Team Catapult

Cultivating Great Leaders and Effective Teams

  • Homepage
  • Workshops
    • Leading in High Stakes
    • Masterclass Series
    • Team Facilitation
    • Agile Team Coaching
  • About us
    • About TeamCatapult
    • Meet the Team
  • Podcast
    • Season 1
    • Season 2
  • Coaching
    • Leadership Coaching
    • Leadership Team Development
  • Resources
    • Blog
    • Articles
    • The Art and Science of Facilitation authored by Marsha Acker
    • Build Your Model for Leading Change by Marsha Acker
    • Podcast
    • Resources for your Journey
    • The Facilitation Planning Toolkit
  • Products
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Sign up for our newsletter

Marsha Acker

How To Best Guide Your Team With Virtual Team Facilitation

Leaders, is your team scattered across the nation, or the globe? Are you struggling to keep your team focussed, cohesive and productive? Whether your team is virtual due to the recent coronavirus pandemic or had been a virtual team by-design, facilitating a team remotely is easy in concept, but more challenging in reality. 

Fortunately, TeamCatapult has been in the remote work and remote team facilitation space for a long time! We have experience in this space and have been conducting Virtual Team Facilitation workshops for years. 

While attending a recent workshop, attendee Lisa from Get The Picture created this incredible resource for virtual team leaders. This is what was discussed and learned on Day1.  At first blush, it’s probably hard to land on a starting point.  We’ve outlined some salient points that touch on the flow of the workshop.

virtual team facilitation 2

Getting Started With Virtual Team Facilitation

The first thing to do when facilitating a virtual team meeting is to reduce distractions.  We recommend that attendees do one or all of these: 

  • Silence their phone
  • Shut the door
  • Close their email tab

While your team members take care of these things on their end, you as the facilitator should take care of some business as well! 

Tips for the Virtual Team Facilitator

1 Display a Welcome Screen

This assures everyone has come to the right place. This also makes everyone feel welcome.

2 Use a Slack channel for Parking Lot 

Be sure to clear it out by the end of the day! If you are unfamiliar with this term, the ‘Parking Lot’ is where you post follow up questions and discussions that might lead you on a path away from what you are teaching at the moment. 

Noting the responses and answers about any of the items and ‘clearing’ them at the end of the day validates the importance of questions without cutting into the formal workshop time.

3 Use a Virtual Circle in Mural to Open 

You can use photos of attendees, and invite people to ‘sit next to someone’. Once everyone is seated in the circle (virtual) take time for everyone to introduce themselves.  Again, this helps new attendees feel welcome and wanted.

4 Use Breakout Rooms in Zoom 

Ask people to reach you in Slack if you are needed during the breakout session. Zoom breakout rooms are a great way to have small group discussions among attendees.  We use these rooms so teams can work on simulations while capturing notes in Mural.

Timezones, Technology and Ground Rules

There are things that can go wrong when using technology, from the challenge of varying time zones, to not being able to connect, to having unstable Wifi. Expect these issues, but be sure to set ground rules!

Set and Scribe Ground Rules

  • Be in a quiet place
  • Be off mute
  • Be on video
  • Be on time
  • Pay attention

Ask: ‘What do you need of me?’ and ‘What do you need of each other?’

Include ways to handle collisions. For example – be clear how you will handle two people speaking at once. It does happen so have a plan in place from the beginning.

Low Stakes Virtual Team Facilitation

Often times meetings can get into a “high-stakes” atmosphere, where there are, simply put, conflicts within the team on an issue.  The question for a facilitator is how will you slow things down and make it feel low stakes and safe to continue on with the conflict? 

Here are three solutions:

  1. Narrate
  2. Chunk instructions
  3. Normalize

Use Question Prompts to Incite Curiosity

Get people outside of their normal ways of thinking about their work! Using question prompts gets attendees to open up and participate and move beyond what’s may have them stuck on how to talk about and resolve a topic.

Virtual Team Facilitation Design Tips!

Here are 3 design tips that might help you organize your next virtual meeting. 

  • Resist the urge to jump to tools
  • Test… is a meeting actually needed?
  • Use offline time to do work!

Learn More About Virtual Team Facilitation!

To find out more about Virtual Team Facilitation, check out what Lisa learned on Day 2 of the Virtual Team Facilitation Workshop!

We are grateful for Lisa’s willingness to share these visuals with you, our audience, to provide you with a glimpse into the world of Virtual Team Facilitation

Whether it is you, your leadership team, or your company that needs help with Virtual Team Facilitation, TeamCatapult is able to lend a hand.

Please contact us today for more information for both private and public Virtual Facilitation Masterclass workshops.

 

Five Guiding Principles of an Agile Team Facilitation Stance

Collaboration Is a Core Value In Agile

Regardless of the agile framework(s) you use, agile practices require some level of collaboration within teams or between teams, customers and stakeholders.

Collaboration is two or more people coming together to co-create something. When collaboration is effective it can have a euphoric feeling of accomplishment, success, trust, and teamwork. When collaboration is ineffective it can drain a team – that feeling that you get of ‘here we go again…same discussion, same outcome, just a different day’. Effective or ineffective, collaboration is messy – you can’t predict how it will go, things don’t always unfold the way you might think they will, and it’s always emergent.

Facilitation is a core competency for Agile Coaches – teams need facilitators who can foster effective collaboration, support meaningful dialogues and enable team decision-making.

In this introduction to developing guiding principles, we’ll identify and offer guidance regarding four of the most common traits that can subtly surface and begin to erode a team’s efficacy. Implementing core values needs to involve team members and the organization’s values alike.

First, here are some common challenges that can get in the way of effective collaboration in agile teams.

  • Asking for input when you’ve already made up your mind about what the decision or outcome will be
  • Using your positional authority of leading a meeting to drive your own agenda and influence a particular outcome
  • An unclear purpose and/or desired outcome for the collaboration
  • The team is unclear about how the final decision will be made (i.e. Is the group making a recommendation or a final decision? Will majority rule or will we strive for consensus?)

How We Think Is How We Lead

Learning facilitation tools and techniques are really useful but if what you believe is different from what you’re doing, well, the tools won’t really matter. Collaboration will be frustrating and less impactful than you might desire. In essence, we are searching for the values of a good facilitator.

It Begins With You

Facilitation is like a complex dance of polarities. When teams come together to collaborate, rarely are topics or decisions black and white with a clear ‘right’ answer. At any given time when you are leading a group from a facilitative stance, you’re interweaving different ideas and perspectives together, creating a rich and textured network of ideas that serve to deepen understanding and seek diversity. You’re helping the group define the shades of gray so that they can make more informed decisions.

You Are Managing Yourself


It takes a high degree of self-awareness, self-management and group awareness to navigate the dance. People are putting their trust in you to lead them through a complex process; to be heard, to be respected, to be valued and to contribute to something greater than what they could accomplish on their own.

Facilitators, you’ll prepare for this kind of work by starting with what you believe. In other words, create guiding principles for leading community members and teams.

How We Think Informs How We Act

The Five Guiding Principles


The five guiding principles of The Agile Team Facilitation Stance form the foundation upon what we believe about groups and teams and how those beliefs might show up in the room. Creating guiding principles for your team facilitation work will prepare you as you facilitate!

Facilitation Stance

1) Maintain Neutrality

At the highest level, this principle is about you owning the process, and the team owning the content.
In practice, this looks like bridging competing ideas, sharing what you see in the process with facts, and without judgment.

Review the following tables for each guiding principle and see what each one can look like in action

Internal Assumptions and Beliefs

  • I am active and engaged (not passive)
  • I own the process, they own the content
  • I add value by reflecting back to the group what’s actually happening
  • I am open minded and see value in all voices
  • Polarities in opinions offer opportunities to find common ground
  • I am vested in helping the group achieve their desired outcomes
  • Critique about the group process is not a critique about who I am

Practices

  • Say what you see, in a factual, non-judgmental way
  • Let go of judging right vs wrong
  • Take a systems perspective
  • Bridge competing ideas
  • Listen for the 2% common ground
  • Offer ideas with no attachment to the outcome
  • Inquire by asking powerful questions
  • Seek to understand and deepen the group’s understanding

2) Stand in the Storm

The term “storm” can look, feel and behave differently in each team. This is about seeking out and really listening to differing stances, perspectives, options, solutions, and paths. Without taking sides, a facilitator holds the space for all to speak and be heard during a meeting.

Internal Assumptions and Beliefs

  • Storms create deeper understanding and context for what’s being discussed
  • I don’t need to take sides; I need to be able to help the group hear all perspectives
  • Opposition offers correction
  • The purpose of conflict is to be helpful to a process
  • Dysfunctional behavior is a sign of displeasure with something that is happening or something that is wanting to happen, more often than it is about what it looks like in the moment (i.e., interpersonal conflict)
  • I don’t need to have the answers; I need to help the group find the solution

Practices 

  • Create the container that allows for storms
  • Sense when there is dissonance – either overt or covert
  • Have empathy with each member of the group
  • Inquire about opposition
  • Be fully present
  • Be self-aware of your own personal bias
  • Adjust the process if the conflict calls for it
  • Activate bystanders  – voice what you are seeing or hearing
  • Turn it back to the group to decide 

3) Hold the Group’s Agenda

By continually asking, “How can I best serve this group?” or “What does this group really need right now?” you’ll be operating within this principle. At times, a feeling of resistance, or an instinct to shut down may arise. Perhaps you receive feedback about the process and you feel the beginnings of defensive feelings.  The best tool to meet that feeling with is curiosity and a focus on holding the group’s agenda.

Internal Assumptions and Beliefs

  • This is their Agenda (Big ‘A’ agenda – the underlying need; not little ‘a’ agenda of a meeting)
  • Resistance is not dysfunctional; it’s trying to be helpful
  • Inability to converge or decide may mean there is something that needs to be discussed that has not been discussed 

Practices

  • Always be asking ‘How can I best serve this group?’
  • Treating all actions by the group as data about what they really need
  • Meeting resistance with curiosity
  • Aware of the difference between the facilitators desire and what the group needs
  • Creating a space that allows for opposition to both process and content
  • Owning the process and being open to feedback about the process 

4) Honor the Wisdom of the Group

Related to Stand in the Storm, mentioned earlier, this principle, at its core is about trust. Trusting that the group has it’s own wisdom and developing an environment where each member of the team can grow, stretch and achieve as a respected and valued collaborator. Everyone on the team has both wisdom to learn and wisdom to share.

Internal Assumptions and Beliefs

  • Trust in the collective intelligence, capacity, and experience of the group
  • People are more committed to what they have helped to create
  • The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
  • Diversity and difference enhance the outcome
  • Inclusiveness and engagement of all is needed
  • An environment of trust will lead to participation by all
  • The group already has all it needs, my job is to help them access that knowledge 

Practices

  • Create a container that fosters trust, connection, and inclusiveness
  • Design group processes that engage the whole group
  • Make it safe for all voices
  • Ask for the opposing voice
  • Find the thread that leads to consensus, and help the group pull it through 

5) Uphold the Agile Mindset

In practice, this principle can be agility itself: mindset, methods, and actions. There’s a foundational belief that a facilitator can help the team adapt the agile practices in the moment while still upholding the agile values and principles. Best accomplished by modeling agile values and maintaining a servant leadership stance.

Internal Assumptions and Beliefs

  • I honor the values and principles of the agile mindset, and use it to inform group processes, both planned and in the moment
  • I hold the agile mindset, lightly, so that the way the group holds the mindset can be prominent
  • I understand the agile practices well enough to support the team
  • I can adapt the agile practices in the moment while still upholding the agile values

Practices

  • Model agile practices
  • Adapt the practices based on the performance, maturity, and needs of the team
  • Embrace a lean/agile mindset
  • Lead with servant leadership

Five Guiding Principles In Action

These are, on the surface, simple principles. You’ve likely noticed in the sections of internal assumptions and practices that it can get complex quickly. Each guiding principle offers its own complex, rich lessons and dynamics. In future posts, we’ll take deeper dives into these complexities with specific examples of each principle in action. We’ll show what they are in action…and what they aren’t too.

For now, which of these principles feels like a mindset that you already hold – it comes naturally for you?

Which principle feels more like a stretch?

What’s one belief you might “try on” in an upcoming meeting?

What actions would you take that might be different from what you have done in the past?

Do you want to learn how to facilitate guiding principles?

How To Lead in a Connected but Separate Space

What Can Make Online Learning Challenging? 

By: Marsha Acker, Antoinette Coetzee, Kay Harper, and Kari McLeod

As we’ve been having conversations with many of you over the past few weeks, we thought we would share and normalize some of the concerns that we’ve heard from you regarding online learning. We understand that you might naturally be feeling hesitant about an online experience. After all, there is no lack of online options these days! 

We at TeamCatapult love connecting with people in a room. We care deeply about creating a space for deep learning through experiences, reflections, and conversations. We feel a connection with our class participants, the teams we coach, and the working session participants we facilitate. We take the time to get to know others.

TeamCatapult has been teaching a workshop called “Virtual Facilitation Masterclass” for the past four years. We co-created this course with Rachel Smith, an expert in Virtual Work and Remote Online learning and in partnership with The Grove, pioneers of visual and virtual collaboration, to help fill a gap we saw as the workplace included more remote and distributed teams. Experienced, in-the-room facilitators were wondering, “How do I translate that into leading engaging collaboration in a virtual environment?” 

With the public health measures in place to stall the Coronavirus and COVID-19 Pandemic, we have decided to pivot and present all our courses in a virtual setting for the foreseeable future.  Which means we will apply the same advanced techniques we teach in the Virtual Facilitation Masterclass to bring our attendees the very best virtual experience in all our workshops.

Fact: Online Learning Will Not Be The Same As in the Room

That is right! Online and in-person learning experiences are different. 

However, difference does not necessarily mean less-than. First and foremost, you can’t simply “copy-paste” a course designed with the intention of in-person training into an online format. 

Virtual space creates different energy–energy that takes a mindset and skill to design and facilitate. The key is that successful virtual leaders examine the intent of what they are trying to accomplish and aren’t merely fixated on porting in-the-room techniques to an online medium. 

The protocols when working online are different and take some getting used to, but once you have gone through the initial learning curve, the rewards extend way beyond the workshop. 

Fact: We Cannot Bring Our Entire Physical Being to an Online Workshop

When we meet one another in person there are a lot of physical cues that help us create connection. In the type of classes we teach at TeamCatapult, we need connection to grow, and that grows into trust, in order to create the optimum conditions for transformational learning. One of the concerns we’ve heard is that people just don’t like “online;” they feel disconnected from others. 

We cannot bring our entire physical being to an online workshop. Well, not yet, anyway! Yet we all have experiences of building connections with people we have never met in person–someone you’ve only exchanged emails or letters with, the characters we see in movies, or our favorite celebrity chef or musical artist. In some cases the connection may be one-way, but it grows because we get to know the person, understand and resonate with them.

Creating connection virtually is one of the things that we are called to do especially now that so much of our work is online via email, Slack, Zoom, Mural, and the like. And from connection, we need to build trust. 

There are three stages of building trust in remote teams, all of which can be applied to online learning: swift trust, cognitive trust, and affective trust. 

Trust builds differently with remote teams than in-person teams. We use our virtual team facilitation experience to build trust with participants, the same way we teach you to do so. 

We start with a brief check-in, not just at the start of the day, but after breaks and lunch. We establish spaces where people can connect informally. In our training, we do this through asking people to Zoom in before class starts and we set up Slack channels that aren’t directly related to the course. As our participants start to connect, we make sure to bring their brief social exchanges into their working sessions. We divide these working sessions into whole-group, small-group, and paired discussions. That’s right! Effective remote meetings and trainings have participants doing things with one another. This too builds trust.

In our online workshops, we guide you to growing your mindset and acquiring the skills to build connection and trust in your teams, which you then take what you’ve learned back to your organizations. You will help your teams, not just while they are working from home because of Coronavirus, but in the future when work is bound to look different than it did two months ago.

Fact: Facilitation and Coaching Skills Can Be Learned Online

We hold two beliefs about the concern whether skills like facilitation and coaching can be learned online.

First, we cannot train others in something that we have not achieved some level of mastery. For that reason, all of our faculty are certified professional coaches, and trained or certified facilitators, and have their own practice of facilitation and coaching with teams. The deep experience of our faculty is what allows each of us to pivot easily in the moment, work with what shows up in a group, and have leadership range in how we co-create and lead an engaging learning environment. 

Our second belief about this concern is that no one can teach you facilitation and coaching simply by providing a course. We can provide key principles. We can help you understand your own mindset and beliefs about these competencies. But, you will only truly learn them by doing them. So practice, practice, practice is a fundamental component to our curriculum. In our virtual classes, you will have the opportunity to practice facilitation and coaching in a safe learning space, and give and get feedback. We set you up for success in growing your mindset and practicing these skills for when you return to work the following day or week.  The same opportunities we provide in our in-person classes, with an added benefit of getting to practice with remote collaboration tools! What better time to practice these skills virtually when you will be using them virtually for work.  

Fact: Online Learning With TeamCatapult Does Not Mean You Sit and Stare at a Screen for 8 Hours Straight!

Virtual work is more taxing than we think it’s going to be. How can it be so tiring just sitting in a chair, looking at a computer screen, typing, and talking on Zoom calls? 

We promise: TeamCatapult virtual classes will not have you sitting for the entire class. 

  • We build in more frequent and longer breaks than you may be used to in both in-person and virtual training. 
  • You’ll have time to go for a walk at lunch and prepare a real meal. 
  • You’ll be able to check-in with kids doing homework and pet your dog during our breaks. 

In our ICAgile Facilitation and Coaching classes, we’ll even have you up and moving around a few times during the class. All of this is designed to give your brain and body a break. Not only will you have more energy for the class, these longer breaks create the time and space that allows what you’ve learned to settle and stick.

The Benefits of Online Learning!

While online learning certainly is not the same as learning in the room, there are numerous ways online learning might be a better fit for you than learning in the room.

Learning and Teaching Online Will Be a Must-Have Skill Moving Forward

As leaders and managers our way of working is changing. 

What will your leadership and management style look like in a year from now? None of us knows the answer to that, but what we do know is that our way of working will change. There is a strong possibility that for the foreseeable future we will not be gathering in a room with 15-20 people to learn and collaborate together. 

The same will be true for your teams. 

How will you lead in a remote world? How will you connect with people? How will you engage a remote team?

The experience you need to make these changes can be learned in our classes and then be applied to your own team. 

Introverts Unite; Online Learning Was Made For You! 

Our world of work and learning is highly biased towards those with a preference for extroversion. Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, writes about how brainstorming, meetings, learning and work all have a bias towards extroversion (click here for a short article).  

In our online programs we certainly do ask people to come prepared to speak, listen, contribute and “play-in.” The experience is different than it is in-person though. We often put participants in small break-out groups where the discussion is in a quiet and private space. You don’t hear the conversation from other groups in the room, which lessens distraction and increases your opportunity to focus and engage. 

In a room with others it’s easy to be distracted by what other people are doing or not doing. Online you can turn off your camera and mute your microphone and truly have a quiet moment. We have also designed even more reflective exercises in our online classes, giving everyone the quiet space to reflect and take notes. 

Getting to Know the Whole Person

We could jump for joy over this benefit! For decades we’ve watched leaders struggle with this concept of “my work self” and “my home self” and that somehow those are different. It’s almost like there’s a belief that one can put on a work suit (armor?) and go off to work and then come home and be a completely different person. This is a false duality because we are whole human beings. The more we try to suppress one side of ourselves at work, the less joyful, authentic and real we feel. It’s been our experience that this is the source of many interpersonal conflicts at work. 

What we’ve seen in our online learning spaces is that the whole person is coming to our courses–mainly because we don’t have a choice! 

We see people wearing sweatshirts rather than dress shirts, sitting at kitchen tables (or in their closet just to find a quiet place), being interrupted by determined and loving pets, and laughing as kids go streaking through the background in diapers or coming in for a quick hug. 

While all of those things could be viewed as distractions, we incorporate them and make them okay. These are all opportunities to get to know one another more deeply.

We know that trust builds more quickly when we know people more personally. When the right conditions are present and people are willing to fully show up, our online learning experience creates deeper connections between people than in the room. 

The Future of TeamCatapult Workshops

Just like you, with the Coronavirus and COVID-19 Pandemic, we’re continuing to experiment, innovate and challenge our own learning edges. We’ve moved most of our workshops online, but we haven’t done it at the expense of lessening the learning or the experience for participants! 

As we continue to sense and respond to the pandemic, we will keep your learning experience at the core of our experimentation and innovation.

We hope you’ll join us as we chart a path towards the future of leading in a connected, but separate space.

Showing Up and Engaging: How We Put It All into Practice

How We Put Agile Leadership into Practice

How we choose to show up and how we choose to engage as leaders directly affects the outcome of becoming an agile organization.

Leaders are the KEY to transformation—they are at the center of the change. To be successful, the change has to begin WITHIN leaders. The job of leadership becomes owning the culture, setting a vision, enrolling others so it becomes a shared vision, and helping support what’s needed in the culture to fuel that vision. 

Everything you say, do, reward, or focus on sets the culture. The job of leaders is shifting away from shaping the work and shifting toward shaping the culture. How am I, as a leader, contributing to the culture we have?

Putting Agile Leadership Into Practice

The question to answer is this: How can we put into practice the characteristics of agile leadership and the structural components of conversation in order to lead cultural change?

Deepen Your Awareness.
Awareness precedes choice precedes change. How do you engage with your team?  What’s the impact you have in the team? How do you know? The more we are able to deepen awareness of our own behavior the easier it becomes to make choices that align with our intentions.

Grow Your Leadership Range.
True innovation and transformation happens when leaders create the space to learn and think together rather than acting on their preconceived ideas about the best way forward. There is common trap that leadership looks like having the answers, and  moving things forward. What if leaders had range? the ability to advocate for an action when needed, but also to create space for inquiry and deepened understanding? Adaptive challenges do not come with roadmaps, they require new ways of engaging and leading through the process of dialogue.

Imagine a company that is experiencing tough times in a competitive market. Now, compare the examples below—they model two different responses to the situation.  

  • Scenario #1: “We need to become more innovative. Our competitors are outpacing us each quarter. I want t  launch a transformation initiative. Janet, I would like you to take this on. Let me know what you need for the budget. Let’s talk next week about defining the key metrics and goals.”
  • Secnario #2: “ I’m noticing we are starting to lag behind our competitors in time to market. I would like to think together about ways we might tackle this issue. What do others see? What opportunities do we have? Where might we be getting it wrong?”


In the first scenario, the leader makes an assertion, observes the current state and makes a move about what’s needed next. In the second scenario, the leader makes an observation (Bystand), names a concern (Bystand), and then inquires of others. The leader in the second scenario signals that there is space for exploration and resists the impulse to jump right into action. 

Growing range in leadership is about learning to make space for other voices, to seek to understand, to be open to hearing things that might be hard. It is about resisting the inherent tension to be the “solver of problems” and instead be the seeker of collective intelligence. Leaders with range are far more likely to discover a clearer path and lead more sustainable change. 

Practice the Four Actions.
Move, Follow, Oppose, Bystand. We all have one that we will do more often than the others. What actions might you be overusing? Which are underutilized?

Pay attention to your conversations. Where do you remain silent or inactive in the conversation? What do you see that you might not be saying?

By practicing all four competencies you build awareness around how you engage and help your team create collectively.

Grow Your Collective Leadership Culture
Leaders create the culture. What we say, how we respond, what we reward… these are all are signals about the culture we’re creating. Team coaching helps leaders learn and grow together so that they become more aware of their actions and more intentional about what changes are needed.

Moreover, team coaching helps leaders learn together, collectively, in their real-world day-to-day challenges. It’s the most effective way to help leadership teams see the patterns in how they engage so that they can take action—and change the outcomes they’ve been getting.

Team Coaching helps leaders develop, together. 

How Leaders Engage: Learning to Be an Agile Leader

Showing Up Is Important. Engaging Is Paramount

In “How Leaders Show Up: Learning to Be an Agile leader” we learned that research consistently and clearly demonstrates that team effectiveness is highly dependent upon the quality of communication between team members. 

The quality of communication is how we explain why some teams are high performing and others struggle. It’s how we explain why some organizations are successful at large organizational changes and others are not. And it’s how we explain why we might have very engaging and productive conversations with some people and end up in complete frustration with others.

In our work with leadership teams, what we often see is that leaders spend a great deal of time focused on the “what” in their business:

  • What’s the target for next quarter? 
  • What’s our revenue? 
  • What are we doing to innovate and transform? 
  • What’s our roadmap? 
  • What metrics will we use to show progress? 

However, leaders spend very little—if any—time looking at how they engage. 

Conversations are the foundation for all of our interactions. But there is a structure to how conversations unfold—to how we engage—that determines how well we perform. Just like the structure of a riverbed determines the flow of water in a stream, the structure of a conversation determines performance. 

Structuring Conversations To Improve Engagement

At TeamCatapult, we’ve found that when we introduce engagement from a structural perspective, leadership teams are able to start seeing things much more clearly:

  • How they are getting in their own way 
  • Where their espoused values and beliefs create dissonance with their actions
  • Where they are having more meaningful and productive conversations to solve the more complex and adaptive challenges in their organization

When we can see and name the structure of conversations in a non-biased way, it’s easier to see where the structure is either enabling or getting in the way of a positive, productive outcome, and it’s easier to feel at choice in our interactions.

Structural Dynamics To Improve Conversations

The theory of “structural dynamics” was developed by David Kantor in the early 1970s. It emerged from his work in family systems therapy but was extrapolated in the 1980s to characterize interaction in any system, including the relationships that exist in organizations. 

4 Kinds Of Action for Effective Interactions

In structural dynamics, there are 4 kinds of action that need to be taken in every conversation in order for the interaction to be effective. 

The 4 action competencies are:

  1. Move: this is when someone initiates an idea. It sets the direction in a conversation. 
  2. Follow: this action continues the direction of the conversation, supporting what is happening an/or offering clarification. 
  3. Oppose: this action challenges or disagrees, and offers an alternate perspective.
  4. Bystand: with this action, someone notices and names what’s happening in the conversation in a morally neutral way. The bystand action often bridges competing ideas. 

For a conversation to unfold in an effective and meaningful way, someone in the room needs to vocally bring each and every one of these actions into the conversation.

Field of Conversations

Everything we want and desire from business agility stems from our ability to have conversations that explore ideas, perceptions, and understanding. From our ability to surface together what people do not already have on their own. 

“We call this type of conversation a dialogue.”

A dialogue is when you explore the uncertainties and questions that no one has answers to. It’s where you think together, using the energy of differences to enhance the collective wisdom.

People often use the terms “discussion,” “conversation,” and “dialogue” interchangeably to mean the same or similar things. In reality, however, they are each quite different and result in very different outcomes. 

From Monologue to Dialogue: Making a Choice

Most teams would self-identify as having lots of dialogue, but when you observe them for a little while you often find that they tend to spend most of their time in monologue. You hear one person dominate, or you hear two people locked in debate with two opposing views. In fact, very few teams are able to have skillful conversations or dialogue without some prompting and some intentional and thoughtful awareness. 

Because our conversations are where we make meaning and sense of what’s happening in our organizations, it is critical to build that intentional and thoughtful awareness. This begins with understanding the basic fields of conversation. If we want to move forward more productively, we need to know where we are. 

The “fields of conversation” is a framework developed by MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer in his observations of groups in conversation. It describes four different fields that we move in and out of when we are interacting in a group. 

  1. “Courteous Compliance”
    In this first field of conversation, we are downloading. In a new group, this is where people are figuring out what’s acceptable and not acceptable. In a more established group or team, this is where people are following the rules, and the conversation often stays on the surface. It is a polite field of conversation where the main action competencies of Move and Follow predominate.
  2. “Breakdown”
    If you stay in the conversation long enough, you will reach this second field of conversation. This is where debate occurs. The action competencies of Move and Oppose are most common in this field. Unconsciously, groups in this field of conversation will make an important choice: they will either stay with the Oppose and make space for it to be voiced, or they will silence the Oppose and go back to a state of courteous compliance. 
  3. “Thinking Together”
    For groups that stay with the often uncomfortable feeling of the Oppose action taken in the “breakdown” field of conversation, the reward is that they get the opportunity to “think together.” No longer focused on rehashing the past or holding tightly to views and opinions, this is the space where genuine curiosity enters. One does not have to agree with another’s point of view in order to inquire and be curious about it. As curiosity flourishes in this field of conversation, the group begins to focus on creating the future.
  4. “Generative Dialogue”On rare occasions, we might push beyond “thinking together” and enter the “generative dialogue” field of conversation. This is the true space of innovation, where we are no longer holding onto our own opinion but are creating new ideas together. Generative in nature, the action competencies we see in this field of conversation are Move, Follow, Oppose, and Bystand. Each action competency is active and voiced within the group.“What you resist persists.” -Carl Jung

How We Do Anything is How We Do Everything. 

When we never leave politeness or debate fields of conversation, we just keep reenacting the past. We get stuck in our current beliefs and thinking. We do this for many reasons. Maybe we have leftover beliefs from how we have seen our mentors lead. Or there is leadership culture in the organization that says, “Let’s not have any surprises,” so everyone makes up their mind on discussion points before they arrive to a meeting. The trap in this thinking is twofold: it assumes that we already know everything we need to know, and it assumes that the decision point requires a technical solution. 

There is risk and vulnerability to showing up and being in dialogue with others. It requires letting go of “knowing” the answers and the desire to have it all figured out. It also requires that we make space for opposition. Rather than viewing the Oppose action as something to be feared, we need to view it as necessary. Without opposition, we will remain stuck where we are. 

And when we gain a new level of understanding, when we learn, and when our beliefs and mindsets shift, we achieve real change.

We Become Agile

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 19
  • Page 20
  • Page 21
  • Page 22
  • Page 23
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 25
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Why We Need to Invest in Behavior Change – Not of Another Tool
  • Why Thinking you Need to Have All the Answers is Counterproductive for your Team
  • How to Welcome Disagreement Within Your Team (and mean it)
  • How to Welcome Team Opposition from a Space of Confidence and Curiosity
  • Why a Difference of Opinion Makes Your Team Much More Effective

Recent Comments

    Archives

    • February 2024
    • October 2023
    • September 2023
    • August 2023
    • July 2023
    • June 2023
    • May 2023
    • April 2023
    • March 2023
    • February 2023
    • January 2023
    • December 2022
    • November 2022
    • October 2022
    • September 2022
    • August 2022
    • July 2022
    • May 2022
    • April 2022
    • March 2022
    • February 2022
    • January 2022
    • December 2021
    • November 2021
    • October 2021
    • September 2021
    • August 2021
    • July 2021
    • June 2021
    • May 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • September 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • April 2017
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • June 2015

    Categories

    • Agenda
    • Agile Coaching
    • Agile Principles
    • Agile Team Coaching
    • Agile Teams
    • Build Your Model for Leading Change
    • Certification
    • Cohort
    • Collaboration
    • Communication
    • Competency
    • Conferences
    • Defining Moments of Leadership
    • Dialogue Facilitation
    • Events
    • Facilitation
    • Facilitation Stance
    • Interview
    • Leadership
    • Leading Change
    • Leading in High Stakes
    • Making Behavioral Change Happen
    • Media Interview
    • Meetings
    • Mentoring
    • News
    • Read the Room
    • Team Coaching
    • Team Conflict
    • Testimonials
    • The Art & Science of Facilitation
    • The Leader's Edge
    • Training
    • Virtual Book Tour
    • Virtual Facilitation
    • Virtual Meetings
    • Workshop

    Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org
    • Workshops
      • Agile Coaching Part 1: Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)
      • Agile Coaching Part 2: Team Coaching (ICP-ACC)
      • Coaching Agility from Within (ICE-AC)
      • Virtual Facilitation Masterclass
      • Facilitating Engaging Retrospectives
      • Advanced Facilitation
      • Changing Behavior in High Stakes
    • Coaching
      • Leadership Coachin
      • Leadership Team Development
    • Resources
    Book a Discovery Session
    ©2020 TEAM CATAPULT | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
    Book a Discovery Session
  • start your journey
  • workshops
  • about us
  • podcast
  • coaching
  • blog
  • products
  • contact us
  • newsletter
  • © TEAM CATAPULT | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

    Copyright © 2025 · Lifestyle Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in