Category Archives: Meetings

Remote Working – SMILE!

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Ernest Borgnine… smiling! (Public Domain – Wikimedia Commons)

With the impacts that Covid 19 has (and will continue to have) on our lives, it suddenly seems like there is a lot of information out there to provide advice for remote communication and work. This information has been there for a long time, but now it’s critical to many people. From what I have seen recently, I’m not seeing any really new information being offered… and after many video chats in the past few days, I realized that my click-bait title for this post should be:

For the love of god… SMILE!

Have you ever seen up close the make-up applied to stage actors? It’s often exaggerated and looks bizarre when you’re next to it. The reason is that they are communicating with people far away in the theater, so the make-up is designed to assist them with physical communication of their craft by accentuating their features. Theater is a communication tool, where people learn the skills required to maximize the effect of that tool.

When we are working with each other digitally, social and physical cues can be hard to recognize and interpret. The tool of video conferencing requires that we adopt skills to make it effective, and knowing when and how to apply them depending on the communication style of the person we are conversing with. Today I realized that when I am on skype/zoom/webex/gotomeeting/hangouts/teams (insert other option here) I have adapted to try to provide overt social cues to the person I’m speaking with. I nod, I tilt my head, I grin, I give thumbs up. I might look like some kind of animatronic anomaly… but… I do it to reinforce my interactions with the person on the other end of the call. I’m trying to make them comfortable and to confirm that we have successfully communicated with one another. As to whether this works or not, that’s another question. But, it seems logical to me.

Give this some thought. We all have certain resting features, and they do affect our face-to-face communication. That effect is likely amplified when we are screen-to-screen. Good communication involves understanding the communication style of the person with whom you are speaking, and benefits from you adapting to that style in order to help them hear you. We also hope that they are doing the same for us.

I share the above to hopefully add something new to the current remote workplace conversations. Beyond establishing work protocols and that we should wear the same clothes as we would to work (including pants), we need to recognize the subtle aspects that help to normalize our digital communications. We are in ominous times, and there is a reality that we can ease the challenge of remote communication by intentionally telegraphing the cues that help other people hear us. At a minimum, smile, modulate your voice, and move your head a little. When people don’t do that, it can be unnerving speaking with them. Don’t be unnerving.

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I am giving things a lot of thought right now and may post again. When I write, it’s in part to share information, but I also use it to clarify my thoughts (selfish me). In case you see another post, here’s some information that might give me some street cred on this topic:

My firm is a small company with six employees based out of Anchorage, Alaska. “Remote office” for us has been an ongoing evolution for the past ten years. This evolution began with a single person in an office in Juneau, and has included various employees in home offices in varied locations in and out of state, and the flexibility to allow staff (and myself) to work when away from our home turf. Each year brings better bandwidth for our internet connections, better options for software and applications… and more understanding about the trials and tribulations of integrating remote work into our workflow. It’s not easy(!), but it allows us to be flexible, and flexibility is something that staff like.

About the Author: Peter Briggs is a landscape architect who has an ongoing preoccupation with the business of design. For more bio information, please see: www.highestexpertise.com/who-is-peter/

The Power of Being Heard

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The Importance of Asking the Right Question

Questions serve many purposes, but for the sake of this post I focus on asking questions with the goal of understanding a situation and the needs and wants of the people within it.

For the purpose of a concrete example, let’s say we’re tasked with understanding people’s thoughts on the development of a new park. Whether meeting in person, in small groups or a large public meeting… the right questions are critical. (It is also critical to understand HOW to ask those questions, but that delves into facilitation and won’t be covered in this post. An example of that is the difference between verbally asking questions of a large group with direct verbal responses, versus asking people to write their responses down on cards. Those two methods can result in drastically different results from a group session.)

So… let’s start with the fact that an answer is only as good as the question that inspired it.

If as designers we are to be good listeners, we need to understand how to ask the right questions.

Remember that your goal is to try to understand everyone around you, and that you are irrelevant except as a facilitator. A friend once told me that when she is running a public meeting, her goal is to leave that meeting knowing as much as possible about the attendees… but having attendees know as little as possible about her. The meeting has absolutely nothing to do with her, so her opinions, ideas and frames of reference shouldn’t taint the process.

We speak only to ask questions ad seek clarification.

Know Your Purpose

  • Why do we want to ask questions?
    • Understanding the situation: The most common reason to reach out to people is to understand a project’s fundamentals. What are the opportunities and constraints? What are the strengths and weaknesses? Problems to be solved? Let’s open it up to understand the situation.
    • Gain Support: When you engage with people, they will hopefully gain some ownership over the process. This can be used for the powers of good, the powers of evil or somewhere in-between. Within the context of wanting to genuinely consult people, we’ll discount autocratic, ritual or placatory reasons for a planning process (Boothroyd, 1986). For our purposes, gaining support is an outgrowth of a good planning process.
  • Research:
    • The Task at Hand: You will need to know enough about what you are doing in order to develop your questions. You will likely learn and refine your questions by interacting with your client or stakeholders. I find that questions change after you ask them a few times. They refine themselves as you discover the unintentional consequences of their wording.
  • Who will we be questioning?  Know your target audience. You may just be asking your clients questions. You might be consulting a whole community.
    • Their level of knowledge: Be careful about the shortcuts that you might take. Your client might be the only person that you question, and might have worked with you before, but don’t assume that your “shared language” is in the best interest of getting good answers. Don’t skip levels within a process if you can avoid it. When you do a full process, you might find that you’re asking the right questions on the wrong project (see Trying to Avoid Work). The ideal project starts with no assumptions.
    • Their level of communication: Cultures have communication shortcuts. We need to be very careful about these, as they are assumptions (see bullet above). Working in a cross-cultural context is an ideal way to understand the fundamentals of communication. Shortcuts are not necessary, and they are sometimes not fair. If we approached all processes with the tools developed for the challenges of cross-cultural communication, I believe that it would clarify communication. A little extra time in the beginning usually saves more time later.

Plan Your Question

There are good resources on line for more specifics or guidance than I give below. Search for “asking a good question”.

  • Simplicity!
    • Context: Provide information and context to allow people to develop answers, but avoid anything that would seek to shape their answer (intentionally or unintentionally). This can be SUPER hard for us designers where we are taught to try to convince people that our ideas are the right ones for them.
    • One Question at a time: Ask one question at a time, and make sure it is simple and clear.
  • Don’t Influence! Don’t influence people’s answers by the context that you provide, or the questions that you ask.
    • Neutral Wording & Avoiding Leading Questions: Simplify your question as much as possible. No adjectives or adverbs. Use words like ‘describe’. Don’t influence the outcome.
    • Open ended vs. specific:
      • Open ended questions allow for brainstorming. This is needed to allow freedom of thought and to find the unexpected.
      • Specific questions allow clarification and refinement. This is needed when narrowing down ideas or prioritizing.
    • Only limit answers when appropriate:
      • Either/Or: There will be times where one option or another is a good question, but remember that asking a question this way limits the options to those you are listing.
      • Yes/No: A yes or no answer can be very useful, but they have the same use/constraints as either/or.:
  • The power of why. The first question will likely not get to any root cause. When you have an important question developed, a good exercise is to ask why five times and encourage people to drill down to truly understand something. Intentionally asking (and answering) “why?” encourages people to stop and think (and perhaps discuss) what is behind their answers.
  • Plan it from start to finish: You will use different questions and different tools as your group gathers, distills and synthesizes information. You should have this whole process planned out and optimized. Then, you also need to be prepared with a Plan B and  Plan C… and be able to adapt and clarify.

Adapt and Clarify

  • Be a Flexible Expert Facilitator: I started this post with saying that HOW the questions are asked wouldn’t really be touched upon as it delves into facilitation. You will need to have a variety of tools and techniques at your disposal as it is YOUR job to understand how best to help each and every person find the right way to answer your question and/or contribute to your session. This will only come with experience. Skillful facilitators are the ultimate communicator in their knowledge of learning styles, psychology, group dynamics, technology, etc…
  • You Can’t Give Up: No matter how strange someone is, they will likely have something valuable to provide to your process. It is YOUR role to help them.
  • Facilitation as a Martial Art: Jujitsu involves receiving energy and redirecting it. Your role is to redirect whatever energy is aimed at you to find the place not only where it belongs, and where it ideally benefits the process. If this energy involves anger/frustration/confusion, it is likely that at their root there might be a useful piece of information. When you discover it, you might be able to re-purpose it for the betterment of your project… and result in someone that feels like they have been heard.

A Listening Framework

  • Listen! Listening is hard until you practice it. We want so hard to contribute and identify with people, but when we do so we wind up risking changing results.
  • Be a good interviewer. This is hard! Your goal is to allow someone to be themselves, and to find the right way to speak and be heard. A good interviewer moves beyond the surface and teases out real information.
  • Respect their time. Always set up meetings with a specific timeline, and respect it. If you get close to the end, check in to see if they value using more time or not. (See this post with relevant aspects about Running a Good Meeting.)
  • Talk as little as possible. Your talking should only relate to helping other people talk to you. Minimize sharing your own stories, except where they are as neutral as possible and might help someone be comfortable with sharing. Every conversation is different. If you find yourself talking more than you’d like, consider that speaking might not be the best way to reach the person or group you are with. That’s where other facilitation/interaction techniques might be useful to reach the information you need (ex. written exercises or online surveys)

We Just Want to Be Heard!

Whether recently, or since the dawn of time… humans just aren’t good at listening to one another. This means that we often don’t feel like we’ve actually been heard. You have the power to listen to people, and actually hear them. Not only hear them, but shown them that they have been heard.

Do not underestimate the power of being heard.

Most Important Skill Ever!!! Running a Good Meeting

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I’ve had the luck to be on a commission, be on an editorial board, be involved with local professional association leadership, be involved with national professional association leadership, run my own company, and have countless discussions over “after beers” when I interacted with anyone else during the business of the above. If anyone were to ask me what the most important part about being a leader is… running a good meeting.

You are a leader! Your role is to enable those around you to achieve their potential. Your role is to let them figure things out, and then bring them to the table. It’s the best when a sub-committee brings a strong decision to a larger board, and all we have to do is vote to support it or not. There might be some brief discussion, but we’ve chosen the right people to be on that sub-committee… so we intrinsically trust what they bring to us.

I should state that this post assumes that it is a board meeting (or similar) with a group of people who function relatively well and are used to interacting. The opposite end of the spectrum is something like a public meeting… which would require numerous posts to address running from minimizing the opportunities for dysfunction.

Board Meetings are for reviewing and approving things.

When people slip into doing the work at a board meeting (getting into the weeds), it means one of a few things:

  • The subcommittee hadn’t completed their work completely,
    • Oops…
  • They weren’t clear about their reason for coming to the board,
    • Always be clear about what you need!
    • A status report (which really has only need for minimal discussion)
    • A request for approval (if it creates major discussion, it might just need to go back to committee)
  • It’s just the wrong thing at the wrong time.

A (secret?) recipe for a good meeting.

My opinions on the secret of a good meeting?
  • Have a good agenda.
    • This should include times for each item.
    • This is where you enable yourself to manage a meeting. When you get to the allocated time, you interrupt the discussion to state you have reached time. Unless the board decides to extend the time, it should be wrapped up.
  • Have a secret agenda.
    • This sounds bad… but isn’t. The president and executive director should have an agenda that might have extra information on it. At a minimum this should include a model motion (this can also be in the standard agenda) and any cheat notes you might want for easy access.
    • This shouldn’t contain anything you wouldn’t want people to see, but it should contain the items that relate to “leadership” and helping you run the meeting well.
  • Announce your role at the start of every meeting. I like to start with:
    • Hi. My role is to keep this meeting going, and make sure you laugh a little.
    • We will use loose Robert’s Rules for this meeting. If we find ourselves in a more complex discussion, we will use tighter Robert’s Rules and I will act as Parlimentarian to the best of my abilities.
    • I will be a time fascist. My role is to keep our meeting on topic and on time. I do this to be respectful of you and your time.
  • Keep to your agenda
    • Be a time fascist. As said, when you hit your time use it as a point to either validate the importance of the existing discussion by extending the time, wrap it up and find the right conclusion, or save it for another meeting.
  • Maintain the level of Robert’s Rules (or similar) needed for your group.
    • Receive reports and information.
    • Ensure that they are received with a specific intent. Is this informational, or does it have need of a motion?
    • As necessary, have a model motion ready for the group and read it out as a basis for someone to easily say, “So moved.”
    • Get your second, and have discussion.
    • Call the question to get your vote.
      • When I can’t see people (teleconference), I ask for all those who are NOT in favor. This gets to the point faster and generally becomes “motion moved unanimously”. You’ll know when you should start with those in favour, and/or ask for abstentions.
    • When things get complex… make sure you know the process for friendly amendments and unfriendly amendments.
    • YOU have to be the person that knows how to maintain procedural order (or the person who consults your parliamentarian and is willing to enforce it on the group). Without it your meeting will devolve.
  • Keep people laughing and enjoying themselves.
    • Break as necessary.
    • Feel empowered as a humour broker, or empower others to do this within reason.
    • During breaks and after the meeting, touch base with board members to socialize and show them people are listening. Make them feel good about themselves.
    • Always find time to provide positive credit and goodness.
Some of the best feedback I have ever heard in my professional career has been “Thank you! That was the shortest meeting ever!” or “You run a meeting well.” Well… that in addition to, “Wow… you look handsome in a suit!” I stop myself from wondering how I looked before I put the suit on… =(