From Go-Go-Go to Going Slow: Lessons from My Own Painful, but Ultimately Successful Journey

I discovered weights freshman year in college, and as a weak and skinny kid, I found them to be a revelation. One of my friends had played football in high school, and he and I would work out together often. He worked out hard — at least five days a week — and I liked his routine, so I adopted something similar.

I rapidly gained strength, but I also peaked quickly. Naturally, I tried working out more, but it didn’t seem to help. I maintained more or less the same routine throughout my sophomore year without any significant gains, which I found frustrating and demotivating. It led to long stretches where I would stop working out altogether.

Junior year, I restarted my workouts, and again saw little progress. My next door neighbor that year turned out to be a serious bodybuilder. One day, I asked him for advice. I started by telling him how much I worked out, and he cut me off. “You’re working out too much,” he said. “Your body needs rest to recover and build muscle. Try doing 45 minutes three days a week.”

“Are you sure?” I asked incredulously. Everything he said made sense except for his specific recommendation, which amounted to half as much as I had been doing for years.

“Try it,” he insisted.

I did. After just a few weeks, I saw marked improvement for the first time in over a year. I was floored. It turned out that, in order to get stronger, I just had to do less.

The Power of the Pause

I am often approached by groups with go-go-go cultures asking how to:

When I hear more about their current situations, I often find myself channeling my bodybuilder friend. You can't do any of these things if you aren't regularly slowing down to pause, to:

  • Reflect together
  • Listen deeply to each other
  • Have hard conversations with each other
  • Make adjustments
  • Rest and recover

If you're not committed to developing your muscles around pausing, you not only will not succeed at any of the above, you may even hurt yourselves.

When my friend told me to try working out less, I was more than happy to try, even though I was skeptical. When I tell other collaboration practitioners they need to practice pausing, I get the same skepticism, but none of the joy. There are reasons why they are go-go-go, and trying to shift those habits and mindsets is not only very hard, it can be downright anxiety-inducing.

I know this all too well. For the first dozen years of my career as a collaboration practitioner, I was the worst perpetuator of this go-go-go mindset. It took me six years of consistent effort and constant failure along with a health scare to learn how to slow down. It's made me a better person and a better practitioner, and it's also made me tremendously empathetic to others who are suffering from similar afflictions.

I blogged a lot about my journey as I was going through it, both on my personal blog and on this one. I also shared a tool — my Self-Care Dashboard — that ended up being enormously useful. But I never bothered writing about how I eventually turned a corner, how I've been able to sustain this balance, and the impact it's had on my life and my work. I'd like to correct that here, both to complete the record and also hopefully to offer actionable encouragement to other practitioners dealing with this challenge.

Developing Bad Habits

The first thing to know about my go-go-go ways is that I wasn't always this way. I was capable of tremendous focus and endurance, especially when it came to things I was passionate about, but I also valued my chill-out time. My childhood was spacious and wonderful, full of time to think, explore, and zone out. My first few years after college were similar, which enabled me to realize my passion for collaboration as well as to develop some initial practices.

My lifestyle started to change for the worse when I cofounded my first collaboration consultancy in 2002. I was extremely fortunate to have a mentor who taught and encouraged me and a cofounder with whom I could play and learn. But I was also in my 20s with no formal experience and a job description that I had more or less made up. Moreover, we were trying to make do in a down economy.

Needless to say, business was not good. I went into debt and barely scratched a living for several years before things slowly started turning around. It was stressful and unhealthy, and even though I was barely making any money, I found myself working all the time. I was also young and single, and I suffered a bit from the Silicon Valley mindset that idolatrized struggle before success. I thought I was simply paying my dues, like any good entrepreneur or changemaker, and if business ever got better, I promised myself that I would return to my more balanced ways. Unfortunately, I was not precise with myself about what "business getting better" looked like, and my difficult habits and scarcity mindset continued to perpetuate themselves.

In 2009, three things converged, causing me to finally reconsider my ways. First, I experienced the painful end of a long relationship. Second, I was massively burned out. Third, my then four-year old nephew, whom I adored (and still adore), came to visit San Francisco for the first time ever, but I was so busy that week, I barely spent any time with him. I was extremely upset about this, and it caused me to reflect deeply on what I was doing and how I could change.

First Steps

One of the first and best things I did was to hire a coach. She helped me to articulate a clear vision of what a balanced life looked like for me. Put simply, all of the best, most balanced times of my life had three things in common: basketball, books, and lots of time with family and friends. Imagining a life replete with these three things made me feel light and happy, and they became my personal North Star.

The next step was to understand what, professionally, was preventing me from having these things. Two answers quickly came to mind: Bad habits perpetuated by a fear of not making enough money and a constant feeling of isolation. I was lucky to have community, but what I needed were colleagues. If I could make more money, and if I felt like I was part of a team, I thought I might take a break every once in a while, which would hopefully and eventually lead to me to my North Star.

I still had more questions than answers, but I made two concrete changes as a result of my coaching sessions. First, I raised my rates for the first time in seven years. More money, I reasoned, would give me more space. I considered myself to be one of the top people in the field, and I had known for years that my rate was not commensurate with others, but my deeply engrained fear of not getting enough work had prevented me from raising them earlier.

Second, I decided that I would never take on another complex systems change project without an equal partner. This decision both thrilled and terrified me. On the one hand, I craved partnership. On the other hand, it meant that I wasn’t just raising my rates, I was essentially raising and doubling them. Would I ever get any work again? I believed, in my head, that I would. I had seen others do it, so I knew it was possible, but I was still really scared.

Fortunately, I was able to test these changes almost immediately. The CIO of a Fortune 100 company approached me about some possible work. He fit the profile of a lot of past clients, in that he had tried working with a few traditional (and very expensive) management consulting firms, he had been dissatisfied with their results, and he was looking for something more outside-the-box. He was already talking to some prestigious design firms, when a colleague mentioned me as a possible candidate.

I felt excited about the possibility of working with him, I knew that budget was not going to be an issue for him the way it might be for a smaller organization, and I already had someone in mind with whom I wanted to partner. I thought my chances of getting the work was low, which emboldened me to really go for it — to put together a team of folks with whom I really wanted to work and to propose what I felt would be the ideal project without constraining myself. When I put together my budget, I could feel my palms sweating and my heart beating. I had managed projects with large budgets before, but I had never before written a proposal for that large a sum of money.

Somehow, we got the work! He and his team turned out to be dream clients, and a few members of the team I had pulled together became the core of the consulting firm I cofounded one year later.

After we secured a verbal agreement with our client, we had to work through some bureaucracy. I had been planning a vacation a few months in advance, but as the date approached, we had still not agreed on an actual contract, and I felt old anxieties cropping up. I strongly considered canceling my vacation, but my partner insisted that she had everything under control and that I should not only go, but fully disconnect while I was gone. I listened to her, and everything worked out. The structures I had created and the people with whom I had surrounded myself liberated me to take my vacation, my first in eight years.

Falling Over and Over Again

I felt relaxed for the first time in my career, and it was showing in the work. I was excited about new opportunities, and I loved everyone with whom I was working. More importantly, my life was feeling more spacious. I thought I had turned a corner. Unfortunately, I had confused taking a few steps with walking. I still had a lot of inner and outer work to do, and — as it turned out — I was going to have to fall a lot more along the way.

Things started getting out of balance again when a few of us decided to formalize our partnership. We spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted to build together and how. In addition to being great consultants and building a great company that modeled our values, I wanted to explore ways of working outside of consulting, as I was feeling like we were reaching the ceiling of the impact that consulting could have. But, in theory at least, I was happy for that to be a stage two project, focusing our initial energies on building a great consultancy.

Over the course of several months, we converged on three priorities for our first year, the third of which was, “Space for Renewal, Learning, and Play.” Everyone was fully committed and aligned around this goal, and we did some things well. We did a good job of protecting other people’s time. We instituted practices such as starting all of our meetings with checkins, a tiny, but much needed pause that enabled us to breathe and be human together on a regular basis. We started tracking our time, which we all hated, but which gave us real data to see how we were doing collectively and to make adjustments accordingly. I designated my Wednesdays as "play days," which at minimum meant no meetings and at maximum meant open time to read, experiment, or simply take a break.

Unfortunately, I was still falling back on a lot of terrible habits. Running a company is stressful. A lot of people are depending on you to bring in revenue and to create a healthy, thriving work environment. I also felt urgency to do more. On top of the day-to-day challenges of building a successful consultancy, I was anxious to at least start exploring models outside of consulting, even though we had agreed not to prioritize this that first year.

All of this pressure — some real, some self-imposed — kickstarted my superhero complex. It was important to me that everyone else on the team had balance in their lives, but I believed that I could make do without, at least temporarily. I was motivated, I was confident in my endurance, and I felt it would move all of us forward without harming anyone. Besides, it would only be for a little while. Once we got over the hump, I could focus on restoring balance for myself.

Of course, it didn't work out this way. As a leader, I was not modeling the behaviors I was professing to prioritize. Everyone noticed this, everyone felt stressed by this, and — fortunately for me — everyone called me out on this. Moreover, intense stress and not enough rest was making me a bad teammate. It also was impacting my health. I thought I felt okay, but I discovered at a regular checkup that my blood pressure was alarmingly high.

This was the ultimate wakeup call for me. I needed to prioritize balance immediately. My life literally depended on it.

Turning the Corner

Shortly after founding my company, I started tracking a set of self-care practices every week on a dashboard that all of my peers could see. It was stark to see how often I neglected all of my self-care practices, including the low-hanging fruit, such as going for a walk. The simple act of tracking helped me make sure I was always doing some form of self-care, which was an important start.

However, it also made me see that "some" self-care was not going to be enough. This forced me to explore more deeply why I wasn’t able to make time to take better care of myself. I realized that working made me feel powerful and in control. When I felt like things were going poorly in my personal life, I defaulted to working as a way of feeling better about myself. I needed to confront these patterns head-on. I also adopted some simple tactics that helped. In particular, I took up photography as a hobby, which served as a much-needed creative outlet, helped reconnect me to my community, and unexpectedly had a profound impact professionally.

All of this core work turned out to be critical for me to implement the simplest and hardest solution of them all. In order to work less, I needed to stop doing something. That meant taking something off my list, which I had never managed to do.

I decided to leave the company I had co-founded, which — to this day — remains the hardest professional decision I have ever made. Leaving helped a lot. I was able to maintain a modicum of balance for the next few years, but I noticed that I easily fell back into old habits. I re-focused on working less, even declaring my intentions here on this blog. Repetition helped, and I was finally getting the hang of being real with myself and taking things off my plate. But, as it turned out, I needed to do one more thing before I truly turned a corner. I needed to stop checking my email so often.

Turning off my work email before dinner and on weekends had long been on my list of self-care practices. They were the easiest to do, and yet, after three years of tracking, they were the things I practiced the least. All of my hard work finally made it possible for me to do these “simple” things, and my self-care scores soared as a result. More importantly, it felt good. It turns out my email behavior was a good leading indicator of how much balance I had and also a keystone habit that unlocked other important practices.

In September 2016, I went to my self-care dashboard — as I had been doing every week for over four years — and decided that I didn't need to track anymore. After six long years of failing over and over again, I felt like I had finally achieved the balance I was seeking.

The following year, my nephew and his little brother came to visit me in San Francisco for the first time since that crazy week in 2009. I cleared my schedule so that I could maximize my time with them. We played basketball every morning, we went on long walks, and we ate delicious food. As I drove them to the airport at the end of their trip, I started to cry, not just because they were leaving, but because I remembered what my life and work was like the first time my nephew had visited eight years earlier, and I felt grateful for how my life had changed since.

Takeaways

It's been five years since I stopped tracking my self-care practices, and I've maintained this balance since. Not only am I as happy, healthy, and fulfilled as I've ever been, I am a significantly better collaboration practitioner than I ever was. Just as my bodybuilder friend explained with weightlifting, to get better at my work, I “simply” had to learn how to do less.

I share these stories not because I've landed on some magic formula for achieving self-care and work-life balance. Everyone's story and circumstances are unique, and I don't want to pretend that what worked for me will work for everyone. I share these stories, because I want folks to know that self-care is really, really hard. If you don’t already have work-life balance, there are likely very real, very hard reasons for this — both internal and external.

Achieving balance requires hard work, experimentation, and tons of support, and — if your experiences are anything like mine — you will fail over and over again. Even if you manage to achieve balance, you will always have to work to maintain it. You will constantly face obstacles, and old habits and mindsets will continue to rear their ugly heads. At the same time, achieving balance will also strengthen your faith in the importance and power of going slow, which will serve as motivation for you to continue your practices.

This matters, especially for collaboration practitioners trying to improve the performance of their groups. Working with urgency is not the same as working urgently. In order to be agile and impactful, in order to learn as you go, in order to do values-aligned work, pausing regularly isn't nice, it's necessary. One of the most powerful acts of leadership — regardless of your job title — is to model this. It's hard, but it may end up being the most important and impactful work that you do.

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The Secret to a Good Retrospective? Actually Having Them!

People often ask me how I structure retrospectives — meetings where a team debriefs and harvests its learning. As with all of my techniques, I am happy to share, and my framework and template is freely available on this website. As a process geek, I love exploring the art of leading good retrospectives. But when it comes to most groups, I prefer talking about some of the more mundane aspects of retrospectives.

Scheduling them, for example.

First, a story. One of the hardest, most time-consuming problems in software development is finding bugs — mistakes in the software’s code. Bugs are inevitable, and fixing them takes up large chunks of a programmer’s time. When I worked in tech over 20 years ago, I met with a vendor that had an extraordinary debugging tool. It would analyze your code and automatically spit out a list of bugs. It wasn’t doing anything magical, it was just clever automation of some oft-practiced techniques.

I was blown away by the simplicity of what they had done. I asked them how others were receiving their tool, figuring that it was selling through the roof. The representative furrowed his brow and responded, “Most people don’t react positively.”

“Why?” I asked in surprise.

“When we demo our tool,” he explained, “we ask people to point it at their actual software, so that it’s working with real data. When it starts spitting out bugs, people start freaking out. They don’t have the resources to fix all of the problems it finds before their scheduled release. They’d rather not know about them.”

It was hard for me to fathom at the time, but as I spent more time in tech, I started seeing this for myself. As I transitioned out of tech into organizational work, I started seeing this manifest in a different way.

Simply put, in my experience, most teams never schedule retrospectives. If we’re being honest with ourselves, I think this is because most of us are afraid of what we might discover. Maybe we’re worried about our ability to fix the problems. Or maybe we’re afraid of negative feedback and challenging conversations. Either way, what it boils down to is that getting better has to wait… possibly forever.

When we do schedule them, they are often the first to get canceled when things get busy, which for most groups is always. I say this with the utmost humility, because this is absolutely true of me. I try really hard to be disciplined about doing them with my teams, and I’m probably better than most. But that’s not saying much, because the bar is really low, and my track record is mottled with canceled meetings.

Perhaps you’ll understand why, then, if you ask me how to lead a successful retrospective, I will often respond, “By scheduling one.” I’m not being facetious. If you’re actually having retrospectives, you’re already doing better than most.

Scheduling them, unfortunately, is only step one. Step two is integrating what you learn. As I wrote last week, people forget things at an exponential rate. It doesn’t matter how artfully you facilitate your retrospective if you’re not building in time to review what you learned, because you will likely forget all those lessons anyway. If you can’t remember what you learned, you’re not going to have anything to integrate. What’s the point of learning if you’re not integrating those lessons?

Step three (which is actually step one) is aligning around goals and success as a group. If you haven’t aligned around goals and success at the beginning of the project, then how can you assess how well you did? For most groups, the answer is generally that whoever has the power gets to decide. There’s no accountability to actual results, because you haven’t decided as a team what you were aiming for. It’s too easy to rationalize anything as success.

If you’re truly serious about learning and improving, then you are, at minimum:

  • Aligning around goals and success as a group
  • Having retrospectives
  • Taking time to review and integrate what you learn

Make sure these are on your calendar, and protect those times.

Photo by Cathy Haglund. CC BY-NC 2.0.

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.

“Balance Bikes” for Group Process

In 2013, I left the consulting firm I cofounded, because I wanted to figure out how I could make more of an impact with my work. Specifically, I wanted to figure out how to help groups collaborate more effectively in ways that did not require consulting support.

My hypothesis was simple. Collaboration is a craft, and as with all crafts — from sports to music — you get better through lots and lots of practice. My goal was to come up with ways to help people practice.

Initially, I was biased against tool development as a possible path to scale, largely because I felt that most people viewed tools as a silver bullet whose mere presence would magically make any group better. Even though this was the opposite of how I viewed tools, I didn’t want to unintentionally contribute to this problematic mindset, which I felt discouraged practice.

However, an unexpected conversation at a party changed my mind. I was catching up with a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in years. He mentioned that he had gotten into bike racing, and we started discussing the joy and pain of learning something new as adults. That’s when he introduced me to balance bikes.

Most people my age learned how to ride bicycles either via brute force (keep trying and trying until you figure it out) or training wheels. The theory behind training wheels is that learning how to ride a bike is hard because people are afraid of falling. Training wheels eliminate that fear.

However, as my friend explained, the other reason that learning how to ride a bike is hard is that it requires balance, and balance takes practice to develop. Training wheels act as a crutch, and hence, discourage you from learning balance.

Balance bikes are low bikes without pedals. Kids (and unfortunately, I have only seen them designed for kids) propel themselves by pushing with their feet, then lifting their feet and gliding for as long as possible. They don’t fear falling, because they can put their feet on the ground any time. However, balance bikes also encourage you to glide (which is what makes riding bikes so fun), and, in doing so, encourages you to practice balancing.

Every tool that I’ve shared on this site is meant to be like a balance bike. They were designed to help you practice and develop strong muscles and habits around group process. You can keep using them for as long as you find them useful, but what matters most for your group’s effectiveness is that you continue to develop the right muscles, regardless of how.

For example, the Strategy / Culture Bicycle (whose name is a nod to how useful I find bicycle metaphors) is designed to help you develop stronger strategy muscles. When I facilitate strategy for groups, I usually eschew the Bicycle, instead custom designing processes based on the challenge at hand and the group’s readiness. However, these processes embody the same principles as the Bicycle. If you don’t have the know-how to custom design something, practicing with the Bicycle will help you develop that know-how.

I’m currently piloting a community of practice focused on using the Goals / Success Spectrum to build more strategic and collaborative muscles. I’m heartened to see how quickly people progress after just a few repetitions, and I’m even more excited about the few who are starting to realize that their quick progress is just the tip of the iceberg, that the real possibility comes from regular repetition and reflection. My hope is for everyone who uses my tools (however they come to them) to understand this — that it’s not about the tools themselves, but about building strong muscles, mindsets, and habits.

Photo by Strider Bikes. CC BY-ND.

Using the Goals + Success Spectrum Skillfully with Groups

This past year, I facilitated a number of workshops on the Goals + Success Spectrum, the tool I use to help groups get clear, specific, and aligned around objectives and metrics. It’s essentially a guided brainstorming activity (using sticky notes or Google Docs) where you categorize your goals across a spectrum — from Minimum to Target to Epic.

I’ve been focusing on doing trainings for this tool rather than my others, because it’s a low-overhead, high-leverage way to get groups aligned and practicing, which are critical steps toward achieving high performance. It’s useful for individuals and for groups, and people generally recognize its utility immediately, even without the benefit of a workshop.

In my workshops, I focus on helping participants experience the mechanics of the tool. They practice using it as individuals, then spend time reviewing each other’s spectrums in pairs and giving each other feedback. I offer no other guidance about using it with groups other than to follow the exact same instructions.

In practice, of course, using the tool with groups is harder than with an individual. Multiple people mean more ideas, and you have to figure out how to consolidate them. That requires critical thinking, communication, conflict, and convergence — all things that make collaboration hard in the first place.

My stated reasons for not offering additional guidance for groups are:

  • The tool itself is designed to address some of these collaboration challenges
  • I want groups to learn how to work through the harder challenges by trusting their own skills, by using the tool repeatedly, and learning and adjusting as they go. That’s ultimately the point of all of my tools — to help people develop strong collaboration muscles and habits through practice.

While these are true, I also just find it hard to offer simple advice about how to facilitate this with groups. Any tactical advice I might have is deeply intertwingled with my philosophy about collaboration, groups, and the design of my tools in general. I can’t talk about one without the other.

All that said, many participants in my workshops have asked thoughtful questions about how to use the Goals + Success Spectrum with groups, so I’m going to attempt to articulate the relevant aspects of my philosophy and answer their questions here.

My Beliefs About Groups

I believe that:

  • Most of the challenges that groups face stem from not talking with each other enough about the right things.
  • People are generally smarter than we give them credit for. If we give people the space and opportunity to be at their best, then we can tap into a group’s collective wisdom, which is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
  • Collaboration is a craft. You will be bad at it at first, but with enough practice, you will eventually get better.

At their core, all of my tools — including the Goals + Success Spectrum — are designed to do three things:

1. Remind you to think about critical, foundational questions. These questions are easy to take for granted, but in our day-to-day grind, we often forget to think about them. In the case of the Goals + Success Spectrum, the questions are:

  • What would the spectrum of success look like for your project, from Minimum to Target to Epic?
  • What would failure look like for your project?

2. Encourage you to write down your answers so that you and others can see them. Forcing you to make the implicit explicit and specific helps you get clear individually and is a critical step helping groups align.

3. Make it easy to practice over and over again. My tools were designed to help you practice and develop strong muscles and habits around group process. The tools themselves aren’t as important as your group continuing to develop and use the right muscles.

My basic approach to using all of my tools with groups is to just use them. Get people in a room, run through the instructions, and see what happens. Groups often are more capable than they themselves believe. This is the best way to demonstrate that.

At best, the tool will encourage everyone to stretch their thinking, de-personalize the ideas, and help people feel heard, which will lead to safer, more constructive conversations. This, along with incorporating a greater diversity of perspectives, will improve the overall quality of and lead to greater collective ownership over the final outcome.

At worst, everybody will get to see what each other thinks, and you’ll learn something from doing the exercise. Make some adjustments based on what you learn, and try it again. And again. People will learn how to set better targets and how to navigate difficult conversations with each other. It’s like learning to speak a language or play an instrument. Failure is both inevitable and okay, as long as you continue to try and learn.

Facilitation Tactics for the Goals + Success Spectrum

Given all this, here are some of the questions people in my workshop asked about how to use the Goals + Success Spectrum, along with my thoughts.

Who in your group should use the Goals + Success spectrum?

Everyone. Talking through goals and success should always be a group exercise, not an individual one. Deciding on goals and metrics doesn’t have to be a consensus activity (and you should be clear about how decisions will be made up front), but coming up with good ones benefits from everyone’s voice.

That said, with larger groups, it may not be practical to bring everyone into the room for the whole process. In these cases, you should aim to have a representative cross-section of the group participate (which means it should not just be the leadership team), with entry points for everyone else to review and give feedback.

How does having groups use the Goals + Success Spectrum work in practice?

There are two constraints: space and time. Larger (simultaneous) groups require more physical space, both to be in a room together and to capture their thinking. It doesn’t necessarily require significantly more time to capture and read everyone’s ideas, because that’s happening in parallel, but it definitely takes more time to work through hard questions and conflict and ultimately converge and align.

I generally find that groups do not allocate enough time for to thinking through goals and success (the “what” and the “why”), instead preferring to rush to the “how.” Alignment is hard, but the payoff is enormous. It doesn’t help if everyone in a boat quickly starts to row if they’re not all rowing in the same direction. Agreeing on where to go might take time, but it will make the subsequent rowing a lot easier.

Why does alignment take so long? Because people’s perspectives are often rooted in deeply held beliefs, and understanding and reconciling those beliefs can take time. Again, groups don’t have to decide on goals and success by consensus. However, alignment is much more likely if people understand the underlying reasons behind a decision and if they feel others understand the reasons for their objections.

You can accelerate alignment through the tool in two ways. First, explore different scenarios before getting into arguments. Second, continuously synthesize and edit the spectrum so that areas of alignment and misalignment are sharpened. I often joke that using these tools with groups is ultimately an exercise in sticky note management, but it’s true. The more you can help keep it clean, the more the group will be able to focus on the important challenges.

While the tools are designed to support a healthy group conversation, they are not a panacea. Any time you’re having a group discussion, group dynamics come into play. By giving everyone an opportunity to fill out and share their ideas on stickies, the tool encourages inclusion. However, once people start talking about the ideas, the tool can’t prevent the voices of a few from drowning out everyone else’s, for example. If this is a frequent problem, you may want to consider appointing a facilitator from either inside or outside of your group.

How would you use the Goals + Success Spectrum across multiple groups within a larger organization or group (e.g. cross-functionally)?

One of the reasons I love doing the Goals + Success workshop is that it’s a great way to build community, because looking at a filled-out spectrum is a great way to get to know another person or group quickly and more deeply. Knowing that your group works on housing issues tells me a little bit. Knowing that your group is trying to create housing for 10,000 people in one year tells me a lot more.

Similarly, the Goals + Success Spectrum can be a powerful way to help de-silo an organization or network. I would have each sub-group do their own spectrums first, then bring all the groups together to gut check each other’s spectrums. Celebrate where the different spectrums complement each other, discuss where they conflict and why, and make adjustments in the respective spectrums.

Most importantly, put the completed spectrums somewhere so that everyone can easily find and see each other’s.

How do you use the Goals + Success Spectrum to assess success or failure afterward?

I start every debrief by asking everyone to review each column of the Goals + Success Spectrum and to mark the ones we achieved and the ones we missed. (I use this debrief template to guide the process.) If there are differences in opinion as to whether or not we hit a mark, that’s both an opportunity to make meaning of what happened and to come up with a more specific and objective metric for next time.

If the group has missed marks in the Minimum column, then the project is technically a failure. This is an opportunity to discuss whether or not you had the right minimum targets and to make adjustments for next time.

Aligning around success is a craft. If you do it repeatedly, you will get better at it over time. Use your spectrums to help you with your assessments, but also recognize that the assessments will help you create better spectrums next time.

Coming out of Retirement

Looking Forward

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.