Leading Teams to Unlock Creative Potential with Design Thinking

There is more intelligence inside our organizations and our teams than we are using.

It’s the job of leaders to unlock the creative power of their teams - not to generate solutions to all problems for them.

Leaders can do this by leading conversations that leverage the power of a creative process - finding new, unexpected and innovative solutions to challenging problems instead of business as usual. 

This creative process has gone by many names, has been studied for decades, and offers leaders powerful, practical tools to drive change and innovation through creative conversations. My book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter is just one of many, many books on this topic. In this essay I’ll break down some essential tools of leading creative conversations and share some other books on the topic for your further reading.

At various times, this process has been called Creative Problem Solving (CPS), and more recently known as Design Thinking. Over the decades these approaches have been hailed as practical and functional, or a terribly failed experiment.

While the realities on the ground of how these methods get implemented is nuanced (to say the least!), Creative Problem Solving and Design Thinking work because they leverage some fundamental forces of creative gravity. In my days as a physicist, we liked to joke that gravity isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. 

You try to get a plane in the air without understanding aerodynamics and the fundamentals of gravity! Working with a basic understanding of the laws of creativity means leaders can make meetings soar, instead of feeling like a drag. And yet most leaders are flying blind or working with outmoded theories.

These methods are best learned in action, so…Let’s do an experiment, shall we? After the game, I’ll unpack the five keys to leading more impactful creative problem solving meetings with your team.

I’ve been playing improv games to help teams learn design thinking in action for years. And I remember the first time I saw a colleague lead a group through this particular game more than 10 years ago. At the time, I had taken some improv classes and had already been teaching design thinking for awhile, but had never thought to put them together. It lit a spark in me that still burns to this day. There are many ways to lead this game and to help teams unpack their experience and make meaning of it. This is my approach.

Setting the Scene

I set the scene by asking the group if anyone has done any improv.

Some have, some haven’t.

I remind those that have done improv that we will be “breaking” some of the rules of improv. This will create some discomfort, and I ask for their patience and curiosity with the discomfort. 

For those who haven’t done improv, I *also* ask them for their patience and curiosity with the exercise ahead.

Yes, But

“Grab a partner and plan a party together for the next 2 minutes. One person will suggest a party idea. The other will respond with yes, but….

And you’ll continue to offer suggestions, back and forth, always starting with yes, but…”

It’s a simple instruction. If you do this exercise in person, you’ll hear the noise in the room rise as people dutifully try to follow your instructions and have a “Yes, But..” conversation. And one minute later, you’ll hear the chatter in the room die down as people struggle to keep the conversation going.

At two minutes I rescue the room from the pain of continuing. 

“What was that like?” I ask

“Painful”

“Hard”

“Slow”

“Argumentative”

…come the replies.

“Did anyone actually get to plan the party?” I probe

Most teams admit that they got bogged down pretty early - where to get the ice became an intractable problem. They got lost in the details.

I draw the axes of Energy over Time and ask the teams - did your energy go up or down during the conversation? The chart below summarizes the overall experience - Energy in the groups drops, fast.

Now, there will be one or two pairs who had a BLAST during this conversation. In some organizations the proportions of “Yes, but” enjoyers are even higher.

“I loved how they kept poking holes in my ideas and I had to find solutions!”

But the room as a whole admits that such conversations create a one-sided effort that does wear thin over time since poking holes is a lot easier than plugging them.

The main points I want teams to notice is that:

Many people do not enjoy “Yes, But” Conversations.

Some people like “Yes, But” Conversations

Overall, “Yes, But” conversations drain energy

Yes, And

“Grab the same partner. The other partner now gets to suggest a party idea. You’ll continue to offer responses, back and forth, always starting with yes, and…for the next 2 minutes”

Again, if you do this exercise in person, you’ll hear the noise in the room rise as people dutifully try to follow your instructions and have a “Yes, And..” conversation. And one minute later, you’ll hear the chatter in the room continue to rise as people really get into the party ideas

At two minutes I have to shout to be heard and get the room to settle down.

“What was that like?” I ask

“Fun”

“Energizing”

“Collaborative”

“Flow”

…come the replies.

“Did anyone actually get to plan the party?” I probe

The room usually explodes with people ready to launch their party ideas into the stratosphere.

Returning to the Energy X Time Chart, I ask the room how the arc of their energy was for this conversation. 

“Was it going up and to the right?”

Most of the room agrees.

“Or was it starting to level off?” I enquire

Now, in a mirror to the “yes, But” portion, there were several  pairs who felt like the “Yes, And” energy was getting to be a bit much towards the end of the conversation. Could they really afford Jay-Z and Beyonce for this intergalactic unicorn party on the moon? Who was going to fund the rocket flight - Bezos or Musk?! Things were starting to feel a bit out of hand for some.

At this point, I want the group to understand:

“Yes, And” Conversations are energy producing

Some people run out of steam with “Yes, And” Conversations

Different people run out of creative energy at different rates.

It is the job of a leader to make space for these modes of creative thinking. We need “Yes, And” thinking to make sure we have MORE creative ideas on the table. And we need “Yes, But” thinking to make sure the ideas actually hold water.

Opening and Closing at the same time sucks

At this point, I can point out the fundamental problem:

There are people who LOVE poking holes in ideas.

There are even folks who love having their ideas being poked.

But generally speaking, it’s more energizing to build on ideas.

So why are our creative meetings so broken?

The problem is that teams are generally playing BOTH games at the same time. We have all been in meetings where people are simultaneously generating and destroying ideas.

“What if we try___________?”

We did that last year… it didn’t work.”

“What if we try___________?”

“We can’t get that past legal.”

“What if we try___________?”

“That sounds expensive”

Like a quantum foam of particles being born of the vacuum and disappearing from existence in an instant, almost nothing escapes this kind of meeting, where “Yes, And” people are cut off by “Yes, But” people before ideas even get to develop or mature.

The leader who understands the physics of creative conversations makes sure we play both the “Yes, And” and the “Yes, But” games ONE AT A TIME. 

Yes, And is Opening. Divergent or Generative Energy.

Yes, But is Closing, Convergent or Subtractive Energy.

Electrons and protons are negatively and positively charged, respectively…but we need both in balance to make up the universe we live in.

So, too, do leaders need to balance positive and negative energy to drive creative thinking.

Creative Culture is limited by classic Cognitive Biases

At least two common cognitive pathways keep us from pushing through “Yes, But” thinking into new and innovative solutions: The Loss-Aversion Bias and the Negativity Bias.

The Negativity bias is thought to be an adaptive evolutionary function (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1999; Vaish et al., 2008; Norman et al., 2011). Our prehistoric ancestors were exposed to environmental threats that were truly threatening - the sound of snapping branches in the woods could actually be a tiger or worse. Being highly attentive to potentially negative stimuli played a useful role in survival. Seeing gaps and challenges in ideas as fatal flaws to be avoided at all costs makes us flee from new ideas.

The Loss-Aversion Bias is summed up by the old saying “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Loss aversion was first proposed back in 1979 by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as an important framework for prospect theory – an analysis of decision under risk. We feel the possible loss of, say $10, much much more sharply than the gain of $10. Investopedia suggests that “human beings experience losses asymmetrically more severely than equivalent gains. This overwhelming fear of loss can cause investors to behave irrationally and make bad decisions, such as holding onto a stock for too long or too little time.”

Samuelson and Zeckhauser, in their 1988 paper “Status quo in decision making” pointed out that incumbents do much better than they would in a neutral election.

These cognitive biases keep us rooted in protecting what we have instead of exploring new possibilities - because doing so costs time and energy.

Creative leaders make space for Opening, Exploring and Closing.

In 2010 I read Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. Gamestorming brought together decades of practical wisdom and research into how groups can work together, better by thinking of work through the lens of game theory.

Yes, And is a Game. The rules create an additive thinking space.

Yes, But is a Game. The rules create a thinking space of subtraction.

It’s easy to get frustrated when you are playing a different game than everyone else on the field. Can you imagine trying to play soccer while everyone else is playing rugby? Or playing chess while your partner is playing backgammon?

It’s impossible to make any progress this way.

Gamestorming opened my eyes to the importance of balancing these three games, in sequence, as in the diagram of a creative process below. The authors also  opened my eyes to a third energy: Emergence, or exploring.

Opening: Divergent (positive)

Exploring: Emergent (neutral)

Closing: Convergent (negative)

In the universe, we have electrons and protons, but it’s actually neutrons that help hold atoms together. And just so, a culture of innovation is found in making space for creative emergence - a kind of “neutral” space, where we are not generating or eliminating ideas, but holding space for them to be heard and to combine and recombine.

Openers love opening and may resist closing.

Closers love closing and may drag their heels in opening.

Almost everyone finds exploring a bit challenging, which is why Sam Kaner’s Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making describes this middle part of the creative process as the “Groan Zone”.

We all need to become switch hitters in the creative process if we’re going to work together.

Openers need to learn to close - to choose and launch

Closers need to learn to lean into opening, to get curious about ideas before poking holes in them.

Leaders can create the guardrails for conversations that make this possible. 

Creative Leaders are Multipliers

Leaders have an outsized influence on how teams solve problems. They can intentionally set up a space where these three modes of creative conversation can flow. If they know where the rough air is going to be in the process, they can plan for it.

For example, in her bestselling book Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter, Liz Wiseman posits that there are at least two types of leaders 

- Multipliers, who expect great results from their teams AND create the conditions for genius to emerge 

and …

- Diminishers, who micromanage, take credit and waste the genius in their teams and organizations.

Multiplier leaders provide the support and forward movement for teams to navigate the perilous middle of the creative process with grace. They expect great results and know that setting time aside for thinking through options and opportunities creates the best results - what Daniel Kahneman calls “Thinking Slow” in his book “Thinking: Fast and Slow”.

How might we create the conditions for effective creative thinking for our teams?

At this point, the hour is coming to a close and there’s precious little time for much more than reflection and projection - getting people who’ve gone through this improv game to think about what it was like, and how they might lead differently in the future. And for them to share what they might already be doing that looks and feels like what we’ve been talking about for the last 45 minutes or so.

Five Steps for Leading Creative Conversations

Make space for Opening, Exploring and Closing. Doing all three in one short meeting may not be possible or feasible at first.

1. Open with a clear challenge statement. What problem are we here to solve? Defining the problem well is a powerful form of creative leadership. More on that here.

2. Open Pt 1: Think alone, then think together. Get everyone to write down their ideas in silence. For more on why, check out “Your next meeting should be silent”

3. Open Pt 2: Get people to share their ideas. No “Yes, But” energy allowed…yet!

4. Explore: Share ideas and remix them. Combine the best parts of ideas together. While some people criticize collective creativity with the saying “A camel is a horse designed by committee” I challenge you to cross the Sahara desert on a horse!

5. Close: Decide on one or more ideas to prototype, test or evolve.

Step Zero should usually be “Decide how you’re going to decide”.

Leaders need to set groups up for success by letting them know if this is a democracy or an advisory committee. Leaving things vague just causes a mess.

Step Six should usually be “Let’s talk to real people facing the challenge we described in step one without showing them our ideas yet” so that we reduce the chances of a third dangerous and common cognitive bias - the Confirmation Bias, ie “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values”.

In the Toyota System of continuous Improvement, this is called Genba, or Genba Walks - “going to the real place where the actual work is done”

Leadership is Designing and Facilitating the conditions for Transformative conversations.

Left to our own devices, conversations will be an unstructured mix of “Yes, And” and “Yes, But” modes of working. Leaders have the opportunity to set up conversations to run on a different operating system - one where teams cycle through “yes, and” and “yes, but” thinking in ways that create respect, psychological safety and forward movement.

This mode of leadership isn’t directive or authoritative, but is more akin to the style of leadership Daniel Goleman described in HBR in 2000 as a Leadership That Gets Results - a coaching mode of leadership. Coaching and Facilitation are two sides of one coin - leadership based in empathy and an understanding of how humans are built - but that’s a conversation for another time.

The Support Matrix

In early May of 2023, the surgeon general of the US released an advisory report calling attention to the loneliness epidemic.

If you’re new to this topic, in short, people today have fewer friends and fewer systems of support than ever before.

Why is this important?

At a societal level, if a population is lonely and disconnected, you’re going to see the impacts in an uptick of negative health outcomes from an increased incidence of heart disease to increases in suicides - that’s why it’s so powerful that the surgeon general is weighing in on this.

Why is this important to you, the reader, in your life?

How much support does a person need?

Some ages back, I wrote about how founders can’t emotionally bootstrap their companies.

Since I wrote that essay, that perspective has been reinforced and expanded through many, many conversations I’ve had with founders and leaders who tell me that they need a whole spectrum of support to sustain themselves, their companies and their relationships.

For example, my podcast conversation with the co-founders of the next-gen gaming platform Artie confirmed that having a coach and a therapist is totally a thing, and nothing to be ashamed about!

What kind of systems of support?

For me, I have a five-legged stool of support systems, regular conversations and gatherings that are blocked in my calendar.

My Therapist (one hour weekly, on and off for 15+ years)

My Men’s Group (two hours weekly, four years strong)

My Coaching Forum (five hours monthly, currently entering our third year)

My Sunday Dinner + Drinks (2-3 hours weekly…this dinner with friends has been going strong for over 10 years).

My journaling and sketching habit - sometimes daily, sometimes less. I have notebooks for my mental health and for my coaching practice.

But we could bucket these into a basic spectrum of support, sized like t-shirts: Large, Medium and Small. The three key conversational buckets, or legs of support are:

• Groups,

• One-on-one conversations, and

• Conversations with myself

Now, I love sorting conversations by size, ie, amount of people, as the Spectrum of Support stool diagram does above, but we could just as easily sort these spectrums of support with many other lenses.

For example:

Self/peer facilitated vs expertly facilitated. My therapist is accredited and expert in their field, while my men’s group and coaching forum are peer-facilitated. It’s great to have self/peer facilitated spaces because guiding conversations is such a critical leadership skill, and these spaces can create opportunities to hone your own approach. Experts, on the other hand, bring safety, clarity and assurance to their approach, and I always learn something new I can steal!

Self-growth focus vs Life Focus: My Sunday dinner conversations are sometimes about life, the universe and everything, but often we talk about media, politics, and other tomfoolery. On the other hand, my men’s group is only focused on personal growth and self-transformation. We don’t talk about stories, we process emotions. I find safety and security in knowing that I have a space like my men’s group that will always be laser focused, vs a space that is flexible and loose.

Self/Others/Nature/Transcendence: My friend and podcast guest Casper ter Kuile uses four very different categories, when he describes rituals that foster connection. Ritual can simply mean “a way to create space and time for something that matters.” He thinks about:

• rituals for connecting with yourself,

• rituals that connect you to others

• rituals for fostering connection to nature

• rituals that create time to connect with something transcendent, which for some might be a sense of “god”, oneness, or something else.

Since he’s largely inspired by what I like to call “Biomimicry but using religion” it’s not surprising that he includes time for focusing on something larger than what we can see with our eyes - connection with the transcendent is a feature of all religions. Connecting with something bigger than ourselves helps inspire awe and wonder, both surprisingly helpful experiences. His company, The Sacred Design Lab explores what we can learn from religion to inspire leadership, gathering and transformation and he wrote a wonderful book on the power of ritual. You can check out our conversation here!

Why is regular, even structured, self-talk so important? Check out my essay here on how impactful self-talk can be on your quality of life. In short, how you talk to and with yourself is the fundamental rate-limiter of your overall success and happiness.

The Commitment-Intimacy Support Matrix

The spectrum that has been on my mind is at the intersection of commitment and intimacy - what I am currently focusing on as the essential factors in any Support Matrix.

I began to realize that the systems of support, the spaces and places that had delivered the most impact to me were all high-commitment and high-intimacy spaces.

For example: My men’s group is a high-commitment space - we commit to coming together each week. If we need to miss a session, we have to reach out to other members and have a 1-1 check in with someone to share what we’re making more important than the meeting.

(Note - it’s 100% okay to say - “I am prioritizing going to a party with my partner” - and committing to being 100% present to having a great time at said party and coming back and sharing that joy with the group!)

Since we’re a high-commitment space, you can’t just flake out. If you do, we’ll call you out on breaking your commitments. We’re also high-intimacy, in the sense that we can bring anything to the group to talk about - it’s one of the few spaces where we can say whatever we need to.

My coaching forum is also a high-intimacy space. Even though we focus on helping each other grow our coaching practice (both in professional excellence and revenue) we also focus on sharing what is really going on in our lives - losses of family members, parenting, fertility journeys, self-doubt, and so on.

Often I see people trying to learn, develop and grow using low-commitment and low-intimacy spaces: Webinars, reading, social media.

These are like snacks. They can keep you alive and moving forward, but they are just not enough.

Deeper commitment is more deeply nourishing.

Deeper intimacy, allowing yourself to really be seen and to see others, is powerful.

The Holy Trinity of Professional Development: Coaching, Mentoring and Peer Forum

With my executive coaching clients, I find there is a powerful trinity of support systems they need to thrive in their roles: Coaching, Mentoring, and Peer Forums.

Sometimes these support systems are more ad-hoc and casual, but I’ve found that they are all like 401ks - the value of commitment and intimacy compounds over time as you reinvest.

Coaching is powerful because it focuses on the belief that the coachee has the answer within, that they can and should find their own way. It creates the space and time for them to think deeply, with a caring and committed thought partner (like me! - learn more about my coaching here).

Coaching is less directive, which means the coachee can tap into their own reserves in a powerful way.

Mentoring is powerful because it helps a leader get vital feedback and information about their unique context. No matter how much confidence and clarity a person can get from coaching, it is incredibly helpful to connect with someone who’s “been there/done that” in some relevant way. Finding great mentors (plural - the more the better) is hard, but worthwhile.

Peer Forums can go by lots of different names: Peer Coaching, Peer Exchange Groups, Masterminds. Organizations like EO, YPO, Starting Bloc, and Vistage host peer groups that are powerful in five ways:

1. They are long (in duration - for example, YPO-style groups meet monthly for a full day in person, while my coaching peer group meets monthly for five hours online.

2. They are ongoing - they usually continue to meet with no end date in sight.

3. They are small - often capped at 10 people - which feeds intimacy.

4. They are highly structured. Either they are expertly facilitated or the people in the group are expertly trained to self-facilitate.

5. They are normalizing. When the group is more similar than different in essential ways, they can provide deeply nourishing feedback that, yes, the challenge you are facing is face-able, since others have also faced it in some manner.

Balancing Diversity with Similarity in Support Systems

Balancing variety and diversity with similarity and familiarity is essential, and also a fundamental challenge of peer groups, coaching and mentoring.

For example - in my men’s group, it's very powerful that some of us are dads, some of us are trying to become dads, and some of us never want kids. It provides richness to the conversation.

On the other hand, when someone is struggling with parenting, it’s incredibly helpful for someone else in the group to be able to say, “I see you,” from having had a similar experience.

On the other hand, there are men’s groups only for dads - having someone who never wants kids in such a group just makes no sense!

Similarly, it can be helpful for a CEO group to only have CEOs or for a CTO group to just have CTOs, but it can be very helpful for them to be in different industries and stages of growth. On the other hand, the peer groups in EO, YPO and others often work to create groups that are in similar stages of development.

Filtering in this way can have advantages …but also drawbacks: too much sameness sucks the richness from the conversation.

How can we find the sweet spot between diversity and similarity?

The Q of a gathering

In 2012, Jonah Lehrer wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker about Groupthink. In the later half of the article, he discussed the work of Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, who dedicated his career to uncovering the ideal team composition. He focused on Broadway musicals as an ideal way to study the complex ways team creativity can impact success, with easy to measure inputs (people) and outputs (box office numbers!).

Musicals, to Uzzi, epitomize group creativity. Collaboration is paramount – composers work with lyricists, choreographers with directors, etc. - to create a successful show. Uzzi studied all 474 Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989, tracking relationships and using a value he called "Q" to measure the amount of social connectivity and familiarity a team had.

Often musicals are developed by teams of artists that have worked together several times before—a common practice to reduce risk with “known quantities." We still see this today in marketing “from the team that brought you X.” Such musical productions would have a relatively high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.

Uzzi, in essence, compared familiarity with success and reported:

“Frankly, I was surprised by how big the effect was…I expected Q to matter, but I had no idea it would matter this much.”

A low Q (low familiarity, or an overly-fresh team) correlated with low success, which Uzzi expected - it may take time to develop a successful collaboration. What was surprising was that a very high Q was also correlated with low success!

It was possible to be too familiar.

Lehrer summarized Uzzi’s insight:

“The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.”

I love this idea of balancing freshness and familiarity in all our gatherings, not just in the success of musicals or the general creativity of teams.

I have seen this play out in my own life - I have an annual eggnog party where I make a quadruple batch of the New York Times classic Nog. It’s been going for about ten years, with a small break for the pandemic. In the before-times, the gathering was often a familiar group of groups from my life - grad school, work, other friends, who knew each other a bit, and more and more over the years. It was always a large and raucous group, but our Q was increasing too much, as it turned out. I had created a guest list that was more regulars than new additions. (although the addition of my wife about five years ago did provide a solid Q-infusion since she has fun friends!)

Last year, I started hosting a series of smaller salon-like gatherings dedicated to serendipity. My wife and I split the invite list and started reconnecting to old acquaintances and new folks we were meeting as we ventured out in the post-pandemic re-socializing of New York. Some folks would get re-invited, others were one-offs. After hosting just 2-3 of these gatherings, the dates of the Egg Nog party approached. We decided to invite everyone who had been to a salon and the whole old timers Nog list.

The group that wound up coming to Nog Fest 2022 had a really great Q-value. A solid balance of freshness and familiarity that everyone commented on.

Similarly, in peer groups, we can be tempted to find a group that all narrowly meet a certain criteria or be a certain type to create a maximal Q-value. But Uzzi’s Q research shows us that variety is the spice of life, and that cultivating diversity of many types can have outsized rewards.

We are social animals and we require varied social nourishment

As a professional, I focus a lot on my own professional development and on helping my clients develop themselves. But, of course, we’re more than just our work.

This is where the conversation moves into the ideas of third places, long-term conversations, and, the importance of clubs in helping us stay connected to each other (which is what the film by my friend Rebecca Davis, Join or Die is all about — Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking work on why you should join a club, and why the fate of America depends on it. If you are dubious, check out the trailer!)

Lower commitment spaces with medium intimacy, like communities and third places, can be extremely helpful for overall mental health and personal flourishing.

Each of us has our own loneliness epidemic that we need to attend to with a spectrum of support tailored to our needs and goals.

My friend and podcast guest Kat Vellos wrote a whole book called We Should Get Together on how challenging it is to build adult friendships due to many, many structural factors, and she shares tons of suggestions on how to build deeper connections. You can check out our podcast conversation here and find links to her work.

My podcast guest Nick Gray says to host more parties, and his work is around helping people do just that. If you haven’t listened to our conversation, you should! And he’s right…if more people held more parties more often, that would be great. But 2-hour, mid-week cocktail parties, while surprisingly powerful, only scratch certain itches and can only provide certain types of support. That said, being the host and creating the support you most want to have is incredibly powerful. In fact, that advice is the advice my coach Robert Ellis gives!

I’d love to hear how many legs your support stool has, and what your key legs of support are!

The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance

Hiring, retaining and developing talent is a key leadership skill. Without great talent it’s impossible to have a great team. And without a great team, it’s impossible to build a great organization.

Hiring, retaining and developing talent is also time consuming, both in amount of time daily and weekly and length of time, over months. 

How much time? 

The HBR classic The First 90 Days (summarized here) has a diagram that explains that a new hire can actually take 3 months to start delivering value and another 3 months to start to see a breakeven return on your investment. 

The space under the line to the lower left is “value consumed” as a hire learns about the organization and the job. There’s no net contribution to be expected until three months in (90 days) -  that’s one of the main reasons that new hires should read The First 90 Days, and use it to develop a plan to manage expectations of their employers - which are always high!

You, as a Leader, are understandably itchy to hire employees that can “hit the ground running” on day one…but that’s rarely a realistic expectation.

Does that mean you have to wait for 3-6 months to find out if you’ve made a good hire?

The Four Quadrants of Employee Performance

Danny Meyer is one of my favorite business thinkers. He’s the pioneering restaurateur behind such acclaimed establishments as Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, and the amazing and ubiquitous Shake Shack.  He’s also renowned for his focus on genuine hospitality and employee-first business thinking through his consulting firm, Union Square Hospitality Group. 

He wrote one of my favorite business books, Setting the Table. Read it!

Danny recently shared one of his most impactful leadership frameworks with Tim Ferris and summarized it here. The core idea is that there are four essential types of employees with four different attitudes towards performance. For each, you can have an action point and a time frame when you start to discover what kind of employee they are.

Flowers and Gems, Puzzles and Candles

Meyer breaks down the four quadrants of employee performance this way: Can and Can’t, Will and Won’t.

“If you've got somebody who can and will, I want to celebrate that person. Those are my flowers. I really want to water them.”

It's easy for leaders to take the Can/Will employees for granted. But it's important to "water these flowers" with praise and recognition. This helps with retention, sure, but it also makes it clear what kind of culture you want to cultivate. More on that later.

“If you have someone who can't but will, I'm gonna coach them. The wick on my candle is pretty long for someone who will…If you can teach them how to do the thing, they've got the right hospitality attitude. Once they learn …you're going to have a loyal employee for life.”

What’s amazing here is that Meyer goes on to say that he has a “six month wick” for these folks (just like HBR suggests!) …and refers to these employees as gems.

Employees that have the right mindset but not the skillset are diamonds in the rough. Many things are teachable. Hospitality, in Meyer’s view, is something that is easier to hire for than to coach.

Coaching is a crucial skill for leaders, and one that is rarely taught. Cultivating a coaching leadership style is one of the key pillars of conversational leadership. You can check out a summary of my core coaching frameworks for leaders here.

Can’t and Won’t: Light a Candle under them

Unmotivated and underperforming team members affect the whole team’s morale and productivity. Meyer says:

“Someone who can't and won't, I'm going to put the candle underneath their rear end, and they're going to have to learn that this isn't working, because the longer that person stays…everyone else on the team says, “why should I try?”

I’ve seen this play out firsthand in my executive coaching practice. A client of mine made a significant hire and found that this person lacked some crucial skills and essential attitudes that got missed in the hiring process. At the two month mark, we agreed that they would light a candle under that hire. That conversation cleared a pathway to letting the hire go at the three month mark if there wasn’t radical improvement. The frustration and disappointment my client worked through in the first two months was alleviated by clear communication of expectations and goals, and it made the process of letting the hire go a month later much more smooth and regret-free.

Can and Won’t: The Toughest Puzzle

It’s like trying to make a puzzle piece fit into the wrong slot, over and over again - but no matter how much the edges fray, it’s just not a perfect fit.

“The hardest one I find is the can but won't, that's the person that you can say to them “You're way better than this, but for some reason, you're just choosing not to bring it here.”

He describes the process of letting these Can't/Won't employees go as saying “you’re a great player, but I think you are part of a different puzzle”.

Meyer’s four quadrants, key action points and time windows are summed up here:

The Culture Equation (or, how to Scale Culture)

Meyer suggests, later in his interview with Tim Ferris, that the culture you have is, in essence, the sum of all the ideal behaviors you reward and celebrate minus all of the unwanted behaviors you tolerate.

Meyers believes that employees will notice when you, as a leader, tolerate the Can/Won’t and the Can’t/Won’t folks, thinking to themselves:

“Why do they keep batting that person in the lineup instead of benching them or sending them to the minor leagues!?”

The way to scale culture is, in short, watering your flowers assiduously and lighting candles intentionally under your potential puzzle pieces.

Easy, right?!

In practice, this is hard. Having so-called difficult conversations are, by definition, difficult. Leaders avoid these uncomfortable conversations and let them simmer, hoping they’ll resolve themselves, somehow.

Meyer’s culture equation points out the cost of doing nothing - it’s impossible to scale the culture you want to create if you let your underperforming employees sap the energy of your flowers and gems.

Leaning into the Coaching Conversation: Conversational Leadership

Watering Flowers and letting Puzzle pieces go isn’t quite enough. Your highest ROI employees are actually the gems - Can’t/Will folks who need more support and coaching to unlock their potential. 

In fact, if you’re working in a high complexity and high volatility environment, eventually everyone, you included, will be faced with an uncertain situation for which there is no easy solution. At some point, we’re all going to be in a Can’t moment. If we’re going to step into the Can’t/Will attitude, and help our teams to do the same, coaching is going to be a perennially crucial skill.

If we can foster a coaching mindset for ourselves and our teams, we can always turn Can’t into Can with a calm, consistent Will.

If you want to hone your skills as a coaching leader, check out my essay here. If you want a coach for yourself, check out my coaching page here and see if I might be a good fit for your needs.

The 9+P Model of Gathering Design

How do you lead a powerful gathering?

START WITH A POWERFUL PLAN USING THE 9P MODEL OF PLANNING.

Learn more for free: Download the 9P worksheet or Check out the 9P Mural Template.

There are more than the 9Ps in this model that can help you plan better gatherings, like:

More and more elegant Patterns of Conversation (explained in the Mural board)

More intentional Positionality to the people and purpose of the gathering (best explained in my podcast conversation with Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel, who introduced me to this concept) and what

Intentional modes of Presence that can help you lead the conversation. To master presence, sign up for my free course on Facilitation, which focuses on how you most want to show up as a leader in the moment to foster the impactful conversations you most want to lead.

Learn and master the essentials. Go beyond the basics.

It can take as little as 10 minutes of reflection to make a gathering plan that serves as a powerful backbone to an impactful gathering.

Check out this self-paced course, where I share tools, templates and patterns to make session planning and design impactful and low-effort.

You'll master a simple framework that will help you craft a clear plan to make your next important gathering as powerful as you need it to be.

45 minutes of video learning and 4 essential frameworks for planning sessions that deliver impact.

Design Powerful Agendas

Start for Free with Mastering Presence

I call this model the 9+ P model of planning because there are way more than the 9Ps in this course.

Again, one of my favorite Ps that isn’t in the nine is Presence - knowing how you need to show up to move the conversation forward.

Mastering how you want to show up is such an important skill. I made this free course with facilitators and leaders with a facilitative approach in mind.

The tools, short Videos and self-guided exercises can help you reimagine and develop a purposeful approach to your leadership.

Sign up for the course, and get 42 essays on modes of leadership, facilitation and presence sent to your inbox for 42 days!

These resources will help you understand what value you bring as a facilitator and a leader…and to increase the range and breadth of what you feel comfortable bringing into the room.

The course uses the metaphor of “hats” to get you to visualize and clarify how you want to show up as a facilitator and leader.

Get the Free Facilitation Course!

Where do you want to lead the conversation?

Conversational Leadership Essentials: Do you Consult or Coach?

Questions evoke answers that are in their likeness. Broad questions usually get broad answers. Generous or thoughtful questions often evoke more generous and thoughtful answers.

Conversations are the fundamental unit of change in any context, and questions are what drive conversations. So if you want to lead powerful change, then you need to master powerful questions. And you may also need to revise your theory of change. It’s common to believe that people will change when told that there’s a better way. But the most powerful changes are self-motivated. Consulting can produce powerful change…but coaching can produce longer-lasting change.

Are you Asking or Telling?

When a waiter comes by your table and asks you and your companions mid-meal “Is Everything Good?” it’s not really a question.

It’s more of a statement, an assumption or presumption….and the generally polite response is a nod or a smile.

“How is everything?” is a question that doesn’t assume that everything is good, but it's SO broad. EVERYTHING? I can’t begin to form an answer. When someone asks me that question, I literally start to scan my entire life.

Similarly, when a leader sits down with a direct report, asking “How is everything?” can be an overbroad question that people can find hard to answer. Breaking “everything” into key components like work-life balance, workload overall, and personal development goals can make it much easier to answer.

A question like “everything good?” sits somewhere between a “pure ask” and a “pure tell” - A pure tell in this situation would be like a waiter coming by and telling you “You’re good. Here’s the check.”

Yikes.

Telling is clearly not the right conversational move in this context.

Questions can lead the conversation toward the past, present or future

“How has your service been?” seeks to understand the past.

“Do you need anything?” seeks to learn if you need anything in the immediate future.

Questions focus the attention of the people hearing it. With our questions, we can draw people’s attention to the past or toward the future. We can focus the conversation on the positives or on the shortcomings of a situation. Each way of forming a question is a way of directing the conversation. Choosing a direction for the conversation is leadership.

One way to see the Past-Present-Future spectrum in action is in project management.

A retrospective asks “How did we do?” at the end of a project, the equivalent of asking a person “How have you been?”

“How are we doing?” is a question that seeks to understand the current situation.

“How will we succeed?” is a question we can ask at the start of a project about the future.

“How did we succeed?” is a question we can ask in the present from the future.

Asking from the future is sometimes called “Backcasting.”

Where do you want to lead the conversation?

Anyone, at any moment, can lead a conversation, just by speaking up. What you say, how you ask, and what you notice, will draw people’s attention to one aspect of the conversation or another.

Where do you want to lead the conversation? What is your compass as you navigate complex challenges?

One fundamental conversational leadership framework I like to use with my coaching clients combines the ASK-TELL spectrum with the PAST-FUTURE spectrum.

I hold these spectrums in mind, together, as I am leading a coaching conversation. And I often draw these spectrums as a 2x2 matrix, below, for my clients when I’m coaching them around *their* coaching skills. Let’s call this the Conversational Leadership Matrix 2.0, since an earlier version can be found in my book, Good Talk.

When to Coach? When to Consult?

When a building is on fire, there’s no time to spare.

If you know where the exits are, just tell people “the building is on fire. The exits are down the hall.”

If you know what a person’s problem is and you can solve it, go ahead and tell them:

“These are the problems you’ve been having. This is the solution that will fix it.”

That’s the “consulting path” in blue, in the diagram below. A Consulting conversation can be a very powerful one.

The “coaching path”, in orange, is different. It creates space and time for someone to decide for themselves what their real challenge is, what they really want to create, and how they will proceed.

Most of the time, challenges that feel like a raging fire are not actual emergencies. It can be worthwhile to slow down and let the person find their own solution.

Framing Powerful Questions IS Leadership

Telling and directing can often feel easier than finding a really powerful question to ask. But telling/directing people has several major downsides:

1. For complex challenges, that aren’t fires (ie, emergencies), simple solutions rarely exist. Complicated challenges can be solved with your past expertise. For complex challenges, your hunch is just a hunch. If you’re new to the complex/complicated distinction, check out the Cynefin framework.

2. Telling places the burden of knowledge, of knowing the "right" solution, on the shoulders of a single person (the leader) in situations that require more nuance or a diverse knowledge set

3. Telling disempowers the people being told/led because it discourages them from finding their own solution.

4. The solutions we find for ourselves are the ones we’re most likely to stick with (The IKEA effect is powerful!)

5. The most Creative and Innovative solutions are most often found by the people who are closest to the challenge. Respecting the knowledge of the person with the challenge means respecting the person. Telling can feel like disrespecting the person.

6. Over time, telling creates a person or team that counts on being told and not listening to their own creativity. It's often triggering for people who have spent time with leaders who rely on telling/directing without justification, so, why bother being creative?!

For these reasons (at least!), coaching, with permission, is one of the most powerful ways to lead and to create change that sticks. Don’t forget the story about the company that replaced all their managers with coaches and achieved 20% more productivity and engagement!

Coaching is a modality that leans into asking over telling, and plays artfully with the past-future spectrum.

Telling people things is a tempting path. It’s a more old-school form of “heroic” leadership. It can offer a sort of short-term high, a dopamine response. Coaching is a slower form of conversational leadership, and the satisfaction from these conversations takes a bit more time.

Hacking Coaching Conversations with the SOON Model

If you want to add coaching to your leadership utility belt, one of my favorite simple models of coaching is the SOON model. It can be a helpful compass for you to find your way in a complex coaching conversation and optimize the flow of the conversation for maximum impact. Let’s break the model down, and as you read along, lets map these key coaching questions to the Conversational Leadership Matrix above.

If you crave a practical roadmap of coaching and want to build your coaching habit as a leader, I highly recommend "The Coaching Habit" from Michael Bungay Stanier! A deeper dive into *why* coaching can be such a powerful conversational “technology” can be found in Timothy Gallwey's "Inner Game of Tennis." If you want to learn from *my* coach, check out my conversation with Robert Ellis, the author of “Coaching from Essence” here.

The SOON model traditionally starts with “success” but I’ve found that people start with where they are - the Situation, and the best coaches let the coachee unwind what the current state is, and how they got there. So I’ve added an extra S!

SSOON stands for Situation, Success, Obstacles, Options and Next Steps.

1. Situation

The Situation is what people come to the coaching conversation with. It’s the answer to the question “What’s going on?” or “How can I help?” These kind of questions are directed to the present, from the present. The coachee might tell you about the past or the challenge, or how things came to be the way they are. It’s your job to probe, inquire and hold space for the full story.

Given that there’s a huge gap between how fast we can talk and how fast we can think (4000 wpm vs 125 wpm) there’s no way that someone can possibly tell you all they could about what they are thinking about a certain issue or challenge. So, it’s worth slowing down and making sure you really understand the situation. Learn more about the thinking/talking gap here.

A transformational coaching stance is to draw the coachee’s attention towards the future, from the past or present challenges.

2. Success

What is Success? This is a question about the future, from the present. The clearer we can help the coachee to think and talk about “what does good look like?” the more helpful we can be as the conversation continues. What is the Ideal Future we’re trying to create?

Asking from the present, to the future, to clarify success and “keep our eye on the prize”, is powerful. But a transformational coaching stance can amp up a vision of success in two ways. One approach is to ask “What’s better than you can imagine?” (a favorite question of *my* coach Robert Ellis). Another conversational tool is to stand in that Ideal Future and ask questions as if that future was now. Sometimes this is called “the Magic Wand” question. “You have the goal we’re defining as Success…now what?” That can help us understand what REAL success looks like. Slow the conversation down. Leverage the Listening Triangle to really expand and clarify that Ideal Future.

3. Obstacles

What are the Obstacles? The Success questions look to amplify the positive aspects of what we’re trying to accomplish. But we need to be open and honest with ourselves about what’s in the way after we’ve clearly defined where we really want to go. List all of the obstacles!

The simplest way is a question that points towards the past “Why don’t you have it (the success state outlined earlier)?”

4. Options

Once we’re clear on the goal and what’s in the way, we need to get clear on the Options ahead of us - the near future. Some say that “the obstacle is the way”. Others say that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time…and that starting with the tusks is the hardest way ahead!

Laying out all the options that can create forward movement toward success is a brainstorming exercise that the coachee needs time and space to think through. What are all the ways they can answer the question “What could you do?”

Once they’ve hit a wall, it’s possible to move into “tell” territory, gently, with questions like “Have you considered something like…?” if you have relevant information, knowledge or experience.

Telling in small doses can be impactful once we’ve asked deeper questions. This is when I find that offering a framework can be extremely helpful - not to give a solution to the coachee, but to help them see their choices in relationship to each other. Mapping options to some timeless frameworks like the Systems Thinking Iceberg, the Ladder of Intervention or my other all-time favorite ladder, the Abstraction Ladder, can help summarize and concretize the work so far, and set you and the coachee up for…

5. Next Steps

At this point, we might be getting close to the time when the conversation needs to end. Once the Zoom room closes, what will happen? What can the coachee commit to doing? If you’ve slowed down the conversation in the Options phase, there will be plenty on the table that they can do…but asking “What will you do?” is a question that points towards commitment.

One framework that my coach Robert loves to use is the idea of the Domino Effect. It’s a wonderful fact of physics that a domino can knock over another domino that’s 1.5X larger. It only takes 29 dominos, each just a bit larger than the next, to knock over an Empire State Building-sized domino.

Picking just one thing that is small enough to be easy to commit to and big enough to be edgy can be powerful. Think of this as the “biggest smallest thing.”

Ask the coachee to find that domino that will set them up for the success they defined earlier - a question that points towards the future.

Shifting the Analysis-Action Set point

Everyone has their own habitual, or learned set point between Analysis and Action.

Some people love to jump straight into action…while others would rather stay in Analysis mode forever…or at least until they feel 1000% sure of their path ahead. Amazon Executive Chairman and Founder Jeff Bezos has been famously quoted from a 2016 annual shareholder letter about this challenge. He suggested that while it's always nice to have access to all of the information you'd want before making a choice and moving into action, in the vast majority of cases, waiting until you know everything you should know is impossible…and detrimental.

"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had," Bezos wrote in the letter. "If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you're probably being slow."

A SSOON coaching conversation moves a person between Analysis, Insights and Action within a fixed time period, all while keeping our minds fixed on Impact - the reason we want to take action. A SSOON conversation is a balanced conversation - one that puts equal emphasis on Analysis, Insights and Action.

Even outside of an official coaching conversation, we can choose to use the tools of coaching to co-create our approach to problem-solving, and to make sure we’re not putting too much emphasis on one mode of thinking vs another. In the context of group conversations, the coaching mindset looks a lot like facilitation. To learn more about leading groups intentionally, check out this essay on three essential conversations for group transformation and this essay on the nine elements of transformational facilitation.

Finding a Sacred Space is an absolute necessity for Leaders

How do you follow your Bliss?

Joseph Campbell invented the term "Follow your Bliss" and this is the moment when he shared his method for doing just that - finding a place and time, each day, for just you, to connect to what matters most, to you - what he calls “a Sacred Space”

I’ve recently been re-watching The Power of Myth, a PBS series from 1988, where Bill Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, then a professor at Sarah Lawrence who wrote several books developing the idea of “The Hero’s Journey” and exploring the connections between the world’s mythologies. Amazingly, you can watch the whole series on YouTube here.

What Does iT Mean to Have a Sacred Place?

Why would someone need a sacred space, especially if you don't believe in a god or gods? Sacred comes from the Proto-Indo-European root root *sak- which meant to "to sanctify”…which just means to set aside or set apart, much like the idea of an “Inner Sanctum”…an inward, protected place. (FYI, Proto-Indo-European is the language that the Sanskrit language group and the Latin languages sprouted from)

Why DO Leaders need a sacred space?

It’s easy to get pulled into the day to day and get lost. Leadership is about holding the vision and helping other people connect with that vision.

Holding space for others takes energy, focus and intention that needs to be replenished, every day. Sleep gives some replenishment for the body and mind…but a sacred space is for your soul!

Below is a transcription of Campbell’s exhortation to each of us to find our “Bliss Station” each day. I can’t really say it any better than him!

This is a term I like to use now as an absolute necessity for anybody today. 

You must have a room or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning. 

You don't know who your friends are. You don't know what you owe to anybody. 

You don't know what anybody owes to you.

 But a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. 

And first you may find that nothing's happening there. But if you have a sacred place and use it.

…most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our life. I don't know whether you've had the experience I've had but as you get older, the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where the hell you are. 

What is it you intended? 

You're always doing something that is required of you. 

This minute, that minute, another minute. 

Where is your bliss station? Try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the records. The music that you really love, even if it's corny music that nobody else respects. I mean, the one that you like or the book you want to read. 

Get it done and have a place in which to do it

Any Leader who wants to be truly effective needs to find this time, in order to renew themselves, to reorient themselves, to ground themselves.

What do I do in this so-called Sacred Space?

First off, Don’t Underestimate the Power of Self-Reflection (says the Harvard Business Review).

Maybe the simplest and most effective morning practice are Morning Pages. Coined and championed by author Julia Cameron, morning pages ask us to hand-write three pages, long hand, without stopping, first thing each day. It can be transformative if you give it a try.

Not into writing?

Some years ago the wonderful podcast, OnBeing, featured this Tree of Contemplative Practices.

“The branches represent different groupings of practices. For example, Stillness Practices focus on quieting the mind and body in order to develop calmness and focus. Generative Practices may come in many different forms but share the common intent of generating thoughts and feelings, such as thoughts of devotion and compassion, rather than calming and quieting the mind.”

Try walking, singing, sketching…anything that falls under the category of “following your bliss” or stepping back from the day-to-day and giving yourself space to be.

The Tree of Contemplative Practices Image by Carrie Bergman + design by Maia Duerr/The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society..

Your Toughest Conversations Are the Ones You Have with Yourself

For Leaders, Your Inner Voice is a Superpower...until it isn't. Here are four ways to shift it.

As a leader, it's natural to think of strategies to tackle current issues or prepare for future ones - that’s the job. But if you find yourself constantly thinking about your company’s challenges, if your thoughts spiral out of control (or inwards), work can take over your life and have a negative impact on your relationships, your health and eventually, your company.

How you manage your inner talk is as important as how you manage your leadership team or how you recruit investors, advisors and board members. 

There is no silver bullet, but there are simple tools you can apply on your own and ways to seek out the right kind of help to get you moving.

Who sits on your inner board of directors?

The idea of having a host of voices in your head isn’t particularly flattering. It can conjure images of a Hollywood-type of schizophrenia. Yet, it’s a fact: each of us has a crowd between our ears. Some of the voices in our heads cheer us on; others put us down. Some whisper to us as we try to fall asleep.

It’s easy to overlook our internal conversation in the bustle of life’s duties. Our culture’s outward focus can keep us from taking time to look inward, and it’s a shame since our inner conversation is the foundation for all of the other conversations we engage in. And shifting our inner chatter can deliver a tremendous ROI. (that's why I included a whole chapter about inner speech in my book Good Talk, about how to design conversations that matter)

What Inner Speech can help with

Being able to reflect silently, to talk to and with ourselves can help us:

++ Make sense of experiences (like when we journal)

++ Remember things, like repeating your grocery list as you walk through the supermarket (don't forget the eggs!)

++ Visualize, simulate and plan for the future (like when we daydream or strategize)

++ Control yourself (like saying "Don't go there!" to yourself as you walk into a conflict)

When we take time to listen to and engage with the voices in our heads, we can begin to identify patterns and themes. We can become aware of how our inner dialogue either supports or undermines our success. We can start to distinguish the helpful from the unhelpful and make changes accordingly.

We can learn how to talk back to ourselves more kindly, offering ourselves words of encouragement and perspective when life gets tough. We can also recognize when certain thought patterns are leading us down a destructive path, and choose different paths instead.

By becoming conscious of our inner conversation, we gain a powerful tool for self-improvement and self-empowerment. It's like gaining a superpower! In fact, inner speech is much, much faster than outer speech, or writing. We can write at 40 words per minute, speak outwardly at 150 words per minute, but some research has clocked inner speech at 4000 words per minute! 

Harnessing that power is incredible.

But sometimes this superpower can turn on itself. Dr. Ethan Koss, in his book Chatter, points out that inner speech can become chatter: a circular, repeating, enervating inner grind.

When Inner Speech runs off the rails

When our inner speech gets out of control, Dr. Koss suggests that:

++ It can make it hard to perform in the moment, because we're stuck anxiously ruminating on the past or projecting into the future.

++ We can burn out our friends and partners by continuously sharing the same challenges with them over and over again.

++ We can burn ourselves out. Overactive inner speech can affect our sleep, which is essential to a healthy life. Extended stress is similarly toxic.

Four approaches to Managing Inner Chatter On your own

In order to combat hyper-active chatter, Dr. Koss suggests three key types of approaches: Those you can do with yourself, those you can apply with others, and things you can do in your physical space. Here are four approaches you use on your own, either in your head or in your space.

1. Talk to yourself by your first Name

2. Use Temporal Distancing

3. Change your Space

4. Slow down and Get into your body

1. Talk to yourself by Name

Use your name when you talk to yourself. It can make your inner voice kinder and more friendly, instantly. It automatically shifts your perspective into a "coaching" mode...we're great at solving challenges for others, so, when we talk to ourselves in the second person, we leverage this linguistic machinery for our own benefit.

2. Use Temporal Distancing

Inner speech, when it gets stuck, is usually stuck in the past or in the near future. Shifting your temporal frame gets you unstuck.

Ask yourself: "How will you feel about this in six months or a year? How do you want to feel about this in five years?"

3. Change your Space

The easiest way to change conversations is to change the space or place the conversation happens in...that's why the "interface" for a conversation is at the center of my Conversation OS Canvas. You can change the space or interface of your conversations by journalling, recording yourself talking out loud in your house or more powerfully…while going for a walk. 

Dr. Koss also suggests that you can "order your surroundings to order your mind"...ie, tidy up your desk or your house when you're caught in anxious chatter!

4. Slow down and Get into your body

We all have voices in our heads. But it’s important to remember that they are just that: voices. In our heads.

Powerful action comes from our whole selves - our heads, our hearts and our guts. So, listen to the voices in your head, but also take time to slow down and listen to your heart and your body. These parts of you have real voices, too. And a Real Voice can change your life, and help you make sense of the world. 

But we can’t hear these other voices until we can get quiet and take a step back. We need space to tune in and listen to our whole selves, our whole voices. Being in silence, mindfully connecting to your whole self, is always time well spent.

The best way to shift your thinking: Talk to someone who expands your thinking frame

When you’re stuck in an inner chatter rut, it can be hard to break out of it, even with the tools above. Your inner speech becomes a monologue. That’s when you need to find a trusted conversation partner to turn your monologue into a dialogue.

It can be tempting to go to someone who will let you unburden yourself and hear you out. It can be tempting to choose people in your life to talk with who will just listen. And you should! Finding someone who will deeply listen is incredibly impactful.

Whether you seek out a friend, family member, therapist, coach or advisor, it’s essential to have deeper dialogues with people who will challenge you and expand your frame of thinking. 

To get out of your rut, pick someone who can leverage the mindsets of coaching, mentoring and advising - not just listening to you, but pushing back on your thinking. They should ask you deeper and deeper questions that pull you into thinking differently. When you start to look at the challenge in a new way, you will start to break out of your inner chatter and start to create something new. If a coach sounds like the right approach for you, you can learn more about my coaching philosophy here.

Note: If your inner speech is particularly dark or repetitive and the four approaches you can try on your own, above, are having no impact at all, talking to friends and family isn’t making a difference, and a coach isn’t making a dent in the situation, you might need a therapist or medication.

An inner speech checklist

1. Recognize when your inner speech is turning into chatter.

2. Take a break and do something else. Take a walk, tidy up...shift your space!

3. Learn how to practice mindfulness and meditation in order to be present in the moment and not ruminate on the past or worry about the future. Get into your body and out of your head

4. Develop healthier thought patterns by challenging negative thoughts with positive ones. Consider the worst case AND the best case scenarios!

5. Work on developing self-compassion and self-forgiveness for when you slip up or make mistakes. This is a “Sporting” mindset: you win some, you lose some, and you keep playing.

6. If the chatter persists, talk to someone who can help you find perspective or look at the situation in an alternate light.

7. Engage in activities that bring you joy and help you relax so that your inner speech can take a break from ruminating on stressful topics.

Take the next step

Which of these strategies resonated the most with you? Which are you going to try out?! 

Let me know! 

Did I miss a strategy that you find works really well for you? 

Let me know!

Your Team Meetings Might be Leaky

Your Team Meetings Might be Leaky

Do your meetings always start and end on time?

Does everyone join at the exact call time, or do people trickle in?

Do people sometimes need to “hop off early”?

Does all the work on the agenda happen in the meeting, or does the work spill over?

If any of the above feel true, your gatherings might be leaky.

Leakiness can become even more pronounced over the course of a multi-week or multi-month project - Leakiness can look like when a team needs to make an important decision and an important decision maker isn’t there.

Leakiness makes it hard to get things done.

It can be hard, maybe even impossible, to have a proper conversation, to come to a realistic or powerful decision or conclusion when the same people aren't in the conversation from the beginning to the end. 

Throwing Vegetables at the Stove

When you cook, do you gather your ingredients, toss them at your stove, turn up the burner and then walk away… and hope that dinner will be ready in 30 minutes?

No, of course not!  Process matters.

You need to prep your veggies. You need to add the ingredients in a certain order, depending on the results you want. 

And you need to pick the right container and the right temperature for your dish.

And for nearly every recipe, you need to raise and lower the heat at different moments in the process.

Four ways to Tighten up a Leaky Meeting Container

When you have a “leaky” container, things don’t heat up or get “well done” the way you might want them to. If you leave the door to the oven open, your turkey will never really cook. Similarly, if your board meetings are poorly run, or your leadership team gatherings or offsites are haphazard, your company simply will not be able to “cook”, i.e. get things properly done, either.

There are four simple ways to tighten up your container, and I think about them visually, like this:

How do we enter? How do we know we can leave or that we need to stay? How do we act when we’re in the container? And most importantly, how do we know we’re “out of bounds”?

In other words, you need:

1. Clear Invitations

2. Clear Commitments

3. Clear Conversational Rules

4. Consistent Application of Boundaries

1. Clear Invitations

When I was writing my book, Good Talk, about how to design conversations that matter, I was tempted to title it “What the F*CK are we talking about?” since I felt like everyone has, at some point, wanted to ask this very question. 

What is this meeting really about? And are we really talking about the right things?

A clear invitation means the goal, the purpose and outcome of the conversation/meeting/project is clear - clear enough for a person to be able to commit to the conversation.

Powerful invitations tap into powerful sources of motivation. Psychologists generally agree that there are two primary types of motivation: internal (or intrinsic) motivation, and external (or extrinsic) motivation. 

The top Intrinsic motivators, in order of potency, are play, purpose and potential. These three could also be thought of as direct motivations. 

Play is the most direct and durable: Come and play...it’ll be fun! Purpose is next, focusing on near-term impact; while potential is about long-term impact.

The most powerful conversations and tightest containers tap into intrinsic sources of motivation. The more you can connect your invitations to the purpose and potential of each person involved, the better.

If you want to know more about the art of invitation, I wrote a whole chapter about it in my book Good Talk.

The simple way to practice this is by giving your meetings a descriptive name. Don’t call it a budget meeting.  Call it “Collectively decide what we’re going to spend money on for 2023”.  Or “discuss options for budget spend” if you’re going to make the final call.

2. Clear Commitments

Are you in or out? Are you coming or not?!

One of the reasons that a workshop can be such a powerful container for getting work done is that clear amounts of time are blocked out for the work, ideally with all of the right people in the room, for the whole time of the gathering.

In a design sprint, a team commits to five days of focused work. On day five, a team commits to testing an idea with customers, regardless of whether the concept feels fully baked or if the team is really ready or not. 

The commitment from the whole team is to come for five days, and to clear their calendar. If someone wants to leave on day three, it’s possible that you can push back, and remind them of their commitment to be fully present for the whole five days.

A commitment has a start and an end. That commitment could last a week, a month or a year. It can be specific, like agreeing to show up on Wednesdays at 1pm for an hour, every other week for 12 weeks. Commitments can be more general, like “looking over a document.”  The more specific a commitment is, the easier it will be to agree to and the easier it will be to reinforce (#4!).

A challenge I’ve had with clear commitments is in longer-term transformation and leadership development programs. Over weeks and months, people get pulled in many directions, and lose focus…the steam escapes from the container and the pressure drops. Usually, only a small fraction of the people who responded to the challenge and the invitation are still deeply committed at the halfway point. 

So, either ask for shorter commitments…or recruit a smaller group of people. Fewer people means less diffusion of the commitment across the group, sometimes called “social loafing”.

This is why I often share my research on Minimum Viable Transformations with folks leading transformational projects. A big change only needs about 3.5% of a group to be consistently and actively engaged. So…get clear on who that 3.5% is as soon as possible and engage with them to maintain consistent commitment!

Clear commitments aren’t just about showing up. Clear commitments can also mean staying engaged *during* a gathering and also *between* gatherings.

Do you have a system to track and follow up on action items? And do you have to chase people to have them do what they said they would? That’s some leakiness, right there. 

This also means that you are not getting the full value out of the meeting.

3. Clear Conversational Rules

This is a rather broad category, but I’ll give you some examples. 

In the documentary Stutz (which is amazing!) Jonah Hill films himself unpacking critical thinking tools with his therapist, Stutz. Hill suggested that we sometimes want our therapist to give us advice and we want our friends to just listen to us. But instead, it’s the other way around…our therapist just listens, and our friends “who are idiots” give us advice.

Conversational Rules can simply look like clear boundaries. 

Show of hands if anybody has ever gotten advice when they just wanted to be listened to? Or gotten advice, but the wrong kind!?

Sharing work for critique with a larger team is a great example of this. Being clear on the challenge you’re solving, what your blockers are and what you do and don’t want help or feedback on is part of the job. Check out my podcast episode on designing a culture of critique here for some insights on designing this crucial conversation.

Setting up clear boundaries is an act of Conversational Leadership. 

In my coaching mastermind group when we share a challenge we make it really really clear:

Do we want coaching on this challenge?

Do we want advice? 

Do we want people to share their own experiences with similar challenges?

Similarly, I regularly pause to set up conversational rules with my wife. If she shares a challenge from work or her life, I ask if she wants empathy, coaching or brainstorming, or something else. 

I learned this approach largely from my men’s group facilitation training. In my men's group we're very clear on boundaries. We only ask questions that help someone go deeper into their own experience of their challenge. We focus on emotions and sensations over stories and enforce that boundary.

We never offer advice. 

Clarifying the rules and boundaries of any conversation is key. 

You can do this with the group or offer guidelines and suggestions to lead the way.

The clearer the invitation, commitments and rules, the tighter (ie, less leaky) the container for the conversation is. 

4. Consistent Application of Boundaries

If you set up a container and never push back or reinforce the boundary when someone breaks a commitment or violates a rule, you wind up with a leaky container. And leaky containers are draining. People see that the boundaries of the container are porous, and things go downhill from there.

If someone misses a meeting and you say nothing, the rest of the group notices this. 

“Do the commitments matter, or do they not?” the team wonders…

If the conversational rule is that each person speaks once in a round, with no cross-talk or advice, and someone breaks that rule, do you let it slide without saying anything? Or do you remind the group of the rules and ask them to continue?

One important rule - consistent application of boundaries isn’t policing. Generally speaking, people don’t like feeling policed, forced or coerced into following rules. Make sure people understand why the rules, boundaries and commitments exist, and reconnect them to the invitation or purpose of the gathering in the first place.

In Harvard’s Negotiation Institute they suggest being “hard on the problem and soft on the people”...so, we’re never faulting a person, or making them wrong…we’re asking everyone to re-engage with the boundaries for the good of the whole group.

Tight Containers Help You Get Things Done

According to Cook’s Illustrated, a cover helps water boil faster, but not by much…a covered pot boils in just over 12 minutes and an uncovered pot boils in 13 minutes and 15 seconds.

But when you lock that lid tight…that’s when you really cook!

Growing up, I knew that my mother loved her pressure cooker and used it for almost everything. Why? Because a pressure cooker has a tight lid.

With that tight lid, the water temperature rises higher and the ingredients cook faster. That’s why instapots were the “it” gift a few years back…they’re not quite instant, but they're faster than your stockpot.

(As with so many other things, the world eventually realized my mom was onto something good!)

In a pressure cooker, instead of boiling at the usual 100 degrees Centigrade, water boils at 121 degrees. That 21-degree increase means a stew that would normally boil for an hour COULD be done in 20 minutes. That’s HUGE.

Locking your container tight gives you a cooking time that's two-thirds shorter.

Getting Things Done Increases Engagement

Disengagement is the biggest issue facing leaders of teams today. Depending on what stats you look at, easily half of employees are disengaged in the workplace. We come to work to offer value, to achieve our goals, and to make progress. Our leaders are there to help make that possible, to remove the barriers to progress. Getting things done, seeing the results of your work, is satisfying, addictive even.

When we feel no progress is being made, it’s an energy suck. When someone walks away from a meeting you’re hosting with a sense of frustration, eventually this becomes burnout, disengagement and churn.

When I run 360s for leaders, one of the key questions I ask their direct reports is “are you able to create extraordinary results with this leader?”

If you’re unsure of how your team would answer, it’s time to start tightening up your leaky containers.

The most powerful way to tighten up any container is to come into the present moment and feel the energy in the room, whether it’s virtual or physical. Does the group feel coherent, clear and energized? If not, slow down, and have the conversation about Invitations, Commitments and Conversational rules. It can take a few moments to tighten up the lid on the container, but it’s always worth the effort to really get things cooking.

Three Questions to Ask Yourself before taking on a new Project

A few weeks ago I stumbled on the lovely diagram below on twitter. It’s a simple flowchart to help answer that extremely essential and very common question:

“Should I take on this new project?”

The basic answer is: NO. You just don’t have enough time. You already have enough on your plate!!!

Delighted with the profound and straightforward wisdom of the original post, I shared the image on LinkedIn…where the conversation got a bit more complex and nuanced. (feel free to add more nuance!)

Many people offered comments to the effect of:

“But!”

and

“But!!!”

And we’ve all been there.

Something glittering comes across your path, all shiny and alluring and we start to think.

There is always an inner conversation that rolls in our heads ( in fact, in writing my book about designing conversations, Good Talk, I explored the power of inner dialogue much more than I expected) and it’s those inner conversations that rule our lives!

Maybe you’ve told yourself the same things when a new project presented itself:

“I should do this, the financial payoff could be enormous!” 

“I should do this…opportunities like this don’t come along all the time.”

“I should do this…if I pull it off it will make me look amazing!”

One commenter on LinkedIn pointed out that a more interesting question is,

“Should you make time to do this?”

They went on to offer that this question shifts our attention towards reprioritizing your time. Are we spending our time where we have the most heart and provide the most value?

This perspective is also in the spirit of my friend and mentor Allan Chochinov who once told me:

“Everything new you take on makes it harder to do everything else you’ve already taken on”.

So, taking on a new project should always give us pause.

With my head spinning from the comments, I took a hard look at the original diagram and reworked it with some new perspectives.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

There are two types of motivations for doing a thing — intrinsic and extrinsic. 

Intrinsic motivation is driven by internal factors. 

Extrinsic motivation is driven by external factors. 

Extrinsic motivations can include economic pressure, emotional pressure and just good old plain inertia…we keep doing something just because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Extrinsic motivation is weaker than intrinsic in at least one sense — when the external pressure is off, the motivation disappears. So, if we’re trying to get someone else to do something, it can be a high-energy endeavor to keep the pressure on.Leading a team or an organization through extrinsic motivation is a poor choice, because we never get the best, juiciest parts of a person to show up through these approaches (more n that in a second).

Yet we try to leverage extrinsic motivation on ourselves!

Extrinsic motivation expressed as inner speech could look like the first three questions above. Also:

“I should do this, I really need the money!” (economic pressure)

“I should do this…otherwise I’ll let everyone down if I don’t!” (emotional pressure)

Intrinsic motivation points the way to three more interesting questions we could ask ourselves as we consider taking on a project.

Invitation is how we bring others (and ourselves) into the conversation. 

The Power of Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is described as having the qualities of autonomy, mastery and purpose in Daniel Pink’s book Drive. But I prefer the description co-authors Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi offer in their book Primed to Perform. They point to play as the most deeply intrinsic motivator.

After all, inside of every adult is a kid, who just loves what they love.

 Turning work into play is the best way to get the best out of others…and it’s also the way to get the best out of ourselves.

McGregor and Doshi offer two other levers of intrinsic motivation: Purpose and Potential. Purpose is motivating, but not as deeply motivating as pure fun. Play is still the peak motivator, even if it’s hard for us adults to tap into.

Potential is a powerful motivator, but less so than Purpose, because potential is in the future. We’re still animals underneath the clothes we wear, and the future exerts a weaker pull than the present. 

The Three Intrinsic Motivation Questions: Play, Purpose and Potential

When someone comes to me for coaching, if they are at a big fork in the road, I’d suggest three questions. Each can help us to reflect on the three levers of intrinsic motivation. The diagram is a bit more convoluted than the original…but it reflects the complexity of life and the journey towards creating a life we love..

should you take on that new project? Yes…if it connects with your deepest sense of intrinsic motivation

Play: Will this project create pure joy for me, right now?

Purpose: Does this project connect to my unique zone of genius or my biggest, hairiest, audacious goals?

Potential: Will this project help create a life I love?

An Inner-Work Checklist for reflection on that shiny project

Being able to answer the play, purpose and potential questions above requires us to do a few things:

1. Know how our whole body responds when we consider the project. Getting out of our heads and into our present-tense embodied experience call tell us a lot… if we pay attention.

2. Do we know where our zone of genius lies? Coined by Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap, he suggests that there are many things we can do with our time and our talent. Our zone of genius is the best use of our time AND our talent. We may be competent and even excellent at many things. Hendricks suggests that we should commit to spending as much time as possible engaged with our deepest talents, aligning ourselves with our best use — our purpose, what we were made to do. 

3. Do we know our BHAG? The notion of a BHAG (or a Big Hairy Audacious Goal) was coined in “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies” by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Knowing your BHAG can help you say yes or no to a project. If it connects to your BHAG, find time for it.

4. The last question “Will this create the life I love?” comes from my coaching coach, Robert Ellis’ work in Coaching from Essence. He teaches that we all have a core essence, that when expressed, is valuable and worthwhile. In short: You are enough. When we let our essence express itself fully, we feel it. Creating a life you love means finding forms that will help you express your essence. That is our highest potential, fully expressed

5. Finally, the diagram as I’ve recreated it, asks us to be intentional about STOPPING doing other things. If we find something that aligns with our sense of play, purpose and potential, it’s time to take a look at the other things on our calendar. Make space and time to look at how you are spending your time!

The Talking and Thinking Gap

Whenever I am designing a gathering, I think about the constraints.

It might be partly my physics degree and partly my design degree.

After all, physics tells us there are some basic constants in the universe that make this universe the way it is - the speed of light, the mass of an electron…you can’t break the law of gravity, you just have to work with it!

Similarly, in design school they taught us that when you’re working with steel, glass, plastics, or any other material, you have to respect and harness the fundamentals of that material.

When your material is people and conversation, you have to respect other kinds of constraints.

How long can people really focus before they need a break?

How much time in their day can they justify setting aside for this conversation?

How many people can we fit into the room!?!

Some constraints can be bent…few can be broken without consequence.

One fundamental constraint of the human condition is the thought-intention-expression gap.

Recently an Instagram friend shared a painting with two circles. One, rather large, was labeled

“What I meant to say”

While the other, much smaller circle was labeled

“What I said”

But there is a third, even larger circle that needs to be taken into consideration:

“Everything I am thinking about this topic”

The basic constraint, in mathematical terms, is this:

People can think at up to 4,000 words a minute.

We can only speak at 125 words per minute, in most cases.

In other words:

There will always be more to say than we can ever express.

There is more that we are thinking about a topic than we might even hope to say.

Of course, there are oodles of famous quotes about this gap…especially when we multiply this diagram by however many people are in the room.

For example:

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

– Robert J. McCloskey, US Ambassador

If you intend to host gatherings, meetings, offsites, strategy sessions, any conversation, really, that are deeper, more connected, and therefore more effective, it’s safe to assume that slowing the conversation down will help you create the space for more deeper connections and more generous sharing.

This talking - thinking gap is why the Listening Triangle I shared a few weeks back is so powerful - leveraging the Listening triangle can help you make sure you get to the heart of a conversation.

How to host deeper connections with the Listening Triangle

Mindfully Slowing down the conversation

Lately, I’ve been hearing lots of friends and colleagues talk about slowing down a bit for the summer.

If it’s summer where you are, and you have the means, that’s an awesome choice

For example, if you’re in the Northeast of the United States of America the peaches are awesome right now…and such delicacies deserve to be savored slowly, far away from the glow of a screen.

(If you happen to be reading this essay months after I wrote it, don’t worry - every season is a great time to slow down.)

Slowing down doesn’t just mean taking time away from work, we can slow down during work, too.

But I don’t mean slacking off for a nap, although plenty of research says that’s an awesome idea.

Slowing Down the Conversation

What would it feel like to give an issue a bit more breathing room?

What would it feel like to solve one key challenge instead of tackling several challenges during a meeting?

What if we stretched out the creative process, just a bit, and came up with one more idea before we started choosing the best way forward?

What if we dropped in, slowed down, and really listened to someone, before moving the conversation forward?

Conventional Conversations move things forward

In conventional conversations, we often ask a question, hear the answer and then move on to the next questions we have in our pockets. We assume that the answer we heard is sufficient, and that it resembles what the person actually meant to say. Rapid fire! Let’s move this convo along, people!

The fact is, while folks can speak around 150 words per minute, we think at the rate of thousands of words per minute.

What does that mean in practical terms? No one can ever say all they mean to.

Plus, most of us, when we’re meant to be listening, also tend to think, even just a little bit about the next question, or how we’ll respond.

Active Listening is a great start.

Paraphrase and confirm! It’s like looping back and “double stitching” each thread of the conversation instead of moving forward in lockstep.

Active Listening Conversations go deeper

But the listening triangle goes one step even deeper!

The Listening Triangle

Triangulation is the process of finding out where you really are in a territory by taking a series of measurements. This approach, applied to listening, was recommended in an HBR article about managing a polarized workforce.

But this listening mental model works well when you want to cool down any heated conversation, or just slow things down for the summer.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Ask a real, powerful question.

2. Actively listen, ie, paraphrase and confirm that you got it right.

3. Re-ask. Don’t move on to another topic. Shift your question just a little bit to dive one step deeper and help triangulate your understanding of the person’s position.

I like to draw the Listening triangle like above, almost like a spiral, going inwards. Instead of moving the conversation forward, we’re taking it deeper, into the heart of the matter.

The authors of the HBR article suggest that the listening triangle can help you listen to understand, not just to respond, which can foster empathy and reduce polarized conversations.

This mode of relating to others can be transformative.

Slowing down your responses by re-asking can also ensure that your assumptions about someone’s beliefs are anchored in reality, not your biases or first reactions..

The listening triangle can also help someone feel really, really deeply heard.

I love to use the listening triangle in my coaching conversations.

If you take the listening triangle out for a spin this summer, let me know how it works out for you.

Five Steps to Manage a Crisis: ABCDE

Stepping back from the problem

Acting from a Crisis Mode is rarely effective. That’s because when we’re experiencing a crisis we either feel like we’re *inside* of the problem, or the problem is inside of us.

As with many conversations, slowing our inner dialogue process down and avoiding jumping to conclusions is often helpful. This can help us pull ourselves out of the problem, and the problem out from inside of us and look at the challenge from a different perspective - maybe even several perspectives!

The concept of “in the problem” vs “the problem is in us” are from my coaching mentor, Robert Ellis. The sketches above are modeled after his and his work in Coaching from Essence.

The sketch below is inspired by an exercise Erin Warner hosted during my Facilitation Masterclass. Erin had the attendees visualize their biggest challenge, and asked them to visualize walking around that challenge, while physically moving in our spaces. Walking around our challenge is powerful - creating movement helps us get unstuck.

Once we’ve done some of that work, inviting others into the challenge in a more strategic way can be a lot easier.

It was Shakespeare who famously wrote in Hamlet:

 “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

I have a favorite quote from the same play that is a slightly weirder way to say the same thing:

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.”

All of which is to say: it is often our own beliefs and perspectives that make life challenging - or amazing. 

Living in a tiny space (a nutshell) is only bad if we want something more/different.

So, having a process to examine our own beliefs about a problem, challenge or crisis is worthwhile. And wouldn't you know it, such a process exists! It’s a five-stage exercise called ABCDE, and Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, is credited with creating this exercise. I use it with my coaching clients often, I use it on myself, it’s in my book Good Talk, and I’d love to share it with you.

But first…why does it work?

Your Mind is Racing

I heard a story on NPR about a woman who would leave herself voice messages, talking to herself about her challenges, while she was out walking her dog. Later, she would listen to the recordings. She could then take a step back, and listen to herself, as if she were listening to the problems of a friend. We all know how much better we are at solving other people’s problems than our own.

Many of us are also kinder to other people than we are to ourselves, applying a very different and more forgiving error recognition OS (operating system) with friends or family. Taking her internal conversation outside (changing the interface of the conversation) shifted how she related to it.

Externalizing her inner conversation also slowed down its cadence. Self-talk is fast—really fast. 

Researchers have clocked inner speech at a pace of 4,000 words per minute —which is about 10 times faster than verbal speech. The voicemail method slows self-talk down. Like taking in a landscape on a stroll versus on a bullet train, she was able to hear nuances in her own perspective that would be easy to miss otherwise.

Comedian George Carlin said, “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” Even with externalization, there is a tendency to agree with ourselves, especially if there’s an issue we’re passionately, stubbornly stuck on. It can be hard to break the thread of a circling thought. Our internal conversation can cut a deep groove and get stuck in a rut. Here is an exercise that can help you change your mind:

ABCDE: Change Your Mind in Five Easy Steps

Are you willing to attempt to disagree with yourself? The thread of this conversation is designed to guide you through a discussion with yourself, and invite you to take more sides in the conversation. Using a “paper interface” for this self-conversation can slow the conversation down and get everything out of your head.

The exercise can also clarify the impact of the stories you’re telling yourself and generate alternatives.

Grab some paper, a pen and a timer. Give yourself five minutes to brain-write (free-association journaling) each step.

Adversity: Capture a detailed, fact-based who/what/when/where of a challenge you’re struggling with. For example, if you’re upset that someone cut quickly in front of you while driving, the adversity is just “I got cut off on the highway.”

Belief: What was running through your mind when the adversity happened? What’s looping through it now? Your belief, in this case, might be that the driver who cut you off is a jerk, inconsiderate, even dangerous.

Consequence: What is the result or impact of your belief on you? Are you mad, sad, or something else? Focus on your own experience. 

Disputation: Write down as many alternative interpretations of the facts as you can. Can you find evidence that might dispute your belief? Was the person who cut you off driving to the hospital? Were they having a really bad day? What else could be true?

Energy: Describe to yourself how these alternative beliefs and narratives make you feel. If the energy from one of these options is better, invite yourself to experiment with it more.

Triple Loop Learning: Being, Thinking and Doing

Learning happens on three levels. The most primal is single loop learning - doing something to get a result…and checking in to see if it got you closer to your goal. 

Think about following a recipe step by step and checking in at the end - does it look and taste like it should? If you’ve ever used someone else’s agenda or activities for a meeting and not gotten the results you wanted, you might ask - did I DO exactly what I should have done?

Often there are unseen variables in a recipe - the freshness of the herbs, how one cuts the ingredients, the altitude of the cook - and the attitude of the cook, too!

Shifts at the level of thinking are essential in complex contexts. A Chef nearly always has to modify a recipe on the fly to adapt to evolving conditions. Otherwise, we can get caught in an Insanity Loop: Doing the same thing, over and over again, and never getting the results we want.

To get out of a trap of single loop, reactive learning, we need to think differently, which can be a challenge. How do we shift how we think?

Which brings us to the third loop of learning. Shifts at the level of thinking can produce powerful results…and the easiest, most high-leverage way to shift your thinking is at the level of being. We can shift our being by letting go of what we’re not, or by shifting our aspirations and our imagination.

Working at the level of being is transformative. Shifts in mindset help you reimagine your role as a host and leader.

The Triple loop learning model draws on the work of Chris Argyris Donald Schön, but this version, boiled down to its essential core, came to me through my coach, Robert Ellis.

Gender at Work: Four tips for defeating Mansplaining and Manspreading

The Bird of Humanity has two wings

The founder of the Baha'i faith is quoted as saying:

“The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly.”

I love this quote, but it’s a bit outdated since it was written in the early 1900s. Today we might say that the bird of humanity also has a lot of non-binary feathers that play a critical role in flight. We're all part of the same bird.

Lifting up women everywhere and strengthening their presence in the halls of power is necessary to stabilize the bird of humanity and help us all move forward together.

Another necessary part of "stabilizing the bird" is to encourage the “male wing” to use some different muscles and re-imagine what masculinity can be.

I’ve been co-leading a men’s group since 2018 and men’s work has been an important part of my ongoing personal development. Men’s work has allowed me to expand my emotional range and resilience. It’s also expanded my range and depth in my one-on-one coaching and team transformation work.

Men have work to do to help shift how we work.

How we talk is how we work

How we talk is how we live, relate… and how we work. 

Conversations are the smallest, atomic unit of change. 

In my book, Good Talk, I identified 9 elements of conversation dynamics that, when shifted, can change how conversations work. In this essay, I’ll share a few of these key elements and ways to reimagine them to create more gender-balanced and productive conversations at work.

There’s work that women-identifying folks can do to shift how conversations work (and I’ll share some strategies below), work that all leaders of any gender-identity can do… but men also need to do their own work, on themselves. 

Let’s say that again: it's not on women to shift how conversations work at work. There are strategies below to help…but men have a lot of work to do, starting with themselves.

I’ll give you a personal example: I rather like feeling smart.

Not having an answer to an important question is frustrating. I get impatient.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Very few people come to me and say:

“I’d like to get my team to have longer meetings, with less-clear outcomes.”

Sitting in the mystery isn’t really the flavor of the 21st century.

Why?

In my own experience, I noticed that being smart, clever and having the right answer was an easy way to get approval from my father at the dinner table.

Good grades were rewarded. Slacking grades were a disappointment. 

Verbal jousting was the family pastime. 

Being silent and reflective was a value, too, but not in a conversation - being first off the blocks got you points.

My pre-teen brain imprinted the lesson:

“talking first = good, 

listening = not as good”. 

“Knowing = good, 

uncertainty = not so good.”

I don’t think I’m alone in this, either.

Agility, Design thinking, Sprints, structured facilitation all offer the promise of better results in less time and all are very, very popular things to train a team on, all for good reason.

Wondering, wandering, asking why and pumping the brakes aren’t quite as flashy and popular, which is a bummer.

A few years back I interviewed my friend Kai Hailey, then the head of the Sprint Leaders Academy at Google, on my podcast. The Sprint is a key part of Google’s startup culture, and helps them move quickly. 

Sprints are about helping teams and organizations move faster…but Kai is passionate about slowing down, too. Why? To make sure we’re all heading in the right direction and to consider the long-term impacts and ethics of our products and services.

I think we all suffer from “go go go” disease… but I think that men have a unique role in the creation of this situation… and in transforming it.

Men’s Work and The Man Box

Men need to learn to listen more deeply. 

Men need to learn to listen more deeply to women. 

Men need to learn to listen more deeply to other men. 

And Men need to learn to listen more deeply to ourselves - to recognize, deeply feel and process our emotions with other men - and discover a broader range of capacities….in other words, we need to get out of the “man box”.

When I look at Jennifer Armbrust’s diagrams of the qualities of a masculine economy and a feminine economy, I feel a much greater pull to the feminine economy!

The Man Box is a rigid set of expectations and perceptions of what is “manly” behavior. 

We tell boys to “stop crying” instead of “It’s okay to feel sad.”

We tell boys “be brave” instead “I understand that you feel scared.”

Because no man perfectly fits the description, all men are limited by hegemonic masculinity through policing of behaviors seen as “violations” (Edwards & Jones, 2009). 

Men are constantly pushing each other to get back in the man box.

Just google “toxic masculinity” if you need a reminder of what men pushing each other back into the Man Box gets us. 

You could also google “mass firing over zoom” to see why men need to learn new modes of being - not just in their lives, but at work. 

The future of work requires masculinity to find comfort in new ways of being.

Men who are forceful are “leaders”. Women who are forceful are hysterical.

… so we are taught. 

Dominance, power, and strength have historically been seen as "male" traits, after all. In fact, there is ample evidence that women are punished for acting too “bossy” or being “pushy”.

Similarly, historically "feminine"  behaviors, like vulnerability, collaboration, caring, connection and empathy are not deeply cultivated or encouraged in men. 

If a man leans too far in that direction, you’ll get pushed back into the Man Box with accusations of being “too soft” or a “sissy.” 

In order for the bird of humanity to shift, in order for new modes of holistic leadership to thrive, men have to step into new ways of working… and to do their own emotional work.

Stepping out of the Man-Box

Men coming together to see each other, and to be seen, to feel deeply and to slow down is a radical act against the norms of masculinity - learning to feel other emotions besides anger and to accept each other as we are, instead of policing each other back into the Man Box.

At one point every man has felt like he wasn’t enough.

Men’s work is just about being mindful and relating intentionally with other people who identify as men, to allow ourselves to just be, together…to stop policing each other, and start supporting each other as whole persons. Men…if you’re reading this: Join a men’s group!

Gender at Work: Hedging, Mansplaining and ManSpreading

Some people still reading this might actually doubt the proposition that gender affects conversations at all. 

Sigh.

Women tend to use what Caroline Turner, author of Difference Works, calls “Disclaimers, hedges and tag questions.”

Power is a fundamental element of conversations, and disclaimers push power away from the speaker: 

“You might have thought of this, but…”

Tags like “I hope to” hedge against the appearance of boasting, or to lessen the appearance of power grabbing. 

“I hope I can generate some ideas for your project…”

If you want to see what this kind of hedging taken to the absurd maximum looks like, enjoy this instagram reel.

In Western culture, speaking directly and bluntly is seen as powerful and “masculine.” 

Women are punished for taking on so-called masculine traits. When they do, men and women describe so-called masculine women as unlikable or “bossy.”

On the other hand, any grammar checker will tell you to take out extra words and the passive voice from your communications:

I think…
I feel like…
It would be great if…
Should be able to…
Basically…

Every leader or manager wants teammates who can say what is really going on - this is the essence of psychological safety. The cost of women feeling like they can’t be direct and own their own knowledge, insight and power is real, from inside a surgery room or a board room or a zoom room.

Ladies: Don’t hedge! Say what you know, and stand in your power!

Dudes: Learn to deal with powerful ladies!

Mansplaining Antidotes

1. Amplification

2. Threading

In meetings, women commonly report getting their ideas “mansplained” back to them. This can lead female-identifying people to speak less (what’s the point, after all!?), and hold feelings of frustration and resentment. 

Sometimes comments spoken by women are not taken seriously until a man agrees with them, and often men will wind up, in essence, stealing a woman’s ideas—running with them, without any attribution to their source, which can affect the promotion of females, equality of pay scales and the retention of a diverse workforce. 

Quite a cascade of effects from one conversation.

This asymmetric gender dynamic happened even inside the Obama White House. Female staffers, who comprised only one third of the staff, had to work to be heard. Frustrated, they began a strategy they called amplification, leveraging two fundamental elements of conversation: Threading (the weaving of conversational narratives) and Turn-taking (being mindful of who speaks when).

Whenever a woman made a key point in a meeting, other women would intentionally repeat it, while giving credit to its author. If a man tried to adapt or co-opt the idea, the female staffers would continue to re-attribute the idea and re-amplify it, bringing the thread of the conversation back to the original sharer.

This careful use of threading and turn-taking left little room for the men to ignore the women’s contributions. The female staffers also seemed to be mindfully leveraging another element of conversations, Error & Repair, by not bothering to attribute malice to the men’s actions or by calling them out or blaming them. They just used turn-taking and threading to fix the imbalance. 

Like pouring clear water into muddy water, slowly, the consistent application of this “amplification” strategy delivered clear results. 

Not only did the Washington Post report on this strategy, apparently, Obama seemed to notice the shift, and began calling on women more often in meetings. Also, during Obama’s second term women gained parity with men in Obama’s inner circle.

Manspreading Antidotes

3. Timeboxing

4. Turn-taking Structures

Manspreading usually refers to the wide-legged habits of male commuters - taking up more than one butt’s-width of bench space on a train or bus.

Manspreading exists in conversations, too.

Many “traditional men” would assume that “traditional women” are more talkative…but some research shows that men talk more than women (especially in groups) and that when they take a turn, they speak for longer. In a now-classic study, Barbara and Gene Eakins recorded seven university faculty meetings. They found that, with one exception, the men at the meeting spoke more often and, without exception, spoke longer.

The longest comment by a woman at all seven gatherings 
was shorter than the shortest comment by a man.

Read that once more and let it sink in. 

Yikes. Not cool, guys!

This manspreading problem is easy to fix, though. 

Don’t yell at the talkative dudes. 

Don’t get an Elmo doll.

Get out a timer. 

It can feel like you’re making your meetings more mechanical, and less natural…but the “natural” way of meeting isn’t working.

Calling on women first in lectures has been shown to balance the levels of gender participation but these kinds of policies have gotten some backlash.

I recommend hearing from *each* person in a meeting for a few short minutes on whatever question, challenge or problem the group is gathering to resolve. Giving people a moment to think or journal on the topic will deliver even better results.

If that adds up to too much time, your meeting is too big, or you have scoped too little time for real conversation.

TLDR: Set up structures that ensure equal airtime for all! 

Don’t get caught up in berating offenders, build  systems of equitable participation.

Who knew that the most powerful tool to dismantle the patriarchy was a timer?

How to Dodge a Question

“What was your salary at your last position?”

“Are you planning on having kids?”

It happens often: we get asked a question we don’t want to answer, or that we don’t feel like we should answer.

We can also get asked questions that we legally don’t have to answer (like #2!)

In that moment, we have a few options. 

We can reply honestly or lie. 

We can decline to answer or give a “non-answer”...or we can deflect, artfully, with another question.

Each option comes with costs and benefits, both economic and relational.

Maintaining Trust and Likability

Saying “I don’t have to answer that” might be true…but can make you seem unlikable. Sigh.

According to this paper, deflection, answering a direct question with another question is a helpful way to maintain a relationship while avoiding a topic. 

This handy table from the paper sums up what honesty, avoidance, lying, paltering (what the authors call a non-answer) and deflection can look like:

Four tips for Artful Deflection

Deflection takes Poise, Humor and Staying on Topic-ish

1. Take a micro-pause. Some direct questions can make your blood freeze or boil, depending. Responding from that place of feeling activated isn’t likely to help you. Panic makes us freeze up. So, take a breath! Try not to audibly groan with anxiety while you do. :-)

2. Stay in the Context. Subtle evasion by asking questions works to avoid a topic…but only if the evasion question is in the same domain according to these two researchers from Harvard. If someone asks about your salary you can’t deflect by asking about vacations. That’s just too obvious!

Conversations that veer off course violate conversation theorist Paul Grice’s Maxims: Conversations are cooperative ventures. Being uncooperative makes you look…uncooperative. You have to keep hold of the thread of the conversation.

So how do you avoid a topic by staying ON topic?! That brings me to tip 3:

3. Playful Inversion. When someone asks in an interview how much you made at your last position and you reply “Does that change who’s paying for lunch?” you are staying in the topic - we’re still talking about money, in a way.

This question also leverages a bit of dry humor…it’s a bit cheeky. Humor lightens the mood and makes your deflection seem…fun.

The person who asked you the question ALSO wants to stay on topic and be helpful…so they have to grin at your response, even if your playful inversion is a bit rough around the edges. In any case, this helps you with #4:

4. Playing for time: “Do you have kids” is an honest question/response to the question “are you planning to have kids?”. It shows cooperativeness and relatedness. Maybe you actually want advice from them!?

Any deflection also buys you time to go back to step one - finding a bit of calm. Unless you KEEP taking step one, it’s hard to get and stay loose and playful in the conversation.

What have you found is a helpful way to avoid a question? When have you had to use it? When have you wished you had these skills at your fingertips?

Minimum Viable Transformation

How many people does it take to change a culture?

No…this isn’t the start of a bad joke. It’s a real question!

Margaret Mead famously said:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

But how small of a group does it really take?!

A 2018 study from the University of Pennsylvania attempted to put a number to that Mead truism…

Damon Centola, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania did a series of experiments, creating groups of online communities and trying to get them to set a norm and then, to shift the norm.

Professor Centola concluded, after running 10 iterations of this experiment, that change became inevitable when 25% of the people were on the side of making the shift - what Centola calls a  “committed minority group” driving the change.

So, if you want to begin changing the culture, you might want to get at least 25 percent of the people in your community on your side.

One asterisk in the experiment – the change actually started with planting ONE activist in the groups. 

So…what’s the journey from one person to a 25% committed minority?

Step One: Nonviolent Change

Erica Chenoweth, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study gave a TEDx talk in 2013, sharing insights about patterns she was seeing underlying one of the hardest types of change: political change. And not just any type of political change…the hardest and most important type - changing an oppressive regime or public policy.

One surprising fact of Professor Chenoweth’s research is that nonviolent change is more successful than violent change. More and more, violent change is rejected as illegitimate, and effective only 10% of the time. But non-violent change is, on the whole, 70% effective.

So - if you’re trying to create a change in your culture, leveraging non-violent methods are going to be your friend - tools like Design Thinking, co-creation, Appreciative inquiry…and intentionally grounding all of these approaches in Non-Violent, inclusive language.

Step Two: The Active, Sustained 3.5% Rule

Again, what’s awesome about the 25% result in the University of Philadelphia work, is that the change initiative started with one activist. 

ONE. 

So, while you might need 25%, you just need to start with one voice - it could be yours!

The 25% rule was just their experimental measurement of when an inevitable tipping point acceleration to a new way of working occurred.

Dr. Chenoweth’s research puts some clarity into the journey from one to 25% and maybe offers a different number.

Looking at hundreds of political change campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that it takes around 3.5% of the population to ensure serious political change. Which is, you may have noticed, somewhat less than 25%!

The 3.5% rule comes with an asterisk, too: those people need to be actively engaged in the change, and engaged over time - sustained involvement. And the work needs to be grounded in Non-Violence resistance, not violent aggression.

Grief, Loss and Invitation

If you’re reading this far, most likely, you’ve got a team you’re hoping to grow into new ways of working or a department or organization you’re hoping to shift. 

I’ve been involved in many change initiatives over the years, and mostly, that change was decided in one room, and then explained and trained in another set of rooms.

I wouldn’t call this conventional process of change non-violent. One coaching client of mine described their current situation as being whipped around by “the re-org of the day”. So much change, coming down the line SO often has people spinning their heads!

Change can create reactive resistance when people aren’t part of the process. Change means loss of the old way of working, without any say in the matter. That sense of loss is grief, and it’s real trauma. Acknowledging and accepting this reality can help us design more inclusive change models.

Certainly, my friend Bree Groff, a partner at SY Partners found that identifying 6 types of loss in change initiatives helped her be more intentional about leading change - we talked about these six types of grief and loss in organizational change in our podcast conversation here.

The core of non-violence is invitation - that someone can come into the change, and make it their own, can be part of a co-creative process, to see and feel their stamp on the process. 

Invitation also means to be able to leave safely at any time. My friend Daniel Mezik introduced me to the importance of invitation in change - and you might enjoy our podcast conversation here about that.

Corporate Transformation: Sheep-Dipping Training vs. Sustained Coaching

I’m embarrassed to say that in the past, I’ve been involved in transformation by “Sheep Dipping” (as one of my clients described it).

Usually, Sheep Dipping describes dipping actual Sheep into an actual solution (fungicide, most often). 

In a corporate transformation context, we’d dip a group of people in a non-solution: A one-day training on the new modes of thinking and working. We’d train a bunch of people, and then move on to the next batch, with maybe a few check-in calls over the next weeks and months, with fewer and fewer folks showing up to each check-in call.

Dipping sheep, actual sheep, actually works. Giving folks a one-day training and expecting they’ll start being different is a tremendous ask. The forgetting curve is real -  people walk out of a training session and lose at least half of what they heard nearly immediately - especially if we’re talking about complex behavior change, like better communication or collaboration. There’s no simple manual that works in all contexts (not even my helpful book on designing better conversations!)

One could also describe this “sheep dipping” approach as “Spray and Pray”.

One aspect of Prayer is hoping that folks will start using the tools and principles we’re teaching them. Bridging the gap between general examples in a training and putting those principles into practice is always a challenge - a challenge folks are often left to manage on their own.

The other aspect of prayer is praying that these folks will stick around.

The old joke goes: 

“What if we train them and they leave?” to which the reply is:

“What if we don’t and they stay?!”

Getting a 25% rate of people trained and bought in on new ways of working, and putting those tools into practice significantly, is a challenge, especially since folks often look at training as an opportunity to grow, and as a signal that the company wants to change - that’s why they hired an external trainer for this, after all.

I’ve found that if the culture doesn’t change, and change quickly, folks are quite happy to take their new-trained mindsets to a company that is into these new ways of thinking and working. 

Getting to 25% when a company is losing folks to the great reshuffling is a challenge, to say the least.

Trying to train large numbers of people at once also allows social loafing - hiding in a crowd of dozens of people is easy.

Step Three: The Law of One person and one step

We all know the quotes about a journey starting with a single step and that we need to be the change we want to see in the world.

What if the 3.5% rule applied to your context? What if we don’t need to train everybody, but instead, just need to coach a small group of people to create a non-violent resistance to the old ways of working, and to slowly, relentlessly bring the new ways in? What would that look like in your context? 

And more importantly…what do you need to do in order to be the change you want to see in your world? What is the first domino you would need to set up and get into motion?

Recipes, Cookbooks, and Chef's Mindset

I love a good recipe.

Take this one, from Food52, for Lemon Bars with a salty, olive oil crust.

I’m not sure how I first stumbled on this recipe, but I do know that I nearly never make it...or at least, not in full.

The crust, however, has become a trusted friend. It’s so easy to make compared to a traditional butter crust, and it’s really tasty.

I know that thanksgiving is coming up for some of us, so I’ll just note that it makes a great crust for pumpkin pie, pumpkin pie cheesecake and pecan pie.

You’re welcome. :-)

The Recipe does not make the Chef

I’ve written before about how the recipe doesn’t make the chef.

What does make a chef is a willingness to pull things apart and to see how they’re made.

Also, the courage to try new things - to take a new recipe out for a spin, and see how it tastes, and to remix cuisines, flavors and techniques in unexpected ways, in pursuit of excellence.

Take a simple recipe for a group conversation, like “Integrated Decision Making” (IDM for short) illustrated below.

IDM comes from the Holacracy world...here’s the recipe, written out:

1. Present a proposal
The proposer states their proposal and the issue this proposal is attempting to resolve.

2. Clarifying questions
Anybody can ask questions that seek information or more understanding. These are not judgments or reactions.

3. Reactions round
Each person reacts to the proposal. Discussions are not allowed

4. Amend & Clarify
The proposer can clarify the proposal further, or amend it, based on these reactions. If it’s not possible to amend right away, the proposer can stop the process and go back to the drawing board.

5. Objection Round
Objections are captured without discussion; the proposal is adopted if none come up. Two questions are asked here: ”Do you see any reasons why adopting this proposal would cause harm or move us backward?” And/or “Is it good enough for now, and safe enough to try?”

6. Integration
If an objection is raised, the facilitator tests the objection for validity. If it is found to be valid, they can lead a discussion to craft an amendment that would avoid the objection. If several objections are raised, they are addressed one at a time, until all are removed.

The process is pretty straightforward and clear.

What’s NOT clear or straightforward is how to get a group of people to engage in this process.

From Outer Games to Inner Games

This is where the work of facilitation shifts from the outer world (doing) to the inner world of thinking and being.

IDM is a nicely designed facilitation “game”...it has rules, it begins and ends...and if everyone on your teams knows how to “play” the IDM “game” it can be pretty effective.

But...How do you build up the courage to suggest a new process to folks and onboard them onto it?

How do you develop the storytelling skills to explain the value and benefits of trying a new model out?

How do you keep your impostor syndrome from collapsing in on yourself when the group hits a snag in the middle?

How do you herd all the cats when someone tries to break the process?

This is where the work of facilitation becomes the work of self-development, self-management and self-leadership. It’s where you push your edge and face your limits and your shadow.

There are two ways I can help with this inner and outer work.

One is the free course I made on developing your facilitation style, through a visual sketching exercise. If you haven’t checked it out, you can sign up here. If you have a co-worker or friend who you know needs to push their boundaries and expand into facilitation more deeply, feel free to send it their way!

The other offering I have is the Facilitation Masterclass I host. It’s 12 weeks deep dive into the inner *and* the outer game of facilitation.

In the Facilitation Masterclass we explore recipes galore...but we don’t neglect the development of the inner skills you need to grow and develop as a facilitator and a leader.

It’s best for folks who are already leading groups and teams inside a company or as consultants and who want to nerd out with other facilitation nerds and find more community.

I’ve also found that folks who have dabbled in facilitation and want to go off the deep end are grateful that they said yes to coming.

Finding the Crust (ie, the Core Idea)

When I look at the IDM process, I see the core of the process as separating the conversation about “What” from the conversation about “So What?” and “Now What?”.

“What” is the proposal or idea. It’s “what” we are considering.
“So what” are the clarifications and reactions.
“Now what” would be the objection and Integration steps.

This core idea is simple and straightforward, and it doesn't require you to explain the whole process at once or to get over the hurdle of explaining what "Integrated Decision Making" means.

Saying “Let’s start using the Integrated Decision Making process” sounds like a chore.

Suggesting we share ideas and clarify them before corresponding to them or objecting to them…to me, that sounds like a nice, solid crust to build a pie on top of.

Adding a sprinkle of...

Remixing and layering group conversation modalities is my jam.

Take the “reactions” round.

One could lead this session freestyle - all reactions accepted however folks want to share them. IDM suggests sharing “in the round” with no crosstalk, which isn’t a bad recipe.

I prefer to add a sprinkle of Rose, Thorn and Bud (RTB) to this step.

People (myself included) love to skew to the negative. Asking for feedback on “what’s good” in the proposal first (a rose) as well as for “what’s missing or not good” (ie, a thorn) can help make sure that a reactions round is balanced, considered and more psychologically safe.. (You can read a bit more about RTB and other ways to split up a reflections process here. RTB as a way to cultivate safety is, in my view, a protocol of protection. Read more about those here.)

The Art of Invitation

This is the heart of the chef’s mindset: You cook up a lovely meal and plop it down in front of a hungry crowd. They eat it, with joy and gratitude.

Cooking up a tasty team conversation is just the same. Explaining the entire process you used to make the food is not required. Announcing the courses of the meal and the next course up is a nice touch, though. (ie, explaining the next activity in plain and simple language, in the context of the whole experience).

This way of bringing people into a new conversation is inviting, not intimidating. It’s not selling or pushing...it’s inviting people in.

My dream is to have you all mixing and remixing, inviting and engaging team conversations, and helping your organizations make great things.

If you want to hang out at the chef’s table, definitely check out my Facilitation Masterclass.

If you want to live the chef’s mindset in your work and want more personalized coaching, you can get in touch with me here.

Conversational Range

Listen to this article:

When you hear the word “conversation” the image that most likely lights up in your brain is of two people facing each other (or these days, in a zoom room).

What happens if those two people are at a party and another person steps up? The two people might swivel outward and invite that third person in. Now the conversation is literally bigger.

As more people get invited into the larger conversation, the dynamics shift. The cadence might heat up as people lean in and engage (or cool off as people look at their phones).

Turn taking might flow through the group as various people hold the floor in a dynamic group discussion. People might make side comments to their neighbors and get drawn into smaller group interactions. This could break the big circle apart into small groups.  If you walk into a party and see ten people in a big circle, you can be reasonably sure that there’s a very funny or popular person holding that circle together.

Hosting these types of dynamic conversations online requires artistry, engineering and design…and the ability to see conversations as a material we can shape - incidentally that’s the core idea behind my book Good Talk. Helping others find their own place of power and purpose as they shape conversations is also why I host my Facilitation Masterclass.

What’s your Conversational Range?

Each of us has a conversational range. What size of conversation brings you alive? Are you more at home in intimate interactions or in big, sprawling discussions? Do you like “single serving friendships”, as described in Fight Club, or do you prefer conversations that are long and meandering…or ones that evolve over decades?

David Whyte’s book The Three Marriages suggests a unique way to think about our conversational range—as a set of marriages. In Whyte’s model, we should each cultivate a healthy “marriage” in these three realms.

The first marriage he outlines is much like a conventional marriage with a beloved person. These sort of intimate relationships nourish our lives through love and mutual support. He also points to the marriage we have with our work, our dedication to our purpose in the larger world. Finally, there’s the marriage we have with ourselves: creating space and time for inner growth and development.

Often people sacrifice one of these relationships for the sake of another, and pay a price for that bargain later in life. We all know too well how a relationship can falter when one person disappears into themselves, or loses themselves in their work. Sacrificing yourself and your work and “living on love” is an equally untenable situation. Whyte suggests that “work-life balance” is too simplistic of a solution to the challenge. It’s more about these relationships being in a dynamic conversation.

Over the years of hosting my podcast, I’ve learned that well-balanced leaders are well-balanced in their ability to navigate the full conversational spectrum of life, to be able to navigate the entire scale from small to large. Being a whole person means being able to cultivate meaningful conversations across this entire range.

The Perfect Conversation

In my recent podcast interview, my friend Michael Bervell outlines a similar conversation model to the one David Whyte lays out, but with some more mathematical straightforwardness.

If you haven’t met Michael before, he’s a Ghanaian-American angel-investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and philosopher. He currently serves as the youngest President of the Harvard Club of Seattle and works as a Portfolio Development Manager at M12, Microsoft’s Venture Capital Fund.

He's also the author of Unlocking Unicorns and the host of the blog "billion dollar startup ideas" 

He's also a conversation design nerd, like me… and his insights into conversation design are not to be missed - that’s why I was so thrilled to host him on a recent podcast episode.

In Good Talk, I drew a spectrum of conversations, a long line from 1 to many, just like the long number line poster my 2nd grade teacher Ms. Brydon had mounted around the entire wall of our classroom.

Michael visualized Conversational range with a Concentric Circle model, like this:

What’s interesting to me about this way of thinking about conversations is that it puts self talk where it belongs, in the center of the conversation.

As Michael points out, we can think at 4,000 words per minute. Over a single conversation of 10 minutes, we’ve thought a lot! And half of those thoughts are about what we could, should or won’t say. What do we “let slip” out? And what ideas should we allow in? Michael’s circle model with arrows helps me visualize this idea more clearly.

If we, as folks who design group conversations (ie, team leaders, facilitators or managers) don’t give self talk the respect it deserves, we’re rushing through a conversation with only surface reactions and letting conversation dynamics run on habit and reflex, not real thinking.

Time to think alone before we talk together

In nearly any workshop or transformation program I run, I love using breakouts to connect people and to have people share thoughts together. People thinking together can create wonderful things.

But before I invite people to think together, I love to ask people to turn off their cameras, grab a piece of paper and sketch out their own point of view on the question at hand. 

This creates a solid center point in the conversation - for each person to be able to say what they really think on an issue, and then to make space for listening and learning about another person’s point of view as well. What we do next with all this information…that’s where the magic comes in!

One interesting approach to redesigning conversations that you might try: don’t speak at all. Check out my guide to silent meetings here.

Let's have a meeting about meetings

Let’s talk about meetings

A few years ago I read an article about the key types of meetings any team or organization should be having…but the ONE type of meeting they said you should NEVER have is a meeting about meetings!

A chill of cold fury (or was it sadness?) ran through my body. 

A meeting about meetings is without a doubt, the most important meeting to host with your team. 

Right now. Or…as soon as you read this essay!

Virtual meetings are here to stay AND we’re all burnt out to a crisp. 

So, let’s delete some meetings on our calendars if we can. But how? There’s so much to get done!

Meeting about meetings #1: Where are we on the trust and communication curve?

My podcast conversation with Emily Levada, who was then the Head of Product at Wayfair at the time of our conversation, but is now the Chief Product officer at Embark Veterinary, advocates for a team conversation based on a simple diagram, pictured below. 

Ask your team to silently note and anonymously map together answers to:

How much trust do I think this team has?

Are we spending too much time talking or not enough?

As Emily points out, when there’s total trust, there’s also a sense of safety - When my collaborators trust me to make things work, I feel empowered to find my own way, without calling for a meeting.

If trust is low, add strategic communication to deepen it - not just more meetings, but meetings with the aim to increase transparency and connection. Work with a team coach and focus on creating the conditions for increased trust.

If trust AND collaboration time is high…find ways to remove collaboration time. One way to do it is by learning to work together asynchronously, which I’ll talk more about in Meetings about Meetings #3.

Meeting about meetings #2: How do we talk when we talk?

Groups can move mountains if everyone is pushing in the same direction. More often, group conversations ping pong back and forth. The conversation flow gets stuck, drifts, or overheats. 

Someone usually speaks first when the team lead shares a challenge or issue. The conversation can get anchored to that first turn.

I call it “first speaker syndrome” and one way to solve it is to not talk at all in your meetings! 

Try a silent meeting, video off, with everyone in a document together.

Silent, video off meetings can be incredibly relaxing. Like Study Hall was back in High School.

Or, just tame the complexity of the group conversation with better turn taking rituals. 

It’s hard to listen to two people speak at the same time. In fact, it’s nearly impossible. Listening to one person talking takes about 60 bit/sec of attention…and our entire attention span is 120 bits/sec!

Try a round robin, or ask people to “pass the mic” so that each person speaks on a topic to open the floor up. Being clear about who’s going to talk and for how much time isn’t being bossy…it’s helping everyone with clarity and leadership so that the conversation can be inclusive and fluid. For extra credit, if you want to really stretch your turn taking patterns, I’m a fan of Quaker style meetings which set a high bar for taking a turn:

Everyone waits in shared silence until someone is moved by the Spirit (i.e. has a strong religious feeling) to share something

A person will only speak if they are convinced that they have something that must be shared, and it is rare for a person to speak more than once.

The words should come from the soul - from the inner light - rather than the mind.

Meeting about meetings #3: Do our rituals and patterns serve us?

My friend Glenn Fajardo co-authored a book called Rituals for Virtual Teams. I was so excited to host him on my podcast and have him share his copious wisdom about helping teams collaborate better from afar.

One thing Glenn excels at is cross-time-zone, asynchronous collaboration. A lot of folks feel like synchronous video and audio (ie, Zoom calls!) are the best (and only) way to connect remotely...but Glenn suggested that video messages can be amazingly connecting, and even more powerful because they are asynchronous. Tools like Loom, Dropbox Capture or even WhatsApp can make remote, asynchronous collaboration fun and efficient.

Design the Moments of Meeting with Occasion, Intention, and Action

Glenn suggests (and I do too!) that you do an inventory of the meetings and moments of interaction for your team. (What are the Occasions?)

Find ways to declare, clarify and if needed shift the Intention so the moment really serves the need the team has.

Action has two lenses: One is what action do you want people to do or take at the end of the occasion/intention moment? Being clear on this can help you lead thoughtfully designed actions...and the more often you host these, the more they will become rituals, ie, core artifacts of your team’s culture, that anyone can start leading.

In short: create an inventory of your team’s essential moments and find a pathway to make those moments create the team experiences you intend to create. It is, as Glenn says, as simple as asking:

“How do we want people to feel in those different moments in a team's lifespan? And then, what are the actions that we could associate with those things?”

Team Work is Team Learning

More and more, I’m aware of this simple fact: True collaboration is a group learning process.

The group needs to learn:

• What everyone else thinks about the challenge: What is happening? What’s the real challenge?

• What they themselves believe is possible — what futures can be created with this group?

• What does the group believe is possible?

• What are we willing to try? How much risk are we willing to endure?

• How committed is the group to the challenge? Who and how will things be seen through?

If we know all of the answers to these questions, we can usually just make a spreadsheet and solve the challenge asynchronously!

So…given that team work is team learning, it’s important to understand that learning for adults isn’t the same as learning for children:

Andragogy isn’t Pedagogy

Pedagogy literally means a method and practice of teaching. But it has the Latin word for “child” in it: Peda. It’s the same root in the word Pediatrician.

(At some point in your life it’s weird to still be seeing your pediatrician. You need to move on to a big kid doctor.)

Pedagogy is all about how kids learn. Adults learn differently from kids. Teaching with adults in mind is called Andragogy, a (very awkward) term coined by Malcolm Knowles. He laid out five principles to follow for better results when teaching adults.

+The learning is self-directed.
+The learning is experiential and utilizes background knowledge.
+The learning is relevant to current roles.
+The instruction is problem-centered.
+The students are motivated to learn.

If you look at these five principles, it looks a lot like empowered teams.

Team learning happens over time

We all know that one meeting isn’t going to solve everything. We need to decide what is going to happen next, questions like:

• who do we need to talk to next?

• Do our assumptions match reality?

• what is safe to try?

For learning with people, over time, the Kolb Cycle of learning is a helpful mental model:

The Kolb Cycle of Learning

In the early 1970s, David A. Kolb and Ronald E. Fry developed their experiential learning model (ELM), which suggested that there were four key elements in learning:

1. Concrete experience

2. Observation of and reflection on that experience

3. Formation of abstract concepts based upon the reflection

4. Testing the new concepts

For me, this cycle feels a lot like design thinking: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. Learn, Make, Test, Reflect.