"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
Here’s a one minute video about my free two hour workshop at EIBTM 2012, Barcelona, on November 28, where you’ll learn how to transform your meetings using powerful participation techniques.
The best way to learn about participation techniques is to experience them, and that’s what we’ll be doing in the workshop. You’ll experience a variety of ways for participants to learn about each other and to discover and share the issues that really matter to them. We’ll also cover the why, when, and where to use these techniques.
The workshop will be held on Wednesday, November 28, 13:30 – 15:30 in Conference Room 4.1. Session attendance is limited, so arrive early to be sure to secure a place!
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore why change is hard and various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
I make a sales visit
In one of my former lives (the one when I ran a solar manufacturing company) I sold devices called air-to-air heat exchangers. These nifty units provide fresh air ventilation to buildings while simultaneously using the outgoing stale air to heat or cool the incoming fresh air, thus saving heating energy in the winter and cooling energy in the summer.
One day I met with the owner of a large offset printing shop who was curious about these gizmos. Entering the print room, the smell of ink almost knocked me over. As Bill showed me around I began to get a splitting headache. Confident that his business could use what I was selling I asked him how he put up with the smell.
“The smell?” he said. “Oh, I don’t even notice it.”
“Does anyone complain?” I asked.
Bill thought for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “I guess most customers mention it when they visit the plant. New employees too.”
He paused.
“But you get used to it.”
To me, desperate to flee the premises, it was incredible that anyone could adapt to the stink. And yet it was clear that everyone else in the building seemed to be happily going about their business.
Habituation
Bill and his employees were providing me, for better or worse, with a good example of sensory habituation. Sensory habituation involves our amazing ability to adapt to sensory stimulation to the point when we no longer notice it. The tick of the wall clock in your home, the lumpy mattress you sleep on every night, the flicker of the fluorescent lighting over your desk. You notice them at first, but in time they disappear from your consciousness. Your amazing neuroplastic brain filters out constant stimuli over time so we can concentrate on the new and unfamiliar.
Most of the time, habituation is a big plus. Imagine always being unable to concentrate on a conversation because of a loud clock ticking, being unable to sleep on your uncomfortable mattress, or getting a headache from the flickering lights in your office. But when we’re trying to change behavior, habituation can get in the way.
Habituation’s downside
As a child in school, most of the time teachers are teaching us things we don’t know. This is because we cram the fruits of thousands of years of human learning into ten to twenty years of school. There’s no way we can be an equal contributor to the teacher’s learning under these circumstances. As a result, is it any wonder that we believe that learning is something that only happens one way: from a teacher to a learner?
And while we’re being taught in school, we sit in straight rows of chairs so other kids won’t distract us while all this knowledge is shared with us. Is it any wonder that we’re habituated to believe that sitting in straight rows of chairs is how we should sit when we’re learning new things?
By the time we become adults, models such as learning and the “normal” room set while learning are habituations. Even though we know that working adults can quickly amass expertise and experience in their professional field that is of great value to their peers. Even though we know that straight-row theatre seating is perhaps the worst arrangement for facilitating the peer-to-peer interactions that are most effective at creating appropriate, accurate, and lasting learning.
Get unstuck
So how do we overcome our habituation to the familiar that may be preventing us from seeing something important?
When we are oblivious to our habituations, we don’t even notice things that might be worth examining. The first step is noticing.
We return from a vacation and, entering our office that has been absent from our life for a week we see the flickering light above our desk. That’s the moment when we have a chance to realize that something may be worth changing in our work environment.
We notice that our neck and lower back are hurting after 15 minutes while sitting at the end of a row twisted towards a speaker who is going to be talking at us for another 45 minutes. That’s another moment when we might make a note to revise the seating plan at our next event.
Amy asks us about a session two days later, and we notice we couldn’t remember anything the speaker said. That’s an opportunity for us to evaluate the effectiveness of the education we’ve been serving up at our conferences.
Noticing is tough. It’s easy to dismiss that little flicker of awareness and let the powerful force of habituation sweep us back into the familiar. A few hours later, we’ve forgotten that we even noticed the flickering light, and we dismiss our evening headache as an unwelcome side effect of going back to work.
That’s why the second step in getting unstuck from the downside of habituation is capturing what you notice. I’ve written about David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which explains how to create safe places to capture ideas and tasks. You can expand his methodology to capture things you notice too. Once captured, we can review them regularly to reinforce what we’ve noticed and begin to work on the process of change.
You can’t win ’em all
My visit gave Bill a chance to notice that his work environment was making newcomers uncomfortable. But the force of habituation won out. By the end of our time together, he remained unconvinced of the need for ventilation, based on his own and his employees’ habituation.
I didn’t make the sale.
The next time you notice that little attention flicker of something out of the ordinary, try capturing it immediately and reviewing it later. You may have noticed something formerly buried by your habituation, something worth changing.
Do you use round tables (aka “rounds”) at your events? Then it’s time to talk about the Nights of the Round Table. Read on, prithee!
A medieval fantasy
Sadly, it’s not clear that King Arthur’s famous Round Table ever actually existed, let alone King Arthur himself. But let’s succumb to a romantic fantasy for a moment (or longer if you like) and assume that there really was a Round Table that looked like the picture above, and you were one of these fabulously clothed dudes hanging out on blocks that were de rigueur for luxurious seating in the 5th century.
How would that work for you?
For me, the “chair” would get to be annoying after a while, but what would really exasperate me would be that I’d only be able to talk to the Knights immediately to my left and right.
All those fascinating Knights of the Round Table. What wonderful stories they could tell! But I’m stuck with talking to just two of them for the whole banquet. Bummer!
Using rounds at events
Back to the present day.
What are round tables about and why do we use them? Well, a round table has no head, implying equal status to everyone who sits there. This is an ideal table shape for pick-your-own seating—no jockeying for the high-status “head” of the table—and everyone faces everybody else as much as possible, given the laws of geometry. As a result, round tables are optimum for small group work when tables are needed (see below).
The larger the table, the more people you can seat around it, but the farther people are from each other. The right table diameter depends on the number of people in each group. Unfortunately, round tables that are too large are often used at events. In practice, once you’re seated at a table that’s more than 54″ in diameter you need the hearing of a teenager, advanced lip-reading ability, or a working Cone of Silence to hear everything that’s going on.
Tables that are larger than needed will reduce the intimacy of the group, so choose the optimum group size and arrange for the correct size rounds in advance, as shown in this table (green is good):
The optimum number of seats versus table size
Table diameter
Optimum number of seats
36”
4
48”
6
54”
7-8
60”
8
66”
9
72”
10
It’s hard to make a strong case for large round tables. In my experience, group work that requires a table is less effective with group sizes larger than 8. And, using the industry standard formula, a 72″ table requires at least 12.1 sq. ft. of room space per person; a 48″ table requires 13.5 sq. ft. If you’re cramming people in so tightly that this difference is important, perhaps you’d enjoy a ride on the Tokyo subway.
As a 70+-year-old starting-to-go-deaf guy, I find that 60″ tables provide a sub-par conversational experience. I strongly recommend not using group discussion tables larger than 60” for multiple table room sets, because they make it difficult for many people to hear those sitting across the table, even if the room has exceptional sound-deadening acoustics and the tables are spaced more widely apart than normal.
Do you even need tables at all?
Seating people at round tables makes sense if they’re going to:
Eat formally in the same room and there isn’t the time and money to change the room set.
Participate in certain kinds of group processes like The Solution Room or World Café where the table—covered with paper—is used as a place to document issues and ideas.
That’s it! Under any other circumstances get rid of the tables! They place an unneeded barrier between attendees, reducing intimacy and connection. And once they’re gone, it’s easy for session participants to quickly reconfigure the room set themselves to switch between, say, curved theatre seating, small group circles, and fishbowl layouts.
This discussion is tabled
Meeting planners; don’t make people suffer through another 1001 tortured Nights of the Round Table. Keep your round tables small, or eliminate them and your attendees will benefit.
Wirearchy not hierarchy! Wirearchy? What’s that? Here’s organizational learning consultant Harold Jarche:
If you are convinced that your future workplace should look more like a Wirearchy, (a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on, knowledge, trust, credibility, a focus on results; enabled by interconnected people and technology) then the best thing you can do now is prepare.
Prepare yourself to be a continuous learner.
Prepare yourself and your team/department to work collaboratively.
Start narrating your work.
Become a knowledge curator and share widely.
Engage in professional social networks and communities of practice.
Model the behaviours you would like to see in others.
These days, this is excellent advice for anyone concerned about job security. As Seth Godin reminds us in a great video: We don’t have a shortage of factory workers anymore.
Furthermore, I believe our conferences should become wirearchies too: places where communication and learning are two-way, where presenters and attendees alike are continuous learners who work collaboratively during the event, and where we engage with our professional community rather than passively sit and listen. I work to model these behaviors—both at the events I organize and those I attend. We’ll all get a lot more out of our events when we practice wirearchy, not hierarchy.
I encourage you to join me.
Photo attribution: Flickr user tanakawho
HT to Chris Corrigan, who informed me that Jon Husband originated the term and the concept of Wirearchy!
Can your evaluation of an event be influenced by the environment in which it’s performed?
In his remarkable book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes a strong case that “an obsession with righteousness is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design…” Although the book is primarily a fascinating exploration of the origins and workings of morality, along the way Haidt describes many interesting aspects of how humans actually behave that are often at odds with how we think we act. Here’s an example that has direct relevance to your attendees’ evaluations of your events.
What these experiments reveal is that our bodily experiences affect our simultaneous judgment of apparently unrelated issues. Our bodies guide our judgments. As Haidt explains: “When we’re trying to decide what we think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling. If I’m feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant, that must mean I don’t like it.”
What does this all imply? If we want to get unbiased evaluations of our events, we need to obtain them in neutral surroundings. Ask an attendee who prides herself on fairness “for a quick video testimonial” in a featureless, smelly corridor when she badly needs a restroom? You’ll get a less favorable response than if you interview her when she’s comfortable. Ask attendees to fill out online evaluations on the Monday they return to work with a backlog of while-you-were-out requests pending? Their evaluations will be negatively biased. Offer a meaningful immediate incentive to those who take the time to fill out the survey? You’ll reduce the bias.
And if we want to bias an evaluation of an event in a positive direction? Well, I think I’ve given you the background to figure out how that might work. Not that you’d ever do such a thing. Would you?
Composite image credits: Flickr users michaelbycroftphotography, nedrai, and safari_vacation
Take it easy!
Before I started using my treadmill desk, my main scheduled exercise was walking outside (on varied, hilly terrain) for forty minutes or so three times a week. After starting, I set the treadmill and timer for four daily 20-minute sessions at 1.7 mph and a 4% incline. I felt great after the sessions and not especially tired. But after a couple of weeks, I began to get achy joints. Not only my knees but also my shoulders and neck. I had been overdoing it.
As a result, I reduced my walking speed to 1.2 – 1.3 mph, increased the session time to 25-30 minutes, and eliminated the incline. I now average 3-4 sessions a day and the aches have disappeared. According to the Sole F80, my daily workout consumes around 200-270 calories, down somewhat from the 300 calories I initially was burning. On average, there are one to two days each week when I don’t have time to go on the treadmill (nearly always when I’m away from home and walking while working or shopping around town).
Ramping up over time
In my first post, I speculated that I might ramp up the number, length, or difficulty of sessions over time. What I’ve found so far is that I feel well-exercised and reluctant to walk more after 90-120 minutes on the treadmill per day. While I’m sure I could stay on the treadmill longer I am satisfied with the time I spend on the machine and don’t currently plan to do more.
Sleeping better
I’ve noticed that I sleep better on the days I exercise. This is a major plus!
Weight loss
After having more or less the same weight for the last year, I’ve lost six pounds over the last three months. I seem to be keeping the weight off. Losing a couple of pounds a month is approximately what you’d expect from the amount of additional exercise I’m now doing. I can stand to lose some more weight—long may this continue!
Increased creativity
Finally, I continue to find working while walking a significant stimulus to my creativity. For a long time, I’ve been writing about one blog post a week. Recently, I have been averaging nearly two a week. I am also working on finishing my next book and have found it much easier to get those 600+ words a day written while walking.
Conclusions?
Better sleep, healthy weight loss, increased creativity? What’s not to like? Using a treadmill desk works for me as long as I don’t overdo it. Recommended!
I have great respect and admiration for those event designers who can make conferences memorable by creating spectacle and wonder through a creative fusion of decor, environment, flow, entertainment, and technical production.
Concentrating on these issues (and filling the holes) is especially appropriate when the process is a human ritual, like a meal, a wedding, or an awards ceremony. We know what happens at such events. We will serve food and drink. Two people will join in matrimony. And worthies will be honored, all in ways that are familiar components of our cultural experience. These processes have been performed countless times before. So, provided the food tastes good, the best man remembers the ring, and the speeches don’t go on too long, convention will be satisfied and the event will be deemed a “success”, at least as far as its process is concerned.
The challenge of ritual events
When we use a ritual event process, the only way left to distinguish the event from a myriad of others is to create spectacle through creative decor, environment, flow, entertainment, and technical production. And this is tough. That’s why, when someone comes up with a new creative wrinkle, like the JK Wedding Dance we’re all pretty impressed:
Another way
I tip my hat to those who can create impressive spectacle at a ritual event. But not all events are ritual events. Conferences—events that are fundamentally about people meeting around a common interest—are about getting content and connection around that common interest, whether it be particle physics, comic books, garden center management, or improv. Many conferences, however, try to be memorable by concentrating on the same elements of spectacle as ritual events.
“Design behaviors, not objects.” —From a blog postby David Weinberger about a talk given by industrial designer Tim Brown of Ideo
Conferences don’t have to be ritual events!
The mistake we make with conferences is to treat them as though they have to be ritual events. (Welcome, keynote, plenaries, breakouts, nice dinner, plenary, breakouts, motivational closing session—sound familiar?)
At ritual events the process is more or less prescribed, so we have to concentrate on the event trappings to make our event memorable.
Conferences don’t need to be ritual events! No one needs to marry at a conference. Conferences are not fundamentally about eating a great meal or awards. The sad reality is that we run the majority of conferences as ritual events either because the organizers have never considered an alternative or because they are scared to do something different.
The routine behavior at most conferences is that of sitting and listening to someone talk. Passive listening is the core ritual process that pervades conferences. The more we buy into this ritual, the more we feel the need to spice up our event.
But we do not have to stay bound to the listen-to-the-speaker ritual at our conferences. Once we escape the notion that there are only a few “correct” (in reality “feel safe”) ways to run conferences we can move our focus from designing memorable trappings to designing creative process, which leads to creative behaviors and consequent memorable experiences at our conferences.
Making conferences memorable
You don’t need to include an elaborately choreographed, surprise dance extravaganza to make your next conference memorable. Some of the best conferences I’ve ever attended took place in ghastly, windowless, and anonymous hotel conference rooms. They weren’t memorable because of the environment (except in a negative sense); they were memorable because their process led to intense interaction, powerful learning, and a ton of fun.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with providing a great environment as well as great process at our conferences. At the San Francisco Applied Improv Network 2012 World Conference (AIN12), the window wall on one side of the main conference room gave us a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge. And Greens’ Restaurant and fine food trucks were a minute’s walk away. These amenities didn’t hurt. But what was far more important in my experience was that during the four-day conference, we never spent more than fifteen minutes listening to anyone. We were interacting, playing, and exploring new possibilities with each other the whole time.
When you stop seeing conferences as a ritual event, you open up a whole new realm of possibilities for making your event memorable. A few examples: the simple improv games at the AIN12 welcome reception; the Spot The Fed contest at DEFCON; or the simulation workshops at the AYE Conference. No longer restricted to traditional formats, these and many other conferences provide memorable experiences by facilitating novel ways for people to be with each other, interact, connect, and learn.
“Our organizations are built on 19th century learning styles coupled by 20th century leadership models fused with 21st century technologies.” —Dan Pontefract, Future of Work
Replace “organizations” with “conferences” in Dan’s great quote, and you encapsulate much of what is wrong with conferences today.
What are you going to do about it?
(Ironic) Powerpoint photo courtesy of Flickr user wmcap
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
Knowing where you are: The Story Spine
Last month, during my immersion into the world of improv at a fabulous BATS Intensive in San Francisco, I learned about The Story Spine, a core ingredient of the improv form. The Story Spine, charted above by my teacher Lisa Rowland, is a blueprint for the dramatic structure of basic stories, whether those told in improv or elsewhere. (Incidentally, it includes all the different pieces of my favorite change model, that of Virginia Satir, which one of these days I’ll find time to write about).
Lisa told us that the first two parts of the Story Spine—Once upon a time… and Every day…— are the platform. Many improv beginners feel compelled to start with something dramatic or unexpected. Lisa explained that this doesn’t work because you can only generate drama when the audience has a baseline from which drama can spring. You need to establish a platform before something new—what in improv is called the tilt—happens. Beginning a scene being pelted with oranges is confusing. Waking up tired on a lumpy mattress with your longtime girlfriend Suzy, entering IKEA to shop for a new bed, and then being pelted with oranges has potential.
This reminds me (the platform, not the orange pelting) of the second question I use in a Personal Introspective…
What is the current situation?
The second question I ask during a closing conference personal introspective is What is the current situation? I used to think this question was the easiest of the five questions to answer. Now I’m not so sure.
Just like in improv, it’s tempting to decide I need dramatic change, and then rush into listing ideas for reshaping your life. The unfortunate reality is that you can’t really figure out where you want to go until you know where you currently are.
Knowing where you are doesn’t just mean the facts of your situation:
I have a job with no prospects of career advancement.
Our customers are complaining about the amount of time they have to wait on hold.
Being responsible for all the logistics of our events exhausts me.
though these are important. It also involves noticing how you feel about these facts, because our biggest blind spots are usually those that are just too painful or embarrassing to notice.
I feel angry doing the same dead-end job day after day.
If I can’t satisfy every customer, I feel inadequate.
I feel selfish if I delegate and take some downtime for myself.
Working on teasing out the feelings behind the facts usually pays rich dividends.
Don’t rush
So don’t be in too much of a hurry to sink your teeth into the juicy possibilities of change in your life. Work on knowing where you are. Be sure to spend enough time figuring out the current situation. Especially the feelings that are driving your desire for change. That will make the tilt, when it comes, all the sweeter.
Wirearchy not hierarchy! 
