When should you let go of your agenda?

Full transcript

Intro

It's really easy for it to go off the rails. There is definitely like this fine line between you want buy-in, but it'd be just go, "Hey, what do you all wanna do with the time?" That feels like we waste our time...

What Becca was talking about in that intro is this sometimes terrifying moment where the conversation that we've designed for our workshop or our sprint is overrun by a new topic and a new conversation. This is episode 13 of Facilitators Q&A, where I'm talking with Becca Block, Senior Director of Innovation and Continuous Improvement at Springboard Collaborative.

If this is the first episode that you're catching in the series, welcome. This is Facilitators Q&A, I'm Jay Melone from New Haircut. And in these episodes, I hope to give ideas and inspiration for you as a facilitator.

If you have topics or questions you'd like me to address in an upcoming episode, be sure to leave them in the comments. Otherwise let's dig into today's topic where Becca Block is helping to answer the question of when and how should you let go of your agenda.

Today’s question

Jay: That we've designed these sessions and these workshops. And once in a while, we participate in a session that goes brilliantly. And we imagine that the facilitator is better and smarter than us, but sometimes it's just that the conversation is much harder. So what is that first thing that you do?

Becca: Always the first reaction they have when that happens in the middle, whether it's in, you know, 20 minutes in or two hours in is, "Oh God, what did I do wrong? I missed something. I missed something." Because inside I'm going, "What are they bringing up? Is this related? Should I have encountered for this? Does it actually lead to our objectives? Is it more important than our objective? Should we be arising of what we're doing?"

The first step that I found is really essential is to do the active listening. So I sort of like pause and I'll say something like, "Okay, so what I hear you saying is ..." And I deliberately reframe it in my own words because I want to understand it. Not just that, like, did I catch the literal words come out of your mouth, but can I translate it and still be accurately capturing it? Usually what I pair with that is, "I wanna make sure I understand that because I think that is different than what's on our agenda. And we need to decide whether or not we're going to go there or stay with our original agenda and to make that decision, I need to make sure we're all on the same page."

It can play out a few different ways, right? It sort of becomes like, choose your own adventure path at that point, right? So one possibility even just for the reminder of, "Oh, wait, that topic is actually not part of the agenda?" will cause people to be like, "Oh, you know what? That is off the, that is not more important than what we were originally talking about. Sorry, yes, that's what it was. But let's get back to the agenda."

More often what happens is someone says either, "Yes, that's what I was surfacing" or "Not quite, I was trying to say..." So it will lead to clarification of is this an accurate synopsis of what this point is that you're bringing up? And what I found is that it doesn't cost me that much more time to then do the step of, "Got it, okay. So you're saying this, we have a choice now. Our original objectives were blank, blank, and blank. That involves us going through the agenda that we laid out. This is not on that agenda, so we need to make a decision of whether we think this is more important to do this, rather than the other thing or whether we want to stick with our original agenda." And putting that decision out to the group, the majority of the time, just giving, returning the choice to the community leads to like, "Oh no, we wanna stick with the original thing."

I also have sometimes had to, where I do that and people say, "No, I really think that this is more important. Now that this has come up, this is more important and we need to do this." And that is awkward, right? Then you end up, you lose some time you are taking that risk. Okay, now we have to live negotiate what it is that we're doing instead of the originally planned agenda and why we're doing it.

Jay: What have you done to make the situation even worse?

Becca: Yeah so, so many things. One guaranteed way to make the situation worse is for me to just sit silently, which is the thing that I've been most likely to do if the person who is brought up the thing is higher up in the org chart than me. Assuming that there is a good reason for the detour has not worked. It's not like the expectations that I was tasked with meeting go away. And now the method that I've created to meet those expectations has gone away. And therefore it creates like all kinds of stress and disappointment and I've had later conversations, you know, whether it's with the president or CEO or whatever, they'd be like, "Well, I didn't know that's what the effect was. You should have just told me to stop."

I have done the thing of then saying, "Great, thank you for clarifying that. I'm gonna put that in the bike rack. And we will revisit at a later time so that we can get to our originally planned agenda." Sometimes that works. But what I've found is some portion of the time when I'm the one that makes that call as the facilitator, one colleague in particular called me up afterwards, after I sort of been running a whole day long thing, and was like, "I really felt shut down by you, putting that in the parking lot. You, you know, just sort of, I think that that was really important and we didn't make space to talk about it. And I don't know when we're gonna make space to talk about it. And so I just wanted you to know that I felt shut down."

And then the other thing that I think this is not a strategy, like an anti-strategy, but it's a thing just for sheer honesty sake that I have found myself doing is sometimes I just get distracted and interested by the tangent that has been brought up, right? That doesn't work out well either. So it requires a certain level of like mindfulness. It's like, oh, wait a second. I, and that is likely to happen when it's colleagues that you're working with, they're bringing up a topic that you're like, that is a topic that we haven't been talking about. And we do need that, that is an important topic. Yeah, let's talk about that topic. And so not allowing myself to get distracted when something is genuinely both important and urgent, but it's still not the topic on hand.

It's really easy for it to go off the rails. There is definitely like this fine line between you want buy-in, but if you just go, "Hey, what do you all wanna do with the time? What do you think?" Then it just sort of becomes like chaotic and at the time in the moment people are trying to figure it out with you, but afterwards I've gotten the feedback of like, "Oh, that doesn't what, that feels like we wasted our time."

Jay: A lot of what we've been talking about has been stuff to do in the room. Are there any good tips that you have for folks to do and prepare for before the sprint, before the workshop?

Becca: Having the agenda prepared 24 hours in advance and shared with everybody.

Having objectives, right? So that it's not just like, here's what we're doing, but having first, like, "Okay, a successful result at the end of this conversation will be that we...", right? And like having the objectives first 'cause it creates a point of reference to return to of like, "Do we agree? This is still what we wanna try to accomplish, right?" And that's most often what causes it to go back onto the rails, is people looking and going, "Oh, no, I really do want to accomplish that objective."

The other thing is the standard stuff of like building in more time. I work really hard to very carefully plan everything out, try to account for every eventuality. And then I multiply it by three.

Jay: Because I think the important point is that this shit happens. And the first thing that some of us do is to blame ourselves and assume that we missed something. Because sometimes too, in these workshops, you have people in the room that aren't used to being in the room and you've designed a conversation in a way to be like unlocking. And they have this aha moment together and you read the room, right? You do your active listening and you see that like, actually this is an important topic and I can't just put it in the bike rack. I've got to let the group have it.

Becca: Yeah, yeah.

Jay: Well, thank you, Becca. I feel less crazy that I'm not the only one that gets like way too emotionally attached to my agenda. And that feeling of like almost hopelessness at a point where you see the conversation drifting away from what you've designed. It's not something that I just do. So it's good to see you, it's good to learn from you as well. Thanks Becca.

Becca: Thanks so much Jay. I really look forward to talking to you again in the future. I always enjoy our conversations.

Join the conversation

Share your ideas and expertise about this topic here

< Watch Episode 12 Watch Episode 14 >