Employing Differences

"You and I continue to explore this space because we're continually learning. There is no end goal for figuring all of this stuff out. There is just getting even better at exploring that collaborative space that lives between individuals." Paul & Karen celebrate two hundred podcast episodes by looking at themes in what they've talked about.

"If my goal is to change somebody else's behavior, I'm very unlikely to be successful. But if my goal is to make the relationship better and to change what I can change about what's going on with me, and how I'm engaging, and how I'm sharing in various ways; the likelihood that their behavior will change actually goes up." Karen & Paul discuss one of the para...

"We can never really know what's going on with the other person. We're almost always guessing at them. And the question is whether or not the guesses we're making are helpful or not. Does it feel certain? Does it feel like I have absolved myself of any responsibility of needing to do anything different? Does it seem like this guess is always true, has always been true, will nev...

"The place I want to start is recognizing, 'What's my pattern?' Do I always start with a question? Do I always start by saying, 'What do you think we should do?' Or do I always start with, 'Here's what I think we should do.'? If you're always doing the same thing – and by always, I mean nine times out of ten – then you're probably not choosing...

"One of the most important things that you can have as a group is an understanding of how you want to repair things when things go wrong, because things always will. We can talk about how we want to work together. We can talk about what we want things to be like. And we know that those things are aspirational. Something will go wrong at some point along the line." Paul  & Karen talk...

"An actual written document or policy or proposal is a concrete thing that I can say yes or no to. I can say, 'I like this part, I don't like that part.' And it requires a fair amount of editing – of making it crisp and clear – so that we are actually talking about the same thing. Because when you get documents that are super vague and super weird, then we all imagine that ther...

"How do you do something other than just the tag team approach? For me, that's really all about designing the partnership. If we're going to partner on facilitating this meeting, what does that look like? And one way that that partnership can be structured is we're going to take turns. But that's not the only choice that we have." Paul  & Karen discuss the benefit...

"Asking about how bad it is can help us to notice when we're digging in our heels in a situation where the conflict that we're going to need to go through to get to our 'better solution' isn't going to be worth it." Karen & Paul discuss assessing, weighing, and judging the costs of various decisions.

"At the end of the day, any action that I might take that's premised on the idea that I have full and complete knowledge of what's going on for another person is really dangerous territory." Paul  & Karen talk about the trouble we can get into when we imagine – or demand to know about – other people's inner lives.

"When people ask, 'Well, what's the best way to make a decision?' is where we fall into the realm of 'best practice.' And the thing is that there's very little actual best practice when it comes to humans working together, because of the complexities of things like this. A good practice in a particular situation is not necessarily going to be a good practice in a...

"There's a lot of different channels for sharing information that we often overlook when we're working in a group. We sometimes think that talking about things is the only way we can get information out there. In our experiences, there are a lot of other, richer ways that we have access to. And then it's up to us as facilitators to notice when might it be useful to do some of t...

"There are a number of ways that you can use fishbowls, but they all have that element in common of creating a shared experience for the larger group around a topic of some import and some relevance."   Karen & Paul discuss the varied uses of one of their favorite facilitation tools. The Cooperative Culture Handbook, which contains the Bridging Circle exercise, is available at www.ic...

"When I started using dyads and triads and groups of four or five within larger facilitated sessions, it was a game changer for me. I saw the quality of participation, the quality of the ideas, and the decisions the groups were making change pretty dramatically." Paul  & Karen talk about the advantages of using small groups inside large meetings.

"There are a lot of really useful things you can do with periods of time as short as 30 seconds or a minute – or as long as half an hour or more – of being together without speaking in that space." Karen & Paul talk about the value of silent time in group meetings.

"If somebody showed up sobbing and saying, 'I'm having a horrible day,' we would probably shower care upon them. I want to encourage that same thing when they're showing up as loud and angry. The same neediness is actually being expressed. It's easier to do it when someone is weepy and sad and not lashing out, but it's the same problem." Paul  & Karen ta...

"If you don't hold things in confidence, you break trust. But if you're not transparent, you also break trust. So how do we navigate this where we want to be in trusting communities, trusting environments, trusting workplaces, and some things need to be confidential and some things need to be transparent?" Karen & Paul  discuss how both confidentiality and transparency can...

"There's a famous quote from Yogi Berra, who may or may not have actually said it: 'If you don't know where you're going, you might end up somewhere else.'" Paul  & Karen talk about the importance of defining the thing that we want and thinking about what's going to get us there.  

"So, if my coworker comes in in that state – or someone in community or whatever – if that person is in front of me, and I would desperately love to fix everything for them, but I can't, how do I live with that?  Karen & Paul discuss strategies for working through feeling helpless.

"What they're usually looking for is the recipe or the magic words. 'What's the thing that I can say that will change the way that this group operates so that we stop having this problem?'  And unfortunately, there are no magic words. There is no magic recipe for addressing these kinds of things. But there are some patterns that we have noticed. So here are some things tha...

"When we find ourselves in conflict – when we find ourselves frustrated with each other – those are indications that we should be asking, 'Are we trying to do the same thing?'" Karen & Paul discuss how shared purpose is the core of any team or partnership.

 "When we're in the moment, and the person does this thing, we lose access to our emotional skills and our ability to work together. How can we calm ourselves down so that we can get back access to that, so that we can show up as the more skillful versions of ourselves? How can we engage with the other person to help them show up as a more skillful version of themselves?" Paul  &amp...

"The assumption is that if we can just change that person's behavior, if we can upskill that person in some way, if we can get them to stop doing the problematic thing that they're doing; then things will be better. And it's true. If they stop doing that, it would be better. And that is one of the hardest paths to walk.  It's a 'low percentage choice,' as one of...

"There are traps that we can fall into when we are trying to do some discovery, some exploration.  We can accidentally get into a case where we commit ourselves to a plan without thinking that that's what we were doing." Paul  & Karen discuss cognitive and emotional pitfalls of trying to work iteratively and incrementally.

"I feel like I have something that might be relevant, but I really wish someone else would say it. I really wish I wasn't the person who needed to bring it." Karen & Paul talk about the challenges of discussing other people in a group setting.

"I definitely have spent a lot of my life cleaning up messes that came because somebody asked me a question and I gave them a clear and decisive answer. And in fact, what they wanted was something that felt to them softer, more collaborative, more engaging." Paul & Karen discuss benefits and drawbacks of being direct. See also Episode 171: Is it safe to disagree with me?