Lemon Meringue Pie, Stiff Peaks, and What Effective Collaboration Feels Like

Stiff Peaks

Stiff Peaks

The summer after my junior year in college, I decided that it was finally time to learn how to cook. I had barely managed to feed myself in previous summers, largely subsisting on pasta and jarred sauce and also "pizza" made with slices of bread, cheese, and jarred sauce. (I ate a lot of jarred sauce.) I was able to survive, but I like to eat, so survival felt like too low of a bar.

Rather than start with something simple, I figured that if I could cook something difficult, I could cook anything. I decided that the hardest thing to cook was lemon meringue pie. I recruited my friends, Justin and Jay (who similarly enjoyed eating food and lacked competence in preparing it) to join me in this experiment. Miraculously, they were persuaded by my convoluted reasoning and enthusiastically agreed to participate.

Our first mistake was to search for a recipe on the Internet. This was in 1995. Recipes on the Internet weren't very good back then. Still, that was the least of our problems. The bigger problem was that we couldn't understand the recipe that we found. The crust required that we quickly roll slices of frozen butter and drops of water around in flour until they formed "marbles." The lemon custard required "tempering" eggs so that they cooked without scrambling.

Needless to say, we mostly got it wrong. Our crust barely held together and tasted like… well, it didn't taste like anything. Our lemon custard was actually lemony scrambled eggs — strangely compelling in their own way, but not good. At the very least, our results were edible and even resembled the bottom of a lemon meringue pie.

We could not say the same for the meringue. The recipe called for us to mix egg whites with cream of tartar and to whip them until they formed "stiff peaks." None of us knew what "stiff peaks" were, but we figured we'd know them when we saw them. None of us owned an electric mixer, much less a whisk, so we went to the store, bought a hand mixer, and proceeded to mix away.

And mix. And mix. One of us would mix until exhaustion, then another would take over and continue. We kept stopping to examine our results and debate whether we had achieved "stiff peaks." It didn't look very stiff, but we still had no idea what "stiff peaks" were, so we kept mixing. All told, we mixed for over an hour until finally giving up. My forearms were so tired, I could barely make a fist. We poured our runny egg whites over the custard, baked the darn thing, and celebrated over slices of glazed, scrambled egg and lemon pie.

The next day, we debriefed with a friend who knew how to cook and who somehow found our whole ordeal hilarious. She laughed heartily at most of our story, but paused in surprise when she heard about our failed meringue. "You mixed for over an hour?!" she remarked. "It shouldn't have taken that long, even by hand."

"How long should it have taken?" we asked.

"Five minutes, maybe ten," she responded.

We started speculating about why our meringue had failed, finally concluding that we should just buy an electric mixer and try again. We did, and this time, it worked. We all stood around the bowl and marveled, "So that's what a stiff peak looks like!"

What Do the Different Stages of Effective Collaboration Feel Like?

Last year, Amy Wu and I announced version 2.0 of our DIY Strategy / Culture toolkits. The following week, I spoke with my friend and colleague, June Kim, who had generously pored over our work and had lots of helpful feedback to share. He said, "You do a pretty good job of explaining how to use your toolkits, but you don't explain how it should feel and what it should look like when you're finished."

This hit a nerve. One of my core mantras is, "Chefs, not recipes." In a previous blog post explaining this principle, I wrote:

Recipes and tools have their place, but they are relatively meaningless without the literacy to wield and interpret them.

In a later blog post detailing the design philosophy underlying the toolkits, I confessed:

Initially, I was biased against tool development as a possible path to scale, largely because I felt that most people viewed tools as a silver bullet whose mere presence would magically make any group better. Even though this was the opposite of how I viewed tools, I didn’t want to unintentionally contribute to this problematic mindset, which I felt discouraged practice.

June's feedback felt like my worst fears come true. Without a clear sense of how it should feel to do strategy or culture work or what it looked like when done well, my toolkits would not be as effective as I wanted them to be for "cultivating chefs." I had written recipes that called for "stiff peaks" without explaining what they were or what the process of creating them should feel like. I swore I would fix this immediately.

Almost a year and a half later, I am happy to announce that… I am still at a loss as to how to do this.

My blog post about alignment was a first attempt, but more still needs to be done. I think my Good Goal-Setting Peer Coaching Workshop is also a step in the right direction. It exposes people to how others use the Goals + Success Spectrum, and it helps develop muscles around looking to peers for feedback, rather than biasing toward self-proclaimed experts. I’m in the process of designing similar offerings for other aspects of the work.

Still, I want to do better. The reason this bugs me so much is that I see groups going through collaborative processes all the time without really understanding how the outcomes are supposed to help them. Consequently, they end up blindly following a recipe, often at great expense, both in money and time. They think they've made lemon meringue pie, but they're actually eating glazed lemon and scrambled egg pie.

If people knew what the equivalent of lemon meringue pie actually looked and tasted like, this would simply be the beginning of a learning process. They'd be able to debrief and make adjustments, in the same way that me and my friends did when we were learning how to cook. But because many people don't, they just end up making and eating glazed lemon and scrambled egg pie over and over and over again. Most people sense that something is wrong, but because they don't know what right is, they keep doing the same things over and over again, hoping that the benefits will eventually present themselves.

The best way I know how to do this is to bring people along in my own work, encouraging them to "taste" along the way, pointing out when things feel right and wrong. It's how I learned, and I think we as a field can create many more opportunities for this. I think it's extremely important that all of us, as practitioners, take time to shadow others and create opportunities for others to shadow us. I continue to experiment with this.

A greater emphasis on storytelling is also critical, and I think that video is a particularly good and under-explored opportunity. If I were trying to learn how to make a lemon meringue pie today, a quick YouTube search would turn up hundreds of examples of what "stiff peaks" are and how to create them. What would be the equivalent videos for all things collaboration? What videos could we, as practitioners, easily make that would help the field understand what effective collaboration feels like? (Here's one of my early attempts.)

What do you think? Have you run across or created really good examples of what a good collaborative process feels like, with all of its ups and downs, be it strategy, culture, experimentation / innovation, or any other process? Please share in the comments below. Don’t feel shy about sharing your own work!

Photo by Tracy Benjamin. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A Personal Case Study on Network-Building: Selfishness, Frequent Collisions, and my Colearning Experiment

In 2013, I left the consultancy I had co-founded to rest, reflect, and reconsider my approach to helping groups collaborate more effectively. That time led me to the premise that has become the foundation of my work since — that getting better at collaboration is “simply” a matter of practicing, and the more we figure out how to encourage practice, the better we all will get at collaboration.

I wanted to explore this premise while also taking care of myself and maintaining balance in my life. I was not ready to start another company, but I was also afraid of feeling isolated. I had felt that way for much of the early part of my career, and being part of a tight-knit team at my consultancy had been a huge joy. I wanted the best of both worlds — the support, learning, and joy of being part of a close team along with the freedom and flexibility of being independent.

I think many people’s first instinct for addressing professional isolation, especially as an independent, is to form a group that meets once a month or a few times a year. I think this is a great thing to do, and I think more people would be well-served if they did this. However, I wanted deeper relationships and learning than an occasional coffee with colleagues would provide.

First instincts also don’t always result in optimal designs. I wanted to model a less knee-jerk, more decentralized approach to creating communities of learning and practice. Specifically, I wanted to play with two design principles:

  • Be selfish, but in a networked way
  • Frequent collisions

Armed with this clarity, I started to experiment.

Be Selfish, but in a Networked Way

When it comes to teams and networks, I often hear rhetoric around the importance of “selflessness.” I understand and appreciate where this comes from, but I don’t think that this is the best framing. Groups perform best when individual interests align with those of the group. You want people to find that alignment without sacrificing their individuality. Because many good collaboration practitioners tend toward the self-sacrificial, I often find myself encouraging others to “be selfish.”

As I embarked on building a new network for myself, I wanted to model selfishness (in a networked way), trusting that my self-interest strongly aligned with a larger, collective purpose. “In a networked way” meant finding ways to share and to encourage emergence without interfering with my selfish goals.

Here’s an example of how this manifested. In late 2014, a colleague had introduced me to Janne Flisrand, a Minnesota-based practitioner who was doing interesting work. Janne was planning on visiting San Francisco and asked if I wanted to grab coffee while she was there. I said yes, then, on a whim, asked:

If I organized a meetup for you, would you be willing to chat informally about your work? I’m sure I could pull together at least 3-5 good folks, and we could continue the conversation over dinner as well.

Here was my selfish reasoning:

  • I valued the opportunity to have some get-to-know-you time, but I also wanted to dive more deeply into Janne’s work. Coffee sessions aren’t usually long enough for that.
  • If I found value in a deep dive, I figured others would find value in it as well. It wouldn’t hurt me to invite a few others. Worst case, everyone would say no, and I’d get lots of one-on-one time with Janne, which was the original plan anyway. Best case, other good folks would come, other relationships would get built, and awesome stuff would emerge from that.

Janne was enthusiastic about my offer, which meant I was now on the hook for trying to organize something. Once again, I wanted to experiment with this principle of maximum selfishness (but in a networked way). This was how it played out:

  • Scheduling. Rather than see who was interested in attending, then trying to find a date that worked for everyone, I picked a date that worked for Janne and me, then invited others to accommodate our schedule. No mass Doodles!
  • Venue. I invited people without picking a specific location, then asked if someone would be willing to host. I figured that if no one responded, then I was no worse off than I was before. However, if someone did respond, then I wouldn’t have to find a space at all, which appealed to my selfish (and lazy) side. As it turned out, someone did end up offering to host!
  • Invitations. I only gave people one week’s notice. If shorter notice meant less people, then we would simply have a more intimate conversation and I wouldn’t have to find as big of a space. If we got lots of people, then my community would start to become more interconnected, which makes me happy and often results in something interesting. Either way, it was a win. I didn’t think too hard about whom to invite, and I ended up asking 18 people. To my surprise, 12 said yes, and some folks asked to bring guests!
  • Design. I wanted to model something that was participatory, but also easily replicable. That meant not investing a lot of time designing anything too intricate. I decided to do a simple fishbowl, where Janne and I would sit inside a circle with two other empty seats, and others could join the conversation simply by grabbing one of the empty seats. Afterward, we’d invite whomever wanted to join for drinks and dinner.

It took me less than an hour to:

  • Conceive of this experiment
  • Think of some additional folks to invite
  • Invite them

This small investment in time enabled me to convert a coffee date into a wonderful gathering, where I got to delve further into a colleague’s work with a dozen great colleagues and to introduce these folks to each other, all without having to juggle calendars or find a space! As always happens, interesting stuff emerged from this gathering, including one new relationship resulting in a large new project for a colleague.

This experiment worked so well, I decided to continue it over the next two years, playing with different variables, but always strictly conforming to this principle of networked selfishness. I tried to manage expectations by being transparent about my organizing principles and by constantly encouraging others to be similarly selfish. My hope was that selfish replication would result in lots of self-organizing and interconnection among Bay Area practitioners. This didn’t happen as much as I would have liked, but I was happy about the good things that did emerge from my small acts of networked selfishness.

Frequent Collisions

Another design principle I wanted to explore was frequent collisions. Many years earlier, I had read a wonderful article about how people with sisters tend to be happier. It postulated that this was because people tended to speak more often with their sisters than their brothers. As someone with two sisters, this resonated.

It also jived with my experiences on teams. At my company (which was virtual), I talked to my co-founder every day, I talked to my other teammates several times a week, and we used online tools to stay in touch asynchronously. We talked a lot about work, but we also talked about our lives, and often, we were just silly. Because we talked frequently, we didn’t have to spend a lot of time catching each other up on things, and it was easy to dive right in and also to give each other support.

This was in the back of my mind when I got an email in 2013 from my friend and colleague in Montreal, Seb Paquet, suggesting we catch up. Our resulting conversation reminded us both how much we enjoyed talking with and learning from each other. Rather than wait around for another excuse to schedule a catch-up, I proposed that we schedule a weekly standing time for the next four weeks with no agenda. To my surprise, Seb accepted.

We called the experiment, SEEK, a somewhat garbled, but easy-to-pronounce combination of our initials. We talked a lot about both our work and our lives. Because we were talking regularly, we didn’t have to provide context and background each time we spoke, which allowed us to get deep quickly and consistently.

At the end of each conversation, we recorded a three-minute video where we each shared one takeaway from the conversation. It was a way to have a private, intimate conversation while also leaving a public trail, hopefully provoking conversations with other colleagues while also inspiring others to replicate our experiment.

Seb is incredibly smart and thoughtful, and talking with him enabled me to crystallize and sharpen what I was learning from many of my experiments. For example, here’s the video takeaway from our second conversation, which not only led to some significant changes to my Goals + Success Spectrum, but was also the impetus for me to package and share what has become my most popular and impactful toolkit:

Despite being incredibly busy, we both found our regular conversations productive and gratifying. Each week, we both found ourselves looking forward to our next session. After our four-week experiment ended, we decided to continue talking weekly. We ended up more or less maintaining our weekly pace for three more months.

Colearning Experiment

My experiments with Seb helped validate my desire for frequent engagement. It also helped validate my “selfish” approach. By asking for what I really wanted — in this case, frequent engagement — I not only got what I wanted, but so did my partner. I was ready to ask for even more.

In late 2013, I pitched an idea to five colleagues. They were all Bay Area-based independents, all changemakers, all collaboration practitioners at some level. I knew all of them well, and they knew each other somewhat, mostly through me. I asked them to engage in an eight-week experiment where we would all pair up and commit to checking in with our partners once a week for eight weeks. After each checkin, we would all share one takeaway on a shared mailing list.

Four of my colleagues — Pete Forsyth, Rebecca Petzel, Amy Wu, and Odin Zackman — agreed! Acknowledging a problem that we all shared, Odin cheekily suggested that we call ourselves “COBI” for “Chronically Overwhelmed, But Improving.” We eventually settled on “Colearning 2.0,” a name suggested by my friend, Mariah Howard. The “2.0” (which we eventually dropped) was a nod to our intention of going beyond the “obvious” ways most tried to design communities of practice.

We also agreed on the following purpose statement:

Create a safe, delightful space where we make our individual work visible to a select group of peers and deepen our learning together.

We think this will help us better achieve our individual goals by:

  • Exchanging more substantial feedback on the issues we’re facing
  • Spurring new, creative thinking
  • Helping us see our individual progress (which, in turn, will help us be more compassionate to ourselves)
  • Creating a sense of peer support and accountability
  • Countering the overwhelm we’re all prone to feeling
  • Bring greater purpose to our work through sharing learning with community

Because we were an odd number and I had already experienced a regular pair checkin with Seb, I decided to do my checkin by email to the whole group.

After eight weeks, one of the pairs had met regularly, the other less so. But the takeaways had been wonderful, and everybody found the experience useful enough that they wanted to continue. We made one small change. Participating virtually with the whole group was not as good as having a partner, so I asked Kate Wing if she would join the experiment as my partner, and she accepted. (Five years later, Kate and I still check in regularly almost weekly. More on this in an upcoming blog post.)

This second phase of Colearning lasted through the end of 2015. We had mixed experiences overall with the checkins. For some (me and Kate included), they went wonderfully. For others, not so much. We experimented with different pairs and formats, I tried this experiment with another group, and I encouraged others to experiment with it on their own. I never found a formula for general peer support that seemed to work for everybody.

However, I walked away with enough confidence in the value of frequent, regular contact, that I began incorporating it into my programs and designs with more narrow purposes, such as Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets. I often faced resistance from participants, who were nervous about the time commitment, but that resistance would start to dissipate almost immediately, and by the end of these programs, many would say that they looked forward to these regular conversations each week.

More importantly, other wonderful things started to emerge with this group. People would often request peer assists about things ranging from the mundane and technical (such as social media) to people’s actual work projects. These were always well-attended and highly valued. Many of us shadowed each other’s work, learning from watching our peers actually doing the work. One person created a shared repository of resources, that many of us still use and contribute to. Another group formed a book club.

We also organized a variety of face-to-face gatherings, ranging from an improv workshop to site visits to hikes and dinners. In September 2014, a group of us organized a one-day, Open Space, peer learning workshop in San Francisco that 20 people attended.

We were a leaderful group by design. There were no officially-sanctioned events, and there was never any asking for permission. People organized things they themselves wanted to participate in, and invited others — including those outside of our little group — to participate.

Perhaps the most gratifying thing that happened was that people started collaborating on work together. This was never an explicit goal of the group, but it was something I hoped would happen. Several people did (and continue to do) projects together, in some cases forming partnerships and collectives.

Toward the end of 2015, we started experimenting with Slack as another way of staying engaged remotely. Soon thereafter, we officially brought the checkin portion of our experiment to a close and migrated from the mailing list to Slack. This brought us to our third and final phase of Colearning, which lasted through the end of 2018.

Slack increased online engagement and also made it a little bit more fun. People also continued to self-organize. In early January 2017, we experimented with a joint retreat for individual visioning and strategizing. We’ve continued doing these twice a year ever since.

All told, 17 people participated in this experiment, with a final count of 13. We started off as a Bay Area group, but we experimented with remote participants, and ended up with people from Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles.

New Beginnings

I started playing with all of this six years ago because I was afraid of losing what I was leaving — specifically, deep relationships with other colleagues. As a result, I focused my energies on people who were working independently, regardless of how much of their work was specifically focused on collaboration. These different experiments had taken me above and beyond what I had hoped for, and I was enormously grateful.

However, my priorities for community has shifted over the years. I am less concerned about isolation and more concerned about deepening my (and other’s) practice around collaboration, which is more mission-aligned for me.

Late last year, I decided to stop participating in the Colearning experiment. As I assured the group:

Just because I won’t be on a Slack with all of you doesn’t mean I won’t be in community with all of you…. Obviously, I have deep relationships with all of you, and I hope to continue deepening those. I hope to stay in touch with all of you, I plan on continuing my weekly checkins with Kate as long as she’s willing to put up with me, and when I organize practitioner events, you all will be high on my invitation list….

Networks are about relationships. Experiments and more formal structures can come and go, but those relationships don’t go away. I wanted to be clean about my exit from the group, but I also didn’t want us to see that as the dissolution of community. When I left, someone started a new Slack with a different frame. Many of us continue to stay in close touch, and the bi-annual retreats have continued.

Most importantly, we had the opportunity to celebrate what we had done together (and mourn its passing), and I feel free to focus my energies on designing something new and more relevant to what I care most about right now. I’m a little bit scared, as I always am when diving into the unknown, but I’m also excited about creating something new.


Thanks to H. Jessica Kim and Eun-Joung Lee for reading early drafts of this post. This is the third in a series of blog posts about building a network of collaboration practitioners. The others are:

  1. Building a Network of Collaboration Practitioners (February 7, 2019)
  2. A Personal Case Study in Network-Building: Pre-IPO (February 20, 2019)
  3. A Personal Case Study in Network-Building: Selfishness, Frequent Collisions, and my Colearning Experiment (May 7, 2019)
  4. What We Learned from Five Years of Check-ins (May 14, 2019)
  5. Design Sketch for a Network of Collaboration Practitioners (November 14, 2019)

Do-It-Yourself Strategy and Culture

Biker

In 2009, I was asked by the Wikimedia Foundation to design and lead a movement-wide strategic planning process. The goal was to create a high-quality, five-year strategic plan the same way that Wikipedia was created — by creating a space where anyone in the world who cared could come and literally co-author the plan.

We had two fundamental challenges. First, it wasn’t enough to simply have a plan. It had to be a good plan that some significant percentage of the movement both understood and felt ownership over.

Second, we were asking people in the community to develop a strategy, but most people had no idea what strategy was. (This, frankly, is true of people in general, even in business.) It was different from Wikipedia in that most people already have a mental model of what an encyclopedia is. We had to be more concrete about what it was that we were asking people to do.

I explained that strategic planning, when done well, consists of collectively exploring four basic questions:

  • Where are we now?
  • Where do we want to go? Why?
  • How do we get there?

I further explained that we were going to create a website with these questions, we were going to get as many people as possible to explore these questions on that website, and by the end of the year, we would have our movement-wide, five-year strategic plan.

And that’s essentially what we did.

Get the right people to explore core questions together. Where are we now? Where do we want to go, and why? How do we get there? Provide the space and the support to help these people have the most effective conversation possible. Trust that something good will emerge and that those who created it will feel ownership over it.

This is how I’ve always done strategy, regardless of the size or shape of the group. It looks different every time, but the basic principles are always the same. People were intrigued by what we accomplished with Wikimedia, because it was global and primarily online, because we had gaudy results, and because Wikipedia is a sexy project. However, I was simply using the same basic approach that I use when working with small teams and even my own life.

The craft of developing strategy is figuring out how best to explore these core questions. It’s not hard to come up with answers. The challenge is coming up with good answers. To do that, you need to give the right people the opportunity and the space to struggle over these questions. That process doesn’t just result in better answers. It results in greater ownership over those answers.

Breakfast and Culture

What’s your strategy for eating breakfast in the morning?

Are you a grab-and-run person, either from your own kitchen or from a coffee shop near your office? Eating breakfast at home is cheaper than eating out, but eating out might be faster. Are you optimizing for time or money? Why?

Maybe you have kids, and you value the ritual of kicking off the day eating together? Maybe you’re a night owl, and you’d rather get an extra 30-minutes of sleep than worry about eating at all in the morning.

Where do you want to go? Why? How do you get there? These are key strategic questions, but you can’t answer them without also considering culture — your patterns of behavior, your values, your mindsets, your identity. Choosing to cook your own meals is as much a cultural decision as it is a strategic one.

In my past life as a collaboration consultant, groups would hire me to help with either strategy or culture, but never both. I realized fairly quickly that trying to separate those two processes was largely artificial, that you couldn’t explore one without inevitably colliding with the other.

Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He did not intend to say that one was more important than the other, but that both were necessarily intertwined. Or, as my friend, Jeff Hwang, has more accurately put it, “Saying culture eats strategy for breakfast is like saying your left foot eats your right foot for breakfast. You need both.”

As with strategy, culture work is a process of collective inquiry, except instead of focusing on action (where do you want to go?), the questions are centered around identity:

  • Who are we now?
  • Who do we want to be, and why?
  • How do we get there?

The key to effective culture work is to explore these questions yourself, to struggle over them together as a group, and to constantly revisit them as you try things and learn.

DIY Strategy and Culture

Toward the end of 2013, Dharmishta Rood, who was then managing Code for America’s startups program, asked me if I would mentor one of its incubator companies, which was having some challenges around communication and decision-making. I had been toying with some ideas for a do-it-yourself toolkit that would help groups develop better collaborative habits on their own, and I suggested that we start there.

We immediately ran into problems. The toolkit assumed that the group was already aligned around a core strategy, but with this group, that wasn’t the case. They had been going, going, going without stopping to step back and ask themselves what they were trying to accomplish, how they wanted to accomplish those things, and why. (This is very typical with startups.)

This group needed space to do some core work around strategy and culture. I threw out my old toolkit and created a new one designed to help groups have strategy and culture conversations continuously and productively on their own. The revised toolkit was based on the key questions underlying strategy and culture depicted as two cyclical loops:

Strategy / Culture Questions

While most strategy or culture processes are progressively staged, in practice, inquiry is never linear, nor should it be. Spending time on one question surfaces new insights into the other questions, and vice-versa. Where you start and the order in which you go are not important. What matters is that you get to all of the questions eventually and that you revisit them constantly — hence the two cycles. My colleague, Kate Wing, recently noted the resemblance of the diagram to bicycle wheels, which is why we now call it the Strategy-Culture Bicycle.

Dharmishta and I saw the Bicycle pay immediate dividends with this group. People were able to wade through the complexity and overwhelm, notice and celebrate what they had already accomplished, and identify high-priority questions that needed further discussion. Furthermore, the process was simple enough that it did not require a third-party’s assistance. They were able to do it fine on their own, and they would get better at it as they practiced.

Pleased and a bit surprised by its effectiveness, I asked my long-time colleague, Amy Wu of Duende, to partner with me on these toolkits. We prototyped another version of the toolkit with four of last year’s Code for America accelerator companies, and once again, saw great success.

We’ve gone through eight iterations together, we’ve tested the kit with over a dozen groups and individuals (for personal and professional life planning), and we’ve added some complementary components. A number of practitioners have used the toolkit on their own to help other groups, including me, Dharmishta, Amy, Kate, and Rebecca Petzel.

I’m thrilled by the potential of toolkits like these to help build the capacity of practitioners to act more strategically and to design their aspired culture. As with all of my work, these toolkits are available here and are public domain, meaning that they are freely available and that you can do anything you want with them. You can also purchase pre-printed packages.

Please use them, share them, and share your experiences! Your feedback will help us continuously improve them.

The Secret to High-Performance Collaboration: Slowing Down

Run, Serena, Run!

At my previous consultancy, we used to spend a considerable amount of time debriefing every engagement, big or small. We were meticulous in our analysis, nitpicking every detail.

Over time, I started noticing a few patterns. First, I realized that our debriefs were largely ineffective, because we weren’t taking the time to integrate what we learned. We needed to be reviewing past debriefs before new engagements in order to remind ourselves of what we had learned and in order to hold ourselves accountable to improvement. Without that additional space, our debriefs were essentially exercises in self-criticism and generating lists, two skills we didn’t need to be practicing.

Second, a few things began to jump out at me as I reviewed our long list of things we could have done better. Almost without fail, when we had “bad” engagements, someone had slept poorly the night before. Or someone had been working while sick. Or someone had forgotten to eat breakfast that morning. (Forgetting to eat was my personal bane.)

We had spent hours and hours and hours debriefing, and this is what we learned:

  • When we didn’t take care of ourselves, our performance suffered.
  • When we didn’t take time to remind ourselves of past lessons, we repeated the same mistakes.

One of my mentors, Gail Taylor, is always encouraging me to seek the simplicity embedded in complexity. What I’ve realized over the years is that, when I find it, I often dismiss it. It seems too obvious. There has to be something else.

Slowly, but surely, I’m breaking this habit, and I’m starting to see more clearly as a result. Which brings me to my biggest insight over the past several months.

The best thing we can do to improve collaborative effectiveness is to slow down.

This has been coming up for me over and over again with all of my recent projects and experiments.

I’m currently doing an experiment with the Code for America incubator in trying to help new companies establish good collaborative habits right from the start. PostCode (the company with which I’m working) is working at a startup pace, and they’ve had inevitable challenges as they move through their storming phase.

Fortunately, when problems crop up, they deal with them quickly. In those situations, they’ve often reached out to me about possible toolkits to help them navigate their challenges. My answer has been consistent: Slow down. They haven’t found the time (beyond the work we’ve done with them, which has been too constrained) for critical conversations about organizational strategy, culture, and group dynamics. It’s understandable. They’re under a tremendous amount of pressure, and in those situations, conversations about strategy and group dynamics can feel like a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

Last week, I facilitated a practitioners workshop for the Garfield Foundation on collaborative networks. For one of the Open Space sessions, I led a group through the power workout I developed for Changemaker Bootcamp. We had a wonderful, nuanced conversation about power dynamics, and several people asked, “How do we make sure we have more of these conversations with our constituencies?” My response: “The first step is making the time.”

Telling others (or even yourself) to slow down is easy. Actually doing it is hard. We move fast because of external pressures, mindsets, habits, cultural norms, and so forth. We have little control over most of these things, and what little we can control is incredibly hard to change. But there are tricks that I’ve found helpful over the years.

Experiments. Changing habits is hard, and you will likely fail many times. Approaching the challenge of slowing down as a series of experiments helps. As I wrote previously, one of the keys to a successful experiment is to hold yourself accountable to the results. Failure is okay as long as you’re committed to the intention and are actively incorporating what you learn into new experiments.

If you are truly committed to slowing down, write it down. Write, “Slow down,” on a piece of paper, and put it up where you will see it. Actively devise and track experiments that will help you do this, so that you can monitor your progress and see what’s working and what’s not.

For important conversations — whether it be organizational strategy or a project debrief — schedule those in advance as part of your project plan, and track whether or not they actually happen. If they don’t happen, take the time to examine why, and devise another experiment. The beauty of applying an experimental framework is that simply the process of devising and tracking an experiment is an act of slowing down.

Checkins. My former business partner, Kristin Cobble, recently wrote a wonderful piece on the power of checkins. She describes them mostly in the context of meetings as a way to invite participation and to garner a sense of the collective whole. What I’ve learned over the past several months is that they also serve a much simpler, deeper function. They force you to slow down and reflect — even if just for a moment.

Starting last year, I embarked on a simple experiment with my friend, Seb Paquet, who’s based in Montreal and who, like me, works for himself. We decided to check in with each other once a week for an hour over Skype. We didn’t have any agenda. We would simply use that time to have an extended checkin.

We ended up doing two phases, and it served to be tremendously valuable. Not only did it deepen our relationship, it served several practical purposes. We both had an opportunity to give each other feedback on our respective projects. We supported each other when we faced challenges and cheered each other when we succeeded. The most interesting thing to happen was that, even when things got tremendously busy for both of us, we both stayed very committed to these checkins. They were not just nice-to-have; they were helping us work more effectively.

Inspired by these results, I invited my colleagues Pete Forsyth, Rebecca Petzel, Odin Zackman, and Amy Wu — who all work independently — to participate in a similar experiment earlier this year. We wanted to experiment with ways that we — as an informal network — could achieve the same (or better) benefits that people get from working in great organizations. In particular, we wanted to be more intentional about learning from each other. We called our experiment, Colearning 2.0, a play on the coworking movement.

We explored several things that we could do together, but we settled on doing weekly pair checkins, as Seb and I had done beforehand. There was some reluctance at first. One thing we all had in common was a frequent feeling of overwhelm, and taking an hour out of our week to “just talk” seemed burdensome. Not only did everyone end up finding the experience valuable, there’s a desire to continue the practice and take it to the next level.

I recently spoke with Joe Hsueh about his recent trip to Istanbul. One of the things that struck him the most about his trip was the adhan — the Islamic call to prayer. Imagine being in a bustling city of 14 million people where every day, at prescribed times, a horn sounds and the entire city goes silent. Imagine what it feels like to have that regular moment of collective, silent reflection.

I believe that checkins could be a powerful keystone habit that helps us slow down overall, which ultimately helps us collaborate more effectively. This is a hypothesis I continue to explore.

What helps you to slow down? What’s been the impact of doing so?

Civic Engagement Funders Aligning for Impact

SIFT Aligning for Impact

Last year, a small group of foundations who fund state-wide civic engagement (the State Infrastructure Funders Table, or SIFT) embarked on a small, but important experiment, facilitated by my friend and colleague, Rebecca Petzel.

These foundations believe that democracy in the U.S. is broken, that it’s serving the interests of the privileged over the public. They have funded many successful initiatives to try and address this problem, but they continue to face tremendous challenges, many of which are a result of poor collaboration. Specifically, different philanthropic strategies often end up crafted in isolation from each other and therefore miss opportunities to align around common goals, especially when it comes to state versus national funders.

These foundations see similar challenges with communication, coordination, and collaboration among their grantees and have asked them to work in networked ways. But the foundations themselves have not been modeling that behavior.

Looking for a better way, Renee Fazzari of General Services Foundation and Mary Tobin of McKay Foundation wanted to see if they could get a small group of funders aligned around vision and strategy, and they asked Rebecca to help them design and facilitate that process. Twenty-five funders representing 12 different states participated in this three-months conversation, which was mostly virtual and which culminated in a two-day face-to-face retreat.

At its core, this project was about creating a space for funders to have a different kind of conversation with each other. It was about getting them to slow down, so that they could work smarter. The process surfaced discrepancies in their theories of change and the language they used to describe them, it strengthened their relationships, and it created a strong commitment to do something even bigger together.

The success speaks to the skill of both the facilitation and the participation. I got a chance to watch the process from afar, and I saw many things that were particularly innovative. The process was mostly virtual, which contradicts the widely-held view that a face-to-face kickoff is the best way to build the relationships and shared understanding necessary for success.

The virtual meetings were designed with the same care as face-to-face meetings, with strong technical support, checkins and checkouts, breakouts, breaks, and most importantly, shared display. All of this lent to a feeling that participants were in the same “room” together, and participants were shocked by the high levels of energy and enthusiasm that were maintained throughout the two-hour calls. Participants took shared notes during breakouts, and Rebecca used Dialogue Mapping to capture and facilitate full-group conversation. They then synthesized these notes, with the help of creative consultant, Amy Wu, into a beautiful visual storybook that told the story of their work.

By chance, I happened to catch Mary, Renee, and Rebecca in the same place earlier this week, and they graciously allowed me to put them on the spot and record some of what they learned on video. Unfortunately, as is often the case with networks of busy people, I could not catch all three of them at the same time, so I took two 15-minute videos — one with Mary and Renee, the other with Mary and Rebecca. This actually nicely models a good network practice — talk in clusters, leave a trail — and I’m happy to share what they said here.