Faster Than 20

Faster Than 20
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Workouts, Tools, and Community for Leaders of High-Performance Groups

Episodes

  1. 4d ago

    The Calculus of Living Your Values

    I have lived in California for most of my life, and so the importance and scarcity of water is engrained in me. Several years ago, my friend Kate told me that she and her husband had made it a practice to capture water from their shower in a five-gallon bucket as they waited for it to warm up. They would then transfer the water into a rain barrel in their garden. I loved that idea, but our bathroom is tiny, and the thought of storing a large empty bucket there seemed challenging. Nevertheless, the idea stuck, and over the years, I pondered different possibilities. Last month, I was passing the automobile aisle in a hardware store, and I saw a four-gallon oil drain container. You lay it on the side to capture the liquid as it drains, then stand it up when storing it. Because the canister is narrow, it’s compact, perfect for our bathroom. We’ve been experimenting with it for the past few months. It saves about 3/4 of a gallon per shower, so 1.5 gallons a day between me and my partner, which amounts to over 500 gallons a year. We use it to water our plants and to refill our bird bath. I find it immensely satisfying. I’m also pretty sure this is one of the least strategic ways for us to save water. We could instead: Take shorter showers Take cold showers Replace our thirstier plants (which we’ve already largely done) and our bird bath Eat less meat Install a gray water system Lobby for a city-wide water recycling program Even if there are better ways to save water, it doesn’t mean our bucket experiment is not a worthwhile activity. Kate, who has worked in ocean conservation most of her career and is now focused on data stewardship, has explained that beach cleanups do almost nothing at a macro level to actually keep our beaches and our oceans clean, but have a slew of other benefits, including giving people a greater sense of connection to the ocean. This feeling not only benefits the individual, it can eventually lead to major policy wins. Staying strategic is about balancing small experiments with larger goals. Trying small things that are not likely to make a huge impact may result in other, unexpected wins. Our bucket experiment gave me a better sense of how much water we actually use and where. I learned that four gallons of water is heavy and unwieldy, and that, if we were to try another version of this experiment, we would use a smaller container. It was also just fun to think creatively and to repurpose an inexpensive household item in an unusual way. At the same time, this experiment could easily have become a gateway to compulsive, stressful behavior that resulted in very little actual gains. When you’re trying to live a values-aligned life, it’s easy to overwhelm yourself with small things that may not have any impact on the results you actually care about. I see this manifest in organizations all the time. I see groups preaching anti-racism while underpaying and overworking their multi-racial staff. I see leaders advocating for self-care while overwhelming their staff with constantly shifting priorities. I see leaders punt on making decisions in the name of inclusion, when what their reports actually want (and are often asking for) is clarity. The legendary basketball coach and executive, Pat Riley, is fond of saying, “Keep the main thing the main thing.” By all means, play, but don’t lose sight of your larger goals. Take the time to be intentional, check in with yourself and your peers, and adjust. Most importantly, be nice to yourselves. Just because it’s not making the impact you want doesn’t mean there aren’t other benefits. Photo by World Bank. CC BY-NC-ND

  2. Jul 6

    Discomfort Is Human (and Valuable)

    In my last blog post, I wrote about ways in which friction has been beneficial to my work and how, in this world of AI, we still have choices as to when and how we try to eliminate friction. I closed my post with the question: What are areas in your work or in your life where adding friction might actually help you? The post and the question resonated with several of you and led to some great comments and conversations. Odin Zackman reminded me of the most fundamental friction in our work: Conflict. Much of collaboration work is about navigating conflict. One of the great benefits of the Tuckman model of group development (i.e. forming, storming, norming, performing) was that it helped normalize conflict as a necessary part of a group’s maturation. But many leaders still make it a goal to eliminate conflict, sometimes rightfully, sometimes to their detriment. I knew of one leader who wouldn’t let her teams do retrospectives, because she didn’t want “things to get negative.” In a related vein, Gabi Fitz named a friction that has many benefits and that AI may eliminate: Showing someone your work and asking for feedback. I have heard people say that one of the great things about working with AI is that you can ask it to push on a hypothesis or direction (AKA play devil's advocate), but I think this actually removes one of the most important experiences of friction: When we make ourselves vulnerable enough to the possibility of having gotten something wrong or being blind to our own bias or misrepresenting what someone's perspective is. It's a low level kind of conflict — friction — that builds humility and understanding. In our Staying Strategic workout, one of the muscles we work on is sharing work early and often. When our participants practice this in the Collaboration Gym, it not only helps them tighten up their thinking, but it also helps strengthen relationships with other gym members, whom they don’t necessarily know well or at all. That’s not the primary point of the workout, but it’s a big bonus. As Gabi points out, the practice of building relationships also makes us better, smarter human beings. A common practice for consultants who are trying to help a team is to interview every member to understand what’s working well and what’s not. The idea is that people are more likely to be frank with an external person, which will help surface problems that need to be addressed. The consultant then summarizes what they learn and shares it with the client, which leads to next steps. I don’t do any of this with my clients unless I’m certain that a group is deeply toxic. Instead, I have members of the team interview each other and take notes that others (including me) can read. I then aggregate and synthesize the notes and proceed as normal. It’s extra friction for the client, and it means a loss of fidelity for me, since I’m relying on imperfect notes. (I give people the option to schedule a one-on-one with me if there’s something they want to share confidentially.) The benefit is that it gets the team talking and listening to each other, even if they are doing it imperfectly, which is the work they need to do repeatedly in order to align and also to strengthen those muscles and their relationships. (You can see a more specific example of what this can look like in our Working Agreements toolkit.) Keep those examples of valuable friction in your work and life coming! And, in the spirit of Gabi’s insight, I’d encourage pushback as well!

  3. Jun 15

    In an AI World, We Can Still Choose the “Hard” Way

    Much of my work is about making it easier for groups to achieve their goals. Often, that entails finding ways to eliminate friction. But sometimes, the best way to help groups achieve their goals is to add friction. Consider exercise. Most of us don’t live in a world where we need to lift large weights above our heads or run long distances to get from one place to another. Technology has eliminated that friction in our lives. But many of us voluntarily reintroduce that friction, because we realize that it makes us healthier. When I’m co-designing meetings with others, I use a template that helps me capture lots of information — intentions, tradeoffs, different scenarios, etc. This is great for having clear design conversations with others, but it’s distracting on the day of the meeting itself. When I’m facilitating, I need to be able to find specific information easily — timing, for example — and want extra whitespace where I can take notes. About a dozen years ago, I decided to tackle this problem. I thought it would be useful to have a tool that automatically converted a meeting design document into a format that was optimized for facilitation. I started by trying to figure out what that format might be. I created a new template and manually transferred and reformatted information from the old one, which took me a few hours. My team and I tested it and found it useful. It validated the idea of an automatic conversion tool, because we certainly were never going to spend a few extra hours manually converting the information ourselves. Except that I discovered something weird: Those few extra hours I spent copying the document over manually made me a better facilitator. Even though I had already spent days poring over a meeting design with my colleagues, the act of transferring the design from one template to another surfaced inconsistencies that we had missed. It also helped me absorb almost every detail of the design until I felt like it was part of my body. This enabled me to be even more present on the day of the meeting, which made it easier for me to adjust and improvise. The act of creating this new version of the design almost made the document itself unnecessary. In the decade since, I’ve spent hundreds of hours manually transferring my designs from one template to the other for all of my meetings. I’ve tried to encourage my colleagues to do the same, but they have all demurred. I get it, and I’ve never pushed anyone too hard. Most of them are doing fine without it, and the performance boost they might get from spending those additional few hours may not seem worth it. But it’s been worth it for me, and I have no plans of stopping. What are areas in your work or in your life where adding friction might actually help you? I think this is an especially important question to ask in this world of artificial intelligence. Technology has always been a catalyst for eliminating friction, and AI is continuing this trend in potentially transformative ways. However, we can still decide that eliminating friction is not always helpful and choose a different path. I shake my head when I work with teams and see blocks of back-to-back meetings on their calendars with no breaks in-between. When you are meeting with people face-to-face, you have to schedule time in-between so that you can physically get from one place to another. That extra time gives you the chance to breathe, grab a snack, go to the bathroom, have a followup conversation, or prepare yourself for your next meeting. It turns out that the friction of moving from one meeting to another gives us an opportunity to rest, and that humans need rest (and food and bathroom breaks) to be at our best. With remote meetings, we don’t have to schedule a break, and so most of us don’t. Then we’re left wondering why we’re exhausted at the end of our work days. Logistically, the fix is easy. The main thing preventing us from scheduling breaks in-between our remote meetings is culture, and culture is powerful. But at the end of the day, we still have a choice. We, in all of our imperfect human goodness, have a choice. We can look to eliminate friction just because we can (have you been in a remote meeting where the AI note-takers outnumbered actual people?), or we can be thoughtful about what will most augment us flesh-and-blood human beings. What are you going to choose? Photo above by Laszlo Ilyes. CC BY 2.0.

  4. Jun 2

    Design Is More Important Than Facilitation

    Facilitation isn't just what happens in the room. Time and care invested in the meeting's design can be far more impactful.

  5. May 13

    What I Learned about Connection and Trust from Black Farmers and the CIA

    Last month, I went to New York and D.C. to attend two meetings that, on the surface, could not have been more different. The first was a tour of land owned by Black farmers in rural upstate New York, which I was attending specifically to see The Center for NuLeadership’s inspiring project, The People’s Land. The second was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the similarly inspiring Intellipedia, held in an “undisclosed,” high-security NSA building in Maryland. The fact that I had been invited to either of these meetings felt unlikely and was reason enough to go. What I didn’t expect was realizing that these two groups had a lot more in common than was evident at first glance. For one, they were all patriots — real patriots, who cared deeply about this country and were trying to make it better for everybody. They were also all systems thinkers and change agents who fundamentally understood the value of community and collaboration, but were in environments that actively discouraged these things. Despite this, they persist and are succeeding, even if this success continues to be tenuous. Intellipedia In 2006, Mark Oehlert, who was then at Booz Allen Hamilton, invited me to participate in a workshop he was organizing for the CIA to talk about the then nascent world of blogs and wikis — how they were being used in companies and the world at large as well as potential hazards and impacts. A year earlier, CIA analyst, Calvin Andrus, had written a white paper entitled “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community” that was stirring things up internally. The notion that intelligence agencies (where “need to know” is the mantra and where employees are regularly strapped to polygraph machines to maintain their security clearance) might adopt tools that encouraged openness and trust would have seemed ludicrous at any other time. However, the failures that led to 9/11 five years earlier still weighed heavily on these agencies, and there were rising sentiments — both top-down and bottom-up — that our national security depended on their ability to collaborate more effectively. In a typical organizational way, the agency sought external “experts” to help them better understand what was happening, even though Andrus’s paper signaled that there were already people internally who understood these tools. Unbeknownst to us, some of these folks had already started actively experimenting with an internal wiki, which they dubbed “Intellipedia” and which ran on the same open source software that ran Wikipedia. Several people had already embraced it, while many others were either mystified or upset about its existence. During our 2006 workshop. I noticed a few people sitting close to the front who kept squirming or nodding vehemently when we would say certain things. I finally pointed to them and said, “You seem to really want to say something. What are you thinking?” It turned out they were Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, the creators of Intellipedia, and they had plenty of insightful thoughts to share. I loved learning about the project, how people were using it internally and the challenges they were facing. The conversation was convivial and, at times, combative, and I learned a lot that day. This burgeoning group of internal activists was trying to do what felt impossible — create an open, collaborative platform inside of a necessarily secretive organization — and they were succeeding, despite severe pushback. Because of my roots in wiki culture, I felt a natural kinship to these folks, and they even gifted me a coveted Intellipedia spade, which I still have and treasure. That was my only “official” connection to the project, a tenuous one at best. I kept in touch with Don and Sean over the years, but I was still surprised and flattered to receive an invitation to the 20th anniversary celebration. They often credited that 2006 workshop with internally validating the work they were doing, which helped them overcome some internal obstacles. Having experienced these kinds of organizational politics many times over the years, I have no doubt that this was true, but I also suspect that they would have found a way to succeed regardless. Still, the fact that this lone touchpoint merited an invitation showed how much they valued contributions of all kinds, how they saw the whole person behind a contribution, and how much they invested in relationships. I have learned over the years that these attributes are not common. They are not just a mark of someone’s goodness, but an indicator of someone who sees and understands systems and how all the different parts— many of which are invisible to most — contribute to the whole. The People’s Land Understanding whole systems and valuing relationships are also signatures of my friend, Kyung-ji Rhee, who along with Chino Hardin, runs The Center for NuLeadership on Human Justice & Healing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. NuLeadership was founded by Eddie Ellis, who also helped launch the New York chapter of the Black Panthers. Like many Black Panthers and other Black civil rights leaders, Ellis was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO. In 1969, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a crime he insists he did not commit. His horrific experiences in Attica led him to dedicating his life to exposing and dismantling the historical, economic, and racist foundations of mass criminalization and incarceration, work that he continued until his death in 2014. In addition to founding NuLeadership, he mentored generations of movement leaders, including Kyung-ji. NuLeadership is a hyperlocal organization, doing real work on the ground in Brooklyn, including forging stronger relationships. For example, in 2017, they brought together the community and the local police to discuss and prototype better ways to handle arrests for minor infractions. One community member and officer play-acted how arrests are typically handled, then walked through possible alternatives. In the process, they found an approach that met all of the different needs and discussed ways to possibly institutionalize them. A week later, that same community member was arrested as a “person of interest” for a crime that had occurred nearby. One of the arresting officers was the same person who had done the role play with this community member the prior week! While placing the handcuffs on him, the policeman whispered in his ear, “Don’t worry, I got you.” He then proceeded to loosen the handcuffs and stood by his side until the community member was released. When institutions fail us, relationships can still protect us in the short-term and change those institutions in the long-term. Over the past decade, NuLeadership has positioned itself beyond responding to harm from incarceration toward the more holistic goal of Human Justice, which for them means Human Rights and Human Development. As part of this shift, Kyung-ji and Chino started thinking about the role that disconnection played in their work — disconnection from each other, our ancestors, how things work, our food, nature. They started imagining how they might fill this void in Bedford-Stuyvesant and what it might look like to own and work their own plot of land out in the country. Two years ago, their vision became reality. They acquired 20 acres about a four-hour drive from Brooklyn, which they have dubbed “The People’s Land.” A mix of staff and community members are now living there. They have established some basic infrastructure, such as water filtration, and have started growing vegetables and flowers. The larger vision is to build a living, learning, and retreat space where people can reconnect to land, engage in food production, and experience the physical, spiritual, and political healing that comes with learning what it is like to be in right relationship with nature. They are building out every aspect of the space themselves, which is enabling them to acquire professional skills applicable both on the land and back in their communities. Two Groups That Couldn’t Be More Different or More Similar Because of my recent gardening and habitat restoration exploits, I was particularly interested in what Kyung-ji and Chino were cooking up. As I was planning my trip to D.C. for the Intellipedia celebration, I learned that The People’s Land was going to be featured on Black Farmers United NYS’s Bridging Land, Agriculture, and Communities Conference (BLACC) 2026 Farm Tour a week beforehand. It seemed too serendipitous to pass up, and I decided to fly to the East Coast early so that I could finally meet the team and see the project for myself. My connection to The People’s Land was even more tenuous than with Intellipedia. I am not a Black farmer, I don’t live in New York, and I had never worked with any of the organizations involved. I arrived at one of the stops on the tour before any of the NuLeadership team arrived, feeling like an interloper. The weather was frigid and gray, with buds barely forming on the still bare trees, but the participants on the tour made me feel warm and comfortable. Knowing that I was friends with Kyung-ji was enough for them to embrace me as one of their own. I loved getting to meet different people on the tour, to break bread with them and hear their stories. Farming is inherently hard work. It’s even harder if you’re a small, independent farm, and harder still if you’re Black and are battling deeply embedded systems of racism and a federal government that has declared war on those who are trying to fix these systems. Despite these challenges, this community is finding ways to support each other while doing amazing, important work in the process. The land was breathtakingly beautiful. Everyone on the NuLeadership team told moving stories about the challenges of living in the inner city and

  6. Mar 30

    Intergenerational Spaces Benefit Everyone

    A few weeks ago, my Winter cohort of Power and Love for Managers had its final session in Oakland. We closed the training with appreciations, and one participant said how much she valued being in an “intentionally intergenerational space.” That comment struck a chord for me. It was an accurate description, but I had framed my goals around diversity more generally and around experience rather than age. I’ve been pondering why I haven’t been more explicit about bridging generations in my work, when it’s been an important value for me from the beginning. I started going down this professional path in 2002 when I was 27. The early days were rough, mainly because the economy was bad and I didn’t have a track record, at least not the kind most people were looking for. The professional field was also small and mostly ill-defined. Saying I was a “collaboration consultant” drew blank stares. There were a few similar job titles, such as leadership and organizational development consultants and facilitators, and although there was plenty of overlap, none of those things described exactly what I was trying to do or how I was trying to do it. It was a struggle simply to survive the first few years, and I could not have done so without many mentors, including Doug Engelbart, Jeff Conklin, Gail and Matt Taylor, and many others. They were generous and encouraging, but they also didn’t treat me as a charity case. They valued my experiences and how I thought about the world and the work, and they wanted to learn from me as much as they wanted to support me. These early experiences strongly influenced my theory of change as well as my personal practice. I knew what my mentors had meant to me, and I wanted to pay it forward. But I also recognized that we wouldn’t see better collaboration at a planetary-scale without many, many more skilled practitioners. Unfortunately, many who are drawn to this practice (often women and people of color) feel isolated and invisible. We don’t realize that trying to help groups collaborate more effectively is a “thing,” and that there are many others who are doing the same. If we could make the practice more visible and connected, we would all benefit. This would also mean making it easier for new people to enter the field, not just by sharing wisdom, but by creating professional opportunities where people could make a living while honing their craft. If the path to doing this work professionally is as hard as it was for me when I was younger, it will deter folks we badly need. Throughout my career, I’ve done my best to build the field through my work. I hire associates on as many projects as I can. Their roles are largely operational, not because senior practitioners are above this work (everybody on my teams “work the line”), but because I want them to value the importance of doing logistics well. Associates are also part of the design team, which means they are in most of the meetings I have with clients. I encourage them to speak up in those meetings, explaining that there is no mistake they can make that I can’t fix and that I will be more upset if they withhold an important observation or insight. Because I revoke all of my intellectual property, people who work with me are free to integrate any of our tools and practices into their own work without worrying about fees or credit. I also pay associates more than market rate, because I’ve realized that your previous paycheck has an outsized impact on how future clients see you and how much they’re willing to pay you, especially when you’re young. I’ve tried to encourage my peers to adopt some of these practices, with mixed success. More than a few colleagues have told me, “I don’t have time to train younger practitioners.” My experience with associates is that any time I invest in my them comes back to me in spades. They add a useful dose of perspective, and they provide backup in case others have to step away. They also inject energy and joy into the work, and they bring their own unique skills and perspectives, providing the rest of the team fresh opportunities to learn. More recently, as I’ve tried to shift more of my focus on training, I’ve had fewer opportunities to hire associates. I’ve tried to make up for this by making my trainings free to folks who are 26 years old or under. Despite my emphasis on supporting less experienced practitioners, until recently, I didn’t think of myself as an “older” practitioner. I think what’s different now — besides turning 50 last year — is that many of the kids in my life are now young adults. Before, I didn’t really look at people in their 20s much differently than I looked at myself. Sure, I was older, but they were essentially still peers. Now, I can’t help seeing them and thinking, “Wow, that person is the same age as my nephew!” I’m also acutely aware of how different the world is now from what it was a quarter century ago — darker, more volatile, more uncertain. I can only imagine what it must be like to have to face this as a 20-year old, and I feel a greater responsibility to support them. It was so much easier when I could just blame the Boomers! Fortunately, the benefits of being in intergenerational spaces are bidirectional. In this month’s Staying Strategic workouts at my Collaboration Gym, I had two people in their 20s participate. They also happened to be children of friends and colleagues, one of whom I’ve known since he was 10. I loved having them. They were thoughtful, earnest, vulnerable, eager to learn and engage, but also willing to contribute. The energy was different with them in the room, and I could see how much everyone else loved working out with them. The same was true with my Winter cohort of Power and Love for Managers, where a third of our participants were in their 20s. Being around younger practitioners lifts my mood, challenges my thinking, and gives me hope. If they are this smart, this curious, this good, then we have a fighting chance to make things better in this world. It behooves the rest of us to do whatever we can to help them. Intentionally creating and being in intergenerational spaces is a great way to do this. Photo by Zoha Raza.

  7. 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.

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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

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

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    Faster Than 20
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    2020 - 2026
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