Micro Moves: Stealing the Illusion of Certainty - the real ice breaker

Small valuable observations

Something I often see:

Before big workshops (a concept I don’t really like, main reasons: height of falling, lack of emergence), everyone comes in thinking they are the ones having it all figured out, while the other ones ....

The workshop starts, the room is full of performative posture - the opposite of clarity.

This changes everything:

The right facilitation sets a different tone early that changes everything. Try to shake up the room and have them bath in the complexity and uncertainty.

“Today we don’t show how much we figured out.”

“Today is for realising that none of us have fully figured it out - instead, we’ll figure it out together.”

“Then we commit. Together.”

How it works:

It breaks vanity and puts the complexity of the task in the center.

It replaces silent guessing and implicitness with shared exploration. It changes form “everything is my head,” to everything needs to be explicit and shared openly to come to a solution.

It sets an enabling environment which lets friction, discussion and decisions emerge, in shared ownership. It creates lightness that replaces the silence and pretending.

This move doesn’t take time.

It might take guts.

That’s my idea of an “ice breaker” but not the tree-hugging, feel good ones.

In the end it creates a solution shred and endorsed by all. A good sign is: No one can remember who contributed which part of the solution.