Range.co on meetings with remote introverts

About the speakers

Dan Pupius

Dan Pupius is CEO and Co-founder of Range, communication software that empower and strengthen teams, built specifically for the needs of the modern workplace. He has an MA in Industrial Design from Sheffield University, and a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Manchester. In past lives he raced snowboards, jumped out of planes, and lived in the jungle.

Jean Hsu

Jean Hsu is the Vice President of Engineering at Range. Prior to Range, she built product and engineering teams at Google, Pulse, and Medium, and co-founded Co Leadership, a leadership development company for engineers and other tech leaders. She’s also a co-actively trained coach and has coached engineers, tech leads, managers, VPs of Engineering, and CTOs. She loves to play ultimate frisbee and lives in Berkeley with her partner and two kids.

Links for more information

• Range
• Dan Pupius on LinkedIn
• Jean Hsu on LinkedIn

Resources mentioned in the show

• get three months of range for free with coupon code MRT2022 which you can apply at checkout
• In his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lawrence Lessig suggests that our behavior is regulated by four main forces: law, social norms, market forces and architecture.

Video interview

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jean: my team is all introverts. How do I, how do I get them to engage in these meetings?

They don't say anything. So I just call on them, which of course increases the anxiety of going to these remote meetings that you're going to be called on to, to, share your opinion at any given point. And so we do a lot of things. Like we have built into range meetings.

We have a spinner and so it shows everyone. And then, we have a check-in round where you spend the spinner and then everyone gets a chance to share how they're doing. If we were discussing a topic and it's a few people, if I notice that no one's saying anything, sometimes I'll set a timer and say Hey, I'm going to give you two minutes.

Just think about this question. And then we'll use the spinner to go around the room and everyone will share, what was surprising or any insights you had. And I find that puts a lot of introverts more at ease, where they have a little bit of time to think about it before responding. And they know that they're going to have to respond. It's pretty mind blowing. How many insights, really good insights come out of that where people might not willingly volunteer them if you were just like anyone have anything to share, but if they know they're going to get called on they'll think of what they want to share.

[00:01:05] Luke: Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. Today, I am super excited to be speaking with the team from range.co I've got Dan Pupius and Jean Hsu, the CEO and CTO, respectively. Let's start a little bit with range itself, what is it exactly that inspired you to build this kind of a system, Dan?

[00:01:55] Dan: So first off, thanks for having us it's good to be here and the important topic, especially given the state of the world today. So fundamentally today range is a set of integrated communication tools that empower and strengthen teams. So we've built it specifically for the needs of today's world.

So work is more complex. Teams are more distributed and people are seeing more purpose, seeking, more purpose in their work so that some of the underlying principles. And at the core is a product that allows for teams through asynchronous check-ins. So it's a little bit like you're a virtual standup.

We integrate with all the tools. So it's really easy to see your work and what you've got done. And then we have integrated team building components, which help build a sense of belonging and connection throughout that ACS process. Around that basically at its core, we have a synchronous meeting, facilitation tools goal set setting, and then a team directory.

So really we're building a suite for remote work.

[00:02:45] Luke: When was the first moment that you started building something like this? Just in terms of timeline? Is it directly after the pandemic started or...

[00:02:56] Dan: so we founded the company quite a while ago. So as some background, Jean, I worked at medium along with my co-founder Jen.

So Jean and I were engineering and Jen was in people ops. And at that time, we were experimenting with alternative ways of managing the company, shall we say? And we saw the opportunity for tooling. So we actually had some internal engineers working on some tools to help us coordinate. And that was really like where we started having this idea of Winston Churchill said, “we shape the buildings, and afterwards they shape us”.

So if we build the software thereafter, the software shapes us, like what would it look like to build a new class of software specifically designed to encourage the behaviors that we think are important in today's workplaces. So that became the impetus for range. And we started in 2017 and. Product and customer discovery.

We had early traction with remote teams and then since the pandemic, obviously everyone's going remote and the value prop of remote oriented tooling has become very clear to everyone.

[00:03:48] Luke: Yeah, I have to say the least. Sure. Come March, 2020 how did things look as things started to, heat up for you, I would assume?

[00:03:57] Dan: Jean, you joined after the pandemic, right? Thanks for remembering.

[00:04:00] Jean: Yeah, I joined in the summer. Very different. From what I've heard from you, pre pandemic, early days of range of oh, is this a market? Some skepticism, I think after the pandemic and ever after everyone went remote, it was like, oh, clearly this is a huge pain point. Like team alignment and team communication tools for remote teams. And yeah, I joined, I think at the summer of 2020.

[00:04:21] Dan: That's all right. And the peak.

Yeah. So in pre pandemic, we had customers we'd been taking a lean approach. So we had, we've been working with development partners since day one, essentially. We had big names like Twitter quite early on yeah, like Gina alluded to while I was like religion for people who saw the need for something like this, who cared about culture and cared about productivity and engagement and belonging, it wasn't a widely held belief and it was a bit of an uphill battle.

But when everyone was forced into this remote world and many of them hadn't been remote before just like the pain was just the amplified. So the need for a new way of working a new way of coordinating was much more.

[00:04:55] Luke: You guys mentioned alignment specifically, so which of the features, most dig into that or what, what seems to help the most?

Is it the the goal setting or is it the async check-ins how do you think about that?

[00:05:07] Dan: So async check-ins is really the core. And if you think about what alignment means, it's not just about. It's not just a, like a cognitive thing of like information.

That's a feeling like we all feel aligned, right? So it's feeling like you're in the same boat. So checking in creates a habit, it's a rhythm. We have these culture building components, which help you actually feel like a team. So even if you're working on disparate work streams, you can, you feel like you're all contributing to a greater whole, and then it provides visibility into the work that's going on, which helps you understand how your work fits into the bigger picture.

And then the goal setting is a bit more about the north star and helping have a sense of purpose and tying your day-to-day work to an organizational objective. And even when, in many companies who are doing okay hours or, high-level goal setting is often very hard to connect day-to-day work to that goal.

So, range is designed to make that easier.

[00:05:55] Jean: I think a lot of times people think of the work getting done and then the connectedness and the feeling of being on a team of separate things. And so they'll have project management tools and that's where the work gets done. And then they'll okay.

Every quarter I'd be like, oh, we need to do something team building related and then, pay an external party to run a, cooking event or something over zoom. They're like, okay, we check the box. Like we did the team building or the kind of social connectedness part for this quarter can we get budget for next quarter?

And I think the unique part about range is it's all integrated. So you do your async check-in and then you answer your team building question that then you can go ahead and read everyone's answers.

[00:06:32] Luke: So what about the decision-making component of alignment? Like group decision-making? Is that, is that when the teams go and define their north star metric or how do you see customers doing that?

[00:06:46] Dan: Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think the way we think about Ranger's role in that is about building the foundation. So about building foundational context of what work is happening and what needs are emerging in the organization, but then also the foundational relationships. So imagine you're in an office you come up the elevator site your day, you make eye contact with Jean across the office.

You go over to the. The coffee kitchen, make a coffee and have a chat with someone, all these little moments these really informal ad hoc belonging cues is the term. And they're just a way of reinforcing the relationship. So range takes over some of the responsibility of those belonging cues which helps you believe that you're on the same side, you're on the same team.

And that you're like in the same tribe. Based the human instincts. So then when you go into these situations of having to make a decision or have a, a synchronous conversation over video chat to discuss some nuanced strategy, you have that foundation. Whereas if you come in cold it's just very hard to get into the flow and into the creative state, if you're feeling disconnected and essentially unsafe from a psychological point of view.

[00:07:43] Jean: I think people often think that that sense of belonging. Much the kind of default to thinking that, okay, remote teams, it's much harder to build that you need to spend time in person. I think one thing we've seen is that's not always necessarily true. Like we, we ask the team building question every Monday. That's like, how are you? How was your weekend?

And you can upload images. And so we get to see like pictures of people's picnics, their living rooms that they're painting, just like all the things they've been doing that. Share broadly with a team if you were in an in-person office. And we're doing that with such intentionality.

And we also get to see, of course people's pets and kids, and all sorts of more personal elements of our lives. I'm on zoom as well.

[00:08:24] Dan: Yeah, I think the worst version of remote workers it's incredibly sterile. You're isolated, you're alone. The only interactions you have with other humans are transactional.

Approve this tickets, or assign this this task and that's not going to lead you to make good creative, good decisions. Either you're not going to get the most out of people. That's fine if you're running a factory, but within creative work, which requires novelty and inspiration.

So we think a lot about how do we create the conditions where you can actually have these like higher functioning interaction.

[00:08:54] Luke: So what about working with developers? In terms of I guess these queues and in particular, this connection, I think because I, myself am pretty much an introvert. I think a lot of developers also tend to tend more in that into that direction. How how do you get that in ways that it doesn't feel let's say imposed but at the same time, people do feel like they can join in?

[00:09:23] Jean: Yeah. We find that the async elements really do speak to people who. It may not be in an in-person office, the loudest person in the room.

Like having async check-ins where you can add more context about how you're doing. We also do a lot of optional game times, things like that, where you can join, but if your head's down in something, you don't have to join or a lot of like audio only syncs. So a lot of different ways to cater to people who have different preferences. I'm a pretty extreme introvert as well. And so like, almost all my one-on-ones are like audio only, or I'll go for a walk. And I actually find that it helps me pay attention to what people are saying more than just I have to look straight at the screen because this person is like, expecting me to be paying attention.

Not having to worry about what I'm, what facial expression I'm making.

[00:10:07] Dan: Yeah, I'm also massively introverted. And I think the thing that we don't realize is that introverts still want human connection. It's just difficult. And so how do we make it easier for them? And early on, actually we saw, we did some studies where people self identifying as introvert versus extrovert and the introverts engaged more on the the team-building features that extroverts and the hypothesis was that the extroverts have their social needs fulfilled elsewhere because they're able to seek it intentionally, whereas the introverts don't have as many opportunities to, to find this connection. So they, we're creating this easier way of connecting actually.

So I think it actually speaks well to a developer audience.

[00:10:44] Jean: The way that we run meetings also really is well-liked by introverts, because I think when I've been running these like effective meeting sessions, and one thing that people often bring up is oh, my team is all introverts. How do I, how do I get them to engage in these meetings?

And they'll say they don't say anything. So I just call on them, which of course increases the anxiety of going to these remote meetings that you're going to be called on to, to, share your opinion at any given point. And so we do a lot of things. Like we have built into range meetings.

We have a spinner and so it shows everyone. And then, we have a check-in round where you spend the spinner and then everyone gets a chance to share how they're doing. If we were discussing a topic and it's a few people, if I notice that no one's saying anything, sometimes I'll set a timer and say Hey, I'm going to give you two minutes.

Just think about this question. And then we'll use the spinner to go around the room and everyone will share, what was surprising or any insights you had. And I find that puts a lot of introverts, more at ease, where they have a little bit of time to think about it before responding.

And they know that they're going to have to respond. It's pretty mind blowing. How many insights, really good insights come out of that where people might not willingly volunteer them if you were just like anyone have anything to share, but if they know they're going to get called on they'll think of what they want to share.

[00:11:56] Dan: Yeah. I think also creating other opportunities to surface things you want to talk about. So that's another power of async is that it allows people to engage in the, on a timeframe that's comfortable for them. So if they think of a meeting topic, ahead of the meeting, or even after the meeting to bring to the next one, that's that should be totally fine.

You don't have to be on the spot thinking like, what should I talk about? Because some people in that context, it's just they freeze. It's like deer in the headlights. Really speaking to different types of communication and also information processing. Some people prefer to go away and think about things and come back 24 hours later with a feedback.

So how do we build organizations where we actually cater to all these different types of types of people?

[00:12:31] Luke: Dan, you mentioned experiments. What was what was your approach? Was it more kind of structured customer development? Was it surveys?

Was it, how were you, or were you going about doing that out of curiosity?

[00:12:42] Dan: Yeah. Early on it was it was it was all of the above. And we had a psychology advisor, so she was an organizational psychologist who who worked with us. Obviously, you're working with companies with their consent and understanding.

We would look at some of the data that they were sharing and what insights could we take away from that. And there's some pretty cool things that came out of it, which we haven't productized yet, but in the future it would be really awesome to revisit. Cause I think. Wait, when an organizational psychologist goes into a company they tend to do surveys people.

So self-reported, and it's very time-consuming. So what we found is some of the data range could provide insights in a very short amount of time that, would take multiple hours of interviews. And then we just did, did a lot of user feedback and user testing.

So to be clear, the tools that we're building at medium was very different to range. It was the principles that were interesting. It was that the software provides architecture and that architecture can support organizational behaviors.

In an organization Lawrence Lessig talks about this actually in I think it's the new Chicago school of economics. But that behavior is motivated by forces of laws, norms markets and architecture, and in modern workplaces. So many of our behaviors or norms like named channels in slack this way, send an email on Monday.

With the reports, don't do this, do that. And it's really hard for people to remember it. It's really hard to onboard and it's really hard to sustain. So if you think of software as a type of architecture, that can actually facilitate behaviors, you can make lives a lot easier for everyone and make organizational behaviors more resilient.

So that was like one of the key takeaways. So we had a team directory that made it very easy for people to reallocate their time. So I'm spend 20% on this project this month. And that made it very easy for Jean and I as like managers to know what people are working on. So I think that was like the key takeaway and that filters into the range of products.

[00:14:29] Jean: When we were working at medium together, we were in the office, but it's really important to have a place people can go to learn about people when they're working remotely cause you don't get to be like, oh, that's the person I see across the office. Now, I need to ask them for something for this project I'm working on.

Let me, they, I they've smiled at me a few times, so I know that they're a friendly person. So actually when Dan and I were still at Google we actually had probably the counterexample to the type of interactions we're trying to build where like I had been trying. Get some code committed into the code base that Dan was a tech lead for.

And I think I was probably one year Gmail, front end. And I was on a separate team was trying to work on a Gmail lab that I had started. I don't remember exactly the interaction, but I think it was just purely through code review where Dan had, it was probably fielding a lot of external teams trying to put code in the Gmail code base.

And I think he said something, just like probably slightly negative. And I remember telling my coworker that I wanted to TP his office. Cause I was like, so offended by this negative interaction we had, that was completely async I didn't know what he looked like. I didn't know anything about him.

I guess we think of remote work as like the last two years, but teams were working remotely. He was probably. We were on the same campus. We were just like, probably a few buildings apart and just like never interacted in person. Building some of that positive sentiment, like async foundation of trust so that, when things like this happen, you have some sense of.

Oh, this is like a human with a life outside of work and probably has a reasonable reason for responding the way they did, which is just, it's just a very funny beginning to our working together because now it's vastly different.

[00:16:07] Dan: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's like a, an important lesson there, which is, it goes to this transactional state of work.

And like for me, I was just getting all these change requests. And the only context I had in the change request was an LDAP name. And the LDAP name didn't seem human to me. So I would be requests in a very transactional way. And, we were getting inundated. Tons of people wanting to integrate with Gmail and it was causing some like technical debt issues.

So I was probably like shutting it down quite quickly, but over my time at Google actually, I started using, we had an internal team directory at Google. So when I get a code review from someone, I would go off to the team directory actually look at them, see their photo with the, some of the history. And it would like humanize them a bit more.

And then I'd come back and I'd actually be much more reasonable and friendly. So it wasn't, I wasn't intentionally being mean. It's just, I was I'm curious. That was before or after we had that. I think it was much later. Yeah, I was when I was on Google plus I was on the infrastructure team. We had 400 people contributing to our codes code base.

So we were defending the code base against 400 seemingly random people. And that sets you up for a lot of conflict, like us and them. So by humanizing people through the tools, and I think slack did this really well early on, you can actually change some of how you interact with people because know, you humanize the recipient and then that can increase the level of discourse.

So in range, profile photos, everywhere people's moods you can hover over and see like some backgrounds, Wednesday, birthday, what their pronouns like, where do they live? All this, seemingly superficial context that has nothing to do with work is really important in helping frame the conversation.

[00:17:38] Jean: Yeah. And Luke, you're asking about and engineers and who I tend to be more introverted. And I I think it's especially important for engineers because if you just default to like code reviews, right? Like code reviews are super transactional. Usually it's, people think that their main job is to point out the things that are wrong, but like very rarely do you get comments like, Hey, you did a really great job on this code change. Like this section looks great, right? Like you just get the kind of what could be better? And so I think without some intentional, like positive sentiment building, it can be pretty, pretty hard to be like, oh, this person really doesn't like me.

Or this is so challenging.

[00:18:14] Dan: Code reviews is another good example that can often go off the rails for many reasons. And when we think about coders, architecture github pull request templates are really valuable, right? So we have one which nudges you to. Like, why are you making this change? Why should the review of starts? Are there any tickets are excellent and contexts that they should be aware of? And then we have a funny one, which is a gift of how does this change make you feel? Actually, you can divert some of the things that often go wrong with pull requests of like, why the hell are you making this change? I don't understand. I don't have any context about this change. And then also just make, adding a bit of fun to it as well.

[00:18:49] Luke: So speaking of context, how. How do your customers use range to build context as they're going about, their team interactions?

[00:19:00] Dan: Jean, You said about how you use range to manage, maybe that's like a good example.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess I start my day in range. I share my plan. So I'm not a very like getting things done. Like I don't have a separate to do list. So I use range as my, what I'm going to do that day. And then it's nice. Cause then it's communicated externally.

And then by the afternoon, when I'm feeling in a slump, then I can just check on what I said, I would do that morning and kind of get back to it. But then after I check it. See what everyone else has said. Maybe later once everyone has checked in, first I'll see all their answers to the team question, which today was like, how are you, how is your weekends?

I get to see how everyone's weekend was. We can also really easily see everyone's main focus for the day. And that'll give me a bit of ambient context. If I know oh, this engineer is working through this one feature usually people will. Integrate or bring in the they'll attach their, like a asana ticket to the check-in and then they'll add some context of hoping to get this done today.

So that makes my job easier. So as we're planning for next week or next cycle, I don't have to go around to every engineer and say, Hey, what's the status on this thing? Feel like I'm nagging them or micromanaging them. Every other Thursday, I sit down with the product manager and designer and we are able to piece together from like range check-ins like where everyone is on their projects. And then that makes it easy for us to plan for the next cycle.

[00:20:24] Jean: Then we also have team dashboard where, because everyone checks in with their mood every day. So green being like good to go, yellow being like a little bit iffy and red is pretty much like I'm in crisis.

So we can see over time a two week period of the team's mood trends. And if half the team's yellow and a few reds here or there. That's not great. And so I'll, check in with people during one-on-ones maybe bring it up in a team meeting of Hey, is it the work or is it external stuff either way?

Let's figure out how we can alleviate some of the pressure, maybe think about cutting scope or moving out a deadline further. So that's one of the most useful things that I use kind of day to day with range.

[00:21:04] Luke: Mostly JIRA, I think yeah, JIRA, slack of fuse different, like speaking of async check-ins I remember I had tried a M for awhile, tried a kind of a slack bot to do stand ups or something, but the thing that was missing, actually what you brought up Gina was really interesting. The thing that was missing for me was first of all, the relationship of what the person wrote in the daily stand up to their daily goal.

And then also how that maps to what the group was doing or trying to achieve. And that's we tried for a while, just completely canceling stand-ups and doing it only async, but then that was the kind of weak spot let's say, right?

[00:21:47] Jean: Yeah. What I've heard from teams who do that is Usually that all gets funneled into like a slack channel.

And that's just like this black hole where no one reads it. Everyone just puts in there. You know what I did yesterday, what I'm planning to do. And then it just no response, no reactions. And that kind of defeats the purpose of a standup where you feel. That's a good opportunity for you to tell people they're blocked, but if they never read your check-in like that's, they're not going to know that you're blocked.

And range has something that's called flags. And so you can flag when you're blocked or if there's things that need discussion and that those things can bumped up for higher visibility. So like they just don't get lost and then you can also slice it to see okay, let me see check-ins for everyone on this team.

Or, everyone that I work with. And sometimes I'll look at the whole team, rather the whole company, rather than just the team you can depending on what you're looking for, you can look at different views.

[00:22:36] Dan: So tools like JIRA and Asana, definitely essential. And they're great for building a backlog and kind of understanding where you are in the grand scheme of things, but it's pretty hard to get a sense of in the moment what's happening and what's changing and what's stuck.

It doesn't really show you that Delta. And if you think about what happens in a standup it's often you get that data point every day, I'm working on ticket 451 then, and then you're sensing in the background. Wait a second. Is that it's not the third day in a row that they're working on this ticket and then you have to make the meaning of that was just this person that stuck.

And that doesn't need to happen in. Like in person either, that can happen asynchronously. So range really surfaces the sort of the deltas and the, and how work is changing and moving through these phases. And then there's a lot of work that happens outside Jira. So you have calendar events, you may be doing interviews.

There's Google docs, confluence. Work is spread over so many places. So range brings that all together. And maybe the reason that ticket isn't moving forward is this person's been sick for three days, or maybe it's that they've had a lot of interviews. So surfacing that context is really valuable for managers.

[00:23:35] Jean: I think the other thing that the stand-up slack bots don't do is they don't integrate into other tools. Like range check-ins, if you flag anything, it'll show up in the meetings. So if we have a team meeting it'll share all the flags that haven't been resolved and we can review them there.

And anything that needs to be discussed can be pulled over to the agenda. So just much more integrated. So it's not just check-ins is the side thing. And then this is where the work gets done. Like it's all part of the same system.

[00:24:01] Luke: So I guess the key thing is that it's pulling together everything really, so that at least you've got this overall view

[00:24:07] Dan: One of our the customer said they said that Jira is the place to go see the state of a project; range is get where you go to see a state of a person she says the state of a person or the team.

Yeah that's interesting, but you could maybe get an office setting a little bit, right? Go to where this team is sitting and you get a sense of oh, everyone seems really low energy. Or, someone seeming really upset, but with everyone, you don't see them unless you're in meetings.

And you really have no idea if you don't have a tool like range or some way to check in on folks async or I guess you could be in meetings all the time, which is also not great, but you wouldn't have a way to know people are having a rough day or like they just went through something really frustrating.

[00:24:47] Luke: How do you think about balancing async and sync correctly, both within your company or within the products?

[00:24:55] Dan: Don't get us wrong. We think synchronous communication is incredibly important. We just think that's historically the default. So it's more of a.

To get people to go asynchronous and synchronous is a crutch. Cause it's, it can be easy, but there's certain things where, async is going to be really slow. So anyway, there's like nuanced conversations, the nuanced discussions decision-making also like deep team building and emotional connection.

You. You can go a long way with some of the async tools, in-person is really where it's at. So we do things synchronous is important. I think the reality of the modern workplace with distributed teams and people needing flexible schedules is it's just the amount of time when you can have synchronous time is so much shorter, so you have to optimize it.

Yeah, so we, we really think about like, how can we maximize the value of that time you spend together and move everything that doesn't need to be synchronous outside that meeting.

[00:25:44] Jean: We'll often do things like say there's some company announcement, right? Dan or Jen might share something by email the more just transactional Hey, this is what's going on.

But if they think that it's something that people might have a reaction to, like I might check in with people in one-on-one so that we can just say, Hey, did you read Dan's email? Do you have any thoughts or concerns about it? And so like pairing async with more of the status update and then following up with synchrony.

Checking on people, how are they feeling? Their reactions? That can be really useful. And then then we're not spending that time in the one-on-one like sharing all the updates, like with each person, just like trying to use that synchronous time, but a bit more efficiently.

[00:26:22] Luke: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's great. That's great. Fabulous. Do you have any particular suggestions in terms of team building? I guess you mentioned the thing the image at the beginning of the week or just team-building yourselves within your company. What works in a way that that everyone feels comfortable with.

[00:26:45] Jean: I'm pretty enthusiastic about better meetings. And I think that's one of the areas that people have gotten used to bad meetings, inefficient meetings, I'll say. And I think that could be a place where if you're a facilitator for a meeting, familiarizing yourself with the tool, setting it up using the spinner, that could be a really good place to just like immediately.

Way better experience, right? Like one half hour, one, one hour meeting where you have an opening round where you have an icebreaker or just like checking in on how people are doing and the one at the end. And then having more structure in between where you can take notes. I think that could be like, choose your worst meeting and run it on range because it'll be a night and day difference.

[00:27:27] Dan: The meta point there is that there's a lot of ways of Engaging and growing and building, but there's also many work processes that are just so poor that they are actively making people feel less engaged and less happy and more burnt out. So often removing some of those things first is probably like the best bet.

If people are in. Eight hours of meetings a week. And they're not feeling that they're worthwhile, they're not feeling listened to and not feeling engaged in those meetings. They're going to become less happy with work less connected to their colleagues. And any team building you do is waste it because it's just it's like a band-aid.

Fixing your team processes is step number one, and building a cadence of communication, getting into the rhythm. And then you can build on top of that to get better connection. Better camaraderie. Then you get a bunch of the benefits.

That's great. Just on the spinner, how exactly does it work? Do you put what the values are in there? So you can put anything you want, like people's names

it's pretty simple figured ones

or

if you imagine and it's also a bit silly, right?

It's designed to be silly. You have attendees of the meeting, which should get sync to your Google calendar. So we bring in names and photos and then it's literally, you press a button and it spins. Who's it going to stop on? So it's like the wheel of fortune. And it's probably not your work context, but And the reason is it's a bit of levity.

It stops one person going around the room and like randomly picking person. That's are you the person that's going to get left the last, every single time? Are you like super anxious about the call order. And it just, it's just a way of just making it a little bit easier to have everyone engaged and get a moment to speak.

And a lot of the evidence suggests that if you speak early on in the meeting you're more likely to speak later, so that has a bunch of positive impacts on inclusion for people of different backgrounds and personality.

It also takes the onus off the facilitator to remember who has spoken. So if you were to go around the room in a physical room, it'd be pretty straightforward, but on a zoom room, you have to keep track of who's gone. Or then sometimes people do this thing where they're like, whoever just went like call on the next person. Everyone has to keep track of who's gone and who hasn't gone. And then sometimes someone gets left out and then they, they make up stories about why they were excluded or like someone whose name is maybe a little bit difficult to pronounce, like no one calls on them. And then they're like always last and just like removes a lot of that.

[00:29:45] Luke: Yeah. Yeah. I like alphabetic basically. Get everyone on the call to just do freedom by first name.

[00:29:53] Dan: But then it's the same every time. So you got like poor Andrew and who's always ready? And zebedee, who's he's always last.

And then some of the other things we have, we know we have a topic timer, so you can make sure that overrun certain topics, you can shut them down and you can track action items and notes. As Jean said earlier, you can bring in work from the asynchronous check-ins. So you can review, essentially the review people's stand-ups or certain flagged items.

Yeah. I've been running panels with the meeting tool. I had one, one panelist who, you know, the first time she saw it and I clicked the spinner. She's whoa can we talk about how cool that spinner is? I need this for all my meetings. yeah, it's just a simple thing, like going around the room and calling on everyone, just yeah. It's just like an unnecessary piece of friction. We just removed that.

Yeah, no that's simple, but very effective.

[00:30:47] Luke: So where do you suggest people go to find out a bit more about range?

[00:30:52] Dan: So you can go to www.range.co. It's a self-serve product, so feel free to sign up. Free up to 20 users. And if you would like to try the premium .Version, happy to extend the coupon to the listeners of managing remote teams.

So we'll include the details in the show notes. Great. And then yeah, reach out and talk to our team. We're always on the intercom chat.

[00:31:14] Luke: Great. Thank you for coming to chat today and sharing your insights and talking about the platform and your journey.

So

[00:31:22] Dan: cool.

[00:31:23] Luke: It's been a blast. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Listening with Raquel Ark

About Raquel Ark

Born and raised in Puerto Rico and Ohio, USA and now living in Germany, Raquel has over 25 years’ experience managing, coaching, facilitating, and training communication and leadership for tech, chemical industries, NGOs and academia. As founder of listening ALCHEMY, Raquel is very curious about the conditions and capacities to hold a listening space that connects and inspires so that communication has more impact. She has been researching and experimenting with listening beyond traditional training and has learned from and collaborated with listening scientists and professionals.

She is the podcast host for, “Listen In with Raquel Ark” focused on listening in teams and organizations beyond what we typically consider. Raquel spoke on the TEDx stage about “Growing Your Listening Superpower".

Links

• tedx talk: https://youtu.be/7wgFrKRjYiA
• podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/listen-in/id1457489060
• Raquel's website: https://listeningalchemy.com/
• LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raquel-ark-b2067613/

Resources mentioned on the show

• https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoHQJLiTvAX7vHlj4p4AHMw/videos (Laura Janusik)
• https://listeningalchemy.com/listen-in/evidence-on-listening-training-and-workplace-performance-with-guy-itzchakov/
• https://listeningalchemy.com/listen-in/leaders-and-asking-questions-the-surprising-discovery-of-what-is-needed-to-find-solutions-and-build-relationships-with-niels-van-quaquebeke/

Video Interview

Transcript

[00:00:00] If I listened to you and you're on my team and I'm your boss, you're more likely to go beyond your roles and responsibilities. Your poor performance will go up if I listen to you and you're more likely to trust, and you're more likely to be engaged in your job and stick around.

[00:00:20] Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the managing remote teams podcast. Today, we are speaking with Raquel Ark, who is a TEDx speaker, a communications expert, in particular in listening. And this is , of course an absolutely fascinating skill that all of us have some experience in, but there's always some potential room for improvement, at least certainly my case. before we get into listening itself, could you say a few words about. Puerto Rico and how that's tied to your interest in listening.

[00:01:29] Sure. So it's really great to be with you here, Luke. And I'm looking forward to our conversation.

[00:01:37] Puerto Rico. So I was born in Puerto Rico. And grew up there until I was around nine years old. And then I my parents got divorced. So then I spent my summers in Puerto Rico and vacation in Puerto Rico. It's a great place to take a vacation. And then I spent I was in school in Ohio. And the reason why I tell you that is because yes, Puerto Rico had a huge influence.

[00:01:57] And I'll tell you about that in a moment, but also growing up between two cultures throughout my life, that also made a huge difference. And I think you've experienced the same thing, with growing up and under seeing that people see the world in different ways.

[00:02:10] Puerto Rico it's a beautiful island.

[00:02:12] If you ever have a chance to go, it's close to the equator. The weather's about the same all year long, except for rainy season and dry season. We used to go to the beach almost every day. So every day we'd go to the beach. And so the beach was my place to to play. To have fun to be with family and whatnot.

[00:02:36] And I didn't realize the full impact that playing in the waves had with me until later and how that was connected to listening. And what I realized later is being with waves and listening to waves, especially when we would go camping on the beach and falling asleep to the waves and then waking up with the waves that that was a time where I was really present.

[00:02:58] There's nothing else existed. It was just the waves. And that impacted a lot on how I perceive being present, which is really important.

[00:03:11] I lived on the the west side of the island where the beaches are calmer.

[00:03:14] So we didn't have as many waves. And yet if you go up about half hour, 40 minutes north, that's where the surfers are and that's where the bigger waves are. And we used to go there and body surf and We would also go camping on an island called Mona island. It's one of the islands of Puerto Rico. And there, when we would go camping, we would have to go snorkeling for our food because we couldn't carry everything with us.

[00:03:42] And so my dad would do spear. We use a spear fish, spear, what do you call this? Use a spear to get the fish anyway. So I would go with him and I, there was this one time where we we would have to, we would get to a reef. It was like a bridge and we'd have to swim under this little bridge of a reef to get to the other side where the water was deeper.

[00:04:05] And that's where we could get the bigger fish. And so we had gone fishing and as we came back, here's the thing with the ocean, the current changed. And all of a sudden we were trying to get under the reef, but instead the current, the waves lifted us up and slammed us on top of the reef and reefs are very sharp.

[00:04:22] And my dad he's a doctor tried to save everyone. He tried saving me, but while he was doing that, he actually slammed on top of me. So we kept, we couldn't get out. We kept slamming against that reef over and over. And eventually though we got over, so we just got a little bit cut up, but it was a really scary experience.

[00:04:42] And what I remember back at that time, I was around nine years old is during that situation, my dad was freaking out, but I was really calm. Like I had no fear at all. I knew that we would get over. And as a child, you're like, what is my, what? Just leave me alone. We're going to get over.

[00:05:00] And so it was, if you can just imagine it's like this, like rhythm of this waves kept going, coming back and forth, but eventually it moved us over and I knew it would. And then we were, I knew it would be okay. So bringing that back to listening, there are the waves that are calm that can put you to sleep or wake you up to play in.

[00:05:19] But there's also those ones that crash, and that's like conversations where things just seem to be crashing over and the importance of staying calm and knowing that we'll get through to the other side, if we can stay as calm as possible.

[00:05:31] So just so we're clear on exactly what you mean. Can you give an example of great listening?

[00:05:37] One of my one of the best bosses I had, even in our group team meetings, she would always have everybody talk first, so she'd have her little notebook with all the topics she wanted to talk about and you'd see her like scratching things off as we went through.

[00:05:50] And then sometimes it went, it would get to her. Then sometimes you'd have something left on the list and then talk about it. Or then she would just share stories if everything was taken care of. And she always had us talk first or even a one on one. She always had me talk first and I noticed this. So I would always try to, get her to talk first and it never worked.

[00:06:08] And I actually interviewed her on a podcast. Like she's so good, but I realized now, like in group meetings if you have a, if whoever's of highest, the hierarchy is the highest higher hierarchy. If they speak first, it will shut down voices for the rest of the group. So you cannot speak first if you, and then they complain that everybody's not speaking out and they want to hear their voices, but if they talk first, then people aren't going to talk, so you really have to hold back.

[00:06:35] Yeah. Yeah. It's so the. The challenge that I had. I think initially when I first started leading teams is that I wasn't setting enough context at the beginning of the meeting. So I think there is a need to do that. But after that yeah.

[00:06:53] But that's describing the situation.

[00:06:54] That's not asking for opinions or giving your opinions and your advice necessarily this getting, having that clarity.

[00:07:00] And then, can you say a few words about what the impact of listening is based on your experience or your research?

[00:07:08] I do some workshops. We did empirical research on these teams over a period of time.

[00:07:15] To see what the impact was of the listening training I was doing that I've been doing. We're just coming up with the results right now. This is in tech. They're not teams, so they're in the same company. We measured them and then we measured them two or three weeks later. Over time.

[00:07:30] Yeah.

[00:07:30] they perceive themselves as better listeners there. What was interesting is they didn't necessarily feel like their team listened to them better, but it wasn't a team training. So that kind of makes sense. But what they did feel like they had more voice. . They felt like they had more voice and they felt more belonging in the organization.

[00:07:49] I think this is my little theory on things. I think that through listening, you understand what other people's interests are, what their needs are, how to connect with them and you build relationships. And therefore then when you do speak to them, then you're more likely to speak in a way that connects versus just what I thought I had to say, or I feel more confident because I paid attention to what's important. And I know what to say that connects and matters. And I think that's where that voice comes in. And then from there they get positive feedback because it connected and it helped. And that's the belonging.

[00:08:27] One guy, I was just thinking about one example, we met a month later and reflected back on what they'd been practicing and what they'd learned. And he said that he used to always figure out when to say something. he knew what he wanted to say before the meeting and tried to get it in. And now he goes to meetings and he sits back and listens and then he makes connections for people or then says something that matters. And he feels like he's contributing more and it's much more relaxing. He feels much better and it's connecting more and he's getting positive feedback.

[00:08:56] So I think that's what's happening.

[00:08:59] So you've moved a few major times, complete changes in cultures. Is there a difference to how people listen in different cultures?

[00:09:10] That's a good question. Now, what I'm telling you is based on my personal experience so I don't have the research on this, but there is a lot of research that talks about how cultures do listen differently, who use silence differently, or cultures that talk on top of each other.

[00:09:25] There's a lot of research in the intercultural world, but what I have noticed in the German language. So I live in Germany now, which is even a different culture in the German language. The verbs don't come until the end of the sentence compared to the English language. And I wonder, I find that in general, Germans tend to be better listeners.

[00:09:48] And I wonder sometimes if that's because the verb comes at the end, 'cause you don't really know what's going to happen until the end of the sentence. Yeah. Where in English, we tend to hear the verb and then we guess what's going to happen afterwards that we jump in. I wonder if that doesn't influence.

[00:10:06] That's interesting. Why is it that people find listening hard? Usually? Or my assuming that people do find it hard and people find it very easy.

[00:10:19] Before I answer that, maybe I'll ask you, what do you find hard about listening?

[00:10:25] I think there's a lot of potential for me personally, to be in my own head and not enough with the other person., maybe that's just, my own thing sometimes it's not an issue at all, but when I am struggling, it's usually for that reason where I'm time shifting ahead thinking about what's about to happen. Something along those lines that would probably be my most common difficulty with

[00:10:47] You're not the only one where that I would hope.

[00:10:52] I hear that so often and I experienced it myself that often, we're thinking about what we want to say, and there's this famous quote, we listened to respond for them to understand. And that's because often we're thinking about where we have distractions, internal distractions, and part of the reason for that.

[00:11:10] Our brains think a lot more. About a thousand to 3000 words a minute. And people are only speaking, about 175 to 200 words a minute. And our mind, there's a lot more going on our mind that what we're saying or what the other person is saying. So that doesn't, it's not really an alignment, but that's one major reason.

[00:11:29] I also had a software engineer once tell me, after he'd been through this listening workshop, he said, you know what? He goes, I don't even think it's I listened to respond. I think I'm listening to judge to evaluate. And I thought that was interesting. I like that. That's really insightful. So we listening to respond.

[00:11:47] Are we listening to evaluate how are we listening? And To go back to why is it hard? Often we think, especially in our work, of how we bring value to figure out, what is it that I bring to the table? And what we don't realize is that, especially for leaders and managers, that when we listen to someone and we're really present, so we've, we try to clear our mind as possible.

[00:12:14] You will have thoughts, just notice when you wander and bring yourself back and then try to be fully present. But when we are without judging, And that you're really trying to understand the other person's perspective. The person who's speaking will actually be able to get more creative, will be able to come up with the ideas themselves.

[00:12:37] You're actually helping them to think smarter so that they can take responsibility for the work that they're doing. So often we want to jump into help, but if you give them that space in time, then you're helping to develop other leaders or other, so something to think about. And then that gives you more time as a leader.

[00:12:55] It also feels to me like there's an element of of thinking versus feeling I think with listening. I for me personally, I'm again, I, again, I don't know the research particularly well but that it, if I'm thinking too much, it's too much about. This kind of, I guess the rational brain says is fast or something.

[00:13:17] Whereas if I'm trying to connect with the other person and also empathize or sympathize as I'm listening to them, then that makes it easier a little bit. But I don't know if there's anything that you've heard of like that before.

[00:13:34] Right now you're talking about what's your purpose there, right?

[00:13:37] Are you wanting to connect with the person so that you can develop trust and work well together? Are you just trying to get some data so you can take with it and do your thing, what are you trying to do? And that's I think there's what most of us think that we can listen better than we do. So the fact that you actually saying, oh, I don't know if I do that. Or I have these times that's much more, you're much more self-reflective than often is the case. Okay. So often we think we're better than what we are, but none of us do a good job with everybody. There's certain people that we listen well to in certain conditions, in certain ways, we tend to have patterns on how we listen and who we listened to. And so part of the practice is to start to become aware of this and then to challenge ourselves, to listen in more ways to more people under different circumstances, especially when things get tough. Which is when it gets hard.

[00:14:35] And often when things get hard we will, our bodies triggered into that reactive fight or flight, and this is where your, the emotional part also can shut off. And we're in our own world. And we have our own biases and we have our own assumptions and that gets in the way. And we will only hear what we think, and we won't really hear everything else.

[00:14:57] We won't even hear everything that's in our own minds, and so when that's the case if you are able to stay calm and to be the one to listen and ask questions, you will help the other person to calm down. Because that listening is the way to get to psychological safety. And you can tell when that person starts to feel better, because all of a sudden they'll have another perspective.

[00:15:22] They're trying to persuade. You try to convince you. And then all of a sudden something will shift. And instead of persuading you they'll start expressing themselves. And it's almost like they're thinking about thinking through things themselves. And at that point they'll actually recognize that there's different, there's more than one way to look at things. And you'll start to notice that in their language that there are different perspectives. Instead of saying that my boss is horrible, but oh, in this situation, he's like this, but this situation he's like this. So they'll start to see different perspectives.

[00:15:53] And they're more likely to listen to your perspective afterwards because the parent, because the parasympathetic system has kicked in and then that helps also with the emotional triggers that have just occurred.

[00:16:07] Yeah, I've really interesting. It reminds me of book a book. I was reading recently how to talk to science deniers.

[00:16:13] And yeah, no it's quite I guess that's almost the most extreme case, or at least for someone like me. I, I guess people have different views on this stuff, but but in terms of, for example, Flat Earthers or something, or I'm, I don't even want to go near political topics but yeah it's it's yeah, it feels like there's just so much conflict between people and cause they're unwilling or unable to listen and then it sets, what to do in those situations, is it just trying to listen to yourself and seeing what happens or and in these kinds of heated discussions, for example, that people get into online or offline.

[00:16:58] So you're asking a really big question, right? Sorry. So you asked how you're asking if there's a conversation that comes up, what's the best way to respond, right?

[00:17:09] Yeah. If it gets heated and yeah, the let's say the other side is, has a very different view than you do, for example.

[00:17:19] Yeah. I really believe that often if you want them to listen to you, you have to be the role model for us to give them an experience they may not have had from somebody else before. So it may, so if you really want someone to be open to other perspectives, then, the best way to do it is to start by listening and not listening with an agenda, being willing for you to change your own mind.

[00:17:46] And then if you do it in that way and think of a more long-term process not just a one-off thing, then the chances that they might come around is higher. Because when you do that, then they may start to listen to themselves. You create a space where they can hear themselves. Let me give you an example.

[00:18:07] There was some research done with managers and they put a good listener or someone who listened well with one group and then a listener who was distracted with another group of managers, with the group where the listener was distracted, those managers perceived themselves, they only saw the strengths that they had, the only, the good things about them.

[00:18:30] The one with the good listeners actually become, became much more aware of their strengths and their weaknesses, which is a more realistic perspective of their performance. And so they're showing that listing helps more complex thought patterns. That's more complex thoughts, so they can see that there is both strengths and the weaknesses.

[00:18:51] There's the times where it works, where it doesn't work, which is more realistic. So if you have someone who's very extreme in their thoughts, then practicing, listening. So you might have to find your way to stay calm and to really move your agenda aside, and move your opinions aside and to ask questions and be truly interested, like you really are interested.

[00:19:13] Then the chances of that person becoming less extreme is much higher. And they've done research with really tough topics, on. Do you bring the body of a terrorist back home so they can be buried with their family, like really tough conversations like this.

[00:19:29] They did that in Israel and and it showed that even in those types of conversations with a good listener, people will become less extreme and more open to conversations with others, but it takes, that's a huge muscle to practice. And so I think it's really important to practice and in situations that are not as extreme first.

[00:19:49] Yeah.

[00:19:49] But that when that moment happens, you can take a deep breath and no matter if you want that person to listen to you, you start by giving them an experience they may not have had by anybody else.

[00:20:03] Yeah. No that's great. Yeah. No, thank you. Since you got interested in the topic, what was the biggest surprise in the research that you found on listening specific.

[00:20:13] In the beginning I had done a lot of listening. I had been, I studied interpersonal organizational communication, so listening was part of my program. But it was more active listening. You listen to someone and then you paraphrase back. But I realize now that's just one tiny piece and that actually can sometimes get in the way of real, the real stuff that has impact what I didn't realize.

[00:20:33] A lot of times, I listen so I can do my job better or to listen to the customer or to listen to what the needs are. What I did not realize is that just by listening, that it helped the speaker. I did not realize that just by listening, the speaker can become more creative, that the speaker actually will perform better.

[00:20:56] If I listened to you and you're on my team and I'm your boss, you're more likely to go beyond your roles and responsibilities. Your poor performance will go up if I listen to you and you're more likely to trust, and you're more likely to be engaged in your job and stick around. I didn't realize that part.

[00:21:15] It takes practice and we can learn. It's not something that just happens. I thought I was pretty good. And so I was just trying to help others. And through the, this, through these years, I've realized, oh my gosh, I can't, I need practice every day.

[00:21:29] And I can learn a lot from others too. And no matter, I think it's a lifelong. And and that the training, you can't just talk about the benefit of listening. So for all of you listening, you can listen to this and think I'm going to get better, but actually it takes experiencing and practicing to get better.

[00:21:46] And then yeah, having time to talk about it and think about afterwards.

[00:21:50] So what exactly do you mean by practice then?

[00:21:53] And then what do I mean by practice? So even if you find somebody and you let you just say, Hey, I'm going to listen to you , I want to hear what you have to say, or someone comes to you, they ask you for an answer, how do I fix this problem before you answer to say, Hey I have some thoughts, but I'd love to hear what you're thinking first and talk me through what you're doing.

[00:22:16] And I'd like to hear your ideas first. I'm going to give you a five minutes and then if you want to hear what I have to say, I'll be happy to share, but let's start with you first and to practice listening. You might be surprised at what might happen. To practice not interrupting, so you can practice on your own like this.

[00:22:33] But like in training programs, like when I do training programs, I don't talk a whole lot. I give a little bit of input, but often I have people experience listening in really playful ways or in different ways. And then having time to reflect back afterwards, what just happened often. They'll actually, people will actually respond in ways that the science is showing and then I can tell them the science afterwards and that anchors it.

[00:22:58] So for example just having two minutes, not interrupting, just only listening without not saying anything and then taking turns or practicing. If you tell a story, people can listen to you better. And to practice that. Where all the focus on a person for five minutes and only that person has that the attention before you switch to the other person.

[00:23:24] We practice things like that. Those are just simple examples.

[00:23:29] Yeah. Yeah. That, that makes sense. What about dialogue? Is there a way of practicing structuring dialogue, or are there good ways of doing that? Cause I think for storytelling, it's, it's a great skill. It's both to tell. And then as, as pretty much as we're saying also listening to it but if you want to be entering into a topic and exploring it, how would, how do you practice that or think about structuring the practicing.

[00:24:01] So here's my question. Before I answer that.

[00:24:03] When you think of wanting a dialogue, like what is the outcome you'd like to have in a dialogue? Are you thinking in terms of a group or are you thinking about one-on-one? Let's say one-on-one just to keep it simple, because I think with a group, it pretty gathered. There's a lot, there's a lot of other factors at play too, even though there's some really simple stuff you can do with groups, just so you know.

[00:24:22] Okay. Let's okay. Let's start with one-on-one and then move to groups.

And are you talking in general, are you talking more like leader, team lead with their.

Let's say team lead. Yeah. With a one-on-one situation team lead with a person on the team, for example, in a meeting on a call, that kind of thing.

[00:24:44] So first of all, I think if you can do some prep work before that is really helpful, you don't have to. I've talked to a lot of people in one on ones and they just show up without preparing. And I find that, especially in the tech industry, if you have people who need time to think that it's helpful to have at least an agenda or a couple of topics or something ahead of time that people prepare and you can even prepare an agenda, a little one short one in terms of questions, because if you do it in terms of questions people are more likely to think about the answers versus coming for the answers.

[00:25:24] Because it's just getting information. So that's one thing

[00:25:28] also. If they do bring their topics to you to find answers have them start thinking about, do I want to share some information and update you? Do I need information from you? Do I want to brainstorm ideas or do I need a decision made? I think you don't always have to do that, but to start helping your team think about what's the purpose of this communication topic?

[00:25:51] How do I want you to listen to me? Do I want to listen to you? Do we want to listen to each other? What is our purpose that can be really helpful because often people don't think about that. But in the moment as a lead, it's really helpful. If you can ask them questions, listen first, before you give your ideas and answers, because I find that the higher you are in the power hierarchy, if you speak first, the chances that the other people won't speak, or they'll just say what they think you want them to say will be the case. So to get them used to talking first and listening first asking questions that help them think further. So it's more than you getting information, but it's more like trying to understand how they're thinking through something and their process, and to give that space in time.

[00:26:42] And when they're silent and come to a pause to wait, don't jump in because it could be that they're thinking about what they just said and trying to reflect on whether there's more to say, often we jump in and we interrupt and they're still in their thinking process. So not to do that. So wait and see if they're really finished and ask, is there anything else before jumping in and usually when you ask, wait. Usually that's when the good stuff comes. So that's something I would really recommend practicing, and then you can respond. It's not that you can't but then when you respond, you're responding in a way that's connecting more to where they're at. Often we jump in thinking we know where they're at, but we're actually responding in a way that's not very helpful.

[00:27:34] And it might be, they take care of their own challenge before or their own issue before you even say anything. They've taken ownership of it. So that's something to listen first, ask questions, even in feedback, getting their thoughts first, before responding.

[00:27:49] And it could be, they say everything you wanted to say, or then you add an example or you can add from that and help them to think about other things that could be really helpful. If there's a crisis, then you got to just take care of things. But if there's not a crisis and you have a little bit of time, what usually surprises people is that because the quality of listing is there, then the conversations actually are more effective and don't take as long.

[00:28:13] Over time they become shorter because you just understand each other better. Yeah. And the, and they start to get, they start to build trust and they start to be able to be more vulnerable or ask for help and things that may not have done otherwise

[00:28:31] so what about groups then?

[00:28:32] Yeah, with groups what do you find is the biggest challenge in groups?

[00:28:38] Usually group dynamics. Especially when starting with a group I think there's a pretty big disconnect between how I relate to each person versus how the group acts. And then if something as simple as sitting there waiting, with, for example, video off, as someone talks for five minutes and then not really wanting to break out of that comfort zone where they aren't, where they're not involved for example, and that, and I think there's a group dynamic component to that.

[00:29:13] Whereas I'm certain each of the people individually actually. Are engaged are interested that's one part of it. You see it in workshops too, right? That's, what's what like icebreakers are for just to get people into that forward momentum.

[00:29:28] That can help if it's the right type of activity for that group of people at that moment. At least from what I've seen

[00:29:37] I know that we had a conversation about how you manage meetings and workshop style and having different ways of interacting and trying to adapt to the group.

[00:29:44] In general, you do a lot already. When it comes to groups, I'm going to tap into the research, the listening research. The biggest impact on whether listening can happen. Quality listening happens has mainly to do with the they call in dyads. So the pairs. So when you put people in twos that has the biggest influence on listening. It's not whether people are "good listeners" or the context. The biggest influencer is the person that they're with on whether the listening happens or not. So when you think, even in groups, the more you can facilitate this, what you talked about, being a facilitator first. Maybe facilitate where people meet in two's first. You can put people into breakout rooms where they can think through a question between two people before bringing it into the larger group. Then they're more likely to speak out.[00:30:41] That's one thing. So to remember that in dyads, they're more likely to have a voice and to think through things. If they're in pairs before coming into a bigger group, the bigger the group is the less likely people are going to speak out. So if you can facilitate ways that you can still get answers or help people to think through things before coming to a bigger group than they're more likely to say something because they have had time to talk to somebody else about it.

[00:31:04] So this is important then when it comes to the group I find that if you have a group that meets on a regular basis to have some communication guidelines on how we want to listen to each other. To even talk about that it makes a huge influence. So if you have a team guideline and then to check in to see if it's working or not what people want because there's different styles, some people more process people, they need an agenda. Other people need to have a little bit of interpersonal friendly talk at the beginning. So you start to talk about that. What do people need? And then how can we create an environment that everybody's needs are fulfilled? So if you can do that, it's really valuable.

[00:31:44] And then there's a structure called the listening circle. It's like you're sitting around the fire, passing the talking stick around. But even virtually online is possible. It's great! Where you have certain guidelines and then you have a structure where the facilitator basically calls names in a specific order. And I tell them, when I call your name, take a moment just to notice, is there something I want to say or not?

[00:32:12] And if not, just say pass, and then we'll keep going around the circle and you always call the names in the same order. And it's okay if you don't have something to say now, because we'll come back around and you'll have another chance. And so what happens saying that there's a structure telling the circle that you're going to go around, that you don't have to speak if you do not want to.

[00:32:34] And you can take a moment to think about it and that when you're not speaking and you really listen to the other person, what happens is that then The introverts are glad that they're noticed, but that they don't have to say something. It's not like the tension on themselves, but then because they don't have to say something and they can say pass, then they feel less stressed.

[00:32:58] And usually they say something after the second or third round. For the extroverts, because they know they'll get their chance. They don't have to always be thinking, when am I going to talk? They spend a lot of time thinking, where am I going to get my voice in because it'll get to them. And so I find that people who talk a lot actually end up maybe talking less over time.

[00:33:18] It's more equal between people who speak and who don't speak. And they also actually are more relaxed because they don't have to work so hard to figure out when they're going to talk.

[00:33:28] It equalizes the conversation. But to make sure you go around a few times, until the time is up or until everything's been said can be really helpful.

[00:33:38] And usually groups will love it once they trust the process, they might think it's a little weird at first, but once they trust the process, they really love it. And it's so relaxing, like physically relaxing, like they feel better. Yeah. And that's when you realize those power dynamics is taken away.

[00:34:00] Just in terms of group, I think we're just at the beginning of that. There's there's more research happening right now with teams.

[00:34:06] Actually one podcast you'd probably enjoy listening to was, is with Dr. Guy Itzchacov. We did a short podcast and we talked about the listening circles there too, where he's talking about listing training and the impact on teams also under high pressure environments. And so that might be something really interesting for you.

[00:34:24] I'll send that one to you. And then probably the one with Neil van Quakebeke he talks about asking questions, but he, they did some research on whether questions, if you ask questions, if that helped get rid of the bad apple team, they thought so, but then they did this research and it didn't work, but with, and then they found out later that it wasn't the asking questions.

[00:34:48] That asking questions is just the spark. If you didn't listen afterwards, then it won’t make the difference. It was actually,

[00:34:57] this is where it's taken for granted.

[00:34:59] Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those. I got like a good, it sounds like it's a great ritual basically, and that kind of calms the head chatter around participation and, I'll get my turn when I need it and if I need it. Interesting. So what are listening playgrounds?

[00:35:14] Cause you organize these things. What are what is that exactly?

[00:35:18] So I've realized that a lot of my learning through listening over time, after I thought I was already good. And then I realized, oh, I have a lot to learn. Happened through having playful experiences the, my mentor, my, one of my biggest mentor, every time we talk, he comes up with something new and playful, and I'm also have learned to do that over time.

[00:35:38] And And because of the research, showing that through experiencing that we actually get better. And so I decided to prototype some listening playgrounds. I called them super power playgrounds to see if in a short period of time, if you bring a bunch of people together to try some playful things around listening, without even explaining everything I'm explaining now to you on the podcast, just to experience things and to see.

[00:36:06] We can do some micro learning through experiences with different people and see if that would help. And so I did that in March every Friday, I had a group of people who prototype that with me. There were 16 people who I reached out my, in a smaller and in that group in a smaller group to see what that would be.

[00:36:26] And we had people from all around the world and all different ages and different cultures. We had everything from students to people who are executive managers to software engineers, to UX, to consultants. We had every different cultures and it worked. And so I was also challenging myself to really focus on small bits and to be able to do something within 45 minutes.

[00:36:53] Yeah, which is not always that easy. And and to make it fun and playful that it was playful and fun and it went so well that I'm going to start doing them once a month in June and just see what the response is. And I'll open up, open that up to a wider group just to come and play and practice and then go from there.

[00:37:12] Great. If you have a blink or something, happy to put it in the show notes for people later one question that I like to ask guests is do you have any kind of team-building tips , from a listening perspective

[00:37:27] so some examples of what to do.

[00:37:30] Yeah,

[00:37:31] just to circle back to what I said before with groups. , if you can facilitate listening with your team, you will start to create bonds. And if you can do it in all different ways in twos and groups of threes and circles, or have having people take turns or sharing stories or sharing experiences that will really have a huge impact.

[00:37:57] And it's really quick. So there's one example there's something called a story carousel where you put people into groups of two and you can have them share a story of some sort. So one of the ones that I love to do, especially when you're working in multicultural environments is to share a story about your.

[00:38:17] So I give people a few moments just to think about a story about your name and it can be why your parents named you the way they named you, how they found it, how they came up with your name, it can be the, your name has a meaning. It can be that like my, like Germans have a hard time pronouncing my name.

[00:38:32] So I talk about that. And then you put people into groups and they take turns. So that one person talks about their names story for two minutes and they have the full two minutes. And then you shift to the other person where that person shares their story about their name for a full two minutes.

[00:38:48] If a person finishes early, like a minute, then the person listening can ask questions to help, be curious. They don't, they shouldn't interrupt not to interrupt too quick. But if that person has the full two minutes, but not to go over so that there's equal time and often when you have these interactions with names, you learn so much, it's not just the name. You learn a lot about that. Person's culture about their family. You learn things that will help you work more with that person in the future. So I'll have people do this and then I'll bring them back to the group and you don't have to do this, but I have people notice, what did you learn about that person that will help you work with them more in the future?

[00:39:29] You've just learned something that will help you do that. And often they find often they find common ground or, they start to feel connection with that person. They see them as a person.

[00:39:38] Another story I'd love to use is, think about a time that someone helped you at work or think about a time that you helped someone at work. Like these are all different levels of stories and just a couple minutes, each story, and you learn a lot about that person and what they find helpful, what their strengths are. What's important to them, what their values are. I start listening to them. And and we even virtually in that moment, we were impacting each other physically.

[00:40:09] You actually feel physically more connected to that person you're more energized, or you might notice that you feel happier, not just the content and people, if you can help people notice that, then you'll start how they impact the interactions, how they impact each other, that has a huge impact on team bonding.

[00:40:28] Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you. And one other question, are there are there any particular resources that you would recommend, that you commonly find yourself recommending to people or giving, or something like that.

[00:40:49] Besides your book . Yes. There is an article that with a Harvard business review that was written by two scientists on this thing, who've done a metadata analysis on listening, Dr.

[00:41:05] Avi Kluger and Dr. Guy Itzchacov. I always laugh because I say his name wrong. Dr. Guy Itzchacov. And they talk about how listening helps people change. And if you know it in our work environment, there's constant change and people have a hard time with change. And so they really lay out the listening science on how listening helps people change and how giving feedback without listening can actually be, can actual actually lower performance whether it's positive feedback or negative feedback.

[00:41:41] And so th that's a really great article to understand this. And why just by listening that helps your team change or helps people and change projects, how that process does that. So that I recommend a lot because it realize how big this listening is. There's a lady named Laura Janusik who has a YouTube video channel where she gives lots of just short tips, listening tips, and we can.

[00:42:13] We can, I can give you the link to that video, but that's really nice for just really practical, basic listening tips that can be really helpful for people in all different types of situations. And she's also, has those, the science as well as the practical side of things. And I think that's what a message I think is really important.

[00:42:33] Like for me, it's really important that it's not just what we think, but what is the science showing? Because there's a lot of science coming out just now, right now. There's a lot of stuff we're just discovering. Now it's becoming more visible. And what are the practical, how does that partner with the practical side of things?

[00:42:52] So those are a couple of things that I recommended.

[00:42:55] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One resource of yours that I'd highly recommend is your TEDx video. So that's your talk is there anything else anywhere where people should go to check you out or where are you typically are on social media?

[00:43:12] You're welcome to check out my podcast. I have a podcast where I interview people who are doing things with listening in ways that are probably surprising all different areas. So all the way from the scientist to you know, trainers, but also to people working in tech and how they're using it.

[00:43:30] And so you can get a lot of different resources there. That might be interesting. You have to pick pick and choose what suits you. And, but there's a lot of really good stuff there. I think there's a lot of people doing a lot of great stuff and listening. And so you might be surprised at what's there and I'll be having some more videos coming out.

[00:43:49] In the next half year with some of the newer science that's coming out, but we still have to do the recordings and I'll be doing that with my mentor, Dr. Avi Kluger. He's one of the best or one of the scientist, who's doing a lot of the work. That's really furthering the stuff where I'm understanding a lot of stuff.

[00:44:04] So we'll be doing some stuff, but that's coming up soon. And that's based on the findings that they have with listening at work. So that's really important. How can we bring more listening into organizations and into teams and how can we bring it into more at a more systemic level integrated into the stuff that we're doing.

[00:44:22] And I think if we can learn how to do that, and we're at the beginning of this. We can have a lot more influence on our productivity and actually people feeling better because there's a lot of problems right now with burnout and whatnot. So this will be really important if people are interested in that, then they should definitely reach out because a lot of us are trying to figure it out right now on how to make that work better.

[00:44:44] Yeah. Yeah. But otherwise LinkedIn reached out on LinkedIn. That's where I post stuff. I'm on Instagram, but LinkedIn is probably the place where I spend more time.

[00:44:56] Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Jim Kalbach on designing remote collaboration

Jim Kalbach, Chief Evangelist at mural

About Jim Kalbach

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in user experience design, information architecture, and strategy. He is currently Head of Customer Experience at MURAL, the leading online whiteboard. Jim has worked with large companies, such as eBay, Audi, SONY, Elsevier Science, Lexis Nexis, and Citrix.

Jim is also the author of three books: Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences (O’Reilly, 2016), and most recently The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020). He is also the Co-founder and Principal at the JTBD Toolkit, an online resource with learning, trainings, and content. Jim blogs at experiencinginformation.com and tweets under @jimkalbach.

Links

• Mural
• Blog
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Amazon

Transcript

[00:00:02] the combination of visualization and guided methods and structure to your meetings, it gets rid of zoom fatigue. When I first heard that term, I was like, what? What's that? Because I didn't experience it myself. And the other thing that I thought was what you need to be a little bit more intentional about how you're getting through your day of.

[00:00:20] Yeah. And so that's my biggest piece of advice is to structure and design. Essentially collaboration design, right? Design your collaborations.

[00:01:01] Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the managing road teams podcast. We are here with Jim Callbox today. Jim wrote two wonderful books, the jobs to be done playbook and experience mapping. Jim is also chief evangelists for mural. And Jim knows the in and out of whiteboards, which I think are an absolutely critical tool for. Remote work or possibly even hybrid work. But I guess we'll get into that in a bit.

[00:01:29] So Jim, could you say a few words about what it is that kind of got you. Into white boarding. And how you lend to at mural in the first place, your varied product background?

[00:01:43] Sure. So I spent a lot of my career in design and innovation teams, a couple of different companies, both internally in large organizations, but also externally as a consultant looking at things like human centered design and design thinking and innovation broad.

[00:02:03] And in 2015, I got contacted by Mariano's Suarez, Bhutan, the CEO of mural. They were very small company back then. And I joined the team because I had been steeped in design and design thinking, which is an important target for me. Very creative types and creative type of work, which I was very familiar with.

[00:02:26] But in my previous role, I worked for Citrix, the makers of go to meeting and go to webinars. So I was in the remote collaboration space as well too. And I always felt that one of the biggest challenges of remote collaboration was creative work. How do you get a team of designers or, an innovation brainstorming session?

[00:02:47] How do you do that with. Folks. So when I came to mural, it was really a combination of those two interests, my interest in remote collaboration in general, but also in creative work and design thinking type work.

[00:03:02] So why are whiteboards so helpful in. And remote collaboration and remote work.

[00:03:08] Yeah. I have this concept of what I call the digitally defined workplace. Which if you think about it in terms of jobs to be done that a team collaborating. Four or five core jobs that they need to get done. They need to communicate in real time. They need to communicate asynchronously.

[00:03:28] They need to have a shared space where they gather documents and things like that. And if you walk around any office building, you'll also see evidence of a need for the job of collaborating. And a lot of people say I'm not a creative or I'm not a designer. I don't collaborate visually. And I've had people tell me that.

[00:03:48] And then I will go over to their workplace and it's full of sticky notes and there's a whiteboard behind them. And there's flip charts all over the place. All of that type of work is visual work, it's not happening in an Excel sheet. And what happens is that tends to happen outside of the computer actually.

[00:04:04] Particularly before the pandemic and when we took the office away from folks during the pandemic, for instance, there was this need, right? So I think from when I think about white boarding it's actually a need that you have when you collaborate to express yourself in a visual way to draw a square and a circle and connect them with a line and say, we need to get from point a to point B as a team.

[00:04:27] There's an aligning effect that, that has right by expressing yourself visually you're able to elevate the conversation and express yourself in a different way. Then you can, if you're just talking or if you're just typing.

[00:04:39] Visual collaboration is complimentary to other modes of collaboration that we had that we already had, whether we knew it or not. We already had it with sticky notes and flip charts and whiteboards in our office. And the digital version of that gets that job done for us.

[00:04:53] When we're collaborating in a team, we need a way to express ourselves visually, even if you're in finance or HR. Again, this isn't just for creatives. This is work in general. Has this need to to be expressed and represented visually.

[00:05:06] How are you defining collaboration here? Exactly.

[00:05:09] Yeah, that that's a great question. And we're working on a more precise definition, but it's when two or more people come together and they have a specific challenge or problem that they're trying to solve with a common mission, that there's a common purpose for this group of people to collaborate.

[00:05:27] Typically, when we talk about collaboration here at mural, we're thinking about workplace collaboration. But we also serve educational institutions. So there might be a student project team, government organizations. And I think that definition still holds true group of people coming together, bending for a common cause.

[00:05:45] And trying to problem solve for a common cause that could be very temporary. It could be a single session and a group of people come together dynamically. It could be a permanent team of people that come together. it can be ongoing collaboration, between people and teams as well, too.

[00:06:01] So I think about all of that as collaboration, essentially individuals, human being. People coming together and trying to solve a problem together. And they do that through interactions. There are certain interactions that that they have. And again, just going back to my previous response, there's a certain type of visual interaction that collaborating teams have always needed.

[00:06:23] That the idea of a virtual whiteboard, isn't just, oh, it's another tool that does the same thing as my other tools. It actually does something fundamentally different for that collaborative.

[00:06:33] So fundamentally different because it's digital or

[00:06:37] because there's visual because it's visual that I can, right now we have audio and video here, you and I can also type in the chat if we were also expressing parts of our conversation, visual.

[00:06:49] It will take the conversation to a different place and to a different level in terms of understanding, we can actually model what we're talking about and we can see it. I can see what you're thinking and you can see what I'm thinking in terms of shapes and sticky notes and arrows and all kinds of things.

[00:07:04] But it also allows for a different level of participation as well, too, because when you're talking or typing, it tends to be the tr the traffic is regulated one by one only one person can talk at a time when you're thinking visually, actually multiple people can be expressing themselves at the same time.

[00:07:21] So it actually gets it gets more inclusion and you potentially get a more diverse type of perspective that can be represented as well, too. So it's all of that. When I talk about visual collaboration, it's all of that.

[00:07:33] In the post pandemic, modern world, if we're not talking about doing that digitally, and if we're not talking about doing that in the cloud, where it's we can't go back to is taking pictures of whiteboards and transcribing and sticky notes. We're going back to the office, but we can't go back to that. We have to pretend like we're in the 21st century work is now digital, including the visual. It would be, imagine a memo coming around your office.

[00:07:57] Remember we used to do memos and used to have a name and you check it off. Like I saw this memo. And then the memo to imagine. Yeah, it sounds funny now, but that's essentially what did very visual collaboration was before the pandemic was essentially like communicating like a memo. We send an email, we send a slack.

[00:08:14] Why isn't our visual collaboration, digital, Nan. I think that's the wake-up call that people got during the pandemic. And this category of whiteboard is now more and more commonplace. I can't tell you how many times Luke I'll pull up mural and people will be like, oh yeah, we've used this before.

[00:08:29] I didn't get that before the pandemic before, what is this thing? So I think we've gotten sensitized to this metaphor of a virtual digital. But for me it still goes back to that fundamental job that it gets done when we're talking and having a conversation, particularly if it's a complex problem solving that problem visually.

[00:08:48] It literally offloads cognitive space. So we can think better together. We literally think better together when we're collaborating visually. And it's really that that I'm most interested in the technology. Yeah. Technology is important, but it's really the effect and the impact that visual collaboration can have on a team.

[00:09:07] Yeah. Yeah. I think in my experience, it's. Everything that you mentioned, but it's also visual interplaying with the conversation and back. So it's, it feeds on each other. Yeah, exactly. You build meaning in a different way. Like you can have a really interesting conversation with somebody and get to a new point.

[00:09:24] I'm not saying that's not that I can even have really meaningful slack conversations. But very often there's a type of conversation and problem solving when you really have to get together and get along. And you have to be able to include a lot of voices. So diversity of perspective, and the problem is complex, right?

[00:09:43] It's those types of conversations and interactions that, that, where visual collaboration. It's not just, it's not just another way to think. It's a different way to think as a group of people, it actually elevates your collaboration in a new.

[00:09:59] It's interesting. You also mentioned schools and education working in a software context that quite often the problem with software team faces is that they have a complex problem. And if they're all remote, then a whiteboard is actually a great way to do that because it's it's like learning is the biggest bottleneck in this type of work.

[00:10:19] Yeah. What are your thoughts on the application of in the context of problem solving specifically Mike and whiteboards. What are things that, that you've seen people do that, that work well with with whiteboards?

[00:10:32] One of the, one of the effects, one of the phenomena that we see, we call it a blank canvas paralysis.

[00:10:40] That if you just pull up a blank canvas and you have a group of people with a complex problem that they're trying to solve and say, okay, go there's this lack of knowing where to start, particularly if there's a group of people who's going to go first, what are we doing? But I think there's a fairly simple and prevalent solution to that, which is to use what we call guided math.

[00:11:03] So from design thinking, for instance, there's a whole class of methods out there where you can actually break down the challenge that you have into smaller chunks. And instead of just improvising the collaboration. So a lot of people think about whiteboard as being white blank. That is, and then you fill it in with scribbles, but you can actually pre structure the conversation.

[00:11:26] Using the tool like mural with guided methods so that I can get a group of people and have the playbook, so to speak the rules of engagement. We're not just improvising the conversation on a blank whiteboard, and then it's it just grows organically or not. You can actually say, let's do an exercise like rose gardens.

[00:11:43] Rose thorn. Bud is a great exercise to analyze a problem from different angles. The roses are the positive things that Thrones that a negative things in the buds are there potential things. If everybody just takes two minutes and puts rose storm buds, and then you cluster. So it's okay. Heads down for two minutes then cluster.

[00:12:00] Okay. Now let's prioritize the clusters and you can vote on those. Okay. Now let's put those on a two by two matrix to see what we're going to do next quarter. You can actually get from point a to point B. Let's say you're planning a sprint or you're planning the roadmap for next quarter. You can get from point a to point B, not by staring at a blank canvas together and scratching your head, but actually structuring the conversation and structuring it.

[00:12:25] So I can give you the instructions and you can print them out on a PDF, but I can also just show you, Hey, we're going to do rose thorn, bud clustering, prioritization matrix, and then go into the roadmapping so that your collaboration is not improvised. You actually have a score.

[00:12:39] I'm a musician, right? So I think. Sheet music, I can have the sheet music, so we're all reading from the same score, that's something that, that we think is funding will fundamentally change collaboration is if it's a lot more deliberate and a lot more.

[00:12:56] Yeah, I can definitely see how for somebody new to it, that would make it a lot easier. It's an interesting interesting problem. Similar to when you're writing and you have a blank page.

[00:13:06] Yes, exactly. And I like to think when I structure a meeting or workshop, I do it spatially. So I started in the upper left of a canvas.

[00:13:14] I like to go right and left. Some people like to go top and bottom, but I'll put a big number one. We're going to do this together right now. I have instructions there and then I put a line and then you move over and then I do number two. So my, my meeting agenda is represented visually. We're going to go from left to, it also lets everybody know that I'm working with what we're going to do. They can see the beginning and the end before we even get started and I just moved the team across. So it's almost as if the visualization and the canvas is facili facilitating my meeting for me, I'll even put breaks in there oh, we're going to take a break at this point.

[00:13:47] We're going to do this for an hour. Take a break, come back through this. So the meeting agenda is spatially represented on the canvas as well too. And then we fill that. Through the guided methods, we fill that in with stuffs that, and that gets us to, to our answer at the end. Again, it's being about being deliberate about collaboration and about designing that collaboration experience.

[00:14:07] And I think the canvas adds a whole new dimension for that.

[00:14:10] You briefly mentioned in passing the effect on alignment that working this way has, why do you think that is?

[00:14:18] I think because there is a when you're thinking about, let's just say a digital whiteboard, it allows people to express what they're thinking in a different way or even.

[00:14:29] Cause sometimes, you might go into, let's just say a sprint planning meeting and there's a set of requirements and somebody will read them off or discuss them. And then there's a group of people sitting around, what's in their mind, what are they thinking? Do they understand those in exactly the same way?

[00:14:44] If we could get them to express what they're thinking as well too. So this idea of participation is really important. You can then see if you're all aligned or not. Literally see it. Do we all have the same. Of what we're headed towards.

[00:14:58] Jeff Patton, he wrote a book called user story mapping. He has a great great little cartoon in. Where there's three people. And at the beginning they have like thought bubbles and one has an orange, a triangle, and the other's thinking of a square and the other thinking of a circle. And I've been on a lot of projects where everybody nods and says, yeah, we're all together. But then if you looked in their minds, they actually have three different opinions or mental models of the thing that they're trying to solve for. And then the next frame of his cartoon is they put it out on a black. They actually put their circle and they said, oh, we're not aligned.

[00:15:31] So this idea of expressing yourself visually helps you then negotiate your different mental models so that you can get closer to a harmonized view of the world.

[00:15:43] One of the things that are really Useful in terms of alignment across departments, is this whole idea of customer experience mapping? You've written about it., quite a lot of depth and nuance if somebody was thinking about doing kind of a customer experience map for the first time, how would you suggest doing that kind of thing to help align with.

[00:16:04] Sure. And I think, for me, just get, just to relate that back to your previous question to a customer journey map for me is essentially a collaboration tool. It's a way for some people to go out and observe the customer experience, right? Cause not everybody in an organization has contact with customers.

[00:16:22] But the people creating the map maker would have the luxury of being able to. Talk to people and investigate data around the customer experience. And they could take that data and write a 50 page report on it and say, here's all the things that we found and send around a 50 page report.

[00:16:39] But we know what happens with 50 page reports when they get sent around, people don't read them or they don't connect. What's on page three with what's on page 17.

[00:16:48] Alternatively I could take that information, that insight that I gathered and represented visually in a single.

[00:16:54] And that's what a customer journey map is. It's a compression of observations that you've made about the outside world human experiences in some way. And I compress it into something that gives an overview. And by visualizing that overview, I get this massive compression of information. 50 pages of, written texts would be a single overview where I can actually see cause and effect in the same overview.

[00:17:19] So I can say, oh here at this step, if we mess this up, that's going to cause this effect downstream. And it's also something that's compelling and engaging. So the idea of creating a journey map is creating these compelling, engaging artifacts that represent a lot of information.

[00:17:36] And the key point there is an alignment from the inside to the outside. We want our perspective as an organization to align to the. Perspective. That's essentially what being customer centric is. But then that diagram, that artifact becomes a collaboration tool inside and I call that insight.

[00:17:54] Alignment. So there's two types of alignment you're looking for. I want to get the outside in perspective, but then I got to get the teams that are trying to deliver that experience that you want aligned as well too. And the visualization helps with that as well too, because the marketing team can see itself in a journey map.

[00:18:11] The product team can see itself in the journey map. Everybody in the organization can see how they fit into the bigger picture in a single overview. And it becomes a collaboration tool at that point. Let's discuss, what are we going to prioritize next quarter? I'm just using that as an example, and you can have a conversation.

[00:18:28] So for me, the visualization of a map, a journey map is really it's to create an artifact that you can have a conversation around and you can use it as a diagnostic tool with a team to collaborate and come up with the solutions and the answers to the problems that you find together. So knowing that I think has impacted.

[00:18:46] You're trying to do two things, align the outside world to the inside. And you're also trying to foster a conversation as well, too. So the map maker, before you get started, you have to keep that in mind. And there's lots of different techniques that you can use. And methods out there.

[00:19:00] There's customer journey maps and service blueprints and mental model diagrams. And that's what I talk about in my book that you mentioned all these different types of maps, but they're essentially trying to do the same thing, which is trying to do these two different types of alignment.

[00:19:12] And the simplest place to start is with the chronology. Typically we think of an experiences things that happen to individuals over time. So it's a chronology and then there are different layers of information and the chronology is usually represented as columns and the layers of information are usually represented as rows.

[00:19:32] And I start journey mapping with actions, thoughts. And what are the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the people that I'm studying over time. So if you have a timeline and then put actions, thoughts, and feelings, that's a great place to get started, I think.

[00:19:45] Just to make it a little more concrete? Yeah. How would you describe a company that's aligned with the customer, but not aligned horizontally as you were saying? What does it, what does that look like? Yeah that's actually common. I think, cause particularly in the past five and 10 years, I think.

[00:20:00] Data about the customer experience is not lacking in organizations. We have everything from surveys and NPS and live usage, data of digital products research teams that go out and do qualitative research. Usability testing is common. We don't necessarily lack information about our customers and what they're experiencing, but is it actionable?

[00:20:23] And I think that's really the purpose of journey mapping as a verb. It's not about the map, but it's not about the now. And it's about the mapping. There's a process of creating the map and there's a process of having a conversation around the map. It's really trying to make sense of the data that you're getting about the experiences that you create, right? So they does not add, we're not lacking data. What we're lacking is a way to actually interpret that data and to make sense of it. And again, that's a collaborative exercise. So a journey map helps you do both of those things make sense of it because what you can do is overlay activities.

[00:20:57] I was talking about guided methods, right? I think my next book on journey mapping is going to be a series. Guided methods. Once you create the map what are you going to do with it? There's all kinds of prioritization techniques. What's the most important point for us. What's the most important point for the customer?

[00:21:13] Do those align? Where's the biggest pain point where you, our competitors Excel and we don't, and you can use that model of the world, the map itself as a springboard into analysis, and conversation. On top.

[00:21:26] You mentioned the outside in view and I guess you're referring to the jobs to be done angle. Mental models and job maps, I think we're closest to the customer. How are these tools and approaches useful for let's say strategy for.

[00:21:43] From a jobs to be done perspective, there's an artifact called. Which is really not looking at it. Doesn't look at your relationship with a customer as a paying customer. It's looking at what they're trying to get done independent of your solution. So it's similar to a customer journey map. A job map is similar to a customer journey map, but it has a different perspective because it's not about your solution.

[00:22:07] In fact, in jobs to be done, we go a great line. To expunge, any reference to technology solutions or methods in the language, and we're not looking at how do people become aware of my solution? How do people decide to buy my solution? Why do they stay loyal to. Those are the three points of a customer journey map, by the way.

[00:22:26] We're really looking at what are they trying to get done independent of my product or my solution. And that gives you an independent view of the job to be done. When you're talking about jobs to be done, you your unit of analysis is the job.

[00:22:39] And a job map represents that individual. So you can actually then say, okay, where is the biggest point of intervention? If I understand what the individual, the people that we're trying to solve, if I'm understanding what they're trying to get done independent of my solution, just what their objective is.

[00:22:56] What we can then do is say, where are the biggest levers? Are there points of intervention where strategically we would make the most difference or strategically where the market and competitors haven't So you can actually find new playing ground at a strategic level from something like a job map.

[00:23:13] And guess what a job map is also visual, and it has that same effect. It's something you can put up and use as a conversation piece and do another layer of conversation and analysis through guided methods and visualization to come to, an agreement within your team.

[00:23:30] Just to , jump topics again, digging further into the question around collaboration what are the most. Common are the most important jobs around working together remotely in general? How do you think about that?

[00:23:45] I think about it in, in two layers actually. And this is a model that I'm hopefully going to be writing about a little bit more in the near future.

[00:23:55] when a group of people come together, I think there are two fundamental jobs. That they have in front of them at the highest level is they come together and this is why they come together is to solve a problem or a challenge. There are methods and then there's a workflow to get that done. And we can look at models of innovation or design thinking process. Agile has its process to help teams solve problems.

[00:24:18] I think there's another layer though, that became very evident during the pandemic, which is teams have to connect. At an interpersonal level. W one thing that we learned during the pandemic is work is social.

[00:24:31] And I don't mean you have to like your colleagues and things like that, but there are two or more human beings coming together, collaborate. Guess what? They bring their human beingness, their human humanity with them. And there's this very social component to work as well, too.

[00:24:45] And what we've found is one of the big challenges coming out of the pandemic is discussing. Now that people are, did feel disconnected. And there's studies that show this as well, too, that okay. I'm working at home now, during the pandemic and I can be productive personally, but team productivity and team connectedness is suffered. So that what we're seeing is projects get going. And again, even everybody might be individually productive, but the project has to start over. Because the teams weren't aligned because they're not connected, or people are very dissatisfied with their work condition because they're not connected to their colleagues anymore at a human level.

[00:25:24] When we're thinking about designing a collaboration experience, I think you need to think about how are the teams going to solve their problems together? How are they going to get from point a to point B, but how are they also going to connect. And we have to make that deliberate in the past, it was basically well went to the office together and that the connection magically happened, the water cooler moments, the happy hours, the cat, the Cantina, meeting our colleagues, the coffee breaks and things like that. Without those things. Or you can, those things still exist, right? Because you still go to the offices and meet in person, but we can't assume that's always going to happen with that within every team that I think we also have to make that other layer, we have to make both problem solving and connecting as human beings, we have to make that.

[00:26:07] And there are ways to do that, that if we're collaborating remotely, there are exercises and activities that we can do to help get to know each other a little bit better. And I'm not talking about, team building activities. Those are good. But those happen, like what, like once a year, once a quarter or something like that, I'm talking about every time you connect, what, where are those little moments where you're connecting and reflecting?

[00:26:29] As a team about yourself and about the group of people. it's not about making friends, I'm not talking about, Hey, you have to be, you gotta be, you gotta be a social person. Now it's just about connecting, as a team, there has to be a cohesiveness there at a human level as well, too.

[00:26:45] So solving problems and connecting, I think are the two big jobs that a team has to do to collaborate.

[00:26:50] As you were mentioning that, I think a really. Difficult point, is the first moment a team comes together? What are your thoughts on that? About how to structure that possibly with the use of some somehow, using a whiteboard

[00:27:05] that's that's what we do at mural.

[00:27:07] We even have templates and things for like team kickoff, and Again, just thinking about those two facets are those two jobs to be done. We need to solve a problem together, but we need to connect. So if I were structuring a team kickoff, I would want to have everybody introduce themselves and disclose something that they're comfortable disclosing.

[00:27:25] I'm not saying again, it's not about making friends, but there is a relationship. There's a work relationship that you have to build with your colleagues. And I would also want to get aligned on what's the problem we're trying to solve. And I would have activities that would be interleaved. Right again, it's not about saying, oh, we're going to take a day off and do team building.

[00:27:43] It's about every time you interact, even at the beginning of a project, how are you going to get to know each other as people? What's the modus operandi of each of these people? What are their perspectives that they're bringing to the table from their jobs and their role? What are their motivations, right?

[00:27:56] How are these people as individuals? What type of person are they? Those types of activities and conversations. As well as what's the problem we're trying to solve right together. Google ventures did this study on high performing teams. And one of the most important factors that is a leading indicator of a high-performing team are things like psychological safety.

[00:28:17] Do you feel safe speaking up in front of that group of individuals that you're collaborating with? Dependability. Can you rely on them to get done with they're done, right? You don't build psychological safety and dependability. If you're only focused on the problem solving side of things, you also have to be deliberate about building up those relationships in those ties.

[00:28:37] So I do feel psychologically safe and I do feel like I can depend on my colleagues. So it's again, it's at the beginning and it's to your question. It's really important to establish, that playing field that we're going to talk about psychological safety and dependency, maybe not directly, but it's going to be something that we're going to be actively and deliberately trying to build.

[00:28:58] Yeah. Project Aristotle was quite amazing at Google.

[00:29:02] You you've got the two books you also have have the toolkit and the other things you do around jobs to be done. Could you say a few words about.

[00:29:10] Sure. So know, I've been looking at jobs to be done almost for two decades now, and using it in my own work.

[00:29:18] But about six or seven years ago, I started to teach a course on jobs to be done so that I could learn what are the questions that people have and figure out what the best way. To answer those questions or what's the language that I need to use to explain jobs to be done. And that was prior to writing the book.

[00:29:35] So when I wrote the book, I felt fairly confident that I understood just to be done, but I also understood how to explain it and really break it down, but I'm not done. I think, and the field's not done. It's not like jobs to be done is static. after the book came out, we me and my business partner created a.

[00:29:54] An online resource called the jobs to be done toolkit JTBD toolkit.com and there's some online learning there where you can do some video courses. We also have live training that we do, but there's also some resources there some articles and things, and we do monthly. We do a, what we call a community.

[00:30:11] Where there's a group of two or three dozen people who are interested in jobs to be done, I interview one of them and then we have a big open conversation and really that, all of that, what I just mentioned was really to keep the conversation going. Around jobs to be done after my book to, to make it alive.

[00:30:26] Cause you write a book. It's static. It's ink on page on paper, but I wanted to continue the conversation because for me, the book is just a point in time. I did a lot of work before the book and the jobs to be done toolkit is what I'm doing after the book.

[00:30:42] What would be your key advice for people now? The pandemic started over two years ago now. They've seen whiteboards, they've seen mural. They've seen, they've tried. Out a bit. I think initially there was a lot of stressing around, general technology and it's going to be overwhelming and spend half the meeting, just getting the thing, working.

[00:31:03] What would you say are the, let's say key tips for people nowadays in terms of getting the most out of using whiteboards?

[00:31:09] Yeah, I think I think some of the initial trepidation is gone, but I still think. We need brave people to step up and lead conversations and design collaboration experiences.

[00:31:22] One thing the pandemic taught us was that a lot of meetings and a lot of collaboration and interactions with our colleagues was improvised. And I think when you're in person, you can get away with improvising a little bit more than you can when you're remote.

[00:31:35] And part of zoom fatigue for me, by the way, is that we basically just took our calendars and replicated it in zoom meetings, but then we didn't ask ourselves, did we need to meet at all? We also didn't ask ourselves, what are the rules of engagement? How are we going to get from point a to point B in this conversation?

[00:31:52] Because if you're just improvising on zoom, it's a lot more obvious that there's no real deliberateness or intentionality behind the interactions. So I think we need brave people to say, okay, we have this new set of technologies and this new work environment, which is sometimes remote sometimes in person sometimes.

[00:32:11] And to step up and be brave to be brave enough to use your imagination, to invent new ways to collaborate. The thing that I would orient to towards is using things like guided methods and there's thousands out there that you can find, right. For icebreakers, how to start a meeting, how to decide together, how to, brainstorm.

[00:32:32] To use deliberate methods to structure the interaction, to be a lot more deliberate about how you're going to collaborate. So you're not just improvising because again, improvising on zoom is what leads to some fatigue. Here's what I find. If you have a mural canvas open and you have an activity that's structured and you have a timer, okay.

[00:32:48] Everybody has five minutes to put their best idea down. Okay. We have 10 minutes to, to prioritize this. Time goes by so quickly. I get that a lot in my workshops loop that people go, how did you feel? Four hours so much? And I wasn't distracted people. Aren't distracted and they're not fatigued from it as well too.

[00:33:04] It's the structure that I put to it. I don't mean structure in terms of rigid. It's just that there's a game plan there. I have a game plan and I have the materials and using neural, I visualize. So everybody can see it and everybody can interact with it.

[00:33:17] So the combination of visualization and guided methods and structure to your meetings, it gets rid of zoom fatigue. When I first heard that term, I was like, what? What's that? Because I didn't experience it myself. And the other thing that I thought was what you need to be a little bit more intentional about how you're getting through your day of.

[00:33:35] Yeah. And so that's my biggest piece of advice is to structure and design. Essentially collaboration design, right? Design your collaborations.

[00:33:43] That's fascinating. And actually one thing you mentioned hybrid have you seen any kind of interesting ways teams or companies are using using neural and in a hybrid context?

[00:33:56] Yeah, sure, absolutely. And I think that's key that, that digitally defined workplace that I talked about, I think that's what is going to make hybrid a lot more. W I have seen teams doing the opposite. And by that, trying to let the people who are in person continue to work with sticky notes and whiteboards, then letting them, continue to sit at a desk without their own laptop or device.

[00:34:19] I don't think that's going to lead to a good hybrid experience. I think the better hybrid experience is to say whether we're in person. Altogether in person, whether we're hybrid and it's mixed. And whether remote, we have to be thinking about how are we going to do this digitally,

[00:34:34] and mural, just to focus on the digital whiteboard component, we do have apps for large touchscreens. We have apps for mobile devices. So if you are in person and you're entering a hybrid collaboration session with colleagues who are remote show up and have a device that you can interact with, because guess what? There's audio and video. There's. How do you chat with the people who are remote? And then if you have a virtual whiteboard, you're going to want to do that virtually as well too.

[00:34:59] I was just talking to somebody who said, yeah, we got together altogether. We were in person, they deliberately met in person and then they wrote things down on sticky notes and flip charts and they said, oh, what are we going to do tomorrow?

[00:35:13] Like they had no game plan. Once you put something out on a sticky note, they were like, oh, somebody's got to do it. And then you do the old fashioned. Let's take photos of it. Let's transcribe it. But as soon as you put something on a piece of paper, it's static. And I think what we have to be thinking about is fluidity, right?

[00:35:29] Because your day and day to day, you're going to move in and out of all of these different modes, you're going to have a call at nine in the morning, everybody's remote, then you might go to the office and half of the people are remote. And half of the people. And then later in the day, you have a meeting with your colleagues who are all in the office and the next day it's going to be a completely different combination on a daily basis.

[00:35:51] Each of us are going to be moving in and out of these different modalities of working remote hybrid, in-person hybrid, in-person remote. You're going to be going back and forth between these and your project is going to be going back and forth between these on Monday. We're all remote on Wednesday.

[00:36:06] We all go to the office together in between where all. So your project materials need to be fluid as well too. And move in and out the way to do that is to be thinking digital from the beginning. And we call that a digital first mindset, right? No that's great. That's great. .

[00:36:22] So the books are experience mapping and the jobs to be done. Playbook. There's the jobs to be done, toolkit, a website and is there any other place where people can look you up to find out more?

[00:36:37] Sure. I hang out a little bit on LinkedIn and if you want to reach out on LinkedIn and say hi and connect to me, I'd love to connect with folks who are like-minded.

[00:36:46] And then also. So it's at Jim callback on Twitter. I'm a little more active on LinkedIn, but I also I'm a little bit active on Twitter and things. I'll see it right away and retweet or comment or something like that. So LinkedIn and Twitter are another good place to find me. Great. Great.

[00:37:02] Thanks very much, Jim.

[00:37:03] Great. Thank you. Thank you very much.