What Could Facilitated K-8 Learning Look Like?

When it comes to facilitated learning, the teacher enables the most engaging learning possible. Although this might sound like jargon, here is just one simple scenario that characterizes why this is a huge game changer. Scenario: Everything students read in the first few formative years of reading is written by students in the next older age group. The older students write things like: personal health guidelines, technology instructions, imaginative fiction and how math as a language works. Older students are assessed on composition and actual user experience by the younger students. Younger students are assessed on reading use and moves to next levels of challenge.

This is a very simple, albeit incredibly disruptive innovation that does nothing but facilitate far higher levels of engagement and relationships across age groups and can continue on all levels of education. And it can apply as well to how onboarding and cross-training can work in organizations.

3 Ways To Surprise People With Their Own Creative Capacity

By the time we get into adulthood most people believe they are not creative. And for at least the last couple decades, the research is that being more creative does not happen on command or with incentives. People have creative potential whether they realize it or not. In the countless creativity and innovation workshops I've done over the years, it is always a delight to see people surprised by their own unleashed creativity. Here are 3 ways to surprise people with their own creative capacity.

1. Liberate their editors

People mute and limit their creativity by over-editing ideas instead of growing them. We now know that quantity of ideas literally leads to quality of ideas, even when we don't over-edit them. The questions we ask make a big difference in this. We help people produce more unedited ideas by asking them for ideas that represent the impossible, the wow and the crazy and ridiculous.

2. Build in breaks

Ideas need incubation space to grow. Getting people outside the building or outside their experience with anything helps new connections and inspirations percolate. Any kind of break works. The best engage as many senses as possible. It might involve watching hilarious videos online, snacking on favorite savory foods, listening to new music. Then bring people back to growing the quantity and diversity of ideas.

3. Encourage prototyping

Many best ideas come from action rather than discussion. Foster the small scale quick experiments of new ideas we call prototypes. Prototype success is measured by the amount of learning gained, not by specific expected results. Encourage at least a few iterations of small experiments to spark and refine ideas.

Fostering creativity is an art that we can develop and practice. These are just a few approaches of countless possibilities.

The entrepreneurship-innovation question

One of the emerging regional and local conversations questions whether, when it comes to growing economies, we should put a premium on growing entrepreneurs or innovators. Of course it depends on how these are defined. 

We can talk about entrepreneurs as those who start up new small enterprises, whatever their profit orientation. They fall into two categories: startups featuring existing value (replications) and startups featuring new value (innovations). 

We can also talk about startups that will create few new employment opportunities for a community and those that will eventually create many.

When it comes to innovations, people and teams can create innovations that result in new business ventures within or outside the communities from which they originate. From this perspective, a community can produce countless innovations that do nothing to grow local businesses, startups or employment and investment opportunities. And they can produce innovations that grow their economies of origin.

These distinctions become critical strategy considerations when any community ponders how to incubate and support the growth of entrepreneurs and innovators. The wise will choose wisely.

Creating High Engagement Non-Profit Boards

The basic features of traditional boards were simple. We had committes, rules of order, reports and votes. And in many cases, we had disengaged talent whose numbers logically decline with disengagement. It's a call for reinventing board architecture and culture.  These days, we're taking whole new approaches.

Boards as networks

We're looking at boards as resource and connection networks that can continue to grow and diversify without limits to size. The richer the ecosystem of support the better for the organization. We can still have a core governance group.

Governance as project incubator

People engage in projects that do real work with specific impacts. When decisions need to be made, the governance group can launch a project team to research and design the best options possible. The governance group engages the whole board network in identifying, resourcing and accomplishing projects that move the organization forward. These keep people, talents and assets well engaged.

Virtual participation

Using shared documents and conference calls, any number of board members can participate in the work of the board virtually, without the constraint of face to face meeting requirements. This is ideal for board members with young families and travel that makes weekday evening meetings a challenge.

Bias for diversity

Diverse talents and perspectives lead to more creative contributions by the board to the organization it serves. This means creating meaningful projects that can engage people across generations, perspectives, networks and business sectors.

These are just a few of endless ways to invigorate boards so they flourish.

Facilitation beyond meetings

The old idea of facilitation defined the role as a function of meetings.  We're now looking at facilitation in a more nuanced and rich way. The conversations, exchanges and progress we facilitate outside meetings is completely as important and often more significant than what happens in meetings. This is particularly true when we stop relying on meetings as the prime media for communicating, updating and working. High engagement groups use meetings as the least favored way to get things done.

And so, facilitation extends its scope to keeping up to date with what's going on in a group on any given day. It means connecting peoples and dots in real time. It means calling impromptu huddles and accelerating decision making when it needs to occur. It means keeping momentum on everything going on.

The case against presentations

When we talk about high engagement meetings of any kind, we have to question whether front of the room slide decks increase or decrease engagement in groups. When I was trained in presentations by mentors in my youth, there was an explicit expectation that a good deck controls the perceptions and interactions of a group. A good presenter took and kept control from the group. Groups would sometimes get time for 1-1 Q&As with the presenter. In larger groups, even the space is structured to limit the amount of peer-peer engagement that would obviously distract from the presenter's sense of control.

Presenters more interested in what they have to say than what the group thinks would present with eye contact predominantly with their screen and vaguely with the group.

In one of my more complex culture changing workshops with mid-level leaders in a large corporation some years ago, I did the workshop sans deck, as I became accustomed to in favor of engagement over control. One whole table of people came up to me at the first break and announced they have determined that I "am not a motivational speaker."

When I asked for details, they said they were accustomed to presenters with slides who "talked at them." I was the first one to authentically "talk with them" and engage them in powerful new conversations together. They went on with more compliments and the session was very groundbreaking.

People want to be engaged. We need to invent ways to more naturally share information, hopefully all before meetings, so our interactions can be more dynamic and authentically engaging. When any presentation has a few key takeaways, why can't people just share them. If they're visually complicated, they can be on a handout that enables rather than disables genuine conversation.

When we become less presentation constrained we even discover that others in the group can equally bring great insights and information to the table, demonstrating again that we are smarter together.

The leader-facilitator difference

The essence of facilitation is helping people come to their own conclusions, commitments and contributions. When we're facilitating, we're not deciding, assigning, thinking or concluding for the group. These are historically the domain of leadership. Making this distinction between facilitator and leader is crucial to recognizing the unique power of facilitation in creating the conditions for authentic engagement. People are authentically engaged when they become co-authors of their experience and outcomes. Facilitation shifts people's locus of control from an external to internal orientation. Only when people have an internal locus of control do they have sustainable passion, agility and commitment.

This dynamic curiously plays out when I hear leaders complaining that no matter how strongly they lead, they continue to be challenged with unengaged people. The core of their complaint is that they have never developed knowledge and skills related to the uniquely distinct work of facilitator. 

Without this distinction, leaders think they're facilitating when in fact they are doing no facilitating. Getting input and updates has nothing to do with facilitation. Having the final say has nothing to do with facilitation. These are the practices of leadership.

So ironically, and realistically, authentic collaboration cannot be led. It can only be facilitated. People fail to collaborate most when they are led. They collaborate well and naturally when they're facilitated.

The good news is that anyone who has learned to become a decent leader can easily learn what it takes to be a decent facilitator.

People Rule #1: Assume nothing

Some people have for historical reasons, developed a protective lack of transparency. This is a disconnect between appearance and experience. When some people seem not interested or engaged, they might be. People who appear sociable and agreeable might actually be otherwise inside.

The key is to assume nothing and check everything out. Good, simple questions can reveal a layer of feeling or intention just below what appears on the surface. With people whose non-transparency is deeply embedded in their narrative, trust sometimes creates space for them to be more congruent in their messaging. Whether or not we can actually influence  their trust levels, we can always offer questions to invite more authentic expression.

Jack's 3 Meeting Don'ts

I am often asked how people could have more productive and engaging meetings. Here are 3 ways to do just that.

  1. Don't have people share updates that could be shared prior in a shared document
  2. Don't have a whole group do the work that could be done by a small group
  3. Don't have people watch other people have a conversation they could have outside the meeting

Creating a culture of experimenting

Testing is the best antidote to decisions by assumption. Whether we work from assumptions because they're our own unquestioned beliefs or because they're the opinion of people with position or power, they are never as effective as question-based testing. Always be testing something. Always have some kind of tests going on for both improvements and innovations of deliverables and processes.

Test new variations. Always test two or more approaches different from the norm in order to drive richer learning.

Do short tests. Do only as much testing as it takes to establish a pattern under fairly consistent conditions. The shorter the testing cycles, the more options can test and the more tests you can do with the same resources.

The principle at work here is simple: growth is learning and learning is experimenting.

Strengths based collaborations

In strengths based collaborations, groups explicitly factor each person's strengths into questions about inclusion and assignment to make sure the right strengths are engaged and optimized at the right time. Strengths include knowledge, experience, skills, abilities and personal character qualities. Groups take time to get to know everyone's strengths. This can be done proactively at the beginning of new collaborations. They can also be done reflectively at the point of achievements. On the reflective side, we identify what strengths contributed to successes.

We can also name weaknesses which are simply poorly timed strengths. The research evidence points to the fact that high engagement and performing groups focus on strengths in ways that make their weaknesses irrelevant. For other strengths needed, we look to how else to include other people with additional and complementary strengths.

 

What kind of people run a $2 billion business?

I was reminded today that growing a multi-billion dollar global business takes a handful of leadership qualities that equally apply to any organizational space.  Include on this list things like humility, humor, empathy, courage and trustworthiness.

Leadership success, especially at the executive level is far more about who we are as people and less about our experience, pedigrees and track records. This is precisely why it's such a challenge helping graduate business students become worthy of executive leadership integrity. 

The 15 years I taught leadership to executive leadership graduate students proved this, that leadership is about character not just charisma or competences. And fortunately, my best students got it. This is what I revisited today.

Agile Canvas as holacracy

There is a fair amount of buzz about how Zappos is joining other innovative companies in the move from hierarchy to holacracy. This is the move a culture that divides people into power and responsibility haves and have-nots to one of distributed governance. It's what the wildly successful Semco organization has been famous for, highlighted by their recent 10th Anniversary celebration of the last time their CEO made a decision. The Agile Canvas methodology works from the principles of holacracy. The process engages everyone in sharing decision making and responsibility for the whole. It also becomes a key cultivator of a holacratic culture. Its design tends to make group decisions actually faster and at least as smart as those previously made top-down. It works from the principles that, with transparency, engagement and distributed accountability, people are smarter together and that none of us are as smart as all of us.

Holacracy is the next logical organizational architecture as intelligence becomes more distributed and agility is a prime requirement in complex adaptive markets and industries.

How many people does it take to make a good decision?

This conversation starts with inquiry into what "good" means. A good decision has 6 characteristics:

  • Realistic: How much it is based on data
  • Supported: How many influencers support it
  • Engaging: How well people commit to follow through on it
  • Timely: How timely it is
  • Impactful: How it impacts intended and unintended consequences
  • Agile: How adaptive it is as change occurs

Good decisions can be made by one person. They might also require a small group of 4-5, dozens or any number of people. There is no absolute positive correlation between the number of people involved and the potential for decision goodness. More people, time or resources invested in decisions do not guarantee better decisions. And demographic diversity does not guarantee creative diversity or learning capacity.

If anything, my bias is that as long as people use a smart process, the crafting of decision options is best done by a small group because small groups are reliably more productive than larger. Once good decision options are crafted, the final decision can be made by one person or any number of people into the thousands and millions.

In a smart process, four of the most important reasons (and principles) we use to include people are:

  • They have unique perspectives, questions, facts (diverse thinking makes us smarter together)
  • Their support or commitment will be crucial to decision follow through (people support what they help create)
  • They are willing to make their agendas and biases are transparent (creativity and alignment are functions of trust)
  • They are avid and agile learners (what we don't know is always more important the what we do)

A smart process is organized by questions. Any group that can create, collect and curate good questions and leverage them with all available resources within the time available will make good decisions.

 

Idea beauty contests

Before we had explicit methods for engaging people in collaborative and organic growth of viable ideas, we naively believed in the efficacy of idea beauty contests.  In these sincere albeit weird rituals, we would parade raw ideas on fashion runways of flip charts and then actually vote to decide on which of the many would be the losers. The cognitive parents of the losers were expected to sport beauty pagent loser smiles in mandatory celebration of the winners.

Even without the tons of research indicating that competition has only deleterious impacts on rich creativity and trust based collaboration, everyone understands that voting doesn't help ideas organically grow into viability.

Fortunately, we now have methods for growing good ideas together. In the countless idea sessions I've facilitated like these, the ultimately implementd ideas usually have little direct resemblance to the original batches of ideas that launch the rich idea evolutions. 

I don't remember the last time I supported any group thinking idea voting has any validity. Every group responds to my position with relief and their best ideas and authentic alignment ever. They especially like the fact that the ultimately implemented ideas were literally products of everyone's contributions and engagements. No losers, we win together or not at all.

Being strategic: The new conversation

The new conversation about being strategic starts with the interesting and powerful principle: Culture trumps strategy. Talk with organizations about what it means to be strategic and expect variations in perspective. 

For some it's disabling competition. This is getting into price, promotion, feature, distribution and value wars with the intent to mame and hopefully turn competitors into unemployment machines.

For others it's disruptive innovation. This is spinning out innovations that disrupt whole industries with the intent of making old ways irrelevant.

In another group, it's diversified agility. This is getting into businesses that cycle differently so overall numbers stay positive regardless of which businesses happen to up or down in any given economic and geopolitic.

These are three different approaches to strategy. There is a fourth approach that focuses on culture. They believe that the end of the strategic planning day, culture trumps strategy. They believe that the right culture is the root cause of the right strategy at the right time and that even the best strategy cannot be implemented in a weak culture.

They also believe that a flourishing culture is one thing that other organizations cannot replicate. Culture is a unique differentiator. And the good news is that we now have the science to support the building of flourishing cultures.

Transforming education through work

What if students learned through creating real time value to their communities? Think of all the ways students of any levels could learn through volunteer and paid work in their communities. They could learn how to learn through community gardens, making things through 3D printing projects, helping seniors, bringing literacy to parents and other students who have dropped out of schools, building and repair projects on houses, cars, appliances and other consumer products, delivering all sorts of services.

Through these they could gain learning, math and social skillets. Teachers become mentors and guides. The possibilities are endless.

30 Habits Of Dysfunctional Groups

Here are 30 things groups do to make collaborative conversations dysfunctional. These are also 30 things that don't happen when we use the Agile Canvas because the model is specifically designed to prevent these.

  1. Discussing and debating assumptions and opinions
  2. Allowing scope creep to prevent closure on anything
  3. Immediately discrediting and dismissing new ideas in their seedling stages
  4. Wasting time watching a few do work in front of many
  5. Getting updates that could be in a shared doc or email
  6. Creating agendas where items are subjects rather than questions
  7. Taking time to review what people received prior and failed to preview
  8. Allowing anyone to dominate or disappear
  9. Encouraging or allowing people to overcommit to anything
  10. Getting negative with or ignoring negative people
  11. Postponing possible action until we get missing resources or assurances
  12. Competing for the prize of being right or in control
  13. Assuming any one of us could be ultimately smarter than all of us
  14. Allowing things to get spoken without being recorded
  15. Having one person do the recording of others' contributions
  16. Using emails rather than shared docs to organize any kind of collaboration
  17. Treating confident opinions as facts
  18. Allowing people to assign tasks to others
  19. Trying to reach consensus without first establishing shared operating principles
  20. Allowing or encouraging the whole group to do anything that a subgroup could do
  21. Assuming that quality of decisions and quantity of people involved are correlated
  22. Defining realistic and unrealistic on our emotions, assumptions and beliefs
  23. Trying to create a plan that we don't have to change
  24. Excluding our networks as sources of new resources and support
  25. Allowing the same people to silo into the same assignments all the time
  26. Defining objectives in fuzzy, vague or ambiguous terms
  27. Doing planning from a belief that planning can create a knowable future
  28. Allowing people to take on tasks without conversation about estimated time requirements
  29. Hoping we interact with trust without taking time to explicitly build trust
  30. Spending more time talking about what we do know than what we don't

 

Moving from ambiguity to action

In most collaborations, we're moving from ambiguity to action. Ambiguity can manifest as any number of unknowns.

  • It's unclear where we need to go or how to get there
  • It's unclear exactly what resources we will have
  • It's unclear what could change as we move forward
  • It's unclear how our efforts will impact outcomes

There are five basic categories of action.

  • Researching our actionable questions
  • Making decisions & commitments
  • Designing and testing something new
  • Communicating and inquiring about something
  • Launching something

When groups aren't moving from ambiguity to action, they're stuck. Stuckness comes a variety of shapes and sizes.

  • Either-or and win-lose competitive debates to be right
  • Hoping someone saves the group from its stuckness
  • Complaining about whatever people believe victimizes them
  • Postponing action in fear it might lead to imperfect outcomes
  • Paralysis of analysis and other speculation based discussions
  • Skeet shooting new ideas until we have none left
  • Investing time in old conversations believing they can get us to get us to new outcomes

What these have in common is they each effectively postpone action. The only antidote to these are the five basic categories of action. Groups get unstuck the instant they take any form of action possible in the present.

 

What do we do with negativity?

It's been my experience that groups who skillfully respond to negativity tend to not get bogged down by it and in many ways can even benefit from it as a gift to be engaged rather than a problem to be fixed. In any group's experience, negativity can manifest in many forms:

  • Judgment, criticism, resistance, complaints
  • Frustration, blame, refusal
  • Defensiveness, rigidity, inflexibility, cynicism

People can become negative situationally or chronically for any of many reasons:

  • It often works for them, influencing others who they label as problems to be fixed
  • It sustains bonds with other people whose bias is negativity
  • It reflects accurately the victimhood and external locus of control central to their narrative
  • It's the only way they know how to be engaged with a group
  • It effectively prevents them from the risks of actually taking action

As legitimate as negativity can be, it constrains the potential of any group

  • It kills the emergence and growth of new ideas
  • It postpones possible action
  • It makes the group more learning disabled
  • It sustains the old conversations that have no power to inspire and engage positive change

In the practice of the Agile Canvas, we have three things to do with negativity when it comes up:

  • We validate the truth of any negative expression
  • We make sure any facts, questions and principles embedded in the negativity gets posted
  • We quickly invite people to volunteer any stories and contributions to sprints they can

This makes people feel included, respected and engaged. Many people are less negative when they feel these.