Public leaders often have to lead small group discussions. Here is something that might help.
A lot of my work involves leading conversations. Sometimes that is because I am researching how people perceive an issue. Other times I am leading a session designed to convey content — how to use social media, ethical campaigning, public leadership.
 I am preparing for a four-day candidate training seminar that is an initiative of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. I’ve been part of this from the beginning, and it is one of the most rewarding things that I do. (Sorensen’s ethics-based candidate training course is the national model for such things and is highly effective.)
Part of the course involves small group discussions, and as we were preparing the agendas for those, I was erminded of a set of “universal probes” that I have been using for years. These are highly useful questions to ask as a follow up (after almost any initial question) and they typically unlock conversation and allow people to think quite deeply about the issue at hand. They are deceptively simple.
I did not come up with these. Chances are, any good focus group moderator will give you the same, or a similar, set. These are just how I articulate them. They arose out of study with one of my mentors, Rich Harwood, and work alongside of two imprtoant colleagues, John Creighton and Dave Moore.
Here are the questions:
- What do you mean by that?
- Say more about why you think that?
- What would that get you?
- What would that look like?
- And that leads you to think . . . ?
See? Simple. But ask them, and see what they can unlock. You might be surprised.
I know it’s just another arbitrary day, but I like to begin the new year looking forward. That usually means I spend the waning days of December reviewing things.
 "Fail" by Flickr user Nimbu My tendency is often to gloss over problems and let myself off the hook more than I should, so I like to carve out some time to really ask myself some hard questions — so I can see where I need to grow.
Here are some of the questions I am asking myself this year:
- What did I fail at? For projects that did not succeed, or are not fulfilling expectations, what part did I play?
- Where have I made progress? Where have I not made progress?
- What have I neglected this year?
- Are my metrics honest? Do they really measure the outcomes and outputs that are important?
- Where should I have spoken up? Where did I not act when I should have? What should I have done, and when?
- To whom do I owe amends? Am I willing to make them? If not, why not, and what will I do instead?
- What hard truths am I avoiding?
- What grade would I give myself as a leader, as a service provider, as an employee?
Self-assessment doesn’t have to be a negative exercise, but to me it is only worthwhile if I focus on what needs to change and not just pat myself on the back. It helps to have a dedicated time to focus in on the hard stuff so I can enjoy the good stuff with a clean conscience.
What hard questions are you asking yourself?
Let me know in the comments.
My latest piece is posted at Public Square Today, my blog at Washington Times Communities:
It’s An Extrovert’s World, But Technology Allows Introverts A Toehold
I recently spent time in a group with a public leader who is very clearly an introvert. Whenever it was her turn to speak, she would pause to think about what to say. People would hang on each sentence, waiting to see what was said. It was clearly a struggle for some in the room not to jump in and interrupt.
 "dave with a megaphone" by Flickr user NatalieHG This experience drove home to me the fact that we live in a world organized and run by extroverts. By “extrovert” I mean the term according to the definition used by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, a widely used psychological profiling tool. An extrovert is not necessarily loud and boorish – an extrovert gains their energy from interactions with others. (Here is a video about how this all works.)
By the same token, an introvert is not necessarily shy – an introvert gains their energy from being alone. Think of it this way: An extrovert recharges by being with people; an introvert recharges by seeking seclusion. Most studies I have read show that there are more extroverts than introverts in the world. Some peg the share of introverts at 25%. (To be fair, some studies say it’s more 50-50.)
Regardless of the numbers, extroverts have set the social norms in society. Jonathan Rauch has written the definitive column on this subject. Being outgoing is seen as friendly and positive. Being silent is seen as being “aloof” or arrogant. An outgoing extrovert has to cross a definite line before they are seen as irritating; whereas, for an introvert, not speaking creates a presumption of disinterest.
But, a major change is afoot. Social media has leveled the playing field somewhat. You don’t have to be an extrovert to be outgoing.
This is opening up public leadership to new people. Success does not need to come with schmoozing and glad-handing, it can come through effective sharing and diligently working online networks.
It will not work for everybody, but it is already beginning to work for some.
My latest piece is posted at Public Square Today, my blog at Washington Times Communities:
What Public Officials Want To Know About New Technology
 "So, this is the Internet?" by Flickr user NJLA In a workshop last week on new technology for engagement at the National League of Cities conference in San Antonio, we had a room full of more than a hundred mayors, city council members, and other municipal officials from across the nation. We thought it would be a good idea to start the session out by asking them to tell us the one question they were hoping would be answered when it comes to new technologies. We passed out index cards and asked them to write it down. We got sixty back, about two thirds of the audience.
What we got in return was a snapshot of public leaders’ anxieties when it comes to integrating new technologies into existing operations. They shook out into four basic areas: Finance; Reach; Implemenation and Use; and Legal and Security.
I go into detail on these at the article here. Take a look!
My latest piece is posted at Public Square Today, my blog at Washington Times Communities:
Gift Cards And Back Alleys
In the bribery case against embattled Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon, the allegations revolve around gift cards. The prosecution says she misused “dozens” of gift cards originally meant for needy families. She says she thought the cards were meant for her all along.
 A shadow economy Gift cards are becoming a shadow economy, not quite credit but not as liquid as cash, where the anonymity provided by the arm’s-length nature of the deal makes it easy to create deniability. Gift cards are a popular method to pay for illicit transactions ranging from prostitution to drugs to graft.
It’s unlikely that gift cards – which are really just hyper-convenient gift certificates or traveler’s checks – will go away. Indeed, as the recession-lengthened holiday gift giving season begins and retailers are pinning some of their hopes on the continued popularity of the plastic ducats. Consumers spent $24.9 billion with them last year.
This is an example of new technologies outstripping society’s rules. In public life, we too often watch idly as this happens. Instead of playing catch-up, public leaders need to be thinking around the next corner and imagining what kinds of new rules we will need to deal with the new ideas bombarding society’s fabric. New ways of banking, new ways of communication, new meanings for the word “community” – we know all these things are happening. Yet there are few serious efforts to predict, understand, or take into account what these changes will mean for the way public life ought to look.
Read the rest here.
My latest piece is posted at Public Square Today, my blog at Washington Times Communities:
 "Do Not Feed The Sock Puppet" by Flickr user dichohecho The Trolls Vs. The Vigilantes In Public Life
At an online community I co-manage, there’s a conflict.
The community in question is a forum for people to discuss local issues, and we’ve set it up intentionally so there are a few hoops people need to jump through before we allow comments. It’s supposed to be an antidote to some of the uglier things that go on in the public square these days — the kind of place where you don’t say what you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.
Recently we discovered sock-puppetry among some of the commenters. That’s when you create an alter-ego and post as both yourself and the fake person. The sock puppets were, as you would imagine, fairly uncivil customers. But, by and large, they stayed just on this side of the line, so we allowed some of their comments even though we wished they would not have been made.
Things were a little more heated than usual because there were municipal elections going on and one of the races was hotly contested, with a bitter division between candidates.
Once we discovered the deception going on, we put a stop to it by banning those individuals from any commenting, and we tightened up our comment policy. But there are those who are now curious as to who these sock-puppet trolls might be. They want us to out them so they can be known. . . .
Read the rest here!
 "Tar Broom" by Flickr user erix! The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about some things that were troubling me. I was unhappy with the behavior of others. As we discussed the situation, it became clear that the behavior may well have been driven by others’ reactions to my own behavior.
“You can’t control what they do,” said my friend, “but you can control what you do.” In retrospect, this is very straightforward advice — yet, in the moment, it’s often hard to see.
What’s even more difficult, is to know what it is I can control. My friend gave me a list that has proven to be very, very helpful. I thought you might find it useful.
These are the things that I can control:
- Attitude: What do I bring to the situation? What are my expectations?
- Effort: Am I just coasting along at half steam, or am I all in?
- Tone: Do I say the correct things, yet clothe them in sarcasm or smugness?
- Motives: Do I have hidden motives, such as vanity or pride?
- Thoughts: Am I harboring negative thoughts about others?
- Actions: Regardless of my intentions, are my actions helpful?
- Reactions: How do I react to what others do? Is it helpful?
If I can keep these elements in check, I can know that if others behave in ways I don’t like, or that cause me problems, it’s not my own fault but something else. I can know that my own side of the street is clean.
Now, I just need to keep this front and center for when I really need it!
I’ve had more than my fair share of occasions to hire someone. I’ve done it on my own, and in teams of people. I’ve been the one making the decision, and I’ve been in an advisory capacity.
 "failure" by Flickr user tinou bao There’s a question I always ask, but that I myself have never been asked. Indeed, when I ask it, most colleagues seem to respond somewhere between rolling there eyes and looking at me in shock. But I think it’s one of the most important questions you can ask.
It’s this: “Tell me about a time that you, personally, failed.”
What I am listening for is the quality of being able to admit that I failed. In my experience, this is an incredibly rare quality. It is the building block for the kind of humility I want my colleagues to exhibit and that I want the initiatives I lead to exhibit.
I am looking for someone who actually has an answer to the question.
In fact, so few people actually answer the question as posed, that I have had to rethink my approach. I used to see the question as fundamental and not being able to answer it was a serious downcheck. Now I’ve flipped it around — not having a good answer is neutral, while having a decent answer (or any answer) is a big-time plus.
Failures Are Not Mistakes
Note that the question does not ask about a project that failed. That would elicit interesting information and reveal something important about how a candidate goes about understanding and organizing their work.
The question also does not ask about a “mistake.” We all make mistakes and they can be big and small. I am looking for a mistake that rises to the level that the person individually would call a failure. It may not have momentous consequences, but it needs to have significance.
This question is all about mindset.
I prefer to work with people who can admit they were wrong, because it makes it easier for me to admit when I am wrong. It’s so easy to see admission of failure as a sign of weakness. It’s what we’re taught from the beginning, especially when it comes to the workplace.
But people who behave that way are a drag. When they do fail, by not being able to own up to it, they create churn, resentment, and inefficiencies. Plus they seem to have bad karma that can just be a bummer to be around.
The Humility Of Organizations
But humility is an increasingly critical skill for organizations and their leaders to have, too. The last decade has seen the empowerment of the individual in ways no one could have imagined. As organizations make missteps in this environment, they will have to apologize. For an object lesson, look at the difference between Domino’s Pizza (who addressed a problem head-on, with sincere remorse) and United Airlines (who stonewalled and tried a token donation to a nonprofit).
In this environment, to pretend that one is always right is no longer just ludicrous. It is a recipe for — well, for failure.
Everyone fails. I want the organizations, initiatives, and people I work with to be able to own up. This is the kind of weakness that makes everyone stronger.
 "Molly," my Carvin CT3M in all mahogany I recently spent an evening with two friends, working on a soundtrack for a DVD. My friend Ed Corr’s company, OPX, is creating a video presentation about what the office of the future might look like, if you ask the twenty-somethings who are going to have to work in them and design them. To its great credit, OPX did not want to just slap some royalty-free ambient noises on the presentation, nor were they comfortable pirating commercial music. So Ed asked me and Mike Shawn to help out. (Mike and I are band mates in The West End; Ed is a member of the band City Farm.)
I did not realize it at the time, but I would gain a number of insights into collaboration from that evening. A couple of days after our session, Ed dropped off a thank you card. On it was a Xeroxed passage from a book (which turned out to be Zen Guitar by Philip Toshio Sudo):
When your collaborator has a strong vision of where to go and you do not, follow the vision.
When you have a strong vision of where to go and your collaborators do not, invite them along and help them see it.
If no one in the project has a strong vision of where to go, develop a common vision before you start working, or at a minimum find one before you finish. A project with no vision yields mediocre results at best, and usually wastes everyone’s time.
Terrific advice to keep in mind the next time your organization collaborates with another. There’s got to be a vision that controls things. It does not have to be a consensus (one party may dominate). But all must submit to it.
Here is a sample of what we (performing as “West Farm”) recorded:
[wpaudio url="http://blog.bradrourke.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/02-Cubicle.mp3" text="West Farm - 'Cubicle'"]
Enjoy!
(Personnel: Ed Corr, acoustic guitar; Brad Rourke, electric guitar; Mike Shawn, keyboards; engineered by Brad Rourke)
 "Daily Moleskine" by Flickr user koalazymonkey One of the most important skills in working withe the public is, I believe, one of the most often overlooked. People whose work is public facing — community benefit organization leaders, public agency heads, journalists — need to be able to theme what they hear.
Put simply, this means “making sense” of what they hear, but it’s a bit deeper than that.
People don’t talk in sound bites. They don’t necessarily have coherent frameworks through which they view the world. In talking about difficult issues, their comments may be all over the map. Put a group of them together, and it can feel like anarchy.
The great public leaders are able to take these divergent strands of conversation and theme them — to extract the handful of important themes running through the conversation. The truly great ones can do it on the spur if the moment, there in the room during the conversation. This can take the discussion to a whole new level, as people see these threads and can then build off of them.
Much of my career has hinged on the ability to theme what people are saying. I listen in a focus group for the important elements to include in a discussion guide. In a strategic planning session, I listen for the places where the group thinks they have agreement but really don’t. In a marketing meeting, I listen for a clients needs — both the ones they acknowledge and the ones that, perhaps, they don’t.
I can only remember one time where I was taught anything explicit about themeing. It was all on-the-job. I was talking about this with a colleague the other day, and he said the same thing. Some people just seem to pick it up. Few organizations try to teach it.
I think this should change. It is one of the most useful skills you can have — at a minimum, it allows you to take better notes.
Here’s a way to get started. It’s a very loose exercise — on purpose. The best way to learn themeing is just to do it. A lot.
You’ll need tto get together a few friends (4 or more) in order to do this:
- Get your friends together and ask them to talk about a public issue. You are going to listen and take notes. If you need an idea, try talking about health care using this discussion guide. Or talk about poverty using session three (starts on p.12) of this one. Spend about 60 to 90 minutes on the discussion.
- As people talk, take notes. You can take part, but make sure you are paying enough attention to get the notes down. Pay attention to key points that people bring up. Listen for:
- Where people get stuck
- What people’s starting points are
- What values are underlying their statements
- Trade offs they would be willing to make
- Where there is agreement
- What people are not saying
- At the end of the conversation, and no more than four hours afterward, write yourself a memo of no more than 1.5 pages, recapping what you saw as the major themes. It should be in bullet form, something like this:
- This group was highly concerned with the cost of health care, especially with routine costs. One man said ‘The nickel and dime you to death.” Catastrophic costs were a concern too. “Five days in the hospital, and it cost $30K,” a woman said. “Thank God I had insurance.”
You’ll end up with a series of bullets that recap the major themes of the conversation. Show it to your friends and ask if you captured the session fairly.
This sounds like an odd exercise, I know. But try it. Most people who do it find it fun to really be pushed to think through and organize what they hear. I can remember the first time I listened to and themed a conversation, it was like a light bulb turned on.
Once this kind of listening — and recapping for yourself — become second nature, you’ll find all sorts of uses for it.
And, you will find your ability to really hear people and act on what you hear to increase exponentially.
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In 2007, I founded Rockville Central (about Rockville, MD) and comanaged it until we ceased publishing in October 2011.
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