NOEL:  Hello and welcome to the Tech Done Right podcast, published by Table XI. I'm Noel Rappin. 
	Tech Done Right is a new podcast. Each episode will have a panel of interesting people in the tech world talking about the questions or problems that interest them. 
	Today, we're talking about building trust and building teams, and I have two people with me on the panel. First of all, I have Mark Rickmeier, CEO of Table XI. Say 'hi', Mark. 
MARK:  Hello. 
NOEL:  And I also have Jessie Shternshus, the founder of The Improv Effect. The Improv Effect uses Improv courses and workshops, build communication skills, trust and innovation among teams. Jessie is also the author of the book 'CTRL Shift' which is a book of Improv games that you can use by yourself to change your mood. Hi, Jessie. 
JESSIE:  Hello. 
NOEL:  Mark and Jessie also are the co-moderators of a project called OpsConf which is an unconference for software consulting companies about the hard business of software. They get together and they talk about their mistakes and they talk about how to build software consultants better. And we're going to talk a little bit about that as well. 
	First off, Jess, can you tell us a little bit about Improv Effect and what kinds of things that you do and how you work with the teams that you work with?
JESSIE:  Sure. I really work with them around usually three different things: either communication, collaboration, or creative problem solving. And all the things typically fall under professional development. So, it might be they want to get better at presentation skills, giving informal presentation to looking at their product in a different way and help them come up with a strategy and [inaudible] to do that. And I like to use Improv in other experiential techniques to get them to feel what it feels like to do that and make it stick.
NOEL:  What do typically get brought in to do for a team? Like why is Improv an effective way -- that;s totally two separate questions -- why is Improv an effective way of teaching that kind of communication for a team? 
JESSIE:  Improv, in my mind, has a lot of benefits way beyond the comedy in the stage and some of the things that's grounded in are around being an active listener. So, really staying in the moment and hearing and understanding what the moment requires of you. And there are tons of Improv games that can help people do that. There are things like using 'Yes, and' which is a way of validating what other people are saying on your team and building ideas together and pushing them forward. 
	So, all of these philosophies have lots and lots of exercises that can go with them that the teams can try and utilize. And hopefully, it starts becoming a practice instead of just something they heard in a lecture. 
MARK:  It really is amazing, by the way, like the few people I know who have gone through some kind of Improv training or coaching. Even without knowing that, you can almost tell they've had something like that when you work with them. It's pretty crazy to see the effect Improv can have on people's listening skills. 
NOEL:  Yes. I think I've gone through Jessie's training place, actually.
MARK:  It doesn't always work, but it almost always works. 
[Laughter]
NOEL:  Ouch! I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. My active listening skill just shut off. 
JESSIE:  Yeah. You can do a third session. 
NOEL:  I'm now passively listening to you, Mark. I'm listening, as I recall. 
JESSIE:  I'm listening. Yes. 
NOEL:  Jessie, do you typically work with teams on a one-shop basis, do you work with teams regularly? How does that help to build communication and trust? How much effect do you get from one shot? How much effect do you get from continually trying to do it?
JESSIE:  My preference for everything that I do is to work with the team or the company over a long period of time so that I can be there to kind of watch the transition of the journey happen. And even more so, it's about the practice of something. If I get a call and somebody is like, "Oh, we have this offsite and our team doesn't really go along well and nobody understands each other. They would all just rather be on their laptops all day. Can you fix that in three hours?" 
NOEL:  Can you?
JESSIE:  "I can get you started. If all you can give me is three hours, here's what you can expect as the outcome. But if you can actually invest the time in making changes," which is typically what they actually need, then I'll create a program for them and go in and work with them and kind of work through the goals that they have to really, like I said, make it become a practice, a habit. 
NOEL:  I've only really done the three hours version. So, that explains why. 
JESSIE:  Yes. [Laughs] I wasn't going to say anything. 
[Laughter]
NOEL:  I have seen Jessie turn an entire conference-size full of people into running around. 
JESSIE:  Not many people can make people run around at a conference. 
NOEL:  It's true, yeah. Getting people to do anything at a conference other than sit on their laptops is pretty impressive. 
MARK:  Which conference was that?
NOEL:  Madison. And I think you did the Chicago ones too, didn't you?
JESSIE:  Yeah. I do a lot of tech conferences, so some of my first clients were in tech and in the Ruby community. So, that's kind of where I like to spread my wings in terms of doing things at conferences and then it kind of built from there to other programming languages and frontend development. It's a fun stuff. 
NOEL:  Spreading your wings wide.
JESSIE:  Yes. 
NOEL:  But then comes OpsConf which is sort of a mix of the corporate training and the conference training. Mark, do you want to talk a little bit about what you try to do with OpsConf and how Jessie's facilitation techniques sort of play into what you're trying to do?
MARK:  Yeah. It's a weird social experiment which we tried three years ago. And so, as I was running Table XI, I was frequently understanding certain parts of the business and being confused by others and wanting to pick the brains of other folks who had done this kind of thing before and thought, "Wouldn't it be neat to try to bring people together who really understand this space," in some ways, direct competitors. We bring them all together and see if they would be willing to share ideas of how they do things anywhere from sales to recruiting to finance to how they do delivery and operations.
	Our first step was renting a really big house in South Carolina and getting a spot for people to come together. Step two was to call Jessie. The challenge you've got is you're purposely trying to bring these people from all over the world who are straight up competitors together, and you're trying to get them to train each other on how to get better at what they do, to trade what they know and give it to their competitors. That's not an easy to thing to sell. I think Improv is a great way to get people to trust each other to start communicating where there hasn't been that trust with their communication before. 
	So, we were thinking about how can we try this social experiment of getting competitors together to collaborate to share? Jessie was the first person I called after the realtor, to get the house and then to get Jessie and I brainstorming on is this kind of social experiment, would it work, could we use effective facilitation techniques and could we use Improv to bring competitors together to make the industry better as a whole. 
NOEL:  I'm guessing the realtor didn't really help with that kind of facilitation. 
MARK:  Not with the facilitation, but the house was lovely and that did help. 
JESSIE:  Yeah. 
MARK:  I think one of the things we found that was actually really effective in that first year is getting people to step outside of their fish bowl into someone else's actually does wonders to help create a shared experience. And so, it was one of the many things that Jessie and I thought about to help create that right environment for this kind of discussion and collaboration. 
NOEL:  Jessie, how do you approach that kind of thing? You're in a situation where you are really trying to build trust really fast. How do you approach that? What kinds of tools do you bring? What are you trying to get people to do that helps work on that?
JESSIE:  First of all, just connecting on a level where they find the commonalities and also they find the uniqueness among the group, and how knowing both of those things and sharing those stories allow them to become more open. Eventually, they become peer mentors, which is kind of where it's ended up. 
	Laughter, among other things, helps break those barriers. If you can get people to laugh with each other and even laugh at their vulnerabilities in a way, then it's a lot easier to get people to communicate and collaborate faster. 
NOEL:  Did you remember a specific thing you had people do, like right when they met? Was there a specific kind of icebreaker game you had people play?
JESSIE:  One of the things we did is we played a game called 'The Commonality Boggle'. And we had them pair up into small groups and they have three minutes to write down as many things as everyone in their group had either experienced, done before, been before, or was true about them. And then they share out towards the other groups. If they have something written on their sheet of paper that another group had, they have to cross it off, and whoever has the most points. It's about quickly connecting and laughing about things, finding out things about people pretty quickly. 
	And then there's the competitive element which typically leadership likes to be competitive on some level, and it brings up talking points. So from the very beginning, there's now a facilitated conversation that happens through a game. 
	And then typically what happens after that is we do things uncommon. So, they go through them. Let's say all of us are in a group together, we have to find something that's unique only to us. And if somebody else has done that experience, then we can't write that down. And so, you have this nice debrief about that commonalities among groups are just as important as differences and uniqueness and diverse mind and all these sorts of things. 
MARK:  I think that's one of the challenges to anyone. You bring these people together. The first thing that they're tempted to think about is all the ways that they're different. Competitors think that way. And so, it's very important early on for them to realize all the things they have in common - the reasons why they have to collaborate, the things, the values that they share, the people that they know, similar experiences. 
	Another thing we did is right when you walk in the door of the house, there's a great big poster board with everyone's faces there with different color markers. We would say, "Draw a line from you to another person if you were in a similar market." Or, "Draw a line if you were at a same conference at one point," or, "Draw a line if youÉ" like the Kevin Bacon game, "If you know similar people." And so, people might come in there feeling like they didn't know anyone and then by the process of going through that, they recognize all these connections - these people they knew, places they had been at the same time and same place. I think we're lucky in that way that the software industry is a really small community, when you look at it. 
NOEL:  How many people did you have for that first year?
MARK:  That's one other thing. Very specifically, we kept it at 20. We really wanted people to be able to build that in-person relationship. It's hard to build trust when you're one among 200 but I think you can really get to know other people. There's a lot of bonding and a lot of experiences you can share over the course of a 4-day retreat. 
NOEL:  At 200 people, are you getting some of the games that you played at the Madison? The Rock-Paper-Scissors was your thing, right? 
JESSIE:  Yeah. 
NOEL:  Where you play Rock-Paper-Scissors, the loser has to root for the winner actively as the winner seeks another winner. 
JESSIE:  That's where everybody is kind of rooting behind one or the other person at the end. The thing is when you're designing these things for these events, you have to keep the audience in mind. Not only who they are, but the size of the audience as well. 
	When I did that particular one at Madison Ruby, the goal for that from [inaudible] that created the conference was can you break down barriers because we find that at conferences, people are sitting next to somebody that might be a great fit for their team or a great peer mentor but they never talk to each other. And so, designing games on a larger level so that what you're basically doing is facilitating breaking those walls down. And now, they've laughed together and had a good time. And all of a sudden, they're open to conversation that they might not have been before. 
NOEL:  I remember a couple of things like find somebody who the third letter of their name is the same as the third letter of your name or something like that. 
JESSIE:  Yes. 
NOEL:  And if you can get a room full of Ruby developers to actually actively speak, even that group which is somewhat unique. It sets a tone where suddenly you're with people who at least you know their name and something about them. And small as it seems, it really does make a difference in the overall tone and the way that people carry themselves for the rest of the couple of days. 
JESSIE:  Yeah. For me, I feel like the most important thing about the event is that you leave there having a great connection with one or two people. If a conference hasn't done that, then I feel like they've let you down in some way because here you are sitting with all these like-minded people that you could learn something from and yet, you never started a conversation. And sometimes, people need help doing that. It doesn't have to be painful, it could be fun. 
MARK:  We tried something different, I think last year at OpsConf which is fun as well because it's a very different skies and scale of problem when you have 20 people versus 200 people -the techniques that you use and the approach that you use is different. And so, one of the things I thought that we tried last year which was really fun was changing the facilitation approach on the first day of the retreat. 
	The first year we did it, we had people come out and share things they're really proud of, things they thought other organizations could borrow and they could learn from and everyone kind of bragged about that thing they were really good at. I don't think I realized at the time how that could be even off putting to someone. You come in to a room full of strangers, people who were competitors to you, and you hear about all these amazing things that they were doing, it can make you feel self-conscious and it can make you feel nervous. 
	The second year we did this, Jessie and I totally changed it. The first day was instead entirely focused on failure. So, you would talk about something you had screwed up, some mistake you had made either in your work or in your relationships at work, or things that you had tried and did not pan out very well. Because we had looked at the personality type, everyone went through kind of a Myers-Briggs test before we got together. We could see that there are a large amount of both introverts and extroverts, so we purposely facilitated the group to break into smaller groups rather than having one big room full of people like we did in the first year. 
	Because that first year, everyone kind of knew each other, I think it was successful but the second year, we had these smaller groups where people would really focus on that thing they screwed up, that thing they tried but totally blew up in their face. It was really -- I don't know. People who took themselves down and talked about those things they screwed up, people were much more open to talk about what they had tried, what they had failed. There was something that was so humanizing about the experience. And it made for some really fun discussions at night because if you were in that small group, it was a great way to break the ice rather than saying, "Hey, who do you work for and what do you do?" You can almost laugh in with what you just screwed up with last year. 
	It was great. Those were some interesting conversations. It was fun to see how we could tailor the conversation for a 20-person group to have some really deep conversations and then you can try a totally different facilitation technique for a 200-person group. Both with the same goal in mind: to break down those barriers and help people find some elements of commonality. 
JESSIE:  What was cool too, as Mark mentioned, we had this kind of map and drew the connections for all these different things, from all these different perspectives. And by the end of each OpsConf, it had gotten filled out even more which was kind of cool. So, you could visually see how there were even more connections towards the end that maybe they didn't realize when they first came in the door. So, that was kind of cool. 
MARK:  I think it's interesting. There are certainly things you can do around how you choose to facilitate, how you choose to physically lay out a room. Even what kind of space in town you choose for a retreat, it can have a non-zero impact on how people collaborate, how they communicate and how they build their relationships. There was a lot of intentional thought as Jessie and I were trying to figure out how to bring competitors together on a 4-day retreat, a lot of discussions around the house, the town, the kind of environment we wanted. All of those things have an impact on how people will form relationships. 
NOEL:  Can you think about one or two specific decisions that really paid off or something that you wound up redoing from the first year to the second year?
MARK:  Yeah. 
JESSIE:  Can you tell him about the beds?
[Laughter]
MARK:  It was almost too personal. We realized this was a house that said it slept like 26. What we didn't realize was that two people would be sharing a bed together in one bedroom. So, we almost got to be very close with our competitors. 
JESSIE:  Thank goodness we figured it out before they got there that they weren't like sharing blankets. 
MARK:  We did that at the second house. I don't think we're talking about quite that kind of conversation. We did try to choose a spot that was very scenic, very quiet. We didn't go to Orlando. We went to more northern Florida to be on Amelia Island, some place a bit more quiet. The first year, rather than being right downtown Charleston, we were out on the coast. So, you had a quiet, more natural environment that will leave room for breaks. 
	Last year, we went to Amelia Island, we were on a resort and we were talking to the hotel about activities and things we could do. And they kept throwing all these really big adventure type things we can do. We said, "What we really want is a campfire on the beach," because we'd do mostly conversation and people sitting around talking around the campfire. 
NOEL:  Think of those sand caught in their shoes. 
MARK:  Oh, yeah. There was a downside. There was a wedding next to us that had their own personal firework display because who doesn't have fireworks at their wedding? They were supposed to usher us off the beach before the mortars are exploding, and they forgot. 
JESSIE:  Yeah. I did duck and cover under the beach chair and then when the coast was clear, I made a run for it. It was kind of crazy. It was memorable. 
MARK:  Secretly, nothing brings people together like surviving a life threatening catastrophe. I do think the mortars exploding over Jessie's head, it did have an impact. 
NOEL:  That's hard to plan for though. 
JESSIE:  It is.
NOEL:  That's a very precise kind of plan. 
JESSIE:  That's why I'm good at impulse - what do you do in that situation. 
MARK:  There were elements of that where we tried to pick a different kind of setting which is great. 
NOEL:  Yes. Jessie, do fireworks respond to 'Yes, and'?
JESSIE:  No, they don't. So, I just take it upon myself to run for the hills. 
MARK:  They also don't respond to people screaming and hiding under chairs. They kept going for quite a while. The photos from that night were pretty remarkable. 
NOEL:  If I'm not putting together a 40-person conference, but I had like an 8-person team, is it worth trying some of these techniques at the beginning of a project as a kickoff technique? Is this the sort of thing that you might recommend that you do every week or two along with retrospectives that you do some sort of trust building? What kind of things do you do when you're dealing with a team more regularly, Jessie?
JESSIE:  First of all, I think to kickoff any project that you're working on, it's really key that the group can communicate in a clear way because if you're communicating outward towards the customer or the stakeholder and inward towards your team and you're having to pass a message for totally different audiences, but in order for the whole project to work, then you need to work on your communication skills. It doesn't have to be dull and painful. It can be fun. 
	And then as you move along, if you're working in an agile way, let's say, and you have retrospectives and things like that, or even standup meetings, that you can incorporate these kind of fun techniques into it (a) to kind of shake it up a little bit. I find that some teams they get so into their way of doing things that they sort of tune out till it's their turn to talk and kind of changing it up by making the standup different or the retrospective different helps rejuvenate people and make them pay attention in a different way than they might not have been doing before. 
NOEL:  Sometimes the failure mode of agile is the team gets bored because everything is sort of so consistent. 
JESSIE:  Very ironic. 
NOEL:  Yeah. One of the things that we do here for retrospectives is we have a project manager who likes to bring in swag associated with what the client does for retrospectives including exercise like head dance and exercise [inaudible] and stuff. 
MARK:  We were doing a project with a hazmat shipping company and I had to wear a hazmat suit for a retro. Not always so cool, but it was great. It definitely was not our typical retro, for sure. You know something else that we consider? If you have a team especially coming together for that first time, not to put ceremony into everything, but there's so many special about a team recognizing that they will be a team for a while. And so, having a chance to either go offsite, even just like for lunch or something, "Hey, this is what this team is going to look like." There's also that concept of team agreement when everyone gets together for the first time. 
	One of the things I always ask a team is what's keeping you up at night about this project? What's something you want to get up on the table before we start? Or is there something that you're working on in your career development that you're really trying to improve so we know we can look out for that and we can provide you feedback on this project. 
	I feel asking some kind of personal questions, and again, to find those elements of commonality between people is a really good way to start something when you're dealing with like a 4 to 8-person team. Because in those cases, they all knew each other's names, they all knew each other's backgrounds. It's not the same techniques you would use at a conference. But I do think exposing people's reservations or their personal goals, "This is what I want to get out of the next few months of this project." That can be very illuminating, a great way to get people to start collaborating as a team, as opposed to a series of individuals assigned to a project. 
JESSIE:  You could even take that a step further - 'Yes, and Mark, and'. [Giggles] 
	Another thing you could do, sometimes I work with teams and typically one in software. There are people that are uncomfortable with speaking up and maybe talking about what their fear is or what they're worried about. So, one way you can do that is even just do it anonymously. Have everybody write that down on a piece of paper and throw it into a hat and have everybody pick a different one out and read it. 
	And then you can even play a little game on how to deal with the particular worry or fear that they have but nobody necessarily knows who put it in there. And then everybody's hearing it. And they may relate to that even though maybe they didn't write that down. Maybe that's another thing they didn't even think of that was bothering them. 
NOEL:  I didn't even know I should be worried about that. 
JESSIE:  But now, thank you. 
MARK:  I think paranoia is a great way to get people together. 
NOEL:  That is true. Nothing bonds people with shared paranoia. 
[Laughter]
NOEL:  Jessie, do you have a lot of experience coming in for teams that are going to be working remote with some or all of the people on different sites? Do these techniques apply or do they specially apply when some people are offsite? What kinds of things can I do? I will have to say I can't really bring my whole team together but I've got two people scattered across the continent. Is there something I can do to help my team communication? 
JESSIE:  I'm sure you see this. More and more teams are becoming distributed. And then you have sometimes the awkwardness of like the majority of the team is in the building together and then there are these two random people that are somewhere else. And so, that's already a barrier to communicating and working together effectively. 
	Even the exercise we just talked about with commonality is something you could literally just put into a chat function even if you didn't have a way to even see each other, you could do that. There are exercises to kind of get people's creative juices flowing and problem solving where I call it the '2-object mash-up'. Let's say you and I are on a team and we're not in the same room together, we can still play this game. What we would do is at the count of three, you would name an object and I would name an object. And then what we would do is mash those two objects together to kind of create and explore what kind of product would that be if those two things came together and create our own new product sort of one idea at a time. We don't need to be in the same room in order to have that connection and our brain sort of thinking divergently. 
NOEL:  It sounds like one of the things that's important here is to have a little bit of space for people on a project to sort of associate and communicate with each other wherein the project goals are not primary so that there'll be a chance to talk a little bit about their commonalities, their differences, that kind of thing to make it easier to communicate. Am I reading too much into that? 
JESSIE:  It's so important. I think the more you are connected as a team, as a culture, more than likely your project is going to go a lot better because you invested the time in doing that with each other. That's such a big part of Improv, too. We don't know what's going to happen on show night at all but we all know each other so well. If our project does the show, we're going to do so much better if we spent a lot of time getting to know each other, and know our strengths and weaknesses so that we can set each other up for success. If we don't know who you are and we're nervous and we're afraid to be vulnerable to make mistakes, then how can we set each other up for success? Ultimately, we want the goal of the project working well together. It depends on the team. 
MARK:  It's amazing. A lot of those project kickoffs will focus on what's this project about, what does the client need, what does success look like for this code base? As opposed to asking questions like what are you trying to get out of this? What's going to be most beneficial for your career? What are you focusing on growing? What are you worried about? I think it's a lot easier for people to give that feedback. 
	One would say, "Hey, I'm really trying to get better at JavaScript. When you see me doing something, come talk to me about that." Or, "I'm really trying to work on my consultation skills, so if I'm talking to a client and I say something you think is a bit goofy," that's the kind of stuff I want to hear. People would be much more willing to give feedback when they know that they're open to it. And a lot of project kickoffs really focus on the deliverable more than the people involved in the project. I feel like having a little bit of context into what's going on someone else's mind and makes it that person that much more relatable and that much better of an outcome when you do start working together. 
NOEL:  More important than any specific methodology is trust. And I think almost all methodologies work better if the members of the team and the people in the different stakeholders have a certain level of trust. The Improv shows kind of the same way, like even if you don't know exactly what's going to happen and you know that you trust the people that you're there with to do the best that they can and to get to a good outcome no matter what happens. 
	One of the things you're looking to do in a kickoff meeting is to start working towards that level of trust. I think really very simple things like those kinds of commonality games. Putting people in situations very quickly where they can say that they're going to do something and show in a very, very short amount of time that they're going to be able to do it have some sort of really, really quick [inaudible] even if it's just within the context of that kickoff meeting, that kind of thing goes a long way towards building people's trust that they're on a team with people who are in it together. 
MARK:  I would never underestimate the power of failure to be able to build trust. I think people who are given space and you're allowed to fail. Some harsh people can make mistakes, they can learn from them. 
	One of the things that Jessie and I tried when we were trying to build that first day, that failure day, the biggest mistake day is we went first. Jessie and I both went first and talked about the mistakes that we made to show them that we were very personal. People were very emotional about the mistakes they had made and how it had impact on their personal and professional lives. I think creating a space where failure can be recognized, embraced, and learned from is one of the most important things that you can encourage in teams. It has a huge impact on people's willingness to admit when they're stuck, to ask for help. A leader who's willing to talk about their own mistakes ultimately what they've learned from them, like when Jessie got up in front of them and said, "Here's something I'm struggling with my business and here's the mistake I'm making and here's what I'm trying to learn from it." It was very brave to be able to say that in front of a room and it changed the tone of the day that everyone else is willing to say something somewhere. Failure is a great way to get people to start trusting each other a bit more, to openly embrace those kinds of mistakes. 
JESSIE:  And to equalize the dynamic, right? I think that's so important too on a team that everybody feels, in some ways, as an equal. If Mark and I were asking them to do something but we're not willing to do it ourselves, then why should they bother? That's when people just start to hold the cards to themselves. 
NOEL:  You don't start something like that in a team meeting by asking the most junior person in the room, "Hey, what's the biggest mistake you made in the last two weeks?"
JESSIE:  Yeah. 
MARK:  Yeah, I think talking about failure is a great way to take [inaudible] situation. 
JESSIE:  And that's important.
NOEL:  I feel like a lot of times trust and feedback kind of go hand in hand a little bit. A team that doesn't trust each other can't really give each other meaningful feedback to improve. And I think the taking of the paradynamics out of feedback -- it's always taking some of the personal aspect out of it or mitigating that with the fact that you really do trust the other people in the team, like that is how you can build a team that's going to get better. 
JESSIE:  Sometimes what's interesting is you can do feedback in a more formal sense, if you will. But sometimes games are a good way to get feedback. So, either you might get feedback about yourself and become more self aware and through the game, you figured out where your strengths and weaknesses were on your own. Or because there's a game, you're more able to hear the feedback from other people because there's this low risk element in gaming it versus being like, "Come to my office at 3:30, sit in this chair, and I'm going to tell you about all the things that are bothering me that you do every day." 
NOEL:  "I'm going to feedback at you right now."
JESSIE:  Yes, "I'm going to feedback at your face for the next five minutes."
NOEL:  I've had a lot of conversations with different people over the last couple of months. What's a game that you would play to elicit that kind of feedback? Do you have a specific technique that we could actually do? A trade secret, possibly?
JESSIE:  [Laughs] Trade secrets. Let's just say for presentation skills, for instance. Maybe you're struggling with people not really understanding the information that you present, they're not absorbing it. I might have you tell a story or give a real world example of something you're working on. And then the rest of the people around you, let's say it's a group of four. They would need to write down the things that they heard and they could even hash tag them. So, what are the major points of what they heard and what stuck with them? And then after the person is done speaking, he would then go around and each person would share the things that they took away from what you said. And what you can see is there might be something across the board that everybody heard, there might be different things or there might be things that you thought everybody would be interested in or be clear on and maybe none of them wrote those things down. 
	And so, here you are playing a game and you're starting to learn that, "Oh, sometimes when I communicate, my ideas aren't as clear as I thought." 
NOEL:  What I kind of like about that is that it's objective, it's focused on what I received and not what you put out there as part of the story. So, that might be an easier way for people to come to thinking about what they're doing. 
JESSIE:  Right. A lot of people get this feedback from their managers or their bosses that people don't understand what you're saying, or you're confusing the two different parties that you're going in between. You hear that, that's great and all, but you have no idea what to do with that because now, you just have feedback but you don't have the how-to. And so, the game adds the element of practice and the data points which is that all of these people heard, some of them heard all the same thing. So now you know, "Okay, these are the things that I am doing well because how would they have all heard it if I didn't." Or, "How did they all miss this thing?"
NOEL:  In my case, people usually just tell me to speak up. 
JESSIE:  [Laughs]
NOEL:  That's pretty easy to operationalize and yet somehow, I can't quite do it. 
	One time when I was in high school and I was doing some performing, one that they gave me feedback was they made me watch myself do it. It was a standup routine and they made me watch it fast forward. And I had this sort of unconscious take off kind of swing. And at fast forward, it was devastating to watch me zigzagging like a top that was about to fall over. 
MARK:  That's amazing. 
JESSIE:  That's hard though. 
NOEL:  Yeah. It was hard. I was in a group and in a place where I really trusted the people who are giving it to me that they had my best interest at heart and they're not doing it in a gotcha kind of way. There was like, "We've told you that you're doing this a bunch of times. Look at this. It's really distracting and it's getting in the way of what you're trying to do." 
	Obviously, it's been a very, very long time ago and I remember it crystal clear and made an impression. But it was effective only because I really felt like I was in a place where people were coming at it from trying to improve what I was trying to do. That was an important part. 
MARK:  The first step is, Noel already pointed out, you have to have to base level of trust which is why most of the facilitation techniques Jessie and I have been talking about are really around building trust within teams, building trust within strangers or competitors. 
	Once you have that, there are two other facilitation techniques I've tried to encourage better feedback, assuming that you have a baseline of trust in there. One of them is a game where you put people in the exact opposite world that they're used to being in. In our case, a customer will come in and we'll make them the developers and we'd become the customer. We make them build software for us. So they learn what it's like to be -- instead of building software in actual Ruby on Rails, we have something called the Agile Lego game. They have to build things out of Lego in 5 minute iterations as opposed to 2 week iterations, and we become their customer. So, we give them feedback on them being developers and then they give us feedback on our ability to help them steer the product. It's really interesting to kind of walk a mile in the other person's shoes and get a sense of what kind of feedback would be most helpful. That is extremely eye-opening and it's been very beneficial. 
	The second thing we've tried and we did this a lot last year. We have sessions called Communicating the Uncomfortable. And so, before people get used to getting feedback, we'd give them something really, really outlandish. Like your partner came in to work today and he's not wearing pants. How would you tell them that? And you started going through really weird uncomfortable situations and then you get better and better communicating these uncomfortable things. Then we started making it a little bit more realistic. It's been interesting to see a room of people laugh and nervously try to have these conversations and you do a couple of role playing. 
	The hardest thing with feedback is getting used to it. A lot of folks want it and a lot of folks are experienced at giving it. And then as a result, they're also not experienced in receiving it. Just the sheer muscle memory and having some fun outlandish scenarios to get people into that mindset has been really, really productive as well. 
	So, those are the two different kind of games we've played to get teams to start that process a bit more, assuming again, you have a trust level in place where they want to be able to participate in that kind of feedback situation. 
JESSIE:  You could also just brainstorm like the top 50 world's worst ways to give feedback. I often like to start with the worst and then flip it to the best. For some reason, that's much easier to go there for people to begin with. And then it's easier to flip those things because you can see what the opposite of that would be. 
MARK:  That was a fun game. I remember playing that with you. 
JESSIE:  Yeah. 
NOEL:  I've played that game too. 
MARK:  We played what's the world's worst way to break up with someone and then half the room is like, "Man! That happened to me. That's terrible." 
JESSIE:  [Laughs] Why is Mark in the fetal position under the table?
MARK:  Exactly. 
[Laughter]
MARK:  But I think that kind of thing, it's always easier to start with. I think you're right. What's the worst way of doing something? And then how can you make that a little bit better? What else could you have done?
	You also tried something like how would you do that if imagine you were now the CEO of Microsoft. How would you have done that? You try to become different people to see how they would have done something and how would they provide feedback.
JESSIE:  Yeah. You can do like a list of personalities or personas. You could do a list of like you're going to give feedback but you're on a go-to meeting that nobody can hear each other but every other word. Or you could give different kind of prompts and then you can put them on Post-Its, pick them off the wall, and then get two people to work on all those scenarios together. 
	What I like to do is to have that extra person there who then is the observer. And then the observer talks about what they observed and actually gives feedback, like meta feedback to the feedback role playing group. And that's important too. I think it's just as important to pinpoint from an observer what you think went well and what you think didn't and not just go, "Oh, that was great." And then not have a reason why. I think the more you can dissect what it is you saw and why it worked and why it didn't, and verbalize that, that's practicing those feedback skills. 
NOEL:  Cool. Jessie, is there one other thing you want people to say? Is there a resource that you can point people to? Do you want to push your book?
JESSIE:  Yes. 
NOEL:  Where can people learn more about Improv Effect and the services that you guys offer?
JESSIE:  As you mentioned earlier, I have a book called 'CTRL Shift 50 Games for 50 ****ing Days Like Today' and it's got 50 different exercises with scenarios that you might be going through. And you can do them by yourself but you can also do them with a team or an organization. And if you want to find out more about what I do, you can go to www.ImprovEffect.com and all the good stuff is there. And then we also have information on OpsConf, right Mark?
MARK:  Yeah. Details on OpsConf are up online. It's an invite-only conference. So, it's a relatively small group of people that we bring together that we think are really in this competitive space that are special services firms that have a lot in terms of similar size, similar values, and who we think would respond well to this kind of sharing and collaborations. So, that's currently an invite-only thing that Jessie and I helped to facilitate. But details of it are up on OpsConf.com. 
	And then in terms of unique practices for team building, I think there are a couple of interesting facilitation techniques. The best advice I can give is to actually look at facilitation as a skill. People take classes in public speaking and they've sometimes conflate the two that if they're a really good speaker, that sometimes they'll be good at facilitating and they're definitely different skill sets. And so, as people are stepping into [inaudible] and thinking about how they can become better in terms of [inaudible] people, to look at facilitation really as an art form and look at where you can actually get better facilitation skills. Not just delegation skills or work management skills or public speaking, I think facilitation is its own gift. Improv has a lot of value that teaches people to both listen and react incredibly well. Plus, they're a lot of fun. I think there are a lot of good Improv classes and studios in Chicago, but it's always great when we get to work with Jessie when she's in town.
JESSIE:  I would add more thing -- it's great to work with you too Mark -- is that if the OpsConf idea sounds interesting to you, that you're trying to figure out how to put together a retreat for a group of people and you want to break down barriers and they get intimate and fun and meaningful, Mark and I would be available to talk to about how we design those kinds of event. 
MARK:  That's a good point. There's a lot that went into that and we've learned a lot in the process of doing this for the last several years. Good mistakes, speaking of failures, mistakes we made along the way, but lots of intentional choices about how to set up and structure something to create that kind of community. And I think there's a lot to be learned and a lot to be shared from that experience. 
NOEL:  Great. Thank you. I'm Noel Rappin and I have with me Mark Rickmeier and Jessie Shternshus. 
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