Eiffel Over

Tag: trust

  • 120 Satsumas at the dentist’s

    Nobody relishes the prospect of a dull meeting, which is why, as a facilitator and trainer, I always try to bring an element of play into my workshops.

    But play isn’t just a distraction from the “real business.” Sometimes, it is the real business. Creative, playful exploration often leads to more insightful and daring ideas. It helps us take risks, builds trust, and provides the buoyancy we need to bounce back when things get tough.

    That’s why I love to include games in my sessions to lighten the mood. One of my favourites is lemon jousting—a simple game where you try to knock a lemon off your opponent’s spoon without losing the lemon on your own spoon. At Constructivist, for ease of procurement, we’ve adopted satsumas instead of lemons. The bonus? Participants get a tasty snack afterward.

    Of course, this playful approach means that in the peripatetic life of a trainer, I often find myself travelling with some rather unusual props.

    Which is how I ended up at the dentist’s, en route to a training course, hauling 120 satsumas.

    👉 Find out more about the facilitation training I deliver at Constructivist.

  • Designers as insiders

    This post has moved.
    It now lives on the Constructivist blog: read the updated version →

    Eiffel Over is now my stage for engineering-related clowning, singing, dancing and writing — you’ll find my professional writing on design and regenerative thinking over at Constructivist.

    Yesterday I said designers are outsiders. Here’s the tricky part: we are also insiders. 

    That’s because we need to earn the right to work with the people we are designing with and for.

    Being an insider means we are trusted and that we are in an empathetic relationship with the people we are seeking to influence.

    Just as being an outsider takes work, so does the trust and empathy building process of being an insider. But if we can’t convince people to move with us, our ideas may be good for nothing. 

  • If you want to save the planet… have dancing lessons

    Serendipitously, as I was preparing for my first dance teaching workshop this morning at the Idler Festival, I spotted a quote in one of my other open browser tabs a quote from David Flemming.

    Commons are cooperative enterprises; they therefore depend on trust, on reciprocity, and on social capital. The market economy can get by, for a time, with a gravely-weakened culture and social capital, but the commons cannot. If you really want to save the planet and to give human society a decent chance of living on it, the first thing you should do is to join a choir. Or have dancing lessons, or both. That is not quite the hyperbole it seems: in enduring communities, the thing which defines and distinguishes them is their culture of dance, music, story and tradition—so intertwined with trust that it is hard to tell cause from effect. 

    David Flemming, in ‘Lean Logic – A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT’

    We always said in the Mudflappers that our mission was to make the world slightly better through the medium of dance. Well here is some compelling philosophical underpinning to back that up. I shared this quote with the dance workshop today and it was well received.

  • Recognise the desert to return it to life

    When renewable systems are over exploited they fall into a desertlike state. In this state the system population is too low to support regrowth and the system structures break down. But given the right conditions and encouragement, regrowth can return. The seeds are all there. The self-organising ecosystem can return to recreate resilience, complexity and diversity associated with rich life.

    (more…)
  • Trust me, I feel your pain, I have a plan – tools for selling design

    Trust me, I feel your pain, I have a plan – tools for selling design

    The final stage in the arc of design thinking workshops that I have been developing at Think Up with my colleague Nick Zienau is developing the ability to convince other people to adopt your design. In these workshops there are three areas we work on with participants: building trust with the client; three elements of content; and giving effective feedback.

    Trust

    Building trust with your client is absolutely essential if you are going to connivence them of anything. There are two things we concentrate on here. The first is being mindful about the first impressions we create. We all create first impressions, whether we like it or not, but we might not be aware of what those are. In our workshops we help people become more aware of the impressions that they create, and help them think about how to create the impressions they want with clients.

    The second thing we concentrate on is developing trust through showing vulnerability. To show vulnerability to someone is to show that you trust them; if you can trust others then they are more likely to reciprocate. In our workshops we help participants explore how they can show their vulnerabilities, such as what they are worried about or where they feel their weaknesses are, and use this as the basis of building trust with others.

    Together, managing first impressions and building reciprocal trust with our clients we call ‘gaining entry’.

    Three-phase content

    For many people, the starting point for any pitch is to work out what they want to say. Aristotle said that for a speaker to convince an audience of anything, then the speaker needs ethos, pathos and logos. Having ethos is to be trustworthy. Having pathos is having a shared sense of their feelings (in particularly their pain). Having logos is to have a logical argument. We can think of these as three phases we need to develop in our pitch.

    In my experience, many engineers are most comfortable starting with the logos phase, the logic of the solution. The trust-building that we start the workshop with is an important element for developing the ethos phase, as is the reputation of the companies that participants work for. For many, the hardest phase is developing pathos. To develop good pathos you need good understanding of the client’s perspective, which is easiest to gain if you have a good relationship with them based on trust.

    Giving and receiving honest non-judgemental feedback

    We now have a plan for getting the content together, but how do we know if the pitch we have put together is any good? Here we rely on feedback from others. But for many, the idea of receiving feedback is dreadful – it isn’t all that fun for the feedback giver either. But when done well, feedback is an invaluable tool for improving our work, and it can be fulfilling for the person offering it too.

    To make feedback work really well, we require the person giving the feedback to be really honest, but also non-judgemental. So they should say how something makes them feel, and why that might be, but not to judge it. A judgement is too final and puts the listener on the defensive, whereas talking about feelings offers the person listening the chance to find out more about why what they have done has elicited these feelings.

    Equally, good feedback has requirements of the receiver too: they need to be open to receiving it, grateful, and not defensive. The last part is critical if the exchange is going to be useful. If the person receiving feedback can hold off on defending, and instead show interest in the other person’s views, then they can really deepen their understanding.

    Taking these tools together, we can build an effective pitch for ideas that says,: ‘trust me, I feel your pain, and I have a plan’.

    [This is an adapted version of a post I originally wrote for the Think Up website, posted on 1st November 2017].