Why organizations fear connecting

Seth Godin points out that many organizations fear connecting because their leadership fears losing control. Even though the control they think they have is a myth.

“Organizations are afraid of connecting. They are afraid of losing control, of handing over power, of walking into a territory where they don’t always get to decide what’s going to happen next. When your customers like each other more than they like you, things can become challenging.

Of course, connecting is where the real emotions and change and impact happen.”
—Seth Godin, ‘Connect to’ vs. ‘Connect’

The importance of connection

A survey I conducted of attendees while writing Conferences That Work confirmed (as do many other meeting surveys) that the two most important reasons people go to meetings are to connect (80%) and learn (75%).

When I asked people why they went to conferences, the two most common answers were: (1) to network with others (80%) and (2) to learn (75%). Seventy percent of my interviewees mentioned both of these reasons. In addition, 15 percent told me that they were required to attend annual conferences to maintain their professional status.

Nevertheless, many conferences are structured like this.

fear connecting: photograph of a speaker on a stage lecturing to an disengaged audience

No one’s connecting here, except, maybe, a single speaker to his audience. The audience members aren’t connecting with each other at all.

To create connection, conferences need to be structured like this.

Photograph of a small group of people in a sunlit room. Three people are standing, the rest sit gathered around a set of tables pushed together. Several flipcharts are full of writing. People are talking, listening, and taking notes.

Here, we see people gathered together, talking, listening, and taking notes. Active learning, rather than passive reception of lecturing, is the model. Active learning is a better model for meetings because it builds connection around meaningful learning.

An organization that fears connecting:

  • Employs hierarchical meetings and events, controlling what happens by using a predetermined agenda of broadcast-style lecture sessions.
  • Creates a fundamental disconnect between the wants and needs of the staff and/or members and the structure of its meetings and conferences. Events that provide connection-rich sessions, allowing participants to discover their tribe and determine what they discuss, are anathema.

“Connect to” is a goal; “connect” is a verb

Seth again:

“An organization might seek to ‘connect to’ its customers or constituents…That’s different, though, than ‘connect'”

Some organizations try to obscure their control-based culture by asserting their goal is to “connect to/with” their clients. There’s plenty of plausible-seeming advice available along these lines; e.g., “How to Connect With Customers” or “5 Ways to Connect With Your Client“.

However, this goal attempts to disguise a desire for control. The leadership wants to control how the organization will “connect with” customers. Such a goal is a one-way street. It ignores the reality that, for healthy relationships, connection is a two-way process.

In contrast, a functional organization makes it easy for customers to connect about their wants and needs.

Connection is no longer a goal (noun). A functional organization connects (verb). In the same way that change is a verb, not a noun.

Creating exceptional connection—and organizations

Exceptional organizations take connection to an even higher level. They facilitate connection between their constituency members, supporting the creation of tribes.

Seth, once more:

“When you connect your customers or your audience or your students, you’re the matchmaker, building horizontal relationships, person to person. This is what makes a tribe.”

Tribes—self-organizing groups bound by a common passion—are the most powerful spontaneous human groups. Tribe members pour energy into connecting around their purpose, which leads to meaningful, powerful action. Having them associated with and supported by your organization reaps substantial rewards for everyone involved.

Seek out and create organizations that don’t fear connecting.

You’ll make your world and the world a better place.

Movement

A black and white animation of a woman dancing—constant movementYesterday, my trusty Apple Watch told me that I had surpassed my daily move goal every day for the last three years.movement
“Movement is life,” said Captain Mac Elwin in Jules Verne‘s A Floating City.

I’m glad to be alive!

Today, I’m tired and achy, recovering from yesterday’s COVID booster. So I replaced my daily run with a long walk.

I continue to move.

My Twitter bio includes that I love to dance, sing, and meditate. All these are different ways to move. For me, dance evokes the very essence of movement in my body. Singing requires the movement of my vocal cords, forming moving sound waves in the air. And even meditation involves movement as I watch breath move in and out of my body.

More than life

In fact, movement is more than life. At a deeper level, everything is moving. Every lifeless atom—whether in a bar of copper, a vat of mercury, or a tank of oxygen—is constantly changing position. At the deepest level, quantum mechanics tells us that no particles in the universe are static; all exist in a probability cloud of possible positions.

I am grateful for the movement in my life, both for the joy it gives me and movement’s constant reminder that I am alive.

Image attribution: Fka Twigs Dance GIF By Sarah Wintner

Achieve success one small step at a time

achieve success with one small step: a black-and-white photograph of a small child walking away from the camera on a brick-paved street. The child is followed by an adult whose step mirrors the child's.
I’ve written frequently about facilitating change. Despite attempting to practice what I preach, I still sometimes fail to create a desired change in my life. Here are two recent examples that led me to realize that I need to achieve success one small step at a time.

1) Meditation and gratitude practice

For 29 years, I’ve been a member of a small local consultants group that meets monthly. Recently I’ve been facilitating a set of meetings to work on changes we want to make in our lives. This involves figuring out what they are, and supporting each other in making these changes a reality.

To model the process, I went through it myself first with our group. Two of the changes I wish to make are maintaining a daily meditation practice (something I’ve struggled with for years), and creating a daily gratitude practice.

My group made two good suggestions for creating these desired changes:

  1. To maintain my daily meditation practice, I committed to meditating for a minimum of five minutes per day without fail. This was much shorter than my prior time goal. I also gained a group buddy who wanted to meditate more frequently. We would send each other an email when we’d completed our daily meditation, helping us to keep on track.
  2. For a gratitude practice, I decided to write down daily three things for which I was grateful. I found some small cards and a box for them and kept these on my desk.

I have been able to faithfully maintain my meditation practice since our last group meeting. Hopefully, this change will become a habit for me. However, I started to miss days for the gratitude practice. This was a little upsetting, and I kept trying, unsuccessfully, to get back on track.

I realized that attempting to make both changes simultaneously was a barrier to complete success. So I’ve dropped the gratitude practice writing. (I still try to notice moments for gratitude when they arise, and I’m getting better at this.)

My goal now is to work on maintaining my daily meditation practice until it becomes a solid and permanent change. At some point, I may increase the minimum time I meditate. Once I feel secure in this change, I will begin to work on maintaining a daily gratitude practice.

One success out of two is an improvement! One small step at a time.

2) Tying my shoes

Don’t laugh! OK, laugh if you want; I don’t mind.

My physical therapist recently showed me a cool new way to tie my shoes. (If you don’t want to learn it, feel free to skip the next bit.) When I was a kid, my mum taught me the most common method, as shown in the first 30 seconds of this video.

one small step
click to watch

The above knot is easy to untie by pulling either lace end. However, over the years, I found that it would occasionally unexpectedly untie. So I added tying the two loops in a half knot. The resulting knot doesn’t spontaneously untie, but you can’t just pull a lace end to untie your shoe; you have to untie the half knot first.

Last month, while fitting some orthotics into my brand-new running shoes, my physical therapist saw how I was tying my shoes. She suggested a better method with one extra step. Watch it in the second half of the same video.

click to watch

Changing something I’ve done the same way for 60+ years isn’t a piece of cake. But I found it fairly easy to get in the habit of tying the thick laces in my running shoes the new way.

However, the skinny laces in my everyday sneakers are another matter. For some reason, it’s much harder for me to add the extra step with these laces. I got frustrated trying to tie my sneakers in the new way, and it was affecting my running shoe-tying muscle memory.

So, instead of trying to make the change in two different places, I decided to give up the new method for my sneakers. Using the new method, but only for my running shoes, is becoming increasingly automatic. I have no problem staying with my childhood method for my sneakers.

Over time, I hope that typing my running shoes the new way will become completely automatic. I’ll have successfully made one small change. Then, it will be time for me to work on adding the change to tying my sneakers and achieving success one small step at a time.

Jerry Weinberg’s take

I’ve learned so much from my late mentor, Jerry Weinberg. And he had something to say about achieving success one small step at a time. Jerry was a consultant to Ford on the ill-fated Edsel. As he recalls in his jewel of a book, The Secrets of Consulting, the Edsel project was a great triumph. Ford “…installed some terrific new computer systems that ultimately were adopted by the entire auto industry.”

Twenty-five years later, Jerry realized that the Edsel was a flop because Ford, scared of all the “better ideas,” put all of them into one car. “That approach guarantees that even if each one of the individual ideas is terrific, the result will be a debacle.”

From this experience, he derived The Edsel Edict.

“If you must have something new, take one, not two.”

In other words, achieve success one small step at a time.

One small step

Have you tried to make changes in your life and, like me, sometimes failed? Perhaps reducing the number of simultaneous changes you attempt may help you achieve success one small step at a time.

Image “one step behind” by Andreas Schalk under CC BY 2.0 license

Successful change requires integration and practice

integration practice. Image attribution: Close-up of a girl training inside a boxing ring by Jacob Lund from Noun ProjectI find Virginia Satir’s change model to be the most useful of the many models of change. There’s a crucial fifth stage in Satir’s model that people often neglect: the integration and practice phase.

integration and practice
The hero’s journey shortchanges change

Why do people overlook the importance of integration and practice? Well, the hero’s journey is a common way we picture how change occurs. A hero goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.

At the end of the hero’s journey, everyone involved, just like in fairy tales, “live happily ever after”.

Integration and practice are absent from this monomyth version of change.

Integration and practice are vital components of change

In reality, integration and practice are vital components of change. You’ve probably experienced moments in your life when you realized that something was or was about to be different: the fourth stage transforming idea/event of Satir’s model of change. I certainly have.

Typically, however, such moments of insight or awareness do not lead to instantaneous change. Think about the times you’ve realized you can/have to/want to make a change in your life.

Some stories about working on change

Here are three stories about working on change in my life:

Losing weight.

Meditating daily.

Asking for help.

Each story includes the awakening moment(s), followed by integration and practice.

Even when we incorporate integration and practice, successful change isn’t guaranteed. Though eating mindfully has maintained my weight loss for 9 years, and I’m now good at asking for help, I still struggle to meditate daily.

As Jerry Weinberg said in his wonderful book Becoming a Change Artist:

Change requires patience. John Stevens tells this story from the martial arts:

Once, a young man petitioned a great swordsman to admit him as a disciple. “I’ll act as your live-in servant and train ceaselessly. How long will it take me to learn everything?”

“At least ten years,” the master replied.

“That’s too long,” the young man protested. “Suppose I work twice as hard as everyone else. Then how long will it take?”

“Thirty years,” the master shot back.

“What do you mean?” the anguished student exclaimed. “I’ll do anything to master swordsmanship as quickly as possible!”

“In that case,” the master said sharply, “you will need fifty years. A person in such a hurry will be a poor student.”‘

Practicing to become a change artist

We all probably hope that implementing change in our lives won’t take decades of integration and practice. So, are there ways we can practice getting better at facilitating change?

Why, yes, suggests Jerry Weinberg!

The title of Chapter 6 of Becoming a Change Artist is “Practicing to Become a Change Artist”.

In it, he makes simple suggestions on how we can practice implementing change in our lives, and, in the process, become more open to and expert in facilitating change for others and ourselves.

‘The purpose is to launch your career as a change artist by experiencing some of the theoretical learnings in the “real world,” but in as small and safe a way as possible.’

Here are some exercises Jerry recommends:

  • Go to work in a different way tomorrow.
  • Make a different lunch every day, or make the same lunch a different way.
  • Brush your teeth in a different order.
  • Instead of trying to change something, sit back, listen, and observe. Notice your urge to change things and what happens when you don’t do anything about your urges.
  • Pick one habit that keeps you from being fully present, and focus on reshaping that habit in all your interactions.

Why not try some of these yourself? I enjoy this challenge!

Practicing how to implement change in small ways in our daily lives can help us improve how we facilitate change. Put another way, concentrating on the process of facilitating change, rather than the product or outcome is the way to go.

Image attribution: Close-up of a girl training inside a boxing ring by Jacob Lund from Noun Project


How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.

Work on *what* to change, not just managing change

A photo of JF Kennedy speaking, with the caption "The world is changing, the old era is ending, the old ways will not do."It’s tempting and understandable to concentrate on trying to manage change. After all, we are constantly experiencing change, and attempting to manage it is often unavoidable. But never lose sight of the importance of working on what to change. As Seth Godin reminds us:

“For too long, there have been lousy schools, inequitable opportunity and the pain of grinding poverty. There have always been innocent people in prison and unheard voices in need of our help. There has long been graft and inefficiency and the tragedy of preventable illness and discomfort.

But we’ve too often turned away from those issues, from the things we’re accustomed to, because they appear to be the same as they were. The status quo is there because we’ve accepted it. We might have worked hard on some of the issues, but it seems impossible to be on our toes about all of them, all of the time.”
Living on the delta, Seth Godin

We can choose to accept the status quo. “Yes, there’s injustice and suffering. But there’s so much of it. It’s overwhelming. I’m spending so much of my time trying to deal with the change I experience daily in my life and work. What else can I do?”

No blame

There’s no blame in doing what you must to manage the change in your life. For some, this is a full-time job. (For some, sadly, it’s an impossible job.) And, sometimes, that’s all we have the time and energy to do.

Changing the status quo, rather than managing it

However, many do have discretionary time and energy to direct towards making a difference to an unjust or insufferable status quo. I have that privilege. We can choose to spend time working to make things better.

The first step is to figure out what to work on.

And the second is to do the work.

What’s important

As Seth concludes: “The problem with living on the delta is that as we strap into a rollercoaster of external change, we forget to work on the problems we have the opportunity to improve.”

Never lose sight of the importance of working on what to change. Because figuring that out, and then doing the work, is how vital change happens in this world.


How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.

Some models of change are better than others

models of changeHow can we work on facilitating change in our lives?

If we want to facilitate change in our lives, having a model of how change happens can be very helpful. But which model? To facilitate business change, there’s an entire industry of well-paid organizational change management consultants who use different change models. And though we may not be aware of it, we all carry around some kind of model in our head about we make changes in our life.

Some models of change are better than others

In this post, I’ll describe four common change models. The first three are simplistic and sometimes misleading. In the corporate world, they have been responsible for significant employee misery. For personal use, these models have little utility.

Did I tempt you to skip to the genuinely useful change model that follows? Resist the temptation, because you may recognize one or more of the first three models in a wide variety of situations you’ve experienced. Discovering that an ineffective change model is in use can help you notice unproductive corporate and personal environments.

You can find more information and insights on these models in Jerry Weinberg‘s excellent book: Becoming a Change Artist.

The Diffusion model of change

models of change
The Diffusion model of change is a fancy way of saying “shit happens”. Change simply diffuses into our lives somehow. The word “diffusion” implies that change propagates, perhaps via social contact or some other process, throughout a group of connected people. But this change model doesn’t add much to our understanding of how change can occur.

The Hole-in-the-floor model of change


The Hole-in-the-floor model of change implies that a carefully designed, top-down, controlled process can create an instant change. This is a common model in organizations, where high-level executives meticulously plan a change “that will go into effect on January 1”. Here’s Jerry’s drawing of how this supposedly works.

Traditional conference designs also adopt this model. Somehow, the inspiring keynote will instantly change attendees’ lives for the better.

Obviously, we can make plans to initiate change. The biggest flaw with the Hole-in-the-floor model of change is the unrealistic assumption that change can occur instantly. In the vast majority of cases, however, change takes time. The model also implies the existence of controlling changers who can instantly change the passive changees. Even if the changer and changee are one and the same, we all know how difficult it is to make an instantaneous change in our own lives.

The Newtonian model of change


The Newtonian model of change tries to improve the Hole-in-the-floor model by adding a sort of human physics, fancifully based on Newton’s first law of motion. The concept is that you can push people to change, and the resulting change will happen over a time that depends on how hard you push. The harder you push, the quicker the change will take place. Naturally, the Newtonian model assumes that to change in a certain direction, you must push in that direction

Unlike the Hole-in-the-wall model, this model at least recognizes that change takes time. But what the Newtonian model of change overlooks is that when you push people, they often push back, or move in a completely different direction. Like the Hole-in-the-wall model, this model assumes that you can control people by pushing them in the direction that the controllers want them to go.

Jerry Weinberg also describes a variant of the Newtonian model: the Learning curve model. In this model, an S-shaped curve replaces the Newtonian model’s linear change over time. The above criticism applies to both models.

The Satir model of change

The Satir model of change was developed by the founder of family systems therapy, Virginia Satir, and described in her book The Satir Model, published in 1991.

Unlike the previous models, the Satir model describes multiple major stages of change, and what each stage of change feels like. The previous three models are limited when applied to understanding how personal change happens. In contrast, the Satir model is universal; it applies to both personal and organizational change. It also suggests what kinds of interventions are appropriate at each stage.

models of change
Above is a diagram of Satir’s model of change, which I’ll briefly outline. [Steven Smith supplies a longer summary, and Jerry’s and Virginia’s books go into more detail.]

foreign element disrupts an old status quo. Then we begin to live in chaos and do not know what will happen next. This provokes our feeling unsettled. Such chaos continues for an unknown period. Eventually, a transforming idea or event allows a period of transition away from chaos, via integration and practice, towards a new status quo.

To help clarify this model, here are two examples of each of these elements, adapted from Jerry’s book.

Old status quo examples

  • You have a bad heart and smoke two packs a day, but play racquetball intensively once a week to compensate.
  • Your product development team has stagnated over the last few years, and really can no longer produce anything innovative.

Foreign elements examples

  • You have chest pains when playing racquetball.
  • A competitor announces an innovative product, and your development team has no idea how to respond.

Chaos examples

  • You start playing racquetball left-handed, and only with certain opponents.
  • Your company’s old reliable product starts developing problems. Team members don’t show up at meetings or answer messages.

Integration and practice examples

  • You give up smoking and racquetball and start walking four miles a day.
  • The company purchases new tools to assist in product development. It also purchases training to go with the tools and provides time for people to attend.

New status quo examples

  • You discover how much you enjoy walking, and how many creative ideas you get about work problems while you walk through the neighborhood.
  • All the development team members are using the new tools. Almost weekly, someone discovers a new way to use a feature and shares it with other team members.

The Satir model is useful because it delineates the major stages of change and the human response to change. The model reveals that feeling unsettled is a natural response to perceived chaos. Keeping in mind that change is unsettling is key to devising change strategies that have a chance to work for human beings! (Conversely, noticing that I’m feeling unsettled is a reliable sign that something has changed or is changing in my life.)

Final thoughts on models of change

Until you understand how change occurs, and how it affects the people and organizations involved, you won’t be successful blindly applying prescriptive models of change, like the first three models I describe above. Yet again, I’m grateful to the late Jerry Weinberg, who taught me so much.


How do you facilitate change? In this occasional series, we explore various aspects of facilitating individual and group change.

Three criteria for working with others for change and action

working with others for change and action: a graphic containing 11 icons that represent speakers, speaking, collaboration, and unityHow can we successfully work with others for change and action?

During the last eight months, I’ve been striving to save a tiny liberal arts school, Marlboro College, from closure. I’ve felt compelled to do this work, not only because the school sits at the heart of rural Marlboro, Vermont, where I’ve lived since 1978, but also because I taught there for ten years (1983-1993) and have a deep affection for the College’s rare form of education.

Someone could write a book about the twists and turns in this struggle, but it won’t be me. Instead, I’m going to share three criteria I uncovered about how to successfully work with others for change and action. When I say “successfully”, I’m not talking about whether “my” side won or lost. Rather, these are pragmatic criteria that can make the process of working with other people on a social or political goal somewhat easier and more productive.

1. Be sure that fundamental motivations are aligned

Attempting to work collaboratively and fruitfully on a complex issue? Take a little time to find out whether your potential collaborators share the same fundamental motivations as you!

It’s tempting to quickly accept any offer of help. At first, all seems well. Sometimes, though, it turns out that a potential collaborator who shares your goals has fundamentally different motivations. I’ve learned that when peoples’ motivations aren’t sufficiently closely aligned, friction and disharmony eventually surface.

When this occurs, you’ll realize that a significant amount of the time and effort spent building the collaborative relationship has been fruitless.

Of course, no two people have exactly the same motivations to work together on a project. Minor differences are often irrelevant, or resolved quickly. Deciding whether fundamental motivations are aligned, therefore, is ultimately a judgment call. However, ignoring motivational differences, no matter how severe, is a recipe for disappointment and frustration.

2. Check that people are willing to work

working with others for change and actionWatch out for folks who are quick to share opinions about what should be done, but always leave the work they propose to others.

For example, during our campaign, many people made suggestions about legal grounds to sue those planning to close the school. Their ideas were plausible on the surface (certainly to a non-attorney like me). But they never offered to contact an attorney and discover whether there was indeed a legal case to make.

Those of us who did spend significant time talking to attorneys discovered that most of the proposed ideas were not good ones. Because we didn’t want to telegraph our legal strategy, it was difficult to openly repudiate the suggestions. The spate of proposals continued.

Ideas are welcome. Some supporters with good ideas simply don’t have sufficient free time to work, and that’s fine. But ultimately, someone needs to do the work of researching the plausibility of ideas and turning them into action. You may need to tolerate those who frequently opine without offering to do the work — but don’t spend too much time appeasing them.

3. Be able to work well with others in the group

working with others for change and action
There are numerous ways that folks who share common goals and motivations and are eager to work can still fail to collaborate successfully. I’ll mention a couple here.

One interesting requirement is a nuanced appreciation of confidentiality. When you’re working in an informal fluid group, you need to have a clear communal understanding of whom to trust with what. In my experience, some people don’t grasp the need for this and don’t think through the consequences of passing on information given to them in confidence. Though I’m sure everyone’s made this mistake at one time or another (I certainly have), someone who routinely breaks confidentiality is not a prime candidate for successful collaboration.

Personality clashes can be another collaboration breaker. For example, over the last eight months, a few people who had useful expertise and experience became more trouble than it was worth to work with because they unpredictably blew up at group members. Dealing with their outbursts significantly reduced the limited time working group members had available. Consequently, there was a reluctant but necessary passing of the ways.

Conclusion

There are, of course, many other factors involved in facilitating large-scale change. Even when a seemingly coherent group forms to address important issues, it still can be difficult to work with others for change and action. I hope the three criteria shared above help you use your energy for social and political activism more productively.

How eventprofs are feeling during COVID-19

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19How are eventprofs feeling during COVID-19? Over the past few weeks amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, I’ve listened to hundreds of people share their feelings at online meetings I’ve led and joined. Though everyone’s response has been unique, three distinct sets of emotions stand out. Here they are, from the perspective of the many meeting professionals I’ve heard.

Anxious

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19I estimate that about 85% of the event professionals I listened to shared feelings of fear, compared to about 65% of the general population. The most common description I heard was anxiety/anxious. But strong expressions like “scared”, “terrified”, and “very worried” were more common than I expected (~5-10%).

This is hardly surprising. Every event professional who spoke had lost essentially all their short-term work and event-related income. In some cases, they were attempting under extreme time and resource pressures to move meetings online. The meeting industry has been struggling for years to understand and develop online meeting models that provide traditional face-to-face meetings’ desired outcomes and are both technically and financially feasible. To have to pivot to such modalities overnight — assuming they are even feasible for the specific meetings in question — is having a huge impact on every aspect of the meeting industry.

When your present circumstances and potential future dramatically change, feeling fear is a normal and healthy response. And fear of anticipated upsetting change leads to the next set of emotions…

Unsettled

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19About half of event professionals, and slightly less of everyone I heard, shared feeling unsettled. “Unsettled” is a mixture of fear and sadness we may feel when we experience the world as less predictable and our sense of control or comfort with our circumstances reduced.

Feeling unsettled is a natural response to perceived chaos, as illuminated by Virginia Satir‘s change model.

Above is a diagram of Satir’s model of change. An old status quo (the event industry before COVID-19) is disrupted by a foreign element (the COVID-19 pandemic). Then we begin to live in chaos and do not know what will happen next. This provokes our feeling unsettled. Such chaos continues for an unknown period. Eventually, a transforming idea or event (in this case, for example, perhaps the development of a vaccine) allows a period of transition away from chaos towards a new status quo (hopefully, a post-pandemic world).

Hopeful

eventprofs feeling during COVID-19I was surprised that about half of the general populace mentioned feeling some form of hopefulness about their current situation. Event professionals were far less likely to share feeling this way. This discrepancy is probably because some of the non-event industry people were retirees, and others have escaped significant professional impact.

It makes sense to me that meeting professionals aren’t feeling especially hopeful right now. If/when the chaos and destruction of the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, we don’t know how much delay there will be before face-to-face events are scheduled and run. And we also don’t know how our industry will change for good, and what our new roles in it will be.

My experience

These days, I feel all the above emotions (though not all at the same time 😀). Clients have canceled all my short-term design and facilitation work. I love to facilitate connection and feel sad about not having face-to-face interactions with clients and meeting participants. I am anxious about the health of my family and myself, and unsettled about an unknown future for my personal and professional life.

Yet I am also hopeful.

I have reached out to connect in real-time online. Although I have created and facilitated hundreds of online meetings over the last ten years (from the days when video chat was a buggy and bandwidth-limited experience) I am continuing to learn more about facilitating connection around relevant content online. And I’m thinking about how online meetings can be significantly improved, using technology to create better implementations of the many in-person participation techniques I’ve developed and championed for decades.

What’s your experience of how eventprofs are feeling during COVID-19?

Please share your own experience and what you’ve heard from others in the comments below!

Unlearning is crucial for change

Unlearning is crucial for change: Illustration of three brain phases of learning. "Learn" (connections made inside the brain), "Unlearn" (connections removed from the brain), and "Relearn" (different connections made inside the brain).Unlearning is crucial for change.

We often think of change as additive. We become wiser by “learning something new”. What we often overlook is that changing our beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions involves unlearning as well as learning.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read & write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”
Alvin Toffler

Unlearning first requires noticing. We are skilled at habituating our circumstances, no matter how unusual. Habituation is valuable because it allows us to adapt to changes in our environment. But habituation also makes it harder to notice that we may need to change our current thinking or behavior.

Thus there’s a delicate balance, a dance, between noticing what is rather than what has become our default ways of thinking, understanding, and acting.

Note that unlearning is not the same as forgetting. Forgetting is the failure to remember what’s still important. (The Japanese remind us of this when you get off a bus.)

I have spent over fifty years unlearning what people and society told me I was and should be. I’m still on a complex journey of relearning who I am. I work to practice being me in each moment. Change work involves not only intellectual shifts and reinterpretations but also the unlearning of habitual responses to emotional experiences and their empathetic replacement.

So remember, unlearning is crucial for change!

Photo attribution: Flickr user gforsythe and Cathy Davidson

Events operate by stories

Events operate by stories: the cover of the book "record of a spaceborn few" by becky chambersEvents operate by stories.

“Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one.”
—Isabel, in Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

I love science fiction, which Pamela Sargent calls “the literature of ideas”. In a world where it sometimes seems change is impossible, science fiction explores how our future will be different. Science fiction is also especially rich with the possibility of introducing cognitive dissonance: the mental discomfort we feel when aware of two contradictory ideas at the same time.

Above all, good science fiction excels at telling stories. Powerful stories. Stories that routinely predict the future: earth orbit satellites, the surveillance state, cell phones, electric submarines, climate change, electronic media, and the Cold War were all foreshadowed by science fiction stories long before they came to pass. Science fiction introduces possible futures, some of which come to pass, by using the power of stories.

Events operate by stories

Like science fiction, events also create futures, and events operate by stories. Just as good stories have a story arc, coherent events have a conference arc. In addition, every event participant creates their own story at an event, just as each reader or viewer individually absorbs and experiences a book or movie story.

The promise of events springs from the reality that we are the stories we tell about ourselves. The stories that events tell and we internalize change us.

It’s incumbent on all of us who create and design events to think carefully and creatively about the stories our events tell. When we do so successfully, the power of stories shapes and maximizes participants’ individual and collective outcomes — and changes lives.