Faster Than 20 – Faster Than 20

Why I Do What I Do, and What That Means for 2017

Seven years ago, a friend challenged me to clearly articulate why I do what I do. She had repeatedly heard my spiel — adopted wholesale from my mentor — about society’s problems growing more complex faster than our ability to address them and the resulting urgency to get collectively smarter faster. She understood what I was saying, but as far as she was concerned, it didn’t fully explain why I was so passionately driven by this work.

I spent many months reflecting on her question, repeatedly asking myself why, and challenging myself to go deeper. The answer finally came to me in L.A., where I was visiting my parents and younger sister. We had gone to the beach together, a family tradition since childhood, and when we arrived, as if on cue, my family immediately splintered. Everyone moved in his and her own direction, with no sense of what anyone else was doing and no coherent rhythm. I watched this lack of synchronicity unfold before me and felt all sorts of old wounds rise up within me.

I was lucky to grow up in a family with lots of love, but — like all families — we had our share of dysfunction. Some of that dysfunction felt especially jarring, considering my parents’ strongly-held value of togetherness and mutual support. As a kid, I grew frustrated over watching seemingly little things disrupt our ability to be together, especially lack of listening, communication, and self-care.

I also had the good fortune of experiencing really great collaboration with others, starting with my love for team sports. I have always been a mediocre or worse athlete, but I quickly learned that teams that practiced together and that played with heart and smarts could easily transcend any individual shortcomings, and I grew to love how it felt to do that. In other collaborative pursuits where I already individually excelled, I found that I could channel my strengths into lifting others, which led to greater success than what was possible by myself and which felt even more joyful and satisfying.

I knew what it felt like to move together in sync and with power with others, and I wanted it in all aspects of my life. I knew that the fundamentals of this wholeness were simple, but not easy, and that small, but significant gains were easily within reach for most groups. When I met and started working with my mentor in 2000, all of this came together for me. I had discovered my purpose and my passion, and I was ready to make it my life pursuit.

2016 Lessons Learned

2016 was a hard year for me on two fronts. I had spent the prior three years experimenting with this notion that the key to high-performance collaboration was practice, and I had directed all of my energies toward exploring ways to encourage and support practice at scale. I wanted to spend this past year focusing on the things I had learned that felt the most promising. My goals were to:

Scale up my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program and Do-It-Yourself Strategy / Culture toolkits, while continuing to refine and improve them
Continue to find ways to support emerging practitioners, including finding ways to connect them with each other and offering real opportunities to practice with me and each other
Return to my consulting past by taking on a really big, really hard problem, incorporating the things I had learned over the past three years, while also telling the story of the work as it happened, so that others could learn from our successes and failures in real-time

While I did plenty of work I felt proud of, most of the things I tried did not work out the way I had hoped. More egregiously, I felt like I ended up making excuses that prevented me from trying things that were higher-risk, higher-reward. Specifically:

In general, I was not disciplined about writing up and sharing what I was learning in the moment, which resulted in only two blog posts in 2016, compared to seven in 2015 and 30 in 2014! I published more posts in this blog’s debut in December 2013 (five) than I did in all of 2016.
This lack of storytelling was particularly bad with my really big, really hard client project. We did good work together, and we also struggled at times. While we did the work transparently (including creating a public dashboard, synthesizing and sharing our framework for experimentation, modeling transparency internally, and inviting outside colleagues to shadow), we did not share enough context for what we were doing for others to be able to learn with us. Some of this was beyond our control, but there were other things that were simply failures on my part, including not writing a single blog post about the project.
While I did some work toward refining and scaling up Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets and the DIY Strategy / Culture toolkits, most of it was reactive rather than proactive, and even then, I was very slow to react. I ended up missing lots of simple opportunities to spread the word and involve other people. For example, Duende, my design partner for the toolkits, created an online store where you can order the toolkits, but you can’t find that store from my website. (Voila! The preceding sentence fixed that problem! More to come!)

While I didn’t accomplish my high-level goals, I don’t want to lose sight of the good things that happened:

Publishing blog posts is not the only thing that matters when it comes to sharing. It’s about the quality of what you share and the number and kinds of people you reach, regardless of medium. I found myself sharing and linking to my two 2016 blog posts more often than average. While I only wrote two, my colleague, Anya Kandel, became the first guest contributor here, writing two really great blog posts about her driving questions and experiences.
In addition to writing up the aforementioned experimentation framework (which I did in collaboration with my colleague, Alison Lin), we did an accompanying webinar in partnership with Social Transformation Project and Leadership Learning Community (LLC) that had almost 400 registrants, third all-time among LLC’s excellent five-year roster of webinars.
I published several of my collaboration workouts, with more to come. My lack of blog posts didn’t prevent my mailing list from growing, and you can now follow me on Instagram and Facebook as well as Twitter. I also made a bunch of subtle design and technical changes to this website, which will help support its ongoing growth and evolution.
I did a Do-It-Together Strategy / Culture Workshop in New York with Anya Kandel, my first outside of the San Francisco Bay Area and hopefully the start of many more.
I maintained the self-care success that I achieved in 2015, not a small feat considering how much work I’ve put into this over the past four years.
I met, worked with, and shadowed lots of great practitioners, especially the aforementioned Alison and Anya, through my informal meetups, my colearning experiment and a similar experiment with my friends at MAG, and my client work.
My client projects were meaningful, and I learned a ton from each of them. I did organizational culture work with Addapp, organizational strategy work with General Service Foundation, which included a strategy-focused Muscles & Mindsets program, and really meaningful work on network strategy and culture with Social Transformation Project, my heretofore un-blogged-about “big, hairy client project.” I got lots of practice, including designing and facilitating two unusually challenging meetings, and I identified lots of areas for ongoing improvement. In addition to having lots of new fodder to write about, I also developed lots of new infrastructure and templates that I plan on packaging and sharing this year.

It’s not that I didn’t accomplish good, valuable things. It’s that I have a larger goal that I care about, and the only way I’m going to have a chance at achieving that goal is through focus, discipline, and rapid adaptation. I’m trying to run a marathon, and while I worked hard and am in better shape now than I was a year ago, I’m not developing strength and endurance quickly enough to successfully complete that marathon.

Which brings me to the second thing that was hard about 2016, for me and for many, many other people.

There are many, many problems in the world today, and they all manifested in some very discouraging ways this past year. All of this divisiveness, siloization, and radicalization are what I and many, many others have been working so hard to shift and prevent for many, many years. These are fundamentally challenging problems, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s happening, but we can’t use that as an excuse not to be disciplined and accountable to how we’re trying to tackle these problems.

How do we know if we’re investing in the right places? Where should I be directing my energy in order to have the biggest impact?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do have hypotheses, and my intention has been to test them. My actions in 2016 were not fully aligned with my intentions, and I want to fix that. Which leads me to my three-year goal and my priorities for 2017.

1,000 High-Performing Collaboration Practitioners by 2020

I believe there are a set of core principles underlying high-performance, collaborative work. I believe we need lots and lots of people who understand those principles and who practice them with devotion and joy.

I practice these principles to the best of my ability, and I want to find others committed to the same principles, whether they are external practitioners trying to help other groups or internal changemakers embedded in their own groups. I want to learn with them, support them in their practice, and help the community grow and improve. By the end of 2020, I want to know of at least 1,000 of these practitioners all in movement together.

Why 1,000? Because I think that number is the minimum needed to sustain a thriving, growing movement.

Why by 2020? Because I think it will be very hard, but doable if I’m smart and focused about how I approach this, and because we can’t afford to wait any longer.

How will I accomplish this? I’m still working out the details, but I’ve got some ideas. I think there are three overlapping categories of activities needed to help catalyze this community of practitioners:

Model these principles myself and continue to practice and improve
Synthesize and share what I’m learning
Nurture and support other practitioners

Most of my past activities have fallen in some subset of these categories, as is the case for similar practitioners. But I’ve realized (through experience and lots of helpful feedback from others) that there are some key activities on which many of these other activities depend. I’ve largely neglected these activities, and I want to correct that.

2017 Priority: Draft a Set of Experience-Based Principles for High-Performance Collaboration

In particular, I need to clearly and accessibly articulate the principles that I think are foundational for high-performance collaboration. Drawing on my and other’s experiences to draft these principles will be my primary focus in 2017.

I often use the metaphor of how we need more chefs. In some ways, I’m saying I want there to be 1,000 “chefs” that I know of by 2020. We can extend this analogy further to explore how we might go about doing this.

One of the reasons I decided to start consulting again at the end of 2015 was my realization that we need more “great restaurants” in order to inspire people to become “chefs.” I thought one of the highest-leverage things I could do was to be one of those restaurants. I wanted to scale up how I modeled the principles of high-performance collaboration in order to inspire others to push their own practice.

I still think we need more “great restaurants,” but I no longer think that’s where my focus should lie. I need to be clear about what I think high-performance collaboration means and what the underlying principles are. Articulating those principles will help serve as a beacon for other practitioners with similar beliefs and commitment. It will provide a framework to help assess collaborative performance — the equivalent to a Michelin Guide in the restaurant world — which is an important step toward actual improvement.

I hope to have a first draft of these principles — which I’ll pull together in an open way with the help of my community (which I hope includes anyone reading this) — by the middle of the year, at which point I’ll use it as a way of scaling up my other activities. I will continue to model and practice, but it will all be in service of articulating these principles.

I’m excited about this renewed focus. It feels true to the reason I got into this business in the first place. I know what high-performance collaboration feels like, and I’ve learned a lot about helping others achieve it. I know that others know a lot as well, and that even more people want to know and learn. I think the path for supporting these practitioners — lots and lots and lots of practice — is straightforward, but challenging, and I’m excited about re-focusing my efforts to pave this path. I believe wholeheartedly in the world that is possible if we’re successful, and I’m going to do everything I can to help create that world.

Celebrating a Meeting That I Had Nothing and Everything to Do With

I was in Detroit a few weeks ago for the RE-AMP Annual Meeting. I was there for reasons that were largely ancillary to the meeting itself. I’m not a member of the RE-AMP network. I wasn’t giving a talk. I didn’t participate in the design or facilitation, other than offering a thought or two when asked.

Still, my experience there felt like validation for everything I’ve been working on over the past two years. It was an incredible high, and it also demonstrated how much work still remains to achieve my larger goal of wide-scale collaborative literacy.

Success Breeds New Challenges

RE-AMP is a network of over 160 organizational members focused on climate change in the Midwest. Their shared goal is to reduce regional global warming emissions 80% by 2050.

It was co-initiated over a decade ago by my friend and former colleague, Rick Reed, who had a simple question he wanted to test:

What would happen if nonprofits and foundations alike took the time to sit down together to really, truly, deeply understand the system they were all trying to change?

So he tested it. With the backing of the Garfield Foundation, he brought together a small group of leaders in the Midwest working on climate change and convinced them to sit together, listen to each other, and strategize together.

The process took almost two years. It was messy and expensive, and it teetered on total and utter failure on multiple occasions. But it worked. Participants arrived at a shared epiphany about what the critical levers were for stopping climate change. The trust and relationships that were built and strengthened through the process led to quick and aligned action among nonprofits and foundations alike around those leverage points.

This strategic alignment resulted in many immediate wins, the most eye-opening being stopping 30 coal plants in the Midwest.

Success created new problems. The hard work of thinking and planning together had forged a collective attitude, a network mindset among the initial participants that drove the way they worked. Their success attracted new participants very quickly, but the shared understanding, the relationships, and the network mindset did not scale at the same pace.

Over the past few years, the network has made a number of moves to try to shift this. Most notably, they hired a network CEO and additional full-time “staff” members to be able to respond more quickly to the needs of the network. (RE-AMP is not its own legal entity. Its “staff” are all employed by other organizations distributed throughout the network.)

This investment in internal capacity has enabled the network to start addressing structural and bigger picture issues that had previously been left by the wayside. One of those issues has been re-integrating systems thinking and a more collaborative mindset back into the DNA of the network.

Helping Groups Help Themselves

Three years ago, I left the consulting firm I co-founded and a team that I loved in order to seek greater balance and impact. I felt that I was doing some of the best work in the field, but it was not translating into the larger-scale impact I was hoping for.

Ever since I got into this business in the early 2000s, I’ve always explained my vision of the world and theory of change with a simple thought exercise:

Think about the best collaborative experience you’ve ever had.

What would your life be like if all of your collaborative experiences were as good as that one?

What would the world be like if everyone’s collaborative experiences were all that good?

How about if everyone’s collaborative experiences were all just slightly better?

I believed (and still believe) that the world would be significantly better if we saw incremental improvement in people’s collaborative literacy across the board at scale.

However, that’s not where I focused my energy. I liked working on hugely complex problems that required cutting-edge capabilities. I did the work inclusively — the only way you had a chance to solve these kinds of problems — with the hope that people would learn enough through the experience that they could continue working in a similar way. Furthermore, I hoped that by openly sharing what I learned, I could have a broader impact than just the projects I was working on.

Both of these turned out to be true, but not appreciably so. The way I was working was benefiting me more than anyone else. It was an incredible opportunity for me to practice and learn and to do work that was joyful and meaningful, and it helped me establish a reputation that created more opportunities. Others were also learning from these experiences, but they weren’t as invested as I was, and there were few structural incentives for them to continue developing their skills after we finished the project.

If I wanted to stay true to my vision, I needed to focus on sustainable interventions for helping others develop their collaborative capabilities. I do not believe that the ability to collaborate effectively is some mystical talent with which only a select few are imbued. I believe that everyone has the ability to be much, much better. All people need are opportunities to practice.

For the past two years, I’ve been focused on creating those opportunities. I’ve been testing workouts and tools designed to help people develop stronger collaborative muscles and mindsets. I stopped doing work for groups and have focused instead on helping them develop the skills to help themselves. I’ve also been mentoring emerging practitioners who want to go the extra mile in developing their skills.

The Meeting

In some ways, RE-AMP has been an ideal testbed for my workouts and tools. Because it’s a decentralized network, it can’t change culture or practices by fiat (or by firing) the way an organization can. Practices have to work, otherwise they will be ignored, and they have to be adopted widely, otherwise they will be rendered ineffective.

Furthermore, its history of great work, strong relationships, and growing internal capacity served as a strong foundation. Its staff, along with many of the informal leaders in the network, are bold, talented, and hungry to learn.

I ran an early pilot of my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program with the RE-AMP staff last year. It went okay. Some things were well-received, some not so much. I developed an assessment to help me determine whether or not my program was working, but the main thing I learned was that my assessment needed improving.

Still, the program was effective enough that they were interested in making it available to the broader network. For the past few months, we’ve been discussing and planning a program that will launch early next month.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to me, the RE-AMP staff was cooking up something interesting on their own. They had decided to run a session at their Annual Meeting based on a Muscles & Mindsets exercise I had led them through at their staff meeting for a dozen people the previous year. They were going to adapt it for 160.

Scaling up the exercise would actually be relatively straightforward. Most exercises I design are meant to scale. Understanding this conceptually, though, and believing it enough to do it in a real-life, high-stakes situation takes courage, especially if you haven’t done it before. This is one reason why people hire people like me to do this for them.

But the RE-AMPers weren’t going to bother with that. They had the audacity to try it on their own. Prior to the meeting, they walked me through what they were going to do, and I made some suggestions and offered encouragement. Beyond that, I had nothing to do with the session.

Watching the session was exciting on many levels. First, Sarah Shanahan and Trevor Drake expertly facilitated the exercise. They had a calm energy, and they gave clear instructions with compelling, relevant examples. They managed to command a large, rowdy room of people by giving up control, which the participants appreciated and which one person made a point of noting during the debrief.

Second, it was a thrill to watch 160 people using a toolkit — our mindset cards — that I had invested a few years and a ton of energy into codesigning. At my previous consulting firm, I had done a lot of organizational culture work with my friend and business partner, Kristin Cobble, who had introduced me to a framework for mapping mindsets to behaviors. It was effective, but also high overhead, and it required facilitators who were very literate with the framework. For example, it took us four months to do this work with a 75-person organization, and that was an accelerated process!

My motivation for designing the cards was to see if we could create a tool that would allow groups to condense a multi-month conversation into a few hours and to allow them to have that conversation without the aid of a framework expert. There were several examples of groups using the cards to great success with groups of 10-15, and I was confident that larger groups could benefit from them as well. But I hadn’t seen it… until the RE-AMP meeting.

It was amazing to watch 160 deeply engaged in conversation using the cards, and it felt even better knowing that they were able to do it without my help. I walked around the room, eavesdropping on conversation, peeking at people’s cards, and soaking in the buzz. I was in heaven.

Third, I was surprised by what happened. Gail Francis, who led the design of this session, had made a decision about something relatively minor against which I had advised. The final exercise for the 20 groups of eight was to use the cards to agree on a set of mindset “spectrums.” The question was how to capture these. I had suggested that the groups write them on a worksheet, then bring them to her. She decided to have people hold up their cards, which she would then collect and transcribe for them. It was a tradeoff between saving time for the participants and saving time for the facilitators.

She understood the trade-off and chose saving the participants’ time. That led to something completely unexpected — groups cheering in excitement every time they completed the exercise. It was fun, it was funny, it bolstered the already high energy in the room, and it likely wouldn’t have happened had she chose what I had suggested.

We’re Not There Yet

I’ve devoted the last two years to developing methods and tools that help groups help themselves. Seeing this work manifest itself this way at the RE-AMP Annual Meeting was gratifying and validating. Every group already has smart, capable people who have the potential to unleash the group’s intelligence. All they need is space, a little guidance, and room to practice and learn.

For this meeting, a few people got that space, and the results were outstanding. They were also only a fraction of what’s possible. As good as they were, they could have been much, much better. They’ll get there if the people in the network are given that room to practice their skills in bigger and more ambitious ways. Unfortunately, most groups do not give people that space.

All too often, “experimenting” consists of one-offs. Mastery doesn’t happen in a one-off. It takes time and commitment and lots of stumbling. In order to raise the bar and create the space for that growth, people need to experience what’s possible. Most people have such poor collaborative experiences, they either flinch and give up at the first sign of trouble, or they stop taking risks after they experience a small win. RE-AMP is ahead of most groups in this regard, but still, I wonder.

If my workouts and tools are going to have a chance at making an impact, then I need to find ways to make it safe for people to commit to them, and I also have to give people the experience of what’s possible. I’m currently exploring ways to do exactly that. In the meantime, I’m appreciating what I’ve accomplished so far and the people who have taken me there, and I’m excited about what’s coming next.

Thanks to Greg Gentschev and H. Jessica Kim for reviewing early drafts of this post.

Correction: The originally published version of this post stated that this was the first time the RE-AMP staff had decided to design and facilitate their Annual Meeting on their own without external facilitation. Gail Francis pointed out that this was not correct. While their early meetings had been designed and facilitated externally, they had actually been designing and facilitating their meetings on their own for several years. I removed my incorrect claim in this version.

Working Less (and Other 2015 Strategic Priorities)

For over a decade, my work has fundamentally been about creating a world that is more alive. My specific focus has been on building up society’s collaborative literacy — the muscles and mindsets we need to be and work together more effectively.

Every year for the past five years, I’ve carefully mapped out a set of goals and strategies that I think will put me on the best path toward realizing my vision. In each of those years, I’ve had three priorities, and the third priority has always been something around work-life balance. In each of those years, I’ve monitored my progress and made adjustments throughout, and at the end of each year, I’ve assessed my overall progress.

Every year for the past five years, I’ve seen a similar pattern. I do well on all of my goals except for the one on work-life balance. I’ve seen incremental improvement every year, but I continue to be far from my targets.

I spent a lot of time at the end of last year reflecting on this. Was this the right goal? Did I need to reframe what I meant by work-life balance? Or did I simply need to experiment with different strategies?

I decided that it was still a critical priority for both personal and professional reasons. I believe in the importance of slowing down, that balance and pace will make me a better practitioner and a better person. I believe that we as a society need to be better at this, and I want to model this practice.

So I kept it as a goal, but I made a few changes. I reframed it slightly, and I made it my top priority.

This year, my number one strategic priority is to work less.

Working less is a clear goal. I’m confident that my metrics (which are based on hours worked and some self-care indicators) are relevant, and I’ve got specific targets, which means that I can clearly and objectively see whether or not I’m achieving this goal. If I hit my targets, I’m confident that I will be happy and healthy.

The real question is whether or not working less will make me more effective at achieving my higher-level goals. I believe it will. If I’m forced to work less, that means I’ll also have to work smarter. I’ll have to make better decisions about how I use my time, which means saying no more often than saying yes. I believe I already have the muscles to do this. Constraints will give me the incentive to use these muscles.

Three months into 2015, I’m thrilled by the results so far. I feel like I have plenty of space to think about the big-picture and also to focus and get things done. I’m seeing the people I want to see, and I’m deepening my relationships and my practice. I’ve definitely had to take things off of my task list — it’s no accident that this is my first post here this year — but the tradeoffs have been worth it, and I think my focus will pay off in big ways.

To understand what this means more concretely, it’s important to understand my other two strategic priorities for 2015. First, I’m focused on building a platform for developing collaborative literacy. Second, I’m looking to engage with 1,000 changemakers.

Building a Platform

I believe that the best way to develop collaborative literacy is through lots and lots of practice.

I’m supporting practice in two ways. First, for the past two years, I’ve been developing and prototyping workouts under the auspices of my 15-week Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets program. I’m really excited about how the program has evolved, and I’m looking to document and distribute what I’ve learned more widely (and, of course, freely). I’m currently doing the program with Forward Together and some of its partners as part of a larger innovation process, and I’m looking for others who’d like to try it. (Contact me if you’re interested!)

Second, I’m trying to create the equivalent of balance bikes for changemakers. These have largely taken the form of DIY toolkits for developing strategy and culture, which I’ve been developing in partnership with Duende and many others and which will also be freely available.

I’ve been prototyping these with lots of groups over the past year, and I’m super excited by how effective they’ve been. Several practitioners have already incorporated these toolkits into their work, and demand has been high. I’m focused on continuing to refine and improve these toolkits and also documenting and distributing them in order to meet demand.

I care about chefs, not recipes, so I’ve been consciously focused on developing tools that support practice rather than writing things that are prescriptive. A number of colleagues have pushed back, suggesting that I’ve been too extreme about this. They’re right. Even though my frameworks are extremely simple, I still have them and ought to share them more proactively. I’ve written about some of them here, but they’re not easily findable. Part of the work of building a platform is weaving these frameworks together so that they’re widely accessible.

Engage with 1,000 Changemakers

Toward the end of last year, I sifted through lots of data to try to get a sense of how many people I engaged with. I came up with roughly 250. A surprising number of those were face-to-face or phone interactions, so 250 felt like a lot. But if my goal is to scale practices that will improve collaborative literacy, I need to reach a lot more than 250 people.

To some extent, creating a good platform — for example, simply documenting and publishing my aforementioned toolkits — will help expand my reach. However, simply hitting my numbers are not the point. The quality of engagement matters, which means going beyond simply making my work more accessible online.

Specifically, I’m focused on deepening my engagement with a core set of practitioners. I’ve been doing that with a small, local group of peers, which we call our “colearning group.” I’ve also been much more intentional about finding and working with emerging practitioners. All of this has helped my own practice tremendously and has also led to better toolkits.

It’s also been the best way to disseminate practices and mindsets for doing this work effectively. Every one of these practitioners are already taking what they learn out into their own communities, and a better platform will better support them in doing so. Furthermore, by modeling a culture of shadowing and mentorship, we are hopefully encouraging others to adopt similar learning practices.

This year, I hope to write less frequently, but more impactfully. I’m excited by what I’ve been doing and learning so far, and I’m looking forward to sharing more in the ensuing months.

What Would You Do If 100 People Were Listening?

I launched this site a little over four months ago. I needed a place to share what I’ve been learning about increasing the world’s collaborative literacy and to be more intentional about storytelling.

Since launching in December, over 2,300 of you have visited. Almost 1,400 of you keep coming back. About 30 of you have commented on my blog, a third of whom I didn’t know before you posted here. Many more of you have shared my content across multiple social media channels.

Over 100 of you have subscribed to my newsletter. Half of you actually open it (triple the industry average), and a third of you who open it click on a link (double the industry average).

Based on these numbers and some hand-wavy calculations, I’d say that I have an “active” audience of about 100 people — people who are engaging with this site and this work on a regular basis.

What has this meant in practice?

Deeper engagement with people I already know. First and foremost, I hear from colleagues a lot more frequently, which in and of itself is gratifying. Moreover, surface-level understanding has evolved into deeper understanding, which is resulting in real impacts in the work. I’m particularly delighted by the number of people who tell me that they’re using one of my toolkits, or that something I wrote helped them with a challenge they were facing.
New, interesting colleagues who are expanding my perspective. I love discovering new people and new work! It’s a constant reminder of how many people in the world care about this stuff and are consciously trying to improve.
Better quality work. More, real engagement means that the work itself improves. All of my toolkits have gotten better, because more people are using them in real-life situations and are sharing with me what they’re learning. Frankly, simply the act of “forced” reflection is helping me get better at what I do.
“Reusable” knowledge nuggets. I’ve been saying a lot of the things I write about in some form or another for many years. Actually writing them down means I can repeat them more easily and that others discover them on their own. The best example of this is my post on networks and power. This has long been foundational thinking for me, and it’s become my most frequently read article, which makes me very happy.
Seeding a community of practice. I’ve loved drawing attention to colleagues like Rebecca Petzel and Joe Hsueh, but I love it even more when people start discovering each other serendipitously. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

When you start a website, you naturally think about potential reach. There are almost 2.5 billion people on the Internet today, and they’re all just a click away!

Sure, I’d like to reach a lot of people, but I’m actually a bit overwhelmed just thinking about 100.

A thought exercise I often use with people interested in networks or distributed collaboration is to imagine that magically transporting your group to the same physical location. What would you hope might happen?

I’ve been going through this exercise in my head, visualizing 100 people crowded into my tiny office on a weekly basis (I would definitely need to get a bigger space), thinking about what’s already happened and what might be possible. My first instinct is to try to understand this group better. I want to know:

Who are you?
What do you care about?
What brought you here?
What are you learning?
Now that you’ve found yourself in a (very crowded) room with 99 other people with similar interests, what would you like to see happen?

I’m looking forward to trying to get some of these answers, to tap into the wonderful potential of these 100 people. You can help by answering these questions in the comments below. Or, if you prefer, drop me an email. Don’t be shy; we all want to hear from you!