Loving vs Hating Process

Morning Yoga in the Bandstand

When you fall in love with the process, and you do it the right way, you have a winning mindset, and the culture is set to make that push and build a winning team.
Tyson Chandler, NBA basketball player

A colleague was telling me about a challenging client project the other day, which included her client flat-out saying to her, “I don’t like process. I just want to get stuff done.”

I hear this all the time. It may surprise many that I actually feel the same way. I’d love to be in better shape, but I hate running, so I’m not. I’d love to play an instrument, but I hate practicing, so I can’t.

Which is exactly the point. Regardless of whether you love or hate process, you can’t get stuff done or be a high-performer without it. The harder the work you’re trying to do, the more this holds true.

I can empathize with people’s dislike of process as long as they can also acknowledge its necessity. The problem is that many do not acknowledge this. I often see people resist doing things that feel “process-y,” such as taking the time to build relationships, developing shared language, or getting aligned around strategy and culture, because they claim it detracts from the “actual” work.

I find this weird and troubling. In music or in sports, you don’t ever hear professionals object to practice because it’s too process-y or because it detracts from the real work. Everyone in these fields knows that process is the real work. I was reminded of this while watching Episode 3 of The Players’ Tribune‘s excellent video series, Rookie/Vet. (Tyson Chandler’s quote from above starts at the three-minute mark.)

I want to shift our mindsets in our field around process and practice. I want people to see collaboration as a craft and to understand that improvement requires practice. There are no shortcuts or magical substitutes. Moreover, the things we’re trying to accomplish via collaboration also require process and practice. It behooves us to acknowledge this and to learn how to get good at it if we truly want to “get things done.”

On the flip-side, those of us in the business of designing and facilitating process have to hold ourselves accountable for why people might have a negative attitude toward process in the first place. One reason is that their experiences with it are poor. If we believe that good process will lead to good results, then we need to do that and hold ourselves accountable to the results.

Fields that embrace a process mindset, such as sports and music, already do that. Tyson Chandler has the credibility to tell his younger colleagues to trust the process, because he’s been a good teammate his whole career and has won a championship. If we want to convince others to trust our process, we have to design with intention and integrity. The more we practice doing this, the more that results will follow.

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.

Network Mindsets and the Golden Rule

Hawaii Leadership Forum Social Network Analysis Exercise

This past weekend, I participated in an education hackathon organized by EduHub for the charter high school, San Francisco Flex Academy. I love hackathons, but San Francisco is saturated with them, so I’m choosy about which ones to attend. I chose to go to this one because I was curious about SF Flex and, more importantly, because actual students would be participating.

I ended up on a team with two great students, Zach and Serena, both of whom were bright, passionate, and ambitious. One of Zach’s great desires was for more interaction with people in industry. He explained that he wanted to design cars, and he was hoping to learn from someone who did that for a living.

As I listened to him talk about his love of cars, I tried to think of people to whom I could connect him. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew, so I pulled another participant into the conversation and said, “Zach wants to design cars. Do you know anyone he could talk to?”

As it turned out, the other participant knew someone who worked at Tesla, and he said he would hook Zach up. I thought that was a generous gesture, but I wasn’t surprised by it. San Francisco is a small place, and in my world, these kinds of introductions happen all the time.

Zach was beside himself with excitement, and afterward, he went out of his way to thank me. All I had done was ask someone else in the room. That other person had made the actual connection, not me. My actions took minimal effort and felt instinctual and obvious. June Holley calls this “network weaving.” It’s a practice that’s deeply embedded in the circles I travel in, and I often forget that not everyone thinks or behaves this way.

When I was just getting started as a collaboration consultant over a decade ago, one of my first clients was the Federal Aviation Administration. A skunkworks group there had started some unofficial Sharepoint groups as a way to encourage collaboration across different departments. These online groups turned out to be very successful, and the powers that be wanted to support them officially. They hired us to help them scale this project across the organization.

Around the same time, I happened to connect with someone from the General Services Administration, who wanted my advice on how to de-silo his organization. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to apply my incredibly sophisticated Beverage De-Siloization Technique (patent-pending), so I decided to share it with him.

“I’m working with a guy at the FAA who’s interested in the same things you are,” I said. “Why don’t I introduce the two of you, and you can get a beer together?”

The exchange that followed was incredibly awkward. The GSA guy truly seemed not to comprehend what I was suggesting. Have a “meeting” after work?! With no agenda other than to connect and exchange stories?! While drinking?! What kind of witchcraft was this?! The GSA guy actually ended up turning down my offer, because he didn’t see value in the connection.

Maintaining the “right” level of connectivity with others is hard. Some people overdo it or do it thoughtlessly, overwhelming themselves and others with introductions to people. I think that most people don’t do it enough. I experience variations of my GSA conversation with others all the time. They don’t understand the value of connecting with others, they feel shy about doing it, or they’re simply not in the habit.

How can we make network weaving a habit?

It starts with the following mindsets:

  • Reciprocity (also known as the Golden Rule). Treat others the way you’d like to be treated. Find ways to help others as you’d like to be helped. Assume that others share the same value of reciprocity. Most humans do, and everybody is people.
  • Introduce and include others sooner rather than later. The earlier people connect, the more impactful the result.
  • Be thoughtful, but not rigid. Don’t connect people or ask for help thoughtlessly, but don’t make too many excuses either.

It continues with practices like these:

  • Ask yourself after every meeting, “Whom do I know who could help or who might benefit from this?” Once you’ve answered this, it’s often obvious whether or not to make an introduction or invitation.
  • When you find yourself wishing you could talk to someone, just do it. Find that person, and talk to him or her.
  • Once a month, make a new connection or deepen an existing one. The Beverage De-siloization Technique works wonders here.