Improve Something Today (Page 10)

Learning

Make your next presentation a spiral, not a line

Cycling through your main point helps your audience. Here’s how.

Find your main point: one thing you want people to remember. Begin the presentation by making your main point as quickly and plainly as you can.

Then, state the main point again. Elaborate on it this time, with a little more context. Give the two most relevant examples you can.

Next, revisit the main point. Explain how it is applicable or meaningful to your audience, based on the elaboration you just did and your understanding of their situation. This is where you can get ultra specific and pile on the details. Nerd out. This works because you’ve built little gathering places into your presentation. When people get distracted or you do a shitty job explaining something, some of your audience’s attention will wander. That’s OK. Each reiteration of your main point is an opportunity for people to get back on board. It is a starting point everyone will be familiar with—since it’s your main point.

Finally, revisit the main point. Remind everyone what the main point is, and what it means for them.

Conclude with a quote or a story that emphasizes the main point.

Having a hard time organizing a talk? Plan it backwards.

Think of how it will end: the capacities, agreement, and energy your audience will have. That’s your ending.
Strip away some detail, and slot that before the ending.
Strip all but the main idea, and that’s your opening.

Facilitation

“What did you notice?” → End your meetings with this short, powerful question

A sign reading “Area Closed for Plant and Wildlife Protection”. — Photo by Brian Kerr.

The simplest technique I know.

“What did you notice?”

Asking this question is an incredible way to close out a meeting or gathering.

Here’s how it’s done

Pose the question: “What did you notice?”
Invite everyone to share an answer, or pass.
Indicate that you'll answer first and point out who’s next.
Give your answer. (I tend to say something like, “I noticed how everyone contributed in their own way and appreciated learning from each of you.”)
Go around the room. Listen. Offer the kindest attention and warmest eye contact you can muster. If someone needs help, ask, “What did you notice?” or the more advanced form, “What’s one thing you noticed?”
When everyone has had a chance to speak, you’re done.
Close with your thanks.

So, what do people say?

Sometimes people share simple things: appreciations and gratitude. For one another. For time together. For kindness or collaboration that has occurred. People might say they noticed conflict, especially if they can point to a moment where it was identified or resolved.

Then a transition happens. This is the magic trick.

It happens in a group of 5 or a group of 50. I don’t know why, but it does. I’ve done this a hundred times in dozens of different groups and each time I worry it won’t happen. It always does. The transition is:

About halfway through, responses shift away from sensory observations and towards the retrospective. Reflection, decision, statements of purpose.

The question hasn’t changed—“What did you notice?”—but the room has.

Maybe some perspective-taking happens. Or someone reinforces shared purpose, especially where there has been disagreement.

By the end, the answers to “What did you notice?” tend toward summary and action. What's next. What's the opportunity. Noticing consensus or its lack.

The group has started with “what” and moved on to “so what” and then “now what.” All with a single question and the lightest structure.

If you want a little more

There are facilitation methods for doing this with a little more scaffolding.

For example, the Institute of Cultural Affairs’ Focused Conversation method is a facilitated discussion that leads a group through stages from Objective to Reflective to Interpretive to Decisional (ORID). Focused Conversations are lovely too, and I use them often.

A simpler version is the “What/So What/Now What” Liberating Structure.

Simpler still is the “what did you notice?” question.

Try it sometime. It’s so simple, it’s magic.

May 15, 2024: edited for length.

Learning

2 ways to get better at guessing

Try out your guesses; write them down.

First way: try out guesses with small, reversible tests

Try out changes on a small scale—involving a few people for a short period of time—and in a way that’s easy to bail on.

Things tried out this way tend to be crappy or prototype-y. Good:

Use a piece of paper instead of a fancy app.
Make a spreadsheet instead of a report.
Draw a table and figures on the wall instead of a spreadsheet.
Do it manually today. Automate later.

Small: you need only enough work to figure out if your guess was any good. Don’t dump resources or spend time rushing towards dead ends.

Reversible: work this way to take the sting out of failure. Idea didn’t work? Stop and try the next one.

Test: once you can point to an initial success, gather resources and proceed with something more elaborate.

Second way: a logbook of guesses

Once you start testing your guesses, you’ll find that you make a lot of guesses, and run a lot of little tests. So keep a log. Write down:

Your guess,
What you thought might happen, and
What actually happened.
Was your test bigger or smaller than it needed to be?

Practice this and your guesses will improve over time.

Don’t take my word for it—try it in a small, reversible way, and see.

July 16, 2024: edited for length.

Continuous improvement

Some things (like pancakes) you should finish once you start

Would you rather have five half-cooked pancakes or two good ones?

Do this with me:

Griddle up a pancake on one side.
Do not flip it. Instead, remove from heat and set on a plate.
Immediately start the first half of another pancake.
Continue until you have a stack of five half-cooked pancakes. They should be crispy and fluffy on one side, oozing and dripping raw batter on the other.

Oops. We didn't make a meal—we made a disaster.

The 10x pancake-maker

I’ve met busy, expert-level cooks who spend a great deal of time making only the first sides of pancakes. Everyone is hungry, the food goes to waste, but you gotta see how fast they move. Their bias towards action. Velocity. Look at them: a “flow state.” There is always something cooking, so they must be great at this. And the incredible variety of pancakes their menu offers.

What remarkable flavors their breakfasts must have, if they ever manage to finish a single god damned flapjack.

The best pancake

The best pancake is cooked perfectly, ready for someone to enjoy.
A strongly OK pancake might be a bowl of batter next to a hot griddle.
The very worst is a pancake-in-progress, one that's started cooking, and then a doorbell rings a few rooms away. It’s easily interruptible, delicate, a liability if the mind or body wanders.

Started but not finished

Put on your continuous improvement goggles, go look for work that has been started but not finished. You’ll find it everywhere. Gross. Let it be as much cause for concern as that stack of half-cooked pancakes.

Given a pancake-in-progress, you can guess how far along it is. Pour, one side, flip, the other, serve. You can even check the batter and guess how many more you can cook.
But given a basket of nuanced, exploratory projects, everyone believes & reports each activity to be 85% complete… but the reality can be obscure. Plus, everybody is too busy starting all these other projects to quite finish any of them.

It’s enough to put you off your breakfast.

August 5, 2024: Edited for length.

Facilitation

Open space technology, principle 1: “Whoever comes is the right people”

What's the use of a crowd?

"Whoever comes is the right people."

I love the slight awkwardness of this sentence as it describes what happens when people (plural) become a people (singular). A people as a process, not as a shuffling, muttering crowd of individuals.

I can think of only two contexts where I’ve experienced this “peopleing”—

Open space technology. This is a lightly facilitated, carefully organized format for a gathering. Open space is convened on a challenge so puzzling that people are compelled to show up to work and listen. It is the most direct, accessible format for group self-organization I’ve ever encountered: both a chapel and a chainsaw.
The Buddhist sangha, in its various permutations. I keep a mailing list of 75 of us who sat weekly for some years in a frigid room before COVID sent everybody home. Over time, I learned some incidental details (occupation, class, family composition, neighborhood, etc.) about maybe 1 out of 8 of those people. But in terms of the topic at hand—styles of meditation, preferred traditions, favorite teachers, etc.—I still recall where each person was and where they were headed, even though we haven’t met since early 2020. Similarly, I sat on a week-length retreat with 50 people and felt like I came to know them so deeply, and shared something so precious, even though what we shared together was silence. These groups—this sangha—is vital, even though it is transient or ‘incomplete’ in a conventional sense.

We’d all benefit from more spaces where two people, or two hundred, could gather and say—“I don’t know anything about you, and you don’t know anything about me, but we have what we need to get this sorted.”

It is an antidote to the social atomization inhibiting our lives under capital.

And until we get there, it’s a hell of a way to organize a meeting.

Open space technology series:

Whoever comes is the right people. → now reading
Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
Whenever it starts is the right time.
When it is over, it is over. (forthcoming)

August 30, 2024: Edited for length.

Continuous improvement

A lousy time to be a good idea

In which “we send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall.”

Podcast episode 0040: A lousy time to be a good idea

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More podcast episodes online or in your favorite app.

In 1992, Oxford English prof Andrew Nuttall wrote the following:

The human capacity to think provisionally, to do thought experiments, to form hypotheses, to imagine what may happen before it happens, is fundamental to our nature and to our spectacular biological success ... The cleverest thing Sir Karl Popper ever said was his remark that our hypotheses ‘die in our stead’. The human race has found a way, if not to abolish, then to defer and diminish the Darwinian treadmill of death. We send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall.

That’s the tidiest explanation I’ve seen of our infinite appetites for catastrophe in media and in the imagination.

There’s much to gain from the activity of worrying about responses to some imagined, awful event. Mental rehearsal prepares us. We imagine. We plan. We ruminate. And as the expendable armies fall, over and over, the mind is cluttered. All this automatically, unwillingly, exhaustively.

We might also stop and turn the armies back and inhabit the silence.

(But that’s for another day.)

This is hard

We’re born experts at doing thought experiments automatically, intuitively, and individually.
But we’re terrible at doing thought experiments deliberately, or being able to speak or write about them.
Even worse, we believe we’re equally great at both kinds of thinking.

The bad news

Think of the containers we’re meant to pour our great ideas into:

Suggestion boxes where ideas go not merely to die but to be forgotten “even by God.”
Big-design-up-front schemes that admit only a single hypothesis. Hope you picked the right idea at the outset of that multiyear effort.
Asinine standards for projects like ‘6x return on investment’, which serve only to preclude experimentation and prohibit critical thinking.
Initiatives where everyone is discouraged by an early failure and gives up, with the cry of: “we tried that and it didn’t work!”

These containers are bad, and you can find them everywhere.

The good news

The good news is: there are better ways of working and deciding, together.

Instead of suggestion boxes, create listening systems.
Do set-based design and allow for new trade-offs and discoveries without blowing the budget.
Validate ideas through rigorous PDSA, with small, reversible changes.
Celebrate failure as the thing one can learn from.

All those continuous improvement methods, all the great facilitation approaches, the techniques for self-organization? That’s what they’re for. They’re here, they’re tested, and they’re effective—and they are not easy.

From where I sit, this is the job. Let’s get to it.

October 7, 2024: Edited for length.

Improve Something Today

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