In this episode, Glenn Fajardo joins me for a conversation about virtual rituals and their power to help us make sense of the virtual waters we are swimming in every day. Glenn co-leads the immersive course Design Across Borders at the Stanford d.school and is the co-author of Rituals for Virtual Meetings: Creative Ways to Engage People and Strengthen Relationships. His thoughts on ritual and using curiosity as a force for connection in virtual collaboration are just some of the must-listen moments.
Glenn is a conversation designer, through and through. I love his simple frame of “Occasion, intention, and action” to think about creating moments of transformation for teams.
Also...as a side note, you should absolutely pair this episode with my conversation with Casper ter Kuile, author of “the power of ritual” and co-founder of the Sacred Design Lab. His work is all about how we can learn about creating meaning by learning from the patterns and principles of religion. It’s like biomimicry, but for religion!
Glenn takes inspiration from storytelling, cinema, and...punctuation! We co-created a new conversation design framework, together, based on commas and ellipses. I kid you not.
Occasion
In my book, Good Talk, I identified a few key components of conversations that, when shifted and changed, can have a profound effect on a conversation. There are nine total in the Conversation OS Canvas and two that Glenn highlights are the interface for the conversation and the cadence of the conversation.
Occasion collapses a few elements of my conversation OS. An occasion usually happens in time and space and a ritual can happen on more than one occasion...giving it a cadence, a pattern of recurrence.
But Glenn has done a tremendous amount of work to design occasions that don’t happen at the same time. What does that mean?
Together and Apart
Glenn has done a lot of experimenting with creating team cohesion, not just when teams are together but apart, in real-time, virtually, but when teams can’t be together but must collaborate - like groups in very disparate time zones. Glenn shares some powerful insights on how to build connection when you can’t be together at the same time.
Creating Expressive Spaces
The medium of a conversation shapes the conversation...it is the interface that enables some types of conversations and makes other modes harder. For example, Zoom’s breakouts were, at one point, a unique innovation that many other platforms lacked, and made having dynamic conversations much easier. Now, video platforms exist that push the boundaries of capability, allowing new interactions to form - like virtual audio spaces that allow people to move around in a virtual space and hear each other differently when they are closer or farther apart. Kumospace is one such tool.
I asked Glenn what was crucial for creating orientation, connection, and productivity in virtual spaces and he pointed out that we must find mediums that capture expressiveness.
A lot of folks feel like synchronous video and audio are the best way to connect remotely..but Glenn suggested that video messages can be amazingly connecting, and even more powerful because they are asynchronous.
If you work with a larger team, across multiple time zones, you’re going to need to be more intentional and creative in your ritual design - creating rituals and engagement in asynchronous conversational platforms like Slack or WhatsApp.
And that’s the message I want you to take from this conversation. Do an inventory of the meetings and moments for your team. Find ways to shift the intention through thoughtfully designed actions...and the more often you do them, the more they will become rituals, ie, core artifacts of your team’s culture.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did...and I hope you take the time to create an inventory of your team’s essential moments and find a pathway to make those moments create the team experiences you intend to create. It is, as Glenn says, as simple as asking:
“How do we want people to feel in those different moments in a team's lifespan? And then, what are the actions that we could associate with those things?”
LINKS, QUOTES, NOTES AND RESOURCES
Making virtual more human at d.school
Making virtual more human: companion piece
Minute 10
I think there are two things. One is, I think it's important for people's distinct person to come across in that introduction. So, I think if you say I'm Daniel and I like pizza, interesting, but a lot of people like pizza. But once you start to get it, what makes a person unique, or quirky, or that thing that is not common? You start to look at them more as an individual versus a category, if that makes sense.
The second thing is figuring out mediums that capture expressiveness. I'll give you a really simple example, the video message is a very underutilized medium. And being able to hear somebody's voice, and see their facial expression, and do it in a way where they have a little bit more agency over it. I think there's a big difference between a video message and a video call.
Minute 28
Anyway, so Ida is a designer we interviewed for the book, pointed out something really important to me, which was, as she said, something like as much as we know we're not supposed to transfer the physical onto the virtual, most of us are not starting with anything. And so, we had to start with what we have.
And take like, okay, if we're thinking about the virtual commute, and we're talking with folks who are not designers, it's those really simple questions of like, okay, let's talk about what it is that you miss about your commute. What are should likes, and concrete examples of things that you do, and then digging into the why, starting from that concrete.
And then, digging into the reason behind it, and then you start to say like, okay, so the reason why you did this is this. Okay, that's really interesting. And then, if you want to get this, how can you take that, and apply it to this different context? And then, how can we start experimenting with different ways to get at that thing that you enjoyed about your commute? While not trying to recreate the things that you hated about it.
Minute 35
Asking what you want from people, and also making sure that everybody has a chance to put an idea forward, and a chance to be heard. And I think the conductivity that comes from that is really critical. Whether it's done, like where everybody shares in a Zoom chat, or on a billboard, or says it out loud in small groups. It's literally a moment for everyone's voice to enter the conversation. And there's so many meetings that don't have a single moment that have that.
Minute 39
So, linking this back to, thinking about affordances, and how people find each other. There are little tricks I use to basically encourage people to stalk each other in a non-creepy way. And so, for example, in a digital whiteboard like MURAL, and I'll do exercises where people will share what questions they have, or curiosities that they have. And then, after that's done, I'll encourage people to look through, and then right click on it to see who said what.
And then, to see like, right-click on something that you found really interesting too. And then, see who said it, and then send, and then create a moment where it's okay for everybody to message each other about that curiosity. So, you have to create the container in which that curiosity can be expressed. And be like a normalized thing versus feeling weird, and out of context, and creepy later.
Minute 45
So, it's this question of like, why is it hard to watch five minutes of Netflix? And the answer is that darn curiosity stuff, and its curiosity in, and curiosity out. So, at the beginning of the episode, there's enough of curiosity creation, where you're like, "Oh, I want to find out what happens." And then, when Netflix is absolutely deadly at is the curiosity out. It's like the ends of the episodes. This is not new to television, but with Netflix, the fact that you can watch the next thing makes it deadly.
I was just going to say, so we don't think of meetings in that way, though. Maybe we think of curiosity going in. If you're lucky, I think that's true. And then, we rarely do the curiosity out part, which I think is so critical to connecting conversations across different times.
MORE ABOUT GLENN
Glenn Fajardo helps people to be creative together when they are far apart. He has been a student of virtual collaboration since 2008, working with people and organizations across six continents engaged in social impact work. At the Stanford d.school, Glenn co-leads the immersive course Design Across Borders and was the d.school's 2020 Distributed Learning Teaching Fellow. He was formerly the Director of the Global Network Co-Design Practice of TechSoup, an international nonprofit social enterprise, and is trained in nuclear engineering sciences and public policy. Glenn plays electric bass and enjoys cooking in other people's kitchens.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Daniel Stillman:
I will welcome you officially to the Conversation Factory, Glenn Fajardo. I feel like I'm always at a risk of mispronouncing your last name, but I appreciate you writing it up phonetically for me. So, hope I did.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, you did great. And if it helps at all, in terms of remembering it, Fajardo literally translated means meat patty.
Daniel Stillman:
The literal translation of Fajardo is meat patty. It's funny. I feel like that's the opposite of helping me remember how to pronounce your name. But it's a very powerful image that shifts. That's so interesting.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, instead of being the frontal mnemonic, that's the backdoor memorability in a different kind of way mnemonic.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. And this is, if you've ever done any research on memory palaces or the people who do memorize random orders of numbers or cards and stuff, they use these unusual associations to remember all the digits of pi. So, this is a very interesting bit of brain hacking you're doing on me. And speaking of brain hacking, I think that's what we're going to be... I feel like we're going to talk a fair amount about brain hacking at some point. Okay. So, I'm so glad you're here.
Daniel Stillman:
You are a deep thinker about this thing we do, gathering people together. And I remember, you've been doing work on getting people connected virtually for a long time. You and Cal have been prototyping stuff at Stanford d.school. I feel like this goes back a couple of years trying to work out digital connection, and virtual collaboration across time zones, and cultures, and things like this. So, can you just, I don't know, tell a little bit about your origin story in this work, and why it's important to you, why you care about it, how you got yourself into this thing?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It actually goes back even farther than that, all the way to 2008. And so, this is at the scene like this was when George W. Bush was president.
Daniel Stillman:
I remember that. It's not everybody's scene. It's some people's scene. Just as a total side note, George Bush is looking great these days. By comparison, he's aged surprisingly well, because he's painting and doesn't like Donald Trump. So, that's interesting, but anyway, sorry. It's an interesting moment in history for you to take us to.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. And this was even before Obama was elected, Zoom was several years from being invented. I was one of the first people in my organization, using the video feature of Skype, that thing called Skype, if you remember. But the reason why I care about this stuff is I've been working with social change makers around the world for the last 13 years.
Glenn Fajardo:
And I have the great fortune of working with a bunch of different people at TechSoup, which is a nonprofit social enterprise that helps other nonprofits with technology. And so, in working with people, we just work with these awesome leaders, who have these great minds, doing awesome things in the world. And I want to co-create things, and I want to be able to think together.
Glenn Fajardo:
And what would happen is we'd go in with the best intentions for co-creation, but then we'd run into these challenges of how to do that remotely. And then, what would end up happening is the usual command and control where San Francisco would be telling our partners basically what to do. And we ended up with what I remember telling my boss this saying, "We're getting to a point of accidental colonialism with this."
Glenn Fajardo:
And that gets the reaction of like, "I know what you're saying, Glenn, but I don't like your frame." But I said, "But you wouldn't say it's completely untrue." They're like, "No, I understand what you're saying." But I think that struggle of the how, how can we be creative together when we're far apart? That's been my obsession for the last 13 years.
Glenn Fajardo:
And I've been gradually chipping away at it with different ways of approaching it, working with people, doing really deep work with people in places like Kenya, in Argentina, just places where, how can we bring each other fully into the conversation, and create together when we're thousands of kilometers, and are coming from completely different cultural context, as well?
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's really important, by the way, and this is just a total side note. Will your partner be done making a sandwich in the kitchen? Whatever is going on back there.
Glenn Fajardo:
I know, I know. This is the flip side of the bike, so to speak.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. It's really interesting, actually, because I miss being in a coffee shop. So, I'm just trying to remind myself, so we're just in a coffee shop with Glenn. And there's somebody clearing plates in the background. So, if you're hearing that, folks, just imagine that Glenn and I are in downtown San Francisco together having this conversation. Like we would be, where we've had versions of this conversation before.
Glenn Fajardo:
And I love that reframe too, where I think, one thing that's interesting about the last year plus is it used to be that something would appear in the background or to be like a noise like, "Oh my God," so unlike it's not the way it should be. Now, we have this thing of like, I feel that the term somebody used the other day about, it's like there's no more borders, in some ways. It's becoming like this. The lines between our work life and personal life are no longer there. And that's life, that's what life looks like and sounds like.
Daniel Stillman:
People have commented, it's not an original thing for me to say, but the guy from the BBC, where his baby, and then his toddler, and then his wife all came in. And it was like this hilarious scandal. When this happens on a meeting that I'm in, I call it out. I say, everyone grab your Zoom bingo cards, and circle cat, if you're playing along at home, and I don't know.
Daniel Stillman:
We were going to talk about theatricality later, but I feel like expecting that everything's going to go well on a virtual meeting is a fool's errand. And I think acting that things are going to go completely awry, and preparing for it, and being laughing at it when it happens, I find is a powerful reframe to make.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, totally. Because I think there's that powerful reframe and I think about how... actually, I think that's you, a fellowship that I was leading in early 2020, where our participants were in 11 different countries. And I remember one participant in particular, I think she was based in Legos. And she'd be embarrassed about like, "Oh, there's background noise. There's this thing like, I'm in the middle of a bunch of different things.
Glenn Fajardo:
Really? No, this is great. First of all, we don't want you to feel embarrassed. If you feel that way, that's what you're feeling, just know that we think it's great that you're here. And as long as we can hear what you're saying, and understand the conversation, and it's not becoming like, I think that's derailing the overall flow of things, that's nice. It's all good."
Daniel Stillman:
I feel like in a way, this connects to in our pre conversation, we were talking about the episode with Alison Coward, where she talked about the luxury of facilitation. And it is a luxury in the sense that having someone who's looking out for everyone, and making it okay, and that's their job does seem luxurious, but it's so critical to have someone setting those norms, welcoming people in, orienting them to the space.
Daniel Stillman:
You said, as you mentioned, you've been thinking about this, I remember when you were prototyping some of your ways to get people to introduce each other, and to know each other better over remote distances. I feel like a lot of what you've learned is in the book you've created. What do you feel is the most important for people to know about creating orientation, and connection, and productivity in this space?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. I think there are two things. One is, I think it's important for people's distinct person to come across in that introduction. So, I think if you say I'm Daniel and I like pizza, interesting, but a lot of people like pizza. But once you start to get it, what makes a person unique, or quirky, or that thing that is not common? You start to look at them more as an individual versus a category, if that makes sense.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes, yeah.
Glenn Fajardo:
The second thing is figuring out mediums that capture expressiveness. I'll give you a really simple example, the video message is a very underutilized medium. And being able to hear somebody's voice, and see their facial expression, and do it in a way where they have a little bit more agency over it. I think there's a big difference between a video message and a video call.
Glenn Fajardo:
But then providing people constraints so that they don't feel like they're staring at infinity when you're making an introduction. So, a really simple one is say your name, where you're based? And what's one thing that most of your friends don't know about you? And then, it gets people at the same usual. And to me, that's more unique and personal. And then, that becomes a different layer of getting to know a person, and also one of the first steps of trust building, as well.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, yeah. And this seems important to do in projects where people are coming from diverse places, from diverse organizations. Is it different? I'm wondering about somebody reading your book. And a lot of the people inside of organizations where people might know each other a little bit already, what are some rituals for virtual meetings that you feel are appropriate or helpful for people who might already know each other? They're not starting from zero.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah. For people who are not starting from zero, I think part of what I try to get at is things that are either new, or novel, or things that are likely sticking out getting in their mind. So, I'll give you an example of the first one. One of my favorite rituals is one called last line, where you have people think about what's one awkward thing that's happened to you in the last month or so?
Glenn Fajardo:
And then, you think about, how would you tell the story of that thing? And then, you're not going to tell the full story, but you're going to share the last line of the story and begin with, but it turns out that like. And so, what happens is, just to fast forward to the punchline is, people see that people's curiosity about each other is suddenly activated, and then you're like, "Oh, I want to hear like," but it turns out that the car could only take unleaded plus.
Glenn Fajardo:
And you're like, "Why is that important to me? What is that thing?" And so, what are ways that you can make people who see each other all the time, more curious about each other? And what is going on? Because a lot of times, I think with groups, we get into this mode, where every day becomes the same. And it's like the same old, same old. So, doing things that give that little nudge towards curiosity towards each other, I think is really important.
Daniel Stillman:
Okay. So, this is good. This is a good hinge point for us to... I feel like we should zoom out at this point. And say, so you started in 2008 with your curiosity. And then, one day, now we're using narrative, and I'm going to totally butcher Kursat's name, you to met, you wrote a book. I'm curious about the journey of the book and where it is now. What it's changed for you. I remember you posting on LinkedIn, you're like, "It says it's a bestseller. Is that a thing?"
Daniel Stillman:
And I'm like, "Yeah, it's a thing." So, can you talk a little bit about the journey of the book, and I feel like people shouldn't need much of a reason to buy. Once they hear the title of the book, they'll be like, "Oh, I think I need that." If you can also define for us why rituals are important, because I feel like you've just started talking about this idea of making things special. And I was like, "Oh, ritual, thanks."
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's probably like, so as far as the origin story of the book, Kursat is totally obsessed with rituals. And this is a guy who runs this thing called the Ritual Design Lab. And it's been his thing since I feel like, since he just got out of the womb, basically. I've never met a person more just like... I used to think like, this guy is crazy. I think about people I know who are so obsessed about certain things.
Glenn Fajardo:
And there's only a few people that come to mind, like Kursat is one of them. Actually, Daniel, I'm not saying this because your podcast, but you're also one of them. Where I've listened to, I'm like, I love how Daniel was so into this thing, but oh, my God it's crazy how much he's so into this thing conversations.
Daniel Stillman:
Because the rabbit hole goes so far deep for us. I read his first book, and it's really, it's just called rituals for meetings. And it's, it is an amazing book. And this is a very needed second book to this, which is like, well, now this is where we meet.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah, this is where we meet. And Kursat and I had run into each other at... we both teach at the Stanford d.school. And we would see each other at lunches for instructors. And then, one day, Kursat said I've been wanting to write a second book, I feel like, this is the book that needs to be written right now. And I'm heavily paraphrasing what Kursat said, but it was basically like, I'm ritual guy, your virtual guy, let's write a book.
Daniel Stillman:
Chocolate and peanut butter. But this was before the pandemic.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, this was leading up to the pandemic, and it was teetering at that point. And so, I had thought, sure, why not? I said like, yeah, I love your work with Rituals for Work. And I'm definitely in the virtual stuff. I'm not sure I fully follow the virtual rituals part. But let's go ahead and see where this goes. And I thought it was going to be like this, we would take maybe six to eight months to develop the concept, and shop it around.
Glenn Fajardo:
And then, we would have a book, who knows when, a year and a half, two years from now. And then, we had our first test pitch with [Wiley 00:17:13], and with the publisher that Kursat worked with before. And immediately, the publisher is like, "Okay, here's the contract, sign and live." And then, they said, like, "Okay, can you finish it by..." this was back in April, April 2020. And they said, "Okay, can you finish the manuscript by July 1st?"
Daniel Stillman:
Wow.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah, I had that same reaction. I was like, how about July 31st? You're in a little bit one side of it.
Daniel Stillman:
What's funny is that you said, "Yeah, let's write a book." That's like saying, "Yeah, let's get married." And then, it's like, "Oh, can we go to Vegas tonight?" And then, that's basically what happened is you're like, "And it's happening now." So, you really brought this together quickly. But as you say, both of you had a wealth of knowledge and experience to bring together. So, not to say, and we've talked about this. It's not easy to birth one of these things, but it's a great book.
Glenn Fajardo:
Thanks, thanks. Yeah. No, it's not easy. But in some ways, the constraint of time. We tried to lean into it as much as possible, just to say, "Hey, what's the advantage of having less time on this? What is-"
Daniel Stillman:
How design thinker-ish of you.
Glenn Fajardo:
And as an author yourself, Daniel, you can imagine the pros and cons of how this stuff works. And we were able to try things and pivot really, really quickly. Kursat's first book, Rituals for Work was more of a compilation of different rituals that many different people did. And so, we started off with like, "Oh, let's go find what different people do with virtual rituals."
Glenn Fajardo:
And then, as we looked around, we found that actually, there's not a whole lot. There's not yet. This is back again, back in April 2020. And so, we did find people who did different things, but part of the book, quite frankly, was also me emptying out my own playbook. And just going through every single thing that I've done, and one of the great things about that journey was, I never had a deadline to go through my life.
Glenn Fajardo:
And like, okay, what did I do? What's going on? Why do people like it? What could have been better, and then just go through that in a very rigorous way, and having to write all of that up. It was a really fantastic journey. And I'm really appreciative of that opportunity to do that part of it, and as well as putting the framework around the first few chapters that were around rituals, and the secret science virtual meetings as well.
Daniel Stillman:
I'd love to unpack rituals a bit because I had Casper ter Kuile on the podcast last year. He wrote a wonderful book about ritual, and how important it is. And he was using ritual in this much broader sense. And bringing in design principles, you might say from religion, from faith, which is a way of giving our year and our years special meaning.
Daniel Stillman:
Each days have significance. And you talked about in our... we all know each other, we go to work every day, it all becomes the same. And so, rituals can be a way of marking time and making things different. How do you define ritual? What is and isn't a ritual in this context for you?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, that's a great question. So, I'm going to give you two answers. One is the Kursat answer, and one is the right answer. Because we have different ways of looking at this.
Daniel Stillman:
And you're still friends after writing the book, just checking.
Glenn Fajardo:
And we're still friends after writing the book. Because I think there's just a lot of different ways you look at a ritual, and Kursat has a very thorough definition, being ritual guy. And so, he talks about rituals as actions that a person or a group does repeatedly, following a similar pattern, or a script in which they've imbued symbolism and meaning.
Glenn Fajardo:
So, I agree with that definition. I don't think that's not true. But because my brain just isn't as big, like I think about rituals in a little bit more of a shorthand way. And I think ritual is actually those constraints with purpose, that lead to a meaningful moment. So, again, that's constraints with purpose, that lead to a meaningful moment. I know, very designery, I know.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. Constraint with purpose that lead to a meaningful moment.
Glenn Fajardo:
Correct.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. What's important? Can we pull that apart? What's important about constraints and purpose for you? These are not accidental constraints.
Glenn Fajardo:
No, no, they're not accidental constraints. And I think they're really around thinking about occasion, intention, and action. So, a ritual has to have like, what's the reason you're doing it? It's because you make people feel a certain way at a certain moment.
Daniel Stillman:
When, why and how. That's this occasion, when does it happen? Intention is why you're doing it. And action is what are you going to actually do? Yeah.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah. So, that is understanding what those things are, I think is really important. But within that simple frame of occasion, intention, and action, I found that to be a helpful frame for helping people come up with their own rituals. And so, when I talk with teams about how they can get into their team rituals, we think about what are the different occasions that your team has?
Glenn Fajardo:
We just kind of brainstorm what are... there's things like starting a meeting or celebrating a thing, there's all these different moments in a team's lifespan. And the more consciously you think about those, and start writing those down, and then you think about, okay, how do we want people to feel up in those different moments in a team's lifespan? And then, what are the actions that we could associate with those things?
Glenn Fajardo:
And then, just get into a spirit of experimentation of trying things out with those three things in mind. I'm not saying that rituals are easy to come up with. But it's not quite as hard. Once you start to have that framework to give you a pointer, a point of departure that you can leap from.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. What do you see something that people do? And we're thinking about design and designing of conversations now. What do you feel like is a challenge that people have as they go into designing their own rituals? What's something that they miss when they're designing them?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. This is going to sound like a circular argument. But I think it's missing on those three things in terms of not being clear on why are you doing it? So, let's say something, like a common one is the fake community, that people have been introducing things. And then, just thinking about why, why is it that you're doing to mark a transition from work to non-work, I think is a great starting point.
Glenn Fajardo:
But digging even deeper into the why of what is it that you want to gain from that practice? And then, that understanding helps you hone that ritual in a way that really works for you, versus just mechanically copying like, "Oh, well, I used to take Caltrain for 30 minutes, I'm going to sit on Caltrain for 30 minutes."
Daniel Stillman:
This really highlights for me why I think people should design, have the mindset of that I am designing the system of our conversations. Because you can try to copy somebody else's rituals, copy somebody else's icebreakers or whatever. But you can't necessarily copy their why. There's an article I wrote a couple of years ago, where if you Google what types of meetings are there, you'll find like, oh, so there's information sharing, and information gathering, and making decisions.
Daniel Stillman:
And this one article I read from Atlassian said, and the one type of meeting you should never have is the meeting about meetings. And I was like, "What, that's actually the most important meeting." We should totally have a meeting about our meetings. And that's what you're saying, in a way. It's like almost doing an inventory. This is design thinking. I was like, "Well, let's discover and define, let's develop and deliver." Let's look at the shape of the thing and be more intentional about it. I think it's profound to do that on purpose.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. I think it's doing it on purpose is almost like, how do you create your own movie? How do you create the movie of your life, and thinking about the different scenes, and what are the transitions in it? What's the overall plot of it? Where's it going? And then, how are people, how are characters developing within that story?
Glenn Fajardo:
And I think that's how our brains are wired to make sense of the world in a lot of ways. But if we go through life on autopilot, and we don't think about those things, I think we miss an opportunity to get a little deeper.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. I want to talk about narrative and using the science of story. But before we do, I want us to go back one step. Because I have needs in affordances circled several times. The virtual commute is actually a feature now in Microsoft Teams. Well, no, it's interesting. They basically said, "Oh, this is a thing, we can set this, we can set when our virtual commute is." I haven't played with it. So, I don't really know the ins and outs of how it works.
Daniel Stillman:
But people, they understood that this was the thing people were doing, this is a need, and they created an affordance. So, I'm wondering, when you think of needs and affordances, and you want to explain them to somebody who's not a user experience designer, what should we be thinking about when we think about the needs and the affordances in this digital system that we're talking... the virtual meeting system?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, yeah. I was just chuckling a bit. Because I think I used to get annoyed with things where I felt like people copy and paste the familiar onto the virtual. And I don't know, do you know Ida Benedetto? I don't know if you guys have crossed paths before.
Daniel Stillman:
I don't know, maybe.
Glenn Fajardo:
Okay. It's like New York is a big city. Anyway, so Ida is a designer, we interviewed for the book, pointed out something really important to me, which was, as she said, something like as much as we know we're not supposed to transfer the physical onto the virtual, most of us are not starting with anything. And so, we had to start with what we have.
Glenn Fajardo:
And take like, okay, if we're thinking about the virtual commute, and we're talking with folks who are not designers, it's those really simple questions of like, okay, let's talk about what it is that you miss about your commute. What are should likes, and concrete examples of things that you do, and then digging into the why, starting from that concrete.
Glenn Fajardo:
And then, digging into the reason behind it, and then you start to say like, okay, so the reason why you did this is this. Okay, that's really interesting. And then, if you want to get this, how can you take that, and apply it to this different context? And then, how can we start experimenting with different ways to get at that thing that you enjoyed about your commute? While not trying to recreate the things that you hated about it.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Right. Some people may have enjoyed the fact that they were able to read something, and other people like, "Oh, I can actually catch up on work before I got into work. I feel like this is... sorry, go ahead.
Glenn Fajardo:
I was going to say, to read something, and then I think it's also to dig even one level deeper into that. It's like you get placed into a set of constraints where you... it's difficult to do what you do by default. In other words, one of the things I grew to actually love about Caltrain, the Caltrain and it's a rail system in the Bay Area, which I would take from San Francisco to Stanford.
Glenn Fajardo:
And I used to think like, "Oh, I hate the fact that Caltrain doesn't have WiFi." And then, after a while, I realized, "No, no, this is the best thing about it." This is a place where it's actually super inconvenient for me to do the things that I would do otherwise. And then, it's not just that I read a book, but it's like being placed in a different context that forces you to be in a different space.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. And so, I think intentionally introducing people into those new spaces can seem risky. You've done all this for a long time. And I think you've had a lot of experience. And so, you have a lot of faith and trust in your ability to try something new, take a risk and experiment. I know that when I coach people, people come through my workshops, and whatnot, there's this... I don't know if I can do that with senior people, or oh, I can't, like, I don't know if people are going to want to do this with me.
Daniel Stillman:
You are a theatrical person. You can bring that energy if you want to. I think for some people, introducing somebody to a new reality, to transport them into a new place can seem hard to do. It takes an infusion of energy. And I just wonder what you found, is there a similarity between the people who are successful at running these types of experiments? What can we learn from them? Those people?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. I think one thing we can learn is one is that I think there are people who are just more theatrical than others. I think to say like, "Oh, no, anyone can be that way," I think there's a little bit disingenuous. But I also think there's also this, where can you start with your experiments? And if you're starting with, "Oh, I can't get senior people to do X, Y, and Z." Maybe it's starting by experimenting with your peers, or even if you have people that report to you, with your subordinates.
Daniel Stillman:
They have to say yes.
Glenn Fajardo:
They have to say yes. But what's the ground on which you can experiment, and get started, and start to get your feet wet in a way that is not going to blow up? Because I think the mistake that can be made is like, "Oh, I need to start with the big impact first." And I'd actually argue the opposite, that you want to start with something that's really small. And then, not only test if it works, but also build your own confidence in being able to facilitate and lead the thing.
Daniel Stillman:
What would be an example of a really small ritual, virtual ritual to bring in? Let's say a micro ritual.
Glenn Fajardo:
Really small micro ritual, and one that I really like from... that I got from a friend, [Murica 00:34:29] at the Acumen Fund, it's just been over I know.
Daniel Stillman:
I love Murica.
Glenn Fajardo:
You know Murica, small world.
Daniel Stillman:
I worked with him years ago.
Glenn Fajardo:
So, Murica has one that Acumen does is almost religious about it. It's just the parting aha. They end every meeting with what's one aha that you got from this meeting. And what I love about it is it's such an ingrained regular practice. It's not just like, "Oh, oh, this time we should do a parting aha." They just do it.
Daniel Stillman:
Right. And I think a lot of people think about this, and we'll look at the book, and people come to workshops I do, and they're like, "Oh, I want to be able to do improv, I want to do warm ups, I want to do games, I want to play, oh, I have to throw out an invisible ball." And that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about having reliable structure that makes sense to people.
Daniel Stillman:
When we were talking about serious rituals, because they don't always have to be silly. What's your aha is a very serious ritual. It's human. Having a regular retrospective is a serious ritual. It's just saying, we will always, every couple of weeks, look back and say what worked, what didn't work? What would we like to change? I think it doesn't have to be a theatrical, high energy experience. It can be like, just asking for what you want out of people.
Glenn Fajardo:
Asking what you want from people, and also making sure that everybody has a chance to put an idea forward, and a chance to be heard. And I think the conductivity that comes from that is really critical. Whether it's done, like where everybody shares in a Zoom chat, or on a billboard, or says it out loud in small groups. It's literally a moment for everyone's voice to enter the conversation. And there's so many meetings that don't have a single moment that have that.
Daniel Stillman:
Right. Yeah. And it's so important. It's funny, my wife, Janet, who you know, went to an actual in-person... she's in the next room. She was like, I had a real sidebar conversation with somebody because they went to a bar outside last Friday, and it was nice enough. And we can do that now legally. And she's like, I had a real sidebar conversation with somebody.
Daniel Stillman:
It is hard to do that virtually. And so, I guess this is leading into the one thing on my arc of the conversation that I really want to make sure we talked about, which was the serendipity engine, the building in of ways for multiple people to interact, which is something which is something that would happen in a team, non-virtually.
Daniel Stillman:
But virtually, it's very hard to create that many-to-many connections. I'm wondering, because you've done some thinking about this, how to create serendipity engines inside of groups. What are some insights that you can share about that?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. I think there's a couple that come to mind. One is a lot of like a serendipity engine to me, is really a curiosity engine.
Daniel Stillman:
I love it. Say more about that. Yes.
Glenn Fajardo:
So, it's like what do you do where people share these almost incomplete thoughts? Where you don't have them share the whole thing, and it ends with a period, you want thoughts that end with a dot, dot, dot, either they have a dot, dot, dot before or after? And so, if we think about in terms of punctuation, I know this is a totally random way to think about it, but because people think, "Oh, we want fully formed..."
Daniel Stillman:
No, you're designing continuation in the conversation. If it's a fully formed thought, it ends, someone has to pick it up. If it's a comma, or a dash, or a hyphen, it's passing an invisible ball.
Glenn Fajardo:
It is passing an invisible ball. I love your framing of it. It actually is about sound ball, Daniel.
Daniel Stillman:
Everything is about sound ball. I can teach anybody anything with sound ball, I'm just saying. How do we start doing that? Because we were talking about the hallway track being the most popular part of conferences in the other episode, which I'll link to in the notes. You're doing some thinking about this, what did that spark in you?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. So, they're like little linking this back to like, thinking about affordances, and how people find each other. There are little tricks I use to basically encourage people to stalk each other in a non-creepy way. And so, for example, in a digital whiteboard like MURAL, and I'll do exercises where will share what questions they have, or curiosities that they have. And then, after that's done, I'll encourage people to look through, and then right click on it to see who said what.
Glenn Fajardo:
And then, to see like, right click on something that you found really interesting too. And then, see who said it, and then send, and then create a moment where it's okay for everybody to message each other about that curiosity. So, you have to create the container in which that curiosity can be expressed. And be like a normalized thing versus feeling like weird, and out of context, and creepy later.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. By the way, to go back to needs and affordances, we talked about how we don't want to make tech the answer, or the thing we worry about. But one thing you're implying there, which I think is really important to highlight is, we have to have a shared channel. And it's ideal if it is persistent.
Daniel Stillman:
From my perspective, Zoom is a shared channel, but it's not persistent, or I think it can be, but it's weird to do it that way. You can message on MURAL, but it's not really where we want to be necessarily. You've done things at Stanford where you have a WhatsApp group, a place where anybody can message anybody else any time, I think is really important for groups to have that hallway track.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. Having that hallway track, and then having a mix of persistent communication that is... have parts that are linear, and have parts that are nonlinear. And so, if we have conversations in... linear is great for certain things, where you have a flow in a direction of where everything is going.
Daniel Stillman:
What's an example of linear?
Glenn Fajardo:
Linear is like a WhatsApp chat. So, it's this continuous flow of things. It also helps to have things that are nonlinear as well, like a digital whiteboard like MURAL, where you can look around, browse in different directions, rearrange things, find patterns. But then, create, I think one of the things that we're still figuring out is how do you facilitate conversations in asynchronous nonlinear media? I know that's very jargony, but like-
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's hard because my own experience, people have to be highly motivated, in order for that to work.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yes, yeah, I think that's true. And I think highly motivated is an achievable thing, if you find the right thing to be motivated around.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Glenn, we're getting up to the... I want to be respectful of your time. We're almost at the top of the hour. That went really fast.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, good.
Daniel Stillman:
What haven't we talked about? What's important for us to say that has not been said? There's a lot, but what haven't I asked you that I ought to have asked you?
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah. I think maybe talking just like for a couple of minutes about story.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, that's on my list.
Glenn Fajardo:
Because I think there are a lot of things that didn't make sense to me about a year ago, and in doing a ton of research. And having the opportunity to do a fellowship that gave me a container to focus my time on that. One thing that I learned was that it was about the length of story basically is around how our brains work. And the twin engines of curiosity, and chunking are really critical.
Glenn Fajardo:
Where curiosity, we talked about quite a bit, but I think understanding that memory doesn't work as a continuous run of everything. But that our minds are model makers. We make what cognitive scientists call event models to remember things. And then, as conversation facilitators, I think what we do is we insert little cues and little things that trigger that chunking. And that becomes even more critical, I think, in virtual and hybrid worlds. Is that making sense so far?
Daniel Stillman:
For me, yes. I don't know if you've listened to the episode with Kate Quarfordt from ages ago. But I'll link to it. She uses the Four Seasons as a container for how she chunks the major components of her conversations. And I think that's what was my entry point into this was using design thinking as a way of organizing a single meeting or a single project. It's chunking. We're in this phase or not in this phase, we're discovering.
Daniel Stillman:
We're not defining, and it really orients we're empathizing, we're now are testing and prototyping. I think it really clarifies for people what is supposed to happen in this conversation, as opposed to what isn't supposed to happen, or what has already happened, and what's going to happen next. I think it's profound, but I think this also goes back to the theatricality of creating peak experiences within the conversation. I think you are very, very aware of how you are shaping an engaging story for people, even within one arc of one conversation.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, within one arc of one conversation, and then the analogy that I use to help people get started with us is to think about Netflix. And if you've ever binged on Netflix, I'm guessing that you have Daniel Stillman.
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, I have. Yeah. I love bingeing.
Glenn Fajardo:
So, it's this question of like, why is it hard to watch five minutes of Netflix? And the answer is that darn curiosity stuff, and its curiosity in, and curiosity out. So, at the beginning of the episode, there's enough of curiosity creation, where you're like, "Oh, I want to find out what happens." And then, when Netflix is absolutely deadly at is the curiosity out. It's like the ends of the episodes. This is not new to television, but with Netflix, the fact that you can watch the next thing makes it deadly.
Daniel Stillman:
I know. I used to... yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Glenn Fajardo:
I was just going to say, so we don't think of meetings in that way, though. Maybe we think of curiosity going in. If you're lucky, I think that's true. And then, we rarely do the curiosity out part, which I think is so critical to connecting conversations across different times.
Daniel Stillman:
So powerful. And by the way, what I was going to interject with was how I hacked my brain so I wouldn't watch too many episodes of Game of Thrones at once.
Glenn Fajardo:
So, how did you do it?
Daniel Stillman:
I would watch, because the end is like, "Oh, my God, what's going to happen next?" And then, you want to watch the next episode. So, what I would do is, I would watch from middle to middle.
Glenn Fajardo:
That's a great hack.
Daniel Stillman:
The middle, because you get to watch the beginning of the episode, and you're like, "Oh, that's what happened-ish." And then, in the middle, there's a lull and you're like, "Okay, now I'm going to stop. My blood pressure is lowered. And now, I can go to sleep, before I go to the end of the next episode, and then I'm going to watch the next beginning one." So, middle to middle, was my way of hacking my own brain. And I think maybe if we think about the reverse patterns, most meetings are middle to middle, which is why they're so terrible.
Glenn Fajardo:
Right, right.
Daniel Stillman:
So, I want to check... sorry, go ahead. Please finish that thought.
Glenn Fajardo:
I was going to say I love how you reverse the words, like the middle to middle is what you need for Netflix. And then, the [inaudible 00:47:47] what you need for meeting, but we do the opposite of that right now. That's why our world is broken with boring meetings and Netflix bingeing.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. And because they're hacking our brains on purpose. We should check out, what's your aha? I'm going to use a new ritual. What's your aha from this conversation?
Glenn Fajardo:
Man, quite a few. I think I'm still sticking with the punctuation and sound ball thing. And I'll fully make the punctuation stuff, that was just a co-created moment in our conversation, which I hadn't thought of before.
Daniel Stillman:
I love that we come up with new things, fresh conversations, everyone delivered to you.
Glenn Fajardo:
So, I think the aha was around that specific point. And then, there's like a meta aha around appreciating those moments of co-creation and conversation.
Daniel Stillman:
My aha is actually, because I'm going to connect that to the curiosity engine, curiosity at the beginning, and the end, versus the middle to middle my hack. I often use the five Es of entice, enter, engage, exit and extend, it's a classic, experienced design framework, which maybe you've seen. And when I'm coaching people on their agendas, I'm like, "Well, what's the entice?
Daniel Stillman:
Why do people want to enter and engage? And then, how do you manage the edge of the experience where they are going to exit? And then, how do you extend that energy?" And so, I love the punctuation, and the curiosity to curiosity that gives you the momentum to get to the next thing. And I think the other aha I'm leaving with is when I think about that big question of how do I take a risk and try something new?
Daniel Stillman:
The realization that it can be something very small, and human, like what's your aha from this meeting? And how profound it is just to have an anchor point of this is how we do things. We end with personal interest. What am I getting out of this? I think often, people look at these things, and they're like, "Oh, I have to be able to..." because some of the ones in the first book, I was like, I don't think I could do those.
Daniel Stillman:
In Kursat's first book, I was like, those are all elevated, like the death of a project, which seemed bigger. And this is like, you can start really small. I think that's huge. Thanks for staying on a little longer. Sorry to keep you over. I think I'm really glad you came on to talk about this stuff. Where should people go on the internet to learn about all things, meat patty?
Glenn Fajardo:
All things meat patty, I know. It's funny, I'm literally in the process of creating a website right now. But one place that you can go at the moment is just glenn-fajardo.medium.com. And that has some material. I always say that I'll be writing more, but I really will be writing more.
Daniel Stillman:
You wrote a whole book. Take a break. You're good.
Glenn Fajardo:
But yeah, that's a good place. But yeah, otherwise you can also find me on Twitter and LinkedIn as well.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes, you're active in all those places. Glenn, I'm really grateful, if you can stand for just one more second for us to close out. I'm just grateful for the time. These are important things, and we can change the world. If people do this, it will change the world. This is important. So, thank you.
Glenn Fajardo:
Yeah, absolutely.
Daniel Stillman:
All right, end scene.