Most of my clients in the last 5 years have been rocket scientists. Actual rocket scientists, much cleverer than me – and my job is to help them solve their problems. Not often rocket-related problems, because that’s the kind of problem rocket scientists enjoy solving, but the kind that really gets them down. In the big company they work for, they sometimes find that in order to be able to do their job they have to interact with other people, and the higher up in the company you go, the greater the number of irrational, unpredictable and annoying people you have to involve if you want to make things happen. Our job is to bring together all the people who need to be involved in making a specific something happen, getting them to agree what that is, agree how it could be done, and agree to do it. This is called “facilitation” and we usually have two days to do this.
Click on the thumbnail to see why it’s easier to not to make things happen.
The person who hires us to run a workshop, called the “problem-owner”, usually wants us to do something like “communicate their strategic vision”. In other words, the problem-owner has a need, which they tend to express in terms of something like “our goal is for everyone to become proficient in process improvement“, or “we must become customer-focussed“, and our job is to get everyone to understand what this means in practice, and to do something about it. We have a lot of cunning techniques and things we use to do this, and one of them, for example, involves asking repeatedly, “yes, but what does that mean?”
Last weekend I went to Wales for my sister Emily’s hen weekend. One of her friends, Blossom, got us to play a great game, based on the game “scissors, rock, paper”, only this was called “giants, wizards and leprechauns.” This game in particular, among the other great games we played, made me remember what the point of playing was when we were little. Playing gets you high, there’s no doubt about it.
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