You Need a State Change Toolkit

Up creativity and quality and diffuse stress by running your company like a learning organization.

Hey everyone! This week I’m blending my two worlds, as a writer and writing mentor, and as an entrepreneur. Whether finding breakthroughs on the page or in a new product feature, State Changes help us collaborate together.

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I’m fascinated by the fundamentals of how humans innovate and collaborate.

But here is the catch. To collaborate, we need to meet. And the default way we do this -- The Meeting -- is universally dreaded.

It’s a paradox we have to get out of. Some tricks I learned from facilitating online courses can help.

Let’s reclaim those special moments where people come together and build world-changing companies with talent from all over the world. Those moments where we unlock a breakthrough that would have never come through rapid fire messages on a slack channel. These aren’t meetings - these are Multiplier Moments. And this essay is about having more of them.

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A glimpse into learning design

In education, we have to think about how to keep energy up, and facilitate learning. These seem like pretty good goals for collaboration in a company too. 

This past year I started mentoring with Write of Passage, a fast-growing online school for writing. Write of Passage claims to help you launch your career by writing online, but it does a lot more than that. As mentors we have to get people - hundreds of them - to open up to each other about their innermost hopes and fears. The questions they can’t stop asking themselves. The stuff they write about alone at their computer that they are about to share with the world. And we do this with people who have never met, all over zoom calls.

Write of Passage gets way better results (retention, completion) than the average online course. The mentor sessions, where we foster vulnerability and breakthroughs, are a big part of the success formula.

My mentor sessions, which I ran for an hour a week, mixed:

• Explaining - the moments where I’m talking about a concept. 

• Reflecting - quiet moments of writing and thinking together. 

• Breaking out - in smaller groups to chew on material, and 

• Discussing together in a group. 

We call these transitions state changes. Going from listening to talking. From a big group discussion to quiet, solitary reflection. 

State changes can help create Multiplier Moments at work too. Great teams have the same ingredients as a Write of Passage mentor session: shared goals, vulnerability and accountability, and intelligent people in the same room. Here are three benefits to giving state changes a try.

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State Changes reduce wandering minds

People get bored. My mind wanders even when I’m not bored. Writing that sentence, I started thinking about a statistic I once heard about the amount of time we spend daydreaming. It took me a minute to snap back into writing mode and remember what I wanted to say next.

Meetings are often one giant mono-activity. I’ll hear something I want to respond to, then write it down so I don’t forget it, then start to play out my argument in my head. All while someone else is still talking.

A state change reduces wandering minds. Try breaking out into a smaller discussion in pairs next time before the room convenes to make a decision. Multiplier Moments require presence, and engagement.

State Changes relieve pressure

We value people with the reaction times of CJ Cregg from the West Wing. Decisive leaders who “think on their feet.” But not everyone makes their best arguments on the spot. Multiplier Moments happen as people are processing and evolving.

Sure, some “meeting prep work” helps with this. Also, next time a debate within a team gets heated, try pausing the discussion and giving everyone a 5-10 minute silent free write. Often a discussion is richer when we have time to reflect. To talk when we are ready, not just when it is our turn.

State Changes foster learning culture 

I work mostly with startups. For young companies finding product market fit, learning is essential to survival. Integrating tools from learning design could only improve the learning culture of companies. Multiplier Moments are ultimately the result of a shared learning journey.

State changes create a bit of slack at work, leaving room for creativity. Tom DeMarco’s book Slack is an argument against the total efficiency approach held by many companies. Inviting the team to write, reflect, draw, discuss in pairs outside of their direct working groups - these might seem to slow a process down. But these tools also allow the mind to expand a little, and that’s essential for learning.

The State Change Toolkit creates artifacts. Those written reflections on why something didn’t work, or discussion summaries about a big decision. How the team was thinking and feeling in these moments is gold down the road, especially as teams grow and people flow in and out. These artifacts can feed into team wikis, and help Future You understand past decisions.

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Meetings shouldn’t be boring. And despite their bad rep, it’s really hard to move a meaningful mission forward without some synchronous collaboration. No matter where you fit into a project, effort or team, it is worth improving how we collaborate and innovate together. If you do try state changes, let me know how it goes. 

Epistemic Note

This one was fun to write, and hard to get feedback on. I’ve learned that I hate meetings a lot less than the average person, which I chalk up to having worked for myself most of my career. I’ve had my share of horrible meetings, both run by myself and others. The former usually causes introspection or self-loathing, more than dread for The Meeting.

When I tried to talk about improving the meeting with others, people’s reactions made me feel like a bureaucracy loving corporate cheerleader. My twitter tests of these ideas, which normally help me refine and focus based on comments, were full of calls to cancel the meeting. Yet I kept coming back to the feeling I had in my mentor sessions, and how that was so obviously translatable to other settings too. I’d like to keep building this out to more of a toolkit others can use.

Thanks

Fei-Ling Tseng

, for the sparring, and helping me to get to the core of why I wanted to write this.