Facilitation Skills for Project Managers featuring Barry Rosen

was just going to say, I mean, not to go into the political system or our form of government, but I do think that if we're going to get back to the basics of democracy and take it to the next level, get through this period and take it to the next level, it's really participatory democracy.

And that really requires people to have process thinking.

So certain kinds of intelligences that we call collaborative intelligence are which is the ability to learn and apply those skills for people to get to mutually satisfactory outcomes.

And it is a skill set that you can learn when you're a kid in school.

A lot of kids go to school now and they do projects and they have to figure out how to work with other kids and move beyond thinking, well, I'm the smartest in the room or I'm the most good looking or whatever.

most charismatic or whatever, and really see, oh, we're in this together, and how do we build agreements? Agreements are the key part of facilitation, just like the agreement that we're going to spend half an hour together like we've done.

And we want to achieve a great result in this meeting that we're having.

that your listeners are going to come out with two or three things that they can apply right away.

That's like an outcome, that the process is smooth and you're facilitating it.

And then we leave it like feeling good about ourselves and good about each other.

So good facilitators manage across those three dimensions of success, results, process, and relationship.

And so nowadays, project managers has to be thinking about that as artificial intelligence is enabling us to handle analytical questions very quickly, but not handling the emotional issues.

So we can bring in IA to help us reduce our thinking time around certain things if we're asking the right questions, which the facilitator helps a group do, but then You know, how do we interact with each other? Are you getting enough talk time? Am I getting enough talk time? Do I feel safe sharing what I have to share? And those are just really important things for people to learn how to do.

Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned the AI play.

I tell people this all the time, and I see it.

The big houses like McKinsey and Gartner and others have been saying that they're projecting that 40% of AI projects that have been launched this year will be canceled next year because they haven't they haven't figured it out.

They're like, they're not seeing the ROI.

And I look at that and based on our conversation that we've just had over these last few minutes, you know, a light bulb went off in my head.

And occasionally that does happen, not often, but occasionally.

And it, it, it dawned on me that, okay, we're probably not talking to each other about what are the outcomes? What are we looking? So we want to implement AI.

Okay.

For what? Because people ask me that.

Well, for what? Well, so we can automate things.

What things? And do you have a strong SOP for this? Do you have a map of what you wanted to do? Do you have an outcome that you would like? Who's going to be involved? Who's running this? Are you giving it to this person? Nothing against them, but it's great.

And those things that you're asking, those questions you're asking, McKinsey doesn't have to ask them for you.