Horse, Rope, Hat, Ready to Go

We have just driven out of Yellowstone National Park, past herds of bison and grazing elk, through Shoshone National Forest along the Buffalo Bill Highway into Cody, Wyoming. My husband remarked that this had been the longest time he had been away from an internet or telephone connection in his professional life (he is a software engineer with a PDA). And I too cannot remember the last time I had five days with absolutely no way of reading my email or checking into the office.

Let me tell you, it is easier than you think. Day 1 is full of anxiety and intruding thoughts about what you left to do while on holiday (when you thought you could check in from time to time). On Day 2 those thoughts are fleeting and gradually give way to resignation about no possible signal (after walking around the campground to see if there is anything secretly emitting a signal that you can jump onto). Then by Day 3, it is the blissful, restful return to the pre-1989 (even 1889) state of NO EMAIL CONTACT. Then you just are where you are, with those you are with, and doing what you are doing at the moment. Fishing for cutthroat trout on a boat in Yellowstone lake. Watching a grizzly bear amble down the roadside. Counting how many colours of wildflowers there are along the trail. Trying to identify all the types of animal skat. Getting ready to go to the rodeo.

There's a whole other world out there that has nothing to do with technology. It's amazing how quickly you can go back...

Like a Surgeon

This week's conference extravaganza has been an eye opener (11 workshops and breakout sessions for a 500+ person conference, with effectively 2 Facilitators). Trying to process, reflect and be appreciative about what has transpired (and blogging about it each night ) has been incredibly useful to capture learning. We came here to help create the subtle environment for generative dialogue. Instead we were working very low on Maslow's hierarcy of needs. That's ok, it was what was needed. Tonight I'm going to use an analogy to try to crystalise what it has felt like to be here trying to focus on process facilitation.

This week we are like surgeons to whom the patient has come a little too late.

You work very hard to diagnose the problem, try different experimental interventions; but it is late in the game and you don't see a significant change. When you finally have all the information, you can see clearly that many months ago, this condition would have been easily treated, but now the condition is too advanced to treat. However, you are compassionate and committed to remaining a caregiver. And you spend your time now focusing on making the patient comfortable, fluffing the pillow, administering local pain relievers, helping the patient maintain dignity - generally creating a nice environment for the final days - and making sure the strongest memories that visitors and loved ones have of your patient are good ones. No level of intervention at this point, no matter how invasive, will change the patient's outcome; so you put your energies into administering care and support, and do it in the nicest possible way. (e.g. My most significant contribution today was buying a bottle of rum for the drafting team.)

There is a real role here for preventive medicine. We need to get to the patients much earlier. We need to help establish good habits, good reflexes, good decision making, good planning, and thus good healthy, interactive workshops and peer learning sessions, and happy participants. Surgeons are trained to do amazing things, if its not too late.

What Was That

I took an art class in college where we got to programme 1 minute of our classmates' lives. I don't remember now what the project was, but it seemed like an interesting thing to do at the time. I worked with another student and we decided to try to fill that 60 seconds with as much stuff as possible - sounds, visuals, odors, movement. We put together everything we could find. We showed overlapping videos, projected enormous slides, put up a wall of writing on an OHP; we played radio music, blasted a CD compilation, tuned an electric guitar, set off a line of alarm clocks. We splash painted the wall with fluorescents as a backdrop, sprayed strong cleaning aerosols, flashed coloured strobes, and got people to take in the whole thing standing and moving around.

We did this for 60 seconds, which might sound short, but in this case felt like a lifetime. With full sensory overload, at the end of it, we were all freaked out and utterly exhausted. People looked at us at the end of this long minute and said, "What was that".

Today, we held our first set of 11 workshops and breakouts for this 500+ person conference. The workshops started 1 and a half hours late and were all over town, some accessed by buses some by foot, breakout groups were in different buildings - the Mayor's office, the cultural centre, an expo space, a parish meeting room. We were two facilitators...

We left this morning at 7am. It is 6pm at the time of writing. Alarms, stand-by helicopters and EMTs, town bells, accordians, police dogs, hundreds of PPT slides, VIPs, walkie talkies, invasive species, flashing cameras, 9 buffet tables, French, TV interviews, English, key note speeches, (the strong smell of) freshly painted everything, Spanish, laptops clattering, walking on the stage with the message, Portuguese, ten buses, walking off the stage with a message, traffic marshals, wifi, climate content, images of sinking islands, rapporteurs, roving mikes. I'm sitting in this auditorium at the end of the day thinking, "What was that?"

Adventures in Facilitation

Over 9 hours today, Aisha (co-facilitator for this big conference in La Reunion) and I drove one and a half hours into the mountains to heroically visit our workshops' venues for tomorrow, and then another hour to the Thursday venues, where we:

* Visited and counted over 1700 chairs in 37 workshop rooms;
* Tested coffee makers for noise and ease of use (I will not sleep for 2 days);
* Checked at least six set of toilet stalls for paper and soap (interestingly found in most cases only in the men's toilets, we did find soap then...);
* Shook hands with the proud Mayor of a small town;
* Remembered that, when you give 500 people the same backpack (gift for site visit), they cannot imagineably find their own again when they put them down, without a label (not a popular recollection with the person who had to go out and find 500 luggage tags);
* Noticed that there are no waste baskets in La Reunion, thus see a huge market opportunity for portable, pop up waste baskets;
* Strategized bus turnaround opportunities on one lane roads with no shoulders;
* Bought 25 magic markers, 100 squares of sticky stuff; and at least 600 boiled sweets;
* Told the person who had given logistics announcements that he had erroneously announced a bus meeting time that was 30 minutes too early (06:30 instead of 07:00) and recommended that he correct that announcement or risk getting lynched by hundreds of non-morning people at breakfast;

I could go on, but the organizing team has just walked in the door, and I need to get back into my mild-mannered facilitator clothes and work with them on the best learning designs for their large-scale workshops, and, of course, brief them to take their own TP tomorrow...

Welcome to La Reunion

It strikes me as particularly fitting that the organizers chose Ile La Reunion (reunion is actually "meeting" in French) for a big conference that is being held this week on the topic of the European Overseas Territory islands and climate change adaptation. This beautiful volcanic island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is as far away from Brussels as you can get (at least contextually if not geographically-it is delightful to see the Brussels-based diplomatic crew in flipflops).

With 586 people descending on the island from all parts of the world, this is turning into a very large gathering of incredibly passionate opionions and a diversity of perspectives. As a result, this week might serve as a not-so-dry run for our upcoming Congress in October and produce some good learning for the most process aware. This could however be a luxury that only I will have, as this meeting has many of the same hallmarks as our Congress - most notably a small organising team made of primarily of content experts who have also been given the task to make it happen (from stuffing the conference bags to delivering one of the keynote speeches). It can be an incredible team building exercise which lets people step out of daily roles and showcase their abilities to stretch into new situations; it can also create situations where the transferability of competencies to different and completely new tasks is not so easy or obvious. The reactions will be very individual and can provide an amazing laboratory for the conscient manager.

Ostensibly I am here in La Reunion to work with the coordinators of a set of 11 workshops on the results-orientation of their workshop designs, and to help deliver a few of these with a second, Mauritian, facilitator. And I am not sure I can resist shining the spotlight from time to time on our overall process here, and what the delivery team is learning. We will see what the appetite is for this simultaneous task and team maintenance conversation. It may also help identify some strategic interventions for more individual and institutional capacity building around these critical convening skills and collaborative processes.

With hundreds of people coming from all parts of the world, from the largest European bureaucracies, and the smallest island administrations, from local civil society to official representatives of the United Nations, La Reunion will no doubt be a creative collision space, both for the participants, and for us.

Reframing Our Big Dig

For the next 18 months, our organization has a Big Dig going on outside our office windows. This enormous excavation started last week with a ground breaking ceremony that launched our new building, one of the greenest in Europe. A hard hat zone, the roar of big machines, the sound of crunching as tons of cement blocks get pulverised into bite sized pieces for carrying away (and giving away), and an absolutely enormous hole. What will they find? Roman coins, medieval dumping grounds, dinosaur bones??? (We are after all located in the foothills of the Jura mountains, home of the original Jurassic Park!)

Of course the intense noise, clouds of dust, and soul shaking vibrations are different than we are used to in our work at headquarters, located in a quiet Swiss town on the banks of Lake Geneva, so this situation is ripe for reframing. If I think about some of the workplaces of our colleagues around the world - on storm-tossed boats in the ocean as they collect specimens in marine biosphere reserves, in deep field offices with dodgy water and intermittent electricity, in work sites near war areas and oil spills, and on and on; I guess this experience helps us imagine some of what our colleagues in the field and other parts of the world get to integrate as a part of their work for our organization. Flexibility, resilience, keeping our sense of humour? All useful workplace survival skills!

Of course, it's easy for me to see things differently, I write this blog post from Australia where I am on a work trip, half way across the world from our Big Dig. And still on Monday, when I was last in the office, I got to feel the thrill what it might have been like to work beside a Tyrannosaurus Rex feeding ground!

Training for the IronMan: A Conference Worker's Guide

(NOTE: This post is dedicated to hundreds of my colleagues who will be literally running our upcoming quadrennial mega-event. You know who you are!)

I spent last week in Barcelona where my organization is going to hold its World Conservation Congress of 8,000 people, which we have been blogging about these past few months. During my trip to Barcelona, we visited the Congress centre and saw the various rooms and halls, and most importantly were given some very practical tips about the centre, where we would be spending around 10 days of our lives, day and night.

On my way home to Geneva from Barcelona, I read an article in the inflight magazine about two London office women who decided to do the Ironman triathalon. The story explained their learning and preparation for this grueling competition, which includes a marathon, 112 miles of biking, and 2.4 miles of swimming. You need to be competent at everything to finish - similar to our Congress. You might be a mild-mannered project manager for 355 days a year, but at Congress you can take on the role of media spokesperson, usher, VIP handler, translator, and high-level panelist in one day, with super quick changeovers between each.

And like the Ironman you need to prepare yourself if you want to finish in one piece. No showing up the day of the race and lining up at the start (or the registration table). For our Congress, preparation means practice of these new roles (I took my media training course today), getting rid of your sleep deficit, and taking care of that low grade cold you have been nuturing for months. Hard work and many nights of minimal sleep will find your immune system a real pushover - probably on day 2 of the Congress.

Another thing the Ironwomen learned in their preparation for the event was that you need to learn things you never imagined you needed to know. Like how to fix your own bicycle - during the race, no one is going to stop and help you fix a blown tire. They are too focused on their own race to even notice, or be able to stop and help. Our Congress may be the same, with everyone flying in every direction preparing for any of the 40 simultaneous events at any given time. When your caffeine withdrawal is giving you a whopping headache, and there are 300 people waiting at the coffee bar, you need to be able to produce your own solution. What about a thermos of coffee that you made that morning in your hotel room? (bring your travel kettle, instant coffee and thermos - sorted). When you just need a glass of wine at the end of the day - know where the nearest supermarket is, and pack your corkscrew. Lay in some nutritional snacks, proper meals will be few and far between - think of those Ironwomen and their protein bars, water bottles, energy drinks.

And don't forget the proper kit and gear. You might not need the wetsuit and onesie, but something that will work for day and the evening reception (that you will never have time to change for), a fanny bag that you can wear even if you are on the podium - so you don't have to retrace your steps over the last few hours to look for the bag you left under a table somewhere. And the essential thick soled shoes (think miles of granite floors, with not a centimeter of carpet in sight.)

And at the end of your test of extreme endurance, you will have the great satisfaction of knowing that you could do it, you finished it, you learned some new things about yourself and your co-racers, and perhaps can help advise the next group of Ironmen and women, or Conference workers, on how to prepare, and hopefully enjoy, this once in a lifetime experience.

Taking Your Work Outdoors

You don't need to be a farmer or a tree surgeon to work outdoors. Even office workers benefit from a bit of fresh air and fresh perspective sometimes.

Today we did our team's mid-year performance assessment, and because it was hot, and there is construction right outside our office window, we decided to have our 2 hour meeting out back of the building in our break area under the trees. It was cool and fresh, and the context was so different that I cannot help to think that the unusual setting encouraged us to have a different conversation than the one we might have had in our more institutional office space.

As a bonus, we also got a new perspective on what work means for some of our colleagues. First we saw a co-worker walk by in a pair of chest waders and a long stick. Following that was another colleague in a long T-shirt and barefeet (and noticeably missing a pair of trousers). Before this blog post gets an X rating, I must say that (upon query) they were draining the bog in our natural garden (a beautiful wetland area with all native Swiss species). We enviously watched another work style in our office, one that happens outside more often than not - and what's stopping all of us from taking our work outdoors more often? Have a meeting? Need to have a different conversation? Take a walk!

"Thanks for the reminder – much appreciated!"

31 out of 40 workshop organizers prefer quick reminders two days before a deadline – or so my learning from last week tells me.

In preparation for a week of ‘Learning Opportunities’ during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, October 2008, I am in regular contact with 40+ organizers of workshops. All are busy people in jobs spread worlwide, offering to share their skills and build the capacities of others to use them.

Over the course of the remaining 4 months - as we put together an online application system for participants, prepare the official Congress programme, develop detailed agendas, collect biographers and supporting materials and make these available on the web – there will be a lot of communication between us. I need to make sure that they continue to cooperate and make my life easy. And I need to help them to help me.

Last Friday was our second deadline (revised titles and session descriptions please). I sent out the request and some guidance two weeks ago. Little back by Wednesday, so I had a decision to make. Sit tight, wait and - come Friday evening - send emails chasing all those who had failed to reply with an impassioned plea and the threat of exclusion from the applicants system? OR a polite, ‘quick reminder’ that afternoon to those i’d not yet heard from. Needless to say, I chose the latter and happily, moments later, in came responses: "Thanks for the reminder – much appreciated!" By Friday evening all had come flooding in. The lesson: help people keep to agreements – it feels good all round.

Games for 1000? Interactivity and Large Groups

Who created the "Wave"? Tens of thousands of fans working together to send a message to their team, standing up, joining the action, adding their voice? If a seated stadium of 50,000 people can be interactive, then a Congress of 8,000 can be too!

Well, we might not be able to do the Wave at our Congress, but there are plenty of other interesting ways to involve those thousands of people in what is happening on stage, in the many smaller meeting rooms, and in the hallways.

Our expert facilitation team has been coaching session organizers in the last 6 weeks to help them define, design, and refine their 90 minute workshops for the upcoming World Conservation Congress. Let's see what kind of interactivity they are coming up with...

Facilitators, can you let us know, what kind of things are the teams creating that is different (from the standard panel session)? What are some of your ideas for creating interactivity in large groups? Write us a few lines in the comments section below - thank you in advance!

Creating the Climate for Change: Raising Your Response Rates

We learned something rather counterintuitive this year about response rates when communicating with a virtual network. Our unit coordinates an expert network of communicators and educators with over 600 people particpating around the world. This network from time to time is asked to contribute their thoughts in planning and decision-making, so their response is important. You would think that interacting with a network of communicators would be a breeze. As it turns out, it is, if you ask the right questions in the right way - therein lies the learning.

Every four years this network gets a new Strategic Plan, a process lead by a Steering Committee of 15 people and validated by the network. Our first message to the group in this process seemed simple enough - the Steering Commitee had identified 3 options for a tag line for the Commission - pick your favorite one. That message went out to 600 people and one week later we had, wait for it, 8 replies. That is a response rate of 1.3% - not statistically relevant. So we did not have our tag line.

Our next challenge was to get inputs to the Strategic Plan itself - a 25-page text document. How could we possibly get a better response rate on a dense document, when only 8 people answered a one-liner? Well, what we decided to do was to NOT send the whole document as an attachment to the group of 600 asking "Dear Commission Members, please find attached a 25-page document for your comments". If you really did not want comments, that would be a strategic way to do it.

Instead, we wrote a short email that informed people about the draft document and asked for volunteers to read it and give comments. Now this was a very different question, and demanded a different response. People needed to write us back first explicitly that they wanted to read the document, and would send comments. This extra step, effectively a commitment statement, proved to be important in terms of getting people's involvement. What they got back then was a personalised email from me with the document, instructions, and a sincere thank you in advance. This time our initial response rate was over 100 people (asking to read the document) and of those over 80 sent in their comments, which were extensive, thoughtful, and significantly strengthened that important document. The final response rate was 13% - it might sound low, but when it's you that's incorporating 2000 pages of detailed comments to a document, it is quite sufficient.

What's more - on page 13 of the document, in the middle of the page, we listed the three tag lines and noted that the Steering Committee requested Commission members to vote for A, B, or C. This time amazingly everyone wrote their vote into the document, and we have our tag line (and most importantly some new learning about) - Creating the Climate for Change.

Insights in Design: Team Retreats

Earlier this week we ran a two day team retreat for one of our largest distributed teams. Attending the retreat was both the technical and admin staff, as well as HQ and outposted staff. That was objective 1 - giving people a sense of interconnectedness in a non-intact team, and at the same time explore the team's diversity.

The retreat also needed to bring up and sensitively deal with issues of growth and managing a larger team. In the last few years, due to their successes, the size of the group has more than doubled, with little turnover. As a result, some of the team practices (communication, decisionmaking, trust building, everyone doing everything him/herself) that worked before with a small, tightly knit team, are no longer as effective with a larger, more functionally diversified group. That was objective 2 - air some growth and management challenges in a way that everyone can feel heard and then make some decisions about how to change them.

Finally, the group needed to think together about what's next. So they needed to tap back into their goals, and also explore together what they needed to add or significantly strengthen in their current practice. This was more programmatic, however, they needed to bring the admin side of the team along so that any decisions made were completely operational. That was objective 3 - consider how to add some functionality to the group, but do so in a way that was realistic and feasible, and fit within the operational system they had and were building (or change it to fit).

With a mandate like that, and two days to work with, we had our work cut out for us. However, we did it, and the team was very happy with the results. Here are a few things we learned that worked:

• We used systems thinking tools to help to guide and structure the discussions. People were delighted to use these new tools, which when applied to the operational aspects of the team's work, were able to integrate and value the inputs of everyone there, from both the technical and administrative parts of the team.
• The systems tools created a safe space. The diagrams helped to externalise the conversations, so that people were able to focus on an object, diagram, that depersonalised issues. People discussed trends and cause and effect: pointing their finger at the flipchart diagram and not each other.
• The tools are iterative, so they break down what seems like a process about everything into a set of logical steps and bitesize pieces. Also because of this structure, there was no anxiety from what might otherwise be a messy process. The tools gave clear boundaries to the discussion.
• Finally, the format of working in parallel on a number of different operational issues allowed people to focus on the ones for which they had the most passion, yet still contribute through the summaries and sharing to the work of other groups.

The report that resulted from the event included the diagrams and captured the creativity of the process for next steps. It was actually a good read, a quality that all workshop reports should have. And it has spawned a number of processes around the outcomes that is making this team one of the leaders of change in our institution.

Learning Lessons from Systems Thinking

I see this pattern over and over and over again. What can one do about it? One potential intervention point is to set a standard/policy on the "attention per project" so that when there is not enough time to do it properly, you do not accept it, thus maintaining quality work and therefore reputation (so in theory the project pipeline never dries up). GTD gives us more time to squeeze more in. Zero-in box helps us comfortably manage our email blizzard. Systems helps us identify problematic patterns and potential leverage points for change. Where can one go to learn "How to Say NO" ?

Appreciating Heroism For the Future

"The new Al Gore presentation on climate change at Ted’s talk is an inspirational, bright and optimistic approach worth a look at" wrote Nicole Thonnard Voillat - and so I did online at World Changing.

I really appreciated his comments on optismism being not about belief but behaviour which goes beyond our choice of lightbulbs to active citizenship in our demoncracy, mobilizing political will and resources. Stimulating a hero generation with a sense of generational mission is an exciting challenge that I would like to hear more from him on - in terms of what he thinks it will take to do this. Reframing the 'terrible burden' on our generation as a fabulous opportunity which we should respond to with profound joy and gratitude is an interesting start...

I wonder how we might use appreciative inquiry to explore examples of past hero generations and learn about how best to leverage another for the future? Thought provoking. What do you think?

Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?

My hopeful answer to this is "well, maybe." I get my evidence from a recent experiment that I conducted quite by accident.

Two month ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test and felt the results were accurate (self-validated). The instrument I thought had captured fairly my preferences on the four dichotomies. One of my preferences at that time was "P" - Perceiving rather than Judging. Perceivers are spontaneous, go with the flow, they make lists and lose them, they complete tasks at the last minute or late rather than well in advance.

Well, in today's world with no speed limits on the information highway, this particular species is likely to get run over. So I have been working on this. One month ago we invited David Allen to come and address our staff on Getting Things Done, an approach which (check previous GTD tags) provides a system to help you keep alive in the organizational jungle. Many of us after his seminar have adoped this appoach and it appears to be working.

Now back to my experiment, yesterday I went to an MBTI training course and for that I had to take the instrument again, just a few months after my first test. I was amazed at the change. Everything was the same, except that my preference on the "outerworld orientation" dichotomy moved from Perceiving to Judging - with unfamiliar words like planned, structured, decisive, scheduled, makes lists and uses them, as descriptors.

I can only imagine that this difference in such a short period of time could be influenced by the GTD experience, which is still very fresh. Hopefully this change will last. I wouldn't want to lose any of my spontaneity, and at the same time a little more structured follow-up and information management would not go amiss. Maybe just half of the spots could change? Would I then become a GMO? (GTD-Modified Organism?)

(Preparing) The Greatest Show on Earth

What do you see when you go to the circus? You see the amazing daredevil acrobatic teams, the perilously high tight rope walkers, the perfectly synchronized performing ducks... What you don't necessarily see is the lifetime of concentrated training the acrobats have undergone, the many hours a day the jugglers practice, and the fact that the lion tamer is actually missing a thumb.

The incredible amount of preparation that it takes to pull off a thrilling, memorable and meaningful performance is what my organization is experiencing right now in the preparation of its quadrennial global Congress. Expectations of 8,000-10,000 attendees have raised the stakes for putting on a really exceptional event. What that means for us is not only getting the logistics right, but also engaging the audience - our colleagues, partners and visitors - in many different, exciting ways.

Some people might be born with the ability to juggle flaming torches while standing bareback on a cantering horse (in sequins no less.) For others, it takes some practice, preparation and a good deal of help. The same is true for our events. So, for the first time at a Congress, we have engaged an international team of professional facilitators as advisors, who will work with 54 of our colleagues leading on different Secretariat sessions. This facilitation team will help the leads to think through their events and make suggestions as to interactive tools and techniques that they might use to get their messages across and novel ways to engage the audience. Whether it is Open Space Technology, Conversation Cafes, or newly designed large group games, the goal is to see how we can break through the fourth wall between those on stage and those in the bleachers, to reach them, touch them, challenge them, learn from them, and engage them in our work.

Because this is rather experimental, we are going to capture our learning throughout the preparation as a part of the M&E process. So more will appear on this blog on the Congress Facilitation Advisory Team and its work to help us prepare our Greatest Show on Earth -suddenly I'm craving popcorn.

The Peak of Productivity: GTD

When do you have a burning desire at 9pm on a Sunday to go into your office and sort through your mountan of paperwork for 3 hours? When you feel like you are, for the first time, actually Getting Thing Done.

After a visit and full day seminar from David Allen last week, creator of this popular approach to personal productivity, our office has been hit by the intense need to Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do. When I started my organizing streak last night, I didn't have to create my own categories of lists, I simply copied my colleague's, who had spent all day Thursday and Friday setting up her own system. We had 54 staff members attend the seminar - I heard that there was a run on folders, and that people were scouring the basement for old in-trays and bits of filing cabinets the rest of the week.

Now I have my own mind sweep nearly complete; that is, getting all of those undone things that David refers to as work on a set of next action lists, from performance assessments to paying my cafeteria tab. And when I can get over the intense sense of urgency of doing all of those things that I had actually forgotten, I hope that my weekly review will free up some physic ram so that I can get on with some of the creative things on my Someday/Maybe list.

Sound like a new language? It might be for some, but it's not a foreign one and not hard to learn. It's based on practices you do regularly, but puts them together in a more effecient, and systemic way. And it seems to really appeal to people. One of my colleagues said that in the first 30 minutes of his seminar she had decided to adopt the GTD approach, because it was simply better than the one she was currently using. Another colleague worried about the extra time investment asked David at the end of his seminar, "Doesn't using GTD take a lot of discipline?" David responded with "Yes, absolutely, but anything takes discipline before it becomes a habit. Brushing your teeth and taking a shower regularly took enormous discipline (or disciplining) when you were a kid. Until it became a habit. Now it feels bad not doing it. You need to get to that stage with this practice as well. "

Feeling on top of things is the peak of work/life balance. I can just about see the top of my paper mountain. It's bright and beautiful up there. When I get there I am going to shout from the top of it, "It works! Labelmaker anyone!?"

Facilitator's Notebook: Were You Listening?

The start of any workshop normally includes a tour-de-table where people introduce themselves and say a few words about their expectations and why they are there. If you are going around in a circle, you can figure out how long it will be until your turn. Then you calculate how many people you can actually listen to before you need to think about what you are going to say. At that point you tune out in order to come up with something that sounds interesting and intelligent, until after your turn. After your turn, you replay your intervention a few times in your head to convince yourself that it was a good contribution and made you look good. Then you tune in again. Out of the 20 or so participants, you ended up hearing about half or less.

As a facilitator what can you do to get people to register the interesting information about each other that will start to connect them at a personal level, allowing you to move the group towards more and more powerful, creative, potentially intense and exciting discussions? People need to feel comfortable with the other group members for that; it can be a bit risky in the group process sense. How can you catalyze that process?

There are of course many ways to do this. What we did last week, with a small group of people who will be working together for two years on a project at a distance, was to give them a team quiz.

No one said that you had to listen the first time, maybe some of them did not. However, the next morning after their introductions on Day 1, they received a pop quiz about the team to complete titled, "Were You Listening?" Match the person to their musical instrument (who played the bassoon, the piano, the guitar?) Who studied philosophy in university? Which two people do not speak Portuguese (because almost everyone else in this group does)? Who coined a well-known conservation term? Who started their career in the civil service? Ten multiple choice questions captured some of the interesting things about this new team, taken from the things that they had said about themselves in the previous day's introductions.

If they did not pick it up the first time, then this was the second opportunity to absorb the information. And this time, going through the answers of the quiz and discussing them further, everyone was listening.

Help Fight the Curse of Knowledge!

Apparently the biggest impediment to effective communication is knowing too much.

This is according to Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck (they have a fantastic blog as well). They cite an experiment in their book conducted at Standford in the 90s. The experiment took pairs of people, one designated to be a "tapper" and the other a "listener." The tapper tapped out common songs (like Happy Birthday) on a table and the listener had to guess the song. Success rates were very low, but more significant was the result when the tapper had to guess whether or not the listener would be able to guess the song. It turned out that the tapper got the message across 1 out of 40 times, but they thought they were geting it across 1 in 2. They had the song going through their heads so clearly that they could not imagine that the other person could not guess it.

This would make a great communications game, to show why, sometimes, scientists don't get their messages across in presentations; or why technical people don't always make the best trainers.

Last week I attended a workshop on Systems Modelling, a basic course. It tooks us from the basic concepts and diagrams to simple modelling (simple I would say is a bit of a misnomer here). I have been conducting training in systems thinking for over 10 years now and thought it would be useful to actually take it through to the computer modelling part. I realise that my past success as a system thinking trainer could be partly due to the fact that I have been rather unburdened by a lot of in-depth knowledge of mathematical models and systems dynamics. Systems thinking diagramming tools like reference mode diagrams (or Behaviour Over Time graphs), and causal loop diagrams, are wonderfully useful all by themselves.

Well, one day into my course, I had learned a couple of new diagramming conventions and did my best to model ipod purchasing, wolf re-introduction into Scotland, and household budgeting. Not too hard when the instructor gives you the figures and units (like wolf/month) and you just pop them into the programme, I managed to keep my head above water. However, Day 2 was an eye opener in complexity (and a lot of digging around in the far back of your brain for mathematical logic). The instructor explained things as though everyone in the world would intuitively know how to normalise their variables so their units would work out and avoid unit errors. And he would add variables in a minute to make sure this happened and his units would be A.O.K.

The curse of knowledge implies that you can't unlearn something, so you cannot easily put yourself in someone else's uninitiated shoes. However, I think one can work on this - on tapping into the pre-expert knowledge state - through constantly embarking on new learning endeavours. If you think about it, you probably do learn something new every day, (perhaps not as new as modelling the population dynamics of Scottish wolves.) That experience gave me hours to tap into what it feels like to be in a pre-knowledge state.

In some ways, being a constant learner can help you be a better communicator and trainer, because no matter how much knowledge you have in some areas, you have a recent experience being on the other side of that knowledge exchange, and can apply that experience to the delivery of your message. Noticing your learning and what it feels like should be able to help us fight the curse of knowledge.

People Buy Adjectives

We were working on a one-page proposal this week, the kind that is going into a board meeting for a yes/no answer, and tinkering around with the text. Wanting it to be minimal, I remembered a presentation I heard by Interact, a UK-based management training group that uses theatre techniques and real actors for training. They gave a demonstration workshop to the Geneva Learning Community a few weeks ago.

The lead trainer, Ian Jessop, a director and producer himself, spoke to us about linguistic audits, that is analysing the language we use and being mindful of how we use words and what they say to people. Here is what he told the group. Nouns are facts, they are not emotional. They are most appreciated by accountants, doctors and biologists who deal in things - dollars, ulnas and rattlesnakes. Verbs however are action oriented, future oriented and have movement and motivation. Activators like verbs.

Adjectives are about emotions. They help to define, tell stories and paint pictures and help people understand and follow. Adjectives are the things we buy. People don't buy a car, they buy a fast, candy apple red sportscar, or a safe car. They don't buy chocolate, they buy the richest creamiest, darkest chocolate.

So we decided, we were no longer talking about a workshop where participants would talk together and identify solutions. Now we were talking about an interactive, outcomes-oriented workshop that would feature peer-learning and generative dialogue, and build relationships among motivated, committed people working towards long-lasting outcomes. It's all still true. Hopefully that sells.