Facilitating without formal authority

Summary

In this episode, Andy sits down with Evan Unger, a consultant and trainer who has spent more than 30 years helping leaders facilitate collaborative decision making across projects, programs, and organizations around the world. Evan's work focuses on helping groups move forward when opinions differ, tension is present, and time is limited. This conversation is packed with immediately actionable ideas.

Andy and Evan dig into why even experienced leaders struggle in high-stakes meetings, and how Evan's POPRA model (Purpose, Objectives, Process, Roles, Agreements) can transform the way you prepare and run them. They talk about how to manage the "HIPPO" (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) without suppressing the voices you most need to hear, a simple virtual technique called the simultaneous chat that can change the dynamic of any online meeting, and how to make sure your meetings actually land, with clear action items and time to close things out properly. Evan also shares his perspective on where AI fits in the future of facilitation, and some surprisingly personal advice about what he'd tell his younger self.

If you're looking for practical, immediately usable tools to run better meetings and lead more collaborative decisions, this episode is for you!

Sound Bites

• "On a scale of zero to a hundred percent, how effective are the meetings you attend? On average, and I can't tell you most of the time I get a number below 60% and often much lower."
• "My confusion as a leader, as a project manager, is immediately the confusion of the group because the group goes to where I'm at. And if I'm confused, welcome to what's about to happen in your meeting: Confusion, Chaos, Dysfunction."
• "The other extreme, and this is truly the art of leadership, is even though I have strong opinions as the project manager, I remain completely neutral, but I'm an expert in process, an expert in how I get other experts to come together, collaborate, make decisions, get 'em to buy in."
• "If I'm the HIPPO and I run the meeting as the expert, I will suppress conversation. People will not tell me what I need to know to make the decision, and I'm going to sub-optimize decisions, and I'm not going get people to buy in."
• "So the art of leadership is knowing how to start and work from the right side of the continuum where I'm an expert in the process of getting others to collaborate and asking questions to elicit their thinking."
• "If I'm not hearing from people as the facilitator of the collaborative conversation, that is a first sign that something's gone awry and I need to know how to hold space."
• "The meeting's purpose and objectives, that's the first tether, the first anchor. If that's not clear, there is no tool or technique that is going to save me."
• "Time is fuel. And we have limited fuel in the plane flight. When time is running out, we don't go knock on the cockpit and say to the pilot, fly faster."
• "People say to me, 'Evan, I've got Copilot now. I got these AIs doing all the monitoring and tracking'. It's like, yeah, great, but you can't trust what it said. You still have to come back and say, 'Do we all agree what we decided and where we go from here?'"
• "The five points were: 1, learn Spanish and become fluent in Spanish. 2, become fluent in Mandarin. 3, make sure you get a hard sciences or engineering degree when you go to school. Do it. Take all the liberal arts courses you want, but have something that people actually want. 4, go do a 10-day silent meditation as soon as you get out of school. And 5, take a backpack when you get out of school. Travel the world for a year.... That list is now down to two points."
• "The plan is now to find something that can't be AI'd out of existence."
• "But really, the art of being a good coach, a good consultant, a good parent, a good manager is querying the people to help them figure out their own answer."

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:44 Start of Interview
• 02:00 Evan's Background and Work
• 03:13 Why Meetings Fail — The Plane Metaphor
• 05:07 Preparing for High-Stakes Meetings: The POPRA Model
• 07:48 Distinguishing Purpose from Objectives
• 08:39 Facilitating Without Formal Authority
• 11:43 Spotting Meeting Drift
• 12:58 Balancing Dominant and Quiet Voices
• 16:12 Face-to-Face Facilitation Techniques
• 17:22 Handling Challenging Participants
• 21:17 Ensuring Meetings Land: Follow-Up Habits
• 23:59 AI and the Future of Facilitation
• 32:25 Advice to Younger Self
• 34:37 How These Skills Apply to Life
• 36:03 End of Interview
• 36:29 Andy Comments After the Interview
• 41:22 Outtakes

Learn More

You can learn more about Evan and his work at terischwartzassociates.com. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn.

For more learning on this topic, check out:

• Episode 413 with Rich Malman and Jim Stewart. They talk about what they call meeting goblins and how to deal with them. It's a very project management-specific take on running better project meetings.
• Episode 246 with Steven Rogelberg. Steven is a meeting researcher, but a really practical guy, and he shares great ideas about running more effective meetings.
• Episode 72 with Steven Rogelberg. An earlier conversation with Steven that is still packed with practical ideas on making meetings work.
• Episode 245 with Elise Keith. Elise is a meeting researcher who shares so many practical ideas on how to make meetings more effective—ideas Andy still calls back to years later.

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Thank you for joining me for this episode of The People and Projects Podcast!

Talent Triangle: Power Skills

Topics: Meeting Facilitation, Collaborative Leadership, Decision Making, HIPPO Effect, Virtual Meetings, Meeting Preparation, Time Management, AI, Project Management, Change Management, Communication, Facilitation Tools

The following music was used for this episode:

Music: Ignotus by Agnese Valmaggia License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Music: Fashion Corporate by Frank Schroeter License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license