E136: Facilitating Improvement Events with Evan Unger

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In this episode, I share an interview with Evan Unger, who is a change leader with expert facilitator that helps leaders transform their virtual teams to dramatically increase collaborative decision-making, buy-in and results. He shares his professional journey from a leadership role at Merck to becoming an expert in collaborative leadership and facilitation.

He introduces the POPRA model (Purpose, Objectives, Process, Roles, and Agreements) as a foundational framework for ensuring high-stakes meetings are productive. He highlights the transition from traditional face-to-face workshops to virtual facilitation over the past few decades, emphasizing that real learning requires active practice rather than passive observation.

He also discusses how successful change management depends heavily on the work done before and after an event to ensure stakeholder alignment and long-term implementation. He also provides practical advice for managing group dynamics, such as handling dominant personalities and using simultaneous chat to engage introverted participants. He also mentions that technical skills are vital, but the ability to navigate human emotions and politics is the essential “missing link” for effective change agents.

To wrap up, he talks about a specific event format called Future Search that is a powerful approach for nonprofits and government agencies to engage large numbers of stakeholders to help find common ground solutions to big problems.

00:17 Career Origins at Merck
02:08 Building Change Methods
03:25 Healthcare Role and Change Agents
04:45 Facilitation Gap in Lean
05:34 Flight Metaphor and POPRA
10:01 Landing and Culture Commitment
13:11 Virtual Training and Practice
24:15 Handling HIPPOs and Dynamics
36:31 Hybrid Tips and Wrap Up

Listen to the podcast on this page, download it on your favorite podcast player (search “Lean Six Sigma for Good”) or watch the entire interview at https://youtu.be/ML8jUKMkwoQ

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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript
Note: may contain typos and errors, generated with AI

Evan Unger

First of all, thank you, Brian, for having me on the program. I think I’m a little older than you, so I got out of business school in 1989, went and worked for a large pharmaceutical company, Merck. And they had a rotational assignment for MBAs. They liked what I was doing. And then they just made-up this job, literally made it up. It was called the Director of Change Leadership and Development, which, in all honesty, was a fancy title. I had no idea what I was doing. I’m like three years out of business school. New CEO comes on board. He does his assessment and CEOs will do. And he’s not happy because it’s bureaucratic, siloed, and people aren’t collaborating. I was running a major re-engineering project back then. And then it was Michael Hammer was the big process improvement guy. That’s how far back I go. And we, what ended up happening, we were trying to redesign how procurement worked collaboratively. And so we did this process where we taught the leaders what came from GE’s workout and their change acceleration process, it went incredibly well. We ended up programmatizing it. And that’s how I got into this field. Now, this is 89. Right? And when the CEO challenges me, it’s 93. I don’t have e-mail yet, Brian. So we were teaching people this art of leadership, what we call collaborative leadership, sitting in rooms together, working on walls, which people still do, right? But it’s on flip charts, right? We’re doing old school stuff. And it was always a program with 12 people and two instructors, three day intensive bootcamp. But over time, technology changed, right? And I got, I left Merck after six years and worked for a healthcare company for a couple of years. And then I started doing consulting on change and cultural interventions. So that’s the genesis of how I got started in this arena.

Brion Hurley

Great. And was there infrastructure in place at Merck at the time? Or you guys were trying to adopt this method, GE workshop, CAP. Is that something you’re picking up from other people or you’re just building it as you win? Or was there some kind of program that they already set up?

Evan Unger

The new CEO was experimenting with something he called the workplace of the future. Actually, it was the head of manufacturing who really was doing it because I was supporting the head of manufacturing. So there to your answer, no, there wasn’t anything, but they had a bunch of senior executives running out and looking at all the best practices. Again, this goes back a ways. And I connected with my mentor, who was a professor at the University of Michigan, and he had run G’s Crotonville. And so on this big lead procurement reengineering project, we were bringing these methodologies from outside that Merck was a very successful company. I think they were Fortune Magazine’s most admired company five years in a row around then. And so they really hadn’t gotten used to dealing with change or anything like that. And they were just going through that because some major products were coming off of patent and they were trying to figure out how are we going to work in a world where we don’t have this guaranteed cash flow stream. And so no, there wasn’t any particular methodology there.

Brion Hurley

Okay. And then on the healthcare side, what was your role there? What kind of work did you do? I know you’re there just shortly, but.

Evan Unger

Yeah, honest truth is I took six months, had gotten divorced and then left Merck, traveled around the world. And then I got, I got recruited and brought in there and they liked the title I had at Merck and they changed the words around slightly. And I was the vice president of leadership development and change. But again, they just made the title, but I was doing the same type of work, right? I was facilitating change projects. And then, of course, as a good internal consultant or good external consultant, what we always want is to build cultural capability. So as part of those interventions, there was always training people in what really at a fundamental level are change agent skills. That’s what this collaborative leadership is. It’s knowing how to bring groups together, help them make the best possible decision, design the best process if we’re improving a process, get people to buy in, so they implement. And that’s what we always did is we facilitate a lot of complex collaborative meetings over the decades, and then train the internal change agents of which Lean Six Sigma types, agile types, people who are running major projects or programs, they’re the change agents. And that’s who we’ve trained for 33 years now.

Brion Hurley

And I think that’s a really important skill set that A lot of people in this process improvement world, they don’t really have that training, a formal training on how to facilitate. It’s, you seem like you could probably lead this group, go in there and help them navigate this. And as people trying to implement change, you’re kind of thrust into this facilitation role, whether you’re prepared for it or not. I think that’s a big gap in a lot of our trainings is. really knowing how to do it well. And just through practice, you get better at it. But I know that’s definitely something that we seem to lack. And I don’t know of a lot of people that got really formalized facilitation training. What are some of the things that you’re going through with that with them on that workshop? Can you talk through that?

Evan Unger

Yeah, it’s really 101. It’s the basics of how to engage a group of people and deal with challenging disruptive people, and having tools and techniques. You know, and process mapping would be a classic example of a tool or technique. The metaphor we might use for leading a task force or a continuous improvement engagement or a meeting or workshop is the metaphor of a plane flight. I’m in Denver. You’re in, I think, Miami. If I’m coming to visit you, there’s three parts to that journey. Takeoff. which doesn’t take a lot of time. I was at the airport last weekend. I always time how long it is from the time they hit the jets to wheels up. It was 37 seconds, usually somewhere in that range. If it doesn’t go well, we’re all dead. Now, once the plane’s in the air, I’m gonna get to Miami airspace, planes on call, flying outta the air. And that’s the work we do in the continuous improvement engagement, in the workshop, in the meeting, and the third part where we get plane crashes is on landing. So the first thing that we teach people is the art of takeoff. Most meetings should not be allowed to happen. They really shouldn’t. Most meetings could be an e-mail. They could be a PowerPoint deck set out ahead of time. We’re focusing on high stakes meetings that need to happen. Process redesign meetings, strategy meetings, planning meetings, right? Meetings on how we’re going to roll a major product, a big strategy decision. So these meetings have to happen. But most meetings should not be allowed under the hangar ’cause the leader has not thought through why are we doing this and what are we trying to get done? So they go into the meetings fuzzy on the most fundamental questions. And if I don’t know what the destination is, Miami, metaphorically, I’m gonna end up down in Dallas-Fort Worth. Any flight plan will do. So the model we teach them, it sounds so simple, and it is so simple, but people just don’t do it, it’s called the POPRA model. It’s an acronym. The first P stands for the purpose, right? The O stands for the objectives for the meeting. And again, call it goals, deliverables, outcomes. What difference does it make? But it’s the same thing. What are we trying to get done? The second P stands for the process, which is the flight plan. In a meeting, it’s the agenda. But underneath an agenda, there’s all sorts of mini processes, if you will, tools, techniques we’re going to use. The R stands for the roles, right? And if I don’t know the destination, what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, I can’t design a flight plan. I can’t even figure out who should be there and what roles they should play. One of the most important roles is who’s going to decide if we can’t reach consensus. Then the A on the POPR model stands for agreements. It’s the rules of engagement, how we want to interact from an interpersonal standpoint. Those five questions have to be answered, often with the client or the sponsor of a major continuous improvement engagement ahead of time. If I don’t have those things answered, I shouldn’t even be allowed to have engagement move forward. Then when I’m in the room, the only person who may know those things, even if I send it out as pre-work, is me. So on takeoff in the meeting, I’ve got to spend time Getting your group clear, why are we doing it, and what are we trying to get done? An agenda is merely the roadmap or flight plan, so that’s fairly straightforward. The roles have to be contracted for. Now, we have tactical roles, who’s described, who’s the timekeeper, right? But the decision-making role and my role as a leader and the participant role has to be explicit. And then we put in place some basic agreements, but that’s the starting point. of making sure you have a well-run, facilitated event, a Kaizen event, a workshop, whatever it is.

Brion Hurley

And you said it was POPRA, P-O-P-R-A.

Evan Unger

That’s the model. It’s very simple, right? It sounds obvious, but people, they don’t have this locked in before the meeting, and then they bounce off other people’s objectives or other people’s agenda for my meeting. And that’s what holds a whole meeting together, and the more explicit it is, the better you’re gonna be as a collaborative leader.

Brion Hurley

I like the flight analogy. I think that’s great cuz it is really three phases that I talk about too, and I go over Kaizen events and improvement workshops. You gotta spend a lot of time in that preparation phase, getting ready so that when you get to that event, if you did that well, the event will go smooth. Like you said, the flight will go well if all the takeoff part is done really well. And then. on the landing, it’s the follow-up part to say, are we going to implement and get all these things done? It’s great that we talked a lot about things and maybe we did some of that during the event to get a lot of these things checked off. But the follow-up, I’m just thinking back to some recent clients and I don’t know if they finished their action items. I ping them and remind them, this is where we should have a final report ready. How are things going? And things tend to drag out, right? So That piece is really that standardized way of kind of running these things, I think is really helpful for people to be successful.

Evan Unger

Yeah, I’d say the event is the easy part. The hard part is the change agent work ahead of time, getting the stakeholders aligned, right? them understanding their roles. Often we would tell the sponsor, you’re coming in, you’re kicking off and telling the group at least the P and the O and the POPRA model why you’re doing it, what you want to do. We want to bring them back at the end. They hear the group’s work, they sign off on the group’s work, and they show some level of commitment. But then the other change agent work is what happens after an event, right? Does it get implemented? And I would say, that most of the time it’s very hard because you have to really have discipline around holding leadership accountable, holding the teams, implementing things accountable. And as consultants, you and I are consulting, we often go into organizations and we do great work, but it may go nowhere if the internal change agents don’t own it. And that is the hard thing for any senior leader is not just pick something agile, lean, lean Six Sigma, pick one thing, and make that everything in your organization, right? If you’re going to be an agile organization, everything should be agile. If you’re going to be a lean organization, everything should be lean. That improves your performance management systems, how you hire people, how you train people. But that kind of cultural commitment is rare. Right? Because people dabble around in things or one leader really gets it, does this, and then the next leader, the next CEO takes over and they’re into something else. And all that work culturally just dissipates. That’s why change in big organizations, any organization, we work with a lot of small organizations, nonprofits, school systems I’ve worked with. It doesn’t, I’ve always said it doesn’t matter the nature of the work you’re doing, educating children. is not manufacturing something, but to some degree you are manufacturing successful students. We wouldn’t like to talk about it. And so it really doesn’t matter what arena you’re in. The same disciplines are essential throughout any organization.

Brion Hurley

Let’s continue on with the idea around the schools. Have you helped, do you do facilitation for the schools? Or do you do, or do you just have people come in and train and then they’re off doing the events? Or have you continued to do that facilitation? And what was your experience working with school systems?

Evan Unger

We did both. I want to emphasize did, right? Because when the pandemic hit, I stopped doing consulting. And I just train people how to facilitate complex collaborative meetings. But when we did it, we were doing both. Right. Often we would work with individual schools and do future search conferences, trying to help our school envision different ways of interacting with parents, community members, students, right. So they were events we would facilitate. And then I did train, it’s got to be over 500 people in this art of leadership. Now understand, when I started my career, as I said, there was no WebEx early on, definitely no Microsoft Teams or Zoom. None of this stuff existed. A Spawk box and a fax was high tech back then. So I don’t have e-mail, but over time, In big companies, unlike school systems, clients started saying, we’re not flying executives around the world anymore. Back in 93, a company would spend a ton of money flying people into a city, run a face to face event. And clients said, Evan, we’re using WebEx or live meeting or GoToMeeting, some of the early platforms, Skype. And can you teach us how to do this virtually on screens where some people are in the room and other people are dialing in from all our countries in the world? And I said, Sure, and I dabbled in it. Honest truth is, I resisted it. It didn’t sound that interesting, right? It really didn’t, working on screens like this. When the pandemic hit, everything changed, right? Even school systems went remote for a while. Certainly organizations on a global team, they all went remote. We were all in lockdown. So I just took what we were doing in terms of teaching people this art of collaborative leadership and ported it onto screens. People loved it. They were in lockdown. They were trying to figure out how do we do these continuous improvement events, right? Or strategy offsites, whatever it is, virtually. And it’s the amazing thing, it’s this almost the same exact program. Now we were running it as a three day face to face program, right? Sitting in rooms, working on walls, working on post-its, sticky dots, all things you’ve done and your listeners have done. Now we train them how to do it virtually. It’s four slightly shorter days, but it’s, you know, still long days. But in the four days, there’s only two hours of lecture, right? Human beings don’t learn through lecture. The bulk of the program, there’s two practice labs, the second and the fourth day where people are on the hot seat. That’s why it’s only 12 people. They’re going to be practicing. They’re going to get intensive feedback. They’re going to have to give feedback, so it becomes a cultural change, just teaching people how to give feedback to one another. And then the third day is all demos, modeling, showing them what the style of leadership is teaching the basic tools. And so this very little lecture, because that’s how adults learn. Now in this day and age, Brian, we all know, and I have senior execs, they’re not going to take four days, right? They’re senior vice presidents at that point in their career, they should, because they’re showing people what miserable leadership looks like, but they won’t. But they’ll come in for three hours, watch the fourth day of the program, see what we’re doing. If they’re running an agile group, Lean Six Sigma group, change transformation group, even a PMO, they’re going to sit with me and I debrief them. They’re like, Evan, I want all my people to know how to do this. And I’ll say, great, let’s do it. And then almost always, they’ll say, but I can’t take people offline this much time. And I’ll say, but wait a minute, because I’ve asked two questions of senior leaders for decades, how many meetings are going to take place in your organization? And that depends on size, right? Big company like Merck, they may have 200,000 meetings in a single day, right? But the second question I’m asked them is, what’s the average effectiveness of a typical meeting? And they say, I’ve asked that question zero to 100%, I don’t know, 5,000, 6,000 times. I’ve never heard someone say 80%, almost always. It’s 60 or lower. Most of the time, it’s in the 30 to 50% range. And I say, you can’t take time to do this. This is the most fundamental thing, this art of knowing how to run high-stakes meetings. And they’ll backpedal in this day and age, and then they’ll say, Evan, this is what I want. I want my people to know how to do this, but here’s how I want you to deliver it as 10 videos that my people can watch. And why don’t you just show them how to do it on video? And I always say, I’m not interested. Go find someone else going to waste your time and money. And some clients find that rather abrupt. They’re like, Evan, the client’s always right. And I say, you’re not right, and you know you’re not right. And they say, what do you mean? I’ll say, Did you have kids who learn to drive? They’ll be like, Yeah, of course. I’ll say, Would you have let your children launch 10 videos on how to drive and given them the car keys or 10 videos on how to swim? Great, I watched the videos. Let’s push in the deep. And nobody would do that. But in this day and age, everyone wants a quick fix. And if I want to learn anything, it requires practice. And that’s why people have loved what we do for decades, because they get real skills that are Apple Pillow in the real world. And we’ll continue to do this. Maybe AI is going to change everything. I’m sure it will, but there’s going to be human beings for a while and they need to know how to manage groups.

Brion Hurley

I’m glad you talked about the virtual. And so AI, that’s one thing I think that we will still have some influence on is the ability to bring people together and make decisions. And unless there’s a robot that can facilitate, I think that maybe, like you said, that is down the line, but.

Evan Unger

Hopefully not, hopefully far enough down the line, I want to retire at 70, so. If I could ride this out for another eight years, I’ll be fine.

Brion Hurley

Me too. Yeah, maybe another 20 years. That’d be nice.

Evan Unger

Maybe not though. It’s coming fast.

Brion Hurley

It’s pretty fast. Yeah. But I think the ability to work through these complex issues that where people have different emotions, they have different motivations, different incentives, different backgrounds, different experiences, that’s not just. something easy to get to a resolution or a plan and get everyone bought into that plan. So I think that is a challenge and a skill set that is very important.

Evan Unger

Yeah, I think AI, what it’s doing already is copilot these things. They can summarize what you’re doing. You don’t need, what, 30 years ago, I would’ve had an administrative assistant in the meeting taking notes. You still have to, when you go to landing at the end of the meeting, you have to check that out. Because AIs aren’t always right, but they can help with that. The second place I think they’re going to help with is scenario planning, very quickly gathering data in the moment and helping human beings make better decisions. They may be able to give you a lot of options for how to redesign the process, but at the end of the day, most of these are going to be value choices, political choices. Human beings are messy. The human beings still are going to make the decision, at least in the short run. Right? Who knows when all of a sudden we’ll turn all the decision making, but generally they’re going to be value choices people need to make. And so I think there’ll be human beings still facilitating other human beings for a while. But then again, I’m sure there are people who are going to say, you got two years. years on that run. In that case, I’d like to just get to 65 and Medicare and Social Security.

Brion Hurley

But I think the also value, the value you talked about of bringing people together in a small group and then practicing and learning in making and struggling through that exercise in a safe space before they get thrust into this real life situation there. I think that’s really valuable too. And being able to talk to each other, I found and training classes, like sometimes the networking and discussions about their challenges and what they’re going through with other people in the room is very valuable that you don’t get when you’re sitting there watching a video by yourself. And so for having time in the training or course to be able to have conversations with others. And I think that’s an important thing that gets lost in this way of trying to streamline and get the information out and think of video is going to be the answer to how to solve that.

Evan Unger

Yeah. Training, it’s changed, right? Because that is the model. It’s self-paced learning. You’ve got master classes or LinkedIn learning video series, and there is a place for that. But one place where training I think is very important, especially as companies were forced or organizations were forced to work hybrid and people now have become happy working from home more. is they lost that human component, just the basics of me knowing how many children you have, or how stories about your youth, the commonality of us, that gets lost. Now, the honest truth in our training, because we’re training people how to facilitate virtually, it’s lost there. When we were running a face to face training, people would go to dinner together, or they’d even go to the break room and share those experiences. When we take breaks, everyone’s in their home. None of that is there. So to me, learning and development also has a critical cultural role to play in a new way, because when I bring people together for face-to-face training, and I think other than ours, where we have to train you how to do it virtually, you should bring people together face-to-face. That’s a place where you’re going to get the connection that’s not happening in these hybrid environments. And that’s why organizations are requiring people to come back to work. Right? Because at least when they’re with their team, those things are happening and they are not, you can’t, working on screens only gets you so far, right? There is just the basic human connection that is lost working in this hybrid way we are all working in now.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, I think that’s the thing that’s most noticeable is the side conversations and the, the breaks where you have conversations and I’m doing both at the same time so I can see that. That interaction at the breaks is way different. And that’s a lost part of that. That’s not really part of the training, but it is an important element that gets overlooked as and being important.

Evan Unger

Oh, I think it’s an implicit outcome, just like in our program. Even we like to train people who are all from the same. group everyone’s doing Kaizen events everyone’s doing agile everyone’s running major projects rather than sending people to programs individually right because you it becomes culture change because just asking people to give feedback and coaching to one another that in and of itself has a very important benefit because what we’re hoping is their comfort doing that in the four-day program then rolls out to their comfort in their real events to taking the discipline of giving coaching and feedback to another way, because on landing the plane, not only do you need to get clear on where we go from here, the explicit action items, who’s going to do what by when, but another important thing to do on landing is give people feedback on how the meetings running, like an after action review at the end of a sprint, right? What do we do? Well, what do we need to do better? So I’m building continuous improvement in, at the meeting by meeting level, the workshop by workshop level. And there’s really five things we’re teaching people. One was that popper model. Another one was landing the plane. The third was the work you need to do before you get to the meeting, because as we said, that’s the most important work. That’s what makes the Kaizen event actually successful. And then the other two are the art of handling challenging people. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term HIPPO decision making by chance from agile, right? It’s the highest paid person’s opinion. It’s an acronym. We’ve all been in that meeting, right? So there’s two things you have to do, right? One is how to handle them. And then the last thing we’re teaching people are some basic fundamental tools. And we use Mural, some people use Miro, we teach people how to facilitate using spreadsheets. But it’s not about the tools and techniques. I need to know how to handle those hippos because often they suppress conversation. They’re smart people in that event. But if the leader doesn’t know how to hold themselves in a way where they create space for others to weigh in, they’re not getting the information to make the best possible decision. And that is my job running those events, is to make sure it’s safe, So the real conversation takes place, the real muddiness of working in human dimensions, the real honest, this is what’s happening on the ground level, because I can’t make a good decision if that conversation hasn’t take place. And so I need to know how to manage the HIPAA. And I need to have enough tools that make sure we’re hearing from everyone, ’cause it’s often the most junior person closest to the work who may well be an introvert. or may well be one of those cool blue analyzing styles, an engineer, an introvert, not willing to talk, who may be a person of color, who may be speaking English as a second, third language, who has exactly the expertise to help the hippo, who may be the ultimate decision maker make the decision, but it never gets put in play. And we suboptimize what we’re doing. And so those are the five things we’re teaching them. They’re fundamentals, they’re 101, you get good at this, then what you’ve been trained on the Lean Six Sigma side, really gets put to work because the harder thing is, unfortunately, people show up in our meetings and we’re all dysfunctional and it’s not easy to deal with human beings and you need to know how to deal with that in addition to the technical side of really making sure the process is fine-tuned to deliver what it should deliver.

Brion Hurley

Yeah. And going into those meetings, you have no idea the background and the politics and the scars that people carry into some of these events and meetings and even talking about certain problems, it can be very challenging because you have no idea the backstory that went along with this whole problem and this person’s frustrated and they’ve tried similar things already and they got shot down and then this leader came in and demoted them and then now they’re rising back up, it’s like all that is unknown. And then it comes out during these events and you have to be able to navigate that. And that’s where a lot of people focus on their facilitation is that meeting part. Their big concern is how do I deal with the challenging person in the room, right? But you’re talking about all the other stuff that needs to be done too besides that. But I think that’s the initial fear that people have is how am I going to deal with this tough situation if someone gets out of hand or starts disrupting the team and we’re not really going down the right path, how do I deal with that?

Evan Unger

Yeah. And again, a lot of that you’re trying to figure out before you get to the event, right? As a consultant, a lot of times I got brought in, a leader would say, hey, I don’t like the way my team’s working. Can you come in and help Now, the first thing I know is probably a lot of the work’s gonna be about how they’re working with their team. I don’t wanna say that to them, but the first thing I would always do is an assessment where I’d go talk to every individual anonymously, have a real conversation, gather raw data, the comments people were really saying about what’s happening, and then sit down with the leader and say, Look, here it is, it’s anonymous. This is what’s really being said, and it’s often shocking to them. Right? And so it’s that message. And then having had those conversations with the people who are going to be involved in the event, I had enough information to know where the hotspots are. Now, there’s still hidden ones, right? Because there’s things that have nothing to do with their career. It could be they were abused as a child, I wouldn’t know that, right? Or they had just a father who was just a real taskmaster. Those kinds of scars would be very hard to surface. But the more data I have going into an event about the human side of things, it’s going to be easier to know how to facilitate because part of handling challenging people is bringing in other voices, right? And I often want to know who the positive people, the people who are supporters of what we’re doing. So I bring their voices in first. try to counterbalance those who might be more resistant or negative. But as I said earlier, the work in a high stakes event is what you did before you show up. The event is running the X’s and O’s.

Brion Hurley

You mentioned the future search. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I’ve read a little bit about that. I haven’t participated in that exactly, but I think it’s a really interesting approach of dealing with large groups and trying to work through a visioning activity.

Evan Unger

I think Marvin Weisbord was one of the intellectual founders of that movement with some other people whose name I should say, but I can’t remember. And again, a lot of that work is the work before you get to the mean, but what you’re doing is bringing the various stakeholder constituents together, often in a three-day event. And there’s a process designed to that where, just like anything else, you’re trying to get them to acknowledge what’s happening in the current state, create a shared vision based on all the stake or groups, and then start launching action teams to try to start shifting to that. So in many ways, a classical sort of visioning process, but it’s quite dynamic. Let’s take a school system, for example. If they were a high school, we would have, obviously, faculty members as one team. We would have community members as another team. We would have parents as another team. We would have administrators as a team. And then the other thing we would do, we would have, if they were high school level, we would have students. And so you would have all the stakeholders and they would be co-creating their vision of the future, right? And so if anyone can look it up, it is a hard meeting to facilitate, right? Because when you have those vested stakeholder interests, it’s hard, but the process of a future search is really quite brilliant in terms of bringing people together, right? And often you act out your vision, you have mixed stakeholder groups create these old way, new way, which really metaphorically gets at what they really want as a community. And then again, the work is what happens afterwards. As with any event, do you hold those action teams accountable for actually implementing what they wanted? And that’s the hard work. And that’s the work of the leader in a school system. It would be the principal’s role, right? But at the end of the day, I think any process, whatever it is, It’s the leader of that organization who ultimately either makes or breaks it. And if they don’t drive it, it’s not gonna go anywhere.

Brion Hurley

Yep. And speaking of facilitator and how many to have, is there a rule of thumb in terms of whether it’s or do you suggest there’s one facilitator or do you always recommend like a have two so there can be switching up or it depends on the size?

Evan Unger

I think two’s always easier. Because one could be in pure observation mode, noticing what the person actually trying to run the group dynamics doing. Now, when you ask a client to pay for two people, it’s twice as expensive. So there’s plenty of meetings I facilitated alone. And it also depends on the group size, right? A group of leadership team of seven people, eight people, I’d love to have a second person. But it’s doable by yourself. When I start getting to, I’d say 15 to 20 people, it becomes unwieldy. And also, I need to start thinking about breakouts. Right now, if you’re running a big event with 25, 30, which we have 50 people, you need to do a lot of the work at the breakout level, which you can do some things without a skilled facilitator in the breakouts. But the best thing would be to have people who you’ve trained as facilitators who can run the breakouts. And then you have two people running the plenary or group session when you bring the 50 pack together. I don’t think there’s any rule of thumb, but I would say it’s always better with two. Now, in the virtual world, it has to be two. because you need a tech facilitator who can monitor the chat, deal with someone whose tech has gone awry, right? And so it is a two person job for sure. I don’t think you can run a complex, let’s say you use Miro or Mural to do process mapping virtually. Someone’s got to be there trying to help the people who are bumbling around with the technology, right? And so I don’t think you have an option in the hybrid world to do it alone. It’s just the technical risk. is way too high. And what if you’re the one whose internet goes down as the facilitator? The meeting’s over. So it is without question in this day and age, if you’re running it as a hybrid process, it’s a two-person job.

Brion Hurley

How about to get ready? I guess what I’ve seen in the past and what I’ve tried to do is have a facilitator go through some kind of training. The first event they’re just participating or observing. And then they’re co-facilitating and then maybe they’re leading with a co-facilitator or a coach helping them out as a backup. Is there a format like that you recommend?

Evan Unger

Yeah, I think you’ve scripted it. That’s the way I learned, right? I went through G’s workout as a participant, right? I think I went through a couple of them. And then I got assigned a coach who was a facilitator of that process. And I started just doing pieces of a larger event, the easier pieces. Every night we sit down and get feedback, I would get feedback and coaching, right? Because that’s where the real work is. And because it’s not easy to run these events. And then I got handed the more complicated pieces, still getting feedback and coaching with a co facilitator was much more seasoned than me. And then eventually, I started launching and running events on my own. Now, when we did change transformation work, that’s the way we work. We were training the change agents up, they went through the process, and And then we would start letting them co-facilitate doing the easy pieces, coaching them, giving them feedback, giving them more and more of the more challenging pieces to run an event. And then eventually there was two of the internal change agents who were running the show. We as consultants pull back. We don’t want to make organizations dependent on us. That’s not our job. We want the change agents to have the skills and then they’re off and flying. So I think what you described is exactly the model because facilitating a group of high stakes senior people, there’s a lot of political risk for you. If it doesn’t go well, your leadership reputation is about to take a plane crash, right? You may not get a second swing. So just throwing people out there, it’s just not fair to the people. It’s not helpful to the group. And so that’s the way I would always run change pro projects. And that’s the way I got trained as a change agent 33 years ago.

Brion Hurley

Great. That’s a lot of good information and really helpful. Thank you.

Evan Unger

I want to leave your listeners who are running hybrid meetings where some people might be in the room, some are on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, a simple tip. And it sounds so obvious. People don’t do this. We’ve all been in the room together and two or three people, if I’ve got 15 people, might carry 80% of the conversation. right? And a lot of people never say a word. One of the things you can do using the chat, we call it a simultaneous chat. It sounds so obvious, but usually the way the chat works is those same two or three people do all the chatting and everyone else is like, what are they doing? What we teach people is do your chats as a simultaneous chat. Here’s what we mean by that. Pose the question that you want to hear a response from everyone. Make them type their response in the chat, full sentence, Right? But don’t let them submit it. Make them weight their intentions so everyone has time to write their response. Now, the other thing you do is you say, all right, use the hand raise reaction emoji. So you know, everyone’s had enough time. This does two things. One, it lets you know as the facilitator, everyone’s had enough time. But just as important, if not more, it starts putting pressure on the people less likely to talk to realize they’re going to have to type something. Then what you do is say, all right, now we’re gonna submit it simultaneous. I’m gonna put a little header in there, right? Maybe the header would be what are the major bottlenecks? And then they stream it all in at the same time. Now it does several things. One, it gives space for the people who never talk a chance and I can start calling them out more safely. Tell me more about what you mean about that bottleneck. I get to go back and look at who’s not participating still, right? Because I’m my tech facilitator and my co-facilitators. Wait, everyone’s participating except this person. And B, it starts holding space. So the hippo’s hearing from everyone. And this is the simplest tool. I don’t know why people don’t do it. But if you just use more simultaneous chat, it will change the dynamic of hearing from everyone. So I want to always like to lead people’s listeners with a simple tool. that anyone could do. And is easy to understand. I’ve appreciated this time and conversation and I hope it’s valuable to your listeners.

Brion Hurley

Absolutely. Yeah. So how can people reach you get a hold of you contact connect with you?

Evan Unger

He could go to Evan Unger and my LinkedIn page. And now there are six Evan Unger. I’ll be the one with a little goofy grin. If you see me, I have a blue check shirt like this one. The name of the company Schwartz and Associates, you can access our website there. It’s actually our landing page. Or you can go and it’s a mouthful. I’m sure you’ll have it in the show notes. https://www.terischwartzassociates.com/virtual/   which really is the information on the program, because our consulting work is not going on as much anymore. And especially if they’re from a nonprofit, they’re not going to pay as much money as a big corporation. But I always offer for listeners, if you’re from a new organization, reach out to me. I’ll knock over $2,000 off the price of a seat. Just try it. Because I know once they’ve tried it, if they’re sitting in a group doing agile or lean, lean Six Sigma, they’re gonna go back to their whoever’s running the group and say, train all our people in this. So I will knock a ton of money off for a new client for seat, reach out to me through our website. I’d love to have you there. And I really know, I haven’t done this for 33 years, this can be transformative. And it is a missing link that lean Six Sigma people don’t get taught. which is the group dynamic. And unfortunately, people show up at our meetings, and it’s messy, right? It would be so much easier if I’m the only one there. And I got to do exactly what I wanted to do. But I have to socialize it through 1215, who knows how many voices?

Brion Hurley

And thank you so much for your time is very insightful. And hopefully everyone connects and reaches out and pursue some more facilitation, training and experience.

Evan Unger

It’s been my pleasure, Brian. Thank you for having me.

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