The Conversation Factory

Today I talk with Jim Kalbach, author of Mapping Experiences, an amazing resource for anyone who wants to help a group of people gain alignment..alignment on what's actually happening in their organization, with their customers, and alignment on where to go next.

This season, I'm investigating ideas and tools around thinking alone and thinking together.

Thinking together matters because whenever we meet, it's a chance to make a choice...and if our thinking is habitual, based on power dynamics or just plain haphazard, the choices we make will be habitual and haphazard! Great facilitators help groups of people think together in amazing ways...Jim is an ace facilitator and I'm thrilled to talk with him today! If you want to see our faces, there is a video in YouTube of our conversation.

As Jim said (to my heart's delight) It's not the map, it's the conversation *about* the map that creates real change. The map is just a durable artifact of the conversation, and lasts longer, communicates better, than a report or slide deck. It's also something people build together, so it gains power from the IKEA effect...people love what they invest time in.

We also talked about the powerful draw the idea of "mapping" has for people: It's like asking for a name brand mustard! He got a call from an amazing organization called Hedayah way out in Dubai to do a mapping workshop for former radical extremists to talk about their journeys out of radicalization and into helping others. He Had to figure out *where* in the long journey of the extremist's experience the work needed to be focused...and we talk about how he got it wrong and how it got it right.

Some key takeways from our conversation are in the show notes on the conversation factory.com:

1. The Map Frames the Narrative,  but leave it incomplete, creating  a  lean forward Conversation

This is one really interesting takeaway from our conversation: Jim is very intentional about how much to do *with* the group, live and in person and how much to build *for* them, through research and his own reflective  process. Leaving it incomplete helps people enter into the world of the map and make it their own. Showing a perfect artifact is *not* the point of these tools. He sees it as a proposal, an opening to the conversation, like a first offer in a negotiation.

2. Alignment is not Groupthink: Breaking the team up helps them work together honestly

Jim calls these maps he makes "alignment diagrams" because they help the team see the same world. But the time spent with people in the room isn't about getting everyone to agree on your map, it's about getting everyone's perspectives out and up on the wall and rebuilding the map to match everyone's understanding, knowledge and experience

3. Where to play, how to win: Focus on a portion of the map for clearer insights

Hendauah asked him to come to Dubai and bring together former gang bangers, white supremacists and Al Qaida members to talk about and map their experiences. T here's a long arc of that experience...and the organization wanted the focus on a particular *moment* in the journey: Not the radicalization journey, not the de-radicalization journey...but the journey of those who choose to help de-radicalize others. Figuring that focus out took a lot of conversation with his partners in Dubai. The more specific you are about your journey "moment" the more clear your work can be...you can zoom in on what's really crucial...and situate that moment in a larger arc.

4. Map the workshop experience, manage the energy

Find an arc and a flow for your mapping workshop: Just like your customers have experiences that you can map, you can map the experience of the team as you think about how they will enter into the workshop, what the flow of energy will be...and always have a plan B: keeping things moving along. Jim talks about shifting the energy and activities between introspective, conversational and game-based.

We also talk about remote workshopping and more!

Links and notes

mapping experiences

https://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Experiences-Complete-Creating-Blueprints/dp/1491923539

Hedayah: The NGO Jim worked with to map the experiences of violent extremists

http://www.hedayah.ae/

this book isn't just about software, it's about any challenge with people: brand, customer experiences, social challenges

the hero's journey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

star wars and the hero's journey (a fun episode of the ted radio hour)

https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/458496650/the-heros-journey

being thoughtful about who to bring along with you on the pre-work interviews

it's not the diagram, it's the process of building the diagram

The chronology of the experience phases  follows a certain logic (although arbitrary), along with tracking Doing/Thinking/Feeling at each moment

The 5 Es of Experience Design: A handy frame (two articles I've written about it on medium:

https://medium.com/@dastillman/the-5es-and-6ps-experience-inventory-a-conversation-guide-849696b5dc70

https://medium.com/@dastillman/facilitation-means-designing-conversations-24bac966076e

Have a Goal at the end of the map, use Verbs

Shout out to GameStorming: Looking at Game Mechanics to get teams to work together better

http://gamestorming.com

To get the team to read the map, get the team to give themselves (ie, their company) a letter grade at each moment in the map

How do you keep the momentum of the conversation going? The Map can be the compact, compelling artifact that keeps the thread of the conversation going: A touchstone

How can you get from the map to an experiment?

Remote can work with the right tools, enough focus and time: Don't try to replicate the in-person experience...but a mapping workshop is a good reason to get a geographically spread out team together.

Mural.com is a great tool for this, but you *must* rethink your methods, cycle through your participants and break exercises into much smaller chunks of 3-10 minutes.

To get remote to work, weave multiple tools together to give people a multi-tasking mindset *on the workshop*...using chat, surveys, mural and other tools.

The remote design thinking workshop with Glenn Fajardo and Kal Joffres with the D.School.

https://dschool.stanford.edu/classes/long-distance-design

Don 't have mixed remote/located teams: different paces of communication make it very hard

The experience map can become a container for the interviews, empathy and notes as the workshop progresses.

This week I talk about how to know where your team "is" in body and spirit and how to start to shift things for the better!

Watch along and read the write up at http://theconversationfactory.com/think-alone-think-together/

Today I talk about the three types of narrative threads that tie a conversation together. Read the show notes and see the other episodes at http://theconversationfactory.com/think-alone-think-together/

This is episode three of "think alone, think together" a livestreaming series. The video and write up helps: https://medium.com/@dastillman/two-better-ways-to-have-group-conversations-d0b66b419ab2

I'm livestreaming/agile releasing a book in chunks. Week two is summarized here, along with the images and video...it helps to watch, but man, the locally recorded audio is better!

https://medium.com/@dastillman/are-you-ready-to-end-fakemeetings-with-a-simple-4-point-checklist-dfef9961884a

Enjoy!

hey! this is an experiment with shorter, more frequent content, as well as working out loud.

Read more here:

https://medium.com/@dastillman/solve-the-3-most-common-meeting-maladies-with-one-simple-tool-26800cd75644

So...Cybernetics. I was describing the ideas behind this episode to a friend and he was like "cybernetics is about steering?" And yep, it is. Check out the show notes for some essential links on cybernetics, *and* an essential diagram to help follow along with this episode.

The idea is this: You have goals and I have goals. If we're in conversation, the way we find a shared goal is through probing, experimentation, alignment on means, revision of the goals, mistakes...and recursion. The recursive process of seeing a goal, aiming for it, seeing the "error" or gap and then moving to close the gap...that's cybernetics. And the principles of cybernetics really are a way to think about everything. Or, rather...anything that has a purpose, goals, intention. So, orgs that need to shift business models, teams that need to tighten timelines...getting your friends to pick a restaurant for next week...So, everything that really matters!

If need people to agree on things before they can happen, you need cybernetics. And if you're good at getting people to agree, you're a solid cyberneticist. Or, in my language, an ace conversation designer.

In my journey through conversation design during this year of the podcast, Dr. Paul Pangaro has been a rich guide and mentor, one of the people who sees the diverse ways that conversations shape the world, how systems can have purposes and goals....and in true conversational style, I've certainly been altered by his ideas. Paul is a professor and chair of the interaction design MFA at Detroit's College of Creative Arts. He got his BS from MIT, where he wound up getting hired by Nicholas Negroponte into a program that evolved into the MIT Media Lab. He then went on to get a PhD in Cybernetics in the UK and came into contact with Gordon Pask, a cybernetics and conversation design visionary, whose work Paul is still evolving and processing.

The application of cybernetics to conversation has been a mind blower for me. It's helped me think about how to structure longer projects, to design teams, to form powerful framing questions. That ability to frame a question in an invitational or motivating way, making it seem solvable without giving the solution...it's an amazing superpower to be able to kickstart an amazing conversation.

But asking that question designs the conversation,  sets the stage for what comes next...and so I'm always cautious in my conversation designs to control for writing solo before group conversation flows...because whoever speaks first sets the stage for whatever comes next...they speak in response to what's been spoken already.

We talk about three big conversations design concepts that are worth paying attention to: how to think about group composition and cadence, the conversation with yourself, in the past (time travel!) and the relationship between goals and play.

1. The group conversation. Do we have the right people in the room? Do we have enough diversity to answer the question at hand? Can we design a cadence of interaction that allows us to shift the question and the composition of the team in a responsive way? In Cybernetics, a system that wants to influence another system has to be at least as complex.

Is your team more complicated that the problem you're solving? Good!

But...who gets to frame the group and the cadence? How do we invite people into the group conversation? Who has the power to give permission?

1. The conversation between myself now and myself in the past through writing. I'm a fan of pen and ink...because as we write, we watch the ink flow and see our thoughts as they were moments ago as we move into the future. The act of sketching or writing allows us to witness our thoughts as they were and converse with them. Crazy right?
2. How established, shared goals allow us to play together, even become one. If we're dancing, a "form" helps us know our roles and goals. Are we dancing the Tango or a Waltz? Knowing this makes it possible to better respond to stimulus from our partners. I think that's why Agile/Design Thinking/Lean are so popular. With Parkinson's Law of ever expanding work, there seem to be no rules anymore. We've broken partner dancing (starting with the twist) and now we never know what to do on the dance floor. Some of us crave for a throwback time, the swing era, the mystery of the tango...where we knew what to do, where there was more clarity. Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking...they are a dance form that makes it clearer what the roles and goals are. They're a game we can play if we know the rules and have a shared vocabulary.

When we share goals, the line between us blurs, or dissolves. We live in "amity"...or you can draw a box around us and call us a system with a shared purpose: to dance!

So...this is the last episode of season one. It's been a year, 22 episodes, hours and hours of conversations in real time and many times that in listening and editing and writing about them. I've learned a ton and had a blast. I'm taking the holidays off and am working on season two! Stay tuned and enjoy the show.

Show notes and links:

Paul on the web

More on Pask

Martin Buber (I and thou)

Requisite Variety: On Paul's Site and Elsewhere

Alex Bavelas

Ambiguity experiments - people start to break down when there's too much of it, blaming each other...it's exceeding our bandwidth (or requisite variety)

The Self Talk NYTimes article: When people repeated their tasks to themselves, they did it better, if it was a clear task. Also check out the Conversation Within Your Head.

Heinz von Foerster: If you desire to see, learn how to act

The Dhatupata: There's a lot less online about this than I thought there would be! The author is here, but deeper info is not. hmmm...

Have you ever had that feeling right before a party you were throwing starts? That creeping dread that no one will show up? Today I talk to Jesse Israel, who doesn't seem to have that fear. Jesse flips that feeling on its head. For Jesse, it's very simple: People *want* to connect. And the invitations we, as organizers and conveners, send out...they're just permission slips. The invitation gives people permission to connect.

Jesse Israel is the founder of Medi Club and the Big Quiet, which hosts huge public meditations in places like Madison Square Garden and the World Trade Center's Oculus for literally thousands of people. I met Jesse Israel at a dinner party way back in early 2015 at a Rabbi's house. We had a great conversation and discovered a few shared interests. Somehow we discovered we both loved biking the city and he invited me to check out his cycle club, the Cyclones. And then he mentioned that he had a meditation club, too. As a life-long meditator (before it was cool!) I was intrigued. When I went to my first Medi Club, I was struck by the energy and the intimacy of it. How easy it was to connect with the crowd, which got larger and larger each time I came. The Medi Club meets monthly and regularly attracts a few hundred people ready to sit in silence with their peers. The Cyclones is similarly huge, and a blast, every time I make it out.

So, to be clear: In Jesse's view, we connect *through* things: the bike, the meditation, is permission to connect. It's the connection we crave. He just opens the door.

There are few key conversation design principles I want to pull out of this conversation, to look for as you listen, all around how to frame profoundly motivating invitations: What permission will you give for people to connect? What's the deep and clear purpose of it? What are the boundaries of the invitation? And something else I saw that Jesse does: he pre-invites. He builds a coalition of the willing early, before he opens up the larger invitation. 

Deeper into the conversation, we talk about how to sustain yourself as a community builder: Jesse talks about how he's learned to develop compassionate boundaries, to maintain his internal integrity. If you don't say no to some requests, you can't continue to give. We also talk about how to trust and develop your team. When that trust is in place, that's where the growth really happens.

For more in-depth consideration of this conversation, head over to the conversation factory.com and take a look at the show notes! I'd also suggest you take a listen to the episode with Daniel Mezick, founder of open space agility, who's thoughts on invitation match up with Jesse's profoundly!

What Permission will you grant?

At Medi Club it's okay to open up. When you step into the door, you know you're among friends. How is that permission granted? Jesse shares first. He leads the way and opens the floor. He makes the example clear: He's going to be real and so you can be, too. Over time, the community attracts more and more of this energy. Others take up the charge and spread the norm.

What's the Clarity of your Purpose?

Early on, Jesse wrote a medium post to declare the intentions of the community he was forming.

The article lays out why Medi Club exists in extremely clear language and outlines the purpose of the club in a way that passes the T-shirt test (a rule of thumb that seems to be from Peter Drucker)

Also: Is there a larger purpose? The Cyclones is a fun Saturday around NYC, but became something more when they started an Indigogo campaign to get bikes in the hands of 1,000 children in Tanzania.

Is there an authentic way to enlarge the purpose of your invitation over time?

Boundaries

Boundaries show up in two ways: Boundaries for the invitation and boundaries for the inviter. The Cyclones invites you to give up expectations and planning...for one afternoon. You don't know where you're going, and that's okay. Medi Club stretches that boundary with their circles: Anyone can host a Medi Club circle and create the same energy with a smaller group, anytime they want. Medi Club holds the larger circle and gives each smaller circle an "authorization" to share the same invitation.

At min 26: Jesse talks about another form of boundary: A boundary for the convener.

"If I don't have compassionate boundaries, I can't show up as a friend or a community builder."

When he's at medi club, he's a public person, and everyone there feels some sort of connection with him. But after the club night is over, Jesse has to find a way to restore his strength and be with himself. And if he said yes to every interview, every request to "pick his brain" from the community...there'd be no time for anything else!  This compassionate boundary is a huge challenge, because saying no doesn't feel generous. Finding a way to create a generous no is a critical skill for leading communities.

I'm terribly grateful that Jesse was willing to sit down with me for this conversation. I learned a ton from it and I hope you do, too.

Links

The Big Quiet

Cyclones Bike Club

Medi Club Medium Article

Cyclones Indigogo

Women make 79 cents on the dollar compared to men and that's wrong. (depending on how you cut the data it's either slightly worse or slightly better - but it's still bad). It's a systemic problem and most of us would throw up our hands and say "There's nothing I can do about it!"

Instead of doing nothing, Claire Wasserman has built a powerful community called Ladies Get Paid around a powerful and critical idea: Fixing the wage gap. And while she says that "this conversation needs an overhaul" it's not just talk. Claire's organization brings women together in town halls all over the country where they focus on what woman can do with their own hands, like learn better negotiation skills and apply for jobs they might not feel ready for, but probably are. Men have been trained, somehow, to be more (slash-over) confident, while the imposter syndrome seems to effect women more strongly.

Claire is an experience designer, designing in-person, transformational events in the same way that a UX designer crafts an app or an HR manager crafts a personnel policy: Thinking about the goal, the intended effect it will have on a person, and working backwards. It is, in the end, Human Centered Design. The materials change, but the goal is the same!

That, after all, is the nature of, and best definition for, Design: Making something to shift the way things are to the way you want them to be. Ladies Get Paid is designed *by* Claire to make the change she wants to see in the world, to change the conversation about gender and money. Beyond her amazing story and her journey to creating this company, I dove into how Claire architects her business, her events and her community.

One issue that Claire and I get into is how to include men in the conversation. What are the levers available to us to design an intimate, safe and productive conversation for women (her primary audience) while allowing men to participate, to help, to learn? How do you design a conversation about gender issues without letting gender become an issue?

Claire has been tinkering with a design that allows men to ONLY ask questions...this format would draw a hard line on mansplaining. Like Jeopardy for conversations, it's a rigid restriction, but would keep men honest: Am I talking to be heard, or to be curious and to learn? It's giving men who want to come to the town halls a hard line: Ask or be silent. Don't declare or explain. When I heard that idea, I offered another option: The fishbowl, where men can *only* listen, from the outside. It's a harder line (but easier to follow for the men!)...and there's a lot of intimacy created for the inner circle of the fishbowl, with no cross-talk possible.

Which is "better"? No men? Men listening in, with no input? Or men inside the circle, but only asking? Each conversation design has implications, repercussions, challenges...there's no best! Claire, like any great designer, will tinker, test and try and see which feels right for her and her community.

Two conversations we didn't talk about enough: How Claire manages her own *internal* conversation. Claire is bootstrapping LGP financially and emotionally! Right now, she doesn't have the mentorship and support she is offering so energetically to others. Taking a step back and getting you core needs cared for is 100% essential for founders!

The other conversation we didn't dig into is negotiation tips and perspectives. For that, you might want to listen to my interview with Harvard Negotiation Professor Bob Bordone, and download my negotiation prep sheet on the downloads page!

You might also check out episode 13 with Rei Wang , Director of the Dorm Room Fund, where we talk about community building and episode 4 with Sara Mitchell of Faraday Futures, where we talk about listening to users: but not all of them!

Enjoy the conversation!

Show notes and links:

Claire on the Web

Ladies Get Paid

Claire's Hyperakt talk

When I look back at the way, way too many Instagram photos I posted during my week at Harvard's Program on Negotiation, I'm left with a sense of awe and gratitude. If you take a listen to episode two, you can hear me getting a solid tip to take the workshop from Leland Maschmeyer, a very smart dude and chief creative officer at Chobani. When someone like that tells you that this class is the best, most worthwhile he's ever taken, you listen. It was *still* hard to take time and money to go. I'm seeing this now with my upcoming Facilitation Masterclass that I'm co-hosting with Think Clearly's Mathias Jakobsen. Someone just canceled their attendance due to a client workshop coming up! I get it. I told my biggest client that I was taking the workshop at Harvard and to not even *tell* me about anything that might pop up that week. I didn't want to get FOMO.

I couldn't know, wouldn't have guessed that my experience as a design thinker and facilitation coach could have prepared me well for my experience at Harvard, or that there would be so much overlap in the Program on Negotiation's approach and the design thinking approach to empathy, active listening, co-creation and ideation. I didn't even think that negotiators cared about that stuff. Robert Bordone, my professor, turned out to be a kindred spirit. And while some of my negotiation counterparts during the training felt that my drawing, colorful post-its and whiteboard use was weird, Bob got it and loved it. We've been talking for months now about how to combine our offerings into something fun and exciting!

Robert Bordone is the Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Founding Director of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program. He teaches several courses at Harvard Law School including the school’s flagship Negotiation Workshop. Bob also teaches in the Harvard Negotiation Institute and the Harvard Program on Negotiation’s Senior Executive Education seminars.

As a professional facilitator and conflict resolution consultant, Bob works with individual and corporate clients across a spectrum of industries. He specializes in dispute systems design and in assisting individuals and groups seeking to manage conflicts in highly sensitive, emotional, or difficult situations.

Negotiation in our culture is a bad or fraught word: it makes people anxious. We see negotiations as win/lose, contentious. That's a misunderstanding. It doesn't have to be win lose. Bob sees negotiation as a creative act that generates possibilities and that can create new value.

I took away three big Insights from our conversation.

You *must* take the perspective of the "other side". The "untrained" negotiator only asks their counterpart questions about their interests and preferences 7% of the time. Finding more about *why* people want what they want is the key to great negotiations. Before you even get into the room, you need to spend half of your prep time thinking, not about what you want and think you can or should get, but what the other person thinks *they* can and should get and why. That's why I made my 1-pager negotiation prep sheet, which synthesizes and summarizes the key elements I learned. It's divided down the middle to remind me to take that time and think one-to-one on all aspects of a solid negotiation preparation. You can download that in the show notes.

Bob also talks about going "to the balcony" to look at the whole situation from an outside perspective, which can be very powerful.

When you find the points of difference in criteria, interests and positions, the negotiation doesn't have to devolve into conflict. You differ. Congratulations! You've identified a dilemma, a core issue. You can call that difference out, and ask "How might we close the gap in our positions?". Then, you can negotiate about the negotiation. You can discuss the differing positions, and lay them all out. The fresh air and sunlight will only help make the process more enjoyable and productive. Don't be afraid of the conflict. Name the game, and find a new way to play it

If you can frame the core conflict with an opening, welcoming question, you and your counterpart can generate multiple potential solutions using many of the tools available in the Design Thinking canon. Negotiating about the process can be a lot easier than deciding the issue. A fair process is easy to choose. A fair outcome is then a lot easier to see, even if we don't get everything we want.

So... Enjoy the episode. Bob is a wonderful thinker! You should check out the show notes and watch some of his other lectures online, especially his talk about increasing conflict capacity!

Bob on twitter

More about Bob at Harvard's Site

The Harvard Program on Negotiation

Getting to Yes: Book and Creative Mornings talk by author William Ury

the circle diagram

The negotiation within PDF

The ZOPA and scoring games (splitting 2 dollars)

The prisoner's dilemma and scorable games evolving over time

Building Conflict capacity

Bonus Content: Reflections from my Negotiation Teammates on the impact of the workshop on their conversations