Facilitation Lab Podcast

"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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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.

"You already have this constellation internally that is very capable, and you and me and everyone we know. But some of it is burdened. And so it has intense emotional charge that hasn't been released, or it has belief systems that are old and archaic and need to be discarded. But then once they're unburdened, the energy and the natural expression of that aspect of you is just available."

Sunni Brown

In this week's episode of the Control the Room podcast, I'm delighted to speak with Sunni Brown, founder of Deep Self Design and Sunni Brown Ink. Sunni has been named one of the 100 most creative people in business and one of the 10 most creative people on Twitter by Fast Company. She is a best selling author, speaker, and expert meeting facilitator.

We talk about the fallacy of using buzzwords in value statements, Cobra Kai, and the tango of co-facilitation. Listen in to find out what The Karate Kid remake can teach us about the complexity of people.

Show Highlights

[8:23] The proven power of taking notes by hand

[15:45] What is authenticity?

[21:27] The fallacy of buzzwords in value statements

[27:38] Cobra Kai, the more naive Karate Kid

[36:47] The tango of co-facilitation

[45:28] Dusting off your inner mirror

Links | Resources

Sunni on LinkedIn

Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers

The Doodle Revolution

SB Ink

Sunni's TedTalk, Doodlers Unite!

About the Guest

Sunni Brown, founder of Deep Self Design and Sunni Brown Ink, is a best-selling author, speaker, and expert meeting facilitator. Fast Company has included her in "100 Most Creative People in Business" and "10 Most Creative People on Twitter."

Sunni, author of Gamestorming and The Doodle Revolution, leads a worldwide campaign advocating for visual, game, design, and improvisational thinking. She lists empathy, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and effective communication as some of her most sought-after leadership 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. This episode is brought to you by MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. At Voltage Control, we use MURAL to facilitate engaging and productive meetings and workshops from anywhere. MURAL gives teams the means, methods and freedoms to collaborate visually. Use their suite of facilitation superpowers to control the virtual room and solve tough problems as a team with their pre-built templates and guided methods. To see for yourself why companies like IBM, Atlassian, and E* Trade rely on MURAL, start your 30 day trial at mural.co. That's mural.co

Douglas: Today I'm with Sunni Brown, founder of Sunni Brown Ink and the Center of Deep Self Design, where she helps people design their best selves.

Welcome to the show, Sunni.

Sunni: Can I call you D?

Douglas: As long as you don't call me Doug—

Sunni: Dougie Fresh.

Douglas: —I think I'll be okay with it.

Sunni: Okay. I might slip up and call you D.

Douglas: D's perfectly fine.

So, how did you get started? How did Sunni Brown become Sunni Brown Ink?

Sunni: Well, there were many roads that led to that incarnation, but first was that I could not keep a job. So I was fired many times. So there's, like, the shadow side of it, and then there's the accidental, you know, serendipitous aspects of it, and then there's the origin story, like the conditioning-from-family stuff. So there's all wrapped up in that, you know? But first and foremost, I could not—I got fired a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean definitely over 13 times. And so I was good at getting jobs, but I wasn't good at keeping jobs, which is a hallmark of entrepreneurism, but I didn't realize that at the time. I just thought that everyone was an idiot, and somehow I didn't belong in a cage or whatever. I was very unruly as an employee. It was actually legitimately hard for me to keep a job. Even though I was good, I was insubordinate. And so eventually I just recognized that, oh, I need to be my own boss. I didn't know the boss of what.

But serendipitously and sort of circuitously, I ended up in the Bay Area, which is rife with ideas and opportunity and innovation and potential, and that was a great place for somebody like me. And so I ended up working at The Grove, which is a visual-thinking company, and that was my introduction to visual literacy and visual thinking. I only worked there two years, and then I left and I started my own company, which again, I think—I mean, I think unless you have entrepreneurism in your family, it's almost always accidental. And it's not— it's accidental and on purpose, but it's not necessarily something—it's, like, something that finds you and you find it, you know? There was a lot of ingredients that made that thing come to life.

Douglas: So, tell us about the experience at The Grove. How did that shape what you're doing now?

Sunni: It was a great experience in the sense that I was from—like, I had just graduated with a master's in public policy, which always surprises people. But I was kind of working in the public sector, and I didn't even identify as a creative at that time. I didn't like the term creative. I didn't like the term artistic. I was very pragmatic and practical. And so I was not looking for anything of the sort, in terms of ending up at The Grove, and so I was very skeptical.

So when I was first there, I was just hired as the executive assistant because I had been other people's assistants, but I didn't always mention I'd been fired a lot. So I was very questionable about my job-acquisition ethics. But I did always end up getting jobs. And so eventually I was working for the president, which was David Sibbet, who's, like, the grandfather of visual thinking in the United States. And I was very lucky because I was mentored by him and then eventually mentored by Dave Gray and other kind of like—he wouldn't want me to call him a grandfather, but another godfather, if you will, of visual thinking.

Douglas: Sort of a luminary.

Sunni: Yeah, absolutely. So those were events happenstantial. But when I first was at The Grove, I was really skeptical about visual thinking, and I thought it was kind of silly, to be honest.

Douglas: So what was the thing that really changed for you? You said you used to think "it was kind of silly." What really connected the dots for you to realize, like, "Wow, this is something deeper"?

Sunni: Well, so, it was like application. I was first a graphic recorder. I don't know if you know that about me, but I started as a graphic recorder. So a person would go and do live large-scale visualizations of auditory content. And what I observed in the process of learning how to be that, which did come naturally to me—it was a skill that kind of mapped itself onto my own skills readily, which was surprising—but through that process, I recognized that there was a lot of benefits of visual thinking that were happening to me cognitively. So I was remembering content really well. I was organizing it in my mind and on paper really skillfully. I was comprehending it and sort of like getting insights. And when you're a graphic recorder, you go and you listen to every topic imaginable. So I noticed that my relationship with the content was really rich and really substantive. And I had to attribute it to what I was doing visually because it wasn't like I was special, you know? It was like, "Oh, my god, there's something meaningful to the brain about this way of thinking." And that's when I became a convert. You know, I was converted.

Douglas: That's incredible. It makes me think about something that I've been talking with a lot of folks about lately, this notion of multithreaded meetings, where when we're in MURAL and everyone is Livescribing and at the same time—now, it's certainly not at the level of proficiency and craftsmanship that, you know, you were taken to the job as a graphic recorder—but if we're all visually working in the meeting through MURAL or Mirro or any of these other tools and live capturing what we're hearing, we are unsynthesizing on the fly, we're adding nuance to what we hear because it's our own, like, filter. Even if we are attempting to be purist as possible, something's going to happen there. And when you look across the room of what everyone wrote down, you get this really rich picture of what was said, because it's, like, not only what was said, but this diversity of thought layered on top of it.

Sunni: That's cool. That's cool that you're doing that. And absolutely. It makes complete sense, right? It's like this beautiful display of insight that is unique to each person. But it's not a thin relationship. It's a really thick relationship between you and what you're trying to understand. And that's why it's so valuable. And so, then, of course, I became an evangelist about that, and that was in a different chapter of my journey. And I'm really grateful for that, because at this point, I don't do anything without having some visual-thinking component. It's just how I work and how I think and how I explain things to people. So it just changed everything about how I function. It's really grateful.

Douglas: That's really cool. You know, it also makes me think about active listening and how one of our skills as a facilitator for active listening is paraphrasing. And if you think about it, only one person can paraphrase at one time because if we were all doing that, it would be cacophonous insanity and the whole power of paraphrasing would be diminished because we're all talking over each other. But if someone's Livescribing or if the whole room is Livescribing, everyone's essentially paraphrasing but in a non-auditory sense, right?

Sunni: Mm-hmm, yeah. That's why I teach it to educators and then they teach it to students, because when you're typing—I mean, there's a lot of research about typing versus writing in terms of notetaking, and the research is very clear that when you use visual notetaking instead of typing on your laptop and just trying to, like, bang out as much as you can based on what the teacher's saying, and similarly with handwriting, the knowledge and the insight is much, much deeper when you're using visual networking because you're synthesizing. So you're actively distilling content on purpose, and you're discerning what to believe and what to put on the page, and then you map it to some kind of icon or image so it comes to life. And so I think that that experience is true for everybody. I mean, I taught it all over the world, and it's not ever been somebody who was like, "No, I prefer my laptop typing in terms of knowledge acquisition." Like, I've never met that person, you know?

Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it also dawned on me. Has the research explored the notion of the spatial aspect of—

Sunni: Uh-huh.

Douglas: —handwritten notes? Because if you think about typed notes, it's direct to linear; it's always left to right; it's up, down—

Sunni: Yeah, totally.

Douglas: —it's squares; it's edges.

Sunni: There's no structure.

Douglas: Yeah. You have that structure is enforced upon you.

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: And if you're having to think through that structure or just flow through it and even move your hand to the upper right and over here and down, it's not so liberal—it's more liberating, maybe.

Sunni: Yeah, that's right. And Tony Buzan has this great page where he talks about that most kids perceive notetaking as punishment. They refer to it as punishment because that's how it feels, because they're confined and constrained by what you can do. And so when you make the page like a blank space, it's basically a field to plan, and then you can show relationships between things, and you can show spatial content that has an architecture that is inherently not in listing or in writing lists. And so there's, like, nine other things that he—He has a great book, Mind Map that he's original. But it just describes how it's like a black-and-white versus a color television. It's just a whole different world. And so it's universally impactful in that way.

So it was easy for me to fall in love with it after I got over myself, you know? I was like, "Oh, shit, this is like a power tool, and nobody knows it." Like, very few people were interested in it or thought it was worth exploring, and it was sort of something you put on the side, like you go to art class and do that, or you be weird and do that. Like this guy—

Douglas: Or these geeks in the corner of the conference just plugging away.

Sunni: That's right. And so I was, like, well, I would like to normalize the shit out of this. And so I was very passionate about it for a long time. And at this point, I've exhausted that passion. But I don't need to have it because other people have it now. So I'm like, "Cool. The torch has been passed, and more power to all of you."

Douglas: And we talked a little bit about that earlier in kind of the preshow chat. We both have books coming out on the non-obvious press, and I was asking you about—

Sunni: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You're writing the one I wanted to write, you old buster.

Douglas: You know, you were writing a book on graphic recording.

Sunni: Yeah. It was, like, rapid doodling. Yeah.

Douglas: Yeah. And I was curious to hear about that. And you said, "Oh, I wasn't inspired."

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: I mean, you were explaining how you kind of lost the flame a bit—

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: —because you've been doing it for a while—

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: —and you know it in and out.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: And it's hard to take that kind of new—

Sunni: Yeah. Like, the beginner's mind. It's such an important state of mind and that my relationship with that is not in that state. So I couldn't strongarm my way into writing that book.

Douglas: And I love how meta that experience for you and going through the conversation with the publisher was in relation to the topic you're actually going to write about, because you talked about not being part of your being or your state right now, the passion right now. And so it must have felt inauthentic.

Sunni: It did. Yeah, it did. It felt forced, for sure. And I told him that I could do it. It's like, it's not that I don't have the ability to sit down and type some shit on a page that makes sense. Like, I can do it. But why would I do that? What is the value of a factory? Like, I'm not a factory. And I mean, I can be, but I don't want to be. And I just was like, fuck it. I'll just—you know, he can get mad at me. I mean, I literally woke up that morning. I was like, what if he sued me? I was like, I don't know what he's going to do. No idea what he was going to do. Because he had the whole—all of our books were going to be published in a certain time, remember? Like, all together. So I didn't—

Douglas: And then COVID happened.

Sunni: That's right. And I was hoping that he would have considered that and that some of his other off—because you turned yours in on time, did you not?

Douglas: Yes. And—

Sunni: Well, that's what I mean. So it didn't affect you. Ugh, god.

Douglas: Well, we're not on time.

Sunni: Yeah, but you're—

Douglas: We turned it in, but then there was a lot of edits—

Sunni: Right, right.

Douglas: —so we're still hard at work on it. But it's great.

Sunni: That's awesome.

Douglas: I found working with them to be really fantastic from a—

Sunni: Oh, good.

Douglas: —get it right—let's take the time to get it right.

Sunni: Uh, yeah. He's awesome, and he really impressed me that day. And so it was nice to arrive at the topic that I am interested in, I have something to say about. And for me, the most energetic time when I'm learning something is where I'm completely convinced that it's valuable. I have internalized quite a bit of it, but I haven't, like, reverse engineered what it is that I did. So it's like when I was a graphic recorder, I was doing that. I had some training, but I basically trained myself. And then I studied what I was doing. And then I was like, oh, wow, that's really interesting. So for me, it's like that was similar with the deep-self-design stuff. It's like I've been applying and practicing this stuff for, like, 13 years, and now I'm studying what I'm doing because I want to teach it. So I apparently have these cycles of that. And I was not in that cycle with rapid doodling for problem solving. And I was like, why would I fake this? This is just completely not true for me at all. So thankfully, Rohit was awesome, and he was, like, "Great. I don't want you to write that." And I almost kissed him through the screen. I was like, "God bless you," because it was getting painful.

Douglas: And what's the title of the new book?

Sunni: Well, I don't know yet exactly. It's still in process, but it's something about the "non-obvious guide to being confident," or maybe "to enter confidence." And then the subtitle is "without being arrogant or inauthentic," something like that.

Douglas: Yeah. And I love this notion of confidence is really important when it comes to facilitation. That's why we both run facilitation practices just to get people experience with the tools and with new ways of doing things. And I also feel that authenticity matters so much. The authenticity allows us to be confident and vice versa. They kind of have this interesting dual purpose or this kind of linked connectedness.

Sunni: And I've always been confused by, what is authenticity? What does it even mean? And it's similarly with integrity. So this is just like a sort of weird question philosophically, which is, if you're authentically being manipulative, like you're totally committed to that activity, then that's not inauthentic. It's un-optimal. It's suboptimal for who you're dealing with. But, like, Trump is authentically an asshole. Do you know what I'm saying?

Douglas: Mm-hmm. Yes, I do know what you're saying.

Sunni: So I don't even know when people describe—because I do often get described as authentic. My mother-in-law—well, she's family so she could be blowing smoke up my ass—but she's often like, authenticity is just your engine. And it took me a while. I was like, I don't even know what she's talking about. But then finally, I came up with this definition, so I want to run it by you and see what you think. So what it is, maybe, is—and I'm sure there are people who've done this research, so I'm right on the edge of doing all this great research—which is your internal experience is matched to your external expression. So in other words, what I'm feeling internally—so if I'm feeling disappointment because somebody didn't respond to my text—when I talk to them, I say, "I'm experiencing disappointment about your lack of responding to me, and I'm interpreting it." So I'm just saying what's true for me. I'm just speaking what— So I think that's what it is. And that's really hard for people, apparently. What do you love about it?

Douglas: Well, you know, it's the same thing as like I think people as a society, we have been primed to not disappoint people and to avoid conflict, and so that forces people to be inauthentic—

Sunni: That's true. So true.

Douglas: —because they're in pursuit of this vibe or this experience or to avoid. It's like to minimize your—

Sunni: Yeah. Conflict avoidance is huge, yes. Yes.

Douglas: Yeah. And it's the same thing as you get a birthday present you don't like, and you're, "Oh, I love it."

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: It's like that incongruency of what you're saying and what you're feeling.

Sunni: Yeah. Right.

Douglas: And imagine you walk into a room and you know that you need to pump up that room and get everyone excited.

Sunni: Right. But you're not feeling it yet.

Douglas: You're not feeling it. And there's a pit in your stomach that you are not that is you're not being authentic.

Sunni: Well, that, I think, creates anxiety, though, right, because when we're trying to defy our actual internal experience, that is anxiety provoking. So that's problematic. And it's not like I nail it every time, but I definitely have a high fidelity to what my experience is and what my truth is, and then I share that. But I'm not undiplomatic.

So it's interesting what you're saying about the gift. When somebody gives you a gift and you don't really love it, but you're honoring that they gave it to you, that can still be an authentic experience because you may not love it, but you love that they gave something to you, that they thought of you, right?

Douglas: Right. So why not? Why is it not customary that we say that?

Sunni: I don't know. I don't think our culture is skillful. I think our culture is really immature in a lot of areas. And communication and conflict is one of them, a big one.

Douglas: Yeah. In our facilitation training, we often work with folks to think about how they can tap into their inner self. And you go much deeper into the internal family-system stuff. The stuff that we're saying to do is at least just check in.

Sunni: Yeah, totally.

Douglas: Does your foot hurt?

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: Does your stomach hurt?

Sunni: Yeah. Connecting to your body.

Douglas: Does it feel hot? Is there a tension in the room? Are you bringing that tension? Are you noticing it? Is that tension impacting you?

Sunni: Yeah. Right. That's so helpful, though, Douglas. People are so oblivious to their own states. And that is also anxiety provoking. When you're divorced from your own experience, how could you not be stressed? How could that not be stressful?

To your point, I do go deep, and I love that. But it's also, what you're doing with people, that's a revelation for a lot of people. Just like, oh, oh, I do. I am hungry. Oh, I have no idea. Or oh, I am disappointed that I wasn't seated with my friend. You know, just anything. And then I often do at the beginning of sessions, I will have them name something that's true for them. And just that simple act of checking in, becoming aware of your state and yourself, and then declaring it, it's like returning to yourself just for a second. And it brings you into the present moment, and it's really helpful.

Douglas: Yeah. Any time we can have some sort of presence-ing activity in an opener, it's really powerful.

Sunni: I know. And you know what's funny, talking about authenticity? I think I was with you one time when we—I have people often draw, like, just in virtual facilitation, they'll draw some emotion on a sticky note. And I will just ask, "What is your state of emotion right now?" and then draw an emoji. And then, you know, the ones that are permissible, right—there's permissible, social, emotional experiences. So it'll be like, the craziest one might be that someone's frazzled, but they would never be like, "I'm depressed," you know?

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Sunni: No— So there's social norms in that. And again, it's like, is that inauthenticity, or is that caretaking of the group, or is that not even knowing maybe how you feel? It's like, just, it's complex, you know?

Douglas: Yeah. It's interesting because if you're intentionally trying to deceive you being authentic—there's different levels, are you being authentic to yourself? There is intention. And then someone else could perceive you as being inauthentic because you're like, wait, he's totally lying to me. So, yeah.

Sunni: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's right.

Douglas: And integrity, I think, is easier for me because I always define integrity—because it shows up on so many companies' values statements, and I don't even know—I think most of the time they don't think about what it means. It's like, oh, yeah. It needs to say integrity.

Sunni: They don't even know what it is.

Douglas: Resourcefulness.

Sunni: They're like, everybody wants that, for sure.

Douglas: Integrity is just you do what you say you're going to do.

Sunni: Say you're going to do? So, okay, what if I say I'm going to throw water on Chet when he's sleeping?

Douglas: That's integrity.

Sunni: And then I do it.

Douglas: You follow through. But if you say you're going to build a wall and you don't build a wall, that's not a lot of integrity.

Sunni: But that means that Hitler had integrity, right? So it's like if you say—and it's controversial, but based on that definition, that would mean that, that he followed through.

Douglas: Yeah. But that's the thing. I think people that take these words and they glorify them as being good qualities.

Sunni: Yeah, they don't mean anything.

Douglas: And sure, if you have good intent—like, you had to combine them with other things because—that segues nicely into something that we were getting excited about during the preshow chat. And this is just good versus bad, and in binary thinking, how dangerous it is.

Sunni: Yeah, it is. It's one of the thinking distortions. So there's a really great list of thinking distortions that has, like, eight on it. But this also segues into Zen practice, which is central to my entire life. But one of the thinking distortions is making things binary. And it's so tempting. And I do it even though I have a devout practice around not doing that, where I'm seeing the nuance. It's still, it's the brain. Like, we are wired to summarize very quickly for survival purposes. It's not like we're bad if we do that. That is just biologically, it's like a biological imperative. And so in order to soften that inclination to just label somebody as, like, stupid or smart; or a desirable, undesirable; or deplorable and undeplorable; or whatever, we have to practice. You actually have to activate the antithesis of that way of thinking by purposefully seeing the shades of gray. It is a practice, and it's super powerful.

And so I like that you're interested in that, too, because as facilitators, I gamify this stuff. I try to teach people that in gaming. That one in particular always blows people's domepieces off because they're like, "Oh, my god, I completely thought my boss was a jerk just by definition." And I'm like, "Did you consider all the other facets of your boss?" And they're like, "No." I'm like, "Why would you? It's not a practice you have."

Douglas: You know, I think that it applies across the spectrum, too, right? A lot of times, especially folks that are brand new to facilitation, they're so curious. Like, how do I deal with difficult people? And that, first of all, is binary thinking. The fact that you're asking that question means that you're thinking there's non-difficult people and difficult people.

Sunni: You're assuming. Right, yeah. And it's funny because when I started facilitating, I never asked that question. I wasn't worried about it. And I think that has to do with conflict avoidance, too. So if people are asking that question, underneath it is a fear that they're going to have to deal with conflict or perceived conflict. And conflict avoidance was not my family strategy. So I usually turn toward it and address it, depending on the depth of the wounding or whatever. But it's like, it's not fearful for me.

And also, I haven't encountered these "difficult" people. I know there are people that can talk over other people, and there are people that want to ask a lot of questions and sort of can derail some of your activities. I know there are people that try to sidle up to you and make alliances with a facilitator. But I don't think of them as difficult. I think of them as people, just human people.

Douglas: What about the people that are desperately trying to help you?

Sunni: Oh, I love those people. It's always—that's so, so sweet because it's like, how do you say "No, thank you. You're going to make it way harder on me if you try to help"? Right? Because when I was a graphic recorder, I used to always carry these big walls, you know? You got to carry these 32-square-foot walls everywhere, and you would not believe how many people tried to help me because I was 5'5" and they'd be like, "She can't carry that up four flights of stairs." And I'd be like, "It weighs two pounds. It's not hard." But I would always just very gently be like, "No. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your interest. But it'll go smoothly if I just do it because I've done it so many times." But there are all those types in meetings.

But to your point, what does it mean if they're difficult? Maybe they just need something, and they need you to be aware of it. And you just look for the need, the underlying need, and see if you can support that or not.

Douglas: You know, I really liked Michael Wilkinson's framing on this. I think in his book—I forgot. It's so many secrets of facilitation. I can't even remember how many there are. There might be, like, let's just say, so many secrets of facilitation.

Sunni: They're secrets?

Douglas: Yeah, well, he's unveiling the secrets of facilitation.

Sunni: What?! The secret teachings?

Douglas: Yeah. It's amazing. So, his whole thing is dysfunctions. How do you deal with dysfunctions? And so I liked that framing a lot better because there's all sorts of them, and how do we think about addressing them as they happen? And the individuals aren't dysfunctional.

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: Maybe eliciting a dysfunction at that moment.

Sunni: Yeah. Or like a malfunction, yeah.

Douglas: Yeah.

Sunni: You know? A little breakdown.

Douglas: A little short circuit, which is an amazing—

Sunni: And I have those, too, you know?

Douglas: I mean, when are they going to come out with, like—so they've done E.T. with Stranger Things. They've done Karate Kid with Cobra Kai. When are they going to come out with the Short Circuit, like the modern Short Circuit?

Sunni: Oh, dude. How can they top the original? It'd be so hard. It'd be impossible. Oh, my god, I've got to watch that tonight. It's Friday night. Thank you for picking my movie.

Douglas: There's something about Cobra Kai that I was—

Sunni: Dude.

Douglas: —thinking about earlier. But—

Sunni: Oh, my god, yes.

Douglas: —I think it's just this notion of this good versus bad.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: You know, I was thinking about that when we were talking about good versus bad.

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: And it's really interesting to me how the more naive Karate Ki— even though, like, look, let's face it. Cobra Kai is like a series that is not really any kind of profound wisdom. But it's funny that the more naive version of Karate Kid was, like, Danny's just like, and Miyagi, are just like the source of good.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: And now, the more modern portrayal, as they're older, they're much more complex, you know?

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: They're both doing things that you're like, why?

Sunni: And that's the truth about people is that we're complex. And that's what people don't want to grapple with, because it requires an awareness of things that can't be tucked into a box really neatly. And the brain, it does not like that. The brain is—I mean, sometimes it's stimulated by it. But ultimately, it needs a summation. And so it's like that's why you have all these characters that are easy to hate, like in Inspector Gadget. What's the dude, Claw? He doesn't even have a face. He's just the bad dude behind the desk, without a face. And then when you look at comic books or graphic novels, they always go into their backstory. I mean, Black Panther, they nailed it by making those characters so complex. That, to me, felt relatable. So it's, like, so fascinating how that starts from storytelling when you're five, you know? Even Star Wars. But I love Star Wars because, dude, I don't—

Douglas: Hero's journey.

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: I mean, you kind of can't go wrong with the hero's journey. In fact, that's something Daniel Stillman and I talk about a lot, using that in your workshop design.

Sunni: Mm-hmm. Hm, interesting. Like, taking each person through some transformational experience related to the content?

Douglas: Yeah. Basically, from start to finish, we're going to go through this hero's journey, where we go into the abyss and come out together with the elixir.

Sunni: Oh, that makes me just want to weep, it's so beautiful. And it's like even if you don't choose—because part of the journey, you have to answer the call. So life will probably summon you. But if you don't answer, then you don't go on the journey, you know? And I've always been fascinated by people that are not available for the journey, because it's just not safe. I mean, it's not, by definition. But for me, it's always worth it to step into challenges. And I think that is also a quality of entrepreneurs, is that we are kind of thrilled by freaking ourselves out.

Douglas: Uncertainty, ambiguity.

Sunni: Yes, dude. We're like those people that like it. We're kind of into it. And over the years, I've had to temper my own instinct to do that. And I know you have too. I mean, I've been a workaholic for a long time, and I'm, like, in recovery. But it's also just because I like being challenged, and I like not knowing everything, because it's such a thrill when you get some new insight or knowledge. It's like, I feel like I'm like the Hulk. I'm like, whoa, I'm growing muscularly. I'm huge. But you could get addicted to that, so it's like every now and then I'm always, like, on a weekend I'm like, girl, you don't need to, like, read 40 sutras this weekend. You can just be an idiot, just be an idiot, you know?

Douglas: Yeah. Just give the brain a little break. Go on a nature bath.

Sunni: Yeah! You know, I told you I'm going to install my hillbilly hot tub. Is that okay to s—? You got—I know. I want—

Douglas: My sauna's getting installed right as we speak.

Sunni: Oh, dude. That's amazing.

Douglas: It's important.

Sunni: It is.

Douglas: Yeah. As you were talking about this, some metaphors were coming up for me, around we're taking people through this risky kind of thing, and there is risk that you're taking. And it reminded me of rapids, right?

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: So whitewater rafting. And you always hire the guide so that you don't go kill yourself.

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: Facilitation's like the mental equivalent of the whitewater-rafting guy.

Sunni: Yeah, yeah.

Douglas: If we're going to go on this risky mental journey, let's make sure we have a shepherd or that guide to make sure that—we're going to wear helmets, of course, but we're going to make sure that we don't bash our heads on the rocks even if we have helmets on.

Sunni: Well, and that's why the facilitator is so important, because they have to trust you completely. And I don't mean they have to, meaning you can't conduct a meeting, but for a successful experience, they really need to trust you. And you, the way that I think about it, is that I demonstrate how I want them to be. So if something goes wrong, I will name that and own that, you know? If I don't have the answer to something, I will not pretend that I do. If I want somebody to collaborate with me, then I will invite them to come and collaborate with me, and then mimic that in their group. So it makes you more human in some ways if you're—I mean, there's every kind of facilitator under the sun, so it's not like there's some gold standard or whatever. That's just my style, is I want them to understand that perfection is not what we're up to. We're up to being humans. And so—

Douglas: I think that's authenticity, right there.

Sunni: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But I could be being, like, what if I had an inner—because I have an inner perfectionist. I'm actually working with this part of me that is authentically perfectionistic, you know?

Douglas: Well, I meant the vulnerability you're talking about. Like, if you don't know the answer—

Sunni: Yeah, let's just name it.

Douglas: —we're going to talk about it.

Sunni: Yeah. And I've been making so many bloopers. Douglas, you would not believe the bloopers on the United Nations project, because I'm learning as I go. And I told you that. It's like we're leaping, and we're building our parachute while we're falling. And the client's not that aware of it. That is an internal awareness that Jessie and I both have. But for me, it's like, oh, my god—it's like I'm back to being a newbie, like, the stuff I do. Like, the other day, I just flung everyone into breakout rooms, just because I impulsively pushed the fucking button. It was like, what do you do? And then—

Douglas: Well, that's the world we're in.

Sunni: I know. It's so crazy.

Douglas: It's going to happen, even—I've run the breakout rooms in Zoom daily—

Sunni: Yeah, I bet.

Douglas: —and I still hit things accidentally. And that's partially because—here's the thing. I don't know if you've seen the book, The Design of Everyday Things.

Sunni: Uh-uh.

Douglas: Oh, man. It's a classic design book. So great.

Sunni: I know. I've heard of it. I don't have it, though.

Douglas: In fact, the doors that are poorly designed are actually named Norman Doors, after the author.

Sunni: Aw.

Douglas: Well, because he points out, don't blame yourself because the door is poorly designed.

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: If there is a giant—like, you ever gone up to a door that has a giant handle on it?

Sunni: Uh-huh.

Douglas: And you're supposed to just grab the handle and pull it toward you?

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: And you pull it, and then it doesn't move because you're supposed to push it?

Sunni: Push it.

Douglas: So on the push side, there needs to be a push plate, and on the pull side, there needs to be a pull handle.

Sunni: Right. Like, you're not the dope here.

Douglas: Yeah. Exactly. You're not the dope. He said, never blame yourself for bad design if someone designed it poorly. And so that's what everyone does. Like, my mom always tells me, I don't understand computers. I'm like, well, that means they didn't design it so that you could understand it.

Sunni: Aww, that's very nice of you to say that. Because it does make people feel stupid when they can't do things.

Douglas: Yes. People always say they're stupid when it's like, man, someone did a poor job of getting you there.

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: And I think Zoom breakout rooms have a lot of room for growth.

Sunni: Yeah. And I think they're working on that, and I know they're making new features and changes to how it—

Douglas: Yeah.

Sunni: Like, they just did the Gallery View. You can shuffle it around.

Douglas: That's right.

Sunni: That's another thing, too, though. It's like all these new things constantly coming, so there's capabilities you don't even know you have, and then there's some that fall off. So it's just a constantly changing environment. And so I've just made mistakes left and right, and then I remember what it's like to be a beginner. And thankfully, I have this foundational practice and that confidence about facilitating and making mistakes and just knowing that it's okay. But if I were a beginning facilitator, it would be so stressful. It'd be super stressful to try to step in.

Douglas: Absolutely. And the thing is, you just found—in a way it's almost like fracking—you hit the depths of what's possible. You would become an expert in facilitation. And then this new fissure opened up because of remote, and now there is a new area to play in and a new area to fail in. But at the same time, you weren't building a parachute while falling. You know what I mean? You were in the squirrel suit, already at terminal velocity—

Sunni: I was already in my gear.

Douglas: And as you're floating down, you're like, "Oh, let me assemble a parachute, because then I'm going to float down even slower."

Sunni: That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Douglas: So I think there's something beautiful in that, right, because you can lean on the experience you have to then go into new, uncharted territory.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: And that uncertainty, while it's scary, also leads to a lot of opportunity.

Sunni: Totally. And that's why I love facilitating with expert facilitators, because we all know that. A lot of the stuff, a lot of the terrors and the weird delusions and the distorted ideas you have about the practice when you first go are gone. They're just burnt off by experience. And then, so, it's just, there's a lot of joy for me, because I online I always have a co-facilitator if it's longer than, like, an hour and a half. You know what I mean? And I love trusting the capacity of that person, because it's crazy, because the other day, Jessie and I were like, I could tell she was looking for something in the back end of Zoom, and I could see from her body language that she had no clue where it was. And so I just started talking. I was like, "Here's why we're doing this, and this is the value of it. And I ask the people questions." And I was just doing it to fill in the gaps so that she could—because I looked at her again. I was like, "Okay, she found it," and now I'm going to close. But that's like a tango that we have because we work together so often. But it's just, it's very sweet. It's a very sweet process to have.

Douglas: What you're describing is so much harder in the virtual space, too, because of the signals we have. When we're in the room together—

Sunni: Totally.

Douglas: —and vibing, whether it's Daniel or John or Eli or any of the facilitators I've facilitated with quite often, it's like you can feel it almost in the air. Like, we don't even have to make eye contact necessarily. It's just like, "Oh, I know they're still riffing." And then, you know, it's almost like when you can tell someone's looking at you. So when they're done looking at you and ready, like, better if you just got the— So I feel like what you were doing is a pro move to be tearing through the tools and trying to revisit the vague signals we do have in virtual.

Sunni: Yeah. It's so funny you're talking about this because Jessie and I were talking about this this morning. When you're asking about my origin story, so part of my early conditioning had to do with hyper vigilance. So I was very aware of what emotional state people were in and what their next move was likely to be. So I'm really attentive to body language. And that, for me, is still very available in Zoom. I mean, I can tell—and Jessie was making fun of me this morning. She was like, "Oh, my god, girl. You name people that they have a question before they have even unmuted themselves or even know they have a question." But it's because I'm watching their body language. When people are about to ask a question, they do things. They move forward. They lean toward the camera. They kind of, like, gesture in these bizarre ways. Sometimes they stop and start. And so for me, that visual and gestural information is still there. So I'd just be like, "Hey, Frank, it seems like you want to say something." And then Jessie was just like—she was making fun of me, because she was like, "That is so weird that you—" but I'm so sensitive to it, you know? And I thought that was normal, but then I realized, oh, yeah, no, that's my trauma. Basically, that's the gift of trauma.

Douglas: You know, that was one of the things that really jumped out to me when you were telling me about internal family systems and giving me the whole low-down there, and I found it really fascinating that things that were previously traumatic or these—I can't remember the Internal Family Systems parlance—but these guards, these managers, that were created because of old wounds are part of yourself. And they can be, they can sometimes be disruptive, but they can also serve a function. They can give you superpowers that other people don't have.

Sunni: Yeah, they do. Absolutely. They're 100 percent really powerful. And that's one of mine is I have a manager who's very watchful, and so it is a super power. Now, the problem is I can't turn it off. So, like, if I'm, for example, in mediating between my husband and his mom, it will kind of be exhausting for me because I know that they're going to have an argument 10 minutes before they do, because I can see where the tones are changing and what the language, how the language is changing. I can see them turning, body language turning away from each other. I can see a color of their skin gets redder and redder. But they're not, like you were saying, people are not aware of what's happening internally to them. So they're not yet aware. So for both of them, the energy, the intensity has to be a certain threshold before they even notice. But for me, I notice it way early. And it's exhausting because I'll just be like, "Dudes. I'm going to walk out now. Five, four, three, two. Okay, your mom's pissed." It's funny.

But as a facilitator, it's really useful. It's a really useful skill, and I'm grateful for the spontaneous—like, going back to IFS, the spontaneous creation of these skill sets based on—and it's not always from trauma. It's just from navigating life, you know? But there is a spontaneous creativity that the body and the mind does to meet whatever circumstances are there. And that's why I have such gratitude for how wise and skillful all of our systems are. So even if a person is "difficult," I respect that there's some aspect of what they're doing that is a protective function and that that's quite healthy for their system. So I just have a deeper, a kind of an abiding appreciation for malfunctions and for strategies that people have, because I'm like, dude, I am the same way. We're designed the same way. I get it, you know? And I just respect it.

Douglas: Yeah. It's amazing to see what strategies other people use and which ones that we can authentically borrow versus things that maybe I don't want to touch that. Maybe that's not such a good tool for me.

Sunni: Yeah. I wonder how many you can borrow, because there are qualities that other people have that I wish that I had. And I kind of admire that they have them, but I don't personally have them myself. Like, what example?

Douglas: From an internal family systems, I doubt there's much borrowing we can do unless we do some deep, long work. I was thinking more from the surface level of, that's an interesting strategy. Ooh, I like the way that they're asking folks to… Who haven't we heard from next? I think there's a lot of fun little prompts and questions and things that we can borrow from folks. But it's critical that we do it authentically. If it doesn't feel comfortable in your belly when you're saying it, maybe leave that one at home.

Sunni: Right. Aww, I know. It's so insightful what you're saying about you can't really borrow them, because I always think about coaches and coaching and why would that work in terms of if you're trying to say, like, if somebody hires a coach to be more assertive, it's like, well, you could hack it. You could put on an assertive demeanor. But it wouldn't really be born of your essence. You wouldn't really be the source of it. So I always think it's interesting, the methods that coaches use to attempt to get great things from people. For me, it has to be natural for them. So you just want to unlock their natural strength.

Douglas: I like that word natural. I think that's very similar to how I think about authentic, is of being natural.

I want to talk about the coaching thing for a second, though. You know, I think part of it is people not taking a robust definition of greatness. They've found some thing that they think is greatness, and then they're glommed onto it, and they're like, teach me how to… I think you were talking about, like, being more confident or whatnot. But what if people more generally said, "I just want to improve. And what does that mean to improve? And let's explore things more openly." I think that kind of coaching can be really, really interesting, right? Let's see how I can explore where my strengths create weakness. In some of the coaching work I've done, it's about how I figure out what I'm not good at, and then is it something that I can improve on? And if not, if it's truly a deep-seeded weakness, let's delegate that. But let's let that be a part of my self-awareness. Coaching should be about becoming more self-aware.

Sunni: That's right. And unburdening some of the parts of you, because you already have this constellation internally that is very capable, and you and me and everyone we know. But some of it is burdened. And so it has intense emotional charge that hasn't been released or it has belief systems that are old and archaic and need to be discarded. But then once they're unburdened, the energy and the natural expression of that aspect of you is just available, which is crazy because that's what Zen practice is all about too. Zen practice, there's the metaphor they use is like wiping dust from a mirror. So your mirror is already there. You can't change that. It's just who you are. It's part of the natural emergence of an incarnated being, is that you're like a reflection of the universe. And it just has dust on it. So the practice is about getting some of the dust off.

There was a big reversal of the way I grew up, which was, like, oh, you're born in sin. And I was like, wait. So I'm just fundamentally fucked up? I was like, oh, I can't relate to that. But people do, you know? And so I think the approach of assuming beauty in the person and then just helping them release some of their inherent capacity is just a really benevolent way to approach coaching. But it's not that common.

Douglas: Sunni, it's been a pleasure chatting with you today. And just want to give you a chance to kind of close out, leave anyone with any final thoughts. Or I know that we've probably got a lot of folks that are really interested in how they can find out more about your work and what you do. So anything they should keep in mind?

Sunni: Well, I was thinking about your audience. They're mostly facilitators, right? They're people who are interested in that practice?

Douglas: Yeah. Our listeners are facilitators as well as leaders that are interested in these techniques and how they can improve their meetings and their employee experience. I think, generally, the audience are growing into just a general appreciation of how meetings could be better.

Sunni: Yeah. You're so good at what you do. If people are interested in a lot—I mean, you and I covered so many great topics that I'm like, "Oh, is our time up? It's so sad." But deepselfdesign.com has some good resources on it. And my other business that is the original venture is sunnibrownink.com. Those are both resources. And you can find me all over the Internet.

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.

“You already have this constellation internally that is very capable, and you and me and everyone we know. But some of it is burdened. And so it has intense emotional charge that hasn't been released, or it has belief systems that are old and archaic and need to be discarded. But then once they're unburdened, the energy and the natural expression of that aspect of you is just available.”

Sunni Brown

In this week’s episode of the Control the Room podcast, I’m delighted to speak with Sunni Brown, founder of Deep Self Design and Sunni Brown Ink. Sunni has been named one of the 100 most creative people in business and one of the 10 most creative people on Twitter by Fast Company. She is a best selling author, speaker, and expert meeting facilitator.

We talk about the fallacy of using buzzwords in value statements, Cobra Kai, and the tango of co-facilitation. Listen in to find out what The Karate Kid remake can teach us about the complexity of people.

Show Highlights

[8:23] The proven power of taking notes by hand

[15:45] What is authenticity?

[21:27] The fallacy of buzzwords in value statements

[27:38] Cobra Kai, the more naive Karate Kid

[36:47] The tango of co-facilitation

[45:28] Dusting off your inner mirror

Links | Resources

Sunni on LinkedIn

Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers

The Doodle Revolution

SB Ink

Sunni’s TedTalk, Doodlers Unite!

About the Guest

Sunni Brown, founder of Deep Self Design and Sunni Brown Ink, is a best-selling author, speaker, and expert meeting facilitator. Fast Company has included her in “100 Most Creative People in Business” and “10 Most Creative People on Twitter.”

Sunni, author of Gamestorming and The Doodle Revolution, leads a worldwide campaign advocating for visual, game, design, and improvisational thinking. She lists empathy, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and effective communication as some of her most sought-after leadership 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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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. This episode is brought to you by MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. At Voltage Control, we use MURAL to facilitate engaging and productive meetings and workshops from anywhere. MURAL gives teams the means, methods and freedoms to collaborate visually. Use their suite of facilitation superpowers to control the virtual room and solve tough problems as a team with their pre-built templates and guided methods. To see for yourself why companies like IBM, Atlassian, and E* Trade rely on MURAL, start your 30 day trial at mural.co. That’s mural.co

Douglas: Today I’m with Sunni Brown, founder of Sunni Brown Ink and the Center of Deep Self Design, where she helps people design their best selves. 

Welcome to the show, Sunni.

Sunni: Can I call you D?

Douglas: As long as you don’t call me Doug—

Sunni: Dougie Fresh.

Douglas: —I think I’ll be okay with it.

Sunni: Okay. I might slip up and call you D.

Douglas: D’s perfectly fine.

So, how did you get started? How did Sunni Brown become Sunni Brown Ink?

Sunni: Well, there were many roads that led to that incarnation, but first was that I could not keep a job. So I was fired many times. So there's, like, the shadow side of it, and then there's the accidental, you know, serendipitous aspects of it, and then there's the origin story, like the conditioning-from-family stuff. So there's all wrapped up in that, you know? But first and foremost, I could not—I got fired a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean definitely over 13 times. And so I was good at getting jobs, but I wasn't good at keeping jobs, which is a hallmark of entrepreneurism, but I didn't realize that at the time. I just thought that everyone was an idiot, and somehow I didn't belong in a cage or whatever. I was very unruly as an employee. It was actually legitimately hard for me to keep a job. Even though I was good, I was insubordinate. And so eventually I just recognized that, oh, I need to be my own boss. I didn't know the boss of what. 

But serendipitously and sort of circuitously, I ended up in the Bay Area, which is rife with ideas and opportunity and innovation and potential, and that was a great place for somebody like me. And so I ended up working at The Grove, which is a visual-thinking company, and that was my introduction to visual literacy and visual thinking. I only worked there two years, and then I left and I started my own company, which again, I think—I mean, I think unless you have entrepreneurism in your family, it's almost always accidental. And it’s not— it's accidental and on purpose, but it's not necessarily something—it's, like, something that finds you and you find it, you know? There was a lot of ingredients that made that thing come to life.

Douglas: So, tell us about the experience at The Grove. How did that shape what you're doing now?

Sunni: It was a great experience in the sense that I was from—like, I had just graduated with a master’s in public policy, which always surprises people. But I was kind of working in the public sector, and I didn't even identify as a creative at that time. I didn't like the term creative. I didn't like the term artistic. I was very pragmatic and practical. And so I was not looking for anything of the sort, in terms of ending up at The Grove, and so I was very skeptical. 

So when I was first there, I was just hired as the executive assistant because I had been other people's assistants, but I didn't always mention I’d been fired a lot. So I was very questionable about my job-acquisition ethics. But I did always end up getting jobs. And so eventually I was working for the president, which was David Sibbet, who's, like, the grandfather of visual thinking in the United States. And I was very lucky because I was mentored by him and then eventually mentored by Dave Gray and other kind of like—he wouldn't want me to call him a grandfather, but another godfather, if you will, of visual thinking.

Douglas: Sort of a luminary. 

Sunni: Yeah, absolutely. So those were events happenstantial. But when I first was at The Grove, I was really skeptical about visual thinking, and I thought it was kind of silly, to be honest.

Douglas: So what was the thing that really changed for you? You said you used to think “it was kind of silly.” What really connected the dots for you to realize, like, “Wow, this is something deeper”?

Sunni: Well, so, it was like application. I was first a graphic recorder. I don’t know if you know that about me, but I started as a graphic recorder. So a person would go and do live large-scale visualizations of auditory content. And what I observed in the process of learning how to be that, which did come naturally to me—it was a skill that kind of mapped itself onto my own skills readily, which was surprising—but through that process, I recognized that there was a lot of benefits of visual thinking that were happening to me cognitively. So I was remembering content really well. I was organizing it in my mind and on paper really skillfully. I was comprehending it and sort of like getting insights. And when you’re a graphic recorder, you go and you listen to every topic imaginable. So I noticed that my relationship with the content was really rich and really substantive. And I had to attribute it to what I was doing visually because it wasn't like I was special, you know? It was like, “Oh, my god, there's something meaningful to the brain about this way of thinking.” And that's when I became a convert. You know, I was converted.

Douglas: That's incredible. It makes me think about something that I've been talking with a lot of folks about lately, this notion of multithreaded meetings, where when we're in MURAL and everyone is Livescribing and at the same time—now, it's certainly not at the level of proficiency and craftsmanship that, you know, you were taken to the job as a graphic recorder—but if we're all visually working in the meeting through MURAL or Mirro or any of these other tools and live capturing what we're hearing, we are unsynthesizing on the fly, we're adding nuance to what we hear because it's our own, like, filter. Even if we are attempting to be purist as possible, something's going to happen there. And when you look across the room of what everyone wrote down, you get this really rich picture of what was said, because it's, like, not only what was said, but this diversity of thought layered on top of it.

Sunni: That's cool. That's cool that you're doing that. And absolutely. It makes complete sense, right? It's like this beautiful display of insight that is unique to each person. But it's not a thin relationship. It's a really thick relationship between you and what you're trying to understand. And that's why it's so valuable. And so, then, of course, I became an evangelist about that, and that was in a different chapter of my journey. And I'm really grateful for that, because at this point, I don't do anything without having some visual-thinking component. It’s just how I work and how I think and how I explain things to people. So it just changed everything about how I function. It's really grateful. 

Douglas: That's really cool. You know, it also makes me think about active listening and how one of our skills as a facilitator for active listening is paraphrasing. And if you think about it, only one person can paraphrase at one time because if we were all doing that, it would be cacophonous insanity and the whole power of paraphrasing would be diminished because we're all talking over each other. But if someone's Livescribing or if the whole room is Livescribing, everyone's essentially paraphrasing but in a non-auditory sense, right?

Sunni: Mm-hmm, yeah. That’s why I teach it to educators and then they teach it to students, because when you're typing—I mean, there's a lot of research about typing versus writing in terms of notetaking, and the research is very clear that when you use visual notetaking instead of typing on your laptop and just trying to, like, bang out as much as you can based on what the teacher’s saying, and similarly with handwriting, the knowledge and the insight is much, much deeper when you're using visual networking because you're synthesizing. So you're actively distilling content on purpose, and you're discerning what to believe and what to put on the page, and then you map it to some kind of icon or image so it comes to life. And so I think that that experience is true for everybody. I mean, I taught it all over the world, and it's not ever been somebody who was like, “No, I prefer my laptop typing in terms of knowledge acquisition.” Like, I’ve never met that person, you know?

Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it also dawned on me. Has the research explored the notion of the spatial aspect of—

Sunni: Uh-huh.

Douglas: —handwritten notes? Because if you think about typed notes, it’s direct to linear; it’s always left to right; it’s up, down—

Sunni: Yeah, totally.

Douglas: —it’s squares; it’s edges.

Sunni: There’s no structure.

Douglas: Yeah. You have that structure is enforced upon you.

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: And if you're having to think through that structure or just flow through it and even move your hand to the upper right and over here and down, it's not so liberal—it's more liberating, maybe.

Sunni: Yeah, that’s right. And Tony Buzan has this great page where he talks about that most kids perceive notetaking as punishment. They refer to it as punishment because that's how it feels, because they're confined and constrained by what you can do. And so when you make the page like a blank space, it's basically a field to plan, and then you can show relationships between things, and you can show spatial content that has an architecture that is inherently not in listing or in writing lists. And so there's, like, nine other things that he—He has a great book, Mind Map that he’s original. But it just describes how it’s like a black-and-white versus a color television. It's just a whole different world. And so it's universally impactful in that way. 

So it was easy for me to fall in love with it after I got over myself, you know? I was like, “Oh, shit, this is like a power tool, and nobody knows it.” Like, very few people were interested in it or thought it was worth exploring, and it was sort of something you put on the side, like you go to art class and do that, or you be weird and do that. Like this guy—

Douglas: Or these geeks in the corner of the conference just plugging away.

Sunni: That’s right. And so I was, like, well, I would like to normalize the shit out of this. And so I was very passionate about it for a long time. And at this point, I've exhausted that passion. But I don't need to have it because other people have it now. So I’m like, “Cool. The torch has been passed, and more power to all of you.”

Douglas: And we talked a little bit about that earlier in kind of the preshow chat. We both have books coming out on the non-obvious press, and I was asking you about—

Sunni: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You’re writing the one I wanted to write, you old buster.

Douglas: You know, you were writing a book on graphic recording.

Sunni: Yeah. It was, like, rapid doodling. Yeah. 

Douglas: Yeah. And I was curious to hear about that. And you said, “Oh, I wasn't inspired.” 

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: I mean, you were explaining how you kind of lost the flame a bit—

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: —because you've been doing it for a while—

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: —and you know it in and out. 

Sunni: Yes. 

Douglas: And it's hard to take that kind of new—

Sunni: Yeah. Like, the beginner’s mind. It’s such an important state of mind and that my relationship with that is not in that state. So I couldn’t strongarm my way into writing that book.

Douglas: And I love how meta that experience for you and going through the conversation with the publisher was in relation to the topic you're actually going to write about, because you talked about not being part of your being or your state right now, the passion right now. And so it must have felt inauthentic.

Sunni: It did. Yeah, it did. It felt forced, for sure. And I told him that I could do it. It's like, it's not that I don't have the ability to sit down and type some shit on a page that makes sense. Like, I can do it. But why would I do that? What is the value of a factory? Like, I'm not a factory. And I mean, I can be, but I don't want to be. And I just was like, fuck it. I'll just—you know, he can get mad at me. I mean, I literally woke up that morning. I was like, what if he sued me? I was like, I don't know what he's going to do. No idea what he was going to do. Because he had the whole—all of our books were going to be published in a certain time, remember? Like, all together. So I didn’t—

Douglas: And then COVID happened.

Sunni: That's right. And I was hoping that he would have considered that and that some of his other off—because you turned yours in on time, did you not? 

Douglas: Yes. And—

Sunni: Well, that's what I mean. So it didn't affect you. Ugh, god.

Douglas: Well, we’re not on time.

Sunni: Yeah, but you’re—

Douglas: We turned it in, but then there was a lot of edits—

Sunni: Right, right.

Douglas: —so we’re still hard at work on it. But it’s great. 

Sunni: That’s awesome.

Douglas: I found working with them to be really fantastic from a—

Sunni: Oh, good.

Douglas: —get it right—let’s take the time to get it right.

Sunni: Uh, yeah. He’s awesome, and he really impressed me that day. And so it was nice to arrive at the topic that I am interested in, I have something to say about. And for me, the most energetic time when I'm learning something is where I'm completely convinced that it's valuable. I have internalized quite a bit of it, but I haven't, like, reverse engineered what it is that I did. So it's like when I was a graphic recorder, I was doing that. I had some training, but I basically trained myself. And then I studied what I was doing. And then I was like, oh, wow, that's really interesting. So for me, it's like that was similar with the deep-self-design stuff. It’s like I've been applying and practicing this stuff for, like, 13 years, and now I'm studying what I'm doing because I want to teach it. So I apparently have these cycles of that. And I was not in that cycle with rapid doodling for problem solving. And I was like, why would I fake this? This is just completely not true for me at all. So thankfully, Rohit was awesome, and he was, like, “Great. I don't want you to write that.” And I almost kissed him through the screen. I was like, “God bless you,” because it was getting painful.

Douglas: And what’s the title of the new book?

Sunni: Well, I don't know yet exactly. It's still in process, but it's something about the “non-obvious guide to being confident,” or maybe “to enter confidence.” And then the subtitle is “without being arrogant or inauthentic,” something like that.

Douglas: Yeah. And I love this notion of confidence is really important when it comes to facilitation. That’s why we both run facilitation practices just to get people experience with the tools and with new ways of doing things. And I also feel that authenticity matters so much. The authenticity allows us to be confident and vice versa. They kind of have this interesting dual purpose or this kind of linked connectedness.

Sunni: And I’ve always been confused by, what is authenticity? What does it even mean? And it’s similarly with integrity. So this is just like a sort of weird question philosophically, which is, if you're authentically being manipulative, like you're totally committed to that activity, then that's not inauthentic. It's un-optimal. It's suboptimal for who you're dealing with. But, like, Trump is authentically an asshole. Do you know what I'm saying? 

Douglas: Mm-hmm. Yes, I do know what you’re saying.

Sunni: So I don’t even know when people describe—because I do often get described as authentic. My mother-in-law—well, she’s family so she could be blowing smoke up my ass—but she’s often like, authenticity is just your engine. And it took me a while. I was like, I don’t even know what she's talking about. But then finally, I came up with this definition, so I want to run it by you and see what you think. So what it is, maybe, is—and I’m sure there are people who’ve done this research, so I'm right on the edge of doing all this great research—which is your internal experience is matched to your external expression. So in other words, what I'm feeling internally—so if I'm feeling disappointment because somebody didn't respond to my text—when I talk to them, I say, “I'm experiencing disappointment about your lack of responding to me, and I'm interpreting it.” So I'm just saying what's true for me. I'm just speaking what— So I think that's what it is. And that's really hard for people, apparently. What do you love about it?

Douglas: Well, you know, it's the same thing as like I think people as a society, we have been primed to not disappoint people and to avoid conflict, and so that forces people to be inauthentic—

Sunni: That's true. So true.

Douglas: —because they’re in pursuit of this vibe or this experience or to avoid. It’s like to minimize your—

Sunni: Yeah. Conflict avoidance is huge, yes. Yes. 

Douglas: Yeah. And it's the same thing as you get a birthday present you don't like, and you’re, “Oh, I love it.”

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: It’s like that incongruency of what you're saying and what you’re feeling. 

Sunni: Yeah. Right.

Douglas: And imagine you walk into a room and you know that you need to pump up that room and get everyone excited. 

Sunni: Right. But you're not feeling it yet.

Douglas: You're not feeling it. And there’s a pit in your stomach that you are not that is you're not being authentic.

Sunni: Well, that, I think, creates anxiety, though, right, because when we’re trying to defy our actual internal experience, that is anxiety provoking. So that’s problematic. And it’s not like I nail it every time, but I definitely have a high fidelity to what my experience is and what my truth is, and then I share that. But I'm not undiplomatic. 

So it's interesting what you're saying about the gift. When somebody gives you a gift and you don't really love it, but you're honoring that they gave it to you, that can still be an authentic experience because you may not love it, but you love that they gave something to you, that they thought of you, right?

Douglas: Right. So why not? Why is it not customary that we say that?

Sunni: I don’t know. I don't think our culture is skillful. I think our culture is really immature in a lot of areas. And communication and conflict is one of them, a big one.

Douglas: Yeah. In our facilitation training, we often work with folks to think about how they can tap into their inner self. And you go much deeper into the internal family-system stuff. The stuff that we're saying to do is at least just check in.

Sunni: Yeah, totally.

Douglas: Does your foot hurt?

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: Does your stomach hurt?

Sunni: Yeah. Connecting to your body.

Douglas: Does it feel hot? Is there a tension in the room? Are you bringing that tension? Are you noticing it? Is that tension impacting you?

Sunni: Yeah. Right. That’s so helpful, though, Douglas. People are so oblivious to their own states. And that is also anxiety provoking. When you’re divorced from your own experience, how could you not be stressed? How could that not be stressful? 

To your point, I do go deep, and I love that. But it's also, what you're doing with people, that's a revelation for a lot of people. Just like, oh, oh, I do. I am hungry. Oh, I have no idea. Or oh, I am disappointed that I wasn't seated with my friend. You know, just anything. And then I often do at the beginning of sessions, I will have them name something that's true for them. And just that simple act of checking in, becoming aware of your state and yourself, and then declaring it, it's like returning to yourself just for a second. And it brings you into the present moment, and it's really helpful.

Douglas: Yeah. Any time we can have some sort of presence-ing activity in an opener, it's really powerful.

Sunni: I know. And you know what’s funny, talking about authenticity? I think I was with you one time when we—I have people often draw, like, just in virtual facilitation, they’ll draw some emotion on a sticky note. And I will just ask, “What is your state of emotion right now?” and then draw an emoji. And then, you know, the ones that are permissible, right—there's permissible, social, emotional experiences. So it'll be like, the craziest one might be that someone's frazzled, but they would never be like, “I’m depressed,” you know?

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Sunni: No— So there's social norms in that. And again, it’s like, is that inauthenticity, or is that caretaking of the group, or is that not even knowing maybe how you feel? It's like, just, it’s complex, you know?

Douglas: Yeah. It’s interesting because if you're intentionally trying to deceive you being authentic—there's different levels, are you being authentic to yourself? There is intention. And then someone else could perceive you as being inauthentic because you're like, wait, he's totally lying to me. So, yeah.

Sunni: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s right.

Douglas: And integrity, I think, is easier for me because I always define integrity—because it shows up on so many companies’ values statements, and I don’t even know—I think most of the time they don’t think about what it means. It’s like, oh, yeah. It needs to say integrity.

Sunni: They don’t even know what it is.

Douglas: Resourcefulness. 

Sunni: They’re like, everybody wants that, for sure.

Douglas: Integrity is just you do what you say you’re going to do.

Sunni: Say you’re going to do? So, okay, what if I say I’m going to throw water on Chet when he’s sleeping? 

Douglas: That’s integrity.

Sunni: And then I do it.

Douglas: You follow through. But if you say you’re going to build a wall and you don’t build a wall, that’s not a lot of integrity.

Sunni: But that means that Hitler had integrity, right? So it’s like if you say—and it’s controversial, but based on that definition, that would mean that, that he followed through.

Douglas: Yeah. But that’s the thing. I think people that take these words and they glorify them as being good qualities.

Sunni: Yeah, they don’t mean anything.

Douglas: And sure, if you have good intent—like, you had to combine them with other things because—that segues nicely into something that we were getting excited about during the preshow chat. And this is just good versus bad, and in binary thinking, how dangerous it is.

Sunni: Yeah, it is. It's one of the thinking distortions. So there's a really great list of thinking distortions that has, like, eight on it. But this also segues into Zen practice, which is central to my entire life. But one of the thinking distortions is making things binary. And it's so tempting. And I do it even though I have a devout practice around not doing that, where I'm seeing the nuance. It's still, it's the brain. Like, we are wired to summarize very quickly for survival purposes. It’s not like we’re bad if we do that. That is just biologically, it's like a biological imperative. And so in order to soften that inclination to just label somebody as, like, stupid or smart; or a desirable, undesirable; or deplorable and undeplorable; or whatever, we have to practice. You actually have to activate the antithesis of that way of thinking by purposefully seeing the shades of gray. It is a practice, and it's super powerful. 

And so I like that you're interested in that, too, because as facilitators, I gamify this stuff. I try to teach people that in gaming. That one in particular always blows people's domepieces off because they're like, “Oh, my god, I completely thought my boss was a jerk just by definition.” And I'm like, “Did you consider all the other facets of your boss?” And they're like, “No.” I'm like, “Why would you? It’s not a practice you have.”

Douglas: You know, I think that it applies across the spectrum, too, right? A lot of times, especially folks that are brand new to facilitation, they're so curious. Like, how do I deal with difficult people? And that, first of all, is binary thinking. The fact that you’re asking that question means that you’re thinking there’s non-difficult people and difficult people.

Sunni: You’re assuming. Right, yeah. And it’s funny because when I started facilitating, I never asked that question. I wasn’t worried about it. And I think that has to do with conflict avoidance, too. So if people are asking that question, underneath it is a fear that they're going to have to deal with conflict or perceived conflict. And conflict avoidance was not my family strategy. So I usually turn toward it and address it, depending on the depth of the wounding or whatever. But it's like, it's not fearful for me. 

And also, I haven't encountered these “difficult” people. I know there are people that can talk over other people, and there are people that want to ask a lot of questions and sort of can derail some of your activities. I know there are people that try to sidle up to you and make alliances with a facilitator. But I don't think of them as difficult. I think of them as people, just human people.

Douglas: What about the people that are desperately trying to help you?

Sunni: Oh, I love those people. It’s always—that's so, so sweet because it’s like, how do you say “No, thank you. You're going to make it way harder on me if you try to help”? Right? Because when I was a graphic recorder, I used to always carry these big walls, you know? You got to carry these 32-square-foot walls everywhere, and you would not believe how many people tried to help me because I was 5’5” and they’d be like, “She can’t carry that up four flights of stairs.” And I’d be like, “It weighs two pounds. It's not hard.” But I would always just very gently be like, “No. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your interest. But it’ll go smoothly if I just do it because I've done it so many times.” But there are all those types in meetings. 

But to your point, what does it mean if they're difficult? Maybe they just need something, and they need you to be aware of it. And you just look for the need, the underlying need, and see if you can support that or not.

Douglas: You know, I really liked Michael Wilkinson's framing on this. I think in his book—I forgot. It’s so many secrets of facilitation. I can't even remember how many there are. There might be, like, let’s just say, so many secrets of facilitation.

Sunni: They’re secrets?

Douglas: Yeah, well, he's unveiling the secrets of facilitation.

Sunni: What?! The secret teachings?

Douglas: Yeah. It’s amazing. So, his whole thing is dysfunctions. How do you deal with dysfunctions? And so I liked that framing a lot better because there’s all sorts of them, and how do we think about addressing them as they happen? And the individuals aren’t dysfunctional.

Sunni: Right. 

Douglas: Maybe eliciting a dysfunction at that moment.

Sunni: Yeah. Or like a malfunction, yeah.

Douglas: Yeah. 

Sunni: You know? A little breakdown. 

Douglas: A little short circuit, which is an amazing—

Sunni: And I have those, too, you know?

Douglas: I mean, when are they going to come out with, like—so they've done E.T. with Stranger Things. They've done Karate Kid with Cobra Kai. When are they going to come out with the Short Circuit, like the modern Short Circuit?

Sunni: Oh, dude. How can they top the original? It’d be so hard. It’d be impossible. Oh, my god, I’ve got to watch that tonight. It’s Friday night. Thank you for picking my movie.

Douglas: There’s something about Cobra Kai that I was—

Sunni: Dude.

Douglas: —thinking about earlier. But—

Sunni: Oh, my god, yes.

Douglas: —I think it’s just this notion of this good versus bad.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: You know, I was thinking about that when we were talking about good versus bad. 

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: And it's really interesting to me how the more naive Karate Ki— even though, like, look, let's face it. Cobra Kai is like a series that is not really any kind of profound wisdom. But it's funny that the more naive version of Karate Kid was, like, Danny’s just like, and Miyagi, are just like the source of good.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: And now, the more modern portrayal, as they're older, they're much more complex, you know?

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: They’re both doing things that you’re like, why?

Sunni: And that’s the truth about people is that we’re complex. And that’s what people don't want to grapple with, because it requires an awareness of things that can't be tucked into a box really neatly. And the brain, it does not like that. The brain is—I mean, sometimes it's stimulated by it. But ultimately, it needs a summation. And so it's like that's why you have all these characters that are easy to hate, like in Inspector Gadget. What’s the dude, Claw? He doesn't even have a face. He's just the bad dude behind the desk, without a face. And then when you look at comic books or graphic novels, they always go into their backstory. I mean, Black Panther, they nailed it by making those characters so complex. That, to me, felt relatable. So it's, like, so fascinating how that starts from storytelling when you're five, you know? Even Star Wars. But I love Star Wars because, dude, I don’t—

Douglas: Hero’s journey. 

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: I mean, you kind of can’t go wrong with the hero’s journey. In fact, that's something Daniel Stillman and I talk about a lot, using that in your workshop design.

Sunni: Mm-hmm. Hm, interesting. Like, taking each person through some transformational experience related to the content?

Douglas: Yeah. Basically, from start to finish, we're going to go through this hero's journey, where we go into the abyss and come out together with the elixir.

Sunni: Oh, that makes me just want to weep, it's so beautiful. And it's like even if you don't choose—because part of the journey, you have to answer the call. So life will probably summon you. But if you don't answer, then you don't go on the journey, you know? And I've always been fascinated by people that are not available for the journey, because it's just not safe. I mean, it's not, by definition. But for me, it's always worth it to step into challenges. And I think that is also a quality of entrepreneurs, is that we are kind of thrilled by freaking ourselves out.

Douglas: Uncertainty, ambiguity.

Sunni: Yes, dude. We’re like those people that like it. We're kind of into it. And over the years, I've had to temper my own instinct to do that. And I know you have too. I mean, I've been a workaholic for a long time, and I'm, like, in recovery. But it's also just because I like being challenged, and I like not knowing everything, because it's such a thrill when you get some new insight or knowledge. It's like, I feel like I'm like the Hulk. I'm like, whoa, I’m growing muscularly. I'm huge. But you could get addicted to that, so it's like every now and then I'm always, like, on a weekend I'm like, girl, you don't need to, like, read 40 sutras this weekend. You can just be an idiot, just be an idiot, you know?

Douglas: Yeah. Just give the brain a little break. Go on a nature bath.

Sunni: Yeah! You know, I told you I’m going to install my hillbilly hot tub. Is that okay to s—? You got—I know. I want—

Douglas: My sauna’s getting installed right as we speak.

Sunni: Oh, dude. That’s amazing. 

Douglas: It’s important. 

Sunni: It is. 

Douglas: Yeah. As you were talking about this, some metaphors were coming up for me, around we're taking people through this risky kind of thing, and there is risk that you're taking. And it reminded me of rapids, right? 

Sunni: Yeah. 

Douglas: So whitewater rafting. And you always hire the guide so that you don't go kill yourself. 

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: Facilitation’s like the mental equivalent of the whitewater-rafting guy. 

Sunni: Yeah, yeah.

Douglas: If we're going to go on this risky mental journey, let’s make sure we have a shepherd or that guide to make sure that—we're going to wear helmets, of course, but we're going to make sure that we don't bash our heads on the rocks even if we have helmets on.

Sunni: Well, and that’s why the facilitator is so important, because they have to trust you completely. And I don't mean they have to, meaning you can't conduct a meeting, but for a successful experience, they really need to trust you. And you, the way that I think about it, is that I demonstrate how I want them to be. So if something goes wrong, I will name that and own that, you know? If I don't have the answer to something, I will not pretend that I do. If I want somebody to collaborate with me, then I will invite them to come and collaborate with me, and then mimic that in their group. So it makes you more human in some ways if you're—I mean, there's every kind of facilitator under the sun, so it’s not like there's some gold standard or whatever. That's just my style, is I want them to understand that perfection is not what we're up to. We’re up to being humans. And so—

Douglas: I think that’s authenticity, right there.

Sunni: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. But I could be being, like, what if I had an inner—because I have an inner perfectionist. I'm actually working with this part of me that is authentically perfectionistic, you know? 

Douglas: Well, I meant the vulnerability you're talking about. Like, if you don't know the answer—

Sunni: Yeah, let’s just name it.

Douglas: —we’re going to talk about it.

Sunni: Yeah. And I've been making so many bloopers. Douglas, you would not believe the bloopers on the United Nations project, because I'm learning as I go. And I told you that. It’s like we're leaping, and we're building our parachute while we’re falling. And the client’s not that aware of it. That is an internal awareness that Jessie and I both have. But for me, it's like, oh, my god—it's like I'm back to being a newbie, like, the stuff I do. Like, the other day, I just flung everyone into breakout rooms, just because I impulsively pushed the fucking button. It was like, what do you do? And then—

Douglas: Well, that’s the world we’re in. 

Sunni: I know. It’s so crazy.

Douglas: It's going to happen, even—I've run the breakout rooms in Zoom daily—

Sunni: Yeah, I bet.

Douglas: —and I still hit things accidentally. And that’s partially because—here’s the thing. I don’t know if you've seen the book, The Design of Everyday Things. 

Sunni: Uh-uh.

Douglas: Oh, man. It's a classic design book. So great.

Sunni: I know. I’ve heard of it. I don’t have it, though.

Douglas: In fact, the doors that are poorly designed are actually named Norman Doors, after the author.

Sunni: Aw.

Douglas: Well, because he points out, don’t blame yourself because the door is poorly designed.

Sunni: Right.

Douglas: If there is a giant—like, you ever gone up to a door that has a giant handle on it?

Sunni: Uh-huh.

Douglas: And you’re supposed to just grab the handle and pull it toward you?

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: And you pull it, and then it doesn’t move because you’re supposed to push it?

Sunni: Push it.

Douglas: So on the push side, there needs to be a push plate, and on the pull side, there needs to be a pull handle.

Sunni: Right. Like, you’re not the dope here.

Douglas: Yeah. Exactly. You’re not the dope. He said, never blame yourself for bad design if someone designed it poorly. And so that's what everyone does. Like, my mom always tells me, I don't understand computers. I’m like, well, that means they didn’t design it so that you could understand it.

Sunni: Aww, that’s very nice of you to say that. Because it does make people feel stupid when they can’t do things.

Douglas: Yes. People always say they’re stupid when it’s like, man, someone did a poor job of getting you there.

Sunni: Yeah.

Douglas: And I think Zoom breakout rooms have a lot of room for growth.

Sunni: Yeah. And I think they're working on that, and I know they're making new features and changes to how it—

Douglas: Yeah.

Sunni: Like, they just did the Gallery View. You can shuffle it around.

Douglas: That’s right.

Sunni: That's another thing, too, though. It's like all these new things constantly coming, so there's capabilities you don’t even know you have, and then there's some that fall off. So it's just a constantly changing environment. And so I've just made mistakes left and right, and then I remember what it's like to be a beginner. And thankfully, I have this foundational practice and that confidence about facilitating and making mistakes and just knowing that it's okay. But if I were a beginning facilitator, it would be so stressful. It’d be super stressful to try to step in.

Douglas: Absolutely. And the thing is, you just found—in a way it's almost like fracking—you hit the depths of what's possible. You would become an expert in facilitation. And then this new fissure opened up because of remote, and now there is a new area to play in and a new area to fail in. But at the same time, you weren't building a parachute while falling. You know what I mean? You were in the squirrel suit, already at terminal velocity—

Sunni: I was already in my gear.

Douglas: And as you’re floating down, you’re like, “Oh, let me assemble a parachute, because then I’m going to float down even slower.”

Sunni: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.

Douglas: So I think there’s something beautiful in that, right, because you can lean on the experience you have to then go into new, uncharted territory.

Sunni: Yes.

Douglas: And that uncertainty, while it’s scary, also leads to a lot of opportunity.

Sunni: Totally. And that's why I love facilitating with expert facilitators, because we all know that. A lot of the stuff, a lot of the terrors and the weird delusions and the distorted ideas you have about the practice when you first go are gone. They're just burnt off by experience. And then, so, it's just, there's a lot of joy for me, because I online I always have a co-facilitator if it's longer than, like, an hour and a half. You know what I mean? And I love trusting the capacity of that person, because it's crazy, because the other day, Jessie and I were like, I could tell she was looking for something in the back end of Zoom, and I could see from her body language that she had no clue where it was. And so I just started talking. I was like, “Here's why we're doing this, and this is the value of it. And I ask the people questions.” And I was just doing it to fill in the gaps so that she could—because I looked at her again. I was like, “Okay, she found it,” and now I'm going to close. But that's like a tango that we have because we work together so often. But it's just, it’s very sweet. It's a very sweet process to have.

Douglas: What you're describing is so much harder in the virtual space, too, because of the signals we have. When we're in the room together—

Sunni: Totally.

Douglas: —and vibing, whether it's Daniel or John or Eli or any of the facilitators I’ve facilitated with quite often, it's like you can feel it almost in the air. Like, we don’t even have to make eye contact necessarily. It's just like, “Oh, I know they're still riffing.” And then, you know, it's almost like when you can tell someone's looking at you. So when they're done looking at you and ready, like, better if you just got the— So I feel like what you were doing is a pro move to be tearing through the tools and trying to revisit the vague signals we do have in virtual.

Sunni: Yeah. It's so funny you're talking about this because Jessie and I were talking about this this morning. When you're asking about my origin story, so part of my early conditioning had to do with hyper vigilance. So I was very aware of what emotional state people were in and what their next move was likely to be. So I'm really attentive to body language. And that, for me, is still very available in Zoom. I mean, I can tell—and Jessie was making fun of me this morning. She was like, “Oh, my god, girl. You name people that they have a question before they have even unmuted themselves or even know they have a question.” But it's because I'm watching their body language. When people are about to ask a question, they do things. They move forward. They lean toward the camera. They kind of, like, gesture in these bizarre ways. Sometimes they stop and start. And so for me, that visual and gestural information is still there. So I’d just be like, “Hey, Frank, it seems like you want to say something.” And then Jessie was just like—she was making fun of me, because she was like, “That is so weird that you—” but I’m so sensitive to it, you know? And I thought that was normal, but then I realized, oh, yeah, no, that's my trauma. Basically, that’s the gift of trauma.

Douglas: You know, that was one of the things that really jumped out to me when you were telling me about internal family systems and giving me the whole low-down there, and I found it really fascinating that things that were previously traumatic or these—I can't remember the Internal Family Systems parlance—but these guards, these managers, that were created because of old wounds are part of yourself. And they can be, they can sometimes be disruptive, but they can also serve a function. They can give you superpowers that other people don't have.

Sunni: Yeah, they do. Absolutely. They’re 100 percent really powerful. And that’s one of mine is I have a manager who's very watchful, and so it is a super power. Now, the problem is I can't turn it off. So, like, if I’m, for example, in mediating between my husband and his mom, it will kind of be exhausting for me because I know that they're going to have an argument 10 minutes before they do, because I can see where the tones are changing and what the language, how the language is changing. I can see them turning, body language turning away from each other. I can see a color of their skin gets redder and redder. But they're not, like you were saying, people are not aware of what's happening internally to them. So they're not yet aware. So for both of them, the energy, the intensity has to be a certain threshold before they even notice. But for me, I notice it way early. And it's exhausting because I'll just be like, “Dudes. I'm going to walk out now. Five, four, three, two. Okay, your mom's pissed.” It’s funny.

But as a facilitator, it's really useful. It's a really useful skill, and I'm grateful for the spontaneous—like, going back to IFS, the spontaneous creation of these skill sets based on—and it’s not always from trauma. It’s just from navigating life, you know? But there is a spontaneous creativity that the body and the mind does to meet whatever circumstances are there. And that's why I have such gratitude for how wise and skillful all of our systems are. So even if a person is “difficult,” I respect that there's some aspect of what they're doing that is a protective function and that that's quite healthy for their system. So I just have a deeper, a kind of an abiding appreciation for malfunctions and for strategies that people have, because I'm like, dude, I am the same way. We're designed the same way. I get it, you know? And I just respect it.

Douglas: Yeah. It's amazing to see what strategies other people use and which ones that we can authentically borrow versus things that maybe I don't want to touch that. Maybe that's not such a good tool for me.

Sunni: Yeah. I wonder how many you can borrow, because there are qualities that other people have that I wish that I had. And I kind of admire that they have them, but I don't personally have them myself. Like, what example?

Douglas: From an internal family systems, I doubt there's much borrowing we can do unless we do some deep, long work. I was thinking more from the surface level of, that's an interesting strategy. Ooh, I like the way that they're asking folks to… Who haven't we heard from next? I think there’s a lot of fun little prompts and questions and things that we can borrow from folks. But it's critical that we do it authentically. If it doesn't feel comfortable in your belly when you're saying it, maybe leave that one at home.

Sunni: Right. Aww, I know. It's so insightful what you're saying about you can't really borrow them, because I always think about coaches and coaching and why would that work in terms of if you're trying to say, like, if somebody hires a coach to be more assertive, it's like, well, you could hack it. You could put on an assertive demeanor. But it wouldn't really be born of your essence. You wouldn't really be the source of it. So I always think it's interesting, the methods that coaches use to attempt to get great things from people. For me, it has to be natural for them. So you just want to unlock their natural strength.

Douglas: I like that word natural. I think that's very similar to how I think about authentic, is of being natural. 

I want to talk about the coaching thing for a second, though. You know, I think part of it is people not taking a robust definition of greatness. They've found some thing that they think is greatness, and then they're glommed onto it, and they're like, teach me how to… I think you were talking about, like, being more confident or whatnot. But what if people more generally said, “I just want to improve. And what does that mean to improve? And let's explore things more openly.” I think that kind of coaching can be really, really interesting, right? Let's see how I can explore where my strengths create weakness. In some of the coaching work I've done, it's about how I figure out what I'm not good at, and then is it something that I can improve on? And if not, if it's truly a deep-seeded weakness, let's delegate that. But let's let that be a part of my self-awareness. Coaching should be about becoming more self-aware.

Sunni: That's right. And unburdening some of the parts of you, because you already have this constellation internally that is very capable, and you and me and everyone we know. But some of it is burdened. And so it has intense emotional charge that hasn't been released or it has belief systems that are old and archaic and need to be discarded. But then once they're unburdened, the energy and the natural expression of that aspect of you is just available, which is crazy because that's what Zen practice is all about too. Zen practice, there's the metaphor they use is like wiping dust from a mirror. So your mirror is already there. You can't change that. It's just who you are. It's part of the natural emergence of an incarnated being, is that you're like a reflection of the universe. And it just has dust on it. So the practice is about getting some of the dust off. 

There was a big reversal of the way I grew up, which was, like, oh, you're born in sin. And I was like, wait. So I'm just fundamentally fucked up? I was like, oh, I can't relate to that. But people do, you know? And so I think the approach of assuming beauty in the person and then just helping them release some of their inherent capacity is just a really benevolent way to approach coaching. But it's not that common.

Douglas: Sunni, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. And just want to give you a chance to kind of close out, leave anyone with any final thoughts. Or I know that we've probably got a lot of folks that are really interested in how they can find out more about your work and what you do. So anything they should keep in mind?

Sunni: Well, I was thinking about your audience. They’re mostly facilitators, right? They’re people who are interested in that practice?

Douglas: Yeah. Our listeners are facilitators as well as leaders that are interested in these techniques and how they can improve their meetings and their employee experience. I think, generally, the audience are growing into just a general appreciation of how meetings could be better.

Sunni: Yeah. You're so good at what you do. If people are interested in a lot—I mean, you and I covered so many great topics that I'm like, “Oh, is our time up? It's so sad.” But deepselfdesign.com has some good resources on it. And my other business that is the original venture is sunnibrownink.com. Those are both resources. And you can find me all over the Internet.

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.

"He's written a book called Finding a Place to Stand, and in that book he talks about citizenship. And he says people join organizations, but they are citizens to institutions. And I'm completely fascinated by that idea because he writes that when you are a citizen, you show it very differently because it is something greater than yourself. When you are a member of an organization, you are bound by the tasks...But you join an institution as a citizen because you say that when we combine our organizational lives, the institution is greater. When the impact of the institution is greater, that's when you become a citizen. And I think organizations have the capacity to create citizens." Tyrome Smith

In episode 15 of the Control the Room podcast, I am so pleased to be speaking with Tyrome Smith, Principal Consultant at Go-In, LLC. Tyrome has more than two decades of experience teaching senior leadership how to solve emerging issues in an ever-complex, rapidly changing world.

Tyrome and I speak about the BLM movement in relation to his background as a former police officer, the fear of irrelevance in the age of COVID, and how family dynamics leak into institutional structures. Listen in to find out to create space for people to create their own unique value for the greater good.

Show Highlights

[2:15] The parallels of group dynamics between families & organizations

[14:07] Having a plan until you're punched in the mouth

[16:18] BLM movement from the perspective of a former police officer

[27:54] The fear of irrelevance

[29:59] Human architecture

[38:11] Getting up and touching the walls

Links | Resources

Tyrome on LinkedIn

Email Tyrome

About the Guest

Tyrome Smith is the Principal Consultant at Go-In, LLC. He says his work can be summarized in one simple quote - "engaging potential, creating possibilities." For two decades, Tyrome has been working with senior leadership to adapt to and solve emerging, complex issues of the changing world.

Outside of his work at Go-In, LLC, Tyrome serves on the board of the AK Rice Institute, where he and the other board members multilayered complicated social systems.

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 Room podcast. The 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. This episode is brought to you by a MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. At Voltage Control, we use MURAL to facilitate engaging and productive meetings and workshops from anywhere. MURAL gives teams the means, methods and freedom to collaborate visually. Use their suite of facilitation superpowers to control the virtual room and solve tough problems as a team with their pre-built templates and guided methods. To see for yourself why companies like IBM, Atlassian and E-Trade rely on MURAL, start your 30 day trial and mural.co. That's mural.co.

Douglas: Today, I'm with Tyrome Smith, principal consultant, at Go-In, LLC. The world is moving fast, Go-In can help you move faster. So excited to have you on the show today, Tyrome.

Tyrome: Thank you, sir. Good to be here.

Douglas: Excellent. So I guess for starters, I would love to hear how you got started in this work that you do.

Tyrome: So I'm from Pennsylvania. My father used to be a police officer. He retired from the Pennsylvania State Police. And so when I was a 1985 graduate from high school, I knew I was going to college. That summer I graduate, I worked at McDonald's. Stank. The following summer. The police chief came to me and said, 'hey, I've got a position.' Very small town, by the way. 'Got a position. You interested?'

Now I'm a track and field guy, for a very long time. I was a state champion runner and high school hurdler, as a matter of fact. And I was like, sure, because it kept me close to my dad. All right. It gave me a way to connect with him. I did that for about four years on and off through college. I'd got some leadership roles in undergraduate school and that introduced me to a different way of thinking about the world. I decided I didn't want to do police work anymore. I started working with kids and I was utterly fascinated with what was happening with these children's lives. Went to graduate school at Howard University in 1993 and I came in about halfway through the first year. So I came in the winter. They had no more money, so I needed to find a job. And I went to work with...because I had worked previously with kids, went to work in a psychiatric hospital, and I saw things in community meetings that I did not quite understand. And so that following, I think it was that following fall, I took a class with a professor, Dr. Leroy Wells. Brilliant man. PhD in organizational dynamics out of Yale.

And he did some stuff on the board. It was a class, a group dynamics course. And he did some stuff on the board that just blew my mind because it was the same kind of dynamics that he was describing. I was seeing every day when I was working with these kids and what I came to find out is that those basic systems that we are all born into, either healthy or unhealthy, known as our family, replicate themselves in organizations. And out of that. I started working with kids a little bit more, but I moved away from working with kids in about 2000, started working with organizations. And it was still the same dynamic that I was seeing working with those children in different formats, with their families in different formats, I was starting to see in organizations. Now, there's a caveat to that, and that is I hate when people say, you know, we're like a family here because my family might be screwed up and yours might be great. So we're dealing with two different kinds of family systems.

But I understand why people want to do that, because they are using their group of note, the one that they grew up with. Out of that, I started dealing and working with more sophisticated organizations. I had an opportunity to work in New York City with a whole box office as a Vice President for Organizational Effectiveness over there for about a year and a half. And since then, about 2009, I've been working in the Department of Defense, in the intelligence community, working with senior leaders, helping them think about strategy, think about innovation, thinking about growth, thinking about what's happening in the world, and how do they manage their organizational designs to execute against value. And that's what I've been doing since, geez since 2009 with the same organization. It's great. I'm having a ball. Even in the pandemic. Actually, our work is even more important now because of the pandemic than it was probably before the pandemic, because the world is changing. The director of our agency says that if we come back in...oh, God bless the creek don't rise...in March of 2021 and we are doing the same things that we were doing in March of 2020, we will have lost. And so that's where I come from.

Douglas: Incredible. It's great to hear all of that. And, you know, as I listened and thought about just the impacts of COVID on organizational development and even just behavioral elements of teams trying to relate to one another and in meetings in general, much less now that we're thrust in these new environments. So I'm curious what you're seeing, what's some low hanging fruit that people could start to think about. I'm sure there's some little things that they can do if they can't afford the big power, the big smart folks like yourself.

Tyrome: Yeah. Be present, which is probably the most difficult thing, to be present for one another. I'm working with a group right now of really smart people and one of the gentlemen that your audience may know, his name is Tristin Kromer. He wrote me and he said, you know what happens if I get somebody's name wrong? If I mispronounce somebody's name? Because this group that we've been working on has been looking at the Black Lives movement, race and racism, and we've been thinking about that. And he said, what do I do if I get- is that being racist? I was like, no, that's not. What is being racist is when you're not present to the other person's experience, when you don't acknowledge their humanity.

And if you look at the word human, the root word to human is hum, H-U-M, and hum in Latin means ground. It is ground. And so what greater gift could you give somebody else than to ground yourself in their experience? And so I think for not just leadership, but for each other to ground ourselves, empathy, whatever you want to call it, to ground ourselves in their experience, so we could be a gift to them is probably the best thing that we could do in my estimation, that we could do for one another, particularly during the pandemic, because we are...we have been dislocated. We're like, we're engines with...very powerful boats with no rudder. There's a buddy of mine who was in the Air Force, he would kill me if he heard me say that, he was a Navy pilot. He said, we're all thrust and no vector right now. We were just moving, but we have no way to vector our energy. And so we feel lost. We feel dislocated, we feel somewhat dispossessed. We don't know where our jobs are anymore, where our values are anymore.

You know, the fact that people aren't going someplace to go to work. I'm dealing with an organization right now, a member of the organization I consult to, and the leaders are yeah I have people who have been working in the same job for 30 years that are now displaced and they can't go back into work. They are saying to themselves and to her, but I only know how to do work when I'm inside the building. I only know how to do my job when I'm inside the building. But she's saying that the customers that we have don't need our stuff from inside, they need to be able to create value. And you guys are valuable even when you're not in the building. What can you do? 'I don't. I don't. I can't. I can't do that.' I mean, literally scared. And so I'm working with her to kind of rethink what does that mean to hold people in a space where they don't have to feel fear, that they can still provide value, still move forward and do good work?

It's important for each one of us to be present. I don't have to make you feel good. You know, Amy Edmenson talks about psychological safety, bright woman. I've had an opportunity to sit down and talk to her and hear her lectures, and we brought her into my agency to do some work- I mean to lecture. The idea that you can provide a safe space will create trust, but you can't ask somebody to trust you unless they feel safe. You know this. What is it? All dogs are animals. Not all animals are dogs. And so what can I do to help others feel safe? And I think that that's the biggest thing that we can do for one another is just be present right now. And that doesn't take, that doesn't take anything else but a little bit of commonsense.

Douglas: I want to talk a little bit more about the humanity element of human and hum. And, you know, I think before the show started, we talked a little bit about our duty as citizens and how this work that we do could be applied in a much broader scope, in a more macro scope. So I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about citizenship and then, you know, kind of being there for the broader community.

Tyorome: Thank you. I belong to an organization known as the AK Rice Institute. I'm on the board of that organization and the AK Rice Institute studies social systems, and one of the ways we study social systems is we go to that layer below how we would normally think about social systems. In other words, like who talks to who, when do we meet? But the layer below that is how do we understand each other? How do we, you know become a part of of each other's lives, kind of an unconscious level. And one of my fellow directors is a psychiatrist. He's written a book called Finding a Place to Stand.

And in that book, he talks about citizenship. And he says people join organizations, but they are citizens to institutions. And I'm completely fascinated by that idea because he writes that when you are a citizen, you show it very differently because it is something greater than yourself.

When you are a member of an organization, you are bound by the tasks. You are bound by the resources. You're bound by your role of getting things done. But you join an institution, think United States, you join an institution as a citizen because you say that when we combine our institu- our organizational lives, the institution is greater. When the impact of the institution is greater, that's when you become a citizen.

And I think that organizations have the capacity to create citizens. It's when - institution, not organization, don't want to mix up my metaphors. That institutions can create citizens. But they can't do it without some kind of notion of where we're going. Northstar, strategy, whatever you want to call it, that says when we combine our efforts, we will get to that place. And that's when you can see people say, 'oh, I now know how I work with you to create something greater than I individually can do.' That's when citizens show up.

Now, are all citizens the same? Well, the history of the United States would suggest no. But how do we create and claim citizenship? Sometimes it's leaders being present. I hear you. I am here for you. I understand. I am selflessly putting myself in place so that I can marshal resources, so I can marshal ideas. Sometimes it's citizens standing up for their place. I will be seen. I have an idea. If this is an organization, how do we create space for our corporate citizens to do the right thing?

The organization that I'm with now, the small team, nicely small, we're...the agency is well over 10,000 people. But my team is five people big. Six, soon to be five, five people big. And we are saying to folks as they go out, 'how do you create space to create innovation?' Because right now they all get targeted for their- we would know this, their KPIs are how many things that you produce, not how much value did you create. And good leaders can create space for people to create value because good citizens find value. They understand what is valuable, what will create value for the greater good versus just for me.

People belong to organizations, make sure that the trains run on time but have no concept of why the trains are running.

Douglas: It makes me think that it really is about purpose and and what brings us all together.

Tyrome: Yeah, I think purposes is completely underrated. Why are we here? You know, Simon Sinek talks about start with why.

During our training, we ask people to identify problems. We say 'ask as many, identify your problems and interrogate that problem by asking why as many times as you can.' And people have difficulty because they want to go to the how and the what. They have difficulty identifying the why. And I think institutions help people to identify the why. But institutions can be..can lose their way, become organizations. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Douglas: Absolutely. So organizations that want to behave more like institutions or maybe want to attract that institutional...those elements. What are some of the things that they can think about?

Tyrome: Yeah, I think those are the organizations that have the capacity to interrogate their own value, but that takes very, very sophisticated leadership, selfless leadership, ones who are saying, 'but are we in a position that we want to be? '

Ones that...Steve Blank says,he wrote a very similar article, maybe some of your audience may have read it. H.B article so I think it's titled. The proper title is Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything.

And then he says, he quotes that pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson that says everybody has a plan until they punched in the mouth. Right. And for me, it's the institutions that can bounce back from the punch in the mouth. It's like oh! Don't do that again. Now, pivot. The arrogant institutions, the ones that don't learn...and maybe that's where I'm going, the ones that can attract are the ones that are learned for, that have an intention to learn. The ones who get punched out and say, oh, don't do that again. The ones that will continue to be organizations will be the ones that will say, yeah, but we're still going to go this way because that's where we say we're going to. And I'm right. And I know that that's right. I was just listening to another podcast the other day, and this is what I think it was Dwight wrote the big shift in about 2010 and it keeps coming up that those organizations that used to be the bluechip top 50+ that were the Mobiles of the world, the G.E.'s of the world, they have been delisted off the bluechip, and now the blue chip ones are the ones that are constantly in an effort to understand their environment.

Douglas: Tyrome,I'm really curious, you know, given all this work that you're doing with organizations and understanding how to help them innovate, help them move past big roadblocks or incumbents, that might be kind of hard to move past or, you know, upstarts that are challenging the status quo. And you're very familiar with an institution that is challenged at the moment. You know, you mentioned Black Lives Matter earlier and the police are getting, you know, calls for being defunded, et cetera. I'm curious, as someone who's gone through that institution, knows what it's like, what the needs are, the good that it can do. I'm curious where your thoughts are as you apply the work you do through the lens of the change that needs to happen there.

Tyrome: As a son of a police officer. As a former police officer for a while. As the brother of somebody who's been in law enforcement in the United States military, I recognize that it is an institution that is much older than anything that I think folks could really understand. The history of policing, the history of policing goes back to the slave catchers.

They would go in. They were legally able to go back and recapture slaves. All the way up to, you know, to now. Right. The ethic of what policing was to do. It was a service to go back and execute against laws that were out there. Now, having been on that side. I recognize that there are laws and that you need people to help execute those laws, that you need people to help enforce those laws because it is for the part of society.

The book that I offered up before, Finding his Place to Stand...my psychiatrist colleague, he's 78 years old. And he said one time, he said as a result of what was going on with the Black Lives Matter, with policing, he said, I am...one of the things that he said that just struck me, struck me dead square in the chest, he said 'as a 78 year old white man, I am ashamed that I didn't realize that police in policing was there to protect my community from those others.' And that's a powerful statement as far as I'm concerned.

That's a powerful indictment about how we've constructed this thing known as policing. So a long time ago. Full stop. A long time ago, I thought, could I use what I've learned about organizations, about the lives of organizations to help police officers rethink how they do community policing? I never explored it because it wasn't quite the right time. But now, as I'm talking to you, it brings me to the point where I'm like, maybe I really need to go back and rethink what that would look like to go back and help police officers rethink about what it means to be a community police officer. How do I integrate and utilize my authority in a way that it is to add to the lives of the community and not "detract" - big air quotes - "detract" from the lives of the community, so people see me as somebody who is a helpmate and not somebody who is a oppressor.

The stories about policing, at least in the black community, are old. You can go back and listen to some of the songs from the Harlem Renaissance. You can go back and listen to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. And they were talking about brutality. Way back there. And so it is a hard problem. It is a institutional problem. It is not an organizational problem. It's not about the police. It's about the institution of policing inside the larger institution of America. And I think the work that I do to help people solve these hard problems, to ask the problem to be solved is possible. You can actually do some brilliant work. I've seen people do brilliant work and come to some realizations and change their minds by asking these very simple, and I mean truly simple...I've thought about starting a podcast and my podcast- the title of the podcast was Hmm, Can I Ask You a Question? Because I believe simple questions lead to complex insights.

Douglas: Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit, because I do feel like questions are the facilitator's superpower. So what are some of your favorite questions or the questions that you find typically will lead to some of these complex insights?

Tyrome: So when we work with...my colleagues and I, when we work with organizations, we're trying to help them create a product, rethink a process, maybe even to the point of doing a reorganization. This is my everyday life. We ask for- and I just, we just developed a fifth question.

And the questions go, what problem you solving? Just plainly. What problem you try to solve? For whom are you trying to solve that problem? To do what to solve that problem? How will you know that you're on the way to solving the problem? And what's the one thing that the problem would really, really get to?

And the reason why we got to this fifth one, the first one we've been asking for a long time, but apparently- and a colleague of mine found this really interesting video about rowing a boat. It was the British. I think it was the '88 games. The '88 games. They were. The guy won. They won. The British won a gold medal. They had not won anything. And they kept their eye on the one thing that matters. And it was, will it make the boat go faster? Right. Will it make the bo- How do we cut our hair? How do we train? How do we pray? How do we get in the boat? How- what kind of shoes do we wear? What's our dinner like? You know, how do we manage our home life? Will it make the boat go faster?

And so those are our five. What problem are you trying to solve? For whom to do what? How will you know? And what's that one thing that will make it better? What's that North Star that you're looking at?

Douglas: I love this notion of the one thing, you know. I think it gets to the core of the essence of the problem. And so many meetings, so many gatherings, so many times when we come together to make a decision or to do some good work, if we're not clear on that. That's what can lead to all the circular conversation or these side chats. And, you know, this stuff that just slows is down. And I was thinking about a story you told about your own, the boat faster. And it immediately conjured up this image of, like, arguing over if they should enter the boat in some certain way or what color they should paint the boat. And all this stuff, it really helps you realize that wait a second. Our purpose is to make the boat go faster. The color is not going to matter. I'm not going to...I don't really have much of a fight. There's no reason to like, to spend too much time on this decision.

Tyrome: Let's unpack that boat going faster thing. Right. So the color of the boat may not matter, but it's the joining of the team that gets to the color of the boat that does matter to make the boat go faster. You feel me?

Douglas: Yes, absolutely.

Tyrome: It's about can we join in a way that we are able to work? My colleagues and I that I work with, we believe that no matter how you show up to work with whoever you show up, if you show up to do the work, you can be there. To my colleagues, straight white men with children, we're going out to do some diversity work. They asked me how are we going to do diversity work? Because we're two straight white men with kids, I'm like yeah, just show up. Coming together. So they asked me as a- and I'm older than both of them...as an older black man, straight black man with two kids. Help us get together because we don't know if we'll be able to do the work. Can you help us? Not giving them permission, but can you help us think through it? Because I didn't give them permission. The only thing I give them permission to do was to be themselves, which they didn't need permission from me to do that. They just needed to show up and do the work. But our ability to collaborate across the boundary of our differences makes our team that much stronger.

That happened well over a year ago. And that team, except for one who got a really good job and went off and left us, that team is still together. And because we had the capacity to be honest with each other, what we call radical candor, and ask good questions and investigate each other's purposes. Man, you talk about a highly functioning team, but when you have a team that can't even come together, say, you know what? To your point, that's 'whatever, that doesn't even matter' what you're talking about but can't have the conversation about 'that doesn't even matter' and not get pissed off at one another and say that this is a part of our getting together and doing good work. So when we have to find that and work on that thing that's super important, we know what we need to do.

So the team comes together, says the boat should be painted his way. I don't agree. Well, let's talk about it. Let's figure it out. That's wonderful. OK, we figured it out. Now, that team that gets in that boat that won, the coxswain says pull harder. Do this. Everybody knows exactly what that means. There is no- and I don't even know what...I know the coxswain just yells at the rowers and yells something and they just pull harder. But the coxswain is now in that boat. And that team knows because it's for the good of the boat, it's for the good of the team, we will make this happen. And there is no argument.

The same thing happens...one of my colleagues is former Special Operations and my brother is as well. When you are six-deep and you are miles from anybody else that can provide support, and the only person you have to depend on is the other five dudes on your team, you dadgum sure better make sure that you can come to some coherent about what we're here to do, because if you don't, that's life and death. That's not just what are we going to eat tomorrow for lunch.

Douglas: Yeah. You know, I think there is a lot of interesting ritual in training for special operations around trust in your fellow officers and...because when it comes down to in the moment, it's life or death. I mean, that's ultimate trust, right? Like, we can't have any micro kind of guesses or take a moment to be like, 'well maybe.' It's like, no, you've got to be 100 percent.

Tyrome: I'm curious about this idea of ritual and which rituals do we keep and which rituals do we let go of?

Douglas: That's right. Which ones serve us and which ones get in our way? And here's the thing. I think you were talking about organizations that reinvent themselves versus the ones that are just, you know, maybe overly dogmatic and can't let go because maybe something served them for years and years and years. And I think that's the ritual that stifles us. But when we can create ritual that is adaptable, we can move beyond it. I'll also, I would argue, meta rituals too. Like rituals that are designed to be flexible by nature.

Tyrome: Yeah, yeah. And as you're saying it, the power of ritual is to help us manage transition and uncertainty. Right. That's why we have ritual. That's why people salute- new military, they salute people. Because it helps us to manage the transition from an uncertain place to an uncertain place. An uncertainty is a certainty. And so I don't know what's going on, but at least I have this to stand on.

Douglas: It's their bedrock.

Tyrome: This makes sense. Exactly. Exactly. But I love your idea that if your rituals aren't adaptive to the context in which they live, you are at risk.

Douglas: And the context is ever evolving, right? So we don't know what it'll be like tomorrow or the day after.

Tyrome: Absolutely. I think that folks who say, 'I don't recognize this, this doesn't make any sense to me...' There's a sense of the dinosaur. I don't want to be that...I don't want to be that cavalier. But it's...are you paying attention to what's happening around you? And if you're not paying attention to what's happening around you, are you going to be around to influence it and to survive in it? And it doesn't mean that you don't continue some of the things that give you solve and comfort, right? But you need to be able to say 'this doesn't, this is no longer in the service of the work of us accomplishing the task.'

There are stories about when people walk into manufacturing facilities and they, you know they'll Lean Six Sigma when they try to do agile and they say- why are you doing it? 'Well, that's just how we do it.' What would happen if you cut that out? 'Well, uhhhhh uhhhh I don't know.' I would submit to you that it has two pieces. One, there's a technical piece to it. 'I don't know,' because they really don't know. They never took it out. But the other part is an unconscious and kind of meta, which is 'but if you cut that out, I don't have any more value. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing now.' And I think that freaks people out even more. I think it's- as a matter of fact, I think that that's the bane of what we see as society today, is that if I am no longer in that space and am I important? That is scary.

Douglas: Yeah, it's that fear of irrelevance.

Tyrome: Oh, my God, yeah. Yeah. And if I am irrelevant, am I important? Do I really exist? I mean this is existential stuff. I mean, I get it. But having people rethink their value, I think is the purview of good facilitation. It's the purview of good consultation. It's the purview of good coaching. Right? Helping people recenter and find themselves in terms of value. How they create value. That's an incredible piece of work if you can do that for folks.

Douglas: Yeah. And, you know, I think it's maybe not only helping people become reflective of their own value, but also providing space where people can provide value outside of the thinly drawn lines that you've carved out for them to create value.

So if we open it up and we say we've truly become inclusive...people talk about diversity, inclusion. But if we were to be truly inclusive, then we're allowing people to color outside the lines and to provide value in ways that we never anticipated. And then therefore, they see the road to providing more value, even if their current value is disrupted.

Tyrome: It's interesting that Dug, that you say this because in the training we do, we talk about Frank Gehry, you know, follow up with the first idea. And we use the example of the Weatherhead School at Case Western University and this looks like just a plop of steel and glass and brick and how he came to that. And so not so much about Gehry, but about architecture. All right. How do we create architectures, human architectures that people can find space to exist?

I'm not an architecture student, but I'm fascinated by this idea of creating, architecting, designing space so people can find space. And I think that our institutional architectures are so rigid because of ritual, are so rigid that when people ask for space, the institutions rebel against space. Now, if you follow the line of this conversation, that's followed back about 10 minutes and that's what policing does. Policing manages space. Because if you don't stay within your space. I have, Ty Smith, my dad Eugene Smith, have arrested people and taken to jail because they violated the space, the architecture, the social architectures of the institution. And I think what good leadership does, what good facilitation can do is help people to explore and interrogate that space so people can find space, find their own space and say, I belong here, too. Now, the question then becomes, do people...do those who constructed the space want other people to be included in the space? I don't know. I don't know.

Douglas: Yeah, that's the thing I think is to make that shift between just having minions versus having citizens like you're talking about, making sure that when we look at the space we've created, that we give people the opportunity to self identify as to how they exist and to how they bring their best selves to the space. You know, it's interesting when I think of facilitation as a meta role where leaders start to adopt facilitated leadership styles. That's exactly what we're talking about. I love this notion of making constituents feel more like citizens. I love this idea of like, shaping space. You know, we may take the raw space that we already have allocated and we might carve it up in interesting ways. We may ask our citizens to help us make sense of the space so that we can carve it up and we can co create the decorations for that space so it's more inviting, it's better for- easier for them to understand. I love how this conversation was not very facilitator focused, but there's so many themes that apply to facilitation that is very clear to me.

Tyrome: So it's interesting you say that Dug, because the metaphor then applies. I think that what you're offering up, the metaphor of the facilitator is architect, right?

Douglas: Mhm, yes. In fact, the facilitators are the architects of the meetings. They're also the producer and the constructor or they're in the meeting live. But they have to plan. I would say 90 percent of facilitators' job is the upfront work before the meeting happens. And, you know, we have this belief at Voltage Control, that, you know, whether you call yourself a facilitator or not or you have facilitator in your title, if you invite people to a meeting and you're hosting that meeting, you are facilitating that meeting. Whether or not you're intentional about it or whether or not you're applying any craft to it, you're still facilitating. And so our wish, our goal is that everyone starts to understand that more deeply amd meetings in general, become more pleasant to attend and more productive.

Tyrome: Let me turn it back on you just a bit. So if that is the case that you're architecting these experiences, what is the role of the facilitator in these architected experiences to help people find their authentic and authorized voice?

Douglas: Yeah. Well, you know, it starts with purpose and intention. You know, you talked about necessity of purpose. So step one is realizing it's necessary, you know? Because if we don't realize it's necessary, we certainly don't plan in ways to do it. And then I think that then we plan on ways to do it. And, you know, I would be curious about how you approach it. But, you know, the first thing that comes to mind for me is co creation is such a powerful tool. Like if people come together to bring their- they're truly bringing their thoughts to the table, then that's how they can tap into what's authentic for them.

Tyrome: The requirements that I have whenever I help facilitate...and it's funny because there is a curious blend of experience and professional space that is training, facilitation, consultation and coaching and differentiating all four of those that happened for me at one time. It is not very clean. It is like Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do where you take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a little bit of that and you flow like water and you find people where they are. I think for me that is, I think there's- in fact, I know based on the training I have about group relations, you manage the boundary, time, task and territory, like what are we here to do? And the answer is in the room. And you're helping people discover that. The answer is always in the room. That they've come to this space, the sacred time, space, location to do some work and the work is in here. My task is to help them discover, to co-create. In a process of discovery, they 'go holy...That was real. What the hell just happened? Something happened in that room that I want to get back to.'

I know I'm always successful in a true facilitation when people go, they'll come to me a year later and they're like 'you know, that thing that we talked about? I went home and I talked about it with my husband. It changed my life with my spouse. It changed my life with my wife. It helped me have a different kind of conversation. I don't, and it would- it could have been about how to build a bridge, you know, but the way that we got to that space of how to build a bridge and asking real questions, that the architecting of the experience helped people really think about themselves and their relationships differently.

Douglas: I think that's beautiful. You know, whenever we can truly tap into something authentic and something personal when they bring it into their personal lives. Because the reason they do that is because it feels natural, right? Because they are already tapped into that space. So they...honestly, I think that's where were the real work happen.

When we can get people into that feeling of being human, they're going to do amazing work. And, you know, I think there's a really awesome...there's so many tactics and ways to do this. But I don't know if you have some some favorite tools, but one of the tools that I'm a big fan of is authentic relating. I think that we really want people to tap into who they are and to connect with people on that level. Using some of those games and tools can be a nice way to prime them before we get into some more specific work around, here's this problem we're trying to solve. Well, let's get him in the mindset first and then flow into the work.

Tyrome: It's interesting. When I did a lot more, we're talking...my oldest boy is 17 now. And so 15 years ago, I used to do a lot more stuff when I would have, you know, games and this- and it's powerful and it works. I am always curious about how the people that I work with, because I get a chance to work with senior leaders in organizations about this stuff, would they be willing to play games? And games are truly important, I mean, don't get me wrong. For me in the moment, I do the work with them about the thing they came to do. This may sound harsh, but I punch him right in the face with it in a loving, caring way that is like, what are you really trying to do? Because what I heard was this.

And part of it is my training and this idea of group relations and how we do our work, how I've been trained to do the work over the last twenty five years and blah blah blah, but really getting people to be hyper focused and go to where their affect and their intellect meet. Now, that might be in terms of getting them to write, getting them up on the board, getting them to talk, getting them to move. I will say this, it is not that I don't trust games because I do trust games. For me, it's more important to get up and touch the walls, touch the walls, get up out of your seat. Move your body. Find yourself in space. Where are you in space? Because where you stand and who you stand next to and how close you stand to the task that we're supposed to, and literally how close do you stand to the work that if it's on the wall, how close do you stand to that? It's telling about your relationship to what you're trying to do. So the games for me and the activities like that is about helping people create relationship to one another and relationship to the work. How close do you really, really want to get to doing this hard stuff?

It's funny. Ten years ago, I did an offsite punch of senior leaders and I said to them...I don't even remember what they were working on, but I do remember that I said to them, 'be prepared to do the hard work of the soft stuff.' Because it's that soft relational work that people dread.

Douglas: Yeah I mean earlier, you talked about how people struggle with purpose so much and I think it's because it's softer, it's squishier. It's like, comes from the heart, not from the from the muscles, you know.

Tyrome: Amen. Amen. And now this is a horrible metric, but when we're doing, like, diversity work and if nobody cries, that means they ain't doing the work. That's a horrible metric.

I've been thinking about that rolling around the back of my head. But I offer it up because if you are intending to do work around race and all of the impactful stuff that go along with race or if you raise it up not so close, but maybe it's even a product that you've spent your life's work on, that you have become the professional. And somebody says, 'I love you. You're a great human being. But that product doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't- we don't need it anymore.' And if people can't connect that, you know, we will say, you know, you are not your job.

But that is almost impossible. Right. Your limbic system won't disconnect from your neocortical system, your thinking system. And so when you have gotten it down, you know, the whole work on behavioral economics and how people are incredibly tied to what and who they are and how it makes them feel. If you come along, your director comes along and says- the director of your organization says 'nah, we're out of that business' and you don't feel something...you don't know what that means or your business is at risk and you don't feel something, you don't go "well okay, then we'll just figure it out. I'll just move on." I'm not buying it. We can't do it. We're human beings.

Douglas: Tyrome, I couldn't agree more. You know, I once heard- I can't remember who to attribute the quote to, but it was something along the lines of 'a man will never admit a truth if the truth would jeopardize their livelihood.' So there are things that we're going to hold steadfast even in the face of evidence that the contrary is true. And it's so important to face those things head on. And, you know, and getting teams to a place where they can dive into the work and, you know, it's like where are those unspeakables that we need to embrace?

And so it's been really fun chatting today. I love that we touched on so many things related to facilitation that facilitators can kind of chew on at a almost metal level. This notion of people being citizens and how can we elevate their status so that they feel like they're part of something- of a whole, that they're potentially even creating this thing that's bigger than themselves and how we can be aligned in purpose. Really amazing stuff. I love the work that you're doing. I'm sure our listeners are gonna want to know how to reach out to you, how to connect. Tell us how they can find you.

Tyrome: It's super simple. I've been so busy over the last five years that even with Go-In, which stands for government transformation through innovation, Go-In. Right. Government innovation. That's my presence. But it's very simple. It's govtinnovation. All one word. govtinnovation, all one word, @gmail.com [[email protected]]. Very simple. Let's talk.

Douglas: Excellent. Yeah. Shoot him an email, reach out. And Tyrome, It's been great chatting with you. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Tyrome: Thank you, Dug. Appreciate you.

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

“He's written a book called Finding a Place to Stand, and in that book he talks about citizenship. And he says people join organizations, but they are citizens to institutions. And I'm completely fascinated by that idea because he writes that when you are a citizen, you show it very differently because it is something greater than yourself. When you are a member of an organization, you are bound by the tasks...But you join an institution as a citizen because you say that when we combine our organizational lives, the institution is greater. When the impact of the institution is greater, that's when you become a citizen. And I think organizations have the capacity to create citizens.” Tyrome Smith

In episode 15 of the Control the Room podcast, I am so pleased to be speaking with Tyrome Smith, Principal Consultant at Go-In, LLC. Tyrome has more than two decades of experience teaching senior leadership how to solve emerging issues in an ever-complex, rapidly changing world.

Tyrome and I speak about the BLM movement in relation to his background as a former police officer, the fear of irrelevance in the age of COVID, and how family dynamics leak into institutional structures. Listen in to find out to create space for people to create their own unique value for the greater good.

Show Highlights

[2:15] The parallels of group dynamics between families & organizations

[14:07] Having a plan until you’re punched in the mouth

[16:18] BLM movement from the perspective of a former police officer

[27:54] The fear of irrelevance

[29:59] Human architecture

[38:11] Getting up and touching the walls

Links | Resources

Tyrome on LinkedIn

Email Tyrome

About the Guest

Tyrome Smith is the Principal Consultant at Go-In, LLC. He says his work can be summarized in one simple quote - “engaging potential, creating possibilities.” For two decades, Tyrome has been working with senior leadership to adapt to and solve emerging, complex issues of the changing world.

Outside of his work at Go-In, LLC, Tyrome serves on the board of the AK Rice Institute, where he and the other board members multilayered complicated social systems.

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 Room podcast. The 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. This episode is brought to you by a MURAL, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. At Voltage Control, we use MURAL to facilitate engaging and productive meetings and workshops from anywhere. MURAL gives teams the means, methods and freedom to collaborate visually. Use their suite of facilitation superpowers to control the virtual room and solve tough problems as a team with their pre-built templates and guided methods. To see for yourself why companies like IBM, Atlassian and E-Trade rely on MURAL, start your 30 day trial and mural.co. That's mural.co.

Douglas: Today, I’m with Tyrome Smith, principal consultant, at Go-In, LLC. The world is moving fast, Go-In can help you move faster. So excited to have you on the show today, Tyrome.

Tyrome: Thank you, sir. Good to be here.

Douglas: Excellent. So I guess for starters, I would love to hear how you got started in this work that you do. 

Tyrome: So I'm from Pennsylvania. My father used to be a police officer. He retired from the Pennsylvania State Police. And so when I was a 1985 graduate from high school, I knew I was going to college. That summer I graduate, I worked at McDonald's. Stank. The following summer. The police chief came to me and said, ‘hey, I've got a position.’ Very small town, by the way. ‘Got a position. You interested?’

Now I'm a track and field guy, for a very long time. I was a state champion runner and high school hurdler, as a matter of fact. And I was like, sure, because it kept me close to my dad. All right. It gave me a way to connect with him. I did that for about four years on and off through college. I'd got some leadership roles in undergraduate school and that introduced me to a different way of thinking about the world. I decided I didn’t want to do police work anymore. I started working with kids and I was utterly fascinated with what was happening with these children's lives. Went to graduate school at Howard University in 1993 and I came in about halfway through the first year. So I came in the winter. They had no more money, so I needed to find a job. And I went to work with...because I had worked previously with kids, went to work in a psychiatric hospital, and I saw things in community meetings that I did not quite understand. And so that following, I think it was that following fall, I took a class with a professor, Dr. Leroy Wells. Brilliant man. PhD in organizational dynamics out of Yale.

And he did some stuff on the board. It was a class, a group dynamics course. And he did some stuff on the board that just blew my mind because it was the same kind of dynamics that he was describing. I was seeing every day when I was working with these kids and what I came to find out is that those basic systems that we are all born into, either healthy or unhealthy, known as our family, replicate themselves in organizations. And out of that. I started working with kids a little bit more, but I moved away from working with kids in about 2000, started working with organizations. And it was still the same dynamic that I was seeing working with those children in different formats, with their families in different formats, I was starting to see in organizations. Now, there's a caveat to that, and that is I hate when people say, you know, we're like a family here because my family might be screwed up and yours might be great. So we're dealing with two different kinds of family systems.

But I understand why people want to do that, because they are using their group of note, the one that they grew up with. Out of that, I started dealing and working with more sophisticated organizations. I had an opportunity to work in New York City with a whole box office as a Vice President for Organizational Effectiveness over there for about a year and a half. And since then, about 2009, I've been working in the Department of Defense, in the intelligence community, working with senior leaders, helping them think about strategy, think about innovation, thinking about growth, thinking about what's happening in the world, and how do they manage their organizational designs to execute against value. And that's what I've been doing since, geez since 2009 with the same organization. It's great. I'm having a ball. Even in the pandemic. Actually, our work is even more important now because of the pandemic than it was probably before the pandemic, because the world is changing. The director of our agency says that if we come back in...oh, God bless the creek don't rise...in March of 2021 and we are doing the same things that we were doing in March of 2020, we will have lost. And so that's where I come from. 

Douglas: Incredible. It's great to hear all of that. And, you know, as I listened and thought about just the impacts of COVID on organizational development and even just behavioral elements of teams trying to relate to one another and in meetings in general, much less now that we're thrust in these new environments. So I'm curious what you're seeing, what’s some low hanging fruit that people could start to think about. I'm sure there's some little things that they can do if they can't afford the big power, the big smart folks like yourself. 

Tyrome: Yeah. Be present, which is probably the most difficult thing, to be present for one another. I'm working with a group right now of really smart people and one of the gentlemen that your audience may know, his name is Tristin Kromer. He wrote me and he said, you know what happens if I get somebody’s name wrong? If I mispronounce somebody's name? Because this group that we've been working on has been looking at the Black Lives movement, race and racism, and we've been thinking about that. And he said, what do I do if I get- is that being racist? I was like, no, that's not. What is being racist is when you're not present to the other person's experience, when you don't acknowledge their humanity.

And if you look at the word human, the root word to human is hum, H-U-M, and hum in Latin means ground. It is ground. And so what greater gift could you give somebody else than to ground yourself in their experience? And so I think for not just leadership, but for each other to ground ourselves, empathy, whatever you want to call it, to ground ourselves in their experience, so we could be a gift to them is probably the best thing that we could do in my estimation, that we could do for one another, particularly during the pandemic, because we are...we have been dislocated. We're like, we're engines with...very powerful boats with no rudder. There’s a buddy of mine who was in the Air Force, he would kill me if he heard me say that, he was a Navy pilot. He said, we're all thrust and no vector right now. We were just moving, but we have no way to vector our energy. And so we feel lost. We feel dislocated, we feel somewhat dispossessed. We don't know where our jobs are anymore, where our values are anymore.

You know, the fact that people aren't going someplace to go to work. I'm dealing with an organization right now, a member of the organization I consult to, and the leaders are yeah I have people who have been working in the same job for 30 years that are now displaced and they can't go back into work. They are saying to themselves and to her, but I only know how to do work when I'm inside the building. I only know how to do my job when I'm inside the building. But she's saying that the customers that we have don't need our stuff from inside, they need to be able to create value. And you guys are valuable even when you're not in the building. What can you do? ‘I don't. I don't. I can't. I can't do that.’ I mean, literally scared. And so I'm working with her to kind of rethink what does that mean to hold people in a space where they don't have to feel fear, that they can still provide value, still move forward and do good work? 

It's important for each one of us to be present. I don't have to make you feel good. You know, Amy Edmenson talks about psychological safety, bright woman. I've had an opportunity to sit down and talk to her and hear her lectures, and we brought her into my agency to do some work- I mean to lecture. The idea that you can provide a safe space will create trust, but you can't ask somebody to trust you unless they feel safe. You know this. What is it? All dogs are animals. Not all animals are dogs. And so what can I do to help others feel safe? And I think that that's the biggest thing that we can do for one another is just be present right now. And that doesn't take, that doesn’t take anything else but a little bit of commonsense. 

Douglas: I want to talk a little bit more about the humanity element of human and hum. And, you know, I think before the show started, we talked a little bit about our duty as citizens and how this work that we do could be applied in a much broader scope, in a more macro scope. So I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about citizenship and then, you know, kind of being there for the broader community. 

Tyorome: Thank you. I belong to an organization known as the AK Rice Institute. I'm on the board of that organization and the AK Rice Institute studies social systems, and one of the ways we study social systems is we go to that layer below how we would normally think about social systems. In other words, like who talks to who, when do we meet? But the layer below that is how do we understand each other? How do we, you know become a part of of each other's lives, kind of an unconscious level. And one of my fellow directors is a psychiatrist. He's written a book called Finding a Place to Stand. 

And in that book, he talks about citizenship. And he says people join organizations, but they are citizens to institutions. And I'm completely fascinated by that idea because he writes that when you are a citizen, you show it very differently because it is something greater than yourself. 

When you are a member of an organization, you are bound by the tasks. You are bound by the resources. You're bound by your role of getting things done. But you join an institution, think United States, you join an institution as a citizen because you say that when we combine our institu- our organizational lives, the institution is greater. When the impact of the institution is greater, that's when you become a citizen. 

And I think that organizations have the capacity to create citizens. It's when - institution, not organization, don’t want to mix up my metaphors. That institutions can create citizens. But they can't do it without some kind of notion of where we're going. Northstar, strategy, whatever you want to call it, that says when we combine our efforts, we will get to that place. And that's when you can see people say, ‘oh, I now know how I work with you to create something greater than I individually can do.’ That's when citizens show up.

Now, are all citizens the same? Well, the history of the United States would suggest no. But how do we create and claim citizenship? Sometimes it’s leaders being present. I hear you. I am here for you. I understand. I am selflessly putting myself in place so that I can marshal resources, so I can marshal ideas. Sometimes it’s citizens standing up for their place. I will be seen. I have an idea. If this is an organization, how do we create space for our corporate citizens to do the right thing? 

The organization that I'm with now, the small team, nicely small, we're...the agency is well over 10,000 people. But my team is five people big. Six, soon to be five, five people big. And we are saying to folks as they go out, ‘how do you create space to create innovation?’ Because right now they all get targeted for their- we would know this, their KPIs are how many things that you produce, not how much value did you create. And good leaders can create space for people to create value because good citizens find value. They understand what is valuable, what will create value for the greater good versus just for me.

People belong to organizations, make sure that the trains run on time but have no concept of why the trains are running.

Douglas: It makes me think that it really is about purpose and and what brings us all together.

Tyrome: Yeah, I think purposes is completely underrated. Why are we here? You know, Simon Sinek talks about start with why. 

During our training, we ask people to identify problems. We say ‘ask as many, identify your problems and interrogate that problem by asking why as many times as you can.’ And people have difficulty because they want to go to the how and the what. They have difficulty identifying the why. And I think institutions help people to identify the why. But institutions can be..can lose their way, become organizations. Does that make sense what I'm saying? 

Douglas: Absolutely. So organizations that want to behave more like institutions or maybe want to attract that institutional...those elements. What are some of the things that they can think about? 

Tyrome: Yeah, I think those are the organizations that have the capacity to interrogate their own value, but that takes very, very sophisticated leadership, selfless leadership, ones who are saying, ‘but are we in a position that we want to be? ‘

Ones that...Steve Blank says,he wrote a very similar article, maybe some of your audience may have read it. H.B article so I think it's titled. The proper title is Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything. 

And then he says, he quotes that pugilist philosopher Mike Tyson that says everybody has a plan until they punched in the mouth. Right. And for me, it's the institutions that can bounce back from the punch in the mouth. It’s like oh! Don't do that again. Now, pivot. The arrogant institutions, the ones that don't learn...and maybe that's where I'm going, the ones that can attract are the ones that are learned for, that have an intention to learn. The ones who get punched out and say, oh, don't do that again. The ones that will continue to be organizations will be the ones that will say, yeah, but we're still going to go this way because that's where we say we're going to. And I'm right. And I know that that's right. I was just listening to another podcast the other day, and this is what I think it was Dwight wrote the big shift in about 2010 and it keeps coming up that those organizations that used to be the bluechip top 50+ that were the Mobiles of the world, the G.E.’s of the world, they have been delisted off the bluechip, and now the blue chip ones are the ones that are constantly in an effort to understand their environment. 

Douglas: Tyrome,I'm really curious, you know, given all this work that you're doing with organizations and understanding how to help them innovate, help them move past big roadblocks or incumbents, that might be kind of hard to move past or, you know, upstarts that are challenging the status quo. And you're very familiar with an institution that is challenged at the moment. You know, you mentioned Black Lives Matter earlier and the police are getting, you know, calls for being defunded, et cetera. I'm curious, as someone who's gone through that institution, knows what it's like, what the needs are, the good that it can do. I'm curious where your thoughts are as you apply the work you do through the lens of the change that needs to happen there. 

Tyrome: As a son of a police officer. As a former police officer for a while. As the brother of somebody who's been in law enforcement in the United States military, I recognize that it is an institution that is much older than anything that I think folks could really understand. The history of policing, the history of policing goes back to the slave catchers. 

They would go in. They were legally able to go back and recapture slaves. All the way up to, you know, to now. Right. The ethic of what policing was to do. It was a service to go back and execute against laws that were out there. Now, having been on that side. I recognize that there are laws and that you need people to help execute those laws, that you need people to help enforce those laws because it is for the part of society.

The book that I offered up before, Finding his Place to Stand...my psychiatrist colleague, he's 78 years old. And he said one time, he said as a result of what was going on with the Black Lives Matter, with policing, he said, I am...one of the things that he said that just struck me, struck me dead square in the chest, he said ‘as a 78 year old white man, I am ashamed that I didn't realize that police in policing was there to protect my community from those others.’ And that's a powerful statement as far as I'm concerned. 

That's a powerful indictment about how we've constructed this thing known as policing. So a long time ago. Full stop. A long time ago, I thought, could I use what I've learned about organizations, about the lives of organizations to help police officers rethink how they do community policing? I never explored it because it wasn't quite the right time. But now, as I'm talking to you, it brings me to the point where I'm like, maybe I really need to go back and rethink what that would look like to go back and help police officers rethink about what it means to be a community police officer. How do I integrate and utilize my authority in a way that it is to add to the lives of the community and not “detract” - big air quotes - “detract” from the lives of the community, so people see me as somebody who is a helpmate and not somebody who is a oppressor.

The stories about policing, at least in the black community, are old. You can go back and listen to some of the songs from the Harlem Renaissance. You can go back and listen to the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. And they were talking about brutality. Way back there. And so it is a hard problem. It is a institutional problem. It is not an organizational problem. It's not about the police. It's about the institution of policing inside the larger institution of America. And I think the work that I do to help people solve these hard problems, to ask the problem to be solved is possible. You can actually do some brilliant work. I've seen people do brilliant work and come to some realizations and change their minds by asking these very simple, and I mean truly simple...I’ve thought about starting a podcast and my podcast- the title of the podcast was Hmm, Can I Ask You a Question? Because I believe simple questions lead to complex insights. 

Douglas: Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit, because I do feel like questions are the facilitator’s superpower. So what are some of your favorite questions or the questions that you find typically will lead to some of these complex insights? 

Tyrome: So when we work with...my colleagues and I, when we work with organizations, we're trying to help them create a product, rethink a process, maybe even to the point of doing a reorganization. This is my everyday life. We ask for- and I just, we just developed a fifth question.

And the questions go, what problem you solving? Just plainly. What problem you try to solve? For whom are you trying to solve that problem? To do what to solve that problem? How will you know that you're on the way to solving the problem? And what's the one thing that the problem would really, really get to?

And the reason why we got to this fifth one, the first one we've been asking for a long time, but apparently- and a colleague of mine found this really interesting video about rowing a boat. It was the British. I think it was the ‘88 games. The ‘88 games. They were. The guy won. They won. The British won a gold medal. They had not won anything. And they kept their eye on the one thing that matters. And it was, will it make the boat go faster? Right. Will it make the bo- How do we cut our hair? How do we train? How do we pray? How do we get in the boat? How- what kind of shoes do we wear? What's our dinner like? You know, how do we manage our home life? Will it make the boat go faster? 

And so those are our five. What problem are you trying to solve? For whom to do what? How will you know? And what's that one thing that will make it better? What's that North Star that you're looking at? 

Douglas: I love this notion of the one thing, you know. I think it gets to the core of the essence of the problem. And so many meetings, so many gatherings, so many times when we come together to make a decision or to do some good work, if we're not clear on that. That's what can lead to all the circular conversation or these side chats. And, you know, this stuff that just slows is down. And I was thinking about a story you told about your own, the boat faster. And it immediately conjured up this image of, like, arguing over if they should enter the boat in some certain way or what color they should paint the boat. And all this stuff, it really helps you realize that wait a second. Our purpose is to make the boat go faster. The color is not going to matter. I'm not going to...I don't really have much of a fight. There's no reason to like, to spend too much time on this decision. 

Tyrome: Let's unpack that boat going faster thing. Right. So the color of the boat may not matter, but it's the joining of the team that gets to the color of the boat that does matter to make the boat go faster. You feel me?

Douglas: Yes, absolutely.

Tyrome: It's about can we join in a way that we are able to work? My colleagues and I that I work with, we believe that no matter how you show up to work with whoever you show up, if you show up to do the work, you can be there. To my colleagues, straight white men with children, we're going out to do some diversity work. They asked me how are we going to do diversity work? Because we're two straight white men with kids, I’m like yeah, just show up. Coming together. So they asked me as a- and I'm older than both of them...as an older black man, straight black man with two kids. Help us get together because we don't know if we'll be able to do the work. Can you help us? Not giving them permission, but can you help us think through it? Because I didn't give them permission. The only thing I give them permission to do was to be themselves, which they didn't need permission from me to do that. They just needed to show up and do the work. But our ability to collaborate across the boundary of our differences makes our team that much stronger.

That happened well over a year ago. And that team, except for one who got a really good job and went off and left us, that team is still together. And because we had the capacity to be honest with each other, what we call radical candor, and ask good questions and investigate each other's purposes. Man, you talk about a highly functioning team, but when you have a team that can't even come together, say, you know what? To your point, that's ‘whatever, that doesn't even matter’ what you're talking about but can't have the conversation about ‘that doesn't even matter’ and not get pissed off at one another and say that this is a part of our getting together and doing good work. So when we have to find that and work on that thing that's super important, we know what we need to do.

So the team comes together, says the boat should be painted his way. I don't agree. Well, let's talk about it. Let's figure it out. That's wonderful. OK, we figured it out. Now, that team that gets in that boat that won, the coxswain says pull harder. Do this. Everybody knows exactly what that means. There is no- and I don't even know what...I know the coxswain just yells at the rowers and yells something and they just pull harder. But the coxswain is now in that boat. And that team knows because it's for the good of the boat, it's for the good of the team, we will make this happen. And there is no argument.

The same thing happens...one of my colleagues is former Special Operations and my brother is as well. When you are six-deep and you are miles from anybody else that can provide support, and the only person you have to depend on is the other five dudes on your team, you dadgum sure better make sure that you can come to some coherent about what we're here to do, because if you don't, that's life and death. That's not just what are we going to eat tomorrow for lunch.

Douglas: Yeah. You know, I think there is a lot of interesting ritual in training for special operations around trust in your fellow officers and...because when it comes down to in the moment, it's life or death. I mean, that's ultimate trust, right? Like, we can't have any micro kind of guesses or take a moment to be like, ‘well maybe.’ It's like, no, you've got to be 100 percent. 

Tyrome: I'm curious about this idea of ritual and which rituals do we keep and which rituals do we let go of? 

Douglas: That's right. Which ones serve us and which ones get in our way? And here's the thing. I think you were talking about organizations that reinvent themselves versus the ones that are just, you know, maybe overly dogmatic and can't let go because maybe something served them for years and years and years. And I think that's the ritual that stifles us. But when we can create ritual that is adaptable, we can move beyond it. I'll also, I would argue, meta rituals too. Like rituals that are designed to be flexible by nature. 

Tyrome: Yeah, yeah. And as you're saying it, the power of ritual is to help us manage transition and uncertainty. Right. That's why we have ritual. That's why people salute- new military, they salute people. Because it helps us to manage the transition from an uncertain place to an uncertain place. An uncertainty is a certainty. And so I don't know what's going on, but at least I have this to stand on.

Douglas: It’s their bedrock.

Tyrome: This makes sense. Exactly. Exactly. But I love your idea that if your rituals aren't adaptive to the context in which they live, you are at risk. 

Douglas: And the context is ever evolving, right? So we don't know what it'll be like tomorrow or the day after. 

Tyrome: Absolutely. I think that folks who say, ‘I don't recognize this, this doesn't make any sense to me...’ There's a sense of the dinosaur. I don't want to be that...I don’t want to be that cavalier. But it's...are you paying attention to what's happening around you? And if you're not paying attention to what's happening around you, are you going to be around to influence it and to survive in it? And it doesn't mean that you don't continue some of the things that give you solve and comfort, right? But you need to be able to say ‘this doesn't, this is no longer in the service of the work of us accomplishing the task.’

There are stories about when people walk into manufacturing facilities and they, you know they'll Lean Six Sigma when they try to do agile and they say- why are you doing it? ‘Well, that's just how we do it.’ What would happen if you cut that out? ‘Well, uhhhhh uhhhh I don't know.’ I would submit to you that it has two pieces. One, there's a technical piece to it. ‘I don't know,’ because they really don't know. They never took it out. But the other part is an unconscious and kind of meta, which is ‘but if you cut that out, I don't have any more value. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing now.’ And I think that freaks people out even more. I think it's- as a matter of fact, I think that that's the bane of what we see as society today, is that if I am no longer in that space and am I important? That is scary. 

Douglas: Yeah, it's that fear of irrelevance.

Tyrome: Oh, my God, yeah. Yeah. And if I am irrelevant, am I important? Do I really exist? I mean this is existential stuff. I mean, I get it. But having people rethink their value, I think is the purview of good facilitation. It's the purview of good consultation. It's the purview of good coaching. Right? Helping people recenter and find themselves in terms of value. How they create value. That's an incredible piece of work if you can do that for folks. 

Douglas: Yeah. And, you know, I think it's maybe not only helping people become reflective of their own value, but also providing space where people can provide value outside of the thinly drawn lines that you've carved out for them to create value. 

So if we open it up and we say we’ve truly become inclusive...people talk about diversity, inclusion. But if we were to be truly inclusive, then we're allowing people to color outside the lines and to provide value in ways that we never anticipated. And then therefore, they see the road to providing more value, even if their current value is disrupted. 

Tyrome: It's interesting that Dug, that you say this because in the training we do, we talk about Frank Gehry, you know, follow up with the first idea. And we use the example of the Weatherhead School at Case Western University and this looks like just a plop of steel and glass and brick and how he came to that. And so not so much about Gehry, but about architecture. All right. How do we create architectures, human architectures that people can find space to exist? 

I'm not an architecture student, but I'm fascinated by this idea of creating, architecting, designing space so people can find space. And I think that our institutional architectures are so rigid because of ritual, are so rigid that when people ask for space, the institutions rebel against space. Now, if you follow the line of this conversation, that's followed back about 10 minutes and that's what policing does. Policing manages space. Because if you don't stay within your space. I have, Ty Smith, my dad Eugene Smith, have arrested people and taken to jail because they violated the space, the architecture, the social architectures of the institution. And I think what good leadership does, what good facilitation can do is help people to explore and interrogate that space so people can find space, find their own space and say, I belong here, too. Now, the question then becomes, do people...do those who constructed the space want other people to be included in the space? I don't know. I don't know. 

Douglas: Yeah, that's the thing I think is to make that shift between just having minions versus having citizens like you're talking about, making sure that when we look at the space we've created, that we give people the opportunity to self identify as to how they exist and to how they bring their best selves to the space. You know, it's interesting when I think of facilitation as a meta role where leaders start to adopt facilitated leadership styles. That's exactly what we're talking about. I love this notion of making constituents feel more like citizens. I love this idea of like, shaping space. You know, we may take the raw space that we already have allocated and we might carve it up in interesting ways. We may ask our citizens to help us make sense of the space so that we can carve it up and we can co create the decorations for that space so it’s more inviting, it's better for- easier for them to understand. I love how this conversation was not very facilitator focused, but there's so many themes that apply to facilitation that is very clear to me. 

Tyrome: So it's interesting you say that Dug, because the metaphor then applies. I think that what you're offering up, the metaphor of the facilitator is architect, right? 

Douglas: Mhm, yes. In fact, the facilitators are the architects of the meetings. They're also the producer and the constructor or they're in the meeting live. But they have to plan. I would say 90 percent of facilitators’ job is the upfront work before the meeting happens. And, you know, we have this belief at Voltage Control, that, you know, whether you call yourself a facilitator or not or you have facilitator in your title, if you invite people to a meeting and you're hosting that meeting, you are facilitating that meeting. Whether or not you're intentional about it or whether or not you're applying any craft to it, you're still facilitating. And so our wish, our goal is that everyone starts to understand that more deeply amd meetings in general, become more pleasant to attend and more productive. 

Tyrome: Let me turn it back on you just a bit. So if that is the case that you're architecting these experiences, what is the role of the facilitator in these architected experiences to help people find their authentic and authorized voice?

Douglas: Yeah. Well, you know, it starts with purpose and intention. You know, you talked about necessity of purpose. So step one is realizing it's necessary, you know? Because if we don't realize it's necessary, we certainly don't plan in ways to do it. And then I think that then we plan on ways to do it. And, you know, I would be curious about how you approach it. But, you know, the first thing that comes to mind for me is co creation is such a powerful tool. Like if people come together to bring their- they're truly bringing their thoughts to the table, then that's how they can tap into what's authentic for them. 

Tyrome: The requirements that I have whenever I help facilitate...and it's funny because there is a curious blend of experience and professional space that is training, facilitation, consultation and coaching and differentiating all four of those that happened for me at one time. It is not very clean. It is like Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do where you take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a little bit of that and you flow like water and you find people where they are. I think for me that is, I think there's- in fact, I know based on the training I have about group relations, you manage the boundary, time, task and territory, like what are we here to do? And the answer is in the room. And you're helping people discover that. The answer is always in the room. That they've come to this space, the sacred time, space, location to do some work and the work is in here. My task is to help them discover, to co-create. In a process of discovery, they ‘go holy...That was real. What the hell just happened? Something happened in that room that I want to get back to.’ 

I know I'm always successful in a true facilitation when people go, they’ll come to me a year later and they’re like ‘you know, that thing that we talked about? I went home and I talked about it with my husband. It changed my life with my spouse. It changed my life with my wife. It helped me have a different kind of conversation. I don’t, and it would- it could have been about how to build a bridge, you know, but the way that we got to that space of how to build a bridge and asking real questions, that the architecting of the experience helped people really think about themselves and their relationships differently. 

Douglas: I think that's beautiful. You know, whenever we can truly tap into something authentic and something personal when they bring it into their personal lives. Because the reason they do that is because it feels natural, right? Because they are already tapped into that space. So they...honestly, I think that's where were the real work happen.

When we can get people into that feeling of being human, they're going to do amazing work. And, you know, I think there's a really awesome...there’s so many tactics and ways to do this. But I don't know if you have some some favorite tools, but one of the tools that I'm a big fan of is authentic relating. I think that we really want people to tap into who they are and to connect with people on that level. Using some of those games and tools can be a nice way to prime them before we get into some more specific work around, here's this problem we're trying to solve. Well, let's get him in the mindset first and then flow into the work. 

Tyrome: It's interesting. When I did a lot more, we're talking...my oldest boy is 17 now. And so 15 years ago, I used to do a lot more stuff when I would have, you know, games and this- and it's powerful and it works. I am always curious about how the people that I work with, because I get a chance to work with senior leaders in organizations about this stuff, would they be willing to play games? And games are truly important, I mean, don't get me wrong. For me in the moment, I do the work with them about the thing they came to do. This may sound harsh, but I punch him right in the face with it in a loving, caring way that is like, what are you really trying to do? Because what I heard was this.

And part of it is my training and this idea of group relations and how we do our work, how I've been trained to do the work over the last twenty five years and blah blah blah, but really getting people to be hyper focused and go to where their affect and their intellect meet. Now, that might be in terms of getting them to write, getting them up on the board, getting them to talk, getting them to move. I will say this, it is not that I don't trust games because I do trust games. For me, it's more important to get up and touch the walls, touch the walls, get up out of your seat. Move your body. Find yourself in space. Where are you in space? Because where you stand and who you stand next to and how close you stand to the task that we're supposed to, and literally how close do you stand to the work that if it's on the wall, how close do you stand to that? It’s telling about your relationship to what you're trying to do. So the games for me and the activities like that is about helping people create relationship to one another and relationship to the work. How close do you really, really want to get to doing this hard stuff? 

It's funny. Ten years ago, I did an offsite punch of senior leaders and I said to them...I don’t even remember what they were working on, but I do remember that I said to them, ‘be prepared to do the hard work of the soft stuff.’ Because it’s that soft relational work that people dread. 

Douglas: Yeah I mean earlier, you talked about how people struggle with purpose so much and I think it's because it's softer, it's squishier. It's like, comes from the heart, not from the from the muscles, you know. 

Tyrome: Amen. Amen. And now this is a horrible metric, but when we're doing, like, diversity work and if nobody cries, that means they ain’t doing the work. That's a horrible metric. 

I've been thinking about that rolling around the back of my head. But I offer it up because if you are intending to do work around race and all of the impactful stuff that go along with race or if you raise it up not so close, but maybe it's even a product that you've spent your life's work on, that you have become the professional. And somebody says, ‘I love you. You're a great human being. But that product doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't- we don't need it anymore.’ And if people can't connect that, you know, we will say, you know, you are not your job. 

But that is almost impossible. Right. Your limbic system won't disconnect from your neocortical system, your thinking system. And so when you have gotten it down, you know, the whole work on behavioral economics and how people are incredibly tied to what and who they are and how it makes them feel. If you come along, your director comes along and says- the director of your organization says ‘nah, we're out of that business’ and you don't feel something...you don't know what that means or your business is at risk and you don't feel something, you don’t go “well okay, then we'll just figure it out. I’ll just move on.” I'm not buying it. We can't do it. We're human beings. 

Douglas: Tyrome, I couldn't agree more. You know, I once heard- I can't remember who to attribute the quote to, but it was something along the lines of ‘a man will never admit a truth if the truth would jeopardize their livelihood.’ So there are things that we're going to hold steadfast even in the face of evidence that the contrary is true. And it's so important to face those things head on. And, you know, and getting teams to a place where they can dive into the work and, you know, it's like where are those unspeakables that we need to embrace?

And so it's been really fun chatting today. I love that we touched on so many things related to facilitation that facilitators can kind of chew on at a almost metal level. This notion of people being citizens and how can we elevate their status so that they feel like they're part of something- of a whole, that they're potentially even creating this thing that's bigger than themselves and how we can be aligned in purpose. Really amazing stuff. I love the work that you're doing. I'm sure our listeners are gonna want to know how to reach out to you, how to connect. Tell us how they can find you. 

Tyrome: It's super simple. I've been so busy over the last five years that even with Go-In, which stands for government transformation through innovation, Go-In. Right. Government innovation. That's my presence. But it's very simple. It's govtinnovation. All one word. govtinnovation, all one word, @gmail.com [[email protected]]. Very simple. Let's talk.

Douglas: Excellent. Yeah. Shoot him an email, reach out. And Tyrome, It's been great chatting with you. I really appreciate you coming on the show. 

Tyrome: Thank you, Dug. Appreciate you.

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

"I can readily admit that I have been scared to break the firewall between where I stand socially and politically in my private life, with my friends and family and stuff, and this sort of professional, polished persona that I've had, that I've built my livelihood on. And one of the really significant things that is different for me personally about the latest sort of, like, unprecedented wave of national interest in supporting black lives and being anti-racist is that I, among many others of my colleagues, have really started to knock down those walls and be much more public and much more vocal."

In these week's episode of the Control the Room podcast, I am so excited to speak with Startup Patterns Founder Sam McAfee. Sam is a Silicon Valley veteran of 20 years and has worked with companies such as Adobe, Teach for America, and PG&E.

Sam and I speak about how a Craigslist posting launched his tech career, how the internet changed the way companies are shaped, and how he is working to be a better ally to people of color in his professional communities. Listen in to find out how he is tearing down the firewall between his personal values and professional persona.

Show Highlights

[2:35] A Craigslist resume & the beginning of Sam's career in tech

[8:14] Startup Patterns: Sam's first book

[12:14] How the internet changed the way companies are shaped

[19:30] Building the next generation of leaders

[24:35] The critical role of purpose in change processes

[31:55] Time & space for reflection

[41:05] Being a good ally & anti-racism policies

Links | Resources

Sam on LinkedIn

Startup Patterns

About the Guest

Sam is the founder of Startup Patterns, a company that helps organizations build and scale new digital products, find product-market fits, improve software development processes, and master teamwork while scaling. He has worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years; some of the companies he has worked with include Adobe, Teach for America, and PG&E. A community activist, he is committed to making the world a better place to live.

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 have Sam McAfee, founder of Startup Patterns, where he helps companies build and scale digital products, and recently has been helping teams through leadership development. Welcome to the show, Sam.

Sam: Thanks, Doug. Great to be here.

Douglas: Absolutely. So I'd like you to start off with a little bit about Sam and how you got to where you are today.

Sam: Sure. So, yeah, it's a fairly circuitous route, but, basically, I grew up on the East coast of the U.S. and came from a fairly social activist kind of background. One of my family members and friends were kind of in that scene around the Boston area. And I went to school originally in social sciences and had no idea that I would end up in tech. I did not do C.S. as an undergrad. It wasn't really my plan.

I came out to California after graduating because California seemed like a cool place to do some sort of social-impact work, looking at a lot of the organizing that was going on out here around climate and sort of prison reform and all kinds of other subjects that I was into. And so I came out here and kind of knocked around for a while at the end of the '90s, trying to figure out what I was going to do. And all of my friends that I made socially here, they were all engineers, and they were all here for the dot-com boom that I was sort of only dimly aware of. I was like a starving B.A. graduate trying to find a job with nonprofits and stuff like that. And they were all making three times as much as I was, running code for all the crazy startups that were going on here. They were like, "Hey, Sam, if you just learn a little bit of web programing, you can get a real job, and then it won't be, like, scrimping and scraping."

So it was really out of economic necessity that I grudgingly picked up a couple of books on web design and hashed together a couple of toy websites over a weekend. And I put my resumé on Craigslist with HTML under "Skills." The next morning, I had 50 emails from recruiters. And I'm not really exaggerating. It was that crazy.

So I consider it beneficial that I kind of got sucked into the demand for technical labor that was going on at the time. I had no idea what I was doing at first. As I started out, I was a freelance web developer, picking up contract jobs here and there. But I did learn fast, and I learned on the job. And I'm sort of a book learner, so I bought all the books on full-stack web development, such as it was in those days, and very quickly became a pretty proficient contractor. And I managed somehow to survive the dot-com, initial dot-com, crash.

Gradually, my freelancing work turned into setting up a little agency. So I found that my people skills were good enough that I could talk to clients and customers and get work, be able to translate that layer between the sort of the business and the client and the technology. So there was a comfort level with working with me. So before long, I was bringing in more work than I myself could do. And so I started recruiting some of my friends who were other engineers to work on projects with me. And that just kind of organically grew into an agency that I ran for about 10 years, from 2002 to just the end of 2011, where a lot of changes were taking place.

So during that time, technology scene changed a lot. You know, Cloud and mobile and lots of things kind of grew up during that decade. I also went back to graduate school to fill in my C.S. gaps that I was really insecure, that I didn't really have, like, data structures and algorithms and distributed programing and all that stuff. So I did some grad work to fill in those gaps. And, you know, I also consider myself fortunate that by the time I was putting a team together to work on projects and had to look up on the Internet, "How does one organize a software project?" that was when Agile was really gaining steam. So I didn't unlearn any previous methodologies. Agile was the thing right from the beginning for me that was the go-to methodology that was really becoming more popular for really good reasons. So I've been kind of steeped in the Agile knowledge base and community, really, since, let's say 2003 or 2004, somewhere around there. And so that for me really was the way that I learned to build projects and the way that I learned to write code, and all the way from the technical practices of test-driven development, etc., etc., to the process approaches.

And so we built really great software in my agency for many, many clients over those years, and one thing that really I noticed a lot was that clients would actually ask me to go out to their team and help them with their process as well. So I ended up sort of farming myself out a little bit as a coach or consultant as well on top of the work that we were doing in-house.

Somewhere along the line, I got exposed pretty early on to the lean startup stuff. I had a buddy who had been reading Steve Blank's book. And this is back when Eric Ries was really just blogging at the time. And that stuff really blew my mind because by that time I'd had enough experiences of building software that nobody really wanted so many times. And granted, we were an agency, so usually it was our client who lost money. We were sort of mercenarial. We still got paid, but it really felt crappy to make stuff that nobody used or wanted. And so I'd had that experience. And so the idea of testing your concept before investing a lot of time in building the code made a lot of sense to me viscerally. So I really got involved with the lean startup kind of community pretty early on, started going to the conferences and meet ups and stuff like that. That stuff really resonated with me.

Eventually, the recession really caught up with us and just kind of slowed business gradually year over year until about 2011 or so. I was pretty burnt out on running my own agency. And so I went off and had a series of adventures as a senior technical person of one sort or another in a couple of different companies in a row. I ran the engineering team at change.org for a while as they were in a period of growth. I was sort of co-founder in a couple of small startups that went the way that startups typically do. I got a chance to work for what was a much more real and polished consulting agency called Neo. A lot of my colleagues these days are sort of alumni from Neo from those days where I sort of learned a lot about how to be a real consultant, how to be kind of polished in front of executives from bigger brands like Adobe and Toyota and places like that, sort of bigger fish than I had been working with myself in my earlier agency. So the Neo days are really great.

And then, basically, in 2016, I went back out on my own and had been working ever since. Startup Patterns actually is my book that while I was at Neo, a number of the folks there were writing books, and they formed a little book writers kind of club to keep us going. And I heard about the club, and I'd always wanted to write a book. That was sort of my trigger to start writing the book. And so the book was self-published, and it took me about two years to finish, and it was called Startup Patterns. And so when I went out on my own, the book title seemed as good a brand as any to use as my company name. So that's why the book and the company are named the same thing.

And so I just have been doing my own sort of coaching and consulting since 2016. And whereas I initially started out really focusing on process on coaching teams, either as startups or bigger companies that were doing innovation labs around how to ship digital products quickly, how to do sort of the Agile-delivery stuff, and how to incorporate that successfully into lean startup, build-measure-learn-style customer-development approaches, that gradually shifted about a year and a half ago more and more into leadership stuff, which I think we'll probably end up talking about a bunch more, which is that no matter how good these teams got with coaching, when you're trying to really be successful in building digital products, the barriers that I kept running into as a coach and as a consultant were in the structure of the organization, in particular the leadership, and whether the leadership of the organization, whether that's middle management or the senior executives, really support the kind of transformation and change that is required for an organization to fully embrace digital and fully embrace Agile leadership was constantly the barrier there. And so I just got more and more interested in putting my attention on, why is it so hard for these organizations to change? And so since then, I've pretty much been focused almost exclusively on working directly with technology managers who are trying to effect change in their organizations and how to kind of become better leaders and all that that entails. So that's what brings me here.

Douglas: Excellent. Well, I want to dig in a little bit there on this concept of structure and how that plays a role and kind of stifling change or, like, embracing change, and you mentioned that in passing as you were starting to talk about this new leadership work that you're doing. So I'm curious to hear how structure plays a role specifically and what leaders can do or what they should be thinking about as it relates to the structure.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The structure of the organization is really important. So when you look at—just kind of stick with Agile, but I mean sort of digital-product-development methodologies broadly, but let's kind of hang it on Agile for a bit. There's sort of this notion of the cross-functional, self-organized team that's building software that the customer wants and able to kind of ship things reliably with high quality and sort of business success. And so a lot of—in the early days of Agile, we were talking a lot about, well, if you want a cross-functional team, you have to break down silos. So, like, you've got sort of design in one area. You've got product management in another area. You've got the business units that are sort of the stakeholders. You've got the engineering or developers in sort of a different area. And how you sort of get across that.

And I think what I found is that those silos are very rooted in sort of a legacy of the corporate culture in most organizations. So you can kind of draw a line at where the Internet becoming a big thing, where companies are sort of digitally native, that came up after the boom of the Internet—so the late '90s, early 2000s—tend to be shaped differently than more traditional, older industrial or consumer or financial companies that have been around for a while that are really only trying to go digital now. And I think what we need to understand is that there's sort of like a couple of major legacy—let's just call it baggage—organizational baggage that's been around since the early days of the 20th century, with Taylorism and Ford, that there's sort of this notion of a very top-down command and control style of organization, where the people at the top are making all the decisions, and the people at the bottom are just doing the stuff that they're told. So clearly, you can't really have a self-organizing team that's embracing agility or trying to move toward agility if they're being told what to do all the time. So there's sort of this conflict between a command-and-control culture and the levels of autonomy that are necessary for a team to be self-organized.

And then with the cross-functional stuff, what you end up having is I.T., as we think of it in generic corporate terms, really grew up out of the finance department. Like, we started using computers in corporations because we needed to crunch numbers. So software development emerging necessarily out of an I.T. function, that is really different from a tech company that was sort of natively starting with a cross-functional team as a startup and sort of grows from there. You know, now with startups, you do have to fight against the sort of silos that grow organically. But I think for big companies that have been around for a while, that are struggling through transformation, what is happening is just the whole structure of the company has to change. And that's really scary for people who have been in an organization for a long time, you know, run a particular department, a lot of their identity is wrapped around, "Well, all these people report to me. I'm the V.P. of whatever it is. So my sense of self and my value as a person in this company is based on my authority, that people will do what I say, and that I have this big department of people that report to me." And so we really have to unlearn that stuff if we want to build an organization that's more flexible, that's more resilient, and that can adapt to change in the way that a digital or agile or lean sort of transformation would require.

Douglas: What are some of the signs that you might see that an organization is not autonomous enough, or they might be trying to make some of these changes, but they're just not successful?

Sam: There's an interesting set of patterns that I do see. One in particular springs to mind as you ask the question, which is that even in organizations where—so there's sort of like two things that can happen, I think. One is the organization doesn't really want to change from being top-down command-and-control style but still wants the Agile teams to deliver or wants the product teams to build the right thing. And so you've got a culture where the folks on the ground who are doing the work are used to being order takers. Like, there's a big difference between being a sort of short-order cook and being a chef. Like, being someone who is just sort of following instructions, you get one style of work coming out of that. And folks who are making a lot of decisions on their own and being more collaborative, you get a different result.

And then, also, I think you have times where the leadership team maybe suddenly becomes enlightened. I don't know if they read a book about autonomy on the airplane ride back from wherever, and they decide, like, "Okay, we have to announce that we're going to do all these new innovative things." And so, you know, I've seen it where the top leadership says, "Okay, everybody, we're taking off the shackles. You're all now free to innovate. Please go forth and innovate." And what you have is an organization full of people who just yesterday were being shouted at and told what to do and are now suddenly being told that they need to be free, independent thinkers. And it's a really abrupt shift in the culture. And so that shifting to an autonomous kind of organization takes time and patience and requires a lot of support and a lot of, what would you call maybe, baby steps. Like, small wins and gradual sort of earning of trust. You can't just sort of like throw everybody free and expect them to know how to operate collaboratively when they're used to being told what to do for years on end. So I think that creates a lot of challenges.

By the time I get there, it's usually because things are broken or something's on fire. So, like, a lot of time—and I'm sure I'm not the only consultant that feels that way. You know, it's like often it can be a rescue job. But what has often happened is that somebody's made the decision to go sort of go Agile, if you will, and they got some shiny consulting company to come in and give them a diagram of how you do it. They try it for a year or two. It doesn't really work. It doesn't really stick. Things are broken and on fire. And then, I show up and I look around, and I realize that it's really because there's not the shift in values from top to bottom in the culture. There's not a shift to—it's like we want the fruits of autonomy, but we don't necessarily want people to really have say over their work. And that just creates a lot of froth and friction. And then people say like, "Oh, well, we tried Agile, and it didn't work."

Douglas: Let's talk a little bit about the shift of values. And so what does it look like when it's done correctly? And I imagine it's somewhat driven around the fact, the notion, that, well, as a leader, this notion of, well, what is my responsibility as a leader now? What does it mean to even be a leader in this new world? And also, I'm on the hook for making sure that the numbers come out correctly in this quarterly report and that we meet expectations for shareholders, etc. And so how do we balance giving over control with being responsible for outcomes? I'm pretty sure that aligns with what you're talking about around this, like, the shared values not being met. So just kind of curious to understand that more.

Sam: Yeah. I think that's really important. If you look at where the leadership literature is going these days, like if you did a search for top leadership books in the last 10 years or so, there's a really consistent pattern, and that pattern to me is a focus on relinquishing control of all the decisions and focusing instead on the leader acting as a coach to grow other leaders. So, like, the real hallmark of a good leader is that they can build the next generation of leaders below them to take their place, that they're focused on succession, they delegate well, and they help solve problems without directing and without micromanaging, but giving people room to grow. So we can actually connect it directly to say Carol Dweck's Mindsets, this concept of a growth or fixed mindset in an individual extends for sure to the organization and its culture as a whole.

So I think when it's done well, people are approaching coaching teams and coaching new leaders that are emerging with really a growth mindset and with a focus on having some space to experiment and some safe-to-fail constraints. So you can draw a line around these experiments. You don't want to make them too big that, as you said, you're in danger of missing your numbers. So, like, we're talking primarily about businesses here that have to ship products and make customers happy and increase their market share and post earnings and post profits.

And so there's always going to be that pressure to perform economically. I think that where the old style of leadership is falling away is that the world has become so complex and even the internal aspects of companies have become so complex that you can't be directive and prescriptive in the way that you can if you're sort of running a more traditional brick-and-mortar, manufacturing organization. In the world of digital in particular—frankly, let's face it. All companies are basically going to have to be digital now—the complexity is massive, and workers are doing work that's much more creative and knowledge work than moving widgets around, and so that kind of work has to be more emergent and collaborative. It's a team sport, especially in design and product development. And so you can't lead that kind of effort with commands. It has to be more like coaching.

Frankly, I use a lot of parenting metaphors. When you think about what you do with your kids, I definitely had experiences myself with, my son's trying to learn how to tie his shoes or something, and I'm sitting there, having to bite my tongue and not just reach over his shoulder, like, "No, give me that. Here's how you do it." It takes a lot of patience for a leader to sit back and watch the people that report to them struggle. But if they don't struggle, they're not going to learn. So that's sort of where this growth-mindset stuff is really critical.

Douglas: So, let's go back to some of these baby steps. You talked about it being an anti-pattern to just read the book and to come in and say, "We're going to go autonomous. There's a new way of working, and we need to adapt or we're going to fail." So what are some of the things that folks can do to get started, and how do they move more intentionally? And I know you get pulled in a lot to kind of fix the fires, but how can they avoid the fires in the first place? How could they do this more intentionally?

Sam: I think that it requires really acknowledging where you are, right? So it's critical to take stock of the current state, and that's the current state of, like, really, for me, that's typically three big pillars in my head of the technology, the process, and the people, the culture, the sort of communication styles and values, and really understanding what the current state is and having some idea of, if we're in a place that has rigid process and a culture of fear or toxicity or even just kind of like polite, passive aggressivity, which I actually see more often than anything else, and we have technology that's legacy and hard to change and brittle and antiquated, it's really going to be dangerous to just dive in and try to change all of those things wholesale all at once. And so we can have a vision, we have to have a vision, for what we want our organization ultimately look like, or at least what we want it to feel like to work there. And I think that's actually a really important distinction. You know, people focus a lot in tech on sort of the left brain. They're like, let's draw a diagram, and let's have maps and charts and spreadsheets.

But I think there's a lot to be said about getting in touch with how we want to feel as a team. Like, what does it actually feel like to come into work every day? Are these people we want to work with? Is this work we want to do? Is there meaning and purpose to what we're trying to accomplish? Are we committed to being in this organization, given its stated mission and values? So I think they, like, having some vision of what the future looks like is really critical for any kind of change process.

And then I think that we have to really only bite off as much as we can chew. Like, this is something, I'm almost saying this to myself because this was a hard lesson for me to learn even as a coach or consultant, where like, look, man, I live in Silicon Valley, and I've been in startups a lot of my career, and I've seen what a small cross-functional team of super smart, fast, flexible people can do in the marketplace. Going from a big old-fashioned organization to that sort of sexy-startup-looking organization is not an overnight thing. And I think I, maybe when I was first doing this work, was really impatient with my clients. I'm sort of like, "Look, I'll tell you how it's done, and I'll show you what good looks like. Let's just go, go, go." And it's been a process for me to learn how to actually be really patient as well, that it's going to be a long road, it's going to be very challenging, and all of those little steps are meaningful along the way.

So if you have a manager, for example, like an engineering manager who's got a bunch of engineers that report to them, and they're trying to work with those people, just getting that engineering manager to think about and embrace their own fears and hopes and dreams and aspirations and think about what kind of leader do they want to be and just having them learn how to, okay, so you're going to have a one on one with your people. How do you make that one on one structured so that the person who reports to you is getting the most value out of it as possible and growing as an employee? So talking to an engineering manager who's a client of mine for an hour about how to have a good one on one and how to start that process seems like a small thing to do in the context of a huge organization, but it's incredibly meaningful, and it's incredibly impactful. And now I've changed the way that engineering manager is thinking about leading their people forever, you know? It's like they'll never look at a one on one the same way. They'll always have a different, more valuable set of conversation.

So for me, that's an example of a baby step, because really, like when we're in an organization, organizations are made of people, and people interact through conversations. And so you can think about like, oh, we're going to change the process or we're going to import this new shiny technology or we're going to make org-chart changes. But really what happens is organizations, as they're more fluid and they're more like squishy tribes or villages where the real work happens often one on one or in small groups of people having real conversations with each other and making decisions about what they believe is true and what they believe is not true and what they're willing to commit to in terms of change.

Douglas: Yeah. I once heard this quote that goes along the lines of, if there's more truth in the hallways than there is in meetings, and it kind of comes back to the point you were just making and-

Sam: Oh, for sure.

Douglas: I'm always curious to hear from folks, if you could change one thing about meetings, what would you change?

Sam: Oh, man. Boy, I think that—so with a little context, there is a lot of anti-meeting sentiment in my field, in tech, and I think it's misplaced, and I think it's probably because people just had a lot of bad meetings. I actually really enjoy bringing a small group of people together to have a conversation. That is typically what we might term a meeting. So I think the concept of having group conversations of some sort or another, there's nothing wrong with that. I think that, you know, where it runs all crazy is when, like, people are there that don't even need to be there. It's not clear why we're there. You know, somebody thinks it's a discussion, and someone else thinks it's a one way update of information.

So I think that it's really hard to pick one thing, but I think that if everyone who came to a meeting decided when they were showing up that they were going to be totally honest and authentic and transparent in their communication at that meeting, like, just, say what is on your mind, if people could be really real in those conversations, it sure would change the tone of a lot of meetings. You know, because I think the opposite is what we're used to, which is everybody's kind of not sure if they should speak up. Maybe they're sort of issuing platitudes. Maybe they're kind of speaking out of one side of their mouth. Like, if all that stuff—that could all go away if everyone's like, "I'm just going to say 100 percent of what I believe 100 percent of the time. And then we'll negotiate the rest," meetings would be a lot more—I mean, some of those conversations would be tougher, but we have better outcomes at the end of the day.

Douglas: That's right. And I think that's very, very possible, when you take a facilitator approach when you think about, like, never starting without a clear purpose, and being really intentional about how you structure the meeting, and you hold space for people to behave those ways. I think it's all possible. And it makes me think about the point you made earlier about in order to identify or prescribe those baby steps that are necessary, we have to take a close look at our current state and just get honest about where we are. I think that is an opportunity for starting the work that needs to be done. So if we're going to be more collaborative, more autonomous, why not create a collaborative group to do this current-state analysis? Let's launch off with these behaviors that we want to model and start doing them organically and build from there, and then the output of that yields more opportunity. It's almost like the kata in a way, right? Like, we're going to take a small incremental step, and then it builds on the next one and builds on the next one.

Sam: I think piggybacking off of that reminds me that one of the things that's really missing in a lot of organizations is time and space for reflection. Whether it's collective or individual, I think that you can't really be aware of your current state unless you can sort of slow down, put the tools down for a minute, and look around and have some reflection time. And as an individual, I know that certainly the people that I coach, the number one problem that most of them have is that they don't have time or they don't demand time—they don't take enough time. Let's put it that way—in their schedules for reflection. All the leadership books are like, leaders got to take an hour and block off their calendar and sit and stare at a blank piece of paper or go for a walk or whatever just to let the brain catch up with what's been going on. Like, the neuroscience is well established. Reflection is critical. So is rest, you know?

And so I find that as individuals, we're so rushing through the rat race, that is our economies all the time and under so much pressure to perform and give in and show up, that taking a little reflection for yourself, it feels selfish, it feels irresponsible, and it's completely the opposite. It's critical. You know, that phrase, like, look, when you're on the airplane, they say put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. Like, that's a good metaphor for thinking about leaders needing to take some time, really anyone, but certainly folks who are in a leadership position, to look back at how we're doing and also for the organization itself, kind of back more specifically to your point, having group or organizational reflection time. I think that if we want to enact change, we need to be able to stop sawing—to take a page from Stephen Covey—and sharpen the saw a little bit. That requires a slow down and reflect. So I think if we were to build that into our company cultures and our values more explicitly, I think it would have a huge impact, a positive impact.

Douglas: Yeah. You know, it definitely resonates with me. We often think a lot about even moments of reflection, debrief, when we're designing meetings and workshops, because that's the moment where people integrate. Like, if we just teach, teach, teach, teach and cram stuff in, well, that's just horrible anyway, but there's no moment for them to really integrate what they've learned. So ideally, there's a lot of practice. They're going to hands on and doing things. But then we want to have them take a step back and go, "What does this mean? How do we make sense of all this?" and then translate it in, into the work at hand. And so I think not only when it's about picking up new skills or coming together on a challenge or some sort of opportunity, it can be everyday work, but taking a chance to reflect. I think for a lot of us, the drive home or the subway ride home after work was that moment where we could do that, and now we don't have that affordance, and so being, especially in this time of the pandemic, let's be intentional about these reflection times and moments.

Sam: Yeah. That's created a lot of pressure on people, I think. It's interesting to look at the required remote work that we're all doing. I mean, I definitely, like, I have an economics background, like a political-economy background. And so I remember back in the day, a lot of people really being worried about, oh, your work is bleeding over into your personal time. The boss is able to call you at night or send you an email, and we all got our smartphones. And so the line between work and life outside of work is really blurry. And actually, I think that there's a huge risk, despite a lot of probably warranted cheerleading about how cool remote work can be and that people are learning how to be distributed teams, and I think a lot of that can be great, and it's really great for the business to not have as much pressure on maintaining an office space like they used to. But for the individual folks doing the work, do they actually feel like they can turn the machine off and have their own lives? And so I do worry about that blurry line, I guess, where we sort of, the diplomatic way to talk about it in Silicon Valley would be work-life balance. There are other more sharp ways of saying that.

But I think that's really important that when you think about reflection time, the conversations in the hallways rather than the meetings, or often at conferences, it used to be that you go to all these talks, and it'd be really interesting one-way communication, but the real cool stuff would be at lunch or outside or on walks or in the hallways between sessions. That's people talking to each other and processing what they just learned and figuring out how to integrate it, as you said. And that integration is really critical, and so if we were actually able to build reflection time more intentionally into our workflows, in our process, and our company culture, that would, I think, soak up a lot of that need that people have to chat with each other and process and have that moment of reflection, that sharpening the saw that we all need to do both as individuals and as organizations.

Douglas: Yeah, I think it's interesting, this notion of not only reserving the personal time, but accounting for and reserving time for the group to do it so that there can be a group synthesis. It reminds me of the Agile retrospective. I think if you really get down to the principles behind it and why we do it, I think there is very much one and the same with what we're talking about right now. I think the problem that I see that's super pervasive and pathological, really, is that people use the retrospective as a way to just address problems that have arisen, and they don't actually do it on a frequent-enough basis to where they are celebrating the wins, integrating the wins, realizing when they slip through by the skin of their teeth and being able to make incremental change. That's one of the things I can easily get on a soapbox about. When I'm working with teams, it's like, man, you got to do this frequently, and it can't be just a tool that you pull out when something goes wrong.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And it can be a forum for a lot of blame and shame, too, like, whether it's explicit or just kind of under the covers, the idea of not taking responsibility ourselves for what we want to do better or want to make better. And I think there's a lot of pressure on a facilitator for sure, retros probably more than anywhere, except maybe like an actual conflict resolution, that facilitator to make sure that people are learning how to listen as much as they're learning how to express. And I think that's a big thing we're also missing in corporate culture.

I make it a big part of the sort of the curriculum and coaching work that I do in leadership is around empathy and learning how to listen and learning how to listen in a way where it's not just waiting for the other person to finish talking, but actually trying to put yourself in their shoes and hang on their every word and really integrate what's being said, like, really build some empathy there. That's real listening. And so I think the onus is on us, as coaches and consultants and facilitators, to teach people in our organizations how to do that. You know, that's something that doesn't come out of management school, doesn't come out of technical school, barely comes out of social sciences, if at all.

Douglas: That's a nice segue because I was going to mention we've had discussions over the past few weeks just about the social unrest in America and how we play our part in breaking the silence and not being complicit and trying to be anti-racist as much as possible. And I remember in those discussions, whether at—various books came up, and you make comments about, "Oh, I read this in school." And so it makes so much sense now that you studied social sciences and were really focused on kind of social justice, social-good-type work before you got into tech. And so I just wanted to touch on this because I know that we've both been grappling this and figuring out how to engage in anti-racist policies and just bring that into the work we do, port it, and just be good allies. I'm just wondering what you've found to be successful and what you might have to offer others that are listening and are just looking to add to their toolkit.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, definitely something that's really important to me. I mean, I think that my perspective has really shifted over time but also in these last few weeks. I read a lot. In college, I studied social sciences. I read a lot about social issues like racism and sexism and other isms in school. And I think that when I got into the tech scene in my mid 20s, I was doing organizing and stuff when I first came out to California. I was kind of a rabid activist, if you will. And when I got into the tech scene, I think that a transformation happened where I erected a firewall between my personal and political and social values and my professional persona. And so for many years, and I've been in tech for 20 years, so let's just say for 20 years, I've experimented with ways of getting involved in merging sort of social-impact stuff with tech. Working at change.org was one way. There were a couple of other examples of sort of trying to figure out a way to bridge those two worlds.

But I really know that I stand on a mountain of privilege, right? So, like, I'm a white guy. I'm hetero. I'm in tech. I work for myself. Like, you could just pile it on, right? And I think that what this latest wave of organizing, you know, and I don't even really necessarily like the term social unrest so much. I think it's sort of maybe accidentally demonizes what is a long tradition of grassroots organizing to change things in this country, whether it's the civil-rights movement or the anti-war movements or the labor movement. I mean, there's a rich tradition of people coming together across many social lines to change things in the conscious. Really, ideally, I mean, really, that's the only way change has really happened for real.

And so for me, I think that what I've been really grappling with the last several years as there's been increasing polarization in the country, is how do I leverage my privilege and my platform to weigh in on the conversation. And I think that I can readily admit that I have been scared to break the firewall between where I stand socially and politically in my private life, with my friends and family and stuff, and this sort of professional, polished persona that I've had, that I've built my livelihood on. And one of the really significant things that is different for me personally about the latest sort of, like, unprecedented wave of national interest in supporting black lives and being anti-racist is that I, among many others of my colleagues, have really started to knock down those walls and be much more public and much more vocal.

And so I've been trying to do that, and I've been trying to be fairly deliberative and careful about how I do it. One of the things, I think—I've never seen so many people in my professional circles grappling with, how do we as white people support movement for black lives? You know, how do we be good allies? And people are really trying to learn, really trying to be sensitive, knowing that it's uncomfortable and making a lot of mistakes. And I've been really impressed, to be honest, with how much the folks that I spend my time with are embracing the challenge of fighting against racism as white people who, let's face it, it's our problem. It's our responsibility, and we benefit from it, and to sort of say, "Look, we're not going to do it right. It's going to be hard. Not to guilt, shame, embarrassment, all that stuff. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to put your foot in your mouth. You're going to have—people are going to criticize you no matter what you do." And that's part of the process. That just has to be okay.

And so I think the big shift for me internally is I'm not scared anymore. I don't really care anymore. This is—I'm seeing now how important it is for people like me to really say something and take a stand. And I feel like I've got to a point, not just professionally, but in my life, sort of personally, morally, spiritually, whatever you want to say, where I'm going to say the right thing, and I don't care what anybody thinks, you know? And I think that really—I'm fired up. I want to try to contribute in whatever way I can. And I am happy to join up with other people that want to have these difficult discussions and figure it out. I'm a little dismayed in some ways that more folks from the tech community, the innovation community, the sort of Agile groups in the world haven't readily come out and been more vocal about these sort of social issues. For folks who really purport to be all about data and continuous improvement and a growth mindset, like, the writing is on the wall. It's right there. Why those folks can choose to be silent, it boggles my mind.

So I'm pretty committed to being out there and being a lot more noisy in support of anti-racism and in support of Black Lives Matter for sure right now, among a number of other social forces that are changing our world right now. So this is a new time, and I'm really embracing it.

Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. I think to your point, whether it's intentional, people are afraid of those firewalls, or definitely afraid of dismantling them. And they're put there. And I've been talking a lot with folks around this notion of professionalism and what it means to be professional. And I think that we've created this dynamic where it's unsafe to be human. Like, we're not supposed to bring our emotions. We're not supposed bring "politics." And sure, we don't want to get in massive debates over who we're for, etc. But I think caring for our neighbors and making sure that we create a safe environment that's inclusive and supportive of everyone goes beyond politics, and that's just human decency, and I don't see why human decency is unprofessional. And so I'm with you in solidarity on tearing down these firewalls. I've been actively working on it as well.

And, you know, I'd like to say thanks for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure. I'd like to just wrap with any—well, I want to make sure that the listeners know how to find you, and you mentioned your book. And then if there's anything you want to leave us with, a parting message. So how can they find you, and what do you want to leave them with?

Sam: Sure. So I'm easy to find. Two different ways. You can search for Startup Patterns, startuppatterns.com. We'll come right up in the search results. That's my site. A big LinkedIn user, Sam McAfee. It's very easy to find on LinkedIn. I really encourage people to reach out to me there, connect with me. let's have a conversation. So there's just are the two easiest ways to get connected with me.

I think that what I would want to leave people with is this is a time that we are in that is unlike anything the world has ever been through before. And it's there for a number of reasons. The pandemic, for sure, is a giant change. It's sort of incomparable to historical events. The sort of associated economic turmoil that comes with it. And now this major social movement that was a long time in the making, but it's really broken the surface. And I think people are thinking and rethinking how they feel about what we want, what kind of world we want to have in ways that they've never been doing before. And I think for me, the personal is political and the political is personal. So there's a lot of internal and individual transformation work that goes along with changing the world. And I just don't want people to forget that. It's not all about going out there. It's not all about the public conversations, and going and being at the rallies and writing and reading and posting and discussing are really important. There's also a lot of internal grappling that we all need to do and just know that you're not the only one. And a lot of us are going through this major reckoning with things that we thought we believed or we thought we valued and really thinking about transforming ourselves from the inside. And so that's a lot of what I focus on, the folks that I work with and friends of mine, around, how do we support each other through that very challenging but necessary personal transformation so that we can really build a world that we all really want to live in?

Douglas: Awesome. Thank you for being on the show, Sam. It's been a great opportunity to talk with you. And I really enjoy the conversation.

Sam: Thanks. Me, too. This has been really great. Thanks for having me.

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 can readily admit that I have been scared to break the firewall between where I stand socially and politically in my private life, with my friends and family and stuff, and this sort of professional, polished persona that I've had, that I've built my livelihood on. And one of the really significant things that is different for me personally about the latest sort of, like, unprecedented wave of national interest in supporting black lives and being anti-racist is that I, among many others of my colleagues, have really started to knock down those walls and be much more public and much more vocal.” 

In these week’s episode of the Control the Room podcast, I am so excited to speak with Startup Patterns Founder Sam McAfee. Sam is a Silicon Valley veteran of 20 years and has worked with companies such as Adobe, Teach for America, and PG&E.

Sam and I speak about how a Craigslist posting launched his tech career, how the internet changed the way companies are shaped, and how he is working to be a better ally to people of color in his professional communities. Listen in to find out how he is tearing down the firewall between his personal values and professional persona.

Show Highlights

[2:35] A Craigslist resume & the beginning of Sam’s career in tech

[8:14] Startup Patterns: Sam’s first book

[12:14] How the internet changed the way companies are shaped

[19:30] Building the next generation of leaders

[24:35] The critical role of purpose in change processes

[31:55] Time & space for reflection

[41:05] Being a good ally & anti-racism policies

Links | Resources

Sam on LinkedIn

Startup Patterns

About the Guest

Sam is the founder of Startup Patterns, a company that helps organizations build and scale new digital products, find product-market fits, improve software development processes, and master teamwork while scaling. He has worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years; some of the companies he has worked with include Adobe, Teach for America, and PG&E. A community activist, he is committed to making the world a better place to live.

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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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 have Sam McAfee, founder of Startup Patterns, where he helps companies build and scale digital products, and recently has been helping teams through leadership development. Welcome to the show, Sam. 

Sam: Thanks, Doug. Great to be here. 

Douglas: Absolutely. So I'd like you to start off with a little bit about Sam and how you got to where you are today. 

Sam: Sure. So, yeah, it's a fairly circuitous route, but, basically, I grew up on the East coast of the U.S. and came from a fairly social activist kind of background. One of my family members and friends were kind of in that scene around the Boston area. And I went to school originally in social sciences and had no idea that I would end up in tech. I did not do C.S. as an undergrad. It wasn't really my plan. 

I came out to California after graduating because California seemed like a cool place to do some sort of social-impact work, looking at a lot of the organizing that was going on out here around climate and sort of prison reform and all kinds of other subjects that I was into. And so I came out here and kind of knocked around for a while at the end of the ‘90s, trying to figure out what I was going to do. And all of my friends that I made socially here, they were all engineers, and they were all here for the dot-com boom that I was sort of only dimly aware of. I was like a starving B.A. graduate trying to find a job with nonprofits and stuff like that. And they were all making three times as much as I was, running code for all the crazy startups that were going on here. They were like, “Hey, Sam, if you just learn a little bit of web programing, you can get a real job, and then it won’t be, like, scrimping and scraping.” 

So it was really out of economic necessity that I grudgingly picked up a couple of books on web design and hashed together a couple of toy websites over a weekend. And I put my resumé on Craigslist with HTML under “Skills.” The next morning, I had 50 emails from recruiters. And I'm not really exaggerating. It was that crazy. 

So I consider it beneficial that I kind of got sucked into the demand for technical labor that was going on at the time. I had no idea what I was doing at first. As I started out, I was a freelance web developer, picking up contract jobs here and there. But I did learn fast, and I learned on the job. And I'm sort of a book learner, so I bought all the books on full-stack web development, such as it was in those days, and very quickly became a pretty proficient contractor. And I managed somehow to survive the dot-com, initial dot-com, crash. 

Gradually, my freelancing work turned into setting up a little agency. So I found that my people skills were good enough that I could talk to clients and customers and get work, be able to translate that layer between the sort of the business and the client and the technology. So there was a comfort level with working with me. So before long, I was bringing in more work than I myself could do. And so I started recruiting some of my friends who were other engineers to work on projects with me. And that just kind of organically grew into an agency that I ran for about 10 years, from 2002 to just the end of 2011, where a lot of changes were taking place.

So during that time, technology scene changed a lot. You know, Cloud and mobile and lots of things kind of grew up during that decade. I also went back to graduate school to fill in my C.S. gaps that I was really insecure, that I didn't really have, like, data structures and algorithms and distributed programing and all that stuff. So I did some grad work to fill in those gaps. And, you know, I also consider myself fortunate that by the time I was putting a team together to work on projects and had to look up on the Internet, “How does one organize a software project?” that was when Agile was really gaining steam. So I didn't unlearn any previous methodologies. Agile was the thing right from the beginning for me that was the go-to methodology that was really becoming more popular for really good reasons. So I've been kind of steeped in the Agile knowledge base and community, really, since, let's say 2003 or 2004, somewhere around there. And so that for me really was the way that I learned to build projects and the way that I learned to write code, and all the way from the technical practices of test-driven development, etc., etc., to the process approaches. 

And so we built really great software in my agency for many, many clients over those years, and one thing that really I noticed a lot was that clients would actually ask me to go out to their team and help them with their process as well. So I ended up sort of farming myself out a little bit as a coach or consultant as well on top of the work that we were doing in-house.

Somewhere along the line, I got exposed pretty early on to the lean startup stuff. I had a buddy who had been reading Steve Blank’s book. And this is back when Eric Ries was really just blogging at the time. And that stuff really blew my mind because by that time I’d had enough experiences of building software that nobody really wanted so many times. And granted, we were an agency, so usually it was our client who lost money. We were sort of mercenarial. We still got paid, but it really felt crappy to make stuff that nobody used or wanted. And so I'd had that experience. And so the idea of testing your concept before investing a lot of time in building the code made a lot of sense to me viscerally. So I really got involved with the lean startup kind of community pretty early on, started going to the conferences and meet ups and stuff like that. That stuff really resonated with me. 

Eventually, the recession really caught up with us and just kind of slowed business gradually year over year until about 2011 or so. I was pretty burnt out on running my own agency. And so I went off and had a series of adventures as a senior technical person of one sort or another in a couple of different companies in a row. I ran the engineering team at change.org for a while as they were in a period of growth. I was sort of co-founder in a couple of small startups that went the way that startups typically do. I got a chance to work for what was a much more real and polished consulting agency called Neo. A lot of my colleagues these days are sort of alumni from Neo from those days where I sort of learned a lot about how to be a real consultant, how to be kind of polished in front of executives from bigger brands like Adobe and Toyota and places like that, sort of bigger fish than I had been working with myself in my earlier agency. So the Neo days are really great.

And then, basically, in 2016, I went back out on my own and had been working ever since. Startup Patterns actually is my book that while I was at Neo, a number of the folks there were writing books, and they formed a little book writers kind of club to keep us going. And I heard about the club, and I’d always wanted to write a book. That was sort of my trigger to start writing the book. And so the book was self-published, and it took me about two years to finish, and it was called Startup Patterns. And so when I went out on my own, the book title seemed as good a brand as any to use as my company name. So that's why the book and the company are named the same thing. 

And so I just have been doing my own sort of coaching and consulting since 2016. And whereas I initially started out really focusing on process on coaching teams, either as startups or bigger companies that were doing innovation labs around how to ship digital products quickly, how to do sort of the Agile-delivery stuff, and how to incorporate that successfully into lean startup, build-measure-learn-style customer-development approaches, that gradually shifted about a year and a half ago more and more into leadership stuff, which I think we'll probably end up talking about a bunch more, which is that no matter how good these teams got with coaching, when you're trying to really be successful in building digital products, the barriers that I kept running into as a coach and as a consultant were in the structure of the organization, in particular the leadership, and whether the leadership of the organization, whether that's middle management or the senior executives, really support the kind of transformation and change that is required for an organization to fully embrace digital and fully embrace Agile leadership was constantly the barrier there. And so I just got more and more interested in putting my attention on, why is it so hard for these organizations to change? And so since then, I've pretty much been focused almost exclusively on working directly with technology managers who are trying to effect change in their organizations and how to kind of become better leaders and all that that entails. So that's what brings me here.

Douglas: Excellent. Well, I want to dig in a little bit there on this concept of structure and how that plays a role and kind of stifling change or, like, embracing change, and you mentioned that in passing as you were starting to talk about this new leadership work that you're doing. So I'm curious to hear how structure plays a role specifically and what leaders can do or what they should be thinking about as it relates to the structure.

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. The structure of the organization is really important. So when you look at—just kind of stick with Agile, but I mean sort of digital-product-development methodologies broadly, but let's kind of hang it on Agile for a bit. There's sort of this notion of the cross-functional, self-organized team that's building software that the customer wants and able to kind of ship things reliably with high quality and sort of business success. And so a lot of—in the early days of Agile, we were talking a lot about, well, if you want a cross-functional team, you have to break down silos. So, like, you've got sort of design in one area. You've got product management in another area. You've got the business units that are sort of the stakeholders. You've got the engineering or developers in sort of a different area. And how you sort of get across that. 

And I think what I found is that those silos are very rooted in sort of a legacy of the corporate culture in most organizations. So you can kind of draw a line at where the Internet becoming a big thing, where companies are sort of digitally native, that came up after the boom of the Internet—so the late ‘90s, early 2000s—tend to be shaped differently than more traditional, older industrial or consumer or financial companies that have been around for a while that are really only trying to go digital now. And I think what we need to understand is that there's sort of like a couple of major legacy—let's just call it baggage—organizational baggage that's been around since the early days of the 20th century, with Taylorism and Ford, that there's sort of this notion of a very top-down command and control style of organization, where the people at the top are making all the decisions, and the people at the bottom are just doing the stuff that they're told. So clearly, you can't really have a self-organizing team that's embracing agility or trying to move toward agility if they're being told what to do all the time. So there's sort of this conflict between a command-and-control culture and the levels of autonomy that are necessary for a team to be self-organized.

And then with the cross-functional stuff, what you end up having is I.T., as we think of it in generic corporate terms, really grew up out of the finance department. Like, we started using computers in corporations because we needed to crunch numbers. So software development emerging necessarily out of an I.T. function, that is really different from a tech company that was sort of natively starting with a cross-functional team as a startup and sort of grows from there. You know, now with startups, you do have to fight against the sort of silos that grow organically. But I think for big companies that have been around for a while, that are struggling through transformation, what is happening is just the whole structure of the company has to change. And that's really scary for people who have been in an organization for a long time, you know, run a particular department, a lot of their identity is wrapped around, “Well, all these people report to me. I'm the V.P. of whatever it is. So my sense of self and my value as a person in this company is based on my authority, that people will do what I say, and that I have this big department of people that report to me.” And so we really have to unlearn that stuff if we want to build an organization that's more flexible, that's more resilient, and that can adapt to change in the way that a digital or agile or lean sort of transformation would require.

Douglas: What are some of the signs that you might see that an organization is not autonomous enough, or they might be trying to make some of these changes, but they're just not successful?

Sam: There's an interesting set of patterns that I do see. One in particular springs to mind as you ask the question, which is that even in organizations where—so there’s sort of like two things that can happen, I think. One is the organization doesn't really want to change from being top-down command-and-control style but still wants the Agile teams to deliver or wants the product teams to build the right thing. And so you've got a culture where the folks on the ground who are doing the work are used to being order takers. Like, there's a big difference between being a sort of short-order cook and being a chef. Like, being someone who is just sort of following instructions, you get one style of work coming out of that. And folks who are making a lot of decisions on their own and being more collaborative, you get a different result. 

And then, also, I think you have times where the leadership team maybe suddenly becomes enlightened. I don't know if they read a book about autonomy on the airplane ride back from wherever, and they decide, like, “Okay, we have to announce that we're going to do all these new innovative things.” And so, you know, I've seen it where the top leadership says, “Okay, everybody, we're taking off the shackles. You're all now free to innovate. Please go forth and innovate.” And what you have is an organization full of people who just yesterday were being shouted at and told what to do and are now suddenly being told that they need to be free, independent thinkers. And it's a really abrupt shift in the culture. And so that shifting to an autonomous kind of organization takes time and patience and requires a lot of support and a lot of, what would you call maybe, baby steps. Like, small wins and gradual sort of earning of trust. You can't just sort of like throw everybody free and expect them to know how to operate collaboratively when they're used to being told what to do for years on end. So I think that creates a lot of challenges. 

By the time I get there, it's usually because things are broken or something's on fire. So, like, a lot of time—and I'm sure I'm not the only consultant that feels that way. You know, it's like often it can be a rescue job. But what has often happened is that somebody’s made the decision to go sort of go Agile, if you will, and they got some shiny consulting company to come in and give them a diagram of how you do it. They try it for a year or two. It doesn't really work. It doesn't really stick. Things are broken and on fire. And then, I show up and I look around, and I realize that it's really because there's not the shift in values from top to bottom in the culture. There's not a shift to—it's like we want the fruits of autonomy, but we don't necessarily want people to really have say over their work. And that just creates a lot of froth and friction. And then people say like, “Oh, well, we tried Agile, and it didn't work.”

Douglas: Let's talk a little bit about the shift of values. And so what does it look like when it's done correctly? And I imagine it's somewhat driven around the fact, the notion, that, well, as a leader, this notion of, well, what is my responsibility as a leader now? What does it mean to even be a leader in this new world? And also, I'm on the hook for making sure that the numbers come out correctly in this quarterly report and that we meet expectations for shareholders, etc. And so how do we balance giving over control with being responsible for outcomes? I'm pretty sure that aligns with what you're talking about around this, like, the shared values not being met. So just kind of curious to understand that more.

Sam: Yeah. I think that's really important. If you look at where the leadership literature is going these days, like if you did a search for top leadership books in the last 10 years or so, there's a really consistent pattern, and that pattern to me is a focus on relinquishing control of all the decisions and focusing instead on the leader acting as a coach to grow other leaders. So, like, the real hallmark of a good leader is that they can build the next generation of leaders below them to take their place, that they're focused on succession, they delegate well, and they help solve problems without directing and without micromanaging, but giving people room to grow. So we can actually connect it directly to say Carol Dweck's Mindsets, this concept of a growth or fixed mindset in an individual extends for sure to the organization and its culture as a whole. 

So I think when it's done well, people are approaching coaching teams and coaching new leaders that are emerging with really a growth mindset and with a focus on having some space to experiment and some safe-to-fail constraints. So you can draw a line around these experiments. You don't want to make them too big that, as you said, you're in danger of missing your numbers. So, like, we're talking primarily about businesses here that have to ship products and make customers happy and increase their market share and post earnings and post profits. 

And so there's always going to be that pressure to perform economically. I think that where the old style of leadership is falling away is that the world has become so complex and even the internal aspects of companies have become so complex that you can't be directive and prescriptive in the way that you can if you're sort of running a more traditional brick-and-mortar, manufacturing organization. In the world of digital in particular—frankly, let's face it. All companies are basically going to have to be digital now—the complexity is massive, and workers are doing work that's much more creative and knowledge work than moving widgets around, and so that kind of work has to be more emergent and collaborative. It's a team sport, especially in design and product development. And so you can't lead that kind of effort with commands. It has to be more like coaching. 

Frankly, I use a lot of parenting metaphors. When you think about what you do with your kids, I definitely had experiences myself with, my son’s trying to learn how to tie his shoes or something, and I'm sitting there, having to bite my tongue and not just reach over his shoulder, like, “No, give me that. Here's how you do it.” It takes a lot of patience for a leader to sit back and watch the people that report to them struggle. But if they don't struggle, they're not going to learn. So that's sort of where this growth-mindset stuff is really critical.

Douglas: So, let's go back to some of these baby steps. You talked about it being an anti-pattern to just read the book and to come in and say, “We're going to go autonomous. There's a new way of working, and we need to adapt or we're going to fail.” So what are some of the things that folks can do to get started, and how do they move more intentionally? And I know you get pulled in a lot to kind of fix the fires, but how can they avoid the fires in the first place? How could they do this more intentionally?

Sam: I think that it requires really acknowledging where you are, right? So it's critical to take stock of the current state, and that's the current state of, like, really, for me, that's typically three big pillars in my head of the technology, the process, and the people, the culture, the sort of communication styles and values, and really understanding what the current state is and having some idea of, if we're in a place that has rigid process and a culture of fear or toxicity or even just kind of like polite, passive aggressivity, which I actually see more often than anything else, and we have technology that's legacy and hard to change and brittle and antiquated, it’s really going to be dangerous to just dive in and try to change all of those things wholesale all at once. And so we can have a vision, we have to have a vision, for what we want our organization ultimately look like, or at least what we want it to feel like to work there. And I think that's actually a really important distinction. You know, people focus a lot in tech on sort of the left brain. They’re like, let's draw a diagram, and let's have maps and charts and spreadsheets. 

But I think there's a lot to be said about getting in touch with how we want to feel as a team. Like, what does it actually feel like to come into work every day? Are these people we want to work with? Is this work we want to do? Is there meaning and purpose to what we're trying to accomplish? Are we committed to being in this organization, given its stated mission and values? So I think they, like, having some vision of what the future looks like is really critical for any kind of change process. 

And then I think that we have to really only bite off as much as we can chew. Like, this is something, I'm almost saying this to myself because this was a hard lesson for me to learn even as a coach or consultant, where like, look, man, I live in Silicon Valley, and I've been in startups a lot of my career, and I've seen what a small cross-functional team of super smart, fast, flexible people can do in the marketplace. Going from a big old-fashioned organization to that sort of sexy-startup-looking organization is not an overnight thing. And I think I, maybe when I was first doing this work, was really impatient with my clients. I'm sort of like, “Look, I'll tell you how it's done, and I'll show you what good looks like. Let's just go, go, go.” And it's been a process for me to learn how to actually be really patient as well, that it's going to be a long road, it’s going to be very challenging, and all of those little steps are meaningful along the way. 

So if you have a manager, for example, like an engineering manager who's got a bunch of engineers that report to them, and they're trying to work with those people, just getting that engineering manager to think about and embrace their own fears and hopes and dreams and aspirations and think about what kind of leader do they want to be and just having them learn how to, okay, so you're going to have a one on one with your people. How do you make that one on one structured so that the person who reports to you is getting the most value out of it as possible and growing as an employee? So talking to an engineering manager who’s a client of mine for an hour about how to have a good one on one and how to start that process seems like a small thing to do in the context of a huge organization, but it's incredibly meaningful, and it's incredibly impactful. And now I've changed the way that engineering manager is thinking about leading their people forever, you know? It's like they'll never look at a one on one the same way. They'll always have a different, more valuable set of conversation. 

So for me, that's an example of a baby step, because really, like when we're in an organization, organizations are made of people, and people interact through conversations. And so you can think about like, oh, we're going to change the process or we're going to import this new shiny technology or we're going to make org-chart changes. But really what happens is organizations, as they're more fluid and they're more like squishy tribes or villages where the real work happens often one on one or in small groups of people having real conversations with each other and making decisions about what they believe is true and what they believe is not true and what they're willing to commit to in terms of change.

Douglas: Yeah. I once heard this quote that goes along the lines of, if there's more truth in the hallways than there is in meetings, and it kind of comes back to the point you were just making and-

Sam: Oh, for sure.

Douglas: I'm always curious to hear from folks, if you could change one thing about meetings, what would you change?

Sam: Oh, man. Boy, I think that—so with a little context, there is a lot of anti-meeting sentiment in my field, in tech, and I think it's misplaced, and I think it's probably because people just had a lot of bad meetings. I actually really enjoy bringing a small group of people together to have a conversation. That is typically what we might term a meeting. So I think the concept of having group conversations of some sort or another, there's nothing wrong with that. I think that, you know, where it runs all crazy is when, like, people are there that don't even need to be there. It's not clear why we’re there. You know, somebody thinks it's a discussion, and someone else thinks it's a one way update of information. 

So I think that it’s really hard to pick one thing, but I think that if everyone who came to a meeting decided when they were showing up that they were going to be totally honest and authentic and transparent in their communication at that meeting, like, just, say what is on your mind, if people could be really real in those conversations, it sure would change the tone of a lot of meetings. You know, because I think the opposite is what we're used to, which is everybody's kind of not sure if they should speak up. Maybe they're sort of issuing platitudes. Maybe they're kind of speaking out of one side of their mouth. Like, if all that stuff—that could all go away if everyone's like, “I'm just going to say 100 percent of what I believe 100 percent of the time. And then we'll negotiate the rest,” meetings would be a lot more—I mean, some of those conversations would be tougher, but we have better outcomes at the end of the day.

Douglas: That's right. And I think that's very, very possible, when you take a facilitator approach when you think about, like, never starting without a clear purpose, and being really intentional about how you structure the meeting, and you hold space for people to behave those ways. I think it's all possible. And it makes me think about the point you made earlier about in order to identify or prescribe those baby steps that are necessary, we have to take a close look at our current state and just get honest about where we are. I think that is an opportunity for starting the work that needs to be done. So if we're going to be more collaborative, more autonomous, why not create a collaborative group to do this current-state analysis? Let's launch off with these behaviors that we want to model and start doing them organically and build from there, and then the output of that yields more opportunity. It's almost like the kata in a way, right? Like, we're going to take a small incremental step, and then it builds on the next one and builds on the next one. 

Sam: I think piggybacking off of that reminds me that one of the things that's really missing in a lot of organizations is time and space for reflection. Whether it's collective or individual, I think that you can't really be aware of your current state unless you can sort of slow down, put the tools down for a minute, and look around and have some reflection time. And as an individual, I know that certainly the people that I coach, the number one problem that most of them have is that they don't have time or they don't demand time—they don't take enough time. Let's put it that way—in their schedules for reflection. All the leadership books are like, leaders got to take an hour and block off their calendar and sit and stare at a blank piece of paper or go for a walk or whatever just to let the brain catch up with what's been going on. Like, the neuroscience is well established. Reflection is critical. So is rest, you know? 

And so I find that as individuals, we’re so rushing through the rat race, that is our economies all the time and under so much pressure to perform and give in and show up, that taking a little reflection for yourself, it feels selfish, it feels irresponsible, and it's completely the opposite. It's critical. You know, that phrase, like, look, when you're on the airplane, they say put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. Like, that's a good metaphor for thinking about leaders needing to take some time, really anyone, but certainly folks who are in a leadership position, to look back at how we're doing and also for the organization itself, kind of back more specifically to your point, having group or organizational reflection time. I think that if we want to enact change, we need to be able to stop sawing—to take a page from Stephen Covey—and sharpen the saw a little bit. That requires a slow down and reflect. So I think if we were to build that into our company cultures and our values more explicitly, I think it would have a huge impact, a positive impact.

Douglas: Yeah. You know, it definitely resonates with me. We often think a lot about even moments of reflection, debrief, when we’re designing meetings and workshops, because that's the moment where people integrate. Like, if we just teach, teach, teach, teach and cram stuff in, well, that's just horrible anyway, but there's no moment for them to really integrate what they've learned. So ideally, there's a lot of practice. They're going to hands on and doing things. But then we want to have them take a step back and go, “What does this mean? How do we make sense of all this?” and then translate it in, into the work at hand. And so I think not only when it's about picking up new skills or coming together on a challenge or some sort of opportunity, it can be everyday work, but taking a chance to reflect. I think for a lot of us, the drive home or the subway ride home after work was that moment where we could do that, and now we don't have that affordance, and so being, especially in this time of the pandemic, let's be intentional about these reflection times and moments. 

Sam: Yeah. That's created a lot of pressure on people, I think. It's interesting to look at the required remote work that we're all doing. I mean, I definitely, like, I have an economics background, like a political-economy background. And so I remember back in the day, a lot of people really being worried about, oh, your work is bleeding over into your personal time. The boss is able to call you at night or send you an email, and we all got our smartphones. And so the line between work and life outside of work is really blurry. And actually, I think that there's a huge risk, despite a lot of probably warranted cheerleading about how cool remote work can be and that people are learning how to be distributed teams, and I think a lot of that can be great, and it's really great for the business to not have as much pressure on maintaining an office space like they used to. But for the individual folks doing the work, do they actually feel like they can turn the machine off and have their own lives? And so I do worry about that blurry line, I guess, where we sort of, the diplomatic way to talk about it in Silicon Valley would be work-life balance. There are other more sharp ways of saying that. 

But I think that's really important that when you think about reflection time, the conversations in the hallways rather than the meetings, or often at conferences, it used to be that you go to all these talks, and it’d be really interesting one-way communication, but the real cool stuff would be at lunch or outside or on walks or in the hallways between sessions. That's people talking to each other and processing what they just learned and figuring out how to integrate it, as you said. And that integration is really critical, and so if we were actually able to build reflection time more intentionally into our workflows, in our process, and our company culture, that would, I think, soak up a lot of that need that people have to chat with each other and process and have that moment of reflection, that sharpening the saw that we all need to do both as individuals and as organizations. 

Douglas: Yeah, I think it's interesting, this notion of not only reserving the personal time, but accounting for and reserving time for the group to do it so that there can be a group synthesis. It reminds me of the Agile retrospective. I think if you really get down to the principles behind it and why we do it, I think there is very much one and the same with what we're talking about right now. I think the problem that I see that’s super pervasive and pathological, really, is that people use the retrospective as a way to just address problems that have arisen, and they don't actually do it on a frequent-enough basis to where they are celebrating the wins, integrating the wins, realizing when they slip through by the skin of their teeth and being able to make incremental change. That's one of the things I can easily get on a soapbox about. When I’m working with teams, it’s like, man, you got to do this frequently, and it can't be just a tool that you pull out when something goes wrong. 

Sam: Yeah, absolutely. And it can be a forum for a lot of blame and shame, too, like, whether it's explicit or just kind of under the covers, the idea of not taking responsibility ourselves for what we want to do better or want to make better. And I think there's a lot of pressure on a facilitator for sure, retros probably more than anywhere, except maybe like an actual conflict resolution, that facilitator to make sure that people are learning how to listen as much as they're learning how to express. And I think that's a big thing we're also missing in corporate culture. 

I make it a big part of the sort of the curriculum and coaching work that I do in leadership is around empathy and learning how to listen and learning how to listen in a way where it's not just waiting for the other person to finish talking, but actually trying to put yourself in their shoes and hang on their every word and really integrate what's being said, like, really build some empathy there. That's real listening. And so I think the onus is on us, as coaches and consultants and facilitators, to teach people in our organizations how to do that. You know, that's something that doesn't come out of management school, doesn't come out of technical school, barely comes out of social sciences, if at all. 

Douglas: That's a nice segue because I was going to mention we've had discussions over the past few weeks just about the social unrest in America and how we play our part in breaking the silence and not being complicit and trying to be anti-racist as much as possible. And I remember in those discussions, whether at—various books came up, and you make comments about, “Oh, I read this in school.” And so it makes so much sense now that you studied social sciences and were really focused on kind of social justice, social-good-type work before you got into tech. And so I just wanted to touch on this because I know that we've both been grappling this and figuring out how to engage in anti-racist policies and just bring that into the work we do, port it, and just be good allies. I'm just wondering what you’ve found to be successful and what you might have to offer others that are listening and are just looking to add to their toolkit.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, definitely something that's really important to me. I mean, I think that my perspective has really shifted over time but also in these last few weeks. I read a lot. In college, I studied social sciences. I read a lot about social issues like racism and sexism and other isms in school. And I think that when I got into the tech scene in my mid 20s, I was doing organizing and stuff when I first came out to California. I was kind of a rabid activist, if you will. And when I got into the tech scene, I think that a transformation happened where I erected a firewall between my personal and political and social values and my professional persona. And so for many years, and I've been in tech for 20 years, so let's just say for 20 years, I've experimented with ways of getting involved in merging sort of social-impact stuff with tech. Working at change.org was one way. There were a couple of other examples of sort of trying to figure out a way to bridge those two worlds. 

But I really know that I stand on a mountain of privilege, right? So, like, I'm a white guy. I'm hetero. I’m in tech. I work for myself. Like, you could just pile it on, right? And I think that what this latest wave of organizing, you know, and I don't even really necessarily like the term social unrest so much. I think it's sort of maybe accidentally demonizes what is a long tradition of grassroots organizing to change things in this country, whether it's the civil-rights movement or the anti-war movements or the labor movement. I mean, there’s a rich tradition of people coming together across many social lines to change things in the conscious. Really, ideally, I mean, really, that's the only way change has really happened for real. 

And so for me, I think that what I've been really grappling with the last several years as there's been increasing polarization in the country, is how do I leverage my privilege and my platform to weigh in on the conversation. And I think that I can readily admit that I have been scared to break the firewall between where I stand socially and politically in my private life, with my friends and family and stuff, and this sort of professional, polished persona that I've had, that I've built my livelihood on. And one of the really significant things that is different for me personally about the latest sort of, like, unprecedented wave of national interest in supporting black lives and being anti-racist is that I, among many others of my colleagues, have really started to knock down those walls and be much more public and much more vocal. 

And so I've been trying to do that, and I've been trying to be fairly deliberative and careful about how I do it. One of the things, I think—I’ve never seen so many people in my professional circles grappling with, how do we as white people support movement for black lives? You know, how do we be good allies? And people are really trying to learn, really trying to be sensitive, knowing that it's uncomfortable and making a lot of mistakes. And I've been really impressed, to be honest, with how much the folks that I spend my time with are embracing the challenge of fighting against racism as white people who, let's face it, it's our problem. It's our responsibility, and we benefit from it, and to sort of say, “Look, we're not going to do it right. It's going to be hard. Not to guilt, shame, embarrassment, all that stuff. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to put your foot in your mouth. You’re going to have—people are going to criticize you no matter what you do.” And that's part of the process. That just has to be okay. 

And so I think the big shift for me internally is I'm not scared anymore. I don't really care anymore. This is—I'm seeing now how important it is for people like me to really say something and take a stand. And I feel like I've got to a point, not just professionally, but in my life, sort of personally, morally, spiritually, whatever you want to say, where I'm going to say the right thing, and I don't care what anybody thinks, you know? And I think that really—I'm fired up. I want to try to contribute in whatever way I can. And I am happy to join up with other people that want to have these difficult discussions and figure it out. I'm a little dismayed in some ways that more folks from the tech community, the innovation community, the sort of Agile groups in the world haven’t readily come out and been more vocal about these sort of social issues. For folks who really purport to be all about data and continuous improvement and a growth mindset, like, the writing is on the wall. It’s right there. Why those folks can choose to be silent, it boggles my mind. 

So I'm pretty committed to being out there and being a lot more noisy in support of anti-racism and in support of Black Lives Matter for sure right now, among a number of other social forces that are changing our world right now. So this is a new time, and I’m really embracing it.

Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. I think to your point, whether it's intentional, people are afraid of those firewalls, or definitely afraid of dismantling them. And they're put there. And I’ve been talking a lot with folks around this notion of professionalism and what it means to be professional. And I think that we've created this dynamic where it's unsafe to be human. Like, we’re not supposed to bring our emotions. We're not supposed bring “politics.” And sure, we don't want to get in massive debates over who we’re for, etc. But I think caring for our neighbors and making sure that we create a safe environment that's inclusive and supportive of everyone goes beyond politics, and that's just human decency, and I don't see why human decency is unprofessional. And so I'm with you in solidarity on tearing down these firewalls. I've been actively working on it as well. 

And, you know, I'd like to say thanks for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure. I'd like to just wrap with any—well, I want to make sure that the listeners know how to find you, and you mentioned your book. And then if there's anything you want to leave us with, a parting message. So how can they find you, and what do you want to leave them with?

Sam: Sure. So I'm easy to find. Two different ways. You can search for Startup Patterns, startuppatterns.com. We'll come right up in the search results. That's my site. A big LinkedIn user, Sam McAfee. It’s very easy to find on LinkedIn. I really encourage people to reach out to me there, connect with me. let's have a conversation. So there's just are the two easiest ways to get connected with me. 

I think that what I would want to leave people with is this is a time that we are in that is unlike anything the world has ever been through before. And it's there for a number of reasons. The pandemic, for sure, is a giant change. It's sort of incomparable to historical events. The sort of associated economic turmoil that comes with it. And now this major social movement that was a long time in the making, but it's really broken the surface. And I think people are thinking and rethinking how they feel about what we want, what kind of world we want to have in ways that they've never been doing before. And I think for me, the personal is political and the political is personal. So there's a lot of internal and individual transformation work that goes along with changing the world. And I just don't want people to forget that. It's not all about going out there. It's not all about the public conversations, and going and being at the rallies and writing and reading and posting and discussing are really important. There’s also a lot of internal grappling that we all need to do and just know that you're not the only one. And a lot of us are going through this major reckoning with things that we thought we believed or we thought we valued and really thinking about transforming ourselves from the inside. And so that's a lot of what I focus on, the folks that I work with and friends of mine, around, how do we support each other through that very challenging but necessary personal transformation so that we can really build a world that we all really want to live in?

Douglas: Awesome. Thank you for being on the show, Sam. It's been a great opportunity to talk with you. And I really enjoy the conversation.

Sam: Thanks. Me, too. This has been really great. Thanks for having me. 

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 work with the agencies who are culture driven, meaning that, yes, we can make more money, but we'd rather make a little less money and put culture first, because we understand that it's a marathon, right? Like, we understand that if our employees are happy, it's going to make our situation a lot better." Kaleem Clarkson

This week on the Control the Room Podcast, I'm excited to speak with Kaleem Clarkson, COO and Co-founder of Blend Me, Inc., a consulting firm that cultivates remote employee experiences from onboarding through off-boarding. He has a particular interest in culture-driven organizations.

Kaleem is also the COO of RemotelyOne, a members-only community on a mission to end remote work isolation by connecting and building relationships between location-independent professionals.

Kaleem and I speak about the different types of remote work, why some companies are struggling to transition to remote work, and why it's so important for a job posting to accurately represent your organization's culture. Listen in to find out how Kaleem's experience as a member of a college metal band led to his career as an employee experience expert.

Show Highlights

[2:43] Blind Melon, Slick Rick, & Warped Tour

[13:43] The Teleworks Big Three

[20:16] The commonality between organizations struggling to work remotely

[28:56] Company culture clubs

[34:48] Handling employee anxieties during COVID-19 layoffs

Links | Resources

Blend Me, Inc.

RemotelyOne

Kaleem on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Kaleem Clarkson is an employee experience expert and remote work advocate helping organizations build intentional employee lifecycles that begin at initial job postings and end after off-boarding. He is the COO and Co-founder of Blend Me, Inc. a remote employee experience consultancy. He is also the COO of RemotelyOne, a members-only community for location-independent professionals.

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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Android

Stitcher

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 Kaleem Clarkson, co-founder and chief operating officer of Blend Me, Inc. He is a remote-employee-experience professional, and developing RemotelyOne, a community for location-independent professionals. Welcome to the show, Kaleem.

Kaleem: Douglas, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I hear this crowd applause in the background. Let's get that in post-production. I love it.

Douglas: Awesome. So, Kaleem, I'm really curious to hear how an employee-experience professional gets their start. How do you find your way on this path?

Kaleem: That's a good question. I probably should have this ready by now. But I guess I'll start my origin story. I guess this is my origin story. So born and raised in Bangor, Maine. I'm going way back. Bangor, Maine, represent. I always love to throw it out. My home state, I love it. But I ended up going to college in Massachusetts. Got a chance to play at Western State University. Got a chance to play some college football there. And during that time, we all had a very good time. Let's put it that way. I enjoy having beverages with people, making sure that everyone else is having a good time, and we ended up throwing a good amount of gatherings, should you say, in college. And started getting into a metal band, believe it or not. Just got into a metal band and started rocking out. Love the stage. Love that whole feel to it. And that led me to starting a nonprofit organization called Concerts for Charity, which I think we started in '99. And we started putting on different concerts with different charities across New England. We got our 513(c) status and started donating to different charities, and we got to work with a lot of cool bands in different areas—you know, a lot of jam bands, a lot of hard-rock bands. We worked with—jeez, I'm trying to think of some bands that we booked in the past. I think we booked Blind Melon on their comeback tour, which was pretty cool. Chk, Chk, Chk out in Sacramento, I remember back in the day. I think we booked Slick Rick, a rapper. If you don't know, some of the old-school folks.

Douglas: Colleague of Doug E. Fresh, if I'm not mistaken.

Kaleem: Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's funny is we went and picked him up at the airport or whatever, and he gets in the car, and total British accent. You know? So, you don't think about that, like, dude's been living in England all these years. And gets in, and he's like, "Hello." Horrible British accent, by the way. That's horrible.

But anyway, yeah. So I got a chance doing that, and that was really kind of my first experience with dealing with virtual volunteers. VolunteerMatch at the time, we ended up connecting with the Warped Tour, and were able to register people to vote through a group called HeadCount as well. Anyway, it was great. It was a cool experience. We got to do a documentary that featured Trey Anastasio from Phish, Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones—really big artists in the jam-band scene. And we got to debut it at HBO. So it was cool. I was probably only, what, 21 years old, 22 years old? I really got my first taste of putting on events and just kind of sitting back and watching everybody having a good time. And I think that's the common theme, right? Everyone was just having a good time. Everyone has that cup, that Red Solo Cup, and that really cheap beer. But everyone's having a good time, generally.

And yeah, so I kind of move on. Moved to Atlanta, my partner and I, and get a job at Kennesaw State University at Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. And that's like a faculty-development center. They basically teach faculty how to teach. I don't know if you knew that, you know, a lot of people may not know this, but college professors, they graduate with a PhD, and they put right in the classroom, so they don't go through any teaching training or anything like that, a lot of them. So, yeah, yeah, it was cool. I got to put on a lot of international conferences there. Again, I'm putting on parties again, right, except in a different setting. That was the kind of interesting, or educational piece to me. I didn't realize faculty also enjoy having a good time, and they do.

So, yeah, all these professional conferences, got a chance to put some of those on, and really kind of just didn't even realize that—I was there for 10 or 12 years. And I would have to say in 2012, I believe, during my work at Kennesaw, I got heavily involved with the Drupal community, and Drupal's an open-source website-application tool, kind of like WordPress, build websites with it. So kind of got involved with that community. And again, that was another experience of being with like-minded people. It was outside of my previous experience of concerts and the entertainment industry, and then getting in the higher ed around faculty in the higher ed industry. Well, now I'm around other computer digital marketers and digital professionals, you know, developers. And yeah, I got heavily involved with Drupal and started building websites, and I kind of became a Drupal developer. And last year, or probably a year and a half ago, yeah, a year, I left higher ed and decided to get involved with a company called Oomph as a UX engineer and started doing some front-end development work.

But the cool thing about Drupal and open source is, again, the networks of people that you meet. And during that time, it was 2012, that I was at a conference in Denver, DrupalCon Denver, and I heard a talk by, his name is Matt Westgate from a company called Lullabot. They're a big development firm. I think they did the Grammy's website and some other big ones. But anyway, yeah, I went to that talk, and he was talking about how to run a virtual organization. And he talked about why they weren't using the word remote and why they were using the word distributed and how those words, what those words actually could mean to people. And I recall him saying remote felt like you were distant from something.

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Kaleem: You were away from a group of people. So it was fascinating. Like, at that time, 2012, it seems like 100 years ago, but there weren't very many people talking about how to work remotely. So I came home, and my partner, she had graduated two years before that, in 2010, with her master's degree from Yukon in organizational development. And she actually wrote her master's paper thesis on virtual volunteerism, because my charity had hooked up with the Warped Tour, and we had virtual volunteers all over the country. So I came home from that, and I was talking with Jen, and I said, "I think we found something. I think we should do our own thing," and she was all about it.

She was looking for strategic HR jobs, and there weren't very many. People love those jobs, by the way. I'll use VP of people and CHRO of people; they don't really leave those jobs, because those jobs, they're great. Strategic HR's obviously a much bigger thing now. So we just decided to create Blend Me, Inc. I kind of took care of the marketing, and then she would take care of the engagement, and that's how we kind of came up with the name.

So she worked for a while at a company that was all distributed. And, you know, we kind of did some consulting on the side with some diversity inclusion. And at the end of the day, you realize all of your experiences are kind of what, together, are who you are, and I was very fortunate in that I had been at companies for—I was at Kennesaw for a very long time, 11 years, and it was because we had a great time. And now, if I'm looking back, you asked me the origin question of how you become an employee-experience professional, you just look back and think about all of the situations and the moments you had that were special with a special group where you accomplished big goals. We accomplished a lot of great things there, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were all having a really, really good time.

So this year, with COVID, I decided that it's time to go full time, that we no longer had that obstacle of proving to people that remote work, you can be productive. That has always been an obstacle. And honestly, what we decided from day one, 2012, when we're writing our mission statement, we said we did not want to work with agencies that wanted us to prove that remote work was the right answer. We didn't want to get into that type of work, because trying to prove to somebody that, no, you could do this, it's just not really in our—we want to help people that have already kind of gone over that hump or already believe that it can be successful, because if there's not a belief from the very top all the way through the organization, it doesn't come through as authentic.

So what's interesting is for all these years, there's been a very small market. But I firmly believe, and I think we can all agree, that from March of 2020 on, I don't think any manager—well, in certain industries, I shouldn't say that—but I'm going to say in 90 percent of jobs today that we have behind a desk or in an office, it's going to be very difficult for managers to say that you're not productive.

So, yeah, that's the whole origin story. I think I got it in, like, eight minutes. I got to work on cutting it down a little bit. But, yeah, that's how we kind of came to this point.

Douglas: Yeah. And I really want to dig in on the definition of remote versus distributed. And, you know, even virtual is kind of mixed in there as well. I ran into this when I was first venturing out of my own and kind of exploring this kind of concept of fractional CTO. And at first I was calling myself a virtual CTO, and someone asked me—it was a junior developer—they said, "So does that mean it's all in the cloud?" And so I thought maybe this word virtual is not a good fit here.

That story or that notion of misinterpretation of the word virtual is I know exactly what you're getting at around remote versus distributed. And I think that a lot of those notions really held us back. But now that everyone's been thrust into this experience where they've been forced to grapple with it, to wrap their hands around it, they're starting to understand that there are some benefits, and things maybe aren't as bad as they might imagine.

Kaleem: Absolutely. And you know what really the difficulty with our industry—and when I say "our," I just mean remote work or telework industry—is that we don't have an association now. I know Laurel Farrer has just created the Remote Work Association, and I give her kudos to that. And I believe—what's her name from FlexJobs?—Sara—can't remember her name, but she started FlexJobs. They created the one-million-person march campaign. There's been different, like, spin-off campaigns.

But one thing that I've learned from higher ed is when you have the National Society for Statistics, Mathematics and Statistics, you know, that's an organization that spits out all the knowledge. When you have SHRM—Society for Human Resource Management—or you have these major-field associations, there is research. There's guidance. There are definitions. There are thought leaders.

And for me and for us when we were trying to talk to clients about the different types of "remote" work, we just always got stuck. Me, having that thought of, well, let's find the history, and realizing that, oh, okay, well, outside of the U.S., a lot of countries use the term telework. The government agencies use the word telework. You know, there's telework guidance guidelines for the government—well, before, but I'm pretty sure that they still exist somewhere. So then we were struggling with that.

So for us, we just figured, okay, we need to come up with our own definitions for when we're working with clients. And we wanted it to show homage to Jack Nilles for coming up with the word telework in 1973. It's kind of a little outdated definition, but we just kind of thought, like, okay, all of these different things of telework, and when we're thinking about the different types, we realized that a lot of the terms are related to a central workplace. So for us, what we decided to do is come up with our own definitions.

Here we go. We call them teleworks big three, right? So we kind of go with, all of it's telework work, but a distributed company doesn't have a centralized workplace. So when we're talking with our clients, we're like, "Oh, yeah. We're a remote company. We don't have an office." We'll say, "Okay, well, for our purposes, when we're in our meetings and when we're talking about the programs that we have, we're going to refer to your agency as a distributed company because you don't have a centralized workplace." So employees, they work from wherever they're the most productive and the most comfortable. So that's distributed.

Then we came to the common word of remote. And what drove us to this was back to that 2012 talk of the reason why they don't use the word remote was that it felt like you were away from the centralized workplace. Well, Lullabot was 100 percent distributed. They didn't have a central workplace. But remote employees are away from a centralized workplace. So to me and to us, when we're talking to—not to me, but internally speaking—remote employees are people who work away from the office. So you have a centralized office, there are people that are going into the office every day, but you also have some remote employees. So that's how we kind of label that.

And then our last one is kind of like the telecommuter, telecommute. You know, telecommute employees share their time between a central workplace and working wherever they feel comfortable.

So to us, that's kind of how we've broken it down. I'd be awesome if everybody out there in the whole remote workspace would say, "Hey, this is great. Let's all agree to this." As far as posting social media, remote work is very popular, the term remote work. And we're kind of still in that space as well, so we understand. But when we're internal, I kind of feel like there are definitely differences.

Another word that we've seen before to replace kind of remote employee is maybe hybrid. You know, we've heard people talk about a hybrid setup and a hybrid setup means half the people are in a central workplace and half the people are not.

So I do feel like it's really important. I wish, I hope somebody steps up and maybe the Remote Work Association will be that governing body for all of us, where we can all post our research too and be a place. For right now, I guess we'll use the term remote work when we're talking to the rest of the world and just try to clarify the differences between the different types, because there's a major difference in communication facilitation and how you're going to manage your team based on the types of telework that you're implementing.

Douglas: Absolutely. And I would imagine that the tactics would be quite different and maybe even the programs which you might use to address the concerns or the needs.

So when you think about these three, this taxonomy, when you're working with clients, is there one category that you find is most popular?

Kaleem: Yeah. There's no doubt that what we call remote or "hybrid" is the most popular, especially like today—you know, so it's kind of a difficult question because it's like, well, are you talking about before or after? So before; let's just talk about before. Before, and I'm saying just so the world knows I'm talking about before COVID-19, okay? Before COVID-19, I would say there were definitely more hybrid companies or remote companies where they had people working in a central workplace and some people working remotely. Telecommuter, it's kind of, you know, I would say a lot of agencies allow their people to work from home a couple of times. So I would say definitely between telecommuting agencies that lets you work from home a couple of times a week and the hybrids were by far the most popular.

Douglas: And what do you think folks are learning as they're shifting a bit, as far as their ability to set the frequency at which people were remote? They went from being a part-time, somewhat sometimes kind of thing to being a full-time thing. And I'm sure you've seen them kind of struggle from—because I would imagine some of the practices and approaches they were using, let's say the weaknesses maybe started to show more once they started to lean more heavily into it. So I'm curious what you noticed. As folks have been forced to be more remote, what have they noticed that broke down? What was no longer working for them? And I'm interested from a pattern standpoint. Like, what's been consistent across most of your conversations? What are you hearing that's like a...kind of a very common issue that's been breaking down for folks as they have become more remote?

Kaleem: There's no doubt it's been communication. We kind of used to brand ourselves as an internal-marketing agency, and we still do a lot of internal marketing. But there's no doubt that the communication has been one of the biggest breakdowns, because you weren't set up to do this. One of the things that we talk about when you're designing your employee experience is you have to look at it from the day they look at your job ad to the day that they are departing. And if you don't have a plan—and you know this with meetings—if you don't have an agenda, right, or you don't have a set of goals that are intentional, then your product's not going to most likely be as good. And then that goes for the same thing with internal communication and doing remote work.

The ones who are struggling are the ones who did not have good internal-marketing practices in place. The organizations who are struggling are the ones who don't trust their employees. The ones who are really having a tough time are the ones who did not take on the responsibility of providing enough resources, enough training, enough documentation to allow you to be distributed now.

So it's really interesting to see the companies who haven't even missed a beat. A lot of the Drupal companies in the web-development space, I'm learning a lot of this, the culture and the practice and stuff, from some of these companies. They're going on—you know that talk that I'm telling you about is 2012. Another company, Four Kitchens, I mean, they're another Drupal company. They've been distributed now for, jeez, probably eight years. And the company I work for, they've had distributed people.

So the organizations who are not having a challenge at all are the ones who are already prepared to be remote already. So, you know, just to kind of re-emphasize, the ones who did not have their internal-communications strategy set up are the ones who are struggling the most. There's no doubt.

Douglas: Yeah. And so what are the hallmarks of a good internal-marketing program? How do we bolster those communication plans?

Kaleem: Whew, yeah, that's a deep one. That's a deep one. So just not just internal marketing. I probably shouldn't say the ones who didn't have the internal-marketing plan, but more along the lines of, you didn't have your whole employee experience planned out, because you can have the best internal marketing set up, but if you haven't explained how your culture works or what your culture's like, a remote employee can't feel that. So I guess I should say, you know, yes, internal marketing is critical because it's part of communication. That's a huge piece. But in the whole employee experience, there are a lot of steps.

And I would say Gallup, for all you researchers out there, Gallup, we've been quoting Gallup a long time for all of the awesome research they've done on remote work: how many people work remotely? They're one of the best that have been producing it. They kind of came up with this great diagram of what the employee experience is like. I'll just kind of go through those different spaces, because internal marketing kind of fits kind of within these things, right?

So their first thing that they talk about is attract. How is your job description written? Does it reflect the type of people that work at your agency? And are you attracting the type of people that you want to be at your agency? So what's your culture statement look like? Do you have a page that talks about your culture? Do you meet every single day? Is it more of a Netflix—work-90-hours-a-week-type culture, or are you more like work whenever you feel comfortable? So that's important that your website's set up right.

Then, you got to hire. Is your hiring practice matching what you've already talked about? Are you interviewing with multiple people on the teams? Are you meeting those people? Do you have a chance to talk to the culture club or people outside of your team instead of just your team?

Then, you have to onboard the people. So now you're only at step three. Onboarding and onboarding alone are very, very thorough. Onboarding program can be up to 18 months. You're talking about, okay, you'll get 30-, 60-, 90-day reviews, and you have to kind of establish what your goals kind of were. And so onboarding can be long.

Then, you have engagement. You got to make sure your employee's engaged. So you have engagement pieces.

Then, you have to set up and go to performance. You got to make sure your performance evaluations are set up correctly. Make sure that everybody understands what is expected of you to be successful at that organization.

And then you have to develop them, right? And then they depart at some point.

So this huge step of, like, seven steps of the whole employee experience, what we've realized from remote work is that you have to have trust. Trust is even more critical. Trust is even more critical because, you know, are you an agency that is going to try to have a piece of software that takes snapshots of your individuals every 90 seconds? Or are you a results-only-type agency that cares more about the results and understands that, hey, with school the way it is in some places, people may not be able to work all day. You know, people may have to work at a different time. So trust is critical.

And then, we kind of talked about responsibility earlier. You have to have this—you know, to work remotely, there's a sense of responsibility both on the employee and on the employer. It's a very two-way street.

So, like, this whole, whole thing is kind of what is the pillar of the remote-employee experience, kind of something that we're kind of labeling as "tree", trust and responsibility. In order for you to get that set up, you just have to start at the beginning, and you have to be intentional of what it is that you're trying to accomplish in each step.

So, I know I didn't answer your question specifically about, like, what are some of the pillars in establishing a good internal-marketing strategy? But, you know, I just kind of wanted to really emphasize that you need to think about this whole thing and not just the internal-marketing side. You have to think about this whole thing, because now we don't have those office places that people can talk to and interact with. You know, now people are distributed behind a computer. So you really do have to think about the whole spectrum.

Douglas: Yeah, that makes sense. What is that journey the employees taking, and how can you meet them at various moments in that journey with intention?

Kaleem: Yeah. Yeah. And we're just seeing it right now. The groups who really, really, really care about their employees, that are—what we like to say is we like to work with agencies who are culture driven. And to us, what that means is, listen, we all want to make money. I kind of feel like people trip sometimes when you talk about we care about people. Even nonprofits, people—look, nonprofits make money, people, just so you know this. And I used to tell people about this all the time. A nonprofit, a 513(c) is an IRS designation. All that means is that entity does not have shareholders. Charities make profits. Your business has to make profits to be sustainable. So with all of that said, we work with the agencies who are culture driven, meaning that, yes, we can make more money, but we'd rather maybe only make a little less money and put culture first, because we understand that it's a marathon, right? Like, we understand that if our employees are happy, it's going to just make our situation a lot better. So I think one thing I like to talk about is culture-driven agencies.

Douglas: Yeah, I like that, this notion that that's a priority and a focus for the leadership.

So I want to talk a little bit about some tactics. And something that we talked about, or that I noticed, in some of our preshow exchange was around the use of Google Docs and how you can, as a remote tool, use that to focus the team into a common task. So I'm just really curious around what are some things that people can go do today, whether it's, like, use Google Docs in this fashion, if you want to elaborate on that, or it could be any other tactic or approach, but what's something that they can just go literally try out and improve their employee experience?

Kaleem: All right. That's cool. I like that. I like that. So I'm just going to kind of go through each one of them. I think that kind of will make a little bit more sense in my brain.

So the first thing that you can do to attract the type of employees that you want, I learned this, actually, with Oomph, inc. is they created a culture club, which I thought was pretty neat. Get some of your team together, make it voluntary, and say, "Hey, you know what. We want to kind of rewrite what our culture statement is like to better fit who we are today. And we want to kind of better illustrate what it's like to be a part of this team." I like to use team instead of family. Sometimes families…you know. So, yeah, "What is it like to be a part of this team?" so that you're attracting the right people.

The other thing, too, is to kind of attract some of those people that you're looking at, get outside of your normal bubble and market yourself, but—we love to say, and now I'm going to kind of talk about engaged—look for people that are going to add to your culture instead of culture fit. So we like to use the word culture ad versus culture fit. Culture's great, but we all talk about why is culture great aside from the obvious reasons from a personal and emotional level.

Back to business, you want as many different people on your team so that you have different perspectives. Like, if you want to just talk about "Straight cash, homey," T.O. quote, it's more about having people, more variety of people, on your team so that you have different perspectives. You know, just think of Corn Pops. If Corn Pops would've had maybe more people on their marketing team, they wouldn't have sent out that Corn Pops box years ago, where the only brown Corn Pops person as the janitor. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's a huge gaffe, right?

So that's attract. So that's one thing that you could do. Maybe get a culture club together, try to rewrite your culture statement.

With hiring, I would say a good one is—oh, yeah. This is a simple one. This is more probably along the lines of in your wheelhouse of facilitation—do not, by all means, do an interview with—and I'm sorry to say this, Owl Labs, because you have an awesome product, but it feels awkward—don't do an interview with your team at a conference table and the employee remote. I understand—I think Owl Labs cameras are the best. Now I can't get it out of my head. It's an unbelievable product, in my opinion. You know, it kind of jumps around to the person that's speaking, and the camera shows the whole room, and it kind of goes back and forth. It's super cool. Like, I would suggest it for any agency that has multiple board rooms in different places that are meeting and talking. But when you have an interviewee, their first impression, and they're trying to talk with you and you're at a conference-room table with eight of your colleagues side by side, there is already an us-versus-them experience. So it's already a "I'm here, and you're there." So my suggestion is just get everybody on Zoom or whatever video system you're using. Equality, it's about the same. So put everyone on the same call, the same platform, the same camera. Everywhere the same.

Douglas: Yeah. You know, I've said that for years. Like, if we're facilitating and someone's remote, everyone should be remote because we want to level the playing field. Otherwise, it's going to be hard to empathize if we're not all experiencing what everyone else is or what those few individuals are experiencing. And it reminds me of all-hands meetings years and years ago, where people would dial into it. And then I thought to myself, what is it like to actually dial into one of these things? So I dialed into one, and it was—I mean, I couldn't hear anything. It was [muffled]. And then you'd hear people talking like that, and you'd think, oh, I don't know. I don't even know what anyone's saying. And maybe every now and then you could make out a few things the CEO said but definitely didn't hear any questions or any dialogue. And it's, like, really not great. And so I love that point of, like, let's level the playing field.

Kaleem: Yeah. Yeah.

So then for onboarding, so you're kind of talking about Google Docs and stuff. But for onboarding, simple solution, like, you got to have a place where someone's going to learn about the organization. Believe it or not, a lot of companies don't have a moment to hear the origin story. Like, we talked about my origin story earlier. And to a lot of people, they may fast forward, but, like, hey, I love to rep Bangor. You know, there's an emotion to why a business got started. You know what I mean? There's something outside. There's a story. And if people don't know that story, then they may not understand what it is, you know, what are the values that are driving the organization?

So to me, I know onboarding is not the initial, it's not the first interaction with the agency. It's not even where first opinions happen, because it's in the third step. We're in the third step, right? I mean, we understand that your first impression is definitely the job description. I mean, when people look at the jobs, their first impression is the job description, and then they go on your website. But when you're onboarding, this is kind of like the first time that employees get to interact or participate. This is the first time that the individual's participating. So this is a really, really, really crucial moment to let them know what that origin story is and let them know what values are driving your organization.

So one of my first recommendations is just record a video of the founder. I mean, it doesn't even have to be crazy. Just record a video of when the founder got the idea for the business and why the founder started it, and then maybe a little bit about what drives the company. Because right now, COVID-19, if you have to let go of 20 people, or maybe you have a staff of 100 and you got to let go 20 or 30 people, those other people that are there, they go through all sorts of emotions, never mind the people that you let go. But the people that are staying there are going through some stuff. They lost some friends that are no longer employed. There's a little bit of uncertainty about the future. If all your employees know what drives you even during uncertain times, a lot of these anxieties that make people nervous and get people looking for other options will be erased.

So onboarding is so critical, and I can't give away all my secrets.

Douglas: Sure, sure.

Kaleem: So I would say the video is something simple. If you don't have a quick little video that somebody can watch or even, like, a couple paragraphs, how you got started and why you got started and then what drives you. And I know people use the word values all the time. I'm trying to use different words than mission and vision and all that stuff. But what drives your company?

Douglas: Yeah. And a couple things I would add there. It's like so many companies talk about values, and even in the job description, they'll describe things that are aspirational and not necessarily—they're not really conveying the fact that we are that culture that's working 60, 80 hours a week. And if you plan to retain people and you're doing that, you should be pretty honest about it up front, right?—

Kaleem: Right. Yes, be honest.

Douglas: —rather than tricking people into coming in. And then the same thing with values, right? If they're just some words that we adopted because they sound like stuff that, you know, you put on values—

Kaleem: Hardworking, go-getter. I mean, like, what is that?

Douglas: Yeah. And integrity.

Kaleem: Yeah. Like, what is that? What is that?

Douglas: So if you can make them authentic, then I think people are going to resonate with those. And if they're shared values that they hold, then it can get people really excited. So I think that's really great.

Kaleem: Yeah, yeah.

Douglas: And one thing that I saw a company do here in Austin I've always been a fan of is they created a scavenger hunt, and, essentially, new employees were given this scavenger hunt. And the cool thing about the scavenger hunt was that it included different aspects of the company's history. The way that they got to the answers or found these things, they would have to go talk to other employees in other departments. And so they got—

Kaleem: Nice.

Douglas: —to know so much about the way the company worked, the way the company—

Kaleem: I love this.

Douglas: —had evolved over time, and they made friends and connected. And it was very participatory. So I love it because it's like a facilitator's dream to do those kinds of things. And so if more companies could institute these types of more participatory onboarding practices, I think you'd start to get into what we talk about as facilitator leadership.

Kaleem: I love that idea. You're definitely going to have to send me some—maybe you can remember the company and send me some stuff on that. I think that's a great, great idea.

So then, yeah. So then you have engagement. And there's a million different ideas for engagement. One thing that I love for remote work that—I don't know, maybe this is more in performance—so engagement, you've got to keep your remote workers engaged. So do you host an annual retreat? Do you host a quarterly retreat? You know, how many—do you have—I don't want to say happy hour, but that's no good. The link to—Zoom happy hours have been pretty tiring of late.

Oh, on engaged, this is my tip for engaged. Something very simple. Ask your employees how they're feeling. Like, literally, you could not imagine how many companies just don't send a very simple employee engagement survey out to their employees. Like, all of us consultants in H.R. are like, "Yo, stop talking, Kaleem." But the fact that you just don't do that, it's so easy. Just write, like…

And the other thing that I would suggest is if you're going to use a survey, if you're going to have a survey, you got to have a plan of what you're going to do with the data. So come up with a very simple survey. And I would say ask that question, ask that survey, the exact same time next year so that you can have some sort of benchmarks. You know, doing a survey for no reason, you need to be able to have some data. And I actually suggest surveying people frequently. There's a lot of great survey software out there. Like, I don't know. Was it Officevibe? Culture Amp? All of these softwares that send random questions to employees. You may not have that software, the budget for that, but you can come up with a very easy SurveyMonkey or Google Forms with four or five questions and ask your employees every quarter. And they could be the same questions. Maybe you'll find out that in the fall this one question's being answered, and they're lower in this for some reason. So for engagement, that would be my one tip is you got to ask your employees how they're feeling.

Douglas: Awesome. We've definitely covered the gamut, from starting off with a good impression on job descriptions; making sure we're thinking about that human connection in the remote landscape; the taxonomy—making sure we think about what bucket we're in, what is our style of remote work, and how can our approaches and tactics be tuned to be appropriate for our style—all the way through to making sure that we are engaging folks and even understanding how they're feeling, especially in this time of a global pandemic that can be damaging morales and stuff. So, wow, covered a ton, and it's been a blast thinking about all this stuff, Kaleem. And I know that the listeners are probably curious how they can connect with you, learn more, maybe end with a little bit around how they can find you.

Kaleem: Yeah, sure. You can find me personally anywhere: kaleemclarkson. So I'm @kaleemclarkson on Twitter, LinkedIn. And you can find our company at blendmeinc.com. And also Remotely One. If you are a remote location, independent professional, and you're feeling the pains of isolation and loneliness and you want to still kind of build your network, come join Remotely One. We're a members-only community for location and independent professionals. So you can find us at remotelyone.com or @remotelyone.

And yeah, I guess if there was something that I wanted to kind of sign off on, I guess that would be, let's not all go back—if there was a piece of advice that I could give to organizations out there, don't go back to the way it was before COVID-19 "just because." So let me repeat that. Don't go back to business before COVID-19, don't go back "just because." And what I mean by that is take this time as an opportunity to further develop your organization to be prepared for other disaster contingencies. They're going to happen. If you're up in New England, you deal with the snow. Midwest, you deal the snow. I mean, there are disasters all the time. Hurricanes. Remote work, as you all have noticed, can help you make it through those times. So take this time to figure out how you can be better when you go back, when we go back, to the "new normal," and maybe think about how you can reuse your space or reuse some of the things that you used to do before. So let's just not go back to the way it was before COVID-19.

Douglas: Kaleem, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining.

Kaleem: I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. Come back anytime.

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 work with the agencies who are culture driven, meaning that, yes, we can make more money, but we'd rather make a little less money and put culture first, because we understand that it's a marathon, right? Like, we understand that if our employees are happy, it's going to make our situation a lot better.” Kaleem Clarkson

This week on the Control the Room Podcast, I’m excited to speak with Kaleem Clarkson, COO and Co-founder of Blend Me, Inc., a consulting firm that cultivates remote employee experiences from onboarding through off-boarding. He has a particular interest in culture-driven organizations.

Kaleem is also the COO of RemotelyOne, a members-only community on a mission to end remote work isolation by connecting and building relationships between location-independent professionals.

Kaleem and I speak about the different types of remote work, why some companies are struggling to transition to remote work, and why it’s so important for a job posting to accurately represent your organization’s culture. Listen in to find out how Kaleem’s experience as a member of a college metal band led to his career as an employee experience expert.

Show Highlights

[2:43] Blind Melon, Slick Rick, & Warped Tour

[13:43] The Teleworks Big Three

[20:16] The commonality between organizations struggling to work remotely

[28:56] Company culture clubs

[34:48] Handling employee anxieties during COVID-19 layoffs

Links | Resources

Blend Me, Inc.

RemotelyOne

Kaleem on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Kaleem Clarkson is an employee experience expert and remote work advocate helping organizations build intentional employee lifecycles that begin at initial job postings and end after off-boarding. He is the COO and Co-founder of Blend Me, Inc. a remote employee experience consultancy. He is also the COO of RemotelyOne, a members-only community for location-independent professionals.

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 Kaleem Clarkson, co-founder and chief operating officer of Blend Me, Inc. He is a remote-employee-experience professional, and developing RemotelyOne, a community for location-independent professionals. Welcome to the show, Kaleem.

Kaleem: Douglas, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I hear this crowd applause in the background. Let’s get that in post-production. I love it.

Douglas: Awesome. So, Kaleem, I'm really curious to hear how an employee-experience professional gets their start. How do you find your way on this path? 

Kaleem: That's a good question. I probably should have this ready by now. But I guess I'll start my origin story. I guess this is my origin story. So born and raised in Bangor, Maine. I’m going way back. Bangor, Maine, represent. I always love to throw it out. My home state, I love it. But I ended up going to college in Massachusetts. Got a chance to play at Western State University. Got a chance to play some college football there. And during that time, we all had a very good time. Let's put it that way. I enjoy having beverages with people, making sure that everyone else is having a good time, and we ended up throwing a good amount of gatherings, should you say, in college. And started getting into a metal band, believe it or not. Just got into a metal band and started rocking out. Love the stage. Love that whole feel to it. And that led me to starting a nonprofit organization called Concerts for Charity, which I think we started in ’99. And we started putting on different concerts with different charities across New England. We got our 513(c) status and started donating to different charities, and we got to work with a lot of cool bands in different areas—you know, a lot of jam bands, a lot of hard-rock bands. We worked with—jeez, I'm trying to think of some bands that we booked in the past. I think we booked Blind Melon on their comeback tour, which was pretty cool. Chk, Chk, Chk out in Sacramento, I remember back in the day. I think we booked Slick Rick, a rapper. If you don't know, some of the old-school folks.

Douglas: Colleague of Doug E. Fresh, if I'm not mistaken. 

Kaleem: Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's funny is we went and picked him up at the airport or whatever, and he gets in the car, and total British accent. You know? So, you don't think about that, like, dude's been living in England all these years. And gets in, and he’s like, “Hello.” Horrible British accent, by the way. That’s horrible. 

But anyway, yeah. So I got a chance doing that, and that was really kind of my first experience with dealing with virtual volunteers. VolunteerMatch at the time, we ended up connecting with the Warped Tour, and were able to register people to vote through a group called HeadCount as well. Anyway, it was great. It was a cool experience. We got to do a documentary that featured Trey Anastasio from Phish, Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones—really big artists in the jam-band scene. And we got to debut it at HBO. So it was cool. I was probably only, what, 21 years old, 22 years old? I really got my first taste of putting on events and just kind of sitting back and watching everybody having a good time. And I think that's the common theme, right? Everyone was just having a good time. Everyone has that cup, that Red Solo Cup, and that really cheap beer. But everyone's having a good time, generally. 

And yeah, so I kind of move on. Moved to Atlanta, my partner and I, and get a job at Kennesaw State University at Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. And that's like a faculty-development center. They basically teach faculty how to teach. I don’t know if you knew that, you know, a lot of people may not know this, but college professors, they graduate with a PhD, and they put right in the classroom, so they don't go through any teaching training or anything like that, a lot of them. So, yeah, yeah, it was cool. I got to put on a lot of international conferences there. Again, I'm putting on parties again, right, except in a different setting. That was the kind of interesting, or educational piece to me. I didn't realize faculty also enjoy having a good time, and they do. 

So, yeah, all these professional conferences, got a chance to put some of those on, and really kind of just didn't even realize that—I was there for 10 or 12 years. And I would have to say in 2012, I believe, during my work at Kennesaw, I got heavily involved with the Drupal community, and Drupal’s an open-source website-application tool, kind of like WordPress, build websites with it. So kind of got involved with that community. And again, that was another experience of being with like-minded people. It was outside of my previous experience of concerts and the entertainment industry, and then getting in the higher ed around faculty in the higher ed industry. Well, now I'm around other computer digital marketers and digital professionals, you know, developers. And yeah, I got heavily involved with Drupal and started building websites, and I kind of became a Drupal developer. And last year, or probably a year and a half ago, yeah, a year, I left higher ed and decided to get involved with a company called Oomph as a UX engineer and started doing some front-end development work.

But the cool thing about Drupal and open source is, again, the networks of people that you meet. And during that time, it was 2012, that I was at a conference in Denver, DrupalCon Denver, and I heard a talk by, his name is Matt Westgate from a company called Lullabot. They’re a big development firm. I think they did the Grammy’s website and some other big ones. But anyway, yeah, I went to that talk, and he was talking about how to run a virtual organization. And he talked about why they weren't using the word remote and why they were using the word distributed and how those words, what those words actually could mean to people. And I recall him saying remote felt like you were distant from something.

Douglas: Mm-hmm.

Kaleem: You were away from a group of people. So it was fascinating. Like, at that time, 2012, it seems like 100 years ago, but there weren't very many people talking about how to work remotely. So I came home, and my partner, she had graduated two years before that, in 2010, with her master's degree from Yukon in organizational development. And she actually wrote her master's paper thesis on virtual volunteerism, because my charity had hooked up with the Warped Tour, and we had virtual volunteers all over the country. So I came home from that, and I was talking with Jen, and I said, “I think we found something. I think we should do our own thing,” and she was all about it. 

She was looking for strategic HR jobs, and there weren't very many. People love those jobs, by the way. I’ll use VP of people and CHRO of people; they don’t really leave those jobs, because those jobs, they’re great. Strategic HR’s obviously a much bigger thing now. So we just decided to create Blend Me, Inc. I kind of took care of the marketing, and then she would take care of the engagement, and that's how we kind of came up with the name. 

So she worked for a while at a company that was all distributed. And, you know, we kind of did some consulting on the side with some diversity inclusion. And at the end of the day, you realize all of your experiences are kind of what, together, are who you are, and I was very fortunate in that I had been at companies for—I was at Kennesaw for a very long time, 11 years, and it was because we had a great time. And now, if I'm looking back, you asked me the origin question of how you become an employee-experience professional, you just look back and think about all of the situations and the moments you had that were special with a special group where you accomplished big goals. We accomplished a lot of great things there, and a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were all having a really, really good time. 

So this year, with COVID, I decided that it's time to go full time, that we no longer had that obstacle of proving to people that remote work, you can be productive. That has always been an obstacle. And honestly, what we decided from day one, 2012, when we're writing our mission statement, we said we did not want to work with agencies that wanted us to prove that remote work was the right answer. We didn't want to get into that type of work, because trying to prove to somebody that, no, you could do this, it’s just not really in our—we want to help people that have already kind of gone over that hump or already believe that it can be successful, because if there's not a belief from the very top all the way through the organization, it doesn't come through as authentic. 

So what's interesting is for all these years, there's been a very small market. But I firmly believe, and I think we can all agree, that from March of 2020 on, I don't think any manager—well, in certain industries, I shouldn't say that—but I'm going to say in 90 percent of jobs today that we have behind a desk or in an office, it's going to be very difficult for managers to say that you're not productive. 

So, yeah, that's the whole origin story. I think I got it in, like, eight minutes. I got to work on cutting it down a little bit. But, yeah, that's how we kind of came to this point.

Douglas: Yeah. And I really want to dig in on the definition of remote versus distributed. And, you know, even virtual is kind of mixed in there as well. I ran into this when I was first venturing out of my own and kind of exploring this kind of concept of fractional CTO. And at first I was calling myself a virtual CTO, and someone asked me—it was a junior developer—they said, “So does that mean it's all in the cloud?” And so I thought maybe this word virtual is not a good fit here. 

That story or that notion of misinterpretation of the word virtual is I know exactly what you're getting at around remote versus distributed. And I think that a lot of those notions really held us back. But now that everyone's been thrust into this experience where they've been forced to grapple with it, to wrap their hands around it, they're starting to understand that there are some benefits, and things maybe aren't as bad as they might imagine.

Kaleem: Absolutely. And you know what really the difficulty with our industry—and when I say “our,” I just mean remote work or telework industry—is that we don't have an association now. I know Laurel Farrer has just created the Remote Work Association, and I give her kudos to that. And I believe—what’s her name from FlexJobs?—Sara—can’t remember her name, but she started FlexJobs. They created the one-million-person march campaign. There’s been different, like, spin-off campaigns.

But one thing that I've learned from higher ed is when you have the National Society for Statistics, Mathematics and Statistics, you know, that's an organization that spits out all the knowledge. When you have SHRM—Society for Human Resource Management—or you have these major-field associations, there is research. There's guidance. There are definitions. There are thought leaders. 

And for me and for us when we were trying to talk to clients about the different types of “remote” work, we just always got stuck. Me, having that thought of, well, let's find the history, and realizing that, oh, okay, well, outside of the U.S., a lot of countries use the term telework. The government agencies use the word telework. You know, there's telework guidance guidelines for the government—well, before, but I'm pretty sure that they still exist somewhere. So then we were struggling with that. 

So for us, we just figured, okay, we need to come up with our own definitions for when we're working with clients. And we wanted it to show homage to Jack Nilles for coming up with the word telework in 1973. It's kind of a little outdated definition, but we just kind of thought, like, okay, all of these different things of telework, and when we're thinking about the different types, we realized that a lot of the terms are related to a central workplace. So for us, what we decided to do is come up with our own definitions. 

Here we go. We call them teleworks big three, right? So we kind of go with, all of it’s telework work, but a distributed company doesn't have a centralized workplace. So when we’re talking with our clients, we’re like, “Oh, yeah. We’re a remote company. We don’t have an office.” We’ll say, “Okay, well, for our purposes, when we’re in our meetings and when we’re talking about the programs that we have, we’re going to refer to your agency as a distributed company because you don't have a centralized workplace.” So employees, they work from wherever they're the most productive and the most comfortable. So that's distributed. 

Then we came to the common word of remote. And what drove us to this was back to that 2012 talk of the reason why they don't use the word remote was that it felt like you were away from the centralized workplace. Well, Lullabot was 100 percent distributed. They didn't have a central workplace. But remote employees are away from a centralized workplace. So to me and to us, when we're talking to—not to me, but internally speaking—remote employees are people who work away from the office. So you have a centralized office, there are people that are going into the office every day, but you also have some remote employees. So that's how we kind of label that. 

And then our last one is kind of like the telecommuter, telecommute. You know, telecommute employees share their time between a central workplace and working wherever they feel comfortable. 

So to us, that's kind of how we've broken it down. I’d be awesome if everybody out there in the whole remote workspace would say, “Hey, this is great. Let's all agree to this.” As far as posting social media, remote work is very popular, the term remote work. And we’re kind of still in that space as well, so we understand. But when we’re internal, I kind of feel like there are definitely differences.

Another word that we've seen before to replace kind of remote employee is maybe hybrid. You know, we've heard people talk about a hybrid setup and a hybrid setup means half the people are in a central workplace and half the people are not. 

So I do feel like it's really important. I wish, I hope somebody steps up and maybe the Remote Work Association will be that governing body for all of us, where we can all post our research too and be a place. For right now, I guess we'll use the term remote work when we're talking to the rest of the world and just try to clarify the differences between the different types, because there's a major difference in communication facilitation and how you're going to manage your team based on the types of telework that you’re implementing.

Douglas: Absolutely. And I would imagine that the tactics would be quite different and maybe even the programs which you might use to address the concerns or the needs. 

So when you think about these three, this taxonomy, when you're working with clients, is there one category that you find is most popular?

Kaleem: Yeah. There's no doubt that what we call remote or “hybrid” is the most popular, especially like today—you know, so it's kind of a difficult question because it's like, well, are you talking about before or after? So before; let's just talk about before. Before, and I'm saying just so the world knows I'm talking about before COVID-19, okay? Before COVID-19, I would say there were definitely more hybrid companies or remote companies where they had people working in a central workplace and some people working remotely. Telecommuter, it's kind of, you know, I would say a lot of agencies allow their people to work from home a couple of times. So I would say definitely between telecommuting agencies that lets you work from home a couple of times a week and the hybrids were by far the most popular.

Douglas: And what do you think folks are learning as they're shifting a bit, as far as their ability to set the frequency at which people were remote? They went from being a part-time, somewhat sometimes kind of thing to being a full-time thing. And I'm sure you've seen them kind of struggle from—because I would imagine some of the practices and approaches they were using, let's say the weaknesses maybe started to show more once they started to lean more heavily into it. So I'm curious what you noticed. As folks have been forced to be more remote, what have they noticed that broke down? What was no longer working for them? And I’m interested from a pattern standpoint. Like, what's been consistent across most of your conversations? What are you hearing that’s like a...kind of a very common issue that's been breaking down for folks as they have become more remote?

Kaleem: There's no doubt it's been communication. We kind of used to brand ourselves as an internal-marketing agency, and we still do a lot of internal marketing. But there's no doubt that the communication has been one of the biggest breakdowns, because you weren't set up to do this. One of the things that we talk about when you're designing your employee experience is you have to look at it from the day they look at your job ad to the day that they are departing. And if you don't have a plan—and you know this with meetings—if you don't have an agenda, right, or you don't have a set of goals that are intentional, then your product’s not going to most likely be as good. And then that goes for the same thing with internal communication and doing remote work. 

The ones who are struggling are the ones who did not have good internal-marketing practices in place. The organizations who are struggling are the ones who don't trust their employees. The ones who are really having a tough time are the ones who did not take on the responsibility of providing enough resources, enough training, enough documentation to allow you to be distributed now. 

So it's really interesting to see the companies who haven't even missed a beat. A lot of the Drupal companies in the web-development space, I'm learning a lot of this, the culture and the practice and stuff, from some of these companies. They’re going on—you know that talk that I’m telling you about is 2012. Another company, Four Kitchens, I mean, they’re another Drupal company. They’ve been distributed now for, jeez, probably eight years. And the company I work for, they've had distributed people. 

So the organizations who are not having a challenge at all are the ones who are already prepared to be remote already. So, you know, just to kind of re-emphasize, the ones who did not have their internal-communications strategy set up are the ones who are struggling the most. There's no doubt. 

Douglas: Yeah. And so what are the hallmarks of a good internal-marketing program? How do we bolster those communication plans?

Kaleem: Whew, yeah, that's a deep one. That's a deep one. So just not just internal marketing. I probably shouldn't say the ones who didn't have the internal-marketing plan, but more along the lines of, you didn't have your whole employee experience planned out, because you can have the best internal marketing set up, but if you haven't explained how your culture works or what your culture’s like, a remote employee can't feel that. So I guess I should say, you know, yes, internal marketing is critical because it's part of communication. That's a huge piece. But in the whole employee experience, there are a lot of steps. 

And I would say Gallup, for all you researchers out there, Gallup, we've been quoting Gallup a long time for all of the awesome research they've done on remote work: how many people work remotely? They're one of the best that have been producing it. They kind of came up with this great diagram of what the employee experience is like. I'll just kind of go through those different spaces, because internal marketing kind of fits kind of within these things, right?

So their first thing that they talk about is attract. How is your job description written? Does it reflect the type of people that work at your agency? And are you attracting the type of people that you want to be at your agency? So what's your culture statement look like? Do you have a page that talks about your culture? Do you meet every single day? Is it more of a Netflix—work-90-hours-a-week-type culture, or are you more like work whenever you feel comfortable? So that's important that your website’s set up right. 

Then, you got to hire. Is your hiring practice matching what you’ve already talked about? Are you interviewing with multiple people on the teams? Are you meeting those people? Do you have a chance to talk to the culture club or people outside of your team instead of just your team? 

Then, you have to onboard the people. So now you're only at step three. Onboarding and onboarding alone are very, very thorough. Onboarding program can be up to 18 months. You're talking about, okay, you’ll get 30-, 60-, 90-day reviews, and you have to kind of establish what your goals kind of were. And so onboarding can be long.

Then, you have engagement. You got to make sure your employee’s engaged. So you have engagement pieces. 

Then, you have to set up and go to performance. You got to make sure your performance evaluations are set up correctly. Make sure that everybody understands what is expected of you to be successful at that organization.

And then you have to develop them, right? And then they depart at some point. 

So this huge step of, like, seven steps of the whole employee experience, what we’ve realized from remote work is that you have to have trust. Trust is even more critical. Trust is even more critical because, you know, are you an agency that is going to try to have a piece of software that takes snapshots of your individuals every 90 seconds? Or are you a results-only-type agency that cares more about the results and understands that, hey, with school the way it is in some places, people may not be able to work all day. You know, people may have to work at a different time. So trust is critical. 

And then, we kind of talked about responsibility earlier. You have to have this—you know, to work remotely, there's a sense of responsibility both on the employee and on the employer. It's a very two-way street. 

So, like, this whole, whole thing is kind of what is the pillar of the remote-employee experience, kind of something that we're kind of labeling as “tree”, trust and responsibility. In order for you to get that set up, you just have to start at the beginning, and you have to be intentional of what it is that you're trying to accomplish in each step. 

So, I know I didn't answer your question specifically about, like, what are some of the pillars in establishing a good internal-marketing strategy? But, you know, I just kind of wanted to really emphasize that you need to think about this whole thing and not just the internal-marketing side. You have to think about this whole thing, because now we don't have those office places that people can talk to and interact with. You know, now people are distributed behind a computer. So you really do have to think about the whole spectrum. 

Douglas: Yeah, that makes sense. What is that journey the employees taking, and how can you meet them at various moments in that journey with intention?

Kaleem: Yeah. Yeah. And we're just seeing it right now. The groups who really, really, really care about their employees, that are—what we like to say is we like to work with agencies who are culture driven. And to us, what that means is, listen, we all want to make money. I kind of feel like people trip sometimes when you talk about we care about people. Even nonprofits, people—look, nonprofits make money, people, just so you know this. And I used to tell people about this all the time. A nonprofit, a 513(c) is an IRS designation. All that means is that entity does not have shareholders. Charities make profits. Your business has to make profits to be sustainable. So with all of that said, we work with the agencies who are culture driven, meaning that, yes, we can make more money, but we'd rather maybe only make a little less money and put culture first, because we understand that it's a marathon, right? Like, we understand that if our employees are happy, it's going to just make our situation a lot better. So I think one thing I like to talk about is culture-driven agencies.

Douglas: Yeah, I like that, this notion that that's a priority and a focus for the leadership. 

So I want to talk a little bit about some tactics. And something that we talked about, or that I noticed, in some of our preshow exchange was around the use of Google Docs and how you can, as a remote tool, use that to focus the team into a common task. So I’m just really curious around what are some things that people can go do today, whether it's, like, use Google Docs in this fashion, if you want to elaborate on that, or it could be any other tactic or approach, but what's something that they can just go literally try out and improve their employee experience? 

Kaleem: All right. That's cool. I like that. I like that. So I'm just going to kind of go through each one of them. I think that kind of will make a little bit more sense in my brain. 

So the first thing that you can do to attract the type of employees that you want, I learned this, actually, with Oomph, inc. is they created a culture club, which I thought was pretty neat. Get some of your team together, make it voluntary, and say, “Hey, you know what. We want to kind of rewrite what our culture statement is like to better fit who we are today. And we want to kind of better illustrate what it's like to be a part of this team.” I like to use team instead of family. Sometimes families…you know. So, yeah, “What is it like to be a part of this team?” so that you’re attracting the right people. 

The other thing, too, is to kind of attract some of those people that you're looking at, get outside of your normal bubble and market yourself, but—we love to say, and now I’m going to kind of talk about engaged—look for people that are going to add to your culture instead of culture fit. So we like to use the word culture ad versus culture fit. Culture’s great, but we all talk about why is culture great aside from the obvious reasons from a personal and emotional level. 

Back to business, you want as many different people on your team so that you have different perspectives. Like, if you want to just talk about “Straight cash, homey,” T.O. quote, it's more about having people, more variety of people, on your team so that you have different perspectives. You know, just think of Corn Pops. If Corn Pops would've had maybe more people on their marketing team, they wouldn't have sent out that Corn Pops box years ago, where the only brown Corn Pops person as the janitor. You know what I'm saying? Like, that's a huge gaffe, right? 

So that's attract. So that's one thing that you could do. Maybe get a culture club together, try to rewrite your culture statement.

With hiring, I would say a good one is—oh, yeah. This is a simple one. This is more probably along the lines of in your wheelhouse of facilitation—do not, by all means, do an interview with—and I'm sorry to say this, Owl Labs, because you have an awesome product, but it feels awkward—don't do an interview with your team at a conference table and the employee remote. I understand—I think Owl Labs cameras are the best. Now I can't get it out of my head. It's an unbelievable product, in my opinion. You know, it kind of jumps around to the person that's speaking, and the camera shows the whole room, and it kind of goes back and forth. It's super cool. Like, I would suggest it for any agency that has multiple board rooms in different places that are meeting and talking. But when you have an interviewee, their first impression, and they're trying to talk with you and you're at a conference-room table with eight of your colleagues side by side, there is already an us-versus-them experience. So it's already a “I'm here, and you're there.” So my suggestion is just get everybody on Zoom or whatever video system you're using. Equality, it's about the same. So put everyone on the same call, the same platform, the same camera. Everywhere the same. 

Douglas: Yeah. You know, I’ve said that for years. Like, if we're facilitating and someone's remote, everyone should be remote because we want to level the playing field. Otherwise, it's going to be hard to empathize if we're not all experiencing what everyone else is or what those few individuals are experiencing. And it reminds me of all-hands meetings years and years ago, where people would dial into it. And then I thought to myself, what is it like to actually dial into one of these things? So I dialed into one, and it was—I mean, I couldn’t hear anything. It was [muffled]. And then you’d hear people talking like that, and you’d think, oh, I don’t know. I don’t even know what anyone’s saying. And maybe every now and then you could make out a few things the CEO said but definitely didn't hear any questions or any dialogue. And it's, like, really not great. And so I love that point of, like, let's level the playing field. 

Kaleem: Yeah. Yeah. 

So then for onboarding, so you're kind of talking about Google Docs and stuff. But for onboarding, simple solution, like, you got to have a place where someone’s going to learn about the organization. Believe it or not, a lot of companies don't have a moment to hear the origin story. Like, we talked about my origin story earlier. And to a lot of people, they may fast forward, but, like, hey, I love to rep Bangor. You know, there's an emotion to why a business got started. You know what I mean? There's something outside. There's a story. And if people don't know that story,  then they may not understand what it is, you know, what are the values that are driving the organization? 

So to me, I know onboarding is not the initial, it's not the first interaction with the agency. It's not even where first opinions happen, because it's in the third step. We’re in the third step, right? I mean, we understand that your first impression is definitely the job description. I mean, when people look at the jobs, their first impression is the job description, and then they go on your website. But when you’re onboarding, this is kind of like the first time that employees get to interact or participate. This is the first time that the individual’s participating. So this is a really, really, really crucial moment to let them know what that origin story is and let them know what values are driving your organization. 

So one of my first recommendations is just record a video of the founder. I mean, it doesn't even have to be crazy. Just record a video of when the founder got the idea for the business and why the founder started it, and then maybe a little bit about what drives the company. Because right now, COVID-19, if you have to let go of 20 people, or maybe you have a staff of 100 and you got to let go 20 or 30 people, those other people that are there, they go through all sorts of emotions, never mind the people that you let go. But the people that are staying there are going through some stuff. They lost some friends that are no longer employed. There’s a little bit of uncertainty about the future. If all your employees know what drives you even during uncertain times, a lot of these anxieties that make people nervous and get people looking for other options will be erased. 

So onboarding is so critical, and I can't give away all my secrets. 

Douglas: Sure, sure.

Kaleem: So I would say the video is something simple. If you don't have a quick little video that somebody can watch or even, like, a couple paragraphs, how you got started and why you got started and then what drives you. And I know people use the word values all the time. I’m trying to use different words than mission and vision and all that stuff. But what drives your company?

Douglas: Yeah. And a couple things I would add there. It’s like so many companies talk about values, and even in the job description, they'll describe things that are aspirational and not necessarily—they're not really conveying the fact that we are that culture that's working 60, 80 hours a week. And if you plan to retain people and you’re doing that, you should be pretty honest about it up front, right?—

Kaleem: Right. Yes, be honest.

Douglas: —rather than tricking people into coming in. And then the same thing with values, right? If they’re just some words that we adopted because they sound like stuff that, you know, you put on values—

Kaleem: Hardworking, go-getter. I mean, like, what is that?

Douglas: Yeah. And integrity. 

Kaleem: Yeah. Like, what is that? What is that? 

Douglas: So if you can make them authentic, then I think people are going to resonate with those. And if they’re shared values that they hold, then it can get people really excited. So I think that's really great. 

Kaleem: Yeah, yeah.

Douglas: And one thing that I saw a company do here in Austin I've always been a fan of is they created a scavenger hunt, and, essentially, new employees were given this scavenger hunt. And the cool thing about the scavenger hunt was that it included different aspects of the company's history. The way that they got to the answers or found these things, they would have to go talk to other employees in other departments. And so they got—

Kaleem: Nice.

Douglas: —to know so much about the way the company worked, the way the company—

Kaleem: I love this.

Douglas: —had evolved over time, and they made friends and connected. And it was very participatory. So I love it because it’s like a facilitator's dream to do those kinds of things. And so if more companies could institute these types of more participatory onboarding practices, I think you’d start to get into what we talk about as facilitator leadership.

Kaleem: I love that idea. You’re definitely going to have to send me some—maybe you can remember the company and send me some stuff on that. I think that's a great, great idea. 

So then, yeah. So then you have engagement. And there's a million different ideas for engagement. One thing that I love for remote work that—I don't know, maybe this is more in performance—so engagement, you've got to keep your remote workers engaged. So do you host an annual retreat? Do you host a quarterly retreat? You know, how many—do you have—I don't want to say happy hour, but that's no good. The link to—Zoom happy hours have been pretty tiring of late. 

Oh, on engaged, this is my tip for engaged. Something very simple. Ask your employees how they're feeling. Like, literally, you could not imagine how many companies just don't send a very simple employee engagement survey out to their employees. Like, all of us consultants in H.R. are like, “Yo, stop talking, Kaleem.” But the fact that you just don’t do that, it’s so easy. Just write, like…

And the other thing that I would suggest is if you’re going to use a survey, if you’re going to have a survey, you got to have a plan of what you’re going to do with the data. So come up with a very simple survey. And I would say ask that question, ask that survey, the exact same time next year so that you can have some sort of benchmarks. You know, doing a survey for no reason, you need to be able to have some data. And  I actually suggest surveying people frequently. There's a lot of great survey software out there. Like, I don’t know. Was it Officevibe? Culture Amp? All of these softwares that send random questions to employees. You may not have that software, the budget for that, but you can come up with a very easy SurveyMonkey or Google Forms with four or five questions and ask your employees every quarter. And they could be the same questions. Maybe you’ll find out that in the fall this one question’s being answered, and they’re lower in this for some reason. So for engagement, that would be my one tip is you got to ask your employees how they’re feeling.

Douglas: Awesome. We've definitely covered the gamut, from starting off with a good impression on job descriptions; making sure we're thinking about that human connection in the remote landscape; the taxonomy—making sure we think about what bucket we're in, what is our style of remote work, and how can our approaches and tactics be tuned to be appropriate for our style—all the way through to making sure that we are engaging folks and even understanding how they're feeling, especially in this time of a global pandemic that can be damaging morales and stuff. So, wow, covered a ton, and it's been a blast thinking about all this stuff, Kaleem. And I know that the listeners are probably curious how they can connect with you, learn more, maybe end with a little bit around how they can find you.

Kaleem: Yeah, sure. You can find me personally anywhere: kaleemclarkson. So I’m @kaleemclarkson on Twitter, LinkedIn. And you can find our company at blendmeinc.com. And also Remotely One. If you are a remote location, independent professional, and you’re feeling the pains of isolation and loneliness and you want to still kind of build your network, come join Remotely One. We’re a members-only community for location and independent professionals. So you can find us at remotelyone.com or @remotelyone. 

And yeah, I guess if there was something that I wanted to kind of sign off on, I guess that would be, let's not all go back—if there was a piece of advice that I could give to organizations out there, don’t go back to the way it was before COVID-19 “just because.” So let me repeat that. Don't go back to business before COVID-19, don't go back “just because.” And what I mean by that is take this time as an opportunity to further develop your organization to be prepared for other disaster contingencies. They’re going to happen. If you're up in New England, you deal with the snow. Midwest, you deal the snow. I mean, there are disasters all the time. Hurricanes. Remote work, as you all have noticed, can help you make it through those times. So take this time to figure out how you can be better when you go back, when we go back, to the “new normal,” and maybe think about how you can reuse your space or reuse some of the things that you used to do before. So let's just not go back to the way it was before COVID-19.

Douglas: Kaleem, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for joining.

Kaleem: I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. Come back anytime.

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.

"A lot of times, people will think that they're experimenting because they're being scrappy and moving fast, but they're not learning as they go. The fundamental benefit comes when you stop and reflect and learn and improve." Kai Haley

This week on the Control the Room Podcast, I'm excited to speak with Kai Haley. In addition to being a founder and leader of their Sprint Master Academy, Kai is Google's Head of UX Methods and Processes. Through the development of design sprint and design thinking curriculum and training programs, she has created a community of expert facilitators at Google.

Listen in to learn more about Google Sprint Masters, the delicate balance between data and design, and how knowledge sharing creates resilient product teams.

Show Highlights

[5:27] The delicate balance between data and design

[11:08] The advent of the virtual facilitator

[21:35] Google Sprint Masters

[26:13] How knowledge sharing creates resilient product teams

[31:31] Embracing asynchronous meetings

Links | Resources

Kai on LinkedIn

About the Guest

Kai Haley, Head of UX Methods and Process at Google, works with teams to define product visions, drive successful user-centered products, and develop an innovation culture across all of Google. As Lead of the Sprint Master Academy, she also develops curriculum and training programs for Google's expert team of facilitators.

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 Kai Haley, head of UX Methods and Process for the UX community at Google. She co-founded and leads to Google Sprint Master Academy, where they train and mentor facilitators within Google. Welcome to the show, Kai.

Kai: Thank you for having me.

Douglas: Of course. So, Kai, let's share with the listeners a little bit of a backstory around how you became such a mover and shaker at Google.

Kai: I joined Google about nine years ago. And prior to that, I had been at Yahoo! for six years, working as a visual designer on the front page there. I started my design career right out of college by starting a design studio focused on complete communication and branding programs for startups in Silicon Valley. So I got my learning on the job initially, which was an amazing experience. Not always advised, though. And while I was at Yahoo!, I went back to school and got my masters in design at CCA, when I realized I really wanted to formulate my design process and practice. And at CCA, I was actually introduced to a designer and teacher from IDEO, and that's where I learned about UX methods and process and got very inspired by the IDEO method and what they were doing there. So I brought some of those back to Yahoo! but really found when I got to Google that there was a much more nurturing environment for design thinking and that kind of collaborative work.

Douglas: You know, it's so important to have that nurturing environment and the support to do the work. I was recently reading a lot of material around an FBI negotiator who was there in the early days, and there wasn't a lot of support, you know? So it was like kind of two jobs. One is learning the material and getting really good at the craft, but then also the diplomacy of trying to convince everyone around you that this new approach is much better.

Kai: Absolutely. And I'll be honest. When I first got to Google nine years ago, the UX community there was quite small. So they were just starting to develop the design-sprint way of working then. And a lot of the hard work that was done at that time was kind of building that culture or building the buy in of better ways to work together. So it wasn't necessarily a smooth and easy sailing process, but the environment at Google has always been receptive to experimentation and working on how to work better together.

Douglas: I think that's pretty clear from the Project Aristotle and all the research that goes into psychological safety and work rules and all those things definitely seems to be a culture of, how do we have better workplace culture and collaboration?

Kai: Absolutely. And that's actually one of the areas that I am focused on right now. In addition to, obviously, making better products, we always want to make more user-centered products, and that's one of our principles here. But my focus is on helping to make a great space for cross-functional collaboration, to really support the UX role and the UX discipline, both inside and outside of Google.

Douglas: So, I'm really curious. As an insider, you probably have some really interesting insight into this, but one thing I've noticed is this paradox between data-driven decisions and then kind of more qualitative type of decision making. And UX tends to kind of sit at the boundary of that, right? There's things that UX does that's quantitative and things that they do that's qualitative. And Jake Knapp always talks about design sprint being so good at quick-and-dirty data before we're waiting around for perfect data. So I'm kind of curious what you found, having to use and leverage qualitative methods and approaches inside a company that's been known publicly to be so data focused and data driven.

Kai: You know, that's a really interesting question. Actually, there's a great video from my series Design Is […] called Design is [Data], if anyone is interested in deep diving into a case study on how design uses data to drive great design. When I was first—well, my second year at Google, I joined the search ads team, which is an incredibly data-driven team. And so that video outlines a project that we worked on, where we looked at how to leverage data to develop a design hypothesis and then use the data to push that design forward, meaning inform our decisions about design.

And working on Search at Google was incredibly transformative for me as a designer because it is so data driven and because it is so large, the user base is so broad, you really had to rely on the data to inform your intuition as a designer. So the qualitative aspect is really important, and we balance that at Google, where we do a lot of user interviews, more foundational research, where we try to understand how people think about things. And then we do experiment-focused either usability tests or we run an experiment on a specific portion of the traffic, like we would do a search, to take that hypothesis and see if it's working. So I always see it as like a balance of both and sometimes quite a delicate balance, especially if you are a UXer, which involves a really strong collaboration with your engineering team.

Douglas: Yeah. I remember reading this blog post years ago that I think came out of Google—yeah, it was Google Maps—and they were talking about drawing together. And so rather than the designers just sketching something, some brilliant solution, it's like, well—and rather than just sitting down and talking—they're like, "Well, sketch out. Can you sketch with me while we're talking?" And they noticed this pattern that came out of a lot of their conversations, and they just took a step back and looked at all the drawings that their interviewees had sketched out while they were talking. They all had this dog-bone shape to them. So there was like this epiphany that, oh, wow, everyone has this kind of dog-bone kind of reality, where it's like you do a lot of stuff around your house and a lot of stuff around your work. And then there's this tiny little connection between the two. And then that epiphany that comes from some of the qualitative stuff could then be married with some data, even ML type stuff, that you feed in this insight into something that's more data driven then you could get some really powerful things out of it.

Kai: Yeah. And that's where the design sprint as a structured collaboration process is really helpful because you can bring the data into the UX conversation early, and you can bring UX and data into the product conversation, right, the product-strategy conversation. So that convergence in an efficient and fast is really where we see a lot of benefit.

And to the point you were making earlier about fast-and-dirty data, sometimes it's also making the time to engage with it, because we're always working against a deadline or moving very quickly. But if we don't stop and analyze what we see and what we know together with different perspectives, we miss a lot of opportunities.

Douglas: Absolutely. And I think that not only taking the time to smell the roses, but like you say, if it's this confluence of threads, because the product team's thinking about a certain set of concerns, the data team has concerns, the engineers have concerns, the designers have concerns, and that's the power of the cross-functional teams. But we don't always, even though we're working as cross-functional teams, we don't always take the time to stop and then kind of look around and ask some of these questions.

Kai: Yeah. And that's where that—I mean, I had a real aha moment in the sprint with one of our partners, where we had a data analyst in the sprint. And, you know, I asked this question, like, "Well, where is the drop off happening? You have this funnel, and people are coming in here. Can you go see what is the level of drop off?" And she pulled up the computer right then and there and said, "Wow, actually, we've got a 40 percent drop off at this point," and that helped us to figure out what was actually going wrong with the design, and we could use that to help problem solve. So I was so excited by the data-analyst role after that. I was like, can we get a data analyst in our sprint?

Douglas: Isn't it amazing when you get the teams together with different capabilities and then folks within different parts of the organization are going to ask totally different questions, but they might ask questions that they can't answer, because you've got the whole kind of, let's say, a gamut of capabilities brought together, amazing things can happen just in those moments.

And, you know, I've seen things within a design spirit that were orthogonal to the work we were doing. In fact, it just happened earlier this week. John's facilitating the design sprint, and I was dipping in here and there just to see how things were going. One of the times I was listening in, I heard them say, "I should totally use this in that community outreach project we're working on." So it's like they're making these discoveries that on the surface feel fairly trivial, but I'm convinced that without the design sprint, they would not have made those discoveries and that project would have suffered, or it would have been mediocre and not as good as it could have been.

Kai: Absolutely, yeah.

Douglas: I notice it because I love this stuff, but I think a lot of times folks have these tangential benefits that they don't even realize or definitely don't necessarily associate to the design sprint because it wasn't even the core product they were working on. There's just these ancillary benefits.

Kai: Yeah. It's interesting how we get so many ancillary benefits from design sprints, particularly also with relationship building, shared vocabulary building, shared knowledge. But now that we are not able to all actually be in a room together, at least at current, at present time, we don't automatically get those benefits. We actually have to think very intentionally about what do we need to get out of a session and design for it, whereas we used to get these added benefits without even necessarily looking for them. We would come in with, well, we need a product outcome, and then benefit from all these side conversations and the increased team building and all that stuff.

But now if we need to build relationships, so if we have a new team or we have new people that we're working with that we need to actually form stronger connections with, we have to intentionally design that because the virtual experience doesn't create it in the way that just being together does.

Douglas: 100 percent. And, you know, we've talked a lot about this notion that ultimately all of these virtual tools are in their infancy. It's sort of like the way e-commerce was in the early 2000s. We were still trying to figure it out, and what are the models that are going to stick? And Daniel talks a lot about, we've had thousands and thousands of years of learning how to meet in person, and we can lean on that knowledge and those customs. But virtually, we don't necessarily have the tooling and the skills where we can just walk into a room and it just naturally happens, like you're talking about. And so I agree it has to be highly designed in and really thoughtful.

And we talked a little bit about that in the preshow chat. It's had an impact on the training programs. I guess I'm just curious what you found you now have to focus on to make sure that Sprint Masters is successful in this virtual world.

Kai: Well, we have to teach them to pay closer attention to that, whereas initially we would sort of take that for granted. You're going to get this by bringing everyone in a room together. The difficult conversations are going to happen. You just have to nudge a little bit to make space for it, to ask the right questions. Now you have to teach not just how to be a facilitator but how to be a very mindful facilitator that's aware of the science and psychology of the virtual space, which, as you said, is very nascent. So we are teaching something as we're learning it. We're modeling it and learning as we go, which is amazing. Also, I can't say that we've gotten it right right now. We're trying it out. But at the same time, we also need to teach people, Googlers, the methodology, so we have the foundational knowledge that they need to gain, which is, what is a design sprint? When do I use it? What do I use it for? How do I scope it properly? All the basics. And then, how do I be a good facilitator? And then, how do I be a good facilitator in a virtual space that I'm maybe not comfortable in and maybe I have to find new tools and techniques for how to build presence or even to consider, what do my facilitator values like and how did they play out here?

Douglas: Yeah. I love this notion of values-based facilitation. It can be really powerful because you can show up in a real, authentic way.

Kai: Yeah, absolutely. And everyone has to find their own way, and that takes time to build your practice and what you feel comfortable with, your authentic self.

Douglas: Absolutely. I think there's a reason that the notion of having a practice is to label it with the word practice because it takes practice. You know, we can't just read a book and expect to be a great facilitator. We have to try things on for size and see what doesn't fit and actually go do the work. We're going to have to be willing to stumble a few times, pick ourselves up, and learn, okay, that didn't feel very authentic. Let me try something different.

Kai: Yeah, it's amazing. And the different ways that people learn is a thing that I have to always remind myself of, because how I learn is not the same way as how other people learn. So we're trying to make space for sort of a diversity of approaches.

Douglas: Yeah. I think as much as we can be multi-sensory as possible to where no matter where someone's at at any particular time, they relate to what we're trying to convey. I think that's pretty huge. And the training, you talked about connection, being able to observe people and draw them in. Have you found any good tactics or are there things you're recommending to your Sprint Masters around how to think about that in the virtual space or what the tools can allow us?

Kai: Yeah, I think there's a lot of great resources out there, but one of the things that we, just at a basic level, are trying to teach our facilitators is this idea of creating. I mean, we talk about creating and holding space in the physical space, but creating and holding the virtual space and making not just room for voices, but giving each person the opportunity to speak and be present. And we have such limited time, so it can be really hard to balance that. And I think that's really forefront on my mind right now because the getting the product outcomes and asking the strategic questions and pushing the thinking, we all feel relatively comfortable with that. But to do it in a way where you create and hold this space, where people feel safe to be creative, they feel connected, like you're saying, it really involves a delicate balance of speaking, being present, being called on, and a combination of, I hate to use the word icebreaker, but it's like activities that can be used to help us get to know each other better.

Douglas: Yeah, you know, it's funny. Icebreaker. Some folks dislike the term. And my perspective is that those are typically things that people throw around without much intention. Being true to what you were saying earlier, the virtual space requires even more intention than the physical space. And when we put those things in, we should be careful about what we're trying to accomplish and just be honest about it and communicate it so that it's well known.

Kai: Yeah. It's a great point about, I think especially in my early days of being a facilitator, I didn't have as much clarity when to use something like an icebreaker or an energizer or a "pair people up and talk about this thing" kind of activity and building that sort of the intuition of knowing, what do you need to do during, at what point throughout the sprint? When do you need to give people quiet moments to reflect? When do you need to build energy and get them feeling inspired and feeling seen or heard? Those are really nuanced things, and that's why I say I hate to use the word icebreaker because an icebreaker is something that you can just be like, "Oh, yeah, everyone stand up and organize yourself like a fruit." Sort by size and color or flavor. And that's fun, and it builds energy in a room, but it's not the same in virtual. So you have to pick very carefully.

Douglas: Absolutely. Even turn taking can be challenging in the virtual space. It's like in the physical space, you can say, "Okay, let's just go in a circle." In the virtual space, we have to think about new paradigms and what's our cadence and what are our signals.

Kai: Yeah. And it can be awkward and take extra time. And I'm just thinking, "Normally, this would take five minutes."

Douglas: It's amazing because some things move a lot faster. You know, if we're voting inside of MURAL or some other tool, it can go quite fast. And so we might have to intentionally slow it down so that it becomes more thoughtful.

Kai: Yeah, absolutely.

Douglas: You know, I think you guys share something in common with us in the sense that you tend to sometimes, or even often, have larger workshops, whereas a classic design sprint's seven people. We've discussed in the past how we've both had workshops that are quite more numerous than that. And I'm curious what sorts of things that you're doing in the virtual space to accommodate for larger audiences.

Kai: Yeah. It's hard. I'll just acknowledge that because we used to do 20-, 30-person sprints. And also, when it comes to training, I used to—I'd be like, "Sure, I could train 60 people. No problem," by myself in a room. But in the virtual space, because of the breakouts and it, just, it's different, so I have not run as many large sprints, though I did do a 45-person one two weeks ago. But what we do is we really rely heavily on breaking out into groups of five with facilitators within it. So it's just the scaled model. I just lean on my facilitator's more, and we'll make sure that each team has a POC or a lead of some kind.

I think it's possible—a lot of our Sprint Masters right now are just saying don't do it, which I understand that. And I think we used to say don't do virtual either, because it's just too complicated. So I think eventually we will find ways. And I really appreciate some of the tips and tricks that I learned from your large-virtual-meetings workshop. Seeing how you manage a group of that size I think is really helpful because you do want to approach it really differently. You're not going to do the around-the-room "show me that special item off your desk and tell me the history" when you've got 45 people. So you are approaching it from a different perspective, but it can be scaled.

Douglas: Absolutely. So coming back to the Sprint Master training, I'm curious. Ultimately, Google is supporting this initiative, so there's clearly an identified business value. For the business folks that are listening, what's the real purpose behind—like, why spend the time to train all these folks? What does that really open up for Google?

Kai: Well, it enables us to work more effectively cross functionally, and I think I've—I don't know how many times I've said the word cross-functional already. You can keep count—but there is so much value we all know that comes from that. And as a larger company, it's not a standard way of working. I think smaller startups will in general work more easily more cross functionally. But when you're in a larger organization with multiple product areas, working across products and working across end product and UX, more marketing, it's really critical to the success of the company. It's critical to understanding the business so that everybody who is working on product teams has that viewpoint across the company to working across those silos.

As the company grows, we need more and more people to do that work, to help with that work, and that's where the Google Spirit Masters come in. We train people across all the PAs, primarily in the UX discipline, but we do folks in some other roles as well, provide the training to them. And ultimately, they're not just running design sprints for their product area. So if you're a Sprint Master on Photos, you might raise your hand to go run a design sprint for Maps or for Cloud. And that also creates cross pollination of ideas and allows you to leverage solutions that have worked in one part of the company in other parts. So there's a lot of value there.

It allows us to work, we say, to accelerate our collaboration, accelerate our innovation, because it helps us to work faster as well. And it's not just faster, but it's more effectively as a group because teamwork is always harder than individual work.

Douglas: I guess one thing that I always loved to visualize the positive impacts is this notion of kind of flipping around your discovery process, because so often integrations start to happen later in the cycle. Even if we're doing continuous integration and all these good things, it's like if we're not doing a lot of this upfront discovery work together, then we discover those kind of break points later. And anyone in this, doing this work at all, knows that the later the discoveries happen, the more expensive they are to address. And sometimes it's too late because it's not going to make or break the project, but it would have created a little extra delight for the user, and it would have been cheap to do if we would've known about it early. But now it's too late.

Kai: Yeah, absolutely. And users don't care that the Photos team is different than the Maps team, you know? Users don't care that Search is a whole other team. Those product lines are not valuable to them. They pop back and forth across multiple suite of products, and we want that to be seamless for them. We want it to be the best experience it can. And when they're owned by different teams, that requires a lot of coordination.

Douglas: Yeah. It reminds me of Conway's Law. I don't know if you've run across this, but most people that have actually written software have seen it numerous times. It's basically the statement that says that any piece of software is going to resemble the structure of the organization that wrote that software. And so what you're describing is exactly the manifestation of Conway's Law, right? You've got these teams that are working on different portions, and at one level you could say they're working on different applications. But when, to your point, one of the user's using it, they're using the system, not an application. And so they're kind of moving fluidly around that. And how cohesive it is is going to depend on how much you can bridge those boundaries of the organization structure.

Kai: Yeah. And that's, in some ways, what the Sprint Masters are an antidote to at times, right?

Douglas: That's amazing.

Kai: Yeah.

Douglas: So you talked a little bit in the preshow chat about this notion of resilient product teams and how the sprint can help with that process. So I'm curious. I think our listeners would enjoy hearing a little bit about that because I think it's fascinating.

Kai: Yeah. Actually, when I think about the resilience on my side, it's maybe less about the sprint process itself and more about how you build a self-sustaining community. And that resilience comes from operating as, like, a learning organization, which means taking the time to reflect on what's working and what's not working, and then focusing on improving the process as you go. You know, that's very standard when you think about a learning organization.

But the example that we recently had was as we had to pivot to moving all of our sprints to virtual and helping 400 Sprint Masters build confidence in the virtual world, also not being experts ourselves, we really turned to this group to build a platform where we could learn from each other. And that's where I see a lot of resilience happening, when you have a system in place for people to solve together the challenges or the things that they're facing, which means it's not me coming in and saying, "I know the answer here, and I'm going to teach all of you how to do this," but people joining forces and saying, "I'm trying this thing over here. I've got an experiment running. I'm going to feed it back in." And my team being that central hub that creates a space for that amplification and knowledge sharing so that we can rapidly adapt and build new ways of thinking. And that sort of comes from how you approach that evolution, how you approach a learning organization.

Douglas: Wow, yeah. I love this concept of the learning organization and this group that can facilitate and be a conduit for these learnings, to kind of come and be dispersed throughout the other teams and whatnot, I think that's a fantastic concept. And we talked a little bit also about embracing the experimentation mindset. And I've been referring to this as the sprint mindset in the context of design sprints and how it's so critical for folks to not only see the benefit. You know, we talked about the direct benefits of how it's moving your project forward and getting people aligned. And then also the ancillary benefits of, like, these weird connections or these epiphanies you have that influence other projects. Then, if you can leave that workshop and have these mindsets permeate all the work you do, then it has this kind of like compounding effect throughout the organization.

Kai: Yeah, absolutely. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently, and I think you know because I reached out to you for more resources, because I think this is something that it's not as easy as it sounds. You're like, "Yeah, just design and experiment and learn from it." There's a way in which oftentimes we will do things and we haven't fully articulated what it is that we want to learn from it. And I think that is one of the benefits or it's sort of the strength of the sprint process, where you go in and say, "What do we know, what do we don't know, and what do we want to know?" And a lot of times, people will think that they're experimenting because they're being scrappy and moving fast, but they're not learning as they go. And that's, like, the fundamental benefit comes when you stop and reflect and learn and improve. So I think it's incredibly valuable for any organization to look at how do we embrace experimentation and really figure out how to bake it into the way that you work.

Douglas: Yeah. I love that. We picked up this concept from the military, which is, you know, people always talk about lessons learned, but basically their stance on this is, like, people use the term lessons learned inappropriately. And most of the time, what they're talking about are lessons identified. And we haven't really learned the lesson until we've actually addressed it and done something about it. So we can identify it all the time, but if we don't actually make the change, we haven't actually done anything about it. We haven't addressed it. We're just located a problem.

Kai: Yeah. And that happens a lot. We're like, "There's a problem. There's a problem." You move on to the next thing, and then you're like, okay. It's human nature, too, you know?

Douglas: Absolutely. And, you know, I think that's one of the beautiful things about facilitation and a lot of these methods is they're designed with human nature in mind and how we can take advantage of the good parts and use them against some of the things that are not so great about human nature.

Kai: Yeah, absolutely. I spend a lot of time saying, you know, "I'm trying to combat design fixation here. Don't spend too much time on that sketch. I don't want you to get too attached to that idea."

Douglas: Yeah. I ran into a term recently called street psychologist, which I thought was pretty incredible. And I think essentially to be a great facilitator is you have to kind of have to be a street psychologist.

Kai: Kind of like an armchair—

Douglas: Yeah, exactly.

Kai: —an armchair psychologist, but we're doing it from the street. I like it.

Douglas: I don't know just enough to understand what we're dealing with.

Kai: Absolutely.

Douglas: So I'm curious. If you could change anything about most meetings, what would it be?

Kai: Well, that's a very broad question because I have all kinds of different meetings. A lot of my meetings are not bad currently. But I would say I find really, really large, kind of all handsy-type meetings to be ones that I often wonder why we do them. So I think there is a way in which sometimes we have meetings that don't really need to be in person or synchronous, as we say. And I think we could be more creative about how we deliver content asynchronously to people and that when we do bring people together, we design for people being together as opposed to a one-way delivery of content, because I often feel like now, even more than ever, a one-way delivery of content is consumed one way. So I would say really embracing when things are bi-directional or multidirectional and designing for that to make the most use of people's time when they're all actually being asked to be together at the same time.

Douglas: Absolutely. We often talk about, is a meeting purely informative, and if so, there's probably better vehicles than bringing everyone together unless we really want to get people's reactions. But if we're truly wanting to get everyone's reactions, like you say, it needs to be designed in a bi-directional way.

Kai: Absolutely.

Douglas: Excellent.

Well, Kai. It's been a pleasure chatting with you today. And I'm sure people are curious how they might be able to follow your work or get in touch or just kind of see more about what you are working on. How can they find you?

Kai: You can always find me on Twitter, @kaihaley, and LinkedIn. And then, of course, the designsprintkit.withgoogle.com is a great site where I post case studies and content for folks, if anyone's interested more in our design-sprint information.

Douglas: Excellent. Thank you so much, Kai.

Kai: Thank you so much for having me. It was such a pleasure.

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