The Bosshole® Chronicles
The Bosshole® Chronicles
Chad Littlefield - The Contribution Method
What if your next meeting didn’t start with, “Let’s wait for a few more to join,” and end with, “Sorry, we’re out of time”? We sat down with Chad Littlefield, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at We and Me, to unpack a practical, repeatable way to turn passive rooms into engaged teams. The Contribution Method replaces consumption with involvement, helping leaders design moments where people feel needed, not managed.
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Greetings to all our friends in The Bosshole Transformation Nation. Welcome back to The Bosshole Chronicles. It might be cold where you are, but today's episode will warm your heart. If you are responsible for people, or events, or anything that includes people, you'll grab some great tidbits from today's conversation with our guest, Chad Littlefield. Chad is the co-founder and chief experience officer of We and Me. And basically, what he's gonna talk today about or talk us through is what he calls the contribution method. It's a way to create experiences and dynamics in your relationships with people where there's value and trust and connection. And in this day and age, that might be the best impact on your bottom line there is. So stay tuned and enjoy this episode.
Announcer:Enjoy today's episode.
Sara Best:Chad Littlefield, welcome to the Bosshole Chronicles.
Chad Littlefield:Thank you for having me.
Sara Best:Yeah, this is exciting and fun uh and important. We're gonna have some important conversation today. For the benefit of our listeners, share that I got to experience you through Psych Safety Day 2025. That was back in December. You and people like Dr. Amy Edmondson and its distinguished faculty of folks talked about how to create psychological safety. And I'd just like to start there because it's such a segue into the heart of what you do and how you help people build connection. So can I kick it over to you and tell us a little bit about your approach?
Chad Littlefield:Well, I uh maybe, maybe the place to start is with the the blunder that you so astutely pointed out. That the morning before I gave the, you know, essentially the opening keynote to Psych Safety Day with the person who, you know, popularized the phrase and term psych safety, Amy Edmondson.
Sara Best:Yes.
Chad Littlefield:Um, I just totally blew it in the family minivan, dropping my kid off at school, kind of rushing him along, and emotions were high. And and he ran off. He ran, he literally opened the door of the van and ran up to mom on the stairs crying. And when he came back, I turned around and he said, Data, I just feel so much safer with mom. I was like, talk about the irony of our own expertise. I'm about to go teach hundreds of people how to build psychological safety in their own organizations. And so, first of all, I maybe I'm like opening with that uh by A, acknowledging that uh I'm the most fallible person in the room. And that might be one of the keys to for good leaders to admit their own blunders. I'm not trying to be a good leader right now, it just actually is a blunder. Um, and and you know, is this misstep? But nobody wants to follow uh a perfect leader who hasn't taken any risks and hasn't made any mistakes. Because if you look at the like, you know, the seven uh the measure that Amy Edmondson used when she partnered up, you know, she was working with Harvard, she partnered up with Google, right? The seven items scale are like I feel comfortable making mistakes on my team. Um I can ask for help. I can ask for help.
Sara Best:Yes, right? I can be myself. Yeah, yeah.
Chad Littlefield:And so starting with like, are you are we doing that uh as leaders? Are we actually doing any of those seven things? Um, and how is our rating on that spectrum? Um as a as a baseline. But for me, what I realized is because I I I did I I had some problems with the idea of psychological safety, in that uh I think it can be shared in a way that puts all the onus on the leader to make everything super safe for people. And I think what is forgotten in that is the other side of things, which is psychological risk taking. And so I think really phenomenal leaders actually assume the social risk for their groups, for their people to take risks, ideally risks and incremental uh levels, right? You're not just like inviting people into the wolf den. But this feels like an essential element of if you don't cast that invitation for people to contribute and take a risk to contribute, you're actually forcing people into either the role of critic or consumer. They just passively take it in or they say, I don't like this and this is why, but I'm not gonna do anything about it. Um but the moment you say, Hey, I'd actually really love your input on this, and I want to create the time and space for everybody to write down their input and drop it in the box without a name attached. It's like, okay, this is a small risk I can take. It's relatively anonymous. And uh that's a very different approach than I'm only going to model and show you. Uh, because that's a very that that method is fine, but it's also designed for consumption. It's just like I watch by example. Um I think we also leaders invite people to do things. Anyway, you can tell I'm mildly passionate about this. So I'm going to stop talking.
John Broer:Oh no. You reminded me of when Dr. Edmondson was on The Boss hole Chronicles and she said, you know, it's really important to remember that while the manager may have a disproportionately higher impact on psychological safety, it does not fall to them exclusively. And so there is an ownership within the team. Yet I, Chad, I think the idea of modeling that, but also how do they react when somebody does step into the danger, if you will, and we try to destigmatize failure, that reaction is critical, that moment. And again, I think that you, you know, in in your vlog, when you talk about uncrossing, you know, getting people to uncross their arms, uh, remove that doubt. I realize I'm mixing a couple of your approaches, but they all relate. Uh that's so critical. And yet it I a manager and a and a supervisor just can't re can't feel like it's exclusively theirs. And that's what we share with teams when we work with them on psychological safety. I just think that's a really critical point.
Chad Littlefield:Yeah. And so for me, the the question is um if if all of the onus is not you, how does a good leader uh welcome their people to take ownership? So uh like can't and shouldn't force uh it on people. But for me, this is I had a mentor very early on who uh I was learning uh you know experiential team development and leadership development and facilitation. His name is Rod Lee. And he took, we were, we co-taught a team and leadership uh facilitation class at Penn State for a couple years while I was in grad school. And he took the podium on the first day of class and literally turned it around and said, this is a better orientation for this. Because there's one of me with one set of life experience, and there's 35 of you. And if you add that up, right, even though I'm older, you are collectively have way more life experience than I do. And so this is how this is gonna go. I'm flipping the podium around. You're gonna teach me just as much as I'm gonna teach you. And this for me, that metaphor and that action exemplifies for me the entire ethos and philosophy of what I've learned to now call the contribution method. It's how do we invite groups consistently over time and through in any type of uh setting or gathering, how do we consistently create invitations for them to contribute, which is for me the only path, actually, to invite someone out of just being a critic or a consumer. Because as soon as I um and the and big companies are occasionally comical at this when uh when you think about like releasing a uh an annual strategic plan, or they've crafted the new brand behind the scenes for six months, and now they're gonna reveal it and they have a big event and there's lights. And what it's saying is like this, like this, like this, get behind this, support this, love this. And I that's the way that we've always done things. Our world is very heavily designed for consumption. A very powerful shift happens when you say, Here's this. What do you think about it? And you invite people in the small groups of three to discuss the brand and unpack it together because they're gonna do it anyway, after the show that you put on. It's just gonna be in the form of gossip. And so the contribution method is like, no, create the avenue for all of this good stuff to happen um altogether.
Sara Best:Yeah. I I have to just comment that I love the idea of you know, the invitation, the allowing the other parties to have responsibility and to own their sense of success in the relationship and in the dynamic in the room. But I'm thinking as you described what that leader has to be able to do, like how your mentor turned that podium around, what I thought about is wow, that takes a pretty self-aware, confident person who not only understands who they are and what their strengths are and what their challenges are, but they believe that their idea isn't the most idea important idea that like their thing doesn't have to win. And I find some of the leaders that we get to work with, it's not so much that they don't believe that their idea needs to win or that they believe their idea needs to win. It's more like I can't not have the idea. Like it's not okay for me not to have the idea. Like I gotta show up this certain kind of way. So the opportunity to flip it around and honor and reverence the expertise in the room just wouldn't even ever occur to them. Does that make sense?
Chad Littlefield:Very much so. A lot of sense. That's right. Yeah, it makes sense. Go ahead, John.
John Broer:Well, no, I I I can't, Sarah. I can't remember if this is this is really bad. I can't remember if this was a story on on the podcast. I don't think it was. I think we were in a conversation with somebody that said, hey, um, not the CEO, but the senior leadership was all up all behind this new approach, open approach. We're going to shift the culture, less command and control, more trust and autonomy. Those are our words, Chad. But I mean, that's essentially what they were really, really in endeavoring to do. Yeah. And they had this town hall, and the CEO, apparently nobody told him, but it just ended up being a two-hour, two-hour monologue of him just talking about what's wrong in the organization, which they were used to. I mean, that that's what they expected to your point. And it's like, yeah, probably somebody probably should have taken him aside and said, this is a new approach. But I mean, it's a great example of where there's a a tone deafness or um just a an un I mean, just there's there's incongruency to the idea of contributing or encouraging contribution. And we're just gonna lay this on you. So sorry, I just totally I don't remember where where we got that, but that is a that was a a boss hole story that maybe never even got on the program.
Chad Littlefield:Right. Totally. And so sure, this is a this is an example where like everybody can be bought in, but if the very top uh just kind of completely goes against that, that resets the uh can reset the culture back to zero. But it also gives people a more astute uh language and and lens to be like, okay, I I also think we can give that CEO potentially uh organizationally, like creating the cultural shift toward contribution and tapping into the collective wisdom and expertise of a group as opposed to uh a top-down command and control approach.
John Broer:Yeah.
Chad Littlefield:I I would invite that organization too to give some grace to the CEO to be like, yeah, of course, this is the way you've always done things. And yeah, maybe it would have been great to get some coaching beforehand. Um and this is where like frustration and this is what ends up having people leave organizations is they work so hard towards something, some more beautiful uh picture of the organizational world. Right. And it keeps getting keep they feel like it keeps getting stomped on uh by the top. And so acknowledging that that right along with, and you hinted at this earlier, just as important as inviting people to contribute and taking the risk, you know, as the leader assuming that social risk to invite people to contribute, just as important is honoring it and acknowledging people's contributions the moment that they uh share, right? So if somebody chooses to take an interpersonal risk on a team, yeah, if you say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not talking about that, and you move on to the next person and you shut that person down, then person number two is never gonna take personal risk. That's done. Of course. Oh my gosh.
Sara Best:Well, and before well, before you dig more deeply into the contribution method that I'm excited about, it's just profound. Yeah, I do think for for any of our listeners that really aren't as familiar with psychological safety, it is about interpersonal risk. It is our um willingness to raise a hand, ask a question, expose ourselves, reveal a mistake without the fear of retribution or dismissal, or like literally or figuratively, that that we would no longer count. So it's it's an interpersonal risk. And for some people, it's really, really, really high. And we have to just appreciate and understand that. So back to you, Chad.
Chad Littlefield:Yeah, and at the risk of potentially being repetitive if you've had Amy Edmondson on. Um, this is also the reason it got real popular and everybody's talking about it, is the study, Aristotle project that they did found it was the number one indicator of high-performing teams, right? Oh, yeah. Why spend any time on psychological safety? Well, uh, I was uh uh hosting an event, and um the founder of Burt's Bees was there and shared that they did this event where they're trying to go zero waste, like zero waste in their uh products at all. And so they had they were doing a pretty darn good job, but they had still had little trash cans all over internally, little trash cans all over. And so um one day they had an all-employee event. They laid out tarps in the parking lot and they brought all these trash cans and dumped all the trash out and went item by item to figure out how we can get rid of this, eliminate the even usage of this thing.
John Broer:Wow.
Chad Littlefield:And uh it was a you know, bottom rung employee who had the idea for it. There was something about the manufacturing of the cap. I don't remember the exact technical thing. Some reason, like you know, you actually what it was is you peel the sticker off, you have this little extra plastic thread uh kind of thing that allows you to take the cap off the chapstick. And they realized that we don't even need that. We can just have a sticker over the whole thing that's perforated and you just twist it, and the sticker just stays right on there, and you have one less piece of plastic floating around. So it's like a small idea, but over the course of you know tens of millions of things of chapstick, like this is a huge impact. Um, and this came from somebody at the very bottom. If they didn't create the idea that everyone here, everyone's perspective here is equal. The CEO's perspective is not actually more valuable than everybody else's perspective in this particular so they created a temporary world where psychological safety was absolute the highest it could possibly be, right? We're all working together to try to solve this one problem.
Sara Best:Right.
Chad Littlefield:No idea is a bad idea. Let's go. Um, so so you know, as an example of because I think sometimes it's shared is like, yeah, maps are high performance, but he's like, what do you mean by that? There's an example.
Sara Best:Um I love that.
Chad Littlefield:Also something that wouldn't have been accomplished if the CEO of Bert Spees stood up and gave a lecture to everybody saying, Hey, we really want to go zero waste next year. Um, this is a priority, a strategic priority. It's written as a strategic priority and then disappear, right? They actually uh the the idea. I have a mentor, Matt Church, who always used to say, uh, never leave a meeting with anything to do. And so one of me, the contribution method, the the main angle that I'm taking on that, while we've unpacked the philosophy, it's like it was created out of my own need to survive and reduce my own anxiety planning group gatherings. And so the actual method is like, no matter what who I'm gathering with or what the length of the gathering is, the way I plan it is I get a blank piece of paper and I write one, two, three, four, five on that blank piece of paper. And that is that those one, two, three, four, five, those five ingredients map to the timeline of a gathering. So if it's an hour-long meeting or an all-day uh all-staff retreat or a half day training that the group is having, or an onboarding session that's happening two hours every day, whatever, whatever the context is, I write one, two, three, four, five and I jot down a couple notes for each of those. And then for me, the session's planned. And so the idea is it's bringing, it's making contribution happen live in the meeting, not saying it's a strategic priority. Now go back and do your homework. It's like they'll just bring it right into the context. Genius. John, I feel like you've got something.
John Broer:Yeah. No, no. I wrote one, I wrote down one, two, three, four, five. I'm I'm I'm excited about the yeah.
Chad Littlefield:Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. So let me give the uh the real quick hook of it first, and then we'll go into one, two, three, four, five. Okay. So uh this is the method that I um now teach people, but for me, it was something that I created out of personal habit. So I was recognizing traveling all over the country, giving keynotes, whether it was to a an uh arena of 6,000 people or a team of 200 executives. Um, I would procrastinate the preparation of that because I would get so worked up uh about that engagement. And this was like 10 years of this, um, getting so worked up that I needed some system or structure to reduce my prep time uh so that I wasn't just wallowing in uh anxiety for days or weeks beforehand. And this is a common occurrence of people that I who host uh things as I've uh learned is that we dwell on this for weeks, we way over prepare. And all of what that is is a focus on myself. My anxiety is coming from I was thinking more about me than I was thinking about the group. I was thinking more about what I was going to say than I was about when the contribution method, this one, two, three, four, five, it's all about what you're inviting the group to do. If I've got 500 people in a room and I try to do all the work for an hour or three hours, I'm gonna be very tired. I'm gonna have a hangover at the end of that session. But if I crowdsource it and distribute the effort to 500 people, they'll get a ton more out of it. I'll spend half as much time prepping. Um, and I also won't have that hangover after, right? So um Can I just say so?
Sara Best:If if there's there's a leader out there that says, well, hey, you know, I'm just facilitating a team meeting once a week with eight people or 10 people. Yeah. Okay, guess what? Same applies. Like same concepts apply. This is beautiful.
Chad Littlefield:Same concept applies. And um the the beauty of these ingredients is they can be dialed up and dialed down. So for a half day program, right? Number one on the list for me is a term I initially learned from uh facilitator named Mark Collard. It's the unofficial start. Typically at work, we reward people for being late by waiting for them. So if a meeting starts at 9 a.m., we're like, ah, so-and-so is not here. 9.03, they show up. Okay, let's get started, everybody. The unofficial start says, no, no, no, no, no. If you've got eight people in a meeting and six or seven of them are there, even if they're not the leader, their time is valuable. And so the unofficial start is what can you, what can we do to immediately begin a couple minutes before the official start? So at 8:57, what are you inviting people to do? Not what are you saying, not what are you, what are you inviting people to do the moment they walk in the room as a rolling start, and then have that run a few minutes after the official start to extend understanding for anybody who is late. And so for me, that might look like um for an intact group, that might look like I've got a deck of cards that I know this won't be posted with uh video, but deck of cards with images on one side and quotes on the other. And so lay out a bunch of images on a table outside the room. And as people walk in, and this is a monthly staff meeting, um, hey, just choose an image that represents the one thing you actually really care about getting out of this meeting. And it turns out that imagery is a lovely way that almost everyone can make a ethereal verbal idea concrete and visual. Right. And so I might choose a picture of a brick wall and say, there are these three obstacles that we just can't get past with this vendor. And I just want to like get everybody's opinion on how I can address this. And so um, so they're just choosing that card. And the unofficial start is choose that image and sit down next to somebody who you haven't chatted with in a while, or sit down next to somebody who you're working on uh a project with right now and just share your image of what can you do. Impelled you to share it. So for six minutes, they're having productive, interesting, memorable conversations that can that are also connected to the reason that you're actually there in the space, right?
Sara Best:That's so good. This reminds me that we will link in our show notes, Chad, to uh the the products that you provide on your website. And one of them is that deck of cards. I think you have a contribution kit and a gathering kit. Is that right?
Chad Littlefield:Connection toolkit, connection toolkit toolkit and uh a handful of decks of cards that are just I've created over the last 10 years. As I've worked with groups, it's like, I need to solve this problem. And so this tool is born out of creating that and uh just put them in a box so other people could have them.
Sara Best:They're so good. And anybody can do that. You don't have to have experiential learning training to offer this deck of cards. And I can attest firsthand that the imagery and what it allows people to expound on is astounding. It's you could never get that stuff from people without the connection to a cool image and uh and the thought it creates. So kudos for that idea.
Chad Littlefield:Do you want the fancy facilitator phrase for what you just said, Sarah?
Sara Best:Yes.
Chad Littlefield:Uh Jennifer Stansfield taught me that she's a facilitator in New Hampshire. Um shielded discussion. And it's a it's a great tool for psychological safety. It's one of the reasons I have an affinity for um the use of cards in certain formats, because it's like I chose the card, I said it because the card allowed me to, and it's like the shield in front of me, whereas I would never have offered that thing because it was too much social risk to just share that with no prompting whatsoever. And so this is actually a core idea of like if leaders uh want to avoid being boss holes, the prompts that we invite people to contribute matter a lot. This is very obvious, like with artificial intelligence. If you say, hey, Chat GPT, give me five ideas for my kid's birthday, it'll do that. But if I say, hey, ChatGPT, give me 45 pirate-themed ideas for my six-year-old's birthday. He really loves whales. It'll also give me 45 way more personalized, better ideas. This is so it's very obvious with we forget that as leaders, a lot of what we're doing with our questions and our invitations are prompting humans. And if we say, do this or else, command and control, we will get a result that is born out of fear. And if we do this from a place of inviting someone's perspective and contribution and involving and tying their meaning and purpose, not making them feel like a cog in the wheel, we'll get a much longer tail, sustained level of results where they're happier at work and they actually stick around as opposed to bail after two years of being bossed around.
Sara Best:A-men.
Chad Littlefield:Okay. Yeah.
Sara Best:Oh, so good.
Chad Littlefield:So, two is the idea of a context hook. And this is the idea, even if you've got eight people or eighty people showing up to a gathering, um, the only thing, in my opinion, that is shared amongst them is the room they are in or the link they clicked. Everything else is different. They had a different morning, different text on their phone, different emails, different stresses, different health concerns. Everything is different except for the room. And so the context hook is one single sentence, one single statement, and ideally something that you're inviting uh the group to do in a really quick format that is so encapsulating that just for that 60 seconds, they're fully present and tuned in. So, for example, if you're listening, and and John and Sarah, let's just do this right now. So if you both cross your arms, and maybe you've seen this experience. And if you look down and whatever arm is on uh on top, just switch arms. So the other arm is on top.
Sara Best:Oh gosh.
Chad Littlefield:That's very hard to do. I hate that. I can't do it. I didn't know. You're just if you're listening and you're just consuming or critiquing, go ahead and do it. Cross your arms and then try to flip arms. It's very unnatural for 98% of people. And so I might do this as a context hook immediately. It doesn't matter if you're if you had 45 uh texts from your kids' school, well, maybe that's an exception, but yeah, you had uh a whole bunch of messages from uh that were sitting a bunch of fires outside of that meeting. As soon as I just invite everybody in the room to just cross your arms and then flip arms with just for that moment, we're all sharing the same experience, the same thing. And then as a the sentence for me in a context hook is an intention that this is very important, includes the needs of the other. Bosses are amazing at sharing their goals for a meeting of what they want to get out of a meeting without any concern of what anybody else cares about. So for example, an objective of a meeting is hey, uh, the purpose of this meeting is to review our strategic priorities for this quarter. That's very much an objective. You can stretch that into an intent by adding so that to the end of it. My intent is to review our strategic priorities so that everybody is 40% less confused this quarter on what they're doing and how they can jump in. Right? People very much like clarity. And so uh when you frame whatever you're doing in a context of what other people care about, it allows by sharing your intention, it allows people to say, yeah, yeah, I want to play that game or not. And that intention right away in that in that context hook roots out manipulation. There is no room for manipulation when a leader is clear about their intent and they share it with the people that it affects.
Sara Best:That's so good. Okay, can I just share an example of uh I was having a conversation with a leader this week, and I think if he said it once, he said it three times and probably did the same in other conversations. I just need to get them fill in the blank. I just need to sit down with them and get them to, I need to get them to understand. I need to get them here.
John Broer:They just need to, yeah. Yeah, I know who you're talking about. Well, there's two from which you could choose, yeah.
Sara Best:This would be the opposite of that. I love this.
Chad Littlefield:But but this is okay, so this is a it's a very reasonable and understandable thing for a leader to feel like that. I have felt like that often with my team. Like, can I just get you to blank? And so for me, the like the hack, uh, if you will, to get that person to stretch that objective into a more empathetic intention is literally two words. So you just add the word so that to the end of it, and then what comes after those words has to be in a currency that other people care about, not you.
Sara Best:So, hey, my intention.
Chad Littlefield:So, Cheryl Sandberg, uh, see former CEO of Meta, uh, was on the board for a tech company called SurveyMonkey and a friend that works for SurveyMonkey, and she walked into a board meeting once and she goes, Hey, everybody, this meeting's really expensive. Let's get started. I like the idea of elevating the context hook to this level of importance of like, and so for me, the in that was embedded as so that of like, hey, everybody, your time is really precious. Let's get started right away so we can and maybe even take this a step further. I want to try to be super structured with our time today so we can get out 15 minutes early. So you have time to work on the stuff that keeps piling up for you. Yeah. What a profoundly different intention than I need to get everybody to understand this stuff.
Sara Best:Yep.
unknown:Yeah.
Sara Best:Love it. And it's it's not that difficult. Subtle. Good.
Chad Littlefield:It's uh I for me, I like the con for me, the contextbook is the thing that takes less than a minute, but it changes the entire 60 minutes of a meeting. And if you don't have it, uh, I would say you're not having a meeting, you're having eight meetings because everybody's on their own track and there isn't a shared intention that everybody's anchored to. So when the meeting goes off the rails and Susan's uh like angry at so-and-so for saying this, you have no anchor to come back to. Whereas the context with that intention is like, whoa, wait, yes, that's something to be discussed, but this meeting is actually about this, right?
Sara Best:Good.
Chad Littlefield:Okay.
Sara Best:So good.
Chad Littlefield:Also, we're going through these in slow motion, but this is like I jot these down and I never take more than a few minutes as I'm jotting these down anymore. Sure. Um, the third idea uh is a phrase that was first popularized or kind of coined by Peter Bloch, um, connection before content. And I'd like to think I've helped popularize that uh that phrase a little bit through my teachings. And Peter's idea is uh that without relatedness, no real work can occur. And I would edit that quote to say without relatedness, no sustained meaningful work can occur. You can get people to do stuff with a carrot and a stick for a little bit. Yeah. But eventually that will not last. Right.
unknown:Yeah.
Chad Littlefield:And so connection before content uh is not an icebreaker, it's not a warm-up, it's not a how is your weekend, everybody. Um, it's the most simple format of it is a single question where you invite even in a group of if you're meeting with six people, you're splitting out into small groups of three. So truples. Single question, excuse me, that allows people to connect with each other and to connect with the purpose of that particular gathering. This is what any icebreaker, team builder kind of thing misses. It's like, you know, tell me your about your favorite camping trip, but you're there to review quarterly finances. Right. It's like this, these two things are very disconnected. And that, that disconnection builds a heap of resentment, right? The like the logical-minded engineer has no interest in telling about the camping trip. They just want to like get to it. Right. Yeah. And so for me, I'm framing connection before content as a way to, in a meeting of nine people, uh, you split out into three groups, you're tripling your productivity in terms of how much content is being shared and a short duration of time. And so it might be um, hey, to connect with each other and the reason we're here, and if the purpose is reviewing quarterly finances, the question might be uh, what's a story of the end of fiscal year gone terribly wrong from your career? You get the other threes, share that. I'm not, I'm not in the finance world that much. So I don't know if that's a great example, but you get the idea, right? It's like figuring out the one question that helps uh link and giving people a few minutes to discuss in them uh of themselves. And then Peter's the the gem that I got from Peter, who's become a mentor, is when people come back, toss out the question, what struck you? What'd you notice about the what'd you what struck you about those conversations? And what it does, it allows everybody to speak in a very short amount of time. And then the what struck you popcorns the top 20% of those conversations and kind of populates it to everybody. So this works just as well in uh an all staff at Google with 500 team members present. Break out into groups of three, answer this one question. And the idea is when you popcorn out what struck you, you do not need to hear from everybody. You need to hear from three to five people, and you've heard from the room. And typically what the things that people say are more about the process of how they're going about things and less about some like tactical specific content. And so they it essentially it's very culture setting.
Sara Best:Nice.
Chad Littlefield:The fourth one is uh 80 to 95% of most people's gatherings. And this is content. It's like, what are you there to do? What's what uh information are you reviewing, sharing? What um decisions are you there to make? It's content, but designed for contribution. So take a training, for example, and that training, let's say, has 20 PowerPoint slides in a deck with information that organization A wants to impart on their employees during onboarding. You can share that content by having a trainer in the front of the room read out that material and teach it. And that's the way it happens in 95% of organizations. Or you could say, in a minute, I'm gonna put up a slide. There's a bunch of words on it. You all have a job. You have 30 seconds to read the slide and tell me what the most important part of information the most important piece of information on the slide is, and the least important that we should probably delete from the slide. Ready? Click. You got 30 seconds, they're reading. The trainer is doing 100% less work. The group is learning 100% more from that. And then at the end, you say, okay, what was the most important piece of information? And from the group, they are teaching each other from their perspective what they seem to be the most important. And then as the trainer, if you if there was gaps, you get to add in and add butter to the popcorn, if you will. But that's just one tactical example of turning content and designing it for contribution and experience.
Sara Best:I love that because what really you get to tap into is the unique perspective and the expertise in the room. I always learn something when I interface with a team or a group, and I trust that there's something out there that I don't know yet, or there's a way to look at this that I haven't thought of. How cool that it just becomes automatic that people are going to be sharing their insights. Love that.
John Broer:This reminds me, oh, go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, go, John. Go. This just is taking me back to the early days of my uh becoming aware of experiential learning and and getting people activated in the learning. And I had a I had a uh, I guess he was a bit of a mentor or a coach that said, look, there are three ways to look at it. You could either tell them, show them, or involve them. And I said, ideally, there's going to be uh, you know, a combination, but the involve has got to be at the center. And if they're not involved in it and contributing, the retention is going to be negligible. And and I again, that's just so it you're reminding me of how critical that involvement is. So that's awesome.
Chad Littlefield:And that applies uh in the moment, their their memory retention and also their retention to an organization. Yes. So every leader wants more engagement. What we don't realize is that's oftentimes disengagement um is the lack of feeling needed at that meeting. Yes.
Sara Best:Yes. I'm a piece of wood. Like nobody cares what I have to say.
unknown:Yeah.
Sara Best:Yeah, I don't count. That's beautiful. It's a good connection over. We, you know, we talk a lot about engagement. I think organizations are measuring it and they're trying to improve it. And we've been chasing uh it chasing it for 25 years through the Gallup research, and we're we're abysmally failing.
John Broer:So that's this is a side note, side note, Chad. I I I just had this conversation yesterday with a group, I was training for a full day of training of new PI practitioners. That's kind of the work, some of the work we do. And I said, you know, for the billions and billions of dollars that are spent on leadership development and all this stuff, it's not turning in the right direction. It is in some regard. I'm I'm sure all the organizations you help, hopefully the ones we help. But overall, it's like, man, these trends, we're missing something. So it, you know what? I think we're missing the collaboration method. And our our listeners are going to learn about it in the next couple of weeks. So anyway, side note, I'm gonna edit all that out.
Chad Littlefield:That feels like a side note to leave in. Uh yeah, I think so too. I think so too. And this is actually one of my reasons for existing on this planet currently, is uh seeing that the world is increasingly designed for consumption, right? Our phones, like there, there's a lot of money being spent and put the onus on creators making content. Yeah. And they're working very hard to figure out what's the right hook to keep you on here a little bit longer. Um, and so increasing our world is designed for consumption. And so uh you know, you take a Hulu and Amazon and Netflix, uh Facebook, uh, any of these platforms, TikTok, any of these platforms are very incentivized to maximize consumption. And so if you want to be competitive in a leadership development space, I would argue do not compete with TikTok, Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix. You will lose. Their budgets are much bigger. And so I would invite people to compete in the land of contribution, not consumption. Because what TikTok is not doing is inviting people to actively be really meaningfully involved. Sure, there's a comment section, um, but this is like you might as well be typing into the into darkness. Um, this is not a you know, social platforms have not have actually left socialness. And so for me, uh look at gathering, any gathering practitioners, trainers, facilitators. I think there's high potential. It's not a guarantee, but I think there's high potential to be quite insulated by a decade of extreme disruption uh with AI over the next 10 years.
Sara Best:Yeah.
Chad Littlefield:Is uh AI is not very good at inviting a group's contribution to be a part of something. It's not very good at involving someone. It's great at spouting out information and keeping people isolated in a chat with a robot or an interaction with a robot. But in terms of actually bringing people together, this is even Sam Altman himself, Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, was interviewing Sam and said, Hey, we're all rolling with Chat GPT 25 and it's all doing our homework, and we're doing a lot less of what we have been for the last century, what will we be left with? And his answer was connection and recreation. And so for me, the um contribution, inviting people to contribute to uh something is a beautiful, low-risk, psychologically safe pathway to meaningful connection. Whereas if you get people in a room and say, okay, ready, go, meaningfully connect. I'm not sure that that's like not a super effective method, which is why I landed on the contribution method and not the connection method or the error um anything else.
Sara Best:So good.
Chad Littlefield:Anyhow, if anybody's listening closely, we should get to closing, which is number five. Number five. Here we are. Number five, the idea is um I met a woman once who was half my height and triple my age. Her name was Connie, all white hair, and she introduced herself to me as a professional storyteller. Like, oh, tell me more. How do you how do you tell really phenomenal stories, Connie? And she said, without skipping a beat, I got it. All you gotta do is know the first sentence that you're gonna say and the last sentence that you're gonna say, and fill in the middle with the truth. And the contribution method version of that is know the first thing you're gonna invite the group to do in the unofficial start, and the last thing you're gonna invite the group to do, and then fill in the middle with the truth. And so for me, closing is any way that you can end with people wanting to come back as opposed to how most meetings and gatherings end, which is stressed out, rushed, incomplete in a in a fizzle of people running to the next meeting with high cortisol levels and starting their next meeting with, oh my God, sorry I didn't even get to, sorry, I'm late. I like had to grab water, our meeting ran late last time.
Sara Best:Like closing.
Chad Littlefield:So I will actually, just to leave people with a practical thing, uh, if I'm in an important meeting and I'm, and especially if I'm hosting it, I will set an alarm on my phone or watch to go off audibly in front of the whole group five or so minutes before, five to ten minutes before the end of the gathering, and it will be a reminder to say close with intention, or I'll actually put whatever closing exercise I'm gonna do. So sometimes that's as simple as hey, we just tackled a lot, get into groups of three and just share the one thing you hope sticks around in your brain three months from now. Um, so like a simple practical takeaway, or there are much uh more creative, fun exercises that uh leave people uh less stressed on a little bit of an energy high as well. Nice.
Sara Best:Very nice.
Chad Littlefield:There you go. That's it. One, two, three, four, five.
John Broer:We will put all of the links and information to Chad and his work in the show notes. So please make sure you're checking that out. I mean, we've been doing this over five years, and the the sheer number of subject matter experts and incredible resources are absolutely going to transform managers that are struggling. And so this is one of them. So I'm I thank you, Chad, for sharing it.
Chad Littlefield:Thanks for having me on and somewhat ironically being such good consumers and listeners. I appreciate it a lot uh about the contribution method.
unknown:Awesome.
Sara Best:It's so good. Yeah. We we'll uh, you know, you can be a keynote speaker for events, organizations can bring you in. So we'll make sure that they know exactly how to find you. We may have you back because I know I'm gonna be keeping in touch with you. You have your connection summit that happens every year. It's a sold-out event. Tickets are hard to come by. Uh, it's where you bring people who are um contributing or are living in this body of work that you uh that you do and and training and facilitating and leading, they come together for uh a couple of days or a week-long connection kind of.
Chad Littlefield:400 gathering nerds brought together uh virtually. So people who are actively hosting, leading, facilitating, running things to come together and and the ideas uh at that gathering, the connection is the content. So uh yeah, we have speakers and we teach uh ideas, but unlike most events, the vast majority of that time is actually well facilitated and structured in between space. It's like the magic of an event and conference often happens in the hallway in between sessions. Oh, yeah. We were like, why don't we just flip it? Why don't we just have short, punchy, valuable content sessions and lots of hallway time, so to speak. Love it. Um, with a little bit of facilitation. I think a little bit of structure to hallway time uh s accelerates the process of having good conversations. So Beautiful. And then once a year I take one cohort and actually teach the teach a master class in the contribution method. Um and that's it. Otherwise, I just practice it. But once a year I uh open up uh people in the spring.
Sara Best:Good to know. It's coming coming up soon. Chad, once again, we thank you. Keep up the amazing work that you do. It's just you're such an easy person to listen to and be around. So we're grateful that you spent time with us today on the Boss Hole Chronicles. We'll see you next time, friends.
Announcer:Thanks very much for checking out this episode of the Bosshole Chronicles. It was so good to have you here. And if you have your own Boss Hole story that you want to share with the Bosshole Transformation Nation, just reach out. You can email us at mystory at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. Again, mystory at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. We'll see you next time.