Facilitating Structures: Toward a New Way of Working and Learning Together

Stephen Anderson
Good morning, or afternoon or evening, whenever it is you’re joining from. I’m so glad you’re here for this talk. It’s called fFacilitating Structures and it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. And one, you’ll definitely see a personal point of view coming out. For that reason, I’m actually excited about this transition to doing this all online. And the chat that will follow. I’m looking forward to to kind of the AMA format the chat discussions, and I do hope that you bring your questions there. Before we get started, there is something you might want to download and print out if you haven’t already. And it’s a handout that I created looks sort of like this has all these boxes and things. This handout will summarize all the essential bits so you can really keep your focus on the stories and the examples that I’m sharing. So I hope if I succeed at this, the talk will be interesting. This will have all the essential stuff. So with that, let’s get started and I want to I want to ground this by being clear about what the promise This talk is there are talks we’ve watched, where you walk away with a single idea or a single thought to think about, there are other talks where maybe you have the five bullet points as the takeaways. Still other talks where you have a framework that you can use or something to, to try out afterwards. I’ve given all of those talks in the past. This is not one of those kinds of talks. Like this one, what I want to do through or over the next 45 minutes, is I want to share a lens. It’s a way of seeing the world. It’s a way that I happen to see the world at this point. And it’s the lens by which you can then view the work that you already do, you can reconsider the work that you already do, and perhaps see things that you don’t see yet today. So that’s the promise of this talk. And I’ll revisit this in a few minutes to reiterate this point, but I really just want to share a perspective and a way of looking at really all that we do. So with that, let’s get started.

Stephen Anderson
And I thought the best place to start would be with kind of a bold proposition. And so here’s the proposition. What if we could change the world? drumroll pause wondering where this is going. Whether we could change the world by playing more board games. Now if you know me, you know, I’m I’m not entirely joking. Actually, I’m half serious. So I’ll add this comment here. No, seriously. This I’ve given talks in the past about board games and UX design and comparisons between the two. talk a lot about play and learning and these things, but when I talk about changing the world by playing more board games, I’m half serious in that proposition. Now let me explain why. strategy games help us understand complex systems. We are in our current situation with COVID-19 definitely seeing the complex system that we live in the economical economic system. We’re seeing that exposed but I don’t Know how much grade school education prepares us to think about complex systems. board games do this very well, especially if you not only play some of the more complex strategy games, but also design board games, you get to see how complex systems work. board games create active engaged participants. So I know the elusive thing that a lot of us are chasing, chasing after all the time is engagement and emotional engagement, anticipation, suspense, all these things. board games do this with pieces of cardboard, and rules and very simple things. There’s something to learn there. board games can teach cooperation and the folly of zero sum games. Something really important that I think we would we would all benefit from if we have this now. I do have to comment here when I shared this bullet point with my wife, she burst out laughing cuz she knows my board gaming group and she’s like, there’s nothing exactly the most cooperative group but competition is high among some Have a guys I play games with. But what led to this idea was you know a lot of the games we play are very competitive and cutthroat and there has to be a winner. But then you have games games such as pandemic games such as spirit Island Arkham Horror, where players work together to compete against the game to try to beat the system or beat the challenge. And it just occurred to me What if we had the whole generation of kids raised on playing cooperative games where they have to work together to solve the present challenges? How might the world be different? So that’s really what I was thinking about here. We know that play is fundamental to building social bonds and games are a great way to explore play in all different ways in all different forms. We also know from elearning and in other areas that simulations are one of the most effective learning methods and games, especially narrative ones can create these really powerful simulations where you can try different possibilities and see what works what doesn’t work. Finally, replaying games helps us develop a learning mindset. And when I talk about replay, it’s the idea that you know, you can grab a game off the shelf, play it, try a strategy doesn’t work, or it does work, put it back on the shelf, try something different next time. And so there’s this replay and iterations learning mindset that you foster when you play the same game over and over again, this is something we’ve seen that’s pretty core to things like testing and experimentation and lean and these ideas, and particularly when things are complex and the control plan, a plan is the not the right way to respond. We really have to lean in and try test try experiments since and respond as the expression goes. So all of that’s interesting. And I could do a whole talk on this. In fact, I have in the past, this is another talk about board games. So if you were about to check out, don’t stick with me. This is really this talk is really about how I see board games and not just board games, but how do I see these other things Like facilitation techniques and okrs, and meetings and trainings and the role of a coach and coaching and canvases like the business model canvas, what I see in all of these things are something I would describe as facilitating structures and offer a loose, loose description of facilitating structures, I would say they are playful structures that empower people to create, discover and improve together as one mind. And so all of these things you see listed and more than I could add to this slide. That is what I that is what I see in these things. And so when I talk about in my personal mission statement, making things to think with and creating spaces for generative play, I’m talking about everything from bringing groups of people together, to work through, you know, a difficult global pandemic, situation or figure out a role to play in board games, to visual management, all these types of things. I think there’s a role that we need to see and recognize Creating facilitating structures. So, again, what I want you to walk away with by the end of this talk is a lens by which to view work we already do, reconsider work we already do, and perhaps see things that we don’t do yet. So that’s the goal of this talk.

Stephen Anderson
So before I get into all the case studies and the examples that will bring this to life and show how I’ve been practicing to create facilitating structures in my own work, I thought it’d probably be best to take five or seven minutes to really ground ourselves on why this is important at this time.Why care? Why does this topic even matter? Why should we care about facilitating structures? As I’ve been reflecting on this and trying to answer this question for myself, really, three, three answers have bubbled up to the top first is Simply this, when we embrace facilitating structures, we embrace the ethos behind what I’m talking about. It creates better places to work and be human. And this is nothing new since at least the late 70s. There have been a number of groups that have talked about creating organizations where it’s healthier for the individuals and for groups of people where you can be yourself. More recently we’ve we’ve heard from folks like Amy Epps and talking about psychological safety or, you know, Bernie brown talking about vulnerability and authenticity. Most recently, I I’ve been following the work of corporate rebels and the book they just published. And they talked about eight shifts or eight trends they’ve identified in some of the healthiest or better companies that they’ve they’ve interviewed and these shifts are things like moving from profit to purpose and values, moving from centralized authority to distributed decision making, moving from secrecy to radical transparent See all these great things, I think if we were to look on where things have shifted to on the on the right in each of these, that’s the type of place we would like to work at, we would like to be, or, you know, we’d like to turn our place into if it’s not already, the company I’ve been working with out of Northern California. Again, the language is different, but the ethos, the beliefs, the sentiments are the same. They talk about ego free leadership. And this company describes moving from a place of, of an ecosystem where things are driven by egos and competitiveness and threats and hiding mistakes, to moving to a culture that’s more eco ecologically minded, thinking about the ecosystem. And in that culture, you see co responsibility and taking risk and the excitement of learning and passion and commitment and all these great, great things. So that’s the that’s the first simple reason is this shift. This way of working in this way of thinking simply creates better places to work and be human. With So I would say this way of working is critical, as we face increasingly complex, interconnected problems. And this, this tweet from a few weeks ago really, really resonated with me. I think a lot of us talk about our company or organization being a learning organization. But right now in the midst of a crisis, I think we’re going to find out as this tweet, alludes to, whether you work for a learning organization or not the thing, the scale, the challenges that we’re facing now are really unlike anything we’ve seen before. And I think it’s going to require a learning mindset as individuals as teams, as companies, where we shift and we learn and we adapt on the fly, and this requires, you know, that ability to test and experiment and try things and, and not fall back on planning and linear thinking and cause and effect sorts of sorts of ways of working. So right now, you’ll be figuring out if you work for me learning organization or not, when I looked across all these different domains, from the familiar like product design, Product Management, lean agile design, to perhaps the more for and for many of us K through 12 education, learning and development, organizational development, startup culture, cultures of innovation, even looking out to things like system thinking, complexity sciences, games and play, I look across all these domains and I see the same trend, the same ideas showing up over and over again and again, the language the semantics may be slightly different, but the ideas and the concepts are fundamentally the same. And it’s, it’s this for complex challenges we need learning that is and I see these attributes show up over and over again, open and shared, self directed, collaborative, just in time we’re in context, continuous and integrated. And again, the Exact bullets may be different, the exact verbiage may may change. But this is the idea that showing up across many domains dealing with complex challenges. And I believe facilitating structures are a means and a method, a way of addressing and dealing with complex challenges. I could do an entire talk just on this one slide and all the stuff I’ve learned, but I just want to pull out one example of this. And that is with some of the tools we use. So we have lots of tools and toolkits. This is one that I think we’re all familiar with, you know, we put things on an x y matrix, and we plot things and the things that get the most attention or need our attention on the upper right, right. This is a fairly common way of approaching or assessing a situation. In the case of risk and risk management, where I pulled this slide from the there was a criticism of this like this is a way of thinking about things, but we also need other lenses and other perspectives and other frames. And so in this presentation, they were talking About more of a network or relationship map, where you see how things are connected. And you see, you see in this frame that maybe the things that are the riskiest aren’t the things in the upper right. But the things were, that are connected the most to other nodes. And so you can see in the center here, these are probably the things that need our need the biggest attention and the most attention.

Stephen Anderson
And I picked this specific example because it kind of harkens back to the game I had in the background earlier, which was pandemic, and then pandemic pandemic. If you’ve ever played that game, you know, when you got three cubes on the city, you’re approaching an outbreak, if something happens, it’s gonna spill over into all the cities around you, and that’s very bad for the game. So again, whether it’s playing a game or whether it’s doing risk analysis, we need to develop this mindset that is more suited for complexity and complex situations. And I believe facilitating structures are a way to do that. Finally, and this is really targeted at a lot of the folks dialed in listening to this, I believe this is increasingly where the role of design is headed. And just just kind of give an example of what I’m talking about. I’ve lined up kind of the Venn sort of patterns, and then maybe now for you, and then Now our next changes that I’ve seen in my career as a designer. So if then was about designing a style guide, I would say now is about getting teams to actually adopt the design system. And I’m just going to interrupt them on this one. I had never really thought about this being a shift until I sat through a talk by Nathan Curtis fabulous talk. He was talking about design systems and style guides and so on. And in his talk, the actual designing the system part was really the top part the outputs. The other things he talked about adoption generations competition hierarchy, like this was this was the bulk of the challenge. He was talking about getting people to actually adopt And use these systems. And you know, we chat about afterwards. I’m like, that’s culture change, right? You’re trying to change people’s behavior and what they do and how they adopt how they think. And that’s kind of the shift. Now, for those of us designing systems, maybe your focus is more customer research. I think the challenge then was advocating for and doing customer research, but in organizations where they’ve embraced research and design and they see the value of this. The problem then is scaling researchers. And so what I’ve seen a lot of companies do is ask the researchers to become trainers and coaches and teach others who aren’t in research roles, how to do basic customer research, and how to listen to customers better and how to read between the lines. Maybe your focus in the past or presently has been how to make things easy to use, and that was our mantra make it easy to use, make it usable. Now I think we have bigger issues like make things that don’t harm people. Maybe in the past it was increased page views or clicks. Now, it’s kind of the opposite advocate for less engagement because we know as as user experience researchers and designers and folks that the harmful effects of some of this always on engagement and social media and so on. Maybe the challenge then was to manage a design team and designers, you know, very insulated group. Now as design is something embraced across the organization, you have new challenge, which is to coach people and train people on the design methods and design mindset and these other things. So all the stuff on the now side requires a different way of working and working through others and, and bringing people along and I think facilitating structures are absolutely spot on for this these new challenges was back in January of 2019, that I that I saw this talk from here doubly, and it’s called problems with problems reconsidering the frame of designing as problem solving. And I think we’ve always encountered at some point, the idea that design is problem solving. Well, this talk basically tears that idea down and says, list all these reasons why that’s probably not a good frame for where design is headed. And the talk kind of concludes with a distinction between first order design and second order design. And what I want you to focus on in the context of this talk is this one bullet right here, this one section, where you definitely says, look, I think design is or needs to be about this creating conditions for systems to emerge in which others can design for themselves. And I looked at that and like that sounds like facilitating structures. To me that sounds exactly in line with everything I’m talking about here. I did write an article on facilitating structures that I’ll also include in the links. I unpack this idea more insight, more designers and design leaders who are saying the same thing in different ways.

Stephen Anderson
So at this point, you have talked about big change. I’ve talked about organizations, I may have even referenced the world and our current situation. If this seems if you’re on board, wow, this seems daunting stick with me because I do believe the path forward, the way to change is through lots of smaller, very many very micro changes. And so what you’re going to see next are five or six case studies examples where I practice this facilitating structures mindset. And you’ll see it’s often just subtle shifts in how we frame stuff or what we do what we share. And so it should bring this from the realm of while it seems daunting and impossible to Oh, yeah, I could do that. I could do this.

Stephen Anderson
So let’s then look at some examples. Like I said, there’ll be five to six case studies, I want to share with you very short, very brief case studies. In each of these. What I’ll do at the end is all pause and I’m going to emphasize the principles or the principle that these Examples highlight. And if you look at the handout that I asked you to download earlier, you’ll see the 12 principles identified. Not every case study reflects all 12. I’ll call out which ones are reflected in each each case study. These are the principles by the way, I won’t read through these, you have these in front of you. One other thing I’ll do at the end of each case study is I want to comment on the verbs at play. And this is something I’ve been thinking about. For simple and complicated problems we’ve had, I would argue, centuries, if not more, to work out how to address simple and complicated problems. And we have verbs like execute, evaluate, decide, make a decision, and so on. But for complex challenges, I would argue we only have maybe a few decades, where we’ve actually been exploring and poking at how to address complex challenges. And for these, there are really three verbs I’m focusing on discover. And that is to discover the known or the unknown, generate as to create or bring out of nothing options or solutions, or improve understanding improved performance. And you’ll see as I, as I reflect on each of these case studies, I’ll comment on which a verb or verbs are at play. So, the challenge case study number one, how do we get teams to stop taking on bad and or poorly framed problems? We’ve all been through this where we take on a project, we’re excited. And then a few days or weeks into the project, we’re like, Wait a second, that’s even the right problem to be solving. So I gave a talk on this at the IAA conference slash summit back in, I believe it was 2012. And it was called stop doing what you’re told. And actually, it looks like it was the AI summit 13 there. I gave a talk on this and in this talk identified, I named label dignified about a dozen or so bad problem. Some statements. And you know, it was really good content, good information. I wouldn’t say it was a great talk. Everyone was engaged. I’m sure it was fine. But as the talk goes, it was a laundry list talk that went on way too long. And so in subsequent versions of the talk, I tried to make it more engaging. I created a bingo sheet where people could be more engaged and follow along. Yeah, that that was a great idea. And then it occurred to me, this is good content, really good content, but it doesn’t fit the narrative structure of a talk, how could this be improved? And so I made a fundamental shift. And I said, Why do I need to go through and, you know, deliver all this content? What if I turn this into a bit of a game? And so I created a card deck and the examples from the talk I turned into Are you put on the backside of this, these cards so you’ll see the on the blue side here? And then the idea was, as a team, you’re supposed to spread out all of the problem statement. And as a team, discuss which ones you think are bad problem statements, and which ones are good. And to make it a bit of a game, I’d sprinkled in some good statements. And then more to the point, since most of these, you know, we know are bad problem statements. The goal was to get the team talking about why it was bad, and to really focus on and analyze and diagnose why or what made this a bad problem statement. And of course, you flip it over and you check yourself. And this response was, has been amazing. people throw up their arms and laugh and there’s, there’s that moment of like, do we get it right? Did we get it not? There’s the debate and the dialogue. And for me, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Because here’s, here’s the real takeaway. In the first version, when I was delivering this as a talk, it was all about passive learning. And trust me, the irony is not lost on me that this is a passive learning mechanism right now, but hopefully some stuff I’ll do at the end, we’ll make this a little more interactive. But the shift was from passive learning me delivering this content where you know, people were seeing would have checked in, or, you know, thinking themselves. I’ll get the slides later on to that of active learning. And my role then was in the background. I teed up the exercise. And then people engaged with the content they debated they discussed the dialogue. And then at the end for the last five or 10 minutes, I was there to clarify, and help facilitate discussions around some of the trickier ones the trickier problem statements, but the group focused on the learning learning happened at the table. So which principles I would say, shared understanding as the outcome, no facilitator required active learning this alert participants were engaged in their own learning learning feels like play through the kind of the reframing here, learning is social, so it’s happening at the table. But I would really emphasize the active learning part, going from passive learning to active learning. Also, learning feels like play which I mentioned.

Stephen Anderson
Alright, let’s talk about the verbs. So in this case, as facilitator, I created this deck, and people were discovering something that I, as the creator of the content already had answers right or wrong to. And so I would put this very much in the Discover category discover knowledge that you didn’t have before this point. And of course, there’s some room to debate this, but largely discover something I didn’t know.

Stephen Anderson
Let’s move to a bit of a different example. You’ll see it’s similar in many ways, but it’s different. It’s, it’s going more in the direction of that second verb generate. So for the second challenge, this was it. How do we prepare trainers for challenging situations, so by trainers and mean facilitators, workshop, trainers, things like that. And as a workshop, trainer and workshop leader, I’ve encountered a number of situations over the years technical behavior, all different things. And I’m always curious how other trainers address these same things. And so I had an idea very similar to the bad problem statement. To create a card deck to address these, and I was expecting something like that when I went through some workshop training facilitation training, but I got something quite different. What the trainers did in this case was they had identified the situations much like identified bad problem statements. But rather than identify solutions, they left the solution box blank. And they invited everyone together with these two pages in hand, and walk around the room. And you would basically do sort of like speed dating, brainstorming. And they would ask, ask you to pair up and brainstorm how you’ve solved or how you think you could solve some of these different problems. And I paused and I reflected on that I was like, This is great. This is really fabulous because suddenly, instead of the facilitator as the keeper of knowledge and the person that I tell you how to solve problems, the facilitator is acknowledging that you know what, there’s probably a lot more knowledge in this room than I have in my own skin. And it would be, it would be better to create the venue or create the avenue for people to share their experiences and how they’ve solved those things. And so in terms of principles here, scaffolding solutions, active learning, learning is social, diverse experiences of expertise, just enough structure no more, I’m gonna come back to the structure one, but in this case, I really see that they valued diverse experiences over expertise. And that to me was powerful. They recognized that there were a lot there was a lot of experience in the room. It wasn’t just the expertise of the facilitator. And this by the way, I’ll just go on a tangent, but this is how I backed into the topic of diversity inclusion. And yes, well, I’ve always agreed that diversity inclusion is important for all the race, gender, you know, age sorts of reasons. For me, it was this idea of cognitive diversity and recognizing that every one of you Every one of us has a completely different perspective based on our experiences, where we grew up, who we are, our age, our gender, our race these things, but we’re have very different experiences. And as a facilitator, the best thing I can do is create the conditions in which everyone’s experience can be shared. And we can learn from each other. In this case to the scaffolding solutions came out in in terms of teeing up common problems, as I looked through the two dozen problems, like Yes, I’ve experienced some of these and who haven’t experienced that one yet. But I’m glad to be preparing. So scaffolding, not solutions, very different from the card deck example. So let’s move all the way over to this verb generate and something it’s all about generating options or solutions where maybe there are none. So the challenge, how do we get designers to engage with AI and machine learning topics so little content text here, I was working at a company where I was kind of heading up some of the design education. And this was a particular topic I wanted to see people engage around. And to be honest, there’s not a lot of knowledge to discover yet. It’s still figuring we’re still figuring it out stage. And so I had an idea, which was issue a challenge. And the challenge was in the form of sort of a science fair. So and and attach it to a deadline. And so it was basically in six weeks. For those who are interested, it’s voluntary. We’ll do sort of a science fair show and tell sort of thing. And we’ll all share everything we learned related to AI and machine learning. It could be you know, it could be a poster, it could be a card deck, it could be some working code, really a poster presentation, whatever it is. And I think there are some good things here issuing the challenge the deadline, but that did not equal success.

Stephen Anderson
And so I thought about it and like what can I do to Make this a little bit better. And so in one of the relaunches and I actually tried a challenge deadline twice before and failed before I rebooted this yet again. And this time I added a learning plan, a bit of scaffolding, a bit of structure. And the Learning Plan was really straightforward. It was just, it comes straight from problem based learning in K through 12. Education. It was just some simple, pretty generic questions, to get individuals to reflect on the questions they wanted to answer to reflect on the first three things they could do right now to get started to come up with a tentative timeline was just a bit of reflection before you started down. And the feedback was amazing that people who had tried with me before and just kind of gave it up because it wasn’t a priority. I felt comforted by the structure and this this amount of reflection and the reflection questions. So again, not a lot that was dramatically different, but there was just a little more structure, a little more scaffolding to ensure success. Among the group, so in this case, I would put a lot of stars by this principle, just enough structure, and no more. And that, that no more part is hard for a lot of us, I think, many times we err on the side of too much structure or I know in my case, I err on the side of not enough structure sometimes. And this goes back to a philosophy that I have that I’m still working out the nuances of. There’s a talk I’ve given in the past. That was probably the defining talk of my career, in which I arrived at this distinction between paths and sandboxes, or path versus sandbox learning, and the exemplars in this case, of course, were two games, Candy Crush, being an example of a progression based leveling up sort of path game, and Minecraft being you know, this the space for generative play. And with the talk, I went back to all areas of life and are we creating stuff Box environments are recreating paths. And the conclusion was, if you’re creating a path, the best you can ever hope for is what you plan for the transaction. But with a sandbox, you create the conditions for people to do amazing things that you could never predict. So that’s my philosophy. And I look at a quote like this about games. And I change the word players to learners and play to learn. And for me, it reads sandbox and playground design both let the learners do what they want, instead of forcing one way to learn.

Stephen Anderson
Of course, the thing I’ve learned and had to reconcile is that sandboxes aren’t for everyone or for every situation. And one of the models that’s helped me think through this is a model that comes from coaching, and it’s the will skill matrix. And normally you see it like this and you see, basically on where someone falls on their, their will, their desire to do something and their skill or ability. There’s four Different ways that you can coach that person from, you know, direct to guide to delegate to excite. And what I found is if I rotated this 45 degrees and put it on a bit of a continuum from control on one end and you know, chaos on the other, it kind of maps nicely and you can figure out your role as coach or facilitator in this case. So that’s an example or a case study of of creating the conditions for people to generate options or solutions where there are none. Let’s then talk about improve, how do we improve understanding or improved performance? So this is one and the details will vary. But the challenge is this how do we get teams to craft great and you can feel this envision problems, story, use case, whatever statements, and these are things these really small statements I’ve seen over and over again. You know, we’ll sit through a training or read a blog post on how to write these well, but there a certain amount of craft and skill that comes with writing these things. Well, we may have the Mad Libs statement, but it’s easy to fill out the Madlib statement poorly. And so this is something I’ve been thinking about is how can we help people craft? Great, you know, vision statements, for example. And again, it could be a vision statement, it could be metrics can be okrs could be customer problem statements. a startup pitch could be how do we open a crucial conversation? It could be the email headline, interview questions, anything that’s short form, but requires a amount of craft answer. Well, so let’s take the bold vision statement. And this is, this is what I’ve seen in my experience. Two ways we commonly help teams on one extreme, we might pull say, all of the the team leads into a room and do a training on not just bold vision statements, other things and how that sets your team up for success. Very efficient, but not very effective. The other extreme I’ve seen coaching. So maybe we will swarm, a team, one team with two coaches for, say, six to eight weeks. And we’ll coach them on all the ways to be a high performing effective team. Very effective, but it’s just not efficient and doesn’t scale well. So I took this and started brainstorming, is there a way, particularly using technology to create something that is both efficient and effective? And this is a concept that I’m working on. But the concept is this imagine an app where you could crowdsource to peers feedback on these statements. And so in this case, let’s say you’re writing your vision statement, and this happens to be a good one, or mostly good one, land the man on the moon and return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. So the idea is this vision statement that you’ve submitted would get peer reviewed by six to 10 peers. But rather than just open feedback, which we have today, the feedback could be structured. And so we would take things like you Ethics and rules and patterns we, we have that we know make for good bowl vision statements. And we would turn those into sort of a feedback or reflection form in this app. So we would ask, you know, does this describe what not how, right that’s, you know, we know that good vision statements don’t put the solution in the phrasing, they focus on the outcomes. And so that’s a simple binary. Yes, no response. Then the next thing might be, you know, more subjective. Did you find this inspiring? No, man, yes, you can have a slider, you know, whatever degrees you wanted. Then, you know, we know good bold vision statements have a deadline built into them. So is there a deadline here? In this case, it’s highlight the deadline, so you’re actually engaging with the content, so you might highlight into the decade. So as you do so you can hit next. How will the success be measured? What’s the success criteria? Or are there no clear measures and of course, here it is, land the man on the moon and return him safely to the earth. So two conditions. So that’s helpful. excessively measured, and so on. And there are about five, or about seven heuristics and check yourself questions for bold vision statements. There are other numbers for different types of things, customer problem statements. And the goal is to give that structured feedback. So then you as the author, have more better, higher quality feedback to act on and iterate.

Stephen Anderson
And so if I think about what we have today, and what I’m proposing here, what we have today is you you go sit through a training, and then you work on your own or maybe with your team to try to craft the statement. And what I’m proposing here is two additional things. One to structure, how you receive feedback, and then to get your feedback from your peers with a coach in the background to add more clarification where needed, and again, then you start to develop this learning muscle. As a peer giving feedback, you start to become aware of the things you should look for in your own statements. And again, that’s provided Just a little bit more structure to how feedback is shared and acceptedand given. Sosome of the highlights here, no facilitator required. Again there in the background. This is peer to peer, just enough structure in a more I commented on that scaffolding but not solutions. So everyone’s helping each other learning a social active learning, shared understanding of the outcome, and so on. All right, let’s return back to discover, but in this case with a radically different example, because I want to I don’t want you to think each of these verbs align with certain types or certain patterns of solutions, the solutions can vary greatly. So let’s go back to discover with a completely different scenario and context. The challenge is this. How do we make complex social issues approachable and understandable by all right complex social issues. So I want to point to the work of Nikki case. And Nikki has been taking these complex issues and complex ideas and turning them into explorable explanations, sort of interactive simulations. And in this case, Nicki took on a really challenging topic, which is desegregation. And based on the paper that when some paper I’ve won some words, Nicki turned this into a simulation that you can actually play. And as you go through the page, there are more dimensions added and you can adjust a slider is like number of percentage neighbors who are not like me. The ratio between me and people aren’t like me, and you can push play and play it out over time and see do you end up with a segregated society or community or do you end up maintaining, that desegregation that we’re after and through playing with this You learn to see patterns and learn to see the levers of the things to push on for the desired outcomes. And I’ve looked at work like this. I’m like, Man, this is just on three dimensions. What about when we can model on many more dimensions? And really, through play, and experimentation, start to learn and see patterns? Isn’t that a great way to facilitate understanding? So in this one, learning feels like play, it’s a bit like a video game and shared understanding as the outcome. And I can’t help but think of our current crisis with COVID-19. And all the models we see. But I’ve seen some people start to criticize the models because it’s very passive thing that we’re just seeing the results of, and to me, I’ve actually wondered how much more powerful would it be to put, make these models more accessible so people can play with models themselves? And much like that game where you try different strategies and things work or don’t work, people could play with the models. And reach their own conclusions, which more than likely would be, you know, the shared shared conclusion? Again, a belief I have. Alright, so I could go on with many more case studies. But I want to turn to a few special topics. Before I do. Just a reminder, I think you’ve heard me say this a few times. It’s not about the things it’s not about the method. It’s not about the tool. And I could go on with more examples and canvases and group facilitation activities, pre mortems card decks, the role of sticky notes, it’s not about the things it’s about the principles behind them. So again, in all of this, and in preparation for this talk, it was a lot of work on my part, just to call the examples but then look for the recurring principles and the patterns. And that’s the things that I want you to focus on. That’s why I pulled this into a handout the download beforehand.

Stephen Anderson
So a few special considerations things I Wanting to give their own airtime, psychological safety being one and group cognition being another. And I on my own had pulled these out as as things I wanted to talk about, because they were like slightly more important than some of the others. And that kind of grand when I came across this article where it talks about the most successful teams are cognitively diverse and psychologically safe. So slightly different language there, but the same, same things I chose to pull out. And if you look here, you know, teams that are high in cognitive diversity and high on psychological safety are also the teams who are curious, encouraging, experimental, forceful, inquiry, nurturing, and so on. So psychological safety. I’m just gonna read this quote from Amy Anderson, bit about psychological safety, and I’ll comment on it. She says ultimately, the one sustainable competitive advantage that a company can have is a culture that enables its people and the entire organization to learn faster. Learning has to come from a place of people feeling safe to talk about what’s working and not working, of recognizing that their job is not to appear perfect, but to get better. And this, you know, harkens back to that ethos of that shift from, you know, an ego driven company to an ego driven one, those eight chefs from the corporate troubles and, you know, psychological safety, it’s, you know, you can’t just turn on a light and you have it, you have to cultivate it, but when you have it, it creates that space where people are openly sharing ideas and learning learning together. So, it said five or six case studies, this would be number six. And again, not going to go into a specific one. But here’s the challenge. How do we help members of a newly formed team share their concerns, again, psychological safety, you know, may take some time to convert to cultivate, you know, how do you build trust, but there are some ways to sort of fast forward and open or create, at least for a time being psychological safety. So, just as an example, in a counterpoint, you know, we have a new team, and you’re brainstorming what might go wrong with this project. And maybe you’re the person who thinks this is the most ridiculous thing ever, it’s gonna go off the rails, I don’t even know why we’re, we’re, you know, investing this or maybe you have some mild concerns. Oftentimes, we don’t speak up, because we’ll be seen as the naysayer or a person who’s negative, you know, from the get go. And with a new team, we don’t want to form that impression. So how do you get around that? How do you avoid it? I’ve actually found, you know, doing things like pre mortem, work really well, where you say, Look, I’m going to create this artificial scenario, this fake scenario in which we imagine this project failed, and hence the pre mortem. It failed. So let’s brainstorm Why did it fail and suddenly, suddenly, you’ve created this safe space that allows people to vote, vocalize and express their concerns and this is invoking fantasy, which I think is a great way to Create safety in fact, got another talk in the works all about fantasy in different different things more than just the pre mortem ways role playing other things, ways to create safety by through this element of fantasy or role playing. Let’s turn then to group cognition. So group cognition,

Stephen Anderson
How do I explain it? social learning is another way that I’ve heard it expressed. It’s really this learning together idea. And, you know, I showed you this example earlier from passive learning to active learning, and you had the group at the table learning together. I think that’s a good example of group cognition and what I’m talking about here, but I want to give you another example. Let’s, let’s think about something simple like math. So if I asked you to multiply four times 11, you know, that pretty much happens. I would say in our head and our head because of a prior Association. We know that four times 11 is 44. And we can just draw that association from memory. If I ask you Do something more complicated like multiply 379 by 413, then good, chances are learning doesn’t happen in your head, you don’t have that prior Association. So you pull out paper or replot a calculator, you work out the problem. In this case, the cognitive learning space is happening, both with your prior associations, but also with the thing you’re using the paper, the pencil, the calculator, and your interactions with the thing. So the cognitive space has actually expanded with me so far. All right. Let’s build on this even more. What happens then, if we introduce more resources, more things more into the mix? What if we introduce more people and we create the conditions where people are free to share and exchange ideas, suddenly, our cognitive space has expanded greatly, if we can create these open these conditions for open sharing. And the point here would be where understanding takes place depends upon what resources we use those resources. can be, you know, people and prior experiences can be things can be allowing for interactions, all these different things. So then if we think about group cognition I think about like this, we all have our own set of prior associations and experiences and things we built. And if we can create the right conditions, then suddenly we have this sort of hesitate, say hive mind, because it’s not super thinking like, but we’re able to all share and contribute our own individual experiences and increase the space in which we are thinking together. And again, for the most complex problems, this is the kind of thinking we need. I don’t think the kind of ego driven design leadership we saw in the past where someone has a vision, and compels people to that vision is what will sustain us and get us through increasingly complex challenges. I think we need to figure out how to work together better. So that leads me to kind of the closing section the biggest challenge of all, and It’s really a really a straightforward one, it’s losing control.

Stephen Anderson
And I’m going to address this in two ways it’s losing control. As a leader, you know, some of you are managers, directors, VPS, or leaders in one way or another. So it’s losing control as an individual, but also losing control as an organization. And organizations do try to maintain some, some amount of control over things and you know, has to do with our legacy and history and where we’re coming from. I want you to read through these statements, and these come from the book managing for happiness. How can we motivate workers? How can we change the organization’s culture? How can we change the mindset of managers? How can we improve teamwork and collaboration? And I put these up here because one like I think a lot of us have asked these questions, but there’s also a theme in these kind of, kind of intensity. theme, and that is this, in all of these questions is a mindset of how can we change other people? And there’s a presumption in there that we know the solution. We know that’s right. We know what’s right. We need to convince other people I know more, I’m better equipped to deal with more complex issues is the belief. And, you know, if you had talked to me about influence and leadership, maybe five, six years ago, I would have talked about changing hearts and minds. And the problem there is you’re trying to get everyone to embrace the mental model, ie my mental model, or your mental model behind an agenda. And now if you ask me to talk about influence and leadership, I’ll talk about working and learning together. And the advantage there is you create a shared emergent mental model by working together. And it may be that you enter in like one person’s mental model ends up being the one that uses this word, but wins out but because it’s right, but everyone’s there together now. Or maybe you end up with this entirely new mental model that no one came to the table with. Either way, everyone emerges with the shared mindset. No one was convinced you all arrived at it together. And this is what I tried to practice in my work now working and learning together. I was, you know, again, it’s not just me as I’m looking around and reading different books and researching, I see these themes come up. This is a book I’ve read recently on unlocking leadership mind traps, how to thrive in complexity, and they identified five things that keep people poor people back, and three of those all highlight rightness, control and ego. Those are the things that hold back leaders from dealing with complexity. So that’s losing control as leader, let’s talk about the organization. And this example comes from the book the surprising power of liberating structures. And this is I I read this and like it resonated with my experiences at different companies. Oftentimes this there’s this very top down approach Two things the leader ie CEO or Executive team identifies problems and endorses best practice intervention developed by the experts. And maybe experts are the mackenzies or the veins that are brought in from the outside. The leader then sponsors a training program to be cascaded down throughout the organization, a series of communication strategies are implemented to generate buy in and overcome local resistance to change. And then frontline workers are expected to replicate the best practices with tight fidelity, no deviation. And this is pretty universal and widespread among large organizations. This is the way many organizations work in a site from this top down flow. I think there’s there’s just this nice contrast with what you’re seeing from the Agile communities and the learning communities and all those different communities I referenced earlier, where you know, a lot of the the organization’s sensing capacity resides with those frontline workers but they’re cut off from the decision making which happens at the top. Now the people who perhaps know that The best or have access to really critical information aren’t the organizations instead of avoid in a way to empower them to help me either make or contribute to those decisions. I think that’s a great articulation of the problem that a lot of organizations find themselves in now.

Stephen Anderson
I, I’ve read this quote, and it kind of kind of sums up nicely, we have to change almost everything about the way in which we meet our material needs and quickly, but we are in the wrong organizational vehicle to make that change. Our hierarchical structures hinder the sensing of emergent issues and thus, innovation. And I I go back to that book management for happiness, they described it in this way. They talked about management, 1.0, management, 2.0 and management 3.0. And management 1.0 was the stereotype of taylorism and everything’s a factory and we’re all treated like factory workers and cogs in the machine, but they introduce nuance with the two or three hours sanctions were, instead of three hours, the magical Star Trek collaborative, like we’re all working together world, they said, Look two hours kind of where most companies are today where we don’t treat people like cogs in the machine. We do care of our workers, and we invest in training. And we do care about candor, radical candor, and these other things. But the problem is we are investing in people and people truly are our greatest asset. But we’re still putting people into this old hierarchical or hierarchy based model or system. And that’s what’s going to change. So we’re in this transition point from embracing human capability, but we’re still wrestling with the old model of the hierarchy. And 3.0, then is addressing the hierarchy. And I love that framing. And that’s it. It shows how we’re on a transition.

Stephen Anderson
So there’s hope for change. And again, this comes from liberating structures and they talk about how things can change. You know, you can change beliefs, you can change values, you can change habits and A big focus that I’ve seen and where I put a lot of my work is in this changing of habits, because that’s really what you can do. Unless you’re at the top or unless you’re, you can set things. habits are the best way to influence change. A theme I kept encountering and systems thinking was, you don’t change the system, you don’t make big wholesale changes, they don’t work, the system rejects those. But you make slight tweaks to the rules, you make slight changes in habits and those ripple throughout the system. And you make a little change, you watch for the ripple effect. And it might be good might be bad, it might be unexpected, most likely, but you make that slight change, and you watch for what happens to the system and then you make another slight change. And so I think there’s enormous power in focusing on habits, particularly habits among groups of people. And in my experience, you know, coming down or coming out with a new mission statement or values, or the CEO has a revelation that has never really changed a culture habits have been one of them. most effective things at changing cultures, starting with one and spreading out. So I believe culture and systems change comes through hundreds, perhaps thousands of small, subtle, but significant choices.So what I’d like to end with is a bit of a challenge. And I gave I gave examples and scenarios and talked about how I brought in this facilitating structures mindset. I would like to end with seven or eight situations. And at the end, you know, I’ll pause briefly, but you should probably pause, reflect on the list of the principles in front of you and decide which principles are relevant, that might affect your decision. Again, I’m not going to ask you what you would decide what you would do. I want you to pause at the intermediary a step and say if I agree with Stephen, if I believe in these principles, then how would it affect my how I respond or the decision I make?

Stephen Anderson
So Situation first situation, you’re deciding whether to make your slack team channels private or public. Again, a small, subtle but significant choice based on the principles I’ve shared. You know which principles would apply in this case? And then what would your decision be? Again, if you want to pause the video and reflect, I’m going to go through these quickly. But you might want to do that between each situation. You’re on the leadership team and you’re writing out okrs objectives and key results for the quarter. You include the whole team, or just leads team leads. Which principles apply. Do you share work in progress? More to the point do you share your files for early half baked ideas. Which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
The big presentation is next week do you let team members present their own work? Or do you represent their work for them? Which principals apply?

Stephen Anderson
The CEO has asked for your honest and direct feedback. But you’re concerned that some members of your team might say things that reflect poorly on your crew. Which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
After a day of brainstorming that wrapped up with a dot voting exercise, several people now feel excluded by the outcomes. Which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
A speaker at a local meetup wants to make sure others completely understand what he’s just presented. Which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
With hundreds of teams your org needs a consistent process across all teams. But you also want toallow individual teams to do what they determined works best for their objectives. Which principle or principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
You are responsible for the accessibility of your products. You recognize this as a topic that other people on the team need to understand the care about if there is to be any change. Which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
You’re working on an end to end customer journey for your entire company, who is invited to participate, which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
Big changes are coming, how much time is spent crafting the narrative. Which principles apply?

Stephen Anderson
Okay. Hopefully those didn’t make you too uncomfortable. I had someone after I shared this talk at a local meetup say she had PTSD from some of the questions I was asking. But I think those are all really tiny decisions that in the moment how we respond, and the values or principles we embrace, can contribute or not to creating this type of culture that we all want to work in. So I want to end with an uncomfortable challenge. And this comes in the form of a video clip. This is from Stranger Things. I’m taking it completely out of context, but it’s such a perfect way to wrap up this talk. So I’ll just let this play and I’ll end with a quote pulled from it. That will be the challenge and we will be done.

Recording
I know this is a difficult conversation to have. I hope you know that I care about you very much. And I know that your eye contact.I know that you both care about each other very much. This does not sound like me at all. Just keep going. Which is why I think it’s important to establish these boundaries. Moving forward. Looking, you know this one, so we can build an environment where we all feel comfortable and trusted and open. Share our feelings to sharing our feelings. This isn’t gonna work. It’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna work. Yes, it will. I promise. Come on. Just kill Mike. I’m Chief of police. I could cover it up. Got this, I promise.

Stephen Anderson
Alright, establish these boundaries moving forward. So we can Build an environment where we all feel comfortable and trusted and open to sharing this work, I promise.

Stephen Anderson
Thank you very much. And I have two announcements. One after nearly eight years in the works, my book is coming out on May 26. It’s called figure it out getting from information to understanding and that will be published by two waves. Rosenfeld media. second announcement, if you found this talk interesting, and you like the ideas presented in here, I’m launching a club called the mighty minds club. You can learn more about it at the mighty minds club calm. But basically, it’s a method of the Month Club, where we’ll be going deep each month with a toolkit, a canvas, a method, something to help groups of people work through difficult situations.

Stephen Anderson
I hope to see you there. Again. Thank you very much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai