“Collaborative AI” is the buzziest term of 2026. Vendors use it. Analysts use it. LinkedIn thought leaders use it. Most of the time it means almost nothing, because the term has been stretched to cover three completely different things at once. A diagram of multiple agents handing tasks to each other gets called collaborative AI. A single user prompting ChatGPT for help gets called collaborative AI. A team using a shared model in a meeting gets called collaborative AI. Three different things, one term. And the thing that actually matters, the thing that is genuinely new about how teams are starting to work with AI, gets buried under the other two. This piece is a working definition. Not the marketing one. The one that lines up with what we actually see when we walk into rooms where teams are doing this well, and what is missing from the rooms where they are not.

The shallow definition (and why it does not help you)

The most common use of “collaborative AI” right now describes a multi-agent architecture. One AI agent generates a draft, hands it to a second agent for review, hands the result to a third for formatting. The agents are collaborating with each other. The diagram is impressive. The phrase has obvious appeal. This is a useful technical pattern. It is not collaboration in any sense that matters for how people work. There are no humans in the loop. The collaboration is between models. Calling this “collaborative AI” is like calling a pipeline “collaborative software.” The work flows through stages, but no one is collaborating. The shallow definition gets worse when it is applied to a single person using a chatbot. Someone types a prompt, the model returns text, the person edits it, sends another prompt. This is not collaboration. It is iterative tool use. Useful, fast, and individual. The output reflects one person’s thinking improved by a model. No one else’s perspective is in the room. If you are looking for what actually changes when AI shows up in a team’s workflow, neither of those definitions will help you.

The working definition

Here is the one that holds up in practice. Collaborative AI is the practice of bringing AI into the room with a team, where it influences collective thinking and output in real time, with shared visibility into how the model is contributing. Three pieces matter, and all three have to be present. In the room with a team. Not one person alone with a chat window. A group, working together, with an AI participating in the work. This could be a workshop, a strategy session, a stand-up, a planning call. The AI is on the screen, not in someone’s pocket. Shapes the team’s collective output in real time. The model is generating, summarizing, surfacing patterns, drafting alternatives.

Whatever the team is producing is being changed by the AI as the team works. Not after the meeting, in someone’s editor. During. Shared visibility into how the model is contributing . This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that determines whether the AI helps the team or quietly hurts them. Everyone in the room knows the model is contributing, knows what it has produced, can see what is generated AI versus team thinking, and has the chance to push back. The AI is a participant, not a hidden assistant. When all three are present, you get something that does not happen with individual AI use or multi-agent pipelines. You get a team that can think faster together, with a shared artifact that captures what the model contributed and what the people contributed, and a record of where they pushed back. That is collaborative AI. Everything else is either delegation (one person and a model) or automation (models talking to models).

What collaborative AI looks like when it works

A leadership team gathers to align on a strategic question. The question is on the screen. So is a model. The facilitator runs the team through a structured divergence: each person types a position privately, the model surfaces themes across the responses, the themes go up on the wall. The team sees the patterns the model found and the dissents the model missed. They argue with the model’s framing. They edit the themes. They re-run the synthesis with their corrections. Two hours in, the team has alignment on a position they could not have produced in two hours without the AI. They also have a record of what the model contributed and where they overrode it. The output is theirs. The model accelerated the path to it. Now imagine the same team, same question, without collaborative AI. Three options.

Option A. Each person prepares their position alone, with their own AI assistant. They come to the meeting with polished drafts that look similar because the underlying models trained on similar content. Discussion devolves into refining the most articulate draft instead of surfacing the real disagreement. The model contributed to each person individually. It did not contribute to the team.

Option B. They run the meeting without AI, fill the wall with sticky notes, take photos for the recap, and the synthesis happens later, in someone’s editor, with a model. The synthesis returns from the model and people argue about whether it captured the room. The model is reading, not collaborating.

Option C. They run a multi-agent system that takes meeting transcripts, summarizes them, drafts strategic options. The output looks like collaboration. No one is in the room with the model. The team is consuming AI output, not shaping it. Each option uses AI. Only the first is collaborative AI as the term should be used.

What it requires from teams (and most teams do not have)

The reason collaborative AI works in some rooms and not others has nothing to do with the model. The model is the same. What changes is what the team brings. A facilitator who can hold the room with AI in it. Most facilitation training assumes the facilitator’s job is to manage human dynamics. With AI in the room, the facilitator’s job expands. Who decides when to use the model? When does the model’s output get accepted, and when does it get pushed back on? Who notices when the model is steering the conversation toward a generic framing the team would not have chosen on its own? These are facilitation moves that did not exist three years ago. Teams that have someone who can run them get collaborative AI. Teams that do not, fall back to one of the three options above. Shared norms about transparency.

The team has to agree, before the session, on what AI use looks like in the room. Is everyone using it? Are some people privately using it while others are not? Is the model running publicly on the screen, or quietly assisting one person? When AI use is visible, the team can engage with it. When it is hidden, it distorts the room. A working understanding of what the model is good at and what it is not. Models are excellent at synthesis, summarization, divergent generation, and surfacing patterns across text. They are bad at judgment under uncertainty, weighing competing values, and noticing what is missing from a conversation. Teams that know this use the model where it helps and override it where it does not. Teams that do not, drift toward whatever the model recommends. These three capabilities are not technical. They are practices. And practices are slow to build, because they require facilitated repetition.

The branding problem

Most “collaborative AI” content you will read in 2026 will be one of the two shallow definitions, dressed up in language that makes it sound like the working one. Vendors have an incentive to call any AI feature collaborative because the word is selling well. The diagram is collaborative. The chatbot is collaborative. The agent network is collaborative. None of them require what real collaboration requires, which is more than one person in the same room making decisions together. The risk for buyers is straightforward: you procure something labeled collaborative AI, deploy it across the organization, and discover that it is a productivity tool for individuals. People use it alone, at their desks, between meetings. The team-level capability you were trying to build never materializes, because the tool was never going to build it. The capability is built by humans, not software. The good news is that the actual practice of collaborative AI does not require a particular vendor. The model layer is a commodity. What is scarce is the facilitation layer on top, and that is what teams have to build for themselves.

Where this fits in the broader shift

This is one piece of a larger pattern. The friction that matters in 2026 is no longer execution speed. AI eliminated that friction. The friction that matters is consensus, alignment, and trust at the team and organization level. AI accelerates execution; it does not, on its own, build alignment. In some configurations it makes alignment harder, because individual users move so fast that the team cannot keep up. Collaborative AI is the response to that. It is what happens when teams refuse to let AI become a private productivity boost and instead bring it into the room as a shared participant. The benefit is real: faster alignment, better synthesis, decisions that more people genuinely own. The cost is that someone has to facilitate it, and most organizations have not built that capability yet. That is the work in front of leadership teams right now. Not picking the right collaborative AI vendor. Building the team practices that make any AI collaborative.

What to do this quarter

If you are leading a team and want to start moving toward collaborative AI:

Pick one recurring meeting. Not a high-stakes one. A regular planning or review session where the team is already aligned on the format. This is your test environment.

Put a model on the screen. Shared, visible, running. The output of the model goes up where everyone can see it, edit it, push back on it.

Name AI use explicitly. When the model contributes something, say so. When someone overrides it, say so. The transparency is what makes the next session better.

Run it for four weeks. The first session will feel awkward. The second will be better. By the fourth, the team will start to develop instincts about when to invoke the model, when to override it, and how to use it without losing their own judgment. After four weeks, you will know if you have built the practice. You will also know what you need from a facilitator, from governance, and from team training to scale it.

The teams that build this capability now will compound on it for the next decade. The teams that wait for the right vendor or the right tool will still be looking for the right vendor when the friction has moved somewhere else. That is the difference between collaborative AI as branding and collaborative AI as a capability. The branding will keep shifting. The capability is yours once you build it.

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The New Friction: Why AI Transformation Stalls and What to Do About It

Two trucks break down in a port. They are thirty meters apart, on the same lane, carrying the same cargo. One port zone recovers from the disruption in seventy minutes. The other takes more than two hours. The zones share everything that matters: the same bridges, the same lane widths, the same weather, the same sixty-second mechanical fault. The only difference is coordination. In the slow-recovery zone, a single algorithm dispatches every vehicle. In the fast-recovery zone, that same algorithm shares infrastructure with a fleet of trucks driven by independent logistics companies, each operating under its own objectives. That is the finding M. Dalbert Ma, a researcher at London Business School, reported to the BIG.AI@MIT conference last month, after studying approximately one year of operations at one of the world’s largest container terminals. The autonomous zones ran 3.8% more efficiently under normal conditions. A single sixty-second fault cost them a 12.2% delay on the operations that followed. Rain, which forces every vehicle to slow and creates temporal buffer between sequential operations, erased the fragility entirely. This is what most AI transformation stories leave out. The efficiency gain is real. So is the cost you pay when something disrupts it. Real AI change management is the work of carrying that cost forward without breaking the system.

The tradeoff that is not on the procurement spreadsheet

Every AI-first workflow your organization designs makes the same structural tradeoff the port made. When execution time collapses, coupling tightens. When coupling tightens, buffer disappears. The same mechanism that produces the efficiency also produces the fragility. This is not a failure of the technology. The AGVs in Ma’s study were operating at SAE Level 4 autonomy, the highest level in commercial deployment. They were not malfunctioning. The algorithm was not broken. What the study shows is that optimization pushed to its limit consumes the slack the system needs to absorb disruption. The port is a clean case because you can measure it. The same pattern is operating inside every organization that has automated a contiguous block of knowledge work without thinking about what the friction was doing for them. When the fault arrives, and it always arrives, the organizations that over-optimized pay a tax the spreadsheet did not predict.

The name for what you are accumulating

JoAnna Vanderhoef, in a poster at the same conference, gave this tradeoff a name: Capability Debt. It is the growing gap between an organization’s apparent efficiency and its adaptive capacity. Capability Debt is subtle because it shows up as absence. Absence of novelty detection. Absence of the junior employee who stumbled into the strange request and learned how to triage it. Absence of the reviewer who noticed the model’s output was technically correct and strategically wrong. Absence of the senior whose judgment was trained on edge cases the automated pipeline now handles without them. You do not see the debt until you need to do something the system was not built for. By then, the people who would have done it have atrophied the capability, or have never built it at all. This is the part of AI transformation that is easy to underweight in a board deck. Efficiency is legible. Judgment loss is not. It hides inside the year-over-year improvement metrics and inside the reduced headcount and inside the deliverables that ship faster and look clean until a situation arrives that needs taste, or context, or the ability to know what is not in the data. Capability Debt is the bill that comes later.

Where the debt accumulates fastest

A team of researchers at MIT, Yale, and Microsoft, led by Mert Demirer, formalized the mechanism. They call it AI chains. An AI chain is a sequence of production steps in which the automated steps are contiguous. The human at the end of the chain verifies only the final output. The verification cost is fixed, not proportional to chain length. So the economic incentive is to keep adding steps to the chain until the marginal failure probability overwhelms the saved verification cost. Two consequences follow. First, the jobs that get automated fastest are the ones where AI-suitable work clusters together. Lecture preparation is one such job. Research, drafting, slide generation, and example synthesis are all AI-suitable, and they are sequential. A single verification at the end is sufficient. The chain collapses into one unit of human work. Tutoring is the opposite. AI-suitable steps are interleaved with diagnostic steps that require real-time human judgment. The chain cannot form. The human is on the hook for verification at every handoff. The second consequence is more important. Jobs that form long AI chains are also the jobs where learning loops get shortest. The junior who used to do the research, draft the slides, and watch the senior edit them loses three apprenticeship cycles per deliverable. What was formerly a sequence of moments where skill formed now happens inside the model. The researchers tested this empirically against O\\\*NET task descriptions combined with data from Anthropic’s Economic Index, which tracks which tasks are actually being performed with AI at scale. The pattern held. AI execution concentrates in contiguous blocks within occupations. Occupations whose AI-exposed steps are more dispersed throughout the workflow show substantially lower AI execution. The policy implication for leaders is quiet but significant. When your team maps its AI automation roadmap, the blocks you want to be careful about are the contiguous ones. They are where the efficiency gain is largest. They are also where the Capability Debt compounds the fastest.

The design move that most organizations never make

Here is what separates the organizations that stall from the ones that scale. The stall pattern looks like this: adopt the tool, measure the productivity, celebrate the win, and then slowly discover that the team cannot do what the team used to do. The workflow ran. The outcome degraded. Nobody is quite sure when. The scale pattern looks different. The scaling organizations are the ones that hold the line on what Renée Gosline, in a separate MIT study presented at the same conference, calls beneficial friction. Her team ran a controlled experiment. Participants worked on cognitive tasks with AI assistance. In the control condition, the AI made its recommendation and the participant accepted or rejected it. In the treatment condition, before accepting or rejecting, the participant was asked to articulate their own reasoning, or to predict what the AI’s reasoning was. That small intervention, which took thirty seconds, measurably reduced over-reliance on AI and preserved the participant’s critical thinking. This is the design move most organizations skip. They treat friction as waste. They are correct that some friction is waste. They are wrong that all friction is waste. The friction that forces a human to articulate their own judgment before the AI’s output is anchored is the friction that carries the capability forward. At the organizational level, beneficial friction looks like this. Decision rights reviews before an AI pipeline goes into production, where the team has to name who owns the outcome the pipeline is producing. Novelty drills, where a percentage of the work that could be automated is routed to humans anyway, so the capability stays alive. Signal sampling, where humans regularly review a random sample of AI outputs not for QA but for drift. Shadow-session reviews, where someone who has not been in the pipeline’s daily operation comes in and asks whether the pipeline is still doing the right thing. None of these are productivity moves. All of them are capability moves. The point of beneficial friction is not to make the system slower. The point is to keep the system teachable.

Why AI change management is a leadership problem

The organizations that are navigating this well understand something the organizations that are stalling do not. The new friction is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem. When execution was expensive, leadership’s job was to clear the path. Remove the blocker. Approve the budget. Unstick the review cycle. That job is largely done. The organizations that still do it well at the leadership level are optimizing a bottleneck that is mostly already gone. The new job is different. When execution is cheap and judgment is scarce, leadership’s job is to carry the organization’s judgment capacity forward. That means designing the decisions that matter, surfacing the dissent that would otherwise stay hidden, ensuring that the people who will need the skill later are getting the practice now. This is facilitation work. Not facilitation in the narrow sense of running meetings well, although that is part of it. Facilitation in the broader sense of helping groups think together, decide together, and build the shared judgment that a single expert, however capable, cannot hold alone. The organizations that treat AI change management as a tool rollout are solving for the wrong variable. The tool is the easy part. The hard part is building the organizational muscle that keeps judgment distributed across the people who will need to exercise it when the situation changes. And situations always change. The port example makes this visceral. The efficiency advantage held until the sixty-second fault. Then the organization that had preserved coordination independence recovered faster, because it had not consumed the slack the recovery required. Your organization is running the same experiment right now. You will not know the outcome until the fault arrives.

What to do about it

The organizations working the new friction well share three habits. They take Capability Debt seriously as an accounting category. Not formally on the balance sheet, but in the same way a good engineering team takes technical debt seriously. They know where it is accumulating. They know what they are choosing to trade for it. They revisit the decision when the debt load feels wrong. They design their AI automation with beneficial friction built in. Not as a safety check that can be switched off when the system is performing well. As a structural feature of how the work is done. The junior still drafts the memo the senior could get from the model. The analyst still writes the recommendation the pipeline could produce. Not because the human output is better. Because the human capability is the thing the organization is actually buying. They treat facilitation as infrastructure, not as a soft skill. They invest in it. They build it across the leadership team. They understand that the capability to carry judgment through an organization is the durable advantage. Tools will change. Models will change. The organizational capacity to decide well under uncertainty will not. This is what we do at Voltage Control. Not because we have a template to hand you. Because the work of navigating the new friction is facilitation work, and facilitation is what we have been building capability around for the last decade.

What is at stake

The organizations that hold the line on beneficial friction will move slower in the short term. They will look less impressive in the quarterly efficiency reports. Their AI transformation stories will be harder to tell in press releases. They will also move further in the long term, because they will still have the people who can do the work the model cannot yet do, and the judgment that closes the gap when the data does not. The organizations that optimize everything for speed will discover the fragility on the worst possible day. Not because the AI failed. Because the people who were supposed to catch what the AI missed have atrophied the capability to catch anything. The new friction is not a problem to be eliminated. It is a signal telling you where your organization’s judgment is concentrating. Work with it, and the organization gets stronger. Optimize it away, and you are running Dalbert Ma’s automated zone, waiting for rain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do most AI transformation initiatives fail? Most stall because organizations treat AI as a technology rollout when it’s actually a leadership and facilitation problem. The tools work. What breaks is the judgment capacity of the organization, the shared decision-making the model cannot replicate, and the distributed expertise that gets quietly hollowed out when contiguous workflows are automated end-to-end. What is capability debt in AI adoption? Capability Debt, named by JoAnna Vanderhoef in 2026, is the growing gap between an organization’s apparent efficiency and its adaptive capacity. It accumulates when AI absorbs work that used to build human judgment. The debt is invisible in productivity metrics and only shows up when the situation changes and the people who would have handled it have atrophied the skill. How does beneficial friction improve AI outcomes? Beneficial friction is a small intervention that forces a human to articulate their own reasoning before accepting an AI output. Renée Gosline’s 2026 MIT study showed a thirty-second reasoning step measurably reduced over-reliance on AI and preserved critical thinking. At the organizational level, beneficial friction looks like decision-rights reviews, novelty drills, signal sampling, and shadow-session reviews of automated pipelines. What role does leadership play in AI transformation? When execution was expensive, leadership cleared the path. Now that execution is cheap and judgment is scarce, leadership’s job is to carry organizational judgment capacity forward, design the decisions that matter, surface dissent, and ensure the people who will need a skill later are getting the practice now. That is facilitation work, not project management. How do you maintain judgment when automating workflows? Treat AI automation roadmaps as portfolio decisions, not efficiency decisions. Be most careful with contiguous AI-suitable steps, since those are where Capability Debt compounds fastest. Build beneficial friction into the workflow as a structural feature rather than a removable safety check. Keep humans in the chain even when the model could handle the step, because the capability is the thing the organization is actually buying.

Ready to work the new friction?

If your organization is hitting the stall, and most are, there are three ways to go deeper. Talk to us. We will help you map where your organization is accumulating Capability Debt and what to do about it. Read the full frame. Our pillar page lays out the thesis and the three pillars: New Friction, Multiplayer, and Spark. Build the capability. Our facilitation certification teaches the skills that matter most when the bottleneck is judgment, not execution.

The post The New Friction appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Robin Neidorf did not open with a slide deck. She opened with a song. The entire room stood and sang “Are You Sleeping” in three-part harmony, and by the time the last chord faded, something had already shifted. The vibrations of collective sound, Robin explained, regulate the nervous system and put people quite literally in harmony with one another. It was also a preview of the session’s entire argument: that facilitation is not just a cognitive practice. It is a bodily one. And most of us have been leaving half our instrument behind.

Trying to Help Gravity

Robin came to embodied facilitation the slow way. For nearly 30 years, she has held two parallel practices: facilitation, which she came to accidentally through consulting, and yoga. The two eventually found each other, but not without a lot of resistance. It took her nearly 10 years of yoga practice to learn how to properly do savasana, the pose where you lie flat on your back on the ground. She would lie there with tension still held in her muscles, unconsciously trying to help gravity do its job. It took another five years to learn that leaning into physical discomfort, rather than mentally fleeing it, would produce new knowledge she could not access any other way.

The parallel to facilitation was direct. Too often, Robin said, she enters a room with her head leading, her ego striving, trying to carry everything herself. When she can instead let the body hold her in its strength, something opens. “If I can lean into the discomfort,” she told the room, “perhaps I might be held.” The invitation of the session was to explore what that might look like in practice.

Activating the Body Before You Facilitate

Robin introduced the concept of the body’s energy centers as a practical grounding tool, not as spiritual doctrine but as lived anatomy. Through a partnered exercise in sensing the edge of each other’s energy field, participants discovered which center felt most alive for them: the head (seat of insight), the throat (voice), the heart (connection), or the belly (intuition). One self-described skeptic was visibly surprised to feel a clear tingle at the edge of his partner’s field. Several others described sensing expansion and contraction, warmth, or a shift in the quality of the space between their hands and their partner’s body.

Robin’s point was practical: knowing your strongest energy center gives you a pre-session grounding ritual that actually fits you. Belly people can do belly breathing, feeling the floor press back as the breath drops low. Head people can work the pressure point between the eyes or use scent to activate that space. Throat people can hum or sing. The goal is to arrive with the body already present, because if the facilitator’s body is not in the room, the participants’ bodies will not be either.

What the Numbers Tell You

The session’s most immediately transferable offering was a structured exercise in group size awareness. Robin walked participants through a sequence: make sustained eye contact in a pair, then in a three, then in a four, then in a five. After each stage, she asked what people noticed, and the room was generous with its observations.

Two was consistently described as the most vulnerable configuration. Breathing synchronized, blinking synchronized, and some participants found themselves moved to tears or laughter simply by being fully seen at close range. Robin noted that facilitators should treat pairs with particular care. A minute of sustained eye contact is a deeply personal thing, and an extended pairing activity carries more relational weight than most session designs account for.

Three, by contrast, is a highly creative number. The energy bounces around a triangle in a way that generates ideas, supports brainstorming, and allows participants to find rhythm and mutual support. Four tends toward the functional and decisive: solid, squared off, well suited for sorting through information and reaching conclusions. And five is where Robin observes the first signs of disengagement. The circle grows larger, eye contact becomes intermittent, and it becomes easier for someone to let the group carry the load. That is not always a problem. Sometimes a deliberate five or six gives people who need a mental breath a moment to take one.

The practical takeaway was about intentionality. Most facilitators choose group sizes based on how many people are in the room and how the math works out. This exercise gave participants a felt sense of what each configuration does to the relational field, and the invitation was to let that inform the design choices they make.

Making It Physical

For the session’s final activity, Robin invited participants to build a model of themselves out of pipe cleaners, paper scraps, and whatever else was on the tables. The instruction was not to create something that looked like them, but to create something that expressed how they want to feel when they are facilitating. The result was a room full of quiet, focused construction, followed by small group conversations about what each model meant, and for some, an attempt to physically embody the shape their model suggested.

The exercise pointed to something Robin named directly: that creating a physical object can feel safer than describing a feeling in words. It provides a kind of middle distance. And the act of then trying to move into the shape of the object in your own body awakens something that verbal reflection alone does not reach.

Robin closed the session with a collective om chant, offering it both as a sacred sound and as something purely physical: a vibration that reconnects the body’s electrical field to those around you. For a session that had moved from singing through energy sensing, eye contact exercises, and pipe cleaner sculptures, it was a fitting close. The body, Robin reminded the room, had been present and offering wisdom the entire time. The practice is simply learning to listen.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Robin’s Session:

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here and really quite honored to be in such an illustrious company of the speakers that we’ve heard so far. It’s just an honor. I didn’t have a walk-up song because we’re going to make our own music.
So, I’d like everyone to stand up, please. And here’s what we’re… I mean, if you know the song, you can sing it along with me this first round through. If you don’t know the song, I’m sure you’ll pick it up. We’re going to sing it through all together twice. All right? Ready? One, two, three.

MUSIC:
Are you sleeping?
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Ding, dong, ding.

Robin Neidorf:
Round two.

MUSIC:
Are you sleeping?
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Ding, dong, ding.

Robin Neidorf:
Guess what? We’re going to do harmony now. All right. So, this third of the room here is going to start. This middle chunk here is going to pick up. Do you know your cue, middle chunk? All right. And this chunk, last third over here, is going to be the third group. Again, we’re going to go through it two full times. So, don’t stop after the first one. And if you get lost, just look at your neighbor and smile. All right. Are we ready with group one? One, two, three.

MUSIC:
Are you sleeping?
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Are you sleeping?
Ding, dong, ding.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Are you sleeping?
Brother John.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Brother John.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.
Morning bells are ringing.
Ding, dong, ding.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you. Thank you all. That was even better than I imagined. So, give yourselves a hand. I wanted to start with a song, and particularly a song in harmony, because of what it does to our bodies. What you’re feeling when you’re singing in a group like that is embodied sound, and the vibrations of the music wake up yourselves, regulate your nervous system and put you quite literally in harmony with those you’re singing with.

Now, why does this matter? As facilitators, we don’t always bring ourselves fully as bodies into the spaces we’re working in, to allow our bodies to be present and fully alive in those spaces. And if we don’t, then participants won’t. And there is so much that happens below the surface of the skin for both individuals and for groups. When I was asked to propose a session for the summit, I knew I wanted to try something that I was not 100% sure I could pull off. So, you can tell me in about 80 minutes how it went.

For nearly 30 years, I’ve had two consistent practices in my life. The first is facilitation, though I haven’t always called it that. I’m also an accidental facilitator. I came to this through consulting, and as many of us do, we find our people. The second practice is yoga. When I’m practicing yoga, I can sometimes achieve a state of radical presence, a full embodiment of my physical, mental, and spiritual self, allowing the innate power and strength of my body to hold me.
On the other hand, when I strive too hard for a pose, when I’m in my ego and straining my muscles, I’m trying to hold myself. It doesn’t work. I sometimes think of it as trying to help gravity, which is crazy. It took me nearly 10 years, 10 years of yoga practice, to figure out how to properly do the pose where you lie flat on your back on the ground. I’m not kidding. I’d lie there and still have tension in my muscles as I was trying to help gravity.

It took me nearly 15 to learn that if I leaned into the physical discomfort of a pose instead of mentally running away from it, new knowledge would awaken. How could I bring these very slow lessons of my yoga practice to my facilitation practice, to find the place where my body holds me in its strength so that I could create that space for others?

As facilitators, there are a number of things that you’re probably already doing to figure out how to get to some of that embodied awareness. A lot of us use breathing exercises, box breathing, breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four. Lots of other breathing exercises work. Grounding exercises where you really plant your feet in the ground and maybe shift your weight back and forth. You might even be doing some reflection on an embodied experience. I was doing some reflection on embodied experience before this, walking around, doing some belly breathing, feeling where my body was.
What I know about myself though is this. Too often when I enter a space to facilitate, it’s my head that’s leading. My ego, my striving, trying to carry it all, trying to help gravity. Whereas if I can lean into the discomfort, perhaps I might be held.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this session, it’s this. Please remember, your body is alive. It is full of power, quite literally. It has an electrical field. Regardless of its age or its condition, it can hold you as a facilitator, as a human, in its strength.

Who’s ready to practice a little bit more? All right. So, for this one, we’re going to use a partner. We’re going to go through the instructions on the screen. I’ll go through everything that we’re going to do and then you’ll find a partner and go into it. Stephanie, would you mind if I came up here for just a second? I’d like to show what we’re going to be doing. So, you’re going to find your partner and this is going to be hard with both a clicker and a microphone, but we’re going to try. [inaudible 00:07:27].

Hands near the head and slowly move your hands out until you feel the edge of energy. Then the same thing at chest height. Same thing or sorry. Throat first, then chest, then belly. Move your hands slowly and feel where the edge of that energy is. Thank you.

Stephanie:
You’re welcome.

Robin Neidorf:
So, find a partner and we’re going to do this for as long as it takes to have something to happen. We’re going to get some feedback here. What do you notice? What did you notice about any of the stages about being the sensor or the sensee? What do you notice?

Marco:
At first, I had to make sense of what I was experiencing, but then I felt a very, very clear tingle at the sort of edge of my skin, and it would sort of decrease as I went furthest, and then it would increase if I went at the sort of sweet spot. And then yeah, it was really, really, really clear. And I approached this with an open mind, but as a skeptic, and I felt it.

Robin Neidorf:
Wonderful.

Marco:
Impressive. I mean, I’m totally blown away.

Robin Neidorf:
Somebody get on the bucks. Yeah. What else? What else do you notice?

Speaker 5:
It’s like a horse.

Speaker 6:
Yeah. I just felt that where tension, contraction, and expansion happened in every part of the body. And maybe it’s because I do this work on my own anyways, but I can just really sense what parts of each section was expansive or contracting. Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Wonderful. Thank you. How about one more? We got one right here.

Speaker 7:
I was also a little skeptical as the person experiencing the closeness, but as the one who had… using my hands, I felt like a heat sensation at my partner’s head. And then I felt a tingle specifically in my index finger when I went to the belly. And then what was interesting is my partner was like, “Is that the root chakra?” I feel like I have really good root chakra energy.

Robin Neidorf:
You’re jumping ahead of me.

Speaker 7:
Oh, sorry. Sorry.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s great. That’s great. Thank you. Love the skepticism. I love that you experience it. Remember, your body is alive and it has this power. In yoga, we talk about the seven chakras or energy centers. We’ve just experimented with four of them, but you don’t have to be a yogi to understand that your body has this electrical field. Your partner feels the tingle and the weight at the edge of that field. And sometimes even as the person who’s being sensed, you can tell when their hands are a little closer, a little further away. It depends on how you’re dialed in.

I’m curious, how many of you felt the most sense of energy when you were at the head chakra? Just raise your hand, please, if that was you. How about those of you at the throat chakra, the voice? Any chest people? A couple? Great. How about belly? Okay. So, a lot of head people in this room, which is interesting.

The head is the seat of insight. The throat is where you have your voice. We’ve just heard beautifully a lot about voice today. The heart is where you really dial into your heartbeat, and the belly is intuition. When you want to facilitate from your greatest strength, you really want to activate that particular energy center before you go and do your thing, because then you’re bringing your body fully in with you and you’re in partnership with it.

For me, it’s always been the belly center that’s the strongest. So, I was doing belly breathing before this session. If you’re a head person, you can use the pressure point between your eyes and do some pulses there. If you’re a throat person, you can hold your fingers up to your throat and feel the vibrations of your voice. You can sing, you can hum something that activates that center. Belly is a great one for belly breathing. If you’re not dressed nicely, you can lie on the floor and actually breathe into the floor and get that immediate feedback from the floor of the feeling of your belly expanding and contracting.
So, there’s all kinds of ways that we can activate that part of our alive body that helps us most do the thing we want to be able to do. This is something you can add to your practice when you’re designing sessions or add it to pre-session grounding rituals. Some of the ways maybe that you’re already using these types of techniques, I’m curious, is anyone using some body techniques to ground yourself, either breathing or one of the things we’ve just talked about or… Want to share? A couple shares? We got one right here.

Speaker 8:
Yeah. So, belly breathing is something I’ve been taught. I have a music background with chorus and also they teach you in theater, and a lot of people breathe incorrectly, if you think about it. So, belly breathing is something I always try to do to calm down.

Also, really good checks if you ever take a deep breath in and you’re breathing with your shoulders. It’s not really what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to breathe through diaphragm. And that’s what Marcos said was my strongest tingly woop-woop.

Robin Neidorf:
Cool.

Speaker 8:
So, I guess I’ve been doing it right.

Robin Neidorf:
Did it make that sound? That’s what I want to know.

Speaker 8:
Yeah, it did.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Wonderful. Thank you. Couple more.

Speaker 9:
We got one.

Robin Neidorf:
A couple more?

Darcy:
So, I love that she mentioned singing because sometimes I do singing vocal warmups and then the red leather, yellow… And then the other thing I have is this bell that’s like an energy bell. And I ring it in the room and I ring it around my body, and it just seems to settle me. And I bring it with me when I travel, too.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s great. Wonderful. Renita.

Renita:
I have a combination of things. I’m a woo-woo girly. When I’m facilitating, I make sure to stop and ground myself on the floor. I walk a lot, but when I’m pausing or listening to someone, I’m kind of imagining my feet going into the roots of the earth, so I have another source of energy that’s kind of coming up and keeping me really in my body and present. Then I’m a big smells person. So depending on, I put on different types of oils that mean different things in the morning, and that sets another level of intention in my energy of what I’m bringing into a space.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. Smell is another great one if head is your primary energy source. In addition to the pressure point, things that you can smell that really fill your head are another great way to activate that energy source.
So, our bodies give us wisdom as facilitators, but we can also start to think how we can safely tap into the bodies of our participants. This next activity is to create awareness around the impact of your choices for combining people and their bodies in activities in your session. It can direct your thinking when you’re deciding how to put people into groups for activities, discussions, et cetera.

I’ll talk through the full activity and then we’ll try it and then we’ll debrief. So, to start out with, you’re going to find a partner. And for one minute, you’re going to look each other in the eye. Then you’ll find a group of three, and for one minute, make eye contact with the other two people that are in your group. Then we’ll do the same with a group of four, making eye contact with all of the other people in your group. And finally, we’ll do it with a group of five. Question from Chris.

Chris:
Just clarifying question.

Robin Neidorf:
Clarify.

Renita:
Group of three and so on. Is it just one person focusing and then switching or is it…

Robin Neidorf:
However you can make eye contact with all the people around what’s going to be your little triangle or your circle.

Renita:
And everyone’s doing it at once?

Robin Neidorf:
Everyone’s doing it at once.

Renita:
Cool. Thank you.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Great question. Great question. All right. Any other questions? Find a partner for the first minute. I’ll warn you, this one’s the hardest. You can stand up, you can stay seated. Standing up is probably a little easier.
So, now form groups of three. And now you have a minute to look the other two people in your group in the eye. Okay, that’s a minute. Find a group of four. You’ve got another minute. Look each other in the eye. All right. Last one. I promise. Last one. Make a group of five.

All right. I want to do some table talk before we do some whole room debriefing. So, with the people at your table, spend… We’ll take five minutes to do this. Just talk about what you noticed. What did you notice in groups of two, three, four, five throughout the entire exercise? What came to mind? What were you thinking maybe even as a facilitator? What does this tell me about facilitation practice? You can have that conversation at your tables for about five minutes.

Let’s talk about what it feels like to be in a group of two. Who’d like to reflect a little bit on what it’s like to be in a pair? No one wants to talk about this experience. Thank you, Paula.

Paula:
Okay. I’m the person who immediately gets emotional, and I feel very overwhelmed with the depth of the person, even if I don’t know them at all.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah.

Paula:
And then it just goes on and on, and I just can’t stop crying.

Robin Neidorf:
Sometimes I cry at cat food commercials. Yeah. Confession time.

Speaker 9:
All right.

Robin Neidorf:
Another person who wants to reflect on what it felt like to be in a group of two.

Speaker 9:
Right here.

Speaker 14:
I think for me, maybe because I know Jesse, it was just easy. We just dropped into it, but it was very comforting. And then I started noticing… I got into this zen moment and then I noticed like, “Wow, our breathing is even locked in and our blinking.” It was just such a cool vibe, and it happened faster than I thought.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you for sharing. Yeah. One thing that human bodies are really good at doing is regulating each other. So, when you are in that kind of close dynamic, you will find breathing synchronizing. Yeah. Marco.

Marco:
I just wanted to share that something really surprising happened every time I looked into the eyes of various groups at this point. This is an emotional response, nothing rational about it, but I could see them as children very, very clearly. Yeah, yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Someone over here. Yeah.

Kristen:
So, we laughed most of the time in our shared discomfort. And so I think this sort of emotion over here, we also bubbled over quite audibly and synced up in our sort of giggles and our laughter and our sort of playfulness, but it was really joyful, I found, and very uncomfortable, both in pairs and then also in fives. Also, I’m really sorry we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to talk until the [inaudible 00:21:45].

Robin Neidorf:
Oh, that’s fine.

Kristen:
Thank you for telling me.

Robin Neidorf:
That was probably less clear than it could have been. Remember the part I said with… I wasn’t sure I could pull this off? Well, that’s an emotion. How about three? What did it feel like to be in a group of three? What did you notice? There’s Amber in the back.

Amber:
One thing that I noticed was you always had a break at some point with the threes, that you weren’t always looking into someone’s eyes. You had a moment to take a breath and like, “Oh, okay. All right. I’m not as uncomfortable at this moment.” And then I’m, “Oh, I’m uncomfortable and I’m okay now.” So, it was kind of interesting to go through this being seen and then having a break and then being seen. Yeah. So, I thought that was interesting.

Robin Neidorf:
Great. Thank you. Thank you. Danny.

Danny:
It’s interesting that you experienced that as having a break. For me, the three was the hardest because it felt like someone always was left out. That’s how I experienced that.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you.

Danny:
Somebody was always being left out.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. I think I heard that conversation over here too as well.

Danny:
And another thing I wanted to call out, just because I think it’s interesting, demographically, whenever you said, “This is what we’re doing,” I immediately looked for a woman to do the first exercise with.

Robin Neidorf:
Oh, thank you.

Danny:
Because it felt safer.

Robin Neidorf:
Understood. And actually, somebody did come up to me earlier and said in the chakra activity, “Why do it on each other and not on ourselves?” And that there’s a sense of safety there. I do want to say that in this particular room on day two of the Facilitation Summit, I felt a little more willing to try things that are perhaps more vulnerable, but it is a really important call out around safety and how people feel.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen this type of exercise build safety, very quickly when people can see each other, really fully see each other as humans and it’s just eye to eye, breath to breath. That is also a way that safety can be explored and multiplied, even. How about more reflections on three people?

Speaker 9:
I have one. So, I’m going to try and make it quick. I have three things. The first one is that one member of our group did not like eye contact, and I noticed that the other member of the group and I were caretaking. We saw that they were uncomfortable and then we started looking at each other, which is cool.

And then, shocker to most of you in the room, I didn’t like when people weren’t looking at me. I think that’s like very human of like, “I’m not in the group, what’s wrong with me? Why am I not being liked?” And the third thing, which is a facilitation takeaway is that I love that you gave us an opportunity to make you the bad guy of…

Robin Neidorf:
My pleasure.

Speaker 9:
Yeah. Of like, “Oh, we got to do this. Isn’t this so weird?” Because people are begging to connect, and we just need an opportunity to. So, this is a question for me and everybody in the room. How can we make ourselves the bad guy in the room so that people can connect? Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Something I haven’t thought about. I think that’s a wonderful takeaway. Thank you for that. One more reflection on three.

Speaker 18:
In my group of three, we definitely noticed a pattern. So, we started to create rhythms and patterns, and we talked about that as a table as they started to feel those natural rhythms and then it might break up and we’d say, “Oh,” and kind of start it again. So, that’s when that… certainly in three more than the others.

Robin Neidorf:
Wonderful. Yeah. That’s that mutual regulation that’s happening again. How about four? What does four feel like?

Speaker 19:
Four was kind of fun because you’re pairing up and a little team up, and then you go find a new teammate and then you team up again. So, nice little rhythm to it.

Robin Neidorf:
More rhythm. Love it. How else does four feel? Here’s one over here.

Speaker 20:
This is less a comment about the number of people as much as Antonio here, and I, we were in each other’s group the whole time, right? And I established more comfort eye-gazing with you than the new people that came in.

Robin Neidorf:
Interesting. Thank you for sharing that. One more reflection on four? Yes. Over here.

Speaker 21:
I think as the group gets bigger, then you kind of realize each person has, you are sharing a specific wavelength with… So, with one person, our eye contact is playful, and then another person is very calming and feels like an old friend. And so it was interesting to notice the, I guess, distinct eye contact personalities or dynamics that were coming through as different people contrasted with each other.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. You get a lot of personality and relationship just in that. Julie, do you want to add?

Julie:
Yeah, just building on that. I started mirroring. I’m like, someone would breathe in. And then I, “Oh, I should breathe in.” And then I look and they were smiling, I’m like, “Oh.” But I started mirroring my person and I was in sync with them. It was interesting how I followed their patterns.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. Deeply human instinct to mirror. Deeply human instinct. All right, let’s talk about five, and then we’ll do some overall reflections on what this might tell us as facilitators. Renita.

Renita:
I think for five, we were talking at the table as well. I was exploring my relationship with equity where at first I was like, “Well, I have to give everybody equal time.” I was like, “You don’t have to give everybody equal time. If you look at some persons more than others, trust them to hold themselves and somebody else has got them. We don’t have to make sure no one’s getting left out. People can hold themselves, and they’re part of the group so that you aren’t being left out. So, just enjoy the experience and kind of naturally be in the flow without feeling like you have to give someone equal time.

Robin Neidorf:
Great. Thank you. One over here?

Speaker 23:
Yep. So, I was going to say one observation I made was it felt like Squid Games, like the Mango Game at first. I was like, “Oh, shoot, we’re going to find somebody.” So, I thought that was kind of fun, but then also a more serious tip. I guess I appreciate the fact that the person I was paired with, Catherine, for the two, we actually stayed together all the way to the fifth group. So, I felt like there was an intimate connection even there looking back and saying, “Wow, we made it through all this together.”

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah, you got a buddy. You got a buddy. Love it.

Speaker 23:
Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Someone over here?

Speaker 24:
I noticed when we got to five that it wasn’t just about the eye contact, but the physical distance between us was also increased, and that shifted the experience as well. And it certainly wasn’t as intimate even in the one-on-one, with the exception of maybe the person to my left or right, who was about the same distance as they would’ve been at the beginning.

Robin Neidorf:
Great.

Speaker 24:
I was also curious, I don’t know if this is the first time you’ve done this exercise or not. Have you ever gone back to two to see what that shift is to expand and then come back to the original?

Robin Neidorf:
I haven’t. And I will say that I actually, this isn’t an activity that I use when I’m facilitating for real. I do it with the facilitators, not with people in the wild, because that would be weird. So, I haven’t tried that, but I think it would be a really interesting add-on, especially when we get to the next part of our discussion. So, one more, Brian on five.

Brian:
Yeah. What was interesting is Kristen’s eyes have so much joy that when I started staring at her, we just couldn’t help from being joyful. And it was interesting because when Josh and I started, we were really serious about everything, we were following and everything. And then in our discomfort as introverts, we decided to role play. She was Meryl Streep. I was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Robin Neidorf:
I love it.

Brian:
And then we realized we weren’t supposed to talk. And then he’s trying to get serious with us. And then Chris came over and the way he was looking at me, it was like… I can’t keep from laughing. And then this other person, I forget what his name was, came over and he was like, “Oh, you’re the skeptics.” And then what we looked over, we’re like, “And you all are all super serious.”

And we were like, “Oh, we’re bad. And then we’re going to disappoint you, Robin, as a facilitator, because we thought we were being unserious.” And so I felt like this range of performance, shame, kind of. So, I was watching how the group was almost dictating to us what we were supposed to be doing. And maybe we projected that, but I’m glad you left it a little bit vague because I watched how a group can influence someone else.

Robin Neidorf:
Right. Thank you. One more, Darcy.

Darcy:
Thank you. For me, when it got to five is when I started feeling insecurities coming up. With the others, I was feeling all the energy and really into it. And maybe it was the fact that in five, you were the most alone for some of that time, right? Because it’s twos and twos and you’re waiting for those two to finish before it comes to you again. So, I had a hard time finding a flow in the five, where with the others, it didn’t seem to matter as much.

Robin Neidorf:
Interesting. Thank you. I’ll tell you, I’ve done this with groups of facilitators before, and it is one of the things I really like doing. We spend more time on it, in part because there’s so much that we do as facilitators that’s about breaking people into smaller groups. And I found that we can talk about that all day long, or we can try it and actually feel in our bodies what happens when we’re in a group of two, when we’re in a group of three, et cetera.
Two, as has been reflected and I think is really the most consistent experience I’ve heard when I’ve done this with facilitators, is, “Two is extremely vulnerable.” So, you want to be extraordinarily careful when you set up pairs for something, especially for an extended period of time. This was just a minute, but it was a minute of looking into each other’s eyes. That’s deeply, deeply personal.

Three is a highly creative number. When I want a group to brainstorm, I often turn to groups of three. Three bounces energy around a circle or a triangle, I guess, really, really nicely. There’s a lot of ways that groups of three find the rhythm, find each other, help each other, support each other in what they need in that moment. And three is a very creative way to go for brainstorming types of things.

My experience of four, and I’m interested that… I didn’t hear this reflected, but I’m going to share it, which is that four is a very much a getting things done number. Four feels like very solid and square, “We’re here to come to a decision. We’re here to sort through all this information and figure out what the most important things are.” At least that’s the way that I’ve experienced four in my practice.

And then in five, I actually find this is a place where a lot of people start to check out. There’s less energy in the circle because you are further away from each other. There’s fewer times that you’re always making eye contact. There’s times where you’re not being looked at. Sorry, Katie. And it can be easier for someone to say, “Okay, well, the rest of the group will hold this. The rest of the group will take care of this.”

So, I’m just very careful about when I use any of these given numbers to create breakouts, whether I’m online or in person. It does make a difference. I’m curious what takeaways you might have as facilitators, how you might use this awareness in thinking differently about maybe it’s an activity that you do regularly, maybe you hadn’t thought about numbers in this way. I’m curious what your takeaways are on this one.

Speaker 26:
I know people had different ways they experienced the odd numbers like, “I’m not being looked at or I’m being left out.” And there’s also an opportunity there to be the person observing other people. So, assigning that role from the outset, if you’re not part of the active conversation, you play a really important role and that is to observe the conversation.

Robin Neidorf:
That’s great.

Speaker 9:
Over here.

Marco:
I would like to build on your point. I could sense that there was something really powerful about what we were experiencing around the potential for using gaze as a port, as a gateway to empathy, as a shortcut to empathy. Empathy is a hard thing, but it’s something everyone is capable of.
So, this is experimental thinking, but maybe in phases of the design process like in user research and in user testing, there is a space where we can use gaze to see if we can more quickly get the person and the problem that we want to try to solve with design.

Robin Neidorf:
I love that. I love that. Something else you were just… I was thinking as you were speaking was that this is also an activity, if you did want to use it with normal people, it doesn’t matter what language people speak. You can have this gaze moment that builds empathy regardless of other barriers that might be in place. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 9:
The one over here?

Speaker 27:
Yeah, I think it was over there.

Speaker 28:
It just got me thinking with the two person, so 1B1. It got me thinking when I’m doing interviews and always trying to make eye contact. Now, we were talking about it. I didn’t have that discomfort doing interviews because you’re too busy listening and you’re distracted, but it got me thinking when the person stops talking and is focusing on their answer, I don’t want to distract that answer because of my all of a sudden, “Oh, no one’s talking and I’m staring at your eyes and this is awkward.” I don’t want that to confuse them or get them off their thought track. So, it was enlightening for me.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah, I love that. Putting it out to another part of the practice, which is interviews is a really important piece. One over here and then one way back in the corner there.

Speaker 29:
I just think it’s interesting. I mean, for people… some of us have been doing these for a long time. We’ve been teaching them and so forth. And I feel like oftentimes the selection of number is more like how many people are at the table or how many people are in the room? Or so forth. It’s much more mechanical. And I think this is interesting because it’s much more intentional for the kind of emotional state you’re trying to create. And so it’s definitely fascinating. Thank you for bringing it up.

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah. Glad you enjoyed it. Thank you. Back here.

Speaker 30:
I think this showed how important it is to build variety in the activities and the people that you’re engaging with. Being in a group and always going back to two and always going back to pairs and doing it over and over again, it can be beneficial, but it’s a bit exhausting and it’s a bit a bit same/same after a while. So, switching it up can lead to much more interesting engagements.

Also, it’s really important with this to design around the energy that people have. If it’s always intense and if it’s continually intense, people are going to just stop disengaging. That’s when people start taking a lot of coffee breaks or a lot of bathroom breaks, and all of a sudden people are not at the tables. There’s only so much energy people have and you have to respect that.

Robin Neidorf:
Right. Great points. And it actually is when I sometimes will deliberately use a five or a six, knowing that that is a place where then people who do need a mental break, can pull back a little bit or take a break or whatever that is they need to do.
And then there’s sometimes the math just don’t math, and you got to do whatever you’ve got to do to make it work. And having this awareness can give you as a facilitator a different sense of what might be happening differently than maybe what your intention was if you have a group of three instead of a group of four or five based on what you’re trying to create. I think that intentionality is really the most important through line here is, how can we be more intentional about the bodies that are in the spaces that we’re facilitating and how we combine them and recombine them. One over here and then we’ll move on.

Speaker 31:
I’m actually holding some curiosity now about when you mentioned virtual facilitation and the consideration of putting people into breakout rooms, and how that energy management kind of can shift because as a virtual facilitator, you hold so much of that or you help to guide so much of that energy without reading the body context cues. So, then thinking about that in the virtual space, I’m just so intrigued. Have you found the numbers to be pretty comparable in the virtual space as they are in the in person space?

Robin Neidorf:
I do find them pretty comparable. I’ve got a longer answer, but I’d actually like to hear from the wisdom of the room. Lots of us do a lot of online facilitation. I’m curious, from what we’ve just discussed, I mean, how might it show up in your virtual practice as well as your in person practice? Anyone? Great.

Speaker 32:
I had to step out… This is not answering your question, so it’s a political answer, “Thanks for asking that question. I’m going to say what I was going to say.” I had to step out-

Robin Neidorf:
Are you in politics?

Speaker 32:
No. I had to step out because I thought I lost my car keys somewhere between here and a parking garage, found them. But when I came back, it was the groups of five. And so I came up the stairs into this room, which was totally silent with 100 whatever people intense… And there was that feeling of being in high school and middle schools like, “I’m the only one left out.” But the energy was just so stable and firm, it was incredible to walk into.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you for sharing that. Just went over here. There’s one over here.

Speaker 33:
So, to answer your question, also well done on finding your car keys. That is anxiety-producing. I do find that in virtual spaces, how you’re talking about these numbers hold, especially with two, sending folks into groups of two, if you then pull them back in what seems like should be a reasonable amount of time, often they’re like, “We introduced ourselves to each other and maybe got to your first question.” So, that vulnerability feels like it is really turned up, especially because you’re eye contact on Zoom. That’s really very, very present in those screens.

Robin Neidorf:
It’s an excellent point. I don’t know that I ever named it before, but I think I’ve used that in my practice a lot. Very rarely will put people into a breakout of two, unless it’s a group of people that knows each other extremely well. Other thoughts about how this translates to virtual or hybrid even? Hybrid’s just bananas.

So, I can tell you, to answer the question, I mean, most of my facilitation on a weekly basis is probably virtual. So, I spend a lot of time staring at a screen with the Brady Bunch [inaudible 00:42:13] faces up there, and I still find it holds. And even when I’m thinking about the size of my overall group, I’m much happier if I’m facilitating online with up to say, I don’t know, 10 people at most, because they do check out past that point. And so being aware of those dynamics, which I think we all innately are, just if you’ve been doing this for any period of time, you know these things, you notice them. But it is a way of being more deliberate and deliberative about how you want to set up whatever the activity is for the objective that you’re going for.

All right. So, we’re going to do one more activity, and for this one, you get to use the pipe cleaners. You’re going to take the pipe cleaners and any other materials you might have at your table, whether that’s paper or piper clips or empty cans of soda, and create a model of yourself. It doesn’t have to look like you. It doesn’t have to actually even be humanoid. I actually found this one in the bin at my table this morning, and I said, “This is me today. This is what I want to look like today.” So, create a model of yourself and then position the model in a physical expression of how you want to feel when you’re facilitating. Whatever you’d like to do with the pipe cleaners, paper, cans, flame clips, lanyards, whatever you want to create.

Kristen:
I like people that [inaudible 00:44:05].

Robin Neidorf:
All right. Finish up wherever you are. And you can see from my instructions that I had an idea about what size groups to put you all in, but I’d actually like to hear from this group. I want to combine everyone into groups so you can show each other your models and talk about them, and possibly even try to express with your bodies if you feel like it, what that model is. What size group would you propose for this activity?

Speaker 20:
Five.

Speaker 5:
Five.

Robin Neidorf:
Group of five? Three? Okay. Let’s hear from someone who said five. I want to hear your reasoning, please.

Speaker 20:
My take for five?

Robin Neidorf:
Yeah.

Speaker 20:
Sometimes you just need-

Speaker 9:
Hold on.

Speaker 20:
Oh, I’ll shout. I love shouting. Sometimes you just need a good measured amount of chaos.

Robin Neidorf:
All right. Measured chaos. I could go with that. A couple of people said three. Who said three? Who’d like to give your reasoning for three?

Darcy:
Well, you mentioned that it’s very good for brainstorming and creativity. So, if that’s what we’re here for, it felt like the right number.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Good question. What’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? Anyone have a vote on something besides three or five?

Marco:
17.

Robin Neidorf:

17. We’ll be here all day. Marco. Marco wants a two? Give us your reasoning.

Marco:
It’s my favorite sort of setup in general, in all aspects of the exchange. Yeah.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Yeah, okay. I think I’ve been convinced by the five, but you can certainly stay at your tables of whatever size you like. Break into fives, go into fours, go into threes. I’ll let you use your own bodily judgment here on what is going to work. Show each other your models, and talk about why you did what you did, what it makes you feel, how you want to feel while you’re facilitating. And if you feel so moved, try to hit the physical pose that expresses what your pipe cleaner and canned creation suggests.

All right, let’s come on back. So, abstracting from the actual body to the model can feel safer for a lot of people. Having objects that you can ground with, put into shapes, sometimes creating a shape that you couldn’t actually do with your physical body can feel very freeing. And at the same time, taking those abstract shapes that represent how you want to feel, and then trying to create them physically, also awakens a different kind of experience of what that might be. I’d actually like to hear, if this table wouldn’t mind, you guys were all trying each other’s models, weren’t you? I’d love to know what that experience was like.

Speaker 34:
It seemed the obvious thing to do, so we did it.

Robin Neidorf:
How did it feel?

Speaker 34:
It was fun. It was like trying a little lens on or like trying a different costume on or a different perspective. I did find it potentially a little vulnerable, like creating yourself. It felt almost like… I don’t know. It felt like I could see how someone might feel intimidated or a little naked.

Robin Neidorf:
So, maybe altering it slightly to make a representation of how you want to feel. Would that be less vulnerable or is that still…

Speaker 34:
I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t find it super vulnerable, but I thought others might.

Robin Neidorf:
Okay. Fair enough.

Speaker 34:
Did anybody find it that way?

Robin Neidorf:
What else? What else did you notice from either presenting your own model to everyone else or hearing about the models or maybe feeling your body move a little bit as you were talking about the models? Kelly over here.

Kelly:
I don’t know if this is profound or anything, but just an interesting observation. We had three at our table, and one person’s was their mind space, one was our energy, and one was their current state. So, we used different time and levels of our being that we represented.

Robin Neidorf:
I love that. Thank you. What else? What did you notice?

Speaker 18:
Ours were all very different, and so there was some that was just, “This is where my brain took me and I don’t know what it means.” And then some that were very purposeful in symbols and symbolizing what’s important to us. And some that was just like, “This is an explosion of me.”

Robin Neidorf:
Great. Thank you.

Speaker 18:
Yeah. Very different.

Robin Neidorf:
Thank you. One more. Anyone? Noelle.

Noelle:
We also broke the rules and just kept all six of us because we were so curious to see what everyone was going to… What it was. But it just felt like a moment to celebrate each other, whatever it was they chose to share, whether they used 15 pipe cleaners or three. We all took very different approaches, but it was just an opportunity to, whatever they chose to share, just celebrate what it was that they brought into the space.

Robin Neidorf:
Love it. And from the front of the room, I can tell you that was definitely the energy that I felt. It was a lot of mutual celebration. Really, really wonderful. And I just also want to say, Daniella made this one that I found this morning that spoke to me about how I wanted to feel. And having a physical reminder, it can be a talisman for you. So, I made a very deliberate point of bringing it up here and having a chair where I could keep my talisman of how I wanted to feel as I was working with you all this afternoon. So, thank you for that.

We are going to move on. I really want to thank you for your willingness to experiment with me today. I realize that the body work can be really vulnerable. I will tell you for myself… I mean, I told you about how I can’t lie on the floor. I didn’t even used to be able to say the word body. It was so upsetting to me. So, to be at a different place in my relationship with my body, with the word, I think it’s made me a better facilitator over time. And I also know that it’s healthier for me as a human. So, I’m glad to have an opportunity to share that with you.

If you’d like to scan the QR code, we’re going to do this quick close and then I do want to do one final thing before we move on to the break. So, enter the code, and let’s see, “Listen beneath your thoughts. What is your body asking you to take into your facilitation?” Regulation, groundedness, kindness, energy. More of me. Intimacy and love. This is a job, but it’s also shared meaning-making. Beautiful. Gratitude, patience, spirals, my somatic and intuitive knowledge. More eye contact. Wonderful.

All right. We’ll let these continue to scroll up, but what I’d like to invite everyone to participate, if you’re comfortable, in one chance of the mantra om, which is the sacred sound of the universe. If you prefer, it’s just a vibrating sound that connects your electrical feel to the people around you.

It resets your nervous system and it grounds you in your body. You can also simply choose to listen if you don’t want to join us in the chant. Even just listening, you get the benefit of the vibration. So, if anyone would like to join me, you can close your eyes, if that makes it easier. We’ll take one deep breath together and then chant om. Deep breath in. Om. Thank you so much for coming on this journey.

The post At the Edge of Knowing: Embodied Practice for Whole-Self Facilitation appeared first on Voltage Control.

The data is in, and it confirms what many of us suspected: the way most organizations are approaching AI adoption is fundamentally broken. What looks like an AI upskilling problem is actually a design problem, and no amount of additional training will solve it. What looks like an AI upskilling problem is actually a design problem, and no amount of additional training will solve it.

In the same week, two independent reports landed on the same conclusion from completely different angles. Gartner’s Digital Workplace Summit presented research showing that generic AI training produces generic results, that 72% of IT leaders say Copilot users struggle to integrate it into their daily routine, and that collaboration, not individual tool proficiency, is the #2 skill IT workers need right now. Meanwhile, Anthropic released its Economic Index showing that experienced AI users get measurably better results than newcomers, and the gap compounds over time. People who have used AI for six months or more have a 10% higher success rate in their conversations. The longer you use it, the wider the gap gets.

This is not a training problem. This is a design problem.

Why AI Upskilling Fails: The Training Trap

Here is what most organizations are doing: they buy licenses, schedule a training session, maybe run a webinar series, and call it done. Gartner’s data shows exactly what happens next. License counts rise. Active daily usage stays flat. Within a day, employees have lost 50% of what they learned. After six days, 90% is gone.

That is not a failure of the training content. It is a failure of the approach. You cannot teach AI fluency in a classroom any more than you can teach someone to swim by showing them a PowerPoint about water.

AI fluency is not taught. It is sparked. Nobody learns something they do not want to learn, and nobody retains a skill they do not practice immediately in the context of their actual work. The most common misconception we encounter when a client first engages us: that training is a one-and-done experience. That a small training event is all that might be needed for change. The reality is that AI upskilling that holds comes from stacking small and deliberate work over time, not from a single workshop.

The Anthropic data makes this even sharper. Their report studied over a million conversations and found that the gap between experienced and new users is not explained by what tasks they are doing, what country they are in, or what model they are using. It is explained by how they interact. Experienced users do not just delegate tasks. They iterate, push back, validate, and learn. They treat AI as a collaborator, not a vending machine.

That is a skill that gets built through practice, not instruction.

The Perception Gap Nobody Is Talking About

Gartner surfaced a stat at the Digital Workplace Summit that should alarm every executive reading this: executives are four times more likely to report high AI productivity gains. Individual contributors are five times more likely to say AI made no difference.

Read that again. The people making the adoption decisions and the people doing the adoption are living in different realities.

This is not a technology gap. It is a perception gap, and it is driven by something deeper than skill level. When four out of five employees believe their organization is trying to replace them with AI, and only 12% feel involved in the decisions about how AI gets used, you do not have a training problem. You have a trust problem. And no amount of lunch-and-learn sessions will fix it.

Consider what this looks like on the ground. A VP of digital transformation rolls out an AI copilot and sees her own productivity jump. She assumes everyone else is having the same experience. Meanwhile, 78% of employees do not even know whether they will lose their job to AI. They are not experimenting with the tool. They are watching it with suspicion, trying to figure out what it means for them. The same technology that feels like a superpower to the executive feels like a threat to the person three levels down.

We see this pattern constantly. Teams do not resist AI because they lack skills. They resist because they do not have a vision for what purposeful adoption looks like, and they do not feel they have agency in it because they were not included. It is a mixture of capability gap and design gap, and the design gap is the one nobody is addressing.

The organizations seeing real value from AI share one characteristic that the others do not: alignment. Gartner found that organizations with business-IT-executive alignment on what problems AI should solve are three times more likely to report significant value. Only 14% of organizations have that alignment today. That is not a technology gap. That is a conversation that has not happened yet.

The Experience Starvation Problem

There is a more insidious consequence of getting AI adoption wrong, and most leaders are not seeing it yet.

When senior people use AI to do junior work faster, they are not just being more productive. They are removing the on-ramps that junior employees need to develop expertise. Gartner calls this “experience starvation.” The expert uses AI to absorb tasks that used to be the proving ground for new hires. The new hire never gets the reps. The pipeline for developing the next generation of talent quietly breaks.

Think about what this means in practice. A senior analyst who once delegated data cleaning to a junior team member now does it herself in minutes with AI. The junior analyst never learns the structure of the data, never develops the intuition that comes from wrestling with messy inputs. The senior person is more productive. The junior person is more expendable. And the organization has quietly eliminated the apprenticeship model that built its bench strength.

This is already showing up in the data. Anthropic’s report found that job-finding rates for 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations have dropped 14% compared to 2022. Software developer employment in that age cohort has declined roughly 20% from its late-2022 peak. The junior roles are not being automated away by AI. They are being absorbed by seniors who now have AI doing the work that used to be someone else’s learning curve.

There is a troubling feedback loop here as well. Anthropic’s researchers found that developers who used AI assistance scored 50% on follow-up knowledge assessments, compared to 67% for those who coded by hand. The tool makes you faster today while potentially making you less capable tomorrow, unless the learning environment is designed to counteract that effect.

Gartner projects that 56% of CEOs will use AI to de-layer middle management within five years. The question is not whether the org chart is going to flatten. It is whether anyone is designing what replaces the development pathways that disappear when it does.

The AI-Fluent Island Problem

Here is something we did not expect to find, but now see repeatedly: the teams with the most AI-fluent individuals are not always the teams getting the most value.

When a few people on a team develop real AI proficiency while everyone else stays at the basics, something counterintuitive happens. The fluent members pull ahead in their individual work, but they cannot embed what they are learning back into the team. They are producing faster, thinking differently, using AI as a genuine thought partner, but the team’s processes, meetings, and decision-making structures have not changed. The fluent members end up on an island.

In some ways, this is worse than universal low adoption. At least when nobody is using AI, the team is aligned in their way of working. When a few members leap ahead without the collaborative infrastructure to support it, you get fragmentation. The AI-fluent people get frustrated because they can see what is possible but cannot bring the team along. The rest of the team feels left behind or skeptical. The organization gets pockets of individual productivity gains that never compound into team-level or org-level value.

This is the single biggest blind spot in the “train the champions” approach that many organizations default to. Champions without a collaborative model just become isolated experts.

Why Collaboration Is the Missing Layer

Here is the part that most AI adoption strategies completely miss: the highest-value applications of AI are not individual. They are collaborative.

Gartner’s research ranks collaboration as the #2 skill IT workers need, at 47%, right behind AI/GenAI itself at 53%. That is not a coincidence. As AI handles more of the execution work, the human work that remains is increasingly about alignment, decision-making, and working across functions. The ability to think together becomes more important precisely because the machines handle more of the thinking alone.

The Anthropic data reinforces this from a different angle. Their report distinguishes between “automation” (delegating a task to AI) and “augmentation” (using AI as a thought partner for more complex, creative, or strategic work). On the consumer platform, augmentation already accounts for 53% of usage. Experienced users disproportionately favor augmentation over pure automation. They have learned that the real value is not in having AI do something for you. It is in having AI think with you.

But thinking with AI is a multiplayer activity. When a team uses AI to generate options, stress-test a strategy, or prototype a solution, the output is only as good as the process that surrounds it. More inputs and faster inputs can actually slow alignment down if the process is broken. A team that cannot align on a decision without AI is not going to align any faster with it. They are just going to generate more options to disagree about.

This is where most organizations have a gap they cannot see. They are investing in individual AI skills while ignoring the collaborative infrastructure that makes those skills productive at scale. They are optimizing the nodes while neglecting the network.

What Real AI Upskilling Looks Like

The organizations that are getting real value from AI are not running better training programs. They are redesigning how teams work together. That is what AI upskilling actually looks like in practice.

The shift that matters is moving from AI as a tool to AI as a toolmate, a participant in the collaborative process rather than something individuals use in isolation. This shift is still so new that most teams do not have models for it yet. “Where do we start beyond the single-player approach?” is the question we hear most often. But when you provide those models, when you show teams what collaborative AI actually looks like in practice, excitement builds fast. People can suddenly see what is possible.

We saw this recently with a client whose previous AI training had focused entirely on individual use cases. Adoption was uneven, value was scattered, and the team could not connect their individual AI experiments to meaningful outcomes. When we introduced collaborative AI and AI toolmates, working with AI as a team rather than as individuals, it was a major unlock. Both the teams and executives saw the shift in real time. The difference was not better training. It was a fundamentally different model for how AI gets used.

Different roles also need fundamentally different AI strategies. Experts need AI that extends their capacity. People still building expertise need AI that accelerates their learning without starving them of foundational experience. A one-size-fits-all training program is the opposite of what any of them need.

The Anthropic data points to the same conclusion from the user behavior side. Their researchers found that high-tenure users actually grant AI lower autonomy, not higher. They stay more involved, iterate more, and get better results because of it. The best AI users are not the ones who have learned to delegate everything. They are the ones who have learned when to push back, when to redirect, and when to go deeper.

That kind of fluency does not come from a training module. It comes from practice in a structured environment, with feedback, with real stakes, and ideally with other people learning alongside you. Think of it as AI fitness, not AI training. A gym metaphor rather than a classroom metaphor. You do not get fit by attending a lecture about exercise. You get fit by showing up consistently and doing the work.

The Widening Gap

The urgency here is not abstract. It is compounding.

Anthropic’s data shows that the skills gap between experienced and new AI users is hardening into something more structural. Washington, D.C., where the population skews highly educated, has AI adoption rates four times what you would expect for a city of its size. Globally, the top 20 countries account for 48% of per-capita AI usage, and that concentration is increasing. The people who started early are pulling further ahead. The organizations that figured this out first are building advantages that will be very difficult to close.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of hiring processes will include AI proficiency testing. At the same time, the atrophy of critical thinking skills due to GenAI use is already pushing organizations toward “AI-free” skills assessments. The workforce is bifurcating: people who can work with AI as a genuine collaborator, and people who either cannot use it effectively or have let it do their thinking for them.

59% of the workforce needs brand new skills in the next two to three years. That is not a number that gets solved by scaling up existing training approaches. It requires a fundamentally different design.

The Design Problem

The question is not “how do we train people on AI.” The question is “how do we redesign how teams work together when half the team is agents.” That reframing is the gap between AI training and real AI upskilling.

That is a facilitation challenge, not a technology challenge. It requires someone who understands how groups make decisions, how trust gets built (and broken), how to create the conditions for people to develop new capabilities through practice rather than instruction.

32 million jobs will be transformed per year due to AI. Gartner estimates that managing this transformation requires 20 times more organizational effort than managing job losses. That is the single most important stat in all of this research. The hard part is not the technology. It is the organizational design work that makes the technology productive.

Today, 80% of IT work is done by humans without AI. By 2030, Gartner projects that 75% will be done by humans with AI, and 25% by AI alone. That transition does not happen through training programs. It happens through deliberate redesign of how people and AI work together, role by role, team by team, process by process.

The organizations that treat AI adoption as a training problem will keep buying licenses that do not get used, running workshops that do not stick, and watching the gap between their AI-fluent employees and everyone else widen. The organizations that treat it as a design problem, one that requires rethinking collaboration, decision-making, and how people learn together, will be the ones that capture the real value.

The tools are ready. The question is whether your organization is designed to use them.

If you are rethinking how your teams work with AI and want to explore what a design-first approach to AI upskilling looks like, let’s talk.

The post Why Your AI Training Program Is Already Obsolete appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Brian Buck opened his session not with a framework but with a meditation. Before a single slide appeared, participants were invited to close their eyes, settle their breath, and bring to mind someone who had truly seen them. Not their performance. Not their output. Them. The exercise set the tone for everything that followed: a session about what it means to shift your identity as a facilitator from someone who brings the fire to someone who ignites it in others.

From Goals to Value Directions

Brian introduced a concept that gave the session its backbone: the difference between goals and value directions. Goals have endpoints. You reach them, and if you’ve built your sense of purpose around reaching them, you often find yourself flat on the other side. Value directions are different. They are orientations you move toward for the rest of your life, never fully arriving, always deepening. Brian’s example was simple: being the best father he can be. That never ends. But inside that direction, he can set annual goals, take specific actions, and measure progress.

The invitation to the room was to apply this to facilitation. What is your value direction as a facilitator? Not what certifications you’re pursuing or what methods you’re mastering, but who are you becoming in this work and why? Brian wove in the broader context of belonging, drawing on recent social science that connects it to engagement, performance, and psychological safety. Belonging, he noted, precedes performance. It’s relational energy. When people feel they belong in a space, they bring themselves into it fully. When they don’t, they withhold. And psychological safety, he reminded the room, is felt, not declared.

Ember, Kindle, Illuminate

To make the value direction of presence illumination tangible, Brian introduced a three-part fire model developed through his capstone work in Voltage Control’s master’s program. The model uses fire as a metaphor for how facilitators can understand both their own internal state and the way they engage the people in their rooms.

The first edge is ember. This is the internal work: regulating before you facilitate, arriving grounded, tending the self before tending the room. Brian was candid about this one, sharing that when he finally accepted a part of himself he had suppressed for years and allowed his full self to show up, his facilitation changed completely. The room could feel it. “Your belonging starts with you first,” he said.

The second edge is kindle. This is where most facilitators live most of the time, holding space, building the container, structuring the session. It’s valuable and necessary. But in kindle, your flame is what people follow. The group is oriented toward you. That works well when you’re the subject matter expert, but it limits what’s possible when the real intelligence is distributed across the room.

The third edge is illuminate. This is the shift Brian was most focused on. Illuminators don’t spotlight answers; they spotlight the people who have the answers. When someone feels seen, Brian argued, they participate differently, contribute differently, and risk differently. That’s how belonging becomes collective intelligence. The model is flexible enough to move between all three edges within a single session. But naming them gives facilitators a lens for asking, where am I right now, and where does this room need me to be?

The Kindle vs. Illuminate Shift

To make the difference between kindle and illuminate visceral, Brian ran a paired exercise in two rounds. In the first round, partners discussed a real facilitation challenge using the skills most experienced facilitators already have: holding space, asking open questions, creating warmth. In the second round, using a reference sheet drawn from David Brooks’ book “How to Know a Person,” participants shifted into illumination mode: listening for who this person is becoming, naming strengths, calling forward potential, reflecting identity rather than just gathering information.

The contrast was immediate and noticeable. One participant said that by the end of round two she had clarity on a challenge she had been navigating for 18 months. Another said that in round one she had been problem-focused; in round two, her partner reframed the same challenge as an opportunity for growth. The shift hadn’t required new information. It required a different kind of attention.

The exercise closed with each partner handing the other a small fire pin and, if they were comfortable, making eye contact and saying three words: “I see you.” Several participants described it as unexpectedly powerful. Brian explained the underlying logic: most difficult facilitation scenarios, in his experience, trace back to people not feeling seen, heard, or valued. Sometimes the real facilitation work happens before the session even begins, in one-on-one conversations that build the trust bridge the larger group will later need.

Brian closed with the question he hoped participants would carry with them: what is waiting to be illuminated through your facilitator presence? Not what tools to add, not what techniques to refine, but what kind of person you are choosing to become in the rooms you enter. The fire, he reminded the room, was already there.irreplaceable.

Reading the Room to Sculpt the Journey

Once you have a voice, the work shifts: now you have to learn when to use it, when to soften it, and when to get entirely out of the way. That’s track two, reading the room to sculpt the journey.

Joe used the image of Questlove performing with one earphone on and one earphone off to illustrate what great presence looks like in practice. The ear with the headphone on is listening to what’s cued up next, evaluating whether it’s still the right move. The open ear is listening to the room, sensing the energy and reading what’s actually happening. Preparation gives you the options, Joe noted. Presence is what tells you which one to choose.

For facilitators, this plays out in every transition. Joe offered three moves drawn from the DJ world: cut (intervene and redirect), blend (carry the current energy into the next activity), or let it end (honor what’s happening in the room even when you’re off schedule). He ran the room through a live scenario. A strategy session, 45 minutes in, a cross-functional leadership team in the middle of something real, and then: you’re 10 minutes over time and the client needs a deliverable by end of day. Cut, blend, or let it end. Ten seconds to decide.

The answers split across all three, and every person had a clear, considered reason. One facilitator said she’d blend because cutting would give her too much anxiety. Another said he’d let it end and let the system see itself, then co-design the path forward with the group. Another called for an “aggressive blend.” One participant named a fourth option entirely: divide, breaking into parallel conversations using remote tools, and compared it to a silent disco. What Joe lifted up was that the diversity of answers wasn’t a problem. It was voice in action. The lens you use guides the choice. The choice reveals who you are.

Joe closed by zooming all the way out to the largest unit of time: the journey. Transitions happen in seconds. Sequencing unfolds over minutes. Arc plays out across tens of minutes. Journey is the whole session, and it’s not something you prescribe at the start and hold to. It’s something you co-create and sculpt. And what people take away from it, Joe reminded the room, is never the specific activities or the particular transitions. It’s how they felt. Whether it meant something. Whether they left changed in some way they couldn’t entirely name. That, ultimately, is what facilitators are building, one choice, one lens, one room at a time.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Brian’s Session:

Brian Buck:
There is a reason why this song is playing. A couple of reasons. It’s going to tie back to later in our session. Not to mention Alicia Keys is an awesome person, but also in Colorado where I’m from, I happen to support a Native American, my volunteer time with a Native American charity in Colorado Springs that supports all of the Native reservations around the US that are going through major hardship. And so, my friends there call me Two-Spirit. And if you know what that means, you know why this girl’s on fire. So, I’ll leave it at that.

And I hope you’re all going to be on fire when we’re finished here. So, I should not put that down. So, what we’re going to do today is about your identity, my identity as a facilitator. It’s not about techniques so much, but I’m going to give you a framework and it’s going to really build on a lot of the discussions that we’ve had so far already. It’s going to be talking about a value-directed way of facilitating. And your value directions are yours as much as I have my own. And we’re going to talk about practicing presence at the edges of belonging. It’s not going to be so much a method, but a stance. And so, Dan talked about our ideas are better than my ideas, our ideas. Renita talked about stop performing facilitator, and start being a person who facilitates. Chris talked about sense making and building a trackable experiments.

Shannon yesterday talked about taking an adventurous approach to facilitation, co-creating and discovering hidden treasure. And Joe just finished talking to us about lens crafting, the power of metaphor and reading the room, which ties to presence. And so, I’m going to be talking about that today. But before we start, here’s some time for you. So, I invite you to get comfortable.

Before we talk about models, frameworks or techniques, I’d like to invite you to begin somewhere more human. Facilitation isn’t about what we do. It’s about how we see people. We have the privilege to be with the people that come into our spaces. We have the privilege and we steward those spaces and hold those spaces. So, before we go into further, I want to invite you to remember something. So, sit comfortably, feet on the floor, have your hands rested gently. Take a slow breath in, and exhale slowly. Again, inhale and exhale slowly. One more time. Inhale, and release.

Let your body settle. If you feel comfortable, close your eyes or just soften your gaze. Bring to mind one person, someone who truly saw you. Not just your performance, not just what you produced, but you. Maybe it was a teacher, a mentor, a leader, a friend, a family member, someone who looked at you and saw possibility. Remember how they listened to you, how they spoke about you, how they held space for you. What did they see in you? Now, notice what happened inside you when you were with them? Did you stand a little taller?

Did you take more risks? Did you try something new? Did you believe something about yourself that you hadn’t fully believed before? When someone sees us deeply, we expand. Stay with that feeling. Hold that feeling for a moment. The steadiness, the confidence, the sense of being known. Now, imagine that person standing just behind you, not speaking, just present, seeing you the way they always have. Let that steadiness settle in your body. And now, without opening your eyes, become that kind of presence for someone else in this room today. Someone here is carrying something invisible. Someone here is waiting to be seen.

Let yourself arrive as the kind of person who sees depth, who assumes worth, who makes space. When people feel seen, something opens. Let that openness be here. And open your eyes when you’re ready. So, like a lot of you, I’m on a facilitation journey. I think I call myself like an accidental facilitator. Does anybody else relate to that? This wasn’t like a major I picked in college or something, but I end up really… It’s encompassed my whole career now and I’m hooked and I’m in. And like a lot of you, I want to go deeper. And here, there’s a picture here I like to show you as we talk about illumination. My friend Zach Connor, you can Google him on Zach Connor photography on… He does a lot of outdoor photography in Colorado. The four people there are myself and my three sons camping in Marble, Colorado.
A little bit trivia about Marble, that’s where we harvest, those Coloradans know this, all of our white marble for our monuments in Washington DC. And so, we were camping here and if you notice, it might be hard to see, maybe you can see it better over here, the stars were literally like that with the naked eye. And it just was stunning. And the illumination against the backdrop, Eric talked about sometimes with the cracks of light. That’s what it was in real life. But what Zach did as an illuminator photographer is he said, “Just stand here,” myself and my three sons. And we each had a flashlight and he said, “Okay, Brian, you make a backwards B.” And then he handed the flashlight to my other son and my next son, and it was a U and C and a K. And I didn’t know what he was doing, frankly, until the picture came.

And it shocked me how awesome it was. And sometimes when we’re facilitating, people don’t need to always understand exactly how we’re doing things, but it’s the effect that we have. And often it’s when we bring light and we bring illumination. So, we’re going to talk about that today. I think for me, and I’m not making a plug just for the core and the cert programs, but it was very illuminating for me as a facilitator. Core was, “Oh, my gosh, everything I’ve been doing for the last five years actually has a term for it. There’s an actual science and oh, I could probably tweak it and be even more effective.” And then master’s recently in the last part of 2025 opened up a whole new vista of how I’m looking and practitioning as a facilitator. And I’m going to share that with you today. And I’m going to invite you to consider this for yourself as a model or think about and spark, “Hey, am I thinking in this same kind of way of how are I approaching my craft?” So, this is more of a personal evolution and not a theory.

I invite you to join me as I evolve. We’re all in this together, so here we go. So, when we were given the option to pick our themes, I don’t know if anybody’s seen some recent studies. We did some work inside Progressive around belonging. It’s a powerful concept and there’s a lot more social science around it. You can see where belonging is powerful for positive things. And if you’re trying to understand other things that are going on our society right now, you’re going to see that there’s connections on belonging there. So, you can’t underestimate the power that it has. But what I want to suggest today and introduce a concept to you is around belonging, a concept called a value direction. So, value directions is something that you never stop doing until maybe the day you take your last breath.

Goals, you nest in through the value direction. So, a lot of times we only set goals for ourselves and we end up with goal depression, which is once we reach the goal, it’s like we got it done. You hear the stories like people got the Oscar or they got the Grammy or they get something and they’re like, “I didn’t feel satisfied.” It’s because we end up only setting our lives around goals. Value directions are we’re always doing it. Me, I want to be the best dad I can be. That’s the value direction. I’m never going to stop working on that, right? But every year I’m going to set a goal of what can I do with my children that I can be a better father. So, I’d like to invite you to think about what is your value direction as a facilitator and how does that attach to your identity as a facilitator?

I’ve heard a lot of conversations these last, gosh, it feels longer than 24 hours, but of people feeling like, where do I fit? Where do I understand these terms? How do I see myself in my journey of maturity? And I want to share that a value direction could be a really good way for you to understand where you want to go. But here’s the change. I want to introduce the concept of illumination and we’ll talk about what that means, but it’s through presence working on ourselves, but the internal integrating to the external that we illuminate the people that are in the space with us, not the answers. A lot of us started facilitating because we were experts at something and they’re like, “Oh, why don’t you go in front of people?” And next thing you know, it keeps going, right?

But where do you transition from, everything is on me. Everybody’s looking at my fire and how could I be igniting others? So, we’re going to talk through that. And I just love high-performing teams because that’s really the outcome. Why does belonging matter? It precedes performance. Anybody that’s been on a high-performing team, there’s this thing that happens where everybody just feels connected. Hopefully you’re feeling belonging here, being part of Voltage Control’s facilitation lab in some way, either locally or on the larger ones. Engagement is relational energy. It’s energy. So, when people feel like they belong, they bring energy into your sessions. So, if you’re not having the energy you think, there could be a belonging issue. Psychological safety is felt not declared. We love, facilitators love to share that we build psychological safety.
Is belonging part of what we’re doing there? Or the people there are just an ingredient for us to get to our… Are they a cog to get to our goal? And then lastly, high performance is a byproduct of belonging. I’m sure all of you can think about the best outcomes you’ve had as a team. More than likely, you all felt like a strong sense of belonging during that period. And you can see some of the other definitions there. So, it’s really kind of transitioning from an expert. And there’s context for that. I’m going to talk a little bit about that, where it’s not that you can’t be an expert any longer, but understand where you may need to adjust and flex. So, flexing from I have the answers to illuminating the answers within others. Okay? It’s from defining content to focusing on the container where then the magic happens on the content.

And then lastly, from dominating the space, I don’t think any of us really show up going, “I want to dominate this space with all this group of people.” But I’ve learned being in community with a lot of you, those of you that are independent contractors, I’ve heard people say, “I have pressure when I show up. All eyes are looking at me, I’m supposed to deliver.” So, what happens is it almost puts you in this position of, “I got to do things,” versus inviting people in. And so, the shift that I’m going to talk about is not necessarily… It’s holding something different. It’s not giving up, it’s letting go and holding onto something that’s even more powerful.

So, thank you, Joe, for introducing the concept of metaphor. I’m going to introduce fire as metaphor. Think about fire when it’s tended. It’s powerful. How did most of us get here? With tended fire inside two circular things flying in the air? How did all of us stay warm last night wherever we were? Contained fire in a furnace. Who took a shower this morning, hopefully? With warm water, contained fire, tended fire. And I think through the master’s program, Mark Dressler’s book was introduced and for me, I learned that fire wasn’t destructive. It can be when it’s not tended. Intending is watching closely without smothering. Tending is protecting the flame, not dominating it, looking for derailments and distractions that could disrupt the flame that’s present and creating conditions for group thinking to ignite.

So, let’s pause for a minute. As I talk about belonging or this idea of shifting your stance from feeling like I have to have all the answers, has some of you gone through a shift and what do you think about that fire metaphor? What does it resonate with you? Let’s have three people. Let’s do a plus add. So, I’m going to go each section so we get equal distribution. Someone down here, what’s coming up for you when you hear some of these terms? Anything resonate? Yeah. Daniela.

Daniela:
You remember my name. The fire metaphor really resonated with me. I’ve been thinking about it from a different stance, but I think they’re very related. I come from a background in theater and when you’re on stage, the director will tell you, “Find your light.” So, you need to find your place on stage where the light hits you. And as a facilitator, I kind of reframe that as finding your light within. And that’s something that we want to do with other people and for other people as we’re facilitating, helping them find their light as a person and as a group. And so, I think it’s very close to this metaphor that you’re proposing and it’s-

Brian Buck:
Cool. Cool.

Daniela:
… nice.

Brian Buck:
How about someone here in the middle of the room?

Chris:
I grew up going to visit family in Toronto and they have a cottage north of the city by like three hours. And as a kid, you kind of do whatever you wanted in the woods and they would teach you how to light a fire. So, it was a very fun thing as a kid to like light a fire… You’re in the middle of the daytime, lightening tiny little fires in the woods, but quickly it became your chore too. If you’re going to cook that night, “Hey, Chris, would you go start the fire?” And you’re all excited because you’re like, “Yeah, totally. We get to burn something big now.” But you quickly understand the way that that fire is built and the materials around you, this aspect of like how to initiate a flame constructively, and then actually the intention of what that fire’s for at different times.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Chris:
A cooking fire is different than a marshmallow roasting fire, is different than, “Oh, we’re going to burn a bunch of stuff because it’s rotting in the front yard,” fire. And yeah, it just makes me think of the tools and the process and the context of that and tending too, and especially never leaving a fire that’s burning.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Chris:
Yeah.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. No, great. Great multiple examples of it’s sustaining, it has practical impact. Yeah, let’s have one more other person down here.

Speaker 4:
[inaudible 00:19:24], but this is about what I’m going to say. I’m from Oregon and I own a very large cattle ranch.

Brian Buck:
Oh, nice.

Speaker 4:
And this makes me think about, as a facilitator, what happens when you are doing your best to manage that fire and a wind comes up and all 10,000 acres burn. What do you do then? Tending fire takes an awful lot of care. That’s it.

Brian Buck:
Thank you for that. Thank you for that. So, a lot of times when you’re learning something new, and my job over the years in tech industry, as well as being at Progressive is helping complex things seem easier to adapt or adapt to. So, through the master’s program, I worked on a capstone project for my company, but this is me, Brian, speaking to you. And what I developed here is me and me in my journey. And what I developed was a three-part model that’s helping me move forward and understanding the gift of the fire that is showing up, the souls. If a person of faith, like an image of God or whoever you see coming in, that valuable human life that’s coming into your spaces, do you see that as something to cherish and to welcome? And it’s like the same beauty as when we look at a fire and fire’s unpredictable to what you just said, right? And so, guess what? Human beings are too, right? So, I want to talk about three edges of fire that could help frame how you can approach your facilitation as you continue maturing.

First is ember, how you show up, you as a facilitator. Second, how you hold space as a facilitator, that’s kindle. And the third one, which is the disruptor one I’m hoping today will be for you, which is illuminate how you see others. And for most of us, we may have never really thought about, when we originally start working with people, do I diminish people? Do I see someone and put them in a box and I haven’t even talked to them for two seconds or this person’s going to talk too much, so oh, they’re going to be a talker? Oh, I got to manage around that, right? So, I’m going to go through each one. And I also want to help invite you to say you could see yourself both as how you practice, but also yourself in each one of these. So, ember is about your internal work.

This is about regulating before you facilitate. Depending on your culture background, I can speak for the frenetic American that some of us were born into and we don’t even notice until we talk to people in other countries and they’re like, “You Americans live very high.” Like you never relax, you never focus, you never contemplate. I’m not going to generalize our entire country, but I’ll just say other people from other places say, “It feels different when you come to our country.” And so, a lot of times as facilitators, are you showing up frazzle, fried? Did you even breathe before you started your sessions? It’s all about being grounded and if you’re unsettled, the room’s going to feel it.

Does everybody relate to that? So, your belonging starts with you first. And honestly, I won’t go into a lot of details, but I went through a big life change where I didn’t accept a really big part of myself for many years. And when I finally did and I allowed my full self to show up, my facilitation took off because people knew this was fully me. And so, I welcome you however you’re made, however you look, whatever you… Be kind to yourself and just say, “This is me and this is how I’m going to show up.” It goes back to what Renita was talking about.

The intent though is work on that core self. This is where I think a lot of us are functioning right now, which is on the edge of kindle. This is the part… I love Chris how he did the imaginations. Could you all relate when he was sharing like you’re going out? Some of us can’t if you’re into camping. It’s always like, how am I going to stack the wood and how’s it going to be perfect and what am I going for? Am I going for like a gigantic bonfire or I just want to try to cook food? But it’s this idea of really thinking about how am I holding the space? So, I think a lot of you do that, but here’s the difference. Often this period here is your flame is what everybody’s following.

People are looking to your flame and that’s good in some cases. You may be facilitating some things where they may need that. You are an expert in a particular area, but this is where I stood for many years being a technologist, we could talk regularly to people. I was put in these situations where, “Hey, put him in here because he’ll translate.” What I found though was that was helpful, but it’s limiting. And I don’t know about you, but lost opportunities really annoy me, like really good opportunities where there’s more treasure to be found and it’s left unrealized. So, again, it’s not bad to be at kindle, there’s time for that, but here’s where things shift. I highly recommend a mentor of mine put me in front of a book. Has anybody read David Brooks, How to Know a Person? Raise your hand.

Hasn’t it changed your way you look at people? And by the way, I don’t make any commission for any book sells on this book, but he said, “The ultimate gift you can give another person is to see them deeply, to understand them and to make them feel known.” I have found in most cases and most challenging facilitation scenarios that most people just want to feel seen, heard and valued. Heard that? And sometimes the facilitation work is before the facilitation event. It’s meeting with some of the people that you identify as, I need to sit down with them and hear them and help them to feel seen before I get into the fun with the larger group. So, it’s this idea of seeing people as already worthy. Catch yourself if you’re finding that you’re judging people before you even get a chance to look at them as there’s a story here.

They’re the only person on the planet that has this DNA sequence. That starts baseline. There’s no one like them, right? There has to be depth. There has to be mystery, not just problems. It’s moving from labeling to understanding. And you as a facilitator have the opportunity to really impact someone’s life and amplify what is emerging in that person, not just in the topics you’re facilitating, and that’s where you’re pivoting.

Not only are you working on your presence, but now I can let go of being the content driver, and now I can be the person who shows up in the space and starts igniting the fire of other people. My flame is strong because I’m still doing that centering, that grounding, but now it’s not so much, “Hey, I have an opinion. I want to drive.” What gets decided so much is I want… [inaudible 00:27:54] smartest person in the room is room. Dan talked about that, right? I’m getting a tattoo. I’ll make sure if I summit next year, I will show it on my arm because I love that phrase, because that’s the treasure. But what are we doing to ignite it?

So, recognition creates… When we start doing this, it’s calling for their fire, not calling it out. It’s recognizing, creating belonging, and that belonging then deepens when people feel fully known, but you have to illuminate that. So, my invitation to you today has become an illuminator and not a diminisher. And some of you might be looking at me right now like, “He’s so weird.” But hopefully you’re shifting your mindset like, “I have a story, you have a story. Are we looking for that side of that?” So, it’s not about your fire and kindle, it’s about igniting theirs as an illuminator. So, illuminators don’t spotlight answers, they spotlight people who have the answers. So, when people feel seen, they participate differently, they contribute differently, they risk differently. That’s how belonging comes to collective intelligence. That’s one thing I was trying to figure out was like, okay, I agree. It’s all about how do we pull forward as… We all do strategic alignment, but how do we do that collective intelligence? And often it’s because we’re not really igniting the fire of others and there’s ways to do that. I’m going to talk about that.

But here’s the part that I really enjoy about this model that’s helping me right now because I’m… By the way, I have not arrived. This is something that I’m using for myself is you need to sense the edge. Where are you? Are you doing self-awareness like, “You know what? I need some ember time. I’m fried. I am burnt out. These people are annoying me, whoever I’m working with, whatever. I love them. They’re great, but I need some extra grace required.” But knowing when you need to work on that ember part, and maybe sometimes because some of you are in specialized facilitation roles, you are doing the kindle part. You’re helping create… We all need to be making sure that we’re creating the container of how the space is being held, but maybe you can lean in a little bit on that you are an expert in this space. But where the magic really happens is when you tap into that illumination and you can move in between.

It can happen in one session. So, it’s a very flexible model of… But hopefully it gives you a lens like what Joe was talking about of how to approach how you’re engaging the space. So, let’s have some three other people. So, let’s start-

Speaker 5:
I actually have something.

Brian Buck:
Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 5:
So, here, I’ll just sit down. So, we’ve talked a lot about how the world is like… My gosh. We’ve talked about how the world is divided. I’m just going to stand. We’ve talked a lot about how the world is divided. And I come from a family who’s very politically ideology. There’s a huge difference between me and the rest of my family. And I had a conversation with my aunt recently where we were doing something like this. And if you want to find a flow state, this is the way to do it. As a facilitator, that was so incredibly gratifying to just ask her questions. And we didn’t agree by the end of it. But you know what she did? She ended up telling me things that she wanted to take to her grave. I ended up coming out to her after 15 years and we have been closer than ever. And so, I want to praise this methodology because it is so gratifying and so needed at this time.

Brian Buck:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. All right. Let’s have… You were middle, right? So, why don’t we try down there? Anybody want to comment? Anything hitting you? Anything resonating? Yes. I like your purple color, by the way.

Speaker 6:
Thank you. I think what came up for me is I really appreciate the thought about moving from labeling to seeing people is already worthy. It feels easy right now in the world and very divisive to assume that some folks don’t have much to bring to the table because they’re so far apart.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 6:
And I appreciate that lens of seeing everyone is already worthy and having value in this space. Yeah. Thank you.

Brian Buck:
Sure. And I highly recommend if, again, if you’re a book reader, Brooks really goes through a whole new paradigm of how to engage people. Yeah, it’s amazing. Down here. Yes. Hi.

Speaker 7:
When you were talking about tending to the ember, like, am I at a point of burnout? Do I need to come back? I know facilitators, especially if you’re being paid and you’re like, “I need to be on,” and it can feel selfish or difficult to go inward. I like thinking about that ember, like if it’s too light, you’re not giving warmth in the space.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7:
And so, if you can think of it as like, “Oh, I really am providing if I tend to that.”

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 7:
You’re creating a warmer room for people, so.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. And taking the metaphor, you can’t really have a bigger flame if you don’t start with something in the embers and it’s sustainable. The other piece I forgot to mention too, thanks for your comments, was it’s also an analogy of how you can see yourself as an evolving facilitator. Some of you have mentioned in passing, some of you are hearing some of our clinical language and nodding. And a lot of you are coming from very different perspectives. Ember is like a description of maybe where you are in your facilitation. In kindle is where you’re learning your craft and letting your flame… Because it’s important that your flame is seen because you’re building that trustworthy with whatever group you’re coming to. But then when you go… What I’m excited about is I know I’ve seen glimpses of one I’ve gone to illuminate and I’m like, “What just happened?” Like, whole what?

Even when you’re camping where the flame… Like you’re somewhere in the remote area and the fire’s going and then suddenly something in the fire makes the fire go big and then the whole darkness around you lights up that you didn’t see before. Think about that as a way from revelations to the talent that’s in the room and half the battle, a lot of times when we’re facilitating is people don’t feel like they’re providing or being helpful, right? Like, “I don’t know if I’m doing enough.” So, when we illuminate, we’re actually engaging people more and then you’re going to have that high-performing team effect. Great comments. Thanks everybody.

So, we’re going to have a table exercise now. Here we go. So, we’re going to move from concept to experience. So, I hope to see and guide you through how it’s going to feel the difference between facilitating with each other at kindle versus illuminate, okay?

So, what we’re going to do is in this first round, there’s going to be a… I can go to the next slide here. We’re going to pair up again, so just two by two. What I encourage you to do is find a partner that you haven’t known, because you’re going to be asking some questions that’ll just help to get to each other to know each other better. Use your discretion as far as how much of yourself you want to share, but you’re going to take turns speaking and listening. And the prompt for these discussions is sharing a real facilitation challenge you’re currently navigating.

Speaker 5:
Not have a handout?

Brian Buck:
Yeah. And the handout actually will come a little bit later, which I will reference that.

Speaker 5:
Oh, I’m so sorry. I thought it was this-

Brian Buck:
No, you’re fine. You’re fine.

Speaker 5:
Someone take the mic away from me.

Brian Buck:
No, you’re fine. Her fire’s showing. Did you see that? So, what you’re going to do is we’re going to take about five minutes or it’s going to be a 10-minute… The first part of this is 10 minutes. So, we’re going to practice kindle. Okay? So, what you’re going to do is… I’m going to leave this slide up here so you can reference it when you’re discussing the things. Partner A is going to speak for five minutes and person or partner B will listen. Then you’re going to switch. Person B speaks for five minutes and then partner A listens. So, the listener, you want to think about creating warmth, ask open any questions. You’re all really skilled at doing this, right? Like creating psychological safety. What I would suggest doing is not trying to solve things for them or… You just want to really help them think mostly.

Don’t reframe things. Don’t interpret identity. Don’t amplify strengths. Imagine when you’re in a… Especially some of you in certain facilitation standpoints where you just don’t have the context to be able to go that. You just want to be curious. Okay? The speaker again is sharing that challenge. I’ll lead you through the next session, but let’s go ahead and get started. Find a partner and I’ll guide you. I’ll tell you when it’s five minutes in where you can switch speaking. So, ready, set, go.
All right. We’re going to pivot a little bit. Do you want to wrap up? Now, that was experiencing kindle, which is probably what you’re often doing in most of your sessions. Okay? Now, what I want to introduce you to is there’s a sheet on their table. We’ll go over this chart, the empty chart later, but look at the one that has the words on the back. There’s like a little picture of me at the bottom. So, what does it mean to illuminate? Okay? You can see in this chart and you can kind of reference it and nobody has to be like… Don’t feel shy if you’re glancing down while you’re listening to the person speaking. Okay? But here’s the shift. Okay? If you can see here the illumination principle, these are based on my interpretation of Brooks’ book on how you can do illuminating questions, how to do accompaniment.

It’s a whole different approach of how to work with someone, both individually and in a group setting. Okay? So, you can see here, there’s illumination principle on the left, what it looks like in the room, and how you as a facilitator can practice each of these areas. Okay? I’m not going to go ahead and read through. I’ll just let you kind of jump in and start cooking. Okay? So, I’m going to set… You’re going to now pivot and as we practice illumination, what you’re going to be doing is we’re not just holding space now. What you’re going to be invited to do is you’re listening for who this person is becoming, okay? So, you want to assume depth. Be curious. There’s stories in each of us. All right? And there’s mystery and there’s magic.

Listen for strengths, reflect identity, call forward potential, and name what you genuinely see. So, listener, it’s basically what I just said here is on the left-hand side, the prompt for the speaker. We’re going to add a little bit more to that original prompt. Share the same real facilitation challenge you are navigating, but this time speak about how it is helping you grow professionally, personally, grow in general. Okay? So, let’s take another five minutes. Ready, set, go.

Okay. Now, we’re going to make this tangible both visually and hopefully meaningfully for those of you that are like more tactile. So, in a moment, each of you will receive a small fire pin and they are all at the tables. And if some of you already put them in your lanyards, that’s fine. Go ahead and take it off because this is the activity, an activation activity. What I invite you to do is look to your partner that you’ve been talking to, hand them the pin. You can hand it to them or if they want you to put it on their lanyard, feel free, whatever space thing that you feel comfortable with, but simple thing, if you feel comfortable, look at them in the eye and say, “I see you.”

Ready, set, go.
Okay. I’d like to bring everybody’s attention back. Hopefully you’ve done your pinning. All right. Let’s have some discussion. I was going to originally have you do at the tables, but I think everybody’s quite warmed up. The dialogue’s just been incredible to hear up here. Why don’t we do sharing across the room, okay? So, mic runners, if you can get ready for your workout. So, the first question I want to ask to the group, everybody, is what changed between round one and two for you? How did it feel different? Raise your hand if you want to share. Okay. Why don’t we go here and then we’ll go here? Go ahead.

Speaker 8:
I think when we started round one, I was really thinking about, and I think we were both thinking about a challenge and something kind of hairy that we’d been struggling with. And by round two, I had clarity. So, I felt… And something that I’d been dealing with for about 18 months. And so, I really had some clarity around what my next step is in both how I tend to myself to make that happen, but also the people that I’m working with.

Brian Buck:
And did you feel through the conversation you had, like that’s how the revelation happened, being able to feel seen or you want to-

Speaker 8:
Yes, being seen and also just asking the right questions. So, being able to ask each other the questions, which is so much of what we’re trying to do, asking each other the questions, to think about the questions that we’re going to ask of the other questions. So, it was like all of that tied together.

Brian Buck:
Okay, great. Great. No, the questions are a really big thing. And again, I don’t want to sound like I’m always pitching Brooks’ book, but he talks about even something… These illuminating questions of when someone gives an opinion, a lot of us will be like, “Oh, okay, that’s interesting.” Or might not even say anything. He invites people to say, “Wow, how did you come to form that opinion?” That’s just one example of where then you start seeing the person deeper and then you have these breakthroughs. So, congratulations. That’s awesome. Woo. All right. Next person.

Speaker 10:
Hi.

Brian Buck:
Hi.

Speaker 10:
I felt that this really resonated with us a lot. Actually, I feel between one and two, we were more problem-focused on like, “Oh, this is all I’m struggling with.” But then round two, it really makes you become vulnerable and have a way more open conversation. And we actually really enjoyed pinning the pin on each other too. It felt like really special. And I don’t know, I think admitting the vulnerability that you have really creates an opportunity to be like, “Actually this is,” and you can understand the person way better. And I just really loved how that was framed and [inaudible 00:45:31]-

Brian Buck:
And hopefully you’re all going to walk around the rest of today and see everybody’s flames now symbolically. So, you can remember there’s a story, right?

Speaker 10:
Yeah.

Brian Buck:
There’s a story, you have dimension, you have value, you have worth, and we can help remember that.

Speaker 10:
Yeah. And when we said we were like ICU, when you said it, we were all like, “Oh.” But then when we actually did it, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, you do see me.” It was just really wonderful.

Brian Buck:
And a lot of people ask, “Well, how can I do that in a large facilitation session?” I had a big challenge where I had to lead… There’s someone in the room here, Mike, who was with me, 11 top-tier domain architects think Sheldon plus, okay? And at first, it was like all the alphas and it was mixed genders too. It wasn’t just your typical Sheldon male. It was people were not used to being in the same space together. And what we learned through that exercise and we stumbled into it, but then that’s what started this was we started meeting with people individually and boy did their continents change when they felt seen, heard and valued ahead of the larger meeting. So, for some of you, you’re like, “How am I going to do this in a larger group?” You may need to spend time with these important people one-on-one and do the same kind of questions ahead of it.
Now, if you have already a strong, tight, strong belonging group, then go use the illuminating questions, but you may need to illuminate one-on-one, okay? And that’s what we did here. How about down here? Anybody? Any revelations, thoughts? What was different between one and two, between kindle and illuminate?

Speaker 9:
I think what was a challenge in round one was just listening and asking clarifying questions.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 9:
And I noticed that I’m a fixer and I like to jump right to ideation, which is funny because when I’m facilitating, I try to pause the ideation, but when I just shut up and listen to what he was really saying and felt he was struggling with. And then in the second round, A, it was great to be able to shout out what I saw as being potential and promising, but B, it was really cool to hear my partner reframe it as opportunity instead of challenge.

Brian Buck:
Great. And did you see this is where the fire model works. Your fire… Typically, in kindle, we’re structuring around the space, we’re doing all our facilitation stuff, right? But we leave space to intentionally illuminate in the sense of, what am I doing to ignite? And so, that’s what I’m practicing now. This is a journey I’m on. If you want to come with me, let’s go. But it’s like, how do we now take our fire and ignite someone else’s? And I love both of these stories because they came from the person, not from you. You weren’t the fixture, right? You revealed, you illuminated, and that’s a great example. Okay.
So, you’re probably wondering, how can I apply this in real life? So, this is the other side of your sheet. Again, my German side, I’m like, “I need to plan.” So, what you’re going to see here, and it’s not filled on in your side. So, this is for you to take some time and reflect and do some contemplation on your own. You can do it here, you can do it back at your hotel or on the airplane tomorrow if you’re flying somewhere or wherever you have it. But what I did is broke out, and let me introduce you to a new term that I’ve developed, which I was inspired by all my peers in master’s. Again, I had no idea I was going to end up here. So, this is like a Forrest Gump moment for me, like, “How did I get here?” But it’s combining what a lot of us know about presence with this idea of intentional illumination.

Your fire is important. You got to where you are because your fire burns bright and people look at it and they follow it. But our story is not stopping there. It’s about igniting with your fire igniting others and then watching that whole thing light up, the whole room. But that’s different, right? So, how are you going to get there? So, the value direction is I’m now going to be a presence eliminator the rest of my facilitation journey. I’m never going to stop doing it. It’s going to be challenging in some ways of breaking old behaviors or thinking I have the answer when it’s really the room. The first is I need to tend my own fire. What am I doing… Somebody mentioned therapy the other day. Oh, my gosh, therapists. Every facilitator should be in therapy. Right? I mean, you talk about tips that only work on yourself, but then you’re like, “Oh, that person’s transferring.”
You have language, but my point is without joking, what am I doing to prepare myself? Are you slowing down enough to work? You deserve to be kind to yourself, to think about how you’re showing up and setting boundaries around that. Tending the fire box. Uncontained fire is dangerous, like our friend over here talked to us. It can be very destructive. So, what firebox are you creating? What is that container and kindle that you’re doing to make sure that your session? And that’s hard too. We live in a very busy time. But again, these are all value directions. It’s aspirations that you can continue to work on. In each of these, it’s like, what are my tactics? What are my goals and what does it look like? I’m giving you an example of what mine are, and I’m going to continue to develop them because value directions, you just never stop.

So, these are almost like goals you could set inside your value direction. The third one is tending the spark. How am I coming into that session expecting to ignite other people in a good way? Am I coming in with, “Oh, these people are going to be a really… They’re going to be really tough or this person that’s in their [inaudible 00:52:07], who was it?” How am I going to prep myself for that? And then lastly, how am I doing like designing questions that surface the spark? I think all of you are successful because you do preparation ahead of time, but it’s a different mindset of how you can frame it.
And that’s what I wanted to help with because there’s such a rich amount of facilitation techniques and methods, but how am I showing up as an identity? And this is what this is. It’s a combination of me and how I had to be healthy, but an outward focus of… Because you’re all change agents. Most facilitators are doing transformation or some big thing in most cases. So, what I’d like to do is… Any questions on how this works, I guess is my question before we go to the next slide? Does this make sense? But here’s the key thing. We are intentional in leaving that blank because this is your journey. Yes, Daniela.

Daniela:
Could you give an example of tactics of [inaudible 00:53:23]-

Brian Buck:
Yeah. On which one? On all of them or?

Daniela:
Any.

Brian Buck:
Okay. You know what? I like the one. I’ll go on illuminate because that’s the one I think a lot of us might be newer to. So, on illuminate, it’s designing questions that surface and spark insight and it’s about practicing intentional restraint. Our friend down here talked about that. It was a repositioning of, you want to help, right? But how can I help that was meaningful to the person? And it’s also name and reinforcing contribution. So, that’s the tactics. So, it’s almost, again, books like David Brooks or others, look for resources or our friend, ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, start asking your AI partner, how can I ask illuminating questions that are aligned with David Brooks’ book? Okay?

The goals would be for tending this spark is it should help foster participant ownership. When I talked to you about that domain architect example, we had kind of, it was like friction and then suddenly when they started feeling like… Showed up, we, Mike and I, they knew that we had their back. They felt like that we had built a trust bridge with them. There was a lot more participation and it also changed the way they talked to each other. It was a lot less ringer. And then they get collective intelligence because a lot of you are taking people probably from multiple disciplines. So, the outcome would be when you’re doing these… Some of those questions may not be to the same people.

So, it may take a little extra work to understand what goals could be for the different types of groups that you could be leading. And then lastly, I think some of you have seen the spark. I’m thinking, I’m sure you’ve been somewhere where the collective intelligence happens and it’s like, “What just happened?” And sometimes I think you could kind of stumble into it, but often it’s because somewhere you let everyone feel seen, heard and valued, but that doesn’t always show up automatically. And so, taking this approach intentionally. And now what I love about this model is it lets you decide what ingredients you want to do, how you want to do it. But the fact is that as a value direction, you’re going to make space now to try to spark the fire of other people, not just have them look at your fire.

And then what does it look like? Participant-generated insights increase, not insights from you necessarily, unless you’re the expert that was brought in. Broader, deeper participation and the feedback reflects empowerment. You feel like… Like with these architects that we had someone go into another role and there was a replacement. This group got all upset because they’re like, “Wait a minute, we’re this group and now we have this new person.” They felt like we bonded and now we had this outsider and we had to quickly bring them in. So, you’re going to find when you do this, like the belonging’s going to be very powerful because people feel safe, they feel like we created this thing. Did that help a little bit? Okay. Yes. Question.

Speaker 11:
How do you not over index here? Because this is like my life. This is why I’m around. This is who I am.

Brian Buck:
Yeah.

Speaker 11:
And so much for people sometimes.

Brian Buck:
Thank you for this question. I have these things called Buckisms, and one of my favorite one is your biggest strength can be your biggest liability when you overpivot. That’s been my case at least. And so, I think it goes back to some of the messages about reading the room and understanding the temperature of what’s going on. I think honestly, what I’m seeing is I think, and it takes more time, there’s a lot more to facilitation in the session that you’re doing. There’s a lot of pre-work and post-work and mid-work, right? I see a lot of nods and that it’s how do you balance that? But I think it’s judging, is this room ready to go here? Right?
And you can signal, you ca

n try little things, like watch if you get the reaction like, “Oh…” Or suddenly everybody, cameras go off or whatever. What are the non-verbals that you see when you try it? So, you might want to try an incremental approach to this, but often you’ll find is once you start the conversation, what I found is people are already ready to do it, right? Yeah. So, it goes back to the experiments Chris talked about. Do some experiments with it and see how it tests you, because it needs to be genuine on your side too, right?

Speaker 11:
I just realized that if the room isn’t ready, [inaudible 00:58:47] for a long way.

Brian Buck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 11:
So, it doesn’t have to be a…

Brian Buck:
And isn’t that make it fun as a practitioner, you’re like, “Ooh, I’m cooking. I’m helping create the space. Now, you can play with it.” And if some of you have been bored, like I’ve been doing kindle my whole… Now, it hopefully opens a whole new realm of there’s untapped treasure in these folks that you’re probably working with because not everybody’s taught how to go down this path. And again, I think my mentor who gave me this book. All right. So, with that said, I think you’ve seen ember, kindle, and illuminate give you a new framework to think about how you’re facilitating. Okay? Hopefully this is helpful to you. I want to say I have to acknowledge… Or the prompt that I want to leave you with is what is waiting to be illuminated through your facilitator presence?

If you were to adopt a presence illuminator identity, this is how I’m going to show up. How does it look and where could you start applying that now? I have to acknowledge my sources of inspiration. So, Standing in the Fire, some of you know that from the certification programs. There’s Brook’s book. The coaching Habit, this is such, what’s it called? The advice monster. This is really an anecdote for us fixtures that I always want to fix. And then Liberating Structures has a thing called heard, seen, respected. And then I also have to call out, we should do these things in community. So, Kathy Ditmore over here and Skye Osunde who helped me as I was working through this and bouncing off the ideas like, “Is this going to make sense to people? Is it too esoteric or is it too symbolic or whatever?” We should do these things develop in community and I just want to call them out and embarrass them a little bit. Skye can’t be here, but I told her I was going to name-drop her. So, thank you.

The post At the Edges of Belonging: Presence Illuminator, Practicing a Value-Directed Facilitation Identity appeared first on Voltage Control.

Every AI transformation leader is hearing the same things right now. “People aren’t using AI together at the levels we hoped for.” “We’re not seeing the ROI.” “Our people aren’t ready.” “Workflows are still broken.”

The instinct is to blame the technology. The models aren’t accurate enough. The data isn’t clean. The vendor oversold the product. Sometimes those things are true.

But after working with leadership teams across dozens of AI transformations, a different pattern keeps emerging. The technology works fine. What breaks is everything around it: the conversations that never happen, the trust that erodes silently, the governance nobody wants to own, the roles shifting beneath people’s feet, and the talent pipeline quietly collapsing. These are organizational frictions, not technical ones. They are the actual reason most AI adoption efforts underperform.

Gartner estimates that 32 million jobs will be transformed per year by AI, and that managing transformation at that scale requires 20x more organizational effort than managing job losses. That ratio reframes the challenge.The problem isn’t whether AI can do the work. It’s whether your organization can handle what happens when it does.

Here are the five frictions that determine whether an AI initiative creates value or just creates chaos.

1. Consensus Friction: Everyone’s Moving Fast, Nobody Agreed on Where

AI collapses execution time. A task that took a team two weeks now takes two minutes. Code writes itself. Reports generate instantly. Analysis that required a dedicated analyst happens in a single prompt.

This sounds like pure upside until you realize what it exposes. When execution was slow, it masked a deeper problem: most teams never fully agreed on what they were building or why. The two-week timeline gave people room to course-correct, to gradually align through iteration Remove that buffer, and the misalignment becomes immediate.

The bottleneck was never the execution. It was the conversation before the execution.

A product team uses AI to generate three prototype concepts in an afternoon. Previously, building one concept took a sprint. Now the constraint isn’t building, it’s deciding. Which concept? For which user? Against which strategic priority? Five people in a room with competing assumptions, and the AI is just sitting there, ready to build whatever they agree on.

Only 14% of organizations have clear alignment between business users, IT, and executives about what problems AI can even solve. That’s not a technology gap. That’s a consensus gap. And the organizations that close it are three times more likely to report significant value from their AI tools.

The speed AI provides is wasted without the ability to decide what to do with it. Decision rights, not processing power, are the new rate limiter. The organizations pulling ahead aren’t the ones with the best models. They’re the ones that have restructured how they make decisions together, fast enough to keep pace with what the technology now makes possible.

2. Trust Friction: Leadership Sees Transformation, the Workforce Sees Replacement

There is a perception gap at the center of most AI strategies, and it is wider than anyone wants to admit.

Executives are four times more likely to report high AI productivity gains. Individual contributors are five times more likely to say AI made no difference. These aren’t minor variations in optimism. These are fundamentally different realities operating inside the same organization.

The trust problem runs deeper than skepticism about the tools. 78% of employees don’t know whether they’ll lose their job to AI. Only 12% feel involved in decisions about how AI gets deployed in their work. And 80% believe their organization is actively trying to replace them. Whether that belief is accurate is almost beside the point. It shapes behavior. People who believe they’re being replaced don’t experiment with new tools. They protect their territory. They withhold the institutional knowledge that makes AI implementations actually work.

This isn’t irrational. It’s a reasonable response to an information vacuum. When leadership talks about “transformation” and “efficiency gains” without naming what happens to the people doing the work being transformed, employees fill the silence with the worst-case scenario.

The psychological mechanism matters here. Executives authorized the AI investment. They have cognitive skin in the game to believe it’s working. Frontline workers read the headlines about displacement. They have cognitive skin in the game to discount the benefits. Neither side is lying. Both are filtering the same reality through different stakes.

Closing this gap requires more than a town hall and a FAQ document. It requires genuine involvement: workers participating in how AI reshapes their roles, not just being informed after the decisions are made. The organizations getting this right, like Vizient, are asking their workforce directly: what work do you want to do? What work do you hate? Then they’re designing AI-augmented roles around those answers. That’s not a communication strategy. It’s an organizational design strategy. And it produces something no amount of messaging can manufacture: actual trust.

3. Governance Friction: Everyone Wants the Rules, Nobody Wants to Have the Conversation

Here’s a paradox that shows up in almost every organization we work with: 70% of IT leaders cite security, governance, and compliance as the number one blocker for large-scale AI deployment. And over 50% say their primary risk mitigation strategy is simply blocking or restricting AI use.

Read that again. The dominant strategy for managing AI risk is preventing people from using AI. That’s not governance. That’s abdication dressed up as caution.

The real problem isn’t that organizations don’t want governance. It’s that governance requires the kind of cross-functional conversation that most organizations are structurally bad at. Security teams, digital workplace leaders, business unit heads, legal, and HR all have legitimate stakes in how AI gets used. In many organizations, these teams have never been in a room together. One Gartner analyst described discovering that the security team and the digital workplace team at a client had a stronger relationship with him, as an external consultant, than they had with each other.

Governance isn’t a document you write. It’s a set of ongoing agreements about acceptable use, risk tolerance, data access, and escalation. Those agreements require facilitation. They require someone who can hold competing interests in the same conversation without letting any single stakeholder dominate.

The organizations doing this well treat governance as an enabler, not a blocker. Adidas built a three-tier model: Standard use (low risk, go ahead), Conditional use (needs review), and Forbidden use (hard stop). That framework didn’t emerge from a policy memo. It emerged from structured conversations between technologists, business leaders, and risk managers who had to negotiate what each tier actually meant in practice.

Meanwhile, 70% of IT leaders are deeply concerned about agent sprawl, and only 13% say they have the internal governance to manage it. Microsoft projects 1.3 billion AI agents by 2028. Every one of those agents will need guardrails, and those guardrails won’t come from the technology layer. They’ll come from organizational agreements about what agents can and cannot do. That’s a facilitation problem masquerading as a technology problem.

4. Identity Friction: Roles Are Shifting and Nobody’s Naming It

The conversation about AI and jobs has been dominated by a binary: will AI take my job, yes or no? That framing misses what’s actually happening. AI isn’t eliminating most roles. It’s reshaping them in ways that nobody is explicitly addressing.

When AI handles the routine components of a role, what’s left is the judgment work, the relationship work, the ambiguity-navigation work. For some people, that’s the part of the job they’ve always wanted to do more of. For others, the routine work was the job. It was the source of their competence, their identity, their value to the organization.

56% of CEOs plan to use AI to delayer middle management within five years. That’s not a future scenario. That’s an active planning assumption in more than half of the C-suites in the economy. And the people in those middle management roles? Most of them haven’t been told.

The identity friction shows up as resistance that looks irrational from the outside. A senior analyst who refuses to use an AI tool that could cut their research time in half. A project manager who insists on manual status updates when automated dashboards exist. A team lead who keeps scheduling coordination meetings that an AI scheduling tool has already made redundant. These aren’t Luddites. These are people whose professional identity is tied to the work that’s being automated, and no one has helped them construct a new identity around the work that remains.

This is where the psychological weight of AI transformation lives. Most change management frameworks treat resistance as an adoption problem: just show people the tool, train them, incentivize them. But when the tool threatens not just how you work but who you are at work, training doesn’t address the actual barrier. The barrier is existential, not operational. A financial analyst whose identity is built on being the person who can build the most complex Excel model doesn’t want to hear that an AI can do it in seconds. Not because they doubt the AI. Because they don’t know what they are without that skill.

97% of CEOs say they want leaders who can combine human capabilities with machine capabilities. But combining requires first understanding what the human capabilities actually are in a post-AI context. That demands honest, often uncomfortable conversations about which parts of each role are genuinely human and which parts were always just execution waiting to be automated.

The organizations navigating this well are doing something specific: they’re involving workers in the redesign of their own roles before deploying the technology. Not after. Not as an afterthought. As the starting point. What work do you find meaningful? What work drains you? Where does your judgment matter most? Those questions produce better role designs than any top-down restructuring, and they give people agency in a moment that otherwise feels like something being done to them.

Most organizations are skipping those conversations entirely. They deploy AI into roles without redesigning the roles themselves, then wonder why adoption stalls. The technology isn’t the problem. The absence of a conversation about what people become after the technology arrives is the problem.

5. Talent Pipeline Friction: The Apprenticeship Model Is Quietly Breaking

This is the friction with the longest fuse and the biggest blast radius.

AI doesn’t primarily take entry-level jobs away from junior workers. It enables senior workers to do the entry-level work themselves. An experienced engineer uses AI to generate the boilerplate code that a junior developer would have written. A senior analyst uses AI to do the data cleaning that a research assistant would have handled. The junior role still exists on paper, but the learning path through it has been hollowed out. This is happening on the record at the C-suite level. Tracey Franklin, Moderna’s Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, told the Wall Street Journal that the company has built more than 3,000 custom GPTs to handle work that previously was routed to people. On the HR side, she put it plainly: “It’s like your virtual HR, AI agent. It’s what would normally be a junior-level HR analyst type; we’ve now converted it into a GPT.” The same month she said this, Moderna announced it was cutting 10% of digital technology jobs. She declined to specify which roles. Call it experience starvation: the systematic removal of the low-stakes, high-repetition work that builds professional judgment.

This is experience starvation: the systematic removal of the low-stakes, high-repetition work that builds professional judgment. The apprenticeship model, where junior people learn by doing progressively more complex work under expert supervision, depends on there being work at every level of complexity. AI is compressing the bottom of that ladder.

The evidence is already visible. Almost half of HR leaders report seeing signs of talent pipeline collapse. The World Economic Forum estimates 59% of the workforce needs fundamentally new skills in the next two to three years. And the Anthropic Economic Index shows that experienced AI users, those with six months or more of practice, achieve measurably better outcomes in their AI interactions. That’s the fluency gap in action: the people who already have professional judgment use AI to amplify it, while newcomers who haven’t built that judgment use AI as a crutch that never develops into competence.

The distinction that matters is between automation and augmentation. Automation delegates a task to AI. Augmentation uses AI as a thought partner for complex, creative, or strategic work. Experienced professionals gravitate toward augmentation. Newcomers default to automation. The gap between those two modes of use is where organizational capability either compounds or erodes.

There’s a concept that captures the core issue: discernment. It’s the accumulated ability to assess whether an AI output is correct, verifiable, and useful. An experienced professional reads an AI-generated analysis and immediately spots what’s plausible but wrong. A newcomer reads the same analysis and accepts it because it looks authoritative. Discernment can’t be trained in a workshop. It develops through years of doing the work that AI is now absorbing.

By 2028, Gartner projects that 40% of workers will be mentored first by AI, not by humans. Whether that produces capable professionals or a generation of workers who can prompt but can’t think depends entirely on how organizations design the experience. Some are already building the replacement: GenAI simulators that create realistic practice environments for high-stakes work. One insurance company using this approach saw an 85% skill increase and a 75% reduction in certification failures. But these solutions don’t emerge spontaneously. They require deliberate organizational choices about how people develop, and those choices require the kind of cross-functional consensus that brings us back to friction number one.

These Aren’t Technology Problems

Every one of these five frictions shares a common root: they can’t be solved by the technology that created them. AI can’t facilitate the consensus conversation your leadership team is avoiding. It can’t rebuild trust between executives and a workforce that feels excluded. It can’t negotiate the governance agreements that require competing stakeholders to find common ground. It can’t help someone reconstruct their professional identity. And it can’t design the developmental experiences that build the next generation of your workforce.

These are human problems. Specifically, they are facilitation problems, problems of getting groups of people with different stakes, different information, and different fears to work through hard questions together and arrive at decisions they can actually execute.

We saw this firsthand working with Church & Dwight. When both teams and executives were in the room together, experiencing and witnessing teams using AI collaboratively, buy-in happened in real time. Not because someone presented a deck about the benefits of AI adoption. Because people saw each other working through the friction together, and both sides realized the obstacle was organizational, not technical. That kind of shared experience is something no rollout plan can replicate.

The organizations that treat AI adoption as a technology deployment will keep failing at it. The organizations that treat it as an organizational transformation, one that requires redesigning how people decide, trust, govern, grow, and work together, will capture the value that everyone else is leaving on the table.

The friction has moved. It’s no longer in the execution of the work. It’s in the human dynamics surrounding it. Right now, that friction is where most organizations are stuck, and it’s where the actual competitive differentiation is happening. The companies pulling ahead aren’t the ones with the biggest AI budgets. They’re the ones that figured out how to have the hard conversations: about priorities, about trust, about governance, about what people become when the nature of their work changes.

This is the new friction. Not forever, because the specific challenges will evolve as the technology matures and organizations adapt. But right now, in this moment of transformation, the friction that determines whether your AI investment creates value or destroys trust is organizational, not technical. It lives in your meeting rooms, not your server rooms.

The question isn’t whether your AI tools are good enough. They are. The question is whether your organization can have the conversations that make those tools actually matter.

If you are leading an AI transformation and recognize any of these five frictions in your own organization, that recognition is the first move. The second move is design: building the structures, conversations, and shared experiences that work the friction instead of avoiding it. That’s the work we do at Voltage Control. Start with our New Friction primer for the full framework, or reach out if you want to talk about where your organization is stuck.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do most AI adoption efforts fail?

Most AI adoption fails for organizational reasons, not technical ones. Five frictions consistently break the rollout: leaders haven’t aligned on what problems AI should solve, the workforce doesn’t trust the strategy, governance is stuck in a default of restriction, roles are shifting without anyone naming the change, and the talent pipeline that produced experienced workers is quietly hollowing out. The technology layer is rarely where the actual failure happens.

What are the biggest barriers to AI implementation?

The biggest barriers are conversational. Only 14% of organizations have clear alignment between business, IT, and executives on what problems AI can solve. 78% of employees don’t know whether they’ll lose their job to AI. 70% of IT leaders cite governance as their top blocker, while more than half respond by simply restricting AI use. None of these are problems the technology can solve.

How do you build consensus around AI initiatives?

Consensus on AI requires structured cross-functional conversation, not a town hall. Bring business, IT, and executive leaders into the same room early, define which problems AI is being deployed to solve, and clarify how value will be measured before tools roll out. Organizations that do this are three times more likely to report significant value from their AI investments.

What governance structure do you need for AI adoption?

Effective AI governance is a set of ongoing agreements, not a static policy document. The organizations doing this well, like Adidas with its three-tier Standard / Conditional / Forbidden model, build governance through structured negotiation between security, legal, HR, and business leaders. The structure matters less than the cross-functional facilitation that produces it.

How do you address employee trust issues with AI?

Trust is built by giving the workforce agency in how AI reshapes their roles, not by communicating decisions after they’ve been made. Ask workers directly which work they want to do, which work drains them, and where their judgment matters most. Then redesign roles around those answers before deploying the technology. That sequence builds the involvement that messaging alone cannot manufacture.

The post Why AI Adoption Fails appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Joe Randel (roadie, practicing musician, radio DJ, and talent buyer) opened his session with a confession: the talk isn’t really about music. It’s about a way of seeing. When Joe joined Voltage Control’s core certification program, he found himself feeling completely out of his depth within the first 15 minutes. Unfamiliar terms, unfamiliar tools, unfamiliar people. And then he watched Eric facilitate, leading a room of strangers through something dynamic and collaborative, softening when vulnerability entered the space, amplifying when energy rose, and it clicked. “You know what? He’s like a DJ.” That single metaphor gave Joe a lens that has guided his facilitation practice ever since, and his session was an invitation for everyone in the room to find their own.

The Power of a Lens

Joe opened with the idea that metaphor isn’t just a literary device; it’s a practical tool. Metaphor literally means to carry across: to transport meaning from one domain to another. When someone says a meeting “went off the rails,” you instantly understand loss of direction, loss of momentum, loss of control. No further explanation needed.

To make this visceral, Joe ran a quick exercise. Participants imagined themselves at Wimbledon, center court, front row, watching their favorite player. Then he asked them to take the same seat, same match, but this time as the coach of the opponent. Same scenario. Completely different experience. One perspective tracked the weather and the crowd; the other was scanning for patterns, weaknesses, and moments of frustration. The point landed cleanly: the lens doesn’t change what’s in front of you. It changes what you notice.

Participants then identified their own lens, the activity or practice that, when they’re facilitating well, it feels like they’re doing. Captain of a ship. A monkey swinging through the jungle, charting its path on the fly. A member of a jazz band, knowing when to come forward and when to fade. A sports metaphor grounded in balance and flow. Each one different, each one a window into how that person understands their work.

Finding Your Voice

Joe introduced the concept of voice through Richard Kneebone’s book Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery, which identifies voice as the penultimate stage of mastery. Defined through jazz, voice is the unique musical fingerprint that distinguishes one musician from another. It’s why you can tell Miles Davis from Dizzy Gillespie even when they’re both playing the same instrument. It’s why James Earl Jones reading “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” sounds different from anyone else reading the exact same words.

For DJs, voice is built from two things: preparation and interpretation. Preparation means building an extensive repertoire, not just the hits but the deep cuts, the surprising choices, the things that will delight an audience in unexpected ways. It means observing other DJs, learning how crowds respond, scouting the venue in advance. It means getting the reps in wherever you can find them. Interpretation is where voice actually lives: how you play a track, how you transition between two songs, what order you sequence them in, the choices you make with other people’s tools that somehow become yours. As Joe put it, a DJ can play the same records you could buy at any store and still sound like no one else.

Facilitators have this too. We build repertoire through methodological range, through co-facilitation with more experienced practitioners, through practice playgrounds that let us experiment without high stakes. And we develop interpretation, the patterned choices that make a framework ours, the instinctive adjustments we make in real time, the way we put a particular prompt or activity into the arc of a session in a way that reflects who we are.

Joe gave participants a chance to excavate this in an exercise he called Something Borrowed, Something You: identify a facilitation move you didn’t invent but use often, and articulate what makes it yours. What came back was vivid. A needle-drop checkout where music hits the exact moment the group claps out the session. A coaching-on-a-page handout designed to anchor internal reflection before external output. A visioning exercise that asks participants to imagine sitting next to their company at a dinner party. In every case, the move wasn’t original. The voice was.

Joe was clear that this matters more urgently now than ever. AI can generate an agenda, populate a session plan, suggest activities. What it cannot do is bring a voice. “Your voice is your competitive advantage against AI,” he said, not because the work is oppositional, but because the human fingerprint of how you facilitate is exactly what makes facilitation irreplaceable.

Reading the Room to Sculpt the Journey

Once you have a voice, the work shifts: now you have to learn when to use it, when to soften it, and when to get entirely out of the way. That’s track two, reading the room to sculpt the journey.

Joe used the image of Questlove performing with one earphone on and one earphone off to illustrate what great presence looks like in practice. The ear with the headphone on is listening to what’s cued up next, evaluating whether it’s still the right move. The open ear is listening to the room, sensing the energy and reading what’s actually happening. Preparation gives you the options, Joe noted. Presence is what tells you which one to choose.

For facilitators, this plays out in every transition. Joe offered three moves drawn from the DJ world: cut (intervene and redirect), blend (carry the current energy into the next activity), or let it end (honor what’s happening in the room even when you’re off schedule). He ran the room through a live scenario. A strategy session, 45 minutes in, a cross-functional leadership team in the middle of something real, and then: you’re 10 minutes over time and the client needs a deliverable by end of day. Cut, blend, or let it end. Ten seconds to decide.

The answers split across all three, and every person had a clear, considered reason. One facilitator said she’d blend because cutting would give her too much anxiety. Another said he’d let it end and let the system see itself, then co-design the path forward with the group. Another called for an “aggressive blend.” One participant named a fourth option entirely: divide, breaking into parallel conversations using remote tools, and compared it to a silent disco. What Joe lifted up was that the diversity of answers wasn’t a problem. It was voice in action. The lens you use guides the choice. The choice reveals who you are.

Joe closed by zooming all the way out to the largest unit of time: the journey. Transitions happen in seconds. Sequencing unfolds over minutes. Arc plays out across tens of minutes. Journey is the whole session, and it’s not something you prescribe at the start and hold to. It’s something you co-create and sculpt. And what people take away from it, Joe reminded the room, is never the specific activities or the particular transitions. It’s how they felt. Whether it meant something. Whether they left changed in some way they couldn’t entirely name. That, ultimately, is what facilitators are building, one choice, one lens, one room at a time.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Joe’s Session:

Joe Randel (00:00:00):
I say that I know about 10% about a lot of things and a little more than 10% about a handful of things. And one of those handfuls of things is music. As Eric mentioned, I’ve had the opportunity to be a roadie on a tour bus, to be a practicing musician, to be a radio station DJ, to be a talent buyer and a booker for music venues. And really overall, just someone who’s been incredibly fortunate to have my life enriched by music. So I’m really excited to any chance that I get to talk about anything music related. But today is really only indirectly about music and about DJing. It’s about a way of seeing and about what we notice. It’s fundamentally about how adopting a metaphor as a lens, in my case, that of a DJ, really helped me to understand my work, to help me clarify my purpose, and also to help me find my voice as a facilitator.

(00:01:10):
So that’s what we want to dig into today, and I’m really excited to see what comes up for us. So this idea really wasn’t theoretical in nature. It came out of a moment of recognition. In February of 2024, I logged on to Voltage Control’s core certification program. And within about 15 minutes, I was very confused about whether or not I was in the right place. It was an unbelievably welcoming space, but I was hearing terms that I didn’t know. Everyone that introduced themselves had a really interesting job that I’d never heard of, and skills that I was not familiar with, and we were using platforms that I didn’t know anything about. And in short, I really felt like I was out of my depth.

(00:02:07):
And in those moments, as I kind of mentioned yesterday during Chris’s presentation, in moments of uncertainty, I tend to look to humans. And so I zeroed in on Eric and I was observing what he was doing and very quickly was really bowled over. He was leading a group of complete strangers through a shared experience, a very dynamic and collaborative one, with shifts in energy along the way. When somebody would tell a funny story or joke, he would respond in his countenance and in his tone and his volume. He would steward that momentum forward when somebody would offer up a moment of vulnerability, he would soften, he would leave more space, and it was just really remarkable to watch that transpire. And all of a sudden, it kind of dawned on me. I said, “You know what? He’s like a DJ.” I’d been a DJ, I knew a little bit about music, and so instantly I kind of had a lens that helped me to see this work in a different and familiar way.

(00:03:29):
So at any point during that class session and subsequently through the program, and then after I started doing a little bit of facilitation on my own, when I would hit those moments of uncertainty, I found myself asking, “What’s the DJ move here? What’s the DJ doing in moments like this? ” And that’s always provided me with a lens that has given me clarity, has given me support, and really helped open up a lot for me in my journey. So I want to start with this idea of metaphor. Metaphor literally means to carry across. It’s the act of caring meaning from one place, one domain to another.

(00:04:18):
Yesterday, I think someone even used this phrase of something going off the rails. When we hear a meeting goes off the rails, we know that means loss of direction, loss of control, loss of momentum, and you don’t need to say all of those words. That meaning is sort of carried over with that image. I think it’s interesting, we’re introduced oftentimes to the idea of metaphor through an English or a literature class or context in grade school as this sort of flourish, this way to dress up the language, but it’s actually super practical. We use these all the time because they work. So what I want to start with today is exploring a little bit about metaphors that each of us use in our work. So I want to ask you to take a couple of minutes, in the baskets or somewhere on your table will probably be some Post-it notes if you need those, if you’ve got other paper to write down.

(00:05:16):
But I want you to take a moment to reflect individually on when you think about your work as a facilitator, when you’re facilitating and it’s going well, what does it feel like? What does it feel like you’re doing in that moment? Or if you want to think of it another way, if it were another practice or activity that you know well, what would that be? It may be helpful to think of something that you do where you trust your intuition, where intuition guides you. And it could be anything. It could be baking sourdough bread, it could be dancing the tango, it could be editing a film, it could be gardening, anything. But what does it feel like you’re doing when you’re facilitating and it’s going well? So I’m going to give you a couple of minutes to think about that and then we’ll move on. And what I want you to do is take that activity that you’ve just identified and throughout the rest of our session this morning, we’re going to kind of think of that as a lens.

(00:06:35):
And what I want you to do next is to grab a single sticky note, and on that sticky note, I want you to write two things. The first is the name of that lens, in my case, a DJ. And the second, I want you to finish this sentence, which is, “This lens helps me to notice…” Blank. Whatever using that lens in a moment might make more clear to you. So in my case, lens of a DJ, this helps me to notice when the energy in a room shifts. So take a second, write those two things on a single sticky note, and then what I’m going to ask you to do is to take your sticky note, also take a writing utensil and stand up and walk to the back wall, the wall that’s got this beautiful kind of mosaic, human mosaic… Or also it’s kind of like an audience I’m realizing.

(00:07:43):
It’s like you’re facing an audience of people who look about split. Half of them are utterly disinterested in looking the other way and some of them are looking forward at you. I don’t know that I… I wish I hadn’t noticed that until now. But you’re going to go to that wall and what I want you to do is put the sticky notes up on the wall. They don’t need to be thematically grouped in any way, but what I want you to do is to put them in columns, think of it sort of like a spreadsheet or more appropriately, think of them like the display in an eyeglass store where you have rows and rows of frames. Just stick them over there. After you put yours on the wall, take a step back, leave a little bit of space for other folks to get in there because we have a large group.

(00:08:25):
And then after everybody’s put theirs up, I want you to do a little window shopping. I want you to peruse. Look at those different lenses. And when you see one that piques your curiosity, one that’s interesting to you or one that resonates with you as something that you can relate to, that lens, just put a plus mark on it. You can have multiple pluses. It’s not a single one and we’re not voting for a best lens here. It’s just identifying which ones speak to us, which ones feel like there may be a shared language. So take your sticky note, you go onto the back wall. If you fill up all the room there, the overflow area is the blue bar area for where the tech team is set up.

Speaker 2 (00:09:12):
[inaudible 00:09:12].

Joe Randel (00:09:20):
So as we kind of regroup here, I would love to have a couple folks sort of share what comes up for you when you review those, when you look at the variety of responses from your colleagues here.

Speaker 3 (00:09:37):
It’s a little ironic that I chose this because my father-in-law has a sailboat and I do everything I can to avoid being on a sailboat, but I said, “Captain of a ship,” because you’re guiding, you’re steering, you’re navigating, there might be weather that comes up. You maybe need to change course a little bit and you’re heading towards a destination. Maybe you don’t know exactly where it is, but you know the direction. So that’s what came up for me.

Joe Randel (00:10:00):
Right on. Awesome.

Speaker 3 (00:10:01):
Sorry for the sailors in the room.

Joe Randel (00:10:03):
No apology needed. Yeah. What about some other folks? What else came up for you when you looked at all those options of different lenses that were up there?

Speaker 4 (00:10:11):
Hi, I look for inspiration through the metaphor of nature often. And so I was just absolutely tickled by somebody’s sticky that said, “Monkey.” I mean, so wherever you were going with that, I love it. But just like thinking of the behavior of a monkey, like swing through the jungle and pivoting and going from one place to the next, like essentially charting their path as they’re doing it. I just love that visual metaphor.

Joe Randel (00:10:49):
Awesome. Yeah. And see how powerful it is that you can even take a lens that wasn’t yours initially and just having it as an option opens up new ways of thinking about it. Anyone else? Yes.

Speaker 5 (00:11:08):
So being a member of a band, usually in an improv sense like jazz or something, and that… It’s not being the leader and it’s being a member of it and letting the structure hold the space for it. And then it’s that listening, knowing I’m going to come forward and I’m going to fade.

Joe Randel (00:11:25):
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Oh, yes.

Speaker 6 (00:11:30):
So I found I was really kind of drawn to the sports type metaphors, which surprised me, but they were all about balance and kind of knowing when you’re in the flow and knowing when you’re kind of off kilter. And I realized for me, that was like one of the things I aspired to as a facilitator. So what you just described about adopting somebody else’s, I’m like, “Thank you, whoever put that out there.”

Joe Randel (00:11:53):
Awesome. Yeah, a metaphor is really powerful for kind of instantly giving us language to understand something unfamiliar. I’m really excited to hear about more options for lenses and to peruse these as well. I want to move on to another exercise real quick. We’re already kind of starting to see this in how people are describing. Everyone has used something completely different. We had captain of a sailboat, we had mountain biking, we had monkey, we had being in a jazz band. This is a pretty broad spectrum of things, but we’re all applying these to the same work that we’re all doing in facilitating groups. To make that even sort of more kind of vivid, when you switch lenses, the point I really want to make is how it helps you to notice different things. So I’m going to give you a scenario and I want you to take in this scenario as yourself, which is you are sitting at center court, front row of the… I always forget, the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, which is the full name of Wimbledon.

(00:13:03):
And it is the women’s semi-finals and your favorite player is playing. So I want you to take a second. You can close your eyes if you want and just put yourself there and ask yourself, kind of what are you paying attention to? What emotions are present for you? What makes you really happy when you see it happen? Okay. So now that you’ve got that, now I want to take the exact same scenario. You’re in the same seat, still at Wimbledon. It’s an unusually sunny and pleasant day there. But now instead of being yourself, you are now the coach of the professional tennis player who has already won their semi-final match and who will face the winner of the match that you’re watching right now tomorrow.

(00:14:06):
So now you’re the coach of the opponent of the winner of this match. And I want you to ask yourself the same questions. What are you noticing? What are you paying attention to? What are you zooming in on? What are the things that happen that trigger specific emotions for you? What makes you happy when you see it? Right. Okay. So that’s one way that you can kind of see how quickly things shift. For one Voltage Control buck, who can tell me something that they were focused on in the latter role, the coach of the opponent?

Speaker 25 (00:14:58):
The thing that I was focusing on was more of their form, tiny details, whereas when I was myself, I was like, “Oh, the weather,” and, “How’s [inaudible 00:15:09]?” [inaudible 00:15:09] was completely fit and different.

Joe Randel (00:15:12):
Awesome. Awesome. Anybody else?

Speaker 8 (00:15:14):
In the second scenario, I felt that I was looking for patterns and weaknesses and strengths to see where they could be exploited in the next round.

Joe Randel (00:15:31):
Awesome. Absolutely. One more. Sorry. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (00:15:43):
I wrote down that I was noticing their [inaudible 00:15:43], so there are patterns when they’re getting flustered and when they’re getting frustrated, kind of what’s causing that. So using that to my advantage there.

Joe Randel (00:15:54):
Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So again, the point that I want to drive home, same scenario, same context, same things that are going on in front of you, same activities, but completely changes what you notice, what you pay attention to. Now that we’ve kind of introduced this idea of a metaphor, thinking of it as a lens, I want to return to the lens that I use that was really helpful for me to kind of further demonstrate this, but also maybe open up some different possibilities that for any non-DJs, may resonate as well. So when we think about these lenses that we have, a DJ has a lens too that they’re using to understand their purpose at a particular event, to guide their actions, and to evaluate the things, and to really drive their attention around what they’re going to notice.

(00:16:54):
There’s a lot of different things, but I want to focus on kind of two primary… We’ll call them sort of orienting principles, or in the language of DJs, we’re going to call them two tracks. The first one, track one, is finding your voice, and the second one is reading the room to sculpt the journey. So I want to start with finding your voice. In a book that I really like and really recommend by author, Richard Kneebone, called Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery, Kneebone talks about six stages of mastery, and the penultimate stage of mastery, he calls voice, and he uses sort of a definition from the world of jazz to explain it. And he defines voice as the unique musical fingerprint that any musician has, no matter what instrument they’re playing. It’s why you can tell the difference between Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, both playing the same instrument.

(00:18:00):
To make it less musical, I could read you the nursery rhyme, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I could then play you a recording of James Earl Jones reading it, or Maya Angelou. Something is clearly different. Same words, same order, but there’s something different. And so there’s that unique musical fingerprint that we have. And in all professions, you have a voice. As facilitators, we have those as well. So when I think about finding your voice, there’s sort of two components, two buckets. The first one is preparation, and the second one is interpretation. Under preparation, we’ve got things like repertoire. DJs are sort of known for spending all disposable income and non-disposable income on the acquisition of records, CDs, cassettes, hard drives to house their MP3s.

(00:19:04):
They’re always looking for everything too. They want the hits, the things that they know will bring people onto the dance floor. They also want, in DJ speak, what they call kind of deep cuts, things that will delight, things that will surprise, things that will peak the audience curiosity, things they haven’t heard before. So they’re always working to build that repertoire and to invest in that. Observation. They are the quintessential students of the game. DJs go and see other DJs perform. They watch how audiences respond to them. They watch how DJs respond to different things that occur in the audience, what songs they play, what order they play them in, how people respond to that.

(00:19:49):
They also plan, and we’re going to dig a little deeper into this idea of planning in a minute as well, but DJs have to plan both for the setting in which they’re going to be operating, but also for the experience that they’re anticipating their audience looking for. So they go to the club the night before to see, “Do they have turntables there or do I need to bring my own? Do they have a CD player? Do I need to bring my own? Where am I going to be seated? Where is the DJ platform? What can I see from there? How do people move around in that space? Where’s the bar? Where’s the exit? Where are the tables?” They’re observing to get a sense as part of this preparation. And then obviously practice, get the reps in. DJs start out wanting to send everyone and their mother playlists that they make.

(00:20:39):
Then they offer to DJ your backyard barbecue or to throw a barbecue at your house. And eventually, they get booked to come perform at a festival or in a club or something like that. So they’re working really hard to make sure that they get the opportunities to practice and put these things into play. The other component of that is interpretation. This is the one that has always really fascinated me. This is how they DJ. When they choose to play a particular song, how they choose to play it, how they might edit it, how they might remix it, how they might connect two songs, the transitions between them. If you think about how unique this is, a DJ is playing records that some other artists made of a song that some other artist wrote and recorded. It’s not their own… The singing, the track itself is not theirs. And not only is it someone else’s, most of the time it’s the same one that you and I could go buy, if it were the ’90s, at Tower Records.

(00:21:54):
So there’s a way that even when you’re using sort of the idea of found objects and other people’s tools, that your voice can still really appear. So the interpretation part of it also includes sort of an unspoken thing about DJs, but also about artists more broadly, that there’s an innate empowerment to innovate. DJs always see themselves as standing on the shoulders of giants, being influenced by someone that got them wanting to do this, and then trying to figure out what they’re going to do to take this further. Where are they going to find that unique fingerprint, that unique voice that they’re seeking? So they take the tools that they’re given and they don’t feel restricted. They don’t feel like they can’t change the order they play them in. They don’t feel like they can’t change the rhythms. They don’t feel like they can’t put Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline back-to-back with Bad Bunny.

(00:22:53):
And so that empowerment to innovate is a critical part of this interpretation. Now, these concepts obviously should feel quite familiar to us as facilitators because I would argue facilitators also have a voice and it’s made up of the same things, preparation, our repertoire. By the way, this is one of the things I love about Voltage Control, the kind of methodological agnosticism. That’s on camera, right? I’m on. This idea that the more tools you have, the more prepared you are for any given situation. It doesn’t mean that liberating structures won’t cover you, but you may need something from Gamestorming. You may need from a different school of thought. So like a DJ, we as facilitators are constantly building our repertoire of frameworks, of warmups, of icebreakers.

(00:23:58):
And in addition to that sort of preparation, the component of repertoire, there’s observation. I think one of the most powerful things about the culture and the community of Voltage Control is you get the opportunity to observe other facilitators applying their craft. And another great way that we get to do this is to co-facilitate with other folks. And so you get a chance to see how other people, more experienced folks, do things and to sort of take the pieces that resonate with you and incorporate them into your own style. Planning as well. We’ve got great tools like SessionLab, great facilitators, plan the presentation. They’ve got their Miro board built, they’ve got their SessionLab, they’ve got their boxes of sticky notes, they’ve got kind of everything there so that they go into a space, which they also have researched.

(00:24:52):
It’s always a great idea to go to the room you’re going to facilitate the day before and understand where the power outlets are, “Does it have a projection? What’s the wifi like? Am I going to be able to zoom people in or not?” I think a favorite is, “Do sticky notes stick to these walls? What is the surface?” So that’s kind of this preparation element. And then again, we talk about planning and then talking about practice, right? Same thing. The practice playgrounds that I think are so fantastic that Voltage Control puts together. You want to get the reps in. You want to figure out, “How does this stuff work? Where can I make some modifications? How do I make this particular device sort of my own?”

(00:25:41):
I think the other thing when we think about… If we flip over to interpretation, I think this is something that as facilitators, we don’t do inherently, but I think it’s important that we think through the same lens. And that’s that idea of the empowerment to innovate. We’re going to dig into this, in an activity in just a second, but anybody can go on liberating structures, can ask ChatGPT, can get the instructions for a lot of the devices that we use, and they can read and follow those directions explicitly. And it’ll work. But the reason that people hire facilitators is this voice. It’s the human element of what we do. It’s the way we adjust those frameworks in different ways that suit the needs of the room and suit our voice as a facilitator.

(00:26:31):
So that value that we bring is really, really critical. And so I want to encourage folks, as we think more about this idea of voice, how you lean into that, because it’s a really powerful thing. I mean, once you find your voice, it gives you that tool that you can call on when something sudden, surprising, happens in your session, and you’re trying to dig deep and figure out how you’re going to respond to it. Now, I would argue that obviously voice has always been a critical component, but for me, this feels so important in our current moment of technological change where artificial intelligence is rapidly revising on what seems like almost a momentary basis, the roles and responsibilities, the interaction between human and machine.

(00:27:23):
And your voice, I would argue, is your competitive advantage against AI. And I don’t mean to set that up in an oppositional way, but in terms of the differentiation, it’s your voice because we’ve probably all done this. You can go to ChatGPT and say, “I’m running a workshop with these people,” and it will spit out the agenda. It will give you the activities. It will give you all those things. Voice is really somewhere that I think in the present and the future of facilitation, we’ve really got to lean very heavily into that because I think it’s the most human quality of our work and that, which makes it essential.

(00:28:00):
So I want to do a little bit of an exercise in finding your voice. I’m reminded a little bit of… There’s a great quote from the legendary record producer, Quincy Jones, that relates to voice and how he was finding his voice as an arranger, as a composer, and then as a producer. And he took piano lessons from a legendary French composer and piano instructor, Nadia Boulanger, and she famously said to him, “Quincy, there are only 12 notes, and until God gives us 13, I want you to know what everybody did with those 12 notes. Bach, Beethoven, Bo Diddley, same 12 notes.” For me, it was very intimidating initially this idea of, “Everybody’s got these same tools. How do I do that?” And the lens of a DJ and finding your voice was really what kind of helped me to do that.

(00:29:00):
So what I want to do now is kind of dig into this a little bit at our individual sort of voice level with something… I’m going to call this Something Borrowed, Something You. And I want you to take a moment, individually. We’re going to pair up in a little bit and get to share more with folks at our table, but I want you to think about a facilitation move that you have. It’s something that you use often, something that you didn’t invent necessarily. A move in this setting can be a prompt, it can be a framework, it can be an icebreaker, it can be an artifact or a technology tool or a prop or something like that, but it’s something that you use often as a facilitator, one of your kind of go to moves, so to speak.

(00:29:46):
So take a minute and think about… Identify one of those in your work. And if it helps you in thinking through this aspect of what you do differently, think of it as, what are the instructions that you might alter? What’s an element that you might soften in the description of how you might implement this? Where’s the place that you always instinctively put it into the overall arc of your facilitation? Okay. So once you’ve got your facilitation move, I want you to turn to the person to your left and I want you to share your move with them.

(00:30:30):
You can literally get up and demonstrate it if you want. And I want you to tell them how you use it differently specifically. So I want you to tell them what move you wrote down and then what it is about that move that makes it yours and how you might use it differently that feels like something that you own. Okay? So take a minute, turn to the person to your left and share.

(00:31:11):
All right folks, clap once if you can hear the sound of my voice. Clap twice if you can hear the sound of my voice. Clap three times if you can hear the sound of my voice. Clap four times if you want some Voltage Control bucks. All right. Awesome. So I’d love to hear from some folks, how that went. What came up for you in those conversations? Yeah.

Speaker 10 (00:31:48):
Thanks, Mark. I can’t wait to hear other people’s things because I’m like, “Oh, this is a wealth of knowledge in this room.” But I was sharing an example that related back to what you were talking about with the power of music and being a DJ and that sometimes in a in-person environment, I’ll have everyone do a one word checkout and then I’ll lead us in a clap out. So I’ll be like, “Hey, Anna, Sarah’s going to count us out. She’s going to go one, two, three. We’re all going to clap. This gathering will have concluded. We’ll see you at the happy hour.” And then so we’ll do the clap out and then as soon as the clap hits, the needle drops on whatever song it is. And then we all just go into the happy hour. So otherwise there’s that awkward like, “Oh, there’s no music happening.” But we love a needle drop moment. Thank you.

Joe Randel (00:32:40):
Spitting straight gold right there. Awesome. Who else?

Speaker 11 (00:32:48):
[inaudible 00:32:48] got something.

Renita (00:32:52):
Fantastic exercise. I love this. What this made me do is actually think about my framework more. And I came to… I’m a queen of a handout, as y’all saw yesterday, but it made me crystallize that I do coaching on a page. So it’s the way of bringing people internal first before they go external because folks like to bypass the self-reflection. So anchoring them on paper first has been so great in the results of then producing the outcomes as the collective too. And I’m going to pass this to Jordan because she had a really good one too.

Joe Randel (00:33:21):
Awesome.

Jordan (00:33:23):
Thank you, Renita. I loved this exercise because it made me reflect in a new way on my practice and try to find a through line in exercises that I love that I find have the best outcomes. So the first thing that came to mind was a dinner party exercise I do for a brand visioning workshop. So before we get into company values and anything, I get into a visioning exercise first where I ask people to imagine they’re sitting next to the company at a dinner party. What do they look like? What are they wearing? Who are they talking to? How do they act? And it just… What I found is that it brings up things that are really unexpected for people and sparks really interesting conversations that then leads into that visioning, values, exercises. So what I found is that visioning exercises, kind of like we did with Chris yesterday, are my through line. So thanks, Renita.

Joe Randel (00:34:20):
Awesome. And let’s see, both of you for collaboration.

Renita (00:34:26):
Yes.

Joe Randel (00:34:26):
Well done. Well done. Who else?

Speaker 14 (00:34:35):
One of the things that I talk about when I speak is communication, the power of relationships and connection and confidence. So I have this little game that I play. It’s called the Jet Fighter Game. And it works super well in all kinds of spaces. So everybody gets like a random coded piece of paper, whether they are A, B, C, D, E, or the messenger… Has anybody heard of this game before? Okay. So it’s a little long. I’m sorry. I’m going to talk fast. So you get this random piece of paper, you’re split into groups. We put the chairs kind of like a plane and the A is the very lead person. And B is the messenger in between them. They’re the only person that can pass notes. You need a lot of Post-its. And then C, D and E in the back are like… Everyone’s given a signal that they’ve got to figure out what signal everyone has in order to land the plane.

(00:35:19):
But C, D and E, all they can do, they can’t talk to each other, they can only talk to B. So suite B is just like this huge mess of Post-it notes. A thinks that they’re the driver and C, D and E are like, “What the hell’s happening?” And you have this messenger who can pass the notes. And if you don’t write your note right, the messenger throws it away, which can be very frustrating. What’s cool about this is one, it makes you work together without knowing all of the pieces of the puzzle. Two, the directions aren’t real clear, so you see who gets irate real fast. And fun fact, I’ve had high school and junior high kids figure it out, and then CEOs of huge corporations get pissed and quit. And the truth is that it links to how we feel when we aren’t in the right seat in the plane, how we feel when we know the answer and we wish other people knew the answer, how you feel when you can’t empower others when that’s what you’re used to doing.

(00:36:11):
So it makes you think through other people’s shoes a tad, and it makes you just walk through the communication and how we could build relationships a little more kind with a little more grace and then just like don’t let your confidence tank just because it’s one thing that you don’t understand. But a friend of mine said that he’s done that before and he said that HR got real mad at him. So beware. Okay.

Joe Randel (00:36:32):
Awesome. Awesome.

Speaker 14 (00:36:34):
Thank you.

Joe Randel (00:36:38):
So a follow-up question for you. So when you were sharing with your partner and your partner was telling you about their move, what’d you notice in them when they were describing their move and telling you about it? Did you notice anything about… Did they change at all in how they spoke or…

Speaker 15 (00:37:02):
[inaudible 00:37:02] share what their experience was… Oh, I need a microphone. They were both very enthusiastic about sharing what they knew, what their experiences were, and how they made things different. And it was great to feel that energy that they had.

Joe Randel (00:37:23):
Yeah, absolutely. And for bouncing two mics, you get $4. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to lift up a couple things. One, this last observation of what it does for people when you allow them to speak in the language that resonates the most for them, and particularly one that can kind of bridge between the two. The other thing I want to lift up is a lot of what you’re hearing are not new inventions. They’re different ways of running existing frameworks. Talk about a checkout, for example. But it’s that twist. It’s that unique way that you approach it. And I want to really lift up the idea that what we’re talking about here is patterned choice. You’re making choices about how to use, what device to use, what the move is, and how you’re going to use it.

(00:38:18):
And so I kind of want to wrap your voice up with this idea of it’s patterned choice. When you start to see the lens as opening up the choices and guiding the choices that you make, it can really unlock a lot. So your voice is patterned choice and it’s made up of a combination of your preparation and your interpretation. It’s really exciting. As I said earlier, when you find that voice, it has a lot of professional value to you. It can become your branding. It can become your professional reputation, but there’s a tension there. A lot of times when we find our voice, we just want to use it all the time. And as a DJ, you must remember, the audience did not come for you. They came to experience something with you.

(00:39:14):
When I go back to Richard Kneebone’s book, he talks about, “Finding your voice needs to balance your emerging identity as an expert with a constant awareness of who your work is for. Finding your voice needs to balance your emerging identity as an expert with a constant awareness of who your work is for.” Once you have a voice, that’s when the work really begins, because now you have to decide when to use it, when to soften it, when to get out of the way entirely with it. And so that brings us to track two, just to read the room, to sculpt the journey. Because if we think about track one as who you are, track two is really about how we listen. And if you listen well enough, a journey will take shape in the room.

(00:40:12):
Let’s start with this idea of reading the room. Why does it matter? Mike Tyson told us why it matters, because everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. Usually the plan isn’t the problem. The problem is that the room and the audience is alive and plans aren’t. Now, I want to be clear that great DJs are not necessarily Jedis that use the force to guide every moment and just wing everything. But a great DJ comes in with a detailed plan and also a complete lack of attachment to that plan and a willingness to throw it out the window if it’s no longer serving the audience.

(00:41:04):
DJs are very observant of these things. And so when we talk about read the room, I like… I often think of images like this. In fact, for many people when they hear the word DJ today, something like this comes up. This particular example is Ahmir Thompson, otherwise known as Questlove, the drummer in The Roots, and a really influential everything, but an amazing DJ. But I want to call your attention to something specific about this photo, and it’s his headphones. How many of you wear your headphones with one ear on and one ear off? I’m so intrigued to understand. In the case of a DJ, this is part of something called queuing, and I think it’s a really great visualization of what great DJs do and also what great facilitators do.

(00:42:08):
In queuing, you have one earpiece on, and that is listening to what’s happening next. That’s the next track that you’ve cued up. You’re listening to it to see if it’s at the right spot where you want to start it. It’s at the right speed, so it’s going to sync up well with what you’re playing, and you’re also evaluating it because with the other ear, you’re listening to the room, and you’re listening to and sensing the energy that’s in the room and what’s going on around you. And you’re evaluating whether or not this thing that’s playing in your right ear is still the right thing to play based on what you’re hearing in your left ear.

(00:42:47):
Because if you can have this really unbelievably rare, James Brown, obscure single that you know will drive every human being onto the dance floor, as soon as they hear it, and you’ve spent 10 years trying to find this record and you found it in an estate sale, and you got to gig this Friday, and these folks are going to witness this song. And right before you play it, miss cue and the dance floor scatters, and you realize, “I’m not sure. I’m not sure about this.” A great DJ can abandon that plan in the moment and say, “What does this room need right now?” If I’ve just sent everyone to their corners, I need to rebuild something. Is it trust? Is the audience’s trust of me stewarding the dance experience that they’re having? I need to rebuild this in some way, and I need to think in a split second, what is the tool that I have that’s going to do that?

(00:43:55):
So really this idea of reading the room is about the idea of presence, right? And I would argue that preparation gives you the options. We talked about planning, but presence is what tells you which one of them to choose. It guides you to know how to respond to those moments. Preparation matters as a DJ. You don’t want to show up with a crate of records and they only have a CD player. You don’t want to show up at a hip hop festival with nothing but Waylon Jennings records, but it’s your presence that’s really going to save you.

(00:44:35):
If you think about how this applies to us as facilitators, again, same thing. We also are observant. We also sense those energy shifts that go on in the room. And it feels incredible when you’ve planned something out, the agenda’s holding, people are coming right along with you. They’re right where you thought they were, but has already come up multiple times during the conference, that doesn’t always happen. And so in that moment, figuring out how you’re going to respond. As facilitators, sometimes we improvise, but we don’t really know why we chose what we did. We just take an action. Sometimes we feel that shift and we hesitate and the room goes off in another direction.

(00:45:25):
This is where presence is really critical. And where I would argue having a lens, having a metaphor can be one of those things that in that moment you draw on, that you go to. How would I, if I were doing X, approach this? In sensing those shifts, sometimes it’s helpful to think about the four elements that… I call them elements that a DJ uses. You think of them as sort of four different knobs and they’re like different sort of units of time that go into putting together a DJ set and the four elements are transitions, sequencing, arc, and journey.

(00:46:12):
So talk about transitions first. So these are the smallest, most kind of atomic units. This is where really an audience instantly senses whether you are playing from a playlist or whether you’re co-creating something with them in that moment. These are the choices that a DJ has to make between every song that they play. How are they going to move from one song to the next? When you’re listening to a record at home, one song fades out or ends and there’s a little beat or two of silence and then the next one starts. But you think about when you go out to an event, that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen on the radio.

(00:46:48):
There’s intentional choices that a DJ is making all along the way of, “Do I let the current track fade out and then do I fade in the next one? Do I start the next track?” And they’re sitting on top of each other in this kind of moment of chaos and tension, and then the first track fades out and you’re left with the new one. Sometimes they may actually want a hard break. I mean, I don’t know if anyone’s been in a concert or a DJ session before where all of a sudden the DJ drops the song out and you realize you’re in a room with 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 people singing in unison with a bunch of other humans at one moment. It’s an unbelievably powerful experience, but these are the choices. These are the transitions that a DJ is kind of wrestling with as they figure out how they’re going to move from one song to the next.

(00:47:40):
Now, there’s a lot of ways you can do this, but what I want to talk about today are kind of three generic ways that you can do these transitions and how they apply to DJing, but also how we might apply them to our work. And these are cut, blend, or let it end. Cutting, in a simple sense, you intervene, you stop the conversation because you’re over time or it’s going in a direction that you don’t want, or et cetera, et cetera. Blend, you figure out how you’re going to take the energy that’s coming out of this current conversation and steer it into the next move, the next session, or let it end. You’re totally off schedule. You’re not going to make your agenda, but what’s happening in the room is important and it needs to happen. So you’re going to let it end.

(00:48:41):
So I want to slow this down a little bit and give us as a room a chance to sort of mess around with these toys a little bit because I think this is something we all know, we’ve been talking about a lot, but it’s not something we practice explicitly and it can be kind of hard to practice. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you a scenario, and at your tables, you’re going to talk through a prompt in response to this scenario and then I’m going to layer on a few additional questions as we go. So the scenario is this. You’re facilitating a strategy session with a cross-functional leadership team and you’re about 45 minutes in. And the purpose of this is to identify two to three strategic priorities for the organization that they’re going to prioritize in the next quarter. Priorities they’re going to prioritize from the Department of Redundancy Department.

(00:49:43):
You’ve just run a small group session that is surfacing some tensions and trade-offs. It seems like it’s going well. You’re noticing that people are leaning in, heads are nodding, notes are being taken, multiple voices are participating. Someone, not some, just said, “I hadn’t thought of it that way before.” So what I want you to do at your tables is kind of go around one at a time and answer this question of, if everything keeps going as is, what would you plan to do? And you can use those three choices of cut, blend, or let it end. Based on what you know here, what would you plan to do next? So I’m going to ask you guys at the table, maybe one person who… Whoever has the most bucks. No, you don’t have to do that. Somebody volunteer to start off and then just go clockwise around the table and offer to the group what you would do based on what you know here.

Speaker 2 (00:50:43):
[inaudible 00:50:43].

Joe Randel (00:50:58):
Okay. Can I have everybody’s attention? Can I have everybody’s attention? Can I get folks attention here? I’ve got some additional information that I want to layer on here for y’all. Can I get everybody’s attention? So as you’re facilitating this and you’re leading the room, you’re also starting to notice some more things. And now one of the things you notice is there’s one person at the table who hasn’t spoken yet. And as you look back, you realize that your initial read that the energy is high was correct, but it’s actually uneven. It’s not evenly distributed among the room. You know that the next activity that you were planning was designed to produce something the group needs in order to make a final decision later in the day and to add the additional detail and nuance a lot of us have sort of alluded to that the client has explicitly asked for and is expecting you to deliver. So please resume your conversations with those details and go back around and revisit your answers and see if it changes anything for you. And then we’ll reconvene in a minute.

Speaker 2 (00:52:08):
[inaudible 00:52:08].

Joe Randel (00:52:08):
Okay. Okay. Can I have everybody’s attention, please? Can I have your attention, please? If you can hold your conversations for a second. I’ve got an important announcement. You realize now as a facilitator that you glanced down at your watch and you were actually supposed to have transitioned to the next activity 10 minutes ago. The next activity directly feeds into the final decision the group has to make by the end of the session today. You now have 10 seconds individually to decide, cut, blend, or let it end to yourselves. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay. Pause. Hold your decision. Show of hands. Cut. Who votes cut? Okay. Come on, Eric. Commit.

Eric (00:53:30):
We’ve invented the cleaned method.

Joe Randel (00:53:37):
Full circle moment. Eric is a brilliant DJ. Innovation. Okay, so cut. Okay. Blend. Show me the blenders. A lot of blenders. Nice. All right. Who says, “Let it end”? Okay. Okay. All right. Well, so let’s hear from a few folks. Who wants to tell us what you picked and why?

Speaker 11 (00:54:15):
Keep your hand raised.

Speaker 17 (00:54:21):
This is not that brilliant, but if we’re already 10 minutes in, I can’t do the thing I was planning to do well like, “Let’s just keep going and I’ll get there another way.”

Joe Randel (00:54:27):
Okay.

Speaker 17 (00:54:41):
I’m not going to force the agenda.

Joe Randel (00:54:41):
Okay. Who else?

Speaker 11 (00:54:41):
All right. Who’s next? Okay.

Speaker 18 (00:54:41):
So one of the things that Amber and I were actually just talking about is instinctively when I read this and the has is like all in caps, which terrifies me. So instinctively, I’m like, “Cut, cut. We got to cut this.” But then Amber and I were just talking and we were like, “Okay, but what does have to really mean?” Is it really something that’s life or death? Because if it’s not, and I realize 10 seconds is still… It’s a very short amount of time, but what is the risk of editing that all caps has to? And I think obviously a lot of factors are at play there, but if it’s something that potentially could be super beneficial to the team to let it go, then it might be worth editing that.

Speaker 11 (00:55:34):
Okay.

Joe Randel (00:55:36):
By the way-

Speaker 11 (00:55:36):
You have one over here.

Joe Randel (00:55:37):
I’m the Federal Reserve and I’m responsible for the flow of money and money supply and I’m not doing well right now. So you get one preemptively.

Speaker 11 (00:55:48):
Yeah. All right, go ahead.

Speaker 19 (00:55:49):
I chose blend mostly because I feel like that’s what you just did. You kind of like blended in front of our eyes as we started our table discussion and then you said, “All right, show of hands.” We still got the point across of we’re making a decision, but we’re moving along in the programming a little quicker. So sometimes you need a piece of it as you’re DJing. You need to play that song, that track, to get the crowd to kind of nod their heads in a certain way, but it could be part of the move to something else. So I hear you.

Joe Randel (00:56:27):
Awesome. Who else? Yeah. Oh, this is like a power participating table right there.

Speaker 20 (00:56:35):
Hi. So I said an aggressive blend because you do need to move it along, but you’re saying we’re only 10 minutes off schedule? Only 10? Hear me out. I can deal with that. Count your blessings, only 10. So it’s time. It’s not off track. So you don’t need to cut. You don’t need to yank them from a direction. You need to turn that direction into your final deliverable. So an aggressive blend.

Joe Randel (00:57:00):
I love aggressive blend. It’s kind of like the knob on the blender. It’s like, “Crush, liquify, blend smoothly.” So lot of choices.

Speaker 21 (00:57:07):
Yeah. So this table is definitely team blend and we talked a lot about it. And as I’m hearing other people talk, what I realized is you can help the group help make that decision too. And that’s something we didn’t talk about here as a group, but if you’re only 10 minutes off and you can let them decide, then it’s even more powerful.

Renita (00:57:29):
And I think I want to double down on the has to, everything is negotiable. And so definitely bringing in the room of like, “Hey, we can either have this have an answer or we can have the right answer. So what do we want to do here?” I can give you an answer by the end of the 10 minutes, but that’s not what you’re paying for. You’re paying to get the right one that’s in the room. So if we can all collectively agree to slow this down, but saying that out loud and let everyone be able to be a part of it, versus just like, “I have to get this done because time said so. ” We made it all up so we can be flexible. I’m a chaos gobbling. So yeah, that is like, “Let’s get to the right thing here and slow down unless there’s a heart in a cooler somewhere,” but outside of that…

Joe Randel (00:58:14):
Wow. Wait, a heart in a cooler or a heart in a refrigerator. I’m giving myself a dollar for that one. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Who else? Who else?

Speaker 22 (00:58:36):
Real quick, I just think whether it’s a cut or a blend, it’s about the transition. So they might look very similar. So it’s the facilitator’s job. Which either one you do, there has to be a smooth transition between whatever it was you’re doing and what you need to get done.

Joe Randel (00:58:59):
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, perfect.

Speaker 23 (00:59:00):
Yeah. So building off a little bit on that, but also reflecting on what you’ve been sharing, I think it also matters how I feel in the situation. And I think to cut would give me a lot of anxiety, but blending would leave me feeling in control. Like I am projecting where we are moving together. I feel confident about it. We don’t have to be rushed about it. And so just reflecting on like what your strengths are as a facilitator, how you are going to be comfortable moving the group forward in addition to all of the other dynamics that are playing out in the people in the room.

Joe Randel (00:59:39):
Yeah. It sounds like you got to be authentic to your voice as a facilitator.

Speaker 24 (00:59:48):
I don’t know about you, but my favorite DJs are also always inventing new transitions. So I’m going to call out a new transition, which could be divide, and with remote tools, we have this ability to break people out into different rooms. So if there’s momentum and you can see the momentum of a particular group, but you still have an activity that could drive towards another outcome, potentially, you could divide the group if you’re in a remote session and just calling out. Those tools are awesome and they do allow these things that in person collaboration doesn’t often always allow or makes it harder. So just thinking about the tension between those two things as well.

Joe Randel (01:00:27):
Love it.

Speaker 24 (01:00:29):
And the analogy would be silent discos where you can have multiple streams going at the same time.

Joe Randel (01:00:37):
Right on.

Speaker 11 (01:00:37):
Right here.

Joe Randel (01:00:38):
Sorry. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:00:41):
I just wanted to add to that comment about comfort. So yesterday there was a session we were talking a little bit about trying things out for size and experimenting. So I think also there’s a potential to… If you’re in that moment and you know your go to is cut like I would be, potentially trying something else and see what happens.

Joe Randel (01:01:04):
Love that idea of trying on something different. Trying on a different lens, different tool.

Speaker 25 (01:01:09):
Yeah. I was one of the controversial hands that said, “Let it end.” As an embodied disruptor, that felt really good to me. And for me, part of it was in that scenario, my preference is always going to be, “Let the system see itself.” And so in that scenario, I would want to like let it end and like let the system see where it gets stuck from ideation or convergence or whatever, towards action. And then they’re going to help me design the path forward. So I would want to let them kind of sit in the tension of, “Here we are. What are we going to do now?” Because I’m super comfortable in that chaos intention and I can hold it for a while.

Joe Randel (01:01:57):
No, that’s awesome. So I want to kind of double click on something. Something I notice with each of you sharing is everyone has a reason why they chose it. And I feel the same confidence and rationale from each person of their decision that I was hearing when I was walking around earlier and people talking about their move, right? That this is actually playing out your voice because if you look at that metaphor and you look at the voice that you’re developing that you’ve built as a facilitator, it shows up in these choices, right? Because the metaphor may guide you into which of these transitions you choose, but also to the point that you made, there’s also a how you do each one of these.

(01:02:48):
So thank you for indulging me on that one. Didn’t mean to necessarily get everybody’s heart racing too early in the morning. So yeah, these are not the only types of transitions that a DJ uses, but they’re pretty common. And having that framework from the DJ lens helped me in those moments to kind of determine how I was going to respond in the room. And so we’ve kind of talked about what each one of these means, but again, in the contributions from the room, you heard that multiple people might have said cut or blend or let it in, but what that meant to them, there were nuances to it. So here’s just some examples of these are not the only way that you can do it, but the way the language that you might use to deploy any one of these.

(01:03:41):
So I want to ask a question layered on top of the choice that you made. First, I want you to think about what happened in your body when I said, “You’ve got 10 seconds to make this decision.” And then I want to ask what you were optimizing for in the choice that you made. Were you optimizing for time, for the energy in the room, for equity, for the outcome? You were probably ultimately being guided by some lens, one of those in the choice that you made. And so it’s just another way to think about how the lens that you choose may lead you down a path, may give you that way to see this, so that you can make the choice that’s authentic to who you are, that’s reflective of the voice that you’ve built as a facilitator. Obviously, I don’t think I have to say, there’s no right or wrong answer to how you do this.

(01:04:49):
This is where voice really kind of shows up. So as we’re moving towards the end of our time, we’ve really kind of zoomed in here into this micro level of transition. But as I mentioned before, there are actually multiple sort of timescale devices and frameworks that a DJ may use. We talked about the transition, we talked about the sequencing… Or we mentioned sequencing, arc and journey. The DJs are constructing all of those in real time by asking the same questions that we do as facilitators. What does the room need now? What’s already happened that I need to honor? And where does this need to land emotionally for folks? And every time that you do this, you’re doing more than just managing time. You’re ultimately sculpting this journey.

(01:05:42):
So just quickly, if we think about those four elements, transitions may happen in seconds. You have seconds to decide them, they occur, you got to make that decision. Sequencing is something that’s over more of like a timescale of minutes. These are the activities in the order that you put them in. The question there is, what comes next? The arc of a session or a DJ set is something more in the kind of tens of minutes. Are we in a moment of building? Are we releasing? Are we grounding? Are we opening? Are we converging? Are we diverging? And then journey is really something that the unit is the whole session. And like a DJ, a facilitator, what you’re really asking is, “Does all of this stuff that we did together today, does it add up to something meaningful?” And that’s where journey is. Journey is not something that we prescribe on the front end and have to hold to all the way through. It’s something that’s co-created in the moment. It’s something that we sculpt.

(01:06:45):
I think it’s important with journey to remember the fact that people don’t remember in a DJ set, all the songs that were played. They don’t remember the additional… The details of which kind of transition the DJ made. What they remember is how they felt. And we’re doing the same thing as facilitators. They don’t come out of our session going, “That was the best troika consulting I’ve ever experienced.” They’re thinking about whether it meant something, whether they learned something, whether they felt that sense of connection. So I want to kind of wrap up today by really zooming all the way out to this idea of journey. And I want to ask you to take a minute to reflect individually on an upcoming session that you have and ask yourself two questions. If somebody described that session the day after, what would I hope they would say? And once you identify that, ask yourself, “What choice can you make today that would most influence that outcome?”

Speaker 26 (01:07:59):
Joe, while people are thinking, thank you so much for a thought-provoking session. I have a 10-year-old daughter who is a wannabe DJ and she would be furious with me if I don’t take the opportunity to ask you this question.

Joe Randel (01:08:14):
I don’t want a furious 10-year-old.

Speaker 26 (01:08:15):
Yeah, me neither. When she saw the email that said I was going to attend a session, it was called DJ Save My Life, she was very jealous. She wants to be here. Here’s the question. Which DJ-

Joe Randel (01:08:29):
Will I come to her birthday party?

Speaker 26 (01:08:30):
Oh, yes, please. Which DJ comes to your mind that best reflects facilitation?

Joe Randel (01:08:37):
Oh gosh. Great conversation for the break. Yeah, so many of them. I’d love to have that conversation. So to wrap us up, just summarizing where we’ve been today. What I’d like you to take away from this is the idea that metaphor can change how you see, can change what you notice. Metaphor can lead you to finding your voice, which sees how you… That helps to shape what your voice is and choice… That the voice shapes the choices that you make. So I’m hopeful that you got some value out of this today. You thought a little bit about a lens that may help you, and the next time that you’re in one of those moments where you don’t know what to do, you can either ask yourself, “What’s the DJ move here,” or what is the given lens that you’ve identified, what’s that move? And it’ll help you to find your way. Thank you so much, y’all. brilliant people with amazing ideas who often in our hyper Western-focused, the loudest voice in the room wins culture, they’re often overlooked. So it’s not just, “Hey, did I make sure so-and-so had a chance to talk?” But am I embedding in the immersion space, emergent space, weighs other methods for people who have a harder time speaking out? So are we using Post-it Notes? Are we in Miro? It’s a round-robin. Everybody’s going to talk. So how am I managing those expectations to help protect the quiet sparks?

(51:30):
And then of course, as challenging as that space is, that’s where the magic happens is keeping that integration space open longer. So today hasn’t really been a laundry list of tips and techniques, but it’s really about that space between people where co-creation, collaboration, true innovation actually happens and how we can create, rather than control, we create the conditions that enable that to happen. So it only happens if we’re willing to hold that space. So the hold the container, trust the process, and allow for that, guide that emergence. All right, that’s the work. And I think you guys are ready for it. So there we go. I’ll leave it there. Thank you.

The post Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: Finding Your Voice as a Facilitator Through Metaphor appeared first on Voltage Control.

We’ve spent the last year talking about how human collaboration is the real friction point of AI adoption. But let’s push that thinking further.

If generative models continue on their current trajectory, eventually the actual execution of almost every corporate task will be automated. The code will write itself. The reports will generate instantly. The logistics will just self-optimize.

When the execution of work takes zero time, the only true bottleneck left in the corporate world will not be processing power or technical capability. It will be human. That is a massive shift, and it reframes what AI decision making actually requires.

It will be human.

That is a massive shift.

The New Speed Limit

Think about what slows down your organization today. Yes, there’s execution time—the hours spent writing code, building presentations, analyzing data, coordinating schedules. But underneath all of that is something slower and stickier: the time it takes for people to decide what to do and agree on why they’re doing it.

Most leaders recognize this in theory. In practice, we’ve built entire organizations around the assumption that execution is the constraint. Teams are organized by function. Success metrics measure output volume. Meetings exist to coordinate work that takes time to complete.

That assumption is collapsing.

AI is rapidly eliminating execution time. But it’s not eliminating the need for human judgment, strategic thinking, or interpersonal alignment. If anything, it’s making those capabilities more valuable because they’re about to become the only thing that determines your velocity.

Consider what happens when a task that once took your team two weeks now takes two minutes. The work itself isn’t the bottleneck anymore. The bottleneck is the conversation before the work. The bottleneck is getting five people in a room to agree on what “good” looks like. The bottleneck is navigating the power dynamics, hidden agendas, and competing priorities that exist in every organization.

In a world where AI decision-making is gated on human collaboration, the leader who knows how to facilitate—who can control the voltage of a room and align competing egos, priorities, and worldviews—will be the one holding all the cards.

How AI Decision Making Reshapes Organizational Design

Most organizations are still structured around execution. Your org chart maps to who does what. Your meetings exist to coordinate parallel work streams. Your KPIs measure throughput.

But if the tasks themselves become instantaneous, what’s the point of the org chart? What are we actually measuring? What are meetings even for?

The answers start to look fundamentally different.

Teams will organize around decision rights, not task execution. The question won’t be “who builds this?” but “who decides what we build and why?” Entire functions that exist today to coordinate execution will need to justify their purpose differently. The role of middle management shifts from task coordination to sensemaking and alignment.

Success metrics will shift from output volume to decision quality and speed. How fast can your leadership team converge on a strategic direction? How often do you revisit decisions because the group wasn’t actually aligned the first time? How much organizational energy gets burned in rework and misalignment? These become your performance indicators.

Meetings will exist to build shared understanding, not coordinate logistics. The status update meeting dies completely. The “let’s align on this” meeting becomes your highest-leverage activity. The quality of your meeting facilitation becomes a competitive advantage.

This isn’t some distant future. It’s already happening in pockets.

We’ve worked with leadership teams that have reduced their decision cycles from weeks to days by redesigning how they deliberate together. We’ve seen product organizations cut sprint planning time in half by introducing better frameworks for negotiating priorities. The teams that are winning aren’t just faster at execution. They’ve fundamentally restructured how they make decisions together.

The Facilitation Advantage

Here’s what makes this shift so interesting: the skills that will matter most are not technical.

They’re human.

The ability to frame a decision clearly so everyone in the room is solving the same problem. The ability to surface the real disagreement underneath the surface-level debate—because what sounds like a tactical argument is usually a values conflict in disguise. The ability to create the conditions where competing perspectives can actually be synthesized rather than just compromised into mediocrity.

The ability to know when to push for resolution and when to let tension be productive. The ability to read power dynamics and make space for the voices that aren’t being heard. The ability to hold a group’s attention on the hardest question until something real emerges.

These are not skills that AI can replicate. These are skills that exist in the realm of human presence, intuition, and relationship. And these are not skills that most organizations have invested in systematically.

Walk into most leadership meetings and watch what happens. Someone presents an idea. A few people react. The loudest voices dominate. The quieter people check out. Side conversations start. The meeting ends without a clear decision, or with a decision that no one really believes in, or with an agreement that will unravel the moment people leave the room.

This is the tax that poor facilitation extracts. It’s been expensive for decades. It’s about to become catastrophic.

Because in an AI-accelerated world, that tax is the only tax left. The technical execution happens instantly. The delay between decision and reality collapses. The only thing standing between you and the outcome is the quality of human alignment.

The organizations that have invested in facilitation capability—that have trained their leaders to run rooms well, that have built cultures where productive conflict is expected and valued, that have made decision-making design a strategic priority—those organizations are about to see their investment compound.

The Hidden Leverage in Your Current Meetings

You don’t have to wait for AI to reach its full potential to start building this muscle. The opportunity is already in your calendar.

Look at your leadership team’s meeting schedule for the next month. How many of those meetings are designed to actually produce a decision? How many have clear decision-making methods attached to them? How many leave space for dissent and synthesis rather than just debate and voting?

Most organizations run meetings the way they always have. Someone puts together an agenda. People show up. Someone talks. Other people react. Time runs out. The meeting ends with action items that may or may not reflect real alignment.

This approach worked—barely—when execution took time because there were natural checkpoints where misalignment would surface. You’d discover that two teams interpreted the decision differently when they came back with different work products. You’d course-correct. It was slow and expensive, but it was survivable.

When execution takes zero time, you don’t get those checkpoints. The misalignment doesn’t surface until the work is done (which is now instantly). You’ve burned velocity on the wrong thing before you even knew you were misaligned.

The fix isn’t better AI tools. The fix is better decision-making design.

That means introducing frameworks that make agreement visible. That means using consent-based methods where appropriate instead of defaulting to consensus or executive fiat. That means structuring pre-mortems and dissent protocols into your process. That means getting comfortable with the silence that happens when you ask a room to actually think instead of just react.

We’ve seen leadership teams cut their decision-making time by 40 to 60 percent by doing nothing more than redesigning how they facilitate their existing meetings. No new technology required. Just better process design and the courage to run a room differently.

The Skills You Need to Build Now

If you’re a VP or above, this is on you. You can’t delegate decision-making design to HR or to a facilitator you bring in for offsites. Those resources help, but the muscle has to be internal and distributed.

That means three things:

1. Get trained. Not in “how to run a meeting” in the generic sense. In how to facilitate decision-making, specifically. How to structure dissent. How to synthesize competing frameworks. How to read a room and know when to intervene. How to design the container so the group can do its best thinking. This is a learnable skill. Most leaders have never been taught it.
2. Normalize facilitation as a leadership expectation. If you’re building an AI-forward organization, facilitation should be a core competency for anyone leading people. Not because it’s nice. Because it’s the only thing that will determine your speed when execution is free.
3. Start practicing on your hardest problems. Don’t wait for the perfect workshop or the big strategy offsite. Take the next contentious decision on your calendar and design a better process for it. Experiment with consent methods. Try a 1-2-4-All structure to surface more perspectives. Do a pre-mortem before you finalize the direction. Treat your leadership meetings as a laboratory for better decision-making design.

The teams that do this now—while execution still takes time—will have a compounding advantage when execution becomes instantaneous. They’ll have built the reflexes and the trust required to move fast together. They’ll have learned how to disagree productively. They’ll have discovered which methods work for their culture and which don’t.

The teams that don’t will still be trying to figure out why they’re stuck in the same meetings they’ve always been stuck in, except now the stakes are higher because the market is moving faster.

The Culture Question

There’s a deeper question underneath all of this, and it’s not about process. It’s about culture.

Most organizations say they want faster AI decision making. What they actually want is faster execution with the same decision-making culture. They want the speed without the discomfort of real deliberation.

But you can’t have it both ways.

Fast consensus requires psychological safety. It requires a culture where dissent is not just tolerated but actively invited. It requires leaders who can hear “I disagree” without interpreting it as disloyalty. It requires teams that trust each other enough to move forward even when not everyone is 100 percent convinced.

This is not the culture most organizations have built. Most organizations reward certainty over curiosity. They reward alignment over authenticity. They reward the appearance of consensus over the reality of synthesis.

If your culture punishes dissent, AI will just automate your way into faster bad decisions.

If your culture can’t distinguish between productive and unproductive conflict, you’ll spend all your newfound execution speed on rework.

If your leadership team doesn’t trust each other, no facilitation technique will save you.

The good news is that culture is malleable. It changes through practice. The way you run your meetings teaches your organization what behavior is valued. If you start running meetings that invite dissent, reward synthesis, and hold space for real thinking—your culture will start to shift.

The leaders who understand this are already building it. They’re not waiting for a mandate. They’re redesigning their own team’s rituals. They’re modeling what good facilitation looks like. They’re creating the conditions where others can practice it too.

Because they know that when execution takes zero time, culture is the only moat left.

What’s at Stake

Let’s be clear about what happens if you don’t invest in this.

Your competitors will. The organizations that figure out how to facilitate alignment  faster will make better decisions faster. They’ll out-maneuver you. They’ll attract better talent because their meetings actually work. They’ll compound their advantage every quarter while you’re still stuck in the same decision-making patterns you’ve had for years.

You’ll have all the same AI tools they have. You’ll have the same access to instant execution. The difference won’t be technical. The difference will be human.

And here’s the thing: you can’t buy your way out of this gap. You can’t license decision-making  capability. You can’t acquire good meeting culture. This has to be built internally, from the top down and the inside out.

The organizations that start now—that invest in facilitation training, that redesign their decision-making processes, that build cultures where real thinking is valued over performance—those organizations will dominate their industries.

The organizations that wait will spend the next five years wondering why they’re not moving faster despite having all the same technology as everyone else.

Where to Start

If this resonates and you’re not sure where to begin, start with one thing: your next contentious leadership decision.

Don’t run the meeting the way you normally would. Design it differently. Bring in a facilitator if you have one. If you don’t, read up on consent-based decision-making or Liberating Structures and try one. Build in time for real dissent. Create space for synthesis, not just debate.

Then debrief it. What worked? What didn’t? What did you learn about how your team actually makes decisions? Where did you feel the friction? Where did you feel the flow?

Do that ten times and you’ll start to see patterns. You’ll start to build the reflexes. You’ll start to discover what your organization actually needs to decide faster.

This isn’t a one-time workshop. It’s a practice. The same way you’ve built practices around quarterly planning or performance reviews, you need to build practices around decision-making design.

The organizations that treat this as a strategic priority—that invest in it, measure it, and iterate on it—will be the ones that thrive in an AI-accelerated world.

Because when execution takes zero time, the only thing left between you and the outcome is the quality and speed of human collaboration .

And the leader who can facilitate will be the one holding all the cards.

The post When Execution Takes Zero Time, Human Collaboration Will Be Your Only Bottleneck appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Shannon Hart brought five years of facilitating innovation sessions at Shell International—working with geoscientists, petrophysicists, and data engineers on complex energy sector challenges—and used that hard-won experience to offer a session that was as much expedition as workshop. Her talk, “Innovation: Stepping off the Edge and Leaving the Agenda Behind,” made the case that real innovation doesn’t happen because a facilitator planned the perfect session. It happens when a facilitator creates the right conditions and then trusts what emerges.

From Tour Guide to Expedition Leader

Shannon opened with a reframe that set the tone for everything that followed. Facilitating innovation, she argued, should feel less like a tour guide on a bus—structured, predictable, with carefully timed stops—and more like an Indiana Jones expedition. There’s a north star, there are skills and tools, but there’s no pre-drawn map. The goal is to search for hidden unknown treasures that you can’t fully define until you find them.

That framing carries real implications for how facilitators prepare. Shannon described the work before an innovation session as building a base camp—everything from asking the right questions to deeply understand the actual problem, to getting the right people in the room, to thinking carefully about who might derail versus who is ready to explore. She shared the cautionary tale of discovering, moments before a session began, that a C-suite executive had already signed a vendor contract for the solution the group was supposed to co-create. The room was intended to validate a decision, not make one. That kind of misalignment, she noted, is why base camp work is non-negotiable: you cannot hold space for genuine innovation if the outcomes have been pre-decided.

Physical environment matters too. Shannon pointed to small but meaningful gestures—colored markers, upgraded Post-it notes, pipe cleaners on tables to give fidgety hands something to work with—as signals that creativity is invited. These things are inexpensive, but they shift the atmosphere before a word has been said.

Three Circles and Unmapped Terrain

To give participants a visceral experience of what co-creation actually feels like, Shannon ran a deceptively simple exercise: each person drew three random circles on a piece of paper, then passed it to the neighbor on their right, who transformed those circles into something new. Tables then found the connections between what had emerged.

The debriefs were rich. Participants named what the exercise quietly demonstrated: that ideas are malleable, that diversity of interpretation is a feature not a bug, that the brain is wired to find patterns and meaning even from fragments, and that unfinished ideas can be more generative than fully formed ones—because they leave room for someone else to bring them somewhere new. One participant captured it simply: “Anything can happen here.” That, Shannon noted, is exactly the energy needed before a group attempts anything genuinely creative.

From there, Shannon sent participants out into unmapped terrain—literally. The walk and talk exercise paired participants with someone they hadn’t met, sent them wherever their legs would take them for 15 minutes, and asked them to share a moment when they were leading a session and the outcome got disrupted. The insights that came back were grounded and honest: the value of side-by-side conversation over face-to-face, the way movement loosens thinking, the reminder that when a group loses track of the facilitator because they’re so deep in conversation, that’s not a failure of control—it’s a sign of genuine ownership.

Protecting the Space Where Magic Happens

Shannon closed the session with the concept that tied everything together: emergence. In innovation, she explained, emergence is when something new arises that was not present or possible before. And the biggest threat to it is the rush to convergence—the desperate drive to wrap up, reach consensus, and declare the problem solved before the real insight has had time to surface.

One participant, Robin, offered what Shannon called the clearest signal that emergence is genuinely happening: “When you’re no longer sure whose idea it was in the first place.” Other signs the room surfaced included people losing their attachment to a fixed destination, questions becoming more interesting than answers, and a room full of laughter and play. Warning signs pointing the other way: forced consensus, burnout, low morale, and the loudest voices crowding out everyone else.

That last point was one Shannon returned to with particular care. In her work with global technical teams, she had seen brilliant people—foreign nationals, non-native English speakers, those who think more slowly and deeply—consistently overlooked in Western-coded brainstorm cultures that reward whoever speaks fastest. Her reminder to the room: protecting the quiet sparks is a design challenge, not just a good intention. It means building in Post-it rounds, structured round-robins, and Miro spaces that don’t require someone to fight for airtime in order to contribute.

She closed with the simplest version of the whole session’s philosophy: “Rather than control, we create the conditions that enable that to happen.” Hold the container, trust the process, and allow for emergence. That’s the work—and she left the room with no doubt that they were ready for it.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Shannon’s Session:

Shannon Hart (00:04):
Thank you for having me. It’s so exciting to be in this space. This is my first facilitation summit, but it will not be my last. I’m stepping up here and I just want to acknowledge two things. One is the layers of nuance and wisdom and brilliance that is already in the room from the previous speakers and how maybe you guys are just geniuses that you planned it this way, but how the topics intertwine and layer on each other and are building. And it’s just going to feed into the themes that I want to explore with you guys today. So that’s just brilliant synergy. And then second, to step into a space where, I mean, I was just standing back there and I don’t know, 10, 15 people, some of whom I don’t even know are acknowledging and supporting the success. They want this to go well and they want me to do well.

(01:00):
And that’s just a really cool space and energy and an important reminder for me when I’m in your seat like, “Oh yeah, I don’t need to sit there with no affect and be bored by somebody’s taking a risk and standing in front of me.” So that’s powerful stuff. So I’m excited. I just feel that energy. So thanks for that. Good. Good. Let’s see. When I think about innovation, I’m talking about, yes, the applying of new ideas to create measurable impact, right? That’s basically what innovation is. But holding the concept, we’ve been talking about it in several different ways already. True innovation is a concept that is, it’s non-linear. It doesn’t happen in a simple, straight line. It’s iterative. It takes lots of tries and experiments. It is relational. Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation.

(02:02):
And that relational, the collaboration piece allows emergence. So those are the features of innovation I want us to hold onto as a backdrop to the conversation today. Emergence in the sense that something new arises that was not present or possible before. So we hold those conditions. So if that’s the way we want to think about innovation, facilitating innovation sessions has to be less like this, less tour guide on the bus where it’s really specific and it’s structured and it’s predictable and I know where we’re going, but I give the participants some freedom. “You can get off the bus here. You got 20 minutes. Then we’ll be back on the bus to move on to the next thing.” Right? So less that and more Indiana Jones style expedition. “We’re heading off to who knows where.”

(03:03):
There is an objective, there’s a north star, but we don’t have a pre-drawn map. We have probably some guidelines, but it’s time to be curious. It’s time to explore together bringing the right skills. We’re not going to wander off in the desert unprepared. So we bring together the right things, but we are searching for hidden unknown treasures. So to give you a little bit of context of where I’m coming from, because I walk into this space knowing that my context is very specific. So I have been supporting for the last five years, a team in Shell International, the data digital and innovation team that supports the upstream business. So for the past five years, my job has largely been facilitating collaboration, co-creation kind of spaces, problem solving.

(04:03):
So coming together, mostly scientists in the petrophysics and the geoscience disciplines, coming together to solve big problems in the energy sector with digital and data solutions. So yeah, it’s pretty niche. That’s pretty specific. So I’m curious about for you guys, when we talk through this stuff, how much of it resonates for the spaces that you’re working in. So that’s one of the reasons I’m excited to explore this with you. How many of you already, you are supporting a team or organization that you would put in that innovation bucket. You’re an innovation team, you’re a design space, you’re a startup. Yeah, so more than a third of us probably already in that space. Now, no matter what space you’re in, how many of you are already facilitating innovation sessions where you’re doing brainstorming, ideation, problem solving? A lot more hands that time, almost everybody.

(05:09):
Yeah. I would think with the never before experienced challenges that are emerging with the fast-paced technologies, that’s only going to become bigger and bigger parts of our jobs, right? In some way or another, we’re going to be having to bring people together to solve new and old problems in new ways, so practicing that. I’ve got three main components to the formula if there could be such a thing as a magic formula for creating safe space for innovation. And if we play with our metaphor a little bit, we’ve got part one, we’ve got to create that safe and inclusive base camp. What’s going to be our launching point? What’s the container going to be like? How are we going to prepare that space? How are we going to be ready for that? And we’ll have a creative tabletop exercise in that space.

(06:12):
And then the second component, biggest component is having the courage to venture into the unmapped territories. And it’s nice to have the space. I feel safe here. We’re going to experiment a little bit there and we’re going to do a paired walk and talk in that unknown terrain space. And then last but definitely not least, the concept of emergence, of integration, of synthesis. How do we create space and focus and time to discover the hidden treasure that we don’t even know what it is yet? So how can we possibly know how to get it? In our first topic, I said we’ll have a creative tabletop. We’ll do a walk and talk. And then in that third area, I’ve got a little bit of a case study. We may or may not have time for that. I’m going to practice what I preach and I’m holding the activities a little bit loosely so that we can follow the energy of the room.

(07:12):
But either way, you’ve got the case study and a little blueprint on your table that when the time comes, you’ll be able to walk out with those. All right. So step one here, preparing the base camp. As I said, we would never go on an expedition unprepared. We’re not going to know something. We’re not going to do some planning in advance, some gathering of the right resources and tools. So what does that look like, at least in my corporate setting? I consider the base camp piece to be the step from the moment you’ve gotten the request, “Hey, we need to have a session around poor pressure drilling. We’ve got this big challenge and we’re going to in two weeks have the session.”

(07:53):
So from that moment up until about the first third of the workshop or session or virtual space, all of that is the window of time we have to prepare and that’s what we need to spend some time doing. Because if the ultimate outcome is, “Hey, we want to have this energized team of explorers out there ready to come up with creative and insightful, perhaps risky concepts, what are the things I need to do in advance to make that possible?” So in my space, that has a lot to do with… I whip out my Consulting 101 manual and I ask a lot of questions, because a lot of times these requests, as you guys have experienced, a lot of these requests come in and they’re not completely clear.

(08:44):
We’re not sure why that needs to happen. So we need some better understanding of the underlying, what’s behind that? Or maybe it’s a known challenge, what’s been in the way of solving that challenge before now? What’s the root of that problem? Or what are some of the symptoms of that? So it’s really important before we lead the expedition that we understand what the… Do we really have a deep understanding of the goal? And then getting the right people in the room, that also happens well in advance. At least in my world, you can’t get anybody to a meeting if you don’t give them weeks of notice.

(09:23):
So if you’ve got a specialized skill, “Oh, we forgot to invite the IT guy.” Well, dang, we’re proposing a digital solution, but we didn’t think to get their perspective on it and now the meeting’s tomorrow, right? So doing a lot of pre-thinking and poking and prodding who’d be the right… “Oh, we definitely don’t want Carl in the room. He’s a big naysayer. He’s got a bad attitude.” “Okay, yeah, but if Carl is holding some important piece of information, that’s going to make it important, right?” So we have those conversations. All of that feeds into preparing the base camp. Then the space itself, are we doing a virtual? My teams are global, so most of my work is virtual with the a few times a year face-to-face summits when we’re really lucky. So if I want this playful, creative, curious atmosphere at the end, or for the ideation part, what do I need to do ahead of time?

(10:24):
So big and small things that you can do. We know it’s really hard to be creative if you’re in a boardroom with the big fat leather chairs, or if you’re the one person online and everybody else is in the space. It’s hard to have participation, so we want to consider inclusion, all that kind of stuff is going to make for a safer base camp. So tiny example for the room, pipe cleaners on the tables. If you are someone who needs permission, you have permission to play with them, do whatever you want with them. That’s what they’re for. A lot of us think better and listen better while we have something in our hands. So consider that your neurodivergent gift to have something. It’s an inexpensive, unexpected, so it’s a small thing that you can do in the room. Colored markers, the upscale post-it notes, all those little things that you can do. They’re small touches, but they really help prepare that space.

(11:27):
And then, of course, the session itself, are you opening up in such a way that you’re setting the right expectations with both your participants and whoever’s owning the meeting? And there’s often a big gap there, at least in my experience. “We want you to think big. We’re talking moonshot, disruption. Let’s really blow it up and we need to start by March.” “Oh, okay.” “We’ve got a $6,000 budget.” “Oh, okay.” So helping know what those expectations are when you open a meeting. There’s nothing worse than discovering those constraints while you’re trying to help people be… “Think moonshot creativity, but within a budget or a timeframe.” Another good one, I’ll just plant this, I’ll tell you one story, is for example, they’re saying they want an ideation workshop. “We want to come together. We’re going to bring all the key players together and we’re going to really search through this problem. We want to deeply understand it.”

(12:36):
And then we find out before, right before the session starts, that somebody at the C-suites has already made a contract with the vendor to provide an off-the-shelf solution for the problem that we’re going to explore together. And it was all intended to be a place for him to showcase the features of the thing that he’s already picked, and he wanted everybody to go, “Oh, that’s such a good idea.” Is that what’s going to happen? No. So we have to set those perfectly legitimate requests, but that’s an alignment meeting. That is not a creative innovation ideation session. And that’s one of the reasons why people moan and groan when you go, “Oh, brainstorming,” because we want certainty that whatever we put our energy and thought and creativity in is actually going to go somewhere. It’s going to matter, it’s going to mean something, and if it’s been predecided.

(13:27):
So again, all of that comes in in your base camp. We’re holding the concept of innovation as collaborative, that it is something that requires more than one person’s input. Our world is too complex now for any one person to solve, hold all of the skills, knowledge, information that we need. And for you, maybe your participants are really well-versed in collaborative problem solving. Mine are not. Mine work in deep technical fields where they tend to be the specialist, they tend to work in a silo. I answer the question, I hand it to the next guy, they work on the next layer of work, et cetera, et cetera. So I don’t have a sense of what it feels like or means to work together. So sometimes our opener has to provide a visceral experience. What does it really mean to collaborate or co-create together? So we’re going to have an experience of that right now. This is one that I use fairly often as a warmup.

(14:32):
So grab, I think everybody should have enough. Grab a white sheet of paper. There’s blank paper on all the tables. Grab a blank sheet of paper and something to write with. Choose the color of the day. And we are going to create something new together. And the spark is simply three random circles on a page. So your job right now, very simple, three random circles on the page. You can see mine are small, medium, and large, and they’re intersecting. Yours might be all the same size, but far apart. They might be inside each other. It doesn’t matter. Three random circles. It’s a 30-second or less effort, not a big effort. People are still picking their colors. Okay, come on. Now take your circle, your page with your circles, and pass it to the person on your right. Right hand.

(15:53):
Now, your job, receiver, is to incorporate the three circle drawing you received into something new. So when you look at it, you have just inherited a spark, a new idea, a green shoot of an idea from a coworker, and now you get to evolve it into something else. What does it look like to you? What does it bring to mind? Artistic ability does not come into play. Let your kindergarten drawing shine. So if your three circles was a 30-second exercise, your drawing is maybe a minute or two. Nothing fancy. Just enough for your concept to be clear is fine. Okay. Are you ready to have a little fun with this? So what you’re going to do is you are going to share around the table, show your picture real quick, just everybody get a view.

(17:00):
And while you’re looking at everybody else’s, I want you to start, you can start with internal reflection. What connections do you see? What is the story that is emerging as you look at your pictures together? Now, it might be something that’s very concrete. Oh, I see we all like the color blue, but I would encourage you to stretch a little bit, get creative, leverage those storytelling skills. And we’ll spend about eight minutes here. So decide what your connections are. All right. Let’s begin to draw your connections to a close. Not a close. That’s a tough word. A little pause here. You’ll have a chance. Your drawings aren’t going anywhere, so they’ll be laying out on your table. But I am curious, we could spend a lot of time debriefing that, right? If I were in the session with my Shell scientists, we would be talking about stuff like, “How was that experience for you? Has your mindset shifted from where you were before?” But I’m curious for us as facilitators, what does that exercise reveal about the evolution of ideas?

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Anything can happen here.

Shannon Hart (18:50):
Yeah. That’s an important energy to bring into a room when you’re about to do creative stuff together, right? There’s that air of possibility. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
Yeah. I thought what was interesting to me about this was how important it was that you gave us permission to be creative and when. It was like, “You’re going to draw three circles, whatever is fine.” And it’s like, okay, there’s only so much creativity you’ve gotten there. But then it’s like, okay, now here is the time when you need to be creative, and everybody rose to the occasion. And I thought that was really great food for though. For me, as I work in the social sector, and a lot of people don’t have the confidence and the resources or the experiences. And so I just really liked that aspect of it.

Shannon Hart (19:39):
Yeah. And you guys went a little crazy. I heard their story. They’re all going to the country fair and they’re riding a three-wheel bicycle to the-

Speaker 3 (19:46):
We brought snacks.

Shannon Hart (19:47):
And you brought snacks.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
Croissant.

Shannon Hart (19:49):
Awesome. Delightful. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:54):
This activity demonstrated how ideas can be malleable and everything can be added on or even modified.

Shannon Hart (20:04):
Yeah. And it’s one of the cores of innovation that we often leave behind. It’s like you go, “Ooh, oh, you said that first. So I’m going to give you permission and I’ll leave it behind.” No, build on it, add to it, enhance it. Let’s talk around it. Right? So that’s a great observation. Yeah. Jordan, mics from all directions.

Speaker 5 (20:27):
I thought it illustrated really well how different experiences, identities and backgrounds can interpret such a universal, simple shape and idea. We all had pretty similar arrangements of a very simple shape, but we all interpret it in such different ways and how diversity of ideas and backgrounds can lead to such an interesting outcome.

Shannon Hart (20:49):
Yeah. And again, one of the cores, if you want to co-create, there’s value in everybody’s viewpoint and it’s, wow, it’s radically different. So it’s a great way to begin that conversation of how are we going to honor what is brought into the room by others, so it’s a good space.

Jordan (21:06):
We have one over here.

Speaker 7 (21:10):
Hello. I liked how we all put these together and passed them along, but we didn’t know where we were going. The outcome or the end goal was not known, but we all brought something very unique to the table and were able to find through lines through it. I thought we were going to keep passing them around, but I like the idea of making a story through the four.

Shannon Hart (21:39):
Yeah. Cool. Go ahead.

Speaker 8 (21:41):
For me, the cool thing was just to see how amazing human brains are and how it’s always naturally trying to find a pattern or a connection or something from nothing.

Shannon Hart (21:54):
Yep.

Speaker 8 (21:55):
So our brains are cool.

Shannon Hart (21:57):
Our brains are cool. Okay. Last thought.

Speaker 9 (22:01):
Well, I was just going to share that I’ve done similar types of activities with groups and it almost as a way to do norms of like deferring judgment and following the rules of the permission in that you didn’t ask us to be an artist. You didn’t qualify that it had to be a certain quality of art, and yet as we shared, I still noticed myself and others defending or… You saw something different than I saw or I didn’t draw that very well, et cetera. And so I think just naming that it’s okay to be imperfect and that I understood what Jackson drew perfectly even though he’s like, “Well, I didn’t do a good job.” And I was like, “But I understood it.” And so the power of just visual thinking as a means for communicating ideas, the bar is a lot lower than we all think it is.

Shannon Hart (22:45):
Yeah. If I had said, “What negative messages do you tell yourself about your creativity that’s keeping you blocked?” We want to put that aside before we start creating together, you’re going to be like, “Well, it’s a different mode,” but having the visceral experience of it’s like, “Oh, it’s right there present.”

Speaker 10 (23:01):
Just a small thing to add, the power of unfinished ideas, because if I had a drawing here of three circles that was clearly something, it’s harder for me to imagine something different because I know what I’m looking at. Instead, when we just have unfinished ideas, we can be a lot more creative sometimes or we allow ourselves to be. And if you think about it, sometimes we’re in a session and because our idea is not all the way clear, we don’t say it out loud and there’s a power in unfinished ideas.

Shannon Hart (23:33):
Yeah. We’re going to explore that a little bit more when we talk deeper in ambiguity, right? It’s unfinished. It’s uncertain. We don’t know. So how do we hold that? So we’re going to explore that next, in fact. All right. Ooh, thank you. That was a good conversation. It is so fun to be in a room of like-minded people. But I can tell you, even when you do that with a bunch of really… What’s the polite word? For the scientists that I work with who are perhaps not as attuned or as open-minded or as relaxed as you guys are, they still always find connections. Humans are wired that way. So again, I call these what to pack for our expedition, but these are your key takeaways, is that reminder that everybody has it in them. Our brains are amazing.

(24:27):
We have these abilities to be creative and innovative. It’s just, it’s layered under a whole bunch of programming that we might have to… So when I think about, do I want to invite Carl who says no to every idea? Do I have the time to do exercises like that to unwind his mindset and help bring him along? And if I don’t, then I probably don’t need Carl in the room. I’m looking for people that are sparky and ready to go when we launch. So trust that everyone is creative and curious, but it still is really important to bring the right people into the room and having the right resources, the right… In my case, the right data, right? It’s a very data-driven organization. If I don’t have the right data, then there’s no point in having the ideations, so having that stuff.

(25:14):
I talked about it, understanding the real goal, and I saw a lot of nodding. You guys understand that clients say one thing, but they mean something else. So before you get into this kind of space, you really have to understand that. And then all the ways that we already know as experienced facilitators to make it safe, to make risk-taking feel better. So psychological safety, warmups and low stakes. And before we leave the topic, low stakes activities like this one where we’re not putting them up on the wall and evaluating everybody’s drawings. But I did want to say one quick thing about grounding. If you’re going to have an ideation session, especially a technical one or something around a complex concept, and you are going to invite Judy from legal and Aman from finance, can they contribute to the conversation? Do they know enough about the complexities of the issue to be able to participate?

(26:15):
So how much or how little, I don’t know, is that a universal term, grounding? We use it in Shell all the time. I need that baseline of information. We need to create a shared understanding before we ideate. The risk in my space is there’ll be three days of grounding and then 30 minutes of ideation. So nobody wants to live through a two-hour presentation on poor pressure before they can start doing the creative things. So really being curated in your grounding, but not skipping that step, that’s really important. So talking with folks about what is it going to take for us all to participate evenly. So all that’s our base camp stuff. Then we’re ready to venture into unmapped terrain and you saw what happened like that was… We didn’t start with clarity. We didn’t start with an end goal. We didn’t even know what was happening.

(27:10):
Although as facilitators were trying to guess, maybe we are going to pass these around. We’re trying to puzzle it out, but we don’t know what’s going to happen, but what did emerge, right? As we worked and shared those fragments and started making sense collaboratively, that’s when meaning and a story started to emerge. So building on that, this moment, it very much is part of the innovation space, but of course it mirrors what happens in facilitation all the time. How much instructions do I give? How detailed? How prepared? How structured should it be? Versus how much freedom, how much interpretation do I need to allow? So that’s, ambiguity and uncertainty is a requirement for innovation. Does that make sense? You’re not going to innovate on stuff when you already know the answer, so how do we handle that?

(28:07):
And I know you guys have loads of experience in it, so we are going to do an ambiguity walk. So I’m going to invite you to think of a time when you were leading a group or a session where you did not know the outcome, or you thought you did, but guess what? Got disrupted, something changed, the group needed to go in a different direction. We’ve talked about this in several different capacities today. What was that experience like? What helped you recover? And what would you do differently? So again, an opportunity to explore how we as facilitators handle that ambiguity. And because you’re advanced, we’re going to notch… I’m especially curious about how handling ambiguity balances with the tension of desired outcomes. So again, I’m being paid to…

(29:05):
At the end of this workshop, we need a roadmap or we need a project plan. But I’m trying to hold space for ambiguity and I’m getting this disruption. So in your experience, I want you to think about an example and then chat with a partner. And I couldn’t think of a better visceral way to experience unmapped terrain than to go walk in unmapped terrain. So 3:45, we’re going to spend 15 minutes in a walk and talk. Find somebody who is not sitting at your table that you have not yet met in the whole day today, somebody you do not know, and share for seven minutes, we’ll switch, they’ll share for seven minutes, but you are free to go wherever your little legs will take you, as long as what? You’re back in 15 minutes.

(29:55):
The risk when you do a walk and talk, especially in an unknown area is that I will never see you again. So I need to see you back here shortly after four o’clock. Okay? So back in here, a little after four, we’re going to play some music. If you want to just make a loop, this building is a nice rectangle. If you want to do more than that, great, but you’re on your honor to be back in the room. It looks, I can see from your faces that that was energizing and nice to get up out of the space for a sec. Anybody go outside? Is it hot out there? Little warm? Good. All right. So maybe three or four different tables. Let’s hear a couple of insights that came up from your walk and talk. What came up for you? Mark’s got it.

Speaker 11 (31:13):
Hi. Both of us had shared experiences where it was actually ambiguous from the beginning and we were given a task to work with some folks that there was… It seemed like just an exercise in ambiguity. And so how could we make sense of that and build something that felt like a win for… Mine was for an organization and hers was for her boss, but it was a win for them that it felt that we were going down a path that was actually helpful and how we used our skills to make that happen, right? That it was like in the end we could work with folks to get somewhere, but knowing that there was such a high level of ambiguity even going into it, that might… Being clear about that, I think from the beginning.

Shannon Hart (32:04):
Yeah. I hear that, the tension between the unknown and the, “We’ve got to have something for our boss at the end of the day.” Yeah, that’s excellent.

Speaker 11 (32:12):
For whatever their reason is.

Shannon Hart (32:13):
It sounds like you navigated that really well, so that’s…

Speaker 8 (32:20):
Thanks. So in my example, it was a team where I didn’t do the grounding part and I didn’t understand the problem space, but I went in with every naive expectation that we could solve the problem that this team needed to solve and quickly ran into a brick wall of no. So that’s when I just called a timeout and I said, “I’m going to meet with you each individually after this so I can level set and I can understand.” Because there was a lot of history about this particular issue that I didn’t have. And so do the grounding, like you said. If you don’t, then surprises happen and you’re probably not going to get the outcome you want.

Shannon Hart (33:05):
Yep. And the grounding doesn’t have to be in the session. Maybe that happens, as you say, in advance. We have little interviews, we have some meetings. Maybe in the scientific community, it’s often a pre-read, “Here’s the 10 things you need to know about this theoretical thing before we start this conversation.” So there’s a lot of ways to be creative about it, but you got to get that part done. Otherwise, surprises happen just as you described. So thanks for sharing. It makes me feel less alone. That’s good. Go for it.

Speaker 12 (33:34):
Thank you. So we were talking about grounding from the perspective of shared principles. So having like, “These are the principles that we work by,” or “This is the intent of this conversation, this meeting.” And then if things get off the rails, coming back to that, or if people don’t respond in the way you intended to, if you set it up upfront. And what I liked about that is it tied back to conversation our table had earlier where people were talking about when you do work with a certain group and the new people join in later, you have to reset those ground rules and you have to reset like, “Here’s the principles of how we’re going to plan to work together.” So just a connection between the sessions today. So appreciate that.

Shannon Hart (34:21):
Yeah. And that’s really powerful because it reminds me of, at least in my environment, it’s really common, “Oh, we’re going to bring an expert in to share about X, Y, Z on Tuesday from two to three, but it’s a three-day workshop.” We’ve all been working together and we’ve created that space and that container. And then here comes somebody in who doesn’t have that context and might say things or derail things without understanding. So it’s a really valid point.

Speaker 12 (34:45):
So I think when you talked about grounding before, it was more in the context of like, what’s the data? What’s the knowledge we need to have?

Shannon Hart (34:46):
The content, yeah.

Speaker 12 (34:46):
The content.

Shannon Hart (34:51):
We use the term in terms of content.

Speaker 12 (34:53):
And then I think what came out of the conversation we had was more really the, how do we work together? What do we expect of the people that are in this room?

Shannon Hart (35:02):
Yeah, I love it. Yeah, whatever you call it, that’s a really important part of it, right? We’ve got to have that, those expectations helps hold the container for sure.

Speaker 13 (35:10):
It’s always so helpful hearing when, because shit always goes sideways. So it’s so great when you hear someone else’s story, you’re like, “That thing may not have happened to me yet, but it probably will.” You know? And it’s so awesome to hear how someone else recovered and landed on their feet or what they said or what they did. So that’s already super valuable, but I was thinking about how… Oh, my train of thought. There it went.

Shannon Hart (35:38):
Left the station. We’ll come back when you need it.

Speaker 13 (35:43):
But yeah, things always go sideways and it’s helpful to hear how other people have navigated things when you know that it’ll probably happen to you.

Shannon Hart (35:51):
It will happen to you. Yeah, that’s good. It’s a good segue. I want to just jump back a minute and think about it again from the meta perspective. For us as facilitators, what is powerful about a walk and talk experience? Or was it not powerful for you? Was it disruptive out of your… I’d love to hear pros or cons about it from your perspective. Yeah. Now you’ve got it.

Speaker 13 (36:15):
I remembered my train of thought.

Shannon Hart (36:15):
Good. Bring it.

Speaker 13 (36:18):
Which is that when you are figuring out what… Oh my God.

Shannon Hart (36:28):
That is so validating. I’m just like, “Yay, you are my people.”

Speaker 13 (36:34):
Oh my goodness.

Shannon Hart (36:35):
Delightful. That is so resonant.

Speaker 13 (36:39):
You know we were talking about… Oh, okay. So I was leading something where it was like a two-hour session that was EMEA-friendly, two-hour session that was APAC-friendly, same group of humans. And we were talking about how you’re not the… It’s not about you. You’re here to provide a service for these human beings in many ways, but the energy with which you’re bringing to that is so important and doing your checklist of staying grounded and all the things. And I, in between the first session, total dumpster fire, and I totally called it out. I was like, “Wow, look at this dumpster fire. It’s happening in real time.” And afterwards, I was like, “I have so much stuff to get done in between these two sessions.” And then I was like, “You know what? No, your job right now is to actually go to the gym, have lunch, take a nap and get it together.” And then the second session was like bomb. We totally knocked it out of the park.

Shannon Hart (37:30):
Awesome.

Speaker 13 (37:31):
Energy was amazing. But that starts with me making sure that I’m showing up in a way that I can serve this group of humans and that part’s super important.

Shannon Hart (37:41):
Yep, that is super important.

Speaker 13 (37:42):
Thank you for-

Shannon Hart (37:42):
Especially post dumpster fire. We need that regroup because you’re busy going, “Oh my gosh, I should have said this and I wish I’d done that.” That doesn’t serve anyone. No, that’s a really good observation.

Speaker 13 (37:53):
Thanks for dealing with my train of thought. Appreciate you.

Shannon Hart (37:55):
I’m thrilled that you brought it back into the room, so thanks for that. Yeah, Kathy.

Kathy (38:01):
So I was talking to Jordan and we had a interesting situations that required us to hold space in the moment when things were on fire. But what stood out to me is not just how maybe the space was grounded, but how did we ground ourselves in that moment so that we could move through it and get beyond it.

Shannon Hart (38:21):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any maybe quick observations on the meta level more… Oh, you’ve got an observation about the activity itself?

Speaker 15 (38:33):
Yeah. I was just going to connect to your train of thought that we got to around the energy you’re bringing to a space and how much a walk can reset the energy for everyone. Like coffee, yes, great, love it. Sugar, also good, but moving changes I think how you think. You’re not looking eye to eye with someone.

Shannon Hart (39:00):
Side by side. Exactly.

Speaker 15 (39:01):
You’re side to side. You’re seeing the same things. You’re also moving physically in space. There’s just so many things that change about, I feel like my thought process feels similar to when you’re in a long car ride with someone you love and you’re like, “Oh, let’s have a big juicy conversation. You can’t leave.”

Shannon Hart (39:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 15 (39:23):
But a smaller scale within the context of this space is incredibly useful.

Shannon Hart (39:29):
It’s super inclusive too, because when you pair up, you cannot sit back and be passive. So everybody has a voice, small scale, then table scale, then big scale, right? And so that’s inclusivity is just a huge part because so much of the stories we tell ourselves about I’m not creative, whatever, whatever, if we are not being included and drawn in, we just stick with that narrative and then we don’t participate. So for me, a walk and talk is a really easy way. We’re talking about a pause, using the pause. It’s a different way to reset the thinking to create different expectations. It is not something that we do in the corporate world very much. So sending people outside, it’s worth the investment of time. And guess what I was doing while you guys were walking? I can do whatever I need to do, breathe and look at my notes and think about what’s next and maybe pivot because we weren’t quiet where… So it benefits me too.

(40:29):
Anytime I can put the entire activity on you, then I have a minute to regroup, which is for me as a more introverted person and a person who has… That helps my nervous system stay settled. So I need that. And you guys are no worse for wear. It’s an add. It’s a benefit for you. All right. I want to share… This is going to be really quick because some of this is familiar to you, but I wanted to refresh on a couple of models because I think these are narratives that we hold in the back of our heads and I wanted to… I was thinking about what makes innovation/ideation sessions different. We’ve got a lot of us grew up, I won’t age myself, but grew up in this model of, I have a problem, I’m going to brainstorm a bunch of ideas about it, I’m going to pick the right answer, and then I’m going to be done.

(41:23):
And it’s a sequence. It often happens alone. The image that comes to my mind is Thomas Edison sitting in his laboratory. He did what? 10,000 tries at the light bulb and voila, light. And somewhere in our brains and somewhere with our participants, we have conflated that. We have the outdated idea of how invention, how innovation actually happens. In a more updated view, the areas that we’ve already talked through that we need to really emphasize and change is the prepare stage. There’s a lot of prep that has to go in. I need to really deeply understand, to your point, the problem. I need to know what the various viewpoints are. I need to gather the right data. I need to have the right resources. I got to get that guy from IT in the room. So that, we need to emphasize that part a lot more. No ideation can happen until all of that stuff happens.

(42:26):
Then I’ve got to create that safe space so that ideation feels fun and creative and curious as we’ve been doing. But then I have to allow time for that emergence, that integration, that part of synthesis. I stole one of those cards. I thought these were so beautiful, but it’s a different that the synthesizer is the person who can summarize key themes from the discussion and suggest a unified approach. So this is the person that’s the pattern finder, that’s the meaning maker, and we all have that to some degree. So we’ve got to make space. How do I build on ideas? How do I have time to integrate your insights into the story I came in the room with? And then how do I build on it? I’m going to add the wheels to the bicycle and I’m going to make it be a penguin. And then how do we create something different together?

(43:24):
And at least in the space I work in, that push to convergence, there’s such a desperate drive to converge that this is a real challenge to keep that space, that integration space, that emergent space open. And I know that. Does those models look familiar to you? Because they map to what? This is how we facilitate processes. It’s the messy middle, it’s the grown zone, but in innovation, it has a really specific flavor. This is a part where we are finding the patterns, we’re making the meaning, we’re building on those ideas because innovation, real change doesn’t happen without that space, which brings us to wrap things up talking about the emergence phase. How do we discover those hidden treasures? How do we go in new and different ways, co-creating together? So let’s explore that in a little bit more of a practical sense.

(44:26):
I’ve got on your tables, there’s two pieces. One is your emergence trail map. It’s like a little canvas. So pull that out. The other piece is a case study. We’re going to set the case study aside because I want you to have it as a go away. You can read this and think about it. What would I do differently? But for the purposes of our conversation, I want us to focus on reading the terrain. If I’m committed to having emergence happen, how do I know that it’s happening? So spend a moment reflecting. What are you watching for? Renita talked about it really well when she’s talking in general about what are you noticing? What are the things you are noticing if your diamond is… Yeah.

Speaker 16 (45:23):
I just don’t know if there are any more of them.

Shannon Hart (45:25):
Oh, are we missing some?Because some tables are… Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Raise your hand if you don’t have one or the other. Everybody good? Thanks for asking. So what are the signs and signals that I’m looking for that emergence is either happening or is not happening, has been shut down prematurely? We’re converging too quickly. We’re going to do this in the one, two, four, all liberating structures format. So spend a moment, I’ll give you a couple of minutes. The block on your sheet that I’m calling your attention to is on the backside and it’s labeled Warning Signs and Interventions: Reading the Terrain. But they might not all be warning signs. They might be pros too, like, what are the things you’re watching for that give you clues that emergence is really happening?

(46:19):
A couple of minutes, individual reflection capture some thoughts, and then turn to your neighbor. And this is a good chance for co-creation together. That means cheat off their answers and write them on your paper if they’ve got good ideas and vice versa. So what are those signs and signals you’re looking for that emergence is happening or not happening? Take a couple quick minutes, have a conversation with your neighbor. I am curious about one concise learning that you have when we’ve reflected a little bit about emergence and what are we watching for. So we’ll take four or five insights here as we wrap things up. Yeah, Robin. It’s coming.

Robin (47:31):
One of the things that signals emergence is when you’re no longer sure whose idea it was in the first place.

Shannon Hart (47:37):
Oh, I love that. I love that. And nobody is claiming ownership.

Speaker 18 (47:43):
That was my idea.

Shannon Hart (47:48):
Beautiful. Thanks, Robin.

Speaker 19 (47:59):
Something that was emerging for us in our conversation. It was an aspect of shifting context and shifting perspective, that people aren’t fixed to their view, and that there’s a deeper interest in the questions and the answers, and there’s liberation because of that. People have lost the desire to get to a destination, and they’re a little bit more comfortable with like, “Oh, that’s curious. Why is that that way?”

Shannon Hart (48:31):
Love it. Thank you. Any other thoughts?

Speaker 20 (48:45):
We talked about a sign of emergence not happening is when consensus feels forced. We’re trying to reach consensus so fast that we forget everything along the way.

Shannon Hart (48:59):
Yeah. Yeah. That rush to convergence, man, for some people that is very much human nature and for some organizations that’s the culture. So how to keep that space open so we don’t rush.

Speaker 21 (49:18):
Yeah.

Shannon Hart (49:22):
Go ahead.

Speaker 21 (49:22):
Oh yeah. Okay. Also, another moment when emergence doesn’t happen is when the whole team is in a state of low morale, burnout. That’s a big part of it, like just feels so depleted.

Shannon Hart (49:35):
Yeah. I don’t have any juice in the tank to get creative with you right now. Right here.

Speaker 22 (49:42):
Dan and I had a similarity in ours in that we might ask the question like, “Is there joy? Is there laughter? Does this feel playful?”

Shannon Hart (49:50):
Yeah. As a facilitator, I can often sense it when I totally lose control of the room, like the walk and talk and everybody’s going, going, going. It didn’t matter if I was like, “Hello, everybody.” Right? That’s a really good sign that it’s not just that their attention is elsewhere, but they’re owning the process, right? They’re so engaged in the process and owning the process that it doesn’t matter. And that’s a great sign for structure. So key takeaways, if I could have my slides back, and we’ve talked about several of these things. But one, we really focus on holding that diamond open longer, slowing the rush to certainty, paying attention, are we rushing because we are just depleted, we’re over it, we can’t shift those perspectives?

(50:40):
You as the facilitator, your job is to protect the quiet sparks, especially in the industry that I’m in, there’s a lot of foreign nationals, there are a lot of non-English speakers, and they are brilliant people with amazing ideas who often in our hyper Western-focused, the loudest voice in the room wins culture, they’re often overlooked. So it’s not just, “Hey, did I make sure so-and-so had a chance to talk?” But am I embedding in the immersion space, emergent space, weighs other methods for people who have a harder time speaking out? So are we using Post-it Notes? Are we in Miro? It’s a round-robin. Everybody’s going to talk. So how am I managing those expectations to help protect the quiet sparks?

(51:30):
And then of course, as challenging as that space is, that’s where the magic happens is keeping that integration space open longer. So today hasn’t really been a laundry list of tips and techniques, but it’s really about that space between people where co-creation, collaboration, true innovation actually happens and how we can create, rather than control, we create the conditions that enable that to happen. So it only happens if we’re willing to hold that space. So the hold the container, trust the process, and allow for that, guide that emergence. All right, that’s the work. And I think you guys are ready for it. So there we go. I’ll leave it there. Thank you.

The post Innovation: Stepping off the Edge and Leaving the Agenda Behind appeared first on Voltage Control.

At the 2026 Facilitation Lab Summit, Chris Lunney opened his session with a blank slide and a single question: “What did you just experience right there?” It was a deliberate provocation—a small, engineered taste of the unknown—and the perfect entry point into a workshop that challenged facilitators to rethink how we navigate uncertainty. Titled “Navigating the Unknown with Whole Intelligence,” Chris’s 90-minute session invited participants to move beyond the analytical mind and access a deeper, more integrated form of knowing: one that draws on the body, the heart, the imagination, and the subconscious alongside conscious thought.

The Trap of the Thinky Brain

Chris opened by naming a tension most people recognize but rarely examine. When we’re trying to move from where we are—Point A—to where we want to be—Point B—we reach instinctively for analysis. We research, compare options, ask for advice, and try to plan the perfect path. The problem is that planning the perfect path tends to leave us stuck, perpetually searching for a missing ingredient that can’t be found through thinking alone. The alternative—finding the optimal path, the shortest route between A and B—is often just exhausting. Sometimes the shortest path goes straight through the mountain.

The core issue, Chris argued, is that we’re trying to navigate the unknown using only the analytical mind: a map without a compass. Our brains are excellent at working with known variables—choosing a refrigerator is his go-to example, a decision with clear dimensions and measurable constraints. But navigating genuine uncertainty requires a different set of instruments. Not just analytical and relational thinking, but somatic and emotional awareness, subconscious and imaginal insight, and personal and collective understanding. He’s been calling this combination “whole intelligence”—what happens when we bring all of these sources of knowing to bear at once, rather than expecting one of them to do the work of all four.

The Refrigerator and the Heart

To make this tangible, Chris led the room through a guided meditation. Participants were invited to bring an unknown situation to mind, close their eyes, and—through a sequence of breathwork and imagery—find themselves at a refrigerator late at night, filled with the weight of their situation. The prompt at the door was deceptively simple: open it to find the exact feeling your heart desires. What word or phrase does that feeling bring with it?

What emerged in the room was striking. One participant found that the answer that surfaced matched almost word-for-word something she had written earlier in the day during a different session entirely. Two others discovered, without any prior conversation, that they were navigating the same unknown—where to move their families. The subconscious and imaginal, it turned out, had plenty to say when given a structured invitation.

The key insight Chris returned to throughout: “The quality of our sense making equals the quality of our sensing.” When we only consult our analytical mind, we’re working with a fraction of the available information. The body knows things. The heart knows things. The imagination, given room to move, often goes directly to what actually matters—bypassing the noise that the thinking brain generates when it’s trying to figure out something it cannot figure out.

From Insight to Experiment

The session didn’t stop at sensing—it built a bridge from inner knowing to action. Drawing on neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments, Chris introduced the concept of a trackable experiment: not a provable hypothesis with a binary pass/fail, but a small, timed commitment that generates useful data. Participants moved from the meditation into identifying one action aligned with what had surfaced—something that engaged the head, the heart, and the hand together—and then gave that action a structure: a timeframe, a way to check in, and a simple retrospective at the end. Plus, minus, next. What’s working? What isn’t? Given this information, what do I do differently?

Three methods, Chris offered, can access whole intelligence depending on who you’re working with and what the room needs: the embodied heart meditation they experienced together; somatic movement practices drawn from Social Presencing Theater, developed at MIT’s Presencing Institute; and structured physical play with objects for those who need to build something in order to think. All three begin in the same place—the body and the heart—and then hand off to the analytical mind once there’s genuine material to work with, rather than asking it to generate insight from scratch in a vacuum.

Chris closed with a poem from his friend Kyle Finchem, a movement practitioner: “There’s always something to see if you’re listening. There’s always something to hear if you’re looking. There’s always someone to feel if you’re here.” For a session about navigating the unknown, it was a fitting final note—a reminder that the path forward isn’t found by thinking harder. It’s found by listening more completely.

Watch the full video below:

Transcript of Chris’s Session:

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Oh, that’s interesting. There’s supposed to be something on this slide. I’m just kidding. What did you just experience right there? Was that

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Like …

Speaker 1 (00:23):
We’re going to talk about that experience today. Usually as humans, we start off at some point. We’ll call that point A. And we do this interesting thing where we want to get to point B. That seems logical enough. And we do this thing where we want a really clear, reliable, easy, risk-free path to get there. And that’s not usually the way it is because it involves change. This is the thing about being at point A. You’re in point A, that’s just what you are. You’re A shaped and you’re trying to get to B shape and that’s just a different thing. And so when you’re trying to get there, it doesn’t look like change. It looks like the unknown.

(01:17):
Because if we stand at point A and we try to figure out how to get to point B, we can’t do that because we’re not point B. We’re trying to be this experience that we haven’t experienced yet. And that’s really scary and frustrating and all types of things. And so today we’re going to talk about how you challenge, well, the challenge of picking the path. Because when you stand at point A, there’s all these other ways you could go. And each one of them kind of looks unknown. And so how do you trust yourself to say, “You know what? Actually, this is the path that I’m going to walk. I might not know so much about it. ” Wow, it’s scary over here personally. I’m like, wow, that’s such a wide stage.

(02:03):
But we’ll explore this today because this is an experiment on how to navigate the unknown authentically. And authentically is going to be an important part about this. We can just go run off into the distance, but there’s a way that’s going to be supportive to do so, sustainable to do so. The beauty is you already have what you need. This isn’t anything new. You just probably are overlooking it. So we’re just going to take a pause here. We learned that earlier. Just to investigate what is your unknown like? You all digesting some food. This is kind of nice. The person after lunch is like, “You got to bring the energy.” It’s like, no, just digest. It’s okay. We’re actually going to sit and just reflect on this for a moment.

(03:00):
You might even want to close your eyes. This is helpful. Bring to mind something that’s unknown currently for you. Seriously, close your eyes. Because this way you’re safer in your own space. Yeah, bring something to mind that’s unknown for you. Something you’re navigating without a clear map. Let yourself really be with this for a moment. Feel where this lives in your body. And patiently identify maybe what sensations arise in you. What emotions? Maybe memories. Maybe images. And when you think about navigating this unknown, what personal tools or resources do you reach for? What’s authentic to grab? Or what do you go to first? Thank you for that. Welcome back to the room. And just in five minutes, just quick and brief, turn to a partner and just debrief. It’s two questions. What sensations are emotions surfaced? And what resources or tools do you commonly reach for in this situation?

(05:22):
If somebody wants to share, what was coming up for you? What emotions, feelings, and maybe what tools were you reaching for?

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Yeah. So sensations, I have lots of things that are unknown right now. So I was like, “What path do I pick?” But what I did notice was that this sort of swirling on instability, once I let myself feel it was like kind of in here was this sort of feeling. In terms of emotions, I mean, that’s just this disorientation, I would say. But because I feel like I’m in this all the time now, that the tools that I’ve been using or the tool that I have going most right now is Twila Tharp. I read the creative habit. She talks about scratching and that you just start scratching at things. And so I don’t need to know where I’m going. I just need to start being very attuned to signs.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
Beautiful.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
And symbols. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Cool.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Anybody else? Their experience of the unknown and the tools? Yeah, go

Speaker 4 (06:27):
For it. Is it cheating if I’m from the same table as the previous?

Speaker 1 (06:30):
No. In fact, now

Speaker 4 (06:30):
The

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Whole table needs to answer, but yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 4 (06:35):
For me, there’s the physical sensations, but what I wanted to mention was particularly the resources and something I just experienced that I closed my eyes. And when I got to that prompt, after a few seconds of reflection, I opened my eyes and I instinctively looked at you. And the tools that I look for in those moments are people, humans, their creativity and their wisdom. And it was a subconscious thing. I right away looked up and looked at you in that moment of contemplating what do I need right now. So Chris, I need you.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Thank you, dearly. I’m going to deflect that as a facilitator and say I don’t have any answers, which is counterintuitive to what I’m about to do. If I could have my slats back real quick. So this is interesting. Kind of between those two answers, there were similarities of like internal investigation, external investigation, and then like personal sense making and collective sense making. And it’s funny, it’s like when you break down the unknown, it looks like risk or failure or, “Oh God, what if I make mistakes or the worst? There’s more unknown.” Oh no, we go through the unknown and there’s just more of this. And then on the other side, it looks like reward and possibility and opportunities and the change we actually seek to make. It looks like that journey between A and B. And the only difference between this is our filtering. One emotional lens is anxiety, which is super easy to fall into.

(08:12):
And the other one’s excitement. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It could be cool. It could be fun. Maybe I become somebody new. It’s kind of like standing in the woods. Eric was just talking to me about this right before this. He didn’t know about it either. And we have this question of like, where am I? I can’t see anything. I have no orientation. For argument’s sake, you were dropped in the woods. You didn’t just walk there. Okay?

(08:42):
And where do I want to go? Is also a deeper question if you can’t see where you are going. Everything’s dense and built up around you. And you’re asking this question, “Well, how do I even get there if I knew all these things?” There’s bramble and bushes and thorns and like, “Is that a river?” Oh God. And so we do this wonderful thing called figuring it out and it really works kind of. We do a lot of research and we compare all the options and we have so many tools to do this now. It’s incredible. We ask other people, “Hey, what have you done in this situation?” Where you’re looking to the facilitator, “What should I do? ” And we do this thing called, “What does the data tell us? No, seriously, what does the data tell us?” Which is interesting. It kind of nuts out one of two ways.

(09:39):
You’ll notice I’m doing a lot of binary thinking here, which is like when our brain goes into freakout mode, we do binary thinking. We don’t see the nuance in between. So at one side, I love this one. This is my favorite. I plan the perfect path.

(09:55):
If I just get all the variables together, I’ll know exactly what I need to do. I’ll have this feeling of like, “Oh, this feels right. I’ve figured it all out. I’ll just do that. ” Or we do this other thing. Well, I’ll get there. If you plan the perfect path, you end up feeling stuck. And why is that? Because you’re always looking for some type of ingredient that feels like it’s rested in you, but you’re moving from an unrested place and trying to fill in the gap about something, frankly, you just won’t know about until you get there. And then there’s the other version, which is I’ll just take the optimal path. What’s the shortest way between A to B?

(10:37):
Thank you. That was the camera guy. Sweet. The shortest path can be tiring. Extremely tiring. Sometimes the shortest path between A and B is through the mountain. Are you going to dig through the mountain? Or maybe it’s at the top of the mountain. All right, fine. You’re going to climb straight up the mountain? How tall is the mountain? You’re going to have to do that for a while. It’s just not sustainable. So something’s missing. Something just doesn’t make sense. So let’s look at sense making for a second. Inside of us, we have this thing called our brain, does the analytical and the relational thinking. It’s pretty good. It’s super good when we have known criteria. It’s like picking a refrigerator. There’s a hole in your wall. It has a specific dimension. There’s an outlet. It has a specific voltage. You have a specific amount of people you need to feed in your house.

(11:39):
You go somewhere and you’re like, “Ah, these three options, these are pretty good. That one’s kind of cheap. I’ll go for that guy.” And there we go. I got a new refrigerator. But then we also have somatic and emotional awareness. This is the thing of what our body’s telling us. And it’s really wonderful when we can combine these two like, “Hey, where should we go to eat for dinner tonight?” This is a fascinating situation. We’re using both our intellect and our body. Where can we go? What can we afford? What do we want to do? What’s close to you? Also, what do I want to eat? What’s nourishing for me? And we’re integrating these senses. And then we also have this interesting thing called the subconscious and imaginal insight. Now, I admit all of this is an abstraction and I’m consolidating a lot of sense making into a single slide, so just bear with me.

(12:24):
This is like happening always even when you’re not conscious. This happens in our dreams. This happens when you’re in the shower and you’re like, “Oh, that would be so cool.” And it’s an amazing thing for asking questions like, “What could my future look like? This is where dreaming and possibility comes from.” And the last one is personal and collective understanding. You’re way ahead of the curve. Thank you. And it’s what do I know about myself and what does the collective know about us together? And when put this together, we can ask questions like, “What could I or we become?” But the thing is, when we’re in the unknown and we only rely on analytical and relational thinking, it’s like using a map without a compass.

(13:07):
Does that make sense? Just bear with me. When you pull out your phone and you look at the map, it’s just oriented to the world. We have taken this for granted greatly. If you were dropped into the woods and someone handed you a map and said, “This is where you are. ” It’s not oriented to anything. You don’t have a compass, especially if you can’t see anything. Yore like, “I can’t see where the mountains are. I don’t know where the river’s at. I have no form of orientation.” And so we have to do this thing where early explorers were looking at constellations. What are a lot of points of reference that I can make sense of together collectively and bring these intuitions and this thinking all into one place where I can start to say, “Ah, this is maybe where I’m going to go. ” And I’ve been coining this thing called whole intelligence.

(13:59):
It’s a shorthand. It’s not perfect. It’s just what I’m working with right now. If you have critiques, come let me know. But it’s this idea of what happens when we put all these pieces together and you’re probably wondering, well, how the heck do we access all of this intentionally? Because that’s a lot of different stuff. So let’s experience it. So in a moment here, we’ll have a nice long bit of time. It’s like you’re still digesting, you’ll just get to meditate. You’re welcome.

(14:34):
In a moment, I’ll bring you through a short guided visual meditation, one where we’ll be accessing the more subtle and embodied parts of ourselves, and we’ll use these along with our intellect to craft a path, something that feels intuitive for us to walk. And before we go in, I want you to bring to mind an unknown situation. It might have been the one that we were just referring to previously. Just pick one if you have a lot. I want you to sit upright in your chair. It might be nice to actually push away from the table too, and you got some little bit of space.

(15:19):
And get oriented. If you’re familiar with meditation and you love an upright posture, rock and roll, if you want to just sit back and relax, that’s also okay. The suggestion is to close your eyes. I think this is easier with your eyes closed. If that freaks you out, don’t worry about it. Keep your eyes open, but kind of have a blurry, vague focus. And classically, with meditation, start focusing on your breath. Just your natural breathing. And just watch the breath. Observe it because we know by just watching the breath, breathing our natural breath, the things we feel out of order or imbalanced, just tend to return to balance.

(16:21):
They tend to restore their natural order just by breathing and watching the breath. And as you breathe out, you see the number three and as you breathe out, you see the number two. And as you breathe out, you see the number one, tall, clear, and bright. And you imagine you’re at home and it’s late at night. It’s one of those nights when your mind has been fixed on this exact unknown situation and breathe out. You find yourself called to the kitchen maybe because you’re still hungry, or maybe you’re just in need of something to distract your mind, and breathe out.

(17:41):
And you arrive at the refrigerator door, and just before opening it, you’re filled with the feeling of your situation, the dynamics of it, the people in it with you, your excitements, and your concerns, and breathe out. What is this situation asking of you? You can sense this in your body and how it makes you feel, and breathe out. And in that moment, you realize something, it’s not your stomach that’s hungry tonight. It’s your heart. Your heart is longing for something in this situation, and breathe out. And with your hands still on the refrigerator door, you now open it to find inside the exact feeling your heart desires, and breathe out.

(19:06):
And just like a dream, you pick up this feeling and you eat it in one bite, your heart and your body satisfied with what’s in you now, and breathe out. And you close the refrigerator door and turn to face the kitchen, and having satisfied your heart’s hunger, a word or a phrase from the feeling in you that you’ve found rises up. And maybe just to yourself in your head, you speak these words as a reminder of how to navigate this situation, to give your heart what it needs, and breathe out. And as easily as you’ve imagined this scene, it now begins to dissolve.

(20:22):
And as you breathe out, you see the number one. And as you breathe out, you see the number two. And as you breathe out, you see the number three, and you slowly, graciously come back to the room. Thank you for enjoying that experiment or experiencing that experiment. So in the next moment, we’ll figure out what to do with emerge for you. You’ll have about five minutes. This is a juicy amount of time for self-reflection, and just write for a second in a notebook, in a device, whatever you got. What images or sensations came up for you in this? I also want to make apparent that if nothing came up for you, that’s okay. That’s totally cool. This is a weird practice that we’re just starting. And in that area of nothingness, there’s also potential.

(21:35):
What feelings emerged? Maybe what word or phrase emerged for you? Did anything surprise you? Feel free to start the timer. Thank you. So next, we’re going to reflect for another about five minutes. How might your heart’s longing be expressed through your actions? These are small things. These don’t need to be grand gestures. Small things that align your head, your heart, and your hand, meaning what makes sense to you? What does your heart want? And what do you know your ability to be able to do? And this phrase could look like, “I could try this, or I could do this.

(22:38):
” So I’m actually borrowing this next method from this book. Go get this book. It’s awesome. It’s called Tiny Experiments by Anne Laurie Lekomf. She’s a neuroscientist and she’s figured out a lot of really good things for how to get unstuck in your life. And she has this technique called building a trackable experiment. Trackable is very different than a provable experiment. Approvable experiments, did it work or did it not? And if you go into the unknown, you might not know, but you will have more information. And so the idea of this is two things. You’re declaring an action, one of those things that you just chose. So just choose one of them. How might this actually look and how might you convert this into something that you can do over time and pick something like a week or a month or something manageable and reasonable that you would actually look at and recount.

(23:35):
And the idea of this is to sense, is there a pattern? Did I even do this thing? And that could be information. No, I didn’t do it. That’s okay. I didn’t want to do it.

(23:46):
And there’s no judgment. We’re just collecting data here. And at the end of this experiment, you do this thing called plus, minus, and not delta. Sorry, voltage control. Plus, minus a next. What’s working? Maybe what’s not working. Given this information, what do I do next in this scenario? And you can recursively regenerate new trackable experiments. So again, in this time, develop an experiment. What’s one of those actions that you came up with and apply some time to it? And maybe how might you check in with yourself? Oh, you know what? I’m going to check in in the morning. I actually do that thing that I said or I’m going to do it before I go to sleep. Or maybe it’s in a moment of work or some habit, some behavior.

(24:42):
So now’s the chatty part. Find a partner. And I think Renita, you maybe shared this earlier, which is this aspect of people are going to be sharing some deep unknown aspects with you. Also, just follow your own boundaries, your own guidelines of what feels intuitive to share. And if somebody’s sharing something really intuitive and authentic with you, hold that. What a beautiful thing to witness. And as a partner, your intention isn’t to like, “Oh wow, that’s amazing. You know what you could do is this. ” You can ask more questions. “Oh, that’s interesting. What do you think of about that? How do you think of applying that? “And I trust we’re in a good room of brilliant facilitators, so we won’t have an issue in that sense. More just guidelines. So we’re going to take 15 minutes, a good chunk of time because we just unearthed a lot of interesting information here.

(25:38):
So at around the seven, eight mark, and I’ll ring a bell because it seems everyone’s Pavlovian in here. That’ll be the cue to switch if you haven’t already. And then I’ll ring the bell again as if somebody won or raced the Olympics and then we’ll come back here.

(26:13):
Just some simple questions. I mean, we went through maybe something that was fairly new for you. Maybe you’re familiar with this type of experience. And I’m just curious, what was that like? The meditation, maybe images, maybe working through these different methods, maybe what felt clear, maybe what didn’t feel clear. It’s totally okay, but both of those are possible. Did anything surprise you?

Speaker 5 (26:37):
I was surprised by two things. I was surprised during the meditation exercise that the sort of answer came to me so clearly. I wasn’t

Speaker 6 (26:46):
Anticipating

Speaker 5 (26:47):
That. And then I moved over to this table for a partner because we’re at odd tables and my partner and I had both explored the same unknown, which was, where should our families move to? Nice. So that was a very weird bit of synergy there in our conversation.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
Yeah. Okay. Perfect. That’s a wonderful serendipity. Anybody else? Yeah.

Speaker 6 (27:23):
I’m going to make a connection between my experience in the meditation and one of the previous reflections we did in one of the other facilitations, but the question of what’s your heart’s desire. My answer spontaneously came out and I was like, wait, I think I wrote that earlier today. And I had the same answer for the pursuit of joy and wellness. I had to look at my notes and I was like, literally the same words came out. So that was surprising and interesting to me.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Convergence. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s also just how sense making works. It’s like we didn’t just drop into the problem for the first time right now. As this has been building over time and what we’re collecting. Maybe from the perspective of the listener, of somebody else explaining their path, what was that like to experience or maybe what surprised you or what felt intuitive for you and how to respond?

Speaker 7 (28:30):
So I first-

Speaker 1 (28:31):
This table’s going strong.

Speaker 7 (28:33):
All

Speaker 1 (28:33):
These other

Speaker 7 (28:34):
Tables. You have to step your game up. Yes. We are the yes and team.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
Remarkable.

Speaker 7 (28:40):
Yes, Antarctic.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Mark, you’re not allowed to give this table a mic anymore.

Speaker 7 (28:44):
Thank you, Mark. So I think I shared first for a moment and then my lovely partner shared and we both actually came up with a similar visual of how we were looking at ourselves and where we are in time and space and in experience. And then someone that we shared our lives with has a different experience and they’re in a different space and time and pace. And it was very interesting because we both were like, well, we’re out here and our person is over here and we have it come at it from different angles, but the visual of it was the same. So that was really, wasn’t that surprising? I thought that was very cool. So thank you. Cool. I’m going to pass it to someone at my table. Oh my

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Goodness. Oh, thank God.

Speaker 7 (29:45):
We have one over here.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
Yeah. Over here. You have one. Yeah, please.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
We’ll

Speaker 1 (29:52):
Come to you next. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
So Jane and I, our unknowns were wildly different, but one of the things that we both really agreed on in general I was supporting ourselves by thinking to ourselves about our unknown in a way that we would maybe talk to a good friend if they were going through that. So we talked about the power of self-talk and how it’s interesting how the nicest people to other people can have really negative self-talk. I mean, I think we all kind of do at some level. And that’s really not fair because we would never say that to someone that we love. So why is it okay for us to say it to ourselves? So we both, even though our unknown was so different, we both really linked up and connected on that concept of, am I actually giving myself a fair shake in the tone that I’m speaking to myself about this?

(30:43):
Probably not. What would I tell a friend or what would I tell somebody that I love? So that was a takeaway for us.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
That’s amazing. Yeah. And there’s a lot of nuance in what you’re sharing. And it’s, God, like the narrative and the language around what our path is and why we could or could not do that and what resists that and how that shapes what we think is even unknown in some way. I want to hear yours after this session, if that’s okay. That’s totally fine. Thank you. So I want to break this down for a second because we kind of just ripped through the exercise. It was quiet, but we were just doing it consistently. The first thing we did was start with personal sensing. Probably no surprise there. And we were looking at our body and our heart and our imagination. And you’ll notice that this really requires slowing down. Sorry, bud.

(31:37):
And deep listening, of which I witnessed you were capable of both. So it’s totally cool. And then we were reflecting and capturing. We were converting things that were inherently ephemeral into something that was structured. So we’re actually taking something that our non-language brain does and moving it into language. And this way we can do something with our analytical brain where we can translate this and synthesize this and come up with patterns and understand what’s emerging for us. We literally do, we let the thinking brain do what it does best. We’ve now given it some material to work with instead of just chatter with itself in a circle.

(32:20):
And then lastly, we were designing a learning experiment. It’s just trackable. And critically, I can’t stress this enough, we are aligning our head, heart, and our hands. Just take that away today. If you just thought I was rambling, just remind yourself of head, heart, and hand. And the beauty is you can just repeat this pattern, the learning keeps going. And so here we have a compass, right? This is our heart. We have a map. This is our head and we have a path because we’ve shaped it to our ability and what’s intuitive for us to walk. It’s not, might be a little scary, but we’ve at least shaped it to a way that we’re invited to go do it. And you might be saying, “Wow, this isn’t so different than most workshops.” And you might be right. We’re just starting somewhere else. It’s like most of the time we ask people to brainstorm, which is a really funny, weird thing when we’re exploring the unknown.

(33:10):
We say, “Hey, use your thinky brain to do some stuff that the thinky brain isn’t going to figure out. ” And so instead, we just use the same structures, but we started somewhere else. We started with the body and the heart and imagination because you can see the rest of it’s just like, cool. We’re generating options. We’re synthesizing those options. We’re discovering patterns. We’re building prototypes out of these things. We just started somewhere else in the body and the heart.

(33:34):
Does this make sense? This is resonating. Yeah. Okay, cool. I think that’s all I wanted. That’s great. I don’t know why. I was like, “I’m going to pause and ask everybody,” but they were like, “Yeah, go for it. ” I was like, “All right, sweet.” I love this quote. This is one of my favorite things. The quality of our sense making equals the quality of our sensing. The quality of our sense making equals the quality of our sensing. If we’re expecting high quality sense making out of ourselves, we need to use all of our senses and we spend … I know I do. I spend most of my time thinking in front of a computer with some AI chat.

(34:20):
And so I know all you are thinking right now. So every time I’m facing the unknown, I should meditate on my refrigerator. Dear God, no, please don’t do that. We should have a refrigerator like branding for this event, at least. I’m going to share a few methods with you. So the first one is what we just experienced. This should be intuitive based on just having gone through it, but it’s simple. We’re breathing and we’re grounding and we’re bringing the challenge to mind and body. We’re not thinking about it, we’re embodying it. That’s not a hard thing. We just have to slow down and be like, “Oh, I’m already feeling these things.” And we shift into our sense of what our heart’s longing is. And if that’s hard for you, I love the reframing of like, what are you hungry for? We experience hunger almost every day, and it’s so much easier, especially if you’re not practiced at asking your heart questions.

(35:14):
And you can reframe that. Well, what’s my heart hungring for? It’s a slightly easier reframe. There’s another thing. If you don’t like meditating and sitting still, you can also move your body. And I’m stealing this from social presencing theater, which is used in theory you to develop at the Presencing Institute at MIT. And it’s an entire suite of embodied practices that you can use to do systems change work and all types of stuff. And I’m doing a real quick abstraction of this one. This is where I wish I had a lav mic.

(35:46):
You can just stand there and say, “What is my unknown situation?” And you can feel it in your body. And it’s kind of like, I don’t know, it’s like this. I don’t even know what the heck this is, but this is what my body is doing. Cool. Okay. And then I’m going to pause. I’m going to say, okay, if this is what my unknown situation is, I’m not going to move to a desired situation. I’m not going to be like, “Ha ha, this is what I want. ” Your brain did that. Don’t do that. I feel this thing and I say, “Oh, this is interesting.” And it’s almost like sitting in a chair uncomfortably for a while. Your body just knows when to move. You don’t think, “Hey, maybe I should move because I’m not getting enough blood flow to my legs.” And then you do that.

(36:32):
It’s like your body just tells you. And so you sit here and you’re like, “Oh, what’s interesting? Oh, oh, I’m feeling … There’s something like standing is easier and actually, oh, whoa, something’s happening. Where is this going? Oh, what do I do with this?

(36:53):
” But this is a very different thing than this. And then you’re doing the same pattern. You’re going to look at those differences and say, “Oh, we can make sense of this. This is a different thing. This might not be the solution, but it’s a different way of relating to this situation.” Where’s my little clicker? The next one. For all the Lego serious play humans out there, this is almost identical. If you’re like, “I don’t want to meditate. I don’t want to use my body weird like you, Chris. I just want to sit at my desk. I’m sure you have a bunch of crap all over your desk and if you’re super organized, get some crap on your desk.” Or you can rip up some pieces of paper and you can scatter them around and just structure like play as if you were a kid building the city of your situation.

(37:40):
What does that look like? How is it structured? What’s stable? Wha’s instable? And maybe move some pieces around. Why would you move that piece specifically? And how would you chart a path through this space differently? So three very different ways to approach something that is more subtle and not thinking first. Okay. So let’s try to apply those. I know we went through those fast and they were abstract. You have at least experienced one of them. And I’ll give you some things to work with here. I’m not going to just throw you into the fray. Again, select a moment of the unknown. You can work with the same one. Actually, it makes more sense to work with a previous one or a future one, I’m going to say. And sketch a plan for how you might engage this concept of whole intelligence, leaning into something you’re not thinking first to develop an authentic path.

(38:33):
And I’m going to give you a few things, right? We have the process. This is what we went over before. These are just some steps. It’s kind of like design thinking, but a little different. And then we have some methods. Just use these or make up your own. You’re like, actually, I do this funny thing when I go and walk my dog that all the answers from my unknown come to me. You’re like, great, just use that dog walking method. We’re going to have a few minutes to digest this. And while you’re answering this, maybe concentrate on these specific questions of like, well, why are you picking this situation to apply it? And maybe you’re not applying it just to yourself, you’re applying it to a group. How might you adapt it to be appropriate for this collective?

(39:35):
If I can bring your attention back here, thank you so much. Yeah, if we could stop the timer and hopefully this remote works. I’m going to do this thing where I trust everything was clear. Everything was amazing. It all worked out perfectly only because we’re nearing the end. So as we were before, you can hop to miro.com/join or use the QR code. And we’ll be answering this question. I’m going to go to the next slide and maybe somebody in charge of slides can click the little QR code button again, the top right. Amazing. We’re going to investigate this question. What’s one thing that’s beginning to emerge for you today? And you could think about this at a personal level. Oh, this is something personal that’s emerging or ooh, these are interesting concepts and practices and maybe this is emerging for me philosophically or conceptually about this.

(40:53):
No right or wrong answer. Truth, failure is not final. More listening to my heart is hungry for the tacos. Just appreciating now, slowing down to the unknown. The real answer is inside of us all along. Trust. Use/listen to your body. Already did some of this work intuitively. Perfect. Unification of my design, emotional and spiritual practices. Thank you for saying that. That’s been the thing I’ve been struggling with most of my life. Convergence. Stretching myself creatively and creating frameworks to do so. I am safe. Beautiful for how everyone’s experiencing this. Being present to what already is. The value of sitting in the unknown longer. Letting the unknown exist without needing to solve it. It’s also a beautiful observation. So often we feel the thrust to do something in the unknown. You’re like, “What if you just sit there? What if you just sit in the unknown for a moment?

(42:04):
If the world’s changing, something will come to you. This is great. I’m going to move forward.” Okay. So the next time you’re in this situation trying to move from A to B and you’re looking for a perfect path, but instead you find yourself in the woods of the unknown. Remember, you have a compass. This is different than a map. Start with a compass.

(42:31):
Start with a compass of your heart, your feelings, your emotions, what’s really you’re yearning for, and then get out the map. Then chart a path. And with that information also into it, what’s reasonable for me to do here? What is my ability? What can my hands achieve in my life? Because this way you can find your authentic path, because the only way through the unknown is the path that you can walk authentically. I wanted to end with a poem from a really good friend, this guy, Kyle Finchem. This guy’s literally in the jungle right now. He’s a great movement practitioner and he’s taught me a lot about how to use the body first and not the mind. And the poem is this. There’s always something to see if you’re listening. There’s always something to hear if you’re looking. There’s always someone to feel if you’re here.

(43:34):
Open your heart, Kyle Finchem. So thank you. Enjoy navigating your path, and I’m very grateful that our paths could merge for a little bit today. See you.

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