Anyone who has ever led a zoom call knows the drain of presenting to people who haven’t turned on their cameras. Is it any different for half-filled venues wondering if people are going to return?

While it’s easy to assume the struggle is a new one post-pandemic, the reality is that organizations have been discussing declining engagement for years.

How do you create genuine connection with the people you most want to engage?

The perverse tailspin of a lack of engagement

Outside of the virtual world, attendance in all types of venues was dropping long before quarantine in 2020. Engagement was the hot topic of conversation for universities, sports venues, theatres, convention centers, workplaces, and churches.

The press revealed the statistics:

“Pro sports franchises that saw an attendance decline of at least 10% from the 2008 season to the 2018 season.” — USA Today, July 2019

“Unduplicated [college] enrollments dipped below 18 million, a decline of more than 2 million students since its peak in 2011.” — Forbes, December 2019

“Orchestras have been performing classical music for more than 400 years. So why in the past two decades has it suddenly become so difficult to keep symphonies afloat?” — Baltimore Sun, August 2019

“U.S. church membership down sharply in past two decades.” — Gallup News, April 2019

“Theater is the artistic discipline in America that is losing audience share at the fastest rate in recent years.” — The New York Times, September 2013

It would appear that 2020 merely accelerated an already established trend.

And while each sector cites different factors to explain the declines (which are shockingly high considering population growth), what if there is a bigger trend at play affecting everyone?

A quick look at the difference between attention and engagement.

We are often told we are living in the “attention economy.” Attention is great. It gets you likes. It gets people talking about you. But keep in mind, attention is when you apply the mind to something. It’s fleeting. A fragile commodity.

Engagement involves emotional involvement and commitment.

If you want someone to spend money, be an advocate, or show up for something, you need to move them from attention to engagement.

This may sound like a subtle point, but whether your world is in the arts, education, sports, worship, or a business, if you want to connect with others in a way that produces action, you need more than attention.

(The social media world knows this well. Likes feel good, but it is following through on the call to action that measures as real engagement.)

The celebrated saves (that don’t actually work) and the one driving virtual attendance higher and higher.

The venues where thousands gather have been in an attention-grabbing technology arms race for over three decades. Bigger screens, more lights, better amenities, and increased “wow” factor with every pressure-filled investment.

But these improvements aren’t changing the engagement trend overall. To add salt to the wound, while in-person events are declining, virtual attendance is ramping up exponentially.

YouTube has 2 billion monthly active users and the TikTok app was downloaded over 2 billion times as of April 2020.

Social media platforms gained 490 million users in 2020 (that’s a 13.2% increase, year over year; 2019’s growth was 7.2%)

Per BCC research, the Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association reports over 60 million people engaged in fantasy games across the U.S. and Canada, with 20 million people playing fantasy games across India, a figure projected to reach 150 million by 2022.

Korean supergroup BTS broke a virtual attendance record with 756,000 viewers of their paid virtual concert in June 2020, the equivalent to 15 shows at a 50,000 seat stadium. Fans were able to choose their view from close-ups to full shots that showed off the choreography. (Keep this detail in mind. We’ll cover it in a moment.)

In 2019 there were 2.5 billion gamers representing a 9.6% increase year on year.

Federal data shows that more than a third of all 2018 college and university students took at least one online course, and that online enrollments continued steady growth as overall numbers dip.

There are all kinds of dynamics cited for the decrease of in-person engagement and the growth of virtual engagement. Everything from generational preferences to the difficulty of leaving a comfortable living room.

But what if the reason is more substantial than that?

What if the nature of engagement is that an audience member has some amount of control over the experience? And what if shifts in technology have changed our expectations about how much control we should have?

The counter-intuitive move that creates engagement.

My daughter grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. While she was sitting on our living room floor, it was a one-way experience. For sure, she could shout a warning to Scooby Doo, but nothing she did would impact what was happening on the screen.

Many cultural aspects to broadcast go unnoticed by those raised with it. Mainly that it is a passive medium for the viewer.

You have no control over the content. There is zero interaction. Something interesting may grab your attention for a moment, but attention is not the same as engagement.

Digital media — on the other hand — is active. You can access what you want anytime and anywhere. You have the power to customize, comment, hack, modify, and hyperlink to something related. You are doing something. You can interact with it. Most importantly, the audience can impact their own experience.

And here is what is missing in all our discussions on engagement: If you want to truly engage someone, you have to share control in the interaction.

This shared control is embedded in the nature of the digital world. This can be personalization, curated engagement (co-creation of content), real-time participation, or active communities. (More on this.)

So, when BTS gives fans the chance to choose their view at a virtual concert or the C2 Montreal conference (an in-person conference with growing attendance) makes it possible for people to set up “brain dates” or host tables on topics of their choice, engagement is by nature higher.

The unbeatable skill that produces engagement.

Creating an event with opportunities for shared control is a different discipline than attracting an audience. New and shiny can pull people’s attention for a time, but we’ve already clarified that attention and engagement are not the same.

The ability to design events and venues for shared control will be the key distinction for people designing, organizing, and facilitating the next wave of venues and events.

The thing is, there are places where this is happening already. It’s just that the model is less like the symphony and more like jazz.

In a symphony, there is sheet music. (A linear plan.) Musicians are highly skilled, and they follow the conductor to create something. The conductor is in control. Everyone follows him. As a general rule, no one freestyles.

Jazz musicians are also highly skilled, but the mechanism is different. They create something with others in real time while the locus of control is handed off between members of the band. When one is leading, the others play a supportive role. Then control is handed off and the others follow. It is an expansive skillset to be able to do it well.

The challenge is that handing off control and moving into a supportive role goes against everything we’ve been taught about how to create success.

We forget that when you hand off control and move to a supportive role, that it’s not a passive role. When the saxophone takes the solo, the other members are creating the space to be successful. When the piano takes the lead, the others adapt.

In venues?

Well, it can feel counter-intuitive to create a context where the crowd is leading some of the time. But it is essential if you want to shift from grabbing attention to creating engagement.

The bottom line on creating engagement with live audiences.

No matter what sector you work in, that dream you have of a growing number of people truly engaging with you isn’t a fantasy. It’s completely achievable.

But, it’s not as simple as just tweaking what’s been done before. You have to design for shared control

The thing is once you’ve put this thinking into your hybrid event strategy, you can reverse the trend and become in-demand in your sector.

The best part is that it’s easy to get started. You just have to start thinking about how you will share some control with your audience and enjoy as your numbers start rising.

If your organization gathers people together, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the word “hybrid” in reference to those events more than once.

Probably ad nauseum.

Over the course of the past year, most organizations have encountered the unique stress that comes with finding new ways to engage people. Trying new things — the only avenues that seem to be open to us — creates risk. It’s hard to create something for which there are no solid templates when the stakes are high.

It isn’t that we didn’t have digital engagement before the pandemic; we did — but it was often a secondary experience to in-person engagement. Our experience during quarantines and lock-downs has changed the game. Digital connection is no longer secondary.

But what does “hybrid” even mean? And more importantly, how do you pull off a “hybrid” event?

Why do we need hybrid events?

In its best form, a “hybrid” event is an event that includes both virtual and in-person audiences, in which each audience can engage with the other.

Why do we need them?

Well, primarily, we need them because audience expectations have changed.

Across multiple industries (e.g., arts, sports, education, workplace, entertainment, worship) there is a new expectation that there will always be both in-person and digital options for events.

While that may seem like an incredible hassle, the reality is that hybrid engagement can be a force multiplier.

If engagement is about the touchpoints you create with people, hybrid events exponentially expand your field. You can build something that creates bigger momentum, energy, and success than you ever could have when limited to either an in-person or digital-only track.

There are different models for creating hybrid engagement — but first, let’s look at a common perspective mistake, so you can deftly avoid it.

There is a missed opportunity in not planning for hybrid events.

I was meeting with a client who had hosted 100% of their events online during a lock-down. After those restrictions lifted, they were surprised and frustrated that 40% of their audience still wanted to attend their events online, as opposed to in-person.

Their concern wasn’t wrong: relationship-building between events was a big deal to this client. Their hope had been that things would “go back to normal.”

But what if getting back to “normal” wasn’t the best place to focus their efforts? What if there are benefits to what developed in their organization during quarantine?

People were still engaging — they were just doing it digitally.

Organizations will miss out when they discount what happens between people online.

Attendance shouldn’t be confused with engagement.

This client was asking: “Why would we want them to watch online? We want them to come back in-person.” But what they could have been asking was: “How can we engage both digital and in-person audiences?” — and more importantly, “How can we help them engage with each other?”

The shift that organizations need to make in their planning now is to consider this truth: digital connection is as important as in-person connection.

There’s a difference between strategizing for attention and strategizing for engagement.

It’s quite possible to have attention from an audience without engagement. Television is a great example of this. An audience can watch a show, but they can’t respond to it directly. Sure, they can share their thoughts about the experience on social media, but nothing they do or say will impact what is being broadcast in real time.

Contrast that to an improv show. In improv, the audience is highly engaged. They connect with performers and co-create the show with their suggestions.

Consider, too, a networking event — in which people can connect in small groups, or one-on-one. That’s engagement, too.

If you don’t want your target audiences to just be consumers — if you truly want them to engage — then you need to create ways for them to contribute by meaningful action.

This requires a different level of planning than many event planners have been accustomed to. After all, planning to transfer content from a stage to an audience is straightforward, regardless of virtual or in-person — but creating ways for the audience to meaningfully respond and connect is different.

We are used to planning for attraction by focusing on the content — but to plan for engagement, you’ll need to focus on all the ways people can contribute to the event.

Here’s where that gets uncomfortable: to get real contribution from participants, you’ll have to give some of the control to them. That’s a whole different model than just live-streaming an event.

There’s a sliding scale for hybrid audience engagement.

Your strategy for engagement hinges on how much power you’re willing to give your audience to co-create the event. The very thought of conceding any power at all may sound scary, but it isn’t like handing teenagers your car keys so they can learn how to drive on the highway in the middle of rush hour.

There is a sliding scale, and you’re allowed to choose your level and frame up the action:

Level 1: Broadcast

In a broadcast, communication goes one way: from you out to an audience. The audience has no power to respond directly, or to connect with other members of the audience. They simply receive the content. (Examples of this are television programs and streaming services.)

Level 2: Personalization

For both in-person and digital contexts, you can give the audience the power to customize elements of their own experience. Examples of this include the 2021 Virtual New Year’s Eve (which allowed participants to create an avatar and explore a virtual Times Square) and NASCAR (which uses Scanner to allow fans to select the audio feed from any car). This type of hybrid engagement has some form of both in-person and digital elements, which provide options to the audience that allow them to tailor their own experiences.

Level 3: Curated Engagement

Talk radio is a great example of curated engagement. The audience has the power to engage with the source, but that power is curated and controlled by the source. Recent digital world examples of curated engagement include Tony Robbins’ “Unleash the Power Within” virtual event and The Ellen Show; both blended live productions with live digital audiences in a way that facilitated audience engagement with the hosts on a curated basis.

Level 4: Real-Time Participation

In this context, audiences have the power to respond in real-time, and be seen and heard by the source. The audience’s actions impact what happens in the event, whether the event is in-person or digital. The NBA Virtual Fan Experience is a good example of this. Virtual fans can be seen and heard by players and other fans in their section. Game hosts interact with virtual fans the same way they would with in-person fans. They start chants during key moments in the game, and the virtual seats are visible on the NBA’s broadcast. Another example is Harvard Business School’s hybrid classrooms, where both in-person and remote students participate in real time with the same access to engagement.

Level 5: Active Communities

The ultimate power of hybrid engagement is in the connection of audiences with the source and with each other. When in-person and digital audiences can create community, their level of engagement is at its peak. This goes beyond the event and is generative in its effect. Examples of this include Mindvalley’s Quests. which offer a mix of content delivery, live group coaching calls, and students who gather together on the Mindvalley platform to participate in groups that connect and share with each other. Another example is Facebook communities, which blend digital connection with in-person connection.

Start your plan by determining your level of hybrid engagement.

Want to streamline your hybrid event planning process? Start with the audience.

Ask:

1. Who is our audience?

2. What are we trying to do for this audience? What is our mission?

3. What level of engagement would best meet that mission?

4. What needs to happen in order to achieve that level of engagement? What activities would be helpful?

5. What tools do we need to facilitate both in-person and digital connection?

It can help to see what others are doing (this article shares some perspective on who is doing what with hybrid events right now), but you can’t start there. You need to determine what your overall mission is first. Mimicking a model without having clarity on what you are trying to achieve is a recipe for failure.

Start with your mission, then determine the level of engagement that will best meet it.

Once you’ve decided on the type of engagement, then you can focus on what needs to happen in order to achieve it; what activity should you plan for?

With those decisions in place, finding the tools you’ll need to facilitate your event is relatively simple.

Does hybrid engagement feel more within reach?

Now that you have a framework for understanding the various levels of hybrid engagement, and a list of questions to help you start planning, how do you feel about getting started? Can you have this conversation with your team?

Just launching the conversation about hybrid engagement demonstrates leadership, and will put you ahead of your competitors, as you figure out how best to host hybrid events in your context. if you need a professional consultation to help you move forward on this, don’t hesitate to reach out at Idibri.com.

What happens to events after over a year of being limited to digital connection? What happens to arts venues, classrooms, arenas, stadia, conventions, and plain old conference rooms as people come back?

Will it be the same?

Doubtful.

We’ve all developed new muscle memory when it comes to connecting in groups.

Event planners, sports strategists, educational consultants, and theatre planners are talking about “hybrid events.” We all know the future will be a combination of in-person and digital presence.

But what does that mean? And more importantly, what will it look like?

What is a “hybrid” event?

Every event has two dynamics when it comes to connection. There is the “source.” This is the performer, presenter, professor, singer, pastor, actor, or sports team. And there is the “audience”. The participants, attendees, fans, students, ticket-holders, or congregation.

In a hybrid event, there is a combination of who participates live and who participates digitally.

If the idea of a live presenter to a remote audience sounds familiar, it is. It’s broadcast.

The difference in hybrid events, is that the communication needs to go both ways. The audience needs the ability to connect back to the source (or each other) and engage.

This bi-directional connection can include:

· the ability to ask questions

· be heard cheering or giving applause

· chat to other participants

· respond to a poll, game, or other interactive

· have audience-created content shared

· or any other type of engagement.

To be clear, if the communication goes only one way, it isn’t hybrid. It’s just broadcast.

Hybrid is a contribution-model, not a consumption model. The audience has a role in creating the event.

Another differentiator between broadcast and hybrid events is that the participants can be known. Just like live participants register when they purchase tickets, remote participants have a login. They are not anonymous to the organizers the way they would be in a broadcast.

When participants are known, there is an opportunity for connection after the event is over — a defining factor in digital events.

The need for hybrid engagement

Audiences have now learned a new muscle memory. We aren’t going backwards. The future won’t look like the past.

And it shouldn’t.

The digital world creates opportunities to broaden reach. You can connect with audiences without the limitations of time and geography.

Because of that, the next five years are going to explode with innovations.

Technology development is already on fire. Everything from Extended Reality (XR) to hybrid event platforms to AV renovations of existing venues to better accommodate hybrid experiences.

As William Gibson put it: “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Who is doing what with hybrid events right now?

If you want to know the future of hybrid events, it helps to see what people are doing right now. While the quarantine has fueled innovation, in some cases people have been experimenting with this for years.

Here’s what we are seeing:

NBA Virtual Fan Experience

The NBA’s virtual fan experience allows fans in virtual seats to watch the game in real-time. Since they are connected to the venue via a live video and audio feed, they can be seen and heard by players and other fans in their section. Game hosts interact with virtual fans the same way they would with real ones. They start chants during key moments in the game. And the virtual seats are visible on the NBA’s broadcast. (Source)

Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within

Author and philanthropist, Tony Robbins, took his live events virtual during the pandemic. Tony and his team created an immersive studio complete with two 180-degree wraparound screens. Tony was able to achieve spontaneous two-way interactivity with any participant at any moment while freely moving about the space. The event also integrated elements such as live performers, music, lighting, and visual effects on the fly. (Source)

Times Square 2021 New Year’s Eve Celebration

When the pandemic closed the annual Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration, the organizers created VNYE(Virtual New Year’s Eve). VNYE brought the experience to mobile devices and computers through an XR platform. The gamified experience allowed participants to create their own avatar to explore a virtual Times Square. (Source)

Philadelphia 76’ers Youth Camps.

The Philadelphia 76ers’ — like many NBA teams — engage young fans through camps and clinics. When the pandemic halted that, the team worked to create digital opportunities. The 76ers hosted a dribble challenge through the HomeCourt app. Using the app’s artificial intelligence, fans recorded videos of themselves completing the challenge. Fans uploaded their videos by tagging @jr_76ers and using the hashtag #StayInTheGame. The 76ers also used HomeCourt to power sponsored virtual camps. (Source)

Tomorrowland Virtual Festival

Tomorrowland, the world’s biggest dance music festival, was set to celebrate its 16th anniversary in 2020. Rather than cancel the live event, they took it digital. Eight stages, 60-plus artists, 16 webinar sessions, and extra activities became a moveable, scalable, virtual world. A green screen was used for on-stage recordings for wide sweeping shots of the 280,000 virtual festival-goers. (Source)

Annual Corporate Meetings

Meeting Planner, Joanna Newcomb, working with Premier Meeting & Event Management, helped to recreate an annual large corporate meeting. They shifted from the “big event” to a more distributed model. Keynotes were streamed to small regional groups meeting in-person so the networking aspect of the event was preserved. Small groups made COVID protections manageable, and people were more likely to go because they could drive rather than fly.

Cloud Clubbing

When nightclubs closed, EDM DJ’s in China started “cloud clubbing” on Douyin (China’s version of Tik Tok). The DJ is live and participants — participating in small groups in their homes — send messages. Not only that, but they are able to spend real money on virtual gifts for performers. (Source)

Wonderlab FiestÓN en Casa

Tech-forward, corporate event planner WonderLab which typically features interactive bracelets and apps at live events, launched FiestÓN en Casa during quarantine. The experience starts with a digital invitation, then there is the lead up to the party where photos and videos create the hype, then the day of the party the event is steamed with a live DJ, personalized trivia, and interaction with the guests. Catering is also coordinated in the app and delivered to each group of guests in their homes. (Source)

Event Cinema Livecasts

The Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, and the Sydney Opera House along with multiple ballet and theatre companies provide live events virtually to audiences in cinemas and parks across the world and have been doing this for years. (Source)

HBS Hybrid Classrooms

Harvard Business School created a unique remote and in-person learning experience that maintains the integrity of the case method pedagogy while ensuring health safety. The goal was to create an equitable experience for remote and in-person participants. The team used a prototyping design process to quickly innovate through feedback and iteration. Remote students can read the chalkboards, see their fellow classmates individually, watch the professor, raise their hand, and easily participate, while the in-person experience facilitates a familiar teaching environment and supports interaction between in-person and remote students. (Source)

Best Cities Global Forum

The Best Cities Global Forum transitioned engagement online for in-person attendees while creating a designed experience for their digital attendees. Live attendees were given a unique link which gave them access to the platform to engage with the online attendees. The event combined both in-person and remote speakers and audiences via the platform. Remote attendees were able to participate in live Q&A sessions, and in-person attendees could engage with online attendees via the chat bar and Q&A widget. (Source)

Wolves Summit

The Wolves Summit made history in October 2020 as “Europe’s first hybrid event.” The event will again be hybrid in 2021 and includes digital experiences including multi-stage and matchmaking functionalities, an Investor Podium, dedicated Scale-up, Accelerator, and Community Partner Stages. (Source)

C2 Montreal Online

The C2 Conference is a mix of business innovators, social game-changers, and experts representing diverse fields. The C2 conference in-person event is designed to create spontaneous interaction between participants. From the conversation prompts in the queues to “Braindates,” everything is about engagement. C2 Online launched in 2020 as a completely digital event separate from the annual C2 Montréal conference each spring. (Source)

Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival

With limited tickets available and many millions more who wanted to attend, the Coachella team invested in live streaming for both weekends of their event on their Youtube channel. For ticket holders attending the live event, it was business as usual. But for folks who couldn’t make it that weekend (or that year at all), this move toward a hybrid event was game changing. A new term, Couchella, was born to signify the shared experience that virtual attendees could have at home on their couches. (Source)

eNASCAR iRacing Pro invitational Series

NASCAR reached 1.7 million new fans during the early days of the lockdown through simulated racing. The iRacing experience is a sophisticated racing simulation that takes place on iRacing.com. Anybody can sign up to race, but there are system requirements. While all three of NASCAR’s premier series were on hold, its iRacing series featured drivers from Cup, Xfinity and Trucks to provide fans with a unique, fun and competitive experience on race day.(Source)

What’s next in hybrid events?

While much of the innovation in virtual events happened because of the COVID quarantine, it won’t stop there. This creativity is sparking new thinking for how we connect in groups. What’s possible has expanded and it won’t go back in the box.

We are at a pivot point where hybrid event strategy needs to be part of every organization’s conversation.

The question is — how are you going to embrace a hybrid strategy going forward?

//Want to enhance your virtual presence? To get practical advice for individuals and companies, download Idibri’s report.

Hybrid Events: Who is doing what right now? was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who are you in your career? And — more importantly — where are you going?

Would it surprise you to learn that most career paths are fixed? And that, to create any sort of change, you might need to cultivate entirely different skillsets than the ones usually prescribed?

It doesn’t matter if you are a professor, architect, manager, nurse, engineer, marketer, or computer programmer: the path you were set on in school is linear. You go from apprentice to expert through an established timeline.

Becoming an expert at what you do is a very worthwhile goal. The bad news is that there are probably a lot of experts in your field already.

But what if you could change the rules of the game?

The noteworthy difference between experts and innovators

• An expert has comprehensive knowledge and advanced technical skill. They can solve problems quickly because they’ve seen them before. Their knowledge is authoritative.
• Clients are willing to pay for an expert’s services to gain competence, efficiency, and a quality end result.
• Experts save the client money because they don’t make the mistakes that novices often do. (Typically, because they learned from their own mistakes early in their careers or suffered through the mistakes of others.)

When a client hires an expert, they have a defined what, where, when and how. The deep technical expertise of the expert delivers it.

• An innovator is someone who introduces new methods, ideas, or products. They go deep into problems to find what hasn’t yet been explored. Their knowledge is incomplete and their thinking is, by necessity, divergent.
• Clients pay a premium for an innovator because they produce exponential results. People use words like creative, pioneering, groundbreaking, or game-changing to describe their work.
• Innovators thrive on solving the problems in the marketplace that no one else has solved.

When a client hires an innovator, they only define the what. It is up to the innovator to discover the how. (The where and when become malleable.)

How experts switch trajectory to become innovators

Years ago, I participated in a rapid prototyping design workshop at the global design and innovation company, Ideo, at their headquarters in Palo Alto. The breakthrough learning for me came when the group leader pointed out that to gain real value from user surveys — a fundamental part of their design process — we needed to intentionally seek input from the wild outliers.

You see, it’s easy to gather mainstream thought. It’s harder to gather influences from the people with such different viewpoints that we would be forced to consider them.

So what does this have to do with you and your path?

Regardless of your field, there is a prescribed career path that will take you from apprentice to expert across a span of about 20 years. As you perform the work and study to increase your knowledge, you will move predictably from point A to point B — and there’s nothing wrong with this. The world needs experts.

But if the thought of traveling this well-worn, more predictable trail doesn’t excite you, I have good news. There’s a different path that isn’t frequently talked about.

You can survive as a solo act as an expert, but becoming an innovator requires the ability to bring together people who have different experiences with the same problem to extract and distill this knowledge from the group. Innovators create a synthesis of different perspectives, uncovering pieces of the problem that more limited perspectives can be blind to in order to unleash a broader range of solutions. In other words, it thrives on being able to identify and pull in the outliers.

But this isn’t training anyone can hand you on a normal career path — especially if you work in a field that has historically been hierarchal. You will have to create your own curriculum to develop your new expertise. Lessons include:

• Apophenia — the ability to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. (Note that apophenia is a two-edged sword. It can fuel true innovation or make you believe in conspiracy theories.)
• Emotional intelligence — The ability to defuse conflict, empathize with others, and understand and manage your own emotions.
• Tolerance for a messy process — Innovation is never a straight line. There will be false starts and things you try that just don’t work. (Hey, if it were easy, innovation would happen all the time!)

The course of study for these skills will not magically appear before you. You will have to search for them. You will also need to shift your mindset, so you are open to, seeking out, and intentionally absorbing the small lessons that, in aggregate, broaden you. This is about learning to think differently, which will require you to read books and articles from authors outside of your field, put yourself in group situations that will stretch you, and seek non-traditional outlier mentors.

The curious training gym for developing yourself into an innovation ninja

The best place I’ve practiced the skills of apophenia, emotional intelligence, and tolerance for a messy process is improvisational theatre, a form of live theatre where everything — plot, characters, dialogue, scene, and story — are created in the moment.

If you find the idea of getting on a stage, in front of a room of other people, with no idea of what is going to happen next to be terrifying, you’re in very good company. But the thing about improv is that what appears made up in the moment is based on rules and methods that develop expertise. (Much like your own professional expertise.)

For example, one rule of improv is that you never say “no” to your scene partners. “No” shuts a scene down, there is nowhere else to go. The better answer is “yes, and…” This keeps the scene going, sparks creativity, and gives your partners something to build on.

Creating something together live on stage based in the rules of improv gives you the same kind of practice you need to draw insights from a diverse group of people so that you can get the best and brightest ideas on the table.

Even just taking a single improv class can expand your capacity for collaboration.

Why? Because presenting information and creating engagement are different skillsets. Improv training helps you build your muscles for pulling insights from groups.

But you can’t study a book to learn improv. (That said, Truth in Comedy: The Manual for Improvisation is one of the best business books I’ve ever read.) There is no substitute for practicing working in teams. You just have to get up there and do it to build the skills you’ll need to move from expert to innovator.

The cost that stops most experts dead in their tracks

If all you have to do to get from expert to innovator is acquire the ability to draw insights from a group and draw in the outliers, then why doesn’t everyone do it?

Here’s the thing: there is a high cost to pay.

Remember when you first learned how to drive a car? It was incredibly slow. You had to think about every little thing. Seatbelt. Mirrors. Hands at 10 and 2. Speed limits. Unfamiliar roads. When to brake and when to hit the gas. It required a ton of mental energy.

But now? Well, if you’ve been driving for a while, now it is automatic.

When the apprentice is developing a skill, their work is incredibly inefficient. But over time, as they develop expertise, everything accelerates. The efficiency of a true expert is beautiful.

Experts enjoy the rewards of this efficiency. (And so do clients.)

But the path to innovation can be ridiculously inefficient. Any time you collaborate with a lot of people to find a solution to an ill-defined problem, there is a cost. There are false starts and failures. Bunny trails and data gathering. It takes a lot of mental, physical, and social energy to go through a process that looks like it’s going nowhere.

Until it does.

It can be bitterly painful — and often impossible — for an expert to give up their hard-won efficiency to get to a place of innovation. In fact, most stop in their tracks before ever pursuing it. Why? Because there is a personal satisfaction to being the one who can do it all. Often an expert derives their identity from their ability to produce and save the day. (I know this because I’ve lived it. It took a deliberate choice to change my trajectory.)

Innovators are willing to pay the inefficiency costs. They know that the highest value isn’t in their own ability to produce, but that the highest value lies in the interaction of the group and the outlier results.

The stupid shortcut that causes people who want to be innovators to fail.

As critical as the soft skills are, you can’t just develop facilitation skills and skip developing your technical expertise. Technical expertise is your ticket to be able to play. The soft skills are what get you to the next level.

Without strong technical skills in your chosen field, you just become a “hand-waver;” someone playing the role of expert without the foundation needed to back it up.

You have to have mastery of the rules before you can creatively break them in pursuit of innovation.

And — more importantly — your client needs to know you have the requisite expertise so they can trust you to pursue innovation on their behalf.

Pursuing innovation makes you the expert of experts (and produces dividends for yourself and the client.)

Making the sweat-equity investment of becoming an innovator can have remarkable payoffs. For one thing, the skill of drawing insights from groups of people is rare — and it produces incredible results.

It also puts you at the center of the innovation, which increases your value and your impact — and gives you a great deal of autonomy.

But here’s the thing: this is not a path anyone will invite you to, because no two innovators share the exact same trail.

You will have to create your own. The only question left is: are you ready to begin?

Are you an expert or an innovator? The difference can transform your career. was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What if complaining about Zoom fatigue is missing the point? What if there is a window of opportunity for creating engagement in Zoom meetings that is going to close if we don’t jump through it?

Here’s the scenario:

Our annual meeting switched from in-person to Zoom to accommodate the quarantine. The group included leaders from a variety of industries — people at the top of their fields with impressive accomplishments.

But I was in for a shock.

The ones I expected to lead — who normally have a commanding presence at the in-person meetings — failed to connect at all.

One looked down his nose as he spoke. He came off dismissive and condescending.

Another’s face was dark. He came off guarded, as if in a witness protection program.

One leaned back in his chair and looked at the wall as if he were on a conference call. He looked lazy and disinterested.

But here’s the surprising thing…

Other leaders connected amazingly well. They came off open, authentic and knowledgeable. Clearly, they had put thought into this and used the medium to its fullest.

These are the people that the group engaged with. Others — the ones normally knocking it out of the park — were left behind. The difference was not subtle.

My takeaway?

Those who adapt their leadership to the new digital reality are going to have a decisive edge.

If you are battling in this area, you are at risk of losing everything you’ve done to position yourself as a leader. Fortunately, creating engagement via screens is a skill you can learn.

Why are dynamic leaders so bad at creating engagement on Zoom?

Probably Saturday morning cartoons.

Hear me out…

Watching television is passive — which means we have thousands of hours of muscle memory of passivity that kicks in whenever there is a screen in front of us.

It doesn’t matter that logically we know we are meeting with people live. It’s hard to overcome what’s been hard wired through practice.

While awareness of the phenomenon helps, a quick fix is to use a standing desk for Zoom calls. Standing is an active posture, and more importantly, it is a physical interruption of the muscle memory for sitting on a couch passively consuming media. (It also disrupts the muscle memory of all of those hours of conference calls where you were multitasking without being seen.)

All of this to say that being bad at Zoom calls isn’t your fault. But if you don’t work to get good at it, others will pass you by.

How to position yourself as a leader in a virtual room.

In-person, some people have a magnetic energy. They draw people to them. They are listened to.

However, in the virtual world, this presence doesn’t always come through — usually because there are things working against you. Here are three questions to ask yourself:

Is your technology minimizing your presence?

Humans are biologically wired to connect with faces. (Our theory is that this is why Facebook beat out MySpace, but that’s a different article.)

If your camera placement works against eye contact or makes you appear to be looking down at people, you are at a disadvantage. If your lighting obscures your expressions, you are at a disadvantage. If your voice sounds tinny or harsh through your computer’s onboard microphone, you are at a disadvantage.

Take a moment to notice how you show up in the gallery view and compare your image with those of others. This is an important exercise. For specific tips on how to improve your set up check out this cheat sheet from Idibri.

What are you communicating with your background?

First impressions are not complicated. Humans make decisions quickly — and we aren’t even smart about it. You can use this to your advantage.

Bookshelves can make you look smart. Industrial finishes can make you look cool. Paintings or musical instruments can make you seem creative. Rich traditional finishes can make you seem wise.

But there’s a catch…

You cannot pull this off with a virtual background. They glitch when you move, so people know they are fake. And you won’t get the benefit of the doubt. Most will jump to the conclusion that you are hiding an unmade bed or piles of clutter rather than assuming that you are working from a room supportive of your leadership style.

In an online environment, background communicates more than the clothes you are wearing. Make your background work for you.

How good is your preshow?

There can be as much as a 5-minute gap between when people start entering a Zoom meeting room and when the meeting starts. While leaders may naturally leverage this time in the real world to connect with participants, people often forget to do it in the virtual one. (Then the dead air cues everyone’s muscle memory for passivity.)

Greeting people by name as they enter and making small talk positions you as a host in the room and automatically confers leadership. While there are a wide range of questions that can work during the “preshow” here are some go/to questions with the purpose behind them if you don’t already have go/to questions of your own:

• What’s been the highlight of your day so far? (Create positive thinking)
• What would make today’s meeting valuable to you? (Align content to participants)
• What are you binge-watching right now? (Create ease and camaraderie.)
• What surprised you most about the shift to working from home? (Build empathy.)
• What’s your stance on pineapple as a pizza topping? (Spark light conversation)

You don’t have to be the leader of the meeting to have game in the preshow. Just start engaging and connecting the other participants. At the very least, you will save the virtual room from 5 minutes of awkward waiting time.

How to create engagement (even when people won’t turn on their cameras.)

Engagement is created both when participants have interest in the meeting, and when they are interactively participating.

How you create engagement on a Zoom call depends on the type of call you are hosting. For this, we are going to need a short sidebar on theatre design (aka. creating engagement with groups in a physical space).

In a theatre, there are three types of communication flow:

1. From the stage into the audience.

2. From the audience back to the stage.

3. From the audience to each other.

Different types of events prioritize different paths of communication. If you know which type of communication flow you want to prioritize, it will cue you to the best strategies to create engagement.

For example:

Presentation

A presentation prioritizes communication from the stage out. The person on the stage has the biggest voice in the room. In the Zoom world this means there is a main screen that features one thing — the content of the speaker. Creating engagement in this Zoom meeting might include:

• Prerecording portions of the presentation so that the content is tight, professional, and delivered in a shorter amount of time.
• Using an emcee to host the presentation and interact with the attendees.
• Using polling tools to take the pulse of the audience throughout the presentation.
• Featuring people in the audience in your examples.
• Sending teaser videos to the audience ahead of time so they have elevated interest in the content when they join the meeting.
• Using the whiteboard or annotation features to make the presentation feel more interactive.

Responsive

A responsive event — like a town hall — prioritizes feedback from the audience to the stage. In a digital meeting space, this means there are dedicated ways for the audience to respond and be heard. Creating engagement in this Zoom meeting might include:

• Using a moderator to prompt discussion and host the room.
• Having someone on the call whose job is to monitor and respond to chat.
• Using a graphic facilitator to capture attendee comments. The graphic facilitator would be a co-host and share their screen. (The co-host feature has to be enabled in settings.)
• Share a cloud-based document with a short url (like bit.ly) that people can contribute to in real time.

Sense of Community

A sense of community is achieved when the highest priority is the communication between the members of the audience to each other. Think about arenas when a wave breaks out or how cheering promotes more cheering — that’s communication from the audience to each other. Creating this sense of community in the digital world might include:

• Visuals and messaging that make participants feel part of something.
• Recommending that participants select “Gallery View” so they can see the other participants. (Include a visual to show how to do this. If people are used to other platforms, they may not know what you are talking about.)
• Sharing a screen with Walls.io or Poll Everywhere to display attendee-generated content.
• Using Zoom’s breakout room feature to create smaller groups. (This can be random or assigned.) Note that one of the comments we get the most using breakout rooms is that it helps if there is a facilitator in the room.

How do you make your Zoom meeting more interactive?

Zoom and other virtual meeting platforms have a variety of tools to make a virtual meeting more interactive. The thing is few people use them without being coached to do so. When we’ve been programmed to be passive in front of screens, it can take some intention to shift the culture from being passive to being more interactive.

One of the best ways to boost this interaction is to “seed the audience.” Seeding an audience is where you have a few “plants” that have been coached on how to respond. (Performers use this in theatre all the time.) Once the “plants” break the ice of interaction it becomes easier for other participants to follow.

You can do this by coaching your “plants” to:

1. Use reactions. (On Zoom this is clapping or a thumbs up).

2. Use the “raise hand” feature.

3. Have questions ready to post into chat.

4. Unmute and chime in.

5. Use the whiteboard or annotations.

Remote meetings will usually start with a passive culture and it takes intention to make it interactive. This is something that can be built over time. When choosing your “plants” don’t go for the people who are used to jumping out there. Choose the intentional people who care about your mission and explain what you are trying to achieve and how they can help.

Then you’ve saved your normal “first responders” to jump on board once the plants cue the interactive behavior.

What do leaders miss in creating engagement on Zoom?

Virtual event expert, Matt Emerson, President of CEAVCO, shares:

“Zoom fatigue is real, and there is so much bad PowerPoint. Leaders have to get better at making sure the content is engaging. It’s easy for the mind to wander or for people to multitask. In general, we have to plan to deliver content in shorter chunks with more intentional breaks.”

“A virtual event requires just as much care and coordination as a live event does. You need to develop a ‘run of show.’ What’s on the screen when? How are transitions going to take place? How will prerecorded videos be delivered? A lot of the planning and skills we use in the four walls of a venue are useful in a virtual meeting.”

Emerson continues, “Another thing people miss is bandwidth. If you are working from home and have two teenagers watching Netflix or playing video games, it can create glitches in your feed. Or, if you happen to be traveling and the Wi-Fi is poor, you need to consider this and have a backup plan.”

This last one burned me recently when I was leading a strategic planning session for a group of 25 architects. My lighting and visuals were on point. I had my run sheet in front of me. And 10 minutes in, I lost my connection. Luckily, my graphic facilitator — who had a copy of the run sheet — jumped in to lead, but it took me several minutes to get back on which cost momentum. You can bet I will have a bandwidth backup plan on the next strategic planning session I lead.

What opportunities do you gain meeting in a virtual space?

Emerson says “There are a couple of distinct advantages to meeting virtually. First, you can broaden your audience because both geography and the meeting time becomes irrelevant. We’ve seen people keep their content live for a window of time and achieve a much broader reach.”

“The second advantage is lower overhead. We’ve seen not-for-profit organizations take their events virtual and achieve much higher net take because there is no cost for a venue, valet, or a catered chicken dinner,” highlights Emerson.

My favorite opportunity is that virtual meetings give leaders the chance to learn the medium which can translate into a host of other opportunities. The better leaders become at engaging people on Zoom, the easier it is to craft a message and engage an audience on other digital platforms. YouTube, social media, your company’s website… You build a new active muscle memory for screens.

And that creates an edge.

Craig Janssen consults with leaders to help them navigate the business and cultural impact of shifts in technology. Learn more at craigjanssen.com.

How Smart Leaders Create Engagement in Zoom Meetings was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remember that strategic plan you invested in? The one that was supposed to last you for 3 years?

Yeah, well that’s out the window now.

For professional service firms, recessions and global pandemics can kill your business. And you will need to move with incredible speed to change that.

As a leader you have to make decisions quickly, in an ecosystem that is continually changing. But how do you know what to choose? How do you make wise decisions?

(Because I’ve got to tell you going through a SWOT exercise feels pretty lame about now.)

You still need to plan, but the rules of the strategic planning radically change. It has to be more agile. And you have to be able to pull it off 10x faster.

You can’t make a strategic plan when variables are changing quickly, but you can do scenario mapping to equip you to make the best decisions possible.

Here’s what leaders of professional services need to know about scenario mapping when everything is shifting:

1. Redefine your objectives based on the current reality.

Rose-colored glasses will not serve you, nor will advisers who are trying to make you feel better.

The hardest thing in dealing with an uncertain economic climate is to forget what you thought the world looked like and immediately deal in reality. You don’t have time to mess around. You have to get real fast.

To have coherence, you have to have clarity. So, to start scenario mapping, your first goal is to define a new version of success.

Thought your firm was going to cross a milestone earnings mark this year? You know that is no longer going to happen.

Your new company goal might simply be to stay alive. To keep as many of your team together as possible. To come out the other side of this mess ready to grow.

There may have been business details you didn’t track with granularity. Right now, you need them because they define reality. You need to know what your cash is, what you are owed, what you owe, what work you have in the pipeline and what your bottom-line costs are. Those are the things you can know.

But, there are also things you don’t know.

You don’t know who will pay you (and who won’t) or when payments will come in. You don’t know what will happen with the economy. You don’t know if you will find new clients.

So, get clear fast on what you can know, and set your new objective.

2. Staying in the game is about managing cash flow. Dive into your metrics.

In a dogfight, pilots will often aim at the ground, then pull out at the last minute. They manage pitch and velocity to outmaneuver whatever is coming at them.

In an unstable economic climate, you do the same thing — but instead you are managing cash. When you run out of cash you hit the ground. Here’s what you are dealing in:

Receivables: What are your receivables (money owed to you) as a multiple of your minimum monthly operating costs? How much you need depends on how fast your clients pay. In architecture and engineering, average payments of receivables is 45–60 days after invoicing. If your payment cycle is similar and if your receivables are less than 3 times your minimum operating costs, then you are in a deep dive pointed at the ground and will probably hit it in 2 months. The only way to pull up is to have deep cash reserves or the ability to immediately cut costs.

Backlog: What’s your backlog as a multiple of minimum monthly operating costs? Backlog is the work that is under contract which you have yet to complete. In our engineering business, projects typically run for 2–3 years and we are under contract for the entire project. For us, we know when backlog divided by minimum operating costs equals 12 or more, we are fine and flying level. If this multiple is 10, then we are in a shallow dive. If this multiple is 8 it means we are in a steep dive and our monthly billing will drop below operating costs within 2, perhaps 3 months. Your multiple can be quite different if most of your work is short term. Know what multiple is healthy for your company by looking at your past.

Pipeline: What new work are you pursuing? Make this a short list that only focuses on the highest probabilities. If something is marked with a 40% chance of winning, that isn’t high enough to treat it as real. Get it out of your projections.

Cash on hand. You need a minimum one month of operating cash or bank credit line to serve as a shock absorber for your monthly operating costs. Trend line it and if you are going backward you are screwed. Make the hard decisions early to pull out of that dive.

Expenses: How much it costs to run your business needs immediate attention. In good economic times, we spend more. Make the cuts you can immediately make as fast as possible, then know your options for cutting deeper. First level? Bring all discretionary spending to a halt. Deeper cuts include ownership salaries, staff salaries, furloughs, and layoffs.

If you don’t have clean reporting structures for your metrics, get them in place. You will need as realistic a picture each day as possible.

A note about debt: if you run a professional services business that has limited debt or no debt, you have an advantage. But, most businesses leverage debt. In uncertain economic times, tempting as it is, debt is not your ally. What you borrow now you need to pay tomorrow. Many companies have used debt to stay alive in downturns, only to go out of business once a recession passes and costs increase.

3. Based on the metrics, map your scenarios and determine your options.

Once you know your metrics, you are in a position to map scenarios.

· What happens if 40% of our clients are slow to pay us and 20% don’t pay at all?

· What happens if our normal flow of new work dries up and our backlog drops?

· What other options do we have to fill our pipeline with new work when the traditional work isn’t there?

· What if we cut costs 10%, 30%, 50%?

You don’t have time to map every scenario so focus on a range of the most likely between optimism and worst-case scenario. Define them and get to your resulting choices as fast as you can. Document the options and be wide and wild with possibility.

Going crazy on this will spark innovation and creativity. You aren’t acting on it yet. Be divergent in your thinking because you may find something that saves you from things going sideways.

The goal is to do this fast. This is about orientation and generating solutions.

Then you start to narrow. Which options hit your new definition of success? The success objective you defined earlier stands as true north for your selection.

(By the way, that 3-year plan you had? Your brain is going to want to go back to that. Forget it. It is no longer relevant.)

4. Decide and act. Then repeat the process.

When things are changing quickly there is no perfect decision — but there can be good decisions.

So, decide and act. Don’t wait.

Here’s the thing. In uncertain economic times, this is not “one and done” scenario mapping. This is a loop that keeps playing out until you hit equilibrium. So, once you’ve made a decision and taken action, you start again.

1. You fix on the next objective.

2. You get a pulse on your current metrics.

3. You scenario map based on where things are now.

4. Then you decide and act again.

As a leader in a professional services firm, it “feels” safer to wait and see. The problem is that time works against you when managing cash flow in uncertain times, and no one has to tell you that adhering to a strategic plan created in stable times is untenable.

Here’s the thing. There is a reason you are here now.

Your team needs you to be the champion for reality and scenario mapping.

You can be the leader your firm needs right now.

In uncertain times, the pain of doing something is less than the pain of doing nothing.

And just by being willing to face reality and make decisions you are so much further ahead than most of the other leaders in your shoes.

You won’t flinch.

You will lead. Even though it is risky, painful, and without guarantee.

It doesn’t matter if you previously thought your A-game was talent in the discipline that made you successful. Right now, your A-game is moving fast and doing hard things.

Leaders are ordinary people who do what needs to be done.

You’ve got this.

Your strategic plan is dead. How scenario mapping can save your professional services firm. was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the midst of crisis management, our instinct is to control anything we can control.

I find myself majoring in the minor details. My strategic brain shifts to focus to what’s small and actionable.

I’m not the only one. I’ve spoken with a wide range of leaders this week. Their emotional response to the current crisis is all over the map — much more than they thought it would be. (Not that everyone reveals this outside of close relationships.)

It’s like we are all working through the stages of grief.

After all, the loss is real.

The market is down.

Our companies have dropped in value.

I’ve heard the term “expectation hangover.” It describes the way we feel when we thought things were going one way, and they go another. The term seems to apply. Whatever expectations we had for this year have been 100% rewritten.

In crisis management, justifying emotional decisions with logic is a losing proposition.

When we are responsible to make decisions which affect the people we lead, we are caught in the tension of control vs adaptability. And control is seductive. Like processed sugar, it’s a quick fix for our emotions.

Control makes us feel safe (even if that safety is an illusion).

In crisis management, parameters are constantly changing. Whatever control you put in place today becomes irrelevant tomorrow.

And here’s the thing…

It’s easy to make control-based decisions to ease personal tension. But if you do that, your team has to will wind up making business decisions based on your controls rather than the realities of the current situation.

A simple example from the COVID-19 crisis with everyone working from home:

A leader (fearing loss of team productivity) institutes a rule requiring hourly check-ins from employees to prove they are available during working hours. (This communicates to the team that the leader is worried about people slacking off.)

An employee (navigating the new normal of having kids at home because there is no school or childcare available) focuses on the check-ins to look productive, when the better move would be to propose work outside of office hours when they could be more productive.

In a crisis, adaptive leadership feels counter-intuitive. But having a framework simplifies it.

When faced with a crisis, there is no time to delay in figuring out what to do. Your strategy has to be immediate. You need emergency tactical responses. Your team needs a plan, and you can’t waffle about it.

You need a framework for to free yourself to triage and pivot as the situation changes.

USAF Colonel John Boyd came up with a framework which has become an important concept in military, legal, and business strategy. The OODA loop (observe-orient-decide-act) is a decision-making process. It is about speed. Whoever can run this cycle the fastest responds to unfolding events more effectively than an opponent.

The OODA loop is a smart framework for anyone making decisions in a crisis.

Here’s what this looks like for leaders who need to respond adaptively to manage a crisis.

Step 1: Observe (Assess yourself)

Part of the problem of making objective decisions is that you are an irremovable part of the equation.

So, factor yourself in.

Understand your emotional reaction to the crisis — and be unflinchingly honest. What fears may color your decisions? What frustrations cause knee-jerk reactions? What goals do you need to let go of?

Observe your own emotional state and reactions. This step will give you a clear view for the next one.

Step 2: Orient (Assess Reality)

What is the current situation right now? Base this on what you know now without projecting forward. (And don’t let your brain feed you worst-case scenarios.) Focus on what’s real in this moment.

Then ask yourself, “What does success look like in the context of our current reality?”

Your definition of success will be different to what it was pre-crisis, but it’s important to define it. This definition of success will orient you for the next step.

Step 3: Decide

Whatever you decide won’t be the perfect decision, but it can be a good one. (Most of us lack the requisite trait of omniscience required for perfect decisions.)

There is no time to overthink. Choose and be confident in it. (Your team needs your confidence.)

Step 4: Act

Once you’ve decided…act.

In fact, a key factor in the OODA loop is speed, and the space between steps 3 & 4 is where people win and lose.

Inaction drains confidence fast. It makes your team think you can’t see the crisis, or worse, that you don’t care. Once you’ve decided, act.

The thing about crisis management is that you don’t do this once. You go back to step one, and run the loop again and again until the crisis passes.

The physiological response that will stop you from running the loop

When reading an article like this, the OODA loop sounds great. The hard part is implementing it in real life when the pressure is on.

You see, if you are unaware, the thing that will stop you from running it is you.

Don’t underestimate the gravitational pull of your amygdala.

The amygdala is that little part of your brain designed to keep you alive in response to a threat. It exerts substantial control over you by triggering the fight-or-flight system. If while managing a crisis, you find yourself in arguments with your team or avoiding conflict completely — you can bet this little part of your brain plays a role in it.

Normally, you operate out of your brain’s frontal lobe — the part that helps you think clearly, make rational decisions, and controls your responses. But, in response to threat, your amygdala is perfectly capable of taking your frontal lobe offline. (This process is sometimes called amygdala hijack.) The amygdala doesn’t just control how you think, it impacts your emotions and physiology.

And here is the key that most leaders miss when it comes to crisis management:

Your fundamental instinct — courtesy of your amygdala — is going to be to get control of all the things outside of yourself.

Even though that is completely impossible.

The control lever most leaders miss, and a simple way to engage it

In his book, Coherence: The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership, Dr. Alan Watkins discusses the impact of physiology, emotion, feeling, and thinking on the results of leaders. While the book covers a wide range of performance factors, one section unexpectedly deals with breathing. Watkins writes, “If you control your breathing then you are in charge of your physiology.”

In short, breathwork is the quickest way to get control of yourself.

While there are a wide range of methods — everything from box breathing to the wildly popular Wim Hof method, just pausing and breathing smoothly and deeply can do the trick.

In crisis management, we start moving so quickly that we don’t even realize the amygdala is in charge. Especially if we aren’t looking for it.

A couple of years ago, we hired Michelle Kinder — previously of Momentous Institute — to speak at Idibri about amygdala hijack and its role in emotional intelligence. During her talk, she handed each of us a plastic bouncy ball — the clear kind with water and glitter inside.

Then she asked us to hold it in front of our face and shake it up.

“Look through it,” she encouraged. “What can you see?”

We could only see glitter.

She then took us through a breathing exercise to calm the body. By the time we were done, the glitter in the balls had settled and we could see clearly through them. She pointed out that our bodies do the same. Our emotions and physiology get triggered and we can’t see things clearly. Breathing settles both.

(“Settle my glitter” is now part of the lexicon in our office.)

Crisis management isn’t just about external conditions. It’s about the internal ones.

While the factors of the crisis are outside of you, the only ones you have control over are inside. Get that wrong as a leader and you will not only make yourself crazy, but you will make your team crazy too. (And minimize their effectiveness.)

Leaders who acknowledge — at least to themselves — the internal component to crisis management are better able to see reality, use frameworks, and inspire teams to follow them.

Because here’s the thing…

You aren’t the only one having to manage your internal conditions. Each member of your team is waging their own internal battle as they respond to the crisis as well.

We all have a driving need to exert control in the middle of chaos.

The best leaders understand that they have full control over the internal and very little on the external.

Then they run the OODA loops like crazy.

Crisis Management | How to choose adaptive leadership when things are out of control was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you feel the pressure of being a leader? Ever lose sleep?

Second-guess yourself?

Get a migraine?

Yeah, me too.

After all, a lot of people are depending on us to get this right. The decisions we make have a tangible impact on people’s lives — like how much they enjoy their careers, whether or not they have the resources to be successful, not to mention the salaries needed to support families.

When you lead a team, there’s a keen sense of responsibility that goes along with it.

Leading well matters.

Which is why we spend so much time seeking out leadership advice. But the thing about advice is that while much is helpful and strategic, there are places where strategy of intent breaks down.

That may be why I missed that I’d been handed the best leadership advice I would ever receive on a schoolyard soccer field…

How the kids at recess got it right.

Growing up in Zambia, the bell would ring, and the kids would run outside as fast as they could.

There was a ball in a clearing with a couple of goals and some white lines. (If you are picturing a suburban American soccer field, you’ve missed the visual. This was not that manicured.)

We had 15 minutes.

The kids quickly pulled together their teams. The good catchers were appointed goalies. Fast runners were strikers. If you were big and strong, you were a defender. All of these designations happened in less than 60 seconds.

People who could play well would always get selected. People who couldn’t play were put in secondary roles. Jerks were slowly voted out of the game. Encouragers ended up in the center of the field.

Where was the teacher?

I have no idea. She was probably drinking tea.

There was a start time and an end time, and the plan was simple: get the ball in the opposite goal as many times as you can in 15 minutes. No one took a rest. No one sat on the grass.

There were no user manuals. No standards or formats.

If you wanted to be in the game, you were in the game, focused on a role you could do well.

How we as leaders so frequently get it wrong.

When you are feeling the pressure as a leader, it’s easy to over-engineer things.

We create organizational frameworks and attempt to impose them, then get surprised when people don’t react the way we hoped.

(It shouldn’t surprise us. After all, while we might be enamored of our own frameworks, we tend to dislike the frameworks others create for us.)

My observation is that in many cases we don’t need to create structure for what happens naturally. We are better off working with the natural flow of how people live and work.

Because while we may have had some experience attempting to force others to our will or rebelling against another’s will, we all have boundless energy for the things we want to do.

Which means many times, our best play as a leader is to stay out of the way.

But wait! Wouldn’t that result in chaos?

Let’s go back to recess…

On the soccer field, the self-organizing hierarchy was situational. It didn’t exist in the classroom, and it didn’t exist if you were playing a different game.

A kid’s strengths determined their role, and if they were in the wrong spot, it was quickly adjusted. (No kid wanted to waste even one of the 15 minutes).

Sure, a teacher could have assigned all of the roles, or even gotten on the field and played, but it would have killed the game. It wasn’t needed.

So, what is needed?

It’s easy to miss the importance of having goals and a soccer field.

Having a place to play doesn’t just happen organically.

Your team shows up every day to play on a field you have an ongoing role in creating.

And just like on the soccer field, every once in a while, there will be a conflict your team can’t navigate, and just like the teacher who came in periodically to break up a fight, you will be the one who steps in if something goes off the rails.

When leaders create a clean framework (goals, a ball, and a field of play) and let people go, good rises to the top, and poor performance gets voted off the field.

You can’t legislate productivity, because a lack of autonomy kills intrinsic motivation for playing the game.

And while we all know this at some level, the problem comes in because busy-ness (being overly involved in the output) makes us feel good. It’s how we measure our worth. But it doesn’t necessarily make us more effective. And worse, it can diminish the effectiveness of the team.

We’ve all heard people complain about micro-managers. The ones who come in and want to play all of the roles. Consider if the teacher had come to play on the field with us. Being twice our size, there would have been no more reason to play. We couldn’t have had impact. It wouldn’t have been fun.

A leaders role is different to those of the team members. It’s about giving them everything they need to make them successful — not about playing the game.

What happens when you make the shift

I wish I could say that I learned this at recess as a kid and it was my leadership method from Day One.

It wasn’t.

A few years into my company’s growth, I found myself exhausted, frustrated, and working so many hours that I practically slept at the office. (And when I didn’t, I took the office home with me.)

My epiphany came when a couple of consultants (who my team called “the Bobs” behind their backs) interviewed everyone in my firm. As I read through their assessment, the message came through loud and clear: I was the bottleneck.

My intense direction of play was killing people’s motivation.

When I changed my role from granularity to creating the field where others could play, my company’s growth exploded. You could see the visible shift in the trend line on our IBIDA.

When you step back and become the facilitator, you discover things.

After all, your team already knows if there is a slow defender trying to play striker.

And here’s the surprising thing…

Often it’s the organizational frameworks we’ve imposed as leaders that keep that person in that wrong place. When we remove the artificial structures (the how) and focus on the mission (the what), people figure it out (a new how that they own).

So, cast the vision, source the resources, and get out of the way.

Stop trying to complicate it.

Then you can use your newly freed up time to chase the higher-level goals or get some much needed recess.

Want more on leadership? Follow me on Twitter. https://twitter.com/craigjanssen

Want to improve your company culture? Why don’t you put in a basketball hoop?

Institute a no door policy.

Upgrade the snacks in the break room.

Close at noon on Friday.

Create a culture handbook.

Appoint a culture director.

Put your mission statement up in the lobby.

Fill a conference room with puppies.

What? That isn’t working?

The list of advice given to leaders to improve company culture ranges from platitudes to the inane.

And while we all want to lead organizations that have great culture, sometimes we inherit a negative one. Or we step into a role where the culture is reported to be good, but we come up against a shadow culture no one acknowledges.

In any case, bad culture happens to good leaders all the time.

The culture advice we parrot isn’t working.

Business leaders are trained to take a mechanical approach when it comes to solving problems. If x, then y. In fact, the reason the advice listed above is passed around is because there is a certain logic to it. People share and re-share because it feels like it would work.

The problem is that organizations are made up of people, not mechanical parts — which makes our companies closer to biological organisms than machines.

To complicate things, people immersed in bad culture usually respond to policy the same way they respond to their doctor’s advice about diet and exercise — they just ignore it. (Or worse, mock it.)

So, if the strategies we are being handed don’t work, then what’s a good leader supposed to do about bad culture?

You are leaking culture, whether you realize it or not.

In the Harvard Business Review’s The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture, the authors write, “For better and worse, culture and leadership are inextricably linked. Founders and influential leaders often set new cultures in motion and imprint values and assumptions that persist for decades. Over time an organization’s leaders can also shape culture, through both conscious and unconscious actions (sometimes with unintended consequences).”

As leaders, we tend to view ourselves outside of the culture. We take the view of the mechanic looking at the machine, forgetting we are inextricably, biologically, part of it.

Ron Martoia, in his book Morph!, shares that leaders leak whatever is inside them to the culture of their organizations — usually without awareness. If you are a leader who is stressed with busyness, you will leak a culture of stress. If you are a leader who is hard on yourself, you will leak a culture of never measuring up.

We’ve all heard people say one thing with their words, while the vibe coming from them was directly opposed to what they said. As leaders, we can be shockingly unaware of this tendency in ourselves.

Shaping what we leak takes more than self-awareness. It takes daily internal work to notice how we show up in the world, and a bit of soul searching to be honest about our tendencies, insecurities, and the places where we don’t have integrity between our thoughts, words, and actions.

You aren’t the only one leaking.

The thing about organizations, is that there are multiple people leaking all at once.

Robert Sutton, PhD in his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t, writes, “The damage that assholes do to their organizations is seen in the costs of increased turnover, absenteeism, decreased commitment to work, and the distraction and impaired individual performance documented in studies of psychological abuse, bullying, and mobbing.”

If the impact of “assholes” (there really isn’t a more impactful term than the one Sutton uses) is so negative, then why do we as leaders tolerate them?

For one thing, they usually provide some profitable function that would be difficult to replace, and for another, they are typically very good at hiding from leadership. What you as a leader experience as vague leaks of condescension, blame shifting, and impatience is likely experienced by their co-workers as a flood of disparaging comments, volatile outbursts, and pernicious bullying.

And here’s the thing, you won’t know how bad it is until it gets out of control. Worse, your team thinks you see it and choose to ignore it. The leak is so obvious to them that they don’t know how you could be unaware.

Culture is an outward reflection of an internal reality.

What your team leaks as a group becomes the company culture.

If you want to improve the culture you are in, it starts with you — a focus on your internal health so that you are leaking good stuff. Once you’ve dealt with that, then take a hard look at the team to notice what others are leaking and take action if there is a dynamic that needs to be removed.

Don’t be fooled, you can’t start the other way around. It always has to begin with you.

And once that’s done?

Well, it might be fun to add a hoop and play basketball on your lunch hour.

And for sure you are going to want a conference room full of puppies.

About the author: Craig Janssen is an expert in design for spaces where thousands come together to share an experience. An international facility strategist serving architects, venue owners, and developers, Craig leads Idibri — a multidisciplinary team of technology designers, acousticians, and theatre planners. Check out Craig’s TEDx talk, Will Future Generations Want What We Build?

My colleague Jeff and I had just shown the numbers to the group sitting in front of us. The graphs on the screen were undeniable.

If our client built what they were planning, they would suffer negative cash flow in year three that they could never recover from.

Our scenario mapping was straightforward and clearly presented.

Every way we parsed the data, the results were the same. And the message to the client was clear:

Build smaller? Your organization grows and thrives.

Build the big thing you are planning? Your organization suffers crippling debt that will kill it in less than four years.

We looked around the table at the nodding heads. We had agreement. Satisfied that we had saved our client from a terrible mistake, Jeff and I walked down the hall to grab some coffee.

When we came back into the room, we were shocked. The client had picked up the charette pieces for the project and all were standing around the table talking animatedly with the architect about how the bigger project would look.

How does this happen?

Was it because the client wasn’t smart?

No way. The client was incredibly savvy. They had built a great organization and grown it to the point that they were overflowing their existing facilities.

Was it because my presentation wasn’t that great?

Possibly, but I had Jeff on the team, and he has this unnatural ability for making complex information simple so people can make decisions on it. (Plus, there were all the nods as they agreed with our conclusions.)

Was it ego-based?

Not in the way you might be thinking. It takes strong personalities to build an organization from nothing to one with momentum. The leader definitely dominated the group, but I don’t think the decisions were being driven by the same drivers that make people choose a certain brand of shoes to look impressive.

So, what went wrong?

Projects center around decisions — which is fairly simple when there is only one person making decisions; but in the case of most business and building projects, decisions are usually made by groups of people.

Which is where groupthink comes into play.

David McRaney, in his popular book, You Are Not So Smart, writes,

“No matter what sort of job you have, from time to time everyone has to get together and come up with a plan. Sometimes you do this in small groups sometimes as an entire company. If your group includes a person who can hire or fire, groupthink comes into play.”

McRaney goes onto explain that with a “boss” hanging around, people weigh the consequences of disagreeing. The problem is that every other person in the group is doing the same thing, and, “if everyone decides it would be a bad idea to risk losing friends or a job, a false consensus will be reached, and no one will do anything about it.”

Social psychologist, Irving L Janis, is the one who first coined the term groupthink in the 1970’s when he noticed that people will set aside their own personal beliefs to adopt the opinion of the group — even when it results in bad decisions. The problem with groupthink is that it removes individual responsibility.

It is also more likely to occur when an influential and charismatic leader commands the group.

Here’s the thing…

While groupthink can occur because of a domineering boss who goes off the handle at dissent, it happens just as frequently when the leader is someone the group admires and respects.

Awareness of groupthink isn’t enough for entrepreneurs to short circuit it.

While awareness of groupthink isn’t enough for entrepreneurs to mitigate it, there’s a structure to allegiances that can make a big difference.

Joseph Myers in his book, Organic Community, shares the story of a soldier who had broken rank and left his post at a makeshift ER hospital in the middle of urban fighting in Fallujah.

When he was confronted about it by his commanding officer, he shared that he had left to deal with men coming over the wall to attack their small medical base. Myers writes:

“Technically, the clerk had broken rank; he had left his post. Truthfully, he was honoring an organic order understanding of power. The project — saving lives — was more important than maintaining the organizational structure of the unit.” Myers goes on to write: “The project has the power.”

I would shift Myers wording to say,

“the mission has the power.”

Whatever the defining mission of the project is, when people are committed to it, then allegiance to the mission trumps allegiance to a person.

Giving the mission the power is a bold strategy to protect against the dark side of groupthink.

Leaders can’t out position groupthink. It’s going to happen. However, you can make it work for you if you continuously give the power to the mission.

This requires incredible clarity — and quite frankly discipline as you align every communication to a central mission. It requires you as an entrepreneur to be authentic in your communication that deviation from the mission is the thing that will make people not okay with you.

Whatever project endeavor you are involved in, the project is just a tool. It’s the purpose of that tool — mission — that you give people permission to champion.

Instead of “what do you think?” being asked in meetings, the question becomes: “Will that choice meet the mission?”

Allegiance to a mission creates healthier teams than allegiance to a project or a person. It makes sharing uncomfortable truths easier — after all, if the truth isn’t told, then the mission the group is committed to won’t be met.

As a leader, your job becomes to clearly define and communicate mission over and over.

It’s the only way you can protect yourself from being cheered on into bad decisions.

Why entrepreneurs make bad decisions was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.