This episode runs 31 min.

David Lecours and Josh Miles discuss how to plan your week in advance for maximum impact. Josh discusses with David a few tips that he picked up at a recent event.

Subscribe to PMS Show on iTunes

Mentioned in This Episode 144: Plan Your Week in Advance

The five commitments
Reduce distractions
Prioritize
Weekly to-dos

 

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

 

We Want to Hear From You

Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

 

Subscribe to our Podcast

To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

 

Read the Episode

David Lecours: Hey, Josh. I heard you went to a great event last week.

Josh Miles: Yeah, so, it turns out I was actually in town. I’ve been traveling a ton lately but my former business coach was presenting on many things productivity related but especially on planning your week in advance and, like we talked about in episode 142, the power of moments. This was one of those things that kind of stuck with me and took away some good nuggets. Thought maybe we could share that with our audience today.

Josh Miles: But maybe, first, you can give us an important announcement.

David Lecours: Yeah. That is that PSM Show is underwritten by SMPS whose vision is business transformed through marketing leadership.

David Lecours: If you’re not a member, gosh darn it, you’re missing out. Go over to SMPS.org and you can learn more about this great organization.

Announcer: This is PSM. It’s insight applied.

David Lecours: All right, so tell me more about this talk. Who put it on? Where was it? Set the stage for our conversation today.

Josh Miles: Yeah, so, this was actually the SMPS Indiana chapter. I was not planning on this but when I got downtown, they asked me to introduce the speaker who is my former business coach. His name is CJ [crosstalk 00:01:40] and he actually sits on the foundation board, so it was a great little, all my worlds woven together at the same time (laughs). So that was pretty cool, but CJ’s a great speaker, he’s a business coach like I mentioned, he does a lot of speaking on the speaking circuit, especially inA the SMPS world, and as I mentioned he was talking sort of all-around productivity, and all these other things but the core concept that he reminded me of was there’s this famous thing called the five commitments, which maybe one of our listeners remembers who wrote this, but that part did not stick with me, but what the five commitments are is what stuck around.

David Lecours: Yeah, that sounds awesome, and I think Josh and I agree that this topic would be super relevant because we all have to plan our week, and we all have so many different kind of plates that we’re spinning throughout the week, in terms of different proposals, and projects, and initiatives, and making sure that we’re serving all our different bosses and masters as well as all the kinds of personal things we need to plan, so we just thought that this would be a real helpful topic for AEC marketers because we’re having to juggle a lot of things.

Josh Miles: Yeah absolutely. And the crazy thing is, CJ was joking about how we all are like, “Maybe we’ll just work a little bit later tonight, and get caught up, or maybe I’ll work a little bit on Saturday and get caught up,” and he was like, “I’ve got a spoiler alert for you, we’re never gonna be caught up.” Even if you think you are, five minutes later, you’re no longer caught up. So, just sort of accepting that, that there’s always more to do is part of the zen of this whole thing, is just being okay with living in a world where the list is never going to be complete.

David Lecours: Right, yeah that reminds me a little of the methodology I use to run my life, is this GTD or “Getting Things Done” by the book by David Allen. His premise is that the mind is a terrible storage device, so if you can put things into places and have systems, then you can get it out of your head and use your head to do that kind of deep work. And it’s that same sort of idea that if you’re just sort of worrying about what’s next, like the to-do list that’s never done, you never really have the efficiency of operating at full capacity. Because your mind is cluttered with this other stuff that shouldn’t be up in there.

Josh Miles: I know he’s written a lot of stuff and I know he’s well-known and I’ve heard people talk of his stuff, but I guess I’ve never really dug in and maybe it’s sort of in line with his philosophy that I have very little of these kind of details in my short-term memory. Things like people say, “What year is your car?” Or, “How many inches is that TV?” And I’m like, “I don’t have any idea,” maybe I could come up with it eventually but these are the kinds of things that, it’s not important for me to remember this.

David Lecours: Well yeah, and his point is, just write it down and put it somewhere because you shouldn’t be carrying around that kind of stuff. If it’s super important you can access it in some way, then it’s effective. Anyway, back to this talk! And these five commitments. So, tell me about the first one.

Josh Miles: So, again he kind of categorized this as five levels and again, this wasn’t CJ’s unique thing, but was quoting from a book, I think. So level one commitment, this is sort of the bottom of the barrel, is no. [crosstalk 00:05:42] (laughs) which sounds like the worst kind of commitment of all…

David Lecours: That’s an option? That is an option?!

Josh Miles: It is, it is. And in fact it’s one that we creative and marketing types sometimes have a hard time with because I know we want to try to do everything, and nobody likes to hear themselves say no, but on the receiving end, sometimes it’s nice just to know, “Oh, okay, let’s not pretend that we’re gonna do this, let’s just agree that it’s not going to happen.”

David Lecours: Yeah, don’t lead people on, right? “Oh, yeah, I’ll get to that,” and then they just never do.

Josh Miles: And all of these middle ones are that gray area that are just so difficult to deal with, so “no,” it turns out is an okay thing to say and at least lets people know where you stand because these next couple are the wishy-washy ones.

David Lecours: But then, real quick, but the “no,” did he talk about ways to say that? It seems like there might be, it’s just hard to say “no” period, and then silence. You know, like, and maybe that’s the key, is just sitting with that discomfort, but it seems like you have to rationalize or explain why “no.”

Josh Miles: Yeah, well you know, I would maybe disagree with one of the things that he said about this, one of his points was don’t say that I don’t have enough time because we all have the same amount of time and I think what I’ve heard said sort of in the opposite category is, how you choose to use your time is actually the best reason to say no. To say, “No, I don’t have time for that.” “I don’t have enough time to do that.”

David Lecours: “I can’t do that effectively.”

Josh Miles: “I could do that, but I have not made time,” “I have to say no to other things if I say yes to your thing, and because of the things that I’ve already said yes to, I don’t any longer have time to do your thing.”

David Lecours: Right, yeah.

Josh Miles: So, it’s a fair thing to say, I mean how would you do it differently?

David Lecours: I didn’t realize how I do it, but I often say, “No, I don’t have the bandwidth for that right now,” saying that I’m previously committed to certain things, and I’m not willing to substitute your thing for this other thing. And it may sound harsh, but yeah, it’s the same sort of thing like, hey, at least people know where they stand and then they can choose to still like me or not.

Josh Miles: Right. Well you know, and it kind of made me realize there are a couple of things that I have been non-committal to that I also have not said no to, that I probably need to get back around to those people or those opportunities and say, “No.” And I think, again, the way you choose to soften it is up to you, but don’t leave it unclear. Saying, “I don’t have the bandwidth,” or, Maybe we could talk again next year, but for now it’s a no,” or those are all versions of the same thing, but it still at least says clearly that this can’t happen right now. Not gonna do it.

David Lecours: I like how you phrased that.

Josh Miles: So level two commitment is where we start to get into this gray, squishy area and it’s the, “I wish I could,” or “I want to,” or, “I would like to,” but it’s definitely not a yes, and it’s not a no. So that’s where probably 90% of my list lives right now. It’s the things that I know are not a priority today, but they’re things I don’t want to forget about. So, “I think I want to do this, I wish I could do this.” The one that we’ve talked about before is me recording the audio book version of “Bold Brands.”

David Lecours: I know, that’s one of your goals!

Josh Miles: I have not recorded another minute of that since we talked about it last because this is the, “I want to do it, I wish I had time for it,” and then it just has not made the priority list, yet, although, it’s still a goal. We’re gonna revisit this again, so I know I have to get to it.

David Lecours: And so just to kind of come back to this “Getting Things Done,” he has these different buckets you put things in, and he calls this “maybe someday.” I happen to use Evernote and I have a list, very long, of “maybe someday” things. And then, the good thing is, if I ever have extra time, I can go to that and maybe something gets promoted from the “maybe someday” list to my what I call “next actions” list. And it’s a nice way to archive it, or park it in a place that I don’t have to think about it, and it’s not an urgent commitment, but at least it’s written down in some form.

Josh Miles: Yeah, that’s another one of those ideas, this mental loop thing, when something is in your mind and you’re thinking about it all the time, but you know you’re not going to get to it. Having a place to literally just park those ideas for the time and maybe you never come back to it, but looking at it with fresh eyes is sometimes enough inspiration to go, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that idea! I really am excited about that now!”

David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely. All right, cool. What’s next?

Josh Miles: So the next one on the list is, “I’ll try.”

David Lecours: (laughs) Right.

Josh Miles: So I’m sure all of us have had friends, who you tell them to come over to your house for a thing, or “We’re all gonna go out,” or “We’re all gonna go to this event,” and they don’t say yes, and they don’t say no, but they’ll say, “Yeah, I’ll try to make it.”

David Lecours: All right, I usually take that as a no.

Josh Miles: (laughs) “I’ll try” is definitely a soft “no.” Is there anything that you feel like you deliver the “I’ll try” on?

David Lecours: I guess I lump that in with the other one and I guess I would put that in my same bucket of the “someday maybe” but I guess if it’s some sort of personal request, I would say, “Look, I can’t commit now,” but I usually try to give myself some sort of deadline for committing “yes” or “no.” But yeah, the “I’ll try” thing doesn’t seem super useful. I mean like, what’s that Yoda quote? “Do or do not, there is no try?”

Josh Miles: Exactly. Yeah. I’m with you on this one. “I’ll try” is definitely up there with just “no.” Let’s stop pretending and let’s just agree that you’re not going to do this. “I’ll catch you next time, maybe.”

David Lecours: For sure.

Josh Miles: So that may be a good segue into this level four commitment. So number one was “no,” number two was “I wish I could” or “I want to,” or “I’d like to,” or “someday maybe,” number three is “I’ll try,” which we agreed is pretty much a “no,” and number four is “I’m committed unless…” So this is like, “Unless I get a better offer,” “Unless I get a better opportunity,” “Unless someone else asks me,” “Sure I’ll go to the dance with you…”

David Lecours: (laughs)

Josh Miles: “Until it’s the person I really want.”

David Lecours: Ouch! Yeah, that can be messy. Yeah so I guess, just to clarify if I’m understanding, these are things maybe you would say to yourself, like you wouldn’t say this to somebody else?

Josh Miles: Right, no.

David Lecours: Okay, okay.

Josh Miles: Yeah, mostly self-talk and maybe it’s perceived externally but when you tell somebody, “Maybe,” or any version of I guess these level two to level four commitments, they’re going to read in all these other things.

David Lecours: Right.

Josh Miles: Committed in the less is the short version of this one.

David Lecours: Yeah so for me, if I say, “I’m committed,” it goes into my calendar and I’m assuming I’m doing it, and then yeah, of course, things can always come up that were some sort of emergency, or where you just need to renegotiate the contract you made with yourself and that person, whoever you’ve committed to because yeah, stuff comes up, and I think people understand that. You should have a good excuse for why you’re changing the agreement, but it’s pretty understood.

Josh Miles: Yeah and maybe doing your own marketing if you’re a firm owner, or you’re a team lead, maybe that falls into this category often. “Well I definitely want to write this blog post to go up at the end of the day today, unless a proposal shows up, or unless some other priority happens that is an emergency,” or unless somebody really needs something. It’s the kind of thing that it’s important to you, but it’s something that can get bumped if something else shows up.

David Lecours: And I would say that’s true for any plan, so let’s say it’s your marketing plan, right, so you’re committing to do these things for the next year, but there’s this implicit understanding that if it’s not quite working, or it’s just definitely not set in stone. I think a lot of times people are reluctant to create a plan because they feel like it’s going to lock them in. That’s never the case. Part of the beauty of creating a plan is the actual process of thinking things through, but also it’s just having something down as sort of the default, and then of course if some better opportunity comes up, or the company shifts into some sort of new vertical market, you’re gonna adapt that plan, and all of it in some way.

Josh Miles: Yeah. Absolutely. I think then the bottom line, or the final commitment is a level five, which is “whatever it takes.” So for you, could be a family commitment, or it could be a planned deadline, or it could be a mission-critical project that you’re all rallying around, but this is the thing that you know is the most important thing in the moment. It’s the thing that you know that you absolutely have to do.

David Lecours: Yeah, because if it’s your kid’s birthday, or maybe a key anniversary in your personal life, but yeah, it’s the non-negotiables. That are going to happen no matter whatever it takes.

Josh Miles: Yeah so, CJ’s recommendation here and the thing that really stuck with me was, I want to talk more about planning your week in advance and that, but he said it’s so easy for us to show up to our work day and think, “What are all the things I need to do?” And then, “I’m just going to pick off some of these easy ones first.”

David Lecours: Right, right, right.

Josh Miles: So you just go after all the little to-dos and you’re busy with email, and you’re busy with whatever’s the loudest or the noisiest, or the most urgent in the second, and you’re not really paying attention necessarily to what’s the most important, so his big takeaway was to really focus on those level five commitments. To identify what they are and make sure those are the first things that you’re tackling every day.

David Lecours: Yeah. Have you ever done that exercise with putting the big rocks first?

Josh Miles: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-yeah, maybe describe that for people who haven’t seen that one.

David Lecours: This may have come from a Stephen Covey thing or someone else, but anyway, you have this exercise and you have some sort of container, let’s just say it’s a bucket. And you have a bunch of rocks that are large, and some medium ones and small ones, and then you have sand. And you literally are given this exercise where you have to try to fit all of the contents, all the rocks, into the bucket. But what you quickly find out, is that if you don’t do them in the right order, they literally won’t fit. You literally have to put the big rocks in first and then the medium rocks, and then the smaller ones, and then the sand will sort of fit through the cracks and work. But if you don’t go in that order, you won’t have room. And so of course this is a metaphor for planning your day, or your week and making sure you handle those big things first. Also, because those big things are going to give you that real sort of sense of satisfaction, rather than just sort of a quick dopamine hit of answering an email and like very temporarily thinking you’re a hero. At the end of the day, if you do a bunch of these little things, you just don’t have that satisfaction.

Josh Miles: Yeah I was using the illustration last night, we were talking about this talk afterwards. I’ve never ridden in a helicopter or certainly not flown one, but I understand it’s kind of like playing the drums, you’re using both arms and both legs. For me, managing your inbox all day feels like that. You’re using all your arms and legs and I got really good at that a long time ago, just being [inaudible 00:19:00] on the spot, responding to all the emails, and then I realized I was getting really good at the wrong thing.

David Lecours: (laughs) Gosh, that’s so important.

Josh Miles: You just don’t ever get caught up, it doesn’t matter that you’re really efficient at email. Get that idea of matching your email or only answering at one time or a couple times during the day, or you know really focusing on those big tasks first is something that took me a long time to figure out.

David Lecours: Right, nobody got promoted for being the best emailer ever.

Josh Miles: There’s no medal.

David Lecours: No merit badge if you listen to our last episode on the power of moments.

Josh Miles: (laughs) You don’t get to wear your email hat while you’re doing email. If anyone’s listening that has an email hat, I would love to see a photo of that.

David Lecours: (laughs) Yeah.

David Lecours: Well that makes sense, should we talk about planning your week? Or is there something else you wanted to discuss first?

Josh Miles: Yeah, let’s jump into that. What’s your ritual or process for planning or managing “to-dos” or let’s dive in here.

David Lecours: Yeah so just in the last year I’ve transitioned from having this ritual that’s like maybe an hour, hour and a half kind of thing that I used to do Monday mornings, but now I’m trying to do it, and I’ve been pretty good this whole year, of doing it Sunday nights so that I can can hit the ground running Monday morning. And it kind of gets my mind in the work mode that night. So I do some things. I go through, and this is sort of all related back to that “Getting Things Done” methodology, where I’ll go through my email and see if I have any unresolved emails and try to get down to inbox zero. I store everything in Evernote, so I have a list of inbox things from Evernote that I need to sort and put in other places. I have a physical file of analog things, like let’s say it’s a doctor’s bill, or things like that, I’ll look at that.

David Lecours: And then, so what I do is I put those into key lists, one of them is called “next actions,” which are things that I need to take to move a project forward. I have another list called “today,” and that’s literally my today to-do list. And so I’m constantly moving things from one list to the other. Once I’m done with all the “today” tasks, I’ll go and grab the next ones from “next actions,” and then prioritize what order I want to do those.

David Lecours: The other thing I have that has been incredibly useful is this bucket that I call “waiting for.” So let’s say, hypothetically, I send an email to somebody and I say, “Hey Josh, get back to me with five topics for our next podcast,” right? And I don’t want to have to carry around in my head that I asked Josh for this, I just want to park it somewhere, and the place I park it is “waiting for.” Through email I can blind-copy a special Evernote address and it goes directly into that bucket within Evernote. So just during my weekly review, I’ll review those “waiting fors” and see if there’s anything outstanding that I need to remind people about that’s coming up.

David Lecours: And the final sort of exercise is literally planning the week where I’m blocking out time, and maybe I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do for the three hours that I’m going to work on a specific project, but I’m allocating that time as blocked out. I’m pretty good about being strict with myself and with others about saying, “All right, if I block that out, I just can’t schedule meetings.”

David Lecours: I also started doing this thing where I don’t schedule meetings until afternoon. I find that I’m more productive for doing deep work in the mornings, and so I’ll schedule meetings any time after lunch, but I really try to carve out that eight to noon time for doing the creative.

David Lecours: So how about you? Do you have a methodology, or way that you do it?

Josh Miles: Yeah, similar. So I started using Asana about a year ago, which is as I understand it, great for teams as well, I’ve never really used it in a team context, but I love it just the to-do list management piece of it. So, I have everything color-coded and categorized and set by date as well so I can drag and drop all these things around and it’s kind of pretty easy for me to manage visually, even when I’m running to the grocery store I add all the items that I’m picking up at the store, goes straight into Asana and I can check those off. It has the bonus of every fifth thing that you check off, like a magical narwhal or unicorn flies across the screen.

David Lecours: (laughs) You get a reward.

Josh Miles: You get a dopamine bonus on top of the visual of checking it and seeing it cross out or disappear. It’s very satisfying. But that’s kind of my master list. I’m constantly moving those dates around and updating things, and dragging and dropping and categorizing. If it’s not in Asana there’s a really good chance it’s not going to get done.

Josh Miles: Even though our day-to-day work for SMPS is all through Basecamp, so all of our messaging, communicating, and to-dos are in there, so I sort of have a second place to check those things but it’s really helpful for me to have that master list where everything from work through personal all rolls up to the same spot, so similarly I try to pay attention to that Sunday night before I clock out, but it’s kind of a constant state of making sure that I’m re-prioritizing the things that are most important because you don’t always know on a Sunday night what the most important thing is going to be on Wednesday. I think that was part of CJ’s talk that was most insightful for me, was thinking, “Well, maybe I should know what these level five commitments are,” to be sure there’s some fours and threes that might show up that I’ll get done as well, but I should probably know what those fives are well in advance.

David Lecours: Yeah there’s something, like the digital part of it is really nice in that a lot of our lives are repeatable actions, so once you create a grocery list, having that as a template for the next time you go to the grocery store just gets you that much far ahead, so for example, I have a list of movies or books that I want to read and I can always go back to that and it’s fun to check those off and add new things, but having a template that you use over and over again is a nice way to be efficient.

Josh Miles: Yeah so practically speaking, doing that in Evernote is that kind of how you swing it, do you have multiple [inaudible 00:26:20]?

David Lecours: Yeah, so I divide things into “active projects” and then “archived projects,” and then I also have another area called “reference material,” which is just stuff that I might refer back to about topics that I’m interested in. But you brought up a really good point and I think it’s that whatever system you use, I think it needs to be integrated, and you mentioned integrated like personal and professional because our lives aren’t 100% 9-5, we don’t think or do anything that is related to personal and the idea that you have to go to a bunch of different places to find these things makes it less efficient. All these things are going to be weighing on us, sort of carrying our psychic energy, and occupying our brains, so just having a single place to keep all this straight, and in my case just keep it out of my head and having a place to go to refer back to things.

Josh Miles: Yeah and I think there’s not a real easy way to get out of all the other things that are clamoring for your attention during the day, let alone social media, and slack groups or in text chats, or email, or whatever else and you’re getting private messages on LinkedIn and you’re just inundated with all these different requests for time and requests for meetings so it’s just so helpful to have just one place to go to see what that actual list is and to manage those real commitments.

David Lecours: I have this other list I call “read/view” and so let’s say I get an email, like a thought leadership piece from somebody that I want to read, but I don’t want to stop my day and read it right then, otherwise I just get sucked in to the email treadmill, so I’ll forward it to this “read/view” folder and I’ve got hundreds of things that I’ve never and will never get to, but at least I have a place that if I’m trying to find something on a particular topic. So it’s “read,” because there’s a lot of readings there, but also “view,” if there’s some sort of video or something that I’d like to watch, I can go to that.

Josh Miles: Yeah. Yeah, love it. I’ve done similar things for reading things, and even for videos too, like, “Oh I think I’d want to watch this later, so I’ll put this on the “watch later” to-do,” just in the notes section and find those later.

David Lecours: All right, well hopefully this has been helpful, are there any kind of closing thoughts on how people can be more productive in planning their weeks?

Josh Miles: Well, yeah I’m curious to hear what tips have stuck out to listeners because the thing that was most important to me isn’t necessarily the thing that’s going to stand out to you, but I guess my challenge, since this level five concept was big for me is, listener, give this a try next week, maybe figure out what your one or two or three level five commitments are for next week at work and try focusing on those first in your workday and see if you don’t walk away from the workweek with a little bit more done.

David Lecours: Super, so yeah we want to hear from you, and if you want to do that, then go over to PSM.show and there’s a simple form you can get in touch with us, and we’d love for you to share this podcast with others in the AC industry that would find it useful, you can just send them over to PSM.show and that’s it for this show. From Josh Miles and myself, thank you to SMPS, our underwriter, and we will see you next time.

This episode runs 35 min.

Marketers facilitate meetings large and small, recurring and one-off. But few of us have received training in running a successful meeting. Ted Sive, of Ted Sive Consulting, shares his unique perspective on getting the most from your meetings.

Subscribe to PMS Show on iTunes

 

Questions Answered in This Episode 143: Ted Sive on Meetings

Why have a meeting vs. other forms of communications?
Why should marketers become better meeting facilitators?
Do marketers have advantages or disadvantages in running meetings?
What does the meeting facilitator control, and not control?
How much should the facilitator talk during the meeting?
What are your go-to tools to use during a meeting?
What are the biggest mistakes facilitators make?
Tips for introverts and meetings?
Best practices for brainstorming meetings?

 

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

 

We Want to Hear From You

 Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

 

Subscribe to our Podcast

 To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

 

Read the Episode

Announcer: Welcome to PSM, The Professional Services Marketing Podcast. It’s insight applied.

David Lecours: Hello, I’m David Lecours, and I’m joined by a special guest, Ted Sive, to talk about meetings. Welcome to the show, Ted.

Ted Sive: Happy to be here, David.

David Lecours: We’re going to learn more about Ted, but first, I want to remind our listeners that we have a fantastic underwriter, and that is SMPS, who reminds us that business is transformed through marketing leadership. You can find out more about SMPS at smps.org.

Announcer: This is PSM, it’s insight applied.

David Lecours: Now, in thinking about today’s episode, I had this sort of realization that as marketing leaders, one of our many tasks is to facilitate meetings. I don’t know about you all, but I never received any sort of training on how to do this, and I think we all just sort of wing it. I’ve been fortunate to experience our guest, Ted lead a meeting and he’s really good at it, and so I asked him to share some best practices for meeting facilitation.

David Lecours: Ted, maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about kind of what you do and how you go to where you are today?

Ted Sive: Okay. David, I’ve listened to some of your podcasts, and one of the things that it reminds me of and it’s sort of a conversation or a theme or I guess a meme I should say. Which is, how do people end up in this industry? I think I want to start off by saying I am proudly someone who chose this industry and this job path of marketer and communicator and strategist in the A/E/C industry intentionally, which I find surprisingly rare even nowadays. I’m basically of the age when I got out of college, professional marketer roles in architecture firms, well, frankly were legal, and in A/E/C firms, were becoming regular.

Ted Sive: I was a guy in college, I had taken a lot of classes in the school of architecture, thought a lot about becoming an architect. As a kid, I was one of those guy who’s doodling house plans in middle school, and I have an absolute love for the world of designing construction, but I’m really in essence a word guy, an ideas guy, a communications guy. When I was in school, I was an English major with the writing focus, and I thought about going into PR and sort of the traditional path. A number of people said, “Well, Ted, there are marketing jobs and firms.” I’m like, “Well, that’s freaking awesome [crosstalk 00:02:57]-

David Lecours: Yeah, it fits.

Ted Sive: Because that’s combining the two things. That’s kind of where I started. I worked for many years at an architectural firm. Had a really interesting job with a variety of roles, as a marketer, as a technical writer, and as a project manager. I left that firm to go work for a very different type of company, a construction company, a big company in the private sector and not public. I was a partner there and Director of Marketing, and then for the last 15 years, I’ve been out on my own as a consultant.

Ted Sive: My work with my clients… well, first of all, my clients are really pretty evenly across the spectrum of architects, engineers, contractors and owners. I love that diversity. There’s also a lot of diversity with of size and type and sort of culture of firm in that mix, and with those companies my work is really in three realms. The first is the strategy. We’re really kind of classic operational and marketing strategy. Who are we? What do we want to be? What’s out there in the world? Who’s the competition? What’s the map? What are the things we’re doing? What are the things we’re not doing?

Ted Sive: A lot of work in the communication realms, both brand strategy at sort of the highest level. I’m on a graphic designer, I’m not a brand designer. I’ve very much a brand strategist in terms of, “Okay, we’ve decided who we are. How do we communicate that to the outside world? What are our expectations? What do we want people to be thinking about the firm?”

Ted Sive: Lastly, and really relevant I think to today’s conversation, and it’s a result of being a facilitator and someone who really enjoys being a facilitator and someone who’s always been interested in working on, reading about and writing about the topic of delivery, that is, how do architects, engineers, contractors and owners just… how do they work better and smarter and have more fun and make more money? As a result of having that skill and being focused on that topic, I do a lot of collaborative delivery. To working with teams on large projects that are actually doing real gnarly work together and working then to sort of assess the team and the desires, the communication risks on the job, and setting up decision-making protocol and patient process.

Ted Sive: The last thing I’ll say as an intro, is I’m a fellow in SMPS, which is something I’m very proud of, and I’m really happy that SMPS kind of writes this. So thank you SMPS.

David Lecours: Yeah, absolutely, we are too.

David Lecours: So I heard once that a boss told you that you weren’t actually a very good meeting facilitator.

Ted Sive: Yes, he did tell me that. You know, that was kind of a turning point for me. On the positive side I realized that I wasn’t really approaching the meetings I was running. I was the director of marketing and I would have these weekly, sort of classic meeting that marketers had, that weekly or bi-weekly meeting and you’ve got single management there and project managers and it’s got a whole bunch of people and you’ve got to talk about marketing and dt. I was not really approaching those meetings as positively or as intently as I could.

Ted Sive: That was a bit of a wake up call from my boss. Another part of the story is the boss didn’t like my facilitation because he and I didn’t necessarily agree all the time. But that’s another discussion David, for another day.

David Lecours: All right, fair enough. Obviously, you know meetings is a big topic and I think you and I agreed beforehand we’re going to sort of narrow the context to a couple things. One is, and you mentioned it earlier, a recurring meeting versus a one off meeting. Then also there’s a difference between a small meeting and we’re going to define small as eight or fewer attendees versus a large meeting, greater than eight. So we’ll kind of keep that in mind as we go through the questions. Just going to kind of give our listeners an outline of where we’re headed. You know, one of the things we really wanted to talk about is, what can and/or should happen at a meeting? Then also what marketers can do to become better facilitators, whether it’s written into our job description, it’s something we definitely do and I think we, and you would agree, we can be better at it.

Ted Sive: Absolutely, and I really think the story you had me start there, I think there’s a connection there for many marketers. Which is, meetings for marketers are really important because it’s your interaction time with your clients, who are internal. So your principles, your project managers, your architects, your engineers, whatever they are. Then the other reason the meetings are really critical is something hopefully is happening at the meeting that wouldn’t happen otherwise. It’s that basic thing, that one plus one equals three, not two. That because you’ve got this assembly of people something is born out of it that would not have happened unless those people where there to together, in person or virtually at the same time.

Ted Sive: I think that the first level that’s a really great guide for meetings is, can this happen otherwise? If it can you probably shouldn’t have a meeting, do an email, do a report.

Ted Sive: Thinking about this, the other thing that occurred to me is that, I think two things are the bane of the marketer’s existence in AEC firms. One is SRM, everyone struggles with it, then two our marketing meetings. Because often a lot of us have marketing meetings which are great, and this is really in that regular meeting category that we’re talking about. Well a lot of them are really a drain, and I think frankly there’s a lot of bad behavior in marketing meetings, all around. What’s interesting is the architect in your meeting whose maybe reading his iPhone or rustling papers instead of really participating, he might or might not hopefully won’t and probably wouldn’t be doing that same thing if he or she was in a meeting with a client.

Ted Sive: So marketers also sort of get the worst of behavior because it’s an internal meeting so people can kind of let down their guard with behavior. Whereas for the marketer, it’s our clients at the table, our internal clients.

David Lecours: Yeah, so what does a facilitator do to help boost engagement? Like get that person who’s looking at his iPhone to participate.

Ted Sive: Wow, how long do I have here? The first thing I want to go back to is that question. Which is, are we talking about stuff that will benefit from the group assembled and/or are there things here that can happen otherwise? What you’re looking for in a meeting is that all these people together as a result of that you’re going to get something more.

Ted Sive: So I think the first thing for marketers is to do that. There’s a lot of kind of basic things that we need, that people sometimes miss. One is having a really well thought out agenda. The agenda’s not just sort of a list of topics, it’s the facilitator thinking about, what’s the flow of meeting? Yeah, I do have to have a certain amount of reporting, when do I want have it reported? Is there going to be some brainstorming or creative activity? When do I want schedules? Who’s going to be at the meeting and how do I best use their time?

Ted Sive: I think we get in the rut of just sort of going to meetings and not thinking them and just sort of going on the fly. So offloading those topics that won’t benefit from the meeting, really thinking about and preparing an agenda beforehand. I’ve go a whole bunch of other things so maybe you-

David Lecours: Yeah, so I was thinking about that agenda part. It reminds of an invitation to a party sets the tone for the event. So would you say that agenda should be sent out in advance?

Ted Sive: You know, I really think it should. Even for regular meetings I think it’s really great to have two or three bullets at the top of the agenda which are, these are the objectives of this meeting. We are going to decide go, no go, on something or we’re going to create proposal strategies for this project. Or we’re going to talk about PR plans for the year, whatever it is. Make it as specific as possible, as sort of, yes we did that or we did not do that. Set that expectation.

David Lecours: Yeah, I love those rails of keeping everybody on track because so quickly and easily things can go off track. But if you have that sort of key purpose at the top, and it’s literally written down you can just keep going back to it, to help keep people focused.

Ted Sive: That is absolutely true. And I think that’s the other thing that’s really hard sometimes for marketers to do, or for any facilitator to do. Because the whole purpose of the meeting is to have something happen that’s unplanned, right? The one plus one equals three? You don’t really know where it’s going to go so, on the one hand you want that to happen. And it maybe that you planned on talking on topic A and you’re ending up talking on topic B and that’s good. But maybe it’s not good.

Ted Sive: I think one of the challenges a lot of facilitators run, is they’re not tracking the conversation in their brain real time. And sort of identifying, “Hey, we’re on a new topic do we want to talk about that or go back to the original topic?”

David Lecours: Right, it could be more important, more relevant. So yeah that flexibility.

Ted Sive: Exactly, or you know, maybe let’s set another time and we’ll get back to that, but lets get back to the original topic.

David Lecours: So do you think marketers have inherent strengths or advantages in facilitating meetings? And I guess conversely maybe there’s some apparent weaknesses that we should be aware of too.

Ted Sive: Well, I do think that marketers have strengths. I think, meetings are about communication, marketers, most of us are, or should be, or supposedly are professional communicators. So I’m always using that mantra, think about the audience. So I do think marketers have a skill of, okay who are the people coming to the meeting and what are their topics? What are their agendas? What is their personality, what’s important to them?

Ted Sive: I mean the exact same process that marketers go through with teams preparing for an interview with a client. SO you’ve got that, hopefully communication skill to sort of assess the audience. The marketers another advantage, I guess kind of in the realm of professional advancement maybe, is a lot of regular meetings the marketer has the opportunity to be speaking with the highest levels of leadership or ownership within an organization. That’s kind of a great opportunity.

David Lecours: Yeah, right it’s this stage to really sort of say, “Hey, I can lead teams and I should be considered for that next promotion.” Kind of thing.

Ted Sive: Exactly, and/or I have good ideas or I can draw the ideas out. That’s absolutely true.

David Lecours: I love that, yeah. So if you just approach this meeting like, hum drum, “Alright, we’ve got to do this.” You’re really kind of communicating that you don’t think originally or that you’re afraid of injecting life in situations where it could definitely be used.

David Lecours: So I think of myself as, it’s not my greatest strength, as somewhat of a control freak. And I’m wondering as a facilitator is that going to help me or hurt me?

Ted Sive: Wow, well both, right? I think the answer to that question goes back a little bit to your previous question about, what other things people should do. One of the things I think a lot of people don’t use is, I go back to a whiteboard and a flip chart. And a lot of people aren’t using those tools as strongly as they might. And it gets to the control, to me the purpose of a whiteboard or flip chart to capture the ideas and the topics being talked about in the meeting. Yes, it’s absolutely to record Jane and Billy-bob’s and Esmeralda’s ideas or input. But it’s also the opportunity for the facilitator to shape what that person is saying in a way that helps move the meeting along, so everyone understands it. And/or frankly they shape it in a direction that, that facilitator thinks it needs to go.

David Lecours: Mm-hmm (affirmative) So you’re not just a stenographer capturing a transcript, you’re kind of summarizing and shaping, I didn’t think about that. But that’s a really interesting topic.

Ted Sive: Absolutely, I think that’s one of the reasons, I don’t know if it’s why I really enjoy facilitating meetings, or it’s my training as a writer, that I’m bringing to the meetings. But I’m very conscious of that and that sounds a bit more machiavellian than I probably am in actuality. But one of the things that happens in meetings is people are talking about different things, they’re talking about apples and orangutans and not apples and oranges. And that facilitation that, that note taking process, that capturing ideas is a way to keep the discussion both organized and understood and also focused and directed.

David Lecours: Yeah, I know, that totally makes sense.

Ted Sive: One of the pieces of that is, I think in a meeting you’re typically running two or three flip charts at once. One might be a list of factors for consideration and another one might be a list of facts or you know, it’s sort of different angles into the discussion. And so as a facilitator when you’re thinking about those discussions think about what those angles might be and come into that discussion prepared. That will help that note taking.

David Lecours: Yeah, so you’ve mentioned a couple tools, a whiteboard, a flip chart. Any other favorites that you like to incorporate to make the meetings better?

Ted Sive: I wouldn’t be worth my salt, or weight, or whatever that expression is if I didn’t use dots. Avery dots and I like the little ones, I think they’re much prettier than the big ones.

David Lecours: So not post-its but actual stickers, the actual dots?

Ted Sive: Yeah, well post-its are great for when you’re getting a bunch of ideas and then rearranging them and sort of categorizing. I’m referring to sort of Avery label dots, which are voting dots. This is more applicable to that large group meeting. This is more applicable to a retreat or a workshop or a two-three hour meeting where you’re going through several series of things. You know, as a facilitator you’re always trying to et everyone to participate equally, that’s sort of the holy grail. You don’t get there, you know there’s some people like me who talk too much. And there’s other people, maybe like you David, who need to talk more.

Ted Sive: And so your job as a facilitator is to draw them out. Well a great way to get people, well one it’s just great to get people out of their chairs and moving, physical thing is terrific. But to get people participating is to have them vote, and I’ll do it in a bunch of different ways. Like I’ll give people green votes and red votes, green is yes and red is no. Sometimes I’ll say you can put all your dots on one idea if you want, or sometimes I’d say no. You know, you sort of figure it out as you go along.

David Lecours: Right, so you give people a budget of dots, say they get ten, and they can decide if they feel so passionate about one issue they are going to go all in and put all ten on that one thing, and try to sway. Yeah, I like that idea.

Ted Sive: But you can also use a negative dot. Some groups are like, “what? A red dot? I can do no?” And I’m like, yeah. And your red dot cancels out someone else’s green dot. Yeah, I don’t always want to do that but it’s an option.

David Lecours: Sure, well I like this from kind of an infographic, kind of way. Real quickly you can see, especially if you’re considering several different things, like where the group stands, by literally looking at the number of dots.

Ted Sive: Absolutely, and back to my comment on notes on the board. Just physically seeing it up there is really helpful. You know, so once again taking this discussion of dots or flip charts into the realm of weekly marketing meetings, it may not be applicable to all parts of it. But maybe you have 20 minute section of that meeting and once again back to my comment earlier when you’re thinking about the flow and the energy and the participation. Maybe you want to create a topic where you’re having a 20 minute feel during your meeting of a retreat, where people brainstorm and vote and do things.

Ted Sive: It’s a great way to shake things up and get people’s blood moving. In what can be otherwise dull meetings.

David Lecours: I think what I’m hearing you say is you’ve just got to vary the routine and think about the pacing and literally getting people out of their seats, does get their blood running and disrupts the status quo. That seems to be the enemy of the recurring meeting. People already know what’s going to happen, it’s the same thing. But if you can shake somebody’s expectations then it seems like it’s going to engage them a little bit more. Keep them on their toes a little bit.

Ted Sive: Another tool to use is to rotate the facilitator ship of the meeting either the whole meeting or portions of the meeting, to break up the routine. The other thing about rotating or changing the facilitator ship is. Let’s say you’re running the meeting and you’re the director of marketing and you are going into a topic that you’re really opinionated about. Maybe you shouldn’t be running that meeting, because you want to be pounding your fist into the table.

David Lecours: Or that part of the meeting.

Ted Sive: Exactly, and say that, up front.

David Lecours: I need to recuse myself, because I’m biased, on this. I’m going to have-

Ted Sive: Well, you know I’m going to ask so and so to facilitate the meeting because I have really strong feelings and I don’t think I’m going to be able to both facilitate and mention the pros and cons.

Ted Sive: I think we’re talking a lot about-

David Lecours: It inspires another question about how much the facilitator should be talking during the meeting. Is there any sort of rule of thumb or how do you manage that part?

Ted Sive: I love that question, I think in general less, rather than more. The facilitator, and this is really as your asking it is a follow on to that other topic. If you’re talking about something that you have a huge stake in and a strong opinion and there’s going to be an in depth or potentially even a heated discussion, you probably shouldn’t be facilitating that. Or you have to put it in some sort of mutual place where you can be having that discussion and somehow the meeting moves along. If your role is as facilitator I think generally for larger meetings, for a market retreat or whatever it might be. You want other people to talk, the best thing that can happen in a meeting is the other people leave the meeting feel their time was worthwhile. That’s why more likely to happen if they’re talking.

David Lecours: Absolutely, I feel more engaged. Like you participated.

Ted Sive: Exactly, the other thing, is you know we are talking a lot about facilitation but in my work, where I’m facilitating a retreat or workshop, I talk with my clients that I wear three hats. I’m a facilitator, as a facilitator I’m in charge of being on topic to talking about specific topics and getting to actionable ends and having even participation of productive conversation.

Ted Sive: I also have the hat of coach and opinion aid, the opinion aider one is like the subject matter. If my clients are talking about whether to get into the K12 market or not, well that’s something I have a lot of perspective on, from my own work to my clients work. So I’ll say hey, I’m putting on my opinion aider hat and I’m going to share some thoughts. That’s a really different role than facilitator. Then the other role is coach, which is both the, “Wow, you’re awesome.” Whether that’s to a group of people or to an individual or also pointing out improvement areas. The coach really comes into the marketers job in the interview presentation. But I think even in regular meetings if the person going to that meeting is thinking about facilitation, coaching and opinion aiding, that will help guide their participation and when they talk.

David Lecours: It seems like it should be clear which hat you’re wearing. I’m thinking a way to make the meeting kind of fun would be, if you’re the facilitator, meeting leader, maybe you literally have three different hats. And you could kind of-

Ted Sive: Oh, I’ve done that. The other thing I do in meetings is when I’m talking too much I put a pen in my mouth. So if I start talking the pen will fall out or I’ll look like a fool.

David Lecours: You know going back to what you were talking about earlier about how much the meeting leader should be speaking. Somebody told me once, “Think of it sort of like a charm bracelet, right? As the facilitator you’re the actual bracelet, which would be sort of understated that links all the charms together. The charms of course being the meeting participants.” But the charms should be, these more dynamic and should be kind of the star of the show. And you should just be the support, the structural integrity, the way for them to come together. I thought that, I like visual metaphors so that spoke to me.

Ted Sive: I like that, I’m going to use that David. No, I think that’s a terrific one. Yeah, gold star, I like that.

David Lecours: Okay, so this question is purely personal, I am an introvert and as a result I prefer to work on deep thinking by myself in a quiet space. So as a result I really hate this idea of group brainstorming, I would much rather be assigned the homework of generating ideas and then come to the meeting with those ideas and hopefully use the group to evaluate the meeting. So how do you navigate the different personality types and specifically this wort of group idea generation? Is it good to generate ideas in groups? Am I crazy? Talk to me about it.

Ted Sive: No, you’re not crazy at all. All of us have probably been exposed at some level to understanding there’s different learning types and there’s different personality and style types. People process information differently people make decisions based on different values. And people are different when they are happy and then when they are under stress. You put all that into a pot and a different topic can and should be addressed different ways by different individuals.

Ted Sive: So I think the practical answer to that is you really have to do both. You have to allow different people to process and do things in their own way. At the same time, the meeting has a purpose. Which is the assembly of the individuals, the whole is greater than just the assembly of individuals. So this gets to that large meeting, workshop, retreat. I generally do assign homework beforehand and it’s in all sorts of different formats and different levels of seriousness or fun. If you’re having a meeting where there’s some brainstorming or some idea generation expected, I do think it’s really beneficial to give people an assignment beforehand. A whole heck of a lot of people are not going to prepare much and that’s okay. People like you will really like it. And you can sometimes put some, “Hey, you’re going to be presenting for 90 seconds, an answer to the question.” Well for those people who don’t prepare their more likely to prepare and if they don’t, you know-

David Lecours: Yeah, and if they have a role.

Ted Sive: Yeah, so both, is my answer to your question.

David Lecours: Yeah, that makes sense. So how does somebody, let’s say, well not prepare but handling these different size groups, so dynamics obviously are very different in a small group, which we defined as eight or less versus large. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how to approach each one to get the most out of the meeting.

Ted Sive: Well, one of the things I do in my work, you know I actually train facilitation and if anyone’s listening to me and has heard me speak previously at SPMS or AIA or elsewhere, will know I always like numbers and steps. I think of preparing for meetings in five steps and those steps are analyzing the specifics, who’s there, what’s their personalities, what’s the setting? That’s the same, no matter the size of the group. Create the agenda, we talked about agenda before here. Anticipate discussion, what might be bad news, what’s the information that’s needed, who might be good people to facilitate different portions? What’s the flow want to be? Once again, I think instinctively, with a smaller group, well these things are probably more important, all these things are more important with a larger group, because you have more chance for people to sort of fade out and lose the connection.

Ted Sive: But you’re going to have differences between those smaller groups and larger groups when you’re thinking about the discussion. [crosstalk 00:32:07]

David Lecours: It seems like good to break the group, a group bigger than eight and you’re encouraging discussion to break them up into smaller groups, and then report back.

Ted Sive: Well absolutely, that’s a great technique. Certainly if you’re meeting for more than two or three hours, I really suggest that, absolutely. So anticipate the discussion and then the quantity of discussion and how to get people involved. My fourth step is lead with confidence and we talk a lot here about, what’s your role? Confident in your role, take command. That whole piece about note taking and how you’re taking notes, that’s a piece of confidence. Then, really from the mental, engage in dialog. This gets back to, what’s the topic being talked about and looking for that moment of excitement and interest. A lot of that gets to the physical piece. Again here there’s an analogy, if that’s what it is, back to preparing for interviews. When we’re working with teams on interview prep a lot of markers are thinking about physical language and physical communication, on watching physical communication.

Ted Sive: This exact thing is happening in meetings, and I sat in meetings where I’ve watched the facilitator miss the physical ques. Miss that time when someone’s engaged or excited or wanting to say more, they’re being quiet but you can tell they’ve got something to say. So engaging in that dialog, where all those people are, that’s really what you want in the meeting is that dialog.

David Lecours: Yeah, those are great tips. Well Ted, we’re about out of time but I want to make sure our audience has a chance to connect with you offline if they want to and learn more about you, and what you do. Is there a good place for them to go? Either online-

Ted Sive: I’ve used the term all the time, my website is like the cobblers children. The cobblers children are the people who have the worst shoes. And I’m sometimes embarrassed by my website, but certainly people can go to my website it’s tedsive.com and read the format on my LinkedIn profile.

David Lecours: All right, super, well that’s it for this episode of PSM show. Where today we focused on meeting facilitation, and I feel like I learned a ton, so thank you so much Ted. And thank you also for our sponsor SPMS. So audience if you have questions or comments, suggestions for future guests, please write to us. Go over to PSM.show, and you can scroll down to the contact form and send us a quick note.

David Lecours: From Ted Sive and myself David Lecours, best wishes leading your next meeting.

 

This episode runs 29 min.

Inspired by the book, The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, David Lecours and Josh Miles discuss how key moments affect the A/E/C client and employee experience.

Subscribe to PMS Show on iTunes

 

Mentioned in This Episode 142: The Power of Moments

 

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact book by Dan and Chip Heath
Moments and employee and client experience, CX and EX
How to identify elements common in defining moments
How to create defining moments
Moments at times of transition: first day, last day, promotion, retirement, project wins, milestones
Defining moments must be memorable and meaningful
Defining moments must be E-P-I-C
Elevation – moments than rise above the everyday
Pride – moments of achievement
Insight – moments to rewire our understanding
Connection – moments strengthened because they are shared 

 

Production of PSM Show is underwritten by:

 

We Want to Hear From You

 Let us know what you think about this episode. Should we do more interviews? Or, would you prefer just Josh and David (no guests)? Or should we get rid of Josh and David altogether? Use the form on our homepage to let us know.

 

Subscribe to our Podcast

 To subscribe to the PSM podcast in iTunes – click here

 

Read the Episode

Announcer: Welcome to PSM, the Professional Services Marketing podcast, it’s insight, applied.

Josh Miles: Hey David, I hear you read a good book that you want to talk about today.

David Lecours: I did, in fact, read a good book, and it’s called, The Power of Moments, by Dan and Chip Heath. I read a bunch of their books, one of which is, Made To Stick, which is one of my favorites. I look forward to talking about that book. But first, this sponsor moment.

Josh Miles: PSM show is underwritten by SMPS, whose vision is, business transformed through marketing leadership. Visit smps.org to learn more.

Announcer: This is PSM, it’s insight applied.

David Lecours: Hey Josh, before we get started on this topic, I wanted to circle back to a topic we talked about in Episode 139 on firm naming. I understand you just got a new dog, a new puppy, and I’m guessing you went through some sort of naming exercise or had to come up with a name. How did that go, and what name did you come up with?

Josh Miles: It was quite the naming process. We had a good ole family fight. We came up with all of these good ideas. Actually was, we’ve been talking about getting a French bulldog for years. It all escalated quite quickly while we were out of town a few weeks ago. He’s actually arriving on Saturday. When this episode airs, this dog will already be chewing and peeing on things in our house. Very excited to welcome Bruce Wayne Miles to the family. Of course, with the bat-like ears on the French bulldog is, it was the inspiration. We had lots of other close runners-up in the naming category. One was, the breeder had named him, the sort of the penciled in name was, Sully. Which we liked, as you know kind of the Monster’s Inc.

David Lecours: Oh, yeah.

Josh Miles: Also, the pilot Sully, [crosstalk 00:02:14] who rescued the plane, he was a Purdue grad, which April and I are grads. That was a strong runner-up, even though it was just random that she named him Sully. Then, our daughter wanted to call him Marquis De Lafayette, who is from Hamilton and French. Also, the Lafayette connections at Perdue University, coincidentally so.

David Lecours: Yeah, some deep thinking. I like it.

Josh Miles: Yeah, so Bruce it is. Bruce it is. I was like, since dada has strucken the check, dada gets the overrule, overriding vote. Bruce it is.

David Lecours: Well that’s exciting.

David Lecours: All right, so on with the show.

Josh Miles: Yeah.

Josh Miles: So about this book, this is related to customer experience through CX

David Lecours: Yeah, that’s why I thought it would probably be relative for our audience, because gosh, so many people are talking about customer or client experience CX. I should explain that the tag, or the subtitle of the book is, Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact. This book, and the concepts are relevant for client experience. They’re definitely relevant for employee experience. I would argue they’re relevant for just any sort of personal experience, right? We always want to have these impactful moments with our friends, our family, our clients, our coworkers. That’s why I thought it would be cool to talk about this.

David Lecours: What I found is that the book sort of identifies, kind of two different themes. One is, they identified elements that are common in what they call defining moments. We’ll talk a little bit more about defining moments in a minute. Then the second part is, that you can create these defining moments using some kind of key elements or a framework, that we’ll also get into. It’s encouraging that it’s not just totally random, and that we can actually have some control over creating these powerful and defining moments.

Josh Miles: What’s some, maybe good in theory, but do you think it’s realistic to be able to create memorable experiences in kind of your everyday?

David Lecours: Yeah, I don’t think that everyday is going to be this over the top kind of thing. I mean, as a bit of an adrenaline junkie, that’s hard for me to say, because I like creating amazing experiences. My wife has to remind me sometimes these projects are a bit of a grind and work can, is not going to be the super, sexy, exciting thing. We just have to get through the slow times. But I do think that defining moments can be created and we just have to be somewhat selective, right? It’s sort of the idea, if everything is at 11, then we all sort of reset and that becomes the new normal or the new baseline. Then you have to ratchet it up to 11 again, which is just highly impossible.

Josh Miles: Right.

David Lecours: What I found out from this book was that a lot of times these defining moments can happen at times of transition. I want our audience to think of, kind of key transition times. Let’s say, for the employee experience, key transition times would be things like, their first day of work, their last day of work. Which is something that often goes totally unnoticed. It’s sort of like, okay don’t let the door hit you on the rear on the way out. The reality of it is that someone may boomerang back and that person may be an eventual client someday, you never know. It really [bahoofs 00:06:01] us to have great last day moments as well. I don’t know, what are some other ones you can think of that relate to employees, Josh?

Josh Miles: Yeah, well just to echo that, I think that’s something that our organization is trying to do a much bigger, better job on, is that initial onboarding. You know, because we don’t hire, in smaller organizations you don’t hire somebody so regularly. There’s often big gaps in between onboarding. Even just keeping track of what you did the last time, and photographing the stuff on the new employee’s desk, so that you can go back and go, “Did we give them a tshirt and an ink pen, or just a coffee mug, or …”

David Lecours: Yeah, because otherwise people would be jealous. How come I didn’t get …

Josh Miles: Just to be, yeah, just to be consistent because everybody wants the full experience. I guess along the same lines as first day and last day would be, if someone makes some place to retirement age, or has a big anniversary. Those are always exciting too.

David Lecours: Yeah, and then also a transition, you wouldn’t typically think of it, but a project win is a transition. In other words, you’re sort of transitioning into this new project, or if there’s a significant marketing goal that was achieved and it’s going to move you from out of one state into the next. That would be something that you could make a great moment out of. That’s kind of more on the employee side. Then the second track of this is more on the client side. After you’ve won that project, having some kind of significant kickoff with the client.

David Lecours: One thing that I’ve started to do with my clients is to do a check-in when we start a new project, and it’s a new client, and say “Hey, what’s your sort of past baggage working with a creative agency?” Because, as we start this new relationship I don’t want any of that past baggage to cloud our new relationship. You know, if they’ve been burned in some way, then I can make a note to myself. Don’t turn things in late, or whatever it is, don’t show up to meetings thirty minutes late kind of stuff.

David Lecours: Also, within that is key meetings. There’s going to be certain project milestones that are essential. Of course, project completion is a transition. Like, topping out, when a building reaches the sort of highest point of the structural build. I think that’s something worthwhile.

David Lecours: I think you could have an anniversaries with clients too. Let’s say, you’ve worked with somebody for five years, it might be worthwhile to make a big deal out of that. It certainly would be unexpected.

David Lecours: Then the other part, most of our projects involve occupancy, in some form or another, making that a moment that’s worth celebrating. When the client actually moves into the building or a public park opens, and the public starts to occupy it.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I think related to the marketing thing or the occupancy, kind of the related thing to that from an agency or marketing perspective, would be like a big brand launch or big website launch. I think those are certainly potential for a big memorable moment.

David Lecours: Yeah, yeah.

David Lecours: Josh, when you think of defining moments what kind of comes up for you?

Josh Miles: I think about things in the past and previous roles where it’s that day, that event or that project that sticks with you. That when you look back and smile on your time there, what are those things that you look back at? The things that stick in your memory and really … For me, my pet word, has always been impact.

David Lecours: Right

Josh Miles: Those moments where I felt impact first and foremost. I think, those are the ones that stick out to me. How about you?

David Lecours: Yeah, definitely the memorable part, one of the things that the book made a real point of was, something can be memorable, but it could be memorable and not such a great experience, right? [inaudible 00:10:09] made this distinction of these two M’s, the memorable and the meaningful. Meaningful, in of course in a positive way. It has, yeah, it’s not just sort of hollow memorable, like just something that sort of shiny but is something that is meaningful tends to have an impact. Then just knowing, we can create these moments, which kind of transitions us into the next sort of part of what I wanted to talk about and how they organized the book, is they came up with this acronym of how we can create defining moments. I love the acronym, because it relevant, and it’s EPIC. You can think of epic moments.

Josh Miles: Of course, as an adrenaline junkie, you would like the EPIC acronym.

David Lecours: Yes, yes! And the southern Californian, who probably, in his youth, used the word epic a little too much. Dude! That’s epic!

David Lecours: EPIC stands for, elevation, pride, insight and connection. We’ll go through each one of those and talk about what those could mean, as a way to create a defining moment. The first one, elev-

Josh Miles: [inaudible 00:11:26] impacts the elevation thing a little bit for us. What’s that about?

David Lecours: Elevation, are moments that rise above the everyday experience. In other words, exceeding expectations. They gave this great opening example, about this hotel, in Hollywood, that had a pool and there’s this button by the pool, and if you go and push the button it triggers a waiter to come and serve you a popsicle of your choice. It’s a popsicle button. Imagine sitting by the pool, it’s hot out, and you have kids that like sweet things. I mean, I’m an adult and I like sweet things. Anyway, I can go and push this button and some guy is going to come out with a silver tray and offer me a array of popsicles. For free! Well, nothing’s free, you’re paying for the room. Anyway, I think it’s a pretty cool concept. So anyway,

Josh Miles: Is this like an unmarked button? It’s just like a blind button and you hit the thing and it closes?

David Lecours: Yeah, yeah I don’t think it’s, right, I don’t think it’s sort of like, I mean when you check in they tell you about it. But, I don’t think they make a big signage, kind of thing.

Josh Miles: It’s so random but amazing also.

David Lecours: Yeah, exactly. It just so unexpected and I think that’s the key. We’re just so inundated with so many different experiences. The idea of being able to surprise people in a good way, is really good.

David Lecours: The other part of elevation is the idea that somehow boosting sensory pleasures, if you think of the five senses. Let’s talk about the first one, which is touch. They made a note that a lot of times these defining moments happen when were wearing different clothes. If you think about, a graduation, you wear this ceremonial robe. That puts you in this mindset that this is something special. It seems like the greatest adult holiday these days, is Halloween. I think that people like it because they get to don these other costumes and they get to maybe take on an alter ego. That’s sort of a touch idea of alternate clothing, is a way to, even if it was just something sort of fun, like an everyday meeting. Yeah, maybe you wouldn’t put on an entire costume, but you could do something fun, like with funny hats or things that would, maybe people would have to take on certain roles in the meeting. As the meeting facilitator, you could come up with props that would relate to that role that you had to take on in the meeting.

David Lecours: That’s the touch part, the other way, of course is taste. If you can involve food in some way, food or drink. This is why things like holiday traditions can be real meaningful. As a lot of times, there will be ceremonial food that you only eat at that particular time like, Thanksgiving turkey or Easter … whatever you eat at Easter, chocolate bunnies.

Josh Miles: Cadbury Eggs.

David Lecours: Then sound, if you could incorporate music or some sort of sonic event.

David Lecours: Sight, would be maybe moving the location. I think sometimes, we just get so put on autopilot, when we have meetings in the same spot every time. Why not mix it up? Do an offsite meeting, rent out a table at a restaurant, or some other place that gets people thinking in a slightly new way and boosting these sensory pleasures.

Josh Miles: Yeah I was just thinking about at all of our fraternity parties or dances, we would always play Piano Man, as the last song.

David Lecours: Oh sweet!

Josh Miles: That’s a traditional thing. Now any time we hear Piano Man, it brings back all these memories or feelings.

David Lecours: Totally, yeah.

David Lecours: It’s about creating these rituals, and people like those. That’s why if you go to a sporting event and they sing the same song, or chant, or seventh inning stretch, everyone gets to chant, sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame, kind of thing. That impacts our brains and helps make things memorable.

Josh Miles: What’s next on the list? This is the P, right?

David Lecours: Right, there’s a couple other things I want to touch base real quickly, within elevation. There’s this idea of somehow raising the stakes, helps things become more memorable and defining. If there is some sort of way to gamify whatever you’re doing, and make it some sort of fun competition. Something where you level up, to make it to the next level, so you have these series of to do’s that enable you to move to the next level. I think this one, often we don’t have to do, it’s already sort of inherent, but the idea of having some sort of deadline, or pressure can help make the stakes seem higher and help your senses become more aware. That makes for a more defining moment.

Josh Miles: There’s probably a lot of marketing teams out there that could relate to that, when they had to get the proposal out or deliver things.

David Lecours: Yeah, right totally. There’s this sort of bonding thing that happens. We have gone into battle together and we got this thing done and now we can hopefully celebrate that we’re still alive.

David Lecours: To summarize, anything that breaks the norm, that’s sort of strategic surprise. For example, Southwest used to be the only airline that would do these funny regulation announcements, where they’d talk about the places to where you could exit the airplane, put on your oxygen mask first. That’s not so much of a surprise anymore, now everybody’s funny. When they did it, it really did break the norm. Anyway you can break the script helps elevate things.

David Lecours: The next up is pride, the P part of EPIC. These would be any sort of moments of achievement where any sort of recognition, gratitude. I think, as marketers we could do a better job of probably expressing gratitude to, not only our coworkers for helping us out, getting us the information we needed for the proposal. Writing hand thank you notes to clients for hiring us, and for being a great client. It’s so easy, in the digital age, to just zip off a text or an email, and that’s better than nothing for sure. But, if you take that extra step of something analog it has a meaningful, and could be a defining moment.

David Lecours: Their example in this was, it’s a defining moment when a kid, who’s in cub scouts, or boy scouts and they get a merit badge. If you’re a karate person you get a belt for achieving a certain level.

David Lecours: Maybe as you’re setting up your marketing plan, you could have things in there that, where there are little ceremonies of fun little things that could say, “Hey, you get your yellow belt, brown belt, or black belt,” or something like that.

Josh Miles: Even the digital badge thing, a certification. I’m a speaker at an event, or those kind of things.

David Lecours: Oh yeah! Oh right, exactly.

Josh Miles: It’s interesting how the badges and belts kind of correlate to the wearing different clothes. You’re not only wearing different clothes but you have a thing, you get to add to your ensemble.

David Lecours: Right, right, right

Josh Miles: To show the pride.

David Lecours: Yeah so right, at the conference you can apply those little adhesive backed ribbons to your badge to indicate that you’re a speaker, or what chapter you’re from. It suggests this idea of achievement, and I think that can be beneficial.

Josh Miles: Sometimes, those things get a little [inaudible 00:19:28]

David Lecours: It may get a little ridiculous, I know, I know. Yeah.

Josh Miles: You know who you are listeners.

David Lecours: Yeah, that’s right.

David Lecours: If you’ve got five or more ribbons attached to your conference badge, you need to just check in with yourself.

Josh Miles: If your lanyard is getting in your own way.

David Lecours: It’s dragging your head down to the floor because it’s so heavy. Right, it shouldn’t be sending you to the chiropractor.

David Lecours: All right, E-P-, now we’re on to I, insight. If you can create a moment where people, somehow they get rewired of either themselves or the world, I know the world is a large ask here. Giving somebody the ability to learn something significant, it’s some sort of education event or something where people have some sort of aha moment. Then it’s going to be, the chances of it being a defining moment are significantly greater. Any defining or aha moment’s recently, Josh?

Josh Miles: Yeah actually, I think this is worth talking about entirely separately, but I was just at a really great program yesterday, that our local chapter put on and I think we should talk about that the next time we get together. I think it [crosstalk 00:20:52]

David Lecours: All right let’s do that for the next episode. All right so we’ll tease it, that when we do our next episode together we’ll talk about that.

Josh Miles: Sounds like a deal.

David Lecours: The other thing I learned in the book about insight. In order for you to really learn, you kind of got to stretch yourself. In order to do that, sometimes you have to risk failure. The cool thing is that whether you succeed or fail, you kind of never regain that original shape. By pushing yourself, by stretching you are almost guaranteed to grown in some way. Putting yourself out there or creating a experience where people somehow go beyond their comfort zone, be vulnerable, maybe it’s some sort of fun improv game or exercise that people do, that in doing so really opens people up. You get to learn a little about them, maybe something in their personal life, but it makes them much more human and much more approachable. Also, we learn about each others and about ourselves. That can be super powerful.

Josh Miles: Maybe letting a little bit of a different of my nerdiness show, but jumping into this last season of Game of Thrones, you see that all the characters are scarred and missing fingers and they’ve been through a really rough timeline, but I think that’s what kind of looks cool. We’re not just talking physical, but when you kind of have those learnings and develop those new things that’s the really the character that forms.

David Lecours: Yeah, those lines on your face tell stories, right?

David Lecours: Okay, the final one, C. Now, that’s it for insight. We’ve talked about elevation, pride, insight, and the last one is C, connection. We’ve eluded to this earlier, but this idea that moments are definitely strengthened because we share them together. I don’t know about you Josh, but if you’ve ever had experience of seeing a movie at home, versus seeing it in the theater, and it really elevates the experience. Both, in terms of if it’s a funny movie or a suspenseful movie, there’s just something about having that collected experience that makes it that much better.

Josh Miles: Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Miles: I think, you know I’m starting to think about too, when you add the connection piece there are things that you combine together, as there that moment of elevation where there’s experience with others. Maybe, I’m stealing a point here.

David Lecours: No, no, no absolutely. There’s definitely a crossover between all of these things. When they are working together then it’s going to be even more impactful.

David Lecours: One of my takeaways in reading this book about this idea of connection is that it’s really difficult, or I should say, you really can’t deliver a great client experience without first creating a great employee experience. I’ve heard it said in that way, and even in other ways before, but that really sort of rang true to me as I was, that wasn’t something that came directly from the book but it was kind of a takeaway. It’s like you got to create this comradery and group cohesion before you can deliver a great client experience, because that’s also going to require a lot of the same skills to get along and be effective within your group to move a client through a project, because there’s just so many things that happen along the way.

Josh Miles: I think that, if listeners are interested in hearing more about that, our chat with Nicole La, earlier in the show is a good one to check out.

David Lecours: Absolutely, that was episode 109. That was a really good one.

David Lecours: This idea to create some sort of social bond that ties the group together. One of the things they said in the book was that laughter was 30 times more common in social settings than in private ones. Which makes sense because if you’re all alone and you’re just laughing out loud it’s a little awkward. Maybe there’s a way to incorporate humor in some way, whether it’s [inaudible 00:25:00] or take an improv class and learning some exercises or, I don’t know, bringing in a comedian or something that’s fun and funny, as a way to lighten things up.

Josh Miles: If you’re sitting in your room, laughing by yourself and not listening to us, because we’re hilarious.

David Lecours: They made this point that purpose isn’t just discovered, it’s cultivated. In other words, you might not know exactly why the project is significant. You just can’t sort of find it. Sometimes, you have to cultivate that and really think through and invent a little bit about why the project you’re working on has value and why it’s meaningful. Whether that’s thinking how it’s going to benefit the end user, who’s going to occupy that building, or how it may be sustainable and that’s going to help benefit the planet. It may not always be apparent, sometimes the purpose must be cultivated.

David Lecours: Then, I guess, the final thing I’ll share about this idea of connection, is something I eluded to earlier. This idea of sharing vulnerability, I’m a fan of Brene Brown and her work, and she talks about this idea of intimacy escalates with this idea of turn taking. If I open up and share something about myself, or maybe I just don’t have all the answers for something, but being candid about that up front and saying “Hey, I could use some help here,” “I think this may be the way to go but let me know and I want your opinion.” There’s this thing in our brains called mirror neurons, and what happens is basically defined as monkey see, monkey do. If I see you do something like that, I tend to want to reciprocate and then open up and share something. Turn taking creates sort of this nice upward spiral of creating this connection. Which is the final C in the EPIC.

Josh Miles: You know for fans of the Tim Ferriss show, this is a tactic that he uses all the time. It used to frustrate me that he keeps telling the same stories about himself to people he’s interviewing and often it’s something really dumb that he’s done before, and he just repeats it all the time. It totally helps that guest let their guard down. It’s kind of his go to handful of stories, that they in turn and kind respond with more personal and deep stories, that maybe you haven’t heard from someone else’s show.

David Lecours: Yeah, well you’ve heard that story before, the guest most likely hasn’t, so it’s totally effective.

Josh Miles: Which totally makes his podcast epic.

David Lecours: The good thing is there’s that 15 second advance thing, now don’t use that on our podcast, but if we’re starting to repeat ourselves you can always use that button to move forward.

Josh Miles: That’s right.

David Lecours: Yeah that’s it, it was really a powerful book and it’s timely for today. I think there’s a lot of lessons in there that we can use to try to create these defining moments. Because, really that’s what builds the brand, right? That’s what builds a career, it’s these series or string of moments strung together. I think it’s really important.

Josh Miles: Great, I’m going to have to check that out and again the book is, Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. Is that right?

David Lecours: We’ll include a link to that in our show. No, it’s at psm.show.

Josh Miles: Well I guess that brings us about to the end of the show. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions for future shows or guests, you can write to us at psm.show, scroll down to contact us and drop us a line. That’s it for this episode of PSM show, from David Lecours and myself, Josh Miles, we’ll see you next time.