Faster Than 20

Faster Than 20

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Workouts, Tools, and Community for Leaders of High-Performance Groups

FEB 24

“Velocity” for Humans

A few years ago, I took an introductory class on Bonsai, the art of growing miniaturized trees in pots. The first thing they taught us was that, with the exception of tropical species, trees needed to be kept outside. Why? Because trees sleep during the winter, and if they are constantly kept awake with artificial light and heat, they will eventually die. It made sense once I understood the reasoning, but I would not have intuited this on my own. I’m clearly not alone, judging from the countless number of posts on various Bonsai forums from folks who are mystified as to why their trees, which they tended to lovingly indoors, end up dying. I’m sure some of this is because of general nature blindness, but I think another factor is society’s dysfunctional relationship to rest. I was reminded of this when a friend was telling me about how the leaders at her work — a large tech company with thousands of employees — are constantly throwing around the word “velocity.” All of the internal messaging is about going faster, never easing up. Not surprisingly, there is a high-level of both burnout and apathy there. When urgency feels artificial, people tune it out. I’ve seen similar cultures at countless nonprofits, but for different reasons. The stakes feel higher, because people’s lives often depend on the work. Resources tend to be scarce, but leaders look to do more with less rather than invest in greater capacity. The resulting burnout is predictable, and yet the cycle has proven difficult to break. Most recently, I’ve been hearing about a new, but similarly pernicious pattern induced by artificial intelligence. Despite AI’s promise to do our hard work for us, people who are using it regularly often find themselves even more exhausted. My friend, Greg Gentschev, recently observed: The funny thing about using AI for projects is that I feel decision fatigue. Everything gets done so fast that it’s hard to keep up. I think this is going to be a common complaint going forward. Using AI can feel like managing a bunch of mostly competent, very fast interns who work nonstop, 24-hours each day. There are more to things to review, more things to respond to, more decisions to make, and no natural barriers (like your team needing to sleep) to stem the tide. We’re like those poor Bonsai trees being kept awake by artificial light and heat. We, too, need to rest, or else we, too, will die. It’s crazy that anyone would feel compelled to explain this core human need, but the pace of de-humanization in our society is bringing new meaning to “velocity.” So what can we do about this? First and foremost, we can re-assess the stories we tell ourselves. As everyone who is actually a high-performer at their craft knows, sustainability and “velocity” are not at odds with each other. Ask any marathon runner. Rest and recovery, along with mental and emotional well-being, are critical for us to be at our best. Telling ourselves otherwise is not only counter-productive, it establishes the foundation of a toxic culture. Second, we can name our intentions clearly. In my work with groups, I often see leaders confuse poor habits with lack of agency. We tend to replicate what we’ve experienced. If no one before us models a healthy, balanced culture, we’re unlikely to do otherwise, regardless of what we actually want. We assume that everything is the way they are, because that’s the only way they can be, when in reality, we tend to have more choices than we realize. Which leads to the third and most important thing we can do: Establish new habits. My training, Power and Love for Managers, along with my work with dysfunctional teams, focuses on establishing Working Agreements and thinking through structures and processes that support them. If your intention is to create an environment that feels welcoming and supportive, then how you onboard new team members or how you run your meetings matter. Being super clear about roles and having clear cycles of stress and recovery will do way more for achieving human “velocity” than excessively preaching about it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go fast. Indeed, sometimes our work requires it. But “velocity” doesn’t require shedding our humanity. Leaning into what actual human beings need to go fast will do wonders for your group’s culture and results.

5 min
11/20/2025

Foraging for Ginseng: Self-Reliance and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Nine years ago, I found myself hiking through the Kentucky Appalachians foraging for ginseng with my then 75-year old mother. She had met a dealer in Los Angeles who spent half the year in Kentucky foraging for the precious root and who occasionally brought others along on his expeditions. My mom wasn’t in the best of health, but she decided she wanted to do this, and when she gets an idea in her head, she is stubborn and resolute. I was worried about her physical condition, and I also found the idea of trekking through the Kentucky woods in autumn irresistible, so I offered to go with her. Our guide was a retired Korean building contractor in his 60s who loved the clean air and solitude of the Kentucky mountains and who had turned his foraging hobby into a side hustle. I wondered how this man, who was decades older than me, managed to leave me huffing and puffing in his trail as he effortlessly scurried up and down the mountainside. I marveled at how he casually scoured the forest floor, quickly spotting the ginseng plant’s trademark leaves among the hundreds of other plants that looked exactly like it, while also managing to maintain his overall bearings. I also marveled at my mom, but for different reasons. It wasn't because she was fearlessly forging off the trail and into the woods, despite her physical condition, in single-minded pursuit of her goal. That was very familiar to me. No, I was surprised because she was letting me help her. My mom is simultaneously the most stubbornly independent and self-sacrificial person I know — self-reliant to a fault, yet unwilling to take care of herself. For as long as I could remember, every time I or my sisters ever tried to help her — carrying her bags, for example — she would fight us tooth and nail. She tried to teach us to follow her lead. “You can’t depend on others,” my mom would explain. “No one is going to help you in this country.” Given how she raised us, it was something for her to let me help her on this trip so overtly, whether it was holding her hand on treacherous inclines or making sure she took enough breaks and drank enough water. Five years earlier, all of this would have been a non-starter. By all accounts, my mom had a steely will from birth. Up until the Korean War, her childhood had been happy, full of family and friends, and her parents — my grandparents — had been active in their community. Then, when she was 11 years old, the North Koreans kidnapped her father. Eight decades later, we still don’t officially know what happened to him, but he was almost certainly murdered. Her mother died a year later. Becoming a war-time orphan was horrific enough, but what defined that moment for her was that she felt like her extended circle — and later, her siblings — let her down when she needed them the most. She stopped trusting people after that. The heart of Kentucky is sparsely populated, with limited cell phone coverage and miles separating many from their closest neighbors. Our guide had a cabin in Stanton, a tiny community that was largely off the grid. Gallons of drinking water and boxes of canned and freeze-dried food lined his kitchen, as the closest grocery store was almost an hour away. People didn’t seem to ask for help around there, if only because everything and everybody was so far away. Still, there were signs of connection and community, from churches to repair shops to the restaurants further out. Every day, as we set out for the woods, we would drive past a cemetery on the outskirts of town. I wondered what it was like to have the graves of people you had known your whole life on the periphery of your consciousness every single day. Stanton felt representative of Kentucky in many ways. A third of the state’s population live below the poverty line, almost triple the national median of 13 percent. Of the 30 poorest counties in the U.S., nine hail from Kentucky, with as many as 45% of the population living in poverty. If you peek a little closer — unemployment, education, mortality, obesity, disability — the story is even more grim. Kentucky is regionally part of what public health officials colloquially call the “Stroke Belt” and “Coronary Valley” for its high rate of poor health. A state with as many challenges as Kentucky naturally needs as much help as it can get. In 2022, 38 percent of its revenue came from federal funds, second in the nation and ten percentage points above average. For every dollar of Medicaid coverage disbursed in the state, the U.S. government pays 71 cents, the sixth highest amount in the country. More than almost every other state, Kentucky depends on everyone else, but folks there don’t realize it. A 2016 survey showed that only 16 percent of Kentucky residents knew that the federal government covered most of their Medicaid bills. I could understand why the residents of Stanton might be distrustful of outside forces. My mom had taught me to be the same way, albeit in different circumstances. I had learned from her difficult experiences, and I understood the consequences of depending on others, only to have them let you down. So I tried not to feel too self-conscious as people’s eyes followed us everywhere we went, undoubtedly processing the sight of a Korean-American and his immigrant companions speaking mostly in a foreign tongue. It was harder the deeper we went into the countryside, as I was conscious of more than a few Confederate flags flying openly in people’s yards. Still, people there minded their own business, and when they did engage, they were respectful. Everyone seemed particularly courteous around my mom and our elderly guide, something I don’t always feel at home in San Francisco or in other coastal cities. There is a long tradition in Kentucky of foraging for wild ginseng, and it epitomizes how complicated self-reliance can be. The plant takes several years to sprout, and its five-leaf pattern is hard to spot on the dense forest floor. Deer and turkeys enjoy nibbling on the leaves and bright red berries, making it even harder to find. Ginseng foraging requires skill and perseverance, but for the 'sangers in Kentucky, it almost feels like a birthright. People there — including the famed frontiersman, Daniel Boone — have been supplementing their incomes with the wild root since the 1700s. For those skillful enough to do it, it’s a profitable endeavor. The root garners anywhere from $50 to $800 a pound, depending on its age and quality. Brent Bailey, the Executive Director of West Virginia Land Trust, found a positive correlation between ginseng harvests and the state's unemployment rate. "The forests are a social safety net in Appalachia," he toldThe New York Times. "Ginseng is Plan B for many households." For something to garner such a high price means that someone out there is willing to pay it. In the case of ginseng, those feisty customers don’t live in Kentucky or any other state for that matter. They live in Asia. Ginseng has been a prized medicinal root there for centuries, so much so that it is almost impossible to find in the wild there anymore. That makes the Kentucky root all the more precious. Even back in 1824, the U.S. exported 750,000 pounds of ginseng across the Pacific. It’s safe to say that without Asia, there would be no Plan B. Ginseng played a large role in my childhood, and not in a good way. When I was a kid, my mom often complained that I lacked energy. Her solution was to force me to drink ginseng tea every day. She would pour a heaping spoonful of this chalky, pungent powder into a tiny cup of hot water, and I would do my best to gag it down, whining and crying the whole time. As I got older, I got better at gulping it down, but I still found it vile, and I violently disagreed with her premise as to why I needed to drink it in the first place. I stopped drinking it as soon as I left for college, and I did my best to forget this childhood ritual. But after graduating, I noticed that I often felt lethargic. Every time I noticed this, I was reminded of what my mom would say to me when I was younger. After a few months of feeling low energy, I swallowed my pride and asked her to send me some of the herb. The tea she sent me wasn’t as strong as what I had drunk as a child, and I used a lower concentration. It felt palatable and familiar, and I was surprised by how comforting it felt to drink. After a few weeks, I felt like my lethargy was going away. But there was more to this story. My first few months after college were the least active period of my life. I was living in a strange place, and I barely knew anyone. I would roll out of bed in the morning, get in my car, and drive to work, where I would spend all day in front of my computer. After work, I would drive home, often stopping for fast food, and would spend my evenings reading or watching TV before going back to bed. By the end of that summer, I had gained 20 pounds. When I think back to that time, I think of how things started to change for me when I started drinking that tea. But it’s also possible that the lethargy started going away because I was shocked by how my clothes no longer fit, and I started consciously finding ways to move again. It’s possible that running into an old high school friend and getting invited to a weekly basketball game had more to do with the shift in my energy than the medicinal root I had once again begun to ingest. Everything is possible. All I know is, almost 30 years later, I still drink ginseng tea every day. The stories we tell ourselves are powerful, especially when they are forged in trauma. But there are always other stories too. On the surface, these stories may seem to contradict each other, but in reality, the truth is in the tension. The residents of Stanton, Kentucky are incredibly independent, and they also rely on the federal government more than others. Foraging for

16 min
08/15/2025

Good Energy

Card by Lindsey Elias. Photograph by Dharmishta Rood. In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment. —Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) Earlier this year, my partner and I were spending an evening with friends, enjoying a beautiful dinner. We mostly avoided talking about current events, but eventually, one of them asked us how we were grappling with our nation’s turn toward authoritarianism and our federal government's attack on much of what we care about and believe in. In truth, I was dealing with it by avoiding these conversations when I could. However, I felt that these friends knew me well enough, both personally and professionally, for me to answer without having to explain myself too much. So I told them that I was dealing with it by going to the nearby hills every Sunday and weeding. The Birds and the Bugs My Mom has always been an avid gardener, and she was disappointed that neither my two sisters nor I seemed to take to the practice. I killed many houseplants before giving up on them entirely. They were just too much trouble. As much as I loved being outdoors, I couldn’t tell one tree from the next. That changed for me during the pandemic lockdown. I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone other than my partner and my younger sister. We ended up spending a lot of time outdoors. And for the first time, I really started paying attention. Truly, actually paying attention. It started with the birds. I’ve always liked birds, but they were all mostly flying brown blobs to me. One day, my partner decided to fill a birdbath I didn’t even know she had because it had always been hidden by a mass of weeds. The next day, we heard something splashing around in there. That was enough for me to clear the weeds and move the birdbath somewhere visible. The payoff came quickly, and we were rewarded with the sight of a little brown blob taking a bath. I was bewitched. I sat there and watched. I listened to the water splashing as the sun faded. I noticed that this brown blob was bigger than most brown blobs I had seen. I decided to look up its name. “California Towhee.” The next day, I saw my friend perusing the yard with its mate. “Hello, Towhee,” I greeted it. It ignored me, hopping around, scratching and pecking. Once again, I sat and watched. Over time, I learned the names of other brown blobs, and I greeted them too. I watched, and I watched. I didn’t have to go out of my way to look for them, because they often were just there. Something started changing in me every time I came across these happy little critters, and I started wondering how I could attract more of them. It turns out that birds eat bugs. Lots of them. They vastly prefer them to other types of food. The best way to bring more birds to your garden is to attract more bugs. The best way to do that is to grow native plants. My previous track record with plants had me hesitant about diving in, but I was newly motivated, and I was lucky enough to have the time and the space. I scoured local nurseries and the Internet, trying to soak in everything I could find. I bought one plant at a time, put them in the ground, and did my best to keep them alive. Miraculously, most of them survived. Native plants are resilient, and they’re already adapted to our local conditions. They don’t need the rigamarole of unnatural watering regimens or soil modifications that traditional gardening requires. I mostly had to stick them in the ground, and most of them did okay. A few years into the practice, I had started to suspect that my enthusiasm for gardening and native plants was more of a dalliance than a passion. I appreciated everything that gardening had done for me, but I wasn’t sure how much more time I wanted to invest into it. Weeding, in particular, felt like just another maintenance task that I was mostly failing at. A Beautiful Discovery When my partner and I first met, she introduced me to Skyline Gardens in the hills just outside of Berkeley, California. We didn’t know the name of the place at the time. The trail didn’t have a clear marker, and we didn’t know where it ended. We would park on the side of a road and hop a fence to reach it. It quickly became our trail, and we would walk it often. During the pandemic and my subsequent gardening deep dive, I realized to my delight that there were many beautiful native plants along the trail. I assumed that they had been there all along and that I was noticing them for the first time, but that wasn’t quite true. Most of the beautiful, “wild” spaces we enjoy are being actively stewarded, whether we realize it or not. Trails need to be cleared, weeds need to be pulled, shrubs and trees need to be pruned. It’s not just about creating lush, accessible, green spaces. It’s also about maintaining safety and balance in the ecosystem, from removing dried foliage from fire-prone areas to creating habitat for endangered pollinators. There’s so much invisible work, it’s easy to take it all for granted. But Skyline Gardens had other gifts beyond active stewardship. A combination of elevation and terrain and location, location, location has made it the most botanically biodiverse region this side of the San Francisco Bay. As someone who was nature-blind prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if an area were biodiverse or not. It all just looked like a bunch of greenery to me. Two years ago, while slowly emerging from my nature-blindness, my partner and I were walking through Skyline Gardens on a beautiful Spring day, and we decided to wander off the beaten path. We walked up a series of switchbacks through tangles of waist-high weeds and a grove of eucalyptus trees. We emerged onto a rocky ridge with panoramic views of the Bay, Oakland, San Francisco, even the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked along the ridge, skirting around thickets of coyote brush and silver bush lupine, until we suddenly came upon this high meadow. I then realized that biodiversity can look like a lot more than a bunch of greenery: Even the most nature-blind person in the world could understand, without explanation, that these fields of colorful splendor were beautiful and exceptional. What I didn’t know was that, a century and a half ago, this was actually the norm for much of California. California is known as the “Golden State,” which is mostly an allusion to the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s. But it might as well be a description of the warm, ochre hues dancing across the hills throughout the state for most of the year. This is the California I grew up with, and in truth, I think it looks beautiful. But those evocative yellows also represent barrenness and destruction. It is the result of invasive grasses, mustards, and thistles that suck up moisture and nutrients, outcompeting everything else in their relentless quest to go to seed and reproduce as quickly and as bountifully as possible. Not only do their shallow roots barely sink any carbon, their short lives make the hills especially fire-prone. Before colonization and industrial agriculture, much of California looked like what Skyline Gardens looks like now. In the 1880s, the conservationist John Muir described the Central Valley as “one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your feet would press more than a hundred flowers at every step.” I had read Muir’s description years ago, but I had had trouble envisioning what it looked like. Thanks to Skyline Gardens, I no longer had to try to imagine. I could see it for myself a quick 20-minute drive from where I lived. The Downside of Vision As long as I can remember, I’ve been a visualizer. I would spend hours as a kid imagining what it might be like when I was older, how I would want to behave, what I would do in different situations. I didn’t have an unhappy childhood, not exactly at least. I grew up in a middle class household in beautiful Southern California, where the sun was always shining. Both of my parents were active in our lives, I was close with my two sisters, and I made friends easily. Still, there was turmoil in my household, secondary trauma from my parents’ experiences growing up in Korea under Japanese oppression, losing close family members during the Korean War, then immigrating to this country without any kind of support system and trying to make do. My parents had a dream for me and my sisters, and they scratched and clawed and fought to try to make it a reality. They fought with people and institutions that did not necessarily like how they looked or sounded or smelled, folks who did not necessarily want them here, much less to succeed. They also fought with each other and with my sisters and me. Every day, they were tired and stressed and scared. When they didn’t know what else they could do, they yelled and screamed. Sometimes, they went beyond that. In those times, I tried to find a place where I could be alone and visualize. I often envisioned difficult situations, and I would think through how I would deal with them. In these scenarios, I always figured things out, although not necessarily easily. It was empowering and hopeful, and it not only helped me problem-solve, it made me more resilient. I first met my mentor, Doug Engelbart, in 1997, when I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 70s. Doug made my little exercises in visioning seem like child’s play. Among the many things I learned from him was that we rarely permit ourselves to truly think big. What was so unique about him was that he wasn’t a dreamer. He was a doer, and his enormous vision was his roadmap. Doug passed away in 2013, and he was depressed the entire time I knew him. Mental health is a complicated affair, and I don’t wan

32 min
02/04/2021

End-of-Year Journey Mapping: How my 2020 Went and How 2021 Is Looking

Four years ago, I started organizing a small end-of-year gathering with other Bay Area collaboration practitioners to celebrate and make meaning of the year together. We would spend the first few hours of our session mapping how our individual years went using an exercise called Journey Mapping, then we would share our respective stories with each other and toast the end of the year with libations and snacks. It was a lovely ritual, and it became an annual tradition. This past year, we couldn’t do a face-to-face gathering due to the pandemic, so we decided to do it remotely instead. Going remote had three wonderful benefits. We were able to divide it into two sessions, which netted us more time. We were able to invite more people, including folks who lived outside of the Bay Area. And, it was a good kick-in-the-pants for me to write up the exercise so that others could organize their own gatherings. (Several folks did, which made me incredibly happy.) Journey Mapping is a quick way of visually telling the story of a project’s highs and lows over a bounded timeline. (Product managers may be familiar with customer journey mapping, which is similar in spirit, but different in practice.) You can do the exercise on your own, but it’s nicer in a group setting, even when everyone is doing it for themselves (as we do in our end-of-year ritual). It’s like working out with a buddy — you’re more likely to do it if others are doing it with you, and it’s a wonderful way to support each other and build community. When you do it as a group on a shared project, it serves as a fantastic tool for making meaning together and for discussing and developing shared narratives. I often use it as a ritual for teams to celebrate, mourn, learn, and transition. How you do the exercise is not as important as simply making time to reflect regularly. The more you do it, the more you’ll understand how best to adjust it for your specific situation. That said, Journey Mapping has three attributes that I think are particularly powerful. First, it contextualizes your work in your overall life. The toolkit specifically asks you to map highs and lows both professionally (or with a specific project) and personally. In a team setting, the tendency is to skip the personal brainstorming, especially when you have limited time. Sometimes, this is warranted. However, you lose a lot when you do this. Several years ago, I did this exercise with a startup’s leadership team, which was struggling mightily with interpersonal dynamics. Earlier that year, they had been running out of money, and they weren’t sure they would be able to raise another round of investments. Not surprisingly, that was a low point professionally for everyone. At the same time, one of the leaders had also been dealing with a family tragedy and the dissolution of a relationship. The rest of the team never knew about this and only found out about this through the Journey Mapping exercise. Learning about their teammate’s personal struggles many months after the fact caused them to re-examine how they viewed their behavior during that time, leading to greater empathy, a little regret, and ultimately forgiveness. Second, the Journey Mapping exercise asks you to list the highs and lows from memory first, then to review your calendar, journal, and other artifacts and add anything you might have forgotten. This reminds you that what you might be feeling and remembering in the moment is rarely the whole story and that there may be lessons to harvest or things to celebrate that are worth revisiting. It also reminds us of the importance of having and reviewing artifacts. Third, the Journey Mapping exercise encourages you to take your somewhat structured set of sticky notes and create meaningful art out of it. For example, these were the sticky notes that I created for my 2020 (using Sticky Studio): and this was my artistic rendition: This part of the exercise almost always gets short shrift. We often treat art as optional — nice, but not necessary. Doing this end-of-year ritual with my colleagues the past four years has helped me realize that this is a mistake, not just with Journey Mapping, but with many of my exercises. Practically speaking, when you create something that’s beautiful, you’re more likely to look at it again. More importantly, the act of creation leads to an understanding that’s far deeper and more meaningful than a set of sticky notes can convey. You can get a taste of what I mean by looking at the art that some of my colleagues created: Everybody chose to tell their story differently, from emphasizing specific themes (e.g. needing space, “re-“ words) to capturing a larger metaphor (e.g. tree, river). My colleague, Catherine Madden, organized her year into five categories and wove her story into the tapestry on the right — you can read more about her story and process here. Seeing what people created and listening to their stories were incredibly moving. I will remember those stories in a way that I don’t think would have been possible if they had simply told them or shared their sticky notes. Moreover, I don’t know that they would have told the stories the way they did if they had not had the chance to create this art. My 2020 The personal backdrop for my 2020 was — like everyone’s — all about the pandemic. I was incredibly fortunate to be healthy and safe and not to lose anyone to COVID-19. So many people were not that lucky. The numbers are staggering — 2.2 million deaths worldwide so far, 450,000 in the U.S alone. (For comparison, 400,000 Americans died in World War II.) What made it all the more heartbreaking — especially for someone whose purpose is to help society collaborate more effectively — was how divided and misaligned we were in these trying times. I was way luckier than most, but pandemic life was still hard. I spent the spring simply trying to cope. Like many people, one mechanism I tried was growing plants. I found a wilted mint sprig in the back of my refrigerator, which I rooted in water for several weeks, then transferred to a pot. I observed and documented the process every day, occasionally sharing what I saw on Instagram. My partner, amused by the loving care I was showing my plant, named it, “Mo.” I was awed by how resilient my mint was, and I was also surprised how gratifying this simple, regular practice of paying attention to Mo Mint felt. Resilience. Paying attention. These became recurring themes both personally and professionally. I went into 2020 hoping that I could spend 30 percent of my time on coaching and training individual collaboration practitioners. I felt that this would be the best path to maximizing my impact, and it’s also where I felt the most energy and joy. A third of the way into the year, as the lockdowns were starting, it was clear that I wasn’t getting enough traction to hit that number. I also went into 2020 adamant that I would only take on organizational clients willing to try my muscle-building approach to addressing their challenges. Convincing clients to do this has always been difficult, but my yield in the first half of 2020 was even lower than what it usually was. In an interesting twist, both the pandemic and the racial unrest created demand around collaboration practitioners who could help with remote work and equity work. However, most of the prospects who came my way were more interested in quick fixes than the kind of deep work that real change requires. Grappling with those two things in concert was hard enough. Doing so during a pandemic was even harder. Paying attention and focusing on resilience made all the difference in the world. The previous year, I had started to experiment with video as a way to better communicate my frameworks and practices, and I had more ideas and partially written scripts than time to produce them. Several conversations I had been having with colleagues inspired me to revisit one of these videos, Acting Strategically, which I published in April. The response was universally positive, with many people asking me, “What would it look like for me or my organization to do this?” This led me to dust off some workouts I had developed over the years and start piloting them with colleagues and friends. The pilots performed well, and I loved doing them. I started preparing an “official” offering for late 2020, when something unexpected happened. Focusing on strategy was helping prospective organizational clients understand my workout approach in a way that had failed to click otherwise. Even when it was clear that they needed to focus on areas other than strategy, because they were better primed for this approach, they were more open to using workouts to address other aspects of collaboration. By late summer, I found myself doing workouts with several organizational clients. It was gratifying and generative, but it was also taking my energy away from my individual practitioner offerings. I was conflicted, but I ultimately decided to go with where the demand was taking me and to hold off on my individual offerings indefinitely. Looking Forward and Backward and Forward Again Doing the Journey Mapping this past December had one more interesting twist. A few years earlier, Catherine Madden had suggested doing the exercise as a way of looking forward, not just looking back. At the beginning of 2020, I decided to try her suggestion, drawing what I imagined my professional curve might look like at the end of 2020. Here’s what I drew: It was fascinating to compare this with how my year actually went. I had imagined a choppy beginning with a gradual upward trend, and I wasn’t completely wrong. However, the choppiness ended up being twice as long with an overall downward trajectory, there was never any “big” win, and while my year did end on an higher note, it wasn’t as high as I had hoped. St

13 min
11/12/2020

What I’ve Learned About Building Collaboration Muscles

It’s now been seven years since I first started exploring a simple hypothesis: Collaboration is a muscle (or, rather, a set of muscles) You strengthen these muscles by exercising them repeatedly (i.e. practice) Our current orientation toward collaboration is knowledge-centric, not practice-centric. No one expects anyone to get good at playing the guitar by handing them a book or sending them to a week-long “training,” yet somehow, this is exactly how we try to help folks get better at communicating or navigating hairy group dynamics. I’ve spent the past seven years trying to change this. I’m currently on the fifth iteration of my experiments, which I’m currently calling Collaboration Gym. The other iterations (slightly out of order) were: Changemaker Bootcamp (2013) Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets (2014-2015) Habits of High-Performing Groups (2018-present) “Personal” Training for Organizations (2016-present) Collaboration Gym (2020-present) I’ve failed a lot and learned a ton with each iteration, and I thought it would be fun to summarize what I’ve been learning here. I’ve also been having provocative conversations with Sarna Salzman and Freya Bradford about what a Collaboration Gym (or, in their case, a “Systems Change Dojo”) might look like in their community of Traverse City, Michigan. We’ve stayed mostly big picture so far, but recently decided that it was time to get real and specific. With their permission, I’ve decided to do my thinking out loud so as to force me to write down these scattered thoughts and also get some early feedback from a broader set of folks. That means you, dear reader! Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Changemaker Bootcamp (2013) The first iteration of this experiment was Changemaker Bootcamp, a face-to-face workout program that met for two hours every week for six weeks. I designed a series of exercises focused on developing muscles I considered to be critical for effective collaboration, such as listening actively, asking generative questions, navigating power, and having challenging conversations. My participants — all of whom enrolled individually — generally found the exercises valuable and appreciated the practice-orientation. They also got along well with each other and valued the peer feedback. I designed the workouts to feel like physical workouts, only without the sweating and exhaustion. They consisted of warmups followed by intense exercises, with “just enough” explanations for why we were doing what we were doing. Most found the experiential emphasis refreshing. A few found it slightly dissatisfying. Even though they trusted me, they still wanted me to explain the why of each workout in greater detail. These initial pilots helped me test and refine my initial set of workouts, and they also helped build my confidence. However, there were three key flaws. We weren’t repeating any of the exercises. In order to do this, I needed more of my participants’ time and I needed to focus my workouts on just a few core muscles. I needed an assessment. This would help me figure out the muscles on which to focus, and it would also help participants sense their progress. I was having trouble explaining the specific value and impact of this kind of training to people who didn’t already know and trust me. Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets (2014-2015) I tried to address these flaws in my next iteration, Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets. I almost tripled the length of the program from six to 16 weeks to create more space for repetition and habit-building. I created an assessment that folks would take at the beginning and at the end of the program, which helped me focus the workouts and also enabled the group to track their progress. Finally, I made it a cohort training rather than a program for individuals, which also helped with focus. I also shifted the trainings from face-to-face to a remote, decentralized model, where I paired people up and made them responsible for scheduling their workouts on their own. After each workout, folks would share one takeaway on an online forum. This created group accountability by signaling that they were doing the workouts, but it itself was also a workout focused on muscles for sharing early and often. Every four weeks, everyone would get together for a full group workout. Not being face-to-face meant I couldn’t (easily) do somatic workouts and that the instructions had to be clear and compelling. Not leading the pair workouts meant that I couldn’t make real-time adjustments. These constraints forced me to be more rigorous in designing and testing my workouts. In return, doing them remotely made it easier to participate and shifted agency away from me to the participants, which was in line with my desire to de-guru-fy this work. I consistently faced early resistance from folks about the time commitment. I tried to explain that the workouts were in the context of the work that they were already doing, so they weren’t actually doing anything “extra,” but reception to this was mixed. Even though people got the metaphor around practice and working out, they didn’t have their own felt experiences around what this might look like, which made my description of the program feel abstract. In the end, I asked participants to trust me, explaining that they would be believers after a few weeks. Most folks are hungry to talk about their work with someone who will empathize, be supportive, and offer feedback. Talking with the same person regularly enables people to get to the point faster, because their partners already know the context. Even if folks ignored my instructions entirely and just talked, I knew that they would get value out of simply having regular conversations with other good people. This almost always turned out to be true. After the first week of workouts, folks would generally report having an excellent conversation with their partner. After about six weeks, people would often start saying that their workouts with their partners were the highlights of their week. Even though people generally had a felt sense of progress by the end of the program, they especially loved the final assessment, because they could point to and talk about the progress they had made in a concrete way. Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets was a vast improvement over Changemaker Bootcamp, but people were still not practicing enough to see the kinds of dramatic, persistent improvement I wanted to see. I needed to focus the workouts even more and find ways to get people more repetitions. I was also still having trouble explaining how doing these workouts would lead to the promised impacts. People understood the theory, but without felt experience, it felt too abstract. If you think about it, telling folks who are out-of-shape that they could be running a 5K in two months simply by running a little bit every day also feels abstract and far-fetched. The reason people are willing to believe this, even without felt experience, is that they know that many others have done it successfully. I probably need to get to the same place before folks truly believe the story I’m telling about collaboration muscles and practice. Habits of High-Performing Groups (2018-present) In 2018, I decided to shift the frame of my trainings to focus on four habits of high-performing groups: Aligning around success Aligning around working agreements Retrospectives Information hygiene Throughout the course of my work with groups of all shapes and sizes, I noticed that the best-performing groups do all four of these things consistently and well. These also serve as keystone habits, meaning that doing them regularly often unlocks and unleashes other important muscles and habits. Regularly trying to align around anything, for example, forces you to get better at listening, synthesizing, and working more iteratively. Only having four habits made focusing my workouts much easier. My monthly Good Goal-Setting Peer Coaching Workshops was an attempt to help people strengthen their muscles around the first habit — aligning around success. Participants were asked to fill out a Success Spectrum before the workshop, then they got two rounds of feedback from their peers and optional feedback from me afterward. People could register for individual workshops, or they could pay for a yearly subscription that enabled them to drop into any workshop. The subscription was priced low to incentivize regular attendance. Almost 30 percent of registrants opted for the subscription, which was wonderful. However, only 40 percent of subscribers participated in more than one workshop, even though their evaluations were positive, which meant that the majority of subscribers were essentially paying a higher fee for a single workshop. One subscriber didn’t show up to any of the trainings, which made my gym analogy even more apt. Another subscriber attended four trainings, and watching her growth reaffirmed the value of this muscle-building approach. However, not being able to get more folks to attend more regularly — even though they had already paid for it — was a bummer. I think I could leverage some behavioral psychology to encourage more repeat participation. One trick I’m keen to try is to have people pay a subscription fee, then give them money back every time they attend a workout. I also think cohort models, like Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets, are better at incentivizing more regular attendance. The most negative feedback I got from these trainings was that some participants wanted more coaching from me as opposed to their peers. I designed these trainings around peer coaching as part of my ongoing effort to de-guru-fy this work. Just like working out with a buddy can be just as effective for getting into shape as working out with a personal fitness instructor, I wanted people to understand that making time to p

15 min
07/24/2020

Doing “More” Is a Terrible Goal

When I was in my early 20s, I used to play pickup basketball with a guy who was 20 years older than me, but didn’t look it. He was in superb shape, and he never seemed to get injured. At one of our games, I sprained my ankle, and when I was healthy enough to return, I asked him if he had any rehab tips. "Yoga," he replied. He hadn't sprained his ankle in over ten years, which he attributed to his yoga practice. I was intrigued, but never seemed to get around to trying it. It took me another ten years before I took my first yoga class. It was hard, it felt great, and I could see the value of making it a regular practice. But I never did, and I was totally okay with that. Now I’m in my mid-40s. My partner is an avid yoga practitioner, so I’ve been doing it more often too — at least once a month. As someone who likes to push myself, I used to chuckle when my instructors would encourage us to do the opposite, to appreciate where we were and to celebrate that we were doing something rather than strain to do more and possibly hurt ourselves along the way. It was the opposite of how I was used to doing things, but I ended up embracing this kinder, gentler mentality. Frankly, if this weren’t the culture, I would probably never do yoga at all. Which is the point! Here’s the thing. The last few years, I’ve done yoga more than I ever have, but I’m not noticeably stronger or more flexible. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m less flexible. The yoga has almost certainly slowed my deterioration, and it’s undoubtedly had other positive effects as well. However, if I want to counter or even surpass the impact of age and lifestyle, once a month clearly won’t cut it. High-performance is a choice. It’s okay not to make that choice (as I have with yoga and my overall flexibility), but it’s helpful to be honest with yourself about it. If you’re the leader of a group, it’s not just helpful, it’s critical, because saying one thing and behaving differently can end up harming others, even if your original intentions were sincere. I have seen this play out with groups my entire career, and I’m seeing it play out again in this current moment as groups struggle with their desire to address their internal challenges around racial and gender equity. The root of the problem is lack of clarity and alignment around what success looks like. A good indicator of this is when leaders say their groups should be doing “more,” without ever specifying how much. What do you actually mean by “more”? If you have a yoga view of the world, then “more” might imply that whatever you end up doing is fine, but not necessary. You’re not holding your group or yourself accountable to the results. If this is indeed what you mean, then it’s better to make this clear. (With the Goals + Success Spectrum, you can do this by putting it in the Epic column.) If this isn’t what you mean, then you run the risk of doing harm. People project what “more” means to them, which leads to contradictory expectations, working at cross-purposes, and toxicity. Worse, people’s definitions can shift over time. When this happens, the person with the most power gets to decide whether or not the group is succeeding or failing, and ends up doling out the consequences accordingly. A team can’t perform if the target is obscure and constantly moving. Furthermore, if someone is already being marginalized in a group, a system like this is only going to further marginalize them. It’s also natural to question a group or leader’s sincerity when they aren’t holding themselves accountable to clear goals. Instead of saying “more,” groups and leaders should practice asking, “how much?” How much more revenue are you trying to make? How much more equitable are you trying to be? How much more collaborative are you trying to be? What exactly does success look like to you? Most importantly, why? Why is it important to make this much more revenue, or to get this much more equitable or collaborative? Your answers to these questions will help you understand whether or not your strategies and even your goal make sense. If your goal is to stay in shape, then running a few miles a week might be enough. If your goal is to run a marathon, then running a few miles a week isn’t going to get you there. If you don’t want to run more, maybe it’s better to prioritize staying in shape over running a marathon. One of my favorite tools to use with groups is the Behavior Over Time graph. Once a group has articulated what “how much” success looks like, I ask them to draw a graph, where the X-axis is time and the Y-axis is the success indicator you’re tracking. I then ask them to put the current date in the middle of the X-axis and to graph their historical progress. Finally, I ask them to graph their best case scenario for what the future might look like if they continue doing what they’re doing. For example, if my goal is to run a marathon by November, but I’m only running a few miles a week, my Behavior Over Time graph might look like this: The gap between the best case scenario and where I want to be is a signal that I either need to do something differently or change my goal. However, someone else might have a different hypothesis for what the best case scenario is: The goal of all this is not to rigidly quantify everything, nor is it to analyze your way to a “definitive” answer. The goal is to make your mental models and theories of change explicit, so that you and others can talk about them, align around them, test them, and either hold yourself accountable or openly and collectively adjust your goals as you learn. Getting concrete about “how much” is a lot harder than simply saying, “more.” You might think you can do everyone a favor by keeping things ambiguous, but what you’d actually be doing is exacerbating toxic power dynamics, where everyone is left guessing what the goal actually is and starts operating accordingly. The way around this is to do the hard work while applying the yoga principle of self-compassion. When you don’t achieve a goal, I think most of our defaults is to be hard on ourselves. The challenge and the opportunity is to re-frame success so that it’s not just about the goal, but about both the goal and the process. If you’re doing anything hard or uncertain, failure is inevitable. What matters is that you fail enough so that you have the opportunity to find success. Holding ourselves accountable to goals is important, but celebrating our hard work and stumbles along the way is equally so. Photo by Eun-Joung Lee.

8 min
07/02/2020

Do the Work

It’s been one month since a white police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, a 46-year old Black father of five. I’ve found the subsequent response remarkable for its intensity, unprecedented diversity, and impact. While I’m moved by how many people and organizations seem genuinely compelled to act, I’m also vexed by some of the rhetoric around what “doing something” actually means. Woke theatre aside, I get that it’s hard to know what to do or how. I can see how easy it is to be overwhelmed by the enormity of wanting to eradicate 400 years of structural and cultural racism or by the fear of doing or saying the “wrong” thing. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there, and folks have been circulating them with abandon. While many resonate with both my personal and professional experience, I’ve found several to be questionable or worse, and I can’t help feeling like most of this resource sharing misses the point. You can’t just work your way through a listicle and solve racism. This work is hard, but maybe not in the way most of us think it is. The muscles required to create a more equitable society are the same ones needed to be skilled collaboration practitioners, and they can only be developed through practice and repetition. The key is to focus on the right things and to do them over and over again. The devil, of course, is in the details, and I want to riff on those here. But first, I want to tell two stories. The first is about data, narratives, and human psychology. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, 91 people have been killed by police in the 38 days since George Floyd’s murder. Nineteen of them (21 percent) were Black, a slight decrease from the overall percentage over the past eight years (25 percent). Thirty-two of the 91 killed were white. I read all of the news items documenting each of these 51 killings (not counting the 40 victims of other or unreported race). The vast majority of the victims were armed. Many were violent criminals — rapists, murderers. Several of the deaths were the result of shootouts, and some cops died as a result. A few cases of both Black and white victims raised my eyebrows, but there was nothing that felt as clearly wrong and overtly racist as George Floyd’s murder. Reading about these 51 deaths left me feeling depressed, but not outraged. As I dove more deeply into these incidents, I couldn’t help wondering how I would have felt about racialized police violence if I had not been exposed to countless stories like George Floyd’s over the years, if my only exposure to police violence were accounts like the 51 articles I read. It was a troubling thought, because of all the numbers that I mentioned and stories that I shared, there’s only one that really matters: that 25 percent of people killed by police are Black. Why does that number matter? Because only 14 percent of Americans are Black, which means that Black people are disproportionately killed by police by a big margin. Even if George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Philando Castile or any of the many Black women and men who were definitively unjustly killed by police over the years had never happened, that 25 percent number would still be a clear indication of a racial disparity that needs to be addressed. Therein lies the essential challenge. No one has ever looked at a number and taken to the streets. There are lots of mental hoops required to make sense of that number, to trust its implications, and then to get outraged by it. We’re seeing this play out right now with the massive racial disparity of COVID-19 deaths, which is killing far more Black and Latinx people than police violence, yet hasn’t resulted in large-scale public outrage. In a perfect world, it shouldn’t take a shocking video of a Black man being callously suffocated to death by a smug white police officer for folks to recognize that the system is racist, but for most of us, that’s exactly what it took. Except that’s not quite the whole story either. As visceral as George Floyd’s death was, it still wouldn’t have had the impact that it did without the massive amount of work and resources that the Movement for Black Lives has invested in organizing, mobilizing, and collectively aligning around a policy platform over the past eight years. Contrary to how it may appear on the surface, the Movement for Black Lives isn’t just a hashtag. It’s also not a single organization with a clear hierarchy of decision-making and leadership. It’s a network full of leaders, organizations, and activists, some more visible than others, but every one of them playing a critical role. That makes it harder to understand, talk about, or fund. Human beings love simple, emotional narratives. We need to accept this about ourselves and leverage it to motivate change. But once we allow ourselves to be moved, we also have to be willing to let go of these simple, emotional narratives and dive more deeply into the messy and far less compelling nuts and bolts of the work. Real change takes lots of hard work, the kind that most people are completely uninterested in hearing about or doing. The second story I want to tell is about basketball. When your team has the ball and is trying to score, one of the easiest ways to help your teammates is to set a screen. This consists of positioning your body so that it serves as a kind of wall that prevents the defender from chasing your teammate. If the defender sees it coming, they can try to dance around the screen, but that split second of separation is often enough to give your teammate an advantage. If the defender doesn’t see it coming, then it results in a collision, which usually hurts them a lot more than it hurts you. If you’re defending, and you see the other team set a screen, all you have to do is yell, “Left!” or “Right!” depending on where the screen is relative to your teammate. At best, your teammates can adjust and eliminate the offensive advantage. At worst, you save a teammate from a painful collision. It is a simple and effective intervention that doesn’t require any special athletic abilities. All it takes is attention and communication. Still, it’s not intuitive. Many players — even experienced ones — have to be told to “call out the screens,” often by a frustrated teammate who has just been flattened by one. I find this fascinating. Basketball is a hard sport to learn and play. I’ve played it my whole life, and I’m still mediocre at the shooting and dribbling part, which require physical acumen. But I’m great at calling out screens, which simply requires me to talk. Why is it so hard for others? Why isn’t this the first thing that people learn how to do? It turns out that being an ally is a muscle, and that developing that muscle takes practice. A few weeks ago, I was on a check-in call for a network of Black activists and allies. On the first part of the call, folks shared a number of inspiring stories about some of the amazing work happening on the ground in Minneapolis and other places around the U.S. Themes around being invisible and the importance of reclaiming one’s own agency and not replicating existing power dynamics came up over and over again. Afterward, we broke out into small discussion groups. I was in a group with four other people, including a moderator. None of us knew each other, so the moderator called on people, one-by-one, to introduce themselves, and he inadvertently skipped me. I waited several moments for someone — anyone — to point this out, but nobody did, and the group started diving into the discussion. I finally found a point to jump in, saying with a smile, “I have a thought, and while I’m at it, I’ll also introduce myself.” The moderator profusely apologized, not just in the moment, but throughout the rest of the discussion. I was touched by how badly he clearly felt. It was fine, I knew it wasn’t intentional, and I would have been okay regardless. And everyone in the group was lovely. What really stuck out for me, though, was how no one else in the group noticed or said anything, especially after all of the talk beforehand about the importance of seeing each other, of being seen, and of being good allies. I’ll say it again: This work is hard, but maybe not in the way most of us think it is. The muscles required to create a more equitable society are the same ones needed to be skilled collaboration practitioners, and they can only be developed through practice and repetition. The key is to focus on the right things and to do them over and over again. I’ve worked with all kinds of groups over the years, including many social justice groups, and I’m constantly struck by how bad most of us are at the fundamentals. It’s why I’ve moved away from larger systems change projects and have focused my energies on training and coaching. If you’re trying to create a more equitable world, but you can’t even run an equitable meeting, much less an equitable organization, you’re focused on the wrong problem. Everything is connected. If we just stepped back and started with smaller, simpler (but by no means simple) challenges, giving ourselves plenty of permission to make mistakes along the way, we would be far more likely to make headway with the bigger, harder societal problems that so many of us care so much about. Which brings me to the thing I really want to say to collaboration practitioners and organizations who want to contribute to a more racially just world. Urgency is the enemy of equity. If you really want to make a difference, start by slowing down. All of the racial equity training in the world won’t make a lick of difference if you don’t have the mechanisms and the right mindsets in place to get clear and aligned about success, to adjust based on what you’re learning, and to hold yourselves accountable to your st

13 min
05/20/2020

Case Study: Designing and Facilitating a Small Nonprofit Board Retreat with Zoe Tamaki

Over the past two years, I helped designed and facilitate two annual board retreats for a small nonprofit with my colleague, Zoe Tamaki. I don’t typically do one-offs like this, but the executive director was a friend of mine, and I was looking for an excuse to work with and learn from Zoe. After last year’s retreat, Zoe and I sat down in front of a camera and discussed some things we learned from the experience and from each other, including: The importance of designing with your stakeholders When relationship-building trumps task work How I handled a funky facilitation moment I’d like to share stories like this more frequently, and I hope to explore other mediums in which to do this, especially video. I want to share a lot more about design, which contributes much more to the success of group process than facilitation. I especially want to talk about the harder stuff — the challenging moments or the stuff that flat out fails. Since my focus over the past few years has shifted to supporting and coaching other collaboration practitioners such as Zoe, I’m especially excited to be sharing things I’m learning from them. Finally, I hope to inspire other practitioners to share stories from their work more frequently and without concern about polish. This work is hard. It’s better to show all the rough edges. Many thanks to Zoe for doing this work with me and for being willing to candidly debrief it on camera afterward! As I think you’ll be able to tell from the video, it was super fun working with her.

24 min
05/04/2020

The Emperor Has No Clothes: Acting Strategically While Recovering from Process Trauma

A huge part of my job over the years has been helping groups recover from Process Trauma (and its ugly cousin Consultant Trauma). It’s caused when a group goes through some kind of process, such as strategic planning, and has a horrible experience. It almost always results in the group deciding never to pursue that process again unless they’re forced to, which exacerbates the trauma. As empathetic as I am to Process Trauma, I am troubled that groups tend to give up on process rather than making adjustments and trying again. If I have a bad experience with a personal fitness trainer, I’m not going to give up on exercise as a path to getting healthier. Why do we do this with our work? I think it’s because people often don’t understand why they’re going through a process in the first place. Instead of pressing for clarity, most folks accept it without questioning it. It’s the organizational version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. People assume that others must know better, or they’re intimidated by the terminology, and they give in. Strategy work is rife with Process Trauma. However, strategy work matters because acting strategically matters. It’s the difference between systematically working toward your higher purpose and flailing in the weeds, trying to put out fires wherever you see them. It’s the difference between flowing in alignment with others and moving at cross-purposes. It’s the difference between success and failure. I recently put together a short video where I explain what strategy is, how to develop good strategy, and how to build strong strategic muscles: I hope this video helps people recover from Process Trauma while also clarifying why and how to do this work. I want to empower folks to speak up when the Emperor has no clothes. I want people to understand that skilled practitioners aren’t good at coming up with answers, but at helping the group ask and explore the right questions. I want people to understand that all good strategy is collective and emergent. I also hope this video helps folks understand why tools like the Strategy / Culture Bicycle are designed the way they are and imagine alternative ways of using them. There’s no one right way to develop good strategy. It’s critical that groups approach it as something they need to figure out for themselves, which takes time and practice. I would love to start a larger conversation about how to align around good strategy. Many strategy consultants are not intentional about helping groups align, which is why their processes often fail. However, collaboration practitioners who are intentional about alignment often stop there rather than making sure that what they align around is good. I touch on some of this in the video, but the devil is always in the details. What strikes me about Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is that the emperor keeps walking, naked as the day he was born, head held high, even after the crowd starts hooting at him. Strategy is hard. If you’re not struggling at it, you’re probably not doing it right. But stubbornly marching ahead, ignoring the people around you, guarantees Process Trauma and failure. Good things happen when people know the purpose of a process, make adjustments when they struggle, and practice, practice, practice. Thanks to H. Jessica Kim for reviewing an early draft of this post. Photo by Png Nexus, CC BY NC-ND 2.0.

4 min
04/13/2020

Online Collaboration Isn’t Just About Meetings

COVID-19 has forced many of us to reckon with a working world where we can’t be face-to-face. I’ve been heartened to see how collaboration practitioners have been responding overall. I love seeing folks tapping the wisdom of their own groups before looking outward and sharing their knowledge freely and broadly. I am especially happy to see people reminding others and themselves to pause and revisit their underlying goals rather than make hasty decisions. There is a lot of amazing digital technology out there, and it’s easy to dive head-first into these tools without considering other, technology-free interventions that might have an even greater impact in these difficult times. It’s been interesting, for example, to see so many people emphasize the importance of checkins and working agreements. When this is all over, I hope people realize that these techniques are relevant when we’re face-to-face as well. After all, online collaboration is just collaboration. The same principles apply. It just takes practice to get them right in different contexts. One adjustment I’d like to see more people make is to focus less on meetings. (This was a problem in our pre-COVID-19 world as well.) Meetings are indeed important, and understanding how to design and facilitate them effectively, whether face-to-face or online, is a craft that not enough people do well. However, meetings are just a tool, and a limited one at that. I’d like to offer two frameworks that help us think beyond meetings. First, try not to think in terms of “online” or “virtual.” Instead, think in terms of work that happens at the same time (synchronous) or at different times (asynchronous), and collaboration that happens in the same or different places (remote). Many collaboration practitioners tend to focus on synchronous collaboration — stuff that happens at the same time (which often ends up translating to meetings). I think some of the best opportunities for improving collaboration lie with asynchronous collaboration. Many of us assume that we can’t replicate the delightful experiences that are possible when people are in the same place at the same time. I think that’s narrow thinking. Many years ago, I asked Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki (the collaborative technology that powers Wikipedia), how he would describe the essence of a wiki. He responded, “It’s when I work on something, put it out into the world, walk away, and come back later, only to find that someone else has taken it and made it better.” To me, that beautifully describes what’s possible when asynchronous collaboration is working well, and it resonates with my own experiences. It also offers a North Star for what we’re trying to achieve when we’re designing for asynchronous collaboration. Second, it’s important to remember that collaboration consists of three different kinds of work: task, relationship, and sensemaking. Breaking collaboration into these three categories can offer greater guidance into how to design and facilitate asynchronous work more effectively. For example, a common type of task work for knowledge workers is creating documents. Agreeing on a single place for finding and editing documents hugely simplifies people’s abilities to collaborate asynchronously. It also better facilitates the kind of experience that Ward described than, say, emailing documents back-and-forth. A common sensemaking exercise is the stand-up meeting, where everyone on a team announces what they’re working on and where they need help. (People are asked to stand up during these meetings to encourage people to keep their updates brief.) You could easily do a stand-up meeting online, but aggregating and re-sharing status updates over email is potentially more efficient and effective. One interesting side effect of so many people meeting over video while sheltering in place is that we literally get a window into each other’s homes and even our families and pets, an emergent form of relationship-building. Pamela Hinds , who has long studied distributed work, calls this “contextual knowledge” and has often cited it as a key factor for successful remote, asynchronous collaboration. (It’s why, when we were designing the Delta Dialogues, a high-conflict project focused on water issues in the Sacramento Delta, we chose to rotate the meetings at people’s offices rather than at a neutral location. We wanted people to experience each other’s workplaces to enhance their sense of connection with each other.) Once we recognize this form of relationship-building as useful, we can start to think about how to do it asynchronously. In my Colearning community of practice, which consists of ten collaboration practitioners across the U.S. and Canada, each of us posts a weekly personal checkin over Slack, often sharing photos and videos of our loved ones. We post and browse at our own convenience, and the ritual and the artifacts forge bonds that run deeper than what would be possible with, say, a monthly video call, which would be incredibly hard to schedule and would almost certainly prevent some of us from participating. Similarly, we don’t need video to see each other’s faces. A trick I stole from Marcia Conner many years ago — well before video was ubiquitous — was to get silly photos of everyone on the team, combine them in a document, and have everybody print and post it on their office wall. This not only enhanced our conversations when we were talking over the phone, it created a constant sense of connection and fun even when we weren’t in a room together. While I hope these examples dispel the notion that synchronous collaboration is inherently more delightful and impactful than asynchronous, I also want to acknowledge that designing for asynchronous collaboration is more challenging. I think there are two reasons for this. First, you have to compensate for lack of attention. When everyone is in a room together, it’s easier to get and keep people’s attention. When people are on their own, you have no control over their environment. You have to leverage other tools and techniques for success, and you’re unlikely to get 100 percent follow-through. The two most common tools for compensating for lack of attention are the artifact and the ritual. An artifact is something tangible, something that you can examine on your own time, whether it’s a written document, a picture, or Proust’s Madeleine. A ritual is an action — often with some cultural significance — that’s repeated. It could be a rule (with enforcement) or a norm that people just do. It’s effective, because it becomes habitual, which means people are able to do it without thought. The trick is finding the right balance of artifacts and rituals. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously requires people to write a six-page memo before meetings, but they designate shared time at the beginning of each meeting to read the memo together. On the one hand, writing the memo requires discipline and attention in-between meetings, or asynchronously. On the other hand, rather than save meeting time by having people read the memos beforehand, they devote synchronous time to reading the memos together. I can guess the reasons for this, but the truth is that I don’t know what they are. Different practices work in different contexts. Everybody has to figure out what works for themselves. Certain kinds of cultures — especially transparent, iterative, developmental ones — will be more conducive to these kinds of practices. Finally, our relationship to technology matters, but maybe not in the way you think. On the one hand, if you are going to use a tool for collaboration, then it’s important to learn how to use it fluently and wield it skillfully. On the other hand, technology has this way of making you forget what you already know. It may be that the tools that will be most helpful for you have nothing to do with the latest and greatest digital technology. This has always been easy for me to understand, because I have always had an uncomplicated relationship with technology. I love technology, but its role is to serve me, not the other way around. When I design structures and processes for collaboration, I always start with people, not tools, and I try to help others do the same. What I’ve come to realize over the years is that this is often hard for others, because they’re worried about what they don’t know and they have a block when it comes to learning about technology. I get this. I have blocks about learning many things, and I know that advice that amounts to “get over it” is not helpful. Please recognize that these feelings are not only real, they’re okay. While I’d encourage everyone to find peers and resources that help them learn about digital tools in a way that feels safe, I also want to remind you that collaboration is ultimately about people. Keeping your humanity front and center will not only help you with your transitions to remote work, it will help you through this crisis.

10 min

10 Episodes

Workouts, Tools, and Community for Leaders of High-Performance Groups

Creator

Faster Than 20
Years Active

2020 - 2026
Episodes

10
Rating

Clean
Show Website

Faster Than 20