Leading Through Collaboration: A New Playbook for Advisory Teams with Douglas Ferguson

Thanks for having me. Doug.

[00:00:27] Doug Heikkinen: Before we get into the topic, can you tell us a little bit about Voltage Control and what you guys do there?

[00:00:34] Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. Happy to. We are a facilitation academy, which means that we train people on how to be collaborative leaders and to drive more productivity and effective collaboration across an organization.

I think it's a really critical leadership skill.

[00:00:53] Doug Heikkinen: So let's get into the topic. Financial advisors. What are some of the overlooked facilitation skills that financial advisors should learn to effectively manage and motivate their teams?

[00:01:06] Douglas Ferguson: The thing I always tell folks is that, when you're in a leadership position working with teams or groups or organizations of all sorts, it's really important to make sure that we are getting the best out of everyone. And as a leader, it's really exhausting to bring all the answers. And so facilitation skills are about how we draw the answers out of people and help them become stronger and more motivated to to be creative, to think about innovative solutions.

And so it's a really important skill to hone and craft if, especially if we're working with teams and trying to get more out of the groups we're working with.

[00:01:50] Doug Heikkinen: How can advisory firms use facilitation techniques to intentionally build their internal culture, especially when rapidly integrating new advisors and new team members.

[00:02:02] Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. I, there's a lot of, a lot of techniques. One of the things we talk a lot about in facilitation is this idea of connection before content. And so when you're integrating new members into the team, we certainly want them to be knowledgeable about the information and about the policies and procedures, but we also had to build a cohesive.

Highly connected organization. And making sure we dedicate time and energy into fostering those relationships will then create dividends long term. So this idea of we might need to move a little slow right now so we can move faster later. And I think a lot of times folks miss out on this idea of let's build the bedrock of a solid team and make sure that people are supporting each other, and, in as many ways as possible. And, so connection before content is a powerful one. Also, just thinking about the tools that are gonna best serve us for what we're trying to accomplish right now. And oftentimes folks will, default to kind of the way we've always run a meeting or the way we always gathered.

And instead, if we're more intentional about being clear on the purpose of what we're trying to accomplish, what are the ideal outcomes for right now, and then tailor fitting those tools in will generally create better results. So an example would be, are we trying to make a decision? And so let's be really clear on the fact that we're gonna make a decision together.

And how we're gonna even approach that decision. I think oftentimes folks will default into, let's just throw a meeting on the calendar. I'm hoping to get some information so I can make a decision. That wasn't clear to everyone. People walk out disgruntled 'cause they were like, why did we meet if they were gonna ignore all my advice and go make the decision?

And so the thing is setting those expectations up front so that we know what we're trying to accomplish and we're using the right tool for the job. 'Cause there's a whole arsenal of facilitation tools, but how do we ensure we're picking the right one that's gonna serve the purpose that we intend.

[00:04:17] Doug Heikkinen: Are you finding that advisory teams struggle with collaboration? And if so, how can leaders proactively address these challenges?

[00:04:28] Douglas Ferguson: I think lots of folks struggle with collaboration. If it's not something we're focused on. Oftentimes I'll see folks assume that collaboration is a natural outcome.

When you just throw people in a room or put people together in some sort of format, oh, I assembled this team, they're gonna collaborate. That's not always the case. And I always tell people to consider a gardening metaphor. We can't force a garden to grow. If we leave it unattended it's not necessarily gonna grow in ways that are most productive or are as bountiful as it could be. And so our job as leaders or gardeners of these teams is to set the conditions where they're gonna thrive. How are we making sure they have the right amount of water, the right around the sun?

They're protected in the right ways, but they're also free to expand and grow as needed. And so I think that's the biggest challenge is just assuming that it's a natural byproduct of humans being together and not taking the time to set the conditions for it to flourish and take root.

[00:05:37] Doug Heikkinen: In your experience, what's the difference between an advisory team that's merely functional and one that's really high performing, cohesive and innovative?

[00:05:49] Douglas Ferguson: Well, maybe that last word is really the differentiator, right? A team that's cohesive working together, they're gonna be more innovative. They're gonna come up with clever solutions. They're gonna create, they're gonna solve problems that maybe we even thought weren't even possible to solve.

They're gonna be offering unique solutions and drive outcomes for folks, when there's a new challenge in the market or just even the way, whether that's financial markets or even just the fickle markets that exist because of the way humans behave right? Then, that stuff can change regularly, and we need to be able to respond to that. We need to be agile to those movements and shifts and perceptions and behaviors. And when you have a team that's collaborative and curious and supporting each other, they're gonna surface some of those, realizations and some of those ideas support each other.

And then ultimately, they're going to arrive at much better outcomes, much better results. And so I, I think that's what innovation's really about, right? It's about observing, staying curious, and then experimenting toward better and better ways to solve the problems that are emerging, versus, just getting into a process or a procedure and running it and checking in and checking out, going home.

I think when you have a collaborative, curious, supportive team, you start to see lots of novel ideas start to surface that really can move the business in ways that. It's hard to even predict until it starts happening, right? The stuff's like nascent and and there, but unless you take the time to allow it to expose itself, those benefits aren't always clear and it's also hard to predict sometime, right?

Like sometimes it's surprisingly simple when some of these things emerge and it's oh, wow, that's gonna either make things smoother or less of a headache, less risky, or it's gonna improve direct revenue outcomes because we're creating better outcomes for our clients and customers, or we're selling more packages just because we're more efficient or more, we're more, I would say, competitive in the things that we're offering.

[00:08:10] Doug Heikkinen: Advisory firms regularly face uncertainty, now more than ever that's incredibly evident. Market volatility, regulatory shifts, client anxiety. How can a facilitative leadership approach help teams thrive during such periods of this complexity?

[00:08:27] Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, I would say probably the best approach to addressing uncertainty is taking a facilitative approach because when we're looking at uncertainty.

We're having to make decisions with limited information. We're having to have an opinion or even, consider outcomes that are hard to even reason about or predict. And there, not only is it powerful to bring a group together and to have a orchestrated exploration of these topics and these unknowable things.

Because that can settle the nerves to begin with, right? Because if, let's, for example, if you're a type of leader that is thinking, gosh, I gotta have all the answers. I gotta figure this out, I gotta come strong with an opinion and with a direction. When you're faced with uncertainty and unknowability, that is anxiety provoking because how do you show up with that very solid, very crisp, direction and opinion if the, those are the circumstances. Whereas if you've created an environment that's more collaborative, more curious, more open, then we can explore that stuff together and it doesn't just rest on someone else's shoulders. 'Cause, at the end of the day, even if you're the type of leader that's bringing the direction and the answers, you haven't hired idiots. And so they see these signals. They know the uncertainty. They feel it too. But they are now powerless and just watching you try to make all decisions and point toward where things need to go.

And so if we create a space that's more open, curious, collaborative, then now we're sharing that exploration and that conversation, and we're more likely to get it right. 'Cause now we're bringing a diverse perspective. Lots of different ideas, lots of vantage points, lots of knowledge to the table to try and solve the problem.

Not only does a mindset have a huge impact, but there's also lots of facilitation tools that are specifically designed for exploring strategic planning and kind of unknowable futures. And in fact, there's a body of work called, futures design, speculative design, and and even just lots of, strategic planning, strategic foresight.

There are lots of these tools and techniques that you can draw from to, to explore those kinds of situations. Probably my favorite is one called, critical Uncertainties. Have you heard of that one?

[00:11:01] Doug Heikkinen: I haven't,

[00:11:02] Douglas Ferguson: So critical uncertainties is a great activity for exploring these kind of unknowable solutions that are critical and and making them a bit more concrete. And so we're gonna use a two by two. And, one axis is gonna be one critical thing that will have a big impact on your business, but is unknowable and the other axis will be yet another.

It's an item that's critical to the business or to your outcomes and is unknowable. And we can maybe predict how it might transpire. And usually we'll look at a continuum like interest rates are gonna go down by a lot or they're gonna go up by a lot. And so we can look at across that and say, all right, they might go up, they might go down by how much.

And then on the other axis, we might look at, people are gonna retire at a earlier age versus they're gonna retire at a younger age. And so we look at those different quadrants and say, all right, if they, if they retire at a younger age and interest rates are higher, what might, how might we respond to that? If they are Retiring in a, at a younger, sorry, older age with lower interest rates. How might we respond to that? And so in each quadrant you're thinking about the strategies of this potential future that we're going to explore.

Then one thing that I really like is once you've done that, and you can even have different members of the team tackle different quadrants and then come back together and discuss Hey, what are we, how might we critique or debrief what, what showed up in each quadrant?

What's missing? What are we thinking? And really can invite some, some smaller group work plus some broad, bigger group conversation. And then after that, after you really exhausted a lot of conversation around these potential futures, you could, you could introduce other axes and it, and start to think about other different versions and combinations.

But also when we look across our strategies, which things maybe work across all quadrants? What are the similarities between the things that we're doing in all four? Or if we've done multiple two by twos, maybe all eight or all 10. And those are your hedging strategies and they're gonna serve you well regardless of what happens.

And so what might seem at first, like a really daunting decision or a lot of messy stuff to wade through, can now seem very simple and obvious. It's like, Well, we don't know what's gonna happen, but clearly after doing a bit of analysis and conversation, we know that these two hedging strategies are really good for us right now and we should, we should, do those no matter what.

[00:13:52] Doug Heikkinen: Let's change gears here and talk about innovation and design thinking in financial advisories, which is a topic that you don't think about when you think about financial advisor firms. So how can innovation and design thinking principles practically apply within advisory practices to strengthen client relationships and outcomes?

[00:14:13] Douglas Ferguson: Yeah. Design thinking is certainly a technique that was born out of product design and even, I would argue service design to some degree. But we see people using it in all sorts of ways. Even there's classes at Stanford that talk about design your life. So how are we using these skills to think about creating the ideal, day-to-day life that we might live?

I've seen people use these techniques with their band to write better music. At the end of the day, these are rooted in solid design philosophy. And, our way of ensuring that we're bringing great design technique and design mindsets into the work that we're creating, into the outputs that we're generating.

And if we think about design from that perspective, like anything can be designed, we can, I can design the best day possible. I can design a great vacation. I can design, anything I can design my wardrobe, right? It's like how we put stuff together, how, we manifest it, how we create is ultimately design.

And so if we're starting to apply these techniques toward anything we're creating, it can really unlock a lot of potential that might have been hidden. And I think the number one thing for folks, 'cause there's a lot of hype out there and it's, you read things and a lot of times the tools and techniques get put center because they're, they might have fun names, they might sound interesting, but I think a lot of, that just creates a lot of noise and it's hard to understand, what's the real purpose of this stuff?

And at the end of the day, it's about bringing design principles and design concepts into how we approach our problems. And one of the most important ones is, separating the problem definition from the solutioning. Quite oftentimes, when we in business settings or even, people were doing this in product, things that felt very designed, people were even doing it wrong there.

Which was, they were jumping to solutions too fast. They were getting into the actual, articulation of the, of what it is and, the components and the capabilities and the nature of how it would function. If we'd spent more time upfront defining what problem are we trying to solve, or what opportunity are we starting or are we attempting to tap into, we get really clear on that and make sure we bring the whole group to in focus on that clarity that we've, are starting to align on.

Then we're gonna create much better outcomes. Quite often we'll see teams, no matter what they're working on, if it's a product, if it's a, if it's a marketing campaign, if it's, a new service or a new solution, or even some way that we're gonna work together. What is our policy for how we're handling asynchronous work?

If we just jump straight into our policy and what are the parameters of it and how's it gonna function, we really missed the opportunity to find some novel solutions because we haven't really articulated the problem or the opportunity in front of us. So the better that we can do that and spend time getting to that clarity, we might get to an aha moment.

The other thing I would say about design thinking, because it's a co-creation and collaborative process quite often, is that we can move past decisions that are purely based on options, where it's oh, here is Tory's idea and here's Doug's idea and here's Susan's idea. Which of these three are we going to pick?

And instead, design thinking and collaborative or facilitative approaches, or looking at how we might integrate them or how, looking at all three of these, what new ideas does that generate? That's like even better than all three of them. So it's moving away from options, moving away from being so fixated on the solution and the outcome too quickly so that we can really uncover nascent and novel ideas.

[00:18:39] Doug Heikkinen: You wrote a book called Beyond the Prototype. How does prototyping iteration translate into financial advisory context? Maybe share an example of a simple prototype advisors could use in client engagements.

[00:18:55] Douglas Ferguson: Yeah, absolutely. So I am a big believer that prototypes are one of the most powerful things we can use in a business.

And at Voltage Control we prototype everything. And here's a great way to think about it. If you remember in school, when we were gonna write a paper, the first step in writing the paper was to write an outline. So that outline is a prototype of your of your paper. And I would say that anytime that this early draft, kinda outline ish straw person version of the thing that you're trying to create, anytime that can resemble the end state as closely as possible, the better.

So your prototype is an idea, a way of getting your idea across that's concrete and very explicit. And so the issue is that a lot of times when we're trying to convey our ideas and we're just using words, it can, and definitely when we're just using conversation, it can leave a lot to be misunderstood.

And so the more clear and visual we make our prototypes, the less ambiguity we have. And so the more clarity and less ambiguity we have, the more the team is understanding each other. And then the more they can say yes and your idea because, if they see it, here's a great example. We were doing some work with Fidelity and they were planning a big project.

And, everyone was on board. This was a board level decision to push this initiative. And they've been working on it for months and months. And through some facilitated workshops, the team developed a prototype. And the team was really like excited because they felt that it was like everything they'd imagined and then some, because they were able to refine it together, it got really crystal clear, really obvious, and they were like, yeah, this is exactly what we want to build.

This is our vision. And we feel even more aligned now that we've able to make some iterations and whatnot. They took that prototype to, to some leadership meetings. And it was this uncanny thing where some of the responses were, oh, that's what you're planning on building. And they were finally at a point where these other leaders in the organization got it.

Because we're not just using slogans and a jargon or just categorical descriptions. We're getting to something that's really concrete. Demonstrating what we're trying to manifest. And we have a mantra here at Voltage Control, which is no prototype, no meeting. And so we always bring prototypes to everything that we work on, with the idea being that with some early version of the thing we're trying to create, we can have way more clarity on what it is.

We can have a lot more momentum build up because now everyone's reacting to this potential thing that, that we're trying to make versus this like more abstract or conceptual description. And then you want to take that to another level as you have multiple people or everyone make prototypes.

Maybe they all make different versions. Then we're comparing what one person made versus the other. Really quite powerful way to, to move the needle. And I would just say that, it can be challenging to find opportunities at first, but once you start doing it and practicing it, you can realize that anything can be a prototype.

If I'm. If I'm gonna do a pitch deck or a presentation, let's say that we wanna start explaining our services a little bit different to clients, then we might, we might make a new draft of our pitch deck or our one pager. That can be a, an early, we can make an early prototype of that and have the team start marking it up and redlining it and thinking about, oh, what else might we do?

If we want to, we want to reimagine how we would have an encounter with a client, we might prototype that through a, an updated script, and we might even do some role playing and let others observe this new script that we're prototyping together. And then if you, the beautiful thing is in creating these prototypes and adopting this prototype mindset, then we start to lean into all of our work as if they're prototypes and that everything is malleable.

And we can update anything at any time and we can always learn from any encounter or anything we're working on. And that's really powerful because once you decide something's written in stone and it's a policy forever, that's when innovation tends to die.

[00:24:17] Doug Heikkinen: Last thing I wanna talk about today is improving client conversations and getting your views on that.

What can advisors learn from facilitation experts like you about conducting conversations that uncover the deeper values, motivations, and the concerns of their clients?

[00:24:37] Douglas Ferguson: I think there is a few things. One is it's all about questions and prompts. The more we can ask good questions that really get people into storytelling mode.

For instance, great way to think about, in fact there's a really great book called, the Beautiful Book of Questions. And it is, that really distills down some great elements of questions that's we're checking out and, the thing I'll say, is to think about your questions, and how they put the clients in this mindset of storytelling.

For instance, if you were to say, tell me about your, tell me about the, what it was like starting your job. Versus what is your job like? So the first version put them in a time and place and a memory. So now they're reliving and recounting those moments. So anytime you can put someone in a time and a place and ask them to remember and share with you what that was like. A classic one is, if you ask someone what their onboarding process is like at their company, either you start getting this very robotic, very detailed, here are the components of our onboarding plan and policy. But, if you ask them, tell me about the time, tell me about when you were onboarded.

Tell me about the last employee that you onboarded into the program. What did that feel like? And so I just encourage people to ask questions that are really open-ended and, avoid yes no questions, and really get people into the storytelling mindset of like, how can we, how can we get really curious, put them in a moment in time so that they really start to, to share the details and things get unfold.

Also, I'd say with prototypes, if we take that mindset and bring it into the client encounters, anytime we can visualize something, share our screen, get folks to react to something, now we have this kinda shared visual moment. I'm a big fan of visual note taking. And so if you're good at doodling and drawing, then you know, grabbing some tool or app that allows you to do that and share your screen.

Or if you're in person with someone, just draw these sketches and these things out on paper. Super powerful way to connect with someone and help them more deeply understand. And then that might draw out more detail as well, because now they're reacting to some visual. If you can't draw or that's not a skill that you're developing, even just like live note taking and organizing.

I'm a big fan of Miro, which is a collaboration tool. It's like a virtual whiteboard. I used to use whiteboards extensively when we were in person. Just getting up there and sometimes just writing words down that you're hearing people say and then coming back to them. Because if you write something down and they can see you wrote it down, then they've, they know that you've taken interest in that.

Without you even prompting, they might go and elaborate and say more about that. And it just speeds up the discovery because you're not having to stop and then ask another question and get them back in the mindset. And so, what are these visual ways that you might get them even more engaged and thinking more deeply about where the conversation might go or what details there might be that might help out the discovery process.

[00:28:33] Doug Heikkinen: There's so much more here that we could dig into, to get your expertise to, to help advisors. But let me ask you this last question. What's been the feedback that you've gotten from financial advisor teams that you've been working with when you go through this process with them and what's the result been?

[00:28:52] Douglas Ferguson: The typical feedback is, where has this been all my life? I wish I would've, I wish I would've been using these skills more, more frequently and definitely, 'cause it's interesting. Some folks will say, this is really familiar. I've seen this before. I've even intuitively done a little bit of this.

But the vocabulary is so powerful to have, and be able to reference and share with each other about oh, I'm doing this technique, or I'm leaning into some clarity around purpose. I'm leaning into some, some better prompting. And so just having a little bit of shared language about how to discuss and talk about these things so that it is a craft and a skill that we're working on.

I think that's really illuminating for people. And I hear that a ton from advisors and other clients around, this is making a difference to put a focus on refining this stuff and how I bring folks together and how I work with clients differently and, bring a bit more curiosity.

And then as far as the outcomes, I think ultimately there's more clarity, there's better alignment on where things need to go. So like whether we're developing a package or a solution for someone that, it's gonna be more aligned with their needs. And I would, and, or if it's not a good fit, we can part ways much sooner.

And, so I think ultimately, you can really draw some lines toward productivity, as well as better performance.

[00:30:36] Doug Heikkinen: There is a lot here and I can see how it can help teams of all different sizes to communicate better internally and with their clients. Douglas, very interesting stuff.

Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:30:49] Douglas Ferguson: Doug, it was my pleasure.

[00:30:51] Doug Heikkinen: To learn more about Voltage Control, please visit VoltageControl.com. We are on all social media platforms @Advisorpedia. Please give us a follow. For our producer Tory Miller and everyone at Advisorpedia, thank you so much for listening.