Employing Differences, Episode 122: What are we still carrying?

Karen: 0:09

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:17

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:19

Each episode we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What are we still carrying?"

Karen: 0:29

So as I work with groups, very often there are these moments where there's some amount of angst or chaos or confusion or frustration with some emotional heat in it. And that coincides with a very full capacity. There's a lack of capacity because we're dealing with some kind of transition or some project deadline or something. So we've got this emotional thing that needs to be processed, and to do that well is going to take time and energy that we simply don't have right now. And so we we make a decision, hopefully consciously. We hope we do this on purpose. Sometimes we don't, but the result is somewhat the same. We say to ourselves, "Okay, we know we've got some emotional work to do. It's not going to work to do it right now. So we're going to put it off until we get past that deadline, we get through that transition, something." And then the important part of that is that when you get through that point that you notice, or at least ask, "What are we still carrying?" So the question is, what are we still carrying?

Paul: 1:49

And then, "What are we going to do about it?" Yeah, there's a bunch of different metaphors that I often use to explore this with groups. Different metaphors resonate with different groups differently. Because it is something that is invisible, that's intangible, it's in the relational space, it's something between – and so sometimes metaphor really helps us to ground it. One metaphor that we occasionally use is this idea of debt. We've taken on some debt. We were able to move forward on this task-oriented work more quickly because we glossed over a bunch of stuff on the relationship side and on the working together side. And that we now have to pay interest on until we pay it down. And so if we have a plan, it can actually be responsible to do that. And so did we do this intentionally or unintentionally? That figures into it. That's one metaphor that I sometimes play with with groups. And that can be around any number of things. It can be relational. In software engineering teams, we often talked about technical debt. It can be design debt. But we've gone into debt in some ways when we've done this. And that resonates with some groups. Another metaphor that I sometimes use is this idea of ghosts. So ghosts are things that are not currently present, but that are showing up and that are impacting the current working relationship. And so the ghost of that meeting, the ghost of the canceled project, the ghost of the previous boss who's not here anymore can show up uninvited into our work. Until we can figure out how we want to be in the presence of it, it's just going to spook us and we're going to react sort of strangely to it. Ghosts can be events, they can be people, they can be all kinds of different things. And so I'll use that metaphor with groups, and then they go,"Oh, yeah," because they sometimes feel like they're being haunted. And the third metaphor that I'll sometimes use is this idea of residue. This comes from some of the safety culture and first response ideas. As we work together and we work through these things, stuff accumulates and it's left on us and between us. And so we need to have some sort of process that we go through for clearing that off. Because it gums up the works, it makes it harder for us to work together. So what I like about all three of these metaphors is that they point out that these are things that happen, they're intangible and invisible, but they have an effect on our future ability to work together. And so those are things that we're carrying with us that if we don't take the time to actually consider and address may continue to impact us in ways that we don't want. And they also might not.

Karen: 4:48

I want to dive into that very last piece of "they might not." There is not a 100% correlation – or even a real very reliable correlation – between the sort of passionate intensity of feeling in the moment when I was irritated or frustrated or whatever and the amount of ghostliness that might be there – the amount of hunting– that may occur a month, two months, three months, six months later, when we're actually dealing with it. It can get bigger and bigger. That nerve can continue to get knocked for whatever reason, and it can get more and more sensitive. We can go to explosive in that direction. Or it can just fade. That person that did the thing that felt totally untrustworthy to me and I'm never going to trust them again? While we're in this other period does three or four things that felt very trustworthy to me. And you know what? Okay, I'm over it. It has dissipated on its own. So one of the things that I think is really tricky about this space is that we need to figure out what is actually still haunting. And it's not the case that you can just look around and go,"Well, somebody's complaining about it, so it's still haunting." Or "Nobody said anything about it, so what must be gone." This is the thing about ghosts. The fact that nobody's talking to them doesn't necessarily mean they aren't there. And so I think it's an interesting problem to figure out, how do we know if we've got ghosts and what those ghosts are?

Paul: 6:31

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference for the first time in three years, which was kind of remarkable. One of the things that happened at that was a lot of reestablishment of relationships. People hadn't seen each other while they might have communicated online. This is the first time "Meeting in 3D", as someone said. But what was interesting was, I had someone say to me, "I'm really wondering about the interactions that I'm having with this other person. They feel a little off. It feels a little weird. I wonder if there's something there? Did I do something?" This person was totally telling themselves a story about how,"Oh, I must have done something to offend them." And I literally said, "Well, you know, you might just bring it up. You might just ask." And so these two people actually talked about it. I happened to be there, right as this conversation started to happen, and it was like, "Hey, I'm noticing there's something a little... Like, we're not as smooth or as comfortable as we used to be with each other. Is there something that either of us is carrying or is bringing to this? Is there something that's showing up?" Turned out no, they were both just out of practice at being with each other and in this environment in particular. And in fact, this was 1500 people in a conference center, the first in person conference that a lot of us had been to in three years. There were COVID protocols in place, but of course, we were all thinking about, "What's happening here?" So it made sense that that weirdness – that coming out sideways – wasn't actually between those two people. It was how they were each reacting to the environment they were in. And so I think you're right, we can't just assume that because the interaction is a little off or there's something that maybe the other person is reacting to that we're not noticing, we can't assume that that means that there's something we need to do. But I do think – as longtime listeners will definitely be able to tell what I'm about to say – that's an opportunity to get curious about what's going on. And just ask the question, "Is there something there?" And I think the layer beyond asking, "Is there something here?" is then asking, "And is that something we want to deal with now?" Because just because there is something that somebody is still carrying doesn't mean that it's the right time to try to process it, to try and work through it, to try to address it. So those actually need to be separate questions.

Karen: 9:03

Yeah. And then the additional question of, "Wnd how would we address it?" And I think that one often ties into,"Are we ready to address it?" One thing that I just want to track is very often in the groups I work with there's been a dynamic where somebody said,"I'm upset," and they were told,"We can't deal with it now, we will later." If you hear yourself say those words, put a note on your calendar. Say, "We will get to it." It's incredibly important to go back to that person with these next questions of, "Is this still a thing?" And I would start with, "Is this still a thing for you?" And then, "Is now the time?" And what I think often happens in that conversation of "Is now the time?" or even, "Is it still real?" is people are hesitant to say, "Yes, I still need work on that thing, and yes, now is the time," because they don't have any idea how. If they don't have an answer to how, they don't know what they need, it feels big and tiring and difficult. Very often people will shove things under the rug and carry resentment about it. They don't actually let go of it. They just sort of give you reason to put it off. And so there's some balance of intuition and engagement and safety that needs to come into that space. And also, I think some of the safety is, "I have some ideas about how we might approach it." And we can talk about those ideas before we commit to doing

Paul: 10:41

This goes back to the idea that if there's something that's anything. living in the space between us, it belongs to both of us. If there's something that happened between you and I, Karen, that I have no problem with but it's something that you notice you're still carrying some resentment, some grievance some, some hurt, something around that, that's not your problem to fix. That's our problem because it's impacting our relationship. And so it's not useful for me to say, "Well, you should just get over it." It is useful for me to find out is it still a thing? And also to really express that I'm part of that, too, and I want to be part of the solution. And I may have ideas. Because I absolutely hear what you're saying in the sense of if somebody asks me is there stuff I still need to deal with and I don't know how I'm going to do it, I may sweep that body under the rug. There's this nice big lump there and everybody knows. But no, I'm fine, there's nothing I need to work with. And so I think another part of that is being able to express that. And it can be I might not have specific ideas, because I don't know what the thing is yet. But being able to say, "I don't necessarily know what it is if there is something there, but I'm committed to finding a way." To us coming up with ideas. I'm part of this. I'm in partnership there. Because I think what's really useful there is to be curious and be supportive. It's not, "Great. If you don't have an idea of how to fix your problem, then we're not going to deal with it." It's way more of"This is an 'us' thing" than anything else.

Karen: 12:39

I think often, especially when it's past – the decision was made, the thing was over with, we're not going to go back and change that what happened in that moment – very often, what's needed is actually just to be heard and understood. I don't expect that you're going to go back and change your mind about the decision. We're not trying to convince each other. I need you to understand what it was like for me. And what it's still like for me, about whatever that experience was. Certainly there's a whole other path about if we think we're going to do something very like that again. But I think often ghosts and residue, they sit there because we aren't ever going to do anything like that again. And so we ignore it and and don't do that work. And then the other thing I want to point to is you're talking about that one-on-one. There's one person unhappy with one other person. And I suspect most of us have some sense of how do we do that and all the things we're talking about. That curiosity, that ownership of it's between us, it belongs to both of us, all of that. I think within that most people can get somewhere with that. More challenging is within a group. And it may be that two people are unhappy with each other but it's a ghost for the whole group. It a ghost that's haunting the whole group. Or it can be that two people are the ones talking about it, but a lot of other people also were upset about it. Or it can be that lots of people were upset about it in various ways. And so how do you do that? How do you create enough safety for a group process to happen around this old ghost or this residue that we're carrying along when you've got a bigger group? One of the places that I go to first is can we do work between two people that is witnessed by the group? Because working with a pair particularly with a facilitator– at that point, I'm hesitant to have two people to be at odds with each other with an audience without some support. But in a facilitated conversation, I've often seen it be stunning the healing for the group to witness, maybe it's the two people who are most upset. Or maybe it's the two people who are willing to talk about it. Maybe they weren't even the ones who were most upset, but two people who saw it from different perspectives, and between them, most people can connect with one or the other. It can be incredibly powerful to have two people doing the work and the others bearing witness as one way to engage that way.

Paul: 15:31

Because anytime there is something like that that happens, it an impact on the group. We witness the harm or the upset or the whatever, and that generates residue between those two people, but it generates it in the group as well. And so you actually need to deal with both. And what can sometimes be tricky, is that even if those two people go and work it out amongst themselves... Karen and I have a shouting match in the middle of a meeting, and then later on I'm like, "That was not..." and we do whatever repair, and processing is necessary between us. That can also be fine if we do it privately, if we then come back, and work with the group and say, "Hey, we worked through this. But we also know that that had an impact on all the rest of you." So I think there's another way that you can go here, which is that even if you work it out privately, whatever was between the two of you, you then need to come back to the group. And so even if the group isn't witnessing you work through the process, there is a big benefit to, "Now we need to get back into right relationship with the rest of the group and clean up whatever residue is there." Because other people might be like, "Yeah, you know, actually, when Karen said that thing, I was thinking that thing too." We both need to know that. "Oh, so then what Karen and I talked about with that was... Does that address your concern around it?" Working through that. So I absolutely agree that if you've got the safety to be able to have who whoever needs to have this work it out to be able to do that witnessed by the group. If there isn't, but it is sufficiently safe that they can work it out, with maybe with a third party, someone else who's facilitating working them through it, then you have to, as a second step, come back and actually do it. Because otherwise the rest of the group is still carrying with them Karen and I shouting at each other in the meeting.

Karen: 17:49

I feel like we're sort of going at this sort of with added complexity. We seem to be stepping up into more and more complex situations. Often I find with groups, they're aware that there's this thing that happened, and people felt different ways about it. And whatever that was they'd like to clear it with the whole group. And I've got to say, that's the one that as a facilitator scares me the most. And I'll tell you why. My belief about this kind of clearing is that the really valuable work happens with depth. It happens when individuals involved connect emotionally, and really get deep into what was real for them, probably a few layers below what actually happened, and what was the emotional driver, and maybe even a little bit about where that came from. And it's tough to get 20 or 30 people all doing depth work at the same time. And to be safe enough. And as a facilitator to hold safety for that many different folks. And so I think what would fit in this episode really is to say that's a really complicated approach. And it can be useful. I'm not in any way saying don't do that. But I would say work with somebody who's done this before. Find some expertise. And structure it. Even the standby of the talking stick, where you just pass it around to everybody, and everybody says their thing. That can work. I don't give it great odds. I think it's possible that what you've now done is spent time where everybody listens to everybody else's grievance, and just in their own head is still reactive. I don't count on that clearing the ghosts. And so I just want to point out here that when you get to that level of complexity, it's not that it's not worth doing. But as a facilitator I'm going to be looking for, can we find less complex systems. And if we really need to do it with that level of complexity, what are the structures we can put in place that make it more likely to work?

Paul: 20:02

We've talked before about"What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?" Start with the simplest intervention that might work. And that if that doesn't work, then scale up. Don't start with the big one right off the bat, because there's something way simpler and way higher percentage chance that will work that may be good for you. The other thing that actually improves the chances of any of these things working is if you do them more often with lower stakes things. If you're building the muscle of noticing,"What are we carrying and ahat can we put down?" when it's small stuff, then that habit, that muscle that you build, it becomes familiar. We know how to do it. And then when we get to the bigger, more complicated stuff, we have something to relate it to. Because that's the challenge that I see a lot in groups is that they do nothing but task-oriented work, all of this stuff builds up, and now the only thing that could possibly work is to do the big intervention. And it's a huge gap for them to bridge, right. It's just a huge leap. And the problem is they've built up so much stuff that any of the smaller things just don't work, because people won't engage in it, because there's too much there. And they don't know how to do it, because their anxiety about the situation is preventing them from learning a new way of working together. So if you can learn the ways of supporting each other, bringing stuff up, being able to work through these things when they're small, when you do get something big, where you do really need this, you've already got the habit, the skill, the familiarity. There's a tool called Constellation, which is for getting an understanding of how everybody in the group feels around a particular thing. And it's something that an organization that I was in we did all the time at the team level. And so a lot of people were familiar with this as a tool. And we did it in you know, groups of six or eight. And then we got to a thing where we realized that we needed to do something for 120 people. But we realized we could basically use a scaled up version of the same thing. And because people were already familiar with it, it went super smooth. Half the people already had experienced it and could work through it. And so it was super useful, but only because we'd invested in building those skills and that understanding of how to do this, so that people weren't trying to do something completely out of their experience in something that is emotionally charged and anxiety producing.

Karen: 22:41

Right. And so this begs the question of, "Okay, so we heard you, Paul. It would have been a really good idea five years ago to start doing some of these things as we but now we're in the big supercharged thing. What do we do?" And again, I'm going to say, what can we look for that's smaller? And perhaps the smaller thing is to say,"Okay, we've got ourselves in this pickle, we need to start learning a new skill." Of course, when I get called in as a facilitator, typically they're saying, "Okay, deal with our great big, giant, hairy mess." And I'm like, "Yeah, first, we got to learn some skills." This is step one. I don't have a magic tool that will take a bunch of people who have no skill and a lot of defensiveness and a ton of hurt feelings, and a big hairy mess and in a four hour workshop solve this problem for everybody. But what I can do is say, "Okay, so we know we don't have good skills for this, or we wouldn't have the big hairy mess. We know we're not there. So let's practice on some smaller stuff." And so if the named objective isn't the big hairy mess, if the named objective is learning, we can actually often go pick up some of those smaller things or some more contained things, get the skills, and – by the way – clear out some of the stuff that's fueling the big hairy mess, usually. Build some trust in the group, get some vulnerability going there. All of those things help. And even if we haven't said a word about the content of the big hairy mess, often it's a little less big and hairy by the time we get to. So that learn the skills with little stuff first, is great preemptively. But it's also, I think, the thing to do when you realize you're stuck.

Paul: 24:34

And I think what gets in the way of us doing that is we think that this is all one thing, and we have to deal with it all at once. What I love is that you're point to either,"What something unrelated we could practice with?" or "What's the smallest coherent piece that we could carve off of this and just start to work with?" Because it helps with the skill building, but also, it often helps dissipate that. We sometimes think we have to deal with the big thing. Sometimes dealing with three small things is enough to clear the clog. Now I'm going to a plumbing metaphor. But sometimes that's all we need. We think that it's a big thing, we have to deal with it all at once. But if we can deal with one or two or three small pieces that are approachable that that's actually sufficient. You've said, "Hey, sometimes, what we need to do is just wait, because it'll dissipate on its own." Sometimes, if we put two or three pieces out of it, that's enough to let the rest of it dissipate on its own. And so I do think that working on the smallest thing you could with the simplest tool you possibly can, and then iterate. If that doesn't clear it, now move on, I think is probably the strategy that you're most likely to have success with.

Karen: 25:51

So tof track where we've been, we're looking at the situation where there is emotional angst remaining about a thing that's passed. And what do we do about that? In that, perhaps the hardest piece is just discerning, is it a ghost that's haunting us, is it residue that we're still tripping over, or has it actually dissipated? What is it that's still here? Is it still haunting us? Is this the time to work with it? And how might we work with it? And then we're naming that the simplest case, of course, if it's just a relationship between two people, being curious, really looking to it as a joint problem, even if only one of us is seeing it. It's a thing that we're both going to work on and be supportive around and be engaged with and just nurture that relationship as part of it. And as we move into more complexity, where we're with larger numbers of people, larger groups, there are a lot of different ways you can go about it. But in general, looking for the smallest piece, or the least heated piece would be another way to say that. Is it possible for two people to go off and work on their own and then come back and report to the group? Is it possible for two people to work with the group as witness, and have that be a way that the group engages? Or some other small group of three or four, or five, or, or whatever? And that when you get to the idea that none of that has worked, it really seems like we need a whole group conversation about this, to be really thoughtful about the structure of that. Make sure there's somebody who can hold that space and hold a structure that has done this before, at least a little bit., so that you've got a pretty good likelihood of success and don't end up feeding the ghost rather than dissipating the ghost. And that philosophy of "Just because we've got a big hairy mess doesn't mean we have to deal with the whole at once." Take a piece, take a part, take a chunk and see where you can get to. Even if that chunk is a skill building kind of exercise. Our first thing is to learn the skills that we were lacking that got us into this and then use those skills to work through it. But that sort of piecemeal approach is more likely then diving into the deep end with all the problems that got us there to begin with.

Paul: 28:24

Yeah, well, that's gonna do it for us for today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 28:29

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.