Ep. 69: Workshop techniques for dealing with egos

[00:00:00] Peter Maddison: Welcome to definitely maybe agile podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale.

[00:00:13] Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of definitely maybe agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock. How are you doing today Dave?

[00:00:20] Dave Sharrock: I'm doing very well, Peter. I often wonder if we started this and you weren't booming in, as you came into the conversation, whether or not it would change the discussion in some way.

[00:00:32] Before we kicked to the mics off, you were talking a little bit about workshops that you've been running. About the challenges of facilitating leaders. Whether you call them type a personalities. Opinionated, strong, individuals who have a strong view as to where things should go. How do you normally to tackle that?

[00:00:50] Peter Maddison: It's this interesting piece, isn't it. When you're trying to come to consensus on something and you're trying to do exploration, and find something out, and you bring all of these people into a room, what you don't want is it to become the HIPPO who makes the decision, right? It can't be the highest paid person's opinion. It's got to be a discussion. And to do that when you have some people in the room, who are potentially have larger than life personalities, they can often override those conversations. There's lots of techniques. And we were talking about some of them before we started, that we use to work through that and make sure that conversation flows, and that everybody gets a voice and that we actually all get to participate and to be heard. Some of the simple ones: we break people into small groups.

[00:01:34] Dave Sharrock: It's very easy to say, it's just these big characters in the room. But so often it's energy and enthusiasm. It's people who want to contribute and they have some they're excited about what's going on. And that energy and enthusiasm carries over to the point where they'll step on other people's toes, in terms of contributing or they're going to hog the limelight in some way. You started talking about some of the practices, smaller groups. That's one of the things. And Zoom and breakout rooms has really facilitated a resurgence in that sort of small group concept. Tell us a little bit about why that works. What's the power behind the power behind it?

[00:02:09] Peter Maddison: In a larger group is very easy to fade into the background, and not be the one speaking. If there's somebody else who's got a larger ego, or larger personality, they will tend to dominate the conversation. If you break people into smaller groups, then there's more opportunity for people to participate and have conversation. Especially if you're then giving them exercises and things to work on, because then they actually have stuff to do. That's the critical piece there is they're working together. Everybody in that smaller group then gets to participate and contribute to whatever it is that they're being asked to do.

[00:02:42] Dave Sharrock: I would add. There's two things that I would think of around group sizes. One of them is well worth pointing at is liberating structures. I mean, if people aren't familiar with liberating structures, go look at liberatingstructures.com. If you are familiar, you'll know, there are many, many examples of great patterns for working with large groups of individuals and getting collaboration and consensus.

[00:03:04] The one I lean on all the time is the "1, 2, 4, all pattern". Where you effectively start off a discussion with individuals and then pair people up and they merge their ideas. Then you pair the pairs up and merge those ideas, and then bring the ideas to the table. This is just a way of structuring that discussion so that everybody has input.

[00:03:24] I also wanted to mention just in this small groups piece, there's another little trick that master facilitators are very astute at using. When you do have a handful of individuals who are dominating conversations with their energy and enthusiasm. That is, when crafting the teams, random groups is great, and Zoom allows you to do that. But every now and again, put all of loud individuals, the energized individuals into one space and let them work in their area. That immediately allows all of the other groups to find their right level. It's one of those tricks that I would say master facilitators have the back pocket. They never make it clear that that's happening.

[00:04:05] Peter Maddison: Yeah. And great group structure is critical lots of ways. We talk about this in other places, even outside of the ego, just making sure that you've got a good distribution of different people. If you allow people to select what tables they sit at, they sit out with their friends. So they go to their tribes. In fact, I saw that this earlier this week, we had all of the products, all of the sales, all of the marketing, everybody sits at the same tables. So mixing that up so you can get those different viewpoints, is also great.

[00:04:30] Dave Sharrock: There are some great practices out there for doing that. That diversity and breaking up the usual tribes so that people are sitting with different people is great. I think it does depend on the purpose of the conversation. So it is driven by that preparation of exactly what you're trying to get to. Before I jump off of this one, we should define small. What's your definition of small in this case?

[00:04:51] Peter Maddison: So I look for, say four to six people in a group typically. Around that number. Keep it around there. That works best for allowing conversations still to flow. Obviously depending on the size of the overall group.

[00:05:03] Dave Sharrock: Yeah. I would even argue it doesn't depend on the size of the overall group. I think small four to six. If you end up with a group of eight, you're going to guarantee have two or three people who aren't engaged. So better.

[00:05:13] Peter Maddison: One of the other exercises I like, is borrowing from Mike Burrow's agenda shift. He has an exercise that he calls 15 minute photo, which uses clean language out of psychology. What's nice about that is, there's three roles in your little table groups. One person gets to be the coach. One person gets to be the client and the other people in the group are the scribes, writing down ideas. And the coach has a very strict set of questions to ask of the client. And they ask " what would you rather have?" And "when you have that X, then what happens". Because they're within that very strict framework, it generates lots of great outcomes, lots of great conversation, but it also helps defuse the one person overriding the whole conversation.

[00:05:59] Dave Sharrock: I do like that. We do a lot of facilitation, so this is an area we spend a lot of time thinking about and reading about. I think one of the critical things around good facilitation is understanding the structure of the discussions that you're creating. Sometimes we think say brainstorming or some sort of collaborative thing is intended to be structure free. This is one of the things I like about Liberating Structures. The intention there is to enable the right conversation through structure. Which I think is in quite a valuable mindset to have. The intention is not to put teams together and throw a bunch of post-it notes and marker pens at them and say, "collaborate". Sometimes you need a really clear, repeatable, well defined structure in order to get the best out of that.

[00:06:41] Peter Maddison: I think the other places at the end when we're trying to get to agreement, when we do the consensus confirming. I was talking about fist to five, and you was talking about Roman voting. The advantage of doing it this way is that the egos in the room aren't the ones you get to override everything else.

[00:06:57] Dave Sharrock: I was just going to say, at the beginning, you talked about how to get to consensus. And I think there's two elements. There's the collaboration. How do we facilitate great collaboration while allowing the quieter voices room to contribute. And then, the second piece is how do you then, having collaborated, reach a consensus on where to go. Again, if you leave it to the energized, excited voices, you often get taken away in one particular way. Things like confirmation of comfort, or a consensus across the entire room, Roman voting, fist of five being the two obvious ones that I think people are familiar with. Bearing in mind that isn't about everybody having to say. If you use the fist of five, which is holding your hand up and either having one finger up to say, I'm giving it one point. I don't agree. I'm not happy. Three fingers is I'm kind of in the middle. Four and five is I agree. And the key bit there being four or fives, we don't really talk to them. They're already on board and we're good to go. It's the ones and twos that we're going to talk to. How can the ones and twos move to a three so that they can buy into whatever that conversation is. I think that's important. It doesn't leave it as a sort of a round robin of "this is what I think is going on". It's a very quick way of identifying, can we move on or is there some element of this conversation we need to revisit?

[00:08:22] Peter Maddison: Yeah. Finding out if there are any concerns in the room and addressing them. So with that, as we wrap up today, are there any other pieces that you'd like to add to this?

[00:08:32] Dave Sharrock: I actually think we've covered quite a few. Because if I look at this one and just try and summarize back, I think one of them is recognize these are energized and excited, engaged individuals. Sometimes there's a bit of a negative connotation. We don't want to bring that to the table. It's not about that at all. The second bit is, the obvious place to start is small groups to facilitate conversation. Even if you've got a large number of people in the room. That small groups immediately reduces the problem to how four to six people might work. And we talked a little bit about some of the tricks that you can do there. Whether it's pulling on structured conversations, through Liberating Structures. Putting all of the energized and excited individuals into one group, whatever it might be. You mentioned a few practices and some of the structures there, which are super important. And I think the third thing that we would come out with is a consensus, some form of consensus across the group, in terms of moving forward to make sure that everybody's on board and there isn't any missed points that need to be addressed.

[00:09:31] Peter Maddison: Yeah. I think that's a very good summary of all of those different pieces. It's certainly a very interesting topic. I look forward to talking about this some more next time. With that, I'd like to thank you for the conversation today as always Dave. If people like to reach out, they can at feedback@ definitelymaybeagile.com and look forward to next time until next time.