Erin - 00:00:24: Hello everybody and welcome back to Awkward Silences. Today we're here with special guest Marsha Acker, who is the CEO of Team Catapult. You have written two books, two more than me, “Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyze clarity and confidence”, as well as, “The Art and Science of Facilitation: How to Lead Effective Collaboration with Agile Teams”. We're really excited today because we're going to get to talk about the details of one of those books, which is facilitation and research leadership, so I think this will be a topic that is very interesting to many, many of our listeners. So thank you for joining us today, Marsha.

Marsha - 00:01:13: Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here and happy to talk about facilitation anytime. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Erin - 00:01:21: Fantastic, we’ve got JH here too.

JH - 00:01:23: Yeah, I'm feeling a little pressure on how we facilitate this interview. We need to do a good job here, so hopefully we don't underwhelm you.

Erin - 00:01:30: Well, maybe that's a good place to start, Marsha. I imagine a lot of people have a sense of what facilitation is, but it might be useful to sort of define it. What is facilitation? Like, when are you doing it? When are you not doing it? What's it look like?

Marsha - 00:01:42: Well, you know, I never thought about it from that perspective. Yeah, I do think we're doing it a lot of times when we're leading any group of people through a conversation towards a desired outcome. I often define facilitation as the art of leading people through a process towards agreed upon outcomes, but I think the nuance in that is that because we do it all the time, we're doing it now, anytime you'd be in front of a group of people, you'd likely be facilitating. But because we do it all the time, I'm not so sure that we ever really see it as a skill to develop, and I think that is sometimes what gets us in trouble.

Erin - 00:02:28: It's like a lot of those things that you do every day all the time are maybe some of the best things to think about as a skill for communication, conversation, these sort of adjacent ideas of if you can do those effectively, you get pretty far in life, and so facilitation feels like kind of one of those.

Marsha - 00:02:45: Yeah, I think it gets under-prioritized a lot of times too because of that.

Erin - 00:02:49: Or like put in that soft skill bucket.

Marsha - 00:02:52: Exactly.

JH - 00:02:53: Right, or just because you do something kind of often doesn't mean you're good at it. I heard somebody express it this way, like, you've spent hundreds of hours driving cars, you'd be a terrible race car driver, right? Like it doesn't mean you're actually good at something. When you think of good facilitation, I know you've kind of broken this down into some key areas and qualities, what are some of the top things that make somebody skilled and a good practitioner?

Marsha - 00:03:11: Well, in the book I write about the facilitation stance. So I think that much of what makes any of us really phenomenal at facilitation is starting with our core beliefs. I call it a stance, like what's your “come from” place when you step in front of a group of people? So whether you're formally leading a group of people through a process, which would be kind of on the formal side of facilitation, or whether you're just simply a leader who's gathered people together and you really wanna make sure that the group gets to the reason that they came together. I think there's both the core beliefs that you'll have and then also a really clear process about how you get yourself ready to be in front of that room of people. So I think it's bringing both of those pieces, it's a set of beliefs and a stance, as well as a process that helps you get ready for it.

Erin - 00:04:03: I love that. And that's really putting you, the facilitator, front and center in this process, right? How do you want to show up for this thing, this facilitation? As we're talking about this, I'm very much picturing you and a group of people together at the same time, whether in physical or digital space. Is that a prerequisite? Can you do async facilitation? Is that a thing? Or are we pretty much like in a group together?

Marsha - 00:04:28: You know, I think facilitation principles can certainly apply asynchronously, but some of the things that I think about in terms of your beliefs will really come to fruition a lot more, I think, when you're in the room, whether it's a virtual room or a physical room with folks.

JH - 00:04:46: When you think about communication, people have different communication styles and there's different styles that can be effective. Is that also true for facilitation? Are people going to have different styles of how they do it and they can be equally effective? Or is it more like you all need to be really adhering to some of these practices because it's the best way to do it?

Marsha - 00:05:02: Both and.

JH - 00:05:03: Ok.

Marsha - 00:05:03: Yeah, we absolutely all have different styles of communication, and, you know, we talk a lot about giving people a shared language for being able to read the room and make sense of not just the style of communication, but the language that people are using, because it's often in the language where we'll either be moving the conversation forward or where we'll be talking past one another. So I think, yes, people will have different ways that they facilitate, like, my facilitation would be different than yours, JH, or than yours, Erin, and I think there are some key principles that sit at the core of it. So we talk a lot of times about giving people kind of like, here's some of my beliefs, and then your job will be to create your own model for how you facilitate. So, you know, I think there's a “both and” in there.

Erin - 00:05:53: So some best practices to maybe start from, that tend to work for a lot of people, and then find your style within that or maybe even deliberately break some of the rules if you find that works for you.

Marsha - 00:06:04: Yeah, absolutely. Break it with intention.

Erin - 00:06:07: Right, exactly. Yeah, so what are some of those?

Marsha - 00:06:09: Well, so the first one that's often met with an awful lot of Scooby-Doo faces of, I'm sorry, is the idea of maintaining neutrality. And I think anytime I say that, particularly to leaders who, whether they're leading interview processes or leading a team, step in front of a room and begin to facilitate, a lot of times they're there because they have quite a lot of opinion and potentially skin in the game about the outcome of that session. But really effective facilitation begins with a group being able to trust that the person guiding them through a process is generally staying out of their content. So maintaining neutrality becomes about dividing that group process into the content side, which will be where people have opinions and where they're making moves and opposing one another, and then also there will be a facilitation process. So it'll start with an intended outcome and then how you're gonna get a group through that process, whether it's gonna be answering an initial question, having them brainstorm something, really giving them an opportunity to explore different points of view. So, ideally, when you've got that facilitator hat on, you're not in people's content.

JH - 00:07:29: Does this almost mean that before you set up this discussion and meeting or whatever it may be to have this facilitation, you need to almost check how strongly you feel? Because if you are so strong towards one outcome, maybe one, you don't need a facilitation session, but two, you are not going to be a successful facilitator. But then if you are more, I lean a little this way but I actually want to really hear this, is there almost like a prerequisite step here of making sure you can do this?

Marsha - 00:07:51: I think that's a fabulous way of saying it. Particularly when leaders step into the role of facilitating, I often say, how much do you care about the outcome or how much opinion do you want to weigh in on? I will bring facilitators in to facilitate conversations, even in my own company, that I care deeply about because there will be places where I know I can't hold the process. I've got too much of an opinion, and I actually don't want to worry about the process, I want to be completely in it. And then there are times where I'm okay, I'm genuinely curious, I can see the process, I can help us get through that, and I want to hear input from others. And so, yeah, I think there are times where you want to just tap a colleague or somebody else on the team and say, hey, I need you to step up today and facilitate this conversation for us.

JH - 00:08:39: Cool. So say it's a situation where you don't feel that strongly, you feel like you're able to be a good facilitator, if you do have a slight bias towards option A versus option B or whatever, do you disclose that to the group to be honest? Or is it more of a like, you just need to really do some work internally to put it out of mind?

Marsha - 00:08:54: I think it's a great position to always reveal your thinking. People will know. If you feel like you're sitting in front of a group and you're having to bite your tongue the whole time, then it seeps out. So where you can share, like, hey, I'm really leaning in this direction, but I want to hear your input, or I want to hear your input and just know that I'm going to make the final decision, and this is where I'm leaning right now. So I think one of the things about this comes into what's your process for getting ready to facilitate is the upfront planning and design of where you're talking about, what's the topic, what's our purpose, what's the desired outcome, and then more importantly, what's the scope of authority for the team? Like, what are they being asked to do? I think one of the greatest challenges in all of our meetings today is where we, as leaders, aren't clear about the decision-making process. So we tend to open it up for a great big discussion, a two-hour meeting, a three-hour meeting, we get everybody's voice into the conversation and we start to ask people to do the hard work of either coming to consensus or narrowing it down to a couple of recommendations, and then somebody goes off and two weeks later you hear, either through the grapevine or back in the same meeting, that a totally different decision was made based on the one that you came up with as a team. And I think that's where trust gets broken in the whole meeting process. I think that's where we see people start to push their chair back from the table or multitask and be like, I'm confused, I don't know what my what the ask of me is, and hey, if you're just going to decide, then tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it. So I think that's where people really check out or they get apathetic about the whole meeting process as it gets really confusing about what we're doing.

Erin - 00:10:43: Yeah, I have two follow up questions. One is let's dig more into that preparation process because I think, you know, fail to plan, right? Let's plan. But also, do you always know you're going to enter a facilitation moment? Does every meeting need a facilitator? Is it safe to say, you are meeting, you're the facilitator, and therefore you need to plan as such? But maybe we can apply some of those planning techniques to-, your time to plan is 30 seconds because it's happening right now. But yeah, let's walk through some of those planning steps.

Marsha - 00:11:17: So two really great questions. So the first would be, what's my process to get ready? And I think in that process, one of the first steps is answering that question, Erin, that you're posing, which is, why are we gathering together? And to what degree of collaboration do we need? Like, is it a low degree of collaboration? What's the topic or the amount of input that we want to get from people? Is this more of an informal, hey, let me tell you what happened last week kind of status, brief out, or are we just sharing information? Or do we truly want to collaborate together? On the higher end of collaboration, it's more of a strategic decision, or it's a really sticky issue that's come up, and we really need to come together and think together. So I think somewhere on that continuum will be, if it's just informational, more of a monologue, more just kind of going around the room and sharing status, you probably don't need a whole lot of time to design your facilitation and probably just need in the moment facilitation, meaning that you, in that role, are paying attention to everybody getting an equal chance to voice and participate and you're just watching dynamics. All the way up to the higher end of design for facilitation, there would be, okay, we want to end, we're going to take two days off site, we're going to be on a highly strategic collaborative conversation, we're having a little bit of a breakdown in our communication internally, we really want to get to the heart of that, understand what's going on in the team and then come out with a vision statement. So things like that would be at a much higher end, and, as a facilitator, I'm going to do some pre-work. I'm going to ask people to do some prep and get ready for that, I'm going to have thought through a facilitation arc about what are the kinds of questions that we'd be answering as a full group in order to get to that outcome. So I think there's a continuum of it, but, yes, does every meeting need a facilitator? Likely. To what degree are they planning? Very much dependent on why we're getting together.

JH - 00:13:19: Nice. That makes sense. We shared ahead of time some of the key qualities for good facilitation. You have six of them here. So we've covered maintaining neutrality. The next one that's listed I'm very curious about, it says standing in the storm, and I'm not quite sure what that means. I would love to hear more about that.

Marsha - 00:13:33: Well, we hold a belief that in good conversation, where we're able to move the conversation forward, there is also a difference of opinion. And the way difference of opinion will often come out in group settings is it can look like conflict, and sometimes it can look like conflict between members of a group, but I think a lot of times it can be also the facilitator, the person sort of standing in that role can become a conduit for it. So groups can push back on your process, they can push back on why you're asking them to do something, So standing in the storm is really a core belief that groups are gonna need to go through difference and conflict in order to get through to the other side of new thinking and new understanding, and groups are really good at avoiding that. And so as we facilitators step into a room, our job becomes to stay with it, like to stay in the conflict or I think about it metaphorically as it can feel a little stormy, and what does it look like to be a calm presence in the middle of that? And be able to help a group stay with it as well, so I often give an example of I was with a group one time, it was a really large group of leaders, so I think we had about 35 people in the room, and a pretty difficult topic had been bravely introduced by two people in that group, and it was not an easy topic for that group to talk about at all, and so we were just continuing to sort of help people voice their own experience, what was going on. We were sitting in a circle and all of a sudden there was a person sitting right next to me who just jumped out of their seat and said, we need to just take a break, I think we need to talk about something different. So this principle really comes forward for me, which is, it could have been easy to say, yeah, it feels like it's getting heated in here, the topic is potentially making people uncomfortable, let's just definitely get up and take a break and change the subject. And I think that's what we, naturally, as humans wanna do is alleviate the pressure, but in that moment, I just said, hey, I think this is super important, let's just give it another 20 minutes and then we'll take a break, but if we leave it right now, we're potentially gonna miss a shift in thinking for the whole group. And so it's just an example of internal work to do, cause we'll all have our own preference for how we deal with conflict.

Erin - 00:16:18: Yeah, that's very interesting. It feels like an area where having some skill with this could really be useful, because I imagine you also, and there's different kinds of conflict, right, there's like, no, I really think we should have these meetings on Wednesday and not Tuesday, and hopefully it's not too charged.

Marsha - 00:16:35: Yes.

Erin - 00:16:35: But then there's bigger conflicts, right? You're getting into real identity stuff, or really deep emotionally charged things. How do you make people feel safe standing in the storm with you?

Marsha - 00:16:48: I think some of that just comes from-, it's why I talk about starting with your beliefs as a facilitator first. So somewhere inside of you, you've got to find your belief that says, hey, difference of opinion, even if it's the difference between our meeting on Wednesday versus Friday, when we have difference of opinion, the task becomes working through it and with it rather than silencing it or avoiding it. And so if you hold that belief, then I do think it becomes about developing the skills of how do I navigate that? That's been some of my greatest work, in this particular cornerstone of being super uncomfortable with conflict. Early on in my facilitation career, I would do everything to manage it out of the room. If I thought that there was a difference of opinion around a topic, I'd have people write instead of talk, or I'd really constrain the agenda. So I think that it is about developing skill, but it also starts with your belief. If you believe that it's important, and I think you then start to signal to a group, you know what, I get that this is tough, but if we work through it, there's new thinking on the other side of it, there's potentially a shift. So it starts with your belief, and then I think creating that trust and container with a group, you know, do we have the working agreements that say, this is how we're going to handle conflict when it comes up?

JH - 00:18:15: Yeah, the thing I keep picturing in my head is almost like a hill, like you're going up one side and you can go this side and it's almost like having the trust and the confidence and the skills to be like, as the temperatures going up and you're coming up the hill one way is to just go back down, take the temperature down that way, or no we just got to get over this crest and this conflict and we'll start coming back down on the other side, there's probably just a little bit of a willingness to kind of see it through, is that a fair way to think of it?

Marsha - 00:18:37: And if you've got that vision, then I think the group will start to trust you. That, okay, I'm uncomfortable, but they seem to know where we're going.

JH - 00:18:47: Right, they think we're going to come through it.

Erin - 00:18:48: What are some other things that you should keep in mind when you're facilitating?

Marsha - 00:18:54: I think there's one about just honoring the wisdom of the group, and I think that gets to be really easy to intellectually say, of course, there's collective intelligence in every group that gathers, right up until you disagree with something in the group. And then you might say, I hear leaders do it all the time, well, I don't really want to take that to the team because they don't have that data or they don't have that knowledge or they just don't know, like I don't really think I want to rely on that group of people to make that decision. And I think that's a tricky slippery slope, when we start to discount the wisdom that sits within a group of people. I think sometimes groups might lack some of that extra knowledge or pieces of data that they need in order to make a collaborative conversation really effective, but I do hold that the group has the ability to say that for themselves. And I think what happens sometimes when we gather people together is that we do all kinds of dances with the dynamics in the room that actually have people start to hold back their real thinking or their real opinion. There's what they'll say in the room, and then there's what they'll say to their friends on a Slack channel or on a phone call afterwards, which will be the real piece of data. So honoring the wisdom of the group comes from the stance and the belief that the group has everything it needs, they actually do have wisdom, and my job as a facilitator is to make sure that the group is able to tap into that collectively.

Erin - 00:20:29: There's probably part of the planning process that can help set this up for success too, right? Like if the group really doesn't have the wisdom, this should not be the outcome we're trying to get from this group.


Marsha - 00:20:41: Erin, I think that's a really great point. One of the pieces about designing that facilitative meeting, again, is what's the purpose and then who needs to come, and then do we have all the right voices? I think about technical teams who often kind of get looped in this trap where there are other pieces of data that they need, or there's another expert or another team member that they need to have in that conversation that would really help to inform it. So yes, do we have the right people in the room?


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Erin - 00:21:21: We want to help you so much that we have created a special place, it's called userinterviews.com/awkward, for you to get your first three participants free.

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JH - 00:21:49: The next one on the list here is upholding the agile mindset, working the product side of things. I think of agile quite a bit, so I'm curious how this one applies.

Marsha - 00:21:57: Yeah, so I think there's lots of talk these days about agility. And there's always the battle of how do we do and be agile in our teams. This one really gets at just tapping into what are the principles of agility, what are the values of it, and how the job of facilitator is not to become the agile process police that says, we have to have a daily stand-up and every day we have to answer these three questions. I think facilitation is all about reading what's happening in a group, really, again, tapping into the collective intelligence and wisdom of that group. There are times where it's back to that, you can start with a process, and you can use a defined process, but it's going to evolve. The needs of the team are going to evolve. So what happens when we're holding meetings and we're just sort of putting the meeting on a rote repeat where we do the same things every time? I think one of the greatest challenges to agility is that we just get tired. We're no longer energized or inspired by the conversations, we're just gathering and going through a standard defined process. It feels like it loses meaning, it feels like the conversation gets really inauthentic. We're just multitasking or really not having the needed conversation. So upholding the agile mindset is, really, what are the principles of agility that would inform or sit behind how we gather and how we look at our work and make sure we're upholding those and we're not becoming the process police.

Erin - 00:23:31: What are some examples of how that could play out? Like, let's say we have a weekly leadership meeting and the agenda has been more or less the same for a while and we want to keep it from being stale and just everyone playing their usual parts.

Marsha - 00:23:43: Yeah, I think a facilitator would come in and say, hey, so I know we gather every week, I'm curious, are we talking about the things that we need to talk about? What are we not talking about that's missing from our conversations? What would we change about the way we're meeting? I really think it becomes about getting the group to reflect, you might end up doing that in a survey ahead of time if you don't feel like you've got a lot of safety in the group or people aren't forthright in the room. But I think that one of the jobs of facilitation is beginning to create spaces over time where people can be forthright. So I think it's about checking in and saying, hey, is this working for us and are we having the conversations we need to have?

Erin - 00:24:24: Good place to start.

Marsha - 00:24:25: Yeah.

Erin - 00:24:25: Yeah, because all of this, as you said in the beginning, is really about trying to get to good outcomes.

Marsha - 00:24:31: Yeah, I hold a core belief that everything that we're trying to do, the change that we're trying to lead, the outcomes we want to have in organizations, it all comes down to how we're having a conversation or not having a conversation. And I think we do plenty of not having conversations, but, I call it collaboration theater, where we sort of pretend like we're doing it, but we're not really, and I think that's one of the reasons-, I read so much over the last three years of the pandemic written about meetings and workplace morale and burnout and all that, I hold that some big part of that comes right down to the core of how we're having conversations.

Erin - 00:25:13: So when you talk about not really doing that, I imagine some of that is like not doing these things we're talking about, right? Like not standing in the storm, not honoring the wisdom of the group. What are other ways in which we aren't really collaborating where we are instead having collaboration theater?

Marsha - 00:25:28: I think some of that comes down to, Erin, you've talked about it today a little bit, like what are we doing to set up the situation, that container for the group, and how do we bring the conversation in the room rather than have the conversation take place offline? So, you can even think about a time, like even if you're listening, when was the last time you left a meeting and you walked away and there was something that you wanted to say but you didn't say? And I think every time that happens, if you take a room of 10 people and if 10 people each had two things that they wanted to say that they didn't say, we're missing out on collective intelligence, we're missing out on data, we're missing out on the real conversation, and I think in those instances, that's where people start to feel disconnected or they spend a lot of time having back channel conversations.

JH - 00:26:28: Yeah. Erin, I don't know that you or I get accused of not sharing our thoughts very often. We probably speak out too much if anything. Cool, I think there's a couple more left. What one would you like to cover next in terms of the quality of good facilitation?

Marsha - 00:26:40: Yeah, I think the last one is honoring the group's agenda. So this particularly, I think this can be a little bit challenging to wrap your mind around sometimes. So, as a facilitator, it's super easy to come in and have done some prep and planning and say, so here's what I think we need to accomplish. Or a leader that says, here's the topic that's on the table today. But what often is missing is checking in with the group about what they want to achieve from the outcome of the meeting. So a lot of times teams will have retrospectives or they'll come together and really need to have a collaborative conversation about something that's happening in the team. And I, as a facilitator, can get hooked on something that I want the team to achieve rather than something that the team really wants. So I think one of the ways that this plays out is sometimes you'll see teams, again, check out or not feel like they're really wanting to contribute to a process or a group conversation. A lot of times I think that's gotten to be a wobbly space where it's potentially become the facilitator's agenda that we want to accomplish in a meeting rather than the team's agenda. So if I am a team member and I don't know what's in it for me to come to this meeting or what I'm gonna gain or how it's gonna help me in my work, it becomes really hard to participate. So it's the principle of just holding the group's agenda. Sometimes I can get really tied to a group achieving a certain outcome, but they still need to talk about a deeper dynamic that's happening in the team that's prohibiting them from getting to the outcome, so if I keep trying to drive them to the outcome and they keep resisting, it can look like indecision, people unwilling to really commit to the decision or they're holding back, or some people will sort of kick up other risks, and so we keep sort of circling around. Those can be behavioral indicators that potentially we're focusing on the wrong agenda, or I'm trying to drive to closure a little bit too fast. So oftentimes I might stop and just say, hey, like I noticed I'm trying to get us here, but it seems like there's something else we need to talk about, what’s the thing we need to talk about?

Erin - 00:28:58: That feels like upholding the agile mindset. I came in with this agenda, this agenda doesn't feel like the right one now that we're doing it, let's maybe not be afraid to change things.

JH - 00:29:09: Is there almost a facilitation step of like, here's how I see the agenda of the meeting and pressure test right up front if people agree or not, or do you kind of feel it out as needed?

Marsha - 00:29:19: I think it's great to share all of that within the first 5 or 10 minutes. Clear purpose statement: the purpose of the meeting today is to come to a decision, get an outcome, and here are the steps that we're going to go through. And then it's a great opportunity to just test if this is why people thought they came? Do you feel like you see yourself in the outcomes of this meeting? Some people might say, no, I have nothing to do with that, so you got an hour back to your day. Yeah, so I think it's a great place to check.

Erin - 00:29:48: Reminds me of a concept from Seth Godin, the Enrollment, he calls it. I think he uses it in the context of giving a presentation, but the idea being like, start out with, this is what we're going, I'm going to sell you on this today, or in this case, this is the outcome we're trying to get to. Agreed? Yes. Because if the answer to that is no, like nothing else matters. And so really just starting with that, getting the collective enrollment happening, so that even if the process of getting there gets a little muddier, has to change course a little bit, at least we're trying to get to the same place together.

Marsha - 00:30:23: Yeah, I totally agree.

JH - 00:30:25: Nice. I'm curious, a facilitator can either be familiar with the group or kind of like an external party, and is one better than the other? Like if you know the group, you know these people have a little bit of a history of conflict, this person's brilliant, but kind of quiet, so we're going to have to pull them in, or these people always agree, and is that useful or is it actually better to kind of come in fresh as a truly neutral facilitator who is just going to kind of look at the group for what it is and navigate it differently?

Marsha - 00:30:50: There are certainly pros and cons to both. I think it's really helpful to have an external facilitator, particularly if it's some interpersonal conflict or a team that's gotten off track or by their own definition, you know, feeling a little stuck where they are. I think it's fantastic to have an outside facilitator because a lot of times if you're not embedded or, you know, less skin in the game, it's easier to see the dynamics and to help the team see the dynamics. That said, I think if you're an outside facilitator, it's super important to have your own process for how you're going to engage with the team and figure out some of those dynamics before you go in. So whether it's surveys or interviews helping to get you a lay of the land or a picture about what you're going in for, I think I've learned that the hard way and anytime I have short-cutted that step because of time or resources, I've always regretted it. If you're someone who's on the team or familiar with the team or close to the team, yes, you're gonna know all of those patterns, so I think your job then becomes, how do you design with a team, or with yourself, that you feel like you've got permission to name some of those things? Because I think some of the challenges will be that we often see things, but can we name them? Do we feel like we have permission to name them? And are we doing it in a way that it feels like we're poking someone in the eye? That's not the intent. Really the intent is always, how do we raise the collective awareness of what's happening in the group?

Erin - 00:32:23: And you're saying name them out loud to the group, and so, you don't want to say, Steve, I've noticed you're always a jerk.

Marsha - 00:32:30: But there will be a behavior that Steve is bringing that you might say, hey, I noticed, Steve, that you're pushing back on a lot of the ideas, can you say what's behind that? So something without judgment.

Erin - 00:32:43: Right.

Marsha - 00:32:43: Yeah.

Erin - 00:32:44: It's having this impact.

Marsha - 00:32:45: Yeah.

Erin - 00:32:46: We're trying to maybe have a different result a little bit. Cool. So I think we want to get to some research applications, which I mean, I'm sure it's been easy to imagine how you can apply this to lots of research settings already, but just to get a little closer to that. So one thing a lot of researchers, people who do research, find themselves doing is workshops of various sorts internally. That seems like a great place to apply facilitation. What might that look like in the context of some sort of workshop you're doing?

Marsha - 00:33:16: Yeah, I think of workshops as multi-day events often that pull people together. Is that how you would define it?

Erin - 00:33:24: Yeah, that's a good question, what is a workshop?

JH - 00:33:27: Yeah, I think it's going to be collaborative, probably some structured steps or exercises to get at some things from different angles. Yeah, I think it could very well be multi-day, I don't think it necessarily has to, but probably an extended time block. It's probably not a 30-minute workshop, it's probably a few hours.

Erin - 00:33:40: I'm picturing Post-Its, potentially.

Marsha - 00:33:45: Yeah, I think facilitation coming into something like that is super helpful and I often say facilitation starts before you ever get in the room and half of it happens in the upfront planning and design of how you're going to go about it. So again, what's your purpose? What's the group of people that are needed to help fulfill that purpose? Are you serving that group of people? What do you want their desired outcome to be? How do you get their voice into the design of it? And then I often think about that arc of where are we gonna start, where are we gonna end? And then what's the arc or the experience that we're gonna take people through when we're in that workshop together? So I think a lot about designing for experience, what do we want people to walk away saying? Or how do we want them to feel as part of being engaged in that process?

JH - 00:34:40: Is there a rule of thumb for people on how large a group can be to effectively facilitate it? So on one hand, if it's two people, it's maybe a little weird to be really formally facilitating it. But then it's also like if it's 30 or 40 people, it's probably becoming rather unwieldy, and there's probably some sweet spot. What do you think about the size of the group? So if I'm planning a workshop, should I try to have a cap on how many people I invite or something like that?

Marsha - 00:35:01: Again, I think it's about purpose. So are people coming together to collaborate for something or are they just gonna learn together and contribute ideas? Certainly somewhere between eight and twelve is a really nice group size. I think the group size of twelve is usually my most favorite because if you're designing exercises where you want people to do breakouts or go into small groups, twelve is just a nice number. It works for pairs and it works for trios. So from a facilitation perspective and thinking about changing the frame for participants along that arc, it's really helpful. Once you get up into about 25 or 30 people, I think you can still have a forum or a large group conversation, but you're often going to start to think about how do I divide people up into smaller groups because, at the size of 30, people are less likely to want to contribute to a full group conversation. And then anything above that 25 to 30 range, you're really looking at large group facilitation methods, and I think about that as it's just a small group facilitation multiplied out. So we're often looking at ways to keep people engaged, wanting people to feel like they've got their voice in the space, and then I also tend to lean on training other facilitators to support that process. So when you get into 50, 75, 200, 300 people, it's super helpful to be able to bring other facilitators in on that journey, so you as a facilitation team are able to guide people through that process.

Erin - 00:36:35: What about in-person versus virtual? We're a virtual company, always have been, but of course the pandemic brought a lot more virtual use cases to folks. Does everything still apply or are there certain concessions or changes that it's helpful to make in one context versus the other?

Marsha - 00:36:52: I think virtual facilitation can be just as meaningful and effective as in the room. I still have a preference for in the room, I think there's just a different kind of connection. But virtual can be done really well, I think you just have to pay very close attention to what are the norms and requests you have of people. So one of the gifts of the pandemic has been the technologies that support virtual collaboration, they were there prior to the pandemic, but the capabilities that they have far exceeded anything. So I often say we need to be able to see one another, hear one another, and be looking at the same thing if we're gonna be virtually online. And so I often set rules that we need to be on camera and off mute, that often makes people disagree.

Erin - 00:37:41: Start with the conflict, get the storm going right away.

Marsha - 00:37:44: I mean, just like we're having this conversation here today, that's the experience that we're trying to create for people virtually, as we want people to be able to get their voice in, not have to fiddle with the mute button. We want people to be able to say something that's funny and hear other people laugh about it. So with all of those little nuances, create a different kind of container. I think the only other thing I'd say about virtual and in person is that we are in a hybrid space now, and I think, before the pandemic, that was also very true. I'm not a fan of hybrid, I think we're either all virtual or all face-to-face. Hybrid just doesn't work well. I think there are ways to make it work, it'll look like having multiple facilitators and on a facilitation team, somebody helping to guide the virtual participants and somebody helping to guide the in the room participants and somewhere along the way, they're still gonna have to see the same thing and be able to get their voice in and communicate. But there's a real shift in power that happens when you have some people gathered in a room together and other people offline, and the people in the room have more power. So it's just something to consider in your design.

Erin - 00:38:56: Yeah, 100%.

JH - 00:38:57: Another thing you see often with groups of people getting together to do something, right, a workshop, a brainstorm, whatever it may be, is some sort of icebreaker, a kickoff thing to try to get people loosened up and maybe have a little bonding or trust established. Do you find anything like that useful or are there things there that people should consider or is that more of just some people do it because they do it type of thing?

Marsha - 00:39:16: I love it. I have a personal bias against the term icebreaker, because I tend to think it's just the way it gets used. But what I love about the concept of designing something at the very beginning, I talk about the need for connection before content. I have to know who you are, why you're here, something about you personally that helps me connect with you before I'm likely to start offering my ideas or what I think about the content that we're getting ready to talk about. So connection before content, I think, is one of the most important ways to start a workshop, and it helps with the container and trust building. So a lot of times, I will often do just a check-in, so something that you want to say that you're looking forward to about today, something that you're concerned about for the conversation we're about ready to have, what's something that you're leaving behind that you have been focused on? So I also think check-ins help us let go of whatever we've been doing prior to rolling up to the conversation. We're in a world today where people just move from one thing to the next to the next, so they help you let go of that, but they also help people just get connected to the content and one another. So I think it's super helpful.

Erin - 00:40:29: Warm up, small talk. It does sound sort of icy. It's icy. Warm ups.


JH - 00:40:33: Yeah, it's a little like I used to do some volunteering stuff at this grief camp and they'd always call it turbo bonding, like we're going to do some stuff that makes us really connected really quickly, and I thought that was like a better frame than yeah, icebreaker.

Marsha - 00:40:42: Yeah, I love that phrase.

Erin - 00:40:43: Nice. Another thing you talk about is the importance of navigating invisible team dynamics, which sounds like another tricky one. Experience is helpful here, I imagine, but maybe you can give us some turbo shortcuts. And it also sounds like that could be trickier, potentially, in a remote setting. But yeah, curious, how do you start to develop this skill?

Marsha - 00:41:05: Well, so yes, we talk about looking at the structure of interpersonal communication and trying to make sense of it because there will be the words that we're saying, but then sometimes it feels like it's going well and other times I feel like there was a shot across the bow, but I'm not certain, so I think that starts to give voice to more of the invisible dynamics that sit in all of our conversations. So I'll give you a really quick example: often, everything that we say can be coded into one of four actions. So all of our sentences are either a move, they're setting direction in the conversation; or a follow that's supporting the conversation; an oppose that's offering correction, it says, no, wait, stop; or a by-stand that's offering a morally neutral comment on the conversation. So four actions, and we need all four to be active in order for the conversation to be effective. So remember I said earlier, standing in the storm, like I'm always listening for the voice of oppose, and when I don't hear it, I used to assume that meant everything was okay, what I know now is that when I don't hear it, it's because it's not coming in the room yet, and it means that it's likely gone offline. So I'll tell you a really quick personal story, my daughter and I had a pattern when she was much younger, she's 14 now, but when she was much younger, we had this pattern between us. We'd have the same conversation every morning, it was me asking her to get her shoes on in order to go to the bus, and I'd say, do you have your shoes on? And she'd say, no. And I'd say, well, will you get them on? We're going to be late for the bus. And she'd say, okay. And I come back five minutes later and she'd be sitting in the same place and I’d say, are your shoes on? She'd say, no. What are you doing? Playing. Get your shoes on now. She'd say, okay. So walking out the door, I turn around and then there's a crying child in the middle of the hallway going, but I don't have my shoes on. So I would make a move and she would voice a follow. She'd say, okay. But what she intended was an oppose. So I can't tell you how many times I think that happens in our conversations and meetings, and so facilitation becomes about, can you hear the patterns of what's happening in the conversation? Are all four of those actions coming sort of naturally and organically in the conversation? If not, can you as the facilitator start to prompt? You know, what I started to do to change the pattern between Lauren and I was, I stopped making moves and I just started to by-stand and I'd say, I noticed the bus is gonna be here in 10 minutes, what do you need to do? She began to say, oh, I need to get my shoes on. So for her, she needed to be the one making a move rather than covertly opposing me.


Erin - 00:44:02: And it sounds like that took more than one trip of the school bus to figure out. Like if you're a professional facilitator and that's literally what you do, you kind of figure out how to get good at this quickly, but if you're doing it kind of casually, you find yourself in that role, maybe you figure out what roles people take and what they really mean over time, or you kind of look for signals as they develop, even within one meeting?


Marsha - 00:44:25: Yeah, absolutely. Like you can do it today. Pick a meeting that you're gonna be in, and particularly, if you're gonna do this, as you get started, it'll probably be helpful to pick a meeting that you're not the center of attention for, you're not the primary facilitator. And then just step back, fade back for a minute and take about five to eight minutes and see if you can just jot down and code the actions in that conversation, and can you pick out a pattern that might be happening? So a lot of times there will be a pattern between move and oppose for advocacy, I have an idea, I disagree, I have another idea, or you'll hear lots of moves, lots of new topics that keep getting introduced, but no follow behind them. So those will be like little balls that roll off into the conversation that nobody really picks up. It's a very common pattern actually for there to be lots of moves. The other thing that can happen is that people can by-stand. They can say, oh, I'm noticing this, what's happening, or I'm noticing this, and there can be a lot of by·stand. What will be missing in both of those conversations is opposition constraint. And so just see if you can pick up what's in the conversation and potentially what's missing, and then anyone in the group can prompt for the missing action.

Erin - 00:45:44: This is really easy to imagine applying for anyone to just look for these things and a little counterintuitive, which I always like too, which is you need all of these things.

JH - 00:45:53: Yeah, and it does seem too like it's a type of thing that as you're live in a conversation really hard to pick up on the pattern, when you start to code something into this structure and then you look at the pattern, it's much more apparent, you're making it explicit which is a really cool idea.

Marsha - 00:46:05: There's a lot more to say about that, but I think that's probably the easiest place to start to get a hold of and actually be able to make a difference for yourself, you're starting to be able to make sense of the invisible dynamics.

Erin - 00:46:19: Yeah, I love it. Marsha, this has been just so interesting and I think will be really interesting to researchers and to anyone doing research or trying to drive change in a collaborative setting. Thanks so much.

JH - 00:46:31: I agree. Yes, this was kind of fun.

Marsha - 00:46:32: I'm glad. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Erin - 00:46:34: Hey there, it's me, Erin.

JH - 00:46:36: And me, JH

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