design – Faster Than 20

Case Study: Designing and Facilitating a Small Nonprofit Board Retreat with Zoe Tamaki

Over the past two years, I helped designed and facilitate two annual board retreats for a small nonprofit with my colleague, Zoe Tamaki. I don’t typically do one-offs like this, but the executive director was a friend of mine, and I was looking for an excuse to work with and learn from Zoe. After last year’s retreat, Zoe and I sat down in front of a camera and discussed some things we learned from the experience and from each other, including:

The importance of designing with your stakeholders
When relationship-building trumps task work
How I handled a funky facilitation moment

I’d like to share stories like this more frequently, and I hope to explore other mediums in which to do this, especially video. I want to share a lot more about design, which contributes much more to the success of group process than facilitation. I especially want to talk about the harder stuff — the challenging moments or the stuff that flat out fails. Since my focus over the past few years has shifted to supporting and coaching other collaboration practitioners such as Zoe, I’m especially excited to be sharing things I’m learning from them.

Finally, I hope to inspire other practitioners to share stories from their work more frequently and without concern about polish. This work is hard. It’s better to show all the rough edges.

Many thanks to Zoe for doing this work with me and for being willing to candidly debrief it on camera afterward! As I think you’ll be able to tell from the video, it was super fun working with her.

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Freaking Out Is Part of Systems Change

We are in the midst of a global pandemic.

Re-reading those last two words still feels bonkers to me, even though it’s been almost three months since the first reported case of COVID-19 and almost two weeks since the World Health Organization (WHO) made its official declaration. I had been casually tracking Coronavirus from the start, and I started paying closer attention about four weeks ago. I’ve also been actively doing some thinking and scenario work around planetary crises with a few friends and colleagues for the past year and a half. I wasn’t as prepared as I could have been, but it’s not like this came out of nowhere.

Which made it even more surprising to me when, just before the official pandemic declaration and a week before the shelter-in-place orders started here in San Francisco, I started freaking out.

One of my superpowers is that I’m able to stay calm in stressful situations. I’ve had this power for as long as I can remember, and it’s served me well in life and in work. It’s actually two interdependent practices: recognition and mitigation. Recognition is both situational — understanding when I’m in a stressful situation — and introspective — understanding when I’m feeling stressed. Once I recognize, I usually have a limited window of time in which to mitigate, which mostly consists of me talking to myself and breathing.

Mitigation is useless without recognition. If I’m not aware of my stress level rising, then I can’t mitigate. Which brings me to my kryptonite: In times of sudden crisis, I’m cool as a cucumber, but when the stress slowly sneaks up on me, I’m like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I’ve learned to just let it happen and be okay with it.

That’s what I did when I started freaking out two weeks ago. A few of my friends on social media, whom I trust, had been sounding the alarm about Coronavirus for a few days, and I had started to wonder whether I was taking it seriously enough. After spending a few days thinking it through and talking it over with friends, I started canceling social engagements and sheltering in place, even though I wasn’t feeling sick. I started asking friends and family to consider doing the same, but I wasn’t yet advocating for it, and I was still feeling calm.

That started changing for me the following day, which is when WHO officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. I was completely ignoring my work, instead obsessively reading articles and clicking through posts on social media. When I talked to friends and family who were still resistant to staying home, I noticed a shortness of breath and a hint of hysteria in my responses. That’s when I sat down and said to myself, “Holy shit, I am officially freaking out.”

For me, part of “let it happen, and be okay with it,” is talking about it with others. (This post is one example of that.) The more I talk about it, the more I normalize it, and the less scary and more manageable it becomes. As I told others about my COVID-19 meltdown, I could start to hear a little voice inside my head saying, “Of course you are freaking out. There’s a worldwide pandemic that’s spreading exponentially, killing thousands of people, and shutting down our economy. You’re rightfully scared, and you rightfully feel helpless.” I don’t know why it takes so long for this little voice to start speaking up about what should seem obvious, but it does. It’s just how freaking-out works.

At my previous consulting firm, we used to hand out a two-page document to new and prospective clients detailing our design process. My favorite paragraph was about what I called, “The Freak-out Moment”:

A few weeks before the engagement, the design generally starts to come together, and people often start feeling more comfortable about the process. Right before the engagement, that happy feeling often goes away. It can even be replaced by panic. This is completely normal, and it’s our role to help you through that.

Participatory, emergent processes are inherently unpredictable. Systems change processes in particular are high stakes and complex. Panic is understandable, because, in the absence of certainty, all you can ask for is faith. Faith is a hard sell, especially if you’ve had limited (or, worse, bad) previous experiences.

Part of the role of a good collaboration practitioner is to guide others through freak-out moments. Another role is to manage these moments yourself, because if you’re doing work that matters and if you’re paying enough attention, you will experience these moments too.

There are three things I try to do to manage these moments.

First, let it happen, and be okay with it.

Second, be compassionate to yourself and to others. Shortly before people started rushing to stores to load up on supplies, I went to the grocery store with my sister to pick up a few items. I was already on edge about being in public, and I was especially annoyed that people were not keeping their distance. Afterward, I complained to my sister about it, and she wisely responded, “It’s not that they don’t care. They’re scared, just like you were a few days ago. They’re not paying attention to distance, because they’re just trying to stock up on groceries as quickly as possible.”

Third, remember that you are not alone, that you are part of a larger system, and that your role is not to be a hero. I am indebted to my mentor, Gail Taylor, for constantly reminding me of this:

The success and failure of a process is never fully dependent on you. You are simply part of the system, just like everyone else. Everyone brings their own special wisdom and superpowers. The whole system holds the space, not just you. This is true with facilitation, this is true with design, and this is true when grappling with global pandemics.

COVID-19 is an opportunity both to apply and to evolve what we know about collaborative processes and systems change. I will do my best to share what I already know, I will be paying attention and sharing what I learn along the way, and I hope others will be as well.

At the same time, remember that these are not normal times. Many of us are having to grapple with huge uncertainties with work. Many of us are suddenly having to grapple with working from home and simultaneously taking care of our homebound kids. Many of us are taking care of our parents. Many of us are working on the frontlines, risking our own lives and livelihoods for our communities.

Please, let yourselves and others freak out, and please be as compassionate as you can be both to others and to yourselves. Most of all, be safe.

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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:

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

Everybody Is People

Many years ago, a colleague, Nick Papadopoulos, told me about a complex negotiation he was asked to facilitate between a large corporation and a community of angry activists. They had met several times without external facilitation and were not making progress. Nick practiced Dialogue Mapping, a visual facilitation technique for mapping complex issues in real-time, and he had other sophisticated skills in his toolbelt as well.

The first meeting he attended started at 8am on a Saturday morning in one of the company’s conference rooms. When he arrived, there was no food or coffee. The meeting began, and people were predictably grouchy. The issues they were discussing were political and personal, and they were also discussing them on an empty stomach.

As it turned out, Nick’s wife had just started a catering business. At the next meeting, he brought a tray of her muffins. The tenor of the discussion shifted noticeably, and he started doing this regularly. Several weeks later, after he had successfully brought the negotiation to a close, several of the participants came up to him and told him how much they enjoyed his wife’s muffins.

I wasn’t at any of those meetings. I have no idea what role the food actually played in Nick’s success. He is both modest and skilled, and that probably mattered more than the food in the end. However, for me, his insight about the food was part of what made him skilled. I’m sure it played a significant role in his success.

Why am I so sure?

Everybody is people.

It’s likely that most people have not yet eaten at an 8am meeting on a Saturday morning. People need food in their systems to be at their best. People like tasty food, especially the homemade kind, which reminds us of family, of people we love, of our humanity. When the topic of conversation is controversial and complex, people need to be at their best. Depriving them of food — consciously or not — is not a good idea. Reminding them of their and each other’s humanity is an excellent idea.

This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget. We get so caught up in complexity that we forget simple, important things. Things like everybody is people.

I led the Wikimedia open strategy process from 2009 through 2010. We had over a thousand people from all over the world participate, mostly virtually. It’s not the hardest project I’ve worked on, but a lot of people still marvel at it. They wonder how we were able to get so many people to volunteer their time and to work together so constructively, especially without seeing each other. The answer was simple.

Everybody is people.

The fact that we were working mostly virtually didn’t change the fact that we were dealing with people, and people have certain basic needs. We did three things that are often overlooked, because they were so simple and the project was so complex, people have a hard time believing they were that important.

First, we took the time to individually welcome every single person who showed up. Everyone.

This is the simplest thing that you can do in any online forum (and in any face-to-face meeting), regardless of the tool you’re using. There happens to be lots of data showing that welcoming people when they show up is one of the best ways to improve engagement. But really, do we need the data to justify this? Welcoming people is a simple way to establish a relationship, to show people that they are seen and appreciated.

Second, we held virtual office hours once a week for the entire year. We alternated the times to make them convenient for people in different timezones, which meant that every other week, we were up late at night talking to people. We happened to be using a tool called IRC, which is an ancient real-time chatting tool that Wikipedians like to use, but it would have worked with any tool.

These were not meetings, and there were no agendas. The sole purpose was to hang out with me and Philippe Beaudette, our facilitator. We wanted to meet people, to get to know them, and to listen to what they had to say. We also wanted to invite others to do the same with us.

People came. They were often surprised by the lack of formality. They expected us to be guarded or to have agendas. We answered questions, sometimes in great detail (I can get very philosophical), but we weren’t there to evangelize. We were there to listen and to get to know our participants.

Not only did we achieve that goal, it turned out that participation in office hours led to participation in the overall process. We had the data to prove this. But even if we didn’t, we still would have continued doing this or something similar. Relationships matter, and this was one of the best ways we had for developing them.

Third, we tried our best to get to know people as whole human beings. My colleagues, Renee Fazzari and Curtis Ogden, both like to say that we’re not just brains on sticks. Unfortunately, it’s amazing how often we treat each other that way, even in a face-to-face context. It’s even easier to make this mistake online when you can’t actually see the person.

Early in our process, we had one participant who was causing a lot of trouble over an obscure decision that we had made and with which everyone else had agreed. It had to do with whether or not Brazilian Portugese is a different language from Portugese. The issue is more complex than it sounds, and we chose to go in a different direction than other Wikimedia communities, which was within our rights but also required explanation. Our reasoning satisfied everybody except for this one participant, who was making it difficult for us to move forward.

We tried engaging with him in a number of different ways, but nothing worked, and I decided at some point that we just had to do our best to ignore him. As it so happened, Philippe, our facilitator, was going to Brazil to meet with community members there, and I asked him to look out for this one participant just in case.

While Philippe was in Brazil, the participant’s demeanor abruptly changed, and he became one of our most constructive contributors. I asked Philippe what happened. “I just talked to him for a bit,” Philippe said. “He was really great — whip smart and very nice. Oh, by the way, he’s 14.”

I got a good laugh out of that. I had envisioned him as a large, cantankerous man in his 50s, and I was probably communicating with him as such. Knowing his age wouldn’t have changed my respect for him, but it would have helped me engage with him more productively.

Everybody is people.

Earlier this year, I was helping a practitioner at a large company design a high-stakes offsite for the leaders of one of its divisions. They had been having intense friction, and they were hoping to work through it at this offsite. This practitioner’s instinct was to schedule a 30-minute working lunch, because… well, that’s what they always did, and they had a lot to cover.

I pushed back. I generally treat lunch and breaks at my meetings as sacred time — time to break bread, to reconnect with each other, to rest and reset. I doubted that the extra 30-minutes would result in substantial progress, but I was certain that not taking a break would detract from the rest of the day’s conversations.

To this practitioner’s credit, she not only embraced my feedback, she made some surprising suggestions. Instead of giving them an hour for lunch, why not give them 90 minutes? And instead of hosting a lunch, why not encourage them to go into the city and eat out together? All of these leaders were used to eating at their desks or in meetings during lunch. Going out would feel different.

We went with her idea, and we had our meeting. I facilitated the conversation using my mindset cards, and I felt like I was on top of my game. It was as intense as we expected, but it went well overall. At the end of the day and in our evaluations, our participants had many good things to say, including appreciations here and there about the mindset cards and about my facilitation.

However, the one thing everyone kept mentioning over and over again was the lunch. Everybody loved how spacious it was, the conversations they got to have with their peers that they never had otherwise. Everybody loved getting out of the meeting room and spending time in the city together. It led into a surprisingly deep conversation about why they didn’t always do this and how they might start.

Six weeks later, I checked in with the practitioner to see how things were going. The team was still having issues, but there were signs of progress here and there. The biggest takeaway from our meeting that had stuck? It wasn’t the mindset work that I had so expertly facilitated. It was the long, luxurious, so-unproductive-it-was-productive lunch. People were going out to lunch together more often. People were scheduling more lunches with their teams and protecting lunches in their meetings.

Everybody is people.

I’ve been helping groups collaborate more effectively for 16 years now. Many of these projects have been extremely complex, which has helped me develop lots of sophisticated skills. I’m proud of these abilities, I have no doubt that they make me a much more effective practitioner, and I work hard to continue to develop them.

But in reflecting on my work over the years, the skill that has undoubtedly had the most impact has been remembering that everybody is people. It’s simultaneously obvious and extraordinary and humbling to realize this. We all understand this at some level, because… well, everybody is people. However, we often forget to incorporate this into our work. We are dazzled by stories of perseverance through difficult circumstances, our ability to “suck it up” or “tough it out,” and rather than optimize our work to help us all be at our best, we create circumstances that require us to be superhuman to succeed and that punish us when we’re not.

This is lunacy. Sadly, it’s all too common.

I don’t think it has to be this way. I think all of us have the power to make changes that will impact our groups in positive, sometimes profound ways, if we just remembered that everybody is people. It starts by looking at ourselves, by asking what we need — as people — to help us be at our best. Maybe there’s something simple that we can do that doesn’t depend on anyone else, whether it’s remembering to eat breakfast or to welcome someone else on your team. It doesn’t have to be hard, but it will make a big difference.

After all, everybody is people.

Thanks to Amy Wu for reviewing an early draft of this post.

Building Ecosystems in Organizations: Lessons from Gap Inc.

Editor’s Note: I am constantly on the lookout for great collaboration practitioners who share my values and whom I can learn from and practice and partner with. I had the pleasure of meeting Anya Kandel two years ago, and I was taken by the quality of her work and the intensity of her inquiry. Her experiences are eclectic, and her thinking and work is powerful. She very graciously agreed to share some of her learnings and questions here. This has also been cross-posted on Medium, where you can follow Anya’s other writing. This is the second of a four-part series. Part one was, “Understanding Sustainable, Collaborative Change.” —Eugene

For the past three years, I worked to build “innovation capacity” at Gap Inc. The work required us to explore the complexities of driving change within ingrained systems and behavioral norms across multiple communities, teams, and brands. Throughout my time there, I asked myself (and my colleagues) this not so simple question:

How do we build thriving, innovative, and strategically-minded organizations and communities that are sustainably driven by the individuals that comprise them?

I don’t have all the answers of course, but I do have ideas and approaches that worked for me:

People and context before process and model
Learn through the work
Democratize strategic thinking and innovation
Coordinated access to strategy and culture tools + practice
Do It Together

1. People and context before process and model

Working at the intersection of innovation, management consulting, and strategy, I witness a big emphasis on model in all these areas. Models are what firms sell in order to scale and what clients use as reference for understanding consultants’ approach and impact. These models, frameworks and processes are important… as tools. But ultimately what makes innovation and strategy consulting firms successful and covetable are the creative, intuitive, and smart people who work there, armed with an understanding of the various processes and techniques that support them to think strategically.

Design Thinking is a good example. It is a rich model and process that works well for many challenges. The philosophy behind the model — one that invites empathy, observation and collaboration in the process of organization and product development — has informed the way we think about problem solving, particularly in the world of business. But, IDEO, grounded in David M. Kelley’s Design Thinking approach, does not sell multi-million dollar projects simply because companies want to buy this model. (It is already accessible and free.) Organizations keep coming back to them because they have a diverse set of creative, strategic, and dedicated people who (with a robust toolkit and lots of experience) can approach every client request in a unique way.

The models (especially sold by innovation firms) aren’t as different as one might think. The power is in the people (those who facilitate, those who participate, and those who work to bring new ideas to life). A good strategic practitioner understands the people and the context, and pools the resources they need to design a process that works best for that specific case. A good approach enables the client / participants to understand the context of various scenarios and problems, ask good questions, and match processes models to context. A good outcome is when an organization, team, or community has the capacity to learn and grow from the experience and continue to evolve the work on their own.

2. Learn through the work

During my time at Gap Inc., I worked to build an internal innovation consulting group. We facilitated teams to solve complex challenges, we designed trainings and systems in order to grow innovation capacity, and we helped teams solve complex business challenges and create new products. In our work, there was certainly no lack of innovative ideas. That was the easy part. The hard part was creating vision and environment where those ideas could surface, as well as a culture that supported ongoing experimentation to help bring those ideas to life.

Initially, we spent much of our time fixing things that weren’t working (rethinking products, systems, and ways of working) and facilitating sessions that solved immediate problems. In parallel, we began to train employees within the company in creative group facilitation, building a force of innovation catalysts. They learned through the “work” of managing innovation projects and co-facilitating with us.

The projects that stuck and the initiatives that had the biggest impact were always those that allowed the catalysts and the collaborators to be the work, instead of receive it. This required them to solve real challenges and test new ways of working in a safe environment.

One of my favorite experiences came during an innovation initiative with a creative leader in store experience and design. We introduced her to a co-creation process, where customers worked collaboratively to evolve what she and her team created. It was amazing to see the shift from theoretical appreciation to active engagement, from the fear of getting something wrong to the discovery of new creative ways of working. From then on, she was able to integrate co-creation and prototyping into her work, recognizing not only the feeling of creative breakthrough, but the visceral understanding of how hard it can be to bring those ideas to life.

Still, given the size of the company and the scale of work we had, our engagements were often confined to executive leadership or isolated teams. Working solely with leaders to build a culture of innovation based on yearly priorities is not enough. Inevitably, leadership and strategy changes, initiatives are dropped, and the pressure of immediate business needs can trump almost anything, no matter how important we think it is.

“Learning through the work” is imperative, but only as powerful as the people who are enabled to actually do so. It wasn’t that our initiatives weren’t big enough or unsuccessful. Rather, we needed to scale or evolve in order to influence the diverse subcultures and teams within the company. We needed to democratize innovation and build a long lasting culture that celebrated experimentation, collaboration, and strategic thinking.

3. Democratize strategic thinking and innovation

Soon after joining Gap Inc., I started to explore how to create alternate spaces for communication that could scale and that skirted hierarchical limitations.

I noticed a disconnect between the leadership’s desire to understand Millennials and the overwhelming majority of Millennials who worked inside the company. Here lay a tremendous opportunity to bridge that divide and create environments for open communication between people who were making decisions and the young people who had insight into how those decisions would impact people like themselves. Plus, we are community of people who inherently function in a networked environment — what was naturally part of our lives outside the company often seemed insurmountable inside.

I started a group called the M Suite, a nonhierarchical, transparent network of Millennials dedicated to building co-creation and collaboration across brand and function. Functioning like a node in a network, M Suite connects people in the organization who were looking for creative input and collaboration, with the very large community of people eager to help solve creative challenges and share their perspectives.

Building our own infrastructure became an experiment in establishing networked, collaborative communities functioning within a hierarchical infrastructure. We used ourselves to explore unique models and approaches. We experimented with different ways of meeting, communicating, and solving problems. We tried different models for governance. We tried partner leadership. Eventually we arrived somewhere between a Holocracy and a leadership network, and officially took the form of an ERG.

Because our work was inherently related to change and the way we worked was very different from our surroundings, our presence invited reservations too:

“What if they don’t know the bigger picture and choose the wrong problems to focus on?”
“Why spend time building visionary ideas and solutions to complex problems when they don’t have the power to implement upon these new ideas?”

Clearly, the notion of “democratizing innovation” and building networks can feel really scary to organizations that rely on more hierarchical way of working. However, I found that these reservations often highlighted circumstances that already existed (i.e. lack of alignment or unclear vision). We never saw their work undermine high-level strategy, but rather elevate the strategic questions and conversations around it.

Democratizing innovation doesn’t necessarily imply that the work of innovation is everyone’s job or that an organization loses all its structure. Rather, it starts with furnishing everyone the respect and equal opportunity to engage in the creative process and think strategically. By expecting this community of individuals to thoughtfully own their work and ask good questions, we invited them to to engage that way. By giving them the tools to walk into any meeting with a strategic mindset, we created an environment where everyone was more likely to try to understand the broader vision and understand what “alignment” could really look like. In fact, they helped to be catalysts for the leadership team, bringing Millennials from various parts of the company to collaborate on the development of leadership goals and help bring them to life.

The desire to join the M Suite was impressive. People from across the company and around the globe participated, hungry to contribute to the evolution of the company. This fitful enthusiasm also reminded me of the social movements and community networks I have worked with in the past and the challenges their emerging organizers faced. The M Suite was soon confronted with the need to fuel a large number of people with the ability to govern themselves differently from the environment they were situated in and the organizational frameworks they were familiar with.

4. Coordinated access to strategy and culture tools + practice

The transition from a conceptual understanding of new systems for working and the actual act of implementing is often conflated with the apparent necessity to already have that systems in place. Of course, this can’t happen. The transition itself implies a journey from one to the other. And the journey is invariably messy, personal, multifarious, iterative, and nonlinear.

We (M Suite co-founders and new board) were called upon to define how to govern ourselves, while still leading. Our growing network of communities were looking for guidance in how to evolve, potentially in very different capacities. The organizers were hungry for tools and techniques that could help them understand how to lead and facilitate collaborative engagements. Plus, they needed to learn tactical strategies for managing the work while also doing their day job.

To answer that need, we organized trainings in innovation project management, client engagement, and collaborative problem solving. We initiated opportunities for shadowing. (At one point, I had eight people shadowing me in a client intake session.) We organized skill shares. We created opportunities to own projects in partnership with those experienced in leadership. We experimented with online tools. We tried new board structures.

We focused our attention on the development of the M Suite board first. This worked, to a certain extent. We became a community for collective learning and growth, and actively serving on the board became a venue for discovering individual potential. Our board members chose to stay at the company longer than they had planned, thanks to the opportunities we provided; or they left earlier than planned, because of the opportunities they realized. In effect, all of the board members were promoted (or promoted themselves by leaving the company) within a year of serving on the board. The need to cycle in new leadership was a happy consequence, but not always an easy one.

Our projects were successful, we grew internationally, and we gained a good reputation in some pockets of the organizations. But the group also became an oasis, striving to become a movement. And it was at this point that I left the company, along with the brilliant original co-founders of the M Suite, Rona Kremer and Jessica Talbert. If I have any regret, it would be not fully figuring out how to embed networked leadership skills and build the strategic “muscles” and tools so that they could more easily drive the creative process on their own and expand more quickly.

As I step away from Gap Inc., the question remains:

How to enable awesome groups like the M Suite to have impact and thrive? How to find ways for people to experiment and engage with the many tools and resources we already have on hand?

I have a lot to learn in this area, but luckily, I have had the privilege of collaborating with and learning from practitioners who are specifically focused on building accessible tools for capacity building. And against Eugene’s wishes, I am going to have to brag about him in his own blog. (Sorry Eugene.)

Eugene stepped away from his founding role in the consulting company, Groupaya, to tackle this very challenge. For the past four years, he has dedicated his time and energy to understanding how to build organizational culture that allows the individual and the organization to thrive. Through this open experimentation with Fortune 500 companies, government organizations, and leadership networks, he is meeting head-on the very difficult work of long-term change.

Eugene’s work has complemented a deficiency I found in many innovation and co-creation initiatives, including my own: accessible, foundational tools and techniques for individuals to be able to actually practice how to work strategically and collaboratively. These resources are public domain, meant to be tools that everyone can use and evolve within their own context. Also, check out Lisa Kay Solomon’s work, which provides a rich foundation in designing strategic processes. She has two fantastic books: Design a Better Business and Moments of Impact. I have no doubt that all of you have a plethora of other resources too, which I encourage you to share in the comments below.

These colleagues have helped me to better understand that matching access to practice is simple but powerful. If everyone has the tools and resources to think strategically, then slowly but surely we can build an ecosystem of individuals and organizations that can thrive together.

5. Do It Together (DIT)

We must create opportunities to build connections that allow us to look beyond “best practices,” models, or frameworks, and utilize each other.

An ecosystem is only as healthy as the biomes within it and the strength of connectivity between them. Beyond the immediate development of communities and teams, my most successful innovation and strategic initiatives have been those that invited people to step out of their own realities (via guest artists, makers, new collaborations) to realize new ways of seeing themselves and possibilities for change.

As a strategist and facilitator, I am increasingly exploring the balance between carrying a group through a transformational experience and curating a set of circumstances and resources that enable a group of people to find what they need in each other. We need both, of course. But if, by the end of our time together, I disappear and they forget to say goodbye, I consider this a success.

In fact, I just received a beautiful invitation for an event hosted by the well-branded M Suite, where they are driving conversation with internal Millennials, external creatives, and all employees. It was a small moment of pride, and I hope that our (the founders) step away has translated into collective greater ownership and autonomy.

The world is made of amazing people doing the work that strategists like myself try to inspire. The more we are not needed, the better. But clearly our work isn’t going away. Many organizations and teams, especially in smaller purpose-driven organizations, seek support but do have the funds and access to strategic coaching that is sometimes required to shift circumstance and behaviors that inspire innovation and change.

So then, how close can we get to putting me out of job? How might we pull back the curtain (often weighed down by the fear of losing IP) and share systems, tools, models and approaches across origination and field?

This has been a fun and challenging question to explore with colleagues like Eugene. Drawing on the DIY (Do It Yourself) mentality that utilizes the power of the network for individual development, we are developing strategies to Do It Together (DIT) and ignite the power of peer groups in order to bridge high-level strategic support and training with access to learning communities and support networks.

So far these efforts have resulted in a growing community of practitioners eager to share what they know and grow their personal practice (no matter the industry). Exchanging and fusing approaches has also provided us a great opportunity to challenge the bounds of our own frameworks and tools and think about what it really means to move people and ideas.

There is so much to learn! Please do join us in the experiment. Share your thoughts below. Try Eugene’s tools, and share your own. Join our workshop. Find collaborators in worlds you might not otherwise speak to. And if you are looking to be matched with one, I might be able to help.

Thanks for listening!

This is the second of a four part series. You can also find this post on Medium. Part one was, “Understanding Sustainable, Collaborative Change.”

The top photo is of Anya Kandel and Jessica Talbert, Gap Inc. M Suite cofounders. The second photo is of Rona Kremer, another M Suite cofounder. The last photo is from Eugene Eric Kim and Anya Kandel’s October 2016 Do-It-Together Strategy / Culture workshop in New York.

Understanding Sustainable, Collaborative Change

I grew up in a theater. The work was serious. 7-11pm rehearsal every night and longer on the weekends. You were never to be late. You were to show up ready to work. You were part of an artistic practice, expected to understand the historical background of the play and the design principles for the production. I never questioned the fact that I was a contributing member of the collective.

In order to truly work as an “ensemble” (the actors, the dramaturge, the director, the designers, everyone involved), we were expected to work as one. Sometimes, during rehearsal and performances, there were moments where the group “clicked.” Individuals transformed into something greater than themselves. It was fulfilling, thrilling, addictive.

In conjunction, students at the conservatory were building the tools to make those transformational moments happen. The resident actors and their students spent long hours together, respecting a shared philosophy about how to work and create (say yes, take risks, respect each other).

Those of you who have been a part of a sports team or an improv group or a band might know what I mean. There is the work of working together, and then there are those private moments of collective breakthrough that feel amazing, that inform the group’s collective sense of self and that often do not require an audience.

Probably because of this upbringing, I remain fascinated by collaborative, creative moments that transform individual inputs into a collective encounter. In high school and college, I started designing and teaching workshops that created spaces for communities to connect through storytelling. After college, I started a nonprofit that enabled encounter through art across borders.

Over time I learned that creating amazing, isolated experiences with a small community or team is very different than building systemic change. Bringing “transformed” individuals into an untransformed environment often leaves them feeling isolated. And the proximity of that experience to how we live and work day-to-day can feel very, very far away. Being part of moments where we create new possibilities together is important, but only as consequential as the work of building a culture and environment that allows that to be the case.

For the past ten years I have been seeking to understand what sustainable, collaborative change looks like, experimenting with ways of cultivating environments and experiences that enable it to happen. This work has led me to explore diverse, creative, collaborative worlds (creative communities, maker spaces, hacker spaces, social movements, corporate innovation labs).

I frequently find myself at the intersection of worlds that often do not speak to each other, peering through social and political difference to understand shared systems, communication processes and experiences that embody the work of change. The way people experience collective breakthrough and the techniques that we use to get them there aren’t necessarily that different. The challenge lies in building a context-specific environment and culture that invites communities of people to do this, for the long term.

Eugene has asked me to make a guest appearance on this blog, and share a little about what I’ve learned. So, over the next few months, I will share my thoughts on collaboration and change in three additional parts, each exploring different communities / cultures that I have worked with. It will look something like this:

Understanding sustainable, collaborative change (this post)
Building ecosystems in organizations: Lessons from Gap Inc.
Exploring emotional and operational networks
Theorizing apolitical activism

This is the first of a four-part series. You can also find this post on Medium. Part two is, “Building Ecosystems in Organizations: Lessons from Gap Inc.”