Workshop techniques for dealing with egos

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you doing today, Dave?

I'm doing very well, Peter. I often wonder if we started this and you weren't booming in as you came into the conversation, whether or not uh it would change the discussion in some way. Let's uh you you before we were kicked to the mics off, you were talking a little bit about workshops that you've been running, about the challenges of facilitating leaders, right? I don't know whether you call them type A personalities, whether you're opinionated, strong uh individuals who have uh a strong view as to where things should go. How do you normally tackle that?

So, I mean it's this interesting piece, isn't it? If you when you when you're trying to come to consensus on something and you get a group of people, or you're trying to do the exploration and find something out, and you bring all of these people into a room, uh what you don't want is it to become the uh hippo who makes the decision, right? That can't be the highest paid person's opinion. It's got to be uh a discussion. And and to do that when you have uh some people in the room who potentially have larger than life personalities, and uh they can often override those conversations. And so there's there's lots of techniques, and we were we were talking about some of them before we started that we use to work through that and make sure that uh conversation flows and that everybody gets a voice and that we we actually all get to participate uh and be heard. Um some of the simple ones are like we we break people into small groups and things like this. Yeah.

I I mean I I pick this up as it's very easy to say it's just these big, you know, big characters in the room. But so often it's energy and enthusiasm, it's it's people who want to contribute and they have some they're they're excited about what's going on, and that energy and enthusiasm carries over to the point where they'll step on other people's toes in terms of contributing or they're they're going to hog the limelight in some way. So you you started talking about some of the practices, smaller groups, that's one of the things that I think, and and Zoom and breakout rooms has really facilitated a resurgence in that sort of small group concept. Tell us a little bit about why that works.

What's the power behind it? The power behind it is that uh in a in a larger group, it's very easy to fade into the background and not be the one speaking. Uh, if there's somebody else who's more who's got a larger ego or a larger personality, they will tend to dominate the conversation. If you break people into smaller groups, then there's more opportunity for people to participate and and have conversation, uh especially if you're then giving them exercises and things to work on, because then they're they actually have stuff to do. And so that's the kind of the critical piece there. As they're working together, everybody in that smaller group then gets to participate and contribute to whatever it is that they're being uh asked to do.

I would add, I think there's a there's two things that I would think of around group sizes, and one of them is well worth pointing, uh pointing at is liberating structures. And I think uh there's a website. I mean, if if people aren't familiar with liberating structures, go look at liberatingstructures.com. If you are familiar, you'll know there are many, many examples of great patterns for working with large groups of individuals and large groups of people and getting collaboration and consensus. The one I lean on all the time is the one, two, four, all pattern, where you effectively start off a com like a discussion with individuals and then pair people up, and they kind of merge their ideas, and then you pair the pairs up and merge those ideas and then bring the ideas to the table. And this is just a way of of um structuring that discussion so that everybody has uh input and that that input can kind of flow through the the conversation. I also wanted to mention just in this small groups piece, there's another little trick that sort of master facilitators are very astute at using when you do have a handful of individuals who are dominating conversations with their energy and enthusiasm, and that is when crafting the teams, yes, random groups is great, and Zoom allows you to do that, but every now and again, that let me put all of the loud individuals, the energized individuals, into one space and let them kind of work in their area, and that immediately allows all of the other groups to find their right level, right? So that's a great it's one of those tricks that I would say master facilitators are kind of have in the back pocket. They never make it clear that that's happening, but sort of they're facilitating that as they set those groups up, whether remotely or in person.

Yeah, and group structure is is critical in uh in in lots of ways. And uh, if we talk about this in other places, even outside of the ego, it's just making sure that you've got a good distribution of uh of different people. Often, if you if you allow people in a physical space, if you allow people to select what tables they sit at, they sit out with their friends, so they they go to their tribes, and and so you'll end up with uh, and in fact, I saw that this earlier this week. We had all of the products, all of the sales, all of the marketing, and all everybody sits at the same table. So mixing that up so you can get those different viewpoints and is uh also very good.

I I think that there are there's some great practices out there for doing that. That diversity and breaking up, as you said, that the the usual tribes so that people are sitting with different people uh is great. It does, I think it does depend on the purpose of the conversation. So it is driven by that preparation of exactly what you're trying to get to. Um what other practices would you oh before I jump off of this one, we should define small. What's your definition of small in this case?

So I look for uh say four to six people in a in a group, typically, around that number. Um keep it around there. That works best for uh um allowing conversation still to flow, often obviously depending on the size of the overall group.

Yeah, I would even argue it doesn't depend on the size of the overall group. I think small, four to six. If you end up with a group of eight, you're gonna guarantee have two or three people who aren't engaged. So better.

Yeah, and I and I meant more in that uh if there's if there's eighteen people, um then four groups of four plus two instead of three groups of six, depending on what you're trying to do, that kind of thing. Yeah, for sure. But but yes, always always four to six. Um yeah, what one of the other exercises I like is borrowing from um uh Mike Burrow's agenda shift. He has an exercise there that he calls 15-minute photo, um, which uses um uh clean language out of psychology. So what's nice about that is that uh there's three roles in your little table groups, and there's one person gets to be the coach, one person gets to be the client, and the other people in the group are the scribes writing down uh ideas. And so there you've got the the coach has a very set of strict set of questions to ask of the client, and so they they ask, uh and what would you rather have? And when you have that X, then what happens? And so you because they're within that very strict framework, it generates lots of great uh outcomes, lots of great conversation, but it also helps diffuse the sort of uh one person overriding the whole conversation.

And I I do like that. I I think um this is uh we do a lot of facilitation, so this is sort of an area we spend a lot of time thinking about and reading about and so on. And I think one of the critical things around good facilitation is understanding the structure of the discussions that you're creating. Sometimes we think, say, brainstorming or some sort of collaborative thing is intended to be structure-free. And this is one of the things I like about liberating structures, is it's I mean the clue's in the name, but that they're there the intention there is to enable the right conversation through structure, which I think is is in uh quite a valuable mindset to have as we look at it. The intention is not to put teams together and sort of throw a bunch of post-it notes and marker pens at them and say collaborate. Sometimes you need a really clear, repeatable, well-defined structure in order to get the best out of that.

I I think the the other place is at the is at the end when we're trying to get to agreement when we do uh like uh the consensus confirming. And uh I was talking about Fist of Five, and you were talking about Roman voting, and the the the advantage of doing it this way is that you that the egos in the room aren't the ones who get to override everything else, and you go on.

I was just going to say at the beginning you talked about how to get to consensus, and I think there's two elements there's the collaboration, how do we facilitate great collaboration while allowing the quieter voices room to contribute? And then the second piece is how do you then, having collaborated, reach a consensus on where to go? And then that I think is again if you leave it to the energized, excited voices, you often kind of get taken away in one particular way. But things like that confirmation of of comfort or a consensus across the entire room, Roman voting, fist of five being the two obvious ones that I think people are familiar with, and bearing in mind that those are it isn't about everybody having to say. You almost if you if you say use the fist of five, which is holding your hand up and either having one finger up to say I'm giving it one point, I don't agree, I'm not happy, three fingers is I'm kind of in the middle, four and five is I agree, and the key bit there being four or fives, we don't really talk to them. They're they're already on board and we're good to go. It's the ones and twos that we're going to talk to. How can the ones and twos move to a three so that they can buy into whatever that conversation is? And I think that's important. It doesn't leave it as a sort of a round robin of this is what I think is going on. It's a very quick way of identifying can we move on, or is there some element of this conversation we need to revisit?

Yep. Yeah. Find finding out if there are any concerns in the room and uh and addressing them then and there. Uh yeah, so so with that, uh there are as we wrap up today, are there any other pieces that you'd like to add to this?

Well, I I actually I think we've covered quite a few because if I look at this one and just try and summarize back, I think one of them is recognize these are energized and excited, engaged individuals. And so sometimes they there's a bit of a negative connotation. We don't want to bring that to the table. It's not about that at all. Um, the the second bit is the obvious place to start is small groups to facilitate conversation, even if you've got a large number of people in the room. That small groups immediately reduces the problem to how four to six people might work. And we talked a little bit about some of the tricks that you can do there, whether it's pulling on structured conversations through liberating structures, putting all of the energized and excited individuals into one group, whatever it might be. You mentioned a few practices and some of the structures there, which are super uh important. And I think the third thing that we would come out with is a consensus, some form of consensus across the group in terms of moving forward to make sure that we're on you know everybody's on board and there isn't uh uh any missed points that need to be addressed.

Yeah, I think that's a very good summary of uh of all of those different pieces. It's uh uh it's suddenly a very interesting topic. So I look forward to uh talking about this some more uh next time. So so with that, I'd like to thank you for the conversation today, as always, Dave. And uh if people would like to reach out, they can at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com and uh look forward to next time. Until next time. Thanks again, Peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.