Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

Consultant and collaboration expert Evan Unger joins Brian to share practical tactics for leading more engaging, effective meetings that actually get results (and don’t drain everyone’s will to live).

Overview

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner welcomes longtime consultant and facilitation expert Evan Unger to dig into one of the most persistent workplace headaches: remote meetings.

With decades of experience helping leaders shift from “presenting at” to true collaboration, Evan shares how a simple POPRA framework can change the game, why simultaneous chat might be your new secret weapon, and what leaders get wrong when they step into the (virtual) room. From deprogramming the HIPPO effect to humanizing remote collaboration, this conversation is packed with real talk, useful tools, and just enough snark to make you want to fire up your next Zoom meeting with purpose.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Evan Unger
Collaborative Leadership: A Virtual Immersion™ Program
#138: The Bad Meeting Hangover with Julie Chickering
#142: Communication Patterns Keeping Your Team Stuck with Marsha Acker
Agile Skills Video Library Use code PODCASTSKILLS for $10 off
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Evan Unger is a collaboration expert and consultant who’s spent over three decades helping leaders turn messy meetings into meaningful progress—even in a post-pandemic, Zoom-fatigued world. As managing partner at Schwartz + Associates, he now trains leaders in the art of virtual facilitation and high-stakes collaboration, so teams can stop surviving meetings and start making decisions that actually stick.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00)
in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always here, Brian Milner, and today, very excited to have Mr. Evan Unger with us. Evan, welcome in.

Evan Unger (00:12)
Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Milner (00:13)
Really excited to have Evan here. If you haven't crossed paths with Evan, let me just give you a little quick introduction here. Evan is a managing partner at Schwartz and Associates. He's been a consultant for about 33 year-ish years. Someone told me recently, Evan, that you're supposed to say 10 plus years ⁓ when you get to be RH. Right, right. But...

Evan Unger (00:26)
Yeah.

Yes, well, I'm not that politically correct.

Brian Milner (00:37)
Evan focuses on helping organizations and leaders really in collaboration and even maybe particularly in kind of this remote era. So we wanted to have him on to have a conversation about this a little bit to talk about a little bit about the challenges that come up. Cause I know I get Scrum Masters, product owners who talk to me all the time.

and say, how do I, how do I facilitate meetings? How do I run things and have effective meetings when I have remote teams? So Evan, why don't we start by just saying what, why is it so hard? Why is it so hard to run meetings to facilitate meetings remotely?

Evan Unger (01:14)
Well, remote is one thing. Running them face to face is hard as well. I'd say why isn't it so hard? It's because we're dysfunctional as human beings. People show up at our meetings. There's politics, there's egos. And most people are never really trained how to lead collaboration. Most senior people, they're trained how to present. And that's an important communication skill set. But the harder thing is

Brian Milner (01:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Evan Unger (01:38)
not when I'm presenting at people, I've got to get a bunch of, you know, human beings who have their own dysfunctions to come together, collaborate. It's just a challenge when people show up.

Brian Milner (01:50)
What do you, I like that distinction between collaboration and presenting. How would you define that? What do you kind of think are the main differences between someone who's just presenting at a meeting versus really enabling collaboration to occur?

Evan Unger (02:04)
Well, mean, we often, can, you and I probably read so many books on leadership, but one of the simplest ways we might think about our leadership's on a continuum. On one extreme, right, we could run a meeting where we're the expert, right? And we're all paid as experts early in our career, we're knowledge workers. And so when we're the expert, we're presenting effectively our ideas, our decisions at the group. That's one extreme.

The other extreme, and this is where we're teaching people to work, is yes, you have expertise and opinions you want to offer to the group, but the real art is knowing how to be an expert and getting other experts to collaborate and to facilitate. So the one side is one way, telling people, deciding for them. The other side is asking and knowing how to run processes.

that allows a group to come up with the answers for themselves. Now, real world, we're in the middle of that continuum, but the art is knowing how to enter from the more neutral process side of the continuum, and that's what we're teaching people.

Brian Milner (03:09)
Yeah. What, just in your experience with working with people on this and training them up, what do people get wrong? What is it that really trips people up mostly in doing this?

Evan Unger (03:20)
Well, there's a metaphor we use, Brian. We could think about running a project, right, or a task force, or a consulting engagement, or a workshop that we're teaching the Lateral and Complex workshop. And the metaphor is a plane flight, right? You're down near Plano, near Dallas somewhere, right? I'm in Denver. If I were coming to visit you, right, you know, there's three parts to that flight. Takeoff.

Right? Which doesn't take a lot of time. Last time I was out here at DIA, I timed it. It took 42 seconds from the time the jets got hit to wheels up. It doesn't go well. We're all dead. Right? It's over. Most of the flight is getting to DFW airspace. Second place we've got to pay particular attention is on landing. But what people get wrong is they don't think about the key questions ahead of time to anchor a meeting. And we teach a very simple.

Brian Milner (03:56)
you

Evan Unger (04:15)
It's so simple, seems obvious, mental model acronym called POPRA, which stands for the purpose, objectives, process, roles, and agreements. The first question we got to be clear on is why are we having the meeting at all? Right. And what are we trying to get done? And if I can't answer why we're having the meeting, what are we trying to get done? We are guaranteed to waste people's time because if I don't know, I'm trying to get to DFW, there's going to be someone in my meeting who wants to go down to Albuquerque.

And because I haven't tethered things to wire and what we're going to follow that person down to Albuquerque. Now the process, right, is the flight plan, but I can't design a flight plan if I don't know the destination. And then the roles are key. We all know there's too many people at meetings, right? That's one of the big challenges. People have FOMO fear of missing out. Everyone wants to be at the meeting, but I got to have the right people at the meeting. I again, can't decide who the right people are if I don't know why we're doing things.

and what we're trying to get done. And then the A in that popper model is agreements. I have to have some ways to interact that are effective. So what people get wrong is they don't go into the meetings clear on their popper, clear why they're there, what they're doing, how, who, in what way, and they're guaranteed to waste people's time. And so that's the first thing. Most meetings shouldn't be allowed to happen.

Brian Milner (05:36)
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a great point. That's something I kind of always try to stress in, in our classes about, know, scrum meetings, because there's the recurring meetings that happen in every scrum, sprint. And, and, that's, that's the thing I find that a lot of times people get wrong about it is they don't really understand why we have each of the meetings. And if you don't understand the purpose, then you're, you know, it's kind of like, you know, if you don't know where you're going,

Any road will get you there, you know, kind of thing. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So I think that's great. I agree with that wholeheartedly. if we understand our purpose and we understand why we're there and what we're trying to do, I know one of the other questions I get quite often is, you know, well, I've got this room full of people.

Evan Unger (06:03)
Exactly. Any flight plan will do if you don't have a destination.

Brian Milner (06:22)
But I feel like I've got a good plan. I've told everyone why we're gonna be there. And then we get in a room and no one talks. Everyone just kind of sits on their hands and doesn't really have anything to contribute. How do I get people to actually talk to each other? How do you deal with that?

Evan Unger (06:36)
Yeah.

Well, there's political dynamics, right? I assume you're familiar with it is an agile term, HIPPO decision making, right? The highest paid person's opinion. I'm not an agile person, but I love that terminology because we've all been there, right? The senior person, the most highly paid person, you know, comes into the room or onto the screen because we're teaching people how to do this on screens virtually. And people are scared, right? They don't want to look stupid.

Brian Milner (06:43)
Yeah. Yep.

Evan Unger (07:03)
I'm going to give your listeners one of the simplest tips that you can only do in virtual meetings for holding space. I don't know that I've invented it, but the first person I've ever seen, I've used it and I teach it in the course. It's called a simultaneous chat. Basically, we use the chat in these meetings, but it's often free form where people weigh in and it's always the same people who seem to weigh in on the chat and the other 10 people are just what's out there. What we often do is we

We make people chat simultaneously. So we'll pose a question to the group and we'll say, you're not allowed to hit enter until everyone is ready to submit. And then we'll stream in a little banner, a header, right? And then we start conditioning Pavlovian. You hit enter as soon as you see that banner. And what starts happening is when people have to wait, all of a sudden the people who would never say a word starts

chiming in because they know they have to chime in because they've had plenty of time to think and be you've held enough space so that the junior people right get to weigh in because we all know the hippo sometimes not that they're not going to make the decision it's my job as a collaborative leader to hold the space so that hippo has the best information and it can often be the most junior person who might be an introvert.

might be speaking English as a second, third language, might be a person of color, who knows, who has the expertise, but the leader of the collaboration does not know how to hold space to get people to weigh in. And that's really the simplest thing, just simultaneous chat. If you do that, you will start changing the dynamic in your virtual meeting.

Brian Milner (08:50)
That's very interesting. I haven't heard that one before. That's a, that's a great approach. there, there's something we do in, in scrum when we do estimation, where we kind of do a similar thing, where you choose the thing you're going to estimate and you choose your number, but everyone reveals, you know, the number all at the same time. yeah, kind of a similar dynamic there. so I get the, the, the idea of holding the space. I'm kind of curious too, how much does personality type actually affect this? And if, if it's personality type, if

personality type does make a big difference, extroverted, introverted, that sort of thing. How much is it my responsibility as the leader of this meeting to be aware of each person's preference for how they interact?

Evan Unger (09:32)
I think it's very much your responsibility because what we're always trying to teach people is what do we want as a great leader? We want to help our teams make the best decision and get maximum buying and ownership. Now, you probably have read Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of Teams, You know, one of my favorite quotes from him is that when we run bad meetings, almost always leads to bad decisions, which is a recipe for mediocrity.

So it is my responsibility as leader to make sure if we're taking people's time, we get the best results of it. Now, if I'm the hippo, right, running the meeting with a skip level below me, if I come into the conversation as the expert leading with my opinions, I will suppress conversation. So what we're trying to train people is come into the conversation understanding your job is to hold space.

have good process structure, ask questions, then once you've heard from your team, you can step in and make the decisions, but at least you've informed yourself and it is hard because we're trained as experts. And so many people get promoted for their technical expertise, right? But leaving a group, truly getting collaboration is a totally different skill set than whatever their technical expertise is. But it is, to your question.

That's their responsibility to get the best out of the other experts they're leading.

Brian Milner (10:56)
Yeah. The leadership dynamic is an interesting, kind of portion of this as well, as you brought up here, because I, I know I've talked to leaders before who, you know, they'll, they'll be in a meeting, as a participant and that there'll be a topic that's up open for discussion, right? We're, we're, we're going to make a decision about XYZ. and whoever is facilitating it, we'll kind of just throw it as an open discussion.

So what does everyone think? And I've heard multiple leaders kind of say to me, I dread that moment because I kind of feel like I have a responsibility to speak. Like everyone's waiting for me to speak because they don't want to, you know, contradict the boss, right? They don't want to step out on a limb and say, well, my opinion is this. And then have the boss speak up and say, well, actually I think this, well, I guess I'd.

I was not good because I said something that didn't go with the boss's opinion. If you're that kind of leader, I'm just wondering, how do you participate in those scenarios? How would you instruct that leader to weigh in in a way that doesn't make other people that are lower on the food chain feel intimidated by their answering and sharing their opinions?

Evan Unger (12:07)
Well, there's a style question there too, right? mean, we've all done things like Disprofile or Myers-Briggs and certain styles are warmer, make people feel safer. I tend to be an intense INTJ. I can be quite intimidating, not a great listener. And I realize I sometimes people say INTJs don't suffer fools very well. That is not a great formula for leadership, right? Because

One of the things then why role contracting is so important is before you start as you're doing this popper as you're taking off You've got to help the group understand. Look ultimately this person's role is the decision-maker right and we know they want to hear the best information from the group and I often have to coach them because some people can't help themselves They're always gonna weigh in and they don't realize they're not holding space

Brian Milner (12:56)
Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Unger (12:59)
A part of it is contracting for their role with the group. Part of it is coaching them to just be a little mindful when they offer their expertise. if they acknowledge people well, and that's what we're training people, how to validate it and acknowledge well, how to engage others in the group, it's going to be hard just because of the hierarchy. But there are ways to do it by understanding

You just need to ask a lot more questions.

Brian Milner (13:25)
Yeah, yeah, that's great. By the way, I'm three out of the four in alignment with you on the Myers-Briggs. So I am an FJ, so slight difference.

Evan Unger (13:35)
OK.

Well, you have better radar on people than I do because I'm in my head all the time.

Brian Milner (13:39)
Yeah.

Well, but then again, it doesn't feel good to say

I'm not a thinker, I'm a feeler. That's not a great thing.

Evan Unger (13:48)
Well, just

to his values to make decisions a little more than I do. Everything for me is very all about rationale, not about impact on people. ⁓

Brian Milner (13:53)
Right.

Right. Right.

But we're both a rare type. Both of those are rare types. So we've set the table here a little bit about some things about meetings in general and how to facilitate, how to participate and be a part of those. So let's talk about the remote elephant in the room. Let's talk a little bit about the unique challenges that come from remote facilitation. How do you?

Why is it so much harder for remote meetings to be successful?

Evan Unger (14:30)
Well, we're teaching the exact same thing we did for 33 years face to face for, I mean, I don't know how far you go back, but I go back, I started my Curgado Business School in 89 when we're from our big pharma, right? I don't have email till 94, okay? So back then we're running everything face to face, sitting in a room together, you know, the most important communication function in a giant global company was the mail room, right?

Brian Milner (14:38)
you

Yeah.

Evan Unger (14:57)
because there was no email. And so for decades, we're teaching people how to run this very same style of leadership face to face. WebEx came along early, live meeting, go to meeting, clients started saying, Adam, we're not meeting the same way. We're dialing in on these platforms. Can you teach us this style of leadership virtually? And in all honesty, I resisted it because I was like, this sounds tedious, right?

Brian Milner (15:22)
Ha ha.

Evan Unger (15:23)
I was the director of change for Merck, but I was a little change resistant. you know, so we started dabbling in it when the pandemic hit, obviously, the world changed. Right? We went, everything went hybrid and companies now are trying to get their employees back. But even I have clients, they say they're all on the same campus. People, they still dial in on Teams, right? Because now one of the reasons they dial in on Teams is the meetings they're in.

are so bad they can get work done while they're passively listening to those meetings. So virtual meetings are harder because we have lost a lot of human dynamic. Here you and I are sitting these little rectangles, right? I can't see anything below your, know, clavicle basically. And so we've lost a lot of nonverbal cues where, so that we can't read people, right, as well. And then

Brian Milner (15:51)
you

Yeah.

Evan Unger (16:16)
let alone a lot of my clients, they don't make people turn on their video. So people are obviously multitasking. But these meetings are a little easier to run, especially complex meetings virtually because it's much easier to give yourself notes. It's much easier to script process structure and have notes taped to the side of the thing and have things on the walls. When we were teaching people how to facilitate,

A complex workshop sitting in a room together using flip charts, working on the walls with post-it notes and sticky notes and sticky dots. We've all done that stuff. That's much more of a high wire act because you can't have nearly as much cheat sheets, but attention levels different virtually too, right? It's hard to keep people, you know, people's attention for, you know, a two hour, three hour segment. And so,

It's just a different world, but it's the exact same principles. We teach five core things. They're the same five core things that we've been teaching for 33 years. That POPR model is one of the five. it's just harder when we're sitting here on screens.

Brian Milner (17:30)
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned kind of the whole dilemma of cameras on or cameras off. What's your take on that?

Evan Unger (17:38)
Well, first of all, there's three types of meetings, right? One meeting is more a one-way presentation, right? There's an expert and they're going through PowerPoint slides and maybe there's some Q &A with the group, but it's primarily a presentation. The second type of meeting is a status update meeting, right? It's the same group of people, the same task force, the same project team, and they meet.

regularly, maybe it's weekly or biweekly or monthly. And most of the agenda items on those meetings are updates and presentations. They're still one way. There's not as many decision making topics. Now we're working on high stakes collaborative decision making, right? You're designing a new process or deciding what's in the user requirements or what's in the next sprint or, you know, what's in next year's budget, right? It's a true collaborative meeting. Now the video question,

is in those status update meetings, there's like seven agenda items. Two of them are relevant to me as a participant. And I have to endure these other five truly mini meetings. And so the working agreement we encourage people to do in those status update meetings is to literally think about if I have a seven agenda item meeting, I'm running seven meetings. And so the only people who need to come on video, if I'm in a 20 person meeting,

are maybe the five people who are germane or relevant to that first agenda item. The other 15 people, we'd love to have you on video, but it's not really your meeting. From a RACI standpoint, you're mostly there to be informed. The people on video need to be the ones that are either responsible, accountable, or need to be consulted. Run that first agenda item, that meeting's over, now I have a second agenda item. The people who are active for the second, they come on video. Because...

It's like if there's nothing to do with me to have to sit here on video, right? It's like, well, I don't have to be on video. I have nothing to say, nothing to do with this agenda item. Now, the types of meetings were run. You have the right people there. They all are either responsible, accountable consultant. Let's get rid of the people who shouldn't be there just because they're there to be informed. Those people should be on video the whole time because we've are in these tiles. We lost so much human information. You turn off the video.

everything slows down and we know everyone's multitasking. Right. And that's one of the reason people on video because they can multitask when they're not on video.

Brian Milner (20:04)
Yeah, that focus is a real problem because as you said, if I can't see, then I don't really know whether you're with me in this conversation or whether you're doing your emails or playing with your dog or whatever, right? And you just, you don't really have any window of visibility into that. Well, you brought up one area there that I know I've thought a lot about as far as facilitating things remotely. And that's kind of like the humanity aspect of it.

Evan Unger (20:17)
You ⁓

Brian Milner (20:30)
of just sort of, know, it's kind of the Brady Bunch, you know, seeing people in these squares or Hollywood squares kind of thing. All dated references that people, many listeners probably don't even know what I'm talking about when I mention those things. But it just it's sort of dehumanizing a little bit that we don't really understand the person. I know, you know, at the last company I worked at, we would have

a of meetings a year that we would get together in person. And it was such a refreshing thing to, I didn't know that you were that tall or I didn't know you were that short. You like I only see you in this little box. And it's just, it was such a weird thing when you saw him actually in real life. What's your thought on that? Are there ways that we can humanize this more and really kind of try to understand each other more on a human level?

Evan Unger (21:18)
It's hard, right? Because even I'm just comparing to when we train people in our what is now a four day intensive over two weeks versus the old face to face three day when we were face to face at the breaks, people would go into the little break room chat. I mean, we know how many kids you have, where'd you go to school, just the basic niceties that make the dialogue less coarse. If we don't have a sort of sense of

Brian Milner (21:37)
Yeah.

Evan Unger (21:46)
I know something about Brian. don't agree with him on everything, but he's a human being like me. Then the coarseness in the dialogue is much harder with things. So even in our face to face workshops, people go to dinner at night together in our virtual workshops. When they take a break, they're in their house. They don't connect with anyone, right? You know, they're all over the world. You know, so it is a very different mind. I think, and I'm not an expert in this, I'm no longer doing culture change work, but

I'm sure with good reason companies want their employees back face to face. I don't know how you're going to build cultures with a hundred percent remote workforce, right? Because it's the small things where you just get to know a person as a human being that are essential to relationships. And we all know business at the end of the day is as long relationship. So companies really, I'm sure are struggling with how do we.

Brian Milner (22:38)
Yeah.

Evan Unger (22:40)
run an organization if we never ever get to see each other outside of these little tiles we're sitting.

Brian Milner (22:47)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's a struggle. I think that that has to be, especially if it's a long-term kind of thing, you know, working with a team, for example, right? You've got to have that intentionality to building that, I think, over time. So yeah, I think that's a really important point. I'm kind of interested in your take on this because I know right after COVID happened, I did like some of the first

certified scrum master classes and things that were done virtually. was one of the first people to like dive in and do that. And immediately afterwards, I had several sessions with other trainers just to try to help them learn how I did it because they didn't know how they were going to do their classes. they, how did you do this? How did you take care of this? And so I'm, most of those conversations I've heard from others, or I've heard anyone who talks about facilitating things remotely.

devolve at some point into tools. And what's the tool to use? And how do you use this tool? And how do you not use, know, what's the right tool to use? What's the wrong use of tool? But I've noticed that you haven't really mentioned tools in any way, shape or form. And I'm guessing that's intentional.

Evan Unger (23:50)
Well, look, I said there's five core things, right? Takeoff is everything, both at the meeting level, but also at the process step by process step level. We have platforms, right? You know, whether it's Miro or Mural or Lucid Spark, all they're doing is enabling us to do the same thing we would have done in a room. tools and techniques is the third of the five things, but really the harder thing is a leader.

is the art of holding the space and the, you know, one of the other core five things is how to manage challenging people, often challenging hippos. What people don't realize is when I get pushed back in resistance, our first habit is to defend when really the first habit in dealing with this is to acknowledge their right to a point of view and not make them wrong.

and understand I don't have to answer the questions. I have the other experts. My job is to know how to engage the other experts often to take on the more challenging person. And that's really the art of facilitation is the realization I'm the process expert. I own the process. We designed the meeting, right? Whatever tools we use, you know, and there's so many tools in the world. Swat analysis, ford field analysis, fishbone diagramming, know, mind map again. We can go on and on and on.

But really they're all about how do I frame people, bring them into a process, and the tool really is a vehicle to get us to the destination. So it's not, it's helpful and we need to know how to run certain tools, but really it's not about the tools, it's about the human dynamic.

Brian Milner (25:33)
Yeah, I agree. Well, I want to make sure before we kind of wrap it up here that we get a chance to hear a little bit more specifically about the course that you guys offer. We mentioned it talked about a little bit here in the course of our conversation, but you have a four-day course called Collaborative Leadership, a virtual immersion program. Tell us a little bit about what that is, who it's for, and we'll make sure we have links to this in our show notes, but tell us a little bit about that course.

Evan Unger (25:59)
Well, I mean, it's a four day intensive, right? And in this day and age, getting people to take four hours to do something is a minor miracle because, you know, I have senior people who come to the course, who come observe the fourth day of the course and they're running, you know, they're the head of the IT group or they're running a Lean Six Sigma group because we train those people to change agents. And every time I'll debrief with them, they'll watch for three hours and they'll say,

Evan, I love this. want all my lean people. want all my, you know, scrum masters, or agile people who know how to do this. I'll say, great, let's do it. And here's what we know happens in this day and age. And they'll quickly say, but I can't take people offline for four days to do this. And I say, hang on a second. I asked you earlier what the average effectiveness of the meetings are you attend. And they said 30%. And I asked you how many meetings are going take place in your organization. In a giant global company, they might say 200,000 in a single day.

And I'll say, do mean? can't take four days to actually address the most fundamental productivity loss of an organization? And they'll backpedal quickly and say, Evan, okay, I get it. It takes hours to learn things. Here's what I want. I want 10 two-hour videos, like a LinkedIn Learning series or a master class that my people can watch on their screens when they have time, self-paced learning. That's what I want.

And I always say, not interested. Go find someone else who's gonna waste your time and money. And some clients are like, it's rather abrupt. The client's always right. And I say, you're not right. And you absolutely know you're not right. And they say, what do you mean? I'll say, did you have kids who learned to drive? And they're like, yeah, of course. I'll say, tell me you would have let your children go watch 10 videos on how to drive and say, all right, you watch the 10 videos, take the car keys or go watch 10 videos on how to swim and say, all right, you watch videos on how to swim, but let's push you in the, no one would ever do that. But in this day and age, everyone wants to pretend we learn things by watching things.

We learn things by listening to things. It doesn't work. We learn by doing. So the four days is primarily practice. There's probably two to three hours of lecture just to get some fundamentals in place. But the whole course is practice, feedback, coaching. Module two and module four, there's only 12 people, two instructors. Everyone's on the hot seat. Everyone's having to practice. They're gonna get feedback. They're gonna get videotaped. They are going to get pushed way outside their comfort zone because we want them to...

have real skill transfer. We're not in this for intellectual entertainment. So it's a four day program with two practice labs. Two days, I just finished up a program with a giant pharma company. It ran last week, Monday, Tuesday, and this week's Monday, Tuesday. So it's always two days, two practice labs, very little lecture. We've run it for 33 years and people love it because it's not theory. It's just the basics of getting human beings

to come together. So it is just an old school intensive that we would have Brian earlier in our career. That's the kind of programs we would have went to. But everyone today wants to watch videos and say I've learned something. Knock yourself out. Doesn't work.

Brian Milner (28:57)
That's so great. Yeah, I love that. Well, and as I said, we'll make sure we have links to this in our show notes. know, I mean, it sounds like a fascinating course and very transformative, but I'll say it out loud here just to make sure people kind of know how to get ahold of you guys. It's terryschwartz, associates.com. T-E-R-I, terryschwartz, associates.com.

But I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. If people want to find that, they can find out more about this course and see when it's being offered and sign up for it with you as well. Evan, can't thank you enough. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for sharing your 33 years of wisdom in this area with us and I appreciate you making time.

Evan Unger (29:37)
Thanks, Brian.