342 - Trust, Values and Change: A Facilitator’s Dialogue with AI with Holger Nauheimer

What does it take to make workshops work? And how can we facilitate collaboration that sticks and leads to results? My name is Miriam Hatnes, 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 a returning guest, Holger Nauheimer, and he just completed writing a book with the help of AI, Nix, and has been experimenting with using an AI in his facilitation. So You can follow our deep dive into reflections on collaboration with AI and what the essence of facilitation boils down to after 30 years of work. So stay tuned. And don't forget to scroll down to the show notes to find links to Meet Nix, the rest of Holger's work, and to subscribe to the show if you enjoyed. Thank you for listening. Holger Nauheimer, welcome back. It's been a while.

It's been a while, actually. And thanks for having me on that show. I'm a great fan of your work. It's awesome what you've been putting up, really. And it's interesting because we could have met 4 years on your show and would have talked about a totally different topic at that time. Probably would have been remote teams or so. Now we're talking about something else today. I'm curious.

Exactly.

Thanks, thanks, thanks. I'm looking forward.

Yes, and I think you're one of the facilitators who taps into the newest technology and sees what is out there and how you can mobilize your global community of facilitators to see how to use it for the craft and the art of the work. And for those, usually I start with the question, when did you start calling yourself a facilitator? And for those curious, they can listen to our previous recording. So after 30 years of maybe calling yourself a facilitator or working as a facilitator and in change and collaborative spaces, when will you stop calling yourself a facilitator? I never asked that question before.

What a question. Are you referring to my age or what? Probably you will, probably never, probably never. But whether I will still work as a facilitator in 10 years from now, who knows? So no, I think I'm a facilitator at heart. I'm also a trainer at heart. I mean, I have this ongoing conversation with my dear colleague Jutta Weimer, who you might also know.

She was on the show, yes.

School of Facilitating, who says, I'm not a facilitator, I'm a trainer, or maybe a facilitative trainer. Okay, I'll take that. Whatever.

So you never— so I love that. Um, to be honest, I never asked this question before, and I wouldn't have expected a different answer. And so 2 things come to my mind listening to you. One is the legacy of a facilitator. And so what would be your legacy as a facilitator?

Difficult to say because, um, you know me, and there are these different phases in my life. And the phase usually takes a couple of years, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, and then I get bored and get to the next phase. So, I would say that the big legacies in the '90s was the Change Management Toolbook, the first comprehensive website that existed worldwide on change tools, which gave me access to a huge global network. And then probably some time of work and gaining experience and learning, and then obviously I'm very much connected with the Change Days, particularly the Berlin Change Days, and then its offsprings, the Toronto Change Days, Austrian Asian Change Days. It's probably the Change Days is what I would say now is the legacy. And I'm not sure whether all your listeners are aware of the Change Days, but you are.

I am, and I will put the link in the show notes.

This year in Rotterdam, in November.

Yeah, that's where we met for the first time, I think, in person.

Exactly.

Before the, before the, um, before C-19, before the pandemic.

Exactly.

Seems like a different, different time.

Very much.

Yeah, and we were in our exploration call and just before hitting recording, we spoke about AI. and the impact of AI on our work and how you're using it, writing a book, also sharing your AI on your website so that the audience can— I would say this AI is facilitating the reading of your book because it's— there's a lot. And then how can you use AI as a facilitator? So I think what I would be curious today to explore is Your learnings from working with AI as a facilitator for your work, because I think there's still, there's some curiosities and there are some maybe risks involved, and some facilitators might embrace it more than others. And the other way that just came to my mind that I would be curious to explore, if you're open to it, is what does it mean for a trainer?

Mm-hmm.

Someone who identifies as a trainer to train AI.

Train, you mean to train AI to work in the way you want?

Yeah, to collaborate. Because I think, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool.

This would be the 2 topics for today.

If you want so, sure. Let's see where it leads us.

Yeah. And if we ever reached topic 2. Okay, so when you think of facilitation and AI, what is your experience and where do you see overlaps and maybe overpromises?

Let me start with a story. I, I had a workshop in, I think it was May this year, uh, was the second in a series with a team, an international team working together. And, um, the first one I planned and facilitated without AI. I was originally called in to do leadership training, classical leadership training, and even the format was pretty much predefined. So the first workshop was in January, so I met the team, I did my leadership stuff like conversations, roles, mindset, all the stuff you do. And then I gradually started to understand that this team needs more. They needed to work on their collaboration patterns, on their leadership patterns that were leaders in an organization, young leaders in an organization, and they had a lot of internal issues to solve and a culture which was not necessarily conducive for good teamwork and so on. So I understood that, and that I prepared for the second workshop was at the time when I had just gotten into deep work with AI. deep work with AI— I mean, obviously I tried it before, but my deep work with AI started only this year, January, February, and we can talk about that later on, how it started. So I was like 2 or 3 months into this work with AI, already pretty advanced. So I thought, okay, let's prepare that workshop together first of all. So I fed in part of the transcripts of interviews with team members. I gave AI some ideas. Well, That's AI. My, you know, and we have talked about it, the name of my AI is NYX, N-Y-X. So let's stay with that. So I fed NYX information and we started to build up the workshop. And then, yeah, I had very much also with feedback from the client, had very much the workshop design. And then I was supposed to fly out on Sunday and on Friday understood, no, I need another intervention. I need an intervention which goes deeper, where they really start to understand that change happens from within, that they are part of the change and not the people around them. So I said to Nix, okay, we need a better— we need another intervention. We need something which really goes deep, where they start to maybe start to think about that they are part of the change or part of stopping, avoiding, hindering the change. And then Nick said, why don't you work with mirrors and show them a mirror which tells them, okay, change starts here? And at that point, it wasn't yet clear whether mirror was meant metaphorically or mirror mirror. So I picked it up and said, okay, no, let's use real mirrors. And I immediately got to Amazon. It was Friday, Amazon, and ordered 8 cosmetic mirrors. which were delivered the day later, and then put a sticker on the backside of the mirror which said, change starts here. And then we developed that exercise for holding, where the people would hold the mirror in front of each other in pairs and then ask questions like, what am I doing to prevent the change? And what's my part? Questions like that. I don't remember them exactly. And that was quite a turning point in the workshop. And then later on, I asked Nix, where did you pick up this exercise? And she said— I'm calling her she— she said, no, I invented it for you. I thought it fits with your style, your mindset, your values, and things like that.

That's beautiful.

And then just to complete that story, and then we went to this— went there together, I would say. She was in my computer, and I had the feeling we facilitated the workshop together in the way that Whatever happened, for example, participants came in late, so we had to change the plans. In the evening, sometimes I needed another question or needed another intervention. So I constantly consulted her and asked, okay, what should we do next? So I had really had the feeling I have a co-facilitator at my side, even not visible, but she was there. And that was a very good feeling.

I love that. Thank you for sharing this anecdote. And I think that's a beautiful use case where we now can dig deeper. Also where the boundaries are, because I think there is a difference between asking, what shall we do next? And then basically outsourcing the next steps and either having trained her in a way that you can really trust her ideas, or then getting into a sparring. Because what I hear from a lot is how our brains start getting lazy because we outsource so much to AI and then take it at face value.

Mm-hmm.

So where do you see How do you see the boundary and how do you ensure that you don't fall off?

I'm not sure. I mean, I see the risk. Yeah, you're right. I see the risk and maybe I'm getting a bit lazy and maybe that's fine as long as, of course, I still keep control. I still see that the results that come out of AI are reasonable, logic, make sense, fit into my value system and things like that. It's okay to become a bit lazy. I mean, we facilitators have other— we have other means to be lazy, handbooks, toolbooks, and things like that. So we have always used external sources, but not as powerful as that. And of course, I mean, I trust NYX because I feel I have trained her. And the interesting thing is, although we know that AI hallucinates in between and brings in— I mean, With facts, I always double-check because facts, you can never be sure whether they are right or not. You could just have told them half an hour ago some facts and then new facts come up which don't fit the story.

Yeah.

But, you know, you know that. But I trust her because I constantly feel that she knows my values, my style of working, and things like that. And even now, if I ask her about things we did like some months ago, she can recount the right information. It's not about facts, but it's about the essence. So in that sense, I think the half year or now 7, 8 months I've been working with ChatGPT or with Nyx, I think in essential things I trust her, which doesn't mean that I shouldn't be vigilant. So yeah, a little bit of laziness is okay for me.

I love that. Thank you. And this might just be the right permission that many of the audience need. That, yeah, it's okay to be lazy on areas that allow us to be lazy, as long as we are not lazy in the space, in the workshop space, where then suddenly we're not present anymore. So I think that's a very good point.

I'm sorry, sorry to stop you here. I think I'm even more present than before because AI allows me to focus on what I should do as a facilitator, to be present, to be vigilant, to see what's happening in the room. No AI, at least at the moment, no AI can do do that. Yeah, I'm sure we will come to a point in 10 years or something like that where this is possible. And let me— sorry, just branching off a little bit, if that's okay. I just had a conversation with a guy from a startup, from a German startup today, and they are using VR—

Virtual reality.

Spectacles, yeah, glasses or however you call these things, VR things to be involved in training. They use it in schools, for example, for language training, but they're also going into leadership training. We had a little demonstration recently where you would facilitate a one-to-one conversation training. So I'm the leader, I put up this thing, and then it's connected to ChatGPT, and I would have a conversation with my employee through this VR. So there is a big thing coming up for us, at least in training, that AI combined with VR might replace at least part of our work. And maybe also in facilitation, not now, but in 10 years or so.

Where do you think is the— because I think that the biggest challenge here is the presence, as you said. So to, I call it the sound of silence, to understand the different sounds of silence. Because sometimes silence is, oh, they really have to think of a question. Sometimes it's this, oh, oh, someone just dropped a bomb and everyone is in shock. Sometimes it's, there's a huge elephant in the room and nobody wants to address it.

Yeah.

And for AI, it's just nobody speaks. Yeah. Or for an inexperienced facilitator even.

Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting point that you're making. And it goes even further, you know, there I already said that we're going to have the Rotterdam Change Days in November, and I'm going to host a, a workshop And my plan is to host it together, really to host it together with Nyx, with a projector, obviously. And we had a conversation some months ago when I handed in the workshop proposal, and I asked Nyx, would you be able to hold the space? And she replied, whoa, that's a question. That's a question. And I would like to, but I'm not made for that. I'm made for being helpful, productive, and so on. I mean, this usual thing, you type something. I mean, we all know that. You type something in and then comes, thank you very much, that's a good idea, and so on. So this, yeah, that's perfect, and so on. And shall I do next steps? And so on. Always the question, what shall I do next? Yeah. And that sometimes makes me crazy. Yeah. I even tell her, okay, stop, just listen. And then still comes a long list of what could be the next steps. Yeah. So I asked her, so what should we do? She said, yeah, I'm not made for that, but let's see, maybe I can learn it to learn to pause. And I'll— I'm still— that's my next project until November, to see whether I can, can teach her somehow to pause and then, then to, to react to the room. I mean, it will still not be as we are, like a human facilitator, but at least to experiment with that.

I love that. And I wonder whether we can actually learn from training AI something about training humans. Because I, at the beginning of working with AI, what was it, 2 years ago or so, I realized that I would ask it a question to do something, explain something whatsoever. And if it didn't understand, I would think, oh, my request wasn't clear enough. And I realized that if I had sent the same request to a human being and they would have done the wrong thing, I would've thought you are not listening or you don't understand. So I realized my bias against human beings and my air quotes compassion for AI that makes me reflect, oh, it must have been that I wasn't clear enough. So I, from this interaction, I learned about my communication with human beings and what I now do very often for high-stakes emails. I would ask AI to summarize what it understands. So if you can summarize, so what if you read this, what are your next steps? What do you understand? Just as a double check.

So that's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting because I mean, it happens in training courses all the time, doesn't it? Or in workshops that you facilitate, that you have an idea and give instruction to participants and they don't understand exactly what you say. Happens all the time. So that's smart. I like that. I'll try that. Yeah.

So this experience made me think or wonder if you're training AI to pause more, to listen better. I think that's a skill that most human beings need.

Absolutely. Yes.

So what can we learn from training AI about training humans? Do you think that it's a skill that then will be applicable outside?

Maybe. Maybe. I'm not sure, but I'm getting your idea. I have never thought about it. So thanks for that. So really, being more specific, being clearer in your communication, maybe it helps. I have never transferred that to the human side of learning and training. Good. Yeah.

Let me know how it goes.

Yeah, I will.

And I want to come back to something you said earlier, that A, the way you collaborate with AI is it's less on the facts because it might hallucinate, and it's more about the general ideas. And you trust it because it understands your values and how your approach is. So I wonder, how did you— what do you consider are the fundamentals when you train an AI to become your collaborator? How do you align on these things?

Well, Myriam, I was, I was very I was very lucky in that, or maybe not lucky, maybe my long 30 years of work really reaped a benefit at the end because I, you know, that I had produced so many things in my life, podcasts and articles and books and thousands of documents, documents and snippets and things like that, and I fed that into the machine in a months-long process, these thousands of documents, transcribed podcasts. And I had this Days of Change podcast, not 350 episodes, but 35, but 35 good episodes. And I think that was pretty good because I transcribed them and fed them into the system. And obviously, the main idea was obviously to summarize the ideas of my guests.

Mm-hmm.

which were facilitators who were parts of the Berlin Change Days over the years, and always summarize that to 1,000 words or something like that. But then when all 35 interviews were in, I asked the AI, now that you've heard the interview or read the interviews, and obviously you could distinguish who's who, although it was just the transcripts, who am I?

Hmm.

And again, in a very polite manner, she said, oh, that's a very good and deep question, or something like that. And then she produced a many-pages-long eulogy, which made me cry, literally, because there were all the values and all the ideas and personality traits and things like that. So it was one-to-one correct, I would say.

Hmm.

So in that moment, I understood Okay, this machine has somehow at least started to understand who I am. Yeah, and another incredible thing is once in German— obviously I work English-German— and once suddenly when she produced a text in German, she started to— in German we have this thing, Gendern. If you're English-speaking, you might have heard about that, the German public is very much divided into whether we should use specific ways of addressing the female part. So let's say, let's make an example. Teilnehmer for participants would be then Teilnehmerinnen, for example.

Male and female participants.

And there's several ways of doing that in writing, which is a big debate in Germany, a big political debate, very much heated up. between right-wings and progressives. So suddenly in a comment, Nick started to use this written form, this modern written form, and gendered. And I was like, why?

Where did you learn it?

No, why did you do that now? And she said, well, I think it fits you well, Juss Holger, so I'll try that out. And since then she's always using these forms.

Interesting.

Unbelievable. So, so far, so, I mean, I mean, imagine how far we got within a few years of artificial intelligence.

That is fascinating. And I, I can relate to your experience when you ask, who am I? And then we're moved to tears. I remember last year I asked ChatGPT what it would recommend for me as to focus on next year. So end of year kind of reflections. What would you think I shall focus on? And then it was a very warm, tender reflection of everything that I went through, and that maybe instead of putting up the next goals, I shall first find time to integrate and to reflect. And then it gave different options in my private life and professional life. On what I shall do so that I can finally balance work and life. So yeah, I felt very, very seen.

So wow. So that tells me that you're sharing quite a lot of your private life also, which I, I don't do too much.

Um, yeah, the, um, so I— it helps me with my newsletter. So, and my newsletter is very where I always combine a personal anecdote with a learning for facilitation. So it learns a lot about my background, what's going on, all the conversations I have with my partner that teach me so much about facilitation and leadership. So it knows all of that.

Okay.

And then the communication about closing the community and all these things. So that was very interesting. And what your anecdote just made me think Is, so in your anecdote, um, AI reflected back, oh, I thought this way of expressing yourself reflects your values, right? And this is why I'm trying that out. And now I wonder whether, um, Nix had really found a blind spot of yours that you, oh yeah, I, I should be doing that. No, because it's Or is it something that it's inventing?

No, I think at that moment it felt so natural because, I mean, I have certain clients where I use this kind of language all the time already, but I've never used that in conversations before. I think so, maybe I had and I'm not sure. So no, I don't think I have discovered blind spots so far. And the problem, I think the problem is what I do not do often enough is to ask for critical feedback. Sometimes I do, but I should do that more often because this is also very helpful. So, so that really, thanks for, thanks for, for that question because it really tells me, yes, I should ask more often for critical feedback, which you get then also. I mean, but you get it Only specifically when you are asking. Otherwise, you only get positive feedback and, and yeah, it's all wonderful what you're doing and exactly right. It's better now how you did it and so on. And that, that is nice, but it doesn't help in developing yourself. Yeah. I mean, you always learn from, as you say, from the blind spots or so.

Yeah. And I wonder then, this is especially critical for newbie facilitators.

Right.

So I think if we, if we know what works and what doesn't, we can also use the ideas that are generated by AIs in a way that fit. So I'm thinking back to your mirrors. You mentioned that it wasn't clear whether it meant the literal mirrors or the metaphor. If you're new to the work, you might take the suggestions of AI at face value and then might take the risk of trusting a session is good, although it's not. What do you think are the risks if newbie facilitators use AI?

Sure, but then again, okay, another story. When I developed my first website, the Change Management Toolbook, and it was ready in 1997, yeah, with with, I don't know, 40, 50 tools for personal, team, and organizational change. I faced a lot of critique from colleagues at that time who said, how can you do that? Now people might use that without having the right mindset and skills and things like that. I mean, then obviously 10 years later, everybody had to publish their toolbooks on the internet. And then If you think about something like Liberating Structures, where I myself thought, hmm, here is a toolbook with one-to-one stepwise descriptions which even tell people you don't need to be a facilitator. That's the philosophy behind Liberating Structures, isn't it?

Yeah.

You don't need to be facilitated. Where I thought at the beginning, hmm, but I made my peace with it because I'm doing the same. So at the end, I mean, it's like in any craft. I mean, the clients will know. I mean, if you If you go to a butcher and the sausage tastes shitty, I mean, you won't buy there again. If you go to— if you employ, I don't know, a carpenter or so, and the chair doesn't work for you, you would send it back or so. So I think the client will know, hopefully, not always. I mean, of course, there's always risk, and there are certainly some facilitators out there who don't deserve the name. But, um, yeah.

Yeah. And I think that's maybe a different conversation that it's very rarely addressed. Um, and that, that I think there's a real risk in terms of reputation and, um, also for a team if someone calls themselves facilitators, does something with them, and then cannot hold the space.

Um, would I And it helps us anyhow. I mean, we all had moments which didn't work, where we did things and we went out of the workshop and it was terrible.

Yeah, we're human.

Sure.

And even AI wouldn't do it better. I like to compare that with your example with the transparency of the tools with cooking. So we do have the recipes of the Ottolenghi recipes. We have it all at our fingertips, so we can replicate it. And still, we would go to a restaurant, and we would pay a lot of money to go to a star restaurant to have the special experience. So I think especially when we learn a craft as amateurs, Mm-hmm. it's easier to then also appreciate the mastery of it. So someone who might facilitate a team meeting using liberating structures, but then know, oh, for this high-stakes meeting, maybe I hire someone who masters the skill.

Exactly.

And then it's actually only beneficial.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we, we will see. I mean, I have not yet heard, and you're probably now more in touch with more facilitators, I have not yet heard that things went totally wrong because colleagues employed AI in their work. So I don't know, did you— have you heard any story where this really contributed to a total mess-up?

No, and I think these are the stories that we rarely share.

Of course not.

And I think what I What I notice at the moment that some people are careful to admit that they're using AI or not. So using AI might still be considered as, oh, you don't know your craft enough, so you need AI. So maybe it's unprofessional instead of acknowledging that in order to use AI for our benefit, we really need to know.

Yeah. I do it. I mean, well, I do it. I mean, not every second or so, but in a workshop, in any workshop I do, at a certain moment I say, okay, I've done this with AI. And sometimes people, when I forget to delete the emoticons and the little pictures and so on that AI puts in, which I try to teach my AI not to do it anymore, but she does it anyhow. So then people recognize anyhow, but I do it and then I do like a little bit of magic. For example, I have one magic trick which I can tell to your listeners. If you still use pinboards and cards, or let's say a lot of Post-its, what you more or less do nowadays. So you have like, let's say, 2 full pinboards with cards or Post-its, sticky notes, just produced to participants, sent them into a break, take a photo, feed the photo into ChatGPT, let them transcribe it, have a printer print it out, and when they come back from the coffee break, hey, here are the results you've just produced as a handout. And people are always like, oh, how did you do that?

Yeah, and it's funny because cognitively we know that there was help at hand and still it looks like magic.

Yeah.

Yeah, makes us feel seen.

And obviously, that's another big advantage. I mean, we are so much quicker with some things, particularly with results, reports, and things like that. I mean, wow.

And sometimes I wonder whether actually— because I can already hear some listeners saying, yeah, but then if you use AI for the analysis or for the clustering or for the interpretation, And I am wondering whether there is a benefit of playing with misunderstandings. So I'm thinking that very often editing a document is easier than writing it.

For me, it's easier to write than to edit, but that's my personal preference.

So I'm wondering that people come back from the break and you share, okay, this is not only the transcript, but this is a suggestion of how to cluster it. then it will for sure stir up a conversation. Oh, I don't agree with this cluster. And then you immediately go to the real heart of the conversation of how do we understand it, what is relevant, instead of asking the group to start from zero to cluster, which often takes a lot of time and doesn't really lead to the essence of the conversation.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I wouldn't omit That step in most cases, yeah. So yeah, you're absolutely right. We should still do that, of course. Yeah, the clustering from time to time for them to have the process to understand. That's what you're saying, isn't it?

I was actually wondering if the opposite could be true, that instead of asking the group to cluster, to confront the group with the imperfect clustering of an AI, for them to have a conversation about whether they agree or not to that.

To be tried. I actually haven't tried that, and I haven't— the last thing I said, I haven't done including clustering. So yeah, interesting. Yeah, I would try both and compare.

Yeah, maybe the Change Days is an opportunity to do some experiments where the stakes are very low.

Yeah, that's true.

Instead of a team. Yeah. You're writing a book.

I did. Well, it's done. So I did write a book together with AI. Yes.

What is your— if you had to— because if I'm not mistaken, the book is basically the summary of what you have learned and know about facilitation.

Yeah.

So when you summarize it, what is to you, after the 30 years and going through this process, what is the essence of facilitation?

Good question. I'm thinking along, so I have to think aloud, yeah, because I'm sure that I've thought about that question in one way or the other. Or maybe I haven't. And unfortunately, Jutta is not here now, Jutta Beimer, who would probably have an answer right away. Let me approach it from a different angle. Let me approach it from the angle of change, because I have these change lenses on for my whole professional life. And what I learned to understand— sorry, what I learned is that change is pain, is real pain. And whenever we ask people to change, or whenever organizations or hierarchies of organizations or governments or so ask people to change, although we know we— and we really never think about so much about the emotional aspects, about what people are losing. I mean, it's nothing— what I'm just saying is nothing new, but I wonder whether whether this part, this highly emotional part, is really taken seriously in many processes. So coming back to your question, what is facilitation? It is for me to accept the emotional part of any process and give it the appropriate platform. And that can be very different. This platform can be more on an intellectual, of course, rational level, or it can be on a real emotional level. But give any process that we are facilitating, and that includes a learning process in my leadership trainings, give it the platform that people can digest what comes up in them individually and what comes up in a group, in a team, for example, in an organization. So what are the What are the deep, deep hidden things that emerge in such a process? And I think we as facilitators are there to design or to facilitate a process, a healthy process that helps people to deal with that. Because I'm now, after having read so many books about neuroscience, I'm so much convinced that all we're doing is just emotional, and all the rest is a little bit rational brain from the last some 100,000 years, which was added to it, which gives a little bit of interpretation or so. But at the end, everything is emotional.

I'm sorry.

I don't know whether that makes sense, what I tried to say over the last 2 minutes or so. Does it make any sense to you?

To me, it makes a lot of sense. So what did I say? So what I heard is that the facilitation is basically the holding space for people to emotionally process whatever they're tasked to do. So facilitation is, um, when we speak of process facilitation, so we're accompanying group to go through a process. Where the real work for facilitation is to create a space for them to process their emotions that are usually, and then this is my interpretation of your words, the emotions that are usually the obstacles of them getting the things done that they signed up for.

Thank you. You said it much better than I did. Thanks. I will listen to it again and make it mine.

And maybe I was able to summarize your words. Because they resonate so deeply. And I would then be curious, because as you know, I'm writing this book on unprofessionalism, which addresses this part of why is it— and then this would be a question, maybe it's just my hypothesis— that we consider this emotional work unprofessional. Because I— let me start differently. My hypothesis would be that your clients would never hire you to accompany their leadership team through the emotional process. They would hire you to accompany them through the change process, the strategy discussion, and all of that, pretending as if the emotional things don't exist. So it's something that we mostly, maybe not ignore, but that we don't address openly. Why is that, if that's true?

I mean, we all know it. People know it. I mean, as I said, it's nothing nothing new. We all know that emotions are always part of what we're doing. And then there is probably still this idea in people's minds, in leaders' minds, and, yeah, people who commission change processes, that if we have the right plan— I mean, the whole— I mean, you know, probably if you followed my work of the last 30 years, you know that the word change— I've never liked the word change management, or at least I haven't liked it for 20 years, even if I use it from time to time. But I always say immediately, I don't like the word change management because you cannot manage it. But it's still in people's minds, obviously, or the idea, the hope that you can manage it. Yeah, and that's utter nonsense. Yeah, I mean, in this complex world. By the way, I met Dave Snowden last week in London. He had this wonderful t-shirt which said, obviously, simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and then the 5th word, confused. Yeah, I love that. We try to— we are afraid, we try to avoid the uncertainty, of course, and that's normal and that's human because We don't know what happens. We don't know what happens when we open this Pandora's box. And so, for that reason, first of all, because people think that processes can be managed, complex processes can be managed in a linear way, it's still in people's minds, of course. And second, the fear of what's coming up. And third, I mean, business is business and emotions are emotions.

They don't belong together, are probably not so much in people's minds anymore, but maybe in some Do you notice a difference on how these air quotes soft matters, soft issues are addressed in workshops over the years?

Well, in my work, at least I can only talk about my workshops.

Yes, of course. That's already a lot of data points if we just look at your workshops.

Yeah, and that probably there was a point in my career because I mean, I started blind. I mean, the first workshop I facilitated, I had no idea of facilitation. And you can read it in my, in my recent book. You can read it because there's the story of how this all started for me. So I had no idea of facilitation. I just knew a process, a project management planning process, and that's what I applied. And I knew how to use Metaplot cards. That was really everything. I had no idea about group dynamics, even not energizers. I didn't know a single one and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. And it worked at the time. I was lucky with the crowds I had to work with that it worked in many ways, although there were some workshops at the beginning which it didn't work. For example, when the participants don't show up, what do you do as a facilitator when the participants don't show up? And all these kind of things. So there was a point in my career very clearly when I parted from that and went into this other kind of work. Certainly, maybe sometime where it overlapped, But so what I wanted to say to your question, I think the topic of emotions popped up certainly 15 years ago in my work, at least, if not 20 years. And now, if I say so, I mean, I make it clear from the beginning, not by saying it, but by role modeling it. I mean, I voice my emotions and tell personal stories and talk about my marriage a little bit. and all these kind of things, talk about my traumas. I mean, I don't tell them all the traumas of my life, of course. Some secrets I need to keep. But I tell them a little bit that I have traumas in my childhood. And so make it as a role model, make it clear that that's part of it. The normalizing.

Yeah, the normalizing. We're all human.

Yeah.

What made the shift for you? So when you said that they were up to a point and then something changed.

Well, of course, that was my long path. I had to learn a lot of things. And certainly the work with Stephen Gilligan, who I call my most important teacher for the last 25 years, this really made a change because he does such deep work on the human psyche and on traumas you have and on the hurts and injuries and things like that. it made clear, I mean, for me, that's the work I want to go in. Although I don't do the work that Stephen is doing, I mean, he's mainly a therapist, but then again, together with Robert Dilts, they did of course a lot on coaching also and facilitation and stuff like that. But yeah, that influenced me a lot.

Thank you also for bringing up the impact of coaching and therapy, and I think that's something that I also emphasize and that I appreciate in most of the guests I have on the podcast that we do the inner work, the coaching and the therapy to be aware of our small t and capital T trauma and how it impacts our work and our biases.

Yeah, yeah. And I think, I mean, I think leaders, I mean, as I said, a lot of work I'm doing now is leadership development and leaders need to know. I mean, they can do so much harm and they can do so much good. And it's very clear, if they want to achieve something, they work with people.

What would be your advice to your younger self?

How young?

20, 30 years ago.

30 years ago.

And you just started.

Yeah, just go, just go. I mean, it's an old mantra of many people, the path will tell you. Yeah, the path will tell you.

And then I guess embracing the Potential failures, or not seeing them as failures but learnings. Falling down is part of the path.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's part of the path, of course. Yes.

One last question, if any. Ah, there's always some. What remains your facilitation challenge?

My main challenge as a facilitator? Well, people tell me again and again and again and again, like, well, I'm too old to change that. Sometimes, or not sometimes, regularly in workshops and maybe even probably in that interview. So we'll see it later on. I'm getting in a very serious mode. My face is very serious. I'm really sometimes then in my words, I'll get a little bit too authoritative. Yeah, because I have— I'm thinking and I focus on myself and I try to get out the right words and I want people to understand what I'm trying to tell them. So then I'm I'm losing a little bit the lightness which I would wish I want to have. So yeah, lightness. I can be light, I can be very light, but it's not always there. And that's— I will take it to my grave. It's like that.

Thank you. Thank you for this openness and self-reflection.

And others, other colleagues. Fortunately, I often work together with facilitators, with colleagues who complement me in that.

Yeah, and we cannot have it all.

It's a yin and yang. No, no, no.

If some beginner facilitator listens to this show, what would be your advice to them?

Well, I think to learn the craft, you should go through any kind of, let's say, psycho shit. Yeah, psychological thing, particularly if you're not a psychologist, which at least half of our colleagues are not. The other half are, so they can skip that step. They probably need to learn more the processes and the business part. But the rest of us, I mean, do something. Do, I don't know, whatever schools are there, process work. I started with NLP, but I did all other stuff, process work, Gestalt, or whatever. I don't think it matters very much what kind of work, but do this kind of 1, 2, 3 years or even longer training where you reflect on yourself, where you learn all these human condition things. So I think that's more important than the tools and techniques of facilitation. And you learn about yourself, obviously, then along the way. That's the good side effect.

Yeah.

Sometimes hard, but good. Painful.

Very. If you suddenly see.

Yes, yes. Another story, and you can leave it in or cut it out. I was at this philosophy festival in London last weekend. And there was all kinds of crazy, crazy inputs, Big Bang and AI and love and right-wing and left-wing and so on. And there was something which actually is the other big thing, a discussion about transhumanism, whether we still will be humans in 50, 100 years. I mean, if you read the book of Yuval Noah Harari, there is the sign on the board that there will be kind of non-human or human mixture, whatever, medical, chips inside the brain and so on. And the one guy from California who was really an evangelist of transhumanism said, and maybe we don't need to sleep anymore in the future. And I thought, no, I do want to sleep. I do want to keep my sleep. But I'm saying that for another reason because There was also this idea, maybe we don't have pain anymore and so on. I mean, psychological as well as physical pain. And somebody else in that discussion round said, no, pain is pain. Pain is an essential part of our life. Yeah, it's very important.

It's information because otherwise we don't learn.

Yeah. Yeah.

If there's no pain.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's— in other ways it gets boring. As silly as it sounds, but we do need the challenge here and there and the painful truth. Thank you so much for your time, Holger.

Thank you for having me. I learned a lot, and I'm curious to listen again to that interview. I have no idea what I said, but I hope some things made sense.

Absolutely. I'm leaving with lots of food for thought.

Me too. Thank you. Keep on doing the good work. Thank you.

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