327 - Building Facilitation from the Inside Out with Matt Homann

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Miriam 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 Matthew Homan, and we speak about holding space, literally. Matt owns a facilitation facility, and we explore How it suddenly shifts the work we do as facilitators when we own the space in which we facilitate and invite the groups to join us there. And obviously we speak about the tools, we speak about neutrality, how COVID hit, and how it helped transform and learn about the business and facilitation as such. So stay tuned and scroll down to the show notes to find all the links. And to reach out to Matt and hit the subscribe button if you enjoyed the show. Thank you for listening. Hello, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Good afternoon. Good morning. Good wherever we happen to be.

Yes, I'm very excited. And we already had to quickly press the record button because we're already diving deep into the conversation. And maybe we can pick up the thread where we left it, being liked as a facilitator. And before we get there, when did you start calling yourself a facilitator? And actually, do you?

Oh, I do. I think it is one of those titles that is underused and often underappreciated, though people who do it well add so much value. So I've embraced it. Though the first time I was— came to this work accidentally, I think as many of us did. And I started a little conference, and it was for legal innovators. I'm a recovering lawyer. And found myself in that event, not really knowing what I was doing, but enjoying a conversation that wasn't driven by PowerPoint, that wasn't presentation heavy. And we used a version of Open Space. And I say a version because we bastardized it probably so much early on because I didn't completely understand it as a tool. And someone in that conference said to me, man, I need you to facilitate something at my company because you're such a good facilitator. And I'd never thought of myself as a facilitator, would have never used that title. And you get introduced a couple of times with that moniker. And I'm like, yeah, like, I'm a facilitator. And so probably the first time it hit me was maybe 25-ish, 23-ish years ago. And I've embraced it ever since.

Beautiful. I love these stories of discovery. of the label. And my favorites are when someone else gifted us with the label facilitator. And I love what you said, that you might have misused the open space. And somehow yesterday I was recording with Thomas Landtaler, and I always call him the MacGyver of facilitation because he just uses whatever is available to him. And we Spoke about frameworks and tools and the importance to deviate from how it's supposed to be so that we can make them our own and adjust them to the group's purpose. And I think when it comes natural to us, because we have not been trained, so you were stepping into the space as a lawyer, and then you hear about open space and you sometimes it's the misunderstandings.

Mm-hmm.

That then make it more valuable because you understand it in a way that works for you and the group in the moment.

I think that's so true. And, and for me, because I've never been trained as a facilitator, uh, that in many ways is the gift that this title has given me, in that I don't have a process, I don't have an approach. We've built our own. And I think that so much of what comes with perhaps the gray hair the experience, the mistakes we make is that we start to trust our instincts that an approach that may feel right in the moment is the right one. Not that it was in a book behind us, that it was taught to us by a mentor. And that trust of, I'm pretty sure it will work. And if it doesn't work, I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to extricate ourselves from whatever danger this approach may have brought us into. has been one of my favorite parts of this work is the confidence to know that as long as you care about your— the room, and as long as you are not an idiot about, you know, about your capabilities, it's almost always going to be okay.

Yeah. And I think the moment where we put away the The walking stick. So we have to stand on our own feet, we have to be fully present with the group. So, and I suffered for a long time from imposter syndrome because I haven't been trained as a facilitator. And similar to you, I developed my own methods because I thought, okay, this kind of makes sense.

Right.

And then reading about some of them afterwards, like, oh, This is actually how it's done.

Isn't it fun to come across a method that is widely admired and adopted, to know that you got there not first, but differently, without knowing that method existed?

Yeah.

And I think about how oftentimes I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm lucky enough to have stumbled upon it on my own. And the validation, I think, comes after sometimes. Versus feeling like you have to follow the recipes that you've been given.

Yeah. And sometimes it's helpful. But I think if we do have— and then it's an experience. Yeah, gray hair definitely helps. You cannot see them with my curls, but I assure you. Yeah. And we left the thread of our previous prerecording call at the— how important it is, or how difficult it is to let go as a facilitator. facilitator, the drive, notion, wanting to be liked. And I was thinking, that's how I try to build the bridge to what you do. What I found fascinating from our exploration call is that you build a home, a space for workshops or meetings to which you're inviting groups to be facilitated. So you're building the home for the facilitator, and they are basically coming to your space. So this makes you literally the host.

Right.

And I wonder how this different dynamic changes the way that you approach the group and how you relate to the group, because I can imagine that when I'm going to someone's space, either to a client in their office spaces, Or to a conference space that has been booked, there might be a different dynamic to that.

Yeah, I started Filament. It's been about 10 years or so, but it was really an accidental business. Again, I love the facilitation, but I never thought I could be a facilitator and run a business. And so I had a company that effectively drew pictures of hard-to-understand things, right? Here's a map of your strategy. Here's a visualization of your culture. Here's a process map, et cetera. But the facilitation of those sessions, the learning from the client, I often see that clients would change. They would rethink their process. They would reimagine their culture because the facilitation was allowing them to have conversations they never really gave themselves room to have on their own. And so, but I had this company, we had 7 or 8 people, and I found this space. I live here in St. Louis, Missouri, right in the middle of the country. And I was looking for an office for that team. And I found this amazing space in an old loft building in downtown St. Louis at the time, and still was a city that it was affordable to take such a bet. And I ultimately took almost 10,000 square feet of space. I meant to do the square meters to square feet conversion and I just didn't get to it. So I don't know how much that is in the rest of the world, but it's a relatively large space. And I saw that I had this epiphany, Myriam, that, wow, if I have this space, I could actually bring people here to facilitate it. And I could do— I could build the space for the meetings that I wanted to facilitate, and I could then build facilitation models that fit the space. And, and that was it. That was the only idea. Because I think it's almost everyone who has facilitated, the room has always kept me from doing something I wanted to do.

And not only you, but the group.

The group. Right? Like, like, our biggest enemy as facilitators isn't the customers, they're rooms they put us in.

Hmm.

And you can't put stuff on the walls, you can't move the furniture, you get a big boardroom table because those who design the rooms or the— who pick the rooms for us don't have an appreciation of the nuance of how much space matters. And so found the space, uh, I had no money, bootstrapped everything, but we've— we happen to be Having to find a bunch of library chairs and tables that were being retrofitted, we found amazing space. It just, it was beautiful. And so having the space for the meetings, there were a couple things that just completely surprised me, and I still am gobsmacked by the, what an impact they had on the business. Is the one is that we realized that we were selling something people had never bought disguised as something they buy all the time. So we were selling meetings. To them, even though the kind of work we were doing, they might have described differently. But because we had space, we got past that first barrier of why should we hire you to work with us?

Mm-hmm.

And having the space all of a sudden became our best salesperson because it was cool, it was interesting, it was different. And so they would come into the space and realize that, oh my goodness, or at least surmise that we might know what we're doing, even if we didn't. So it became in many ways for us early the proof that we were real versus the kind of conversations I used to have when I would go to visit them. Oh, what makes you different? You're just like all these other facilitators. Well, we were the ones who had the space. And then the second thing, and this was— this really shocked me as well, is I started to realize how much power we had and how the power dynamic had shifted when I was hosting versus when I was being hosted.

Mm-hmm.

It became relatively easy To tell the CEO of a big corporation here in town, no.

Mm-hmm.

We started banning PowerPoint. We wouldn't let our clients show PowerPoint slides in their meetings anymore. We were, were able to pivot more readily because we had our copier and we could print new tools and, and change approaches. And we also realized that we were way smarter about the business the moment we stopped renting our space to other people. And that were all, that was, we made lots of mistakes early because we would have good clients and like, oh, we're bringing an outside consultant. Can we use a space? We're like, oh, we love you. Fill in the blank of the company. Happy to do it. And I realized that if someone was gonna have a bad meeting at Filament, I wanted it to be our fault.

Mm. That's a—

And because I was so, because it was Filament, that was the space. And I didn't want someone to say, I went to Filament and had a bad meeting.

Mm-hmm.

And we saw some of those state-of-the-art meetings that other people were paying people a significant amount of money to do in our space weren't that good. And the moment we stopped renting space and started selling meetings that included food, that included snacks, that included facilitation, that included an illustrator who draws in every session, that didn't include the projector because we weren't using PowerPoint, that had a fridge full of If you wanted to grab something at 2:00 in the afternoon, you could. We weren't in the business of counting things. We were in the business of hosting people in our space. And it just changed everything in so many ways that I hadn't expected or appreciated until looking backwards, I realized were value that we didn't think we could extricate from the business model and totally did.

Yeah. Oh, thank you for this example and for telling the full story. There's so much to unpack. And what I first want to reflect on is the role as a facilitator, as you said, it's a shift in the power dynamics. And you're creating a space of abundance and generosity and abundance in space and attitude also translates into an abundance of mindset and how you deal with each other. And I'm just thinking of the moments as an external facilitator, I come in, I I have to be escorted everywhere I have to go because I need a badge and because it's high security. Or I have to ask, oh, can— I do need more sticky notes. Can you please, please find someone to— So there's always this making myself small, but it's not really that. It's, yeah, restrictive in movement and restrictive in creativity and everything that I— I usually bring my own Sharpies because the pens are never good enough. That everyone else provides because they're cheap on it because they don't see the value. So I think the space that you create represents directly your value system.

It also gives people a sense when they come that the meeting will be different, right? The shelf behind me is one of about 20 of these, of books and knickknacks, and my childhood toys are around, right? The things that, the things that I grew up with. So the moment people come in, To signal to them that it will be different. There's almost always something that they find that they're curious about. It signals a sense of play almost from the, from the, the get-go. But I'll say one other thing that having space has changed for us is it's allowed us to try more things. If we wanted to do an event, and we just tried one of these last 2 weeks ago, we called it Play Days. But we literally realized lots of our Customers struggle with AI. They just haven't had a chance. So we just— we called it Play Day. Say, we came in, we give them 60 minutes of here's how we use it and hang out with us all day long and play.

Mm.

And 60 or 70 people came for that event. And it was just the gift of permission. But because we have space, it was easy to do. We didn't have to— swipe a credit card to rent a ballroom. We didn't have to ask for a favor. So we constantly are able to try new things here in a way that we never— that I never felt easy— that was easy to do when I was always looking to borrow, beg, steal, or rent someone else's space.

Yeah, very interesting. And then suddenly the funnel— so speaking from a business perspective, the funnel is a very different one. Because when you invite people to your space and you, they walk in and know that this space stands for something and it's not rentable with other facilitators, then there is already, you build a relationship from moment one and you connect it with positive experiences and learning.

Right. And having, uh, and, and having the capacity to invite to help, we've had here in the US, as everyone in the world knows, a handful of, I'll just say, puzzling decisions coming from our leaders in this country. And that's to be as generous as I can with the language. And we know that lots of the nonprofits in our town that we know, that we engage with, don't know what's happening.

Mm-hmm.

And so we spun up a thing called the Uncertainty Summit. We invited nonprofits. We just let them come. We didn't charge for it because, again, the space doesn't cost us anything extra for a day.

Yeah.

And we were able to give generously a sense of, come think about it. We're going to help you with some of the tools and approaches we have, plot a different path, not giving them that path because we don't present ourselves as experts. And again, it gave them room to have a conversation that they generally just have been too harried, too stressed to be able to have. And so, again, the space gives us It's the coolest tool in a facilitator's toolkit that no one else has, or very few people do.

Yeah. In other ways, it's very difficult to make it your own. Yeah, that is fascinating. And how have you as a— so I can see the role as the host shifting, and what is the impact on the group in terms of power dynamics?

There's a couple things that change. I think the one thing that changes Is because the space is built for the kinds of facilitation that we want to do. We have 2 big rooms, one that I'm sitting in here now with my desk, but we have a bunch of couches and chairs and comfortable spaces for breakouts. We have another room that has our gigantic 30-foot whiteboard in the front of it, has a big gigantic television that we painted the wall black so no one can see it on a stage. And we make the table small. We make it really hard to plug in a laptop. Like, all the things that we do to kind of— we can design against their worst impulses is one way where power shows up, I think. The other way—

Mm.

—is that at the very beginning when they come, I'm welcoming them to my place. Our other facilitator, Lauren, does the same. Like, welcome to our space. And just like you were a host, we could ask them, frankly, if we wanted to, take your shoes off at the door like someone might— At their home. We don't, but like, we've already shared that dynamic and it feels comfortable and interesting and creative and different. And so we get so much goodwill from the very beginning, even from the skeptics who come in, in a way that when they're coming straight from a meeting down the hall into a boardroom or training room, or they're coming down from their hotel room into a—

Meeting room.

a windowless ballroom. It just doesn't. We still work on the road quite a bit, but every time I'm on the road, I'm like, wow, like, why can't I have Filament here?

Yeah. And I can imagine that it also helps the leaders relax because suddenly they're the same. They're also one of the guests.

Yes. Yes. And I think what all good facilitators do is we turn leaders into peers. Right? Especially with the breakouts. But what, where it hit me probably at the most was the CEO of one of our biggest companies came in and he was visiting a session we were doing for one of his leaders. And that leader came up to me and said, Matt, what should I be doing for this next segment of the session? And the CEO's like, looked at me and snapped at him like, why are you asking this guy who is the space rental guy? Effectively is what he thought. And Our client said, no, no, no, Matt has been guiding us through this entire 2 days with our team. I've worked with him 4 times before at other companies. He's not a space rental place. He's our partner, peer, and guide. And that peer thing is another thing that's happened here in that when our space— We now can believe we are, and we're treated as our customers as their peer. no matter where they are in the hierarchy of their organization.

Hmm.

And that's difficult to do when everyone in the executive suite of the top floor of a building is nervous about offending the CEO or every word she might say. And I, I, one of my favorite stories, we had, uh, a senior leader and everyone at their offices as we were planning, because they were, they're right down the street, they We're tiptoeing around, can we wear jeans? What should the dress code be? We've never seen our CEO wear jeans. And I just told the CEO, I said, you know, I need you to wear jeans. It's like, okay. And, and everyone was like, what? Like, I'm like, because you're going to be coming to my place. And that would have— that could have never happened in the traditional way that we used to work.

Yeah. Yeah. And still the, the story where you were confused or called the space rental guy, I think it says so much about the importance of labels and how we tend to put people into compartments. And I think this also how facilitators are often seen by those who are not used to work with facilitators or the woo-woo people who ask you to express how you feel and sit in a circle. And I haven't seen this downside of being confused where suddenly owning the space and being literally the space holder.

Yes.

So you're in your company, then you're all doing the same thing. So there's no one who would be the go-to person for the logistics and the space who would literally be the space guy?

Yeah, so we, the way we have, we have someone who leads hospitality for us and she's amazing. We have a full-time artist who draws in every meeting, 2 facilitators. We have a project manager, a virtual admin. So we're a relatively small team, but it's when you sleep in your own bed, you can do more work. And so we might have a week here at Filament, might have 2, 3, rarely 4, but sometimes 4 days worth of events.

Mm-hmm.

That versus the— in the olden days, 1 day felt pretty good. Like if I could do a day a week, it was a good living, right? Maybe a day every other week, a day every third week, depending upon how I priced it. But we have a team that's, that's committed to delivering a really great experience. And again, because they're here all the time, our clients are here all the time. We, we've started to realize what's important to them and what's not. And it's not the kinds of things that event planners care about. It's, they don't care about lunch as long as it's okay, because all of the other things about the experience are different.

And still a very bad lunch or no lunch can destroy the entire experience.

Oh, absolutely. But when you ask an event planner what people care about, they care about the food is what they'll say, or the coffee's hot. And it's because we've built— and this is maybe straying into kind of bigger meetings, but we have so many places that build these amazing containers for terrible meetings to get poured inside of. Kind of started from the, like, building from the middle, like from that center out versus from the outside in.

Yeah. And is this a model? Are you planning to expand? Is this something that more cities could have? Like a— yeah, I'm thinking of this, um, yeah, models of coworking spaces.

So we are here in St. Louis post-COVID. We moved to, uh, an amazing space here in the center of the Innovation District. So we have a big Innovation District here in St. Louis. Uh, they invited us in. We don't pay rent to be here. We deliver programming to the district.

Hmm.

So the business model is dramatically different. We do monthly sessions around training and collaboration. We support the leadership of the district and their board. We do fun events, but we'll do all things that are all kind of layered through with our DNA. And so what we've learned— it's taken us a while. We've been at this 10 years— is that We now realize that what we are selling effectively is innovation as an amenity. And so we're starting to have conversations with other innovation districts who all have these spaces that are amazing but are not particularly activated. And it's not just the coworking spaces, which is now a fairly undifferentiated amenity. Like you've seen one, you've seen most of them. But by having space, we do a couple things. We invite people in who could be tenants. They're like, oh, this is really great. I'd like to work here. able to provide services at a discount to tenants who are already here as a benefit for being in that district. And we're also able to deliver and be an extension of that district, engaging with the community, working with nonprofits, doing other programming and things. And so the long answer to your short question is that we now finally think we've cracked the code. It took some time to really figure out what our core value proposition is, but I would expect that in the next 2 to 3 years we'll have passed at least 4 to 5 additional filaments and maybe more.

Fascinating. And 2 things came up that I would like to touch upon. I parked the COVID question for a while. You came out the other end, and I'm curious how. But before going there, all these innovation spaces that might look just the same that as yours, but things are not happening inside of them. What's the difference?

There, there was a, and this may be before the shift that happened in workplace behaviors and, and such, and post-COVID, but it's a long time that like real estate developers, whether they're developing innovation districts or big buildings in Midtown Manhattan, used to think that amenities were differentiation. So let's put a ping pong table in because that will show we're innovative. Or let's have a coffee bar, or let's upgrade the gym. And it's an arms race they can't quite win because there's always a way to make the amenity better, make the lobby fancier, make the, the, the place seem cool. What rarely do we see happen is this intentionality around the services that, that amenity can deliver to the tenants, right? From how do we think about collaboration? How do we just meet better?

Mm-hmm.

Right? Meetings are terrible. Uh, we never thought we'd be in the meeting training business, but we do a lot of it now because everyone hates their meetings. Uh, how do we think about solving problems with intention? How do we think about connecting with others in the building? That service layer in most spaces is done on an ad hoc basis if anyone owns it at all.

Mm-hmm.

And it is almost always centered on happy hours and drinking. And, and that's one thing that has changed post-COVID. People don't come to a Thursday afternoon happy hour quite as much as they once did. But on top of that, that, like, we've always thought people connect better when they think together, not when they drink together.

Oh, I love this sentence. Thank you.

You're welcome. And, and so when, when alcohol is at the centerpiece of some sort of engagement, it's unfriendlier to introverts. It frankly is unfriendlier to women than it is to men. And so We've always taken this approach of what's a different and better way to accomplish these things that this district, that others might want to do. And because we've got a common through line, because we've got a reputation, because we deliver other things, it is, it's just been an easier and a better way to do it.

Mm-hmm.

And so again, another unexpected insight from, from having the space and doing the work. But like, people come to Filament Things now because they know they're a Filament Thing and they trust us regardless of what the subject matter is or what the goal of the event might be.

Yeah, because it's created with intention and care. And I, what I observe everywhere is that even with sports clubs, and I can imagine that in coworking spaces it's similar, if not even worse, people come to a sports class and they don't look at each other. They're all treating the— so they're In this small space, they're sweating with each other. It's very intimate. And they don't even look at each other or share a word or say hello or bye, nothing of that. And I, as a facilitator, each time it kind of physically hurts. And I haven't been active in a coworking space for a while, but from the times I remember and the times I enter some, it's similar. People go there, they don't look at anyone, they go to their table. So it feels as if there's maybe a fear of connecting, or maybe it's because of the— it's post-traumatic COVID. What can you do to change that? Maybe not in a yoga studio, but at least in a coworking space.

The thing that, like, people almost— again, broad overgeneralization— they oftentimes believe they're the only person that has the challenge they have. They think the challenge is more complicated than others, and they struggle to believe that others, that person sitting next to them, can help them.

Hmm.

And so in many ways, by giving them a framework, by giving them a, a place, by giving them permission to say, here's what I'm working on, sometimes that's enough. And we've realized, Myriam, as we use all of our tools, we use lots of these things we call tool sheets. They're effectively canvases or worksheets, but We've learned that people's compulsion to follow directions overcomes their reluctance to share.

Hmm.

And so the moment that I say to a group, here's a framework, uh, I want you to think about a challenge that we all have. How might you address it? Break 'em into small groups, give 'em the Sharpie to write on the sheet. They'll do it because there's a rule follower in every group. And then when they come back, it's not me sharing, it's our group sharing, even if I'm the one doing the readout. And so By being able to find a common problem or challenge, giving them an artificial thing to think about, constraints that feel silly but might lead to some more insight, people will gather and engage. But they need the permission, they need the framework, and they need to trust that it's not going to be silly, that it's not going to embarrass them, that it's not going to feel fruitless.

And then so what I hear in that is for coworking space to find A hook that is maybe a specific problem around which to gather, or just the permission to speak to the person sitting in the office or in the desk next to one.

Right.

Yeah. And although it's a— for facilitators, obviously, it's fantastic to know that people— how did you say it? It sounds brilliant.

People are more easier to follow instructions Their compulsion to follow instructions overcomes their reluctance to share.

Yes. As reassuring as it is for a facilitator, isn't that scary as well? And especially when we speak about innovation. So isn't there a tension between the compulsion to follow instructions, and don't we need those who also break the instructions, the rebels? Is there space for that?

100%. And someone always tries to, tries to break the exercise or deviate a bit from the work. But the point is, and I think that, that as a facilitator, we all, I think, appreciate this, that regardless of what the framework is we're using or the tool we're giving, as long as they're talking with one another about something that they all feel is important, and that is, that is attached at least tangentially to the work.

Mm-hmm.

Is a win. And so I don't mind a bunch if I find one group taking a, a bit of a tangent. But the difference is if I say to them, Myriam, that I need you to talk about this for the next 30 minutes, they'll all take the tangent and there's no way for me to tether them back and pull them back in without sitting in every group.

Yeah.

But if I say, if I say to them, here's the thing that I'm gonna make you fill out.

Yeah.

That will guide their conversation. At least it provides guardrails where the guardrails don't exist. And then I could go to each group and say, you know, the quality of this conversation must be amazing. You're clearly in first place there, but you're in last place on the quantity of words you've put on that sheet. And it is just a small little joke, but all of a sudden someone in that group will be like, oh, we gotta, we gotta get going and pull them back to the exercise. And again, the only reason we use these tools is to— it helps us scale facilitation to a room of 1,000 people.

Yeah.

If we have to, because we don't need to be guiding every group, every breakout through every stage gate of the conversation we want them to have.

Yeah, where the framework is definitely a facilitator.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that's also interesting where the prompts also matter. I have the impression that if it's too wide and leaves too much room for interpretation, Then the group's going into tangents or spend their time with discussing what is actually meant, because it— there's always someone who needs more control, needs more understanding. And then the entire group speaks about what to do and not how to do it.

Right.

Or if it's too scary and touches something that is maybe outside the comfort zone, then they also go on tangents. Just to distract themselves and to rather speak about something else.

One of the frameworks that we've developed is called Easy, Hard, Safe, Crazy. And it's literally 4 boxes on a sheet of paper. But we'll, we'll frame the question. And the question sometimes emerges during our work. Sometimes it's something we plan ahead with our customers. But we start with the how might we question. And then the 4 quadrants are some easy things we can do right away, some hard things we can begin to explore, some safe things everyone else is gonna do too. Mm-hmm. And a few things so crazy they just might work. And what we found, and again, it, it gets to the, the things that go unsaid in conversations, is that it's not so much that people are afraid to share crazy ideas, although some of them are, it's that they don't share the easy and the safe ones because they think everyone has already had them.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And so to be able to say to someone, uh, there's a quote we have on the wall by Scott Berkun that says, you know, Everything is obvious to someone, but nothing is obvious to everyone. Something along those lines. And so all of a sudden you'll see someone say, well, this is easy. And everyone else's eyes get as big as saucers, but you're like, what a brilliant idea. And it doesn't matter what box the ideas go in, but it's giving them permission to share in any way that they might identify it. And we found those 4 categories seem to capture the most and broadest variety of topics. And then they'll come back. And that's an early exercise. It's more of a generative exercise. But you've now seen them have a conversation about things that might improve their organization, might make them work faster, might help them overcome their culture difficulties, whatever the challenge is. And it is just an amazing, simple, simple way to get them to share things that might go unsaid.

Yeah, I love that on so many different levels. It's also— I mean, the beauty of 4 boxes, easier than putting things into boxes, gives just enough boundaries to enhance our creativity, gives permission to share something that we think is so mundane and so simple, I wouldn't otherwise, or something that is so crazy that we wouldn't dare either.

But we got to have something in the crazy box. Yeah. So who's got a crazy idea, right?

Yeah. And then all the different discussions that then can then even emerge from the box as you zoom in, because the easy ideas are, okay, is it so easy that we have overlooked it? Or is it so easy that our competitors will do it? Is it so easy that we're actually underestimating some challenges? What are we not seeing? Where's our blind spot? So depending on how to look at each of these boxes, can create different conversations. And on top of that, there's a surprise of these boxes because it's not the— how do you call the general 4 boxes with the challenges and the risks?

SWOT?

Oh, the SWOT analysis.

Oh, I hate the SWOT analysis.

Yeah, everyone is tired of the SWOT because been there, done that, done that. And yours is not that different. So the same things could be in there.

We have another one that's very similar called None, Some, Lots, All. And we just have them take a snapshot of the organization. What happens if we don't change anything?

Hmm.

What happens if we can kind of nibble around the edges and change some things? If we could change lots of things? And then what if we could start with a blank sheet of paper and change absolutely everything? And again, it's just— it's the conversation. The tool is so small in the scheme of the ways you want them to talk, but it gives them a place to take those conversations in a way that As an individual guide, you can do in a small room, but then the extroverts always win, right? They're the ones who always— because like me, I can't think without talking. I've learned that about myself.

Yes, me too. We are terrible for people who think to speak. They hate us.

Right.

Yes. Sorry, I interrupted you.

No, no, it's okay. Just the, the, the tools, the frameworks, the, the— they allow us to get the most out of out of our folks. And also, it also shortens our preparation time.

Hmm.

Because there, we have a lot of these kind of evergreen generic exercises that we know work as long as we frame them and prime them with the right question, we use them at the right time. And each Filament meeting looks and feels different, but there's a handful of things that, you know, I can go to the closet and say, okay, this is the exercise we didn't think we needed, but we need now. And Here it is.

Yeah, yeah. I just want to express, and sometimes it's so easy to forget how valuable the simplicity of some exercise or tools are. And then we get excited with new tools and fancy things and forget that sometimes the— and there is actually this perfect spot where simplicity meets the boundaries. So we want to be very specific in what we ask, but not so specific that we just get the generic.

Right.

And I was wondering whether this might— and thinking the thought, maybe it's ridiculous— but whether it's something that you acquired from your previous life as a lawyer where The talent is in interpreting. So there's huge restrictions, right? You have all these paragraphs, you have all these laws, and they are as they are. And still, it's your task to find the creativity, the flexibility, the nuance within them.

It's funny, I've never thought of it that way. I think that lawyers often believe they're being paid to make things more complicated because it then reinforces their expertise as the only ones who can decipher this language that they've— that they So it's a little bit of self-fulfilling, almost a flywheel of the more lawyers get involved, the more nuanced the how do I show that I'm smart? How do I show that I brought value? It's also billing by the hour. That's a whole nother conversation that the longer I take to do anything, something, the more money I make. And where we've really boiled so many things down to simplicity is it comes to the fact that you've got to describe how to do it. And, and I saw this in COVID when we were trying to explore all these different tools to use online. And no matter what the tool was, if it was new to someone, one-third of people would not be able to figure it out. And, and that has really shown up both before and after in our tools, that the tool needs to be so basic that it doesn't need a facilitator to guide them for— through. It's the, hey, here's what you're going to do. The instructions are on the sheet. Go do it. I'll tell you when to come back.

Mm-hmm.

Like, that's almost the way that I want all of our tools to work. Some have a bit more nuance, but getting people the capacity to Giving them the mind space to think about the problem they're solving and not also the instructions on how to solve, how to engage with a tool that helps them solve the problem. It pulls more of their attention and insight into why they're there and not to also decipher our process we're using for them to get to where they need to be.

Yeah. And then I'm, I'm thinking about what you said previously. So other facilitators coming to your space, And creating not good enough experiences. What is it that distinguishes? Because if you're using— and I'm thinking about that, as you mentioned, that lawyers want to make it complicated so that they stand out as the experts. It could be easy as a facilitator to fall into that trap, to make it as complex, and then groups rely on us to facilitate it because otherwise they wouldn't, or You have to sell and spend a lot of money to get certified in a certain method. So what is it if you take all that away and you make the method and the tool so simple? What is left in your perspective?

For us, I think the simplicity is the— it allows us as facilitators to do our best work because we're not at once trying to put people into a dilemma of something they can't understand and then show our expertise to extricate them. From that same dilemma. It— so for us, what I'm meeting here at Filament is different because we trust our clients more than I think most facilitators do, to the point of what we're talking about. The space feels different. They're constantly in small groups. They're using these tools. They're coming back. They're reporting out. We're sharing. We're unpacking, and we rinse and repeat. We draw, so we don't have PowerPoint. That's a big differentiator for us. I don't hate PowerPoint, but I know that I'm the first meeting they've had in years that did not have any PowerPoint involved. It's a big differentiator for us. But the simpler it is, what we find happen is that it allows them to have the conversations they just never get to have. And we get credit for that, even if we're not in every one. Then on top of that, we generally give the tools that we've used in an event to them to continue to use. And I've had people come to me and say, man, I, I, I love that framework that you use. I'm like, you've never worked with us before. Where'd you get it? Oh, my husband brought it back from a nonprofit session that he led or that his company or his team led. And we use it all the time. And so the simpler the tools are, the more likely people are to continue to engage with them. But I don't want to shine because I have something complicated to give you to think through. If you're coming to us and paying the money to use this, you've got something complicated you already need to think through. I don't want to layer additional complexity of mine on top of yours.

I love that. Yeah. And what just came to my mind is a recent experience leading a train-the-trainer where it's about— The groups would go through a self-assessment, and then in the coaching session with the group, it's all about interpreting the results of the assessment. And what the core of this train-the-trainer was, to be able to allow the results to just be the results. And most probably there is no value in these results because everyone is biased. Half of the people misunderstood the question. So there is, in the worst case, it's absolutely wrong. And still it's important because it's a conversation opener. So if, and I'm just thinking back to that, thinking about the tools. If we come in with complicated tools, we get married or we fall in love with the results that this tool raises, and then we lose the openness to— allow other things outside of that to emerge. So if I would, or if the trainers that I train would spend hours to analyze the results of the team assessment, then they would spend hours to present their solution, which is worthless to the team as long as they don't feel the ownership and engage.

Yeah, one of the things that we will kick off lots of our meetings with the framework, We get— oh, I actually have one right here. These little half-page cards, and it says, I wish, I wonder, I worry.

Mm-hmm.

And so the question is, I think about the meeting we're about to begin, as I think about our company's next year, as I think about the project we're kicking off, whatever the prompt is, I wish we would, I wonder if we could, and I worry that we won't. And so people take just a moment to fill it out. We call on someone. We always ask the volunteer to go first or last. They always joke, I'll go last. Okay, then make them pick the person to go first. And, and we just ask, share one of the 3. And so someone might, you can see where the worries are, the, like, and they'll, they'll choose, but each person picks the next person to go. So I don't have to be the bad guy calling on people from the very beginning. And it can unpack, we can unpack over 10 minutes or an hour and a half the nuance of what they're thinking. And it validates for others, oh, everything people have already said, all the things I had on my card or what have you. We collect the cards, we scan them. I have an AI that reads everyone's terrible handwriting. And we're now able to give back to effectively our customers a sentiment analysis of what the room was thinking about that day about this thing.

Hmm.

And, and what's so cool about it is, again, it's the easiest, simplest thing. It takes a minute to describe. The instructions are on the card, but it leads you down the path of a conversation they want to have versus you assuming that we have to begin with This presentation or this data or this analysis. And as a facilitator, the questions you ask are, tell me more.

Mm-hmm.

Like, what do you, what, what do you mean by that? And that's it. And, and now an hour of your day has gone through. Everyone has been heard. They've had a chance to introduce themselves quickly with a name and a title if they, it feels important to them. But the simpler the frameworks, the, the better it feels to the customers. And frankly, the easier it is to modify and keep playing with them because you're share— you're changing one little piece of it versus having to go back into a complicated thing that you've built over years. It's why SWOT actually works, as much as I hate it. There's 4 things, and the words in the initials are the things you're talking about, and the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities, threats, etc. And so we just keep on looking for other things like that that That we can own, you know, literally or figuratively, because people also— there's value in the novelty. Oh, I've not had this approach before, versus what you said earlier, like, oh, who's going to stand at the flip chart and start writing these things down?

Yeah, yeah. And I love how you just mentioned how you introduce or include the digital and AI. What have you learned from COVID So as a businessman and as a facilitator, So as a—

one of our, one of our core tenets has always been we want to do in-person things you have to be together to do. And so information delivery is not one of those things. Insight discovery is. And so we built our first 4 and a half years of this business on only doing in-person stuff.

Mm-hmm.

We wouldn't do hybrid and we rarely did virtual. We had a couple signals from clients as COVID was just starting to make the news. Where they were telling us it's going to be real. It's going to be more serious than anyone thinks. A gigantic insurance company, one of our universities, like they knew that it wasn't here in the US, 100 people on a cruise ship, right? And it wasn't going to be done by Easter. And so we started to invest relatively quickly in increasing our capacity to do this work online. And as I mentioned earlier, we tried every tool and realized that unless our clients were going to give us an extra hour of walking through the laggards in how to use it, They weren't particularly effective for us. And so technologically, we ended up just using Google Slides. We would put our worksheets on a slide. We would give everyone the link because nearly everyone can get a Google thing through their IT department, and they would break out, and we would use Zoom breakout rooms again. Like the, the, the, we used that, we made it as simple as possible. But the biggest lesson we learned is that we got called to do some work that I would've otherwise said no to because it was necessary. It was in the sciences. And so we actually did really well in COVID after that first 2 months of terror. All our meetings canceled. Like, we had $200,000 worth of meetings cancel in a single day, which was at that point a really significant part of our revenue. The first month, no one did anything. The second month, everyone thought they could do it themselves. And by the third month, they realized that their meetings were even worse than before. And they needed some help. And once we got to that 3rd month, COVID wasn't great for anyone. But the learnings we had, the validation that the tools and approaches we had that worked in the room worked really well virtually. Because again, the breakout rooms, the popping from room to room, just like we do here, the tools were the same. And the moment we peeled the complexity back out of the process, it was amazing.

Mm-hmm.

And we also were able to do some work that we would have said no to because it would have seemed outside of our wheelhouse, too complex, rooms full of PhDs talking about satellite imagery or crop sites. But the tools and the conversations work. We don't have to be smart about the conversations they're having. We just had to be smart about ways to get them to have the conversation. And we continue to use those lessons even back when we're mostly in person again in the work we do today.

Yeah. And what have you learned as a businessman from Losing $200,000 in a day.

As a business person, think smarter about accounts receivable. Get paid the moment the contract's signed, even if it— it's shocking to me how small a discount large corporations will take if— will pay, how fast large corporations will pay big dollars if they can save a percent or 2. So we've front-loaded a bunch of our— a bunch of the way our contracts work. We have gotten better at the process on how we qualify customers. And I think the other thing is that, and Blair Enns says this, he talks about how the sample is the sale, is we would do these things called sketch sessions whenever clients would hire us and they'd hire us, we'd sign the contract, we do all that. And then we would come together, we draw with 90 minutes with them on the whiteboard and talk about their event. And we realized that if we just gave that part away for free, We would accomplish a couple things. One is we would have them invite their advocates and heretics into the mix, and they could see how we'd work before the contract got signed. So they had a sense to understand how we were different, often in our space or even virtually. And then we would often realize the scope of the work would increase because they're like, oh, here's another problem we have.

Hmm.

That I wish, I wonder, I worry is the best sales set of questions ever. And so we would find that we started doing that in COVID. But we started to realize that the lessons we learned in COVID shifted our entire— the way we think about our funnel, the way that we engage, the way that we sell, and it has been transformative for the business.

So if I— thank you for sharing that. I find this very, very inspiring. So if I understand you correctly, you would have a pre-conversation, which is basically a sales conversation that you would sketch. So you visualize what they explain what their core problem is, and maybe some first ideas on how to solve it or to at least identify where the gap is and how you can help them to solve it.

And they would bring more than just the client. So we did one yesterday, the day before yesterday, that they brought 7 people in. So all of a sudden now, before we've identified exactly what the scope is, before we have proposed a contract, before they've gotten a price from us, we've had 7 leaders for an hour and a half sampling what it means and feels like to work with.

That's a high investment from their side in the beginning. And psychologically, so they have invested already. So they are part of, it's like the IKEA effect. So they've been part of the building. So they want to keep it and continue. And if you have 7 people, the likelihood of having at least one who says, why not?

And now we've built 7 people who can go back to their organization and explain what they've heard. We send them the pictures of the visuals we've created, and they see us work.

That's so smart.

And, and, and this is another piece of having space, Myriam, that is different, is that I can schedule a couple of those a day. Like, I don't have to get on an airplane to go do that.

Yeah.

With an artist. So the cost of that to us is relatively minimal.

Yeah. What I find fascinating is often we say we want to minimize the group. We want to speak only with those who are the decision makers, especially for these early conversations, and you're doing the exact opposite for very smart reasons. And at the same time, thereby also showing them that it is possible to have a conversation and an exchange of ideas with such a large group, where I would say in 99% of the cases beforehand, having 7 people in the room without a facilitator is always a nightmare.

It is. And, and we uncover so much more from them And about them than we ever would have gotten in a sales conversation because it doesn't feel like a sales conversation. That, that was the big epiphany is that no one felt it was a sales conversation. It's a conversation about their challenges and, and just learning more about them.

Yeah, it's leading selling through care and content instead of pushing them. And I think nowadays it's— we are bombarded with everyone has the best solution for us anyway. We're bombarded with cold sales calls or emails. They all sound the same. So I think to get this extra care to be listened to, I can see that there's value. And then to get it for free, to already get value for free, then there's entire reciprocity mechanism switching on in our brain. Oh, we received this nice drawing. Now we really want to work with them.

And we ask them to bring the people who will be most challenging On their teams to the process. That's what I talk about.

You can convince them and they don't have to, right?

The like—that's why we say bring your advocates and heretics. I want to—I want you to bring the people who you're most concerned about this and who will be the otherwise the ones who are you know bitching and moaning. Why are we doing something different? Why don't we like like the ones who complain? Like if they're in the room, at least now they go back and say they're on the planning team. Right? It takes the teeth out of their criticism a bit. And even when they still are skeptical, they've now seen us address their skepticism in the work we're doing, even in that early process.

And see that it's okay, and maybe even favored to have the skepticism, because you can work with that. If everyone agrees, they wouldn't need you anyway. And to I think to find the joy in this disagreement and the creativity, that can be a big learning moment for them as well.

And if they're all skeptics, we might realize we don't want to work with them.

Has it happened to you that you said, maybe we're not for you?

Only a couple of times. And it was pretty clear from the get-go that the person who was bringing them in was not— didn't have— power is not the right word, but they were We were too big a difference for them in an organization that might not be good at taking any risks. So ideally, we'd be great for them, but we'd also realize that their team just wasn't ready for something like this. And other times we've just realized, like, they've rescheduled 10 times.

Mm-hmm.

Right? They can't bring the team in. And, and at that moment we realize, like, this is a signal to us about the rest of the engagement. So we're not a fit. And oftentimes we're just able to, to price that high enough that they decide against it. Or at least makes it easier for us to justify doing the work because we know it's going to be a lot of extra handholding and engagement.

Yeah. And funny enough, then putting a higher price tag on it also pushes them to really commit and stick to the work because they have to walk the talk. Yeah. Put the mouth where the money was. That's right. Yeah. What remains your facilitation challenge?

So this is where facilitator and business person overlap is I'm here in a town and it goes back, Myriam, to your very first question. Like, when did you first start calling yourself a facilitator? Is that as we think about growth both here in St. Louis, the work we do on the road, but also looking at other locations, the finding other people who can do this work well is crucial for us because our, like, we, the clients want to hire someone who's going to do the work. With them, not a salesperson who will hand them off to a facilitator. And, and we realized that our model's a bit different. The way that we work is a bit different. We're a bit more opinionated in some ways than the purely neutral facilitator. So we have to have stories to tell. And I, I, I joked about the gray hair. It's not gray hair, but it, it's being perceived, having the capacity to believe yourself as, and being perceived as a peer to the most senior people in the room. Because the moment you're in awe of someone who might be someone that you see on the news or that, you know, is making— made a billion dollars last year, you've lost.

Mm-hmm.

And so the challenge we have is codifying our process a bit, but finding others who can deliver it.

Mm-hmm.

And because to your point about facilitator, the best facilitators rarely have facilitator on their LinkedIn profile. They're artists, musicians, creative directors, lawyers, teachers, right? They realize that they've got this natural knack for getting smart people to think together better, but they've never identified themselves or called themselves facilitators. So it makes it harder to find those people.

Yeah. And also speaking to, to the authority power dynamic, there is still kind of a weird label on facilitator. That's why some would prefer to call themselves consultants.

We, we talk about being— and this, this is one of the, the promises we make to our clients— is we are catalysts, not consultants. Because even though some might view us as that, we have been really intentional about avoiding that word for our work. Because a consultant needs to be perceived as having expertise in a given domain.

Mm-hmm.

And clients are like, oh, we want to be innovative. Who exactly like us have you done this exact same work with before? Right? It's the kind of question you get. As a facilitator, we are able to, to work across 40 or 50 different industry verticals, nonprofits, educational institutions, government, big corporations, small businesses. Because we, even though we realize that, and I've learned this, one of my favorite lessons is that everybody's broken in the same 5 ways. They all think they're broken in completely unique ways. And they all assume they're more broken than everybody else. And so people are like, oh my goodness, you don't know our industry. Do you have problems communicating? Yeah. Is your strategy clear to your team? No. Are you worried about technology changing the landscape of your work? Yeah. Like, I mean, it's, it, there's all the same things. And so where our clients and where we've leaned into this from a value proposition as being facilitators versus consultants, Maryam, is that, you know, I can tell someone, if you want a consultant who knows your industry, who will give you the playbook they've given to all your competitors, that's what we do. But if you want someone who can pull together some interesting threads from different industries, completely different sectors, then we can add more value.

Yeah. And I think the Monday morning argument, do you want people to actually get onto the doing after the workshop on Monday morning? If they build the solution themselves? Yes, they will. If they were handed over the handbook on how to change the, how to change the company now to survive, probably not. Yeah. You used the N-word and I'm very curious. Neutrality is the big— some facilitators—

Thank you for defining what the N-word is, because if that's said and that's the only clip that comes out of the, out of this thing, Oh, yes.

Thank you. Thank you.

Neutrality.

Yes, neutrality. Oh, whoa, whoa. I haven't even thought of that. How naive am I? And maybe it's, yeah, outside the US, we are maybe less sensitive to that. The neutrality word. Oops. Recalibrating. And you said that you're less— you're opinionated. I love that. I would love to hear more about that.

We, you know, part of, part of why our clients, I think, enjoy our work is because they get ideas from us, not just from themselves. And we do our best work, people are in small groups, I hummingbird from group to group, or the facilitator does, and we might be able to say, have you thought about this? Or here's something another one of our clients has done, or here's an idea for you. And, and in the breakouts, when we do it well, they either take that idea or discard it, but they come back and it's their idea, it's not ours.

Mm.

But we, I, I've always struggled with the complete neutrality of facilitators. And I know that there's a school of thought that that is the only way to facilitate. But in the front of the room, when they come back and gather, I will push them hard sometimes. I will be able to not only ask the questions, but say things that they can't say. Yeah. And, and again, this is where being able to be viewed as a peer elevates your capacity and the permission your clients give to you to treat them as such and to be offering insight and advice. Now, we never tell them what to do, but it's not uncommon for me to be dismissive potentially of something that isn't a big enough idea for them, oftentimes with humor. You can be funny. Very rarely with judgment. But they're hiring us because of the work we've done, and not just because of the process. And so that's where I find myself. And, and it's one of the most difficult parts is how do I not stray too far? And because we also, we've also been in those worlds, all of us, where we know the answer because we've seen it last week. And so I'm very careful not to, to cross that boundary.

Mm-hmm.

But I might suggest in a handful of groups, hey, have you thought about this?

Yeah.

So that's one of those things that the older I've gotten, the less worried I am about it because I also realize that when clients come to visit us, that's one of the things that we've sold them to expect.

Yeah. And I think there is a nuance whether you let someone struggle and there is no need to struggle and giving them a little push, a hint. a new direction would just elevate them on the next level, as opposed to giving them the solution, end of story. And I think the neutrality— so for me, the neutrality is in the outcome. I'm not attached to what you agree upon in the end. And that's as much neutrality that I have.

Right.

Because otherwise, yeah, I think as humans, to be fully neutral, very difficult.

And it, in some ways, the neutrality And, and again, this isn't, this isn't the way that the best facilitators use it, but it's, it's a bit of saying, I don't care what you do.

Hmm.

And that's rarely true. Like, I care what you do, whether it's the, the team members you've brought, the impact on your culture, the impact on the community because you're a nonprofit. I mean, like, I care. And I've always believed, and it's kind of the core of, of who we are, is the world works better when people meet better. And I want them to work better. I want them to get to a place where they've made progress. And sometimes that requires a bit more prescriptive facilitation versus the complete neutral, whatever you all think.

Yeah. And I think there are also nuances of neutrality. So it can— we can be very neutral with lots of care because we believe in them and don't want to give it away. And I think there are moments where it makes sense to be totally neutral.

Of course.

Yeah. Final question. What is it that you wished you had known before? What advice would you give to your younger self?

So only partially joking, it would have been to go to business school versus law school. Though I love being a lawyer, and it's taken me in places that I would have never imagined. But I think the advice I would have given myself that's a bit more serious than that is to lean into my creativity and my instincts sooner than I did. And whether that shows up as— it may be imposter syndrome to some, but there were lots of times when the things that were obvious to me, I thought wouldn't work because I wasn't seeing them in the world, whether it was an approach, whether it was a business or a way to think about this work. And I've made— I always love the idea of calling some mistakes or failure tuition versus failure. It's like, I'm willing to pay tuition to learn a lesson. I just don't want to pay to take the same class twice.

I love that.

And I didn't trust myself early enough. I doubted myself still as the business was progressing, kind of like, why is this working? There's got to be something I'm missing sort of thing. So the advice I'd give is to lean in a bit more to the instincts and perhaps even find ways to test them sooner. To build those proof points that build confidence earlier in my career versus later.

Love that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Is— we almost spoke for 1.5 hours. Is there anything that you wanted to share that we haven't touched upon yet?

I, um, I, I do have my— it's, it's something that I do out of, uh, it's a labor of love for me, but it may be one of the coolest things we've built at Filament, and I'll give you the link to share. We created this thing called Thanksgiving here in St. Louis. It's a thing that pairs businesses with nonprofits. What we realized is that our, our clients had the same challenges. And so what we do is we work with nonprofits here in our town and we help them come up with a challenge that can't be about money.

Mm-hmm.

Otherwise they would all be about money. And we then, uh, uh, invite business partners in. So mostly teams from businesses. We have a draft, so they pick a challenge, but they don't know the nonprofit it belongs to till after they're paired. And then we teach the business partners how to run an innovation day. We build the tools, we do a workshop with them, but on a single day they all gather. So the business partners bring a team of 4 or 5. Oftentimes for them now it's younger emerging professionals, high growth potential leaders. And then the nonprofits bring a similar size team of the executive leader, a person close to the problem, maybe a board member, a volunteer, a constituent they serve, and they spend a day here in our innovation district working on those problems. And we've learned that the nonprofits never take the time to work on problems that aren't attached to their survival. So they might think about culture or team or strategy or scaling an offering or pricing or those sorts of things that they never otherwise give themselves the time to think deeply about.

Maslow.

The business partners recognize that those problems are very similar to the ones that they have. And we ask them to partner, not be saviors, but to think creatively about the problem. And by the end of the day, we have what looks like a, a middle school science fair. Everyone has these poster boards where they talk about the problem, the potential solutions, the experiments they're going to try, what they'll do next. They make an unreasonable request to the world, something that would be meaningful to change their trajectory as a nonprofit. But we've brought as many as 800 people together for this day.

Hmm.

We had, last year was about 50. The year before we had 70 nonprofits all got help in a single day. And I share that for 2 reasons. One is I, I, it's just, I love the way that facilitators can think about doing good that isn't— and the business partners pay us, but the nonprofits participate for free. But it's also a thing for me that had we never had space, it could have never happened.

Hmm.

And so I've just loved being able to kind of realize that this unique set of skills that we as facilitators have, the communities we're parts of, that we can think creatively to do some amazing things that have impact beyond just us being in the room. And that for me has been one of the most rewarding things about it. Now we've had 160 or 170 different nonprofits in our town have, have gone through Thanksgiving. Some have said it's the best day they've ever spent when it comes to the future of their organization. And it's all because we had a unique vantage point on playing in both worlds a bit and the curiosity of like, what if we got them together? What could we do? So that's the last piece I'll share just because it's something I'm deeply proud of. And we'll share the link. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I can totally see how it's valuable for the businesses because one of the coaching questions is, what would you advise your best friend if they shared the same problem? So when we look at the problems of others, it's so easy to find solutions. And as you mentioned before, very often they have the same problems. So then, oh, what if we applied that to ourselves? Because most of our advice to others is actually us projecting our problems on them.

Yes, yes, it is. And those business partners all of a sudden get connected to the community and to a problem they might not have ever knew existed.

Yeah.

I do have one last thing I'll share just because it's something that hit us literally and figuratively last week is St. Louis, Missouri got hit by a terrible tornado last Friday. And if you see any opportunity to support relief efforts here in St. Louis, it would be deeply appreciated. The communities that were impacted most were the ones almost as always who have the least capacity to respond and to come out of it better on the other side. So if you're looking for a donation to make, take a look at some of the nonprofits here in St. Louis who are doing great work. The tornado was devastating. for just parts of our town, but for those that hit, it was absolutely destroyed. So if you feel like giving, that would be something that would be a valuable thing and would go towards a very good cause.

Thank you. And we'll put the links in the show notes.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Matt, for your commitment to the work and, uh, for sharing with us. It was very inspiring.

I loved it. It was so fun to talk with you, Myriam, and thank you for the work you do. Elevating facilitators is something that has been long overdue, and it's work that makes every bit of work better. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for staying tuned and for listening until the very end. I hope that you found the inspiration and the wisdom that you are looking for, and I hope that you will subscribe to the show so that you never miss any of the interviews with another inspiring facilitator from across the world. I'm devoted to continue this podcast and to deliver weekly an episode that maintains the quality that you expect and you deserve. And if you would like to help me to maintain this quality and to keep the podcast free, please help us visit workshops.work/support to make a small donation to keep the podcast free. Thank you so much. I hope to be in your ears next week.