workshops work Podcast
This is a podcast about facilitation: the practice of creating conditions for people to think better together.
Whether you’re leading strategy, navigating change or developing leaders, the quality of your conversations shapes the quality of your decisions.
Hosted by Dr Myriam Hadnes, behavioural economist, facilitator and founder of workshops.work, each episode explores the human dynamics of working together: how psychological safety is built, why some conversations lead to action while others stall, how leaders foster genuine participation, and what behavioural science can teach us about collaboration. Alongside these conversations, Dr Hadnes shares reflections from her own client work, offering practical insights from the realities of designing and facilitating workshops in organisations.
Recognised as the facilitation community’s most-recommended podcast in SessionLab’s State of Facilitation reports from 2024 to 2026, the show has grown into an archive of more than 350 conversations spanning the craft, the inner work, and the unexpected edges of facilitation. Whether you’re a facilitator, leader, consultant or L&D professional, you'll come away with sharper questions and a few ideas worth borrowing.
workshops work Podcast
228 - Leading Through Facilitation: Unpacking the Complexity of Group Dynamics with Rob Evans
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The prevailing view in organisations (and among their leaders) is that change processes are rational challenges — a question of getting from A to B with efficiency and minimal interruption.
After 30+ years of facilitating change processes and training others to do the same, Rob Evans has learned that a great deal of the work to be done is anything but rational.
The emotional and political contexts in which groups exist matter. The decision-making structure around the team matter. The restrictions and fears matter.
Join us for a discussion in the depth and detail of group dynamics, participant empowerment, and the deeply human sides of facilitation.
Find out about:
- Why prioritising participants learning and growth is an ever-reliable foundation for workshop planning
- How to account for emotional and political contexts in your workshop and avoid over-rationalisation
- Why Rob believes successful workshops hinge on having a large enough group
- How to approach a problem that is too big for the group to fix
- Why it’s worth asking why a change hasn’t happened yet, before we ask how to make the change
- What Rob has learned form helping drug users to rehabilitate from their addictions
Don’t miss the next episode: subscribe to the show with your favourite podcast player.
Links:
Watch the video recording of this episode on YouTube.
The Collaboration Code website.
Connect to Rob:
On LinkedIn.
Support the show:
Make a one-off donation and contribute to the ongoing costs of running the podcast.
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👉 What happens when being “professional” gets in the way of being human? My new podcast Unprofessionalism explores the rules we’re taught to follow at work, and what happens when we break them. Listen here: https://unprofessionalism.buzzsprout.com/ 👈
What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that takes two results? My name is Ma'am Hapner, and with the Workshops Work Podcast, I'm on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show is WebAppen and we speak about the softest stuff that's actually the hardest stuff and the role of facilitation in management and how to facilitate managers. So stay tuned. And by the way, if you don't have pen and paper at hand to take your own notes, scroll down to the show notes to download my free one-page summary. And now lean back to be inspired. Hello, Bob. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Miriam. I'm delighted to be here. Me too. Me too. And cannot wait to unpeel the onion about facilitation and leadership and managers and design thinking. And before we're getting there, I always start with the same question. When did you start calling yourself a facilitator? And actually, do you?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's great. That's a great question. I had done a lot of group work prior to 1986, working in a volunteer program in corrections in prisons, but we called ourselves teachers then. And through that group, I got a job while I was a full-time grad student at Harvard as a full-time clinical director of a drug detoxification ward under Cambridge City Hospital, Harvard Medical School. And there I got interested not so much in facilitation as in proper management, humane management. I had a very close friend in another part of the program who ended up getting in some trouble. We won't go into the details, but it turned out when they found him in the bar, he had a syringe of heroin in his back pocket, which no one knew about. And he was a very close friend. I didn't know about this. And that really set me back. And I asked myself, how could this happen? How could we not take care of the people taking care of people? Particularly when it's such a tough environment to work in, anyway, emotionally. So I got interested in management and joined a company in 1986 called Organizational Dynamics Incorporated that taught participative management, taught managers how to listen to their people. And in training them, we called ourselves facilitators. Probably the first time I'd ever heard the word.
SPEAKER_00Oh, and participatory management sounds a lot like facilitation, actually.
SPEAKER_01It is. It's exactly like facilitation. It's all about teaching managers how not to give orders, but to really facilitate their people to get the best out of them. Because here's the thing I know about management and I know about workshops. I know one thing for sure. And that is that people support what they help create. The EKA effect. They support the work, they have some input into managers who recognize that even on a manufacturing line, their people show up not just with their hands, but with their heads and their hearts, do a better job because the people doing the work see ways to improve the work.
SPEAKER_00And why don't they by default? And I think it's not rocket science. It doesn't take much, as you say. It's acknowledging, appreciating, listening.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it has to do with traditional ideas of well, what does it mean to be a boss? Well, you boss people, right? And that's why they call it boss. You manage people. I'm going to manage you over here and you over here. And it's just the stereotypes, the archetypes of the boss are overly directive. And when I was training new managers, people who were just given the job, I noticed something that helped explain that to me. So imagine you're in a work group, and all of a sudden you, Miriam, are promoted to be the supervisor of that group. You're promoted because you did great work, you have the qualities we're looking for. Okay, what's it like to have your relationships with your peers upended? Maybe some of them wanted the job. But in any event, the psychological defenses people put up when they're newly promoted into a management, their first management job, particularly without any education, which is how it usually happens, then what have they got? They've got two things. Externally, they've got the archetype of the boss. Internally, they have their sense of loss at their relationships with their old buddies. They have their sense of insecurity because I'm not sure I know how to do this, but I can't tell them I don't know how to do this. So I have to become harsher and tougher and all sorts of bad things just to compensate for the change. So I really saw that when I was working with young managers who had tremendous insecurity. I was their first teacher of management ever. And they were grateful for some education. And what we were teaching them was how to involve people, but still retain a sense of authority and responsibility and control, but not like a boss, like something else.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think it has to do a lot with self-compassion.
SPEAKER_01Exactly right. Well, that's good. That's exactly right.
SPEAKER_00Because I think it's when we feel insecure, and that's what I hear in what you just explained. If if managers feel insecure whether they are the right person for the job, maybe someone else on their team could have done it better, would have done it better. So all this insecurity needs to be protected. And then it's just easier to be defensive and directive.
SPEAKER_01It's so good.
SPEAKER_00And I think if they learn to self-manage maybe the self-leadership part in management or to to have more compassion to themselves, then it would be easier as well to I think approach their teammates or their former teammates and now direct reports with compassion and talk about it.
SPEAKER_01Quite possibly. And to give themselves a break when they're not perfect.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01When they make mistakes. You know, I'll I'll often work with senior manager groups and I'll say something like, you know, if we're honest with ourselves, we're all here, you and me, because we made more and better mistakes than many of our colleagues. And we learn from them. But we're not here because we're perfect. We're here because our mistakes are of a higher order. So I'll tell them, I'm probably going to make some mistakes with you, but I've been doing this for a long time. So the mistakes I make with you are going to be world class, I promise.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01As a half joke, because I want to defang the fear of making an error or of saying something that they then come to not believe or want to disavow in the group, just to make it safe to say what's up.
SPEAKER_00But then doesn't it require also a safe space for that manager? Because it doesn't happen in a void. So I'm just thinking, coming back to the concept of participatory management. So if a manager then invites team members to participate in the leadership and to also have a word, something goes wrong, they have to have their back. And they have to be sure that their manager or leader has the same attitude and has their back.
SPEAKER_01That's right. And we're going to try this. If it doesn't work out, we're going to try something else. So that experimental approach, curiosity and experimentation, in doing things that look, let's be honest, we don't know how to do this yet. So we're going to try some things. We're going to we're going to talk about it. We're going to come up with the best plan we got. No plan is perfect. And then we're going to build on that. We're going to beat the plan next time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I find it interesting what you're saying that yes, most managers get promoted or people get promoted into management positions without having had a formal education. And I think you can study an MBA, you can study management, but I think there is becoming a manager is like becoming a parent. It is very difficult, and no one can prepare you for that. And every time it's different.
SPEAKER_01And what no one prepares you for in being a parent is how painfully tired you will be. How you will be doing things with no sleep in the middle of the night with tremendous pressures on you, and you still have to do things. And that's what people don't understand about management. It's a serious job. And people don't understand that about facilitation either. That it's physically demanding. It takes a certain energy level and focus and not crazy, too much coffee energy, but real centered, calm when it needs to be, urgent when it needs to be, directed energy. And it that energy management is a piece of both facilitation and management. Well, you're not going to learn that necessarily at Harvard Business School or any business school. I don't want to pick on Harvard Business School just because they have a magazine, right? Yeah. I think it is becoming more of a question of an issue of a topic within business schools, the so-called soft side of things.
SPEAKER_00And aren't the soft sides the hardest sites?
SPEAKER_01Well, one of my great projects was working with FedEx over a period of years at every level of the company, at the Fred Smith level with his direct reports, right down to people who loaded airplanes and delivered packages in a large project of total quality management that my company was doing with them. I was leading the charge with them. And we helped them become the first Baldridge, the first service company to win the Baldridge Award, the National Quality Award in the US. When everybody thought, nah, it's just for manufacturing. FedEx showed how you do it as a service company. And in working with Fred and his direct reports, at one point he said, Look, guys, the hard stuff is easy. It's the soft stuff that's hard. Now, no one accused Fred Smith of being a softie. He was a tough guy. He built a big company against huge odds. He was a Marine in Vietnam, one tour on the ground, one tour as a marine aviator. So he was a tough guy. But he said he learned in the Marines that the real job of an officer is to take care of his people. You take care of your people, and your people get the job done. And he adopted that within FedEx in brilliant ways. And realized that's the hard part of leadership. It's the dealing with people and all the all the varieties of people who show up. Well, they're your people. What are you going to do? You have to deal with them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I wonder what is then the difference between leadership. So what we learn in leadership courses and facilitation. And I wonder whether very often in when I read about leadership, it's about the frameworks, the models. It makes it look as if it was the hard stuff, air quotes.
SPEAKER_01And we became friends over time. I was facilitating programs for him with Ernston Young. He was teaching our partners, all of our partners, there are a lot of partners, teaching them all about leadership. And he makes a distinction between management and leadership. Management is all about the organizing and budgeting and controlling. That's important. You need that in an organization. Leadership is about vision, motivating, mobilizing people, energizing people. That's a lot of what a facilitator will do. And his John Cutter's approach to the vision is it's not that the leader has a vision. The leader collects a guiding coalition. And through dialogue, they develop the vision that they then own.
SPEAKER_00And I think this is especially true when you're dealing with smart people. So when you're leading a group of highly skilled individuals, they have so much to give, and they don't want to blindly follow someone else's vision. They want to contribute.
SPEAKER_01Exactly right. And if the leader says, I've got a vision, they go, Well, big deal. I've got a vision too. You just happen to be the leader today. Well, maybe someday I'll be the leader and then we'll do my thing, which is often what happens. The next one takes over and says, Oh, I got here just in time. We're glad the last guy's gone. Here's what we're going to do now. But that's just so temporary. It's so short-sighted.
SPEAKER_00That's how change the processes fail.
SPEAKER_01What's possible is organizing and motivating and mobilizing groups of people because it's truly groups that get things done.
SPEAKER_00So, what have you learned in your very early days working with in the prison and with drug addicts about facilitation?
SPEAKER_01That's a great question. You have good questions, Miriam, if I may say so, which you know, and everybody who listens to you knows, but here we go. What I learned in drug programs was that's a lot. I learned at some level everybody's broken somewhere. Sometimes the breaks are more obvious, and sometimes they're not. So I learned compassion for people. You never know what's going on with someone. You never know what just happened at home or what's happening with their elderly parents or with their kids. Maybe the kids are sick. Maybe something's up. Maybe the marriage is not what they hoped it would be. You never know. You never know where someone's coming from. And so compassion and care. And I also learned boundaries. Learned the importance of boundaries and of being willing to say, no, not that. No, that's not what we do here. That's across the line. And to help people keep within ethical boundaries, moral boundaries, technological boundaries. Yeah, we'd like to be able to do that, but we just don't have the technology for that yet. What else have we got? And so careful attention to both what's possible and what's possible now. They call that the adjacent possible. Something might be possible someday, but we can't get there from here. We have a path we have to follow. What's possible now? And even through the dialogue, what has just become possible? Because now we're talking about it. What's possible now? What's longing to happen now? That's the question for facilitation and I think for leadership.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And the boundaries are a beautiful space to be to acknowledge the boundaries, to be able to respect and defend them, and then actually to use them because that's where the creativity happens. If everything is possible, nothing is possible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, nothing's possible. And where's the fun? It's like everything is possible. Okay, well, then we know it doesn't work like that. That is not how the universe works. And the universe reminds us of that every time we imagine everything's possible. And that's a good thing. I like what you said about boundaries and creativity, because the the process I use in my facilitation, we call a design shop process. And it's based on design and education. And it's was developed uh years ago by a couple, Matt and Gail Taylor. Matt is, they're both still alive. I talk with them regularly every week. Matt studied as a young man with the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Gail was an educator who was able to take the throwaway kids and have them excel beyond the so-called gifted ones. So together, it's quite a combination. And the work we do is based on design. And good design embraces limits and says within those limits, a budget, of structural conditions, what can we do? What's possible?
SPEAKER_00And when you say design, the definition that comes to my mind, and I just want to make sure that we're talking about the same thing, is an intentional setup of a framework or an intentional boundary. What is design?
SPEAKER_01What is design? Uh, Steve Jobs said something like, I'll misquote him. Sorry about that, Steve. Uh, wherever you are. Something like design isn't just making it pretty at the end. Design is how it works. So design is attention to how things work based on the needs of the people for whom we are designing something. Whether it's a device like an iPhone, or it's a process within an organization, or it's uh move toward peace rather than war, we've applied it to all of those, all of those, and design is a careful process of working together, collaborating, co-laboring, working together with the end user in mind, with the end user in mind. Yeah, given all the constraints we have to work with, what's possible? What can we do? How can our creativity and imagination bring something into being that has never been before, or recreate something for this situation that has to be adapted to work here? Just can't take it off the shelf. Boop, boop, it doesn't work like that.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00And then I think the high art of workshop design is then to have the boundaries, to think the possible or the edges of possibility within these boundaries, but then also to bring it home and to plant a seed for action.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00So that something happens after you left.
SPEAKER_01I'm so glad you said the A-word, Miriam. It's all about action. Why would you do a workshop unless you're aiming toward action? That's not that's not a workshop, that's a meeting, that's an information session. What's it leading to? How are we mobilizing people to do what? That's why you have a workshop. One of the questions I ask the people for whom I'm with whom I'm designing workshop is okay, it's a workshop. What's the work? Yeah, what's the work? And then the next question is, okay, why is that hard? Why don't you just do it? Why are we having this conversation? Then we're getting to the real heart of the issue. Why is this hard? What's in our way?
SPEAKER_00And what's usually in their way?
SPEAKER_01Well, this is where I walk to the whiteboard or grab a piece of paper, or if I'm talking to somebody on the phone, I say, okay, imagine this. And I say, imagine a circle. And I draw a circle with my finger, or I draw it on a board. And then down below, like a Venn diagram, two more interlocking circles. So one above two. In the top circle, I put an R. See, that stands for the rational outcomes we're looking for. Well, we need a new business plan. We need a new organizational model. We need to find a way to solve this problem for that community. Whatever it is, that's the rational piece. If that were all there is, that would be easy. Then it would be technical, a technical problem. Well, guess what? There's usually more than that. In the circle below on the left, I'll put an E. And I see E stands for emotional. What's going on emotionally in the face of this potential change? Where are people threatened by it? Do they wonder, does this match the values I signed on for when I joined here? What's going to happen to me if that rational change is carried out and these changes go into effect? Wow, what happens to me in that situation? I may not know how to prosper then. But wait, there's more. The other circle on the right, I put a P. That stands for political. Who's gonna wield power in the new situation? Who loses power? Who's likely to fight this because of who they are afraid they will end up working for in the new situation? And then I draw a line across. So the bottom two circles are mostly under the line. And I say that's the water line. And most of the emotional and political stuff is undiscussable. And when changes or transformations to be grandiose fail, it's much more because we didn't get the emotional side right or the political side right than that we missed the technical solution. So our job in the workshop and our job. Preparing the workshop is to lower the water. And I say, You remind them of the Titanic, the great ship that sank when it hit an iceberg. I say, you know, the part of the iceberg that sank the Titanic was the part below the water, the part they didn't see. They saw the top part, but who knows how big the bottom part is. Well, it was bigger than they thought. They couldn't avoid it. It ripped a hole in the side, down a wind. And that's what typically happens. So let's lower the water line, see what we're dealing with, and deal with that along with the rational technical problems we have to solve.
SPEAKER_00And this is where it gets tricky.
SPEAKER_01So how do you that's where you were in the big bucks, Miriam? That's really right. That's right.
SPEAKER_00Let me ask one of my general questions. What makes the workshop then fail? So what can you not to lower the waterline? And then we can speak about how to lower the waterline.
SPEAKER_01Right. Well, you you you're you put your finger on one of them. What makes it fail is we don't know there's something below the waterline. We think that the rational solution will sell itself. That's not how people change. People don't change because they see a new idea, they change because they feel a change is necessary and safe enough to give it a try.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. At the end, it's always economics, right? There's a positive, there's something to win, there's something to change for. You know. Or the pain is big enough.
SPEAKER_01So you might you might think it's all economics, but I'm not sure it is. I think economics is an important piece of it, but I think the emotions are a bigger piece of it.
SPEAKER_00I I count emotions into economics.
SPEAKER_01Well, then I'm glad we clarified our definitions, because then I have to agree with you. Yeah, the the emotional economy of a change is much more important than what whatever's on the balance sheet, whatever's in the budget.
SPEAKER_00Okay, is it painful or not to change what is waiting for me on the other end? And if it's if the outcome of the change minus all the costs still positive.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01You know, back in my drug treatment days, you could boil it down to a very simple set of questions and say, Well, what's wrong? Well, I I'm addicted to drugs. Okay, well, why is that a problem? Well, because these this happens and this happens and this happens and this happens. Okay, okay, so stop using drugs. And they go, oh no, I have to use drugs. And they go, ah, now we're getting somewhere. Let's talk about why you have to do the thing that hurts you and hurts other people. That's the real question here. Because they can see, you know, this is hurting me. All right, well, let's talk about what's keeping you the same, what's preventing you from doing what you know you need to do. That's the heart of the matter.
SPEAKER_00And isn't it often because there's something else that hurts even more, that's even more scary that drugs prevent them from.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I mean, a lot of people who start using drugs early find themselves years later, 25 years old, going on 13, because their emotional age was stunted as they found ways to manage change and the pain of change and the pain of their lives. I mean, that's not like these people have such great lives. The level of trauma that many of them were raised with is just overwhelming. So is the level of other mental conditions going on that need to be addressed. But never mind that. The point is they skip their own development because pain and difficulty is what drives development. It's not easy. And if you numb it, then you if you numb it, you don't grow up. And then you have a little leeway to be a 14-year-old when you're a 14-year-old. When you're 25 or 45, the world does not give you the latitude to then be a 14-year-old trying to be a 15-year-old. That level of psychological development isn't supported by the world. They expect you to have that behind you. That's hard.
SPEAKER_00I love that tangent. Thank you. I think this is uh release.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's a bit of a tangent, I admit. And now back to our regularly scheduled program, Miriam.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it can be interesting. It can open an entire different conversation about um work being an addiction and how it numbs all these other things. Maybe we keep this to another time because then we will have the to an half-hour conversation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we might. We might.
SPEAKER_00How do you then lower the water level?
SPEAKER_01So we do it in my practice, and I say our practice because people all around the world use the methods of the design shop approach. And my work for the last oh, five, six, seven years has been writing and teaching the in-depth secret stuff about this approach to many people in large organizations and individual practitioners and so on. In our approach, Miriam, we always begin by responding to the one who says, could we do a workshop on X with a conversation that goes something like this? Who do you need at your level or above to make that change? Because most managers are faced with problems that aren't contained within their span of control. Okay, so it gets back to management. How do you get ahead in management? Well, you solve problems within your budget and within a time frame so that you can get your bonus by the end of the year by pointing to what you solved that year. Okay, that's not how problems show up in the world. They're beyond my span of control. And sometimes they may take longer than a year to solve. Sometimes they may not take the full year if we do it right. But I ask, okay, who needs to be involved in the conversation of how we solve this? And we put together a sponsor design team. And then we, which would be five, three, five, seven colleagues who might have some version of the problem themselves and who are necessary to really solve it, and not just get the manager who called you his or her bonus. We're going to get you your bonus, but only by solving the real. And with them, we have the conversation. I draw my little three circles, I always do. It's my go-to model because it invites a conversation on the tricky bits, as we used to say when I ran the company in England. What are the tricky bits? The tricky bits are that stuff. Why is this hard? What's the real work? Why haven't we solved it already? Where did we try to solve it? And that blew up. Okay, what do we learn from that? How do you see it from your perspective over there? And then from another perspective the other way, so that when we join our perspectives together, we have a fuller picture of what we're up against. And we're also inviting them to, remember, be the guiding coalition of the change that can actually make this happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And all of this happens before the workshop. So this is basically the strategy part and the warm-up part of the sponsor.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And that's, you know, our workshops are very highly designed. My workshops might be well, I just did one, is that last week? Uh yeah, it was last week, 60 people uh for two and a half days. That's standard, and they they go bigger than that. So it maybe it's usually not below 25. But it's far beyond the typical facilitation size group, which facilitators answer the question how many people can I have in one room at one time and not lose control of the process? And for some people, the answer is um eight or 12, or maybe if they're feeling especially energetic, um 20. But our process is designed to bring the whole system in the room to work on the problem.
SPEAKER_00So what is the magic trick then? And I love that. How many can I have without breaking the process? Is it a problem of the process, or is it a problem of the presence and guidance of the facilitator? Or is it a problem of the preparation of the client or the sponsor of the workshop?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I should have written those down because yes, it can be all those problems. One is a problem of the imagination of the facilitator in knowing that it can go beyond that small group that I think I'm in control. You're not really, but you think you are, you can manage the process. To have a process that allows you to scale up the size of the group to match the size of the problem. Okay. If we bring too small a group, because we can't imagine working with any larger group, but the problem is bigger than their perspective or their ability to handle it, then they're going to do something, but it's not going to solve the problem.
SPEAKER_00And I just want to emphasize that I think this is for many counterintuitive. I think in many, very often, what we think is that the bigger the problem, the smaller the group, because the bigger the problem, then it's only management that needs to be. Then it's strategic and then it's management.
SPEAKER_01Wouldn't you like to know where people got that silly idea? Tell me. Wouldn't you like to know? I don't, I'm not sure I know. I I I'm not sure I do. I've seen it a lot, but you're you really put your finger on it. It's the bigger the problem, well, the smaller the group, and they got to be a powerful group.
SPEAKER_00I usually that's that's the approach. So I mean like, yes, actually, it's so true. The bigger the problem, the bigger needs to be the group.
SPEAKER_01The group needs to be requisite, as we say in our design process. It needs to be requisite, and that's a technical term from electronics and cybernetics, and it needs to have as many perspectives as are necessary to solve the complex problem. Because when we assemble a group, it's not just the people who decide. Yeah, we want to have the people who decide in the room. But guess who else we need? We need the people who know, and often the people who decide are one or two steps removed from what's actually going on. So let's bring the people who are involved, the people who do, the people who know, internal, external, subject matter experts, and then the people who need to live with it, who need to live with the solution. The people who know, the people who decide, the people who do, and the people for whom this is being created. Well, if we get them all in the room, it's going to be a livelier conversation. It'll take a little more time than the two hours the managers would give it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it reminds me of it was Joe Nelson who made the shared a metaphor in our exploration called of the diamond. That a diamond, the more sides and edges it has, the more it shines and the more valuable it is. And so is it with the many perspectives that you need, but it's also hard work. I mean, that's why diamonds get so expensive.
SPEAKER_01And that's why facilitators get so tired. Because it's hard work. And it also takes you would say expensive. And not to mention expensive. The question is: do we really want to solve the problem, or are we just going to make a gesture so that at bonus time it looks like we did enough to get me my bonus? We really have to solve it. What's it worth to solve it? Really solve it? That's the question. Is it expensive? Yeah, compared to what? Compared to having the problem persist.
SPEAKER_00And then how much work goes actually in the preparation? Because yes, you need to. So you have this strategy bit to prepare the client or the um who is actually inviting to it. And then it's about having the right people in the room. They need to know why they're in the room.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00And aligned. And then start the work on the process in the space.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and you don't have to have all the answers given to the people who show up before they show up because we're showing up to co-evolve, to develop, to collaborate, and develop together an answer that may not have existed before and couldn't exist without the perspectives of all those people in the room, and then won't be carried out without the commitment of people in the room to play their part as we go forward. People support what they help create. So we have three phases in every one of our design shops. We call them design shops. Scan, focus, and act. Now, act is okay, what are we going to do? How do we break this down into roles and responsibilities so people coming out of here know what's going to happen, what their piece of the action is going forward? How are we going to test it? How are we going to iterate it and evolve it? How will it get better when some parts fail and we recover from that? That's all the part of the act. Starting with, okay, what are we going to do? Of all the things we could do, what are we going to commit to? And do we all commit? How do you get that? That's great. That sounds great. How do you get there? You start with a scan. Scan meaning, what do we have to learn? How do we have a different conversation about this? And what does Miriam know that Rob doesn't know? A lot. Well, good. How do we help Miriam share what she knows along with the other 59 people sharing what they know and what their perspectives are? Wow, that takes a little thinking of getting that out, and we know how to do that. How do we bring in external examples? How do we bring in metaphors and historical examples? How do we bring in science? How do we bring in nature? How do we bring in what natural processes look and feel kind of like this? For one example, I mean, what am I talking about? Let me see if I can be concrete here. We were working with a company that was in an economic downturn. And the question was, how do we get through this? So among the metaphors we had them look at was one based on my taking my kids out to a dude ranch in Arizona when they were in high school. We learned about the survival of animals and plants in a desert. At the Sonoran Desert Museum, I picked up a bunch of books. I said, this is great. I can use this in my design shops. Okay, how do animals and plants survive these harsh conditions until the rains come again in the spring? We had people read that stuff, and they came up with the most marvelous ideas because they were thinking metaphorically. They weren't thinking, oh my God, how are we going to get through the next quarter? They were discovering how plants protected themselves. They discovered deep roots, they discovered a whole bunch of things. And through the metaphors, they got ideas, all part of the scan.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting how it works, right? Because it creates new synapses or it's a prime, actually, it's a priming mechanism for our brain. It helps us to put on glasses, to look at the problem through a new perspective that has basically been primed or manipulated through the metaphor. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Well, manipulated, uh, I like to say designed. And so designed with the sponsors, because I would not do anything I didn't tell them I was going to do. I may not tell the group what I'm going to do because they would think it's crazy and decide that's a good time to go take a phone call. So the sponsors know it's coming, even if the group doesn't. And in a group of, let's just make the numbers easy, in a group of 50, I'd have seven groups of seven people looking at a different metaphor or a different historical example, or so on. And first of all, reading some things. What we're coming together to read. Yeah, because you know you wouldn't read it if I send it out in advance. So we're going to sit and we're going to spend an hour reading. We're going to spend an hour reading, and then you're going to talk about what you read because you will have all read something different on this one topic. And then the question is, oh, how do we apply what we learn from that to what we're here to do? And they come up with the most marvelous answers.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for sharing this example. What I love about it is that, yeah, acknowledging that nobody will do the pre-work anyway is great. It already gives them the sense of okay, I can just arrive as I am. Then to allow time for reading is again like it feels like a gift because in in busy days, how much time does a manager have to read something? And then to share what they've read gives them everyone becomes an expert. Everyone is the same because they all learn something new, and then they can share it. So you basically give them a container of expertise that they can share and then mix and match. And then this, and I'm making this up, but I can imagine that this also democratizes or flattens the space because everyone is just a newly made expert. They weren't the expert in that field an hour before, but now they are. So then they will talk about that and not about all the other expertise they have.
SPEAKER_01You got it. You crack the code. And then we'll bring outside experts in and let them talk in small groups. We don't allow any PowerPoint, no PowerPoint projectors. All right, you can print out your PowerPoint stuff, but we use artists. We'll have artists create big boards based on input from the external expert of something they want to talk about. And these visuals will be so beautifully created that the production values alone reinforce the value of the information. And people get to decide. Again, let's imagine this group of 50. All right, so we'd have eight different, we call them chat rooms, we used to call them trade shows, but that invited the subject matter experts to give a little pitch. We don't want a pitch. We want them to give us your information, we'll create it visually, because people read four times faster than they listen. Which is why PowerPoint sucks, you pardon the expression. I'm going to show you my favorite 10 bullet points in this topic. And while I'm reading bullet point number two, you've read down to the bottom and are wondering what's taken me so long to get to the next slide. So we don't do that. We put information out visually because people can take it in much faster. And we say, let's have a conversation about that information and what it means. So even when there is an external expert, we prep them with questions, not answers, so they get the conversation going. But you have really put your finger on the essence of this. It's about igniting the agency of a group and individuals to own what they know and apply what they know together in new creative ways to solve this problem.
SPEAKER_03I love that.
SPEAKER_01So we started with act, then there's scan, and in the middle is focus, where we play what if? What if this? What if that? We'll do scenarios. We'll say, all right, let's uh let's do a a pre-mortem. If we were going to blow this up, how would we do it? What are the typical ways that our organization typically screws something up? All right, let's imagine we screw it up this way. How do we do it? And how could we have anticipated and avoided that early? Or we'll we'll play red team. We'll say one of the seven groups. You get to be a collection of your worst fears, two of your biggest competitors combine, they hire you to work with them to take down the organization that they just hired you from. How would you do it? Or if you had the resources of this company, how would you apply those resources to this problem? Okay. The ideas are great, and we're sifting through ideas because we we like to say, Miriam, creativity is the process of eliminating options. Just coming up with a long list of what we could do. Big deal.
SPEAKER_00You love the counterintuitive, right?
SPEAKER_01It's exactly right.
SPEAKER_00Usually people would say creativity is the art of adding options and widening the horizon. And yes, yeah, that never works. The difficult part is to eliminate.
SPEAKER_01Well, we do widen the horizon. Sometimes we say to solve a problem, you have to make it bigger. Yeah. We go, What? No, no, no. I'm trying to make it smaller. Yeah, we will we'll make it smaller, but first we make it bigger.
SPEAKER_00To see the nuances and the edges.
SPEAKER_01Exactly right. And bring the people in we need to solve that big problem because then along the way, oh, by the way, your problem will be solved too.
SPEAKER_00And then you can see through the cracks. Yes. If you find it. Yeah. And when I think of my brain is just firing up. And I too.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for that.
SPEAKER_00I really love how you're relying on basic human behavior or instinctive human behavior to craft your sessions.
SPEAKER_01That, you know, back from what I learned from drug programs on is you work with the people who show up, not the people you wish had showed up. Yeah. If you're not dealing with human beings, who exactly are you dealing with? You're dealing with something fake. And we all know how to be fake. We do that all the time. But if we really want to invite human beings to show up, and that's our secret, by the way. Shh, I'm going to tell you, but don't tell anybody else, okay? The secret to our process is to create an environment in which human beings can actually show up. Because human beings are phenomenal problem solvers. We've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, or we wouldn't be here.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and now I can clearly see how your past, and that's an assumption, but I can see it, how your past working with drug addicts helps to because if you can have compassion or in prisons, if you can have compassion, if you master the compassion and seeing the human beings, the deep humanity in a person who basically arrived at the bottom of society. If you can see them as human beings and honor them, their humanity, then it's very easy to do the same in a workshop context with leaders and powerful people.
SPEAKER_01That's one wing of the butterfly. The other wing of the butterfly is to hold a vision for what's possible for this person that they may not believe is possible and to not let them settle for less. That's the thing most rookie facilitators don't get. They think they're done when the client is tired. No, you work with the sponsor design team to really be tough, hard nosed about look, what has this solution got to be able to do? And if it can't do it, we don't have it yet. So just because you're tired doesn't mean we're done.
unknownI love it.
SPEAKER_00And still, I wonder whether for me, this is where coaching comes in. And that's a very thin line. Because how can you hold the notion of the neutral facilitator? And some facilitators are very dogmatic about the neutrality that they have to hold, and the ambition to push them not over the edge, but further towards the edge. Because that's a judgment.
SPEAKER_01So again, don't tell anybody, you know, they'll they'll take away my facilitator credentials, as if there were such a thing. But I'm not I'm not a big fan of that neutrality thing. I don't think you can or should be neutral about the outcomes, about the standards of the outcomes. I think you have to hold firm to that. Nor should you be neutral about how people treat each other in your sessions. You take a stand for some things, even if you pretend you're neutral. The preparation, uh, which why, Miriam, a little while ago you accused us of manipulation.
SPEAKER_00Well, no, design manipulation can be a good thing.
SPEAKER_01Design is and manipulation can be if you're doing it not for your own ends, your own benefit, that's where you need to be neutral. You need to be out of the payout, right? Uh yeah, they're gonna pay you to do the thing and all that, but if you have some vested interest above and beyond helping them solve their problem, even getting the next contract can undermine what you're trying to do. So that you do need to be neutral. You have a fiduciary responsibility, yeah. Just like your financial planner can't be in it for her or his benefit at the expense of your benefit. Yeah, you're gonna get paid and you do well, and they're gonna do well, okay. But that clear contract precludes them from taking advantage of you. That facilitators need to be scrupulously clear about. And that said, you have to really commit to the outcomes that are good for them and good for society. If you can't commit to that, you shouldn't do the work.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's not all facilitators would agree.
SPEAKER_01I um I know that. And I'm glad. Yeah, you know, when we all agree.
SPEAKER_00Um and I think it it depends on the capacity of the facilitator. Because if you challenge the group and push them further and have a vision where that you want to share with them so that they can go beyond what they they envision, you do have to have the intellectual capacity and understanding.
unknownRight. You do.
SPEAKER_00So that's a different level of responsibility. And you do have to have the coaching skills that goes with it. Because facilitation and coaching, yes, we often use the same skills. And I think there's some parts that are very different.
SPEAKER_01No, remember that sponsor. I agree with that, Miriam. Let me explain how that shows up in our work. The sponsor design team group of, let's call them five people who work with you leading up to the session, who have the responsibility to get the right people in the room. You want people with a political clout to say, I need you to show up, or would you do this for me? Or they need to get the right people there. They need to work with us in advance to figure out what's below the water line, what's hard about this, what are the headwinds we have to deal with, what are we really trying to achieve, and why is that good? And what happens if we don't? Then they come early and stay late. We work with them the day before the session, we show them what we're gonna do, we develop the agenda. We don't tell anybody but them the agenda, because when you hand out an agenda, most of what can happen to that is bad. Yes, so they know it enough. And I'll even make a joke about that when we start off. I say, how many of you saw the agenda for this before we what? No one exactly, and then I'll explain why. Because we don't want people bailing on something they don't understand or fighting something. I don't have time to explain it. We you'll understand it when we do it. Yeah, you want like everything we do, that's okay, deal with it. So we work the day before to show people everything we're gonna hand out. In those seven groups, we don't have a facilitator in each group that we identify. We write an assignment and say to the group, pick a facilitator. And we talk about that. So even the leadership of the subgroups is their responsibility.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And then at the end of the first day, these are often three-day things. At the end of the first day, which could be a 10 or 12 hour day with the clients, then we meet with our team again, with a sponsor team, and say, okay, what did we learn? Where are the surprises? Does our plan for day two hold up? Or what changes do we need to make? What it was not a problem that we now know is a problem. What do we think was going to be the problem that doesn't seem to be showing up here? We think they're beyond that. So it's trimming the sails of this boat every day. And along the way, if something really goes sideways, we'll pull that team together and say, this just went sideways. Here's what I think we could do. What do you think? So we're always working with them, and that's where the coaching comes in. It's facilitation, but it's also coaching. It's also coaching, particularly for the most senior people in the group, to help them understand how to be in a group of this size in a way that enhances their leadership rather than detracts from it. Yeah. How would you feel about a short break right now?
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Let's do that.
SPEAKER_01And I'm gonna come back and hit me with the toughest question you got. I will. Okay, good. I'll be back.
SPEAKER_00With all this experience and all these years, what remains your number one facilitation challenge?
SPEAKER_01That's great. Well, that's a good question. You know, I think the the the biggest challenge when you've been doing this work as long as I have, which is a pretty long time, it's decades and decades, is to remind myself that even if I've seen something that looks like this, I haven't seen it with this group. And what might not be new for me is new for them. And what matters is their discovery, not my declaration. So that's challenging as you as you get on in years and so on. Just to remind myself that this is this is the first time they're doing this. And they have the right to find their own way, to make some mistakes along the way, because they'll learn from those and they're good, and that my shortcuts aren't useful to them necessarily.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Reminds me again of parenting. And funny that I bring up all these uh parenting metaphors, although I'm not a parent, but I can you had parents, so you do have the parents. And I can very much relate to them trying to help me not to make mistakes, as every parent do. But everyone has to make their own. So um your shortcuts are not helpful for the group.
SPEAKER_01Exactly right. Exactly right. And they're also not helpful for me. Because if I haven't turned on my own learning switch, then I'm not being creative. And if I'm not being creative, that's creating a field in which the group is going to work in a less creative way than they could.
SPEAKER_00If you're not yeah, that's a very nice way. What comes to my mind is um we have to create our own little challenging context so that we keep up on our chose and sharp for the group. And if we get bored because it's just the same autopilot process, the same anecdotes and stories, yes, we lose the focus, the sharpness.
SPEAKER_01We do, and so do they. See, we put a lot of emphasis on the physical environment that people walk into. We have big rolling whiteboards. I've got all this stuff stashed in a warehouse in Atlanta. We put it on a truck, we roll it to the venue, and we unroll it, and we spend a day building it, putting it back together so that it's this a Disney world for facilitators with acres of whiteboards and plants and music and books. I have a library. I travel with a library of several hundred books. I make it in a in a big crate that opens up, and there's the library, and we unpack it. And I have artists creating live art in front of people. We use music to regulate the mood and the energy of the environment. So the physical environment is very important. Remember, the the process was developed by an architect, and um Churchill once said, We create our buildings, and from that point on, our buildings create us. We're influenced by the environment to such a degree. Yes. And so it makes a difference. Are people sitting opposed to each other across a table, or are they alongside each other facing a whiteboard in which ideas are written down, not as this sides or that sides, but as ideas, and then we can be hard on the ideas without being hard on each other.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, and the impact it has to remove a table.
SPEAKER_01Huge. It's a bit well, well, where am I going to put your my computer? I said, What do you need a computer for? You don't need a computer. Well, I want to take notes. We're taking notes. We're going to take pictures of everything that goes up on the wall, and we'll make that available to you. In fact, you can have it in the next session if you need it. It'll be that quick, that quick a turnaround. And we'll also make it all available after the session. You don't need to take you can, but you can't take it on your computer because the computer is not a computer, it's a connector. And all these weapons of mass distraction that we carry around in our pockets and in our purses and in our briefcases, we don't need them. It's not about that, it's about connecting with each other.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So, what do you need a table for? Now, when we bring out the books, you're going to read these books, then we need a table. We then we have tables that break down and set up and break down and set up very easily. And the environment changes to meet the needs of the group. It facilitates, it makes easy or smooth, which is what facilities are supposed to do and often do not do. We aim that ours do. So we think carefully about each exercise and what environment will serve the group in that exercise. And that's what they show up. That's that's what appears for them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, which brings to my mind what you mentioned in the beginning of our conversation about managing the energy.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00And how to manage the energy of a group with also standing up, going into different ways, using different parts of our senses, but also of the space, because if we are sitting down all the time.
SPEAKER_01That's so good, Miriam. And that's another reason to not have tables. Tables are to be sat at. Whiteboards are to be written on by everybody. That's why you have all these markers and they all work. We test them before every session. So there's never a dry marker. Because who needs that? That detracts from the energy. Yeah. Okay. So you want people on their feet at the board talking with each other. A friend of mine once said, you know, it dawned on me, I never had a good idea while I was sitting down. I was always standing up and moving. So how do we get groups to move? Is the question.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Beautiful. And I I remember that in our um exploration call, you mentioned that you helped Tony Robbins design his very first workshop. So I cannot not ask. What can we learn from Tony Robbins about facilitate?
SPEAKER_01That was such an interesting time. I ran into Tony as he was just starting out. He was just beginning to do his big workshops, and he needed somebody to produce his workshops in Boston and New York. And I was running drug programs. And I said, This looks like fun. I changed my dissertation topic at Harvard from leadership. I was a doctoral student in religion and society, and changed it from leadership succession in the Hare Krishna's to firewalking, because I became very interested in one, the phenomenon and the metaphor. What I learned from Tony is the power I learned a lot from Tony. I learned the power of metaphors. Think about fire as a metaphor. Fire is inherently fascinating to everybody, including young children, who must be taught that fire is dangerous for them. Oh, hot, hot, oh, oh, hot, oh, and they don't even know what hot is, but they they they do it, they touch it. But you don't want them to touch it. So you're warning them about this inherently fascinating thing. Oh, the first in a series of inherently fascinating things, like crossing streets, like strangers, like eventually sex, like all these other things that are inherently fascinating that have learned inhibitions. Well then, what happens if you go back to the the Ur metaphor, the first metaphor, fire? The first fascinating thing we learn to be afraid of, and we deal with our fear of that. The subtitle of the workshop was Fear into Power. Well, when you walk on fire and you don't get burned, that's pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. And then the question is, what else did you learn to be afraid of that maybe you don't need to be afraid of anymore? What did you reconsider? And that's what interested me. So I learned about the power of a really good metaphor, Tony. I watched his management of his own energy over the course of a weekend workshop, and I saw how he used his energy, music, group interaction to manage the energy of a group and to impart information within the context of that energy management. So I learned a lot from Tony.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Energy management again. And the metaphors and how you describe them reminds me a lot of what we call now experiential learning.
SPEAKER_01And that's what Gail Taylor, Matt's wife, the educator, was very involved in as it was being promulgated in the US after the Russians scared us with Sputnik. And we felt like, oh my God, we're falling behind. We need to catch up. And experiential education, particularly in the sciences, but also in any kind of education, started to take off then. In my latest case book, every year I publish a book of examples of good work being done around the world. And I'll throw in a few Easter eggs, not listed in the table of contents, but just for fun. And if you find this, I think you'll enjoy it. And one is Gail's telling the story of her developing the learning exchange for students of all ages in Kansas City following this outburst of experiential education is as the latest, greatest thing in education. And Gail said, well, maybe it shouldn't just be for kids, maybe it should be for all ages learning together. So, yes, it is experiential education. And that's at the very roots of this process, because people learn more from experience than they learn from explanations or examples.
SPEAKER_00Which then brings your background in the studies of religion and society. And we spoke about that in our exploration call. So I also I published a paper in the Journal of Religion. So very interested in that. And now wonder the connection I haven't made before is that that's how religion or religious communities actually also work, that they use experiences for learning purposes.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And religious leaders have to be fantastic facilitators. So I think there's a lot we can learn from them in general. And still they it's a slippery slope.
SPEAKER_01Yes, it is. Anyone presuming to speak for the divine is a little presumptuous.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that's and being presumptuous is always a slippery slope.
SPEAKER_00So how can especially in the in the space where the facilitator loses neutrality but has higher ambitions than neutrally leading a group? Because I think the neutrality is also a protection for us not to cross the line.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01The neutrality, that's exactly right. And that's why it's that's why it's not a bad thing, particularly in younger facilitators who can get quite full of themselves very quickly when they recognize that it's not so hard to move a group. It's not so hard to even manipulate a group. And if you're not careful, it's really fun to manipulate a group. To what end? Who cares? It's fun. Ah watch yourself. When I would train facilitators, Miriam, over the course of a week, uh I would give them a gift at the end. I would, along the way, show them an episode from Star Wars with Yoda training Luke, where Luke goes down into a cave and the image of Darth Vader comes and they fight and wins, cuts off Darth Vader's head, and the head rolls down, and the mask is revealed that it's not Darth Vader, but it's Luke. And he's his own potential energy and enemy. But Yoda, the Jedi Master, has gotten beyond that. And then I would show them the clip from Fantasia of Mickey as the sorcerer's apprentice. Wielding powers beyond his ability to really control them and getting in trouble. And at the end of the workshop, I had Uh access to little figures, one of Mickey, and they're on my shelf. I'm not gonna go get them, but I then Hotel Disney created a coin with Mickey on one side and Yoda on the other, because I can't get them anymore. I can't get these little figures anymore. But I would give them to facilitators and say, on any given day, you're on a continuum between Yoda, the wise Jedi master who knows the ways of the force, and Mickey, who only thinks he knows what he's doing, but is way over his head. And without the proper humility, without a connection with your clients, without a connection with your teams, you won't know where you are any given day. But you need to know the continuum exists, and it probably doesn't resolve only in the Yoda direction. So it's humility and feedback that keeps you clean, keeps you safe, keeps them safe from the worst parts of you, and continually working on yourself and catching your own ego involved. It's not about you, it's really not about you. It's about everything you know how to do in service to the group, including your discernment about boundaries and real objectives, and settling for less in terms of an outcome and morally settling for you for less. That's all part of the deal. So I guess you can take the boy out of divinity school, but you can't take divinity school out of the boy.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Thank you. Lots to think about.
SPEAKER_01I know me too. Thank you for that. Let me ask you, can I ask you a question? Sure. We've reached a place where we could go, okay, we're done. And we could maybe we say, okay, we're done. We splice this out and we're done. Here's my question for you. You're talking with facilitators all the time. What is the growing edge of those conversations? What is longing to happen in the world of facilitation and workshops that is only beginning to emerge like a little green chute in the spring?
SPEAKER_00Impact.
SPEAKER_01Impact.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01People want greater impact?
SPEAKER_00I think there is a potential to have greater impact as facilitators that is not fully recognized yet. And I think that yeah, conversations like this one and to actually question the need of neutrality and discuss what it means if there's no neutrality and how to then stay within the boundaries. Um then come along with it. But I think in general, what I see is facilitators are getting more self-confident in a good way because they see that it's more recognized and more demanded. And then I think just need to grow into it because they still I do like the fact that there's not a lot lot of regulation in the space of facilitation. And still, if there's not a lot of regulation, it's difficult to know um who is the right person for the job. And as we discussed, there are some jobs who do need some intellectual capacity to guide groups.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Absolutely. This is not again, it's not something you can do by rote. You don't learn it once and then you just keep doing that. Then it really requires an agility, which is part of the fun. Yes. I would not want to be learning all the time. Um as exhausting as that can be. But it does, it does take agility. And the other the other piece of impact that I've seen is I've seen people get be kind of cranky. You know, I could help here, but nobody's asked me. And I'm so you're the world's best kept secret. Is that it? How do you get in the game? Is is the question. How can you connect with people in positions of some power? Because in a way, sometimes we're allergic to power. Okay, it's not about speaking truth to power, it's also about being useful to power for the right reasons. How do you get in the game there? And it involves being willing to take a risk and be in conversations with people and let them know what you can do by demonstrating what you can do, um in small ways and then larger ways. But it involves getting engaged with power, and that seems like a dirty word for many people. Interesting, yeah. Is it if it's power over, yeah, then maybe. But if it's power in order to, power in order to do something. I was in but one of the big consulting companies, 10 years to Midnight, written by a guy named Blair Shepard at PWC. I had a chance to work with Blair, and the book is brilliant, was written two years ago. And basically it argues what many have argued, we've got 10 years to not have our civilization go over a cliff. Okay, the scale of problems has increased beyond our ability to mobilize ourselves to address problems at that scale. Humanity's never had to deal with this. We've got to figure it out, and we have something to add to that. We don't have the whole answer, but we need to get engaged with people in business, in government, in society, in culture, who have the power, and together, together, not through just what you do or just what I do, but together, humanity has a shot. But we don't have all the time in the world.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I wonder where the where the learnings are from the pandemic, because this was a good trial. And I wonder where the international retrospective is of what can we do better next time?
SPEAKER_01With the next pandemic, as there will be one. But but what do we learn? What did we really learn from the pandemic? That's a good question. I'm not being cynical. I think we learned a lot. Yeah. We learned we're one world. Yes. What else have we all experienced at the same time and recognizably the same way? To go, yeah, they got that over here, we got it over there, we have better vaccines, we had them faster, we don't want to share them. Why not? It's like if they stay sick, they're just gonna come up with a new COVID. We we're all in this together. We learned that the world regenerates itself with just a little bit of breathing space. Well, that's a relief. That's good news, that it's not all in our lap. The world is naturally regenerative, and we have screwing it up.
SPEAKER_00And we can adjust to very strong restrictions very quickly.
SPEAKER_01Well, witness this conversation over a screen, yeah, which is now simply the way one has a conversation, yeah, at almost no cost. Wow, we are connected and personally connected in ways that will serve us, and some ways that are killing us, like social media. But all right, we'll deal with that too. Yeah. So I'm I'm one of the more optimistic pessimists you'll ever talk to. That I really have a uh an ability to see what could go wrong, but I also am what my friend William Urey, the guy who co-wrote Getting to Yes, calls a possibilist. A possibilist. That you have a really steely-eyed view of what our situation is, and you don't stop there.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01What's possible now?
SPEAKER_00Possibilist. Yeah. I guess you have to be one as a facilitator. And infect others to become possibilities.
SPEAKER_01We're carriers. Oh no, we're carriers of possibilism.
SPEAKER_00Love that. Beautiful. Print a t-shirt with that.
SPEAKER_01Carrier of possibilities. William did. And those of us working with William have one that says possibilist. Like, what does that mean? Oh, I'm glad you asked.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much, Rom, for this rich conversation. Covered so much. I take a lot of food for thought away on a few things that I have taken for granted, or and then suddenly you shook them up. Like the bigger the problem, the bigger the group. Neutrality and the edges, Yoda and Mickey.
SPEAKER_01I take away this notion of impact. And I'll be thinking about that. Um, I believe those in your listeners who are trained to really work carefully, creatively with groups are more in need by humanity than ever. And it's as if we've been training for a time such as this, and it's time for us to be willing to wade in, which means challenge connecting with people that we might not be drawn to otherwise, but wade in because this is what we've been trained for. This is the time.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. This has been a pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for staying tuned and for listening until the very end. I hope that you found the inspiration and the wisdom that you are looking for. And I hope that you will subscribe to the show so that you never miss any of the interviews with another inspiring facilitator from across the world. I'm devoted to continue this podcast and to deliver weekly an episode that maintains the quality that you expect and you deserve. And if you would like to help me to maintain this quality and to keep the podcast free, please help us visit workshops.org slash support to make a small donation to keep the podcast free. Thank you so much. I hope to be in your ears next week.
