How Do You Spell Your Name?
Do you focus on the big picture or the details?
Not literally…I mean, what process do you use when someone asks you how to spell your name?
I was on line at the pharmacy recently and the person before me was asked this question by the pharmacist.
This customer did something strange.
They started listing all the letters of their name. (in order, naturally)
Halfway through, the pharmacist stopped the customer and asked for a clarification of the last few letters. So the customer started over from the beginning with a stream of letters.
This moment struck me.
When someone asks me how to spell my name I first SAY my last name, then spell it, then say it again.
Stillman. S-T-I-L-L-M-A-N. Stillman. Like I’m in a Spelling Bee. (These are a somewhat American thing, so if you’re unfamiliar with the genre, watch this gem)
Spelling as Storytelling
Have you been in meetings like this? We gather together and someone asks: What is this meeting about? What are we here for?
And the reply is a list of letters. Agendas are often just laundry lists, a series of topics or tasks.
It can be hard to get those letters to cohere into words and phrases — an arc of “what is going to happen”.
This is the challenge when people protest making their meetings optional. “People won’t come if they don’t have to!” And that, dear reader, is on us to fix.
Sharing the Arc of your Agenda
The simple solution to to share the ARC of what is going to happen. The arc of an agenda is the story of what’s ahead, the flow. It’s the words and sentences instead of just the letters.
The solution is to draw the open, explore and close arc in one broad stroke. Say, spell, say is a very simple way to design your facilitation conversations for maximum clarity. What are we opening our minds to? What/How are we going we explore together? What do we need to close on?
These are three sketches of three “Facilitation Hats”. (I explain the importance of them here).
These sketches came out of an exercise I’ve been doing as part of my in-person facilitation masterclasses for over 5 years: I get people to draw their roles as a facilitator as hats and use those drawings to help them introspect and reflect with other facilitators. Hats are things you can take on and off while you stay the same, so I’ve found it a continuously powerful metaphor for developing people.
Recently, I looked through all the pictures of folks who’ve done this exercise and turned these sketches into a deck of cards, 42 hats in all, plus some cards to help people synthesize and clarify their hats. I often use this exercise as the foundation of the facilitation coaching I offer.
If you’d like a deck of cards you can get some here (physically or digitally)
Or you can get them all sent to you, one at a time, for free. It’s a course that takes you through all 42 hats I’ve synthesized. The series also takes your through how to use the hats to build your own model of how to show up as a facilitator — since there’s no one way to be as a facilitator.
