“Those doing the work are often the only ones who really understand the context. Leadership is helping build the structure and then protecting the space to do meaningful work.“ —Harold Jarche, work in 2018
Build the structure to do meaningful work
Few traditional meetings are built to do meaningful work. Instead, they unconsciously adopt an ancient model: a rote diet of lectures. Conscious meeting design, on the other hand, builds an appropriate structure that supports and leads to defined and desired outcomes, aka meaningful work.
Protect the space to do meaningful work
The old-school status roles baked into traditional meetings minimize useful connection and learning by defining in advance those who have something important to say. This makes it difficult and risky for the audience to share their own expertise and experience for everyone’s benefit.
“Leadership is helping build the structure and then protecting the space to do meaningful work.” When seen through the lens of participant-driven and participation-rich meeting design, I view Harold’s two-part definition as a perfect description of leadership for meetings.
Do your meeting designs truly support participants doing meaningful work? Do you provide leadership for meetings?
I often design and facilitate workshops for association members most of whom haven’t met before. The desired outcomes are for each participant to gain useful and relevant professional insights, and to make significant new connections.
Here’s what you might see on a stroll through a typical workshop:
An example
At one workshop, association staffers noted that no one touched a cell phone, and intense conversations with frequent bursts of laughter filled the entire two-hour event.
A participant started crying and his group members rushed to console and support him. (We learned later that he had been unfairly fired earlier in the day.) Afterward, we saw many people swapping business cards and making arrangements to meet up again. Before leaving, the fired man told me that, despite his dire circumstances, he had had a very positive experience and made several good new friends in his group. Other participants shared during post-workshop conversations that the experience would be memorable because of their personal learning and the new connections made.
Follow-up evaluations confirmed that participants obtained meaningful peer support and advice, and began new friendships with other workshop participants.
Such workshops routinely meet the outcomes they’re designed to achieve: creating useful and memorable learning experiences and connections.
Why are these workshops successful?
These workshops are not successful because of the:
excellence of a speaker;
beauty/novelty of the venue/F&B/entertainment; or
extraordinary facilitation.
(Full disclosure: the facilitation needs to be competent!)
Adult professional peers can learn much from each other, and when they meet they are hungry to find solutions to current problems, explore issues, and make connections with others who work in the same sphere.
The successful workshops I’ve described above do not have a single expert sharing content. (Rather, it’s fair to say, they tap the expertise and experience of everyone present.) All they need for success is good process, competent facilitation, and a few low-tech items.
They are also simple. Every process element is a strategic ingredient of the workshop design. Running these workshops helps me continually refine the design, stripping away components that distract focus from the desired outcomes.
Many organizations focus on getting the “best” experts to speak at their meetings. Ironically, in my experience it’s almost always easier to create memorable learning and valuable connection for attendees by employing participatory workshop formats. Why? Because they take full advantage of the group’s combined expertise, hone in on what people actually want and need to learn, and build lasting relationships in the process.
Sometimes, I just need to shut up and listen. When I close peer conferences with a Group Spective, there’s always a moment that is hard for me. It occurs during the Plus/Delta when people are sharing what they’d like to change in the event they’ve just experienced. Participants offer many suggestions, perspectives, and ideas that make the organization’s future activities and events better, and their sharing frequently helps me improve my own work.
And then someone, let’s call them John, comes up to the microphone and says something like this:
“Well, at the beginning of this conference we spent a lot of time choosing the sessions. I think it would be much better if we just asked everyone what they wanted to talk about before the conference. Then we could start the program right away and have more time for the sessions!”
I know John’s intentions are good. I know he’s genuinely trying to help to make the conference better.
Regardless, at this point, a voice inside me is saying:
“Aargh, not again! Do you think no one has ever suggested this before? If I’d found a way during the thirty years I’ve spent designing and facilitating events to create better conference programs by asking people what they wanted in advance, don’t you think I would be using it?
The reason we spent precious time at the start of this event learning about our wants and needs and experience and expertise and then co-creating a conference program optimized from what we discover is that I’ve found that taking this time creates a much better conference than one where the program is somehow determined in advance!”
And so on. I feel sad and misunderstood and disconnected listening to John who doesn’t get the essence of what I’ve spent years creating and fine-tuning, to whom I’ve failed to convey something that I believe is valuable and important.
I feel frustrated in much the same way as when I meet people who insist that the world is really less than ten thousand years old, are sure vaccines cause autism, or believe there’s a scientific conspiracy to falsely declare that recent human activities cause climate warming.
On one occasion I couldn’t stop myself from responding to a participant who said that the initial roundtable and peer session sign-up we had used was a waste of time. I said that in my experience, it created a better conference. The participant, a state legislator, looked at me and said, “This is a time for me to share my opinions, not for you to share yours.”
And he was right.
Yes, it’s hard at moments like this for me to keep my mouth shut.
But it’s important that I do. My job is to facilitate the process that’s going on, not offer my own opinions.
The silver lining
In the end, it turns out that I don’t actually need to say anything. Invariably, other participants respond to John. They’ll come up to the microphone and say things like:
“Actually, John, I disagree, I liked what we did! Yes, it took a bit longer, but I: — got to know many attendees in really helpful ways; —made valuable connections with people who have useful expertise and experience; —learned about interesting topics I hadn’t thought about before; and —enjoyed some excellent sessions, many of which I suspect wouldn’t have been included in a traditional conference.”
And I feel better again.
Which teaches me something else. Though I experience my feelings in the moment as permanent and unchangeable, my feelings are transitory. This too shall pass.
When the audience can’t stop talking about what they did…
Last week, I led The Solution Room for a group of New York City attorneys. When it ended at 8 pm, after two hours of continuous intense conversation and connection, no one left. The participants, despite having worked a full day before my evening session, hung around and talked and swapped business cards while venue workers patiently reset the room for the law firm’s next business day.
For me, having people unwilling to leave after one of my sessions is over is a sign of success. It’s an example of what Seth Godin calls viral work.
Important work is easily dismissed by the audience. It involves change and risk and thought.
Popular work resonates with the people who already like what you do. Viral work is what happens when the audience can’t stop talking about what you did.
Every once in awhile, all three things will co-exist, but odds are, you’re going to need to choose.
—Seth Godin, Important, popular or viral
I like Seth’s definition of viral work, but I’d change one word to better describe my facilitative work.
“Viral work is what happens when the audience can’t stop talking about what they did.”
How often do you get to do viral work? Share your successes in the comments below!
[P.S. I don’t usually photograph the challenge representations drawn by Solution Room participants because they can contain personal information, but I made an exception for the charming image that graces this post.]
Gosh, how could I have overlooked International Facilitation Week? (Dontcha know, there’s a minute, hour, day, week, month, or year for everything these days.) Luckily it’s not too late to share this compilation of fine facilitation wisdom from the mysterious ShitFacilitatorsSay (profile: “I facilitate groups. But really, I’m just holding the space”; location: “A Circle of Chairs Near You.”)
Here are some recent favorites:
Been so busy weaving networks of collaborative intention that I almost missed #FacWeek
Want to improve the learning at your meetings? Make sure your meeting messages are received. That’s what I learned from You. No, not you — “You“!
“You”
“You“ is a delightful improv game I played at the Mindful Play, Playful Mind retreat in Mere Point, Maine. Players stand in a circle and the first player points to someone and says, “You”. The pointed-to player does the same by pointing to someone else until the last person has pointed back to the 1st person, creating a pattern. The pattern is practiced a few times until everyone has it … and then another pattern is created, using names of a class of common objects such as junk food, birds, colors, etc. Once the players have got that pattern down … well, let’s run both patterns simultaneously! Then let’s start doing things like adding another pattern, changing places in the circle with the “next” player…
As the game gets more complicated, it becomes an exercise in concentration and dealing with potential chaos. You have to figure out how to deal with unexpected situations. An example? Two people point to you simultaneously with a pattern while you’re trying to pass a third pattern to someone else. It’s challenging — and a lot of fun!
Learning from a debrief
After you play a game at an improv workshop, it’s time for a debrief. So we held one in between adding further complexities to “You.” Then we worked on incorporating our incremental learning into the next round.
What did we learn?
We discovered that when we were playing with multiple patterns going around the circle, the game fell apart. This happened when we incorrectly believed we had passed on a pattern to the next person and mistakenly turned our attention back to the circle to deal with the next pattern passed to us. It’s easy to point to the pattern’s next recipient, then hear another pattern that you have to respond to and fail to make sure that the pattern you’re passing has been successfully received. This only has to happen once for a pattern to stop going around the circle.
We realized that when we got caught up in the excitement and high-attention needs of a complex game, we played too quickly to reliably pass on pattern messages to the next person in the sequence, leading to dropped patterns.
Switch the focus!
To play the game reliably, we needed to switch our focus from frantically keeping up to making sure that our pattern message for the next person was received. We had to wait until our desired receiver was giving us their full attention. Then we could pass the pattern and check visually that they had received it. Then we’d turn our attention back to receiving patterns from others in the group.
The beauty of this focus switch was that if everyone did it, the game automatically slowed down as needed to successfully deal with complex or new situations. For example, if Mohamed & Juanita both wanted to send me a pattern while I was supposed to send one to Laurie, I would wait until Laurie was free to receive my pattern before turning my attention to Mohamed & Juanita. Mohamed & Juanita would see that I was occupied and wait until I had successfully sent Laurie my pattern, whereupon one of them would get my attention while the other waited until I was finally free.
If you didn’t carefully read the previous paragraph with full understanding, I forgive you. It’s much easier to experience how this focus switch works than to explain it.
The Lesson. You’ve gotta ask! Twice!
Ever had someone tell you something, and you don’t understand what they said? Duh! Of course you have! When this happens, the obvious thing to do is to ask them to explain. Do we always do that? No! In Conferences That Work I tell the story of how an entire class of graduate students (including me) stopped understanding our math professor halfway through the semester, and none of us ever informed him we were lost. What a waste of everyone’s time!
When you teach, it’s important to provide clear, understandable information. When you facilitate or lead a group, it’s important to provide clear process instructions. But regardless of how “good” you are at this, there is no guarantee that your message has been received completely or correctly.
And so to our lesson:
To teach or facilitate effectively, check early and often that what we are saying has been received and understood. When we use the ask, tell, ask model of participative learning, the second ask — the follow-up check for reception and understanding — is the one that’s all too easy to omit.
In other words: Make sure your meeting messages are received!
When we improv players made sure that our pattern passes had been received, we were amazed at how complex a game of “You” we could successfully play. In the same way, faithfully using all three steps of the ask, tell, ask model allows us to check that our teaching and facilitation as been received and understood, allowing us to create complex and successful active learning at our meetings.
I was facilitating a one-day workshop for 24 college presidents. At the start, we agreed to follow six covenants, including the freedom to ask questions at any time, and a commitment to stay on schedule. Our program was tight and college presidents are not known for their brevity, and I was feeling somewhat apprehensive about the group’s ability to honor the latter covenant.
During our opening roundtable sharing, everybody heroically tried to stop when their time was up, but we were still running late when, at the end of one participant’s contribution, someone I’ll call Q said, “Can I ask a question?”
All eyes turned in my direction. Conflicted and flustered, I blurted out: “No.”
Everyone laughed. My self-contradiction was funny—in the same way that seeing someone slipping on a banana peel is funny.
Q then asked his question anyway, which was the right thing to do. Why? Because both the question and the answer that followed were brief, and then we were on our way again. It was a challenge, but with the participants’ help we stayed on schedule for the rest of the day.
What I learned from this collision of agreements
This was an interesting learning experience for me for three reasons. I learned that:
A preoccupation with a long-term process goal (keeping a program on schedule) can lead me to try to block a short-term need (getting a question answered).
I can trust participants who respect the covenants we’re using (Q saw a contradiction and rightly asked me what was appropriate for him to do) to do the right thing.
I am far more capable of dealing with potentially embarrassing situations than I used to be. (The moment I realized that my aim to keep the event on track wasn’t threatened, the experience became funny to me too. In the past, I would have remained feeling uncomfortable for a while about “losing control.”)
I suspect it’s impossible to have a set of covenants that won’t occasionally clash—and I think that’s a good thing.
A Taoist might say that tension between opposites illuminates the underlying core. In this example, I was attempting to balance the success of the overall experience with the needs of the moment. There’s no “right” answer. After all, too many delaying questions could have disrupted the workshop flow and reduced the value of our time together. Awareness of the potential contradictions helped me to focus on a key aspect of the day’s work.
Noticing and responding as best one can to such tensions is necessary and valuable in the moment of facilitation. And, as a bonus, sometimes the outcome of a collision of agreements is amusing too.
Perhaps you’re wondering: What’s the connection between facilitation, rapt attention, and love?
Why am I drawn to facilitation? I’ve often heard an uneasy inner voice that wonders if it’s about a desire or need for control and/or power. And yet I know through experience that when I am facilitating well, I have influence but no real control or power.
Then I read this:
“Freud said that psychoanalysis is a ‘cure through love,’ and I think that is essentially correct. The love is conveyed not so much in the content as in the form: the rapt attention of someone who cares enough to interrogate you. The love stows away in the conversation.” —Psychotherapist and writer Gary Greenberg, interviewed in “Who Are You Calling Crazy?”, The Sun, July 2016
Facilitation is not psychotherapy (though sometimes it may have similar results.) But they both have something in common when performed with skill: the gift of listening closely. And that gift of rapt attention is given out of love—not of the content but through the form.
Though I sometimes want to be in (illusory) control, I am drawn to facilitation out of love.
Facilitation, rapt attention, and love.
Why are you drawn (if, indeed, you are) to facilitation?
Ten minutes after I’d finished facilitating a large national association meeting hour-long fishbowl sandwich discussion on solutions for a persistent industry problem, the conference education director walked in. His jaw dropped. “The attendees are still here talking to each other! That never happens!” he exclaimed.
Well, it happened this time. Many small groups had formed and people were chatting energetically. Business cards were being swapped. When I left to catch my flight home twenty minutes later, conversations were still going on all around the room.
How did I build and support this level of interaction and engagement?
I used a fishbowl sandwich. What’s that? Read on!
The components of a fishbowl sandwich
A fishbowl sandwich, like any good sandwich, has a filling surrounded by bread and spread (or accompaniment). The filling is the fishbowl technique, the surrounding bread is comprised of pair-shares at the start and end, and the accompaniment is the facilitative language that segues between the bread and the filling.
How I began the fishbowl sandwich
As people trickled into the room I asked them to pair up by sitting next to someone, preferably someone they didn’t know. I lightly repeated the request several times before the session started.
For the first piece of sandwich “bread”, I asked everyone to think of something they had done, small or large, which was a (probably partial) solution to the challenges the industry faced. After about 30 seconds I asked one of each pair’s members to spend 30 seconds sharing what they had done with their partner. A final 30-second share from the second partner to the first wrapped up the opening pair-share.
As usual, it was hard to get everyone to turn back to the front of the room for the next bite of the sandwich!
At this point, everyone had switched, at least for a while from “listening” to “participation” brain mode—they were ready to engage.
Time for the fishbowl
I was sitting on a low stage with three empty chairs beside me, wearing a headset mike, with a couple of wireless stick mikes at hand, and took a minute to share the rules of fishbowl:
You can only talk if you’re sitting in one of these chairs.
If you have something to say, come and sit in an empty chair. You don’t have to wait for someone else to finish talking.
When you’ve finished what you have to say (for the moment, you can always return) vacate your chair.
If all chairs are full, when someone new walks up, the person who’s been talking longest should leave.
And we were off. For the next fifty minutes, a constant stream of people came up and shared their ideas and experiences. Sometimes they shared with the audience; sometimes they spoke with each other while the audience listened. No one “hogged the mike”.
A woman wearing a large backpack shared a novel approach that could be implemented regionally. I ran a hand poll to see how many people had done something similar—only about 20% of the audience. I asked those who hadn’t how many would be willing to do the same. Most hands went up, and people looked thoughtful. An industry leader told the woman he wanted to interview her for the association’s national magazine.
After about 40 minutes I said that we had heard an incredible amount of good ideas and advice and it was clear that there was a tremendous amount of expertise and experience in the room. I asked if anyone wanted help with specific problems. Two brave souls came up and shared their individual frustrations. Sure enough, several folks came up and supplied helpful suggestions.
Finishing the fishbowl sandwich
It was time for the final pair-share slice of bread. To conclude, I asked each pair member to share with their partner their single best takeaway from the session. Once again, a buzz of conversation arose, and after a couple of minutes I announced that the session was over.
[Want to learn more? Find detailed information on fishbowls (there are two kinds) and pair-share in The Power of Participation. Or learn how to create your own fishbowl sandwich from my latest book, Event Crowdsourcing. ]
That’s the fishbowl sandwich. Have you used one, or something similar, at your events? Share in the comments below!
Image adapted from a McDonald’s ad. Hope that’s OK, Giant Corporation.
What might leadership for meetings look like?
I often design and facilitate workshops for association members most of whom haven’t met before. The desired outcomes are for each participant to gain useful and relevant professional insights, and to make significant new connections.
When I close peer conferences with a 
Gosh, how could I have overlooked 
Make Sure Your Meeting Messages Are Received!
Ever experienced a collision of agreements?
Perhaps you’re wondering: What’s the connection between facilitation, rapt attention, and love?
Ten minutes after I’d finished facilitating a large national association meeting hour-long fishbowl sandwich discussion on solutions for a persistent industry problem, the conference education director walked in. His jaw dropped. “The attendees are still here talking to each other! That never happens!” he exclaimed.