“I’m 83 years old and have been managing our events for 59 years. I reckon I have a couple more years left before I retire. My community’s events are stale; we’re not getting the kind of engagement we used to. This workshop has opened my eyes to simple and effective ways to improve our events. I’ve experienced some really good techniques here and we’re going to change some things we do.”
Wow! I hope I can stay as open when I’m 83 and for the rest of my life.
Yes grammar wonks, “change” can be a noun. But change(-noun) is about the past or the future. “He dyed his hair!” or “I’m determined to lose a few pounds!” When we use “change” as a noun, we’re passive observers, noticing change without being a part of it.
In the competitive world of consulting, the word catalyst has become a synonym for change. Catalyst sounds sexy, mysterious, and—scientific! Not surprising then that it’s a common marketing term for consultants. “Idea Catalysts”, “Strategic Catalysts”, “Creativity Catalysts”, “Innovation Catalysts”, and “Marketing Catalysts” abound.
Can you be a genuine catalyst?
But can you be a genuine catalyst—a person who facilitates change of some sort but stays unchanged in the process?
I don’t think so.
If you set yourself up as an unchangeable teacher or trainer who flies in, runs your box of processes to change others in some way, and leaves unaltered, you are someone who is closed to learning while simultaneously advocating it to others. This is not congruent behavior.
I attempt to be open to learning as much as I can. I wrote my first book about participant-driven and participation-rich conference design after seventeen years of refining the process first used in 1992. Four years later, I published an update that included many important improvements I’d learned from feedback and my own observations. Every conference I facilitate leads to more ideas. There will always be refinements to the Conferences That Work format for as long as I’m convening events.
In fact, if I ever run an event and feel that I haven’t learned something from it and change in the process, that will be a sign that I’m losing my effectiveness and should consider doing something different.
Being open to change
I’m not sure that you can facilitate change effectively without changing yourself—or, at the very least, being open to the reality that you may change.
So if you’re planning to work with someone who calls themselves a human catalyst, be cautious. They may be using the term as a synonym for change (like my friend Thom Singer who is certainly open to being changed himself). But alternatively, they may believe that they are true catalysts—they “have the answer”. The wisest and most interesting individuals I know are, despite their obvious expertise and experience, always open to learn from anyone and change in the process. These are the people with whom you may want to spend your time.
“Part of the art of making change happen is seeing which cultural tropes are past their prime and having the guts to invent new ones.” —Seth Godin, Skinny, sad and pale
Conference programming consisting of one person lecturing at many has been our standard meeting model for hundreds of years. One day I think we will look back on this tradition. And we’ll marvel at how we could believe that it was the best thing to do at meetings.
A fundamental flaw
The fundamental flaw of traditional meetings is that most of the time only one person—the lecturer—is active while everyone else passively listens. Everyone who’s ever taught a class knows that the best way to learn anything is to teach it. But we rarely use participatory session formats where everyone gets to “teach” their understanding, questions, and points of view—and, as a bonus, gets to meet and connect with other participants with whom they share common interests.
Passive programs are past their prime. I think most people don’t use participatory session formats because they aren’t aware of them. Even when they are, they don’t know how to use them effectively and/or are scared of doing something perceived as “different”. Luckily, an increasing number of people have the guts to create and use powerful processes (e.g. World Café, Open Space, Art of Hosting, and, yes, Conferences That Work) that incorporate what we now know about how people effectively learn, connect, engage, and come to action.
All the above meeting formats are about twenty years old (although they all build on much older informal process). We now possess tools to make fundamental meeting change happen.
My professional life mission is to promote awareness of such tools, work on improving them, and encourage and support their increasing use. Join me and a growing number of others in our mission to fundamentally enhance the quality and value of meetings, one meeting at a time.
This is another post in the occasional series How do you facilitate change? where we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
In 1982, Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori was the cause of most ulcers, challenging the established medical doctrine that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. Their claim was ridiculed, so Barry drank a Petri dish containing cultured Heliobacter and promptly developed gastritis. His self-experiment eventually helped change medical thinking. In 2005, both men were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
So, how do we convince people?
Changing events
Often when I’m working with a client on implementing experiential and participant-driven events, he wants to understand how what I’m proposing will work.
It’s perfectly reasonable that he wants to understand. The trouble is, unless he’s had the experience of participating in an experiential and participant-driven event, he simply may not be able to understand how the format works.
If you think about it, this seems silly. Every day we experience unexpected things, and some of them change our world for the better in ways we’d never rationally expect. Right? So why are we skeptical that this can happen at our events?
Because most meetings and conferences are tightly scripted and controlled. So we’ve likely never experienced the intense conversations, learning, and facilitated connection around topics and issues that we, not a conference program committee, chose. We’ve never had the opportunity to discover the empowerment and joy when we get to meet, face-to-face, peers who share and have insights on our specific challenges. We’ve never seen a solid, long-lasting community of fellow participants being built before our eyes. And we’ve never encountered an event that galvanized participants into appropriate and effective action.
The need to understand
So when someone like me proposes a “different” way to design events, clients want to “understand” how it works before they’ll give me a go-ahead. When they don’t, I’ll get responses like this [verbatim extract from an email I received this week]:
“We presented our program to [our board] last week and got some push back on having two full days of the format/program devoted to the unconference. The primary concern is being able to effectively market the program such that potential attendees can show the published programming/topics and get manager support for the expense to attend/travel to the event. Without a descriptive agenda with topics – the fear is that managers won’t be able to justify that it is a relevant agenda for professional development.”
In fact, everyone who experiences a well-designed participant-driven event knows that on-site development of an agenda that is truly relevant to the attendees’ professional development is not a problem. Yet without that experience, most people cannot understand how such a format can work.
If I get sufficient access to the decision-makers, I can usually provide enough “understanding” to convince them to go ahead. But experiencing the design itself is far more effective. Here’s a post-event communication excerpt from a decision-making former skeptic:
Thank you for your efforts in making our very first [foundation] meeting a huge success. The meeting far exceeded my expectations and I have been reporting the success of the event to the leadership here at [foundation].
And here’s a participant’s feedback from the same event:
Thank you Adrian! I was skeptical at first of the conference format. But now I’m really glad that it was organized that way!
Experience to understand
Sometimes you need to experience to understand. Seth Godin puts it like this:
It turns out, humans don’t use explanations to make change happen. They change, and then try to explain it. —Seth Godin, Clarity vs. impact
When I have the opportunity and authority to facilitate an experience that can lead to powerful, appropriate learning and change, I don’t spend much time explaining why it might do so. I just start. The hardest part is being given the authority to do it. Because that requires trust in my ability to deliver what I’m offering.
I don’t blame the skeptics out there. The world is full of people who promise miracles and don’t deliver. That’s why, besides attempting to explain why what I do works, I also encourage clients to talk to some of the tens of thousands of people who have participated in one of my experiential sessions or conferences. If they take the time to check, this usually does the trick.
Taking a leap
Yes, it’s hard to take a leap and trust something you haven’t experienced and don’t yet understand. Ask me to be the first person to ever jump from a plane with something called a “parachute” on my back? I’d turn you down. But you’re not the first person to jump! Talk to people you trust who have already made it safely and wonderfully to the ground. You may well realize that if they did it, you can do it too.
Then, go for the change. You can work on understanding it later.
This post is part of the series How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
What could be wrong with requiring measurable outcomes?
“Enough of this feel-good stuff! How do we know whether people have learned anything unless we measure it?”
—A little voice, heard once in a while in learning designers’ heads
Ah, the lure of measurement! Yes, it’s important. From a scientific perspective, a better understanding of the world we live in requires doing experiments that involve quantifying properties in a statistically meaningful and repeatable way. Science has no opinion about ghosts, life after death, and astrology, for example, because we can’t reliably measure associated attributes.
The power of scientific thinking became widely evident at the start of the twentieth century. It was probably inevitable that it would be applied to management. The result was the concept of scientific management, developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Even though Taylorism is no longer a dominant management paradigm, its Victorian influence on how we view working with others still persists to this day.
The essence of these classic problem-solving steps is the belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now…
…In fact it is this very mindset, one based on clear definition, prediction, and measurement which prevents anything fundamental from changing.
—Peter Block, Community: The Structure of Belonging
One of my important learning experiences occurred unexpectedly in a workshop. A participant in a small group I was leading got furious after something I had said. He stood up and stepped towards me, shouting and balling his fists. At that moment, to my surprise, I knew that his intense anger was all about him and not about me. Instead of my habitual response—taking anger personally—I was able to effectively help him look at why he had become so enraged.
There was nothing measurable about this interchange, yet it was an amazing learning and empowering moment for me.
The danger of focussing on what can be measured
So, one of the dangers of requiring measurable outcomes is that it restricts us to concentrating on what can be measured, not what’s important. Educator Alfie Kohn supplies this example:
…it is much easier to quantify the number of times a semicolon has been used correctly in an essay than it is to quantify how well the student has explored ideas in that essay.
—Alfie Kohn, Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests
Another reason why we fixate on assigning a number to a “measured” outcome is that doing so can make people feel they can show they’ve accomplished something, masking the common painful reality that they have no idea how to honestly measure their effectiveness.
This leads to my final danger of requiring measurable outcomes. It turns out that measurements of learning outcomes aren’t reliable anyway!
For nearly 50 years measurement scholars have warned against pursuing the blind alley of value added assessment. Our research has demonstrated yet again that the reliability of gain scores and residual scores…is negligible.
—Professor Trudy W. Banta, A Warning on Measuring Learning Outcomes, Inside Higher Ed
Given that requiring measurable outcomes often inhibits fundamental change and is of dubious reliability, I believe we should be considerably more reluctant to insist on including them in today’s learning and organizational environments.
Here’s a magical question to ask when someone says “I don’t know“.
I don’t know
One of the most common answers to a question is I don’t know. (I’m not saying it’s especially common, just more common than “cheddar”, “42”, and “in the second drawer on the left”.) Generally, I don’t know is a good answer because it’s likely to be an honest one. After all, it’s when someone confidently answers a question about which they really haven’t a clue that all kinds of trouble can follow.
But occasionally someone—let’s call him Paul—answers with I don’t know after a pause, perhaps in a hesitant manner, that makes you wonder if perhaps he does have an interesting answer “at the back of his mind”. Here’s a magical follow-up question that often leads to a more specific, useful response.
Let’s suppose that a specific problem has been identified and described by Paul and you ask him:
“What would the solution look like?”
Paul, after a pause, says hesitantly:
“I don’t know.”
Here’s the magical follow-up question, asked in an even tone:
“If you did know, what do you think the solution would look like?”
Now stay quiet and wait for an answer.
You may get another, puzzled, I don’t know, but more often than not, this reframing of your original question will evoke a specific answer to your question.
Why does this work?
I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that this follow-up question works because we don’t consciously know everything we know. The “if you did know” addition gives Paul temporary permission to ignore his stated lack of knowledge and potentially tap his experience and expertise at an unconscious level.
Note that if Paul appears confident that he doesn’t know, this is not the right question to ask. Also, if you have a hunch that the magical question might work, don’t ask it in a condescending way, i.e. implying that you know Paul knows the answer but he doesn’t.
I’ve used this magical question judiciously with good results. Have you? How did it work out? Share your experience in the comments!
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
Opportunities that can change our lives in amazing ways surround us. These opportunities come in the form of a choice between continuing with what we are already doing and doing something different. Think of them as forks in the road.
The fork in the road offers only two difficulties…
Seeing it.
and
Taking it
Most organizations that stumble fail to do either one. The good news is that there are far more people than ever pointing out the forks that are open to us. The “this” or “that” alternatives that each lead to success if we’re gutsy enough to take one or the other.
Taking the fork is hard because we fear change. Venturing into the unknown scares us. Perhaps we are scared of what might happen if we fail, or of feeling embarrassed. We may even be scared of what might happen if we succeed!
Change potentially threatens the way we see the world and when we confront circumstances that are inconsistent with our worldview, we’re likely to feel stress. How many people do you know who enjoy extra stress in their life?
Change is also potentially associated with loss. Loss, for example, of all the time and effort we’ve expended learning how to do something a particular way. How many people do you know who enjoy loss?
The reality of this extra stress and loss is a hard obstacle to overcome—and it must be dealt with in order for you to take the fork.
So how can we do better at choosing a new path?
Here are three steps.
First, notice how you’re feeling about taking the fork. If you’re oblivious to how you feel about a change, your emotions will likely determine your actions. When fear is the dominant emotion, you are unlikely to take the fork. If you do take the fork without awareness of the associated stress and loss, they will ambush you later, usually when their effects have built to dangerous levels.
Second, express how you’re feeling about taking the fork. I find that sharing my feelings with someone I trust is the best way to do this, though some people prefer to journal privately about the emotions that taking the fork brings up. Processing how you are feeling helps you work through your emotions and integrate the new path into a feasible personal future.
Third, take the fork! Like most things in life, practice makes taking the fork easier. When you feel those butterflies in your stomach it’s easier to make the scary choice when you’ve felt them a hundred times before and, most of those times, things turned out alright. There will always be more forks, and the more frequently you take them, the easier it’ll be to take the next one. Robert Frost “took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.” Follow his footsteps!
Photo attribution: Flickr user raptortheangel
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.
How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change. In this post, we’ll explore two ways to handle a major obstacle to change.
One of the reasons it’s so hard to change is because so much of what we “know” is tacit. Tacit knowledge is that which cannot be easily shared verbally or in writing—as Michael Polanyi says, “…we can know more than we can tell.” A simple example of tacit knowledge is how to ride a bicycle.
Not only is tacit knowledge hard to transmit, we are often not even aware that we know it ourselves. We all possess unexamined and/or unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that can limit our ability to see, question, or act on desirable change in our life and work.
It’s hard enough when we don’t know what we know. But what happens when some of our tacit knowledge is incorrect or inaccurate? Here’s what Chief of Confusion John Seely Brown says:
It turns out that this learning to unlearn may be a lot trickier than a lot of us at first think. Because if you look at knowledge, and look at least two different dimensions of knowledge, the explicit dimension and the tacit dimension, the explicit dimension probably represents a tiny fraction of what we really do know, the explicit being the concept, the facts, the theories, the explicit things that live in our head. And the tacit turns out to be much more the practices that we actually use to get things done with…
…Now the problem is that an awful lot of the learning that we need to do is obviously building up this body of knowledge, but even more so the unlearning that we need to do has to do with challenging the tacit. The problem is that most of us can’t easily get a grip on. It is very hard to reflect on the tacit because you don’t even know that you know. And in fact, what you do know is often just dead wrong. And it is almost impossible to change your beliefs about something that is in the tacit and is different from what you happen to think. —John Seely Brown, Storytelling: Scientist’s Perspective
Tacit knowledge acts like an invisible force that guides and constrains our potential choices and actions. This makes unlearning incorrect or inaccurate tacit knowledge seem like a hopeless task.
Two tools for working with a major obstacle to change
Surprisingly, there are tools available that allow us to become aware of and work with our tacit knowledge. The key insight: we can overcome our inability to reflect on our tacit knowledge, by working with others!
Conversation
While it’s common to think of knowledge as being something an individual possesses, in reality, knowledge is socially constructed with others. (Remember Socrates in ancient Greece, pursuing knowledge through dialog?) This leads us to the first tool to free ourselves from the limitations arising from what we don’t know we know: conversation with others. Other people can see our blind spots and share with us what they see. By reflecting and gently challenging the beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions that form our tacit knowledge, they can help us see what we cannot and provide us an opening to, at least, become aware of what was formerly invisible to us.
Storytelling
The second tool available to us is one of the most powerful ways to see and process the boundaries and consequences of our tacit knowledge: storytelling.
We can explore our tacit knowledge via storytelling in two ways:
By examining honestly the stories we tell others. Ultimately, we are the stories we tell about ourselves. Our own stories illuminate the tacit in us—somehow they craftily bypass our conscious limitations. If we scrutinize our own stories that have emotional resonance, we can learn much that would otherwise stay hidden.
Conversation and stories create frameworks that can help us transcend some of the barriers to change imposed by our tacit knowledge. I think it’s fitting that we need to connect and engage with others to do this important work.
Stay open to change!
