181 - The Facilitator as a Difficultator - New Perspectives and old Concepts with Tobias Mayer

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Myriam Hadnes, and with the Workshops Work podcast, I'm on the mission to find the magic ingredients that make workshops work. Today with me on the show is Tobias Meyer, and we speak about the role of a facilitator as a difficultator. So stay tuned. And by the way, if you don't have pen and paper at hand to take your own notes, scroll down to the show notes to download my free one-page summary. Now lean back and be ready to be inspired. Tobias, welcome to the show.

Hi there, I'm Myriam.

You've been recommended to me from so many different angles that I'm overly curious.

That's nice. Yes, I won't even ask about which angles, but I'm— that's always— it's always nice to hear that.

Yeah, I put it on LinkedIn and several people tagged you. And I always enjoy kicking off the conversation with one question: when did you start calling yourself a facilitator? And do you—

I think a long time ago, probably back in the '90s. Maybe even before that. Yeah, in the early 1990s, I started working for government training programs, helping first of all young people get into the workplace and then older people get back into the workplace after, you know, downturn of economy or people losing jobs. And so I was called a trainer, but it never quite sat well with me. So I always felt that I was facilitating change or facilitating learning for somebody. So it kind of just stayed with me. And then I worked in— this is all before I became involved in the IT world. I was working in that field and then in youth work. And I worked for a period of time for the Refugee Council in Brixton in London, running similar kind of programs. In this case, it was helping people who had just recently moved to the UK from all kinds of different places, and not by choice, and helping them to adjust and kind of figure out what the skills that they had and how they might be applicable in the new context they found themselves in. So it was not training. It's very much not training. You know, it was very much about facilitating and lifting. There's something about lifting people, I think, as well.

I think it's very interesting because the examples you're giving is It could be very quickly in the box of training or even in the box of, let me give you a presentation. Let's invite people and bombard them with information, which is even less than training. So, yes, where does the difference for you come in between training and facilitation? Where did this lifting happen? What are the tools you're using?

The tools are the human beings themselves, essentially, and the relationship between them. So that's really all you need. You need the people who are there, the people who are there, and they have and will develop relationships between them and with me as the person facilitating or holding the space, if you like, holding the space for learning. But, you know, in context like the one I'm describing, there can be no expert because each person has a unique story. A lot of it is about story, actually. It's about hearing story, not about telling stories so much, about hearing other people's stories and helping them to sometimes reframe aspects of that. So I don't know, I've never really felt like a trainer. When I learned about this thing called Scrum, which is what I teach quite a lot now, and I say, use the word teach, and talk a bit more about that in a moment. But I teach that now. But when I was brought into that space, it was very much PowerPoint presentations, you know, and a few little exercises kind of thrown into the mix. And it was called training, and I was called a trainer. And I never liked it. It never felt right. And I didn't, you know, I learned from one person how to run these workshops, and I very quickly found my own style of holding these workshops and getting the same information across and perhaps more information in more engaging ways. And so it's a team-centric way of working that I'm teaching. So inevitably one has to teach in teams, otherwise they're not learning what they need to model it, right? It's a model.

Exactly.

Well, that's, that's a good word, actually. And that's a lovely word. I think it is about modeling. It's about modeling the change. that we want to imbue into people through the facilitation work that we do.

And I find it interesting, the difference between the work that you've done in the beginning as a trainer, but facilitating people connecting to each other and becoming the tool, as you said. And these people were, they were brought to the space without actually wanting it. And they didn't know each other. So previously, before joining the session that you hosted, they didn't know each other, they didn't have any connections. And now in the space that you're working, if I understand correctly, is teaching Scrum to teams. It is, yeah. So where's the difference? How do you create these connections between people who actually don't want to be there and still have to collaborate in the space? And to connect.

Okay, let me, let me just go back, right? So going from the work I used to do in the helping professions, I suppose you would loosely call that, I then went to university in my mid-30s and studied software engineering. I just became hooked on coding, basically. And so when I graduated, I moved to the States, coincidentally, and worked out there for— well, I lived and worked out there for about 17 years, actually. But moving into the coding space meant moving into the corporate world, essentially. That's where it all happened. And I was kind of horrified by the environments that I found myself in, these big companies and hierarchical structures and people not listening to each other. And then when I found myself in a position of being a manager, I then kind of reached out for something that was more compatible with my way of being. And I came across Scrum. I came across Scrum through something called extreme programming, which was a method of writing code that was kind of on the rise at that point in time. And again, it's very teamwork-oriented, very collaborative. And so what I found then was the way I wanted to manage people suddenly felt aligned with what I used to do in the helping professions, in that facilitation space. And I thought, I can bring that way of working into this space and it's okay. And the things that I found in common is that the kind of people I was working with, especially the young people, this is very true of the young people in that area, is there was a level of oppression in society and these people were at the bottom. They were being pushed down. They were the kids that were excluded from school. the misbehaved, the badly behaved ones. And then working for the Refugee Council, the people that were fleeing their country and had no status in this country whatsoever. You know, you're talking about people who owned farms in Ethiopia, for example, coming to live in Brixton, who've never been in a city before, you know, and suddenly they've gone from being quite important to feeling like nothing. So there was this sense of working with oppressed people. And now I'm finding myself in Silicon Valley in the USA, in the corporate world. I thought I'm as far away from oppression as I could be, but I'm not. I'm right in the middle of it, actually. And these corporations have some of the worst kind of oppression going on because they do it— oppression behind a smile.

Mm.

And the people at the bottom of these corporate hierarchies are not happy. They're disengaged, they're angry, they're upset, they're unheard. And it's the same thing. It's just that they get paid a lot of money. That's the only difference, right? And of course, it makes a big difference, you know, because people put up with quite a lot when they're paid well, but they're not happy for the most part. You know, of course, many people are and do enjoy that kind of work. But there was something that needed to shift and change. And that's what the whole agile movement is about. And agile movement is part of a bigger movement to humanize the workplace, essentially. And And bring a sense of humanity back into these workplaces. We're still working on the Tayloristic model from the Industrial Revolution, white-collar, blue-collar separation. We still have that model in place, driving people forward by rewards and punishments and seriously out-of-date ideas that people just won't let go of.

And taking away basically all the autonomy and creativity by putting them into boxes and processes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So would then—

People in boxes, I mean, that's a big one. You know what's interesting about the work I do with this thing called Scrum? We have this role in an organization called the Scrum Master, and the Scrum Master is a sort of a blend of facilitator, coach, educator, like the joker in the pack almost, the wild card, the one who, like the court jester, who speaks truth to power. Organizations can't handle this role at all, so they keep crushing it down. They keep trying to blend it in with other roles that they know are okay, like, you know, a release manager or engineering manager or—

Process manager.

Sort of a slash role, Scrum Master slash coach, Scrum Master slash manager. They can't just embrace the purity of this role because it's too damn scary, because they don't know where to put it, doesn't fit the box. But the HR Department usually has very clear boxes, levels to put people in. The last full-time job I had, I was called project manager level 3 or some nonsense term like that. It meant nothing. I've never learned to be a project manager in my life. I have no project management skills whatsoever.

And what you did was being a Scrum Master?

I was a Scrum Master, basically. Yeah, I mean, that's how I describe myself. And they wanted to call me a coach, they wanted to call me a project manager.

Would you call a Scrum Master a facilitator?

Yes, very much so. Yeah, yeah, they facilitate change, they facilitate space.

And collaboration and progress. And collaboration and progress.

Yeah, all of it. I mean, they're building an environment where people can thrive, right? So they're not in control of anything. They're, well, they're not in control of any people. They are in control of making a space where people can grow. They're like gardeners. You know, in the way that a gardener facilitates the growth of a garden, it doesn't make it grow. He's there to support its growth and to provide for it and to nurture it and care for it. And that's what a Scrum Master is. So there's a lot of facilitation in that. You know, you can think about a gardener as facilitating the growth of the plants, because they're not managing them, they're not directing them, they're not shouting, grow faster!

They cannot force it, they cannot make it rain.

They can't, exactly. Yeah, they can just do the best with what they've got. Right. And, and, and also create, you know, like if a plant is not thriving, you can move a plant, you can put it into more sun or less sun, or you can give it more or less water, you can, you can build shade, or you can build, you know, glass houses. And so there's a lot you can do. But ultimately, the plant is going to do its own thing. And so are people. People are too.

It's interesting. Yes, you can build a glass house or a greenhouse for some plants, and for some plants it might work and for others it doesn't. So you also have to decide on what tools to use depending on the environment that you're in that you cannot change.

Well, this is why these cookie-cutter methods that people try and apply don't work. When they come into an organization with these big change things called scaled agile framework or the Spotify model or Whatever else, you know, they come in with these big things, they try and impose them on organizations from the top down. And it's kind of like saying all plants will thrive in a greenhouse. Well, many won't, they'll die. You know, and so everyone's not going to thrive in that kind of environment. A few might, usually the people higher up in the organization do all right. Change needs to happen in my— the way I see it. It needs to happen from the ground up. It can't, it can't come top down. It really can't, you know, and people say, well, it has to come from both directions. Well, it has to be supported from above, but it has to change itself, has to happen lower down in an organization. And it's an organic thing. It has to grow through the experience of the people doing it.

Yes. And still, this is a chicken and egg problem, right? Because Literally nobody likes change that is put upon them. I don't like if someone tells me to change. No, I don't want that.

You don't want that, no.

And still, I like all the change that comes from within me. So I want to change myself and grow all the time. So yes, it must come from within because that's natural. But then there's always a more strategic vision Or goal, why change might be necessary, or in which direction it needs to go. That must be guided or inspired from above.

There's change of direction, there's change of vision, and that obviously needs to come from, I would say, above. But yeah, above in a sense that it's coming from a big picture view, isn't it? And you get the big picture view. Eagles have a big picture view more than mice do. But on the ground, the people doing the work are responsible for how the work is done. No one else is responsible for that. And they should probably be involved in vision-making too, even though they may not be big-picture thinkers. They may have some thoughts to contribute to that, but also need to step away and let the people who've got the skills in that area do the vision setting. We all have different skills, right? But what we have in the corporate world is someone who has risen up to a higher management position thinking they must know Well, they're paid to know, right? They're just paid to know. And for one thing, that stops them learning anything new because they can't admit they don't know because they're paid to know. And therefore they think they have to tell other people what to do because that's how they got to where they are. So there's a lot of fear and a lot of terror in that middle management layer.

And I wonder, where do you think does this come from? Is it maybe a cognitive dissonance that, oh, I'm a manager, I'm paid the salary, this is on my job description, so I have to know. So I don't want to admit to myself that I don't know. So I better believe it, and then I give directions as if I knew. Or is it an ego thing? I don't want to admit that I don't know. Or maybe just a lack of perspective, that if I'm up there, I cannot even relate to the details down there. So it's absolute ignorance.

Yeah, it's probably a mix of all those things, and it's different for different people. But, and there are some amazingly good managers. Let's not, let's not, you know, denigrate them all. Some great ones, and I've worked with some. But the structure itself doesn't lend itself to— it doesn't, it doesn't build a learning environment. You know, if you, if, if as you go higher up, you're expected to know more and more, you are encouraged to learn less and less by default, almost. So we don't, we're not building organizations that are primed for learning. So when people lower down in the organization request to be sent on a training course or to get some sort of learning time. Very often it's denied. And the fact that you even have to ask for it is wrong. It should be a given in a work package.

Yeah.

But let's go back to facilitation. I facilitate work with managers too. My preference is to work kind of ground up, but I will, and I have very often worked with management teams and executive teams as well. I don't like it as much, and I think it is because there's a greater degree of blockage. The more people believe they know, it's the filling up the cup thing, you know, the Zen story, you can't put more tea in a cup that's already full, it just spills out and makes a mess. So when someone's cup is full, they're just, they're closed, their mind is closed. And you get less of that when people are raw and newer. You know, even at the level of teaching people Scrum, those who've said they've been doing Scrum for 2 or 3 years, they're the ones who don't learn Scrum promptly. I like to say promptly, according to the rules, if you like. And other people are much more open to it because they know nothing. They come there with an empty mind, an empty cup.

Which is actually a nice angle to look at facilitation. To what extent is it, as you described, that many organizations fail to change because they try to apply a certain format that has worked for others on themselves, and then they wonder that it doesn't work because it doesn't come from within? It's not adjusted to their culture.

Right.

And similarly, a facilitator or Scrum Master who's just coming with the same method, trying to impose it on a group and achieve the same results as in the textbook might not actually work. So how much of the actual facilitation work is intuition and must be adjusted to the ecosystem in which it's applied?

Well, there's some intuition in there, but I think that there's also some basic rules to follow. And the first one is come in to listen, don't come in to tell. That's a great starting point, isn't it, for any facilitator in any situation? Because the chances are you don't know very much about the group or the organization that you're about to work with. Now, if you're an internal person, you've been in the organization for some time and you're facilitating change from within, then that's slightly different. But for the most part, we're invited in Well, I certainly am. I'm invited in from the outside, you know, and very often in those situations, the people that I find myself working with didn't really have a choice. They're just told, you're going to come to this thing, this session, this training, this whatever it is, you know. So there's some resistance and some people aren't necessarily there because they want to be. That's why I much prefer open public workshops for learning where people come because they choose to come.

And I wonder whether this is actually also the best way to drive change, because change is basically mostly behavioral change.

Yeah.

And as you said, maybe the key aspect is to relearn to ask questions or to unlearn the thought or belief that a manager has to know it all. And the best way to learn that or to change the behavior is actually to experience A facilitated workshop.

It could be, yeah. I mean, very often it's quite difficult to get managers to even into the room, some of that work. But, you know, like I say, there are some good ones, and the good ones are there and willing to experience something different, a different way of being, you know.

So you mentioned coming in to listen as one of the facilitation skills. Yeah. What are for you the core facilitation skills?

In the work that I do, in the space that I'm in, in the Agile world, there's a lot of excitement around the idea of games for learning and people facilitating games. And I've used games of one kind or another in the past, but there's different kinds of games. There's games that have an intended outcome. So I'm going to play this game so you will learn this principle or this skill. I don't like those games. So one of my principles is never play games with defined outcomes. Only ever play a game where you have no idea what's going to happen.

It's fun.

It's got structure, it's got rules, but you don't know the end result. And you're often— I am often surprised by what occurs in these games. And I go with it. I don't try and guide people back to what I think they ought to learn. I go with the learning that's occurring.

And it's so funny, when I train facilitation, I say basically the same thing about questions. Never ask a question when there is a correct answer.

That's another one of my principles. Thank you. I love that. Yeah. And it's kind of mind-blowing for people when you tell them that, because so much of what you— corporate world training is people are running quizzes or asking people questions, and that people would put their hand up and get the right answer. It's like being in school. It shouldn't even be like that in schools, actually.

I have a theory about that, if I may share. Similar to what you shared about the workforce and training that is still kind of related to the industrial age, I think that how our understanding of questions is still related to the industrial age, where we ask questions to find answers. Because all the answers were in books or in the library or in church, and there were only a few who had them. Today, answers are actually just a mouse click away. So we are asking questions to find new perspectives instead of answers. And I think this mindset shift around questions and why we ask questions hasn't happened yet.

It hasn't really happened, has it? Because there's, you know, there's still this thing in many workshops where they do Q&A. At the end of the workshop or throughout the workshop. And it dawned on me quite a while ago now that I didn't know the answers, so I couldn't do a Q&A. I could do questions and responses, or I could do questions and maybe— what I started calling it one time was Q and BQ, questions and better questions. So it's like taking a question and say, how do we make that into a better question? I'll give you an example of a question that you can turn into a better question. And this comes up a lot in my work. People say, well, how does— they say Scrum, but they say, how does Scrum help me deal with bugs? And so I get them to sort of pause about that. And I'll ask, well, why do you have bugs in your software? Well, everyone has bugs. So actually, that's not true. Not everyone, not every software engineer writes bugs into their code. Some don't. And they can't believe that for a start. So I said, maybe another question would be, How do we avoid getting bugs in our system? That's a different question. It's a better question, isn't it? Because it drives you to take responsibility for the change rather than saying to me, how are you going to fix my bugs?

And how is the method being the holy grail to the bugs?

Right.

Although it's not yet.

So it's about, you know, and this is what one of the skills of a Scrum Master is, to turn things around and kind of bounce them back to The person, so that each of us may take responsibility. So when people come to me as a Scrum Master and say, "You've got to fix X, Y, and Z. This is broken. Can you?" I would say, "Well, what would you like to do about it?" And I emphasize the you. What would you like to do about it? No, I want you to fix it. Well, you know, I might be able to do that, but it might you you know if it happens again, then I'm and I'm not around. What's going to happen then? And so it's like, what would you like to do? What could you do about it? What can you and your team do about this today so that it won't happen again? So you're always bouncing it back and putting the responsibility, because if you don't do that, you're just, you're just Mr. Fix-It, you know, Mr. Who's— and you can't go away because you're always the one who knows.

You become the micromanager.

Yeah.

And 2 things pop up in my mind now that you're speaking. One is, now I better understand what you meant by you're lifting the group when you're coming in as a facilitator. The second thing reminds me of something that you said during our exploration call. that the facilitator is actually the difficultator. Because the moment where, when I listen to you, your Q&A, facile, making it easy, give me the damn answer. I ask you a question, give me the answer. What you do is you actually make it more difficult for the person.

In the short term.

In the short term, you're making it more difficult, but at the same time, giving them the agency To find their own answer and thereby growing. And that's another twist. So for me, a question is a gift to someone, because with a question, you're inviting someone to explore within themselves to find an answer.

Yeah, certain kinds of questions are gifts. Not all questions are gifts. I mean, some questions can be threats.

And weapons. Yes.

A weapon. I mean, you know, the kind of questions people often ask in workshops like mine is how questions. How do I, or how do we do this with Scrum, or how do we fix this thing? And I always kind of wrap all of those questions up into a single question. So, you know, this is context-specific for one thing, and I can't answer these questions. But I'll tell you what the answer is, and it's come straight out of Peter Block. The answer to how is yes. So yes, you can make these changes. Now, how you do it is up to you. And it's up to your context, and it's up to the people you work with. But it can be done, I promise you that. So it's really just giving them an affirmative and saying, yes, you can do that. Now go away and figure out how to do it. Because you own the how, I don't own the how. I can't, I'm just an outside person, right? I'm a 2-day class teacher, maybe, or at the best, you know, a few months in an organization.

And 2 things come to my mind. One is, then it really depends You're really relying on having the best people around you who indeed have the ability to fix it and to figure out the how.

Well, it doesn't mean you— no, that's not necessarily true. I mean, often you don't, right? And so the question then is, well, what can you do about it? And if you keep persisting with what can I do, what can I do, and you run up against wall after wall, you know, block after block, then what you can do is change jobs. That's your choice, right? You always have that choice. But obviously, we want to, you know, if we like the work and we like the people we work with, we want to help make change happen. And very often it's not possible, or it's only possible up to a certain ceiling, and then it just gets stopped and blocked, you know. And I don't think we can rely too much on other people. Well, certainly not people above us. We can rely on one another as peers, as teammates. I think that's really important and building up that sense of camaraderie and the strength of unity and the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and all that good stuff, you know. And there's a lot of reliance there and trust that builds up. But if we start relying on the leader to fix things for us, we're always going to be in trouble because it's not going to happen. If it happens, it's short-term, you know, leaders go away.

And it creates dependency and doesn't make us happy ultimately. Yeah, yeah.

We've got the, you know, the relationship between people in the corporation with leadership is like a parent-child relationship. It's very unhealthy because we're adults, we're not children.

And we all end up in therapy.

As a result of that, most likely.

I think as a parent you can only fail. Either you're too perfect or you're doing—

Well, there's another parent-child relationship right in the therapy room, so go bounce from one to the other. I don't know. You know, I think one of the, the thing about this kind of work— most of my friends who are coaches, and I wouldn't class myself among them, but most of my friends who are coaches have the same philosophy. It's like, I don't want to be there for long. I want to raise people up so they can manage their own lives effectively. You know, short-term solution-focused psychotherapy is the same. It's very similar to coaching in that sense. You know, it's just like lifting people out of their slump, out of their depression, or helping them cope better with their anxiety or their addiction or whatever it is, and move on. You know, just like, do life now. Don't just come back every week to talk about your problems, because you're just churning around. And all of this we're talking about, it's all facilitation.

Mm-hmm.

Back to the topic, you know, whether we often think about facilitation as having a group come into a room and do something or other to solve a problem, or, you know, discover something new or something. And that is part of it, of course, but it's the working inside organizations, This environment creation thing, the gardening metaphor I used—that's facilitation. That's facilitating space and facilitating relationships between people. And all of that is facilitation. And sometimes it's difficultation because it isn't always about being easy, is it? It's about being confrontational with compassion. To confront with compassion is a fine art. Can you elaborate on that? Well, you know, confrontation is often given a bad rap, isn't it? It's like we don't want to be confrontational. We want things to be nice and to be smooth and everything, everyone's kind to each other. But kindness and niceness are not the same. You know, sometimes the cruel to be kind thing, you know, it's like sometimes you have to just say it like it is in order for people to wake up.

Radical candor.

Yeah, that's a great term. Yeah, radical candor. You know, people who have a relative or a close friend who's an alcoholic or a drug addict, only up to a point can you tolerate it, right? At some point, you've got to speak up to it. You've got to confront them about it. Otherwise, it will just drift on, it will just continue. And the kindest, most loving act you can do in a situation like that is to speak the truth bluntly, but not without love. You can do that rudely and you can do it aggressively. And that doesn't help, people can't listen to that. But in the corporate world, we need some of that too, you know, because we get caught up in old patterns of behavior, a lot of fear-based behavior, because we don't want to rock the boat, you know, worried about getting fired or what my manager is going to think or not getting a good review at the end of the year and a bonus. And so we just toe the line very often. And, and if everyone just keeps doing that, nothing ever changes, does it? And so sometimes you need people to step outside of that. And they need to be shaken a little bit to, to have the guts to do it.

And then the question is, how much leverage does a facilitator actually have if the environment, the ecosystem, is not up for it?

Almost no power. But I don't know that a facilitator needs to have power. What the facilitator is trying to do is to help people step into their own power at whatever level they're comfortable with. And to increase that and improve it, you know. And there are, there are people I've worked with who leap at this opportunity and they go charging in and they make demands and they lose their jobs. It's— you've got to be cautious up to, you know, there's a balance, isn't there?

Or not.

We want to be able to help things to shift in the corporate world because we need to. Everyone needs to do that. It's not a nice to have, it's an essential actually. And at the same time, we have to do it with gentleness, we have to do it with love, and we have to do it often with quite a slow pace, perhaps slower than you might like. When I started doing this kind of work, I was very impatient. I couldn't believe that people didn't see the world as I saw the world. It's so obvious, you've got to do this, otherwise this will happen and that will happen. And they weren't ready and they turned away from me.

How did you learn to be more patient?

Through a series of rejections and getting fired, I suppose, or something like that. It's just, you know, after a while, you just see the futility of it, right? And so now I am more patient and more gentle. Coming back to that facilitation skill, listening, right? That's— I had to learn to do that. I'm not naturally a good listener. I had to learn that. I'm a good talker, but my talking isn't that useful in the work that I do. At the beginning, it is. As it progresses, because I'm talking things that come from experience, so it is useful. But at the beginning, if you're not ready to hear, you're not going to hear, are you?

Yeah, you first need to build the trust and the curiosity to then be open to listen. Exactly. And the rapport.

You know, I found the other thing is just asking people about themselves is really powerful. Just like coming in with curiosity. Who are you? Where are you from? What happened? You know, what— how did you find yourself? How did you get here? What was your experience before? And then getting into some more personal— you've got cat hair on you. Have you got cats at home? How many cats have you got? You know, just kind of like getting curious. And people love talking about themselves for the most part. And then they think you're a nice guy because you've heard them, you know. So, and then they're comfortable, ready, they're ready then to, to be a bit more open perhaps, or to not be, not think you're coming in to fix them. I think that's really important to get that message across really early. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm not here to change you. I'm not here to tell you how to do your work.

And I would like to link this back to the observation of patience, because I think who's even less patient than many facilitators are the leadership, the managers who might call facilitators to help facilitate the change. And please, we actually needed yesterday, so can you please make them accept the change?

Yeah.

Can you please fix them?

Yeah.

And then you tell them, I'm not here to fix them, I'm here to lift them. And then you come in and say, okay, so let's start with turn to your neighbor and share about who you are and some personal sides. And it happened to me that then the manager said, I don't have time for this woo-woo. And we are not here to talk about our personal lives, but to make a strategy. So how do you facilitate patience In organizations and patience and curiosity, so that you actually—

Some of that then becomes, you know, I think in those situations, and I've experienced almost exactly what you're talking about there, you need one-on-one time with those individuals to try and understand what is it that's making them panic? What is the rush? What is the urgency? And are they looking for a quick short-term fix? Are they looking for something more sustainable? And, you know, honestly, sometimes they're looking for a short term fixed because they want to prove themselves and get their bonus and get out and find another job somewhere else. Executives are— they're ship-hopping all the time. The higher up you go in the corporate world, the less time executives seem to spend in these places. I mean, that's my experience of it anyway. And, you know, of course, you've got exceptions to that. But the life of a CEO now in Silicon Valley area is something like 3 to 4 years. Yeah, they don't stay.

It's dangerous. I mean, from a game theoretical point of view, that's very dangerous. They're playing—

You can't really make sustainable change in that time, can you? You can only— you see, the thing is, and what we're up against, I think the thing that all the people like us are up against in the corporate world is the primacy of shareholders, because it's all focused on short-term profit to benefit the shareholders, the stockholders. at the expense of any kind of long-term strategy or kindness to the employees. So it's always— the focus is wrong. You can't change that really within the system we're in. It takes a unique company to want something more than that.

And I wonder, if this is the reality, we can sit here and hope for a better world, and we can complain about the existing structures and how they're playing the game.

Hmm.

What can we as facilitators do to accept these structures and this reality and still do the best in our job to lift the individuals and to empower them and to make the best out of it?

Well, I mean, I don't know that there's a huge amount you can do from a systemic point of view. Systems change when enough people in the system want the change. So if people in the system are complacent or accepting or just don't care, then it won't change. But what comes to mind is that story about the little girl finding the starfish on the beach and throwing them back in the sea one by one. a man commenting, you can't possibly save all of them, it's a waste of time. And she picks up one and she says, it's not a waste of time for this one. She throws it in the water. And this is a bit what it's like, isn't it? It's like, for me, there were— well, I realized, I don't know when it was, maybe 8 or 9 years ago, it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn't change organizations. It was futile to try. And it was arrogant as well. But what I could change was possibly one person's mind. I'm not saying change the person, just change their mind. And that will ultimately have a ripple effect, I think. And so, you know, it's like the single starfish. If I can put one starfish back in the water, that starfish is going to propagate and have more starfish. And so this person who has changed in an organization is going to possibly leave that organization because it no longer serves their purpose and go somewhere else and instigate some change there. And so, and we do see this, we do see this kind of small chain reaction occurring in the Agile world, you know, more and more people are getting it and wanting it, wanting some form of a different way of working. Some people just want the same way of working with pretty names imposed on the top, you know, like a sort of facade.

Yeah.

But there are a lot of people who are genuinely waking up. There's this shift, there really is a shift towards the humane workplace and there's resistance to it because the status quo doesn't accept it. But if that push gets big enough, it's going to push. It's just like if the world gets warm enough, the ice is going to melt. There's not much we can do about it. It's the same kind of thing if enough people care. It's a form of revolution. I mean, we're not talking like French Revolution, storming of the Bastille, or maybe we are, I don't know. But I don't imagine it's going to be violent, but it's just going to be It's going to be strong, though. It's going to be a strong force of change that's going to happen.

And I think the more working from home or working from anywhere is allowed, the stronger the push will be. And that's, I believe, many leaders, CEOs are against the working from home because you cannot micromanage employees who are working from home. You cannot shout at them because, oh, internet connection bad. Shutting down, so he didn't hear you.

Yeah, it has changed things, hasn't it? You know, I was never a fan of online teamwork or anything before COVID And when COVID came, I chose not to work for the first 6 months or so, because I just thought I'll just wait for it to pass. And then it'll go back to, you know, in-person work, but it didn't pass, of course. And so I began to rethink how can I— because I hadn't facilitated online, I've only Up to then, I'd only facilitated in person, and I couldn't conceive of it. But I did start to think about it. I had conversations with people I trust who were doing it and got some ideas about how it would be. And it's not just porting, it's really not. And I've seen people that, you know, do the same thing as me, try to port their classes from live to online. It's disastrous, awful, just a totally different medium. So you have to reinvent it, right? You have to reinvent it. But you're right in that— I think you're right anyway, in that self-organization happens in these environments, these Zoom environments, in a way that gets blocked in an office place by management, not intentionally perhaps, but just by their presence sometimes. And when they're not around, their presence is not felt as strongly. People figure out how to do things in their own way. And so I think, yeah, you're right that there's a force that's getting bigger because of this working from home thing. Which is a really surprising thing to me, actually. I thought it would kind of dissolve it in some way, but it hasn't. It's even more strong.

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