Fostering Productive Learning Environments through Balancing Structure and Anti-Structure

Today my guests are Lisa Kay Solomon and Chris Ertel, the co-authors of the powerhouse 2014 book Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year! I devoured this book 10 years ago and I think you might enjoy it, too!

Lisa Kay Solomon is currently a Designer in Residence at the Stanford d. school, where she teaches classes such as Inventing the Future where students imagine, debate and analyze the 50-year futures of emerging tech, and works closely with the K12 community to make futures thinking a mainstay of 21c core curriculum. She has also been named to the Thinkers50 2022 Radar List and is one of ixDA's Women of Design 2020.

Chris Ertel is a managing director of Deloitte Consulting LLP with a specialist role designing and providing high-stakes strategic conversations for clients and priority firm initiatives, in the Deloitte Greenhouse® signature environments. Chris is an innovation strategist with 18 years of experience advising leading organizations. He holds a PhD in demography from UC-Berkeley.

We talk about

• What it really means to be a facilitative leader, and why it's so impactful. As Lisa and Chris say in MOI:

"At these critical moments, everyone will be looking at you, not for all the answers, but to help them unearth the answers together"

• The Five Core Principles of Moments of Impact, which can form a Design Process

1. Define your purpose (your design intent!)

2. Engage multiple perspectives (with your facilitation skills!)

3. Frame the issues

4. Set the Scene

5. Make it an experience (even an intense or challenging one!)

• How designing conversations is different from facilitating them: Lisa makes it clear that Conversation Design is about intent and purpose while Facilitation skills are the tool that helps orchestrate those Moments of Impact.

• Why Conversation Design isn't taught to leaders but should be (Lisa also tells us why it's so hard to teach, since it brings together strategy, psychology and emotional intelligence)

• Why Chris always coaches leaders to condense and delete content from their strategic meetings (to 10 slides!) instead of making what communications expert Nancy Duarte calls a "Procument" (something that's neither an easy to use and digest presentation or a leave-behind document!)

• How crucial discussing decision-making rights are - as Chris suggests many leaders want to keep their options open and wind up creating an "air of democracy without the reality of it"

• Why You should start becoming a junkie of learning theories

• The importance of balancing humor and levity with challenging-ness and sparkiness to create productive environments

• The importance of knowing that the "yeah buts" will come when we're hosting challenging conversations as in:

yeah, but, that won't work here! or…

yeah, but, what will we be able to report next quarter? Or…

yeah, but who's budget is going to cover that?

And so much more! If you have Moments of Impact that you need to shape, design, and lead and you *don't* have Moments of Impact on your desk - get it!

Head over to theconversationfactory.com/listen for full episode transcripts, links, show notes and more key quotes and ideas. You can also head over there and become a monthly supporter of the show for as little as $8 a month. You'll get complimentary access to exclusive workshops and resources that I only share with this circle of facilitators and leaders.

Links

Get Moments of Impact!

https://www.lisakaysolomon.com/about

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/profiles/certel.html

A plan is not a strategy: The short video from Roger Martin we were talking about!