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.

Cat Herding

Have you ever felt like you were herding cats on a project?

It’s a metaphor for a pointless task.

I have run workshops and meetings that have felt like this...distracted participants wandering aimlessly about, scratching the furniture.

What do you do in those situations?

Give up? Hang up your hat? Resign yourself to the hopelessness of the task and keep going anyway?

Me? I open up a can of tuna fish.

Now, this won’t work with adult humans..

Well....maybe?

If the cats are metaphorical and the tuna is metaphorical, what’s a can of tuna for your situation?

What will get your client, your team, your leader to stop and perk up their ears at the sound of a can opening?

What scent will get them to come running?

One way to think about “opening a can of tuna” is asking a question that everyone, anyone will want to answer.

“Why does this matter...to you?”
“What would this look like if it were easy?”
“What is the cost of doing nothing?”

Those are some tuna fish questions that can get the cats circling your legs, metaphorically speaking.

The cat herder has deep reserves of strength and perseverance. And clever tricks up their sleeves.

How can you bring more of this mindset into your work?

If you want some more help with managing difficult people in your meetings and workshops, I have a handout for that.

The Five-second Masterpiece

You might have heard this classic, apocryphal story about Picasso, five minutes, and a priceless napkin:

Picasso was having a drink in a restaurant — probably a traditional French pavement café.

He doodled on his napkin as he drank his aperitif.

The admirer recognized his doodles and his face and exclaimed “Oh my goodness, are you the famous Pablo Picasso?”

The painter nodded nonchalantly.

The admirer looked at his napkin and asked if they might have it.

The artist was happy to oblige and handed over the napkin…but asked a considerable amount of money in exchange.

The admirer was horrified, “But that took you less than five minutes!” they exclaimed.

Picasso leaned over, carefully took the napkin back and said:

“No, that took me a lifetime.”

A few weeks ago I sat down with one of my coaching clients who shared a similar story with me: The story of a conversation they had that was worth nearly a million dollars a minute. Or so.

For the sake of this story, let’s call my client Picasso.

Picasso is leading an innovation accelerator that needs sponsorship from their larger organization to run…that means people attached to real projects and problems and resources to run experiments on those problems. Picasso landed an hour-long meeting with a powerful person at their company, (let’s call them Q) who owned 90% of their company’s business.

Picasso and I are on a retainer, which means, some months we talk more than other months. We’re not on a clock.

So Picasso asked me to help with a quick call to go over their slides and prompts for their conversation with Q. We scheduled 30 minutes and wound up 2 hours deep in designing a powerful conversation to help Picasso win the projects their accelerator needed.

At the end of our two hours, we were both pretty excited about the slides, the arc of the conversation…the plan was tight!

Frankly, I was elated, and so was Picasso.

And then…

The meeting was a bust.

Q was in a funk. They weren’t focused. Zoom burnout, perhaps?

No commitments or alignment came out of the conversation.

The next week, Picasso got a another meeting with X…an executive who owned the other 10% of the business.

But instead of an hour, Picasso only had 15 minutes!

Picasso ditched the slides and spoke directly from their core, but with the slides and the conversation arc we’d designed in their mind’s eye.

Ten minutes into the conversation, X was hooked.

“I have about 11 Million slated for future horizon thinking and a few projects that I think would be perfect for your process. I’m sold.”

How much was Picasso’s “napkin sketch” worth?

The 2 hours we spent to create an hour’s meeting that became a 15 minute conversation that was worth millions to the accelerator.

These two opportunities could result in 2 projects for the accelerator that could create billions of value for their company.

Was Picasso’s conversation with X worth millions? Or billions? If we wanted to calculate a Millions/minute rate, should we divide by the 15 minutes the conversation with X took or should we tack on the 1 hour of conversation with Q, since it proved to be a very helpful rehearsal? Or should we add on the 2 hours of conversation with me?

…

And so…how much is powerful coaching worth?

How should Picasso think about their investment in working with me!?

Since I’m on a retainer, I don’t count the conversation Picasso and I had to prep for the conversation with Q as “extra”… I’m invested in Picasso becoming the best Picasso they can be and coaching them as much as is required for them to achieve their dreams.

But I can surely say that the 2 hours we spent together didn’t go to waste (even though it felt that way after the meeting with Q)

I think that we can safely say that the value of a powerful conversation is…incalculable.

My most recent podcast conversation is a special one…me, coaching someone live, on how they want to evolve their thought leadership. Sharing it with you all feels edgy and vulnerable, so I hope you enjoy it.

Facilitation Means Designing Conversations

This post was first published on the Meeteor Blog

I’m a Facilitator and a Coach….which means I’m a conversation designer.

When I design a meeting, a workshop or an off-site, my goal is to create an experience that shifts a group of people or an individual to a new trajectory, to transform the way people, teams and companies work, long after we work together. I do it by co-creating a powerful and engaging conversation with my clients using the tools of experience design applied to conversations.

If you want to master the tools of facilitation with a community of passionate learners, apply to the Facilitation Masterclass here.

Designing a Meeting as an Experience

Meetings are experiences in the same way a digital product or service is an experience. And experiences have a clear architecture, that, once you see, it’s impossible to unsee. And once you see the components of an experience, you can shape them!

Earlier this year, I started a podcast called The Conversation Factory to find out if there’s a common thread running through how people foster effective, transformative, creative conversations. I’ve interviewed Harvard Negotiation Professors, Global Brand Strategists, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Agile Coaches and Conversation Design Advocates at Google (of all places!).

The thread I see connecting all effective conversations is seeing those experiences as a design material that can be shaped, like the shape of a story arc. The shape of that arc is best described by the 5Es framework, first coined by the Doblin Group.

5Es of Experience Design: ENTICE, ENTER, ENGAGE, EXIT, EXTEND

When you design a meeting as an experience, keep the 5Es framework as 5 “phases” of the experience in mind. Ask yourself: How might I entice people to join the meeting, how to get them to enter the conversation, how best to engage the participants, how to exit on the right note and how to extend the action to maintain momentum. I’ll guide you through these five phases with tools and case studies, so you can apply them at your work.

ENTICE

We often accept meeting invites without a second thought, mostly because we’re expected to show up when asked, not because we actually want to go. Don’t settle for a reluctant “yes” instead of an enthusiastic “yes!”

The invitation to a meeting is one absolutely critical component that people often get wrong, leave out or miss the mark on. And I’m not just talking about the email you send out. Great products get it right. Think about all the unboxing videos on youtube, of people opening up their iPhones for the first time. The experience of that product is enticing *way* before you even turn it on!

Tool for inspiration: The Cover Story

I was coaching someone at a major financial firm about a brainstorm she was planning for her team. She wanted them to help generate ideas for an internal tool they needed to make. She mapped out a plan that was missing the “entice phase.” When I looked at her agenda, it wasn’t clear to me what sort of ideas her team was going to be inspired to have.

I advised her to use a “future state” visioning tool called a “cover story mockup“. This activity includes creating a poster that shows the cover of a magazine featuring their successful product or project. What would get this internal tool on the cover of the Harvard Business Review? How can they knock it out of the ballpark? Sharing the goal of her meeting through a cover story activity with her team ahead of time made people eager to come out to the meeting and give their best creative efforts.

ENTER

At the threshold of your meeting experience, what will people find? How will they leave behind everything else on their plates and come to be fully engaged with the world of your meeting?

Getting people to leave their tech at their desk or turned off is one great way to get people to leave the world outside the meeting behind. So is a moment of mindful quiet, if your culture is cool with that.

I tend towards wanting to warm things up and move people towards the Engage phase rapidly, so I think of “energizers” and “thought starters” as a great way to enter into a meeting environment. I get asked about “warm up” or “icebreaker” activities in my coaching all the time. How can we design a meeting activity that really gets people into the world of the problem, to own it, and to be ready to roll up their sleeves? And how can it not be too silly?

Tool for inspiration: 5–10–20 Sketchstorm

One really easy way to get people to enter the world of the problem, to get them thinking, is to give them time to draw. Draw?! Yes, draw. Drawing activates many more parts of the brain than just talking alone. Drawing gets people to pull ideas out of their heads and make them tangible, making them easier to discuss. 5 minutes of solo sketching followed by 10 minutes of paired discussion and co-sketching can get people fully in the room and in the problem. The final piece is 20 minutes of sharing around the room: what did people think before and know now? Were there surprises? With an experienced facilitator or team, this activity can shortened. You might also skip the third phase if you’re using it just as a warm up. If you want to read more about how to run a sketch studio, click here.

ENGAGE

If you have designed for the Entice and Enter phases, Engagement should be an easy next step: people will be ready for anything! But I usually like to “chunk” my engagement time into little arcs: People need to be re-enticed and re-entered into each topic or section of a meeting. You move the participants through the three modes of conversation: open, explore, close the experience arc, in each segment.

Tool for inspiration: Divide and Conquer

There are two ways I like to divide and conquer dis-engagement: By time and by people. It can be hard to manage engagement when 7+ people are talking “popcorn” style around a table. Only the people talking are the most engaged, and the people who talk the most are the same from meeting to meeting, right? Allowing people to talk in small groups and report out to the large group makes sure more voices are heard and that more people are engaged.

Tool for inspiration: Mapping to Explore

Mapping ideas or options together is the best way I know to maintain deep engagement as well as to explore ideas. There are many, many mapping methods. Proscriptive methods like SWOT analysiscan be useful, as are mapping options by Importance or Impact vs Complexity or Difficulty. Inventing new categories in the moment, together, is vastly more engaging! One way to do this is Affinity Clustering, also called the KJ Technique. To implement this method, you can ask participants to write an idea on each sticky note, and identify new categories of ideas together.

EXIT TO EXTEND

Literally while writing this article I got a text from a coachee who’s a freelance strategist for a major fashion brand. He sent me a picture of a whiteboard with an Importance-Difficulty matrix he just built with his client that helped them map out ideas and options for a major transformation they’re planning. The clarity of the matrix helped them start to build a Now-Next plan to leave the meeting with. Leaving without clarity, without designing the exit is a major “cliffhanger” in an experience. And it’s not a good one.

Tool for inspiration: 2–2–2 Map

One great way to frame this perspective is a tool called 2 Days, 2 Weeks, 2 Months that I first learned about from Nobl, an org design company. Simply put, ask everyone to grab a piece of paper and write down what they will be doing to keep the project moving forward in those three time frames. Obviously, if your project is shorter or longer, you can map your own time frames, or use the Now/Next/Later framework. Having a quick share-around and a celebration is a solid way to make sure you leave the room with a boost to keep things moving forward.

USING THE FRAMEWORK

If you want to use the 5E framework to plan a meeting or workshop experience, this 5E Experience Inventory Guide might help. It brings in elements of service blueprinting to help you track not just the five phases of experience design, but the 6 places the experiences can be supported by.

Download the worksheet at my site (No, I won’t spam you. And no, you don’t have to pay for it, although tipping is allowed.)

LOOKING WITH NEW EYES

“ALL REAL LIVING IS MEETING” — Martin Buber, philosopher

The next time you feel super happy with a product or a service, notice why. A chocolate on your pillow at a wonderful hotel. A masterful host at a fantastic restaurant. An amazing onboarding screen for a new app. An entertaining screen that asks you to please not unsubscribe from a newsletter or a 404 error screen that makes you laugh. These are moments that have been carefully designed for a particular phase of an experience and help bridge gaps and smooth things out.

You can use nuggets from those moments to make your meetings not just meetings, but extraordinary experiences that make them come alive.

If you want to master the tools of facilitation, apply to the Facilitation Masterclass here!

Domino Effect: The Art of Getting Started

Often, it can be hard to get started on a big vision or a dream that seems out of reach. Maybe, like me, you’re thinking about building something big this year.

I don’t know about you, but I love to procrastinate. Sometimes I resist getting down to business because the task looks so large. Other times Impostor Syndrome rears its ugly head and stops me in my tracks.

And even when I do get going on a big project, it’s easy to get bogged down in the middle, as the nuanced complexity and enormity of the thing starts to unfold. Oh, and my impostor syndrome usually circles back around at this point.

A few weeks ago I shared some ideas on building a serendipity engine to help you connect and build a powerful network that can help you build a life you love. Several folks reached out to me to share how this idea resonated, so I thought I’d share some more ideas on how to create amazing things in your life.

How to achieve your dreams with the Domino Effect

The domino effect is one powerful way to overcome two of these challenges: getting started and getting bogged down. 

The domino effect can help you find the courage to get started and keep going. The third challenge, impostor syndrome, can take a bit more work to resolve. One handy way to deal with that dragon is to get curious about it. Resistance is, after all, information.

When I was a kid, I loved playing with dominos.

But I didn’t know how to actually play dominoes like the older gentlemen did on the street corners in my neighborhood, on plywood boards atop trash cans. 

Instead, I knew how to set up long rows of dominos carefully and then knock the first one down, watching with glee as the rest fell in order, making that delightful clicky-clacky sound.

Mostly when people talk about “the domino effect” they are talking about this sort of chain reaction - one thing knocking over another thing. In the case of dominos, they are usually the same size.

The domino is much more powerful than we realize. In this 1983 study, University of British Columbia physicist Lorne Whitehead demonstrated the true power of the domino effect: dominoes can actually knock down things about one-and-a-half times their size.

...Big whoop, right? Okay, that might seem a bit underwhelming. Bear with me:

The Multiplier Effect: A Domino The Size Of A Tic Tac Could Topple A Building

In this video made by University of Toronto professor Stephen Morris, he set up 13 dominos. 

The first was 5 millimeters tall and only 1 millimeter thick (it's actually smaller than a Tic Tac), so small that it needed to be set up with tweezers. The 13th was more than three feet tall and weighed about 100 pounds.

The first takeaway from this version of the Domino effect is that often, we think that the first step towards a big goal needs to be significant and worthwhile. It had better make a dent in the problem. But physics tells us that we just need to find a really really really small thing that gets us started and gets the chain reaction going.

It’s hard to imagine, but starting with a domino just five millimeters tall, it would take just 29 progressively-larger dominoes to knock over a domino the size of the Empire State Building.

If you hate imagining things, this video is a scale-up to 6.4 meters, a purported World Record attempt posted in 2009.

How to Keep Going: Set up the last domino and Hire a coach

But we are not purely physical objects. Although the adage “if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person” does seem to jive with Newton’s Law that “an object in motion tends to stay in motion”...it’s easy to get bogged down in the journey towards a big dream.

When I think about the process of writing my book, Good Talk, there were five things that I did that helped me keep on track:

1. Find a tiny first step (the first domino)

2. Set up the *last* domino

3. Eliminate the option to stop

4. Engage with a community

5. Hire a coach

There is some research out of NYU in 2009 that implies that when we tell folks about our goals, we get a sense of “premature sense of completeness”. However, a more recent, 2015 study published by the American Psychological Association said that people are more likely to achieve their goals when they closely monitor their progress, and the chances of success are boosted if progress is publicly reported or physically recorded. Take NaNoWriMo for example, a non-profit that has helped 798,162 folks write 367,913 novels, one November at a time, since 1999, using community, clarity and accountability.

For me, I pre-sold hundreds of copies of my book in 2018, when the book was only a proposal - barely more than a sketch (that was the first domino). The proposal was a significant domino, but selling all of those books to friends and family, colleagues and clients put a fair bit of healthy pressure on me. I had, in effect, eliminated the option to stop (#3). I had told people that mattered to me - it doesn’t get more public than that.

Creating the proposal could have stayed a secret...but setting up the launch page for the book was, in essence, setting up the “last domino” (#2)

By sending the email out to *everyone* on my email list, I got #3 and #4 underway: eliminating the option to stop and engaging with my community.

I often do steps 1-4 by setting up an Eventbrite and selling tickets to a workshop or program I want to prototype. Once I sell the first few seats, it’s hard for me to back out.

But of all the things I did, the most effective was hiring a coach. Even with the domino effect in mind, impostor syndrome reared its head over and over again during the writing process. And the complexity of the project expanded and shifted, many times over.

Working with someone on a regular basis kept my eye on the ball. When I got lost or down, they helped pick me up and helped me find the path. 

If you have a big dream you want to make an impact on in 2022 and beyond, find a coach to believe in your dream and keep you on track, knocking down larger and larger dominos.

Instead of Networking, Build a Serendipity Engine

What is a Serendipity Engine?

It's hard to know what moments are going to be the ones that really matter in life, since there's no movie music playing in the background to cue you on the portent each moment may hold. 

I write this essay, for myself, and maybe for you, too - if you, like me, feel exhausted from time to time by networking and "getting out there".

Networking sounds like a lot of work.

I mean, it’s right there in the word!

Being open to serendipity is a radically different approach to building a network.

Any one conversation can lead to so much more. We can look at each moment as a transaction, or a moment in a potentially infinite story - an opportunity to find out what is possible, if we meet that moment with curiosity.

Having more moments of potential serendipity and unexpected transformation can help you create a life you love, build a better network and find amazing opportunities…without it seeming like so much work.

My coach and I call this way of living having a "serendipity engine" - consistently creating moments of potential connection and designing a cadence of connection in your life that can lead to unexpected, deeper connections if you're open to them.

Do you have a serendipity engine? I'd love to hear about it - you can share it on LinkedIn on this thread.

One of my serendipity engines is the Facilitation Masterclass - a 12-week transformational program that evolved from a one-day workshop back in 2018.

My other serendipity engine? The Conversation Factory Insiders group and the Facilitation Friday sessions I host with that group.

I’m going to tell you a personal story, show you a picture that sparks joy for me…and then give you seven tips for building a serendipity engine.

One Conversation can Change your Life

In 2017 I was on the road a lot, in lots of time zones. I was often tired, and I often had the sniffles from airplane air.

Usually, I had just enough energy to do the workshops I was hired to do, and then sleep. I wanted more diversity in the work I was doing, but I didn't know how to create it.

One night, I got a WhatsApp message from my friend Richard who asked me to connect with a friend of his: someone who was, at the time, leading Google's Sprint community, which I knew pretty much nothing about.

I fit the call with Richard's friend into a late night (for me) in the wrong time zone for my body. To be honest, I wasn't really sure what the call was about...and I certainly didn't know what would come of it.

It was through that conversation that I got invited to the first Google Sprint Conference (SprintCon for short) at their San Francisco offices.

It was an amazing event. I wound up meeting rockstars and powerhouses in the design innovation world - some of who went on to become new friends and collaborators, but not for another year or more.

I also learned that Google's San Francisco office made the most amazing chocolate chip cookies. True story.

In 2017, I was mainly an attendee. However, I did get to help run one session at the last minute through *another* conversation...and because of that session, the following year, I was invited to offer a full-day pre-conference workshop leading into the 2018 SprintCon.

In conversation with the organizers, and to differentiate my session from an introductory Sprint Facilitation session being offered, we agreed to call my one-day workshop an Advanced Facilitation Masterclass...which was so audacious of a title for a one-day workshop that some deeply talented folks came to the session. That's where the "workshop selfie" below happened...a hinge point in my Serendipity Engine.

I love taking workshop selfies. Back when we met in-person, I would struggle, hilariously, to get all the participants into one shot.

(recently, I learned on Ted Lasso that these kinds of pics should be called "ussies" since they are a shot of "us" not "just myself)

That session led to so much more. I wound up offering a version of that workshop to organizations all over the world. Ross Chapman, grinning in the back, hosted me to run a similar workshop in London a year later.

I met amazing people in that session, like Christen Penny, one of my favorite coaching clients ever (who was also on a recent podcast) and Tomomi Sasaki who I admire greatly and who came on my podcast to drop some wisdom earlier this year.

One conversation in 2017 led to some of the most personally and professionally rewarding experiences of my last FIVE years. When I think back to how tired I was on that late night, seemingly random call with a friend of a friend, and how I didn't really understand who I was talking to, what a Google Sprint was, or what would come of it all, it makes me wonder - have there been other hinge points since then, that I don't understand the impact of, just yet?

Where have the Hinge Points been in your Life?

The truth is we never know when the hinge points in our lives are until much, much later.

I didn't know the call would result in the conference, or that there would be another invitation to the next one...or that that workshop selfie would make me smile with gratitude in 2021.

And the *really* funny thing?

It's hard to know when a dark time will shift to a brighter one.

I think Richard and I had only connected over a few phone calls at that point, over the course of a few years. We hadn't even met in person!

I got connected to Richard in 2015 when my life was falling apart.

I had just been ousted from a company I had started three years earlier...and had no idea what to do with myself: so I reached out to some trusted friends who eventually connected the two of us.

The time from mid-2015 to the SprintCon in 2017 was a turbulent, complex and challenging phase in my life. I wish I had known that a corner was coming...but I didn't.

I hope this essay helps you attune your antennae to serendipity, to scan the horizon for more opportunities to create surprise, and to meet those moments with curiosity, wondering what might unfold.

Seven tips to build a better Serendipity Engine

1. Say yes. Say yes to anything that lights you up, seems interesting, or sparks your curiosity.

2. Say no. Say no to everything that doesn’t meet the criterion in #1. It will leave you more space for things that do.

3. Show up with curiosity and enthusiasm. Being your best self means that people get to see the real you. If they like it, hooray! If they don’t…even bigger hooray! A clear no is great information that helps you move on to the next

4. Connect with people you like one-on-one. Take time to get to know them. And then ask for help and connections. People love to help - don’t you?

5. Find and leverage communities. One-to-one conversations are awesome, but many-to-many conversations (like book clubs, meetups, conferences and the like) provide connection at scale, and increate your serendipity.

6. Be the host. Don’t wait for #5…make your own opportunities for cross-pollination and many-to-many conversations.

7. Repeat. Say yes to conversations that come out of 1-6. The more times you get to #7, the more your serendipity engine will become a flywheel.

Turn Taking to Tame the Complexity of Group Conversations

Three's a Crowd, Four's a Mob

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. Why are group conversations so messy?

Alignment and connection in one-on-one conversations is complex enough. In groups, these connections compound, fast. The illustration below draws lines of conversation between each participant. As the headcount grows, these connections grow even more quickly. On the lower left, we have two people and one line of connection. With three people we have three lines of conversation to wrangle into one group discussion. Once we get past three people, the lines of conversation stack up rapidly. Five people can have 10 possible lines of dialogue.

Six folks have up to 15 lines of conversation to untangle!

Interactions shift quickly from complicated to chaotic.

People struggle to be heard and to hear others over the noise.

It’s also easy to get sidelined if a person or pair of people dominate the floor. The exclusion factor only gets larger as we increase the number of participants. Who gets heard or ignored? Who feels empowered to speak and why? Can groups improve their collaboration without an official leader taking control?

Taming Complexity with Turn Taking Rituals

There’s one in every group: the guy who opens his mouth first. (and sorry...yes, for some reason, it's a guy!)

What’s the big deal? Someone has to break the ice, right?

The deal is this: The first speaker sets the tone for the rest of the conversation, anchoring the terms of debate. The second speaker builds a thread from that first turn, whether they agree with the first speaker or oppose them.

Simple turn-taking rituals can help balance participation.

In my men’s group, we use popcorning to balance participation and slow down the cadence of heated conversations. When you pop a pot of popcorn, any kernel can pop whenever it wants, but it must pop and only once. In a popcorn conversation, each person gets to speak once on a key issue, whenever they like, no hand raising required. The whole group takes ownership of balancing the turn-taking.

Round-Robin conversations use seating order to determine speaking order. The conversation flows around a circle of people, and each person takes a turn. This mode can be faster than popcorning, since no one spends time deciding if they want to speak. On the downside, knowing you are going last isn’t always fun. Passing the baton can alleviate this issue.

The current speaker chooses the next speaker, keeping everyone focused on distributing turn-taking.

These simple ritual patterns can refresh group conversations and ensure everyone is heard.

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.

The Cadence of Size in Group Conversations

In larger groups, it takes a long time to hear from everyone using rounds or popcorn structures. Even with those patterns, the first-speaker still has an outsized impact on the group. Breaking up the larger conversation into smaller ones, and rejoining them later, can reduce cognitive load—smaller group conversations are easier to manage. In this way, no single first speaker can affect the entire group. In the bargain, shy speakers have less of a place to hide in a group of two or three.

There are many game-like structures to manage the dividing and recombining of groups. 1-2-4-All is one of the simplest to “invoke” and run without a facilitator. While I used it for years in my own work, I didn’t have a clear name for it until I saw it in the Liberating Structures collection. 1-2-4-All  works well for groups from 8 to 80. You can play with the timings to suit your needs. It works like this:

One: Each person has one minute to think about whatever issue is at hand. Start with a clear “conversation starter.”

Two: Find a partner and take two minutes for both people to share what they thought about the issue.

Four: Two sets of partners combine and take four minutes to connect and discuss what came up in each paired conversation.

All: Each group of four shares one idea from their conversation with the whole group, for one to two minutes each.

These group-forming and turn-taking patterns help a larger group conversation advance gradually and progressively. Groups can collapse into “groupthink” quickly. Patterns like 1-2-4-All shift that tendency and allow real group thinking to emerge.

Talking Alone, Talking Together (TATT)

Using your turn to invite people to speak according to one of these simple patterns is a thoughtful way to begin a group conversation—instead of just “getting down to business.”

Giving everyone a moment to understand and consider their own opinions and ideas on whatever topic is at hand is powerful. It protects the introverts from the extroverts, and protects the extroverts from themselves. Often, those who suffer from first speaker syndrome don’t know how their affliction affects the larger conversation. The ideal solution is for everyone to talk at the same time, which is possible if we shift the interface of the conversation.

Using a paper interface for the conversation (like sticky notes) makes each participant’s perspective physical. Each person’s ideas can be pointed to, moved around and connected to everyone else’s. Taking a few minutes for solo recording also slows the cadence of the conversation, allowing people to absorb information more fully, like Amanda Palmer’s dinner table conversation, but at scale.

With TATT, it’s possible to make sure that no voice gets left behind. Each person’s voice is clearly and independently expressed.

I use this pattern of simultaneous turn-taking as often as I can to create safety and clarity in communication for myself and others. Adding stickies to 1-2-4-All can create a magical group conversation.

If you want to learn how to have better conversations with yourself, in your life and in your work check out my book, Good Talk. Turn Taking is just one of nine elements that can help you transform your conversations in work and life. 

Get free chapters and downloads here.

Know Your Conversation Design Facts

Singing Happy Birthday on Zoom

Have you tried to do this over the last nineteen months? What did you notice?
I've also tried Zoom Karaoke. What seems to happen is that the song slows down, more and more. We're all slightly out-of-synch online, and we try to get back in synch. It's a polite act - we try not to speak over each other too much in person. Online, we hesitate and try to match the group. The result is an off-kilter cadence that gets slower and slower until it just doesn't feel right.

Conversations are shaped by the space they take place in - just like a long, formal boardroom vs a set of beanbags around a whiteboard set different tones.

The internet is shaping our conversations, changing the fundamentals of how they function.

Know your Conversation Design Facts

Do you remember learning your multiplication tables? My teacher back then called these "Math Facts". Memorizing what 4 times 6 equaled would just make your life easier, rather than doing the math manually, each time. 

Alas, I never seemed to get the hang of my 12-times tables.

I have a short list of Conversation Facts. I gathered these as I prepared to write Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter. These facts matter, because they help me, and can help you, understand the limits of the material we're designing with. Just like you can't make clay act like steel, Conversation has parameters and limits.

Here's a few numbers to remember:

200 milliseconds. That's the general, global average, expected pause between when one person finishes speaking and another person starts. That's the space between a starter pistol going off and a sprinter starting to run. Longer pauses can be interpreted as "overthinking."

600 milliseconds. That's how long it takes a brain to formulate a reply. You may notice a 400 millisecond gap in those facts! Having the ability to say "that's a great question...I have a few thoughts on that" can buy your brain some time to catch up. 
 

125 words per minute. That's how quickly we can speak, and express our thoughts.

4000 words per minute. That's how quickly we can think. Some research estimates the rate at only 900 words/minute...but in any case, the facts are clear: We can't *ever* express everything that's on our minds!

The 200/600 and 125/4000 gaps are *both* good reasons to have Active Listening skills in your front pocket, at the ready. Active Listening can help us slow a conversation down and make sense of it, both for ourselves, and our conversation partners.

Speaking of making sense: 

120 bits/sec: Is your attention bandwidth. That's how much information you can "take in" at any one time.

60 bits/sec is one person talking. In "real life" we use slight differences in volume to filter out sounds. It's how we can still (mostly) hold a conversation at a noisy bar or cocktail party. Online, we have only a limited ability to do this. On Zoom or teams, all voices have the same volume, which can make an unstructured conversation feel pretty overwhelming, pretty fast.

Spatial Audio interfaces are emerging (I'll share links to a few I've tried below) but they can be challenging for folks to use for day-to-day meetings or workshops - and they don't always meet standards of security and accessibility that many orgs require.

Spatial Audio

The cocktail party effect is discussed here. A few online spaces that make use of this effect are Cozy Room and KumoSpace. Cozy Room is interesting because it's audio-focused, and you can "look" in a direction to focus on a sound. In KumoSpace you are a tiny thumbnail video, and can move around, like in a video game and have a radius around your avatar that you can hear within.

Have you tried any others that you like? If you have, drop me a line on LinkedIn and share your favorites!

PS:

• Join me every month for intentional practice and community support, through the Conversation Factory Insiders group. You'll get access to a monthly practice and reflection session, my book club, and discounts on my workshops.

• When you subscribe, you'll also get an invite to the Conversation Factory Book Club. Check out the first edition here.

• I also have a free course on exploring and expanding your roles as a facilitator, which includes over 40 essays on some of the most impactful modes of showing up with a group. Sign up here.

• Check out the latest episode of my Podcast here. It's all about Doing vs Experiencing Design Thinking, with Professor Jeanne Liedtka.

It's not the recipe that makes the chef

My Argentine mother-in-law has a saying that she loves:

No es el trapo, es la percha. (it’s not the clothes, it’s the hanger)

My wife pointed out that trapo means rags, which is maybe the equivalent in Yiddish of shmata, which also means rags, but is often used to refer to a shabby dress you wear around the house. (Or at least, that's how my Jewish mother uses the word.)

Why am I talking about clothes and hangers?!

Well, the idea of the quote is that the clothes aren't as important as the person wearing them. The clothes are just rags. On the bed or on the floor, clothes are lifeless, inanimate. We animate them.

We make the clothes beautiful, not the other way around.

This quote came to mind recently as I sat down with two recent alums of the Facilitation Masterclass I host to dive into their experiences more deeply. In our final session of the masterclass, both of them shared reflections that made my ears perk up.

Making your own Games and Recipes

One said that they were hoping that the Masterclass would help them learn more facilitation games and tricks (which they did) but that the real benefit of the masterclass was that they learned to design their *own* games.

Another said that they thought they would get a cookbook, the secret recipes for leading powerful group experience (which they did) but that the real benefit of the masterclass was that they learned to cook up their own recipes, and to have the mindset of a chef as they designed workshops, meetings and projects.

You can hear their thoughts directly, here.

It's not the recipe that makes the chef. The chef enlivens the recipe.

This is why, in the Masterclass, there's so much work on who you are as a facilitator and leader in the masterclass: because your values drive what you create.

If you’d like to join us for the next cohort, or stay in the loop on the next one, head over here.

An Experience is worth a Thousand Slides

How to change how people think

I am obsessed with change and transformation…and always puzzling over how it really happens.

One thing I know for sure: Forcing change, telling people to change, doesn’t make it happen.

I think there are two ways to profoundly facilitate change. One is:

💫 Asking people questions that shift the conversation.

When I talk about Conversational Leadership in my book, Good Talk, this is what I mean: We can transform how other people think, not by telling them how or what to think, but by framing and fostering a new conversation.

The other way is by:

💥Facilitating experiences that foster an “aha” moment.

This means, for me, asking a series of questions, and making space for conversations that bring people into a new mode of thinking - the other side of an “a-ha”.

This is why I love to say "an experience is worth a thousand slides".

We can throw a thousand slides at a group and never see the shift we want to foster.

Coaching Leaders to Think in New ways

This year, I've been running a series of short sessions for the Executive Leadership team and VPs of a Fortune 1000 consumer brand. These short sessions (2 hours) complement the longer and deeper sessions (multi-week) being offered for managers and individual contributors in Design Thinking and Lean Innovation. The short sessions are designed to help the execs in the org know what to expect and inspect as their direct reports start working differently. The sessions start with one of my favorite exercises to get folks to deeply understand the nature of design, innovation and collaboration: Sketching Vases.

I always loved this exercise, but seeing it through someone else’s eyes really helped me reframe its potential impact.

Late last year, Jeff Gothelf invited me to run this exercise for one of his clients, and he did a lovely write-up of it. It's always thrilling to see one's impact through someone else's eyes. His reflections are below and linked here.

---

A few months ago I had the pleasure of collaborating with Daniel Stillman on a client engagement. Daniel led a series of activities with the client team teaching them Design Thinking. The first exercise he ran with the team consisted of two simple prompts:

Draw a vase for holding flowers. 

The team and their vases

This was the first prompt. The team worked individually with paper and pen to come up with a variety of vase designs. There were tall ones and short ones. Round ones and square ones. Some were hexagonal. Some had designs on them. Some were plain. All of them were vases — a container that held water and had room for flowers. 

Daniel then changed the prompt: 

Draw a way to experience flowers. 

Working alone, again, each team member envisioned their own approach to experiencing flowers. Some designed edible flowers. Others created physical environments. Still others came up with digital approaches. And yes, there were a couple of fancy vases too. But the collective output of the team was infinitely more innovative and creative after the second prompt than the first. 

The team designing ways to experience flowers.

Why was that? 

When prompted to draw a vase, the team had their options constrained. They were told what the product should be. They had some freedom to adjust the vase but it was clear that only a “vase” would meet expectations. There was little room for innovation. In fact, you could argue that innovation was discouraged. The “client” — in this case, Daniel — was very clear on what he believed would meet the needs of his customers. 

When prompted to design a way to experience flowers, the challenge and the environment within which the challenge was to be solved were radically different. This time around the client set an outcome as a goal — ensure our customers experience flowers. He didn’t dictate a solution. He didn’t assume he knew the best way for flowers to be experienced. He left that discovery and innovation process to the team. 

He didn’t dictate a solution. He didn’t assume he knew the best way for flowers to be experienced.

By reframing the requirement away from a specific object to the intended result, Daniel explicitly created the psychological safety for creativity and innovation to take place. The team felt safe to explore new, different and sometimes unrealistic ideas. They stretched and through that exploratory process were able to come up with some amazing ideas to recreate an experience in an exciting new way. 

If you’ve struggled to get the kind of creativity and innovation the market expects these days out of your team, ask yourself what you’re asking them to do for you, your clients and your customers. Are they drawing vases? Or are they designing ways to experience flowers?

Safety is impossible. Build protocols of Protection instead.

I believe that psychological safety is essential for groups and organizations to do their best work. And I’m not alone. Google has studied it, books have been written about it. Even little old me has written about it. In my men’s work we talk about creating safety for ourselves first, so we can do it for others. And I stand by that point of view.

I also stand by the work on safety I did with a wonderful group of Sprint Leaders at Google Relay, which explored the future of the Design Sprint for its 10-year anniversary. Working with the Google Sprint team for the last several years has been one of the highlights of my career. Every time we collaborate, they push me to go deeper and find something more real, honest and true in my work. This time was no different.

My team designed a "safety manual" with some amazing resources (including one of my recent favorites: Dr. Lesley Ann Noel’s Positionality Wheel – a powerful way to build safety through acknowledging diversity)

But what if it’s actually impossible to create safety?

Protection over Safety

I recently had the pleasure to interview Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking can Save the World.

He captures a fundamental, and fundamentally different perspective on safety that I think is essential to share:

“The biggest problem with contemporary approaches is to risk the illusion of safety as a human right that can be controlled as a variable in advance - it cannot.

In fact there is no such thing as safety in Aboriginal worldviews. We have no word for it in our languages. Safety provided by an invisible hierarchy is complete anathema to our way of being. There is no agency in safety, which places a person in a passive role at the mercy of authorities who may or may not intervene when needed. So we have no word for safety or risk...

however we have plenty of words for protection.

Protection has two protocols:

The first is to look out for yourself.

The second is to look out for the people around you.

This is such a wonderful way to live: knowing that you have the power to defend yourself and the ones you love while also being intensely aware that at any given moment there are dozens of people who are watching your back as you watch theirs.

This is the interdependence that our kinship pairs and network of pairs offer.”

Protocols of Protection

Last year, Annaliese Griffin interviewed me about designing for error and repair in conversations. In passing, she mentioned a framework she had recently learned in a parenting and racial equity workshop: ouch, oops & woah.

Annaliese summarized this protocol like so: 

If you say something that comes out wrong, that you suddenly realize is kind of shitty, or just sounds different hanging in the air than it did in your head, you say “oops.”

If someone else says something that hits you in a way that feels bad, you say “ouch.”

If the conversation is moving too fast, you’re not following a line of reasoning, you aren’t familiar with a concept or an acronym, or you just want to slow down, you say “whoa,” and ask for clarification.

The point of this tool is to signal a clear set of values: Mistakes are normal, harm can be mended, it’s okay to not know something, and accountability is a shared responsibility.

In our conversation, she also added (and I think this is essential) that you can say “oops” if someone says “ouch” or “woah”…that is, if you say something off, you can take a mulligan.

Seed it before you need it

It’s SO important to set up these protocols of protection before the conversation really gets underway. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when someone will trip up and say something off. As the Avenue Q song goes, everyone is a little bit racist (even by accident!). We all have phrases we still use that we shouldn’t. For example(s): 

I reminded someone recently (and nicely!) that their use of Pow Wow was a no-no. They thanked me and told me that they are always learning how to clean up their language. They then related how their company recently stopped using “brown bag” for their lunch-and-learn sessions because the people of color in the organization asked them to stop.

This is not about “cancel culture” or “tiptoeing” around. It’s about people being upfront about when they feel harmed so the harm can stop...at least, in that specific instance! 

Hopefully, we can all share an attitude of learning and moving forward, together. This is the spirit of Ouch, Oops and Woah.

So, put the protocols in place before you need them. Plant the seed of mutual protection early, so that it’s a shared effort to create a safe space through bravery.

Safety is impossible, so design a protocol for people to protect themselves and each other instead.

Error and Repair

In my book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter, I identified Error and Repair as a key element in the design of conversations, of all shapes and sizes. So, if “oops” isn’t enough, you might need these handy, science-backed instructions for how to say you’re sorry.

How to Say “Sorry” in Four Easy Steps

If you have caused someone offense, and you’d like to repair the relationship, an apology is in order. The Greater Good in Action (GGIA) project works to synthesize the best science on how to live a good life. GGIA cites a delightful study titled “An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies” outlined here:

1. Acknowledge the offense. “I made a mistake” is much more effective than “mistakes were made.”  Be specific.

2. Provide an explanation. Backstory or context can help, but making an excuse or minimizing the harm another person feels will backfire. If you want to hear the formula in action, there’s a lovely podcast episode from the GGIA here.

3. Express remorse. You might feel bad for hurting another person; sharing that remorse can help build empathy.

4. Make amends. Don’t stop with feeling sorry. Offer to do something about the mess you’ve made. That’s the essence of repairing the error. Ask what might make them feel better rather than assuming you know. Make the offer specific and tangible.

The study showed that the acknowledgment of responsibility (#1) and an offer of repair (#4) were the most important elements. A word of caution: Don’t try to fake an apology, even with this guide!

Recently, someone pointed out that this process is very similar to Ho'oponopono, an ancient Hawaiian spiritual practice that involves:

“learning to heal all things by accepting "Total Responsibility" for everything that surrounds us – confession, repentance, and reconciliation.”

For your teams, for your organization, for your family - establish protocols of protection. Watch each other’s backs, and speak up when you see or feel harm. Then...allow someone to apologize and offer forgiveness if you can - which is much harder than apologizing.

The Ladder of Intervention: How to Change the World by changing the default

The power of changing the default

Changing the world isn’t easy.

Challenges are complex. People are complex.

Finding a point of leverage to start a transformation is non-trivial.

One model of systems change is the Ladder of Intervention, which I’ve adapted from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics from 2007. It’s a model that comes up often when I coach leaders on spending less energy leading.

The Nuffield Model was designed to help frame what Government, Industry and individuals could do to enable people to lead a healthy life and address issues like smoking and epidemic obesity but it can be applied to any complex systems change.

For example, as a public safety official, if you decide that obesity is a community challenge you want to address, you have choices: You can ban junk food, provide calorie information, and so on.

The Ladder of Intervention suggests that we can shift a system by forcing a change - eliminating choice and free will (like banning soda) or just by clarifying choices (like putting up signs with calorie counts). Some options on the ladder are coercive…and this can have negative effects.

I recently got an email from a client who shared some subsequent research (PDF link) (2015) that builds upon the Nuffield Ladder (2007) by framing the steps in terms of the impact on perceived personal freedom and how that might affect engagement and outcomes. He said “It essentially reverses the direction of the ladder and adds +/- modifiers to the steps, acknowledging that the more paternalistic / enforced the method to drive change, the greater the negative impact on personal freedom.”

Mic dropped.

The Ladder of Intervention always reminds me of the power of changing the default choice people make (like making participation in a 401K retirement plan opt-out versus opt in.) Shifting defaults can be helpful without being forceful.

escalating levels of intervention

As Helen Walls wrote in 2015:

“Less intrusive measures on the ladder could include provision of information about healthy and unhealthy foods, and provision of nutritional information on products (which helps knowledge be put into action). More effective than labelling is the signposting of healthier choices.

Taking a few steps up the ladder brings in ‘nudge’, a concept from behavioral economics. A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.”

Knowledge, nudge or nanny are not our only options if we want to lead a change.

The power of changing the default

Recently, I tried to retweet an article that I hadn’t read. Twitter put some friction into the process and made me think before retweeting. In the language of the Nuffield Ladder, they provided information that clarified the choice. I could still retweet an article I hadn’t read - that choice hadn’t been eliminated. But they were pointing out, subtly, that retweeting without reading wasn’t an awesome choice.

There’s friction created to do something less awesome. The awesome choice (read the tweet and/or save for retirement) is made easy. The non-awesome choice is thus made less easy.

The prompt tells users that retweeting without reading isn’t a great idea.

Sticks or Carrots?

In leading teams and transforming culture, I take my inspiration from group dynamics. It’s hard work to make the extroverts talk less and the introverts talk more in a meeting or group working session. And if someone persistently over-talks, or is disruptive, we have to consider escalating our interventions: Are going to try and use a stick or a carrot to get people to behave as we want them to?

For example, if we have a Mr. X who’s being verbose what do we do?

“Guys, we’re running low on time…I need to hear from everyone, or this meeting will run over.”

(That’s just providing information…but in a “stick-ish” sort of way.)

“Excuse me, Mr. X, but you're taking up a lot of the group's time ..."

(That’s trying to restrict choice after the fact)

Rounds, Popcorn, or Quaker Meetings

It’s much more powerful to shift the default structures…the sweet spot on the ladder of intervention (which I’ve colored green since I love that color and I love changing defaults!).

For example, if we had set up clearer rules for the conversation, we could remind Mr. X that they were violating them.

Simple turn-taking rituals can help balance participation and set up boundaries.

In my men’s group, we use popcorning to balance participation and slow down the cadence of heated conversations. When you pop a pot of popcorn, any kernel can pop whenever it wants, but it must pop and only once. In a popcorn conversation, each person gets to speak once on a key issue, whenever they like, no hand raising required. The whole group takes ownership of balancing the turn-taking.

Round-Robin conversations use seating order to determine speaking order. The conversation flows around a circle of people, and each person takes a turn. This mode can be faster than popcorning, since no one spends time deciding if they want to speak. On the downside, knowing you are going last isn’t always fun. Passing the baton can alleviate this issue. The current speaker chooses the next speaker, keeping everyone focused on distributing turn-taking.

These simple ritual patterns can refresh group conversations and ensure everyone is heard.

Rather than being the enforcer of the rules, we can make the rules clear, simple and egalitarian. Leading the group becomes something everyone is involved in. We’re not babysitting the group or forcing them to
”be good”…we are introducing simple norms (defaults!) that are simple and simply better.

Systems thinking: Changing our mental models

I’ve written about the power of systems thinking and systems change in more depth here.

Round Robin Popcorning and Pass the Mic mechanically shift the rules of turn-taking…and changing the default mode of participation can be profound. But shifting the essential mental model of entire meeting is revolutionary. Take the Quaker meeting:

Quaker meetings ask that we “come with heart and mind prepared” and bring "neither a determination to speak nor a determination to remain silent.”

People only speak when the spirit moves them.

Those are more profound invitations. We might, in the Nuffield language, think about this as changing dynamics through changing incentives. From the Systems thinking approach, we are shifting the entire mental model of a meeting.

In a single meeting, or over time, we can react to a challenge with restricting or incentivizing change…or we can work to shift mental models and transform the default choice. Reacting is draining. Transformation takes time, but is ultimately more durable change.

Shifting the default of what (or: Finding points of Leverage)

Looking at your team as a system can allow you to step back and consider: what intervention will create the most durable, lasting change with the least effort? And when you are stepping in to make that change, what are you hoping to shift?

In short, what is your theory of change?

Going back to Nuffield and the perceived challenge of community obesity, it’s most likely that a suite of interventions will provide the shift we want to see.

Professor Susan Jebb from Oxford University was quoted as suggesting “we need a range of policy types, across the range of rungs on the ladder” if we want to transform a complex challenge. Signage, taxes, policies, education, etc. It’s a portfolio approach, based on what points of leverage you feel are most possible, relevant and potent.

Donella Meadows put together this lovely diagram of systemic leverage points, arranged in order of impact. Just like my diagram above, shifting the mental model, overall goals or paradigm of the whole system are most influential…yet, it’s challenging to shift those things directly, in a crisis point. So…

Donella Meadows’ 12 leverage points for a system

When will your intervention be impactful?

Adam Groves, Design Lead at The Children's Society, suggested a “systems leverage map” to step back and rethink how we transform complex systems from a crisis-based reactivity, to a proactive, portfolio approach.

He integrated Donella Meadows’ 12 leverage points for a system with a chronological perspective - addressing causes before they become problems, as well as dealing with problems and deeper challenges as they arise - since it’s impossible to avoid a crisis.

One version of this Systems Leverage diagram is below. Read his full article here.

What would a systems leverage diagram look like for your team, your department, your culture…or your life!?

The ladder of intervention is a powerful mental model for finding the sweet spot in fostering change, balancing the energy you expend on the change and how much free will you remove from the system. Shifting the default patterns people work with is a great start, since it can stave off the challenge before it comes to a head.

Adam Groves Systems Leverage Map (see/download a larger version here)

Leading Alignment with the Ladder of Inference

Getting groups to make good decisions is no trivial matter. Mostly because it’s hard to agree on what we’re agreeing on: What’s the “real problem” we’re solving for? Who (for what stakeholder?) are we optimizing our solution? What does the data say? (Since the data doesn’t say anything without us interpreting it…)

Establishing a baseline reality and following a simple process to get to good agreement is non-trivial, but a simple framework can help: The ladder of inference.

Let’s take a step behind the stage to understand why it’s important…

We have eyelids but no earlids. Even with our eyes closed, we absorb waves of data constantly. Our “working attention,” what we notice, is only a small part of all the data collected by our senses. This is, in one sense, a survival mechanism. We can’t see everything. So we look for what’s most important to our survival. Is that a saber-toothed tiger or an elk? Is it going to make a meal of us, or is it a meal?

For eons, survival has also depended on quick action. We make assumptions about our selected data and we swiftly draw conclusions based on those assumptions. If you guessed right, you live. So, we can forgive ourselves and others for jumping to conclusions.

Over time, our guesses and assumptions solidify into beliefs about the way things are, a concentrated conglomeration of conclusions. We act based on those beliefs, in a time-saving process of efficient noticing and reacting.

And in a reflexive loop, what we see in the available data is filtered by our beliefs, in a cycle of self-reinforcement. So, we often see what we’re looking for, scanning with intention, not just attention. 

Chris Argyris, an influential business theorist and author, developed “The Ladder of Inference” (not to be confused with the abstraction ladder which I’ve written about here ) to help clarify the path from data to action. The diagram below illustrates this concept.

If you find yourself in a disagreement with someone else, the most essential question is: Are we looking at the same data?

If we agree on the same facts, are we drawing the same conclusions about those facts?

According to Argyris, the first step in building alignment is to doubt your conclusions. Your judgments are built on a series of potentially shaky steps, so tread carefully.

Mapping your team’s Decision-making Ladder

Most decisions are not of the saber-toothed variety. Although it might feel that way, our lives are not at stake for the average team decision. So, rather than using instinct and speed, it’s ideal to slow the conversation down, to create clarity and safety and alignment at each rung of the Ladder of Inference.

Can you map a recent decision your team has made to the Ladder of Inference?

Can you take 30 minutes and get your team to map its next big decisions against the ladder of inference? Stepping back and slowing down from survival mode might help you all see with new eyes, and agree on a better path forward.

Extra Credit: Climbing someone else’s Ladder

When we disagree with someone or dislike the way someone has acted, it’s often a useful exercise to take a walk in their shoes…or in this case, take a climb on their ladder, down from their actions (at the top of the ladder), to their data (at the bottom)—what do they see as true? What beliefs are they acting out and with what assumptions? Can we walk a mile in their shoes and experience the data they’re working with?

The Most Fundamental Problem Framing Tool Ever

"If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer

Where do we want to go, together?

I first encountered the Nietzsche quote on the above in Viktor Frankl’s excellent book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl survived the horrors of the Holocaust in World War II and found in this experience an opportunity to practice his philosophy of logotherapy. In essence, his approach suggests that our task in life is to find and live our purpose—our why—and to imbue the how of life with that purpose.

Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk, “Start with Why,” has been viewed  64 million times (at the time of this writing). Like Frankl, Sinek says that we must start with the why. Once the why has been locked in, the how and what come much more easily. 

While Frankl and Sinek are not wrong to bring our focus to why, I would offer that why is not more critical than how. Why and how exist in conversation with each other. A why without a how creates big-picture ideas that are just castles in the air. A how without a why has no soul. 

At least in a business context, it’s not always helpful to insist that why is more important than how. Strategists (why-people) are not more important than engineers (how-people). Conversations can get caught between big-picture people who care more about the why, and laser-focused people who care more about the how. You need both to get the job done.

A simple set of diagrams can create an interface to open up the conversation between why, how, and what we are creating. Two models are below.

Sinek/Nietzsche/Frankel on the left, Hayakawa on the right

The result of drawing this conversation can be deeper agreements and clearer goals. Having this conversation can create more energy to move forward on what we’re going to do, together. HOW you draw this conversation will have an impact on the direction you take.

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So…let’s take a quick step back… If you want to read more about goals, I’ve written about why vs how in the context of personal reflection and resolutions here. This essay is an excerpt from my recent book Good Talk, How to Design Conversations that matter. You can get a sample chapter and the main tool discussed as a template here.

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Why Else? A Web of Why, What, and How

If I have my why and you have yours, then what? If these goals are not perfectly aligned, friction can develop. If you stay laser-focused on your why and your conversation partners do the same, how can you avoid becoming like the Zax, stuck with no way forward? How can we find shared goals?

Above, on the left, is Sinek’s “Golden Circle,” showing how a central why can drive a diverse array of what. People rarely have singular, one-dimensional goals, just as people aren’t one-dimensional. We’re all pulled in many directions, with layers to our needs and goals. This truth can provide a way forward: in those layers, we can sometimes find a higher why that can contain all of our individual goals or an opening to connect. We can visualize those layers using a diagram called an abstraction ladder, sketched above, on the right. Abstraction Laddering is a concept that has been around since at least the late 40s, with some people attributing it’s formalization to S.I. Hayakawa’s 1949 work, Language in Thought and Action.

Why? Why Else?

Asking simple questions like, “Why else?” can open up the conversation and unpack higher goals. Why do we want what we want, in order to accomplish what? Similarly, we can delve into how someone imagines they can accomplish these goals. Knowing the layers to our own and someone else’s goals in a conversation can help us find common ground. 

Abstracting Goals

Abstraction laddering gives a different interface for the conversation between why, what and how. Instead of placing why at the center, it puts what at the center. Most of the time we come together to talk about something, not some why. Why and how, abstract and concrete goals, are placed at the top and the bottom of the ladder, in dynamic tension. 

The International Center for Studies in Creativity has a wonderfully hokey video that dramatizes an abstraction laddering conversation. Roger and Suzanne are talking about Roger’s business challenges. He has a ladder company that he wants to market better to increase sales.

“Why?” Suzanne asks. Roger replies with the simple goal: in order to make more money.

“Why else?” She probes. Roger admits he also wants more brand recognition. Suzanne is developing a web of whys motivating Roger. She then moves Roger up the ladder of abstraction by asking:

“Why do you want to make more money? In order to accomplish what? Why do you want to have more brand recognition?”

Understanding and mapping all of Roger’s whys, and the whys behind those whys, can offer a richer understanding of the initial challenge. Every person has a web of whys and hows. It’s worth exploring that web if you want to work together.

Simultaneous Turns: An Interface for Goals

The Abstraction Laddering template on the below is based on a version I learned in 2015, when I took a Design Thinking Instructor certification course with the LUMA Institute. Drawing this template as a large poster creates a visual and durable (ie, sticky) interface for an important conversation on where we want to go together—finding our shared goals. 

The interface breaks down the complexity of the conversation into clear turns that each person can take at the same time. This tool is also a handy method for reframing issues as opportunities. Set aside 30 minutes to try it. It might help you redesign an important conversation that matters.

1. What: Start with writing your current challenge in the middle of the paper. (We start with “what,” not “why.”) This is our initial goal.

2. Why: Give everyone some time to think on their own. Using 3 x 3 inch sticky notes, have everyone write 2-3 reasons (one per sticky note) on why they feel this challenge is critical. I ask them to finish the phrase “In order to…”

3. Invite people to post the “why” sticky notes and map them according to their level of abstraction, clustering similar goals.

4. How: In what ways might we achieve these goals mapped in step 3 or the initial goal? Ask people to get concrete with their goals by finishing the phrase, “We could…” with each person writing 2-3 “hows.”

5. Post up the “how” sticky notes and map them according to their level of concreteness, clustering similar approaches.

Steps 1-5 help us map a web of whys and hows. How can we find a way forward and close out this conversation? Giving each person 2-3 sticky dot votes to choose their favorite why and how can give us a “heat map” of where there’s shared energy and close out the conversation. Now we can talk about how to move forward.

Download a version of this diagram as a step-by-step worksheet here.

Frame your questions better with Abstraction Laddering

My favorite go-to way to use abstraction laddering enforces the “Think Alone, Think Together” principle and helps me get a snapshot of where a team is on a challenge.

How might I get in Shape?

Using the question of how to get in shape as an example, I ask participants to write down 3 reasons WHY they have wanted to get in shape and 3 approaches to HOW to get into better shape. I then invite them to cluster their whys and hows, having a visual dialogue on what level of the question to address.

Let’s Break it down:

Some common reasons Why people want to get into better shape:

Have more energy

keep up with their kids

Feel better about themselves

Fit into their clothes.

Each of these reasons why are more “abstract” goals. And we can make them more abstract by asking why again and again:

Why do I want to have more energy? Because it feels good!

Why do I want to feel good? Well…that’s where the questioning ends! The answer is “Because!”

But *How* to have more energy? There’s a lot of ways to get there: Sleep better, eat better…

How do I eat better? Go Paleo or Raw Vegan!? Get Blue Apron instead of takeout?

Doing this as a brainstorm online can look like this:

Getting clear on what “level” of question we’re addressing can take a thorny question and make it more specific, more solvable. I’ll give a more real example: Do we go after our core customer or try to get a new demographic? Can we do both?

This question came up during a 2-day problem framing workshop I ran recently for a major fashion brand (I’ve blurred out an identifying sticky note) It was a thorny question, and a quick Abstraction Laddering exercise helped the team begin to unpack different approaches to this issue.

The right question is always about finding the dynamic tension between the giant, abstract goals (notice the $$ at the top of the diagram?) and the nitty gritty approaches to the problem. How far into the weeds are we going? Is this meeting about giant goals or detailed actions?

Getting clear on the “real” why behind the why can help teams solve the right problem.

Getting clear on all the approaches open to us (the hows) helps teams solve the problem in the right way.

The Future of Work is Conversational

also: The future of work is already here.

What is the “Future of Work”? For some, the future of work is Artificial Intelligence and automation. For others, it’s the gig economy, fluid workers moving from job to job in the blink of an eye.

All of those futures of work are already here. People stay in jobs for shorter spans. Computers and robots are better than us at more and more tasks, from reviewing legal precedents to logging trees. Soon, the jobs that are left will be the ones that ask more of our unique human capacities, emotionally and intellectually, to do things robots can’t do well: feel and wonder. The future of work is in jobs where the outcomes are tough to measure and goals shift frequently. These jobs can only be done through conversation.

At work and in our work, we’re not taught how to have conversations. The art of conversations is lost in the fast-paced, tech-driven world. When we’re next to someone we don’t offer to make conversation, we look down at our phones, avoiding any potential awkward conversation. The result being — we don’t really know how to talk to people.

I wrote a book about conversations and how we can (and already do) design them. Some people feel like conversations are a squishy word and that design excludes people. I say: design belongs to everyone now. And we are all designers of our conversations. What you’re reading is an excerpt from that book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter.

“We had talk enough, but no conversation.” Samuel Johnson

The Difference Between Talk and Conversation

Sherry Turkle’s NYT bestseller, “reclaiming conversation” begins with the quote “We had talk enough, but no conversation.” from Samuel Johnson’s 1752 The Rambler

We have plenty of meetings and lots of talk. Some estimates figure that the average worker spends about five hours in meetings each week. For managers, that number rises to 12 hours. In the public sector, it’s 14 hours. Most of these hours are reported to be “ineffective” at delivering solid outcomes. That’s a huge financial loss in productivity. That loss could be as much as 37 billion (with a B!) according to one study. And that’s just official meetings. How can we move from just a lot of talk to…meaning?

Telling people the solution to a problem only feels strong and heroic. Conversational leaders empower others through thoughtful questions, framing the debate in a more subtle mode of power: making others feel powerful.

We move towards conversations when we move towards asking and listening over micromanaging and telling. Conversational leaders are the managers who don’t just tell their employees to work harder, fix this, or change that. They’re the managers that stop and ask, “Well what do you think? Why did you design this that way?” And without realizing it, the employees feel empowered to really give their best and care about their work. It’s a life-changing experience to have a boss, manager (or even friend) who knows how to ask questions and have conversations about work and life.

The future of work is filled with managers, employees, and people who lead by having conversations.

Leading the Conversation

Since we all have the power to speak (in writing or speech) anyone can be a conversational leader, no anointment required. These leaders appear in the moment — when they see a need — and meet it. These leaders are also not permanent. They are more like waves in the ocean, swelling up and cresting, and then disappearing back into the wide expanse of the sea.

All that’s required in order to be a conversational leader is the curiosity and willingness to ask powerful or interesting questions. The world needs conversational leaders, now, more than ever.

In 1867 John Stuart Mill suggested that, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” Conversational leaders can look like whistleblowers reporting dangerous or harmful industry practices. Or they can be the person on the team willing to wonder out loud why things are the way they are and ask if we can do better.

Without anyone to ask and open the conversation, no progress is possible.

If you want to be one of these leaders, you need to learn how to have (and design) conversations that matter. The kinds of conversations robots (hopefully) will never be able to have.

Learn more and pre-order Good Talk: How To Design Conversations That Matter.

You can find free chapters and downloads here.

Lazy Facilitation

The secret of transformative facilitators

When I coach facilitators, one thing I notice is how overwhelming the job can feel. There’s a lot to keep track of: Stakeholder requirements ahead of a session, bringing together people for a working session (cat herding!), keeping your eyes on the goals and outcomes to make sure that the time was well spent…all while making sure that all voices are heard and included…*and* while keeping an eye on the agenda, flexing and shaving time where needed.

It’s a lot.

If there’s one thing I want facilitators, leaders and coaches of all stripes to remember it is this: Never do anything for others that they can do for themselves.**

The less you do, the more they own.

Collaboration is Group 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 the answers to these questions, there’s no need for a collaborative session!

Never touch their paper

Last week I was working with a group on deepening their abilities as teachers and coaches — the group was at the start of a journey from being masters of sprint facilitation to becoming teachers and coaches of others. During this 2-day session I shared a story about the teacher who has taught me the most — my origami mentor, Michael Shall, who I apprenticed to in my teens. This story showed up in a surprising number of post-session reflections, so I feel it’s worth resharing.

I learned a lot from Michael: About the importance of clarity in instruction, about the value of harnessing your largest voice to capture the attention of a room…but most importantly, he reminded me to never touch their paper.

While he would teach an origami model, step by step from the front of the room to a group of 100 middle schoolers, I would wander the room and check in on people. Was anyone struggling?

It was not my job to fix their challenges by finishing the move for them. It was my job to help them keep trying.

Michael caught me “helping” a student once by finishing the step for them. He took the paper from my hands, undid the step I made for the student, and handed the paper back to them, and gave them a clear and crisp direction on how to finish the step, which they then did. He pulled me aside and taught me that lesson that I keep with me to this day: never touch their paper.

By touching the paper of the student I was taking away their temporary frustration, but robbing them of the chance to figure it out for themselves.

Why is this so important?

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

My taking the paper from a student robbed them of the concrete experience of working the step out for themselves, taking away their first step in the learning process.

Similarly, if a facilitator steps in and makes a process too easy for a group, by synthesizing ahead of where the group is, by giving them a word rather than letting them find their own…that facilitator is “taking the paper” from the hands of the group. From that moment on, the work the group is doing may not be fully owned by that group.

Lazy Facilitation

Stepping back and letting the group figure things out for themselves means the facilitator can exert effort and attention at the most critical points, in the most thoughtful ways…in order to make sure that the group really does the work and really owns the outcomes.

Lazy facilitation also means setting up structures and systems that allows the group to manage itself…it’s not unleashing chaos on them!

A few structures and systems Micheal used:

Cheating vs. Sharing

Michael always used to tell a group:

“In school, if you copy from your neighbor’s paper it’s called cheating. In origami it’s called sharing”

This radical transparency allowed a group to teach itself. If someone was struggling, they could feel free to glance left and right and see if some help was at the ready.

In large workshops, I ask groups to do the same — they can look over at the other groups’ work (whether it’s on a wall or on a Mural online) and see what’s supposed to be happening.

Show me what I’m showing you

Another phrase Michael taught me was “show me what I’m showing you”. He always folded the model the group was working on in much larger paper…after a move was finished, he would hold up his giant model and ask everyone to do the same. In one quick moment, the group could check in on where they were supposed to be, what “good looked like” and at the same time, he could scan the room and see, at a glance, where any big issues were…and send me over to help them out.

In group work, I use this principle often — having a finished template or simple diagram to refer a group to can get them towards the right direction, without doing it for them.

Breaking things down

In this way, facilitation is helping a group by breaking complex moves into clear, crisp steps. This is where Michael’s genius was. He built thoughtful vocabulary for groups — helping them learn the difference between a “raw” and a “folded” edge, to notice the angle a paper was being folded to, seeing the shapes we were making with our hands. He helped us see the paper’s structure and gave us clear guidance, step by step.

Facilitation means “making things easy” but not by doing things for people…we make things easy by asking the right questions and breaking the challenge down into clear steps.

Origami for Teams

If you want to learn more from Michael, I wrote a short book with four origami-based exercises I learned through him. It’s called The 30 Second Elephant and the Paper Airplane Experiment. It’s a fun and strange little tome, just like Michael was.

** it turns out that Michael’s wisdom is reflected in other places. He’s not the only advocate of self-management! This quote, “Never do anything for others that they can do for themselves.” is sometimes termed “The Iron Rule of community organizing” and is attributed to American community activist and political theorist Saul Alinsky.

The Nine Elements of Transformative Facilitation

Exploring the Conversation OS Canvas

Meetings are Group Conversations

My work over the past several years has been in learning and applying the principles of conversation dynamics, found in studying one-to-one conversations to complex group conversations. You might call these group conversations by another name: meetings or workshops, teamwork…even cultures and communities can be understood through this lens.

The size of the conversations (in number of participants) is different, but the essential structures are the same.

Conversations have Structure

Understanding the patterns behind things is an intellectual pleasure. But there’s practical value, too. If we know the principles on which something is built, we can build it better, or adapt those principles to other contexts. Biomimicry, for example, works to learn how nature makes amazing materials, and how to apply those insights. Learning how geckos stick to walls led to the development of new types of adhesives. Studying insect flight improves miniature drone flight.

Conversations can seem like mushy, fluid things. Holding and guiding a conversation can feel like trying to mail someone a thought. Yet conversations do have a structure, if you slow them down and look closely enough. Mastering that structure can help you design conversations that really matter.

These principles apply to any iterative communication, verbal or visual, over text messages, semaphore code (with flags), or even body language. The rules and patterns of the game are still the same.

….

Learn more about these ideas in my book Good Talk: How To Design Conversations That Matter. You can download a few free chapters here and find links to buy the audio book and physical books online.

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Conversations Have an Operating System

In my conversation design workshops, I ask, “What are conversations made of?” The answers are diverse: Voices. Ideas. Vibes. Connections. Collaboration. Listening. Emotions. Reactions. Gaps. Openness.

Designing conversations well requires seeing the parts they are made of. From all the models of conversations I’ve worked with, I’ve selected nine core components. I’ve chosen these because they are the easiest to see, the easiest to shift, and they can have the biggest impact. Although vibes and emotions are important in conversations, they’re difficult to hold onto and change.

One way to think about these components is as a fundamental conversation operating system (OS). An OS is the most basic software that allows a device to run other programs — to manage inputs and outputs with the larger world. Technology and people run on code. For technology, the code is zeros and ones. For people, our conversation OS is how we manage and combine these nine fundamental elements, our unique arrangement of habits, rules, and beliefs. We all live by a code, whether we know it or not.

The Conversation OS Canvas

Nine ways of looking at a Conversation

Each of the nine elements of the Conversation OS, can be seen as a question, a way of looking at a conversation from all angles. As a facilitator and leader, mastering and shifting these elements is your job, based on your intentions and vision. I’ve used the OS Canvas to map the current or future desired state of conversations of all shapes and sizes. Below is a quick outline of the 9 elements and how they apply to facilitation and leadership.

…

While this is an excerpt of my recent book: Good Talk: How To Design Conversations That Matter, you can download a few free chapters here and find links to buy the audio book and physical books online.

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Goals: Why do people join the conversation? What’s the shared goal?

As a leader and facilitator, how do you clarify and intensify the goals of each person and of the group as a whole?

Invitation: How do people get invited in?

As a leader and facilitator, how do you inspire and motivate people to join the conversation?

Turn-Taking: Who speaks and when?

As a leader and facilitator, how do you make sure all voices are heard and matter? What patterns to you have in your toolbox to keep the conversation fresh and fluid?

Error and Repair: How do we know when a mistake has been made? How do we fix it?

As a leader and facilitator, how do you make sure the team feels safe to fail and knows how to repair breaches in trust?

Threading: What is the narrative thread that holds the conversation together? Who weaves it?

As a leader and facilitator, how do you craft the narrative of work? More on that here.

Interface: Where does the conversation happen? What spaces and places (physical and digital) support it?

As a leader and facilitator, do you shape the space to suit the conversation? What elements of space can you see and shape? More on that here.

Cadence: What is the pacing of interactions?

As a leader and facilitator, can you sprint as well as slow down and deepen the conversation?

People: Who do we want to be part of the conversation? Who is not part of the conversation?

As a leader and facilitator, how do you ensure that conversations are diverse and inclusive? How do you bring voices into the conversation?

Power: How is power distributed? Who can change the conversation and how?

As a leader and facilitator, can you distribute power (ie, empower others) as well as take control in a safe and secure way?

…

To go deeper into expanding and exploring your approaches as a facilitator and leader, check out my free online course here.

This essay is an excerpt of my recent book: Good Talk: How To Design Conversations That Matter. You can download a few free chapters here and find links to buy the audio book and physical books online.

Three Essential Leadership Conversations for Creative Transformation

Fact Tennis

“A dialogue is a conversation with a center, not with sides.”

William Issacs

Being able to facilitate and lead such a conversation is no trivial task.

Conversations can easily become what Philippa Perry, in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, calls fact tennis: Each side lobs their own facts back and forth trying to score points...what those points can be later cashed in for, no one knows.

Our teams and organizations are defined by the conversations that they can and can’t have. And fact tennis doesn’t help us solve the biggest challenges we face.

What we need more of are leaders who can get groups to face those challenges and face each other in deeper dialog - to sit in a circle (or a grid on zoom) and talk these issues out.

At the center of the circle of a conversation is the question - the central question - a group of people are considering. To go more deeply into that question, to find a real solution, is the goal of a facilitative leader.

Facilitative Leadership

Why is facilitative leadership so important? One leader I coach had this struggle: She was very excited about the innovation project she was leading and the possibilities for transformation the mission implied...but the team assigned to this special project was a little less enthusiastic. Cue the flashback to high school group projects, right?

Also, when I say leading...she was the driver for the project, but many folks on the team were near-peers of hers. Some were more senior, even. So, leading this project was a delicate affair.

Many projects are like this: a group of people, all with their own motivations, levels of dedication to the project and levels of seniority. She couldn’t put her foot down and order folks around. Consensus was the order of the day...and that kind of teamwork takes facilitative leadership, not command-and-control leadership. Even if she had positional authority, force doesn't get the best out of people.

How do you bring a group of folks together who aren’t actually sure that the challenge is even worth solving?

The team knew the core business model of the mid-size pharmaceutical concern they worked for all too well. They knew what kinds of work would get them bonuses or promotions. Innovation projects, with their long horizons and likely chance of failure, were not the stuff of amazing performance reviews.

So, this leader had a tide pushing against her. How, with the organization sending mixed signals, could she get her team inspired? Inspired, when conventional thinking easily proved that what they were doing would very likely not work? Why bother even thinking of ideas?

Traditional and Modern Brainstorming

Modern brainstorming best practices have actually not evolved that much since their first formulation by Alex Osborn in the 1950s. 

These basic rules like deferring judgement and encouraging wild ideas are really hard to use on a group of rational cynics with low motivation. 

The question my coachee and I sat with was this: How should she show up to get the group to be creative when suspending disbelief (deferring judgement- first rule!) was an unlikely possibility? What were her options?

Three Essential Leadership Conversations for Creative Transformation

Getting to a “center with no sides” state is great. This is where my coachee was trying to get her team to - thinking of solutions to their central,  big hairy goal. But it doesn’t come for free...you have to build up to that conversation. First she had to get them to locate themselves as *in* vs outside the circle of the question. Once they were aligned with the goals...that’s where the magic of the third conversation comes in.

Leading powerful, transformational change requires the ability to facilitate three essential conversations, to answer three key questions:

1. What is in and what is out? Ie, what are we talking about and what are we not going to talk about? Who is in and who’s out? Are we all in?

2. What is our center with no sides? Ie, what is the most central question we are hoping to solve together?

3. How can we dance on the edge of possibility? Once we know what we are talking about, and our most central question, how can we look past what’s possible to solve this challenge?

What is In and Out?

As we talked, I drew a circle for her. Her team, although they didn’t know it, had such a circle in their minds. The inside of the circle was what’s IN (or possible) and the outside of the circle being OUT (or what’s impossible). We’ve all been taught to color inside the lines and to play inside the playground...don’t go running in the street!

Making this sort of a circle explicit instead of implicit is powerful. Anytime you’ve used a “parking lot” in a meeting you’re basically doing this. My first suggestion was that she get the team to draw their own circles, list what was “in” and “out”  and compare them. She might find out that some folks differed, even slightly, about what they thought was impossible. This could be a crack in the fortress, and a tremendous opportunity for conversation.

It’s also helpful to draw an in and out circle and ask people: “why is this challenge important to you?” …ie, what would make you want to be “in” this circle of conversation and problem solving?

We’re often afraid to hear that people are not fully committed to a challenge…it triggers feelings of being broken up with or picked last for a team or pushed to the outside of a tribe. But finding out -explicitly- that people are out instead of in can be a relief.

Facilitating the in/out conversation as a co-created exploration is different and powerful from telling people what is in and out.

In fact, this in/out circle must be established at the start of any and every meeting, conversation, workshop. Even if you have some positional authority, pausing for additions and amendments to your proposed in/out agenda can be highly motivating for your team.

A Center with no Sides

What does it mean to have a conversation with a center, but no sides? Issacs cites an example from the public stage: resolving the violence in Northern Ireland. John Hulme, a Nobel-prize winning politician from Ulster, spent years behind the scenes in deep conversation with Gerry Adams, who was the leader of Sinn fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. 

Their central question: How do we stop the violence? 

Hulme is quoted as saying 

“Twenty-Five years we’ve been fighting violence. Five governments have failed to stop it. Twenty Five thousand troops and fifteen thousand policemen failed to stop it. So I thought it was time to try something else. Dialogue.”

With that question at the heart of their conversations, the two leaders were able to talk to that central issue. That they were on two sides of the issue didn’t matter. They could agree on a central question to look at, together.

In her business context, as in any business, the best center with no sides is a Human-Centered outcome. Which human? Ideally someone outside the company! But as long as you are clear about what human(s) you are centering a challenge around, the conversation will be much, much smoother. Positive patient outcomes on a larger scale was the point of her project, after all. Putting that conversation in the center can make the questions of possible vs impossible easier to approach.

Dancing on the Edge of Possibility

Now that we have a group of people who are IN, and we’ve established a central question...how do we break the rules?

My coachee was stuck. The team would barely have ideas. They would shoot anything remotely risky down.

Zoom way in

I made a suggestion: Zooming as close as possible into the boundary between the possible and impossible, she might help folks examine their assumptions and shift ideas, ever so slightly, from the impossible to the barely possible. The closer you look at a line, the more fuzzy it becomes.

This visual metaphor helped her with a flash of insight.  Her job was to get the team to “dance on the edge of possibility” - that was her phrase, and I loved it. It’s why I’m writing this essay.

This allowed us to start brainstorming: In what ways could she inspire them to dive into the razor’s thin edge of what they knew could work, and what they were sure could not. Not to shy away from it...but to make it very, very explicit. This is the opposite of “encourage wild ideas”...this approach is about rigidly defining constraints until they become harder to explain or defend. It’s 5 Whys on rocket fuel, zoomed in.

This phrase “Dance on the edge of the possible” was enough of a spark. She could imagine herself putting on her “Dancing on the Edge of the Possible” Hat and working to get her team to do the same. She would explicitly invite them into the conversation of what was possible and impossible and explicitly get them to look at that border, ever more closely.

Her opinions about what was in and out of the circle were not, ultimately, critical. Selling the team on what she thought was possible wasn’t the point. She wanted the whole team bought in and aligned. And so she had her clear vision and plan about how she wanted to show up for her team.

Bad Ideas Only

The other way we decided she could get her team to be creative was to think of bad ideas and to slowly nudge them back into the circle. In the pharma context where she works it took some careful planning for folks to feel safe to say, out loud, things that were illegal or unethical. Saying “we can’t do this...but what if we could?” is a delicate matter.

Her job was to create a safe space for the conversation...a larger circle of trust. The goal, the central question, was still how to create better patient outcomes...and maybe bend some international regulations in the process.

Everyone knows how to turn bad, immoral and illegal ideas into good, human and legal ideas...as long as you can create the environment to have bad ideas first. 

Slowly but surely, she was able to get her team to have “wild” ideas and to slowly turn them into ideas that they could use.

It was an act of heroic innovation leadership.

For the next tough crowd you have to lead into wildness, start the conversation with a circle.

Resistance is Information

A Pile of Snakes

The analogy that seems to keep coming up in my coaching conversations recently is one of my favorite scenes from Pee Wee's Big Adventure, a truly strange and wonderful movie.

Pee Wee Herman comes upon a pet shop in flames and dashes in to save the endangered pets. First he frees a chimp to help him along (very smart move!) and then gets to the puppies, the kittens, the birds and so on. On each trip in and out of the burning shop, he passes a large tank of snakes. He sneers at them each time, feeling the gross-out resistance to the challenge.

Finally, the tank of snakes are last living things in the shop and he can't NOT save them, so he grabs two handfuls of snake and runs out, shouting at the top of his lungs as he collapses on the street. 

End scene.

I related this absurd vignette to two people I coach. One is a startup CEO who felt like they needed to spend time on their sales pitch deck instead of product-market-fit. Another is a director of learning and development who had an email sitting in their inbox for a week, glaring at them to respond to a group of senior leaders.

Resisting Resistance

Both of them needed to hear this story so that they could stop playing the "snakes are gross" game with themselves. Resisting resistance creates more resistance. This is what I mean when I say that "resistance is information". 

For example, the CEO needed to look at why "sales" felt repulsive. They had a narrative around funding that left them feeling conflicted: you are either funding or building. If you half-fund or half-build, you're not doing it right. Sitting with the resistance and the story behind it helped them turn funding into a sprint and an experiment. This approach made them feel curious and excited to do a cycle of fundraising. It didn't have to be forever. it could be a two-week cycle. Once they got curious about the resistance, the path became more clear.

Becoming curious about resistance

For the Director of Learning, just telling me about her resistance allowed her to take a step back and look at the story behind it. The “pile of snakes story” helped her see that her resistance to the email was a self-reinforcing cycle. Or, as my wife likes to say “what you resist, persists.”

Curiosity about resistance is a gentle and effective path “through”.

This idea is just as true for coaches. Resistance is information to be curious about. It’s much easier to react to resistance as disrespect. I was coaching a friend of mine who is (in turn) coaching an innovation team. He was feeling resistance from the team. This team was part of a larger initiative to build an innovation process, including a growth board and milestones for funding of initiatives.

Just like my CEO, the team wanted to build their product and get traction, not build decks about their process and experiments in order to get the next fundraise from their innovation board.

The complaint from my friend was that "they aren't listening to me...how do I get them to buy into this larger, systematic approach to innovation?"

From the coach's perspective, the team needed to learn a systematic approach to reporting on experiments, not to just keep experimenting. 

As we probed more deeply, it turned out that there was a simple explanation. The team didn't think that the innovation board mattered. If they could show enough traction, they had been told by a senior stakeholder, that there was some money they could float them.

The resistance wasn't a battle between a coach and a team. That was the story my friend was telling themselves. Given that the situation was seen as a battle,  they wanted to know how to gain an upper hand in the battle.

When they got curious about the resistance instead, the way became much more clear - they needed to change the game the team was playing...because they were definitely trying to game the system.

What are you resisting? What are your stakeholders or collaborators resisting? How can you get curious about the tension and lean into it?

And then...how can you change the game you're playing?