Author: Adrian Reed

I once worked for an organization that had several buildings within walking distance of each other.  There was one building where the organization rented a single floor, and since a project was ending they no longer needed the space so everyone moved out.  I had left some paperwork there, so I went over to retrieve it.  I had expected my pass wouldn’t work and I’d have to get special permission to get in, but I was pleasantly surprised to find my pass still swiped me in.

When I first started doing business analysis work, I couldn’t believe the confidence that more experienced colleagues showed. They could facilitate workshops, deal with conflict and navigate through complex political landscapes gracefully. They instinctively judged the context and could somehow pull out the most appropriate tool or technique for the job.  They seemed to have this ability to adapt to anything that happened in a seamless way.  Like a swan floating around a pond that suddenly pivots towards the family throwing bread into the water, they’d adapt and weave but make everything look deliberate and disciplined.  Without skipping a beat they’d adapt their approach and make sure they get the best out of the situation.

We rarely talk about how people gain this confidence, so in this brief article I’ll reflect on  (and share) my experience.  What follows is my own personal journey, I am sure others’ experiences will have differed.

Nervousness Never Disappears: When Managed Well It’s Your Friend

I still get nervous before every single workshop I run, especially if it’s for a new client or a new group of stakeholders.  I get nervous before giving presentations, and sometimes I even hover over the ‘send button before sending a document out for review.  Perhaps you’ve experienced the same feeling: “What if I send this and there’s a really embarrassing typo in there?! Or what if I’ve accidentally attached the wrong version?”.

In my case, I’ve come to the conclusion that nervousness is only a problem if it’s uncontrolled or if it escalates into feelings of intense worry.   A little bit of healthy ‘nervousness’ feels to me a lot like ‘anticipation’ or ‘excitement’.  It is the thing that makes sure I prepare in time, that I consider what might go wrong, and that I arrive fully prepared.  It reminds me of that feeling you have when on a rollercoaster, climbing up a steep incline.  You know that the elation of the ride is coming, but there’s a slight nervousness as to what exactly is going to happen.  Yet the elation of the ride relies on the anticipation….it’s part of the process.

I’ve always found that the lead-up to a workshop is nerve-wracking, but when the workshop starts the nerves start to subside.  The preparation pays off and I genuinely enjoy it.  When I was starting out, I genuinely thought the nerves would eventually subside… now I’d rather that elements of them remain.

Managing Nerves

Different people have different approaches for managing nerves.  Some people advocate mindfulness, if this is a topic you’re interested in check out the recorded webinar Building Resilience Through Mindfulness with Kathy Berkidge.  Certainly, focusing on  breathing can really help.  A key thing I like to remind myself is that a little bit of nervousness is rarely visible, and not only that, the other people in the workshop might be just as nervous.

One particularly effective approach is to spend time speaking with people one-to-one in advance of any kind of ‘high stakes’ meeting.  This is a great opportunity to get to know people and also explore any concerns they have in advance.  It can also mean that the workshop or meeting runs more smoothly as areas of consensus can be navigated quickly, spending time on the areas that really matter.  But above all, meeting people in advance avoids the feeling of having to meet ‘a bunch of strangers’ on the day of the meeting.

Also, it’s important to remember that a facilitator is rarely expected to be an expert in the subject matter.  It’s therefore fine to deliberately pause and ask for clarification.  In fact, it can be very valuable to do so—very often different stakeholders will be using the same words to mean very different things.  Although it can initially be nerve-wracking to ask a ‘stupid question’, experience shows us that in reality these questions are far more ‘curious’ than ‘stupid’, and it is curiosity that helps the group collectively navigate its way to a common understanding.

Preparation & Recovery

As a rule of thumb, I generally spend longer preparing for ‘mission critical’ workshops than their actual duration.  Others have different approaches, and some people would say this is overkill, but I find prior preparation means that I can ensure the meeting runs smoothly.  This typically involves research, designing flipcharts or virtual whiteboards, putting together an agenda and also a ‘run sheet’ which I’ll use to ensure I stick (broadly) to the time plan… or at least know when we’re going off track so the group can make a decision on how to react.

It’s tempting to think that preparation is a luxury that can only be afforded to those that have the time to do so.  The cruel reality is that workshops that take place without sufficient preparation probably end up wasting far more time overall.  I’d stress that what ‘appropriate preparation’ really does depends on the context. Of course, your style of preparation will probably be very different to mine!

Along with preparation, it’s important to consider recovery time.  Facilitation is, for many people, a fun but energy-intensive experience.  Where possible, scheduling some time away from other people to write up the output whilst it is front-of-mind can be a very good idea.  The key thing here is self-awareness around energy levels.  We owe it to our workshop attendees to ensure that we’re at our best so that we give them the best possible experience.

A Message To My Younger Self

If I could go back in time and give my younger self advice on these topics, I’d reassure myself that nervousness is normal, the key is to manage it.

What are your views? Do you experience nervousness, or is your experience different? I’d love to hear, be sure to connect with me on LinkedIN and we can keep the conversation going!

One of the perennial challenges of corporate life seems to be that everything is perceived as “urgent”.

People spend their lives bouncing from one virtual meeting to the next, desperately trying to complete their actions by deadlines that seemed reasonable at the time (but seem almost impossible in retrospect!). The move to virtual working has perhaps exacerbated this for some–when working in an office it physically takes time to move between meeting rooms so even when a diary is filled “back to back” there is some time to move and think…

As practitioners of organizational change, we are usually aiming to maximize the value that is realized by our organizations and customers. This means focusing on delivering the most valuable things first, and “time” seems to be a significant focus on many projects and product development initiatives.  Yet delivering the “wrong” thing faster is unlikely to win many supporters. I suspect we’ve all seen situations where things were more complicated than initially seemed to be the case, but pressure is still applied to deliver to the original deadline…

Reflection Time

One fairly basic planning tenant is that elapsed time is a different thing to effort. This sounds almost trivial and obvious, doesn’t it? I mean obviously a day’s work can take much longer if the people who need to contribute aren’t available.  Yet, so often planning seems to be optimistically conducted assuming people are available, no unexpected information surfaces and decisions can be made instantly. Perhaps you’ve also fallen into this trap? “We’ll have the workshop on Tuesday so the decision will be made on Tuesday”. This sounds logical and might sometimes be the case, but equally we might find somebody discovers some additional information that requires thought and investigation before an informed decision can be made. If the deadline is still Tuesday then we have a dilemma.

Deadlines like this create pressure and they can reduce the ability or willingness to consider constructive dissent and additional unexpected information. If a facilitator says “we must agree today, and if we don’t it’ll be escalated to the board”, this is hardly creating conditions for a fair and balanced discussion. People with doubts might choose to refrain from expressing them. Who wants to be the reason that a deadline is missed… particularly if it’s a concern where there isn’t 100% certainly? Yet that very concern might have been the one that uncovered a major misconception and nudged the project onto a better track.

Of course, there needs to be a balance and we need to avoid “analysis paralysis”. Yet we also need to avoid steamrollering decisions through. An important contributing factor is to build in time for reflection.  This involves deliberately building space for people to think, consider and for ideas to incubate.

This is probably something we all do intuitively, but it’s worth bringing it to the fore and considering it consciously. It might involve, for example, holding 1 on 1 interviews with stakeholders on Monday, then a workshop to synthesize their views on Thursday, sending them the output on Friday and reconvening for a quick check the following Wednesday.  Rather than building an expectation of “back to back” engagement and sprinting from interview to workshop to validation session, we create space for creativity and for more information to emerge. It’ll also likely be easier to schedule as few stakeholders have lots of consecutive free time in their diaries. After the initial interviews people might have “Eureka” moments and send additional information by email that we wouldn’t have seen if the timetable had been tighter.

This also highlights an important part of analysis work: analysis requires collaboration and relies on thinking. It isn’t purely mechanistic work that can be easily sequenced. In a factory, if someone can produce 50 widgets in an hour, then all things being equal they can probably produce 100 widgets in two hours.  The same isn’t true for analysis; an eight hour day filled with eight back to back stakeholder interviews would likely lead to information getting lost (no time to write up notes) and a missed opportunity for connecting the dots between information provided. We don’t work in an “analysis factory”.

As with anything in analysis, there will be times when we need to adapt to the context. There will always be times when something urgent and unexpected happens and we need to mobilize quickly and we have less time that we’d like. However, even in those situations we ought to avoid situations where there’s no time for thinking and creative reflection.  At the very least, when a deadline is presented, questions including “how was this deadline arrived at” and “what are the consequences if it is not met” ought to be asked. It may well be that a few days delay now, in return for a better product and more benefits later might be deemed not only acceptable but desirable!

Recently, for the first time in years, I had to fax a multi-page document through to a company I was dealing with.

Of course, I don’t own a fax machine as it’s not 1995 anymore, but I do still have a USB fax modem which just about did the job.  As I listened to the computer dial and heard the old familiar beep and screech of the fax being sent it brought back memories of a time when faxes were common.

As I waited the 20 minutes (yes, really) for the thirty three page document to send, I couldn’t help but consider the ludicrousness of the situation.  It is 2021, we have the Internet, we can video-call anyone in the world, yet the only way I could get documents to this particular company was via fax (or by regular post/mail).  The issue was of security: They didn’t have any other secure means of me getting the information to them.

As I was watching the progress bar slowly move as page after page slowly got sent, it made me think about how processes are defined in organizations, and specifically how handovers work.  In many situations it is information that needs to flow between actors, or put differently, one person (or IT system) provides information to another so that a decision can be made or some work can be undertaken.  In this example, I needed to securely get some information into a process, as a customer, from outside the organization.

Think Beyond Format & Channel: Focus on Why

When looking to improve existing processes, it’s very easy to get caught up in thinking too much about the format of the information and focus on improving the channel of communication, instead of asking the fundamental question “why is this information required, and what is the recipient going to do with it?”.

Let’s take my fax example: I was faxing a series of receipts and pieces of correspondence to my credit card company as a supplier did not deliver the service they promised, and had delayed issuing a refund.  Imagine we were redesigning this process, with a view to making it more effective and efficient. We might ask: how else could that documentation get to us? We might suggest that the scanned evidence is uploaded to a portal, or perhaps we might center upon an encrypted e-mail solution.  Yet doing so would be focusing on a solution too soon…

Let’s imagine instead we ask the recipient why they want the information. Perhaps, for example, they say that they need to:

1. Validate details of the items or services purchased
2. Establish that the cardholder has contacted the merchant to request a refund which hasn’t materialized

A logical next question would be “what do you do with the information once it’s received?” and “why do you do that?” We might find out that they:

In this example there is work being created simply because a historical assumption has been made over the format of the information.  It’s been assumed that it must be ‘documentary evidence’, PDF copies of scanned receipts and so forth.  Yet (in this hypothetical example) the minute that information comes in, it is rekeyed and checked with the merchant anyway as the documentation itself isn’t trusted.

Ask The Provocative Questions

This is where we can really earn our money as analysts.  We might ask the provocative but illuminating question “if we don’t trust the documents, why ask for them at all?”.  If we’re going to check the details with the merchant in 100% of cases, why not just ask for a smaller subset of information, e.g. transaction date, time and a brief description of the issue.  Perhaps this could be quickly vetted and then automatically directed to the merchant so that they can add their version of events.  Supplementary information could be asked for when needed.  Rather than asking for “everything we might conceivably need” up front, the process changes to “let’s make everyone’s life easier, ask for the minimum amount, and streamline things as much as we can”.  A risk based approach could be taken, a single five dollar refund from a customer who has never requested a refund before is probably going to be treated differently from a ten thousand dollar refund.

Of course, this is just one example, and it’s probably a while since you last saw a fax machine.  Yet I’m sure you’ve seen similar patterns on the processes you are working with, where old constraints have become ‘baked in’. It’s our job to question them!

If this topic is of interest to you, you may also be interested in seeing the ‘Brown Cow Model’ by James & Suzanne Robertson, which I am certain indirectly inspired this post!