Speculative Falilitation Unleashed

00:00:03: Johannes Schartau: Welcome to Transform Together, the holistic on podcast meetup. I'm Johannes Schartau, and in our last episode, I actually managed to use the wrong name for the podcast.

00:00:13: Johannes Schartau: And my really nice colleague, Kali, she had to edit this out, so we're off to a great start, because, you know, what could go wrong? This is already perfect.

00:00:22: Johannes Schartau: this is episode 2 today, and I will be talking to Anna Jackson and Fisher Qua.

00:00:29: Johannes Schartau: They have been liberating structures as maestros from the very beginning, and they helped spread liberating structures in Europe.

00:00:35: Johannes Schartau: By touring multiple countries.

00:00:38: Johannes Schartau: They have a shared practice called Lucky Hunch, and they offer something that they call speculative facilitation.

00:00:45: Johannes Schartau: Anna and Fisher, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:48: Johannes Schartau: You're free to unmute yourself now.

00:00:53: Anna Jackson: Hello! Thanks for having us!

00:00:56: Johannes Schartau: so, you know, pleased for you to show up today. I'm going to ask you a few questions, and then I will hand over to you.

00:01:05: Johannes Schartau: For the interactive part, we get to experience some cool stuff, which won't be recorded.

00:01:11: Johannes Schartau: So, everybody who's listening, you're absolutely missing out, and this should be a lesson for the future, to make space

00:01:19: Johannes Schartau: For this podcast and the meetup part, because…

00:01:23: Johannes Schartau: This will be lost, and only the people here will know what we have done.

00:01:28: Johannes Schartau: Alright, Anna, Fisher, do you feel ready to get into this?

00:01:34: Johannes Schartau: They're nodding, I'm super excited.

00:01:38: Anna Jackson: I'm kind of waiting for Fisher to introduce his voice at some point. You gonna talk, buddy?

00:01:44: Fisher: Sure, I'll talk. I'm ready.

00:01:46: Johannes Schartau: Great.

00:01:48: Johannes Schartau: I'll just, you know, this is a conversation, let's get into it. So, you have a shared practice that is called Lucky Hunch, and your approach is called speculative facilitation.

00:01:58: Johannes Schartau: I'm gonna ask more questions about this, but what I'm really interested in is, what was your path to creating all of this? So, how did you end up

00:02:07: Johannes Schartau: At, you know, calling this Lucky Hunch, and also calling this speculative facilitation.

00:02:16: Fisher: You wanna go first? You tell the story first.

00:02:21: Anna Jackson: Yeah.

00:02:23: Anna Jackson: So, I think… I think maybe this is good context for the whole… for the whole conversation, the…

00:02:31: Anna Jackson: right around… Fisher and I started to work closely together in, like, 2019, but we had known each other for almost a decade.

00:02:39: Anna Jackson: Before that. And, I sort of hated him, right? This is, like, part of the story. I was, like, very annoyed by all the attention he got from one of our shared mentors. You know, I just found the whole situation very obnoxious. And then we started to work together, and we became

00:02:57: Anna Jackson: pretty good working partners, and it became… it started to get really fun. And…

00:03:02: Anna Jackson: if you've had experiences where you sync up with someone that you both have a similar practice, I think it's similar for, like, musicians, or people who cook, or… and you start to realize you can sort of combine

00:03:15: Anna Jackson: things get really exciting and really fun, and that's what happened on our first workshops tour together. We just had all kinds of fun with

00:03:22: Anna Jackson: A lot of the people that are on this call.

00:03:25: Anna Jackson: And we… what started to happen was we would get sort of an inkling that there would be a thread to follow, and there would be a sort of

00:03:35: Anna Jackson: over time, as we worked together longer, we described it as, like… and I think this is existing language, like, a long hunch. There's something over there. We're gonna see if we can sort of

00:03:47: Anna Jackson: Follow that?

00:03:49: Anna Jackson: And that's where I think once things started to get, pretty interesting for us in the practice, even if it wasn't interesting for other folks, it got pretty interesting for us, you know, and fun, we sort of built out from that, and that's where the term… that's where Lucky Hunch came from.

00:04:09: Anna Jackson: But in 2020, I think

00:04:12: Anna Jackson: because of the way that COVID shifted our context and threw everything into

00:04:18: Anna Jackson: Some degree of creative destruction.

00:04:21: Anna Jackson: That hunch, some of the hunches we'd been following became… like…

00:04:26: Anna Jackson: things locked into place and became… it became possible for us to try out a lot of stuff.

00:04:33: Anna Jackson: And that's where some of the speculations, indulgences, really… Got fully exercised, so…

00:04:42: Anna Jackson: What would you add, Fisher? What did I miss?

00:04:44: Fisher: I think that last part that you were just describing, has a little bit to do with the theme that we were talking about a bit for today, was, like, these

00:04:55: Fisher: Things that were speculative for us early on became relevant later.

00:05:01: Fisher: The things that we were…

00:05:03: Fisher: we had, like, I don't even know if they were hunches, they were just, like…

00:05:07: Fisher: playful, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes… sometimes speculative, because they were more deliberate or careful, became relevant, especially during the pandemic.

00:05:19: Fisher: And that was kind of an interesting observation to think back on. Anna was telling a story of doing a…

00:05:28: Fisher: Learning history with an organization. And you should tell the rest of the story, but…

00:05:34: Fisher: The person she was doing the learning history with

00:05:37: Fisher: had this moment of kind of… I don't know if it was crisis, or sadness, or… I don't know what it was, but sort of said, you know, our organization is struggling to figure out how to stay relevant. We were so immediately needed during the pandemic.

00:05:53: Fisher: And now… Now what do we do? How do we maintain that kind of relevance in our community?

00:06:02: Fisher: So…

00:06:04: Anna Jackson: Yeah, they had… I mean, I think there's other examples of this around. I think one of the reasons we thought, you know, thinking about transforming together, sometimes things are much clearer in retrospect, right?

00:06:15: Anna Jackson: the retrospective coherence thing is real. And we've all… we all went through… we've all went through a quarantining part of COVID. We went through this shared thing where things really shifted.

00:06:27: Anna Jackson: this person that I was talking to, I was doing a big retrospective with her, and she talks about being… it was lightning in a bottle for her organization. And you can't… it doesn't… that's not how it works over time. So how does resonance and relevance continue

00:06:45: Anna Jackson: Through… through time?

00:06:48: Anna Jackson: It can feel very scary unless you just embrace that

00:06:53: Anna Jackson: you just get to be irrelevant sometimes, and that's, like, maybe awesome, and very freeing, you know? Sweet.

00:07:01: Johannes Schartau: So I know that you have your roots in liberating structures. When we talk about speculative facilitation, how much of liberating structures is in there, or how much…

00:07:11: Johannes Schartau: Do you feel like you have evolved from this? How would you explain this to someone?

00:07:24: Fisher: I think probably for me, like, the… The…

00:07:29: Fisher: So much of my, learning around group dynamics happened first with liberating structures, like, as my first language of group work.

00:07:40: Fisher: And so, as a result, I can't separate the two. It's like the…

00:07:45: Fisher: especially the underlying logic of liberating structures, the idea that there are elements that make up our interactions and can be specified at any moment to change what's possible or change the results is fundamental, I think, to the way I… the way I work.

00:08:05: Fisher: And so…

00:08:08: Fisher: the… even if the… I mean, I still use all of the methods all of the time, because I think they…

00:08:14: Fisher: make space for… Something speculative to happen, or they… they accept that, you know, a speculative result is…

00:08:25: Fisher: always there.

00:08:28: Fisher: And so I don't really distinguish between the two or separate the two. It's hard for me to say, oh, it's not liberating structures, it's something else. I think speculative facilitation, just a…

00:08:38: Fisher: playful name that Anna and I had for describing the thing that we both enjoy about group work.

00:08:45: Fisher: Which is the uncertainty and the…

00:08:51: Fisher: The risk that comes along with novelty.

00:08:57: Fisher: Would you say that's true, Anna? How would you, like, how do you think about the relationship between the two?

00:09:04: Anna Jackson: I think of liberating structures as, like.

00:09:07: Anna Jackson: a number of… as a network of people and a shared practice. I think of it as the way that we describe

00:09:16: Anna Jackson: experience interactive structures. I don't think of it purely as, like, a repertoire, so I think any method that I might use, I can organize and describe in a liberating structures way.

00:09:29: Anna Jackson: So to me, there's the broader structure that I can think about through. I… I… there aren't that many liberating structures that are just liberating structures and nothing else. They all come out of somewhere else, or they at least all come out of a shared practice together. So for me, it feels like, sure.

00:09:45: Anna Jackson: you know, maybe speculative facilitation is a way for me to think about the umbrella of it. And there's no facilitation I want to be involved with that is not speculative at some level. Like, there's A, there's no illusion of control ever in working with humans and the ingredients that are the humans, right? So everything we do has to be speculative at some

00:10:08: Anna Jackson: level, so I don't even think we were talking about this yesterday. I don't know that…

00:10:12: Anna Jackson: it does exist in a way that isn't speculative. However.

00:10:17: Anna Jackson: I think both of us, this is maybe how I heard what Fisher just described.

00:10:22: Anna Jackson: what LS and complexity-informed work can do is sort of allow us to just honor and set the expectation that there's, like, always mystery, there's always, you know, uncertainty, there's always risk, so let's just make the most of it.

00:10:40: Anna Jackson: And that feels… that feels good to me. So if you were to look at our designs, when we're doing, like, proper, like, we're like, okay, let's go full-on, just be very, very, like, speculative in the design, you would recognize things, and you would also be like, oh.

00:10:57: Anna Jackson: that's… odd. Maybe that's a thing that, like, came from somewhere else and has evolved into this, right? I think you would recognize, but it's, like, twists.

00:11:08: Anna Jackson: On it, or we would maybe take traditional or, you know, liberating structures that are very recognizable and do something like

00:11:18: Anna Jackson: maybe for us, what is something difficult with the content of the thing, which is what we'll do later. It's just a little push on the experience of it in a way that's maybe a little more challenging.

00:11:33: Johannes Schartau: You mentioned so many interesting things, and something that I would like to go a bit deeper in is that

00:11:39: Johannes Schartau: I often…

00:11:41: Johannes Schartau: have people have a certain expectation of what the outcome of a group process could be. So, often what I hear, for example, is, in the end, I would everyone, you know, to kind of, you know, just align, or, like, I want everyone…

00:11:56: Johannes Schartau: Kind of to have the same opinion.

00:11:58: Johannes Schartau: You were talking a lot about ambiguity and speculation in there, and just keeping that alive. Could you…

00:12:05: Johannes Schartau: Just let us know a bit how you navigate this, maybe, expectation of certain people in the group, and this…

00:12:13: Johannes Schartau: Desire to have clarity and uniformity? And how do you balance that with that… Complexity and the entire speculation.

00:12:24: Anna Jackson: No, it's, like, such a tension… we're, like, starting to talk about client work, right? Even if it's not, like… it's, like, whether the client is a… is…

00:12:32: Anna Jackson: it's just community, right? There's just… but you're designing with people, usually, or for and around a set of, you know, dynamics related to that. So, that's one reason that we like the Lucky Hunch and, like, speculative facilitation frame, because it's like, alright.

00:12:50: Anna Jackson: At least we're setting people up to know that, like, we might push to find

00:12:57: Anna Jackson: where there are real ranges of… because often, right, people are trying to converge. It's often a thing of, like, right, alignment at least is, like, not homogeneity, right? Like, at least alignment has some space for, like, depending on how people are thinking about it.

00:13:15: Anna Jackson: So, yeah, it's a tricky part of…

00:13:20: Anna Jackson: partnering with people, and that's where, I think when we do community sessions, where we're all sort of there to be like, alright, let's try a thing, it's very different from when we're doing something and a business needs to accomplish something, or a community group that is organized to, like, feed the people in their community

00:13:40: Anna Jackson: their purpose has high stakes, right? Like, they need, right, they need to be able… so I think

00:13:46: Anna Jackson: For me, there's some dimension of it that relates to, like, the human ingredients, the way that we connect and relate to each other, and the variation that exists in that, and honoring that, and helping people that are hosting

00:13:59: Anna Jackson: Hold that, and honor that, and see that as part of their role.

00:14:03: Anna Jackson: And then there's the part that's like, by the end of 4 hours, we're gonna get to this thing, and I think… I don't know, I feel like…

00:14:13: Anna Jackson: that's a perpetual challenge for all of us, that, like, I'm not gonna say anything interesting right now about it, right? Like, for sure, you might have

00:14:22: Anna Jackson: I try my best to do both. It's a good, wicked question, right? It's, like, holding space for all the variation, uncertainty, and, like, you know…

00:14:32: Anna Jackson: disappointment?

00:14:36: Anna Jackson: That's something Fisher's good at.

00:14:38: Anna Jackson: Just honoring disappointment, you know?

00:14:42: Fisher: That's like the,

00:14:45: Fisher: The thing it makes me think of, Johannes, is, usually people will use the phrase, I want people to be on the same page, or we need to get on the same page.

00:14:53: Fisher: And… the way I've tried to sometimes reframe that for them is, like.

00:14:59: Fisher: we're never gonna be on the same page. Once in a while, we'll be in the same chapter. We're lucky if we get in the same book.

00:15:05: Fisher: Often, we want to be in the same stack of the library, but frequently, we're just all wandering around, luckily, in the same building.

00:15:14: Fisher: I was like, you're never gonna… you're never gonna all end up on the same… having magically, like, found your way to the same book and gotten on the same page, and it's actually probably not that productive to be on the same page. If you're really thinking about an adaptive organization or community, you need people reading from different books at different moments.

00:15:33: Fisher: And then if they still don't accept that, we'll play What is the Pig?

00:15:38: Fisher: And be like, we're not even gonna have the same words to agree on here, like, the words aren't even gonna have the same meaning.

00:15:45: Fisher: Like, we're already hopeless, so let's start from that place and figure out how we actually work with the reality that you're never gonna get people on the same page, because we're not even going to share the same language. And so, how do you use that as an asset and benefit, as opposed to something

00:16:04: Fisher: to… to… to push towards. How do you let that… that reality pull you to a different…

00:16:12: Fisher: Solution, as opposed to pushing one that is assumed by being on the same page, you'll get something.

00:16:21: Fisher: Something specific to happen as a result.

00:16:23: Anna Jackson: But, like.

00:16:25: Anna Jackson: you, you know, you work with people, and you, like, you know, they want alignment, right? So, like, do… for me, it's, like, embracing good enough. It's, like, doing that pep talk, doing these pep talks or exercises to help people get, you know, in the space of, like, not being fully disappointed, but more, like, just working with

00:16:45: Anna Jackson: Working with the variation that will exist, but also making progress.

00:16:50: Anna Jackson: Usually, people, once they see and feel progress, because we get real work done, right? Like, then they start to realize, like, okay, this is… this is more what's possible.

00:17:02: Anna Jackson: Or that flat strategic plan that we have, it's just a snapshot… it's a document or a snapshot that represents the fullness of how we are cohering together as a group now.

00:17:13: Anna Jackson: Because…

00:17:15: Anna Jackson: of the various things we've done over 6 months, or 3 days, or half a day. This is… it just, you know, it's a way to communicate

00:17:24: Anna Jackson: it's not necessarily gonna represent, and we're gonna try to honor the fuller picture when we're together, and also know that we need to communicate out to the world or to each other in a way that we can reference. And that… that to me feels like, at least an integrity.

00:17:39: Anna Jackson: Do you know? .

00:17:41: Fisher: Yeah, it's making me think. The complexity framing on that for me is, like, that idea of punctuated equilibrium.

00:17:48: Fisher: Like, at very specific moments, we achieve equilibrium, but otherwise, we're just… ourselves, our organizations, our teams, they're in disequilibrium all the time, and so you need those moments of, like, punctuated equilibrium where it feels stable enough for people to navigate the…

00:18:08: Fisher: The perpetual uncertainty that they're in.

00:18:14: Johannes Schartau: So when you work in groups, I'm assuming not everything is always great, or do you have moments that you're…

00:18:21: Johannes Schartau: happier about than other moments. What do you look for in a group process, if it's possible to describe, to kind of say, what are some indicators that let you go, now we're making progress, or this is… I think this is productive?

00:18:38: Fisher: Anna hinted at this. I often, use… it sort of is meant to deliberately diffuse some of the cynicism in a group, but also, like, my… my primary evaluation metric is

00:18:52: Fisher: That everybody has an even distribution of disappointment.

00:18:57: Fisher: Like, if… as long as the disappointment is equally shared, we've done our job well here.

00:19:04: Fisher: And it kind of horrifies the positive psychology people, it sort of horrifies the people that are a little more optimistic. And they know I'm not serious about it, but I am kind of semi… it's kind of semi-real. It's like, I don't want some people to be despairing and some people to be ecstatic.

00:19:23: Fisher: And I think it's just too rare for everybody to be ecstatic, so I'm like, okay, you can all equally hold…

00:19:29: Fisher: The disappointment that is other humans, and having to interact with them and do something together.

00:19:37: Johannes Schartau: So, just to check again, because often when I talk to people, they kind of hope I have this answer, but you haven't found the magic formula to make people in the group happy, the people who pay you happy, and make yourselves happy at the same time.

00:19:52: Johannes Schartau: Haven't found that yet.

00:19:54: Fisher: I haven't.

00:19:56: Anna Jackson: I think setting people up… I, I, I will say the low expectations, approach is great, except, it doesn't…

00:20:06: Anna Jackson: Yeah, I… I mean, I… yeah. I feel like,

00:20:11: Anna Jackson: similar to the disappointment angle. On the front end, the expectations, but that doesn't usually work if you're getting paid. You gotta, like, have some degree of expectation.

00:20:20: Anna Jackson: This is a reason I'm a horrible evaluator, Johannes. Like, I work as an evaluator, and for me, thank goodness I have the complexity theory, like, that frame, because I would, like, you know, my… my call… like, my evaluation colleagues

00:20:37: Anna Jackson: So, so much better at being able to offer a structure that can be tracked. Do you know what I mean? They can offer something that they can evaluate, and for me, it's…

00:20:48: Anna Jackson: All the mushy stuff, like, has attunement improved?

00:20:52: Anna Jackson: you know, did a conflict surface, and they were able to meaningfully… you know, it's these really, really, like, group-dynamic-y things, so I'm often looking for group functioning in whatever way I think about that, with the group I know… what I know of the group, to, like, change over time.

00:21:10: Anna Jackson: And that's different than, like, a business outcome usually, right? But it really contributes To business outcomes, so…

00:21:19: Fisher: I'm just hoping to survive half the time.

00:21:23: Fisher: I'm like… it's like I get in there, and I'm like, how can I just get out of this with myself intact?

00:21:29: Fisher: I can't even hold on to, like, what the outcome is.

00:21:33: Johannes Schartau: Just for the people listening, multiple people on this call just kind of closed their eyes and chuckled, because apparently it feels familiar.

00:21:42: Johannes Schartau: Do you… because this is something that I like to do, I like to project onto other people that they might have the solution and the perfect formula. Who do you suspect has that magic touch and that magic ability just to work magic all the time and…

00:21:58: Johannes Schartau: solve problems immediately and just walk out, or just be… not even walk out, being carried out, I guess, by people cheering and, everybody being happy.

00:22:09: Johannes Schartau: Who do you think… who do you think.

00:22:10: Fisher: I mean, if you've interacted with Henry, Henry will solve everyone's problems.

00:22:17: Fisher: You're just gonna leave, kinda, probably…

00:22:21: Anna Jackson: embattled.

00:22:23: Anna Jackson: He's gonna make you work for it. He's gonna make you work for it. But this is, like, I think, Johannes, that's, like, one of the reasons, I think I can talk about this handedly and openly, was, like, there's…

00:22:36: Anna Jackson: I think I have some real…

00:22:39: Anna Jackson: I just have such a frustration with that impulse, maybe?

00:22:43: Anna Jackson: And I have it, which is why I have frustration with it, right? Like, I find it… and so, like, when I first started working with Fisher, you know, our beloved mentor, who's, like, a dear friend, just, like, celebration, we love Fisher, Fisher is, like, the most brilliant facilitator, and I'm like, boo! Group intelligence, boo! Like, I hate that idea that someone has it.

00:23:07: Anna Jackson: Right? It can't be someone. It's the chemistry of the people who have gathered. So it, like, irks me, but it irks me so much because I have that impulse, too.

00:23:17: Anna Jackson: And so then, I'm working so hard to be in… you know what I mean? I'm working so hard to, like, maintain that it is in the group, and it is in the ingredients of the group that, like, I… so I think it's a very fun thing to imagine in a group setting, being like,

00:23:35: Anna Jackson: you know, Nadia, do you have the answer to that? You know, like, or, like, what do you think? And that's a very sweet way to, like, elevate different people in the, you know, they're making sure that their contributions are, like, honored in the moment, but it's the…

00:23:51: Anna Jackson: the pull to…

00:23:53: Anna Jackson: sort of have that quickly, or the pull to, like, have a way that I feel like I'm in constant resistance to, you know? And it's, like.

00:24:03: Anna Jackson: my… some of my closest colleagues are very comfortable with authority. They're so… brilliant people who have, like, taught so many grad school classes and university classes, and they're just comfortable being knowledge sharers.

00:24:17: Anna Jackson: And, like, this kind of context is so uncomfortable, I think, for us, because the way that we're trained, right, like, we're trained to sort of try to turn it, and trained to try to, like, make it. And I find that, yeah, it's one of my, like, most…

00:24:34: Anna Jackson: intense inner tensions. It's like, I want to be able to just hold authority, and say a thing, and have it be correct, and factual, and accurate, and like, you know, so I think it's a good topic. I think, like, the idea of that, and that it might live with

00:24:53: Anna Jackson: anyone, even in any moment, is pretty interesting, and makes me so uncomfortable, because it makes me feel so comforted. Do you know what I mean? Like…

00:25:04: Anna Jackson: Yeah, I want that.

00:25:06: Anna Jackson: Who has it?

00:25:09: Johannes Schartau: I've been in situations where There was just authority in the room, and it just…

00:25:17: Johannes Schartau: I've just sped up the entire… you know, like, it…

00:25:22: Johannes Schartau: It's like a shortcut, but there is a payoff.

00:25:26: Johannes Schartau: it doesn't come for free. And I think that is something that you really have to keep in mind, and sometimes I just long for that solution, just to be like, okay, maybe, you with the tie on, maybe you make the decision for everybody else.

00:25:42: Johannes Schartau: But I know that in the long run, you know, it's not that easy.

00:25:47: Anna Jackson: Always the one with the tie on. Or, like, we got, you know, if you're wearing your blazer, if you're, like, you know, like, yeah.

00:25:55: Anna Jackson: Costuming.

00:25:56: Fisher: Obviously, this was one of the things that Henry was… I think Henry was very particularly… clear about is…

00:26:06: Fisher: at least in organizations, for those of you who don't know who we're referencing when we say Henry, we're talking about Henry Litmanowicz, who's one of the two, kind of, co-developers of liberating structures.

00:26:15: Fisher: Henry was really clear that, like.

00:26:19: Fisher: There's organizational authority, and I don't know if he was really thinking about the wider forms of power, but at least in organizations, there is designated authority in roles, and something like a simple liberating structure, one, two, for all.

00:26:35: Fisher: 1-2-4-All actually works better.

00:26:37: Fisher: In a situation where the authority is clear.

00:26:42: Fisher: than in a situation where it's too widely distributed. So if you think about 1-2-for-all, it works best in a hierarchy, as opposed to a flat.

00:26:52: Fisher: community structure, where somebody, let's say it's Henry, who's, you know, was at the time a very high-level executive, he could tap into the full intelligence of the group. I need, as the leader of this business unit, a recommendation about what we do

00:27:08: Fisher: for this new regulation in this country relative to this pharmaceutical we're developing. I need everybody in this room to contribute a recommendation to me right now. So everybody alone, think about your recommendation. In pairs.

00:27:22: Fisher: compare and talk about the recommendation. In groups of four, I want one recommendation from each quartet, and it is my responsibility, and I have the authority.

00:27:32: Fisher: from out of those recommendations to actually take a decision and carry it forward. If you don't have that authority layer.

00:27:41: Fisher: what… what happens then? You need, like, some…

00:27:44: Fisher: some highly involved participatory decision-making process to then evaluate what the groups of four generated, and so you need this whole other structure in place. And so I do appreciate the, like, the ways in which he thinks about

00:28:00: Fisher: Holding and using authority even in a very highly distributed participatory approach or structure.

00:28:08: Fisher: But I think that's kind of an underappreciated dimension.

00:28:12: Fisher: of… The context in which you might use some of these methods.

00:28:20: Johannes Schartau: Alright, we're getting close to the end of our podcast section. I would be interested in the question if… imagine I'm starting out as a facilitator.

00:28:30: Johannes Schartau: And I want to just, I don't know, just improve. What is something that people, in your opinion, should try first? What is something that provides quick benefit?

00:28:44: Fisher: all the people I know that, like, really…

00:28:49: Fisher: Accelerated their familiarity with group process, or group dynamics, or group structure, or facilitation, whatever framing you want to put around it.

00:28:59: Fisher: I think noticed that almost every interaction we're a part of is under-structured.

00:29:07: Fisher: Whether that is…

00:29:09: Fisher: The community meeting at the farm that you're a part of, whether that is the check-in with your family in the evening, whether that is…

00:29:21: Fisher: I don't know, a conversation with your religious group, whatever the situation is, there is almost always an under-structured dimension to it.

00:29:32: Fisher: And the people I know that really sort of picked up and started working very quickly

00:29:38: Fisher: Found those very low-risk situations to bring a little bit more structure to.

00:29:45: Fisher: And as a result, Kind of learned that it was trustworthy.

00:29:52: Fisher: And that structure does have a possible benefit in those situations.

00:29:58: Fisher: So, those are the people that I sort of observed growing their practice very quickly.

00:30:05: Anna Jackson: I think, if you're just getting started, and you gotta do something with a group.

00:30:11: Anna Jackson: Troika is a wonderful hedge. You got 3 people, everybody's chewing on something, everybody can contribute to each other, like, it's a wonderful… it's a wonderful method to give and receive and feel the wisdom of a group.

00:30:26: Anna Jackson: And it's really easy to run. So if, like, you know, you want a quick win, you want to make some progress, it's like…

00:30:33: Anna Jackson: I think a really good one for that, and I still love it. And it's incredibly well-structured, it's very robust if you look through the different lenses that LS are organized around. It's got a lot of… it's got a lot going on.

00:30:50: Johannes Schartau: Great, thank you for this conversation. You're going to stay here, and we'll do some interaction. Let me just wrap up. So I hope this session has given you some concrete ideas for your own transformation challenges.

00:31:01: Johannes Schartau: At HolisticCon, we put into practice what we discuss in Transform together. We provide companies with holistic support throughout the digital transformation process, from strategy and technology to organizational change.

00:31:13: Johannes Schartau: We make our customers more resilient, establish a future-proof agile culture, create new business models, and inspire people with better services and products.

00:31:21: Johannes Schartau: If you're facing similar challenges, or are wondering how you can implement the ideas from this session in your organization, please feel free to contact us. You can find all the information you need at holisticon.de.

00:31:33: Johannes Schartau: And also, don't miss our next Transform Together session on October 10th at 4pm, that is Central European Summertime.

00:31:42: Johannes Schartau: Our guest will be Anton Skornyakov, and he will be talking about his book, The Art of Slicing Work, and we're again going to have some interaction there, and you will learn how to slice any kind of project or initiative

00:31:56: Johannes Schartau: Into valuable subsets and packages, and really looking forward to seeing you then.