Facilitation Lab Podcast
171 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago -Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast, where Douglas Ferguson, founder of facilitation academy Voltage Control, speaks with Voltage Control Certification Alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. These discussions embrace a method-agnostic approach, so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences.
This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative. If you’d like to join a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab Community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.
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Episodes
Episode 99: Knowing How To Speak Up
June 07, 2022 16:49 - 52 minutes - 72.3 MB“Audiences don't want to see you fail. They really are on your side. They want to see you succeed. When you get uncomfortable and nervous and start that spiraling, they feel embarrassed for you. They want to save you. They feel horrible, and it makes them very uncomfortable. If you think of any situation you've been in, I'm sure that you've ... If you've ever seen a nervous speaker, you really feel for them. But when it's us up there, we forget that. We think that everybody's against us and ...
Episode 98: Know Your Purpose
May 30, 2022 19:42 - 40 minutes - 55.2 MB“So first of all, make very clear what the purpose of the team is, or the organization. What is it we're trying to accomplish? What's our big goal? What's our mission? Where are we going? Unless that is stated clearly, the people who are in the team won't be able to line up together. So think of a rowing crew in a rowing boat, and they don't know where they're going and nobody is setting the pace. They're going to have difficulty functioning well, and we have that kind of problem in many tea...
Episode 97: Like-Hearted Before Like-Minded
May 23, 2022 14:22 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MB“So I would design all this stuff and if something went wrong, they always blamed the people. And I'm like, this is interesting. So whenever I went to the people side, it was very different to see that in essence, we create the environments for the people, especially if we're in the HR or the leadership spaces. And so how people didn't look at that, they didn't look how it was designed. They did not look at how it had been engineered or crafted. Is, is this actually meant for a human to suc...
Episode 96: Moving Forward With Grace
May 16, 2022 15:48 - 33 minutes - 46.5 MB“I'd say the feminine is the magician, and the masculine is the warrior. And those are two archetypes that are used in union and different types of readings that I've read of archetypes. So with that, I would say that this article lays out that there are about 28, I believe 27, 28 leadership competencies, and it shows the feminine expression and the masculine expression. And how that ties to my work is that I sometimes will be coaching someone, and I'll notice that they are sharing some of t...
Episode 96: Unlocking Innovation With Networks
May 16, 2022 15:48 - 33 minutes - 46.5 MB“I think that's whn build a hypothesis, they can do some experimentation, they can share back on that, they can learn from it, and they can pivot, it takes a leader who I think is comfortable with that.” -Leah Fleischner In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kate Leto about her experience in Product Management, Organizational Development, and Personal Development industries that has taken her around the world. She shares how self-awareness can help make ...
Episode 95: Org Development From The Inside Out
May 10, 2022 13:15 - 46 minutes - 63.7 MB“I think that's where the leadership development side of the work that I've been doing really comes in. Because to be a leader within an organization that encourages autonomous teams with missions and encourages cross-functional work and a more decentralized structure, they need to feel comfortable and confident themselves. A lot of organizations I've seen will have that command and control kind of traditional hierarchy, and a lot of that is because that's what the leader has experience in an...
Episode 96: Org Development From The Inside Out
May 10, 2022 13:15 - 46 minutes - 63.7 MB“I think that's where the leadership development side of the work that I've been doing really comes in. Because to be a leader within an organization that encourages autonomous teams with missions and encourages cross-functional work and a more decentralized structure, they need to feel comfortable and confident themselves. A lot of organizations I've seen will have that command and control kind of traditional hierarchy, and a lot of that is because that's what the leader has experience in an...
Episode 94: Unlocking Innovation With Networks
May 03, 2022 14:30 - 43 minutes - 59.9 MB“ So we've been studying energizing ties for over 20 years now. And so we've found that people in organizations have a range of impacts on each other. At the one extreme are interactions we would call energizing. And I think we all kind of intuitively know the characteristics of an energizer. They help you tackle problems. They are kind of selfless in their willingness to help you. They're optimistic but not pie in the sky optimistic. And they act with honesty and integrity, and thoughtfulne...
Shannon Varcoe: Laughing With Everyone
April 25, 2022 13:42 - 36 minutes - 50.6 MB“Yeah. I think it's absolutely true. I think there are also really interesting things that happen with adults when it comes to playing of, why don't we? What's in the way of that? Is also really interesting to me too, when all those things that you're seeing are true, right? If it's as needed in our lives, why aren't we doing it? What is it? I think, from what I've found in facilitation, what holds people back from ... We think of play, I think, when we think of, as facilitators often we'll ...
Liam Martin: Operate Your Job
April 18, 2022 14:57 - 50 minutes - 69.5 MB“The spontaneity and the collaboration effect are definitely more prevalent inside of the asynchronous on-premise environment. However, do I want to give up all of that deep work for that type of spontaneity? Because a lot of the time spontaneity is a distraction in another... You call it spontaneity. I call it a distraction. I call it, okay, this is the seventh time someone's walked into my office today, and I actually just really need to get this email sequence written as an example. And I...
Jacques W Martiquet: The Fun Quotient
April 11, 2022 14:02 - 43 minutes - 60.3 MB“What I often share with people is that oftentimes at a party, we're doing things together, but separately. Like there's this story we tell ourselves like, "Oh, I'm United with everyone around me," but there's actually very little eye contact. There's very little touch. There's very little attention that we put on each other in these maladapted party environments. So yeah, creating more of that sense of unity and belonging and seeing each other is something that, yeah, I'm obsessed with. And...
Rodney Evans: We Can’t Plan Our Way Out Of Complexity
April 04, 2022 15:36 - 48 minutes - 67.1 MB“And to your earlier point about complexity, most of those kinds of models and titles and bands and blah, blah, blah, are complicated solutions that don't serve well in complexity. And so my job as an org designer is to say, what is the lightest most elegant, most intuitive solution that equips us to navigate complexity rather than what is a complicated and over-engineered solution that doesn't actually do anything to cut through complexity, it's just an exercise that we have to go through.”...
Sean Harvey: Warrior Compassion Energy
March 28, 2022 14:43 - 36 minutes - 50.6 MB“I think we're going to be as vulnerable as we're comfortable or as vulnerable as we're aware. To be a leader today, I think to be able to be vulnerable, to model vulnerability, we still have to be aware of our own stories, and what are we comfortable sharing of our own stories? What are we comfortable sharing of all parts of ourselves? In writing, my book, one of the things that came through loud and clear, is it's one thing for me to be vulnerable with my employees, right? But one place th...
Yasmine Morrison: Jobs 3.0
March 21, 2022 17:29 - 34 minutes - 47.7 MB“We're now entering the fourth industrial revolution, and I think this is really where Jobs 3.0 is happening. And if I had to describe it in one word, I would probably say fluid. It's a much more fluid model, and it comes down to all those different things we touched upon. It's the global citizen, it's the role of the office. It also comes down to your background in education, how that role will play, and these new structures of DAOs, and the way you are being compensated. One thing as well...
Nicole Richard: Embracing Facilitation Techniques
March 14, 2022 13:50 - 32 minutes - 44.9 MB“Yeah. I think the facilitative approach to leadership it's all the good things about leadership like bringing active listening skills to a group, being able to encourage and generate participative discussion and groups. Help stimulate creative thinking through different brainstorming and idea generation processes. Help people work through different problem spaces. Being able to draw out the opinions of people in objective and non-judgmental ways, be able to create that psychological safety....
Lauren Green: Born Into Facilitation
March 07, 2022 16:33 - 40 minutes - 55.4 MB“So the hypothesis is if facilitation were a wider skillset for more people, would we have better meetings, better, more intentional meetings, and better conferences and events? And I think it's a good hypothesis, but it's making a lot of assumptions. Because it makes the assumption that people actually know that they have a gap, which means you have to make them consciously incompetent to go back to that. And how do you do that? How do you say, "Hey, this conference kind of sucks? Can we mak...
Phil Balagtas: The Future Of Futures Thinking
February 28, 2022 16:37 - 51 minutes - 70.3 MB“It's nice to have someone who is an expert in social behavior, right? Anthropologists, historians, scientists are great UX designers, are great UX researchers. There's no real difference in futures thinking. I think one of the myths that we're trying to dispel is that futures thinking is not this whole other or body of practice like service design isn't a whole other body of practice. It's still designed, it's still systems thinking. They just have some different tools such as a service blu...
Denise Withers: Storytelling For Problem Solving
February 21, 2022 16:02 - 40 minutes - 56.1 MB“I firmly believe that culture is essentially just a collection of stories that define how we think and how we behave. In a very simple organizational example, if you're sitting in a meeting and somebody speaks up to question what their boss says and their boss tells them to shut up, that's a story that everybody's going to remember, everybody's going to file away in their own story database and that story is going to define the way they behave and it's going to influence whether or not they ...
Tricia Conyers: Building The Organizational ‘Change’ Muscle
February 14, 2022 17:28 - 47 minutes - 65.7 MB“Why does change fail? There are so many reasons why change can fail. I think you could pick from anything. When working on change, change is very much a journey. It's a reason why people call it a journey. The word journey symbolizes a lot of things. It symbolizes the up and downs that you're going to go through, the fact that it's not just going to be smooth. That it's going to have challenges along the way. That it's going to take time.” -Tricia Conyers In this episode of Control the Ro...
Reagan Pugh: Stewarding The Emotions Of The Room
February 08, 2022 14:49 - 37 minutes - 51.3 MB“What I learned when I shifted from acting to consensus building and facilitating is, you've got to let go of the idea that people are there for you and you've got to let go of the idea that you're the most important person in the room, that the show's about you, but there's still a similarity around what it means to steward the emotions of the room. And I still carry that from the theater days. And I believe that a good facilitator is acutely aware of the energy in the room and is constant...
The Way Of A People Nerd
January 31, 2022 20:00 - 38 minutes - 53.3 MB“When I first started facilitating, I was of the mindset that getting anything out of that meeting was better than getting nothing out of it. They were going around the room almost trying to show everybody how smart they were, by rehearsing various things and saying this, that, or the other, and I cut that out. I was like, "Hey, let's get to what we agree on quickly so that we can talk about what we disagree on." It was as simple as time boxing people, to say, "All right, hey, look, you two ...
Warren Berger: Building Cultures Of Inquiry
January 24, 2022 16:06 - 44 minutes - 60.8 MB“Neil Postman, and Neil postman said, "Children enter school as question marks and they leave and as periods." And I love that, and I think what he's saying is, they're coming in full of wonder and then they're coming out less full of wonder. So I felt like I want to tackle this issue in some way, and so what I've been doing is going around to schools and just talk about some things maybe that could be done to create an environment where children are going to be more likely to raise their h...
Laura Melchor McCanlies: Giving Your Teams Opportunities To Experiment
January 18, 2022 13:51 - 40 minutes - 56 MB“ I ask the team because I don't want to be imposing too much. Because I'm really having so much fun because I like improvisation and creativity. And they tell me the thing that they like a lot is when we bring people from other groups. And the reason is, that we understand the meaning of why we are doing certain things. Especially, my peers, they come and talk about their expertise, why they love what they're doing and how it works in the organization. How it impacts the organization, right...
Hassan Ghiassi: Dialogue Should Be A Habit Not An Intervention
January 10, 2022 20:38 - 35 minutes - 48.8 MB“I think that's also a big piece of what is interesting about holding sessions with groups is to see how people relate to each other. I think part of what I've noticed is that just someone hearing how someone else is feeling and if it matches them, they almost feel that they spoke it themselves. They don't have the need to validate it. They already feel that they belong to a group. I think belonging is a really important part of what we need in our lives.” -Hassan Ghiassi In this episode o...
Tricia Ratliff: Creating Space For Others To Succeed Together
January 03, 2022 17:58 - 42 minutes - 58.7 MB“At the time, I didn't even think of myself as working in an innovation lab, even though there were multiple innovation labs and all the teams worked in them. The way I perceived it back then is that we had a lot of freedom and that you were given a principle or a value, a problem to solve, and that it was the teams or your individual responsibility to really sincerely think about that problem and challenge yourself to solve it in creative ways, to reach out to people, to not be defensive. S...
Carlye Lauff: Prototyping Is A Mindset
December 20, 2021 14:53 - 40 minutes - 55.4 MB“I think one of my favorite quotes that I heard was this idea that a picture's worth a thousand words and a prototype is worth like a thousand pictures. And this idea that you bring this thing that you can interact with, you are going to have such a depth of conversation of feedback, you are going to just have this amazing conversation and learn so, so much instead of just showing up to your client and saying, "Okay, let's talk about it." Right?”-Carlye Lauff In this episode of Control the...
Jennifer Reil: The Rarity Of Truths
December 14, 2021 16:13 - 35 minutes - 48.6 MB“I think that it is challenging to bring our own thinking and our own mental models to the surface because we're not trained to do it. We're not really teaching kids how to be reflective of their own thinking and the role that their emotions play in framing up their conclusions and how they feel about the world. And so we don't have great capability in that. It doesn't mean we can't, there are certainly people who have developed and cultivated a deep practice of reflection and metacognition ...
Jenny Theolin: Be A Mirror For The Energy You’d Like To See In World
December 13, 2021 21:25 - 43 minutes - 59.5 MB“My approach on facilitation completely changed because I was really nervous going into a session where we basically had everybody sitting around in a circle and everybody had a chance to share their feedback and their thoughts to this really positive thing that we are doing. I think it wasn't until I had a more experienced person helping me navigate that. But also when I could connect my actions to what I was aware of that they were going through. So they were going through an experience t...
Darren Chait: How To Best Use Great People
December 06, 2021 21:03 - 32 minutes - 44.4 MB“I was at a conference last year pre COVID, and this lady came up to me at a conference booth and said, "Oh great. I just read your book 10X Culture and it's fantastic timing because we're about to redo our culture." And I had a little chuckle to myself, like she was about to paint her living room. Like you can just transform a company culture overnight, but as we both know, and I strongly believe to be the case, culture is really just the sum or the aggregate of the people in the organizati...
Terrence Metz: Be Kind, Not Nice
November 29, 2021 18:01 - 39 minutes - 53.5 MB“Rhetoric to us is the adjustment of ideas to people and people to ideas. Essentially that calls for what we refer to as rhetorical precision. We suggest that a facilitator be much more reliant on substance than style. In fact, we encourage people not to be charismatic because you want the focus on the content, not on the individual themselves. So clarity and precision demand a very sensitive tuning into rhetoric and what one is actually saying or asking.”-Terrence Metz In this episode of ...
Anna Jackson: A Space For Fallow
November 23, 2021 17:05 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MB“Fallow is such an eco-cyclical idea but I feel that it's very underrated. So I've been thinking about the value. We think about moving through creative destruction into periods of renewal, there is a space and time that is fallow. Things are sort of resting and they're quiet. And there are different ideas and different sorts of notions or learnings that are sort of dormant in us. And then they come out at these times and you're like, well, that's been waiting to just emerge as this delight...
Matthew Reynolds: Crafting Your Equity Lens
November 16, 2021 14:15 - 40 minutes - 54.9 MB“ I wanted the classroom to be based on the fact that first and foremost, bring everything you got. Bring all aspects of who you feel and think and believe yourself to be, because we're all constantly forming that idea, all trying to figure out who our authentic self is. So through that, I started to focus more on creating an actual pledge for each of my class periods. So instead of saying these are the rules, I had my students help create community in that particular class period and what t...
Bre Gentile: What To Do After You Listen
November 08, 2021 20:45 - 36 minutes - 49.9 MB“One of the most common things that I'm hearing is, ‘thank you for sharing’. It drives me nuts because there's a big part of me that is just like, there's no ‘thank you’ needed. I didn't share that for your gratitude to be received. I shared that because it was on my mind. And so I think what I fear is happening is we're starting to have this conversation about let's listen. Let's just take time to listen. Without having been trained on what to do after you hear things. And I don't know if...
Brian Sullivan: Healing Broken Teams
November 01, 2021 19:57 - 37 minutes - 51.7 MB“I think one of the things that is unfortunate about design thinking is it gets a little bit of a bad rap in that people don't see a practical application of it. And I think if you can strip away some of the aesthetics and strip away some of the language, but there are practical applications, I call it, we have to be practical and tactical because we can really drive a lot of change in our organization by doing that.” -Brian Sullivan In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure o...
Gregory Galle: ‘Being’ In A Different Way
October 25, 2021 21:49 - 46 minutes - 63.3 MB“We spend a lot of time figuring out how to dismantle people's ideas. How to poke holes in them. Critical thinking is supposed to be critical, right? Well, not always. Critical thinking sometimes is about how you combine things in new ways and create new things out of them. See what's possible. Not just how you deconstruct them and leave all the parts on the table.”-Gregory Galle In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Gregory Galle about his 30 years o...
Petra Willie: Developing Strong Product People
October 18, 2021 18:41 - 34 minutes - 46.8 MB“Every product leader needs to have their own definition of what makes a great product manager because there is not this one size fits all definition. We’re operating in so many different sizes and types of companies and organizations, so I strongly encourage the product teams to come up with their own definition.”-Petra Willie In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Petra Willie about her extensive experience developing product people and how her experienc...
Dana Publicover: Delivering an Exceptional Sales Experience
October 11, 2021 14:01 - 36 minutes - 50.4 MB“I really believe that anyone who has a business is a salesperson. You've got this far and you may not follow that traditional path. You may not be the guy in the polo shirt who's going to make 100 phone calls that day. But I feel like there's something to be said for people who have built their business and want to keep selling it and they have the tools to sell it. You can have these conversations.”-Dana Publicover In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with ...
Evo Heyning: Facilitating a Protopian Metaverse
October 04, 2021 17:19 - 41 minutes - 56.4 MB“To me the future of the public commons is the metaverse. And so, if you're hearing this word metaverse and you're thinking, ;What is that?; It is a digital universe. It has many planets and solar systems. The ecosystems of the metaverse might be like a crypto experience, or it might be a virtual world, or it might be augmented reality or smart glasses. These are all places where we come to collaborate, where we come to find each other, and where we come to figure it out. We need these place...
Madelon Guinazzo: The Consent of Self Care
September 27, 2021 15:00 - 30 minutes - 42 MB“The number one foundational principle as a facilitator is to create psychological safety, psychological security, emotional security in the room by informing people and letting them know what the expectations are upfront. So what is the agenda? What is the goal? What is expected of them? Because that helps people relax, when they know what I am supposed to be doing here? Because otherwise they're tiptoeing around hoping that they don't stub their toe on something.” -Madelon Guinazzo In th...
Todd Allmond: Factoring in The Mediators of Experience
September 20, 2021 14:11 - 39 minutes - 54.7 MB“Three-quarters of enterprise customers and around 67% of consumers primarily buy and compete on experience. And we kind of know that intuitively. Think about it, we pay extra for certain brands that we feel connected to. And it's one of the interesting things I've been talking more about. There's a great quote, not mine... "The best experience anywhere becomes the minimum expectation everywhere."” -Todd Allmond In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Todd ...
Paula Rosecky: Cultivating Cross-cultural Belonging
September 13, 2021 22:48 - 40 minutes - 56 MB“I think it's important to have silent time because each individual has something unique to contribute to the collective of the group. In order to not be influenced by what others are saying or contributing, it's important that they listen to their own thoughts or ideas or opinions or beliefs about whatever it is that is being shared, whatever we're trying to accomplish. So that you can have more variety, possibly more diversity, more genuine personal truth in what you're bringing to the tab...
Tim Beattie: A Future Forward in DevOps
September 07, 2021 13:57 - 35 minutes - 48.3 MB“To me, [DevOps is] a collaboration philosophy. It's an ideology that is all about breaking down silos and getting communication flows, working through an organization. Starting with dev and ops, that's where the name came from, but really extending beyond that. It flows through the whole organization, you taking that product mindset approach to everything, continuous discovery, continuous delivery, a foundation of culture.” -Tim Beattie In this episode of Control the Room, Tim Beattie...
Jeff Marple: Advocate For Your Customer
August 30, 2021 18:13 - 30 minutes - 42.5 MB“We really pride ourselves as somebody that can go into a company and put on the team's jersey, so to speak, and act as the advocate for the person who hired us. In order to do that, you've got to know your environment. So we listen a lot. We take a lot of notes. We ask a lot of questions. And we very much try to keep an open mind. In this episode of Control the Room, Jeff Marple and I discuss how innovation can sometimes appear taboo in the legal operations industry, and the opportunity t...
Teresa Torres: Embrace the Messy
August 23, 2021 17:23 - 40 minutes - 56.2 MB“That's what I nerd out on. I really love this idea of how...organizations create environments where they can push decision making down to the edges, so...they become a complex organism that's way better at engaging with the world and creating value in the world.” -Teresa Torres In this episode of Control the Room, Teresa Torres and I examine her diverse career journey centered in human-centered design, where she helps organizations embrace and optimize the complex dynamics of team decisi...
David Sibbet: Think Visually
August 17, 2021 13:33 - 49 minutes - 67.6 MB“ If you really listen to people and understand what's happening, if you illustrate an image that they're actually describing in their mind, [while] reflecting back maybe a sketch of what they were trying to say, people love it. People absolutely go crazy being listened to. ” -David Sibbet In this episode of Control the Room, David Sibbet and I break down his unique career path in consulting and facilitating visual meetings and how individuals can use visual elements to amplify their...
Van Lai-DuMone: Normalize Creativity in the Workplace
August 11, 2021 14:05 - 35 minutes - 48.7 MB“When we follow our curiosity...and take small steps towards that curiosity, that's how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.” -Van Lai-DuMone In this episode of the Control the Room Podcast, Van Lai-DuMone and I unpack the creative footprint that inspired her to dedicate her life’s work at worksmART to uncover creativity in every organization. Van shares her observations on the creativity disconnect she’s seen unfold in the corporate workforce and how teams can reignit...
Sarah L Collie: Facilitation as a Means, Not an End
August 02, 2021 22:22 - 46 minutes - 63.2 MB“There's a spectrum of teaching styles, and there's maybe the more traditional historical style of command style and sage on stage, all the way to a self-discovery. It appears to me that facilitation is really in that middle space between the command style and the self-discovery. [Facilitation] is about unleashing the collective power of a group.” -Sarah L. Collie In this episode of Control the Room, Sarah Collie and I chat about the influence facilitation has played throughout her profes...
Jim Scott: Design First
July 27, 2021 12:39 - 45 minutes - 62.9 MB“Design is an artifact, it's a thing, I believe it's also a process. I find that there's not a strong tie to people expressing and trying to describe the essence of the problem. To ask that question, ‘What is the essence of the problem we're trying to solve here?’ There's something deeper there and I think that's somewhat been lost.” -Jim Scott In this episode of Control the Room, Jim Scott and I examine the multi-layered career of design. We discuss the benefits of implementing the macro ...
Liya James: Create a Courageous Culture
July 20, 2021 16:22 - 33 minutes - 46.4 MB“Once people have the experience [to step] outside and they're willing...to create, to model, to look at the world with a new perspective and they realize, ‘Oh my, the power is not the things. The power is my willingness and my openness to interact with these things and give it my imagination.’” -Liya James In this episode of Control the Room, Liya James and I discuss the value of environment shifts in organizations to unleash creation and the significance of a creative & courageous minds...
Diana Joseph: The Critical Corporate/Startup Collaboration
July 12, 2021 22:12 - 43 minutes - 59.6 MB“We have two really strong capacities [as human beings]. One is about discipline, finishing things and staying aligned. ...We'll call that the discipline muscle. The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That's where we're going out on a limb, we're taking a risk, we're being creative, we're curious about what might happen if.” -Diana Joseph Diana Joseph is the Founder of the Corporate Accelerator Forum, an organization that builds a space for key relationships, stories, & tools in corpo...