How do we break down the barriers to collaboration when we gather?

Christine: 00:08

Welcome to the More the Brainier, the brave space where creative minds come to share and solve their most pressing burning questions. From Montreal, I'm your host, Christine Renaud, CEO of Braindate.

Over the last decade at Braindate, I've seen firsthand how knowledge-sharing discussions can be transformative, how unexpected insights emerge when brilliant minds think together. Feeling stuck on a challenge? Sometimes all it takes is a fresh perspective, or three, to light the way forward.

In the studio with me today is Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer.

Jane, who are the guests on today's show?

Jane: 00:57

This month, our three guests work hard at forging a path off the beaten track: Alex McLean, Co-Founder and CEO at Alveole, Mara Sandoval, Head of Event Design and Interaction at the World Economic Forum, and Cindy Gallup, CEO and Founder of MakeLoveNotPorn. This month, we'll be covering the themes of the birds and the bees; how to find money from people you can actually work with and how to make the switch from simply gathering to true collaboration.

Christine: 01:34

Thank you, Jane. Cindy, Alex, Mara, bonjour, welcome again. Today's conversation is all about the impact of bringing people together.

We'll talk about design and hosting, but before we get there, I would love to start with something Priya Parker often reminds us that great gatherings don't just depend on great hosts. They also depend on great guests too. So I'm curious, when you bring people together, whether for work or for pleasure, what makes someone a truly good guest?

Cindy, do you want to get us started?

Cindy: 02:05

So I used to throw very big birthday parties on my birthday every year when I lived in a much larger apartment. And I had a very rigorous no plus one rule. You had to be either married or actively engaged, or you had to pitch me on why you should be allowed. And about 200 people passed through my apartment in the course of the evening. Basically, every single guest at this party has two things in common:

The first is you are a friend of mine, therefore you are a very nice person because that is my number one criteria for friends. So you know that every single person at this party is a very nice person, personally endorsed by me. And secondly, you're a friend of mine, you all have me in common. And so you all have something to talk about. And so you can absolutely go up to anybody at this party, know they're a nice person and go, how do you know somebody? And my particles were famous. They were enormous fun. People made so many new friends. And so it really is about who is a real friend, who is therefore a very nice person. And then you can't go wrong.

Christine: 03:09

And when you say birthday parties, was it just for your own or for everybody?

Cindy: 03:12

No,no, no, no, no. I do that once a year!

Christine: 03:16

That's amazing. And Alex?

Alex: 03:19

I like to do something a little similar where if I'm going to have quite a few people in a gathering, make sure that there's at least one wild card. Make sure that there's at least one person in there that people don't know and that will spark a bit more conversation to find and people get onto their best behavior if there's someone they don't know in the room as well. So I like the wild card advice.

Christine: 03:38

Fun, and Mara?

Mara: 03:40

Back in the day when I would invite people and have big fun dinner parties that were around themes, you know, we'd have different themes, so people get really excited about it. I always invited people that just had a lot of curiosity, you know, that just have lots of interest, that do lots of different things. So that, much like Cindy said, I really love to mix people that normally weren't together and just see what happened. And I usually found that if people did have that curiosity within, things could just emerge and there would be spontaneity in how the evening progressed and it was usually quite interesting and fun.

Christine: 04:13

And Mara, you're our special guest for today's episode.

Mara

I am.

Christine

Yes, and I'm very delighted to have you with us. And you mentioned that you're a lover of silence and nature. However, your main role at the World Economic Forum is Head of Event design and Interaction. So I'm not sure how much silence and nature you get to encounter on the job, but I would love to hear more about what you do at the World Economic Forum.

Mara: 04:37

Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me here. And it's really been fun getting to know Alex and Cindy as well, and their burning questions. So I'm a designer. I work at the World Economic Forum, which is an international organization for public and private cooperation. The thing about the forum is it has incredible convening power. And the area that I'm interested in is what happens when we bring people together and how do they collaborate.

So my background is actually first in anthropology. I studied at UC Berkeley and was really fascinated by society and how people behave and the patterns that we create over time. But then we realized I didn't really want to be in the field. I didn't picture myself as being an anthropologist in the field or being a professor. But what I really was fascinated by was this idea of stepping into the shoes of someone else, of being part of a community, getting to know them, and then learning from them.

And then when I was at university, I discovered graphic design. I was always creative. I didn't know graphic design existed. And then I realized that's what I wanted to do. My mother told me, always finish what you start, so I finished my degree in anthropology and then went on to study design at the Art Center College of Design. And I realized that this curiosity about human behavior, about how people are together and learning about other people was very applicable in design, in graphic design.

But it wasn't until I began working at the World Economic Forum that I was able to merge my learnings around anthropology and graphic design in the sense that I started to work with content, so presentations, what were people presenting and how to make it more digestible, and also the spaces.

So it wasn't just about what people were thinking and saying, but what were the spaces looking like and what was actually the entire journey from the moment that someone was invited to the event: how they were invited to the event, what it was like when they arrived, how they found their way, and what they did when they went to a session and where they were asked to interact in the session, and then what happened afterwards. So it was really about the entire journey. And so I'm really interested in that, in design as a way of transforming how people interact, how people behave, and how design can help people get to very tangible outcomes and very clear objectives.

And that this is very important in how people come together and in making it meaningful. The way that it comes together is design as a theory of change. ⁓ And what that means is that it's the design goes beyond creating a product or a service or a system, but it's more of a strategic approach to drive this meaningful transformation. And it means that you can make intentional design decisions to shape behaviors, interactions and outcomes.

So this is the area that I'm quite interested in, in seeing and trying to apply within an organization like the World Economic Forum, which brings together very influential people, you know, there's high stakes for what these people are doing when they come together.

Christine: 07:29

Absolutely. And most people, I think, would know from the World Economic Forum, the Davos Summit. Can you just tell us quickly a little bit more about the other gatherings that you create?

Mara: 07:40

Davos, as we said, is what we're most known for. We have other events that are quite large that bring many people together. In China, in Dubai, we have an event coming up. We have many convenings also on a smaller scale that are more around initiatives that the forum is trying to bring forward.

You know our mission is to improve the state of the world. So in every sector that you can think of, in every area that can think of, there's a project, there's initiative going forward. So there's a lot of much smaller convenings that we're not really known for, but are quite important in bringing people that normally wouldn't speak about these things or have a hard time coming together. And the forum really plays that role in bringing people together to speak about these topics in a way, in sort of like a neutral space where people can really come together and engage and speak about topics that might be difficult elsewhere.

Christine: 08:29

Absolutely.

And that leads us directly to your burning question.

Please, Mara, just share with us your burning question and any context you feel might be interesting for us to understand.

Mara: 08:45

Yes, so my burning question is how do we break down the barriers to collaboration when we gather? It's a little bit connected to what Cindy had spoken about in an earlier moment, which was about change comes from the bottom up. So it's quite easy, I think, for the people that are actively thinking about or designing moments of how people can be to be proactive in how to do this.

But when it comes to getting sort of buy-in and the higher leadership, it's a little bit more difficult. And there is some kind of resistance. I'm not quite sure why. ⁓ The higher up you go, and not just in the organizations that I work for, but kind of anywhere, the higher up you go, the more resistance there is to come together in collaborative ways that are different from your usual, I don't know, boardroom setup. Or a situation where there's just a speaker and there's an audience.

So I'm interested in thinking about or trying to break that barrier of why is, that there seems to be that the higher up in leadership that people are, the more resistance there is to try to come together in ways that are less typical, that could be maybe more ⁓ emergent in terms of solutions, that could be more exploratory, more maybe even risky, but to break the usual way of how people come together.

So yeah, so that's what I'm trying to figure out is how to bring the methodologies, the practices of collaborative design, of emergent design into boardrooms.

Christine: 10:16

That's definitely very valuable.

I would love to move to our second section. So Alex, Cindy, it's time to ask your clarifying questions again not a moment to share advice or thoughts, but really just to try and understand Mara's perspective a bit better so we can support her. Alex, you want to start?

Alex: 10:44

Yeah, I'm less familiar with the space and so I'm curious, what are the things that you've tried? Like what are the things that you've explored and navigated through and learned? And I think that might give a little bit more colour on the kind of things that we can add on top of it.

Mara: 10:55

I've worked together with colleagues to put together sort of a training. It's called Interaction by Design. And I have partnered with an external agency called Matter Group. And this is a collective of designers and facilitators who are really experts at solving complex problems. And we've come together to basically outline some methodologies and design principles to get people started to have a common language within the organization of how we talk about designing, for example, a session or a workshop or a meeting.

And the idea really, the intention really there is to sort of normalize the thinking around this and standardize also, as I said, the language so that when we speak about things, so we all know what we're talking about. For me though, it's really about a mindset that all of this is about having a process in mind of where you start. The first principle is that you start with the end in mind. What is it you're trying to achieve? What is your objective?

And if you have clarity on that, then you go backwards to kind of figure out, how do you get there? And quite often what happens, again, not just in the organization I work for, but in many other places is people go straight to, this is what I have to do. I have to invite these people or I have to talk about this topic. And then they go straight there without asking why. Why do we need to do this? Why do we need to invite these people? Why do we do it? How is it going to serve others?

There's a process of asking all these questions to sort of to slow down so that you can speed up later to take the time to really be intentional about why you're asking people to come together. Yeah, so that's something that we're doing and it's just it's quite new. There's about 200 people that have done it so far and, you know, we're over a thousand people in the organization. And so what we're finding is that, you know, they're they're very the people that have done the training are really eager and excited about the possibilities.

But then because of the systems that we have in place or just the ways of doing things in the past, they're confronted with sort of resistance from people who haven't done the training or people who are not familiar with this language or this way of thinking. So that's why I'm thinking of trying to figure out, how do we bridge the two, right? The top and the bottom so that we're all speaking the same language and working towards the same things.

Alex: 13:06

Okay, thank you.

Christine

Cindy?

Cindy: 13:08

So, several clarifying questions, Mara. When you gave us your burning question originally, I took it as, you're asking two things: A) how can you inspire more collaboration within a gathering? secondly, how can you get more senior people to want to attend that gathering in the first place? And then I wasn't sure, now that you've spoken more within your own organization or are you asking that about the gatherings that you actually host and organize?

Christine: 13:38

I had the same question.

Mara: 13:40

It’s kind of the same for me, you know. As I mentioned, we convene people that are, you know, very high level, very influential decision makers and the resistance to try something different or rather the bias that people have towards how, you know, leaders want to learn or engage with each other is something that's set in tradition or maybe what's always happened in the past or the way that even they themselves, I believe, are used to coming together. And so there is this like, pattern, I would say that leaders have in the way that they come together that is manifested in the organization I work in. It's manifested in the way that many CEOs come together at our events, but of course in other events, it's not exclusive to what we do. And I'm just wondering why, why is there this resistance? Why do we always follow the same patterns for how we convene very high level people in that there are either like a board meeting or in a circle, that there seems to be the same formula.

Is there a possibility or is there an appetite to try something different? From where I sit as a designer, I'm absolutely convinced that the future of humanity, especially with AI coming at the forefront, is dependent on us being together and knowing how to collaborate. It's not enough just to bring us together. It's not enough to convene people. You have to have a formula or a methodology for what happens when you bring people together. And I just think that we're taking for granted how we can bring people at the highest level in public and private spaces together to discuss these very important topics and make decisions that make real concrete change. That was my very long answer.

Christine: 15:17

That's so relevant. And I wonder when I was listening to you talking earlier, what came to mind was the idea of politics, know, and party line, and not just talking about necessarily, ⁓ you know, head of state, but also, as you were mentioning, leaders, CEOs. And I wonder, what have you witnessed would be kind of the level of flexibility that they have in showing up as their true self for true collaboration? Versus them having to hold the party line to avoid any repercussion that would be connected with them, you know, kind of going rogue and that type of the impact that it could have on their organization.

Mara: 15:56

Yeah, well, two things. First, I think it's really important to say that what I'm suggesting in terms of changing how leaders convene and how they collaborate, it's not about being gimmicky, you know, using design to just, you know, do something differently. OK, now we're going to play with Lego and now we're going to do this or that. I think there's a time and place for where Lego is appropriate. And I do think leaders of all levels can benefit from using Lego in a workshop, let's say.

But it has to be very intentional. It has to be connected to, as I said before, the objective, right? That the journey that people are going to go through when they collaborate or when they convene is purposeful, and that the activities that they're doing is for a purpose. It's really important for me to clarify that because it's what makes it, in my mind, possible to bring these different ways of convening at the highest level.

Within our headquarters, we have a lot of photographs of past events. There's one photo of Quincy Jones. He's smiling and he's taking off his tie. And behind him, there's a sign that says, no ties permitted or something like this. So was a session that he was entering. It was in Davos. I don't know what session. And they were being asked to remove their tie. And that, for me, was very symbolic of what I'm talking about, where it might have been just that that was different in terms of how people showed up in that session. But by taking off their tie, they were signaling, there was a signal that, okay, this is going to be a bit more relaxed for whatever reason. I don't know the purpose for why they did that. I wasn't there when that was ⁓ created.

But I think that when, I think, again, designed well, I think all it takes is for someone to dare to do it differently and leaders will come along. But to get the approval to do that, let's say, or for people to accept that this can happen.I feel like sometimes there's a lot of resistance, again, because of the patterns that we've had in the past, because of maybe the protocols that we're used to, or the protocols that people expect to be put into play. And yet what I always believe is that we're all human at the end. And as humans, we share many similar things, emotions, desires, et cetera. And that maybe this is what would allow us to introduce these different ways of convening at the highest level if we just dared and just believe that it would be okay to do it. Again, with intention in mind, it was a very purposeful strategy for how to do it.

Christine: 18:27

Okay, I know that our listeners will love this discussion. So I'm very grateful that you brought it up, Maha. And it's time for you to sit back and relax and enjoy the conversation and for Alex, and I to discuss your challenge and see if we can provide any light that was not provided before. Cindy, would you like to get us started?

Cindy: 18:50

Sure. First of all, to drive more collaboration within a gathering, there's a very simple mechanism. Make the gathering majority women and you will see more collaboration as a result.

On the question about how do you get very senior people to a) be prepared to dedicate time to come to think that and b) then be more collaborative within it. I mean, first of all, ⁓ you absolutely have to make them feel that they are being invited to participate in something that is very special.

And when I say special, I don't mean exclusive or elitist. I mean, literally what you're inviting them to is something really unique and special because when they feel that, they absolutely will carve time out of their calendars. You absolutely make time for what you want to make time for.

And I find everything you talk about very interesting, Mara, because I have for many years exhorted the conference industry to completely reinvent the way it operates because, oh my God, the bar is set so low for the conference industry. People go to conferences expecting to be bored. And they go because it's a break from the office and it's a trip and it's away from the family, whatever. And so I literally have spent many years thinking about conference redesign and where I've actually been able to talk to conference organizers, I've urged conference redesign. And there are two things that I've been especially keen to try and get people to make happen.

So the first is completely rethinking, the format, the environment. So you'll be familiar with Bruce Mau, in his Incomplete Manifesto for Change, he cites a gathering that took place in, I think it took place in Stockholm in the 70s. And it was a collective of artists and creative people who observed that all the most interesting things happen at conferences in the bits in between. Not on the conference stage, not in the sessions, but in the bits in between.

And so they constructed and they organized and they held a conference composed entirely of the bits in between. So this conference was made up of: shared taxi rides to and from the airport, coffee breaks, smoke breaks outside. Literally, they put all of these things together.

Christine: 20:59

Bacon donuts.

Cindy: 21:00

Yeah.It was wildly successful and spawned a tonne of creative collaborations. I mean, that's an example of turning a conference inside out and redesigning it to put people into environments where things really happen.

to TED many years ago back in: 2000

But I bring up TED because…I mean, TED is brilliant at designing experiences. But my first starter before I started MakeLoveNotPorn was a startup called If We Ran the World. And it was inspired by a number of things that I observed, including my observation at TED. Because If We Ran the World came out in my observation that the single biggest pool of untapped natural resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action.

I absolutely found that observation striking me at TED because for the week of TED, TED is a hot house of good intentions. This is amazing. Speakers, we're all going to change the world together. Yeah. And you leave TED and psssht! all of those good intentions dissipate to nothingness. And so I built a platform that was designed to turn human and corporate good intentions into action.

And one example recently, I spoke on a sex tech panel at SIFTED, which is a tech summit that happens in London. And SIFTED asked me, you know, just for ideas how they could be more effective. And I went: Be the tech conference where female founders leave with checks. You invite a bunch of investors, you create a kind of speed pitch scenario, you get commitments that they will write a check to any female founder within that who will leave the conference with a check. The moment you become the conference of female founders leave with checks, the whole of the female tech world flocks to you. So action, action, action, make action happen, engineer action. Design action into the entire premise.

Christine: 23:10

I love it. Thank you, Cindy. Alex?

Alex: 23:12

I'm going to go in a whole other direction. ⁓

Christine: 23:13

Hahaha

Cindy: 23:16

great.

Alex: 23:17

⁓ I don't know the conference scene that well and the events scene. What came to mind as I was listening to kind of the burning question that you have is something I've taken up over a few months ago, or probably half a year now, of ⁓ meeting on regular basis with a group of CEOs and Founders through a pretty organized structure.

And there's something that's happened in those moments that I ⁓ wasn't very excited about getting into because it kind of broke this concept that I kind of lean on a lot, which is to give advice to people and then a little bit actually what we're doing in this this session right of asking a question and gaining advice and maybe listening more about the advice that you're given actually thinking about what the person is actually going through and there's only one rule in these these gatherings and it's that you can't give advice to people, actually no, there's more rules there's a bunch of structure on how these these actually work but they're er small groups of people that meet and that as CEOs probably giving advice constantly or giving indications constantly in doing this

And I found it really striking to get a group of people that, you know, spend 90 % of their time doing that, to not be able to do that, and actually just react through shared experiences. so, which I guess what I'm doing right now, of just sharing a personal experience, but it actually becomes quite powerful and interesting how everyone becomes very vulnerable very, very quickly when the thing that needs to come after someone's, you know, question or personal interaction is not an advice or not, you know, this is what you should do, but more, this reminds me of something that I'm going through and this is the emotions kind of coming through it. And so I was almost completely against it. I didn't know that this was part of this gathering and it's really transformed the way I think about now getting people and even thinking about how I react to people when they share things that they're going through. And I don't know how that gets intertwined into events and all that, but I thought that that simple rule created a whole new dynamic of between people that aren't wired that way necessarily.

Christine: 25:09

I love it. And Mara, when I was listening to you speaking, you said something I thought that was so important. As a person from the industry as well, I'm really something that I'm talking a lot with folks is the power of intention that we oftentimes probably because of the way we were schooled as participants, our posture when we attend an event is to be a spectator and just absorb whatever it is when we're not on our phone looking, checking our emails.

And I think to have a strong intention as a participant is key to having a self-directed experience. And you mentioned something that I really love. I don't know if it comes from you or it's actually something you said like this, but to make sure that the people that are going to be in the room are aware of what is it that you're trying to create for them so that they can align their own intention with the experience that you're creating. Because if they are not willing to let go of the party line and to collaborate and to feeling that they're being pushed out of their comfort zone. If they don't feel safe doing that for whichever reason, they won't engage. And I thought it was so powerful when you named that because I think that maybe there are some people attending your events that will not be willing to go there for reasons that might be, not even personal, but maybe organizational.

But the people that would be willing to go there and would be willing to engage in that type of collaboration that can generate the type of change at scale that we could see coming out of the World Economic Forum and the gatherings that you create, those people, they should be in that room and they should engage with that content. And they should be made aware that that's the intention. And if they're willing to go there, that's the session that they should attend.

So I think you're already with that design path that you're creating inside your organization. I think that's a great path. And I think the next step might be to make sure that the folks that are in the room at those sessions know what they're getting into and are excited about it.

And with that, I would love to grant you back your right to speak, Mara, and to hear any takeaways that you might have from our conversation.

Mara: 27:30

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, everyone. I took a lot of notes. Christine, what you were mentioning just now made me think about how sometimes what is needed is just a simple conversation. You know, like sometimes it doesn't really require anything more than that. And so what I'm signaling is really when a simple conversation is not enough, there should be the opportunity to be able to provide more meaningful outcomes, if you will, or to get more specific outcomes. ⁓

From Cindy, I really like the idea: “Make sh*t happen”. I feel like if that is the compass with which we design, then we'll really be focused on how to make sh*t happen. So I like that action and urgency connected to those words. And that really resonated with me, especially when we're talking about solving big systemic issues. It's not a moment to be casual about it. Let's just be really serious, right? Like, let's really action it. And as you said, action, action, action. So how to go about...in the case of what I'm talking about here is how to use design to make sure that we do action, action, action.

And Christine, what you mentioned about making sure that people are aware about what the intention is before they come into rooms. So it's not just the back of the room and need for the back of the room, but also for the people that are coming. That's really important.

And Cindy, as you said, that if people are aware that this is really unique and special, then they will come and I absolutely agree with you. I mean, if you feel like you're gonna really experience something different, really learn something, you will make the time, right? You will go on that journey.

And I think that's Alex, a little bit of what you were saying as well is that when you do change the formula of how, of what people expect and you create a space, like you went into that space, somehow trusting to go into that space, you took a risk, if you will, to just like go on that journey of what it was like to follow those rules and then found, you know, valuable outcomes because of it.

I think that's really important as well, right? That there's a way you created a way in for people to come in and experiment with you and to trust that they can. So yeah, lots to think about. There was a lot more. I need to reflect on it, but thank you so much for your ideas.

Christine: 29:41

Alex, Cindy, Mara, thank you so much. This is the end of our series. It was such a delight to have you all, and I'm really grateful for your thoughts and your kindness and your compassion. And excited to see you in real life very soon. Alex at the office in a couple of days, and Mara and Cindy hopefully at a conference near you, at a gathering near you.

Mara: 30:03

Come your way.

Christine: 30:04

Absolutely! And thank you also to Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer here at The More the Brainier, and to Jenya Sverlov and Chris Leon, our delightful sound engineers.

Jane: 30:16

Thank you Mara, Alex, Cindy and Christine.

If you have a contribution to Mara's burning question, please share it on Braindate's LinkedIn page while we'll be posting this episode or send us an email at TMTB@braindate.com.

And this brings us to the end of our series for June and also to our summer break. Have a great July and August and join us in October for our fifth series.

This podcast was brought to you by Braindate, the world's leading technology that turns your event into a knowledge sharing feast, leaving your participants transformed by each other.