Case Study: Designing and Facilitating a Small Nonprofit Board Retreat with Zoe Tamaki


Over the past two years, I helped designed and facilitate two annual board retreats for a small nonprofit with my colleague, Zoe Tamaki. I don’t typically do one-offs like this, but the executive director was a friend of mine, and I was looking for an excuse to work with and learn from Zoe. After last year’s retreat, Zoe and I sat down in front of a camera and discussed some things we learned from the experience and from each other, including:

  • The importance of designing with your stakeholders
  • When relationship-building trumps task work
  • How I handled a funky facilitation moment

I’d like to share stories like this more frequently, and I hope to explore other mediums in which to do this, especially video. I want to share a lot more about design, which contributes much more to the success of group process than facilitation. I especially want to talk about the harder stuff — the challenging moments or the stuff that flat out fails. Since my focus over the past few years has shifted to supporting and coaching other collaboration practitioners such as Zoe, I’m especially excited to be sharing things I’m learning from them.

Finally, I hope to inspire other practitioners to share stories from their work more frequently and without concern about polish. This work is hard. It’s better to show all the rough edges.

Many thanks to Zoe for doing this work with me and for being willing to candidly debrief it on camera afterward! As I think you’ll be able to tell from the video, it was super fun working with her.

Freaking Out Is Part of Systems Change

We are in the midst of a global pandemic.

Re-reading those last two words still feels bonkers to me, even though it’s been almost three months since the first reported case of COVID-19 and almost two weeks since the World Health Organization (WHO) made its official declaration. I had been casually tracking Coronavirus from the start, and I started paying closer attention about four weeks ago. I’ve also been actively doing some thinking and scenario work around planetary crises with a few friends and colleagues for the past year and a half. I wasn’t as prepared as I could have been, but it’s not like this came out of nowhere.

Which made it even more surprising to me when, just before the official pandemic declaration and a week before the shelter-in-place orders started here in San Francisco, I started freaking out.

One of my superpowers is that I’m able to stay calm in stressful situations. I’ve had this power for as long as I can remember, and it’s served me well in life and in work. It’s actually two interdependent practices: recognition and mitigation. Recognition is both situational — understanding when I’m in a stressful situation — and introspective — understanding when I’m feeling stressed. Once I recognize, I usually have a limited window of time in which to mitigate, which mostly consists of me talking to myself and breathing.

Mitigation is useless without recognition. If I’m not aware of my stress level rising, then I can’t mitigate. Which brings me to my kryptonite: In times of sudden crisis, I’m cool as a cucumber, but when the stress slowly sneaks up on me, I’m like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I’ve learned to just let it happen and be okay with it.

That’s what I did when I started freaking out two weeks ago. A few of my friends on social media, whom I trust, had been sounding the alarm about Coronavirus for a few days, and I had started to wonder whether I was taking it seriously enough. After spending a few days thinking it through and talking it over with friends, I started canceling social engagements and sheltering in place, even though I wasn’t feeling sick. I started asking friends and family to consider doing the same, but I wasn’t yet advocating for it, and I was still feeling calm.

That started changing for me the following day, which is when WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. I was completely ignoring my work, instead obsessively reading articles and clicking through posts on social media. When I talked to friends and family who were still resistant to staying home, I noticed a shortness of breath and a hint of hysteria in my responses. That’s when I sat down and said to myself, “Holy shit, I am officially freaking out.”

For me, part of “let it happen, and be okay with it,” is talking about it with others. (This post is one example of that.) The more I talk about it, the more I normalize it, and the less scary and more manageable it becomes. As I told others about my COVID-19 meltdown, I could start to hear a little voice inside my head saying, “Of course you are freaking out. There’s a worldwide pandemic that’s spreading exponentially, killing thousands of people, and shutting down our economy. You’re rightfully scared, and you rightfully feel helpless.” I don’t know why it takes so long for this little voice to start speaking up about what should seem obvious, but it does. It’s just how freaking-out works.

At my previous consulting firm, we used to hand out a two-page document to new and prospective clients detailing our design process. My favorite paragraph was about what I called, “The Freak-out Moment”:

A few weeks before the engagement, the design generally starts to come together, and people often start feeling more comfortable about the process. Right before the engagement, that happy feeling often goes away. It can even be replaced by panic. This is completely normal, and it’s our role to help you through that.

Participatory, emergent processes are inherently unpredictable. Systems change processes in particular are high stakes and complex. Panic is understandable, because, in the absence of certainty, all you can ask for is faith. Faith is a hard sell, especially if you’ve had limited (or, worse, bad) previous experiences.

Part of the role of a good collaboration practitioner is to guide others through freak-out moments. Another role is to manage these moments yourself, because if you’re doing work that matters and if you’re paying enough attention, you will experience these moments too.

There are three things I try to do to manage these moments.

First, let it happen, and be okay with it.

Second, be compassionate to yourself and to others. Shortly before people started rushing to stores to load up on supplies, I went to the grocery store with my sister to pick up a few items. I was already on edge about being in public, and I was especially annoyed that people were not keeping their distance. Afterward, I complained to my sister about it, and she wisely responded, “It’s not that they don’t care. They’re scared, just like you were a few days ago. They’re not paying attention to distance, because they’re just trying to stock up on groceries as quickly as possible.”

Third, remember that you are not alone, that you are part of a larger system, and that your role is not to be a hero. I am indebted to my mentor, Gail Taylor, for constantly reminding me of this:

The success and failure of a process is never fully dependent on you. You are simply part of the system, just like everyone else. Everyone brings their own special wisdom and superpowers. The whole system holds the space, not just you. This is true with facilitation, this is true with design, and this is true when grappling with global pandemics.

COVID-19 is an opportunity both to apply and to evolve what we know about collaborative processes and systems change. I will do my best to share what I already know, I will be paying attention and sharing what I learn along the way, and I hope others will be as well.

At the same time, remember that these are not normal times. Many of us are having to grapple with huge uncertainties with work. Many of us are suddenly having to grapple with working from home and simultaneously taking care of our homebound kids. Many of us are taking care of our parents. Many of us are working on the frontlines, risking our own lives and livelihoods for our communities.

Please, let yourselves and others freak out, and please be as compassionate as you can be both to others and to yourselves. Most of all, be safe.

Everybody Is People

Many years ago, a colleague, Nick Papadopoulos, told me about a complex negotiation he was asked to facilitate between a large corporation and a community of angry activists. They had met several times without external facilitation and were not making progress. Nick practiced Dialogue Mapping, a visual facilitation technique for mapping complex issues in real-time, and he had other sophisticated skills in his toolbelt as well.

The first meeting he attended started at 8am on a Saturday morning in one of the company’s conference rooms. When he arrived, there was no food or coffee. The meeting began, and people were predictably grouchy. The issues they were discussing were political and personal, and they were also discussing them on an empty stomach.

As it turned out, Nick’s wife had just started a catering business. At the next meeting, he brought a tray of her muffins. The tenor of the discussion shifted noticeably, and he started doing this regularly. Several weeks later, after he had successfully brought the negotiation to a close, several of the participants came up to him and told him how much they enjoyed his wife’s muffins.

I wasn’t at any of those meetings. I have no idea what role the food actually played in Nick’s success. He is both modest and skilled, and that probably mattered more than the food in the end. However, for me, his insight about the food was part of what made him skilled. I’m sure it played a significant role in his success.

Why am I so sure?

Everybody is people.

It’s likely that most people have not yet eaten at an 8am meeting on a Saturday morning. People need food in their systems to be at their best. People like tasty food, especially the homemade kind, which reminds us of family, of people we love, of our humanity. When the topic of conversation is controversial and complex, people need to be at their best. Depriving them of food — consciously or not — is not a good idea. Reminding them of their and each other’s humanity is an excellent idea.

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget. We get so caught up in complexity that we forget simple, important things. Things like everybody is people.

I led the Wikimedia open strategy process from 2009 through 2010. We had over a thousand people from all over the world participate, mostly virtually. It’s not the hardest project I’ve worked on, but a lot of people still marvel at it. They wonder how we were able to get so many people to volunteer their time and to work together so constructively, especially without seeing each other. The answer was simple.

Everybody is people.

The fact that we were working mostly virtually didn’t change the fact that we were dealing with people, and people have certain basic needs. We did three things that are often overlooked, because they were so simple and the project was so complex, people have a hard time believing they were that important.

First, we took the time to individually welcome every single person who showed up. Everyone.

This is the simplest thing that you can do in any online forum (and in any face-to-face meeting), regardless of the tool you’re using. There happens to be lots of data showing that welcoming people when they show up is one of the best ways to improve engagement. But really, do we need the data to justify this? Welcoming people is a simple way to establish a relationship, to show people that they are seen and appreciated.

Second, we held virtual office hours once a week for the entire year. We alternated the times to make them convenient for people in different timezones, which meant that every other week, we were up late at night talking to people. We happened to be using a tool called IRC, which is an ancient real-time chatting tool that Wikipedians like to use, but it would have worked with any tool.

These were not meetings, and there were no agendas. The sole purpose was to hang out with me and Philippe Beaudette, our facilitator. We wanted to meet people, to get to know them, and to listen to what they had to say. We also wanted to invite others to do the same with us.

People came. They were often surprised by the lack of formality. They expected us to be guarded or to have agendas. We answered questions, sometimes in great detail (I can get very philosophical), but we weren’t there to evangelize. We were there to listen and to get to know our participants.

Not only did we achieve that goal, it turned out that participation in office hours led to participation in the overall process. We had the data to prove this. But even if we didn’t, we still would have continued doing this or something similar. Relationships matter, and this was one of the best ways we had for developing them.

Third, we tried our best to get to know people as whole human beings. My colleagues, Renee Fazzari and Curtis Ogden, both like to say that we’re not just brains on sticks. Unfortunately, it’s amazing how often we treat each other that way, even in a face-to-face context. It’s even easier to make this mistake online when you can’t actually see the person.

Early in our process, we had one participant who was causing a lot of trouble over an obscure decision that we had made and with which everyone else had agreed. It had to do with whether or not Brazilian Portugese is a different language from Portugese. The issue is more complex than it sounds, and we chose to go in a different direction than other Wikimedia communities, which was within our rights but also required explanation. Our reasoning satisfied everybody except for this one participant, who was making it difficult for us to move forward.

We tried engaging with him in a number of different ways, but nothing worked, and I decided at some point that we just had to do our best to ignore him. As it so happened, Philippe, our facilitator, was going to Brazil to meet with community members there, and I asked him to look out for this one participant just in case.

While Philippe was in Brazil, the participant’s demeanor abruptly changed, and he became one of our most constructive contributors. I asked Philippe what happened. “I just talked to him for a bit,” Philippe said. “He was really great — whip smart and very nice. Oh, by the way, he’s 14.”

I got a good laugh out of that. I had envisioned him as a large, cantankerous man in his 50s, and I was probably communicating with him as such. Knowing his age wouldn’t have changed my respect for him, but it would have helped me engage with him more productively.

Everybody is people.

Earlier this year, I was helping a practitioner at a large company design a high-stakes offsite for the leaders of one of its divisions. They had been having intense friction, and they were hoping to work through it at this offsite. This practitioner’s instinct was to schedule a 30-minute working lunch, because… well, that’s what they always did, and they had a lot to cover.

I pushed back. I generally treat lunch and breaks at my meetings as sacred time — time to break bread, to reconnect with each other, to rest and reset. I doubted that the extra 30-minutes would result in substantial progress, but I was certain that not taking a break would detract from the rest of the day’s conversations.

To this practitioner’s credit, she not only embraced my feedback, she made some surprising suggestions. Instead of giving them an hour for lunch, why not give them 90 minutes? And instead of hosting a lunch, why not encourage them to go into the city and eat out together? All of these leaders were used to eating at their desks or in meetings during lunch. Going out would feel different.

We went with her idea, and we had our meeting. I facilitated the conversation using my mindset cards, and I felt like I was on top of my game. It was as intense as we expected, but it went well overall. At the end of the day and in our evaluations, our participants had many good things to say, including appreciations here and there about the mindset cards and about my facilitation.

However, the one thing everyone kept mentioning over and over again was the lunch. Everybody loved how spacious it was, the conversations they got to have with their peers that they never had otherwise. Everybody loved getting out of the meeting room and spending time in the city together. It led into a surprisingly deep conversation about why they didn’t always do this and how they might start.

Six weeks later, I checked in with the practitioner to see how things were going. The team was still having issues, but there were signs of progress here and there. The biggest takeaway from our meeting that had stuck? It wasn’t the mindset work that I had so expertly facilitated. It was the long, luxurious, so-unproductive-it-was-productive lunch. People were going out to lunch together more often. People were scheduling more lunches with their teams and protecting lunches in their meetings.

Everybody is people.

I’ve been helping groups collaborate more effectively for 16 years now. Many of these projects have been extremely complex, which has helped me develop lots of sophisticated skills. I’m proud of these abilities, I have no doubt that they make me a much more effective practitioner, and I work hard to continue to develop them.

But in reflecting on my work over the years, the skill that has undoubtedly had the most impact has been remembering that everybody is people. It’s simultaneously obvious and extraordinary and humbling to realize this. We all understand this at some level, because… well, everybody is people. However, we often forget to incorporate this into our work. We are dazzled by stories of perseverance through difficult circumstances, our ability to “suck it up” or “tough it out,” and rather than optimize our work to help us all be at our best, we create circumstances that require us to be superhuman to succeed and that punish us when we’re not.

This is lunacy. Sadly, it’s all too common.

I don’t think it has to be this way. I think all of us have the power to make changes that will impact our groups in positive, sometimes profound ways, if we just remembered that everybody is people. It starts by looking at ourselves, by asking what we need — as people — to help us be at our best. Maybe there’s something simple that we can do that doesn’t depend on anyone else, whether it’s remembering to eat breakfast or to welcome someone else on your team. It doesn’t have to be hard, but it will make a big difference.

After all, everybody is people.

Thanks to Amy Wu for reviewing an early draft of this post.

Effective Facilitation Is Not About Being Liked

Hug Me!

How do you know if you’ve done a good job facilitating?

There is no simple or universal answer to this question, but there is a wrong answer. Effective meeting facilitation is not about being liked. Just because a few of your participants sing your praises afterward doesn’t mean you’ve actually accomplished your goals. Conversely, just because your participants aren’t smiling or hugging each other or you afterward doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

The biggest mistake that facilitators make going into meetings is not going in with clear, aligned goals. If there’s no goal clarity, there’s no fair way of collectively assessing how you did.

Even if you have goal clarity, “reading the room” is not an effective way to assess those goals, regardless of how skillful you think you are. We as humans all suffer from cognitive biases and a predilection for projecting our own opinions onto others.

My friend, Ed, is a radiologist, and he recently pointed me to this op-ed about the recent trend in U.S. health care of conflating patient satisfaction with effectiveness. The problem is that research shows that high patient satisfaction scores do not correlate to healthier patients. However, they do correlate with higher spending on drugs and higher death rates.

People-pleasing is a natural human instinct, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Losing sight of other critical goals is. Relying on perceived satisfaction as a way to assess your performance will lead you down that stray path. Medicine has the advantage of having clearer, objective measures, but the absence of those measures does not mean you can give up trying.

I create evaluation surveys before meetings, and I always ask assessment questions about the meeting’s goals. This forces you and your co-designers to get clear about what your goals are and how you might measure success up-front, which in and of itself will make your meetings better. At worst, you get aggregate feedback that is more likely to be frank than feedback shared with the whole group or one-on-one at the end of a meeting, when everyone is on an emotional high (or low). But surveys are simply a starting point, and it’s important not to read too much into them.

Last April, I led a collaborative networks practitioners workshop on behalf of the Garfield Foundation. We had three goals, which we shared up-front with our participants:

  • Share the Garfield frame around collaborative action networks
  • Start developing a shared understanding of the participants’ frame around collaborative action networks
  • Create a valuable experience for practitioners who support, fund, and participate in collaborative action networks

At the end of the meeting, people shared glowing reflections on the two days, and several people came up to me praising me for my facilitation. If I were using that alone as my success metric, I might have thought that I had pulled off the best meeting ever. However, our evaluation survey told a more nuanced story.

We received high scores for the first and third goals, but a mixed (although overall solid) score for our second goal around developing a shared understanding of the participants’ frame. That also included a few biting comments about my facilitation.

I didn’t stress about the negative comments. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, I was not perfect, and even if I were, you’re not always going to please everyone. (In fact, when I expect to be diving into difficult conversation, which was not the case at this workshop, I often use that kind of negative feedback as a measure of success.)

The score on our second goal, however, required us to go deeper. We had to reflect on what we could have done better, but also what the scores did and didn’t tell us. This also got us thinking about behavioral metrics (as opposed to self-assessment surveys) that we could use to better track this goal.

There are no perfect ways to evaluate the effectiveness of your facilitation. But starting with clear goals takes you halfway there, and being thoughtful, intentional, and iterative about collecting better data will take you even further. Hugs are data too, so don’t discount them when you get them. Just don’t conflate them with success.

Photo by lintmachine. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The Separation Is in the Preparation

Preparing for a Design Meeting Kickoff

When it comes to facilitation, people only see what happens in the room. If you do well, they usually attribute that to talent and experience.

Those things matter. But to quote Russell Wilson, “The separation is in the preparation.” The hard work happens in the design process, the pre-work, the practice.

My mission is to get people to see that, to understand and appreciate that, and to learn how to do it. I’m still exploring how best to do this, but I know for sure that it starts by modeling it.