Why they pay us so much

…or why they don’t pay us enough!

I had a sponsor meeting today to prepare an event to support the merger of two divisions of a major bank. As always, my first priority in such sponsor sessions is to align expectations around event objectives and outcomes. Once these are agreed and documented, we discuss the inputs necessary (among which, the participants) to achieve the agreed outputs. Thus, a good sponsor session is about formulating the right questions that our event serves to answer.

Ten minutes before the sponsor session was to begin, the principal sponsor (and newly-appointed capo of the merged unit) told me that he really only wanted four out of the 12 participants and that couldn’t I dis-invite the rest (at that moment eating our sandwiches) and facilitate a small discussion among the five protagonists to simply iron out the entire merger strategy. “You’re a facilitator, that’s your job!”

So, after pleading that we ought to make good use of the people who had come from so far away, etc., I asked for everyone’s attention and, as diplomatically as I could, I invited all but the five chosen participants to bugger off.

As anticipated, the dis-invited immediately pounced: “What a shambles!” to which my sponsor immediately reacted by cowering: “Dan, perhaps we need a quick huddle.” So, back to plan A, though now with a room full of very hostile sponsors.

“Perhaps you should explain to us the rationale for this merger,” growled one particularly peeved participant. All eyes on our key sponsor.

Silence

Pleading look at me to get him off the hook. I look the other way.

“To make us a world class bank…” mumbled our hero

Slouching, crossed arms, rolling eyes, all the behaviors that signal that enough is enough.

My job is to design the next 3½ hours on-the-fly and extract at least some useful work from the mutineers to satisfy my sponsor and build the groundwork for an event.

Noises Off

The client has gone away for the evening and the krew is eating dinner and talking about… the client.
Is there a compelling case for change?
Is the event necessary or could they have done the work in a traditional way?
Are they as aligned as they seem, or are they just going through the motions?
Is the sponsor really listening to his colleagues or is he planning to shanghai them?

But if we want them to be open with each other, then we have to be just as open with them. So we shot photos of each krew member, wrote these observations as thought bubbles, and left them out for the participants to view over their breakfast

Did we give them permission to say the unsay-able. Or did we pre-empt what might have been a more useful conversation between the paerticipants?

Doin’ my ‘ed in

I am currently planning three events for three consecutive weeks. Two of these are for different divisions of the same client and all three are based in the same city: sunny Edinburgh.

What confusion! When I was asked to do the first event, I simply wrote ‘Edinburgh’ in my calendar for the various meetings, planning sessions, and event days. Then, when the second and third events came along, I had no idea what the calendar entries referred to. When speaking with one client I would call him by the name of another and when trying to earn the client’s trust by referring to his turn of phrase, I would rely on another client’s jargon.

Two observations: First of all, keeping these events straight in my head requires that I document my entire thought process even more thoroughly than I usually do. I keep ragged pages of discussion notes, abandoned drafts, e-mail print-outs, and even annotated photos of my event sponsors in separate event folders.

Second, and more interestingly, I am letting the confusion run its course. When I confuse one client’s metaphor or solution element, or term of art for another, I let it stand and stand back to see what happens. The accidental application of one client’s perspective to another client’s problem is starting to lend the events an element of surprise which the client sponsors can feel and which they have commented on with wonder and uncharacteristic optimism.

Sponsors

Templates

Yesterday morning, on the last day of a large event, one of the event sponsors asked that we provide the participants with templates to capture and structure their work. We acquiesced.

What did we gain and what did we lose by using templates? We gained two things principally. First of all, the sponsor was pessimistic about the likelihood of achieving the event’s desired result and felt comforted by the thought that she and her colleagues would, at a minimum, fill in the templates with useful information. So we helped lower her blood pressure for a few hours.

The other benefit of using templates is the uniformity of output, which simplifies the design and production of an executive summary. If all the teams are working to the same template, building a deliverable is a cakewalk.

The downsides of using templates far outweighs these benefits. First of all, the uniformity of structure rarely corresponds to the variety of issues and ideas that emerge from genuinely creative work. Second, providing templates robs the participants of some of their sense of ownership over their outputs and thus of their event.

But the most damaging aspect of templates, I believe, is that they represent a pre-formulated question. As an event proceeds, our questioning should leave more and more room for interpretation. We strive for some sort of elegant ambiguity in our assignments early in an event, and as the work proceeds, our assignments become so short and open-ended as to offer barely any guide at all as to what is expected. We do this because the answers our participants provide are only a fraction as useful as the questions they have to ask themselves to arrive at those answers. The most creative aspect of their work – and thus the most difficult – is figuring out what the question is that they are trying to answer. When they stumble and go around in circles and lose their way, it isn’t because they don’t know the answer, it is almost always because they don’t know the question. And the search for a question is the most genuinely creative aspect of collaborative work.

At a practical level, what should I have told my event sponsor when she presented me with a template? Perhaps I should have said, “Great! We’ll give it to them 15 minutes before the end of the day and ask them to use it to summarize some of the work they’ve done. But only after they’ve done their work.”

Common Language

The easiest way for a large group to avoid taking a difficult decision is for it to use language that people can interpret at will. Imprecise language, euphemism, cliché, and ‘flexible’ interpretation lead to the illusion of consensus – or acquiescence – whose battle cry is the ubiquitous and exasperated “Whatever”.

I’ve just come from an event in which the lack of common language nearly deprived the participants of understanding what they were agreeing on and why such agreement might really matter. It’s easy to agree that, for example, “all account reconciliation activities will from now on be managed by a shared service center” if we haven’t defined the precise scope of ‘reconciliation activities’ and if we haven’t agreed what a ‘shared service center’ is and isn’t, who runs it, how will they be accountable, etc. Giving the participants the tools to develop their own definitions of these terms and the space to work out and document the precise meaning of each element of their models proved to be the key to success of this event. The basis of our work is modeling, and a model isn’t complete until its elements have been accurately labeled. In this event, the principal outcome – a detailed operating model – was accompanied by a highly-detailed glossary and a set of precise criteria for defining new elements that might enter the model in the future.

(We sometimes prepare a glossary as an input to our events or else use a Terms of Art module early on. Perhaps we should think of a precise and signed-off glossary as an output of our events.

What languages do we have at our disposal?

We have a modeling language that helps participants construct alternative futures and test them. The modeling language gives participants the courage to be precise and avoid compromise. Interestingly, when we teach our modeling language, we start from the most basic elements as if we were teaching German or Swahili: We begin with lines, dots, shapes, and build a modeling grammar and vocabulary that participants can use to paint remarkably rich pictures.

We have a pattern language which helps us shape and model collaborative behaviors. Very little of our pattern language is codified, but that doesn’t make it any less precise. I find that the most remarkable consequence of our pattern language is the speed with which our teams, frequently made up of people who have never worked together before, can know the best way to behave in novel circumstances.

We also use a musical language in our events and too often under-rate the precision and power with which music can transform a difficult-to-enunciate emotion into a shared and remembered experience. The words of the songs we play can make a useful comment on the work we are doing, but much more important is the music itself both for its ability to harmonize our energy and for its remarkable power in touching parts of our psyche that words never reach.

Perhaps metaphor provides us with the most powerful language of all. I frequently tell stories as a facilitation technique. I choose my stories carefully (though I almost never plan them in advance) and having told them, I mine them for the rest of the event as a source of metaphorical language. I think that our ‘Metaphors’ module is one of our most powerful, and I always introduce two or three new metaphors each time I use that module. Perhaps the greatest benefit of this module is the way it enables our participants to mine their new metaphors for new language with which to see their problems in new ways. (Although I always choose metaphors for this module with great care, I suspect that similar results could be achieved with randomly-chosen metaphors.)

The flip side of metaphor is allegory, and we need both. Metaphor is useful when we need to open up a topic, when we need to see a problem from multiple and un-expected points-of-view. Allegory, on the other hand, is useful when we need to develop the sort of precision about which I wrote above.

What is the difference between metaphor and allegory? Here is T.S. Eliot comparing allegory in Dante to metaphor in Shakespeare:

“It is the allegory which makes it possible for the reader who is not even an Italian scholar to enjoy Dante….Dante’s attempt is to make us see what he saw. He therefore employs very simple language, and very few metaphors, for allegory and metaphor do not get on well together…. There is a well-known comparison or simile in the great XVth canto of Inferno…. He is speaking of the crowd in Hell who peered at him and his guide under a dim light:
…and sharpened their vision (knitted their brows) at us, like an old tailor peering at the eye of his needle.
“The purpose of this simile is solely to make us see more definitely the scene which Dante has put before us….
“she looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong toil of grace.
“The image of Shakespeare’s is much more complicated….’catch in her toil’ is a metaphor. But whereas the simile of Dante is to make you see more clearly how the people looked, and is explanatory, the figure of Shakespeare is expansive rather than intensive; its purpose is to add to what you see….”



I facilitate events in both English and Italian and the language I use has an enormous impact on how I facilitate. As it is my mother tongue, I can be much more precise in English than I can in Italian. I can help participants by providing them with more precise language which they can accept or reject, thereby adding precision. In Italian, I often ask participants to re-phrase their comments until they reach a level of clarity that I am comfortable with. I explain my uncertain interpretation of their comments and ask them to help me understand better what they are trying to say. In English, I am the language’s master; in Italian I am its slave.

Each language also presents intrinsic challenges. For example, English-speakers are prone to irony, which is the enemy of precise language and honest discourse. Italian, on the other hand, presents significant differences in its spoken and written forms, which renders documentation unreliable. The greater use of gesture in Italian has a similar effect. Also, the greater use of the passive voice renders Italian somewhat less suited to clarity in the writing of assignments.

My ability to demonstrate that I precisely understand what participants are trying to communicate – that I am genuinely listening to them – is a proxy for their desperate need to be listened to by one another. Precision in language is one of two prerequisites for helping clients know they are being listened to. The other is actually listening. And oh how much easier it is to listen with care and attention when they speak with care and attention! A large part of our job is helping them to do so.

Knowledge Drudgery

Several weeks ago I worked on an extremely large event as one of 27 knowledge workers. It was the first time in several years that I played a role other than front-of-room facilitation and I found that I had forgotten many of the processes we use to facilitate our events.

As hard it was being a newbie all over again, the most difficult aspect of working this event was staying so focused at task level that I was unable to experience the participant’s journey and I was largely blind to any challenges they faced other than validating use cases and filling in templates.

Now surely the blame for not emerging from Task mode lies with me, and without a doubt I underperformed as a consequence. But to the extent that any knowledge worker can feel excluded from the arc and the narrative of the event is a sign that something more fundamental is wrong with our work.

Manifesto v. 0.1

What if:
• our client’s problems were framed and addressed using new models that we help them build?
• consultants supported our collaborative work instead of our events supporting the consulting assignment?
• we sold and delivered solutions instead of facilitation? instead of events?
• we threw out the consulting model and built our own?

How would we take this proposition to market?
How could we sell and deliver it profitably?
How would we need to be organized?

Irony

Irony n.
a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.

To help people find solutions that they wouldn’t otherwise find, we often have to get them to behave in ways that they are unaccustomed to. By building an environment where openness and honesty are prized, we ask people to expose themselves, to say or do things that might make them feel vulnerable in front of their colleagues.

With each exercise we guide our participants through a minefield of potential embarrassment. The potential for embarrassment is especially acute when we have a group of participants who don’t all know each other or, worse, when we cut across a hierarchy, potentially exposing a boss to the ridicule of his or her underlings.

So it’s to minimize this risk of embarrassment (and thus to reward sincerity) that we shun irony in our work. We say what we mean and we mean what we say. Always. Our participants have to believe in the absolute sincerity of what we say. They will sense that any use of irony might be mocking or somehow undermine the trust that we need them to place in us.

Where do we risk being ironic? Toys, for example. When clients ask me what the toys are for, I reply, “To play with.” If they want more explanation, I provide it, but my initial response is usually sufficient because it is true and is said without irony. What undermines my response is if the toys themselves were chosen with irony. For example, it is plausible to imagine that a plush animal is intended to be played with, but not a Barbie or an Easy-Bake Oven.

Humor is very useful to leaven and event and open up participants who often feel under considerable pressure. But ironic humor almost always has a sting in its tail and conveys the notion that the teller knows something that the listener might not be privy to.

I make an occasional exception for irony in music. Choosing a song with lyrics that make an ironic comment on the proceedings or, better still, that has a musical theme which humorously contrasts the atmosphere of the moment can reduce tension whereas a ‘humorous’ song would simply fall flat.

As a rule-of-thumb, though, we need to always remember that our participants always need to believe what we say and they will only do so if we believe what we say.

In a recent event for 87 bankers from 22 different banks, I needed them to individually stand up, at the beginning of the event, and describe a particular problem that they personally faced in their bank. Prior to the event, my sponsors feared that nobody would have the courage to stand up in front of strangers and expose themselves. But when the time came, I invited them up as if it were the most natural thing to do, because at that moment I believed it was. It was like Indiana Jones stepping over a chasm, knowing that a moment’s doubt would cause the path that miraculously appeared under his feet to vanish. Had he let his typical ironic attitude get the better of him, he would have tumbled to the bottom of the chasm like Wyle E. Coyote.
Had I not expected them to come up and expose themselves before their peers, they simply wouldn’t have. Had I expressed doubt, they would have felt vulnerable. Had I expressed irony, they would have felt ridiculed.