Why I Suck - A Facilitator's Take on Learning From Mistakes

I have previously been the moderator of my forum. I was a moderator for a year.  And even though I spend 6,462x more time thinking about Forums than the average YPOer, and we are now fostering an energized learning community of ~75 Forum facilitators, I am personally pretty crappy at it. Here are the confessions of a cobbler's shoeless kid.

Hygiene Matters

I bobbled the admin stuff. I think of this as "hygiene." Hygiene is thankless. Employees never rave about spic & span bathrooms,  but if the toilets are unflushed and the soap is crusted, you'll hear about it. Remember offices? I miss offices. A lack of Forum hygiene can make a Forum sick. This is what it looked like at the time:

• I forget to add enough meetings to the calendar and send calendar invites so that people hold them.

• I lose track of who we decided will present, and I don't remind them beforehand, so sometimes they are not prepared.

• My parking lot lives on scrap paper, useless at best and dangerously exposed at worst, so I don't always pick the best presentation. Sometimes, people are overlooked and don't present for a year unless they speak up.

The implications can be severe. We've missed meetings. We've gone through a year when one person presented several times and another not at all. They don’t always complain, but this creates tension and uneven value. That person expected to be called on was waiting to be called upon. Resentment builds up, momentum fades. I feel like there are a thousand cuts, and any one of them could get infected.

Failure is a Great Teacher

On the positive side, I am now pretty good at making sure people are all talking equally in meetings. Even though I’ve handed over the moderator reigns, I still think this is vital. Equal talk time is the single biggest lesson of my twenty years of forum practice and 7+ years of building a Forum company. There's solid research behind how turn-taking can make or break small groups and is the single most important factor in creating psychological safety. Anita Wooley (Carnegie Mellon) and Sandy Pentland (MIT)’s seminal work on this influenced a generation of impactful thought-leaders, like Brene Brown and Amy Edmundson.

I learned this lesson by screwing it up. About six years ago, my wife and I started Gotham Gymnastics with partners. I lead the founding team through the classic "lifeline" team building exercise, where everyone gets 7 minutes to share the highs and lows of their life. It was going well, and I could feel the connection deepening as we got to know each other. And then, one participant wouldn't stop. Her story involved Christ and a dead gymnast, so she felt entitled to keep going. I let her. This facilitation lapse had a profound impact. It undermined the value of my facilitating meetings in an already skeptical crowd. The coach involved was difficult to rein in from that time forward; she broke other norms of the gym, and ended up getting thrown out, painfully long after we should have dealt with it. I can still picture the moment and see it as the start of a slide into team dysfunction.

More Than Keeping Time

The facilitators I admire are really good at three things: the beginning, middle, and end of a Forum meeting. 

Beginning: They set a strong opening tone, sliding confidently into vulnerability and depth in the first few minutes. This gets everyone into the right mood. I sometimes forget to do this and get right into business.

Middle: They carefully choose the challenges to be explored in the meeting. They survey the parking lot, consider the participant, and lead the group into the most important conversation that needs to happen. I equivocate, asking for input in a way that sometimes lets the loudest voice decide for me. I kick myself for not coming prepared with an idea of who should present or what topic to discuss going into the meeting.

End: The best of the best facilitators capture the value of the meeting and summarize the gems of insight that come up. Sometimes, great guides send notes afterwards. My notes are crap, and I rarely take the time to review before my memory of what happened evaporates, and I can't make out what I scribbled down.

Good News: We’re Working On It

I was trained as a moderator so long ago and with such complexity that much has faded. Moderating once a month every seven years is not enough practice. But we found a sweet spot with our facilitator (we call them “guides”) community, where professionals lead enough Forums that they are getting good practice in and improving. Plus, we’ve built a learning community around it - highly active slack, mentorship circles, and regular deep-dive retrainings.

Plus, technology. ForumSpace is working on that. Simple timers, calendar systems, and presentation tracking now support our guides, and as we polish and polish, it is getting to the point where it could really help someone like me. My suckiness is slowly leading to tools that will greatly help other member-moderators. Tools such as the ForumSpace App we  built to help moderators in their task. Bill Gates once said something similar, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." 

And here’s another silver lining. I’m pretty good at work meetings. I find them easier. Because the principles that I have mastered because of Forum: vulnerability, equal talk time, structured agendas, and powerful questions are now second nature. More and more, I’m hearing that Forum participants are picking up on this, and it is improving their work culture. 

We’ll keep at it, and in seven years, when I next take my turn moderating, I’m gonna be great.