Faster Than 20 – Faster Than 20

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 practice with anyone helps develop collaboration muscles. Still, I think there’s an opportunity to strike a better balance between peer feedback and feedback from me.

In this vein, this past year, I started offering Coaching for Collaboration Practitioners as a way to help leaders and groups develop the four habits of high-performing groups. This has been my most effective muscle-building approach to date, which makes me somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, I’m glad that acting as a personal trainer is effective at getting people to work out. On the other hand, not everyone can afford a personal trainer. We need more gym-like practice spaces if we’re going to help folks at scale.

“Personal” Training for Organizations (2016-present)

Finally, over the past five years, I’ve been experimenting with customized organizational workouts focused on specific needs, such as strategy and equity.

I’ve found decent success at convincing potential clients to let me take a muscle-building approach toward their work. For example, rather than help a client develop a strategy, I will lead a client through a series of workouts designed to strengthen their muscles for acting strategically. Still, I often have to strike a tricky balance between more traditional consulting and this workout approach.

I’ve gotten much better at striking this balance over the years. In the early days, I tried partnering with other consultants to handle the more traditional work so that I could focus on the training. That almost always failed, especially with more established partners, because they didn’t fully get and believe in my approach, and in the struggle to find the right balance, the workouts would usually fall by the wayside.

Working by myself allowed me to be more disciplined in my approach, but I still struggled to maintain the right balance, and I failed a lot. I feel like I’ve only begun to turn the corner in the past few months. One thing that’s helped is getting much clearer about what clients need to already have in place in order for the muscle-building approach to succeed, specifically:

Alignment around the what, why, and how
Structures, mindsets, and muscles to support their work

For example, attempting to help a group develop muscles when they don’t have the right structures in place can cause more harm than good. To help demonstrate what happens when you’re missing one of these critical ingredients, I created a model inspired by the Lippitt-Knoster Model, to which Kate Wing introduced me:

Alignment	Structures	Mindsets	Muscles	=	Performance
Alignment	Structures	Mindsets	Muscles	=	Confusion “Why are we doing this?!”
Alignment	Structures	Mindsets	Muscles	=	Frustration “We can’t succeed in these conditions.”
Alignment	Structures	Mindsets	Muscles	=	Resistance “I don’t want to be doing this.”
Alignment	Structures	Mindsets	Muscles	=	Anxiety “We’re not capable of doing this.”

Collaboration Gym and Future Iterations

I’m mostly resigned to more “personal training” work, if only to accumulate more Couch-to-5K-style success stories, so that people can develop more faith in the muscle-building approach. (If you or your organization would like to hire me for coaching or to design a custom workout program, drop me an email.) But I continue to be committed to experimenting with more scaleable and affordable approaches to muscle-building than hiring personal trainers. I’m hoping to unveil the Collaboration Gym early next year, and I’ve already successfully piloted a number of new workouts that will be part of it.

Epic success for me is to see others participate in similar experiments on their own and to share what they learn. A Collaboration Gym is only useful if there are lots of gyms all over the place. I give away all of my intellectual property so that others can copy and build on it, and I will continue to share my learnings here to further encourage replication.

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Announcing DIY Strategy / Culture v2.0

After many months of hard work, I am pleased to announce version 2.0 of the DIY Strategy / Culture toolkits, available now! My design partner, Amy Wu of Duende, and I have done a thorough update of all of the toolkits based on feedback from many of you as well as lessons learned from using them ourselves.

The goal of these toolkits are to help anyone and everyone get better at doing strategy and culture work for their groups, regardless of experience or role. We’ve put these toolkits into the public domain in order to support this goal. In this vein, it’s been humbling and gratifying to see these tools spread and to hear stories about how you’re using them, what you’re learning, and how we might make them better.

The new toolkits are cleaner and clearer overall. We’ve also updated the web pages about them, offering tips and tricks, making it easier to purchase, and even including a new video.

Changes include:

Re-designing the paper toolkits to make them more sticky note-friendly and to emphasize certain design elements. Plus, they’re now in color!
Updating all of the instructions, including best practices for many of the toolkits
The Mindset Cards now come with printed (color!) instructions and a box
A new toolkit for developing group Working Agreements
Convenient links to buy printed versions of all of our toolkits via Duende. (But remember, you can download them for free!)

These tools were modeled after balance bikes. Using them repeatedly should help you strengthen your collaboration muscles. In this vein, we’re experimenting with other ways to support the practice of using these tools.

For example, Amy and I created a self-guided, online video tutorial that walks you through using the Goals + Success Spectrum.

I’m also offering online peer coaching for the Goals + Success Spectrum starting in September. (Registration deadline is August 10, 2018.) It’s based on several pilots I ran earlier this year.

I am humbled by all the things we’ve learned about these toolkits from all of you, as well as the growing word of mouth about these tools. Please continue to share with folks and groups who might benefit from them, and please continue to share stories with us about how you’re using them!

The “Secret” to High-Performance Collaboration Is Practice

On March 22, 2017, I had the pleasure of giving the keynote at The Collaboratory 5, a forum of about 200 Jewish innovators and entrepreneurs focused on grassroots change. My talk was on my favorite topic and the driving force behind my work for the past four years: how practice can lead to better collaboration.

Afterward, I led the whole group through the one-minute drill, followed by two breakout sessions where I led smaller groups through a power workout (including power video analysis and playing with status). My goal was not only to tell people how important practice was, but to lead them through an experience where they could get a sense of what I meant by practice and its value, especially if repeated over and over again.

I had an incredible time. It reminded me how different this mindset around practice is and how much I enjoy talking about and doing this stuff with new audiences. I’m looking forward to giving more talks and workouts in the near future. (If you’d like me to do this with your group, drop me an email.) Many thanks to my friend and colleague, Adene Sacks, for referring me and to Lisa Lepson, Jenny Kibrit Smith, and all of the organizers for inviting me and for being great hosts! Thanks to Duane Stork for the photo above.

Here’s a video of my talk!

Edited Transcript

Here are my slides and a tightly edited transcript.

What’s the best collaborative experience you’ve ever had? It could be personal or professional, with one other person or a large group, etc.

How many of you were able to come up with an example?

How many of you came up with one easily?

The story I want to share today has nothing to do with my work and didn’t even involve me. I have a friend who used to teach violin. She would start her beginning students by teaching them variations of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. The first time I saw her teach, she was teaching this very serious five-year old. Toward the end of the lesson, after numerous repetitions, my friend — who was playing alongside her student — decided to harmonize the last few bars. When she heard the harmony, the little girl’s face just absolutely lit up.

I’m lucky to have been a part of and to have seen and studied many great collaborative experiences. But that time I watched that little girl’s face light up upon experiencing that simple little harmony that she herself was a part of stands out in my mind. I get chills thinking about that moment, because hearing that simple little harmony lit me up too.

When I ask folks about their best experiences collaborating, most people have a hard time coming up with an example. But, whether you can easily recall an experience or not, I think everyone has had a moment like that little girl had with Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We all have an intuition about what great collaboration should feel like, even if we have low expectations about getting to experience it.

What would your world be like if all of your experiences collaborating were at least as good as your best?

What would the world be like if everybody’s experiences collaborating were at least as good as their best? Imagine this world for a moment, and soak in the feeling.

Practice

My mission for the past 15 years has been to create a world where everyone’s baseline experience with collaboration feels exactly like that little girl did when my friend started harmonizing with her.

How do you do this? How do you help improve everybody’s collaborative experiences?

Said another way, what’s the secret to high-performance collaboration, and how do you scale this?

About five years ago, I realized that most of my successes in helping others collaborate more effectively were hollow. We would do good work together side-by-side, we would achieve good outcomes, and people would have a good experience getting there. But when I left, most groups would fall back on old habits. I was like a ringer in basketball. If I played on your team, I could help make everyone better, but once I left, the team would revert back to what it was. Maybe folks picked up a thing or two along the way, but the impact wouldn’t be what I wanted it to be.

So I decided to rethink how I did the work. To help me do this, I started with the premise that collaboration is very hard to do well. If it weren’t, we’d all be doing it already, and it would be simple for everyone to come up with examples of great collaboration.

Then I thought about what it takes to achieve things that are very hard. I thought about things like playing the violin or learning a language (my personal bane). And my conclusion was simple.

The more you practice, the better you will get at collaboration.

Things that are hard require lots and lots of practice to do well. Everyone is capable of doing them better. You either put in the time, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you generally aren’t going to be successful.

Simple, right? Maybe so, but to me, this was a revelation. I realized that everybody I ever knew or saw — myself included —who was good at collaboration had had lots of opportunities to practice, whether it was conscious or not.

How much practice do we need to get really good at collaboration?

Consider one example of high-performance collaboration: professional basketball.

Professional basketball players play six months out of the year — November through April, not including the playoffs. They play 82 48-minute games over the course of their season — about 66 hours total, or 11 hours a month.

11 hours a month! Great job, right? Of course, they’re working a lot more than 11 hours a month. The rest of the regular season — about 93 percent of their actual working time — they’re practicing, training, working on fundamentals, both individually and as a team.

We’re talking well over a 9:1 ratio of practice to performance. Performance, of course, is a form of practice, but the main distinction I’m drawing here is that, when you’re performing, the results count. You can afford to fail a lot when you practice — that’s all part of the process.

Think about your job for a moment. How much of your job relies on collaborating effectively with others? What percentage of your time do you spend practicing versus performing?

I’m not arguing that 9:1 is the right ratio in every context. But I’m going to guess that, for most of you, your ratio is pretty much the opposite of this, and I think that a 1:9 ratio is definitely wrong. Folks who care about getting better rarely consciously consider how they can practice more.

Our predominant culture believes that collaboration is some special knowledge that, once acquired, will magically make groups better. All of our learning mechanisms are oriented this way. We scour articles looking for magical tricks, we invest in magical apps, or we hire consultants whom we hope will share some magical secret.

At the end of the day, none of that works very well. If we want to get better at collaboration, we need to find ways to incorporate a lot more practice, to get our practice-to-performance ratios up.

How do we do this?

Supporting Practice

One way is to provide more structures for encouraging practice. To explain what I mean, consider fitness.

Fitness already has a culture centered around practice. We don’t technically need any structures to help us do that, but structures help. To understand how, let’s map out the ecosystem of structures that support practice in physical fitness along two axes: supply (how much of it is available) and cost.

We’ve got lots of books and free articles on the Internet that give us advice. Those go in the upper left of our chart.

You could work out with a friend or enroll in a gym or take a class or a bootcamp. Some of these things are free, and some cost money, but they’re all still relatively cheap, and there are quite a few options.

You could also hire a personal trainer. These are the most expensive options, and they’re the least used of the options, so we’ll put them on the lower right.

I’m going to claim that this is an ecosystem that more or less works. If we want to get fit, we can find all sorts of structures across a broad price spectrum that will support us in doing so.

What does the collaboration ecosystem look like?

As with fitness, you can easily find thousands of pretty decent articles that explain how to get better at collaboration.

There are plenty of one-off trainings, some of which might even be pretty good.

You could go to business school. This is more on the high-end in terms of cost.

And there are a plethora of folks like me — the equivalent of a personal trainer — you could hire.

This ecosystem favors the high-end. We have very few structures in the middle, which means that there are a lot of people who get left behind.

I would argue that, if we want to support more collaboration practice, we need the collaboration ecosystem to look more like the fitness ecosystem.

We don’t need as many options in the high-end, and we need something to fill in the middle. If we could figure out how to shift the collaboration ecosystem so that it looks more like this, then I think more people would be practicing collaboration. If more people practiced collaboration, a lot more groups would be good at it, and we’d start getting closer to this vision of a world where everybody’s baseline experience with collaboration is a great one.

Muscles

How do we shift the collaboration ecosystem so that we’re doing a better job of encouraging and supporting effective practice?

First, we have to get clear about what we’re talking about when we’re talking about “collaboration.” We need to get more concrete about what we mean by “collaboration muscles.”

Collaboration is an aggregation of several skills, some of which are context-dependent. For example, good communication — listening in particular — is clearly important. Your ability to recognize and navigate power dynamics in groups is also important.

Over the past four years, I’ve identified and refined a set of muscles in four different muscle groups.

Once we’ve identified specific muscles, the exercises (or workouts) start to become clearer. I’ve aggregated a bunch that I use on my website, which I’ve made public domain so that you can do whatever you want with them. I’m not going to say too much more about these now, as we’ll do a listening workout together after I’m done talking, and I’ll be leading power workouts in both the morning and afternoon breakouts.

What’s important to remember about these exercises in the context of practice is that doing them once or a few times or even ten times isn’t enough to be useful. You have to repeat them over and over and over again to develop your muscles, and you have to be intentional about how you practice.

Finally, once we know what the workouts are, we can start developing programs to support them — the equivalent of gyms or bootcamps, the equivalent of exercise “equipment” or apps, muscle assessments, etc. And voila, the ecosystem will start to shift the way we want it to shift.

Shifting Culture

At the end of the day, what I really hope to achieve is a shift in culture. I simply want people to associate improving at collaboration with lots and lots of practice. I hope that all of you walk away from this talk thinking about how you can integrate practice more in your own work and lives, and I hope you’ll try to convince others to do this as well.

If enough of us start doing this, culture shift will happen. Still, I don’t want to make light of how difficult this shift I’m describing will be, both societally and also individually.

Over the past four years, I’ve completely changed how I work with groups. Instead of being a ringer on a basketball team, I’m now their workout instructor. It’s been successful enough that I continue to do this work this way, refining the process along the way. My biggest takeaway, however, has not been how valuable practice is, but how emotionally challenging the journey can be.

To close, I want to share a personal story about what it takes to learn something hard through lots and lots of practice.

One of the things that I am really bad at is learning languages. I don’t speak Korean, which has always been a sore spot for me, as it’s prevented me communicating with many of my relatives and even my own parents, to some extent.

About five years ago, my mom invited me to go to Korea with her. In preparation for this trip with my mom, I decided to enroll in my very first Korean class. I knew that it would take a lot of practice to learn, and I used every trick in the book to try to support me in this. I had lots of people supporting me, and I was super motivated. But I wasn’t having much success, and it was killing me.

At some point, it hit me. Babies are really good at learning languages, and my sister recently had a baby! My nephew, Benjamin, is six now, but he was about one when I was about to go on this trip, so we were both learning a new language at the same time. I decided to watch him closely to see what tips I could pick up from him.

Here’s what I learned. Benjamin, my one-year old nephew, really sucked at speaking English. He was really, really bad. But what was different was that he didn’t expect to be good. When he did speak, everybody — including me — would go nuts! It didn’t matter if what he said made any sense or if he pronounced the words correctly. We would all laugh and coo and celebrate, and he would clearly respond to that. Learning a language, for my one-year old nephew, was a joyful experience, not a painful one.

This was a revelation to me. Benjamin took a good three or four years before he spoke English more or less fluently and correctly, and it was a joyful experience all the way. Here I was, beating myself up after a few weeks of Korean classes, where I wasn’t even fully immersed, thinking for some reason that I needed to be speaking Korean better than I was. What if I assumed that I was going to suck for a long time, and instead of beating myself up for it, celebrated the same way we celebrated Benjamin?

Getting good at collaboration is really hard. It takes practice to get good at it. If we’re really going to get good at it, we all have to learn from Benjamin’s example. We have to understand that we’re going to trip and fall and suck for probably a long time, but we can still celebrate the little victories along the way. And if we give ourselves enough time, we will eventually get so good at it that we won’t even think about it.

Imagine that. What would our world look like if we all became that fluent at collaboration?

Thank you very much!

Why I Do What I Do, and What That Means for 2017

Seven years ago, a friend challenged me to clearly articulate why I do what I do. She had repeatedly heard my spiel — adopted wholesale from my mentor — about society’s problems growing more complex faster than our ability to address them and the resulting urgency to get collectively smarter faster. She understood what I was saying, but as far as she was concerned, it didn’t fully explain why I was so passionately driven by this work.

I spent many months reflecting on her question, repeatedly asking myself why, and challenging myself to go deeper. The answer finally came to me in L.A., where I was visiting my parents and younger sister. We had gone to the beach together, a family tradition since childhood, and when we arrived, as if on cue, my family immediately splintered. Everyone moved in his and her own direction, with no sense of what anyone else was doing and no coherent rhythm. I watched this lack of synchronicity unfold before me and felt all sorts of old wounds rise up within me.

I was lucky to grow up in a family with lots of love, but — like all families — we had our share of dysfunction. Some of that dysfunction felt especially jarring, considering my parents’ strongly-held value of togetherness and mutual support. As a kid, I grew frustrated over watching seemingly little things disrupt our ability to be together, especially lack of listening, communication, and self-care.

I also had the good fortune of experiencing really great collaboration with others, starting with my love for team sports. I have always been a mediocre or worse athlete, but I quickly learned that teams that practiced together and that played with heart and smarts could easily transcend any individual shortcomings, and I grew to love how it felt to do that. In other collaborative pursuits where I already individually excelled, I found that I could channel my strengths into lifting others, which led to greater success than what was possible by myself and which felt even more joyful and satisfying.

I knew what it felt like to move together in sync and with power with others, and I wanted it in all aspects of my life. I knew that the fundamentals of this wholeness were simple, but not easy, and that small, but significant gains were easily within reach for most groups. When I met and started working with my mentor in 2000, all of this came together for me. I had discovered my purpose and my passion, and I was ready to make it my life pursuit.

2016 Lessons Learned

2016 was a hard year for me on two fronts. I had spent the prior three years experimenting with this notion that the key to high-performance collaboration was practice, and I had directed all of my energies toward exploring ways to encourage and support practice at scale. I wanted to spend this past year focusing on the things I had learned that felt the most promising. My goals were to:

Scale up my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program and Do-It-Yourself Strategy / Culture toolkits, while continuing to refine and improve them
Continue to find ways to support emerging practitioners, including finding ways to connect them with each other and offering real opportunities to practice with me and each other
Return to my consulting past by taking on a really big, really hard problem, incorporating the things I had learned over the past three years, while also telling the story of the work as it happened, so that others could learn from our successes and failures in real-time

While I did plenty of work I felt proud of, most of the things I tried did not work out the way I had hoped. More egregiously, I felt like I ended up making excuses that prevented me from trying things that were higher-risk, higher-reward. Specifically:

In general, I was not disciplined about writing up and sharing what I was learning in the moment, which resulted in only two blog posts in 2016, compared to seven in 2015 and 30 in 2014! I published more posts in this blog’s debut in December 2013 (five) than I did in all of 2016.
This lack of storytelling was particularly bad with my really big, really hard client project. We did good work together, and we also struggled at times. While we did the work transparently (including creating a public dashboard, synthesizing and sharing our framework for experimentation, modeling transparency internally, and inviting outside colleagues to shadow), we did not share enough context for what we were doing for others to be able to learn with us. Some of this was beyond our control, but there were other things that were simply failures on my part, including not writing a single blog post about the project.
While I did some work toward refining and scaling up Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets and the DIY Strategy / Culture toolkits, most of it was reactive rather than proactive, and even then, I was very slow to react. I ended up missing lots of simple opportunities to spread the word and involve other people. For example, Duende, my design partner for the toolkits, created an online store where you can order the toolkits, but you can’t find that store from my website. (Voila! The preceding sentence fixed that problem! More to come!)

While I didn’t accomplish my high-level goals, I don’t want to lose sight of the good things that happened:

Publishing blog posts is not the only thing that matters when it comes to sharing. It’s about the quality of what you share and the number and kinds of people you reach, regardless of medium. I found myself sharing and linking to my two 2016 blog posts more often than average. While I only wrote two, my colleague, Anya Kandel, became the first guest contributor here, writing two really great blog posts about her driving questions and experiences.
In addition to writing up the aforementioned experimentation framework (which I did in collaboration with my colleague, Alison Lin), we did an accompanying webinar in partnership with Social Transformation Project and Leadership Learning Community (LLC) that had almost 400 registrants, third all-time among LLC’s excellent five-year roster of webinars.
I published several of my collaboration workouts, with more to come. My lack of blog posts didn’t prevent my mailing list from growing, and you can now follow me on Instagram and Facebook as well as Twitter. I also made a bunch of subtle design and technical changes to this website, which will help support its ongoing growth and evolution.
I did a Do-It-Together Strategy / Culture Workshop in New York with Anya Kandel, my first outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and hopefully the start of many more.
I maintained the self-care success that I achieved in 2015, not a small feat considering how much work I’ve put into this over the past four years.
I met, worked with, and shadowed lots of great practitioners, especially the aforementioned Alison and Anya, through my informal meetups, my colearning experiment and a similar experiment with my friends at MAG, and my client work.
My client projects were meaningful, and I learned a ton from each of them. I did organizational culture work with Addapp, organizational strategy work with General Service Foundation, which included a strategy-focused Muscles & Mindsets program, and really meaningful work on network strategy and culture with Social Transformation Project, my heretofore un-blogged-about “big, hairy client project.” I got lots of practice, including designing and facilitating two unusually challenging meetings, and I identified lots of areas for ongoing improvement. In addition to having lots of new fodder to write about, I also developed lots of new infrastructure and templates that I plan on packaging and sharing this year.

It’s not that I didn’t accomplish good, valuable things. It’s that I have a larger goal that I care about, and the only way I’m going to have a chance at achieving that goal is through focus, discipline, and rapid adaptation. I’m trying to run a marathon, and while I worked hard and am in better shape now than I was a year ago, I’m not developing strength and endurance quickly enough to successfully complete that marathon.

Which brings me to the second thing that was hard about 2016, for me and for many, many other people.

There are many, many problems in the world today, and they all manifested in some very discouraging ways this past year. All of this divisiveness, siloization, and radicalization are what I and many, many others have been working so hard to shift and prevent for many, many years. These are fundamentally challenging problems, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s happening, but we can’t use that as an excuse not to be disciplined and accountable to how we’re trying to tackle these problems.

How do we know if we’re investing in the right places? Where should I be directing my energy in order to have the biggest impact?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do have hypotheses, and my intention has been to test them. My actions in 2016 were not fully aligned with my intentions, and I want to fix that. Which leads me to my three-year goal and my priorities for 2017.

1,000 High-Performing Collaboration Practitioners by 2020

I believe there are a set of core principles underlying high-performance, collaborative work. I believe we need lots and lots of people who understand those principles and who practice them with devotion and joy.

I practice these principles to the best of my ability, and I want to find others committed to the same principles, whether they are external practitioners trying to help other groups or internal changemakers embedded in their own groups. I want to learn with them, support them in their practice, and help the community grow and improve. By the end of 2020, I want to know of at least 1,000 of these practitioners all in movement together.

Why 1,000? Because I think that number is the minimum needed to sustain a thriving, growing movement.

Why by 2020? Because I think it will be very hard, but doable if I’m smart and focused about how I approach this, and because we can’t afford to wait any longer.

How will I accomplish this? I’m still working out the details, but I’ve got some ideas. I think there are three overlapping categories of activities needed to help catalyze this community of practitioners:

Model these principles myself and continue to practice and improve
Synthesize and share what I’m learning
Nurture and support other practitioners

Most of my past activities have fallen in some subset of these categories, as is the case for similar practitioners. But I’ve realized (through experience and lots of helpful feedback from others) that there are some key activities on which many of these other activities depend. I’ve largely neglected these activities, and I want to correct that.

2017 Priority: Draft a Set of Experience-Based Principles for High-Performance Collaboration

In particular, I need to clearly and accessibly articulate the principles that I think are foundational for high-performance collaboration. Drawing on my and other’s experiences to draft these principles will be my primary focus in 2017.

I often use the metaphor of how we need more chefs. In some ways, I’m saying I want there to be 1,000 “chefs” that I know of by 2020. We can extend this analogy further to explore how we might go about doing this.

One of the reasons I decided to start consulting again at the end of 2015 was my realization that we need more “great restaurants” in order to inspire people to become “chefs.” I thought one of the highest-leverage things I could do was to be one of those restaurants. I wanted to scale up how I modeled the principles of high-performance collaboration in order to inspire others to push their own practice.

I still think we need more “great restaurants,” but I no longer think that’s where my focus should lie. I need to be clear about what I think high-performance collaboration means and what the underlying principles are. Articulating those principles will help serve as a beacon for other practitioners with similar beliefs and commitment. It will provide a framework to help assess collaborative performance — the equivalent to a Michelin Guide in the restaurant world — which is an important step toward actual improvement.

I hope to have a first draft of these principles — which I’ll pull together in an open way with the help of my community (which I hope includes anyone reading this) — by the middle of the year, at which point I’ll use it as a way of scaling up my other activities. I will continue to model and practice, but it will all be in service of articulating these principles.

I’m excited about this renewed focus. It feels true to the reason I got into this business in the first place. I know what high-performance collaboration feels like, and I’ve learned a lot about helping others achieve it. I know that others know a lot as well, and that even more people want to know and learn. I think the path for supporting these practitioners — lots and lots and lots of practice — is straightforward, but challenging, and I’m excited about re-focusing my efforts to pave this path. I believe wholeheartedly in the world that is possible if we’re successful, and I’m going to do everything I can to help create that world.

High-Performance Collaboration Requires Experiencing “Great Meals”

I love eggs, but I’m not an egg snob. I used to scramble them by whisking them with a fork and cooking them quickly over medium heat. Often, I didn’t even bother with the fork. I simply cracked them whole in a cold pan, and stirred them up vigorously with a spatula as the pan warmed.

I had tried all the other best practices — using a whisk, adding milk or cream, folding them slowly over low heat — but, up until recently, I hadn’t found the results worth the extra effort. Then, a few weeks ago, I met a colleague at Boulette’s Larder for breakfast, where I had the best damn scrambled eggs I have ever eaten. They were tender, unctuous, and tasty, and they inspired me to revisit how I cook my eggs.

In my usual, OCD way, I’ve used every breakfast since as an opportunity to experiment. I haven’t quite replicated the Boulette’s Larder version, but my scrambled eggs are now significantly tastier than they ever used to be — enough so that I have permanently shelved my good-enough approach to cooking them.

I didn’t do any research, and I’m not using any new ingredients or techniques. The only thing that changed was that I had an experience that inspired me. That experience led to a renewed focus and a shift in how I applied techniques and ingredients that I already understood.

In my work as a collaboration practitioner, one of my mottos is, “Chefs, not recipes.” I believe this so strongly, I had it engraved on my phone. My insight three years ago was that practice was more important than tools for becoming a great chef, and I’ve been experimenting with ways to support and encourage collaboration practice ever since.

What I’ve come to realize this past year is that practice alone does not make great chefs. You also need to experience great meals. You need to understand what’s possible, a standard toward which you’re driving.

“Great meals” in collaboration are out there, but they’re in short supply, and they’re often not in the places most people are looking. I was lucky to have tasted the collaboration equivalent of some amazing meals early in my career, and those experiences continue to inspire me. I also see groups after groups that have not experienced great meals stop practicing after achieving minor gains. They settle, because they don’t understand what’s possible or what’s necessary for true high-performance. Their minor gains feel good enough, just like my fork-scrambled eggs.

Three years ago, I started with the premise that we needed an ecosystem of “gyms” where people could practice collaboration. I’m now realizing we also need an ecosystem of top-notch “restaurants” where people can experience great collaboration. It’s why I’m partially returning to my former practice of creating my own “great meals” and writing about them. However, this alone will not be enough. I don’t have any answers yet, but I’m looking forward to experimenting with possibilities in the coming year, and I’d love to hear your ideas!

Coming out of Retirement

I’m coming out of retirement.

When I left my consulting firm three years ago, I had a simple premise that I wanted to test: Anyone could get good at collaboration with enough practice.

I wanted to test this hypothesis aggressively and honestly, and I wanted to challenge every assumption I had about how best to do this work. In order to help others solve their own collaboration problems, I had to stop designing and facilitating custom processes for them, and instead focus on how to help them develop their own skills. I often had trouble explaining what I was doing and how it was different from my previous work, so I just told people that I was retired.

Retirement was fun and generative, but hard. Challenging my assumptions at times felt like my identity was unraveling, which was humbling and emotionally taxing. Moreover, few — even close colleagues — understood what I was trying to do.

Still, it was worth it. I am both a better practitioner and a better person. I learned an amazing amount, and I think I can have a much bigger impact on the world as a result. I’m excited to continue to build on what I’ve learned, and I have a growing community of practitioners who are also engaged with the work I’ve been doing. I also love the life balance I was able to achieve over the past three years, and I’m not about to give that up.

So why am I coming out of retirement?

One of my primary points of emphasis these past three years has been around field-building. When I decided I wanted to devote myself to collaboration professionally over a dozen years ago, I had amazing mentors who were incredibly generous with me.

Furthermore, no one expected anything of me, which was good, because I didn’t know anything. I spent my first four years trying stuff and failing, trying stuff and failing. I was able to come into my own on my own, which was an incredible luxury, and by the time I retired at the end of 2012, I felt like I was at the top of my profession.

My path was fruitful, but challenging. I made it because I was passionate, persistent, and very, very lucky. It was a good path for me, but if it’s the only path for people who care as much about collaboration as I do, we’re not going to have many people in our field.

For several years now, I’ve done whatever I could to make that path easier for anyone who was hungry and committed to learning, from sharing all of my templates to providing professional opportunities to promising practitioners. I’ve been able to help a lot of people simply by making time to talk with and encourage them.

However, at the end of the day, the best way to learn is to do the work, to try stuff and to fail over and over again. Before I “retired,” I was able to create safe opportunities for others to do exactly that by inviting them to work with me on real projects.

Those who shadowed me were able to see how I thought about problems and how my ideas manifested themselves in practice. They were able to experience and develop good preparation habits. They were able to practice on real problems without fear of failing, because I could act as their safety net.

Most importantly, they could watch me fail and understand that failing is simply part of the process, that we all do it, and that there is an art to doing it gracefully and successfully.

When I retired, I lost this platform. I was focused entirely on capacity-building, and while I could share stories and advice, I couldn’t show people how I approached process design and facilitation, because I wasn’t doing that work anymore.

This alone wasn’t reason enough to unretire. I know many great practitioners in this space, and I referred people to those who were willing to open up their work practices. I also devoted a lot of my own time to shadow these peers myself for my own learning.

While I learned quite a bit from shadowing, I was extremely disappointed overall by the quality of work I was seeing from some of the most well-respected people in this field. The standard for what it means to do this work well is very low, and it seems that many good practitioners are simply hopping over this bar, which they can do easily.

The problem is that simply clearing the bar does not lead to high performance. If we want to live in a world that is more alive, if we want to address the challenging, urgent problems that we all face, then we, as practitioners, need to raise the bar, not just clear it.

There were exceptions to my shadowing experiences. They tended not to be consultants, but rather people who were embedded in organizations, often younger practitioners who had skin in the game and a hunger to learn. I saw some excellent work from these practitioners, most of whom are largely invisible both in their organizations and in this larger field of collaborative practitioners.

Furthermore, even though I stopped designing and facilitating processes for hire, I actually got better at it during my retirement. I have a much greater understanding for how to integrate capacity-building into my processes, and I can design interventions that are more scalable and sustainable as a result. Also, because I’ve been doing my own workouts (as well as leading them for others), my own collaboration muscles have simply gotten stronger.

I wrote previously about how we need chefs, not recipes. In order to inspire great cooking, people need to taste great meals. I’m hungry to show what’s possible by taking on problems that are hard and meaningful. I want to raise the bar, and I want to do it in a way so that others can learn with me.

I’m still prioritizing my capacity-buiding efforts. I have more programs to offer and more things to give away. I am convinced that these are levers that have the best chance at improving our abilities to collaborate at scale.

At the same time, I’m open to taking on consulting work again. I will be extremely selective, and I will only take on one project at a time. I’ll use these projects as a way to model best practices and as a platform where other practitioners can learn with me. As it so happens, I already have a project, which I’m excited to share more about soon.