I almost subtitled this blog Notes from a Reluctant Energizer Bunny!
I recently spent four days with a dynamic group of senior leaders, facilitating a series of strategic conversations. This was the first time that they had met in person for a while and there were a mix of new and seasoned people on the team as well as a myriad of conversations that needed to happen. During the design phase I had a conversation with the organizer where we brainstormed how we could avoid consistently going down ‘rabbit holes’ during conversations.
(Note: for non native English speakers rabbit holes are a metaphor for conversations which deviate from the agenda topic. They can be interesting and important, even critical to the needs of the organization, but when we follow them without intention, we lose track of the original conversation.) And we know how frustrating that becomes to a team when it happens consistently and repeatedly.
The challenge that we were wrestling with was threefold:
- How to call attention respectfully to the issue when it arose – it can be hard to interrupt someone gracefully when they are mid flow. It becomes even harder when there are power dynamics in the room (and there are always power dynamics in the room!).
- The rabbit holes were all likely to be important to the future of the organization – so how did we not lose track of them when coming back to the original topic.
- How to build ownership within the room so that responsibility for keeping focus didn’t just sit with one person (the facilitator, the organizer or the chair) but belonged to the whole group.
We came up with three interrelated strategies to be mindful about this. Firstly, we named a commitment to focus as we set agreements for the meeting. Secondly, we created a “Things we HAVE to talk about” sheet where we could list out additional topics as they came up. We then created an intentional session on the last day to make sure we were talking about any of these topics that had not yet been covered. I intentionally avoid the term ‘parking lot’ as so many of us have experience of metaphorical parking lots that then get abandoned and never referred back to as meetings run out of time.
The final strategy, by far my favorite and the most fun, was that we gave every participant a bunny on a stick (see picture) that they were invited to wave any time they felt that the conversation was getting off track. It is much easier to signal with the wave of a bunny on a stick than to interrupt verbally. This allowed me as facilitator to then pause the conversation and ask the group what they wanted to do. And by having the rabbits on the table, it was a visual reminder to all of us of the commitment to focus. AND it was playful. There was no calling people out or shaming. It was a light way to acknowledge how much there is to discuss and that we couldn’t do it all at once. And this group was fantastic – people started ‘outing themselves’ when they thought they might be going off on a tangent. They created a whole new vocabulary that I hope may stick. My favorite phrase being ‘I’m going to rabbit myself on this one… !’.
I’ve used this strategy once before using elephants instead of rabbits, for a group where we were aware that there were a lot of hard to mention topics that were circulating in the group. Whenever we sensed there was a metaphorical elephant in the room we raised our sticks so to speak. We know from the neuroscience that we are most open to learning and co-creating when our brains are relaxed and open and that finding ways to ‘play’ is one way to do this. And I’m wondering what other animals might show up in meetings into the future!
