failure – Faster Than 20

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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Coming out of Retirement

I’m coming out of retirement.

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

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

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

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

So why am I coming out of retirement?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falling Off a Tightrope: A Lesson in Resilience

My favorite exercise from my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets workout program is also the simplest and most fundamental. I call it the “One-Minute Drill.” In its simplest form, there is a speaker and a listener. The speaker spends one-minute answering a question or telling a story. He or she then takes a minute to answer the same question or to repeat the same story, refining or adding wherever he or she sees fit.

The listener listens without taking notes. When the speaker finishes, the listener reflects back what he or she heard. The speaker then grades the listener on a 1-5 scale (with 5 being the best) based on how well the listener reflected back what the speaker said. If the listener missed any nuance, no matter how subtle, the speaker is instructed not to give the listener a 5. I often have the listener repeat the exercise until he or she gets a 5.

It’s not easy. Even doing it once reveals a lot about both parties and about the nature and critical importance of listening, of synthesizing, of feeling heard, and of practice. But Muscles & Mindsets isn’t about doing exercises once. It’s about repetition, developing critical muscles, building good habits.

There are countless ways to tweak this exercise, and over the course of my program, participants experience many of these variations. It doesn’t matter how good they are at listening. At some point — usually sooner rather than later — they will fail the exercise.

Deep listening is hard enough when the circumstances are ideal. In reality, circumstances never are. Our attentions are constantly being pulled in multiple directions. Our physical, mental, and emotional states affect our ability to be present. Then there are times when we simply don’t care what the other person is saying.

The point of the exercise is not to prevent failure. It’s not even to minimize it. It’s to train ourselves to recognize it when it happens and to recover from it. You do this through practice, practice, practice.

Many of us — including me — often forget this. We focus on avoiding failure, rather than developing resilience, and we often punish ourselves when we inevitably fail.

Recently, Idelisse Malavé, a long-time advisor to the Social Transformation Project, shared a wonderful metaphor from Sharon Salzberg, a meditation teacher, and Idelisse kindly let me record her as she explained it. The work that so many of us are trying to do is fundamentally hard, like walking a tightrope. There are inevitably times when we will lose our balance and fall. If our reaction is to curse at ourselves, we will miss the many additional tightropes underneath us. Our focus should be on regaining our balance on a new tightrope so that we can start to walk again.

Photo by Josh Heald. CC BY-NC.

The Secret to High-Performance Collaboration: Slowing Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Fail Successfully

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote speech for the 2014 Hult Prize finalists, a social entrepreneurship accelerator for university students. Many thanks to Mansi Kakkar for the invitation to speak and to Kate Michi Ettinger for the referral.

My 20-minute talk was entitled, “How to Fail Successfully.” The video is above, the slides below.

The delightful sketches in the slides are courtesy of my long-time collaborator, creative consultant extraordinaire, Amy Wu. The cute kids are courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law. The stories of failure are all my own, although I do go into a mini-rant about failure competitions.