Made of Love

This past year, I had the chance to shadow my friend and colleague, Odin Zackman, for the June and October sessions of the Water Solutions Network, a leadership development program for mid-career leaders focused on California water issues. The program was facilitated by Odin, Donald Proby, and Celeste Cantu, and managed by Angela Pang.

Their second cohort, consisting of 24 wonderful participants, had spent several months working on a group project focused on the Human Right to Water. Watching a group that large try to self-organize can be an awkward exercise, but this group had a special chemistry, and watching them work was one of the highlights of my experience.

The October session was their final meeting, and they were scheduled to present their project to a room full of guests and VIPs. The morning of their presentation, the group did a one-word checkin. Most people expressed enthusiasm and excitement. The one exception was a participant whose word was “stressed.” That made everyone laugh. This participant was outwardly quiet and composed, and she was well loved by her peers, so no one was taken aback by her sentiment. To the contrary, I think that people appreciated it, as others were feeling the same, and hearing her say it out loud helped defuse it.

The presentation was superb. The next morning, when folks were reflecting on how it went, this same participant referred back to her checkin the previous day. She talked about how one of her peers came up to her afterward and gave her a hug and told her that everything would be okay. She talked about how worried she was about things going awry during prep, then how she saw how everything was coming together nicely, with folks acting with creativity and care to address challenges as they arose, in some cases differently than she would have but no less effectively. She talked about how empowering that was and how she needed more of that in her work and in her life. Then she broke down and started crying. So did most of the room. So did I.

The professional world of water is full of engineers and government agencies, about as far from touchy-feely as you can get. It’s conservative, rules-based, and rigid. It was so clear from both sessions I watched and from this moment in particular how huge it was for this group to escape from that culture, to let go of control and orthodoxy, and to just trust each other.

Watching this group break down the way it did, seeing the heavy burden that many of them carried and the relief they felt when the burden was off their shoulders really hit home for me. I was moved by the moment and by the joy they felt from performing together in this way, but I also felt guilt and shame as I thought about moments when I, as a leader, had created the opposite experience for people who had worked with me.

I know Odin well and wasn’t surprised that he had skillfully built and held a space that enabled the participants to free themselves and to trust each other. I didn’t know Donald at all before these sessions, and I was struck both by his energy and the relationships that he had developed with these participants. Donald loved everyone, and everyone loved him back. Several of them cited how much his words and his way of being had impacted them.

In his final checkout to the group, Odin, who has a beautiful way with words, laughingly acknowledged the Donald love-fest, saying that it made perfect sense, because Donald was “made of love.” Odin then talked about how that love comes through in the work, and compared it to a meal that one’s grandmother might make. His stories hit me in the heart and in the gut, stirring up all sorts of new feelings. This concept of “made of love” resonated so strongly while also embodying a tension that I struggle with as a leader. Just because something is made of love doesn’t mean that it feels that way.

When I hear “made of love,” I think of my 79-year old mom’s kimchi — how she goes directly to Korea to source certain ingredients, often traveling far and wide to visit the best vendors, how she meticulously washes and salts every leaf of cabbage, how she stays up all night chopping and processing all of the ingredients just so, so that when she finally and vigorously massages them together, they create the perfect balance. She doesn’t have some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder, nor is she swimming in free time. She does all this because she’s making kimchi for me and my sisters, whom she loves more than anything, and because that is how she expresses her love.

My mom is made of love, and so is her food. But there’s a cost to this kind of love. It takes a lot of work, and it requires some hard tradeoffs and sacrifices. Moreover, not everyone can feel the love. To some, all kimchi, whether store-bought or handmade, tastes more or less the same. It doesn’t matter how it’s made or by whom. To those who feel that way, the end result doesn’t justify the labor, the sacrifices, or the strife.

My mom raised me and my sisters the way she made kimchi. We, too, are made of love, but we didn’t always experience it that way. My mom was highly critical of us when we were growing up. Still is, actually. She wanted the best for us, she knew how difficult our journey would be as children of immigrants with limited means and connections, and she had experienced deep trauma in her own life that she wanted us to avoid. She could be harsh and demanding. In the best of times, my sisters and I understood that this was her way of expressing her love, but we also suffered from it. Still do.

We all have different ways we like to express and receive love. It’s what makes relationships and family in particular so challenging. The problem is that love, when not executed with care and deep consideration of the other person, is not love, regardless of the intent. At its best, it’s harshness. At its worst, it’s violence. I know this first-hand. I think most of us do.

People need to choose for themselves whether or not to imbue their work with love and how to express that love. I love my work, and I approach it the same way my mom makes kimchi. I do my best to be transparent about what that means to me, so that people can choose whether or not they want to work with me. But that’s only the first step of a long, ongoing journey. You still have to take the time to deeply understand the people you work with. You have to be aware of your impact on others, regardless of your intent. You have to find ways to manage that impact while staying true to whom you are.

This is the work. And it’s really, really hard.

I try to create environments for my teams where everyone feels seen, trusted, and loved. I’m also intense, and I hold myself and my teams to a very high standard. I’m proud of this, I think it’s consistent with my values, and I have no intention of changing. Most people I work with know and value this too. Not everyone wants to be held to these standards, and those folks should simply not work with me (and generally don’t).

However, when conflict has arisen (and it always does), it’s been difficult to unpack whether it’s been about differing standards or a result of my communication style (blunt and sometimes unskilled) and energy (again, intense). I’ve worked really hard over the years to be more conscious of this, and I continue to work hard to find the right balance, but it’s not easy, and I’ve hurt a lot of people along the way. I can’t say definitively whether I was right or wrong in those cases (or if that’s even the correct way of thinking about it), but I know for certain that, regardless of my intentions, deep in my heart, I feel shame and incredible sadness for ever making anyone feel that way.

What impressed me so much about Donald was not just how clearly love was at the center of everything he did, but how much we all (me included) felt his love and the impact of that love on the group as a whole. I can’t ever be like Donald, but I can strive to have my teammates experience my love in similar ways. I think that would have a profound impact on my work and my relationships.

I also don’t want people to think that love is everything.

Watching the Water Solutions Network cohort work on its final project was magical, but it wasn’t solely because of the container that Odin, Donald, Celeste, and Angela created, or because the participants cared about their final project and each other, or because they — and their facilitators — were made of love. All of those things happened to be true, and they all mattered, but they weren’t the only reason they all worked together so well. They worked together well, because they were all talented and skilled, because they all had similarly high standards, because they had the right amount of diversity, and because… well, because they also got lucky.

If any one of those factors were even slightly off, it wouldn’t have been nearly the same experience. All that love mattered, but it wasn’t sufficient. The best work happens when love is at the core, but if you don’t have the other factors as well, that can exacerbate the harsher aspects of love. There are a whole slew of collaboration practitioners who are most definitely made of love, but who are terrible at the work, because they don’t understand this.

Fortunately, I think most of the people I work with already know that love alone doesn’t make the work sing. As a leader, I want to support my teams in tapping into their love, so that the work is imbued with it. I want them to love, but also feel loved. Love does not always feel good, but it should always feel safe. Striking that balance is hard, and there aren’t a lot of models for doing it well. I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to experience that balance through Odin, Donald, Celeste, Angela, and the entire Water Solutions Network cohort’s leadership and example. They are all indeed made of love.

Thanks to H. Jessica Kim, Travis Kriplean, and Eun-Joung Lee for reviewing earlier versions of this draft, and to Denise Collazo, whose stories of forgiveness inspired me to share this.

Habits of High-Performance Groups

I am passionately committed to helping as many people as possible get better at collaboration. Within this larger mission, I am most interested in helping groups collaborate on our most complex and challenging problems. Over the past 17 years, I’ve gotten to work on some crazy hard stuff, from reproductive health in Africa and Southeast Asia to water in California. I’ve learned a ton from doing this work, I continue to be passionate about it, and I’ve developed a lot of sophisticated skills as a result.

However, for the past year, I’ve been focusing most of my energy on encouraging people to practice setting better goals and aligning around success. My Goals + Success Spectrum is already my most popular and widely used toolkit, and yet, through programs like my Good Goal-Setting workshops, I’ve been doubling down on helping people get better at using it and — more importantly — making it a regular habit.

I’ve been getting a lot of funny looks about this, especially from folks who know about my passion around systems and complexity. If I care so much about addressing our most wicked and challenging problems, why am I making such a big deal about something as “basic” and “easy” as setting better goals and aligning around success?

Because most of us don’t do it regularly. (This included me for much of my career, as I explain below. It also includes many of my colleagues, who are otherwise outstanding practitioners.)

Because many who are doing it regularly are just going through the motions. We rarely revisit and refine our stated goals, much less hold ourselves accountable to them.

Because much of the group dysfunction I see can often be traced to not setting clear goals and aligning around success regularly or well.

Because doing this regularly and well not only corrects these dysfunctions, it leads to higher performance and better outcomes while also saving groups time.

And finally, because doing this regularly and well does not require consultants or any other form of “expert” (i.e. costly) help. It “simply” requires repetition and intentionality.

Investing in the “Basics” and Eating Humble Pie

In 2012, I co-led a process called the Delta Dialogues, where we tried to get a diverse set of stakeholders around California water issues — including water companies, farmers and fishermen, environmentalists, government officials, and other local community members — to trust each other more. Many of our participants had been at each other’s throats — literally, in some cases —for almost 30 years. About half of our participants were suing each other.

It was a seemingly impossible task for an intractable problem — how to fairly distribute a critical resource, one that is literally required for life — when there isn’t enough of it to go around. I thought that it would require virtuoso performances of our most sophisticated facilitation techniques in order to be successful. We had a very senior, skilled team, and I was excited to see what it would look like for us to perform at our best.

Unfortunately, we did not deliver virtuoso performances of our most sophisticated facilitation techniques. We worked really hard, but we were not totally in sync, and our performances often fell flat. However, something strange started to happen. Despite our worst efforts, our process worked. Our participants gelled and even started working together.

Toward the end of our process, after one of our best meetings, our client, Campbell Ingram, the executive officer of the Delta Conservancy, paid us one of the best professional compliments I have ever received. He first thanked us for a job well done, to which I responded, “It’s easy with this group. It’s a great, great group of people.”

“It is a great group,” he acknowledged, “but that’s not it. I’ve seen this exact same set of people at other meetings screaming their heads off at each other. There’s something that you’re doing that’s changing their dynamic.”

My immediate reaction to what he said was to brush it aside. Of course we were able to create that kind of space for our participants. Doing that was fundamental to our work, and they were all “basic” things. For example, we listened deeply to our participants throughout the whole process and invited them to design with us. We co-designed a set of working agreements before the process started, which was itself an intense and productive conversation. We asked that people bring their whole selves into the conversation, and we modeled that by asking them very basic, very human questions, such as, “What’s your favorite place in the Delta?” and “How are you feeling today?” We rotated locations so that people could experience each other’s places of work and community, which built greater shared understanding and empathy. We paired people up so that folks could build deeper relationships with each other between meetings.

These were all the “basic” things that we did with any group with which we worked. I didn’t think it was special. I thought it was what we layered on top of these fundamentals that made us good at what we did.

But in reflecting on Campbell’s compliment, I realized that I was wrong. Most groups do not do these basic things. For us, they were habits, and as a result, we overlooked them. They also weren’t necessarily hard to do, which made us undervalue them even more. Anyone could open a meeting by asking everyone how they were feeling. Only a practitioner with years of experience could skillfully map a complex conversation in real-time.

I (and others) overvalued our more “sophisticated” skills, because they were showier and more unique. However, it didn’t matter that we were applying them poorly. They helped, and they would have helped even more if we were doing them well, but they weren’t critical. Doing the “basics” mattered far more. Fortunately, we were doing the basics, and doing them well.

Not doing them would have sunk the project. I know this, because we neglected a basic practice with one critical meeting in the middle of our process, and we ended up doing a terrible job facilitating it despite all of our supposed skill. The long, silent car ride back home after that meeting was miserable. I mostly stared out the window, reliving the day’s events over and over again in my head. Finally, we began to discuss what had happened. Rebecca Petzel, who was playing a supporting role, listened to us nitpick for a while, then finally spoke up. “The problem,” she said, “was that we lost sight of our goals.”

Her words both clarified and stung. She was absolutely right. We knew that this meeting was going to be our most complex. We were all trying to balance many different needs, but while we had talked about possible moves and tradeoffs, we hadn’t aligned around a set of collective priorities. We each had made moves that we thought would lead to the best outcome. We just hadn’t agreed in advance on what the best outcomes were, and we ended up working at cross-purposes.

I was proud of Rebecca for having this insight, despite her being the most junior member of our team, and I also felt ashamed. I often made a big deal of how important aligning around success was, but I had neglected to model it for this meeting, and we had failed as a result.

Habits Are Hard

After the Delta Dialogues, I made a list of all the things I “knew” were important to collaborating effectively, then compared them to what I actually practiced on a regular basis. The gap wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t trivial either. I then asked myself why I ended up skipping these things. The answer generally had something to do with feeling urgency. I decided to try being more disciplined about these “basic” practices even in the face of urgency and to see what happened.

I was surprised by how dramatically the quality and consistency of my work improved. I was even more surprised by how slowing down somehow made the urgency go away. The more I practiced, the more engrained these habits became, which made them feel even more efficient and productive over time.

In 2013, I left the consulting firm I had co-founded to embark on my current journey. Helping groups build good collaborative habits through practice has become the cornerstone of my work. Anyone can easily develop the skills required to do the “basics” with groups. They just need to be willing to practice.

I’ve identified four keystone habits that high-performance groups seem to share:

The specific manifestation of each practice isn’t that important. What matters most is for groups to do all four of them regularly and well.

Over the past six years, I’ve had decent success developing practices and tools that work well when repeated with intention. Unfortunately, I haven’t been as successful at encouraging groups to make these practices habits. As I mentioned earlier, I think one reason is that it’s easy to undervalue practices that seem basic. I think the biggest reason is that developing new habits — even if we understand them to be important and are highly motivated — is very, very hard.

In his book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande writes that every year, two million Americans get an infection while in a hospital, and 90,000 die from that infection. What’s the number one cause of these infections? Doctors and other hospital staff not washing their hands.

For over 170 years, doctors have understood the causal relationship between washing their hands and preventing infection. Everybody knows this, and yet, almost two centuries later, with so many lives at stake, getting people to do this consistently is still extremely hard, and 90,000 people die every year as a result. Gawande explains:

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right — one after the other, no slip-ups, no goofs, everyone pitching in. We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

If it’s this hard to get doctors to wash their hands, even when they know that people’s lives are at stake, I don’t know how successful I can expect to be at getting groups to adopting these habits of high-performance groups when the stakes don’t feel as high.

Still, I think the stakes are much higher than many realize. I recently had a fantastic, provocative conversation with Chris Darby about the challenges of thinking ambitiously and hopefully when our obstacles are so vast. Afterward, I read this quote he shared on his blog from adrienne maree brown’s, Emergent Strategy:

Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.

We all have the right to articulate our own vision for success. When we don’t exercise that right, we not only allow our muscles for doing so to atrophy, but we give others the space to articulate that vision for us. Hopefully, these stakes feel high enough to encourage groups to start making this a regular practice.

For help developing your muscles around articulating success, sign up for our Good Goal-Setting online peer coaching workshop. We offer these the first Tuesday of every month.

Investing in and Designing for Trust

"Bank" in Kano, Nigeria

I spent the first half of 2008 helping a network of reproductive health leaders across several developing countries find ways to collaborate more effectively with each other. As part of this work, I spent a week working with leaders in Kano, Nigeria. When I first arrived there, I asked my host to show me where the local bank was so that I could exchange some currency. He explained that people in Kano don’t go to banks. Thieves knew to hang out there, and even if you managed to avoid getting robbed, you couldn’t trust the banks to give you real currency.

Instead, he introduced me to a guy in a red truck parked outside of a Chinese restaurant, and he negotiated an exchange. When I asked him how he knew where to go and whom to trust, he explained that it was largely word of mouth — family, friends of friends, etc. But he also made it clear that word of mouth wasn’t consistently trustworthy either, and that you had to remain constantly vigilant. Constant vigilance meant constant stress, which is what I felt throughout my trip knowing that I couldn’t trust the institutions that I generally depended on here in the U.S. However, relationships still mattered. Knowing and trusting a few core locals enabled me to acclimate quickly and even learn to thrive.

The Problem with Structure

Trust is an essential part of effective collaboration. Without it, most groups fall apart. However, we are often naive in how we design for trust.

Consider decision-making. One of the easiest ways to gauge how much a group trusts each other is to look at its governance structure. In high-trust groups, people assume that everyone will do what it takes to make the best decisions. Sometimes, this means reaching out to others for discussion and pushback. Other times, it means being proactive about making decisions, understanding that it’s impossible to know everything in advance and that mistakes will happen. These groups often get away with minimal, mostly informal governance structures.

In low-trust groups, people fear that they won’t be properly represented and that others won’t make good decisions on their own, so they insist on being part of every decision. Decision-making is often time-consuming and ineffective as a result. These groups often try to compensate by adding more rigid, formal governance structures.

High-trust groups are about forgiveness. Low-trust groups are about permission.

Even though rigid, overly formal structures are often a symptom of low-trust groups, we often try to compensate for this by creating additional — you guessed it — rigid, overly formal structures. The problem isn’t that new structures can’t help. It’s that the structures we choose don’t necessarily increase trust and may even serve to impede it.

For example, many international aid organizations require some sort of government involvement in order to ensure that money goes to the right places and is used in the right ways. Their assumption is that government is the most trustworthy way for this to happen. As I saw firsthand in Nigeria, this assumption is sometimes wrong, and the work suffers as a result.

There are two ways to navigate around this. The first is to remember that there are other ways to invest in trust beyond building new structures — specifically, investing in relationships. The second is to think more intentionally and creatively about the structures you build.

Investing in Relationships

In 2012, I co-led a multistakeholder process called the Delta Dialogues focused on California water issues. California has been embroiled in a complex and expensive debate over water policy for several years. Rather than propose an alternative policy process, we chose to augment the existing processes by focusing on trust-building between key players.

We mostly focused on building shared understanding using sophisticated mapping tools, but we also placed a huge emphasis on getting to know each other as people. For example:

  • Whenever someone joined the Dialogues, we asked them to share their favorite place in the Delta.
  • Rather than seek a “neutral” location for our meetings, we rotated locations among the participants, so that everyone could see and experience each other’s workplace.
  • We assigned each participant a buddy, and we asked that they talk to each other before and after each meeting.

Journalist, Joe Mathews, who covered the Dialogues, later wrote:

Participants would say the field trips in general were the most valuable part of the Dialogues. All of the participants had lived or done work on the Delta. But even those who had spent their whole lives living in the Delta had seen only parts of the massive estuary. To get a guided tour from another participant and see a piece of the Delta through that person’s eyes proved to be invaluable.

Campbell Ingram [director of the Delta Conservancy, and our client] expressed some embarrassment that the experience of this field trip was so new. “I was pretty amazed that I spent so many years at the BDCP table [the water policy discussion] without that gut level understanding of what it means to be a pear farmer in the Delta. I always thought pear farming was in decline, and then got to see and hear reality, and their issues with their inability to plan. To me, that had a huge impact. It made me feel really uncomfortable. I think a lot of us had the realization that the degree to which we had overlooked the Delta in these processes.”

…

Outside the meetings and field trips, the Dialogues were deepening and taking root in ways that the facilitators couldn’t see. The participants found they liked each other. And they began to talk and meet outside the Dialogues.

These personal relationships and conversations would be among the most treasured products of the Dialogues. Many of these connections were of the strange bedfellows variety.”

Assuming Trust

Most structures — from governance to physical structures — are designed with low-trust in mind. Consider the humble traffic light. The fundamental assumption underlying its design is that we cannot trust people to negotiate intersections with each other in a safe, efficient manner. But what if we could? What might intersections look like then?

Traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s answer to this question was a traffic circle. As it turns out, traffic circles are safer and more efficient than traffic lights. Giving control back to the drivers forces them to be more present and more diligent, which results in better outcomes.

Similarly, most websites have login credentials and access permissions. They assume that without gatekeepers, people will just go around breaking things. While these websites are decent at keeping bad guys out, they are also surprisingly bad at allowing good guys to get in. Most of us believe that this is an unfortunate, but necessary tradeoff.

Wikis flip this assumption around. They assume that most people are intelligent and want to do good, that if you trust people by default, good things will happen. Wikis not only allow anyone to edit them, they do not impose any kind of editorial workflow. They assume that good, smart people will figure out for themselves how to create the highest quality content. Wikipedia — the most prominent of all wikis — is a devastating example of this principle operating at massive scale.

Wikis still have structure, only their structures are designed to reinforce, rather than replace, trustworthy behaviors. For example, wikis maintain a copy of all prior revisions. This encourages people to try things, knowing that their mistakes can be easily reverted. People’s contribution histories also serve as a kind of currency that helps reinforce their trustworthiness.

When you design for trust, the results are often simpler and more elegant (and sometimes counter-intuitive). These designs give up control rather than assert it, resulting in greater agility and higher quality.

However, designing for trust doesn’t work so well if you don’t have trust in the first place. Organizational forms without explicit hierarchy have existed for decades, but recent instantiations like Holocracy have recently become popular, especially in the technology sector. What people are starting to realize is that trust is a critical ingredient to make this work, lack of trust is often a cultural problem, and eliminating structure does not solve anything if your problem is with culture.

Structure and trust have a tumultuous relationship, but if we start with some basic principles, we can harness both to create higher-quality collaboration. Invest in relationships, then design structures that reinforce, rather than replace, trust.

Special thanks goes to Jerry Michalski, who — when we first met 12 years ago — first provoked me with the question, “What if we trusted people?” I’ve been pondering that question ever since.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Squirm Test: Building Trust and Shared Understanding

Elliott's Monster Face

Trust. Shared understanding. Shared language. I constantly mention these as critical elements of collaboration. But how do we develop these things, and how do we know if we’ve got them?

We can start by playing Tic-Tac-Toe, then by applying the Squirm Test.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Many years ago, one of my mentors, Jeff Conklin, taught me a simple exercise that gave me a visceral understanding of why trust, shared understanding, and shared language were so important, as well as some clues for how to develop these things.

First:

  1. Find a partner.
  2. Play Tic-Tac-Toe.

Try it now! What happened?

Hopefully, nobody won, but don’t stress too much if you lost. It happens!

Second: Play Tic-Tac-Toe again, except this time, don’t use pen or paper.

Try it now! What happened?

In order to play, you needed to come up with shared language to describe positions on the board. You probably managed, but it was almost certainly harder.

Third:

  1. Play Tic-Tac-Toe without pen or paper again, except, this time, play on a four-by-four board — four rows, four columns.
  2. Play until it’s too hard to play anymore, until someone has won, or until there’s a dispute about what the board looks like. When you’re done, both you and your partner should draw what you think the board looks like without looking at each other’s work. Now compare.

Try it now! What happened?

Research suggests that we can hold between five to nine thoughts in our head at a time before our short-term memory begins to degrade. This is why American phone numbers have seven digits. It’s also why three-by-three Tic-Tac-Toe (nine total squares) without pen and paper felt hard, but doable, whereas increasing the board by just one row and column (sixteen total squares) made the game feel impossible.

How many ideas do you think you’re holding in your head after just five minutes of moderately complex conversation? How often are you using some kind of shared display — a whiteboard, a napkin, the back of an envelope — to make sure that everyone is tracking the same conversation?

While you were playing, how much did you trust that the two of you were seeing the same board at all times? Were you right?

In cooperation theory, the most successful groups trust each other by default. You almost certainly assumed that your partner knew the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe and was playing it fairly to the best of his or her ability. If you already had a strong relationship with your partner, you probably trusted him or her even more.

But trust is fragile, and it’s not always relational. If it’s not constantly being reinforced, it weakens. A lack of shared understanding is one of the easiest ways to undermine trust.

With the Delta Dialogues, we were dealing with a uniquely wicked and divisive issue — water in California. As a facilitator, you always want to get the group out of scarcity thinking. But water is a zero-sum game, and no amount of kumbaya is going to change that. Moreover, we were dealing with a half-century legacy of mistrust and a group of participants who were constantly in litigation with each other.

We did a lot of unique, relational work that played an important role in the success of Phase 1 — rotating site visits, asking people to share their favorite places in the Delta, implementing a buddy system, leaving plenty of space for breaking bread. But we were not relying on these things alone to build trust.

Our focus was on building shared understanding through a mapping process that allowed the group to see their ideas and track their conversations in real-time. Prior to our process, the group had been attempting to play multi-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe with thousands of rows and columns… and no pen and paper. We brought the pen and paper, along with the ability to wield it skillfully.

Like many of my colleagues, I believe strongly in building and modeling a culture where people are engaging in powerful, constructive, sometimes difficult conversation. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to get people into a circle and to have them hold hands and talk about their feelings. The more wicked the problem, the more inadequate our traditional conversational tools become, no matter how skillfully they are wielded.

This recognition is what separates the Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative from similar well-intentioned, but misguided initiatives in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds, and it’s why I’m working with them right now. We happen to be employing system mapping (and the talents of Joe Hsueh) right now as our “pen and paper” for developing that shared understanding, but it’s how and why we’re mapping — not the specific tool itself — that separates our efforts from other processes.

The Squirm Test

How do you know how much shared understanding you have in the first place? And if you choose to employ some version of “pen and paper” to help develop that shared understanding, how do you know whether or not you’re intervention is effective?

Many years ago, I crafted a thought experiment for doing exactly that called the Squirm Test.

  1. Take all of the people in your group, and have them sit on their hands and in a circle.
  2. Have one person get up and spend a few minutes describing what the group is doing and thinking, and why.
  3. Repeat until everyone has spoken.

You can measure the amount of shared understanding in the group by observing the amount of squirming that happened during the presentations. More squirming means less shared understanding.

You can implement the Squirm Test in all sorts of ways, and it even appears in different high-performance communities in real-life. For example, the Wikipedia principle of Neutral Point of View is essentially the Squirm Test in action. If you read an article on Wikipedia, and it makes you squirm, edit it until the squirming goes away. If enough people do that, then that article will accurately reflect the shared understanding of that group of people and will thus achieve Neutral Point of View.

Toward the end of Phase 1 of the Delta Dialogues, we designed a whole day around the Squirm Test. We had participants capture on flipcharts what they thought the interests and concerns were of the other stakeholder groups. Then we had participants indicate whether these points represented themselves accurately and whether they found shared understanding on certain issues surprising. There was very little squirming and quite a bit of surprise about that fact. It was a turning point for the process, because the participants were able to see in a visceral way how much shared understanding had been built through all of their hard work together.

Last week, I was describing the Squirm Test to Rick Reed, the leader of Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative. He pointed out a discrepancy that I had not thought of before. “People might not be squirming because there’s no shared understanding. They might be squirming because, after seeing the collective understanding, they realize that they’re wrong!”

This is exactly what happened with the Garfield Foundation’s first Collaborative Network initiative, RE-AMP. When you are able to see the whole system, including your place in it, you may discover that your frame is wrong. The kind of squirming that Rick describes is the good kind. Understanding how to design for it is a topic for another day!