The Conversation Factory

Today I talk with Kate Quarfordt,  the Founding Director of Arts Integration & Culture at City School of the Arts. My conversation with Kate was a rich and wonderful surprise! I found her 4-seasons framework someplace in the corners of the internet and was immediately enchanted with it. Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter as metaphors for the flow of work... The Framework is so powerful in the types of conversations it allows into the larger conversation about work, especially winter, a time to reflect and consider, to heal and incubate. It's rare to make space for that type of work!

The opening and closing circles Kate hosts in her school to bookend the week...it touched my heart! It's such a beautiful way to work. And so similar to how Daniel Mezick gets organizations to shift how they work through Open Space Agility! Check that episode out here!

This conversation has started to open up the idea of threads and threading in conversation design for me. I first got the sense of threading from my conversation with Nandini Stocker, Google's Head of Conversation Design Advocacy. As I see it now,  the arc of a conversation  is made of stories. And the way Kate describes our stories coming together to make a new one, using the word "Braiding", makes so much sense.  Conversations are the exchange of stories, and placing ourselves and others into the hero role, shifting perspective as empathy and generosity demands is the flow of real dialogue.

Finally, we talked about how creative work requires an audience! An Audience provides a "pull" and "push" for work. At least, that's the way I experience it. Even when I don't feel like it, I push myself to finish work on an episode because I know people are waiting (pulling) for it. And there's a loop of feedback on the work: People write me to tell me what was great and where I missed the mark. That's one of the reasons that I feel the conversation between an organization and its customers is one of the most critical, missing pieces in companies that struggle with a sluggish work cadence. There's not enough urgency.  If you want to dig into that conversation more, check out the episodes from Rei Wang, Director of the Dorm Room Fund and Sarah Mitchell, Lead designer at Faraday Futures. Both helped me see principles at work in sustaining great conversations with customers and community.

 Thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did making it !

Notes and Links

____

Meeting Kate on Twitter

New York City Charter School for the Arts (CSA)

Specials On C

Gothamsmith

Threading in Conversation Design: In Podcast Show notes

What we need is a Montage (montage!)

The X that we were solving for: Feeling out of synch, loss of clear cadence

The Seasons Wheel applied to a Week or a Cultural Transformation:

Open and Closing Circles: Open Space Agility with Daniel Mezick

Mary Oliver: making yourself visible to yourself in a way you never imagined!

From Blue Pastures:

I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one piles, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe – that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

The Inner Winter Process: Leaving yourself voicemails! (creates a third point for reflection, just as a drawing or journal does)

Dave Gray on Drawing creating a clearer interface for conversations

https://medium.com/the-conversation-factory/the-math-behind-drawing-in-together-1a24fe4b9084

Morning Pages

http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

The Inner Conversation

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/figuring-out-how-and-why-we-talk-to-ourselves/508487/

Spring Cleaning Script from Mama Gena: http://www.mamagenas.com/where-women-store-garbage/

Holding Space is incredible power: Who initiates the request? Who Has permission? The Paradox of Flow vs Framework: Absence of Structure vs. Structure vs. balancing who introduces the structure.

What's the Deal with Agile?

http://theconversationfactory.com/podcast/2017/7/19/alistair-cockburn-on-the-heart-of-agile-jazz-dialog-and-guest-leadership

How is a school like a conversation? Moving from the School-As-Script model to the School-As-Dialogue model.

Waterfall vs Agile

http://agilitrix.com/2016/04/agile-vs-waterfall/

Kate's Post-call reflections on Winter and Work as a Relay Race:

"As I was transitioning into the rest of my day I realized that there was one last thing that I wanted to share apropos of the winter phase and the importance of rest and rejuvenation--not just in the creative learning space, but also in the context of activism and resistance. As I mentioned, we are doing a lot of work with young folks around using the arts as a vehicle for activism, especially given how passionate they are about making their voices heard in this current political moment. On Monday night I had the chance to perform with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a women/femme-led singing group created by the leaders of the Women's March to keep the momentum of the march moving forward and also--crucially--to frame joy and rejuvenation as acts of resistance in and necessary elements of a sustainable movement. Paola Mendoza, co-artistic director of the March, and one of the producers of Monday night's event, said something that evening that resonated super powerfully with me.

https://m.mic.com/articles/182826/the-womens-march-launches-resistance-revival-in-effort-to-keep-anti-trump-momentum-going#.GFf3ipI25)

She said, "The resistance is not a sprint, but it's not a marathon either. It's a relay race." I love that image because it evokes the sustainability that becomes possible when hard work and leadership are shouldered by a full community instead of by a single individual. There's a sense of permission implicit in this approach, the understanding that it's ok for each member of the community to pause and refill the tanks every so often, because there's always someone else right there who's ready to take up the baton and run the next leg. In the context of the season wheel, this is the idea that different community members can be in different phases at different times...  it's OK for you to be in winter, because you know I'm in summer and I've got you covered, and then we can switch so I get a chance to rest and reflect while you keep the work moving forward. I'm excited to bring that relay race image back to the kiddos when we gather to kick off year two.
 

My coaching conversation with Mark covers some really deep topics, and I am really grateful to Mark for his presence and willingness to be open, to go deep, and to let me share this recording of our coaching session.

We hit on three key ideas that are worth looking at in your own work!

1. The meetings you have, the conversations you can and can't have IS the organization you are in. If you can change the way you meet, the way you converse, you can change how you organize.

As Martin Buber, the 20th Century Jewish Philosopher said: 'All real living is meeting'

If your meetings don't feel like they're alive, it's up to you to bring the energy they need to come back to life. Mark's organization is so focused on delivering on their core promises in a big way that they micromanage and try to eliminate failure. Without any tolerance for failure or conjecture, without an idea of constant experimentation and learning, new ideas can be deeply frightening. Every meeting is about delivery. They are an organization of closers. That brings us to idea number two:

2. Mark identified how frustrating it is when teammates have mismatched models of creativity and different abilities and tolerances in and with the other modes. Mark identified the three modes of creative conversations as Opening, Exploring and Closing (which I try to teach to every group I come in to consult with....it's so core to productive collaborative conversations!)

Opening is the creative divergence that loves to bring new ideas to the table. Exploring is the creative emergence,  which allows ideas to breathe and grow. And Closing is the creative convergence, the comfort with eliminating choices, aligning and delivering on ideas.

Mark is an Explorer. He likes to talk things out, to let things emerge from the soup of his creative process. Closers, particularly , find that mode frustrating, wasteful and confusing. Closers like to land the plane, to figure things out, to end dialogue.

Openers, Explorers and Closers need each other. And they each need to learn how to tolerate the other modes and ask for their own needs in creative conversations. Which brings us to our third key idea:

3. We all need to design invitations with the creative tendenciesof other people in mind. Mark wants others to understand his creative energies and help him support and shape them. But he needs to frame the process as an invitation into a  finite game. In my work, I find that people are willing to try something if they know that they can end the game anytime they want! Mark also wants others to support *his* mode of thinking, but isn't thinking about how the other people on his team mightbe thinking the *exact* same thing! So, the rules of his game, the game he wants to invite people into, we could call the "give me your energy, attention,  benefit of the doubt and tolerance for my creative modes" game. That's a big ask, and totally unilateral.  His job is to find a way to include other people in the process, and to make the rules of his game apply to everyone.  That's an invitation that people can get behind. That's the art of conversation design!

As Mark says, he needs to learn how to be with others in a way that isn't" just launching into my mode without preparing people for the rules of the game" and he needs to do it in a way that feels natural, not in a way that requires him to invert his approach, to turn himself upside down and inside out in order to work with others, which is what he's doing now. And it's killing him.

The question we start with, can a public purpose organization be more agile, becomes "can a purpose driven person bring the energies needed for creative transformation?" And that question, I believe, requires individuals in the organization to be agile, to be comfortable picking up the creative energies required for the moment, for themselves and for those they work and play with. Organizational agility totally and completely counts on people who can be agile in their movement between the creative modes and who can frame shifts in those modes as invitations.

So...that's a lot to chew on. Thanks again to Mark for letting me record and share this and for giving me the opportunity to listen and speak with him! Enjoy...

In episode I talk with Stephen Sokoler, the founder and CEO of Journey Meditation, a company dedicated to a world where more people meditate! I wanted to talk to Stephen because the inner conversation we need to foster is often forgotten completely. Instead, we focus on our teams, our organizations, our communities...all of the other critical conversations we've discussed in past episodes. But without going inward, the whole thing falls apart.

Meditation is like when an actor goes backstage to freshen their makeup, change costumes, look over the script... In life, we go from role to role without pause...and meditation is a way to step back and let it all chill.

I screwed this episode up! I'll be honest. I've done it before. When you're doing your own field recordings, it's easy to press the record button once, watch it blink, check your levels and then get into the interview. Oops! You actually need to press the button twice! The blinking stops and the seconds counter goes up. I messed up and lost about 30 minutes of sweet, sweet conversation with Stephen. Noticing it during our interview sent a cold chill through my whole body. I  just wasted this man's time, terribly. I had two options. Say nothing and try to "fix it in post" or cop to it and try again. I went for honesty...and since we're friends, Stephen humored me and we started over.

I mention this, not because I love honesty or vulnerability (although I do!) but because you might hear how the conversation with Stephen starts off a little stiff, a little mechanical. We are both *pushing* energy into the system to try to get the energy of the conversation back to where it was!  It's not tremendously noticeable...but you'll hear, once we get to the halfway point, things relax, we find a new thread for the conversation instead of trying to pull back towards the old one, and the conversation finds a more natural tone.

Meditation is like this, too. Being present has a gravity, but we can lose it, drift off to wherever. And we have to "bring ourselves back" in a way that isn't forced or artificial.  In the episode, Stephen and I discover another really interesting point, a connection between meditation and conversation that I hadn't noticed before.  Meditation is about coming back to your center. Recently, I was talking to a facilitator friend of mine who described his role as "holding the center" ...facilitating a great team conversation is about holding that space for real dialogue, open, at the center, and keeping people who drift off from getting too far. We just bring things back, as gently as we can, to the thread and keep things going.

Enjoy the episode! Stephen is a gentle and passionate soul, building an amazing company based on something he truly loves...I learned a lot from this episode, and I hope you do too!

Journey Meditation

Buddhism for Busy People

The Four Core Conversations: Medium Article (coming soon)

The Costs of Burnout

Light Watkins

Sharon Salzberg

Why have a Coach

The benefits of Group Meditation

Open, Explore and Close: The Three Creative Conversations Medium Article (coming soon)

No Good or bad ideas: Episode two with Abby Covert

Stephen's Five MCs (in order mentioned, not ranked)

Biggie Smalls

TuPac

Eminem

Jay-Z

Rakim

Honorable mention:

Chance the Rapper

On this episode of the conversation factory, I talk with Elliot Felix, founder of Brightspot Strategy, a boutique consultancy. Elliot founded Brightspot almost seven years ago, and as a former founder of an even smaller design consultancy, I'm totally impressed by what he's built and grown. Elliot has a background in Architecture, which I tease him about (only an architect uses "sightline" in a sentence)...different types of designers talk about and see the world differently: we manage different materials. I studied Industrial Design, and so I often look at an idea and think "can this be made at scale?"...even if it's a service, I break it down and ask if it can be manufactured, reproduced. This tendency can annoy people! It's been recently suggested to me that when people tell me about their ideas I should just say "that sounds fun!" and leave it at that...

Elliot was kind enough to do our episode on site at Brightspot's offices in the Financial District here in NYC and as we walked around chatting about various artifacts in the office, Elliot's love of space as a primary material of design was clear. As he says in the opening quote: the right space can facilitate work, help express ideas, support and reinforce or make culture manifest.

I've seen this in my own facilitation work: I can't tell you how many times I've seen a group get stuck in rut, literally because they'd run out of wall space to work with. Just giving them a new wall to work on gave them a new space to have a conversation, got them unstuck. Walls help make work visible, and when work is visible we can have more productive conversations. Without it, we slow down. Designing the space work takes place in *is* conversation design. Change the space, change the conversation.

At Brightspot they frame challenges as a three conversation checklist: Examining the Spaces people are in, the services offered in those spaces, and how people are organized in that space. This checklist is, itself, a design for a productive client-consultant conversation. Trying to shift asystem by approaching one of those conversations and not all of them is going to be harder. On the other hand, changing all three at once might be tough. But having the conversation about space, content and people is clearly crucial, that's why Brightspot designs their client conversations to include each of these three aspects of work.

When I teach facilitation I always tell people that they have to make the space they are facilitating in their own...and my favorite story of this is one of my first days working with Applegate Farms,  an organic food company, back in 2013. The room we were working in was large, cavernous, and had three big tables arranged in a "U" shape, with a screen projecting at the mouth of the U...the room had been designed for presentation, for the "sage on the stage"...but I wanted the group I was coaching on design thinking to collaborate, not focus on me! The U made everyone sit on the outside, facing me, not each other.

So during the break, I took the foot of the U and rotated it, so all three tables were parallel. The team walked in and was a little disoriented...the room was the same, but the energy was different. They sat in the chairs, facing each other, and we could get down to work in the style I was trying to cultivate.

Thinking about your own work: Is your space working for you or against you? Do you have the right variety of spaces, large, small, intimate, public, to do your work? In conversation design, we talk about the Q: the requisite variety of talent on your team, the right balance of familiar faces and fresh blood...it seems like, in talking to Elliot, that there's a similar quality of balance to be found in the spaces a truly functional company inhabits. If your space isn't working for you, shake it up!

Links and Notes

BrightSpot Strategy

Making a War Room for projects (but can we find a better name?!)

Expertise Audit: What do our people know? What knowledge aren't we tapping?

Vertical years and Horizontal years: Alternate Keeping the work the same and adding people with new skills and Evolving the offering.

Sightline - the most architectural word Elliott uses

Osmotic Communication

Leaders send signals whether they think are sending them or not: Semiotics

Idiosyncrasies of Leaders can be scaled unintentionally: Elliott over-analyzes, so his org tends to as well! Be intentional about communicating what's optional and what example you're setting, what aspects (quirks) of your personality you're transferring to the culture.

Focus and Time: Choosing our battles and having the time to fight them: Is there a better word: Where to learn and how to grow?

2X2: Size and Structure of conversations

Q of teams: New Yorker Article and Source, ie Requisite Variety in a System

Is your space working for you?

Larry Greiner:  The Greiner Curve

Problemtunity

My conversation with Alistair Cockburn was Agile to the core! We revised our timeline and deliverable with a quick standup and got right into it: After all, Agile principle #2 is to welcome changing requirements, even late in development. To wit, I thought we had an hour, early on the call he asked for 20, tops! (Somehow I kept him on the line for 45, since I'm deft at conversational manipulation. And he was keen to keep it going, too.)

Alistair quite the nomad, teaching Advanced Agile workshops all over the world. When he's not teaching, he might be dancing Tango in Argentina or brushing up on his French in Nice. But sometimes the location is too distracting, so he was holed up in Florida where he found a town that was *just* boring enough to allow him some time to get some work done. He was moving house unexpectedly the day we were slated to chat. I saw on Facebook that his AirBnB had a shag carpet and the humidity and mustiness mixed with a thick carpet was making him sick! I tried to give him an out, but he was adamant we do our conversation, even for only 20 minutes. His motto: Now is better than the future.

One of the pleasures and inspirations of talking with Alistair is that he's a man who really lives his principles: Agile principle #10 is that "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential". You'll hear how Alistair tries to design his life to make this principle a reality!

As I mentioned two episodes back with Daniel Mezick, around Open Space Agile Transformations, Agile is kicked around a lot in the consulting world, but my sense is that all of those people haven't actually read the Agile Manifesto! Alistair was one of the originators and signatories back in 2001, and it was a response to a broken way of working. But just like any ideology, it's come to be interpreted in alot of ways by a lot of people. It was fun to go back to the source!

I really enjoyed Alistair disagreeing with my characterization of Agile as a Design for Conversations. But I see it that way: Agile designs for some conversations and  not for others. And in fact, Alistair has a lot in common with Dave Gray, who I interviewed a few months back: Dave wondered about who has the right to design a conversation and if it can be overdesigned! Alistair is a proponent of Guest Leadership...that making space for momentary, voluntary leadership can powerfully transform work and teams.

Alistair and I had what he would call a Jazz Dialogue: a conversation with a meta-conversation layered on top! I have listened to this episode a few times and it's a tough one to summarize or encapsulate. One thing that I'm left with is the idea that even the desire for agility or the hunger for no ideology is an ideology. Which leaves me reflecting on the ways that my own internal tendencies leads to my own ways of seeing things as "right". After all, designing a conversation is power and power should be exercised carefully...because I could be wrong!

Show Bullets and Links

Alistair Cockburn on the Web

Agile Manifesto

Crystal Clear

Improvisation in Dance: What's Fixed and What's Flexible?

"I expect people to decline my advice"

The Oath of Non-Allegiance

Precision vs. Looseness

Crystal Clear: The Sloppiest methodology that could possibly work (Martin Fowler)

"Arranging my life for the maximum amount of freedom"

Anchoring Sloppiness in Essential details. (the opposite of an Overdetermined System)

Cultural Invasion: Design as Cultural Imperialism

Assuming that people bring their whole adult self to work:

Agile Practitioners mentioned:

Daniel Mezick

Ken Schwaber

Nic Sementa

Kay Johansen

Guest Leadership

RE: When do people step forward and help: The Good Samaritan Experiment (hint: when they're not in a hurry)

Be the Change you want to See can backfire

Host Leadership

The Art of Hosting

Open Space Technology

Going Meta: Talking about how we talk

Jazz Dialogue

The Heart of Agile

Self Storytelling

Kokoro: The heart

Alistair's Poets: ee cummings and Emily Dickinson and a poem Alistair wrote in honor of ee:

Mary Oliver's Wild Geese: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves

One of the great pleasures of hosting this show is that I have an excuse to reach out to old friends and spend some quality time with them. And I get to double the quality time! I really love gettingto listen to the whole episode again. It's a time to dig in and figure out what the episode was really about, and write these essays. Originally I was going to have the episodes transcribed and then read them, but in episode 2, I heard a different perspective. Information Architect  Abby Covert  talked about how processing her own research transcripts was essential to her work....I tried it, and she was right.

It can be hard to give oneself the time for reflection and learning, even though our internal conversation is  the most critical of all the conversations I've been researching (See David Whyte's The Three marriages for more on that!) In a few weeks I'll be sharing an episode I did on Meditation, one of the key tools to maintain (and silence, occasionally) a healthyinner conversation. Redesigning your inner conversation! Who wouldn't sign up for that from time to time?

In this episode I talk with Rei Wang, Director of the Dorm Room Fund. Rei and I connected way back in my Design Gym days: I think we were running an innovation day for GOOD magazine  where she was manager of GOOD Local. The workshop might have been  around connecting with your neighbors? We stayed connected as she moved to General Assembly (where I taught UX part time) as she rose up the ranks and managed their rapidly growing community efforts.

She now directs the Dorm Room fund for First Round Capital, and it's an amazing and unique organization. First Round does early investing in companies like Blue Apron, Birchbox and Warby Parker. And while the Dorm Room Fund is funded by First Round, it's run completely by college student volunteers, not professional VCs! This tight community of volunteers IS the Dorm Room Fund.

I think there is a lot talk about community: about building it and trying to monetize it...but few people treat their community as an living conversation to be designed.  In the opening quote I pulled, I was struck by Rei's perspective that companies develop better products in deep dialog with their communities. To some, this is obvious, but only those who cultivate their community consistently and with intentionality get to harvest insights and profit!

Community can be just for celebrating and marketing a product, it can be to have customers contribute to the product...but Rei sees her community *as* the product, which means she's very careful to orchestrate it's development and evolution. The volunteer students in the Dorm Room fund must have a high level of autonomy and drive, which means she has to pull the work out of them, not push it on them!

And her community is rapidly refreshing, by design: Each year they lose people as they graduate and gain students who come in: Capability leaks out of her community constantly! Rei's solution doesn't seem to have a name, so I'll call it Cohort Mixing. In her annual event, she makes sure incoming, current and outgoing groups all connect in significant ways, in large and small groups and over time. This helps keep traditions and institutional knowledge alive and constant, even as the community renews.

Thinking about your own company or product...how can community transform how you develop and test ideas? And how can you empower people in the community of your company to share and pull their own work forward, without you pushing every day?

Enjoy the episode! Rei's insights are solid gold. No bonus tracks this time...Rei and I somehow got it all in under the bell!

Show notes:

Community as Product workshop at CMX East 2015

First Round Capital

Dorm Room Fund

Defining Community

GA Hub: Community Engagement through curation

CMX Community Professionals Organization

Good Magazine

Foursquare's Superuser Group

The Famous Designer who said internships should be paid!

Rei's totally venture backable card company based on her mother's tiger mom texts

Radical Candor

Level Mixing In Communities

CMX's excellent article on community Engagement

Mutualism in Pair Relationships

Tony Robbins - I am Not your Guru

Slow Goodbyes : The Post-Wedding brunch

Automation in Group Decision Making: Not what they use at DRF, but an interesting example of using automation to simplify group conversations at the close

Balancing Privacy and Openness in Community: An office perspective

Mashup Teams: The optimal density of connections in teams

Motivation in Volunteer Communities: Open Source Sustainability and community building

Rewarding your community Volunteers: The Creative Mornings Summit

On today's episode I talk to Dan Mezick, author of the Culture Game and the founder of Open Space Agility. Dan has a really unique perspective on culture, self management and how to make agile really work. At the core, agile believes that a team doing work is the authority on what needs to be done for that work, since they're closest to the work. This is self management at the team level.

In trying to make a switch to agile ways of working, organizations often dictate new frameworks, patterns and procedures. To dictate a new way for how work is to be done is basically the opposite of self management...and a clear limit on how an externally generated conversation design can really work: Change from the outside is going to get push back.

That Agile is implemented in a non-agile way is an irony not lost on Dan!

in Dan's view, culture is a game, how work is done is a game, meetings are games, with rules, ways progress is measured...some of the rules are implicit, some are explicit, but it's kind of annoying to play a game with no rules, or with rules unevenly applied, or with rules that change without notice. If you're a reader of "Calvin and Hobbes" you've heard of CalvinBall, and you know how frustrating it is!

Whoever *must* play, can't really play... (that's from james carse's excellent book on Finite and Infinite games)

Dan suggests that agile be *invite only*, pull, not push, and that that "pull" invitation be in the form of an Open Space meeting. People that opt in, step into the circle, decide what to talk about, and leave with proceedings, outputs. That starts a new game, with new rules, written by those who want to play.

 Dan's Open Space Agility process is an answer to the question of how to change the rules of a work culture in a clear and fair way, without hemorrhaging people in the process. Open Space dictates that whoever responds to the invitation are the right people, what conclusions they come to are the right conclusions, worthy of an experimental test, at the very least.

Open space meeting philosophy has infected my own conversation design practice. I feel particularly uneasy when a facilitator I'm working with tries to massage or shift the decisions a group is coming to....it's one of the reasons I say a facilitator should ask better questions instead of giving answers. A great question is an invitation. An invitation is the start of a new conversation. This episode has me rethinking all the invitations I send out, for all my meetings, and all my conversations, moment by moment. Are my invitations inviting? Are people hearing an invitation to the game I want them to play?

Check out the a bonus track where Dan and I talk about Holocracy and his work with Zappos....enjoy the episode!

The Agile Manifesto: 12 values and 4 principles

Jeff Sutherland

Scrum: rules, roles, artifacts

Planning Poker

User Stories

The Alpha Geek and the pecking order

meetings as games

Open Space Agility

Open Space four principles and the law of two feet

Butterfly and the Bumblebee

Waterfall vs Agile Culture

Pull vs Push Culture

Triggering Self management

AgileBoston.org

four variables in software development: cost, delivery date, features, quality

client's changing their mind is a feature, not a bug

Pareto's Principle is the opposite of what you think

90% syndrome

Code gets brittle

The Big Picture Diagram of Open Space Agility

Signal Events in Culture

Buying into a process vs. Authoring a process

Proceedings of an Open Space Meeting

Organizational Cadence

The Agile Imposition

Beware the man of one book

SaFE Framework

Taylorism

Extras:

The Mandate of Holocracy at Zappos

Holocracy or Quit

In this episode of the conversation factory I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Nandini Stocker, the head of conversation design advocacy and partnerships at Google. She's the rare individual who is more of a conversation design geek than me, to the point that she interrupted me just to make a point about how awkward interruptions are!

We cover a sprawling number of topics in conversation design, and you might enjoy downloading Google's PDF on "How Conversations Work" and read along! I think just knowing that threading, repair and turn taking are *things* means you can look for them in your own work and find ways to transform conversation experiences that you design.

David Bohm, the storied physicist, wrote a book called "on dialogue" and said "Conversation is a principled, mutual process of collaboration and negotiation." So I shouldn't be surprised when Google's map of how conversations work matches exactly to the process of opening, exploring and closing I teach groups to follow when designing a creative, collaborative process for design thinking and innovation. Opening a channel for conversation is like the invitation into a cooperative game, a world to explore and engage with, and every leader needs to think empathically to design these invitations to be...inviting! Finding places along a conversation journey where there is breakage leads us to think about how to repair the thread of conversation and keep things moving along towards closure: a desired action or agreement!

We've be conversing for thousands of years, and we've gotten pretty good at it. But being good at something doesn't mean you know how to teach someone else how. Nandini's work is specifically on how to help us talk to digital agents with more natural ease.  We spoke a few weeks ahead of Google's I/O conference, and she's since sent me a wealth of talks that happened there that you might enjoy digging into. One of my favorites is about Conversational Hacks, where one of her colleges digs into the cooperative principle, a way of helping us think about how relevant, clear and helpful information is exchanged at a steady pace in a good conversation.

Compare two exchanges:

"How much did your shirt cost?"

"Don't you love it? I got it at Vinnie's Vintage Warehouse!"

vs.

"Don't you love it? Shirt has five letters and five is my favorite number!"

To a computer, both responses contain about the same "amount" of information, but only a human conversationalist can tell that the information is irrelevant and unhelpful...at least for now!

If you want to hear Nandini tell one of the worst/best Harry Potter puns ever (She calls puns the earworms of the English language, check out this short outtake.

Show Notes and Links:

Grice's Maxims in brief and extended

Threading and building threads

Seven of Nine

Turn Taking and Yielding

Conversation Repair

conversation overlap

Personality in digital agents:

discourse markers

Google: How Conversations Work

Google's quick reference design principles for conversation design

Amplifying Women's Voices in Obama's oval office

Barge In capability

The Uncanny Valley

On Inner Dialogue

Clifford Nass on Multitasking and his Obit

Prosody

Bonus: Core talks from the Google Team from IO17:

This one is my favorite: Applying Built-in Hacks of Conversation to Your Voice UI 

Building Apps for the Google Assistant 

Finding the Right Voice Interactions for Your App 

Defining Multimodal Interactions: One Size Does Not Fit All

In Conversation, There Are No Errors

Getting Your Assistant App Discovered

How Words Can Make Your Product Stand Out

PullString: Storytelling in the Age of Conversational Interfaces 

Google's VUI design codelab:

Crafting a Character: Design an engaging Assistant app

Some solid talks from IXD17 on chatbots and conversational UIs:

and the pun game

Holacracy asks a big question: How can organizations be designed  in a way that really works, for everyone in the organization? Right now, orgs are often structured according to power from the top to the bottom, rather than self management distributed throughout the organization. This slows orgs down and demotivates some people.

In this episode, I talk to Sally McCutchion, a certified Holacracy coach based in the UK. Sally teaches public workshops on Holocracy and coaches orgs  in making the shift to working with Holacracy.  Sally and I had a seriously wide ranging conversation about Holacracy. We hit on some big topics towards the end that I've placed in the extras, which you can find here. Check those out, as they're really juicy.

One conversation design principle of Holacracy is to allow information and knowledge to flow through the org. Too often, people at the "edges" of an org, the people closest to the users, know a lot about what's wrong and how to make it right...but those same people don't feel empowered or safe to speak up, or even to just do something to shift issues. One CEO who's organization I coached years back desperately wanted people to feel a sense of ownership: How, if you own your house, and the toilet is running, you fix it, if you know how, or talk to someone who can. You don't just let it run. Holacracy attempts to open regular channels of communication between areas of the organization and to allow sections of the organization to feel that they can solve problems that they see without asking permission, waiting for permission, identifying if permission is even possible.

Holacracy designs several meetings within orgs very rigidly, in order to break down power structures and allow all voices to be heard: People are expected to bring updates framed as needs, not just complaints. Other structures  are a lot more open and can be adapted to the unique company requirements. It is without a doubt a very interesting design for organizational conversations. I get into the weeds with Sally a bit, and if you follow the links in the show notes you might find some of the terminology and structures dizzying...but the forest and the trees of Holacracy are worth absorbing: That self managementand purpose are essential all scales: at the scale of the person, the team, and all throughout an organization.

Show Notes:

Holacracy

SallyMcCutchion

Apollonian Gasket

Glass Frog

Holon

Holacracy Tactical (triage) meeting

Rep Link

Lead Link

Proverb

"If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together."

Sociocracy

Another Interview with Sally: Punks in Suits

Today I talk with Donna Lichaw, a UX strategist, coach, teacher and author of The User's Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love.

What's awesome about Donn'a approach to storytelling is that it's practical. There are a lot of frameworks for storytelling: The Hero's journey, Aristotle's 2 or 3-ish act structure, the rising and falling action of "Freytag's pyramid". It really doesn't matter which framework you use...in the end, when you see things as story, story becomes a doorway into a new way of working. Story becomes a material you can shape by design. For me, I've started to see conversation in the same way: a material that can be shaped to create better experiences for people.

Donna and I talk about story*telling* vs story*making* and story*doing*. Storymaking is not the act of enrapturing a group of people around a campfire or at a podium, in a meeting...it's knowing how you want people to feel about an experience after it's over, what you want them to remember, to walk away with, to talk about. Storymaking isn't about manipulation, it's about intent, in this mindset. When you see experiences as a rising and falling arc, you want to make that arc smooth and incredible. You want to shape it well, with no jerks, gaps or cliffhangers...at least not unintentionally!

Designing with Story in mind and designing with Conversation in mind seem to me to be two sides of the same coin. You want the person experiencing your story to respond in some way. And the next story you guide them through continues that dialogue until...? I don't know. The next chapter?

Every Story has a hero, and we want to root for that hero, to see her win the day. In a great conversation you try to make the other person the hero, not you....it's the empathy with the other person and their needs and goals that makes story a powerful tool in great conversation design.

Links!

Donna's Site

Donna's Book: The User's Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love

3 act structure: What did Aristotle Say about that?

rising and falling action

4 act structure

5 act structure

the hero with a thousand faces: Book

The Hero's Journey

Dave grey mapping workshops with the Hero's journey

Star wars and the Hero'sjourney TED Radio hour NPR episode

dan harmon's story circle

the writer's journey book

The Writer's Journey on the web

Nancy Duarte's Book Resonate

Nancy's Ted Talk

Presentation Zen

Dan Roam Back of napkin

The storytelling of Steve Jobs and the iphone release

User Scenarios

Burying the Lede

How I built this podcast: Lyft and story

Marshal McLuhan: Hot and cool media

General Background on McLuhan: Video