Adam Lawrence: Facilitation Skills for Content Designers and Strategists – Episode 152

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As strategists and designers, we often facilitate gatherings of stakeholders with a variety of priorities and approaches.

There can be a temptation in such groups to leap into action and start building solutions and creating content right away.

A good facilitator like Adam Lawrence can redirect this natural human enthusiasm to bring focus to our equally natural curiosity and humility, which almost always results in better products that address customers’ actual problems.

We talked about:

• his work with This is Service Design Doing and the Global Service Jam
• the “facilitator’s challenge” – the tendency of people in workshops to leap to action rather than remaining curious as the actual problem at hand
• the need for humility and curiosity when evaluating ideas
• the importance of creating safe space in workshops
• the insight that “an early prototype is not a proposal, it’s an experiment”
• how to manage the intention of a workshop and the preferences of participants
• the role of the “difficultator” – a facilitator who challenges the group
• the importance of testing ideas as quickly as possible with prototypes
• the similarities between facilitation and the scientific method
• the role of language in workshop facilitation
• the importance of being aware of both cultural and language issues in workshops that include participants from multiple cultures
• the challenges of facilitating workshops remotely

Adam’s bio

Adam Lawrence (he/him) is a design educator and author, as well as a comedian, actor and singer with a background in psychology and the global automotive industry. For years he has used expertise gained in the world of theater, film, music and storytelling to help organisations become more creative, more realistic, more human – and thus to innovate better.

Adam is co-initiator of the Global Service Jams, the world’s biggest co-creative design event, as well as co-author of the top-selling books This is Service Design Doing and This is Service Design Methods.

Adam is adjunct professor of service design thinking at the world-class IE Business School in Madrid, was one of the first SDN Master trainers, and has been recognized with the Core77 prize for service design. Based in the European Union and working for organizations worldwide, he is a founding Partner at WorkPlayExperience. A specialist in facilitation, he loves to help people better collaborate and create more value.

Adam enjoys nature, riding his classic Japanese motorcycle, and dressing up in medieval clothes to hit his friends with sticks.

Connect with Adam online

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• This is Service Design Doing
• Global Service Jams

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 152. When you gather stakeholders and colleagues to design new products or services, there’s a temptation to leap into action and start creating and building right away. A good facilitator knows how to redirect this natural human enthusiasm into activities that reveal the actual problems that your customers have and help you create products that solve them. Adam Lawrence has honed these kinds of facilitation skills and taught them to thousands of designers.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 152 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Adam Lawrence. Adam is like a really multi-talented guy. He facilitates design innovation stuff in a number of contexts, has decades of theater experience, a really skilled facilitator – I can attest to from first-hand experience. So welcome to the show, Adam. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Adam:
Thanks, Larry. It’s great to be here. Lots is going on right now. We are still in the sort of post-Covid, getting back into the swing of it things because we did a big shift during Covid to do much more online stuff, which was super-interesting but now we’re trying to get more of a mix going again. So that’s keeping us really busy. We’re doing some big projects with some organizations I can’t talk about, but they’re really fun. We are gearing up for the next Global Service Jam, which comes around in about nine months. So it’s time now to think about it and get people engaged in that, and generally enjoying the hot summer weather. I quite like this hot weather. I know it’s not great. There’s bad stuff happening to the planet, but I do quite enjoy it personally – me, me, me – when it’s sunny and warm outside.

Larry:
I was enjoying it until it got up to about 30 yesterday and then-

Adam:
Yeah, that gets a bit much. That gets a bit much. Yeah.

Larry:
That’s fine. But one of the things I’ve… Like I alluded to, I attended your service design workshop in Amsterdam last March, and that was really, really enjoyable and really good.

Adam:
Thanks.

Larry:
And among the things you did in there, you had this thing you would say about sort of projects that were, let’s say, inadequately researched. You would just say, “Oh, that’s interesting. So we’re just going to run with assumptions here.” And I think that’s the thing that a lot of content strategists and designers and designers of all stripes see all the time. But you have this thing, you talk about the facilitator’s challenge. Can you tell us about the generic big challenge that faces every facilitator when they-?

Adam:
Well, I guess the big challenge in one word is humans. We work with human beings and they have all the superpowers and all the blind spots and all the Achilles’ heel and all the kryptonites that humans have. One of them is one you just mentioned there. Let’s go with assumptions, is that we very quickly assume we understand what’s going on. Yeah, we are very quick to jump into action, into moving forward rather than staying where we are and looking around, being curious. When I talk to people, doing keynotes and stuff like this, I want to get their attention. I nearly always start with the same story, which is a story of an airport who were targeting the over fifties and they knew that over fifties used the bathroom more often. And I can sympathize, having turned 55 years ago, my Facebook advertising changing overnight from being about tight pants and adventure holidays to being about caravans and continence products.

Adam:
So I say to them, “If you know that you have all these oldsters in your airport who are using the bathrooms a lot, what do you do?” And people say, “Oh, add more bathrooms or make the bathrooms more accessible, or make more signage to the bathrooms. Put the bathrooms near the gates, play ’80s music in the bathrooms.” All these kind of things get suggested, which are all great ideas and which could all maybe improve the experience but I say to them, “Why are they using the bathrooms?” And they say, “Well, they are peeing.” And I say, “Are you sure?” And how do you find out? You can’t hang up cameras or ask people, “What are you doing in there?” It’s not going to work. But in this real project, people did some observation. They hung around in the hand washing areas, washed their hands a lot, and they saw that these oldsters were not using the bathrooms to pee.

Adam:
They were going in there because in the bathrooms, you can hear the flight announcements better. And I love telling that story straight away because the entire room, I could have 800 lawyers in front of me that now have their chins dropped and their mouths open because they all would’ve just spent a whole load of money on the wrong problem. So some of the problems that we have working with humans is that humans think we understand stuff too quickly, we focus on the wrong thing, and we think our ideas are great. “I love my ideas. They’re in my head, they’re perfect, pristine. If you criticize my ideas, you criticize me.” But we know that most of our ideas are terrible. At least I know most of your ideas are terrible, you know most of my ideas are terrible, but not when it’s mine. So it’s getting people to have, if you like, curiosity and humility. That’s what I’m going for.

Adam:
And that’s I think what design is a great mechanism for. It gives us tools to be curious about the world, to ask questions in a smart way, to get away from biases, to get away from methods that don’t work well, but to use things which are cheap and lightweight and can get as good insights. And then to fail our way forward, to make prototypes, to run tests that sometimes don’t work, and to learn from that and these learning loops. And the trouble is that’s not how people are used to working. We all want to work in a straight line. The fastest distance between A and B is a straight line. And it’s not, it’s just simply not in design because you might not be heading for B and you might not even be standing at A when you think you are.

Larry:
Yeah, I’m going to project some of my immediately prior professional experiences on this and observe that there are places, like in product and engineering, where there is this more of a straight line thing and you’re often collaborating with… And the other professions as well. Those are just my most recent ones. And like you said, you’re kind of dealing with different human beings. The goal and the thing that makes this work to get through those biases and things you talked about, the curiosity and humility you want to cultivate, can you talk a little bit about how you…? Not that you can make people more curious or humble, but you can facilitate an environment where those qualities are rewarded. Is that feels like what’s going on when you facilitate? Is that what you’re doing?

Adam:
Thank you. Certainly we are. We talk about a concept called safe space, which we often even capitalize we think it’s so important. It’s a theater term. And as you mentioned before, I spent a lot of my life working in theater as an actor, a director, a singer, even a stripper, even a dancer at times. And in theater we have these rehearsal rooms and I can go into a rehearsal room anywhere in the world and it’s a room usually painted black with black wooden flooring, with dusty black curtains, with broken furniture and the worst coffee in the world. And I know when I enter that room that I can do what I like in here because I decide what leaves the room. It’s a physical and mental space where it’s okay to mess up. And that’s the opposite of most organizations. In most organizations, if you mess up, there’s a meeting.

Adam:
And that is quite right in some contexts. When we are doing things we’ve done before, when we’re running the business, we’re doing familiar things, then A to B is a straight line and we try and get it straighter and straighter and we optimize that. If an architect has built 99 houses of the same plan and she’s building the hundredth one, there’s no point experimenting. You just do it again better. But if we ask the same architect to build a boat and she just thinks and sketches and starts building the thing, that’s a bad idea. She needs to learn and be curious and figure things out and try floating lollipop sticks in her bathtub and stuff first and work her way towards building a boat. So we’ve got two modes. We’ve got the mode of doing what we know. Some people call that exploitation or running the business.

Adam:
And we have the mode of doing what we don’t know, discovering the future, which is exploration or changing the business. And we need to have two mindsets for these. And it’s really important to shift between them. When we ask people to go from one that they’re familiar, that running the business that I know how to do this mode, into uncertainty, that’s a big ask. That’s a big ask. You’re asking people to maybe embarrass themselves, they think make expensive mistakes, and so on. And you need to set up an atmosphere around them where it’s okay to start failing, failing because we need to fail to succeed in the end. We need to have negative experimental results. We need to do things that don’t work to learn what might work.

Adam:
And that needs a certain safety around that. And a lot of what we do in facilitation is about setting up that safe space, setting up that thing which is given to me as an actor when I enter that black room with the bad coffee. I just get that. I’ve been conditioned to accept that, but I don’t have that in organizations, so I have to walk into a meeting, into a project, and start… I can’t paint the walls black and hang out curtains so I have to use other techniques and processes and even rituals to help people figure out, “Okay, I’m uncertain. And that’s okay.”

Larry:
And you talked a little bit about the mindset. So a couple things there. You probably need to be aware in your own head of whether you’re in the kind of exploitative mode or exploration mode. So there’s that, but then there’s also just the things you were talking about, the fact that those are mindsets and you’re in this physical setting, like in the theater. And also, I guess there’s a third thing I’m curious about too. One of the grounding metaphors in service design is the audience, the front of the stage, the back of the stage. Those associations, that all kind of goes together as a piece, I’m going to guess.

Adam:
Yeah, very much so. And it’s so hard to know where to start with all that. But I mean, we do have the idea of a safe space, which in the theater, the metaphor there is the backstage, it’s hidden away from the world and so on. But in design, we’re also co-creating. So we’re doing things that are even weirder than in theater because very few theaters will show the public an early rehearsal. But that’s the kind of stuff that we do in design. We try to get prototypes in front of people really, really early because, this is one of those things I quote all the time, an early prototype is not a proposal, it’s an experiment. A prototype is not a proposal. That’s one of those things I have written on t-shirts. So we’re getting out early, we are co-creating with our audiences. So there’s even a degree of courage there, or a degree of… I don’t know, a degree of not taking yourself too seriously is a better phrase maybe, which is stronger than it is in my other life, in theater.

Larry:
And then you… Go ahead.

Adam:
And it’s all intertwined. So then in service design, we have the decision of where to draw the curtain, the metaphorical curtain. You think about restaurants today. The most expensive table in the restaurant might well be in the kitchen. That was unthinkable 50 years ago where everything was done behind red walls and then the waiters would come out and simultaneously lift the cloches from 12 plates so we all see the reveal of the food at the same time. And that still exists. That’s one style of restaurant now but we also have the restaurants where we see everything. And that applies to us especially in design and consulting fields, because we do better work if the people are engaged in that, if they’re seeing us work, if they’re working with us. They’re also more willing to pay if they see the amount of effort that we make and not just an end result. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff here about what is seen and what is unseen, what is finished, and what is not finished, and how we work with those productively.

Larry:
Yeah, as you talk about that, I’m reminded of the sort of layers in this whole system, from the front of the stage to the back of the stage and the underlying systems, but there’s also the variety of activities that’s going on that you’re doing. At some point, you’re doing research and discovery stuff and then ideation and then prototyping, and then maybe even implementation. But it didn’t occur to me, just now asking but are there different sort of facilitation modes that you shift into with different intentions in the workshops you’re running?

Adam:
I think so because there are a lot of things going on. One of the things is that some people really like doing certain things and some people like doing other things, but generally speaking, organizations like being abstract and cerebral. They like to do brainstorming and they like to do PowerPoints. There are many exceptions. Every organization, they don’t want to go out and talk to customers. “That’s weird. Sitting on a customer’s sofa, that’s weird.” They don’t want to build things that look a bit crappy and may fail because that’s not what we’d been conditioned to do by education or by our corporate environments and so on. So there are phases where you’re kind of holding people back and there are phases where you are encouraging people forward. And that’s always really, really interesting. There’ll always be some exceptions in the group, and that’s great, using that, the diversity of skill, but also of preferences within the groups to move that forward productively and also to move at the right pace.

Adam:
The classic thing is we have one idea, we think it’s great, let’s do it. We’re in love with our idea, especially if the CEO had it or whatever. And that’s what orgs like to do. Let’s make lots of vision statements and make PowerPoints about it and it’s going to be awesome because everything works in PowerPoint. But as a facilitator, and in fact, I often use the word difficultator, as a difficultator… That’s a word from Boal, which you can look into. Some of this is about saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Are we doing good work here? Is this based on assumptions? Is this based on reality? What’s our backup plan when this fails? What’s our backup plan when the backup plan fails? Do we have a portfolio of ideas going forward, a portfolio of insights or prototypes and not just one that we love?” Because if we have one idea that we love, we can’t afford to let it fail. And that’s just bad design. That means we’re going to push things through because of our egos rather than because the world needs them.

Larry:
As you say that, I’m reminded that a lot of people, especially people under deadline pressure or other kinds of pressure at work, I don’t know how much of the adoption of ideas happens because of that kind of thing, but regardless of the mechanism by which they’re stuck to their ideas, you’ve talked a lot about the great ways to do that, to help people get unattached or less attached to their ideas. Do you have any good success stories there? Because I think among, my listeners, I guarantee you that 99% of them have had this experience of just being impelled to execute on an idea that they might have had some concerns about. So I guess maybe what I’m asking for there is are there any ways you can difficultate from outside when you see a bad idea about to be implemented?

Adam:
One of the things there is also to have humility yourself. Sometimes I’ve heard the CEO’s got a big idea and I thought, “Oh no, here we go again.” And maybe it was a brilliant idea. I mean, maybe it took years to incubate, it’s based on hundreds of conversations and real experiences, and stuff like this. And maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. Quite often, they’re wrong, or at least they’re only partly right. So what we try to do… And this is part of facilitation. Facilitation is not just workshops, but part of facilitation is saying, “Okay, that idea is there. How can we get some version of that idea in front of users tomorrow? And I mean tomorrow. How can we make a mock-up, a fake version of this? Can we put an advertisement out there and see if anybody clicks it? Can we fake this using human beings where there should be technology and actually get it in front of users and see how they react?”

Adam:
And not ask them, “Do you like my idea?” Because they’re going to say yes if they like me and know if they hate me, but actually see what happens when they get their hands on this thing. And sometimes you find out the CEO was brilliant, this is great. Let’s just do it. Let’s push it through. More often you’ll find out, “Oh, there are things happening we didn’t expect. Obviously we don’t know enough about the problem or the need or the user. Maybe we should find out more and generate a few more ideas.” And you are back into the much more healthy, iterative way of working, which ends up being faster in the long run and cheaper because you make all the mistakes at the beginning when they’re quick and cheap rather than later on where they’re really expensive and really slow to fix.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s something we’re often in this world trying to sell, the value of our work. We’re still a relatively new discipline and the ability to show the benefits of failing quicker and earlier and then doing the correcting going forward. But one part about that that I’m reminded of as you talk is that… You talked earlier about the exploitative versus explorative mindsets. It almost seems like there’s an even higher level mindset around this, thinking like a scientist. Anything you hear is a hypothesis that you need to test. Is that kind of…?

Adam:
I like that a lot. And in fact, I often compare, let’s say, design management or the leadership of innovation, new things, leadership of new work, I often compare it to running a scientific lab. There’s a model of leadership. If you go on one of those visualization courses and they say, “Draw leadership,” they’ll probably have you draw a figure, usually a male figure, standing on a high rock, pointing in a direction. Everyone’s marching in that direction. It’s like, “This way, follow me.” And what we’re saying in design is that we don’t know the direction yet. And that is just good science. There is, I hope, no physicist out there who’s trying to, for example, prove string theory. They might like string theory, but they’re not trying to prove it. They’re trying to investigate it. They’re trying to do good science and publish it and not take dirty money and stuff like this and be curious about the problem, not in love with a solution.

Adam:
And the way that you run a scientific lab is about saying, “We’re doing good science, we’re not trying to prove A or B. We don’t know where it’s going to take us. Although we have some goals maybe and some wishes and some hopes, we don’t know where we’re going to end up.” That’s a great model for design leadership. It’s about saying, “How are we doing this?” Not, “Where is it going to take us?” Of course, organizations have goals and they have spreadsheets, and we have to make money at the end of the day but I found that the way you do that is by delivering what people actually need, not what you want them to need.

Larry:
Yep. That’s going to resonate with my folks, I guarantee you. And any more tips you have on that, we’re going to always going to be welcome. But hey, one thing, speaking of my folks, this is a content strategy podcast and we are all language nerds here. And something you didn’t talk about it explicitly very much in your workshop, but I’ve watched you operate and you are really attentive to language, in many facets, both in terms of how you include people or just how you operate in the workshop, but also you’re often working in multicultural settings where you have even sometimes more than one language in the workshop.

Adam:
Sure.

Larry:
So there’s two questions in there. One, am I correctly inferring that you are sensitive to language and that that affects how you operate?

Adam:
Hugely so. Hugely so. There’s a couple of aspects to that. The church bells are going in my little town here. I hope they don’t disturb the recording too much, but it’s romantic.

Larry:
No, it’s fine.

Adam:
Yeah. One thing is when you are working in a room, there are certain words that get you certain behaviors from people, that may make people more or less nervous, or make them feel more or less safe. We’re trying to avoid, for example, attachment to ideas too early on. So when we ask people for ideas, we don’t say, “Give me a good idea,” or, “Give me a crazy idea.” These all have been proved to actually slow people down. We say, “Give me any old idea. Tell me any old story. Give me an example of that.” It’s like lowering the ante on everything. I don’t want a good example, I just want an example. I don’t want a great solution, I want some solutions.

Adam:
And this is really, really important. And that could just be in a word that you say. We run a large event called the Global Service Jam, a big global hackathon. And in that one, we found that to spread this way of working through the tens of thousands of people who’ve taken part in that now that we have some very key messages that we just keep repeating and we’ve really, really honed those down to get the shortest number of words, it’s content design, it’s just what you folks do, to find ones that work really, really well, that work in multiple languages and context when translated, because they mean much the same thing in any language with the Jams. It’s doing, not talking. That’s one of the things. It’s, “Get out of your sea, get out on the street.” It’s, “Stop comparing opinions, start comparing prototypes.” These kind of things.

Adam:
They’re short, they’re snappy, often rhyme, all the classics that we know from advertising and so on. But it’s really, really important to get these right. And sometimes just a little tweak can make a huge difference as content designers know well. That can be fun when you’re in a multicultural context. One of the most fun is, I’m going to do it in a couple of weeks actually, is I go once or twice a year over to China and we do some facilitation teaching there. And the great challenge of that one is that we have a room full of people. Some of them speak only Chinese, Mandarin, Chinese, some of them speak only in English, and some of them speak both. So we have no language in the room that works for everybody. I don’t speak any Chinese. So I’m working in English and I have another English-speaking colleague and two Chinese-speaking colleagues who also speak English with me, and we have to make this work.

Adam:
And it’s really, really interesting to do that. On a very practical level, for example, we use sticky notes a lot in service design. It’s kind of a cliche of us, to carry little particles of information and move them around and sort them and so on. So we might ask people to write a bunch of sticky notes and they do it in their own language, either in English or in Chinese. And then we put them all on the wall, and then we ask the folks who speak both languages to swarm over the wall and add the other language to each sticky note. So now each sticky note contains both languages, and then we can all sort them again and we can all look at them and respond to them. That’s really, really fun. And that works on a practical level. It doesn’t always work on the cultural level.

Adam:
That’s where it gets interesting. Often, at the start of a session, we set expectations and we ask people, “What would you like to get out of these three days?” And we write down what they say, and it’s kind of a running gag that at some point somebody says, “Want it to be fun.” And we get very serious and we put a line through it and say, “No fun. You didn’t pay for the fun version. That’s more expensive.” Make jokes about this and that works pretty well and people laugh. And did this one time in China, and three days later, a little delegation of participants came to us and said, “We’re very sorry, but you said not to have any fun, but you keep being funny. And we’re really trying hard not to laugh.” And we had to say, “Wow, sorry. That was massively our fault. That was a joke. It just didn’t translate. It just did not translate. And we’re sorry.” And that’s just basic. Humor is not multicultural sometimes.

Adam:
Oops. There goes the wind. So sometimes the technical side of translating, of making words work is fine. Making the content behind those work or the emotion behind those words work is not always as easy.

Larry:
Since I moved to Europe… In America, all the content designers come from copywriting and journalism and other writing professions. Everybody in the Europe seems to come from localization of one kind or another so I’ve become much more attuned to those issues. That’s really, really interesting. Like the one you just mentioned, I just want to quickly touch on… I know we’re kind of coming out of Covid, but I think one of the things that’s lingering and enduring and because there’s some benefits of it, is the idea of remote facilitation.

Adam:
Yeah.

Larry:
Tell me a little bit about… Are there unique challenges or new practices-?

Adam:
Hugely so, huge so. You’re right, there are great things about it. I went into Covid being very dogmatic about remote being just useless and it would never work. And I had to grow up and admit that a lot of stuff worked really, really well online. And we’ve spent some time getting nice equipment and so on. And we use lots of music and sound and stuff that we use in-room also online, which surprises people. All my buttons here that I can press anytime to get jingles and punches and background music and things like that. But there are some things that will always be missing. Many, many years ago I studied psychology. Back when the rocks were still soft and the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a psychology student and I actually specialized in monkey psychology. So, “Hi, Larry. I’m Adam.”

Adam:
We are two monkeys, and this is really, really important, the fact that we still are fundamentally physical beings and we still use lots of physicality in our communication, in our collaboration. We smell each other. That’s literally a thing, pheromonic communication between human beings. It happens. When we feel the same temperature change or smell the same food or feel the same air movement, our brains literally synchronize. Not in a kind of hippie kind of moonbeams kind of way, in a literal brain cycling way, our brains start to synchronize. And when our brains start to synchronize, we collaborate better. So the fact that you and I are feeling different temperatures right now, or I just had a noise in the background and you didn’t, that de-synchronizes our brains, which can be useful at times. But usually we’re trying to synchronize people’s brains because we want them to collaborate better.

Adam:
And so there’s a huge, huge bunch of challenges around the fact that you are now a talking head, that I can’t see what your hands and feet are doing that, that I can’t read the environment you are in very well. And in a video call, there could be 14 or 15 environments I’m trying to read. But for me, the main challenge of working online, apart from all the missing monkey factors of touching and smelling and seeing your whole body and hearing you breathe and the timing of your breathing and stuff like this, the main challenge of that is we lose the in-between, we lose the implicit. There are so many instances in physical work where I might, for example, be about to enter a room and I hear the tone of voice through the door and I think, “I’ll come back in half an hour.”

Adam:
That is really, really important. Or I could be in a group session, I’m about to say something, and I glance across at a colleague and they just make a little downward moment of the corner of their mouth and I decide not to say it. Or they encourage me to say it and that doesn’t work. I can type to somebody in the chat window, but then the moment’s gone and chat again is very explicit. There are lots of in-betweens in communication that don’t fit into words. This is a huge thing in design, by the way. We are dealing with things that we don’t have words for. That’s why we use prototypes and visualizations. To give the example, I work just down the road here from two fantastic sport fashion manufacturers here in Germany. You can probably guess which ones they are. And they work with things like coolness, this thing is cool, this thing is not cool.

Adam:
Can you describe why? Not really, but if you look at it, you can see. So the things that don’t fit into words are really, really important. And we lose a huge amount of that on online communication. Even with the cameras on, we’re still losing a huge amount of that. And there’s still lots of folks who, as a matter of course, work with their cameras off, which just baffles me. But there’s still people who do that. There are good reasons for some folks to do it, I understand that. But for many of us, honestly, it’s just being lazy.

Larry:
And if you’re in a communication mode… And you’re reminding me of that truism, that something like, what, 97% of communication is non-verbal. And we still got some of the visual here.

Adam:
Yeah. That’s Mehrabian, an often misquoted study, he was talking about the communication of likability, if you like. But it does show that an awful lot of it is physical. And even if it’s only 10, 20%, that’s a massive success factor. If you could make conversations 20% better, wouldn’t you do it?

Larry:
Absolutely, yeah. One thing… I try to keep this podcast short. I don’t know if it’s a better conversation, but it’s more consumable. So we’re coming up on time.

Adam:
Sure.

Larry:
But I want to make sure, before we wrap up, is there anything that’s come up in the conversation you want to revisit or just that’s on your mind about facilitation or anything about design?

Adam:
Couple of things. One is if folks are interested in facilitation, we run these free regular chats online at a thing called the Co-Creation School, which does not exist. It’s an experimental space where we try stuff out with short communication lines and it’s often messy and it’s always really, really fun. So if you look for the Co-Creation School online, you’ll find regular free monthly sessions just for hanging out and talking about helping folks do great work. And it’s really, really good. It’s my recharge every month, just an hour, three times a month or two times a month in my time zone just to talk to people like you, other colleagues, and just chat about what’s going on. And the other one… This, by the way, is a nonprofit. I make no money from that.

Adam:
Another nonprofit which I’m involved in is the Global Service Jam. I mentioned it already. One weekend a year, all over the world, people come together – mostly physically, some virtually – thousands of people in 150 cities, and they get a challenge, surprise challenge at the start of their weekend and have 48 hours working with strangers to research, ideate, prototype, and publish fully new services or products. And it is a blast. We have such fun, we link up with people all around the world, we’re scratching our heads on the same problems, getting out into the street, talking to people, fumbling for words, building awesome prototypes, testing them, throwing them away. And there’s usually lots of pizza and rubber chickens and it’s great, great fun. So if anybody would like to learn more about the world of service design or innovation, whatever you call this stuff, check out Global Jams, like stuff you put on toast, globaljams.org. And I would love to see folks at that event.

Larry:
Yeah, that’ll be fun. I’m a big fan of Barcamps and Startup Weekends and hackathons.

Adam:
It’s just that kind of vibe.

Larry:
Exactly. Yeah. I am a big fan of that. Well, one very last thing, Adam. What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch if they want to connect online?

Adam:
Yeah, I’m pretty visible online. I have a middle name, which is strange. It’s StJohn, which is spelled S-T-J-O-H-N. So it’s Adam StJohn Lawrence. That makes me much easier to Google because there’s some other folks called Adam Lawrence out there. Or you can just write to me, adam at servicedesign dot de. No punctuation in there except for the at and the dot.

Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Adam. Really fun conversation. Always fun having you.

Adam:
Thanks for having me. And thanks for your kind words about the work. Looking forward to listening to the podcast.