'Keyhole' Facilitation

A lot of the times when consultants and facilitators like me are brought into an organization to change something, the assumption is, from either side or both, that we need a lot of time to do things. I've spent months of my life on off-site retreats, hosting and participating, where we might spend a day, three, or a whole week to “deep dive” to look at our strategic future, or, design our organizational culture, unpack our implicit bias, or develop leadership acumen.

These ‘retreats’ can be highly effective, they can be inflection points for significant contributions and changes. They can be empowering and clarifying, enabling more and greater contributions from more people. But they are also a great way for a few people to get together to naval-gaze, feel self-important, and then carry on doing what they were always going to do. That's what I hear happens most often from clients who have worked with others before me. As a facilitator of this type of work it is frustrating to hear from others about such terrible processes and progress. Blunt and crude approaches that try to open everything up to solve everything. High cost, low value.

Last week I had Keyhole Surgery (nothing major, but my new advice is: don’t ski on East Coast Ice when you’re used to Colorado Powder), and it has made me think about the evolution of facilitated processes as being a bit like the evolution of surgery. There was a time when, if you ruptured a tendon in your shoulder, that would mean tearing open the whole shoulder and causing a whole lot of damage in order to repair some even worse damage. What follows is a lengthy recovery process that might leave you with a mostly-functioning shoulder that is, at least, better than it would have been if it hadn't been for the intense surgery but far from ideal or fully-functioning. These days, however, the advent of keyhole surgeries and other modern techniques can mean that only a tiny incision or three is required to do what has historically been an incredibly invasive procedure. In some cases a full recovery can be made to a shoulder that would have at other times been at best partially usable.

So what is ‘Keyhole’ Facilitation? The concept is, I would hope, fairly self-explanatory from the metaphor. How might we use a comparatively small amount of time and resources to create a lot of value and get us to a better and hopefully ideal position? It’s an idea and a practice that I’ve come to really love.

One of the weirder things I’ll say this week: organizations are a bit like shoulders. Every organization is different, but there's some common Anatomy in terms of people gathering to do things together for a particular purpose. There’s flow of resources, decision making, repeated actions... But the shoulder of a baby startup is very different from the shoulder of an elderly multinational corporation. The shoulder of an athlete in their 80s is different than that of a sedentary 80 year old, much like the strategy for a multinational for-profit Corporation would be different than that of a multinational not-for-profit, despite there being similarities by nature of them both being multinational. Diagnosing the need and the nature of the tensions and challenges at play is highly context and structure-dependent. They are also largely predictable, within reason. That's not to say the specifics aren't important, they always really really are, but also: knowing our own shoulder really well is a different thing to knowing what generally happens with shoulders. They’re both helpful in different ways.

A lot of people don't realize how often surgeries go wrong, have significant post operational issues, or are done erroneously (including removing the wrong limb). In recent years dramatic work has been put into and done by the international medical community to try and decrease the number of preventable errors to save stupid amounts of money and unnecessary suffering. Surgeon, writer, and public health researcher Atul Gawande wrote a fantastic book called “The Checklist Manifesto” about how using check lists can prevent surgical teams from accidentally leaving towels inside of people (my words, not his) because it turns out that surgical teams are people who make mistakes also. The main point of the book is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes. Well designed check lists take what we know about the context, situation, people involved and common occurrences, then enable us to work through them in a simple fashion to save time and effort. It crosses t’s and dot’s i’s in the way that we know diet, sleep, and exercise are important, but forces us to actually do them before starting some other medication. Preparation and pre-planning, pre-thinking, and anticipation of unlikely-but-possible shit that might hit known-fans is a big part of doing effective modern surgery. It also means you don’t have to rip a whole shoulder open.

I recently tested this ‘Keyhole’ Facilitation approach with a mid-sized membership organization as I facilitated their annual strategic planning session. They didn’t know I was testing anything because they didn’t need to: they had a problem and wanted my help to fix it, and trusted me to find the best approach. And it worked! By directly naming the patterns across organizations like theirs, naming the wider context and current reality, and getting everyone across that in 3 pages of pre-reading before we met, we were able to immediately get down to the task at hand and process some gnarly stuff.

A week later I connected with the Executive Director to do a debrief - a bit of post-operative surgical care if you will - and the feedback says it all

“I am thrilled - I never thought that we would accomplish what we did, having been part of other several-day strategic plans. I am definitely more solution oriented, I wanted to cut through the crap and get to the answer, I was absolutely amazed.”

Here’s hoping my post-operation follow up is this positive!