What speaking to a room full of executives reminded me about leadership, psychology, collaboration, and our strange human need to solve problems.
I like to think I understand people.
A fairly significant portion of my career has been spent studying why people do what they do: psychology, human behavior, decision-making, motivation, creativity. leadership…all the classics. It’s all about why we buy things, why we believe things, and why smart people occasionally do remarkably dumb things. Understanding people has become such a big part of how I pay my bills, but apparently I still have some work to do, because it seems I really don’t understand people as well as I thought I did.
Recently, I had the chance to participate in Off Record, an invite-only gathering of more than 60 marketing executives designed to create experiences where they can actually talk, think, and work together instead of exchanging business cards while pretending they aren’t looking over each other’s shoulders for someone more important.
I started the event on stage, moderating a panel about AI search and the “new era of discoverability.” It was one of those conversations a moderator hopes for because the people on the panel actually know what they’re talking about. My job was easy. I didn’t have to manufacture a conversation; I justI had to ask the question that opened the conversation up, with the hope of following an interesting idea around. That, to me, is what good moderation is because it was far less of me spouting my nonsense.
Then came the part I was much less confident about, the part where I proved I don’t understand people: Executive Workshops!
The idea was to put these C-suite and senior marketing leaders into small teams, give them a real-world business challenge, and ask them to solve it collaboratively. They’d have to bring their individual experiences, industry knowledge, perspectives, and personalities into the room, work through the problem, build a recommendation, and eventually present it.
Boring!
Basically, we invited a bunch of fancy executives to a networking event and then told them to do work.
My immediate thought was: Nobody is going to want to do this. Who goes to a networking event hoping for an assignment? Who even brings a laptop? Who walks past an open bar and thinks, “You know what would really make this evening better? A difficult strategic problem that puts my brain to the test.”
So, I prepared accordingly.
I tried to make the exercise fun. A little ridiculous and loose enough that nobody would feel like they were suddenly back at the office. My job as the workshop facilitator was to create some energy, drive conversation when things got quiet, keep the team moving when they wandered, make sure everyone had an opportunity to speak, and prevent the biggest personalities from swallowing the room whole. But I really focused on making it not work. I made up a dumb little story that turned the assignment into play, which I hoped would help them just relax.
I had a plan! Then I met my team of execs. (As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they punched in the mouth.”)
Brenda Jahnke from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Ann Collette Krantz from Masonicare, Giovana Monaco from Connex Credit Union, Tanya Palmer-Labeck and Megan Arias from Mattatuck Museum, and Whitney Cadett from Sikorsky Credit Union.
And they absolutely ruined my plan, because they needed almost none of it, and they shockingly actually embraced the work. What the fuck was going on in this world?!?!?!
They came in with fervor and fury. Not competitive fury. Creative fury! It’s that wondrous energy you see when smart people are given a problem they didn’t know they wanted to solve and suddenly can’t stop solving it.
I was supposed to drive the conversation. I didn’t have to.
I was supposed to keep them focused. I didn’t have to.
I was supposed to make sure everyone spoke. I didn’t have to.
I was supposed to keep people from talking over each other, fighting for attention, or turning the whole thing into a fight to see who could be smarter, faster, louder. I really didn’t have to.
They listened. They built on each other. They disagreed without becoming defensive. An idea from one person became a better idea from someone else. People moved naturally between leading and following depending on where their expertise was most useful. Ann even pitched a great movie idea! And every time I assumed they must be getting tired of thinking, I was wrong again.
I offered a break. Nope!
I reminded them there was an open bar. Nothing!
I basically kept trying to rescue these poor executives from the terrible burden of intellectual engagement, and they politely ignored me and kept working. Weird!
Maybe I’m just lazy, or maybe there’s actually some interesting psychology underneath what happened.
Their Motivation Made It Work
One aspect of our motivation research is Self-Determination Theory, which argues that human motivation is strongly influenced by three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
We want some ownership over what we’re doing, and opportunities to use and demonstrate our abilities. And we want meaningful connection with other people. That room had all three.
Nobody was being told exactly how to solve the problem. They had autonomy.
The exercise gave accomplished people a chance to bring their experience and intelligence to something difficult. There was definitely competence.
And because they were solving something together instead of standing around making small talk, they developed connection through the work itself. Clear relatedness.
Maybe we misunderstand what people actually want from professional events. We assume people want less friction. Less work. Less demand. More cocktails. More entertainment. More passive experiences. More business cards to toss later.
But humans don’t necessarily come alive when nothing is being asked of us. Sometimes we come alive when something interesting is being asked of us.
Shit, I’m now selling our events. I don’t want to do that, so let’s get nerdy again…
Famously unpronounceable psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as the state that can emerge when challenge and ability meet at a sweet spot. Too little challenge and we become bored; too much and we become anxious. Somewhere between the two, we become absorbed.
You could see versions of that flow state in play during our workshop. These weren’t executives being forced into an exercise. They were leaders being given a problem worthy of their attention, teamed with people worthy of solving it together.
My team eventually built a smart, creative solution and delivered a presentation filled with personality. But what I remember more than the answer they created was watching the magic happen.
They were smiling. They were thinking. They were building. They were getting to know one another through something far more revealing than, “So, what do you do?” All while I presumed they wanted to do absolutely none of this.
That’s my biggest takeaway from Off Record: Networking asks people to connect. Collaboration gives them a reason to connect, as humans.
We need more of that, don’t we?
I went into the workshop assuming that most of these executives would tolerate the exercise because we asked them to. Instead, they reminded me why I love rooms like this in the first place. I got to see, once again, that people are strange, complicated, and constantly violating the neat little models we build to explain them.
Maybe the moment we think we’ve completely figured people out is probably the moment we’ve stopped paying attention to them, and we start becoming terrible at our jobs. So, I guess it’s a good thing that I really don’t understand people.
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James Dowd is the COO and Chief Creative Officer of Rebellion Group, an author, keynote speaker, moderator, and executive facilitator who explores the intersection of human behavior, creativity, leadership, marketing, and technology. He has spent his career studying how people think, make decisions, communicate, collaborate, and create, then applying that understanding to brands, businesses, teams, and rooms full of very opinionated people.