Planning Isn’t Helpful If You Can’t Remember Your Agreements

When my friend, Kristin Cobble, and I founded Groupaya, my previous consulting firm, in 2011, one of our goals was to model the best practices of high-performing groups. We didn’t want to just help other groups develop these skills and habits. We wanted to show what a high-performance group looked like.

One habit we were sure we’d adopt was making time to talk together about strategy and culture. In our planning stage, our associate, Rebecca Petzel, facilitated us through a number of important conversations, including one about our values. We eventually converged on six words that we thought best represented our most important shared values.

I was proud, even smug about the time we had invested in this work. In my mind, we were modeling what it meant to be a values-driven company. So I was taken aback when, six months later, Rebecca asked us if we could name our six values, and both Kristin and I could only name four between us.

What was the point of coming up with a list of values if we couldn’t remember what they were?

Entrepreneur and investor, Marc Andreessen, once said, “The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless.” In some ways, this was true for us. Because of the conversations we had had with each other, we were more aligned, and we understood and trusted each other more. Furthermore, even though we didn’t remember all six of our words, we still cared deeply about each and every one of those values, and our work reflected this. How your values come through in your actions is the point of values work, not the list itself.

However, what if we hadn’t been living the values that we had named? How would anyone have known? The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t remember our six words. The problem was that we weren’t constantly thinking together about them, talking together about them, reflecting together on what it meant to live them. We weren’t holding ourselves accountable to our values, because we weren’t taking the time to assess ourselves. We were making it hard to stay aligned around our values, because we weren’t taking the time to talk about what this meant and why it was important.

I was embarrassed, but I also knew that we weren’t alone. Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, asked middle managers at over 250 companies to list their companies’ top five strategic priorities. Half of them could not even remember one. Only a third could remember two. Even worse, only half said they understood the connections between their companies’ priorities and initiatives. They had seen the priorities plenty of times — almost 90 percent said that top leaders communicated the strategy frequently enough. Those who remembered them just didn’t understand them.

Once we recognized the problem, we were able to fix it. But I’m amazed by how many leaders and consultants make the same mistakes that we made… and keep making them. It starts by understanding what the mistakes are.

The first mistake is not making time for the whole team to talk about strategy and culture.

The second mistake is assuming that your work is done after one meeting.

My colleague, Catherine Madden, made this wonderful video last year about psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus’s pioneering research around memory and the “Forgetting Curve” for Edutopia.

The brilliant Nicky Case took these concepts even further in this interactive explanation of how you counter the Forgetting Curve. I highly recommend that everyone look at both, but I’ll summarize their key points here:

  • In the 1880s, Ebbinghaus found that — without any reinforcement — we forget what we learn or hear at an exponential rate. After just one hour, we will already forget half of what we’ve learned. After one day, we will forget two-thirds.
  • There are a number of ways to counter this. The basic one is to reinforce what you learn. But you have to do it quickly, and you have to do it repetitively, because doing it once only slows down the curve. (Explore Nicky’s explanation of spaced repetition to understand this more deeply.)
  • Some methods are more effective at reinforcing than others, specifically peer learning and visualizations.

Given this, what’s the right way to do strategy and culture work? The first step is to create space for the whole group to discuss strategy and culture. However, if all you’re doing is scheduling one meeting, you’re doing it wrong, regardless of how expertly you design or facilitate it. You also need to:

  • Write down the agreements from the meeting. Bonus points if you use pictures. More bonus points if the participants themselves draw the pictures. (As an aside, this also applies to next steps and decisions made at any meeting. If you don’t write them down, they might as well not have happened.)
  • Make sure everyone knows where the agreements are. Put them somewhere where everyone will see them often. (Again, this also applies to next steps and decisions made.) My colleague, Rachel Weidinger, has a great trick with remote teams. She’ll have her teammates print their agreements, post them somewhere near their workspaces, and take and share photos of where they put them so that everyone else knows that they’ve done this. It creates accountability, and it also lets people see each other workspaces, which has other benefits with remote work.
  • Schedule followups at the same time as you’re planning your meeting. These could take many forms. They could be pair conversations, they could be designated time at the beginning or end of regular standup meetings or checkins, they could be regularly scheduled reviews of the artifacts, etc. Be creative — they don’t have to be meetings. What matters most is doing these repetitively and frequently.

None of this is easy. Doing them doesn’t mean that you’ll succeed, but not doing them guarantees that you’ll fail.

Eating Humble Pie: Lessons in Listening

The most fundamental exercise in my Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets workout program is the “one-minute drill.” It’s the first exercise people do, and we repeat it several times throughout the course of a program. It’s an exercise in listening deeply and showing that you’re listening.

Even though it seems simple, people quickly discover that it’s not. Really, truly listening is hard. Furthermore, being capable of listening well isn’t the same as actually doing it. When I work with groups, even skillful ones, I often see good listeners talking past each other. All too often, we’re distracted by other things, including our own emotional states.

Making people feel heard — which is deeply intertwined with listening, but is not the same thing — is even harder. The one-minute drill helps you quickly and objectively recognize how hard these things are. It humbles you without humiliating you.

I don’t just lead workouts, I do them myself. I’ve done the one-minute drill hundreds of times with many different people, and I always seem to learn something new. Recently, I’ve been working out with my friend and colleague, Kristin Cobble. The past few times I’ve done the one-minute drill with her, she’s docked me points. “You’re reflecting back everything that I’m saying,” she explained, “but you’re not acknowledging how I’m feeling.”

She was absolutely right. I am very good at listening for substance and at reframing and reflecting back the essence of the content. It’s one of my strengths as a facilitator. But sometimes, people aren’t actually trying to convey a substantive message. They’re trying to get you to understand how they feel.

I had heard the emotion that Kristin had conveyed in the one-minute drill, but I hadn’t recognized the importance she had placed on them. Upon receiving her feedback, I was able to see what I had done and adjust my reflection accordingly.

However, it’s not always that straightforward. If someone is expressing anxiety, for example, how do you acknowledge that? Saying, “You seem really anxious,” might be appropriate in some circumstances, but it’s almost certainly the wrong thing to say in others. How you say it also matters. If someone is feeling excited, the words, “You seem excited,” may not be appreciated if your tone feels apathetic or resentful.

My experience with Kristin was timely, because I’ve run into this exact issue twice (that I know of) in the last month. In both cases, I was having difficult conversations with colleagues. In both cases, I was relatively calm, I was breathing slowly and consciously so that I could listen more deeply, and I reflected back the content of what I heard. And in both cases, my colleagues let me know that they didn’t feel heard.

It was frustrating to get that feedback, and if I had not had similar experiences with Kristin in recent practice sessions, I might have missed what was happening. In one of those cases, I was able to make the adjustment, but not in the other. Honestly, I’m still not sure what I could have said in the other case both to truly hear my colleague and to let her know that I heard her. That’s why I keep practicing.

In 2009, I worked with a think tank that was trying to grapple with very hard public policy challenges through both traditional, expert-oriented methods and bottoms-up, participatory processes. The first challenge we took on was clean energy. We kicked off our process with a day-long gathering in San Francisco with about 200 participants. The plan was to let the conversation go in multiple directions throughout the day, then weave it all together into something coherent that we would share at the end of the day. It was essentially a listening and reflection exercise at scale.

We asked our friend, the brilliant Katherine Fulton, to take on the difficult task of distilling six hours of discussion into a 10-minute talk in more or less real-time. She listened deeply throughout the day, as she is so skilled at doing. Then she went up on stage, and said to the audience, “Raise your hand if you feel scared.”

Most of the participants raised their hands.

“Raise your hand if you feel hopeful.”

Most of the participants raised their hands.

“I think that’s the essence of human condition,” Katherine opined. “I don’t think we’re going to fix this with just rational argument or all the great innovative ideas in the world. We have to have those. But the energy to do it and the will to do it is actually also going to have to come from another part of the human spirit, from our resilience.”

I still vividly remember how the energy of that room felt as Katherine got us out of our heads and into our hearts. She recognized that trying to reflect back what everyone had been saying was an exercise in futility and — in that moment, at least — would lead to more harm than good. What we all needed from her in that moment was an acknowledgement of how we were feeling.

I learned something very important watching Katherine that day, and I continue to work on developing this muscle. I’ve gotten better, but I still have a ways to go, as my experiences this past month reminded me. That’s why I keep practicing and encouraging others to do the same.

Rubber Bands and the Art of Visioning

Reaching for the Moon

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up (1936)

My mentor, Doug Engelbart, was a visionary and a doer. When he first embarked on his career as an engineer in the 1950s, only a handful of computers existed — expensive behemoths controlled by stacks of punched cards. Doug had the audacity to envision a world where everybody had access to computers, where they could engage with these devices in real-time using graphical, interactive displays, and where all of these machines were connected to each other.

His ideas were so far-fetched, he spent the next 20 years battling detractors and disdain. That didn’t stop him from making his vision a reality, which he unveiled in 1968 at an event that would later become known as the Mother of All Demos. While he wowed everyone in the room that day, it turned out he was still yet another 20 years ahead of his time, as the technologies he demonstrated that day didn’t become widespread until the late 1980s.

Doug permanently instilled in me the importance of thinking big… then thinking even bigger. Thinking big requires thinking long-term, because big things take time.

But he also showed me that whatever you imagined also had to be realistic. As crazy as Doug’s vision for computing seemed to be in the 1950s, he knew it was possible. His ideas around display technology came directly from his experiences as a radar engineer in the Navy during World War II. Furthermore, he had spent some time studying the rate at which computing technology had been advancing — Moore’s Law a quarter of a century before Gordon Moore had articulated it as such — and he knew that it would be a matter of time before scaling effects would make computing technology both powerful enough and affordable. “A matter of time” happened to be four decades, a long time for sure, but well within the realm of possibility.

Finding the right balance between big and possible is the essential challenge of effective visioning. Doing it well requires the ability to shift back and forth between radically different perspectives without getting dizzy and losing your orientation. The challenge for practitioners is figuring out ways to support this dance between big-picture thinking and cold, hard pragmatism.

None of this is easy.

Getting Real

Last year, I helped support an innovation process for Forward Together, an amazing social justice organization based in Oakland. I led a cohort of staff and funders through a four-month Collaboration Muscles & Mindsets training in preparation for the actual experimentation process, which was led by Rebecca Petzel.

Rebecca kicked off the process with a two-day workshop, where participants rapidly brainstormed and refined ideas. We invited several guests who brought different perspectives and helped stretch what our cohort had previously thought was possible. This resulted in lots of energy, inspiration, and great, creative ideas. Everyone was in high spirits after the first day and a half.

Then Rebecca told the participants it was time to get real. She put up several large, poster-sized calendars, and she asked people to get out their personal calendars so that we could flesh out the plan for testing the ideas.

As people looked through their calendars, you could see their shoulders slump and their spirits deflate. Everyone was busy, and they were having trouble seeing how any followup would be possible. One person after another voiced this same concern loudly and clearly. It was like an avalanche of negativity.

I was taken aback. I had expected folks to get real, but I had not expected complete demoralization. After a very low-energy discussion, Rebecca and I huddled about what to do next. I had been scheduled to review some of the muscles and mindsets work we had done, especially for those in the room who hadn’t participated, but I wanted to scrap the exercise. “They need more time to work through the roadmap,” I argued.

“They need to review the mindsets and all the work they’ve done the past four months,” insisted Rebecca. “It will remind them of what’s possible.”

Rebecca was right. The first step in my Muscles & Mindsets program is for the participants to identify a core set of productive mindsets that they aspire to have, as well as the corresponding less productive mindsets that they want to shift. As it turned out, four of the five shifts they had chosen seemed to apply to this exact scenario:

Feeling stuck
“I’m scared of the unknown and would prefer to avoid it.”
Innovation
“When I walk into the unknown, I’m going to learn and grow. I don’t know what the answers are, but I’ll figure them out by trying things.”
Not enough time
“I don’t have time for anything more than what’s in front of me.”
Slow down to speed up
“Slowing down will help me make better choices and save time.”
Fixed reality
“There aren’t enough time or resources.”
Flexible reality
“If we think outside the box, we’ll see ways to create time and resources. To do that, we need to be conscious of power and equity.”
Me
“Everything depends on me.”
We
“We’re in it together. I don’t always have to be out in front. I need to be compassionate with myself so that I can be supportive of others.”

Reviewing these helped our participants become viscerally aware of how quickly they had snapped back to the very mindsets they had been working hard to shift. That relieved some of the anxiety, and we were able to end the workshop on a strong, hopeful note. Still, it was a stark reminder of how simply bringing people together and giving them an inspiring, one-off experience is not sufficient to move people on an ongoing basis, especially when faced with everyday realities.

Stretching the Rubber Band

My friend and colleague, Kristin Cobble, is skilled at getting people to a hopeful place and supporting them in staying there, and she strongly influenced how I approach visioning. In addition to sharing many specific techniques, Kristin introduced me to Robert Fritz’s rubber band metaphor, which has become a central principle for how I think about this work.

In short, a powerful vision is both inspiring and grounded. Think of it as two poles: Where you currently are and where you want to be (the vision). Fritz asks that you imagine a rubber band stretched between those two poles. The goal is to create just enough tension so that you feel pulled along by the vision. If the aspiration is too wild, the rubber band will stretch too far and snap. If it is too conservative, then the rubber band will lie there, limp.

Most visioning processes fail in one of two places:

  • They don’t find the right tension in the first place.
  • They don’t support you in maintaining that tension.

How do you find that right tension?

It starts by being specific, both about where you are and where you want to go. One of my favorite tricks, courtesy of Kristin, is to specify how far forward you want to look, then have you write down your age in that year. You can’t get more specific or grounded than that!

Another trick is to start with vision, then work backwards. Two of my mentors, Gail and Matt Taylor, have been harnessing group genius for almost a half century, and they’ve formulated a set of helpful axioms along the way. Their first two axioms are:

  • The future is rational only in hindsight.
  • You can’t get there from here, but you can get here from there.

In other words, articulate a clear vision, assume that it is true and that you are currently living in it, and work backwards. Tell the history of how you got to the future (getting from there to here), a process called backcasting. Working backwards in this way results in greater specificity and also helps you gut-check your vision. There’s also good research that shows that grounding your vision in this way makes it more actionable.

In a similar vein, Danny Spitzberg of Peak Agency recently shared a powerful trick that he uses with the Goals / Success Spectrum. After he has people articulate minimum, target, and epic success, he asks people to assign a dollar amount to each column designating what they think the cost is for achieving that success. Nothing grounds a conversation better than talking about money. Not only does it help surface different assumptions about costs, it helps people get real about what it will take to achieve different goals, which helps people adjust their rubber band accordingly.

How do you support others in maintaining the tension of their rubber bands?

This is the harder problem, one that has been driving much of my work for the past three years. Most of the time, spending a few days with a group articulating a clear vision and finding the right initial tension is not enough. Worse, it can be demoralizing and even destructive if there isn’t any followthrough.

Maintaining tension requires an ongoing practice of reflection and adjustment. One way to support this is to make sure the vision is captured somewhere accessible, so that people can find it and remind themselves of it constantly. This may sound obvious, but I am amazed at how often people seem to skip this step.

Another way to support this tension is to build in accountability structures. For example, build in time in standing meetings to revisit and check in on the vision. Assign accountability partners, or even hire coaches.

Creating a grounded, compelling vision is hard. Living into it is harder. One of the most powerful ways to support this tension is to acknowledge that it’s hard, to talk openly about what falling down looks like, and to expect that you will fall down often in pursuit of your vision. At our Forward Together workshop last year, Rebecca’s instincts to revisit the mindsets reminded our participants of how challenging this work was, and it enabled them to re-calibrate their rubber bands.

Celebration and Community

I first met Doug in 1998, 30 years after the Mother of All Demos, and I started working with him two years later. At the time, he had a corner office at Logitech headquarters in Fremont, California. To get there, you had to walk past rows and rows of cubicles, each of which had a computer — usually with a web browser open — and a mouse.

The first time I met him there, I asked him what it felt like to walk past those cubicles every day and to see his creations on every desk.

He looked at me sadly, and he answered immediately. “It feels like failure.”

Interactive, networked computing was only a tiny part of Doug’s vision. What he actually cared about was a world where people lived in harmony with each other and the planet. He saw, in the 1950s, that we were moving in the opposite direction, because our challenges were getting harder faster than our ability to grapple with them. He thought he could stem that by creating tools that would help people get smarter collectively. He did exactly that, but it took a lot longer than he expected, and there was a lot more work that needed to happen. Even though he lived in a world where many of his 30-year old inventions were more or less ubiquitous, people seemed to have missed the point of why he had created all of those tools in the first place.

Doug was depressed for most of the time I knew him (he passed away in 2013), and he spoke often about how he was a failure. That didn’t stop him from his single-minded pursuit of his vision, but it also didn’t seem very productive.

Moreover, I most certainly did not agree with his assessment. I was never a very nurturing, feel-good type of person, but I was always good at voicing my opinions. “You have to look at two things,” I would tell him, “Where we are now, and where you think we would have been if you had not done the work you had done. Furthermore, if you insist that we have a collective responsibility to change the way we are, then you cannot beat yourself up individually for our collective inability to do so.”

I wasn’t the only person to say these sorts of things to him, and I don’t think any of us ever swayed him or made him feel better. But while he remained stubbornly self-critical, he always took delight in the tiny, practically inconsequential victories of the many, many, many people who were inspired and touched by him.

I learned so many things about the importance of vision from working with Doug, but maybe the most important lesson is the one with which I continue to grapple: Celebration and community are critical to maintaining the right tension. If this work is so hard that you will fall down many times, then every time you get up is cause for celebration. Recognizing and doing this effectively is an art, one that is made infinitely easier with the support of others.

Brooking Gatewood, who is both a poet and a skilled practitioner, recently shared these wonderful words from Wendell Berry’s essay, “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” which I found both beautiful and apt:

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form…. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

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

Mindset Mania

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.

The Secret to High-Performance Collaboration: Slowing Down

Run, Serena, Run!

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?