From Go-Go-Go to Going Slow: Lessons from My Own Painful, but Ultimately Successful Journey

I discovered weights freshman year in college, and as a weak and skinny kid, I found them to be a revelation. One of my friends had played football in high school, and he and I would work out together often. He worked out hard — at least five days a week — and I liked his routine, so I adopted something similar.

I rapidly gained strength, but I also peaked quickly. Naturally, I tried working out more, but it didn’t seem to help. I maintained more or less the same routine throughout my sophomore year without any significant gains, which I found frustrating and demotivating. It led to long stretches where I would stop working out altogether.

Junior year, I restarted my workouts, and again saw little progress. My next door neighbor that year turned out to be a serious bodybuilder. One day, I asked him for advice. I started by telling him how much I worked out, and he cut me off. “You’re working out too much,” he said. “Your body needs rest to recover and build muscle. Try doing 45 minutes three days a week.”

“Are you sure?” I asked incredulously. Everything he said made sense except for his specific recommendation, which amounted to half as much as I had been doing for years.

“Try it,” he insisted.

I did. After just a few weeks, I saw marked improvement for the first time in over a year. I was floored. It turned out that, in order to get stronger, I just had to do less.

The Power of the Pause

I am often approached by groups with go-go-go cultures asking how to:

When I hear more about their current situations, I often find myself channeling my bodybuilder friend. You can't do any of these things if you aren't regularly slowing down to pause, to:

  • Reflect together
  • Listen deeply to each other
  • Have hard conversations with each other
  • Make adjustments
  • Rest and recover

If you're not committed to developing your muscles around pausing, you not only will not succeed at any of the above, you may even hurt yourselves.

When my friend told me to try working out less, I was more than happy to try, even though I was skeptical. When I tell other collaboration practitioners they need to practice pausing, I get the same skepticism, but none of the joy. There are reasons why they are go-go-go, and trying to shift those habits and mindsets is not only very hard, it can be downright anxiety-inducing.

I know this all too well. For the first dozen years of my career as a collaboration practitioner, I was the worst perpetuator of this go-go-go mindset. It took me six years of consistent effort and constant failure along with a health scare to learn how to slow down. It's made me a better person and a better practitioner, and it's also made me tremendously empathetic to others who are suffering from similar afflictions.

I blogged a lot about my journey as I was going through it, both on my personal blog and on this one. I also shared a tool — my Self-Care Dashboard — that ended up being enormously useful. But I never bothered writing about how I eventually turned a corner, how I've been able to sustain this balance, and the impact it's had on my life and my work. I'd like to correct that here, both to complete the record and also hopefully to offer actionable encouragement to other practitioners dealing with this challenge.

Developing Bad Habits

The first thing to know about my go-go-go ways is that I wasn't always this way. I was capable of tremendous focus and endurance, especially when it came to things I was passionate about, but I also valued my chill-out time. My childhood was spacious and wonderful, full of time to think, explore, and zone out. My first few years after college were similar, which enabled me to realize my passion for collaboration as well as to develop some initial practices.

My lifestyle started to change for the worse when I cofounded my first collaboration consultancy in 2002. I was extremely fortunate to have a mentor who taught and encouraged me and a cofounder with whom I could play and learn. But I was also in my 20s with no formal experience and a job description that I had more or less made up. Moreover, we were trying to make do in a down economy.

Needless to say, business was not good. I went into debt and barely scratched a living for several years before things slowly started turning around. It was stressful and unhealthy, and even though I was barely making any money, I found myself working all the time. I was also young and single, and I suffered a bit from the Silicon Valley mindset that idolatrized struggle before success. I thought I was simply paying my dues, like any good entrepreneur or changemaker, and if business ever got better, I promised myself that I would return to my more balanced ways. Unfortunately, I was not precise with myself about what "business getting better" looked like, and my difficult habits and scarcity mindset continued to perpetuate themselves.

In 2009, three things converged, causing me to finally reconsider my ways. First, I experienced the painful end of a long relationship. Second, I was massively burned out. Third, my then four-year old nephew, whom I adored (and still adore), came to visit San Francisco for the first time ever, but I was so busy that week, I barely spent any time with him. I was extremely upset about this, and it caused me to reflect deeply on what I was doing and how I could change.

First Steps

One of the first and best things I did was to hire a coach. She helped me to articulate a clear vision of what a balanced life looked like for me. Put simply, all of the best, most balanced times of my life had three things in common: basketball, books, and lots of time with family and friends. Imagining a life replete with these three things made me feel light and happy, and they became my personal North Star.

The next step was to understand what, professionally, was preventing me from having these things. Two answers quickly came to mind: Bad habits perpetuated by a fear of not making enough money and a constant feeling of isolation. I was lucky to have community, but what I needed were colleagues. If I could make more money, and if I felt like I was part of a team, I thought I might take a break every once in a while, which would hopefully and eventually lead to me to my North Star.

I still had more questions than answers, but I made two concrete changes as a result of my coaching sessions. First, I raised my rates for the first time in seven years. More money, I reasoned, would give me more space. I considered myself to be one of the top people in the field, and I had known for years that my rate was not commensurate with others, but my deeply engrained fear of not getting enough work had prevented me from raising them earlier.

Second, I decided that I would never take on another complex systems change project without an equal partner. This decision both thrilled and terrified me. On the one hand, I craved partnership. On the other hand, it meant that I wasn’t just raising my rates, I was essentially raising and doubling them. Would I ever get any work again? I believed, in my head, that I would. I had seen others do it, so I knew it was possible, but I was still really scared.

Fortunately, I was able to test these changes almost immediately. The CIO of a Fortune 100 company approached me about some possible work. He fit the profile of a lot of past clients, in that he had tried working with a few traditional (and very expensive) management consulting firms, he had been dissatisfied with their results, and he was looking for something more outside-the-box. He was already talking to some prestigious design firms, when a colleague mentioned me as a possible candidate.

I felt excited about the possibility of working with him, I knew that budget was not going to be an issue for him the way it might be for a smaller organization, and I already had someone in mind with whom I wanted to partner. I thought my chances of getting the work was low, which emboldened me to really go for it — to put together a team of folks with whom I really wanted to work and to propose what I felt would be the ideal project without constraining myself. When I put together my budget, I could feel my palms sweating and my heart beating. I had managed projects with large budgets before, but I had never before written a proposal for that large a sum of money.

Somehow, we got the work! He and his team turned out to be dream clients, and a few members of the team I had pulled together became the core of the consulting firm I cofounded one year later.

After we secured a verbal agreement with our client, we had to work through some bureaucracy. I had been planning a vacation a few months in advance, but as the date approached, we had still not agreed on an actual contract, and I felt old anxieties cropping up. I strongly considered canceling my vacation, but my partner insisted that she had everything under control and that I should not only go, but fully disconnect while I was gone. I listened to her, and everything worked out. The structures I had created and the people with whom I had surrounded myself liberated me to take my vacation, my first in eight years.

Falling Over and Over Again

I felt relaxed for the first time in my career, and it was showing in the work. I was excited about new opportunities, and I loved everyone with whom I was working. More importantly, my life was feeling more spacious. I thought I had turned a corner. Unfortunately, I had confused taking a few steps with walking. I still had a lot of inner and outer work to do, and — as it turned out — I was going to have to fall a lot more along the way.

Things started getting out of balance again when a few of us decided to formalize our partnership. We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to build together and how. In addition to being great consultants and building a great company that modeled our values, I wanted to explore ways of working outside of consulting, as I was feeling like we were reaching the ceiling of the impact that consulting could have. But, in theory at least, I was happy for that to be a stage two project, focusing our initial energies on building a great consultancy.

Over the course of several months, we converged on three priorities for our first year, the third of which was, “Space for Renewal, Learning, and Play.” Everyone was fully committed and aligned around this goal, and we did some things well. We did a good job of protecting other people’s time. We instituted practices such as starting all of our meetings with checkins, a tiny, but much needed pause that enabled us to breathe and be human together on a regular basis. We started tracking our time, which we all hated, but which gave us real data to see how we were doing collectively and to make adjustments accordingly. I designated my Wednesdays as "play days," which at minimum meant no meetings and at maximum meant open time to read, experiment, or simply take a break.

Unfortunately, I was still falling back on a lot of terrible habits. Running a company is stressful. A lot of people are depending on you to bring in revenue and to create a healthy, thriving work environment. I also felt urgency to do more. On top of the day-to-day challenges of building a successful consultancy, I was anxious to at least start exploring models outside of consulting, even though we had agreed not to prioritize this that first year.

All of this pressure — some real, some self-imposed — kickstarted my superhero complex. It was important to me that everyone else on the team had balance in their lives, but I believed that I could make do without, at least temporarily. I was motivated, I was confident in my endurance, and I felt it would move all of us forward without harming anyone. Besides, it would only be for a little while. Once we got over the hump, I could focus on restoring balance for myself.

Of course, it didn't work out this way. As a leader, I was not modeling the behaviors I was professing to prioritize. Everyone noticed this, everyone felt stressed by this, and — fortunately for me — everyone called me out on this. Moreover, intense stress and not enough rest was making me a bad teammate. It also was impacting my health. I thought I felt okay, but I discovered at a regular checkup that my blood pressure was alarmingly high.

This was the ultimate wakeup call for me. I needed to prioritize balance immediately. My life literally depended on it.

Turning the Corner

Shortly after founding my company, I started tracking a set of self-care practices every week on a dashboard that all of my peers could see. It was stark to see how often I neglected all of my self-care practices, including the low-hanging fruit, such as going for a walk. The simple act of tracking helped me make sure I was always doing some form of self-care, which was an important start.

However, it also made me see that "some" self-care was not going to be enough. This forced me to explore more deeply why I wasn’t able to make time to take better care of myself. I realized that working made me feel powerful and in control. When I felt like things were going poorly in my personal life, I defaulted to working as a way of feeling better about myself. I needed to confront these patterns head-on. I also adopted some simple tactics that helped. In particular, I took up photography as a hobby, which served as a much-needed creative outlet, helped reconnect me to my community, and unexpectedly had a profound impact professionally.

All of this core work turned out to be critical for me to implement the simplest and hardest solution of them all. In order to work less, I needed to stop doing something. That meant taking something off my list, which I had never managed to do.

I decided to leave the company I had co-founded, which — to this day — remains the hardest professional decision I have ever made. Leaving helped a lot. I was able to maintain a modicum of balance for the next few years, but I noticed that I easily fell back into old habits. I re-focused on working less, even declaring my intentions here on this blog. Repetition helped, and I was finally getting the hang of being real with myself and taking things off my plate. But, as it turned out, I needed to do one more thing before I truly turned a corner. I needed to stop checking my email so often.

Turning off my work email before dinner and on weekends had long been on my list of self-care practices. They were the easiest to do, and yet, after three years of tracking, they were the things I practiced the least. All of my hard work finally made it possible for me to do these “simple” things, and my self-care scores soared as a result. More importantly, it felt good. It turns out my email behavior was a good leading indicator of how much balance I had and also a keystone habit that unlocked other important practices.

In September 2016, I went to my self-care dashboard — as I had been doing every week for over four years — and decided that I didn't need to track anymore. After six long years of failing over and over again, I felt like I had finally achieved the balance I was seeking.

The following year, my nephew and his little brother came to visit me in San Francisco for the first time since that crazy week in 2009. I cleared my schedule so that I could maximize my time with them. We played basketball every morning, we went on long walks, and we ate delicious food. As I drove them to the airport at the end of their trip, I started to cry, not just because they were leaving, but because I remembered what my life and work was like the first time my nephew had visited eight years earlier, and I felt grateful for how my life had changed since.

Takeaways

It's been five years since I stopped tracking my self-care practices, and I've maintained this balance since. Not only am I as happy, healthy, and fulfilled as I've ever been, I am a significantly better collaboration practitioner than I ever was. Just as my bodybuilder friend explained with weightlifting, to get better at my work, I “simply” had to learn how to do less.

I share these stories not because I've landed on some magic formula for achieving self-care and work-life balance. Everyone's story and circumstances are unique, and I don't want to pretend that what worked for me will work for everyone. I share these stories, because I want folks to know that self-care is really, really hard. If you don’t already have work-life balance, there are likely very real, very hard reasons for this — both internal and external.

Achieving balance requires hard work, experimentation, and tons of support, and — if your experiences are anything like mine — you will fail over and over again. Even if you manage to achieve balance, you will always have to work to maintain it. You will constantly face obstacles, and old habits and mindsets will continue to rear their ugly heads. At the same time, achieving balance will also strengthen your faith in the importance and power of going slow, which will serve as motivation for you to continue your practices.

This matters, especially for collaboration practitioners trying to improve the performance of their groups. Working with urgency is not the same as working urgently. In order to be agile and impactful, in order to learn as you go, in order to do values-aligned work, pausing regularly isn't nice, it's necessary. One of the most powerful acts of leadership — regardless of your job title — is to model this. It's hard, but it may end up being the most important and impactful work that you do.

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Design Sketch for a Network of Collaboration Practitioners

Earlier this year, I announced that I wanted to build a more formal network of collaboration practitioners. I wrote:

It’s always been an important part of my strategy, and it feels like the right moment to prioritize it.

I also want to be open and transparent about how I’m trying to do it in order to model network principles. As the field has professionalized, I’ve felt a narrowness in how many practitioners interpret and practice network principles. I want to offer a counter to this.

In subsequent blog posts, I shared what I had learned from previous experiences. In my first case study, I pulled out the following principles:

  • Be clear about what you want
  • Avoid premature and unnecessary structure
  • Assume abundance!

In my second case study, I pulled out a few more principles:

  • Be selfish, but in a networked way
  • Frequent collisions
  • Networks are about relationships

In this post, I want to offer a few more driving principles and outline how I’m currently thinking about pulling this all together.

Inspired by Alcoholics Anonymous

In addition to my previous work, one of my biggest inspirations for how I want to design this is Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.). A.A. is a global, open, decentralized, self-organizing network that emphasizes pair relationships and peer support, and it has helped thousands of people over the years, including a few whom I know. The core of its program is its 12 steps, the first step of which is admitting you have a problem. Anyone can start an A.A. support group. It simply requires “the need for one as expressed by at least two or three alcoholics; the cooperation of other A.A. members; a meeting place; a coffeepot; A.A. literature and meeting lists; and other supplies.”

I love how open, clear, and simple the platform is. There are formal structures to help keep this all organized, but the basic model is to encourage motivated people to take action. Furthermore, there is a deeply embedded culture of support and practice. This is not dictated by the structure, but it’s reinforced by it. The structures themselves are simple, even though the work of living with addiction is not.

I’ve always been taken by A.A.’s model and results. I also think that what many collaboration practitioners (including me) need amounts to self-help. Most of us are not working in structures that are conducive to our work. Many of us are not doing this work as part of our official roles within our groups, which means it often comes on our own time, and the work is often unseen and undervalued. When structure and culture is working against you, it’s even more contingent for you to maintain disciplined habits and to find support where you can.

I think a lot of collaboration practitioners already find ways to do this on our own, especially the peer support part. However, I think our default culture prevents us from truly getting what we want. I think we generally don’t ask for as much time as we need (and that others would happily provide, because it would benefit them too), and I think we’re generally not as open or transparent about what we’re learning as we could be.

What I Want

I want to create a support group for collaboration practitioners focused on developing and maintaining good habits, the kinds of habits that will not only make us better practitioners, but also enable us to live happy, healthy, sane lives. (These two things are inextricably intertwingled in my opinion.)

I want us to be focused on depth over breadth — deep practice, deep sharing, deep relationships. I want all of us to have a sense of what’s going on with each other professionally and personally. I want there to be enough trust and shared understanding and language that we all feel comfortable throwing around crazy ideas or asking for help. I would love to see participants collaborate, but only when it’s compelling. I’m not interested in collaboration for collaboration’s sake.

I want it to be an open group, but I also want it to feel intimate. I assume this means that it needs to be small, which may require limiting the size of the group, but I don’t know what the limit should be or whether this assumption is even true. I want participants to share what they learn from each other more broadly while also being thoughtful and respectful of people’s privacy and safety.

In other words, I don’t just want this to be a group of folks we already know and are comfortable with. I want to see diversity in as many dimensions as possible — age, gender, race, job, etc. This suggests paying particular attention to diversity and mobility (people moving in and out) with the initial group and letting it evolve from there.

I want participants to feel ownership and agency over their experience in the group. I want it to be leaderful and bold.

Finally, I want to create structures and practices that are easily replicable and customizable, I want to invest in the culture and capacities that can lead to success, and I want to share everything that I learn in the process. I’d love to see many, many, many groups copy what we do, customizing it as they see fit, and openly and frequently sharing what they learn so that we all may benefit. These groups could share a common “brand” or identity, like A.A., but it’s not that important to me. What matters more is that these types of spaces for collaboration practitioners to support each other are abundant.

Design Sketch

Given all of the above, here’s what I’m thinking (and have already started to experiment with). The group (as yet unnamed) would be centered around supporting each other with these Habits of Effective Collaboration Practitioners:

  1. Admit you are a collaboration practitioner.
  2. Breathe.
  3. Start with you.
  4. Listen and understand others.
  5. Be intentional, and hold it lightly.
  6. Stretch, but don't hurt yourself.
  7. Be compassionate.
  8. Do the work.
  9. Pick yourself up.
  10. Celebrate!
  11. Reflect and integrate.
  12. Share!
  13. Repeat.

Most practitioners already do some subset of these regularly. Our goal would be to support each other in doing all of them, which would help all of us become better practitioners and people. (I’ll blog more about this list later, as I’m still eliciting feedback and making changes. I’d love to hear your reactions in the comments section below. Many thanks to Anya Kandel, Travis Kriplean, Eun-Joung Lee, Danny Spitzberg, Matt Thompson, and Kate Wing for providing early feedback.)

Everyone participating would go through an on-boarding process that would include reviewing these habits and talking one-on-one with at least two current participants. This would help people feel more welcome, and it would remind everyone that networks are fundamentally about people and relationships and that we encourage people to forge their own individual connections beyond the platform.

Beyond the on-boarding, there would be only one required activity (which would take place on a Slack instance set up for this group) — checking in every week. The checkin could be brief, and the prompt could change over time, but the basic idea is that everyone would share what was going on in their work and lives at least once a week.

This simple practice would accomplish several things:

  • Make it clear whether you’re in or out. (More on this below.)
  • Help people learn how to use and get comfortable with the platform
  • Build community and relationships through frequent, but lightweight engagement
  • Establish a rhythm that makes the community and the space feel alive
  • Support participants in developing core collaboration and network muscles, especially our Sharing muscles.

I want to make it both simple and clear to delineate between those participating in this network and those who are not. If you’re willing to go through the on-boarding, agree to some basic community agreements, and check in regularly, you’re welcome to participate. I also want to make it okay not to participate. This structure may not feel right for some, or it may not be the right group of people, or it may be asking for too much time. Just because you’re not participating in this particular network doesn’t mean you can’t (or don’t) have a relationship with me or other participants. If you stop participating for whatever reason, that’s okay too, and you’d be welcome to return by just going through the on-boarding again.

I’m also making a bet about our Sharing muscles. When it comes to sharing, most of the practitioners I’ve met default to sharing only when they’re face-to-face with others and in larger, more "finished" chunks. There’s nothing wrong with this. However, many of the interesting and desirable things that sometimes emerge from networks require more frequent and open sharing. Rather than hoping this happens organically, I want to actively cultivate this muscle by encouraging participants to share rough little tidbits about their work and their thinking more frequently. My hope is that developing this one keystone habit will help unlock all sorts of other desirable muscles and mindsets — pausing, working iteratively, comfort sharing rough work, vulnerability, celebration, etc. — which will both help all of us individually as practitioners and the network as a whole.

Finally, I want to encourage (but not require) participants to find a regular checkin partner, similar to my experiences with Kate Wing over the past five years.

I’ve been experimenting with some of these ideas and structures over the past year, and I’m looking forward to taking another step forward. (Many thanks to Cherine Badawi, Shirley Huey, Anya Kandel, Travis Kriplean, Adene Sacks, and Zoe Tamaki for playing.) I have lots of open questions, and I’m looking forward to exploring these.

I’m not ready to open it up to everyone just yet. I want to be really intentional about establishing the culture and practices with a core group, and I want to make sure that we have a good balance of emerging and experienced practitioners. That said, if you think you might want to play, please either leave a comment below or send me an email directly. If you want to try to start your own group stealing any or all of this, please do, and please let me know, as I’d love to learn from your experiences! Finally, if you have any other thoughts on any of this, please leave a comment below. This is a work-in-progress, and I’m looking forward to continuing to share what I learn.

This is the last 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)

Building a Network of Collaboration Practitioners

Most groups have at least one person who is motivated to help their group get better at collaboration, regardless of their role. I call these folks, “collaboration practitioners.” They are the people I am most interested in empowering and supporting. The more I can help them, the more groups I can impact.

In order to support collaboration practitioners, I need to find them. “Collaboration practitioner” is not everyday parlance. Most people have no idea what I’m talking about when I use this term. Moreover, many people who play this role are not doing it formally. It’s not in their job description, and they may not even realize they’re doing it.

Self-awareness is the first step. It’s hard to seek help if you don’t have a name for what you’re doing. Having that name makes it easier to find and learn from others who play similar roles.

In the past, I’ve played a small role in connecting collaboration practitioners with each other. For the most part, it’s been a selfish endeavor. When I first got started in this business, I was desperate to find and learn from other practitioners. When I started finding them, I held onto them for dear life. It took me several years before I stopped feeling isolated. Ever since, my community has been an invaluable support structure.

Weaving some of these relationships together came naturally to me. After all, it’s one of the muscles needed to be great at collaboration. At the same time, I intentionally shied away from spending too much time doing this. I wanted to focus on going deeper, not broader.

This year. I want to invest more of my time building a network of practitioners. It’s always been an important part of my strategy, and it feels like the right moment to prioritize it.

I also want to be open and transparent about how I’m trying to do it in order to model network principles. As the field has professionalized, I’ve felt a narrowness in how many practitioners interpret and practice network principles. I want to offer a counter to this.

The beauty of trying to model network principles in my own field rather than for a client is that I have fewer constraints. I can be much more creative about what I do and how I do it, and I can be much more candid about my experiences.

Sometimes (hopefully more often than not), I’ll be successful. Other times, I won’t. I want to show both. This work is hard. Pretending that it’s not is not only dishonest, it’s a disservice to those of us trying to learn and improve.

I’ll start by sharing a series of blog posts over the next few weeks about past experiences, surfacing and exploring important principles through these stories. I’ll then start sharing what I’m thinking and doing about this new network. A lot of those posts will be half-baked, because… well, these things take a while to bake. I hope that this half-bakedness serves as an invitation, an opportunity for you to shape this network as well through your thinking, ideas, and participation.

This is the first 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)

Invisibility Doesn’t Serve the Work

Last year, I got an email out of the blue from Joanna Levitt Cea, Director of Buen Vivir Fund at Thousand Currents and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Global Projects Center. She and her colleague, Jess Rimington, Managing Director of /The Rules, had spent their Stanford fellowship trying to understand why the social sector didn’t seem to be as good as the for-profit sector at innovation. After some extensive research, they had pulled together some preliminary hypotheses, and they wanted to test these with other practitioners.

Neither Joanna nor Jess had heard of me before. A few people had recommended that they talk to me, and they thought enough of my online bio to invite me to a three-day workshop in New Orleans. When I spoke with them, they were incredibly warm and kind. They were curious about my work, and they were humble about theirs. I read an early draft of their research, which I found thoughtful and provocative, and I could see how much hard work they had poured into it.

I was particularly intrigued by their workshop attendees, mainly because I didn’t know any of them, which surprised me. I’ve been in this field for 15 years, and I’m obsessed with finding other great practitioners, yet I had never heard of any of these other attendees or their work. Googling didn’t turn up much either, but I found enough to interest me. For example, two of the practitioners were the hosts of our workshop: Steven Bingler and Bobbie Hill of Concordia, a community-centered planning and design firm. Among their many, many great projects was the Unified New Orleans Plan, a five-month planning process they led following Hurricane Katrina, which involved 9,000 residents and resulted in a comprehensive redevelopment plan.

I arrived at Steven’s house not knowing a soul, and he and Bobbie immediately made sure I and all the other attendees felt at home. Everyone was warm and friendly, and we bonded over crawfish, crab, and conversation before heading to Poplarville, Mississippi for our retreat. I rode in Bobbie’s car, where we talked about our lives and shared our respective journeys. I later got to learn more about Steven’s vision and philosophy as well.

I was struck by how different our backgrounds were, yet how similarly we approached the work and how aligned our values were. After getting to know Steven and Bobbie better, as well as the other participants, I was even more surprised that we had never heard of each other before. I thought Steven might have heard of Matt Taylor, one of my mentors, because they were both architects, but he hadn’t.

One of my favorite sayings when describing this work is, “Chefs, not recipes.” This simple phrase encapsulates everything I believe about the craft of collaboration, but it also says a lot about high-performance ecosystems. As it turns out, the chef scene is very tight. Everyone who cooks seriously — from top chefs to rising cooks — seems to know each other.

Part of this is due to the popularization of food culture and all the trappings that come with it — celebrity chefs, reality television, food blogs, and so forth. However, the roots of this tight-knit, informal network are far older and deeper. Cooks have long had a culture of staging (i.e. apprenticeship) as a way of learning the craft. Not only do cooks taste each other’s food, they often work side by side with other cooks to see how that food is made. Because of this, cooks not only know each other, they are intimately familiar with each other’s work.

That is not my experience with my field. Why is this? What would be possible if this were not the case?

Joanna and Jess recently wrote about their work in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article entitled, “Creating Breakout Innovation.” I think the whole piece is excellent, and I plan on playing with their assessment tool. I was particularly struck by this conclusion:

We found that actors delivering such breakout results cocreated in ways that represent a significant rupture from mainstream practice within their field. In fact, we were surprised to find that many of the big names in cocreation — including those speaking the loudest about seemingly cutting-edge practices like “collective impact,” “crowdsourcing,” and “design thinking” — were not actually significantly departing from the status quo, particularly when it came to generating a shift in power, voice, and ownership. Instead, breakout actors tend to be on the fringes of their fields.

I’m not surprised by this, but I’m troubled by it. The best practitioners I know in this space are fundamentally motivated to lift others up and couldn’t care less about talking about themselves. They are classic yellow threads — leaders who brighten everyone around them while remaining mostly invisible themselves.

There is something admirable about this, but it’s also extremely problematic. If people don’t share these stories themselves, who will? If we’re not learning about these stories or about the people responsible for them, how will the rest of us know where to go to learn, to stage?

Not surprisingly, Joanna and Jess themselves fall prey to this mindset in their article. One of the breakout projects they mention in their article is the Health eHeart initiative, a brilliant example of participatory design led by my friends and colleagues, Rebecca Petzel and Brooking Gatewood. Joanna and Jess mentioned Emergence Collective, the brand under which Rebecca and Brooking are working, but they never mentioned either of them by name.

As it turned out, this was intentional. They didn’t mention any individual practitioners unless they were quoting them. Why not? I recently asked them, and they had a predictably thoughtful answer: They didn’t want to overly shine attention on individuals when so many people were involved. However, in multiple cases, they did mention an individual’s name, and the individual asked them to replace it with the group name!

Clearly, most of the practitioners either didn’t care that they weren’t mentioned or didn’t want to be mentioned. Well, I care, and I want my peers, whom I respect so much, to start caring too. By not celebrating this less ego-centric form of leadership, we enable models that don’t work and the practitioners responsible for them to perpetuate. Invisibility doesn’t serve the work.

In fairness to Joanna and Jess, I had multiple opportunities to give them this feedback before the article was published, and I didn’t. It took a while to coalesce in my brain, which perhaps speaks to how foreign this kind of thinking is to many of us. I’m definitely not the best model of this highlighting behavior, at least not on the surface. I give my work away, and I do not require credit. I have seen other firms attempt to take credit for my work and have just shrugged my shoulders. I’m usually mentioned in projects I’m involved with, but not prominently (which is intentional). As a facilitator, my goal is to hold the space without being at the center of it. To this day, there are a number of people who have participated in meetings I’ve been involved with who think I’m a professional photographer, because that’s what they saw me doing.

None of this bothers me, because it’s not why I do the work, and I get all the credit I need to live a happy life. Frankly, I hate it when I hear people, who haven’t actually seen me work, speak glowingly about me. I’m flattered that people think highly of me, but I want them to withhold judgement until they actually experience my work side by side, as cooks do.

Maybe all of this is a disservice to my point about invisibility. I’ve been reflecting a lot about this recently, and I’ll probably try some different things. But there are a number of things I already do that serve my larger goals:

  • I try to amplify any great work I hear about, regardless of who did it
  • I don’t take on work I can’t talk about
  • I try to tell the story of my work in real-time. For the past seven years, I have intentionally made storytelling a (budgeted) priority on many of my projects.
  • I encourage people to shadow my work
  • While I don’t go out of my way to talk about myself, I don’t shy away from it either. I happily take credit for what I do well and responsibility for what I do poorly. This blog is evidence of that.

I’d like to see more of my peers practice all of these things, especially this last point, which I think will be the hardest thing for most of them to do. That includes Joanna and Jess. They have already transcended what most of us do by investing so much of their own time to find and tell these stories. They not only lifted up other people, they did so with rigor while also living into their own principles.

What makes them particularly unique is that they are not academics. They themselves are practitioners who have stories worth sharing. I hope that they — and all of my peers — start to value their own leadership as much as they’ve valued others. I hope that we, as a community, can find ways to lift and celebrate our own and each other’s stories.

Thanks to Anya Kandel and H. Jessica Kim for reviewing early drafts of this post.

Update (June 22, 2017): Joanna and Jess informed me that, in several cases, they did mention individual names, but those individuals asked that their names be replaced by the group’s name. I’ve updated the post to reflect this.