Facilitation Lab Podcast

"I've always loved how do you do things, very tool or method-oriented person. Getting there, I think the accomplishments or the path toward it was always kindling, always maintaining that curiosity about what is it that helps people shape their future strategically with others...I think it's that if there was any one thing, it's following a thread, following a hunch from the very first position I had and an interest in strategy and shaping the future."

Keith McCandless, co-developer of Liberating Structures, specializes in working with groups to unleash creativity, discover opportunities, and build on momentum. He calls himself a structured improvisationalist.

In this episode of Control the Room, Douglas speaks with Keith about goat rodeos, grief walking, and prototyping responses to unsafe behaviors. Listen in to find out what's giving Keith hope right now.

"The moment I became conscience that I was operating from a certain script, being the instrumental script, I started my own developmental journey, both in the domain of social-emotional intelligence and maturity and on the other side in looking at thought structures in teams and in groups and seeing how the scripts that I was using implicitly and the maps that allowed me to take perspectives, to integrate perspectives in teams and in all kinds of communications, hindered me and how I could break out of those patterns."

Jan DeVisch is an executive professor at Flanders Business School, where he teaches organizational development and human capital design. He is also managing director at Connect and Transform, where he helps teams and organizations cope with increasing complexity.

In this episode of Control the Room, Douglas speaks with Jan about reducing reality into logical categories, software that can help facilitators pre-assess a team's communication patterns, and resistance as a concept invented by the facilitator. Listen in to find out how to level up your facilitation skills through scientific research in the field of adult development.

"I think [the students] have found some ownership in taking charge of their education. I think students right now are showing up and saying, I need X, Y, and Z in order to succeed. And they're really finding their voice. I think they're able to find their voice and say, this is my education. This is my future on the line. I'm having to deal with X, Y, and Z at home, but I still need to continue to thrive academically."

Kristin Fulton is the Development and Operations Manager for Schools That Can, a national education nonprofit that is building an education to employment pathway for students in low-income schools.

In episode 24 of Control the Room, Douglas speaks with Kristin about closing the opportunity and skills gap, teaching confidence, and the tipping point at which students become leaders. Listen in to find out how Kristin utilizes her MFA in Acting in her work with Schools That Can.

"And it seemed to me that so many of the problems and issues that we face in the world were down to this increasing connectivity, increasing complexity that we weren't really suited to deal with. And so it dawned on me that conversation was the tool that we could use to make better sense of the world."

David Gurteen, director of Gurteen Knowledge, is best known as the creator of the Knowledge Café – a versatile conversational process to bring a group of people together to learn from each other, share experiences, and make better sense of a rapidly changing, less predictable world.

In this episode of Control the Room, Douglas speaks with David about street epistemology, virtual knowledge cafes, and David's interest in astrophysics. Listen in to find out how conversation can help us make better sense of the world.

"What we need to figure out though, is what is our relationship to these boxes on our computer that we're locked into for so many hours a day. I think it's time for us to just acknowledge that no human being should be in front of a screen for eight to 10 hours a day, that's just not healthy."

Christina Wodtke is the author of the best-seller Radical Focus, which uses the power of story to build a new approach to OKRs, as well as The Team that Managed Itself and Pencil Me In. Christina currently teaches at Stanford in the HCI program in Computer Science. She speaks worldwide about humanity, teamwork, and the journey to excellence.

I had the pleasure of having Christina as a guest on this episode of the Control the Room podcast. We speak about influencing the influencers, psychological safety online, and re-evaluating our relationship with our computers. Listen in to find out why it's okay to miss your OKR's.

"Working with children gives me an opportunity to begin introducing the power of 'I become who I practice being,' so that as they're wiring this neurology, there's more awareness on, well who do I want to be? What's the impact of who I am on a group experience? What's the impact of who I am and how can I reflect on that?"

Solomon Masala is the co-founder of consulting firm Source Consulting Group. He has over 25 years of experience in team-building and leadership development in almost every sector. Charismatic and full of energy, Solomon engages participants with a kinesthetically-oriented approach to facilitation.

In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Solomon about mindfulness, how we show up for people, and the true heart of humanity. Listen in to find out how changing the way you sit in front of a screen can affect your ability to connect with other human beings.

"Through my continued research, I realized there's a way you can blend and merge identities. And actually that's your truest form of yourself when you're in the intersections of multiple identities. And that's the hybrid." Sarabeth Berk

Sarabeth Berk, Chief Creative Disruptor of More Than My Title, is a researcher and innovation strategist demystifying the human experience. She is known for her research on the hybrid professional - people with multiple professional identities who integrate talents together and bring unique value to employers and clients.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Sarabeth about the professional identity crisis that inspired her research on the hybrid professional, the increasing demand for hybrids in the job market, and how you can network to learn someone's identity rather than their position. Listen in to find out if you might be a hybrid professional.

Show Highlights

[0:59] Sarabeth's professional identity crisis

[6:25] Jobs of the future will always become commonplace

[16:17] Emerging hybrids vs established hybrids

[23:00] Identity work & being seen

[26:25] Gaining clarity of self through misunderstanding

[31:21] How to network with identity in mind

Links | Resources

Sarabeth on LinkedIn

More Than My Title

Are You a Hybrid Professional? Sarabeth's TEDx Talk

About the Guest

Sarabeth Berk is a creative disruptor and innovation strategist who demystifies the human experience. As a researcher, she is known for her research on the hybrid professional - people with multiple professional identities who integrate talents together and bring unique value to employers and clients. Sarabeth is currently the Chief Creative Disruptor of More Than My Title, a professional coaching agency in Denver, CO that helps clients discover their truest professional identity.

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Voltage Control on the Web

Contact Voltage Control

Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Today I'm with Dr. Sarabeth Berk. Dr. Sarabeth Berk is a hybrid professional, who also researches hybrid professional identity. She's also the author of More Than My Title. Welcome to the show, Sarabeth.

Sarabeth: I'm so glad to be here. Thanks, Douglas.

Douglas: So, tell us a little bit about how you got started in this work you do, this notion of hybrid professional identity. Where did that even come from?

Sarabeth: Yeah. It's been a wild journey, and it really started with that age-old question: What do you do? And I was going through my own career-change transition and trying to figure out what my next move was. And when people asked me, "What do you do?" I just struggled. I didn't know who I was. I wanted to be seen as more than my current job, and at that point, I was a teacher, and I was ready to break out. I wanted to transform systems and do more strategy and design and innovation work. And so essentially, I was having a professional-identity crisis. I didn't know who I was.

And that led me onto this big research journey and interviewing a lot of people and starting to understand, what is this notion of professional identity? We just don't talk about it. And I looked at existing research. But what was fascinating to me the most was when I talked to other people, I thought they had it figured out and that I was the one that was confused, and this was a problem only I experienced. And that was so far from the truth. I quickly realized that people, many people, are more than their job title. That's just this kind of generic way that we give ourselves a frame and a label. And everyone I spoke to was so much more. So it gave me a sense of ease and peace to realize, oh, my gosh. Okay, it's not only me trying to figure out my identity.

And then it started to open up a lot of new questions and thinking of, why don't we talk about this, and why is it so hidden that people do many things. But beyond that—here was the real kick—I realized I have multiple professional identities. I was an artist and a teacher, and I was becoming a researcher, and I loved design. I probably had a handful of others. But I didn't want to be just one identity at a time. When I took a job, I didn't want to just be hired as the designer or the researcher. I loved using all of those identities together.

So through my continued research, I realized there's a way you can blend and merge identities. And actually that's your truest form of yourself when you're in the intersections of multiple identities. And that's the hybrid.

So that's sort of my short story on how I happened upon it. But now that I've unlocked it and I'm sharing it with other people that are trying to figure out how do they get their next job or how do they really explain and articulate what their value is, this notion of the hybrid is just the game changer, and I'm so glad people are liking it.

Douglas: You know, I personally resonate with this a lot because my degree that I obtained in college was entitled multidisciplinary studies because I didn't want to be in school and get four different majors, but I wanted to study a lot of different things. And in fact, I had spent a lot of time in computer-science-type stuff in high school but enjoyed it so much I was just, like, figured that stuff out. I want to go study other stuff. And so I think I personally carved out this journey where there wasn't this one to one between my degree and my job. And I think a lot of folks, that's the classic route. And I felt a little bit different early in that journey. But it seems like it's more and more, we're finding whether you're a product manager or a facilitator or just this podcast is dedicated to, there are so many roles out there where you can't just go and get a degree in that role. And in fact, it takes a very diverse and well-rounded background to make you excel in the role.

So I'm just kind of curious. How much do you think it has to do with these new types of roles that of themselves are not super well-defined. They're kind of hybrid in nature.

Sarabeth: I love everything you just framed because the truth is you're not alone. A lot of people are not the exact thing they went to school for or got a degree in, and they've changed jobs and accumulated so many talents over time that they are like, yeah, what am I now? And I just wrote a really popular blog post a couple weeks ago that looks at this issue of job descriptions and positions and the way that roles are being named.

One that really stood out to me is a company called Jump, and they do a ton of design and design-thinking-type work. And they were hiring a person to be an innovation strategist, which is something that resonates with me. And what I loved in the job description is the first thing they wrote is, Are you a hybrid thinker? They call that out. And then below that, they described it as someone who's one part a humanist, one part technologist, one part anthropologist and filmmaker, entrepreneur. They kind of listed these identity mashups that nailed it for me because companies are starting to realize they need someone that is multidisciplinary or multifaceted. And that's actually the value when you can find a person with this crazy combined skill set and identity set.

Douglas: You know, as someone who's hired a lot of people over the years, I hear that and part of me is reminded of this really, I would say, treacherous territory of carving out this unicorn that maybe doesn't exist, and then you have these unrealistic expectations on finding the person. But I think as the job market or the pool gets more and more sophisticated and people have more and more experience, these unicorns do tend to, they're out there.

Sarabeth: Yeah.

Douglas: And so I'm just kind of curious of your thoughts on that.

Sarabeth: Yeah. It's that notion that the jobs of the future will eventually become commonplace today. So an example of that would be a social-media manager. We never knew we needed that role 10 years ago. That was really outlandish and exotic. And now it's so normal that multiple people have that in their job description underneath other duties. And I think now we see things like a DevOps manager. Well, that's hybrid. You're doing development and operations. Or even a data scientist. What is that? That's a hybrid title that now is becoming more normalized because we're like, yeah, of course, you have to look at data scientifically with other methods and insights behind that.

So I think it's that notion that when things are hybrid, I'll use more of a product example for a second. When CamelBak created a backpack that had a water-bottle bladder inside of it, well, what the heck do you call that? That was a new product that combined two existing functions. And they named it CamelBak.

And that suddenly caught on as the new way to call that object. Well, the same thing goes for people in roles. We don't know what they are until we sort of adopt it and get used to it. So I believe the unicorns are out there. We just don't have enough language to define them.

Douglas: Yeah. It's interesting. It's like, are we tapping into an emergent phenomenon or really just dreaming up something that some really crazy custom-fit jigsaw-puzzle piece that would just help our organization? Or are we tapping into some trends that are just starting to emerge?

Sarabeth: Probably all the above.

Douglas: Yeah. I think the risk is when we overfit that jigsaw puzzle, and it's like, oh, here's this thing that's like—does that thing even exist? Maybe that's two different people.

Sarabeth: Yeah. No, and that's part of the art and the science of this, so thanks for putting that into perspective. We can't say we need someone that is the jack of all trades and an expert in everything, because that's not realistic.

So my quick framework is that there's three types of professionals: people that have really one type of expertise, I call that singularity. People that have multiple things they do for work, I call that multiplicity. And then the hybrid is somewhere in the middle, where you're blending and combining multiple expertise as well as multiple areas of generalists. And so it's sort of fuzzy.

And so people say if you're a hybrid, then you're not an expert. And actually, I disagree. I think you're an expert in your own hybridity, because in that emergent space—I love that word you used—and you're in the intersection of multiple identities simultaneously, that's an expertise no one else can replicate.

And to your point a moment ago of, is it too crazy to ask for someone to be all these things? Yeah. I think it is. So when I work with people one on one or in groups, I say you have to first have a ton of self-awareness and know what are your core professional identities, the two, three, four at the most, that are really the ones you're best at. They light you up. You want the world to know you for. If you stop doing any of those tomorrow, you'd feel like part of you is missing. Once you land on those two, three, or four, that's what makes your hybridity. That's kind of the ingredients of a mixture. So, yes, you probably can do more than those three or four identities, but that's not going to be the best use of who you are as a hybrid. Where I'm trying to go with this is that there is sort of—a hybrid needs to just be a certain set of components. It can't be everything. Does that make sense?

Douglas: Absolutely. And I think that was the risk I was trying to point out to folks that wanted to tap into this phenomenon is temper your expectations. We can't just sit there and just conjure up the most perfect combination of skills and experience, because the more things you layer on, the less the probability that someone in the world has accumulated those things and is available and is interested in working with you.

Sarabeth: Yeah, that's true. And people are fluid and dynamic, and as the workforce is shifting, people are changing industries. And so once you start not just getting new jobs, but you're going from finance into healthcare, into tech, now you have this whole different set of who you are and how do you articulate that value. And I think that's what I'm trying to help people discern is you need to tell a story of the relationships between the different identities you have.

Douglas: I love that. Gosh, that brings up a lot of stuff for me. I was even thinking about internal family systems. But this notion of fluidity is really fantastic. And maybe the advice to hiring managers, and the thing I would probably internalize, is that if we're hiring people that are hybrid or have that hybrid affinity, it means that we can benefit from that fluidity and adaptability because they realize that they have this growth mindset and they are accumulating new skills. And so even though they're not this unicorn, maybe they're missing a few pieces, then they're going to grow into that, and they can adapt and they're not just fixed into this identity of who they are and what they do.

Sarabeth: Absolutely. Identity is a really big spectrum, and we change depending on context and time of our lives. We are not the same individuals that we were 10 years ago, you and I. We have different tastes and interests and hobbies and probably even friends. So why would we ever think that our career stays stagnant too?

Douglas: Mm. Also, just kind of tying this back to meetings and facilitation and also your comment around people saying that hybrids aren't experts, I would say that my interpretation of that would be hybrids are experts at gluing things together, because you may have—and in fact, a hybrid could be a deep expert in two things, and they're gluing together a bunch of other things. But even if they're not super-deep expertise in whatever is the topic at hand, their deep expertise might be somewhere else, even if they have the ability to span these different spectrums, it means they're going to be able to glue together the deep knowledge that others on the team have, and that is super powerful. And I would argue that hybrids make great facilitators because our role is to glue together, it's to understand enough to say, hey, what you're saying is contradicting this other person, even though you seem to be agreeing. And that takes some hybridity. You have to understand enough of each of these things and have enough experience to be able to call on that knowledge and apply it in a way that everyone can kind of come to the table and understand it.

Sarabeth: Yeah. That's really a great insight and observation. I agree that hybrids definitely have one foot in different worlds, and so they get to be these master translators, which isn't the route of facilitation to make it easier. And so you're the person transferring knowledge between disciplines or industries or sectors or departments or whatever to help them make it easier of, What are these languages and ideas and concepts we're doing? How do they fit together?

Douglas: Yeah, one thing I also say is one of the superpowers of a facilitator is really quick synthesis, to be able to take a bunch of inputs in, synthesize them, make some meaning of it, and then kind of spit it back out for the group to react to. And so there's a balance between totally mirroring what you're hearing but also synthesizing some things to help spur and move things ahead. And I think a lot of, I would say, varied and diverse background and perspective can really make that synthesis easier, because it's not about necessarily how fast your brain is processing stuff. I mean, sure, there's an element of that. But if you have different models and contexts that you can draw on, it definitely reduces the need for your brain to have to go into hyperdrive.

Sarabeth: Yeah. I love what you're saying. That was one of the findings I had in looking at hybrids, and where does hybridity show up? And hybrids are masters at pattern recognition and meeting making. And you just said that in your own words.

Douglas: That's fantastic. You know, I'd written down complexity earlier, for a different reason. And I think you could kind of map this stuff onto a Cynefin framework even, based on a few things I've heard you speaking about today already. Early on, before hybrid, we have a very simple view of the world. It's like I learn to do something, and I do it. And then as I learn more and more difficult things and get more and more specialized, moving into the complicated domain, that hybrids really thrive in this complex domain, where things are adapting and changing, and we have to respond to them. And we have that fluidity that we can lean on so that if something new comes at us, we don't just get knocked off. We kind of just, we remain in balance.

Sarabeth: Yeah, definitely. I think hybrids are very adaptable, and they tinker and invent and hack, and they see the standard process, and they know how to kind of tweak it or make it better or change it completely.

Douglas: The other fascinating thing about the Cynefin model is that in between the domains, because a lot of people look at it and think it's just a two by two. The lines between the domains is a domain in and of itself, so this disorder that you move through when you transition. And you were talking about these hybrids transitioning, and I think whenever we transition domains, there's some disorder. We have to, you know, like, Clark Kent can't just turn into Superman. He has to go into the phone booth and emerge as Superman.

And I think that that in itself, I mean, there's two things I think of that might be interesting to unpack from your work, which was, do you see that there is a transition, an uncomfortable transition, as people start to learn? As they're moving from a simple, like, "I know this one thing. I'm starting to learn, build this other skill," it's like maybe there's some identity crisis starting to happen.

Sarabeth: No. I was completely agreeing. I have a table I created in the book I wrote, More Than My Title, where I talk about emerging hybrids versus established hybrids, because there is sort of this developmental thing that's happening as you're feeling the push and pull and tension of having multiple identities, but not understanding the relationship between them, how they fit together, and how to build that as the way you're working in the world. You're sort of stuck in this awkward phase. And there's a few different indicators I have of that. And one of it is this, I call it, crossover. It's like sometimes you know how to tie your identities together and you're in that zone of genius, and other times you don't. It's like you only are one or the other, and you haven't found that natural cadence or just natural ability to let it be simultaneous.

And one thing that just my kind of artsy head that inspired some of my research findings was I was looking at paintings by Rene Magritte, and he is one of the ultimate surrealists. And he had one painting where it's a sandy beach, it's the seashore, and there's a doorway, just the frame of a door, and the door is open. And so you can walk through that doorway and get to the water or you can stay on the beach. It's sort of that moment of this invisible gateway between the two worlds. And that's my visual mental metaphor of us trying to figure out, How do we find these spaces of transition between the different parts of ourselves?

Douglas: It's amazing. As you were sharing some of that I'm starting to formalize some of, like you were helping me articulate where my head was going previously, which is I think there's two modes, maybe. One is as you're first exploring the land of hybridity, it's almost like going through puberty because it's like, wait a second. This is a real awkward transition.

Sarabeth: Yeah.

Douglas: And as you start to become more hybrid, so you're developing different facets of yourself, when you're in that zone, I would imagine early on that fluidity isn't quite so fluid. Being able to shift between those modes may be more awkward. I'm actually taking this hat off, putting it on the table, and putting this other hat on, and it's a little clunky. I have to maybe reboot a little bit. But then more and more you do it, the more skilled you are of just blending between the two to where it's almost like a dance. Like, you don't even notice that you're shifting between these modes.

Sarabeth: Yeah. That's exactly right. The other tool that I brought into my work is this idea of developing your consciousness. Hybrids don't realize they're even hybrids. They have to learn that construct and realize, oh, my gosh, this might apply to me. And even once you learn the term, you still might not understand how it looks for you and what makes you a hybrid.

Oftentimes when I speak to people that they're excited and this resonates, and they go, "Of course, I'm a hybrid. I do marketing and sales, and I'm a gardener on the side. And I love to do graphics and computer animation," but they don't understand how those things fit together or how they're using synergies and a marriage of all that. Then there's still that emerging phase. That's more multiplicity, in my mind, when you are just putting one hat on, taking it off, putting the next hat on. And the hybrid is literally wearing all the hats at once and has tentacles of skills.

Let me give a clear, concrete picture of my hybridity in action. So actually, when I'm facilitating a meeting and I start to do either some visual recording, graphic facilitation, or in the moment ask people to take on roleplaying, to play out different personas of stakeholders that we're trying to imagine how would they experience this thing, those are moments when I notice big shifts in the room, and other people don't run meetings that way. That's me and my hybridity because the researcher is turning on, the designer's turning on, the educator's turning on, in that moment to get people to do things they don't normally do to make sense of information we're struggling with.

So that's kind of how detailed I push people to see themselves in these moments of their hybridity, to reveal it to themselves.

Douglas: You know, that reminds me of one of the thoughts that I had when we first met and I was starting to wrap my head around your work, and it was that this is in a way, is a really practical, pragmatic approach to personal branding.

Sarabeth: Definitely. It has that connection, which I think is just one of the outcomes of doing the work. So I didn't even really do my full hybrid introduction, but essentially I've designed my own title for my hybridity, and I call myself a creative disruptor because to me that encapsulates who I am in the intersections. And it's a unique name. It's not too out there or trendy, but it feels authentic and accurate, and it takes some practice and exploration to find that right combination of words.

And what my "creative disruptor" title represents is that I'm comprised of being an artist, designer, educator, and researcher. Those are my four primary, or core, identities that mean the most and I have to use pretty frequently in the work I do. If I don't, I get bored or I stop doing that job, or other things happen, more disengaged.

So that's really kind of the building blocks of this work is having self-awareness of your identities, and then asking yourself, Who are you in those intersections, and what do you call yourself in that bullseye of your intersections? That's your hybrid title, which then becomes a beautiful personal brand that all of your history and work experience connects to.

Douglas: Yeah. I love this notion of authenticity in its purest sense, right?

Sarabeth: Mm-hmm.

Douglas: A lot of times we hear that word thrown around, be authentic, etc., but I truly believe that if we're going to be great facilitators, we have to be authentic. And that means being true to ourselves and showing up in that way. And I love that your work is a tool for folks to do that self-reflection and think about, well, what are these elements that are critical? And I think in a way, it's not all that dissimilar than thinking about values as well. But I think that values is such an overused and diluted term that a lot of times people, especially when you're at the company and it's the things that are just hanging on the walls, and no one really lives by them. So I love it as a framework that helps us get to that same need, but it's not a bunch of handwaving stuff.

Sarabeth: Yeah. And one other thing I'll add to that would be I think it's about being seen, which ultimately is about belonging, right? And we know that's one of the steps to have safety and strong teams and trust is you have to feel like you belong and people understand who you are. And when we just walk around and know each other on teams or companies as you're the director of programs, you're the head of A.I., you do sales, I don't really know who you are, and I actually don't really understand your job. And I understand that we need a hierarchy of formal job titles, so I'm not pushing against disrupting and changing all that. But what I am saying and what I've started doing with more teams during workshops and companies is let's do some of this identity work to reveal your professional identity so your colleagues and peers see you the way that you want to be seen and know you for what you're best at. And that's more than just your StrengthsFinders or Myers-Briggs profile, which are other talents and skills. Your identity is something that just defines who you are and overarches your passion, your purpose, your skills, everything.

Douglas: I'm kind of getting into my nerd brain now on the facilitation, but I'm starting to visualize. It could be—we've been building a lot of MURAL templates for various activities and a lot of the things we would do in real life. And one of them—you mentioned StrengthsFinder—one of them is based on StrengthsFinders, and there was another one based on the books everyone's reading right now. So how do we, coming together as a team, visually kind of exciting each other around possibility or around vision, around the makeup or composition of the team—I think it'd be really fascinating to do some of this exploration as a team. What you're talking about is deeply introspective, and I'm sure you coach a lot of folks and help draw that stuff out—I can imagine teams helping each other draw it out because they see things in their teammates that their teammates might not see in themselves or aren't recognizing. They're a little blind to it because it's things they do but don't perceive or don't say about themselves.

Sarabeth: I just have a huge smile on my face right now. You couldn't have said it better. I think doing this work in collaboration with your teammates is one of the best ways because they mirror back to you how they see you and help you realize the truer parts of yourself that maybe you've never given a name to or wouldn't have called out. Like you said, they perceive things and they can reflect it back. Yeah, I think that's really powerful.

Douglas: I think one of the thoughts I was having, too, is one of my favorite ways to dispel a conflict is something I call roles and coffee, and as two people were kind of at loggerheads or whatever. And I don't feel like—usually you can tell as a leader, is something bad going on here, or they just misunderstanding each other? Ninety percent of the time, it's just some silly misunderstanding stuff. And so I'll just tell them to schedule a coffee. And there are no rules besides one simple rule that they can't talk about work or the task that they're doing. They can't discuss the project or anything. They can only discuss what they think each other does from a role standpoint. "I want you to sit down and tell me what your role is. I'm going tell you what your role is, and you're going to tell me what my role is. And you have to sit and listen."

Sarabeth: Yeah.

Douglas: And it can be very eye-opening to hear how people misunderstand what you do and what you bring to the table.

Sarabeth: Completely. That is the beginning. I have a workbook that complements my book, and the first section is, What do other people say you do? Talk to your colleagues. How does your partner or family members describe what you do? How does a child, how does a neighbor? Trying these different scenarios to understand how people interpret and perceive you and what words they're using. And if they're totally vague or uncertain, that's also evidence as well. And it's not that everyone has to be super crystal clear, because it is really hard to define all the different things we do. But if people are that fuzzy and if you're not telling a story that's articulating the way you want to show up in the world, then other people won't get it either. So that's kind of why I think this is a really big deal of how you describe your hybrid identity and find language that you believe in will start to cascade to your boss, to clients, to everyone.

And the more I've talked about being a hybrid, I've noticed people start to introduce me that way, or they've walked up—I had a boss one time say, "Hey, Sarabeth. Are you able to use enough of your identities in this job? How is that going for you?" And that blew me away because when would you ever expect a manager or a boss to say that and to make sure you're feeling supported and seen? And I think the more we talk about this explicitly, the more we feel, wow, this is really what's been missing from our lives.

Douglas: That's amazing. You know, and it's like I think that to me the fascinating piece is absolutely others are going to help you identify things that you may not realize that you might want to kind of craft into that narrative. They may actually also point out things that they're perceiving that are incorrect or that maybe we're presenting things in a way that it's confusing or people are reading into it in ways that we don't want. We can repair those things as well.

Sarabeth: Oh, definitely. Yeah. If people are reflecting back to you—like, I used to get called the design-thinking guru a lot, and it was kind of just a fun, easy way for people to reference me. But that kind of drove me crazy because that's not who I saw myself as. Like, yes, I know design thinking, but that wasn't the way I wanted to show up in a room or be introduced. So, yeah, that was good feedback where I needed to tailor and tweak how I introduced myself and how I talked about myself. And then it started to shift that introduction when other people said it.

Douglas: Absolutely. I had the same thing happen to me when I first started Voltage Control, because I was doing a little bit of fractional CTO work, as well as facilitating and running design sprints. And I would tell people that, right? I would tell them that hybrid nature of, like, I'm a fractional CTO, and I do design sprints.

It is fascinating to me how people would always remember one or the other. And so I'd either get introduced as the CTO guy or the design-sprint guy. And as I was doing less and less CTO work, it was even more frustrating because people would still introduce me as this fractional CTO. And it's like, "Well, I'm not really doing that as much anymore." It's a struggle, and it's real.

Sarabeth: Yeah. And it just takes practice and experimentation. I tell people to keep iterating. It took me a while to even figure out my hybrid title. And if you don't have one, if that's daunting, because going into these intersections, I will say right now, is the hardest work. People get really lit up, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, you just want me to draw this Venn diagram and look at my overlapping identities. I love it. That's genius." And then they start scratching their heads and go, "Oh, my god, I don't know how to do that." But if you just want a starting point, even just saying, "Hey, I'm a hybrid. I work at the intersections of, in my case, being an artist, designer, researcher, educator," that is a nice gateway, and that's a really simple way to start reinforcing this stuff. But I agree. It takes a while for people to actually, like, hold onto it and remember it.

Douglas: So, I want to come back to something you mentioned in passing earlier as this kind of a setup to kind of explaining this work. And it really struck me, it brought me back to a place that I haven't been in a while, which is bumping into people in a networking environment or maybe at a party, and you just met them. You didn't get a really good intro. And the easiest, the most mundane question is, So what do you do?

Sarabeth: Every time. Yep.

Douglas: Yeah. And so, you know, I always kind of feel awkward with that question, but it was the thing I always wanted to ask, but I felt like an idiot asking it. And so now that we've advanced, well, (a) it's kind of difficult to even find ourselves in networking situations these days, but I guess in your work, have you found more interesting questions, better ways to probe into this hybridity and to learn more about people rather than, "So what do you do?"

Sarabeth: Oh, definitely. I mean, a quick one that's not as much identity related is just, What do you love to do? Adding that love part shifts it more into hobbies and extracurricular activities. But if you're trying to stay on a professional note and especially hybrid stuff, I'd say, "What do you call yourself?" You know, that right away, I ask people, "What is your identity?" or just "What are your different professional identities?," which right away assumes people are more than one thing. Some of those might need a little bit more contextualization to help people not feel affronted or thrown too far off. You might say, "Hey, I realize we're more than our job titles. Tell me about the different identities you use in your work." And shifting to an identity conversation could be interesting. So those are maybe the top three that just came out of my mouth.

Douglas: Yeah. As you were kind of sharing some of those, it reminded me my friend has a great prompt that I've totally stolen. And it's, What's lighting you up these days?

Sarabeth: Yeah. I love that.

Douglas: I find that people always have some really fun answers to that question.

So speaking of questions, questions are kind of, I think, the facilitator's Swiss Army knife. They get us out of a lot of trouble. They can kind of move us forward, etc.. So apart from just the breaking-the-ice, "I just met you" questions, what are some of the questions that you think are provocative or helpful when we're in meetings or just helping people work better together?

Sarabeth: Yeah. One of the top things I notice when I'm working with groups and we're problem solving is all the assumptions that they're holding onto that they don't hear and kind of those limited beliefs. So probably a few of my top questions I ask the most is, How do you know? You know, just asking them if they're like, "Oh, we don't need to research that. We already talked to those people and they said blank." And it's like, well, how do you know they really feel that way? Or what do you see that makes you say that? Getting really objective and moving away from their interpretations and subjective feelings so that they have to back it with actual fact and have a reality check and kind of question where did this story in their head start from?

And probably the last one, it's sort of a loose tool, and I adjust this in so many ways. I could use it for an interview script or facilitation and brainstorming. But these four words, I think, are my driving, just ideas when I'm doing facilitating. And they are needs, beliefs, pain points, and desires. I'm constantly returning back to those to understand, What does a user need? What are they believing? What are their pain points and desires? And I just found if we can answer those, we can reveal the next best set of insights to get us moving forward.

Douglas: I think that's also true for the participants, too. Are we pointing that inward to what's going on inside the hearts and minds of the folks in the room as well as who this room is focused on solutioning for.

Sarabeth: Mm-hmm.

Douglas: So I love that, yeah.

Excellent. Well, Sarabeth, it's been a pleasure chatting with you today. And I'm sure if everyone enjoyed this as much as I did, then they're eager to find out where they can learn more and maybe also think about—I'd love to hear what you might be interested in leaving the audience with.

Sarabeth: Ah, so many good nuggets. Douglas, you and I just have the best synergy. We could have talked forever. Let's see. So essentially the work I'm doing, go to my website, morethanmytitle.com. I just wrote a book with the same name called More Than My Title: The Power of Hybrid Professionals in a Workforce of Experts and Generalists, because essentially I think this is a movement of a hidden segment of the workforce, and I'm really trying to build awareness and give people practical tools to both help them with their own personal identity, but also to realize the workforce is made up of more than just experts and generalists. And then you can find my workbook, and I have online courses. So my goal is just to help people activate and learn about themselves and their identity.

And my takeaway for your audience today is my favorite question, which is, Who are you in the intersections of your multiple professional identities? And when you can start to answer that question, you are going to see a whole new side and really just version of who you are in the world.

Douglas: Fantastic. Sarabeth, it's been a pleasure chatting with you. And I'm really excited to see how the listeners take this work to heart and what they find as they start to explore new identities. So thanks so much for being on the show, and we'll talk again soon.

Sarabeth: I hope so, Douglas. I'd love to come back anytime. Just keep me on your radar. You're great. This is wonderful. Thank you.

Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

"Life is gray. It's not black and white. It's possible to admit that the FBI made mistakes and at the same time recognize the ultimate responsibility of Koresh to have led his people out peacefully, as we encouraged him to do every single day." Gary Noesner

Gary Noesner, author of the book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30-year career. During this career, Gary was named the first chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. As a negotiator, he was personally involved in numerous high-profile crises, cases, and seizures, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, recently dramatized by the Netflix series.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Gary about the gray nature of life, what distinguishes wants vs needs, and the game-changing power of making adjustments at half-time. Listen in to find out how Gary's discomfort with conflict in his youth led to his career as a hostage negotiator for the FBI.

Show Highlights

[7:29] The fatal mistake of assuming that high rank equals expertise

[14:07] The realization that life is gray

[19:00] Saving the most lives possible

[22:29] Making adjustments at half-time

[26:40] Distinguishing between wants and needs

Links | Resources

Gary on LinkedIn

Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator

About the Guest

Gary Noesner, author of the book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator, retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30-year career. During this career, Gary was named the first chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. As a negotiator, he was personally involved in numerous high-profile crises, cases, and seizures, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, recently dramatized by the Netflix series.

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Contact Voltage Control

Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Today I'm with Gary Noesner. Gary retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30-year career, during which he was named the first chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit. As a negotiator, he was personally involved in numerous high-profile crises, cases, and seizures, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, recently dramatized by the Netflix series. He's also author of the book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator.

Welcome to the show, Gary.

Gary: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Douglas: So, Gary, I'm always fascinated to hear how people got their start, especially in the world of facilitation. And I'm sure negotiators are no different. While there's certainly a course at Quantico, there's not readily degree programs, like, "Oh, I'm going to go become a negotiator or become a facilitator." It's a quite circuitous path a lot of people take. And I'm curious. All the way back to the Lakeland High School, you know, talking about some of those early situations you found yourself in, at what point did you really start to realize that you had this gift of kind of working with people?

Gary: Well, I think as an early age, I was always uncomfortable around conflict and always sort of stepped up to the plate to de-escalate confrontations and arguments, whether it's between friends or others. It just seemed like a natural and appropriate thing to do for me. So when I got into the FBI, after wanting to do that since I was young, I had no sense that anything about negotiation existed because it didn't when I joined. But when I first got in the early part of my career, the FBI had sort of taken on this hostage-negotiation concept that had been started by NYPD. And there's something about it that really attracted me, and I thought it fit my personality and skill set. So I got the early training, and it was an auxiliary function for me for many, many years. And eventually I became a full-time negotiator and chief of the Crisis Negotiation Unit for the last 10 years of my career. But it was very challenging, and, yeah, there's a lot of similarities with mediation, facilitation. It's all about building relationships and influencing people in a positive way.

Douglas: And it must have been kind of—it's like coming full circle as you were one of the first to take the course, and then you ended up taking the program over. What did that feel like when you remember it? Like, what was that like?

Gary: Well, in those days, when I first got involved, the FBI, perhaps more so than today, played a pretty significant role in training police departments. Police departments didn't have a lot of money for training back then, so part of the FBI's mission was to provide it at no charge. And one of the areas, of course, was negotiation. It eventually became the thing we taught more than anything else, except for maybe firearms. And it gave me an opportunity to really interface with a lot of police officers in ways that I might not have had a chance otherwise. And that was a really valuable piece of my learning as an agent, as a human being. And, you know, I certainly got as much from those officers as I gave. It became apparent to me very quickly that the skills and the approaches we were teaching had a real impact. It wasn't theoretical. It allowed officers to exercise some specific skills to prevent violence and come home alive to their families. So immediately I recognized it as rewarding and meaningful and certainly something I always enjoyed.

Douglas: Something that really caught my eye—and I kind of can parallel it back to even the theme of the show, which is control, and how much control do we lean into, and how much do we back away from? And I really struck a chord with this notion of maintaining balance. And you were talking about managing yourself and the people around you. And in fact, I think there is a quote that really caught my eye, which was, if you cannot control your own emotions, how can you expect to influence those of others?

Gary: That's literally the first line that comes out of my mouth when I teach negotiations, because it's so true. I mean, if you want to influence others and yet you yourself are emotionally charged or dealing not in a logical, thoughtful, empathic way, then you're probably not going to be as successful as you would otherwise. So self-control is terribly important. And you tend to see people that perform at the highest levels in certainly law-enforcement negotiations are typically people who have a lot of self-control.

And one of the chapters in my book, Stalling for Time, I start each chapter with a quote. And a quote I always like, it's a partial quote from Rudyard Kipling about if you can keep your head about you when all else are losing theirs.

And I think that says a lot to me about the kind of person that makes a good negotiator and what is required. It's somebody that can think clearly in the midst of a situation where others might be so overcome with various forms of reaction that they're not optimally performing. You know, it's kind of like—I always do the comparison of a trauma surgeon. You know, when mass casualties are brought into an emergency room, the trauma surgeon, it's not that they're not human and don't see the damage that some people have suffered or perhaps been deceased, but they focus immediately on what has to be done, which is to save as many lives and determine which ones need their most immediate care. So they put those emotions aside so that they can function at an optimal level or highest level they can. And I think negotiations is very akin to that.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of the, never confusing getting even with what you want.

Gary: Yeah. And it's a good phrase we used to use for our commanders because even law enforcement, somebody can be a fairly high rank and have a lot of different experiences in an agency. It doesn't mean that they've had a lot of experience managing with these kinds of crises.

And law-enforcement officers are human beings, and when a perpetrator, particularly one that is maybe not a model citizen or somebody that may not have any attributes that we would find commendable, when they refuse to do what we want and they don't cooperate and they back out of promises, they engage in any number of problematic behaviors, you really got to maintain your self-control because if you respond and react to that, you may get even with them, but are you really accomplishing what your goal is, which is to get your way? And "to get our way" in the context of negotiation means we get people to peacefully surrender, to comply, to do what we think is not only in our best interest, but in their best interest. We don't want anybody to get hurt. So I found a lot of my career time was helping on-scene commanders and decision makers, chiefs of police, sheriffs, understand that concept.

There's always an assumption that people of a high rank know how to do everything. And of course, that's a fatal mistake you can make, because they don't necessarily understand, especially—someone might be a great internist as a doctor, but can they perform brain surgery? Probably not. So, you know, just because you have the MD in front of your name doesn't mean you can do everything there is that could possibly come before you. So we have to know our limitations, and we have to understand that there are people who have more expertise that we probably would be wise to listen to.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of your points in the book around just the crises within the crises and these other negotiations that have to happen. So you're managing quite a lot at the same time.

Gary: Yeah. I mean, and of course, I know we'll be talking about Waco shortly, but I got asked this on a recent interview, and I never really thought about it from that complexity point of view that while out there, I had three very distinct roles. I had to manage the negotiation team, maybe 15 or 20 people, and ensure that it was functioning properly and proceeding in a strategic way, the way I wanted it to. And at the same time, I had to convey what we wanted to the bosses and convince them to support the strategic approach we were taking, and that could often be a challenge. And then, last but not least, is dealing with David Koresh and all the unique issues and problems that he brought to the table. So, you know, you find yourself sometimes being the ringleader in a three-ring circus, you know, and trying to keep everybody functioning in the right way so we can achieve the outcome we want.

Douglas: Yeah. And speaking of Waco, let's talk about that for a moment. I was really curious to hear your thoughts on how well it portrayed the negotiation process, because from a storyline perspective, when I compare your book to the show, there's definitely some sensationalism on the Branch Davidian side. My depiction was that it demonstrated the conflict with the kind of more forceful approach and also just the kind of slow, intentional approach ya'll were taking. But I'm just kind of curious as far as, like, anything about the negotiation process that you felt was maybe skewed in the presentation.

Gary: It's a big question, and there's a lot of variables. Obviously, they bought my book to show the FBI side of the story and what perspective we had from outside looking in. And then they bought David Thibodeau's book—he was a surviving Branch Davidian—to get the perspective of someone inside looking out. And I liked that approach, to look at it from both angles. But specifically addressing the negotiation part, they got a lot of parts of the negotiation very right. What was the Hollywood dramatization part is they had my character doing all these things on his own, when in reality I'm leading the team, and there's eight, nine negotiators per shift. It's quite a complex and many-moving-part operation. So obviously, Hollywood doesn't want to pay those additional actors and introduce their characters and get the audience to know them. It's a whole different level of challenge, that they wanted to showcase Michael Shannon, who was one of the two main stars of the TV show who played me.

Douglas: I got to say, if I'm ever played by anyone, I would say Michael Shannon wouldn't be a bad—that's not a bad deal to get.

Gary: I had seen Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire, that TV show.

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Gary: I was very impressed with him in that show, and I didn't even know his name, to be honest with you. And they came out and said, "This Michael Shannon's been hired to play you." And I looked him up right away. I said, "Oh, it's that guy." Well, he is just an incredible actor and human being. And, you know, during my time on the set, we had an opportunity to become quite friendly and had basically drinks and dinner every night while I was out there. And what an incredible actor. And he certainly was not trying to imitate me, but he captured the tenor of my philosophy, which goes back to your earlier question. I think those issues that came up, including the conflict between the tactical side of the FBI that wanted to take a different approach, I think that's very accurately reflected. Again, not so much in the exact form, but certainly in terms of substance. And he had it down very, very well and, I think, did an incredible job.

And let me add another thing, Douglas. You know, what I found is I felt that part of the reason I wrote my book was to educate current and future FBI leaders. And one of the things they need to be educated on is to understand not only the mistakes that the FBI made there, but the good things we did. And there were far more of those than not. But if someone doesn't write that down and record it, those things fall through the cracks and they're forgotten, and sometimes mistakes are repeated, and good behaviors are not appreciated or replicated. So I wanted to write it for that reason. And I also feel that in the FBI, we serve the American people. If we do something wrong, we should step up to the plate, admit what we did, demonstrate that we are making changes and corrections, and I think we owe it to the American people that we serve to do those things. So for all those reasons, I wrote that book and stand by the portrayal of the FBI overall.

What I'm not quite as happy about is I think the portrayal on the other side of David Koresh came up a bit short for me because in reality, David Koresh was a far more dark and sinister, manipulative guy than was portrayed. The other great actor there—there were several of them—but Taylor Kitsch, who played Koresh, was just phenomenal. And he's such a nice guy in real life that I think that came through. And the producer, directors wanted to show the charismatic side of Koresh, what allowed him to attract followers and gain their total allegiance. And they did that, but I just don't think they showed sufficiently. They showed some dark things from him but not enough to my satisfaction. And I talked to them about that and tried to change that. But what you find out is when you sell your book to Hollywood or somebody else, you have some influence, but you don't have control.

Douglas: Yep. I think that echoes my read on it as well. It's a little sensationalized on the, like, kind of making people want to have a little more sympathy than maybe you would have if you were watching it go down from the sidelines.

Gary: You know, you're into facilitation, and I think the biggest takeaway for facilitators, if you want to use Waco as sort of an example, is the realization that life is gray. It's not black and white. It's possible to admit that the FBI made mistakes and at the same time recognize the ultimate responsibility of Koresh to have led his people out peacefully, as we encouraged him to do every single day. So you don't have to say, "Oh, these guys were all good, and these guys were all bad. The big old bad government came in and just wanted to kill people." I mean, it's actually intellectually lazy to take on those extreme views and not very realistic. There were good people in there who were practicing their faith, and there were highly dedicated FBI agents who wanted nothing but everybody to come out alive. So to make those general derogatory statements, I think, is just showing you haven't done your research, and you haven't read about what really happened, and you don't understand.

Douglas: Coming back to your goals for the book around really cementing the positive impact so they're not lost, it also jumped out to me when you were talking about these post-incident reviews and applying these lessons learned, it was interesting because it seemed like the popularity of the techniques within the FBI began to grow as you started to celebrate some of these wins. But the irony of it all was, maybe one of the ones that I was the most tickled by and I thought that you guys did such an amazing move was the steaks and gravy and cakes for the prisoners. So they're all having a Thanksgiving coma while the tactical thing went in, and clearly, not much credit was given after the fact for that.

Gary: Yeah. You know, it's funny. A lot of people in law enforcement are really not well versed on what negotiators do and why we do it. It's sort of a soft science, and you know there's more to taking action than here's a bad guy. We're going to do this to suppress them, arrest them, whatever we have to do. And, you know, when you do negotiate people out, which we do, in the 90 percentile, people say, "Well, it must not have been so hard. That guy must not have been that dangerous anyway." And they sort of make some excuses for it. Of course, I always want to say, "Well, you try doing it when somebody's life is on the line." But it's a hard thing to define.

But just as in facilitation, we're building relationships, and people expect in these situations law enforcement to show up and be very confrontational, very demanding, very dictatorial. You will do this and you better do that, or we're going to do x, y, z. And instead they get somebody like me show up and say, "Hey, David. This is Gary. What's going on in there? I'm here to help. I don't want to see anybody get hurt." It's something they don't expect, and it gives us an opportunity to listen to them and to better understand what their motivation is, what their feelings are, how they interpret what has happened. It allows us slowly and steadily to lower the tension, to de-conflict and de-confrontate. And it allows us to begin eventually to have some influence over their behavior. And, you know, you typically will get to a point where a guy like David Koresh, which you didn't hear, he said, "You know, I just don't know what I can do. I don't know what to get out of, how to get out of what I got into." And you say, "Well, you know, here's some ideas for you, and here's something you might want to think about. And come out to jail and tell the world your side of the story. It needs to be heard." You know, those are things we did, and with some effect, we got 35 people out during the first half when I was there, including 21 children. That's a fact that many people forget. And it was not an easy task, and I'm very proud of it. I'm no less disappointed that we didn't get more out or everybody out. But you got to recognize that human emotion is a really challenging thing. And when there's been loss of life, like it was at Waco before we even arrived as the FBI, I mean, we were already in a deep ditch, and we got to dig out of that. It's pretty tough.

Douglas: You know, as you were speaking, it reminded me of some notes I wrote down around there's a lot of similarities between facilitation and negotiation, but there's some clear differences as well. We're not dealing with—life and death is usually not at stake. And the fundamental contradiction that you mentioned, which I thought was really fascinating, we don't really struggle with that so much, right? Like, we're all about building trust, but we never, ever have to bend the truth, or we never have to potentially send them into harm's way. And when I think about that story, was it in West Virginia, where Cheryl's husband, her and her child. And there was a lot of interesting dynamics there from the perspective of opening up options and demonstrating a future when you know that that future may not exist. So I'm kind of curious how that unfolds, just as you're kind of regulating your emotions.

Gary: Well, it's a tough case. And, you know, my book is about the importance of negotiation and how it is a tool that law enforcement should even use more, and then I start off the first chapter of my book with a situation where we have to use deadly force to resolve it. But it was a very dramatic case. It showed how even in those cases where the behaviors, the actions of the perpetrator are so extreme that our chance of getting them to comply and resolve it peacefully are pretty slim and, thereby, someone else is going to die. So then the negotiator has to segue into a role that allows you to become more supportive of the only option we have left, and that's using force.

In Sperryville, I talked him into coming out to a helicopter, where a marksman ended his life. In the Talladega prison, that you alluded to earlier, we knew hostages were going to die, so we gave in and gave them a very sumptuous meal for the first time in eight days to sort of, excuse the expression, fatten them up and to lure them into a sense of victory and empowerment. And they took the bait and gorged on the food and basically went into sweet slumber that allowed the Hostage Rescue team to make a really terrific, well-executed entry and save everybody's lives.

So there are times where negotiators have to recognize reality, that while we will be successful most of the time, there's nothing in what we do that guarantees success and certainly not 100 percent of the time. So we have to be adaptable and flexible. And the bottom line is, how do we save the most lives possible?

Douglas: Yes. That was the thing that was going through my mind in both of those scenarios because Sperryville, you saved a woman and her child; and then the prison example, I mean, how much more carnage would have happened if they would have been bracing for it?

Gary: That's right. I mean, if we had continued to deny them food until they released the hostages, I mean, I think we stood a good chance of having them kill one of the hostages to try to force us to do what they wanted, and that's one less human being alive today to survive that. So we have to take all that into consideration. And you make the best decisions you can, and you have to weigh all the facts. That's why we function—in Waco, I get a lot of credit operating by myself, but in reality, we're leveraging a team of very skilled and talented negotiators that bring a lot to the table from their training and their personal experience. We said, "What do you think? What are your ideas? Did you hear something I didn't hear?" And we really use that to full advantage to try to come up with the best approach that we think will achieve what we want in this particular incident.

Douglas: That brings to mind something else I wanted to bring up, which was the comment of you write good notes. And it really resonated with me because I often love to facilitate with a co-facilitator, and I find that when, especially when we're exploring really tough issues that, like, a team is really struggling, like, they can't seem to get past some personal issues, or they're just stuck on some things, when you're there working directly, it's sometimes hard to see the big picture because you're in the content, you're in the moment. But if you're on the sideline kind of just observing, you can see interesting things. So I was just wondering, is that similar in the negotiation world? When you're observing and writing these notes, do you find that you see things you wouldn't have seen if you were just on the phone, in the moment with them, like, watching every word, that kind of thing?

Gary: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's akin, Douglas, if you want to do a comparison, you think of a college or a professional football game. You ever notice how sometimes—not all the time—the second half is dramatically different from the first half? I mean, dramatically different? And you say, "Boy, what happened? That must've been a hell of a speech that the coach gave." Well, what it really was is the coaches up in the booth, they're studying what happened. They're making adjustments at halftime. It's coaching. It's not being personally involved in playing that position out on the field, but watching it and seeing where changes or improvements can be made to get the outcome we wanted.

So negotiations is no different. If I'm the negotiation coordinator, or the coach, it allows me to listen to the interplay between the primary negotiator on the phone and the perpetrator, and then either in between calls or through passing a short, cryptic note, help nudge them to something I've seen that I think they may not have fully appreciated.

The quote you're talking about is in Waco. This mother was very angry that her son was by himself. He had been released in the Child Protective Services, and we sent a video in of all the children. And she was very angry at us for his forlorn status. And, you know, rather than just trying to defend ourselves, I passed a note to John Dolan, our primary negotiator at the time, and he read it, and he smiled. And it just said, "You know, Kathy, what little Brian needs now is a hug from his mommy." And you could almost hear the arrow strike her heart. And, I mean, it was the one phrase that kind of brought it home to her that she was the missing piece. It wasn't us that was causing trauma to her child. It was the fact that she sent him out, and she stayed in to fight for Koresh, that it was her maternal responsibility to do this. And I think that shot hit home, and she came out the next day, and she was the first, essentially the first, adult that came out. And that was a very meaningful goal that we'd achieved.

Douglas: It really struck home for me when I read that because sometimes people aren't even necessarily self-aware or why they're upset. And if they're lashing out to you, and you can—it's almost like judo, which is redirect their energy, kind of become more aware of where the center is.

Gary: Yeah. You know, when you look at negotiations broadly—I'm not talking specifically Waco here—really, very few of them are actually hostage-taking events, where someone's being held to force somebody else to do something. Probably 90 percent of what police do around the country are dealing with highly emotionally charged situations. Often the jilted lovers, romantic situation gone bad; somebody holding an employer who fired them; an argument with a neighbor. There are people who are expressing anger, rage, and frustration who don't even have a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve. In other words, they've gotten themselves into something they have no idea how to get out of. And that's the role that the negotiator could play to try to understand those emotions and those drivers of their behavior, and to try to deal with those and diffuse those. That's what makes us successful. It's an approach that people don't expect from law enforcement. We certainly got that from the mental-health counseling community. And it's very effective in getting people to, for the first time, hear themselves what is driving them, and they may not appreciate, you know?

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of another note that I had taken around you had talked about the role of the negotiator was to help people express their fears, so allowing them to open up. And it was interesting because as I read it, it was definitely similar to things that we're trying to do in the workplace, because often people have these unstated fears. It's just they're not vulnerable enough to say it out loud because they're worried someone's going to judge them or maybe they haven't even figured it out yet. And so simply stating what might be clear to you but not to them and allowing them to acknowledge it or even just to say yes, I thought that was pretty interesting.

Gary: You know, we used to talk about helping people understand the difference between wants and needs. So somebody involved in one of these situations may say, I want this and I want that, but it's our job to find out what they really need. Do they really need their job back? Or is it the loss of respect and the embarrassment of having to go home and tell your wife you haven't got a job anymore? I mean, you know, we don't always get that right. But that's kind of our goal, you know? And when we're communicating with them, and we say, "It sounds like you're really embarrassed by what happened," and if he hasn't articulated that and that, in fact, is what he feels, then we've just really scored some big points because he said, "Yes, that's exactly right. I'm embarrassed by having been fired." Well, that's important for us to know if we're going to deal with how he's viewing what happened to him.

Douglas: So, I had this—it was one of the last kind of sentences in your book. And I wrote it down because I thought it was pretty spot on. So I'm just going to read it, and then I'd love to just hear your thoughts today on this. But, "The happiest and most successful people are the ones that can remain calm in difficult times and put aside emotions like pride and anger that stop them from finding common ground. We need to be good listeners and understand the problems and needs of the other side."

Gary: Yeah. I guess it's never been more true than it is today in our very acrimonious political climate. And I'll bring up some recent events: the protests around the country. When people go out on the street and they carry signs and they're yelling and singing songs, whatever they're doing, what they're basically saying is, "We want somebody to hear us."

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Gary: And if instead of finding ways to creatively listen to them, we simply attack them, we're probably not going to be successful. I suspect if you had 100 people in a room and 50 were pro-life and 50 were pro-choice, you could even have great meaningful discussion all night long, and at the end of the evening, you'd probably still have 50-50. But that's okay as long as we've avoided name calling and shouts and threats and violence and so forth. That's the major goal. It's a slow, steady process to try to create an atmosphere where we can listen to others and appreciate their point of view, even if it's different. And I just hate to see that today, particularly in our political environment, we seem to be going in the wrong direction.

Douglas: Yeah. I think that there's a real beauty—I had underscored the statement you made at the end of one of the early chapters, which was, "Listening is the cheapest concession we can make."

Gary: Yeah. It is. It costs you nothing. And, you know, you can acknowledge someone's point of view, "Let me make sure I understand. You're angry at your boss because he fired you. You don't think he appreciated your work, and you felt as though he mistreated you," and so forth and so on. I'm not saying to him, "Yes, I think you should kill your boss." I'm saying to him, "I understand how you feel about what happened." I mean, that's a powerful thing. If you think about it, the whole evolution of communication between human beings, and we're social animals, we want other people to understand what we're saying and how we feel about it. And if you do that as a facilitator, as a negotiator, you're going to be successful.

Douglas: Gary, it's been so great having you on the show today, and fun chatting and hearing about just the riveting life and career you've had in negotiation. Would you like to leave the listeners with any final words?

Gary: Well, I would suggest that people really work on listening. Listening is such an important tool. So when you go out, not so much these days with COVID, but when you have an opportunity to have a social interaction, pick out somebody you don't know very well or somebody that's a little quiet over in the corner or whatever, and go and talk to them and find out about their life and ask good questions. "Can you tell me more about that? That sounds very interesting. I'd like to hear about that hobby that you have or that trip that you took." And you'll find that people are far more interesting than you might have realized, that people have done and seen things that you had no idea, and you will learn a lot. And they, in turn, will appreciate the fact that you have taken the time and demonstrated the interest in learning more about them. It is a very, very powerful tool.

And you know, what we all want to achieve is cooperation with other human beings, and we get that through being likable, plain old likable. Just be a person that strives to be likable and to automatically not think the worst of others and blame others, but seek to understand. Even the business guru Stephen Covey says, first seek to understand, then to be understood. So I'm not sure if that helps, but I would urge people to really make an effort at that.

Douglas: Well, thanks again for being on the show. It's been great.

Gary: My pleasure.

Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

"I think that's where my background in behavioral science really helps me because we are very often just standing in our own way. So it's uncomfortable to try to figure out the right question, because usually we satisfy this desire of instant gratification by just solving the easy question first."

Myriam Hadnes is on a mission to change the world, one workshop at a time. She is a behavioral economist, podcast host, and facilitator in the Netherlands. She is also the founder of workshops.work, a professional training & coaching company based out of Amsterdam, as well as the host of a podcast called Workshops Work.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Myriam about throwing idea parties, listening to what we don't want to hear, and the hidden reasons that we have for holding meetings. Listen in to find out why being a facilitator is a lot like being a yoga instructor.

Show Highlights

[6:10] Listening to what we don't want to hear

[12:27] Hidden reasons for having a meeting

[14:30] Idea parties

[20:27] Permission to interrupt

[29:23] Transition moments in virtual meetings

Links | Resources

Myriam on LinkedIn

workshops.work

Workshops Work Podcast

About the Guest

Myriam Hadnes is a behavioral economist, podcast host, and facilitator in the Netherlands. She is the founder of workshops.work, a professional training & coaching company based out of Amsterdam. She is also the host of a podcast called Workshops Work and a Project Facilitator with the European Investment Bank.

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Contact Voltage Control

Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Today I'm with Myriam Hadnes, a behavioral economist and host of Workshops Work, and an amazing facilitator. Welcome to the show, Myriam.

Myriam: Thank you for inviting me, Douglas.

Douglas: Absolutely. I've been really excited about having you on the show. And so let's start by hearing just a little bit about how you got your start. It's always fascinating to hear how facilitators found themselves in the role of bringing people together to work better.

Myriam: Yeah. And I think that's the beauty of the profession of facilitators, that it's nothing that you can study at uni or learn at school, so everyone comes with their own background and their own story. And usually we all had these moments where we realized how beautiful it is when we can help a group of people to co-create something or to come to a solution, and then started to become curious about the art of facilitation. And I think for me, it was similar.

Now, looking back, I think that I've been facilitating for over a decade. So initially I had a career in higher education. I actually left uni only maybe three or four years ago, and I was teaching economics in Vietnam. And now I realized that what I did was I facilitated learning to these students. When I then moved to Luxembourg, I still worked in higher education, but in university strategy, and this was the first time that I really got close to what a workshop was, where we had world cafes with professors and students and lobbyists and ministers in order to design a university strategy. And I got fascinated. And so when I decided that it's time for me to leave the public sector, I moved to Amsterdam.

It took me another year until I decided that I want to start my own business—no, that I had to start my own business because I was literally unemployable. I had no idea where to start because I was a public servant for my entire life. So I started to throw idea parties. I had a meetup, I invited people to show up with a challenge or a problem, and then at the group, we just brainstormed on solutions. And I was experimenting with different designs and different brainstorming techniques, all based on my background of behavioral economics and how our brain works. And suddenly people started to ask me for advice on how to design and facilitate workshops. Then they started to hire me to facilitate the workshops, and eventually they even paid me money to design workshops that I didn't even have to facilitate. I thought, "Hmm, maybe that's something that I can call my job." Yeah, that was the very beginning of it.

Douglas: It's really interesting that the tool that you started to lean on or bring to the question around, What should my business, or what should my job be? that tool itself turned into the job. That's really cool.

Myriam: Yeah.

Douglas: So, you know, I want to go back to that moment when you were in the world cafes and first getting exposed to this kind of thinking, this kind of working, these kinds of settings. Like, what did it feel like to experience that?

Myriam: I think for me, it's this excitement that I still have when I am in a room where new ideas emerge. And funny enough, it was before I left my job, I took Simon Sinek's WHY course, and what came up as my why is to bring people together so that new ways of being and doing can emerge. And back then, I was like, "Ah? What does that mean?" And today it perfectly describes my job.

But it was back then, already, exactly that, that we, through intervention, through smart design, we could help people who initially didn't have a basis to communicate because they literally didn't understand each other. A social-science professor and a physics professor discussing about a model university, it seemed impossible. And then you put a minister next to it and someone from the finance lobby, impossible to come to common grounds. And then magic happened, and they could find a way to communicate and to actually inspire each other and find meaning and value in each other's perspective. And for me, this is magic, and that's why I really believe that we can change the world one workshop at a time, because it's through this tool that we can help people to communicate in a constructive way.

Douglas: And the thing that comes to mind for me is it all just comes down to understanding. If we can understand each other, then we can build upon that foundation of understanding.

Myriam: Yes. Yes, totally. And understanding. I think our understanding of understanding very often is too narrow because we're thinking about language barriers. But it's not about the language. It's about, What do we understand when we use certain words?

Douglas: That's right. And mindset, even.

Myriam: Yes. And how can we actually start listening to what we don't want to hear? I mean, I talked on my podcast to Oscar Trimboli, who mentioned how quick we can speak, how quick we can think—and I don't know the numbers anymore—but we're just not able to listen at the same speed as we can speak and think. So we only hear what we want to hear anyway.

Douglas: Wow. It reminds me of something I heard recently, which is, like, different cultures have different norms for how long a pause is acceptable. What I mean by that, or what I read or understood, was that in some cultures, even a half of a second is long enough to indicate that no one has anything to add. Or in another culture, it might be 10 seconds, no one has anything to add. Now, if you bring those two cultures together, that means the culture that has a snappier response time, the half-a-second response time, they're going to dominate the conversation because the people that are waiting 10 seconds are, you know, the other culture's going to assume they don't have anything to add.

Myriam: I love that example. And then translate this into the online world, where already every time that there is a pause, we get anxious, so we start asking, "Are you still there? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

So the value of silence and thinking pauses, it's a totally different meaning suddenly. So we don't have the cultural differences only anymore, but we also have all the noise that is attached to it.

Douglas: That's right. And I think, you know, one of the things that's not talked about enough in the facilitation space is just the role the facilitator in setting expectations. And sometimes they're called ground rules or operating principles or operating agreements or whatever. But at the end of the day, we're setting expectations, even sharing the purpose before the meeting or setting down ahead of time to make sure people know what we're going to do or kind of what the arc of the event's going to look like. But if we're more intentional about that stuff, then, you know, silence, 10 seconds, that's what we're doing here.

Myriam: Yes, so true. If we know why we're here and what our goals are, then silence doesn't feel as uncomfortable anymore.

Douglas: Especially if we know it's providing a function and we explain that.

Myriam: Yes. On online meetings, we have to be much more explicit than we used to be in order to take away this uncertainty and this anxiety. And I think regarding the ground rules, I totally agree with you, and I would even say that the thing that is even more neglected than the purpose is the role of participants. I don't know where I read it once, that the question, What is worse than being in a meeting? It's not being invited to a meeting. And I think it's hilarious because it describes exactly what happens in so many whatsoever. You have a meeting, you have a purpose, and then, "Oh, yeah, but if we invite him, then maybe we should also invite her because otherwise she complains," or "If he knows that we're meeting, then he also wants to be there, and we want to avoid a conflict, so let's invite them all." And then you have these overpopulated meetings, and then all these individuals who, actually, were not supposed to be there, they start with comments like, "Are we again discussing that? Oh, if you had asked me before, I could have told you," or "We are discussing about that for the last 20 years." And all of this can be avoided by just not inviting them, but nobody has the guts.

Douglas: Yes. And we often refer to that as, or at least a cousin of that, is something we refer to as meeting FOMO. And there's kind of a, if you will, that the pendulum can swing, because then on one side you've got a lack of inclusion, and that's a problem. Then, when companies become aware of inclusivity and how important it is, they can swing the pendulum in the other direction, and now everyone's got meeting FOMO, and everyone wants to be in every meeting. And we have to find better ways to scale our time.

And then, you know, you've got these other issues that you're talking about that are related, which is if we invite the wrong people, then we're not going to have the right meeting, or we're not going to get the right work done.

Myriam: Yeah. And not the right conversations. And I wonder whether—I think this has actually reduced with the working-from-home times we're currently living in, because back in the days in an office, running from one meeting to the other was a perfect excuse not to do the work. "Oh, I'm so busy. I have so many meetings," constantly complaining, always having an excuse why pushing these kind of uncomfortable tasks away. So it was actually a nice thing, and I think it's related to cognitive dissonance. You just want to be the person who is engaged with the work, and you don't want to be the person who is actually avoiding work, so you accept all the meetings and have a fantastic excuse. And now with working from home, I think we realized what the real opportunity costs of a meeting are because we can either enjoy family time or we can do the work that we try to avoid or we can have a meeting.

Douglas: Or we can do the work in the meeting. If we truly need to collaborate, let's come together and do the work. I think so many meetings are status updates or informative, and they're not really serving a greater purpose.

Myriam: Yeah. Most meetings are actually emails.

Douglas: Mm-hmm. And if they're not, let's honor that. Let's be explicit of why an email is not going to suffice, because if there's a reason it's not an email and we don't communicate that, then no one understands, and it's not going to live up to its potential.

Myriam: Wonderful. And this is exactly, I think, where the art of facilitation comes in and where facilitation must not necessarily be restricted to an external facilitator you hire—

Douglas: That's right.

Myriam: —but it's the responsibility of every team leader or manager to facilitate to speak out these hidden reasons why we meet. Maybe we want to meet because it just feels good to be surrounded with some human beings and to share how we are feeling. And even if it's just for a boring status update that could have done by email, yes, but we enjoy wasting our time for half an hour.

Douglas: You know, the BBC did a report, and they said that most dysfunctional meetings were actually a form of therapy. And, you know, it rung really true for me. It's like, man, the people need to come together and connect. They just throw a meeting on the calendar, and they make an excuse to have it. Well, if that's the case, let's honor that purpose. Let's really unpack it and say, "The real reason that I'm bringing folks together is I want to connect with the team." Well, then, let's just say it's a team-connection meeting. Don't give some other guys or some other stuff that no one wants to talk about and everyone's going to hate anyway. Let's really say, "Let's just talk about the weather." And if it's going to build trust and connection on the team, then there's a benefit to it. But let's honor what we're trying to get out of it.

Myriam: Totally. And I think it's so true, and it's not only true for meetings. I think the moment we are just not honest about the purpose, why we're doing something, and we try to hide it, where we lack integrity, something happens to our mind that we are not as calm and focused and empathetic towards each other. So I think if we are then suddenly having a room full of people who are spending time for a reason that they actually rationally know that is not the real reason, I think, obviously, most meetings turn out to be very undelightful, to say the least.

Douglas: So, I want to come back to your idea parties. That sounds fun. How did it work?

Myriam: It was fantastic, actually. I booked a room in the coworking space where I was, and provided beer and sticky notes. So everyone came with a challenge. They had two minutes to pitch their challenge, and it could be whatever, from "I want to build a business" to "I want to stop fighting with my boyfriend." And then, we had three minutes of brainstorming with everyone who was in the room. Everyone had a block of sticky notes. And we were first brainstorming on questions, because I realized that we are so quick in giving solutions to people and feedback and it's totally unsolicited, and in two minutes we don't understand what the problem is anyway. So what we are lacking is not ideas how to solve it, but we like perspectives on how to look at our problem from a different way. So we would brainstorm for two minutes on questions. So everyone would just shout out a question that comes to their mind, write it on a sticky note, and at the end of the three minutes, the person in the spotlight or hot seat received a bunch of sticky notes to take home and to reflect on. So we did this, and everyone could just jump in the spotlight and share. And in the second round, we, then, did a kind of premortem brainstorm. So they would pitch their goal, "I want to be a millionaire tomorrow." And then we would do the same thing with, "Okay, what can you do to fail for sure?" And then they would get a bunch of Post-it Notes, how they can fail.

Douglas: I love the lateral-thinking-type stuff, like, how can we fail in liberating structures, TRIZ. Like, what are we doing today that resembles any of these counterproductive behaviors? It's really cool stuff.

And then also the questioning. I love question storms or just getting folks to focus on thinking about the problem framer and the questioning. My favorite—Einstein has that quote. If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. And then once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

Myriam: Yes. And it's so true. It's so true until today that I think that's where my background in behavioral science really helps me because we are very often just standing in our own way. So it's uncomfortable to try to figure out the right question, because usually we satisfy this desire of instant gratification by just solving the easy question first. I was sitting in these board meetings in my life in the public sector, where the tiniest problems or challenges got blown up and took 80 percent of the meeting time just to avoid the actual really important topics that were kind of hairy. And I think this is just how our brains work. So the role of a facilitator is, How can we actually help the group to get out of their own way? How can we make it easier to address these hairy problems? And how can we use the way how our brains are wired in order to solve the problems? And a question storm or a premortem are just perfect ways to use our instincts in a kind of efficient way.

Douglas: Absolutely. And, you know, I think back to your statement around, it doesn't have to be external; it can be internal facilitator. And I think the thing that so many folks miss is that you don't have to have facilitator in your title. Anybody who books a meeting as a facilitator, the question is, Are you being intentional about it? Are you doing a good job as a facilitator? Are you just setting a meeting and then showing up and, at best, pointing them an agenda?

Myriam: And are you curious about the outcome? Are you open for whatever shows up? And I think even as a parent, you can be a facilitator. Educators are facilitators. Maybe a spouse is a facilitator.

Douglas: Yeah. I mean, if you look at the definition of to make easy, I mean, I think anyone can facilitate almost anything, right? Like, how can we support and coach and guide things to their natural resting place?

Myriam: Yeah. And I have many conversations around the question whether it is actually a goal to make things easy, and then we often end up in technicalities. Okay, replace easy by simple, or—

Douglas: Yeah.

Myriam: —replace complexity. But I think that's the essence to make it less frictionous.

Douglas: Yes, exactly. When I hear to make easy, it's not that we're going to avoid complex or complicated things. It's not that we're going to avoid discomfort.

Myriam: Yes.

Douglas: We're just going to make it easy to sit with that discomfort. We're going to move through it. We're going to sit with it. We're going to walk with it. But it would be a lot harder if the facilitator wasn't there, if that guide wasn't with you. And it doesn't mean we're not going to take a—we're going to avoid this strenuous hike. It just means that we're going to have a guide that's going to point out where the rattlesnakes are or help us kind of stay together as a pack.

Myriam: Yeah. And sometimes it's just good to give permission to someone to interrupt us, to be provocative, to be strict with the time to tell us to come back, to ask us the uncomfortable questions. I think it's like a yoga teacher or a gym teacher. You hate them for 59 minutes, right? You just don't want them to be there, because they push you a little further, and they make it really difficult for you. But that's why you're going there, and that's why you love them at the last minute and for the entire week before the next workout.

Douglas: That's right. I love it.

So let's shift gears a little bit to thinking about the future and sort of, like, what's on the horizon? What are you exploring right now? What risks are you taking? I'm really curious about how people are just embracing the future. I know you have Never Done Before coming up, and I just want to explore some of the future a little bit with you.

Myriam: Yeah. I think the future's really been so abstract and uncertain at the moment, where I think very few people plan longer than two weeks. So I think my future started in March this year, when the first lockdown happened, and I lost, within a week, about 50,000 Euros in expected income. That's a lot of money for a solopreneur. And I realized that I have to shift gears very quickly and to become very creative.

At the same time, I also realized that from a mindset of desperation and anxiety, I won't be able to actually move forward, because it's like in dating. If someone is desperate, everyone can smell it, and they will never hide it. Nobody will date a desperate girl or a desperate guy. Nobody will hire a desperate entrepreneur. So you have to be in this space where you dance with this uncertainty and where you dance with fear and just embrace everything that comes, trusting that something great will come out of it.

I think what drove me back then, and it's still what drives me now, is the observation that it's a fantastic opportunity that COVID presents us, despite all the misery, of course, and despite all the health issues and economic implications. But the shift that we really have to reconsider the way how we communicate, how we meet, and how we make use of our time together, I think this is a great opportunity.

And for me personally, it was a learning journey. Before March, I was a pen-and-paper facilitator, and suddenly I became—I didn't even know how to create a breakout room before March, to be very honest. And I was very lucky that I had very early a mentor on MURAL because I had to translate my offline mastermind into a virtual mastermind within a weekend, and it magically worked. And since then, I was still thriving. I was absorbing everything that was coming up.

And then, luckily, I found encouragement in my network to bring the idea of the Never Done Before Facilitation Festival to the online space. So basically, the idea was, what if we rethought the way how we organize facilitation conferences? What if we do it differently? What if we provided space where we can try things we have never tried before, where we can really find design, explore the new trends in facilitation? And it started with a crazy idea. And then others called me brave. I think I was just naive enough to underestimate the effort and the risk of doing that and starting with such a bold statement. But now it's, yeah, it will happen. We have the Never Done Before Facilitation Festival fully online, 24 hours, around the globe, 30 facilitators from all continents joining. And we do everything differently. And yeah, we dance with the status quo of facilitation.

Douglas: I love it. I love the whole idea of pushing the boundaries. And you had this concept before COVID hit, and then it became even more poignant in the sense that we're doing all these things we've never done before. And it crossed my mind that I wonder how many people had ideas that they wanted to try, that they were planning to do for the Festival, and then they actually had—they were forced to do them because of COVID so they could no longer say they were never been done before.

Myriam: Yes, that's true. On the other hand, and this is funny, despite the fact that we are, on a daily basis, I think, all of us are doing stuff that we've never done before.

Douglas: That's right.

Myriam: Still, most of the stuff that we see online is all of the same, and been there, done that, so many times because I think the first month, or the first six weeks, and this was the beauty of the first wave, was that we had permission to try and to be imperfect and to fail because we're in this boat together. And now, suddenly, second wave, kind of everyone expects us to have figured it out. So we are less prone to take risks—

Douglas: Mm.

Myriam: —maybe less happy to experiment, and I think it's time to revive that because there's so many things we can do online that are impossible to do offline. And this is something we haven't explored enough yet. We are so much focusing on how can we translate our offline stuff into the online world, ignoring that maybe offline, it wasn't that grand anyway.

Douglas: Yeah. You know, the thing that comes to mind for me is just also how the tools can guide so much of the way we think, because it's like, oh, I'm assuming I use MURAL, I'm assuming I use Zoom, and then I sit down and look at those tools and think, well, what can I do here? versus just starting first with a concept, with the purpose, and walking around with that for a little bit and thinking, how can I create something and then force the tool? You know, I can bend the tool to my will.

Myriam: And also, there are so many new tools out there. I mean, it's a vegetable garden of mushrooms. I don't know how you say that in English. Anyway, all these tools are emerging.

Douglas: Wait. So it literally translates as a "vegetable garden of mushrooms"?

Myriam: No.

Douglas: No, okay. Well, that was a literal translation. I think that would be awesome, and I will start using it.

Myriam: You can start using it anyway. Never used before.

Douglas: Right. Yeah. There you go.

Myriam: Yeah. So for instance, because of Never Done Before, I'm experimenting with a lot of tools, and I found myself in these situations where I just host a workshop or meet up on a new tool. So recently I was on ____(27:43), which I love. So it's totally avatar based. It's perfect for fishbowl or world cafe, but it's very new to facilitators. So there I was, with a room full of professional, expert facilitators, without video and a tool that they didn't know. And I was amazed by the dynamics it took and how quickly, then, we actually also learned to adjust our facilitation side because we have to communicate differently. So that's what I like about your prompt because let's first sit down and think about the purpose and the desired outcome in the group and then find the tool that actually enhances that, because I think for many conversations, we actually don't need a video, and we would have much more focused conversations if we don't have to try to look good all the time.

Douglas: That is true. And, you know, the other thing is while video's great, it's also pretty exhausting when you compare it to someone being in a meeting room, because in a meeting room, you don't feel like—you could do this, right? Just kind of slump over for a second, lean over on the table, put your head down and just kind of listen for a second. But when the video's here, no one does that, you know? Like, no one does that, because they're like, oh, I'm framed up. I got to stay on—oh, law of thirds. I got to keep my eyes right here. So it's a whole different dynamic. And I think that's another reason why we have to plan so many breaks and give people opportunities to just check out of that little zone of, I don't know, insanity that we're stuck in all day.

Myriam: Yes. And I think there's one more thing that we neglect tremendously is that we are missing these transition moments that we walked into a meeting room and then our brain knew, okay, new topic, new group, new focus, peace, free headspace around now because we are in a new setting. With Zoom or with our computer, our brain literally thinks that we are still in the same room with still the same thing happening because we haven't moved. But we stop one meeting, we start the next meeting, and we expect our emotions and our minds and brains to adjust. But we don't give it space. To start meetings, online meetings, with a very clear check in, I think, is more important than ever just to create this transition moment.

Douglas: I've been saying that for a while, too. I couldn't agree more, because even an in-person meeting, everyone is just running from meeting to meeting. And even though there was that transition where you're walking is a physical shift, I don't know if it's enough time for people to mentally prepare. So I used to call it the boot-up time. Actually, we give people time to allow their brains to soak up this new topic, because we don't know what they were just—they might have just been on the phone, walking into the next meeting, you know?

Myriam: Yeah.

Douglas: So, yeah, it's important.

And the other thing I've noticed personally is since I don't have to drive into town anymore—I had about a 20-, 30-minute drive in the morning and in the evening, and it sort of acted as a transition moment. If you look at complexity theory—I love the cynefin model—how they have in between each domain, there's that disorder. So you kind of have to go through that transition through to switch domains. And it's sort of like Superman changing into—Clark Kent has to go into the telephone booth to become Superman. He can't just instantly switch, right? And so when I switch between husband Douglas and Voltage Control Douglas, now it's me just walking in and shutting that door, right? Before, it used to be me getting in the car, and I would listen to some music or a podcast or something. I don't have that anymore, you know? I probably should invent something new, whether it's a walk around the block or something that could replace that, because I think that ritual's important. And it's very similar to what you were talking about, these transition moments.

Myriam: And I love the example, actually, where Superman, Clark, and the telephone booth. And I think you're fortunate that you do have the door you can walk through to separate your professional from your private life—

Douglas: Yes.

Myriam: —because I work for some who would use the kitchen table for breakfast in the morning—

Douglas: That's right.

Myriam: —then it becomes the office, then it becomes the playground, and then it becomes the dinner table. But I read this book, Alter Ego, where he explains that very often we have these items we use, and they trigger something in our personality. So, for instance, Martin Luther King, he actually didn't need glasses, but once he put on his glasses, he had the confidence to speak like he spoke. And for instance, I realized for myself that at one point I could better focus on the person I was talking to in a video conference when I had my microphone in my hand, because this put me into my, okay, I'm a podcaster now, so I'm totally focused on my conversation partner. So what if you could have another pair of glasses so that, okay, when you switch from Voltage Control Douglas to Daddy Douglas, you can just change your pair of glasses or you can put the head on of.

Douglas: That's right. Yeah, for sure. That's amazing. I love it.

Well, unfortunately, we have come to the conclusion of our conversation, and it's been so much fun, Myriam. I think we could go on for hours, of course, but here we are.

And I want to just give you a moment to share a message, a parting message, to our listeners. So what would you like to leave them with?

Myriam: We can change the world one workshop at a time. I truly believe that. And I believe that we don't have to call ourselves "professional facilitators" to do that. But I think if we bring the facilitator's mindset to the table to make conversations easy, to highlight different perspectives and co-create solutions, I think that the world would really be a better place.

Douglas: Awesome. Well, hopefully, listeners and everyone in our networks will take that to heart because I agree. I think if we can be more intentional, we can change the world.

So thank you so much for being with me today, Myriam, and hope to talk to you soon and see you at Never Done Before.

Myriam: Thank you, Douglas. Looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks for the conversation. Loved it.

Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

"We're doing all of our education right now remotely, using Zoom and thinking through, okay, how does learning happen there? What's kind of uniquely possible—I like those words—with that medium? And how can we capture those moments? It's not a replacement. It's like, oh, it's going to be just like things that happen face to face. Like, no, it's different, but also good. And how do we get to that different-but-also-good place?"

Dr. Dawan Stanford

In this episode of the Control the Room podcast, I'm pleased to be speaking with Dr. Dawan Stanford of Fluid Hive, a design-driven innovation company. As president of Fluide Hive, Dawan helps organizations to see, solve, and act on challenges that are complex, dynamic, and interconnected.

Dawan and I talk about pushing energy into a room, checking in with people, and his experience with remote learning as the Design Studio Director of Georgetown University's Learning & Design program. Listen in to find out how Times New Roman ended his legal career.

Show Highlights

[1:30] How Times New Roman ended Dawan's legal career

[10:33] What's in it for the Participant

[18:39] Cut the Tools Some Slack

[24:56] Writing a Detailed Agenda, then Adjusting it

[28:36] Pushing Energy into the Room

[33:29] Checking in with People

Links | Resources

Dawan on LinkedIn

Fluide Hive

About the Guest

Dr. Dawan Stanford, President of design-driven innovation company Fluid Hive, helps organizations to see, solve, and act on challenges that are complex, dynamic, and interconnected. He has experience in Silicon Valley and international business that he combines with design, design thinking, and academic research in his work at Fluide Hive.

Dr. Stanford is also the Design Studio Director and a Professor of Learning & Design at Georgetown University. His studio serves as a space where students integrate their core coursework in the program, develop as learning practitioners, and develop their leadership, collaboration, and facilitation skills.

Voltage Control is a facilitation agency that helps teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Voltage Control on the Web

Contact Voltage Control

Intro: Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, a series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control, and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas: Today I'm with Dawan Stanford, president of Fluid Hives. Welcome to the show, Dawan.

Dawan: Hello. Thank you for having me.

Douglas: Of course, so excited to talk facilitation with you. And for starters, one of the things I love hearing from guests on the show is how they got their start, because there's not really any college out there that you can go take a facilitation degree. And so most people find themselves in this work through many different channels, and there's always an interesting story, and so I'd love to hear how you found your way into this amazing work.

Dawan: Well, I'm a designer, and my path into design started many, many years ago with some professional training and photography, and that led to looking at layout and then studying color and then studying graphic design. And as I progressed in that career, I had a legal career for a while, and I realized that I stayed late to design the closing binders for the client because the normal design was Times New Roman, centered, and you put some things in bold and underlined them. Like, oh, no. We can do something better than that. And after spending a couple hours designing closing-binder covers, I got a look from one of the partners: Maybe you're not one of us. Like, maybe I'm not. So I found out like, no, I'm not one of you.

And as I started doing more and more work, I was looking at more and more moments where it was design together, creating together, bringing groups of people together to understand how they need to work, how they are working, how they understand the context where they're working. And so I began to take a very close look at my role in those moments, those conversations, and how to be very intentional about constructing them, because it's a precious thing when you have a handful of people in a room, or more, focusing their attention on one endeavor. And to be offered that gift is something that I want to take seriously and treat carefully.

Douglas: Yeah, it's interesting. I love this notion that it wasn't that long ago when we started to have a plural form of priority.

Dawan: Mm-hmm.

Douglas: I think focus is the same way, right? And so this notion that, hey, we can have more than one focus or more than one priority is very modern thinking. And I think it's a disservice to us, and facilitation techniques can help us get back to that, like, and get everyone kind of aligned in thinking in the same way so that we can actually make some real progress.

Dawan: Yeah. Making those choices ahead of time and those tradeoffs. I often look at the situations where I'm leading a group through something and kind of start to think about all the different people involved, because often the person who's sponsoring, has asked me to come in and help, isn't necessarily going to participate. Sometimes they do. So you have the sponsor, you have participants. Then, there's often someone that the sponsor is reporting to, which may be one or more organizations or maybe someone in their chain, and starting to think about how all of these people have expectations and needs. And there may be people downstream from the event or facilitated moment that need to do something with what was created. So how to think about what gets built and passed on and how that is captured and packaged is also a piece of it.

Douglas: You know, I love this. That's your design background coming into the center, right? It's like, how do we make sure to design in a way that considers and accommodates all these various people, because they're all going to come from different perspectives, different roles, different needs, and how do we design for them?

Dawan: And so often, people will be asking for an event or a workshop or a moment, and I'll hear a lot about the thing, and "We want people to do this. And we have this much time, and this, this." "Well, what problem are you trying to solve? Let's talk about sort of the thing that individually or organizationally you are hoping to accomplish. How will the world be different, how will your world be different when we're done?" Then we can start talking about like, "All right, well, what kind of thing actually solves that problem? And maybe it's a four-hour thing instead of a two-hour thing. Maybe it's a two-hour thing instead of a four-hour thing. Maybe it's something that we need to come back to over a series of weeks."

But one of the first conversations I often have is, number one, listening to how people are framing up the problem they think they're trying to solve, because people don't like to hear that they're wrong about that. And so it's how you listen. And I say, "Okay. How do you know?" Because what I want to know is, okay, here's the problem you think you're trying to solve. What evidence do you have about that? And sometimes they're, "Oh, well, this is what's happened in the past. Here's what's led to this. Here's how we decided that this would contribute to this trajectory." Okay, I can kind of take that as a given. But often I hear like, "Oh, well, we had some space in the schedule, and we were hoping to…" Then I want to dig for a meaningful problem for both them and the participants, for the sponsor and the participants, so that I don't come and do something, and then afterwards people are, "Hey, wait a minute. That wasn't a great experience for us. You didn't do a very good job." Like, "Oh, because I helped you solve a problem you didn't really have." So that's a key first step in the conversation for me.

Douglas: Absolutely. You mentioned, how do you know? Another question that I think is similar to that is, how will we know? And it's the, how will we know if we were successful, and did we actually get the outcome we were seeking? And if we're not clear on the outcome, we can't even articulate that ahead of time. So, you know, how do we design in some of these assessment points so that we can tell if we did a good job or not?

Dawan: Sort of following on pretty much on the heels of the, "what problem are we trying to solve?" conversation, beginning to map out high-level options on an experience and suggesting, "Okay, here's where we might end up with this path," and suggesting a couple of different paths so that the sponsor can start to have the conversation about like, "Okay, does this look like a win for you? We're heading toward, we can achieve this, this, and this in this amount of time and with this level of resourcing. Is that going to be worth it? Is that going to be a worthwhile use of both time and money and energy?" And having those conversations explicitly on the front end makes things so much easier, because once you have clear objectives, once you have a clear idea of the problem that you're trying to solve with the experience, then you can say, okay, I can get into design mode with what's happening from minute to minute without having to sort of guess and hope, and, like, show up on a day physically or virtually, and say, "I hope this works out," as opposed to, like, "I'm fairly confident that this is going to work," barring the usual emergencies that we encounter during facilitation.

Douglas: Yeah. The thing that was kind of coming to mind for me as I was listening is this kind of scenario that you're creating, where you're allowing them to peer into the future, but let's consider that this is the outcome that we're at, and they can kind of sit with it, because you're right. So many people get so fixated on the thing that they need to go do, especially if something becomes really hip and really, I don't know, there's really trendy. Like, for a while it seemed like everybody was doing hackathons. I think some people still do them. But when do you think to yourself, "I need to have a hackathon," and your thoughts are so focused on the what that you're not actually peering into, well, what's that going to generate for us? What's that going to...? What kind of new opportunity or a new position does that put us in? And I like the framing that you were sharing around, because we talk a lot about purpose and outcomes, but the way you were describing it was really about setting up this kind of vision into this future scenario, where it's like, oh, this is the way the world will be if we do this. And how does that make you feel, or what does that create for you?

Dawan: Yeah. And it's helping the sponsor articulate what is uniquely possible with this group of people in this moment, and how can we start to approach making that happen? because it's, you're just like, oh, insert hackathon here. Well, no. What is the thing that we need and this group of people needs from this moment?

Douglas: Also, earlier, you were talking about what I translated to be buyer versus user, at least that's the language we would use in the startup world, the software world. In the facilitation world, I guess we would say sponsor or stakeholder and participant. And coming back to that design background you have, I think it's really fascinating to think about, if we're not considering both in our outcomes and how we structure the flow of the day or the flow of the event, then we could potentially design something that's at a disservice or is not properly tuned for one versus the other. And often I think the sponsor is the one, or the buyer, is the one that gets a lot of the attention.

Dawan: Yeah. The sponsor gets a lot of the attention because they're kind of in the room when you're designing. But the participants have to have not only have a good experience, but you have to understand what's in it for them so that they're going to bring the energy. They're going to be open to the flow of experience. They're going to be open to doing hard work at an intense pace, because the pacing of the events that I build is really, really tight. It's flexible, but tight. And we can we can talk about the mechanics of that, but it's mapping out who all of the people are. And you could say stakeholder or user or customer, but all the people. And that includes sponsor, participant, any people upstream who will be using what you produce. Sometimes it's also the people who are served by the people in the room who will be, perhaps, the ultimate beneficiary of some of the ideas that are put together in the room. And it's, "Okay with all of these people," and then you can start to map out, "Okay, here's what this person needs out of the situation. The participants kind of need these things." And you can also start to think about all the different relationships to the work, because sometimes part of the responsibility of the facilitator is to deepen relationships between participants or to help amplify ways people have connected in the past to do a particular bit of work.

Douglas: I love this notion of thinking about relationships or the interconnectedness of the group, or the lack thereof, and how that impacts the work to be done or how the work that is done is impacted, impacting the future states of those relationships. I think that way of thinking, almost, like, you know, it's a micro social network, and you're applying some almost network theory to it a bit and thinking about how you mend relationships or how you lean on existing ones. I think that's a really powerful design tool or lens to apply, and I like that way of thinking about it. I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective before.

Dawan: I owe many debts of gratitude to different designers and design researchers, in particular, Indi Young, and she really talks about the difference between the problem space and the solution space, and people like to race into the solution space without doing the hard work to understand the people and how people are making decisions and why people are behaving the way they behave. And if part of the work is getting into behavior change, to even more wanting to understand the people before you start setting up what happens in the room or what happens online, and especially her work around listening and how to listen well. I've taken that both into the sponsor conversations but also into the room, when I'm thinking about how to bring the deep listening that helps everyone really be fully present in the space.

Douglas: It's amazing how much presence and deep listening could just have vast impacts across all meetings. And I often love to ask folks, if you could change one thing about any meeting, where would it be? And I think that might be—it's hard for me to choose because we think about and work in this space so much, it's like, oh, man, there's so many issues. But I tell you, that's so prevalent, this attendees just spending majority of the meeting thinking about what they're going to say next, and a lot of it's just because they don't want to sound dumb or they want to say something impressive in front of leadership. But I think there's a real missed opportunity to not worry about those things and to create safety for people just to speak however they speak and let the ideas flow.

And so I guess I'm curious. That brings me to that thinking around these moments in meetings that could be so much better. What kind of things start to surface for you as you think about things that could be and people could just do in their everyday meetings?

Dawan: Oh, my gosh. Here comes the avalanche. Well, it's starting off before the meeting, what problem are you trying to solve? What is it that can only be done by bringing this group of people together and being clear about that before people get in the room or on Zoom or wherever? And then it's being conscious, like giving people space to think. And one of the things that I do in most of the events that I create and sometimes in meetings is give people a moment to write down what they're thinking. And it's just a few minutes, sometimes 10 minutes, depending on the length and depth of what we're working on. But then you give everyone a chance to get their thoughts down. That says a couple of things. You have people who are reluctant to speak, and that's because of power in the room, because of personality, because of relationships, because of trust, because of a whole bunch of things. So you have reluctance to speak. Then you have people who are—just need a moment to get a handle on sort of, "All right, what do I think about this? What do I really think?"

And the other thing that you get when you do that writing, especially in longer events, is you're able to capture some of those individual thoughts to process later after the event. So you're setting up what happens after, depending on how you structure what's captured. So that's one thing. Make sure there's enough space for people to think.

And then there's time and being disciplined about time, saying, okay, we have this list of things, and this isn't necessarily an agenda, but it's saying what's most important for us to get accomplished and then allocating your time across those most important things. That way you can say, "All right, we're confident that we're going to get these most important things done. And these couple other things, maybe we can take care of those offline or in a different way." Those are a couple of things.

The other thing, and this is perhaps harder—can be harder—in meetings, depending on who you are. But it's just looking at the energy of the people who are in the room and helping people come into this space well. And sometimes that's taking moments so everyone can check in with each other. And those couple of minutes to reset and be human can help people attend to the business at hand faster and better. And I've noticed that when I've given people those, a little bit of a buffer and a chance to be human, it just made what follows really, really nice. And that's one of the advantages if you're meeting remotely and every everyone's remote, you can put people into one-on-one conversations for a couple minutes, because often you have the meeting dynamics of, oh, my people come in and they sit by who they sit by, and they say hello to say hello. But, you know, people get patterns. They have people they're closer to and people they know better. And you have the opportunity to force some of that mixing and build some of that team cohesiveness through those conversations, just with a couple of flicks of a switch in your favorite meeting software.

Douglas: Yeah, it's interesting. Brings up two things we spoke about in the preshow chat. And the first is anytime we're thinking about design, space becomes a very critical element, whether we're talking about negative space or what have you. And I think in the virtual world, the tools we use can impact the space that we provide for our attendees and for people who are experiencing the design that we've laid out for the meeting and the session. And one of the things you mentioned was there's just too much blame being pointed at the tools themselves.

Dawan: Yeah. Taking your in-person meeting practices and not changing anything and just dumping them into—I think everyone's in front of a laptop. Everyone's in front of a camera—probably not going to work so well. And there's a decent chance that the meetings weren't so great to begin with, and now you're expecting that to work better in a different context, where you have different kinds of feedback, different kinds of interactions.

I've been watching the sort of emergency online-education conversations play out. There're lots of people saying, "See? This whole online-education thing doesn't work." Like, well, when people have three days to take an entire university online, I don't know, who might want to cut them some slack on that because what can you do? But people are starting to see other deeper examples of designed online education where you have the instructional design team working with faculty. And these are conversations we're having a lot where I teach at Georgetown in the master's in Learning, Design, and Technology. And we're doing all of our education right now remotely, using Zoom and thinking through, okay, how does learning happen there? What's kind of uniquely possible—I like those words—with that medium? And how can we capture those moments? It's not a replacement. It's like, oh, it's going to be just like things that happen face to face. Like, no, it's different, but also good. And how do we get to that different-but-also-good place?

Douglas: That's amazing. You know, so much of the work we do is about kind of accelerating innovation, and so people can get it in their heads that it's about moving quickly. And just because we're accelerating action doesn't mean that it means that everything we have to do must be fast. And in fact, a lot of it is about taking the time it requires to design things carefully. But what we don't want is analysis paralysis, where we're just kind of spinning our wheels and just thinking about things. As long as we're making progress and doing things, then allowing the design process to take the time it requires, that's goodness. That's good stuff. It results in better outcomes.

Dawan: And I like that, allowing the process to take the time it needs. Because I— in one way or another, I often said, like, listen, you're going to kind of pay the price of this now, or you're going to pay later.

Douglas: That old analogy or that old saying of, if you think an expert's expensive, try working with a novice.

Dawan: Yeah. If you don't take the time— I remember a conversation. It was like, "Well, we really don't have time to really do this work you're talking about around the problem we're trying to solve, the problem space. We really need to just get in there and do this and that." And I say, "Okay, well, I understand what you're saying. How much time and resources do you have to do all of this over again?" And they say, "What?" It's like, "No, no, no. I just want to make sure that if we're taking this approach, that you can reinvest all of this to do all of this work again in case we get the problem wrong, because then we can just sort of jump in and guess because you have this huge stack of resources to burn." And usually they're like, "Oh, no, no, no, we don't have extra money. We don't have extra time. So, yeah. Maybe we should spend a little time increasing the chances that we're solving problems that are worth solving."

Douglas: Yeah. It's always a Tilt sign for me when someone comes in and they've got it all figured out and they just want a price. It's like, hey, I'm not selling cars here. I can't just say, this is what it's going to be. And, you know, it's always, how much is it? And I think that mentality of innovation in a bottle on the shelf is something that would give the allure that that's what's happening, but it takes a lot of care and a lot of time to design and extract out where the there is.

Dawan: Well, I've learned to be very clear around the expectations of what's possible within the boundaries of the work, because there is this—I think we're past the moment a little bit. But there was this moment maybe five years ago when it was the design as magic. It was like, oh, it's magic. It's the Silicon Valley juice, and drink it. You will sprout innovation. You will sprout market cap. Like, it's amazing. Like, oh my gosh, an IPO just fell out of my body. No. It doesn't work that way, and there are some people who also, like, heard that, went out and bought some, it didn't work. Like, oh, this doesn't work. And it's like, "Oh, yeah." And it's like, you probably said, "I will pay x," and someone said, "I will take x," and then you were surprised you didn't get the results, as opposed to someone who says, "Well, what problem are you trying to solve? What are you hoping to accomplish? What are you looking to invest over time in doing this work well and building the skills of your team to do this well?" because ideally, after working with me for a while, people no longer need me. I hate to want to do that to myself, but if I'm doing my work well, eventually it seems like, "No, we've got this. We can build on our own," or "It's been built into the organization." Sometimes people will just want me to come in and do. But those are the things that I get happy about. Like, "Oh, you want me to build something that will last longer than I'm there? I like that."

Douglas: Yeah. There's legacy. We're making a difference in the world.

Dawan: Yeah. And it's also seeing what good design can do once it takes root in a culture. It's not, once again, going to be somehow magical, but I would say it will be better. And better varies from place to place. But I like to see that, or even just to see people taking away little things.

One of the things that I do with all of my engagements is I create a very detailed facilitation guide, and I have it all the way down to one-minute increments for different things. And I showed one of the—someone I work with one of these. They're like, "Are you crazy? People will be late for this, and this will run long, and that will..." I know. But now that I've thought through it at this level, I know that when something goes wrong here, I know where to adjust and how to adjust. And so once you have that problem to resolve in the outcomes, then you can say, "Well, these people are trying to get to know each other, so a five-minute break here isn't really going to work. They kind of need 10 minutes. And how can we make sure the mingling happens? How can we make sure that people are in the relationship-building phase as opposed to a relationship deepening? So how do we build that into the breaks, or if there's a lunch or whatever the moments are? And that requires getting really granular on paper so that during the event you can roll with the opportunities, whether it's a tech fail or sort of one moment that is better than you expected. I don't want to interrupt this, because the thing that we wanted to happen at 4:00 p.m. is now happening at 11:00. So I'm not going to get in the way of it. I'll just have to redesign." And it gives you something to tweak, something to adapt.

Douglas: And I love this mantra from, I think it comes from complexity-in-form thinking, and definitely heard it in the Liberating Structures community. But what happens was meant to happen. And it's very much akin to what I heard you say earlier around embracing the uniquely possible.

Dawan: Mm-hmm.

Douglas: So going back to this concept of participant energy and taking into consideration all the fatigue we're all experiencing, and also someone could have had a crises, even though we've done some upfront research and exploration into where the team's at and the dynamics, when we walk into the room, things could be quite different. So I'm curious to hear what you've done in scenarios like that or what you do to prepare for things and be ready for the unexpected.

Dawan: Well, I leave a cushion in every event of a certain amount of time, knowing that sometimes different things will run over. I design every break. So if I have a five-minute break in the schedule, and I tell everyone, "Hey, it's time for five-minute break," I have 10 minutes built into the schedule because five-minute breaks always take ten minutes. And those are some of the mechanics on the how I'm connecting with people. I'm assuming, and especially sort of now as we're recording in the summer of COVID, that people are coming into the event fragile and burned out. And so one of the things that I try to stop and do is give people a chance to check in and talk. I'm assuming they're, like, "Hey, your social interactions are kind of not happening the way they used to. Your coping mechanisms have all been broken and reshuffled." So it's helping people have just very human conversations and easing into the work, and I also find taking more breaks, not expecting people to sustain the intensity as long.

When I'm in the room with people, it's very easy to read the energy. And I find a lot of the work is me sort of pushing energy into the room. And you can do that to an extent. You're like, "Well, what do you mean, pushing energy? Is this some sort of mystical, reiki thing? What are you doing?" Well, it's making that eye contact, giving people the big smile, and getting the big smile back, and doing that with lots of people moving around in the space, giving people a different place to focus in. And when I'm doing that virtually, it's a lot of time sort of scanning the faces on the screens, but recognizing when like, "Oh, you know, we need to do sort of an impromptu small-group thing," and mixing up the types of interaction, the types of things people are seeing on the screen, so it's not just, oh, you're seeing other faces. Sometimes there's going to be oh I don't know, images, diagrams, but also using if you have any kind of whiteboarding or drawing overlay in the software that you're using, I take it home to mark things up. One of the things I do in small groups, we'll actually get giant sheets of paper and draw with each other, and that pulls people in. And you can do the same thing virtually.

You know, those are a couple ways I think about just the energy in the room and keeping it going. And also, you have to recognize that there may come a point where people are just done, and it may come before you want it to, but there's nothing you can do about that. The thing I do structurally is I try to put sort of the high-intensity generative things earlier in the schedule and the playing with, making sense with, tweaking of things that are sort of already out there later in the day so that it's kind of organizing and making sense of and playing with so that you're not being called upon to do the mentally intense things or the things that are going to rely on a lot of your interpersonal skills around negotiation and figuring things out late in the day. That tends to be, oh, if people are going to run out of steam, you start to see it in the outputs late in the day. So I try to push some of that earlier in the day so that by the time we are getting toward the end of things, it's like, okay, these are lighter-lift activities and exchanges.

Douglas: Even during break times, I like to remind people to turn off their video and step away to remind them not to go, just jump in the email or whatever, because it'll only contribute to the fatigue later.

Dawan: I've had a sort of working-from-home career, so the adjustment wasn't quite as brutal for me. I've done my share of time in the office, but I was just used to sort of having my studio in the house and doing everything that I needed to do with the short commute and managing the time and interaction and getting my people time in and having the energy flow. And when you're having to learn those things and adjust those things, especially if it doesn't suit your personality, that's when it can be difficult. And in meetings, it's recognizing that you might have some people who are very comfortable with the screen and the environment and how the technology flows, and other people may be just straining against it because they're desperate to be within touching distance of another human being and get that high-fidelity interaction with micro expressions and scents and all sorts of things.

Douglas: Yeah. The dynamic's completely shifted. And in the in-person realm, you could have folks that are quiet and don't ask a lot of questions. Those same folks might ask a lot of questions when they're virtual because just that layer of glass and many, many miles of air is separation enough to where they feel more comfortable speaking up. And other folks, you know, like you say, are debilitated because they don't have all the signals they're used to having. I think it's a great reminder that facilitators, we just have to listen, and we have to bring in as much data as we can from the signals we have. And you mentioned reading the room. I'm curious which signals that you use to read that digital room, because that can be problematic.

Dawan: Well, in some ways, they're the same signals. I'm looking for, for example, give a set of instructions. I'm looking for the brows that are suddenly furrowed. And usually when people are sort of squinching their eyebrows together, that's their way of saying, "Those instructions were unclear to me." But people are reluctant to say that. They'll sort of dive into it, thinking that they're the only one who didn't understand. And probably not. It's probably that your instructions were unclear, and you need to try that again.

And another thing is just actually checking in with people. The underutilized chat function, for example, in Zoom, there's so much that you can do with that, because when you're in a sort of face-to-face environment, you have kind of one channel in terms of, there's like, yeah, there's sort of visual cues and all that. But let's just say that there's, like, okay, you're going to say something or make a gesture in some way. But if we're actually going to talk, it's going to be voices. Whereas in Zoom you have the voice, you have the chat feed. Sometimes there's another backchannel if everyone is, say, in Slack. And so you have all of these multiple channels. And that's a different kind of conversation because now you can have people dropping in web links as someone is presenting, asking questions that can be picked up later, and so you have these multiple threads going on. And if you're looking for, oh, we want this to be just like our in-person meetings, that's really distracting. Like, well, that's a huge opportunity for people to just drop in questions as they think of them. And you come back and weave them in. You have if one person is presenting, you have someone else on the team keep an eye on the chat. So there are, I think, huge opportunities presented by that in the different channels. So the reading the room becomes kind of an interactive, participatory process. Instead of one person reading in the face-to-face contacts, you have sort of multiple people nurturing the conversation via those multiple channels.

Douglas: Yeah. And those things become elements you can design for, because I think in real life, we've spent years and years so it's in a lot of ways just second nature, so we don't consider it much like when we just walk into a room, because we can rely on our innate skills at relating. And sure, as facilitators we sharpen them, but we kind of have matured to a point, I feel, that it's not always a consideration, but in the digital space, you know, thinking of how many co-facilitators do I want? Do I want someone on Slack or Zoom chats, watching that stuff? So to me, it's really become a design consideration before we even enter into the meeting itself.

Dawan: And we're still figuring out the opportunities. I like to say, okay, well, before I sort of add other tools, add other functionality, what are the ways we can sort of tweak what we have, twist what we have so that everyone's like, "Oh yeah, there's these simple tools"? Sometimes it's as simple as "Okay, get a piece of paper and a pen, and everyone turn off your cameras and sketch out how you think this holds together for a few minutes. And then we'll have the conversation," so that you're even having someone, they're not stepping away from the meeting, but they're stepping away from, "I just have my keyboard." You're like, "Oh, I get to draw for a minute." And it's using those simple opportunities to make the exchange extremely rich the same way it would be if everyone was in the room.

And there have been a couple of instances where I was happy that everyone was online, because I knew that their interactions, we wouldn't have been able to have if everyone was face to face. So like, for example, having 20 people have one-on-one conversations and doing several rounds of those, after you've done that and everyone's had a chance to chat for a few minutes with three different people in the room, now you're set up differently as a group for what happens later, as opposed to if you were sort of face to face in a room doing that and having 10 conversations all going on in a conference room, it's just like, oh, you can't really, like, having trouble hearing, and there's overhearing, and you can't just focus on one person. There's all this distraction. So people are able to connect that way really fast, really deep, which is nice.

So it's finding those things that are the opportunities presented by the challenge of leading and collaborating as we sort of adapt to our world as it changes.

Douglas: Yeah. To use your words, we're embracing what's uniquely possible with these new tools.

Dawan: Yeah.

Douglas: Excellent.

Well, I think that might be a great spot to stop here on today's show. But before we go, I think listeners will be really curious how to find you, how to connect with you. You're doing some great work, and I know some people are going to want to know how to reach out.

Dawan: Oh, thanks. While I'm easy to find at fluidhive.com. If you search my last name, you will get a university. But Dawan Stanford, there aren't many of them, so that's another easy way to find me. LinkedIn and Twitter are good places to look. You can also learn more about the learning-design work that I'm involved with at Georgetown in the master's in Learning, Design, and Technology at Georgetown University. And you can also check me out on the Design Thinking 101 podcast, where I am hosting that show.

Douglas: Excellent. Yeah, definitely check it out. And Dawan, it's been a pleasure chatting with you today. I hope we stay in touch and continue the journey together.

Dawan: Oh, well, thanks for having me. It's been a ball.

Outro: Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don't forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.