💫  Hybrid @ MURAL 💫 Virtual Event

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Work is a space, not a place.

Hybrid @ MURAL is a virtual event 🎉  featuring thought leaders who believe work is a space — not a place — and are changing how organizations (big and small) think about hybrid work.

Tune in every Tuesday and Thursday as these experts share valuable insights and advice on thinking digital-first, including everyone, and staying in-sync with async.

Whether you’re back in the office or working remotely, Hybrid @ MURAL will provide tips and tricks to help you make hybrid work, work!

CLICK HERE TO SAVE YOUR SPOT

When: Every Tues/Thurs until Oct. 21

How: Join us virtually, online

Stay tuned! We'll be sharing transcripts from select sessions in this thread, so be sure to follow along.

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: Adventures in Collaboration (1/6)

Check out the conversation between Bill Johnston, Chief Community Officer at Structure3C, and Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at MURAL. Prefer to see the session? Watch the webinar recording here.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

 

Jim Kalbach: Hey, Bill. Thanks for joining. Why don't you tell folks a little bit about yourself? 

Bill Johnston: Absolutely. I'm a facilitator as part of my overall process. So, you'll get some novel facilitation advice potentially, but I'm a community builder at heart and in practice. For the majority of my career, from my big break, if you will, at techrepublic.com in the late nineties, to stints at Autodesk and Dell, I helped create online community programs, mostly for customers.

Essentially, creating networks of relationships between employees, partners, customers, and prospects for brands. And doing things that ranged from helping companies strategize around doing things from technical support to open source projects to ideation on future products and everything in between.

But at the end of the day, I'm a community builder, and about six years ago, I decided it would be really fun. I'd always wanted to go out on my own and try to create something, sort of like IDEO and Frog, but for the community space. And so I have a small agency, a small consulting firm called Structure3C, and we work mostly with large brands on large community projects and community with a capital 'C.'

So, what does ecosystem development look like? What does community mean in their context? What does it mean to their customers? And especially now, and I know that we'll dig into this, but what does it mean now? We're in kind of weird, interstitial space where everything has been mediated through screens and networks for the past year and a half. And so where are we on the map and where are we going with that? To me, that's the most interesting question right now. 

JK: That's great. And I think that's a good segue into the first topic that I wanted to dig into. You know, you hear about Zoom fatigue from the pandemic. And I think just in general, meetings can quite honestly be for a lot of teams and a lot of companies just drudgery and people probably feel that.

They live in a Dilbert cartoon sometimes or a scene from The Office. And here you are using the word "adventures" in collaboration. I love that word "adventure." And tell us what is an adventure in collaboration? How can collaboration be adventurous when our meetings are so terrible? 

BJ: Absolutely. For me, I feel like I sort of stumbled. I've been very lucky and I feel very grateful about the path my career has taken, but I always feel initially like I'm the odd person out for any organization. And I'm always like, "Hey, why don't we try this?" And I get a lot of blank looks and, "What are you talking about, Bill?" But then we try it and it's fantastic. And hopefully, we'll get into some of those examples. But for me, adventure is a quest or a process undertaken with some risk to achieve a result or to learn something that you couldn't in any other way and I think that that definition really is, you know per Wikipedia, right? The official source for anything online, you know. So, there's an inherent risk in it, but there's also this sort of very specific reward because you put in the effort. And so for collaboration, you said it, we're in the sort of standing wave of feeling like we're in some version of The Office, but now it's online.

Right? So, everything that we were doing wrong and was awful about in-person collaboration at work, the instinct was let's just do that online and it'll be fine. And we're clearly seeing it's not from Zoom fatigue. It's generally what it's called, but there's still real, very real, emotional and mental health impacts happening with this stuff now, right? I mean, another thing for me this year has been there's this element of compassion that we need to put out in the world. Compassion is motivation to alleviate suffering, right? It may sound way too big and grand, but I think that's exactly a key thread of what we're all trying to do here with these new tools and these new methods. How can we do this better? How can we take advantage of this massive disruption in this massive reset and some other circumstances that I hope we get into and take it as an opportunity to do things better moving forward.

JK: Yeah, that's great. Here at MURAL, we talk about imagination work and activating your imagination. I see that on two levels, one is using your imagination as the input to innovation to imagine a better future for your customers, but you could also use that back on your own teamwork.

When I hear about Zoom fatigue, the first thing that comes through my mind is you didn't re-imagine team collaboration. You just took your calendar and recreated it on Zoom. It's not going to work because you didn't use your imagination. I love the word adventure though because it implies a little bit about that imagination, but is also that risk-taking and it makes it actionable like, "Hey, hey, let's go into that and re-imagine how we're going to be working together, but in an adventurous way." 

BJ: Exactly. 

JK: Yeah. Okay, great. I'm glad we're on the same wavelength.

BJ: For me, adventurous, is a better word than fun, right? When I see “enjoy” on the Coca-Cola logo, it's always bugged me ever since I was a kid for some reason. Maybe it's the oppositional, defiant part of me, but it's like, “Don't tell me to enjoy it. I'll decide if I want to enjoy it.” It's the same thing with fun. Adventure is at least a call to action and it's something with a sort of higher purpose. 

JK: Well, the thing I love about it is that you don't necessarily know what the outcome is because you're going down a path that nobody's gone down before, metaphorically speaking, and you don't know, but you know what, we'll figure it out together. Right? So there's this kind of let's grab each other's hands. I love the compassion aspect of it because you're in it together. I really love that framing of new ways of collaborating around adventurous as well as compassion. When we were talking earlier, you pointed to the premier issue of Fast Company, which has this cover and says work is personal. Knowledge is power, right? Work is social as well, too. Can you talk about some of those aspects of it too, and maybe get into the compassion side of it? 

BJ: Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in Kentucky, right? I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. That was probably the first time feeling like the odd man out. When I first discovered Fast Company, I would grab onto like, "Oh, there's the Mondo 2000, you know, Cyber Culture Guide and, oh, there's Wired." Why are you paying six bucks for a magazine? I don't care. It's awesome. And Fast Company came out. It was just, it was incredible to me. Because it was a counterpoint to everything that I've learned today, which is business is adversarial. My first boss essentially said in any business relationship building, you need to understand this. He used colorful language that I won't go into here, but he was basically like, “There's a winner and a loser, and you want to be the winner as often as possible.” We've seen kind of as a country where that zero sum thinking has gotten us. So the whole, "Hey, there's a new way to do this. There's a new way of thinking. (P.S. It's enabled by the internet, by the network.)” That's sort of slowly deploying out across the world and we can change things. This is an opportunity to get under the hood of the car or whatever metaphor you wanna use. But there's a time where things are malleable.

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Hybrid @ MURAL: Adventures in Collaboration (2/6)

BJ: Culture is malleable. Rules are malleable and we can make change. I was so inspired by that, I just started bugging the hell out of anyone I could get to within the magazine. I wound up contacting Heath Rowe, who was organizing the first Company of Friends gatherings. I was able to set up one of the first Company of Friends chapters, which was their experiment with online communities in Louisville, Kentucky, around the time when I was at Tech Republic. Years later, I was able to actually meet Allen Weber, one of the co-founders and have him speak at one of the conferences I organized. A couple of years after that, I worked on some primary research around the role of purpose and online communities that AARP sponsored, oddly enough, and Allen was one of the advisors on that project.

There's this thread of Fast Company, at least early Fast Company throughout my career, I've just always loved. Let's take a second to look at this. 

JK: Those are great themes. It overlaps a lot with our thinking. In fact, a couple of years ago, we co-sponsored and co-founded a movement. I'll call it a movement and initiative, an open source initiative, called work forward. If you go to workforward.co, you'll see our main theses. We had a summit to kick off this initiative, and now we have quarterly meetups and things like that.

We say, "Work is personal, work is social, and work is human." And this is 25 years after the Fast Company cover that you pointed to. What happened in those 25 years? If we knew that now, why are we still saying the same things? And we haven't gotten there? What happened? 

BJ: I think part of it is generational. I think part of it is what Nilofer Merchant calls the kind of middle management air sandwich. I think incentives have been misaligned. I think there are a number of, if you will, comorbidities, right? Because I have that question all the time. I mean, for my work, in my area, online communities, we're in the fourth wave thinking. These are very revolutionary things in a very revolutionary mindset, but why is it not sticking? When we have these cycles, are we landing in a place and making forward motion or is it a complete reset? I scratch my head about that with Fast Company, with the Cluetrain Manifesto, and all the things that were espoused there and all the movements that fell out of it.

When I start to worry too much about it, I check in with my former boss, Jim Cashel, who's a great guy. He is the chairman of Forum One Communications and helped found and run a ton of the conferences that I alluded to in my prep work and Jim's arc of quality human collaboration bends towards the more human, so don't worry, we're making progress. But in the moment and especially looking back, it's frustrating.

I guess it's sort of a weasely answer, but I have faith that we're making progress. When you start to look at it in a very black and white way and take score, it can be discouraging. Who knows where we are with navigating COVID, but I think there are a couple of big trends pushing everything forward.

One is: we're 60ish percent of the way toward wiring the world. We're over halfway toward giving everyone access to broadband internet, which I think is huge. There are some very huge risks in that, but I think that will be a huge equalizer if done well for the majority of the world, right?

There's a sort of cultural disruption wave that comes on top of that, and as we see new generations entering the workforce, I'm encouraged by the process we see. Gen-X pushed it forward to a certain degree. We believe Millennials pushed it forward, and I'm speaking grossly generally, but they changed work habits and expectations.

Gen Z is hitting the workforce now. So, I think every generation kind of carries it forward in their own way. 

JK: Gotcha. Yeah. A big fan of Nilofer Merchant, by the way. I love the concept of the air sandwich. Yes, we have been making progress, but it's kind of the long nose, right? If you look at innovation, excepted, or very often has this long nose, and here's what I think and why your identification of now is the time, because there's an opportunity. I think the air sandwich was popped a little bit, it was burst a little bit by the pandemic. I think a lot of the myths and just the mindsets that were holding us back, we kind of disrupted all of that during the pandemic. We said, "Oh, wait, I can manage teams at a distance and people are productive when they're at home." So I think our opportunity now is to kind of take that best practice that came out of the pandemic and actually do something with it. When we say we're going back to the office, we might physically be going into a building, but we can't go back to the old ways of working, right? I just want to hear your thoughts about what, what is that opportunity that we now have?

BJ: Well, back to Nilofer for a second. Others have written about it and Nilofer uses the example that I have close to mind, which is the air sandwich is essentially the kind of gap between individual contributors and executives where incentives with middle management are aligned to essentially stay status quo. Christiansen writes about this as a barrier to a disruptive innovation as well. There are several people that are talking about this misalignment with incentives and essentially the tent, the inertia to keep doing what you're doing so that you maintain position and privilege and pay and all that.

I think the opportunity now, in some cases, we've seen people at their most vulnerable, at their most raw. I recall a client session about a year ago where one of the principals was going through chemo in the middle of all this, had young kids and she was just like, "I'm showing up, I'm going to do my job. My kids are running around in the background. I know, like I don't look well and that's going to have to be okay." And it was, right? I can't imagine this person who was a fairly senior person doing that two years ago. I think part of it is just acknowledging we're not robots, we're human. 

That comes with a ton of upside and some things we're going to have to get used to. I think it would be very healthy to get used to. I think that's one thing. I think the ways that we collaborate and the definition of work, especially the tendency to do performative work, like to have a large meeting where nothing happens.

You know, so many clients two years ago, it was impossible to get time with them because they were just like eight hours a day. It was just like standing meetings with no output. One of our favorite phrases, which I actually picked up at Dell is, “Get it to the glass.” The other version is, “ship it.” If this isn't in front of the customer, if we can't draw a straight line to the customer or key stakeholder and it being a net positive benefit to them, what are we doing? I'm seeing those conversations happen as well. And then the tools because internet access is so pervasive now because we've had this almost, it's not really spontaneous, but the synchronous sort of forcing of digital collaboration, which started with Zoom and tools like that, but we all had to get used to it together. I think that creates the biggest opportunity because there was hesitancy to do certain meetings online or digital first, which I know is one of the key topics here and now that's open to debate.

How much further can we take that? We've got the synchronous communication going with things like Zoom. Things like MURAL, which I stumbled onto because I had a client, a major client meeting, I was supposed to have people flying in from all over the world to come to San Francisco.

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: Adventures in Collaboration (3/6)

BJ: I was on this sort of very elaborate and involved trip around the world with my family. I was working from around the world for a year. Then we ran into the pandemic. So January through February of 2020, I had to start making a plan B for a ton of stuff, right? One of the first experiences with MURAL was one of those opportunities that I'm talking about, where a giant tech brand in San Francisco all of a sudden decides look, nobody can come in the building.

We have to figure out how to do this online and we know an eight hour video call is going to be miserable. So, Bill with Structure3C, what do you got? We had to figure out how to transpose the agenda. We had to learn all the facilitation tools in MURAL. I had to go back.

I take great inspiration from things like open space technology. I was thrown into the deep end of the pool years ago with facilitating conferences for community leaders. I have faith that if you get a group of smart, motivated humans together, you're clear about the topic and you find ways to engage them in a respectful way and in a way that kind of honors how they want to participate, good things will happen, which is generally my loose interpretation of open space on the fly. That's what we've been able to start to achieve with MURAL. I know it may not be a straight line, but there's this weird sort of connection my brain has created between all the great stuff that has happened in open space conferences that I've run and the good stuff that happens when we do MURAL- based sessions.

It's just participation, it's very visual. There are lots of stickies involved, which happens with open space as well. So yeah, your original question was around, how do we start to push this forward? And I think to just give you a way more succinct answer, it's taking advantage of the fact that the rules and methods are malleable, experimenting quickly with new rules and methods, but with the north star being creating customer- stakeholder value, creating company value and just acknowledging humans are on the other end of these technologies, not robots. And frankly not the stilted humans that may have been showing up to work two years ago.

JK: Yeah, I love that last point too, because as a tool provider, I mean, I work for a software company, right? And a lot of times, when I engage in conversations with our customers, they want to know about the tool or the hardware around the tool. And those are great, really important topics to cover because they enable new behaviors. And I think that's what your point was that they allow for things. But it's always the human factors that come back in that are the hard part, right? The tools have changed, but then the tools change us and, you mentioned there while you were talking, you had to transpose your agenda. I love that word because it implies you didn't just take it one to one. You actually recalibrated it for the tools that you had and the environment and the context and things like that. But for me, I always tried to shift the conversation toward the behavior, the human factors. What do you have to change with your methods and things like that?

So, I'd love to just hear your take on the human factor side of it. Because what I find is I start off by saying, “Well, it depends. How many people? Give me all the context.” I know you have a set of heuristics that I think help you get through some of that "well, it depends" kind of things. I'd love to just hear your take a little bit more on that. The human factor side of collaboration. 

BJ: Absolutely. These probably wouldn't be the first things out of the mouth of someone who focuses more on facilitation full time. This is hodgepodge of industrial designer, person who just likes to play around and tinker with methods and tools and that sort of thing. That's a sufficient caveat. Drawing from the open space tradition, it's imagining what is possible, given the topic, tools, and people showing up and what they initially say they want to achieve, which often changes when you start to dig in, right? So the first thing is at the end of the day, what is possible? What are we trying to do? Does that kind of all line up? Before you even start sketching out the agenda and then thinking about where folks are dialing in from, what time of day, like getting into the person context especially for global meetings, right? How much time they have available, right? From a bandwidth perspective. Scheduling an eight hour meeting that starts at nine o'clock Pacific and ends at five o'clock Pacific and you have people from all over the world, is going to be an awful meeting, right? Links, start time, et cetera. So, really honoring the group’s context and designing in a way that, to the best of your ability, honors their attention and contribution. So, you're not starting the session with a giant area with a thousand sticky notes and say perform. There's a sequential warmup to the session and steps.

That idea of being clear on outcomes at the start and in course-correcting, being open to better outcomes in that initial discussion and, as you get started, thinking about it from an inclusive perspective. There's a great example with a volunteer project we did, which I hope we can get to at some point.

There were folks from all over. AtmaGo is a social network for good that operates mostly in the developing world. They have some resources in Puerto Rico. We were doing a big project with them to essentially help them pivot from a Facebook model to more of a local news for good public service model that was predicated on having local community leaders.

It was a big deal for them and they wanted to include as many people as possible in the conversation, so we designed that session to run at night because most of the participants were in Southeast Asia. We started the session with a very simple introduction section in the mural so that we could understand what everyone's level of comfort in participating with this.

Like, how much is English as a second language going to be a barrier in participation? Are people just straight up not comfortable with the tool? We had a couple of folks back channeling so that they could just transpose. You know, chat text into notes and things like that. We started by just trying to understand their context.

We did some pre-wiring with, “We're going to use mural. Here's the tool. Here's some simple videos on how it's going to work.” But trying to be as inclusive as possible, right? I think the interesting thing with a lot of the murals created in session, as another heuristic is it becomes kind of this living artifact, right? Either for reference or to be added to over time. 

The very last thing is, I like when appropriate, and there's some corporate settings it's not appropriate, but I'd like to end with a gratitude session. We learned this in Open Space, running the conferences. We held 15 minutes at the end of Open Space and let folks essentially give gratitude to others that they had learned from, or that had made a meaningful difference in the session. Because I was living in Sonoma at the time, the sessions were in Mountain View. I always brought down a couple of cases of really nice wine. So, you were basically gifting wine. For a lot of people, that was the high point of the session in some ways.

They would hang out for two hours and have amazing conversations after the conference was open. We try to, when we can, imbue that gratitude at the end of most of our sessions. So acknowledging when folks have made contributions, when folks have made a difference and allowing the group, the little community, frankly, that's formed during the session to give and receive gratitude.

It's a really beautiful, to use a word that may make folks uncomfortable, but it's just a really beautiful way to end a session in my opinion. 

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: Adventures in Collaboration (4/6)

JK: Yeah. I really love that take and I'd love to get into your example that was mentioned, but I wanted to just look at the word “digital” first because what you just said had nothing to do with being digital. It had to do with being human and compassion and gratitude and things like that. You even started off by saying, you got to imagine what's possible as well, too. I think personally digital-first collaboration starts with an understanding of what your new superpowers are. You know, MURAL gives you a new superpower to visualize and do all these, but it's really the human aspects that you have to re-imagine and break apart. I mean, you took an eight hour session and you totally ripped it apart and did something new with it and then reassembled it. For me, that's really ultimately what digital-first mean, it’s combining the digital with the human and re-engineering or re-imagining how you're going to actually work together. Is that kind of your take on digital-first? 

BJ: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you framing it up that way. File under yet another thing this meaning has been sort of lost in the sands of time. Digital was the interface between the human and the tech. So, in some ways it's redundant. When we said digital transformation and we intend to imbue human into your 'something.' It's kind of redundant, but yes, that's absolutely digital-first in my opinion.

JK: Let's take a look at your example. I forgot. I forget the company that you mentioned. But we'd love to see that. 

BJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, this is AtmaGo. This is the session that I talked about. The parent companies, AtmaConnect, the product, the sort of little mobile social network is AtmaGo. This session was to kind of re-imagine what the product might look like, what the corporate focus might look like, what their mission might be, if they pivoted to focus more on community leadership.

There are some great native templates in MURAL for warmups and introductions and ice breakers. We just had to go with a super, super simple warm up. The ask was your name, your role, and I like to do a very personal tidbit in introductions. So, I asked for the musical artists that you feel the most guilty liking. We started and saw who was comfortable, who wasn't, who was having problems. It was a great way to kind of troubleshoot in a moment that was fairly low stakes. Then, we moved into the heart of the matter, which was we started to explore if we're going to hang everything on this role of community leader, what are we talking about?

We used this kind of a hack of a game storming method. I think there's a mural template. But we did a hack to add digital ecosystem. We wanted to, from the collective group's perspective, understand what they thought the attributes were, the desire, the activities that these folks who were performing unprompted anyways, what their motivations were for those activities, and then sort of what their digital ecosystem looked like across the world, right? Because we're dealing with a very heterogeneous environment that the app was deployed in. Then, we took all of that and thought, “Okay, if we had a program for hanging everything on this community leadership model, and we started to build a program around that, let's get at specifically the behaviors we would like to encourage, acknowledge and reward, which is this green box.” Then, what could we offer to elicit this intrinsic motivation to participate and help build community in their local communities. Had a great brainstorm there. This is one of my favorite techniques that shows up in kind of everything. We did some future casting.

So, five years from now. Oh, we did one year from now. I usually do five. One year from now, we've been wildly successful in this endeavor. What does this look like to the community residents? The extended stakeholder that's affected by this leadership, what does it look like through the community leader themselves?

What does it look like, AtmaGo as an organization? We talked about this future state and frankly, what I like to describe as imagining it, getting out and walking around in it. There are not a ton of boundaries. It's just like, “Yeah, whatever's top of mind, let's get it down and talk through it.”

Before we went there, actually, we did a couple of voting exercises. The voting is obviously great in MURAL. So, we did voting on this incentives and rewards section. To just kind of stack rank what the most important factors were. Lastly, we ended, and I redacted this because it was kind of their product, we talked about putting it in action. So, everything we talked about: What are we going to do right now? As soon as we hang up, what are we doing next quarter? What valuable things are future state? That's the kind of flow of this session and it was incredible. I mean, I was terrified. I was as terrified as the first time I ran an Open Space event where for those of you that haven't been, or haven't run one, you're standing in front of several hundred people with a completely blank agenda behind you. And your job, for 20 minutes, is to fill it up or there's no conference.

This was probably one of the most intimidating things I've ever done at Structure3C and we got so much great feedback that people felt heard, they felt included. They appreciated the exercise. The CEO, Meena, reached out to say, "You know, it was very successful."

They were making plans based upon the mural and for something that we did as a volunteer exercise, it just filled me up. It filled the team up based upon our seed of purpose. That was one that we can put in the win column. So that was pretty satisfying.

JK: I would say you were adventurous and you took a risk, but I would actually say in retrospect, you didn't actually take a risk. I get this a lot with customers. They say, “Jim, I'm doing this big workshop, high stakes. I need you to help me do this.” Then I look at what they've done and I basically say, “It's all right there, you created the flow and the structure. You need to take that leap of faith and have the faith that structure and that flow is actually going to get you through that session.” It did, in your case here. I mean, it's a perfect example of that risk that you talked about, having that flow and structure.

To me, it actually contrasts a lot of meetings at work because I think the physical office was almost a perverted lab experiment that companies threw us into and said, “If we just put them in the same room together, they'll be able to figure it out.” It's like, well, actually, yeah. Meetings aren't that great anyway, and what I see in here, what you just showed me, it's actually an opportunity to really reinvent collaboration in general, whether it's offline or digital or not. Like, "Hey, we can get from point A to point B. We don't know the answer at point B, but we know how to get there.”

It's not just going to be improvising a conversation. You might have an agenda, but the rest of it is improvised. Most meetings are just improvised, right? You weren't actually improvising, you had the sheet music on how to get from A to B. 

BJ: Yeah. I really appreciate you going there because that was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn in my career because I came out of college with a fine arts degree, right? I knew nothing about work. I'm the last person in some ways that should be running a small business, right? Because I'm learning the hard way, but the hardest thing to learn, and I remember this at Autodesk, was I was so stressed the first six months because I felt like I had to have all the answers and I had to know all the outcomes and I learned through just being ground down, like, “No, you have to have a process and you have to have the confidence and the courage to be able to solve the problem, and a method to solve the problem.” But nobody has the answer out of the gate. 

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: Adventures in Collaboration (5/6)

BJ: In fact, one of the things that I took away and I love this book so much, I recommend it to everyone. I had the first edition of it. It's called The Universal Traveler. This is pre-design thinking. Two professors, Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall, from Cal Poly SLO just wrote down this kind of manual for creative process in the seventies.

It was like a systems thinking, create a process guide. It's amazing, right? That's one of the things that I've carried forward with me. I had kind of had, I guess, a certain amount of stress-induced amnesia about I actually know how to do this. I know I have a creative process. I can figure this stuff out. One interesting thing to do, might be to compare and contrast the AtmaGo exercise with something a little more seemingly hardcore, if you will, we'll just go there. 

JK: I just had one comment though because I'm a musician, myself. I actually studied music, too. I have an arts kind of background, and I would argue that your BFA, your arts background, actually gave you the mindset, the adventurous mindset, the imaginative mindset to be able to do this better than maybe, and I'm not picking on anybody, an MBA type of person as well, too. I think what the world needs is this, the design thinking background or the music or the fine arts background as well too because it's those types of skills. I don't know the answer, but I know how to get there. I have a process and I can imagine how we might do it together. That's how we have to be thinking moving forward. 

BJ: I love that. I love that you tease that, that very succinct observation. 

JK: I felt connected there when you started talking about, “What the heck am I doing?” Because I say that sometimes. “I'm a musician. What am I doing here, doing this?” I was like, no, that's actually the skillset that you learn, right? You just start off a piece of music or a blank canvas. You don't know what's going to come out. But you know how to get there, together. Right?

BJ: Exactly. I mean, just a little bit of a sidetrack for a second. I have a 16-year-old daughter who is very interested in art, incredibly smart. She draws all the time. She's very interested in art. She had the opportunity to start participating in a robotics team. That whole package and the opportunities that are presented to her right now, she doesn't feel the need to be categorized. She doesn't feel the need to identify with a particular discipline. I just admire her so much for effortlessly, to certain degree, flowing through her day, and picking up the tools she needs at the time she needs them to just do stuff, right? And have this ease of being in life.

It's incredible. I think in part, that's why I have a lot of faith in Gen-Z right now, not to advocate for the state of the world because we still have a lot of work to do, but it's a mindset. 

JK: Yeah. If you have another example of that, let's continue this. 

BJ: For sure. One of the things I don't talk about publicly a lot, but the consulting work funds, primary research for things I feel are important.

One of the things that I'm interested in and concerned about is this intersection of artificial intelligence and automation and communities; particularly if we go back to this point our reality was partially mediated for the last couple of three years through things like Facebook. This screen was our view, our window into the world, right? I'm incredibly concerned with the ability at this point, unregulated and unrestricted, for certain technologies to essentially do whatever they want without any sort of accountability or, from the user's perspective, means to understand what's happening.

We've done a lot of research on the state of AI and how it's impacting collaborative and community experiences. I have a small mastermind group and I was trying to figure out a way to, in a human way, because AI is so wonky and technical, figure out a human way. How can we tee up the process of starting to think through the use of AI and a human equitable and appropriate way. We had a two hour working session last year, the first half of it was just like a ton of data. I was guilty of the sin of too many slides and shoving stuff down folks’ throats or presenting a lot of data. I wanted to end the session with more of a fun exploration.

I put forward this idea of an expedition and talked about how you might think about rolling AI out. I went into a MURAL exercise, of course, a MURAL exercise; and started to tee it up by thinking AI in a way is like a superhero, but sometimes unrestricted. They kind of are awful and make big messes. How might we use that superhero metaphor to think about using AI with your communities? We went into this exercise. We had four sections. The first one is having people articulate their gnarliest problems, right? Like their massive, most insolvable problems. Then, starting to explore how AI might play a role by thinking about if you had a superhero on your staff that could do anything. What might you task them with? As a way to start to think about this more as a relationship with something versus something running autonomously, that's a black box.

Then, really starting to dig into, from the context of key stakeholders, community members, community leader, and an executive. What's the value? But then, also what are the risks with experience? With the community, et cetera. Lastly, just a quick little worksheet, essentially.

I duplicated this mural for this part and had them sort of map out their own expedition, which I use the categories of prepare, plan, pitch, and proceed. Thinking through that process, reflecting back on how that might've been for them. So, that was another kind of adventure flow, if you will? Start to finish, with some reflection at the end. Another very different context but kind of similar approach, similar design for the mural. 

JK: Now, I want to tie that back, what you just showed us there, particularly those four different sections to the heuristic that you talked about around knowing what the outcomes are that you want and the goal. I just want to dig a little bit. How did you come up with not only those four sections, but then the metaphor of the superhero as well? Because, I mean, it sounds like you kind of threw the classic workshop rule book away, and you said, “Here's my objective.” Then, you creatively filled that in with a flow. How did you actually do that? How did you actually come up with that metaphor? Why was it four sections? Just let us double click on that a little bit more, how you got to this point.

BJ: Sure. The first thing was we had done this research three times and in some cases, teams weren't thinking about it at all. Very few people were running pilots. So, I started to get really curious about why, right? Because like everyone else, I read that for the last tranche of research, we did this pretty massive investigation of all the business literature from HBR, MIT, Sloan, et cetera, on how executives were thinking about AI and running pilots. It was curious because things around community and customer experience were largely absent.

I got really curious as to why and started having some informal conversations with folks. One was like, the technology was just so intimidating. The second was, they weren't being asked for it. And the third was like, so far down the list of things that they wanted to be thinking about because of all the other backlog of stuff that was happening. For this one, I'll contradict myself to a certain degree. I want to make it fun and knowing the group that I was working with, the metaphor that was the kind of most expedient shortcut to making it fun and engaging was like the superhero genre.

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: Adventures in Collaboration (6/6)

BJ: It was fun for me as well. When those two pieces fell into place, I was like, “Okay, let's approach this from helping folks envision large problems that are blockers, and then let's help folks.” The second session was let's help folks envision the technology as the superhero. So, they're partnering, in some cases maybe they're a superhero, as well. We didn't get that explicit, but it just felt like thinking about having an Ironman help you versus some bizarro, abstract set of technologies was a little easier. Once we got into that mindset of, “Hey, I can start to envision a future possible.”

Then, let's click down and talk about value and risk to see if maybe there are opportunities to start pilots. Especially for some of the larger, more tech savvy organizations. Can this alleviate stress? Can this alleviate friction? Can this serve or improve customer experience in some way? That sort of thing.

The expedition metaphor was we've gone through, we've identified some ideas. How might you, if you were excited and motivated about taking something forward, you plan it? Just helping them walk through that process of getting to a plan. 

JK: Yeah. A couple of things in there that I think might help folks listening, too. One is just that overall arc and that shape of going from kind of unstructured to a plan or, very often, we talk about a divergent and then convergent and breaking about that flow as an arc. The thing I really loved is metaphor, and I think metaphors can help you rethink how you're collaborating.

I love the fact that you latched on to the metaphor there, but the real word that you just said that I wrote down was curiosity. I think curiosity is part of being adventurous and you called this an expedition as well, too. That's why I think I'm always kind of left feeling empty when people say, "One of the keys to a good meeting is having an agenda". Like, that's not nearly enough. You need to have curiosity and an arc and metaphor and engagement and fun and games, even. Like the rules of games; you need to bring all that in there. The agenda's not going to get you here. I mean, you could have written four bullet points. That's not what you have here. You have a lot more. The reason why you have a lot more of this I think is because you're a curious person and you wanted to explore things a little bit more, be adventurous. 

BJ: Exactly. For me, the idea that I'm most enamored with and why you continue to do community work is a network, you know, between the two of us on the line here or within a team or within a community. There's latent value in those connections, right? A good community or a network that's managed in a quality way actualizes and realizes that potential. That really intrigues me and motivates me and gets me out of bed and gets me really fired up to go to work and to a session, especially a creative session. Sort of a microcosm of that, one KPI or one barometer for me is with all the brilliance that we have connected here, but based upon the problem we're trying to solve, which is hopefully worthy of everyone's time and attention, what can we realize? What dots can we connect with possibilities? Can we put into the world? And I just think, there are times when you really nail that it's just fantastic. It's magical. 

JK: Yeah. I love that word “magic” as well, too. The idea of networks. I do want to bring things to a close here and I know we talked a little bit about there's an opportunity here. I think the disruption that we experienced during the pandemic is actually an opportunity for us to redefine how we work. That's really the opportunity. You started talking a little bit about the networks there, too, and I just wanted to deepen that or solidify that topic. 

What is it about the networks? Particularly, when we talk about digital-first, what is that opportunity to be thinking about connections and relationships and all of those things as well? 

BJ: Right. So, the old adage or chestnut or common wisdom around networks is they essentially bring the distance between any two things on the network to zero. For the, the sort of network thinking with creative sessions, facilitation things you might do with MURAL, tools like MURAL, enable a similar effect, right? There's zero distance between minds and possibilities and creativity and opportunity. I know I haven't come up with the brilliant kind of insight or metaphor to frame it up exactly perfectly, but it's transposing that sort of value of network, that sort of creative equivalent of Metcalf's Law, to work. There's no friction, there's no distance between, your brilliance, your ideas, the group's ideas and the possibility of realizing those in the world.

JK: Thanks so much for that, Bill This was a fantastic conversation. I feel like we could continue this for another couple of hours. I would like to circle back with you on some of those other points we were talking about earlier as well, too. I think for the folks listening, the question is what adventures are you planning?

What adventures do you have and daring experiments? The word experiment is great too, because we're talking about hybrid now, right? We came out of this all-remote situation. Now, we're going back into this mixed-mode situation as well, too. We're going to learn again in 2022. I think those opportunities are hard to embrace and to leverage networks and network thinking, as well.

BJ: Yeah, absolutely. Three spring to mind. One is, moving forward, what is the role of automation and AI technologies in our collaborative experiences? I think two is there's a lot of hype around community right now. What do we really mean? How can we talk about it in a more valuable way? So, helping continue to shape that conversation. The last one, which may be a little bit of a curve ball, is one of the things that I've become really interested in, open innovation. I helped to redesign Ideastorm at Dell when I was there a few years ago and I was always struck by how limited the opportunities were for creative collaboration because it was mediated through a webpage. So, what happens if you embed something like MURAL into one of those little brainstorming snippets? Or you embed something like new, fully immersive, 3D parametric models of computers or other things. I'm also really keen as tools advance, as broadband becomes more ubiquitous, on how does the next wave of crowdsourcing and ideation come into play and what opportunities might be there. 

JK: That's great. I think we'll have to end it there but, Bill Johnston, thanks so much for being here. Bill, of course, you're the Chief Community Officer at Structure3C and I encourage folks to go check that out.

BJ: Yeah, absolutely. Enjoyed the conversation and enjoyed meeting you and thanks MURAL for hosting. Appreciate it.

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: 10 Ways to Leave Meeting Attendees Wanting More (1/3)

Check out the conversation between Ashley Welch and Justin Jones, Co-Founders of Somersault Innovation. Prefer to see the session? Watch the webinar recording here.

The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ashley Welch: Hello, everybody. I am Ashley Welch, Co-Founder of Somersault Innovation, here with my business partner.

Justin Jones: Hey, I'm Justin Jones, based in Durango, Colorado.

AW: And I'm in Boston, Massachusetts, and we are very pleased to be here with you. Thanks for signing on with us. We own a consulting firm which is all about bringing the tools of design thinking into the go-to-market community world and really helping sellers and anyone in the go-to-market space be more customer-centric, do better discovery, have better meetings with their clients in order to expand pipeline, grow revenue and be that trusted advisor that all of us wanna do.

So today, we thought we'd give you two tips of what not to do, and also what to do, in the hybrid environment, which is so new for all of us and is particularly high stakes, I think, for us sellers when we're working with customers, right? So, what we're talking about today in this session is really when you're working with your customers and it's hybrid, which means some people are online, some people are face to face. What do you do? Because you're it. You're the facilitator and there's a lot riding on your expertise as a facilitator. So, what am I missing, Justin, before we get into this?

JJ: Yeah, I just think it's a really interesting way for us all to think about how we lead hybrid meetings and I think there are sort of two interesting escalations around why these meetings have to be so good. One is hybrid, right? So you just have people in different modalities and they're having different experiences and you're trying to keep them all together. But then, in sales, it's customer facing. And so, it's just this really high standard, like our customer is expecting great things from us. We are the face of our company. So, you get the point, right?

We don't need to overdue it maybe too much, but we just like the, the purity that comes from like, "Hey, we need to do this really well. We can't get away with maybe some of our habitual ways of just showing up, sitting down and great things happen, rolling."

AW: Yeah. And, you know, I'd also say that like some of us haven't actually even done this. Like a lot of people still haven't done the hybrid. We're still virtual. So, some of this is trial and error. So we're giving you some tips and tools. We will always encourage you to iterate like try something, figure it out, get some feedback, do something differently next time because this is new for all of us. So, let's get into it. Should we start with like, "Really don't do this?"

JJ: Ever, never.

AW: So we've got a list. We said we'd do 10. We'll keep to that more or less...

JJ: Don't count. Yeah.

AW: Don't count. So we're gonna start with some of the things not to do. So, shall I just go down on our list and you wanna jump in and add color commentary?

JJ: Yeah, we'll tag team it.

AW: Okay. So, you know we're all about co-creation, right? Customer centricity, co-creation, that's the name of the game. So, you do not want this one way. You do not wanna go into this classic buyer-seller dynamic, you're gonna run the show and at the very end, ask for any kind of feedback. So, don't do that.

Not one way. You don't also wanna do what you just said [laughs] Justin, which is like, "We're just gonna show up and hope for the best," right? It takes even more planning, so don't, how do I say this double negative? Don't not plan.

Definitely plan. Well, there's too much of me talking. What else do we not wanna do, Justin? 

JJ: You know, we just, we just sorta jump right in, right? I think we feel the pressure to like, "Hey, dazzle," and we take all that responsibility on ourselves, which is something that you were talking about, which is the opposite of co-creation or shared responsibility for the meeting. One of the key things that we miss is just talking about the agenda, who's in the meeting, how we're gonna work together. We just jump right into the content of the meeting because we feel the pressure from the client. Like that's what they wanna know.

AW: Another thing we don't do well, I think, or we'd recommend you don't do, is we don't share responsibility. Meaning actually it's all of our meeting and the more I can involve people and give them roles, the better the meeting. So, when we don't share responsibility, it doesn't go as well. 

JJ: I think just knowing your tech tools is another one. I think the time, hopefully, like 18 plus months in has passed where we're able to just let go of like, "Hey, we're gonna be able to fly and show up and, and it'll be like it was again, soon." We have to embrace the Zooms or whatever we're using and, and the MURAL canvases and really get good at that, and tech can't be a tool in our meetings anymore.

AW: Yes, for sure. And there's a lot of tech to learn. I like this one also: we don't attend often to the diverse needs of the audiences. So, it just got increasingly complex with hybrid and everybody has a little bit of a different scenario wherever they are, whether they're face-to-face or virtual. And so we really need to put ourselves in everybody's shoes and plan for that, so don't just assume you understand what everybody's situation is or if they can hear or if they feel like they can participate easily.

JJ: Yeah.

AW: Any last don'ts?

JJ: No, I'm starting to feel depressed, like there's so many things that I'm feeling.

AW: Just forget about it. Don't have the hybrid meetings.

JJ: I'm guilty of all these too. I think we all are, right? So I'm wanting to move us to like, "Hey, here's the really smart, cool things that we can do that really make a positive difference in the hybrid experience for us and for our customers."

AW: All right. So, let's go there. And these actually aren't very difficult. These are pretty simple, so we should all be able to do them. What should I do if I'm running a hybrid meeting with my customer and let's imagine that there's five people on the customer side that are in the room, there's one online and then there are three of my colleagues who are also online? What do I do before the meeting? And I'm like, I'm virtual actually, and I'm running the meeting. What do I do?

JJ: Yeah, so I think the first thing that we're gonna try out is something that we see sellers avoid doing, which is planning like before the meeting like how to prepare because we're back-to-back, we've got so many customer meetings scheduled in our day, especially when we're working virtually, our calendar just gets stacked up. So, any fraction of time that you can spend planning, before the meeting to set yourself and your customers in all of the spaces that you just described, the folks in a room together virtually, is time well spent especially for a high stakes meeting.

So, let's be real. If I'm a seller, maybe I'm not gonna do all these planning things we're gonna talk about for every meeting, but if it's a high stakes hybrid meeting, these are definitely things that you should do.

AW: So what would you do?

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: 10 Ways to Leave Meeting Attendees Wanting More (2/3)

JJ: Find out in advance from the customer the layout like that Ashley just gave us. Like who will be where, right? And that helps me sort of as if I'm the seller understand. Or you're the seller, you kind of know and I'll actually do like a little cheat sheet and it doesn't have to be fancy. Just a sketch so I can place people physically in time and space. That's one of the really hard things that we lose track of is just knowing like Ashley's in Boston, I'm in Durango, these people are on the West Coast, right? So, I kind of have a sense of where the players are. If you can influence this, depending on your relationship with the customer, ask that people have their cameras on, right? It's like such a no brainer anymore, but people in that room together can all be seen by whatever camera device that they have and that people participating from their remote home offices have their cameras on. And there's something about that in the invite even is a big deal.

AW: And I would say one caveat is I was just talking to a client today who works for sort of a very old school tech firm and she said it is impossible to get people to turn on their cameras.

So, there is always of course this awareness of know who you're asking and understand the culture of your organization. But to the extent that it feels appropriate, definitely ask. 

JJ: Was there anything else like before the meeting? Like those are the big ones in my mind just to kind of tee those up.

AW: Yeah, I just think the mindset that I try to have myself as a facilitator, as a seller facilitator is, "How can I share responsibility for this meeting? How can I give people roles?" Because the more fingerprints they have on it, the better. I put myself in their shoes. So, what do I imagine this is like, and plan for that. And then I love this idea of thinking about it as two rooms you're managing. You're managing the virtual room and the face-to-face room. So, you have different sort of set up options and ways to engage people. You have to think about both of them.

JJ: Yeah. Good. All right. If those are like critical cue things you could do in advance, maybe one other one is just the roles that you'll have. So, if it's a high stake meeting, I want a teammate from the account team or my boss who can help me with this meeting and I'll give them a job. And that could be like, "Your job is to monitor the chat." You know, or "Your job is to take notes on the meeting." Or "We're gonna screen share. We're gonna have a MURAL canvas and I want you to capture sort of key points or notes," or whatever we want to record. I wanna build that agreement with my team members in advance so we kinda know what we're doing, and we show up like with our best foot forward.

AW: And actually that brings us right into the, "During the meeting, what do you do?" And one of the things that we believe is really important is to have this visual of what's going on so that you can share your screen and everybody can see where notes are being taken or main ideas that you're talking about. MURAL canvas, of course, would be our go to suggestion of what to use.

JJ: Yeah. Okay, so the chime sounded. We're turning the page and now we're in the meeting. So, that was like stuff to do ahead. Here's some of the, I don't know how many tips we're up to, but we're gettin' to 10. We'll probably go over. But it is building the same agreement at the start of the meeting. There's all these small agreements that you can and should build with participants instead of jumping in on content like we were talking about earlier. Building small agreements creates that sense of shared responsibility that you were talking about, Ashley, that co-creative sense.

"This is our meeting." So, just building agreement on the agenda. That's the first sorta natural thing to just, and you could have a visual up, and just kinda pop through like, "Hey, these are the things that we thought we might cover in this order, the why of each one," and then checking in and asking, this is the key part, an open-ended question.

"How does, how does this sound to everyone?" Or "How closely does this fit the needs of people? What you expected for this meeting?"

AW: Yeah, or, "What else would you like to see happen?"

JJ: Versus, "Sound good?"

AW: "This is good, right?"

JJ: Yeah. There's a big difference between those two agreements. I love your point about the common visual, especially for this hybrid space because I'm here in my home office. There's all kinds of stuff that could be goin' on around me, but if you put something on my screen, it helps me focus and it helps all of us focus on the same thing at the same time in the same way.

So, just visuals in general that you can share on your screen are a big deal and the more dynamic they are, like a MURAL canvas, which is manipulated in real time, so much better than a dead PowerPoint slide, right? Because it's doesn't change. It's passive.

AW: The other things we talk about is this idea of setting expectations at the beginning of your meeting like just acknowledging, "This is hybrid. It's new and different and perhaps difficult for all of us, so we're gonna try to make this as effective as possible. Please give me feedback along the way." And also giving people a specific way to interject to offer information. So, you might say that people virtually, "Hey, if you have something to add, please either raise your hand, I'll see you, or you know, you have your icon. Please raise your icon hand and I'll make sure to include you." Or as you already said, "Use the chat function." Anyway, give them a way to offer information during the session.

JJ: Good. Yeah, so if the first agreements are the outcomes or the flow of the agenda, Ashley. You're getting into how we're gonna work together and what this is gonna be like in this sort of hybrid environment, the tools that we have. One of the things that you will do is have like a point person. If there's a group of people physically in a room, having someone who's like the translator or who's on point who can just share with the group like something happens and we see it on camera, there's body language, like something's afoot. We want the translator like, "Hey, so it looks like there's a lot of discussion in Boston. What are you all thinking there?" Right? And have them help sort of bring that out, or you can have someone on the account team side, on the customer side, who owns like checking in with people who are virtual and making sure that they have a voice.

AW: So I think we should probably bring this home now with our two last points.

It's easy for us to be super serious, sort of plow through our agenda, not to mention we're nervous. But if there's any way for us to add a little levity, it makes everything better. So, levity, what does that look like? It could be as simple as doing an, if you feel comfortable, ice breaker in the beginning like just start chatting in or, "Let's talk about your favorite podcast," or, "What's a Netflix show you can't live without right now?" Very simple, very easy, sorta gets people to loosen up and builds relationship. What's another one, Justin, you've used to have some fun and break the ice?

jessicazech

Hybrid @ MURAL: 10 Ways to Leave Meeting Attendees Wanting More (3/3)

JJ: Yeah, it's such a big deal because that is what's missing in hybrid meetings is relationship. So, let's see. What's the part of your morning routine that you never miss. People say all kinds of interesting things. So, just something that gets everybody to lean in a personal and specific way. Like it doesn't have to be a ropes course. We're not gonna do that kinda team building at the beginning...

AW: Grab your rope.

JJ: Yeah. I mean, I guess that might be interesting to play with, but you know, it really can just be giving everybody a chance to get on camera, their voices heard and it's something specific to them, gives them like an emotional stake in the meeting.

AW: I'll always remember a guy named Drew at Work Day who said, "I know for us as sellers, when you're with a customer doing an ice breaker, something like this feels like, no." He's like, "Every time I try it, it works. Like every time I do it, people appreciate it and it changes the whole dynamic of the meeting and it always goes better."

JJ: I think the other, so the intro is important and then, you know, think about your transitions. So, usually in the meeting, like let's say, you know, we're gonna start by talking about, "Here is what we understand about the current meter of the opportunity, the current state, the problem space," right? And, "We'll probably spend so much of our agenda and then we're gonna pivot to these are all the different solution ideas that we can start sharing and start to explore them let's say." That's a key transition and those are really great times to check in. To check in with people like, "Let's check in with our virtual folks. Who's on point? What are people thinking?" Or check in with the folks in that room, right, and that's an opportunity to build a relationship. People are talking and engaging. Jokes are made and then we pivot together. So, it's just a way to keep that hybrid motion on the rails.

AW: And then you're coming to the end of your meeting and so one of the things we would absolutely recommend at the end of your meeting is to get some feedback on how it went in a way that feels comfortable to you, right? But asking for specific feedback from the group, from your customer, you know, "What worked well and it would've been better if, both in terms of technology and process as well as content. Did I miss something that you'd like to hear more about?" We were talking a little bit, Justin, about how to capture that because it should be captured, so we could capture it on your MURAL. You could be asking people to chat it in. For people virtual, just be offering it, on chat and then the recorder is capturing it visually. Any other ideas?

JJ: Yeah. I think the visual capture is important because it's a way to show like not only is the idea important, but the person sharing it is important. So, it validates and it creates this shared responsibility piece, right, and it makes me want to contribute more. So, that's why sharing your screen and taking notes like throughout the meeting can be so engaging, certainly at the end, for feedback as well.

AW: All right. So, I think that's a wrap for what we've got to share this time around. There's certainly many other things I'm sure you all will be trying and actually, we'd love to hear what you've tried, what's working or what was a total bomb, and we'd love to hear from you in general. You can find us at somersaultinnovation.com. We're both on LinkedIn, Ashley Welch and Justin Jones, and we're here to talk and learn with you.

JJ: Good luck in your meetings and take care.

AW: Thank you. Ooh, we just forgot two things, Justin. What are they?

JJ: Yeah. So, one is a meeting summary. That's a really important thing to do at the end of a hybrid meeting because people get distracted, who knows what they're doing. It's one more opportunity to recap and acknowledge people for the things that happened in the meeting, what was discussed, right? So, our meeting summary is you can't show up and treat your hybrid meetings the way you used to do it in person. It's way past time, so you've got to be at your facilitative, co-creative, design thinking best and plan for the meeting, find ways to build agreements on what and how you're gonna work together and keep checking in with people in those different spaces, those hybrid spaces to keep them on the rails and with you. What was the other thing?

AW: I don't know. Maybe there was only one.

JJ: I think it was just one.

AW: Okay. Sorry. It's an over promise. So, that was your one extra bonus thing. Okay, see you later. Bye.

JJ: Bye.