Moving groups
(Messy) human connection is the fuel for innovation, motivation, curiosity, and problem-solving.
One of my professionally formative experiences was working as a math and science tutor at a community college in Santa Fe, NM. New Mexico has a public education system ranked 49 out of 50, so many of the students arrived at the college profoundly unprepared for college work.
At the time, I was exploring a career change to nursing. I became rapidly aware that my two previous literature degrees gave me a huge advantage over my fellow students. Biology is all about language and visualization ability, both of which came naturally to me. But the other students worked much harder than I did. Many of them were single mothers in their 20s who wanted to create a better life for their families. I was interested in ideas and new ways of thinking; they were interested in giving their children the support needed for them to thrive.
Their personal motivation created a lot of commitment. They were so dedicated that they would do things like copy the textbook word-for-word, in an attempt to memorize the material. That’s hours of work every day, hundreds of pages, and no end of pen ink.
Take that in, oh privileged messy humans. You have to admire their bad-assery.
That said, it was a stunning display of working harder rather than working smarter, because — and here’s the important part — they had never seen anyone study effectively, so they didn’t know how to improve their own understanding and retention.
Group tutoring to the rescue
While taking Anatomy & Physiology, most of us participated in a group tutoring program called Supplemental Instruction (SI),1 developed at the University of Missouri - Kansas City. SI is an academic support program that targets high-risk, historically difficult courses. It focuses on working with students in small, collaborative groups to show them how to integrate course content with reasoning and study skills. SI rapidly creates momentum and a sense of supportive community that reduces learning stress and increases student success rates.
After watching how impactful it was, it was an easy decision for me to get trained in SI, so I could tutor the next cohort of badasses. I learned how to set up small groups to process complex information together, to share the burden of learning and to provide mutual support. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of my abiding interest in group facilitation and collaborative instruction and problem-solving. Plus, it was fun and effective.
One of the core rules of good tutoring is to meet people where they are. In some cases, this means completely changing how you talk, shifting your body language, and adjusting your tempo, sometimes slower, sometimes faster. It means thoughtfully breaking the content into smaller digestible pieces that you guide people through, checking frequently along the way for understanding. You need to create connection and get into their heads in order to create the right path.
On top of that, you need to believe that it is not your job to “fix” them. Not only is “fixer” a disrespectful, one-up stance, but it’s also less effective because your interactions will be tainted by your bias about what “good” looks like.
Instead, effective tutoring is all about invitation and questions.
Talking to groups without losing connection
Good tutoring and group work are based on the idea that you create spaces for people to discover. One-on-one, this is relatively easy to navigate, with some training and a heavy dose of empathic perspective-taking. But when looking at groups, it’s more challenging to customize an experience. Left to our own devices (e.g without training), we mimic what we see in the world around us: telling and broadcasting. But by doing this, we quickly lose the fidelity and customization of the message that we can create in personal conversation. The instant we create a generic message for everyone, perhaps targeting the “lowest common denominator,” we create a message that resonates for only a few.
But we’re so habituated to telling that we forget the power of connection, both as Broadcasters and Listeners. Think for a moment about all the ways that you are the consumer of a broadcasted message. You know that the most common thing you do is just receive it passively — doom scrolling, staring at a screen, or sitting in an All-hands. It becomes a unidirectional power exchange. We give the Broadcaster space in our brains, rent free. And the Broadcaster gets the feeling that they are in charge, accompanied by little to no feedback about how the message actually landed.
Because this is a passive interaction, it’s useful for transmitting generic messages, but it’s horrible for creating action and engagement.
Think about it. When you hear a broadcast that’s asking for a change in your behavior, you have a choice: comply or subvert. In my decade of observing and sometimes running large organizational transformations, I have seen what this behavior does at scale. Compliance creates lackluster change, without heart or energy in it. This makes it vulnerable to subversion, by which I mean things like nodding yes in a meeting and then going back to your desk and continuing to work the way you know works best. This combination of energies in an organization undergoing change is deadly. The Compliers will follow the new rules, but they often don’t care about them enough to advocate for them. And the Subverters have a profound amount of influence, especially in aggregate. Unchecked subversion can take down a multimillion-dollar, 10,000+ person transformation in just a year or two. I have witnessed this twice now, and trust me, it’s humbling to see the power of resistance. Not only does it generate a remarkable amount of drama, but it often results in an executive being escorted out the door.
What to do, what to do?
So how do you combat these dynamics? If I’ve learned nothing else in my 56 years, I have deeply internalized the transformative power of human connection. I don’t mean networking or small talk. I mean mucking around in each other’s minds and coming to deeply understand each other. In addition to making life worth living, (messy) human connection is the fuel for innovation, motivation, curiosity, and contextually informed problem-solving. It’s worth consciously cultivating.
When working at scale, whether within a large organization or the consumer marketplace, connection reigns supreme. This connection can manifest as widespread resistance or as an excited groundswell of support. The folks focused on external customers — marketers, user experience practitioners, sales people, and customer success experts — know this and have big bags of tricks for finding the least-effort action that will create a sense of connection and influence customer behavior in the desired direction.
These ideas can apply within the workplace too. Most seasoned leaders invest in both individual connection and interaction in groups, as much as their energy allows. But some still think of these interactions as transactional — the employee(s) trade life energy for a salary and benefits, and the employee does what’s requested of them. This way of thinking leaves a lot of fuel on the table: intrinsic motivation, loyalty, wholehearted engagement, and minds engaged in problem-solving instead of self-defense or self-censorship.
The real shift comes when leaders step back and look for ways to leverage all that pent-up messy human potential, using the natural traits of humans in groups. These traits include needing to belong, collaboration in small groups, bonding around shared problems, producing the reward-hormone dopamine in response to small wins, and thinking most clearly when supported by community.
This can be a huge mental shift for people used to broadcasting / telling. But I argue that it’s worth the investment. If you think about it, the mental shift from broadcasting to understanding human behavior in groups is a crucial underpinning of modern leadership approaches like intent-based leadership, distributed decision-making, and empowering employees and teams. Each of these focus on optimizing decision-making by pushing information and agency as close as possible to the work being done, because that’s where the most updated and granular information is. You have to understand how to capture and hold the attention of your employees in order to provide them with sufficient information and skill to support well-informed decisions in the moment.
The idea is to think more like marketers or user experience folks, by redefining the employees as your customers. Leaders playing this game install methods for checking their own assumptions about how their customer-employees feel and think, so that they can more effectively ignite the fuel of hearts and minds won over. Interactions become less about wielding power and more about testing and working with the system of people as a whole to solve problems. I think of it as a well-informed improvisational dance where the possible steps are known, but which ones are chosen depends on how you interpret the music playing. Your people are the music.
The happy news is that well understood structures and patterns exist for creating environments that increase knowledge and artfully shape human behavior. Many of these can be found in the discipline of collaborative group facilitation.2 These approaches focus on creating experiences that potentiate groups and the individuals within them, using insight-generating questions, structured group interactions, and shared visualizations. All of this happens within a context of belonging and psychological safety created and protected by a skilled facilitator and / or leader. While use of these techniques is uncommon, they are imminently learnable, and if you look around, you can find a seasoned facilitator to help model this for your organization.
If you haven’t witnessed the power of this kind of group work, stay tuned. In upcoming posts, I’ll be exploring this further. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts.
Two of my favorite resources:
Kaner, Sam, Facilitator's. _- Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, 3rd Edition and Liberating Structures
This is a very difficult subject and I'm not sure how well this translates to the workplace sometimes. I knew someone I worked with that had a degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology who didn't seem like a serious person to me. Curious, I asked the psychotherapist I was seeing at the time what she thought. I discovered an antipathy on the part of clinical psychologists for industrial organizational psychologists that might be even more pronounced than mechanical versus electrical engineering. I gathered that she thought diagnosing one mind at a time was tricky enough without applying it to groups. In our nomenclature we would say it doesn't scale. And I also gathered that there are real ethical concerns because you can end up being a shill for corporate executives with few ethics. Sort of a dangerous combination of a Human Resources person who actually thinks they know something. Now, I know I am describing this in a biased sort of way. This is from years of working in IT and being a major Dilbert fan no doubt. But we need to recognize who we are working with and the talented practitioners that transform agents work with will have these biases too.
Generally speaking, it is my belief that transformative agents (agile coaches, leadership coaches, etc. etc.) have an outsized belief in the influence of "leaders" among experienced and talented skilled professionals. I do not envy anyone that takes up the task of trying to transform skilled and creative professional work from the top down. I don't believe that is often a roadmap for success.
Often transformation agents put a lot of effort into metrics and into facts. Skilled practitioners especially in the Information Technology space know how fungible information and data actually is. We know how fine the line is between reporting the facts as they are and also analyzing and reanalyzing the data until it creates a picture that tells the story that the purveyors wish to tell. In some cases, we have been threatened with our jobs if we don't participate in such efforts.
This is why meeting people where they are is the single most important thing that you pointed out. The difficulty though is that is very difficult to do because where individuals are in a group are frequently very far apart. The was a book once that was pretty hot. "Men are from Mars Women are from Venus". I think a great case could be made for "Software Developers are from Mars, Agile Coaches are from Saturn. And executives are from The Delta Quadrant of Star Trek fame.