Tag: facilitation

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Build community to create memorable experiences

Recently, my partner and I went on our first big long vacation since 2019. We went to Italy for two weeks, which was wonderful. Although we did plenty of things on our own, we did sign up for some tours of historic sites, of museums, of a region’s food. Some of the tours were great and some of the tours were…well, they weren’t horrible or anything. They were simply lacking.

What were they lacking?

My partner and I asked each other this, and we both came up with fairly similar answers. The tours and group activities we enjoyed most were the ones where we had the opportunity to build relationships with the other participants – even if only for a couple hours.

Table with a charcuterie board, a dish of olives, a bowl of bread, and a basket of fava beans. No one is sitting at the table yet,
We did a food tour in Florence, and it was not only enjoyable because of the food (sensory touchpoints), or what we learned, or the tour guide, but also because we got to share the experience of trying new food with other people, and we had the chance to share a table and get to know them and hear about their trips as well.

Of course, leave it to a service designer to want to mull on this a little more…

When designing for someone to have a positive experience, you’re often thinking about what the purpose is, what the desired outcome is, what is the person’s job to be done. A big part of this is meeting expectations and understanding what a positive outcome would be for the customer, event attendee, student, whoever is engaging with your product, service, class, tour, whathaveyou. (I get a bit annoyed at the constant talk of delight in the design process. It makes sense if you’re designing something fun, like game or makeup. When I am renewing my driver’s license, what would delight me is to not have to do it at all!)

In service design, a core question is how to create value for everyone involved—the customer and the business to be sure, but also the employees and others involved in or impacted by the service. While it might be focused on the humans using the service and their experience, it’s not sustainable if it burns out your employees nor if it detracts from the organization’s primary goals. (If a person’s goal is to ensure their kids are safe while they go run errands, perhaps that is not great if your organization is say, a museum, and not a childcare provider or otherwise set up to supervise children. And perhaps not great for the kids either.)

Through the framework of service design, we can break a service down into touchpoints (the things a customer is touching, so to speak, whether it’s packaging or an email), interactions between a customer and employee, and all the other layers of what happens (or is needed, infrastructure-wise) behind the scenes that allow us to deliver that service in that way.

Typically, when we think about what will make something a good experience, we think about touchpoints and interactions. Maybe we want our emails to have a friendly tone, or we want to make sure our staff are trained on how to work with disabled customers and provide various accommodations. Maybe we think about the relationships and try to have an assigned account representative for each client or good practices around entering data into a CRM so that any employee can assist any client smoothly with all of their details and history at their fingertips.

But how often, unless our service is explicitly about creating community, do we think about creating community within group experiences? How often do we consider the interactions between our clients, students, participants?

I’ve been a community manager—where my role was specifically to foster community and knowledge exchange among an evolving group of practitioners. (I still do this for fun in my creative pursuits!) But I’ve also used community building in other roles and in shorter terms.

When I was a technical instructor who was training new staff, I always started each training with an icebreaker. I would ask at least one question that was about us as people outside of work, and I usually tried to ask one question that related to the topic. I did this for a few reasons:

  1. Whatever people were doing before they came to the training, meeting, workshop, or other session you’re facilitating, it’s helpful to give people a way to shift their brains into what you’re about to do next.
  2. Most of the training I led was required onboarding, and it was all on using databases, which is a bit of a dry topic to dive directly into for many people. When it’s a topic that sometimes people dread, or that they’re a little worried will be difficult, it’s helpful to ground people in their existing knowledge. For example, during trainings on using the database to manage event attendees, I would ask people to share about an event they enjoyed and what made it a positive experience.
  3. Everyone in my trainings had recently joined the organization. I wanted to provide a low-stakes opportunity for them to practice introducing themselves with their new role and to get to know other new employees across the organization (a rare opportunity in most large organizations, as this was).
  4. I wanted to model what kind of space this was: a space where they could be seen as more than their job title, where they were invited to participate and use their voice from the start, and a space that, in its playfulness, hopefully felt more like a sandbox and less like a classroom.

Certainly, everyone was there to check the box as something they needed to perform their jobs. But I’d like to believe my efforts also helped reduce any anxiety (a thing in data/technology training) so that they could learn, helped new employees feel a little more seen and connected within such a vast organization, and made it easier for people to reach out to me for help in the future (many did). And that’s valuable to the training participants, it’s valuable to the organization, and it was valuable to me, as an instructional designer – to know what other learning needs there were after the training.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as building community. I thought of it as holding and shaping a space, for that time when we were all together, and creating an atmosphere within that space where we would all be primed for what we were about to do together—so that we may get the most value out of it.

The ability to connect as humans with everyone experiencing the same thing I am in the moment always make things a little brighter, and a little deeper. Growing up in NYC, sometimes we would have blackouts in the summer. And the neighbors emerge from their homes, and we’d sit outside together and talk, creating our own light in the dark.

Build community, even if it’s ephemeral.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s for an hour-long workshop, or a three-hour tour, or if the people will ever see each other again. Sure, having one instructor train 20 new employees is more efficient than training everyone 1:1. But it’s not the only reason to do it.

I’d like to call out that, first of all, it’s far less awkward. Isn’t a little silly to act as if everyone is in their own little bubble and can’t see or hear the other participants? Rather than leaving people to navigate the ambiguous social situation by themselves, we could (as facilitators, hosts, tour guides, et al.) create a starting point for intentional connection.

More importantly, creating opportunities for human creation is another way to add value to the experience. It is human to crave connection. If you’ve ever experienced something and suddenly wished that a specific person was there to share it with you – you know that an experience is different when you’ve shared it with someone. The same way that adding a dash of salt deepens the taste of caramel or that sprinkling in some red pepper flakes near the end of cooking intensifies the other flavors in a dish, that connection makes an experience feel fuller, as if you yourself, in opening up to others, have more fully opened up to that experience.

While you may not build a community that outlasts the event, human connections are the foundation. So why is this post about community rather than about connections? Simply trying to connect people to each other ends up being some sort of transactional speed-dating situation that leaves everyone unsatisfied. But if you think about it in terms of building community, and leave it open to each member to contribute what they will, you create something much better together.

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On the magic of medium, or why we write on sticky notes with markers

Have you ever been in a workshop or meeting where you’re handed a pile of sticky notes and a marker?

white wall with multiple colors of sticky notes arranged in columns and sequenced in a workflow from left to right

Did you ever wonder why you couldn’t simply use a pen?  Or why can’t you write your ideas directly on the whiteboard?

It is true, that it will be easier to see things written in marker than in pen, especially if you’re looking at them from a standing-in-front-of-a-wall distance rather than a reading-a-piece-of-paper-on-your-desk distance.  It is also true that the sticky notes allow you to move the ideas around more easily and arrange them in different configurations.

What else?

Sticky notes are usually small squares or rectangles.  They automatically set some limits on how much you can write on there – especially if you’re writing in marker.  It encourages you to break your thoughts and ideas into smaller units that can then be easily arranged and sorted and combined in various ways.

Writing in a small space with marker forces you to be more succinct.  You’re more likely to put down a bullet point or a phrase or a word rather than a complete, composed sentence.  Even on a letter sized sheet of paper, when you write with marker, it is more likely that you’ll write something like headlines or bullet points than an essay.  You can write headlines or bullet points on a sheet of paper using a pen, true.  However, the narrower point and more precise line that results also tends to encourage that we work to perfect what we write with a pen.  Consider even the difference between how you write when using pen and paper vs. typing. 

Combined, sticky notes and markers encourage a rapid fire of ideas, balancing the constraint of space with the fuzziness of using a less precise medium. While digital whiteboards and sticky notes where you can change the font size can be very convenient, the benefits of a particular form can get lost.

Next time you’re having trouble getting started on a new project or getting stuck trying to solve a problem, try using a different medium to work on it.

Inspired by this issue of the Ask Polly newsletter, in which Heather Havrilesky interviews Austin Kleon, who mentions using a pocket brush pen.

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Meetings are better with collaborative notes

It now feels like ages ago when someone at an organization I was volunteering with introduced me to collaborative notes: an openly shared Google Document that could be edited by any of us at the meeting and accessed by us all afterwards.

It was a revelation.

Now, I had always been a huge proponent of taking notes—I even once had a job where part of my role was taking board meeting minutes.  I had also been an advocate for sharing those notes with everyone who was at the meeting. 

But.

Collaborative notes are next level.

Let me tell you why.

Meeting notes, when done well, serve as documentation of what was discussed, decisions made, and who is responsible for which follow-up items.

To be fair, not all meeting notes are created equally, but they should all contain some key information: when the meeting occurred, who participated, what was discussed, decisions that were made, and any action items that resulted (hopefully also with who is responsible for completing them and by when).

When you have documented this key information in the meeting notes, then meeting notes can serve a few key functions.

Meeting notes can serve as a decision log, documenting decisions that were made, alongside with notes about the discussion leading to them, or why those decisions were made.  This makes it easier to go back and look, when circumstances change, to see whether a decision should be adjusted.  Listing the participants also allows you to see who was or was not part of making that decision.

Meeting notes can also act as a way to track who said they would do what, so that you can follow up with the appropriate person after the meeting.  Even for things I’ve signed up to do, action items in meeting notes serve as a reminder that I can then check off (I do like to check things off!).  In turn, my checking things off can tell anyone else looking at the meeting notes that this task has been completed.

And of course, meeting notes can serve as a bit of a historical record for a team, a program, or a project.  How are we progressing?  What changed along the way?  Perhaps, what did we learn?

Shared meeting notes give everyone access to one central source of key information from the meeting.

In general, it’s a good practice to share meeting notes because so that people who were not there (or who joined late or had to leave early) can access at least some of the key information from that meeting.  It’s also good because no one remembers everything anyway.  Even if people take their own notes, then there is a different set of notes per every participant and without shared meeting notes, there is no one source of truth about what was discussed, what was decided, or who needs to do what afterwards. 

And this is critical: Shared meeting notes help create shared meaning. 

Imagine what happens when one person writes down that Keisha from marketing will share the microsite mockups by the end of the week, and another person writes down that Marketing will share the website mockups by Monday. 

Disputes can abound when everybody has their own version of what happened at the meeting.  But having a central source of shared meeting notes means that there is one version to dispute rather than 8 conflicting ones. 

Collaborative notes, when everyone in the meeting contributes to them, give participants more agency in shaping the meaning of the meeting.

Speaking of shared meaning, creating the record of what happened during the meeting together also gives participants more agency in shaping this meaning—not only during the meeting, but what gets documented afterwards.  People are usually more engaged when they both have more agency and can see how their inputs make a difference.  People will have their own interpretations and their own ways to make sense of what happened regardless—better that all those different interpretations come together in meeting notes visible to everyone so that everyone can get on the same page.

There can be power in who gets to write the meeting notes and thus synthesize and determine the meaning of what occurred during the meeting.  On the flipside, it is also easy to dismiss the official notes when you think they’ve missed a lot or misunderstood a lot of what was said.

And collaborative meeting notes that everyone can see in real time allow for people to clarify and correct things during the meeting.

When people co-create the notes during the meeting—as opposed to adding their individual notes to a shared document afterwards (which, let’s be real, will likely be mainly the notes of whoever cares the most)—this gives others in the meeting the opportunity to clarify and correct things that may have been noted incorrectly or that are unclear.  Yes, sharing out meeting notes after the meeting still allows for this but sometimes people don’t, or they do raise it, but it gets lost in the email inbox swamp.  Being able to see and respond and raise the question during the meeting, while everyone is still there, means it’s more likely to be resolved and resolved more quickly than the devolving reply-all email chain.  Who needs that endless back and forth when everybody has already checked out of the meeting?

Simply put, collaborative meeting notes are more efficient and they help you facilitate more engaging and effective meetings.  Make your meeting notes collaborative by default.