Episode 56: Normalize Creativity in the Workplace

A conversation with Van Lai-DuMone, Founder of WorksmART & TEDx Speaker

This article was originally published on voltagecontrol.com

“When we follow our curiosity…and take small steps towards that curiosity, that’s how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.”?-Van Lai-DuMone

In this episode of the Control the Room Podcast, Van Lai-DuMone and I unpack the creative footprint that inspired her to dedicate her life’s work at worksmART to uncover creativity in every organization. Van shares her observations on the creativity disconnect she’s seen unfold in the corporate workforce and how teams can reignite collective creativity in their work. She highlights her go-to creativity strategies that demonstrate trying a “different” approach in the workplace and the significance of discovering creative artifacts for teams. Van and I discuss the transformative impact a strong collaboration flow has on teams when working on projects/ideas as well as when coordinating virtual and in-person events and meetings. We specifically speak to how organizations must prioritize connection in both the virtual & physical landscapes to make a successful shift to hybrid work, and the need for intentionality in daily workplace interactions in order to provide space for real connection in organizations. Listen in to hear Van’s perspective on her journey to living a life in creativity and rediscovering your organization’s creative niche.

Show Highlights

[10:40] Van’s Career Journey & the Creativity Spark

[13:26] The Creativity Disconnect in Corporate America

[17:42] Van’s Creative Strategies in the Workplace

[28:41] The Flow Effect

[34:48] Creating Connection in the Virtual & Physical Landscape

[43:09] Van’s Hybrid Work Perspective & Final Thoughts

Links | Resources

Van’s LinkedIn

WorksmART

What If? The Life-Changing Power of Curiosity & Courage

About the Guest

Van Lai-DuMone is the founder of?WorksmART , a progressive team and leadership development company, where she invites clients to think with their hands and use right brain creative tools to disrupt traditional training methods. Van’s work proposes that we all innately possess curiosity and creativity, that good ideas can come from any level of an organization, and that all organizations should continuously cultivate idea-sharing in the workplace to foster creativity. Van formerly studied Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned her MBA from Pepperdine University. She has over 15 years of corporate and start-up experience with leading companies across industries, including Google, LinkedIn, and Pandora. Her mission is to continue to help workplaces everywhere implement creativity as a pivotal core value.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control the Room Podcast, series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room, means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out all in the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control the Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab.

Douglas Ferguson:

If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I’m with Van Lai-DuMone, founder of worksmART, where she disrupts traditional corporate training with creativity. Her goal is to make crayons a staple office supply, and she is also TEDx speaker and advocate for the veteran community. Welcome to the show Van.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Hello, Douglas. Very nice to see you here today and I’m glad to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Yeah, it was great to have you. So let’s just hear a little bit about how you got your start, and how did you get this obsession with crayons?

Van Lai-DuMone:

So I got my start, I’m going to go way back to early childhood, I’ve always been really creative. I would never have called myself an artist, I was never professionally trained as artist, I was just always creating things. My mom would buy me a shirt or shoes, I would instantly rip it up with a pair of scissors or color them with paint. And she was not too pleased with that but that’s just how I’ve always been.

Van Lai-DuMone:

In college, I started a small business, I can’t even call it a business, I think I just went to garage sales, bought furniture, strip them and repainted them and sold them to my friends. So creativity is always been a part of my life, but because of my upbringing I followed a very traditional path of going to school, going to college, getting my MBA, and just going into the corporate world.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I ebbed and flowed between the corporate world and entrepreneurial startup ventures for about 15 years. I think it was because I never felt I was in the right place, I was always looking for where I belonged. So it wasn’t until about six years ago that was working for a large pharmaceutical company. And I really found myself in a place where I’m like, “This is 100% not for me. How did I get here? I need to make a drastic change.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it was also the time where my son was born. And between those two things coming to that realization, having him being born, looking at this little child and thinking, “I want him to grow up with a mom that’s doing something she loves.” So I went back to this idea I had several years ago around starting a business, around bringing creativity into the workplace and that’s where worksmART started.

Van Lai-DuMone:

But even back then, it wasn’t called worksmART, it was called Craftivity Events. I was trying to sell workshops into corporations called Weave of Dreams or Follow Your Heart, right? Which I was not doing so well, so I hunger back down, revisited it, really kind of thought about like, “What am I really trying to do in the workplace?” And redeveloped it into what it is now, bringing creativity into team development and leadership training in the corporate environment.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s amazing. And so I guess I’m curious, you told this story about being very creative as a young child, and then you jumped to getting the MBA and then kind of being in the corporate world and clocking in and clocking out and maybe being a little disconnected from the creativity, at least that’s what it seemed like.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so when did the creativity disconnect first started to happen? When did you feel that way in, was it gradual? Was it sudden? Like what was that like?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s an interesting question, Douglas, because I don’t really think I’ve thought about that before. And I remember still being very creative in college and even into parts of my career, still painting on the side or do some creative things. But I think it was really getting into the corporate world and starting to climb the ladder of the corporate experience and really being focused on that, that not only was it not creative in the workplace but I stopped being creative in my personal life too.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And that really was where I found the need for creativity. So I think possibly if I had remained creative in my personal life, I may have not needed as much in my professional career, but it’s almost a blessing that I did because it really got me support. I was like, “Wow, if I’m feeling this way, how many other people are feeling this way in about their work?” Where there’s no creativity where creativity is, is limited to the people in marketing or whatever department people consider normally creative, but why can’t people in the accounting department have some creativity there?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Now, maybe people will argue that, maybe you shouldn’t be that creative in accounting, but you know what I mean?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. Well, people have certainly gotten into a lot of trouble with creative accounting-

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes, that’s true.

Douglas Ferguson:

… practices, but maybe they could be a little playful in how they collaborate and how they communicate with each other, for sure. So this really gets into one of our meeting mantras around embrace the child’s mind. And really big fan of Daniel Coyle’s book, The Culture Code, where he talks about, one of the examples he gave us a Stanford study that looked at this creativity exercise and how kindergartners did such a better than CEOs and then he tried the engineers and designers, and then even a cross-functional group of professionals. Yet, the kindergartners repeatedly did better.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then what you were just telling me really reinforced this argument, because he says that the reason that those groups struggle so much is that they spend so much of their time trying to understand their position as it relates to the group. And so it’s all politics, right? And so, and you talked about climbing the ladder, and I imagine that the more you climb the ladder the more political things get, the more you had to be concerned about navigating those types of things.

Douglas Ferguson:

And it can be all consuming and it can rewire your brain. And so I think that it’s not surprising that it’s hard to keep up even the creativity in your personal life.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah, and that really resonates with what you just said, Douglas, because I feel that as you climb up the corporate ladder and as you get higher up in organizations, you should be taking more risks, but you don’t, it’s almost the opposite.

Van Lai-DuMone:

You stop taking risks and creativity is about taking risks. So you really do lose your creativity or your willingness to be more creative or your willingness to take more risks as the stakes become higher for your career.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s like we often see that with folks that are maybe about to make tenure or they’re thinking about their legacy or they’re like, it’s only one year until I retired, do I really want to rock the boat here?

Douglas Ferguson:

And if there’s not already a very rich culture of experimentation and curiosity and risk taking, that’s really hard for folks to go out on a limb in those situations.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Absolutely. And I do hear that with some of my clients who will come to a workshop about how to bring creativity in the workplace and we teach them these innovative tools on problem-solving and brainstorming. And they’ll say they love it but I don’t feel like I can bring this in the workplace because I’m afraid it won’t be accepted.

Douglas Ferguson:

So let’s talk about that a little bit, because I hear that often too. What are some of your go-to strategies when you hear that from the participant in one of these workshops, what do you tell them? How do you coach them through navigating that?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Well, sometimes tell me like, just start with yourself, right? I think the more confident you are on the tools, the more likely you are willing to spread the word about it. So rather than bringing some of these tools around creative problem solving to a group to start with, do it on your own. These tools are meant to be done individually or collectively, so try some of the tools just on your own.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And as you see how effective they are, you’re more likely now, and we’re willing to go and tell other people about it. So have the experience for yourself first so that you can have the confidence and competence to go out there and share it. The other thing I tell people is, don’t use the word creative, don’t use the word creative, just go out and say, “We’re going to try something different today.” And here it is.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that, Van. One of the things I think that goes hand in hand with that is I coach people on, don’t tell them the name of the activity because a lot of these activities have like fun, creative names that are meant to be almost like, “Oh, it’s just branding, right? If an activity has a really clever, witty name, you’re going to remember it.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Well, that’s going to get you into trouble when you got a group of naysayers and you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to do how might we’s or whatever,” it’s like just start doing it. Just tell them how to do it and we get them doing it. So they don’t have a name to fight against or whatever, or a thing to like push against.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And that I learned that, I was mentioning, the first iteration of my business was called Craftivity Events and I was trying to force feed workshops to organizations called Weave of Dreams. And now I do the same, I do those Weave of Dreams workshops, but they don’t call that it’s around values, it’s around narrowing values and collaborating on values and seeing how values impact the workplace.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And also the idea of creative artifacts, a lot of my work is around visual arts. We do our workshops and at the end we’ll often do a creative art project as an anchor back to the work we did that day. I no longer call them creative art projects, they’re called creative artifacts now. And all of a sudden companies like, “Ooh, we need artifacts.” They didn’t need the creative art project, they need the creative artifact.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. And I think it’s interesting that you mentioned values a second ago, and it’s not just about language, it’s about values. And it’s a bit meta because you were talking about, they were using these tools to focus on creating shared values, but at the end of the day, an executive or any member of a workshop has things they value. And if you can align your language to things they value, or if you can align the work to things they value, they’re going to embrace it a lot more.

Douglas Ferguson:

And so if there are things that they’re afraid of, that they maybe don’t value as much, that’s going to be a hard sell.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Absolutely. And here’s the thing I learned to do as I started working with more clients is, know who you’re talking to. Like exactly what you’re saying, know your clients, so visit their websites. In my proposals, I often am sprinkling in words I found from their website that correlate to what I do, but in their language.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right, I love that. And so I want to come back to, you mentioned in your work that you do a problem solving type of activities, et cetera. Can you give some examples of like how you’re helping teams going to embark on this creative work and what some of these kind of tools might look like?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Certainly, I mean, it’s hard because a lot of them are visual, but like a common one is from improv the yes, and method where we are talking, when you’re coming up with ideas rather than saying no, but, or what I talk about is like the idea of killing ideas before they have a chance.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So oftentimes in a meeting room, you will ask a question and people, someone will give an answer or someone will give an idea, and the next person says no, but, or yes, but. Either way, whether it’s a no, but, or yes, but, what you do is you’re killing the idea before it has a chance.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So this yes, and principle, as you know is this idea of letting people share their idea and the next person has to say yes, and, an add to the idea. But I think the overall, rather than share like individuals like the overall premise of the work I do in creative problem solving is the concept that you want to give everyone a chance to have their voice heard in a way that makes sense for them.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So again, going back to that conference room, you’re in this meeting room, the lead person asks a question, let’s come up with ideas for X, Y, or Z. And we all know these people too, you have those two or three people who have all the ideas, they’re going to continue to raise their hand and give ideas.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then you have the rest of us, like me who are actually introverts and I don’t think that way, I can’t come up with ideas off the top of my head. For several reasons, number one, that’s not the way I think. And number two, I don’t want to sound stupid, I want to think about my ideas before I state them out loud.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So with creative problem solving, creative thinking, with visual tools what you’re able to do is give everyone access to ways to share their ideas in a way that makes sense for them. So some examples for that might be okay, so you asked your question, now I’m going to play classical music for 10 minutes. Think about your ideas and write them down.

Van Lai-DuMone:

There’s Legos in front of you, build your ideas, you sketch your idea. So for people who have their ways of thinking to be able to share ideas, rather than just saying, speak them out loud right now.

Douglas Ferguson:

I really liked that. And one of my favorite go-to is just getting people in the small groups to combat some of the like over talkers or people that are having trouble sharing or talking. And one of my favorite prompts that I learned from the awesome and great Keith McCandless is when you come back from a small group activity and you now are in the big group, again, asking the group, “What is something that everybody must hear?”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, I like that. Yes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Right? Because you ask people like, “What did you hear that’s interesting?” Or like, “Anyone want to share anything they heard?” But it was like, “What is something that everyone must hear?” It’s like really provocative from the sense of like, “Oh yeah. The thing Van told me, people need to hear that.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Right, because you know in those small groups, people have that thought like, “Ooh, that was good. That was good.” I wish people could know this. And so you give them the opportunity to share that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it’s really good.

Van Lai-DuMone:

I’m using that one too, Douglas. I’m going to take that one from you.

Douglas Ferguson:

I know. That’s one of the beautiful things about facilitation and creating communities of practice is that we can all share because there’s cool techniques and cool prompts that just kind of work, and just add little nuggets to our toolkit.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. And that’s why I love that Voltage Control and that community, because I was having a conversation with someone the other day. I have no idea who it was, but they were talking about the communities I built on in this work I thought the beauty…

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, you know what it was, there’s a conflict management course I teach and we talk about, people do a survey and it’s about… What am I talking about? This was for your facilitator… What’s the Thursday thing? Facilitator…

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh yeah, facilitation lab.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Okay. For facilitation lab, I did this conflict management course for facilitation lab, and what I had to do before was a survey around what is your go-to conflict resolution style? And there’s five of them, one of them is competitive. And what was so interesting is that this was a group of facilitators, nobody had chosen competitive.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I thought that was so interesting because it says so much about this community of facilitators, because we are also willing to share and help each other and just share ideas.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s pretty phenomenal. Also, I feel like that’s in the water here in Austin. It’s like, there’s such a sense of helpfulness and just in the ecosystem and the community. And I really appreciate it. I think that it tends to create better results than to be super competitive or super, I don’t know, restrictive or exclusive.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it’s interesting because I feel like where else do you find that? It’s an interesting dynamic between facilities, even though we all most of us have our own businesses, running our own thing. Yet, everyone is still willing to share and collaborate.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think it’s also a passion for the work and how we elevate, I would say, the practice or the discipline. And the more we share about what we’re learning and what we’re noticing allows us all to elevate it as a form of leadership, because the more people that do it, the better off we are. It’s almost like capitalizing society, right? The more people that do it and they get good at, the more that we can… It’ll raise the GDP.

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s right, yes. It raises the value for all of us.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then on the other side of it too, is that the way I look at it as well is, when I started my business, there was a lot of hoarding, right? “Oh, yes, you want me to do a workshop on how to file your taxes? Sure. I’m going to tell you that out.” I was like, there’s so much like I will do anything anyone wants me to do, I would learn it and try to do it. But as my business grew, and as I saw impact on clients by collaborating, most of the work I do now is through collaboration because really the goal is to bring the highest value to the client, and if I can’t do it, I’m going to bring someone on who can.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s awesome. And so that brings me to a topic that we spoke about earlier and it was this idea of flow. And I want to talk about flow in general, but it also might be interesting to examine it from the perspective of creating flow with a collaborator, because I’ve certainly found collaborators that I can instantly get into the flow with, whereas others it’s been more difficult.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I really treasure the ones where it’s just almost instantaneous, you don’t work with them for a year and you come back together and it’s almost like we just took a coffee break and we came back, right?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes. So when I talk about flows, I went on this retreat, or I should say it was a weekend with Cairn Leadership Strategies, they’re based in San Diego. And they take people on weekend, three-day outdoor adventures and there’s leadership topics that we discussed. So it was interesting, so I went on the Black Canyon River canoeing trips, and then our topic was flow, so that just flowed nicely.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And what we talked about was this idea of like, how do you find flow in your life? And for me, it’s always been this idea of, it’s always been accidental for me, so there’s always been this idea of like, “Oh my gosh, how did all these hours pass? I’ve been doing all this work and let the hours just went so quickly and I got a lot accomplished.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

But what I learned in this trip and in their lessons about flow is that you can actually stack these triggers to find your flow. So there apparently is a psychological triggers, social triggers and environmental triggers.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And under each of those categories, there’s things you can do. So what I’ve been trying to do now is like, “Okay, if I want to get in flow, what psychological trigger can I put in place right now?” Something like, I’m going to focus on something that demands all my attention.

Van Lai-DuMone:

A social trigger might be something like it has to be familiar enough for me, or be in a familiar space but make it a little bit challenging. And then environmental flow might be something like create a rich environment, play music in the background. So if I stack those triggers, I’m more likely to get myself into this state of flow.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So we asked about doing that in collaboration with someone, that’s a really interesting topic because it’s that something that just comes naturally and I wonder, and I haven’t tried this, I wonder if you can stat triggers to get into a better collaboration. For those that you’re saying is not as natural.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think the question then becomes, do we share the same triggers?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That’s right.

Douglas Ferguson:

And do we value the same things? And then that also make me think a little bit about this notion of group flow and how like, when we were having events in person, this notion that we would really think intentionally about the initial conditions or the environment we wanted to create, so that everything was easy and everything flowed. And so how’s the room organized? Do we have round tables or square tables? How many chairs do we have? Do we have chairs? Is there a projector? Where is it located? Do we have music? Where’s the food going to be?

Douglas Ferguson:

All these kind of questions around how we organize the space and how we layout groups and thinking about, even the flow of the event will directly impact how people can go in and out of flow states.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. So because I didn’t really do, most of you guys do a lot of events. So my events were basically facilitating workshops at corporations at someone’s office. So I didn’t always have complete control over what that looked and felt like, but I tried my best. But you have more experience in that sense, I feel like what I do was learn how to do that virtually.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So you may help me be able to take some of your experience in a live setting, it’d be like, “Okay, so here are all the elements that we want to recreate virtually.” And that’s interesting, so I kind of went to the virtual environment thinking I cannot take what I was doing in-person and just throw that into a virtual environment.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So how do I recreate that same idea of flow, that same feeling of collectiveness and comradery in a virtual environment? And for me over the last year, a little more than year now, what I found around that is first preparation or setting expectations, and setting expectations for what we need the audience to do, keep your camera on, get ready to participate, here might be some pre-work.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And then within the facilitation, making sure those transitions were really smooth, and making sure that we had a many different elements for people to connect, whether that’s, it wasn’t all like, “Okay, throw things in the chat. Okay, here’s seven breakout rooms.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

It was like, “Okay, let’s throw a breakout room here, that makes sense. Now, let’s have people postings for this exercise. Now, let’s have everyone, few people share out loud to the whole group here. And I found that to be really interesting to navigate and try to figure out during this time like what worked, what didn’t work.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I think in terms of facilitation and when I talk about… or not even facilitation, even when I work with clients who run their own meetings, is this idea of giving people dedicated time and giving, and being really intentional, intentional in this virtual environment, about giving people time to connect, because that’s what I mean… I was at Control the Room live in Austin two years ago and there was the way the room was laid out, there was food where the food and drinks were and the way there was time and space made for connection really made a difference.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And if we’re not doing that in a virtual environment, then we lose out on so much.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. We don’t want to make those things victims of a shift in space. All right, like we’re shifted to this virtual space so we can’t lose sight of what are the core kind of principles that we need to live by, and the connection is one of them.

Douglas Ferguson:

As facilitators, we have to establish connection and it’s certainly bubbled up right at the beginning of the pandemic. We held events for facilitators to come, it was almost like group therapy for facilitators which is actually the precursor for a facilitation lab and that came up big time. It was two big themes, one was just like real concern about how do we foster connection and then will it be lost? And then there was a concern around, will we be able to support this digital divide and lack of access kind of thing?

Van Lai-DuMone:

I get that, yeah. And how has that been? What have you seen from what you’ve developed?

Douglas Ferguson:

The lack of access thing is one that has to be handled on a case by case basis, like to your point earlier about knowing your audience and who’s showing up who could be there, who’s being left out, who is being excluded because of circumstances and how do we include them either by sending them devices or providing a space that they can go to, to connect in, or even just like reducing the fidelity.

Douglas Ferguson:

Do we make this a phone call so that they can participate in some way? So I think it’s just designing around those constraints and understanding that they’re there. And then as far as the connection piece, I think it’s everything you were just describing around just making it a focus and being intentional about it.

Douglas Ferguson:

And quite often, that might involve things like energizers, icebreakers, et cetera. And we always advise when you’re doing those things, ideally tie them into the purpose of the intent of the event. So it’s not just, it doesn’t feel like, “Oh, why are we doing this thing? Let’s connect it in to the work that we’re doing, but give time for people to connect and to build some rapport and understanding.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yes, I love that point too because I think it is always important to make those connections and those transitions so that they… It just makes sense, so people just think, “I’m just doing this exercise to do this exercise,” but make them meaningful. I think that’s where facilitators can really make a difference is in terms of like building those icebreakers, those energizers.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So that it’s really about creating a way for people to build personal connections to each other, rather than just having fun. And I often talk about team building versus team development, I think it’s the same thing, like team building, let’s have fun together, let’s get together, and whatever might be. Like clearing out virtually like go bowling, or go on a scavenger hunt.

Van Lai-DuMone:

But for me, these energizers, you’re talking about more like team development where like, “How do we have fun together?” But we’re also using the time to get to know each other better and get to know how to work well with each other.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think to me the best way to define the differences about the half-life. So team building exercises have a very short half-life, team development has a much longer half-life, because we’ve actually become more intentional about doing things that are going to have lasting value because we created some deeper connection.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s going to be a lot harder to evaporate or like just pull apart or tease the part. It’s almost like weed in a basket that’s real tight versus the one that’s really loose. Is it going to come apart or is it going to stay together?

Van Lai-DuMone:

That great. There’s an exercise I’ve done in person, I haven’t… But now that I’m like I finally started using mural, and big thanks to you guys too, I kind of like, “Okay, if I’m going to be facilitating facilitation lab and doing, and uses like a a mural,” but there’s an exercise that you do in person that it was yarn.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And have you heard of Climer Cards, making use any pictures you can just like, I just threw a bunch of pictures on the floor and I had people pick a picture that represents something about you outside the work you do. They’d pick a picture up, someone will start with a ball of yarn, and they would say what their picture means. So they had a picture of a farmhouse, I would say, like, “I picked the picture of the farmhouse because I want to live on a farm one day.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And if that resonated with anyone, they would raise their hand, you hold onto the yarn, throw it to each person who has their hand up. And by the time you’re done, you have this big yarn weaves, it’s a visual representation of all the connections in the room. And it was one of the most powerful exercises I did because you’ve found connections you would never talk about in the workplace.

Van Lai-DuMone:

There was one organization I worked with where this young man, he was probably 22, 23, you picked the picture of a car and said, “I love to restore old classic cars.” And there’s other woman on the other side of the room, late 60’s, like me too. Like where were those who have ever had that connection? And I guarantee you, next time she walks past her desk, they’re having a conversation. Next time he emails her, she’s probably used that email a lot, a little bit faster than she would have before.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s really cool. And so what do you call this?

Van Lai-DuMone:

It was on my Weave of Dreams, I have no idea. No, I don’t.

Douglas Ferguson:

Weave of Dreams.

Van Lai-DuMone:

That isn’t what my Weave of Dreams. Weave of Dreams was around values, that on I don’t know what I called it. I think it was just like connections exercise.

Douglas Ferguson:

Cool, yeah. And I love that the yarn is like, there’s this thing around the connections that were made. So like, even as we moved on and there’s new connections getting made, you can still look back to like, “Oh yeah, I remember this connection now.” You can almost take a photo of it too and you’ve got like these lines, like you’ve got these indicators of like, “Well, the connections are amazing, that’s really cool.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

So speaking of that, I think of mural is now that I’m thinking about that could be a really interesting way to capture it because on mural what you can have are those images, the image that they selected on the mural board. So then you can really just have an artifact of who picked that image and where the connections are.

Douglas Ferguson:

It makes me think like one way to do it is like, if you trapped in a bunch of images into your mural, and so you got, I don’t know, 30 people dropping 30 images, and then you can use their alignment tool. So you could say align left and align top, and now they’re stacked all on top of each other.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Oh, interesting.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then you could like create like a circle of people and you go, “All right, starting with Susan, we’re going to go clockwise. So Susan, do you get the first image?” And you can even put like someone on top of the stack, so they wouldn’t get to see what’s there until you get started.

Douglas Ferguson:

And then they drag it over and then they each drag one, and then you could draw the connections after you… Anyway, that would be kind of fun. The Climer Cards, you mentioned those briefly, were those kind of cool thought starter cards?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Yeah. So Amy Climer, she’s a consultant, she works in the similar work where in bringing creativity into the workplace, and creative thinking, creative problem solving. And she watercolor acrylic painted, I don’t know, these cards, and they’re just like a deck of cards. And on each card there’s just a watercolor picture, whether it’s as a fish or farmhouse, whatever it is.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And it’s just this, they’re so simple you wouldn’t think like, “Well, where are these four?” But you can use them for so many things for storytelling, for activities like this on connection, because with visual images what’s amazing about them is that people read them differently. We all see things through our own perspective, our own lens.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So, a school of fish on a watercolor school of fish and a card to me is might mean something completely different to you. Not mine most likely will mean something completely different to you. So it was a great way to use a visual tool to see other people’s perspectives.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s cool, I love it. So I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier around these kind of pivots and the shifts, and we had to make a big shifts. Gosh, was it 18 months ago now or embarking on what might be another shift with hybrid as people start to think about going back to work and hosting meetings that may or may not include people that are in person and remote?

Douglas Ferguson:

And we’d just released our hybrid work guide which has some thinking in it. I’d love to hear what’s on your mind with regards to having to support this. And when we spoke earlier before the show, you were mentioning that you haven’t had to do much of this yet. But it’s always interesting to hear like how people are processing, what might be coming. And I think other facilitators might find it comforting just to hear some of your perspective on like, “Gosh, what is this going to mean for me?”

Douglas Ferguson:

So what are some of the questions you’re asking yourself right now, as it relates to having to start to maybe hold some hybrid sessions?

Van Lai-DuMone:

Well, it’s interesting because I think this past year has taught me to really embrace ambiguity, and all of us have had to make that shift. So I remember when we first went into lockdown, I’m part of this little consultant group and I remember being on the phone with everyone in Zoom with them saying like, “I’m not doing anything on Zoom, I’m just waiting,” I’m like, “I have no desire to do anything virtually. I’m just going to wait until things go back to normal.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

And about two months into, I’m like, “Okay, maybe I should be doing something differently.” And clients started calling and saying, “Hey, could that workshop we did last year, are we able to do that again this year, but clearly virtually?” And it made me, it forced me to look into it. It forced me to make a shift and just change the way I did things and to think creatively. And to really be like, “Okay, let me create this for them now.”

Van Lai-DuMone:

So like we said before the show, I have no idea what, I had not had experience doing a hybrid facilitation, but what’s interesting is I am not scared of it. I’m really excited because I know we can do it, I know we can do it, there’s tools out there. I know we as facilitators have the mindset to do it.

Van Lai-DuMone:

And I think the experience of redesigning, redeveloping and all that creation we had to deal all the past year built my confidence, whatever that hybrid looks like we’re going to nail this thing and we’re going to make it so amazing and great. So that’s where my mindset is in terms of logistics of how we’re going to do that. No idea, but that’s also exciting to me.

Douglas Ferguson:

No doubt. I think one of the strong messages I wanted to send with a guide was that, this is not a prescriptive guide, this is a set of considerations, as well as some ideas on how to solve some types of things that we’re going to run into.

Douglas Ferguson:

And we even encouraged people to reach out with feedback and with further ideas, because we want it to be a growing, ever expanding guide because we’re going to embark on a journey if you will or time period of experimentation, because there are no right or wrong answers, there are no best practices and we’re going to figure them out as we go.

Van Lai-DuMone:

As we’ve done. And what we were talking about before really plays into that, that this is a community that enjoys sharing and enjoys elevating our profession. So I’m excited to see what that guide is currently and what it becomes.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. Well, I think that lands us to a nice stopping point Van. And I want to thank you for the time today, and I’m excited to hear about all the work you’re doing and creativity, and just the enthusiasm you have for embarking on this next frontier of hybrid. It’s going to be fun times, I’m sure we’ll be comparing notes. And I wanted to give you a moment to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Sure. So I think what we didn’t touch upon is my work around curiosity and it plays into what we just talked about is this idea that like the world is clearly full of unknowns. But when we follow our curiosity, as what if in a forward thinking way, like what if I do X, Y, and Z, and then take small steps towards that curiosity, that’s how we create possibilities for ourselves and for others.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So that is a TEDx talk that I did about just right before we shut down and my TEDx talk is called “What If The Life-Changing Power Of Curiosity And Courage”, so you can go check that out. And I am always on LinkedIn, all day long, that’s my social media platform of choice and of addiction.

Van Lai-DuMone:

So find me on there, I love meeting new people. And then also if you’d like to follow my work and join us for some upcoming events, you can go to my website, worksmartadvantage.com, and join my newsletter called Curious About Creativity.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. Well, I highly encouraged folks to check out the newsletter and any of your upcoming workshops, because not only does Van work with companies and the private workshops, she also periodically offers public workshops.

Douglas Ferguson:

So definitely worth checking out because this is really incredible stuff. And remember, there’s a difference between team building and team development and it’s worth doing, it will pay dividends. So thanks again Van for being on the show, it was a tremendous pleasure chatting with you.

Van Lai-DuMone:

Thanks, Douglas. Really enjoyed it.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I posted weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.