferguson:

In fact, without the prep, it’s hard to know what the outcomes that you desire are because you haven’t identified them.

Lipika Grover:

Exactly. Yeah. I think in a lot of corporate sessions, sometimes there’s just not enough time going into that prep work or you don’t have the right stakeholders in the room to do that prep work. So sometimes that’s where we can fall flat. That’s where sometimes the innovation part doesn’t get to the desired outcomes if you aren’t able to spend the appropriate time and with the right people in the room.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s always critical to get the right people. A lot of times that’s including people that have been overlooked or sometimes being a little bit more discerning on who we invite. I think a lot of times people get invited that frankly don’t need to be there, it’s going to be a distraction for them, or it’s just unnecessary. The more people we have in the room, while diversity is great, it’s also going to add to the number of voices we have to consider and accommodate for and design for. So being really mindful of the best folks for that outcome I think is really critical. Have you had any experiences having to think critically about who’s perfect for the engagement?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, absolutely. I think oftentimes we know who we need in the room, and then there’s the people that we want in the room, and then there’s people that are going to maybe create noise in the room that are not actually going to add as much time. So I think that tends to be true, and it’s hard to be discerning with that, but I think purposeful inclusion or exclusion is critical to ensuring for a successful session. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned people with the noise and it’s like sometimes noise is valuable. Sometimes the people that push back and create friction are exactly who you want in the room. That could be part of their criteria, but certainly folks that are pure noise, they don’t have context or it doesn’t really pertain to them, but we just like them, so we invited them or whatever.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. Or sometimes I think people point out problems without solutions, and that can be sometimes distracting because you’re not getting to a specific point. But yeah, I do think it’s important to have people push back on your ideas. You don’t just want to call people that like you and that your ideas because that’s not going to get you to the mass outcome that you’re trying to achieve either.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Yeah. One thing I wanted to come back to is you mentioned executives being really chatty, and I thought for the listener, we might just spend a moment maybe expanding on what you meant there and ways of facilitating or using facilitation to work with that.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, absolutely. Of course that’s very much a generalization, but I think oftentimes, not just executives, honestly, this goes for almost anybody, but sometimes you think by speaking, I will get my point across and I will be able to share my opinion, but it may not even add to what we’re trying to discuss in that moment. Especially when you’re in really large groups, you need to be extremely focused on who is speaking and at what time and for how long you’re speaking. So in terms of ways to combat that, I think there are several different techniques that I’ve used in the past.

One of them, I think mostly remotely, this can be very helpful, but having some sort of timer when you’re having people share out ideas. Let’s say you’re going through a certain session, or you do little breakouts and then you want people to come back and share their ideas. Oftentimes that can go on for five minutes per pair or group. But in reality, in order for the facilitator to stay on time, we need to be able to cap that to a certain amount. So depending on the conversation, I tend to use the timer feature. I think when you set that ground rule upfront, people are more able to see the value of it, and they’re less likely to go over the time because they can respect that we’re all trying to stick to a certain schedule and we have other things that we want to achieve. So that’s one tip that I would share.

Then another one would be to use a tool, some sort of tool, any sort of virtual whiteboarding type of tool to get people to share their ideas asynchronously during the meeting first. So even we can use the timer again, but we can say, let’s say I have a question that I want to put out to the group. Instead of having every person go around the room and share, okay, this is what I think, this is what think. Having a timer on and then having people put their post-it notes or ideas into a whiteboard at the same exact time. Then as a facilitator, I can go and call on specific people based on the idea that they’re sharing. We can cluster, can group the ideas and then have people expand on them based on what they have to share. So that can be really, really helpful when you’re trying to collect everybody’s ideas but not have everyone speak at the same time.

Douglas Ferguson:

All of that I would categorize as limiting dialogue, and I think that’s an aha moment for a lot of folks that haven’t been exposed to facilitation much because when you think about facilitation, when you think about good meetings, I think it’s customarily conjures up this idea of a lot of dialogue. Yet some of the more powerful facilitation tools actually limit the dialogue. We don’t remove it, we just limit it. So to your point, time boxing so that let’s keep it in this frame, or even activities that might allow the dialogue to take a certain shape or a certain form that then helps focus it, but ultimately constrain it because, to your point, all the voices in the room all the time fighting for that oxygen, it’s not an effective strategy.

Lipika Grover:

I’d add one thing, you mentioned dialogue is really critical, or that’s what people think of when they think of effective workshop. I think it’s dialogue, but it’s also participation. I think people just want to feel like they are present in the room. I think with these types of asynchronous things, people still are required to be present the whole time because almost more so than when somebody is talking because sometimes easy to tune out when you’re in the room and one person is talking on a monologue for a long time. So by asking everybody to either journal, this could also be in person where they have to journal in their own paper based on a specific prompt question that we’re asking the whole group, and then we ask certain people to share and certain people to add onto their ideas. I think that being present is actually the way that people feel like they attended a very impactful workshop if they feel like they were fully there.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s fascinating. This idea of presence and walking out feeling like they were there versus something they just checked the box on, attended and split, right?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

What are some of your go-to mechanisms for driving engagement?

Lipika Grover:

I would say always starting with something that’s maybe fun/related to the current environment that we are all going through. Some sort of icebreaker. I don’t really love the word icebreaker, but just something that starts at a neutral, but also a shared ground where people can all feel like they’re tied to whatever that question might be. There’s a whole host of different types of icebreakers that of course you all share on your website as well as so many other types of icebreakers out there on the internet. But I think one thing I would say is starting somewhere neutral. Then having a really strong session design to make sure that you’re always having people engaged in a certain activity, whether that is something that they’re doing independently, whether that’s something that they’re doing in a breakout group, whether that’s something that they’re doing in a whole group.

I think making sure there’s not a lot of dead time in there, especially timing your breaks appropriately, making sure that you’re creating a space where you’re always giving them something that they should be working on or doing, and very focused time for those things. It’s like let’s say you want to do deep work on your own, you want to put in a timer for 30 minutes or 40 minutes, and you probably get your most work done in that time during the day because you have a set timer for it.

It’s like what you said earlier about being constrained, and so setting those constraints throughout the session. Then I think a skilled facilitator will ensure that there are breaks built in and making sure that they’re also having time to share their voice. That can be in breakouts so that it doesn’t feel like it’s overpowering all of the time. So I do use breakouts quite a bit for engagement because I think having deeper, smaller conversations can be really helpful, and then coming back and sharing with the broader group is something that I find to be really impactful there.

But otherwise, I think using Mural is a huge… I can talk about that more, but I feel like that’s something that from a visual perspective, most of us are visual learners, and so engagement can also be from something that’s really visual and something that’s beautiful to look at. So I tend to put a lot of time into designing my murals in a way that has a certain theme or has some sort of excitement to it, and it carries that excitement throughout the session that you’re looking forward to what’s going to be uncovered next in that visual collaboration tool.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was going to ask about that, building on the engagement piece, because a lot of times people will ask about cameras being on as their signal that there’s engagement and then their solution to driving that is just requiring cameras on. Yet, I think you talked about giving people tasks, using breakouts, making things visual as ways of driving engagement. What are your thoughts on this whole video on, video off versus some of the techniques you talked about, which are more making things hands-on and tangible and giving people tasks?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, I think it really depends on the size of the group in terms of the video on or off. I do think for small group sessions, it’s very helpful to have videos on. If everybody has their video off and one or two people have it on, it becomes a very, I think, a little bit strange dynamic for the group. But if everybody decides to be videos off, that’s fine too. I think you can have a pretty engaging session that way. But if most people are having their videos on, then I think it’s nice to ask for people to turn their cameras on. Of course, if it’s a very, very long session and people need to step away for a few minutes and eat or do something and turn their cameras off, as a facilitator, I usually just say, hey, if you need to just message me so that I know you’re here. That way, it’s not like you’re disappearing and I’m calling on you, and I’m in an awkward position now where it looks like you’re not paying attention. Now everybody else thinks they have the permission to not pay attention either.

So yeah, I do think that I just ask for communication if you’re going to turn your camera off. I wouldn’t compare the techniques like, oh, it’s this or that, but I do think that having some sort of visual type of tool can really build that engagement further because it can create another, almost like a third space for people to go and create connection. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned calling on someone when they’re not there, and it reminds me of the importance of signals. How are we collecting signals on how people are participating? The visual tools provide another mechanism for that. There’s a notion of presence. Are they in the tool or not? Am I seeing outputs from them? So video on is not the only signal, and I think that’s the trick. So many people rely on that as the only signal and the only thing they’re trying to change, I think there’s a lot of depth to your point. You’re sharing a lot of stuff there.

I want to pivot to talk a little bit about your time at Mural, and then we probably have a little time to talk about the future and what’s next as well. But you mentioned doing sales enablement, and I imagine some listeners might hear that and go facilitation and sales enablement, what does that look like? So can you tell us a little bit about how you’re approaching that from, what was the tools? I’m sure you’re using Mural, but what was the experience like? If someone wanted to use facilitation for sales enablement, how might that look? What might they do?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, it’s a good question. I would say what we did at Mural, I can’t speak to what sales enablement looks like at other companies, but we had oftentimes weekly live meetings with the entire sales team, sometimes the customer success team as well. So it was more revenue enablement at that point, and marketing sometimes as well where we would bring everybody together. We’d have an usually really beautifully designed Mural to be able to teach certain concepts based on whatever enablement was needed at that time.

So if it was specific to, let’s say, how to do really good discovery, let’s say how to do really good discovery on certain sales calls, we would create Mural about that, and we would have certain questions that you can go into breakout rooms to do role plays on. We’d built certain spaces within the Mural for people to be able to practice certain concepts, whatever it is that we were teaching at that time. We would often use Mural as a place for you to share resources with the teams to be able to say, hey, these are a little resource hub of this is what you need to pay attention to for this week, new marketing collateral, new, anything that is relevant, new scripts for you to use in emails or things like that. That way it’s all in one place.

We tried really, I think, to make it very creative so that people felt like, again, that engagement during that time that they were together. I think sales enablement is something, or enablement in general, I think learning and development teams often are trying to figure out how do we make this time that we have synchronously as impactful as possible because these people are doing this outside of their day-to-day job. This is something that they are opting into doing. Sometimes it’s a required thing, but most of the time it’s to level up their own skillset. So making that synchronous time very impactful is the biggest thing that was on our minds is how can we make sure that people get a lot out of this time together because it’s a lot to ask them to do.

So we would think of different creative ways to use Mural or breakout rooms or other sort of engagement strategies to make the most of that time together and have people be present. Like Q&A at the end of the session, that’s just another idea, using Mural to have people put questions in at the end as well. Then we could take that and turn it into a whole session on its own of what are the topics that you’re struggling with right now? We can use voting even to figure out, okay, what are the things that are on your mind right now and how can we design a session around that? So just another idea there.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I know right now you’re focused a lot on resilience and the coaching work that you’re doing and helping build confidence and creating vulnerability with folks. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that’s surfacing?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. So my focus with resiliency workshops is really empowering people to understand that they can do hard things and that they have all the answers within themselves to be able to achieve everything that they want to. I think so often people stop themselves from going after their goals or their visions simply because they are scared they’re going to fail and that they’re fearful that their life is going to change in a large way. We all are creatures of habit. We like being comfortable and we don’t necessarily feel comfortable extending ourselves into new spaces.

But as a coach and as a facilitator, a lot of what I do is ask people questions to help them to get to a place where they’re able to say, actually, yeah, I want that. It’s all coming from themselves. I don’t know the answers as a coach of what they want to do. My job is purely to create that space, that vulnerable space, for people to be able to talk through what their visions are, what their goals are, and get them to believe in themselves and believe that they can do anything that they really set their minds to. So that’s the focus right now of a lot of the work that I’m doing. I do this in one-on-one sessions as well as in group sessions, and so I’m excited to see how that unfolds.

Douglas Ferguson:

So the group work, how does that play out? Is this a team that you’re working with, the folks that are working together, or is it more like a public cohort where there’s a number of individuals that you’re helping just support each other in this moment?

Lipika Grover:

It’s a great question. I’m actually launching my first cohort next year or so, early next year, where we will be creating, it’s more of a public space where people can join and they’ll be surrounded with others that also have big dreams for themselves, and they have a growth mindset, and they are just needing maybe a little bit more support and accountability from others around them to get them to where they want to go.

I piloted it already, I did a resiliency workshop earlier this year in a group setting that went really well, and people really got a sense of feeling like they found that light within themselves. That was the name of the workshop was The Light Within. I think a lot of times we think, Hey, after I do this, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. We use that phrase all the time, the light at the end of the tunnel. But my whole premise is that we have light within ourselves at all times. So I just want people to be able to tap into that, especially when they’re going through maybe a change or a transition or some sort of new thing in their life. So that’s the premise of what the workshops are going to be next year.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Most of the folks you’re working with individually are also in this moment of transition as well?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. It’s mostly people who are either going through a career transition, a relationship transition, sometimes a move, all at the same time. Most of the time we’re all going through multiple changes at all times in our lives. I wouldn’t even say it’s always a very tangible change that it’s sometimes is truly like, hey, I want to step into a better version of myself, or I want to step into a new goal that I’ve been wanting to achieve, and I just need the mindset to be able to achieve that goal. So a lot of work is like, how do I get you from point A to point B? For example, if somebody is like, hey, I really want to go to get my MBA, but I’m working and I just don’t know how to make that leap, making that mindset shift is part of the work that we do, is just getting them to understand that they’re capable of doing it and that they are going to be able to achieve success in that. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

How often do you work with folks that know that something’s missing, they’re not feeling fulfilled, but they haven’t been able to pinpoint what it is yet?

Lipika Grover:

Very often. I think a lot of times people feel like, especially in careers, I think a lot of times it’s like, hey, I’m in this job, I’ve been in this job for a long time. I’m starting to feel like I don’t connect with it anymore, or I just know that I’m not doing what I really want to do. That’s something I hear often. It’s like, I know this is not what I really want to do, but they don’t know what that other thing is. So a lot of the work is uncovering what that North Star is going to look like for them. Some of it is just understanding your strengths, understanding who you are as a person, what you enjoy doing, what you don’t enjoy doing. Going back to the drawing board in that space. I think a lot of times people also don’t realize that what got them to this point is beautiful, and we are grateful for it all, and it may not be the thing that is needed right now in this moment.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, what do we need to leave behind?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, exactly. What can we let go of right now?

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Awesome. Well, when you think about this work, the resiliency workshops, the coaching, all this great work you’re doing, where do you think it leads to? What’s this bright future? What is this North Star that of your own? Just like you’ve been uncovering for others, what is this North Star for you, as far as when you really peer out a ways?

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. Honestly, it’s a great question and it’s something that I’ve been designing for myself as I’ve started this path myself. I think I’ve also learned to surrender a little bit. Part of the North Star work is also following the leads, if that makes sense. So sometimes it’s pulling on different threads to see where we go, and we don’t always have to have this big reveal answer of what is coming up next. So while I would love to say, I have this 10-year plan and this is what I want to do with it, I think the reality is I’m following the energy and I’m following what is bringing me joy, and I’m following that path and we’ll see where it leads. I think that’s to be discovered.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Well, let’s check in the future and see where it went. I love that.

Lipika Grover:

Absolutely. Yeah. One thing I can say is that the work is very impactful and the work, it doesn’t feel like work in some ways because it just feels like you’re creating a large impact on maybe a smaller number of people, and that can be really fulfilling some ways. So I just want to keep doing it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. I feel that this passion driven existence is very prevalent and common in the world of facilitation because it’s the type of career that people find through passion. It’s something that people get excited about. Some careers people get into because they’re good at it, and it’s like, I’m going to be an accountant to make a living and get paid, or I am really fascinated by models for discovering whatever, but there’s not this excitement and passion about it some other fields. I think facilitation’s one of those things that’s like, I rarely meet someone that’s doing it just because it pays the bills or whatever. It’s a passion driven field.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. I think so too. I am curious, if you don’t mind sharing too, when you started Voltage Control, how did you feel in terms of what was your North Star? Did you have the North Star where you are today, or is it something that’s evolved and changed over time?

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s funny. I have multiple threads. I think you talking about pulling on the threads resonates a bit. I always refer to myself as a change junkie. I’m just obsessed with change, and I always invite change. I’m always curious about what’s around the corner. I did have a vision early on that was very anchored in facilitation and group process and helping people. I did not necessarily have this vision of being a certifying entity. I did tell myself though, that if we ever went down that path, I wanted to take it really seriously. That certificates wouldn’t be a thing we would just hand out as something you would get for attending a workshop. That I wanted to make sure that if we did that we’re really serious about it. It really meant something. It was pass/fail. You really had to do the work to receive it so it’d be meaningful to people. To me, it’s about staying true to my values and what’s important to me. Then just, to your point, following that path, but being true to those values.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah. It’s something that I would say I’ve seen over time is that the dots always connect later, this is true throughout my whole career. Even you asking, how did you get into facilitation? It’s like, I wouldn’t have said back when I was at Accenture that I was going to go into facilitation or coaching as a career, but the dots always connect later in terms of how you see the threads that we got excited by or that brought us joy along the way.

I think that’s one thing that if I could leave with is I think life is long, I think a lot of times we think life is short, which is true in a lot of ways in that we should be present when we are with our loved ones or with ourselves. I think that’s very true. But a lot of times we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do everything right now and get it all done, and we have to achieve all this, achieve, achieve, achieve. But in reality, life is long and it’s almost better if we focus on one thing at a time sometimes and just see where it leads because it’ll unfold later. Yeah, it’ll all make sense later.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Always ask my guests to leave our listeners with a final thought. You’ve given us one there. Anything else you want to share?

Lipika Grover:

I think one thing is just trust your intuition. I think a lot of times we don’t give ourselves enough credit that we know what we want and we know what we want out of life. So I would just say trust your intuition. Sometimes you have to quiet everything else down in order to really pay attention to what it is that your head, your heart, your gut is all telling you to do. So just silence the rest of the world for a moment and figure out, okay, ask yourself what is it that I really want? That can help guide some pretty big decisions, or at least it has in my life. Whenever I have listened to that intuition, it has turned out in a better way than I think I would have if I just listened to my head or after some sort of credible thing. I think there’s so many other things that we chase in this world, but if we quiet everything down and just listen to our intuition, we’re able to follow a different path and that path is not written. Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. I love that. The thing I would add, because I love that so much, is I would just say that sometimes you can’t hear the intuition. I love this idea that you say here, the quiet everything down so you can tune into it. So if you’re like me where you hear your intuition quite often, then the moments where you can’t, it can be frustrating. I don’t know what to do right now. The thing I’ve learned through the years is when I find those moments, don’t spiral into the moment, just sit back and say, it’s okay. It will speak soon. Just be in this quiet time. Let your subconscious chew on whatever it needs to chew on because it’ll speak to you soon enough. So I think both is true, right? Quieting down the noise, but if everything’s really quiet, being okay with that quiet and just knowing that when the time’s right, it’ll let you know.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, exactly. I think, to be honest, you asked me that question about North Star, and it’s like sometimes it can be frustrating to not have the answer where you’re like, oh, I wish I could give you a real answer there. But to your point, I think the answer will come as I keep doing it, and I think action is progress. Progress is motivation. So if you keep putting one step in front of the other, you’re so much more able to actually see where it unfolds.

Douglas Ferguson:

Love that. Excellent. Well, it’s been such a great honor and pleasure to chat today, Lipi. I really appreciate you joining me.

Lipika Grover:

Yeah, likewise. I appreciate the time and I appreciate getting to be on this podcast. To all of the listeners, just keep doing what you do and put one foot in front of the other. I feel like that is my big takeaway from today. So yeah, I appreciate being on the podcast with you, Douglas.

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.