May 9-10, 2005

Day 1: The first question posed was, "How can we take lessons learned here and pass along to other women?"

Nancy Houfek - background is theatre and strategic performance. Let’s take things actors know and bring into our lives. Women sat in tables of about 6.

The first exercise involved throwing a tennis ball. Someone start and throw the tennis ball at someone else at your table without talking. What were the results? Every one got a turn. At one table it was passed back more often to person who had it, this wasn’t true at another table. You have to look at the person who’s got the ball. 2) Now think about "Are you ready?" "Here it comes" and "Did you get it?" What were the results? It was slower because you had to think about who you will be throwing the ball to. The ball was dropped less. Eye contact was critical. 3) Now do it a different way every time it is thrown, keeping the same three questions in mind. What were the results? Orange juice got knocked over. There was risk and accidents happened. Had some risky tactics and some worked and some didn’t. Had to think more about how am I going to do it than if you got it. 4) Do same as #3 and think about the person getting it. What were the results? Little slower and had to think about range of tactics to ensure the ball reached the target.

The point being think of our range of tactics and ensure the point is getting there when we are communicating. We communicate with our bodies. What happens from the neck down? We sometimes think of ourselves as giant heads, but it’s also necessary to get bodies available and ready.

Next we did an exercise about energy flow. Reach out and try to touch something outside the window in nature in the distance. Now stop the energy (don’t focus on it). What happened? Arms got heavier and vision gets closer.

In complex negotiations, we often put big glass wall between ourselves and our partner. Want to land energy in same way we tossed the tennis ball. In a meeting, what do you do with energy? If you shut off your breath, the energy gets heavy, especially in a situation with people who you can’t stand. You want to have a continuous flow of positive energy even when you are experiencing negative energy. Think, that’s negative energy, I’m going to send back positive.

Then we did an exercise of shaking our arms and legs and opening up our bodies to feel the presence and power and breath of the body.

Lee Warren is from the business school. When someone says something, the mind shuts down. Take a moment, breathe, and get centered. Lee discussed 3 concepts:

1. Get up on the balcony. When we’re on the dance floor, we can’t see very much of what is really going on. Who’s dancing with whom, who is and isn’t dancing. In order to gather more information, extract yourself up a level. Who’s holding the ball? What are the hidden issues? Choose your words and choose your timing.
2. Do not personalize. Before you go into a meeting, determine what your objective and purpose are. If you take things personally, you get lost and your goals get lost. When somebody is scapegoated, represents a problem in the organization. Keep your objective in mind and keep moving forward even if someone else is being bad. What if you can’t get a word in edgewise? Stand up - use your body! Nancy reemphasized that the key to everything is the breath. In a stressful moment, breathe deeply. This calms the body down. If you squeeze your body, you squeeze your brain. Be strategic rather than reactive. If you have a three dimensional breath you have a three dimensional brain. Someone asked the question - what about 1:1 situation. You can always say, "I can’t respond right now, let’s meet tomorrow." Keep you eye on the goal/focus.
3. If trying to make a big change happen, don’t do it alone. Have a confidant outside of your organization that you can tell everything to - and get honest feedback. Also need allies in the workplace, but your ally and confidant are not the same person. Be sure you have both.

Now, shifting gears, start telling your stories. Think about one specific instance of a time you were in a meeting (group or 1:1, leading or not leading) that didn’t go the way you wished it had gone and it is still unresolved in your mind. In groups of 3, with people you don’t know, talk about it.

One theme was being steamrolled in meetings. Women sometimes being labeled "Johnny one-note" and seen as too aggressive. Lee: "Smart articulate women are aggressive, have to be relentlessly pleasant."

Then we role-played one of these stories. Look at how do you get your voice heard? What are some strategies to use in situation of being steamrolled in meetings?

• invoke precedent
• bring in authority from outside
• focus, refocus on the objective
• use humor
• follow up on important point
• separate comments
• point out reasons

Did a re-enactment of a meeting that occurred with people playing the roles sitting in the same positions. Could see that the seating position created a negative energy triangle.

How to get in a word when being steamrolled? Restate the song under the words - listen for the song under the words

• to hear to restate
• to ask
• to name the elephant in the room
• to stop him in tracks
• to accuse
• to help them understand
• to explain
• to put out feelers
• to summarize
• to stop blame and move forward
• to include all
• to acknowledge the frustration/problem
• to listen
• to deserve
• to prepare
• ask for input from your allies

In the course of a lifetime, women don’t ask for salary and difference is $500,000.

We are always racing to meetings without thinking about the meeting.

• Have a knowledge of the agenda
• Clear goals
• Know who your allies are

If it’s an important issue, do a lot of work ahead of time.

In meetings:

• preparation (agenda, issues, allies, ask for input)
• position (we tend to sit next to our allies, have them across the room)
• posture (not collapsing, spine long, edge of seat, hand out and open; if we sit back we have check out) - importance of body language
• purpose

A technique from acting theory is "playing an objective." "I want to find a way to get to eagerly and willingly be or do ." Something happens in meetings to knock us off the objective. It takes real through to determine our actual objective. Know what your primary objective is.

Tactics

• most common one is reason with
• start over
• restate
• gather group
• suggest resource
• to ally
• to offer benefits
• enroll allies
• to understand
• to ask
• to restate their objectives
• to support
• to acknowledge
• to ridicule
• restate outcome
• to threaten
• to remind
• invoke competition
• to minimize
• to expose flaw
• to challenge
• to amplify positive "deviance"

Find the super objective - the objective that everyone in the room can agree on. For example, if it’s an issue about the "2 body problem" in academia, the super objective could be "to improve ranking, to get $, to have the best dept, to do good computer science." The super objective is the one everyone can agree on and work down from there.

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Dinner discussion

1. If you had to redefine areas of computer science - systems, AI theory, what would they be?
2. What are key synergies between computer and computational science (application science)
3. How do we attract our best and brightest?

Summaries:

1. interdisciplinary, not just about coding
2. applications
3. theme-based, not just programming
4. people (user)
5. modeling and abstraction

Day 2: Learnings from yesterday - feedback from participants:

• Multi-disciplinary effort
• Idea of closing down vs opening up
• Physical reminders to re-enforce behaviors I know I ought to
• Single objective vs multiple objective, keep focused on what you want
• Taking negative energy and putting back as positive
• Observing meeting, image of getting on balcony
• Preparing ahead of time and knowing who allies are
• Interesting to see how rattled the person got who was negative when did second role play differently that how the meeting originally went
• Know you have choices and multiple tactics
• Idea of performance rather than "me being attacked" - distinguish between yourself and your role
• Did group role play but didn’t get to 1:1, but the concepts are the same
• Books "Getting to Yes, Difficult Conversations" - about negotiations, what are the underlying needs

Nancy talked about playing with the idea of voice. In voice training, "what’s the point, if I can’t hear you?" How do we get our voices out there?

The process of communication: we have a thought, take a breath, sound waves travel across the room. We want to make sure our thoughts land and the other person has time to process that thought. If we go at our rate and not their rate, they may not have time to process our thoughts.

In general, when women get tense, their voices get tight and it cuts off at the neck and cuts off body resonance. We want to get resonance going. The participants did an exercise where they sent their names across the room to someone else. It was like throwing a ball. Then they sent nonsense sounds across the room.

The book, The Right to Speak by Patty Roseberg . through culture, environment, or family, we are silenced. Getting voice out there we can change how we are perceived in the world.

Idea . visualizing arc of voice and calibrating. We want to calibrate our voices and project to whom we are talking.

Voice gets louder when angry, tactics to shout can sometimes be useful but not always. Take the word .hi.. You can say it, you can say it to invigorate, you can say it to intimidate. It.s the same word, but different actions are associated with it depending on the voice. When voice gets loud, generates negative energy. Think in terms of what is my tactic. In a conference phone call, you can stand up (to breathe), visualize the person you are talking to and calibrate distance over the phone rather than speaking at the phone. Imagine biting an apple and say .hi. . get mouths moving. Make your lips move, 96% of information we get is through the eyes . practice as if we are speaking at someone who is deaf. Speech isn.t just thought, it.s muscular activity.

Lee discussed leadership ideas. .Leadership on the Line. book. Adaptive vs Technical Challenges.

Adaptive . freedom vs. structure, run organization. Technical . how to run meetings. The difference between technical changes and adaptive change. Adaptive change . open to opportunity; happens when there.s some disequilibrium going on. For example, redefining computer science . there are some technical challenges, adaptive are big, messy changes . require people to change .below the neck.. Usually means some casualties . asking some people to lose something. Useful to ask, is this technical challenge or adaptive? If you want to create change, declare a crisis. We think there is a crisis in the field. Find a way to heat up the issue using a variety of tactics.

Leadership vs Authority. Leadership . verb not a noun . mobilizing people to face adaptive challenge. Authority is about rank or position, protection, direction and order. Leadership is about facing the messy issues. You don.t necessarily have the answer.

People will do what they can to avoid adaptive challenges. Adaptive change . what does someone need to give up to make changes? Leadership challenge . get technical change people to make adaptive change in absence of crisis. As a leader, you can set up opportunities for adaptive change. Shift in computer science has occurred to a global shift, can we adapt to it? Industry . imminent threat makes change.

3 main tasks to exercise leadership

1. observation
2. interpretation
3. intervention

People not in power need to raise the heat. It.s everybody.s job.

Now we shifted to the Fishbowl exercise. Instead of focusing on the content of the meeting, observe what is happening . when do things shift, notice process, what happened to turn my mind off, what.s going on with body language. Participants were picked from the fishbowl and had a 15 minute conversation with moderator. What were some of the observations?

• hedging. One person said .just. and discounted what they were saying before saying it
• focus of eyes on someone vs middle of table
• launched big issue and everyone side stepped it
• misunderstood comment because from industry talking
• eye contact
• voice, body position
• didn.t use break time to get allies, no agenda for meeting

What was the process? The facilitators set up the exercise and then had a break. Everyone just showed up. Facilitator is also authority. Rather than think of nice, think about what you want. I want to find a way to get people in the room to rather than just put issue out, when people talk at length, they lose their audience. Have your elevator speech.

My objective is to get this group to agree that..

My objective is to get this group to talk about.

Group going in a way we don.t like, fight or flight kicks in.

Learn about objectives, focus on adaptive challenges, getting voices, determine allies. One of the ways to get the group off adaptive is attack authority. Talk to different audiences. Difficult to get to adaptive question and how to address it. Learn how to be more effective participant in meetings.