Facilitation Lab Podcast

" The main objective is to drive economic impact for our city, for our province, for our country. So, we need to give a platform to entrepreneurs to have their brand shine, but we also need to architect them meeting people. So, how do we source the audience? How do we create moments of connection throughout the experience? How do we hype people before the event to come and discover these talents?...

"Keep listening. Definitely keep listening, keep trying. But it is what you're saying, it's our goal to help people change their behavior. And if we want to help people change their behavior, we have to show them how and we have to seduce them. If we force people to change, it will be much harder. But what if we seduce people to change, to show them what it's worth for them to change? That's much...

"There is a phenomenon in quantum mechanics where vibrations of energy actually have an effect around them, on their environment and the other. You've probably heard that in quantum mechanics, you can actually observe a quantum phenomenon and by observing it you've changed it. It's the strangest weirdest thing. Well, you go out there in the world and you reflect a certain positivity. It's astonish...

"I don't know whether teacher change issues are any more difficult than others. It's just where I have experience. I think any time you're working on... I mean, you know this. People sort of like the idea of change. They just don't want to. And anytime you're working with really talented experts, human beings accustomed to tremendous autonomy, that's a really difficult room. And so the challenge f...

"Audiences don't want to see you fail. They really are on your side. They want to see you succeed. When you get uncomfortable and nervous and start that spiraling, they feel embarrassed for you. They want to save you. They feel horrible, and it makes them very uncomfortable. If you think of any situation you've been in, I'm sure that you've ... If you've ever seen a nervous speaker, you really fee...

"So first of all, make very clear what the purpose of the team is, or the organization. What is it we're trying to accomplish? What's our big goal? What's our mission? Where are we going? Unless that is stated clearly, the people who are in the team won't be able to line up together. So think of a rowing crew in a rowing boat, and they don't know where they're going and nobody is setting the pace....

"So I would design all this stuff and if something went wrong, they always blamed the people. And I'm like, this is interesting. So whenever I went to the people side, it was very different to see that in essence, we create the environments for the people, especially if we're in the HR or the leadership spaces.  And so how people didn't look at that, they didn't look how it was designed. They did...

"I'd say the feminine is the magician, and the masculine is the warrior. And those are two archetypes that are used in union and different types of readings that I've read of archetypes. So with that, I would say that this article lays out that there are about 28, I believe 27, 28 leadership competencies, and it shows the feminine expression and the masculine expression. And how that ties to my wo...

"I think that's where the leadership development side of the work that I've been doing really comes in. Because to be a leader within an organization that encourages autonomous teams with missions and encourages cross-functional work and a more decentralized structure, they need to feel comfortable and confident themselves. A lot of organizations I've seen will have that command and control kind o...

" So we've been studying energizing ties for over 20 years now. And so we've found that people in organizations have a range of impacts on each other. At the one extreme are interactions we would call energizing. And I think we all kind of intuitively know the characteristics of an energizer. They help you tackle problems. They are kind of selfless in their willingness to help you. They're optimis...

"Yeah. I think it's absolutely true. I think there are also really interesting things that happen with adults when it comes to playing of, why don't we? What's in the way of that? Is also really interesting to me too, when all those things that you're seeing are true, right? If it's as needed in our lives, why aren't we doing it? What is it? I think, from what I've found in facilitation, what hold...

"The spontaneity and the collaboration effect are definitely more prevalent inside of the asynchronous on-premise environment. However, do I want to give up all of that deep work for that type of spontaneity? Because a lot of the time spontaneity is a distraction in another... You call it spontaneity. I call it a distraction. I call it, okay, this is the seventh time someone's walked into my offic...

"What I often share with people is that oftentimes at a party, we're doing things together, but separately. Like there's this story we tell ourselves like, "Oh, I'm United with everyone around me," but there's actually very little eye contact. There's very little touch. There's very little attention that we put on each other in these maladapted party environments. So yeah, creating more of that se...

"And to your earlier point about complexity, most of those kinds of models and titles and bands and blah, blah, blah, are complicated solutions that don't serve well in complexity. And so my job as an org designer is to say, what is the lightest most elegant, most intuitive solution that equips us to navigate complexity rather than what is a complicated and over-engineered solution that doesn't ac...

"I think we're going to be as vulnerable as we're comfortable or as vulnerable as we're aware. To be a leader today, I think to be able to be vulnerable, to model vulnerability, we still have to be aware of our own stories, and what are we comfortable sharing of our own stories? What are we comfortable sharing of all parts of ourselves? In writing, my book, one of the things that came through loud...

"We're now entering the fourth industrial revolution, and I think this is really where Jobs 3.0 is happening. And if I had to describe it in one word, I would probably say fluid. It's a much more fluid model, and it comes down to all those different things we touched upon. It's the global citizen, it's the role of the office. It also comes down to your background in education, how that role will p...

"Yeah. I think the facilitative approach to leadership it's all the good things about leadership like bringing active listening skills to a group, being able to encourage and generate participative discussion and groups. Help stimulate creative thinking through different brainstorming and idea generation processes. Help people work through different problem spaces. Being able to draw out the opini...

"So the hypothesis is if facilitation were a wider skillset for more people, would we have better meetings, better, more intentional meetings, and better conferences and events? And I think it's a good hypothesis, but it's making a lot of assumptions. Because it makes the assumption that people actually know that they have a gap, which means you have to make them consciously incompetent to go back...

"It's nice to have someone who is an expert in social behavior, right? Anthropologists, historians, scientists are great UX designers, are great UX researchers. There's no real difference in futures thinking. I think one of the myths that we're trying to dispel is that futures thinking is not this whole other or body of practice like service design isn't a whole other body of practice. It's still...

"I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you're sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that's a story that everybody's going to remember, everybody's going to file away in their own story database and t...

"Why does change fail? There are so many reasons why change can fail. I think you could pick from anything. When working on change, change is very much a journey. It's a reason why people call it a journey. The word journey symbolizes a lot of things. It symbolizes the up and downs that you're going to go through, the fact that it's not just going to be smooth. That it's going to have challenges a...

"What I learned when I shifted from acting to consensus building and facilitating is, you've got to let go of the idea that people are there for you and you've got to let go of the idea that you're the most important person in the room, that the show's about you, but there's still a similarity around what it means to steward the emotions of the room. And I still carry that from the theater days. ...

"When I first started facilitating, I was of the mindset that getting anything out of that meeting was better than getting nothing out of it. They were going around the room almost trying to show everybody how smart they were, by rehearsing various things and saying this, that, or the other, and I cut that out. I was like, "Hey, let's get to what we agree on quickly so that we can talk about what...

"Neil Postman, and Neil postman said, "Children enter school as question marks and they leave and as periods." And I love that, and I think what he's saying is, they're coming in full of wonder and then they're coming out less full of wonder.  So I felt like I want to tackle this issue in some way, and so what I've been doing is going around to schools and just talk about some things maybe that co...

" I ask the team because I don't want to be imposing too much. Because I'm really having so much fun because I like improvisation and creativity. And they tell me the thing that they like a lot is when we bring people from other groups. And the reason is, that we understand the meaning of why we are doing certain things. Especially, my peers, they come and talk about their expertise, why they love...